Chapter Text
It was a summer morning and I just kicked the blanket out of my bed when someone called me. Face half-buried into a pillow, I ran my hand on the bedside table, rummaging around for my phone, before grabbing hard at the metal object, blaring like a sort of siren. Head still fogged up from sleep, I stared at the name on the screen.
Ganyu? We hooked up several times, but Ganyu has been out of the orbit of my life for a long while, and I didn’t expect our trajectory to ever cross again. I could just ignore her and message, calculated five minutes later, that I was preparing for a rehearsal.
So I waited. For Ganyu, ten rings are enough for her to give up. But, as it turned out, fifteen rings and she was still waiting patiently at the end of the line. I picked up within a heartbeat.
“Hi,” I said, my voice rough from sleep. “Haven’t heard from you for months.”
“Hi. Sorry.” She sounded casual enough, I concluded— maybe too soon. “I’ve been busy with… well, everything.”
“As expected from the artist of the year.”
She chuckled. I almost forgot how infectious that little laugh is. “Let me get to the point before you run out of compliments. Can you play anything at all on a piano?”
“If you have a music sheet and two minutes for me to familiarize with it, yeah.”
“You’re a godsend, Keqing.” The crackles came through between her words. It seemed that she was shifting the phone from one hand to the other. “I’m in the middle of my exhibition and the pianist I hired just decided to quit on me. What’s your rate?”
I smiled, for no reason. “I’m just a student, Ganyu. Not a full-time pianist.”
“I’ll pay you the same amount I paid that guy,” she paused, or stopped mid-sentence from a sudden realization. “Does that also mean you have a rehearsal?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, but truth be told, I didn’t believe I could do anything to adjust my schedule at the time. The events of my life are arranged and played seamlessly from one movement to another, like music.
Strange enough, the conductor is not the same person as the composer, and one of them, if not both, orchestrated this movement of my life to Ganyu’s motif. As soon as Ganyu thanked me and hung up, the rehearsal for my upcoming recital was canceled for the week.
I sat at the edge of my bed for ten whole minutes, collecting my scattered notes and lost tempo that seemed to be swept to Ganyu’s piece. Hanging out with her always feels like improvisation, the notes that aren’t on the page, but fall perfectly into places. It drove me mad sometimes, and other times it rearranged me into a piece of music I had never heard before. Sitting behind the piano in the main hall of the gallery that afternoon, everything seemed to be the way it should be.
I played some of Chopin’s Nocturnes, then moved to his best friend, Liszt. As I struck the first chord of the first movement of Liebesträume, the steady raindrops began to pound the window. More and more people came around, seeking shelter. Some of them, hearing my music, willingly forgot themselves. And it was my fingerwork that won against the fast cadenza of the rain outside.
“Thanks for saving my life.” Ganyu appeared behind my shoulders. When I turned around from nothingness I was staring into, she was already smiling. “Can I have you back behind the piano again around six? It’s Saturday. People are most likely to flock in again after dinner.”
I eased out a smile. “Sure. What do you want me to play?”
“Let’s see… Can you play Evans? I really like his Conversations With Myself. ”
“Are you kidding me?” That unconsciously slipped out of my mouth. “Sorry. I mean... I’m not really into Jazz.”
To be fair, I just don’t quite know how to feel about it. Every time one of my best friends, a Jazz drummer, tries to connect me to the world of Jazz, I just feel lost, and slightly insulted.
“As expected from the classical piano student.”
“What? Are you going to lecture me about it?” I reacted, still bottomlessly bitter about the time she actually lectured me about contemporary “art” that appeared more like childish blobs of paint.
“Oh, baby, you don’t want me to,” she crooned. And, to be honest, she was right. “Hmm. Then let’s go with whatever you want, but not Liebestraume.”
"Why?" I asked. My face tensed up a little.
"Your Liebestraume was missing something... something I couldn't really put my fingers on."
"I didn't miss a single note, and my expression was just about right,” I explained, trying to defend myself.
"No, no, of course you didn't.” Ganyu shook her head slightly. A soft smile was written across her lips. “You're terrific. It's just that... you don't play for someone enough for Liebestraume to be a love song, if that makes sense."
"It doesn’t,” I shot back with steeled intensity. “There is a metronome in my brain and I’m playing by it, not by a heartbeat. Any good musician knows that too.”
Her eyes flickered like a ripple on the twilight sky seen on the surface of the water. “That was so you, you know that, right?”
“Take it or leave it.” I threw all the cards in my hands onto the invisible table before us, but Ganyu still had hers. She always had hers.
As if my words were comic relief, Ganyu laughed with her eyes closed. I cooly, almost irresistibly, joined that laughter. In the smallest silence, she trained her eyes on me, reminding me again of what exactly she is— the gravitational field, and I was just a lost particle being pulled toward her. She had always been that kind of person, not a center of attention, but before you know it, she already had you.
And I completely forgot how total her gravity is.
“Do you want a tour? You have to say yes.”
Her exhibition— Who’s Afraid of Blue?— was, as the name suggested, full of blue paintings, blue photo strips, blue sculptures, blue texts, blue collages, and films rendered in blue. The main attraction of the exhibition was the room painted blue, with nothing else but a chair to be absorbed in the blueness. I tend to frown over things I don’t understand, but this honestly didn’t surprise me as much as it should. Nothing ever surprised me anymore after what happened last autumn in a hotel room, where Ganyu quoted me the entire passage from the History of Arts book to delay my orgasm. Then, over a freshly-lit cigarette, she tried to sell me a blank space. It’s my art project, she said casually, but you have to promise you will burn the receipt and not be offended if I throw your money away. I refused, of course. Nobody is out of their minds enough to buy a blank space. Nobody owns a blank space, to begin with.
“Why blue?”
“As you can see, I’m obsessed with blue,” she began again. “The world is blue at its edge and at its depth. The sky is blue because the light at the blue end of the spectrum gets lost. The same happens to the water. The light scatters in it, making what is actually colorless seem blue.”
“This one, for example.” Catching my some kind of faraway face, Ganyu commanded my attention toward the bluest painting in the hall, with the height of a human, and the length of the entire room. It seemed to be the centerpiece that every guest in the hall made a point to avoid, seeing it as another blue canvas that can be easily replicated even by a five-year-old kid.
“It’s named The Horizon because the blue at the edge of the sky has always fascinated me… the way it didn’t exist in the place miles away, too far for anyone to reach, but in the distance. The distance you can never arrive.”
I stared at the painting, searching for meanings beneath those layers of brushstrokes, though nothing really came to my mind. The monomania of hundreds of blue paintings we walked through has left me underwater. It never ceases to amaze me how artists could dedicate their entire exhibitions using only one color.
If someone were to ask me to compose a symphony that consists of one note, I would cry.
“It certainly feels blue ,” I replied at last.
“Why do you think they use the expression blue for melancholy?”
“No idea.”
“When you say I’m feeling blue mostly it’s because you feel the endless distance between yourself and the object of your longing.”
“Like loving someone who will never love you back,” I said the first thing that sprang to mind, and regretted it.
“A tongue that can never taste honey will only yearn for honey, no?”
But do we really want something that we can never keep?
I don’t know.
The rain grew faint, then picked up again when my hands went back on the piano’s keys. I played some of the more underrated pieces from Brahms, then, as people flooded into the hall more and more, I decided it was best to stick with more well-known pieces from well-known composers. All the while I couldn’t stop thinking about what Ganyu told me, that I played like I had no one to play for. Come to think of it, I have never once played for myself. I was a child prodigy who won every competition and breezed into the elite institution. But, somewhere along the scale that I moved my hands up and down, I lost myself. I was just a skeleton behind the piano, always striking the right chord—on the paper, not in the heart of people.
Come to think of it, this was worse than the act of selling a blank space.
Ganyu offered me a ride when the exhibit closed up for the day. Helping her with art supplies and leftover materials, I secretly wear my heart on my sleeves, preparing what I would say to her. Where have you been? No, that was too broad. She was definitely going to say that she was ‘just busy’ like she did last time I asked her that. Having a tough time? Of course she was. Why is it getting wet inside when it’s raining outside? No, no, no, Keqing. Not that one.
Unable to find any words, I sank helplessly into the leather seat of her Lexus, the same old Lexus we used as a makeshift bed. The heart that was on my sleeves I put it back to where it is. Where it should be.
It was almost midnight, from the glowing numbers on the dash, when the car pulled up outside my apartment. The summer rainstorm threatened another downpour outside. Weightless, I feared that I might get blown away if I were to step out of the comfort of her car, so I sat there, unmoving.
Ganyu was humming Rain Rain Go Away while gazing out the window. I stole a greedy look on her face, bathed now in the deep indigo, the same shade that washed over the inside of the car. Her twilight eyes, playing with a porchlight behind me, burned mine as she caught me.
Like a thief being caught red-handed, I averted my eyes and planned my escape route. I could reach the staircase to my apartment’s front porch in five steps from where we pulled over, but even myself seemed to work against me today.
After all, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but her midriff, flaunting itself below her grey cropped hoodie. What about this artwork , I thought, clearing my throat for no reason. Do you mind giving me a tour there?
Ganyu reached out, and I braced myself against her touch, but it never came. Instead, she reached to manually unlock the door on my side. That act alone propelled my pathetic self out of the car.
“Thanks for the ride. I’ll see you again in five months?”
The artist cut the headlight, covering us in the blue dark, five minutes before midnight. I was grabbing the door handle when I heard the little click from all sides. Smirking, Ganyu had locked them from the driver's side and was now leaning toward me. This time her hand found me first, then her lips. She pushed through the still night, like light itself— smooth and fast and undeniable. I lifted my face, closed my eyes, seeking myself in her steering. My hand almost automatically ran behind her neck, taking her in by the root of the pale blue hair.
“You were counting. I’m flattered,” She spoke under her breath, slowly working her way to my mouth again. It had been five months and, despite having a memory of a goldfish when it comes to things unrelated to music, I could still remember her scent, the atmosphere of her, as if when she came to me, her lips have never tasted honey from any jar except mine.
Sensing my wanting to speak, Ganyu backed away a little, giving us both a room to breathe. “What does that even mean?” I said, my fingers still in her hair.
“Was it the back of my car?” Disregarding my question, she asked to my neck. The sudden urge to punch her gorgeous face was sharp in me, but immediately softened by want.
And what could you do with a woman like that but turn yourself into a honey jar, a sweet container without a lid where she could return again and again, savoring all your contents? Or a blank wall, where she could make you wet over and over, then spread the paint all over you, making you into the most beautiful fresco?
Yes.
“...It was the parking lot,” I whispered to her arm when she climbed on top of me in the backseat, our thighs touching. But none of us were interested in the last time anymore as we fumbled around our pants, trying to get this time right.
Her brows furrowing, Ganyu might take a mental note not to wear sweatpants when I came around. Because when I came around means taking whatever we wanted from each other, be it the backseat of her car or a shadowy corner of a parking lot or a deserted lecture hall. I helped her take care of it, and, as soon as the pants crumpled on the car mat, she thanked me by a tenderness no mouth knows a word for.
Before I could make out her face, blued by the hour, Ganyu traced the canvas of my body, making a rough outline with her fingers. Her mouth followed the outline masterfully, and, with a precise brush of her tongue, she stroked it back and forth at the tip of my breast. The artist worked her way downward, her free hand gently opened me out, but her brush seemed to be everywhere but there.
Please, I wordlessly begged, offering my all, put your color theory inside me. Make me your masterpiece.
The bloom spread when the paper was generously wet. Her simple wet-on-wet technique never failed to make me squirm. Her hair rustled noiselessly on my pelvis as her brush dabbed the paint at the same spot repeatedly. I writhed at the touches, letting out my moan, my welcoming legs— everything that would speed the painting process. As if teasing, she was going slower now, taking her time with each brushstroke. One of her hands, equally hungry, roving up, trailing the canvas, before coloring my nipples glistened pink, rendering me impatient and embarrassed. She was so effortlessly superb that she didn’t even start and here I was, almost finished.
The rain outside shifted the dark and her hand, retreating from my breast, now dragged along my left thigh. I looked down, about to tell her to tint the other one also, when she did the next best thing. Muffling something through the heat, Ganyu used the other hand to spread me fully open, lifting me off the body-warm leather seat, so her paintbrush could do the job at every corner. I caught my breath as the paint was wildly smeared, the pattern no longer existed. The oeuvre of pleasure began to take shape in my lower belly. Her brush, her brushes. I held her head down in place, the burst of colors rushing through me, filling my black-and-white self with the palette of summer. She pressed her lips gently on my groin, signing on the work, her finest yet, and coming to rest upon it.
So this was what felt like, being painted, being colored in. Silently shuddering, I exhaled deeply while we waited for the paint to dry. All was still until Ganyu surfaced from down below, shaking her hair off her face, running her fingers through it. I watched the silky insistence of her gestures with the right mix of lighthearted wonder and illuminated hunger.
When Ganyu finished tying her hair, revealing the back of her neck, where the flesh was the softest, I dove into her, sealing my lips on it. Then going lower, to her shoulder, the flowing muscle of her upper arm, her bare breasts, her belly, the front of her only protection. I glanced up at her with my best version of puppy eyes, and, permission received, I slid my fingers in, taking it off. By the slightest movement of her legs, the hardest work was out of the way.
Sitting up now, I brought her to my lap, where the air thickened with our closeness and our anticipating breath. The folds of her depth laid before my fingers, like the beckoned keys of a well-touched piano. My hand splayed, clenching her breast, while the other struck the keys, creating music out of her. Ganyu could barely contain herself, putting her mouth to any part of me to keep it in. But, if anything, I was confident in my fast and accurate fingers, with all my pianist’s pride.
“Where are your earrings?” She nibbled at my ear, her breath started to quicken as we found the rhythm we needed to fit each other.
“I don’t wear them anymore,” I murmured, still tuning into her music.
Tremor struck her voice as I hit the chord. “...Why not? You look pretty in them.”
I let my musicianship answer. As we locked onto our own tempo, I drove my face into Ganyu’s body once more, drinking from her mouth, her neck, her budding tips— she liked it there, it seemed, as she drew me closer, cradling my head between her breasts. The tip swelled in my mouth, warm and welcoming to the true summer on the backseat of the car. I tightened my grip on her hip, while she twisted her waist to the beat. I could compose the entire piano concerto this way.
Rule number one in composing a concerto: a slow movement preceded, followed by faster movements. In the wake of my stroking fingers, her song intensified, pouring all those extravagant declarations, mostly I’m so close, baby, in my ears. With my fingers full of her, I could feel the resonance deep inside, long before she even reached her cadence. Ganyu breathed hard above me, rewarding my performance with a long, lyrical kiss. Her skin rose with shudders of relief.
The light shifted, the shadows played along. In the blue of the hour, it was Ganyu who moved first. She reached past my head to open the window. The rain has long gone. The stillness fell upon the neighborhood, lulling the row of houses with what was left of the summer rainstorm. Somewhere inside me, too, the earthquake just finished with its aftershock. I sighed contentedly, laid back on the seat.
Curling up at another end of the backseat, clothless, Ganyu glanced my way and chuckled through cigarette smoke.
The strange warmth crept up in me again. “What?”
She suppressed another laughter. “Next time, how about I want you inside me, instead of I will see you again in five months? ”
“I just wasn’t sure.”
“Please, Keqing. This is not your first time.”
Embarrassment held my gaze down. “As if you haven’t been gone for five months. Where have you been?” I finally had the nerve to ask her, now that I kind of reacquainted with her.
Ganyu marveled at the burning end of her cigarette. “I was busy with the exhibit. And I was way behind the schedule with everything. The whole thing is a miracle at the deathbed, to be honest.”
“And it was almost over because some guy decided not to show up.”
“That’s why I said it's a miracle.” She paused to undry her lips with her tongue. I studied how it moved and the heat flowered inside me again. Give me a break. “I didn’t even want to imagine if you hadn’t shown up today.”
“I actually had a rehearsal, but for some reason it was canceled.”
“I guess we are fated to be doomed in the back of my car?” Ganyu bent over and snubbed out her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray at the front seat. Without any more words between us, I knew this was my sign to go. I reached for my jeans and swiped my phone, three missed calls from Ningguang and some texts flooded the screen. I tried to figure out the cause of all these calls and texts, but in Ganyu’s presence, even thinking became too problematic sometimes.
We seeped ourselves in the silence as we put our clothes back on.
“Keqing,” she called me. I liked how her lips saying my name. When I looked up from my phone, she was already staring right into me, an arm’s length away.
“I’m really sorry. I should’ve texted you or something, but I guess I’m too used to being alone.” She compressed her lips, thinking. “Friends with benefits are still friends, and I hurt your feelings as a friend.”
“It’s fine.” I broke away from her gaze a little. “No hard feelings.”
“Let me make it up to you. What do you want to do? Getting drunk in a bar, screaming I hate Jazz from a cliffside, building a sandcastle on a seashore…I’m all yours tonight.”
I was dying to say yes, but also I could have died from saying yes. So I took a step back. “I thought friends with benefits shouldn’t hang out?”
Ganyu gave me a smile— a final nail in my coffin— and went past me to the driver’s seat. “Says who? If we have no rules, we don’t break rules. It’s that easy.”
No rules, I mulled over the phrase for several minutes, hoping all the relationship’s guidebooks in the world would knock some sense into me, so that I could look right into her eyes and turn her down, like friends do. Although, that night, the law of gravity reigned supreme, and it was pulling me towards her.
“Can I get a cup of coffee first?” I finally said, settling in the seat next to her. “That way, we could also clean up.” At that point, my whole head was tossed into a washing machine, and I was in serious need of wakefulness that I didn’t yet know what for.
Perhaps for stopping myself from doing anything stupid, like falling in love with someone who will never love me back.
“And then?” Without looking at me, Ganyu asked the question I knew no answer for. Both of her hands strummed on the wheel.
I said I would think about what’s next with the post-midnight caffeine in my system. Then we, or rather, Ganyu, stopped for coffee at a random all-night cafe in a random downtown neighborhood. If you went in you would never let me pay for it, so wait here like a good girl. She declared under the glow of the string lights, hung low above the entrance of the coffee shop.
I pulled out the phone from my jean’s pocket, thinking about staring blankly at some music sheets to kill time. Before I could even do anything, Ningguang called me. A past midnight phone call was strange, even for someone who has a daily schedule of an owl like Ningguang.
“Where the hell are you?” She sounded like she was talking from inside a bass amplifier.
“No, Where the hell are you ?” I retorted. The loudness in the background started to hold the separate concert inside my ears.
She almost yelled this time. “At the bar, Keqing. God, I can’t believe you forgot! Get your ass off the piano and come here.”
Every piece seemed to come together now— the reason she called me and even barraged my inbox with storms of texts and rolling eyes emojis was because apparently I am boring and in need of a night out with the kids in the Jazz department at the bar where one of us, Beidou, was regularly playing at.
“I’m with a… a friend.” My throat tightened as her name—secret and unrepeatable— swelled up to the cliff of my tongue. I swallowed it, glancing briefly in her direction. Ganyu was still ordering our late-late-night coffee and oblivious to my heartbeats when saying her name.
“Since when do you have a friend other than us?” Beidou chimed in. I knew right away I was on speakerphone, and was being interrogated for the crime about to happen.
Left without choices, I gave in. “I’m with Ganyu.”
“What?!” Now they both chorused.
“I thought she’s your fuck friend?” Ningguang cross-examined my evidence. “You aren’t supposed to date your fuck friend, Keqing.”
“We just hang out. No rules,” I said to them what she said to me. It was not much of convincing them as it was to convince myself.
“Well, no rules is shit. Get the hell out of there.”
I switched my phone to the right, peering over my shoulders again. Ganyu was walking my way and I simply had to end this conversation, even if I would be forever on the run as a criminal, guilty of breaking friends with benefits laws.
“Don’t worry about me. I know what I’m doing.”
“You—”
The rest broke off into nothingness beyond the line. I was back to where I was standing. Ganyu handed me a cup of hot latte. I mouthed a thank you and beamed at her. She smiled back. Although I was left with more fuel to burn with.
The second we stepped out of the halo of the coffee shop’s light to the car, the blueness descended again. Suddenly we were the only ones left on the far edge of the universe.
“So?” Ganyu shoved one hand into the kangaroo pocket of her crop hoodie, while the other wrapped around the paper cup.
“Any suggestions?” Leaning against her car, I took an uninspiring sip of the latte. I usually have things planned ahead of time, with a specific date and time, so any improv was harder than playing La Campanella backward.
“How about we steal that cat statue?”
I looked in the direction she was pointing, where the stone cat was forever sitting in front of the cafe, and turned my head to her. I gave this several thoughts until my head turned into the world’s smallest apocalypse. “Are you sure?”
She let out a half-suppressed laugh. “Did you actually believe that? What kind of monster do you think I am?”
“The artist who sold a blank space can do anything,” I said with a glance in her direction.
“That work was listed as one of the most influential art projects of all time , mind you.” Ganyu’s eyes wandered around the place. “Look at us. It’s like we’re in the glitch of the world. The crack in the flawless system where the lost, forgotten things go.”
There was something in the way Ganyu looked when she was lost in thought. Her cloudless eyes became obscured and guarded, like an evening that finally disappeared behind the mountains. Night, like this one, unchallenged and absolute, extended across those twilight irises. She was receding into her own world. The blue little world I was standing on its threshold.
“Are we lost?” I asked, not knowing what I meant.
The eternal sunset in her eyes came back as they stopped at me. “I once hung out with a girl and got lost intentionally around a part of the city I didn’t even know.”
“When was that?”
“Right now.” She down the rest of the drink. “You’re the girl. Come on, let’s go.”
Riding with her that night, I felt like we were committing a crime— the long, discreet, and perpetual one. But covered by the night, emboldened by the streetlights and protected by our lawless laws, we got away with it. We hadn’t yet seen the warrant for our arrest, thus no idea of what we were breaking and what sentences we might be serving after it all comes to an end.
But watching Ganyu’s face, lit by streetlights and her careless laughter, I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, this is the crime I was going to be convicted of.
Because by then, by the time the first light had washed all the traces of the night, her face, her voice had turned into a scene from a nightmare. The sugar-sweet one. Who was this woman? I asked myself. Why, in our paper-thin distance, did I feel the horizon coming down on us and moving us apart, as if we were mere strangers? And why, for a moment after she dropped me in front of my apartment, was my whole body still in the car next to her, following her to a pancake place for breakfast?
My mouth took it upon itself to say something while she was still there. “Ganyu?” My voice against her name was so brittle I was afraid something might break out. Ganyu had been driving for more than six hours, and all the time her face showed not the barest trace of exhaustion— amazing and concerning at the same time.
She looked up at me, the quickening look she had when I called her by her name, not just hey or tapping her shoulders. I continued in spite of myself, “Be careful on the road, okay?”
The driver nodded with a smile, then, after an obligatory thanks, sped away. Each step upstairs, the taste of her name remained in my mouth. The mouthfeel of the two syllables resembled her kiss, the velvet heat of it.
Back in my room, I checked my phone and found a bombard of messages from both Ningguang and Beidou. Among the curses I got, they told me that they and Xinyan won’t be back for the night, so I had the place for myself that morning. Which was exactly what I wanted— the room for gathering my wild thoughts.
With her sweet-bitter scent still on my clothes, her voices in my ears, my fingers began to glide along the piano keys into Liszt’s Liebestraume. I didn’t have the music sheet on the holder, nor did I know it by heart, but that morning, I played better than I had played my whole life. With each chord, the notes that glowed intensely were not Liszt’s, not mine, but hers. At last, the skeleton behind the piano was playing for someone. Every passage in those three solo pieces was the terrain of longing, the miles it took for us to find each other, and I was walking them.
But the more I walked, the farther from her I became.