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Naran leans back against the couch and lights his cigarette, surprised to find that his hands are steady. He reaches out to light Krailert’s. It still feels extraordinary, to be doing this naked. The room smells of sweat, and of sex and smoke: he likes it.
He rubs at the imprint of his own teeth, in his arm. Even though there’s no-one in the library to hear him, he’d muffled his cries, because it had been so intense – again – that he’d thought he might scream, shout, make even louder sounds that would reveal quite how unravelled Krailert’s mouth, and his cock, made him feel.
“You know I like to hear you,” Krailert says, watching his movements.
Naran looks sideways at him. As always, he marvels at how beautiful Krailert is in the lamplight, lighting the sharp planes of his face, now softened by sex and perhaps, a little, by affection.
“I know that,” he says, smiling at him. “But perhaps I don’t want to hear myself.”
Krailert blinks. He takes a drag, and blows out smoke. “Nothing you do or say could ever embarrass me.”
“You mean, here,” Naran says, gesturing round them, at the private space they’ve carved out of their real worlds, at their nakedness there. He’s half-joking, but only half.
Krailert grimaces, and Naran instantly wants to take it back. He can’t and won’t pretend he doesn’t do the job he does, or that he’ll ever want to stop doing it. But now he’s accidentally ruining the peaceful moments in the aftermath, when the frantic need he’s pretty sure they both feel has temporarily cooled down.
He reaches for a way to change the conversation. “I’ve never…” he says, trailing off in a deliberately coquettish way. “I mean, you’re very good at this.”
Krailert’s mouth turns up, amused at Naran’s obviousness, and Naran gives him a grin. He does mean it, after all.
“Practice,” Krailert says, and shrugs.
Naran smokes, thinking about that, wondering if he’s jealous. Maybe a little. Also, he’s curious. He knows he can’t be the only man Krailert’s been involved with, but how did he meet those other men, and when?
“I had a lover,” Krailert says, abruptly, as if he’s reading Naran’s line of thought. “Before – before I was married.”
“What happened to him?”
Krailert is looking away, into the corner of the room. Naran waits.
“Nothing good,” Krailert says, finally. There’s an unusual rawness in his voice, more than Naran thinks he would usually let show.
Naran turns over that answer. Part of him doesn’t want to pry, and would rather move closer, wrap his arms around Krailert, and distract him from whatever old grief or pain he might be feeling.
And part of him feels that frisson of journalistic excitement, the pricked ears that come with the sense of a story.
“Was he in the army too?” he asks.
Krailert makes a half-amused sound, as if the idea was ridiculous. “No. He was—he was an actor. It doesn’t matter. He’s long gone.”
There’s still the same note in his voice. He thinks this man, his lover, is dead, Naran realises, without being sure how he knows it. That’s – perhaps it should be frightening. Instead, it’s interesting. It’s the shape of something horrifying and intriguing. Story, his brain whispers to him again, and he can’t quite brush it away.
Krailert leans forward and finds an ashtray, to stub out his cigarette. Naran, without thinking, moves to catch his arm, and pulls him back into a kiss, tugs him in, to bracket him. He feels Krailert relaxing into the familiar heat of their mouths, moving together, saying the things that neither of them are quite prepared to say yet.
Naran puts his arms around him. Much scarier than his desperate need to fuck and be fucked by this man is his warring impulse to hold him, to care for him, to ferret out his secrets and understand him.
They only have another few minutes, before they’ll have to go.
Naran abandons himself to the kiss, running his hand down Krailert’s back, warm and alive.
It’s not surprising, though he wishes it was, that Naran can’t let it go. He can’t concentrate on the fucking pointless write-by-numbers puff piece he’s been assigned this morning, because his brain is ticking over every nuance of what Krailert said, and what he might have meant.
He stops typing. “Hey,” he says to Son. “If I wanted to find out about something bad that happened to some actor, some years back, where would I look?”
“Are you asking me just because I’m a girl?” she says, narrowing her eyes at him.
Naran is absolutely asking her because she’s the only female journalist on the Siam Daily. It’s true that this means he’s being a dick, though, since he knows exactly how she feels about always being landed with the celebrity beat.
“Sorry,” he says, sincerely.
“She does know, though,” Prayun says, half under his breath.
“Shut up.” Son glares at him, then turns to Naran. “Since you apologized. Do you know the actor’s name?”
Naran shakes his head. He doesn’t think much of his chances of getting a name out of Krailert. “I don’t even know what happened to him. Just wanted to follow up on a rumour.”
“I feel like there was something…some actor who disappeared, back when I was a teenager…” She frowns, thinking.
“Why do you want to know?” Prayun says. The entire newsroom have stopped even pretending to work and are now watching this exchange, which is not what Naran wants at all.
“Nothing important.” He shrugs, and types a few words at random. “Some gossip I picked up.”
He can practically taste his colleagues’ scepticism. They think he’s onto a story. Which is good, because they won’t try to poach it. And also bad, because what the fuck is he doing, trying to find out about this and not even being subtle about it?
“It’s not coming to me,” Son says. “But you know Sakulthai? Their staff might know. And their old issues are all in boxes in a back room behind their office. You could try there.”
“Thanks,” Naran says. Dao likes that magazine, he’s never read it himself. “Maybe if I have a spare moment.”
“But you’re so busy writing a sponsored review of the new resort,” Prayun says. Someone throws a paper ball at him, someone else starts complaining, and Naran goes back to composing stupid sentences about the relaxing qualities of sea air.
In his lunch break, though, he looks up Sakulthai’s address and calls round to their office. The magazine staff are a lot more mixed than his crowd are: the main office has two men and two women on duty, also much better dressed than they are in the purposefully down-at-heel and crumpled atmosphere of his own newsroom.
He explains his errand, awkwardly.
“You’re that Naran guy, aren’t you? The firebrand. Didn’t expect to see the Siam Daily coming to us,” one of the men says, arching an eyebrow at Naran in what he thinks might be a suggestive way. “Are you onto some juicy info, then?”
“I doubt it. Just a rumour.”
“Hey, boss?” the man says, to the older woman frowning over a set of photos. “You’ve been here longest. Ring any bells?”
“Asawin Wish,” she says, without looking up. “Disappeared from the industry nine years ago. Didn’t make much of a stir, though. Rumour was he went to Hollywood to try to be a big star.”
“There you go,” the man says. “Come to think of it, I vaguely remember that. My mum liked him.”
“And no-one knows what happened to him?” Naran tries to keep this casual, though from the sharp way this guy is looking at him, it’s not working very well.
“No,” says the older woman. Her hair is bobbed, iron gray, and she has on batswing glasses that are somewhere in between fashionable and frumpy. She fixes Naran with a steely gaze. “This issue has to be out by today.”
“Sorry, sorry. Your magazine though, you were running then…any chance I could look at some back issues?”
“I’ll take you,” the man says, standing up. His boss – the editor, Naran assumes, he should’ve looked up her name – tuts, but goes back to her photos. Naran gives the room a polite wai, and follows.
The back issues are indeed filed in boxes in a small back room. His companion hangs around watching him for a few minutes, and then, when Naran shows no inclination to chat, excuses himself.
The 1960 issues, in the celebrity pages, are full of half-familiar faces from Naran’s teenage days. He sits cross-legged on the dusty floor with the box and leafs through them methodically. It doesn’t take long to find photos of Asawin Wish; he features relatively prominently, though not in the most heavily promoted articles.
Naran takes out his notebook to write down who Asawin Wish, or Win, is with in these photos – most often he’s on the arm of an actress who seems to be his co-star, usually named simply as ‘Lily’ – and the names of his films. There’s nothing remotely interesting in the accompanying text, just blurb about his films and gossip about him and this Lily and their apparent relationship.
He’s beginning to wonder if the office made a mistake, when he realizes that in his rapid scanning he’s gone through three issues with no mention of what events Win was attending and who with. He stops, goes back. And he finds it. One small box, noting that according to the Siam Daily Mail – what the fuck, Naran thinks – no-one has seen Win for several weeks.
“Is he taking a well-earned break, or has he gone to pastures new?” the piece suggests. But if he was taking a break, he didn’t come back from it in the rest of 1960, or in 1961 or 1962, since Naran checks every magazine from those years.
He sits back, leaning on his hands. It’s not much. It’s something, though. His instincts are still prodding at him, his pulse thrumming.
He puts the magazines in order, methodical, thinking.
“Thank you,” he says to the office, on his way out. “I wonder…the actress called Lily, from the early 1960s? Do you know where she is now?”
“Still acting,” the man says. He rifles through a messy pile of papers on his desk and comes up with a clipping, passing it over. It’s recognizably the same person from nearly a decade ago, only now she’s evidently been relegated to playing the heroine’s mother.
“That’s very helpful,” he says, with his most charming smile. The man lets his fingers brush Naran’s, as he hands the picture back.
Naran might not have noticed this a few months back. Now, he does, and suddenly he misses Krailert ferociously. Whatever is on his face makes his new friend look away, busying himself.
“Thanks again,” Naran says, and lets himself out.
The back issues of the Siam Daily require less negotiation to find. It’s a headline front-page article there, Win’s disappearance, which is interesting. He marks the date, which is two weeks before the Sakulthai article. Then he goes through every other issue, from every day, for the next three months.
There’s nothing there. No follow-up, no more speculation, no update for eager readers. A fairly famous actor vanishes, and apparently no-one at the paper thought to investigate where he’d gone.
The story was killed. It’s not exactly difficult to join the dots and work out why.
He automatically takes out the next issue and stops, staring. The front page has a wedding photo, and it’s Krailert, in uniform, looking at the camera with his most set smile.
Nara leans back against the shelves in their archive cupboard. His heart aches. This certainly seems like evidence that nothing good did indeed happen to a former lover of Krailert’s. The handsome young actor Asawin Wish disappears, and three months later Krailert has married a general’s daughter. Coincidence, or causation? Does the army know, about Krailert?
He knows, dimly, that he should find this thought terrifying. Instead, all he can think about is how much he longs to reach through time and hug this younger man, stiff in his uniform, or to take his hand and drag him away from the altar, from the wrong he knows he’s doing to himself and his wife.
This should be a sign that he should break things off. Maybe that’s even why he went looking. But he’s well aware that he’s not going to, even if he could, even though he should. The countdown is already ticking on their future. He can't make himself do anything to speed it up, not until the inevitable point when he'll have no choice.
It’s Sarasawadee’s turn to pick a song. He thinks he hasn’t written about ‘Sugar, Sugar’ yet, about the sweetness and stickiness of love and lust, the way Krailert’s touch makes him melt. He thinks about how to put that in writing so that only one reader, out of all the thousands in Bangkok, will understand that sometimes sweetness can be sharp like an ache, that you can break your teeth on it.
Two days until he sees Krailert again. He wonders if Klai Rung will have time to respond, and what they might say.
Krailert has his hands pinned above his head, and part of Naran’s brain is astonished at how frantic this has made him. The rest of his brain is too hazed with lust to analyse the surprise of learning yet another new thing about himself: he arches into Krailert’s hold, gasps into his mouth.
Krailert pulls back, his eyes wide and dark.
“You like this?” He presses a little, with his hands, to demonstrate.
Naran would roll his eyes if he were capable of it. Instead he licks his lips, and tries to nod.
Krailert blinks. He lets go, reaching down, and Naran is about to try to summon words to protest when he sees that Krailert is pulling Naran’s belt out of his trousers.
His mouth goes dry, and he hears himself make a sound.
Krailert’s mouth turns up. “I think that’s yes.” He loops the belt carefully round Naran’s wrists, ties it. It’s not too tight, and Naran could almost certainly get out of it, but when he pulls at it, it holds.
He has to shut his eyes, at the wash of lust through him, and to escape the intensity of Krailert’s gaze, for a moment.
Krailert starts kissing down his body, taking his time, and Naran feels every kiss like a brand. He’s so hard it hurts, and he needs…
When Krailert finally, after what seems like hours, takes his cock in his mouth, Naran does shout, and hasn’t any way to muffle it, this time. He clenches his fists, feeling it in his whole body and helpless to stop himself dissolving like crystals in hot water; losing himself entirely in pleasure.
There are tears in his eyes by the time Krailert finally lets him come, and his throat hurts. His wrists are throbbing where he’s twisted against the belt. He wants to be freed, but he can’t find words yet: he can only watch Krailert, blazing with lust, his eyes on Naran’s body as he touches himself. He comes on Naran’s chest, with his own shout, and then half-collapses on him.
Naran slowly tries to reassemble himself. He wriggles, and Krailert makes a muffled sound into his skin.
“You’re heavy,” Naran says. “And my wrists…”
That makes Krailert push himself up, alarmed, hair falling over his face, and untie the belt. He lifts Naran’s wrists, inspects them, and kisses the already-fading marks.
Sometimes Naran marvels at how this man, so passionate, and so tender, adopted a profession that requires such capability for violence. He’s aware there’s nothing fake about the way Krailert does his job, and that he does have that capability. It’s simply hard to believe it, when there’s this softness beneath his intensity.
He wonders about telling Krailert he knows about Win. Except that he doesn’t yet know enough. If he can find out anything more, even a little, then he can consider what to do with that knowledge.
“What are you thinking?” Krailert says, carefully settling himself in beside him. Naran shifts to make room.
“Nothing,” he says, and Krailert sighs a little, and lets the lie stand.
He goes through three contacts before he finds an address for Lily, real name Chitta Sombat. Luckily she still lives in the suburbs of Bangkok, and so Naran doesn’t have to take much time off to try his luck.
He assumes that this might take a while, and that he might have to lay siege. But instead, when he sends in his name by the maid, he’s admitted, into a bright living space opening onto a flower garden, modern and comfortable.
His hostess is waiting for him, perfectly poised in a modern armchair. He bows politely, and she gestures to the seat opposite her. She’s still beautiful, perhaps even more so, in some ways. Dao would be able to assess her clothes, her jewels: all he can tell is that they look expensive.
“I always take the Siam Daily,” she explains, looking him over. He wishes he had dressed more carefully. “I’ve heard of you. What can I help you with?”
There’s no point in wasting time. Naran decides to plunge straight in.
“I’m, ah. Looking into what happened to Asawin Wish, back in 1960. I happened to come across an article about his disappearance, I wondered…” He takes his notebook out of his pocket.
The maid is bringing in a clinking tray of orange juice, sweets. He trails off.
Lily pours him a glass, and sips from her own. Her expression is guarded. The maid leaves them.
“Anything you could tell me about those days might be helpful,” Naran says, trying to make his tone friendly and interested.
“No-one from the press ever asked me about Win,” she says. “Not once. And now, suddenly, here you are.” She waves a hand at him, a theatrical gesture.
Naran isn’t sure how well his usual journalistic charm is working. She certainly doesn’t look convinced. And he doesn’t want to lie outright to her.
“I don’t know if I’m working on a story,” he tries. “I’m more—curious.”
“I still have a career, Mr Pitayatorn. Such as it is. I can tell you that Win was my good friend, nothing more, and that I miss him. And that this…investigation… is not something I can assist with. My advice would be to let bygones be bygones. Now, if there was nothing else…?”
He’s lost her, Naran thinks. She’s about to throw him out.
“What if my curiosity were personal?” he says.
Lily tilts her head to one side and considers him. Naran feels his cheeks heating. He puts the notebook back in his bag.
“I think I understand why no-one ever asked you,” he says, meeting her eyes. “Why Win disappeared, and why no-one reported it. And I won’t report it either, if you don’t want me too. I just—I need to try to find out what happened.”
“You’re too young to have known him.”
Holding her gaze is too hard. Naran looks away, out at the garden.
“I know a friend of his. That is, if I’m right. If I am right, then. Then Win and I have something important in common.”
He lets that sit between them, in silence. His breath is coming a little faster: he can’t quite believe he really admitted this to someone else, even in this sideways fashion. There are some kind of giant pink flowers on a bush right outside the glass doors. He has no idea what they’re called, but they’re pretty. He focuses on them, hard.
After some time, Lily makes a considering noise, and he manages to look at her.
“You’re very young,” she says, even though she’s hardly that much older than him. “And so was he. So were we.” She sighs. “If we’re speaking frankly, Mr Pitayatorn, then I knew that Win had…a friend. He never told me who it was, and I never asked. But he was radiant, in those last months. So whoever it was, they made him happy.”
Naran swallows. He feels as if Krailert’s name, and everything Naran feels for him, is written all over his face.
“Maybe I should have asked.” Lily sighs again. “All I know is that he—that his friend—needed to be kept secret. I assume that the wrong person, or the wrong people, found out.”
“Did you—did Win ever say anything…” Did he ever feel scared, Naran wants to ask. Was he threatened, was he hurt. He can’t bring himself to say any of this.
“This is off the record. I don’t want to see anything about in your paper.”
He nods, waiting.
“Win came here one evening, in a terrible state. He had a black eye, he was bruised all over, crying. He told me he had to get out of the country, immediately. And so I helped him.”
Naran lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “He was alive? You saw him leave?”
“I watched him board the plane,” Lily says. Her face has softened. Naran isn’t sure he likes the sympathy he can see there.
“Thank you,” he says, meaning it.
Lily smiles at him, though it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I do miss him. Wait here.”
She stands, gracefully, and moves away into another room. Naran takes a sip of his juice, slightly shakily, grateful for the shock of its cold sweetness on his tongue.
Lily comes back carrying something, and gives it to him. It’s a black and white photo of a man standing outside what appears to be a restaurant, grinning and pointing to the sign. “Thai Orchid,’ it says, in English. The street looks indefinably foreign. Naran turns the picture over. There’s an address on the back, also written in English. The address itself isn’t immediately translatable, but he knows the final line: New York.
He looks up at Lily. She’s smiling more sincerely, now. “He writes to me now and then,” she says. “He never went back to acting, but he took enough of his savings with him to start a new career. He doesn’t sound unhappy, though of course it’s hard to tell. I don’t imagine he’ll ever come back. Not unless things were very different.”
Naran turns the photo back over. He wouldn’t have recognized the man as the young actor he’s seen, though now that he knows, he can trace the resemblance. He wants to slide the photo into his notebook and keep it close. He makes himself pass it back, instead.
“I’m glad,” he says. “And I—I wish things were different, too. For all of us.”
Lily makes a face. “I’ve read your articles. I don’t think we should get started on politics.”
Naran is surprised to find that he can laugh. He straightens, aware that a weight has been lifted.
“I should let you get on with your day,” he says. “May I ask one more favour, though? If I—if I were to tell one other person…”
“You seem like an honest man,” Lily says. “As long as you keep us safe, I trust your judgement. But if I may say so, be careful. Win wasn’t careful enough.”
“I’ll do my best,” Naran says, aware even as he says it that he’s lying here, too.
Krailert is pulling on his trousers, his vest. He puts his socks and carefully polished shoes on, and bends to lace them up. He surveys himself in the cracked mirror they keep in the corner, and combs his hair back, then studies himself again, checking there are no marks, no signs.
He takes his uniform shirt from the hatstand, the last piece.
“Let me,” Naran says, coming to stand close and fasten the buttons for him, one by one. He likes the erotic contrast of being still nude, when Krailert is in uniform: likes it and hates it, all at once.
Krailert runs a hand through Naran’s hair, and presses his lips to his forehead.
“What will you write to me, this week?” he asks.
“I haven’t decided yet. It can be a surprise.” Naran fits the last button through, and smooths down the shirt front. Krailert’s chest rises and falls, beneath his hand.
Naran steps back and looks at him. Krailert straightens under his gaze, putting his shoulders back. There’s already the slight distance in his eyes, that he gets when he’s about to return to his other life, his real life.
In his head Naran sees Krailert in a loose shirt, sleeves rolled up, maybe jeans, his hair wild. He’s walking down a New York street, free and confident. People turn to look at him. This Krailert turns to call to someone, grinning.
It doesn’t matter who he’s calling to. What matters is the sound of traffic and maybe birdsong, if New York has birds; the American accents; someone playing a guitar on the stoop of a building; skyscrapers soaring into the blue sky.
“Till next week,” Krailert says.
“I’ll see you then.”
Krailert kisses him once, hard, and turns to go. The Krailert in his mind’s eye walks on down the busy street, out of shot.
What matters is the future, and that Naran’s here now, to try to make it.