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The sea was a constant element. Different places on Earth have different seas, and different waves, but it all comes down to three elements: the water, the salt and the wind. Zhou Zishu’s life had always been about finding balance in those three elements. Him, a foreign body in that cohesive total, balancing on a board to face the waves. When they had talked about him they had said that he slayed waves, that he won against them, that he defeated, conquered, overcame waves. It had been wrong. He had made them accept him. The closest description he had received was about taming waves, but can someone tame the ocean? Is it not so much bigger than men that it can drown them without even trying?
He had begged the ocean to drown him, once. More than once. More than one ocean. If that ocean had been tamed by him, would it have obeyed his request to drown him or tried to protect him? No point in dwelling over it, anyway. He had not drowned.
He had tried to let the scars heal, he’d closed that one contract in a terrible way, had taken his passport and traveled to the other side of that ocean, and had tried staying away from the water, from the sea, from the boards.
Zhou Zishu, who now hadn’t let anyone call him with that name for almost two years, should have known, however, that just like all rivers end up in the sea, and all smaller seas pour into a larger ocean, he would have eventually found his way back on the water. He just happened to be taking a bus on a very windy day and — and that had been a mistake — he lived in a city that had beaches. And on that bus a very loud group of teens, all dressed up in what was possibly the latest fashion on this side of the Pacific, started talking about waves, wind, surfboards.
Something stirred in Zhou Zishu, something that sounded very much like an echo of a voice he once valued very much and that said “You’re the most valuable athlete in this country in this discipline”, and that then turned sour and said “I should have never put all this trust on you, I should have known how weak you are”. But if he just saw the waves one more time. What harm could that do? He followed the bus route to the seaside, the beach was not the best surfing spot, but a good number of surfers was there, nonetheless. Many people stared at them from the sand, quite a few girls ogling the boys in their tight attire. Zhou Zishu scoffed, to these people it wasn’t serious. It was a hobby. He had given up everything for it, and then, it hadn’t been enough. The sea hadn’t wanted him, had refused drowning him, but had accepted his two teammates without complaints. When he’d broken his own shoulder to get out of the competition world the pain had almost been freeing.
He stood on the sand for a while, before even contemplating removing his shoes and touching the sand with his naked skin. The last time he’d done that he had tried to kill himself, and had emerged from the sea with not enough water in his lungs.
He sat down on the hot sand, the sun not hot enough to bother divesting. He watched a couple of girls walking down on the shore, their feet in the water, chatting to themselves, their hair tied up and their naked necks exposed. Zhou Zishu felt nothing . He was once a young person full of desires of every kind, though he was mainly focused on his athletic career; he remembered spending nights out in bars and clubs with his teammates. He remembered having felt things having girls interested in them, being wanted, wanting. Sometimes, getting. Now, though, he just stared at people acting their lives and their emotions, and he sat on the sand.
Until a kid on a longboard fell down and didn’t re-emerge. Zishu had been watching that portion of water with a sort of focused disinterest, not not paying attention. He just noticed that a board was empty for too long, his trained eye immediately catching something was wrong.
It was instinct, more than a conscious decision, that made him throw off his shirt and jump in the water, swimming nimbly to where that abandoned board floated. It was a matter of seconds, catching a thin body in his hands, its small wrist still tied to the board, and then bringing it back to the surface, hanging the both of them from the surfing board. It was a small kid, not small, exactly, more like a sort of pre-adolescent who still had to grow into his limbs, too thin and not strong enough to face this kind of waves with this kind of board.
Zhou Zishu took a quick look at whether the other surfers had paid any attention and wasn’t surprised to realize that no one seemed to have noticed anything. The kid was coughing and spitting, hanging on to the board for dear life. His hair was in his eyes, he looked like a wet kitten. Zishu shook his head. “Are you okay to swim back to shore?” he asked.
The kid nodded, and placed himself on the board, horizontally, to drive it back to the beach. Zhou Zishu swam back, too, close by. When they touched shore, he found that many eyes were focused on him, his manoeuvre not unnoticed. He turned back to the kid, “Hey, are you okay?”
The kid moved the hair away from his face, “Yes,” he said, quite shyly. “I’m sorry for the trouble.”
Zhou Zishu couldn’t believe that the kid was worried about having forced him to get his clothes wet. He could have drowned, who cared about an old pair of jeans. “Who are you with, kid?” he asked, instead, because the kid was still a child and it was worrisome that he’d been out at sea alone.
“Those guys told me they would teach me,” he said, “and my uncle Zhao let me come with them to the beach.”
Zishu threw another glance to those guys , a group of older teenagers who hadn’t spared a single glance at their “friend” who had almost drowned. “They don’t know what they’re doing, how can they teach you!” he said, and then, “I think I should just get you back to your uncle, boy.”
“I think this is your shirt,” said a new person, a young man, a weird young man, He was wearing sunglasses, fancy ones. And he was also wearing a hat, like the sun should have no access at all to his face. Which made for an interesting choice, considering he was on a beach, and wearing swim trunks, over long, pale legs. He was also holding Zishu’s shirt, with his phone in the pocket.
Zishu took it immediately. “Thanks.” he said, but the man didn’t leave. A slow, warm, smile spread on his face, instead, as he removed the sunglasses. He looked nice, Zishu thought, if nice could in some language mean hot. And he looked like an asshole.
“Kid, are you okay?” the stranger asked, as if Zishu hadn’t asked the same question two seconds ago.
The kid nodded once again, and the stranger turned back to Zishu. “You know, if you’re busy I can make sure the kid gets back home. I’ll just grab my own kid and then we can set off, okay?”
“Not okay,” Zishu replied, because who the hell was this guy, coming and stealing kids away from Zhou Zishu. “Also, who the fuck are you?”
The man’s face did something funny. “Oh. I’m Wen Ke Xing, I am quite well-known around here.” he said.
“Well, I don’t know you, so I couldn’t care less.” Zishu replied, and signaled at the kid to follow him. The kid, weirdly enough, obeyed.
“There’s a surf school,” the stranger, Wen Ke Xing, called after them. “They need teachers. And students.”
Zhou Zishu turned to him one last time, or so he hoped, “So what?” he spat out. “Where is it, also? Wouldn’t want to come across it by chance, I wanna be sure to avoid it.”
Wen Ke Xing smiled even more, impossible as it seemed, and pointed his long, slender, index finger to a building on the beach, a sort of shed, but larger. “There,” he said, and he sighed into it. Zhou Zishu already hated him.
“Fine. Goodbye.” He started walking on the sand, eager to get away.
“You’re not even telling me your name?” the other man laughed, catching up to them. Zhou Zishu sighed, what a nuisance.
“Will you leave me alone if I do?”
Wen Ke Xing put his sunglasses back on. “For today,” he said. Which was okay, Zhou Zishu wouldn’t come back here, anyway.
“Sure. that’s Zhou Xu.” To his credit, Wen Ke Xing stopped on the beach to wave him goodbye and didn’t follow him and that kid any further. What a weird, absurd, day.
Bringing that kid back home was no easy feat, truly. Traffic in the city was unpleasant, as usual, but it wasn’t just that. It was clear that the child didn’t want to go to his uncle. Zhang Chengling. That was the kid’s name. Zhou Zishu hadn’t asked, the kid volunteered the information by himself, starting to say that he had been recently adopted by this uncle of his, but maybe he would have preferred not leaving his hometown, and a series of very sad things that a thirteen year old child should never even come to think.
Zhou Zishu was a bit taken aback, hearing this whole story on a bus and then on a tram and then again walking along a residential avenue with very large houses and even larger gardens. “I thought,” the child went on, monologuing on his own and apparently not giving a damn if he was or wasn’t listening, “that if I could learn how to surf, at least, I could have something in common with my dad, who always wanted to teach me but never managed to. But surf schools are all expensive, and I don’t want to weigh on my uncle. And so those kids, who live around here, told me they were going and could teach me. And I thought I might as well try.”
Zhou Zishu thought that teenagers can be very stupid and should also stop acting like grown adults when it’s very obvious that they have no brain to match their words. “And you almost drowned,” he said.
“But you came along!” Chengling said, half apologetic and half happy. Weird kid, he was.
“That was just luck.” Zishu muttered, and he truly believed his words.
“Do you know how to surf?” the kid asked, and Zhou Zishu’s stomach tightened. Yes . I was the best at that, in the whole world.
“I used to,” he replied. Lying. Because he still knew how to do that. He had deliberately fucked up his shoulder in a way that made it impossible for it to heal and grant him the chance to practice a sport in a professional setting. But, on the other hand, he thought he could still surf if he wanted, for leisure. He had just not done that in a couple years, but he trusted that his body remembered how to do that.
“I guess it would be weird if I asked you to teach me,” Chengling mused, his voice hopeful.
“Would it stop you from seeking your own death again?” Out of the two of them, Zishu was sure, the one who had actively tried to kill himself had been him and not the boy, but it was all the same.
“Sure, you already saved me once,” that absurd child said.
It was a crazy decision, an illogical one. It was devoid of any common sense, and yet Zhou Zishu took a look at that kid, his round eyes full of a sadness that could surpass the strongest barriers of his happy smiles, and said. “Sit tight at your uncle’s home until you hear from me, then.” And Chengling, an absurd boy he had met on an even more absurd day, hugged him. He patted him lightly on his shoulder and deposited him on the driveway to his uncle’s villa, ready to walk back to the bus stop, thinking about how he could actually teach this poor kid how to surf when he himself had none of the equipment.
In the following week, Zhou Zishu managed to reduce the thought of the surf lessons to just a small noise in the back of his brain. He had found a job in a gym downtown and he focused all his efforts there. How humiliating for a world class athlete to be the one who now checked that people did their sit-ups right.
It wasn’t until two weeks later that he thought back about Chengling and — possibly — about how to help him learn how to surf. On that day, in fact, he saw a man waiting for someone out of the gym, a man that was, without doubt, the same guy who had retrieved his shirt from the beach. Wen something. The hot asshole. The one who claimed to be well-known.
What was he doing there? Was he stalking him? How had he found Zhou Zishu? Did he know who he really was?
All of these questions turned to dust when Asshole Wen smiled that warm smile of his to a thin girl coming out of the gym with a duffel bag. The girl looked like a teenager, seventeen or so to judge from the giddy way she dragged herself around, and Zhou Zishu was hit with a pang of curiosity to learn who she was, why she was with Asshole Wen in Zishu’s gym.
He turned to the receptionist, coming out of the weight room where he was stationed. “Who’s that one?” he asked.
The receptionist — a blonde woman who thought herself quite pretty — widened her eyes, “Wen Ke Xing?”
Ah, yes. That was the full name of the asshole. “I still have no idea who that is,” Zishu replied, not even lying.
“He owns a large bar on the beach,” she replied, “a famous one. The Valley, it’s called. It used to be called Ghost Valley, but they rebranded when he started managing it.” Oh god, a landlord. Was that why he was such an asshole?
“You’re informed,” he commented, offhanded.
The girl smiled again. “It is part of my job to know who our clients are,” she said.
“And who’s the girl?” Zishu asked, because he had nothing to lose by asking.
“Oh.” the receptionist stopped. Zishu threw her an expectant glance, and she went on, “She’s thought to be his daughter.”
“She’s too old to be his daughter,” Zishu cut off. The asshole might have been thirty or so, not much older, and either he had had a daughter when he was thirteen — which, although possible, was unlikely — or that wasn’t his daughter.
“He keeps signing all the documents as her guardian, either way,” the receptionist said. And, when Zishu didn’t say anything else, she added, “It’s him that caught your eye, right?”
Zhou Zishu blinked, “That girl is a child ,” he stated, serious in his tone and in his face. He might have been caught by surprise by the presence of that asshole near his gym, but one thing was to be caught off guard by a man who was insufferable, yes, but still eye-pleasing, another thing was to be accused of ogling teenagers. One of those things was immoral, and unfortunately thinking about the dimples on Asshole Wen’s cheeks wasn’t yet immoral.
Before he thought better of it, the next day, in the late afternoon, he went to that beach again. He noticed, then, that the Valley Bar was right on the other side of the avenue from the beach. He also saw the surf school shed Asshole Wen had told him about. And then, unfortunately, he was spotted by the asshole in question.
“A-Xu!” Wen Ke Xing, resident VIP and horrible person, greeted him, too informal by any standard. Zhou Zishu was about to tell him that, but it was going to be useless. Wen Ke Xing went on, “You’re back! Couldn’t stay away from this nice spot? Where’s that kid you prevented from drowning?”
“The kid is with his own family,” Zishu replied, “But he wants to learn how to surf,” he added, thinking that if this asshole was determined to stay here he might as well exploit him to his advantage.
Asshole Wen removed his sunglasses and, once again, Zhou Zishu was forced to deal with the knowledge that he had a very pretty face in front of him, and attached to that face was a very nice body, too. The problem lied with the brain and the nonsense it produced.
“A-Xu! What wonderful news!” Wen Ke Xing laughed, “I told you about that school here, right? I’m sure they would love to take him in!” Zishu was sure, as well, but that wasn’t the point of this.
“He wants me to teach him,” he made it clear, and watched how unsubtly Wen Xe Xing’s eyes trailed along his torso, only clad in a white t-shirt.
“What fine taste,” Wen Ke Xing smirked, and Zhou Zishu felt like smacking that smile off his face with a slap, “you’ll excel at being a surf master, I’m sure.”
He studied Zishu’s face for a while yet, and it was unnerving, because Zishu wasn’t used to having this kind of undivided attention for himself, not from someone like that, at least. “And what would you do to ensure that I excel?” he pushed back, still a man with nothing to lose. He had already lost all he cared about.
Wen Ke Xing’s smile faltered a tiny bit, then going back into place, “I could offer you a job at that school, A-Xu” he said. Zishu had anticipated this. “With free access to the equipment, the keys to the shed, and everything. In your free hours, I guess, you could teach that kid.”
Zhou Zishu turned his eyes to stare at him, in turn. Something had shifted in Wen Ke Xing’s demeanor. If he’d been cocky and flirty the second before, he was now heavily guarded.
“Is that school yours?” he asked.
“It’s on my property,” Wen Ke Xing replied. “I make the calls.”
Zhou Zishu knew that powerful men didn’t give their secrets away just like that, but he learned that day that some powerful men, especially the kind that goes to the beach with hats, sunglasses and fancy silk shirts, have a way to make you ache to learn their secrets. And it made no sense, because why on earth would Zhou Zishu know anything about that man? Why would he want to learn why he kept a decrepit shed on his fancy beach and didn’t close it off instead? Why would he want to strip him of his sunglasses to watch closely as he finally told him why he acted like he owned the whole world and then let an insignificant man like Zhou Zishu have this much power over him with just a simple question? Couldn’t he guard the emotion on his face a bit more? Could he not stay away from Zhou Zishu?
“I hate being in debt with people,” Zishu said, watching him again. Their eyes met, and Zishu found it hard to keep thinking that Wen Ke Xing was an asshole when he stared at him with that expression.
“A-Xu, I’m merely offering a place for you to work. Working creates no debt. I’m not giving you the keys for free.” Wen Ke Xing bit back, and Zhou Zishu wanted to walk away from him, but at the same time didn’t want the other one to walk away first.
“Fine. Part time. I want to keep the other job I have, as well.” Zishu said, and Wen Ke Xing’s throat worked, as if he couldn’t find the words. His neck was elegant, long, and Zhou Zishu hadn’t had anyone in years, and even before no one had had a neck that looked so incredible.
He had to stop himself from staring at where he wanted to sink his teeth, and also to remind himself that this man in front of him was now sort of his boss.
“I just want that kid to learn,” Wen Ke Xing said, and his tone was a bit forlorn, as if he knew things about Chengling, as if he owed him something. Zhou Zishu was a reckless man, the one who had tried to tame the ocean, after all. So when he said, “Aren’t you offering me a drink for my hiring?” really it wasn’t anything out of character.
Wen Ke Xing was intriguing. And still an asshole. But the kind of asshole that Zhou Zishu — a bit of an asshole himself — could very much enjoy. It became clear when they started their third cocktail, sitting on the beach, and they had talked about the sea, the ocean, the waves, the surfers that were currently in the water, and Wen Ke Xing, with a smile tugging at his lips, turned back to study Zhou Zishu’s face. He had been doing that all evening. And the interesting thing was that Zishu had stopped caring, or, to say it better, he had started enjoying it.
“A-Xu,” Wen Ke Xing started, amused in his voice, a playful smile on that handsome face of his, “you’ll have to come back to surf with me some other time. I wanted to do it with you as soon as possible, but I’ve had too much to drink and it’s night and I don’t really want to die.”
Zhou Zishu huffed a laugh, he was entertaining, like this, face flushed, hair in slight disarray, and Zishu could now say, with certainty, that there had never been any other person who had looked at him in this way. It was quite unsettling, and a bit destabilizing, that a stranger who he’d just met was taking the liberty to drag his eyes on him however he pleased. But it was possibly the only certain thing about this Wen Ke Xing, who owned a bar and feared getting tanned, it was possibly the only truth he now knew about him, that honest way he wanted Zhou Zishu.
“You’ll have to be patient, to see me surf again,” he conceded, too much truth in his own words, hoping for some more truth in return.
“I am nothing but patient,” Ke Xing replied, “Patience is the foundation on which this bar was built,” he added. And it was true. Zhou Zishu smiled, grateful.
The time it took for Zishu to teach Chengling how to stand properly on a board was too much. Too much by any standard. If he’d been an honest teacher, he would have told Zhang Chengling that it was pointless, he just wasn’t suited for surfing, he could find something else to do. If he’d been a good man, too, he would have done that. But Zhou Zishu was nothing if not selfish, and the moment he had an excuse to spend his afternoons in the water and criticize how others surfed, and maybe, on occasions, surf himself, he wasn’t going to let it go.
There were other kids who came for lessons, some teens, too. A couple of girls who kept eyeing him were very obviously invited not to come back by Wen Ke Xing himself. Because that, unusual as it was for Zhou Zishu, was also another issue. Or well, maybe not an issue. More like an enigma to be unraveled. Wen Ke Xing’s eyes never left him for longer than ten seconds, when they were both there, he flirted like he was paid to do so, but he never did anything. He never even asked for anything. He just gave and gave and gave. And Zhou Zishu, possibly, was more than willing to give back. But he didn’t know how to breach through all those defenses, through all those layers of good manners, of teasing and insistent glances.
“You wanted to surf with me,” Zishu said one Thursday afternoon in which his class had been cancelled because the small girl he taught had come down with a cold. Wen Ke Xing’s bar had placed a secondary counter on the beach, now that it was summer, and Zishu was leaning across it to talk to the Valley owner.
“A-Xu,” Wen Ke Xing started, as usual, then threw a glance at A-Xiang, who was washing glasses, “are you offering?”
“I’m free now,” he stated, plainly, and he let himself be stared at by Wen Ke Xing’s inquisitive eyes. “You’re kinda free, too. Let’s go.”
Wen Ke Xing without a shirt was not something Zishu had been ready to face. Well, he had been ready to face it, but not like this. Not while he coated himself in sun screen and picked up a board. Not while he kept looking at Zishu with those eyes full of things of all sorts. As soon as they touched the water, Zishu sprayed Wen Ke Xing, playfully, and was sprayed back.
Surfing had always been about being perfect, for Zhou Zishu. Being balanced, being quick, being adaptive. It had not once been about spending time with someone he enjoyed the company of. Sure, he had nothing but love and care for his teammates, when he’d lost them his life had gone to shit. But when they were in the water together, it wasn’t about having fun, it was about being athletes who won competitions.
Now, though, with Ke Xing being sprayed by the waves, smiling wildly against the wind, his gaze focused on how to shift according to the changing tide, it wasn’t like that. Not at all. He hesitated to jump on the board, preferring to stay low and watch how Ke Xing fared on his own. He looked like he had lost the heavy baggage he seemed to always drag along with him, he was just a young man enjoying the waves.
Seeing him like this, Zhou Zishu thought that this was what normal people their age should look like, happy, carefree. Not with the kind of anguish they both seemed to share. He wanted to know what it was that weighed Ke Xing down, he wanted to share that load, he wanted Ke Xing to share his own load. Fuck it, he jumped on the board for the next wave, Wen Ke Xing was in himself an ocean where drowning was too easy.
After a long while, longer than Zhou Zishu had ever surfed in the last few years, they came back to the beach.
“What happened to your shoulder?” Wen Ke Xing asked, while they were putting the boards back. Zhou Zishu glanced at his right shoulder. The scar was noticeable, ugly. No one had asked anything about it, anyway. And, come to think of it, it had possibly been Ke Xing’s doing.
“ I happened to my shoulder,” Zishu said, and he teared his eyes away from Wen Ke Xing’s hurt expression. “It was the only way out.”
Wen Ke Xing’s fingers came to rest on his jarred skin. Zishu hitched a breath. The contact was unprecedented, as much as Lao Wen was a physical person, he’d never dared touch Zishu’s scar like this. He looked so full of pain, of compassion. Zishu couldn’t stand it. He took a step back.
“Out of what?” Lao Wen asked, his voice small. Zishu closed his eyes for a short second.
“You truly don’t know who I am?” he had to ask, because he had thought that all this time Wen Ke Xing had recognized him. Why else ask him to come teach surf?
“A-Xu,” Lao Wen pleaded, “I only know you’re someone who came here from abroad, and who surfs real good, looks real good and-” he stopped. “A-Xu, your only way out of what?”
Zhou Zishu leaned against the wooden wall of the surf shack. He let out a bitter laugh. “I was world champion for five consecutive times,” he said. “And then my two teammates were involved in an accident, out at sea. They drowned, Lao Wen. And our coach told me to go back to the championship, as if nothing happened. I lost on purpose. I tried to hurt myself more than once, but nothing seemed to stick.”
Ke Xing was staring at him with tears in his eyes. He was silently listening to all of this, and Zishu wanted nothing more than to wrap him up in his arms and tell him that he was still here, he was here now and he wasn’t going to try to end it anymore. He had Chengling to teach, he had- he had Wen Ke Xing to take care of, in some measure.
“Lao Wen,” Zishu said, and Ke Xing looked at him once again, taking a ragged breath. “Lao Wen, I had to run away from there. It was too much. But you’ve seen me, I’m okay now. I’ve got not one, but two jobs. I can still surf. I’ve got nothing to complain about.” I’ve got you . He didn’t say that, because it wouldn’t have been fair.
Wen Ke Xing took his hand in his, stroking it lightly. “You didn’t deserve any of those things,” he said, quietly, “and right now I wish I could hurt who brought you to hate yourself so much. I would skin them alive,” he went on, tone low and dark, “I would listen to them screaming for a mercy that wouldn’t come. I would-”
Zishu snaked an arm around Ke Xing’s waist and pulled him in and crashed their lips together. Desperate, he was desperate for this, he had wanted this for so long, and to hear Ke Xing be so distraught by his words was the final straw. Wen Ke Xing went in with a startled moan, and then adjusted himself so as to be perfectly placed between Zhou Zishu’s legs, kissing back in earnest. Zishu’s hands went both in Ke Xing’s wet hair, keeping him close, keeping him in the reach of his starved mouth.
Zishu had never wanted this so much, he was bursting from inside. He slid his tongue against Wen Ke Xing’s lips, his palate, and then he dragged his teeth on his lower lip. Wen Ke Xing moaned again, softly, and then he pulled back. His eyes were dark, large, and the tears he had been cradling earlier were now pooled at the angle of his eyes. Zhou Zishu wiped them with his thumb. “You shouldn’t cry for me.”
Wen Ke Xing let out a hollow laugh, “You will be the death of me,” he answered, and he dropped his head on his shoulder. Zishu caressed his hair, again, a silky tangle that reached his shoulders and that was so, so beautiful on the daily, just as much as the rest of Wen Ke Xing.
“I don’t want to be the death of you,” Zhou Zishu murmured against his head, “I want to spend as much time as I can with you. I want to take you to see the world, Lao Wen. I want you to-”
This time it was Wen Ke Xing who shut him up with a kiss, a deep, meaningful one. Zishu let him do whatever he wanted, bite him, lick him. Ke Xing was a hungry thing in his arms, a man who had been floating without a destination and now had found a raft to hang on to. Zishu knew the feeling, he had been on that same raft hoping it would break under him and let him drown. But now there were two of them and they wouldn’t let go.
They had dinner together, which wasn’t unusual. They often ate together, Wen Ke Xing had a bar, after all. But this time it was different: the way Wen Ke Xing kept filling his plate, as if to make sure he wouldn’t waste away in front of him, was different. The way Wen Ke Xing kept taking his hands to hold them was different. The way Zhou Zishu wanted to kiss him breathless and to see him come apart in front of him wasn’t different, though, the difference was that now he could look forward to it.
Not that same night, no. The things he had revealed still hung heavy over them, but he could now fathom a tomorrow in which Wen Ke Xing could still want him as much as he wanted him.
“I mean this,” Zishu said when they said goodbye for the night.
“What?” Ke Xing asked, and he sounded tense. Had Zishu misread the whole thing? It seemed hardly possible.
“You. And me. I mean that. I meant it when I first kissed you. I mean it now, that I want to keep seeing you and to be with you. I mean it.”
Wen Ke Xing’s expression turned a bit sour, a flash of self-hate in his eyes. “Why would you, five times world champion A-Xu, want to date me? Why make it something serious? Why not just have our fun?”
Ke Xing was lucky that Zishu had learned to read at least a bit of his many secret languages. He took his hand again. “Okay.” he said, “I would want to date you because of many reasons, one being how beautiful your face is.” Wen Ke Xing’s lips curved into a tiny, hesitant smile. “But we can have our fun, if you prefer. But, Lao Wen, it’s your choice and I respect that, but if it were up to me, I’m sure about you. About choosing you.”
Wen Ke Xing’s face did that thing again, where he tried to school all of his expressions behind a cover of blankness. “A-Xu. You wouldn’t say this, if you knew-”
“Stop this,” Zishu imposed himself, “I don’t care. What I know is that I like you. Lao Wen, trust me.”
Dealing with Wen Ke Xing as an acquaintance had been funny, challenging, stimulating. Dealing with him as a friend had been harder, because both of them had very unfriendly intentions towards the other. Dealing with Lao Wen as a lover, as a boyfriend, was very similar to surfing, in so far as it was a game of balancing oneself with the mercurial temperament of the other man, who changed his mood quicker than the tide changed.
Zishu wanted to understand him. He wanted to know where he went when he disappeared in the back of the bar for two hours at a time, more and more often. He wanted to know why he kept his distance now more than before.
But it was so easy to fall victim of his enthrallment, all the time. Zishu was incapable of resisting the pull of his lips, once he’d kissed him the first time he had found himself unable to live without doing it all the time. As shameless as Ke Xing had been in flirting with him since the very start, he was now almost shy when it came to displaying the changed nature of their relationship to the public.
The surf shack was still the best place where he would kiss him and be kissed in return, but the Valley’s administration room had seen its fair share. It was simply impossible for Zhou Zishu to stop when he started, he kept wanting more and more of Ke Xing’s pretty mouth. It was as if he’d been made to kiss the other man non-stop.
“Do you want to come upstairs?” asked one night Wen Ke Xing, while they were — unsurprisingly — making out on the beach.
“Upstairs?” Zishu frowned.
“I live upstairs from the bar,” Ke Xing smirked, blinking slowly. “I thought you knew.”
Zhou Zishu laughed. That ridiculous man he was head over heels for. Of course he hadn’t mentioned the fact that his bedroom was five meters away from where they currently were. Just another one of the ten thousand traps and tests set by the beautiful, deadly, Wen Ke Xing.
“What would we do upstairs?” Zishu joked, as he started getting up.
“Play chess,” Ke Xing replied, not missing a beat. And then he smiled, kindly, fully. “Naked. With no chessboard. And no pieces. I don’t want to play chess.”
Zhou Zishu took his hand and kissed his knuckles. “I would have said yes to chess, though,” he said, “but you sound like a valid alternative option.”
Zhou Zishu didn’t have the time to get a decent glance of Ke Xing’s apartment, because as soon as he walked through the door he was pulled in a bedroom and on a soft mattress, and then he had a lap full of Wen Ke Xing kissing him and trying to get him out of his clothes. Zhou Zishu let himself get lost in the feeling, in the eagerness his lover was displaying. How heavy his hands were on him.
Wen Ke Xing kissed his scar on his shoulder with all the reverence in the world, and Zhou Zishu knew in that exact moment — as if he had ever harbored any doubt in the first place — that he was loved just as much as he loved. His eyes stung with tears, which he tried to blink away. Ke Xing removed his shirt, and Zishu feasted on the pale expanse of skin that was offered to him. “Lao Wen,” he breathed, and he didn’t even know what he wanted to say, “can I- can you? Can we?”
Wen Ke Xing laughed quietly. “Yes, we can.” he said, “But I think you should.”
Zishu brought his lips back against his own, and deepened their kiss until they both gasped for air, breathing heavily in the dark room, with only the moon’s light outlining their shapes.
He rolled them over, finding himself on top of Wen Ke Xing, whose hair was splayed on the pillow, dark against the pale cover. He looked so beautiful right then.
He kissed him again, and he brought down a hand to stroke his cock, getting a deep moan in return. “A-Xu.”
“Mh?”
“I want you to take me apart,” he said, “A-Xu, destroy me,” he begged. And Zhou Zishu wanted the same, to break him and put him back together himself. It was his only duty in the world. So, without ever taking his lips away from Wen Ke Xing’s neck and shoulders, he put on a condom — ready for him, because Wen Ke Xing was nothing if not a prudent man, and had decided where this night was going and was watching it go exactly that way — and slowly pushed in, into his Ke Xing, who tightened around him, before relaxing again. “Go,” Ke Xing said, “Go on, A-Xu, for god’s sake.”
Zishu smiled, enveloped in a heat that had nothing to do with the warm summer air around them. He pushed further. And then he moved his hips. Ke Xing let out a sound that was neither a cry nor a moan, it was animal. It was the most sincere thing that had ever escaped his lips. Zishu kept going.
“A-Xu,” Ke Xing said, “ A-Xu , I’ve wanted this since I saw you,” he said, and the words were barely understandable, interrupted by sobs and moans. “I saw you jumping into the water,” he kept talking even now, it was truly something. “You came out looking like a god,” Ke Xing said and his breath was less and less regular. “A god ,” he repeated, “oh my god,” he gasped, “you’re, A-Xu, fuck, A-Xu,” coherence was leaving him as Zishu was hammering into him more and more, drunk on what he was hearing, both words and sounds. “You’re better than a god,” Ke Xing managed to say, and then he arched in a beautiful way, falling back on the mattress immediately after. “Yeah,” he said, “like that .”
Zishu pinned his arms over his head, while he kept that up, taking in the beautiful sight of his lover finally unable to produce words, gasping and panting and keeping his eyes always on him, never ever leaving Zishu.
“Can you come like this?” Zishu asked, because he was getting there and he didn’t want to be alone.
“Fuck,” Wen Ke Xing breathed, “ yes .” That answer itself brought them both over, and as Zishu spilled inside of Wen Ke Xing still, his Lao Wen did the same over the both of them. “Fuck,” he repeated.
“The shed,” Wen Ke Xing said, after a while, having gotten up and come back, cleaner and, unfortunately, less naked.
“What of it?”
“My parents built that surfing school,” he started telling, slowly. He wasn’t looking at Zishu, which was why Zishu went to him, sat on the bed, and wrapped around him from behind. This way when he talked, he could hear the vibration of the air going through his lungs from his skin. Wen Ke Xing placed a hand over Zishu’s. “They died when I was little. I wanted to buy it back, but the owner of Ghost Valley had bought it all. I-”
He took a breath that shook through the both of them, Zishu just kissed his shoulder. He could wait years to hear the rest of this story, he was in no rush. Not anymore. Not now that they had come together, like they seemed to be meant to do.
“A-Xu, I destroyed that man.” He knew already. He had suspected as much, but it didn’t matter. “Economically, politically. On all levels except physical, I killed that man.”
“Did he,” Zishu whispered his question, they were so close, “did he kill your parents?”
“Zishu,” Ke Xing said, his tone cold, distant, “A-Xu.” he repeated, “Of course he did.”
“Then you did what was fair,” he stated, and, again, he placed his lips on his skin, “I would have done the same. You did right.”
Wen Ke Xing turned to face him, displacing him, but he would take it, gladly. “And what if they hated the person I’ve become?” What a hard question. The dead don’t have opinions on the living. If they had, then Zishu should worry about what his teammates would think about him, and this wasn’t something he would do.
“You’re not a person who deserves to be hated,” he replied, “you have a huge heart, Lao Wen, you should be loved. You deserve that.” And I want to do that .
Wen Ke Xing nodded. Then he took a sharp breath, laughing emptily. “Wow. How I ruined the mood, huh.” Zishu wanted to slap him. He hadn’t ruined anything, he’d finally taken down some of the many walls that he’d built around him. Why didn’t he want Zishu to see him vulnerable and messed up? Why did he hide his scars under such a carefully crafted mask? Zishu didn’t have the luxury of hiding the scars on his body like Ke Xing hid the ones on his soul.
“You didn’t ruin shit,” he told him, “I still want you. I wanted you before, I want you now. And tomorrow, I will still want you. And the day after, and-” Wen Ke Xing slapped him on his leg, and he laughed, and Lao Wen with him.
“You’re so stupid, A-Xu,” he said, through laughter, “You shouldn’t want me at all.”
Zhou Zishu rolled his eyes and took his face in his hand, holding his chin. “How come? I do, though. And now we’re stuck together. How unfortunate, it’s two for the price of one.”
Lao Wen kept laughing and it was fine, it could go on like this forever, if Zhou Zishu had a say in this. If he had to remind Wen Ke Xing that he loved him every day, he would do that. And sooner or later he would learn that it was true.
When summer came to an end, the weather turned somewhat more humid and in the evening the wind that came from the ocean was chilling. Zhou Zishu’s shoulder was acting up. He managed to do most of the things his gym job required, the surfing, though, not so much. He tried getting on the board and he fell in the water, rather undignified.
“You okay, Zhou-ge?” A-Xiang, in the water with him, asked. She was just getting finished with her lessons, and he was going to wait for Chengling. But maybe it was the case that he waited on the beach, if he had to just fall face first on his board.
“Yeah, yeah, just my shoulder’s feeling the changing of the seasons,” he answered, truthfully, and she smiled brightly at him, before running to get changed up. Ten minutes later, Lao Wen sat down next to him, in a wetsuit.
“I can do the lesson, today.” He stated, quietly. Zhou Zishu suspected that A-Xiang had told him about his earlier fall, but maybe he had just seen that for himself.
“You always say you surf like shit,” he replied, while a nice warmness spread through his chest. It was the effect Wen Ke Xing always had on him, the way he could tease him, bully him, and Wen Ke Xing would be there for him. And vice versa.
Wen Ke Xing made a show of being offended, then he turned to look at him with his pleading face, his puppy eyes a mastered act. “A-Xu,” he started, “A-Xu you wound me, didn’t you say that I was a decent surfer just the other day?”
He pretended to think about it, “Mh,” he considered, focused on something, “are you sure that I didn’t say it while you were-”
Wen Ke Xing punched him on his healthy shoulder, where he knew it wouldn’t hurt. “You ungrateful man,” he protested, “I put in a lot of work for you and what do you do? Make fun of my hard work!”
Zhou Zishu laughed at him and then threw an arm around his shoulders, watching him from his lower angle. “I am very grateful,” he whispered. And then he noticed a new shadow on the sand.
Chengling.
Shit. They’d been waiting for him. He cleared his throat, letting go of Wen Ke Xing, although reluctantly.
Ke Xing got up and told Chengling to follow him in the water. “You’re with me today. Your teacher is too much of an old man to deal with colder wind,” he joked, throwing a fond glance at Zhou Zishu.
When he was young, maybe thirteen or something like that, Zhou Zishu had dreamed of opening his own surf school, back home. He would have had a small room in front of the sea, full of boards of all kinds, and hangers for the wetsuits to dry off, and photos of people playing with the waves. Kids of all ages would have come to him to learn how to surf. He would have done what he did best, surf, and teach people how to do that.
He had given up on that dream when he'd won his first world title. A world champion wouldn’t surely be allowed to live off a small surf school. When he tried to escape that world, he couldn’t surely think about his childhood dream. He only wanted to be free.
And now he was standing on the sand, all the way on the other side of the ocean, and he worked in a surf school, and he wasn’t alone. His companion, the man who spent his days on his side, was wild like the waves they often rode together, and as unpredictable as the ocean itself. But there is something that all people who deal with water have to learn, and that is that water is a primordial thing: there is no life without water, but it also brings destruction. Cities are built next to rivers, who then flood them. Ships sail the sea that allows them to travel and make money, and sometimes sinks them. Rain gives life, rain can take life. Ke Xing was the same. He had managed to put Zishu back together, he’d helped him find his place in the world again, and if the downside to it was that his moods were something to deal with, he would gladly do so. Taming the waves was impossible, and taming Ke Xing was also impossible. But everyone had gotten it wrong from the start, Zishu had never tamed either thing, he’d just made himself go along with it.
“Lao Wen,” he yelled, and his lover looked back at him from the water, “make him work harder!”
Wen Ke Xing laughed at him, and Chengling audibly groaned. “Didn’t you want to learn how to surf?” Ke Xing asked him, and he nodded, “then listen to your teacher!”
Wen Ke Xing wasn’t a bad man, when he taught that kid he looked like the best of men, or, at least, he looked like the only man Zhou Zishu could ever want.
“Zhou-ge,” A-Xiang sat down next to him, watching the two in the waves as well. “Do you know that Ke Xing and I met in the same group home?”
He didn’t know, he had picked up bits and pieces, but never the full story. Wen Ke Xing hadn’t been willing to share it. “Mh,” he said.
“He’s older than I am, I was seven when he turned eighteen.” She went on. “He keeps saying he is a bad man, he believes it when he says so. But he came back to the group home when he was not even nineteen yet and put down the papers to adopt me. And they couldn’t deny him. So.” She sounded unnaturally shy, “when he tells you to leave him, to run away because he’s a bad man, you must not believe him. Okay?”
Zishu turned to look at her, and she looked so small but so strong, and Zhou Zishu could see in the set of her chin and her shoulders that Wen Ke Xing had brought her up. As a father, a brother, a friend. “Do you really think I would believe him when he says that bullshit?”
A-Xiang smiled, bright, happy. “Ah, Zhou-ge,” she said, “you really get Ke Xing-ge’s mind. I think he doesn’t deserve you being so nice to him, anyway,” she concluded, getting up and leaving him to laugh.
Wen Ke Xing hadn’t missed how they had been talking and was frowning, worried, from the water. He smiled at him, and watched the other man mirror his smile, relaxing under his gaze. It would be a long time until he could truly believe that Zhou Zishu had no intention of running away from him.
Chengling left, and Zishu joined Ke Xing again in the water. He hugged him, loosely. Ke Xing had finally come around, about how Zishu kept touching him in public. He let him act like a cat all the time, these days, and Zishu was sometimes tempted to explore the limits of his patience. But now he just took advantage of the semi-deserted beach to drag him into the laziest kind of kiss.
“What did that witch tell you?” Ke Xing asked, without shoving Zishu away.
“That I should love you more,” he replied, lying. Wen Ke Xing laughed, splashin some water against him.
“Can you even do that?” he asked, a playful tilt to his voice, which meant that he didn’t care about the truth right now.
“Do you feel not loved enough?” he shot back, “Who’s ungrateful now?” Wen Ke Xing shook his head, laughing, and allowed him to kiss him again. And again. And at a certain point, the sand gave way under their feet and they both toppled in the water, under the surface, gasping for air and flailing around, hitting each other before resurfacing.
Zhou Zishu couldn’t stop laughing. He felt like he hadn’t laughed for twenty years and then the ridiculous man he’d fallen for had taught him how to laugh once again, from scratch.
“Lao Wen,” he said, serious, with his smile still tugging at his lips. “I grew up unaccustomed to hearing people saying how much they loved each other.” he said, watching Wen Ke Xing’s face go through a myriad of emotions. “But I will. I will tell you. Because I do. I love you, Lao Wen. I've let you love me for all this time, and I need you to let me love you back. Allow me. Believe me when I tell you that I love you. I choose to love you, I choose it every day and I will keep choosing it. Give me this chance.” Who knew if it was tears or sea water that tasted like salt when they kissed each other once again.
Zhou Zishu could see himself grow old in this place, a small house, two stories, next to the sea. He could see himself, his hair already grayed, sitting on the beach in front of the house, Chengling coming to visit him with his own students — the same Chengling that he had helped live through his days with his uncle until he hadn’t been eighteen and free to move elsewhere, namely, at Zhou Zishu and Wen Ke Xing’s beach house. The same house he had been living in for the last seven years, with Wen Ke Xing.
Ke Xing, his love, his light, his strength, his husband. His everything. Calling him his husband was still as electrifying as the first day he entertained the thought that here, on this side of the ocean, he could actually marry this man and have everyone know that they were bound to each other. Ke Xing didn’t share his enthusiasm on this subject, but had gone along with the procedure, nonetheless. He had gone along with many things, and had dragged him along in as many.
The principle of floating bodies states that, in order to stay afloat, a body has to move water with a strength that the water will give back, in full. Such was their love.
Wen Ke Xing came to sit next to him on the beach, bringing him a glass of wine. “If you love me so much as you keep saying since eight years ago,” he started, “you should let me get a cat.”
Zhou Zishu, smiling at him, replied, “Fine. But when the cat comes to sleep on our bed and fucks up my sleep pattern even more, I will take it out on you.”
Somewhere along the road, Wen Ke Xing had stopped trying to stop the sunlight from reaching his face, and now he had been slightly squinting at the sun that washed his beautiful face. Then he turned quickly to Zishu. Wen Ke Xing pouted slightly, his puppy expression uncorrupted by the years, “A-Xu, I will cook you breakfast forever,” he said, “and brush your hair when your shoulder acts up, and-”
Zhou Zishu, more than eight years later, still thought that the best way to shut Lao Wen up was to kiss him mute. And he proceeded to do just that, moving love with a strength he would get back, in full.
End.