Chapter Text
After graduation is over, they go to the seaside for the weekend—one final hurrah before Shide leaves for California. The weather is nice. They spend all of Saturday on the beach and, thanks entirely to Yuxin and her hamper of sunscreens, there are relatively few sunburns.
Water inevitably brings out the competition in Shide, Shuyi, Bingwei, and Zhengwen and hours are spent on competing to see who can swim the fastest against the waves, who can dive the deepest, who can stay underwater the longest. Every iteration yields a different winner, which annoys them all. Zheyu is scolded by the life guards twice for attempting to drown Bingwei, as much as it's possible to attempt to drown someone who is comfortably standing on the ocean floor with his head above the water.
Yuxin and Shuyi start a giant ticktacktoe board in the sand and they play three-a-side. Shide and Yuxin are a tactical force to be reckoned with, and Bingwei sits smugly by as Shuyi, Zhengwen, and Zheyu stare at their losses over and over again, not quite sure what's happening.
Dinner is at a hot pot restaurant with one wall of windows open to the water and staff who patiently endure their guests tracking sand onto the floors. Shide keeps an eye trained on Shuyi’s plate (“I will call Pei Shouyi. Don’t think I won’t!”) and Zheyu poorly disguises his delight when Bingwei lets him pick his meat first. Yuxin peels Zhengwen’s shrimp for him, and when Shuyi starts giving him shit for letting his girlfriend mother him, Yuxin pokes him so hard in the side with her chopsticks that he squeaks. Shide imitates that squeak for the rest of the weekend.
After dinner the six of them retire to their two hotel rooms. Shuyi, Zheyu, Shide, and Bingwei in one room, Yuxin and Zhengwen in the other. (“I don’t want to share a room with that giant muppet!” Zheyu complained upon arriving at the hotel and finding out there were only two double rooms available to book. “You’d rather share with the couple?” Shide asked. That was the end of that.) Yuxin and Zhengwen arrive at breakfast the next morning looking refreshed. The rest of the boys turn up looking ruffled and sleepy.
“He snores!”
“He wouldn’t stop moving!”
“Well, you talk in your sleep.”
“At least I don’t kick!”
“Hey, you could have slept on the floor.”
“You could have slept on the floor!”
Sunday goes much the same as Saturday, although Yuxin posts up under an umbrella with a book—“Some of us still have school, kids!”—and Zheyu doesn’t try to drown Bingwei again. They rent body boards and spend most of the afternoon making fun of each other for wiping out. Dinner is at an Italian-style seafood restaurant that won’t abide sandy feet and swim shorts, so they go back to the hotel beforehand and change into nicer clothes. Shide drops an ice cube down the back of Shuyi’s shirt when everyone is distracted and he shrieks again and nearly gets them thrown out of the restaurant when he threatens to stab Shide in the arm with his fish fork.
Owing to the complaints regarding the original sleeping arrangements, Shide and Shuyi bunk together on Sunday night while Zheyu and Bingwei do the same. In the morning Bingwei is starfished over the bed like he’s been dropped from a height, Zheyu is in a ball on the sofa, and Shide and Shuyi are curled up together like kittens. When they aren't in the dining room for breakfast by seven, Yuxin to uses the spare keycard to get into their room and discovers that their room phone, off its hook, prevented them from getting their wake-up call. She also discovers Shide and Shuyi, and gleefully takes a few quick bursts of photos while holding down giggles. She resolves to keep them in her back pocket for blackmail some time in the future.
Shuyi wakes up when the door closes after Yuxin as she makes her escape. He's always been a light sleeper. It appears to be his curse. He disentangles himself from Shide, carefully, and says nothing when Shide wakes up.
Shide leaves for America on a Wednesday afternoon. His mother’s house is unrecognizable when Shuyi shows up to wish him farewell, all her homey touches in cargo containers bound for California, or in storage, or covered in dust sheets so that they’re ready for Shide when he comes back from his time abroad.
“You’re a good one, Zhou Shuyi,” Shide’s mum says, patting his cheek like he’s five years old and playing nicely with the other children. He blushes and hands her suitcase off to the taxi driver. “I’m so glad you boys started getting along. My baby really needed a good friend like you.”
“Muuuum,” Shide groans, schlepping down the front stairs and handing over his own luggage. “Please!”
“I’m not going to see xiao-Yi for a long time!” she protests, grinning and squeezing Shuyi’s arm gently. “I have to embarrass you enough now to make up for it!”
“Or you could not?” Shide suggests.
“Backchat!” she exclaims. “Is this the sweet little boy I raised? Xiao-Yi, is he this rude to you?”
“All the time, auntie.”
“Hey! Whose side are you on?!”
“Eh, Shide! Count your blessings that this one is willing to be friends with you despite that attitude of yours!”
Shide drops his face into his hands and makes a noise like a dying whale. “Please get in the car, mum.”
“Oh, alright. I’ll let you say goodbye to your friend. Keep in touch, xiao-Yi!”
“Of course, auntie.”
“Mum.”
“Okay, okay!”
Shide watches with narrowed eyes until she’s safely in the backseat of the taxi and the door is closed, and then he turns to Shuyi.
“Looks like this is it, then,” he says, suddenly shy now that his mother and her teasing are out of the equation.
“Looks like it.”
“I hope your new job goes well.”
“Thanks. I hope you like California.”
“Yeah, I think it'll be cool.”
“Yeah..."
They look at each other, faces turned away a little, awkward in a way they haven’t been for months now. They've come a long way from being schoolboy rivals. Despite the inauspicious nature of Shide’s half-assed attempt at blackmail, their friendship has developed into something surprisingly comfortable. Shide has become a fixture in his life, and Shuyi really hopes that this separation won’t be the end of it. He wonders if they’re the kind of friends who hug.
“Oh, screw it.”
Turns out they are. Shide, always one for making the executive decision, takes a step forward and wraps his arms around Shuyi’s shoulders, tugging him in. Shuyi hugs him back in turn. It probably lasts an appropriate amount of time, but it feels too soon before Shide is stepping back and smiling, although it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“See you in two months, I guess.”
“Have a good flight.” It’s not what Shuyi wants to say, but he doesn’t know what he does want to say. He watches as Shide gets into the cab, and he waves until it turns off the street.
Shuyi lasts four hours before he writes the first email, curled up on a window ledge in the big, echoing apartment that he and his father share. He debates whether he should do it right up until the moment it’s done. The origin of this plan makes him uncomfortable; he got it from overhearing a couple of girls talk about their long distance boyfriends. Is it inherently a romantic gesture? He doesn’t want them to lose touch, but he doesn’t want Shide to get the wrong idea, either.
Ordinarily, it doesn't bother him too much. Truth be told, these days Shuyi rarely thinks about what happened in the infirmary that morning after the haunted hunt. It was weird in the immediate aftermath, to be sure, when Shuyi felt as though if he couldn't tell Shide he was uninterested, he had to show him with the first girl available. There was a brief period of extreme discomfort when all the wires in his brain were getting crossed, Shide's face and words appearing in his mind's eye at the least convenient of times. But then he'd twisted his ankle and Shide had run interference so that Pei Shouyi wouldn't wallop him for his carelessness, and things began to settle into a new kind of a normal. Shide has never treated him any differently, and Shuyi eventually got over the phantom feeling of being kissed on the cheek whenever silence settled between them.
It's been weeks and weeks since then, and it hasn't interfered with anything. He hasn’t let it. Shide's never brought it up, and Shuyi wasn’t meant to hear it, so he’s gone on as though he didn’t. But sometimes… He does wonder if Shide has gotten over it—over him—or if he still feels that way. If he’s good at hiding it. Shuyi may not return his feelings but they are friends, incredibly enough, and he doesn’t want to cause him undue pain.
He writes the email. He texts Yuxin: Is it normal to email with a friend who’s going away? Almost right away he gets back: omg. Zhou Shuyi, quit overthinking everything!!
He texts Zhengwen: It wouldn’t be weird for me to email Gao Shide, right? And again, almost instantly he gets a reply: Kiddo!! Stop being so paranoid!! And! Just! Do it!!!
Jiang Yuxin, he fires back, does Zhengwen know you have his phone?
Less text! More email!!
Shuyi rolls his eyes and, tabbing back over to his email program, hits send.
For the next five minutes his stomach tumbles with anxiety.
Then: ding!
Idiot. This is a good idea, though. When we land I’ll send you a photo of the view from the plane.
And he does.
Shide arrives in Taiwan one year and five weeks, almost to the day, after he left. Shuyi meets him at the airport, along with Zheyu and Bingwei. (Shide’s reaction to Shuyi’s email with the news that Zheyu and Bingwei were dating had been simple: three full lines of laugh-crying emojis.)
The four of them cram into the back of Shuyi’s car, headed for Shide’s mother’s place. Shuyi tries not to stare at him too much. They’ve video-chatted, and emailed and even talked on the phone a couple of times, but it’s a very different thing for him to be physically present. He’s actually, finally back, even though the original two months ballooned when his mum found out she was pregnant. And then there was baby Oscar and she was ill and Shide, obviously, wanted to stay and help her. But now he’s back and he’s going to be working for the family business, living in Taipei, in his old house. He’s really, really back.
“Do I have something on my face?” Shide asks when they’re about halfway through the trip, eyebrow arched like it’s a serious question, though the upward tick at the corner of his mouth says otherwise.
Shuyi has to fight off a blush at being caught out, tries to cover it with bluster. “No, I just forgot how stupid you look in real life.”
Shide barks out a laugh, obviously not buying it for a second, and grabs him around the shoulders, yanking him into his side and ruffling his hair obnoxiously. Bingwei and Zheyu snicker at Shuyi as he squeals and tries to get away, only managing it after several, pained seconds of swiping out at any part of Shide he can reach.
“There!” Shide huffs out, hand pressed to his ribs in the spot where Shuyi jabbed him. “Now we both look stupid!”
Shuyi gets promoted. It should feel great—and it does—but he can't enjoy it fully. He's twenty three, he'll probably be a vice president in the company within the next two years if his career trajectory goes as planned. He's smart! He's successful! And yet still he feels like a kid.
“Maybe it’s because you live with your dad,” Yuxin suggests, feet in his lap as they watch movies on the couch she shares with Zhengwen. “You know—you work for him and you live with him. You could use some independence, right?”
He tells Shide that he’s moving out of his dad’s place.
“Where to?” Shide asks, plucking a giant, nasty piece of carrot out of the pot and dropping it into Shuyi’s bowl without looking at it, like he thinks he’s subtle or something.
“I don’t know,” Shuyi admits, picking the carrot up and deliberately placing it on Shide’s plate instead. “I haven’t got that far yet.”
“You could move in with me,” Shide says, casually, like he’s offering Shuyi a pencil and not a space in his home. “Mum’s old bedroom is just storage at the moment, and I wouldn’t mind the company.”
Shuyi narrows his eyes at him. “Be serious, Gao Shide,” he says. “You don’t want to live with me.”
“Why not? You don't seem like such a bad roommate, aside from your cleaning problem." Shuyi feints like he's going to throw a glass of water in his face, but Shide doesn't even flinch, which feels very unfair. "It would be rent free, since Mum owns this place," Shide continues. "You’re not going to get a better deal, Zhou Shuyi. Take it or leave it.”
Shuyi accidentally eats the carrot. He accepts the proposal anyway.
Shuyi goes through girlfriends like Bingwei goes through ties. The major difference between them is that Zheyu isn’t throwing Shuyi’s girlfriends in the trash because he’s offended by look of them. Shuyi’s problem is that his girlfriends think he’s hiding something.
“Are you married? Is that it? Are you hiding me from your wife?” Yilin asks him, face twisted in incredulity when he suggests they spend the night at her place for the fifth time in a row, even though the restaurant they had dinner at is in his neighborhood.
“What? No!”
“Then why can’t we go back to yours?”
“I have a roommate.”
“So what?!”
“Isn’t it better to be alone?”
“What, do you actually share a room with him? I want to see where you live, Zhou Shuyi!”
“No. We’re not going to my place.”
“Well, you’re not staying at mine!”
Every argument follows that model almost to the word. A couple of the girls do become convinced that he’s two-timing a wife or another girlfriend. One of them thinks he’s secretly homeless. He knows it’s a weird hill to die on, but he just… He just doesn’t want them to meet Shide. He doesn’t want to know if Shide still likes him like that. Because they get along fine. They get along great, actually. They’re closer than ever now that they live together, and he doesn’t want to fuck that up by bringing a girlfriend home. Doesn't want to risk catching some expression on Shide’s face that he isn’t meant to see. Like hurt, or regret, or resignation: “So that’s what he likes.” To say nothing of the horror of Shide hearing something…
So he never brings his girlfriends home and they, as a result, don't tolerate him for very long. He probably shouldn’t be surprised when Shide calls him on it.
“I’m sorry, who?” he interrupts when Shuyi is telling a story over breakfast about how his latest girl met Michael Jordan when she went to Chicago for a conference.
“Li Qian,” Shuyi repeats.
“Who?”
“My girlfriend.”
Shide stares at him. “I thought her name was Belle.”
“That was months ago.”
Shide blinks, and then shakes his head. “Zhou Shuyi… You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met one of your girlfriends.”
“Really?” Shuyi asks, like it's not the result of a concerted effort on his part.
Shide gives him a narrow look. “Really. It’s weird, actually. I would have thought that they'd stay the night sometimes.”
"Why would they stay the ni-"
"Don't tell me you're not sleeping with them, Shuyi," he says, pointing his chopsticks at Shuyi's face. "I'm not an idiot."
"I wasn't going to!" He definitely was, but. “I thought you didn’t want girlfriends staying over?” he suggests instead, fully aware that it’s paper-thin excuse, but it'll be a cold day in hell when he tells Shide the truth about this.
“Why would you think that?”
“Well, none of your girlfriends have ever slept over. Hey—why are you giving me trouble, Gao Shide? I’ve never met any of your girlfriends, either!”
Bad idea. Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad idea. He knows it even before Shide’s expression goes wry.
“I’ve never had one.”
“Haha! Don’t be ridiculous, Gao Shide! If they’re ugly, you can just tell me. There’s no need to hide it—” Shuyi can feel himself rambling, hear the pitchiness in his own voice, trying to stave off the inevitable. It doesn’t help.
Shide cuts him off. “I’m gay, Shuyi.”
Silence drops in like lead. Shuyi stares at his plate. Tries to think of something to say that’s not going to sound patronizing, or fake, or insane, like: I didn't know you liked all guys. I thought I was the exception.
“I thought you knew,” Shide says. And that’s the thing, of course. Shuyi did know. He doesn’t know why he’s pretending otherwise. It’s completely unnecessary. He wants to kick himself. But Shide’s still talking: “When we were in college, I told you about the guy I liked. You told me I could talk to you about it, if I needed to.”
Me, Shuyi’s brain corrects: You told me what you liked about me. But I’m not supposed to know.
“I thought maybe you liked girls, too,” he explains, seizing upon the first plausible excuse which pops to mind. “Some guys like both.”
But maybe that was also the wrong thing to say, because now Shide is wearing yet another inscrutable expression.
“Speaking from personal experience?” he asks, in that careful way of his that comes off condescending unless you know him. And Shuyi knows him. He knows that this is what Shide sounds like when he’s preemptively protecting himself from something he’s not sure he wants to hear.
Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Shuyi has never wanted to give Shide the wrong impression—never wanted to lead him on, if indeed he still had any feelings which could be led—and now he’s planted his stupid foot directly in his stupid mouth, insinuating that there’s a possibility, any possibility at all… Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Why would you say that?! Where did that even come from?!
“N-no!” he sputters, extremely self-aware and feeling a complete twat. “I’ve just heard of guys who are like that, that’s all. And that’s fine!” he hastens to clarify. “That’s fine! And so is being gay! It’s fine! It’s just,” he coughs a bit, choking on his stupid, idiot tongue. “It’s just. Not. For me.”
Shide stares at him for a long, long moment. A long, silent moment. And then he looks away, and somehow that's worse. He chews at his lip, eyes on the edge of the table.
He says: “Right.”
“You can tell me, you know. If there’s someone you like. If it’s that old guy, or if it’s a new one. You can tell me. You can have him over! If you have a boyfriend, I mean. Ah…” For fuck’s sake. First Shuyi’s mute, now he can’t shut up.
“I don’t have a boyfriend, Shuyi.”
“Well, if you do. You know, in the future, if you do. I’d, um... I’d like to meet him.”
Shide huffs, eyes flicking up and out, like he can't quite bring himself to look at Shuyi.
“What?” Shuyi asks, trying not to sound hysterical. “I would!”
And then Shide does look at him, and that... that is actually the worst thing that has happened to Shuyi in a long time. Shide's eyes are wet around the edges and oh, no. He’s not going to cry, is he? If Zhou Shuyi makes Gao Shide cry he’s going to have to move out and live on the street, or with Yuxin and Zhengwen and they’re so incredibly cute that being homeless might be preferable, but—
“Okay.” Shide says. He looks at Shuyi a little longer, scanning Shuyi's red, mortified face, searching for something that Shuyi can't even begin to guess at. And then, after a moment, he clears his throat, picks up a scallion pancake and pops it in his mouth. The tears don't fall. It’s okay.
They finish their breakfast, as usual. They check each other's ties before they leave the house, as usual. Shuyi's chauffeur picks them up and drops Shide off at his office before going on to Shuyi's, as usual. That evening, Shuyi doesn't bring his girlfriend over and Shide doesn't mention any boys, new or old.
They don’t talk about it again. It gets added to the long list of things that Shuyi is Never to Bring Up, and it’s fine. Everything is normal. It’s fine. It really is.
Until it’s not.