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Li Lianhua took a long drink from his gourd of wine and looked at the moon. It was full and bright, a cloudless night. Out on the stairs of Lotus tower, the breeze was cool, and the wine was warm. It was a perfect night for eating outside.
There was a grunt beside him. Li Lianhua brought his attention back to Di Feisheng, who was holding out a hand for the wine. “Isn’t it time you got your own?” Li Lianhua complained as he handed it over. “You’ve been hogging mine for years now.”
Unheeding, A-Fei took a sip. A drop of wine escaped and ran down his neck. Li Lianhua clicked his tongue and shook his head at him. “Wasting it too.”
A-Fei handed it back with a smile like a sated cat. As Li Lianhua took it, he noticed a bruise on the back of his hand. It had been worse just after their match, but was nearly healed now.
“I didn’t retire from the Jianghu for the second time to have an intense death match every week, you know,” Li Lanhua complained.
To be fair, it was never a death match. They barely drew blood. And he wasn’t really complaining; It was fun to see Di Feisheng pretend to be mad about losing or ending in a draw, just to come and help with dinner five minutes later. It was just as fun to pull out their most impressive moves before Fang Xiaobao and watch him gape. The boy wasn’t subtle. Li Xiangyi’s love for showing off had faded long ago, but Xiaobao’s attention was… pleasant.
So, he wasn’t really objecting to the fights. Complaining was just obligatory between him and A-Fei.
“I told you,” A-Fei answered, shifting to lean against the railing and face him properly. “I’m here to defeat you, Li Xiangyi.”
Li Lianhua couldn't help but smile at that. What a stubborn man.
It had been a while since it was just the two of them in Lotus tower, without Xiaobao and A-Fei picking petty fights all the time; Fang Duobing had finally found the guts to officially cancel his Royal wedding for good, properly. The Capital was a good way away, and since going by himself was faster than transporting their entire house, he’d set off a day ago.
They had the night to themselves, it seemed. Li Lianhua leaned back on his hands and asked A-Fei, “Is fighting me the only thing you’re here for, Di Mengzhu? How boring. Isn’t that too single-minded?”
A-Fei closed his eyes with a grin. They had been rare, once. Now they saw them all the time. “Defeating you is enough of a challenge for a lifetime,” he replied. Li Lainhua decided to take it as a compliment, and raised his wine in agreement.
Before he could take a sip, A-Fei opened his eyes and looked at him long and hard. Then he said, “There are other things I'm here for.”
With a curious tilt of his head, Li Lianhua raised his brows. “Really? What things?”
After a moment of thinking about it, Di Feisheng leaned forward and kissed him. Just for a moment, a firm press of soft lips against his before he drew back and looked at Li Lianhua, as calm and steady as that kiss had been.
Li Lianhua narrowed his eyes and feigned disappointment. “Is that all?”
A-Fei scoffed and leaned in again. Li Lianhua was better prepared this time. It was so easy– the way A-Fei’s hand came to rest over the front of his robes and on his neck, the way Li Lianhua’s hands slotted along his jaw as he drew closer. Why had it taken them so long to do this?
They spent an uncertain length of time making out on the steps. Li Lianhua found himself in A-Fei’s lap, fascinated by the way A-Fei’s breath hitched when he sucked at his tongue, when a telltale snuffling noise came from behind them.
“Huli Jing!” He scrambled off A-Fei and shooed her away from the bowl of chicken bones. He scratched her head in apology. “You’ll choke on these, Huli Jing. Didn’t you just eat dinner?”
Huli Jing whined pitifully, and Di Feisheng scoffed. He had gotten to his feet already. “Greedy dog,” he said, making direct eye-contact with it. It whined in response.
“Why are you scolding it?” Li Lianhua scolded him, picking up the dishes along the ground. “Who distracted us from taking all this in and washing up?”
He smiled, way too smugly, and went in with the rest of the remains of their dinner. Li Lianhua followed, and felt him watch closely as he took all the dirty dishes out back.
“Are you going to wash them now ?” A-Fei said, incredulously.
Li Lianhua tried his best not to smirk and instead put on his most sensible expression. “Of course! Always wash the dishes after using them. It’s my rule. You’re not tempting enough for me to break my rules. Ah, come help me, do your part.”
“Do it yourself,” A-Fei grumbled back.
“It’ll finish faster with two,” Li Lianhua pointed out, rolling up his sleeves and settling down on a stool to get started. After some more huffing and grumbling, A-Fei joined. He even carried all the washed vessels back in! The wonders never ceased.
What he didn’t do, however, was put them out to dry. While Li Lianhua did that, a pair of hands slipped around his waist. A-Fei nosed at the bend of his neck, and Li Lianhua tutted. “You’re in the way,” he said, doing nothing to move away. He actually started drying the vessels even more meticulously.
“There’s more I want to do,” One of the hands slipped away to push Li Lianhua’s hair out of the way, and A-Fei kissed the bared skin. Li Lianhua couldn’t hold back a shiver as he felt the wet and warm press of his tongue. But both of them were too stubborn to give up, after all. Li Lianhua kept at the dishes till he’d dried the last one, and A-Fei stayed plastered to his back, trying to nose further into the collar of his robes.
Once he was done, Li Lianhua turned around and flopped the damp dishcloth at A-Fei’s face. “Put it back.”
A-Fei snatched it from him and threw it over the back of the nearest chair.
“Aiyah, how will it dry if it’s all bunched up like that? Put it properly-Mph.”
A-Fei stole the rest of his breath with another kiss. That was definitely more thorough than the ones before.
“Li Lianhua,” he rumbled, pausing. “Shut up.”
This time, he let A-Fei drag him along towards the bed, their kisses getting sloppier with each step. Li Lianhua sat down on the edge, letting go of A-Fei’s shoulders and taking his hands instead. He deposited A-Fei’s hands on his shoulders and slipped his own around A-Fei’s knees to tug.
With a chuckle, A-Fei followed and climbed onto his lap. Li Lianhua wrapped his hands back around his shoulders and pulled him down into kissing range. But A-Fei ignored it entirely. He slipped a hand into Li Lianhua’s hair and tugged, tipping his head back to bare his neck. He settled there, sucking and licking and biting.
Li Lianhua shifted, and despite the many collective layers of robes between them, he groaned when A-Fei’s ass pressed down on his dick. He felt A-Fei laugh again against collarbone and huffed. Before anything could be done about it, A-Fei moved back. His fingers made quick work of the ties of Li Lianhua’s robes.
As he closed his lips around a nipple, Li Lianhua leaned back on his hands and let A-Fei have his way. Every time his breath stuttered, A-Fei would spend a little longer on that spot before moving further down. Every time he looked up at Li Lianhua through those long lashes, he lost a little bit of his sanity. The urge to grab him and pull him closer grew tenfold, like a real itch under his skin.
Li Lianhua would have complained about the distance between them, but he had severely underestimated how fetching A-Fei would look kneeling between his legs. He had slid off his lap and down to the floor as he made his way down Li Lianhua’s body.
A-Fei paused when he reached his pants and looked up. As Li Lianhua shifted in anticipation, the layers of open robes clinging to his shoulders - not a single one had been shed fully - slipped a little. A-Fei’s eyes tracked it with deliberate heat. He surged up to kiss the bare shoulder too.
“What are you doing, marking your territory?” Li Lianhua needled, laughing.
A-Fei looked him right in the eye and said, without missing a beat, “Yes.”
What the hell could one say to such a shameless answer? Li Lianhua sat up straight, forcing him to move back too, and picked at the ties of his various layers. “What even are these knots? Who ties such complicated ones for their clothes?”
“They’re simple,” A-Fei replied, not lifting his face from the newly revealed shoulder. Li Lianhua could still hear the smile in his voice, though. “You just can’t figure them out.”
This gave Li Lianhua the opening to do one of his favourite things– roll over and admit defeat instead of rising to one of A-Fei’s petty challenges. In his most unimpressed voice, he said, “Yes, yes, I’m quite ignorant compared to Di Mengzhu. Show this lowly one how to undo them.”
The stink-eye A-Fei gave him was worth it. Li Lianhua of course paid attention to how he undid the knots with a flick of his fingers. It was quite simple. He could undo the last one himself. He looked up smugly at A-Fei who kissed him about it.
Hasty all of a sudden, he went back down on his knees, pulling all his layers off and flinging them away somewhere towards the back of the room. He stroked the tent in Li Lianhua’s pants with long, broad fingers, then lowered his mouth to it.
Li Lianhua endured the teasing for a while before reaching to settle a hand on his jaw. “A-Fei, is this really all you wanted to do?”
“You look annoyed,” A-Fei observed with an all-too-pleased smile.
“If you just want to annoy me, you can do it in a hundred other ways. Leave me and my dick alone, go.”
A-Fei grabbed his hips and kept him on the bed. Li Lanhua cocked his head and wondered out loud. “Are you inexperienced? Is that why you’re hesitating? Don’t worry, I won’t be too critical of your skill.”
A-Fei stared at him, unimpressed, for a few seconds. Then he shook his head and undid the ties of the pants huffily. Li Lianhua wouldn’t admit it out loud till he was maybe on his deathbed, but A-Fei was quite cute when he got huffy.
A-Fei took him into his mouth, and Li Lianhua fell back on his arms to prop himself up. In the next few minutes, Li Lianhua came to the conclusion that whether or not A-Fei was experienced, he was definitely skilled. Methodical, even. He tried a whole bunch of things with his hand and his mouth– petting and tracing, licking and sucking, sometimes light and sometimes firm.
Every time he looked up at him to gauge reactions, Li Lianhua momentarily forgot to breathe properly. Lips puffy and slick from the kisses, the intent focus, the way his hair spilled over broad shoulders– who knew debauched would be such a good look on him.
Once A-Fei figured out that he had a weakness for being swallowed down, he was unstoppable. Li Lianhua’s quiet gasps turned into a strangled groan as he came soon after, and A-Fei didn’t let off till he started going soft in his mouth.
Li Lianhua drew him back into his lap and they kissed. It was an utter mess, and A-Fei’s ass rubbing against his sensitive cock didn’t help, but Li Lianhua kept him there. It took him a bit to recover all his senses, but he got busy the moment he did.
Sucking marks on A-Fei’s throat and down his front, he discovered with great delight that A-Fei was loud. He groaned as Li Lianhua dragged his lips along his collarbone, whined in his throat as Li Lianhua used his mouth on his tits, moaned when he finally tugged his pants open and started jerking him off.
Li Lianhua set a slow and steady pace, with a firm grip, pausing every now and then to thumb at the head of his cock. A-Fei, face buried in Li Lianhua’s neck and lips brushing his pulse, panted wetly. Tracing down the curled line of his spine with his free hand, Li Lianhua bit at A-Fei’s ear lightly and earned a whine. It trailed off into silence as he slipped the wandering hand into the back of A-Fei’s pants to pull him closer with a hand on his ass.
Li Lianhua’s wrist wasn’t at the best of angles but he didn’t stop to adjust. A-Fei was trembling in his arms and warm against him, skin to skin. He really didn’t want it to stop.
A-Fei seized up and tipped his head back as he picked up the speed of his pumping. He came with a cry that made warmth curl in Li Lianhua’s stomach. He worked him through it, peppering kisses along his neck, to his chin.
They ended up half-splayed on the bed, making out languidly. A-Fei’s solid weight on top of him, the aimlessness of it, the calm of it curled up inside Li Lianhua like a perfectly rolled ball of twine. He never wanted to move from here.
Eventually, though, the ickiness of not cleaning up won. Li Lianhua pushed at A-Fei’s shoulder. “We have to clean up.”
A-Fei lingered a while with his forehead resting against his shoulder, and finally rose with a sigh. He looked at Li Lianhua, who stayed stretched out on the bed.
“Aren’t you getting up?” A-Fei asked, suspicious. He knew him too well.
“Bring me a wet cloth when you’re done,” Li Lianhua asked with a smile. It was quite shameless, but Li Lianhua wasn’t particularly bothered.
With an exasperated shake of his head, A-Fei left. He reappeared with a cloth soon and started wiping him down.
Li Lianhua flinched and cursed. He glared accusingly at A-Fei.
“What,” came the response.
“Why is it so cold?”
“Is it?”
Grumbling, Li Lianhua decided to take what he could, braced himself and melted back onto the bed. “If my dick gets frostbite and falls off, it’s on you.”
A-Fei dismissed it with a scoff. “Dramatics. It’s not that cold.” He was thorough with his task, and even went to wash and dry the cloth by himself, letting Li Lianhua bask in the pleasant aftermath.
When A-Fei came back to the bed, he was pulling on and fastening the two inner layers of his robes. Li Lianhua frowned at the loss. “What are you doing, take them off.”
“It’s cold,” A-Fei grumbled, coming over and frowning at Li Lianhua’s still open robes. “You’re being really useless. Are you always going to be like this after sex?”
Li Lianhua smiled as A-Fei sat down on the bed and started securing the robes for him. “Are you always going to be this obliging and helpful after sex?”
A-Fei huffed. It wasn’t a no. He gathered Li Lianhua’s discarded pants and the rest of the layers he’d flung off, folded them, and draped them over a chair neatly. Then he climbed into bed beside Li Lianhua.
“This bed isn’t big enough for two grown men,” Li Lianhua told him even as he scooted in. In answer, A-Fei simply lay down on his side and turned him over on his side too. He pulled the quilt up to cover them.
“Don’t blame me if I kick you out in my sleep,” Li Lianhua told him.
"Go to sleep," A-Fei rumbled against the nape of his neck.
When had he last shared a bed like this? He wasn’t sure. It didn’t feel strange like new things tend to, though. He could get used to this just fine. Li Lianhua melted into the arms wrapped around him and the legs tangled with his. He went to sleep.