The bed weighs to one side, blankets shifting and pillow dipping. It’s too early for Saturday. It’s too early for any day—he can tell because the family of heron nesting on his roof is yet to scratch their talons against the metal. If his mother’s constant nagging about early birds is to be believed, he deserves to sleep in as long as they do, surely… surely.

An arm coils around his waist and tightens. A pair of lips fold over his ear and pull. A voice murmurs about too many clothes and spills. Tae groans. He tells himself he’s too old to do this anymore. He tells himself he’s furious about this and that, formulates excuses to make the other feel bad. But his mouth won’t repeat the words.

“Why are you here?” he asks instead, half-asleep.

“Because you’re here.” And just like that Lee brushes aside any trace of annoyance. With a few strategic whispers of a few sweet words, his suave expertise dismantles every possible conflict as if it were made of nothing. Just like that Tae decides to mould his shape to match the container of Lee’s warm, all-encompassing embrace. He is nestled, arranged, carefully opened to become part of a large and bright presence.

“Why didn’t you come last night?” he whines anyway. “I even bought a weird… lace thing and everything.”

“Hmm, lace thing?” the other lazes in the curve of a welcoming neck.

“Yeah. Some kind of… fancy hosiery. I don’t know what it’s called.”

Lee chuckles, drawing a firmer circle around them. “Did you try it on?”

“Probably doesn’t fit me…”

“Ah. Well. I’m here now,” Lee consoles, voice smiling, skin warm. “Isn’t that OK?”

“No,” Tae lies, because of course it’s OK. He spends his breath bated on the possibility that Lee might visit. He spends hours of his day fantasising about it, bones elated, muscles on tenterhooks. On the bus from work, on the drive back from the hardware store, brushing the deck and hanging the laundry… there isn’t a single waking second in his life that Lee is not welcome to invade. There isn’t a single instance when his voice or his touch or his happiness is an uninvited guest in Tae’s home. It’s always OK: which is the problem.

“I classify this as asshole behaviour.”

“How terrible,” the other teases.

“It is,” Tae twists to shoot a glare. Its only effect is to spread a grin across Lee’s loving face. His bleached hair is tousled. His amber eyes are crescents. His soft laugh is sunlit. And when he leans their foreheads together, Tae melts. “It’s the worst. So are you,” the weightless complaint continues. “And then you show up looking like… like the cover of a Leslie Cheung album. Expecting what?”

“… do you wanna make love?” Lee remembers the title track.

“What if I do?”

With a hearty laugh Lee gathers them closer still. The day breaks on his palms. The sky brightens between his arms. His fingers streak Tae’s body with the warmth of summer months. His kisses paint flushed thighs and florid knees with the colours of the horizon. His arousal feels heavy, hot despite the layers of fabric separating them. He lights a series of blazes wherever his tongue journeys. And Tae in turn liberates the reins of his own body, all traces of resentment dissolved in sugary pools of desire.

“Won’t you say it’s OK?” Lee entreats, smiling. When his shirt lifts away so do a dozen invisible barricades between them, leaving only a sinless, sculpted stretch.

“… no.” Tae replies. He acts playful and cheeky, but in truth Lee’s forever-calm sends him in a fluster. His light and his love, though crackling with energy, is also steady. Continuous. Dependable. To meet someone so self-possessed is rare. To be ministered to by them, a singularity. So Tae conceals his rattled nerves with impudence.

“Not OK.”

“Then… I just have to keep trying, right?”

“Sure, mister.” Tae purses his lips and fakes indifference. “If that’s what you want.”

“Ey…” a soothing kiss convinces a shuddering chest. “Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

Another kiss comes to rest on Tae’s navel. “… like you’d rather I leave.”

Here again their perpetual problem makes itself apparent. That Lee is so enamoured, that he is always so fond, that his fondness never dwindles—it must be ubiquitous. He must extend his saccharine self to all those who pass through his life. Because, Tae reasons, the sun shines the same on everyone. Its ferocity is equal, as is its benevolence. It cheers everything it touches and leaves desolation everywhere it turns its back. Just because it deems to illuminate Tae’s quotidian life from time to time can’t possibly mean what they share is unique.

Yet he welcomes the press of hipbones and fingertips, pushing back against their blissful weight. He welcomes the breach into his body, weaving and churning, begging until he begs. He welcomes the gravity of Lee’s mouth, receives Lee’s teeth on his seams, greets Lee’s tongue with his own. He welcomes the damp exploration, the humming appreciation, the arrows of purposeful glances; the squirming moments that pass on his back, hands clutching sheets or hair, whatever is closest. He welcomes each shallow inhale around a hey, uh or a please, please. He welcomes the gentle hushes and whispered praises. He welcomes every intent to charm.

“How fucking cute,” Lee murmurs, spit linking pulsing lips to pulsing arousal.

“So…?” Tae pants at the ceiling, pushing back the mess of his hair. “Will you rip the rest of my clothes off and give me a long, hard—o-oh!”

The ring of Lee’s fingers tenses for a prolonged moment before letting go. “I just got here. What’s the rush?” he grins.

“You say that and then…”

“And then?”

Tae welcomes these sultry minutes, but he will never welcome the silent hours that are sure to follow, vernal cologne soaking his sheets, strings of texts beeping his phone only to grant a paltry I’ll see you again, very soon.

“And then you—”

He can’t insist he’s special. Lee must confer on many others with his brief, hurried exchanges. His furtive appearances must quench the long-held thirst of several more. When he craves pleasure or seeks respect, when he searches for a friend in these winding streets of life, his eyes do not look for Tae. His body does not hunger for this room or its quiet, lonesome inhabitant. Like the hundred times before and the hundred more to follow, he begins these exchanges with unspoken promises he will certainly break. Because, of course, Tae is not special.

“Just like this?” their game proceeds. “Or have you got a—?”

“No need,” an impatient Tae spreads himself thin. “Do it.”

For now, it is his doubled legs Lee settles between, waiting. It is his cheek Lee grazes with heated exhales. It is his thrumming body Lee hovers over, back flexing, hips eager. It is him that Lee raises his eyebrows to question, the action wordless yet leaden by meaning. It’s just as the man said—he is here because Tae is here. And that is enough to drench the pride.

Tae’s heartbeat slithers and parades. Soon an arc of lightning will strike every ugly thought that hangs from him, evaporating it for long enough to let this moment be. Because for now, for this very moment, it’s impossible to not feel like the centre of the universe.

“I’m sorry you waited,” Lee says, so sincere, so honest. So fucking special, the song plays in Tae’s head.

“Then make up for it.”

Lee’s face remains solemn. “I could never,” he says even as he pushes in with the sword of his desires, tempered, noble, carving its intensity into Tae’s heart. His sweat is dew. His lips are afire. His scent is a baking afternoon. He burrows his face in Tae’s hair and moves like a gilded dream, like a silken fantasy.

And maybe the song was written for the angel named Lee. Maybe it describes him in all his seraphic glory, a ballad in his own right. Maybe the words were always about his expansive diamond wings, hidden away, unfurled only when he moves; only when he circumambulates the world, not noticing when Tae is or isn’t around. Maybe those lines were always about this man and the lavender charges of thunder that make up his touch.

Their clammy paradise climbs up the bedhead, then the wall with each insistent press.

“So light… eat more,” Lee banters, arms powerful as they hold Tae up beside rattling photo frames.

“Yeah. Sure. Whatev—” Tae’s legs fasten around the other, bearing every bound. Sweat drips to their join. Blood rushes in a dance. Thoughts spin like dervishes. The heat makes him dizzy, too dizzy.

An accidental brush sends glass crashing to the floor.

“Ah, shit. Should I…?”

“N-no, forget it…!”

And maybe Tae is a weirdo for wanting to be so like Lee, to be so close to him in distance and resemblance that he ends up disappointing himself. Maybe Tae is always aspiring to be special because Lee so unfairly is. It breaks him to neither be led nor be followed, to always revolve around the cumbrous subject of Lee. It breaks Tae to walk this broad and pleasant path alone, even his shadow discouraged, allowed to leave no trace of the hope that Lee settles on him—just once, just for a while longer.

It breaks him to be so ordinary.

“Wait,” Lee pauses, carefully letting an unwilling Tae down. The separation is agonising. “You’ll get hurt like this.”

“Ah, who cares?! Just—”

“Hey,” Lee’s hands are scalding with resolve when they surround Tae’s reverberating thoughts. “I do,” he smiles.

Breath racing, heart angry, Tae loops his arms around the other’s neck. “Then…” he gulps. “Then do something for me.”

They thaw and fuse, returning to the mattress, adding to the knots that Tae has never once tried to loosen even if they hold him back from moving on.

“Anything.”

A stubby finger glides across Tae’s lips before being caught. Stay, he wants to demand, sucking Lee’s finger at every guarded push. Heels set, ass raised, he draws all of the other into himself. Stay, he quietly urges, though he knows of the continents and seas, the forests, rivers, and meridians that stretch between them.

The sun does not play favourites. The sun does not oblige. The sun burns for a day, then it is gone. To touch it does not mean accomplishment. To be loved by it does not mean triumph. To behold it will only be blinding, never enlightening. Tae can never be special. But he still continues to fly towards Lee’s radiance without a thought spared for his own fragile, waxen wings.

Stay…

Later, when Lee is helping with a warm towel, he reverts to the subject. “So. What was this fancy lace thing you were talking about earlier?”

“Hmm? Ah,” Tae twists, groaning as he reaches under the bed and pulls out his latest acquisition. It is a sheer peach-coloured assembly of straps and beribboned stockings, unworn yet pathetically wrinkled.

“What a waste…” he flings it towards the other.

“I don’t know,” Lee reasons, pinching the gossamer fabric between his fingers. “Could try it out next time.”

Tae snorts. “Like there’ll be a next time.”

“Why?” Lee asks, festooning the stockings like a scarf around his neck, being silly and pleasant and lovely as always. “You don’t want me to visit again?”

Tae does his best to maintain a casual expression. “Nope,” he shakes his head. “Won’t need you again, thanks for your service.”

“Ah, service. That’s too bad…” Lee nods slowly, still wiping Tae’s thighs. “And here I thought we had something. Here I thought we could… change things up a bit,” he proposes, lips beginning to pull in a smile.

“Hmm?”

“Guess I won’t be moving in then. Since you’re so sick of me.”

Dousing the millions of firecracker thoughts in his mind, Tae continues to keep a hold of his blasé face. The sun is unattainable, yet its light knows him best. He hisses in a thoughtful breath. “An intriguing proposal. Not one that ever crossed my mind. Of course, I’ll need lots of time to consider it and. You know. Weigh all my options. Can’t rush myself into making stupid decisions like that and then—”

“This punk!” Lee pounces on him.