Shoulderblades to the chill of the wall, that shadowcrafted boy so blindsided by escalation couldn’t see where intent could lead. He was an innocent thing so naïve to his companion’s wants, eyes flitting to Yuhui’s face in a playful challenge divested from the nervous flicker of his shyest state.

“How are you gonna show me that?” Laike replied softly through an incredulous grin. He didn’t believe Yu would be able to accomplish this fairytale feat.

“I will give you a kiss.” The prince lifted his chin, angled his head curiously. “If you want it.”

“Why would you give me that?” Suddenly, the boy understood all the meandering threads of their conversation. He was wide eyed but he didn’t move, breath barely a tremble between them. “We just met today—I’m… am I… Yuhui…”

Laike was reduced to stammers and rapid blinks like his saccadic SOS would sort this out for him. After a moment of dysfunction, the boy settled into a sigh, unaware of what or how he should feel.

“Don’t play with me,” he said softly with his chin tilted down. “If you’re joking with me, Yuhui, it would cause me great suffering.”

“I’m not joking with you, Laike.” Yuhui hesitated in a step that wanted to press forward but was unable to. “Even when I have been joking, there’s been truth to the things I’ve said. Plainly put, I think you’re beautiful and I want to kiss you. You can tell me no, I can take no if you don’t want me to, or you don’t like boys, or if I’ve made you uncomfortable. I don’t want to push you to do something you don’t want.”

Reaching forward, that shadowstep boy caught Yuhui by the fold of a collar, the edge of his wide belt, pulling him into the step he hesitated to take. Laike rested against the wall, gaze haughty in its downward cant, observation amplified by proximity.

“Do it,” he exhaled, barely at the edge of an audible whisper.

The other boy was quick—a blush on an upswing, an incline so inclined to close the gap of sight between them and unite the sunstars splattering their alleyway on the absence of space in their closeness. His heels pushed him up, lips a timid greeting in the aftermath of his audacity, such a sweet and silent reprieve from the complications of harried words and the thoughts that made them. Somehow bolder, Yuhui’s hand slid along the curve of the boy’s jaw streamflow soft, a slip of affection that begged him to remain—

pleaded for Laike to linger in his first kiss like a test,

his second like a challenge,

his third like the gift of a memory that he hoped would stay with them both, enduring and defiant against all odds and shapes of status stacked against them.

Laike was a quick learner, a brilliant savant under the Prince’s keen tutelage. With his copper strand hands firm about Yuhui’s narrow waist, thumbs looped into his belt, that mongrel boy held captive by the mountain for so long pulled his beautiful minx of a companion closer, easier now without words to get in his way.

He gave the fourth kiss like he spoke this language

the fifth like a prayer fervent with teeth

the sixth like he’d pledge anything, fucking anything his Prince asked of him if he’d be awarded a seventh reprieve.

Even as Yu acquiesced, as his touch slid further into the shadows of Laike’s hair to find the shorn underside at the back of his skull, as he kept him in this kiss as though it was his lucky number, the older boy’s free hand lifted to press against the center of the younger boy’s chest. The Tian son’s open palm laid still, feeling the beat of his friend’s heart, trying to catch the rhythm of that dark-dressed boy for himself so he could have it and hold it and master it by experiencing its thrumming repetition.

The prince welcomed himself past the parting of Lai’s lips; he still wore his dried blood like it was his favorite color beneath the indigo sea of his silks, intent on dragging him deeper into the lightless suffocation of his fathomless desire.

Somewhere between eight and nine, Lai caught his friend’s hand. If the prince sought a heartbeat, he would oblige; he pressed royal fingers past the gap in his collar, till he found himself chilled by the older boy’s touch against his heatsink skin. When he finally broke for breath, he was transfixed—seeking his tutor’s black sky eye with his own fluttering gaze.

He wanted to speak, but he’d been robbed; he was destitute, bereft of word or sense. The hand he clutched was his last item of value and he’d be loathe to give it up.

Yuhui had his bottom lip tucked between his teeth when he gave himself to Laike’s line of sight, breath a steady fluctuation from his heaving chest. Exhilarated, his own expression was bright; lit by his fondness reinforced, corners of his mouth curled and full of conspiracy as they stood in the valley of day, shielded by nothing but a crowd’s non-interest in the lackluster wares drawing little attention just outside of their alleyway.

“That’s what it’s like to feel wanted,” the older boy said with the dreamy chime of a sigh.

Laike, slow as honey, slipped Yuhui’s hand up his chest beneath the layers of his black garments till his companion’s touch trespassed his shoulder, his collarbone, his throat. How was he expected to let go? How was Laike to return to the mountain when that star-crossed boy only wanted this moment stretched endless over the basilisk shadow of mid-day? The sheltered youth pulled his impish benefactor flush to his shape, dotingly kissed him again upon his cheek, again upon his jaw, again upon the corner of his mouth. “Do I make you feel wanted too?”

The older boy nodded in the light of his gentle smile, soaking up Laike’s traveling affections greedily, so parched for this type of attention from another. “Yes, you do. You’ve tilted my world in the very best way, Laike.”

No matter how contented either boy felt in that moment, how much they wanted to persist as they were until infinity claimed them, time always had other motives. Yuhui watched the way his arms fit around that boy’s neck, watched the shifting beauty of his expressions with a critical interest. He dipped his head and turned his line of sight to the entrance of their hideaway, exposing the line of his neck for a moment of brief observation.

“… But we should go.” The prince’s eyes followed the outlines of three men approaching. Their weapons flickered beneath the weird canopy stretched long above, menace exuded almost as thoroughly as the scent of old grease and recycled oil staining their skin and garments.