He didn't know yet how deep it went or what shape it was taking.
But the evidence of it had been accumulating for long enough that pretending otherwise felt like a waste of his own intelligence.
He wanted to be near him.
He wanted to touch him.
He wanted, with a constancy that had crept up on him without announcing itself, to take care of him not out of obligation, not out of the arrangement they'd walked into at a civil affairs bureau, but because something in him had simply decided that this was what it wanted to do.
And today, on that concourse, watching the red mark rise on Guiying's cheek, it had felt like his own cheek. That was the clearest way he could put it. Like something had been done to him directly and not to someone nearby.
He hadn't expected that.
He leaned further against the railing and looked at the lights below and considered the other thing quietly.
