After the Wine Wears Off

'I like you…'

'…'

'I really like you…'

'…'

The young man hung his head, lips murmuring half an inch from Xie Qingcheng's mouth, a few loose strands of hair falling across his brow, his gaze feverish and unmoored.

He had Xie Qingcheng's hand in a tight grip, and Xie Qingcheng — struck by this sudden confession out of nowhere — had gone completely still.

If a moment ago he had only been angry and caught off guard, now he was stunned as though lightning had split him clean through.

He had even forgotten to resist…

Who liked whom?

He Yu liked him?

How was that possible…

They were both men, and He Yu had never shown any indication of being gay — on top of which, he was thirteen years older…

He lay on He Yu's hotel bed, bathrobe in disarray, drenched in sweat, turning his head with slow, stiff effort to look at the young man pressing down on him in the dark — unaware that those eyes were looking through him, fixed on some girl who bore his resemblance.

'I really, really like you…'

'…'

'Be good. Don't be with him…'

'…'

Those words, and Xie Qingcheng finally began, slowly, to surface from his stupor — and through clenched teeth he ground out: '…What the fuck—'

He Yu was drunk. The bastard had the wrong person.

He pulled his gaze from He Yu's face, and felt everything that had puzzled him these past weeks suddenly snap together like beads on a string — the role He Yu had taken, his sudden episode, what he'd said that day at Neverland about wanting to confess to a girl, all that babbling back and forth in his drunken haze… it all clicked into place at once.

He understood it all now.

He Yu had confessed to that poor girl and been turned down…

Xie Qingcheng couldn't help pressing a hand to his forehead. After the brutal, full-bodied struggle of a few minutes ago, his brow was soaked through with sweat. He raked the damp, disheveled hair back from his face with one hand, his chest still heaving.

The neck He Yu had seized was still a dull, throbbing ache — though it was nothing next to the headache — and he thought to himself that this entire night had been an absurd, wretched piece of bad luck. Still, he couldn't help feeling a flicker of relief on behalf of a girl he'd never met:

At least she'd been spared this.

And then there was He Yu himself.

A patient with psychic Ebola needed calm and restraint, minimal emotional turbulence — the more rational the better. Love was the kind of thing that ground a person down; best to stay as far from it as possible. But Xie Qingcheng had the distinct sense that He Yu had developed a 'Xie Qingcheng PTSD' of sorts — he would listen to anyone, anyone at all, except him, and refused to follow medical advice.

And so, inevitably, it had come to this.

Though at least it had only come to this — it could still be contained.

Pinned beneath a tall, fever-warm body, Xie Qingcheng cleared his head, pressed his palm flat against He Yu's chest, and said, low and dark: 'You — get the fuck off me.'

'Get off!!'

He Yu's eyes had been unfocused for some time already.

The medication he'd taken was beginning to take hold; the sedative effect crept in gradually. He was still staring at Xie Qingcheng, but the grip of his hands was loosening. The wildness drained out of him, and his breathing slowly evened out.

For a moment something almost lucid flickered through his eyes — but the focus held only an instant before it scattered again…

Xie Qingcheng seized the opening, wrenched himself free with full force, grabbed the bathrobe around himself and got off the bed, his wrists pulsing with pain.

He Yu had finally gone quiet — or rather, the drugs had at last dulled whatever drove his violence — because after being shoved hard he didn't try anything more.

He lay there with his eyes open and empty, and after a long moment, softly: '…Do you know… I can't find the bridge anymore…'

'What?'

'Can't find it… I can't get out…'

'I… no matter what I do, I can't get out…'

These few murmured words were not addressed to Xie Qingcheng, not addressed to anyone. His expression as he spoke was hollow, as though he no longer knew where he was — as though they were words spoken into darkness, a sleepwalker's lament.

He Yu's eyes drifted closed, lashes trembling faintly.

Xie Qingcheng had no idea what bridge he was talking about. He had been pushed close to his limit tonight. He suppressed his anger and his revulsion, face rigid, dumped He Yu onto the bed, threw the blanket over him, and turned away to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

Xie Qingcheng had something of an aversion to physical contact — he disliked unnecessary closeness with people at the best of times, let alone being kissed by another man.

The disgust was almost overwhelming. Water ran loud from the tap. He washed for a long time, then cupped his hands and poured a palmful of cold water over his face, leaned against the vanity, and finally began to recover himself — lifting his eyes to look at his own dripping reflection in the mirror.

Young people's feelings were a ledger full of bad debts — flip it open and feathers flew everywhere. If it hadn't come knocking at his door, he wouldn't have wasted a single glance on it.

What a goddamn mess. An absolute haunting.

For babysitting He Jiwei's kid this thoroughly, He Jiwei owed him money — that couldn't be argued. He'd go collect when this was over.

Xie Qingcheng stood there, face set, recovering for a good while. He pressed his fingers to his throbbing temple, turned off the tap, and went out to sit in the armchair beside the bed, staring at nothing.

By the time he emerged, the medication had done its work — He Yu was asleep, lying in bed with his arms around the duvet, looking perfectly docile, every bit the model student and upstanding exemplar he was in ordinary life. Nothing at all like the creature who had just been clinging to him without mercy.

Xie Qingcheng looked at him with a dark expression, uncapped the complimentary mineral water to take a sip and cool his temper — but the moment his lips touched the bottle he hissed in sharp pain. He drew back, raised his hand to check, and found that his lip had actually been bitten open by He Yu. In thirty-two years of life, no one had ever dared bite his lip. Xie Qingcheng's face went black.

He set the bottle down hard, and — not caring in the least whether He Yu liked it — lit a cigarette and smoked it in the room, making sure the little beast lying there got a full serving of secondhand smoke before he finally ground the stub out.

…Fine.

Fine, forget it.

He'd been kissed, in the end. So what? What could be done about it?

He was a man — nothing was actually lost. Aside from the disgust, there was no real harm. And at bottom, this was just a misunderstanding.

Xie Qingcheng was a rational person. He wasn't going to waste emotional energy on a stupid misunderstanding.

Thinking about it clearly, what mattered more right now was He Yu's current condition.

He had now personally witnessed one of He Yu's episodes — only a partial episode at that, one that had been held in check — and it was already deeply unhinged.

A full episode? That didn't bear thinking about.

He Yu's situation was perhaps not as stable as it appeared on the surface.

Xie Qingcheng closed his eyes briefly. He had long anticipated that if He Yu fell in love, the condition would fluctuate to some degree.

That day on the island, when he'd stopped He Yu from going to confess — it wasn't only for the girl's sake. He had genuinely factored He Yu in as well. But He Yu hadn't listened.

He Yu had looked at him and said: 'Nineteen years. I haven't hurt anyone. I only like someone — is it that I'm not allowed even that?'

He had looked into He Yu's eyes, and found himself with nothing to say.

He had watched He Yu since he was small. The illness ran deep — a double abyss, psychological and physical, in which He Yu had wandered for going on twenty years without finding a way out. This kind of patient carried immense internal fury; during a psychic episode, it could turn to extreme violence and a thirst for blood.

Yet He Yu had always turned it inward.

He had always stayed inside his own dragon's lair — howling, raging, slamming his head against the walls — but he had never gone out to harm anyone. He bore all of it alone, in a darkness with no end.

—

So — was this girl, the one he didn't know, the thread of light He Yu had been searching for?

Xie Qingcheng thought of the tears He Yu had left on him just now, remembered the boy choking out how much he liked her, and turned back despite himself to look once more at the young man who had already gone still in sleep.

So that was why he had left school. Why he couldn't hold on. Why the old wound buried inside him had opened.

Xie Qingcheng raised his hand and touched, without thinking, the lip He Yu had kissed — and somewhere beneath the feeling of 'this little beast is insufferable,' something else quietly surfaced: 'this little beast is pitiable.'

But Xie Qingcheng had taken too hard a blow tonight to think it through carefully, and he simply took the 'Xie' He Yu had spoken as a name murmured in that half-conscious haze — a name that happened to be his own. He didn't follow the thought toward Xie Xue.

In Xie Qingcheng's mind, although He Yu and Xie Xue were the same generation, there was still a five-year gap between them — and five years, in his view, was enough to make any romantic entanglement essentially impossible. It had never once crossed his mind that He Yu might harbor feelings for Xie Xue.

Besides — how old was He Yu? Nineteen. Not even into his twenties. In ancient times he wouldn't even have come of age. Practically a minor.

Frankly, in the rigidly categorical worldview of Xie Qingcheng, a nineteen-year-old boy having a relationship counted as puppy love. Getting tangled up in romance before you'd grown up or finished your education, before you had a settled mind — could it possibly go anywhere? And if something came of it, could he take the girl to the civil affairs office and sign the papers? On his own, could he support a family of three plus four elderly parents? Without his parents' help, could he earn enough for formula, enough that a pregnant wife wouldn't have to worry about making ends meet?

No. He couldn't do any of it.

Which made him still a boy. Not a man.

Xie Qingcheng was of course not going to put someone like that in the same category as a future brother-in-law.

Just then the young man on the bed seemed troubled by something in his dream — a faint furrow crossed his clean brow. Xie Qingcheng had no desire to go on looking at him, even less at the thoroughly wrecked bed.

He got up, pushed the door open, and walked out.

He Yu didn't wake until the following morning.

He opened his eyes in a daze, lifted a hand to push the tangled hair from his brow, and pressed his palm against his cold forehead.

Memory after a night of heavy drinking was like shattered porcelain — putting the pieces back together meant getting cut on every jagged edge.

He Yu bore the winding-clock throbbing inside his skull as the events of the previous night slowly assembled themselves into something recognizable. He remembered the confused, mistaken kiss in the midst of all that chaos, and his whole body seized — and then the realization arrived:

He had… apparently… kissed Xie Qingcheng…

'…'

His first instinct was to hope he was having a nightmare, but the spot where his lip had been bitten still faintly tasted of blood — a lick brought a sting sharp enough to leave no doubt that everything that had happened last night was real.

As a model student and all-around high achiever from childhood on, He Yu had the hallmark traits of the academically exceptional: a high tolerance for new information, a fast processing speed. But this exceeded his threshold entirely. He sat on the bed, face drained of color.

Then came the beep of a keycard at the door. It swung hard open, and He Yu watched, helpless, as the person he had unwittingly sexually harassed the night before walked in with a settled, impassive expression.

Xie Qingcheng hadn't slept. He'd gone back to his own room and stared into nothing for several hours, and by now he was quite calm. He had just finished washing up when He Yu woke — he walked in to find the neurotic already awake, sitting there with disheveled hair and wide, guileless eyes, staring at him.

He somehow managed to look innocent and bewildered — and with that bright, handsome scholar's face, lips red against white teeth, he might have been the wronged party.

Animal.

Xie Qingcheng picked up He Yu's T-shirt from the armchair and flung it directly at the animal scholar's face, covering those two eyes that were getting on his nerves.

'Get up,' he said coldly.

The animal scholar pulled the white T off his face and began, with considerable difficulty: 'Xie Qingcheng, last night, did we — did I and you — was I…'

Xie Qingcheng, flatly: 'Yes.'

He Yu's color worsened.

Xie Qingcheng: 'But don't say another word about it.'

'…'

He Yu blinked again, taken aback. He hadn't expected this man to open his mouth with such a thoroughly detached, done-and-gone air — if he hadn't been certain his memory was intact, he'd almost have started doubting whether it was him who'd been too drunk to see straight and kissed the wrong person, or whether it had in fact been Xie Qingcheng who'd been scheming all along and seized a premeditated opportunity to harass him.

Done-and-gone Xie Qingcheng leaned back against the TV stand, arms folded, and looked at him with an expression that was cool and entirely serious: 'Get your clothes on properly. We need to talk.'

After such an acutely embarrassing physical encounter the night before — even if it was a misunderstanding — there was more than enough cause for bad conscience on both sides.

He Yu had taken liberties, which left him without much ground to argue from — any other day he'd have snapped back by now, but today he couldn't quite get his footing, so whatever Xie Qingcheng said, he did.

'You went to confess to the girl you like, didn't you?'

'…No.'

'You're still going to hide it from me? You don't remember what you said last night.'

He Yu remembered bits of it in a blurry way, but his head wasn't entirely clear yet, and it took him a long moment to answer: '…I had the wrong person. I didn't confess to her — I just found out she already likes someone else… forget it, why am I even explaining all this to you. Go ahead and laugh if you want.'

He raised his eyes: 'I know you're pleased. Everything played out exactly as you said it would — nobody likes me, I couldn't even control myself, every prediction you made came true. Happy now?'

Xie Qingcheng held his gaze. 'I'm glad you didn't go further off the rails.'

He paused, noting the wariness all over He Yu's face — He Yu evidently expected what was coming to be something like: I've thought this through all night and drawn up two treatment plans for you; your options are chemical castration or physical castration, take your pick, no need to be polite.

Xie Qingcheng let out a breath. He had no interest in going around on this indefinitely — it was juvenile, and it wasted time. So he simply said: '…Forget it. He Yu.'

'Let it go.'

He Yu looked at him. Model students were conditioned to jump in with answers — the more unruly specimens carried that habit straight into the bedroom — so He Yu asked: 'But?'

'But—' Professor Xie swept a stern look over his face, visibly displeased by the interjection, then continued: 'I've been thinking. What happened last night tells me your condition right now is very poor. I'll be honest with you — your father called me some time ago and asked me to keep an eye on you. Taking uncontrolled medication during an episode, then trying to conceal it from everyone — that's not acceptable. So…'

He Yu's father — Chairman Xie — had started his lecture.

He Yu still hadn't fully surfaced; there was a low drone in his head and he felt entirely elsewhere. What his father was saying — he caught the opening and then it stopped reaching him. Whatever it was, it could only mean trouble for him.

But on second thought, he had never asked Xie Qingcheng to manage him. It was Xie Qingcheng who had forced his way in. They were both straight men with no feeling for other men — if they were talking about who'd had bad luck, he'd had his share too. He didn't owe the man anything.

It was lucky he hadn't let Xie Xue's name slip out last night. If he had, this would be a great deal harder to put back together…

'…More or less, that's it.'

At some point his father had finished the lecture and issued a summary.

'Did you take any of that in?'

He Yu looked up and met Xie Qingcheng's gaze, which was cold enough to send ice chips scattering.

Xie Qingcheng had talked himself thirsty. He picked up the mineral water and uncapped it, drank what he hadn't managed to drink the night before, and said, with flat indifference: '…If you're willing, we can put this behind us.'

He Yu had barely followed any of what came before — his hungover head, still dully throbbing, had really only absorbed the phrase 'put this behind us.' But as someone accustomed to performing well, he nodded on instinct.

Xie Qingcheng looked down at him from above with an unreadable expression: 'Good. After you wrap filming, come find me at Medical University.'

'…'

He Yu came back to himself then, realizing he had apparently agreed to something during his mental absence — and finally snapped fully awake, voice rough with sleep: 'Wait. Sorry — what did you just say?'

Xie Qingcheng's expression cooled immediately, his tone turning blunt: 'Do you have conditions you'd like to negotiate?'

He Yu thought: what conditions?

He hadn't absorbed so much as a word of what that man had just been saying so breezily…

God help him — what on earth had he agreed to?

Meanwhile, Xie Qingcheng felt he had been remarkably lenient with He Yu.

He hadn't even brought up what had happened the night before. Admittedly the main reason was that he had absolutely no desire to revisit that kiss, which made his scalp crawl to think about.

Now that he'd seen the state He Yu's condition was actually in, he couldn't ignore it — He Jiwei's feelings aside, even if this had been a complete stranger having an episode in front of him, he couldn't have looked away.

He couldn't treat He Yu the way he once had, directly and hands-on. But keeping a check on his emotional state, offering a degree of guidance — that was still within reach.

And in the process, he could put He Yu to work as cheap labor. He Yu, when he was being cooperative, was genuinely useful — sharp, capable, hard-wearing. If he could get that out of him the way he used to, it would more than settle the account for having been licked by this dog.

Two birds, one stone.

Seeing He Yu's mind drift off again, Xie Qingcheng repeated himself curtly: 'After you wrap filming, come to Medical University. Do what I tell you — put yourself through some paces, do some work for me, break the pattern of lying around brooding all day. You have someone you like, which means you need to start getting a grip on your emotions now, learn to manage them sooner rather than later. You won't lose out.'

He Yu was quiet for a moment. '…She likes someone else. Not me.'

Xie Qingcheng exhaled. 'The girl you like — she's young, isn't she?'

'…Young enough.'

'The future's uncertain. And even if she still doesn't like you later on, there may be other people. When that time comes, if you've managed to bring your condition under control, that's still a good thing.'

He Yu was quiet a moment longer, then said abruptly: '…Why haven't you asked me who she is?'

'What does it have to do with me.'

'…' He Yu lowered his head, something faintly sardonic in his downcast eyes. 'Right. Nothing to do with you.'

He thought of the conversation he'd had with Xie Qingcheng at the police station.

Xie Qingcheng had said then: it was impossible that anyone could ever like someone like him — he would fail, without question.

He had felt it like a hard slap across the face, and at the time he'd thought: if he and Xie Xue ever ended up together, he would make sure Xie Qingcheng lost his composure in front of him — he had wanted to see Xie Qingcheng fall apart. But now everything had gone the other way.

It was Xie Qingcheng who had seen him at his most wretched.

If he retreated now, he would have nothing left of his dignity in front of this man…

He Yu closed his eyes briefly, then smiled. 'When you get down to it — you came here specifically to watch me make a fool of myself, didn't you?'

'If that's how you want to see it, sure.'

'…'

Meeting that man's indifferent, faintly provocative gaze, He Yu felt the darkness in him settle and deepen.

He had genuinely despised this look on Xie Qingcheng's face for as long as he could remember — he had seen it more times than he could count, and every time he felt the cold of it plainly, along with that overbearing, repellent air of command.

After a long, sullen silence, he looked up at Xie Qingcheng. 'You want me to work for you and keep my mind off things. What kind of work?'

'Haven't decided yet.' Xie Qingcheng, offhand: 'But you've followed me before. You know what I'm like. I'll think of ways to put you through it, and there'll be no shortage of that — you can count on it.'

'…You're planning to make my life difficult?'

Xie Qingcheng paused, brow lifting slightly at one corner. 'You're scared.'

He Yu had no interest in losing face and then his self-respect on top of it: 'You flatter yourself. There's nothing I'm afraid of.'

Xie Qingcheng heard the answer, reached down to pull out a cigarette, bit it between his lips, and said indistinctly: 'I'll hold you to that. Don't come crawling after three days saying you want to quit. The lighter's on the bedside table — hand it to me.'

He Yu ignored him, got out of bed, and went to the bathroom to wash up — even though that kiss had left no trace on him, He Yu still felt revolted. Thinking about how he'd mistaken the person and ended up kissing a man with that much abandon, he felt worse still, and was determined to scrub himself clean.

Before he stepped into the bathroom, he turned back and threw a glance at last night's object of his abandon. He was quite clear-headed now, quite upstanding and proper, as though it hadn't been him pressing the man into the bed and kissing him in a frenzy the night before: 'Secondhand smoke doesn't count as part of the hardship you're assigning me — that's just slow-motion homicide. If you want to smoke, go outside.'

With that he shut the bathroom door and went to wash up.

In the bathroom.

He Yu faced the mirror and ran a fingertip across his lip where Xie Qingcheng had bitten it the night before—

He cupped his hands under the tap and pressed the water against his face, then reached for the faucet handle.

The veins on the back of the young man's hand stood faint and taut; he gripped it hard and wrenched the tap shut, the flow cutting off. He straightened and looked at the person in the mirror.

Put him through his paces? That was just Xie Qingcheng wanting to keep watching him stumble, wanting to push him around, wanting to use him.

…He'd really walked straight into this one with that old schemer Xie Qingcheng.