Chapter 6: The Lamp Remembers

Gu Chen had kept Ye Ming's rule for four nights, and it was hard.

When Ye Ming's eyes were open, Gu Chen stood at the edge of the lamplight, where he could be seen.

He kept his hands at his sides.

When Ye Ming slept, he could not be seen at all.

So he went into the lamp.

He sat curled in the brass belly of it, small and cold, behind the candle, and listened to a man breathe.

He had watched Ye Ming for four years from a shelf, and he knew every kind of tired.

This was the breathing of a man who lay on his back, with one arm over his eyes, afraid of the ceiling.

Gu Chen wanted to stand by the bed and watch until morning.

He wanted that more than he had wanted anything since he died, and he did not do it, because Ye Ming had said not to.

It was the only thing anyone had asked of him in eight years.

He had one kiss, and he went over it again and again.

It had been brief, and the cold had hurt his borrowed mouth, and he would have paid every night he had left to have it again.

He remembered the numb cold at the corner of Ye Ming's lip, where the small dark mole was.

He remembered that Ye Ming had stepped in, and that nobody had pushed him.

Alone in the brass, with no body to want with, he wanted anyway.

He turned the rule over and over in the dark.

On Monday Ye Ming carried the lamp back to the Hall and set it on the office shelf, as usual, before the morning meeting.

"Wait here," he said, quietly, to the empty air.

"I'll wait," said Gu Chen.

"Don't go anywhere you can't see me from."

"I don't go anywhere."

There was a small pause, and Gu Chen felt the rule bend, just slightly, in Ye Ming's favor.

"I know," Ye Ming said. "It's a figure of speech."

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