Chapter 22: The House in Peach Ford

The house in Peach Ford had a bed that creaked.

Wuhen woke to it, and to light.

It lay across the quilt in a long gold bar from the window, warm on his bare shoulder, with dust turning slowly in it.

Outside, a hen was complaining.

Somewhere a woman was shaking out a rug, and a child shouted at a dog, and the peach tree in the yard dropped a petal on the sill.

He lay still and listened to all of it.

Nobody had ever come to carry him off.

Behind him a heavy arm tightened around his waist.

"You're awake," Chenjue said into his hair.

"I'm listening."

"To what?" Chenjue asked.

"The hen. She's got opinions."

"I'll buy her," Chenjue replied.

"You will not."

The arm pulled him back until his shoulders met a warm chest.

The room was small, with a plain timber ceiling and a basin on a stand and a chest of drawers with one leg shorter than the rest.

It smelled of cedar and sun on linen.

It was the plainest room Wuhen had ever been in, and he did not want to leave it.

"I'm hungry," he said.

"There's rice downstairs."

"I'm not hungry for rice."

A pause.

Then a laugh moved through the broad chest against his back.

"At this hour?"

"The walls are thin. The neighbors are awake. The bed creaks." Wuhen turned his head. "I thought I'd mention it."

"You're a terrible influence."

"I'm a jailer," Wuhen answered.

"You're a menace."

He kissed Wuhen's shoulder, then his neck, and then the corner of his jaw, slow and warm, and Wuhen let his eyes close.

There was no hurry anywhere.

It was the strangest thing.

For a hundred years there had been a clock in his bones, ticking toward the end of him, and for a month there had been a deadline.

Now there was only the sun on the quilt, and a mouth at his ear.

Chenjue sat up against the headboard.

He drew Wuhen up with him, between his open thighs, with his back against that chest and his legs laid out over Chenjue's.

They faced the window.

Through it, the peach tree stood in full flower in the morning light, pink and white, and beyond it the river glittered.

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