My Straight Best Friend Thinks It's Bro Stuff novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Candles

Fu Lingchen did not sleep on the nights he lay beside Tang, and he had stopped pretending otherwise to himself.

At one in the morning he got up quietly and took the green notebook and a pen to the sofa.

He switched on the lamp over the shoe cabinet.

Rule one was holding.

Tang had gone to sleep on his right side and had not moved, with one bare shoulder out of the duvet.

Fu pulled the cover back over it before he left the room.

He opened the notebook to the back.

The front half was his treatment record, the dull, honest half that had saved him that morning.

The back half had never been shown to anybody.

It began with a date: 20 March 2023.

Fu's eighteenth birthday had been a cold clear night.

Tang had carried a cake up to the roof of their old apartment block, with the candles already lit and his hand cupped around them.

It was a cheap cake from the bakery on Yulin Road, with blue icing and a crooked 18 in white.

Tang had turned nineteen two weeks before, and he had a beer in his other hand.

"Make a wish, bro," he'd said.

Fu remembered the candlelight on his face, orange and moving, and the wide, stupid, happy grin.

He remembered that he had understood everything in one piece.

He was in love with Tang Zhiyuan.

He had been for a long time, and he'd simply had no word for it until that moment.

Fu had closed his eyes and made a wish he would not repeat to anyone, and blown out all eighteen candles at once.

Then Tang, a little drunk, had started on his rules.

He had invented them standing on the parapet with his arms out.

Back to back in bed, hugs with a slap, no hands except on a road.

He'd laughed his way down the list, and Fu had listened to every word and watched his hands.

They had been moving too fast, and his smile had been too wide.

His eyes had not been on Fu's face for even a second.

Fu was a good reader of bodies.

He had understood that Tang was drawing a line, though not why.

And he had understood the rest of it, too, in a cold, clear way he did not like.

Tang's parents had split when he was fifteen.

His mother had gone to Shenzhen and his father to Chongqing.

For a year Tang had slept in the Fus' spare room and eaten at the Fus' table.

Everything he had left that stayed in one place was Fu.

If Fu said the other thing, and Tang said no, even kindly, Tang would lose the only house he had.

If Fu said it and Tang said yes, and it ended badly, the same.

"Okay," Fu had said, on the roof, to the last rule.

That was the night he made himself a promise.

He would never take Tang's friendship by surprise.

He would not say it first, whatever it cost.

He would make a place where Tang could say it if he wanted to, and wait.

He had been waiting three and a half years.

He turned to the page where he had written, under the date, in small square letters:

Promise one: I will not say it first.

Promise two: I will make a room where he can.

The lease on Phoenix Lane was dated 2 September.

Tang's second fever of the term had been on the first.

On the sofa, in the lamplight, Fu turned to a newer page.

He had written it on Monday night, after the canteen.

12 Oct. He stood on a chair. He said anything. I did not know what to do with my face so I left.

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