Chapter 6: The Steady Hand

Shao Hanjing sat in the chair beside the east suite bed and watched Jiang Yu sleep.

He had done it for six nights.

It was three in the morning, and the lamp was turned to the wall.

Yu lay curled on his left side with his fist over the whistle.

At twenty-nine Hanjing had never taken a man to bed.

Nine years he had told himself it was grief, and Lu Wen called it discipline.

It was neither. He had been waiting, and now the waiting was in the room.

Yu had not asked him to stay in the bed.

Yu had said he needed time, that he was a different person after Vancouver, that he wanted to be known slowly.

Hanjing had said yes to all of it, as he'd have said yes to anything.

So he sat in the chair.

Yu made a sound in his sleep, thin and high, and his body jerked.

"No," he said. "Not the water. No."

Hanjing was across the room before he knew he'd moved.

He took Yu's shoulders and Yu woke with a gasp and stared at him blindly.

"Han."

"You were dreaming."

"The sea. I was in the sea." Yu's breath came in snatches. "Please don't ever take me back to the coast."

"I won't."

"I can't look at it. Not since that night."

"You don't have to."

Yu held on to his sleeve until his breathing slowed.

Hanjing smoothed the damp hair off his forehead, and the old tenderness came up in him, exactly where he had left it.

It was good to feel it again.

It was also, he noticed, the third time this week that Yu had turned his face away from water.

He put the thought away in the place where he put such things.

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