His lips parted, and the words came out before he could stop them. “You took your time.”
He could not have said whether he meant this time, or something else entirely.
Ying Bujie still had his gaze lowered, and said quietly, “Yes.”
Gao Shi looked at those long lashes, trembling faintly, veiling his eyes and hiding whatever lay within them. All at once, Gao Shi very much wanted to know what he was thinking.
“I like you.”
“Yes.”
An answer without a single ripple. It felt somehow unexpected, and somehow exactly as it should be.
Something rose in Gao Shi’s chest that he had no words for. It was as though someone had crumpled his heart in their hands, kneaded it soft, and then left it to steep in a bath of sweet and sour.
Ying Bujie raised his head. The eyes that had been hidden behind those lashes held within them a tenderness so fierce it startled him.
“As am I. My heart is yours.”
Ying Bujie lowered his head and pressed a light kiss to Gao Shi’s forehead. Gentle and restrained.
There had been many moments of closeness between them before, yet this one nearly sent Gao Shi’s heart leaping out of his chest. The sweet and sour water in which his heart had been steeping turned suddenly to warm wine, and hit him all at once, leaving him giddy before he had any time to brace for it.
“May I?”
Nose touching nose. Breath mingling with breath. Gao Shi did not answer in words. He reached up, hooked his arm around the back of Ying Bujie’s neck, and pulled him down.
Their lips met, and Ying Bujie’s lips were faintly cool as well.
Gao Shi had no experience with kissing, but he was after all a grown man. He instinctively raised his hand to knock at the gate. The instant their tongues touched, a current seemed to run the length of Gao Shi’s spine, and his vision went briefly, utterly blank. He missed his window to advance entirely and found himself on the receiving end of a thorough conquest.
Ying Bujie cupped the back of his neck, as though he wanted to fold him into his own body and never be separated again.
In a daze, voices rose at his ear. The images before him flickered, and the line between reality and dream dissolved.
A white-robed young man lying on the bough of an enormous tree, a jug of wine hooked in his arm, laughing and easy. [Come now. Drink my wine, and you are mine.]
The clashing of gold and iron. Every strike thrown with full force, yet somehow in perfect unspoken accord with the person across from him. A smile, open and unhurried. [This round is mine, I believe.]
Lying in the grass, idly chewing on a stem, then turning suddenly to look at the person sitting beside him. [Hey. What if we were together?]
[Alright.]
As though they had been embracing since a past life and only now arrived at this moment. As though the time of separation had stretched on without end, leaving Ying Bujie alone to search through the long unfolding of years.
The hand Ying Bujie had at his waist tightened. Outside of dreams, Gao Shi had never seen Ying Bujie this undone. He was like a traveller who had been crossing a boundless desert and finally glimpsed an oasis. Like a lone boat adrift on a black sea that had at last found a lighthouse. Ying Bujie with reason cast aside was like a wild creature, wanting to swallow him whole so that they would never again be parted.
Gao Shi did not know why, but a sharp and aching tenderness welled up in his chest without warning. He answered tentatively, telling Ying Bujie over and over: [I am here. I have always been here.]
The Ghost King’s remnant soul finally tore itself free of Ying Bujie’s sword and fled in desperate haste. Ying Bujie raised his head. Gao Shi pulled him back toward himself, foreheads pressed together, breathing unsteadily. “Let him go.”
The ache and tenderness dissolved into the long, unhurried kiss. Gao Shi, only gradually catching up, felt the bright joy of a confession returned. He found himself rather amused, and then suddenly noticed something: he had no idea how Ying Bujie had practised, but during kissing the man gave him absolutely no advantage. The moment his breath ran shorter by a fraction, he crumbled completely.
Gao Shi told himself that Ying Bujie had been raised on a mountain from childhood. Back when his soul was incomplete, it had been Gao Shi who taught him basic life skills step by step. In something like kissing, he was naturally not going to come off worse.
Unwilling to lose, Gao Shi pressed forward. Ying Bujie looked at the physiological flush spreading to the corners of Gao Shi’s eyes, and something shifted in his gaze.
Breathing against each other, he turned and set Gao Shi gently back against the wall.
Lips soft and yielding, his tongue swept across the roof of his mouth, sending a wave of tingling warmth through him. The moment Gao Shi’s tongue moved in response, Ying Bujie seized the territory without ceremony, coaxing his tongue and tormenting it, then at the very end giving a light graze of the base of his tongue, and biting the tip as he retreated.
Ying Bujie’s hands had not moved at all, resting with perfect propriety at his waist and the back of his neck. And yet those two hands felt to Gao Shi astonishingly hot, so hot that his waist went weak, and currents ran both up and down his spine. Sensing that things were heading somewhere dangerous, Gao Shi quickly stepped back, trying to put some distance between them.
“Wait…”
Ying Bujie, who had been looking down, lifted his head. His eyes were hazy, filmed over with something soft. “One more time. A kiss. May I?”
Gao Shi felt as though something had struck him directly in the chest, and for the first time in his life he understood what it meant to lose all reason to desire.
“Alright…”
Gao Shi leaned in of his own accord. Ying Bujie was considerably more well-behaved than before, and finally conceded the upper hand to Gao Shi for once. Just as Gao Shi was patrolling his territory with great self-satisfaction, he left an opening. He was routed immediately and comprehensively. A soft sound escaped from Gao Shi’s throat, and he cracked his eyes open unable to bear it, only to find Ying Bujie’s gaze upon him, dark and deep as ten thousand miles of night sky.
He thought hazily back to the dream, and recalled that in it, he had been the one in the less dominant position.
***
The Ghost King’s soul finally fled the ghost city. He was consumed with fury. Reduced now to nothing but a drifting remnant soul, he was at his most vulnerable, and needed to replenish his Yin energy immediately.
Directly absorbing Yang energy from the living was a crude method he had always looked down upon, but he could not deny it was the fastest way to restore his Yin energy.
He burst out of the ghost city, intending to find a village on the mountainside to plunder.
He had not expected that the moment he surfaced, he would lock eyes with a Taoist priest.
The Taoist startled, flung out one long arm, and shouted, “Over here! There is a ghost!”
A dozen voices answered at once. The group of Taoist priests behind him rose to their feet, every one of them with a ritual implement in hand. “Where?” “Where?” “There!”
A storm of sacred artifact light came crashing toward the Ghost King. He had never in his life seen anything like this. Under normal circumstances he would not even spare these attacks a glance. In his current state they nearly sent his soul scattering to oblivion.
He fled urgently to the other side, and came face to face with a group of people, every one of them manning a machine gun, each gun fitted with a Buddha’s head.
With the Ghost King’s discerning eye, he could see in an instant that every last one of them had been ritually consecrated.
What kind of respectable monk goes around consecrating Gatling guns?!
The Ghost King fled again, straight into the encirclement, where a group of people bearing distinctly non-human features caught sight of him, eyes lighting up.
“Quick! Take him alive! Turn him in to the Gao family for the reward money!”
Tigers ahead. Hungry wolves behind. Venomous serpents to the left. Savage jackals to the right. The Ghost King’s vision went dark.
A researcher from the institute shouldered through the crowd with a toolbox, shouting at the top of his lungs.
“Stop stop stop! Stop hitting him! One more hit and there will be nothing left!”
“My research subject!”
***
Sam Williams On TYMIMA Chapter 152