[BL] Swan Song for the Morning

By seven in the morning, Ji-Heng had already prevented three small disasters no one else would remember had nearly happened.

The first was on slide twenty-seven of Yao-Chen’s presentation, where a projected occupancy figure had somehow survived two rounds of internal review despite being carried over from an older model. The second was folded into Xi-An’s schoolbag between a physics workbook and a camera magazine: a permission form for a Saturday photography outing that had spent the night unsigned beneath a stack of mail. The third was Yao-Chen’s eight o’clock call with a financing partner in Singapore, which Yao-Chen had moved twice and apparently forgotten a third time.

None of these qualified as emergencies. Ji-Heng preferred problems before they earned the title.

He sat at the end of the kitchen island with Yao-Chen’s laptop open beneath the pendant lights, one hand curled around tea that had already gone lukewarm. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, Taipei was still the pale blue-gray of a winter morning deciding whether it intended to brighten. Towers stood in layers through the faint haze. On the street below, scooters gathered at the intersection in neat, impatient rows before pouring forward when the light changed.

“Slide twenty-seven,” Ji-Heng said.

Yao-Chen, standing at the counter in shirtsleeves and expensive trousers, looked up from his phone. “What about it?”

“You’re promising a number the current plan cannot support unless you’ve discovered a way to make walls optional.”

Xi-An made a sound into his bowl that was suspiciously close to a laugh.

Yao-Chen pointed at him without looking. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

“I’m eating breakfast,” Xi-An said. “I didn’t realize we’d divided into factions.”

“At fifteen, everything is factions.”

“Then I’m with whoever isn’t making me look at spreadsheets before school.”

Ji-Heng reached over and nudged the permission form farther into the front pocket of Xi-An’s bag. “Your principles are inspiring.”

Xi-An grinned at him, the expression arriving first in the eyebrows and then the mouth, exactly as it had when he was five and about to lie badly. At fifteen he had grown into Ji-Heng’s eyes without inheriting his ability to keep them quiet. His hair was still damp from the shower and had dried incorrectly along one side, but Ji-Heng knew better than to fix it. There were forms of paternal affection a teenager accepted and forms that could apparently cause death from embarrassment.

Yao-Chen finally put his phone facedown on the counter and crossed to the laptop. He bent over Ji-Heng’s shoulder, smelling faintly of cedar cologne and the coffee he had abandoned somewhere behind them.

“Show me.”

Ji-Heng scrolled back. “Here. You’ve used the gross leasable area in the narrative, but the financial model underneath it is based on net usable area after the revised circulation plan. Anyone actually reading both will think you’re inflating the return.”

“I’m not inflating anything.”

“The number is fine,” Ji-Heng said. “The slide is wrong.”

Something small changed in Yao-Chen’s face anyway. Nineteen years had made observation less an act than a reflex: Ji-Heng knew the lift of Yao-Chen’s left eyebrow when he thought a client was lying, the particular stillness that meant he had been offended but wanted the other person to think otherwise, the way he set his keys down too carefully when he came home angry. There had been a time when Yao-Chen found that attention intimate. Lately, correction seemed to touch some bruise Ji-Heng could not see.

“I heard you the first time.”

Xi-An’s spoon stopped against the ceramic bowl.

Yao-Chen exhaled and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Sorry. I have three people asking me three different things before I’ve finished coffee.”

“No one’s asking you anything,” Xi-An said. “Dad is fixing your thing, and I’m eating cereal.”

Yao-Chen gave him a long look. “Thank you for the clarification.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Xi-An,” Ji-Heng said.

“What? I was polite.”

“You were technically polite. There’s a difference.”

Yao-Chen laughed then, abruptly and for real, and for a few seconds the kitchen became itself again.

That laugh had once undone Ji-Heng almost embarrassingly quickly. It was still loud, still warmer than Yao-Chen’s polished public smile, still capable of summoning the nineteen-year-old boy who had told the presumed Zhan heir that his risk assessment was cowardly. Yao-Chen had wanted things with a hunger Ji-Heng had found almost indecent: food, money, beautiful buildings, his own name on something no one could take from him. Ji-Heng, raised inside a future designed before he could speak, had loved the sight of someone reaching for one.

He saved the corrected slide and closed the laptop.

“Your Singapore call is at eight.”

Yao-Chen’s amusement vanished. “No, it isn’t.”

Ji-Heng only looked at him. Yao-Chen picked up his phone.

“Damn it.”

“You moved it from Friday.”

“I know I moved it.”

“Apparently not where you could find it.”

“Do you keep my calendar in your head?”

“Only the parts you don’t.”

Xi-An snorted, but this time Yao-Chen did not laugh. His phone lit in his hand, and his thumb immediately turned the screen toward his own body before the preview could settle. It was not the first time Ji-Heng had noticed. Lately Yao-Chen took the phone into the shower, answered messages on the balcony, set it facedown at dinner after years of leaving it wherever it landed.

Ji-Heng had not asked. He preferred to call that trust.

The dull ache under his ribs tightened as he shifted on the stool, reaching backward toward the middle of his back. He pressed his palm briefly against his upper abdomen and waited. Too much tea without enough food, probably. Too many nights bent over drawings on the sofa. He had lost weight since autumn, though the fact had not seemed worth dramatizing. He had been busy. He had not been hungry. At thirty-eight, a man was allowed to discover that his body no longer considered three coffees and half a lunch a reasonable diet.

“Are you okay?” Xi-An asked.

Ji-Heng dropped his hand. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You made the face.”

“What face?”

“The one where you pretend nothing hurts.”

Yao-Chen’s attention flickered up from the phone, and Ji-Heng smiled as though that settled anything. “I’m being bullied in my own kitchen.”

“You’re avoiding the question in your own kitchen.”

“It’s my back.”

“You said that last week.”

“And it was my back last week too.”

Xi-An narrowed his eyes. “You should get it checked.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“That means never.”

Yao-Chen picked up the laptop. “He’ll go when someone physically puts him in a car.”

The complaint was casual, almost affectionate, accumulated through years of knowing another person’s worst habits. Ji-Heng looked at him and found, beneath the morning’s irritation, the man who had once sat beside him all night in a California hospital because Ji-Heng could not stop checking the nursery even after the nurses assured him Xi-An was breathing perfectly well.

Whatever distance had grown between them, it had not erased everything underneath. Long love had sediment; even unhappiness had to pass through layers of tenderness before it reached the surface.

“Your call,” Ji-Heng reminded him.

“Yes, husband.” Yao-Chen leaned down and kissed the side of Ji-Heng’s head, quick and absentminded. “I’m going to hide in the study until it’s over.”

“Use the corrected deck.”

“I was planning to present the wrong one out of spite.”

“Then at least do it confidently.”

Yao-Chen’s mouth curved. “That I can manage.”

He disappeared toward the study with his laptop and phone. Xi-An watched him go, then looked at Ji-Heng until Ji-Heng finally asked, “What?”

“He’s weird lately.”

“He’s under pressure.”

“So are you.”

“Yes, but I was weird to begin with.”

Xi-An smiled despite himself. “True.”

Ji-Heng reached over and flicked the edge of his ear.

“Hey.”

“Your car will be downstairs in six minutes. Permission form is in the front pocket. Your spare battery is in the side pocket because you left the other one charging on the desk, and if your photography teacher asks, I absolutely did not rescue you again.”

Xi-An stared at him. “You found the battery?”

“No. It crawled into your bag because it values education.”

“Dad.”

“Go.”

Xi-An slung the bag over one shoulder, stepped in close long enough to press his forehead briefly against Ji-Heng’s temple, and then was gone with the quick, loose-limbed energy of someone whose whole body still expected the future to be there when he arrived.

Ji-Heng remained at the island after the apartment door shut. From down the hall came the muted rise and fall of Yao-Chen’s conference-call voice: assured, persuasive, slightly deeper than the one he used at home. Ji-Heng could tell by cadence alone when Yao-Chen was moving into the part of a pitch he liked best—vision, arrival, the promise that a building was not merely somewhere to live but a declaration about who a buyer had become.

He was very good at it. Ji-Heng had never doubted that.

Twenty minutes later Yao-Chen came back into the kitchen with the altered energy of a man who had just won something. His tie was still undone around his collar, but his shoulders had settled and his eyes were bright.

“They’re moving us to the next round,” he said.

Ji-Heng looked up from the dishes. “Of course they do.”

“That sounded dangerously close to confidence in me.”

“I have confidence in you. I have less confidence in people who put old occupancy figures into new decks.”

Yao-Chen leaned a hip against the counter. “They asked exactly about that slide.”

“And?”

“I walked them through the revised framing.”

“Good.”

“They liked it.”

Ji-Heng dried his hands. “You sound surprised.”

“Can I be impressive for five minutes before you remind me you caught it first?”

Ji-Heng considered the sentence rather than defending himself from it. Yao-Chen reacted quickly; Ji-Heng preferred to understand where a reaction had come from before deciding whether it deserved an answer.

“I wasn’t reminding you.”

Yao-Chen’s fingers tapped once against the stone countertop. “Forget it.”

Ji-Heng could have. Instead he crossed the short distance between them and straightened the tie Yao-Chen had left hanging loose. The silk was dark green, one Ji-Heng had bought him two birthdays ago because it made his skin look warmer under conference-room lighting.

“You were impressive,” Ji-Heng said. “You usually are.”

The defensiveness left Yao-Chen’s face almost at once. “That sounded romantic.”

“Don’t become dependent on it.”

“Too late.”

Yao-Chen caught Ji-Heng by the waist and drew him in. The embrace was brief and casual, their bodies fitting through the old intelligence of repetition. Ji-Heng rested a hand against Yao-Chen’s chest and felt the familiar warmth beneath the shirt.

“There’s another thing,” Yao-Chen said.

“There always is.”

“Zheng at Mingyuan wants us to commit to the stone supplier before the revised mock-up.”

Ji-Heng’s hand stilled. “Why?”

“He says the quarry allocation will disappear.”

“Then let it.”

Yao-Chen pulled back enough to look at him. “It’s the material we specified.”

“It’s also the supplier who changed finishing subcontractors in November and didn’t tell you until after the hotel lobby shipment was delayed.”

“That was a different division.”

“Same owner. Same habit of solving problems by making them someone else’s emergency.”

Yao-Chen’s mouth tightened, more thoughtful than annoyed. “You really remember every bad decision anyone has ever made, don’t you?”

“Only the expensive ones.”

“I can’t tell whether that’s useful or a personality disorder.”

“They’re not mutually exclusive.”

That earned another laugh. Yao-Chen picked up his phone, already moving toward the hall. “I’ll tell Zheng we wait for the mock-up.”

“Tell him you’re willing to lose the allocation. If he thinks you need it, he’ll keep pressuring you.”

Yao-Chen stopped. His expression sharpened with the pleasure Ji-Heng had always loved seeing there: not obedience, but recognition, the moment when a scattered instinct became strategy.

“Right,” he said. “That’s better.”

Then the phone in his hand vibrated. Something private lit Yao-Chen’s face before he turned the screen toward himself.

“Work?” Ji-Heng asked.

“Xuan-Lin. He’s sending revisions for the site meeting.”

The name meant nothing threatening. Xuan-Lin was talented, occasionally severe, and better than most designers Yaojing hired at distinguishing expensive from merely costly. Ji-Heng had met him several times. After the first dinner, he had told Yao-Chen the younger man was worth listening to.

“Tell him the lighting plan in the east lobby still fights the stone,” Ji-Heng said.

Yao-Chen gave him a look. “You know you don’t actually work for my company.”

“So you remind me whenever I’m useful.”

“One day you’re going to send me an invoice for nineteen years of consulting.”

Ji-Heng turned back to the sink. “You couldn’t afford me.”

“I married you instead.”

The line was old, born when they lived in an apartment small enough that Ji-Heng could correct a proposal from the bed while Yao-Chen cooked noodles three meters away. Ji-Heng smiled despite himself.

“Terrible financial decision,” he said.

“My specialty.”

Yao-Chen left the kitchen still typing.

Ji-Heng gathered the dishes, rinsed them, and stood for a moment with both palms braced against the counter while the ache under his ribs receded. When it did, he treated its departure as proof that it had never deserved attention.

By eight-forty, he was dressed to leave.

His own morning was less glamorous: a meeting with an accountant handling one of his personal investment vehicles, followed by an errand to collect documents he had been putting off signing. There had once been a time when the Zhan name could have sent three assistants to accomplish all of it without Ji-Heng leaving home. He had not lived that way in years, though people still straightened subtly when they recognized him.

At the entryway, Yao-Chen emerged from the study with his phone pressed to his ear. He covered the microphone.

“Are you going out?”

Ji-Heng glanced down at his coat. “That was the idea.”

“How long?”

“A few hours. Why?”

“No reason.” Yao-Chen’s eyes moved briefly toward the living room windows rather than Ji-Heng’s face. “I might work from home until the site meeting.”

“All right.”

“Dinner?”

“I’ll cook if I’m back first.”

“I may be late.”

“Then I’ll cook for two.”

Something unreadable passed over Yao-Chen’s expression. Guilt would have been an easy word if Ji-Heng had already known to look for it. Without that knowledge, it resembled distraction.

Yao-Chen reached for his sleeve before Ji-Heng could open the door and tugged him back half a step.

“What?”

“You forgot me.”

For one stupid, tender second, Ji-Heng thought he meant something larger.

Then Yao-Chen tapped his own cheek.

Ji-Heng laughed under his breath and kissed him, the contact brief and familiar. Yao-Chen’s hand rested at his waist for less than a heartbeat before the phone murmured against his palm.

“Go make people believe in expensive buildings,” Ji-Heng said.

“I always do.”

Ji-Heng stepped into the hall.

He would remember the kiss later with a precision that made him hate memory.

At 9:12 a.m., halfway to his meeting, Ji-Heng realized he had left his personal seal in the locked drawer of his desk.

The accountant could have rescheduled the signatures. Ji-Heng could have asked for a courier. He could have done any of the reasonable things that, afterward, would seem like doors a kinder universe had left open for him.

Instead, he told the driver to turn back.

Traffic was forgiving; the return took eleven minutes. Ji-Heng messaged no one because there was no reason to.

It was his home.

The first thing he noticed when he opened the apartment door was the shoes.

Not Yao-Chen’s. Not Xi-An’s. A pair of black leather ankle boots stood near the built-in cabinet, sleek enough to be expensive and narrow enough that Ji-Heng knew immediately they belonged to neither man in his family.

He stopped with one hand still on the door handle. The apartment was quiet in the way a room became quiet after sound had just ended. Then something moved farther inside—a soft knock, furniture perhaps, followed by a breath of laughter cut short.

Ji-Heng closed the door behind him because leaving it open seemed suddenly impossible.

A charcoal overcoat hung over the back of a dining chair. He recognized it before he remembered why: Xuan-Lin had worn it at a Yaojing dinner in December, a severe, beautiful thing that made his lean body look almost architectural. Ji-Heng had complimented it. Xuan-Lin had smiled and told him he had a good eye.

The memory arrived whole and useless.

For several seconds Ji-Heng’s mind built explanations as quickly as it could. Xuan-Lin had brought materials over. Yao-Chen had asked him to come before the site meeting. They were discussing the flagship interiors. The boots were by the door because that was where guests put their shoes; the coat was on the chair because Yao-Chen never remembered to offer anyone a hanger.

Then Ji-Heng heard Yao-Chen’s voice from the bedroom—not words at first, but a low, rough sound he knew too well—and the explanations stopped.

He did not remember deciding to move. One moment he was beside the dining table; the next he was walking down the hall with such care that his own body seemed to belong to someone breaking into the apartment.

The bedroom door was not fully closed. Through the narrow opening he saw the edge of their bed, Yao-Chen’s discarded shirt on the floor, Xuan-Lin’s bare leg drawn high across the white duvet.

Ji-Heng’s hand found the wall. He could have turned away.

He did not.

Yao-Chen was naked from the waist down, one knee sunk into the mattress between Xuan-Lin’s spread thighs. Ji-Heng saw the long flex of his back beneath the undershirt he had not bothered removing, his hand locked around Xuan-Lin’s hip, the intimate joining of their bodies as Yao-Chen drove his cock into him with a practiced rhythm that contained no hesitation, no fumbling discovery, nothing that could be mistaken for a first catastrophe.

Xuan-Lin lay beneath him flushed and open, shirt pushed high against his ribs, one hand gripping Yao-Chen’s forearm while the other twisted in the sheets Ji-Heng had slept in the night before.

“Slower,” Xuan-Lin whispered, though his hips lifted to meet the next thrust. “You’ll make me sore again.”

Again.

The word entered Ji-Heng more cleanly than any blade could have.

Yao-Chen laughed softly against Xuan-Lin’s mouth. Not his public laugh, and not the laugh from the kitchen less than an hour earlier. Ji-Heng knew this one too: the lower register sharpened by arousal, the way Yao-Chen became almost boyish when desire stripped the performance out of him.

“You said that last time,” Yao-Chen murmured.

“And you ignored me last time.”

“You liked that I ignored you.”

Xuan-Lin’s answer dissolved under the next thrust.

Ji-Heng’s eyes fixed on details because the whole was impossible: Yao-Chen’s black watch on the bedside table; the glass of water beside Ji-Heng’s book; a torn condom wrapper near the lamp; Xuan-Lin’s underwear caught beneath the foot of the bed. Yao-Chen’s hand moved over Xuan-Lin with the confidence of memory. Beneath the smell of sweat and lubricant was cedar cologne. The room was the same room where Xi-An sprawled on Sunday mornings complaining that both his fathers were impossible.

Yao-Chen bent over Xuan-Lin and kissed him while still moving inside him. Xuan-Lin wrapped both arms around his shoulders.

There was affection in it. That was worse.

Ji-Heng had imagined, in the abstract way married people sometimes did, that discovering infidelity would produce rage first: a slammed door, a shouted name, something dramatic enough to match the scale of the injury. Instead his mind became hideously orderly.

Xuan-Lin had been there before. When Yao-Chen paused to reach for more lubricant, Xuan-Lin found the bedside drawer without looking. Yao-Chen did not need to tell him where anything was.

He knew their bedroom. He knew which side Yao-Chen slept on. He knew how loudly they could be in an apartment expected to remain empty until afternoon.

He knew Ji-Heng’s schedule.

Yao-Chen pushed back into him. Xuan-Lin turned his face against Ji-Heng’s pillow.

The pillow held Ji-Heng’s gaze longer than either man did. He had bought the linen cases because Yao-Chen complained cotton became too warm against his face. The absurdity of that fact nearly undid him. Not the naked bodies. Not the sex. Linen.

Nineteen years of love had left its fingerprints on objects too ordinary to defend themselves.

Xuan-Lin opened his eyes, and for one terrible instant Ji-Heng thought he had been seen. But Xuan-Lin looked only at Yao-Chen, bright and intent and completely certain of his right to be there.

“Come here,” he said.

Yao-Chen lowered himself over him. The kiss was slow.

Ji-Heng stepped backward carefully. Being discovered would require him to become a person capable of speech, and he could not imagine what language belonged to this.

At his study door he remembered, with almost comic absurdity, why he had returned: the seal. He entered the study, opened the locked drawer, and took it. His hands were steady.

Yao-Chen’s corrected presentation remained open on the secondary monitor where Ji-Heng had sent it earlier. Slide twenty-seven now contained the right figure. A message preview in the corner read, Excellent recovery on the occupancy question. They liked the revised framing.

Ji-Heng stared at it, then closed the preview because leaving someone else’s message open felt intrusive.

From the bedroom, Xuan-Lin’s voice rose and broke. Yao-Chen said something Ji-Heng could not make out, followed by a muffled curse.

Ji-Heng put the seal into his coat pocket and returned to the entryway. Xuan-Lin’s boots were slightly crooked. Without thinking, he nudged one aside so the cabinet door would close properly.

His own hand disgusted him.

He left.

The elevator arrived almost immediately. Inside, mirrored walls multiplied him from three angles: dark coat, pale face, immaculate hair, one hand still in his pocket around the hard carved edge of the seal. He looked exactly like himself. There should have been some visible evidence that the last nineteen years had just split down the center.

The elevator descended thirty-one floors while his mind continued doing what it had always done: sorting, scheduling, placing facts where they belonged. On twenty-four, Ji-Heng thought, Xi-An gets home at five-thirty. On eighteen: The sheets need changing. On eleven: Yao-Chen has a site meeting at noon. By six, all his mind offered him was Xuan-Lin’s coat on the dining chair.

In the lobby he realized he had been holding his breath and let it out slowly through his nose. The doorman greeted him; Ji-Heng greeted him back.

Outside, Taipei had become fully morning. A delivery scooter idled near the curb. Two office workers crossed against the light, one holding a paper cup beneath her mask while the other laughed at something on his phone. A bus sighed to a stop. Somewhere close, a metal shutter rattled upward over a storefront. The city had the indecency to continue without consulting him.

His driver stepped forward, but Ji-Heng shook his head.

“I’ll walk a little.”

“Mr. Zhan, your appointment—”

“Please tell them I’m delayed.”

The driver hesitated. “Of course.”

Ji-Heng began walking before anyone could ask where. He had no destination in mind, which frightened him more than it should have. Even leisure acquired structure in his hands: reservations, routes, weather checked the night before. Xi-An teased him that he could turn getting bubble tea into a logistics exercise.

Now he moved with the weak winter sun against his face and did not know whether he was trying to get away from Yao-Chen or waiting for the world to rearrange itself into something he recognized.

At the next intersection, the pedestrian signal counted down from seventeen. A woman shifted a shopping bag from one hand to the other. A boy in a school uniform tugged his mask down long enough to drink soy milk, earning a sharp correction from the grandmother beside him. Someone’s phone rang with a bright electronic melody.

Ji-Heng looked at the glass façade across the street and found himself reflected among strangers.

Yao-Chen bending over Xuan-Lin.

The kiss in the entryway.

You forgot me.

His stomach turned so suddenly he had to stop. The light changed and people flowed around him as he stepped back from the curb and pressed his fingers against the base of his sternum. For a moment he thought the nausea belonged entirely to what he had seen, his body’s blunt refusal of an image his mind could not yet process.

Then the pain arrived.

Not the dull ache from breakfast. This was deeper, hard and bright beneath his upper abdomen, boring through toward his back with enough force that the street lost definition at the edges. Ji-Heng gripped the cold metal railing beside the crossing and waited for it to pass.

It did not.

A stranger asked if he was all right, and Ji-Heng heard himself say yes automatically. The lie came so easily that, under any other circumstances, he might have admired the efficiency of it.

He stood there with Yao-Chen’s betrayal still wet and vivid in his mind, one hand clenched around the railing and the other pressed uselessly against a body that had begun, at last, to make its own demand.