Weiran threw a pen at him. “I’m going to hit you.”

“I’m okay with that too. Whatever you like.”

THEY’D AGREED NOT to meet on weekends for several reasons: firstly, Weiran needed to be able to take all the information that Xiaokai was giving him and actually do something with it—research it, write it down, whatever; secondly, Xiaokai couldn’t be going to the hotel on days that he didn’t have appointments, no matter how good his excuse of “getting away from Xingyu” was; thirdly, neither Xiaokai nor Weiran wanted to have to look at each other’s faces any longer than they needed to.

Or so Xiaokai had explained it to Weiran.

Weiran wasn’t as convinced. Well, the first two reasons were logical enough, at least—Weiran did need time to do his work without having distractions around, and it would be both difficult and suspicious to continuously come up with excuses as to why Xiaokai kept going to the hotel outside of…what was Weiran supposed to call it? “Work hours”? He had the annoyed feeling that, if he asked Xiaokai what he called these things other than “appointments”—and used the words “work hours”—that Xiaokai would laugh and say something stupid like “Just call them what they are. Whore hours.”

It was that third point—that last bullet point—that oddly rubbed Weiran the wrong way. He didn’t really like Xiaokai in any manner of the word, and really if he thought about it he didn’t want to look at Xiaokai’s face for too long with the knowledge that it wasn’t—well, that it wasn’t Xingyu’s face.

But he was somehow irritated that Xiaokai acknowledged it just like that. After that first meeting, he thought their dynamic had been decided—Weiran was going to be the ornery one who was obvious about his dislikes, Xiaokai was going to be the one who pretended to be polite but still gave thinly-veiled insults, and Xingyu was going to be the one in the middle, desperately trying to make them get along. Weiran thought that’s what they decided. But here was Xiaokai, just coming right out the bat and telling Weiran directly to his face that he didn’t like Weiran at all.

Did Weiran want Xiaokai to like him?