He wanted to hate him. He wanted to hate him for how miserable Xingyu always looked because of him, wanted to hate him for how Xingyu tried so hard to have a good relationship with him to no avail. But it was harder, now that Xiaokai had told him all of that.

Weiran went to the bathroom and washed his face, and then he gargled mouthwash for a few minutes. Was Xiaokai in an appointment right now? No, if he had he would have stopped by to give up more information. Or—no, maybe Xiaokai just wasn’t stopping by because spending too many hours at the hotel, whether he had an appointment or not, was suspicious and would be hard to explain.

Weiran spat out the mouthwash in the sink. He stared at himself in the mirror.

“Shit,” he whispered. “Stop thinking about Xiaokai.”

Ironically, as Weiran was twisting all this around in his mind, Xiaokai was thinking about him too.

It wasn’t as complicated as what Weiran was simultaneously trying to figure out and ignore. Xiaokai didn’t have the time or the patience or perhaps even the capability to wrestle so many emotions in his mind—no, after a day at the office, and after he’d gotten ready for bed and dutifully dumped the proper amount of medication into the toilet and flushed it down, he was sitting in bed and thinking about Weiran because he didn’t have anyone else to get off to.

He didn’t have an undying libido. That wasn’t it. And it wasn’t that he found Zhang Weiran in any way irresistible—attractive, yes, he wasn’t too proud to admit that; his first impression of Weiran was that he was mildly attractive, that he was uncultured, that he seemed like just the sort of person that Xingyu would latch onto to seem normal to everyone else. But yes, attractive. Enough for Xiaokai to use him like this.

It wasn’t the libido, and it wasn’t any attraction to Zhang Weiran—rather, it was the lack of anything else that worked. Xiaokai wasn’t going to take the pills again. The worst of his symptoms had all but subsided after the few days he was feverish, and now he was just feeling general fatigue and nausea—both things that he could hide without an issue. He wasn’t about to take the medication again just to go through all of that again when he wanted to feel something other than numbness. He’d been considering it for a few days now, seducing Weiran. He wondered whether it would work. He wondered whether it would really, actually let him sleep.