Xiaokai was typing out a message now on his phone, and Weiran waited while he finished and sent it out. “Sorry, I was just telling my driver that I’d be a bit. Yes, seriously.”

“Are you…hiding something?”

“From you?” He tossed the phone onto the side table. “Yeah, a ton.”

“Then your clothes—”

“It’s bruises,” Xiaokai interrupted, and Weiran took a beat to let that in.

“You aren’t taking off your clothes…because of bruises.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve seen bruises before.”

“Yeah, but I know you’ll get annoying if you see these. Just drop it.” He gave Weiran an impish grin, the persona that so often ticked Weiran off immediately disappearing behind it. “Have you ever given someone a blow job?”

It felt like something came and punched Weiran in the gut, knocking all the wind out of him. He sputtered. “I—yes.”

“Really? Before or after meeting Xingyu?”

“Before! God.” He rubbed his face. “Why do you even ask?”

That grin got wider, crooked. Xiaokai rolled onto his back and spread his legs out. “I don’t have to take my clothes off for you to blow me, right?”

Weiran swore under his breath. He closed his eyes, inhaled—

And when he opened them, all he saw was Xingyu.

AT SOME POINT, he had taken off his clothes, which Weiran really only processed after he’d already come across the muscled expanse of his back. He could see why Xiaokai had initially wanted to keep them on.

The first time Weiran had seen Xiaokai’s body, it was the fact that he could see it at all that caught and held his attention—the fact that this was Xingyu’s brother, the fact that they looked almost the same, the fact that their bodies probably looked the same too—he hadn’t looked closer because he was quite incapable of it at the time. There was only the shock, the confusion, the disgust, the lustful curiosity—

And then they’d slept together, and Weiran had gotten it into his head that everything about Liu Xiaokai’s appearance was perfect: his soft hair, his sharp eyes, the color of his nipples, the way his cock fit into Weiran’s hand so perfectly, his long muscled legs, the slope of his neck—

But Xiaokai had taken off his clothes. And now that Weiran was looking at Xiaokai like this, when both of them had had sex several times already and that shocked fascination had worn off, he saw that Xiaokai did indeed have something about him that was imperfect.

He was covered in marks.

Some of them were more temporary—hickeys or bite marks or bruises in the shape of hands or long thin welts across his legs or the smattering of yellowed bruises everywhere Weiran looked. Some of them were more permanent: cigarette burns on his chest and inner thighs, long thin scars across the backs of his legs—