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Nhai stares at the big pink spot. He can’t seem to stop looking at it, can barely tear his eyes away to look at Ai while he talks. He’s aware that he‘s maybe making it a bigger deal than it is, but his heart is still pounding in his chest and he can still feel Ai’s lips on his neck. Soft lips, gentle teeth, warm tongue, hot suction. He looks at the mark and he can feel it like a brand, like it’s Ai’s teeth that have settled deep into his skin instead of just the flush of an oncoming hickey.
A week ago Nhai thought he was straight. Sure he’d thought Ai was handsome when they first met and maybe he’d mentioned it more than a few times to his friends. He’s not the type of straight guy who confuses aesthetic attraction with sexual attraction. There was a boy in his class in high school that Nhai had thought was handsome. He can’t even remember the boy’s name now. He’d had a crush on the boy’s desk partner, a girl called May, and sometimes Nhai would catch himself staring at the boy the same way he’d stare at May. …Oh. Wait.
No. Nhai has always been straight. Right? All of his exes have been girls. He just had a crush on a girl. He’d definitely wanted to date her, hold her hand, kiss her. He thinks about the boy from high school. Would he have wanted to date him, hold his hand, kiss him? No. Maybe? I’d have worried too much about what everyone around us thought. He can’t imagine holding the boy’s hand without also imagining their classmates looking at them in disgust, laughing at them.
He looks up at Ai and finds that Ai is already looking at him. Their gazes lock in the mirror. He’s already done more than that with Ai. He looks back down at the red mark, feels the memory of teeth and tongue. He’d liked it. He’d been getting worked up. It scares him. They’d already had sex once and it had rocked Nhai’s whole world in more ways than just one, both good and bad. He feels like a new person, someone who’s gone through a realization about himself, but he also kind of wants to stuff himself back into the mold of who he used to be.
If he likes guys, if he’s liked guys this whole time but repressed it, what does that mean for him now? P’Singh had called Nigh bisexual but that feels almost as scary as being…. Nigh’s had sex with a guy but he can’t even say the word. It’s scary. He was just making out with a guy on his bed, a guy he’s had sex with before, a guy who left a hickey on his neck. Then he realized he was hard and so was Ai and he panicked.
He can’t stop staring at the hickey. He had been trying to find ways to hide it so P’Singh won’t see it and think they slept together again. He still feels squirmy when he thinks about it and he can’t decide if it’s a bad feeling or a good feeling. It felt good when it happened. He liked it. He feels ashamed for liking it. He feels ashamed for feeling ashamed. He knows it not shameful to be… to like other guys. He would never shame anyone else for it. He’s known about P’Singh for years.
But for some reason he’s having trouble shaking it off. He remembers pulling Ai down on top of him, letting Ai touch him in places he’s never been touched before, enjoying every minute of it. But then he came down from his high and then they were in the shower together and he couldn’t look at himself or at Ai and he’d felt like he’d done something horribly wrong. He couldn’t stop crying. Couldn’t stop the shame from welling up, pulsing through every part of him.
He remembers watching a movie when he was young. He doesn’t remember a lot of the plot or any of the characters names, but he remembers two scenes vividly. In the first scene, two boys are sitting outside in the front garden of one of their homes. They talk for a bit and then one leans in slowly and the other leans in too and then they’re kissing. Nigh hadn’t even known that boys could do that, hadn’t known that boys were allowed to kiss each other. He’d never seen it happen before. He’d watched on in wonder.
Then the second scene happened and he realized he’d been right all along. The mother of one of the boys was talking to the other one. He doesn’t remember the exact words but he remembers the feelings. Oh. It is wrong after all. The mom had been disgusted with the boy in front of her. She didn’t want them to be together. And Nigh learned why he had never seen two boys kissing on tv before. It was bad.
He grew up and the world started changing. It wasn’t strange to see boys kissing on tv anymore. There were gay boys in his high school who liked to experiment with makeup and use -ka instead of -khab. A boy on the basketball team was dating a boy on the swim team and they were treated mostly like a normal couple. But those things had all been far removed from what Nhai had seen himself to be. Nhai liked girls.
But he doesn’t want to lose Ai. He wants to be around him, wants Ai to see the kind of person that Nigh is, the parts of him he hides from other people. He does want to kiss Ai. His body obviously reacts to Ai. It feels right when they’re on the bed, lips and bodies pressed together, but then Nigh will see himself from an outside perspective and panic will flood his veins like ice. He’ll see himself letting another man touch him in ways that he’s supposed to touch girls. He’s not supposed to want this. He's not supposed to let someone else push him down into the bed, he’s supposed to be the one doing that.
Why though? Why is it so shameful for him to want it? If Ton or Nine or In confessed to feeling these feelings he wouldn’t shame them for it. He might rag on them a little since that’s how their friendship is, but he would never think lesser of them for it. So why is it so hard not to think lesser of himself? It hurts his head to think about. He hasn’t even told them what happened.
And he can’t stop looking at the hickey, craning his neck to get a better look at it. Yes he wants to hide it so that no one else can see it. But at the same time… He slides his eyes back up to Ai. He’s no longer looking at Nigh’s face, eyes trailing down, tracing Nigh’s naked chest hungrily. Warmth flushes through him. His eyes catch on Ai’s lips and then fall back down to the hickey. At the same time, something warm pools in his stomach at the physical reminder of Ai’s lips, tongue, teeth, on his skin.
He wants to hide it yes. Does he want it to go away? It’s a hard question to answer only because he knows the answer and has to battle with himself over it. No he doesn’t want it to go away. He can’t stop looking at it. Dark pink against pale skin. It’s mesmerizing and dizzying and Ai did that to him. Ai painted Nigh’s skin pink with his mouth and a detached little part of him wants Ai to do it again, to paint Nigh in hickeys all over so that Nigh can look at them and feel Ai all over his body.
But the shame tells him he can’t let Ai know that he likes it. He can’t let anyone know. He’s not strong enough yet to not listen to it. So he kicks up a fuss and he tries to figure out how to hide it and he hopes beyond hope that P’Singh won’t notice it when he goes to get his motorcycle from the bar. In a world with just the two of them where no one else would be able to see the marks on his skin, Nigh wouldn’t have to worry about what other people would think when they saw them. He could enjoy seeing them, enjoy Ai giving them to him, enjoy Ai pressed up against him without the weight of other people’s thoughts weighing him down with panic.
For now he keeps admiring the mark, alone in his bedroom with the guy who gave it to him. He can’t admit to anything out loud, but he also can’t tear his eyes away for more than a few seconds. He can feel the corners of his mouth pulling up, happiness simmering in his belly. Hopefully someday he’ll be able to beat the shame, but for today he’ll enjoy a smaller victory. For now, right in this moment, he’ll let himself have this, let himself enjoy Ai’s mark on his skin. He'll look at the hickey and he’ll smile.