He didn’t know yet how deep it went or what shape it was taking.

But the evidence of it had been accumulating for long enough that pretending otherwise felt like a waste of his own intelligence.

He wanted to be near him.

He wanted to touch him.

He wanted, with a constancy that had crept up on him without announcing itself, to take care of him not out of obligation, not out of the arrangement they’d walked into at a civil affairs bureau, but because something in him had simply decided that this was what it wanted to do.

And today, on that concourse, watching the red mark rise on Guiying’s cheek, it had felt like his own cheek. That was the clearest way he could put it. Like something had been done to him directly and not to someone nearby.

He hadn’t expected that.

He leaned further against the railing and looked at the lights below and considered the other thing quietly.

His preference had never run toward someone this young. He’d known what he liked, what worked for him, and Guiying hadn’t fit any of it on paper.

Too young, too unpredictable, arriving in his life through the most improbable circumstances imaginable.

And yet.

Here he was on a balcony at whatever hour this was, thinking about the way Guiying had tilted his face up and called him cute with absolute sincerity, and the smile that appeared when he’d decided something, and the way he’d dropped a bag in a bin and said ’I can’t give you something like that’ as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

He’d grown on him.

That was the honest version of it.

Quietly, consistently, without asking permission Xue Guiying had simply grown on him.

Liuxian picked up his phone and turned back toward the suite.

Through the glass he could see the shape of Guiying in the bed, still and unbothered, sleeping the way he always slept when he finally went down completely, like he’d simply switched off.

Liuxian slid the balcony door open quietly and went back inside.

He got back into bed carefully, settling without disturbing him, and lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling.

Vegas tomorrow.

He closed his eyes.

Vegas hit differently at night.

They’d taken a private flight in the late afternoon, short enough that Guiying had barely finished reading before they were descending, and by the time the car pulled onto the Strip the sky had gone fully dark and the city was doing what Las Vegas did best, lighting itself up like it had something to prove to the entire state of Nevada.

Guiying had his face turned toward the window.

He’d been to a lot of places.

Cities that announced themselves quietly, cities that didn’t announce themselves at all, that simply existed and let you find them at your own pace. Vegas was neither of those things. Vegas walked up to you and grabbed you by the collar and the sheer committed audacity of it was so complete, so without apology, that Guiying found himself charmed before he’d even gotten out of the car.

"It’s a lot," he said.

"It is," Liuxian agreed.

"I like it."

Liuxian glanced at him. The lights from the Strip were moving across Guiying’s face through the window, gold and white and red cycling through in turns, and Liuxian looked back at the road.

The hotel received them the way Vegas hotels received everyone, like you’d been expected and the party had already started without you. The lobby was vast and bright, the ceilings high, the sound of the casino floor already bleeding through the moment the doors opened, that low continuous hum of machines and voices and the particular energy of a room full of people who had collectively decided tonight was the night.

Guiying stood in the lobby and looked at all of it.

Then he looked at Liuxian.

"Check in first," Liuxian said.

"And then?"

"And then wherever you want."

They came back down an hour later, changed, and the casino floor received them with the same indifferent enthusiasm it extended to everyone.

Guiying had put on something fitted and dark, his hair pushed back, the gold ring on his right hand catching the light when he moved. He looked, objectively, like he belonged somewhere considerably more glamorous than a Wednesday night in Vegas. Liuxian noted this and said nothing about it.

They found a blackjack table with space and Guiying settled onto a stool and looked at the layout in front of him with the focused consideration of someone who intended to understand something before they committed to it.

The dealer a woman in her twenties with the patient, been-here-forever energy of someone who’d explained this a thousand times and didn’t mind making it a thousand and one caught his expression and smiled.

"First time?"

Guiying glanced at Liuxian.

"His first time," Liuxian said. "Mine too, at your table."

The dealer smiled at that. "Alright, let me walk you through it." She set her hands flat on the felt. "The goal is simple. You want to get closer to twenty-one than the dealer without going over. Going over is a bust you lose automatically, doesn’t matter what I have."

She tapped the layout. "Number cards are face value. Face cards..kings, queens, jacks are all ten. Aces are either one or eleven, whichever helps you more."

Guiying was watching her hands.

"You start with two cards," she continued. "I start with two cards, but one of mine is face down you can’t see it. Then you decide. You want another card, you say hit."

She mimed tapping the table.

"You’re happy with what you have, you say stand." She held her hand flat, fingers together. "That’s the core of it. There’s more splits, doubles but we’ll get there if we get there."

"What’s the dealer’s rule?" Guiying said.

She raised her eyebrows slightly, pleasantly. "I have to hit until I reach seventeen. At seventeen or above I have to stand. No choice in it for me...house rules."