↳ in which chan is back after being away for months, and he doesn’t smell like home anymore
↳ little bit angsty, mostly fluffy
Chan is home, returning for the first time in months. He doesn’t smell like himself anymore. No longer do the scents of singed candle wicks like lavender and oak cling to his skin. Instead, the entire world fills my nostrils: spices I have never tasted and flowers I have never heard of. He smells like the rain in Thailand, and I have no idea what that even means. At the very least, he looks like himself—a few months older, maybe, and tired, but the latter has always been true.
The afternoon is warm, mid-seventies, and I’m shaking. Shaking because touching him sends jolts of electricity through my legs. Shaking because I smell the same and look the same and am for the most part well-rested. Shaking because I’m not the world.
But Chan doesn’t seem to realize.
“Hi,” he says, kissing my forehead and cheeks and every inch of my bare face until he settles on my lips. “I’m home.”
I hadn’t stopped fidgeting in days, but hearing him say home stills my nerves for a brief moment of peace. “You are,” I say, cupping his face in my hands to confirm. He’s not a compilation of pixels through a low-quality video chat or a high-quality fan photo. He’s warm and real and here.
“Are you cold?” he asks, leaning into my touch. I wonder if the electricity flows in him, too. It has to. “You’re shaking.”
I shake my head. No, I was afraid you’d come home from the world and realize I’m only a fraction of it— a fraction that starts with a decimal and is followed by a million zeros.
But he tells me, on a nightly basis, that he loves me, that he can’t wait to see me again. I grasp for him over video chat on the nights he has a spare moment to call, hoping my atoms will disperse and reform on the other side of the computer. My attempts have yet to meet success.
“Just excited,” I tell him instead. He lifts his hands to wrap his fingers around mine, squeezing gently to remind me not to venture too deep into my own thoughts.
“Want to tell me how your week has been?” he asks. Usually he takes a few minutes to ask what I’ve been up to, but wrapping up promotions has taken up so much time that he’s barely been able to message me other than to tell me goodnight.
To be honest, I don’t remember any of the past four days now that he’s here. I had lunch with a coworker. French food, I think, or maybe Greek. I got an email about an event downtown and wanted him to join me, but what or when the event was escapes me. “It was just another week. It became the best week a couple minutes ago.” I blush, and in a quieter voice I add. “I’d rather you tell me about the world.”
“Okay, then let’s sit. Mind taking this?” Chan hands the bag on his shoulder over to me and lifts the two suitcases behind him, carrying them into the living room. He told me a couple times that he’s been working out a lot, but I only notice the progress now in the way his muscles shift under the black tee he’s wearing.
Oh, I think, swallowing hard, but the thought that follows is one of thousands of screaming fans ogling over the same body that I do. I’m still getting used to sharing him.
“Come here, silly.” He brings me back by patting the space on the couch next to him, and I join. He takes back the bag that I carried and sets it in the unoccupied cushion, pulling back the zipper to reveal contents I don’t recognize.
“What’s all this?” I ask, craning my neck over him.
“I’m gonna show you! No peeking!” he fusses, and I smile a little at his childlike enthusiasm. He’s brought back pieces of the world, treasures to share with me.
One by one, he pulls materialized memories out of the bag, explaining each gift like they are stars he brought from the sky, and to me, they’re damn close. There’s a bracelet in my favorite color that he found at a bazaar in the Philippines, and a vial of sand from a beach in Thailand with a couple shells trapped inside. Candy from Japan he says I’ll love, a few books on foreign philosophies that he knows I’ll devour as soon as he leaves again. Even a tacky “I Heart New York” shirt thrown in the mix, because he thought it was funny, and I think it’s funny, too.
“Oh, one more thing,” he gushes, reaching into a side zipper as he tells me to close my eyes. I listen, squeezing them shut until cool metal hits my hand. “Okay, you can open them now.”
There’s a silver key resting in my palm, attached to a delicate chain. “Let me guess. Because I have the key to your heart?” I tease, expecting him to pull out another necklace with a locket.
“Not quite,” he says, showing me his hand, in which rests an identical key. He flips it over to show me the spot where my initials are engraved, and I turn over my own. Sure enough: CB. “Because together, we can unlock any door, or do anything, or be whoever we want.”
“That’s just as cheesy,” I say, deadpan.
“It’s romantic!” he pouts. “I had them custom-made in Paris. They didn’t appreciate that I only gave them two days, but it worked out.”
“Paris?” I echo, and I love the gift that much more. He had been to a couple countries in Europe, but not France. How would he ever have found the time?
“You’ve always wanted to go, and one day, we’ll go together, but for now I decided to bring a piece back to you,” he says. I think my heart falls out of my chest because it needs to find a place with more room to love him. “Do you mind if I—?” He takes the necklace, unclasps it, and hooks it around my neck. I return the favor, and for a moment we sit and stare at the other half. At our other half.
“Une clé,” I say. My years of French classes don’t fail me, and he smiles.
“That has a nice sound to it,” he muses, hooking his finger under my chain and gently pulling me forward until my lips brush his. “Une clé.” My accent is better, but his effort is admirable. I spend the afternoon teaching him French words.
Night is normal again, with Chan in his spot in bed next to mine. The way it should be. The way it rarely is. His long day of travel puts him to sleep first, but I remain, unable to help myself as I get a headstart on one of the books he brought home. I glance at him now and again, too, trying to get used to the changes. His presence. His physique. His key, still hanging around his neck. One of his arms is tucked under the pillow, and the other reaches for me, rested on my stomach so he knows I’m there. I’m not the only one who has to remind myself, apparently.
“Baby,” he murmurs long after I assumed him asleep, fingers twitching to life.
“Yes?” I answer, marking my page and closing the book. I set it on the nightstand, sliding down under the covers until my nose is only inches from his. He smells less worldly after a long shower, but still doesn’t smell like home.
“You were worried earlier,” he says. “The shaking. Your eyes. I could tell. What was wrong?”
I was afraid. I was afraid. I was afraid. I think of the world in him and the stagnancy in myself. “There’s the world, and there’s me. There are a thousand cities waiting for you and a million people, and there’s me. There are infinite things, and there’s me. Do you understand?”
His eyes flutter shut in a moment of tired processing, and then he shakes his head. “Not at all.”
I take a deep breath and sigh. “I’m afraid that while you’re out seeing the entire world, you’ll forget about me, because the world is so big and I’m so small and eventually the cities and the sights and the people will swallow me whole.”
He’s wide awake now, eyes darting to every curve and edge of my face. “You’re not the world,” he says. So he does realize. “But you are bigger—bigger than every city, or every sight, or every person put together. I’d sooner forget myself than you.”
“I get jealous. Sometimes,” I admit, quieter, because I hate to say it. “Because the world gets to see you so much, and I get to see you so little, and I have to share you with a million people who fawn over you and your talent and your body and…everything. Is that terrible? Am I terrible?”
“You’re jealous that other people want to sleep with me?” he smirks. I whack his arm and try to roll over, but he laughs and brings me right back. It’s not hard to do. “I appreciate you everyday for letting me live my dream. You know that, right?”
I nod. Because I do. And Chan would never look at another person with an ounce of the adoration he showed me, but every once in a while jealousy grinned my way. “I know, yes.”
“And maybe there are a million others you have to share me with, but none of them I’d share this with.” He touches the key hanging at my chest. “They’re custom, remember? No two others like them anywhere, and no one deserves to wear it except you.”
“Just me and you,” I say, and he nods. As much as the world around us has changed, Chan is the same boy I fell in love with. To most, time and distance are a ticking equation for ruin, but they’re nothing but words to him.
“And one day you’ll be able to see it all with me. I’ll bring you everywhere I’ll go, and we’ll never be apart longer than a week.”
The promise sounds so far away, especially considering he’ll leave again in a few weeks, but I believe him. “And until then I have the key. And everything else you brought.”
“Exactly. And my love, always,” he says, kissing my forehead. “What’s French for ‘you have the key to my heart’?”
“You said that’s not what they were for.”
“They can have a dual meaning, and I’m curious.” He shrugs, but I know he just wants to hear me say something else in French.
“Tu as la clé de ma cœur.”
He repeats after me, his pronunciation much less graceful, and he giggles at the sound of himself halfway through, but the sentiment is the same.
“Et tu as la mienne,” I answer. I don’t need to translate for him to know.
me?? actually writing something?? and posting it?? after three months?? i’m gonna try to be more active i promisE but college is R O U GH
jacobvanloon
prguitarman
gummygunk
areudirty
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
