Are You Even Straight?

Yu Chong stared at him, cold as frost. "Say that again."

Ding Peichen was already laughing too hard to breathe, though he fought to keep his volume down. "Godzilla! Or one of those three-headed, six-armed things with glowing green eyes at night! A fat pig, a hippo, a dinosaur—scare you to death—"

Yu Chong did not find it funny. He didn't move, just stared.

"Shut up! Hugging a doll is not normal!" His voice spiked.

The snoring on the sofa stopped.

Ding Peichen glared at him and clapped his palm over the life-sized doll's lips, roaring in a whisper, "Can you keep it DOWN?"

The room stayed quiet for a few seconds. Only when the snoring resumed did he breathe again.

Then he caught Yu Chong watching his mouth with a half-smile, and it made his blood boil.

Yu Chong yanked him back, man and doll both swallowed into the quilt. "That mouth of yours—sharp as a knife when you're insulting people."

Ding Peichen's eyes went round with disbelief.

A life-sized doll—where did it get that kind of strength?!

He tried to make Yu Chong let go, but the moment he opened his mouth, Yu Chong's fingers slid past his teeth, shamelessly scraping along his tongue.

It tickled.

An itch that shot from the root of his tongue straight to the top of his skull.

"Wha—what are you doing?!?" Ding Peichen slurred around the intrusion.

His knees went soft; his body curled toward Yu Chong of its own accord, pressing against the doll's cold, hard chest.

Only when he'd had his fill did Yu Chong withdraw his hand, silver threads glinting across his knuckles. "Weren't you the one saying hugging anyone is the same? Then what are you shaking for?"

Ding Peichen couldn't speak. Every inch of his skin was screaming for more.

What was left of his reason dragged him back from the whirlpool of hunger by the collar. Hoarse, thrashing fists and feet: "Get off."

Yu Chong wasn't finished. Cold lips brushed the shell of his ear. "Behave. Your cousin's right outside."

One quilt away.

Ding Peichen bit his teeth and made no sound—for one reason only: he could not let Ding Aonan think he was getting up to unspeakable antics in his bed at midnight.

Yu Chong's hands were hardly idle; he was already working at the buttons of Ding Peichen's pajama top.

Ding Peichen made to struggle—and the sofa springs creaked outside the quilt.

His heartbeat felt loud enough to crack his ribs.

The doll's touch branded itself across his skin, finding bare chest, slow and deliberate.

That single point of contact detonated into a thousandfold shiver.

The hunger couldn't be sated; Ding Peichen clung, nearly past controlling it.

He knew perfectly well this was wrong. His body leaned in anyway, honest, curling deeper into the doll's arms.

Yu Chong's hands kept drifting lower, his palm pressed flat over Ding Peichen's racing heart. "Something in your pants is awfully hard, Ding Peichen. Just how starved are you?"

Heat flooded Ding Peichen's face; a glance down confirmed the shape beneath his pajama pants had indeed changed.

He grabbed for Yu Chong's hand to stop him—and caught nothing.

Damn it all. He couldn't touch Yu Chong. Couldn't move him.

Only Yu Chong could touch him. Toy with him. Tease and torment him.

"Are you even straight? One touch and you're hard." Yu Chong didn't waver, his fingertip pressing the swollen outline through the fabric.

"You're insane—" Ding Peichen went weak all over under the touch.

Shame crashed over him. He was getting hard—for a man. For a vicious ghost dead in the water.

And a ghost he had killed with his own hands, at that.

Ding Peichen's breathing turned ragged; his mind went white.

He could not like men.

He had zero interest in men.

He was straight.

Completely, absolutely straight.

This reaction was just the touch-starvation. Just the illness.

Anyone's touch would do this to him. It wasn't about the person. It certainly wasn't about men.

He couldn't keep the thought going.

Seeing Ding Peichen nearly bite through his lower lip, the hatred in Yu Chong's eyes loosened for an instant—something murky and unreadable surfacing beneath it.

But he didn't stop the tormenting pinches and strokes right away. "What are you biting for?"

Ding Peichen released his lip. Blood, river water, cold—a strange tangle of tastes.

The life-sized doll behind him radiated damp chill. "Wouldn't all this be avoided if you just didn't send him away? And who's the one suffering now? Hmm?"

Ding Peichen kept his lip between his teeth and didn't answer, silently cursing Yu Chong's ancestors eighteen generations back and forth again, several hundred times over.

This vicious ghost was too cunning—always picking exactly the right moment to torment him.

He carved the debt deep into his heart.

"Yu Chong, you just you wait. You absolute piece of shit."

"I'm not letting this go…"

Yu Chong smirked. "Fine. I'll wait."

"Though—besides begging Half-Immortal Wang, what else can you actually do?"

Another sound came from outside the quilt; Ding Peichen went statue-still.

Shuffling footsteps dragged toward the bathroom.

Yu Chong finally let up, tossing the miniature in front of Ding Peichen.

Then he wrapped an arm firm around Ding Peichen's waist and said, dead serious, "All right. You hug your miniature, I'll hug mine."

"We each hug our own."

Spoken like an order, with zero room for negotiation.

Ding Peichen's whole body prickled—but at last he could breathe.

He didn't refuse. Or rather, he couldn't.

Otherwise he couldn't imagine what incomprehensible thing Yu Chong would do the next second.

Skin pressed against the doll's. At some point, the doll seemed to breathe like a living person.

Only when Ding Peichen's eyes finally drifted shut did Yu Chong dissolve into a wisp of cold night mist, scattering through the rental.

The miniature in Ding Peichen's arms rocked gently, still wearing its foolish grin.

Early next morning, Ding Aonan woke first on the sofa.

One glance at the bed: Ding Peichen and the life-sized doll, pressed tight together, clinging like glue.

His eyes went round. It wasn't his place to ask. He padded to the bathroom in his slippers—and slipped, for no reason at all, across the perfectly dry floor.

Ding Aonan crashed to the ground and howled.

The noise woke the bed's occupant completely. Propping himself up on his arms, shoving the doll aside, he roared, "Ding Aonan, are you sick?! What are you screaming about at dawn?"

Long silence from the bathroom. When Ding Peichen went in to look, the man on the floor was bleeding from the knee.

He must have cracked it against the corner of the sink on the way down.

But the floor was bone dry, no obstacle in sight—and Ding Peichen strongly suspected Yu Chong's handiwork.

A hulk over a meter eighty couldn't help whimpering. "Shit. It hurts, cuz—"

Ding Peichen rolled his eyes and walked straight out the door without another word.

Ding Aonan assumed he'd been heartlessly abandoned. He sat on the floor a good while, and once the burn in the wound dulled, tried to pull himself up along the wall.

A pool of blood had gathered on the floor.

Then—thwack—a white plastic bag landed beside the blood.

Inside was an assortment of medical supplies. Ding Aonan stared, dumbfounded.

He looked up. Ding Peichen stood in the bathroom doorway, face dark, tone foul. "Handle it yourself. I'm not a doctor; I can't work this stuff."

Then he went to the bed to tidy up. The miniature was buried in the quilt.

Quilt folded, miniature in hand, he looked over the life-sized doll and fell into thought.

His head was full of what Yu Chong had said and done last night.

When he'd ordered the doll, the stuffing was the same memory foam either way—what actual difference was there between a woman and a man?

None. The only difference between a female doll and a male doll was one face.

Cheng had asked if he wanted to look at female templates. He'd refused on the spot.

Why refuse? Were women's faces ugly? Did women make for worse cuddling?

Hug a woman and wouldn't it just be a blow-up doll?

He'd bought the doll to treat his condition—to have something pressing against his skin at night, something with weight on him, so that when the touch-starvation flared past midnight he wouldn't scratch himself bloody.

What he needed was contact. Not a woman.

And if he brought home a female doll and hugged it to sleep, and anyone glimpsed it, they'd exchange looks and whisper behind his hands—look at that kid, so young, but he sure knows how to play.

Just picturing it raised gooseflesh all over him.

But he'd never actually thought any of this through back then. Choosing a male doll had felt self-evident.

In everything he remembered, he was straight. Straight. Iron straight.

Not a single thought about men.

Looking at a man's body was like looking at his own: flat, dull, boring.

When he picked the male doll, Cheng had him sit at the computer and DIY the face model himself. He'd dragged a few sliders at random and closed the page.

Cheng thought it was too careless. "Want to keep tweaking? Pick a face shape that's nicer, smoother?"

What had he said back then? "Whatever. If it looks fine, it's fine."

Now he glanced at the life-sized doll on the bed. A few sliders dragged at random—and somehow they had landed on a face eerily close to Yu Chong's.

Some devil's mischief?

Ding Peichen's dreams held only blurred shadows and dead-silent river water.

He could barely remember what Yu Chong looked like anymore. So how had he sculpted a dead man's face so precisely?

He simply didn't dare think about it—didn't want to admit that a man four years dead had left such a deep print in his subconscious.

Even less did he want to admit that he, Ding Peichen, a man who believed he only liked women, had carved Yu Chong's face into his mind in some fleeting moment of his youth.

"Damn it." His fist slammed the desk.

By then, Ding Aonan had limped out of the bathroom, one hand on the wall, his knee freshly bandaged, streaks of half-cleaned blood still on his shin.

He hollered, "What's this rental floor made of?! Custom-built to kill me?!"

"That's your cue to leave. Stay any longer and some ghost really will strangle you in your sleep." Ding Peichen snickered.

Ding Aonan's face stiffened. "Get lost. Who are you scaring in broad daylight?!"

"I'm not paying rent, and I'm not leaving? Watch me."

Ding Peichen couldn't be bothered to argue. Staring at the blood on Ding Aonan's leg, he suddenly remembered the third method Half-Immortal Wang had mentioned.

Blood lures.

He'd never slept well to begin with, and Yu Chong's torment and humiliation had left him sleepless entirely.

The soul-suppressing talisman was useless—worse, Yu Chong could now puppet him through the miniature.

When would he ever escape this ghost's claws?

He turned it over and over, and decided: try the new method.

Whether it worked or not—he'd know once he tried.

The corner of his mouth curled despite himself.

Bag slung over his shoulder, Ding Peichen went to class. When the afternoon's lectures ended, he headed for the crossroads by the back street.

He entered a shop and came out with a few things, then pulled his cap low and walked into the dark.

At the narrow alley on the way back to the rental, a black shadow dropped down in front of him, its presence pressing down like a weight.

Ding Peichen stopped. His blue eye began to heat. He pressed the cap lower. "Playing stalker in the middle of the night?"

Yu Chong's voice drifted down, dark and vicious. "What's in your pocket."