Chapter Twenty
Leander’s shouldersstung from the bird’s talons, but as he sat up in the shallows of the sluggish river, he realized he wasn’t hurt anywhere else.His next thought was of Xi.“Are you all right?”He struggled to free himself from the sucking mud that had trapped his legs.
Xi was lying face up on the bank, one arm half buried in the silt and mud, but he braced himself on a large rock that he’d barely missed.“What was that?”he asked.Mud dripped from his hair, and a clump of slimy grass cascaded over his shoulder like the edge of a cloak.The sight was enough to make Leander giggle.Or maybe it was the relief.That was possible.
“Are you laughing at me?”Xi sounded incredulous.
“No,” Leander said, but he didn’t disguise the fact that he was lying.
Xi ran his fingers through his hair, flinging off the mud that gathered on his hands.“Before you say anything, think about how you look.I think that’s a fish on your head.”
Leander reached for his hair, but all he found was more mud.He glared at Xi who was now scooping up handfuls of water and trying to clean himself.“Seriously, though, what was that?”
Leander studied his shoulder and the four talon marks neatly drawn across it.“I think we got too close to a bird’s nest.”
“What the hell kind of bird was that?”
“A very large one.”Only the baskets scattered by their fall remained, no hint of a giant bird.Leander would not abandon the baskets to any animal, no matter how sharp the talons.However, next time he tried climbing, he would have a sturdy branch in hand and a few dozen vines ready to trap the damned thing.
“I have mud in places mud should never go,” Xi said in a miserable voice.He reached under his robe, and Leander’s eyes grew wide as he remembered that no one had bought Xi pants.Xi waded into the deeper part of the river and started rinsing in the waist-deep water.Leander had been about to say something uncharitable and witty, but Creek stripped off his robe without warning.The words died in Leander’s throat.
Xi must have taken Leander’s silence as criticism because he said, “I am not going back to the Nie house covered in mud with sand jammed in places that are guaranteed to chafe.I might still be wet when we get back, but I will be semi-clean.”
Leander understood the impulse.The Chinese cared about propriety, and no matter how fine his baskets were, nobody would appreciate him looking like he had swum through mud.However, he didn’t want to strip here.“I’m going to wade upstream and find deeper water.”
“Give it a rest.We lived together for years, and I have seen everything you have multiple times.I’m pretty sure all of us have seen each other’s altogethers.Do you remember when Miss Tiffany walked in when Ireen had used our bathroom because Tecca was always taking up the girls’ bathroom?”
“I’d forgotten that.”Tiffany had been a high-school dropout hired as an glorified babysitter, and she’d justknownIreen would get pregnant from sitting on the toilet while Finn was in the shower.Instead, Leander had a few very sharp words about what he would do to Ireen’s hair, her clothes, her homework, and her reputation if she ever came near a naked Finn again.
And then Finn had had a long conversation with Leander about possessiveness and bisexuality and boundaries.
That would be why Leander tried to avoid thinking about the incident.
“We were different people back then.”Leander climbed to his feet, losing a shoe as he tried to free himself from the mud.Before he could retrieve it and stand, Xi was there in all his nearly naked glory.He was wearing weird loose underwear that wasn’t enough to hide the cut abs or the curves of his thigh muscles or the way water slid over his body.
Leander was a fucking monk these days, but he wasn’t dead.Hell, even if he was dead, he might react to a half-naked Xi with his sharp cheekbones and sharper lines on his abdomen.
“It’s safer if you stay here.I won’t jump your bones, and if I wanted to, we have a perfectly good bed at home.It’s weird, the bedroom itself is so tiny that I can cross it in three steps, but the bed is huge.”
Keeping his gaze on the far riverbank, Leander said, “I can’t figure out whether we’re being disrespected or whether the Chinese just have a different understanding of what a bedroom should look like.”
“I’m happy with anything private.Privacy was a luxury working for the government.”
Leander winced.He had been so busy feeling sorry for himself he hadn’t even asked how Xi felt.“I can ask them to open a new bedroom and move out,” he offered.
Xi rolled his eyes.“I didn’t mean you, idiot.When I first graduated,” and at that word, Xi made air quotes with his fingers, “they moved me from a student dormitory to an employee dormitory.Promotions came with a private room, but one with security cameras and shared common spaces, but I don’t mind sharing with you because I know you won’t report any treasonous thoughts to our handlers.”
“It would be hard when your handlers are on the other side of the planet,” Leander joked even though the truth horrified him.On some days when Druwolf had asked him to do something particularly heinous, Leander had envied Xi for getting out before his soul was irreparably corrupted.It sounded like there was little to envy.
“I take great comfort in that,” Xi said with a laugh before he waded back into the deeper part of the river to continue washing.“But seriously, strip down and rinse off because I don’t care if you were smart enough to put pants under your dress, you still have sand and mud in uncomfortable places.”
He wasn’t wrong.Leander pulled the robe over his head and then groaned at the mud that stained his cuffs so badly that he couldn’t see the embroidery.“Great,” he whispered.Leander scrubbed the cloth with his bare hands.Auntie Daiyu said that even simpletons with a touch of Chinese magic could perform cleaning spells, yet Leander was helpless in the face of dirt.He would have to ask Mother Huiling to get the robe properly cleaned, but Xi was right that he needed to at least get the worst off.Hopefully, his helplessness would amuse Mother Huiling and Father Xiaobo.
He looked up, and Xi appeared to have finished washing his robe, but he was standing in thigh-deep water with his back heaving as he took deep breaths.“Xi?”Leander called.He draped his robe over a nearby rock.
Xi didn’t turn, saying, “Yes?”from his spot.
Now Leander knew something was wrong.“Hey, what’s that?”he shouted.Xi whirled around, his hands already up as though to ward off an attacking bird.
