FicWad

Chapter Two/Thank the Stars


We headed out from the Cherry Moon and went straight to the little corner store near the inn. We got there just as it was about to close for the night, being as this was one of those small towns where they roll the sidewalks up pretty soon after the sun goes down. They had a special on a plum wine from a local winery that looked pretty interesting so I bought a bottle with my smokes. We left there, and since it was such a perfect early autumn night, we decided to ramble around for a while. For some reason neither of us seemed to be in a hurry to go back to the room just yet.

The town was laid out around either a large pond or a small lake, depending on how you looked at it, and it had been landscaped beautifully with willows and red maples, and an assortment of low flowering shrubs on the banks. Small gaslight lanterns lit the herringbone brickwork sidewalks leading up to the lake and the walkway that went around the circumference of it. At the narrower end of the lake a wide arched wooden walkway bridged over the water, and at its center was a circular gazebo lined with wooden benches. We ambled around the lake for a while, talking about this and that, and nothing in particular, which was unusual for Sanzo. He is not a man who is normally one for small talk. I took this as an encouraging sign that he was in a better-than-average mood. Eventually we decided to cross over to the gazebo and sit on the benches for a while.

“What a find, ne?” I said as I sat down on the bench, near him, but not so close that I was actually touching him - I knew better than to push my luck with that just yet. “Who’d have thought a little town that looks so drab from the outside would have this little gem inside?”

“Appearances can often be deceptive” Sanzo said cryptically, and looked at me with one eyebrow raised. He continued to look at me like that, which started to make me more uneasy than I already was.

I sat for a minute puzzling on his remark. “OK, Sanzo, I’m not the Buddhist monk here. What exactly is that supposed to mean? Help me out.”

“What do you think it means, erogappa?” he said, with just the faintest hint of a smile at one corner of his mouth.

Now I was starting to get pissed off. “SHIT! Sanzo, it means you’re not really a monk, you’re a fucking sadist! I don’t know!” To settle my jangled nerves I got the plum wine out of the bag and opened it and took a good long pull. Then another.

“Well,” Sanzo drawled slowly as he lit a cigarette “I suppose it could have something to do with why the great ladies’ man has been coming on to me for the past six months.”

I was in the middle of my fourth swig of plum wine and it took all the self-control I had for it not to get re-routed through my nostrils on that one. I swallowed, took a deep breath, offered Sanzo the bottle (which he took) and carefully considered my options. Between hearing in my head the echoes of the little conversation I had had with myself earlier (better to die trying, etc… remember?) and the extra bit of courage the plum wine was giving me, I decided to plunge in quickly before I could lose my nerve.

“Well, what if I have been, maybe it’s because I …” here I started to flounder. “Because I.. well,.. because I feel like it!! What do you think of that?” I realized immediately it was weak, but it had been the best I could come up with. My heart was in my throat as I awaited his response, which – of course – he made me wait forever for, the cool bastard that he is.

“Oh, DO you now?” he said after several excruciating seconds. He took a long slow pull on the plum wine himself. “Do you realize how complicated things could get if you and I got ‘involved’ on this little expedition we’re on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, kappa, I’m the one responsible for this ridiculous jaunt of ours… I’m the one the Sanbutsushin called in and gave this job to, not you, not Hakkai, and certainly not the goddamn monkey. I have to be in control all the damn time, and be able to make decisions, and I can’t do that if I’m playing hide-the-banana with one of the troops. It’s just not done. That’s what I mean.”

“Alexander the Great did it.”

“WHAT!” You know how in the old cartoons when someone flops at telling a joke and you just hear the crickets, nothing else? Man, I wish you could have seen the look on the monk’s face- it was the last thing in the world he would have ever expected to hear from me. “How in the the fucking blue hell do you even know who Alexander the Great is, much less know who he had hanky-panky with?” Sanzo was just flat-out staring at me by this point, and I had a distinct feeling I was starting to get the edge on him. At the very least, he was a little discombobulated for a change instead of me.

“Hey, man, I know a lot more than you think. Living with Hakkai all that time, some of those smarts started to rub off, you know? He always was bringing all these books and magazines home, and he helped me a lot with my reading, since I didn’t get all that much out of school when I was a kid. He had this one egghead magazine with an article about ‘homosexuality in history’, and it kinda sounded interesting, so I thought I’d take a little look-see. Well it kind of stuck with me, ‘coz it made it seem like it wasn’t always looked at like such a bad thing, y’know? You never hear about it, but for those ancient Greeks - and also for the Samurai, too – it was considered a good and honorable thing. The Samurai called it Bi-Do – ‘The Beautiful Way.’ And don’t you think Alexander the Great and the Samurai had to deal with ‘complications’, too? And look what they accomplished.” (1.)

Sanzo was still staring at me but now his mouth was hanging slightly open in shock. I couldn’t resist, I reached over and gently pushed on the tip of his chin to close his mouth.

“You’re gonna let the fireflies in if ya sit there like that too long, y’know,” I teased. He sort of shook himself as he was trying to bring himself back to reality from someplace faraway and strange. Jeez, you’d think I was a complete halfwit without an intelligent thought in my head, the way people act when I say something halfway intelligent!

“So what do you have to say to that, ‘General’?” I asked him. I’m sure the smirk that I was trying to hold back was showing on my face anyway. I could see from Sanzo’s face that he was struggling with something inside himself, and he started to speak a couple of times but then stopped for some reason each time, softly shaking his head and letting out a little sigh the last time. As the seconds ticked past his face his started to relax a bit, as if he was beginning to make some sort of peace with whatever the battle was that had been going on inside him.

He took another long pull on the wine and handed it back to me. He took a deep breath, slowly let it out, and leaned back as far as he could against the back of the gazebo bench. “Man, take a look at all those stars.. that’s pretty fucking amazing.”

I took a swig of the wine, which by now was about gone, and set the bottle down beside me and –discretely I hoped- scootched over closer to him on the bench and leaned back to have a look for myself. He was right about that – it was more stars than I has seen in a long time, which was even more surprising since we were in a village and that usually meant less than optimum stargazing. As we sat there together, surrounded by the cool clean Fall breezes and warmed from within by the sweet wine, it was like the Merciful Goddess herself was putting on a show up there just for us, blanketing the sky with an infinite number of her shimmering jewels.

We sat together like that for a long time, heads back, looking up at the heavens. It didn’t take a psychic to know what we were both thinking about as we sat there… about our little journey, about us, about what could be, about how it really could complicate things if we got involved and things went bad. Hell, it could even complicate things if it went right! Not to mention, how would we explain two men having sex to the Monkey? That alone was enough to scare anybody off from getting into a relationship. It wasn’t hard to see that both of our minds were going 900 miles a minute, in spite of the plum wine. But still we stayed silent and just looked at the extravaganza of stars.

“Goddammit!” It finally just burst out of me and I stood up suddenly. I just couldn’t stand to be that close to him and yet so distant a moment longer. I couldn’t tolerate another minute of breathing in his intoxicating scent, especially if nothing was ever going to happen between us, if he wasn’t willing to take that chance, if I was never going to be able to have him, to hold him close, to make him mine, to strip off his clothes along with all of his layers of defenses, and make love to him right down to his bones. I walked across the gazebo and stood with my hands white-knuckled on the rail. As I stood staring down into the dark water at the gold and white flashes of the koi they had stocked the lake with, I had absolutely no idea what to do next. I only knew that I was hurting like hell, and it was way too familiar a feeling.

After a minute Sanzo rose, quietly paced the few steps across the distance between us, and came up directly behind me. He stood stock still with his chest pressed to my back and leaned lightly against me, slipping his arms lightly around my waist and resting his head against my neck. He didn’t say a word the whole time, but I noticed he was trembling slightly, and for once in my damned cockroach life I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut and just be still. The one thing I did know for sure was that for anything to happen with Sanzo and me, he was going to have to feel like he was in control, and things would have to happen on his terms at his pace. And that was ok by me- for all of his faults, I had a feeling he would be worth the wait.


We stood like that for only a few seconds, but it seemed like much longer. I was frozen in time and space like a statue, and while my body didn’t move at all, my mind just flew. I wanted my brain to slow down and savor all the little sensory details I was getting flooded with all at once: the warm pressure of Sanzo’s body against my back, the concoction of wonderful smells that was only him mixed with the sweet scent of the wine and the faint smokey smell of campfires, the soft gold shine of his soft spiky blonde hair, the cool smoothness of his skin on his arms where they brushed against mine… I wanted to memorize every tiny detail so I could always remember them all. Deep down I knew, with Sanzo being who and what he was, that ‘this’ – this moment here and now –‘ might be all I would ever have, and it might never happen again.

After a few seconds like that Sanzo slowly turned me around and held my face firmly between his hands. He stared into my eyes for what seemed like an eternity, with those damn gorgeous purple eyes of his. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or throw him down right there in the gazebo and ravish him, but again my gut told me to leave it all to him, so I just looked back at him in silence. Sanzo’s eyes said more in that look than I ever could have imagined, more than I had ever known about any one person in my life…There was wonder, sadness, torment, need, anger, fear, loneliness, and pure unadulterated lust all mixed together in the depths of those violet eyes of his. It was almost like they were floodgates to all the emotions inside Sanzo, the only thin small barriers between the him and all those sfeelings that he kept bottled up so tightly all the time and hidden away from the world. It was all I could do not to turn away from the sheer intensity of it, but at the same time I was falling into those mysterious eyes like they were deep wells and I was a man lost in the desert and dying for a drink.

Suddenly -he nearly yelled it - “K’so!” and almost violently he twined his long slender fingers in my hair, and pulled my mouth down to his. I was lost in a kiss like none I had ever experienced. It’s not that I hadn’t been with women that knew how to kiss, but it’s just that there was this instant connection with Sanzo, like a powerful electric current had been turned on. Hell, it was like all the night lights in a whole freaking football stadium had been turned on at once! Our tongues sparred, our lips crushed together, and he just knew how to kiss me the way I wanted it, and vice versa. It was if the knowledge came from some deep animal part of our brains and the memory had been triggered by simply us finding each other, like it was pre-programmed into us since birth to be doing this, with each other right here, right now. (2.)

Suddenly it all made sense – finding ‘Kai on that rainy night, this wacky damn trip, the Talking Heads, the teasing, the whacks with the fan, all of it…. I was where I was where I was supposed to be doing what I was supposed to be doing, finally doing it with the right person. The last piece of the puzzle of Sha Gojyo had fallen into place.

I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him as closely to me as I could, as if I wanted to banish any remaining barriers between us with this embrace once and for all. His scent came flooding through my senses once again, but this time it wasn’t a frustration to me, it was “this is what love smells like. Now you know.”

I couldn’t resist taking one hand I had around his waist and holding his head gently so that I could finally find out how that beautiful silky spun gold hair of his felt. How many times riding in jippu had I wanted to reach out and run my fingers through it and caress it as I watched it capturing bits of sunlight and riffling in the wind as we rode… now it was mine…

“NO! “ just as suddenly as he had started it, Sanzo pulled away from me, ending the embrace and leaving me stunned and stuttering. Suddenly the night seemed completely empty and cold, and I shivered as I stood reeling there in the gazebo.

“I have to think about this,” he said. “This affects everything, not just us. I have responsibilities.”

“Sanzo, angel…”

“DON’T call me that!”

“But you know… the kiss…you… I … we ….we have to….”

“NO!” He snapped. “ Shit! This has to stop. Now. There is no ‘we.’

“BUT Sanzo!…”

“NO! Come on. Fuck it. I’m going back to the inn. Are you coming or not?”

“But….” At this point I had the beginnings of tears in my eyes, of hurt and frustration, and that old familiar pain of being rejected by the one I loved the most. I tried hard to throttle it all back, because I knew it would only push him in the opposite direction, ‘complications’ and all that.

“Look….” He paused for a moment and sighed. “All I can promise you is I will think about it. Now, let’s go back to the room. We need to get some sleep – tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

HA! Like I could possibly think about anything else?! Like I would be able to actually sleep?! Ever again?!? The man was inhuman!!

But he did say he would think about it… at least that was something… Gods, I was beginning to sound pathetic already!

He stalked off in the direction of the inn, and when I realized he truly meant business I had no choice but to follow him. I grabbed the wine bottle and ditched it in a trashcan – at this point it was just a reminder I wasn’t sure I even wanted to have around. I followed along behind him, but as I mulled over the events of the past hour or so in my head, trying to make sense of what had happened, and I guess I was walking slower than he wanted.

“Don’t sulk, Gojyo. It’s childish.” Now that pissed me off, so I caught up to him, and was about to give him a piece of my mind, when I realized he was probably just trying make things seem a little more “status quo” between us, to make us both a little less uncomfortable with the moment. We walked the rest of the way back to the Cherry Moon in silence, each lost in our own thoughts.

As we walked along and I thought about it all, one big thing started to become clear to me, and the clearer it got, the more it bugged me. I realized that nowhere in anything that had been said or done had I, being my usual inarticulate tongue-tied self, managed to communicate to Sanzo that I was interested in anything more than just a roll in the hay. But what that kiss (that one long amazing spectacular kiss!) had made painfully obvious to me was that while sex between Sanzo and me would no doubt be fan-fucking-tastic, it would only be the delicious icing on the very big, very beautiful cake of everything we could be to each other, if he would allow it. (Jeez, I sound like Goku with the food imagery, don’t I!?)

To put it bluntly, I was realizing very quickly that behind all the teasing and all the lusty thoughts, I was in love with the man. It was more than the blonde hair, more than how sexy he looked in his black getup, or how great he smelled. It was the whole assortment of things that made him the great Genjo Sanzo. It was the courage he showed in fighting the demons every day, and the leadership he showed us every day on this ridiculous journey of ours. It was the tenderness he showed Goku when he thought no one was looking. It was even his pain-in-the-ass stubbornness and that damn frosty smartass wit that I so often end up being the victim of. It was all the million and one things that go into making him Sanzo.

I realized that once I could I talk it all over honestly with myself, I could tell you the exact moment I fell in love with Genjo Sanzo. It was not all that long after I met him, when we all four went with Hakkai to the castle where Kanan’s body should have been, because he wanted to see her one more time to say goodbye. We found that the castle and everything in it had been burned and there was nothing but ashes. I asked Sanzo to chant the sutra for Kanan to help ‘Kai, and even as he was saying his usual “I don’t chant sutra’s for the dead” line, he was sitting down, preparing to chant the damn sutra. The minute I saw him start saying that sutra, sitting there like a beacon of hope for the three of us in the midst of all that death and destruction, chanting those beautiful words of comfort and rebirth, that was the moment I first fell in love with Genyo Sanzo. (3.)

And as we walked back to the inn after the kiss on the bridge I realized he needed to know at least some of this, to be aware that I didn’t just want to jump his bones, that there was so much more to it than that. I didn’t know how the hell I was going to find the words to tell him, big oaf that I am, but I was going to have to at least try. I felt like I owed that much to both of us before the whole thing got shoved under the rug, if that was what was going to have to happen. I didn’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t do at least that much.

As we walked into the room I shut the door behind me, took a deep breath, and said “Sanzo, I need to tell you something.” Well, that was straight to the point. So far, so good.

“Dammit, cockroach, I need to go to bed, I’m tired.” Shit!

“No, really. I need to talk to you now, it really can’t wait.” I was almost begging, but I was afraid if I didn’t get if off my chest now I never would, and then where would I be? Nowhere.

“Oh, all right!” He heaved a heavy sigh (jeez, you would have thought I’d asked the guy to open a vein!), lit a cigarette, took off his jacket and shoes, and flopped down on the big bed by the window. He let out another long exaggerated sigh. “What IS it?”

“Well, Sanzo, y’see, uhm…”

“GET ON WITH IT, WATERSPRITE”

“OKITHINKIMINLOVEWITHYOU!” Well, he asked for it.

“WHAT?”

“Hmm. Well, ah, that didn’t come out exactly like I planned it. But, hehheh, now that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak….” I was scared shitless, and expecting to find the Smith and Wesson in my face any minute, so I was trying to keep the mood from getting too heavy. “Well, it’s just that I wanted you to be aware of the fact that, well, I have…these.. ah…feelings…”

“Like I didn’t know that?” he snarled.

“Will you please let me finish!? As I was saying, I have these …feelings… for you besides just wanting to get into your pants, man. I wouldn’t want you to think that that was all there was to it, because, well, because it’s not. And I realized tonight that there’s been more to it than that for quite a while.”

Again he just sat and looked at me with the one eyebrow raised, letting me twist in the wind for a while as he contemplated this. He can really be a cruel bastard sometimes.

“Since when?” he lit a fresh cigarette from the one he was finishing. It occurred to me that I must be having some effect on him for him to be smoking so much more than usual.

“Well, if you want to know the truth….”

“That would be refreshing.”

“You’re not making this any easier!”

”Sorry.”

“No you’re not. Anyway, well, since back when we all went with Hakkai to try to find Kanan’s body and you chanted the sutra.”

“Since all the way back THEN? And you’re just NOW getting around to telling me?”

“Well you’re not exactly the easiest person to talk to in the world, you know! Shit, somebody looks at you sideways and you’ve got the Smith and Wesson shoved up their ass!”

“Is that a hint?”

“What?.. Shit…Man, you are just impossible. Here I am pouring my poor kappa heart out to you…”

“Alright alright .. don’t get your knickers all in a twist. Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“OK. Well, I was thinking on the walk back tonight, and I realized that I hadn’t said anything that let you know what I really think of you… I realized that, with the opinion you seem to have of me and all, you know, I’m just the “horny cockroach” and all that, you probably think all I want is to get you in the sack, just another notch on my belt, and all that.”

“And your point would be…?” Sanzo started rummaging around in his valise, and motioned to me that he was still listening. Curious as to what he was doing, I waited and watched while he came up with a bottle of sake, and he lifted it up towards me, questioning silently if I wanted to partake. I padded over to the sink and got two of the inn’s cheesy little wrapped paper cups and unwrapped them and handed them to him. He handed me my cup back filled with a hefty amount of sake. I raised it to him in a silent “Kampai” before I sat back down and launched back into my “true confessions.” (4.)

“Anyway…well, I just want you to know that it isn’t just all about wanting to bump uglies with you. I realized that, well, sure, we could no doubt have a mad-thundersex thing and just secretly bang each others’ brains out once in a while, and who’s to be the wiser.. no strings, no commitment, yadayadayada. As you know, that’s been Standard Operating Procedure with me for my whole life, with men and women.”

“You’ve had lots of men before?”

“I’ve had a few, yeah. You can’t end up on the streets as young as I did and not end up falling prey to some men that like young boys. There were times, especially before I got good at cards, that the money I could make that way made the difference between eating and starving. Then when I got older and I didn’t have to do it, I started to find out that I actually kind of liked it, you know, if the guy was a decent guy, and easy on the eyes … I just like sex, Sanzo, with men and women. It all feels good to me. An orgasm is an orgasm is an orgasm you know? One of my girlfriends caught a rumor about me and a guy one time, and she asked me, ‘so are you bisexual, or homosexual, or hetero, or what?’ And I told her ‘Honey, don’t you worry about it, old Gojyo’s just plain sexual.”

“R-i-i-i-ght,” he said drily. He took a big slug of sake on that one. I was beginning to wonder how much my Sanzo knew about sex, with men or women. But that was going to have to wait. I did notice that there was just a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth, though, and for the monk, that’s a big achievement.

At that point the sake combined with the plum wine was starting to make me feel a little loose so I started to speak a little more boldly. “And I don’t know about you, but there is no doubt in my mind, after that kiss back there, that the sex between us would be pretty fuckin’ hot--- I mean, we’re talking legendary here.”

“You think so, huh, “Old Gojyo”?”

“Yes, Sanzo-baby, I most certainly do.” He flinched a little at the “baby” thing, but he didn’t hit me with the fan, which was even more progress. “ However” I continued, “as much as I look forward to the prospect of getting you between the sheets – and believe me after thinking about it all this time I do look forward to it! - there is a lot more going on here than that, at least from my viewpoint.”

“Like what? Illuminate me.”

“Do what?”

“Explain.”

“Oh. Well, uhm.. for instance, I have a great deal of respect for you… Like, for one thing, the way you lead us on this little expedition of ours, even though I don’t always show it. And the way you take care of the monkey – you may grumble about him lot, but it’s obvious to all of us that you care a great deal for the bakasaru and want what’s best for him.”

“ch!”

“Don’t try to deny it,” I shook my sake cup at him, spilling a little on my jeans in the process. “I’ve seen how you look at him when he’s hurt or in danger. Hell, even tonight when he just had a damn bellyache, you were looking pretty fucking worried when you thought no one was looking.”

“Yeah, whatever.” He snorted. “What else?” At this point I almost began to suspect he was fishing for compliments, but this was important, hell, this was everything on the line here, so I kept plugging away, and didn’t hold anything back. The sake helped. “OK, the way you went to bat for Hakkai when he had to go before the Sanbutsushin: you didn’t have to do that, you had just met the man, but you literally saved his life and gave him a second chance that he would never have had otherwise… This little expedition couldn’t have happened if you hadn’t done that, and I wouldn’t still have my best friend. That means a helluva lot to me. Not everybody would have done that, especially for someone they just met!”

“Uh-huh. Yeah, I’m a regular fucking saint. What does this have to do with the price of tea in Chang’an?” He was waving his cup of sake around now.

“YAARRGGH!! Goddammit, will you just shut your motherfucking hole and listen to me? You love to tell the rest of us to do that — now YOU do it for once in your life!” I had stood up to emphasize my point and was pretty much yelling at him, and was thinking seriously about grabbing his harisen from where he had stashed it under the bed and giving him a good thwacking with it to really get his attention, when he suddenly stopped the sarcasm and looked straight at me. Guess the combination of the wine and the sake was mellowing him out a little.

“Ok, ok, I’m sorry… I’ll listen,” he said. “Come here and have some more sake and sit down. He motioned towards the end of the bed and held out the bottle. I hesitated for a split-second, wondering if he was tricking me or something, but he seemed to mean it. I figured I’d better seize on his apparent good mood before it vanished, and quickly did what he suggested. After I’d poured myself another sake I topped his off, and took a long sip of mine before I started talking again. Sanzo was stretched out on the bed, leaning back against the headboard on a pile of pillows. I perched on the edge of the bed at the end opposite his head. My gods, he looked so incredibly hot stretched out like that, like some feral jungle cat relaxing after a big meal from a fresh kill. I had to take a real deep breath and concentrate to get back on-task and start again with the business at hand.

“ I guess I started falling in love with you…“ he had been looking out the window for a moment when I started talking, and as soon as he realized what I said his head whipped around. Suddenly his eyes had lost that half-drunk and relaxed look they had had just moments ago. “YES, that’s what I said, ‘I started falling in love with you.’ Would you rather I said I just wanted to fuck you up the ass like a madman and could care less about fuck-all anything else?”

“Maybe.”

“Liar. You would not and you know it. You talk all that Buddhist shit about needing nothing and ‘if you meet your father kill your father’ and all that, but deep down you know you want more out of life than that. You know how much you loved your Master, and it almost killed you to lose him…“

He paused a minute. “And I should want to go through that again why…..” he said softly.

“Shit, Sanzo, because it’s what life is all about! Because ‘we’re only living so we can die laughing’, right? Because what we gain on this road, we only gain through risk – you’ve played enough cards to know that. You can’t spend your whole life shut down inside because you got hurt the first time you loved someone. Well, you could, but it would be a horrible waste… I mean I could want to do that because of what Mom did to me, but I won’t give her the satisfaction. If you give up on ever loving again because of what happened to your Master, then that only means the bastards that killed him have won! You deserve better than that, baby. Life is short. When the gods give us a chance at happiness we have to grab it with both hands.”

He thought about that for a minute. “You were saying when you started falling…”

“Oh, yeah, right.” I kept talking but as I did I noticed he had a strange expression on his face… at first I thought maybe it was just the sake, because he looked kind of warm, and sake will do that to you even when it hasn’t been warmed, but it was more than that, it was like all his hard edges and angles were starting to soften a little. “It was actually the first day I met you, believe it or not. You came banging on my door to collect ‘Kai to take him back to stand trial, and after I kicked your ass…” I couldn’t resist this little dig.

“I beg your pardon!”

“Just making sure you were still paying attention, baby” I patted him on the leg, smirked a little and went on. I did notice that he didn’t wince at all when I touched him or called him “baby” this time – I guessed that could be considered real progress. He did look more relaxed now, whether from the sake or whatever, and he didn’t have that ‘pissed at the world’ look that he usually had. He was studying me very intensely then as if every word I said was part of the last clue to solving the biggest mystery in the history of the world. It unnerved me but at the same time it gave me the courage to plow ahead. “ So after we all had our little scuffle and ‘Gonou’ turned himself in to you, you were gracious enough-“

“damn straight.”

“to let him go back to that godforsaken castle to say goodbye to Kanan for the last time. When we got there and it was all ashes, and you said that sutra for her, well, really for’Kai… well, it was something I will never forget as long as I live. Sanzo, Tenshi…,” I turned slightly on the bed so that I could look at Sanzo straight-on when I told him about this. I started to get tears at the corners of my eyes just remembering how much I had felt on that moment on that day. “I have this image etched in my mind of you sitting there, this beautiful serene young bodhisattva in the middle of all this death and destruction, chanting those words of rebirth and light. There was this unearthly glow about you… You had your eyes closed the whole time so you couldn’t see it, but I’m here to tell you, you didn’t just help Hakkai that day… That sutra was for all of us, and the deep wounds we all carry. Each of us on this little trip has our little tragedies of our own, our ‘baggage’, and what you did that day was an amazing healing thing that helped us all. That’s why I can tell you now, I realized tonight that was the moment when I started to fall in love with Genjo Sanzo, and I have been falling more and more in love with you ever since, but I just didn’t have the balls to admit it until now, and that’s what I needed to tell you So no matter what does or doesn’t happen between us, you know the truth now. You know it isn’t just that I want to fuck you, that there is a lot more to it than that, and has been for a long time. And you also might as well know I have never said anything like this to anyone in my life. Ever. That’s all I have to say.”

I stopped, and heaved a deep sigh and finished what was left of the sake in my cup and crumpled it and pitched it in the wastebasket. I was afraid to look at Sanzo after all this, and I turned back around and sat with my head down looking at my feet. Sanzo sat staring out of the big dark bay window over the bed, looking up into the night sky. There was a silence in the room you could have cut with a chainsaw. The only sound was the crickets outside and the faint sound of the monkey snoring from next door.

As the silence stretched on I began to figure that I had well and truly blown it, and started to improvise plans in my head to try to beat a hasty retreat and save what little I could of the tattered remains of my pride. Something like “Hey –had ya going that time, didn’t I?” no, that was weak… Or “ what, you mean it’s NOT April Fools?” no, that was pretty lame as well… Then there was “ I was trying out an idea for a story I’m thinking of writing…” Oh, yeah, like he would believe that from me!

I was about to give up on words completely and just bolt from the room when I realized Sanzo had sat up and – goddess help me!- was sliding over to sit right next to me. I turned and looked at him questioningly as he reached over with one hand and stubbed out the cig he had been smoking in the bedside ashtray. I opened my mouth to ask him what the hell was he doing but before I could get out a single sound he put a finger to my lips to silence me an shook his head in a silent “no.” He cupped my chin firmly in his hand, and pulled my face within about two inches of his. Our faces were so close, my eyes nearly crossed as I looked directly into his beautiful violet ones, and I’m sure the confusion in my crimson ones was quite clear.

He shook my chin firmly a couple of times, and in that low commanding voice of his, sort of a soft growwwwwwlllll, said “So what took you so fucking long?” At that the hand holding my chin snaked around behind my head and his fingers laced through my hair, and pulled my mouth to his, and his other arm slid around my waist and pulled me down on top of him onto the bed.


Author's notes:

(1) Football is the main team sport in China, which is where the boys actually are supposed to be traveling from. Football is their name for what is called Soccer in the USA. It was either that or Baseball Field in Japan!

(2.)Actually the Samurai and the Greek traditions were primarily of older men and younger boys, who the men were mentoring, but they were longstanding homosexual relationships, and very important and accepted part of both military cultures.

(3.) Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist Funeral practices both consist of traditionally essentially of the cremation of the body –hence Kanan’s death was almost appropriate – and the monks chanting of the bardos or sutras for the release and rebirth of the soul of the deceased.
(4) “Cheers” or general toast to your health