Page 63 of Love Limits

Zhong chuckled. He was starting to get a better idea of the Daddy/little/puppy stuff between a few small comments and his research.

Mostly he liked that Ash just asked for what they wanted, even if it was with ridiculous, adorable GIFs. It made it much easier for him to provide it.

Or at least to provide the components that he could.

Zhong: Come over and I’ll make you dinner.

Ash sent back a gigantic sundae with the word “Dinner?” typed above it.

Ash: look! it has peanuts and bananas!

Yeah, and about twenty scoops of ice cream dripping in sticky sauces. Just looking at it made Zhong shudder, even while he laughed. He had an instinctive aversion to dairy products and simple sugars that had been drilled into him as a child. At the time, he’d hated it when his mother sent him to school each day with embarrassing traditional Chinese meals designed to keep his energies in balance.

The other children, many of whom boarded at the school and ate three meals a day of hamburgers with fluffy buns and French fries dripping grease, hadn’t often laughed at him. But in his mind they were always judging.

Now it felt automatic to make sure that Ash wouldn’t have too much “damp energy” if they were going to eat dairy. He felt a little silly thinking it, because he wasn’t sure if he bought into traditional Chinese medicine, but it felt like what you were supposed to do to take care of someone the way that he knew best.

Zhong checked over his cart. He already had plenty of vegetables, some lean beef, and chicken. Now that the weather was getting warm, he’d switched over to the cooler foods like lettuce, mustard leaf, dates, and bamboo shoots. Maybe he could make something with coriander tonight. Or cold roasted chicken? Those would help keep Ash in balance.

Or maybe he was just being sentimental and weird.

He returned to his phone.

Zhong: Yuck. That’s still not food.

Ash: if u insist, i suppose i will suffer through a delicious, homemade meal

Ash: and then ice cream?

Zhong took a minute to find a gif of a teeny tiny scoop of ice cream in a giant bowl and sent it back.

He kept ice cream for Ash in his freezer now. It was just like the gross peanut butter that Dustin liked and his favorite energy bars. He even had both items on the permanent shopping list of staples at the back of his notebook.

It made him happy every time he could pull them out for either of his friends. He would have probably bought more stuff for Dustin, but since they usually just hung out at Dustin’s place it would have just gone bad.

With Ash it was all junk food, but he suspected that Ash mostly asked for it to tease. They polished off their vegetables at every meal and possibly enjoyed being told no about the dessert more than they actually liked eating it.

It was probably a Daddy thing. Pretty much everything they did to get him to take care of them was a Daddy thing. It had just taken him a while to figure it out.

Not that he was complaining. If he could meet a few of their Daddy needs for the time being, it worked out well for both of them. He liked cooking for them. In fact, he liked anything that made them happy.

And they were very good at letting him know what that was.

His phone buzzed with a picture of a dozen chocolate-covered ice cream bricks all stacked on top of each other, a small child peeking out from behind them.

The naughty expression on the child’s face was exactly what Zhong would imagine from Ash. Not that he was going to let them eat all that junk. But he could imagine their eyes widening at the sight.

If Ash wanted ice cream bricks, he could get it for them. He’d seen commercials for it before. Something with a polar bear logo, he thought. He’d have to look.

He texted Ash back to confirm a time. Then he found the last few things on his list, plus some extras now that Ash was coming over. Each time he added something Ash liked, he felt a little glow, thinking of their smile.

That led him back to his revelation from the night at Ash’s house. A crush. He had a crush on Ash. Now that he’d had some time to let it settle into his mind, it was starting to make sense. He just wasn’t sure what to do about it.

His notebook was already out and he untucked the pencil from the metal coil at the spine. He was standing in the cereal aisle, but no one else was there and writing things down always helped. He balanced the book on top of a bag of oranges and found a clean page to start wrangling his thoughts into order, making little tables and boxes to notate his thoughts. Questions appeared across. Conclusions went in bigger square letters at the bottom. Symbols helped to line things up and indicate his level of certainty or curiosity for each one.

Fact: Ash had previously had a crush on him and now he had a crush on Ash.

Question: Did Ash still have a crush on him?