The Rule

Signal Number Eight went up at ten past five, and by six o’clock Stanley Fung had stopped pretending to read the freight report.

The office on the fourteenth floor of a Sheung Wan tower had emptied by half past five. The juniors had gone for the MTR with their jackets over their heads and a quick bow to the door. The receptionist had texted from Tai Po to say she was safe and that nobody should do anything stupid. Outside the window the harbour was a sheet of dirty grey, and the rain was coming sideways in great flat handfuls and hitting the glass with a noise like thrown sand. Down in Connaught Road the trams had stopped. In the whole of the tower Stanley could hear one other thing, which was Patrick Yip on the phone in the next room, speaking Cantonese in the flat patient voice he used for charterers who were lying.

They had started the firm in 2006 with two desks and a borrowed fax machine in a room above a noodle shop in Wing Lok Street. Stanley was the one who knew ships and owners, who could stand in a Greek’s office for three hours and come out with a fixture. Patrick was the one who read the contracts, every clause, every comma, and never lost an argument he could put in writing. Twenty years had made them rich enough to afford the fourteenth floor and not rich enough to stop sharing a kettle. They had been to each other’s mothers’ funerals and eaten Sunday lunch together more weeks than not, and nobody in the industry had ever asked whether it was more than that. Stanley had spent most of twenty years being grateful.

At six he came in with the phone still in his hand.

“Panamax is off Lamma,” he said. “Master says he is dragging anchor. Owners say it is not their problem till he is aground. I told them it is their problem now, and I told them we are not going home, so they can call us whenever they like.”

“We’re not going home?”

“Stanley.” Patrick took off his round glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It is Signal Eight. There are no taxis. I live in Quarry Bay, and you live in Kennedy Town, and there is a tree on the road. We stay. The duty room has a bed. I will take the floor.”

“You are fifty-two,” Stanley said. “You will not take the floor. I’ll take it.”

“You are fifty-three and you have a back.”

“Aiya.” He closed the report. “We’ll flip for it.”

For a second nobody said anything. They had stood in this room with the lights on a thousand nights, doing the same ordinary things, and tonight the wind was shaking the whole tower on its foundations and he could hear Patrick breathing.

---

The duty room was at the back, a narrow windowless cell with a steel locker and a kettle. Patrick had bought the bunk himself eleven years ago, for four thousand dollars from a man in Aberdeen who broke up old ferries, and it still had a brass plate on the frame that said CREW ONLY. It was three feet wide, with a thin mattress and a grey blanket, and on bad fixture nights the two of them had taken it in turns, an hour apiece.

He stood in the doorway and looked at it.

“One of us on the floor,” Stanley said, behind him.

“Yes.”

“Or neither of us on the floor.”

Patrick turned round. Stanley was standing in the corridor in his shirtsleeves, with his tie pulled loose and his big hands hanging, and his face was as plain as it had been for twenty years, a broad flat tired face with the grey stubble coming in and the heavy brows. He had been looking at Patrick like this for some time, Patrick thought. He had not noticed. Or he had noticed and filed it where he filed things.

“Say what you are saying,” Patrick said.

“I’m saying I want to.” Stanley’s voice was low and perfectly steady. “Tonight. With you. I want to take you on that bunk, and I’ve wanted to since the Star Ferry, and I have broken the rule in my head about three thousand times and I’d like to break it once in the room. If you say no, it’s no, and I’ll sleep in the corridor and we never mention it.”

The wind boomed against the building. A long way down, something metal fell over in the street.

Patrick opened the safe in the corner, because his hands wanted something to do. It had been the firm’s safe since 2006. Inside, under the charter-party originals and a bottle of Hennessy that nobody had ever opened, lay a paper napkin from the old pier café, folded in four. He unfolded it. His own handwriting, then Stanley’s underneath, both of them drunk on the last ferry in March 2007, after a night with a Greek owner and too much whisky and a kiss on the upper deck that had lasted until Tsim Sha Tsui.

Rule. No. Not ever. The firm first. Signed.

“We said not ever,” Patrick said.

“We did.”

“We did not write an exception clause.”

“Force majeure,” said Stanley.

Patrick looked up. He put the napkin on the desk and found, to his horror, that he was laughing. It was the laugh he laughed in negotiations, when a man on the other side had said exactly the right wrong thing.

“A typhoon is an act of God. Force majeure.” He wiped his eyes. “Is that your legal advice?”

“It’s my commercial one.”

“Then I say yes.” He said it plainly, in English, the way you say a thing that has to be on the record. “Yes, Stanley. I’ve wanted it for nineteen years, and you took your time.”

“Notice of readiness,” Stanley said hoarsely, “tendered.”

“Accepted.” Patrick crossed the floor. “Laytime’s running.”

---

The kiss was slower than the one on the ferry, which had been wet and clumsy and sudden. This time he took his time, with his hands on Patrick’s face, thumbs on the cheekbones, and Patrick shut his eyes and kissed him back with a low sound that went through them both. He tasted of tea and rain. When Stanley opened his mouth he felt the small blunt press of Patrick’s tongue, and an old hunger, so old he had stopped noticing it, woke up low in his back.

They undressed standing in the duty room under the single tube light, awkwardly, because the room was too small for two big men and there was a locker at Patrick’s back. Stanley had his shirt off first. Patrick put a palm flat on the heavy grey-furred chest and slid it down to the swell of his belly, and said, “Wah. I thought it would be like this,” in a voice that made Stanley’s cock jump.

“Like what?”

“Warm.” Patrick opened his belt. “You always look like you’d be warm.”

Naked, Patrick was compact and solid and brown all over, his round belly and strong thighs shifting as Stanley’s thumb found a nipple and it went hard under his thumb. His cock was already up and glistening at the tip. Stanley took it in his hand and watched Patrick’s mouth fall open.

“Stanley. Don’t stand there looking. Do something.”

“Bossy.”

“Twenty years of invoices.” He was breathing quickly. “I have been waiting to be bossy for twenty years.”

Stanley laughed, and then he stopped laughing, because Patrick had gone down on his knees on the floor and taken him in his mouth. It was clumsy. The bunk was too narrow and Patrick’s knee knocked the steel frame, and he swore in Cantonese around a mouthful of cock, and Stanley was gripping the locker door with one hand and saying, “Fuck. Fuck, Patrick, slowly, slowly, I’ll—”

Patrick took him deeper in answer. His mouth was hot and thorough. His tongue worked along the underside, long and slow, and one hand cupped Stanley’s balls and tugged, and in the tiny room the noises he made were filthy and loud. Stanley stood it for a minute and a half. Then he pulled him off by the shoulders, hard, and said, “Not like that. I want to finish in you.”

Patrick looked up. His mouth was swollen and shining.

“Then do it properly.”

“Tell me how.”

“From behind,” Patrick said. “Lying down. The bunk is too narrow for anything else, and I want to feel you the whole way along.”

“Not yet,” Stanley said. “First I want a taste.”

He hauled Patrick up off the floor and laid him on the bunk on his back, and took one dark nipple in his mouth and sucked it until Patrick swore. Then he worked down. He licked the soft round belly and the inside of each thigh with a slowness that made Patrick’s heels scrabble at the frame. When he finally took the cock in his mouth, Patrick said “Aiya, Stanley,” in a high, helpless voice and grabbed the thin pillow with both hands.

“Mm,” said Stanley, around him, and sucked in a long pull.

“Your mouth, Stanley,” Patrick gasped. “Your hot bloody mouth. All those years of fixtures, and it was this mouth all along.”

“Stop. Stop that, I’m going to come, and I’ve waited twenty years and I am not going to come in your mouth like a man with no self-control.”

Stanley let him go with a pop and sat back, grinning, his beard wet. “You taste like salt.”

“You taste like a man in the middle of a sentence. Turn me over.”

---

The tube of lubricant was in the left-hand drawer of Patrick’s desk. Stanley fetched it, and neither of them looked at the other while he did it. Patrick lay down on the bunk on his left side with his face to the bulkhead and his knees drawn up, the grey blanket kicked to the floor, and stared at the brass plate that said CREW ONLY. He had not been this nervous at his father’s funeral, or at his first charter dispute in the High Court. His own heartbeat was banging in his ears.

Then the bunk dipped and creaked, and a big warm body fitted itself along the length of his back, and the nervousness went somewhere else.

“Are you sure,” Stanley said, very close. “Say it again. Even now.”

“Yes.” His voice came out muffled. “Yes, I am sure. If I want to stop I will say stop, and you will stop, and you won’t sulk about it. Now come in here.”

Stanley’s arm went over his ribs. The chest behind him was a hot wall of fur and the belly pressed into his lower back, soft and heavy, and he could feel the thickness of Stanley’s cock lying hard along the cleft of his arse. He pushed back against it before he could stop himself. Stanley breathed out a laugh into his shoulder.

“Greedy.”

“Twenty years of watching you eat lunch. I’m hungry.”

A slick finger touched him and he flinched, and then he did not flinch, because it was Stanley’s, and it was careful. It went in slowly, and out, and in, a little further each time. Patrick made a low noise in his throat. The second finger stung, and Stanley stopped at once and said “Alright?” and he said “Alright, keep going,” and the stretch turned into a deep, heavy ache that spread through his hips and into his belly. When Stanley found the spot that lit him up from the inside, he grunted and rocked back onto the hand.

“There,” Stanley said. “That one?”

“That one, yes. Yes, fuck, Stanley, that one. Another. Put it all in.”

“You talk too much for a man with my fingers in him.”

“I always talk too much in a negotiation.”

Stanley put a condom on. Then the thick blunt head pressed against his hole, and pushed.

It was larger than he had imagined, and he had imagined it a great deal. Patrick opened his mouth against the pillow and breathed through the burn, with Stanley’s hand spread flat on his belly to hold him, slow, slow, until Stanley was fully inside him, hard against him.

“All in,” Stanley said hoarsely, into his hair.

“I know. I can feel you everywhere.” He laughed, shakily, and the laugh made him clench, and Stanley groaned. “Twenty years you kept that behind a desk. Move, you coward. Deeper. I want to feel it tomorrow every time I sit down in my chair.”

Stanley moved. At first the strokes were long and careful, and Patrick felt each one drag along him from his guts to his spine. The bunk groaned and banged on its bolts. Then his own voice said “faster,” and then “more,” and then, in a cracked voice he did not recognise, “yes, like that, like that, fuck me, Stanley, don’t be gentle.” So Stanley stopped being gentle. He hooked an arm across Patrick’s chest, hauled him back onto his cock and drove into him, and the steel frame slammed the bulkhead at every stroke. Rain lashed the tower. Somewhere far below a siren was going, and neither of them cared.

“You feel so good,” Stanley said, rough in his ear. “Fuck, Patrick. You feel so fucking good. All those years across the table, and you had this the whole time.”

“I wasn’t hiding it, you were not looking.” He had a hand between his own legs now, wrapped round his cock, and he was pumping himself in time with the thrusts. “More. I’m close. Don’t stop, don’t stop.”

“I won’t. I’ll fuck you till the signal comes down. I’ll fuck you through Signal Nine if I have to.” Stanley’s mouth was against his shoulder, hot and wet. “You want it like that? Open for me, give me the lot, that’s it, partner.”

“Tell me. Tell me you want me.”

“I’ve wanted you since the ferry, you stubborn bastard.” His mouth dragged across Patrick’s shoulder. “Every day. In that office, with my hands in my pockets, listening to you talk to Greeks. Come, Patrick. Let me feel it.”

Patrick came with a cry that broke halfway, spilling across the sheet and his own fist in long hot pulses, and his arse locked round Stanley’s cock so hard that it dragged the breath out of him. Stanley’s rhythm broke. He drove in once more, deep, with a groan that he smothered in Patrick’s shoulder, and shook all down his back, a great heavy man trembling like a boat in a swell.

For a time neither of them could speak. The bunk creaked. The wind was a long way off.

“Wah,” said Patrick at last, into the pillow. “That is the best fixture I ever concluded.”

“Don’t,” Stanley said, and started laughing so hard that he slid out of him, and Patrick turned over, and the narrow bed nearly dumped them both on the floor.

---

They did not sleep much. At two in the morning the owners rang, and Stanley took the call sitting naked on the edge of the bunk with Patrick’s palm lying on his thigh, saying “yes, yes, I understand your position” in such a calm voice that Patrick had to bury his face in the blanket. The panamax held. At four the rain began to ease. At five the wind dropped, and the tower stopped shaking, and a bar of grey light came in under the door from the corridor where the window was.

At ten past six, on the radio on the desk, the Observatory took the signal down.

They shared a toothbrush and a glass of the Hennessy, which Stanley opened with a bad conscience and a fifteen-dollar corkscrew, and then they dressed in yesterday’s shirts and rode down in a lift that smelled of wet carpet. Connaught Road was full of leaves and broken branches and one overturned bin. A man in a reflective vest was hosing the tram lines. The sky over the harbour had been washed white.

A cha chaan teng on Wing Lok Street had its shutter half up, and the owner, who had also been up all night, sold them two milk teas and two pineapple buns through the gap without a word. They drank standing in the street. Stanley’s back hurt, in three places. Patrick walked as if somebody had borrowed one of his legs. Nobody mentioned it, and neither of them stopped smiling, and when the owner glanced from one to the other he nodded once, slowly, the way you nod at a ship coming in safe.

The Star Ferry started again at eight, two hours after the signal came down. They took it for no reason, because neither of them had said anything about not taking it, and they stood at the rail on the upper deck among the early commuters, the cleaners and the clerks with their umbrellas furled. The water was still brown and heaving. Behind them Hong Kong shone wet and enormous in the morning.

Patrick put his hand into Stanley’s, in full view, between a woman in a hospital uniform and a schoolteacher with a bag of oranges.

“Aiya,” Stanley said. “People will see.”

“Let them see.” Patrick did not let go. “Laytime has not expired.”

An old auntie with a shopping trolley looked down at their joined hands, then up at their faces, and then out at the harbour, with an expression of deep and total indifference. The ferry swung round towards Tsim Sha Tsui. Stanley held on.