notoquesnada:

Audrey tilted her head at him in confusion as he seemed to be babbling. She wondered what was going on in that head. She smirked slightly as he seemed to be fumbling, finding it kind of cute. “Don’t pull a muscle.” She teased as he insisted he was the boy she’d kissed. Yeah, she was there, she remembered.

She sighed, “Yeah I don’t know what the deal is. It’s been kind of embarrassing. I had never even met that woman before.” Audrey shook her head, but then realized that Ping was asking her something else entirely. She thought for a second and shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess? I mean, I’ve never met a girl that was attracted to me or that I was attracted to, but I guess if I did, I wouldn’t mind kissing them?” Audrey offered with another shrug. She’d never really thought about it. 

Audrey tilted her head towards him curiously, but smirked. “If it makes you feel better, the kiss with you was probably the best I’d had all day.” She offered. 

Slightly scandalized by how casually Audrey spoke of kissing women, Ping considered the situation.  Sometimes, men took male lovers - though they also married, to sire sons who would carry on the family name - everybody knew that.  Even he knew that, although to be fair, Ping hadn’t heard the jokes about tóngzhì until he’d arrived and, not for the last time, had been mildly shocked.  Never again would he hear one man call another “comrade” without understanding that a deeper meaning might exist.  The young would-be soldier might have grown up on a farm - he could not be ignorant about “clouds and rain,” though Hua Li had done her best to shield her child from such things - but Ping was still not comfortable with the occasional joke about how pretty he was, for a boy.  There were multiple reasons for this.

“Oh,” was all he could volunteer when Audrey told him it was a nice kiss: Because what else could Ping say?  "I - I was really surprised.“  Which was only a deft way of avoiding mentioning that Ping couldn’t understand what there had been to enjoy, or that he had also would have enjoyed the kiss if it had not been so strange, or that he was really a woman.