Kissing Spree
By Merilyn Chang
Joyce S. Chan, Wall5a (2019). Gift wrapping paper, contact paper, 19x15 inches.
Image description: Gold wrapping paper hanging from a white wall, its interior cut into leaf patterns.
Rozi knew she loved Lux when Lux was still a girl. She went by a different name back in the middle school they attended. It was a dead name now, so Rozi tried to forget it whenever she thought of Lux. But she sometimes smiled knowing that, now, she was the only one of Lux’s girls who knew her by her dead name.
Rozi also had another name before. She changed it to Rozi—not to put stake in a new identity, but rather so that her American peers would have an easier time remembering it. When she moved to the States, she met girls with names that sounded so uncannily American—Samantha, Ashley, Anna—they felt made up. But they were real people—and somehow it made Rozi feel less real when she introduced herself by her given name.
Today, Rozi was meeting Lux and his new girlfriend Bri for dinner at a New American restaurant in West Berlin. Both she and Lux had grown to be the types of people they wanted to become—the kinds with enviable Instagrams gridlocked with pink tequila drinks on exotic vacations, culinary dishes that looked almost too good to taste, parties that were filled with micro-influencers who had others questioning why they had more than 10K followers. The restaurant Lux chose tonight only served small plates—dishes with multiple hyphens in the name like New Orleans-styled baked-tonkatsu-oysters or browned duck-egg-custard French Toast. German was interchangeable with English in the city, and names were really nothing more than placeholders anyway.
Lux had already insisted that he pay for the meal, so Rozi knew they were all eating well tonight. Lux’s dad came from the casino business and had raised his family on the southern tip of the island right beside his most lucrative hotel-casino. Despite coming from far more humble roots in Malaysia, he was insistent that his only child will never experience a middle-class existence. This promise extended into adulthood. Lux was never fucked up from the wealth, like so many of his other peers who spent their money on Lamborghinis, Birkins, and bottle services at only 18 years old. He had other ideas for the money, including waterfront property in San Diego, a culinary dream in Oslo, and top surgery which brought a slew of passive-aggressive tension to his family on all of his subsequent return trips to Singapore.
The threesome ordered olives, bread, and a bottle of white wine to start. They sat outside to savor the warmth of a Northern European summer—the sun setting at 10:30 pm, the ambient chatter on streets brimming with people who made any excuse to stay outside for the only three months of nice weather.
Bri poured them water as Lux and Rozi exchanged an inside joke in Malay. Most of their conversations today took place in English, despite their shared roots. It was as if both had unanimously agreed to shed their old skin and embrace new lives in the West.
When they were in middle school, Rozi and Lux went to an all-girls boarding school. It was there that Rozi first felt the soft pangs in her chest of what she would later realize to be heartache for Lux. They were mostly in the same classes, but their friendship blossomed more in the hallways between classes. Lux liked to hold Rozi’s hand sometimes when they ran late, sprinting down the hallways before the final strike of the bell.
Rozi recognized, in retrospect, that she had always wanted to feel closer to Lux—that sharing a water bottle, or their chopsticks at lunch wasn’t enough. She didn’t only want to feel what Lux had touched on his lips. She wanted to crawl into Lux’s skin, nestle his neck from the inside, lick the upper palate of his mouth, running her tongue along the ridged creases of his fleshy gums. Sometimes, they would trade clothes on the weekends when they didn’t have to be in uniform and Rozi would relish in the baggy t-shirts and jeans that had just slipped off Lux’s body. She loved wearing his oversized clothing as if the space between her body and the fabric was a layer of protection between herself and Lux, against the rest of the world.
She also liked that she was the only girl Lux would trade clothes with.
“I think Bri’s going to come visit me in New York later this summer. We’re thinking of going to Marseille for a week maybe?” Lux reached for Bri’s palm under the table, resting their hands on Bri’s lap. Rozi was more aware of the empty seat beside her and draped her wrist around the ear of the chair.
“Oh, the fox! Did you guys see that?” Lux let go of Bri’s hand and craned his head, staring behind Rozi at the edge of the street that led into the park. He ran his hands through his hair, which was buzzed at the sides in the trendy Lower East Side art-kid manner. “I keep seeing them here…you know what that means?”
“Maybe that you’re seeing things, babe. There’s no foxes in the city.” Rozi put her glass down. “St. Barts sounds fun though!”
Lux loved splurging on the people he loved. It wasn’t that he was trying to buy affection. He just liked living a certain lifestyle, preferably with the ones he loved. Eleven years after they had graduated from middle school, they both separately found themselves living in San Diego. Rozi had bought a car then, and Lux was in the process of buying a house. It was their first time living in the same city again. Rozi had no other friends on the West Coast and felt herself drifting closer and closer to Lux’s orbit again. This time, a little more cautiously. She was a decade older now, and pining for someone as an adult was somehow less romantic than in adolescence.
Lux had few friends in the city, and he preferred to keep it that way. It wasn’t that he was a workaholic, or antisocial. He just preferred to run his own show. Except with Rozi. She was always a welcomed guest at his Del Mar waterfront house. Rozi worked remotely three days a week at an agency that boasted nearly 100K followers on Instagram despite having only six clients on their roster. But she loved the lore of calling herself a creative director—almost as much as she loved spending her remote days with Lux.
Lux liked to think they were cosplaying a real couple in their Del Mar days, but Rozi insisted that they were not the loves of each other’s lives. That they were simply friends who were romantic placeholders for each other till someone else came along—not friends with benefits, which implied something coldly transactional. No, they loved each other far too much for that. But friends who were not meant to stray beyond the limits of platonic love. Even though they did, again and again, just never when the other was ready.
“Yeah, I think either Marseille or maybe Portugal.” Lux had sat down again, forgetting the fox.
“You love beach vacations.” Rozi chided.
“Who doesn’t? I think you enjoyed that Costa Rican trip we had, didn’t you?”
“Hard not too when you’re the one paying for it babe.” Rozi glanced at Bri, unsure if she had disclosed sensitive information.
“Yeah, I was showing Bri pics from that trip the other day.” Lux returned his hand to Bri’s lap. “I think we should go too.”
Rozi relaxed seeing Bri nod in agreement.
“I think it’s really beautiful what you guys have by the way.” Bri smiled at Rozi, earnestly. “I loved hearing stories about you Rozi.”
“Ah, getting sappy now, huh.” Lux kissed Bri on the cheek.
Rozi ignored Lux. “It’s nice everything’s in the open.”
“Everyone knows about you, Rozi.” Lux said, stuffing bread into his mouth followed by an olive.
Lux always got all the girls in school. Even before the girls knew they liked girls—although by now, many of those girls were married, some with a kid. It was unpopular to be single past 26 in Asia. Lux just happened to be the first love of several girls before they coasted into a more domestic adulthood. He knew it would happen, too, which is why he stayed in the West after college. He had a real shot at love here—not just being the point of fleeting adoration from girls who ultimately wanted exactly what their parents told them to want.
On the weekends they were allowed to take the train from their boarding school into the city. Lux usually took one of his girls. Rozi always tagged along, invited by Lux, because it made her feel more involved—even though she cradled small pangs of jealousy in the creases of her body throughout the entire train ride. Sometimes she’d get on a different cart, or sit on the opposite side of the cart, pretending she was on her own journey when, really, she knew that she was always and would always be on Lux’s.
Joyce S. Chan, Wall5b (2019). Gift wrapping paper, contact paper, 19x15 inches.
Image description: Gold wrapping paper hanging from a white wall, its interior cut into leaf patterns.
She never knew Lux noticed, until the day her hand got smashed by the train cart window. That day she had, as usual, stuck her hand out the tiny crack at the upper part of the window. She liked feeling the breeze on her fingertips, and it was a distraction from watching Lux flirt. But someone else further down the train had decided they wanted to close the windows. Without noticing Rozi, they shut the window while her fingers were still hooked on the edges of the glass. The impact on her skin made her yelp as she tried to jump back, pulling her hands from the windows. Lux noticed and immediately jumped up, pulling Rozi into an embrace, holding her hands, which were bleeding slightly.
They decided to skip their city trip that day, and Lux, Rozi, and the other girl—whose name Rozi had forgotten as soon as they’d left middle school—headed home for the afternoon.
That night, Lux came into Rozi’s dorm room and stroked the bandages on her fingers. He asked her if she liked looking out the window so that she wouldn’t have to look at him. Rozi nodded. She told him then that she wanted to be his girl. He said, without taking his eyes off her bandages, that she was really the only girl that mattered. But it wasn’t the right time.
“Maybe when we are older and we can do it right,” Lux said. Had anyone else said those words to Rozi, she would have brushed them off as inconsequential promises from non-committal lovers. But from Lux, it felt more like a pact.
Lux slept in Rozi’s bed that night and held her hand till the morning. Girls shared beds quite often in the boarding school—usually when one friend was upset from family drama or had scored poor marks on an exam. No one thought much of it, except Rozi, who stayed awake for most of that night, trying to be as still as possible, etching into her memory what it felt like to sleep next to her best friend.
“So supposedly a fox sighting is some kind of warning.” Lux had pulled out his phone, scrolling through different Reddit threads on foxes in cities. He read directly from one thread. “To be cautious and trust your intuition.”
“I think you’re usually pretty good at that.” Bri reassured him.
“I think so too, but what do I need to be cautious about?”
“Maybe your Marseille trip.” Rozi chimed in. A moment of silence, almost indiscernible, followed. “Just kidding. You don’t have to be so superstitious, Lux. Not everything has a meaning.”
“No, but you can find meaning in everything if you’re looking.”
“Why are you looking so hard?”
“Why are you so opposed to me looking? Rozi, it’s just a fun little game to play. What is up with you?”
They were interrupted by the arrival of their main courses. A mix of seasonal vegetables, pita bread, and pinkish steak with chimichurri sauce drizzled beside it like a crayon scribble of forest green beside the meat.
“You’re right. It’s just a game. I just don’t like superstitious stuff. It makes me feel like nothing is in our control. You know.”
“Maybe it’s not. You just have to lean into it.”
The last time Lux told Rozi to lean into it, they were on vacation in Costa Rica. It was during the brief six months when they were actually together. They hadn’t defined the relationship, but they were seeing each other exclusively—even without having openly acknowledged it. Rozi still told her friends that they were keeping the door open in case they met others—she meant more fitting partners. But in reality, neither Rozi nor Lux were looking. They spent three or four nights a week at Lux’s place and went on vacations together. It felt, to Lux, like the relationship he had always craved.
On that trip, Lux had booked them an art-deco-inspired villa by the beach in Papagayo. The type that had an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, and the beach only a few meters outside the property. But Rozi, after eating street food on their first night, was in a constant state of fever for the rest of the trip, moving between their bed and one of the pools in the house. Even in her feeble state, she tried to reject Lux’s affections, as if giving into his embrace would somehow place her lower in their power dynamic. She liked where they stood now—that she was no longer a little girl pining for his love. But rather that she had made her own luck, and by a turn of fate had become the subject of adoration for the one she had always assumed she would never fully have.
Sometimes she wondered if it was cruel. If it was so obvious that she enjoyed having what she was denied of before. Maybe she was more in love with her new position in their relationship than she was with him.
Lux never challenged Rozi’s bouts of coldness. He understood when she told him she didn’t want to cuddle that night or brushed his hand away when he tried to hold hers.
It was only on their last night in Costa Rica that Rozi started to feel better. She opened the windows to their Airbnb, letting the smell of seawater in, along with a humid breeze. The saltiness of it, the thickness, how the air felt almost sticky to touch. Lux hugged her from behind. They were the same height, so he rested his head comfortably on her shoulder. To others, from outside the window, their silhouettes looked like any other couple’s, moonlight licking their shoulders. Rozi wiggled slightly after some time in Lux’s embrace. This was the part where her brain started to panic. He could tell. It was always after moments of closeness that she would grasp defiantly for a sense of independence.
But in that moment he felt, for the first and only time, inclined to ask her otherwise. “Lean into it.” Lux said quietly to Rozi, and she did.
In fact, she leaned into it all the way back to San Diego. Until she drove home from Lux’s waterfront house the weekend after. Even until the point when she kissed Lux goodbye, on the lips, telling him she’d see him next weekend. A long holiday weekend that they had planned to spend together drinking beers on the private beach. Her food poisoning had finally elapsed, and Lux looked forward to having a proper beach day with Rozi. She leaned into it all throughout the drive back to her apartment downtown, where she arrived in the late evening, collapsing on her mattress and pulling out her phone to write Lux that she had arrived safely. She wished, in retrospect, that she could have leaned into it more—that she could have put her phone away after the first message. But instead, she wrote to Lux that she wouldn’t be coming anymore the following weekend.
And that was that. It wasn’t fear that pushed Rozi away—that would be too simple an excuse. When she dug deep enough in her mind, she could grasp at the shadows lurking around their shared childhood. Figures and past iterations of herself that no longer existed—things she knew she had to leave behind. Lux never tried to convince Rozi otherwise because he didn’t believe her to be the persuadable type. He respected her too much to believe he could change her mind. And Rozi appreciated that about her best friend, in every situation except this one—where she wished, somewhere in the back of her mind, that he could have told her to just lean into it a little more. Their conversation, which turned from text to call, was cordial and even tender at moments—two people resigning to a stubborn fatality that all their privileges combined could not overcome.
By the time the trio had finished their main courses, the sun had gone over the hill. They were far north enough that the sun never fully set at this time of the year. The sky was always painted a deep blue, even at 11 pm.
Lux paid the bill, as always. He was as impartial with his love as he was his money. The three stepped out and Lux pulled a loose cigarette from his pocket. “One for the road?” He raised an eyebrow at Rozi as he flicked his lighter. They started sharing cigarettes as kids right before Lux transferred to a new high school. It was a habit both had quit by now, only bringing it to life when they were in each other’s company.
“No thanks, Lux. My asthma is pretty bad right now.” Rozi reached over to Bri, extending her arms for a hug. “I hope you guys have the most beautiful time in Marseille.”
Bri kissed Rozi on her cheeks and stepped aside, allowing Rozi to reach for Lux.
“I’ll see you in the winter? Let me know when you’re back in San Diego.” She said into Lux’s neck. He put the cigarette out on the street before wrapping his arms around her.
“I’ll see you soon, Rozi.”
Rozi watched Lux wrap his arm around Bri’s shoulders as they strolled away. She waited to see if he would turn back, but he didn’t. She flipped through the contents of her own purse, finding a cigarette and lighting it on the now emptying streets. The flame from her lighter flickered for a moment, revealing a blur of orange behind it. She lowered the lighter and saw a fox across the street. Perhaps the one Lux had seen earlier, she thought. The fox stared back, and Rozi found herself in a stare-off with the little animal. Three cars passed on the street before the fox began trotting into the shadowy park behind it. Rozi continued to watch the creature, mesmerized by its color despite the dark of evening. Slowing down slightly, the fox stopped before the edge of the park and turned around. To Rozi, he was looking directly at her.
Without looking both ways, she crossed the street, bridging the distance between herself and the fox till they were several feet apart. The fox then continued, following a footpath into the park. Rozi was hesitant to follow, but for the sake of Lux’s whims decided to lean into it.
It was darker in the park than it was on the street. If not for the fox’s bright orange coat, she would have lost it immediately. But the fox seemed to wait for Rozi as she stumbled over sticks and shrubs, now veering off the narrow footpath. He always stayed a few feet ahead of her but would occasionally dart behind a shrub and peek out as if checking to see that she had followed. She did, like one would follow their worship, till she looked behind and realized that she had lost her path entirely. She looked ahead again for the fox and realized that she had lost it too. The ambient hue of the park was now dark without the orange glow of the fox.
She wandered on, making tsk tsk tsk sounds with her mouth, hoping to summon the fox as one would a house cat. To no avail. Rozi walked to the edge of the wooded part, to where the bushes parted to a clearing. She sat down in the glade, realizing then that the place just beyond the edge of the grass was speckled with tiny lights. She crawled forward on all fours, till she came to the edge of the plateau—the tiny lights, she saw, came from disparate streetlamps that dotted the city and a haphazard array of apartment lights that were on, shining through the gaunt windows of apartments constructed to resemble their pre-war glory.
She looked at the city from the top of the hill. It could have been any city, really. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine any other place, until she was interrupted by the cracking of a twig to her left. She jerked her head and found the fox a mere two feet away from her. The little creature stalked beside her, sitting down, wrapping its tail around its body, as if to tell Rozi that it wasn’t scared.
Nice night huh? Rozi said to the fox. The orange animal stared. Kinda feels like an ending doesn’t it? She continued the conversation in her head. Like the part of the movie where the credits roll and the character finally finds resolution
Resolution is never real.
Rozi whipped her head around, as if expecting to see the fox talking to her. But the creature was still sitting silently beside her, eyes scanning the lights below.
You’re right. Rozi said. She watched the fox’s fur turn lighter in the company of a breeze that greeted them from below the hill.
Time to go. She pushed herself off the ground, watching the fox follow suit, lifting its body gracefully onto all fours. He jumped past the wispy leaves behind her and back into the wooded area. Rozi tried to follow again—yearning for whatever adventure the orange fur would lead her to. But after jumping into the shrubs herself, she realized that the fox was gone. She leafed around, peeking behind larger-trunked-trees and low-hanging vines, walking forward, blindly flailing her arms around to ward off stray leaves and spider webs. Till she arrived. A cobblestone path, illuminated just slightly, beyond the wooded area that she was stumbling out of. Looking behind, she tried to catch a glimpse of the fox again but it had disappeared entirely. She looked up. The platform above the cobblestoned street howled with the wind from an incoming train at the metro station.
Her train was on the above-ground platform—the ring that ran around the outskirts of the city, encircling Berlin in its center. She liked this train because she could see the entire city if she rode it all the way around. She could also see the outskirts, which were always darker, more distant.
Joyce S. Chan, Wall5c (2019). Gift wrapping paper, contact paper, 24x15 inches.
Image description: Gold wrapping paper hanging from a white wall, its interior cut into leaf patterns.
Across the platform, she noticed a boy with bleached hair holding hands with another girl, a natural blonde. She craned her neck. It couldn’t be them—so much time had passed since she went into the woods. But it was. Lux wrapped his arm around Bri’s waist, reaching for a kiss just before their train arrived. Rozi watched their movements, like a video in stop motion, sliced up in a jargon of yellow walls, blonde hair, glass windows.
She saw, through the layers of glass, that they had found a seat. That Lux was nuzzling Bri’s ear. That Bri was laughing a gummy smile—the kind of laugh that people hated in themselves but adored in the ones they loved. Lux watched her as she laughed.
Rozi’s favorite thing that Lux gave her was not his kindness or his friendship or any numerable gift. It was the feeling that she was his most important girl. The one that would outlast the others at the end of the day. She thought about the times he’d made her feel that way. How it seemed constant—the single point in the world which she could come back to again, and again, and again. She thought about this as she watched him kiss her. How, for the first time, the feeling was estranged.
Her train arrived then. Just as Lux’s departed the platform. Rozi watched the couple in the other train as they drifted away, the backs of their heads, Lux’s hand in Bri’s hair. For a moment, Rozi felt so close to him that she swore she could see the specks of dirt under his fingernails, the light traces of facial hair around his jaw. How she wanted to kiss every single part. But she would never tell this to him. Rozi sat down in her train—a window seat, looking at the empty tracks where Lux’s had just left. Her hands against the glass, she wondered what, if anything, the fox was trying to tell her. Maybe Lux was onto something.
Merilyn is a writer and journalist based between New York and Berlin. Her poetry and fiction have been featured in InkFish, Literary Shanghai, Eunoia Review, Harpur Palate, and more. In 2025, she was selected by Only Poems as their Poet of the Week, where a collection of her poems currently lives. She studied comparative literature and creative writing at NYU and has since been working on her first novel.
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Joyce S. Chan (BFA Manhattanville College; MFA Queens College CUNY) is a visual artist based in Astoria, Queens, NY. Her work with paper, drawing, and sculpture examines race and identity through the lens of a Chinese-American female. Notable exhibitions include The Drawing Center (NY), Flushing Town Hall, Collar Works, Local Project, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, academic gallery, PH GALLERY + STUDIO, Sculptors Guild at Governor’s Island, LaGuardia Community College, Manhattanville College, and Iona College. More info: https://www.chanjoyces.com
