The city outside Kai’s window was a relentless argument of light and noise, but in his small, rented room, the only sound was our breathing, slowing back to normal. The air was thick with the scent of us—sex, sweat, cheap laundry powder, and the faint, ever-present damp that haunted every Hong Kong apartment not hermetically sealed against the sea.
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Then came the ritual.
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He would disentangle himself, his movements always so careful, as if afraid to break the spell of the moment. He’d pad, naked, across the cool linoleum to the small, rickety desk shoved against the wall. On it sat a ceramic jar, glazed a milky blue, shaped like a fat, sleeping cat. He’d lift the lid, and his hand would vanish inside.
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He’d return to the rumpled sheets, his body warm against mine again, and press it into my palm: a sweet. Always a single one. Unwrapped.
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It was never anything grand. Not fancy imported chocolates or artisanal confections. It was the humble currency of childhood, of corner shops and grandmothers’ handbags. A White Rabbit milk candy, its edible rice paper melting on the tongue. A Haw Flake, tart and crimson, a shocking burst of flavour after the salt of skin. A piece of crunchy, maltose-rich Dragon’s Beard Candy, or sometimes just a simple, buttery fortune cookie from the takeaway downstairs.
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This was Butterfly Biscuit. And this small, silent offering after the intimacy of sex was the thing that unstitched me completely.
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His real name was Lok. I called him Butterfly Biscuit because of a packet of delicate, wing-shaped shortbread he’d once shared with me on the Star Ferry, our shoulders brushing as we watched the skyline slide past. The name stuck. It suited his lightness, his fleeting beauty. He was beautiful in a way that felt temporary, like something you could cup in your hands but never cage.
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The sex itself was good—a hungry, laughing, desperate release from the pressures that waited for us outside his door. But it was the sweetness after that truly undid me. It was a punctuation mark. Not a full stop, not a question mark, but a gentle ellipsis… It said: This was not just a physical transaction. This matters. You matter. I am here, with you, in this quiet aftermath.
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He was v sweet that way. The gesture was so tender, so considered. It was a reversal of the usual order. Men so often took something away; even a good lover could leave you feeling slightly hollowed out, a vessel they had used and set aside. Butterfly Biscuit gave. He replenished. He offered a little hit of sugar, a small kindness to carry you back out into the bitter world.
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It was that kindness that made me fall for him hard. The sex forged a physical bond, but the sweets forged an emotional one. They were a language without words, a promise of care that felt more substantial than any grand declaration. In a city that was all sharp edges and ruthless efficiency, his post-coital sweetness was a tiny act of rebellion. It was softness where there should have been none.
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We’d lie there, side by side, the taste of the candy blooming in our mouths. My head on his chest, listening to the steady thump of his heart under my ear. In those moments, the world contracted to the size of his single bed. The problems didn’t vanish, but they were held at bay, silenced by the simple, shared act of dissolving sugar on the tongue.
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“Haw Flake today,” I’d murmur, the tang making my lips pucker. “Good choice.”
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He’d squeeze me tighter, his laughter a soft rumble in his chest. “I know you like the red ones.”
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He noticed. He remembered. It felt like a superpower.
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But the candy always finished. The sweetness faded, leaving only a memory on the taste buds. And the real world, with its brutal, immutable mathematics, would come rushing back in.
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We could not afford housing to get married.
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The sentence hung over us, as solid and suffocating as the humidity. It was the title of our story, the chorus of our song. We were two people with decent, but mediocre jobs, staring up at a property market that was a form of elegant, socially acceptable violence. A flat, any flat, not even a nice one, cost a fortune that was an abstract concept to us, a number with so many zeros it felt mythological.
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Marriage wasn’t about love or commitment. In Hong Kong, marriage was a property merger. It was a financial structure. And we had no capital. Our love, however real it felt in that milky-blue twilight, had no liquidity. It couldn’t be used for a down payment.
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So our relationship was stuck. Beautifully, agonizingly stuck. We were a record skipping on the same perfect, heartbreaking chord. We had the intimacy, the inside jokes, the deep knowledge of each other’s bodies and moods. We had a future sketched out in daydreams: a cat, a balcony with plants, a kitchen big enough to cook in together without bumping elbows.
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But we had no pathway to get there. Our relationship was a bird that had learned to fly in a room that was too small. It could beat its wings against the walls, but it could never truly soar. We were trapped in the prolonged adolescence of rental living, of being someone’s tenant, never someone’s foundation.
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We talked about it, of course. At first, it was a joke. “Maybe we should just live in a tent on Lion Rock,” he’d say, feeding me a piece of mango gummy.
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“You’d hate it,” I’d reply. “No power for your PlayStation.”
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Later, the conversations grew darker, tinged with a helpless rage. We’d sit on the floor of his room, surrounded by property listings he’d printed out from the library computer. The prices were circled in angry red ink.
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“Look at this,” he’d say, his voice tight. “Two hundred square feet. A shoebox. A literal shoebox. And it costs more than we’ll earn in five years. It’s insane. It’s a sickness.”
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I’d take the paper from him, my heart sinking. The photos showed rooms that were cells, with windows looking into other, identical cells. This was the dream we were supposed to kill ourselves working for.
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“Maybe we could move to the New Territories,” I’d offer weakly, already knowing the answer. Even there, the prices were spiralling into the stratosphere. And our jobs were here, in the heart of the beast.
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“And commute three hours a day?” he’d sigh, the fight going out of him. He’d slump against the bed. “What kind of life is that?”
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It was no life. It was an existence. It was what we had.
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The sweetness after sex began to take on a new, painful dimension. It became a symbol of all we could give each other, and all we couldn’t. The candy was a tiny, affordable paradise. It was a moment of “happily ever after” that lasted exactly as long as it took to eat a White Rabbit. It was a beautiful, heartbreaking consolation prize.
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The ceramic cat on his desk started to feel like a reliquary, holding the sacred, insignificant artifacts of our impossible love. Every sweet was a prayer offered to a god that wasn’t listening.
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One evening, after a particularly tense day where the future felt heavier than ever, the ritual felt different. The sex had been frantic, almost angry, a way to scream without making a sound. Afterwards, he went to the cat jar, his shoulders stiffer than usual. He came back and placed a single, pale yellow candy in my hand. It was a lemon drop. Sharp, sour, ultimately sweet.
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I didn’t put it in my mouth immediately. I just held it, feeling its hard, cool surface in my warm palm.
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“This is it, isn’t it?” I said, my voice small in the dim room. “This is all we get. The sweets after. Not the home before.”
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He didn’t look at me. He stared at the ceiling, his profile a sharp, beautiful line against the peeling paint. “It’s something,” he said, but his voice was hollow. The usual warmth was gone. The magic of the ritual was crumbling under the weight of reality.
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“It’s not enough,” I whispered, the words a betrayal of the joy those sweets had once given me.
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He finally turned his head. There were tears in his eyes. I had never seen him cry. “I know,” he said, his voice cracking. “I know it’s not. But it’s all I have to give you.”
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I put the lemon drop in my mouth. The sourness made my eyes water, a sharp shock that made the sweetness that followed taste like loss.
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We broke up on a Tuesday. There was no big fight, no single moment of drama. It was a mutual, silent understanding that the pain of staying stuck was beginning to outweigh the joy of being together. We were killing each other softly with the impossibility of our situation. The love was still there, but it was being crushed, pressed into a diamond of pure grief.
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The last time I saw him, he walked me to the MTR station. We didn’t speak. At the turnstiles, he hesitated, then reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out not a single sweet, but the entire blue ceramic cat jar. He pressed it into my hands.
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“Here,” he said. “So you never run out.”
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Then he turned and walked away, disappearing into the crowd. I stood there, holding the jar, feeling the weight of all the sweets inside, a lifetime’s supply of tiny, unbearable kindnesses.
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I never saw him again. Sometimes, when the loneliness of my own small room feels absolute, I open the jar. The scent that wafts out is a ghost—a mixture of sugar and him and a future that never was. I take a single sweet, place it on my tongue, and let it dissolve. The taste is still sweet, but it’s the sweetness of a ghost limb, a feeling remembered but no longer felt. A beautiful, painful taste of what it was to be loved, perfectly and insufficiently, by Butterfly Biscuit.
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and then Add to home screen.