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"You can stay as long as you like," Yuta said.
"Thanks." Taeyong shifted his duffel from one shoulder to another. The apartment wasn't big, but it seemed to have a spare room. The walls, decorated with some sort of abstract minimalist art, didn't seem to carry Yuta's touch, but maybe he had changed.
Yuta smiled at him. At least that was the same. He was as open as ever, it seemed, and Taeyong could feel the tightness between his shoulders ease a fraction at the thought.
The first night they sat around the low table in the living room together. Yuta only kept one light on, so they were shrouded partly in darkness. They had already eaten and Yuta had brought out some good sake--for the occasion, he claimed.
"It's not every day your old bandmate comes to visit."
"Has anyone else come so far?" Taeyong asked. It was the closest they'd gotten to discussing the issue.
"You are in fact the first," Yuta said. He poured with a grand flourish, one of those little gestures Taeyong had forgotten.
But he didn't seem lonely. There was something Taeyong wanted to ask, but he waited until they were a couple of cups in. "In the bathroom," he said.
Yuta quirked an eyebrow at him.
"There's more than one toothbrush."
"Ah." Yuta didn't say anything for a moment. His mouth quirked up in a private smile. "Yes."
"So... if you're with someone...."
"It's a private relationship," Yuta said. "You don't need to worry about it."
"I do, a bit," Taeyong said. He hesitated and then drained his cup. He turned his body to face Yuta. "I need to know--is it allowed for me to do this?"
When he leaned in, Yuta was already meeting him halfway. The question remained without an answer--or maybe, Taeyong thought, reflecting later in Yuta's bed, the answer was one he wouldn't want to know.
"I didn't realise you knew," Yuta said the next morning. Taeyong had feared awkwardness between them, but in the bright light of day, the sunlight reflecting off the sterile walls, it seemed like a foolish concern.
"About yourself or about me?"
"About..." Yuta laughed. "Well, about either. I always knew."
"About both of us?"
"Yeah, of course. It was hard not to realise. You're more obvious than you think. And so am I, by the way, which just goes to show how oblivious everyone else was."
"That's what I learned in the military." Taeyong hesitated. "It gave me time to reflect and to--rethink some of what happened back then."
He could see Yuta's eyebrows furrow. "You would have done this back then?" Before, he meant.
Taeyong shook his head. "I could never have." But the question brought up another question. "Wait--did you?"
Yuta winked at him. "Don't worry about it," he said with the same cheer he'd brought to the interviews, the concerts, the fanservice they'd all done without hardly knowing what they were doing.
Taeyong's mouth opened and closed. It didn't matter anyway, so he didn't push it.
Wearing a facemask, he accompanied Yuta out to the conbini. He was probably famous enough to get stopped here, but only with prior warning, and he was banking on no one knowing he was in Osaka. Yuta, it seemed, wasn't famous enough at all, and ran around all the time exactly how he wanted.
"We're just going to get more alcohol," Yuta said, smiling. "I have a lot of food at home already, but I didn't expect you to drink so much."
Taeyong didn't know if this was a comment on how much more he could hold now than before. It didn't matter. If Yuta wanted to say something, he would have said it; that was their relationship.
"You don't have work?"
"I can call out," Yuta said vaguely. "For an old friend's visit..." Taeyong knew he owned a dance studio, but he didn't know, and still wasn't sure, how serious his involvement was.
Back in the apartment Yuta splayed himself out on the couch. Taeyong looked away, face hot. Even though they had already slept together, it felt intrusive somehow to see Yuta's slim legs in his shorts, how tan he looked against the white. He blinked a couple of times and realised he missed something Yuta was saying.
"Earth to Taeyong-sama," Yuta said, grinning. "Should I plan anything? Tourist stuff? Or are we just going to sit in the apartment and drink?" Taeyong blinked at him for a moment, and the lines of his face changed, sobered. "It's fine if you want to stay inside, you know." He didn't say anything about the reason for Taeyong's visit, which Taeyong thought was good. He really had just shown up at Yuta's door for no reason. His phone was switched off too. Technically he was on vacation but even more technically there were things he had to be doing. He shouldn't have just run off. No doubt Yuta knew this and was giving him an out. If they were spotted together the questions would be difficult to handle.
"Maybe just stay inside," he said. "I won't impose on your hospitality for too long."
Yuta shrugged. The way he was seated, his tank top slipped off his shoulder, leaving it bare. Taeyong looked away, but the afterimage was imprinted on his eyes. "I told you, you can stay as long as you want," he said. "I mean, after a week I'll have to go back to work, but you can still stay here and we can hang out at night."
Taeyong didn't say anything. His mind was on the other toothbrush in the bathroom.
They drank again that night.
"What was service like?" Yuta said.
Taeyong shrugged. "I guess... what you would expect."
"I mean, if you got a sexual awakening from it...."
"Not like that," Taeyong said. He could feel himself flushing from the alcohol and from the insinuation. "Well, it was a bit like that. But it was mostly... monotonous. It passed quickly. I don't know what you're asking."
"Was it hard?" Yuta said. He was sitting cross legged. He drained his glass and poured more for himself and Taeyong.
"It was easy to follow orders. That's something we were always good at anyway."
Yuta raised and dropped a shoulder as if to say that's true.
"It was easy to follow orders," Taeyong repeated. "And it was ..." He couldn't think of the word for it. Comforting? "It wasn't hard."
"I always wondered what would have happened if I had had to do it," Yuta said. "Because by the time you and Taeil-hyung left I already knew."
"Knew what?"
Yuta gave him a flat look. "That I wasn't coming back," he said. "But if I had had that break, maybe I would have decided it was a better idea to stay on."
Taeyong didn't point out the obvious--that Johnny had stayed on. It didn't matter. Their staggered debut dates meant their contracts had been all over the place. "Do you still talk to Taeil-hyung?" he asked instead.
"Yes," Yuta said. "Just occasionally. Nothing serious. I like to send him videos of my kids." Taeyong tried not to feel hurt by this. Yuta noticed and made a face at him. "If we didn't talk it was your own fault, Lee Taeyong. Don't say I didn't try."
"I know," Taeyong said. His tongue was heavy. He wanted another drink and poured himself one. "It's not that. It's..." He trailed off. Yuta didn't complete his sentence the way he might have in an earlier life. He just watched Taeyong search for words. "It's not the same anymore," Taeyong finished. "The way it used to be."
"It can't ever be the way it used to be."
"Of course not." But that wasn't the answer Taeyong was looking for. "That isn't what I mean, though. Without you, it's not the same."
"I hardly did anything," Yuta said. It was meant to be dismissive, and indeed it came off that way, but a tinge of honesty bled its way through, the old hurt Taeyong used to see all the time.
"You held us together."
Yuta rolled his eyes. "That's something people say when they can't think of anything nicer to say. You know it is. For the company--" He raised his hand and gestured with no purpose. His hand made a huge shadow in the light coming from the kitchen. "I was just filler. Which was fine when I was twenty-five, but then..."
Taeyong didn't say anything.
Yuta took a deep breath. "Why did you come here?" he asked, almost rhetorically. The question was hardly aimed at Taeyong; rather, it hung in the air between them.
Taeyong chose to answer it anyway. "I needed to leave."
"You're going to have to leave something, if you stay here any longer without answering your calls. They'll make you leave the company."
"No," Taeyong said, but it was uncertain. "They knew I would be--"
"Unavailable? Like this? Not even in Korea? Have you even talked to your manager?"
"He knows where I am."
"Well." Yuta let his arm loll out in front of him before dropping it to his side. "That's good, at least."
"You were the first person I thought of," Taeyong admitted, his voice small. Saying it out loud felt very vulnerable.
"So you just decided to up and buy a ticket to Osaka?"
"I couldn't be there anymore."
To that, Yuta had no reply, at least not for a moment. Then he said, "I know what you mean." Another pause. "When I felt like that, that was when I decided not to renew my contract."
Taeyong didn't say anything. He had years more left on his. Yuta didn't seem to expect a reply anyway.
The silence was only broken by the glug of the sake bottle as Yuta poured more into their cups. He drained his own glass and said, as if deciding something with himself, "Oh, fuck it." Then he kissed Taeyong full on the mouth again.
This time, instead of moving it to the bedroom, Taeyong came, gasping, into Yuta's mouth right there on the living room floor, his hand in Yuta's hair, Yuta's head between his legs.
"You're pretty good at that," Yuta said when he returned the favour. Taeyong wiped his hand on the back of his mouth and Yuta looked like he wanted to laugh at the crudeness of the gesture.
"The military," Taeyong said. He pushed his hair back out of his face.
"Did you really learn that you liked sucking dick in the military?" Yuta said. "I feel like we all had a lot of opportunities to learn that before then. Like trainee dorms."
"I wouldn't have done that in the dorms..."
"Why not?" Yuta's dick was basically hanging out of his shorts, but he looked unselfconscious about it in a way Taeyong still hadn't achieved at thirty. "You're telling me you wouldn't have done it in the dorms but you did it in the military?"
"People are more discreet," Taeyong said, but that wasn't actually true. "Or they're--they have different priorities. Things happen between men."
"And you believe that?" Yuta said. "'Things happen between men'?"
Taeyong shook his head. "When it happened, I knew it was different for me. But I let it be something that happened between men."
"I see," Yuta said. "And then afterwards you came to me to confirm it."
Taeyong felt his face grow hot. "It isn't like that."
Yuta cast a curious glance at him. "Isn't it?"
Taeyong didn't have anything to say in return. Maybe it was like that. "I just missed seeing you," he said at last. He'd always felt that Yuta provided him with moral clarity.
"I miss Johnny, but I don't go to Seoul to suck his dick," Yuta returned cheerfully. "It's fine if it's like that. I told you, I don't mind. It's just funny. I thought about this tons of times when we were in the group."
Taeyong didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't say anything. He let Yuta top his glass up instead.
The next morning he woke up with a hangover and the strong sense that it was time to check his phone. At the kitchen table, Yuta saw him flipping through it and said, "Decided to go back to your responsibilities?"
Taeyong shook his head. "Just... seeing what's going on."
As expected there were a number of confused calls and messages. He'd forgotten that he was meant to go meet Johnny for dinner, but Johnny seemed to realise he'd been stood up and kept the calls to a minimum. He'd been meant to go consult on a new subunit involving Jisung, Jaemin and Jeno, but he'd missed that meeting too.
He winced and put the phone back in his pocket. Yuta watched him curiously. "Do you want to go outside today?" he said. Taeyong shook his head. Then he reconsidered.
"Does your studio have observer sessions?"
There was something bittersweet about watching Yuta direct other people. He was clearly well-known and in his element, especially in the kids' sessions, where they all clamoured for his attention. Everyone left Taeyong alone for the most part, which was how he wanted it. He was banking on an element of anonymity he knew he was treading a fine line by claiming. Whether or not he wanted it, he was still famous, and so was Yuta, to a certain extent. He told himself firmly there was nothing wrong with fantasy, whatever that fantasy might have been, and let himself sit in the back, watching Yuta's shiny hair flop as he corrected someone's posture.
They picked up takeout for dinner. Taeyong sat at the low table in the living room, arranging the food. He looked at Yuta and thought about the studio, about the apartment with someone else's art, about the other toothbrush in the bathroom. The apartment with two rooms. The way Yuta could walk anonymously down the street. He averted his gaze for a moment and then looked back.
"Yuta," he said, which caught Yuta's attention. He held Yuta's gaze for a moment. "I wish you had stayed."
At the window, Yuta, who was looking through his phone, smiled. It wasn't in reaction to Taeyong's statement, more an absent-minded afterthought of an action. Taeyong wondered if he were looking at texts from whoever shared the apartment with him.
"I know," Yuta said. He flicked through something again. Standing at the window how he was, the smile on his face was illuminated by the setting sun.