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In hindsight, Shohei doesn’t know why it took him so long to figure out the truth.
Looking back, the signs have all been there — in every shared glance, in every exchanged word. Honestly, the most embarrassing part of all this is not even taking a whole three months to put two and two together, but realizing that they were not at all trying to hide it — it was just him who’s been too daft to notice what’s been going on right in front of his eyes.
But— ah, well. Can anyone blame him, really? It’s Kim Doyoung.
It’s like asking someone to look at a vaguely object-shaped cloud when there’s a wholeass rainbow shining in the sky. How can anyone be expected to pay attention to anything else when Kim Doyoung’s around?
Shohei met Doyoung three weeks before the rest of the faculty. It hadn’t even been two seconds (literally, he hadn’t even finished exhaling) since he unpacked the last of his boxes in his new apartment when he got an email from him — a simple Hello! in the subject line, and a single straightforward but friendly paragraph in the body:
I’m Kim Doyoung, I teach Music at Hanyang Academy. I heard you’re new to the town in general, so if you like, we can meet for a friendly cup of coffee anytime before the school year starts. I’ve been the “new kid” myself here six years ago, so I know it won’t hurt to have a friendly face come March. No pressure if you don’t want to. Just let me know if you’re down.
Shohei was no stranger to the “new kid” feeling. In fact, it had been his sixth school and fourth city at the time, but this was his first in South Korea, so the email did come as an unexpected but very much welcome invitation. No one had ever extended an offer like that to him before in all the other schools he’d taught at, and it eased the anxiety that had been building up in him since deciding on a whim one summer ago to move to the country.
He typed out a quick, “Thank you very much, this is really kind of you. Yes, I’ll take you up on that! Does Friday afternoon sound good?” before he could overthink the social interaction.
It took him until that Friday afternoon — walking out of his apartment building and checking Doyoung’s message again for the directions to the cafe — that he realized they had been conversing in Japanese right from the very first email.
It was a silly thing to realize so late (and god, he really could be so slow on the uptake, huh?), but to his credit, Shohei wasn’t used to seeing emails in Korean in his inbox just yet, save for the few correspondences he had with the school when they were finalizing his contract. He’s fluent, having taken several language courses back in college, so it wasn’t really an issue either way. But when he first got Doyoung’s email, it didn’t really occur to him to wonder at how his new Korean colleague (soon-to-be, technically) was talking to him in his native tongue. It was just another Japanese conversation among the hundred other Japanese conversations in his inbox.
It gave him some comfort, though, realizing it on the walk to the cafe — the fact that he already had a new friend to speak Japanese with at work. It made the upcoming school year less daunting, somehow.
Shohei doesn’t know why, but it never occurred to him to ask Doyoung how he got fluent at Japanese. Not on that first meeting, and not in the next months that followed with them working together and Doyoung casually speaking to him in Japanese sometimes.
If he had asked, then right from the very first day of school, he probably would have been able to connect the dots.
It’s Doyoung’s smile that would stick to him from that first meet-up at the coffee shop.
There is the kind of bright smile that intimidates you, much like looking up at a star-filled sky and realizing your cosmic insignificance. And then there is the kind that makes you feel welcomed, like stepping into a place for the first time and already knowing you could make a home out of it, given time. Doyoung’s smile, that first day, somehow managed to be both.
He was already seated at a corner table when Shohei got to the cafe. Doyoung stood up when he saw him and gave him a slight bow — the sudden formality of it catching Shohei a little off-guard after all the friendly emails they’ve exchanged so far. Doyoung introduced himself as kind of the unofficial single-membership welcome committee of the Hanyang Academy faculty (because of course he is) and carried the conversation so well that there was no room for Shohei to feel any awkwardness or doubt.
Doyoung told him about the workplace and the student culture, about the unique traditions (Korean and Hanyang-specific alike) throughout the school year that he should look forward to, and answered the few questions he had. It had been a pleasant time, and Doyoung had been nothing but friendly (and honestly nothing more than that), but it was a surprise — walking back home with a little more pep in his step, a little more shine in his smile, and a little more… heartbeats per minute than usual — that Shohei realized he just got a new crush.
Two weeks into the school year, Taeyong (another colleague, teaches Art) would tell him it’s normal.
“Oh god, not you, too?” were his exact words, actually. It’s only then that Shohei would learn about the Kim Doyoung Effect — capital E because everyone thinks of it as a proper noun.
No one, Shohei learned with equal parts disappointment and relief, really meets Kim Doyoung and walks away with their heart intact.
(Doyoung ordered a to-go cup of hot americano just before they parted that day, despite telling Shohei when they first got their drinks that he had low tolerance for caffeine. Shohei really should have realized it could only be for someone else. And later, he should have noticed, too, how there’s only one person in the faculty who never touched the sugar or creamer in the pantry when making their coffee. But then again, how was he to put two and two?)
“Welcome to the Fuck Doyoung Club!”
Shohei cringes as a knee-jerk reaction to hearing a curse word inside school grounds. He looks around instinctively to check if there are students around but Jungwoo (History) just laughs and lightly pats his arm. “Chill, the gremlins are banned here.”
Here is what seems like a hidden room behind an innocent-looking bookshelf in the faculty room. Shohei is torn between marveling at the discovery of a secret room — a secret room revealed by sliding an old bookshelf! Just like in the movies! Holy shit? — and realizing that it’s a well-known faculty secret that he only got privy to after a month of working here. The room itself is not that impressive, just a square thing with plain white walls. But the other teachers have made a cozy nook out of the place. There’s a foosball table at the center of the room that also seems to serve as a normal table, considering the plates that Johnny (English) and Jaehyun (Literature) are balancing on top of it.
“Uhh…” Shohei says, faced with the sight.
Taeyong, who led him into the room and introduced him to the Fuck Doyoung Club (…apparently? He must have misheard, right?) has already claimed one of the five colorful bean bags scattered around the room.
“…Fuck Doyoung what?”
The other teachers look up at him then, all wearing varying degrees of amusement and surprised smirk on their faces. Ten (Economics) is the only one who scoffs disappointedly. “Damn, you too?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Taeyong tells him.
Shohei is still standing by the door gripping the bottle of Gatorade he got from the fridge and staring slack-jawed at the people gathered in the room. It’s Johnny — bless his heart — who saves him the burden of asking.
“It’s an inside joke,” he says, waving a hand and gesturing for Shohei to take one of the other beanbags. “It’s a club for people who, at one time, wanted to fuck Doyoung. Now it mostly just means fuck Doyoung open parenthesis derogatory closed parenthesis.”
“For the record, I first joined because I thought it exclusively means the latter,” Ten pipes up.
At Shohei’s look of utter confusion, Jaehyun decides to add, “Don’t worry, Doyoung-hyung’s in on it.”
“No I’m not.”
Shohei startles at the sound of the bookshelf aka secret door sliding open. He turns around to see Doyoung himself entering the room, a glare in his eyes and a tupperware in one hand. “Please don’t tell the newbie false stories about me,” he says in the long-suffering tone of someone who seems like this is not the first time that he has to utter these exact words.
“I didn’t… I don’t—” Shohei sputters out, realizing that Taeyong just welcomed him to a Fuck Doyoung Club — whatever that means between the two that Johnny just explained — and Doyoung is here to make some conclusions out of it. I don’t want to fuck you, is what he wants to say, in every manner of the word.
Doyoung gives him a look before he can even finish his sentence. “Don’t mind them,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“I’m not—” Shohei tries again, but Jungwoo scoots his own beanbag closer and… drapes himself all over him…. for lack of a better term, and places a silencing finger on his lips.
This workplace is certainly… touchy, Shohei observes.
“Shh…” Jungwoo says. “You don’t need to deny it, we’ve all seen how you looked at Doyoung-hyung your first few days here. If you were a cartoon character, you’d have heart-eyes already.”
“I—”
Jungwoo presses his finger firmly against Shohei’s lips. “It’s okay, we’ve all gone through it. Well, except Ten-hyung. It’s the Kim Doyoung Effect. Everyone’s a little bit in love with him.”
Shohei can’t help but look at Doyoung with panicked eyes, instinctively wanting to deny everything with his gaze since he still can’t speak with Jungwoo practically sealing his lips shut.
(Fine. He has a tiny teeny crush. Tiny! Practically dust-sized. Microscopic, even.) (But that was before… he found out. And he won’t risk making things awkward with Doyoung — the first person to welcome him to the school and to this town — especially now that he learned he doesn’t stand a single chance.)
Doyoung just smiles at him, though, looking unbothered by everything Jungwoo’s saying. Everyone’s a little bit in love with him. That should have warranted at least a blush and an awkward smile, right? But Doyoung looks like he’s heard it a thousand times before and he’s not the least bit affected by it.
“You do know I’m married, right?” he says casually, no hint of embarrassment or pity that usually comes when you’re indirectly rejecting someone.
Yes. Shohei did know he’s married — only learned about it a few minutes ago, as a matter of fact, when he finally got some semblance of courage to ask Taeyong, back in the breakroom, a shy and inaudible “So uh, Taeyong-hyung… about Doyoung, uh… do you know if he’s uh… by any chance, uh, single?” and Taeyong looked at him with an interesting mix of pity and amusement, exclaimed “Oh god, not you too?” and led him to this secret room.
Which brings him to… now.
Jungwoo finally, blessedly lets go of Shohei’s lips so he can stutter out a response. “I- Yeah, I mean. I didn’t, not until today. But I don’t— I didn’t have plans of—”
Doyoung smiles. Intimidating and welcoming, all at the same time. “I wasn’t thinking you were, don’t worry. I’m just saying.”
In the corner, Ten huffs out an amused laugh.
(“At least you didn’t give him flowers on Valentine’s Day and got rejected on your own birthday,” Jaehyun huffs out later, when Doyoung leaves the room, and Shohei laments about the fact that Doyoung knows (even though he insisted the contrary) about his silly crush.
“At least you found out right away. It took me five months and an embarrassing drunk text that his husband replied to before I knew. God, why does he not wear a wedding ring?” Taeyong says.
“Wait,” Shohei sits up, looking between the two of them and momentarily forgetting his current internal struggle, “aren’t you two together?”
“Yeah,” Ten answers in behalf of Taeyong and Jaehyun. “They take turns pretending to be Doyoung.”
Jaehyun laughs while Taeyong throws a bean bag — yes, a whole beanbag — at him. (It lands weakly not even one foot in front of Ten.) (It barely left the floor, to be honest.)
This group, Shohei decides, is so fucking weird.
“No one can beat Johnny-hyung, though,” Jungwoo says.
Shohei looks at the English teacher in question. Johnny groans good-naturedly before shaking his head. “I asked him out to prom his first year here—”
“That was so fucking lame,” Ten interjects with a laugh.
“Hey, in my defense, we’ll both be chaperoning anyway!”
“Whatever, Seo.”
It’s then that it occurs to Shohei that, when Taeyong said Welcome to the Fuck Doyoung Club! earlier… he actually honest-to-god meant it.)
In theory, Shohei should have been fast friends with the soccer varsity’s head coach Yuta Nakamoto as the only other Japanese teacher in the school.
In reality, though, they don’t have a lot of opportunities to interact as Yuta spends most of his time in the field and Shohei doesn’t really have any reason to venture to that side of the school grounds. In fact, this is probably the longest conversation he’s ever had with him.
“And the mid-semester recital is on Wednesday, because only god knows why Doyoung schedules things like that in the middle of the week, and the game is on Friday which is — yes, technically not the same day, duh, but it’s not like my boys just wake up in the morning, go to school, and know how to fucking kick the ball right, they need to practice, so I need them to be excused from their classes starting Wednesday — you know this Mr. Matsushima, right? You were kind enough to excuse the varsity from your class unlike some people I know — but Mr. Kim here absolutely does not want to reschedule his recital and Sungchan, god bless this poor boy’s heart, wants to be the next Troy Bolton or something and can’t miss either.”
Shohei just blinks.
In front of him, Doyoung lets out an exasperated sigh. “Yuta, please. I’m sure Shohei has better things to do than—”
“Uh. Maybe Sungchan can do his recital on Tuesday instead?” Shohei suggests, a little timidly.
It’s the other two’s turn to blink at him, as if the thought — which Shohei would have guessed is anyone’s first thought of a compromise to the dilemma at hand — only just occurred to them.
“Math teachers are so smart,” Yuta just says.
Doyoung sighs again. “I’ll ask the kid if he thinks he can be ready by Tuesday. It’s still unfair for him to have a shorter preparation time than the rest of the class, so this discussion is not over.”
“Great, it’s decided then!” Yuta chirps in complete disregard of what Doyoung just said. There’s a cheeky smile on his lips that’s in stark contrast with the murderous glare in Doyoung’s eyes. It’s the first time that Shohei sees that expression on him, but Yuta seems thoroughly unruffled.
“Pain in the ass,” Doyoung murmurs as he walks away.
“Love you, too!” Yuta cheerfully calls out to his retreating back. Shohei laughs, partly to release the tension from suddenly being called to mediate in their fight (he was walking down the hall when Yuta called him from inside the music room and said, “Hey, do you have a minute? Can you help me and Doyoung settle an argument?”), but mostly at Yuta’s audacity to joke around with Doyoung like that.
God, he really should have known then, huh?
(Shohei had never seen Yuta in the… er, Fuck Doyoung Club until two months into the semester, when he was hanging out with the other teachers during break and Yuta had popped by.
“Doyoung said he left my coffee here?” he asked Taeyong, who had been guarding a to-go cup of coffee by his side for the better part of an hour.
“It’s cold now,” Taeyong said when he handed it to Yuta.
Yuta scrunched his nose. “I know. Meeting with the Principal ran long, ugh. Thanks,” he said, nodded a quick hello at Shohei and Jungwoo — the only other two in the room — and slid the bookshelf closed again.
Shohei looked at the closed door, wondering about Yuta and Doyoung’s strange… relationship, for lack of a word for it. He thought the two didn’t like each other at first, what with the constant bickering in faculty meetings, and Yuta always teasing Doyoung whenever they were in the same room. But then again, it seemed to Shohei that Yuta was the only one who can get away with teasing him, and there are little things — like the coffee, for example — that would make him think the two are actually a lot closer than you would think.
There was one time, when Shohei got to the school early hoping to squeeze in some time to check students’ homeworks before his classes for the day, that he caught Yuta in Doyoung’s music room as he was passing by. Yuta seemed to be organizing some things on the desk, and when Shohei walked closer, curiousity getting the better of him, Yuta just looked up at him with a smile.
“Hey. Doyoung’s stressed today, so I’m just making sure things are okay in here before he gets in,” he explained, even though Shohei didn’t say anything.
So there really isn’t animosity between them, huh. What a thoughtful thing to do for a friend, Shohei remembers thinking.
Now, in the secret room, it finally occurs to him to ask, “Is Yuta not part of the, uh, Fuck Doyoung Club?”
The question makes Taeyong and Jungwoo snort in laughter at the same time.
“Honey,” Taeyong says. “He’s the honorary President.”
Shohei laughed along, too. Ha. Okay. He got it. Fuck Doyoung (derogatory), like Ten said, is it?)
“Tell me about Doyoung’s husband.”
Ten gives him a funny look. “Poor thing. Are you still pining?”
“No!” Shohei immediately says. Is he? No. He’s pretty sure he’s not. He’s pretty sure all pining thoughts went out the window when he learned Doyoung’s a married man. He’s just curious, is all. He says as much, but the funny look doesn’t let up on Ten’s face.
“Okay, what do you want to know about Doyoung’s husband?” he asks, exaggeratingly emphasizing the last two words like there’s some inside joke in it.
“Just, I don’t know. I guess I’m just curious about the kind of man Doyoung likes — not because I’m pining!” He hastily adds when Ten raises an eyebrow. “I’m just curious, I told you.”
Ten takes a slow sip of coffee before he replies. “They’re perfect for each other.”
Shohei sits back on his chair and thinks about this. They’re perfect for each other. What does that mean, exactly? What kind of guy is perfect for a Kim Doyoung? Someone who likes Classical music, probably? Someone just as quiet as he is? Shohei imagines Doyoung with his faceless husband, sitting on the porch of a white picket-fenced house, watching the sunset.
“We joke a lot about all of us having a crush on Doyoung at one point, but it’s all silly little crushes. The guy just has that effect on everyone. When you get to know his husband,” again Ten stresses the words like they amuse him so much, “you’ll be like, Huh. That makes sense. It’s easy to move on from him when you realize he’s found his soulmate.”
That’s… huh. Strangely profound.
Wait.
“All of us? You too? I thought you were only in the club for the “latter meaning” of the name?”
Ten laughs at him. “You know the whole club thing is just a joke, right? But yeah, me too. Please. I’m the first one who ever had a crush on Doyoung out of all of us.”
Shohei blinks.
“To be fair, I had a crush on his husband, too.”
Shohei might actually beat Johnny for the most embarrassing way of finding out.
To be fair, he learned fairly quick that Doyoung is married, but god — couldn’t they have told him who his husband is, too?
He finds out on a Tuesday morning at the break room when he was squeezing in a late breakfast after his first period. Johnny, Yuta, and Jaehyun are already gathered around the table looking at something on Yuta’s phone.
“God, he’s so cute,” Johnny says.
“Bro, he totally has your eyes,” Jaehyun adds. Johnny and Yuta look at him with incredulous faces.
“You do know he’s adopted and Yuta didn’t birth the little dude, right?”
Jaehyun rolls his eyes. “I know, I was just saying? He looks like Yuta-hyung!”
“Hey,” Shohei says in greeting when he comes in. “What are you guys looking at?”
“Yuta’s son,” Johnny says.
Shohei pauses for a moment, masking his surprise. He didn’t even know Yuta is married, much less that he has a son.
Yuta looks up at him with a bright smile and turns his phone so Shohei can see the screen. “He’s coming home with us tonight.”
The little boy in the picture does have Yuta’s eyes, to Jaehyun’s credit. Shohei coos appropriately, a strange secondhand feeling of warmth in his heart— like secondhand embarrassment, but for when you’re happy for someone. Yuta looks so happy, his face ten times brighter than how he looked like when his team won a game just last week.
Shohei takes a seat on the table, a sudden thought occurring to him in the moment. Huh, what a strange coincidence.
“Hey,” he says. “Doyoung and his husband are in the process of adoption too, right? What a coincidence.”
All three men in front of him pause and slowly stare up at him like he just grew another head.
“What?”
“Oh my god, are you serious?” Jaehyun asks. He looks like it’s taking all of him not to laugh out loud.
“What, why?”
And then Yuta says the words that will forever haunt Shohei on 3AMs when his brain decides to replay the most embarrassing moments of his life.
“I’m Doyoung’s husband. Oh my god, did you not know that?”
(“You’ll be like, Huh. That makes sense,” Ten told him that one time.
Yuta would be the last person Shohei would peg as Doyoung’s husband, but strangely, looking back at everything now, it does make sense. How Yuta would always joke that he can never be friends with someone who puts more than two sugars on their coffee but still married someone like Doyoung who uses four and a shitton of creamer in his. How Yuta would tease Doyoung about his class’ recital schedule but still go to the school an hour early just to make sure everything’s in order in his class before he even wakes up.
It’s easy to move on from him when you realize he’s found his soulmate.
Shohei just blinks at Yuta’s words — the embarrassment at taking so long to figure it all out would come later. For now, there’s just a sense of clarity and rightness at finding it out.
“Huh,” he says to Yuta. “That makes sense.”)
“So, I heard you finally learned who Doyoung’s husband is?” Ten says when Shohei goes back to his desk in the faculty room after his last class of the day.
Shohei just glares at him. “You could have told me. We had a whole conversation about him and you could have told me.”
“Sorry,” Ten shrugs, not sounding sorry at all. “But there’s no fun in that.”