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Felix shouldn’t have come.
He should tell the driver to turn around, take him home, extra fare be damned. A sign from god, probably, when Minho and Jisung backed out. Don’t waste your time, don’t go, you’re not wanted. But Felix has never been religious.
The worst of it, then, is that he knows Chan will act like it’s fine, treat him like he’s welcome. He knows Chan that well, at the very least.
A downward swing of an ax through wood, he wishes his head were on the block next. The cold glass of the window will have to do, the steam crawling from his hot breath. Rainy, it’s always so rainy out here. The driver is playing some sort of hymn. A sign from god, he supposes, though he’s never been a good listener.
He gets dripped on standing on the porch. The driver long gone, bumbling down the gravel drive. Miles into the woods now, Felix could die out here and no one would ever know. The birds chirp in the trees despite the rain. If his body was laid down for long enough maybe they’d have their fill. A good way to go, feeding life.
The door opens and Chan is there, and he looks just as Felix remembers only with longer hair, softer arms. His eyes are still sunken, his face with a shadow of stubble, always on the edge of something put together, or rather, something fallen apart.
“You came,” he says.
Felix nods, curt, still being dripped on.
“I didn’t expect—” Chan stops, steps back through the door. “Come in, you’ll get sick.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, because there’s nothing else appropriate for the situation. He’s not really sorry, but it feels apt to pretend he is.
“No, Lix, of course not,” Chan brushes him off, just as expected. “Never say sorry for coming to visit.”
“I understand if you want me to go,” Felix drips on the floor, searching for an excuse to leave, maybe. He wishes Chan were the type to make him go.
Chan blinks at him, his lips twitch down into something of a frown only for a moment. “Can I hug you?”
“Yes.”
And this is the same too, the warmth of it and the strength, the size of his hands across Felix’s back, the smell of bergamot and oud.
“I missed you,” Chan murmurs hot into his hair, and normally a kiss to the skull would come next, but they broke normally a long time ago.
“Me too,” Felix says.
The guest room he’s given is at the back of the house. A window overlooking the woods, across the world from Chan’s own room. Felix wonders if he did it on purpose, subconsciously or not.
“How long are you staying?” Chan asks, hanging by the door.
Felix doesn’t know what he’s asking, but he’ll take it to mean in this place. “Maybe three weeks.”
A nod, a deep breath, stepping out of his space. “Sounds good, make yourself at home. You know where to find me if you need anything, yeah?”
“Yes.”
A tight smile and he’s gone, bones of the house creaking with his steps.
The duvet is flowery, pink, intricate vines and roses woven together in a pattern that might have been sophisticated ages before Felix was born. Still, he likes it. Something so pretty and soft; delicate, even. He half wonders where Chan got it, he doesn’t remember it, but that seems a silly thing to dwell on.
Chan would never buy such a thing for himself. Maybe a girlfriend got it for him. His girlfriends were always the type to spoil him, to buy him things and coo over him.
Ironic, because Chan would act the same way with his boyfriends.
The clock on the side table reads five in the evening. Red digital numbers taunting him. He wants to go to sleep.
The numbers blink.
Felix blinks back. Five o’ four PM.
He hurries to the bath down the hall, skittish like a child trying to avoid a parent, even though he knows Chan is probably already locked in his studio. Hiding in his own right.
Fluorescent lights sting his eyes. The shower curtain is pink. So is the curtain in the window. So is the rug.
A girlfriend. The thought shouldn’t make him sick, not anymore. He lost that right when he threw his life away. Felix scrubs his face with the kind of soap meant for a body, and that turns him pink too.
Five twenty two. Blink. Five twenty three. Felix goes to sleep anyway.
-
There’s a complex of bird feeders sitting a few meters away from the back porch. This is new too. Felix thinks he should probably stop taking stock of the new, but it feels an impossible feat.
This is new too. At least five feeders, and a carved stone bath. The birds swarm.
Birds are meant to be gentle creatures, or so he thought. In princess movies they sing and galavant with humans. The sparrows that flit to the feeders keep getting into little spats. Pecking and flapping at one another, squawking when they get tossed off a perch.
The few sitting in the bath, cleaning their wings with the overflow of rainwater from last night are being more polite.
Felix catches a chill from the light breeze. His sleep clothes are thin and worn. The shirt he’s wearing is faded through, impossible to tell what it once said. He thinks it might have been Chan’s, once upon a time.
He hugs his legs closer to his chest where he’s sitting on the steps down from the porch. Socks would have been good. Toes curl under his feet, trying to keep warm against the wood.
It’s always been helpful for him to feel a little uncomfortable. A sordid reminder that he’s alive.
The sun peeks over the tops of the trees, the forest engulfing the clearing of the backyard from all sides. So early, it must be close to six by now. He woke around four, laid in bed with the flowery pink duvet hugged tight to his chest, staring out the window and waiting for it to be light enough to entice him outside.
The door clicks, one, two steps, Felix whips his head around. Chan is there, blearily surprised. “Hey, I didn’t expect you to be up.”
Felix shrugs. “I get up early now.”
Before, Felix was never out of bed before noon. A symptom of his deterioration more than anything else. He liked the night time because it was dark, he liked staying up when no one else was awake, because it didn’t make him feel jealous of the people that were living.
Now he’s come to appreciate the morning. The cool air and dew, the mist and fog, the sun and the stirring of life. Now the night scares him. Now he’s afraid of the dark.
Chan bites his lip, chews on it. He stands leaning against the wall of the house, arms across his chest, staring at the birds. “Did you eat anything last night?”
“No. Wasn’t hungry.” Old habits. The explanation, that is. A simple ‘No’ would have sufficed.
“You can help yourself to the leftovers in the fridge. Or anything else. What’s mine is yours,” Chan says. He pauses for a moment, kicks off the wall. A hand, waved in the air, a shaky breath. “Ah, I’m sure you know that.”
He does.
“I have some work to do today, but I’ll be in my studio if you need me, yeah?”
“Okay. Thank you, Chris.” The name feels odd on Felix’s tongue. He hasn’t said it in a year. Intimate, almost.
It seems to give Chan pause too, his face stutters for a moment before finding a soft smile. “No problem, Lix.”
If he were using the name equivalent to Felix calling him ‘Chris’ he might have said ‘little one’, or ‘baby’. Felix feels sick again. The door clicks shut.
A mourning dove coos in that very specific way, accompanied by a flap and flurry of wings as she’s pecked by a particularly rude little chickadee. And still, Felix feels sick.
Felix does eat. Much later when he’s quelled his nausea with chamomile tea and honey.
He stood at the kitchen counter for much too long, holding the jar of honey to the sun streaming in from the skylight. The way it caught against a drop Felix had spilled over the side on accident, slowly crawling down with gravity, something about it was exquisite. Deep gold, bubbling, viscous and quiet on the descent.
He stirred a spoon of honey into his tea then, and watched it dissolve into nothing. The smell, that lonely drop, the only indication that it existed at all.
Leftovers. Felix thinks that’s what he is too. He’s the last remaining piece of Chan’s before, in this place that’s moved on. Still, the food tastes good, Chan is a good cook.
The silence in the cabin used to freak Felix out. It’s the sort of place that has no television, no phone. No wifi, even. Chan works without it, uses this time as his inspiration to unearth new things, build them from the ground up instead of using the aids of modern technology.
So, so quiet. Each footstep creaks, and the lights hum when they’re turned on. The birds chirp, the wind blows, and Felix can hear his breath. Every single one, in and out. That’s something he used to hate too.
Before and after. Used to versus now. It’s all useless. All of it. His therapist told him that it’s okay to think about the past, but what’s more important is where he goes next. She didn’t expect his next to be back where he started, he’s certain. But he didn’t either, so check the box for Lee Felix surprising everyone. He’s done it. Cheers to follow when he inevitably mucks it all up again.
He sits on an armchair and wastes his day away thinking about nothing much at all.
–
Felix’s pills are small and yellow. He takes two every night before bed. The real reason he can’t stay longer than three weeks is that he needs to go to the pharmacy then. To get some more.
Now that he’s here, he doesn’t think he’ll have much of a problem leaving.
Daydreaming has been a plague on his existence since he was a child. When the worst of it was over, when he stopped sleeping in bed with his mother, a few months after he went home, he started daydreaming again.
Chan has been a constant since Felix was eighteen. When he moved across an ocean to go to school, and Chan was there to catch him. Beautiful, smart, kind. He reminded Felix of home, and his daydreams turned to those of love.
It had been like that in the past, when Felix had crushes, but nothing had ever felt like Chan.
Seven fifty eight AM.
They were never together.
Always, always the wrong time. Right person wrong time. Over, and over, and over. Eventually it starts feeling like the opposite. Wrong person, right time. Like a sign.
Felix has never been good at listening.
Eight o’ three AM.
Every creak of the wooden floorboards in the hall makes Felix cringe. As if Chan would even notice. As if he’s not so wrapped up in his work that nothing else matters.
Chan has always been a workaholic. Part of the reason they wouldn’t have worked before. Felix was needy, helpless, they would have fallen apart. Felix would have always needed more, something Chan couldn’t give. Chan was always giving the wrong parts, the ones that made Felix feel suffocated.
He knocks on the doorframe, and Chan jerks up, shoving his headphones off. Felix tries to smile but his muscles won’t cooperate. “Still working too much?”
“Ah, yeah, probably,” Chan rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms, the dark circles there. “I’d like to think I’ve gotten better. I’m always more inspired out here, you know how it is.”
Put yourself out there, Felix!
His therapist didn’t expect him to come right back to Chris.
“Could we have dinner tonight? Together?”
“Yes,” Chan nods, and he smiles, even though it doesn’t reach all the way to his eyes. “I’d like that.”
“Me too.”
The dishes have little flowers on them. Painted, tiny little flowers. Felix doesn’t ask. He bites his tongue, swallows it down with his food.
He feels loneliest when Chan is right next to him saying nothing at all.
“How is everyone?”
Of course that’s all it took. One swing of the hammer and Chan is bubbling over with words. Even when they’re avoiding talking about them, Chan can always talk about the rest.
Felix is grateful. He’s impossibly grateful that Chan doesn’t comment on the way his hands shake when he holds his fork, and that he doesn’t ask what he wants to. A combination of How have you been, Felix? and Why?
The words are probably trapped and rattling around in Chan’s chest, battering his heart. But still, he doesn’t ask. A year is a long time. Maybe Chan has changed too. Felix pushes the thought from his head. He doesn’t care for how much it frightens him.
Seungmin has a good job, Chan says. Felix doesn’t tell him he already knows. That would be rude. He doesn’t tell Chan that he already knows how everyone is doing, because he’s been keeping up with everyone but him.
Friends are one thing, they always have been. Chan is wholly another.
Still, he listens, and he says thank you for the meal, and he feels a little less nauseous when he swallows his pills than he did the night before.
They were never together, but they were something.
An unquestioned conglomerate. Felix was a parasite riding on his back, and Chan his accommodating host.
It took Felix three months to learn how to breathe again after the separation.
–
Seungmin asked Felix if he was sure he wanted to come. He asked him ten times over, and then an eleventh for good measure.
Without Minho and Jisung it might be lonely.
How could Felix be lonely when his favorite company is himself? How could he be lonely when the only thing he’s ever wanted for the last five years is just down the hall?
Maybe it’s because Seungmin loves to talk. He fills space with words and argues for a living. To him, something like this would be lonely.
Felix isn’t lonely because he isn’t alone. Not in his head or in this world. Not as he sits in the wet morning grass, with his legs tucked up under him, and watches a deer lay claim to a pumpkin at the edge of the trees.
A massacre. Shell cracked open, flesh and stringy guts spread in the wake of the fall. Bright, piercing orange against the mud.
She takes her time. She doesn’t care much that she’s being watched, it seems. So long as Felix doesn’t move she continues about her way.
Juice bubbles out where teeth meet skin, a soft gush, the prettiest defilement. Felix wishes he had Hyunjin’s hands. That he could draw her. The prettiest picture of violence.
Sweet, quiet, gentle. That’s how it is. By the time the point of no return is reached you’d barely even know you’ve been fed on. Now it’s much too late, and you’re dying, and all you can do is smile as you fade.
Felix shakes himself out of his head. Orange and brown and green, back in focus. Too easy to lose himself in there, but he’s gotten a handle on pulling himself out.
He feels guilty sometimes. Because his darkness was never something big and loud and scary. It was a creeping feeling of dread and the pull of weights on his bones, on the grooves of his brain. If it were big and loud and scary, maybe he wouldn’t have waited so long to do something about it, wouldn’t have destroyed he and Chan in the process.
They were on the precipice of something. He could feel it in the quick of his nails and the roots of his teeth. He knew Chan could feel it too, the way they looked at one another, the way their hands lingered. But Felix was on the lip of the void, and his fingers were barely holding on, and no one, not even Chan, would have been able to help him.
Insecurity of the most wretched kind. It consumed him nearly constantly. It made him feel small, and childlike, and idiotic.
Chan is confident. He walks with the knowledge of his body, his presence. He may get insecure, sure, but it’s in his work, in his laugh, never in his very being. In his presence in a room, his presence in the world.
Snap, crunch, the deer presses a hoof into the casing of the pumpkin as it tears meat from the inside.
Felix has a hard time feeling like he’s not on the precipice of something again. He just can’t for the life of him figure out what.
When he finally makes his way back inside his pants are soaked through where he sat on the grass and Chan is standing with his hip resting on the kitchen counter, staring out the window at where Felix had been.
“Making friends?” he asks, smiling out at the deer. He’s probably named her. Chan likes that sort of thing.
“Yes. She’s beautiful.”
“She is. I try not to spoil her too much, just so she doesn’t become reliant on it when I’m gone.”
The strike falls out before Felix can think better of it, “Learned from experience?”
Sorrow cuts deep in Chan’s eyes, his smile. Devastation. Total and unflinching. “Something like that.”
–
Felix leaving had been planned. An escape disguised as a week long vacation.
He figured, back then, that his options were to run or to pitch himself off of the top of their apartment building.
In the end he chose to run, because he couldn’t bear the thought of his mother crying any more than she already had for him.
The decision wasn’t an easy one.
He didn’t tell Chan before he went, because Chan would have stopped him. He would have cried and begged and held onto his wrist and told him not to go. He may have even kissed him. Felix couldn’t tell Chan, because he would have listened, and if he stayed that would mean he had to pitch himself off of the roof.
He packed all of his things into his big suitcase. He didn’t have much. Most of what he left was always Chan’s to begin with. He got on the plane and flew to his mother, and he didn’t come back.
Chan texted him every night for the first week. Little comments about things at home, asking how everything was, and each text made Felix cry. He left them all unanswered. The day he was supposed to go back he called, already halfway catatonic, and he managed out a strangled, sobbed, “I’m not coming back, Channie. I’m staying here for a while.”
He hung up when he heard tears in Chan’s voice. He was a coward.
He’d do it again in a heartbeat.
One year. So much changes in a year.
Nine seventeen AM.
There’s a frilly pink duvet, and a pink curtain in the shower, and Felix is better but somehow he feels like he’s made it worse again. Because after all this time, and after all the daydreaming, he still wants Chris just as badly as when he left.
One forty two PM.
The real question, then, is if anything has changed at all. Because Felix has changed, and he thinks maybe Chan has changed too, but he’s still a coward, and he hasn’t talked about it. Everything’s changed, nothing’s changed— a year ago that deer probably wasn’t even alive.
Five thirty one PM.
When Jeongin and Hyunjin picked Felix up at the airport last week and gave him a hug, he felt like a newborn calf on his feet for the first time. Like his lungs were sucked of fluid and suddenly he could breathe again.
On the way to Seungmin’s apartment Felix sat in the back. He watched as Hyunjin took Jeongin’s hand while he drove, smiled sweetly across the console at him. That was new too, but it was also all the same.
Things like that make him think that he can have it too. That changes don’t have to make the world shift or cause an explosion. A shifting, locking into place rather than a fuck up of the status quo.
Five fifty nine PM. Blink.
Some days Felix still can’t get out of bed.
–
The problem with Chan is that he’ll give all of himself for the people he loves, even if they don’t ask for it.
When Felix graduated from school and had nowhere to land, Chan gave up his extra room. When Felix looked paler than normal, Chan delivered food. When Felix didn’t get out of bed, Chan did things for him without asking.
Selfless. Half the battle was understanding why he couldn’t be grateful for it. But the truth of the matter is that he was feeling impossibly coddled with no way out. Like he was finally old enough to be an adult, but then he couldn’t even be an equal to the one person he needed.
“Are you okay?” Chan asks now, bumping Felix with his elbow as they wash vegetables at the sink. “You’ve been drying that same tomato for a while.”
“Yes, sorry,” Felix blinks, setting the thing down. He takes the next one that Chan offers him, rubbing at the smooth skin with the towel clutched in his hands. If he looks hard enough, he swears he can see his reflection in the red. Or maybe he’s spent too much time looking in the mirror and his mind is projecting back what it knows.
“Anything bothering you?”
Another tomato, this one bigger.
“No,” Felix lies.
Everything is bothering him. It’s bothering him that they can’t just go back to how they were. Not in the codependent way. Not in the way where they were something but nothing at all, or where he felt like a child, but in the way where Chan was his best friend, and he felt more comfortable with him than anyone else. In the way that he didn’t feel afraid to ask for a hug.
He needs a hug so badly.
Chan hums. Felix thinks he might drop it for a minute, but then he holds his hand over Felix’s with the next tomato, holding out on passing it over. He looks Felix in the eye, too. “You can always talk to me, Lix. That hasn’t changed. I’ve worked on becoming a better listener.”
Tomato, towel, reflection–not reflection. Blink.
“I know.” He didn’t.
Chan always salts the water in the pot. Says it makes it boil faster. Felix is unconvinced, but he still does it too, because it’s ingrained in him now. He watches the water bubble, pours in the spaghetti.
This feels like before. He can’t tell what’s new and what’s not anymore. He doesn’t remember what a year ago feels like in regards to this.
Stirring, chopping, blink, blink, blink.
“Why did you leave?” Chan waited until they were almost through with their food.
He probably knew Felix would immediately put down his fork and refuse to eat any more. That’s exactly what happens. He stares into the sauce on his plate, the tomato clean enough to show his reflection chopped into tens of little pieces. He doesn’t respond. He wishes he could rinse his mouth with fluoride and mint.
“C’mon,” Chan urges. “I gave you a week without asking.”
The pressing is new. The insistence. It diverts assumption, gives him direction.
Felix takes a long drink of his water. Not enough sting to clean his mouth like he craves. He settles on the truth, because he owes Chan at least that much. It’s been a year.
“I wanted to die, Chan.”
“Felix…” He breaks in two, as expected.
Felix won’t eat, Chan breaks in two. They’ve known each other with certainty since the moment they met. The way that two people that were born to be tied together do.
“Why didn't you tell me?” A pause, but Felix won’t answer. “Why didn't you let me help?”
He almost laughs. Almost. “It was never about that. It was about me.” There’s his reflection again, this time on the plate; little flowers painted on his head.
“I wanted to be a part of you, Lix,” Chan’s voice goes watery. “I wanted to be there for you.”
“I know, Channie,” Felix is right there with him. His sinuses burn. “I never would have been able to look at you the same, I’m selfish.”
“Lix, baby,” Chan whispers. Felix looks up then, and teary eyes meet teary eyes. “Can I hug you?”
“Please.”
Chan backs his chair from the table, opens his arms, asking. “Come here, little one.”
Felix would crawl across the table if he could. Anything to get there faster.
His chest shudders with his sob when he lands in Chan’s lap, curls into his chest, arms around his neck, just like he used to. Chan wraps him up, holds him close, and Felix leaks onto his shirt with tears and snot, and he knows that Chan would never complain.
“I missed you so much, Chris. I thought about you every day.”
“Me too. Every single day.” Chan lays soft kisses to the crown of his head. Planting seeds to sprout new. “I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”
“Me either.”
In the window across the room, Felix can, for sure and for real, see a reflection. Felix, head cradled so close to Chan’s heart he thinks he might implode.
–
In the light of the morning things created in the night feel fragile.
Felix sits on the same steps as each morning he’s been here, knees at his chest. Today Chan is here, dumping seed into the feeders, and Felix can’t help but feel small.
He can’t ignore the way that now that he's touched Chan for real, he wants to be doing it all the time. But everything is fragile in the morning.
Seed spills across the ground, missing the lip of the feeder. For the squirrels, the things that can’t fly. Chan’s shirt has short sleeves. His skin pulls around muscle, soft curves for something so sturdy. His arms, god, his arms.
When he’s done, Chan sets the bucket of feed on the porch, he sits down on the same step as Felix, only a few feet away. Felix’s fingers itch. The birds squawk, peck each other over their replenished mana. Never happy, those birds.
Felix’s fingers curl around the wooden edge of the stair. Counting to sixty, he waits to see if he’ll change his mind. Of course he doesn’t. He shuffles over, until he’s pressed to Chan along the line of their bodies. Knee to knee, arm to arm. He lays his head on his shoulder.
Chan goes painfully stiff, still. His breath is tight, a consequence of the invisible arms holding him in place. A mourning dove coos. Felix’s fingers curl around soft, curved, strong muscle. If Chan moves it might break.
“It’s just me, Chris.”
“That’s what scares me,” Chan admits, so quiet Felix almost misses it.
It grows dark again and everything still feels fragile.
–
Once upon a time Felix would have considered drowning himself here. In this pink bathroom with a shiny porcelain tub.
He was always concerned with how pretty he’d look in death. Like he had to make up for how bruised he felt living. Like somehow that would make up for the fact that he was no longer breathing.
A twisted thought, he knows now. He learned a lot through gentle voices and probing words, through small yellow pills and everything in between.
The water sloshes when he moves his legs. Knees peek out of iridescent bubbles, pink in the heat. His elbows probably look the same. The sharpest parts of him softened by the blood in his veins. Being alive can be beautiful like that.
Plinking drops at the faucet head, pads of finger on the grout between tiles. His lip beads with sweat, but he doesn’t care. He’s meat in a stew and the toughest parts of him have gone soft. Pretty and pink.
Sometimes, when he’s feeling tender, Felix will imagine a life. There’s still some kind of dissonance between imagining a life and connecting it to his own, no matter how badly he wants that to be the case.
He’s a main character in the life, for what that’s worth.
There’s a house on a hill with flowers in the beds outside. The wind touches the little windmill up top. There's two little girls. And Chris. Always Chris.
Chris dotes on their girls. He picks them up and swings them around and laughs when they squeal. He drags Felix in by the waist and kisses him until he’s dizzy, and the girls squeal some more. When everyone is all tucked into bed, Chris makes love to him, slow and deep, and then he kisses him dizzy again.
Each time Felix is through with thinking about the little life, he finds tears in his eyes, running down his cheeks. He wipes them away with pink knuckled hands, pulls the plug on his bath.
The mirror has fogged, but a pink towel wipes it away. Felix stares at his reflection. His eyes are rimmed pink, but it melts into the pink of the rest of him, undetectable enough to get by.
A hot bath is the best place to cry.
On the couch, his feet kicked up into Chan’s lap as he works. An offering, the fact that Chan left his office, replaced his desk with Felix’s ankles. Chan is trying.
His brow scrunches up as he stares at his screen, dragging things around, clicking buttons Felix doesn’t understand. The programs he uses make his computer burn hot. Felix’s ankles, the bottom of his shins are surely cooking below. He doesn’t mind. A small price to pay for an inch of progress.
Talking to himself, Chan’s words blow from his mouth in a mash of melted whisper, only understandable to himself. Felix feels left out.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
Pink. Rising in Chan’s cheeks, just barely visible in the blue-light glow from his computer. “No. Why would you think so?”
“There’s a lot of pink.” A bit sexist. Felix likes pink perfectly well. Chan makes him feel crazy sometimes.
Chan laughs, barked, short. “No. It’s much more embarrassing than a girlfriend.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s not—” pause, tick, blink. Chan rubs his face with a big hand, fucking up his eyebrows. “After you left. Fuck—”
Felix wiggles his legs. “Tell me.”
Wayward glance, softness in his eyes. “After you left,” Chan clears his throat, his hand drops to cover the top of Felix’s foot. A warm weight to ground them both. “I was falling apart. My mom came to visit. She picked it all out.”
“Oh.”
Chan hates when his mom visits. He feels suffocated and powerless. He’d never have let her change anything if it wasn’t bad. If he weren’t too weak to protest. Maybe he was happy to have something new too.
Silence bleeds into minutes. Chan stares at the wall, Felix stares at him. Blink.
“Do you regret leaving?” Chan’s voice creaks. He could use a glass of water. Felix could too. He swings his head and looks Felix in the eye, thumb ghosting over where his ankle connects to his foot. Back and forth.
“No. I would have died.”
Chan nods, mouth pressed into a line. “Then I don’t regret it either. I need you to know that.”
Needle meet thread, seed meet dirt, wing meet bird.
–
Felix has a tendency to self-destruct.
It’s written into his DNA, coded, inescapable.
If he were born on a spaceship, years in the future, they’d lay him on a table and tie down his arms and legs. Giant lasers, cutting him open, stringing his genetics up out of his body like the guts of a pumpkin. One zap and he’d be cured.
But he wasn’t born on a spaceship, he was born on earth.
Do you find it helpful to imagine things that will never be possible?
He knew that she was searching for a certain answer, so he lied to please her. No.
Each morning bleeds to evening, and in the meantime another support gets built on this thing they’re building. A metal rod, shaky in it’s own right, but stronger when it’s coupled with another, and another, and another.
Felix has his head in Chan’s lap, and Chan’s fingers in his hair, and he has a tendency to self-destruct, and it’s all he can think about.
“You’re so beautiful. You’ve always been so beautiful.”
“Why are you saying it like a prayer?” Felix asks.
“You make me feel like a disciple.”
Chan would have never admitted it before. The longing glances, the lingering stares. Not once had he ever told Felix he’s beautiful unprompted. He wouldn’t have. It was too far over the line they were toeing.
Nails across his scalp, a thumb catches his cheek, traces the line. Then his lips, soft peaks, the rough pad of Chan’s finger leaving electricity in its wake.
Felix has a tendency to self-destruct, but his fuse has grown longer. He’s been taught the smell of burning, given a shoe to stomp out the flame before it gets too far.
The possibility of it slipping out of his notice is always there. He hates that part of it. If he were born on a spaceship they could just zap the possibility away, cut the fuse in half so that the lit part would lead nowhere. But he was born on earth, so he has to keep his shoe on and stay alert.
He was terrified. He spoke to Seungmin about it at length. He was terrified that being near Chris would distract him from the fuse. That he’d be so caught up that he wouldn’t smell the sour burn, that it would get far too up to stop the bang.
Seungmin always knows what to say. Level headed and smart, intensely rational. It must be all of that logic he was taught in law school. He told Felix he won’t know unless he tries, but no one is going to fault him for not wanting to try.
He wanted to try. He still wants to try.
He can breathe. Because Chan’s fingers are in his hair, and he’s thinking about how he has a tendency to self-destruct, and he thinks it will be alright.
“You’ve always been beautiful too, Channie. You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”
–
“Do you still have nightmares?” Chan knows the answer, because Felix woke them both up by screaming in the middle of the night. Because Chan climbed into his bed and cradled him back to sleep afterwards.
Chan knows the answer, but now they’re sitting on the steps, watching the birds, and he still asks. He asks instead of assuming, and the bar is in hell but Felix still gets a champagne bubble fizz in his stomach.
“Yes. Sometimes.”
But not like before.
Nothing could ever touch the nightmares he had before. The most horrible things his brain could spin. The violent death of everyone he loved, on loop, ten times over. Blood and screaming and crying. So many car accidents. Felix doesn’t even drive. In his dreams he was always at the wheel. It was always directed by him, a conductor with a wand dragging his friends and family to hang above the sharks, left for dead. Vile, horrible things. He thought himself a monster for even being able to think of them.
Back then Chan would rock him to sleep, but Felix could never tell him what the dreams were about. He’d try, but it would get lodged in his throat. Things like that couldn’t be spoken out loud, because it would be admitting that he thought them up.
Now his nightmares don’t involve anyone else. Only his dreams involve others.
His brain’s favorite plaything at the moment is a setting of a large bed in the middle of pitch black darkness. So dark that looking into it feels like having his eyes closed. He can’t breathe when he’s on that bed, and then the monster comes, crawls out of the black and starts reaching for his feet, his legs. There’s nowhere to go, and Felix is too afraid of the dark to run.
“It’s not like before, though.”
He half expects the words to get lodged in his throat, to stop him up and make him suffocate. Chris puts a hand on his knee.
“Before, I would dream about all of you dying. It would be like, me, driving a car, and I’d hit someone. And when I’d get out to look, you, or Minho, or Changbin would be bleeding out in the street. Things like that.”
Fingers closing around his thigh, holding him together.
“But it was always my fault, you know? Like either I caused it, or I couldn’t stop it. Sometimes it would be us in a plane, going down, and you’d force me to take the oxygen instead of you. Or it would be Jeongin, choking, but I forgot how to do CPR.” Felix looks down at his lap, blinks for the first time in what feels like minutes. His words come out a little jumbled, “You know, things like that.”
“I hope you know I’d never judge you,” Chan murmurs, teasing apart Felix’s fingers, locking them between his own. “I’ll always listen.”
“I know, Channie,” Felix smiles, just a soft curve of his lips, but Chan returns it tenfold. “Can you hold me?”
“Of course I can, little one,” Chan scoops him up, no problem, settles him into his lap.
Chan has a beautiful singing voice. It pokes through like sun on sheer curtains when he hums. Felix tucks his head up below Chan’s chin, lets his eyes flutter shut, fingers splayed across his chest, feeling the vibrations of his song.
Who knows if it has a name. It might be something Chan is working on but hasn’t finished. It could be something he knows. All that matters is that he’s humming it for Felix.
“Lixie, are you staying? In the country?”
“I don’t know yet,” Felix lies. He’s not yet managed to break that habit, but in his defense, he’s holding up rickety metal poles to support this fragile thing, and he doesn’t want to accidentally tear them down.
–
Six o’ six AM.
Seven thirteen AM.
Twelve o’ clock.
“Do you need anything?”
No. A simple shake of the head.
“Call me if you do, baby. I’ll just be out there.”
Three thirty six PM.
Five fifty one PM.
“Some food, sweetheart.”
“Thank you.”
“Mhm. I’ll let you be.”
Nine o’ four PM.
Some days Felix still can’t get out of bed.
–
Pop songs straight out of Felix’s childhood crackle from the speakers in the grocery store. Tinny and whining, indistinguishable if he didn’t already know the beat by heart.
They had to drive almost an hour to get here. Ten minutes of that was spent on the driveway to Chan’s place, winding out to the main road.
It’s raining today. The tin roof catches drops in a funny way, a distinct sound next to the fuzz of the radio.
Fluorescent lighting, red and white checked tile, baskets of produce freshly waxed. He’s supposed to be picking out carrots, but none of them seem quite right. The tomatoes are giving him dirty looks nearby, their rubbery shells reflecting his shadow back at him. He frowns, picks up another carrot to study it.
Too big, the flavor won’t be right. Too damaged, the skin going brown in little divots where it’s been hit. Too— he doesn’t know, it just doesn’t feel right.
“How’re you going?” Chan’s voice rolls across his skin, stops at the place where a warm hand meets the small of his back. Chan looks over his shoulder, at the empty produce bag in his hand, the not right carrot in the other. “Nothing looks good, huh?”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Chan says easily. Like he’s sure. “You’re just not in the headspace to pick carrots today. Here,” he directs Felix a step to the side with his hands at his waist, plucks the bag from his fingers. “Why don’t you go look at the pumpkins? I owe Dahlia one.”
“Is that her name?”
“Ah, yes,” Chan’s cheeks start running red. “I know it’s embarrassing. It slipped out.”
“It’s not embarrassing,” Felix shakes his head. “I figured you had named her.”
Chan laughs lightly. He’s wearing a baseball cap tight over his curls. Felix wants to knock it off and bury his hands there. “Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because you care about things like that. It's a sign of respect, to afford her a name.”
Felix leaves before he can catch a reaction. He doesn’t care much to see what kind of swirling Chan’s smile will set off in his stomach. He can imagine it perfectly well, without experiencing the nausea that comes with it.
Pumpkins are just as orange as carrots, but they don’t give him the same trouble. Maybe Chan was right about it being a bad carrot day. Bad carrot day, good pumpkin day, but because he’s got someone to help him he can still leave the store with both. That’s a superpower, he’s sure.
“Which one will it be?”
Felix points it out. The perfect pumpkin for Dahlia. Her violent little teeth and strong jaw.
“Love it,” Chan hoists the thing into the cart. “She’ll love it. Thank you, Lixie.”
The urge to kiss Chan always grows when they’re in the car. Something about driving. Eyes on the road, lips moving as he sings quietly along to the music, hand on the gearshift. Felix wants to climb across the way and set himself into Chan’s lap, take his tongue into his mouth, his hand into his chest, take him, in any way he can.
He was afraid that the love would wane. He told his mother so.
Across an ocean, all he had were memories. Ignored texts. His memories were full of love, harsh and true. A year is a long time. His heart seized when he stepped foot off the airplane, when he realized that everything could feel different.
It’s like he had expected to get back and for everything else to have paused, waited for him to catch up. It hit him when he saw Hyunjin and Jeongin’s hands tangled together, that everything could feel very different, all at once.
So he was afraid that the love would wane.
He and Chan have always been above the waves of life. Each new step, they were doing it together.
The love didn’t wane. It burns deep and bright in the core of Felix’s being. Something that’s been dormant for a while will take a while to wake up. A hibernation, joints stiff as winter turns to spring.
His love for Chan is like that. It’s stretching its legs and arms, shooting warmth to the edges of his chest, and when it yawns again, the flame catches, lights.
–
“She looks like you,” Chan whispers, hot into his ear.
They’re watching Dahlia eat. An hour ago, Chan had let Felix hold the pumpkin over his head and send it crashing to the ground, cracking open with a sick thunk.
The shell broke into three big pieces. A perfect throw, Chan said.
They got a blanket, sat side by side, and waited for her to come.
“Shut up, she does not,” Felix says, but he’s smiling, chin tucked to his chest to try to hide the worst of it.
“She does,” Chan insists. “Look at those big eyes, long lashes. I think if we got closer she’d have freckles.”
Felix shoves Chan by the shoulder, gently. Chan plays along, rocking away from him, coming right back, arm settling around Felix’s waist.
Felix looks up at Chan, just the slightest incline from where he’s slouched over, and he wants to kiss him. He wants it so bad he aches to the tips of his fingers, the bones in his feet.
He’ll wait. To make sure it’s not a fluke.
Yesterday in the car, today in the grass.
Tomorrow, if he still wants to kiss Chan, he’ll ask.
An exercise in recognizing his impulsions. He wants something real, that will last. Something that isn’t fleeting, or time sensitive. Or, maybe, he just needs some more time to build up the courage to ask for the thing he’s wanted for five straight years.
–
Three hundred and sixty five days. Not exactly. The exact number is somewhere a bit higher. By now, maybe three hundred and ninety something. Four hundred. Felix doesn’t know, he has never been counting. All he knows is that every day he woke up and thought about Chris.
He thought it would wane, or go away, or something, anything, he doesn’t know what. It never did. It never will, probably. Even if they drift apart, and their weak structure of flimsy metal rods doesn’t survive the days until Felix needs his medication refilled. Even then. That’s why he had to try.
A full day blown by. Birds, deer, chopping carrots and linking ankles beneath the table. A full day before Felix’s heart slows enough to afford him a second to catch his breath and form a simple question.
Standing in the middle of the living room, chest to chest, Chan took the proximity in stride, his hands ghosting over Felix’s hips, Felix’s steady on his chest.
Chan looks so beautiful from up close. The details in his skin, the signs of his life. Divots and marks and scars. His lips are the prettiest shade of pink, they glisten when he pokes his tongue out, a nervous habit.
“Chris, will you kiss me goodnight?”
He’s close enough to hear the slight change in Chan’s breathing. “Is that what you want?”
“I’ve never wanted anything more.”
And then there’s a hand, warm and smooth at his jaw, and he’s leaning in without any help, and tipping his head, and bang.
Felix never kissed Chan before because he knew it would change him in a way he couldn’t come back from. An implosion starting deep in his chest, sending him flying in all directions. When he comes back together again, Chan fills a hole that wasn’t there before, and there’s no coming back from this. From that.
Chan kisses him like he’s running out of time, because he already has. His lips are soft, and his tongue is wet, and the warmth of it sends Felix arching his back, keening in. Chan holds him closer, a hand at the base of his spine, pressing their hips flush. He helps Felix tilt further, to accommodate the depth of his tongue. His nose presses against Felix’s cheek, he tastes the undersides of his teeth, the roof of his mouth.
A slow descent, a gradual fall. Searching turns to sliding tongues, to lockings of lips. Quiet and gentle, they end their dance, but Felix goes back for one more taste as soon as they pull apart.
“Let’s get you to bed, then, little one,” Chan chuckles. A kiss on Felix’s nose, one on each of his cheeks. He’s floating when Chan links their hands, leads him down the hall.
He’s floating when he looks at the clock and doesn’t even register a time. He’s smiling when he falls asleep.
–
“Good, you’re up,” Chan fumbles around the kitchen, throwing things into his pockets. Keys.
“Are you leaving?” Felix’s blood runs cold. He’s been dunked in acid and his skin is falling off of bone.
“I have a few errands to run,” Chan doesn’t look at him. “I didn’t want to leave before you got up.”
Nails and razor blades down his throat, Felix swallows them all and tastes the blood bubbling up with his words. “Do you not want to be with me?”
Chan looks up. How could he not. With Felix bleeding out at his feet. He looks sad, creases in his forehead like cracks in a vase. “No, Lixie, that’s not it,” he says, structure of his words is breathy and light. He steps around the island, holds Felix up before he collapses, hands solid on each side of his face. “I do, baby. But, I just need a second to straighten my head. I’m so into you that I can’t think straight if I don’t take the time to regroup.”
“Okay,” Felix wilts, bows toward him and leans his forehead on his shoulder.
“Will you be alright?” Chan murmurs into his hair, lips and breath and heart.
“I will. As long as you come back.”
“I’ll come back tonight. I promise.”
“I trust you.” The most basic truth. A given. Felix isn’t sure Chan knows, though. He needs Chan to know.
One long, firm kiss on his forehead, and then Chan is gone, leaving Felix in the kitchen with curled toes and closed eyes, the remnants of wound on his insides scabbing over.
In therapy, Felix learned to funnel his restless energy into something productive. He’s become very good at cleaning in the last year.
The numbers on the microwave are green. Nine twenty three AM. Blink. Nine twenty four.
The smell of bleach always clears his head. His mom tells him it’s because it’s killing his brain cells, but he doesn’t mind. The motions of scrubbing are soothing, a massage for his worries, a distraction that rubs them pliant enough to tease apart.
Eleven something. He can’t see the other half of the clock from where he’s kneeling on the floor, hard at work. Cleaning is nice because he feels proud when he’s done.
Two thirty three PM and Felix takes a shower.
He feels it then, the burn low in his gut. He gets himself off with his cheek pressed to tile, fingers pushed inside of himself. He likes fucking himself because it makes him relax. He thinks of Chris’ fingers, his lips, as he does.
Every time he used to do that he’d feel guilty afterwards. Now he just feels hopeful.
Five, and six, and seven. Chan comes home at Seven fifteen, a bag of takeout in his hand.
Felix tries his best to eat. He’s been selfish. He stole Chan’s sweatshirt after his shower, tossed it on over his pajama shorts. Chan doesn’t blink, but Felix hopes he’s feeling something, anything, about it.
“How was your day?” Felix asks, toes shoved underneath Chan’s thigh on the couch, arms hugged around his knees.
Chan runs a hand through his hair, wild and messy. He blows along breath from his mouth, looks at Felix with an unexpected ferocity.
“I need to know what went wrong, Lix.”
There’s no room for interpretation. If Felix were playing dumb, maybe, but he’s not. He’s sick of playing dumb, and he’s sick of pretending he doesn’t want this.
“I didn’t feel like a person.” Felix rests his chin between his knees, forces himself to look Chan in the eye. “I dug myself too deep into a hole, and I felt like a child. I didn’t feel like your equal.”
Chan blinks, he moves a hand to wind around Felix’s ankle. They both need that, for comfort, just a connection point.
“And I felt so guilty, because I know you just wanted to help because you care, but it wasn’t allowing me to get better. I felt so guilty, I was sucking both of us dry. That’s why I had to leave, because I was so depressed. I was slowly dying, and I couldn't get better if I didn’t go. I didn’t tell you because I knew you would try to save me.”
“I understand. You’re right.”
“You do?” Felix’s heart skips a beat, and another. He didn’t know what to expect. Certainly not that.
“Yes,” Chan nods, sure. Just once. No one to convince. “I know you wouldn’t have left if you didn’t have to. I think I just had to come to terms with that.”
“But I came back.”
A tug at the corners of Chan’s lips, a gentle smile. “You did.”
“And I kissed you.”
“You did.” Chan’s thumb rolls over the ball of his ankle.
“I’d really like to kiss you again,” Felix’s tongue runs over his lips, wetting them. “I’d really like you to take me to bed. To make love to me.”
Chan’s hand tightens, his eyes fall shut. “Felix,” he murmurs. Another prayer.
Felix raises a hand to his cheek, lays it flat, small against the sharp line of his jaw. “I’ve been in love with you since I was eighteen, Chris.”
“Felix,” he says again, this time with more feeling. Felix can’t tell if the tone is closer to hope or despair. “I can’t lose you again. I can’t be without you if we start this.”
“You won’t be. We’ll iron it out later, I promise,” Felix feels close to a begging man. He’d get on his knees if that’s what it took. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” Chan tips his chin down, kisses the heel of Felix’s hand. “Implicitly.”
Felix nods, he brings his feet out from under Chan’s leg, unfurls them, maneuvers his power to set himself into his lap. Straddling him, hands on either side of his neck, Chan’s falling to his waist, nearly big enough to meet in the middle.
“I want you to fuck me, Channie, please. I need to feel you.” He collapses in with his next exhale, until their noses are brushing. “Touch me, take care of me. Please.”
“I’ll take care of you, baby.”
Sex is a concept that Felix never felt he had mastered. He has a penchant for daydreaming, and the real thing could never do much but brush the tips of his toes where he was floating.
No one knows him better than Chan. No one could even come close. It translates to this. To his body, his needs. Oh, it translates.
Flat on the bed, a thigh between his legs, Felix leaks into his shorts. He can’t help it, not when Chan’s hands are slipping under the hem of his sweatshirt, dragging across the planes of his stomach, his chest, rolling over his nipples.
Felix gasps. He can’t stop gasping, even when he thinks he’s finally run out of breath. Chan is feeding him new life through each twitch of his finger, refilling his lungs just to punch them clean again.
“Love when you wear my clothes,” he murmurs, sucking Felix’s tongue into his mouth in the next breath. Not a moment between moves, each beat impeccably timed.
Chan is a musician. Felix thinks that after tonight he might become jealous of his guitars. Keyboards. Anything else Chan’s fingers play.
Whimpering, writhing, before he’s even been properly touched.
“Can I take your clothes off, baby?” Chan’s fingers are already hooking under his waistband. Felix nods, he can’t stop, even as he fumbles with tugging his shirt over his head.
Chan chuckles, helps him rid himself of the thing, sighing in appreciation when he has Felix bare from the waist up, shorts forgotten for now. Felix feels divine.
Lips meet collarbone, teeth and tongue follow. No square untouched. Chan is laying a blessing over his body, and all Felix can do is lay and be blessed.
“So gorgeous. You’re unreal. My beautiful boy.”
“You too,” Felix pleads. “I want to see you too.”
Felix never mastered the concept of sex, desire, need, because he was never doing it with the right person. Chris is it for him. The only one that could have him burning from the inside out, the only one that knows him from the outside in. And he knows Chris in return.
He could crawl down his throat and map his insides and teach a class on the intricacies of his being. It would be unfair. Only he could ace the test.
Their friends used to make fun of them. Call them soulmates. In Felix’s opinion it’s something much more than that. Soulmates assumes a meeting. He and Chan are a reunion of missing parts of a whole.
Felix marvels at how his hands look against Chan’s bare chest, the muscle in his stomach. He could melt in, that’s how well he belongs.
“You’re so wet already, baby,” Chan’s eyes are heavy, dark with hunger. “Is all this for me?”
“Everything,” Felix’s eyes roll back at the first stoke of his fist. “All of it is for you. It always has been.”
Chan’s bed is big, the duvet is softer than the pink flowery one. The clock isn’t visible from where Felix is at. It wouldn’t matter, he’s too busy looking at Chan.
He’s looking at Chan as his knees are gently parted, as he takes Chan’s fingers, spread, opened. The leftover signs of his lust from before make Chan moan in satisfaction.
Felix’s lips fall apart when Chan crooks his fingers into his prostate, a twisted gasp, nothing more than, “Ah!”
“I need you inside of me,” Felix begs, his nails dig into Chan’s back, holding him closer. He can feel Chan’s cock, hard through his pants. Why is he still wearing pants? “Please, I’m going to cry if you don’t fuck me.”
“Hush,” Chan kisses up his jaw, behind his ear, nipping at the lobe. “I told you I’d take care of you, Lixie.”
Chan doesn’t have any condoms. He looks completely defeated at the realization. Felix kisses him, tells him he’s crazy if he thinks he would have let him use one anyway.
Felix’s mouth goes wet and dry all at once when he gets Chan out of his pants. He’d daydreamed about this too. He never thought it so thick.
He’d like it in his mouth, really. Preferably stuffed down his throat until he’s gagging. But right now he’s selfish, and needy, and he’s working off a promise that he’ll be taken care of.
“How do you want it, love?” Chan kisses him, again and again, until Felix’s head spins and his cock leaks some more. “Any which way, tell me and I’ll give it to you.”
Chan is giving him the power to decide. He’ll take it, of course he will. He sits Chan against the headboard, climbs into his lap. “When I get tired, I want you to fuck me like you mean it, Chris. Until I can’t talk. Until I cry.”
“Jesus, Felix,” Chan groans, fingers pressing white into the curve of Felix’s ass, bringing him closer, until their cocks are rutting together uselessly.
Felix lifts himself up, takes Chan with little affair. They both go quiet as he does, like the air has been sucked from between them, all the things they need to say contained in their eyes. The first breath is shaky, Felix winds his hands up, into Chan’s hair, grabs and pulls his head back to kiss him.
The glass breaks with the bounce of Felix’s hips. Matching moans, a complete understanding, a cosmic fate.
“Incredible— you’re— fuck,” Chan breathes, helps the steady roll, the lift and fall.
A chant, a hymn, repetitions of his name burn off of Felix’s lips, a delirious babble. To the brim. Full. Deep and sure. Knocking free pieces of his heart with every drag and thrust.
He’s never wished he saved himself before, but Chan makes him want in a way he never thought possible.
Hands on his back, he’s lifted up, left gasping, empty, but then Chris is back, and he’s burying himself inside again, and he’s holding Felix’s hands to the mattress as he fucks into him. Like he means it.
Brainless, Felix hooks sore legs around his waist, loose, accommodating. Chris bears down, thrusts harder, looking straight into his eyes, until Felix is teary and his oh my god’s turn to desperate little whines.
Until he can’t talk.
He was a fool for thinking he wouldn’t cry anyway, when he told Chan he’d cry if he didn’t fuck him. He always cries when it’s good. Nothing has ever felt this good.
A wracked sob, and Chan is kissing the tears off his cheeks, whispering encouragements into his mouth, there we go, baby. My Lixie. Show me how good I make you feel. Cum for me, baby.
And he does, abdomen shuddering with the force of it, his body trying to suck Chan further in, to make it count, to make it last. White as his brain goes, he hangs onto the sight of Chan’s eyes, the prettiest shade of deep brown.
“Inside, I need you, Channie,” his last breath before Chan is there with him.
He thought the love would wane. He was terrified of it. But now he’s feeling the push of Chan’s release deep below his navel, and the flame in his chest reaches a fever pitch.
It’s only grown. It’s bloomed and prospered despite a year of neglect, and he holds it inside. Cherishes it. He’s finally asked for what he wants.
He locks their hips together, if only for a moment.
“I love you, Chris. I always have.”
“I love you too, baby.” Chan kisses him. He smiles against his lips, doesn’t mind the salty remnants of tears. The salt tastes better than it’s derived from pleasure rather than pain.
Some time without. Blink. A minute passes and Felix is born anew. Sprouting from the kisses places on the crown of his head and every other space of his skin.
The moon winks from the gap between the curtains. Chan pulls out, but Felix doesn’t feel like he’s lost him. Not this time.
–
Felix wakes first. He wiggles out of Chan’s arms and steps into his shorts, back into Chan’s sweatshirt. He pads across the house, to the porch, to the step he’s made his resting spot.
The birds are peaceful today. Maybe they could feel the change in the air, the rightening of the world. It will be a good day.
There will be bad days, sure. Always. A consequence of being born of earth instead of on a space ship. So many days have passed, and so many days he’s worked to make himself whole again.
Felix likes feeling proud. He feels impossibly proud of himself. A ribbon tied around an armful of flimsy metal supports, enough to build a life off of.
His therapist didn’t expect him to come back to Chris, but Felix is pretty sure she didn’t expect him to be brave enough to do much at all but lay in bed with his mother. What noise.
The sky turns pink with the sun. It’s going to be a good day.
Chan comes out a while later. He sits next to Felix on the step, a few feet away. They sit quietly for a bit, listening to the mourning doves coo in that particular way of theirs.
“Chris?” When Felix looks, Chan is already there, face soft and lovely. A red and purple indication of Felix’s claim blooms on his throat.
“Hm?”
“I’m moving home.”
A deck of cards, running through emotions. Confusion the most prominent. “What do you mean? Home home, or home here, or?”
“Home here. I’ve already moved, about a month ago. To the city. I’m staying with Seungmin until I find a place of my own.”
Hope. Plain and simple. A breaking grin, dimples and teeth and watery eyes. “You are?” like he’s unsure. Like Felix would ever lie about such a thing.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Felix scooches closer, just a bit, his fingers pressing into wood, teeth catching his cheek. He looks up and Chan is right there, just as he’s meant to be. “I was hoping you’d kiss me.”
So, Chan does.