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The last time Jeonghan saw Seungcheol was in a dream. This is a tad dramatic because the dream is from the previous night, and really, the last time he saw Seungcheol was just over a month ago before he left for a training camp somewhere in Europe—and Jeonghan’s spam of cat memes unread with it. Probably because he’s busy and the network is spotty. If it were anyone else, Jeonghan might think it’s an excuse, but its Seungcheol, who’s never needed one.
This is all to say Jeonghan misses him, particularly in this loud bar surrounded by their little group of idiots, because his favourite pastime when his social battery is spent like it is today, is huddling against Seunghceol—who’s always curled up at the end of the booth—and watching. It's laughing in time with him when Chan bites back hard enough to shock Seungkwan into a sulky silence, having him rest his chin on Jeonghan’s shoulder and hum contentedly, warm and a little tired. It's an instinct to meet his eyes first when Soonyoung is in his element, an instinct that distance doesn’t dull because he leans back anyway, crowds himself against the end of the booth and records Seokmin and Soonyoung doing some bit, lets it take its place in the month’s worth of unread messages.
Jeonghan looks up as a shot of soju clinks against the table in front of him—a swirling, pale neon, like the dull booth coloured with the backscattered lights—and then further up at a very flushed Jisoo. “Stop being sulky and sentimental and come dance,” he says, and then after a beat, “He’s coming home tomorrow.”
Another day, Jeonghan might’ve let it prickle him; he might’ve snapped and retreated because Jisoo sees everything that Jeonghan hides and likes to push at it, press down on it like an old bruise. But today he’s looking at Jeonghan like he does when he’s warm and tipsy, a touch red around the eyes; so Jeonghan concedes, downs the soju and lets himself be dragged by the wrist.
“We should just leave him on the curb,” Jeonghan tells Jisoo later, stumbling under the weight of a very drunk Mingyu, who took those extra shots Wonwoo very emphatically told him not to, because he always ends up like this, slipping on the wet roads and standing half-asleep.
Mingyu makes a whining noise in his ear, nuzzling it like an overgrown puppy. “ Hyuuuung , don’t be mean .” Then he giggles, attempting to face Jeonghan, and knocks their heads together painfully instead. “I love you.”
“Then please don’t pass out on me till I get you in a taxi,” Jeonghan sighs, suppressing the urge to ruffle Mingyu’s hair because they’ll both eat a mouthful of tar if he tries.
Jeonghan’s bones pop in at least three different places as Mingyu’s taxi leaves. Jisoo loops his arm through Jeonghan’s and pulls him along.
“So,” Jeonghan says conspiratorially. “Did you finally kiss Wonwoo?”
“I do not want to kiss Wonwoo.”
“You want him to fuck your brains out.”
“Oh my God, shut up. Leave me alone.”
Jeonghan pulls him closer, slipping his other arm through Jisoo’s, too.
“So, you do.”
“When are you finally going to kiss Seungcheol?”
Again, another day, Jeonghan would’ve run. But he’s buzzed just so, warm down to his bones with the anticipation and Jisoo’s fingers tangled in his.
“Already did,” he says, and lets Jisoo sigh and give up, lets him think he’s running away anyway.
←
When Jeonghan was young, his father threatened to abandon him in the middle of a 7-Eleven. He remembers it rather acutely, the harsh LEDs even with the glaring summer sun outside, the goosebumps on his skin from the air conditioner. The shelves were double his height and he couldn’t find the shrimp chips he knew to always be in the last row, right in the centre display.
“I’m not going to ask her for you, Jeonghan-ah,” his father had said. “I’m only here to pay.” Because Jeonghan was young, but just old enough. Old enough to break out of his shell, his father had coaxed him, old enough to ask. But Jeonghan had always been bad at asking for things he wanted. He would rather hide away in his father’s shadow and say he didn’t really want it anyway. Being old enough didn’t help.
It grew, like that. The meekness and timidity morphed itself into something bigger, more daunting, the shadow of its creature inescapable, until Jeonghan had to leash it in with fraying ropes and pretend it wasn’t biting at his insides. It seems stupid now—maybe it was just a simple shyness after all. Maybe it was only so big because he was so small, maybe it was nothing at all, but his insides are stained crimson anyway.
At a party, a distant relative asks him how he’s doing in school.
“It’s going good, samcheon ,” he says, because he can’t say, It sucks and I want to die.
He can’t, because his mother will hear later through the half-jokes and half-chidings about her son and sit him down, say sternly, Your words hold weight, Jeonghan-ah. Use them carefully.
Jeonghan doesn’t really understand, but he concedes anyway, asks politely in return about his uncle’s wife and family, tries to remember what college his daughter got into and what he does for a living because his mother had told him to be interested. A day later, Jeonghan can barely remember what he looked like.
Soonyoung will tell him later, years and years later, at his apartment and on his third beer, that he thought Jeonghan shallow on their first meeting.
“I thought you were just being polite,” he will say, like the room isn’t spinning just a little. “I didn’t think you meant it when you said we would be good friends. You didn’t look like you meant it.”
Jeonghan can’t remember what he said in reply, if he said anything at all, but it becomes the first of many. Aloof , he hears. Closed-off . Enthusiastic and smiling and full of questions and answers, but with an opaque sincerity. A smokescreen. For a long time, it doesn’t weigh too much on his mind because Soonyoung comes to love him anyway, and while Jeonghan loves being loved, a stranger’s opinion is allowed only so much space in his insecurities. It is one cold November night, however, that Jeonghan sees where he really stands, how even everyone he knows to be his, in his orbit like companion stars in a galaxy too big for him, sees him only through a telescope. Yoon Jeonghan, Jisoo had said then, drunk and teetering on the edge of unconsciousness, sentimental as he is in moments like this, tucked against Jeonghan’s shoulder in a cab, you seem so far away, even like this.
→
When Jeonghan eventually stopped taking his pills, he’d had just enough to hold onto and just enough to forget: forget that he’s trying to forget his parents, forget why sometimes the edges of his vision go dark. Forgetting was just as hard as remembering, harder even, because it slipped around him, why he was bothering at all when it was all the same, really, in the end. The stitches in his skin only kept it from bleeding all over, and they hurt more than the wound. For a whole year, the vicious teeth came slinking back, but the threadbare rope snagged itself in all the sharp corners, cradling all the soft, fleshy parts of his insides, until he could no longer tell whether it was a blessing or a curse.
It’s different now, the rough edges smoothed over with time. Jeonghan is happy. He hasn’t cried himself to sleep in years. He hates working but it lets him contribute to buying Jisoo the ugliest orange couch he’s ever seen as a gag gift, which is a joke on himself because they share a living room. He hates having to wake up at 7am but it’s nice that Minghao is the first face he sees in the morning as he picks up his coffee. Everything he likes weaves itself into him in little ways—one to match everything he dislikes.
But sometimes it all comes back, like that: stone grey and washed out, bone-tired from just waking up, curled into his sheets for wholly inappropriate amounts of time. It comes back like that, when Soobin visits him on the third Sunday of the month, gives him two boxes of radish kimchi and says like it’s a script, Call Eomma, she misses you ; when he comes home too close to midnight in a skewed tie, and his striped shirt has the afterimages of all the neon signs three streets down from his, drained and empty and filling up with the past instead.
It comes back like that now, when Seungcheol waves at him weakly, pretty smile and tired eyes, enveloping Jeonghan in a hug anyway, arms strong around his waist. Like when he takes a closer look at Jeonghan’s face and says, “How much did you drink yesterday?”
Sometimes it swallows him up, like that, everything he’s worked hard to leave behind.
“Less than Mingyu,” he answers, still, with a smile, pawing at the overgrown brown of Seungcheol’s hair. “Do they not have hairdressers in Germany?”
Seungcheol pinches his side and is satisfied with the yelp he gets in response. “I didn’t have time,” he says. “And Mingyu is not a healthy standard for alcohol consumption.”
Jeonghan rolls his eyes and begins leading them towards his car. “What do you think about yukgaejang? I bet your taste buds have become weak from all the bread.”
“Seriously? I get off a twelve-hour flight, and you won’t even help with my luggage?” Seungcheol chides, but Jeonghan takes only the lone gift back hanging from the handle of the smaller suitcase.
“You’re the martial artist here; stop asking me to do your heavy lifting.” There’s no bite to it, just Jeonghan’s rushing pulse right at the high of his cheekbone. “You look paler.”
“I was only there a month.” He knows Seungcheol is making a face as he begins to drag the suitcases along anyway. “Germans don’t eat only bread, by the way.”
“What’s this?” Is Jeonghan’s non-answer because the rectangular box inside the gift bag is covered in what looks like cat-themed wrapping paper and gives away nothing.
“Have patience,” Seungcheol says placatingly— annoyingly —flicking Jeonghan’s cheek when he pouts. “Yukgaejang sounds good. But let’s get some spicy tteokbokki first.”
Jeonghan drives.
←
In his last year of college, Jeonghan realises that he wants to kiss Seungcheol. It’s nothing big, really, nothing special. He knocks at Seungcheol’s door at the end of a tedious week, an insistent, scratchy buzzing under his skin, his hands trembling ever so slightly from exhaustion. When Seungcheol opens the door, hair dripping and in his favourite grey sweatpants, he lets Jeonghan’s forehead go straight to his collarbone, lets him nose at the collar of the oversized printed t-shirt that he loves to steal.
“Long day?” Seungcheol asks, heel of his palm against Jeonghan’s neck, fingers in his hair.
Jeonghan takes a second, two more, grumbles, “Long week ,” and looks up. He messes with Seungcheol’s beach-blond mop of hair, says, “Your roots are showing.”
“I like it,” he gets in reply. Me too, he wants to say.
“You look like pudding,” he says instead, pushing his way in and slumping onto the couch.
“Sleep.” Seungcheol shuts the door behind him with a click. “I’ll make us something.”
Jeonghan opens his eyes only to the smell of cup ramen as it’s set down on the coffee table that they’d thrifted together—small and a pretty mahogany. They watch New Journey to the West and drink strawberry soju in the pale-yellow lamplight of Seungcheol’s living room. When it’s late but not respectably late enough for college students, Jeonghan’s mind is half-lucid from the tiredness and the itch under his skin has been replaced by something more pleasant. It’s a hum, warm, like the cicadas singing in the still summer air, against the wood of the oak tree—like Seungcheol singing under his breath, head tucked into Jeonghan’s shoulder, stained sticky sweet from the soju. Like Seungcheol’s eyes as he lifts his head at Jeonghan’s sudden stillness, like the tilt of his head when he asks, “Want to sleep?”
Jeonghan shakes his head. “No.” I think I love you.
“Okay,” Seungcheol says easily, smiling, “Another beer?”
He says yes even though he doesn’t really want one. He watches Seungcheol slide his socked feet across to the kitchen, illuminated softly by the light of the TV, all changing colours and scattering patterns. He comes back, hands Jeonghan his beer, and offers his shoulder this time. Jeonghan’s throat is dry and the beer doesn’t help. Everything is stuck there. They’ve had so many nights like this, when Jeonghan was in better places, when he was at his worst. His twenty second birthday. The night after the funeral. The day Seungcheol won his last college match.
There is nothing as insignificant as this night where Jeonghan is just drained from classes and maybe a little terrified that his graduation is closer than it is far away. There’s nothing special, because Seungcheol looks at him like this all the time. Always gives this way—the beer, the shoulder, the shirts Jeonghan never returns, the fingers in his hair, the bed he wakes up in the next morning. It’s so normal that Jeonghan feels stupid, wants to wrap himself around Seungcheol and cry.
“Jeonghan-ah?”
Up his eyes go, from the ripped seams of the shirt to the fading blond. “Are you okay?”
“Just tired,” he says. I love you.
Seungcheol has the decency to look only a little worried. “Sure you don’t wanna sleep?”
The tips of Jeonghan’s fingers are trembling again, so he takes the shoulder offered in response, a sip of the cold beer. He lets Seungcheol distractedly turn his palm over and doesn’t meet his eyes. He thinks of looking up, of smoothing the worried lines he knows are creasing Seungcheol’s forehead, and if he didn’t think a single twitch of the muscle would shatter the fragile air around him, he might’ve. Instead, everything unsaid makes its home in Jeonghan’s lungs, chokes him up like the black ash of his cigarette smoke.
In the dark blue haze between late nights, early mornings, and the muted TV, Jeonghan will understand that it’s the other way around, that it all comes from somewhere much deeper, much before the 7-Eleven with its glaring lights and the hundred first-and-only conversations he’s had.
What are you so afraid of? His father had asked him once—many times, really—a precursor to the same fights they always had. Jeonghan never had an answer, only the prickling, too close to the surface of his skin but too far to scratch away.
There’s something else there, something mortifying. Paralysing, because Jeonghan, who barely understands who he is, cannot crack, cannot give himself away in any capacity, cannot cross the line he drew for himself—can’t lose something he can’t even define. Can’t spill over. So, he’ll hold himself close to his own chest, head between the knees, tucked away into places nobody is allowed to see, and hope they’ll come looking anyway.
→
It’s Seungcheol’s welcome back party, and Jeonghan’s body that is pushing thirty is simply not meant for two plastered nights in a row. They haven’t talked all night but Jeonghan is too busy bullying Chan and Mingyu to let it get to him. Drinking or not, it’s always fun to count how many shots it takes for Soonyoung to start crying. Still, he eventually ends up sipping on some suspicious concoction at the bar because his creaking joints don’t agree with whatever Seokmin and Minghao are doing on the dancefloor.
“Hyung.” It’s Jihoon.
Jeonghan puts his drink down and breaks into a smile. “Our Jihooniiie~” he says to be annoying, and maybe to pretend he doesn’t know where this is going. Jihoon fixes him with a blank stare and takes a seat beside him anyway, so he gives up.
Jihoon doesn’t say anything for a while. Jeonghan is accustomed to the silences, but the picking at the skin of his fingers is new. The sliding glances, too, anywhere but Jeonghan’s face. Jihoon is nothing if not straightforward and entirely unafraid, so this is not just new, but strange. Jeonghan knows, however, that more than anything, Jihoon is especially kind, the most perceptive person he knows.
“You don’t have to say anything.” Jeonghan doesn’t look, gives him a way out. “You won’t offend me, if that’s what you’re afraid of, but it’s okay if you just can’t.”
Jihoon turns to him slightly in his periphery. “Hyung, that’s not—” he pauses, breathes out like he’s frustrated, and Jeonghan can’t tell with whom. Jihoon looks over to where Seungcheol is, laughing at Joshua and Seokmin trying to ballroom dance, trails his eyes back to meet Jeonghan’s. “You know how he is.” He says evenly, and Jeonghan bristles because he knows that tone, the tone that means everything he’s saying is carefully measured—carefully concealing and carefully revealing.
Jeonghan raises an eyebrow, but Jihoon is already hopping off the stool, apparently having given up on this conversation even faster than Jeonghan. He looks back only once. “I just,” a breath, a carefully placed strand falling into his eyes again. “I don’t want you to regret anything, hyung. Always.”
Three drinks later, Jeonghan is still at the bar and Seungcheol is lost in conversation with Wonwoo, probably catching him up on the camp. He’s always beautiful like this, uninhibited in his love and laughter, surrounded by his whole life in a small space that’s just his. Seungcheol is simple like that, easy to please and easy to satisfy. The light catches in Seungcheol’s smiling eyes, and Jeonghan suddenly feels the air drain around him. He tells a mostly sober Jun that he’s taking a breather and hopes the grapevine will both inform and deter anyone looking for him.
Except for Seungcheol, of course, whose footsteps he hears only a minute later. When Jeonghan sees him peek into the alley, he turns his head just enough for an acknowledgement, and then back, lets it rest against the wall. “It’s your party. Why are you out here?”
“Why are you?”
Jeonghan meets him with the sharp edge of his eyes, shrugs. “I’m trying to cut down on drinking.”
“And replace it with worse things?”
Jeonghan shrugs. Seungcheol gives him a look.
“Shut up,” Jeonghan says.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Shut up anyway.”
“Maybe I should start secretly getting rid of them every time you buy some.”
“Say goodbye to your precious action figure collection, then. Two for each pack you throw away.”
Seungcheol pouts up at him, because he always slinks down like this despite his height, as if he wants to look Jeonghan right in the eyes.
“You have terrible posture for a martial artist,” he says, so he doesn’t have to hold the stare. Seungcheol seems to consider, whether to let the rope go or pull the noose tighter still.
“And you have terrible habits for someone who’s always threatening to haunt Jisoo in the afterlife.”
There’s no undertone to it anymore—nothing unsaid, nothing to read between the lines for, and Jeonghan is thankful for it. He lets it go too, loosens the hold, says easily, “Ghosts don’t age. I can hang around and wait for a little while.”
The answer is easy, too. “You have strange ways of admitting you love someone, Yoon Jeonghan.”
Of course, Jeonghan thinks, you would know best.
←
When Jeonghan is seventeen and leaning against the overgrown roots of the lone oak tree in their school yard, Seungcheol is the first to come looking. Seungcheol plays idly with the ends of his box-dyed beach-blond hair under the shade of its canopy where the summer sun burns into him through the gaps in the leaves. There’s cigarette smoke in the humid air and calloused fingers at his nape.
“You should quit smoking,” Seungcheol is saying, waving away the smoke and wrinkling his nose distastefully.
“Why? Because it’s bad for my health?”
“Because it’s bad for mine, ” Seungcheol counters. “Hapkido is all about breathing. I need to breathe well so I can keep tripping Jeon Wonwoo onto the mat forever.”
“What a romantic,” Jeonghan scoffs, takes a longer drag.
Seungcheol pouts, switches tactics. “It’ll be your fault if I can’t teach you how to defend yourself because I’m sick and you end up dead in a ditch.” Jeonghan smiles because he understands, and so does Seungcheol, because he understands, too, always.
Three years later, Seungcheol will let Jeonghan ghost him for three weeks and then make his way to the little apartment he shares with Seungkwan. He’ll find Jeonghan on the couch in clothes that are days old and say nothing. Will make him tea, wash the dishes that have been in the sink for a week because Seungkwan went home to visit his family. He’ll change Jeonghan’s sheets and water his poor cactus and drag him to the bath he’s drawn up and set the plates on the table. When Jeonghan walks out, there will be ramen next to the kimchi jjigae full of the expiring store-bought kimchi in the fridge. It’ll be replaced with a box of his mother’s fresh kimchi instead. Jeonghan will drag himself up from under the tides just so Seungcheol’s hard work doesn’t go to waste, because he owes at least that much. The food will taste like nothing on his tongue but Seungcheol’s gummy smile will be enough to make him full.
Four years later, it won’t be Jeonghan’s fault, but he’ll leave in the middle of class and run desperately to find Seungcheol’s leg in a cast, stretched taut and resting on the loop of bandage hanging from the bedframe. He’ll want to scream but he won’t. He’ll want to throw up and tear his hair out but he won’t. He won’t, because it’s not him whose entire life is halted one day short of the most important match of his college career. Seungcheol looks at him like his life is over, except it isn’t.
Jeonghan will burn all the kimchi fried rice and nearly half his kitchen, and stick to bringing his mother’s gimbap and flowers to the hospital instead. He’ll be the third crutch when Seungcheol hates having even one and pretend to be asleep when he hears the muffled sniffling in the middle of the night. He’ll hold Seungcheol’s hand when the cast is finally off and tighten the black belt around his dobok before his first step onto the mat in seven months, and Seungcheol will look at him like he’s been given another life, because he has.
Five years later Seungcheol will stand tall on the podium draped in red ribbon and a gold medal the size of half his chest and hold a bouquet of wildflowers. He’ll smile at Jeonghan who’s tucked away in the last rows of the audience, drowning in the ugly blue varsity jacket. Jeonghan will stick to two shots of soju and dodge Seokmin’s flailing arms as he cries about how proud he is of Seungcheol. He’ll get roped into Seungkwan’s pointless arguments with Mingyu and pick sides for fun. He’ll needle Minghao till he gets cursed out in incomprehensible Chinese and tell him everything he wants to know about Soonyoung.
Much later, he’ll let a warm and happy and sated Seungcheol bury his face in the crook of his neck and drag him to the park nearby. They’ll sit on the swings because Seungcheol needs the air, because he can finally breathe again.
Back under the tree, Jeonghan leans his head selfishly into Seungcheol’s shoulder to hide the red tips of his ears and puts the cigarette out so that Seungcheol will let him stay longer.
→
Jihoon is cooking, which should’ve been reason enough for Jeonghan to refuse this particular hangout, but it’s his second anniversary with Mingyu and he’s trying to be sweet, making up for whatever it was at Seungcheol’s comeback party. Jihoon rarely asks anything of him, and maybe Jeonghan isn’t as immune to Mingyu’s pouting as he likes to think. So, he picks an expensive wine he knows Mingyu will like and forgoes his pile of hoodies and cardigans for a simple button-up and some nice pants.
Seungcheol is in a black dress-shirt and some jeans with his hair pushed back, which feels wholly unfair and more uncalled for than the coffee machine being broken for a week straight at his office.
Ultimately, Jihoon somehow burns the japchae, makes the best galbi-jjim Jeonghan has ever eaten, and knocks back half the wine bottle with Seungcheol. Jeonghan accepts the apology for what it is, although there’s nothing to forgive. As he cleans up, Mingyu comes back into the kitchen looking equal parts fond and exasperated. Jeonghan smiles back.
“How’s he doing?”
Mingyu makes a cutting motion across his throat. “He hasn’t drunk like that in ages.”
Jeonghan towels his hands, and sends Mingyu his most lovingly annoying smile. “He must be really happy.”
Mingyu goes red in the face like he expects, so he lends some mercy. “Seungcheol?”
“My bed.”
Jeonghan nods, takes two freshly washed wine glasses, and turns around in question. Mingyu’s eyes crinkle.
They end up against the side of the couch, illuminated only by the flickering lights of the one a.m. Seoul skyline that reflect off the wine like diamonds in blood. Mingyu sits close, takes a sip, puts the glass down. He knocks his shoulder against Jeonghan’s.
“You seem happy today, hyung.”
Jeonghan pauses, grins sharply, “Told you the wine was good.”
Mingyu’s laughs a touch awkwardly, and his eyes flit around, landing in the vague direction of Jeonghan’s wine glass. “I meant with—you know,” He tips his head in the general direction of his room.
Mingyu has always been like this, since they met in the second year of college, in Jeonghan’s compulsory Politics lecture. He’s honest, upfront—the same way Seungcheol and Jihoon are —but more so, he’s brave. You’re all idiots, he’d said on one of the nights they’d been convinced that they would all never again be the way they were then, under the sombre lights of Jihoon’s dorm room, if you think I’d let go of you all so easily. Instead of drinking away the fear like they were, he’d clinked their glasses with hope, bound them to the pact that one day every month would be theirs and theirs only. Mingyu’s sincerity and his love make him tactless, his fear that always fights instead of fleeing, which he doesn’t see as a flaw at all, and which is Jeonghan’s worst nightmare.
“Mingyu-yah—” he starts, only to be interrupted.
“I’m just saying.” He still won’t look away.
Jeonghan shares that stubbornness; it’s how he got this far. “No, you’re not.”
Mingyu won’t look away, even still, won’t answer, and there’s something else there, besides his annoying persistence, something that makes Jeonghan ask: “Why are you bringing this up now, Mingyu-yah?”
Mingyu snaps his gaze away at that, takes a moment. He huffs, then, pouting, and Jeonghan is reminded that he is young, still, in many ways. “Fine,” he concedes. “It’s just—” He looks up again and all the somethings that Jeonghan can’t decipher have been wiped off his face. It’s unusual for him to hold back.
“I just hate seeing you both like this.”
Jeonghan tilts his head, only a little menacing. “Like what?”
Mingyu falters. “You know, like,” he waves his arm around, drops his head heavily back onto the couch. “...this.”
Jeonghan contemplates, chooses to laugh because he loves to pretend, loves to run. “Mingyu-yah,” he says, “We’re both adults. If Seungcheol had an issue with anything—if there was something wrong with the way things are, he’d tell me.” Jeonghan can’t tell how much he’s lying because he doesn’t know. Mingyu looks like he does. He gives Jeonghan an unreadable look.
“Hyung,” he says, sounding tired. “He lets you get away with everything. What’s a little more?”
←
Sometimes, rarely, when he’s just on the right side of being tipsy and the night is quiet, Jeonghan will wonder to himself, will try to trace the iron fist around his heart back to its roots. He will remember the sound of glass shattering in the kitchen through the music blasting in his headphones, the shrill voices that follow, so distant and unrecognisable though they’re only twenty feet away. He’ll remember folding himself under the study table as small as he can, hoping the ground will swallow him up and take him far away, someplace quiet. Remembers the last time he saw his parents together, drowning in the gown and cap that was two sizes too big for him and sensing, through the hugs and praises and teeth-filled smiles, that they didn’t look at each other once.
He wonders on these nights whether years of tiptoeing around his own house, knowing instinctively where the landmines were, is what brings Mingyu and Dokyeom and Chan to him on their bad days; if playing therapist and peacemaker to those who were supposed to raise him brings Vernon and Jihoon and Soonyoung to him on their worst ones. If that’s why he gives it so freely, because it’s all he knows.
He wonders on those nights what else, if anything, makes them stay.
Hyung? Seungkwan will say. Can I talk to you about something? And Jeonghan will pause the new episode he’d just started and think about it for the two hours that Seungkwan talks. Jihoon will look a little off, or maybe he’ll look like he always does, but Jeonghan will ask, You good? And it’ll feel like lead on his tongue because he can’t tell if he actually cares, or just wants to show Jihoon that he does. After their monthly meetup at Wonwoo’s apartment, he’ll peel himself off the couch and volunteer to do the dishes, usher Chan out of the kitchen and ten minutes later grind his teeth to stop the tears, because his hands are shaking again and he can hear the loud chatter from just around the corner and he’s forgotten to turn on the light near the sink.
It feels like play-acting, like he’s painted on a mask, so that can tease and whine and poke as much as he likes, push the limits as far as they go, so long as he’s just nice enough— just helpful enough, just useful enough, just on the right side of everything—to matter. It’s just a checklist to follow: ask Minghao about his shoulder in the morning, offer to wash Seungkwan’s mug when he’s done with his tea, pretend like he doesn’t want the last piece of sushi so Chan can have it instead. Keep watching and keep the time and steer Soonyoung away right before Jihoon snaps at him, pull Minghao aside and ask about Jun’s palpable silence, buy an unsmiling Seokmin beef and get him drunk enough to either start talking or forget. He’ll keep ticking the boxes, pretending all his wants are altruistic, and try to forget the way he wants to crawl into the ground or run away to another country.
Jeonghan is always walking the line, toeing it dangerously, playing the role as if everyone is watching, like it’s just a matter of time before he’ll slip and be left standing alone in the spotlight like a museum display, all fingers pointed at him, the murmurs of pretender and fraud and cheat sinking into his skin like invisible tattoos. In the million lives fluttering around him, Jeonghan is just arrogant enough to think that everyone cares about his.
→
One thing Jeonghan never has to pretend about, though, is his concerningly low stamina and general lack of talent at anything remotely athletic, which is funny considering the large portion of his youth spent watching Seungcheol’s form in the bleached white lights of their school gymnasium. Somewhere between the cold October breeze, and the match after match after match he’d attended pretending to know the rules, it becomes a thing: spending the dull hours of the night on the cold wooden floor of the dojang, dragging a mat out when it’s been a long day— over the years, another notch in the wood post of things that are just them, unspoken and unquestioned.
Seungcheol is his best on the mat. Seungcheol, who is burdened always by the weight of his own expectations, whose eyes flit a million different directions because he’s easily distracted, easily overwhelmed by the beauty in all the little nothings around him, stray only within the proportions of his opponent, feet planted in foam. For somebody with his heart on his sleeve and fire in his veins, Seungcheol moves like water. Makes space for everything in his way, caves in as a defence, uses the puzzle pieces he’s created to match every blow. Up, slowly, down under and up again, hold and switch, chest moving in tandem with every twitch of the muscle that it everything seizes in Jeonghan’s lungs, drowns him like the flowing water and leaves him breathless.
It’s a summer night, distant in Jeonghan’s memory, where Seungcheol tells him, “Falling techniques are the most important.” He gestures for Jeonghan to come forward, tightening the belt on the dobok he’d borrowed and letting his hands rest there on his hips, just over it.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” Jeonghan asks, head tilted up, and Seungcheol smiles through the heat.
“Obviously. But you need to do it to get used to it. Over and over.”
The hands on his waist tighten. “Don’t keep your body too loose.” He nudges at Jeonghan’s foot with his. “And take a step back and sit down as I lift you off. Don’t land on your knee.”
Jeonghan falls, lands a little too hard on the tailbone, but he manages to roll backward and right up, hair all in his face. It breaks a giggle out of him. “So, you just fall and get back up for hours on end?”
Seungcheol’s eyes crinkle. “You switch too, to learn both about the fall and the throw.” He reaches a hand out, and Jeonghan takes it. “It’s about reciprocity. I will fall for you, and in exchange, you will fall for me.” He combs his fingers gently through Jeonghan’s hair and back, out of his eyes. “Then we both stop fearing it.”
Even now, though, many summers later, knowing the rules isn’t much help when Seungcheol’s shoulders are twice the size of his and the grip of his palm is hiked riskily up the thigh. What Jeonghan likes best about hapkido is that there are no sharp corners and no surprises. It’s clean and structured, meant to disarm and placate rather than abuse. It’s this supposition, however, that is Jeonghan’s weakness: that predictability means ease, that structure means comfort.
“You have too many tells,” Seungcheol says, leaning over Jeonghan, blocking the blinding LEDs above. “You move cautiously, like you’re watching me for cues, like a street cat trying to escape instead of attack.” Seungcheol lets go at that, and Jeonghan lets the ceiling lights burn through the sweat beading his forehead, trying to slow his breathing.
“You don’t win by watching me, Jeonghan-ah.” He reaches a hand out. Jeonghan takes it, this time again, and notes the way Seungcheol hasn’t really looked at him all night. He does this too, often: holds the fight in his body, stiff in the way he moves, when he’s trying to hold something back and trying to pretend he’s not. Jeonghan lets him, because there’s nothing to do but wait when Seungcheol is in his own head.
“How do I win, then?” he asks instead.
Seungcheol looks up slowly, finally meets his gaze, and the shallow breaths Jeonghan was taking halt entirely. “You win by leading the fight.” Seungcheol breaks, looks down and up again. “By leading me.”
←
If there’s one thing Jeonghan learnt from slaving away at his job, it was that in most cases, outcomes of risks could be predicted to the point where it wasn’t really considered a risk at all.
And also that if that isn’t the case, taking risks is a stupid thing to do. Seungcheol is one of those things.
In his very short vegan phase, Seungcheol drank nothing but oat milk, and given how often he stayed over, Jeonghan had to add it to the grocery list every other week. It was one of those things Seungcheol did, deciding to change his life and committing to it devoutly, even if he gave it up in a month. Jeonghan chalked this one up to their newly attained statuses as adults with jobs and Seungcheol’s obligation to be healthy for a pay check. He was brave like that.
This is simple, though, compared to Seungcheol quitting his very well-paying job of three years as an instructor because he wanted to start his own dojang. It wasn’t a stupid thing to do, not really, because it’s Seungcheol. But Jeonghan can’t imagine waking up with a dream and then walking straight into it like that, walking straight out of everything you know. He tells himself instead that he treads the line between practicality and fiction—always has—that reality demands the fear festering in his ribs.
He doesn’t need to tell himself any differently when they wordlessly apply to the same colleges and Seungcheol says Who’s going to put up with your whining when you need to bleach your roots every two months? Jeonghan goes and dyes it a wine red in the first year, but Seungcheol is there for that too, to make sure Jeonghan doesn’t fall asleep with his head hanging over the edge of the sink.
The ambiguity of the middle is nice like that, when Jeonghan goes to Daegu every month because it’s close to their university, where Seungcheol’s mother keeps the peanuts far away and his brother buys him shoes for his birthday and they watch every movie with subtitles on just for him.
There’s no reason to tip the scales in either direction—risk the half-crumpled post-it notes Seungcheol leaves on Seungkwan’s battered fridge, and later on Jisoo’s expensive one, with grocery lists and reminders about doctor’s appointments—because nothing and no one except for Jeonghan and Seungcheol could take each other away.
→
When the call from his sister came, Jeonghan was doing laundry. He was pouring in the fabric softener, focused on trying to extend its lifespan by measuring it drop by drop as she stuttered hesitantly on the crackling phone speaker. The delighted laughter of the ahjumma across the street carried over to his cramped little balcony. The kids returning from school leaned against the graffiti-ed brick wall for momentary relief from the July sun. The neighbourhood sparrows were chirping. Jeonghan was doing laundry, and his father was dead.
Today feels a little like that.
“I got an offer,” Seungcheol tells him. “A permanent position.”
He thinks Seungcheol keeps talking after that, something about Germany and coaching and how he’ll still be able to compete if he likes, but it’s all dull, far away, like Jeonghan’s brain has been emptied and re-stuffed with cotton. It peters out slowly, like fading music, and catches again only when he hears, “I leave in two months.”
Jeonghan’s dentist appointment is in two months, a fact he’s sure he’ll forget because Seungcheol has reminded him every year since they turned twenty. There will be an extra box of radish kimchi left too, because he always gives one to Seungcheol on the third Sunday of the month. Everything slows in Jeonghan’s head, molten lava on rock, and then clicks into place like a rusty switch. He remembers where he is.
“Do the others know?” He tries to keep the edge out of it, but Jeonghan has always been a creature full of teeth.
Seungcheol breaks the steady gaze he’d been holding, wrings his hands together like he’d done six years ago, asking if he could come with Jeonghan to the therapist, scared to cross the line, scared to rip the ropes he’s always tugging at.
“You’re the last person I’m telling.”
Jeonghan stutters somewhere between hurt and flattery. He could ask why, but he knows the answer: it’s hard, when it’s them. It feels ridiculous too, because Seungcheol is always everything Jeonghan isn’t. In the same city with its buildings of glass and streets of smoke, Seungcheol runs, hair flying and face etched with laughter, and Jeonghan can only watch.
“Are you mad?” Seungcheol is picking off the skin around his nails now, and Jeonghan remembers. Seungcheol is always thinking of him, even here, in places where he is no one.
He places his hand on top of Seungcheol’s, if only to stop him. “Are you stupid? Of course not.” He flicks Seungcheol on the forehead, gets him to look up. “Are you happy?”
There’s a heavy silence filled with something Jeonghan can’t decipher before it’s all gone, lost in the smile that stretches across Seungcheol’s face. “I am.”
Jeonghan mirrors it and hopes it doesn’t look as pasted on as it is. “Then I’m happy, too.”
←
For all that they’ve shared with each other—all the late nights and early morning they’ve dragged their conversations into over stale beer and day-old chicken and the muted TV—there’s only one night that remains locked in the box they stuffed it into, the key lost on purpose, because it was just a kiss and it didn’t matter.
Because Jeonghan was drunk and his father was dead and nothing mattered.
It’s simple, like most things are with them. Jeonghan can’t remember the last thing he’d said to his father, the last thing his father had said to him. The last time they talked was three months ago. He doesn’t go to the funeral because he knows his mother is crying, only does so after his sister calls to say that Eomma left. Seungcheol comes along, does everything Jeonghan is supposed to do: greets the guests—all the faces he’s seen in passing at Jeonghan’s house, the ones he’s never seen at all—asks them to eat, cleans up the tables. Jeonghan sits and stares at the picture of his father that his mother chose, one from the early days of their marriage, smiling under the Gangwondo sun. He’d never gotten a portrait done.
When it’s past midnight and everyone has left and his mother still hasn’t returned, Jeonghan goes home. Seungcheol doesn’t say anything, just follows him—closes the door because Jeonghan forgets to and pulls melon soju out of the fridge.
When Jeonghan is two bottles in and Seungcheol’s first shot is only half empty, he cries. His hands shake until his glass is set down, and he keeps crying.
When the tears have dried and it’s closer to daylight and his father has been dead two days already, Jeonghan turns. “Kiss me,” he says, and Seungcheol does, presses him into the base of the couch until the dull ache in his spine numbs the throbbing in his head, until he forgets why he’s tasting salt on his tongue.
→
He avoids Seungcheol. Not obviously—he doesn’t cancel plans or text him any less—but he doesn’t let Seungcheol bring it up, veers the conversation immediately away anytime he tries. Seungcheol notices because of course he does, tries to ask, but even he can’t stop Jeonghan when he’s running away. Jeonghan works himself to the bone instead, late and overtime and everything in between, goes to company dinners and gatherings, attends a co-worker’s housewarming, a baby shower of a staff member he’s talked to no more than two times.
“Shocking. You’re alive,” Jisoo says at two in the afternoon one Sunday, when Jeonghan finally drags himself out of bed. It’s probably deserved because he doesn’t think he’s seen Jisoo in two weeks, but that’s for a reason too, a reason that Jeonghan is reminded of immediately when a cup of coffee is set down in front of him. He would have walked away if the steam didn’t instantly cure his headache.
“Are we going to talk about it?”
Jeonghan groans, picking up the mug. “I just woke up.”
“It’s a wonder you did at all, actually, given that you haven’t been home in four days.”
Jeonghan takes a sip. “Sorry.” It’s half-sincere.
Jisoo sits down on the opposite side of the kitchen counter. “I’m not mad. I’m worried.” He sighs. “The last time you were like this was—”
Jeonghan sees what’s coming from a mile away. He bites the bullet to pretend he’s in control.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jeonghan knows—and so does Jisoo if the look on his face is anything to go by—that he’s being as unsubtle as he possibly can, that the accusation isn’t fair. Jisoo tells him as much.
“It wasn’t my place.”
“That’s never stopped you before.”
Jisoo rolls his eyes. “Betraying you in some stupid game in college is not the same thing and you know it.”
“It was still an asshole move—”
“You do it all the time —” He catches himself. “Stop distracting me.” He breathes out, shifting uncomfortably. They don’t do this, him and Jisoo. Their friendship is built on concrete layers of superficiality with unsaid understanding filling in all the million little gaps. They don’t do this, because they are not Mingyu or Minghao or Seungkwan. They are a push and a pull, conversations full of half-questions and half-answers, because it’s enough and doesn’t feel like being stripped naked under a microscope.
In the end, though, it’s Jisoo’s eyes that are pulling at the corners from the same bone-deep exhaustion that win, and like he’s been doing a lot lately, Jeonghan gives in first. He picks at the ratty edges of his sleep shirt—another piece of Seungcheol he’d stolen—shrugs like he isn’t spilling everything inside him messily across their stupid faux wooden flooring. “I can’t be selfish.”
Jisoo studies him for a second, then lets out a short, disbelieving laugh. “Don’t pretend to be good,” he says.
Jeonghan frowns. He doesn’t know whether to be offended or relieved that Jisoo never takes him seriously. “Yah—”
“You’re scared.”
He’d forgotten that Jisoo takes him very seriously—the most, more than anyone. He’d forgotten that Jisoo had held his hand to the therapist’s office, held them under the washed-out covers in Jeonghan’s college apartment. He’d forgotten that he hadn’t missed a single meal for two weeks after the funeral when he didn’t even bother getting out of bed. He looks away.
“Yoon Jeonghan,” Jisoo says. “You’re allowed to want things.”
“I know that,” Jeonghan sighs, frustrated, and gets up to wash out the coffee. It’s gone cold. “I know.”
“Then why won’t you tell him?”
Jisoo gives him an expectant look—knows the answer already, probably—but as always, he’s never satisfied till he dangles Jeonghan right at the edge of the cliff; except this time, he’s not pulling back. He’s waiting for the storm to come and sweep him away instead. Jeonghan feels the worn-out threads of the rope stretched beyond reprieve, trembling with the tension of holding on, of letting go. He gives in, again, like he keeps doing. Again and again and again except where it matters.
“I can’t hold him back.”
Jeonghan hates pity, and Jisoo knows this. But he gives him a look close to it anyway, walks over to the sink that Jeonghan’s knuckles are turning white against, and says very softly:
“Maybe he wants you to.”
He picks up the coffee mug covered in dish soap and rinses it out, lays it out on the stand, and Jeonghan watches as droplets of water drip onto the mat below, disappearing into the navy-blue bubbles. He hears Jisoo from somewhere very far away past the rush in his ears.
“It’s not always a compliment that you let things go easily, Jeonghan-ah.”
←
This is all the worst it could be, really, because Jeonghan knows. Jeonghan knows he’s first in the race, farther than everyone—only needs to look in Seungcheol’s direction to see that he’s already looking back, that the attention is already all his. He holds this knowledge the way he holds Seungcheol’s heart, like water in his hands; holds it closer still when it’s been seven years since the dappled shade of the oak tree and Seungcheol introduces to them to Kibum at the monthly meetup, glowing a warm shade of red under the muted blue of the bar three streets down from Jeonghan’s apartment. He lets it all slip through his fingers in rivulets because not even Jeonghan who’s done it all first has the right to do anything but. He can stay here in this bruised-purple haze of loving Seungcheol and having him in all the ways except those that matter, and watch with an unclear gaze how it’s only his fault that the fog never clears.
They’ve both seen people, Jeonghan should reason with himself. A healthy amount for twenty-four-year-olds, if a little less than the average. It’s how he met Wonwoo in second year, actually, before they realised that they were far better off terrorising Mingyu together instead.
But the problem with Seungcheol is that nothing about him is ever lukewarm; never half-hearted, never one foot out the door. Everything he does takes all of him. So, when Kim Kibum extends his hand and says, like they all say, I’ve heard so much about you, Jeonghan-ssi , he tries to remember that Seungcheol isn’t doing this on purpose. He isn’t stitching together the tattered rope and pulling it apart again and again to be cruel. It’s just who he is.
Unlike Jeonghan, for all that Seungcheol asks of him, it’s never been selfish. Unlike Jeonghan, who is cruel on purpose, who didn’t speak to Seungcheol for a week after the funeral and then showed up with a new boyfriend.
Unlike Jeonghan, who asks everything of Seungcheol and gives nothing in return.
He knows what it looks like, like he has all the cards in his hand, but it’s all wrong. Seungcheol isn’t the one who needs him. Seungcheol will tell the truth when he says, I don’t need your fucking help, bitter and venomous and more afraid than angry, when he can’t walk from his bed to the bathroom without crutches and Jeonghan’s careful hands on his arms. Seungcheol lets him stay only because he’s convinced Jeonghan would never do anything magnanimous like deal with his penchant for being the worst patient in the world, believes Jeonghan’s excuse of boredom because it would be offensive not to. Jeonghan lets Seungcheol think he doesn’t care as much if it means he stops feeling like a burden.
Jeonghan will be lying, though, the year before, when he says, I don’t need your help, or anyone’s, cool and collected with the restless storm under his skin, like a poorly stitched doll bursting at the seams. He’ll let Seungcheol stay because it’s exactly what he wants, because Seungcheol will stay regardless of what he wants anyway. He’ll say, I’m here, and Jeonghan will think he should have never let Seungcheol come looking, should have never dragged him into the shade of the oak tree when he belonged in the sun.
Like that, the selfishness bleeds into the guilt, and the guilt into the fabric of his happiness that is held together by Seungcheol knocking on his door at 2am, and Jeonghan doesn’t move. Can’t. He sits idle in his own cowardice, drowning in the knowledge of having known it all first, having felt it all first, and having done nothing about it. Understands again, now, sixteen years later, out of the snack aisle in 7-Eleven that his inaction is not intentional—out of the shade of the oak tree that its instinct, an inability he can’t shake because the fabric of his happiness is really a sheet of kaleidoscopic glass, a touch away from shattering the light and letting all the ugly creatures of his darkness come crawling back.
→
Jeonghan goes home. It’s been five years, but it’s all there: the white-flowered vines along the window of Soobin’s old room and the mosaic of scratched crayon hanging in the foyer that Jeonghan made when he was five, reading Happy Birthday Eomma in sprawling, ugly script. His mother looks older, skin sunken into faint wrinkles and hair thinned at the edges, but her eyes are the same, if a little misted over, when she opens the door. Jeonghan realises it’s been a long time, though, when her frame seems to shrink into his arms, a little bony and still very warm.
He’s sitting at the dining table swinging his legs back and forth when Soobin comes home from work and whacks him right on the head with her bag. Jeonghan goes Yah! Is this how I raised you? And she hugs him in answer. They sit there like that in the dusk-coated dining room, Jeonghan getting egg rolls hand fed to him as Soobin tugs at his hair and tells him he looks pretty.
Seungcheol texts him Don’t come back without mastering Eomma’s radish kimchi when he means spend good time with her . Jeonghan replies with an achingly adorable picture of Seungcheol in their elementary school baseball uniform that’s hung up on the living room wall, front teeth knocked out in his smile, arm hooked through Jeonghan’s elbow.
After Soobin retires for the night and Seungcheol sends him a selfie in his headset—which means he’ll be up till six and won’t look at his phone—Jeonghan slides off the couch and pads to the refrigerator. In the dim kitchen lights, his mother sits on the haunches and unwraps cabbages into a bright pink tub. She looks up, gestures over to the packet of gloves on the counter, and Jeonghan goes.
“Why are you doing this late at night?” he asks, settling down next to her and pulling the cabbage apart where the cut is. Kimchi is always a whole day’s work.
Her mouth turns up at the corners. “Appa would insist on helping me but he rarely ever got days off, so—” she gestures to the tub, “—I’m used to it now.”
Jeonghan feels like a child, forgetting that his father would buy her flowers every birthday, would cook even after a long day at work just so she could catch an hour more of sleep, would drive across the city and back for work and still leave again to pick her up at the bus stop every night. He feels like a child, remembering only his selfish little pain and forgetting theirs.
He picks up another cabbage, dips his hand in the bucket next to him and runs it over the leaves, between them, sprinkles across the top. He does one, two, another one, and something about the salt chafing his skin through the gloves and the dull pain in his ankles and picture of his father on the dining room wall makes him whisper, “Eomma.” She doesn’t look like she hears him. He exhales softly. “I’m sorry for running away.”
His mother keeps working, transferring the salted quarters into a separate container, pressing the lid down as far as it’ll go. She places it on the counter and settles back beside Jeonghan, dipping her hand into the salt and taking the last two quarters in the tub.
“Have you been eating well?” she asks.
For a moment, he wonders if she even heard him, if this is something else, but she does nothing to clear his confusion, already done with one of the quarters. He nods even though she isn’t looking. “I have.”
“Then there’s nothing to be sorry for.”
She says it so easily, like all the resentment living in little pockets of their house is nothing but a faraway dream. It is, in a way, because he misses the chipped tile of the kitchen floor too much for it to be anything else. He closes his eyes and sits back against the counter because there’s already enough salt in the cabbage.
“Seungcheol’s leaving soon,” he says, voice scratchy, because there’s nothing else to say.
“Oh? Where to?”
“Just..far.” Away from me, he means to say.
His mother goes quiet again. She boxes up the last of the salted cabbage and leaves it on the counter. To kill the bad bacteria, she’d said when he was younger, And then we wash it off just enough to let the good ones grow.
“It’s not a bad thing to take time, Jeonghan-ah,” she says finally, like a sigh. “Lots of good things take time.” She pulls the gloves off and taps his head with a finger, then brushes the hair downward, fingers cold against his scalp. “But too much time, and anything will start rotting.”
←
Somewhere in the obscurity of being twenty-five and in love with his best friend, Jeonghan asks Seungcheol: What do you want? And Seungcheol, who knows only to give and give and give, trails after Jeonghan who just broke up with a boyfriend who was never meant to stick around, who was meant only to redraw the line they couldn’t cross, even if they’d already gone past it and right back again. A month does nothing to make him forget the taste of melon soju and cherry chapstick. Seungcheol, who always gives, lets himself be dragged all the way to a drunk Jeonghan’s apartment, lets himself be pressed against the wall, so close but not enough, lets the door shut in his face when the answer, It doesn’t matter what I want, reminds Jeonghan that he’s held the reigns for too long when he doesn’t even know what to do with them.
When it really comes down to it, Seungcheol is just as bad as Jeonghan in asking for what he wants.
It was a night of indulgence, just one, because in the end, Jeonghan is always stuck with the ugly things, with the waxen air and the passing wondering that fear could be so fatal a flaw.
→
When Jeonghan finally falls off the cliff, it is, as always, because of Soonyoung.
After their graduation party, Jeonghan had been woken up gently somewhere in the blue hours of the morning on the couch Soonyoung then shared with Jisoo. Ridiculous, tiger-themed pants and the Advil he was handed are Jeonghan’s only memory of that night. Jeonghan had then made truth out of Soonyoung’s later accusations despite liking his company—had been only a friend of a friend for the three years they shared, Chan’s friend and Mingyu’s. That night, though, Soonyoung had settled close to Jeonghan on the couch, pulled the blanket over his legs, and said simply, “Mingyu’s hogging my blankets right now and won’t stop talking about Jihoon in his sleep.” Jeonghan had tugged at his buzzed blonde hair and woken up with Soonyoung in place of the blankets.
Jeonghan will come to appreciate thoughtless thoughtfulness and unintentional sincerity for years after, when he visits Jeonghan two weeks after the funeral and takes him shopping because he needs to choose a pair of neon pants for his date with Minghao, when he drags Jeonghan to the dance floor to show off his newest routine the night they meet Kibum.
Today, he says, only half-joking, “When will you put him out of his misery, hyung?”
Only Soonyoung would do that, pick Seungcheol’s side when he’s drinking with Jeonghan, sit opposite him and shatter Jeonghan’s world with the soju in his hand and the crinkle of his eyes. Because to him, it’s never about fixing things like Jisoo, never about meddling like Seungkwan; certainly not about conversation and understanding like Mingyu. Soonyoung likes the bright blue skies and the warmth of the sun, and in his eyes, Jeonghan’s ashen mist has no place amidst it. So, he’ll trip Jeonghan off the edge—through the heavy rain cloud, down against the cutting wind—until he’s falling somewhere that he can see better, tinges of light even with the grey above him. Who cares if it’s a hundred feet down, if you think you’re dying on the way there, if it seems like the end. At least it isn’t hazy anymore.
Jeonghan remembers all the edges he’s dangled his feet off of, like a stupid child who doesn’t know fear until he falls off a tree. Except Jeonghan knew the fear without the bruises. Do whatever you want, Jeonghan-ah, his mother had told him at the end of high school, on the cusp of college, another fiery-red, burning edge. His whole life was starting already, but not really; he had to pick a place to run to, map out the path, but the starting line was disappearing and everyone else seemed to be at the horizon. Do whatever you want.
What did she mean, he thinks he should've asked. Was it in the knowledge of comfort he already had, to make a life out of the obvious and foreseen and established, out of the freedom that came with familiarity? Or something beyond, in the horizon Jeonghan never seems to reach, because he’s never meant to? What did it mean to Jeonghan, he should’ve asked, who never knew how to want, much less how to deserve?
→
It’s raining when Jeonghan leaves the bar, a sparse summer shower, light as the breeze, but the mist is sinking into Jeonghan’s thin shirt.
Are you miserable because of me, Choi Seungcheol? He wants to ask. Maybe he wants to scream. Are you waiting for me to fall off the stupid tree?
Jeonghan can be miserable, stuck in his world of smoke and mirrors, can let the cold water slip through his fingers, can hold his breath all his life for a moment that will never come because Seungcheol will not cross a line until Jeonghan lets him. It’s okay when it’s him, when it’s only him in the white-walled room.
Maybe this is another selfishness, too, not to consider that Seungcheol has his own room—to forget that Seungcheol came looking first. His selflessness is selfish and so is his selfishness, so Jeonghan wonders why he’d bothered keeping score for so long. He should’ve taken everything for himself, he thinks, a year ago, maybe three. Maybe even before, under the oak tree, in that 7-Eleven. He should’ve put his hands together, curled his fingers in, never allowed the water to drip. It’s been a long time, too long, really—too many summer suns and fluorescent lights and useless truths floating in his lungs. Maybe the fraying ropes were meant to snap, and the teeth meant to draw blood.
In the sweet spray, Jeonghan lets it all roll off like the raindrops down his face, like the lip tint staining his white shirt. They’ve spent a decade trading clothes and comfort and everything in between; Seungcheol rolling an omelette in the dim morning light of his kitchen, Seungcheol folding laundry and stashing them in the closet, ignoring the hoodies Jeonghan stole from him, Seungcheol, bleary eyed in the darkness of Jeonghan’s room squinting at his laptop, complaining about the endless logistics of trying to set up a dojang while Jeonghan rubs a cheek into his shoulder and hums at everything he says.
Seungcheol, Seungcheol, Seungcheol everywhere, in everything all around him, in his morning tea and the cactus on his window sill and the conditioner he uses. In the brick-walled alley on the other side of the building where he’d shared his first and last cigarette with Jeonghan, where he’d yielded after two drags, keeling over in a mix of choked coughs and laughter.
Seungcheol is everywhere, but most importantly, he is at the tip of Jeonghan’s fingers, in his reach and just out of it, on the couch in his lap where Jeonghan is tracing the line of his forehead as he sleeps, in his hands when Seungcheol slots them together as they step out of the elevator. Because of the cold, he says, and Jeonghan concedes. He’s there at the edge of the slight tremor of Jeonghan’s hands, just at the edge of his vision in that alleyway where Jeonghan wanted to drag Seungcheol by the neck and kiss the bitterness of cigarette ash into his sweet mouth.
Jeonghan-ah, he says, in the way that he does, and Jeonghan goes like the wind to the sea.
→
“My dentist appointment is in two months.”
Seungcheol stares, palm still on the door handle, hair mussed. He blinks slowly, catching up. “Jeonghannie?”
“You can’t go,” Jeonghan says, taking advantage of Seungcheol’s drowsiness and slipping inside, kicking his shoes off as he goes.
“Where?” Seungcheol turns, shuts the door, tilts his head and trails his gaze downward. “And why are you wet? Do you want to change?”
Jeonghan groans. “Yah, Choi Seungcheol.” He walks closer, keeps his itching hands to himself and holds Seungcheol by the eyes instead. “Listen to me.”
Seungcheol seems to blink awake suddenly at the proximity, and he breathes out slowly. “Okay.” He takes a step back. “Aren’t you cold, though?”
Jeonghan barely resists punching him in the arm. He’s freezing. “No. Now listen.” He points to the couch.
Seungcheol follows him silently, takes the opposite end, and Jeonghan knows that he’s really listening. He doesn’t breathe, afraid the courage will escape him through the exhale.
“Like I was saying, you can’t go.” Seungcheol keeps looking expectantly, blinking sleepily, and Jeonghan clarifies, “To Germany.”
Something in Seungcheol’s expression shifts at that, shutters in his eyes; but they widen too, sharper now, and he leans closer. “Why?”
“I have my dentist appointment two days after you leave and I’m going to forget by then.”
“You have your…dentist appointment.” Seungcheol sounds like he’s trying to sound normal.
“Yes.”
“So…I can’t go to Germany?”
“Exactly.”
“Are you drunk?”
Jeonghan rolls his eyes for some pretence of normalcy. “I had like, one beer. But that’s not the point.”
Seungcheol stares. “I—”
“Eomma wants you to come over, too. She says it’s been a while.”
There’s a pause. “Jeongha—”
“Soobinnie too.”
“Yah, Yoon Jeonghan—”
Jeonghan cuts him off again because he can’t really see the ground anymore, and even when it feels so close, he’s wishing he’d never jumped off at all. He keeps falling anyway. “And you opened your dojang only three years ago,” he barrels on. “It’s just starting to pick up the way you wanted it to and suddenly you want to leave?” He’s not even looking at Seungcheol anymore. “I didn’t listen to you complain for a whole year and let you leech off me for free. You aren’t allowed to leave until you pay me back—”
“Okay,” Seungcheol says. “I won’t go.”
“—and—what?”
“I won’t go,” he says again, like it’s a totally sane thing to say.
Jeonghan pauses, blinks. “Just like that?”
Seungcheol smiles, a little smile he sees when he’s indulging Chan or Seokmin, when he’s amused about being two steps ahead. “Just like that.”
Jeonghan feels the ground fold into itself and get swallowed up, feels himself getting dragged under the weight of the devotion in Seungcheol’s eyes. He always feels flayed open by Seungcheol’s gaze, like a glass window, like his skin has been peeled carefully to expose the soft muscle, the pulsing blood, staining red against the palm.
It creeps up again, though, from the inside.
“Why?”
Seungcheol pulls the blanket over the armrest of the couch and lays it over Jeonghan’s lap. There’s one of those silences where Seungcheol is trying to string words together in his head, and when he leans back, eyes straying to the floor and then up again, Jeonghan can see the light outrunning him. It’s space, a distance. “The same reason you don’t want me to leave.”
Seungcheol is asking a question. It’s an in and an out.
“My dentist?” is Jeonghan’s answer—stupid, idiotic, because he’s still toeing the line, but he must do something right with the crack in his voice because then Seungcheol is leaning forward and smiling and the light is rushing in again.
“No,” Seungcheol says. “The other thing.”
Jeonghan curls his trembling hands into fists, lets Seungcheol rest his palms over them, lets it all go, the rope and the rainwater and all that’s rotting. He looks up.
“Because…I love you?”
Seungcheol smiles so wide that Jeonghan goes a little blind. “No. The other thing.”
Seungcheol is teasing him. He’s teasing him and it’s all coming loose inside Jeonghan, everything that was balanced on the taut rope. “I’m leaving.” He stands, and the blanket falls to the ground.
Seungcheol catches his hand because he always does, tugs downwards, until Jeonghan’s back is hitting the couch. “Because I love you,” Seungcheol says. “Because I love you, Yoon Jeonghan.”
He always feels flayed open by Seungcheol’s gaze, but this is something else. Jeonghan can’t tell if his chest hurts because somebody has taken a blender to his ribcage and scooped everything out of it or because he hasn’t breathed in a whole minute. He looks down at where Seungcheol’s fingers are wrapped around his wrist. “I’m sorry,” he manages to say, slowly. It’s a good place to begin.
Seungcheol shifts closer, takes the damp strands of hair between his fingers, warm against Jeonghan’s cheekbone where his knuckles skim over it. Seungcheol watches the movement, looks up just as slowly, mouth pulled up softly at the corners. “What for?”
Jeonghan scoffs a wet laugh, asks for the sake of it, “Are you stupid?” Because Seungcheol is looking at him, in the way that he does, and he feels like crying.
“Jeonghan-ah,” Seungcheol says, a lilt of laughter, a tuck of the strands behind his ear and a slip of the hand down to his neck, right beside Jeonghan’s delicate rabbit pulse. He pulls Jeonghan into the crook of his neck and keeps him there. Jeonghan screws his eyes shut, feels Seungcheol breathe out. “It’s okay.” Fingers in his hair and a mouth to his head.
“I was happy. I was happy for all of it.”
Jeonghan wants to claw at Seungcheol’s shirt, wants to shake him hard enough to rattle his brain around and kiss him, but he thinks he might break if he’s let go of, so instead he curls himself around Seungcheol—arms around the shoulders and legs around the waist—and vaguely hopes he can still breathe. “You’re so fucking stupid,” he says again into the crook of Seungcheol’s neck, fingers tangling in the strands of brown. “I love you.”
←
Two weeks before their first college semester begins, they take the three a.m. train to Gangneung. They sit far from the water in the cold, hardened sand and watch the sunrise with nothing but vending machine coffee to warm their hands. “Why are we doing this to ourselves,” Jeonghan whines, cocooning himself with his padded jacket and two scarves. Seungcheol smiles that crinkly smile.
“I’ve never been on a day trip,” he says. “I wanted to take one before,” he shrugs. “—you know. As a celebration for getting through high school.”
Jeonghan turns. He unwraps one of his scarves and throws it at Seungcheol’s pretty face that’s stained with the pretty citrus sun. “You won’t make it to college with the way you’re dressing.”
Seungcheol is still grinning when he pulls the scarf around his neck and presses his thigh against Jeonghan’s. “It’s a little scary.” He looks forward again. “Are you scared?”
Jeonghan watches the morning waves break against the beach, watches the foam bubble up and disappear unrelentingly. He keeps watching—the sunrise in Seungcheol’s eyes and the tufts of hair escaping his orange beanie. He’ll forget later, because this pocket of warmth is too big to bottle, but in this moment, he can’t fathom what there is to be afraid of, with Seungcheol’s hand in the sand next to him. “Don’t be a sap,” he answers, looking away, and Seungcheol’s laughs like he expected it.
At the edge of nineteen, Jeonghan watches the moving watercolour painting of a sky and lets the cold sand slip through his cold fingers, right there, next to him.
At the edge of twenty-nine, Jeonghan takes the hand in his, threading fingers through fingers, palm against palm, and in the unsweetened summer haze, lets the salt and the sand fill his smiling mouth.
⇉
they’ll ask ‘when did it turn into love?’ and i’ll say it was always love, it just went by a different name then.