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Hongjoong packed his things and moved to Los Angeles.
The owner of the food stand sounded none too happy about it. He was also Hongjoong’s uncle so perhaps it was justified. Seonghwa returned home and told his mother. She was hanging laundry out to dry since it was a rare sunny day in the dead of winter. Their washing machine had been broken for a week, long since relegated to a personal project for Seonghwa’s father who wanted to fix many things and thus, had a whole room full of them. One day, he would get around to it. Just like Hongjoong who had packed his things and moved to Los Angeles.
“Just up and left,” she was muttering more to herself than speaking to anyone. “Left his mother all alone like that.”
Seonghwa, hands cradling a mug of hot tea, bristled. “He has another brother, eomma—”
“And what does his father think? How will they talk to him? Did he leave a number? Of course he didn’t! Children these days.” She shook her head and violently wrung out a tablecloth, “Don’t you care about us? We are growing old.”
She shot him a glance and pulled more clothes out of the bucket at her feet. Seonghwa shrank in his chair. He wanted to assure her he cared, that he would never buy a ticket to some country about which the only thing he knew was whatever music was imported over the radio, the hot dogs, pilfered magazines from the local library, the Gap t-shirt his uncle had graciously brought for him from one of his business trips. She may or may not believe him. She may place her faith in him or spend an extra hour in church praying for God to remove the thought of America and its discontents from her son’s susceptible mind. She could simply tell him she’d die the day he abandoned his parents and it would effectively shackle his feet for the rest of his days.
Except, his mother shook her head with relief, clipped a pair of socks to the line, and said, “It’s a blessing you’re not ambitious.” She smiled and wrung out a shirt, clipped it to the line, and picked up the empty bucket, “Shut the balcony door, will you? It’s getting drafty inside.”
Seonghwa shut and latched the door. His mother entered the store room and told his father off for wasting his time tinkering with the broken radio. His laughter echoed through the small, cold house. The radio began to play Connie Francis. Seonghwa’s mother emerged quickly from the room, ducking into the kitchen. It didn’t matter, not really. Seonghwa was too dazed to notice the furious blush on her cheeks, the shy, half-smile playing at her lips.
“D’you think I’m lazy?”
The tiny gas heater was placed dangerously close to the bed. Snow had begun to fall outside. Yunho’s face surfaced like a dull schooner of confusion from between Seonghwa’s legs, making Seonghwa look away.
“Kinda.” Yunho sat up, “Look at me. What’s up?”
Seonghwa shook his head and looped a leg around Yunho’s waist to force him back down. He relented with some hesitation, reappearing moments later when Seonghwa spoke again.
“I want to move. Go somewhere far away.”
Yunho smiled. “I'm getting some time off next week—”
Seonghwa sat up and placed a distracted hand over his lap, thighs closing around it. With his other hand he fumbled around on the side table, almost knocking over a framed photograph of Yunho and his brother. Yunho, eternal diviner of needs, gently intervened and plucked the carton of cigarettes from where it lay obscured on the other side of the lamp. The lighter flicked. Seonghwa was still staring at his lap when he was offered the lit cigarette, smoke rising softly from the tip like tears of farewell. He muttered his thanks and took a drag.
Outside the sun was setting. Today too, his sun set in Yunho’s tiny apartment above the market district where he lived alone, away from family Seonghwa was only peripherally aware of through photographs and shrill trills of the landline phone in the kitchen. Yunho had begun humming a song some time ago. He rose from the bed and walked to the corner of the room where a radio sat on a thin shelf densely populated with various objects from his life; more photographs, small sports trophies, a gaudy vase dusty around it's crystal lip, empty matchboxes, half a candle clad in a thick dress of molten wax. Seonghwa’s stomach did a turn when the radio came on and began playing the same American hits that haunted his own house.
Yunho swayed with a cigarette in his hand, smoke pluming around his head like a halo as he moved. The muscles in his thighs and ass rippled like sea animals. Seonghwa found an empty can of coke next to the bed and tapped the ash into it.
California dreamin’, sang Yunho and Seonghwa said, “That's where Hongjoong went.” because it had become an inescapable fact of life. Hongjoong packed his bags and went to Los Angeles. He had left no number, only a Bowie record that he mailed to Seonghwa from wherever he'd been stuck on a layover. In 1989, he had said he wanted to be somebody. In 1991, he had vanished into the billowing cloak of airplane smoke streaking across the sky like a comet soon to descend upon the star-studded streets of L. A. All the while, Seonghwa sat smoking stale cigarettes in Jeong Yunho's market apartment watching his athlete's body sway to foreign music. Tough luck.
“I want to move away,” Seonghwa repeated, half hoping the music would drown it out.
Yunho turned around and smiled at him. His cock hung soft between his thighs. It swung with every step he took towards the bed, knees first, thrusting his face in front of Seonghwa's.
“You can do anything you want.”
They kissed, one hesitant, the other farthest from it. Seonghwa stubbed his wasting cigarette out against the top of the can of coke and wrapped both arms around Yunho’s neck.
“I don't know what I want.”
“Sure you do,” Yunho whispered against his throat, dampening the skin with all the love in his mouth. “What's keeping you?”
Everything, Seonghwa wanted to say, everything scares me. My mother scares me. Her endless sorrows and homely comforts, my father's dauntless energy for things nobody else would look twice at, my own hopeless luckless nature, this gaping wound that is my person, the grating edge of my voice and the ungrateful sharpness of my nose. But you scare me the most. I see in you a capacity to love so great that it dwarfs my soul. Huge, benign, indifferent, you; you take my words at face value and expect nothing to change. You think you are doomed to buy cigarettes for two on a salary for one for the foreseeable and the unforeseeable future, that you will be yourself until this self becomes too large for this apartment to contain. That I will rot in your unmade bed making plans that refuse to materialise and ambition that will never germinate. You know I am yours and I am too tired to be someone else's. Moving into someone else's embrace will kill me because of the strength it requires. I am yours, I am yours, I am yours—
Yunho's fingers pressed into Seonghwa and drew out a ragged sound. Seonghwa saw all dreams of California evaporate into the heat of a Seoul summer evening. Maybe nothing would change, maybe everything would. Once he came on Yunho's sheets and sucked him off, once he walked on shaky legs to the narrow bathroom where he tended to bang his hip against the ceramic bowl of the sink trying to manoeuvre his way up from the toilet, once he washed his hands and rinsed his mouth and ultimately decided to stay the night and pretended not to see the sweetness blooming on Yunho's face, once night dissolved into hoary dawn and it came time to head home. Something would change. He felt a deep fatigue settling into his bones and atrophying his muscles. Once he had slept some… once he had some more energy… surely, then—
“Wash up later.” Yunho, viscous and gold-bodied, child of the setting sun and delayed plans, “Come to bed.”
Once he had slept some, Seonghwa thought, slipping like a dream into Yunho's bed. Surely, then… Surely—