Home Between Us

by Daeshin0908

Summary:

Yeon Sieun is a single dad juggling a job in finance while raising his five-year-old son, Minjae. Reserved and hyper-responsible, Sieun keeps his life structured and tightly controlled. But he’s stretched thin and reluctantly accepts that he needs help. Enter Ahn Suho—bright, energetic, a college student desperate for a part-time job to cover school fee. He’s far from the polished, professional nanny Sieun imagined—but Minjae adores him from day one.

Notes:

Another SHSE fic. I'm sorry but writing is my way of decompression, for now.

Chapter 1

Yeon Sieun had the kind of face that made people look twice. Too pretty for someone who lived in spreadsheets and numbers all day, too sharp and cold for anyone to mistake him for approachable. Deep, ocean-dark eyes that revealed little except exhaustion, lips that looked far too soft for someone who rarely smiled. In finance, people liked to joke he was a machine disguised as a man. But the truth was, there was nothing mechanical about the way he tucked his son’s blanket at night, or how his voice lowered to a softness reserved only for Minjae.

Being a single father at twenty-five was not in any plan Sieun had ever made, but life hadn’t asked for his permission. Minjae was five now—mischievous, stubborn, with a smile that could melt walls Sieun didn’t even realize he had. And Sieun loved him more fiercely than he thought possible. But between eighty-hour weeks, endless data models, and the relentless demand of clients who thought finance people didn’t need sleep, he was running on fumes.

But even Minjae’s patient little world was stretched thin by Sieun’s life. Every evening, the boy was always the last one at kindergarten, sitting on the bench with his backpack dangling from his small shoulders, waiting quietly beside the teacher while the sun slipped lower. Other children had already gone home to mothers and fathers who worked reasonable hours, while Minjae’s eyes searched the door until Sieun finally appeared, breathless, tie crooked, apologies catching in his throat. And every time, the boy smiled like he hadn’t been waiting at all. That smile broke something in Sieun, because it was too forgiving.

Some nights were worse. After picking Minjae up, he would have to drop him at home, put together something quick for dinner, kiss his hair, and leave again for the office. He told himself it was only for a few hours, that Minjae was fine with his toys and cartoons, that he was too young to notice the silence that settled over the apartment in his father’s absence. But he noticed. He always noticed.

The math didn’t add up. Numbers were Sieun’s life, and he could see the equation clearly: too much work, too little time, a boy growing lonelier by the day. Something had to shift. Which was why, against every instinct that told him to handle things alone, he started looking for a nanny. Not a live-in, not a full-time professional with certifications and stiff smiles. Just someone who could pick Minjae up in the afternoons, bring him home, cook something warm, make sure he showered, and stay until Sieun dragged himself back from the office. A part-time gap-filler, someone to keep Minjae from being the last child waiting on the bench every day.

It sounded simple. It was anything but.

The first interview had lasted less than ten minutes. A tall woman with glossy hair and perfume that clung to the air smiled at Sieun more than at Minjae. “You hardly look old enough to be a father,” she purred, crossing her legs. “What you really need is some adult company after long workdays.” Sieun thanked her curtly and showed her out. Minjae, sipping his juice box, said flatly, “She’s weird.”

The second candidate brought a typed schedule that blocked out every minute of Minjae’s life, from “silent reading” at 5:00 p.m. sharp to “meditation” before dinner. Sieun raised an eyebrow; Minjae took one look and announced, “No thank you,” with all the seriousness of a CEO rejecting a proposal.

The third was younger, freshly graduated, and seemed promising until she leaned forward with a sympathetic tilt of her head. “It must be hard, raising him all on your own. Where’s his mother?” When Sieun didn’t answer, she tried again: “You know, a man as handsome as you shouldn’t be alone. If you ever need… support…” She trailed her fingers over the resume she had placed on the table. Minjae whispered, “Daddy, she’s trying to marry you,” and Sieun ended the interview immediately.

The fourth was a man in a crisp suit who claimed to be experienced with children but spent the entire half hour pitching Sieun on an insurance plan. Minjae fell asleep on the couch midway through. Sieun almost envied him.

By the sixth attempt, Sieun was beginning to think the search was cursed. Every hopeful face that walked through the door seemed to be looking past Minjae, toward him instead. It wasn’t just frustrating—it made his chest ache. His son deserved someone who would actually see him.

That night, Sieun lingered at Minjae’s bedroom door. The boy was already asleep, hand curled around his stuffed dinosaur, his little chest rising and falling steadily. He looked peaceful, but Sieun knew better. He knew how much waiting, how much silence, stretched behind that tiny frame.

The apartment was too clean, too quiet, too heavy. Sieun loosened his tie and rubbed his face with both hands. “You deserve better than this,” he whispered into the dark.

He had almost given up, almost resigned himself to juggling until he broke. Then another name landed in his inbox: a third-year student, no formal childcare background, just part-time availability, desperation for work, and an awkward note that said willing to learn.

It didn’t sound promising. But then again, nothing else had.

And so the next afternoon, he found himself waiting for someone named Ahn Suho to knock on his door.

Chapter 2

The apartment was spotless, every object aligned with quiet precision. Order had become a necessity for Sieun, not because he cared about appearances, but because it was the only way to keep his unraveling life stitched together. A clean counter, an organized desk, numbers stacked neatly in rows — at least those things stayed where he put them. Unlike time. Unlike his son’s lonely waiting.

He was already regretting this. Another interview, another wasted half hour. He adjusted his cuffs, ocean eyes flicking to the clock. He could almost hear the tick of lost minutes that should have gone to reports, projections, clients. But then again, if this didn’t work, he would lose far more than minutes.

The doorbell rang.

When he opened the door, he was confronted with… youth.

The boy — no, the young man — on his doorstep was tall, broad-shouldered, with a face that was entirely too handsome for someone who looked so hopelessly unprepared. His dark hair was mussed from the wind, falling into eyes that shone with something too bright to be professionalism. His red windbreaker was unzipped over a plain T-shirt, his jeans worn at the knees, his sneakers scuffed gray. A backpack hung off one shoulder like an afterthought.

“Hello!” He bowed too fast, nearly catching his toe on the doormat, straightening with an embarrassed laugh. “I’m Ahn Suho! Sorry I’m late, the bus was—actually, two buses—and then traffic, and I might’ve gotten off at the wrong stop once, but I ran the last part so I wouldn’t—um. Hi.” He smiled, wide and disarming, like this was the start of something good instead of the beginning of a disaster.

Sieun stared at him, face blank, thoughts cold and exact: This is already a mistake.

Inside, Suho perched on the edge of the couch, knees bouncing, hands gripping the strap of his backpack like it might keep him upright. His presence was too loud for the room, as if even his fidgeting was disruptive to the careful silence Sieun had curated.

“Experience with childcare?” Sieun asked, voice clipped, eyes narrowing.

Suho straightened, eager. “Yes! I mean—sort of. Not, like, officially. But I babysat my cousins all the time when I was younger, and my grandma runs kind of a neighborhood daycare, so I’ve been around kids a lot. I’m great with games, and snacks, and sports, and—” He cut himself off with a sheepish laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. “I don’t have a certificate or whatever, but I’m willing to learn! Really willing. Like… desperate.”

“Desperate,” Sieun repeated flatly, leaning back in his chair.

Suho flushed. “For money. Not—like—not in a weird way. I just, um, failed a couple credits last semester, so I need to retake them, and my scholarship doesn’t cover it, so I need a part-time job to make up the cost. But I’m dependable! I swear. I mean, I wouldn’t just quit or anything. I’ll work hard.”

The more he talked, the deeper Sieun’s skepticism grew. This was absurd. A twenty-year-old boy with messy hair and no qualifications. What was he doing, sitting here pretending this could possibly work—

“Daddy?” Minjae’s voice pulled his gaze to the hallway. The boy had peeked out, his stuffed dinosaur clutched to his chest. His eyes, curious and cautious, landed on Suho.

Immediately, Suho dropped off the couch and crouched low, meeting Minjae’s gaze at eye level. “Hi,” he said softly. “I’m Suho. What’s your name?”

“Minjae.”

“Minjae,” Suho repeated, tasting the syllables like they mattered. His grin widened. “That’s strong. You like dinosaurs?”

Minjae nodded.

Without hesitation, Suho let out the most ridiculous, guttural dinosaur roar, snapping his arms like tiny T-Rex limbs. Minjae startled, then burst into uncontrollable laughter. Suho followed it up by pretending to bite his own backpack, staggering dramatically as if the dinosaur had taken over.

Sieun blinked. He hadn’t heard Minjae laugh like that in weeks.

“You like basketball?” Suho asked suddenly, straightening with a grin. “Watch this.” He picked up one of Minjae’s small rubber balls from the toy bin and tried to spin it on his finger. For one miraculous second, it balanced, and Suho’s grin was triumphant. Then it fell, bouncing off his knee and rolling under the couch. “Okay—uh—that wasn’t my best spin. But I’m usually good!”

Minjae giggled harder, clapping his hands. “Do it again!”

Suho tried again. And again. Each attempt ended in some new form of failure — the ball bouncing off the wall, slipping from his hand, once even hitting himself in the forehead. Each time, Minjae laughed until his small body curled in delight.

Sieun pressed his lips together, arms crossed. He told himself this was childish, irresponsible, ridiculous. And yet his son’s laughter filled the room, lifting the silence off the walls, and the sound pressed something sharp against his ribs.

When Suho looked up, sheepish and smiling, marker doodles already forming on his palm where Minjae had insisted on “team tattoos,” Sieun’s ocean eyes narrowed. Relief was dangerous. He didn’t want to feel it.

“This is a mistake,” he muttered under his breath, but Minjae tugged at his sleeve, eyes wide and shining. “Daddy, I like him. Can we keep him?”

For the first time in weeks, Sieun hesitated. Logic and order demanded no. But his son’s smile demanded something else. Finally, he said, “Part-time. Afternoons only. You pick him up, cook, make sure he showers, keep him company until I return. That’s all. Boundaries.”

Suho nodded so fast he nearly bounced in place. “Yes! Got it! Super clear. I won’t let you down.”

When the door shut behind him, silence settled again. Sieun stood there, staring at the empty hallway. He told himself it wouldn’t last a week. That the boy would quit. That this was nothing more than a temporary fix.

And yet, down the hall, Minjae’s laughter lingered in the air, faint but stubborn. For the first time in a long time, the quiet didn’t feel quite so crushing.

Chapter 3

Suho was late.

Not disastrously late, not the kind that would make the teacher march to the phone with lips thin and judgment sharpened to a point, but late enough that Minjae was once again perched on the pickup bench with his dinosaur tucked under his chin like a spare heart. The afternoon sun was a warm coin pressed against the windows. The hallway smelled faintly of tempera paint and apple soap. Other children had already ricocheted into their parents’ arms and dissolved into the noise of the street.

Then came the thudding footsteps, a gust of wind, and a tall boy in a red windbreaker burst through the entrance like he’d outrun a bus. He nearly skidded on the tile, caught himself on the sign-out counter, and bowed at a ninety-degree angle that almost looked like he was apologizing to the floor.

“I’m—hi—Suho—sorry—two buses—no, three—wrong stop—found it!” he said in one breath, then flashed a grin so bright and guileless that Minjae’s head popped up like a sunflower tracking the sun.

The teacher arched a brow. “You are Ahn… Suho?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, breath finally catching up to him. “Picking up Yeon Minjae. I brought an ID, and my grandma said to always sign things, and—oh—pen.” He stabbed at the sign-out sheet with heroic seriousness, handwriting slanted and enthusiastic, then crouched so he was eye-level with Minjae. “Hey, teammate.”

Minjae blinked. “Teammate?”

“If you’ll have me.” Suho held out his palm for a secret handshake that didn’t exist yet. Minjae stared, then solemnly bumped his dinosaur against Suho’s hand. Close enough.

They stepped out into the light together, Suho trying to look competent and unruffled while he was very obviously both ruffled and slightly lost. He tried to dribble Minjae’s rubber ball, which someone had abandoned by the door; it bounced obediently twice, then ricocheted off his shoe into a bush. Suho lunged after it with such dramatic dedication that Minjae burst into laughter, quiet at first, then brighter, as if someone had turned a dimmer and the room obliged.

“Not my best warm-up,” Suho admitted, plucking leaves out of the ball’s dimples. “We’ll call that… defense.”

“Defense,” Minjae echoed, dead serious.

By the time they reached the bus stop, Minjae’s hand had found the red windbreaker sleeve. Suho pretended not to notice, only slowed his long stride to match the small one flickering beside him. The bus wheezed like an old dragon. They climbed on and sat in the front, Minjae bouncing his heels, Suho trying not to look like he was counting crumpled coins in his pocket before tapping his card. He pointed out a dog with a bandana. He made up names for every passenger they passed on the sidewalk—Captain Briefcase, Miss Sunglasses, The Mysterious Man Who Eats Ice Cream in Winter—until Minjae giggled helplessly and buried his face in the dinosaur.

While they rattled toward home, Sieun stared at numbers that unfocused every time his gaze touched them. The office hummed around him: clipped conversation, the quiet staccato of keys, someone’s controlled laughter bleeding through glass. He should have sunk into the comfort of figures—cells stacking obediently, lines forming arguments he could win—but the only countdown he could hear was the one inside his chest. He checked his phone: nothing. He set it down, then checked again as if that would change the laws of the universe. He imagined the empty bench, the teacher’s pursed mouth. He imagined a tall, handsome boy in a windbreaker turning the wrong way at the crosswalk.

“I thought you liked living in spreadsheets,” a colleague said lightly, passing by.

“I do,” he said, and kept staring at a column of digits that, today, refused to be tamed.

Home was a different kind of equation. It solved itself in noises: the bus’s exhale at the curb, the jangle of keys Suho almost dropped but did not, the scrape of sneakers being toed off in the entryway. Minjae announced, “We’re home,” to no one and everyone, as if the walls needed reminding.

“Okay,” Suho said with the solemnity of a surgeon, shrugging out of his windbreaker and hanging it carefully on a hook too small for it. “Mission brief: pick up, feed, wash, play, survive.”

“Survive,” Minjae intoned again, clearly thrilled by the seriousness of it all.

The kitchen introduced itself as stainless steel and rational light. Suho opened cabinets as if they might bite him, then closed them with new confidence. “We’re cooking,” he decided. “Well. We are… heating. Pasta is basically a personality, right? You boil water and believe in yourself.”

He filled a pot too full, salted the water with a flourish that would have made his grandmother sigh and say, child, the ocean is not in the pot; then he dumped spaghetti in before it boiled. The result was instant theater. Steam rose like a ghost. A single strand of pasta clung to the side of the pot like it was making a break for freedom. Suho tried to separate noodles with a wooden spoon and somehow created a knot of pasta that behaved like a stubborn sea creature. Minjae leaned on the counter, chin in his hands, watching with reverence.

“Is it supposed to do that?” he asked.

“Absolutely not,” Suho said cheerfully. “But we adapt.”

The water frothed up. Suho, wanting to look competent, clapped the lid on. The pot hissed, rumbled, and—like a tiny volcano with a sense of humor—burped starchy foam onto the stove. The smoke alarm cleared its throat, decided this was an event, and began to shriek. Suho threw the window open, flapped his windbreaker at the ceiling, and yelled, “It’s okay! We’re fine! We’re making… ambiance!”

Minjae laughed so hard he hiccuped. The smoke alarm, perhaps charmed by the windbreaker’s dedication, finally sulked into silence.

They ate what could generously be called spaghetti, though the noodles were glued together in affectionate clumps and wore a scandalous amount of ketchup because the jar of tomato sauce in the fridge turned out to be salsa. Suho took a bite, grimaced, and smiled through it. “Gourmet. Five stars. Don’t tell your dad we used ketchup.”

“He doesn’t like ketchup on noodles,” Minjae confided, eyes sparkling with the thrill of conspiracy.

“Then this is our secret. Team rules.”

“Team rules,” Minjae agreed, magnanimous, and offered Suho the first meatball like he was knighting him.

Shower time began as a logistical problem and evolved rapidly into a water park with questionable permits. Suho rolled up his sleeves and tried to be practical. “We rinse, we soap, we rinse again,” he said, and for exactly three seconds that’s what happened. Then the dinosaur required a ceremonial bath, the plastic cup became a bucket, and Minjae, delighted, found that if he clapped the water at just the right angle it arced perfectly into Suho’s face.

“I surrender!” Suho sputtered, blinking through droplets, hair flattened and dripping. “I am a humble waterfall!”

“You’re all wet,” Minjae observed, glowing.

“That makes two of us.” Suho wrapped the boy in a towel so fluffy it swallowed him whole, then crouched to rub small circles on his back, gentle in the way people are when they’ve learned tenderness by watching it rather than being taught. “Warm enough?” he asked quietly.

Minjae nodded against his shoulder, a small, damp weight trusting the moment to hold.

They built a fort the way architects build cathedrals: with ambition, trial, error, and absolute faith. Two dining chairs became pillars, the windbreaker became a ceremonial flag, and the couch cushions turned into battlements that leaned, reconsidered, and finally consented to stand. Suho brought the lamp inside and then brought it back out with an expression of grave chastisement after it tried to overheat their new country. They lay on their backs in the dim, trading facts of enormous consequence.

“Dinosaurs had feathers,” Minjae reported.

“I failed Physics once,” Suho confessed, and Minjae gasped, thrilled. “But I can spin a ball… sometimes.”

“Show me.”

Suho found the rubber ball and tried in the confined space to demonstrate. It worked for exactly the length of time it would take for a camera shutter to click, then thumped his forehead. He fell back dramatically, clutching his heart. “I have been defeated by science.”

“Again,” Minjae demanded, gleeful tyrant.

“Again,” Suho agreed, because some defeats were victories in disguise.

Across the city, numbers waited for Sieun like a scolding. He forced his attention across a spreadsheet that should have been simple, but the edges of his concentration kept dissolving. He imagined the apartment unspooling into chaos: the gleam of clean counters scuffed by small hands, the echo of slapdash laughter. His phone sat face down, and yet his fingers hovered near it as if proximity could make it speak. He almost typed—How is he?—and stopped. He did not want to be the man who hovered. He had no right to hover. He had hired a twenty-year-old boy who drew on his own hands with a marker and roared like a T-Rex; he had no one to blame for the unease but himself.

And still—those minutes he had so meticulously budgeted refused to behave. He packed up earlier than he announced to anyone, briefcase latched with the finality of a decision he pretended was practical.

When he opened the apartment door, the first thing he noticed was the smell of something faintly scorched and vaguely tomato-adjacent. The second was the sound—not noise so much as the imprint of it, laughter smoothed into the walls until it felt like warmth. He stepped out of his shoes and took in the landscape: the kitchen showing evidence of volcanic pasta; the bathroom towel hung at a valiant, damp angle; a trail of small socks like breadcrumbs leading to the living room where the world had been reimagined.

The fort rose like a small, proud city-state. Inside it, Suho sat cross-legged in a T-shirt that clung to him in damp confession, hair tipped in unruly curls from the shower’s generosity, marker tattoos blooming on his palm. Minjae was tucked against his side, already gone heavy with sleep, mouth soft, dinosaur wedged between cheek and shoulder like a guardian. The lamp on the coffee table cast a gentle halo, as if blessing the foolishness.

Suho looked up and put a finger to his lips, face breaking into a sheepish, quiet smile. “He—uh—ate,” he whispered. “And bathed. And…” He gestured helplessly to the magnificence of the fort. “Structural engineering happened.”

Sieun’s ocean eyes moved from the fort to the boy to the man and back again. Something eased and protested in the same breath, like a knot loosening around a bruise. He nodded once. He knelt, slid his arms under Minjae with the practice of a hundred nights, and lifted him. The child stirred, sighed, and settled against the familiar scent at Sieun’s collar.

In the bedroom, he tucked the blanket with careful fingers and stood for a moment longer than necessary, counting the slow rise of Minjae’s chest. When he returned to the living room, Suho was half inside the fort, half out, trying to fold the windbreaker one-handed and not collapse the entire civilization. He sprang to his feet, mortified.

“I’m sorry about the… everything,” he said in a rush. “The pasta was a crime, the smoke alarm got dramatic, and the bathroom floor is—well, it learned to be a lake for a few minutes, but I mopped it, I swear. He laughed a lot. He was brave in the water. He said ketchup on noodles is illegal in this house, but we agreed to short-term amnesty. I know this was— I mean, I will be better tomorrow. I will be on time. Earlier than on time. Pre-time.”

The speech ran out of breath and stood there, panting.

Sieun, who had prepared a quiet reprimand on the walk down the hall, found the words dissolved by the memory of Minjae’s limp trust against his shoulder and the way the apartment felt like someone had opened a window and let weather in. He looked at the fortress of chairs and blankets; at the boy with water still drying in the curve of his hair; at the inked smiley face beaming from Suho’s palm as if someone had approved him.

“Tomorrow,” he said, and heard his own voice as if from a little distance. “Same time.”

Suho’s relief was so genuine it was almost indecent. His shoulders dropped; his grin unfurled, bright enough to tilt the room. “Yes. Tomorrow. I’ll bring… real sauce. And maybe a ball that doesn’t hate me.”

“Please don’t break the lamp,” Sieun said, which was not a no.

“I will not break the lamp,” Suho promised, solemn as a vow. “Team rules.”

“Team rules,” came soft from the hallway where Minjae turned in his sleep, the words a dream crossing into the waking world.

After the door closed behind Suho, the apartment caught its breath. Order waited, as it always did—the stove to be wiped, the chairs to be unstacked, the notes to be rewritten in his head about boundaries and protocols and schedules that did not involve ketchup. He could do all of that. He would. But for one lingering moment, he stood in the quiet and allowed himself the impossible luxury of not fixing anything at all.

The silence felt different. Not empty. Not punishing. Something else. As if laughter had left a residue that even soap could not scrub away, a proof that the house could hold more than the sound of keys on a keyboard and the hum of a refrigerator. He thought of a tall boy in a red windbreaker, ridiculous and earnest, holding out his hand for a handshake that hadn’t existed and making one anyway.

It would not last a week, he told himself. He would not let it matter. He turned off the lamp and the fort’s shadow became a low mountain on the wall, familiar and strange.

In the bedroom, Minjae breathed evenly, safely, as if the equation had solved itself for the night.

Chapter 4

It wasn’t supposed to be this hard to find a job. A part-time job. He wasn’t picky. Cafés, delivery shifts, tutoring — anything would’ve done. But the weeks had stretched thin, and each “we’ll call you back” dissolved into silence. Suho had started counting coins twice before tapping his transit card, rationing instant noodles, skipping meals when his grandmother wasn’t looking. He’d failed two credits last semester — stupid, stupid — and the retakes were expensive, and scholarships didn’t bend backwards for people who missed exams because their grandma had slipped on the stairs and needed him home.

He needed cash. Desperately.

Which was why his stomach had flipped when he saw the ad pinned on the bulletin board at the community center: Part-time nanny needed. Afternoons only. Must pick up from kindergarten, supervise, cook simple meals. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t in his wheelhouse. But kids liked him — they always had. He’d grown up half-raising the neighborhood children with his grandmother anyway. It wasn’t that different, right? And the pay — the pay would cover at least one credit, maybe both, if he stretched it.

So he’d scribbled the number down, heart hammering, and sent the world’s most awkward message: I don’t have official experience but I’m willing to learn. He hadn’t expected a reply. But then one came. A time, an address.

And suddenly, he was riding three different buses and still getting lost because he’d misread the street signs. By the time he found the building, sweat clung to his collar and his sneakers were caked with dust. He adjusted his red windbreaker twice, combed his fingers through his hair, tried to breathe. He could not afford to screw this up.

When the door opened, the world tilted.

He hadn’t expected the father to be so young. So… beautiful. It didn’t seem fair. Ocean-dark eyes that looked through him, sharp and unwelcoming, lips soft and full in a way that made Suho’s brain short-circuit. For one dizzying moment, he forgot the speech he’d rehearsed. Forgot his own name, practically. He bowed too fast, tripped over the doormat, blurted apologies about buses and traffic, and wanted to sink through the floor.

The man’s expression didn’t move. If anything, his face grew colder. Suho thought: He already hates me. I’m screwed.

Inside, it was worse. The apartment was immaculate, like something out of a magazine, and he sat there in his scuffed sneakers and windbreaker, sticking out like a blot of red ink on a white page. He rambled. Of course he rambled — about his cousins, about his grandma’s daycare, about failing credits and needing cash, as if that was the world’s most professional introduction. The silence from across the table stretched longer and longer, those ocean eyes narrowing until Suho wanted to curl up and disappear.

Then the boy appeared.

Minjae. Small, serious, clutching a dinosaur as if it could ward off the world. He peeked out from behind his father, eyes wary but curious. Something in Suho softened immediately, like someone had untied a knot in his chest.

He crouched. He introduced himself. He asked about dinosaurs.

And when Minjae smiled — when he laughed, high and bright and unguarded — it felt like the entire apartment shifted. Suho’s throat tightened unexpectedly. He hadn’t known he was capable of making anyone sound like that. He’d been drowning in silence for weeks, months, but this was different: the kind of sound that made you want to keep talking just to hear it again.

So he tried basketball tricks, because basketball was the one thing he could always count on. Except his nerves made him fumble every time, the ball slipping, bouncing, betraying him. But Minjae laughed harder with each failure, clutching his dinosaur, delighted. Suho thought, Okay. Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make him happy, even if I’m an idiot at everything else.

When Sieun finally stood, Suho expected dismissal. He was too young, too unqualified, too much of a mess. But instead: boundaries, rules, pay. A chance.

Suho nodded so hard he thought his head might come off. He promised things he wasn’t sure he could deliver but swore he’d die trying.

And then it was over. He stepped out into the hallway, back into the ordinary air, the red windbreaker suddenly too warm around him. But all he could think about was how guarded those eyes had been, how young the father had looked despite the weariness in his posture, and how, for one impossible second, Suho had wanted to make him smile too.

---

It was only his second day and already he thought he might die of nerves.

The kindergarten gate loomed like a fortress. Parents streamed past, polished and purposeful, scooping up their children like it was the most natural thing in the world. Suho stood there in his red windbreaker, sweating through the collar, wondering how long it would take before they realized he didn’t belong. He adjusted the strap of his backpack and checked the paper in his pocket for the fiftieth time: Pick up Minjae. 4:30 p.m. Don’t be late.

He was late. Again.

The teacher gave him a look that could slice glass as he stumbled up the path, panting. Minjae was still waiting on the bench, dinosaur clutched to his chest, patient in a way that hurt to see. Suho’s heart twisted. He dropped to one knee immediately. “Sorry, buddy,” he whispered. “Bus trouble. My fault. But I’m here now. Want to head home?”

Minjae’s little face softened as if the apology had been enough. He slipped his hand into Suho’s sleeve. The teacher didn’t look convinced, but Minjae’s small trust anchored Suho like nothing else.

The ride back was chaos in disguise. Suho made up names for strangers on the bus—The Man with the Mystery Ice Cream, Captain Briefcase—and Minjae giggled into his dinosaur, shoulders shaking. For a moment Suho almost forgot he was broke and failing credits and drowning in everything. For a moment he was just a boy on a bus making another boy laugh.

The apartment, when they arrived, was intimidatingly clean. Sieun’s kind of clean, which was to say cold, sterile, like nothing dared to be out of place. Suho toed his sneakers off and thought grimly: I’m about to ruin this man’s home.

Cooking was a disaster. He filled the pot too high, salted the water like he was trying to re-create the ocean, dumped the pasta before it boiled. He tried to separate the noodles and somehow created a single giant noodle-monster. When the pot boiled over, the smoke alarm screamed bloody murder. Minjae shrieked with laughter while Suho flapped his windbreaker at the ceiling, yelling, “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s ambience!”

Dinner turned into clumped noodles with ketchup because the tomato jar turned out to be salsa. Suho tasted it, grimaced, and smiled anyway. “Gourmet. Don’t tell your dad.”

Minjae whispered back, conspiratorial, “Daddy hates ketchup on noodles.”

Suho put a finger to his lips. “Team rules.”

Shower time soaked him more than Minjae. He tried to be practical—rinse, soap, rinse—but Minjae discovered that splashing his new nanny was the funniest game in the world. By the end Suho’s T-shirt clung to him, his hair dripping into his eyes. He looked like someone who’d survived a flood. Minjae wrapped in his towel, grinning, declared, “You’re all wet.”

“That makes two of us,” Suho said, laughing, though inside he was aching a little. When was the last time someone had laughed with him like this?

The fort was the crown jewel. Chairs, cushions, his own windbreaker as a flag. Minjae gasped when it held together. They crawled inside, and Suho attempted to spin the rubber ball like he had promised. It lasted a second on his finger before smacking his forehead. He fell back dramatically. “I have been defeated by science.” Minjae collapsed into giggles, face bright in the dim. Suho thought, This. This is why I need this job. Not for the money. For this.

When Sieun came home, Suho’s stomach plummeted. He scrambled to explain everything: the pasta fiasco, the smoke alarm, the water on the floor. He expected a lecture, a cold dismissal. Instead, Sieun’s ocean eyes just swept over him, unreadable. For a heartbeat, Suho drowned in them again—those eyes too deep, too tired, too beautiful for someone so young to be carrying so much. He looked away quickly, throat tight.

“Tomorrow. Same time,” Sieun said.

The relief almost knocked Suho over. He smiled too wide, nodded too eagerly, but he didn’t care. He’d lasted one day. He’d made Minjae laugh. He hadn’t been fired. That was enough.

Back in the hallway, pulling his red windbreaker on again, Suho let out a long breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The job was going to be chaos. He knew that. But when he thought of Minjae’s sleepy weight leaning against him in the fort, when he thought of those ocean eyes watching them in silence—he felt, for the first time in weeks, that maybe he wasn’t drowning after all.

Chapter 5

The first week settled into a rhythm he hadn’t expected.

He thought it would fall apart immediately. A boy like Ahn Suho—barely twenty, late on the very first day, smiling too brightly for someone with no experience—should have given up after the first mess, the first mistake. Sieun had prepared himself for it: another disappointment, another reminder that there was no easy answer to the imbalance he carried on his shoulders.

And yet, the boy kept showing up.

Every afternoon, Sieun returned home to chaos. The kind of chaos he once swore never to allow into his apartment: blanket forts sprawling across the living room, chairs dragged out of place, toy dinosaurs lined up like soldiers across the rug. The faint smell of something experimental—sometimes edible, sometimes only survivable—still hung in the kitchen air. He should have hated it. He should have snapped at the disorder, reminded Suho that this wasn’t a playground.

But his son was laughing.

The sound reached him before he even opened the door. High and unguarded, spilling through the walls, echoing in corners that had long gone silent. It startled him every time, left him standing in the entryway longer than necessary, shoes still on, listening. Minjae’s voice, small but bright, weaving between Suho’s deeper tones as the two of them invented games that made no sense and mattered anyway.

And there Suho would be: tall frame folded easily onto the floor, sneakers left at odd angles by the door, hair falling into his eyes as he crouched to let Minjae draw on his hands with markers. Long fingers stained with doodled stars, grinning like he’d been given treasure instead of ink smudges. His red windbreaker slung over the back of a chair, a slash of color in Sieun’s neat, monochrome home. Too loud. Too careless. Too alive.

Sieun told himself it was temporary, but the evidence of permanence crept in.

At school, Minjae’s teacher remarked that the boy seemed brighter, more talkative. At pickup, Sieun noticed his son clutching not just his dinosaur but also a paper covered in scribbles: a stick-figure Minjae with a taller one beside him, carefully labeled “ME AND SUHO HYUNG.” At bedtime, when Sieun tried to read a story, Minjae interrupted with Suho’s retelling—filled with dramatic voices, exaggerated battles, endings warped into laughter.

It unsettled him. But more than that—it surprised him.

He had expected resistance, mistakes, frustration. Instead, Suho was… doing well. Not perfect, not professional, but good. His son was brighter. Happier. The weight Sieun had carried alone seemed to lighten, fraction by fraction, as though the boy had reached into the silence and pried it open.

One evening, he came home earlier than usual. He paused in the hallway, briefcase still in hand, drawn by the sound of low voices. Inside the fort, Minjae’s words floated out, hesitant but sure.

“I don’t feel lonely anymore when you come.”

The sentence pierced straight through him. Loneliness. The word caught, echoing in his chest. He had tried so hard to guard against it, to keep his son safe and content, but the truth was undeniable. And now it wasn’t him easing it—it was Suho. That fact both hurt and healed in the same breath. He lingered too long outside the room, heart pressed against the walls of his chest, before turning away with a weight he couldn’t name.

By the second week, something shifted again.

He came home late one night, exhausted and hollow from a day that had stretched without mercy. He expected to find the apartment asleep, Minjae already tucked into bed, the quiet as punishing as always. Instead, his son ran to him at the door, eyes bright with pride.

“Daddy, Suho-hyung cooked more so you can eat too.”

On the counter sat a plate, covered, still faintly warm. Rice, stir-fried vegetables, an egg fried a little unevenly but whole. Not takeout. Not instant noodles. Not burnt pasta.

Sieun stared at it longer than he should have. His tie felt suddenly too tight around his throat. He turned toward Minjae, who was smiling as though this was the greatest gift he could give his father.

Later, when the boy was asleep, Sieun sat at the kitchen table and uncovered the plate. The food was simple, clumsy in places, but made with care. Made for him. He picked up his chopsticks, ate slowly, silently. He tried not to imagine Suho in this same kitchen, sleeves rolled up, brows furrowed in concentration as he cooked. Tried not to imagine those long hands—marker still faint on his skin—stirring vegetables, plating rice. Tried not to picture the grin, the bright voice saying I made extra, so he has something proper to eat too.

He leaned back when the plate was empty, head tipping against the chair. His ocean eyes lingered on the quiet apartment. It no longer felt quite so cold.

Relief seeped in, unwelcome and undeniable. He told himself not to trust it. Not to let it mean anything. But even as he argued with himself, the truth settled heavy in his chest. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he wasn’t carrying everything alone.

And for that, though he would never say it aloud, he was grateful.

Chapter 6

Suho knew something was wrong the second the door clicked shut behind them and Minjae didn’t announce their arrival to the air.

No victory speech, no dinosaur lifted like a parade flag. Just a small boy walking past the entryway, backpack still slung on one shoulder, and folding himself onto the couch as if he were trying to disappear into the cushion seam. The dinosaur sat in his lap, limp, as if even it had decided to be quiet.

“Hey,” Suho said softly, easing down to the rug in front of him. “We lost our mission briefing privileges?”

Minjae didn’t smile. He worried the edge of the dinosaur’s felt ear with his thumb. “Can we not do basketball today?”

“Sure.” Suho kept his voice easy, as if this were nothing at all. “We can… I dunno, build a city where all the traffic lights only turn green for us. Or we can lie very still and pretend we’re plants. I am an excellent fern.”

Nothing. Minjae’s mouth did a small downward thing that Suho wanted to smooth with a hand he didn’t know if he was allowed to use.

“Talk to me, teammate,” he tried again. “Did something happen?”

The boy’s shoulders rose and fell once, stubborn and small. When he finally spoke, the words were almost a whisper, as if saying them too loudly might make them larger. “Some kids said I’m the kid with no mommy.”

The words landed with a dull sound in Suho’s chest. He had been expecting it, in the way you always expect the world to be careless at the exact place you are softest, but it still knocked the breath from him. For a moment he didn’t trust himself to speak. Then he slid closer on the rug until his knees touched the couch and tipped his head to find Minjae’s eyes.

“Sometimes,” he said carefully, “people say things they don’t understand. And sometimes people are born into families that look different from what those people think is ‘normal.’ But different and not-perfect doesn’t mean not-complete.” He let the words sit between them, steadying his own lungs around them. “You have a dad who does two people’s jobs and still makes sure your dinosaur never goes into the wash by accident. That sounds pretty complete to me.”

Minjae blinked, a little crease deepening between his brows. “But… they said it like it’s bad.”

“It’s not.” Suho swallowed. He sat back on his heels, then made himself say it out loud, the way he always had in his head. “I don’t have a mom or a dad, either. It’s been me and my grandma for as long as I can remember. She cooks soup like magic and yells at the TV like it can hear her. It was… different, and sometimes it felt lonely when I was little. But it wasn’t bad. It was ours. And I was loved.” He nudged the dinosaur with a finger. “You’re loved. You have the best dad in the world. That’s luck.”

Minjae’s head came up at that, the way sunflowers turn for light. “Best in the world?”

“Have you seen his tie-tying speed? It’s illegal in some countries.” Suho leaned in and dropped his voice. “Also, and don’t tell anyone, but I saw him once fold your blanket so perfectly the blanket said thank you.”

The laugh that came wasn’t bright, not yet, but it was real. It uncurled something inside Suho he hadn’t realized was clenched. He held out his hand, palm up. Minjae slid his smaller one onto it, fingers warm, trust heavier than a weight.

“If they say it again,” Minjae asked, testing the words like stepping-stones, “what do I say?”

“You can say, ‘My family is mine and it’s enough.’ Or you can say, ‘I have a dad who loves me so much his hair is tired,’” Suho said gravely, and Minjae huffed something that almost became a smile. “Or—and this is a good one—you can say nothing, and walk away to someone who knows the truth.”

“Like you,” Minjae answered, quick and sure, and Suho had to look down at their joined hands for a second so his face wouldn’t say too much.

They made dinner slowly, an amble through motions rather than a performance. Minjae stood on his chair and handed Suho cloves of garlic like gifts. The good pan warmed, oil breathing a small hello. Suho moved the flame lower because today didn’t need sizzle; it needed gentle. He called his grandmother briefly so Minjae could tell her he was “helping,” which earned him a blessing in the form of a recipe and a demand for his midterm schedule. While the rice rested, they peeled cucumbers for a salad, Minjae’s peels ribboning like streamers. When Suho reached to cover a third plate, Minjae did it first with grave ceremony.

“For Daddy,” he said.

“For Daddy,” Suho echoed, surprised by the steadiness in his voice.

Shower time was quieter than usual. No sea battles, no tidal waves. Minjae leaned into Suho’s hand when he scrubbed around the ears and rested his forehead on Suho’s shoulder for the rinse. Suho wrapped him in a towel and rubbed his arms briskly until the boy snapped awake again like a bird fluffing its feathers. They built a small fort, not the usual empire; they lay on their backs and counted the buttons on the underside of the couch together as if it were a constellation.

“I don’t want a mommy,” Minjae said into the fabric, very small.

“You don’t have to,” Suho said. “You only have to want what you already have.”

“What do I have?”

“You have you, and your dinosaur, and a dad who shows up when he’s tired, and a hyung who is very good at burning garlic.” He felt Minjae smile against his sleeve. “And you have team rules.”

“Team rules,” Minjae murmured, and drifted.

After he tucked the blanket under Minjae’s chin, Suho cleaned as if order could be an offering. He wiped the counters, rinsed the pan, set the plate for Sieun at a neat angle that pleased him for no good reason. He didn’t want to leave; he didn’t want to sit down; he didn’t want to do anything except hold the silence steady until it could be put into Sieun’s hands without spilling.

When the lock finally turned, it was later than usual. Sieun stepped inside with the night on his shoulders, tie loosened, ocean-dark eyes rimmed with the unmistakable red of too much screen and too little sleep. Suho didn’t give him the time to armor back up.

“Hey,” he said, voice low so it wouldn’t bounce. “Can we talk?”

The words startled them both. Sieun’s mouth opened, closed. He nodded once and drifted to the table as if that was always where he was going. Suho fished two beers from the back of the fridge because there was nothing else—no tea leaves, no juice, only the adult apology of carbonation in a can. He popped both and slid one across.

“He had a rough day,” Suho began, and then told it straight, without theatrics or softening. The bench at school. The kids’ words, careless as stones. The way Minjae folded inward on the couch. How he’d tried to write something gentler over it with the truth.

Sieun listened without blinking, one hand on the beer he wasn’t drinking. When Suho mentioned his own grandmother, the fact of “no parents,” something flickered across the still water of his face—recognition, or regret, Suho couldn’t tell. When he described the quiet shower, the small fort, the covered plate, the way Minjae said he didn’t want a mommy because wanting hurt—Sieun’s fingers tightened on aluminum until the metal made a tired sound.

“I’m sorry,” Sieun said finally. It sounded like a phrase he knew by heart and also like one he wasn’t used to saying. “I’m sorry he heard that. I… try to be there for all the ways a child should not have to be brave.” He found Suho’s eyes for the first time since he’d walked in. “Thank you for catching him where I couldn’t.”

“It’s—” Suho cleared his throat. “I like catching him.” He attempted a smile; it came out wobbly. “He’s very aerodynamic.”

Sieun’s mouth did an unexpected thing then—it softened. Not a smile, exactly, but some narrower cousin. He cracked his beer, took a careful sip, and set it back down with the air of someone allowing himself one square inch of permission.

“You’re good with him,” he said, and the sentence rode on breath like a confession. “Better than I thought anyone could be this quickly. I thought this would be… a mess I would be cleaning up at night.” His glance flicked toward the sink, where the good pan air-dried like a faithful soldier. “Instead, I come home and—” He exhaled through his nose, as if the rest of the thought were too indulgent to say. “He laughs. He eats properly. He sleeps easier. I had… not expected to owe anyone for that.”

“You don’t owe me,” Suho said too fast. “I mean—this is my job. I want to do it right.”

“And you are,” Sieun said simply. He nudged the covered plate with a knuckle, almost shy. “Thank you for the dinners. I had forgotten what it feels like to lift the lid and have something waiting that isn’t… punishment.”

Suho laughed softly, caught by the truth of it. “I’m still learning. Your son is very forgiving about my culinary crimes.”

“He’s as forgiving as he is stubborn,” Sieun said. The corner of his mouth tugged again, a brief sunrise. “He told me yesterday that ketchup on noodles is ‘illegal, but hyung got a special permit.’”

“Temporary amnesty,” Suho confirmed solemnly. “Expires when I learn how to make real sauce.”

Silence settled then, but it wasn’t empty. It waited with them, a third thing at the table. Suho tried not to stare and failed. Up close, without the blur of motion and duty, Sieun’s face did not look like a mask; it looked like someone who had learned how to hold himself still because moving invited cracks. The ocean eyes that had struck Suho dumb on the first day were softer now in the kitchen’s dim; tired, yes, but lit from within by something he didn’t trust himself to name. Even the way Sieun pressed his lips together when he thought—Suho felt dangerously fixated on it, the small, human thing of it, the reminder that this beautiful, untouchable man was made of muscles and habits and nights like anyone else.

“I told him,” Suho said, and his voice came out quieter than before, “that he has the best dad in the world.”

Something unguarded flashed. Sieun looked down fast, then back up as if the only way out was through. “He does not,” he said. “But he has a father who tries.” He paused. “It… helps, that someone else tries with him.”

The beer cans sweated rings onto the table. Somewhere in the apartment, the refrigerator hummed its own private song. Suho’s pulse had migrated to his throat and refused to leave. He could feel himself tipping, just a little, toward a place he hadn’t meant to go.

“You don’t have to stay and tell me these things,” Sieun added, almost awkwardly, as if he’d caught himself asking for too much. “You could just… write a note.”

“I know,” Suho said. “But I wanted you to know, not the note. And I…” He swallowed. Honesty had already taken too much ground to retreat now. “I like talking to you.”

That did it. The almost-smile came back, fragile, undeniably there. Sieun lifted his can in a small, rueful toast. “To team rules,” he said, and the words, in his mouth, sounded like he was letting himself believe in something.

“To team rules,” Suho echoed, and clinked, and drowned a little deeper than was wise in the ocean of those eyes.

He left late. The hallway felt thinner than usual, as if the walls had learned what was happening in the kitchen and were trying to eavesdrop. He tugged on the red windbreaker and stood for a second with his forehead against the cool metal of the elevator door, breath fogging a tiny circle only he could see. In his pocket, his phone buzzed with a message from Baku he didn’t open: some joke, some tug back toward a life that had room for late-night courts and fast food. He would answer tomorrow. Tonight his chest felt warm and heavy and right in a way that was going to make everything harder.

Inside the apartment, Sieun sat alone for a moment longer at the table, fingers resting on the ring of condensation Suho’s can had left, as if memorizing its size. Then he lifted the lid from the plate and ate, slowly, in the hush that no longer felt like punishment.

Neither of them said it—couldn’t, yet—but something had shifted. A small, stubborn truth had taken a seat between them and refused to leave.

 

Chapter 7

The first salary shouldn’t have felt like a milestone. It wasn’t even enough to cover half his tuition bill. But when the envelope landed in Suho’s hand, smooth and warm from being passed across a desk, he held it tighter than he expected. On the bus ride back, he tore it open, counting fast. His eyebrows rose. A little more than he’d been told.

Tucked neatly inside was a slip of paper in sharp, meticulous handwriting:

This includes for the extra dinners you’ve been making. Thank you.

The words were so stiffly polite they might have been carved in stone. Suho stared at them for the rest of the bus ride, tapping the edge against his knee. He told himself not to grin like an idiot.

---

He blew the money almost immediately — not on himself, but on the gang.

The pojangmacha tent flapped in the wind as the four of them crammed into a corner table sticky with dried soju. The air was heavy with the smell of grilling meat, red chili paste, and smoke that stung the eyes. Baku slapped him on the back so hard the bottles rattled.

“Look who finally remembered we exist! Mr. Babysitter himself.”

“I told you, it’s temporary,” Suho muttered, tugging his cap lower.

“Temporary? You’ve been MIA for a month,” Seongje drawled, swirling his soju shot like it was wine. “We thought you got abducted. Or worse — cuffed down by some sugar mommy.”

Laughter exploded around the table. Even Baekjin, usually quiet, cracked a grin. “A sugar daddy, more like.”

Suho choked on his beer. “What the hell, hyung—”

Baku leaned in with a wide smirk. “Come on. Admit it. You’re living in some guy’s apartment, cooking dinner, picking up his kid—how is that not housewife training?”

“I don’t live there,” Suho protested.

“But you want to,” Seongje cut in smoothly. “Look at his ears, they’re turning red.”

“They’re red because of the grill!” Suho grabbed a piece of charred meat, stuffed it in his mouth, chewed furiously as if that would end the conversation.

But they were like sharks who’d scented blood.

“Do you tuck the kid in with lullabies?”
“Do you wear an apron?”
“Do you call him honey when you serve the rice?”

Suho slammed his chopsticks down. “Shut up. He’s my boss. That’s all.”

The laughter rose again, echoing under the tent. It should have been easy to ride the noise, to laugh with them until it dulled the edge of their teasing. He even tried — plastering a grin, tossing a fry back at Baku. But somewhere between the third round of soju and the fourth plate of pork belly, his thoughts slipped.

Not to the gang. Not to school. Not even to his bank balance.

Back to a neat apartment, to Minjae’s shrill laughter, to the way the boy had grabbed his hand and dragged him into blanket forts as if he belonged there. And then — unbidden, intrusive — the memory of Sieun’s eyes: ocean-dark, too deep, too watery, rimmed with exhaustion, yet sharp enough to make Suho lose his words. Eyes that made him wonder if rulers could really ever stay straight.

---

F

For Yeon Sieun, the month blurred into late nights and heavy mornings. Reports piled on his desk, meetings bled into each other, and deadlines stretched thinner than his patience. But when he came home, something had shifted.

The apartment was no longer silent when he unlocked the door. He would step inside and hear Minjae’s laughter spilling out from the living room, sometimes followed by Suho’s exasperated yelp.

One Thursday evening, Sieun returned to find the dining table covered in an elaborate fort of cushions and blankets, fairy lights strung up haphazardly. Minjae’s head popped out from the gap, cheeks flushed, Suho grinning behind him like a boy himself. For a moment, Sieun stood frozen in the doorway — briefcase in one hand, exhaustion forgotten — and felt something he couldn’t name.

Other nights, it was quieter. Sieun would loosen his tie, open the fridge, and find a container waiting: kimchi stew, stir-fried vegetables, sometimes even neatly packed rice balls. He ate standing up in the kitchen, chopsticks still in his hand when his phone buzzed with work emails. But in the warmth of that food, there was a comfort that unnerved him.

He told himself it was nothing. Temporary. Practical. A convenience, not a comfort. And yet—

“Daddy, look!” Minjae tugged on his sleeve one Friday, holding up a crayon drawing. A crooked figure with black hair, holding hands with a smaller figure labeled “me,” and next to them a taller one, messy hair, wide grin. Underneath, in uneven letters: me and Suho-hyung.

Sieun stared at it longer than he should have. He felt the corners of his mouth twitch before he stopped it, pressing a hand against Minjae’s head instead. “Good job.”

That night, after Minjae fell asleep, Sieun lingered by the bedroom door. He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. But through the crack, he heard the boy’s whisper:

“I don’t feel lonely anymore when you come, Suho-hyung.”

The words hit harder than any late-night spreadsheet. Relief, because his son wasn’t lonely. Ache, because it took someone else to fix that. He backed away before he could hear Suho’s reply, but the sentence echoed long into the night.

---

And so the days spilled on, a strange rhythm forming.

Suho laughed too loud at the pojangmacha, but fell silent on the bus ride home, replaying Minjae’s laugh in his head.

Sieun stacked files on his desk at work, but paused too long when he remembered the container of stew waiting in the fridge.

Neither of them said it. Neither of them admitted it. But already, without their consent, the shape of their lives had begun to shift — quiet, domestic, fragile as glass, yet steady as the tide.

Chapter 8

The apartment was quiet when Yeon Sieun unlocked the door, but not the kind of quiet he had grown used to over the years. It wasn’t the hollow silence of exhaustion, when only the refrigerator’s hum and his own footsteps existed. Tonight, the air hummed with something warmer, softer—an echo of laughter still clinging to the walls. He paused in the entryway, shoes aligned automatically on the mat, and let his eyes travel to the living room. 

Suho was there, exactly where Sieun had half expected him to be, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of a battlefield of Lego blocks. Minjae, with his cheeks flushed pink, was leaning across Suho’s shoulder to show him something—a crooked tower, a spaceship maybe, or some strange hybrid of both. Suho’s head tilted as if he were listening intently to a world-shattering discovery, nodding with such exaggerated seriousness that Minjae dissolved into giggles.

Sieun felt something unclench, though he would never call it relief.

His gaze flicked to the kitchen before he could stop himself. The faint smell of tomato and basil lingered, almost alien compared to the usual burnt instant noodle broth. On the counter, covered by a plate, sat a still-warm portion. A yellow sticky note was crookedly slapped onto it, the handwriting sloppy but cheerful: Don’t burn it, hyung.

He swallowed, the corner of his mouth tugging upward for half a second before he shut it down. He stepped further inside, his voice even and cool. “It’s late.”

Suho startled slightly, then scrambled to his feet with all the gracelessness of someone too tall for his own limbs. His sneakers squeaked against the floor. He brushed off his sweatpants, flashing that same irrepressible grin that irritated Sieun for reasons he could not articulate.

“Hey—welcome home.”

Sieun froze. It was the way he said it. Not mechanical like the polite bows of coworkers, not casual like an acquaintance. It sounded… habitual. Familiar. Like the apartment was supposed to have two adults in it.

He blinked once, tamped down the thought, and muttered, “Minjae, bedtime.”

Minjae groaned but obeyed, scampering off toward his room, dragging his stuffed dinosaur by the tail. Suho stayed behind, rocking slightly on his heels, still wearing that grin.

And then—unexpectedly—he said it. “I hope the pasta last night wasn’t too salty.”

Sieun turned his head sharply. The words had been casual, almost careless, but they landed with a strange weight. Nobody asked him about dinner. Not colleagues, not acquaintances, not even family. His son sometimes complained. But this—

“It was fine,” he said, clipped.

Suho’s grin widened like he’d won something. “Good. I was worried. My grandma used to say I season like a soldier—too much or nothing at all.”

Sieun had no idea what that meant. He didn’t ask.

But something in his chest felt… off balance.

---

The days that followed carried the same pattern, though with small shifts that Sieun tried not to notice.

Every afternoon, he returned to the sight of his son’s happiness—genuine, unguarded. There were pillow forts straining against gravity, toy cars lodged under the sofa, sometimes even a faint burnt smell from Suho’s questionable culinary experiments. But there was always laughter. And tucked neatly in the kitchen: enough dinner for him, as though by default.

Suho had started talking more, too. Tiny intrusions, nothing dramatic, but they landed like pebbles against the glass of Sieun’s composure.

“How was your day, hyung? You look… tired.”
“I tried packing Minjae’s lunch differently—less carrots. He swore he hates carrots.”
“The kid beat me at Go Fish three times today. I think he’s hustling me.”

Sieun answered in clipped syllables, but he didn’t shut them down. That unsettled him most of all—that he let them stay.

And Suho, apparently, noticed everything. He noticed when Sieun’s tie was still tight at midnight, when the coffee canister was nearly empty by Wednesday, when Minjae’s drawings started featuring an extra tall figure labeled “Suho-hyung.”

One evening, Minjae begged for a story. “But Suho-hyung has to do the voices,” he insisted.

So Suho sprawled on the rug, waving his arms wildly, giving each character a ridiculous accent. Minjae howled until hiccups shook his chest. Sieun sat stiff on the couch, book in hand, pretending to supervise. When he tried to interject—“That’s not how the line goes”—Suho only grinned, undeterred.

“He’s got your laugh, hyung. Loud when it slips out.”

The words dropped like a stone. Sieun’s breath caught. He hadn’t realized Suho had been watching him that closely. He hadn’t realized his laugh was loud at all.

He masked it with a cough, flipping the page. But his chest felt unsteady, like the walls he’d built were shifting.

Then came the night that broke the pattern in a quieter direction.

He wasn’t even that late. The office had coughed him out sooner than usual; the elevator ride home felt like an indulgence. The apartment was dim—only the lamp in the living room on, its shade throwing a mellow circle across the table. The kitchen was clean in that learned way Suho cleaned—drying rack neat, counters wiped in big circles you could still see in the sheen. The hallway held the soft night-breath of a child asleep.

Sieun stood at Minjae’s door longer than needed. The nightlight cast a small moon on the wall; his son’s dinosaur guarded the pillow fort that was now just a tumbled stack. Minjae slept sprawled, one hand flung open like a thought abandoned mid-sentence. The blanket had been tugged up with gentle, deliberate hands. There was safety in the smallness of that room that made Sieun’s throat tighten. It hadn’t always felt this way.

When he turned, he found Suho at the dining table, hunched over a mess of printed sheets and a notebook fat with scribbles. He had a pen between his teeth, another tucked behind his ear. The lamp turned the tips of his hair into light. He did not look like chaos, not now. He looked like a young man trying very hard.

“Your posture is an injury,” Sieun said, because anything else would have been too much like walking into a conversation he didn’t know how to have.

Suho jumped; the pen pinged against the table. Then he grinned, sheepish and unembarrassed. “Welcome home,” he said, softer this time, like they were both aware Minjae was down the hall. He pushed the papers into a tidier pile with the edge of his hand. “He knocked out early tonight. Big day. He and the dinosaur had a reconciliation ceremony after snack time betrayal.”

“And you?” The question surprised Sieun as it left him.

Suho’s mouth tipped. “Midterm project. Sports management. I have to build a microplan for a youth program. Schedules, nutrition, budget. I can do the part where you run around and get sweaty.” He gestured helplessly at the spreadsheets he’d attempted on ruled paper. “The rest is… a lot of numbers pretending to be people.”

The chair scraped before Sieun decided to pull it out. He sat. The dining table was his desk some nights and a cluttered workbench others; tonight it became a classroom neither of them had planned. He touched the nearest sheet with a finger, scanning the column where Suho had listed snacks as “yummy,” “healthy,” and “sneaky healthy.”

“You can’t just write ‘yummy’ in a plan,” he said.

Suho leaned in, peering. “But it’s a critical metric.”

“You can define the metric as ‘palatability for target demographic,’” Sieun corrected dryly.

Suho said the words under his breath, as if trying on a coat too big for him. “Pala… palata— I’m going to write ‘tasty.’”

“Write both.” He reached for a pen and drew a grid without asking permission of the page. “You’re mixing fixed and variable costs, and you’re duplicating line items. Here—break them apart. Equipment purchases are up front, replacement cycles can be amortized across the quarters.”

“My brain is leaving my body,” Suho said, eyes wide and glittering with a mix of panic and delight. “Amor—what? Is that a dinosaur?”

“Depreciation schedule,” Sieun said, and because patience was muscle memory when Minjae was involved, he slowed the sentence down. “We assume your cheap cones die after a year. Your balls—” He stopped, and Suho slapped a hand over his mouth to smother a laugh that tried very hard to be quiet. A beat. “Basketballs.” He did not smile. “Replace them in the budget annually. That way the cost isn’t a surprise.”

“Okay,” Suho said, and he really was trying. His handwriting was big and eager. “Cones die. Balls—basketballs—have birthdays. Got it.”

They worked like that for a while—Sieun drawing columns, Suho populating them with messy numbers; Sieun framing a sentence, Suho translating it into his own clumsy clarity. The lamp hummed. Somewhere beyond the window, a motorcycle insisted on having feelings. Every so often, the apartment settled—pipes ticking, the refrigerator clearing its throat—and both of them would glance down the hall as if the house itself needed permission to keep breathing.

“Your nutrition section is a manifesto,” Sieun said at one point, turning a page covered in exclamation points.

Suho looked mortified. “I get… enthusiastic about kids eating actual food.”

“That is obvious.” He tapped the margin. “Keep the energy. Cut the exclamation points. Swap stories for data—‘Kids who help cook eat more vegetables’ instead of ‘Please don’t feed them only chips or I will cry.’”

“Fine. I’ll save my tears for when the sauce burns.”

There was a moment then—not long, but noticeable—when Suho set his pen down and slumped back in the chair. “Nobody ever really sat down with me like this,” he said. It wasn’t a fishing line, not a plea for praise. It was just fact, laid gently on the table between them. “Grandma tried, but homework wasn’t her battlefield. Teachers were always… busy. I learned to guess and go fast.”

“Guessing is expensive,” Sieun said, and it should have sounded like a lecture, but it came out quiet.

Suho’s eyes lifted. In the lamplight they were darker than daytime, soft at the edges but bright. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

Sieun didn’t know what complicated thing pressed against his ribs then—something like recognition, something like regret, something like the tired tenderness he allowed himself only when Minjae was asleep. He cleared his throat. He drew a smaller grid. He explained quarterly reviews and buffer percentages and why promises were safest when they lived inside numbers first.

Suho took it all in with a kind of joyous stubbornness. He asked when he needed to, nodded when he didn’t, cracked jokes just enough to keep the room from getting too stiff. Twice he nearly wrote “yummy” again and caught himself at the last second, throwing a guilty side-eye at Sieun like a child sneaking candy.

They finished close to midnight. The plan was still a student’s plan—rough edges, a few crooked lines—but it held together. It would do.

Suho sat back and let out a long, satisfied breath that seemed to lighten the room. “Thank you,” he said, and he said it like he meant the whole hour, the patience tucked into the explanations, the way Sieun had turned his pen without commentary when Suho’s ran out of ink. “For real. You… make things easier. Even when you don’t know you’re doing it.”

Something uncoiled and then recoiled in Sieun, like a creature unused to daylight. He capped the pen. He stacked the papers neatly to give his hands an occupation. “Go home,” he said, because that was the safest sentence. “You have class tomorrow.”

“Bossy,” Suho murmured, but his grin was soft. He gathered his pages, tugged his hoodie on, and stood. For once he didn’t trip over anything on his way to the door. He stopped there and turned, one hand on the frame, and it would have been so easy for Sieun to just nod and send him off into the hallway.

“Hyung,” Suho said, small. “How was your day?”

The question landed differently now, after columns and amortization and quiet. It wasn’t a pebble at the window. It was a chair pulled out at a table.

“It was long,” Sieun said, and he found, to his own surprise, that he wanted to add more. “But it ends better than it started.”

Suho’s smile did that thing again—unreasonable, immediate. He lifted two fingers in a salute. “See you tomorrow. Don’t… skip dinner.”

“Don’t burn the sauce,” Sieun countered, and the way Suho’s laugh spilled down the hall after the door clicked shut made the apartment feel briefly—dangerously—like a place with two sets of footsteps in it.

He didn’t go to his room. Not yet. He rinsed two cups that hadn’t been used. He straightened a stack of Minjae’s books no one had asked him to straighten. He walked to the doorway of his son’s room and stood there, the soft in-and-out of Minjae’s breathing smoothing the sharpness of the day. Then he went back to the table and sat where Suho had sat, half expecting warmth to have sunk into the wood and stayed there.

The plan lay between his hands, a map of a young man’s attempt at order. He could see the places he’d corrected, his handwriting stark against Suho’s eager sprawl. He saw, too, the places he’d let be—Suho’s over-earnest sentence about kids cooking vegetables; the line in the schedule labeled “Dance break (mandatory).” He didn’t cross it out.

On his way to the kitchen he opened the fridge without thinking. The container was there, the sticky note more crooked than yesterday’s. He ate standing up, chopsticks moving on muscle memory while his mind replayed the lamp-lit hour in slow circles. He tried to name the feeling and failed. Relief was part of it. Fear, a sliver. Something warmer that he would not touch.

Later, in bed, the apartment made the night sounds it had always made, but they seemed to belong to a different house—a house where the quiet rested instead of accused, where the dark did not swallow so much as fold around. He closed his eyes and saw the shape of Suho’s hand gripping a pen too tight, the way his mouth moved around a new word until it fit, the way he had said you make things easier like he was putting truth down gently where it couldn’t be knocked over.

He told himself it was temporary. He told himself he was grateful for competence, for energy, for a boy who wasn’t a boy where it mattered. He told himself a lot of things as sleep crept up on him, and none of them contained the sentence that wanted to be said most: Stay.

In the morning, Minjae would find a new sticky note on the fridge with a small drawing in a tidy hand: three stick figures and, beside them, a fourth thing that was not a person—just a square with a bow. A packed lunch. He would ask who it was for. “Suho-hyung,” Sieun would say, and make it sound practical.

For now, the lamp was off, the city was a rumor beyond the window, and somewhere a young man in a red windbreaker was walking down a street with his head up, pockets full of lists, and a page that held, for the first time, numbers that behaved.

Chapter 9

It was supposed to be a night off. For once, Suho wasn’t running from one place to another, juggling classes and the part-time job he’d stumbled into like a lifeline. He was leaning back in a too-small chair at a noisy fried chicken joint, a bottle of beer sweating in his hand while Baku and Beakjin argued over who was the worst shooter on the court. Seongje was laughing so hard he nearly choked on a wing.

“You’ve changed, man,” Baku said, grinning across the table at Suho. “A month ago you’d be here every night, talking trash and drinking us under. Now you’re always running home like—” he wagged his brows, “—like some househusband. Don’t tell me that hot single dad stole you away for good.”

The table erupted into laughter. Suho rolled his eyes and reached for another chicken wing. “Shut up. I'm working my ass off for real.”

“You’re whipped,” Seongje declared suddenly, pointing a greasy drumstick at him.

“I’m not whipped,” Suho shot back, reaching across to steal a fry.

“Bro,” Beakjin cut in, grinning like a wolf. “You ditched us twice last week because Minjae had a school project. You’re basically the kid’s second dad.”

“Housewife,” Seongje chimed in, raising his beer in mock salute. “The way you cook dinners? Pack it up, Suho, you’re done for.”

Suho groaned, slumping back in his chair. “He’s my boss. End of story.”

Baku leaned forward, eyes glinting. “A hot boss, with eyes like the ocean. You said so yourself, remember? Don’t think we forgot.”

Suho froze, caught off guard. He had said that once, weeks ago, half-drunk and too loose-tongued for his own good. His friends roared with laughter at the look on his face.

“Man, bet he’s a player,” Beakjin said, voice dripping mischief. “Knocked up some girl and now ended up being a hot single dad. You sure you wanna get involved in that mess?”

Suho bristled. “He’s not—” He stopped himself, realizing how defensive he sounded. “Look, he’s not like that. He’s… just tired. Works too much. Drinks coffee like water. Half the time, I think he forgets to eat unless someone reminds him. He’s not some player.”

“I’m serious!” Beakjin pressed. “Have you even asked about the mother? Maybe she’s still around. Maybe she’s coming back.”

Something tightened in Suho’s chest. He hadn’t asked. He didn’t dare. Every time he thought about it, something in Sieun’s eyes — the kind of hollow depth you couldn’t fake — warned him away from the question.

“I’m not interested,” Suho muttered finally, though the heat in his ears betrayed him. “He’s… he’s straight as a ruler anyway.”

Baku barked a laugh. “Straight? Please. You’re in too deep, bro. Next thing we know, you’ll be showing up here in an apron, bragging about how you made Daddy Yeon’s favorite soup.”

The whole table dissolved again, and Suho forced himself to laugh with them. But later, when the laughter dulled and the night air cooled against his skin outside, the words lingered, curling heavy in the corners of his mind.

Have you even asked about the mother?
Hot boss, with eyes like the ocean.

His phone buzzed against the table. He ignored it, halfway through his beer. It buzzed again. And again.

When he finally glanced down and saw the name on the screen, his pulse jolted. Sieun.

He excused himself, stepping into the cool night air, and pressed accept. “Hello?”

The voice on the other end wasn’t the composed, clipped tone he’d grown used to. Sieun’s words tumbled fast, fraying. “Suho—sorry—it’s late, I know, but Minjae’s got a fever, it’s high, I gave him medicine but it won’t go down. I—” He broke off, breathing sharp. “I just got called in. They need me in the office. It’s urgent. I can’t—” A ragged pause, and then, quieter: “Can you please stay with him? Just tonight. Please.”

Suho didn’t even think. “I’ll be there.”

“Really?” The relief in that single word nearly undid him.

“Yeah. Just—don’t panic. I’m coming now.”

By the time he ducked back inside, his friends were staring at him like he’d grown a second head. “What’s the rush?” Beakjin asked.

“Kid emergency,” Suho muttered, pulling on his jacket. He ignored the wolf-whistles and teasing comments that followed, his thoughts already racing ahead.

---

He arrived at the apartment breathless, damp hair sticking to his forehead. The door swung open to reveal Sieun, pale and harried, one hand pressed to Minjae’s forehead. The boy lay restless on the couch, cheeks flushed, breathing shallow.

Sieun’s tie was half-off, shirt wrinkled, as if he’d tried to dress for work and care for his son at the same time. For once, the man who always seemed so controlled looked frayed, fragile.

“Sorry,” Sieun said, the word tight, rushed. “I shouldn’t ask this of you, but I have no choice. He—he needs someone with him.” His voice cracked, almost imperceptibly.

Suho shook his head, stepping forward. “Go. I’ll stay. Don’t worry.”

Their eyes met, and for a moment Sieun froze. There was something unspoken there — trust, desperation, the tiniest spark of something else. Then he grabbed his car key, muttered another apology, and left in a whirl of hurried footsteps.

The apartment fell into silence. Suho knelt beside Minjae, touching his forehead with a cool towel. “Hey, champ. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

Minjae whimpered, small hand reaching blindly, and Suho let him hold on, his fingers squeezing tighter than they should for someone so little. He told him stories — nonsense about a brave knight who fought off fevers with magic ice swords, about a dragon who guarded soup instead of treasure. Slowly, the boy relaxed, his breathing evening out.

Hours stretched. Suho stayed, refreshing the towel, whispering reassurances, until his own head nodded heavy and he dozed off in the chair beside the couch, hand still resting protectively on the blanket.

---

When Sieun came back, the sky was paling with the first hint of dawn. He stepped quietly inside, shoulders weighted from a night of damage control at work, but his eyes softened instantly.

Suho slouched on the floor, head tilted back against the couch, dozing lightly. Minjae tucked in, cooler now, face peaceful.

For a long moment, Sieun just stood there. His chest tightened in a way he didn’t want to name.

Suho stirred at the sound, blinking awake. “Hey,” he said softly, voice rough with sleep. “He’s okay. Fever dropped a little.”

Relief cracked through Sieun so sharply it almost hurt. He set his briefcase down, pinched the bridge of his nose. “…Thank you.”

They ended up in the kitchen, the apartment hushed around them. Sieun pulled out two beers, pushed one toward Suho. They sat at the table, both too tired to fill the silence at first.

Finally, Sieun spoke. “You didn’t have to do all this. But you did. I don’t…” He trailed off, lips pressed tight. Then, quieter: “You made it easier. For both of us.”

Suho looked at him — really looked — at the worn lines of his face, the exhaustion tempered by something softer. And, damn it, there it was again: those ocean eyes, tired but still shimmering, drawing him in deeper than he meant to go.

He covered it with a grin, raising his bottle. “Guess I’m good for more than burnt pasta, huh?”

The laugh that slipped from Sieun’s mouth was quiet, almost reluctant. But it was real.

And that, Suho thought, was worth everything.

Chapter 10

The laugh followed Suho home like a warm hand at the small of his back. It wasn’t loud. It hadn’t been bravado—no bark, no edge. Just a small sound that slipped out of Yeon Sieun before he could catch it, startled free by a dumb joke about burnt pasta and the way Suho raised his bottle like a trophy. Suho rode that sound all the way onto the last bus, sat with it pressed inside his ribs while the city moved past in stripes of sodium light, and fell asleep with it buzzing in his ears like something he hadn’t known he was starving for.

By afternoon, he was grinning at nothing. Minjae accused him of hiding candy.

“Why are you smiling like that?” the kid demanded, squinting up at him as they waited at the kindergarten gate. The late sun laid a dull coin of light on the pavement. Minjae’s nose was still a little pink from the fever night, his energy back but soft around the edges, like he’d learned that bodies could betray you and needed to be coaxed back into trust.

“Because my teammate didn’t let a dragon eat him,” Suho said, dropping into a crouch. “Very brave. Heroic, even. Should we celebrate with broccoli?”

“Boo,” Minjae said gravely. “Broccoli is the dragon.”

“Then we must defeat it,” Suho whispered, and he made a show of flexing his fingers like a magician about to pull a coin from behind Minjae’s ear. It got him a giggle, the kind that shook out of the boy like he’d been wound too tight and needed an escape valve. Suho took the small hand that always found his sleeve and let the day tug him forward.

He cooked without thinking. He didn’t burn the sauce this time. He snuck a sliver of carrot into something saucy and watched Minjae eat it without noticing. He lined up the little medicine spoon next to a glass of water and didn’t announce it, just nudged them into the edge of the boy’s vision until compliance felt like his own idea. The ordinary victory of it made Suho’s chest lift.

By the time the front door unlocked, the apartment smelled like garlic and something comfortingly plain. Minjae looked up from the fort he’d built, ready to pounce, then remembered he was supposed to be convalescent and settled on a dignified wave. Sieun stepped in with the night clinging to his shoulders and a tiredness that felt less like a mood and more like a fact of the world. For half a beat, he seemed braced for nothing good.

Then his gaze snagged on the boy—color back in his face, eyes bright—and slid to the kitchen where a covered plate waited, then to Suho at the stove with a towel thrown over one shoulder like he’d seen in a movie about people who knew what they were doing.

“Welcome home,” Suho said. It still felt like temptation, saying it out loud.

Something eased under Sieun’s skin, barely there. He nodded at Minjae first, as if the boy were a compass he had to check before he could trust the room. He put his briefcase down without that sharp sound it usually made. “You look better,” he told his son, and it came out soft, the words unused to air.

“Hyung says I defeated two broccoli and a carrot,” Minjae announced.

“Formidable,” Sieun said, and the tiny tug at his mouth might have been amusement. He turned toward the stove. “And you didn’t burn anything?”

“He believes in me now,” Suho said, fighting a smile, and when Sieun shot him a look—something between dry and warning—he couldn’t help it. “What? That laugh last night? That was basically a recommendation letter.”

Color rose along Sieun’s cheekbones that had nothing to do with the heat of the room. He took off his tie like a man shelving a weapon and washed his hands for longer than he needed to, as if the water could make the moment less close. “Eat,” he said, to Minjae, to himself, to the apartment.

They did. Minjae nodded off halfway through a story about a dinosaur unionizing. Suho carried him to bed and found the blanket already folded back with that neat tuck only Sieun did; he covered the boy, smoothed his hair once without thinking, and stood there for a breath too long watching the small chest rise and fall. When he returned to the living room, the place where he would normally strap on his bag and mutter a quick goodnight, Sieun was standing in the doorway like a person debating something with himself.

Two beers sat on the coffee table. Condensation pooled in delicate circles. The television was on mute, the blue rectangle of it casting a low light over the couch.

“You’re still here,” Sieun said, not quite a question.

“Guess I am,” Suho answered, and his voice surprised him with how steady it sounded. He sank onto the couch, tapping the label of one bottle. “Is this a bribe to get me out?”

“Insurance,” Sieun said, stepping into the room. “In case you burnt the sauce.”

“It was edible,” Suho said, solemn. “Minjae is still alive.”

“That seems to be the new standard,” Sieun murmured, and for the first time that day—maybe in days—the briefest flash of humor crossed his face and stayed.

They drank without clinking. It wasn’t a toast so much as a truce. The TV showed a talking head, a crawl of headlines muttering about markets and ministers. Suho pretended to pay attention for exactly three seconds before the weight of the silence made his skin buzz. He turned his bottle on the table, watched it draw a wet ring. He could feel himself staring, and he made it worse by trying not to. He noticed everything: the way Sieun sat with a sliver of space between his shoulder blades and the back of the couch like his body didn’t trust furniture not to disappear; the way his hand stayed wrapped around the bottle long after he’d taken a sip, thumb pressed against the glass as if measuring the temperature; the small notch at his throat where his pulse showed when he forgot to hide it.

“You always do that?” Suho asked, because he was terminally incapable of letting a moment pass quietly. “Work till you drop, then pretend beer counts as dinner?”

Sieun’s eyes slid sideways, unreadable and also somehow readable now that Suho knew to look. “It used to count.”

“Used to,” Suho repeated, hiding a smile in the lip of the bottle.

Sieun didn’t take the bait. He tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling like there were lines there he needed to memorize. “So Saturday night,” he said, and he didn’t clear his throat first, didn’t sculpt the sentence into something cool and forgettable. “I didn’t know who else to call.”

Something happened between Suho’s ribs like a rope pulled taut suddenly slackening. He set the bottle down, quietly, as if noise might spook the truth away. “You called me.”

“Yes,” Sieun said, and he held Suho’s gaze in a way he had been carefully not doing for weeks. It landed like a hand. “I called you.”

They let that sit. The TV cycled to an advertisement with a smiling family holding matching toothbrushes. Minjae made a soft sound in the bedroom, turning in his sleep. The apartment breathed.

“You did good,” Suho said, and he meant the whole day, the fact of a father going and coming back and admitting to being afraid in a voice that hardly ever admitted to anything.

“You did better,” Sieun answered, simple, stripping out any excess that might make it less true. “He sleeps when you tell him stories. He eats when you cook. He—” He stopped, jaw tightening like he’d almost said something he didn’t have a container for. “He trusts you.”

Suho swallowed, the beer suddenly medieval in his mouth, too heavy, too simple. “I trust you,” he almost said and didn’t. Instead he shrugged, as if it cost him nothing. “Team rules.”

That dragged the not-smile to Sieun’s mouth again. He looked at the television like he might find a safer conversation there. He didn’t. His attention circled back, inevitably.

When Suho reached for the remote, their hands met. Not a dramatic, fated interlock—just skin where there had always been space. Heat. The smallest friction. The moment cracked like ice: cleanly, loudly, in a way that made both of them go still.

“Sorry,” Suho said quickly, reflexive. He tried to pull back, but the room, treacherous, had slowed. The distance didn’t return fast enough. He looked up.

Those eyes. Ocean was a dumb word for them—lazy, too romantic—but he couldn’t come up with a better one. They weren’t gentle; they weren’t drowning him, exactly. They were… deep in a way that made you aware of your own shallows. There was fatigue in them tonight, yes, a tiredness that made the edges go soft; but under that, the same startled clarity he’d glimpsed when Sieun had laughed. Not an invitation. Not a refusal. A recognition.

“No,” Sieun said, and it was not a warning. More like an answer to something that hadn’t been asked. He didn’t move his hand for a beat that was both too long and not nearly long enough.

Then he leaned back, letting the remote go. The spell—if that’s what it was—quietly stepped into another room. Suho let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, and the exhale was shaky enough to make him want to laugh at himself. He didn’t.

They watched a minute of the muted news. The anchor’s mouth rounded silent vowels. The city beyond the window lifted and set down the night.

“How’s your grandmother?” Sieun asked, and the pivot was so gentle it took Suho a second to understand that they were both choosing this: the safer path that was still, somehow, not as narrow as before.

“She’s good,” Suho said, surprised back into a grin. “She asked if my ‘new boss has enough sense to eat soup.’ I told her it’s a work in progress.”

“And she decided…?”

“That you’re fixable,” Suho said. “But she also says if you don’t start sleeping normal hours, your liver is going to write you a resignation letter.”

Sieun almost choked on his drink. He coughed into the back of his hand and then stared at the bottle like it had betrayed him. “Noted.”

“Also,” Suho added, reckless with the sudden bright relief of conversation, “she wanted to know if you are old.”

“Old,” Sieun repeated, blank.

“I told her you’re twenty-six with ancient eyes.”

Sieun blinked. “And that helped?”

“She said, ‘Ah,’ like it explained everything.” Suho’s smile softened. “She has a theory that some people are born heavy and get lighter when someone else insists on carrying a corner.”

Silence moved through the room, not empty. The words sat between them, too honest for a weeknight. Suho looked down at his hands, the way his knuckles had gone white when they brushed Sieun’s, and loosened his grip on the bottle.

“You should go,” Sieun said after a while, and there wasn’t any edge in it. “It’s late.”

“Yeah.” Suho stood up because the smart part of him agreed, because the distance would put everything back where it belonged. He slid his backpack on one shoulder and then paused. The drawing from earlier—the one with three figures—was still on the counter, an apple magnet holding it to the fridge. “He drew me taller than you,” he said, unable to help himself. “I think that’s slander.”

“He thinks height correlates with volume,” Sieun said drily. He stood too, out of habit or politeness or the new instinct to walk people to doors. “He’s five. His data set is flawed.”

“Tell him that,” Suho said. He fished his keys out of his pocket, fumbled them, caught them midair in a way that looked cooler than it felt. “See you tomorrow, hyung.”

“Suho,” Sieun said.

He turned, expecting a reminder about lunch boxes, about homework, about keep the noise down after seven. He got none of those.

“Thank you,” Sieun said again, and this time it folded in more than it had last night. Not just for the fever. Not just for the food. For staying when called. For turning the evening into something that didn’t need to be survived.

Suho’s chest did that soft, stupid thing. “Anytime,” he said, and almost tripped over the truth of it. “Team rules.”

The corridor smelled like varnish and someone’s late ramen. The elevator took too long. Suho leaned his head against the cool metal and laughed once, quietly, at nothing. His palm still remembered the heat of that accidental contact. His brain still replayed the fraction of a second when neither of them had moved away.

Inside, Sieun stood in the middle of the living room and let the apartment adjust around him. He picked up the bottles and rinsed them like there was a right way to do that, like it mattered, and found himself standing in front of the fridge without deciding to. The drawing was objectively terrible. The figures were uneven; the stick-limbs were all wrong. But Minjae had gotten one thing startlingly right: the way the taller figure leaned a fraction toward the smaller one, the way the smaller one stood between them like a point of balance.

He didn’t take it down. He didn’t add anything else to the door either. He just left it there, and then he walked to his son’s room to listen to the ordinary miracle of sleeping breaths and, later, he sat at the dining table where a young man had helped him turn chaos into grids and wrote nothing in a notebook for a long time.

There would be other nights. More laughter fought out of him against his will. More small questions asked like permission that didn’t need to be given. More accidents that weren’t. He told himself it was still temporary. He told himself he was not someone who let people in. He told himself that hand on the remote had meant nothing.

When he finally shut off the light, the room holds the outline of two people sitting with beer between them and the deadline of a day behind them. The quiet didn’t accuse tonight. It waited, and for once, he didn’t feel like he was the only one responsible for answering it.

Outside, in a bus window, a boy in a red windbreaker grinned at his own reflection and didn’t recognize his face, which suddenly looked like someone who had a place to be.

 

 

 

Chapter 11

Minjae started talking about sports day like it was a national holiday and he was the host. He bounced in his chair at dinner, feet drumming the chair rungs, dinosaur clamped under his arm like a mascot who’d unionized.

“You have to come,” he told Suho, sauce on his chin. “You and Daddy. If you don’t come, who will shout ‘run run run run run’ in the exact right voice?”

Sieun, who had been pretending not to listen while de-weaponizing a cherry tomato, said, “Suho has classes,” in the careful tone of a man offering an out he did not want accepted.

Suho glanced at Minjae’s expectant face. “I can shout in several professional registers,” he said. “Cheer voice, coach voice, dinosaur voice. I’m in.”

Minjae whooped, nearly fell off his chair, and then tried out a test chant while Sieun’s mouth did that micro-twitch it did around things he wanted to call impractical and secretly approved of anyway.

The morning arrived bright and aggressively cheerful, the kind of early light that made even apartment stairwells look freshly invented. Suho showed up in a cap and track pants and a T-shirt that had lost a war with a dryer, carrying a tote bag so overstuffed it had opinions. He’d labeled water bottles (HYUNG / DADDY / CHAMPION), packed snacks, a travel umbrella, the “good” band-aids (cartoon dinosaurs—he had become that person), and sunscreen he had already decided would be reapplied every hour whether the sun liked it or not.

Sieun looked…out of place. Not in a suit, thank god, but in simple jeans and a pale button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. It wasn’t casual in the way other dads were—no sportswear, no sneakers meant for sprinting—but somehow the neatness only made him stand out more. His hair was ruffled, as if he’d run a distracted hand through it on the way out the door. His face looked tired, faint shadows beneath his ocean-colored eyes, lips pressed in the kind of straight line that suggested he’d rather be at his desk or anywhere else but here.

And yet.

To Suho, watching from a half-step behind, the man still looked devastatingly nice. Too much so for a kindergarten sports day where other fathers were busy sweating through polyester. Sieun bent down to adjust Minjae’s shoelaces, murmuring something so quietly Suho couldn’t catch it, and for one dangerous second Suho thought, beautiful.

The kindergarten yard was an explosion of small humans and bigger humans trying to look collected. Flags strung overhead blinked in the breeze, teachers wore matching T-shirts that said GO TEAM KINDER in aggressive fonts, and someone had set up a speaker that alternated between peppy children’s songs and inexplicably, 80s rock. The smell of cut grass, sunscreen, and the secondhand stress of a hundred adults wafted in waves.

“Appa! Appa!” a teacher chirped when she saw them, bustling over with a clipboard and the energy of a caffeinated squirrel. She looked at Suho, then at Sieun, then at Minjae bouncing between them like ping-pong. Her smile widened by mathematical degrees. “The whole family! So nice to see both parents today!”

There was a beat in which zero people corrected her.

Suho almost did—some snark lived permanently on his tongue—but Minjae had hooked his small hand into Suho’s sleeve and was looking up at all three of them like the picture had finally matched the book. Suho shut his mouth, nodded solemnly, and said, “Team Yeon reporting for duty.”

Sieun’s ears went faintly pink. He didn’t move to disabuse anyone of anything. Suho looked away so he wouldn’t smile with his whole face.

Warm-up stretched into something between choreography and chaos. The teachers led a follow-along dance that appeared to have been invented by a committee: jump, clap, spin, pretend to be a tree, suddenly stomp like a dinosaur. Suho committed like a man auditioning for the role of “Fun Uncle,” limbs too long, hat askew, Minjae shrieking at his dramatic velociraptor. Sieun began stiffly, then—under Minjae’s merciless coaching—attempted the stomp with the seriousness of a merger. When he accidentally spun into Suho and then pretended he had meant to, Suho wheezed and Minjae declared their technique “illegal, but cool.”

Events spilled across the field in cheerful tyranny: obstacle course, beanbag toss, balancing races involving spoons and golf balls and the fragile dignity of adults. Suho tied shoelaces like a triage nurse, stuck stickers on foreheads for bravery, and became, within fifteen minutes, the designated piggyback ride for three children who were not his. He rotated water bottles like a pit crew chief and sunscreened Minjae’s nose with the gravitas of a war painter. When he held the bottle out to Sieun, there was a hesitance at the edges, a question that wasn’t about SPF at all.

Sieun, who had the kind of complexion that burned even under fluorescent office light, tilted his face without a comment. Suho dabbed two neat stripes on his cheeks. “Now you look like you’re going into battle,” he said.

“I am,” Sieun said, eyeing the upcoming parents’ relay with visible calculation. “And I am under-equipped.”

The parents’ relay began as all disasters do: with optimism. Minjae insisted on pairing with both of them (“You are my two legs,” he declared, scandalizing physics), so a compromise was struck: Suho would run the balloon-between-foreheads stretch with him; Sieun would take the three-legged final.

The balloon segment devolved immediately into a farce. Suho leaned down, Minjae tiptoed, they pressed foreheads to plastic and toddled like ungainly deer. Suho narrated in whispers—“We are stealth spies. The balloon is a secret code. Do not pop the government.”—which was ruined six steps in when Minjae laughed so hard he popped their intelligence. The pop startled a nearby dad into dropping his egg-and-spoon, which set off a chain reaction of dropped eggs and one child triumphantly shouting, “WE LOST WITH HONOR!”

By the time they reached the hand-off cone, both of them were crying with laughter. Sieun knotted his leg to Minjae’s with the focus of a sailor securing a ship in a storm. Suho, bent double, wheezed, “Run like you’re late to a quarterly review.”

Sieun shot him a look that said he did not run late to quarterly reviews, then took off in a careful hop-hop. Minjae’s little leg tied to his long stride turned the movement into a synchronized ridiculousness that somehow worked. They didn’t win, but Minjae threw his arms up like they had set a world record. He beamed at both of them, face bright and sweaty, and declared, “My team is the tallest.”

“You hear that?” Suho said, handing Sieun a water bottle. “Tallest team. Data-backed.”

Sieun took the bottle. Their fingers brushed. The moment was nothing and too much at once, the tiny warmth of it arrowing under Suho’s ribcage. Sieun blinked once and then looked at anywhere that was not Suho’s mouth.

Between events, the teachers made the rounds, sticky stars at the ready. One, a cheerful woman with a pixie cut and a voice that could command ten toddlers at once, stopped in front of them. “Family photo?” she asked, already lifting her tablet. “It’s for our newsletter!”

Suho opened his mouth to say something appropriately unserious and then shut it because Minjae had plastered himself to both their legs and was holding up his medal ribbon like a knight saluting his king and queen. Sieun hesitated. The teacher solved it by physically arranging them: Minjae in the middle, Sieun’s hand on his shoulder, Suho slightly behind and to the side. “Closer,” she chirped. Suho moved; he felt the brush of Sieun’s shoulder through cotton, the slightest contact that the camera would never capture and his skin would not forget.

“Say ‘bulgogi!’”

“Bulgogi,” Suho echoed, grinning like a man who did not know where to put his hands, and the shutter clicked.

The tug-of-war finale turned into a morality tale about hubris. Suho dug his heels in like a cartoon ox, made faces at Minjae to keep him laughing, and took the whole left flank far too seriously because he had been called out by a dad in a tracksuit who said, with a glint, “Hyung, don’t lose.” Sieun joined, which was insane—his shoes were treacherous—and still he leaned back with a straight line from jaw to heel, quiet and implacable. They slid anyway, grass coating Suho’s calves, Minjae squealing with glee even as they were dragged past the line.

“Unfair,” Suho gasped from the ground, hair full of turf, laughing so hard his cap fell off. “They had, like, six uncles on their team.”

“You were making faces at a six-year-old while losing ground,” Sieun said, dusting grass off Suho’s shoulder with two curt, unnecessary pats that somehow set Suho’s entire nervous system on fire. “Consider a strategy not reliant on grimacing.”

“Wow.” Suho flopped a hand to his chest. “We’re getting post-game notes now. Coach Yeon emerges.”

“I am merely observing,” Sieun said.

“Uh-huh.” Suho raised his brows. “Observation: you almost smiled when I face-planted.”

“I did no such thing.”

“You did. It was small, like when your email says ‘per my last message.’”

“Drink water,” Sieun said, which was not a denial.

Parents started to pack up. Someone passed out paper cups of lurid juice. Minjae, medal slightly crooked, ran in small triumphant circles, showing every staff member and two rocks his gleaming prize. Suho fielded questions from three different moms who asked if he gave lessons (“Lessons in what?”—“Being this tall and patient,” one said, fanning herself theatrically), and he tried not to look at Sieun during that onslaught because the place behind Suho’s ribs felt like it might do something reckless if he saw anything that could be read as reaction.

He failed not to look when a child, bold and literal, marched up to Minjae and asked, “Where’s your mom?”

Another parent winced, too late to intercept. Minjae didn’t flinch. He glanced instinctively at Suho and Sieun and then squared his small shoulders.

“We don’t have one,” he said, with the grave serenity of a pronouncement. “We have Daddy. And Suho-hyung. It’s enough.”

The sentence landed like a bell. Suho’s throat closed and then opened again around a laugh he couldn’t release. He reached down and squeezed Minjae’s shoulder once, brief and fierce. Over the boy’s head, he saw something move in Sieun’s face—something complicated and bright and afraid, the way light looks under water when the surface has just been broken.

“Let’s go, champion,” Suho said then, too loudly, full of air he didn’t need. “You need victory dumplings.”

“I need two,” Minjae said, instantly mercenary.

“Start with one,” Sieun said, automatic, and Suho caught the corner of his mouth, the tiny lift that came with having someone else to volley with.

On the way out, the pixie-cut teacher pressed a slip of paper into Sieun’s hand. “We’ll send the photos tonight. The family shot is adorable.” She beamed and was gone before either of them could stammer anything that wasn’t an admission of something they couldn’t name.

Minjae fell asleep in the car before they pulled out of the lot, medal askew, mouth parted. The world shrank to the quiet cabin, afternoon light angling in, the soft click of the turn signal—a metronome for thoughts neither of them wanted to speak.

“He’s happy,” Suho said finally, voice low, as if saying it too loud would wake the spell. “You’re doing a good job.”

Sieun’s hands tightened on the wheel and then loosened. He kept his eyes on the road. “You’re part of that,” he said. It was not gratitude. It was an inclusion.

They drove in that self-contained hush that only exists when a sleeping child is in the backseat, the warmth between front seats something other than the weather. At a red light, both their phones buzzed. The school had sent the link. The preview thumbnail showed three figures: a small boy blazing with joy, a tall young man leaning in a fraction without realizing it, and a man with ancient eyes caught mid-softness, as if he’d forgotten to wear the rest of his armor for the picture.

Suho stared longer than necessary. “Send me that?” he asked, too casual.

“I will,” Sieun said, and his voice did the thing it did when he wasn’t thinking about keeping it level. “I’ll print a copy for Minjae, too.”

He almost added and one for you, and Suho almost said and one for you, and they didn’t, because the light turned green and the city made its regular demands.

Back at the apartment, the debrief was practical: shoes off, medal placed in a bowl like a relic, sweatshirt tied around the sleeping boy’s waist before Suho folded him into his arms and carried him to bed. They orchestrated a quiet undress, a careful blanket pull, the ridiculous art of removing a medal ribbon from a child’s neck without waking him, both stifling laughter when the medal thunked lightly against the headboard and Minjae snuffled but did not wake.

In the hallway, they spoke in whispers because the walls remembered joy better that way.

“Next year,” Suho said, still a little breathless for reasons sprinting did not explain, “you’re wearing sneakers.”

“Next year,” Sieun said, dry, “you’re not picking a fight with a balloon.”

“Bold of you to assume the balloon won’t start it.”

“Go home safely,” Sieun said, and it meant a dozen smaller things: thank you for today; I saw you; leave before I say more.

Suho took a step back, then another, then stopped. “Hey,” he said, thumb hooking the strap of his bag. “That family photo… even if they got it wrong,” and here his eyes flicked without meaning to, “it looked right. To me.”

He could have left it at that. He should have. But Sieun’s face did something at that sentence, a small unguarded thing that made Suho’s body want to move forward instead of away. He didn’t. He lifted two fingers in a salute that, somehow, wasn’t unserious.

“See you tomorrow, hyung.”

“Tomorrow,” Sieun echoed. It sounded like the end of a prayer and the beginning of one.

When the door closed, the hallway felt suddenly too narrow and the elevator too slow. He grinned into his shoulder, helpless, and then laughed when his phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number that was not unknown at all:

Sieun: Photo.

A second later, the image arrived again, high-resolution proof that whatever they weren’t saying had a shape anyway.

Inside, Sieun stood at the kitchen counter with the printed slip from the teacher in his pocket and the sound of muffled traffic outside and the weight of a long, absurdly good day pressing at his bones. He looked around the apartment—as if seeing it for the first time: the shoes lined up messily, the water bottles with their stupid labels waiting in the dish rack, the medal sleeping in the bowl. He opened the fridge to no real end and closed it again with a small nod to no one.

The silence had changed color. It would again. For now, it held a picture. For now, it held the echo of a chant still faintly ringing in his ears—run run run—and the knowledge that when he had, someone else had run beside him, ridiculous shoes and all.

Chapter 12

Suho had never thought kindergarten sports day would stick to him like this. It should’ve been the kind of thing you laughed about once and moved on — kids in oversized T-shirts running in crooked lines, parents pretending not to mind grass stains, balloon races that ended in chaos. And yet he kept seeing it in flashes, like a reel looping in the back of his mind.

Minjae grinning so hard his cheeks went pink, holding up his medal like it was gold.
Sieun, sleeves rolled to his elbows, running a three-legged race with all the awkward dignity of a man who had never been off-balance in his life — and laughing when Minjae tripped him anyway.
The teacher lining them up for a photo, insisting they “stand closer, family!” while Minjae clutched both their hands at once.

Suho had laughed it off at the time, tossing out a joke about “Team Yeon.” But that photo haunted him. The way Sieun’s head tilted the slightest bit toward him, like gravity itself was in on a joke. The way his own shoulder brushed Sieun’s, and how he hadn’t moved away.

He hadn’t stopped thinking about it. About them.

Which was insane.

Suho sprawled across his bed now, the ceiling fan slicing lazy shadows above, textbooks half-open on the floor where they’d slipped off hours ago. He was twenty. He should’ve been worrying about exams, or whether he had enough saved to cover tuition after that failed credit last semester. Not about a man in his mid-twenties with a five-year-old and eyes like the ocean.

But every time he closed his eyes, those eyes filled the darkness. Watery, deep, so calm they should’ve been cold — and yet something in them tugged Suho closer, made his chest ache and his brain short-circuit. He’d look up from tying Minjae’s shoelaces and forget what he was doing because Sieun had glanced at him across the room. He’d sit at the kitchen table listening to Sieun explain some finance thing to Minjae like it was a puzzle, and Suho would just… blank.

It wasn’t fear. Not exactly. It was confusion, a fog he couldn’t push through. This was new territory, this domestic orbit he’d fallen into. Grocery lists, dinners, bedtime stories, morning texts about whether Minjae remembered his homework. It shouldn’t feel like home, but it did. And that made Suho’s chest both swell and tighten, like a balloon filled too far.

---

“You’re spacing again,” Baku hissed, jabbing Suho’s side with a pen.

They were wedged into the back row of a lecture hall, the professor’s voice vibrating off concrete. Seongje had a cap pulled low and the posture of a man asleep with his eyes open. Beakjin had two straws in one iced coffee like that was a normal human choice.

“Don’t say it,” Suho muttered.

“Hot boss, ocean eyes, tragic backstory.” Beakjin said immediately, grinning. “We've heard it all."

“You said it yourself,” Beakjin added, pointing his chopsticks at him. “Those eyes make you forget what you were doing. Your words, man.”

Suho flushed, “Shut up. It’s not like that.”

“Weekend trip,” Seongje interjected, as if saving Suho by setting him on fire. “Two days. River cabin. My cousin owes me. We grill. We drink. We remember what your face looks like without tomato sauce on it.”

“I don’t have tomato sauce on my face,” Suho said, rubbing his cheek anyway.

“Your aura does,” Baku said. “You’ve been domesticated. Congrats.”

Suho tried to smother a laugh and failed. “I have class. And work. And—”

“And you’re whipped,” Beakjin sang under his breath. “Look at him. He’s already thinking of texting the boss to ask permission.”

“Die,” Suho said cheerfully, and under the table his knee bounced because he could see it: river water thick and green-black, a grill spitting fat, the four of them hacking through off-key karaoke on a Bluetooth speaker. It sounded like something he’d normally say yes to without thinking. Now the yes caught in his throat.

“Two days,” Seongje coaxed. “Saturday to Sunday. We’ll be back before your daycare shift Monday.”

“I don’t work weekends,” Suho said, then realized how that made it worse. He had zero excuse. He fumbled for one anyway. “I… have to check something. My grandma wanted—”

“Grandma says go,” Baku said. “I asked her.”

“You did not.”

“I did not,” Baku admitted. “But she would.”

Suho laughed, until the laughter blurred at the edges and became something else. He wanted to go. He also imagined the apartment without him and hated the idea: Minjae waiting at the gate and the person there not being him; Sieun coming home to quiet that wasn’t soft but hollow. It was ridiculous, and yet.

“Fine,” he said, because he needed to say something. “I’ll think about it.”

“Translation: he’s asking the ocean for permission,” Beakjin whispered.

Suho threw his pen. It bounced off the desk and clattered across the floor in a slapstick arc. Three heads turned. The professor didn’t. The three of them snorted silently, shoulders shaking, and Suho dropped his face into his hands, laughing into his palms and hating how easy it was to also picture a living room lamp and two beers sweating on a table.

His phone buzzed against his thigh. Once. Twice. Persistent.

He checked it to get away from himself.

Yeon Sieun.

The bounce in his knee stopped. He slipped out into the hallway and answered. “Hello?”

“Are you on campus?” Sieun’s voice was low, clipped, like someone trying to be calm while holding three things at once.

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“Minjae’s teacher just called me. He has show-and-tell in like an hour. He brought a… rock.” You could hear his confusion at the concept of rocks as pedagogical tools. “It’s at home. He’s… upset.”

Suho had a mental flash of the “meteorite” Minjae had painted last night, a fist-sized river stone with silver glitter and the word BOOM on it. “The rock,” he said, because of course. “Got it.”

“I’m stuck in a meeting.” There were muffled voices behind him—someone saying “Yeon-ssi?” and paper shuffling. The restraint in Sieun’s voice made Suho feel it more, a tight thread under the words. “Could you—”

“I’ll grab it,” Suho said, already jogging toward the stairs. "I'll be there".

There was a breath on the other end, a barely-there exhale. “…Thank you.”

The line clicked. The world sped up.

He bolted through campus, backpack thumping, past a cluster of freshmen doing yoga on the grass, past a couple kissing like they’d invented it. He took the bus because running across the city wouldn’t make him arrive faster, but his body didn’t accept physics; his heel jiggled relentlessly, hand locked white around the pole. The driver took a turn like he was trying to spill the bus onto the curb. Suho swayed, grinned at a grandmother who clucked and handed him a candy, then sprinted the last two blocks to the apartment.

Inside smelled like lemon-ish cleaner that wasn’t actually lemon and something faintly tomato from last night. He dropped his bag, scanned the living room. The rock: not on the coffee table. He crouched to peer under the sofa (two crayons, one sock, a dinosaur sticker fossilized to the floor). Kitchen counter? No. He yanked open the junk drawer, because of course there was a junk drawer now, and found batteries, three rubber bands, seeds Minjae swore would become a forest, a shopping list in Sieun’s tidy block letters (milk / apples / rice / coffee / coffee / coffee), and a small folded sticky note: Hyung, don’t skip dinner, yes? His chest did something unhelpful. He shut the drawer.

“Where would I hide if I were a space rock,” he muttered, turning in a slow circle, and then his eye snagged on the windowsill of Minjae’s room. The “meteorite” sat in a place of honor, glitter catching the light like it had opinions. BOOM indeed. He wrapped it in a dish towel like it was precious (it was) and shoved it into his tote, resisting the urge to pocket a sticky note for no sane reason, and ran.

The kindergarten receptionist had that particular energy of a person who has seen every possible emergency and kept the ship afloat with stickers and willpower. “You’re Minjae’s…?” she asked, sliding a visitor badge across the desk.

“Suho,” he said, catching himself half a beat before saying hyung. “He forgot his rock.”

“Ah, yes.” She grinned, like this explained everything. “Room B. They’re about to start. Hurry—meteorites go on first.”

He jogged down the hall, slowed at the doorway. The classroom was a low thrum of little voices. A teacher with a cheerful sweater was crouched next to a small boy whose mouth was doing that awkward tremble of trying not to cry while also being five. “Minjae,” she said gently, “it’s okay if we—”

“Special delivery,” Suho said, knocking once on the doorframe and slipping in, breath a little wild. He held up the towel-wrapped bundle like a movie hero offering a sacred relic. “From outer space.”

Minjae’s head snapped up. The wobble vanished. “Hyung!”

The teacher sagged visibly with relief. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“Debatable,” Suho said, kneeling and unwrapping with dramatics. “Meteorite BOOM has landed.” He whispered, fast and low, “You got this, champ.”

Minjae nodded fiercely like he was about to argue a case before the Supreme Court. He marched his glitter rock to the front and cleared his throat. “This is a rock from space,” he announced. “It made all the dinosaurs go boom. But not all of them. Because birds are dinosaurs.” He pointed at a kid in a bird shirt. “So you’re part dinosaur.”

The class lost its mind. The teacher made a face that meant we will circle back to scientific accuracy later. Suho laughed so hard he had to put a hand against the wall. Minjae turned to him mid-presentation to whisper, stage-loyal, “Thank you,” and Suho swallowed against how big his chest felt and gave him a tiny thumbs-up that said of course and always.

He didn’t stay. He didn’t need to be the tall guy in the doorway while five-year-olds debated the merits of birds. He left quiet, visitor badge in his pocket because he forgot to give it back, took the bus back toward campus, and only when he was seated did he realize he was grinning like an idiot at nothing.

His friends flooded the group chat.

Baku: verdict on the trip??

Beakjin: the river is calling and says u smell like tomato

Seongje: pls come, baku is in charge of grill and will poison us

Baku: i grill with love

Seongje: and lighter fluid

Suho stared. His thumb hovered over Yes, because the old reflex was still there, and then his phone buzzed with a different tone.

Sieun: Teacher said he presented it. Thank you. Really. I don’t know what I’d do without you.

He read it once. Twice. Something in his breath went uneven. It wasn’t the words themselves—they were simple, practical gratitude, no hearts, no flourish. It was what they carried: the choice of who to call when something small but important went wrong. It was the picture of Sieun in a conference room with a dozen eyes on him and a quiet, tight voice saying Can you…? It was the relief tucked into the period at the end.

His friends were still typing.

Baku: hello???

Beakjin: if u don’t answer we’re telling grandma you’ve been unfaithful to the river

Seongje: #freeSuho

He typed:

Suho: can’t this weekend. next time.

Three typing dots blinked like a strobe.

Baku: WHIPPED

Beakjin: ocean eyes wins again

Seongje: bring us a meteorite

He snorted and set the phone face down next to his thigh. The bus shuddered through an intersection. He pressed his temple against the cool glass and watched the city slide past—the noodle place that never closed, a laundry strung like flags between windows, a kid dragging a scooter with one wheel squealing. It felt like two worlds moving on either side of the glass: the one where he was twenty and stupid and free; the one where he had keys to an apartment that wasn’t his and knew exactly which cupboard the good plates were in.

His phone buzzed again. He looked down before he could tell himself not to.

Sieun: Thank

The message was so mundanely phrased it might as well have been about buying milk. Suho’s vision fuzzed for a second anyway.

Suho: ok

He added, because he couldn’t stop himself,

Suho: he did great btw. opened with a thesis. crushed the Q&A. we might have a lawyer.

A long minute. Then:

Sieun: Of course he did.

He could hear the smile in the text, which made no sense and all the sense.

Back on campus, Baku appeared like a debt collector and hooked an arm around Suho’s neck. “You love us less,” he intoned, faux-wounded. “Say it. Say it to my face.”

“I love you equal,” Suho said, swatting him off. “I just—something came up.”

“Something rock-shaped,” Beakjin guessed, because he had psychic gossip powers. “Are we competing with a five-year-old’s geology? Is that our life now?”

“You were losing to my grandma before this,” Suho said. “Don’t act surprised.”

They sprawled on the steps and harassed pigeons with stale crackers. Seongje produced a portable speaker and forced them to endure a ballad about doomed love at volume fourteen until a campus guard appeared out of thin air and scolded him. Suho laughed, mean and fond, until the laughter curved inward and touched the place in him that was new and dangerous.

Because somewhere between the pigeons and the scolding, he’d opened the class chat again. The sports day photo filled the screen: Minjae a spark between them; his own cap tilted; Sieun mid-softness. Suho zoomed in like a creep and stared at the nothing-space between their shoulders that was not empty at all. He was twenty. This was insane.

“You’re doing that far-away face,” Baku said, mouth full.

“Thinking about the grill,” Suho lied.

“Thinking about a man with—”

“I will end you,” Suho said, and Baku grinned like he knew and loved him anyway.

Evening pooled around the buildings. He went home—his actual home, his grandma’s place—to find her clucking at a drama on TV and swatting at a plot twist with a dish towel. “Eat,” she commanded, and he did, and he told her an edited version of the day that made her say, “Ah,” the particular ah she deployed when things made sense they weren’t supposed to. He washed dishes and stared out the window at the thin slice of city sky and thought about keys dropped into drawers.

In bed, he flicked his phone dark and then alive and then dark again. The group chat had devolved into memes of rivers and tomatoes. Sieun’s chat sat quiet, last message a period that felt like a hand on a table—steadying, patient.

He typed and erased twenty times. He wanted to say I almost said yes to a weekend because I miss being stupid with my friends and then you called and I ran across the city and my body didn’t ask my brain first and I don’t know what that means except I liked how it felt. He wanted to say Your eyes are impossible. He wanted to say nothing.

He sent: Thank you again for today. And sorry for making you skipping classes.

Suho: if he needs anything for tomorrow, text me. i’ll bring it when i pick him up

After a beat:

Sieun: I will.

He put the phone face down on his chest and looked at the ceiling until it blurred. He wasn’t scared. He was not running. He was confused and flooded and strangely… steady. He felt like someone had taken a corner of something heavy from him without asking and he’d only noticed because the lift made him lighter.

Somewhere, a weekend river moved without him. Somewhere else, a man in a quiet apartment slid a spare key into the lunchbox drawer and shut it like a door he didn’t want to think about opening. Suho lay in between and listened to his own breathing and tried not to name the thing growing there.

The next morning, he’d walk into the kindergarten yard and Minjae would barrel at him with news of how BOOM had slayed and someone’s mom had brought cupcakes with dinosaur sprinkles. He’d look up and catch a pair of ocean eyes already on him, and every argument he had rehearsed about trips and freedom and being twenty would go quiet for a second. Only a second. Just long enough to know he was already choosing.

For now, he let the phone warm his sternum and the city hum like a distant engine and the picture in the class chat wait in its square, proof of something the year didn’t have a name for yet.

 

Chapter 13

Friday nights now had a rhythm. Minjae always made it a duel first—bedtime vs. dinosaur—in which bedtime lost for a while and then, inevitably, won. By nine-fifteen the roar softened to a yawn; by nine-thirty he was starfished across the covers, one sock on, one sock lost to the mysterious under-bed void, plastic stegosaurus clamped beneath his chin like a bodyguard. Ten o’clock used to mean Suho washed the last dish, texted his grandma—home soon—and slipped out into the night with the easy relief of a day that fit its edges.

Tonight didn’t fit. Ten slid to ten-thirty. Eleven. The apartment was too quiet, the kind of quiet that made the refrigerator hum sound like it had things to say. The hallway to Minjae’s room was a small tunnel of dark; soft breathing eased out of it in a steady, comforting rhythm. Suho sat near the door with his backpack on the floor and his phone in his hand and told himself not to look at the lock every thirty seconds.

He couldn’t leave. Of course he couldn’t. Responsibility had weight, and it was five years old and asleep in the next room. He tried to pretend that was the only reason his knee kept bouncing. It wasn’t.

He killed time badly. He opened a textbook and read one sentence six times until it turned into sound instead of meaning. He scrolled through the class group chat and tried to care about a meme war over whether coffee counted as a food group. He messaged Baku back—still at work?—and got approximately three skull emojis and we’re playing 2K u coward, log on later in reply. He stood, paced, sat, stood again. He checked the peephole (useless). He went to the sink, filled a glass, didn’t drink it, set it on the counter, picked it up, drank it after all, then hated the glass for not solving anything.

By eleven-thirty he was irritated at how much not-knowing could take up space. At eleven forty-three he walked to Minjae’s door and just stood there, listening, letting the tiny proof of the boy’s breathing loosen the knot behind his ribs. He whispered, “Go back to sleep, champ,” to no one and to himself.

At eleven fifty-six the lock finally scraped.

Relief hit so hard it made him laugh under his breath, this little broken thing, and then the door swung open and everything he knew about Yeon Sieun—cool, composed, cut from glass—fell apart in one crooked step.

He stumbled. Not the elegant stumble of a man who would pretend he’d meant it. A real, gravity-wins stumble. His tie was loose, his shirt half-untucked, his hair had given up and gone soft, and his eyes—those impossible dark oceans—were blurred at the edges, unfocused, a tide rolled up too far. Soju clung to him like a second suit.

“Hyung?” Suho crossed the room fast, catching his elbow before he could go down. “Oh my— You’re gone.”

Sieun blinked. It took time to land on Suho’s face. “Clients,” he said, very seriously, as if this explained physics and regret. “Important dinner. Had to… be agreeable.”

“Yeah, and apparently ‘agreeable’ means trying to become a rice wine,” Suho muttered, shifting so Sieun’s arm was over his shoulders. “God, why are you this wasted? Who let you do this? Who is your handler and where can I fight them?”

“I’m fine,” Sieun tried, which would have been more convincing if he hadn’t immediately leaned with all his weight into Suho like the room had decided to slide diagonally.

“Fine, my ass.” Suho braced his legs and started them toward the hallway in these lurching, ridiculous steps, half drag, half waltz. “You’re about two sojus from starring in a corporate HR warning video.”

“Sorry,” Sieun mumbled. His voice kept catching on s’s and falling through vowels. “Sorry. Clients… dinner. Didn’t want… Minjae to…”

“I know,” Suho said before he could stop himself, tone going gentle under the sarcasm. “He didn’t see. He’s out like a light. Come on, move, you’re not sleeping in the entryway like a decorative plant.”

They made it three steps. Sieun discovered the wall, leaned his forehead against it with the grave tenderness of a man greeting an old friend, and shut his eyes. “Cold,” he sighed, content, like he’d arrived.

Suho smacked his shoulder lightly with the back of his hand. “Do not make friends with the wall. This is not your stop.”

“Wall,” Sieun said firmly, like he was correcting him. “Reliable.”

“Okay, first of all, rude. I’m reliable.” Suho tugged him. “Second, your bed is literally ten steps away. Third, if you fall asleep here, I will take photos and show them to Minjae when he’s a teenager.”

That got a frown, which on drunk-Sieun looked like a kitten trying to be a hawk. “Mean.”

“Effective.” Suho set his foot against the baseboard and leveraged him away, muttering to himself: “I did not sign up for adult wrangling. I am a nanny. For a child. A small one. With better balance than you.”

They pinballed down the hall. Twice, Sieun tried to sit on the shoe cabinet like it was a bench. Once, he attempted a dignified hand-wave that almost took out a lamp. Suho narrated the whole trek like an exhausted tour guide.

“On your left, a plant that does not want you. On your right, a bookshelf that will sue if you touch it. Straight ahead, a bed. You know beds. You’re a fan. Let’s go.”

He kicked the bedroom door open with his foot and the room came into view and, just for a second, Suho forgot how to move.

He’d never been inside. He’d imagined sterile: colorless, cold, spare the way Sieun could be when he shut himself tight. It was neat, yes—files stacked straight, books squared to the shelf edge—but there were soft things inexplicable in their ability to cut: a photo of Minjae in absurd sunglasses, teeth bared in a feral grin; a sweater draped over the chair, like someone had been too tired to fold it and decided that was allowed; a watch resting beside a mug with a brown ring at the bottom; a tiny paper crown, crooked, obviously handmade, tucked under the corner of a picture frame like a secret talisman.

It was a room somebody lived in. It was a room somebody came home to. It smelled faintly like coffee and clean cotton and something else Suho only knew as him.

“Sit,” Suho ordered, because his brain needed a job and that one existed. He wrangled Sieun to the mattress and the man sat with the boneless obedience of a marionette whose strings had been dropped. Then he listed sideways abruptly, like the bed had turned, and Suho lunged to catch him, cursing and laughing all at once.

“You’re heavy,” he groaned, easing him back onto the pillows. “I’m going to need hazard pay and a chiropractor.”

“Sorry,” again, but softer this time, the kind of sorry you say when the word itself feels like a cushion.

He tugged at the laces—no, too elegant for laces; of course the shoes were slip-ons with smug little elastic—and got them off. He set them neatly beside the bed without thinking, like he’d been coming in here a hundred nights and therefore knew where they belonged. He loosened the tie, unbuttoned the cuffs. It was not sensual; it was survival. Still, his fingers felt too aware of the pulse at Sieun’s wrist, the warm slide of fabric, the way the man exhaled when his collar loosened as if air could finally get in.

“Next time,” Suho muttered, which implied there might be one, which he did not examine, “pace yourself. Or smuggle water between courses. Or fake a stomach bug. Or—this is radical—say no.”

“Clients,” Sieun repeated like a prayer that didn’t save him.

“Yeah, well, your clients can fight me,” Suho said. “I’ll win on points.”

That almost-smile flickered. Suho pretended he didn’t see it because he was busy pulling the blanket up. His hand smoothed it once; his palm felt the shape of a shoulder through cotton; his breath did something inadvisable. He snatched his hand back.

He turned toward the door and then back again—like the room had a gravity that tilted him in a small arc—and stood there longer than he meant to, watching. He had known from the beginning that Sieun was beautiful in a way that made the word feel sloppy—carved features, that mouth, those eyes that could look right through noise. He had not considered that mess would make it worse. But something about this—the slackness, the unarmored line of his throat, the way his lashes lay dark against his cheek—punched below language.

“Goodnight, hyung,” he said, barely sound, and the word hyung flashed in him like it always did—playful, affectionate, dangerous when applied to a man who wasn’t supposed to have that title from his mouth—and then he fled.

The apartment felt too big when he pulled the door nearly shut behind him. The hallway’s dim gave way to the kitchen’s low light. He could leave now. He could write a note—put water by the bed—and go. But his hands had their own plan already; they were pulling the cupboard open, finding the pot, assessing the too-empty fridge with the fatalism of a college student and the optimism of a grandmother.

Rice. Egg. A half bunch of scallions. A little leftover chicken breast, plain and tidy, in a container like everything else in this man’s life. Suho rinsed the rice until the water went cloudy, dropped it in, covered with water, added the little things that made poor ingredients rich—a pinch of salt, a sliver of ginger from the back of the crisper, the white ends of the scallions bruised with the flat of the knife. He let it come to a boil, turned it down so it would get that soft, spoon-barely-needs-to-do-anything texture. His grandma’s voice arrived like muscle memory: Soup fixes things your pride won’t. The first time he’d failed a credit, she’d ladled him congee and called him my smart boy anyway, and that had been worse and better than crying.

Steam softened the edges of the air. He stirred, added the egg in a thin stream, watched the broth catch and cloud, scattered the green of the scallions on top so it looked like luck. He tasted and winced and adjusted and tasted again until it tasted like something that said it’s okay without getting sentimental about it.

He poured a glass of water and put it on the bedside table. He dragged the small trash bin to within easy reach because he was not naïve. He hesitated at the door, listening: nothing but even breath. Good. He pressed the door almost closed, leaving that narrow slice of safety open—the habit of a man who’d learned children sometimes needed a hallway’s worth of reassurance to get through the night.

Back in the kitchen, he tore a piece of paper from a grocery list and scratched a note, handwriting slanted from using the counter as a desk.

Soup’s on the stove. Good for hangovers.
Grandma makes it for me after failed credits lol.
Don’t skip breakfast, hyung.

He frowned at the lol, considered crossing it out, decided it softened the line of worry in the word hangovers, and let it stand. He propped the note against the pot lid where even a half-dead man would see it.

It was very late now. Or very early. The city’s noise had thinned to the small persistent sounds of people who worked when everyone else slept. Suho’s body was suddenly heavy with the crash after adrenaline, and his brain—traitor—wanted to tiptoe back to the door and look again. He didn’t. He rinsed the knife, turned off the stove, took one last look around the kitchen to make sure it was more neat than it had been, as if that was a kind of care, and slipped out into the corridor with a key twist that didn’t dare click loud.

He didn’t notice until he was in the elevator, watching floors blink down, that his palms smelled faintly like ginger and scallion and soap, and that the smell made him ache.

—

Morning. A slow, ugly thing with light that overdid it and a headache that wrote its name carefully across the inside of Sieun’s skull.

He surfaced the way you surface from bad water: cautious, a little shocked to find air. The room arranged itself around him—desk, shelves, the stupid paper crown Minjae had demanded he keep—like a puzzle he’d solved a thousand times and suddenly couldn’t remember if he’d put together correctly the night before. He moved and his shirt tugged softly at his shoulder and he realized, with a detached sort of curiosity, that his tie was off and his cuffs unbuttoned and his shoes were lined up neatly on the floor, toes paired, as if some gentler version of himself had prepared for him to land.

Memory was a sawtooth. Clients, smiling with too many teeth. Glass clinks that multiplied into something like rain. Laughter too loud, a joke that wasn’t funny but required a performance, the particular heat behind the eyes that meant too much. The walk home felt like film missing frames. And then—like a bright card resurfacing—you. Suho’s face, closer than he usually allowed it to be. The feel of a shoulder under his hand, young and solid. A voice, exasperated and careful at the same time. The brief, humiliating thought—don’t let my son see me like this—and the relief of hearing he didn’t in a tone that made a promise out of simple fact.

His mouth tasted like regret. His stomach made a warning noise and then decided to try being reasonable. He got upright slowly, discovered someone had placed a glass of water on the bedside table (not him; he was not that kind to himself), drank it in careful swallows, and made it as far as the kitchen before the smell found him.

Warm. Clean. The kind of smell that convinces the body to trust the next minute.

A pot sat on the stove, still faintly warm to the touch. Beside it, a note. He didn’t recognize the paper until he turned it over; milk / apples / rice / coffee stared back at him in his own block letters—the list he’d written, twice: coffee, because he didn’t trust himself to remember the first one. On the front, in Suho’s mess of strokes:

Soup’s on the stove. Good for hangovers.
Grandma makes it for me after failed credits lol.
Don’t skip breakfast, hyung.

He stood there with the note in his hand and let the silence behave differently. It didn’t press on him. It held him up, a little. He could hear Minjae’s voice in the rooms that weren’t awake yet, like an echo; he could hear, absurdly, the hiss of a pot one hour ago when he’d been unconscious. He was not alone inside his morning.

He lifted the lid and steam rose like something forgiving. Rice bloomed soft in broth; ribbons of egg curled golden; scallion freckled the surface. He ladled it out and the first spoonful found the place in him that had been scraped raw by performance and filled it. He exhaled by accident.

He leaned on the counter, bowl in one hand, note in the other, and let the two facts sit side by side: he had called Suho; Suho had come; this was now on his stove. He did not let his mind write the sentence I don’t know what I’d do without you in present tense even though he had already typed it last night. He did not let himself think the word dependence. He did let himself stand there longer than necessary reading the same four lines until the lol made him huff an unwilling smile.

He rinsed the bowl, set it in the rack, folded the note in half and then in half again without meaning to, as if making it small would make it less loud, and tucked it under a magnet on the side of the fridge where Minjae wouldn’t notice right away. He caught sight of himself in the microwave door—a man not quite as ruined as he’d felt waking up, hair a mess, eyes still too dark but clearer—and he thought for one second of last night’s room: a boy in a red windbreaker shouldering him to bed with more competence than he’d had the right to have; a ridiculous voice threatening to show his son blackmail photos; a gentling hand pulling a blanket up just to the collarbone and then snatching away like it had touched heat.

His phone was on the table with the charger coiled beside it. Two messages glowed from clients—curt, satisfied, something about numbers moving as they should. One sat in the thread with Suho: nothing new, just the last line he’d sent: Don’t skip breakfast, hyung. He considered writing Thank you and decided that was redundant—he’d said it last night; he would say it again, properly, when the day allowed his mouth to work. He typed instead:

You didn’t have to. Thank you anyway.

He hovered, deleted anyway, retyped it, deleted it again, sent the shorter thing before he could edit the human out.

Then another impulse, less tidy, pushed his thumb: It helped.

He set the phone down like it might bite him, went to check on his son so he would remember the reason for all this, and paused in the hallway to press his palm to the door Suho had pulled almost, not quite, closed. The gap let the night’s care leak into the morning. He could hear Minjae’s soft snuffle, that small animal sound children make when they turn over into another dream. He pressed the heel of his hand to his temple, felt the throb muted by soup and water and sleep, and let himself think, okay. Just once.

—

Suho woke late at his grandma’s to the sound of a kettle and the smell of rice. He squinted at his phone and found two messages stacked like little lights:

You didn’t have to. Thank you.

It helped.

His chest did the swift, stupid thing again. He typed back:

How’s the head?

A long beat. Then:

Recovering. Will attempt coffee after… soup.

Proud of you, he wrote, because reckless was a morning mood, and then added, Text if you need—

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. The offer was always there now, threaded through his days like a second color.

His grandma knocked his ankle with her toe. “Eat,” she said. “You look like a boy who fought a storm.”

He grinned. “I won.”

“Of course you did.” She squinted at him. “You smell like ginger.”

He did. He thought of a dark hallway, a door he’d left a finger’s width open, a man asleep with his cuffs undone, a room that had looked more like a life than he’d expected. He thought of a note propped against a pot and a magnet on a fridge and a line that had read, Don’t skip breakfast, hyung. He ate, and the rice was perfect because his grandma was a machine, and when he left for the day, his phone buzzed with another flood of messages in the group chat — Baku demanding his RSVP for the trip, Seongje threatening to “kidnap him,” Beakjin sending memes about rivers. Suho just locked the screen. The bus that would take him to the kindergarten gate was due in three minutes, and that mattered more. 

When he reached the apartment that evening, Minjae would brag about how his daddy had eaten two bowls of breakfast, which in this house counted as a miracle. Suho would look at Sieun, who would look back not quite as long as the night demanded and say nothing he couldn’t take back. That was fine. A night ago, he’d held him up. This morning, he’d kept him steady. The day would come when steadiness would be a habit and not an emergency.

For now, he shoved his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t do something idiotic like touch the edge of a sleeve in passing, and he let the wait at the gate be simple: a kid barreling toward him like proof, a routine forming teeth, a slow burn being patient with itself.

Chapter 14

The note was still there. Folded, pinned under a magnet, quiet in the corner of his kitchen. Soup’s on the stove. Good for hangovers. Grandma makes it for me after failed credits lol. Don’t skip breakfast, hyung.

He had told himself, more than once, to throw it away. To crumple it and let the trash lid shut over it like it had never mattered. But every morning since that drunken Friday, his eyes had strayed to it while the kettle boiled. And every morning, his hand had stopped just shy of taking it down.

It wasn’t the soup that unsettled him — though he had eaten two bowls that morning and felt steadier than he wanted to admit. It was the handwriting. The note. The fact of it: someone thinking of him when he was too far gone to think of himself.

He shouldn’t have called Suho that night. There were colleagues, neighbors, anyone else. It had been a small thing — Minjae forgetting a project — but in the moment, trapped in a meeting, he had reached for Suho without hesitation. A twenty-year-old boy, barely past being a child himself.

And that was what troubled him. How easily Suho had become the answer. How natural it had felt to type the words I don’t know what I’d do without you.

He told himself it was because Minjae laughed more these days. Because his son came home clutching drawings of “me and Suho-hyung,” because bedtime was easier, the apartment less silent. He told himself Suho was just doing a good job.

But the truth pressed harder: Suho was everywhere now. At the kindergarten gate. In the laughter echoing down the hall. In the fridge, where leftovers were labeled in messy block letters. In the fridge door, where a stupid note clung like a reminder that Sieun was not as alone as he insisted.

And it bothered him. It bothered him because he didn’t understand why it bothered him. Why a boy — a nanny — was filling his thoughts in the cracks between work and home. Why every time he shut his eyes, he saw a red windbreaker hunched over his kitchen counter, steam rising from soup, a grin tugging at a flour-dusted face.

He should have drawn the line. He should have pulled back. But he didn’t.

By the time Tuesday evening rolled over him, heavy and merciless, he was too tired to think of lines. The day had bled him dry — clients demanding, deadlines pressing, his inbox a hydra of endless replies. His tie was suffocating, his head buzzing with numbers, and all he wanted was silence. Silence and a cold beer.

Instead, he opened the apartment door — and froze.

The smell hit him first. Sweet, cloying, not quite right. Then the noise: clattering, laughter, Suho’s voice saying, exasperated and fond all at once, “No, not that much salt—Minjae, the sprinkles don’t go in yet—hey, don’t eat that raw!”

“Daddy!”

Minjae darted out from the kitchen, face streaked with frosting, hands sticky, hair wild. Behind him, the kitchen looked like a snowstorm had broken in: flour dust across the counters, a bowl abandoned in the sink, sprinkles scattered like confetti. And in the center of the table, crooked and plain, sat a cake.

“Happy Father’s Day!” Minjae shouted, practically vibrating with pride. “We made it! Suho-hyung helped! I did the sprinkles!”

Sieun just stood there. His body had been primed for exhaustion, for collapse into silence. Instead, his chest flooded with something sharp and warm that hurt more than the day’s grind.

On the table, the cake slouched sideways, its middle sunken, frosting uneven. It looked awful. It looked perfect.

“You… made this?” His voice came out quieter than he meant.

“Yes!” Minjae grabbed his hand, dragging him forward. “Try it, Daddy! It’s for you!”

Suho leaned in the doorway, hoodie dusted in flour, a streak of something white across his cheek. He looked sheepish, grinning despite himself. “It’s… edible. Probably.”

Sieun sat, because Minjae shoved a fork into his hand and his legs didn’t trust themselves. He took a bite. The cake was dense, bland, a little salty where sugar should have been. But his son’s eyes shone at him, proud and waiting. And Suho was watching too, grin tugging crooked, daring him to find fault.

“It’s…” He swallowed, throat tight. “It’s good. Thank you.”

Minjae cheered like the cake had won an award. Suho laughed, the sound warm, easy, filling the corners of the room. And Sieun, tired to his bones, felt something give way inside him.

Later, when Minjae had run off to show his dinosaur plush the “special cake,” Sieun lingered in the kitchen. The mess was still everywhere — flour, bowls, frosting smears.

They cleaned together, or rather Suho cleaned and Sieun leaned against the counter with a beer in hand, too drained to do more than watch. The boy moved with restless energy, sponge dragging across the counter, sleeves shoved up, hoodie streaked with flour. He looked absurd and young and—unsettlingly—like he belonged here.

Sieun opened the fridge again, pulled out another beer, and held it out. “Here.”

Suho blinked, surprised, a smear of frosting still bright on his cheek. “Err... thank you?”

“You helped him,” Sieun said simply. Their fingers brushed when the bottle passed between them. The touch was brief, but he felt it longer than he should have.

For a moment they drank in silence, the only sound the fizz of the bottles and the low hum of the refrigerator. It wasn’t the silence Sieun usually preferred—the safe, heavy kind that walled him off. This silence felt alive, like it was waiting.

He stared at the crooked cake still sitting on the table, half-collapsed but proud in its ruin. His throat tightened before he could stop it. “I don’t really celebrate Father’s Day,” he said quietly.

Suho’s head turned, surprise flickering across his face. “You don’t?”

Sieun rolled the cool glass bottle between his palms. “It feels… wrong. I’m not a good one.” He let out a humorless breath. “Most of the time, I’m late. He waits at school longer than he should. I work until he’s asleep. I leave him with someone else so I can chase numbers that don’t stop moving. A good father doesn’t do that.”

The words came faster now, as if the beer had loosened a valve. “And he—Minjae—he deserves better. A father who shows up on time. Who cooks him dinner instead of hiring someone else to. Who doesn’t…” He trailed off, pressing his thumb hard against the rim of the bottle. “Who doesn’t look at his son and wonder if he’ll remember the empty spaces more than the filled ones.”

The confession sat raw between them. He hated himself for saying it. He hated how much it hurt to hear his own voice shape the thoughts that gnawed at him in the quiet hours.

For once, Suho didn’t fill the air with clumsy words. He leaned back against the counter, bottle loose in his hand, and said, low and steady, “Minjae doesn’t think about it that way.”

Sieun’s head jerked up.

“He doesn’t,” Suho repeated, gaze steady. “He talks about you all the time. How smart you are. How hard you work. How you buy the dinosaur yogurt even though you hate shopping. He brags that his dad wears suits and has ‘ocean eyes’—his words, not mine.” Suho’s grin was quick, but his eyes stayed serious. “He thinks you’re the best. That’s what matters.”

The words pierced too cleanly. Sieun’s chest ached in a way he couldn’t name. “You don’t understand,” he said, the instinctive defense sharp in his voice. “His mother—”

He stopped. He hadn’t planned to go there. But Suho waited, patient, not pressing, and the rest slid out anyway. “She’s not in the picture. Hasn’t been for a long time. It’s just been me and him since he was one.”

Suho’s expression shifted—no pity, no shock, just quiet comprehension.

Sieun forced the rest out, low, almost like admitting defeat. “And most days it feels like I’m failing both jobs—the one that pays, and the one that matters.”

Silence stretched. Not empty. Not heavy. Just… still.

Then Suho spoke, and his voice was soft but unflinching. “You’re not failing. He’s happy. He laughs. He’s proud to be your kid. That doesn’t happen if you’re failing.”

Sieun let out a humorless breath, looking away. “You make it sound simple.”

“It is simple,” Suho said. “Kids don’t measure love in hours worked or deadlines met. They measure it in who comes home. And you always come home.”

The words lodged deep. Sieun stared at the crooked cake on the table, at the sprinkles clumped in the corner. He felt something warm spread through him, slow and disarming, and it frightened him.

He took another swallow of beer, trying to steady himself. “You’re too young to sound this sure.”

Suho smiled, crooked. “Maybe. But I know what it’s like not to have a parent around. And I know Minjae doesn’t feel that way. Not with you.”

The words hit harder than Sieun wanted to admit. His chest felt tight, his throat thick. He pressed the heel of his hand to his brow, muttering, “You talk too much.”

“Yeah,” Suho said, grin widening. “But sometimes I’m right.”

Sieun huffed out something like a laugh, soft and reluctant. Their eyes met across the space between them. The air seemed to hum with something unsaid, and for a moment, Sieun let it be. He let the warmth seep in, even if he knew he shouldn’t.

He drained the last of his beer and set the bottle down hard enough to end the moment. “You should go. It’s late.”

But when Suho left, when the door clicked behind him, Sieun stood for a long time in the kitchen, staring at the cake, the mess, the empty bottles. He felt the warmth of Suho’s words still in his chest, dangerous and lingering.

He thought: Maybe I’m not a good father. But maybe—maybe—I’m not as bad as I thought.

And that thought, fragile and unfamiliar, carried him into the quiet of the night.

Chapter 15

The warmth of Father’s Day still lingered, stubborn as smoke. The crooked cake was wrapped in foil in the fridge, its sprinkles dulled but still bright. The note Suho had written weeks ago — Soup’s on the stove. Don’t skip breakfast, hyung. — was still pinned under the magnet, a weight he couldn’t throw away.

For days after, Sieun had carried a strange lightness into the grind of work. He caught himself thinking about Suho’s words — He doesn’t think you’re failing. He thinks you’re everything. He had carried the taste of beer and the sound of his own confession, the warmth of Suho’s quiet defiance, like something dangerous tucked against his ribs.

For the first time in years, he had wondered if maybe, just maybe, letting this be wasn’t so dangerous.

The thought lasted until Thursday night.

He opened the apartment door, exhausted, expecting silence. Instead, he was hit by light, laughter.

On the couch, Minjae was wide awake, bouncing with a dinosaur clutched in his hand. Beside him, Suho sat cross-legged, waving another toy like it was alive. An empty noodle bowl sat on the table, the scent unmistakable.

“Minjae,” Sieun said sharply, dropping his briefcase with a thud. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

The boy froze. Suho straightened, startled. “Ah—he wasn’t sleepy, so—”

“It’s past ten.” Sieun’s voice cut like glass. “He has school in the morning.”

“I know,” Suho said quickly. “He just asked and—”

“And you gave him noodles?” Sieun’s gaze burned on the bowl. His tone rose. “At this hour?”

Suho blinked, then frowned, defensive. “He was hungry. It was one bowl. It’s not a big deal.”

“It is,” Sieun snapped. “Routine matters. He needs structure.”

Suho’s brows knit, heat in his voice now. “Structure? He’s five. He had a long day. Sometimes he just wants something small before bed. It doesn’t mean—”

“You don’t get it,” Sieun cut in. His chest tightened, exhaustion tipping into anger. “You can’t just give in because he smiles at you.”

“I don’t just ‘give in,’” Suho shot back. “I take care of him. I make sure he eats. I get him to laugh when he’s sad. I help him with homework. I tuck him in. You think I don’t know he needs more than jokes and noodles?”

The sharpness of his tone startled Sieun. But the words that rose in his throat came sharper still, honed by fatigue and fear.

“You think this is a game?” he bit out. “You get to play house for a few hours, let him stay up, feed him whatever, and then go back to your own life like nothing happened. But I don’t get to walk away. This isn’t a game for me. This is my son’s life.”

The silence after was brutal.

Minjae’s face crumpled. His small voice broke: “I’m sorry, Daddy…”

The guilt landed like a blow. But Suho moved first — crouching by Minjae, voice soft. “No, champ. You didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t cry. It’s not your fault.” He stroked the boy’s hair, whispered until his sniffles eased, and gently led him down the hall.

Sieun stood rooted to the spot, the echo of his own words still burning in his ears.

When Suho returned, his face wasn’t angry — it was worse. Quiet. Closed.

“Suho—”

“I get it,” Suho cut in, voice low but steady. “You don’t have to remind me. I’m just the nanny.”

“That’s not—” Sieun’s throat tightened. “That’s not what I meant.”

But Suho’s eyes held his, unflinching. Hurt threaded through the steadiness. “Really? Because that’s what it sounded like. Like none of it matters. Like I don’t matter.”

Sieun swallowed. “I didn’t—”

“I’m here almost every day,” Suho said, the words rushing now, like he’d been holding them back too long. “I pick him up. I cook. I make sure he laughs. I—” He broke off, shaking his head. “But you still think I’m just playing.”

Sieun opened his mouth, but nothing came. The truth of it pressed sharp inside him: he had meant to protect his son, but the words had cut deeper than he’d intended.

Suho slung his backpack over his shoulder, his movements clipped. “Maybe I should take a few days off. Give you space.”

It wasn’t a threat. It was simple, quiet, final.

“Suho—” Sieun started, but the boy was already turning. Their eyes met once more, and Sieun saw the hurt there, raw and silent. Then he was gone.

The door shut softly, but it sounded like a slam.

The silence crashed in, suffocating.

Sieun dropped onto the couch, staring at the empty bowl, the abandoned toy dinosaur. The apartment felt cavernous again, heavier than it had in months. But now, the hollowness wasn’t relief. It was loss.

Later, he stood in Minjae’s doorway. His son was curled around the dinosaur, tear tracks on his cheeks. Sieun smoothed his hair back, whispered, “I’m sorry,” though the boy couldn’t hear.

In his own room, he sat on the bed with his tie still choking him, the words replaying over and over. Play house. Walk away. Just the nanny. Each repetition cut deeper.

For the first time in years, the silence he had once clung to suffocated him. Because now he knew exactly what was missing.

---

He tried to sleep.

The apartment was too quiet without Suho’s voice in it, without Minjae’s late giggles echoing down the hall. Sieun lay in bed, tie still knotted around his throat, staring at the ceiling. The words he’d spat replayed on a loop, sharper every time. Play house. Walk away. Just the nanny.

He turned onto his side, shut his eyes. The silence pressed heavier.

After what felt like hours, he got up. Barefoot, he padded to the kitchen. The clock on the wall blinked past two in the morning.

The fridge hummed softly. The foil-covered cake was still inside. And there — pinned under the magnet — the note. Soup’s on the stove. Don’t skip breakfast, hyung.

His eyes locked on the messy handwriting. For a long time he just stood there, the hum of the fridge filling the silence Suho used to.

He reached up, fingers brushing the paper, ready to tear it down. But his hand froze. The thought of crumpling it, of throwing it away, left a hollow ache in his chest.

With a quiet curse, he let his hand drop.

He poured himself water, didn’t drink it, left it on the counter. Then he stood there longer, staring at the stupid note like it was mocking him.

Like I don’t matter. Suho’s voice replayed, steady, hurt.

Sieun pressed his palms into the countertop, head hanging. He told himself it was better this way. Suho was just the nanny. He was temporary. A twenty-year-old boy shouldn’t matter this much.

But the ache in his chest wouldn’t listen.

When he finally lay down again, dawn was bleeding through the curtains. He closed his eyes, but the darkness wasn’t quiet anymore. It was filled with a red windbreaker, flour-dusted smiles, laughter spilling down his hallway. And the echo of words he hadn’t meant to cut so deep.

The silence pressed, heavier than it had in years. And for the first time, Yeon Sieun realized he didn’t know how to bear it.

Chapter 16

Suho had walked out steady, or at least he thought he had. His voice even, his shoulders squared, backpack slung like it was nothing. But by the time he reached the bus stop, the mask cracked.

The words chased him down the dark street, quiet but relentless. Just the nanny.

He jammed his hands into his pockets, shoulders hunched against the night air. He wanted to be angry, sharp, set ablaze by what Sieun had said. Anger would have been easier — cleaner. But it wasn’t anger that gnawed at him. It was something slower, heavier. Hurt.

At the bus shelter, he sat down too hard and pulled out his phone, thumb sliding into the group chat. The gang was awake, of course — they always were.

[Baku]: oi suhooo where tf u been
[Beakjin]: he’s prob folding towels for his boss again
[Seongje]: nah he’s doin dishes in a frilly apron rn. housewife suho 🧽✨

Suho barked out a laugh despite the tightness in his chest. They never failed to hit where it stung.

I quit, he typed. Taking a few days off.

The replies were immediate, savage.

[Baku]: LMAO whipped and dumped in the same week
[Beakjin]: man turned into a househusband and got divorced after 3 months. custody goes to the hot dad
[Seongje]: pls tell me you at least got benefits. dental? vision? hot dad allowance?

Suho groaned, covering his face with one hand, laughter muffled in his palm. “You guys are the worst.”

[Baku]: nah. we’re the best. pack ur shit
[Beakjin]: weekend trip. more than weekend. mountains. river. beer. no kids.
[Seongje]: unless ur still breastfeeding ur boss lol

“Shut up,” Suho muttered, grinning despite himself, but the ache in his chest throbbed under the grin.

[Baku]: u in or nah
[Beakjin]: stop being boring
[Seongje]: yeah come cry into the river w us.

Suho stared at the screen, thumb hovering. His head told him no, he should stay, study, keep the routine he’d built. But his chest ached with every memory of ocean eyes narrowing at him, every word replayed sharper than he meant them. Just the nanny.

His thumb moved before his brain did: Fine.

He told himself it was the right choice. Space. Perspective. A reminder that his life wasn’t supposed to orbit around a too-serious man and his dinosaur-obsessed kid.

But when the bus rolled up, he still felt hollow.

The cabin smelled of wood smoke and cheap beer. The gang sprawled in plastic chairs outside, a deck of cards between them, bottles scattered. The mountains rose black against the night sky, stars sharp above.

Suho sat with them, letting their laughter wash over him.

“Seriously though,” Baku said, pointing a card at him like an accusation. “You. Living in some dude’s apartment every night. Cooking, cleaning, babysitting. That’s wife shit.”

“It’s a job,” Suho muttered, but his voice lacked heat. "You all know I need extra cash to cover my school fee."

“Job my ass,” Beakjin scoffed. “You’ve been glowing, man. Domestic bliss. I swear you’ve been smiling more since you started wiping that kid’s nose.”

“Gross,” Suho said, tossing a chip at him.

“Tell us the truth,” Seongje leaned back, grinning wicked. “Is he real hot? Are those eyes that beautiful? Show us the picture. That’s why you stayed, right?”

Suho snorted, but the sound snagged in his throat. “Shut up.”

Baku howled. “He’s hot. He’s hot and you’re whipped. Admit it.”

“I’m not—”

“Bro,” Beakjin cut in, deadpan. “You literally skipped gaming nights to wash dishes in someone else’s kitchen. You’re a househusband. Housewife Suho.”

“Can you all drop dead?” Suho groaned, dragging a hand over his face.

“Fine, but only after you answer,” Seongje pressed. “On a scale from one to ten—”

“Ten,” Suho muttered without thinking, too fast.

The table erupted, laughter exploding into the night. Baku nearly fell out of his chair. Beakjin wheezed. Seongje clapped like he’d won the lottery.

“WHIPPED.”
“Completely gone.”
“Pack it up boys, our Suho’s a family man now.”

Suho threw another chip at them, laughing, but his ears burned. He downed the rest of his beer and reached for another. The laughter faded into the night, but the ache didn’t. Even here, with his oldest friends, under stars and jokes and noise, he couldn’t shake the thought of Minjae’s little hand tugging his sleeve, or Sieun’s eyes heavy with exhaustion but so impossibly deep when they looked at him.

He laughed harder, louder, to drown it out.

---

Back in the city, Sieun was drowning in work. He told himself it was fine, that Suho had taken time off and they’d manage. He had managed for years before. He buried himself in meetings, numbers, reports, until the hours blurred into each other.

At four-forty-five, his phone buzzed. The kindergarten.

“Mr. Yeon?” the teacher’s voice was polite, careful. “It’s almost five. Minjae is still here. He’s waiting. He said Suho usually comes.”

The bottom dropped out of his stomach. His chair scraped back. “I’ll be there in fifteen,” he said, already shoving files into his bag, his pulse pounding in his ears.

The drive was a blur. When he arrived, the hallway was empty, the other children gone. And there by the door sat Minjae, small and quiet, backpack clutched tight, dinosaur tucked under his chin.

“Daddy,” he said softly. Not angry. Just hurt. “Suho-hyung didn’t come.”

The words cut deeper than any client’s rebuke. Sieun crouched, reaching for him, but the boy’s eyes flicked up, disappointment shining. He smoothed his son’s hair, whispered, “I’m sorry. I should’ve been here sooner.”

Minjae nodded but didn’t smile. He hugged his dinosaur tighter.

The ride home was silent. The kind of silence Sieun used to consider normal, preferable. Now every second pressed against his ribs like stone.

Dinner was worse. Minjae pushed food around his plate, appetite gone. He asked once, voice small: “Is Suho-hyung coming back?”

Sieun’s throat closed. He reached across the table, touched his son’s hand, forcing the words out. “He just needs some time.” They sounded flat, empty, and Minjae looked back down, chewing slowly, eyes too old for his age.

That night, after Minjae curled small under his blanket, Sieun lingered in the kitchen. The foil-wrapped cake sat on the counter, sprinkles dulled. He unwrapped it, stared at the lopsided frosting, then wrapped it again without taking a bite.

His eyes lifted to the fridge. The note still pinned under the magnet. Soup’s on the stove. Don’t skip breakfast, hyung.

He reached for it, fingers curling at the corner. Ready to tear it down. Ready to end the madness of letting a boy’s handwriting haunt him.

But his hand froze.

Throwing it away felt like ripping out something vital. Something he wasn’t sure he could survive without.

He let his hand fall, sat back down, buried his face in his hands. The silence pressed harder than ever.

---

Up in the mountains, Suho sat outside the cabin, beer sweating in his palm, listening to his friends argue over who cheated at cards. Their laughter rang, sharp and loud, but when he tipped his head back, the stars blurred. He thought of Minjae’s disappointed voice, though he hadn’t even heard it — only imagined it. He thought of Sieun’s face when he’d said those words, as if cutting him down was easier than letting him in.

He told himself space was good. He told himself he needed this. But under the stars, with his friends shouting nonsense, he realized that no amount of beer or laughter could quiet the ache of being absent from a certain place he wanted to be.