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That morning, he opens his eyes to an empty bed. The air of his apartment is colder than ever, the cruel winter of Seoul choking his throat. The ache in his chest, for a moment, seems perfectly carved into the shape of the mystery that haunts his dreams.
The tears don’t come. Somehow, he wishes they would.
He meets him at work.
Yoo Joonghyuk is a professional gamer, but he doesn’t feel like it. There’s a melancholy in his eyes, framed by dark lashes and thick brows, and an uncommon severity to his features. The angle of his jaw, the sharp line of his nose, and the sardonic set of his lips tell of something beyond the vapid beauty that graces subway advertisements as they race by, meant to be forgotten moments later for other mundane thoughts.
There’s a story to him. He wants it, yearns for it in the way a reader clamors for a protagonist’s backstory. It’s only natural.
He’s lucky, for once in his life, that luck doesn’t favor him. Despite the utter mediocrity and bland listlessness he presents on a daily basis, he’s assigned to show the man around the office building. It’s a boring, thankless task by any metric, except for the fact that it’s Yoo Joonghyuk, and somehow that makes all the difference.
Yoo Joonghyuk trails in his wake, steps echoing alongside his in the empty hallway. The silence brings a newfound hyperawareness, his breaths lining up with the squeak of the other man’s boots against the freshly waxed floor.
Is this as unnaturally charged for Yoo Joonghyuk as it is for him?
“I’m Kim Dokja,” he offers, pressing the button for the elevator with the knuckle of his finger. “QA department.”
“Yoo Joonghyuk,” the man replies after a long pause. The heat of his presence burns circles into his left shoulder blade, the edge of his coat scraping bone. “Have we met before?”
He looks back, and feels it, the lingering ache from the morning making itself known. “No,” he says, stepping into the elevator. “No, I don’t think we’ve ever met.”
“This is yours,” he tells him, fingers curling loosely on the thin barrier between cubicles. “I guess they put you in the QA department for now. We do have a lot of space.”
A lot of space it is. He swallows the bitter reminder that his own cubicle will become yet another space in this room once his contract expires next month, plastering a sickly smile on his face.
Yoo Joonghyuk, mute as he was during the tour, speaks up. “Where’s your desk?”
“Right next door,” he responds, tilting his head to the left.
He watches as he cranes his neck to peer over the wall, eyes roving over his bare space. Where others would have photos of family, friends, lovers, he has the dull gray plastic of the cubicle desk, bland and sterile. Some days, he’s considered putting up something to pretend to be normal, but the very thought of it, of pretending for them, makes him want to tear his skin off.
A single splash of color presents itself as the yellow note stuck to the center of his monitor—broken, it reads in fading blue ink. Yoo Joonghyuk mouths the word to himself like it’s a secret.
“The screen’s broken,” he explains, even though it’s self-explanatory. “I’m sending it to the tech department later today.”
Yoo Joonghyuk nods, still staring at the sticky note.
He checks his phone. “You have that lunch meeting.”
Yoo Joonghyuk frowns at him.
“For the collaboration. Did you forget?”
“Are you going?”
“No,” he says, but he can’t help the cynical laugh that follows. “Of course not. They don’t put me on important projects. I’m unreliable, as they say.”
Yoo Joonghyuk hums in response, face blank.
He would look better smiling. He can almost imagine it, the faint image tugging at the corner of his mind.
“You should get going,” he reminds him. “It’s the same room as earlier. You don’t need me to take you there, do you?”
Yoo Joonghyuk studies him for a moment more, then turns on his heel and strides away.
The second he leaves his sight, he can breathe again, but it’s almost a curse to be able to.
The rain comes down in sheets, pelting a steady rhythm against the windows.
“Kim Dokja.”
He doesn’t need to turn to know who it is. It’s strange; they’ve only known each other for a few hours. How can someone be so foreign yet so familiar?
The buzzing beneath his skin intensifies. He takes a sip of his coffee to calm himself, the liquid lukewarm on his tongue.
The silence of the office is unnerving, but not abnormal for this time of day. Lunch is the only time of the work day he can be alone with himself.
“Done with the meeting?”
He hears his footsteps behind him, approaching. His shoulder brushes against his, and instinctively, he pulls away a fraction, teeth worrying at the edge of his paper cup as he takes another sip.
“Yes.”
“That was fast,” he comments. “Isn’t the food for the meeting catered? You should’ve stayed longer.”
Yoo Joonghyuk exhales. “I’m not hungry.”
He snorts, despite himself. That makes two of them, but he suspects it’s for vastly different reasons.
His shoulder knocks into his again. His coffee sloshes in the cup, lapping at the bite marks on the inner rim.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” He sighs. “So, how long is the collaboration?”
“A month.” There’s a distaste in the way his lips curl around the words, but the reason for it is lost on him the longer he stares at his face.
It’s nothing but a coincidence. A month is only a measure of time, after all.
There’s nothing more to say on the matter. He downs the rest of his coffee, crushing the empty cup in his hand. It crumples without resistance, a stray drip of coffee trailing down the side of his finger.
“Do you like the rain?”
It’s an innocuous question. Why does it feel otherwise?
He looks over at Yoo Joonghyuk. The world outside the window reflects in his eyes as he stares out at the city, gaze out of focus. The pattern of the light shifts by the second, painting his face in a transient wash of gray.
“It’s pretty.” The shape of the compliment is foreign in his mouth. “Don’t you think so?”
“No.”
“Why would you ask me, then?”
His eyelashes tremble. He wants to reach out and touch them, light as a feather, if only to remind him he’s there, waiting for his answer.
“I don’t know.” Some part of him shudders at the low tone of his voice. “I wanted to.”
Their shoulders touch again. He coughs, but doesn’t pull away, the bitter aftertaste lingering at the back of his throat.
The second he gets home, he peels his jacket off numb shoulders, leaving it in a wet pile at the doorway. The rest of his clothes follow suit.
He catches a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror when he goes to shower. His hair is as wet as he feels, plastered to his skull like a second skin. Running a hand through it gives it a little messy charm, though, if he’s allowed to say that about himself. He studies himself a moment more while he waits for the water to warm up.
Twenty seconds later, the water’s still ice cold. He goes back out to dig his phone out of his pants, and comes across the landlord’s text about water boiler maintenance. The subtle heat of the phone in his palm is almost a mockery.
He sighs, turning the shower off. Just his luck.
Still soaked to the bone, he falls face first into his pillow, soft and misshapen from years of use. The sheets are colder than he is, and that omnipresent mystery ache presses itself tight against his core, as if he wasn’t miserable enough.
He’s twenty-eight years old, living in the same old shitty studio apartment he rented after graduation, and still working for the same old black company that considers him an easily replaceable number in a database. He’s done nothing remarkable with his life, and that’s alright, really. He never expected to live past fifteen, so what does it matter that he’ll never amount to anything?
But if it’s truly okay, if he’s satisfied with this life, then why does it feel so…empty?
The rain continues into the next morning.
His hair is already lightly dampened by the time he swipes his transit card to enter the station. It’s morning rush hour, and the fact that he gets a spot next to the door where he can lean against the wall is rare enough to be considered a treat. He scrolls through a few webnovels, not finding anything to his taste until the doors are opening at one of the passing stations and—
“Yoo Joonghyuk?”
He’s dressed for the weather, black trench coat over his clothing, and stylishly dry. Calling his name gets him to turn his head, his gaze landing directly on him.
“Kim Dokja.”
“They’re making you come into the office two days in a row?” He sighs. “Well, I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
Yoo Joonghyuk graces him with a stiff nod in response. His eyes scan over his face with an odd urgency, lingering on a stray droplet of water clinging to the lashes of his left eye. “You’re wet.”
“Obviously,” he says, pushing his hair back. “It’s raining, if you haven’t noticed.”
The subway begins moving, and Yoo Joonghyuk braces himself against the nearest pole. With that, he returns to his hunt for a worthy webnovel, even though everything in sight is dull and uninspired, much like the life he wants to get away from on this crowded subway ride.
“You like the rain.”
Well, everything is dull and uninspired except this man he’s only known for a little less than a day.
“Yeah?” He recalls their conversation from yesterday, and gives an involuntary shudder, the back of his hand knocking into Yoo Joonghyuk’s elbow. “I didn’t say I liked it. I just said it—”
“—looked pretty,” Yoo Joonghyuk finishes for him, a note of derision tinging the words, “so you like it.”
He shrugs. “I don’t have to like it just because it looks nice. It’s inconvenient on days like this.”
His eyes stray back to his screen for the briefest of moments, before Yoo Joonghyuk opens his mouth again. “Are you bothered?”
“Hm?” He taps a nail against the side of his phone. “I wouldn’t say so. If I was really bothered, I wouldn’t be walking around without a jacket or umbrella.”
A fresh wave of commuters squeeze into the train car, jostling and pushing. He presses his back tight against the wall, watching as Yoo Joonghyuk takes a tentative step into his space.
“Sorry.”
“You apologize a lot,” he notes, another passing person bumping into Yoo Joonghyuk’s shoulder and causing his scowl to deepen. “You don’t seem like the type.”
His eyes drag across his face, closer than ever as he braces himself against the wall. His hand is close enough that if he turned his head, his lips would brush against the inside of his wrist. It would be a mistake, and nothing more, but the thought of it might consume him for days, the way it’s consuming in this very moment.
“The type?” Yoo Joonghyuk echoes, voice low as if the words are just for him to hear and remember.
“To apologize. You’re the kind of person who lives with no regrets. I can tell.”
Yoo Joonghyuk sighs, the heat of his body caging him in. “I’m regretting something right now,” he tells him, staring at him with those unfathomable dark eyes. It feels like a confession.
He tilts his head. “Really? What is it?”
“Being on this train.”
Incredulous, he laughs. “That makes two of us, then.”
He opens the door to the roof, and there he is.
The intermittent drizzle sends a chill down his spine as he inhales. “Yoo Joonghyuk.”
He turns, and a timely gust of wind sends his hair into disarray, dark strands spilling like ink into the dreary backdrop of the city. Those eyes lock onto him, and he forces himself to exhale, breath a white smoke screen to break that devastating moment.
“Kim Dokja.”
He approaches with slow steps, slipping into the space next to him at the railing.
“Want one?”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s gaze drops to the cigarette between his fingers, then back up to his face. “I don’t smoke.”
He shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He turns to the side, cupping a hand around his lighter to protect it from the elements.
He strikes it once. Twice. The flame sputters, but doesn’t catch, and he curses under his breath. The callus on his thumb, built from years of feigned smoke breaks, doesn’t stop the skin from rubbing raw on the spark wheel as he makes another attempt.
“Come here.”
“What?”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s fingers are paradoxically gentle as they pry the lighter out of his hand. With a swift flick, it comes to life, now caged by much larger hands. When he leans in, cigarette hanging from his lips, Yoo Joonghyuk twitches at the sudden proximity, the flame darting just out of reach. Huffing out a laugh under his breath, he wraps his fingers around Yoo Joonghyuk’s wrist, holding him steady as he waits for the fire to catch.
“Thanks,” he says, letting go of his wrist. Yoo Joonghyuk nods wordlessly, pressing the lighter back into his hand. The phantom heat of it is dull but burns all the same.
They stand there in silence, cigarette lodged between his teeth. He stares down at the cityscape, its bustle a mere whisper at twenty-two floors above the ground. It’s a long way down, and the air up here is thin enough that he can forget what it feels like to hit the ground.
“I didn’t think you smoked.”
He glances over at Yoo Joonghyuk. He’s staring at him, bare forearms pressed against the damp metal rail, his new employee badge gathering beads of condensation on the surface.
“I don’t.”
Yoo Joonghyuk arches a perfectly drawn eyebrow at him.
“Really,” he confirms, blinking back stinging tears from the smoke in the air. For whatever reason, he doesn’t want to lie to him. It feels wrong to lie to someone who feels so achingly genuine in all his brevity. He wants to be honest. He wants him to know him. He wants to crawl under his skin like it’s his home. It’s terrifying. Yoo Joonghyuk terrifies him.
Yoo Joonghyuk reaches out and plucks the cigarette from his mouth, grazing his cheek in the motion. He stands there and watches him take a drag, torturously slow like he’s trying to commit the taste to memory.
“I thought you didn’t smoke.”
“I don’t,” Yoo Joonghyuk responds, the faintest hint of a smile tugging at his mouth as the wind rips the smoke from him. “It’s unhealthy.”
“I’m faking it,” he finds himself admitting to that earnest expression of his, fiddling with the lighter in his hands. “Management gets mad if you take breaks too often, but they’re lenient on smokers. I come up here and pretend I’m smoking so I can think.”
Yoo Joonghyuk hums in response, rolling the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “You’re pretending.”
“Right.”
He turns to him, and reaches over to slot the cigarette back between his lips. “You don’t have to,” he tells him. His fingers apply the slightest, ghosting pressure against his lips, keeping the cigarette in place. “Pretend, I mean.”
He scoffs. “You don’t get it.” A person like Yoo Joonghyuk never would. Societal pressure, corporate politics, even an apocalypse signaling the end of the world as they know it—these things could never touch someone like Yoo Joonghyuk, who stands there with a brusquely lonely confidence as if the universe yearns to belong to him in spite of his rejection. Does he even know what it means to be forsaken by the world?
A thin line of smoke curls in the space between them as Yoo Joonghyuk leans in, gaze drifting across his face.
“It doesn’t suit you.”
“What?”
For a moment, he can see himself mirrored in his eyes—a blurry, smoky image drowning in the dark depths.
“The smoke.”
His reflexes, shot as they are, are just enough to catch the cigarette with his lips before it falls to the ground. As he watches him go, that familiar, aching emptiness thrums in his chest once more, like a curse.
Does Yoo Joonghyuk feel this too, this larger-than-life longing that eludes him?
Yoo Joonghyuk is a man of few words, but he makes up for it in action. He greets him with a nod when they pass in the hallway, even as he chooses to ignore every other faceless worker transiting through his life. He shields him from the crowd during rush hour, as if it were only expected of him. He gets him a coffee from the break room, copiously done up with sugar and cream just the way he likes it, and grimaces as he slides it around the divider between their cubicles. He stands a little too close to him in the elevator, stares at him a little too much, and is seemingly always on the cusp of saying something that never gets said.
In exchange, he lets his guard down, lets the metaphysical wall that separates him from the world thin the slightest fraction. He doesn’t run when Yoo Joonghyuk begins to infiltrate his moments of isolation, allowing his presence when he’d sooner get stabbed in the chest than allow any other. It’s strange, the way Yoo Joonghyuk seems to slot so perfectly into that space beside him, as if it’d always been reserved for him. The knowledge that Yoo Joonghyuk prefers tea—but would really prefer to drink nothing at all when presented with the Mino Soft break room selection—makes him smile to himself in a way that few things have in recent years. His small kindnesses are less burdensome than those of others, because he never expects in return. Everything is different when it comes to him, easier than it is with others, as if they’ve spent years—or perhaps lifetimes—memorizing what makes the other tick.
Yoo Joonghyuk is like a protagonist, lovingly crafted just for him, the reader. The idea that someone like him could be made for him is simply laughable, but there is no other way to explain the tacit understanding, the stolen glances, the raw attraction like that between opposing poles of the same magnet. Perhaps it’s infatuation that’s coloring his perception, maybe even love, but even that word feels too small for this earth-shattering pull, this aching want that seems too much for someone as insignificant as him to carry.
He runs into him at the grocery store one weekend. One look at the silhouette of his back, and he knows it’s Yoo Joonghyuk there in the produce aisle, poring over the price of cabbage or something else entirely irrelevant. He taps him on the shoulder, and he startles at the touch, scowling with a heroic vengeance.
“Kim Dokja,” he says, expression melting into something almost softer when their eyes meet. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but for a moment, he can almost delude himself into believing that Yoo Joonghyuk thinks the same of this intangible thing between them.
“Yoo Joonghyuk.”
With them, the kind of inane small talk that would happen between ordinary coworkers is unnecessary. Yoo Joonghyuk prefers silence over unproductive chatter, and he’s all too happy to not perform that routine. Instead, he follows him down the line of leafy green produce, and Yoo Joonghyuk lets him. He tries to imagine how Yoo Joonghyuk would treat any other Mino Soft worker if they tried to follow him around in the store, and the very thought is soberingly impossible.
“You’re buying a lot,” he notes, eyes trailing over the contents of his cart.
Yoo Joonghyuk casts him a glance before digging through a pile of cilantro with the kind of earnest determination that suits him so well. “It’s necessary.”
“For you and your sister, right?” he asks, remembering his previous brief mentions of her. Most days, it’s just an after work comment about picking her up from cram school. Once, it’d been something else—an under-the-breath complaint about the difficulties of dealing with long hair, made while peeling a frilly hair tie off his wrist. In what’s been left unsaid, he’s pieced together the story fragments; there are no other people in their life, only Yoo Joonghyuk and Yoo Mia. If it’s a burden, Yoo Joonghyuk never voices it, his face always soft and achingly proud when he speaks of her. It’s an expression he’s never seen anyone make about him, but recognizable all the same.
Yoo Joonghyuk makes a noise of assent, turning to him. “What about you?”
“Me?”
Yoo Joonghyuk eyes his basket, filled with the barest minimum of sustenance, and sighs. “Never mind. It’s just you, isn’t it?”
“And how would you know?” he sniffs, half-joking. “Maybe I have a beautiful girlfriend waiting at home to cook me a nice bowl of instant ramyun.”
“Do you?”
There’s an incongruous fluttering in his chest at Yoo Joonghyuk’s deadpanned question.
“I should be asking you that,” he shoots back. “Everyone at the office is curious, you know?”
At that, Yoo Joonghyuk scoffs. “It’s none of their business.”
“So you have one?” He keeps his tone light, but there’s a tension coiling deep in his bones, like he’s instinctively preparing for the answer to shatter him.
They stop in the middle of the walkway. He looks at him, tilting his head in question, and Yoo Joonghyuk looks back, staring as if he wants to peel him apart, layer by layer, like the onions laying at the bottom of his shopping cart.
“No,” he finally says, voice slightly hoarse. “No, I don’t.”
After that, it becomes reckless.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand slips around his waist in the late-night stillness of the office, seated just close enough for their office chairs to collide. Between keystrokes, he tells him of the high school reunion he’d missed last weekend, of people he’d prefer to never see again because it’d remind him of an unnamed, formless past. Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t pry, just listens while watching him bug test the unreleased game on his screen.
He rests his head on Yoo Joonghyuk’s shoulder during a particularly tedious commute home. Yoo Joonghyuk talks to him in velvety soft tones about harshly lit screens in dark internet cafes, where he’d leveled and leveled into the night in a desperate bid for survival. He’s oddly blase, for talking about something that seems so core to his existence, but he gets it. Even the events of a few years ago seem so far away, let alone those that must’ve happened in his early youth.
Their coworkers notice, to no surprise. A pointed comment here, a thinly veiled probing question there. He fends them off as well as he has his whole life, and Yoo Joonghyuk does the same with practiced detachment. Maybe they’re not so different, him and Yoo Joonghyuk, even though they’ve lived such vastly different lives before meeting. They deflect and deny, all in the name of protecting a hazy, barely-there existence that neither of them have acknowledged.
There’s fear there, he admits. Fear, of prying too hard and watching this fragile something disappear like smoke. But mostly, he’s just a little selfish. Just for this moment, he’d like to pretend there is something, and pretend that Yoo Joonghyuk is mirroring his caution for the same reasons. A game of pretend, between two twenty-eight year old men who are too old for fantasies but too young to not instinctively fight the stagnation of growing old.
There are worse things to be. After all, the younger him never thought of growing old.
Time is ticking down, faster than he would’ve anticipated.
Back when the only thing he associated with the end of the month was his own day of judgement, the days oozed by molasses-slow, bleeding into each other with dreary determination. Now, with the final collaboration event upon them, the panic in the air is near palpable, the claws of anxiety raking at his very core. One day closer to losing his job. One day closer to losing this. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands of people out in the venue, and none of them would ever come close to understanding the desire he harbors in his heart, to cling to this small shred of humanity he’s found and never let go.
“Hurry up and change.”
He blinks, tilting his head. “You know, this isn’t what I had in mind when I said I was going to the bathroom.”
Yoo Joonghyuk scowls. “Stop talking. They’re waiting for me.”
“You could leave,” he points out, fiddling with the top button of his shirt.
At that, he sighs, leaning against the tiled wall, all perfect angles and long lines like the wound hands of a watch. “I wouldn’t.” The words are honed with deadly conviction, much like the man himself, whose bottomless eyes burn with a slow, quiet intensity.
“You wouldn’t,” he agrees, making quick work of the remaining buttons. “I just don’t think there’s much to look at.” He gives him a lopsided smile, watches the hard bob of his throat at that provocation, and slips his shirt off his shoulders.
Wordlessly, Yoo Joonghyuk hands him the event worker shirt—some lurid neon green affair in Yoo Joonghyuk’s brand colors—and in exchange, takes his own shirt off his hands, smoothing out the wrinkles with strangely careful fingers as he folds it over his arm.
“Did they consult you on the design for the shirt?” he asks him, turning to the side to hold it in a more flattering light.
“No.”
He clicks his tongue. “Then what did they even have all those meetings for? You—”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand meets skin in a burst of goosebumps, tracing along the sharp edge of his collarbone with a sickening reverence. “You’re too thin,” he breathes, close enough to feel the tangibility of that wisp, fingers sliding frictionless against the skin and grinding his trace into his bones.
He chokes back the ticklishness, the shy noise that would taint the situation with unwanted intimacy as he shifts away from his touch, entire body thrumming with the force of that persistent, deep-seated ache. “Are you complaining?”
Yoo Joonghyuk parts his lips to speak, but nothing comes out. “No,” he says, after much deliberation. “You should take better care of yourself.”
“Someone’s feeling kind today,” he quips, continuing with his task of pulling the shirt over his head. “I’m honored. Maybe one of these days, you’ll finally feel kind enough to let me have some of your lunch.”
“I offered,” he mutters, folding his hand back into the crook of his elbow. “You won’t take it.”
He stifles a laugh at that thought. “Who’d believe that you’d want to share with a guy you’ve only known for a month?”
Staring into the mirror now, he grimaces, running a hand through his hair. “Ah, really…you’re the only guy in the world who’d look good in neon green. Honestly, you should’ve—”
“Do you believe that?”
“What?” He stares at Yoo Joonghyuk, perfectly reflected in that water-stained mirror, standing behind him. “That you look good in neon green? Don’t ask me questions you know the answer to.”
That someone like Yoo Joonghyuk would really be like him, wanting to feel something just to convince himself he’s alive? He can pretend all he wants, but he isn’t so deluded as to think it’s real, this supposed connection between him and Yoo Joonghyuk.
Yoo Joonghyuk stares back at him in the mirror, catastrophically beautiful in the way he sees too much of him. “You’d look good in it,” he says, finally. “Not this, but…one of my jackets.”
He can tell him whatever he’d like in response, but his reflection would betray him every time, pink in a way that clashes with Yoo Joonghyuk’s green. And he’s sure that Yoo Joonghyuk knows it, with how he allows himself the smallest, softest smile at what he sees reflected in the mirror.
It’s after the celebration party, that it all goes wrong.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand is warm on the dip of his waist, and he’s giggling despite himself, leaning into his side as if absorbing himself into his body will make his wildest dreams come true. The streets are empty at this time of night, and the only existence in the world is Yoo Joonghyuk by his side. Yoo Joonghyuk is indulging him, and the narrative seems to tilt on its axis, so off-kilter he can barely breathe through the words he’s rambling under his breath to fill the silence that Yoo Joonghyuk has left him.
He’s drunk. Not just off a few shots of cheap soju, but on this feeling that Yoo Joonghyuk gives him—as if he can do anything, be anything, feel anything. As if he’s alive, and not just a mechanical system of blood and sinew wired to keep him going until he drops dead one day. Yoo Joonghyuk is everything he’s ever subconsciously yearned for, written into one perfect yet stubbornly flawed character, and—
“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk murmurs into his hair, hot and needy and a question all wrapped into one, toeing the line that barely even seems to exist in this moment.
His response is to stick out his tongue, and lick a long, trembling strip of heat up the line of his throat. It comes as no surprise when Yoo Joonghyuk clutches him closer and kisses him breathless, desperation set alight in the way his fingers thread tight into his hair, as if he’ll never let go.
“Let’s go home, Kim Dokja,” he mutters with that painfully raw voice, lips glistening a soft red. “Let’s go home.”
Because home has, impossibly, become Yoo Joonghyuk, he follows him past the threshold of his door, stumbling with a laugh caught in his throat as he crashes onto the bed. Yoo Joonghyuk follows suit, all tousled and panting and so, so hot. His fingers are clumsy on the buttons, fumbling on his belt, but Yoo Joonghyuk is the same, all hushed curses that betray the farce of dancing around each other for a month. They could’ve been doing this since the day they met, could’ve tasted his blood on his tongue as he bites down on his shoulder, could’ve had Yoo Joonghyuk’s lips pressing bruises bone-deep like a brand. His hands are reverent but the way he plays is dirty, chasing release in this dark room like he did victories in that long-gone internet cafe. The push and pull of it punches visceral holes into him, ones he knows will stay long after Yoo Joonghyuk is gone and the world moves on. It’ll be another source of that ache for something he can’t quite grasp, except now he’ll know what it’s like to have it and lose it.
Yoo Joonghyuk is all he ever wanted, but he’s not his to want. But maybe in this moment, with Yoo Joonghyuk’s lips mouthing the shape of his name against his ear, he can pretend he’s allowed to want this for a lifetime.
Yoo Joonghyuk lets him shower first. The water runs scalding down his back, against the ghostly divots left by his fingertips. The soap he uses is his, but it’s regretfully scentless. It’s a mercy, perhaps, that the only thing he’ll have to carry with him is the memory now branded into his skin.
Afterwards, he pads towards the sound, to the sight of a shirtless Yoo Joonghyuk standing there in the barely lit kitchen, staring absentmindedly at a glass of water. He stands there for a moment more, watching, waiting. There’s something unbearable about this, about the way the too-warm light hits him, throws the tantalizing angles of his body into sharp, painful contrast that makes him look so distant and unreal. As if he’s some piece of art, never meant to be brought to life in this accursed universe, never meant to be standing just a few steps away from the person who selfishly wished for him to exist and sweep him away from it all.
He shifts on his feet, and Yoo Joonghyuk’s gaze snaps to him, startled in a way that breaks the moment just like that.
“Do you want water?”
He steps closer, and takes the cup he pushes across the table to him in his hands like a lifeline. “Aren’t you going to shower?”
Yoo Joonghyuk gives him a meaningful look, eyes shadowed by sinfully long lashes. “Will you…”
“What?”
He shakes his head, turning away. “Never mind. Just…stay.”
He doesn’t give an answer to that. He doesn’t have to. Yoo Joonghyuk knows a little too much about him, somehow knows his tendencies like one knows the feel of the back of their teeth, memorized by tongue. Maybe he’s been a little too complacent, letting him get so far past his walls when he knew he’d have to let go at the end. Maybe Yoo Joonghyuk is a little too complacent, letting him out of his sight for ten minutes when he knows what he does best.
Whatever the case, he hopes he doesn’t blame himself for what was meant to be for something as ridiculous as this, with someone as ridiculous as Kim Dokja. After all, endings should be happy, and he already knows this one isn’t. The click of the door behind him is so eerily, perfectly quiet that he can almost convince himself it never happened.
That morning, he opens his eyes to an empty bed. The air of his apartment is colder than ever, the cruel winter of Seoul choking his throat. The ache in his chest, for a moment, seems perfectly carved into the shape of Yoo Joonghyuk.
That morning, for reasons that he will never be able to explain, he drags himself out of bed. Out of bed, and into the streets, where he boards that subway he used to take to the Mino Soft office where he met him. Maybe he’s only reminiscing, fantasizing about insignificant what-ifs that don’t happen to people like him, who were born just to die someday.
Regardless, he stands on that platform long after the subway leaves the station, watching the crowds of people pass him by. Falling back into his old patterns, fading into the background like the one-off character of a long, tedious novel.
He sighs to himself. Another train pulls into the station, and he boards this one, back to where he started the morning.
One stop. Two stops. The commute blurs into a drab, watery affair, and in desperation, he takes out his phone, searching for a webnovel that will, at least temporarily, soothe this ache that he can never seem to rid himself of.
It’s then that it happens. He looks up.
He laughs at the ridiculousness of it all—a shaky, disbelieving thing that rattles him to the core, hysterical at the edges. “Yoo Joonghyuk. What are you doing here?”
He tilts his head, so unfairly, devastatingly beautiful in his indignation. “Taking you back home."
Dokja sighs. Laughs. Does something, maybe. It doesn’t really matter, not when it comes to Yoo Joonghyuk.
Yoo Joonghyuk is, for reasons that can only be described as fate, his protagonist. And maybe, just maybe, this is more than just a story.