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"Well, he's tall, and handsome, and so romantic. Oh, we walked together, and talked together, and just before we say goodbye, he takes me in his arms, and then...I wake up."
If sleep is for the weak, then Leo is down bad.
This surprises exactly no one. Somehow, in between always running late for classes and guzzling down coffee like it’s water, Leo has garnered a reputation for half-sleeping his way through life. It’s not his fault he’s a night owl—even though his friends have grown too tired themselves of his excuses to spare him any sympathy.
There is, as is usually the case when it comes to Leo, exactly one exception. His roommate, Lee Sangwon.
Lee Sangwon, who will perch indulgently next to him on his bed as he naps the afternoons away, face buried in a book and a hand occasionally petting Leo’s shoulder through his pyjamas.
Which brings him to his real problem. His ‘pyjamas’.
Real sleepers know that pyjamas are for posers. All those buttons and pockets and stiff, plasticky fabrics are a man-made, self-inflicted crime against humanity. Where it’s really at is worn-out cotton t-shirts, at least two sizes too big and loose enough to hang open around the collarbones for maximum comfort. Leo has spent a lifetime curating the perfect collection of sleepwear, and like any good vintage pieces, they only get better with age.
Which is why it’s quite so devastating when they start to go missing.
It hadn’t been a big deal at first. A single missing t-shirt can be explained away with ease—maybe he left it at his parents; or one of the few friends’ places he’s slept over at after a party; or even just let it slip down the back of some piece of furniture for him to find months later when he finally gets around to cleaning. He can excuse two missing shirts; three, even.
When the tally reaches four, he knows something is up.
Sure, he has a collection, but it’s not an endless resource. He’s had to cycle through the few he has left several times already, always rushing to wash and dry the laundry before he’s due a shirt change. Hygiene may not be his utmost concern in daily life—he is a man in his early-twenties, after all—but good sleep needs fresh cottons. He lies awake each night with his arms crossed protectively over his chest, half-expecting some goblin thief to steal the shirt off his back as he drifts off into dreamland.
Sangwon says he’s delusional.
Sangwon is full of shit.
Something’s got to give. And if Leo’s learned anything these past few years of army crawling his way through college, it’s how to choke down a Red Bull espresso and get shit done.
Suspect #6 — The Baby Brother
To write a good essay, one must always start with the conclusion. Leo’s a music production major, though, so essays have never really been his strong suit. Nevertheless, he takes the advice head-on and launches his investigation with the straggler—the unlikeliest and least threatening of them all—so he can cross the name out and dive into the juicier, meatier chunks. Of the essay, that is. Analogies have never been his thing either.
Sanghyeon shoots him an easy smile from across the coffee table, kicking his legs against the bottom of his booth seat and noisily rattling the ice in the drink Leo had bought him. There’s a small stack of notebooks and pens at one end of the table, but Sanghyeon pays them no mind, simply tapping away on his phone in between trading habitual jabs with Leo.
“I told you to bring your homework so you would actually do it, you know,” Leo huffs. He’s disappointed, but not surprised—Sanghyeon always brings his homework to their weekly café visits, holding up his end of the deal, but the books slam shut the second he’s handed his drink, courtesy of Leo’s bank account. It’s a meager fund, but Sanghyeon’s teenage naïvety distorts Leo’s student loans into endless rivers of free cash flow.
“It’s just English. I could answer that quiz in my sleep.” He glances over at the pretty barista behind the counter, who, bless his soul, accepts Sanghyeon’s puppy crush with only a smidge of awkwardness. He smiles cutely and winks when they lock eyes, turning back to Leo when he successfully makes the barista flush and run off into the back room. “You clearly want something, anyway. What’s with the staring, bro?” He says the last word in English and preens a little in satisfaction as he does every time he speaks the language.
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.” Leo squints at him. Sanghyeon blinks back, the picture of innocence that hasn’t fooled Leo since he was in the single digits running around under the Australian sun. “Could do the quiz in your sleep, huh?” He trails off, letting his voice grow quiet to really infuse it with suspicion. “You been sleepwalking again lately?”
Sanghyeon blushes. “No—I haven’t. I don’t.” He lowers his voice too, eyes rapidly flitting back and forth between Leo and his pretty barista who has just reappeared. “Did Eomma say something?” he whispers incredulously.
“Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t.” She didn’t, but the fidgeting it ignites in Sanghyeon is worth the deception. Let him squirm. Maybe getting to the bottom of this will be much quicker than Leo thought. He leans back in his chair with an air of casualness, pretending the wooden slats aren’t digging into his spine. “If she did, though…I don’t suppose there’s anything you’d want to confess?…”
Sanghyeon’s hands grip tighter against his plastic cup, condensation running down the side in a trail of guilty sweat. “Hyung,” he says, like he only does when he’s trying to wiggle his way out of something incriminating. “It’s not what you think.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Leo is winning. Oh, he’s so excited to rub this in Sangwon’s face when he gets back to their room later. “Recall the night of the 17th. I spent the night at home, correct?”
Sanghyeon furrows his eyebrows and squints across the table at him, but nods nonetheless. “Appa’s birthday,” he agrees. “You brought Sangwon-hyung home for dinner, and then you slept in your old room and went back to your dorm the next day.”
“Precisely,” Leo nods sagely. “And you’d agree that, as I intended to spend the night, I brought some belongings with me, correct?”
“Uh. I think you had a bag?”
“Precisely! And the contents of that bag—”
“Here’s your croissant. Sorry for the wait, the toaster oven is acting up.”
Stars fill Sanghyeon’s eyes in an instant. “Thank you, Libu-hyung,” he croons. Liyu (Liyu-hyung, Leo thinks bitterly, who never needs to lift a finger to earn the honorific from Sanghyeon) smiles politely at him and ducks back through the kitchen before Sanghyeon inevitably starts bombarding him with flirty comments. Leo had managed a conversation with him on a rare occasion he’d dipped into the café without his little brother in tow—he’s a nice dude, but very aware of Sanghyeon’s infatuation with him and very aware that Sanghyeon is still a high schooler. He accepts the compliments with grace (if regularly spilling hot coffee over his fingers can count as grace), but that’s as far as he’s willing to take it. Leo’s just glad he doesn’t need to start throwing punches and finding a new coffee shop. Liyu makes a really good ashotchu.
“Anyway—” he continues, but Sanghyeon is already stuffing his face with the croissant Leo had intended for them to share. Leo snatches a hand out to grab a fistful of what turns out to be mostly flaky crumbs. He’s not made of money, damn it. At least this should manage to butter Sanghyeon up; loosen his lips a little…
“I dunno what y’re talking about, hyumg.”
“I know you’re stealing my shit, Sanghyeon!” He’d meant to be more subtle about it, but he should have known subtlety never works on Sanghyeon until you bash him over the head with it like a flick to the forehead of a disobedient puppy.
Sanghyeon’s eyes go wide and he looks hurriedly around the room, scandalised. “Leo,” he chastises, making a big show of swallowing down the croissant in a huge gulp, “I’m going to tell Eomma you said that.”
Leo drags a weary hand down his face. “I’m twenty three years old. I can swear if I want to. And right now I do want to, because I know you’ve been stealing my shit!”
“Does Eomma agree with that?” He slurps at his coffee, unbothered.
“She—that doesn’t matter.”
“Does she, though?” How he manages to make the purse of his lips around the straw look so annoying, Leo has no idea. “I don’t think she does.” He starts kicking underneath the table again, and the thud of the baseboard launches Leo into action like a push onto the highway.
“I’ll tell Liyu you like him.”
“Hyung!” Sanghyeon’s hand flies out to cover his mouth, sticky with butter. “Not so loud!” At Leo’s glare, he starts to slowly lower the hand, threatening to cover his mouth again when he opens it to speak. Leo rolls his eyes with a sigh and pushes his hand back down to the table.
“Come on, Sanghyeon, you’re caught. Just admit it.”
Sanghyeon purses his lips again, this time accompanied by a serious thinking face that puffs his cheeks out adorably. “I didn’t mean to,” he mumbles into his glass.
“Just tell me. I’m not mad.”
He raises a disbelieving eyebrow. Leo ignores it and gestures for him to continue, crossing his arms as he leans back.
“It’s just—You’re never really home anymore. And I know I see you on the weekends, and Eomma and Appa are home most nights, but it’s…not the same anymore.” He fiddles with his straw, ice melted. “Don’t tell Woojin, he’d laugh at me, but sometimes I go into your room when you’re away. Just to sit there for a bit, do my homework, write some lyrics.”
Leo’s heart clenches in his chest. It lands somewhere between fondness and indigestion. He probably should have chewed that croissant more.
“I don’t mind if you go in there, you know.” He smiles gently, nudging his shoe against Sanghyeon’s under the table. “I trust you not to break anything. And it’s pretty cute,” he tacks on teasingly, secretly adoring the blush Sanghyeon fails to hide as it swallows his cheeks.
“Can we finish the croissant now? It’s going cold.”
It’s already cold, but neither of them mention it. They split the remnants equally—or as equally as they can, given its half-crumpled, wilted state. It tastes the same regardless.
“I gotta ask, though,” Leo says, half-heartedly covering his mouth with one hand as he chews. “Why the sleep shirts?”
The tilt of Sanghyeon’s head is so puppylike he almost coos out loud. “Huh? I’ve never touched your sleep shirts. Why would I? I just took the leather jacket from your closet.”
Huh. Suspect #6—not guilty.
“Wait—you took my leather jacket?!”
Suspects #5 & #4 — The Lovers
“It’s not like I thought it was Sanghyeon-ie anyway,” Leo calls out to Sangwon from where he’s already snuggled into bed. It’s 9pm: too early to sleep, still, but just early enough for maximum bed rot time beforehand. Sangwon understands, having obligingly gone to brush his teeth because he knows Leo will be too sleepy to let him go after a few hours of cuddles and doomscrolling. “He has no reason to steal my pyjamas. That’s why I started with him—it’s my strategy.”
“Your strategy sounds a lot like you made a guess and struck out.” A halo of light follows Sangwon from the bathroom door, illuminating the steamy haze left over from his earlier shower. He stretches high above his head and Leo doesn’t glance down to see the smooth sliver of skin it bares around his tiny waist—except it doesn’t. Sangwon is wearing a hoodie.
“Won’t you overheat in that?”
Sangwon shrugs. “It’s cold.”
“It’s June.”
A few strands of wet hair fall into Sangwon’s big eyes when he settles back against the headboard of Leo’s bed. He flicks his head with enough force for the droplets to splatter over Leo’s face, like a stupidly pretty humidifier. “Yeah, and it’s cold,” he insists.
His nervous system can’t quite discern whether he’s been hit by a car or just a thick waft of Sangwon’s clean skin as he leans over Leo to grab a book, the scent of his body wash something sweet and unidentifiable. Leo lets out an exaggerated groan as a pointy elbow prods at his side, and Sangwon barely spares him a glance before driving it between his ribs viciously. He grabs the book he keeps in Leo’s bedside table and, with one finalising jab to Leo’s vital organs, pushes himself back upright. “If it really is a strategy,” his voice has gone quiet, thumbing through the pages until he reaches the polaroid he’s been using as a bookmark, “what’s your next move?”
Leo hums, tucking his head into the crook of Sangwon’s shoulder and only jabbing him a little with his chin. “I have something in mind.”
When the facts lead you astray, you retrace them. This is precisely what brings Leo to the front door of Kim Geonwoo and He Xinlong; aka the physical manifestation of ‘historians will say they were roommates’.
They are roommates, of course, as evidenced by the way they both peer at him when they open the door. Geonwoo has a hand around Xinlong’s waist, and they’re both breathing a little heavier than strictly necessary. “You’re disgusting,” Leo greets them.
“Nice seeing you, hyung,” Geonwoo says, shutting the door in his face. Leo shoves his foot in the doorframe and promptly yelps, forgetting that threadbare converse are no match for this ancient building’s fire-hazardous doors. Xinlong flings it back open wide in alarm and tugs Leo into the apartment, while Geonwoo trails along behind them grumbling softly under his breath.
Xinlong pushes him down onto the couch and, on very brief examination, decides he’s in perfect health. “Not fair, hyung,” he mumbles, and shifts slightly closer to where Geonwoo is hovering next to the arm of the chair.
Their little off-campus apartment is a lot cleaner than the last time Leo had been there. He hadn’t cared at the time, of course, drunk off his ass as he was. “Clean-up go okay after the party, then?”
The party was weeks ago. Xinlong and Geonwoo side-eye each other, clearly suspicious of this line of questioning. “Yeah,” Geonwoo answers on behalf of both of them, “no thanks to you.”
“So that’s why you wanted me to stay over so badly. To take advantage of my free labour.” His memory of that night is fuzzy, both from the alcohol and the sudden rush of relief he’d felt after exams were finally, finally over, but he distinctly remembers the two of them clinging to his arms as he tried to slip through the front door unnoticed.
“You tried to leave all your stuff behind and run off into the night. We didn’t want you to get flattened by a car,” Geonwoo scoffs.
“Sangwon hyung would have dug our graves himself,” Xinlong shudders lowly.
“It’s funny you should mention that.”
Leo had indeed taken an overnight bag to their apartment that day. It had been a modestly sized party, enough people to fill the room without being overwhelming. Geonwoo and Xinlong had the only off-campus place in their friend group so often volunteered to host, but that didn’t mean they were thrilled by the idea of crazy vase-smashing house parties where you only know a handful of people. Xinlong especially was a serial introvert, so the parties were kept pretty tightly within their group, with several of them opting to stay overnight afterwards.
All the better for Leo, who is diligently refining his suspect list one filthy little thief at a time.
“You’re not going to tell us something traumatic happened when you left, are you? Because we tried our best, man, we even locked you in the bathroom for a while just to keep you in one place.”
“What he’s trying to ask—” Xinlong shoots a look at Geonwoo, who rolls his eyes good-naturedly, “is whether everything’s okay, hyung.”
Xinlong can be a little shit when the mood is right. Leo squints at him, trying to gauge whether this is his mock-serious face or his serious-serious face. Xinlong breaks eye contact, shiftily glancing to the side. Leo squints harder.
“Do you have something in your eye, hyung? I think we have eyedrops somewhere. Xinlong-ie uses them for his contacts.” Geonwoo starts wandering off in the direction of the bathroom—the crime scene. Leo leaps up to follow, ignoring the concerned glances that pass over his head as he stalks after Geonwoo.
The bathroom is clean and tidy and generally a pretty standard bathroom. There’s a candle on the windowsill. A matching shampoo and conditioner set sits beside a single, shared body wash that Leo knows to smell like pine and something vaguely spiced. He peers into the bathtub.
“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” Geonwoo pauses in his rummaging through the bathroom cabinet. Seizing the opportunity, Leo nudges him out the way to start feeling around the back of the cupboard. Spare toothbrushes; floss; tampons and pads because they are nothing if not hospitable hosts; a disturbingly varied selection of lube.
“Where could it be,” Leo mutters under his breath, standing upright and scanning the room. His eyes land on the laundry hamper, half full.
Geonwoo catches his wrist before he can reach for it and marches him back into the living room where Xinlong still sits, legs pulled up criss-cross as he stares at them. “Okay, seriously—what’s up with you? Why were you trying to look through our laundry?”
“You were looking through what—”
“That night,” Leo starts. He pauses for dramatic effect and lures Xinlong and Geonwoo to lean into him slightly in suspense. “That night…”
“Do you think he hit his head?” Xinlong turns to Geonwoo and murmurs in his ear, but his voice is much too deep for it to be subtle. “Should I call an ambulance?”
“That night,” Leo interrupts, louder this time. “I lost something deeply important to me.”
“Your mind,” Geonwoo muses, pressing his lips together and nodding sincerely in understanding.
“I brought it here, into the home of two dearly trusted friends.” He ignores the finger that Geonwoo points toward himself in feigned surprise, eyebrows raised. “And when I returned home the next day, it was nowhere to be found.”
“What was it, hyung?” Xinlong’s hair flops around his cheekbones as he glances around the room, as if the mysterious item could apparate in their presence at any moment. “I don’t remember seeing anything. Was it in your bag? The blue one?”
“It was. But when I looked in my bag back at the dorm, it was gone.”
“Okay, but what was in your bag?” Geonwoo huffs, exasperated. “Why are you being so cryptic about it?”
“Because this is an ongoing investigation, Geonwoo!” he cries. “My prized possession…”
“We didn’t touch your bag. It sat right here, where you left it, until Sangwon took it to go look for you.”
“But it’s not there,” he insists. “My sleep shirt, it’s gone.”
The room falls to a silence that quickly shatters with a half-muffled cackle. He Xinlong, the minx everyone forgets he is, turns red with the force of his laughter. Geonwoo gawks at him, dopey-eyed. “Hyung,” Xinlong gasps out, “you were wearing the shirt when you left.”
The heavy door just barely catches his ankle as he leaves, and he limps dejectedly to the stairs. He doesn’t bother checking the elevators, knowing in his heart this is what he deserves.
Suspect #3 — The Bookworm
“You thought they were hiding it in their laundry?” Leo burrows further under his covers, refusing to comment. “It’s been weeks since that party, hyung.” A pause. “…How often have you been doing your laundry?”
“More often now, because I don’t have any fucking shirts left,” he wails into the pillows. A warm hand snakes up his spine to settle comfortingly on his back before giving him a swift slap to the back of the head. “Ow.” He looks up, incredulous. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
Sangwon is wearing a hoodie again. The hood is down and the sleeves are rolled up to his elbows.
“It’s cold.” He lies, pulling back his own blankets and settling in, wriggling a few times like a kitten to get comfortable.
No, they don’t always sleep in the same bed, regardless of what Anxin says. They can’t, anyway, because Sangwon is still insisting on wearing a hoodie to bed in June like a psychopath and they would both boil to death in their sleep, as very nearly happened the night before. Not that he minds, per say—Leo is perfectly capable of falling asleep without Sangwon’s help. It’s one of his greatest talents, in fact. He’s just concerned about the quality of Sangwon’s rest. Yes, that’s it.
He watches Sangwon sink into his sheets until they’re drowning him up to the neck. He’s stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the hot flush spreading over his cheeks where they’re barely peeking out under all the layers.
Leo wordlessly reaches over and flicks on the aircon unit. Maybe he should cut Sangwon some slack—he seems stressed these days, what with his advanced summer classes rapidly approaching. Some time off would do him some good. And if it would happen to coincide with Leo’s investigation, that’s all the better.
“Sangwon-ah,” he calls to the blanket mound, “You feel like going to the library tomorrow?”
The campus library building is as tall and imposing as ever, even more stark without the buffer of bustling college students rushing to catch a bus or grab a coffee or write a semester-long assignment in two hours. It is June, after all, and most of the student body had scattered like bugs the second their red solo cups dried up at the end of semester parties a few weeks back. Leo and Sangwon were the odd exception, the impending doom of Sangwon’s summer classes and Leo’s internship keeping them in the city.
The place is deserted: they have dealer’s choice on any of the tables, even the good ones with the big desks and the couches you usually need to camp outside for in the wee hours like a fangirl. He watches Sangwon’s eyes gaze over at them longingly, practically itching to collapse in the corner seat with a book and not move until the sun dips under the horizon.
But that’s not why they’re here. He tangles his fingers with Sangwon’s, ignoring the way he stares at the tables like a lost lover, and drags him over to the information desk where he can practically taste victory hiding behind the counter. By the time he’s done here, that little ‘i’ dangling on a hanging sign will stand for interrogation.
“Kim Junseo-ssi.”
Junseo looks up at them in surprise. He probably hasn’t seen another living person in weeks. Even the librarian has deemed it quiet enough to trust Junseo with manning the desk on his own. “Surprised to see us?”
“Hey, guys. Yeah, actually—what are you doing here over summer break?”
“It’s funny you should ask, Kim Junseo-ssi. What are you doing here over summer break?”
In his peripherals, he can just make out Sangwon slowly turning his head to stare at the side of Leo’s face. Fine, let him. He’ll be doing more than just staring when Leo solves this mystery and proves that he really isn’t delusional after all.
“I’m…working?” Junseo ducks his head forward and cranes his neck up to look at the sign as if to check it hasn’t disappeared. “Why are you calling me Junseo-ssi?”
“He’s going insane, hyung. Ignore him—we’ll be going now. Those tables over there are free—”
“Where were you on the morning of Saturday the 14th?” Leo slams his hands down on the desk. He fights the urge to recoil when he registers the ballpoint pen his left hand has landed on, plastic creaking ominously under the assault.
“I work Saturdays. I was probably here.” Junseo reaches out very slowly and very carefully, as if to avoid spooking a small animal, and retrieves the pen from under Leo’s grip. “Why—”
“And did you see any activities you would describe as…suspicious?”
Junseo blinks rapidly, bewildered. His gaze slips down under the table, almost as if looking into an invisible camera. Beside him, Sangwon points his index finger to his own head and twirls it, mouthing ‘Crazy, hyung.’ Leo scowls.
“It’s summer, nothing really goes on around here until everyone comes back in the fall. Unless…was that the day you napped on the couch?”
He’d been at the end-of-year party the night before. Junseo had been there too, actually, somehow managing to grind up against a new guy every time Leo walked by. Most people had either jumped ship back to their hometowns the day after or spent it rotting out a gruesome hangover in their dorms. Leo, refusing to taint the sanctity of his bed with bad vibes, had drunkenly stumbled his pyjama-clad way over to the library soon after opening and splayed out on one of the good couches for the better half of the day.
Junseo nods, humming in realisation. “It was, wasn’t it? You kept mumbling in your sleep. I had to throw books at you to shut you up before my manager noticed and kicked you out.”
“That’s where those bruises came from?” Leo muses to himself, stunned. “I kept dreaming that I was being mauled by evil library ghosts.”
Sangwon tilts his chin contemplatively to the sky, stroking an imaginary beard. “That does explain all the books you had on you. I thought you were using them for warmth. Like when you sleep over at a friend’s house and they forget to give you a blanket.”
Junseo hums. “You didn’t know? Isn’t that what you came here to ask?”
He’s been derailed! Junseo, sly fox that he is, has dodged the question entirely. “No—the books don’t matter.” Junseo and Sangwon let out twin gasps, clearly unserious and testing Leo’s patience. “Shut up, both of you. Anyway—” he leans over Junseo, using his height as leverage, and secretly hopes that Junseo won’t stand up from his desk chair and rob him of the advantage. Junseo stares back, unimpressed. “I lost something that day. Would you happen to have seen it?”
There’s a box behind Junseo’s head very clearly labelled ‘LOST AND FOUND’. He spins around slowly and hooks two fingers in the open lip, tipping it to show Leo a scattering of pens, a Rubik’s cube, and what looks a lot like a single, wrapped condom, size extra small. “Any of this look familiar to you?” He’s sure he doesn’t imagine Junseo’s eyes flickering down to his crotch, one eyebrow raised high beneath his half-bangs.
“No, it’s—are you really going to make me spell it out?”
“If you could make it quick; I’ve got shit I need to finish before next semester,” he gestures around at the general nothingness of their surroundings and the pristinely packed shelves of books. A single speck of dust floats past them like a tumbleweed. Junseo’s eyes flicker tellingly to one book in particular that sits on the desk in front of him. It’s laying face down like a tiny little tent in the way that Sangwon loathes because it damages the spine. He looks under the table again, smirking almost imperceptibly.
“I know what you’re hiding.”
“Sure, Leo. Look, this is still a library, you need to lower your voice—”
Leo dives headfirst over the desk, ignoring the pangs in his hipbones and shoulders as he tries not to flip clean over.
“What the fuck, Leo—” some amalgamation of Sangwon and Junseo cry. Junseo pushes his desk chair back in alarm to stand and reveals—
His phone, open on a group chat log. Leo grabs it, swiftly righting himself and spinning around to avoid a swarm of flapping hands. “‘Leo’s here,’” he reads aloud, voice booming and triumphant in a declaration of war, “‘he says he knows everything.’”
Sangwon gasps, scandalised. Junseo’s forehead wrinkles in a way that is somehow still flattering, hands on his cocked hips like he’s expecting. Leo’s expecting, too—expecting a damn explanation. “Why’d you take it?”
“Look, it’s not a big deal—”
“Not a big deal? Not a big deal?! I can’t sleep at night, ‘hyung’, how is that not a big deal?”
Junseo’s brain undergoes a series of mechanical whirring and tinkering. The clunking sounds of his thoughts are practically deafening in the dead hush of the library. “Are you serious? I’ll delete it if it bothers you that much—it’s not even that bad…”
It’s Leo’s turn to malfunction. “Delete what?”
“The photo? The one I took of you sleeping. I thought Sangwon had shown you. Or one of the others, even.”
Sangwon, the traitor, simply shrugs beside him. “I set it as my lockscreen. He just hasn’t noticed yet. He’s a little stupid.”
“I am not—wait, so you didn’t steal my shirt?!”
Leo gets kicked out of the library.
Suspect #2 — The Dancer
“I just don’t get it.” It had been days now of questioning his suspects/friends and he was no closer to finding out the truth. “How can they just disappear?”
Sangwon flips a page with an elegant swish of his hand. The sound flutters across to Leo’s side of the room, familiar and soothing even though Sangwon is so damn far away. He’s not even under his blankets today, undoubtedly too warm with the oversized hoodie hiding most of him from view.
“Maybe you’re just not looking in the right places, hyung.” He looks up at Leo then, tilting his head meaningfully as he stares past the curtain of his hair and the hood draped up high over his head.
“I know that now. Everyone thinks I’m losing my mind.” Leo rolls over to stare up at the ceiling. The aircon whirs quietly in the back of his mind and he shivers. He cocoons himself in his duvet and tries not to think about how empty his bed feels. “At least I’m not the one wearing hoodies to bed in summer,” he grumbles under his breath.
Sangwon offers no response. He hunches a little further into his pages, letting Leo stew in his thoughts. The muggy silence steeps him until he’s soft and unguarded. “Sangwon-ah?” His voice comes out low and heavy, like a whisper too weighted for its own good. “Are you still cold?”
Another page turns. The pause is long, hesitant. “Yeah, hyung. I am.”
The sun is bright and suffocating when morning comes. Sangwon is lying with his back to Leo, unmoving except for deep breaths that jostle his whole frame. His blankets are pushed down to the foot of his bed, tangled around his ankles like weights.
Leo pauses in the midst of swinging his legs to the floor and just watches. Sangwon must have lost the hood in the night, his hair a puffy ball of brown splayed out across his pillow. His shorts have ridden up his legs to expose much of his upper thigh. They’re the same shorts he usually wears when the two of them share a bed—he always says the heat of two bodies is too much to wear anything longer. He’s always been sensitive to the heat; this sudden insistence on wearing thick hoodies to bed is so unlike him that Leo’s growing more concerned about him than his stupid t-shirts.
He pads softly over to Sangwon, dodging a pair of jeans and a stray shoe that have been dropped between the two beds, and reaches out a hand to gently feel along Sangwon’s forehead for a fever. He has to brush away a messy puff of hair, and an endeared smile fights its way out of him despite the clouding worry.
“Hyung?” Sangwon mumbles, puffy eyes parting to peer up at him in barely lucid questioning. His skin is warm and a little sweaty, but not feverish—there’s a slight flush across his cheekbones and down his neck, though Leo’s almost certain he’s just feeling the heat from the hoodie that has for some reason replaced his own blankets. Replaced him, he tries not to think.
He fails.
“Morning.”
Sangwon says nothing. His eyes slip shut again, humming quietly under Leo’s touch like a purr. “I’m going to the studio with the guys today. Will you come?”
As long as Sangwon keeps leaning into him like that, there’s not a thing in this world Leo would say no to.
The studio, as with the rest of campus, is a shell of what it was a month ago. During the semester it’s a fight between dance majors, extracurricular teams, and solo hobbyists to score a room booking. Now, though, Leo and Sangwon can comfortably wander the corridors, only passing by a few people as they go. A smattering of voices float amicably through the halls, growing in volume as they approach the very last set of doors.
“Again, Hao-ge!” Anxin demands as they let the door shut quietly behind them.
“Yeah, show us again, Hao-ge,” Junseo teases, a telling rosiness sitting high and round on his cheeks.
Jiahao rolls his eyes and goes to demonstrate a move again before his eyes latch onto Leo and Sangwon in the mirror. “Finally,” he breathes, half relief and half exasperation. “Is that everyone? No Sanghyeon today?”
“Nah, he’s got summer homework. Our parents found out he’s been blowing it off and won’t let him leave the house until it’s done.”
Geonwoo giggles from the corner where he and Xinlong are helping each other stretch. “Still going after the barista guy?”
“‘Until the day he dies,’” Leo quotes, crossing an arm across his chest until the muscle starts to burn just slightly. “Since they’re ‘soulmates’, and all. He’s planning to ask him out properly when he starts college.”
There’s a low whistle. Anxin is on the floor, trying to untie Jiahao’s shoelaces without him noticing. Jiahao glances down at the noise and kicks Anxin’s knee so gently it barely counts as a tap. “That’s commitment,” Anxin nods approvingly. “Turns out he does take after you, hyung.”
Leo’s eyebrows furrow, debating the merits of feeling pride or offence. He settles somewhere in between. “What does that mean?”
Anxin taps his chin thoughtfully and starts listing off on his fingers. “Obsessive; whipped; a massive loser, honestly, in a romantic kind of way.” He shrugs, ignoring Leo’s indignant objections. “You’re one and the same. I hope for his sake Libu-hyung says yes. Who asked who out between you and Sangwon, anyway?”
The room holds its breath. Leo feels the eyes on him like spotlights, the mirrors reminding him not to want what he cannot have. “We—”
“We’re not together.” Sangwon says quietly, looking down at the floor. He doesn’t comment on Anxin’s lack of honorifics like he usually would, instead making his way over to the sound system to start poking around their playlist.
“Anxin,” Jiahao hisses under his breath. He starts whispering in rapid-fire Mandarin while Anxin alternates between reluctantly nodding and sighing in a tortured kind of way. Xinlong and Geonwoo are visibly trying to hide that they’re eavesdropping and fooling precisely no one.
Maybe Leo is losing his mind, but he’s clearly not the only one. Everything has been so weird lately, and Leo can’t help but feel like they all know why except him. It’s clear that nobody will address it, though, everyone avoiding his eyes when he tries to catch sight of them in the mirror. If he lingers slightly on Sangwon where he’s still hunched over the speakers, then it’s only fair that Leo gets to keep a secret too.
He wrings his hands against the bottom of the loose shirt he’s wearing, a habit he’s kept since childhood despite Sangwon chastising him for stretching out his shirts. He’d opted to wear one of his precious few remaining sleep shirts today, the soft comfort of it around his shoulders worth the risk of losing it.
Abruptly, he remembers the last time he’d been in this room. He and Sangwon had escaped in the midst of a study spree to seek much needed refuge in the studio. Most of their friends had been knee-deep in exam prep themselves, with one exception…
“Jiahao.” Leo starts, wrapping a firm hand around his bicep and dragging him to a corner far away from nosy ears. Anxin makes to start slowly crawling towards him but, at Leo’s venomous glare, holds his hands up in surrender and changes course to a Xinlong who is clearly still feeling the uncomfortable tension in the room. “Jiahao. Arno. My same-age friend. You’re very dear to me, you know that?”
Jiahao grants him a timid-looking smile, but his eyes are laser-focused straight through Leo’s bullshit. “I didn’t take your shirt,” he says simply. Leo’s face drops open in shock, but Jiahao simply shrugs and says “Anxin,” like that explains everything. Which it does, the gossipy little shit.
The headache of it all resettles itself oppressingly around his temples. “But—but I had it. Right here, in this room! I wore it for practice, changed into a spare, and when I came back from the bathroom to take Sangwon home it was gone.” He rubs ineffectively at the tension in his skull. “You were the only one here, it had to have been you.”
Jiahao really does have very large eyes. They look at him like he’s stupid, and Leo is inclined to agree simply because of how earnest Jiahao’s judgement is. “It wasn’t,” he repeats, not offering any elaboration. “Have you thought about why anyone would even want your shirts? Isn’t—” He pauses for a second, tossing Korean vocabulary around in his head. “Isn’t motive just as important as circumstance?” He says it all with a sincere and challenging nod. At that moment, Leo feels less like a college student and more like a kindergartener.
Nonetheless, he considers Jiahao’s words. Up until this point, he’s been solely considering the whereabouts of his suspects—the opportunity, the alibi. But he’s been missing the why—why the sleep shirts, why the secrecy?
There’s only one person who would gain anything from doing this to him. One person who has flown so far below Leo’s radar that until Jiahao had stared the truth right into him, he’d never truly considered him as a threat. He’s been a fool. An honest-to-God fool.
Music finally bursts from the speakers, each of them rushing to the middle of the room in preparation. In the center, one person stands above the chaos. They lock eyes in the mirror, and Leo can’t help the smirk as he catches the mystifying gaze of one Zhou Anxin.
Suspect #1 — The Thief
Practice is tense. There’s no reason for it to be, what with the semester being over and there being several months left until the dance meet they’re preparing choreo for, but the pressure is glaring and heady in the growing humidity of the room. Leo keeps his eyes locked on Anxin, who was initially amused but slowly descends into incredulity under his stare. He starts to miss a few steps, stumbles a little on a turn, hits a move one beat too late. Leo watches it all. For once, it won’t be him chasing after the truth—he’s going to make Anxin come straight to him with a confession and a guilty conscience.
“What the hell is your problem?” Anxin hisses as he drags him outside after they call it quits. The sun dances above their heads, birds singing smugly in the trees. “Hyung,” Anxin tacks on with purpose, too late to even be considered an afterthought.
“Haven’t been sleeping,” Leo muses. “And I need to do my laundry again. And it’s so hot, Anxin-ah, it’s just too damn hot, isn’t it?”
The pissiness fizzles out of Anxin in an instant. His face turns pallid and boyish, the naïvety in his eyes betraying his age. “Hyung, what nonsense—are you okay? Wait here, I’ll get the others—”
“No need, Anxin-ah,” he croons jovially. He throws an arm over Anxin’s shoulder and starts tugging him along aimlessly. They’re heading the wrong direction for the dorms. “I’ve got all I need right here. You’ve got something to say to me, don’t you?”
Anxin starts walking with hesitant feet. “Do you know you sound crazy right now? It’s important to me that you know that.” He glances around them and realises they’ve strayed far away from the rest of the group. “Is this because of what I said about Sangwon?”
“I’m not in love with Sangwon,” he refutes. Belatedly, it occurs to him that Anxin did not claim anything of the sort, and he plows onward before Anxin can notice. “No, it’s not about that. It’s about something you took from hyung.”
An eyebrow raises up toward Anxin’s hairline. If Anxin’s mom had said Anxin was born with that look on his face, Leo would not be surprised. In fact, he thinks the world would make more sense that way. “Something I took,” he parrots. “Can you be more specific?”
Here’s the thing about Anxin—he has sticky fingers. In every sense of the phrase. He’s touchy-feely; he craves contact like a drug, even if he has to resort to teasing prods and jibes to receive it. And he takes things. A sip of someone’s drink, a bite of their meal, a snack that had been carefully hidden away…And, occasionally, personal belongings. He’s been known to swipe baseball caps or rings and the like, patiently waiting to be discovered so he can get his kicks and return whatever it is he stole with a charming smile. This, though…
“This has been going on long enough, Anxin. I need the shirts back.” He pulls Anxin further into his side and pats him gently on the chest, placating. “I’m not mad. I just want them back, okay?”
Anxin stumbles to a stop in the middle of the path. A cyclist dodges them and spits a curse that floats back past them in a breath of wind. “Shirts. Your sleep shirts?”
“My sleep shirts, yes.”
“I don’t have them.”
Leo sighs and turns his face heavenward. His tired eyes slip shut and he lets the breeze wash away his suffering. “I know it’s you, Anxin. There’s no one left. Just admit it.”
“No, I don’t have them, hyung. For real.” When Leo peeks open one eye to peer at him, the other eyebrow has joined the first high on Anxin’s forehead. The lines they form on his skin read Trust me, hyung. This is my honest face. “They’re at your dorm.”
“They’re—when did you—how?” Leo splutters. The birds caw again, and this time he knows they’re mocking him.
“Just go, hyung. Trust me.”
Suspect #0
The dorm was ransacked the minute Leo returned that day. He searched his drawers, his closet, even lifted his mattress in case Anxin had rammed them between it and the frame like a pea. He did love to make comments about him being Sleeping Beauty, oblivious and uncaring that that’s a different fairytale altogether.
The mattress was heavy. It would have really helped to have Sangwon there, but he’d mumbled some non-excuse and ducked back out of the dorm before Leo could even get a word in. He wonders absently if Sangwon is still upset by what Anxin said, and the thought makes something deep inside him pang with hurt.
He sits among the wreckage. His clothes are splayed all over the floor, drawers hanging open and disemboweled.
Sangwon hasn’t come back yet. It hangs heavily in his mind as he slowly starts to tidy up the mess he’s made of it all.
When everything has been rammed back inside, only a few sleeves caught between the drawer’s teeth, he burrows himself under the covers and waits.
It’s dark when Sangwon peeks around the door, tiptoeing his way into the room. Leo watches from the shadows as he balances precariously on one foot to tug off a shoe. He fumbles it and startles when it falls between their beds with a crash, head whipping round to stare cautiously at Leo.
“Sangwon,” Leo says, voice croaky from disuse, “Come to bed with me.” Dread pools sticky in his throat at Sangwon’s silence. When he tacks on a quiet “Please?” it comes out a little wet.
“Okay, hyung,” he whispers. “Okay.”
Leo keeps watching as Sangwon gathers his things and dips into the bathroom. He comes back wearing a hoodie, but Leo can’t find it in himself to care when Sangwon only sighs and slips into the open space Leo has left for him. They lay side by side, touching only where the lack of space necessitates, and drift off into a tense, dreamless sleep.
Only hours later, Leo finds himself blinking awake again. The moonlight still clings to the curtains, half of the room swallowed in darkness.
Sangwon isn’t beside him.
The hoodie hangs abandoned over his desk chair.
He only has a few moments to panic before the bathroom door is swinging quietly open and Sangwon appears, half-swallowed by the light. He yawns and stretches, seemingly oblivious to having woken Leo up. The movement exposes a sliver of skin around his tiny waist.
“That’s—you’re wearing—“
Sangwon stops abruptly, one knee hovering above the bed in aborted movement. Hanging loose around his collarbones is one of Leo’s missing shirts.
Leo gapes. Sangwon takes a deep, grounding breath, and yawns again at the taste of it. “Shh, hyung,” he says, clambering back into bed and curling himself up small to fit against Leo’s chest. “Not now. Just sleep.” His voice is muffled against Leo’s shirt. “I’m cold.”
Leo wraps around him and gives in.
He dreams of Sangwon’s arms.
When he next wakes, his head rises and falls with the tide of Sangwon’s breaths. The fabric of Leo’s t-shirt is soft and warm under his own cheek, draping finely over the firm muscles of Sangwon’s chest.
The sun awakens before Sangwon does. It peers with fiery eyes over the buildings across the street, lighting the highlights in Sangwon’s hair into thin golden threads. He’s glowing, even though his eyes are puffy with sleep and his lips are pursed unflatteringly. Leo nuzzles into Sangwon’s chest almost unconsciously and Sangwon’s face relaxes back into the pillows. Leo lets his eyes slip shut again and breathes in the scent of them.
Sangwon is gone again when he yawns himself awake for real this time. That’s how it seems, at least, until the flutter of a page reaches his ears. “Good morning, hyung.” Sangwon speaks quietly, like he’s trying to hide his voice below dawn.
But the sun is up, now.
“Sangwon-ah.” Leo sits up and shakes the sleep from his body, wriggling each finger and toe to wring out the tiredness. “Wait for me, yeah?”
He can feel his own gaze boring into him from the mirror as he brushes his teeth. He stares, and stares back, stuck in a loop where he can’t let himself spare a glance at what he truly wants. Who he truly wants. He’d thought he only cared about the truth, but now…
Sangwon waits for him. The polaroid bookmark sits beside him at the desk. Leo tries to meet his own eyes, but his stare toward Sangwon is immortalised in shiny ink.
“You’re still wearing the shirt.”
Sangwon looks down at himself, resigned. “Yeah.”
“Do you have the others, too?”
“Yeah.”
It doesn’t bother him as much as it should. As much as it would, had it been anyone else. “Why?” he asks: why the secrets; why the lies; why even take the shirts in the first place? There are too many questions to fit in this small space carved between them, so he settles for just one. “Why? I just—I don’t understand.”
Sangwon’s sigh comes from someplace deeper than his lungs. “We’re not together, hyung.”
Leo chews the inside of his lip. The nip is sharp and quick, like an elbow jabbing into his side. “Is it still bothering you? What Anxin said?”
“No, hyung—” Sangwon shivers, the aircon set much too high for the threadbare t-shirt he clutches between his fists. He pulls it out from his chest a little as he speaks, making him look larger than he really is. “We’re not dating. We’re not.”
His hands are trembling, from the cold or something more complicated. Leo reaches out and takes them between his own.
Sangwon laughs breathily, and it comes out a little wet, a little hoarse. “We’re not. But then you do this—you hold my hands, and hold me to sleep, and—and you kiss my forehead, but…we’re not.”
The tension in his hands pulls piano string tendons. Leo smooths them out with a thumb, tracing the lines like reading sheet music. “Is that—” He clears his throat. Tries again. “Is that what’s bothering you? That we’re…not?”
Sangwon tries to pull his hands back, but Leo just holds him tighter. Their knees slot together like keys, Sangwon at the desk and Leo at the foot of his bed, and Leo brings their clasped hands to their laps. Sangwon’s face is scrunched with the effort of containing himself, but a tear escapes and hits Leo’s wrist regardless. It hits him like a bass drum.
“Do you think that’s not what I want?”
Those big, watery eyes flit up to look at him carefully. The crease between his eyebrows is unsure, unbelieving. “What?” he asks, more air than sound.
“How could you—of course that’s what I want. I can’t imagine ever not wanting that. I think—any version of me and any version of you…that’s just how it is. How we are. Does that make sense?”
He knows it doesn’t, but the ridiculousness of it nudges the corners of Sangwon’s lips up into a smile anyway. “No,” Sangwon agrees. “No, hyung. You must really be losing your mind.” His laugh is quiet and jolted, squeezing out a few more tears with each jump. He hiccups.
“Nah,” Leo murmurs, unthreading one hand from between Sangwon’s to wipe gently at the tear tracks on his face with the pad of his thumb. “I lost it a long time ago. You stole it, actually.”
Sangwon pokes at his stomach, but it loses its force in the tangle of their fingers. “Aren’t you supposed to say I stole your heart?”
“You stole all of it. My heart, my mind—my pyjamas, apparently.” He’s teasing, but Sangwon looks down at their laps again, trying to pull back his hands to tug self-consciously at the shirt.
“I’m sorry, hyung. Really. I’ll give them all back.”
His collarbones are peeking out from under the stretched hem, flushed with the heat of their bodies and the words they’d both been burying for far too long. He’s pretty, and he’s Leo’s. What more could he want?
“I don’t care about a few shirts, Sangwon-ah.” Sangwon splutters indignantly, but he continues on, unwilling to let go of this now that he’s so, so close to actually having it. “They look good on you. This looks good on you.”
His hand comes to rest at the crook of Sangwon’s shoulder, just holding. The muscles move under his touch, inching a little closer. His hand curls around the back of his neck and scratches soothingly in the short hairs there. He watches as Sangwon’s eyes droop.
“Are you…are you sure, Sangwon-ah?”
He blinks those big kitten eyes at him. Once, twice. “You really are stupid, hyung,” he says, and he tastes of toothpaste. Which Leo knows because he’s kissing him.
Sangwon is kissing him.
The shock ripples through him fast and hard, leaving him shivering into Sangwon’s hold. They move slowly, then quickly, their rhythm ebbing and finding each other seamlessly every time. The warmth swells when Sangwon climbs into his lap, pausing to laugh breathlessly into Leo’s mouth as he knees him in the kidney, and settles around him like a blanket.
They kiss for a long, long time.
Eventually, the sun rises high enough to demand their attention, making them squint in the glare from the half-open blinds. They retreat to the island of Leo’s bed, lying together in a mirror of their earlier selves. Leo strokes a hand through Sangwon’s hair, smoothing out the ruffles that still cling to him from the night. He feels a hot puff of air through his shirt as Sangwon sighs, content. Distantly, he remembers that he needs to do the laundry today.
“Maybe…you could give some of them back? Just a few?”
He deserves the harsh poke he gets to the ribs.
Epilogue
The summer heat beats down mercilessly, crisping the grass to crunching under their feet as they throw a ball around. It’s nearing July, the heat maturing into something stronger and more humid. Geonwoo wipes a drop of sweat off his brow and throws the ball toward Junseo, who’s too busy staring distractedly at Jiahao’s bare arms.
Leo and Sangwon have taken refuge in the shadow of a tall tree, the air just cool enough to let them curl against one another in their vests and shorts. Anxin catches a glance and sticks his tongue out at them. His hand conceals incomprehensible words aimed at Sanghyeon, who points a finger at his throat and pretends to gag.
It’s perfect, even if Leo’s eyes are starting to droop under the warm cushion of it all.
“I’m still curious about something,” he murmurs to Sangwon. He bumps his hard skull against Leo’s chest as he jerks himself awake, slapping half-heartedly to avoid getting crushed as Leo tries to double over in pain.
“It’s your fault for being so comfortable, hyung. I was always going to fall asleep.” There’s a weight to his words where there wouldn’t have been before. I was always going to fall. It warms him from the inside out, trapping a giddy feeling under his skin.
“How did you end up with the shirts? The ones I lost when we weren’t home?”
Sangwon hums, turning in Leo’s lap to face the bright blue shining through the gaps in the leaves. “Your parents’,” he starts, “you left your shirt on the bed while we had breakfast. That one was easy.” He hooks his right index finger around his left, counting off. “The library. You were hungover as shit, Junseo-hyung had to help me drag you upright because you were so floppy.” He giggles to himself at the memory, pulling out his phone for a moment to smile at the image of Leo curled up on one of the good couches. “I brought you a spare shirt; you hate taking your pyjamas on the bus. Was pretty easy to convince you to change, and you were too out of it to ask where the old shirt went.”
Leo tangles a hand through his hair and tugs a little, wiggling Sangwon’s head around in gentle reprimand. Sangwon continues, unperturbed. “I wasn’t going to take the one you wore to practice—it felt too obvious. But you kept pushing the sleeves up over your shoulders, and fanning yourself with it, and…” he trails off, staring over at the group. Xinlong lets out a squawk, Geonwoo looking equally sheepish and ecstatic as he picks up the ball that had just bounced off his boyfriend’s head.
Leo whistles, low. It gathers the attention of half the group, puppies that they are, but he only has eyes for Sangwon. “You’re kinda down bad,” he muses, brushing the hair off of Sangwon’s sweaty forehead.
Sangwon glares up at him. “Sure, hyung. Whatever helps you sleep at night.” He turns back over onto his side, not bothering to hide his grin as he curls further into Leo’s lap. Leo smiles at the sun, closes his eyes, and sleeps.