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Chicago is both just as cold as Sungho expected and somehow much worse. So cold they keep laughing about it—when they landed at O'Hare at 10PM and stood shivering outside, huddled together waiting for the Uber that Sanghyuk insisted on because if there was ever a time to flex his money it was when the wind chill hit negative thirty. When Jaehyun drags them to Millennium Park the next day, patches of snow clinging to the Bean, icicles like daggers hanging from every building and sign, the sidewalks covered in a slick layer of snow. When they give up on trying to catch up while power walking between destinations because they're tucked into their scarves and can't see each other around the hoods of their coats, and even that is funny.
They take pictures of Jaehyun in front of the building where he works, a shiny skyscraper rising from the steam rolling off the river. He's just a pair of eyes between his scarf and beanie but Sungho can still tell he's smiling in that sheepish way, flattered and embarrassed by their presence here, in his new city, seeing this new version of him. He points about halfway up the building and tells them, "That's my floor."
"Do you ever get scared of how high up you are?" Sanghyuk asks.
"Every day," Jaehyun says.
Lunch is at a small Korean place close to Jaehyun's apartment, tucked in between a Colombian restaurant and a Middle Eastern grocery store. Jaehyun says it's the most authentic food he's had in Chicago. Sungho's soup is homey in a good way and most importantly it's hot, warming him from the inside out.
Jaehyun hands his card to the owner before Sungho can even pull out his wallet.
"You flew 14 hours to freeze your asses off," Jaehyun says when they both protest. "It's on me."
That night they sit around Jaehyun's coffee table drinking soju and fighting jet lag. Jaehyun's studio apartment is old, but also in a good way, with dark wood floors that creak under Sungho's feet and large windows that look out onto a street lined with bare trees.
Sanghyuk still isn't a drinker but he's in his element when they get like this, the way Jaehyun and Sungho laugh at every little thing, egging him on, his impressions of celebrities and cartoons and people they knew back in college getting sloppier and all the more funny for it. Jaehyun falls into Sungho's lap, wheezing, picking up the casual invasion of personal space right where he left off.
Jaehyun doesn't make it to his own bed that night; he falls asleep on the futon between Sungho and Sanghyuk, head lolling onto Sungho's pillow. Just before he drifts off, Sungho looks at Jaehyun's face in the dark and thinks: maybe nothing has changed.
Over the next few days they visit the Art Institute and the Field Museum (Donghyun enjoys the pictures of the taxidermied animals, says he's jealous) and walk alongside the lake, covered in sheets of ice, the expanse of it more vast than Sungho anticipated. Jaehyun feeds them deep dish pizza and Chicago style hot dogs, guides them on a tour of four different donut shops, and by the end Sungho is stricken by the carb load and Sanghyuk is delighted. They go to a karaoke place that doesn't quite give Seoul, but there's ramen and tteokbokki and all of the ballads they could want.
Sungho almost feels like he's back in college again, like the MT their sophomore year when their club rented that pension in Gapyeong and everyone stayed up all night taking shots, playing the same drinking games and belting out the same ballads, Sanghyuk doing the same impressions until Jaehyun was literally crying with laughter. Their club president insisted on dragging everyone on a hike the next day despite the hangovers (or maybe because of them—what was an MT without a little communal suffering?) and Sungho remembers thirty minutes in, feeling like he was going to puke, and before he could even say anything, Sanghyuk handed him a bottle of Pocari Sweat.
The inside jokes from that trip lasted years, becoming a part of their own private language. There's something about the friends you make at eighteen, nineteen, when your personality is still malleable and you're figuring yourself out. Sungho, Jaehyun, and Sanghyuk had done that together, and the version of Sungho that is here now only came to be because of the way he was shaped around them.
And it feels just like college again in the way Sungho catches Sanghyuk leaning into Jaehyun's space to look at his phone, their heads tilting together when they laugh, the duet at the karaoke place where Jaehyun strokes Sanghyuk's cheek with the back of his hand, tender in a way that doesn't match the absurdity of his singing. Sungho never felt left out, exactly. Just that he was always aware that the two of them continued to exist when he left the room, that he would never know what shape they took in his absence.
On the third night, Sungho wakes up in the middle of the night. Or maybe he'd never really fallen asleep, stuck on the threshold of sleep and wakefulness, the jet lag belatedly catching up to him.
A window scrapes open. He only then processes that Sanghyuk is no longer lying beside him.
Sungho hears the click of a lighter and he smells cigarette smoke over the floral detergent scent on his blanket. Sanghyuk quit six months ago; Sungho was the one who had to listen to him complain about it.
There is a rustle of sheets. The floorboards creak and for some reason, Sungho finds himself holding his breath.
"I thought you stopped," Jaehyun says drowsily.
"I did," Sanghyuk says. "Mostly. Is this okay?"
"It's fine." There is a pause. Then Jaehyun's voice, soft in a way Sungho hasn't heard since they got here, "How are you, really?"
It's not how are you, given that I've dragged you around this freezing city and it's not so what have you been up to. It's more like: tell me something you're not telling anyone else.
Sungho is lying on his side, facing the doorway. He can't see them but he knows what they look like—Jaehyun with his bedhead, Sanghyuk with the cigarette poised between painted fingernails, their bodies naturally curving toward each other. He imagines their socked feet touching.
Sanghyuk doesn't answer for a while. Sungho listens to the ambient sounds of the apartment, the refrigerator hum and the groan of the hardwood when someone shifts and distant airplanes overhead. Sanghyuk finally says, "I don't know. It's kind of hard, seeing you like this."
Sungho should roll over, cough, do something to alert them to his presence. He doesn't.
"But it's good, though. It's really good to see you."
"I'm happy you're here," Jaehyun says.
"Do you ever think about coming back to Seoul?"
"Sometimes, maybe. Do you want me to?"
"I guess," Sanghyuk says. He stops, probably to take another drag from his cigarette. And then, "I don't really know."
Something hangs in the air, a weight that Sungho can feel pressing down on them even from over here. He wonders what things can't be acknowledged even in the dark.
"Yeah." Jaehyun's voice is quiet. "Me neither."
The window rattles shut, letting in a final rush of frigid air. No one moves for a moment. Jaehyun clears his throat. "You should come back in the summer, though. Lollapalooza's in August."
"Yeah?" Sanghyuk says.
Sungho's chest tightens, bracing for something he doesn't want to name. He holds himself still.
"Do you think Sungho would be able to get the time off though?" Jaehyun asks.
"If he asks early enough, probably."
"Someone told me there's rumors that Jennie's going to be headlining."
The floor creaks and there's the sound of movement—Sanghyuk probably automatically launching into some choreography. Jaehyun laughs softly. "Go to bed before you wake him up with your dancing."
"You know he's a heavy sleeper," Sanghyuk says, but his voice is quieter, closer now.
Sungho hears Jaehyun shuffling back to his bed. The futon dips as Sanghyuk settles in next to him, lifting the blanket carefully so as not to disturb Sungho, cold air from the window still clinging faintly to his clothes.
"Good night," Jaehyun whispers from the darkness.
"Night."
The apartment goes quiet again. Sungho feels some of the tension seeping out of him, though the knot in his chest is still there. He doesn't know what he heard, or what he didn't hear, what didn't need to be said to be understood. Where he fits into any of it.
But he thinks about private languages, and how it took all three of them to create theirs. About Jaehyun saying his name like it belonged in the conversation, like their future was always going to include him. And maybe it's not that nothing has changed—it's that it's been changing all along. He's always been shaped by the things that occurred in his absence.
Next to him, Sanghyuk's breathing is slowing into sleep. Sungho rolls onto his back, lets his spine settle. The wind gusts against the window, Chicago's coldest hour before it begins its incremental climb from brutal to only slightly less brutal. It doesn't seem so funny now.
Sungho closes his eyes. In two days he'll go back to the predictable punishment of a Seoul winter. And in six months, he'll come back here, when it's warm. The three of them.