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These days Sin-jae had stopped getting on edge whenever he received a text from Jo Yeong (from Eun-sup’s borrowed number) providing intel or summoning him to Yeong’s hotel room. The first few times he’d assumed it was a sign of an emergency, assumed that a man as taciturn and focused as Yeong wouldn’t bother to contact Sin-jae or anyone from this world otherwise. Once or twice it had indeed been something important (once it had even been the appearance of someone Yeong claimed was the Kingdom’s prime minister, and Yeong had gotten shot!) but more often it was just a mundane update, some relatively simple questions, or a request for backup in a dubious situation. Yeong, as it turned out, was not nearly as hesitant to ask for help as Sin-jae would have thought.
Today he had asked Sin-jae to drop by his hotel after work, and had the table in the parlor set up for his visit: A file folder with papers explaining his current lead sat on it right next to a mug of coffee fixed how Sin-jae liked it. Sin-jae sipped the coffee and examined the papers.
“So far,” Yeong said as he skimmed, “my search has been mostly confined to Seoul and the surrounding area. A recent interrogation has me looking further south—I was told there is a safe house located in Haenam, a couple miles out of Haenam-eup. I doubt Lee Lim would be staying that far from Seoul, but he probably has some men there. It’s worth investigating.”
“A recent interrogation,” Sin-jae scoffed. The papers gave details (typed up by Yeong, mostly) on how he had found the source, and it was all very efficient and thorough. What still made Sin-jae uncomfortable was that Yeong really had no authority to be chasing criminals down and interrogating them; not to mention Sin-jae wasn’t sure what Yeong did with the people he caught after interrogating them, and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Yeong hadn’t come to Sin-jae asking for help hiding a body yet, at least, so there was that, but then again, Sin-jae suspected that if Yeong had to hide a body, he wouldn’t find it all that difficult.
That was probably just his paranoia speaking, of course. Yeong had told Sin-jae he’d let some of the people he’d caught go, and he’d called Sin-jae in other times to bring them to a police station if there was evidence of them committing crimes. Still, he was a loose cannon, only answering to a king who was currently out of contact with this entire dimension. And every time Sin-jae wanted to criticize him for his presumptuous actions in a world where he held no authority, he could hear the retort already in his head—“Aren’t you part of the Kingdom of Corea too?”—and it made him bite his tongue and hold back, and it was irritating.
Yeong was still waiting for his opinion on the lead, apparently. “Looks promising,” Sin-jae said. “You probably shouldn’t go out to Haenam and bust a safe house by yourself, though.”
Yeong nodded and raised his eyebrows. “Of course not.”
“Of course… Oh. So that’s why you called me here.” Sin-jae frowned. “You want to drag me out to Haenam.”
“We should go tomorrow,” Yeong said. “You aren’t scheduled to work tomorrow, are you? You might have to take the day after off as a sick day as well, depending on how it goes. But we should act quickly, before Lee Lim realizes the location’s been compromised.”
Sin-jae sighed. “Do you know how few days off I get?”
“More than you use, according to Lietenant Jeong,” Yeong retorted. “Are you coming or not?”
So demanding. Again, as if he had the authority of a commanding officer instead of an unwelcome intruder on Sin-jae’s already disordered life. But it wasn’t like Sin-jae was going to send him off to investigate a hidden safe house by himself; if he got killed his king would probably come and chop off the heads of everyone involved, including Sin-jae, besides which, letting a man with poor Eun-sup’s face get murdered would be a little too pitiful. And if Sin-jae went, he could cancel his plans with Tae-eul. Usually he would have hated that, but lately, since finding out Sin-jae was from another world, Tae-eul had been acting strangely self-conscious around him, and he hated that more.
“I’ll come,” he grouched. “You really think it will take more than a day? I should pack an overnight bag or something? You better pay if we have to stay at a hotel…”
Yeong dismissed his concerns with an impatient look. “Go get some sleep and prepare for the trip. Meet me here tomorrow at nine. We’ll take my car.”
Oh, that car. The unsubtle shiny black I’m-a-security-guard-slash-spy car that he’d bought a couple weeks ago, claiming he needed it for mobility. The number one reason Eun-sup’s siblings looked askance at him. That car. Great.
It was a nice car. The kind of car you saw in sexy car commercials. Sometimes when Yeong leaned against it, Sin-jae felt like he was actually in one of those commercials, and he felt like Yeong was well aware of the effect. That, for an entire day.
Sin-jae finished his coffee. (Which Yeong had given him, and now he was demanding Sin-jae go sleep. He was lucky Sin-jae was probably sleep deprived enough to manage it anyway.) “Sure. See you then.”
The ride was pretty much as torturous as Sin-jae had expected. Not least because it did indeed begin with Yeong leaning against his car and raising his eyebrows in a mysterious James Bond fashion as he beckoned Sin-jae to get in. There was also the question of music. Sin-jae wanted to listen to relatively mellow music, but after two songs, Yeong decisively turned the radio off.
“Hey. You could at least choose music you like, instead of just turning it off altogether.”
“You wouldn’t like the music I like.”
“What, are you really just into classical or something?” It was either that, Sin-jae felt, or heavy metal. One or the other. Yeong gave off vibes too extreme for anything else.
Yeong just shot him a disdainful glance. Sin-jae couldn’t tell if that was a yes or a no.
With no music, the only thing left was to either play car games—and Sin-jae felt this would not go over well with Yeong; one way he was different from Eun-sup was that he seemed to hate fun—or make conversation. So Sin-jae found himself rambling at Yeong about recent cases. He was a little surprised when Yeong reciprocated with a couple stories of his own work. Handling paparazzi intruding on the castle or getting a hold of classified information. Supporting his king when they had to handle a stand-off against a Japanese battleship.
“…a what?”
Yeong explained further.
They had started out the trip at nine-thirty, later than planned, and as a result Yeong insisted on stopping for lunch before they reached their destination. He picked out a fast food place, dragged Sin-jae in, and ordered a large plate of fried chicken for them to share. When the chicken arrived, he dug in with gusto.
“Hm,” Sin-jae said. “Now if you would just smile a bit, I feel like you really could be Eun-sup right now.”
Yeong looked up and offered Sin-jae a very sarcastic smile. Despite the sarcasm, it did make him look weirdly like Eun-sup. (And yet the slight edge to it gave Sin-jae a different kind of feeling entirely…) “Are you shocked to discover I can eat?”
“You eat with a lot of energy. And the chicken. You ordered it so quickly, as if you’d been thinking about chicken the entire ride here.”
“It’s a special. It’s on sale,” Yeong said. Again, not things Sin-jae pictured Captain Jo thinking about.
“I feel like that’s not why you got it, though. Eun-sup has a thing about chicken. Whenever we go out for dinner, the two of us or us and Tae-eul, he always makes us get it. Then I usually have to pay for it, so I guess that’s one difference.”
“You’ll pay for Jo Eun-sup’s chicken but not for mine?” Yeong leaned back in his seat, smile turning to scowl. “Why not pay for it? It’s on sale.”
Sin-jae stared at him. “…are you actually that cheap?”
“Cheap?” Yeong’s scowl intensified. “I’ve been making and buying you coffee for months now.”
“Wait, that was supposed to be some sort of quid pro quo? I thought it was…” He’d really just thought it was Yeong being rich and, well, sort of friendly. But fuck if he was going to admit they were friends. “I thought you were trying to bribe me into coming back to the Kingdom of Corea. Like, look how good we can treat you in the Royal Guard, come join up kind of shit.”
He had actually kind of thought that at first, when he noticed that Yeong was pretty nice to him compared to how he acted around Eun-sup or Tae-eul. But Yeong had never told Sin-jae he should return to Yeong’s world even the couple times he’d said something about Sin-jae belonging there, and after the first couple awkward conversations, he’d mostly stopped bringing up Sin-jae’s past altogether. So Sin-jae probably deserved the unimpressed glare he received for this remark. He didn’t buckle under it though, only took another piece of chicken and savagely bit into it.
In the end they agreed to split the cost. Sin-jae paid with his card, and Yeong gave him cash in exchange. He handed it over very begrudgingly, though, clearly not satisfied with this entirely equitable solution.
What was the guy’s deal?
They didn’t make another stop before arriving at the alleged safe-house.
Sin-jae had imagined it would be something like an abandoned warehouse, but it was simply an old house on the outskirts of town, distant enough that there wouldn’t be many people around to notice who might come and go. The kind of bland house that could be someone’s home but just as easily be a shop, though not a very nice one. Not run-down enough to look haunted, not kept-up enough to look lived in. There were no cars parked outside it and the lights were off. Yeong parked across the street. “They must have known I was coming.”
Sin-jae did ask this time: “What did you do with the guy when you were done questioning him?”
“Let him loose. There was evidence of crimes against the Kingdom of Corea, but not for crimes against the Republic. His majesty isn’t here and the road between worlds is closed, so there’s only so much I can do.” Yeong was getting out of the car as he spoke, and Sin-jae followed his lead. “There might be evidence left behind here. We should still look.”
“Or it might be a trap.”
“Or it might be a trap,” Yeong agreed. “That’s why I brought back-up.”
They went in slow and careful. The door had been left unlocked, which spared them having to break in but seemed a little suspicious. The rooms were empty except for some rudimentary furniture that had been left behind as if it were too inconvenient to move—a large empty bookcase, a table in what might once have been a dining room or a parlor.
They checked the basement after the first floor, and found in it nothing incriminating, though there was one box full of newspapers, some old and some new. Yeong said, “We should go through those later. See if there are any from home.”
They’d talked before about how one might explain the existence of multiple worlds to someone who didn’t know, if one were like Lee Lim, trying to talk people into joining one’s criminal organization in exchange for a better life, and if one’s target was not, like Sin-jae, already aware that multiple worlds existed despite having repressed said knowledge, or, like Eun-sup or Tae-eul, given a couple months to adjust to the idea and then presented with a doppelganger like Yeong. One solid idea was to use media from the other world to at least introduce the concept. Newspapers from another world could be faked, of course, but they at least would get the ball rolling.
Then they went up to check the second floor of the house. They were looking through a room that looked like it could have been used as a bedroom but had no furniture except a set of drawers, and Sin-jae was looking through the drawers while Yeong was checking the closet, when the explosion happened.
Probably, it was triggered by Yeong opening the closet, disturbing some sort of mechanism. That was where the explosion came from, at any rate. It sent Yeong flying back, crashing to the floor, and made Sin-jae fall as well, though less violently. When he reoriented himself, the room smelled like smoke, the closet door was damaged, and Yeong was still lying on the floor. His head was bleeding. He wasn’t moving.
Sin-jae checked his pulse; he was alive at least. He touched his shoulder, said his name. Yeong didn’t react. Fuck. Unwilling to risk moving him, Sin-jae took out his phone and called an ambulance.
“You’re going to the fucking hospital this time,” he said to Yeong. “I don’t care if it threatens your identity or if you were wearing a bullet-proof vest or what. You’re going to the hospital.”
The phone shook in his hand as he tucked it away in his pocket. Yeong didn’t argue or react at all. Sin-jae had wondered sometimes whether asleep he would look as stupid (if perhaps a little cute) as Eun-sup did when he napped at the station. The sight of him unconscious was instead as terrifying as the sight of him awake, if in a very different way.
Sin-jae sat back against the wall and waited for either an ambulance or an ambush, since this clearly had been a trap after all. It was an ambulance that came in the end, but he still didn’t relax, not all the way to the hospital.
Yeong was, in Yeong’s own words, mostly fine.
In the doctor’s words, he had a bad concussion and had also fractured a rib and would have to stay at the hospital overnight under observation and check out the next day if all went well. Yeong protested that he could not only leave but could probably drive back to Seoul with no difficulties.
In Sin-jae’s words, Yeong was a fucking idiot and was going to damn well stay in the hospital overnight. “You could have died,” he pointed out. “The explosion was probably meant to kill you—either Lee Lim has a shit bomb technician or you’re a cockroach, but either way, it was… you could have died. What’s wrong with you?”
It wasn’t that he was blaming Yeong for nearly dying. What he didn’t like was how calm and unaffected Yeong was acting now. Eerie, honestly.
Sin-jae was probably more upset than he was!
Yeong shrugged. “I think it wasn’t meant to kill me. They would have made a stronger bomb. This… maybe it was meant as a warning to back off. Or something else. I’ll have to think it over. Either way, I’m fine.”
“Whether it was meant to kill you or not,” Sin-jae said, “you still could have died. You hit your head badly. You broke a bone. Stay down and rest for a while.”
He would have gone on, but he noticed a small smile on Yeong’s lips. “What, do you think this is funny?”
“You remind me of his majesty. Though he’d tell me to stay and rest on king’s orders if it were him. You don’t really have the authority.”
Sin-jae crossed his arms. “Fuck you.” What was similar about him and Lee Gon? (Interest in Jeong Tae-eul aside.) This was the normal reaction to people hitting heads and breaking ribs because of explosions.
“Usually, if I get hurt or end up in the hospital, he overreacts just the same.”
“What, do you get hurt a lot? Working for him?”
Yeong frowned, pulled out of semi-happy reminiscing. “No. Only once in a while. I’m not that bad at my job.”
Sin-jae hadn’t been implying he was. It just irritated him, thinking of Yeong being in the hospital often enough to be able to predict people’s reactions, especially since he knew Yeong didn’t consider even getting shot with a vest on a big enough injury to go to the hospital for. What, was this something he’d have to catalogue in his “Differences Between Yeong and Eun-sup” list—“Jo Yeong is the doppelganger with a penchant for getting himself shot, blown up and otherwise injured”? He couldn’t imagine Eun-sup being so… irresponsible was almost the word for it, though not quite.
“Detective Kang,” Yeong said, changing the subject, “you should still go back and take a look at those newspapers. We had to leave them behind.”
“I’m not going to abandon you in the hospital to go fetch some newspapers,” Sin-jae said.
Yeong said, “Why not?”
Why not indeed? The hospital was safe. Sin-jae wasn’t really doing any good being here.
It was just another thought he didn’t like. Yeong was already alone in this world, being the only one here from the Kingdom of Corea except for Sin-jae—well, the only one not allied with Lee Lim, at least. Getting left alone in a hospital while injured, a hospital where everyone would call him Jo Eun-sup because that was the name on his ID, where he wouldn’t be able to talk about the investigation that led to the explosion in the first place, where even concussed and tired he would have to continue to lie…
Probably wasn’t a big deal to him. Sin-jae wouldn’t be the best company anyways.
If he’d been back in the Kingdom of Corea, he would have been in some sort of royal hospital, no doubt. Probably everyone would know him there, or at least know of him, given that he was apparently some sort of celebrity. Probably Lee Gon would insist on sitting by his bed to keep an eye on him, and Yeong wouldn’t dare to send him off since he was the king. Probably even the hospital staff wouldn’t dare to kick the king out—he would even be allowed to stay overnight, keep Yeong company while he slept in a strange bed.
Well, actually, probably not. Realistically a king would have better things to do, and Lee Gon seemed to be strongly of the opinion that Yeong could take care of himself judging by how easily he fucked off to other dimensions, leaving Yeong behind. Realistically in the Kingdom of Corea a hospital would still be a hospital and a concussion would still be a concussion and it would suck either way.
Sin-jae just didn’t like leaving Yeong right now. That was it. Short and simple.
But it was getting late and the hospital staff would kick him out eventually anyways. He might as well go get those newspapers before Lee Lim’s men returned to grab any remaining evidence or maybe set up new traps.
“Fine, I’ll go,” he said. “You stay in bed and rest. Be good.”
Yeong huffed and looked away. He didn’t even remind Sin-jae to be careful or say goodbye as he left. Sin-jae would have been annoyed at that except that he suspected this was less Yeong being taciturn and more him being embarrassed.
“It’s kind of cute,” he muttered as he waited for a cab to take him back to the safe-house (the car had been left behind when they had boarded the ambulance). “That fucker.”
Yeong was actually kind of cute. Sometimes.
The newspapers were just newspapers. Sin-jae brought them back to a hotel room with him—which he ended up having to pay for, Yeong being at the hospital, so so much for Yeong’s promise to pay for any trip expenses—and went through them one by one. They covered a long period of time. Some of them were from as far back as the 1940s. But they were all just newspapers, all from the Republic of Korea, none from the Kingdom. Sin-jae still thought they might be useful evidence, especially after he noticed that some of them had articles cut out.
The next step was to find out what those articles were—they’d have to find other copies of the same newspaper from the same date for that, and with some of them being pretty old it might be tricky, but perhaps they could contact the publications themselves—and then decide whether the newspapers were being used for the purpose that he and Yeong had theorized for them. If they were, those articles might be telling; if they weren’t just about important current events but were about more obscure people, perhaps individuals who had disappeared or died or notably changed recently, that would certainly be interesting, wouldn’t it? Maybe a lead worth following.
Of course, the fact that these newspapers had been left behind in an abandoned safe-house made it far more likely that there wasn’t anything here they could really use. But even a mastermind could make mistakes. For example, Sin-jae still wasn’t convinced Lee Lim hadn’t been trying to murder Yeong, and if he had been trying, he’d failed. That was a mistake right there.
As Sin-jae continued to ponder the various turns of this case, getting progressively more off-track, his phone buzzed. Quickly he took it out. He expected it to be Yeong, checking in on how his newspaper-fetching mission had gone, but the phone said it was Tae-eul. A little let-down (but that was probably just a release of tension, as talking to Yeong might have been stressful and involved important business) he picked up the call.
“Hello?”
“Kang Sin-jae! How was your day off? I hope Jo Yeong hasn’t been bossing you around too much, driving you too hard—even if he’s dragged you off on a mission, you’re still on vacation, after all.”
“What makes you think Jo Yeong is capable of bossing me around?” Sin-jae retorted. “It’s been fine. Well, actually no, it hasn’t been fine. The safehouse was a trap and Jo Yeong walked right into it and now he’s in the hospital. Bomb in a closet.”
“Shit! Were you hurt?”
“Me? No, I’m fine.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They checked on me at the hospital too—barely a scrape on me.”
“How is he then?”
“Concussion, broken rib. Says he’s ‘mostly fine’. We’re delayed a while, but we’ll probably be back tomorrow.”
They chatted for a while longer, Sin-jae updating Tae-eul on all that had occurred and Tae-eul sharing the daily station gossip. When they hung up, Sin-jae found himself reluctant to put his phone away. He wanted to call Yeong. He’d thought the call would be from him, and now he wanted to talk to him. Make sure he was doing all right. Hear his voice.
(Fuck, he wanted to hear Jo Eun-sup’s voice before going to sleep—that was something he’d really never expected of himself.)
He dialed Eun-sup’s cell.
Yeong picked up immediately. “Detective Kang, is something wrong?”
“Huh? No. I picked up the newspapers. Might have a lead worth following or might not, hard to say. I was just checking in.”
He could hear the sound of Yeong letting out a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down. Had he actually made Yeong panic for a moment? He supposed, now that he thought about it, that although Yeong had gotten into a habit of calling him over all sorts of small issues, he never tended to call Yeong first. Or maybe Yeong had been worrying, like Sin-jae, that Lee Lim’s men might return to the safehouse.
In that case, he should have just called Sin-jae sooner. Sin-jae smiled as he described his findings and the conclusions he’d drawn. “We can look into it after we return to Seoul. Probably we’ll have to make a lot of phone calls. Well, how about you then? Have you been following the doctor’s orders?”
“I’ve been sitting around doing nothing,” Yeong said. His boredom was palpable even through the phone. “Now they’re telling me to get some sleep.”
“And you can’t?”
“We still haven’t found anything really notable. This whole thing has been a waste of time so far. I feel like we’re missing something—but I guess we just came too late. Or Lee Lim set it all up to begin with, and they were never using the house as a meeting place to begin with. It’s… frustrating. I’m being of no use to my king like this.”
Jo Yeong, confiding his feelings in Sin-jae.
Well, maybe it wasn’t so strange.
“Jo Yeong. Calm down and quit worrying. You have me and Tae-eul—we’ll hunt Lee Lim down eventually. And we’ve made progress, haven’t we? If Lee Lim’s trying to target you now, it’s because you’re a threat to him. So we must be getting closer than we think. But you can’t keep working through the night with a concussion. Go to sleep.”
“You can say that,” Yeong complained, “but I still can’t.”
“What, am I supposed to sing you a lullaby?”
Silence on the other end. Not quite disapproving.
“Do you actually want me to?” Sin-jae asked.
“No, not really. I was just wondering if the lullabies are different here,” Yeong said.
Sin-jae closed his eyes. “I think they are. When I was a kid, there were lots of little things that used to confuse me about the world. I kept on remembering things wrong. I got the lyrics to songs wrong a lot. Sometimes people thought it was creepy, the changes I’d make. Mostly they just thought I was an idiot, all the things I misremembered. I was shit at history too.”
“You weren’t an idiot,” Yeong said. “Probably a lot of the time you were right.”
“Right for the wrong world.” Sin-jae snorted. “Yeah, that did me a lot of good.”
The silence that followed now as uncomfortable. Then, “I’ll sing you a lullaby,” Yeong said. “Or a couple, if you like. You can compare.”
By the time Sin-jae hung up, he almost wanted to cry. The words had been right. All those stupid mistakes he used to make, Yeong had made too. But he’d sung in a certain voice, unwavering. He had a nice voice, like he’d been in a chorus once. Sin-jae had wanted to make him sing fifty songs rather than the four he had offered, but it was late, and after all, he’d been the one telling Yeong to go to sleep.
Sin-jae woke up to someone pounding on the door. When he went to look through the peephole, he was met with the sight of an unimpressed Jo Yeong, still wearing the same clothes from yesterday but with his hair looking weirdly soft without any gel in it. Very soft and touchable, Sin-jae thought, an opinion which only intensified when he opened the door and got a better look at it.
This was not his primary concern at the moment, though. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the hospital?”
“It’s almost noon,” Yeong said. “I checked out and came here—you told me where you were staying last night, remember? And you have all my things… where are they? Did you leave my clothes in the car?”
“Your overnight bag? Yeah.”
Yeong sighed. Instead of running off to fetch the bag, though, he just sat down on the bed. “Maybe I won’t bother changing. We should just get back to Seoul. Oh, are those the newspapers? I’ll have a look at them. You should get dressed; it’s almost noon.”
Although Yeong had said it twice, it was not almost noon. It was in fact a little past ten, and if Sin-jae hadn’t intended to sleep this late, he still thought Yeong could have waited at the hospital to be picked up. Still, he bit back any complaints and began to change. He kept on glancing back over at Yeong, though. He was examining one of the newspapers with a very serious expression, but with his hair loose and looking so soft, he simply lacked his usual severity.
Halfway through dressing, Sin-jae succumbed to temptation. He touched the hair.
It was nice.
He let his hand rest on Yeong’s head. Yeong slowly lowered his newspaper and looked up. Only his eyes moved—he didn’t shift away, as if afraid to dislodge Sin-jae’s hand. “Detective Kang?”
“Your hair is nice. You shouldn’t always slick it back.”
“What, do you like Jo Eun-sup’s hair better?”
Sin-jae felt strangely offended. “Don’t be stupid. Your hair is shorter, and it’s… different.” It was literally the same hair, but it was still different. “I like your hair.” To emphasize this point, he vigorously ran his hand back and forth over Yeong’s head, messing his hair up a good deal.
Yeong’s hand shot up and grabbed his wrist. He did not, however, push it away. Instead, holding Sin-jae’s hand pinned to his head, he said, “You should be more careful with someone who recently had a concussion.”
“Oh.” Yeah, he’d been a little rough. “Sorry.”
Yeong’s eyes narrowed. In a grave voice, he said, “Slow strokes. Gentle pats.” He then released Sin-jae’s hand.
…what the fuck?
Feeling that if he backed down now, he would have somehow lost something, Sin-jae stroked Yeong’s hair a bit more slowly and considerately, trying to return it to its earlier state of order. After a moment, Yeong grabbed his hand again, but this time he pulled it down, dragging it over his cheek and then to his lips. As Sin-jae stared at him, he kissed Sin-jae’s palm. Then, pulling the hand down lower, he left another kiss on Sin-jae’s wrist.
“What,” Sin-jae asked, “are you doing?”
Yeong gave him a highly condescending look. “Clearly I’m trying to bribe you into coming to the Kingdom of Corea and joining the Royal Guard.” He turned Sin-jae’s hand over and kissed his knuckles. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
He did not have another chance to kiss Sin-jae’s hand, because it was moving now, grabbing a hold of his shirt and pulling him to his feet. The other hand maybe got involved too. And then there were lips meeting, and tongues, and Sin-jae was again grabbing at Yeong’s hair but mostly just to keep his head in place. Being gentle was a bit more of a struggle now. Fuck, the guy had a broken rib—just a fractured rib, Yeong assured him—why did he have to be such a tease? He was making it very hard for Sin-jae to be nice.
“I’m a tease?” Yeong said. His lips were against Sin-jae’s neck; his hands were sliding under the waistband of Sin-jae’s pants. “You started petting me without bothering to put a shirt on.”
“You were just sitting there being—fuck—Jo Yeong.”
“Yes,” Yeong said. “Just being Jo Yeong. Is that all it takes, for you?”
That wasn’t what Sin-jae had meant to say at all, but when he thought about it, it wasn’t exactly inaccurate either, no matter how humiliating it was. He didn’t say that, though. He just kissed Yeong and hoped that Yeong would let it drop. Anyways, it wasn’t like Yeong had room to throw stones. He was the one who’d started it, hadn’t he? And he was the one who—who always called Sin-jae when he needed help or just wanted to talk something over, who always had coffee made just how Sin-jae liked it, who had asked Sin-jae out on a road trip and then literally sung him to sleep—well, Sin-jae hadn’t fallen asleep for a while but that wasn’t the point—the point was, “I’m on to you,” Sin-jae said between pants. “Jo Yeong.”
“You’re into me,” Yeong corrected. “But you should be in me.” He pulled Sin-jae’s pants down and right off.
“Fuck,” Sin-jae said. “You’re right.”
He was still totally on to what Yeong had been up to, but that could wait until later.
Sin-jae was the one who drove them back to Seoul. The drive was both better and worse than the ride to Haenam had been. On the one hand, Yeong now looked less like a car commercial inhabitant. On the other hand, he looked like someone who’d been recently wrecked and was feeling very smug about it.
Sin-jae couldn’t stand him. Sin-jae was going to find some excuse to visit his hotel more often. Maybe he could say he was checking up on him because he was injured. Maybe they could work on the whole newspaper thing.
…maybe Yeong wouldn’t mind if he didn’t have an excuse.
“I’ll pay for lunch today,” he said into the smug silence.
Yeong said, "It's a date." His voice was very serious. He was not quite smirking.
Sin-jae sighed. Fine. It was a date. Maybe he felt a little pleased about that. Maybe.