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Mark doesn’t really remember what led him to apply for an English degree, of all things.
He would sort himself into that niche category of nerds with a very specific taste in books, but he never really felt like dedicating his life to it. He was prophesied to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a man of God, yet nothing about that ever spoke to him. Nothing about anything ever spoke to him, really.
So he got into English. It’s been going lovely, if he omits mother's sad looks and father’s pursed lips. He doesn’t talk to them about college anymore. He doesn’t talk to them about a lot of things anymore.
It’s a peculiar thing — to be so close with your family, and yet so far away. His hypocritical mask of innocence wore off years ago, after his parents were called into school on the account of his smoking and making out with the football captain behind the bleachers. To this day, Mark doesn’t know what they were more disappointed about — the smoking or the boy.
Mark quit smoking after admitting to himself it was a stupid call of attention. He could never quite get around to quitting boys. Father was not pleased, yet at least, he said, Mark wouldn’t die of lung cancer. It hung between them unspoken — that Mark could die of other things that came with loving boys in the small superstitious town in 1982. Such a strange dissonance it was — father’s calm acceptance of his inclinations yet absolute and terrifyingly silent disapproval of his Major choice. Father makes sure to let him choose his own path yet makes it painfully clear that he doesn’t believe in the steps Mark takes on it.
It has been a year now of this… this chilling, icy fog that he has been walking in. It creeps into his lungs at night, stinking of burning tobacco and dead leaves. Mark’s fingers curl around his blanket as his mind whirls into the cringingly unpleasant void of realization that he is—
broken and bruised
not the good boy he was raised to be.
His roommate is coming tomorrow. New year, new roommate. Not the policy of his college but rather a circumstance brought forth by a cruel twist of fate.
His last roommate, a nice if rather jock-y, dimpled boy named Jaehyun from Mark's hometown, was found dead on the last day of their spring semester, missing nothing but the silver cross he always wore. Heart attack, they said, tragic and heartbreaking — Mark hated himself for chuckling at the irony. Nothing was amiss in Jaehyun’s life or surroundings, and a small note at the bottom of a grey page written by Sicheng, the Journalist major who runs the writing club, said that it was simply that his heart… gave out. Gave up. Mark, somehow pathetically, relates to it.
And as it goes, everybody agreed it was natural causes, but Mark, at night deep in his thoughts, knows it wasn’t it. If it was a simple heart failure — that happened to a boy of twenty — why would the campus police question Mark about his whereabouts and knowledge about Jaehyun’s friend circle? Mark barely qualified for it, anyway, since Jaehyun ran with the sports crowd and was only polite to Mark by default because his mother attended Mark’s father’s church. Mark liked him, in a way, yet in another way — one that sends chills down his back and shame flaming up his cheeks — he was not really sad about Jaehyun’s passing. Upset, of course, yet upset in a way everybody is when death touches them indirectly, brushes past their neck. Icy, cold imprint of its bony claws to your shoulder. Kinda like fog.
They never found Jaehyun’s cross, no matter how hard and long they searched through his things.
/
Johnny takes Mark’s breath away from the second he comes into the room, bringing with himself a small grey suitcase and the thick smell of the fall clinging to his dark hoodie and slightly long hair.
Mark stands awkwardly near his bed with his covers clutched in cold fingers. He finds himself mesmerized and — suddenly — scared. Of what, he cannot pinpoint, yet it settles over the already-cold pools of his soul like winter frost, crunchy and patterned with intricate designs of overlapping lines and spirals.
“Hey,” Johnny says, with a small smile and eyes that don’t really look like they belong on his face. They’re too dark for him, Mark thinks. “I’m Johnny.”
Mark can’t really seem to find his words, yet he must have introduced himself and started a conversation, because five minutes later, he finds himself cross-legged on Johnny’s bed and listening to the boy talking about his summer project. It has something to do with the works of Poe and King, but Mark is way too lost in studying the movements of Johnny’s long fingers in the air to be paying much attention to that.
Johnny’s animated and so painfully alive it makes Mark ache in the tender place between his ribs and lungs. He feels bright, absolutely brilliant, and perfectly extraordinary, and it draws Mark in, like — and forgive him this cliche metaphor — a moth to the flame.
Yet something invisible, perhaps the barrier of cautiousness created, Mark believes, by countless pinches and sideways glances, keeps him away, doesn’t really let him lean in fully. Or perhaps, it is something different. Johnny’s eyes bore in him as he talks — something that looks like his habit, one that is unsettling as it is alluring — and Mark looks at them, looks into them, but he cannot quite look through them. They’re out of place on Johnny’s happy face, not really in touch with his lopsided smile, never quite reached by the laughter that falls from his lips.
Mark can’t look through them, yet a feeble tremble of anxiety in his heart tells him that Johnny can see through Mark.
/
The second death happens in October, on Halloween night.
A loud party, one that was formally forbidden, thrown by the biggest frat on campus. Mark visited it for ten minutes before leaving, and Johnny only attended for a couple of hours, coming home before midnight, smelling of fog and leaves, and curling up on his bed with a book.
Since him moving in, they’ve exchanged quite a lot of words, and Mark was surprised at himself being so open — so trusting — with a boy who feels like an unfinished chapter of a published story. Every time he’s alone, Mark chastises himself, promises he will stay away, because something about Johnny is so absolutely and maddeningly attractive it makes him terrifying. Yet only does this thought cross his mind, Johnny appears as if out of nowhere — as if out of the fog — and smiles at Mark, draws him into another conversation, whispers under the cover of the night — and Mark falls, deeper and deeper, into the dark ravine laid with dead leaves and sharp pebblestones.
It is, perhaps, the way Johnny looks at him. Not like anybody else in Mark’s life, not like anything, really. He doesn’t judge, or assess, or approve, or like. Johnny, as it seems, just doesn’t care. In its painful coldness, it’s comforting. Mark finds himself peaceful under the impassive eyes that always trail him around the room. What scared him in the beginning has become his haven. Johnny’s eyes might be like an empty house barren of furniture and people and life, yet they are still a home, a home where Mark can be alone and unbothered and unsullied by the disappointment and sadness he’s brought upon the people in his life.
So when the news about Doyoung come, Mark, somehow on reflex, turns to meet Johnny’s eyes. They’re dark and emotionless, but in them, Mark finds the comfort of a safety harbor. The bony claws do not touch him when Johnny is looking at him.
“What do you think happened to him?” He asks one night two days after the news break. The news piece this time is bigger and stinks of coppery murder stories — Doyoung suffocated, yet the police didn’t seem to find what caused it.
Johnny looks up at him, that dark cold gaze for a moment allowing Mark to forget the gruesome details he’s just read.
“He died,” he states simply. Shrugs. “Pity.”
A shiver runs through Mark, but a shiver, he comes to realize with shame, of not fear — a shiver of attraction. Johnny’s only wearing sweatpants and a cut-sleeve, his right foot hanging off the bed, his hair tousled and damp from the shower — and the calm, sure, unbothered way he carries himself with is something Mark wants to touch and taste and experience himself. In his coldness, Johnny is the warmest thing Mark’s ever wanted to feel on his skin.
Mark breaks out of his reverie and looks back at the page.
“He was missing a bracelet,” Mark hums. Johnny doesn’t respond. “Just like Jaehyun was missing his cross. They were friends, I think.”
“Maybe, the killer wanted a trophy,” Johnny muses.
Mark stills. “The killer?”
Johnny looks up at him grimly and raises a dark eyebrow. “You don’t think it was natural causes?”
“That’s what police said,” Mark murmurs, unsurely, and realizes he’s gripping his own cross.
“People don’t just suffocate in the fog, Mark,” Johnny says quietly.
With that, he leans over the report he’s proofreading, and the short curtain of his hair falling forward lets Mark know this conversation is over. Mark’s stomach falls, but he stays silent.
As much as he would want nothing else than to talk to Johnny, sometimes, the sound of his voice sets Mark’s nerves on edge.
/
Mark wakes up on the day of his finals from a nightmare precisely two hours before his alarm. His heart pounds with terror, yet the longer he looks into the grey dimness of dawn, the more the details of the dream slip away through his cold fingers. He huffs on them, but even the heating turned up to the max wouldn’t be able to warm him.
“Are you okay?”
Mark jerks from the voice and looks to his left, to Johnny’s bed. He’s sitting on it fully clothed, his laced fingers hanging between his legs.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” Mark croaks out.
“I never went,” Johnny hums. “Studying. Are you okay?”
Mark wants to lie.
“No.” He clears his throat. “Bad dream.”
Johnny squints his eyes at him and tilts his head. “Remember the details?”
“No.”
“Hm. For the best, maybe.”
And then, as Mark watches with growing fear, he changes out of his dress clothes into his pajamas, and, when Mark expects him to climb under the covers and catch a few desperate hours of sleep, he turns on his heels and approaches Mark’s bed.
“May I?” He asks politely, looming over Mark.
“What?” Mark whispers, spooked.
“I’m known to chase away nightmares,” Johnny shares calmly. “So, may I?”
Mark doesn’t say anything, can’t bring himself to, but his body moves on its own, scooching to the wall and clearing some space for the man that could probably wrap around Mark and completely absorb him in his arms.
Which is exactly what Johnny does, and suddenly, Mark finds himself surrounded by Johnny’s smell — vanilla, of all things — and undeniable, maddening warmth. Johnny’s palm settles on the small of Mark’s back, and another — on his neck — as he sighs contently and presses his lips to Mark’s hair.
“Sweet dreams, Mark,” Johnny whispers, and for the first time, there is something familiar in his voice. For the first time, Mark doesn’t have to guess and ponder on what is lurking behind Johnny’s meaning. This time, he knows what it is. He doesn’t quite remember — he’s been quite forgetful as of late — but he knows.
He smiles and closes his eyes.
“Goodnight, Johnny.”
In Johnny’s arms, Mark doesn’t dream.
/
Johnny kisses him in the morning. Uncaring of morning breath or the fact Mark’s exhausted face probably looks like he’s been ground through a blender, Johnny caresses Mark’s chin with his fingers and, when Mark tilts his face up like a sad lovesick boy he is, presses their lips together. They slide against each other in a breathless wonder of first love, and Mark never quite felt like this — warm, calm, peaceful.
Johnny doesn’t act like this is a novelty. Johnny doesn’t act like anything, really. When they separate for some breath, he chuckles and kisses Mark’s temple.
“You have an exam to attend,” he reminds in a whisper.
“Alright,” Mark whispers back, unwilling to break the serene calmness of the early morning. “Wish me luck.”
“You won’t need it.”
He can’t help one last kiss, and Johnny responds strongly, his fingers pressing into Mark’s hipbones. If there wasn’t a persistent, nagging voice inside that keeps reminding him to be a good boy, he would stay here for the whole day, forever, maybe; but eventually, he has to break away from Johnny and sneak into the bathroom. He presses his back to the door and touches his face with cold hands. They immediately warm against the scorching skin of his cheeks. He giggles to himself and shakes his head. How silly. How wonderfully silly.
It’s when Mark takes off his clothes to get into the shower that he finds a dead leaf stuck to the underside of his sleeping shirt’s hood. He frowns at it, wondering how it got there if he never wears it outside, but then his alarm clock goes off in the room and he shakes it off, rushing into the shower.
The exam turns out to be canceled. There has been another death on campus, right near the Law school dormitory, and this time, it became a third-too-many coincidence. The police get involved, and all of them get put on lockdown in the dorms until the investigation is complete. The parent board raises a ruckus over their children being left alone with a potential serial killer, but until the police can at least finish questioning, nobody is allowed in or out.
At first, they don’t say who was the victim, but the word travels fast between students, especially those locked up together and mortifyingly bored, so by the end of the second day, they all know it was Jungwoo, the infamous human rights activist, which brings a suspicion that his death was a hate crime, but Mark, in some weird assured way, knows it wasn’t that.
He does not know, of course, what it was, but someone who knows someone who was in charge of gathering Jungwoo’s things, says in a grotesquely haughty whisper that Jungwoo’s silver ring was missing.
/
Precisely a week after the lockdown started, Mark dreams of the boy he kissed in school. He was quite enamored with him, he realizes in the dream, something he didn’t really remember in reality. The boy is tall and nice and funny, and he warms Mark’s hands between his palms behind the bleachers as they kiss, and the kiss tastes like tobacco. The boy holds Mark as he cries because his father spoke about love in his last sermon and chases away Mark’s fears. The boy smiles into Mark’s hair and kisses his forehead and reminds him to do his homework. The boy lies to his team about his whereabouts and takes Mark’s breath away with his lips and his hands on Mark’s hips. The boy takes the fall when the school finds out about two fruity boys snuggling up and dies a week later after getting beaten to death in the forest behind a gas station.
Mark wakes up with a plea on his lips, but Johnny is there before he can voice it.
“Bad dream?” Johnny whispers into his ear, and Mark leans into him.
“Bad memory,” he says, and finds it is true.
It’s strange. He didn’t remember.
/
They don’t find the killer, and eventually, after two months of disrupted education, the college lets them go home for a week. Mark walks out of the dormitory with a small grey suitcase and breathes in the spring fog. There is something particular about it in March. It’s thick and smells of cold.
When he comes home and mom meets him with a sad but hopeful smile and father greets him with a disapproving frown, Mark feels empty. After dinner, he excuses himself and goes out, weaving through the quiet lovely streets — everything in this town is so quiet and so lovely after dark, so law and God-abiding — and makes his way to the edge of town. To the cemetery.
He thinks about his last day at college. He thinks about Johnny. He thinks about Sicheng coming to ask him if he knew anything about the murders, with a strangely suspicious glint in his eyes. Mark didn't. Sicheng, before leaving, threw a glance at an empty bed on the right side of the room and wondered with a hint of jealousy as to how they never assigned Mark a new roommate after Jaehyun’s death.
Mark only remembered it recently. All of it, even if the details are hazy.
He finds the grave easily enough. It’s neat and covered in wild roses. Mark kneels before it and digs his knees into the dirt.
“I brought you something,” he whispers.
Johnny looks up at him with dark, cold eyes, and they warm when Mark lies down his gifts on Johnny’s eternal bed.
“Thank you,” Johnny whispers. “It’s lovely.”
Mark smiles at him and nods, stuffing his palms into the pockets of the old letterman jacket. It once belonged to a boy with warm hands and a lopsided smile.
They look neat on the bed of white roses, Mark reckons, so after a while, he stands up and leaves, trusting the wind not to disturb his gifts. It’s chilly and smells of tobacco when Mark exits the cemetery, leaving behind, on the grave of a boy he once kissed and loved, a cross, a bracelet, and a ring.