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In the books his dad used to read him, choices always had consequences. The more thoughtless the action, the more subtle the ripple of effect. Beggars with dirty feet were revealed to be immortal kings, and favors never forgotten. Foxes carried grudges for generations. There was always a lesson, but he would ask Jongin what he thought that lesson might be instead of giving him the answer. (What did we learn from Pororo the penguin, Seoyeon might crouch down and remind him as he cried over, what — a smashed caterpillar, a dog that didn’t want to be his friend, his split lip. He cried all the time when he was small.)
This is a simple story. There are no goblins or witches or interventionist gods.
The story goes like this: Jongin loves ballet. He loves the shimmery sound of the music they play in class and he loves spinning until he’s dizzy and he loves the cat-paw feeling of padding in his soft shoes on a polished floor.
Then his teacher retires, and no one takes over her class at the community center. There is another in the next town, where he has only ever been to pick up his school uniforms and you can’t cross the street without looking both ways, Jiyeon reminds him, squeezing his hand tight and making him repeat after her. The studio is bigger and brighter and unlike before there are no other boys.
Here is the choice: Jongin quits ballet.
He picks up volleyball.
(Here is the choice that waits until his back is turned and stalks him like a fox waiting to sink its teeth in: he chooses one high school over another. He doesn’t want to tell his father he knows private school is too expensive and he knows he keeps the bills in the bottom drawer of his desk under a tin of hard plum candy. He tells his father, I want to be close enough to walk home, I hate taking the bus. It seems like a small thing at the time. It’s only three years.)
The air in his hometown is heavy with summer.
He stops at the farm first, to see the kids competing for most spoiled grandchild, and scoops them up under their arms to smell the last persimmon blossoms on command so his dad doesn’t throw his back out doing the same. They don’t smell good, exactly, but the twins like to wrinkle their noses and wriggle like it’s a surprise every time. To him it’s comforting, the smell of good growing things; Taemin shoved his face up into the leaves once and reported that they smelled like semen, but that wasn’t the word he used.
“Have you been cutting your own hair again?” Seoyeon sighs, and she sits him on the back porch and tilts his head this way and that for the trimmers like he’s twelve. “You’re fit to be seen now,” she declares when she’s finished, dusting stray hairs from his bare shoulders. He imagines he can feel the heat freed from the close shave along his nape. “Wear that green shirt I gave you and I’ll give you a lift into town.”
He drove his own car down from the city but he finds himself saying no, I’ll walk. The orchard gives way to the margin of their neighbor’s paddy field gives way to pavement and street lamps and electric blue pole banners advertising the midsummer festival, hanging limp in the windless heat. More than one car honks in passing and he remembers not to jump in his skin. He waves back blind and tries to smile like he's used to it by now, unable to read faces through the late afternoon glare off the windscreens.
It happens like this.
Dizzy with all the sun in his eyes, he misses his chance to cross the street. He’s staring at the bus stop across the way and his brain feels pulpy and sluggish trying to understand why. There’s a shape cut from the air like a familiar word made strange and uncertain on the page but it doesn’t click into place until Taemin lifts his head from his phone and gapes back at him.
He doesn’t stop to think. He runs.
He sprints as fast as his stupid stiff new jeans will allow and leaps over uneven pavement and weaves through pedestrians who seem to move in slow motion like wax melting and unseen he hears the yelp of outrage in his wake. He hears his name, too, and then Taemin saves his breath for running.
They crash into each other a stride from the entrance. His knee jolts a white hot pang in warning but his palm slaps against the door first, stinging like a good serve. His thumb is banged under the heel of Taemin’s hand a fraction of a second after, too late.
“You bitch, that headstart—” Taemin is hollering, delighted, straight into his ear. He never did care if people stared. He slithers around trying to hook Jongin’s ankle and steal his balance. “What if I was going somewhere else?”
“You would’ve raced me anyway,” he pants back, and throws him into a headlock like muscle memory. “That’s 404-403, loser.” Then he thinks he’s said too much, because Taemin ought to be elbowing him in the ribs demanding a rematch but he only slips from his hold and slants him a strange weighted look.
The door drops out beneath them and Chanyeol beams down at their tangled limbs.
“We already took a vote,” he announces, pleased. “First round on you two if you started fighting.”
This isn’t fighting Taemin protests just as Jongin says loser pays and Taemin pinches his waist like he wants to leave a bruise.
Jongin picks a school with an okay volleyball club where he knows he won’t spend his first year wasted on the bench. He allows for taller players to beat (and there are) and third years staking out their territory (who laugh at his seriousness, instead, but they aren’t laughing when the team starts to win).
He hates slow math scratched out on paper but there are a thousand calculations in volleyball and what he hasn’t mastered yet he knows he will, the same way he knows each summer will surrender to fall. Force, acceleration. Distance, time, velocity. Launching the ball just right into a parabola or a blistering straight line.
The variable he fails to include is a shrimpy first year with a bowl cut who can spike the ball like a comet and on their first day tells Jongin, unimpressed, that he ought to call him hyung.
When Taemin left he was as tall as Junmyeon. Maybe he has a centimeter on him now, to go with the ten he gained when they were in high school. Everyone is already exclaiming over him, slapping his back and fluffing at his long hair where it flops into his eyes. He’s dyed it an ashy color like driftwood. Flashy. His ears are pierced, too.
No one expects Jongin to talk much anyway. His pulse slows from the run and his tongue feels heavy in his mouth. He tilts his phone under the table to see if he missed any messages from the old team group chat, any reaction to Taemin swanning in after more than two years away. Nothing. Maybe Junmyeon kept the play close to his chest like a good captain.
Surprise.
There’s beer and soju and rice cakes and chicken feet and there is Taemin the mirage holding court at the head of the tables they’ve pushed together even though they’re meant to be celebrating Junmyeon’s birthday, a month late or not. He beams at Minseok and Jongdae even though he clearly can’t understand what they’re saying over the crosstalk and he tilts his ear closer. His shirt is a sun bleached sort of white, rumpled, the cuffs pushed past his elbows. Maybe it still smells like the beach. Where his collar is unbuttoned there’s a silver cross he’s never seen before, a glimmer against the glowing darkness of his skin.
It kind of feels like he’s looking in the window of someone else’s house. The days and weeks and months stack on top of each other like bricks. If he lets himself count them, he might think that Taemin has been in Chile falling in love with beach volleyball nearly as long as they knew each other in high school, which was only three years anyway.
They do text each other. They’ve been messaging back and forth about a documentary on antimatter, which the rest of the group chat still thinks is part of some elaborate joke they’ve been keeping up. It shouldn’t feel so jarring to see him in person, but it does.
He seems larger. Maybe not taller after all, not really. But like he's wearing another suit of himself, a heavy coat. No wonder he looked like a stranger. His shoulders are broad and his pants pulled taut over his thighs when he folded himself under the table, like they never used to back when no matter how much he ate it all seemed to melt off his limbs and leave him with sullen round cheeks for the third years to pinch. His hands are as tiny as ever, but Chanyeol and Sehun are still shoving to line up with him palm to fingertip as if he might have grown there, too.
He frowns. “Can you still jump with all that extra weight?”
Someone mutters here we go. Sehun snickers and tops off Taemin’s soju.
“Higher, actually,” he grins, looking giddy about it. This is the same, the way he has of smiling like a kid, so amazed with himself when he scored that the other teams couldn’t even seem to hate him for it. Jongin has been told he smirks, personally, so that last bit never seems to apply. (He doesn’t gloat, Minseok would explain unasked, digging Jongin’s serves at practice like a cat pouncing. To which Jongin would scowl back I don’t gloat either and Minseok might shrug in well-meaning but lukewarm sympathy. Not your fault you were born with a smug face. Maybe if you were more unfortunate looking — you could break your nose a couple of times and see if that helps.)
“Anyway, I'll never be as physically imposing as some people,” Taemin continues for the benefit of the table. “Have to make up the difference somehow if I’m going to keep up with the greats.” He rakes Jongin and his height with a lazy mocking glance. He’s never been in a fight, not on purpose, and he would never risk his hands throwing a punch, but he told Seoyeon once he’d never met somebody who could make him so mad just breathing. And Taemin had said I’m right here, dumbass and Seoyeon said if you two don’t fix that window before dark no one will ever find your bodies.
“Cute, our pretty boy’s jealous,” Junmyeon croons, leaning across the table to pinch his cheeks together into a fishlike pout. Jongin mumbles something murderous but allows it, because it’s still better than the alternative.
Taemin gasps and his stomach flips over in dread. “That’s right. You’re all evil for holding out on me, show me the goods!”
“Feast your eyes,” Chanyeol booms, then apologizes profusely to the waitress he bumps when he leaps up, shooting off at speed like it’s match point.
He returns with a nearly life sized cardboard cutout, sun faded like it sat in the window of a store. The same waitress pauses with a platter balanced on one arm and glances between the standee and Jongin in interest.
“Oh, you’re that footballer,” she guesses, pleased, and he shoves his face into his hands.
This is the greatest day of my life, take my picture he hears cut through the earthquake of laughter that busts up their corner of the restaurant. Taemin, already on his feet, is cradling the standee by the waist and miming a big smacking kiss to its cheek. He has no clue why everyone who meets him says he’s so nice; Lee Taemin is, objectively speaking, the worst person in the world. He sits again but props the standee up behind him and taps his beer against the one the picture is holding. Paper Jongin grins idiotically at nothing and continues to advertise Shimmering Light Summer Lager.
“You’re not being a very good spokesman,” Taemin observes after he abandons the cutout to weasel in between Jongin and Chanyeol and bother him up close. “You aren’t even drinking.”
“I’m driving back to the city tonight.” This isn’t unusual. With Seoyeon’s husband and the twins in the house, and her reassuring him that he isn’t in the way, in the way is exactly how he feels.
“Oh?” Taemin knocks back half of Chanyeol’s beer without effort and no one stops him. “Too famous for the train now? Eesh, you have it so hard, I’m crying for you. Why don’t you make yourself useful and autograph something for me?”
Jongin pinches and twists his ear until Chanyeol wedges an elbow between them and he catches Junmyeon’s expression, gone strange and unreadable before he grins again and it’s gone.
There’s the same song they used to holler on the bus, with Jongdae miming apologies to the servers even as he sings loudest of them all. Chanyeol asks him if he’s still dating the girl from TV and Jongin says no, not so much, and they were never really dating anyway, they were both too busy. Minseok keeps refilling Chanyeol’s glass for him, he notices, which seems backward, but it’s probably a smart precautionary measure if you’ve ever helped Chanyeol clean his spilled Pocari Sweat off bus seats, and bus floors, and bus ceilings.
Taemin came from his aunt’s house but he’ll crash over at Junmyeon’s not to wake her tonight, he finds out, because of course he needs somewhere to stay, he’s not a ghost. They were always nice to him, Taemin’s aunt and uncle, but he doesn’t think to ask how they are soon enough and now the others are talking about university, which he knows even less about than antimatter or black holes, so he cracks open another Milkis and listens. Taemin’s elbow prods his ribs every time he reaches for his beer.
(He didn’t cry at their graduation. He was thinking of bus tickets, and how to find his hotel in Seoul, and the dizzy high of training with the national team. But his throat got tight at the end, thinking another year here wouldn’t feel that long.)
“Hey,” Taemin murmurs at his shoulder with dangerous nonchalance, and Jongin thinks it’s inevitable that his answer to almost anything will be yes. “How do you feel about a little breaking and entering?”
Seoyeon is born first and Jiyeon follows clinging to her ankle, or so his dad tells it. Jongin comes seven years later. On a cellular level they are closer to him than anyone in the world will ever be again, but even the nearest star to the sun is four light years away, which doesn’t sound so far, until Taemin tells him this is over forty trillion kilometers. Jongin is foggy from surgery then and admits that he can’t picture numbers that big, and Taemin says that’s the point, dummy. His laughter crackles over the phone, or maybe this is only the sound of the waves halfway around the world breaking on shore.
No, this is the point, Jongin might say. Some of his first memories were watching his sisters toss a volleyball in the shade, Seoyeon aiming to knock a persimmon from the highest branch. His dad holding him up to the railing in the gymnasium so he could see Jiyeon fly. When the twins play together not even their shadows can keep up.
When they graduate junior high they are the stars of the best girls club in their league. They pass Jongin between their teammates at the celebratory dinner after that last win, like he was the trophy, call him a good luck charm and pluck him morsels of spicy pork sizzling from the grill. He is nine years old and still turns pink when people pay attention to him for too long, but the meat he likes.
Then Jiyeon decides she wants to be a lawyer, which means getting serious, she says, which means quitting volleyball in favor of a school two bus rides away where they have study hours until ten at night and no sports. He can’t remember any fights about it. Seoyeon puts away her soft soled gym shoes and her medals as simply as gravity brings every ball back to earth, and she cuts Jongin’s hair in the summer and teaches him how to brace his forearms to receive a ball better than any of the boys in his year can. She teaches him how to knock a persimmon from the highest branch.
The point is, when you give someone a hold on you then you don’t have much say in what they do with it after, he thinks. Black holes aren’t frightening compared to all that.
“Hey,” Taemin’s voice makes him jump and look back over his shoulder even though the windows of the school are all dark and empty with summer. He shushes him anyway, which Taemin ignores. “Remember when we fell asleep in the locker room?”
“It wasn’t that long ago, why wouldn’t I remember,” he mumbles, peering around a corner only for Taemin to stroll nonchalantly past him. It wasn’t the only time they practiced later than they promised they would, Junmyeon turning over the key with a sigh, but instead of trudging home on wobbly legs past midnight it had seemed so much easier to lay down with their gym bags under their heads and talk about the tournament a week away, uncharacteristically sober in the dark. He didn’t remember to call Taemin an airhead even once. Coach made them run laps at morning practice until he thought they’d puke.
“So what do you think, through a window?” Taemin asks, casual as he sizes up the old gym with his hands in his pockets.
“I had higher hopes for you as a delinquent,” he shakes his head. “You can’t even pick a lock? That’s embarrassing.”
“Jonginnie,” he simpers and hops unerringly out of reach before he can kick him, “you’re so gullible, I’m impressed you have room to be embarrassed for anyone else.” He pulls a small ring of keys from his pocket and beams. “I asked permission and everything.”
Of course, he thinks. Minseok is the faculty advisor for the club now that he’s teaching. He wonders if Taemin performed his sleight of hand on the spot, or if he asked for the keys before he even got on the plane. His pulse quickens and beats loud in his ears with the need to get inside and spike a ball at his face.
They warm up and the gym echoes with emptiness, shadows pooled in corners from the lights they aren’t using like those last nights before Nationals their third year, before Coach started dragging off the court by their ears and locking them out until morning practice. Taemin’s unbuttoned collar slips past a splash of black inked over his chest, which is new, and he squeaks out impatient little cartoon noises as he stretches, which is the same.
Heat has a way of creeping up in summer. He blames the weight of late June humidity for the fine tremor in his hand as he hefts a ball from the trolley, or too much sugar in all those Milkis.
They line up four balls along the back row and Jongin’s serves smash away each one. For once Taemin is quiet instead of heckling. He lobs Jongin balls from the trolley and waits his turn. His jump serve is — he could always jump, but watching him now is like a cannon erupting. Difficult to play on sand, he thinks again, and forgets to comment when Taemin’s fourth serve misses the mark. He huffs a laugh and rakes his hair back, already jogging to line up another set of balls.
“Again.” So they go again, and again.
His palms buzz from impact. When the body is occupied words are easier, he thinks, effortless as exhaling. Taemin tells him about the winter he left behind, the high hazy noon sun on the waves like beaten silver, how his team would practice sometimes with women so tall they would try to throw him over a shoulder like a sack of rice and steal him. He passes along his aunt and uncle’s regards, tells him his cousin the musician has opened up a jazz bar now in the city where he gets to hold court from his piano every night and they’re both gagging with pride over it. He asks about Jongin’s sisters, so he tells him about Jiyeon passing the bar exam in a fog of energy drinks with lethal sounding names and late night calls home to Seoyeon. He doesn’t need to explain that you can tell when one of the twins is talking to the other just by the color of her voice; Taemin has met them. Then of course Taemin asks after the kids, and his face aches with some stupid grin when he assures him that they’re the very worst.
Movement is good. It unwinds a little knot from behind his sternum and makes his feet feel light as if he were a dragonfly skating over still water. Best of three sets becomes best of five, best of seven, best of thirteen.
Taemin paces two steps forwards and three steps back instead of serving and shakes his hair out of his eyes.
“Toss to me,” he calls out so lightly, and the ball is aloft before Jongin can think, much less answer or accuse him of quitting while he’s ahead. 404-404, he records somewhere muffled and faraway, his feet are already moving. The ball meets his fingertips and his neck cranes back as he tosses it overhead like a spring snapping.
He wishes there were blockers waiting on the other side of the net, giants with hands like frying pans, just to watch Taemin fly over their heads. He seems to hang in the air, still a searing afterimage as the ball hits the far corner of the court so fast and so hard his heart leaps into his throat like maybe it could fly, too. You can’t go telling Taemin things like that, though. Jongin plays with professionals, and any comparison would make him intolerable. That Taemin is the only teammate who’s ever seemed to read his mind is irrelevant, a weakness even. It’s Jongin’s job to give his hitters perfect tosses regardless.
Back on the ground, all pink and pleased with himself, Taemin says something incomprehensible and snickers at Jongin's blank look.
“I said, buy me a drink about it. Last time someone looked at me like that, I got laid,” he adds, casual. “Come on, I know you’re impossible to impress but my Spanish isn't half bad.”
Jongin's mouth feels arid. Better than your English, he means to say.
“Sounds like you got plenty of use out of that one.”
“Yeah, I did.” In the half light, half shadow over the court Taemin's eyes are hooded dark.
He scoops another ball from the trolley and delivers it to Taemin’s waiting hands. His burning palms itch. With all their running around the air feels even heavier, like storm clouds sinking low.
“Hey,” he trips out before Taemin can swat the ball into play again. He tilts his head at him and waits. His shirt clings to the fresh bloom of sweat on his chest and Jongin can see the dark outline of that tattoo through the material but he can’t guess what it might be. Telepathy only ever extended to volleyball. “We should call the others before they get too drunk. Get a three on three going, they’d come. Chanyeol’s always talking about a monthly game and I’ve got enough time off-season. If you’re in town.”
“Sounds fun.” It’s a polite dismissal when he’s never been polite, not to Jongin. He turns the ball over in his hands and looks thoughtful. Too serious, Jongin thinks, and his stomach flips over itself obligingly. “I’m not really supposed to tell anybody about this yet.”
Taemin is fundamentally incapable of meeting a stranger. If he were a plant he would put out flowers and require pollination to fruit. He would twine up trellises and posts and turn his face toward the sun. He’s the sort of person who has not only friends but friends of friends of friends, and finds a welcome in any room.
So of course a friend of a friend would want him to try for a team in Osaka. Of course he would come back, for that. He hasn’t been on the beach all this time for his health. He hasn’t been standing still.
Taemin tosses the ball over his head a few feet and catches it. “Even if I make the cut, their gymnasium isn’t any bigger than yours. Four thousand seats, I think. I was really looking forward to getting a point on you with that one.”
His knee aches. He wants to curl over himself and rub the scars. “Took you long enough,” he nods. “Junmyeon’s gonna throw you a party about it when he finds out.”
They played well together. This is a modest understatement, and neither one of them were ever much for modesty. They were freaks of nature together. They stunned the stands into silence together. Sometimes he understands Taemin like an extension of his own body, or he used to. He used to know which way Taemin would move without looking, and he would toss that perfect parabolic curve to his waiting hand. He used to know the sound of his breath blind.
He knows if he sets with you kissed me. You kissed me and you left— Taemin would be waiting to strike, poised for deafening impact.
And you didn’t say anything, Jongin. Expressing your opinion was never a problem for you before.
Not a word?
Say just one now.
"Last one," Taemin says for him.
The ball floats from his fingertips. For just a moment it looks as though he's cupping light in his hands.
I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life.
I'm sorry I wasn't wiser sooner.
I'm sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely.
- Mary Oliver