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When they’re sixteen, Jisung says he’d kill Chenle’s father. Murmured under his breath, determined and sure.
Chenle is lying on Jisung’s bed, legs locked straight, hands crossed over his chest, like he’s a body in a coffin, which should be symbolic enough. The sun is shining bright outside, and Jisung has been fiddling with a screwdriver and a transistor radio on the floor for the past half hour.
Chenle wasn’t sure Jisung was even paying attention. Which had been why he'd talked.
He’s never heard Jisung wish harm on another living thing — save for a huge cockroach which the two of them had found in the PE shed at school. Chenle thinks that doesn’t count, because who doesn’t hate giant bugs.
This time it’s said with conviction. Chenle knows how terrifying it can be when Jisung sets his mind to something, and for a second, he wants Jisung to go through with it.
He wants to see Jisung with blood on his hands. He wants to imagine someone might love him that much that they would kill for him. That they would do anything to reverse the irreversible. The scar tissue around Chenle’s heart, bloody, stuck with needles. This secret no-one will ever speak of, that becomes something black buried in the back of his mind.
This thing Chenle will carry for the rest of his life.
Jisung doesn’t look up when he speaks about murder, and Chenle feels something rush up his throat. He’s not sure if it’s tears, vomit, or blood.
Chenle’s life is a long series of nevers. Never, ever, ever. A long series of short sentences, no commas, no cadence. Lifeless, like music with a single beat. No chord change, probably something minor and sad, that maybe evokes something in the first minute, but now it’s been two and a half minutes, and nothing has improved, and you’re tired.
There’s a reason most people don’t stay. There’s a reason Chenle doesn’t like being touched. He hooked up with a boy in college — pretty, clear eyes, strong arms. He held Chenle not like he was delicate, but like he was a man, too. He held him, and Chenle wanted to give him his body, but there was a step he couldn’t take. A shame in him, that he was wrong to be this way.
Was he broken? Was he like this because he was broken? Did Chenle love boys because he was broken, because his mind recognised no woman would love a weak man, and now he doesn’t let those boys touch him. He presses them face down in the sheets and fucks them. He comes inside them and pushes them out the door, and if they try to stay he levels their gaze and tells them they need to leave.
Some of them try to stay. Some of them try to touch him, or kiss him, or curl up against him.
Some of them try to stay. He thinks some of them might try to fix him, but how do you fix what doesn’t want to be fixed? How do you fix the machine that has accepted it is broken, and works around those broken parts?
How do you dislodge the shrapnel in your lungs when the flesh has grown around it? He’d drown, he’d collapse, blood in his mouth. Better to breathe like this, because he’s accustomed to it.
Sometimes he wishes he’d let Jisung kill. He wishes he’d encouraged him, opened his mouth and asked: “And then?”
Instead he’d stared at the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling and smiled, and Jisung had sworn under his breath as he fiddled with the dial on his radio. He’d spent all day with it, with his screwdriver, with his little tinker’s brain. Eventually it had sung.
Jisung comes out in college.
Actually, they come out to each other. Chenle had just hung up the phone with his parents, and he’d set it down on the top of his bedspread. He hasn’t cried since he was eleven — not since he watched Jisung rescue a nest full of baby birds from where they’d fallen on the highway.
He’d been too scared of the cars to help him. He’d just stood beside the barrier, cradling each bird in his hands as Jisung passed them back to him. Even then his hands were too large for his body — they just grew with him — but his touch was always gentle. Tiny little creatures, downy feathers, great wide beaks the same shade of yellow as the dotted lines painted in the middle of the road, screaming at him as he placed them on the ground. Jisung saved them all. Six — Chenle had counted. So brittle that if Chenle had closed his fist even slightly he might have hurt their tiny little hearts.
He doesn’t even know if they’d survived. They’d picked up the nest and put it back in the tree, and they’d sat in the woods afterwards, but no birds had ever returned.
Anyway, Chenle had cried when Jisung had brought the last one off the highway, because an eighteen-wheeler had rolled over a minute later, and he’d been so strung out and tense it was the only way to release the giant knot of feelings in his chest. It was weird, in a way, because it was like a flood valve releasing, but Chenle was also terrified. He kept expecting the other shoe to drop, but Jisung didn’t tell him that boys didn’t cry. He just held his hand and sat beside him, and when Chenle was done they both stood up and walked along the side of the road again, broken branches in hand, sunset dripping molten gold against the horizon at their backs.
Jisung comes out in college. Chenle hangs up the phone, and Jisung is standing in the doorway. He knows not to come in when Chenle is on the phone to his parents, but he always lets Chenle know he’s around if he needs it. He always gets it without Chenle saying anything, their own secret language they’ve been developing for their entire lives. Spoken in glances and tilts of the head, in the way they understand the slightest shift in each other’s voices. These secrets they keep locked up tight.
Jisung, leaning on the doorframe. Fiddling with his fingers. His left pointer is painted red. His pinky and ring, black. He’d done them with a sharpie in their economics lecture, and then he’d drawn a heart over the heel of Chenle’s palm.
It’s still there when Chenle raises his hand to wave at him, though it’s faded. Full of gaps, smudged ink like blood at a crime scene.
“Can I tell you something?” Jisung asks, and Chenle smiles at him.
“You know you can tell me anything.”
This secret they both keep. It’s impossible to keep a secret from someone who is the other half of your soul. They both know the weight that settles on the other’s heart. They both know:
“I’m gay,” Jisung says. Body in a pool. Baby bird dropped into Chenle’s hands. Heart fluttering under his skin. Wings that can’t fly. He takes flight, anyway.
“So am I.”
There’s something caught in Chenle’s throat. There’s something on the tip of Jisung’s tongue. Chenle knows what he looks like when he wants to speak but he can’t, when the words won’t quite work. He gapes at Chenle, and then Chenle says:
“You’re gonna end up eating flies if you don’t shut your mouth.”
And Jisung shakes his head and smiles, gummy, brilliant. The light is dull. His eyes twinkle and he takes the few steps across the rug they’d stolen from Chenle’s parents — the first piece of decor in their shared dorm room — and crosses the room to stand beside Chenle’s bed.
He pins him to the mattress. He wraps his arms around Chenle. He buries his face in his shoulder, and here, Chenle cries.
Jisung is always the exception to the rule. The only non ‘never’. The only one who stays. Who Chenle allows close to him. The only constant. Eb and flow, like the sea. Graduation. First job. Chenle goes through a rolodex of hookups. Jisung dates the same boy for four years. He breaks up with him two months before they’re supposed to get married. His mother gets a refund on the wedding deposit. Chenle doesn’t get a refund on his suit rental.
Chenle and Jisung sit on the fire escape together. It’s the middle of summer, and the road is six storeys below, taxis and ubers and cars with drivers on the phone, a dog hanging out the window, a cyclist weaving between the gridlock. There’s a guy pissing on the front doorstep. Chenle flicks his bottle cap at him, but it misses and hits the footpath, and the guy is definitely too drunk to notice.
Jisung’s covers Chenle’s hand with own — broad palm, knobbly knuckles, tendons standing out.
He’s been crying all day. On and off. In the artificial lighting — street lamps below, car headlights, a billboard that Chenle always swears at when he wakes up and it’s spilling through the broken curtains — the red of his eyes is a little more hidden.
“I’m not as sad as I think I should be,” Jisung says, “if I’m gonna be honest.”
Chenle feels like he should be holding Jisung’s hand, instead. Exceptions, exceptions. He’s been broken for so long. Jisung is like the seal that keeps him watertight.
“Did you love him?”
“I loved him,” Jisung says. There’s a ‘but’. There’s always a ‘but’. Chenle understands this. He doesn’t think he’s ever been in love. Love to him is hooking up more than once. Love is when he lets them look him in the eyes when he fucks them. Love is two bodies moving together. Love is when he hopes he remembers their name.
Chenle is not a good lover, but he’s also not a good person, so it doesn’t matter in the end. Jisung, at least, deserves love. He deserves so much, and Chenle would give it all to him if he could.
“But?” he offers, when he realises Jisung isn’t going to speak.
Someone leans on their car horn below. There’s a loud thud. A four wheel drive rear ends a taxi. The driver gets out and starts yelling. Chenle leans his head on Jisung’s shoulder and Jisung moves his hand from Chenle’s to sling it around his body, pulling him closer. Bare skin on bare skin, humid air all around them.
“But it didn’t feel like enough. I looked at him and I knew I was settling. I didn’t know how. I just — he was good. Not good enough.”
“How do you know that? How do you know that love isn’t enough?”
Jisung shakes his head. “I don’t know. I just knew. It — this sounds ridiculous. I swear I dreamed it. I swear—” his voice stutters and sticks “—I swear you told me once.”
Chenle’s heartbeat slows. Acid in his bones, burning through his ribs.
“You were blackout drunk,” Jisung says. “When — what’s that club you liked to go to with Kun?”
Chenle shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“The one he does shows at,” Jisung says, and he’s crying. Crying, talking about a drag queen. Talking about Chenle’s friend. Kun bought Chenle his first ever pair of high heels. Kun did Chenle’s makeup the first time he went on-stage. Kun cinched his corset, and told him not to break any ribs.
“Mirage,” Chenle says. He swallows. Kun is kind to him. Too kind. Chenle doesn’t know how to be kind to people who aren’t Jisung without fucking them. He doesn’t understand what’s good about him, except for his body. Kun doesn’t want his body.
“You were so drunk, Chenle. And you told me I didn’t love him.”
Like a firecracker in the cavity of his chest, burning him clean through, blasting him open for the entire world to see.
“You stopped me and begged me not to marry him.”
They’re still arguing — the taxi driver and the four wheel drive guy. Four wheel drive guy has pushed his sunglasses up into his hair, and he has obvious pit stains on his dress shirt. Taxi guy looks like he’s about to punch him. Chenle almost wishes he was them. That he could trade places. That there isn’t black swill in his gullet, that he isn’t so polluted to his core that he would take Jisung’s happiness from him.
“I’m sorry,” Chenle says, because it’s all he can do.
“No,” Jisung says. “No. You shouldn’t have said it. But you were right.”
They sleep back to chest. Jisung’s bare chest, Chenle’s bare back. The knobs of his spine. Jisung’s arms around him. Jisung murmuring in his sleep. Chenle doesn’t know what he says. He stays awake for half of the night, alcohol heavy on his mind, and he counts every single crease on Jisung’s palms, though he never quite makes it to the end. He always messes up around fifty or so.
Chenle’s father dies when Chenle is thirty-three. Jisung is in London, and Chenle is in New York, and Jisung books a flight across the Atlantic while he’s on the phone. Crossing it like it was the road that used to separate their houses, where they used to play on their bikes, where they used to pick the stones from the asphalt, tar stuck under their nails. Jisung dropped his ice cream on that road more than once. Chenle gave him his every time. Jisung always tried to give it back.
He doesn’t go to the funeral. His mother calls him from LA and screams at him in Shanghainese, and Chenle screams back in Mandarin, and then Jisung takes his phone from him and tells her to leave Chenle the fuck alone.
“Why the fuck did you do that!” Chenle shouts, and Jisung stares at him, wide eyed.
There’s hot fury in his veins. He snatches his phone back. “What the fuck was that,” he repeats. His heart is pounding. His head hurts. His mother…
“You don’t owe them anything,” Jisung says. “Not a breath. Not a second of your time.”
“It’s my mother.”
“Who stood idly by for so long while—” Jisung’s throat bobs when he swallows, the end of the sentence left unsaid. His eyes are deep brown. Chenle’s chest is heaving, his shirt suddenly too tight, his skin restricting him, an iron maiden of his own construction. How else would it fit him so well?
Chenle takes a deep breath.
“I wish I’d killed him,” Jisung says, before Chenle can speak.
He’s sitting on the bed again. The sun spills through the blinds, and the radio keeps spitting random noises every time Jisung touches the wires together.
“You…?”
“I wish you’d let me kill him. When we were sixteen. I wish I could undo all this.”
“You can’t undo it,” Chenle says. “The damage is done. Has been done. Look at me.”
“Look at you,” Jisung repeats. The song on the radio is sunny, something from the 80s, maybe. It doesn’t suit Jisung, who’s going through a belated emo phase. No need to dye his hair, but Chenle had helped him bleach streaks into it a few days ago, Google open on his phone, aluminium foil balanced amongst the mess of his bathroom countertop.
Here, in the present, Jisung reaches out. He touches Chenle’s knuckles, gentle, and when Chenle doesn’t pull away he takes his phone away and places it on the bed. It starts to ring, and Chenle jerks for it, but Jisung’s fingers circle his wrists — grip like iron — and he stares Chenle in the eyes.
“Don’t answer it,” he says.
Chenle glances down. It’s his sister calling. It rings and it rings and it rings, and when it stops Jisung lets go of his wrists, imprint of his grip bright red against Chenle’s pale skin. A brand. A crown of thorns worn like manacles.
“Okay?” Jisung says, voice low.
“But it’s…”
“What good would it do? You’re not going. What would you say?”
“I—”
Chenle traces Jisung’s fingerprints on his skin. Presses against the bone that juts like a broken wing, not quite breaking the surface. Not quite letting him fly.
He looks up, and Jisung is staring at him.
Looks down, again.
“Would you really kill for me?”
“Yes,” Jisung says, without hesitation. With something that terrifies Chenle. What has he ever had to offer Jisung, anyway?
“Why?”
Jisung blinks. Heart shaped lips, parting with no sound. He reaches up and cups Chenle’s jaw in his hand, then raises his other hand and places it on his cheek. Holding his face forward so Chenle is forced to stare him in the eyes, heart beating slow and steady. Blood rushing in his ears, the crash of the waves against the harbour. The crash of the waves on the beach, the sand between their toes, the endless sky above them.
“What would you say?”
“Would you really kill for me?”
The radio, cutting in and out. Jisung mumbles as he fiddles with the screwdriver, checking the manual he has laid out on the floor. It’s gonna sing, he says. The shadow of the fan rotates on the ceiling. Jisung smooths his thumb over Chenle’s cheekbone.
Broken boy. Broken, broken boy. Four years of therapy can’t fix the messed up wires in Chenle’s chest. It can’t undo the scar tissue. He can’t travel back in time. He can’t do this — sit beside Jisung on the floor and listen to the radio.
He can only keep going forward.
“Yes,” Jisung says. “Believe me.”
“Why?”
“I have to go back to London in four days.”
It’s two conversations at once. Three. Four. Little pieces, weaving in and out. Different parts of them speaking different things. Jisung’s eyes say something else. Chenle reaches out and covers his knee with his palm. He’s wearing shorts, and the skin is bare and warm, like he’s been sitting in the sun for too long. This too is another conversation.
“Not home?”
“You know it’s not home.”
“Then come back?”
“You miss me?”
“I always miss you. I miss my best friend.”
Chenle lays it bare. Bare as he’s ever been, as Jisung has always had him. Fingers fit in the gaps in his ribs, cradling his heart like it’s a baby bird in his palm.
“Have you been dating?”
“Here and there.”
“And…?”
“And what?”
Jisung bites his lip. “When you were drunk. That one time. When…”
“I used to be drunk a lot,” Chenle says. He’s nine months sober. Jisung watched him pour his last beer down the sink through FaceTime, which they both agreed didn’t quite have the same effect as him being there in person.
“When you told me I shouldn’t get married,” Jisung says.
“Oh.”
“You said something else, too. Do you remember that?”
Chenle knows what he’s talking about. He doesn’t remember it, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t know. How couldn’t he know? Chenle never got the return on his suit rental, because Chenle never rented a suit, because he couldn’t let the wedding go through, because he’s always been a selfish creature, always tearing down everything around him, always trying to fill the black hole drilled through his sternum, trying to stuff it full of pretty things and pretty boys and drugs and drink and:
“I told you I loved you, didn’t I?”
Jisung’s lip trembles. “Yes,” he says. His voice is small. Too small for this boy that has always been larger than life. This boy that has always been so gentle. This boy that has laid his hands on Chenle’s chest and left a tattoo on his heart.
The radio sings. There’s sunlight on the floor.
“You ruined my wedding,” Jisung says.
“Your wedding never happened.”
“It should have happened.”
“But it didn’t.”
Chenle’s heart feels like it’s about to explode. Another firecracker lit in the chasm of his chest, and when he opens his mouth he breathes sparks. Adrenaline bursting through his veins. He’s ready to fight. He’s ready — he’s ready for everything.
“No,” Jisung says. “It didn’t. It should have. But it shouldn’t have. It wasn’t fair to him. It’s never been fair, has it?”
“I was a mess then,” Chenle says.
“I loved you before that.”
It spills from his lips so easily. His eyes dart all over Chenle’s face, but he doesn’t duck away. For once, Jisung doesn’t duck away. That same determination that always used to scare Chenle — that always used to draw him in. He shivers.
“You’re crazy,” Chenle says.
“Maybe.”
Jisung takes a deep breath. His palms are clammy. The way he stares at Chenle makes him feel like every one of his organs has been removed from his body and then carefully placed back inside. As an analogy, it doesn’t make sense, but sometimes you don’t make sense when the feelings that pour through your throat are things you can’t voice otherwise. Sometimes you say stupid things. Sometimes...
“You know I always wanted you to go through with it,” Chenle says. “That was — that was when I knew.”
Sometimes you know you’re gay because you’ve been in love with your best friend since you were sixteen.
“Oh my god,” Jisung says. “You’re crazy.”
“You’d fucking kill for me.”
“I’d do anything for you,” Jisung says. “I just fucking — I just flew across the fucking ocean and told your mother to fuck off. I didn’t even think about it.”
“I know,” Chenle says. He reaches up and holds Jisung’s face in his hands, mirror of the way Jisung is holding him. The creature inside of him is hungry — burning with love. Everyone's a little in love with their best friend, but a little could have never captured the way Chenle has felt for Jisung. A little would have never been enough, and Jisung has never tried to give him a little.
He presses his thumbs against Jisung's cheeks.
“Then let me?” Jisung asks.
“Let you?”
“Do anything.”
Chenle swallows. “I always wanted to see you with blood on your hands.”