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Soonyoung kisses like coming up for air. Chan knows this because, right now, Soonyoung has a hand in Jun’s hair and another at his neck, and Soonyoung has not stopped since he began. Chan marvels for a moment at how starved two people must be to kiss like that, but Soonyoung is like that in all aspects of his life: hungry and determined and a little bit wild.
First, when he walked down to the basement with two cups in hand (beer for Soonyoung, water for Chan) and saw them together, it felt like something in him had sunk. Nothing new; the bottom of his stomach is like that of a fountain: littered with pennies and nickels and wishes that haven’t come true. A person gets used to weight if it’s added over time, but now there is lead in his blood and Chan thinks he might fall over. He curls around himself. He was so light when he walked through the door with Soonyoung’s arm around his shoulders. There were people there who didn’t know either of them and Chan’s chest had swelled with the thought that maybe someone would look at them and think they were dating. He figured it wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch. He knows how he looks at Soonyoung.
Hansol had taken a photo of him a few years ago. Soonyoung was telling a story about a bird that hit the window during his physics final, hands flying in excitement and his smile lifting his cheeks so high on his face that they squeezed his eyes impossibly smaller. Hansol snickered at his phone, nudging Seungkwan and tilting his phone screen so he could see. Seungkwan, never one for subtlety, had burst out laughing, screaming, “Channie, if I didn’t know any better I’d think you were in love with Soonyoung!” in between heaving breaths.
It’s so much to hear it out loud, even if Chan had been thinking it over and over in his head for years. Without any time to prepare himself, it was real. Seungkwan shoved the phone between the two boys and Soonyoung leaned forward to look closer. Chan knew what he would find reflected in his face if he went to squeeze in next to Soonyoung and he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He shifted his gaze to Soonyoung instead. He studied the slope of his nose and slight pout of his bottom lip and noticed that he was wearing the earrings Chan had gotten him for his birthday. He observed it all with the type of reverence one might feel when looking at ancient Greek statues or ruins, like a little piece of one of the best parts of the world was with him at that moment. Chan would worship at Soonyoung’s altar, would phrase his every word as a prayer, to hold him between his own hands. When he looked up again, Hansol was staring back at him with a soft smile on his lips. And then Soonyoung laughed, moving away from the phone, and Hansol’s face melted into something bigger and that was the end of that conversation.
Chan has liked Soonyoung since they met all those years ago in ballet class. It started as fascination and a little bit of envy for the boy with an easy confidence Chan had never known. Then, it turned into adoration. Soonyoung tugged him along to playdates and birthday parties which he had been invited to and Chan became invited to by proxy and Chan basked in the warm glow of knowing this very cool person liked him the best out of everyone there. Somewhere along the line, as they entered puberty together and Soonyoung’s body grew and hardened, Chan started looking at him like he did in the photo.
Hansol sent it to him hours later. It is a startling thing to be confronted with yourself so harshly as to be staring at your face as it spills your every emotion onto the room like a can of paint. It wasn’t clear where Soonyoung was looking, but Chan’s eyes were locked on him, all soft and wide like Soonyoung had handed him the sun to keep in his pocket. They were brimming with an emotion he felt pulsing like an open wound but couldn’t name.
Come have dinner with me, Hansol texted. Bring your mom’s picnic blanket. They met at the park between their houses and walked together to find the right spot to sit down.
“Is here okay?”
“It has too much dirt and not enough grass. My mom would kill me if I stained the blanket and couldn’t get it out.”
“Channie, you know we’re in a park, right? There’s gonna be dirt.” Hansol said, but he kept walking with Chan, the soft little smile on his face, until he found a spot he thought was ok. “You’ll thank me later when your ass isn’t wet and sore from sitting on the places you were picking out.”
Chan unfolded the red and white blanket and laid it out. Hansol had brought pasta and a bottle of cheap wine his brother had bought him. The pasta was overdone and almost fell apart on Chan’s plastic fork but the sauce was decadent and flavorful and he found himself smiling. Hansol forgot cups so they drank the wine out of the bottle, streaks of red running down their chins. It was sweet and messy and it stained Hansol’s lips pink. The taste of grape juice and vinegar was cloying in Chan’s mouth. Hansol laughed and Chan laughed with him, though nothing was said, and they fell back onto the blanket together.
“You know,” started Hansol, “I liked you for a while. It wasn’t always so obvious how much you were in love with Soonyoung.” He smiled. “Now, of course, I’m pretty sure anyone who looks at the two of you could put the pieces together.” Chan opened his mouth to speak, but Hansol held up a hand to silence him and continued. “I’m over you now, if that’s what you were gonna ask. I just thought you were cool. I loved the way you dance, I still do…” he drifted off; took another drink from the bottle. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s ok if he doesn’t like you back. You’re not unlovable. You’ll always have me.”
Hansol’s smile is gentler than Soonyoung’s. He is a person that moves through life with a contagious kind of ease, someone so calm that it feels stupid to try and stress around him. If Soonyoung crosses all of Chan’s strings into knots, Hansol finds the one thread that will unravel them all. Chan wanted to say something like thanks or I’m sorry, but none of the letters were forming into words. Hansol nudged the wine towards him and rolled so he was facing the sky again. He gave Chan so much mercy.
“How long have you known?” He asked. He only had to look at the picture one time to understand. It was dark. The sky was relentlessly black and Chan thought his words might get swallowed up. He hoped they would.
“Years.” Chan had answered, but it didn’t feel like enough.
“I think the feelings were always there, for as long as I’ve known him, but I only realized what they were after the dance intensive.” That was true. Chan’s earliest memories were of Soonyoung’s laugh and his jeans with rips at the knees from how hard he would dance even then. He watched realization pass over Hansol’s face and continued.
“He and Yerin looked so good together. And it sucked because when it finally dawned on me—and I had gotten over all the self-loathing and confusion—I had to act like nothing had changed. He would put his hands all over me trying to teach me his choreography and I would be trying with everything in me not to stare at his mouth in the mirror.” Soonyoung has warm hands, even when it’s cold out. When he touched him, Chan thought he’d keep the burns on his skin for years. “Then I had to watch him do the same thing with Yerin.”
He pictured all of Soonyoung’s different faces: the one with his eyes squinted and careful, darting across the room to catch everyone’s mistakes and then his hesitant grin when everything starts to come together, his face after working the same eight counts for hours, the smile that cracks his whole face apart. Chan could list them for days.
They kissed that night, with Chan’s back pressed against the trunk of a big oak tree and Hansol’s hand cradling his head. It felt like an apology. It tasted like sugar.
“Is this okay?” Chan had asked, but Hansol just closed his eyes and pulled him closer.
Chan tried again, with his lips moving against Hansol’s collarbone, to find the words. “It’s not like ‘happy’ or ‘in love.’” He thought of the photo, of his eyes and the smile at the corners of his mouth. “It feels so much bigger than that, or overwhelming. Like, being with him is like swimming through high tide. I’m treading water right now, but inside, everything in me is screaming that it would be so much better to drown.”
Back in the basement, his chest is open to Soonyoung and Jun. Chan could try with everything he has, but he will never be able to hide from Soonyoung. Something always unfurls his shoulders. Chan will always walk around with his jugular bared to the threat of Soonyoung’s teeth anyway. Chan knows with incredible certainty that Soonyoung loves him more than anything, even if it’s not in the way he wants, so Chan will heal from the hurt and continue to love him back. Soonyoung moves to kiss down Jun’s neck and Chan can taste bile creeping up his throat. He thinks he should prefer a thousand different faces to this one on Soonyoung, but all his mind can supply is awe at how beautiful he looks. He sets down the cup he got for Soonyoung and walks back upstairs.
Some people are playing beer pong. Hansol and Seungkwan are with them. Someone Chan doesn’t know has a girl he thinks he’s seen in a hallway somewhere in his lap, and she’s laughing high in her throat. The guy looks proud of himself, like maybe he’s won something, and Chan knows that feeling. To be happy to be the reason someone’s laughing. There’s music playing, and Chan knows this, too. He can feel the bass stitch his wounds back together, or at least begin to.
The song switches to something slower, with a guitar hook that winds itself around Chan’s limbs, and by the time the chorus plays for the second time he’s dancing with someone’s hands on his hips. Their grip is hot but a little loose and he can feel their hands through the fabric of his jeans like they’re touching his skin. Maybe it’s the memory of Soonyoung’s pink lips glossed over with spit still fresh in his mind or maybe it’s the fact that the hands feel larger than his own against him but the image of Soonyoung behind him comes frighteningly easily.
Chan got good at forcing his mind away from Soonyoung when he was still in the early stages of his feelings for him. He figured if he just avoided the thoughts at all costs they’d go away eventually and he could go back to thinking about his best friend a perfectly normal amount in a perfectly platonic way. The only thing he gained from those few months is a fickle-at-best ability to cut off his thoughts before they progress into anything he wouldn’t be able to look Soonyoung in the eye over. Admittedly, sometimes he hasn’t been quick enough, but those moments are few and far between, and they happen in the hazy light of dusk where hardly anyone can control anything. Chan only blames himself a little for those.
Chan has seen sweat roll down Soonyoung’s neck, his thighs in the jeans he’s wearing tonight, what his face looks like when he sees something (someone) he wants. Chan has all the pictures, he just has to make them move. “
You look stunning tonight” Soonyoung would whisper.
“I am nothing compared to you” Chan would finally, finally, be able to say. But Soonyoung wouldn’t accept that, would move his hands further up his waist and pull him closer. With his lips right by the shell of his ear, “I haven’t been able to look at anyone else. It’s always been you.” They would leave the party and Soonyoung would show Chan just how much he loved every single part of him and
The film wastes away behind his eyelids.
Chan wants him with a desperation that leaves him breathless and hollow. He puts himself through so much pain just to imagine what it would be like to hold Soonyoung or to kiss him, to know that Soonyoung belongs to him in the same way he has belonged to Soonyoung for their whole lives. The worst thing is that he doesn’t care. He’d take worse.
He blinks a few times. For a second he thinks he’s alone and he feels dirty, like something has dried on his skin, but then he remembers someone is dancing with him. It’s nice, nice to feel warm hands guiding his hips, nicer to just be wanted, and Chan decides that it doesn’t matter who’s behind him. At every given opportunity, Soonyoung has chosen someone else and Chan is so damn tired of waiting for him.
The song is at its bridge and Chan is glad for it. Music has always been his buoy, and right now he is clinging tightly; white knuckles and calloused palms. He turns in the hold of the person behind him and trails his arms up around their neck. Chan has already closed his eyes because he knows he won’t be able to handle knowing who’s behind him. He’s hoping the person will just think he’s excited. When their lips touch he feels nothing. There are no fireworks or a swooping feeling in his gut, but Chan pushes on—he’s not here for romance.
Chan kisses like war. He can taste blood but can’t tell if it’s really there and he knows he won’t pull away. The person—a boy, he has decided, or is hoping—is already licking into his mouth and the taste of iron and salt is gone. In its place is tongue and teeth and Chan is starving (he knows now, how starved two people must be) and he can feel it gnawing at his insides with teeth sharper than his own.
Still, with every battle comes casualties. As Chan tangles his fingers deeper into the boy’s hair he completely misses the tip of a knife pressed right under his jaw.
It’s the boy who pulls away first. Hot puffs of air fan against Chan’s cheek. He opens his eyes before he can think better of it, a little drunk from the kisses and a little tired of the dark—not as easy to live in without someone to share it with. His eyes adjust quickly in the low lighting, and maybe if the face in front of him wasn’t one that he has spent his entire life looking at and longing for then he wouldn’t have recognized it, but Chan has rarely been so lucky. The knife has made its cut along his throat, and Chan is bleeding out all over the floor.
Staring back at him is Soonyoung’s beautiful, stupid face and Chan has never seen his eyes this sad. Soonyoung rips his hands away from Chan’s waist, or removes them gently, or maybe he hits Chan in the face. Chan can’t feel anything, can’t see anything other than Soonyoung’s face and his scared, sad eyes that won’t stop looking at him.
“Fuck. I should’ve—I’m so sorry. Shit.” Chan says.
He turns away, already trying to find the door to get out. Distantly, he feels a hand on his arm trying to pull him back, then another, and Soonyoung’s voice saying “please can we just talk” but Chan knows what he’ll want to say and he can’t stand to hear it right now. I’m sorry, I just don’t think of you like that; This was a mistake, I’m sorry; I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
Chan has imagined kissing Soonyoung many times. He never thought he’d have to apologize for it.
He leaves.
Chan goes to the practice room. It’s 12:27 in the morning. He has a key for when he needs to open the studio for the private lessons. Chan goes to the practice room at 12:27 in the morning because he's never known anything else, no other way to cope. When Soonyoung told him about Yerin (and Johnny, Doyeon, and Jisoo) he had congratulated him with as big of a smile as he could force his face into making and asked for the details. He left all the hurt to bounce in the space between his heart and his ribs and told himself a splintered bone or two was worth it for Soonyoung's wide eyes and flushed cheeks. Then he had run all the way to the studio, dancing until his breath fogged up the mirror and he couldn’t see anymore. Then he danced some more, his movement so ragged and feral he was glad to not be able to look at himself.
“She makes me so happy,” Soonyoung had said, and Chan choreographed his first winning solo. They stood next to each other on stage to receive their awards because Soonyoung won second place and Soonyoung and Chan have never been that far apart in their lives. Chan wasn’t hurting anymore, Chan always heals from whatever Soonyoung cuts across his skin, and he thought they both had things to be happy about, but then Soonyoung had gone out with Nessa instead of their two families like usual. Chan was stuck at dinner with his parents and a bouquet of sunflowers.
Chan’s mom put them in a vase on the dinner table once they got home and Chan went out to eat every day until they died.
Chan can find his way to the studio from anywhere in his town. It’s like a piece of himself is buried in one of the walls, smoothed over by mortar and nestled next to some bricks, and it calls to him like a homing beacon. Dance and that studio are as much a part of him as his lungs or his heart, so he will always find his way back.
He knows the woman who runs the deli a couple blocks away. He knows the man who sits outside of the deli and preaches about God. There’s a shoe print in one of the squares that make up the streets from when he was late to class and stepped in the wet cement because he wasn’t looking. Soonyoung had lent him his extra pair of sneakers. That was nothing new; the seams between what is Soonyoung’s and what is Chan’s frayed long ago, giving way to one big closet existing across two houses. It was special, though, to have everyone see Soonyoung give something up to Chan.
When he unlocks the door and steps inside he closes it gently as if not to disturb anyone's dancing, but no one is there. It’s just him and the dark hallway leading to the classrooms, but it’s enough to bring him some peace. Chan thinks he might be the only person in the world who’s this comforted by a vague smell of feet and a much stronger smell of Clorox.
He flips to a smaller key on his ring and walks to the very end of the hallway to unlock studio D. That’s his room. In the quiet of the early morning shift in their first month as instructors, Soonyoung said “Channie, you ever notice how the D looks like a C there?” No, Chan hadn’t. He was confused, but Soonyoung’s eyes were sparkling and wide and that has always been enough to keep Chan interested. “It’s like fate that you’d teach here. Do you believe in fate, Channie?” Soonyoung said, and his voice was soft with feeling. He lifted his right hand where he had been clutching a Sharpie. “I do,” Chan responded, and he meant it with all the power he had inside him to mean things. Soonyoung uncapped the marker and wrote Channie’s Room on the door’s plaque, right below the D. Their boss had scolded them for all of one minute before her attempted hard face broke and melted back into the one she wore with them normally; motherly and warm. After all, they were her best and oldest students. “Just don’t do it again.” she said, but she said it with a smile.
Chan teaches all his classes in studio D. The dance studio has other rooms that he could take, but he likes it best so he stays. The wood is smooth under his feet and it seems to move with him as it dips with his weight and springs him up on his jumps. The room breathes as he breathes.
The door gets caught where the floor is uneven and Chan pushes past it with practiced ease, shifting his weight to his right foot and shoving his shoulder into the door.
He’s barely two steps into Channie’s Room before he collapses onto the floor. Something is thrashing between his shirt and his chest and he feels it through his whole being.
His hands shake as he unties his shoelaces and toes his shoes off. He takes his socks off with his pants, and then his shirt—Soonyoung’s shirt—falls into the pile of wrinkled clothing. He thought there might be something to the quotidian motion of taking off his clothes that would soothe him or let him pretend that this was any other day, but now he’s sitting on the floor in just his underwear and he’s still shaking. There’s nothing he can do, really, so he turns and folds the clothes; first Soonyoung’s shirt and then his pants. He tucks his socks into each other and puts the bundle inside his left shoe, then he lines his shoes against the door. He moves the rest of his clothes to sit by his shoes and then decides he doesn’t like how he folded the shirt. It’s one of Soonyoung’s favorites, a voice in his head supplies, as if Chan doesn’t already know, doesn’t already feel like he’s walking a tightrope while he’s wearing it. He’s teetering on the edge of something right now, too. He smoothes the shirt out on the floor so there are no creases and then Chan folds it again. He lays it over his pants.
There’s weight on his chest and he knows he’s not rid of the trashing yet, that he will have to work it loose, but he’s coming back to himself. There’s no use in putting on his spare dance clothes. He thinks he might need to be bare in the mirror, to be face to face with himself. For a moment, he contemplates dancing without music. He’s really here to move, and he can do that just as well in silence, but perhaps this wound runs too deep to be bled out without anything to carry him forward. Chan plugs his phone into the speakers and shuffles the playlist he made for moments like these. It’s filled with serenades, because the dances he creates when Soonyoung has hurt him are just confessions of love over and over again.
Chan starts as he always starts: by breathing. Small things that barely lift his chest and then he allows himself to grow until his whole body is moving with each inhale. He remembers when he and Soonyoung first met. They were only seven and still he was the brightest person Chan would ever meet. He was dressed in his black tights and white shirt feeling entirely too silly around all the girls when another boy walked in dressed the same as him. His footfalls were loud, nothing like the quiet little steps Chan took to avoid making noise and he was so impressed with his easy confidence and his gleaming smile.
The boy approached him wearing that same smile, one that wouldn’t change at all throughout their friendship, and said “Hi! My name’s Soonyoung, what’s your name?”
“My mom told me not to answer that question to people I don’t know.”
“But you do know me! I just said, my name is Soonyoung. Here, I’ll tell you more: my favorite food is pizza, I’m really good at Mario Kart, and this is my first ballet class but I’m really excited. Now you really know me! Did your mom say you could give your name to people you do know?”
Chan couldn’t deny his logic. If this boy with the smile tried to kill him later at least he’d have learned a lesson.
“My name is Chan,” he said. “This is my first ballet class, too.”
Soonyoung beamed at this and pushed his arm through Chan’s own and led him right to the front. “That’s so cool! We can learn together.”
Chan’s face is wet, though he can’t tell if it’s from tears or sweat. He thinks he must have missed a thousand chances to tell Soonyoung how he feels. He thinks if he weren’t such a coward all the time, if he didn’t always back away from things, that kissing Soonyoung might be a thing he’s allowed to do. They might be in love. Soonyoung’s arm would stay wrapped around him at parties and when they kissed like war in the middle of the floor it would be ok because they would kiss much softer later.
Chan is sweeping across the room, bringing his arms around in graceful arcs as if to fly away. He remembers every moment he and Soonyoung have ever shared and he sees them all as though he were a scorned lover gazing upon old photos before throwing them into the fireplace; in brief glances that strike him straight in the gut.
The music hits a crescendo as all the string instruments play together and Chan is leaping higher than he ever has. He looks like someone who has just seen a mouse twitching in a trap or a broken bone. Like someone who is scared and trying to run away. But just as soon as he is in the air he is on the ground. The cellos have dropped out and now there is just the high, lonely sound of the violins. He is on his back, breathing like the oxygen is being torn out of his lungs by someone’s hand. Chan feels no thrashing, but maybe it’s still there, just drowned out by the sound of his heartbeat. He hears it in his ears and feels its movement through his whole body.
Then, the sound of keys turning in a lock.