Work Text:
1.
When everyone was asleep he kissed him. In the neon flicker of a cartoon on Jimin’s tv; one of those high-budget Japanese ones that make you cry for no reason, with a soundtrack like a lost dream. Beer cans all around them. Too much to drink, too many sweaty boys in this room, it was the first night of summer vacation. The window was open and above the crickets they could hear someone else’s party raging from down the street. Seokjin had hauled an air cooler all across town on the subway but left the batteries at home, so there was not much to be done about the heat; Yoongi and Namjoon were asleep in the bathtub, there was a bag of frozen peas melting to mush on Taehyung’s forehead, Hoseok felt drunk and flushed all the way out in his toes and his t-shirt was damp and sticky, but he still hugged Jeongguk close enough to bruise. It is hard to say who kissed who. Suddenly it was just happening: Jeongguk’s warm weight, his warm skin and hair, his warm lips on Hoseok’s like this was something they always did. When Hoseok opened his eyes Jeongguk was quietly snoring into the pit of his throat, and the credits were rolling past the tv screen, white on black. The summer seemed to stretch before him like an endless landscape framed in a similar simplicity. It didn’t matter anymore that he had to rot at work for most of it. It didn’t matter anymore that he had flunked his last exam. All that mattered was this; he could see it clear as day.
---
The next morning, as they’re walking home to their respective dorms, Hoseok offers to buy Jeongguk breakfast.
Jeongguk knows a lot of things about a lot of things, and he knows about hangover food. Hoseok leans on his shoulder and watches him pick out boiled eggs for antioxidants, pre-sliced kiwi fruit and strawberries for electrolytes, a pot of honey-flavoured greek yoghurt just because it’s sweet. All of it looks delicious to Hoseok. The convenience store is empty and cool and there’s an entire summer ahead of them, and Jeongguk kissed him. Jeongguk kissed him! Or he kissed Jeongguk. He only remembers that it happened. He wants it to happen again.
Then they sit in the dewy grass of a riverside park and watch the sun glint at steep angles on the water. The water is green, the sky is grey. Jeongguk peels his eggs with surgical precision, drinks his iced latte in measured sips, eats the fruit neatly with a plastic spork. A shrimp cracker from last night is caught in the soft black tangles of his hair, and his skin is like gold in the peachy light.
“How about this view?” Hoseok says, a little breathless from it all.
“It’s okay I guess.”
“Only okay?”
“It’s the kind of view you think would look really nice in a picture, but then if you did take a picture it would turn out too saturated, like your skin would look weird—y’know, all orange.”
“Orange is very weird.”
Jeongguk shrugs. “Because of the light,” he says, in a quieter tone like his thoughts are drifting. “It’s to do with the exposure.”
“Too much of a good thing?”
“Maybe.”
Hoseok picks up the pot of yoghurt. The lid is hard to peel with his blunt nails, his still sleep-numb fingers. He watches a seagull circle the shore as he fiddles with it, mentally painting its crisp white feathers in autumnal golds—something more on fire.
“Sit still, hyung.”
“Why?” He squares up. “Is there a bug?”
“No, just sit still.”
The seagull disappears downstream as Jeongguk shifts closer in the grass, the faint coffee-smelling puffs of his breath brushing Hoseok’s neck, then the clear slicing sound of a camera shutter. Hoseok turns his head and sees his own face captured on Jeongguk’s phone screen. It’s in profile, his eyes shadowed by hair, and it makes him laugh.
“Am I meant to say I look ugly?”
“I never said you look ugly.”
“Cos it’s easier to blame the light?”
“No. I just wanted to show you.”
“Show me what?”
“What I meant, hyung.”
“Which is what?”
“I don’t know.” He frowns at the picture. “I don’t know how to describe it.”
Hoseok looks away from him, giving the yoghurt lid a firmer pinch that finally peels it off, and he thinks, well, either Jeongguk remembers the kiss or he doesn’t. Bringing it up would probably confuse him, the same way Jeongguk seems to be confused by all simple and uncomplicated things—like reality shows, dating etiquette, and high school maths. In some matters you don't hit the nail on the head; you stroke it gently. Similarly Hoseok doesn't kiss Jeongguk again; he pulls the shrimp cracker from his hair and holds a sporkful of yoghurt up to his mouth and he tries to smile, because they will get there or they won’t, but either way the view is nice.
2.
Here is how they became friends forever ago: A somewhat odd-looking kid—gangly limbs, bambi eyes too big for his face, uniform lovingly ironed and buttoned all the way up as if for school portrait day—standing by the skatepark one afternoon asking in a solemn, pre-pubescent voice if Hoseok knew how to do an axle stall.
“What’s an axle stall?” Hoseok said, since he’d only ever heard of ollies and kickflips. He wasn’t very interested in skating. His older sister had given him the board for his birthday in the hopes it might teach him some street smarts, but the only thing it had taught him so far was that younger kids found him approachable.
“It’s when you stop at the highest point and look down,” Jeongguk said patiently. He took Hoseok’s skateboard and stepped onto it, swaying like the little sapling of a human being that he was, and steered it without hesitation over the edge of the big bowl. At the bottom, he fell over, and looked up at Hoseok apologetically. “Not like that,” he clarified. He straightened the thin striped tie that had flapped into his face.
“You can try again,” Hoseok said.
“Really?”
“If you borrow my helmet.” He unfastened his helmet and his knee pads and tossed them into the bowl, and then he sat down and drank a pouch of watermelon juice as he watched Jeongguk try again and fall over again, until the sun had almost set and a young, elegant woman on a bicycle showed up at the skatepark, telling Jeongguk that dinner was ready.
A week later Jeongguk returned with a board of his own and a grave expression that suggested he had work to do. A year later he could do axle stalls better than any of the eighteen-year-olds who sometimes swung by for an ego boost. He wore baggy t-shirts now, jeans that didn’t fit him, checkerboard slip-on vans that he let girls doodle hearts on. There was usually a little crowd perched around the edge of the big bowl, taking pictures and cheering him on, and handing him his baseball cap when it fell off during wild spins. Hoseok, sitting among them, took pride in the fact that he had witnessed Jeongguk’s first axle stall; that he was the first member of the fanclub. It didn’t bother him that he still couldn’t do an ollie without falling over. It didn’t bother him that everybody was in love with Jeongguk. He felt that Jeongguk’s success was as good as his own.
---
For his summer job, Hoseok snakes through tourist-heavy streets and picks up litter with a selfie stick. Sometimes he prunes the flowerbeds in roundabouts, or mops the floors in power nodes, or follows his boss around to change lightbulbs or fix holes in wire fences. He doesn’t mind the work—it’s physically exhausting but almost meditative as time potters on. He gets to leech on the joy of other people’s summer holidays, instead of being stuck in some fast food kitchen or cigarette-smelling back office like most of his friends; imagines his rubbish bag and his workman’s overall and his skier’s suntan immortalised in the backdrop of countless family photographs, which is a nice thought to him, somehow. He lets Soundcloud shuffle lofi rap and indie songs and rewinds the prettiest ones to keep that montage feel, that intro-credits feel.
For these first couple weeks of freedom, Jeongguk, who’s never bothered to find a job since his parents spoil him for doing so disgustingly well in school, by contrast locks himself inside his dorm room and doesn’t answer any phone calls or react to any memes or dinner plans dropped in any group chat. The only reason Hoseok manages to catch a glimpse of him at all is because he knows how Jeongguk’s brain is wired. Jeongguk goes grocery shopping on Mondays and Fridays and he does laundry between eight and ten p.m. on Thursdays, no matter if he’s been living in the same shirt for a week. When Hoseok thus shows up one night at the campus laundromat, after having showered and blow-dried his hair and changed back into daytime clothes, with a chocolate bar and a bottle of banana milk in his hands, Jeongguk is sitting cross-legged in front of a washing machine in his underwear, playing a violent-looking mobile card game that paints his face blue from below.
Hoseok sits down next to Jeongguk on the floor.
A whole minute passes.
His heart beats very quickly.
“I heard jokes in the bar yesterday that you died,” he says then, by way of greeting.
Jeongguk sighs. “Sorry to disappoint.”
“Jiminie and Taehyungie said they might drag you off to Bangkok for a weekend in September.” He struggles with the chocolate bar wrapping. “But they were drunk, of course.”
Jeongguk says nothing.
“Neither of them can afford to go to Bangkok.”
“I know, hyung.”
The washing machine churns on with a barely-suppressed rage, bubbles frothing to and fro. There is an electric fan in the ceiling that enhances a smell of burnt lint. Hoseok peels open the chocolate bar and breaks off a square for Jeongguk and then one for himself, and then he spends a little while screwing and unscrewing the lid on the fabric softener, trying to decide if it really does smell like sea breeze or if it’s mostly chemicals. He’s happy like this. His heart calms down. Jeongguk’s skin where their knees are touching is warm.
When the chocolate is gone Jeongguk turns around on some sixth-sense impulse and zones in on the milk bottle in Hoseok’s lap, and the overhead lights hit his eyes and cheekbones in a way that makes him look suddenly older, as if all this time he’s spent stewing in his own company has really been a period of reinvention; another layer of paint drying, fresh and modern, utterly captivating.
“When was the last time you shaved?” Hoseok asks, as he hands him the bottle.
“How should I know?”
“It looks like a while ago.”
“Well, hyung, some things there’s just no point in keeping track of.”
Hoseok smiles. “Would you mind if I did it?”
“Did what?”
“Helped you shave.”
“It’s not like I need help with it.”
“Of course, I know that. But just as a nice gesture.”
Jeongguk peers at him from behind his curtain of hair, game all but forgotten on the floor, milk bottle half empty. “Now?” he asks brusquely, as if he’s very busy.
“The sooner the better, right?” Hoseok says.
“Will it take more than half an hour?”
“What?”
Jeongguk points at the washing machine. “There’s half an hour left of the cycle.”
“We can go and come back within half an hour,” Hoseok assures him.
---
He leads Jeongguk—who is still only wearing a pair of boxers and a blue t-shirt that’s coming apart at the seams—across the courtyard, up the staircase and into the private bathroom in his dorm room. He makes him sit down on the toilet lid. His own head is still spinning slightly from the fabric softener, and it’s not helped by the robot-like way Jeongguk’s eyes track him as he moves about the room, collecting a razor and shaving cream, a small terry cloth that he drapes around Jeongguk’s neck like they’re at the salon.
But once he gets started the worry runs off him.
He’s struck by weird memories of odd-wheeling his sister’s slumber parties, of sitting doll-like on the living room floor way past his bedtime as a cluster of tweens braided his hair and filed his nails and painted his face with drugstore makeup, and fawned over his eyelashes, and told him he was too young to understand why all of it was important. But Hoseok did understand—it was about feeling good. It was about taking care of something you loved and making it feel its best.
“Isn’t this kinda nice?” he asks Jeongguk, smiling as he moves about to reach under his jaw. His voice echoes slightly off the clinker walls.
“I think it’s weird,” Jeongguk says. “It’s not like I couldn’t do this myself.”
“That’s the whole point.”
“How’s it nice for you then?”
“It just is.”
Jeongguk is quiet as Hoseok pinches his chin to get at his cupid’s bow, eyes trained on him intently, but when Hoseok moves on he says, “I think you need a hobby, hyung.”
“Can’t taking care of you be my hobby?”
“I’d rather it wasn’t.”
Hoseok flicks him on the nose. “Then prove it doesn’t need to be, eh? Don’t lock yourself up for weeks and come out looking like a hobo unless you want me to worry.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh there’s nothing to be sorry for, Jeongguk-ah.” He pulls the terry cloth from his shoulders and smiles assuringly. “What have you been doing in there, anyway?”
Jeongguk looks down at the phone he’s still holding, which is paused mid-explosion. After a good ten seconds of silence, he says, “Hearthstone.”
“I see,” Hoseok says. “Well. If you’re up for something more physical for a change, you could always come along to my spinning class.”
“Spinning class.”
“Mhm. There’s one on Saturday.” Hoseok takes a steadying breath. Propositions like this must be stated like mathematics. Like pure logic. “It’s great exercise,” he says carefully, “y’know—not too gruelling. I could take you to dinner afterwards.” He bites his lip but then can’t help it: “Hyung’s treat?”
Jeongguk gives him a look that’s not exactly flattered, not exactly anything, but Hoseok still hopes it’s a good sign. He lets Jeongguk rinse off the shaving cream and study his face in the mirror for flaws that don’t exist. Then they walk out of the bathroom and Hoseok gives Jeongguk another banana milk and then they stand in silence listening to someone next door play the saxophone.
“What’s all that?” Jeongguk asks, pointing at the mess of textbooks and empty red bull cans on Hoseok’s desk.
“Oh—” Hoseok kills the urge to lie. “I have a resit in September.”
“You didn’t tell me that, hyung.”
“I think it’s mostly because I didn’t put in enough work the first time. Y’know, I was lazy. It’s not actually difficult stuff.”
“But you have a job now.”
“Not a mentally draining job.”
“So helping me shave wasn’t just procrastination?”
“Of course not,” Hoseok says, smiling at him. “I always have time for you.”
---
They collect Jeongguk’s clean clothes and Hoseok helps him hang them up in a dryer cupboard. Then he walks him home. When they’re on the landing outside Jeongguk’s room, in the dingy fluorescents and the permanent smell of burnt rice wafting from the dorm kitchen, Jeongguk turns to him and says, “Okay.”
“Spinning class?”
“Sure.”
“Jeongguk-ah, that makes me really happy.”
Jeongguk nods awkwardly, leans against the wall with downcast eyes. He detaches the plastic straw from the banana milk and twirls it in his thin fingers. The urge to hug him is so strong it hurts.
“Then I’ll see you Saturday?” Hoseok asks.
Jeongguk nods again.
“And will you maybe talk to the others? Send a text? So they know you’re alive, at least?” When Jeongguk just stabs the straw through the bottle cap, face blank, Hoseok huffs a laugh and adds, “Is it really that scary to have dinner with your friends?”
“No.”
“What’s the big deal then?”
“I think I’d just rather be alone.” With this Jeongguk unlocks the door and slips inside, slurping loudly from the milk, the empty glare of the spy bubble as his only goodbye.
Which is odd, but. You know. Nothing to worry about.
Hoseok knows how Jeongguk’s brain is wired.
He knows that Jeongguk sometimes lies.
He remembers Jeongguk explaining to him, shortly after he moved in (which is more than two years ago now—god time moves fast), how he had written a computer script while he was still in high school, which had kept him logged in to all the student housing websites and refreshed them every two minutes, and automatically signed him up for any rooms that became available.
“So I basically had free picking,” Jeongguk said, straightening the corners of a Marvel poster he was putting up above his dresser, with a blank look on his face as if building bots to do your menial tasks was completely normal behaviour for an eighteen-year-old.
“And still you chose to live here?” Hoseok said, from where he was curled up on Jeongguk’s bed, watching him with a big-brotherly warmth in his chest. “You could have stayed closer to downtown. Or by the river. Or by the mall.”
“Yeah I guess,” Jeongguk said. He turned around so that Hoseok couldn’t see his face. “But this is where you live, hyung.”
3.
It’s Saturday and they’re at the gym. There’s a storm outside—water hissing sideways like a spiderweb, sealing them in a cocoon. Hoseok watches it all with a slowly calming pulse as he drinks a cup of water from the fountain at reception, keeping an eye on the clock on the wall and the ten minutes or so that Jeongguk has spent in the shower. Health nuts mingle about in their yoga pants, hiring personal trainers, buying oat-based energy drinks from the vending machines.
Objectively it’s polite of Hoseok to wait, but he still made the excuse of being too hot. He doesn’t think he could deal with knowing what Jeongguk looks like naked these days while also knowing that they’ve kissed. Even if Jeongguk doesn’t remember that they’ve kissed. Even if the kiss didn’t mean anything. Actually, especially if the kiss didn’t mean anything.
After ten more minutes he returns to the changing room and finds Jeongguk dressed in a nice shirt and skinny jeans, blow-drying his hair by the mirrors.
“I got carried away,” Hoseok says, holding up his phone as a vague excuse, but Jeongguk just shrugs. He turns off the blow dryer and reaches into his makeup bag for a pair of dangly gold earrings, which he attaches carefully, giving himself grave looks in the mirror. The fabric of his button-up is so thin you can make out the slight inward curve of his waist.
“What’s with the outfit?” Hoseok asks, as he pulls off his shirt. “I wasn’t planning on anything fancy for dinner.”
“I’m going out for drinks later on.”
“With who?”
“Just a few friends from my course.”
“Oh,” Hoseok says, “well that’s nice.”
Jeongguk turns around, looks him up and down with a blank expression. “You think so?” he asks flatly.
“Why wouldn’t it be nice?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then why are you stressed about it?”
“Why would you think it is nice, hyung?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I’m hungry, let’s go.”
---
They find a pojangmacha with electrical heating. The owners have rolled the tent walls down to protect from the rain, and inside it’s steamy like a sauna, people crammed on plastic stools around rickety folding tables. It smells like canola oil and burnt meat and sweat.
Jeongguk eats chicken skewers by peeling the chicken from the skewers and picking it piece by piece off the plate. His carefully made-up face has a serene quality in the chaos of this crowd, like finding a tv on mute at a party.
“Why do you like spinning so much?” he asks.
“I just do,” Hoseok says.
Jeongguk sniffs. “You stay in the same place and you get tired.”
“You could say the same thing about school.”
“It’s pointless.”
“Maybe.”
“How’s studying going?”
Hoseok laughs around his chicken. “Why do you want to know about that?”
“Well it’s just polite to ask.”
“True.”
“How’s studying going, hyung?”
“Not very good.”
“What subject is it?”
“Maths.”
“Algebra? Calculus?”
“Multivariable.”
“Is it hard?”
“I think it’s hard.”
“Multi is only hard if you’re stressed out.”
“I’m not stressed out, Jeongguk-ah, I’m just not very good at maths.”
“Exercise helps when you’re stressed out.”
“True.”
“Why did you want me to come to spinning class with you?”
“Because I like spinning.”
“So?”
“And I like you. It just seemed like a nice thing to do together.”
“I haven’t been stressed out, though,” Jeongguk says. He crosses his empty chicken skewers on his paper plate and glances around the tent, the drunken guests and the sizzling wok pans, the pink party lights. “Actually,” he says, “I’m a little stressed out right now.”
“I can tell,” Hoseok says.
“How?”
“You’re talking a lot.”
He looks miserable. “I am?”
“Would you like me to buy you a drink?”
“Please.”
They get a shot of soju each and down them before sharing a plate of fried dumplings, both of them black holes from the exercise and the chill in the air.
“Better?” Hoseok asks.
“A little better.”
He’s sitting up straighter now, his soft black hair poofed up slightly from the steam, some colour finally in his cheeks.
“I think you’ll have a good time tonight,” Hoseok says, feeding him a dumpling. “I think this was a really good idea.”
“Why would you say that?”
Hoseok smiles. “Just look how handsome you are.”
---
Once he has waved goodbye to Jeongguk outside a subway station, Hoseok goes to see Namjoon, who has spent his Saturday repainting the walls of his kitchen. There are green splotches on his arms and hands and some in his hair, where he has touched his face accidentally.
“I don’t know,” he says when he lets Hoseok in, gaze a little wild. “I just felt like it. I’ve been thinking about it for ages and then suddenly this morning I got tired of just thinking about it. It’s been a lot of fun. I think it looks really ugly, though.”
Namjoon lets Hoseok sit on his couch and sort through his old notes on multivariable calculus, while he tears up the newspapers he has taped to his kitchen floor. He’s making a lot of noise, muttering to himself all the while, so Hoseok soon feels compelled to abandon the notes and go help him. They spend an hour cleaning the kitchen and then sit on the floor drinking beer while admiring the greenery, high on paint fumes, and when Hoseok gets home that night he is so drunk that he falls asleep with his clothes on.
When he wakes up, at around three in the morning, he has a shower and brushes his teeth. As he’s about to crawl back into bed, he notices he has a bunch of messages from Jeongguk in his phone. Most of them are incoherent spellings of Hoseok’s name and enthusiastic updates on the situation—they’ve been drinking, they’ve been clubbing, they’ve been roaming around some sort of park—and then there are three video clips sent at increasing time intervals.
Hoseok hovers his thumb above the first one, head pulsing slightly from the hangover that’s already settling in. He doesn’t know why he’s hesitating. He clicks on the clip. It shows Jeongguk walking into a bathroom and giving himself a thumbs up in the mirror. What the aim of this is is unclear.
The second clip is from the park, Jeongguk spinning his phone in a wobbly circle, showing the far-off city lights through the wet rainy trees, the water gurgling in a fountain, some shadowy shapes moving in the distance that must be his friends since they are shouting his name, telling him to hurry up. The camera falls to the ground and shows a slab of black sky, before there is a rustling noise and the video ends.
The third clip is longer and seems to be from Jeongguk back in his room. It is quiet, and very dark. He speaks in a detached voice that’s a little hoarse and slurred:
“Since I was little there’s this feeling I’ve had sometimes, that my thoughts are being thought in someone else’s voice. Sometimes I feel like I’m being translated from a language I don’t understand. Like I am a figment of someone else’s dream, and that person is trying to wake up. It’s not a particularly good feeling. It used to make me really sad. But when you speak to me, hyung, like earlier when we were eating chicken, I feel like the same person is thinking up your words as well, something about the way they trail out of your mouth and how you look at me, maybe, this blunt tone you have, it’s hard to explain but—it makes me think that we’re both part of the same dream that someone is having. It’s like everything falls away and it’s only us talking. And then I feel safer and a little less lonely.” There is a good ten seconds pause in which Jeongguk seems to have fallen asleep, but then he continues: “I don’t know what the best thing to do about it is. I really don’t know, hyung. But I think, maybe, if we stay very still, and if we stay very quiet, it will take a while for the person to wake up.”
4.
In mid-August Hoseok’s mother and sister invite themselves for a visit to Seoul. Hoseok spends three miserable nights in a bedroll on the floor while they share his bed, and withstands their endless teasing of him until it feels like his face has frozen in a serene, submissive, unoffensive smile. The main thing they accuse him of is gaining muscle and a tan and looking older, as if the fact that he is twenty-three and has been sweating outdoors for two and a half weeks is the result of some vanity on his part. He’s talking posh too, they tell him. He must be getting grand ideas of himself, they assume. It gets to the point where he lies about passing his courses, because he doesn’t want to prove them right.
(At night he feels bad about it, though. He knows they’re only nagging at him because they’re scared he’s forgetting them; it’s all misguided love and pride. If he did tell them about flunking his exam they would probably hug him and be really sad.)
The three of them go shopping and sightseeing and they get drunk together. This is a good way to spend a family holiday. On the last day they suddenly want to know how Jeongguk is doing, and when they learn he is in town doing basically nothing, they force Hoseok to ask him out.
My mum wants you to come to dinner
Hoseok writes in a text message, shifting the blame.
He’s nervous about it for no reason. He hasn’t seen Jeongguk since last week when they went to the gym. He has tried to keep the video clips from his mind. Jeongguk hasn’t brought them up so then it seems polite to ignore them.
Do you not want me to come to dinner?
Jeongguk writes back.
No I want you to come too
Ok. Then I’ll come
His mother and his sister bicker the whole way to the restaurant. While trying to tune them out, Hoseok thinks of Jeongguk’s family, where everyone is calm and booksmart and beautiful, and where everyone’s idea of a family holiday is to drive someplace very far off in the mountains and take long hikes through pine forests under collectively meditative silences, and then pitching a tent, boiling powdered soup in a storm kitchen, saying solemn things about the universe while gazing at the stars. Hoseok knows all this because he came along on such an excursion once, many years ago, when he was still pretending to be better friends with Jeongguk’s older brother than with Jeongguk himself. The fact that there was a time when he was “pretending” anything in relation to Jeongguk seems very alien now.
---
At dinner, Hoseok’s mother asks Jeongguk what he’s planning to do with his life.
Jeongguk replies he wants to study astrophysics in Chile.
Hoseok’s mother is impressed by both of these words and doesn’t ask any follow-up questions. She says if Jeongguk wants to go to Chile, she is sure he will go there. In fact, she says, if Jeongguk wants to go to the moon, she is sure he will go to the moon.
“Do you want to go to the moon?” Hoseok asks, when his mother and sister are busy choosing ice cream flavours for dessert.
“What’s there to do on the moon?” Jeongguk says.
“Less than in Bangkok.”
“That’s probably true. But there are fewer people on the moon. I’ll have strawberry, please.”
---
“How about this view?”
“It’s pretty good.”
“Could you take a picture of it?”
“Are you asking me to?”
“Last time you judged the view based on how good it would look in a picture.”
“I’m not sure that’s what I did.”
“Well, in either case.”
“Do you want me to take a picture of you?”
“If you make me look good.”
It’s been two hours since they talked about the moon. They’re on the sky deck floor in Lotte World Tower. It was Hoseok’s mother’s idea to go up in Lotte World Tower, but the elevator made her nauseous and now she’s having a cocktail in the lounge.
478 metres high. Two girls are taking selfies by the skywalk so they wait.
“One day it’s going to shatter,” Jeongguk says.
“What do you mean?”
“One day the glass is going to shatter.”
“Why would you say that right before I’m getting on it?”
“Because I was thinking it.”
“Now I’m thinking it too.”
“Like magic.”
“No, not like magic, Jeongguk-ah. You could have chosen not to say it.”
The girls stop taking selfies and start making out.
Hoseok’s face heats up. He doesn’t look at Jeongguk. He wishes his sister would hurry up in the bathroom.
He leans back against the wall and checks his phone. It’s almost nine o’clock. Light from the city falls through the window panes and paints blue squares on the floor.
“Why did you tell your mum you passed the exam?” Jeongguk asks.
Hoseok looks back at him. Jeongguk is standing right in a blue square.
“At dinner,” Jeongguk says impatiently. “You said you passed the multi. Why did you lie?”
“I just didn’t want her to worry,” Hoseok says.
“So instead you’ll be worried alone.”
“No I won’t,” Hoseok says, heart beating fast. Jeongguk’s features are so sharp in this light and it’s verging on scary. “You know about it too.”
“But you wouldn’t have told me about it unless I had found out.”
Hoseok sighs. “Why is that such a big deal, Jeongguk-ah?”
“It just is. I don’t ever want you to lie to me.”
“But I haven’t lied to you.”
“In another dimension you lied to me.”
Hoseok’s sister returns from the bathroom. She has no qualms about telling the girls to make out somewhere else. She ushers Hoseok and Jeongguk onto the skywalk and crouches down on the floor with her dslr.
“Look happier,” she says.
If the floor shatters they will fall for a very long time through the air. The entirety of Seoul is underneath them. The ground is so far away, it’s almost like it has switched places with the sky, and what they are looking at is not lightbulbs but stars. If the floor shatters maybe they will just keep falling through the stars.
“Don’t look down,” Hoseok’s sister says. “And don’t stand so far apart—you guys look really awkward.”
Jeongguk rests his head on Hoseok’s shoulder. Hoseok puts an arm around him and plasters a smile onto his own face. Despite standing 478 metres above Seoul and having a lot to think about, he can’t rid the image of the girls making out from his mind, because it seems to have complicated something that up until now felt very simple. What exactly has he been doing all summer? What exactly does he expect will happen through keeping on like this? Even if the glass is going to shatter one day, it’s not going to shatter on its own.
In the picture, Hoseok is looking at the camera, smiling like an air hostess, and Jeongguk’s eyes are closed.
---
“I’m sorry I lied to you in another dimension,” Hoseok says later, when they’re all having martinis in the lounge.
“That’s okay,” Jeongguk says.
“You’re not upset anymore?”
“I was never upset.” He stirs the toothpick olive in his drink. “In another dimension I was upset.”
“I think you were upset in this dimension for a few seconds,” Hoseok says.
“Look at the sky,” Jeongguk says, like he’s not listening.
“I looked at it before.”
“No you didn’t, you were looking at those girls.”
Hoseok looks at the sky. “What am I meant to be seeing?”
“Exactly,” Jeongguk says. “There’s nothing. There’s nothing to be upset about at all.”
5.
Three days later Jimin calls him and says they need to talk. They meet up for dinner in a rowdy basement bar that’s bursting with other off-duty college kids, air so bloated with hormones and barbecue grease that they decide to sit outside on picnic chairs. Jimin is still in a white shirt and tie from his clerk job at the post office. Hoseok is still in his workman’s overall, now unzipped and rolled down, since his tank top felt like plastic on his skin. The air is sort of damp and misty. They both ordered burgers and liquor without thinking twice.
“So this is very nice, isn’t it?” Hoseok says as he squints around in the sunset, since, in case you weren’t already aware, he likes starting conversations he dreads with this kind of inane positivity.
Jimin is already aware. “What part of it is nice?” he asks flatly.
“In general it is nice.”
“’It’?”
“Summer. This evening.” Hoseok points towards Jimin’s heart. “Sitting here with you.”
“Yeah I bet that’s how you feel,” Jimin says, rubbing at his chest. “In general, it is nice when your friend is being a dumbass.”
Their drinks arrive. Jimin pours them both a modest shot of soju, has a delicate sip, and then says, “So Jeonggukie picked me up from work yesterday?”
“Did he? That was kind of him.”
Jimin shrugs. “We went drinking. Then we got to talking—y’know, as you do.”
“Sure.”
“He told me some weird things. He said he’s been very rude to you all summer, but still you’ve been coming around to his room and dragging him about and making him do things. He said he went up in Lotte World Tower with your mum?”
“That was her idea. And she didn’t see much of it. But yes.”
“Well, hyung, what’s all that about?”
Hoseok glances up at the sky and thinks about the video clips. “I’m a little worried about him.”
“Why?”
“He’s been acting strange.”
Jimin scoffs. “He’s always been acting strange. He’s been acting no stranger this summer than any other summer.”
“Maybe that’s the worrying part.”
“Hyung—bless him, but the guy’s denser than a bag of bricks. He’s never going to realise unless you face up and tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
Jimin’s voice softens. “Aren’t you in love with him?”
“Of course I’m in love with him,” Hoseok says, relieved it was nothing worse, and laughs so sincerely he splashes soju on his lap. As he pats around the table for a tissue, he adds, “Everyone’s in love with him, Jimin-ah—You’re in love with him.”
“But I think there’s a difference,” Jimin says.
A waitress comes scurrying up the basement stairs with their burgers. She sets them down in the awkward silence that’s collected at their table, and when she’s gone, Hoseok avoids Jimin’s eyes a little longer by rubbing at the stain on his overalls.
“Do you seriously not know what I’m talking about, hyung? Isn’t there a difference?”
Hoseok stops rubbing at the stain. “Well, sure, I mean—maybe.” He clears his throat. “But the thing is, I don’t walk around thinking pieces of my life are missing.”
“Yeah obviously you don’t—or else we wouldn’t be having this goddamn conversation.” Jimin takes a bite of his burger that squirts mayonnaise onto his shirt, and he glances up as if daring Hoseok to laugh. But whatever he reads on Hoseok’s face must just fuel his frustration, because he adds, mercilessly, “Or perhaps you do think that way, but you’re too much of a wuss to admit it even to yourself.”
“Are you trying to make me angry?”
“If it helps sort out this mess, then I don’t mind making you angry, hyung.” He looks away as if suddenly interested in the architecture down the street, or maybe the pigeons walking around hoovering crumbs, and very daintily puts the burger back on his plate.
There’s another brief silence.
Then Hoseok takes a breath, and reaches across the table to give Jimin’s wrist a soothing squeeze. “Jimin-ah,” he says, “I’m happy. It’s not healthy to keep thinking too much about whether things could be better in some way that they are not. How can you then ever enjoy anything?”
“I don’t know, hyung. If that’s really how you feel then you’re probably right. I just think you should know that he feels bad about not knowing how to deal with you.”
“Deal with me?”
“Yes—whatever it is you’ve been doing is confusing him. I need to fix this—” he adds out of nowhere, tearing his wrist free to gesture at the mayo stain, and slips down the basement stairs without another word. When he returns his face is wet, and there is a large see-through circle on his chest framing the stain like a bruised wound. “So, anyway,” he says on a long sigh, refilling their drinks before he sits down again, “did you hear he wants to take us all to Bangkok for his birthday? Can you believe that? Won’t that be a fucking treat?”
---
In any case Hoseok takes Jeongguk to a movie. This is under no pretext whatsoever. Any two friends might go out one summer afternoon and eat popcorn and watch superheroes fly about and curl up against each other in the dark.
You see, when Jeongguk was a baby and had first moved to Seoul (more than two years ago, what the hell), he’d knock at Hoseok’s door every other night with some half-assed question about school or girls or social mishaps and then pretend to fall asleep in Hoseok’s bed, always facing the wall, always with his eyes hidden. This was completely normal. They’d wake up hugging each other in the mornings, and it wasn’t awkward.
Exactly what is different now is hard to say—well, perhaps the kiss. Perhaps the fact that they are both grown adults.
Yet as Hoseok looks away from the screen to watch his own fingers ghost up and down the smooth skin of Jeongguk’s wrist, an erratic pulse cradled between his ear and Jeongguk’s shoulder, he thinks about the video clip. And he thinks about what Jimin said. He imagines if he were to turn to Jeongguk right now and whisper, Hey, do you love me as much as I love you? Has it really been like that all these years? Don’t I know you better? How about I just sort of hold onto you to the end of time?
“Hyung?”
“Hm?”
“Can we leave?”
They leave.
When they’re out in the street—in the muggy air, the half dusk—Jeongguk makes a show of stretching his arms to the sky and sighing deeply, as if shaking off boredom. He’s wearing an oversized green t-shirt that slips down to his armpits as he does so. “It wasn’t exactly a good movie,” he says, perhaps sensing how Hoseok is staring.
“No not exactly.”
“D’you wanna race me through that park?”
“Why?”
“I just feel like it.”
They run around for a while like rabid dogs. It’s a strange weather to be running around like rabid dogs, with the sun hung egg-like on the horizon in a sickly yellow fog, a late-summer storm around the corner. The crickets in the grass seem tense for something. Tired and tone-deaf. Airplanes fly overhead but make no noise. Cars drive by seemingly on their own accord. Everything is sticky and on the verge of giving up.
Eventually, when Hoseok’s fingers are tingling from exhaustion, he stretches out on the dust-smelly lawn on his back. “I think I’m a worm now,” he says, wiping sweat from his throat, willing his pulse and thoughts to slow.
Jeongguk comes up next to him and peers down. “That’s not how worms look,” he says.
“No?”
“No. This is a worm.” And he does a half-hearted dance move on the ground.
“Worms don’t move backwards,” Hoseok says.
“Neither do snakes.”
“Do the leech instead.”
“The what?”
“Or the tick. Come here—”
He says it without thinking, and without thinking Jeongguk seems to obey, because then they’re hugging on the ground. Jeongguk presses the sharp peck of his heart into Hoseok’s ribs, his shallow breathing loud now in a way it was not in the movie theatre. They’re just hugging in a park like any two friends.
Across the street, people are filing out of the theatre building, squinting at the sky with worried faces.
“The movie must have ended,” Hoseok mumbles.
“Who cares,” Jeongguk says, closing his eyes.
The sky darkens.
Hoseok realises something: Everything seems to end these days.
Summers, childhood. Perhaps even life.
And it’s so silly, but right then he’s convinced he would be able to deal with that if he could just kiss Jeongguk again, if he could just for a second know again what it feels like to kiss him.
How about I just sort of hold onto you to the end of time.
If we stay very still, and if we stay very quiet.
“Hyung.”
“Hm?”
“Do you wanna eat dinner in my room tomorrow?”
“You wanna eat dinner together?”
“Yeah. I can make you something.”
“Why?”
“Just as a nice gesture.” He takes a breath and lets it out. It rustles Hoseok’s hair. “Then maybe I can help you study.”
“As a nice gesture?”
“I don’t want you to feel stressed out.”
“I’m not stressed out,” Hoseok says gently, but realises that Jeongguk has moved his hand so that his palm is pressed up against Hoseok’s throat, where his pulse is still racing. “I mean, I don’t want you to spend your free time on worrying about me.”
“But that’s what you do.”
“True.”
They feel the first few drops of rain.
“Did you watch the video I sent you?” Jeongguk asks quietly.
“Mmh. I did. Do you really feel like that?”
“Sometimes.”
“I’m sorry, Jeongguk-ah.”
“It’s okay. I’m not sure it’s a sad thing anymore.”
“Why?”
“I guess you get used to life being the way it is.”
Rain is now pouring down. They get off the lawn and huddle under the roof of a bus station. Jeongguk’s hair falls in wet stripes past his cheeks, and he’s shivering in his t-shirt; it’s moss-green from the rain. Hoseok wonders if it would be too much to hug him again so soon.
“I’d love to eat dinner tomorrow,” he says instead.
Jeongguk sneezes. “Cool,” he says. “I’ll make dessert.”
+1.
When Hoseok gets home from work the next day, a Thursday, he has a shower and a shave and puts his hair in a towel bun. He sits on a chair with the window open and watches trains pass by in the distance. It’s a little cold.
At six o’clock he puts on shoes and crosses the courtyard. In the dorm kitchen, Jeongguk has three different saucepans on the stove, and the fan is on full power, hissing like a vacuum cleaner.
“If I don’t, the fire alarm goes off,” he says when Hoseok comments on it. “We have about three fire drills a week.”
“Because people don’t put the fan on?”
“No, because the fire alarm is too good.”
“Is that really a thing? The fire alarm being ‘too good’?”
“They’re worried about people smoking indoors.”
“But you don’t smoke.”
“No.”
“Not indoors or outdoors.”
Jeongguk glances at him, as he expertly flips an omelette in one of the pans. “Are you nervous, hyung?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You’re being weirdly interested in the fire alarm.”
“Well, the food looks good too.”
“Thanks.”
Hoseok rests his chin on Jeongguk’s shoulder to watch him work. “And you look good too,” he mumbles.
Jeongguk folds the omelette into a roll on one end of the pan. He cracks another egg in the empty half and whisks it a little with his chopsticks, the translucent white turning orange. Then he gives Hoseok’s arm a little pat. “So do you,” he says.
---
There’s no table in Jeongguk’s room, but they arrange the dishes artfully on the floor like an indoors picnic. Jeongguk has bought a bottle of white wine, which he seems proud of until he discovers that there’s a hidden cork in the neck, and he doesn’t own a corkscrew. They have to borrow one from the neighbour.
There’s kimchi fried rice and marinated chicken wings and an omelette with carrots and scallions. For dessert, there’s sticky sweet rice with chestnuts. Jeongguk connects his phone to his tv and plays chill guitar music on youtube, so that they won’t be caught in an awkward silence while eating, but they end up talking more than they usually do. They talk about the trip to Bangkok that Jeongguk is planning. It will be for his birthday, but it probably won’t happen until November.
“That’s when we’ll need it the most, anyway,” Hoseok says, stretching out on the floor. He’s so full. He gives the wine bottle an appraising look, but it’s past half empty, and if he drinks any more he’ll pass out.
Jeongguk is in a similar position. “That’s what I was thinking too,” he says, through a yawn.
“I can’t believe summer’s almost over. It feels like it just began.”
“I feel like I could open my eyes and be back in Jiminie-hyung’s apartment.”
“Same,” Hoseok says. “I was so drunk that night. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if I unlocked something and fell into another dimension.”
“What kind of other dimension?” Jeongguk asks.
“There are different kinds?”
“Of course. For example, some people believe every mathematical structure corresponds to a reality. If that’s the case then we are living in a universe that could be summarised with a mathematical statement.”
“What, like five plus one?”
“I guess.” He yawns again. “And that’s to say nothing of quantum theory.”
“Where everything happens at once?”
“More like where you always find yourself in the place that you are.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“A lot of things don’t make any sense,” Jeongguk says.
They go out to the dorm kitchen and do the dishes. Jeongguk washes and Hoseok dries. When they return to Jeongguk’s room, the tv is on sleep mode, the sun is setting, and they can hear the next-door neighbour playing mario kart.
“I’m really tired,” Hoseok says, cuddling up on Jeongguk’s bed, feeling heavy. “I was up at six and now I’m sort of drunk.”
“What’s your point, hyung?”
“I want to have a nap. But I don’t want to sleep.”
Jeongguk gives him a long look. He’s dressed in the luxe-athletic style of most guys on campus—skinny black sweatpants, a white pullover sweater, striped adidas socks. He sits down on the bed and takes Hoseok’s hand in his. They’re sitting cross-legged face-to-face, as if Jeongguk is admiring an invisible ring, or as if he’s about to do a palm reading. His hands are warm.
“Do you know why I wanted to cook for you tonight?” he says.
“No.”
They hear Yoshi screaming in the other room.
“Well?” Hoseok says.
“I don’t really know either,” Jeongguk says. He points at their interlocked hands, frowning. “This is just nice.”
“I think it’s nice too.”
“I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Me neither.”
“Do you want to kiss me?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps we should have that nap.”
They do. Jeongguk lies facing the wall, breathing steadily. Hoseok lies on his back and watches shadows creep across the ceiling. His eyes sort of hurt. It’s only eight o’clock. All of existence is condensed to these facts.
“Ask me again what kind of dimension this is,” Hoseok whispers, when he thinks Jeongguk is asleep.
“What kind of dimension is this?” Jeongguk whispers back.
Hoseok twists onto his side. He brushes the hair from Jeongguk’s neck and touches his skin with the tip of his finger. Gently, like touching glass you know is there. “The right one,” he says.