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“Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.”
—Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
Mark calls Donghyuck as soon as he gets the email.
“Dude, my heart is, like, in my ass.”
“As expected of Mark Lee.” Donghyuck is on dinner break at English hagwon, staring into the thermos of kimchi jjigae his mother packed for him. He doesn’t like the way his spoon trembles in his hand, so he sweeps the eraser shavings off his desk and sets it down. “Big of heart and big of ass.”
“Right back at you. I’m on the applicant portal thingy now, by the way. It says I need to sign in with my application ID, but I have no clue what—”
“Check your email,” Donghyuck says evenly. Gross, his palms are sweating. He wipes them on his pants with a frown. “You must’ve gotten a confirmation message when you applied. Maybe your ID is in there.”
The faint clickety-clack of Mark’s absurdly old keyboard, then: “Donghyuck, you’re a genius.”
“I know.”
“Okay, I’m in. It says, There have been updates to your admissions status. God, I’m seriously gonna puke. Once I click this link it’s all over. One way or another.”
Dinner break is drawing to a close; students who left to get their meals from the nearby convenience store are filtering back in. Donghyuck’s food is still untouched, his stomach in knots. He squeezes his eyes shut. “It’ll be alright, Mark. No matter what happens.”
“You’re right. I gotta just go for it. Deep breath, here we—Holy fuck, I got in!”
And Donghyuck makes himself smile, as if Mark will know if he doesn’t.
“I knew you would. Congratulations, hyung.”
✩
Missing Mark is only natural. After all, he and Donghyuck have always been together, ever since that fateful day on the playground outside their apartment complex when they argued over the tire swing for ten minutes straight before deciding to be best friends.
Jeno and Jaemin came next, then Renjun and Chenle and finally Jisung, and so their life arranged itself into sevens. Of course, they always knew Mark would graduate first, hop on a plane and leave their little island for a school on the peninsula. Selfishly, Donghyuck half-hoped he would settle for one in Jeju-do, but Mark had his sights set on Seoul, and that’s exactly where he went.
He left on a frigid Thursday in February. They couldn’t all accompany him to the airport, so they gathered on the sidewalk outside his apartment, huddled beside a van sagging beneath the weight of nineteen years stuffed into suitcases and cardboard boxes. The whole affair was unbearably awkward. They’d never said goodbye to one another.
Instead, Chenle insisted Mark buy them all university sweaters, and Jaemin rambled about stranger danger and proper eating habits, and Jisung said, “Don’t forget about us,” a shade too earnestly.
“I’ll be back for summer break,” Mark said. “It’s not like I’m dying.”
“You better not,” Donghyuck muttered, and waited until he was back home to stare at the ceiling and wonder how their life could possibly rearrange itself into sixes.
Missing Mark is only natural, but the way Donghyuck misses him seems anything but. Though he would never admit it, he feels like everything began that day on the playground, like their world only grew around them and left Mark-and-Donghyuck untouched at the center for all these years.
But he still has his five other best friends, and his family—and besides, he’s a senior in high school now. He throws himself into his studies and allows himself to call Mark no more than once a day, to miss him for no more than a minute after they hang up. (The second rule always ends up broken.)
“I’m applying to Sungkyunkwan too,” he says from his bedroom floor, his cheek squished against the open Korean history textbook he’s using as a pillow. “I’ll join you soon, you’ll see. Just wait.”
“We can room together,” Mark suggests, because he’s too kind to say You might not even get in.
“Sure. But you’ll have to put up with me leaving the lights on at night.”
“I don’t know how you can sleep like that, honestly—”
“It’s scary otherwise!”
“You always leave the window open, too.”
“It gets stuffy!”
“At our last sleepover it was freezing—”
And Donghyuck wants to wake up every day and argue with Mark again and again, like they did when they met, like they used to on the walk to school each morning. He wants it so badly that he can hardly stand the sight of himself in the mirror.
A year is not so long in the grand scheme of things. He can endure it, he thinks, for just a year longer.
❀
SPRING.
“Did you hear?” Jeno asks absentmindedly, the words slightly distorted around the pen he’s nibbling. Disgusting habit, really. “Yoo Jimin got into SNU. Early admission.”
The high school seniors of their group are scattered about Donghyuck’s bedroom, in various stages of pretending to study—from Renjun, with a highlighter in hand and his book still propped open before him, to Donghyuck, who’s abandoned the ruse entirely and is curled up like a boiled shrimp in his bed, staring at his phone. The sleeve of his discarded sweater creases his cheek.
“How could I not hear?” Jaemin sighs, turning a lazy circle in his swivel chair. “My mom’s been talking my ear off about it.”
“She’s so lucky. She doesn’t have to spend the rest of the year worrying.”
“Must be nice…”
“Yah, Lee Donghyuck.” Renjun grabs a crumpled up worksheet and lobs it directly at Donghyuck’s face. Well, he tries to, anyway; Donghyuck is certain of it. It lands instead in the crook of his elbow, where he promptly crushes it just for the hell of it. “You’re not paying attention.”
“So? Neither are you guys.”
“Yeah, but we’re all not paying attention about the same thing. You’re over there in your own little world.”
Jeno, who’s sitting at the foot of the bed, twists around and cranes his neck to catch a glimpse of Donghyuck’s phone screen. “He’s busy Internet stalking Mark’s college friends again.”
“I’m not stalking,” Donghyuck protests. His joints pop an embarrassing amount as he sits up indignantly. “I’m just looking.” (Kang Mina’s Instagram feed, he’s discovered, is absurdly aesthetic, color-coordinated with impossible cohesion. Seriously, does she search up the trendy cafés she visits beforehand to make sure they’re decorated in earth tones?) “Mark tells all these stories about them and I just—want to be able to picture them, I guess.”
This is mostly true, or at least it used to be. They’ve always gone to the sort of school where everybody knows everybody, and it pains Donghyuck not to recognize the names that come out of Mark’s mouth for the first time. To imagine that their life is no longer expanding around them, but branching off into fractions.
Now, there’s Mina and her immaculate feed, the latest addition to which features her arm slung around Mark’s middle, the two of them posing by the Han River.
There’s Kim Yerim, a drama major who ended up in three of Mark’s classes by pure coincidence. You’d love her, Mark said, because that’s how he explains everything new—through Donghyuck’s eyes.
Then there’s Kang Daniel, the RA on Mark’s floor whose name is always followed by a high-pitched giggle, and Kim Jungwoo, Mark’s angelic roommate without the faintest SNS footprint, and…
Honestly, Donghyuck knows that he’s pathetic. He doesn’t need the gentle weight of his friends’ eyes on him to tell him so.
“I mean, don’t you guys care at all who Mark’s getting tangled up with out there in the city?” he whines, petulant.
“He has a point,” Renjun muses. “Mark decided to be friends with us, after all. So it’s not like he has the best judgement.”
“Exactly!”
Donghyuck’s mother enters then, bearing a platter of sliced Asian pears and a strongly worded reminder to focus on their studies. As they resume, Donghyuck leaves sticky little fingerprints of fruit juice at the corners of glossy textbook pages and resists the urge to turn and shake his friends’ shoulders, to demand, Is it just me who can’t stand it? Is it just me who’s dying?
It’s only another ten months, after all. Even shorter till summer break.
“So I sort of got a summer internship?”
The news comes while Donghyuck is sitting at his kitchen table, his phone lying before him on speaker mode, one hand shoveling his mom’s kimbap into his mouth and the other marking up his little brother’s math homework. They’ll go over it together once he gets home from taekwondo. “How do you sort of get an internship?” he asks with a frown that Mark can’t see. (They tried video calling a few times the week after Mark left, but it was way too awkward. They never knew where to look.)
“I mean, I did get one. It’s just so sudden! It’s at this little indie publishing house; apparently a spot opened up unexpectedly and my professor recommended me…”
Suddenly the kimbap sticks like glue in Donghyuck’s mouth. “So you’re staying in Seoul for the summer?”
“Yeah. I already asked the school and I should be able to stay in the dorms. I think it’ll be really fun, Donghyuck—I mean, I’ll be mostly doing, like, administrative stuff and copyediting, but it’s cool to think about something I worked on getting published, you know? And I really like the place. They produce a lot of feminist literature and stuff.”
“It’s not easy to land something like that in your first year,” Donghyuck hears himself say. Somehow an errant blot of red marker has blossomed on his brother’s homework; he holds it to the light to make out the pencil marks beneath. “But it doesn’t surprise me that you managed it.”
He can practically hear Mark blushing on the other end as he swerves inelegantly around the compliment. “Um, anyway, you have to visit, okay? Since I won’t be coming home.”
“Visit you? In Seoul?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“I don’t know.” Donghyuck struggles to imagine himself against the backdrop of the bustling city he’s come to think of as Mark’s. Seeing the room where he’s been staying, meeting the friends he’s been talking about. Contextualizing Mark in his new life. “I’ll still have hagwon five days a week. This summer is the most crucial period before the CSAT, you know. Plus even a short trip costs money, and my mom expects me to help with the kids and everything…”
“Oh. Yeah, of course.”
Guilt surges up Donghyuck’s throat like bile. “I’ll try, though.”
“Totally, just let me know. And I can…I can pay for your airfare. If you want.”
“Mark, I told you before—”
“I know, I know! It’s just—I’d be so sad not seeing you for the whole summer. So helping you visit is, like, a personal expense. Since it benefits me too.”
Mark is clearly desperate to avoid a fight. He’s lucky. For the first time in a while, Donghyuck can’t find it in himself to raise one.
“Like I said, hyung, I’ll try. But I should go now; my brother will be home soon.”
“Okay. I, uh—” Mark audibly swallows. “I hope you make it.”
“I hope so, too.”
☼
SUMMER.
The first sign that the universe hates Lee Donghyuck: he has a final exam on his birthday.
He was studying last night when Mark texted, right at midnight. As usual, his phone was set to “do not disturb”, so he didn’t see it until this morning when he was preparing for school.
milk lee
waaa,,, you’re really becoming an adult! somehow i feel more touched than i did on my own birthday? kind of strange ㅠㅠ anyway, fighting for this year, donghyuck-ah!!
But Donghyuck’s head was heavy with too little sleep, stuffed with cotton and buzzing with nerves, so he did the only sensible thing he could and swiped away the notification without opening it. He’ll have more mental capacity once his exams are over.
Speaking of which. The second sign that the universe hates Lee Donghyuck: the classroom AC is broken. His uniform tie is strangling, his pencil slippery between his sweat-slick fingers as he bubbles in his answers. They’re not allowed to wear wristwatches during exams and his teacher is definitely side-eyeing the sheer amount of times he’s glanced up at the clock on the wall, but whatever; he needs to maintain his pace. He writes the time faintly in the upper-right corner of each new page, his heart thumping twice for every single tick of the second hand.
Afterward, Yoo Jimin catches him by the door, her backpack dangling by one strap and her long black hair swishing behind her in slow motion somehow. “Hey, Donghyuck!” she beams. They were lab partners once and she’s friendly like that. “How’d you do?”
“Okay, I think,” Donghyuck replies honestly as they exit into a hallway teeming with students. He’s still a bit shaky, the exam jitters sloughing off of him in waves. The relief hasn’t set in yet. “I had to guess on a few of the multiple choice ones, but I’m pretty confident about my short answer responses.”
“Really?” Jimin’s eyebrows shoot up in admiration. “That’s so cool. I always freeze up on the short answers. I can’t organize my thoughts quickly enough.” She must catch the skeptical look Donghyuck gives her, because she snorts and says, “Hey, I can struggle too, you know?”
Which makes Donghyuck feel like a jerk. “Of course. But I’m sure you did great anyway.” He draws to an awkward halt by his locker, leaning against the cool metal just to clear his head. “Congrats on SNU, by the way.”
“Thank you.” Jimin blushes like she hasn’t already heard it a million times. Or maybe that’s exactly what’s so embarrassing about it.
They wish each other a happy summer and part ways. Donghyuck gathers his things from his locker, acutely conscious of the weight of his cell phone in his pocket as he shuffles toward the school exit. Maybe he’ll text Mark on the way home, tell him that—
Jisung is crying on the school’s front steps.
Donghyuck is by his side in an instant. The crowd of homebound students parts around them like river water around a stone, only slowing the slightest bit to stare. Assholes. “Jisung, what’s wrong?”
Red and puffy-faced, Jisung sobs out his reply—something about how he ran out of time on his physics exam and had to leave one of the responses blank or something. He’s crying so much that it’s mostly unintelligible, but Donghyuck just nods along and rubs soothing circles into his back.
“Baby,” he murmurs, sweeter than he used to when they were little and he meant it as an insult, “it’ll be alright.”
“No it won’t.”
And Donghyuck’s lungs flood with envy. The ugliest emotion of all. Envy over the ability to cry in public, to catastrophize, to admit that it hurts—what the fuck is wrong with him? No wonder the universe hates him. “Listen, why don’t we call the others and get something to eat?” he suggests. It feels dirty, like he’s just saying it to assuage his guilt, but he presses on. “Hyung’s treat. You didn’t eat much at lunch, right?”
“I can’t,” Jisung sniffles. “I have tutoring. I still have another final tomorrow.”
“What about afterward? I know it’ll be a bit late, but I’m sure your mom will understand. Doyoung hyung can drive us.”
“I don’t know…”
“We can go to that jjampong place you and Chenle like.”
“Okay,” Jisung acquiesces. He smiles a bit, still looking cute and pretty even though he’s snotty and gross. It’s his superpower. “I’ll really miss you next year, hyung. All of you.”
Donghyuck wraps his arms around Jisung’s shoulders and gives a little squeeze. “Don’t think about that just yet, okay?”
Jisung’s mom calls then. He mumbles a quiet, “Happy birthday,” before he leaves, much to Donghyuck’s surprise. He’d completely forgotten.
“Thank you, Sung-ah. I’ll see you later.”
Donghyuck only responds to Mark’s text after flopping into bed that night, the smell of oil from the restaurant still clinging to his hair. His mom wouldn’t approve, but he’ll shower in the morning.
full sun
thx hyung <3 sorry for the late reply. fighting for both of us, makgeolli !!
It’s read in an instant, replied to with a cheery pink bear sticker the next. With a frown, Donghyuck realizes that Mark also transferred him 60,000 won, the attached note containing nothing but an airplane emoji.
He sends the money back, rolls over, and goes to sleep.
☽
FALL.
Autumn roars to life in Jeju like a flame in oxygen. The Sunday of seasons. Everything fades into the crinkle of leaves and the flutter of test prep booklets, and every conversation spins circles around the CSAT before getting yanked down the drain.
“Send me pictures,” Mark implores. “There aren’t as many trees in Seoul.”
In Donghyuck’s dreams, the trees shed their foliage all at once, shivering straight from the resplendence of spring to the nudity of winter. You’ve changed, the Mark of his dreams says, and Donghyuck shakes his head in protest. I’m still the same. It’s you. It’s everything around us.
He sleeps at his desk more often than in his bed. In November, he takes an exam he’s been preparing for his entire life without a trace of nerves, but his hands shake for hours afterward.
The leaves fall. Donghyuck is starting to wonder how much longer he can bear it.
❄
WINTER.
Donghyuck waits an hour before calling Mark.
During that time, he paces the apartment so many times that he’s sure the downstairs neighbors will complain, pulls a container of kimchi fried rice from the fridge, organizes his closet, returns the rice to the fridge without eating it, and lies in bed. All the while, the two decision letters on his kitchen table leer up at him, the folds of the white envelopes looking like a pair of sharp and angry mouths.
He rises from bed. Sits at the kitchen table. Dials Mark’s number and listens to it ring.
And ring.
And ring.
Okay, he thinks over the sound of Mark’s voicemail message, that’s fine. That’s to be expected. Mark is probably studying in the library, or working his part-time job, or doing whatever university students do that keeps them from attending to their childhood best friends’ mounting panic attacks. Donghyuck really can’t drag this on any longer. He’s supposed to meet up with the others soon.
In for 4, hold for 7, out for 8, Mark would say. Donghyuck splays his palms against the table and inhales for 4, holds for 7, and exhales for 8.
Then, with only his breath to accompany him, he opens the letters.
“Guess what, motherfuckers?”
Only Jeno bothers to look up as Donghyuck bursts into Chenle’s living room, where the entire group (minus Mark, plus Daegal) is assembled. He even gives one of his adorable eye-smiles. God, this is why he’s Donghyuck’s favorite.
“Your boy actually did it!” Donghyuck says with another shout, waving his acceptance papers in the air.
Jisung’s nose crinkles disdainfully. “Since when are you our boy?”
“Respect your elders, Sung-ah,” Jaemin chides, then reaches over to pinch Donghyuck’s cheeks. “This is a momentous occasion. My baby is leaving the nest!”
“Is that what you call respecting your elders?” Donghyuck grumbles, swatting Jaemin’s hands away. “I’m two months older than you.”
“But you’re still my baby.”
In the end, it’s not such a big deal—at least not on the outside. Everyone offers their congratulations, they order pizza, and it’s not until they’re taking a break after their third round of Kartrider that Renjun leans subtly into Donghyuck’s space and murmurs, “Have you told him yet?”, his voice low.
The grin plastered across Donghyuck’s face falters a bit. “Not yet.” He doesn’t mention his unanswered call from earlier that day.
“He’ll be so happy for you, you know.”
“You think?”
“Of course. That’s what best friends are for, right?”
Donghyuck wills his eye not to twitch. “Right.”
With a snort, Renjun casts a slow, roaming gaze over the room, and Donghyuck follows his line of sight—from Chenle and Jisung bickering over the last slice of pizza (not for themselves; they’re both insisting that the other take it), to Jaemin feigning interest in Jeno’s monologue about bicycles, to Daegal tearing the stuffing from one of her toys.
“It’s so weird,” Renjun sighs. “I still can’t imagine leaving.”
“I, uh—” Donghyuck stumbles to his feet, nearly tripping over himself in the process. The pressure behind his eyes is building and he needs to get out of here before he makes things weird. “I should go home and get ready. My mom wants to have, like, a celebratory dinner.”
“So soon?” Jaemin pouts, at the same time that Chenle whines, “We’re not invited?” Renjun, for his part, simply raises a judgmental eyebrow. I’m totally not buying it, that eyebrow says, but I’m not saying anything and I expect future compensation for my benevolence.
“Sorry,” Donghyuck says breezily, summoning another smile. I know this, and I love you, his smile tells Renjun’s eyebrow. “I’ll see you guys at school on Monday.”
The bus ride home is lonely. Donghyuck leans his head against the window even though the motion makes his teeth chatter because it just feels more melodramatic that way. It’s only a twenty minute ride, he reminds himself. Once he’s home, he can curl up in bed and cry to his heart’s content for a good hour before his family gets home and he needs to make himself decent for dinner.
He stares at the ceiling as he lets himself into the apartment, trying to keep his tears from flowing through sheer force of gravity, and it takes him a second to process that the TV is on and there are sounds coming from the kitchen. Donghyuck freezes. He’s supposed to be home alone.
Is his day not shitty enough? Does he have to get robbed, too? (Or kidnapped? Killed?)
Also—Donghyuck grabs an umbrella from the coat rack as a poor excuse for a weapon on his way to the kitchen—what kind of robber/kidnapper/killer stops to raid the fridge? And, for that matter, turns the TV on to watch—honestly, Donghyuck doesn’t know what show it is, just that there’s a laugh track and white people emphatically speaking English without subtitles, which is fucking bizarre—
The umbrella drops to the floor with a clatter.
“Mark?”
“Jesus Christ!”
The boy in Donghyuck’s kitchen—who looks exactly like Mark, but can’t possibly be Mark, because Mark is in Seoul—jolts in surprise, narrowly avoiding spilling the large mixing bowl of cake batter in his arms everywhere. If anything, Donghyuck thinks he should be the one in shock, but Mark/Mark’s ghost/Mark’s long-lost twin takes a good ten seconds to recover, clutching his chest with wide eyes.
“Dude,” he wheezes, “you scared the shit out of me. Why do you have an umbrella? It’s not raining, is it?”
“What are you doing here?”
Mark’s gaze jerks back from the window, where he’d been staring as if to catch a glimpse of the rain he somehow missed. (Yeah, it’s definitely the real him. Even if Donghyuck can’t wrap his head around it yet.) “Um, your mom called me,” he explains, setting down the mixing bowl and scratching at his neck awkwardly. “She invited me to dinner. I don’t think she meant it super seriously, but I said I’d come.”
“To dinner,” Donghyuck says faintly. He’s starting to wonder if he fell asleep on the bus.
“Yeah.”
“So you...took a flight here. For dinner.”
“Yeah. Is that okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know.” Mark bites his lip, and for a moment he looks so boyish, so vulnerable, that it sets in all at once that he’s really here. His next words are directed more to the kitchen tile than to Donghyuck. “You never came to visit. It’s been, like—”
“Nine months.” It sounds ridiculous aloud. From the moment they met, until that frigid morning in February when Mark left, they were never apart for even nine days.
“Nine months,” Mark echoes. He shakes his head like he can’t quite believe it either. “Anyway, it was supposed to be a surprise, but your mom said you wouldn’t be home until six and I thought I had more time to get these in the oven—oh, they’re gonna be cupcakes, by the way—”
“Hyung, Sungkyunkwan rejected me.”
Donghyuck didn’t say it when he called his mother, he didn’t say it while he smiled and played games with the others, but he says it now, and it cleaves him clean in two. Maybe this is why he never went to Seoul: something about Mark always unravels the thread holding him together.
“I figured,” Mark admits. “When your mom only mentioned Dong-ah Institute. I knew it was your second choice. But it’s such a good school, Donghyuck-ah, I’m so proud of you—”
Donghyuck crushes Mark into a hug. The embrace serves two functions, namely:
- He can bury his tears in Mark’s shirt.
- He’s been wanting to do this for a very, very long time.
Tentatively, then firmly, Mark’s arms circle Donghyuck’s waist and squeeze tight.
“We’ll be so far apart,” Donghyuck sniffles.
“It’s only an hour by train,” Mark hums, because of course he knows that offhand. “It’s closer than we are now. We’ll be on the same landmass again.”
“Yeah, but…”
“You’ll love your new school, I just know it. You’ll make new friends, and take classes that excite you, and in a year you’ll think, Remember when I wanted to go to SKKU? And you won’t even be able to imagine it.”
Donghyuck’s body goes numb.
The words are supposed to be comforting, and he appreciates them, really, but—but—
“Hyuck-ah? Did I say something wrong?”
“No, it’s just—what you said.” Donghyuck pulls away and leans against the kitchen counter. His throat constricts. “It’s what you’ll do to me.”
For a moment, Mark goes deathly still, and the only sound is that weird Western sitcom in the living room. Then his lower lip wobbles, and he looks so fucking upset that Donghyuck wants to apologize immediately, wants to take back everything he said and the tears he shed and the entire nine months wedged between them. “Donghyuck,” Mark says, uncharacteristically grave. “That’s not true.”
“But you said it yourself.” He doesn’t know why he keeps arguing, why he always makes things worse. “Things will change and we’ll get used to it. We won’t go to the same school anymore, and you’ll be someone I visit instead of someone I live with.”
“Sure, but that’s just growing up. It doesn’t mean we have to grow apart.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Donghyuck,” Mark huffs. For a moment, he looks frustrated, and it’s nice. Familiar. “I literally called off work and flew here so I could bake for you. I’m choosing this. Even if shit changes, you’re still my number one.”
Despite everything, Donghyuck can’t help but snort at that one. (Then immediately wipe his nose, because it’s still a bit runny from crying and that was honestly kinda gross.) “Your number one? How romantic of you, Mark Lee.”
“Well, it’s embarrassing when you put it like that…”
“You’re literally the one who put it like that first.”
“I’m trying to be sweet and you always have to make it weird!”
“Yet you’re still choosing me.”
“I’m seriously reconsidering.”
“Hyung.” Donghyuck doesn’t want to bring the mood back down now that they’re finally laughing again, but he needs to say it. “I’m sorry I pushed you away.”
Mark’s face softens. It’s striking, suddenly, how grown up he looks. “It’s okay, Donghyuck. I mean, I won’t pretend I wasn’t hurt, but—you were having a hard time, right?”
“Oh my god, the worst.” It’s such a relief to admit it. “Like, the ninth circle of hell is probably just a simulation of being a senior in high school. I thought I was going to die.”
“But you did it.” Mark smiles. He’s blushing, probably on the brink of fainting from the amount of cheesy things he’s said in such a short time frame. “I meant it when I said I was proud of you. Now help me finish baking these?”
The cupcakes come out underbaked the first time and burnt the second. They scrape the tops off and eat them anyway. Donghyuck’s family comes home and they go to dinner.
Mark spends the night; he’ll fly back to Seoul the next morning. As they bicker over how many lights to leave on and how far to open the window, Donghyuck lets hope flare bright in his chest, illuminating every run-down nook and cranny of his heart. Tomorrow he’ll make a joke about Mark’s noodle hair from freshman year, and Mark will threaten to choke him, and they’ll love each other. Further down the line, Donghyuck will get better about texting and calling and visiting—all six of them—and the missing won’t ache so deeply and they’ll still love each other. Just like that.
♡
SPRING.
Change isn’t such a bad thing, Donghyuck thinks.
For instance, change is why he’s not in high school anymore. Any complaint he could make about university is easily outweighed by the simple fact that it isn’t high school.
Change is also why Mark kisses him hello and goodbye now. It’s why they’ve made a habit of video calling. And it’s why they don’t fight as much when Donghyuck spends the night, because they’ve finally settled on a night light that satisfies them both.
The world keeps branching off around them, but even the most jagged lines can be followed back to the center.