Chapter Text
It’s Heeseung’s last day of being in love with Kim Sunoo, and the boy has just asked him to be his first kiss.
This complicates things for a couple of reasons.
1) It’ll certainly throw a wrench in the whole “Getting over your best friend who you’ve been in love with for pretty much forever” plan.
2) It is a known fact— to all parties involved— that Park Sunghoon has been pining over Sunoo for years.
So when Sunoo bursts into his and Sunghoon’s shared dorm room to proposition him, Heeseung doesn’t really know what to think, other than that perhaps it wasn’t such a wise idea to make the boy a copy of their key.
“Please clarify what you mean by that,” Heeseung says stupidly. Sunoo gives him an odd look.
“Clarify what I mean by asking you to kiss me?”
“Yes, that.”
Sunoo sighs, shuffling his right foot in a little rhythm he learned during the two months of tap class he took in fourth grade. His shoe makes a swishing noise as it brushes against the carpet.
Backward, forward, step. Backward, forward, step.
“Well, I’m in university now and I still haven’t been kissed, let alone been in a relationship,” Sunoo says pensively, chewing on his bottom lip. “I guess I’m tired of waiting around.”
Heeseung nods like this makes perfect sense, but it really doesn’t. Sunoo has never had to ‘wait around.’ He’s had plenty of admirers, plenty of opportunities. Hell, if he wanted to, he could have had a long string of lovers by now.
So what has he been waiting for?
“You could kiss anyone,” Heeseung tells him pointedly.
“Okay,” Sunoo shrugs. “You fall under the umbrella of ‘anyone,’ don’t you?”
“It’s your first kiss,” Heeseung says slowly, his mind spinning. “If it doesn’t turn out the way you’ve been imagining, you might never look at me the same.”
Sunoo smiles. “And in what way would that be?”
Heeseung manages to process the question, but just barely. He’s having a difficult time processing anything right now, nor has he fully come to terms with the fact that Kim Sunoo wants to kiss him.
“As a friend,” he answers shakily. “As someone you trust.”
“You’ll always be someone I trust, Heeseungie.” Sunoo’s voice is soft; Heeseung feels cradled by it. “And I think it’ll be everything I imagined it to be.”
His heart is in his throat, he’s choking around his own pulse. “When were you thinking?”
“No time like the present, right?”
“What, now?” Heeseung asks incredulously.
“Why not?” There’s a challenge in Sunoo’s tone. He doesn’t know if it’s daring him to back away, or to take a step forward.
Heeseung looks about helplessly, but there’s nothing around to save him. Sunghoon is in class. They’re completely alone, and Sunoo is coming closer like a leopard slinking towards an unsuspecting gazelle.
Heeseung’s sitting cross-legged on the lower bunk, hands buried in his sheets. There’s no escape route, no space to back away.
Everything has happened far too quickly for him to catch up— Why now? What now?
It takes a moment for him to realize that Sunoo is shaking his head, suddenly looking hesitant. For a split second, fear zings through his body as Heeseung anticipates him pulling away, calling the whole thing off before it even has had the chance to sink in. Instead, he hears a familiar phrase:
“Tell me something,” Sunoo says quietly.
“What, Sunoo?” he replies with what little breath he has left.
“I need to know for sure, or I won’t ask this of you. What do you want, Hee?”
He stills.
What does he want?
The question is laughable, but maybe Sunoo doesn’t know it. He’s standing over him, and Heeseung is sitting down, and their bodies are angled towards each other, leaning in, staring, waiting, and Heeseung takes a deep breath and musters up all of his courage to finally say:
“I want you.”
And that’s all that he needs to say.
Sunoo’s body falls forward, his hands clinging to the edge of the bed frame above him. He hangs there for a moment, an eternal pause, before diving in for the kill.
It’s a soft death; just a light touch of lips, a whisper of a kiss, and then Sunoo’s withdrawing. It’s over in a second.
Their eyes search one another. Neither of them speak.
Heeseung doesn’t tell Sunoo that it was also his first, even though it should be fairly obvious. He’s always told Sunoo everything, and the boy would be the first to know about any such milestones if they had already occurred.
But whether Sunoo knows or not, he doesn’t bring attention to it. So he doesn’t tell Sunoo that this was a first kiss for both of them, and he doesn’t tell Sunoo that he would have waited forever to have that first with him.
Heeseung doesn’t think his plan would have ever panned out anyway. There is no getting over Kim Sunoo. His is the kind of love that aches— but without it, there wouldn’t be the relief of painlessness.
Just an empty void. The sense of something irretrievable that has been lost.
Maybe it’s this thought that compels Heeseung forward. Maybe it’s the idea that this may very well never happen again that plants his mouth over the other boy’s once more.
Maybe it would be too cliche to say that he feels like he’s died and been reborn.
But it would be fitting to say that when Heeseung finally knows what it is to kiss Sunoo, it feels like nothing else that has come before has ever truly mattered.
Because Sunoo gives. He gives everything, lending meaning to something that might be empty for him, but holds everything for Heeseung.
And Heeseung knows how close he is to letting go. How the feeling of a sigh down his throat reignites something in his chest that never truly had a chance of dwindling.
It happens the moment Sunoo reaches up to cradle his cheek. His fingers are velvet, the bittersweet embrace of a siren luring its prey down to the depths.
It’s almost poetic, how such a simple gesture can break his heart.
How one motion, the slightest movement of a hand can mean that every thread in Heeseung’s body is unraveling one by one at the speed of light, so that within that single, confined moment, he has been reduced to a long and endless trail of aimless desires.
It’s in that same moment that Sunghoon walks through the door.
***
They met Park Sunghoon in their sophomore year of high school.
He wasn’t new exactly, but he essentially was, since most of his freshman experience had been consumed with missed days due to figure skating practice.
Later, when they’d ask him why he wasn’t doing it anymore, he’d just shrug with a wistful smile. “Didn’t pan out.”
It was actually Sunoo who met him first, and Heeseung who saw him second.
He was waiting at their lunch spot underneath the willow tree on the edge of the lawn, when he spotted Sunoo stumbling his way— sporting frighteningly bloody knees, fingers threaded with those of a boy he didn’t know.
It was a surprising sight, especially considering Sunoo wasn’t the touchiest person with those he was close with, let alone a stranger. The other boy’s cheeks were flushed, a bashful tilt to his lips. From what Heeseung could see, he was allowing himself to be dragged along without any complaints.
“This is Park Sunghoon,” Sunoo announced cheerfully, once they came to a stop before him. The sun was right in his eyes, causing him to squint up at them rather stupidly. “He just saved me from the utter humiliation of being picked last for volleyball, and so I’ve decided that we’re adopting him.”
Heeseung eyed them both up and down.
“I don’t know if saved is the right word, seeing how you've skinned yourself,” he remarked.
“He’s surprisingly good,” Sunghoon spoke up with a grin. The grin turned into a smirk. “Especially when he’s got a competent team captain.”
An introvert with a streak of mischief, Heeseung noted.
“He can’t be all that good, or he’d still be intact.”
To his amusement, Sunghoon burst into wheezing, doubled-over laughter.
“You two better sit down.” Heeseung turned on Sunoo, “Entertain our guest while I get a band-aid before you bleed to death.”
“Okay, okay,” Sunoo giggled, the pair collapsing into the grass.
Before he got up to head over to the nurse’s office, Heeseung noticed a faint look of relief come over Sunghoon’s face— almost as if he’d been expecting to be turned away at the very last second.
It wasn’t difficult, integrating a third person into their long established bond of two. Neither of them were particularly phased by it. Hell, even Heeseung, who by then was well aware of the extent of his feelings for Sunoo, didn’t find the addition threatening.
Something about them just worked. Like another layer of highlights and shadows overtop a painting that had already been believed to be complete.
Like an additional piece of a puzzle without borders.
Like a sentimental photograph turned three-dimensional.
Three years later, and they’re still inseparable— that much hasn’t changed. But something has been altered, somewhere beneath the surface. Every day brings a new twist and turn, like an ever revolving kaleidoscope spinning through infinite arrays of fractals.
Right now, it feels like they’re suspended between one vision and the next. One more shift, and the formation might change completely. Different colors, different patterns.
The dilemma: to stay locked into place, or to make the turn— and risk rewriting the image forever?
***
“You kissed him,” Heeseung hears from above.
He stares up at the wooden slats of the bed frame. Between the gaps, he sees the mattress shift beneath Sunghoon’s weight as the boy rolls over. He sighs.
“He asked me to,” he says, as if this is all that he has to say on the matter.
“I know. He told me.”
Heeseung waits for him to say something else, but nothing comes.
“It didn’t mean anything.”
“Don’t be naive, Heeseung,” Sunghoon scoffs. “He wanted it to be you. That alone means that it meant something.”
“He asked me because I’m safe for him. Not like…”
Not like you. Not like someone he could actually want.
There’s a creaking noise by his ear, and he realizes it’s Sunghoon descending the rickety ladder propped against their beds. He hears the muffled landing of the boy’s feet against the carpeted floor.
“It’s always been you two. I only came after.” Heeseung doesn’t want to listen, can’t bear that melancholic whisper. “There’s no prize for last place, is there?”
He continues staring straight upwards. It would be no use to try to explain it— he’s never been eloquent, not when it matters.
He wouldn’t know the words to properly explain how he feels the exact reverse; that it was Sunghoon who came in and flipped the script, how Heeseung can’t even find it in him to be bitter about it, because he understands.
Sunghoon is competent, attractive, playfully enigmatic. Sunoo was intoxicated from the very first moment, and how can he be upset when he was the exact same way?
He can still see the boy’s silhouette in his peripheral vision, but is afraid to turn to meet it head on. “Sunghoon…”
“Kiss me, Heeseung.”
His brain short-circuits.
“What?”
“Prove to me that I’m not the odd one out. That I still mean something to both of you.”
Heeseung sits up slowly, like Sunghoon is an animal that will be spooked if he makes too sudden of a movement. In the dark, he can’t make out the expression on his face.
He has to be joking. He has to be. Sunghoon is not making any sense. None of this makes any sense. It all feels like a scene he’s acted out before, rewound and recast with a new character.
“Hoon, I know you’re upset,” he says lowly. “But this isn’t going to solve anything. This isn’t what you want to do.”
He hears more than sees Sunghoon move, the fabric of his pajamas rustling as he pads over to the wall to flick on the light.
The brightness floods the room, stinging Heeseung’s eyes with its intensity. He closes them briefly, before opening them into slits. A hand grabs ahold of him tightly, and the boy is now standing before him in full view.
Sunghoon’s gaze is bruising, ugly. His lips form the shape of a sneer he doesn’t mean, his fingers around Heeseung’s wrist blossoming florets of red. He leans in close, his words steaming against Heeseung’s skin.
“Don’t tell me what I do or don’t want,” he says through his teeth, before his eyes flutter shut.
Kissing Sunoo feels like falling apart.
When Sunghoon’s mouth slots against his, messy, wet, reckless, calculated— Heeseung is consumed by the overwhelming sense of becoming whole.
***
It was a balmy summer evening, and their parents had just granted them grudging permission to spend the night in their treehouse.
Though it was suspended right above the fence that bordered both their properties, the tree itself was really planted in Heeseung’s yard. But they called it theirs, because it had first been Sunoo’s idea to actually make use of it, and it had functioned as their hideout ever since.
Heeseung carried up their rolled up sleeping bags and the large basket containing Sunoo’s custom snack arrangement before returning to lift Sunoo onto his back and ascend once more (the boy always complained that the rungs of the ladder left him with splinters in his hands).
The day petered out quickly, leaving them with pitch black sky and the white noise of crickets for company.
Outside their treehouse window— which was really just a roughly square-shaped hole— a small swarm of fireflies were somersaulting through the foliage. Their luminescent bodies were like little lanterns, little flecks of molten gold.
Heeseung watched them in a trance for a while, but his friend had other things on his mind.
Sunoo turned to him, eyes sparkling. Heeseung already anticipated the next words that would spring from his lips.
“Tell me something.”
It had become their routine.
Tell me something: It was a simple phrase, straight and to the point. Sunoo would gaze at him expectantly and say tell me something, and Heeseung would have to deliver some morsel of information, some story about his day, some interesting fact that he had just discovered.
He pursed his lips, wracking his brain for ideas. His eyes drifted outside.
“Did you know that fireflies talk to each other with light? I learned it in class.”
Sunoo frowned, casting a cursory glance towards the floating lights in question. “Those are stars,” he said stubbornly.
Heeseung gaped at him. “How can they be stars? They’re right there. They’re moving around.”
Sunoo stuck his lower lip out.
“Okay,” he caved immediately. “They’re stars.”
“Hee. I have another question.”
“Hm.”
Sunoo’s face was bright. He scooted his sleeping bag until their sides were glued together, the boy’s grown out bangs spilling over Heeseung’s shoulder as he beamed up at him.
“Are you going to be married one day?” Sunoo whispered conspiratorially, like they were trading secrets.
“I don’t know,” Heeseung whispered back. “Probably.”
“Do you love me?”
“Yeah,” Heeseung said.
“I love you, Hee,” Sunoo said sweetly. “You should be with me always, because you loved me first.”
“Okay,” Heeseung agreed easily. “I promise.”
With their index fingers, they sketched x’s onto their palms and shook on it, and then didn’t pull away.
It was Heeseung’s first pact. His first dream. The first seed of what would become his first love.
At the ages of just six and eight, they were naive and full of nonsensical visions of the future. Their words meant almost nothing then, not as they spoke them, and not for a very long time.
They meant almost nothing— until they became almost everything.
***
Sunghoon is already fast asleep when the lights start flashing.
Blink. Blink, blink. Blink.
Heeseung slips out of bed and peers out the window. Their dorm building is constructed in an L-shape formation, with theirs and Sunoo’s room being situated on adjacent sides of the inner corner.
Meaning that if any of them were to be standing right beside their window at the same time, they’d have a clear view of each other.
Sure enough, there Sunoo is, his hand on the light switch. He tilts his head for emphasis, conveying his signaled message once again.
Come.
Sunoo opens at the first knock, as if he’s been waiting by the door. He’s holding a pillow, the one that he can’t sleep without wrapping himself like a koala around. With one hand he pulls Heeseung in by his shirt front, pushing him into the room.
“Sunghoon’s knocked out?” he asks perfunctorily.
“Like a log. A log that snores.”
Sunoo exhales loudly through his nose. “Sometimes I forget about the loneliness, and I’m just grateful for having a room to myself.”
“Sometimes I forget how nice the company can be, and I’m just jealous you have parents who’ll shell out for a single.”
“There was no one else I’d want to room with. It’s not my fault you two entered university a year ahead and left me in the dust.”
“That’s what you get for being younger,” Heeseung tousles his hair fondly.
“You still could’ve ditched him this year and been my roommate instead,” Sunoo jokes.
Heeseung rolls his eyes, but he knows that Sunoo is kind of right.
He could have, but he hadn’t. It’s some solace to know that he’s not so helplessly in love that he’d drop everything and run to move in with Sunoo. Of course, it helps that Sunghoon is not a bad roommate either.
Though with the current state of things, that particular line of thought has him squirming.
“What did you call me for?” he asks. Sunoo shrugs, situating himself so that he’s lying down in the middle of the floor, hugging the pillow to his chest.
“Nothing in particular. Couldn’t sleep.”
Heeseung nods, plopping himself onto the traffic-cone orange beanie bag by the wall. It had been an impulse buy— Sunoo had dragged him to the furniture store insisting that he needed more color to spice the place up. Heeseung had jokingly pointed to the neon lump of a chair, and voila. Here it was.
“I have to tell you something, actually.” Heeseung studies his slippers. “About Sunghoon.”
“Hm?” Sunoo wiggles closer to him. “What about Sunghoon?”
Heeseung suddenly feels just as neon as his seat, too visible, too easily perceived. He wishes he could vanish for a moment, camouflage with his surroundings so that Sunoo won’t be able to look at him.
“He kissed me. Or, I kissed him.” He sucks in a breath, holds it. “We kissed each other.”
“I see.” Sunoo doesn’t even miss a beat.
“He was upset about what he saw the other day.”
“Hm.”
“I— he asked me to. I don’t know what his reasoning was, but…” He pauses, trying to decipher the expression on the other boy’s face. “Are you upset?” Sunoo doesn’t look upset.
“No,” Sunoo says. “Not at all.”
“I really don’t know what he meant by it,” Heeseung says honestly. “It seemed like a rash impulse. I think he resents me a little at the moment.”
Sunoo’s voice comes muffled, and he realizes the pillow has been moved to smother his face.
“I don’t think he does, Hee. I don’t see why he would.”
“He loves you, you know.” Heeseung doesn’t think he needs to point this out. Sunoo has never been one to be oblivious, but everything has felt disconnected over these last few days. He doesn’t know what he knows anymore, nor can he fathom the extent of what anyone else knows.
Sunoo slowly sits up, rises to his knees. He shuffles over to where Heeseung is sitting, until they’re facing each other directly.
“He loves you too,” Sunoo says, his face earnest. “We both do.”
Heeseung thinks he’s missing the point. It feels out of character, but there’s no way that he would knowingly be implying what he is. What Sunghoon feels for Heeseung is worlds apart from what he feels for Sunoo. And as for Sunoo’s feelings…
He pushes the thought out of his head. There’s no use dwelling on something that can’t happen, not even when Sunoo kissed him first. Not even when Sunoo is looking at him like that.
Not even when he hadn’t noticed when exactly their faces had gotten so close.
They’re breaths apart.
A single breath.
The world expands and collapses in on itself, and Heeseung is ready to be taken apart once more, even if it leaves him un-mendable. As much as he yearns to be whole, he will gladly live in fragments if this is what it feels like to be shattered.
“I don’t know how to be someone that’s loved,” he says shakily.
“Oh, but you’ve been doing such a wonderful job already,” Sunoo whispers, and kisses him.
Heeseung thinks about time often. Of the possibility of its non-linearity, of the concept of all events existing simultaneously on some fabric of space.
Everything that has happened will come about, and everything that will happen has already passed, and everything that is happening right this second has been happening all along, and even if none of these thoughts are making any sense, it’s some comfort to imagine that maybe he has been loving and kissing Sunoo his whole life—
And that even once this moment expires, it will still continue to happen, and he will still be kissing Sunoo in this small, self-contained vacuum of a memory, and Sunoo will be kissing him back.
He pulls away with a gasp and presses his forehead to Sunoo’s, his mouth searching for air.
“Tell me that it’s only me,” he breathes. “Tell me that it’ll only be us.” Heeseung feels like a fool, even as he’s pleading. “Tell me what you want, Sunoo.”
Don’t tell me what I do or don’t want.
Heeseung’s a coward. A hypocrite. Sunghoon’s words echo in his head. The memory of him is seared onto his mouth.
He wants to scrub it away, replace it with all things Sunoo. He wants to feel it again. He doesn’t know what he wants, and he’s asking, begging Sunoo to tell him instead.
Sunoo’s face is unreadable. Instead of answering right away, he delicately settles into Heeseung's lap, their combined weight sinking them into the cushion. He curls up against Heeseung’s chest, turns his face inward.
“What was it like, kissing him?” Sunoo mumbles into his collar.
The question surprises him. He hadn’t thought about it until now, or rather, hadn’t allowed himself to dwell on it.
“Different,” he says truthfully. “It was different.”
‘Different good, or different bad?’ he can imagine Sunoo asking next.
But he doesn’t ask. Heeseung doesn’t know what his answer would be, anyway.
“If someone told you it hurts less to lose one thing you love, so long as you get to keep another, would you believe them?”
Sunoo’s voice sounds wet, but Heeseung can’t feel any tears on the fabric of his shirt. He tightens his hold on the boy all the same, as much of an effort to comfort him as it is to comfort himself.
This question takes longer for him to think about.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I guess that depends on what you mean by ‘to lose,’ and how you define ‘to keep.’”
Dampness seeps through to his chest. Sunoo is trembling between his hands.
“I don’t want to lose either of you. Does that make me selfish?”
Heeseung doesn’t speak.
Time spills across the floor.
He’s kissing Sunoo. He’s kissing Sunghoon. It began in a tree house twelve years ago, and maybe it began again today.
He’s staring out the window at the fireflies, he’s staring out the window at Sunoo’s blinking light; Sunoo’s skinned his knees and Sunghoon’s embarrassed smile is lighting up his face and they mark their palms with x and shake on it and they’re walking towards him hand in hand.
This is Park Sunghoon, he says,
Tell me something, he says,
Kiss me, Heeseung
Don’t tell me what I do or don’t want
Tell me what you want, Sunoo—
What do I want?
Heeseung realizes it all along, and all at once:
That he lost the right to say anything at all about selfishness, the instant he allowed himself to fall in love with both of his best friends.