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“Your wrist.” Yuri’s frowning. “It’s bruised again.”
The failing lightbulb in Seonwoo’s room is criminal. Needlessly attentive to the sharp lines of Yuri’s features, it glances across his jaw and pools around the slick-black fan of his lashes—terrible, honest. Seonwoo draws his hand back far too late to escape notice. Far too delayed to be a genuine protest.
Yuri barely bats an eye before grabbing his wrist again, but he trains his gaze on Seonwoo this time, stare piercing. “What happened?”
Seonwoo sighs. “Yuri.”
The pads of Yuri’s fingers are heated against Seonwoo’s wrist, the warmth carving out something dangerous beneath his pulse. Yuri doesn’t reply. Just continues to watch him, eyes deceptively innocent, as the two of them stand a heartbeat apart in the foyer.
He’s gotten better, Seonwoo forces himself to admit. At playing this game, doing this crippled little dance they do time and time again. Coaxing Seonwoo into reneging on his words with all the precise, deadly care of an assassin.
And yet—sometimes it aches, looking at Yuri. To see so much naked want written on his face, so haplessly innocent Seonwoo can only avert his eyes in shame. Schoolboy crush. Fleeting infatuation. Forget about me, Seonwoo wants to beg. Please. For the both of us.
He follows Yuri’s line of vision as it drifts past his shoulder, settling on his ever-pitiful collection of empty soju bottles.
“You’re drinking less,” Yuri says finally, cutting into the silence.
Seonwoo closes his eyes. His wrist stings. “You need to go.”
“Doesn’t that mean I’m helping?”
Yuri’s eyes are no less penetrable when Seonwoo musters up the courage to hold his gaze again. Alcohol would hurt less, truthfully; a predictable burn in his stomach, warning skating down his throat. As opposed to the uncanny way everything Yuri does plunges him leagues underwater—ghost hand pinned to his throat, unrelenting.
“Don’t,” he rasps. Yuri’s lifting his wrist. Angling his head. “Don’t, no, Yuri—”
Yuri presses his lips to Seonwoo’s wrist. Slow, measured. His mouth warm against the black-blue bruise, a violence made so juvenilely tender. The room seems to hold its breath in time with Seonwoo, fraught.
"I'm not going to do anything," Yuri murmurs, quiet. "I already told you."
He’s stripped so bare. In the ugly, naked way they've always existed around each other. Yuri looks at him and Seonwoo feels shot-through, transparent, the splintered, heaving thing in his chest bleeding dry for the world to see. Always intimate in the cruelest of ways, the two of them.
Just this once, Seonwoo lets himself think helplessly. Just this once. He takes a step forward.
Yuri smiles against his arm.