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Sometimes Chan imagines what it would be like to fly.
He thinks about hotel balconies and planes with no windows. About that first step, the one that’s always scariest, before the air envelops his body and then he’s nothing. No one. Weightless and bereft and aching, more feather than bird, hovering just beneath the clouds.
(Once, when he spoke about it casually, Changbin reached across the desk and held his hand and asked him if he ever planned to jump.
“No,” Chan said, and he knew that he meant it. “It’s just—it’s one of those things that I think about sometimes. It’s not like I’m gonna do it, you know? That’d be crazy.”
Changbin nodded. He still had a death grip on his hand, like if he were to let go Chan would take that first step, and then a second and a third, and let himself drop. Changbin’s fingers flexed around Chan’s palm. He squeezed.
“Yeah, hyung.” His touch disappeared, but Chan could still feel the ghost of it along his skin, anchoring him to the ground. “It would be.”
Changbin said this like he didn’t believe him. To be fair, Chan still isn’t even sure if he believes himself.)
Chan walks into the dorm and finds Felix laying beside Hyunjin, who’s drooling into the couch cushions, and he’s distinctly aware of the gravity that clings to his edges.
It’s almost one in the morning. They should be sleeping; neither of them are. Chan drops his keys in the dish in the entryway and kicks off his shoes, and watches as Felix’s head pops up, tufts of dark hair standing up on his head. From here, Chan can see the thin sheen of sweat that clings to the skin of his neck, and the little bits of sleep that still hover over the angles of his perpetually soft face, and he imagines, distantly and enormously, what it would be like to grab each of these parts of him and refuse to let go.
“Chris,” Felix says. His voice is somehow both deeper and gentler at the same time. “It’s late.”
When they speak to each other in English, it almost feels sacred. Before Felix, Chan hadn’t thought of the language as anything more than it actually was: vowels and consonants and the residue that it left on each string of Korean to leave his mouth. Now, every word that they say feels like little pieces of home.
“What are you doing here?” He asks. He knows the answer. Lately, more often than not, Chan has been finding echoes of Felix hovering in all of his spaces, waiting.
Felix shrugs. His shoulder, freckled and sharp, peeks out of the neckline of his shirt. “I couldn’t sleep.”
He shouldn’t. Chan knows that he shouldn’t. He knows this like he knows everything else: it sits in a row of unmoving, indisputable facts. The sun rises in the east, sets in the west. Summer will come once the spring has died. Chan needs to stop pulling back each newly-scabbed layer of himself to present for Felix to prod at.
He does it anyway.
Chan nods in the direction of his room. Takes a step back, slowly, carefully. Felix’s tongue swipes at the soft flesh of his bottom lip, and Chan’s heart stutters at the flash of teeth.
This song and dance of theirs is practiced, perfected in all of its nuances, but Chan still finds himself waiting for a rejection that they both know will never come. In the morning they’ll find Hyunjin with the blanket that sits on the end of Changbin’s bed draped over his sides, Jisung half-asleep over a bowl of cornflakes, and they will not speak about it. Felix will look at him and smile and Chan will feel the almost-fall air hit the exposed skin of his underbelly, waiting to be sliced open. He’ll press the tip of that knife against his stomach and guide Felix’s hand to the hilt and say hurt me, cut me open and reach beneath my skin and rip apart whatever softness I have left.
Felix never does. Instead, he laughs as he buries his face in the back of Chan’s neck, wraps his arms around his waist, and touches him with the kind of gentleness that aches.
When he told Sana about it, she said that it wouldn’t be love.
“When you love someone, you don’t want to hurt them.” She said this as she peeled the skin of a tangerine, its soft body repeatedly punctured by the tips of her nails. Her voice, like always, was exceedingly gentle. “The people that you love are supposed to treat you kindly.”
They were sitting on the floor of her dorm. Even after years, Chan still felt like an interloper there. This was not his group, not his space, even if he’d spent a decade tangled around it.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he said. His left leg had been trapped beneath his right for so long that it was starting to fall asleep. “People love people and hurt them all the time.”
He thought about Sana and the way that she loved Momo: wholly, entirely, like a blind man in front of a car on fire. She couldn’t see it, and only felt its heat when the wind blew just right. Sometimes, during movie nights and award shows, Momo would watch Sana, Sana would watch Mina, and Chan would sit at the edges of it all, waiting for an explosion that would never come.
He didn’t tell her this. It wasn’t his fire to douse.
Sana sighed. She shifted closer, resting her elbow on the curve of his knee. “Think of it like this,” she said. She tore a slice of fruit away from the rest of the orange’s body, letting it fall to the floor. “If I loved this orange, dropping it doesn’t mean that I love it any less. It wasn’t something that I meant to do. I can still pick it back up and wipe off the dust, and it’ll be the same as before.”
Her hand came down, hovering over it. She pressed down until juice splattered across the ground. Something about it made Chan sick.
“I did that on purpose,” she said gently, “and look at it now.”
He did. It was flattened against the wood, shining under the early afternoon light. He wanted to reach out and cup it in the palm of his hand and never let go.
“I wouldn’t do that to something that I loved.” This was said with an air of approaching finality to it, like the blank screen before the credits start to roll.
Chan was still looking at that crushed orange, splayed across her floor like a body splattered along the sidewalk. The sickly sweet smell of citrus clung to his nose. He felt like crying, almost.
“What if I wanted somebody to?”
Sana made a gentle humming sound. She wiped at her palm with a tissue before cleaning up the mess she’d made, dropping it into the nearby garbage can. The memory of it still lingered.
“Felix wouldn’t do that to you.”
He frowned. “I never mentioned Felix.”
“It is about him, though.” This wasn’t a question. “And I’m telling you, Chan-ah, he’s not going to hurt you. Even if you think you want him to.”
Slim fingers broke off another slice of orange. Part of him expected her to crush it again, but instead, Sana pressed the piece of fruit against his lips and waited for him to open. He took it into his mouth and chewed once, twice.
He swallowed.
On his way out, when Sana wasn’t looking, he reached into the bin and pulled out that half-wrapped orange and slipped it into his pocket. He left it there, in a hoodie on the floor of his closet, and tried his hardest to forget. He found it again when doing laundry two weeks later and tossed out the whole thing, sweater and all.
He spent the rest of the day trying not to cry. Chan still isn’t sure why.
When they have sex, Chan doesn’t kiss him, but this isn’t to say that he doesn’t want to. Sometimes, when he leans up and mouths at the curve of Chan’s cheek, he imagines Felix’s jaw unhinging and swallowing him whole. It would be too close, he thinks. Even in separate rooms, Chan still has trouble figuring out where he ends and Felix begins.
(Chan thinks that if he were to kiss him, he’d never be able to stop.)
They sleep together regularly. On some nights, Felix will curl up against his side and breathe deeply, evenly, and Chan will count each rise and fall of his chest until the sun rises. On others, Felix’s mouth will wrap around the length of him, Chan will spread him open and take him apart piece by piece, and they won’t talk about it in the morning. For two people who share the same language, there’s an awful lot of silence between them.
This is how it happened, the first time:
Felix was crying. Chan didn’t know why, and Felix didn’t try to tell him. He crawled into Chan’s bunk somewhere around midnight and laid his head on his chest, his hair dyed a stringy sort of blond, and took short, uneven breaths. Chan frowned and ran a hand along his back, pulling him closer.
“Lix,” he said. “Felix. C’mon, breathe for me.”
Felix’s shoulders shuddered. He propped his head up on Chan’s chest, the point of his chin digging into the bone. Chan hid his wince by running a hand through Felix’s hair. Even like this: nose running, eyes red, he was the most beautiful thing that Chan has ever seen.
“Hyung, it hurts.” He wiped at his nose before switching to English. “It’s—it’s in my chest, you know?”
Chan frowned. Absent-mindedly, he brought his hand down to rub at the space above Felix’s heart, as if searching for a wound. “What is?” He asked. “Is your heart hurting you? Should I get someone to call a doctor?”
Felix shook his head. “It’s not like that.”
“What is it, then?” He asked. Above them, Changbin shifted in his sleep. “I can’t help you unless I know what’s wrong, baby.”
“I love someone too much and it hurts,” Felix said. He placed a hand over Chan’s on his chest, soft and warm. “It’s right here. I keep trying to stop, but I can’t.”
Chan thought about sandy beaches and warm winters and little slices of home wherever he could grasp them, about meeting Felix years ago and how it felt like every part of himself that he’d ever given up had fallen right back into his lap. He thought about standing at the end of a line and watching as it was all taken away, only to be given back weeks later. Sometimes it still felt like he was biding time, waiting for whatever pieces of his soul he’d managed to find to disappear again. Loving Felix was something close to self-preservation.
“I know what it’s like,” Chan whispered. “It’ll get easier. I promise.”
Felix nodded, clearing his throat. “Can I stay here tonight?”
“Always,” Chan said.
Chan’s hands flexed around his waist, pulling him closer. He wondered how to beg somebody to never leave without using any words.
Hours earlier, in the studio, Jisung leant over the back of Chan’s chair to squint at his computer screen. His eyes started to cross as he focused on reading the lyrics.
“What’s this?” He asked. His chin came down, resting on Chan’s shoulder. He pressed his face close to hear the music playing through Chan’s headphones.
Chan felt his ears turn red. He didn’t try to hide it. “Just something I’m working on,” he said. “I’m playing around with the track Yennie didn’t want. Thinking about using it for the Replay.”
“Oh,” Jisung said. He frowned a little, tilting his head as he looked at Chan. His nose was almost brushing Chan’s cheek. “But isn’t this about…”
(Jisung knows about Chan and Felix in the same way he knows everything else—a little more intimately than he should. Even when Chan cradles something to his chest, hidden from the rest of the world, Jisung always manages to find a part of it. Chan thinks that it might be because he holds Jisung just as closely.)
Chan shook his head. “Not every song that I write is about him.”
Jisung nodded, making a face that Chan couldn’t decipher. “Okay, hyung.” He pulled away, flopping back onto the couch. “That doesn’t mean this one isn’t, though.”
Chan ran his tongue over his teeth, scanning the lyrics again. He hadn’t thought much while writing them. It was like he closed his eyes, took a breath, and exhaled everything that he was feeling onto the screen. There was more in between, but this is what mattered: Chan thought about forbidden love and Romeo and Juliet and taking a step off of a cliff. The finality of it, falling with no parachute, waking up before he could hit the ground. He didn’t need to jump to know that if he did, the impact would come.
“It’s not about Felix,” he said, as if trying to reaffirm it. Jisung didn’t say anything, but they both knew that Chan was wrong. Pawn takes king.
The door to his bedroom shuts quietly behind them. Chan imagines what this would look like to somebody else, set up like little clay figures on a stop-motion set. Deft hands move his body to sit on the edge of a too-small bed. It wasn’t made for two people, just like their relationship wasn’t built to withstand this crooked sort of love, but it never stops either of them from trying.
(He thinks that this is the best way to describe what they’ve become: crooked. A little to the left of where they used to be, and too far to the right to be where they should. Their conversations happen on steep inclines that spill off into comfortable silence. When they were younger, their time spent together was never quiet. Things have changed between them in more ways than one.)
“You look tired,” Felix says. Chan has been hearing variations of this for two years now, but it always sounds kinder coming from him. “Have you been sleeping?”
“Sometimes,” he says. Sleep comes to him in flashes, and he finds Felix in all of his dreams.
Felix frowns. “You need to take care of yourself.”
Chan reaches out, tugging Felix to stand between his legs. Felix makes a low, surprised sound in the base of his throat, but doesn’t try to move away.
“You’ll take care of me,” Chan says. “I always sleep better when you’re around.”
Chan tilts his head up, resting his chin on the hard pane of Felix’s chest. Felix makes a disgusted face, scrunching up nose. “Cheesy,” he mumbles.
“Like parmesan,” Chan agrees solemnly. Felix tips his head back as he laughs, exposing the column of his throat.
Sometimes Felix is so vulnerable that it hurts. Chan watches, both from the sidelines and by his side, as Felix exposes himself to the world like a nerve left uncovered. Everything about him is raw and open in a way that Chan will never be able to replicate. There are times where looking at Felix feels like a mirror is being held to his face, and an image of himself from years ago is staring back, refracted. This is you, it tells him, this is what we could have been, this is the only piece of me that you will ever have again.
“Will you stay with me?” Chan asks.
Felix smiles down at him. Chan wonders, distantly, if this feeling in his chest is the kind of reverence that the bible tried to put into words. “Always.”
Once, in a western movie that he can’t remember the name of, Chan listened as the protagonist described the feeling of knowing that the world was going to end, no matter how hard they tried to stop it. This is what it felt like to watch as Felix was eliminated.
“I’m sorry,” Park Jinyoung said. The end is coming. “This time, you won’t be able to continue together.” The end is here.
He didn’t cry at first. Chan picked at his nails, chewed the inside of his cheek, and listened as Jisung sought out Felix, pulling him close. It felt a little like sending off a dog to be put down; there was no death, but they still mourned something that never had the chance to be. The room was quiet, and the staff barely moved. Chan thought about the sign he’d seen sitting outside of a veterinary office when he was young. When the light is on, please speak softly. Someone is saying their goodbyes.
Chan found him, eventually. He tried not to look at Felix’s face, but after months of seeking it out whenever they were in the same room, Chan found it hard to keep away.
“Always find me, yeah?” He asked. He wondered if it sounded like he was begging.
Felix sniffled. His cheeks, round and soft, shone under the practice room lights. Chan’s hands twitched at his sides, aching to wipe that wetness away.
Losing Minho hurt differently. Minho was something that he had found, pressed against his skin, and then ached as he was ripped away. It was like losing something that he’d only begun to have. When Minho left, Chan held the others closely in the following weeks, like they would disappear if he dared to blink. When he thought about Felix, it felt more like a limb. He was always there, from the moment Chan was born, even if he didn’t realize it. That was the issue with something so comfortable in its consistency—Chan never considered what it would be like to lose him.
Chan swallowed. There was a stinging behind his eyes, like when the pollen came in the spring.
“I’m not gonna leave you behind,” he said, but what he meant was: I won’t let them take the last piece of myself that I have left. Still, Felix nodded like he understood it all the same.
Felix is vulnerable in all of the places that Chan has become jaded. This is why he loves him, although Chan isn’t sure that something so enormous could be condensed into words. He tries to imitate it, hold up that broken mirror and let the shards reflect a warped version of the softness he craves, but it never comes out right. Refracted. Crooked. Knife pressed to belly, begging to be sliced. This is how he should be loved: wholly and violently, or not at all.
“Would you do that to him?” Sana asked later. Her fingers still smelled vaguely of citrus. “Would you hurt him and call it love?”
“Never,” Chan vowed.
Sana smiled softly, knocking their knees together. “Then why can’t he love you in the same way?” Chan didn’t have an answer, but it wasn’t the kind of question that needed one.
(He knows it now. This is what matters.)
“Chris.”
Felix’s face is buried in Chan’s neck. The lights wash violet over his skin. They’re tangled together on his bed, a mess of red strings that he doesn’t have the heart to undo.
Chan shifts. Sleep weighs heavy on his eyes, but he pushes it away. “Hm?”
As he speaks, Felix’s lips brush against the skin of Chan’s jaw. They’re close enough that beginnings and ends become blurred, but Chan thinks that they always have been. “I have a question.”
“C’mon then.” He shifts a little, pulling Felix closer. “Ask it.”
“Why don’t you kiss me?”
Chan swallows. The air whips around him, thousands of feet in the air. His toes hang over the edge. He looks down, and he can’t see the bottom. He doesn’t know where he’s going to land. When he falls, because he was always going to, one way or another, he knows that his body is going to hit the ground.
His thumb traces circles against Felix’s waist. He doesn’t look at him, even when his body aches for it. “Do you want me to?”
Silence lapses. Soft fingers find his hand, pulling it higher, pressing his palm against the center of Felix’s chest, where it used to hurt the most.
“Chris,” he says again, quieter this time. “Hyung. Will you look at me?”
Chan does. Beneath his feet, the cliff begins to crumble.
(Felix sat on the kitchen counter, legs swinging as he peeled a tangerine. Chan watched him from the doorway. There was fondness building in his chest, spilling out of his pores. Sometimes, there was so much that he didn’t know what to do with it.
Felix caught sight of him. He smiled, picking off the last of the skin before extending the fruit towards him. “Here,” he said. “You didn’t have breakfast.”
Chan took a step forward, reaching for it. His fingers brushed the soft flesh, and then it went tumbling down. Its body rolled over once, twice, before settling on the kitchen floor. Felix frowned.
“Shit,” he said. “Sorry, I’ll peel you another one.”
Chan reached down, picking it back up, He blew on its surface. The fondness in his chest was replaced by something warm.
“It’s alright.” He broke off a slice of the tangerine, pressing it against Felix’s lips. “It’s still the same.”)
This is how it happens, the last time:
Beside him, Felix sucks in a breath. His chest trembles beneath Chan’s palm. He imagines sinking deeper, slipping beneath sinew and bone, and cupping Felix’s heart in his hands. He would wipe off the dust, take away all of the hurt. Chan doesn’t know if he would ever be able to let go.
“Felix,” he whispers, quietly and reverently.
He tilts his head down, eyes flitting across his face. Their lips brush, just barely touching. Felix says something back, his voice so soft that Chan can barely hear him. He thinks it might be a prayer, or the sound of his name. Sometimes, it’s like Felix says them in the same way.
Chan leans closer, bridging the gap between them. He jumps.
Felix catches him. He always does.