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“Seonghwa,” the stranger speaks around the joint between his lips. He pulls it out and extends it to Yunho cordially. “I’m Seonghwa.”
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Each and every letter clinks and clanks its way down Yunho’s spine like a cell phone dropped down an elevator shaft. His knees nearly collapse under him from the weight of the word. What a strange sensation.
He straightens up as much as he can to estimate the difference in their heights. It’s not a lot, but it still brings a shivery thump to Yunho’s stomach as he stares down his nose at the mysterious newcomer.
Yunho’s week had been less than satisfactory. Low sales numbers, high-pitched voices of disapproval in the boardroom, the weight of the world on his broad shoulders. He just wanted to escape. He just wanted to breathe.
The stranger, Seonghwa, smiles at him without teeth. It’s a coy smile. His eyes shine like silver in the inky pitch of night. There isn’t a speck of skin showing under his perfectly-fitted peacoat and dress pants, but Yunho feels like he’s staring at a man undressed and bare for all the world to see.
Seonghwa came here with a purpose. Just like Yunho.
His impatience rings loud in Yunho’s ears when his shiny loafer begins a steady tapping on the hard cement of the bridge beneath them.
Yunho grabs the joint from Seonghwa, and finally, blissfully lets go.
With each held inhale of the shimmery sweet smoke in his lungs, the world spins. Not in a dizzying way. In a mesmerizing way. He never wants it to stop. Wishes he could see the hundreds of colors and taste the way the world breathes around him all the time.
Seonghwa falls against him, his skin flush from a bout of tinkling laughter that makes Yunho want to cry with joy. He’s truly enraptured. When Yunho saw the stranger online, he knew he had to have him. He felt it in his blood—this low, deep ache of familiarity that made him want to scream until his lungs bled.
“You’re exactly what I’ve been looking for,” he whispers against the heated skin of Seonghwa’s freckled throat.
The words make a path of posies blossom all along the otherwise pale flesh. Yunho longs to taste the salt of the entity before him. He wants to give it all to him. He knows. He knows . He’s ready.
“Am I?” Seonghwa links their fingers together and pulls their bodies together in a haphazard dance. Their chests brush. Their noses bump. Yunho can taste the stinging sweetness of the joint’s smoke on Seonghwa’s breath when he exhales this close. “Everything you ever dreamed of?”
“Mhm.” Yunho is bigger than his newfound dance partner, but when Seonghwa speaks, the legs under Yunho are chopped in half. He’s an ant at the foot of a mountain so grand that it isn’t even fathomable. He doesn’t deserve the raw pleasure of being crushed beneath the mountain’s heel, but here he is all the same.
When Seonghwa’s fingers drizzle down the length of Yunho’s torso to cup his already painfully hard cock, the world spins again. This time, it isn’t from the smoke. It’s from the taste of Seonghwa’s breath on his lips. It’s from the lazy strokes of his firm fingertips along the seam of Yunho’s slacks. It’s the way his silvery eyes glimmer and gleam despite the jet-black gloom of the abandoned bridge they’re dancing on.
When Seonghwa finally takes pity and leans forward to let their lips brush, Yunho needs to grab the nearby railing of the bridge for support. The feeling that washes over him at that little bit of contact is so all-consuming, so immeasurably grand. Yunho forgets the ground he stands on. He is washed away on the seas of reverence that swish and slam against the brig of his mind cacophonously.
“Do you swear yourself to me, sweet one?” When their lips part, and Seonghwa speaks again, Yunho has actually been dwarfed by his majesty. His knees sting from the grit and gravel of the cold bridge beneath him.
His own eyes shine like silver now as he stares up at the being before him. A God. The God. A being with so much potential for power that Yunho can’t truly know what he’s signing up for when he smiles up at Seonghwa and nods dazedly. “I do. I swear. Anything for you.”
When Yunho stumbled upon the Piety app, as if drawn there by fate, earlier in the year—he thought it was a cruel joke. He had been languishing in a dead-end job with no prospects and hardly any friends in a city cold and detached. The app sucked him in with its promises. At first, he thought it was just some BDSM shit. Gods being matched with devotees via app? What kind of world had he stumbled upon on his late-night dives into feeling alive on the internet?
“Is this real?” Yunho knows he should just believe. That he should harbor some semblance of faith while Seonghwa puts two hands on both of his cheeks and smiles down at him. Yunho knows now that Seonghwa isn’t his real name. It’s certainly not his first name. It’s one of many names. Despite the disquiet in his mind, Yunho can feel that Seonghwa is more than he seems.
The skin of Seonghwa’s palms heat and heat and heat until the doughy skin of Yunho’s cheeks feels completely set ablaze. The heat doesn’t burn— it warms. The cold of the ground below and the air around him fades away with the blistering warmth of Seonghwa’s returned affection.
His voice is brittle, dried violets pressed between the pages of ancient tomes as it drifts down into Yunho’s reddened ears, “I am as real as you make me, my light. As you give yourself to me, I will become all that you want of me. We, as Gods, are only as powerful as the faith of the followers that grant us omnipotence.” Seonghwa is still standing, but he leans down at the waist to brush his sharp nose along Yunho’s flushed cheek, now streaked with tears. The God’s own cheeks are wet from reciprocated appreciation. He finishes, “Will you join me?”
Yunho can’t look away. The fiery glow of molten silver that swirls in Seonghwa’s eyes draws him in. He feels like he’s being swallowed whole, wouldn’t really mind all that much if he was. He speaks his consent in the deepest parts of his mind while nodding, and Seonghwa seems to hear it. He looks so pleased, his burning palms sliding down to cup Yunho’s jaw like a lover.
Their lips connect again. This time, the sweltering heat of the God pours into Yunho. He can feel it coursing through each and every one of his nerves and veins. The power. The faith. The giving of one’s self. It sweeps over him entirely. He’s bundled up, not unlike a child, in the embrace of vigor his God affords him.
They’re still clothed, still standing and kneeling on the dirty city bridge that connects boroughs, but Yunho feels stripped himself. He can feel hands groping and tugging at every inch of skin he possesses. The heat of Seonghwa’s care stings and tingles deep inside of him, the sweltering glow of it throbbing deep in his guts in time with his gasping breaths.
He can feel Seonghwa’s surrender too. Despite the power imbalance, his God is rubbed raw for all to see in the dingy glow of streetlights and fogged-out starshine. Yunho keens, his voice reaching shaky heights. Seonghwa’s essence ebbs and flows, sloshing up against the solid structure of Yunho’s mortal bones.
The sky is grapes and roses. The waters below them scream with the windswept power of deliverance. The city streets are loud over half a mile away, but Yunho can scarcely hear the fanfare because he is saved.
The world around them is on fire, but Yunho is saved .
He collapses, his senses overwhelmed, and his nerves shot. When he wakes, he’s at home in clean pajamas with a chilly glass of water on his bedside table. In the fridge, there is an easy breakfast to heat up. And as he showers, he sees the skin of his throat is branded with a line of shiny stars that glitter with the same silver of his God’s bright eyes.
And Yunho knows he’s made the right choice.