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✦
When Changbin tells Jisung he’s in love with him, it’s a Friday. He’s twenty-six, and Jisung is twenty-five, and it feels like the entire world is behind them and ahead of them at once.
They’re at Hyunjin’s twenty-fifth birthday party, standing side-by-side and looking out at the city from the corner of a rooftop bar, and there’s no more room in Changbin’s body for anything besides the roiling tide of his anticipation. Hyunjin rents the same bar every year, both for nostalgia and for the view, and the bistro lights strung in ropes over the tables are golden and beautiful, their clear glass globes and their coiled filaments as bright against the sky of Myeongdong as stars might be in the mountains. Changbin looks at Jisung’s face and sees the distant shape of Namsan Tower reflected in the watery dark of his eyes.
“It’s so pretty up here,” Jisung says. He’s nursing the same cocktail he’d ordered when the party started and there’s a handful of berries bobbing at the surface of the drink. “We should do this more often.”
“Go to our rich friends’ birthday parties?”
“You’re rich,” says Jisung, almost automatically. Changbin rolls his eyes. “But no. I mean, we should go out like this more often. At night, when the world’s all different.”
It’s surprising, coming from Jisung, who usually wants to stay inside, and Changbin’s heart skips a beat. He’s different with you, a voice in his head says. You make him feel safe.
“My family’s rich,” says Changbin. “I’m a lowly grad student. I work at a gym.” He looks over Jisung’s shoulder at Hyunjin, whose head is tipped back in a peal of laughter and who’s clutching at his model friend’s arm. Hyunjin’s been doing that a lot lately, reaching out to touch people like he’s waiting to see if a bond will form, and Changbin wants to hold Jisung’s hand. It’d be damp with condensation, he thinks. Jisung’s fingers would be cold.
“I agree, though,” Changbin adds, after a moment. “We should do this again.”
Jisung shivers a little, although there are heat lamps sprinkled among the tables and the glass walls around the rooftop keep out some of the cold.
“Just pick a day,” he says, and Changbin feels a stab of an emotion that’s not his own. Something regretful and agonizing, something so sincere it hurts. The ache of looking back over your shoulder at a home you’re driving away from, the pang of saying hello to someone you know you’re about to say goodbye to. I’ll miss you but not enough to stay, or, I love you but I love someone else more. Jisung doesn’t know everything Changbin knows, but he knows enough to know what will hurt.
Changbin’s wearing Jisung’s jacket, which is baggy on Jisung and tight on Changbin, and he starts to shrug it off. He’d borrowed it going home one night and then he’d kept it, draped it over a chair in his living room, hung it from his bedroom doorknob. Its presence had been a daydream: close your eyes, it had said, and you can pretend Jisung’s your boyfriend.
“Here,” Changbin says. “It’s yours anyway.”
“It’s okay,” Jisung says. “I’m not cold.”
“Jisung,” Changbin says, softly. They’re standing closer together than Changbin had realized and he can see a hint of stubble on Jisung’s chin. Jisung’s lips are wet with gin and Changbin’s heart is on fire. “You know, right?”
It’s out of his mouth before he can stop himself and Jisung stays silent for a minute. Hyunjin’s laugh crests and crashes over the sounds of highball glasses clinking against one another and leather shoes on hard cement.
“Know what?” Jisung asks, eventually.
“How I feel.” Changbin hears himself saying it and it’s not how he practiced. He’d planned a whole speech. He’d gone over it and over it in the bathroom mirror, stared into his own eyes as he spoke. “How I feel about you.” He pauses, swallows. All or nothing. “I love you, Jisung.”
Jisung’s eyes widen and he takes a quick, sharp breath. Later on, when morning comes, Changbin wakes with a heart still aflame.
✺
When Minho arrived, Changbin was sitting on a bench outside the College of Music, elbows on his knees, trying not to look as pathetic as he felt.
“You’re really feeling sorry for yourself, aren’t you?” Minho asked, not unkindly, dropping down next to Changbin. It was early enough in the year that mornings still came cold and tender, the blossoms on the trees a delicate, pale pink against the dark brick of the building behind them.
“It’s Hyunjin’s birthday,” said Changbin. He traced a crack in the asphalt with the toe of his sneaker, knowing Minho understood what Hyunjin’s birthday meant. He thought about the lights of the buildings of Seoul at night, about Jisung’s palm wrapped around his sweating drink. He thought about the way Jisung’s lips had parted, the way his tongue had darted out between them. Hyunjin rented the same bar every year. “And I met Jisung outside this building.”
Minho nodded. He reached out and squeezed Changbin’s knee, and Changbin stopped himself from recoiling. None of this was Minho’s fault. Minho had agreed to spend the day with Changbin because he’d known Changbin would be miserable alone — he’d agreed to meet up after Changbin finished his coursework and then he’d agreed to get a meal together, to wander the city, to make his slow way to Hyunjin’s party alongside Changbin. Hyung will pay, he’d said, when Changbin had asked him.
“How long ago was that, at this point?” Minho asked. Changbin’s heart ached, a quick throb like a feeling his pulse in a wound. The question, coming from Minho, felt gentle. It felt like Minho making space for Changbin’s sadness, even if he was still partly unaware of its cause.
“How long ago did I meet Jisung? I’m not even sure,” said Changbin, which was a lie. “Years ago. He’d just gotten back from the military.”
Jisung had been starting his third year of university, his hair growing out at odd angles after being close-cropped for so many months, and when Changbin had seen him, walking next to Chan across the courtyard with his wide eyes and his chunky sneakers, something inside Changbin’s chest had responded to something unknowable inside Jisung’s. This is my friend, Chan had said. He’s studying composition.
“And it never stopped?” Minho asked. A soft breeze picked up, quiet and cool off the river, and Changbin shivered, feeling as though someone were standing behind him and pressing their lips to the nape of his neck. The air, just for a moment, smelled sweetly of unfallen blossoms, the vegetal scent of their fragile petals.
“Loving him?”
“Being bonded to him.”
Changbin could hear what Minho wasn’t saying. After all this time, the bond never broke? You never figured out how to break it? He’d pinned so much on Jisung, on his love for Jisung — he’d hoped so hard and for so long that after a while, it had started to feel as though the bones of his body had been replaced by the calcified remains of a desire that had gone hungry and then gone on living.
But Changbin had never been able to break his bond with Jisung. He’d barely even wanted to, although breaking it might mean he’d bond with someone else later on. He’d learned, growing up, that bonding was natural and desirable —that most people wanted it, that most people ached for it, that rich people went to clinics to get matched up with potential partners a life coach thought most likely to trigger the bonding process. He’d been told, reading adaptations of Chunhyangjeon at his desk at school and watching movies with his sister on the couch, that the first bond you formed should be the purest one, that you’d be happiest if you never let it go. To give up a bond after he’d already found it, even when it had frayed and failed and seemed only to go in one direction, felt impossible. It felt like giving up.
“It wasn’t something I asked for,” said Changbin, quietly. “Then or now.”
“I know,” said Minho, and there was something in his voice Changbin had never heard there before. “You don’t really get to choose.”
“Have you ever bonded with someone?” Changbin asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“No,” said Minho, voice quiet. “But I wish — ” He paused, his whole body tense beside Changbin’s on the bench. “I wish we could pick, you know? I wish we could pick who we bonded with. I wish we could pick and I wish it was always reciprocated.”
A couple of undergraduates walked by, a girl clutching a flute in a case and a boy with a cello that made him look small in comparison. The girl was saying something and the boy was laughing, his eyes wide, his face hopeful. This is the start of something, Changbin thought, looking at them, and remembered standing in this same courtyard, thinking something of his own was beginning as well. He wondered if the boy’s fingers were callused from the strings of the cello, if they might feel rough against the girl’s soft cheek. He thought about how Jisung’s mouth pulled sideways when he sang.
“I do too,” said Changbin. “I would’ve — well.”
He let Minho fill in the gaps as he liked. I would’ve chosen someone other than Jisung. I would’ve met Chan somewhere else that day. I would’ve picked someone it wouldn’t hurt to love. Choice would have been nice, but Changbin never had a choice. Jisung had walked across the courtyard outside the Seoul National University College of Music and he’d shaken Changbin’s hand, and Changbin had gone hot and then immediately cold. His chest had tightened and he’d gone instantly dizzy, he’d been both lightheaded and filled with a clarity as deep and unfathomable as the surface of a lake at dawn. He’d understood, for the first time, what it felt like to live in a body that cried out for another.
“I feel like I’m grieving him and he’s not gone,” Changbin said, into the silence. “I’ll look at him and even if he’s happy it hurts.” He paused, took a breath. He wished he had something to hold in his hands, something to drink, something to distract him. “I want to be the kind of person who’s happy when someone I love is happy. Even when I’m not the reason.”
“We all want that, I think,” Minho said. “But wanting doesn’t always make it possible.”
No one understood why bonding happened, why some people touched one another and found themselves linked. Theories had abounded, over the centuries — a mandate from the gods or an implausible compatibility of DNA, the eventual returning together of two halves of a being that had once been whole — but in the end, the result was the same. Bonds that were one-sided, either originally or after the bond broke for one person in a pair, made no sense, mythologically or scientifically. There was no evolutionary or theological reason for someone to ache so badly for a person who did not ache back that they felt as though their body were coming apart, and it would take time, so much time, for Changbin’s bond with Jisung to break. It might never break, so long as he spent his days in Jisung’s presence, but Changbin knew how much pain Jisung’s friendship was worth.
Changbin nodded. He sat up straight and rolled his shoulders back. It was Hyunjin’s birthday, and he needed to be able to celebrate it. He needed to be able to go to the bar where he could still picture himself confessing to Jisung and try not to see ghosts at the tables.
☆
“You’re gonna tell him?” Jeongin asked. They’d been on the phone for twenty minutes already, because Changbin had buried the lede. “Really?”
“I’m gonna tell him at Hyunjin’s birthday party,” said Changbin.
“Fuck.” When Jeongin swore, it was always matter-of-fact. He didn’t sound like his heart was in his throat. He didn’t sound worked up.
“Honestly, I keep thinking I’m gonna throw up.”
“I probably already would’ve,” said Jeongin supportively. “At least twice.”
Changbin stretched out on his back on his bed and stared at his ceiling. There was a spiderweb clinging to the light fixture. “What was it like for you?” he asked. “With Seungmin?”
Jeongin hummed. Changbin’s phone had grown warm against his face.
“I wasn’t the one who said something first,” Jeongin said. “Hyung was. And he knew — I mean, he knew about me. He wasn’t asking to date me, not really. He just wanted to, like…be with me. Be my partner.”
Changbin thought about that for a minute. Seungmin had found the English word “aromantic” on the internet when they’d all been undergraduates and when he’d shown it to Jeongin, everything had fallen into place. Jeongin and Seungmin lived together now. Seungmin hooked up with people when he felt like it, and went on dates if he wanted to, and then at the end of the day he came home to their shared apartment and a life he’d built by Jeongin’s side.
Maybe, Changbin thought, he could make himself accept something similar with Jisung. If he couldn’t have what he wanted, in the end, if Jisung didn’t feel the same way he did, then maybe he and Jisung could just be partners like Seungmin and Jeongin were. Maybe that would be enough. Maybe he could stand it, watching Jisung date other people, if he knew in his heart that Jisung wasn’t going to give him up.
“Hyung,” said Jeongin, and Changbin came back down to earth. Of course he couldn’t make himself accept that, because he was romantically attracted to Jisung in a way Jeongin wasn’t to Seungmin. He was attracted to Jisung in every way he’d ever been attracted to anyone. Given the chance, he’d take anything Jisung gave him and he’d take it on his knees, and he couldn’t let himself do that.
“Must be nice,” Changbin said morosely. “Not having to worry about dating.”
Jeongin hummed again, but it was a very different hum. They’d had this conversation before, and Jeongin didn’t like it.
“It’s not easy,” said Jeongin. “I know what he feels isn’t quite the same as what I feel. I know he wants something I don’t want, even if he doesn’t talk about it, and part of me is guilty about that every day.”
Part of me wonders if I’m enough for him, Jeongin didn’t need to say. It was something he’d told Changbin before, more than once, and Changbin wished he hadn’t brought it up. He wished he knew how to tell Jeongin that he would always be enough for Seungmin. He wished he wouldn’t be lying if he told Jeongin that Seungmin didn’t want a romantic relationship that Jeongin didn’t want to have.
“I know, aegi-yah,” said Changbin, softly. It was getting dark out and his bedroom had gone bluish and dim. He rolled over and his hip hurt from a workout gone slightly awry. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” said Jeongin. “Just stop thinking everyone else has it easier.”
It occurred to Changbin that maybe he was the Seungmin of his situation. He imagined Jisung on the phone to a friend one day, talking about the night Changbin confessed at Hyunjin’s birthday party, and he wondered what Jisung might say about him. I know he wants something I don’t want, and part of me is guilty about that every day.
✺
“Jesus,” said Minho. “I feel like we’re on some kind of misery tour.”
Changbin pushed a slice of onion around his bowl of gopchang-jeongol with his chopsticks as Minho continued placing choice bites of sausage on top of Changbin’s rice. The onion encountered an oily bubble on the surface of the soup and broke it apart like a cell splitting in two.
“Hey,” said Changbin, aiming for a levity he didn’t feel. “It’s not my fault today sucks.”
“I know,” said Minho, and his voice was suddenly softer. Suddenly accommodating of a kind of pain Changbin wished neither of them had ever needed to become familiar with. “I know, Changbin-ah.”
Hyunjin’s party wouldn’t start for another hour and a half and the bar was still a fifteen minute walk away. There was no reason for any of the guests to show up at this restaurant and yet in every open space, Changbin saw Jisung.
“Can you — ” Minho started and then trailed off. He looked over Changbin’s shoulder at a group of friends arguing about what to order. “Can you feel him? What he’s feeling?”
Part of being bonded, Changbin understood intimately, was the ability to feel whatever your bonded partner was feeling. Across a country, a continent, an ocean — distance didn’t matter. It was supposed to be stronger if the bond was bidirectional, but it was plenty strong for Changbin anyway. He was two people some days, he thought, himself and Jisung. There was a part of his body that was set aside for Jisung, both because Changbin wanted it to be and because he had no choice.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s not, like…specific. I don’t know why he’s feeling what he’s feeling, or what he’s doing. It’s just pangs of it.”
Another part of being bonded was the dreaming, but Changbin didn’t mention that part. Minho already knew, as well as any of Changbin’s friends knew, and Changbin didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to dwell on the things he dreamed, on the way it felt to wake up choking on truth.
Minho chewed on his lip and didn’t ask what Changbin knew he wanted to ask. Changbin answered the unspoken question anyway.
“He’s excited,” Changbin said. “For the party, probably? He’s nervous. He’s nervous a lot, honestly — his chest gets tight. His stomach gets fluttery.”
Changbin recognized, to some degree, that this information wasn’t his to share — that Minho didn’t need it, that it should be Jisung’s to give him in Jisung’s own time. But Changbin also knew, with a horrible sort of clarity, why Jisung was nervous, why he’d been nervous all day, and soon enough Minho would know too. Soon enough, Minho would understand all the intricacies of the dance Changbin did every morning, untangling his own feelings from Jisung’s. Soon enough, Minho would do the dance himself, except for the part where Changbin learned to remind himself that when Jisung’s heart throbbed with love, it wasn’t with love for Changbin.
Minho nudged at Changbin’s bowl with his chopsticks.
“Eat,” he said. “You’ve gotta go be really sad later.”
“You’re so helpful, hyung,” Changbin grumbled, but he took a bite. It was spicy enough to make his mouth burn and the burn was a welcome distraction.
“I do my best,” said Minho, in an intentional approximation of brightness, and he watched as Changbin ate his rice and meat and stained his lips red with soup. He seemed to be waiting for something.
“For what it’s worth,” Minho said, once Changbin had finished at least most of a meal, “I’m sorry.”
Changbin set his chopsticks down, throat tight. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
“I’m not saying that I’m sorry for doing something wrong,” said Minho. “I’m just saying that I’m sorry tonight will hurt.”
Changbin nodded. He didn’t want to make Minho feel guilty. He just wanted to grieve the thing that Minho would get to have and he wouldn’t, the relationship he wanted and Minho would get; he wanted to grieve it now, before he had to be happy for Jisung and Minho. He wanted Minho to understand the value of Jisung’s affection and he wanted to cry, also, because he knew that Minho did.
“It’ll be okay,” Minho said, after they’d finished and he’d paid the check. They stepped out onto the sidewalk and he looked at Changbin with such open concern that it made Changbin’s chest ache. “I know you think you know how this is going to go, but it’ll be okay.”
“You make it sound like I don’t know for sure,” said Changbin. “I do.”
“Regardless,” said Minho, undeterred. “We’ll be there for you, yeah? It’ll be okay.”
“I know,” said Changbin, but he didn’t look at Minho as they left the restaurant. He thought about Jisung’s sharp intake of breath, the tidal shape of the words How I feel about you, and understood with a crushing finality that Minho would get to have all of that. The place where everything started was the place it would end.
☆
“Does he know?” Jeongin asked, eventually. It was the thing neither of them had brought up yet. “About the dreams?” A pause. “About any of it?”
Did Jisung know about the dreams, Changbin wondered, and he almost laughed. Would it be harder or easier if he did? Jisung knew that when he was sick, Changbin would show up at his apartment with white soondubu jjigae; that when he had a panic attack, Changbin would somehow know to call. Jisung knew that ever since his third year of university, when Chan introduced them in the courtyard of the College of Music, Changbin would appear at his side after a long hard day, carrying coffee or cheesecake or something sweet. Jisung knew that in the years since finishing university, as he’d transitioned into producing with Chan and Changbin had started a graduate program, Changbin had never lost his preternatural sense for what Jisung needed, where he was going, what he wanted. But ultimately:
“No, he doesn’t,” Changbin said. “I wouldn’t do that to him, you know? It’s too much pressure.” He paused and added, “He doesn’t know about the bond at all. I never wanted him to.”
It wasn’t uncommon, to have prophetic dreams about the person you were bonded to. It went along with other things — shared pain, shared pleasure, the feedback loop of sex. Changbin had imagined it, feeling his own pleasure reflected back at him through Jisung’s, and he wondered what would happen after the party. If he’d feel Jisung’s pleasure like a memory, if he’d feel the hands on Jisung’s body as though there were hands on his own. Jisung hadn’t had sex with anyone since Changbin’s bond formed, and Changbin didn’t know if it would be different than the dull throb of arousal he felt when Jisung touched himself.
“That almost doesn’t feel fair,” said Jeongin. “Hasn’t he — I mean, if you’re feeling what he’s feeling and he doesn’t know, that doesn’t seem like it’s fair.”
Changbin swallowed around a knot in this throat. “It isn’t,” he said, because Jeongin was right. For years, he’d had insight into Jisung that Jisung hadn’t given him, and he’d clung to it as much as it hurt him. “It isn’t fair. But if I’d told him, would that have been better? He doesn’t feel what I feel. He’s never going to. What would it do to us, if he knew?”
Bonding with someone who didn’t bond with you back was always the worst-case scenario. Changbin had grown up with stories and legends about what a one-sided bond could do to you, about the ways it could tear you apart, and he thought about the legend of Jigwi. He thought about Jigwi loving Queen Seondeok so intensely and so all-consumingly that his body turned to fire as he lay under a pagoda. He wondered if his own body would turn to fire one day too, if he would burn from the inside out.
“Is it always the same dream?” Jeongin asked, sounding thoughtful.
“It’s not always the same dream,” said Changbin. “Sometimes — I mean, last night it was at the bar, at Hyunjin’s birthday, but I’ve dreamed about it happening all over the place. It’s just always the same conversation.”
“What’s the conversation, then?” said Jeongin. “Maybe you could change it. Maybe if you did something different, you could change the future, you know? Maybe you don’t have to resign yourself to he worst possible outcome.”
“Jeongin-ah,” said Changbin, softly. “I can change a lot of things — I can change the setting, I can change the lead-up, I can change the wording — but I can’t make him love me.” He paused, took a breath. “Every time, I say I love you, Jisung, or I want to be with you, Jisung, or I have feelings for you, Jisung, and it’s always the same from there. He takes this sharp little breath and he lets me down gently, and then — ” Changbin trailed off. He didn’t say what came next. He’d never told anyone what came next.
“Then why confess at all?” Jeongin asked. “If you know he’s going to say no, if you know it’s not reciprocated — why do this to yourself?”
“Because I have to, Jeongin-ah,” Changbin said. “I have to say my part. I can’t go on like this, just never telling him. I’m not gonna tell him about the bond, but I have to tell him how I feel. I have to.”
I feel like I’ll die if I don’t, he didn’t add. I feel like I’m two people at once and I can’t take it anymore.
“I guess I get that,” said Jeongin. “I just — hyung, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt so bad.”
“It’ll hurt either way,” said Changbin. “I just don’t want to lie about this anymore.”
Jeongin sighed, soft and quiet. He sounded resigned, and Changbin knew the feeling. “Text me afterwards,” he said, gently. “I’ll be at the party, I can come find you.”
“Thanks,” Changbin said, and his voice sounded hoarse. It sounded like he’d already been crying. “And Minho-hyung says he’ll hang out with me during the day — he says he’ll meet me on campus and we’ll go get something to eat before the party.”
“That’s good,” said Jeongin. In the background, Changbin heard a door open and Seungmin say, I’m home in a tone of voice that sounded like I love you. “It’ll be okay, hyung. After a while it’ll be okay.”
After a while, thought Changbin, and the prospect of time was a physical weight. How long would it take, he wondered, to feel better; how long would it be before he could wake up and not be at least a little bit in love? He thought about Minho, and about the relationship Jisung and Minho would have with each other, and wondered too if he would stop dreaming about it once it started. He wondered which new dream would replace the one where Jisung’s eyes widen and he takes a quick, sharp breath. The one where Changbin says I love you and Jisung’s face flickers like a candle.
✦
When Changbin tells Jisung he’s in love with him, it’s a Friday. He’s twenty-six, and Jisung is twenty-five, and it feels like the entire world is behind them and ahead of them at once.
Jisung’s eyes widen and he takes a quick, sharp breath. “Hyung,” he says, and it’s not awe. It’s not reverence, or hope, or disbelief. It’s something closer to pity, something closer to the way a wave trembles at the top of its crest before it crashes, because crashing was always what it was going to do. It’s something closer to the breathless, hesitant pause someone might take before reaching into another person’s belly and rearranging the mess of their guts.
“I just wanted to tell you,” says Changbin, and he knows how this goes. He knows how this goes because he’s dreamed it, so vivid and so brilliant that to dream it was the same as to live it.
“I’m so sorry,” says Jisung, and he sounds it. He means it.
Maybe it isn’t the same, Changbin thinks; maybe it isn’t the same, to dream it and to live it, because he’s living it and it’s as though someone has punched the air out of him. He’s living it and he’s not sure how he’s going to wake up in the morning and keep breathing, even though he’s gone on breathing a hundred mornings after he dreamed the same awful dream.
“It’s not,” Jisung starts, and then stops again. He takes a deep, slow breath, eyes fixed on the horizon, hand tight around his glass. “It’s not that I don’t love you.”
“But?” asks Changbin, although he knows the answer. His voice is steady and the steadiness surprises him. His face is so close to the glass wall of the bar that it fogs up when he breathes out.
“But I like someone else,” Jisung says, all in a rush.
“Yeah,” says Changbin, and he shuts his eyes. He stops himself before he says I know, because he doesn’t want Jisung to know how he knows. Why he knows. He doesn’t want Jisung to realize that for years, Changbin has been privy to his private feelings, to the aches and twinges of his love for Minho; he doesn’t want Jisung to know that what Changbin feels for Jisung goes beyond love, because it will only make it harder for both of them. Jisung will feel guilty, and his guilt will flay Changbin open.
“I’m so sorry,” Jisung says again. “I can’t help it.”
“I know you can’t,” Changbin says. “I’m not mad. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I’m the one who should be saying sorry, Changbin thinks. I’m the one who should be saying sorry for loving you.
Changbin thinks about Minho in the restaurant earlier in the afternoon, thinks about Jeongin on the phone a few days before — this is it, the only thing he’s held back from them. The final blow. Minho has known for two months about Changbin’s dreams, about Changbin’s bond, about Changbin’s intention to confess even though he knew it would be futile; Jeongin has known for even longer. But Changbin has never told either of them the worst thing he always knew to be true: that Jisung and Minho were in love with each other, and that one day they would touch and something would change.
Jisung shifts his weight from foot to foot, drums his fingernails against the side of his glass.
“I’ll give you some space,” he says finally. “But like — I want to be friends. Always. If — I mean, if you want that too.” He looks profoundly uncomfortable, so different from how he usually is around Changbin, that Changbin wonders if he’s broken something he won’t be able to put back together. Changbin wonders if maybe there are some problems that are unfixable, that were irreparable from the beginning.
“Of course,” says Changbin, sounding robotic. “I’ll never stop being your friend.”
He means it, even though he doesn’t sound like he does. It might be better if he stopped being Jisung’s friend, but he knows he isn’t strong enough to make that choice. Jisung, still clutching his drink, takes a few awkward steps away from Changbin. He waves with his free hand, strange and stiff, and then slips away, temporarily obscured from view by a cluster of Hyunjin’s high school friends. Changbin drops into a chair at an unoccupied table. He pulls out his phone and texts Jeongin, who’s somewhere on the opposite side of the rooftop, that he’s done it. That it’s over.
I’ll come find you, Jeongin replies, and Changbin nods at his phone even though Jeongin can’t see him. His vision starts to swim. His throat is tight and sore and he watches, across the bar, as Jisung reemerges from behind Hyunjin’s friends and catches sight of Minho, who’s been skulking behind a potted tree since Jisung and Changbin started talking. Changbin watches as Jisung makes his way over to Minho, his expression still abject and stricken, and he watches as Jisung reaches out for Minho’s arm. He watches as Minho reaches back. He watches as the bond forms.
Bond formation is spontaneous. It can happen at any time, even between people who’ve known each other for years. Even between people who’ve touched before. Changbin wishes that Jisung bonding with Minho would cause Changbin’s bond with Jisung to break, but it doesn’t. He feels the stab of Jisung’s realization in his joints, the heavy settling of Jisung’s impossible love in his hair, his jaw, his wrists, his teeth. He wonders, horrified, if the bond formed because of what he did. If it formed because he left Jisung open and vulnerable, left him lost and looking for comfort.
Changbin doesn’t wait for Jeongin to find him. He gets to his feet and walks out, head down, still wearing Jisung’s jacket. He passes Hyunjin, who starts to turn and call after him, but he pretends not to notice, telling himself he’ll text Hyunjin a happy birthday later. Minho’s twenty-seven, and Jisung is twenty-five, and the place in Changbin’s body that’s set aside for Jisung doesn’t feel any smaller than before.
Later on, when morning comes, Changbin doesn’t wake, because he never went to sleep in the first place.