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The first person Jungwoo falls in love with has a golden cross necklace and a propensity for joy. Nineteen and he wears his shoelaces double-knotted, his cardigan buttons half-way done. Tucks his hair behind his ear when he’s nervous, bites the skin between his fingers when he’s bored. Exactly two moles on his cheeks and two on his neck and when Jungwoo tells him that these are all the places he’s been kissed in a past life, he laughs and tells him there are no past lives. Only this life, and the next.
Then, that same night, he presses his mouth to the high of Jungwoo’s left cheek, lips a whisper by his lashes. Breath hot beneath the blanket and he kisses him there again and again until Jungwoo feels it like a brand against his skin, a mark that someone has made him theirs. Sleeps to the feeling of drool pooling down his neck, wriggly hands caught into his pyjamas and a leg slotted firm between his. Rest has never come so easy.
The next morning, with the house still quiet, Jungwoo rises to raid his older sister’s bathroom. With her make up, he draws a small spot high up on his left cheek where the heat still lingers, then tip-toes his way into the kitchen. Mark wakes to breakfast set on the table - all two bowls of rice, three eggs and enough dried anchovies to have the ocean pressing charges - and sinks a smile to Jungwoo’s neck in thanks, his stubble sharp and sweet.
“Jungwoo,” he says, thumb running circles just below his eye. “Did you know moles were where your lover kissed you in a past life?”
i. autumn
Jungwoo goes to church because his mother does, and his mother goes to church because the move from Seoul to Vancouver was long and hard and she misses the feel of her own tongue, the warmth of dark, dark eyes framed by dark, dark hair. Most days, resentment finds its feast in the ravines of Jungwoo’s stomach. Other days, he thinks he understands his mother more than anyone else in this world.
The church is a thirty-minute drive away and they make the trip in a second-hand car with peeling orange paint and one working brake light. His father in his pressed brown suit, his mother in her best dress finally pulled out of its plastic. Hair up in little ringlets, shoes polished until sparkling. His sister sits in the back with him in their mother’s blouse and a skirt they had thrifted only yesterday, hemmed up thrice by a numb hand and a tired eye.
“Don’t pout,” she says to him. “You’re twenty now, you’re an adult. At least do this for her.”
Jungwoo does not pout, but he does roll down the window as far as it’ll go. To the sound of his family’s chatter, their hums a gentle swirl of bubbling sea foam, Jungwoo feels the September air rush across his face and pretends he’s on a ferry to Jejudo instead.
Of course, though delusion will have you reclining on sunny islands where your name is held round and sweet on tongues like yours, thirty minutes in a beat-up car can only take you so far. So far, in this case, being a farmhouse-style church with little arched windows and stained glass walls. It comes to single steeple, its crowning cross caught in wisps of cloud smoke, calling out to God. Saying, we are here at your feet. To be devoted then is to be loud, to ensure you are seen. The hangul in front is a comfort at least.
When Jungwoo reaches the steps of the church, red-bricked and lined with young mayflowers, the people who come to welcome him look like the people back home. Sound like them too with a rise and fall that has Jungwoo thinking of his grandmother, hands warm where they hold him steady. Groups of people in shades of his mother and father, fingers garlic-stained and palms calloused in mounds. None really his age besides one with eyebrows arched to the heavens and ears as big as his nose. Looking a little too small in a dress shirt a little too big for him, and iron-pleated trousers that look like they could belong to an older brother.
“This is Mark,” says his mother, pushing them together. She races off to her own group before either of them can say another word, face curled into a smile Jungwoo hasn’t seen in months, and it is enough. Jungwoo can do this for her at least.
In the silence between them, Mark looks up at him through the thick of his fringe, smile slight but sweet. Shuffles himself closer as if they are a pair who have known each other for years instead of minutes. “I heard from my mom that you moved here a couple weeks ago,” he says, his English round and fast in a curl of flowing consonants. “Wanna be friends?”
“Friends?”
“Yeah, you know. Like, people who hang out and do stuff together.”
“I know friends.” Jungwoo had plenty back home. Here - well. He tries not to think about that too much.
“Alright, okay. Good.” Mark’s fingers come to pick at the back of his palm, before they find home on the cuff of Jungwoo’s dress shirt instead. Uncertainty made confident with ambition. “That’s us then. Friends.”
Before mass begins, Mark takes him just behind the church and has him lie on the grass, dry leaves poking into their backs. His English slower than before, a deep rumble Jungwoo feels beneath his skin.
“I do this sometimes with my brother. Like, just watch the sky pass us by and see the world move around us. Sometimes, we’d make shapes out of clouds too and just see what we can come up with. Do you um, I dunno. Do you do that in Korea? Cloud-watching I mean. I just - I’ve only been to Seoul once to visit my grandma and I was so young, all I remember is her curly hair and how she always smelled of Tiger Balm and - um. Sorry.” Mark nudges him with his elbow, cheeks like little spring blooms caught beneath river ice. “So… do you?”
Jungwoo nods twice - once, because he had lost himself half-way through the question and again because Mark is pretty when he smiles, free and fierce like a lion cub. The type of person who hides nothing, who feels everything with their entire body and he is aglow with the belief there is a connection here, an understanding between new souls. Who is Jungwoo to sever it?
“Cool.” Mark turns into him slightly, so Jungwoo feels the heat of his words on his neck next. A light dusting of intimacy, a secret made to be shared. “So you get it, right? The sky is kinda like how the universe speaks to us, don’t you think?”
With a blistered finger, he points above them and teaches Jungwoo the word for eventide, then cumulus clouds. When Jungwoo repeats them, stumbling over its sharp edges, Mark lets out a laugh, fresh and clear. It comes rolling in like an ocean breeze, makes Jungwoo think perhaps he did end up in Jejudo after all. So he says it again, butchers it twice just to hear Mark chortle until he’s rolling into Jungwoo, slapping him hard on the arm until happiness becomes the shape of a hand on your skin, a trace that you have given someone a joy that exceeds the confines of an earthly body.
“You’re so cute,” says Mark, and makes a heavy tongue a gift, a passage to being adored. Mark, who is a year younger but calls him friend in an accent that has Jungwoo wondering the shape of a language. Who tells him they don’t do age gaps like that here in Canada and anyway, nineteen and twenty are close enough so no need to worry about all of that it. Jungwoo is just Jungwoo. Not an older brother, not someone burdened with responsibility because a few months distance dictates so. He is, in the end, simply himself in the eyes of another who calls him friend.
When mass begins, Mark forces his way between Jungwoo and his older sister, wriggling himself into space, his thigh pressed tight against him. Like this, with him so close Jungwoo can smell the sweetness of fabric softener and the grass stains on his elbows, the pastor begins his sermon on the grace of God. Our Father gives second chances, second lives, he says, and the church is where we are born again. In return, all he asks is for our faith. Jungwoo doesn’t believe in God and there are no second chances in a life with one end. Yet, Mark’s laughter lingers still, the warmth of his body against his, and Jungwoo thinks rebirth is an illusion he can play into, however temporary.
On his knees, with his fingers joined in a steeple to his mouth, Jungwoo says his first prayer to God, and thinks of sky.
With Mark comes a sense of home and, inevitably, as Jungwoo learns, Johnny too. Johnny is a couple years older than them both, already graduated with some high-paying office job to fund his lavish life of tailored suits and luxury bags. He has a charming mouth that curls at the edges, a body Jungwoo’s only seen on the models his sister hangs on her walls and, most importantly, he has history with Mark.
Over a lunch of Mark’s fifth attempt to make curry and some takeout of dumplings and jjajangmyeon to supplement it, Jungwoo watches history play out, unwinding like a film reel. Mark’s pupils grow twice their size as he giggles over jokes half-funny and slaps his hands together to impressions half-baked. (Pity laughs, Jungwoo convinces himself because his are surely far superior.) A lingering touch on an arm here, feet kicking against each other beneath the table and Jungwoo is watching sunrise from behind glass. Possession are for things, not people, he reminds himself. Though the pout and fingers at Mark’s back stay put.
“We were thinking of going to the new exhibition at the gallery this week,” says Mark to Johnny, scooping more rice into Jungwoo’s bowl. He piles on kimchi and dried anchovies along with it, then a dumpling from his own dish. “Wanna come?”
“Sure. Why not?” Johnny runs his hands through his hair. It falls, parted in the middle, and frames his chiselled jaw and handsome face in dark curtains, like a night sky split open. Jungwoo moves his fingers to the thick of Mark’s thighs, digs his nails in there just shy of being strange, and though Mark makes nothing of it, he shuffles himself closer still.
“Doesn’t Johnny have work or something?”
“We can go on a Saturday,” says Mark.
“No, I think we’re going on a Friday.”
Johnny places two dumplings into Mark’s bowl and Jungwoo leans over to take them both. “Friday is still good for me. After work okay?”
“Of course,” says Mark.
“Absolutely not,” says Jungwoo, poking his slices of pickled radish with his chopsticks and digging a hole in two.
Johnny has nice teeth too, he realises, when he watches his pretty mouth grow into a crescent moon. Fuck. “Great. It’s a date.”
“Not a date.” Jungwoo stuffs his mouth with enough radish to make his cheeks sour, to make the grimace he sends across the table look accidental enough. “I don’t go on dates with greedy corporate businessmen. Don’t you have morals?”
“Jungwoo!”
“How about a double date, then?” suggests Johnny. “My girlfriend’s been wanting to go too so this works out. You don’t mind if she tags along, right?”
Oh. The radish falls from Jungwoo’s mouth. Mark picks it back out of his bowl with his chopsticks, then gently guides it back into his lips. “You have a girlfriend?”
“Of two years,” adds Johnny, smirking. “Idiot.”
Jungwoo’s chopsticks clatter onto the table, spilling rice and radish and relief. “He called me an idiot!”
“Um, I think he was talking to me,” says Mark.
“No,” replies Johnny, grin wide and knowing. “Both of you. Idiots.”
The first song Mark ever plays to him on his guitar is a gospel hymn he learns from his father. In Jungwoo’s backyard, beneath a sky made of orange leaves and filtered sun, he strums the chords to His Eye is on the Sparrow, voice a soft swirl of a downstream river, a light rainfall on concrete strip. With his head on Mark’s thigh, eyes closed and branches digging into his back, Jungwoo feels the tide of it first, then the words second. A song of deluded faith and ignorance and sometimes, Jungwoo resents Mark as much as he likes him.
“Mark, I have to tell you something,” begins Jungwoo. Behind his lids, he sees the shadow of Mark loom above him, an angel, he hopes, come to whisk him away.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know if you’re ready for it.”
“I’m ready. Just say it.”
A pause - and then, “I don’t care for sparrows.”
Mark’s laughter is a drum beat to his music, strings plucking along with the bubbling of it all. “That’s fine. Birds are kinda scary, hey? The song is about more than that anyway.”
Jungwoo turns his cheek to rest on Mark’s thigh. He sucks in a breath, and lets it out in one. “I don’t believe in God either.”
The guitar continues to strum, Mark’s silhouette still splendid above him. “You go to church though.”
“Because of you. Because of my family.” The music stops. “I don’t - God’s eye. I don’t trust it. We can’t rely on that and pretend everything is going to be okay. All we have in this world is ourselves.”
Hardened fingers come to draw his hair away from his forehead, then rest themselves on his jaw, holding him there steady. “That’s alright, that’s okay. Many people don’t believe in him but he watches over us anyway. He watches the sparrow, so he watches over us too. We’re safe, no matter what. That’s all the song means.”
“That’s not - ”
“What you meant. I know. But well. I just want you to know you’re always safe here. I just want you to know someone is always here for you. Like you said, all we have in this world is ourselves - and each other.”
When Jungwoo looks up, Mark’s gaze is only on him. Wide and warm, made bright by afternoon sun and adoration unchanged. The light coalesces around him, turning him blinding, like a halo Jungwoo can’t help but turn into, lips to the soft inside of his knee.
“Okay. I can accept that,” he says, and though he doesn’t believe in God, he believes in Mark. In a pain of living halved because someone has looked at all of you and chosen to cherish you still.
It takes three months into university for someone to proclaim their like for him. Jungwoo is surprised because he had made a bet with Johnny it would only take one, and surprised again when he is unmoved by her confession. She’s cute enough with hair that reaches her waist, and smells of summer when she leans into him to run her hand along his arm during class. Except, Jungwoo finds her fingers too soft and her skin too smooth. Her cheekbones not sharp or high enough and her teeth too big in lips too plush. How can he begin to like someone without callouses on their knuckles, who doesn’t hit him when they laugh or fashion themselves to his side when he cries?
Johnny snickers when he tells him over a pot of ramyeon, the steam rising up between them like clouds ascending. “Maybe you’re just the type of person who needs more than a nice face to like someone.”
“She’s nice too, I guess. She doesn’t laugh at my English. Do you think that’s the problem?”
“Huh.” Johnny scoops up some bok choy onto Jungwoo’s bowl and a heaping of spam only people their age can eat without worrying. “How’s Mark?” he asks.
Jungwoo pokes a hole into his poached egg, watching its yellow yolk run around his noodles like sun cracked open, and thinks of Mark. “He’s abandoned me for his final assignments,” grumbles Jungwoo. “That’s why I’m stuck with you. Anyway, did you hear anything I just said? We’re supposed to be talking about my love life here, not Mark.”
“Same thing,” says Johnny, and slurps his bowl clean.
ii. winter
Jungwoo’s fascination for ducks begins the same day he spots a pair of them in Mark’s front yard. Last night’s rain has carved its puddles into the grass, forming little murky pools of sodden soil. From inside, they watch two mallard ducks gather in their sunken shape, one floating on a drop, the other watching on, two green heads touched by morning dew.
“Stupid ducks,” says Jungwoo. “They’re cute though, at least.”
When Mark leans his head on Jungwoo’s shoulder, Jungwoo forgets the feeling of breath. Mark’s body is fresh and hot from the bed, elbows pink, and he moulds himself against him like water does to mountain rock. “I guess but like, don’t you think there’s something kinda wonderful there?” he replies. “Like, turning puddles into ponds and all that. They’re always finding ways to live.”
Jungwoo doesn’t move. He keeps his arm still and rigid so the heat of Mark’s cheek on his skin stays like an imprint, a stamp he can carry around him to show the world he is owned by the most beautiful boy in the world. “Huh. I never thought about it like that.”
“You know when they migrate, they’ll fly in the shape of a V too? To help each other fly easy,” continues Mark. “I guess these two here are a little different. I dunno, maybe they got left behind during the move or something but they’re still trying. They still have each other.”
Later that night, with Mark asleep on the couch beside him, his feet tucked into Jungwoo’s lap for warmth, Jungwoo will search up all about ducks and their migration. Then, with Mark in deep sleep and wrapped in two blankets and Jungwoo’s jacket, he’ll watch the two outside swim in a puddle they make into home. Emerald gems in a suburban hole, huddled into each other for comfort. In preparation for winter, mallard ducks fly south to seek warmth, to seek life. To say to the earth that they are living onwards, in spite of the world around them. Sparrows do not.
When Valentine’s Day comes around, Jungwoo receives some pepero from his mother who feels sorry for him, a few homemade chocolates his sister leaves behind for being too ugly to give away, and nothing from Mark.
“Valentine’s Day is different here,” says his sister, packing a box with two ribbons and a bow for a colleague she thinks looks like a young So Ji-sub from his I’m Sorry, I Love You days. “It’s mainly for people who are already dating.” She smacks his hand away when he tries to reach for the cookies and kicks him out of the kitchen entirely by time he’s on his fourth spiel about Mark’s moonlit smile.
“Mark’s not the brightest when it comes to this stuff,” says Johnny over the phone. “Like you. So, you know. Keep trying.” More experienced in the matters of Jungwoo’s woes and he manages to hang up before Jungwoo can even begin to his first verse on the slope of Mark’s nose or the wonder of his ambition.
Keep trying, says Johnny, but Jungwoo’s never stopped. Not for a moment, not for a second. So, before Mark’s night class starts, Jungwoo rushes down to campus before the day can end and hands him a small box of twelve chocolates purchased from an artisan boutique, a hummingbird making home in the thrumming of his chest.
“For you,” he says in a throat stuffed with cotton balls.
Mark smiles at him with eyes too large for a face so darling, pinches his cheek in thanks. “Oh, that’s so sweet,” he says into the thick of his scarf, then turns away. “See you after I’m done?”
On his way to class, Mark shares his ribbon-tied sweets with Donghyuck, their mouths sweet with Jungwoo’s heart. Glued to each other’s shoulders, bodies drawn to another in the cold as they walk across the field, and Jungwoo watches on, watches on, still sick with want.
To be devoted then is to love, whether you are seen or not.
A few days later has Jungwoo finding himself where he always does at two a.m. on a Friday: in the parking lot of a Tim Hortons, in the passenger seat of Mark’s car. Mark’s car is a beat-up hand-me-down from his older brother which in turn was a hand-me-down from his dad, who had bought it second-hand from a friend of a friend of an uncle. It has cobwebs on the side mirrors from being parked perpetually outside, a license plate with a dent in the middle from the first and only time Jungwoo had tried to park it in the tiny lot of their university, and sand on backseat from their last road trip to Wasaga Beach. The strange stink of it comes from Mark always forgetting to turn off the aircon before he turns off the engine, then trying to cover up the damp smell with cheap air fresheners stolen from his brother’s glove box. Still, Jungwoo had fought Mark the day he considered selling it all for a couple hundred dollars and a free lunch.
Outside, the snow falls steady and soft, just enough to cover the telephone wires in a thin sheet, ice clinging to the lamp post and crackling onto concrete. The sky indigo, the stars pinprick freckles through lines of stratus clouds. Despite the frost, Mark keeps the car windows open anyway, rolled all the way down so Jungwoo can hang his hand outside, cigarette smoke rising into the chill. He says nothing of it but squeezes Jungwoo’s knee thrice when he lights up his third for the night.
“What’ll you do after graduation?” asks Mark as Jungwoo sucks in a drag, then breathes smoke rings out the window. When Jungwoo closes his eyes, it feels too cold to be Jejudo and Donghyuck’s face, bright and sweet and round when Mark had fed him love, lingers like a bad taste.
“What else? Be an engineer.”
“Is that what you want?”
“It’s easy.”
“Easy?”
“It’s safe,” Jungwoo clarifies and sometimes, that is enough. It is enough to know there is a road for you to follow, that there is a place you can go to and be safe. Sometimes life is just that.
“But is it what you want?”
“Who cares what I want?”
“I do.”
Jungwoo’s ash falls onto the snow, an explosion of storm clouds come down like rain. “What are you going to do after uni?” he asks instead.
“What else?” repeats Mark. “Be a writer.”
“What if you fail? Won’t it kill you? To fail at something like that.”
“Maybe. I guess.” Mark’s face is sharp beneath the fluorescent light of the lamp post above them, jaw tight. “But other people risk their lives for less.” That’s the thing with Mark. Always so full of passion, thinking life is made to pursue dreams, thinking the only option is to leap into life. Some days, Jungwoo isn’t so sure whether to fear him or pity him for it. When he blows out another ring of smoke, Mark squeezes his knee again, tighter this time. “I just want you to do what you want.”
“I want to be comfortable.”
“And happy?”
Jungwoo isn’t so sure what this is. To call sitting in a beaten-up car in the middle of the night happiness, he thinks, is to cheapen the idea of it. But it isn’t unhappiness, either. No peace found in such simplicity can ever be so.
“I’m not so sure it’s possible to be happy,” he begins, thinking of Donghyuck, then of Mark. “But this is close enough.”
Jungwoo rests his hand on the one tight against his knee, squeezing thrice. In the silence, he puts out his cigarette in a metal tin Mark keeps in his car just for him, and the snow falls on.
Two weeks after the fourteenth, Mark shows up to lunch with two boxes of cookies, their edges burned to crisps, and his fingers covered in bandages.
“Johnny told me - I didn’t know… I didn’t know about Valentine’s Day,” he begins, looking everywhere else but at Jungwoo. His cheeks glow deep and darling, lips tight between pearl teeth. “Um, like, I know what it is and stuff, I’ve just never celebrated it and it’s not something I think about so I didn’t know it was a big thing for you or that it meant um… something else… but like, if I did know, I would have for sure - anyway. Sorry.” Mark pushes his little bundle of poorly-tied bows into Jungwoo’s arms, then looks up at him with moons for eyes. “Is this okay?”
“It’s perfect,” says Jungwoo, and thinks he has never wanted to kiss someone more in his life.
iii. spring
White Day comes too soon, along with all Jungwoo’s anxieties.
“Mark doesn’t even know what White Day is, you fool,” says Johnny when Jungwoo calls to ask if one box of homemade chocolates and another bought from a fancy store with a name he can’t pronounce is enough. “It’s not a thing here. No one knows what it is.”
“But I do,” replies Jungwoo. Across the kitchen counter, his sister’s own haul boasts fancy chocolates and a box of premium biscuits. None homemade and her So Ji-sub boy can’t hold a flame to the fire that is Jungwoo’s ardour. “I know about it so I need to make sure I get this right.”
“You could literally give him some convenience store Cadbury and Mark will still pinch your cheeks and call you cute.”
“But I want him to do more than that.” Jungwoo wipes his chocolate-stained elbows on the sides of his apron, and pulls out five different kinds of ribbons from the drawer. One doesn’t seem enough to portray the full extent of his passion so he settles on using three and ties the last two into an elaborate bow with lace edges and a baby-blue centre. “Like, I don’t know, I want him to spin me around in circles and tell me I’m the best in the world. Or, wear a cute little pleated skirt for me and - ”
“Stop before I hang up please,” hisses Johnny. “I can’t believe you called me during work for this.”
“You picked up though.”
“Because you said it was an emergency!”
“Are matters of the heart not emergencies?” replies Jungwoo. He looks over at the piles of chocolate on the bench - four batches in case some didn’t turn out right - and a pile of cookies shaped into various hearts. “I’m gonna - I’m packing him three boxes just in case. Oh! And do you think the florist will have any more tulips left?”
“You’re insane.”
“Insanely in love!”
“Goodbye,” says Johnny. He hangs up the phone to leave Jungwoo alone with cream on the ceiling and butter on the floor, lace and silk caught around his arms.
Of course, like Johnny predicts, Mark doesn’t have a clue why Jungwoo shows up to his doorstep later that day with enough boxes and sweets to rival a small patisserie.
“White Day,” explains Jungwoo and then, when Mark continues to stare at him blankly, “but just an ordinary day works too.”
“Why?”
“Because - because it’s you. And I just want to do things for you.”
Mark laughs, high and loud, and meets him somewhere half-way between his desires and Johnny’s foresight. “You’re the cutest in the world,” he says, mouth to the sharp of Jungwoo’s jaw. “Thank you.”
Before the day is over, Mark demolishes his two boxes of chocolates and feeds the third back into Jungwoo, fingers sticky and sweet.
Jungwoo’s first kiss is at seventeen, past midnight, behind a convenience store where the LED sign barely flickers and the streetlights glow dim. In the pocket of his trousers, his phone buzzes with messages from his sister, a missed call from his mother and a text from Taeil asking him to stay safe - but it is the feel of brick and mortar behind his back that he feels more, the heat of a body pressed tight against his. Doyoung is two years older than him but twice shyer and he mouths against his neck like he isn’t so sure he should, licks at Jungwoo’s lips to ask for more. In return, Jungwoo kisses him back with too much teeth and not enough kindness, with hands that grab the flesh of his waist and sink their nails into his hips. A reminder for himself that they are alive, are living still, and although this isn’t love or like or anything of that sort, it is something better. A chance, at least. That’s all boys like them really need.
Three years later and, although Jungwoo has shared many moments with many boys and girls after that, his first kiss with Mark feels like he’s never been kissed at all. Mark isn’t slow and soft like Doyoung or sweet and firm like Jaehyun. Lips chapped and cold from the ice he had sucked clean between his fingers to stave off the afternoon heat, faint stubble sharp and prickly to preclude any chance of this being mere fantasy. He doesn’t tell him to meet him at a certain place where no one can see, doesn’t corner him in the dark where only the moon can touch them. He doesn’t hint, doesn’t play. No tentative touches to his waist or neck or a hand slowly reaching over the grass to find his. Only Mark and Jungwoo, side by side on the green carpet of his living room, sunlight streaming hot and bright. Amongst the chirping birds and occasional passing car, Mark calls out Jungwoo’s name like he knows no other word, then turns to him as flowers do to sun.
“Jungwoo,” he says. “Your hair’s gotten a little long.”
Jungwoo shuffles himself closer, eyes caught on the moles on Mark’s cheek, thinking of past lovers. “I’m thinking of cutting it,” he says.
“That’s too bad,” replies Mark, and leans into him.
Jungwoo doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t close his eyes in the face of golden light upon Mark’s brow, the shadow of his lashes on the blush of his face. Open mouthed, Mark kisses like he laughs, with too much enthusiasm and enough passion to drown the world. He smells like his mother’s packed lunch of ham kimbap and the muscat grapes he’d stolen from Jungwoo’s fruit cup. Tastes a little like seaweed and sesame, a lot like promise. When he reaches up to pull Jungwoo’s hair back, tucking it behind his ear like he does his own, Jungwoo vows to never cut it again.
Jungwoo isn’t too certain what they are after that. To give a name to something is to make it all he more visible, all the more vulnerable and he isn’t so sure he wants to take the risk. All roads are fraught with their own risks and Jungwoo walks a tightrope laid by God’s watching eye, a plan ordained by destiny, and a boy who believes in both.
But the next day, as Mark reads to him soft and slow from a book of cats and tables, his voice a rise and fall of ocean waves, Jungwoo thinks there is no one more beautiful in this world, no one more he wishes to make his. Beneath the brush of eventide, Mark’s hair and skin and eyes glow orange until the sun is a star that lives within a boy who dog-ears his favourite pages and uses receipts as bookmarks. Stunning in his simplicity and Jungwoo’s body moves of its own accord. He takes Mark’s fingers from the page, brings them to his mouth. Turns his hand over to sink his lips into his palm, then the pulse of his wrist. Here, on skin that carries no freckles, no moles, Jungwoo sucks Mark’s heartbeat into himself. A thrum beneath his lips that sings high and fast, vibrating against him, saying, we are alive, are alive, are living still. Ducks turning puddles into ponds, ascending into migration. Flying into life on a green living room carpet and suburban sunrise.
“Jungwoo,” calls Mark, like the first time. Like a name is not yours to own but give away, so you can hear the beauty of yourself in another’s mouth.
“Yes?”
Mark’s hand comes up to brush the hair away from Jungwoo’s nape, voice deep when he leans down to whisper, “Were you even listening to the story?”
“No,” replies Jungwoo, “not at all,” and kisses Mark’s heartbeat again and again until the heat of Mark’s lips finds his, until Jungwoo knows that rapture comes from the way another holds you safe, their fingers caught in your hair.
By the end of May, Jungwoo’s hair reaches his shoulders, bleached to a light brown that Mark says matches his eyes and looks sweet on him. Annoying some days when his fringe flops down to poke at his lashes but worth it all when Mark buys him a headband with little round bear ears at the top to hold them back. Jungwoo wears it daily from then on, a crown to remind him that there is someone who keeps him safe in the root of their heart. On days where Mark is feeling particularly generous, he’ll place the headband on Jungwoo himself, pushing his hair back soft and slow. The warmth of a smile against Jungwoo’s forehead is an extra gift he asks for freely and takes just as eagerly.
“What the hell is on your head,” says Johnny when they arrive at the cinema. Jungwoo, with his round ears perched high on his head and Mark tucked into his side.
“Do you like it?” asks Mark. “I got it for him so people can see his pretty face better.”
“He looks stupid,” replies Johnny, and then, turning back to Jungwoo, “You look stupid. Like a washed-up idol from the nineties who doesn’t realise time’s up.”
Jungwoo, still beaming, still brimming with the shape of Mark’s mouth against his skin just moments before, sticks his hands into Mark’s jacket pocket and pulls him closer. “Mark likes it.”
“And he also likes wearing ratty old t-shirts and socks with holes, you really wanna be taking fashion advice from him?”
“I think he looks cute,” says Mark, and he strokes the back of Jungwoo’s head in a way that has his toes curling in his sneakers. “Kinda like a puppy.”
“You guys are into some sick shit,” replies Johnny, before he snatches the popcorn and tickets from Mark and walks into the theatre himself.
Impressively, Mark lasts almost twenty minutes into the movie before he pulls at Jungwoo’s sleeve, though it only takes three seconds for Jungwoo to get the message. Face a little pale, pupils shaky, and Mark has never really been a fan of any type of blood or gore. With an apologetic look to Johnny, Jungwoo pulls him from his seat and out to wait outside the cinema where they watch The Truman Show on the little screen of his phone instead.
You really are idiots, texts Johnny from Theatre Three.
Thank you, Jungwoo texts back, along with a picture of Mark tucked beneath his chin.
Johnny doesn’t ever really go to the movies with them again after that.
Jungwoo has slept with only two people before Mark, but Mark has slept with none before him. He knows this for a fact because Mark makes sure to tell him this exactly four times before they make it to his bedroom, then another three when Jungwoo tries to press his cock between Mark’s cheeks.
Beneath him, Mark is something otherworldly. Jungwoo’s shirt, too big and too loose on Mark, falls half-way down his shoulder to show a collarbone sharp and pretty. The bedside lamp licks him up golden, makes him seem like stilled sunlight caught in the night. Hair tousled from the wind, from the way Jungwoo had insisted they ride with the windows down, and eyes darker than it all. If Jungwoo looks too long, he wonders whether he’ll sink into it and then, if he’ll make it back. To be devoured by beauty wouldn’t be so bad.
“I haven’t – ” begins Mark again as Jungwoo rubs the head of his cock against his hole.
“I know.”
“So – so I’m sorry if – ”
“No need,” replies Jungwoo, leaning down to sink a smile into his forehead. He tastes like sea and soap, smells like fresh linen. “I’ll go slow.”
Mark swallows, eyes flickering back up to him, and Jungwoo thinks he will never know a greater sight than this. In the darkness of that gaze, he sees only a reflection of himself, as if Mark has carved a home for him inside himself, has made room in his own body for Jungwoo to fit into, and though Jungwoo does not believe in God, Mark makes him believe in higher beings at least. In reverence, in piety. In a church found among bedsheets and and tangled limbs, in an altar made from the heat of another pressed tight against your thrumming chest and aching bones.
“Okay,” says Mark, and Jungwoo is made almost immobile in the face of such raw desire. “Alright. I trust you.”
When he finally presses himself into the heat of Mark’s ass, Jungwoo almost forgets how to breath. These things happen in dreams, Jungwoo thinks, in the fantasies of your dark heart you keep to make life bearable. Not in a bedroom of dingy boyband posters and dusty carpets, a chair piled with clothes in the corner. Hardly romantic but, as Mark holds onto him, pressing his mouth to a mole on Jungwoo’s shoulder to tell a past lover a new one is here to cherish him more, Jungwoo thinks this is something far more than mere romance. Apostasy, perhaps. Sanctity, certainly.
Over the headboard, the sign of the cross gleams beneath the pale moon, brass glinting like an eye above them. The one at church, right on the pulpit, had burned with the same intensity last Sunday. Repent, the pastor had said, and be saved. It is the only way.
Jungwoo runs his fingers by Mark’s waist in a ghost of a touch, committing every curve of his body to memory. “God might be watching,” he says.
Mark pulls Jungwoo further into himself, legs tight around him. “God is always watching,” he replies in a heartbeat, and rises up to kiss him again.
The next day at the arcade, Johnny claps Jungwoo on the back hard enough to have him stumbling into the crane machine. “So I heard you’re packing?” he laughs, grinning shark-toothed under the fluorescent light. “Welcome to the club, hey? Who’d have thought that this baby-face puppy dog type of kid had a giant cock beneath - ”
“Dude! That was a secret,” hisses Mark.
Jungwoo splutters, watching the timer hit zero on the machine, his thousand-won bill down the drain. The crane zips back to its home, empty-handed. “You told him?”
“Um, not in detail, I guess and - ”
“Mark told me his feet couldn’t touch the floor at one point,” interjects Johnny
“Mark!”
“I told him not to tell anyone about it though!”
“Well that really stopped him, didn’t it?” Jungwoo grumbles, scrummaging his bag for more notes to burn. “Unless I don’t count as someone.”
Mark presses a couple coins into his palm as a peace offering, then brushes the back of Jungwoo’s neck in a ghost of a finger’s kiss. Boys like Mark never really know how to play fair in the face of someone who adores you so, and Jungwoo keeps his cheeks full and pout deep, hoping to be held there a little longer. “I didn’t want to, but he made me."
“How did he make you do anything? Did he threaten you?”
“No, but… it was… it was part of the trade.”
“What trade?”
“You know,” begins Johnny, face still sharp from the lift of his smile. “I told Mark ways to suck cock and in exchange, he told me how it was,” and then, when Jungwoo’s lips curve into a puppy’s frown deep enough to have the corner of his lips grazing his chin, continues, “Just advice and some videos of course. No touching, so stop looking at me like that.”
Beside him, Mark’s cheeks bloom fierce, as red as the little Vancouver shirt he wears to sleep. Sheepish when he bows his head down, then looks up at him with eyes like a lunar eclipse. Deadly in it all and sometimes, Jungwoo wonders if Mark knows exactly what he’s doing. “I just wanted make sure I was good for you.”
Jungwoo’s five-hundred won coin slips from his fingers to roll beneath a dance rhythm game. “Oh.”
“Sorry,” says Mark, and kisses him better.
iv. summer
It’s different in Vancouver as all Jungwoo’s old friends from Seoul will say. Although they’ve never set foot here, they tell him he’s better off in a city where the faces are plenty and the people come in every way. Jungwoo is free there. He can like anyone he chooses.
But the thing is, Jungwoo doesn’t live in Vancouver. He lives in the hands of his mother, in the arms of a tight community, in the eye of Mark’s piety. There are consequences to everything and Jungwoo is careful with his love as much as he is full with it.
“It will kill my mother if she knows,” says Jungwoo to the ceiling, its corners peeling with paint and heavy with faint cobwebs. The fan above them spins and spins, spitting out hot air down to their feet. “And it will kill me if I’m not with you.”
Mark, beside him, rises up from the bed. Throws his legs over Jungwoo’s hips and hovers above him until all he can see is Mark and the sweat of his brow and the cupid’s bow of his chapped lips, Mark and certainty of his gaze, the tendons of his neck, taunt and tight when he says, “It’s okay, it’s alright. She doesn’t have to know. No one does.” Mark, pretty and sweet and a child of God, who kisses Jungwoo once below his left eye, Jungwoo, a boy, a disbeliever, a sinner. Mark, who loves and loves and loves until it spills out of him in waves great enough to drown the world, says, “Whatever you want. It’s okay. I’m always here.”
The cross on Mark’s chest swings between them, glinting gold in the low light of Jungwoo’s bedside lamp. In a moment of greed, in a desire to consume all of him, Jungwoo takes it into his mouth. Warm from Mark’s skin and he runs his tongue over its edges, bites it in the middle until he tastes the iron from his own gums as if teeth and hunger can wear gold into halves. With the cross still hot on Jungwoo’s tongue, Mark leans down to crown him with his mouth. Kisses him softly here, by the side of his head, with a reverence that has Jungwoo understanding why they call this place the temple. Humming, His Eye is on the Sparrow. Saying, it’s fine because they have each other. All fine, all fine because though sparrows do not migrate, they adapt. They make do.
The art gallery stands just across from the downtown square with five stone pillars rising high and grand above them like tepid giants and five pointed, narrow trees out front to match. Caught in its own shadow, it reminds Jungwoo of buildings from a time before them, plucked out from history textbooks and made new. Before they walk in, Jungwoo passes an elastic to Mark, who ties up his hair just high enough so he can lean down and press his lips to his nape.
“You’re perfect,” says Mark, mouth sweet by his skin. A light noon breeze comes in to wash them both but Jungwoo is still hot from the heat of noon, the passion of Mark’s consistent devotion.
When they enter, Mark takes a pamphlet to guide them and then slowly walks him through each piece. From artist biographies to the inspiration for a piece, he goes on and on about the beauty of a paint stroke, a detail of a print. All this comes from him in a mix of English spoken soft and slow and Korean interspersed between so Jungwoo understands every word – but in truth, Jungwoo doesn’t recall a single fact, he doesn’t take down a single note. He’s caught somewhere – not in a painting or a sculpture or a time beyond him, but in the flow of Mark’s words, the way they come gently, tailor-made for only him, and he has never known English to sound like this before. He has never heard a language made to be his, made only for him, and he comes to feel the shape of Mark’s words rather than hear them. Language as a hurdle, an obstacle, a bridge, yes, but have you ever known it also to be love?
At the register of the gift shop are a palette of mood rings, gleaming silver, glowing black. Jungwoo buys two and tucks them into his pocket.
The perks of having long hair, as outlined by Kim Jungwoo at four in the morning with Mark snoring on his chest:
The first is simply that he looks good. Very, very good. Handsome, charming. Sweet face in a curtain of auburn and he looks as pretty as his sister, Johnny begrudgingly admits after three cans of beer and a bowl of makgeolli.
The second is the way Mark will tangle his fingers into it in any quiet moment that allows him such a blessing. On the couch with Jungwoo’s head in his lap, after a shower as he towels it dry, at night when he believes Jungwoo to be sleeping. Mark will lift it up and let each individual strand fall like waterfall does to bedrock, like even the smallest parts of a person you treasure are more precious than anything in this world.
The third, but not last, is the way Mark strokes it back, tender and kind. Back to his ear, away from the nape of his neck. Up in a ponytail or little low bun and then kiss him where he leaves skin bare. Always a kiss with every parting, as if he couldn’t stand to leave Jungwoo without his touch, as if a parting never truly means apart.
Of course, with all great things come its frailties. Knots in the morning, bed hair that has him spending an extra half hour to look somewhat decent, and Mark pulling out a strand from his mouth to tell him he’s not going to eat his cooking anymore.
The other, not so great thing comes in the afternoon heat, in the streets of the city, the sun a blazing white eye in an ocean face. Jungwoo’s long hair is up in a ponytail, his headband there to keep away his fringe so the wind can greet his sweat-soaked face. Mark fans him with the visor of his cap, pressing a cool water bottle to his cheeks to starve off brimming fire. And then, as they cross the road, a man passes them. Says something to Jungwoo about his hair, and then another thing about him. Jungwoo isn’t so sure of the meaning exactly but he knows a tone when he hears it. When he sees Mark’s face, tight and pale, his hand leaving Jungwoo’s to lie cold, it is enough. An easy fix for a little peace.
That same day, Jungwoo sits in his bathroom, in a chair Mark had pulled from the dining room with a towel wrapped around his neck and his hair pulled back and low. In the reflection of the sink mirror, Mark looks gaunt, the fluorescent lights turning him pallid, making the hollow of his cheeks dark and deep.
“Are you - are you sure about this?” he asks, lips pulled into a thin line. “You don’t have to - you should do what you like. You shouldn’t let some guy… it doesn’t matter what anyone says. They’re no one.”
“I’m sure,” replies Jungwoo, because the fact Mark had made then is imprinted on him still and there is a pride in Mark he refuses to admit, a belief that he can be nothing short of perfect in the eyes of the world.
“Then shouldn’t we - like, maybe we should go to a hairdresser. They’ll do a better job than me and they’d have the professional scissors and everything.”
“It’s fine. I want you to do it.” Jungwoo turns his cheek, presses his mouth to the hand tight on his shoulder. “If you’re willing.”
"Okay." Mark swallows, grip tight around a pair of kitchen scissors. "Of course. Anything for you."
With a shudder, he pulls away and then, in a few sharp snips, cuts the ponytail at Jungwoo’s nape off, dropping it to the tiled floor like spilt rain. After that, the rest comes easier. A couple more cuts here and there to neaten things up, a little too much off the top because Mark cuts too quick and fast and thinks a little more will even everything out. When it’s over, Jungwoo is left staring in the sink mirror. Fringe uneven, covered in his own hair, and he looks like a fool even to him. Mark stands over his left shoulder, scissors still tight in his hand.
“How is it?” asks Jungwoo, turning around towards him. Above, the bathroom lights crown Mark in a white halo, turn his face dark with its shadows. Still, Jungwoo knows this face like he knows the creases of his own palm and he sees the way Mark’s gaze flickers all over him from hair to chin, pausing, thinking. Beneath its intensity, Jungwoo feels his lungs ready to burst into a flurry of monarch butterflies, wings beating south.
Then, after a moment, Mark traces an arc with his fingers from Jungwoo’s temple to his ear, in a mimicry of a touch first made on heat of a green living room carpet. “You’re beautiful,” he says, soft and reverent, full of grace, as if he has never known of such a vision in his life. Far greater than anything he has ever whispered before an apse and he leans down to kiss Jungwoo on his forehead, dragging his mouth to the spot beneath his left eye. "You’re so, so beautiful."
Beautiful. Jungwoo has always known himself to be handsome. These things come naturally with a nose sharp and tall and eyes that kiss at the corners. Yet there in his bathroom of missing tiles, his bangs far above his eyebrows and hair a scattering of long uneven freckles all over his cheeks, Jungwoo knows himself beautiful for the first time because somebody loves him.
Mark believes in God, but he doesn’t believe in marriage. Sings songs about sparrows but won’t listen to Canon in D or anything else associated with walking down a flower petal aisle. Fake Canadian, laughs Jungwoo when Mark turns off Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, then holds Mark’s white-knuckled hand to his cheek in the silence that follows. In this single-use life, every person finds their own ways to protect themselves. For all his faith in God’s will, Mark is no exception to this.
When Johnny announces to them that he’s engaged to a pretty girl with soft pearl skin and long, long hair, her smile like warm sun on fresh snow, they celebrate over three rounds of beer, two bottles of soju and enough hanwoo to have Jungwoo’s bank calling him the next day to enquire about suspicious activity. At the end of it all, drunk on somaek and charcoal flame, Johnny holds up a photo of a dainty finger held sweet by a ring, and Mark, born of goodness, made of greatness, congratulates him. Grins for exactly six seconds before he downs the rest of his beer, and then whatever is left in Jungwoo’s. Jungwoo doesn’t feel too hungry after that.
“Should we get a tattoo?” asks Mark as they both watch Johnny’s taxi melt into city skyline, his hand sticking out the window to wave goodbye. Beneath the tepid glow of the streetlights, Mark’s cheeks cut sharp, face grown. Looking a little older than his boy of fall and the warmth of too many shots and a still summer night have his brow damp, scarlet trailing down, down his neck.
Jungwoo slides his hands below Mark’s shirt, leans down to hold his mouth to his hair. He smells of Jungwoo’s cigarette smoke and coconut shampoo, Johnny’s fading cologne, and his body is a canvas of the people he adores. Jungwoo runs his lips to the back of his ear, hoping perfume comes out with enough desire. “Where would you get one?”
“I want mine on my shoulder but you know. You can get it wherever.”
“What would you get?”
“A tulip, of course. I like the way they look like people, y’know? Like, big heads on little bodies, and their leaves are kinda like tiny arms, don’t you think?” Mark turns to him then, eyes bright and shimmering like two moons caught beneath a lake. “What would you get?”
A spot, thinks Jungwoo. High on his left cheek, just below his eye. “Nothing,” he replies instead. His mouth is hot when it runs down to Mark’s jaw, holding him steady. In the humid, stifling air, Mark, on the tips of his toes, presses forward, so that the heat of it lingers. “But I’ll hold your hand when you cry.”
“As if I’d cry over something like that!” Mark laughs, but doesn’t pull away. “You’d be the one bawling if I got one.”
“Is it a crime that I can’t bare to see you in pain?”
Mark rolls his eyes but takes Jungwoo’s hand in his own anyway, fingers sticky and bare. In the end, he doesn’t get a tattoo at all. His mother would be devastated and he could never do that to her, the perfect son he is. But, during nights where Mark is vulnerable beneath him, Jungwoo will mouth at a place on his shoulder, his teeth grazing the surface until it is red and raw and Mark is writhing in his desperation. With the flat of his tongue against this heat, Jungwoo will imagine a flower there in half-bloom, its leaves like little arms. A tulip, because Mark likes the way they look like people.
There is a boy who lives in the pupils of Jungwoo’s eyes. He has a slight bump on his nose Jungwoo likes to run his fingers over, two moles he kisses each morning for luck. On Sundays, mouth full with faith, he kneels down before the altar, then at night does the same before Jungwoo. A Bible on his nightstand, a copy of Men’s Health in his drawers. He likes tulips because they remind him of people and he adores people as much as he adores sky. The sky, he says, is how the universe speaks to us so we should always be looking, always be listening, to remember that we are never alone. Most of all, his boy is made of ambition, of desire. This is what scares Jungwoo the most. Mark always gets what he wants and once, what he wanted was not Jungwoo. Perhaps worse than that is what he longs for now, always, still: to be his family’s pride and joy. A perfect son, and his mother has always spoken of a church wedding and grandchildren to round off the wonder of a life.
Yet, for all of his fear, Jungwoo understands ambition. There are things he desires too, sometimes. Like, perhaps, to be an engineer and run his own little firm one day. Or, more honestly, to sing karaoke through the night until the morning birds sing with him and sleep until noon without festering in guilt. Then, there are things he desires always. Like Mark’s hands gliding up and down his arm, pinching his elbow. Or the feel of Mark’s back against his chest, his fingers caressing his nape, stroking his face warm. And then, to also own his heart, to pry it out from the hands of another, and swallow it down, down, down into himself until no one else can ever take it away. Not Johnny, or Mark, or a family who covets a child destined for greatness. Only Jungwoo and his boy, and a heart he takes as his own.
Ambition. Jungwoo knows more of it than he lets on.
Though Jungwoo plays the fool to hear Mark’s laughter, he is, in the end, none of it. If God’s eye is on the sparrow, then Jungwoo’s is turned forever to Mark, and it doesn’t take much to realise that he is not the first person Mark has loved. Some days, he isn’t even sure if he will be the last - though he hopes, at least. Beyond that is another, simpler truth: Mark despises marriage as much as he yearns for it.
That night, after celebrating Johnny’s engagement, Jungwoo pulls out two mood rings from his beside table, kept safe under scrunched-up tissues and mismatched socks. He falls back onto the bed with Mark breathing soft and slow by his side, drenched in thin sweat and Jungwoo’s affection, his hips and thighs purpling from an earlier touch. When Jungwoo prods at a bruise on his neck, Mark flinches back, only to come back into him closer than before.
“Sorry,” he says over nothing, his head now tucked beneath Jungwoo’s chin. A little tired, a little small. His hair is a scratchy mess, cut short to match Jungwoo’s own, and Jungwoo sinks his cheek into it.
“For what?”
“I don’t know. I just - I just feel sorry. For many things.”
Jungwoo’s mouth stays tight in response. Mark is a son forever weighed down by his own pressures, by his own way of seeing the world and what debt he believes he owes, and words cannot help carry a burden so heavy. Instead, he slips two metal bands onto both of their ring fingers, damp from heat and twice-fold desire. Beneath the shadows of a spinning ceiling fan, they watch the colours spin and turn before settling - Jungwoo’s a dark violet, Mark’s a deep blue.
“What does it mean?” asks Mark.
“It’s supposed to reflect how you feel.”
Mark brings their hands to his mouth the way he does in prayer. Clasped tight, grasp firm on a tightrope of unbridled faith and natural doubt, and it turns orange underneath his lips. “I know that but like, what does the colour mean? How do I feel?” he continues. “Am I - are we happy?”
“Yes,” replies Jungwoo without thought, and makes them happy. “We are.”
“Oh," says Mark, pulling the ring away from his mouth, and it seeps back into a dark green. "Perhaps mood rings work after all.”
“As much as God maybe,” replies Jungwoo.
In the dark, Mark’s laugh is rain on tinfoil. He turns towards Jungwoo, face bright and knowing. Fingers soft where it strokes the hair stuck to the sheen of his forehead, lashes deep shadows against his skin. In the reflection of Mark’s dark eyes, Jungwoo seems himself there, all-consuming. Cradled in the heart of a boy who loves church and sky and tulips and sparrows, but loves Jungwoo most.
“Jungwoo,” says Mark, mouth high on his left cheek, “did you know moles are where a lover will kiss you in the next life?”