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In Jaehyun’s world, he was an idol. He was famous to the point of having difficulty moving around too much in public. He was a singer and an actor. He lived alone and spent all of his free time alone, and every other moment with the people he worked with, the staff and the members and the crew of the drama. He had friends he never saw. He wasn’t happy, but who was happy? He was content to keep going and that was more than most people, right? He was chronically single. He was living a lie.
In this world, he was an ordinary man. He was handsome but hid it behind his glasses and his quietness and his diligence at his job in local government. He lived alone in a much smaller apartment, and the size of the place meant that his meagre personal possessions spread out more. He had friends who messaged him constantly, and he saw some of them at work. He went out on Saturday nights and one night he met a man he couldn’t stand to be without.
Experiencing the memories of both Jaehyuns was giving him a migraine. Understanding both at the same time, the Jaehyun he knew to be the Jaehyun he was who was Idol Jaehyun and the Jaehyun he wasn’t but whose small life a pettier man might scorn who was Alternative Jaehyun, was giving him double vision. He held his head in his hands.
Which Jaehyun was he right now?
The cafe clattered around him and he wished it would stop. The noise of the city was beating a nail into his already-fragmented sense of reality. Parallel worlds didn’t exist, so why could he perceive them? Alternative universes were a work of fiction, so why was he looking down at a work pass for a local authority office in a city south of Seoul? His identity dissonance rippled through him again and caused him to shudder.
A presence pushed through, despite this.
“Hyung?”
It was Jungwoo.
There were dissonances between Idol Jaehyun and Alternative Jaehyun, but some things tracked across. His eyesight, the way he dressed, Kim Jungwoo.
“I have a headache,” he managed to say.
“You get a lot of headaches these days,” Jungwoo said worriedly. Did he? Was Alternative Jaehyun doubling up with migraine corona when he returned to his own reality too, as Jaehyun knew he would when this episode passed? He could see the spots already. It was a matter of hours.
Jungwoo took him home. He had a scooter that he used to get out to the campus on the edge of the city, zipping in and out of traffic in a way that made Jaehyun’s heart pound when he thought of that beautiful face bruised and broken by a chrome fender or a stretch of asphalt. But he’d had a helmet made for Jaehyun with a cartoon peach on the side of it and had given it to Alternative Jaehyun on his birthday and this had been thoughtful enough to earn him a pass from Jaehyun’s nagging. Jungwoo had given Idol Jaehyun an unlimited cinema pass for his birthday this year. He hadn’t used it yet. Jungwoo had one too. He used it a lot, he said. Jaehyun wished he had the courage to use his.
The little apartment was cool from the air conditioner. Jungwoo peeled off his clothes anyway once they were inside, and pressed his lovely body to Jaehyun’s in an unserious mockery of seduction that made Jaehyun’s heart hurt.
“Endorphins are good for headaches,” Jungwoo beamed at him, grinding his hips into Jaehyun’s in a way that Idol Jaehyun’s Jungwoo never had. Jaehyun held his hips steady. The corona was starting to tunnel his vision.
“I have to lie down,” he said slowly. Jungwoo, serious all of a sudden, nodded and went to turn off the air conditioning. To get him a glass of water. Jaehyun lay in the darkened bedroom with the window open and the familiar unfamiliar of Jungwoo’s body lying next to him, reading webtoons on his phone. Jaehyun was desperate to touch him, and knew that this body certainly had. This body and Jungwoo’s body were intimately familiar with each other. He didn’t want those memories so he didn’t seek them out. It wasn’t for him to remember how soft Jungwoo’s skin must be. He had his own sad fantasies to console him on that count, he didn’t need to delve into Alternative Jaehyun’s. Jungwoo, sighing in pleasure like Jaehyun had sometimes overheard in the middle of the night when they shared a room. Jungwoo with his eyes fixed on Jaehyun’s, and his eyelids fluttering shut. Jungwoo with bruises from Jaehyun’s teeth on his pristine skin. Jungwoo, ready for him and open for him and enveloping him.
He need only ask this Jungwoo for whom these were memories and not an intangible wish exacerbated by a lie. He didn’t ask. It would be a betrayal if he did.
He shut his eyes.
And woke up in his own bed. The episode was over. There was a body next to him still, and he saw that it was Jungwoo. Jungwoo stirred.
Jaehyun looked around. He was in his own body again, his own bed. His old bed, back at the dorm where Jungwoo still lived, in his unused bedroom where mussed sheets betrayed that somebody else often slept here. Mussed sheets more often these days because this was where he’d asked Jungwoo to take him if he was acting strange.
He never asked Jungwoo what Alternative Jaehyun was like. He never interrogated the sadness in his eyes.
“How long?” Jaehyun asked Jungwoo, waking him. Jungwoo’s eyelashes fluttered, opened. He had such lovely eyes. Alternative Jaehyun would kiss Alternative Jungwoo’s eyelids sometimes. Idol Jaehyun sat up and took the glass of water off the nightstand. He wondered who had poured it.
“You don’t know?” Jungwoo sat up too. What was he doing here, in Jaehyun’s bed?
“I came to when I was in the office this time,” he said. “Maybe six hours?”
“You’ve been asleep for four hours more than that,” Jungwoo said. “It’s the middle of the night.” Jungwoo got up to leave.
Jaehyun hated this part. He hated when Jungwoo left.
He was the only person in this version of reality who knew Jaehyun well enough to know when he wasn’t himself. He’d been the only person Jaehyun told when his consciousness started slipping into the consciousness of another him. He was the only person he felt safe enough with to tell him when he thought he was going insane. Alternative Jaehyun hadn’t told his Jungwoo a damn thing.
“Stay,” he heard himself say.
Jungwoo considered him tremulously. “Really?”
“Please,” was all Jaehyun said in response, and settled back against the pillows. Then, so did Jungwoo.
“What’s he like?” Jungwoo asked when Jaehyun had turned off the bedside lamp. He knew who Jungwoo was talking about.
“Not like you, but like you,” he said, the only coherent answer he could come up with. His migraine was still pounding through his skull, thumbtacks on the bridge of his nose, a nail in the base of his spine, flashlights behind his eyes. He turned on his side and saw that Jungwoo’s eyes were open, shining in the light coming through the uncurtained window.
He had to ask, “Does he touch you?”
Jungwoo didn’t answer right away.
Jaehyun felt a pain in his solar plexus. It wasn’t like his bodyswap pain, the pain that came with rocketing out of his body and into another version of himself somewhere on the celestial plane. It hurt in a different way, the jealousy.
“Do you touch him?”
Jaehyun held Jungwoo’s gaze and saw the worry there, the doubt, the same reflected jealousy. They had never touched, not the way their Alternatives did.
“He doesn’t know,” Jaehyun said with a sigh. “It would be a violation.”
Jungwoo must have been holding his breath, because Jaehyun felt his exhale against his own lips, toothpaste mint and Jungwoo and so close he could taste him if he wanted. Wanting had never been the problem.
“He wants to…” Jungwoo said into the dark, when Jaehyun thought that this whole conversation was through once again.
“What?”
“He wants to touch me,” Jungwoo said. Jaehyun imagined that he was blushing. He knew Jungwoo well enough to know when he was. “He doesn’t,” he said finally. “But I know he finds it hard to look at me.”
Jaehyun could relate. “Go to sleep,” he whispered.
“How much longer will this go on?” Jungwoo’s voice was tight.
It had been two months. Every three or four days, for two months. Dizzy spells and fatigue had explained away his absences at schedules. A breakdown everybody could see coming because it was normal in this industry.
A lot of things were normal in this industry.
A lot of things he accepted and internalised and it took a slip into an alternative dimension for him to realise that it wasn’t normal at all to live like this.
He felt Jungwoo’s hands as a whisper of air before they settled on his face, his neck, his shoulder. He felt the bed shift under his weight and the careful settling of a body into the space between them until there was no space at all. The toothpaste-and-Jungwoo was back, closer now.
“Jungwoo,” Jaehyun whispered, a little tortured, a little desperate, a little like he needed to not think anymore. His headache was gone. His identity dissonance was fading. He was in his own head and alone there for the first time in months.
Jungwoo was pressing his thumb into the cleft in his chin.
He parted his lips.
Jaehyun felt so light. It was like he’d been folded up and dragged through a vacuum, and a door slammed shut behind him as he was suddenly so present in himself he couldn’t remember how to breathe through his own lungs. He opened his mouth to gulp in air and Jungwoo met his mouth, a sudden and uncontrolled kiss that was all idea until it wasn’t. Jungwoo had been testing things, pushing on the proximity, until he was actually kissing Jaehyun and Jaehyun could only kiss him back.
He kissed him back like there was never a universe in which they didn’t come together like this. He kissed him back like they’d been doing it across every reality.
That vacuum feeling again, and he forgot the searing pain of the migraines, the lights and the tunnel vision, and the greasy film of somebody else’s memories overlaid on his own. The sensations that had become his world for two months retreated as he pulled Jungwoo to him, pulled his leg over his hip so they fit because of course they did.
They kissed for a long time.
Then Jungwoo replaced his thumb on Jaehyun’s chin and drew back, holding him still.
“What was that?” Jaehyun asked.
“Experiment,” Jungwoo said. And kissed him again.