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Leehan is the boy Taesan kisses behind the church. Beneath the stained-glass window, a watchful eye of judgment over them. The boys’ choir is singing a hymn indoors. The sun is a great big persimmon sinking over the hilltops, and Taesan’s hand is rucking up Leehan’s faded blue hoodie.
Leehan’s blinking at him when they pull apart. Eyes large and curious and dark, the setting sun casting a warm glow on them. He’s red in the face, a color that spreads beneath his freckles that Taesan has spent too much time idly counting one by one while they toil away at algebraic equations in class.
Leehan’s cute. He’s a boy and he’s cute. “Taesan,” Leehan says. “Um.”
Taesan kisses him again. Open-mouthed, pressed to the wall. He runs a hand up Leehan’s arm and feels the curve of his bicep under the fabric. Musses up his hair that’s a little sunkissed brown and historically caused more than one instance of the school faculty suspecting he’d dyed his hair against dress code.
Here and here and here. Soft reminders of Leehan’s boyishness because he is a boy. And Taesan is a boy so he knows these things well.
Fifteen and they’re already hapless. But they’re only fifteen so they wouldn’t know. All they know is that they’re kissing for the first time, and Taesan can feel Leehan smiling against his lips.
Everyone that Taesan kisses after Leehan is not Leehan.
It’s not that they drift apart. It’s the opposite. They stick by each other’s side as time rolls by, slower than the mottled-shelled turtles that crawl the rim of the creek on their commute to school. 9th grade, 10th grade, a blur of colors and fuzzy shapes of everyone else that Taesan kisses in hidden spaces.
Taesan kisses a lot of people. Boys. Even Riwoo once, just to try it. Maybe they’ll discover something new, maybe even change, but Riwoo says it feels the same as puckering his lips on his arm, as usual, and Taesan’s mind wanders back to Leehan blushing behind the church, as usual.
Nothing is quite the same. Nothing feels as bad as kissing Leehan. The horrible flutter of his heart and the knotting of his stomach, Taesan sometimes craves to relive. But Taesan’s shuffling in his school uniform and locking lips with other people because he’s trying to prove something about Leehan. He couldn’t kiss Leehan again. It’d break the formula, a thing that’s fragile enough on its own.
The hands that they share on the long, lonely walks home after the 7th period school bell are more than a kiss could ever be, anyway.
A rush of sixteen, seventeen, summer catching up to them. Just one more year. Taesan and Riwoo have a promise to get matching piercings and Leehan is with a hopeful light in his eyes. He’s sprawled out on Taesan’s back patio, legs dangled over the ledge. A sea of cattails below shake in the night breeze and tickle their feet.
Between them, a bag of fresh lychees from Leehan’s sweet grandmother, half of them empty discarded shells. Taesan’s chipping his black nail polish as he snaps them open and licks the juice off his fingers.
“Our last summer,” Leehan says. “And then we’re graduating.”
Taesan looks up. The starry sky hasn’t changed at all.
“Yeah. We’re almost there. I can’t believe it.”
Taesan looks at Leehan. Leehan smiles at him. Stupid and gummy and hair falling in strands over his face.
The flutter against his ribs. The soar of his heart into his throat, ready to be thrown up.
Taesan says, “Let’s take over summer.”
Leehan folds his hands in his lap. “Meaning?”
Flopping onto his back, the wood of the patio is a cool touch on Taesan’s nape. Dirty, too, but it’s not like anyone this deep in the countryside has ever cared.
Taesan thinks about it all. Every summer that he’s spent here in this old, old town. From the time he met Leehan when they were twelve only to squabble with him over who actually caught the biggest rhino beetle perched on that one locust tree trunk, to the time Leehan kissed pain-pain-go-away the cut on Taesan’s finger from being a bit too confident with the creek crayfish.
“We’ll grab it by the scruff and swing it around until it’s ours,” Taesan says to the stars. “Really, really ours.”
Next to him, Leehan is quiet, then he bursts into laughter.
“I like that. Let’s do it.”
Taesan’s head turns over to Leehan. Holding out his pinky finger, waiting for Leehan to hook his own.
“Once it’s summer break, let’s meet by the Lees’ motor shop,” he says. “Then we’ll bike down the creek and the fields to the old abandoned school.”
Leehan melts into a smile. “Like we used to.”
“Like we used to,” Taesan echoes, choked with certainty.
On the first day of summer break Leehan doesn’t show up at the Lees’ motor shop. Taesan rides around the border of town for half an hour, sweltering sun beating down on his back, until he’s tired and dull and cycles back home.
“Did you hear, son?” his mother prompts at the dinner table.
“The Kims’ oldest boy,” his father supplies. “Leehan. In your grade.”
“They sent him away for the summer,” his mother says.
“It’s a good thing,” his father says. “They’ll right him there.”
Taesan shovels rice into his mouth, fuming with every inch of his body.
They’re stealing away a summer that he and Leehan had promised to spend together. Everyone is stealing their summer away from them. Their last summer. Their last chance to pretend they’re innocent and pure in the universe’s eyes. Everyone. Every single person. Leehan’s parents, Taesan’s parents, their teachers, the priests and the sisters, the geriatric persimmon farmhand who sometimes bellows a slur at them when they ride by on their bicycles.
Who’s the selfish one here? Who’s really selfish when he and Leehan are just a pair of boys and the entire town of maybe a couple hundred people is picking them apart at the open stomachs? Taesan used to pray, you know. Sometimes he still does. They told him the big man upstairs would have an answer for every question. Taesan hasn’t gotten his.
“I kissed him,” Taesan lashes out. Not a violent burst, but a memory. A promise, a threat.
His mother puts her rice bowl down.
“You mean he… that boy came onto you?”
“No,” Taesan says. “I kissed him. I did.”
His mother blanches. His father, silent.
Taesan sneaks out to Riwoo’s place for that night. They rev up Riwoo’s old motorbike and ride all around the night, all around the acres of farmland and rice paddies until they wind their way up the mountain. Little kids don’t bring their feet around these parts. They’re scared away from the thick of the trees because the grownups warn them of hideous forest monsters lurking under the marsh.
Taesan stands at the edge of a cliff. To the chasm down below, to every right and wrong, he inhales and screams until he’s hoarse. Riwoo, watching, cross-legged on a wet mossy boulder, splits a chocolate bar with him.
On the last day of summer break Leehan returns. He’s wearing an unbefitting suit and his hair is properly cut and coiffed back so Taesan bikes with him to the most secluded part of the riverbank where he can undo it all.
They’re on the grass. Leehan’s dress slacks are ruined by the mud and Taesan’s on top of him, kissing him long and sloppy. All that experience from the past years and it’s still so unpracticed. It’s different, see. Leehan’s not just any boy that you kiss. His hands ruffle up Leehan’s hair, just the way he’s always liked it.
“You’re so stupid,” Taesan breathes out on Leehan’s mouth. He puts his palms over Leehan’s face. “Why’d you let them take you away? Why?”
Leehan does his lopsided smile. Sweet and kind and lasting.
“I thought about you,” he says. “Every day.”
“Fuck,” Taesan says. His eyes well up and he blinks it back but it all comes pouring out. At least the tearstain’ll fit right in with Leehan’s suit. “Fuck,” he says again. “You can’t just do that to me,” he cries, and cries, and his watery vision of Leehan kisses him to silence.
They kick Taesan out on the eve of graduation. Seventeen and a walking, talking bruise. He gets one duffel bag and one backpack for his things and nothing more.
Black tar smeared across the peak of his cheek, Riwoo emerges from the motor shop and takes him out to the edge of town. To the road. The one road that could take you anywhere out of here.
The road where Leehan’s waiting, with a parked car.
After dropping Taesan off, Riwoo waves a simple hand goodbye at them and rides back to town.
Leehan helps Taesan’s belongings in the trunk.
There’s no other way to put it. Taesan’s his own destruction. But in the face of that, Leehan’s selfless. So selfless throughout everything. So selfless that Taesan almost, sometimes, wishes they’d fixed him for that last summer so Leehan wouldn’t be here right now, offering to cut up half his heart to patch Taesan up. But Leehan does that. Taesan lets him do that. Leehan’s blood is on Leehan’s hands and Taesan’s hands and it’s the warmest thing he’s felt in all seventeen miserable years of his life.
“I don’t have any money to my name,” Taesan says, climbing into the passenger seat.
“Yeah,” Leehan says, turning on the ignition.
“I don’t have a single clue where to go,” Taesan says, putting on the seatbelt.
“Yeah,” Leehan says, foot on the pedal.
Taesan grabs Leehan’s hand.
“I have nothing,” he says. “I’m nothing.”
Leehan glances at him. The curl of the smile on his lips, the same as ever. He squeezes Taesan’s hand.
“We’ll just have to go nowhere to complete the set then, won’t we?”