Archive of Our Own

“Hey. Who died?” Sunghoon whispers, picking up the pace of his already frantic steps to keep up with his sister, leaning down slightly in the hope that he would only be heard by her.

Yeji rolls her eyes, and Sunghoon isn’t surprised that that’s her gut reaction – she’d been excited when he’d arrived the night before, because they hadn’t seen each other since Christmas, but apparently his novelty has already worn off. His expiry date, it seems, is not even eighteen hours.

“Ask Eomma,” she counters.

“You don’t know either,” Sunghoon points out, confident in his accusation.

“I do,” Yeji snaps, not sounding even slightly believable. “But I’m not telling you. Go ask Eomma.”

The problem with that plan is that their mom had outpaced both of them at some point, and was already greeting the sniffling woman at the door, holding one of her hands in both of hers, speaking to her in hushed tones appropriate for the wake already taking place inside.

They’re already late. And Sunghoon is late to asking whose wake they were late to. He knew his mother wouldn’t appreciate being held up any more than they already had been by his father trying to tie his tie, so he’d counted on Yeji pulling through for him. That was his second mistake.

His first mistake was agreeing to come in the first place. It’d been sprung on him no less than ten minutes before they were scheduled to leave, and even with the extra few minutes awarded to him by his dad’s wardrobe crisis, Sunghoon still hadn’t been given enough time to properly prepare. But his mom is an expert at getting him in situations he’d really rather not be in, and sure enough, twenty minutes later, he’d been herded into the back seat of his parents’ car without even the foggiest of recollections of how she’d gotten him to agree.

He’s only home for a week. He can survive an hour at a wake to please her. He just needs to know who died.

“Appa,” Sunghoon turns to face his dad where he’s walking a few paces behind them, casually teeing up a question that he should be able to answer without any difficulty. “Eomma didn’t tell us who died.”

He knows by the look on his father’s face that he hadn’t been told, either. But he puts on a show of humming in thought, like it’s on the tip of his tongue. He gives up after no more than a few seconds, then says, “She told Yeji. Ask her.”

Sunghoon glares at his sister. She covers her mouth with her hand, but it’s clear that she’s laughing at him.

✷

“I’m so sorry,” Sunghoon says, letting the frail woman who he vaguely recognizes from neighbourhood get-togethers grab his hand with hers, even though she squeezes it far too tightly, even though she still has a used tissue clutched in one of them. He chooses his words carefully, omitting the for your loss, because he’s not sure if it’s his loss too, because no one will tell him if he knew the deceased or not.

“Thank you, dear,” she sighs, reaching up with, thankfully, her non-tissue-holding hand, patting his cheek a few times. “It’s wonderful to see you, Sunghoon. You’ve gotten so tall.”

Sunghoon has no idea what this woman’s name is. She knows his, though, and she’s clearly the bereaved, so he just nods in agreement, and lets her hold onto him and continue describing everything that was different about him, until Yeji catches her attention, and she becomes the newest victim of awkward forced eye contact with someone they probably haven’t engaged in conversation with since they were children.

Sunghoon manages to escape once the focus is no longer on him, abandoning Yeji unarmed in the trenches, because she’d do the same to him if the roles were reversed. He beelines for where his mother was now greeting a group of women from the neighbourhood book club, with big plans of hovering behind her and letting her do all the talking until it was time to leave.

For a few blissful moments, he’s deluded into thinking it might actually work. And then one of the ladies takes a proper look at Sunghoon, and after several seconds of commentary on how grown up he is, she utters a word – a name, actually – that never fails to send sparks of terror shooting down Sunghoon’s spine.

His blood turns to ice in his veins. Fear calcifies in his bones. His heart starts thumping loud enough that he can’t hear a thing, even though he sure would like to for once, to get more information on the perceived threat – where is he? Is he here? How close? How long does Sunghoon have to flee before –

“Ah, there he is!” The woman exclaims, at a volume far too loud for a wake, but just loud enough for Sunghoon to hear her clearly.

He doesn’t turn around. He knows what he’ll find, and he’s just being merciful to himself by dropping his gaze to the floor, scuffing the dress shoes he’d borrowed from his dad against the dusty carpet of the mostly unfamiliar home that now served as his cage.

Sunghoon refuses to look up, refuses to see the predator he’d been tossed into the cage with as the book club lady grabs him by the elbow and pulls him into the conversation, refuses to fall into the category of prey, like he does every time he meets his eyes.

It makes sense that this would happen at a funeral. It makes sense, because Sunghoon is already experiencing one loss – although he’s still not sure if it is actually his loss – so why not add one more? Why not lose his dignity, why not lose this new chapter of his life, the one he’d so carefully crafted for himself, the one that has absolutely nothing to do with Heeseung Lee?

Sunghoon had painstakingly turned himself into the patient and the scalpel alike in his efforts to cut the sharp shards of shrapnel that were all shaped like Heeseung out of where they’d lodged under his ribcage, and most of the time, he can fool himself into thinking he’d succeeded.

Clearly, he hadn’t. Because the lady says, “Heeseung, don’t you remember Sunghoon? You two were so close when you were little,” and Sunghoon is once again reduced to nothing more than that dull ache in his chest, the one that serves both as a reminder of the long, tedious process of ridding himself of the lingering effects of being pulled into Heeseung’s orbit, and a reminder of the fact that he’d failed, that despite his efforts, he’ll always be a victim to the lure and the appeal of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a bath, drawn for him by someone he thought had his best intentions at heart, and Sunghoon sinks into it expecting it to be warm, only to find it merely tepid, only to be forced to stay in until the water eventually turns freezing. And even when the chill has reached his bones, Sunghoon knows he won’t be able to pull himself out.

He keeps his head down. This time, he won’t even let himself be tricked into dipping his toes in.

✷

The day things ended between Sunghoon and Heeseung is not the last time they were in each other’s orbits, no matter how much Sunghoon may have wished it would be.

They grew up across the street from each other, which had once seemed like a blessing to Sunghoon, when they were best friends, thick as thieves, inseparable. He used to want nothing more than to be inseparable from Heeseung, but in the end, it wasn’t possible. And then he wanted nothing more than to be as far away from Heeseung as the universe could allow, only that turned out to be impossible, too.

There were times he’d come home for Christmas, and he’d catch a glimpse of Heeseung through a foggy window that made him look even hazier than he already exists in Sunghoon’s memory. There were times he’d come home for the summer, and Heeseung would be sitting on his front porch with a book in hand, and Sunghoon would use the back door as his main mode of entry and exit from his parents’ house for the entirety of the rest of his break.

Sometimes, it felt like Heeseung was everywhere he looked, lurking around every corner, underfoot like a landmine he’d forgotten exactly where he buried. And that feeling wasn’t exclusively tied to being in his hometown, because Sunghoon wears paranoia like armour, but it’s certainly never worse than it is when he’s home.

He was under the impression that Heeseung was no longer going to be living with his parents, that he was living in an apartment in the same city he went to university in. At least, that’s what he’d been told, last time they saw each other.

It’d been over spring break, and it was just a run-in at the local grocery store, the one that he and Heeseung had once shoplifted popsicles from when they were seven and out of pocket money and unaware of consequence, but that time, both of their mothers had been present and full of chatter, which meant all Sunghoon was required to do to survive the interaction would be to keep his head down and try not to breathe too deeply, lest he feel the scars on his lungs left by that Heeseung shaped shrapnel.

But back then – almost exactly two years ago, if his memory serves him correctly, which it unfortunately always does when it comes to Heeseung – Sunghoon wasn’t as far removed from nostalgia as he is now, and he wasn’t as far removed from Heeseung as he’d liked to think he was. So he’d looked up, and met Heeseung’s eyes, and it had been like sinking into what he thought was a warm bath and finding the tub unsettlingly empty. And full of piranhas.

Heeseung had just stared back, his eyes devoid of any emotion, entirely unfamiliar. The rest of him, though – the sunken lines of his face, the pale state of his skin, the inky black colour of his hair and the way it was long and unkempt enough to curl slightly around his ears – those worked together to form a face that was so simultaneously unchanged and completely new, so familiar and unfamiliar, that Sunghoon felt like he’d stumbled upon someone wearing his Heeseung’s skin. Uncanny valley.

Sunghoon had only made it as far as opening his mouth to speak, and then, just as the words died a slow, painful death in his throat, his mom had swooped in to do the heavy lifting of getting answers for him.

How’s school going, Heeseung? She’d asked, and Heeseung had dutifully answered with a generic response about how it was going well, about how he was graduating next year, while Heeseung’s mother chimed in to brag about how he’d made honour roll.

Heeseung had dark, purplish bags under his cold, unfamiliar eyes. Sunghoon felt like he’d stumbled upon some sort of eldritch horror pulled straight from his most unsettling nightmares.

Heeseung’s going to law school. Heeseung’s got an apartment in the city. Heeseung already has internship offers. Heeseung’s the human personification of perfection. How are you, Sunghoon? Are you doing well? Can you compare to that? Can you handle the pressure? How many times have you cried in your car this week?

Sunghoon’s mom, to her credit, had made an attempt to brag about him in turn, but there’s only so much she could do with the material she’d been given. She seemed to remedy this with little white lies of omission, and Sunghoon tried not to take it personally. No, he’s not skating anymore, but he’s got academic scholarships, so he doesn’t need to. She doesn’t mention that he’d lost those, too. He’s top of his class. He is, but they’re all remedial ones he’d been forced into after finally being taken off academic probation. He’s thinking of going to grad school. He’d rather sink into that bathtub full of piranhas.

We’re so proud. They might be, but if they are, that was the first Sunghoon had heard of it.

Sunghoon is a mess, but Heeseung has an apartment in the city. He thought that’d be a consolation, that at least it would mean he wouldn’t have to worry about running into him anymore.

Sunghoon has come to learn that there is no such thing as a consolation, at least, not when it comes to Heeseung. There’s only reality, unforgiving like porcelain, and there’s only Heeseung, cold like the water of the bath that Sunghoon had been left to freeze to death in.

✷

Nostalgia wins once again. Sunghoon looks up.

Heeseung is already looking at him.

“Yeah, of course I remember,” Heeseung says, and he’s smiling, his teeth blindingly white, and Sunghoon fights a flinch, like he’s face to face with an animal that had already ripped him to shreds once before. He is, but it’s easy to forget that, when Heeseung is smiling at him.

“You two were always so adorable,” Book Club Lady says, reaching up to pinch Heeseung’s cheek. “I remember when they would go looking for frogs in my backyard.”

Sunghoon presses his mouth into a tight line. He won’t smile back.

“Oh, I hated when they did that,” Sunghoon’s mom sighs. “Sunghoon would always get a rash on his hands after he held them.”

Heeseung’s skin is tinged gold like he’d just stepped inside from a long day of basking in the glow of the sun, and his hair has been lightened to a chocolate brown colour, and it looks like he trims it regularly, albeit, probably by himself, because he can see a few strands that are jaggedly cut short enough to fall into his eyes, something he knows drives Heeseung insane.

“Yes, that’s right, you were just full of allergies, weren’t you? I can’t believe you even let him outside. I would have put him in a bubble.”

Laughter echoes around him, but Sunghoon’s not tuned in to what’s being said.

“I tried, trust me. But he just wanted to go wherever Heeseung went.”

Sunghoon is wearing his dad’s suit, and it’s too big for him, and he hadn’t had time to shower before they had to leave, meaning he was fairly certain there was still some dirt on his face from when he was helping his mom in the garden earlier that morning. He hates that garden, because it reminds him of Heeseung, but he was trying to scrape together all his pathetic remaining ways that he could still turn out to be a good son, so he’d sucked it up and helped her plant her cosmos.

He looks like a mess. Heeseung looks amazing.

✷

Objectively, Sunghoon knew that Heeseung as a teenager had been an awkward, acne-ridden mess of gangly limbs and encyclopedic League of Legends knowledge. He knew that Heeseung was, by all definitions of the word, uncool. But through the warped and slightly rose-tinted gaze of a teenage Sunghoon, he was practically a god.

He’d never been able to be objective about any version of Heeseung. Not before their teenage years, not after, and definitely not during them.

Before they’d become friends – real friends, not just forced acquaintances by his mother’s overbearing hands, shoving him in Heeseung’s direction out of fear that he wouldn’t make any friends in the neighbourhood they’d just moved into – Sunghoon hadn’t quite known what to expect from Heeseung. He’d long been the boy across the street, the one with the cool red mountain bike and the bandaids always covering every inch of his battered knees, the one who always played by himself but always seemed to be having fun.

Sunghoon could only ever feel embarrassed when he played by himself, so he’d bravely crossed the street to Heeseung’s yard one summer afternoon, one week before he was set to start first grade. Heeseung had been biking in circles in his driveway, and Sunghoon had approached just in time to see him pop a wheelie, and when he’d asked how he did it, Heeseung had just beamed at him with his incomplete smile – the two front teeth were gone, and Sunghoon could see new ones growing in, because he was a year older than Sunghoon and, in his eyes, had wisdom he couldn’t even dream of – and had offered to teach him how.

They used to take turns on Heeseung’s bike, riding it up and down the street within the parameters set by their mothers, because all of Sunghoon’s family’s extra money went into his figure skating, and therefore things like bikes were a luxury to be saved for Christmas gifts.

Sure enough, that year, Sunghoon was walked out to the front porch with his mom’s hands over his eyes to find a blue mountain bike with a bow on it, and he doesn’t remember ever being so excited for anything, both because he loved riding Heeseung’s bike, and because it meant that he and Heeseung were inching closer to being equals.

All he wanted was to be his equal, to be his friend, even though Heeseung had already started to get his grown-up teeth and he already knew how to pop a wheelie. He thought that would be all it would take: a bike, matching Heeseung’s except in colour, for them to race against each other with, for them to speed towards a finish line that surely, once crossed, meant Sunghoon would be worthy of being friends with someone older and infinitely more comfortable in his skin than he was.

After nearly two decades of learning that there is no such thing as feeling equal when it comes to Heeseung, his first bike still sits in the back of his parents’ garage, rusty and well-loved, the back tire completely flat from how much stress he’d put on it, from lifting the front one over and over again to prove to the boy across the street that he could do it too, that he was his equal, that he was worthy.

And that was before. Through the during, and the after, and all of the repetitions of befores, afters, and durings, Sunghoon would come to learn what it really meant to want to be seen by the boy across the street. But before all of that, there was just a red bike and a blue bike, tipped over sideways and resting on the lawn of Sunghoon’s new home, Heeseung’s tossed haphazardly to the ground, Sunghoon’s set down carefully and mindfully of all it’s moving parts.

In the end, it wouldn’t matter how careful or careless they were in abandoning them. In the end, the bikes would still end up sitting unused in their respective garages, grown out of and forgotten by everyone, except for nostalgia, which doesn’t forget nearly as easily.

✷

“So, your mom says you’re going to grad school, is that right?”

Sunghoon winces. He’d managed to escape the conversation with Book Club Lady and the devil incarnate, but it seems there’s no escaping the endless barrage of questions about who exactly he’d turned out to be.

“Oh, no, not grad school,” Sunghoon says. “I just have a bachelor's degree, in business. But I’m starting an internship soon that I’m hoping is going to turn into a job.”

It was a lie, one that had been spoon-fed to him by his mother. Sunghoon is a twenty-three year old with absolutely no prospects, a bank account in the negative, and the crushing weight of the expectations that had been thrust upon him.

He’d never wanted the expectations, but they’d always been there. He thought, surely, that if he continued to not meet them time after time, eventually he’d be free of them. But that moment of relief never came, and Sunghoon never lived up to them.

✷

When Sunghoon was ten and Heeseung was eleven, Sunghoon’s dad took them ice skating.

They’d just cleared the pond only a few minutes walk from Sunghoon’s house as safe to skate on, and Sunghoon rarely ever skated as a hobby, for his own enjoyment, but he’d jumped at the opportunity to show Heeseung something he was good at.

Heeseung was good at everything. When his mom spoke to him in Korean, he always knew how to answer, and he could finish his multiplication tables in half the time it took Sunghoon. And he’s older, and a grade above Sunghoon, so that made sense, but skating was different. Skating was Sunghoon’s, and he was good at it, and he wanted Heeseung to see him in his element.

And then Heeseung touched skate to ice, and pushed forward like it was nothing, like it wasn’t only his second time ever trying it, and Sunghoon felt defeat creep over him, as cold and hard to breathe through as the winter air around him was.

Heeseung was good at everything. Sunghoon would be reminded of this at every opportunity, through report cards and scholarships, through bike races and now, through skating. He wasn’t better than Sunghoon, but he was good, and he couldn’t even be angry about it, because he was too busy with being mesmerized by him.

Heeseung never fully felt real to Sunghoon. Maybe it’s because they only ever hung out outside of school, when everything feels a little surreal, a little fuzzy. Maybe it’s because he’d built a pedestal for him in his mind, one that Heeseung always climbed to the top of with ease, while Sunghoon felt like he was always balancing on blades, attempting to skate his way to the top of his own pedestal, always feeling his feet slide out from underneath of him, always landing face-first in front of everyone that had been rooting for him.

Sunghoon balanced on the line between admiration and envy, never able to choose which side he wanted to fall towards, never seeing it coming that he would one day trip and fall forward, straight into something else entirely, something he might have seen coming if he wasn’t so busy watching Heeseung.

✷

Sunghoon inspects the plastic plates and tupperware containers full of baked goods, overwhelmed and choosing to blame it on the finger foods, and not Heeseung, whose eyes he can feel watching his every move from across the room.

His cage is now a fishbowl, primed for observation. Sunghoon is a goldfish, already taken out of his element to be observed, and Heeseung is tapping on the glass.

In the end, he neglects choosing any of the desserts presented to him in favour of searching for his sister, even though he’d been told by three separate distant relatives that he looked too thin, that he should be eating more. He finds Yeji in the backyard, kneeling down next to a dog tied to a leash and scratching behind its ears, and Sunghoon is suddenly that much closer to figuring out the mystery of who died, because he knows this backyard, and he knows this dog, even if it’s fur has gone white and it’s looking a little more lethargic than he remembers.

“Hey,” she says as he kneels down too, patting the dog as it flops over to lay on its side, warm from the sun, fur tangled beyond being able to pet him properly. “Heeseung’s here.”

Sunghoon just hums. “Mr. Hong died, didn’t he?” He asks, keeping his voice quiet.

“Yup,” Yeji says, popping the ‘p’. “Heart attack.”

“Shit,” Sunghoon mutters, because he’d liked him. He’d always stop to let Sunghoon pet his dog, who had now outlived him, when they went for their daily walk, and the time he’d caught Heeseung and Sunghoon in the woods behind his house well after dark, he’d sent them on their way with nothing more required of them than a promise not to do it again.

“Heeseung’s here,” Yeji repeats. “Are you good?”

Sunghoon, not for the first time, wishes she’d never found out what she found out that day, almost a decade ago. And then he shrugs, and says, “I’m good. What about you? How’s school?”

Yeji sighs, standing up, brushing the dirt off her tights and glaring at him from the moral high ground she’d found herself on, before stomping away, making no effort to hide her disappointment in him.

At eighteen, she’s still bolder, and braver than Sunghoon is at twenty-three, and really, he’d known since she was ten and he was fifteen that that was going to be the case.

✷

“We should go to my room,” Sunghoon muttered as Heeseung leaned back down, his braces bumping against Sunghoon’s lips where they’d already torn the skin minutes prior. He’d even gotten a dot of blood on his shirt, visible only to those who would look closely enough, just like a secret, just like this secret. Sunghoon still wasn’t sure that nobody would look closely at them, but Heeseung didn’t seem to share his concern.

“Your parents aren’t home,” Heeseung reminded him.

“Yeji is,” Sunghoon said, then gestured to their surroundings, to his mother’s garden, to the hammock they were laying in. “And – someone could look over the fence.”

“Who would look over the fence?” Heeseung asked, his nose wrinkling in confusion. “It’s there for a reason. Privacy.”

The first time they’d done this, the first time their lips had found their way to each other, they’d had the luxury of privacy. His parents had been out of town to bring Yeji to a volleyball tournament, and since Sunghoon was fifteen, practically an adult, he was allowed to stay home alone. Heeseung wasn’t allowed to spend the night without some kind of real adult present, but during the day, they had the rare treat of a house to themselves.

Sunghoon had assumed they’d get up to debauchery of some kind, but he was still shocked to his core when Heeseung leaned in just as Sunghoon was about to take a bite of one of the strawberries that his mom had washed and left in the fridge for them. Their mouths had awkwardly met with the berry in between them, and Heeseung had pulled away with a quiet laugh, and when Sunghoon accidentally dropped the strawberry on the tile of the kitchen, Heeseung hadn’t wasted a second before leaning in again.

Since then, they hadn’t been awarded the same level of privacy, but that hadn’t stopped them from leaning in again, and again, and again.

Sunghoon was already aware of the fact that he liked boys, even before Heeseung had kissed him. Heeseung was still insistent that he didn’t, that he just liked kissing Sunghoon, that it didn’t mean anything.

But he always kissed him like it meant something. Even with his braces, even in the thick of his award phase, Heeseung was a good kisser. Sunghoon didn’t have anything to compare it to, but Heeseung was good at everything, so of course he was good at this, too.

This time, it was easy just as easy to get lost in. It was so easy, in fact, that Sunghoon forgot about the relative lack of privacy, and all the reasons why it was a bad idea to kiss in the open like this. He got so lost that he didn’t hear the back door open, didn’t hear the small, shocked intake of breath that followed it.

Heeseung did, because if Heeseung ever gets lost in anything, looking back, Sunghoon’s sure he wasn’t one of those things, at least, not yet. Heeseung had ripped away from him like Sunghoon had burned him, like he wasn’t the perfect temperature to sink comfortably into, like someone had turned up the heat far higher than he was comfortable with.

And at first, he hadn’t understood why, not until he followed Heeseung’s gaze and saw Yeji standing there, jaw dropped in shock until she snapped it shut, like even she was more aware of how she could be perceived in that moment than Sunghoon was, than he should have been.

They never talked about it. She never told anyone. But Heeseung stopped coming over anyway.

✷

Someone’s baby is incessantly, loudly screaming. Sunghoon can understand the instinct to make a scene, but he resents the fact that it’s not acceptable for him to scream along with it.

Heeseung is crossing the room, slowly but surely. The distance between them is minimizing, and Sunghoon feels every step taken like a punch to the gut.

“Eomma,” Sunghoon mutters, pushing off from where he was leaning against the wall, trying to get close enough to her to interrupt the conversation she was having with their next-door neighbour, the one that never liked Sunghoon, the one that definitely had, on more than one occasion, looked over the privacy fence to see if she could catch him in any wrongdoing. She never did, but it didn’t help the constant feeling of being observed that Sunghoon had his whole life. “Eomma, I’m going to leave.”

That gets her attention, and she excuses herself before whirling around, leveling him with an exasperated look that he’d fully expected. “No you are not,” she hisses. “We’ve barely been here ten minutes.”

Sunghoon’s pretty sure he’s been trapped in this house of horrors for days, but he lets it go in favour of staying on topic.

And then she beats him to it, and stays a little too on topic. “You should go catch up with Heeseung. I don’t even remember the last time you two saw each other, but you barely said a word to him earlier.”

He tenses all over, his fists balling at his sides, his mouth pressing into a line as he takes a steadying inhale through his nose. “We don’t really talk anymore, Eomma.”

“Well, you could still go say hello. It’s never too late to make amends,” she says, then sighs, turning to properly face him as her forehead wrinkles in confusion. “What happened to you two, anyway? You two were always so close, I thought you’d be best man at each other’s weddings, for goodness sake.”

Sunghoon can’t breathe. His vision has gone a little blurry. What does she mean by that? Why would she bring up a wedding? Sunghoon isn’t dating anybody, hasn’t dated anybody in months, and even then, she’d only been vaguely aware of their existence, because she was still getting used to Sunghoon being gay, even now, three years after he’d told her. So why would she say that? Is Heeseung dating somebody? Is it serious enough for the neighbourhood ladies to be chatting about weddings?

“I have a headache,” he blurts out.

“Go have something to drink,” she tells him, and then waves him away, clearly not in the mood to entertain what she perceives as his rudeness and not his desperation.

But Sunghoon has still been given an out, albeit a temporary one, so he makes his way over to the punch bowl, away from Heeseung, just as he prefers to be. But his skin still itches like he’s having an allergic reaction, like the child inside of Sunghoon still associates being near Heeseung with his skin swelling up after he’d ignored his better judgment and touched some unfamiliar plant or animal, because Heeseung was full of adventure and Sunghoon was full of a desire to impress him.

He’ll always be that kid, who broke out in rashes in the name of trying to gain the respect of someone who was always going to leave him in the end. Heeseung will always be that someone who left.

Except for right now – now, Heeseung is the one following Sunghoon, and Sunghoon is the one trying to escape.

Heeseung turns the corner into the kitchen, and he’s picked up his pace now like he’s finally committed to talking to Sunghoon, and their eyes meet for half a second, and in his haste to get away, he trips over the leg of the table holding the punch. Luckily – although, Sunghoon doesn’t really feel wealthy in luck right now – the consequence of that isn’t the entire punch bowl being knocked over, but rather it’s him bumping into the back of the woman that had babysat him and Yeji a few times growing up, sending fruit punch sloshing down the front of his father’s white dress shirt as she yelps in surprise.

The red liquid seeps into the fabric as he frantically apologizes, and when Sunghoon looks down at his mess, he remembers the cut on his lip from Heeseung’s braces, the way it had dripped blood onto the cotton of his t-shirt, the way it had felt like a precious secret between the two of them, the way this feels like everyone in the room has suddenly turned to start pointing and laughing at him.

No one’s pointing and laughing. They’re just glancing at him, and speaking in hushed tones, like the caged animal he’d felt like earlier had been riled up and then let out, and now no one wants to be the first to risk startling him.

“Sunghoon, hey, are you –”

Heeseung – also braver than Sunghoon, because who isn’t, apparently not afraid of getting mauled by the unpredictable animal Sunghoon has been reduced to – is standing beside him. A hand comes down to rest on his shoulder, and Sunghoon quickly shrugs it away, and says, his words like razor-sharp teeth tearing through skin, “Don’t touch me.”

Heeseung drops his hand back to his side. He opens his mouth to say something, but Sunghoon’s already gone, blood – no, fruit punch, not blood – soaking his shirt, a wild look in his eyes, leaving nothing but carnage in his wake.

✷

After what happened in the garden, Heeseung spent nearly two years pretending Sunghoon didn't exist.

Sunghoon didn’t think that ten years of friendship would be so easily let go of, but Heeseung certainly let go, and Sunghoon didn’t have the energy to try and cling to him, no matter how much he may have wanted to.

They didn’t make eye contact in the halls of their high school, or knock on each other’s doors or climb through each other’s windows, and Sunghoon learned how to exist in a state of solitude, how to be comfortable being lonesome.

When Heeseung graduated, Sunghoon watched from his bedroom window as his parents loaded the back of a U-Haul with boxes surely full of things for Heeseung’s new life, leaving all traces of Sunghoon, every photo they took together, every movie ticket saved, in his childhood bedroom, while Sunghoon would remain stuck in his for another year.

Heeseung looked up at where he knew Sunghoon’s window was. Sunghoon had ducked down, but he knew Heeseung had seen him. He always knows when Heeseung’s eyes are on him, knows the sensation of it better than he knows almost anything.

The next time he felt Heeseung’s eyes on him, he was seventeen, freshly graduated from high school, and he was in the garden. (Not on the hammock. Never on the hammock.) He was laying in the grass, still adjusting to the warmth that early summer was bringing, trying to soak up shade instead of the sun's incessant rays. He had headphones in. His eyes were closed. Even if they weren’t, though, he still never would have seen Heeseung coming, not until he felt his eyes on him and knew, like he so rarely knows things, that he should be paying attention to his surroundings.

Sunghoon cracked his eyes open. Heeseung was standing over him, smiling down at him, but his eyes were dead and empty. Uncanny valley.

It was, physically, the closest they’d gotten in ages, but they’d end up getting much closer than that. Heeseung sits down beside Sunghoon and mutters a simple I’m sorry, and Sunghoon forgives him. Later that night, when Sunghoon lets him into his bedroom through the window and they spend a while talking about everything they’d missed in each other’s lives, Heeseung says it’s been a while, but Sunghoon hears I missed you, and he can’t remember who leaned in first, but someone did.

They curl up together in Sunghoon’s twin bed, and Heeseung tells him he likes both girls and boys, and Sunghoon tells him it’s okay, and when he woke up the next morning, he was no longer in the before, or the after, of knowing Heeseung. He’s thrown right back into the depths of the during, but it doesn’t really matter, because it was all the same for him. That time, back then, he loved Heeseung the same before, during, and after.

The same can’t be said for the next time he disappears, but even then, learning not to love Heeseung had been a torturous process.

Loving him, though – that was all too easy. Sunghoon’s never been forthcoming with his emotions, but he knows what they are when he feels them, and he knew what he felt for Heeseung to be love, simple and unconditional.

He loved him for a summer, and he knows Heeseung loved him back, although he never was able to figure out why.

Heeseung was older, and wiser, and better in almost every perceivable way, and he knew more about love and relationships than Sunghoon did, but he wasted his precious time on him anyway.

Sunghoon has always had an abundance of things in life that he’d been told he should be proud of – his grades, his face, his skating. He’d never been able to find any substantial amount of pride in those things, but he can find plenty in Heeseung, in being worthy of being loved by him.

Maybe it wasn’t healthy, but he won’t come to realize that until there’s a chill in the air, until the leaves start to fall from the trees. But while the sun still shines on them, all they know is sweaty palms pressed together, and kissing – so much kissing, in their bedrooms and in the garden and in the back row of the movie theatre and in every dark corner or secluded grove of trees they can find – and going even further than that, and soaking up the feeling of something everlasting, even when they both knew it was temporary.

Sunghoon knew the summer would only be temporary, but foolishly, he thought he and Heeseung would outlast it.

✷

Sunghoon tries to force air through his nose, tries to breathe it out steadily through his mouth, but everything comes out gasping, and desperate, and his lungs aren’t filling the way they’re supposed to.

He’s gripping the cool porcelain of the sink so hard he’s worried it may crack, and he can’t bear to look his reflection in the eye, so he just keeps his head down, keeps blinking away tears as they form, keeps trying and failing to catch his breath.

Why did he have to come here?

Sunghoon hasn’t even seen Heeseung’s parents yet, let alone any potential partner. Did he come on his own? Did he know Sunghoon would be here? Did he come to gloat?

If he had, it’s having the desired effect. Sunghoon feels all of his inadequacies that he tries his best not to think about prickle across his skin, and crawl up his throat like bile, and he gags before he can make an attempt to swallow it back.

It’s just a panic attack. He knows. He’s had them before, countless times, so he knows he’s fine, but he also might be dying.

Heeseung might not be out there anymore. Maybe he’s decided to take pity on Sunghoon and leave, because that’s what he does, because that’s what Sunghoon is used to from him. But there’s only one way to find out, and it involves stepping out of the bathroom, and Sunghoon isn’t doing that, at least, not until the pain in his chest is gone – and he knows all too well that that day might never come.

✷

The next time Heeseung leaves, at the end of their summer together, Sunghoon watched him go from the end of his driveway, arms wrapped around himself, biting down on his bottom lip to keep any of his emotions from bleeding through to his relatively neutral expression. He was trying to be neutral, at least. He’s sure he failed.

Sunghoon was always good at staying unphased, unaffected, but he could never bring himself to be either when Heeseung was involved.

And Sunghoon was leaving for university too, in just a few days, and everything in his life was about to change, but for some reason, he wasn’t worried about things changing between him and Heeseung.

In hindsight, he should have been. In hindsight, he never should have accepted Heeseung’s apology, never should have let him lean in, never should have gotten used to the comfortable temperature of the water when Heeseung had pulled him under.

Because Sunghoon would be left to sit in it as it slowly froze around him, as Heeseung answered less and called less, as he was forced to get updates about him through his Instagram stories, which almost always featured people Sunghoon had never heard him mention before, but would come to be all too familiar with.

His new friends. His new life. His life outside of Sunghoon, outside of summer, outside of what, for Sunghoon, was an entire world that he was content to live in, just the two of them. Heeseung didn’t share in that sentiment, and maybe that should have been obvious to him, but as Heeseung pulled away, all that Sunghoon could bring himself to do was cling tighter, because his past self, the one that couldn’t muster the energy to do just that, is a ghost that knows how to haunt him all too well.

He was just a spectator to it all. As he attempted to adjust to what university was throwing his way and made exactly zero friends save for his roommate, although Sunghoon was fairly certain he hated him most days, Heeseung had seemingly decided that what he needed was to be shut out, to be left outside in the cold to fend for himself.

He stopped skating. He stopped studying. He stopped putting in any effort at all, because even when he did it still wasn’t enough, so what was the point? It was a gradual process, one that wasn’t solely caused by Heeseung’s disappearance, but that certainly didn’t do much to help it, either.

Sunghoon just – he gave up. And then one winter evening, as he was walking back from his long night of sitting in the library staring off into space while his roommate studied, he got a phone call.

He thinks it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be able to find the words to describe what he felt as he listened to Heeseung’s slurred speech through the phone, explaining that he didn’t mean for this to happen and he never meant to hurt you, Sunghoon. It’s not surprise, because he wasn’t surprised, not really. It’s not anger, because Sunghoon isn’t sure that he’s ever felt that towards Heeseung, and it would have been difficult to start then. It’s not numbness, because he was feeling far too much, all at once, but he couldn’t discern any of it. There was betrayal in there, somewhere, but it was buried under layers and layers of blaming himself.

He just stood there, and listened to Heeseung explain what had just transpired at a party, how he’d been drinking too much and how he’d just been so confused lately, and how he didn’t expect Sunghoon to forgive him, but that he couldn’t lose him.

Sunghoon remembers laughing. He remembers the dry, empty sound, and he remembers saying just leave me alone, Heeseung, and he remembers hanging up. He doesn’t remember blocking his number, because he never did, but despite that, Heeseung never called again.

✷

Sunghoon opens the bathroom door. Heeseung is standing there with his fist raised, like he was debating knocking.

For a moment, they just stare at each other, Heeseung’s jaw slightly agape in surprise, Sunghoon’s expression carefully neutral. “Hey,” Sunghoon says, hoping he won’t notice the way his nose and eyes are still red and puffy. “Sorry, I was just –”

“Were you crying?” Heeseung asks, then seemingly regrets it in the next instant, his mouth snapping shut, his hand dropping back to his side helplessly, but as usual, he doesn’t explain himself.

“Just…” Sunghoon starts, trailing off as he thinks of something he can say, before remembering where they are and what they were here for. “Thinking about Mr. Hong. It’s sad.”

Heeseung nods. “Yeah. He was really nice.”

Sunghoon is sure they’re thinking about the same thing, about how the man had caught them together in the woods, had been given the power to out them to their families, but only sent them on their way with a stern look and nothing more. They didn’t stop to pet his dog anymore after that, but they still smiled at him when he passed by, and the smile was always returned.

He doesn’t like sharing in nostalgia with Heeseung, and he wasn’t actually crying about Mr. Hong, so he’s relieved when it’s left at that.

“Can I… can I talk to you?” Heeseung says, and Sunghoon blinks. For some reason, he hadn’t been expecting him to ask.

In lieu of an answer – because Sunghoon can’t give him one, because his lungs ache again and his mouth is suddenly uncomfortably dry – he just takes a step back, giving Heeseung the space and the indirect invitation to step into the bathroom. He takes it.

Sunghoon doesn’t know why he lets him in, or why he shuts the door behind them after he does, because he doesn’t want to talk to Heeseung, but it feels unavoidable at this point. If he can’t keep running, at the very least, he doesn’t want anyone to be there to see it when he collapses to the ground in defeat and gives in.

Heeseung leans against the windowsill on the wall opposite from where Sunghoon is hovering near the door, ready to make his escape if need be. His arms are crossed over his chest, and he’s staring down at the floor between them, scuffing his shoe against the tile of the floor.

“You want to talk to me,” Sunghoon points out after several long seconds of silence. “So talk.”

“Okay,” Heeseung says, under his breath, and then takes a deep one. “How are you? How have you been?”

Heeseung’s eyes dart up to meet his, and for the first time today, Sunghoon notices that they’re a little bloodshot.

Heeseung’s always composed, and even in the rare moments that he’s not, Sunghoon’s pretty sure he’s the only one that notices. He searches for flaws in Heeseung with the desperation of a man chipping away at stone searching for veins of gold, and when he finds them, they’re worth just as much to him.

For a long time, Heeseung was his own gold mine. Sunghoon could never see his flaws, not until he trained himself to be able to recognize them, and every ore, every minute undiscovered facet of Heeseung that he found buried under the rubble was treated with gravity, even if it turned out to be fool’s gold, in the end.

He knew it was only a matter of time before other people stumbled upon his gold mine, before the gold rush began.

He was always going to lose Heeseung. No matter how well Sunghoon thought he knew him, no matter how well he thought he’d explored him and mapped him out and no matter how well he thought he’d hidden him away, someone else was always going to discover the treasure he never deserved, but thought was his anyway.

Heeseung was never his equal. It was a hard-learned lesson, through bike races and skates on ice and drunken, empty apologies over the phone, but he was always going to outpace Sunghoon.

He’d always known that, but he wasn’t prepared for how it affected him to have him so close now, in the same small space, looking him in the eyes, equal but not really, not at all.

Heeseung’s eyes are bloodshot, but he’s doing well. His parents are proud of him. He might have a partner, and he’ll have no trouble finding a job. They may appear as equals now – freshly graduated, living with their parents for the summer, with bloodshot eyes and no clue how to talk to each other – but Heeseung had outpaced him a long time ago, and now he’s just a dot on the horizon, so far away that Sunghoon can’t even be sure it’s him in the distance, or just a mirage.

And Heeseung wants to know how he’s doing. Sunghoon doesn’t even know if he has an answer for that, let alone one that will make sense to Heeseung.

“You never called,” Sunghoon says after what he’s sure was an uncomfortably long lapse of heavy silence for Heeseung. “I didn’t block you, but you never called.”

Heeseung drops his head again, and Sunghoon can feel the shame, the guilt radiating off of him in waves, but it doesn’t make him feel any further from nausea. The air is thick with it, and Sunghoon thinks he might suffocate if he doesn’t fill his lungs with something else.

He gets his chance a moment later, because just as Heeseung opens his mouth to respond, there’s a knock at the door.

“Heeseung? Are you in there?”

Sunghoon knows who it is before Heeseung even says, “Yeah, Mom, I’m in here,” but his stomach still lurches in discomfort.

“Don’t be too long,” Heeseung’s mom says. “The priest just arrived, he’s going to start doing prayers soon.”

“Okay,” Heeseung calls out, his voice going hoarse around the word. “I’ll be right down.”

It goes quiet again, and Sunghoon still can’t breathe. He barely waits until he hears the sound of retreating footsteps down the stairs before he’s yanking the bathroom door open, ignoring Heeseung’s meek protest, nearly tripping on the carpeted stairs as he flees.

They’ve already started the prayers downstairs. It’s near-silent, save for the sound of Sunghoon’s shoes thumping onto the ground floor, which means it’s not surprising when all eyes land on him.

He locks eyes with Heeseung’s mother, and a few things happen at once. He freezes, and hears his mother whisper his name like she’s scolding him, but he’s focused on the way Heeseung’s mother’s face changes as she realizes exactly where Sunghoon had come from, and exactly who he’d been with.

And that shouldn’t be a big deal, because Heeseung’s mother has no idea what happened between Heeseung and Sunghoon, except suddenly, he gets the feeling that she does. There’s a knowing, and a mild horror in her eyes that she’d never looked at him with before.

Heeseung had told her.

That’s fine. Sunghoon is out, he’s been out. Heeseung, though, he’d long assumed was planning on staying in the closet forever, locked up and claustrophobic but still appearing as the perfect son he always has been.

But now, it seems like he’d told her. Sunghoon doesn’t know what that means, and he doesn’t intend on finding out. He’s left no room in his life for the need for answers, for explanations, or nostalgia, or Heeseung.

He walks out the front door as the priest resumes muttering prayers, and doesn’t look back.

✷

The night before Heeseung went back to university, before everything fell apart, before Sunghoon learned how to breathe without him, he crawled through Sunghoon’s window.

It was something he did often. Sunghoon’s mother worked from home, and was always on the phone or in meetings, and preferred the doorbell not be rung except in the case of an emergency. Normally, it wasn’t an issue, because Sunghoon was at school during the day, and because even if he wasn’t, no one came looking for him anyway.

But then, he and Heeseung were speaking again – more than speaking, actually – and he wasn’t even startled when he walked into his room and found Heeseung kneeling on the roof outside of his window, the one that was all too easy to climb up to from their porch. When he was a kid, and they’d just moved in, he’d drive himself insane at night, triple checking that the windows were locked, that no one dangerous could break in.

But it was just Heeseung, and it was only ever Heeseung, so the window was always left unlocked now.

“It’s late,” Sunghoon said as Heeseung pushed the window open, climbing through and landing on his feet with grace. “My parents are already asleep.”

“I know,” Heeseung said, making himself comfortable, flopping down on Sunghoon’s twin bed, stretching one of his legs out until his foot hooked around Sunghoon’s knee, pulling him closer like he was a fish caught on Heeseung’s line. His dad had taken them fishing, once. Heeseung had caught five fish. Sunghoon had caught one. “I just thought I’d see what you were up to.”

I wanted to see you, Heeseung didn’t say, because he never said anything he really meant.

Sunghoon just hummed, and let Heeseung pull him in until his shins were pressed against the wood of his bed frame. He knew what was angling for, although he wouldn’t directly ask for it, because he never did that, either. Sunghoon didn’t give in immediately, surprisingly. He just took a moment to look at him.

Heeseung at eighteen, almost nineteen, was still a little unfamiliar to Sunghoon at seventeen, almost eighteen, even after a summer of learning him, of etching this new version of him into his heart. He’d put it right next to the sixteen year old version of Heeseung that leaned in and kissed him for the first time, who will probably always be the most familiar to Sunghoon, the one he’ll always hold closest to his heart.

Sixteen year old Heeseung was shy, and he tried to cover it up with falsified and easily-broken confidence. He was uncool in the coolest way possible, and he had Sunghoon fooled, hook line and sinker. He thought Heeseung was cool. He wanted Heeseung to think he was cool.

He was the only one, for a while. But Heeseung had grown up and out of his awkward phase, and now his beauty, his gravitational pull, was hard to ignore. Everyone was always looking at Heeseung, not even just because of his beauty, but because of the way he carried himself, the way he walked through the world like he belonged in it. Sunghoon lacked that entirely, and yet Heeseung was always looking back at him, and only him.

He had Sunghoon fooled. At the time, he didn’t know just how much of a fool Heeseung would end up making out of him, but seventeen, almost eighteen year old Sunghoon wouldn’t be surprised at where they ended up. It always felt like it was too good to be true.

Heeseung’s beautiful. Sunghoon doesn’t tell him.

He just muttered, “You’re weird,” and slumped down on top of him, letting him wrap his long limbs around him, clinging to him like Sunghoon was the one leaving tomorrow. He wasn’t leaving yet, and even when he did, he wasn't going nearly as far as Heeseung was.

Sunghoon couldn’t say what he was really thinking, so he didn't. Heeseung couldn’t say what he was really thinking, so he just said, “You’ll have to come visit me. Before Thanksgiving break, ‘cause I’ll see you then.”

He knew, even then, even before he really knew what was going to happen between him and Heeseung, that it wouldn’t be the case. He was always aware of Heeseung’s presence, could always feel when it was going to be fleeting, when he was going to fall through the gaps between Sunghoon’s fingers like the sands of time.

He must have known, even then, that time would come for them, that it would turn this into something that no longer felt real, something that instead felt nostalgic. He must have known, because he felt it, but just like most things he felt around Heeseung, he didn’t have the words to describe it.

He just hugged him a little tighter. He knew that it wouldn’t make a difference, in the end, but he let himself believe in that moment that he could hold onto him.

✷

Now, after his great escape from the wake, and a very tense family dinner, someone is knocking on his window for the first time in years.

It couldn’t be anyone other than Heeseung, but Sunghoon lets himself believe he might get lucky and find a murderer there instead.

He’s getting changed, pulling a hoodie over his bare upper half, and he had big plans of rotting in his bed for the rest of the night, unlikely to catch a wink of sleep. He feels like a livewire, every part of him wide awake and ready to short-circuit. But he’d taken a hot shower first, to make himself feel marginally better after the scolding he’d gotten from his mother about embarrassing her, and it had worked, kind of.

But now Heeseung is at his window. Sunghoon walks over, tries not to meet his eyes, and clicks the lock into place. He hadn’t even realized it was unlocked, and the idea unsettles him.

“Sunghoon,” Heeseung says, slightly muffled through the glass. “Please.”

He sighs, reaches up, and unlocks it again. Heeseung slides the window open, and Sunghoon takes a step back so there’s no risk of them touching as Heeseung climbs through, tripping a bit as his foot catches on the window sill.

Heeseung shuts the window behind him, but Sunghoon sees a mosquito fly in just above his head anyway, and acts on instinct, reaching over and swatting the air. He misses, and Heeseung flinches, ducking and recoiling from Sunghoon with a look of horror on his face.

“There was a bug,” Sunghoon says, his cheeks burning in embarrassment as he realizes Heeseung thought he was trying to hit him.

“Oh,” Heeseung says, and laughs a bit, straightening up, keeping one arm wrapped around himself like a shield. “You could have hit me. I wouldn’t have been mad.”

Sunghoon’s tempted, but he thinks his best option is to instead move away from Heeseung, taking a few steps back until there’s an appropriate amount of distance.

Heeseung still flinches like he had hit him.

“You left,” Heeseung starts, hesitant like he knows the accusation is ridiculous, all things considered. “Before I got a chance to answer.”

“I knew what you were going to say,” Sunghoon says, because he always hears what goes unsaid between him and Heeseung. He’s sure that hasn’t changed, except, maybe it has, because Heeseung’s face screws up unpleasantly, and he shakes his head.

“No, you didn’t,” Heeseung insists.

“I did,” Sunghoon says, because he has to be able to cling to something, and he’s decided that that something will be being right about Heeseung Lee.

“What was I going to say, then?”

“You were going to say something that wasn’t really anything,” Sunghoon explains. “But you would have made it sound like it was something.”

Nothing about his words make any sense. But he knows Heeseung understands anyway, because his features contort in pure misery. “What if I was going to say something real?”

“You weren’t,” Sunghoon says, because Heeseung doesn’t do that.

For a while, Heeseung doesn’t say anything at all. He just hovers silently near Sunghoon’s window, stuck halfway between opening it and fleeing again, or staying, and trying to say something real. Sunghoon doesn’t have to admit to which one he’s hoping for. It should be the first one.

“I did love you,” Heeseung says eventually, his voice soft and quiet, but Sunghoon hears it as if he was holding a megaphone to his mouth. “I loved you a lot. It wasn’t because I didn’t love you.”

And that, Sunghoon knows to be true. Real. It doesn’t mean it hurts any less, doesn’t mean he doesn’t wish Heeseung had just spit a cruel lie in his face. Admitting to this, to the one thing he thought would always go unsaid between them, and so casually, it’s about the cruelest thing Heeseung could have done. But it is real.

“Then why didn’t you call?” Sunghoon asks, his voice hoarse with misery, his lungs aching more and more with every breath. “Why didn’t you try?”

Heeseung doesn’t speak again for a minute, all of which Sunghoon spends trying and failing to catch his breath, to fill his lungs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m sorry. That’s the realest answer I have for you. I’m still trying to understand it.”

“Then why would you come here?” Sunghoon asks.

“Because I still love you.”

Sunghoon waits for his lungs to cave in, for the ground to tilt under his feet, for everything to suddenly stop making sense. It never does, because Heeseung loving Sunghoon has always made sense, even when Sunghoon couldn’t make sense of it himself. He always loved him like it just made sense for him to be loved.

“Why would you do that?” Sunghoon asks around the lump in his throat.

“I don’t know,” Heeseung repeats, laughing a bit. “It’s pathetic, right?”

Sunghoon nods, because he can’t say, no, it isn’t, or at least, you’re not the only one. He’s spent years cutting Heeseung out of him. He can’t acknowledge that he hadn’t gotten all the shrapnel out, that the wound had infected, that it was coursing through his body, slowed down but not entirely stopped.

“Aren’t you – aren’t you dating someone?” He asks, and it feels like he’s searching for another reason to hate Heeseung, to help bury the lingering love – that’s really just nostalgia, he’s sure of it – with something that makes more sense, that aligns with the image he’d built of Heeseung over the years. He has to keep up his fight to replace the kid in his memory with the bandaged knees and the red bike, the boy with the braces that cut at Sunghoon’s lips, the boy who loved Sunghoon, with the man who left, the man who cheated and ran away, the man who surely still stands in front of him now.

He knows it’s not that simple. He knows they’re all Heeseung, that every version of him was as real as the last, that they all co-exist inside of him no matter how much dissonance that creates for the neat box Sunghoon has herded him into in his mind. But he can’t let him out of that box, not without letting everything out, every single little thing Sunghoon has tried so hard to forget about him.

Heeseung’s face wrinkles in confusion, and he shakes his head. “No, I’m not,” he says. “Who would I be dating?”

Someone nice, Sunghoon thinks. A nice girl with a good job. Someone you’d feel proud to walk down the street hand in hand with, to introduce to your associates when you pass the bar exam and become a hotshot lawyer. Someone you can have a big wedding with, where both sides of the family are happy to be there, and think you’re a lovely couple. Someone you can have a few kids with, and settle down in some suburb where your kids will learn to ride a bike in the street, and maybe your son will make friends with the boy across the street, and you’ll watch them ride their bikes together from the window, and you’ll think about me then, but only then.

“I don’t know,” Sunghoon shrugs. “You just seem like you’d be dating someone by now.”

Heeseung winces, like he knows exactly what Sunghoon is trying to say, like he somehow knows about the future he’d planned out for him in his head. He gets the impression that it doesn’t align with the future he’s on track for, but Sunghoon doesn’t understand how that could possibly be the case.

“Maybe that’s why,” Heeseung mutters under his breath after a moment.

“Why what?” Sunghoon asks, brows furrowing.

“Maybe that’s why I didn’t call.”

“Because you were dating someone?”

“No,” Heeseung sighs. “I mean, yes, I have dated people, but that’s not –” he cuts off, seemingly in frustration, and takes a few long seconds before he attempts to speak again. “I was never as good as you thought I was. I was a fuck up. I’m still a fuck up.”

Sunghoon snaps his mouth closed, not even realizing it had been open, that he’d been about to protest. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to protest to, but something inside him was boiling over, something like anger, but not quite. He tries to take a steadying breath, but when he does speak, a touch of anger still seeps through, the words sizzling on top of hot coals beneath them, not fully aflame, but hot to the touch. “Are you trying to say it’s my fault? That I – that I shouldn't have expected you wouldn’t cheat on me?”

Heeseung flinches. “No, Sunghoon, that’s not what I’m saying. Not at all. Everything I did, everything I fucked up, even before that, it was me. My fault. But you never saw it that way. That’s why I didn’t call again. Because you… you would have forgiven me.”

Sunghoon doesn’t respond, because he knows it’s true.

“I couldn’t…” Heeseung trails off again, his voice meek. He clears his throat. “I couldn’t live up to the expectations you had for me. It was too much pressure.”

Sunghoon can’t help it – he laughs, wry and bitter. “What?” He scoffs, crossing his arms around himself like he was trying to hold something inside of him. He fails, miserably so, and the words burst out of him like he’d been holding them in a lot longer than he knew. “You – you couldn’t live up to my expectations? You felt pressure? Everyone in my life compares me to you. Everyone. But I was putting pressure on you?”

Heeseung just stares at him for a moment, his eyes devoid of life just like they were two years ago, when they ran into each other at the grocery store, when his mother listed all the reasons she had to be proud of her son, and Sunghoon’s mother had to lie to do the same.

“Yes,” Heeseung says, seemingly getting a burst of confidence, and Sunghoon wonders if he’s getting through to him for once, getting under his skin. He wonders if he always would have been able to, no matter how unphased Heeseung always seemed, or if this was something new, something born out of a weakness that hadn’t always been there. “Sunghoon, you thought the world of me. You were completely blind to every flaw I had, and I had plenty, and I never tried to hide them from you. You didn’t want to see them. You thought I was going to go on to do great things and that we were going to do them together, but I – but I couldn’t even tell my parents about us. You deserved better than that, and I always knew that, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t walk away from you. I loved you too much.”

There’s something unsaid, something Sunghoon is able to mentally tack onto the end without it ever being verbalized, because he knows Heeseung, because he’d been carved into him a long time ago. He has the scars to prove it, and he feels them again as he takes a shaky breath in. Heeseung couldn’t walk away, so he made sure that Sunghoon could. He destroyed what they had because he was afraid it might last forever, if he didn’t.

The difference between them was clear. Sunghoon would have been okay with it lasting forever, even if it was always enclosed in darkness, in secrecy. Heeseung wouldn’t have been. It’s something Sunghoon never needed confirmation of, but Heeseung had crawled through his window and forced it upon him anyway.

“But you told them,” Sunghoon points out. “You told your mom, didn’t you?”

“She asked,” Heeseung admits. “Your mom mentioned to her that you came out. She asked me if we ever…” he trails off. “She wasn’t happy about it, but yeah, she knows. She’s getting used to it.”

He feels a little nauseous. He turns away from Heeseung, wrapping his arms tighter around himself and shutting his eyes tightly, but he feels the floor beneath his feet shift and creak as Heeseung steps closer. Sunghoon is putting himself in the position of prey, giving Heeseung the upper hand, exposing his vulnerable back to him, but he can’t stop himself. It’s an instinct, and all he can do is hope that Heeseung won’t attack this time.

“You should go,” Sunghoon says.

“I will,” Heeseung assures him, and Sunghoon believes him, because that’s what he does. He leaves. “I just – I need you to know that I’m sorry. I’ve never forgiven myself for what I did to you, and I hope you don’t forgive me either, but I am sorry, Sunghoon. I’ve regretted it every day for the last five years, and I know how late this apology is, and – and maybe I’m just saying all of this to make myself feel better, I don’t know, but I think I’m just… I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Sunghoon, for several long seconds, feels like he can’t move a muscle. Every rise and fall of his chest feels like he’s fighting through a tonne of weight on top of it, and when he drops his arms and lets them rest at his sides, the movement is stiff, stilted, forced. Every step it takes to turn and face Heeseung again has him feeling like someone has tied cinderblocks to his feet. It’s probably a sign from someone omniscient – something Sunghoon isn’t even close to being, he only knows what’s directly in front of him, and that happens to be Heeseung now – that he’s doing something he shouldn’t be, but it’s too late.

He’s caught Heeseung’s eyes again, and there’s no trace of deception in them. And he knows when he’s being deceived by Heeseung, because he’d done so for years. He’d deceived Sunghoon into thinking he had a future with Heeseung in it, only – he’s found himself in the future now, and Heeseung is here.

He’s here, and he doesn’t have all the answers, but he’s sorry, and he’s not lying to Sunghoon about it, and he’s not lying to anyone about Sunghoon, apparently, about what they were to each other.

It’s still not enough to make it okay. But it’s enough to have the ache, the weight, the pressure, lessen ever so slightly. It’s enough to shatter the image he’d maintained of Heeseung in his mind, enough to shake loose something long buried, although not as deeply as he once thought it was.

“I don’t,” Sunghoon says after several long moments, his voice hoarse, strained. “I don’t forgive you.”

Heeseung sighs, and it sounds relieved, but his gaze drops down to the floor between them, and he looks disappointed. Sunghoon wonders if he really can somehow be both.

“But,” Sunghoon starts, and Heeseung’s eyes dart back up to meet his, wide and almost fearful, “I could. After I’ve had some time.”

Because maybe Heeseung had felt the same pressure Sunghoon had. Maybe they just hadn’t talked about it, hadn’t been honest with each other about it, and maybe they should have. Maybe this apology is coming late, but not too late. Maybe they can still talk about it, someday, when Sunghoon’s scars have fully healed, or when those scars have started to turn back into what they once were – history, nostalgia, memories, good ones, ones Sunghoon would like to be able to look back on without feeling like he’d been left in the cold.

And because Heeseung doesn’t push, like he’d pushed his way back into Sunghoon’s life before. He just nods, his eyes sad and hopeful all at once, and says, “Of course. You can have as much time as you need.”

Sunghoon has missed him. He hadn’t realized just how much until they once again found themselves in each others’ orbit, but he’s missed his first friend, his first love, his first everything. And maybe they have a long way to go – a long way, because even as Heeseung stands here now, Sunghoon is still missing him, which tells him they’ll never truly return to their old selves, but he thinks that’s probably a good thing – but they won’t ever get there unless they start.

This time, Heeseung hesitates before he leaves. Leaving is an instinct for him, but Sunghoon can tell he’s fighting it, that he’s trying to learn when the time to leave is, and when the time to stay is. Sunghoon doesn’t say anything, but when Heeseung clearly settles on leaving as the best option, he doesn’t just let him go this time. He’s not finished yet.

“Maybe I’ll see you in the summer, if you’ll be here,” Sunghoon says, just as Heeseung pushes his window open again. He turns to look at him one more time, and smiles, just a bit.

Summer is always the time that Sunghoon loves Heeseung most. It’s like the flowers in his mother’s garden, the ones that sprout without fail every June, no matter how rough of a winter they’d endured before that. He knows that hasn’t changed, because he can already feel something beginning to bloom from those scars in his chest left by the Heeseung shaped shrapnel. Something warm, something simultaneously familiar, nostalgic, but also new and burgeoning with possibility. Sunghoon thinks that, in time, he might be able to sink into it again, and without completely losing himself in the process.

He thinks that possibility, that potential, is something worth trying to reach for, something worth not giving up on.

“Okay,” Heeseung says, swinging one leg over the window sill, leaving but not really, because he might actually end up staying this time. Sunghoon can’t know for sure, but he thinks it’d be an awful waste of love – years of it, nearly two decades worth – not to try and believe it. And then, like he’s trying to reinforce that Sunghoon is right to try, Heeseung adds, “I’ll be here. You know where to find me.”

Sunghoon does. He always will, because it’s ingrained in his memory, and nostalgia always wins in the end. And maybe he’ll walk the short distance between their houses again, and each step won’t feel like he’s undoing progress but rather working toward something good for once, and maybe Heeseung will be waiting for him when he gets there.

If he isn’t, Sunghoon will be okay. If he is, they might be okay, too, and that thought alone is enough to convince him he’s safe to dip his toe in, to cling to the idea that even if the water isn’t warm enough for him yet, at the very least, it won’t ever go cold again.

Sunghoon takes a deep breath in, and it doesn’t ache as much. He watches Heeseung go, and it doesn’t ache as much. For the first time in a long time, he can imagine a future where it doesn’t ache at all, and thinks there’s a good chance Heeseung could be a part of that future.

It’s a nice thought. He thinks it might be safe to hold onto, this time.