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“I don't believe in love,” is the first thing Kyungsoo hears from his mouth. Then, the door he’s kept open for the past three months falls shut.
So this is how it’ll be, thinks Kyungsoo, knowing who’s still left on this floor to hear the wood shivering on its hinges. The separateness sits too tight around his ears—or it’s the absence of a draught that swept secrets into the open. Kyungsoo liked having so little stand between him and everyone. Less pretence, lies drying out in the sun.
It may be that it’s different with a stranger. He looks him over for markers of familiarity. He’s as tall as Kyungsoo likes his women, lips bitten, lipstick tacky, expression closed off into upset. Struggling with unlacing his boots, as if they’d been tied to never come off. Kyungsoo never took to living with a future in mind, and it’s only today that he understands: each last time, it doesn’t weigh on him. Something lifts off him instead.
His bare feet are joined by the stranger’s, more wiry than Kyungsoo’s. The creases in his skin from seams and tightly-tied boots will wear out before night falls. His footprints will join Kyungsoo’s on the floor that almost burns up beneath his soles.
Kyungsoo is done caring about bills. Closer to the end, Kyungsoo feels wide and light with life.
The man’s skin turns golden under the glaze of deep-yellow light. Kyungsoo returns his gaze to his mouth again, the ring in his lower lip a glint to a smile sharpened by hesitance.
“I don’t want to fuck,” replies Kyungsoo in kind. “I’m cooking.”
It’s not an invitation. He‘s followed anyway: the puffed up bird Kyungsoo’s doorstep caught is, without its coat, a willowy one. One with bony elbows, Kyungsoo’s shoulders soon learn, forearms slit like birch bark beneath bunched up sleeves, and a voice more prone to sound than words. His weight, the heat of his body exorcise the docile tension from Kyungsoo’s.
“When did you last eat?” asks Kyungsoo. Places cuts on two onions that feel like water, like a morning slipping through fingers, steady hands only shaken by the weight against his shoulders shifting. Content unfurls inside of him; he’d have liked to peel the dry skin off someone and stem them, too. But it’s good like this. He’d forgotten almost that he liked it unpredictable the best.
The man, two knuckles deep in a bowl set aside for later, winces. “Didn’t have much of an appetite.”
The announcement gave Kyungsoo nothing but. Gave him what he’d wanted most: a life of nothing to do, and a door open wide to those who walked in with suspicion and left with a sated heart.
His fingers are slick with grease by the time Kyungsoo tips roughly diced potatoes off his cutting board into the pot and takes the time to look, and dyed red.
“Slow down, you’ll hurt your stomach if you eat too much at once.” An instinct he once felt terrible enough to fold into a hidden corner and now knows as fondness—while Kyungsoo has no regrets, some days he does wish he’d given into it more. Cared more. Loved more, laid out the contents of his heart.
“Zitao,” he’s offered in place of an apology.
“Kyungsoo.” When he turns, he finds he likes the dove’s smile on a fox’s face. He sinks his teeth into this new name and takes him by the wrists, and in the sink washes potato starch off his own, grease off Zitao’s skin. Rinses off also the thoughts telling him where he’d have to position the knife to—
“I didn’t expect you to be this way,” says Zitao when his pliant hands are enfolded in a towel, so quiet Kyungsoo could hear the flicker of a candle. “There’s nothing in you that’s scared.”
Kyungsoo likes the clumsiness to his Korean, the frustration like a bitterness lingering in the corners of his mouth as he speaks. It reminds him of a time when everyone deemed themself immortal, and ineptitudes a wrongdoing. “What’s there to be scared of?”
“Insects. Ghosts. People.”
“Expectations?” asks Kyungsoo.
“Not those. So, the sex, is it me or a general thing?” Zitao asks when Kyungsoo turns between the arms corralling him against the counter, the distance between them made up of mere heartbeats.
Kyungsoo looks up into this last face he’ll ever see. Imagines it soft with affection, torn by hurt, blooming with spite. “The love, is it romantic or a general thing?”
His nose wrinkles. “General, I think.”
“For me too. —If there was time I’d make you sit for a portrait.”
“Who cares about time, you should follow your heart,” tells him Zitao.
It sounds like something people used to say in the before, a quick thorn of kindness that stung with not being meant, but Zitao’s face lies earnest and warm, until a grin slits through. “You have this all planned out? Did you write a script?”
Kyungsoo can’t help the laugh, can’t help the sobering either. “You know those places that help people die when they’re terminally ill?”
“You got your hands on the good stuff, from before the announcement?” asks Zitao, catching on, surprise arching his eyebrows. “I brought something too, but it’s not like I could test it. I didn’t want to—a friend of mine told me—”
“Later,” Kyungsoo cuts him off. He has garlic and ginger to crush and mince, has one last stew to cook. “You eat pork? If I’d known you weren’t Korean I would have prepared something other than these.”
“I didn’t come to eat,” says Zitao. Rests his elbows again on Kyungsoo’s shoulders, and leaves a sigh against his nape, damp as a kiss.
“What did you come for?”
“I don’t know, it’s my first end of the world.”
It comes out as a whine, too unguardedly sincere and a touch confused. In another life, Kyungsoo would have taken the time to get to know him. In this one, it was enough that Zitao had trawled a forum the morning of. At the thought, an ache bruises Kyungsoo’s stomach like a pear shaken down by the wind. You’re not alone anymore. You don’t have to live through it alone, he could say. The thought alone tastes of mould. He sets aside the knife and reaches into a cabinet abovehead instead. “Put this on.”
Zitao takes his time. His hand fills out the glove the way Kyungsoo’s does, although the plastic pulls into more folds along his fingers. Still he ignores Kyungsoo scraping the seasoning paste into the pot, inspects its fit with a strange sense of expectation. Then, he softens over Kyungsoo’s shoulder again, rests both hands upside down on Kyungsoo’s arms.
Consonants sharpened he asks against Kyungsoo’s neck: “Kyungsoo-ssi, where are your friends?”
“You’re enough,” says Kyungsoo. “Mix this for me.”
There are more side dishes to make, more emptied bowls to stack. The glove turns red, fingerprints smear along one side of the gleaming pot. Kyungsoo’s disruption, in his too-wide hoodie and ripped jeans, turns unsteady. His gaze drifts to the taped-over display of the stove.
“Do you need to lie down?” asks Kyungsoo when the stew ingredients marinate and Zitao’s folded over his back again, a coat hung to dry. “Hold on,” he says to no reply.
Zitao’s grip doesn’t loosen, but he lets himself be steered into the bathtub sitting on the enclosed balcony, sighs when Kyungsoo folds his legs gently.
“Comfortable?” asks Kyungsoo, passing a thumb over the sweat pearling beneath his hairline.
Eyelids heavy, Zitao tilts his head back against a pillow, eyes searching for Kyungsoo’s. His gaze is hazy, scatters like powder. “Don’t go,” he murmurs, left hand searching for Kyungsoo, too.
Kyungsoo takes it between his own, where it sits fever-warm and trembling. “I’ll eat out here,” he promises. “Told you to slow down. I would have enjoyed a dance or two.”
“You dance,” says Zitao, and his eyes close with a shudder that runs shoulder to ankle, like something rushing through his limbs.
It’s not discomfort, Kyungsoo understands when his smile softens further, blurs, and his hand smudges in Kyungsoo’s hold. “I’ll join you soon.”
He watches, until there’s nothing left to watch. The last of his delusory thoughts smothered and quiet, Kyungsoo gives him a stir, until the last silver piercing sinks.
With the window slid wide open, wind and light push along the surface, a thick, hungry black, sticky still. The air smells of seaweed and salt, as if the sea had moved closer, brought with it its tang. Kyungsoo runs a hand through his own hair, and tilts his face into the breeze.