Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Seok Yujin knows three things for absolute certain:

1. He graduates high school in two weeks, 

2. His nineteenth birthday is in a month and a half, and

3. His dad has never told him who his other father is.

(At eighteen-nearly-nineteen, Yujin knows more than that, obviously, but for his current intents and purposes, those are certainly three things that he knows.)

It isn’t that he’s ever lacked anything—complain as Yujin does about his cornball sense of humor and questionable cooking experiments, Seok Matthew is the best dad he could have asked for and Yujin has spent eighteen-nearly-nineteen years showered in love and support and bad jokes—it’s just that… now that Yujin is graduating high school, wouldn’t his other dad want to know? Isn’t there some other man out there who would find pride in the kid with half of his genes crossing that stage, being handed a diploma, finally becoming an adult?

“If we get caught, I’m playing victim,” Gunwook stage whispers, checking behind his shoulder for the nth time, as if somewhere in the open apartment, Yujin’s dad has magically teleported back from the gym and is waiting to jump out at them from around a corner.

Yujin scoffs. “You’re older, taller, and more muscular than me.”

“Yeah, and I’m practically a teddy bear,” Gunwook intones, aegyo entirely wasted on a Yujin with a plan. “I can’t have your dad mad at me, he’s cool! And kind of a D—”

“If you call my dad a DILF in front of me, hyung…”

Gunwook flashes a smile, all teeth, apologetic but unashamed. Like just because he’s (barely) twenty-one now, it’s suddenly not weird. Yujin sighs—he really needs friends his own age, but that’s what a childhood of flip-flopping between countries does to you. Vancouver to Seoul to Vancouver again and then back to Seoul, and sometimes the easiest friend to make is the smiling giant next door who’s two years older and also likes to play soccer after school.

(He loves Gunwook, he really does. The asshole.)

Yujin pushes all other thoughts out of his mind. They have an hour, maybe two—his dad normally texts when he’s on the way home, but sometimes it slips his mind. Usually when Yujin’s doing something he shouldn’t, like the one time he convinced Gunwook they wouldn’t get caught out past curfew, only for his dad to come home early from his date and catch them mid-scrimmage in the grass field outside of their building. His dad has never been very effective with punishments—couldn’t ground him from soccer because Yujin was in the club at school, couldn’t ground him from Gunwook because their bedrooms shared a wall and they’d learn Morse code if they had to, so a week without video games it was—but this time…

“I don’t see why we have to use your dad’s computer when you’ve got your own,” Gunwook, voice of reason he tries to be, says. He flops onto the other end of the couch while Yujin opens the lid of the laptop on the coffee table.

His own face, twelve years past, stares back at him from the lock screen, smiling with missing front teeth behind a lopsided birthday cake. He types the password—110320, because his dad is sweet and sentimental and easy to crack—and sighs in relief that it’s still the same.

“Because,” Yujin says, already opening a browser window, “his laptop will be logged into all of his SNS accounts already. Saves time trying to figure out a thousand passwords, and we can just delete the browsing history when we’re done.”

“And you really think he’s just going to have nineteen-year-old messages lying around?”

Yujin waves a hand. “Dad’s nostalgic. And even if he ever tried to delete something, Uncle Hanbin would probably talk him into keeping it because he’s, like, ten times as nostalgic. Between the two of them, I think my entire childhood has been preserved frame-by-frame.”

“Ooh, Hanbin-hyung. Now there’s a D—”

“Do not,” hisses Yujin, rather than celebrating the quiet victory that yes, his dad’s computer is logged into Instagram, KakaoTalk, and Facebook (which, seriously, who even uses Facebook in the year 2030?). “Uncle Hanbin’s not even a dad.”

“DILF is a state of mind,” is Gunwook’s reasoning. He dodges the elbow Yujin sends blindly his way, catching it and shoving Yujin’s arm back. “So what now? We just… scroll back nineteen years and hope we find someone sliding into his DM’s?”

“Not exactly.”

See, there are three more things that Yujin knows.

1. He was born on March 20, 2011, the day before his due date, meaning,

2. Loathe as he is to acknowledge the act, he was conceived sometime between the end of June and the beginning of July 2010, and

3. His dad spent summer 2010—the summer after his first year at UBC Vancouver—in Seoul for his cousin’s wedding.

(And three additional things that, with careful snooping disguised as natural curiosity, Yujin has learned. Namely,

1. His dad had an ambiguous situationship-boyfriend back in Canada,

2. There was a fling with a bellhop at the hotel he’d stayed in that summer, and

3. At some point on the night of the wedding, Aunt Yaebin saw him leave the venue with the violinist.

All varying levels of traumatic for Yujin to find out about his father, particularly Aunt Yaebin pitching her voice down to say, “Oh, Yujinie, you have no idea about your dad’s hoe phase” in the middle of dinner until his dad had squawked and said, “Can you not tell my teenager that I had a hoe phase!”—though, to his aunt’s credit, Yujin was the one who had pushed it—but informational nonetheless.)

Logically, the first plan of attack is the boyfriend. If they’d been in a relationship and his dad was anything then like he is now, there’s got to be pictures on his feed. Of course, scrolling nearly two decades’ worth of selcas and his own childhood photos is going to take an eternity, but that’s why Yujin has Gunwook as his lookout and second set of eyes in case he gets too gung-ho with his scrolling and—

“There!”

Yujin’s fingers freeze on the track pad as Gunwook thrusts a hand over his shoulder, pointing a finger at the screen.

“That’s, like, the third selca with this dude, and he’s always got his arm around him.”

The offending third selca is in the center of the page: a mirror shot, Yujin’s dad holding up a peace sign next to his face and another man (Boy? Weird to think that his dad and this potential boyfriend were Yujin’s age here) standing close, a hand on his waist. He clicks the photo, searching for a tagged account, but there’s nothing to be found—either this picture predates the tag function, his dad just didn’t tag this guy, or he doesn’t have social media, which throws a wrench into things.

But Yujin looks at the other guy, really scans his face, his wide mouth and his dimples and—

“No way. No way.”

Gunwook makes a small noise of confusion. “What? Is something—”

“There’s no way that Kim Taerae is my dad.”

June 23, 2010

“You’re sure you don’t want to come?”

Taerae, sprawled across Matthew’s unmade bed in ugly red sweatpants that shouldn’t be so endearing but are, damn it, clicks his tongue against the back of his teeth—a surefire sign that Matthew is not getting the answer he’d like to hear. Not the resounding, “Yes, I’ll accompany you to this wedding across the globe just so you won’t be bored and alone and bombarded with conversation from family members you don’t actually know because I am your darling, doting boyfriend and also I love you,” he’d been hoping for. Not even the, “Sure, why not, we can cross ‘Korean wedding hall’ off of our list of places we’ve fooled around,” that had been a second place pipe dream.

“As much as I’d like to, I am right in the middle of summer session and literally have a project due in six hours.”

Fuck your project, Matthew wants to say. Fuck summer session. Wants to crawl into bed and wrap himself around Taerae and say, You don’t need school, you’re going to be a rock star anyway.

But Kim Taerae has a level head on his shoulders and far more responsibilities and restrictions on him as an international student, so Matthew doesn’t press further.

That much further.

“The wedding’s not for a week, conveniently when you get a three day weekend for Canada Day,” he wheedles. Doesn’t resist the urge to slide next to Taerae, to octopus his arms around him and nip at his collarbone where the stretched cotton of his T-shirt has exposed skin starting to flush pink. “I could pick you up at the airport.”

“And step right off a flight and into your cousin’s wedding—uninvited, mind you—jet lagged, only to come back the next day?” Taerae, ever the realist, chuckles. He’s got his arms pulled around Matthew’s shoulders, blunt nails scratching at his biceps, but it feels less like a loving embrace than a pep-talk. It’s the gentlest hard no he could give.

Sometimes, Matthew just wants to sit on top of Taerae, grab his sweet, dimpled face, and say, I really fucking like you, goddamnit, can you please take me seriously for once?, but at the same time, he knew going into this that Taerae was never looking for anything serious. He’ll finish out his study abroad program, go back to SNU to finish his bachelor’s, then get his master’s while Matthew stays in Canada with his creative writing degree and the crush he’ll harbor into eternity.

“Worth a shot,” Matthew murmurs. Chin propped on Taerae’s chest, meeting him eye-to-eye in the way that Taerae always struggles with, he says, “I’ll miss you while I’m gone, for what it’s worth.”

Taerae touches the side of his face. He’s small, barely taller than Matthew, but he’s got guitarist hands—wide palms, long fingers, the pads of them brushing the curve of Matthew’s lower lip. Matthew would kiss them if he didn’t have the sudden feeling that it’d make everything worse—that this is the beginning of an end, even before their looming deadline.

“I’ll miss you too, Thew-yah,” Taerae says, in full Korean rather than the odd Konglish they tend to fall into. Like he doesn’t want to say anything wrong—Taerae’s English is about where Matthew’s Korean is, in that he speaks it well, but sometimes, things get lost in translation. He defaults to Korean when he’s trying to explain a concept, or he’s really passionate about something, or, apparently, when he’s letting his boyfriend down slowly. “But you don’t have to wait for me, you know. You’ll be in Seoul for two weeks, you should have whatever fun you want to. Even if it doesn’t involve me.”

The point, Matthew wants to say, is that I want to have fun with you involved. Instead, he says, “Okay,” and stops the rest of the words from coming out with a kiss. Presses himself against Taerae, hands fisted at his waist and knee sliding between those fuckass red pants, like he can get his point across on body contact alone.

Only when he’s certain that the flood of I love you please come with me please stay please don’t leave has been dammed does Matthew pull back, forehead pressed to Taerae’s and the stale mid-morning of their breath mingling between them, and say, “But give me something to remember you by first.”

“Kim Tae-who?”

“Kim Tae-wh—the main vocal-guitarist of One Wake? Hyung, he’s only, like, the vocalist of a generation,” Yujin spits, suddenly offended on behalf of a generation he isn’t even a part of. His dad’s generation—his dads’ generation, plural? Yujin grew up on One Wake, a devoted WakeUp most of his life, always playing in the background at his request, and even though it was Lee Jeonghyeon who’d caught his eye and made kindergartner Yujin beg his dad for piano lessons, he’d know Kim Taerae’s voice—and face—anywhere. And that’s certainly a younger version of him with a covert hand on Yujin’s dad’s waist.

“Oh! I think my mom listens to them.” Gunwook squints through his glasses at the screen, getting a good look at eighteen-year-old Kim Taerae holding Yujin’s nineteen-year-old father in a decidedly non-platonic way. He tilts his head, pupils blowing a little wider. “You kind of have his face shape.”

Yujin balks. “I don’t! Wait, do I?”

“Do you think your dad was, like, a groupie? Hung around their shows and—”

“La-la-la-la, I can’t hear you! Hyung is talking crazy!” Yujin sings in his loudest, most obnoxious voice to drown out Gunwook’s terrible nonsense fantasies. Even if that were true—which it isn’t, because Yujin’s dad was always the number one complainer when asked to hit replay on “Sunset Smile” for the fifth time—the timelines don’t even add up. Yujin was born in 2011; One Wake didn’t release their first album until the end of 2013. “There’s no way my other dad is a rock star. Like, that would be cool, but Dad wouldn’t even take me to a One Wake concert the first time we moved here, because…”

Yujin was five years old the first time he and his dad had flip-flopped countries. Leaving Canada for Korea had been daunting at first, but when Yujin recognized the word Seoul from a One Wake concert advertisement, he’d begged and sniffled and pleaded. The answer had been a soft, Sorry, Peach, but Dad’s got work things going on that day, and rock shows can be dangerous for little ones, and an offer to see Taemin in the summer instead. Yujin had taken it, but he’d never understood why every One Wake request was met with a no, even when he got older and bigger and shot up past his dad.

Until now, apparently.

“Because he didn’t want to see Kim Taerae… because he’s his ex and could be your dad,” Gunwook finishes for a Yujin too busy staring into space as the synapses in his brain threaten to set the whole thing on fire. The limited time until his dad gets home is suddenly forgotten in favor of figuring out a new plan of action, because, as Gunwook points out so astutely that Yujin kind of wants to scream, “So how are you going to get ahold of a man with 1.8 million Instagram followers who probably gets a hundred messages a day claiming to be his illegitimate child?”

Yujin picks up his phone, opening his own Instagram account that is mostly photo dumps of food and memes and inside jokes for all 162 accounts that follow him. No real reason for a rock star like Kim Taerae to give a second glance to a message from, except…

“There,” Yujin says after a moment of tapping around. When Gunwook cranes his head to look at his phone, he flashes his feed: the same pictures as always, but pinned to the top is now his post from last year’s Parents’ Day: a sleepy-smiled, twenty-year-old Seok Matthew holding a hanbok-clad, one-year-old Seok Yujin during his doljanchi, juxtaposed with a selca of Yujin, seventeen, and his dad, thirty-seven, at some publishing house event that Yujin only agreed to tag along to because he got free food. The caption—happy parents’ day @seokmaetyu you’re ok i guess (just kidding i can’t even joke about how if i only get one parent in this world, i’m glad it’s you, i love you)—is both heartfelt enough and conveniently already had his dad’s account tagged.

Because maybe Kim Taerae gets a hundred messages a day claiming to be his child, but none from an eighteen-nearly-nineteen-year-old with the same family name as the man he dated nineteen years ago and a photo of him right at the top of his feed.

Gunwook, grinning, ruffles Yujin’s hair with an outstretched hand. “And here I thought I was the brains in this friendship.”

Yujin glares. “Then be the brains and help me figure out who the bellhop was.”

“Easy.” Gunwook pulls the laptop towards himself in one swift motion. “Do you know what hotel it was?”

“I think Aunt Yaebin said something about the Lotte Hotel? No idea if that’s where they actually stayed though—”

June 26, 2010

As far as liminal spaces go, a hotel lobby has to be, like, the most liminal. No one goes to a hotel for the lobby. No one wants to be in one for more than as long as it takes to pass through on the way to the elevator. No one actually likes the free coffee.

All of this and much less when your mood is as sour as Matthew’s has been since his family touched down in Incheon.

He hasn’t said much of anything, other than a couple of thank yous to the people who stepped aside for him at the baggage claim and a no, I’m fine, it’s just jetlag to his mother’s fussing and doting over him during the cab ride to Jung-gu. Yaebin keeps glancing up at him from her phone, where she’s been texting her boyfriend since they landed; Matthew keeps ignoring her to bury his face in his DS, where he’s been working on his Pokédex because his boyfriend hasn’t messaged him since before takeoff.

It’s six o’clock in the evening back home—Taerae’s last class this session ends at four. Even if he locked himself and his guitar in a rehearsal room after handing in his project, he’s at least got to be stopping for dinner soon.

Not like Matthew’s been obsessively checking the time zones since he took his phone off of airplane mode or anything.

“You okay?” Yaebin whispers in English behind their father’s head, bent over the check-in desk while he makes absolutely sure that the rooms they’ve booked are adjoining or at least adjacent.

Matthew shrugs a shoulder. “Tired,” he says, which is true, but not the half of it. Yaebin knows about Taerae in the same way that she’d been the first he’d asked to call him Matthew—but still, confiding his boy problems with her in the middle of a needlessly swanky, deeply liminal hotel lobby when he’s already in a terrible mood is the last thing he feels like doing right now.

He feels like taking a nap. He feels like hunkering down to find a shiny Squirtle. He feels like texting Taerae, hey i know i already told you i made it here safe but can you reply or something so i know you’re also alive. Feels like saying, i miss you already. Feels like hiding beneath the covers so no one can see him to send off, i know we aren’t exclusive and i know you said i could do whatever i wanted but i don’t want anyone but you so what do we do with that.

But he knows it’s not fair. He agreed to what he agreed to the first time he pressed his lips to Kim Taerae’s. It doesn’t stop the want, though.

Yaebin squeezes his shoulder and doesn’t ask any further questions, though if Matthew notices she looks up from her texts more often, neither of them acknowledge it. Their dad is finishing up with the concierge, who beckons over a bellhop with a golden luggage cart in tow. 

“Your bags?” asks the man, and Matthew is suddenly too aware of his rumpled clothes and dark circles from the flight.

An elbow bumps his ribs, Yaebin mouthing emphatically, “He’s cute,” like Matthew isn’t currently having a crisis about another boy she also once deemed cute when he brought Taerae home for Christmas and she caught them making out in Matthew’s childhood bedroom.

But the bellhop meets his eyes, gives him a smile that rounds the apples of his cheeks, and flashes teeth almost perfectly straight except for a singular crooked canine, and fine, he’s cute.

“Thank you,” Matthew says, rolling his sticker-covered suitcase over. The bellhop’s eyes catch on the scuffed Pikachu on the handle, and there’s another peek of that crooked tooth.

He doesn’t say anything, though, and Matthew doesn’t either. In fact, he forgets all about the cute bellhop while his parents drag him and Yaebin to a lunch with aunts and uncles that neither of them is awake enough to fully process. He checks his phone, still free of notifications other than Tumblr likes, under the table enough times that one of his uncles points an accusatory pair of tongs at him and says, “Yah, Woohyun-ah, be present and stop texting all your girlfriends back home,” which is both nice to hear his chosen Korean name and not, because it’s one specific boy he’s waiting on a text from.

It isn’t until early in the evening, when Matthew’s father sends him on a mission to fill both rooms’ ice buckets, that the memory is jogged. He’s standing with his forehead against the cool metal of the ice machine, trying to keep himself awake at least until a normal bedtime, when the ding of an arriving elevator cuts through the metallic thunk of ice cubes into the bucket. Matthew lifts his head, trying to appear less unkempt than he feels, when he hears a quiet, breathy laugh.

Whipping his head around, expecting one of his family members wondering what’s taken so long to fill two buckets, Matthew finds himself making instant eye contact with the cute bellhop. He’s still in his uniform, though a bit more disheveled in the later hour than he had been during the morning: the summer heat’s left a sheen across the bridge of his nose, his hair fallen from its once-neat styling and across his brow. The same crooked smile grows while Matthew tries to act like he’d been standing up straight the whole time.

“The machines on the next floor work better,” says the bellhop. “I’ve submitted service request after service request, but management claims they don’t want to call in a technician just for one machine.”

“Wouldn’t it be proactive for them to call one and have them check the other floors’ machines, too?” Matthew half-speak-half-yawns, covering it with a belated hand. He’s sure that was very attractive on top of his puffy, tired face.

“You’d think with all the money they’re making, that’d be the case, but…” The bellhop leans against the wall next to the machine, looking like this is the first rest he’s taken in a while by the way his broad shoulders ease and slump. He’s handsome with an edge of the boyish charm that always seems to hook Matthew right in—he shoves thoughts of Taerae’s pouty lips and dimples aside, focusing instead on the bellhop’s bright eyes on him. “My name’s Jiwoong, by the way.”

Matthew accepts the hand that Jiwoong offers. “Matthew,” he says, and then amends, “Or Woohyun,” because when he was twelve and sat his parents down to tell them that he was trans and his name was Matthew and would they please get him on puberty blockers before he sprouted boobs, his mom had pinched his cheek and said, Okay, but you need a Korean name, too, Matthew-yah.

“Matthew,” Jiwoong repeats. Matthew’s name sounds nice in his voice, deep and clear and a little shaky on the unfamiliar consonants. “I have half an hour until I’m done with my shift, and I’m starving. There’s a good naengmyeon place a couple of blocks over, if you wanted to join me for dinner?”

Matthew is sure the way he’s staring looks ridiculous. He’s also pretty sure that this is a weird, sleep-deprived hallucination because there is no way in hell that he’s been in Seoul for less than eight hours and has somehow got a man who looks like he’s just stepped out of a drama batting his eyes at him, but the longer he stares without a word, the more Jiwoong’s confident smile seems to falter, going stiff around the edges.

Thumbing the unused phone in the pocket of his jeans, Matthew straightens his posture and clears his throat. If Taerae wants him to have fun while he proceeds to go ghost on him, then fine. Matthew can have fun.

“I’d love to,” Matthew finally answers, mentally preening when Jiwoong’s frozen smile goes soft. “Can the starvation wait an hour? I need to shower and get some coffee in me so I don’t fall asleep on you, Jiwoong-ssi.”

“We can get coffee, too,” Jiwoong’s answer comes so easily, so confidently. He pulls away from the wall, but that boyish smile still slips through his mask of professionalism. “Meet you in the lobby at 5:30?”

“5:30,” Matthew answers, and forgets all about the ice buckets.

“Boom. Found him.”

Gunwook leans back so triumphantly that the couch cushions jump with him, and Yujin startles in surprise—he’d been so absorbed in drafting and redrafting a message to Kim Taerae that he’d drowned out his best friend’s quiet mumblings of the last fifteen minutes entirely. As it is, he’s only got the words hello kim taerae-ssi, my name is seok yujin and in his DM window, while Gunwook has somehow managed to pull up the Facebook page of their latest suspect—apparently people do still use Facebook.

Yujin studies the page: a generic header of a cloud-speckled blue sky, a profile photo of a man in a white button-up with an elegant swoop of dark hair, and a name: Kim Jiwoong. Identical to the profiles of probably a thousand millennial Seoulite professionals.

“What makes you think that’s him?” Yujin asks, shoving right up against Gunwook to get a better look at this guy. Sure, he’s got the same prominent aegyo sal that Yujin sees in the mirror every day, and sure, he’s also got the deep double eyelids that Yujin certainly did not inherit from his own father’s fox-like monolids, but—

Gunwook scrolls past the profile photo, the recent posts that all look like quotes and articles. He clicks the guy’s about info and tosses the mouse back down on the mouse pad in triumph.

“Worked as a bellhop at the Lotte Hotel Seoul from 2010 to 2012. Sexual orientation listed as gay, relationship status is married to someone named Yoon Seobin—a man, I checked, as if the gay thing didn’t make that obvious. Also there’s a Woong-hyung in your dad’s KKT contacts that he has no active chats with.”

“Jesus,” Yujin whispers, half to Kim Jiwoong’s profile picture and half to Gunwook’s smug expression as he leans back again. “I guess you’re pre-law for a reason.”

“Just call me Detective Gunwookie.”

Kim Jiwoong stares back at Yujin through the computer screen, and Yujin tries to imagine his dad, at the tail end of his teens, and a younger version of this man in the photo. It feels more feasible than having a nationally-renowned celebrity as a father at the same time as it feels a little hollow to look at a complete stranger and wonder if you share DNA.

Kim Jiwoong, Kim Taerae—would he have been Kim Yujin, had the circumstances been different?

As if he understands exactly why Yujin’s gone silent, best friend telepathy, Gunwook sits up straight and bumps their shoulders together. Eyes wide behind the thick frames of his glasses, he gives a half-smile that’s encouraging in the same way that it’s a little sad. “Do you ever wonder why your dad never told you?”

“All the time, lately.” A single click and Yujin is back on his dad’s desktop home page. The little reminder note—February 11, 2030, 10am: Yujinie’s graduation 🍑—taunts him from the corner of the screen. Two weeks and he’ll graduate—but in two weeks, will he know? Will he be ready to know? Will his dad—his dad, Seok Matthew, the one who raised him and made him who he is now—be ready? “I mean, I never asked. It’s always just been the two of us, so I never really thought to nitpick. Like, Dad is great and I don’t need anyone else, you know? But if there is someone else out there, would they want to know? And do they already?”

That’s probably the thought that’s haunted Yujin the most since he got the idea to find his other dad—what if he already knows? What if he knows about Yujin, nearly an adult now, but didn’t want to be part of his life anyway? Didn’t want to be part of his dad’s life, which might hurt even worse, because even if everything is good now, Yujin knows those early days weren’t easy on him. The palpable exhaustion in his eyes in every one of Yujin’s baby pictures, only nineteen when he was born but juggling university and work and new fatherhood as a trans guy in the early 2010’s.

Yujin stares hard at Kim Jiwoong’s profile picture, wondering if this is the type of guy who’d leave them, and pulls up his profile on his phone, too.

June 27, 2010

“I mean, it’s not all bad. They picked up on the name thing pretty easily—like, it took a second for them today to remember that I’m Woohyun, but the deadname didn’t pop out in its place. I’m sure it’s only because I pass now, but still. Now to get my family to realize that this still doesn’t mean that I’m straight.”

The bare chest beneath Matthew’s palms heaves with a laugh. Jiwoong cranes forward, nipping at his lower lip until Matthew pulls his arms around his neck again, accepting the kiss with the same ease as it’s given.

Easy is a good word for Jiwoong—not in the pejorative sense, just that nothing’s felt forced or awkward or uncomfortable since he curled a gentle hand around Matthew’s elbow in the lobby at precisely 5:30. They sipped convenience store iced coffees on the walk to the naengmyeon place, where Jiwoong paid for their meals and listened intently to every answer Matthew gave him to every question he asked, and then, in the still-warm summer night outside of the restaurant, held both of Matthew’s hands and asked if he could kiss him.

Matthew had stopped himself halfway through the automatic yes that wanted to come out. “I kind of have a boyfriend. It’s not exclusive, but… just so you know,” he’d said, and then, “Also I’m trans, and that being a dealbreaker for you would be even more of a dealbreaker for me, so—” But Jiwoong had just brushed a piece of hair off of Matthew’s forehead and said, “No dealbreakers there. Your boyfriend doesn’t know what he’s missing, though,” before he brushed their noses together and waited for Matthew to bridge the final gap.

The quick bus ride to Jiwoong’s apartment may have been Matthew being the easy one, but there had been something thrilling about subtly sliding his hand over top of Jiwoong’s on the grab handle and watching the tips of his ears turn red at the contact. Now, naked in his double bed, no awkwardness has settled in. Matthew’s talked and Jiwoong’s listened, carding a hand through his hair, tracing fingers down his spine, occasionally chiming in with a quip or a kiss or both.

“It’s good that they’re trying, at least.” Jiwoong’s palm cups Matthew’s chin, the pad of his thumb pressed into the dip of it. He laughs when Matthew bites at the tip, leaving a pair of teeth marks in the calloused skin. It’s only a brief distraction before Jiwoong’s eyes fall—there had been a conversation over dinner, hushed from the other patrons, that gave the distinct impression that Jiwoong did not have the same familial support when he came out as gay that Matthew did with the whole transgender-bisexual revelation. “But you also deserve better than that.”

“Yeah. It’s annoying, but baby steps.” Matthew offers another kiss, and Jiwoong lets it linger. It tastes like the odd combination of coffee and broth and strawberry lube, which shouldn’t work and doesn’t, but the feeling it leaves is sweet enough to chase regardless. “You do too,” he says in the spaces between presses of their lips. “Just by the way.”

“Yeah, well. Guess that’s what I have friends for.” The moment ends when, this time, Jiwoong is the first to yawn, stretching with one arm and covering his mouth with the opposite hand, as if Matthew hadn’t just kissed him with that weird dinner-sex breath. When he’s done, he brushes his hands through Matthew’s hair again, smiling softly when Matthew keens into the touch. “What time do you need to be back at the hotel?”

Glancing at the alarm clock on the bedside table, Matthew groans. His parents left half an hour before he did, saying they were having dinner and drinks with old friends and that he and Yaebin could do what they wanted for dinner—though he’s sure they didn’t mean for Matthew to sneak out with the bellhop and Yaebin to fish out her laptop to video call with her boyfriend over cup ramyeon. “It’s eleven, so within the hour. Noona said she’d cover for me if our parents got back before I did, but…”

“But that gives her reason to lord it over your head for the rest of your lives?” Jiwoong chuckles. “I, too, used to scheme with my older brother.”

He says it with an air of wistfulness that tugs at the center of Matthew’s chest, a feeling he doesn’t know quite what to do with. With Taerae, the deadline on their version of casual is far enough away that Matthew’s spent the last semester convincing himself he can worm his way into his heart, make a permanent home there, make him want to stay. But he’s only in Seoul for two weeks, and this thing—if it even is a thing—with Jiwoong is and has to be as casual as casual can get.

So Matthew only holds Jiwoong’s face for a moment of silent I know and I’m sorry sort of eye contact before swinging out from underneath the covers. He uses the bathroom and redresses in the mirror above the sink, checking for any obvious signs of his whereabouts—but Jiwoong, the perfect gentleman, left no marks and, when he reemerges into the studio, says he’s called him a cab.

“It’s not a very long walk back,” Matthew protests at the door, but Jiwoong nudges him against it one last time, capturing his mouth.

“Yeah, but you’re precious cargo,” he mumbles against Matthew’s lips.

In the back seat of the cab, Matthew lets Yaebin know he’s on the way and tries not to think about how, if he had the chance to, he could really like Jiwoong.

“I’d say that’s the most convoluted message I’ve ever seen, but then I’d be suddenly afraid that you’d tell me you sent something even worse to Kim Jiwoong.”

Yujin rips his phone back from Gunwook’s fingers with a half-hearted glare. “I’d like to think it’s dripping with teenage sincerity and he’ll get it right away.”

“It’s dripping with something, alright.”

“Gross.”

“I meant grammatical errors.”

“They make it more sincere,” Yujin huffs. “I only sent Kim Jiwoong an opening line because he’s not famous and is more likely to actually read and respond, so.”

He flashes the screen again, a Facebook Messenger window open with nothing in the sent section but, hi, sorry to message from a brand new profile but literally who uses facebook anymore??? anyway, do you or did you ever know a seok matthew?

Gunwook stares over his glasses at him for a long moment before sighing. “I think we’re back at square one now, Yujinie. Or twelve steps before square one.”

With a groan, Yujin throws himself backwards, nearly keeling off the couch entirely, which is probably what he deserves for all of this. If he’d have just asked, point-blank, maybe his dad would have just told him. Now he’s two options deep in a three-person search for the other half of his DNA and it feels too far gone to stop now.

He should. He really should. Option three is a shot in the dark—how is he supposed to get a hold of a random violinist who played at a dime-a-dozen wedding hall nearly two decades ago and may or may not have even been involved with his dad?—and is just as good a reason as any to quit before he makes everything weirder than it already is.

Yujin mulls it over for a long second, his silence only punctuated by the sounds of Gunwook scrolling and typing. Eventually, he finds the words: “Hyung, do you think we should—”

“Got him!”

Mouth still open around the quit while we’re ahead that he’d been intending, Yujin freezes up. Gunwook’s got a Weibo profile pulled up, and Yujin barely understands even the Chinese he’s learned in school and cannot accurately guess the age of anyone much older than himself, but the man in the profile photo certainly looks his dad’s age and is holding, of all things, a violin.

“And what? Every violinist is in the potential dad pool now?” Yujin tries for, because he’d been that close—that close—to giving up a minute ago, and he’d like to think he still holds some conviction.

“I was looking for him at the same time as I looked for the last guy, I just got lucky with the bellhop search first. But in the meantime, I found your Aunt Soomin’s old Facebook posts from the wedding day. She tagged the string quartet they’d hired, and lo and behold, their sixth post down: Please join us in congratulating our former violinist Zhang Hao on his recent appointment as concertmaster of the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra. Naver search, Zhang Hao Xiamen Philharmonic, and there’s the top result.”

“But that doesn’t mean—”

“Look at him.”

Zhang Hao, in many ways, looks like a mirror into Yujin’s future. The same strong nose, with the same mole on the side of the bridge. A lower lip that juts out, the upper one curling inward with his smile. Yujin has his dad’s smile—his dad’s smile, Matthew’s smile—but he could have that from this man, too, which feels like a betrayal.

One roadblock and suddenly he realizes how this looks—how this is. He didn’t even talk to his dad, didn’t ask, Hey, do you know my other dad still? Can we invite him to my graduation?

“Resemblance doesn’t mean everything,” Yujin tries for, burying the ache in his chest at the sight of Zhang Hao. “People say I look like Uncle Hanbin all the time, doesn’t mean he’s my dad.”

He pointedly ignores Gunwook’s murmur of spiritual DILF under his breath, bristling when Gunwook studies Zhang Hao’s face over his shoulder again.

“I mean, sure, but this guy’s like… dead ringer, Yujinie.”

Zhang Hao and his violin stare at the two of them. Yujin groans. “Hyung, sometimes I wish you were bad at the questionable things I ask you to do.”

July 2, 2010

Because of course he does, Taerae messages the night of the wedding.

Right as Matthew’s finally figured out this damned Windsor knot, right as he’s tamed his hair—cut shorter than usual after an unfortunate dorm bathroom bleach job fried the ends and now a nightmare of a learning curve—into submission, and right as Yaebin’s banging on the bathroom door, demanding, “If you don’t get out of there soon, it’s gonna be your bed that I pee on,” his phone nearly vibrates itself into the sink that he’d had it balancing precariously on the edge of. He dives for it before it can fall into the puddled remnants of water from washing his face and doesn’t look at the message until he’s left the bathroom with a sarcastic bow and a, “Your throne awaits, your highness,” to Yaebin’s sneer.

Only when he’s sat on the edge of his hotel bed, feet slipped into his dress shoes but not yet tied, does he tap the notification: two messages and a photo. Matthew steels himself for it.

A Matthew with his head on straight probably wouldn’t bend for it. Would remind himself that just this morning, he’d stolen a kiss behind the hood of the continental breakfast bar from a handsome bellhop who’s replied to all his messages from the last week in a timely and affectionate manner. Would say dude what the hell we haven’t spoken in a week and now you’re sending me shirtless bed selfies at midnight.

But he’s nineteen and lovesick, so he does none of that. He ties his shoes, flops backward on the unmade bed, and sends, ㅠㅠ so cute. sleep well, i miss you <3. Then he saves the picture and finds it in his camera roll, just to stare at it. Zooms in on the swell of Taerae’s lips, the scattered freckles across his cheeks, the honey blonde of his hair because his subtler bleaching had been more successful than Matthew’s piss-poor attempt at platinum.

When Yaebin reemerges from the bathroom, he pretends he’d been scrolling Tumblr, diligently reblogging Adventure Time GIFs. She doesn’t say anything, and he gives one final glance to Taerae’s picture before swiping KakaoTalk closed. He’s got messages from some of his online friends in Korea asking how long he’ll be in Seoul, which have gone largely unanswered in a week of being dragged to family events and slipping out to see Jiwoong in some secluded corner where the security cameras won’t catch them making out while he’s on the clock. The ride from the hotel to the wedding hall is only a few minutes long, so he answers them in the back seat: a yes to dropping in on a dance class with his first and best internet friend, Hanbin, before he goes back home; a sad face to Keita, who goes to Konkuk University but is home in Osaka for the summer and won’t be back until next month.

The wedding venue is nondescript from the outside, tucked into a building that also houses a café and a small parking garage. An usher stands inside the entrance and shows them to a glass-walled hall with domed, stained glass ceilings that let in the last hours of sunlight from the rooftop garden, already set for the reception. White wisteria vines hang from the ceiling above a faux grass aisle, screens set up on either side of the altar displaying a slideshow of pictures of Soomin and her fiancé, Junho, from childhood until now.

It’s all very pretty. It all makes Matthew feel that much more lonely.

Sitting between Yaebin and their mother is enough motivation to not touch his phone for the ceremony, brief as it is. Matthew smiles when it’s appropriate, is serious when it isn’t, makes a show of being tuned in even when his mind is wandering—to Taerae, who will be back here in less than a year, and to Jiwoong, who can only be a two-week-long distraction. He watches the sun set on the garden through the windows while the string quartet plays on, then focuses his attention on the pretty violinist who closes his eyes to the melody of the wedding march like he’s playing a concerto and not a wedding hall that’s probably seen half a dozen ceremonies this week alone.

Soomin and Junho leave the hall, ushered off for photos and then their paebaek and then even more photos, and Matthew quietly follows his parents out to the garden for dinner. He barely knows the relatives at their table—more aunts and uncles he’s never met but his parents immediately fall into spirited chatter with—and Yaebin gets whisked off to gossip with a group of their female cousins the second she gets a few bites of janchi guksu down.

Alone, not wanting to resort to waiting for another text from a Taerae who has probably been asleep since he sent the first, Matthew takes to wandering the garden. Nondescript in the basic suit his parents rented for him, he disappears between rose bushes and potted plants, watching the sky darken and cast odd shadows from the fountain in the center of everything.

When he spots a secluded ledge to rest on, he finds he’s no longer alone.

“Oh! Sorry,” Matthew says to the violinist already seated on the edge of a brick planter brimming with white and purple flowers. The boy, who’d had his head tipped up to the sky, sits upright, locking his gaze on him. He’s got big eyes, thick brows, cherry cola hair that’s a touch less neat than it had been during the ceremony, like he’s run his hands through it a few times since.

“It—it’s okay,” says the violinist, a little unsteady. He makes a move to stand up, gripping the violin case that had been resting in his lap. “I can go.”

“No, no!” Matthew protests before the boy can get fully to his feet. He doesn’t know what compels him to keep him there: guilt for startling him, a desire not to inconvenience someone who’s still technically on work hours, deep-seated loneliness. “Don’t go just because of me. You can sit.”

The violinist sits back down with a half-bow that makes his bangs flop into his eyes. “Thank you,” he says, and repeats, “You can sit, too.”

So Matthew does, a few bricks down so there’s space to breathe between them. He glances sidelong at the violinist, who’s fiddling uneasily with the clasps of his case, and says, “I was watching you play during the ceremony. You’re really good.”

The boy’s brows shoot up beneath his bangs, and a small smile overtakes his lips. “Thank you,” he says, and then, “Sorry. My Korean isn’t perfect.”

Matthew snorts. “Neither is mine,” he says, and flips the trilingual switch in his head. “English?”

The violinist lifts a hand, his pointer finger and thumb pinched together. His voice is a little higher in English when he says, “Little bit. I have a friend from LA, but I only learned…” He trails off, switches back to Korean, “Curse words?”

Valid, Matthew thinks, because he and his friends definitely spent their time in high school French class typing whatever twisted, teenage shit popped into their heads into Google translate. He laughs, and the tips of the violinist’s large ears begin to flush pink in the garden lights.

“I’m not terrible in Korean, just not perfect,” says the violinist. “I mean, I live here, so you’d hope.”

Matthew grins at him. “Seok Matthew,” he says, extending a hand. “From Canada.”

The violinist accepts, giving a brief shake. His fingers are long, elegant—musician’s hands in a different way than Taerae’s calloused and frequently bloody fingertips.

Matthew shakes his head of the thought.

“Zhang Hao, from China,” the violinist says as he lets go of his hand, gesturing instead at the festivities beyond their secluded corner. “Are you family?”

Matthew nods, then shrugs. “The bride is my cousin, but I don’t really know anyone here but my sister and my parents. Hence why I was wandering alone.”

Zhang Hao’s eyes flick over Matthew, giving a once-over that he isn’t sure how to interpret, then pitches his voice down to say, “I don’t know anyone but the rest of the quartet, and I’m trying to avoid our cellist—sweet girl, but six months in and she still hasn’t gotten the hint that I’m very, very gay.”

An involuntary, inelegant snort comes from Matthew. He smacks a hand over his mouth as he notices Zhang Hao’s grip tense uneasily on his violin case once more.

And oh. He gets it now: the once-over, the can I trust this random kid to not be weird about me dropping the gay bomb, followed by immediate laughter. Matthew reaches a steadying hand across the gap between them, gently resting it over top of Zhang Hao’s when he doesn’t immediately pull away.

“I get it. I guess I’m kind of avoiding being paired up with random girls by the aunts and uncles that are practically strangers—I like girls, but it’s the assumption, you know? Like, I like guys, too.”

Beneath Matthew’s palm, Zhang Hao’s grip untenses.

“I play weddings here a lot,” Zhang Hao says, gaze trained on their hands resting together. “By now, the bridal suite should be cleared out if you… if you wanted to talk somewhere more private?”

He looks up at Matthew through fluttering lashes, eyes reflecting the fairy lights sparking to life around them. The reception is still loud beyond the bushes, their hiding spot less and less hidden the more solar-powered lights that flick on in the dimming night. And he’s pretty and he’s kind and, maybe most importantly, he’s here, so Matthew twines their fingers together and rises to his feet.

“Lead the way,” he says, and lets Zhang Hao pull him back through the garden.

Yujin hasn’t stopped staring at Zhang Hao’s profile picture the entire time Gunwook’s stolen his phone and drafted what he deems to be an acceptable introduction, to be thrown into Papago and then chucked into the void that is this man’s messages, answered or not.

He just can’t stop looking. Can’t stop wondering. What if Gunwook is right and the resemblance means something? What happens then, he drags this man from his beautiful, seaside home in Xiamen to a high school graduation in Seoul? He drops a bomb that may upend his entire life? So Yujin can, what, have an extra guest at graduation? Say that he’s met a man he’s been unsure of the existence of for most of his life?

“Hyung.” Yujin reaches a blind hand out to his side, wrapping it around Gunwook’s wrist. To his credit, Gunwook stops typing immediately. The pride and determination that had been painted on his face after the Kim Jiwoong discovery has melted into something else, a quieter emotion that has his eyebrows lower and his mouth set in a pout. Yujin gives his wrist a squeeze before letting go, and Gunwook drops the phone to the coffee table.

“We’re having the same thought?”

Yujin nods. There’s a burning behind his eyes that he doesn’t want to acknowledge—but god, there’s a sticker of his second year middle school yearbook photo stuck to the lid of his dad’s laptop and a framed shot of seven-year-old Yujin clinging to Hanbin’s back at Lotte World on the wall and an empty glass sits on a coaster he made in kindergarten that’s lived on the coffee table of every home they’ve lived in since, and Yujin sniffles without thought when he looks down at his lap. “This was such a bad idea. All I’m going to do with this is break Dad’s heart.”

Ever the brains and heart of their friendship, Gunwook immediately cranes forward to wrap both arms around Yujin’s shoulders and murmur, “It’s okay. I’ll delete the Zhang Hao draft right now. The chances that Taerae-ssi even opens the message are low, we can delete the Facebook account, and we were already going to wipe the browser history.”

Unaffected by the consolation, Yujin can’t find it in him to stop now that he’s started. “I should’ve just asked him. Dad’s never lied to me about anything, I don’t think he’d start now.”

“Then you ask him when he gets home,” Gunwook says. “If he wants to know why you’re suddenly curious, then you tell him. If he doesn’t, then he never has to know that we found the guys first.”

A miserable hiccup, and Yujin finally leans his head on his best friend’s shoulder. “He does, though. I can’t just keep this from him now.”

“Okay.” Gunwook’s hug tightens to a bruising grip. “Do you want me to stay with you to talk to him?”

Yujin shakes his head. As much as he’d like the emotional support, this is his cross to bear alone. “Just me and him. I won’t tell him you were part of it.”

“You know I don’t care if you do. We’re partners in crime, remember, Seok Yujin?” Gunwook unwraps him, pulling back and offering a reassuring smile. If Yujin’s eyes are glassy when he meets them, he doesn’t mention it, just holds two knuckles up and mimes a knock in the still air between them as he rises to his feet again. “If you need me, I’m on the other side of the wall.”

“I know.” Yujin bumps their knuckles together, and for all they tease each other, he’s glad that it was Park Gunwook who first kicked a soccer ball at his feet and said, Yah, you’re the new kid at Apgujeong Middle School, aren’t you? to a twelve-year-old Yujin sitting alone on the swings outside of their building. “Thank you, hy—”

The front door beeps with the sound of a code being input, and Yujin freezes in front of the computer screen, still open to a Weibo profile that he should not be privy to. His dad usually messages on his way home, an ETA and an emoji and—

He had, but Gunwook had been busy drafting a message to Zhang Hao and probably mindlessly swiped it away. Fifteen minutes ago, a flexed arm emoji and a brief, heading home now. takeout thoughts?

Yujin’s dad opens the apartment door, flushed from a gym session and the cold air, completely oblivious to the weight of guilt on his son’s shoulders that’s just grown tenfold.

“Oh, Gunwook-ah, I wasn’t expecting you!” His dad’s smile grows as he toes off his sneakers in the doorway. “Are you staying for dinner? I asked Yujinie about takeout but I haven’t heard back so—”

“I have—” Gunwook, already standing, goes ramrod, military straight. He glances down at Yujin, who shrugs, too absorbed in steeling himself for the conversation to come to help him come up with a believable excuse to leave. “Uh, course registration deadlines! Forgot about them until right now, actually. But thanks, abeonim!”

He rushes to grab his backpack and barely steps into his shoes before he’s shooting Yujin a look from the open door, soft and comforting, holding his two fingers up to knock in the air again. The knot in Yujin’s chest still pulls tight, but the gesture at least soothes something until he’s out the door.

“Weird kid,” Yujin’s dad says cheerfully, watching Gunwook go. “So, dinner? I wasn’t expecting to be at the gym this late, but Hanbin-hyung joined me and—are you doing homework during break?”

Yujin freezes, feeling stuck to the spot. True, he usually only uses his dad’s laptop for homework because he doesn’t have a hard drive full of gaming files that make it lag, but school’s out until graduation, and even if it weren’t, no homework he’d be assigned would ever involve looking up the Weibo profile of the concertmaster of the Xiamen Philharmonic who he is, in many ways, the spitting image of.

Suddenly, it’s like Yujin can’t sit for any longer. He shoots to his feet, not even bothering to close the laptop lid when it remains the link to what he’s done and what he needs to confess to.

“I’m sorry,” Yujin says. He curls his palms into the starched sleeves of his uniform shirt, trembling already. His dad, only halfway out of his coat, pauses mid-movement.

“Peach?” he calls, the nickname he gave Yujin when he was a newborn because, “your little head just looked like a peach, Yujinie, I don’t know how else to describe it.” Him alone, not any of the ghosts haunting his search history. “What happened?”

“I did something I shouldn’t have and it was fucked up and I’m so sorry, I’m so—”

“Yujinie.” His dad is crossing the apartment in sure strides before Yujin can even finish his sentence. He puts a hand on either of his shoulders, having to reach up because Yujin outgrew him in his second year of middle school. “I promise there’s nothing you could do to make me love you less. You know that, right?”

“I know,” because Yujin does know, even if he thinks he’d love himself a little less for this if he were his father.

A hand cups Yujin’s cheek, his dad’s smile tentative but encouraging nonetheless. “So you can tell me, okay?”

So Yujin tells him.

Matthew’s heart currently lives deep, deep in the pit of his stomach—cavernous, dark, all-consuming, and entirely his own fault.

“I’m so sorry,” Yujin says for what must be the fifteenth time in as many minutes. He hasn’t sat down, knees locked and posture rigid, even when Matthew flopped onto the couch, head in his hands, trying to process everything.

Nineteen years and some change ago, palm pressed to his still-flat stomach with the kind of reckless determination only afforded to a nineteen-year-old desperate for an outlet for the love inside of him that had nowhere else to go, Matthew decided he could do it all on his own. He didn’t expect anyone to understand—he himself didn’t even fully understand it, and to this day can only call it his Yujin Sense—but he wanted that baby and he didn’t want that baby to have to deal with the mess its father had made in the process.

He should have seen it coming that in nineteen years, that baby would be dealing with the mess anyway.

“Yujinie,” Matthew says. He lifts his head, reaching for one of Yujin’s balled fists. Something inside of him untwists when Yujin easily lets their fingers interlock. “Come here.”

Yujin moves like he first needs to process that he can. First, his other hand unclasps. Then, his knees bend, and no sooner does the couch cushion to Matthew’s side dip than he’s got a shoulder full of his son’s hair.

Matthew chooses his words carefully, afraid to say the wrong thing and scare Yujin off again. He’s never been good at this—confrontation, on the giving or receiving end. Yujin used to joke that he didn’t know how to ground him; Matthew insisted from experience that it’s because grounding never did anything but make you really good at not getting caught the next time.

But this is different. This is Yujin trying to atone for something that he shouldn’t have had to do in the first place, because Matthew should have been the one to tell him.

“Every time I think I’ve figured out how smart you are, you surprise me,” he decides on.

Yujin’s shoulders stiffen. He doesn’t let go of Matthew’s hand, but he doesn’t ease up, either. Matthew wishes he had the magic touch like he did back when Yujin was just a little thing, to tickle his back and say something silly to make him laugh again. He hates to see his little boy tense like this almost as much as he hates to see him cry. Maybe more—at least the crying is cathartic.

“Was I—” Yujin starts, cutting himself off before restarting. “Does that mean I was right? Because even if I was right, I was wrong to—”

“Peach,” Matthew says, and maybe this is the magic button, because at the sound of the nickname, Yujin’s shoulders slump and his head buries itself further onto Matthew’s shoulder, hair tickling at his jaw. “Your methods were… maybe a little sneaky, but it’s me who should be apologizing.”

Yujin squeezes his hand. He doesn’t lift his head, but slowly, he eases more and more, drawing his knees up to his chest until Matthew guides his senselessly long legs over his own—it’s been years since Yujin last needed the comfort of curling into his dad’s lap, but eight or eighteen, this is his one and only baby.

“I never told you who your other dad was because I never knew.”

The admission sits in the air for a moment, long enough that the fear of disappointing his son creeps up Matthew’s spine—but Yujin doesn’t make any attempt to move away from him, doesn’t even lift his head to look him in the eye, to judge him for the past that gave them each other. All he does is hum under his breath and say, quiet enough that Matthew might not have even heard it had his son’s head not been buried in the crook of his neck, “You didn’t?”

“I don’t,” Matthew confirms. The secrets of the last nineteen years feel heavy on his tongue, but it’s about time they come out. “There was just… so much going on when I found out about you. And I made a lot of dumb excuses not to find out after that.”

Nineteen and a half years ago, Matthew had come home from Seoul feeling more rattled than when he’d left. The discomfort crawled up his spine at all hours, made him temperamental, made him queasy. Convinced it was the physical effects of unrequited love, he’d met Taerae at a café on campus and broken it off. Told him it wasn’t fair for either of them to go on like they were, one in love and the other going home after the semester’s end and not looking for attachment. They parted amicably, but Matthew had no intention of reaching out again. He’d blocked Taerae’s number, told himself it was to guard his own heart.

A week later, nausea still roiling in his stomach, he’d convinced himself it was food poisoning.

Three days after that, with his cheek pressed to the toilet seat, Yaebin slid a bottle of mouthwash and a pregnancy test through the cracked bathroom door.

Two more days, the two of them lying side-by-side on the trampoline in the backyard, she’d asked, “Are you going to tell Taerae?”

Matthew had opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“I don’t know if it’s his,” he’d said. And even if it was, he couldn’t try and tie him down when Seoul and school and stardom were surely in Taerae’s future, not a child back in Canada when he’d only just turned nineteen.

Matthew could see Yaebin turn her head towards him out of the corner of his eye. “The hot bellhop?”

He’d swallowed the bile down, unsure if it was the morning sickness or the anxiety. “...Is definitely an option.”

But he couldn’t tell Jiwoong either. His family had already cut him off when he’d come out, and a baby with a summer fling—a man—out of wedlock would have just made everything worse for him.

So Matthew had kept it to himself. For nineteen years, he’s kept the curiosity at bay by force, because he convinced himself that it didn’t matter who the baby shared DNA with, just that he was here now and Matthew was going to be dad enough for two.

But he can’t help but see the possibilities of them when he looks at his son: sees Taerae in his dimpled smirk and his mischievous side, sees Jiwoong in his kindness and his bright eyes, sees—

“Then why did you keep me?”

Something shatters in Matthew’s chest. They’ve never talked about this—never talked about any of it, but certainly not this. Yujin was always so young, Matthew never wanted him to doubt a thing. But now he’s practically an adult as much as he’s Matthew’s eternal baby, grown up and mature and deserving to know whatever he wants about himself.

He smooths down the mussed hair at the back of Yujin’s head and takes a deep breath in.

“Would it have been easier, not going through my second year of university trying to hide a belly that would basically out me to anyone who didn’t already know I was trans, not having to beg my professors to let me have my assignments in advance so I wouldn’t fall behind when I gave birth, only to have to take academic leave anyway? Sure. Your aunt would have taken me to the clinic, never told our parents, and that would’ve been it.”

This far removed, the Matthew of back then feels like a distant cry of a memory. Half his life ago, trembling in Yaebin’s arms on the floor of the bathroom that separated their childhood bedrooms with that little plastic plus sign on the floor beside them. How she’d pet his hair and kissed his temple and seemed much more than four years older than him as she assured him, baby brother, I will do whatever you need me to do for you, okay? until his sobs died down. And then she’d smacked him on the back of the head and said, How many times did the doctor tell you that T isn’t birth control? I swear to god, Matt, you are such a guy, and he’d laughed so hard, he burst into tears again.

“I made the appointment and everything, but there was this awful heat wave that summer. The clinic called the morning of to let me know that they were having rolling blackouts and would have to reschedule when it would be safer to go through with the procedure. I got so scared, because I didn’t know another day that Yaebin-noona could take me without our parents finding out, and then I got even more scared because I didn’t know what I wanted anymore.” He scratches a hand over Yujin’s spine, finding him rigid in his hold again, the breathing in his ear unsteady. Matthew tips the side of his head against the top of Yujin’s, another point of contact that he hopes conveys I’m here and you’re here and it’s all okay now. “The longer I sat with it, the more I thought that I could do it. I was young, but I had support. Your Halmeoni and Harabeoji… I was scared of what they’d think, but when I came clean, they ended up saying the same as your Aunt Yaebin did—it was my choice. And, maybe shortsightedly, I wanted to be a dad. I wanted you.”

Yujin sniffles and clears his throat in the kind of quick succession that always means that he’s tearing up but doesn’t want anyone to know. “You chose to become a teen dad because of a gut feeling?”

“What can I say? You passed the vibe check in utero.” A flick to the back of Yujin’s head, a sweet, wet laugh tumbling out of his mouth that soothes the ache in Matthew’s chest. Matthew tightens his grip around his entire world. “And I turned twenty two months after, thank you very much.”

“You were so dumb.”

“I was.”

Another sniffle, but the voice that comes out sounds like it’s smiling. “You know, if you rescheduled the appointment, I wouldn’t have had to take the CSAT.”

“If I rescheduled the appointment, you wouldn’t have a collection of signed Taemin albums.” Matthew kisses the top of Yujin’s head, where he used to smell like baby powder and now just smells like sweaty teen boy, and Matthew loves his kid so much that it’s just as sweet. “It’s weird to think that I was barely older than you are now when I found out about you. I still think of you as a baby—you still are a baby to me.”

Yujin curls his fist into Matthew’s shirt over his waist—a habit ever since he was a baby, always cradled against Dad’s chest with a tiny handful like he was afraid that if he let go, he’d cease to exist.

Matthew expects the same protest he always gets when he babies Yujin. He does not expect the low murmur, so faint he might have mistaken it for a sigh if he didn’t feel the subtle movement of Yujin’s jaw against shoulder, “I love you.”

Tears spring to Matthew’s eyes for the first time since Yujin sat him down. Not for the past, for the sudden reintroduction of old lovers back into his life, for his son seeking them out—but tears because after it all, he still gets this. Because that rash decision in his youth paid off in the best person he’s ever known.

“I love you so much, and I’m sorry I never told you. From now on, anything you want to know, you can ask me, okay?” He pauses until he feels the slight nod in the crook of his neck, Yujin’s hand gripping tighter in his shirt.

They breathe in tandem for a long while, Yujin’s hitched inhales evening out into something calmer—enough for everything to sink in, at least on Matthew’s end. He huffs a laugh, almost unintentional, but Yujin looks up with curiosity in his big eyes anyway.

“What?”

A bored nineteen-year-old at a wedding reappears in Matthew’s mind for the first time in years, his fingers linked with a pretty violinist’s. “Just… you mostly got everyone right.”

Yujin’s lower lip juts out into a pout. “Mostly?”

Matthew nods. “It’s probably a good thing you never sent the message to Zhang Hao, because he isn’t one of the three options.”

The pout deepens. “But Auntie Yaebin said—”

“I left the wedding with him, but—god, I can’t believe I’m saying this to my teenager—all we did was steal a bottle of champagne and make out until he had to get back to work. No funny business.”

He still holds fond memories of Zhang Hao, a bright light in a dull evening, but they’ve been long buried deep beneath everything else from those two weeks: tipsy laughter, knees slotted together on a bridal suite couch, kisses that tasted like champagne and wedding cake. Nothing more.

“Oh,” says Yujin. His brows knit together, confusion and curiosity. The moment it clicks is obvious—his wide eyes grow even wider, jaw popping open. “Wait, but you still said three options.”

Matthew lets out a breath. This is the one that might get a mixed reaction.

“Yeah,” he says. “I did.”

March 31, 2011

Matthew isn’t sure when it will stop being a novel thing that the concept of a person he’s spoken to through his stretched skin for the past eight months is here, living and breathing and hiccuping in his sleep. Inside of Matthew’s stomach, he’d felt massive; peacefully resting in his cradle next to the bed, the baby—his son—Yujin—seems so tiny. His whole hand barely grasps the tip of Matthew’s thumb, his head barely making a dip in the mattress, barely flattening the downy-soft peach fuzz of his hair.

Matthew’s mother keeps softly tsking at him, telling him to get sleep while Yujin does, but the compulsion to just stare at this little kid that grew in his body is too strong for him to not sacrifice a nap here and there. He’s sore and he’s exhausted and he’s already getting tired of the miyeokguk his parents insist he keeps eating with every meal, but there’s an antsiness, too, that keeps him from sleeping too much. A hypervigilance for his son, a thrumming beneath his skin from days of being confined to his bed to heal.

In another life, he’d be elbows-deep in final projects, hunched over his laptop, pounding out words, rather than watching his baby sleep—he takes a moment to send a thought to that alternate universe version of himself at the same time he traces a finger across Yujin’s little belly, rising and falling with each breath, no regrets. School will be there when he’s rested and healthy enough to go back; for now, he has a thousand firsts to bear witness to.

Sleep has nearly decided to take over when there’s a knock on the door, two soft raps like whoever’s behind it knows to tread carefully while Yujin naps. Just shy of two weeks old, and Matthew thanks whatever deity might be listening on the daily that his son is a good sleeper, but he still keeps a careful eye on him as he climbs off of the bed to answer the knocks.

The first thing Matthew sees is an array of flowers, blues and yellows and whites wrapped in matching paper and ribbon. The second thing he sees, cheeks ruddy and eyes sparkling, is Sung Hanbin.

“Hyung?” Matthew can barely stop himself from pitching his voice up, only catching the volume of it when he remembers the newborn behind him.

“Hi,” says Hanbin, already knowingly quiet, but the smile on his face is bright enough to make up for the lack of volume. The same smile he’d lit up with when Matthew knocked on the frame of a dance practice room door last summer and introduced himself in person, rather than as Tumblr user matttwo (an attempt on a Mewtwo pun that no one but Hanbin ever understood) for the first time. “I wanted to visit you in the hospital, but I had school, and after that, I figured you were probably exhausted and overwhelmed and—”

Matthew throws his arms around him, startling a cute squeak of a yelp from Hanbin. He almost drops the bouquet, but Matthew feels him catch it behind his back as he melts into the embrace.

“Hyung,” Matthew says again, muffled into Hanbin’s hoodie. Hanbin smells like airplane and a cloud of soft perfume, like he’d come straight here from the airport—probably did, the circles beneath his eyes matching the ones Matthew had from his own ten hour flight nine months and a whole baby ago. “You’re—I—you’re here.”

Not a single beat passes. “Of course I am,” Hanbin murmurs into Matthew’s hair, voice honey sweet against the shell of his ear. “I wouldn’t miss this.”

Matthew pulls back, holds him at arm’s length, and really takes him in: the sleepy eyes, the mussed hair, cheeks flushed and splotchy from the lingering chill of the first days of spring. Only the second time he’s seen Hanbin in person, and he wants to commit to memory the look of a boy who’s crossed the world for him.

“How did you even know where I lived?” Matthew asks, voice colored with disbelief and wonder. In the eleven days since he brought Yujin into the world, he hasn’t seen much of anyone but his parents and Yaebin and the nosy neighbors who bring food but keep calling his son Eugene in the most Canadian accents possible—as it turns out, leaving school to have a baby at nineteen does not invite much socialization from your fellow classmates. Hanbin and Keita and the other internet friends who like his inane posts about sleep deprivation and diapers and how Yujin stuck his tongue out at him so he must have the smartest baby of all time have been his one bastion of non-family human contact; Hanbin in the flesh almost feels like a fever dream, a trick of a mind still adjusting to a newborn’s sleep schedule.

“I messaged your sister and asked if a surprise would be too much too soon. She practically yelled at me for not having come sooner.” Hanbin bites his lower lip, bashful, and his eyes flick up, scanning the room until they land on the little white crib next to the bed. “Can I… see him?”

“Of course,” Matthew says, as if the thought doesn’t immediately make his chest ache. He takes the bouquet, nodding towards the crib.

Matthew has had nine months of wondering what his son would look like, if he’d look at him and just know who the other father was. Eleven days in, Yujin mostly just looks squishy and eczema-speckled and cute in a weird, alien sort of way, but Matthew can’t help but hone in on the little things: are those Taerae’s dimples that come out when Yujin suckles from his bottle at meal time? Jiwoong’s eyes that blink blearily at him during his brief moments of wakefulness each day? The peaks of Hanbin’s defined Cupid’s bow when he smacks his lips together to let Dad know he’s hungry?

Hanbin pads socked feet across the carpet, approaching Yujin as if he’s afraid to startle him—a wild animal rather than a sleeping infant. It’s cute, and Matthew watches from the doorway, clutching the flowers to his chest as if they could quell the palpitations of his heart.

Nothing could prepare him, though, for the way Hanbin’s eyes go liquid the moment they fall on Yujin. The softening of his expression, the tiny drop of his jaw, the near-immediate tears that cling to his long lashes.

“Oh,” says Hanbin, and Matthew buries his face in the mass of daffodils and daisies and forget-me-nots to hide that his eyes are welling up, too. “Seokmae, he’s—”

Before him, Yujin makes a tiny, grunting sigh of a noise. Hanbin’s brows shoot up beneath his bangs, a tear falling loose from its perch on the curl of his eyelashes. He looks up at Matthew, the anxious surprise on his face not covering up the wonder at all.

“I’m sorry,” Hanbin says, still a whisper, hands hovering in the air like he’s unsure if he’s allowed to reach out or not. “I didn’t mean to wake him.”

With a final, hidden sniffle masked with a laugh, Matthew places the flowers down on his dresser and steps to Hanbin’s side. Yujin stares forward with unfocused eyes, tiny fists grasping the air at his sides, quiet. Matthew knows from countless Google deep dives that he’s too young to see much further than his face, so slowly, carefully, he reaches down to pick his son up.

“Don’t worry about it. His nap was bound to end soon anyway,” Matthew says, hushed. Cradled in his arms, he angles Yujin so his big eyes can hone in on Hanbin’s face. The baby stares impassively, his hilariously serious newborn gaze that’s such a contrast to the glimmering light in Hanbin’s misty eyes. “Say hi, Hanbin, I’m Yujinie and I smell like pee so bad right now.”

Yujin says no such thing, but Hanbin beams like he had anyway, crouching so he’s eye level with him.

“Hi, sweet Yujinie, your appa didn’t tell me you were the most beautiful baby in the world! Even if you smell like pee.”

“I actually think I did.” Matthew grins when Hanbin meets his gaze—no point in hiding that they’ve both shed a few tears. “I need to change his diaper, but if you wanted to hold him after, while I make him a bottle…”

“You know I do.”

Rising back to his full height, a hand on the small of Matthew’s back that sends a chill up his spine that he wonders if Yujin can feel secondhand, Hanbin keeps on staring, alternating between Yujin and Matthew himself.

Even when they’d first met, stealing glances through the dance practice room mirror, there’s always been something about the way Hanbin looks at him that makes Matthew’s stomach clench. Butterflies, if he was willing to call them that—maybe that’s why, on his last day in Seoul, after an hour of dancing together and even longer of sitting in the back corner of a café talking about everything and nothing, Matthew had kissed Hanbin in a photo booth on the way to the station that was supposed to take him back to the hotel and instead let Hanbin lead him to his tiny studio apartment.

Present day Hanbin lounges across the foot of the bed while Matthew lays little Yujin on the changing mat beside him, yapping the whole time because those same Google deep-dives told him to talk and sing and play as much as he could in the short time Yujin’s awake each day. So much of what he knows about parenting that hasn’t come directly from his own mother and father has sprouted from search windows opened over chats with friends scattered across the globe—it’s almost fitting, then, that when he falters on a half-remembered Korean nursery rhyme, it’s Hanbin who reaches for one of Yujin’s wiggling palms and finishes the line for him. He’d offered to be the one to change the diaper, to give Matthew another few moments of rest, and had graciously accepted Matthew’s gentle, anxious-new-dad refusal and counter-offer of distracting Yujin in case he got fussy in the process.

Hanbin would be such a good dad, which is what makes the butterflies in Matthew’s stomach feel like they’re at war. Gentle and attentive, already a doting brother to his own little sister. Matthew can’t tell if it makes him feel worse that Taerae and Jiwoong don’t know that Yujin exists, or that Hanbin does and loves him as immediately as he seems to, even when he doesn’t know if he’s his.

With Yujin all changed and remarkably unbothered but opening and closing his little mouth, hungry, Matthew settles him carefully into Hanbin’s open arms. He waits for the distress—his son had not been a fan of the unfamiliar nurses in the hospital, only somewhat tolerated Yaebin until he got used to her—but it doesn’t come. Yujin blinks curiously at what must be a blurry, half-formed person in his new eyes, but he doesn’t fuss at Hanbin’s presence. Not for the slow trip down the stairs, nor when Hanbin curls the two of them up on the edge of the couch closest to the mouth of the open kitchen.

(Matthew had bit his tongue on the fact that he usually lets meal time double as skin-to-skin contact time, unsure he’d be able to handle the sight of Yujin cradled to Hanbin’s bare chest, the tattoo beneath his collarbones that Matthew had pressed his lips to so many times before they’d last parted.)

Matthew passes Hanbin a prepared bottle, which he takes no time to get Yujin to start drinking from. Settling down beside them, Matthew raises a brow, impressed.

“What the hell, dude, I was so nervous feeding him the first time, and you’re just a natural at it?”

Hanbin chuckles, a bashful flush rising to his cheeks. “I have a lot of baby cousins and a lot of aunts and uncles who like to pawn them off on the eldest kid at any family gathering.”

“The irony that I was always the cousin that no one ever handed the baby to, and now I’ve been holding one nonstop for a week and a half.” Matthew catches one of Yujin’s wriggling feet as he greedily takes down his bottle. He’d been such a kicker before he was born, it’s unsurprising that the behavior’s continued—if Matthew doesn’t have a future soccer star on his hands, he’d be shocked. He pinches Yujin’s tiny toes between his fingers, pitching his voice up, “Not that I’m complaining, my little peach.”

Hanbin looks at him, eyebrows furrowed, lips curving into a frown. “Has it just been you this whole time?”

Matthew shrugs. “I mean, living with my parents again has been a godsend as much as it used to be stifling. And a couple of my university friends visited in the hospital, but, like… no one since, really. Which I get, finals are coming up and—”

“Still,” Hanbin cuts him off, and it’s not forceful, but he does seem a little taken aback by the abruptness of his own words. “I just… It sucks, I guess. If they’re your friends, shouldn’t they come to see you? I mean, I should’ve come sooner—”

“Don’t listen to noona, she was probably just fucking with you. You literally flew across the world, hyung. I don’t know another person who would do that for me.”

Except that he might, actually. The worst of the guilt has come in the form of all of the what ifs—because, sure, Taerae wasn’t looking for love, but he was responsible, kind. Maybe he wouldn’t have stayed in Canada past the semester, but no way would he have abandoned Matthew the way that Matthew ghosted him, avoided him, disappeared from campus the moment he could no longer pass the growing belly beneath his baggy clothes off as the freshman fifteen hitting a year too late. And Jiwoong hadn’t seemed all that interested in reconnecting with the family that shunned him, but Matthew was the one who was denying him a second chance at a family of his own.

Matthew loves that Hanbin is here as much as he hates that the only reason he told him about the baby was because he needed an internet outlet to vent all of his problems, and Hanbin was his very favorite person on said outlet.

(At thirty-eight, he’ll see the flaws in his youthful, hormonal judgment—at nineteen-nearly-twenty, even though it aches, it somehow makes sense to him.)

“Anyone who wouldn’t doesn’t deserve you.”

Hanbin’s voice is quiet, hardly above a murmur, as if he’s unsure if he wants Matthew to hear or not—but he does, and it sits in the air for a long while. Silence falls between them, broken only by the suckling and cooing and grunting sounds coming from the contented baby nestled in Hanbin’s arms.

Matthew’s head falls to Hanbin’s shoulder, exhausted, and Hanbin, equally so from jetlag, lets his rest gently atop Matthew’s in return. Together, they watch Matthew’s son—potentially their son, a thought Matthew won’t let himself think about for longer than it takes to pass the forefront of his mind—finish his bottle and fall peacefully back asleep in Hanbin’s careful hold.

Soft enough not to wake Yujin, after long enough that they’re sure he’s really sleeping, Hanbin asks, “Do you want to know?”

Matthew doesn’t have to ask for clarification—the other half of Yujin’s paternity has been a constant thought in the back of his mind, a near-daily post on his Tumblr that’s become less and less a place to look at edits of his favorite shows and more and more where he goes to word vomit about his life. Hanbin’s been privy to it the whole time, the reasons why Matthew’s never told Taerae or Jiwoong, and if he disagrees with Matthew’s motives, he’s never let on that he does.

“I don’t know,” Matthew says. What he bites back is, I think it would be easier if it were you, but it’s too honest, too unfair when there’s a distinct possibility that he isn’t. He forces a laugh that’s little more than a sharp exhale. “I don’t know if I should be making decisions like that when I’m out of my fucking mind with shifting hormones, you know?”

Hanbin’s shoulder stiffens beneath his cheek. “No, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Hyung, it’s okay.” Without looking, Matthew takes hold of Hanbin’s elbow, fingers fisted in the soft cream cotton of his hoodie sleeve. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

“You know I’d cross the world a hundred times to be.”

“And you know you’re allowed to be in his life as much as you want to. Even if he’s not…”

Trailing off, Matthew can feel the soft touch of lips to the side of his head, less of a kiss and more of a reminder. A comfort. A tether to his new reality.

“I know,” Hanbin whispers, and there are so many unsaid promises in those two words.

Seok Yujin isn’t quite sure if he knows anything anymore.

He’s still eighteen going on nineteen. He’s still about to graduate high school. He still doesn’t know who his other father is, though now his dad has laid out all of the possibilities for him, and therein lies the problem.

“So… Uncle Hanbin is, like, definitely not Uncle Hanbin.”

“I mean…” There’s a sheepish edge to his dad’s voice, though Yujin still hasn’t removed his head from his shoulder to actually check his expression. The whole story, how Uncle Hanbin had been an old internet friend and not someone his dad met the first time they moved to Seoul like Yujin had always assumed, replays between his ears. How, sure, he was still his dad’s best friend, but once, nineteen years ago, there had been a with benefits tacked onto it for a night—which, eugh, not something Yujin needs to think about ever. But it almost makes sense, in a weird way. “In the way that Aunt Ricky and Uncle Gyuvin aren’t actually your aunt and uncle, either. But you knew that already.”

Somehow, that startles a laugh out of Yujin, and all of the sudden, he realizes he isn’t angry. In fact, the compulsion to tease doesn’t just sit on the tip of his tongue, it flows right out, unbidden. “I don’t think that’s in the same way—”

“Not like that. I just mean…”

“I know. Uncle as in older but not a hyung. I’m messing with you, Dad, come on.”

His dad’s head lifts, only breaking the embrace to hold him at arm’s length—or half an arm’s length, given the position they’re sitting in. Eyes narrowed, brows knitted together, he says, “I feel like you should be more upset about this. Why aren’t you more upset about this?”

The truth is that Yujin doesn’t know why he’s not all that upset. He could be—maybe he should be, a lifetime of not knowing something so fundamental to himself—but he isn’t. He’s had a good life. He has a good father, and he’s never felt like having just the one was a detriment. And as queasy as it had made him feel just an hour or two ago, the idea that biologically, he’s half of some man he’s never met (or, maybe the weirdest part of all, half of Uncle Hanbin) feels inconsequential. He is the same Yujin he was yesterday, the same Yujin he’s been for nearly nineteen years. He is, at the end of the day, Seok Matthew’s son.

So Yujin just shrugs a shoulder, smirking in the way he knows gives him the little pensive dimple his dad has always cooed over. “I don’t know, I’m just not?” It works—his dad’s expression shifts from confusion into a smile as he jabs him in the cheek. “Do you want me to be? I could pretend, but there’s a reason I’m in the soccer club and not the drama club. Oh, Dad, how could you—”

The impromptu snuggle has turned into a wrestling match, and this feels like more familiar territory. Rather than the two of them wracked with their own inescapable guilt, Yujin will take grappling with his dad’s arm that’s trying to pin him to the armrest any day. He’s got the height, the teenage agility, but his dad has the gym rat arm muscles needed to have Yujin shrieking, “Fine, fine, you win! White flag! I’m a minor!”

Still, before he lets him go, his dad looks him right in the eyes and says, “So, are we inviting the potential dads to your graduation or not?”

Something about it dumbfounds Yujin. He’d been so sneaky, so genuinely out of his rights in upending not just his dad’s life, but the lives of the men of his past, his potential other dads, and now he… gets what he’d been snooping around for anyway? Just like that?

Yujin opens his mouth and shuts it twice over before he can figure out a response that won’t derail the progress they’d made in getting back to being them, weird and affectionate, not the sulking son and his confused father. In the end, he settles on, “Is that a new millennial way to say that I’m grounded?”

And in the way that he hadn’t been mad, his dad doesn’t seem to be, either. Maybe they’re even now.

Leaning back, an expression that Yujin isn’t quite privy to but might call satisfaction, maybe closure, crosses his dad’s face.

“I’ve got nineteen years of wrongs to right,” he says, thumbing at the shape of the phone in the pocket of his sweats. “And you always said I was terrible at grounding you anyway.”

Under the covers, Yujin taps two knuckles against the wall that runs parallel to his bed. Within moments, his phone lights up.

The call connects almost immediately after Matthew taps on the contact name, as always. He’s stopped feeling smug about it—instead, there’s a warmth that fills his chest when Hanbin’s face appears on his screen, taking up the whole lens with his always questionable camera angles.

He’s cute regardless. Always has been.

“Hey!” Hanbin chirps, a hushed whisper of a shout even though he’s likely the only one in his apartment besides the cat. “You didn’t send your usual made it home text and I didn’t know if that meant you were busy or hanging out with Yujinie or what. Glad to see that face unharmed.”

Matthew lets the smile on his face grow, unbidden. “Unharmed? You think I’m getting into back alley fights, hyung?”

Hanbin frowns in the dramatic way that means he isn’t actually upset about anything at all. The image of him on the screen pulls the phone down with him as he lays on his side, pulling his own covers up to his chin. Like this, it’s almost easy to pretend they’re laying face-to-face.

“You know I always worry about you,” Hanbin says, a small pout of a thing that makes Matthew regret that he can’t just reach out for him, bury his head in his shoulder.

“I do know,” Matthew replies. The Hanbin on the screen grins, eyes shut, cozy. Matthew almost hates to have to break it with the news of the evening—except he doesn’t, after such a long time coming. “So, um.”

Hanbin flutters his lashes, seeming to hone in on the hesitation that colors Matthew’s voice, but he doesn’t interrupt. Just stares with those wide brown eyes until Matthew can find the right words to convey the last hours of his life.

“He knows,” is all he can say, and then, to clarify the confusion that paints itself across Hanbin’s features, adds, “Yujin.”

“Knows?” Hanbin’s head tilts into the pillow it’s pressed into, quizzical. For a brief moment, he simply stares at the screen, processing. Matthew can tell the moment it clicks. “The… wait, which part?”

Because, of course, there’s more than one part. There’s the three men of Matthew’s past, and then there’s the present: touches that linger too long when passing shared gym equipment, a steadying hand on the waist when the metro jolts unexpectedly, the night Yujin was on a school trip and Matthew woke up on the couch with Hanbin’s head pillowed on his thighs and traced the line of his jaw, his perfectly curved nose, the points of his upper lip until Hanbin woke, too, and smiled up at him so incandescently that Matthew wanted to spill three ground-shaking words. The them that neither of them will acknowledge because it would change everything.

“You”—Matthew pictures a lanky twenty-year-old with a fresh tattoo between his collarbones, the same and yet so different from the man on the other end of the call—“and Jiwoong-hyung”—a flash of a crooked canine, the delighted curl of an upper lip—“and Taerae”—sees his early college kind-of-boyfriend with his glasses and the perpetual guitar in his lap, rather than the rock star that everyone swoons over once a week on the survival show he’s mentoring now.

Hanbin’s jaw pops open. “Oh,” is all he says, and then, “Wow.”

“Yeah,” Matthew breathes. He waits for it to sink in, but it still hasn’t fully that Yujin knows, much less Hanbin. Much less that, in the aftermath, with Yujin still tucked against his side, he’d composed a message to Kim Jiwoong for the first time since their two week fling nearly two decades ago. Much, much less that he unblocked Kim Taerae’s number without knowing whether or not he’d kept the same one after all of these years—he hadn’t, naturally, not when sasaengs and the press exist, but even the automated this number is no longer in service text had felt like something.

“He found out on his own? Or did you tell him?”

Not accusatory, just curious, and Matthew closes his eyes on a smile painted in fond irritation. “Oh no, he was snooping.”

The corner of Hanbin’s mouth quirks when Matthew opens his eyes again. With it, one of the knots in Matthew’s chest loosens. “Definitely your kid.”

“If I were the uncertain half of his parentage, this all would have been so much easier.” Sinking further beneath the covers to escape the chill of the bedroom, Matthew breathes in laundry detergent and breathes out what might be the scariest part of what he has to say: “I asked him if he wanted to find out. Like, for certain.”

But Hanbin’s face doesn’t twist or fall, eyes only widening further, endless and dark against the glow of his phone. Matthew doesn’t know anymore if it’s productive or not to see Yujin’s wide-eyed stare in them.

“What did he say?”

Yujin’s blank look of complete indecision passes through Matthew’s thoughts. His cute, short-sighted kid who did all that he did without a concrete plan for what would come after—another tick on the endless list of why he is so very Matthew’s child.

“He said he wanted to meet them first before he made a decision,” Matthew tells Hanbin. “We, uh, invited them to his graduation.”

He’d rather be having this conversation in person, to gauge reactions without the proxy of a screen between them. When he’d ushered Yujin to bed, however, the inability to keep it in thrummed beneath Matthew’s skin—he needed to talk to someone about everything that had happened, and after all of these years, Sung Hanbin was his unchanging someone. So a midnight call across the city would have to do, loathe as he is to drop bombs like this without being able to use his hands to smooth over the cracks they caused.

Hanbin, however, does not crack. For nineteen years, Matthew has wondered what the breaking point would be, if it existed, and yet, for nineteen years, whether on the same side of the world or not, Hanbin has held his hand through everything. Even now, the smile that slips onto his face is nothing but warm, reaching all the way beneath the frame of those thick lashes.

“I’m proud of you, Seokmae,” Hanbin says, and Matthew loves him so much it threatens to burst forward from his chest. He aches to say it aloud, such a long time coming, but he bites his tongue. Not yet, not when everything is so fragile and liable to change at a moment’s notice.

“Me?” asks Matthew instead, a laugh of disbelief. “Why?”

“I’m literally always proud of you.” Hanbin sounds so serious, even with the telltale smiling crease of his aegyo sal. “But in this specific case, it’s for letting yourself have this.”

“Letting myself—”

“You’re going to protest and I’m not going to let you.” A peek of Hanbin’s teeth, the front two charmingly longer than the rest, the bottom row crooked. The whiskers of his dimples sink in, and Matthew wants to press his thumbs to the creases and watch his cheeks redden beneath his touch. “You’ve spent nearly two decades kicking yourself and calling yourself selfish for a decision you made when you were young and scared. And I’m not going to argue with you about whether or not it was the right decision, because there’s no right answer to that. But I remember a phone call with you en route to the hospital the night Yujin was born, delirious and terrified, and you said to me—”

“I just want to protect him,” Matthew whispers, an echo of himself at nineteen, wincing in pain in the back seat of his parents’ sedan, sweaty forehead pressed to the window and phone held in the trembling hand that wasn’t already clutching his stomach because he needed his someone.

“You just wanted to protect him,” Hanbin repeats, nodding. “And you said, hyung, I’m so sorry I’m doing this to you.”

“I’ve never stopped being sorry,” Matthew murmurs into the dead air between himself and the phone. “I want this to be the start of me making up for it.”

But even as Matthew’s stomach turns with the memory, Hanbin’s smile doesn’t fade. Just gets softer, contemplative. He smiles like he’s reaching out for Matthew’s hand.

“I was upset for a while. Before then, after then—you probably noticed, I’m not exactly a pro at hiding my feelings.”

Matthew thinks of the way Hanbin had gone rigid with tiny, days-old Yujin in his arms when Matthew said he still wasn’t ready to know; the far-away look in his eyes the first time Matthew returned to Seoul with a five-year-old who’d somehow sprouted features from each prospective father. He nods, and Hanbin continues.

“But the more I replayed that in my head, the more I thought… it was just your way of doing just that: protecting Yujin, in your own way.” Hanbin’s eyes glimmer; there might be tears gathering, but it’s hard to tell in the post-midnight darkness. “You raised a boy so full of love that he’s bursting with it. You gave him the dad he deserves, you, and that’s all that matters.”

Matthew’s voice doesn’t want to come out, unshed tears of his own so thick and heavy that they stop up his throat. He watches as one breaks free and slips down Hanbin’s face in the dim light of his bedside lamp.

“I don’t know how Jiwoong-ssi or Taerae-ssi will feel—that’s more complicated,” says Hanbin, slow and careful and a little shakier now than when he started. “But I’ve had all this time to sit with it, and I’ve never stopped loving you. I could never stop loving you.”

It’s dangerously close to the confession Matthew’s been holding back since he gave up on dating when no one ever came close to Sung Hanbin, the one person he’d never let himself give into the temptation of. He fists his hands in his comforter, imagining just for a moment that he can feel Hanbin’s knobby knuckles between his.

“Sometimes I wish I’d have just let you be his dad from the start,” Matthew says instead of the I love you he wants to. Not yet. Not with these things still unsaid. “It’s not fair and it wouldn’t have been any more truthful on my part, but… all those years, I kept him from you.”

“I don’t c—” With a furrow of his eyebrows that smooths out just as quickly as they’d twitched, Hanbin stops himself mid-sentence. “Well, no. I do care, but I understand. Nothing was easy—nothing is easy. You did what you had to so you felt safe.”

“I know,” says Matthew, and, “I’m sorry,” and, because he’ll never say it enough, “Thank you.”

It’s past midnight and they both have obligations in just a handful of hours, a morning-grouchy teenager and an impending draft deadline for Matthew, a slew of classes to teach for Hanbin. Still, they look at each other through their phones instead of chasing sleep. Two decades’ worth of memories, together and afar, two decades of inside jokes and bad haircuts and telling each other they look good even when they don’t, two decades of growing and changing and watching the corners of their eyes crinkle more with each laugh and smile.

After a long while, Hanbin, reaching for the switch on his lamp, yawns right into the camera, and it doesn’t phase Matthew a bit. “We should get to bed,” Hanbin says, barely a silhouette of the tip of his nose in the screen as he becomes one with his mattress. “Goodnight, Seokmae. I love you.”

Matthew isn’t sure if he even realizes he’s said it, but the words burrow themselves deep into his heart regardless, in their home right next to Yujin whispering the same to him just hours ago.

“Sleep well, hyung,” Matthew says before he taps to end the call. “I love you.”