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Friday nights have never been so cold. Euijoo’s slipping under the covers just in time for his self-imposed curfew when the call comes.
“Nico?” Euijoo greets, flustered. “Um, it’s been a while. You never call. Are you okay?”
“Juju!” Euijoo winces away from the speaker. “I wasn’t– haha, I wasn’t, um… didn’t think you’d, like, pick up. Wow! Juju, I can hear your voice!”
He’s sloshed. It’s not an uncommon state for him to be in, though it’s been some time since Euijoo’s heard him this drunk. Euijoo is deeply familiar with Nicholas’s drunk voice. His mumble gets worse, his volume gets much worse, and it’s the signal that he’s about fifteen minutes away from collapsing into the deepest sleep of his life. Usually, Euijoo manages to get him home before the clock runs out.
It’s still early by most people’s standards and especially by Nicholas’s. He can go until sunrise if he paces himself. Clearly, tonight was not one of those nights. Never again will Euijoo let Nicholas make fun of him for his “geriatric bedtime.”
“Yeah, that’s how phone calls work,” Euijoo informs, dry. “Where are you?”
“I’m… where…? Oh! I’m at the bars.”
Indiscernible noise crackles in from the background and then Nicholas is laughing at whatever—or whoever—made it. It’s his unrestrained laugh, bubbly and silly. Euijoo can't hear any music, so he must be outside, or maybe it's just his selective Nicholas-hearing coming back to bite him. Is he with someone? Is it unfair of Euijoo to wonder?
They haven’t gone out together in over a month. Euijoo hopes he hasn’t been drinking alone all this time, that he’s had someone around to keep an eye on him. Maybe he doesn’t go out as often now that he can’t drag Euijoo along, barely willing, in a curated outfit from Nicholas’s very own closet. If he's with someone, it isn't one of their mutual friends; all of them are still riding out Kei and Taki’s movie marathon, the one Euijoo left early. The one Nicholas refused to go to.
“Which bar?”
Nicholas hums. He’s distracted. “Um, the one— uh… I don’t remember. We left, so...”
So he is with someone. Do these mysterious new friends know how to take care of him? Do they know what a lightweight he is? Do they know how clingy he gets two shots in? Have they learned how much affection to give him to keep him from pouting after three? After four, he starts doing things he knows he shouldn’t. Euijoo guesses that tonight he had five.
“Find a street sign and turn on your video.”
A gasp, then a whine. Is he…? In public?
“Juju, please.” Euijoo’s ears are hot. He isn’t, then. Even if they were on speaking terms, he wouldn’t be doing something like that and calling for Euijoo. “You can’t see me like this. I’m a— I’m a mess. Juju, my dignity.”
Euijoo rolls his eyes where Nicholas can’t see and grouse at him for it. Muscles at the corners of his mouth fight to disarm him. In the quiet dark of his bedroom, they almost win.
“I’ve seen you messier. It’s just me.”
Nicholas hasn’t turned on his camera, but Euijoo can hear the frown in his voice when his next words filter through. They’re practically inaudible. Euijoo has to squash the phone against his ear to try and make them out. “That’s why I…”
“Huh? Nico, speak up.”
“Nico!” A voice in the background, unmistakable now. They’re friendly enough to call him by that name, at least. “C’mon, we’re gonna leave without you!”
“One second!” Nicholas calls, vowels warped around the consonants. He forgets to pull the receiver aside so Euijoo gets a blast of feedback straight to the eardrum.
He waits for Nicholas to say more, but the words don’t come. It’s just Nicholas’s presence, loud in its silent demand, his breaths slipping through the phone and warming Euijoo’s face the more he sits there listening, voyeuristic and greedy. It’s been a long time since they’ve talked and even longer since they’ve talked like friends. Euijoo devours the seconds as they tick along with a patience he never afforded either of them before.
Still, though, the longer Nicholas is on the phone with him, the longer he’s also out alone on a Friday night with people Euijoo doesn’t know and a drunkenness that requires adult supervision.
“Nico, we’re leaving!”
Nicholas doesn’t call out his response. Instead, he mutters, “It’s funny. I thought about inviting you tonight.”
Euijoo swallows. There are no words for what he wants to say.
“You would have hated it. Would've turned me down, right? Hah.” The background noise fades. His friends must have already left. There’s only him, Euijoo, and the phone when he whispers into it, “It’s not the same, y’know. Without you.”
Euijoo ignores this for both their sakes. “Are you alone?”
“Huh? Oh, uh… I mean… it’s not… like that. Aw, man. You’re making me sound pathetic.”
“It's just a question. Is anyone with you right now? You shouldn’t be left on your own. How are you getting home?”
“Worried about me? Juju, I’m blushing.”
“It’s irresponsible. You know better.” Euijoo picks at the skin of his lip and makes a decision. Rhetorically, unfairly: “No one’s helping you get back, are they?”
“No, Juju,” Nicholas groans. He knows every one of Euijoo’s voices. This one means You started a fire and I’m coming to put it out. It’s the one Nicholas has heard the most. “It’s past your bedtime. I’m fine! I’m so fine right now! I’m actually standing all by myself. Like, I can walk. Promise! So you don’t have to come.”
Immediately after that, a concerning thud echoes through the phone speaker. Euijoo chews his lip and tries not to feel desperate.
Since Nicholas isn’t in any state to cooperate, he pulls up Find My. He expects it to be a lost cause.
It’s not. Nicholas never turned off his location sharing, even though Euijoo turned off his. Euijoo has a lot of feelings about that, none of which he's going to examine until after Nicholas is home safe. He’s around the corner from a bar Euijoo’s never been to. It’s far, especially from Nicholas’s apartment. How was he expecting to get home? His friends don't seem to care what happens to him. Had he planned to call Euijoo before he even went out? Fat chance. Euijoo’s heart still knocks around inside his chest just thinking about it.
“Don’t move,” Euijoo instructs, already out of bed and stuffing his wallet and keys into his hoodie pocket. Before Nicholas can reply, with foolish hope that he'll at least wait until Euijoo’s there before getting into any more trouble, he hangs up.
Ten minutes in the car means ten minutes of wondering if it isn’t too late to turn back. Nicholas told him not to come. He’s making a mistake. Worst of all, Euijoo’s the reason Nicholas would ever hesitate to ask.
Euijoo was the one who cut contact in the first place. After an argument just stupid enough, he stopped responding, and one day Nicholas stopped reaching out. It felt like the right thing to do at the time. Now Euijoo doesn’t even remember what he was so upset over.
Five weeks in, he can finally admit to himself that it wasn't about the argument. He was jealous. Jealous of Nicholas’s freedom, of anyone allowed to look at him the way Euijoo tries not to, of the person Nicholas thinks he is. He disguised it as concern but beneath it all was nothing more than selfish, ugly longing. That’s no one’s fault but Euijoo’s. He had no right to be angry.
He might not have done it if he’d known this is how they’d end up. In the years since they met, even throughout all the bickering, they’ve never been apart. He was spoiled. He didn’t know how good he had it.
Loving Nicholas, then, is knowing the absence of him. Fearing it. It took five weeks of radio silence and scaring him away from his own friends to come to that conclusion, and even still, Nicholas is the one extending the olive branch.
Some best friend Euijoo is. Nicholas has shit taste.
After an eternity of hunting for downtown parking, he finds Nicholas hunched over on the curb of some dingy side street. His posture is just as bad as the day Euijoo met him. He’s swaying where he sits, dressed in clothes too dark to be near speeding taxis at night and too revealing to be outside in the autumn wind. Even from a couple paces away, the flush running from his face to his chest is stark. A warning sign, if Euijoo had any survival instincts.
As he approaches, he hears Nicholas mumbling along to a song in his head, something about trouble and lemonade. He resents that he recognizes it. He resents that he recognizes the movements of Nicholas’s hand, sloppy from the alcohol though they are, and that they’re movements they thought up together.
“Hi,” Euijoo says, because he doesn’t know what else to.
Nicholas doesn’t look up. His voice is low and gruff, not how it sounded over the phone but the way it sounds when he first wakes up. There was a time when Euijoo got to hear that voice nearly every day.
“Why are you here? I didn’t… didn’t want…”
He trails off, distracted by the nail polish he’s picking at. He’s wearing a new set, predictably, though it must be old and flaking by now. Euijoo hasn’t been around to keep track.
“Nichol?” Euijoo prompts.
“Didn’t wanna see you,” Nicholas admits. He tosses a scrap of polish at the ground like it offended him.
The distance provided by the phone had emboldened him, but here in the flesh, the icy trepidation of the previous five weeks returns. Nicholas sounded happy when he was with his other friends. Now he’s with Euijoo and he’s scowling at his shoes.
“You called me,” Euijoo reminds him. He clenches two hands around his keys from the privacy of his pocket so he doesn’t fidget—not that Nicholas would even notice with how much he is. Euijoo's fingertips go numb against the metal.
“I didn’t ask you to come,” Nicholas grouches, abandoning his nails to stoop over his knees. He cuts his gaze to some point in the middle distance down the street, like he could escape if he wished for it hard enough.
“I’m just here to get you home.”
Apparently, it’s the wrong thing to say.
“Oh yeah? You just— you’re just here to babysit me, ‘cause I can’t do anything right, huh? Is that it?” The words tumble out gruff and defensive but his eyebrows are knitted like they scald him on the way out. “‘Cause I f-fuck everything up. 'Cause I don’t know when to— to take it slow, and I ask for too much and… and you hate to be asked for anything, Juju.”
At last, his eyes meet Euijoo’s. He laughs, once, and it creaks with disappointment.
“Look at you. You only come when I don’t ask.”
Euijoo drops his gaze to the pavement to see himself bleeding out on it. Leave it to Nicholas to cut straight through to bone.
“You were asking,” Euijoo defends, quiet.
“You think so? Maybe I was.” Nicholas rolls his shoulder, glancing away again. He seems to sober up the more he talks. Combustion came and went, and now he just looks tired. “Maybe you just wanted me to.”
Euijoo works his tongue until it splits beneath his teeth. He wouldn’t know what to say to that anyway. Possessed by unearned greed, he says something worse.
“Those people you were with. Are they… friends?”
Nicholas’s face twists. “Or what? Worried I’ll try and fuck them?”
Yes.
“I mean, are they nice to you?”
Nicholas scoffs. “Better than the last one.”
Now that he’s here, sweating through his hoodie, with Nicholas in arm’s reach for the first time in maybe a lifetime, he can’t keep his mouth shut. Even though it’s what got them into this mess, the thought won’t leave him alone:
“Is it— Was one of them a, uh, boyfriend?”
Nicholas grates his shoes over the pavement, smearing the scum of Euijoo across it. “You don’t get to ask me that, and I’m not going to tell you.”
Smoke leaks from his mouth and he heaves and heaves to drag it back down where it belongs, stifled and unseen. “Right.”
The homecoming of that loyal thief: silence.
Nicholas deflates. “Man, this sucks. I don’t know how to be mad at you. You and I aren’t, like… We only ever argue about dumb shit.”
That, Euijoo can do.
“I don’t get why you’re dressed like that. You look cold.”
“Hah.” A smile ghosts across his features. “Little bare skin too much for you, Juju?”
It might be funny if it were different people, but they aren’t, so the words don’t do anything but tug on haphazard sutures.
“It was never about that.”
“Oh yeah, ‘cause it was about me. Almost forgot. Thanks for the reminder.”
Euijoo’s lip wobbles. He bites down. “I never thought that. Not once.”
“Whatever.” Nicholas brings a nail to teeth. “What do I know, right?”
Euijoo isn’t the one who drank, but he thinks he might throw up. Instead, out come words, violent and disgusting: “I’m sorry, Nicholas.”
Rasping, weary laughter. Wetness, maybe, at the corner of Nicholas’s eye.
“You know how long I’ve been waiting to hear you say that?” He scrubs his face and sniffs loud enough to echo down the empty street. “I hate it more than I thought I would. Apologies don’t suit you, Juju.”
“Sorry.”
Nicholas laughs again, louder this time, a little more like the sound Euijoo remembers. He leans back on his palms, stares up at the night sky where street lights stain it a milky yellow, and breaks Euijoo’s heart.
“I don’t forgive you.”
With nothing else to do, Euijoo chews the inside of his cheek and nods. “I understand.”
“I love you,” Nicholas says then, stitching him back up with messy, handmade seams. His eyes are back on Euijoo’s. Their weight cuts and then soothes, the weapon and the salve all at once. “You’re an asshole.”
“I’m getting some mixed signals here.”
Nicholas releases a breath and they both watch it take shape in the night air. It coils into the conception of hot and cold, the birth of anomaly, possibility and impossibility. Complex, but simple in the end.
“I’m freezing, my head hurts, and I just want my best friend back.”
He stretches his arms out. His face is wide and wet and vulnerable. Euijoo huffs, ignores the hairline fractures tearing through his rib cage, and stoops to meet him. He carries him to his feet and allows Nicholas to stumble into him. His arms latch around Euijoo for balance and stay there, tightening when Euijoo moves to pull away. Euijoo gives up too easily. He sighs out every crushing emotion he’s had to carry alone all this time and wilts into the hold and then they’re hugging in the middle of the street like a couple of idiots.
Nicholas’s hand comes up to rest at the base of his skull, stroking slow and tender like he’s trying to memorize or recall its contours. Euijoo curls fists into his shirt, one at his shoulder and the other at the small of his back, slipping and snagging on mesh fabric to feel every place they fit together. Their bodies sway to a rhythm inside Nicholas’s head, maybe the one from before, or maybe it’s just the alcohol. It's nice to hold him. Euijoo didn't think he'd get another chance.
They aren’t meant to mix. There is no future between fear and freedom but one that goes up in flames. Nicholas will do too much and Euijoo will do too little. In five weeks of nonbeing, Euijoo has discovered greed but not what to do with it. He will take too long to figure it out and Nicholas, if he knows what’s good for him, will not wait around.
“Where’d your friends go? You shouldn’t hang out with people who’ll leave you behind like that.”
Nicholas carves his cheek into the side of Euijoo's neck and chooses not to say the obvious. “I have you now, don’t I?”
Euijoo swallows the itch in his throat and buries his face in Nicholas’s shoulder. “Yeah. You do.”
The meeting of their bodies ignites a warm horizon. There is no resolution to be found in it, yet here they are, seeking reprieve in the pyre.
“Come on, Nico. Let’s go home.”
Euijoo offers his hand. Nicholas takes it. Between their palms: kindling and a match.