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It had been nearly ten years of this, of finding each other in new rooms and insisting the wallpaper made it different. Through enlistments, staggered comebacks on stages with different alphabets, anniversaries that came with confetti and interviews that came with careful lies. Through airports with carpet that smelled like rain, through winters that weren’t synchronized, through summers that were too loud to sleep. Nicholas had moved in circles he called straight lines: Tokyo to Taipei to Seoul and back again. Each apartment pretended to be clean of him, but Euijoo was etched into the paint anyway, into a shirt that hid in the laundry like a soft smirk, into a note tucked under a drawer’s felt that said nothing important and therefore everything, into the way a pillow remembered someone else’s head. A million hotel rooms across the world learned their names and never told. They said they wouldn’t, over and over, and Nicholas, who prided himself on being honest, kept discovering he was only as good as the next liar.
They no longer wasted energy asking what they were. Labels had peeled and fluttered to the floor midway through their twenties. They were planets with a bad orbit, gravity that didn’t know when to stop tugging, bodies that collided and then drifted like the fight never happened and the bruise was the only map worth keeping. That was tonight. Another collision. Another bed that would hold the shape of them after they left. Another sheet of lies and delusions drafted in the dark like a treaty neither of them could sign.
The hotel room in this unmarked city breathed its small, conditioned weather. Neon combed the blinds, and the ceiling tried to settle down from the day. The room smelled like detergent that had met its match and something sweeter and saltier that said people had been here trying. Nicholas lay on his back and watched light knead itself into a steady pattern. Euijoo was turned away, the long, clean line of his spine a sentence Nicholas would never stop rereading.
“I won’t do this again,” Euijoo said, voice level, like a custom declaration he’d memorized.
Nicholas let out a breath that wasn’t a laugh. “You always say that.”
“And you always ignore me.”
“Because you never mean it.”
Silence put its furniture down between them. A bus sighed at a light somewhere below; the blinds wrote quick gray bars across the room. Nicholas could still feel the ghost-weight of Euijoo’s palm on his chest from an hour ago. Aftertaste of touch. It made him generous and cruel at once.
“I’m tired of hearing it,” he said.
“Then stop coming back.”
“You make that sound easy.”
“It should be.”
“It never is,” Nicholas told him gently. “We ruin everything we touch.”
The bed creaked as Euijoo sat up. The sheet fell to his waist. Neon divided his cheek into warm and cool, like a coin deciding a side. “Maybe that’s why we fit.”
Nicholas rolled onto an elbow, arm still shaky with the afterglow that felt like memory pretending to be muscle. The minibar mirror caught a slice of them, shoulder, throat, the rope of twisted sheet, and he looked away, unwilling to make strangers of themselves. “Say it again,” he murmured. “If it helps.”
“We won’t do this again.” Euijoo’s eyes stayed on the window, like the city had the lines written there for him.
“Okay,” Nicholas said, nodding with the ritual politeness of sinners who know the liturgy better than the priest.
Neither moved. The air conditioner carried on, a small persistent heart. Nicholas let his hand hover above Euijoo’s shoulder, close enough to feel heat, far enough not to claim. This was their other fluency: the kindness of almost.
“Nichol,” Euijoo said after a moment, and the nickname slid under Nicholas’s ribs the way it always did. Gentle, practiced, designed to wound without leaving a visible cut. “Don’t make it easy for me next time.”
“Do you want a wall?” Nicholas asked. “Or a door?”
“A wall,” Euijoo said.
“Then you’ll only lean on me,” Nicholas said, and the truth made the tiniest sound when it landed, like glass set on wood in the dark.
They lay there in the kind of quiet that lets history speak. Nicholas thought about the years when the Navy kept Euijoo on ships with names Nicholas couldn’t pronounce without Googling. He remembered the first time back, the way they had stood in a parking garage, stupid with weather and distance, and laughed like their lungs were breaking. He remembered Taipei, where his apartment had a balcony with railings you could thread your fingers through, and Seoul, where winter came with a blue light and their fights were strangely courteous, and Tokyo, where even the silence felt punctual. The memory unspooled on its own. He didn’t pull the thread.
“Tell me the rules again,” Euijoo said. He sounded tired of being tired.
“No calling after midnight,” Nicholas said. “No showing up uninvited. No rehearsals alone. No sharing cabs. No, ” He stopped and smiled at himself. “The list keeps breeding when I’m not looking.”
“And if we break them?”
“We will,” Nicholas said. “But we’ll know which promise we insulted.”
“That’s not how rules work.”
“It is for us.” He didn’t bother to defend it. They both knew the rules were labels for the cabinets where they kept their weaknesses. Knowing where you’ll fail is its own kind of honesty.
Euijoo exhaled. “When did we get like this.”
“‘Like this’ makes it sound new.” Nicholas shifted onto his back again. “We were always like this. We’ve just gotten better at naming it.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What.”
“Make it a sentence I can’t escape.”
Nicholas smiled without teeth. “I thought you wanted a wall.”
“Not a clever one,” Euijoo said, and the softness pulled at the corners of his mouth against his will. He touched the sheet near Nicholas’s hip, not touching Nicholas, exactly, but touching the choice not to.
“You always know when I’m about to leave,” Nicholas said, softer now. “Your voice changes. It gets tidy.”
“Tidy,” Euijoo repeated, faintly amused. “That’s what you hate?”
“I hate that I start rehearsing what I’ll say after you go,” Nicholas said. “Sometimes before.”
“What do you rehearse.”
“The brave version,” he said. “The bored version. The version where I’m already texting a friend and it looks like I just had dinner and we talked about films and I didn’t think of you in the elevator. The version where I say I’m fine and it’s true for twenty minutes.”
Euijoo looked down. “I don’t want you to perform for me.”
“You don’t have to want it for it to happen.”
The city outside changed color; some sign cycled from pink to a tired gold. It drew a different Euijoo on the wall, and Nicholas added that one to the series he kept. Not on purpose. He collected him the way people collect languages they can’t pronounce alone. Slowly, with mistakes. Greedily, without meaning to be greedy.
“Do you remember Busan,” Euijoo asked abruptly.
“Which time.”
“The time on leave when you got angry that I paid at the noodle shop and then pretended you weren’t angry and then got angrier because you were pretending.”
Nicholas closed his eyes, laughing once. “You’re misremembering. I was angry you told the server we were cousins.”
“We were in uniform-adjacent trouble,” Euijoo said primly, then let the primness crack. “We were also children.”
“You were twenty-seven,” Nicholas said. “I was immortal.”
“Are you less immortal now.”
“Only on the right days,” he said. “Tonight I’m very mortal. It’s exhausting.”
A pause. The kind that could take a turn into joking or a turn into honesty and you never knew until it was too late.
“Do you ever think we’re unfair,” Euijoo asked.
“To whom.”
“To everyone who isn’t in this room.”
“Constantly,” Nicholas said. “It doesn’t help.”
“I’m not asking for help,” Euijoo said. “I’m asking for reality.”
“Reality,” Nicholas repeated, tasting the word like it might be too sour. “Reality is that I will want you tomorrow morning. Also next month. Reality is that you will think about me in three weeks in an airport and you will hate the fact of it and then you will text me something about a song and pretend that’s what you meant to say.”
“What song,” Euijoo asked, almost smiling.
“Something with a beat so you can walk to it,” Nicholas said. “You like to turn your feeling into cardio.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You asked for reality.”
Euijoo rubbed at his jaw. The sound of skin moving under a palm felt as intimate as anything. “Nichol,” he said, and the name did its old alchemy, annoyance to affection, salt to honey, bruise to weather report. “What are we going to do.”
“Try,” Nicholas said. “Fail politely. Try again.”
“I hate polite failure.”
“I know.” He looked at Euijoo and wanted to memorize the line of fatigue under his eye, because even tired, he was beautiful in a way that felt like an accusation. “We could also break up dramatically, if you prefer. Throw a vase. Let the neighbors hear.”
“We don’t have a vase,” Euijoo said.
“That’s the problem with hotels,” Nicholas said. “No props.”
Euijoo laughed then, bare and brief and genuine. It warmed the room as if the thermostat had finally learned who it served. He looked at Nicholas with that old, treacherous fondness. “You always think you’re the funny one.”
“I’m the one still here to test the line,” Nicholas said. “What else can I be.”
“Honest.”
“I’m the honest one too,” he said lightly, which was itself a lie and both of them knew it.
“Tell me one honest thing,” Euijoo said. “Just one.”
Nicholas thought about choosing something small and safe. He didn’t. “If you reach for me, I’ll let you.”
Euijoo’s breath stuttered once. “Don’t say things like that.”
“You asked for honesty.”
“You know I meant the kind we can survive.”
“We have survived worse,” Nicholas said. “We’ve survived ‘we won’t do this again’ nine hundred times.”
“Nine hundred,” Euijoo said, dry. “Specific.”
“I’m rounding down.”
They looked at each other properly for the first time since the line started, the pretend final one. The city played light tricks on Euijoo’s mouth. Nicholas watched it steady, then soften. He wanted to make a joke. He did not.
“Say you’ll stop,” he said instead.
“You know I can’t.”
“Say it anyway.”
“We won’t do this again.”
“Okay,” Nicholas said, gentler now. “Okay.”
“Say something I can take with me,” Euijoo said. “A thing that won’t make me come back.”
Nicholas considered. “Brush your teeth.”
Euijoo blinked, surprised into a short laugh. “That’s not poetic.”
“It will pass for poetry at two a.m. in a mirror,” Nicholas said. “Also, you’ll think of me.”
“I’ll think you’re insufferable.”
“That too.”
He watched Euijoo reach for the glass on the nightstand and drink. The swallow went through him like a small river that had learned the room by heart. Nicholas’s gaze caught on the end of Euijoo’s sleeve, wrinkled, soft with heat, then on his wrist, then the little pale scar from a prop sword in a rehearsal when they were old enough to know better. The inventory soothed him and hurt him. He had always been a collector of useless facts that mattered.
“Do your parents still ask after me,” he asked, apropos of nothing and everything.
“They ask if I’m sleeping,” Euijoo said, and looked like he might apologize for the answer.
“Tell them no,” Nicholas said. “Tell them I’m the reason.”
“I don’t want them to hate you.”
“They won’t,” Nicholas said. “You never tell the stories in which I’m worst.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is,” he said. “You forgive me before the story starts.”
Euijoo didn’t argue. He put the glass down and sat quietly for a while, both of them pretending the clock wasn’t capable of violence. The air conditioner rattled and then remembered itself. Down on the street, a motorcycle passed, and the sound wrote a diagonal across the silence.
“Do you ever wish we’d met later,” Euijoo asked, “or earlier.”
“Both,” Nicholas said. “Earlier so I’d have more of you. Later so I’d be less stupid with you.”
“You’re not stupid.”
“Baby,” Nicholas said softly, and the endearment shocked both of them, an old country they hadn’t visited in years. He swallowed. “Baby, I built a life across three countries that was essentially a scavenger hunt for you.”
“That’s not fair,” Euijoo whispered.
“It’s not a complaint,” Nicholas said.
“I don’t know how to be the person who fixes that.”
“I don’t want you to fix it,” Nicholas said. “I want you to stand in it with me and admit we like the rain.”
“And then what.”
“Then we buy an umbrella and lose it in a cab.”
“You always lose umbrellas.”
“You always keep napkins,” Nicholas said. “You think paper can save us.”
“It can,” Euijoo said, half-smile. “If it has a contract printed on it.”
“Sign here,” Nicholas said. “Initial the part where we fail.”
“Stop,” Euijoo said, but he was smiling in that old way, the one that made Nicholas meaner and softer at once.
“Get dressed,” Nicholas said finally, because the alternative was to reach and he had always been good at reaching. “Leave my bed while I still can be noble about it.”
“It’s not your bed,” Euijoo replied out of habit, shifting as the mattress exhaled.
“No,” Nicholas said. “It’s ours when we’re in it.”
The sentence hung like expensive lighting they couldn’t afford. Euijoo looked at him as if Nicholas had handed him something priceless and told him it was plastic. He stood and found his shirt on the chair, threading his arms into sleeves with the kind of care that pretends to be indifference. Nicholas watched the slope of his back become fabric. He stared at the carpet when he wanted to help him find a sock. Dignity is a small god; you feed it by not moving.
“At least, ” Euijoo began, then stopped. “Nichol.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t be kind about me when I’m gone.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Nicholas said. “I don’t know how to be anything else about you.”
“Try,” Euijoo said, and the word was unhandsome in his mouth, the first ugly thing he’d said tonight. “Please.”
Nicholas nodded once. “I’ll say you snore.”
“I don’t.”
“I’ll say you make bad coffee.”
“I don’t do that either.”
“I’ll say you’re a coward,” Nicholas said, and watched Euijoo flinch like he’d slid a blade between ribs. He softened immediately. “I won’t say that.”
“Sometimes I am,” Euijoo said, quiet.
“Sometimes we both are,” Nicholas said. “And sometimes we’re brave in ways that don’t look like bravery at all.”
Euijoo pulled on his shoes. He checked his phone although no one was calling. He found the spare keycard and turned it over in his fingers like a coin that could decide their fate if it felt like it. The blinds wrote their moving shadow across his face. Not a metaphor, just light doing what light does.
“Say it,” Nicholas said. “The line.”
Euijoo went to the door and put his hand on the knob. He looked back at Nicholas as if the room had given him different eyes. “We won’t do this again.”
Nicholas nodded with ceremonial accuracy. “Okay.”
The hallway’s brightness pressed against the threshold. It smelled like citrus cleaner and a future he had no use for. Euijoo stepped out, then paused, mouth crooked at one corner. “Text me when you get home.”
“I’m home,” Nicholas said.
For a beat, Euijoo closed his eyes like that hurt in the right way. “Nichol,” he whispered, a benediction and a curse.
“Yeah.”
“Brush your teeth,” he said, because he remembered the earlier joke and because pettiness could be tenderness in disguise.
“Yes, sir,” Nicholas said, smiling despite the ache.
The door softened shut. The latch clicked, faint and pretending to be final. Nicholas stayed still, because stillness was the only thing that didn’t make promises. He listened to the air conditioner breathe, to the city changes registering in the bones of the building, to the soft brag of the linens. He let his heart come down in stages like a plane told to circle. In a little while he would get up. He would stand in the shower and let the water tutor him in the difference between heat and warmth. He would drink something cold. He would put his phone face down and practice not touching it. He would fail at least one of those with dignity. He would succeed at another and call it growth.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling until it stopped pretending to be anything but white. He pictured the future like an honest thief: another city, another hotel, another sheet making an unruly knot around their ankles. He pictured Euijoo saying I won’t do this again. He pictured himself saying okay with the fluency of a man who has rehearsed for a decade. He pictured, in the unruly middle of the same soft wreckage, the moment he would lean in and say the only modest truth he knew: that trying was the shape their staying took, and leaving was a language neither of them had learned to speak without an accent.
When sleep finally came, it was shallow and made of thresholds. In each doorway he paused with his hand on the frame, loving the boundary too much to cross. The room kept their heat like it had a secret it didn’t plan to tell. Outside, somewhere, morning put on its shoes. Inside, Nicholas practiced not answering the message that had not been sent and might never be. He had years of rehearsal. He was very, very good at it.