Archive of Our Own ^beta

The thing about summer is that it hits like a bus. One day it’s spring and tulips are growing in the garden — this is big news, because you’ve been trying to grow tulips all year round but they never seem to last, but they’re finally thriving and it must be because of the weather — and you go to sleep and wake up the next day and find the yellow flights are all dead and the ice cream truck hiked up the prices.

Realistically speaking, it’s not Mark’s fault the flowers passed their prime, but he can’t help but feel like it is. They were brilliant golden, sparkling under the gentle rays of spring for the three weeks they lived, the only thing setting their house apart from the other ones on Beach Street. And Chenle had put his whole heart and soul into growing those, God, wouldn’t he just be gutted to come back home to a patch of dirt in their place?

Mark doesn’t hate the summer, doesn’t hate much besides himself, but he sure as hell doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like all the bugs, for one, and he doesn’t like the smell of mosquito repellent but he puts it on religiously anyway. He doesn’t like the heat that he can feel through the road, the kids running all over the place now that school’s out. Oh, and he doesn’t like seeing all the spring flowers die, obviously.

“Yellow flights are seasonal flowers,” Chenle insists upon returning home. “You didn’t kill them.”

“I read that they can survive down till mid-June, though,” he sulks.

“Not the seeds we get.” It sounds reasonable enough, so Mark lets it go. He doesn’t know anything about gardening anyways. He’s in no place to get emotional over some flowers dying on a strip of land somewhere in Bethesda, Maryland.

This summer is going to be fucking harsh, he can feel it.

“Maybe it’s because you’re unemployed and have no hobbies or friends,” Johnny suggests when he comes over one day, hauling a truckload of fruit into their living room. He spits out a watermelon seed into the bowl by his side as if he didn’t just shoot daggers at Mark’s conscience. Taking into account the look he shoots him, he adds, “You know I didn’t mean it like that. You have nothing to do in this house.”

“I have nothing to do in this whole town,” Mark corrects, eyes lingering over one of the muscat grapes before choosing a raspberry in its stead. 

Johnny opens his mouth to speak, only to be cut off before he can even let out a sound.

“Ugh, don’t start. I’m not going to listen, so just don’t say it.”

Johnny doesn’t say it, just looks at him with a look that explains everything. You are the saddest boy I have ever seen in my life, he wants to say, but he won’t. You are hopeless, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it for some reason. Instead, he holds out a comically large muscat grape in Mark’s direction and doesn’t retract his arm until the other succumbs and takes it. It shouldn’t taste bitter, but it does, tastes bitter and acrid and all the other words that meant Donghyuck.

And there it is: Mark’s thinking about him again.

It’s kind of hard not to, though. When Mark isn’t doing anything, which is most of the time, he’s thinking about Donghyuck, about the taste of the insides of his mouth and how he can’t quite remember it and how he should have savored it but how could he have known things would end up like this and so on. 

Mark thinks about Donghyuck the way fire thinks about oxygen, the way metal dreams about rusting. Mark thinks about Donghyuck all the time.

Johnny doesn’t overstay his welcome even though Mark wishes he would. Maybe next time he’ll take the initiative and visit first because he never knows when it’s time to leave, never has. Johnny’s house is only a twenty minute drive away but Mark’s not the best driver and he can’t say he’s even tried to pedal that Corolla ever since he slammed the side into the garage door. He’ll stick to his bike for now, thanks.

Maybe Mark should do something this summer instead of wallowing over dead tulips and Donghyuck. Yes, maybe he should go outside for once and face the scorching sun, let his blood pump through the afternoon and sweat through his socks and make his body feel other things that remind him of Donghyuck, and there he goes again, making everything about that stupid boy.

Who’s the real stupid one here?

So for the first time since May set in and he killed Chenle’s plants that only just came about, Mark takes a step outside his house, outside the driveway, into the scorching neighborhood. He feels like he’s eleven years old again, going to middle school for the first time, biting the insides of his cheeks because he hates virtually everything about Maryland except for the fact that it’s not Vancouver.

He feels the same way right now. He feels like a soon-to-be sixth grader that’s bitter about everything. He feels like a sixth grader that doesn’t know he’s going to immobilize his left arm in a few years, doesn’t know he’s going to kiss a boy on the mouth and the neck and the ear and the fucking mouth. 

But maybe Mark’s not giving sixth grade him enough credit, maybe he already knew all of that when he was freshly eleven. Maybe, fresh out the womb, he could feel the tendons pulsing under his skin, feel the blood pumping and pumping and visualize it exploding like an atom bomb, Trinity. He can still feel radiation.

It’s only May, but the sun is in full swing, worse than Mark ever remembered it. He doesn’t really know where he’s going but his feet move regardless, swept up by the Bethesda roads, tracing the path he used to walk to the district school, through the park full of kids wearing jerseys of football teams he can’t name, by the kindergarten Chenle went to for six months, past the public library he would go to just to play games on the computer. 

He swears he doesn’t miss it but that’s only partly true because he would die willingly if it meant he could go back to being piercingly young. Not that that’s an achievement. He hates to admit it but Mark is still the tenth grader who would die in anyone’s stead, for any cause. A martyr, if you will, not that Mark will, it’s too pious a word for him. He needs something meaner, something harsher. He’s the kind of boy that tastes like hot water on a sunny day, the kind that leaves your mouth dry anyways. 

He doesn’t know how he got here — he was just wandering around the suburb, but here he is, in front of the Lava Java, another one of the forever places in this town. He’s pretty sure the Lava Java has existed since his parents’ parents were kids, since before they lived in Bethesda, Maryland, since the time their whole family tree was located in a tiny speck on the map of British Columbia. 

Mark was little but he still remembers those days, right down to the crunch of grass under his tennis shoes and the beating of his heart in his throat, he remembers the begging his mom to get them out of there because he couldn’t take it anymore and how she packed up all their stuff and abandoned years of their family history. He used to think she did it for him, but he’s not so sure anymore. 

Point is, the Lava Java’s still around. Mark can see himself, in freshman year, gathered under the cantilever umbrella with Yukhei and Yerim in the peak of summer, a summer just like this except the weather might’ve been the only constant. Yerim left years ago, outgrew this sickly little town, outgrew seeing Sooyoung every time she stepped out of her house, so she left and that was that.

Beach Street will survive without her. Bethesda, Maryland will survive without Kim Yerim.

“You can go inside,” a voice calls behind him. A sweet, soft cooing that would sound lighter if it wasn’t so familiar. Mark doesn’t have to turn around to perfectly envision Sooyoung’s face, he can picture the clouds under her eyes and the color fading from her bitten, bloodied lips.

Mark turns around and sees Sooyoung, rosy cheeks and chocolate brown eyes, hair cut short, thick gold hoops dangling from her ears. Mark sees Sooyoung but he knows this is not the Sooyoung he used to play Yu-Gi-Oh! with every day in seventh grade. She’s a different person. Reinvented. Reimagined. Mark doesn’t know if that’s because Yerim left or because it’s been years since Yerim left. Mark doesn’t know if people change people or if time changes people.

She speaks again, buttery smooth like it’s easy to get the words out, and maybe for her it is. “No point standing around, right?” She gestures to the antique door, approaching it and pushing it open.

The door chime ushers them in; the place is as empty as it gets on a weekday afternoon, which is to say, it’s practically full, full like it would be in the sixties and full like it would’ve been when they were high school freshmen. That’s the thing about forever places like the Lava Java, they never die, always frozen in place. Mark sees the elder women gossiping about their kids and the freshly twenty-ones drinking their first beer. He wonders how that feels, he never waited until twenty-one.

Sooyoung pushes him over to a bar stool and drops her bag down on the counter in front of them. There used to be a time when her and Mark were the only ones out of their whole group that would get caramel macchiatos when they went out for coffee, but she’s not that kind of person anymore. She sips on her oolong tea and dabs her mouth with a napkin every few sips.

“What’s the occasion today?” she asks, releasing the cup from her hands. “I don’t usually see you out and about.”

“Nothing,” he responds but it’s an obvious lie. He wonders if Sooyoung can still tell when he’s lying. Probably not. 

She pauses a moment. Then, “I’m glad you’re out here again.”

It’s a sweet sentiment, but Mark feels like he’s been kicked in the shins. To him, it sounds like: I’m glad you’re finally getting off your ass and getting over stupid Lee Donghyuck, the love of your life who ruined your life and the love you let ruin you. And it fucking hurts, because Mark is not getting over stupid Lee Donghyuck. He’s not even trying.

“Maybe we’ll run into each other more often,” he says, just for lack of other things to tell her.

But she shakes her head. “Probably not.” And the thing about Sooyoung is she always has to knock for six, whether she’s sixteen and cheering on her team from the shitty display screen in the courtyard or twenty-something and drinking oolong tea in the Lava Java. “I’m moving to New York. Next week.”

Mark would die to go back to being a kid but he isn’t entirely sure it wouldn’t kill him first.

So Sooyoung is leaving, he tells Chenle once he gets home and the sky is bleeding pink and orange all over the clear sky like an oil stain or a bruise. She’s going to New York, he adds on, slouching against the sofa. He doesn’t add that he has a feeling she’s not the kind of person who would survive in a place like that, but Chenle has a way of knowing what he’s thinking.

Chenle works at the florist, which is fitting for a number of reasons, the main one being that he likes it. Likes cutting the thorns off stems until the threat is gone. Likes making bouquets of yellow daisies and water lilies and gifting them to mothers who will put them in a vase in the middle of their family rooms. Likes standing around and guessing what kind of plant the high schooler wants to get his corsages made with.

Yeah, no matter how much Mark thinks about it, he isn’t sure he could ever do a job like that. But maybe that’s why Chenle is the florist and not him.

When he thinks about it, Chenle’s been the same since he was eight years old, since Mark first moved into his house on Beach Street and greeted the family across the street; he was just so happy, the kind of happy you only get to be at eight, the kind of happy you look back on two or twenty years later and miss. The first time they met, Chenle was squatting next to his mother, dirt on his face and along his ungloved fingers, uprooting a canna lily.

“Wanna join?” he had offered, already shifting to make room for him to catch a glimpse of the strip of dirt the two were working on.

But Mark declined like the stuck-up, bitchy, perpetually Vancouver boy he was. “Not big on getting my hands dirty.” It was a bad excuse, but eight-year-old boys are gullible and don’t recognize when ten-year-old boys tell them stupid shit or bad excuses and neither do they care. They love you just for being, even if you’re someone like Mark.

Chenle probably never cared about Mark or anything he did until he was twelve and learned about the Cold War and nuclear bombs and figured that Mark was the Trinity Test because he could still feel the radiation when he grabbed his hand. And he could smell the death wish like a cigarette every time Mark opened his mouth but he still loved him.

He thinks Chenle’s the kind of boy people go to war and die on the battlefield for, has thought that for as long as he’s known the guy. 

Mark wonders if Chenle still feels radiation on his skin and in his blood and on his tongue every time he opens his mouth. Chenle probably loved Mark before he ever cared about him.

Mark can count on his fingers the number of people currently living on Beach Street that also lived here fifteen years ago: eight, seven once Sooyoung makes it to New York. The number used to be bigger up until recently; the town must’ve lost its quaint appeal everyone spoke of when he was ten. He never got it but maybe it was never about getting it because there was nothing to get about the nostalgia held by people who lived their whole life here.

Well, anyways, seven’s a lucky number, luckier than eight at the very least. Mark has got to get rid of that habit of assuming everything’s for the worse. Mark has got to start being productive.

Productive, to him, is sitting in a corner in the Lava Java, with his laptop whipped out, Americano sitting dangerously close to the device. It has been months since he’s last done this; he is out of practice and his eyes keep flitting to the drink just in case it spilled and he failed to notice. He’s only written one, no, half a sentence and he doesn’t even like it. He is so out of practice and Mark has got to start being productive, for Doyoung’s sake if not his own.

Sometimes he feels bad for the guy. He’s Mark’s only editor since forever and is unrelenting with his belief in Mark’s capabilities to write the way he did when he was nineteen. But he’s twenty-six and things are so different and he doesn’t even know where to start.

His first draft was supposed to go in a week ago. Well, technically, it was supposed to go in four years ago, if you’re being extra picky. Mark isn’t, but only because Doyoung isn’t.

Anyways, the point is, Mark is twenty-six and that means it’s been seven years since his debut novel came out and he has not written anything like it since. Doesn’t think he’ll ever write anything like it, doesn’t think he’ll ever write anything ever again. So he’s really, really got to start being productive, and this stupid Americano threatening to fall over his laptop and hamper the motherboard’s function even more is really not fucking helping. He thinks about chugging it in one go, thinks about throwing up in a porta-potty on the side of the road, thinks it’s the kind of thing he would’ve done in sophomore year.

He looks at the drink and thinks maybe not. He looks back at his laptop and the few words on the dark screen.

Every day since some forevers ago has been like this. Wake up, stare at the screen until the battery runs out, go home, charge, repeat. Doyoung might be out of a job at this rate.

It’s been too long since Mark has done this, writing at the Lava Java. Writing about love that’s good and right and enough. Writing in general. He wonders if it’s too late to scrap the whole outline and change the plot to a man who goes insane and kills himself on his twenty-seventh birthday. That would be easier, he thinks, he’s experienced in going insane.

Mark Lee was a bitch when he was a kid, real mean, but he had things going for him. Published and successful by nineteen was a pipe dream in their stupid little neighborhood but Mark did it and this was a big deal. Obviously, because nobody else from Beach Street in Bethesda, Maryland, had ever done that before and it didn’t even matter that Mark wasn’t from here because he was published and successful at nineteen. 

It might’ve been the first time in nine years his mother felt like she belonged here. People would see her in the supermarket and congratulate her for her boy’s success and tell her how they always knew he would do such good things and that they always believed in him no matter what anyone else said. Mark knew this wasn’t true but his mom was gullible, not unlike an eight-year-old boy who loves anyone just for being, even if you’re Mark. She would come home with this look in her eyes, sparkling, marvelling. Like she had just learned about blind people and started valuing her eyesight double, that kind of brightness.

He didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t even know these expressions were in his mother’s library of feelings. He couldn’t tell if it made him want to write another book, another ten, or tie a rope around the jugular because he did everything he had to do by nine-fucking-teen. The latter would really drive that home.

But he didn’t because he was riding the thrill of being nineteen and having everything and not even knowing it. For that, who can blame him?

Mark doesn’t consider himself a writer so much as he does a boy who got lucky when he was a teenager because he had more guts than was good for him. Because Yukhei emailed the publishing house with some stupid shit he had written and they actually liked it. So he went behind his mom’s back and published a stupid book and that was it.

It’s not easy for a boy who’s under twenty and well on the way to dropping out of college to bare his soul for all America, but sometimes it works out, and it worked out for Mark. 

He doesn’t think his mother read the book. Doesn’t think anyone in that damn town read the book, only the newspaper articles that rolled out about him winning some award and being invited to some city in Minnesota. But maybe that’s for the better.

Mark was a bitch when he was younger and he wrote like it. He’s softened up now and he writes like it. Or, he’s still a bitch but can’t write like one anymore.

He deletes the sentence he wrote today and slams his laptop shut. Another unproductive day. All he has recently is unproductive days, weeks, months, years, and he can’t stand how everyone keeps letting him be. If Donghyuck were here, he would’ve flicked him on the forehead and told him to fix his terrible habits immediately. If Donghyuck were here, he would’ve written another hundred books by now.

But he is not here and Mark can’t wish him back, although it would be a lie to say he hasn’t tried.

“Should I get out of here?” he asks Johnny when he’s over at his house. He made the brave choice to whip out his car despite his certainty that he was going to scratch it again, maybe even crash it, and took the twenty minute journey to the other end of Beach Street, crossing the park and the schools and the cafes and the supermarkets, all to ask this. “I mean, is it finally time to get out?”

Johnny scoffs. “And go where?”

Mark ponders for a bit. Opens his mouth to talk, make a suggestion, and then closes it. In the end, he goes with, “Anywhere. Anywhere away from here. I can’t do anything here.”

Johnny doesn’t say it because he never says anything he’s actually thinking, but Mark can already see it in his eyes. You’re not the kind of person who could survive outside of here, he’s thinking. And it’s true, he’s not. That’s why his mom moved here in the first place. Who is he to argue with that?

“I can’t do anything here,” he repeats. “You think it’s too late to kill myself?”

Johnny rolls his eyes and pushes the tray of finger foods where it’s more accessible to Mark. He fiddles with a pretzel between his hands before shoving it between teeth. He wonders if the pretzel can feel the death wish on his tongue, if Johnny knows he wasn’t really joking.

“Isn’t this just writer’s block?” he suggests instead, looking straight at Mark sitting across from him.

“For seven years?”

He shrugs. “Stuff happens. Besides, you’ve written some stuff after that. It hasn’t been a full seven years.”

“Seven years since I wrote something worth recognizing, though.”

“You didn’t think anything was worth recognizing until Yukhei distributed it.”

That’s because it wasn’t, he wants to say, but he holds back. He doesn’t know what Doyoung, that youth writers’ association, anybody who read it and liked it — doesn’t know what they saw in it. Doesn’t know what the fuck is wrong with them if they read that and liked it.

Johnny sighs, releases an icy breath that penetrates through Mark’s skin barriers, melted by the summer. “Why are you so desperate to crank out another novel?”

Because I want to. Because I want to feel useful. Because I want to be the person I was at nineteen and I want Chenle to be proud of being my roommate. Because I want this town to know that Mark Lee is still alive and kicking against all odds. Because I want everyone who left to know that I was the only good thing to come out of Beach Street and I still can. Because I want Donghyuck to see that I’m still around.

He thinks all these things but doesn’t say them. They’re barely real reasons, just threads he’s pulling, feelings he’s trying to rationalize but he should know better than anyone that that’s hardly reason enough to want anything.

Johnny doesn’t wait for an answer. He just lifts himself from the couch slightly and pulls the voile shut. Mark only realizes he was frowning until he feels his face relax without the sun burning rays into the exposed parts of his skin. “Take your time,” says Johnny. Mark will. 

If Chenle’s been a florist since he was born, Johnny has been a repairman. It fits him like latex gloves fit a big hand, like a box cutter fits Mark’s left arm. His store gets all the business this side of Bethesda which should say enough about their reliability but really it says more about how small this side of Bethesda is. 

Johnny was the one who fixed his Corolla after he butchered the side by ramming it into their garage door in junior year. He had just finished college and returned to his hometown and he fixed Mark’s car graciously. Mark couldn’t help but notice how right he looked wearing a tank top, wrench in hand, drenched in sweat. 

Mark doesn’t think he looks like that next to a printed manuscript, in the publisher’s office, getting an award through email. Writing never fit him like a latex glove fits a big hand or like a box cutter fits his left arm, like being a florist fits Chenle or being a repairman fits Johnny. But he does it anyway, and who’s going to stop him.

Mark is going through the motions. He doesn’t know when a day started to feel so long, maybe it’s because it’s summer but he doesn’t remember the summer of senior year in high school feeling like this. Every day he opens his laptop and stares at the screen, fingers positioned and waiting. He’s stopped ordering his Americano just to see if it’ll make a difference, it doesn’t. Maybe it would be better if it did spill over his stupid laptop, maybe a typewriter would be a better fit for Mark.

He hears someone, somewhere say that Sooyoung’s gone. He’s not sure when she left or how she’s doing but he supposes it doesn’t matter anymore. She’s never coming back now, and he should feel sad, should be drowning in nostalgia of the days when they would stay out until the sun went down, weekends when she’d drive them all down to the city, Sunday nights and Monday mornings they’d scramble to get the weed smell out of Mr. Park’s pickup truck. 

But Sooyoung’s probably not that person anymore. Probably died somewhere a long time ago, maybe when she got her own car and realized just what her dad hated so much about that odor. If Mark is sad about losing Sooyoung, it’s definitely not because she moved some million miles away.

Doyoung calls and Mark’s started picking up. See, he can do things like these.

“I can’t fucking do anything,” he says into the phone, guarded by one of the huge cantilevers in the outside seating of the Lava Java. “Nothing’s coming out.”

“Shut up,” Doyoung retorts immediately. Then, softer, “Don’t force yourself to do something you can’t, Mark. You’ve got time.”

That’s all he ever seems to have, he notes. So much time and nothing to do with it. He shuts his stupid device and observes the unfairly close distance this place is at from the district high school, his district high school where he was Mark Lee, the Vancouver bitch, the writer, the greatest he had ever been.

Don’t force yourself to do something you can’t, says Doyoung, so Mark slaps his laptop shut and thinks about being saved and if he had been saved sooner, would he still have traces of radiation on his hands, in his bloodstream? Would he still be published and successful at nineteen?

They are contingent on each other.

Mark thinks about automated machines, thinks about spinning jennies and flour mills, thinks about himself and how he would fit right alongside them: old, discarded relics of the past. But they did serve their purpose at some point.

“Hello?” Doyoung says and he must be thinking this is a scammer because Mark’s never called him first before. “Mark?”

“Um,” he starts, not sure how to get this out. “Can I visit you?” 

There is a pause. Like Doyoung is considering. Weighing the benefits. Deciding if Mark is still worth all the trouble he’s gone through for him. Mark almost wants to take it back, hang up the phone, block Doyoung’s number and never call first or pick up again.

Then, “Should I send someone to get you, or will you be okay on your own?” He lets out a small, breathless giggle on his end and Mark can already taste freedom.

Bethesda, Maryland is the kind of place you leave. The kind of place you tell people about when you want them to know you started out as a bum. Mark used to dream of just that, of talking on the big stage and saying he was Beach Street’s biggest bitch but he made it out of here.

Now, he’s not exactly making it out of anywhere, but he’s boarding a plane for the first time since he got out of Vancouver and it’s gratifying enough. The decision was spur of the moment but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s going somewhere. Chenle took time off from work to drop him off at the airport in Baltimore, he really can’t trust Mark’s driving skills but Mark can’t quite blame him. Not after what he did to his own car in junior year.

“You’re horrible for leaving like this, you know,” Chenle says, tapping his shoulders twice with a wide smile and then turning him towards the gate.

Mark knows. “I’ll be back in no time,” he promises and he knows it’s true because Mark is not the type of person who can survive anywhere outside of Bethesda, Maryland.

Someone from Doyoung’s team is going to meet him at LAX and take him back to the office, maybe show him around the place while he’s at it. Mark wonders if it’s anything, even the slightest bit like Vancouver there. He hopes not. It would be a shame to have escaped Bethesda and end up somewhere worse.

He’s on the plane and tries not to think about crashing, a water landing, wheels gliding against the sea, scarlet orange life vests spilled over an endless blue, like a summer sunset or a football bruise. Mark was never the swimmer type, the stay-alive type. 

But he tries not to think about it anyways, stares out the window and pictures himself in the clouds and falling from this height, pictures the mess of blood and bones he would be if he crashed, the mess of blood and bones he already is. What changes midair that make a dying man a dead one? Mark wonders. 

He wonders and wonders and wonders. It seems that’s all he does nowadays.

California is hot, hotter than Maryland but it doesn’t burn the same way. It’s full of people that look like they didn’t survive suburbia or suburbia didn’t survive them. Mark can close his eyes and imagine bringing a relit cigarette to his lips in a dingy corner of the city, neon lights and background radiation and all. It’s a damn shame Mark would drop dead, drop deader than he already is, if he had to spend all his forevers in a place like LA.

A crisp voice cuts through his visions of smoke and the city. “Hi,” says the man in front of him when Mark opens his eyes. “You must be Mark Lee?”

He holds out a hand and Mark takes it, takes the black of his suit and the sparkle of his eyes in, takes it all in and then releases his hand. He should greet the man now but Mark is suddenly at a loss for words, which, considering he’s an author, is a terrible thing.

“I’m Jaehyun,” the suited man says, gesturing to another figure Mark spots behind him. The other man takes hold of his suitcase swiftly and Jaehyun leads him through the crowd, one hand gentle against Mark’s back, the other clutching a tablet closely. 

He can’t say the airport is easy to maneuver through, it’s not, and thank God for Jaehyun because Mark would never have made it this far himself. He’s not made for pushing and shoving through crowds of unfamiliar people. The closest thing Beach Street has to this is the Davis Library’s Book Fair where people, aspiring authors, from a few counties over are invited.

Bethesda really knows how to capitalize on the dreams of “aspiring authors.” LA doesn’t know anything about that, Mark thinks, doesn’t seem like the kind of place for people who are only just aspiring. It’s nothing like Bethesda, that’s for sure; which is to say, it’s nowhere for Mark.

But it’s not all unfamiliar, he observes as people whip past him, trying to cover up the marijuana scent on them. He lets the escalator carry him down to ground level, keeping an eye on the inky fabric of Jaehyun’s suit to make sure he’s going the right way. Not that he can really get lost on an escalator when he isn’t moving.

He wants to close his eyes and picture himself on a road, an 18-wheeler coming right for him, there’s nothing he can do. Instead, he forces his eyes open, can feel the inflammation in his conjunctiva, wonders if it’s pink like bubblegum and flamingo pool floats or pink like angiogenesis.

“Fuck,” he hears someone say, snapping him out of his thoughts. He realizes belatedly that they are nearing their end of the uphill journey and another rushing passenger has crashed the wheels of his suitcase into Mark’s foot. “So sorry,” the man says, avoiding his eyes by pulling a bucket hat over his head.

Must be another stoner, he thinks. “S’okay, it happens,” Mark says. And for a second, he’s back in Maryland, eleven-year-old Donghyuck has just ran over his foot with the scooter he got for his birthday and he’s hiding behind Jaemin, tears welling up in his eyes. Who are you when you don’t know the extent of the destruction you can cause, and who do you become when you find out? What changes in the time you dry your eyes?

Mark doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he associates pain with Donghyuck and not himself.

“Doyoung was really excited when you called,” Jaehyun explains once they’re in the comfort of the car. He wipes a bead of sweat from his forehead, laughing through his words. So he’s the kind of guy that can smile despite being sent to receive a brat like Mark from the airport. “He said it’s the first active contact he’s ever gotten from you.”

Mark doesn’t know how to respond to that. “Yeah, I, umm, had something to discuss,” he lies. Actually, the only thing he has to discuss with Doyoung is that he needs to stop trying to make this work.

“I hope it’s good news,” Jaehyun says with a cheeky smile. “Doyoung is thrilled at the thought of anything to do with you. He’s a little bit obsessed with you.”

“I don’t think I’ve done anything to deserve that, but… thanks.”

“C’mon, don’t be humble. Have you read your own work?” — Mark wants to cut him off and say no, he hasn’t, he deleted the document and it only exists on Yukhei’s old pendrive, and of course every online library and every physical one, but he holds back — “It’s fucking good.”

“It’s just some shit I pulled out of my ass when I was in high school.”

He rolls his eyes. “Whatever you say, Mark. But Doyoung believes in you.” There’s a long pause, then, “And for the record, I trust his judgement. He knows his people.”

There is so much Mark can say. That Doyoung knows writers and Mark barely counts as one, that Doyoung doesn’t know how much worse Mark’s gotten since high school, that Doyoung’s relentless nature couldn’t ever make Mark good again. He decides against all of those and stays silent, counts Jaehyun’s eyelashes instead.

LA is nothing like Maryland, he notices for the umpteenth time while staring out the window at the endless road, cars flitting past their own, people strutting down the street with purpose. It’s a movie scene.

Dejun who used to live a few houses down from the middle school Mark went to did his bachelors in California, somewhere around here probably, and settled down in a boxy apartment, something like all the other ones lining the sides of all the streets probably. Mark wonders, stupidly so, if he’ll run into Dejun anywhere around here. Of course he won’t.

He’s heard from Dejun’s mother who still lives in her little put-up on Beach Street that LA isn’t a walkable city like their own, that he has to drive at least thirty minutes to get anywhere worth going. But the drive from the airport to the publishing office doesn’t feel like thirty minutes, in fact, it doesn’t even feel like ten to Mark.

But maybe that’s just him. He’s never been good at observing time qualitatively.

The building is bigger, cleaner than Mark could have ever imagined, white like slate, like the clouds, like a hospital room or a hotel bed. It fits the company car well, black on white. Yin and yang.

He follows Jaehyun diligently through the revolving door and gets hit with a breeze of cool air as soon as he steps inside. Apparently, Doyoung’s office is on the top floor, the twelfth floor, along with all the senior editors. His office is huge and extremely private and Mark’s sure to love it there, says Jaehyun. He’s sure to work something out with Doyoung.

Mark holds his breath from the second they step into the elevator to the second they step out, greeted by lush green plants and walls of white and gray, bone and tile. Jaehyun raps on the door once, twice then pushes it open without waiting for an answer. 

Mark does know that seven years is long enough for a person to change their every perceivable aspect, but he knows that some things never change with time, and maybe Doyoung is a testament to all the things that never change. Doyoung, round glasses perched on his nose, blonde dye fading from the ends of his hair, squinting at his desktop screen.

Mark feels nineteen when he looks at Doyoung.

“God, it’s been forever since we last saw each other in real life, right?” he says, echoing Mark’s thoughts perfectly. He gestures to a seat across from his desk, “Sit down, sit down. Let’s catch up some more.”

“Umm,” Mark says, stiff in the chair. He has so, so much to say but doesn’t have the words. He never has the words for anything, never did. “I quit?”

Doyoung pauses a second. Mark pictures his fury, imagines him collecting all of it into a compact little ball, rather, a bullet. He pictures Doyoung in a shooting range, gun in his hands, every target shaped like Mark, speaks like Mark, writes like Mark. The gun is warm in Doyoung’s hands, warm like California sun, and all that’s left is to shoot.

Doyoung laughs and Mark pictures him throwing the pistol to the side carelessly, letting it fall into a bush of peonies. “Nice try, Mark, but I’m not gonna let you do that. Haven’t we been over this enough times?”

They really have. “And like I said all those times, I’m jeopardizing your job by not being able to write anything. Aren’t you sick of it?”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” he says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Because we’re hosting a workshop this weekend. And you came right in time to make the list! It’s funny how things work out that way, isn’t it?”

He can’t conceal his smile, he’s so damn excited. Mark pictures Doyoung reeling in a Gatling gun like he built it himself and has been waiting for this opportunity ever since. Waiting to shoot. Shooting to bruise but never kill. Doyoung isn’t the assassin type, after all.

“You could’ve mentioned,” Mark sulks, resigned. 

Doyoung just laughs. “You know I couldn’t.”

It must have been the summer after his first year of college that Mark first heard the name Kim Doyoung. June, maybe. Yukhei showed up at his house, rapping on the door vigorously in the morning before dragging Mark outside the second he opened the door. He was saying something, talking too fast for half-asleep Mark to even register what it was. Then all of a sudden, he whipped out his phone and shoved it cold against Mark’s ear.

“Hi there,” he had said, “my name is Kim Doyoung, and I read your manuscript, thanks to your friend Yukhei. I’m really interested in discussing it further with you, if that’s something you’d like to consider.”

Mark can’t remember now what he had said, it was too early, his brain wasn’t exactly working, but that was when the Skype calls with Doyoung started. When the editing started. He must’ve finished in July, scrambled to get it approved before August rolled around and his twentieth birthday passed him by.

Now, Mark thinks maybe he should’ve held on to it a little longer, made it a little better. Maybe then he’d be prouder of it, probably not though, he’s not a very proud person. He’s happy enough to just leave that in the past and blame the sappy writing on his underdeveloped teenage brain.

Doyoung must be beaming at the thought of Mark being subject to the absolute horror of a writing workshop. Asking a guy with chronic writer’s block to attend a workshop at a publishing house is like forcing a gallon of water down the throat of a rabies patient: it’s a fucking death trap. And Kim Doyoung, Executive Editor Kim Doyoung, knows that better than anyone.

He must be pleased as punch right now knowing he’s sending the writer he kept around for seven years to death at the stake. Must be giggling to himself under the sheets, Mark’s willing to bet. 

Mark, he doesn’t get a wink of sleep, consumed by the terror of interacting with people who are the splitting image of what he isn’t. He throws on a shirt and some trousers, a look that really screams reclusive author with no proof of excellency and leaves his hotel a mess at nine in the morning.

“You know this is going to be boring as hell, right?” he says to Doyoung outside the meeting room. They’re waiting to get admitted into the venue where their guest will speak on for no less than two hours about finding inspiration or grammar rules or God knows what new writing concepts have been created in recent years.

Doyoung just nods. “I know,” he affirms, “but at least you’ll be forced to write.”

“It’s not about being forced. It’s like, my fingers get paralyzed and my brain goes blank when I sit down to write. And I don’t even want to think about writing, but here I am.” Mark has to roll his eyes at that one. He doesn’t know what Doyoung thinks he’s doing.

Finally, the doors open from the inside, and the other seven pairs of writers and their editors are ushered inside, directed to their assigned seats one by one. The guest author sits at the front, hooking up his laptop to the big screen to project a presentation that Mark can already tell is boring.

Mark wonders if the other writers wanted to be here or if their editors forced it down their throats, too. He can’t comprehend the idea of wanting to improve your writing ability. Maybe he just can’t comprehend the idea of wanting to improve, period.

Even now, he’s probably still the best writer in Beach Street.

“Hi everyone,” the man says after an infinitely long period of setting up his device, “I’m here today to work with you guys and help you write even with” — he gestures towards the screen — “writers’ block.”

God, Mark didn’t know Doyoung abhorred him this much.

The guy’s name is Yuta, Mark learns from his introduction, he’s been an author officially for only a little while but he’s been a writer forever. The opposite of Mark. He’s had writers’ block so many times and for so long that it’s just become a part of him. He’s written so much but it still feels like nothing. He’s sure plenty of other people in the room feel the same way.

Mark shuts out his voice and stares at the empty document open on his screen. Staring at things don’t make them easier to look at, like a gash running down the inside of your calf, things that become ugly remain ugly until they are destroyed. Blank screens remain blank for as long as you let them be, and Mark doesn’t have the heart to disturb.

He sees more than hears Yuta talk about his own novel writing journey, the paralysis he went through during the process but Mark knows it’s not his kind of paralysis. Obviously not, because here Yuta is with a bunch of books published, teaching others how he did it. Teaching others how to save their asses.

It’s the kind of thing Mark used to do at the Davis Library, only he did it to a crowd of middle schoolers that pretty much all knew Mark since they were in elementary school. Mark wonders if they could tell just from the look on his face that he wouldn’t ever be able to do it again. Probably not, he decides. Nobody knew what was going to happen to Mark back then, not even himself.

Yuta flashes a prompt on the screen and Mark can already feel his fingers numbing before he even reads the words. Revise an old draft… keep only the start the same… Mark’s having a headache. He looks at Doyoung, begs with his eyes, something he hasn’t had to do for years, kicks his shin under the desk.

“You got this, Mark,” says Doyoung, and Mark thinks he really needs to consider getting a new editor.

This has got to be a joke. Mark doesn’t have old drafts, he has two-page documents of his suicide plans as dictated through the voice of another from when he was twenty-one, when he still thought the writing could save him. When he thought that anything could bring Donghyuck back. 

And that is the last thing he wants to revisit, but it isn’t as if he has much choice. The clicking away on the touchpads and incessant typing of the people around him is a decent motivator, too. He finds the most recent one, three pages, last edit made a few days after he turned twenty-three. It’s barely legible, he was clearly drunk, or stoned, or something else, while writing it.

Mark cringes. He catches Doyoung looking over his shoulder at the text, just as much if not more confusion in his eyes. How in God’s name is he supposed to work with this piece of shit, he’s got no fucking idea.

He’s about to go back and look for something else when he hears “That’s a good one” up close and near him. The deep red mullet that appears beside him makes it clear that Doyoung wasn’t the only one spying on him, and Mark isn’t quite sure he knows how to feel about that. He turns to face Yuta completely, studies his formal shirt and pants and wonders how he makes them look like bedroom clothes. Yuta doesn’t seem to care, or maybe he really doesn’t notice, too immersed in the words on Mark’s laptop screen.

“What on earth are you talking about…?” Mark says, trying not to sound too rude. Again, not that Yuta cares.

“Your draft,” he answers matter-of-factly. Like it’s not the most garbled and jumbled love letter to the forever love of his life he’s possibly ever written. “Perfectly captures the drunken spirit. Keep going.” He pats Mark’s back twice like he’s a kid that needs cheering up and Yuta’s just another kid that doesn’t know how to do it. 

That was how Mark felt the first time he saw Donghyuck cry, really cry. He remembers it unfairly well, memory fresh in his mind like a stubborn abrasion that just refuses to heal.

Mark had asked him if he wanted to try out his new skateboard together. Said that Chenle was busy learning math, that Jaemin was at a friend’s house at least ten blocks over doing God-knows-what. He was being careful, it was only a few weeks ago since Donghyuck had stopped avoiding him after Mark promised, pinky swore actually, that the crepe bandage on his foot wasn’t his fault.

He didn’t really know how, but Donghyuck agreed. Reluctantly, yes, but he still agreed. Mark was twelve and didn’t know anything about being alive, thought it was just a state of existence, but riding his stupid skateboard on the rocky neighborhood sidewalk with Donghyuck gave the word alive new meaning. 

For the first time in his life he understood why his science teachers were so obsessed with separating living organisms from biotic ones. For the first time in his life he realized that maybe he could be a living organism and not just a biotic one.

Mark broke his nose that day, slammed right into the concrete while trying to show the kid a flip he had learned, but maybe the size of this board was different from the one he was used to, or he just lost his balance, or tripped on a rock on the damn sidewalk — anyways, the flip didn’t work, he fell face-first into the road, tumbled over to his side, writhing in pain.

And Donghyuck watched, frozen in horror until Mark picked himself up. It didn’t hurt that much, he’d said, it was true. The look on Donghyuck’s face was a million times scarier than any concrete road, any broken nose.

It healed, of course it did, Mark was back to normal in no time. He didn’t think anything of it, but Donghyuck was different. Terrified. Convinced it was his fault. The first time Mark joined him and Chenle outside wearing his splint, he could see the tremble in Donghyuck’s lips, the avoiding his eyes, the staring at his nose and then down into the grass. Like he was wishing it was him instead. A kid, not even in sixth grade, a martyr.

As if Mark would ever fucking let him.

He walked Donghyuck to his house that day, pulled on his t-shirt when they were nearing the front porch. Donghyuck with his trembling lips, a layer of glass clouding his cornea, avoiding Mark’s eyes. I’m okay, Mark promised, really okay. Something like that wouldn’t kill me. But Donghyuck didn’t like this joke very much, didn’t like it so much that he dipped his head into his hands, squatted down into the uncut grass outside his porch, and let out the most heart-wrenching howl known to man, known to Mark.

So maybe people become aware of the destruction they can cause and the destruction that exists even if you don’t cause it. Maybe destruction becomes something you live with, maybe you cry and you let the older boy that walked you home squat down next to you and pull you into a hug and wipe your tears, and maybe when you’re a kid you don’t think it means anything, maybe you think love is a side effect of destroying and not the other way around. Maybe realizing you can destroy something, a nose, a foot, a heart, and still be loved is the whole point.

Maybe Donghyuck didn’t know Mark would think about him for the rest of his life when they first met in elementary school. Maybe he really didn’t know Mark would never forget that look on his face, the slight pout, red in his conjunctiva, red like a stop sign, redder than the bleed on Mark’s face when he collided with concrete. 

All of that to say, maybe Yuta thinks Mark writes like shit too but at least it’s something he’s not going to forget. And maybe that’s worse.

“Mark, this is fucking good.”

Case in point. Somehow, when it’s almost time for Mark to retire to the hotel after a long day of interacting with writers and receiving gratingly euphemized feedback on the alphabet soup he produced in the given timeframe, he’s in hell with the literal devil.

“You told me you couldn’t write!” Doyoung accuses when Mark doesn’t say anything, actually sounding slightly offended. He pushes his glasses off and gently tosses them onto a relatively clean area of his desk, sighs.

“I couldn’t,” Mark insists. “Can’t. This isn’t really… writing.”

Doyoung rolls his eyes. “Oh, please. What would you know about writing. I’ve probably done more than you have in the last five or so years.”

He can’t argue with that. “Yeah, probably.”

“That’s not the point,” he snaps again. “What was it you said to me? That your fingers get, uh, paralyzed, and your brain goes blank?”

“Mr. Nakamoto’s presentation was so good that I got inspired to write again.”

“Oh shut up, I know you weren’t even listening to that. See, I knew you had it in you.” What exactly did Doyoung see in Mark, he wonders, that convinced him so hard.

Mark shakes his head vehemently. “I don’t really know. I just fixed up a draft like that prompt said. Maybe the change of scenery is doing me some good.”

Doyoung beams at him, it feels just like their Skype calls throughout the summer working on his first book. “Mark, you have to flesh this out.”

He frowns. Looks hard at his editor’s face for any hint of his usual joking nature; Doyoung used to say that he’d publish the first thing Mark wrote if he just started writing again but that was supposed to be a joke.

“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” he says, immediately moving to get up, get out. He’d rather be anywhere but Doyoung’s office right now, but his voice cuts through, sharp.

“Mark, I know this is hard for you to accept, but please.” He sighs, tired. And for the first time since Mark came to LA, he realizes the same seven years have passed here as they did in Maryland. Age doesn’t show up on Doyoung’s hair or skin but it’s there in the veins, in everything he does. “This really is good. It’s really good. I don’t think you’ll recognize that, it’s fine. You don’t have to. But this is my job, to know what’s good, I mean, and I can say with confidence that this is good.”

Try as he might to deny it, Mark Lee is still somewhat the bitch he was when he was in high school, but some things have changed. Like right now, if Mark was younger, had more energy, he might’ve fought back and retorted a few more times, but Mark knows where this is going. He knows he’s in the wrong.

Mark writes, he just writes everything. And Doyoung knows what’s good, what’s right, what’s worth writing. That’s how it is — how it’s been forever.

So he nods and looks at Doyoung’s pleading eyes and nods some more, he’ll consider it, he says. And looking at his face, this expression, maybe he really will consider it. Mark’s got to stop being difficult at some point.

Doyoung relaxes and moves to stand up. “Oh, right, Mark,” he says, trudging over to his side, “do you want to go out with some of us for drinks?”

“Uh, me?” he repeats. “You’re not doing this just so that I work on that draft, right?”

Doyoung rolls his eyes. “Obviously not. I just want to show off my amazing author to all my colleagues. Plus, you’re not in LA for much longer, are you?”

He nods. His flight is tomorrow night and it’s true, he still hasn’t gotten the chance to experience the dark and dangerous smoker alleys that the state was so well known for.

“C’mon, you’ll like it,” Doyoung insists, slipping his arms into his coat, the kind that is definitely not fit for summer but he wears it anyways. He pushes Mark towards the door and drags him down to their car, shoves him in the back with a shy new hire and an author he’s been working with. Doyoung says he’ll get along great with them, all of them, but Mark doubts that.

Mark realizes something upon reaching the venue that he never really paid much mind to, mostly because it was never his place to. Editor Kim Doyoung is a freak. A total party animal. The kind of guy that mixes drinks for people that don’t drink, haven’t drank in years after they realized in their youth that maybe alcohol actually does something to your brain. Mark doesn’t want to be here.

The people he knows are limited to Doyoung and Jaehyun and they’re both a handful and they sure seem to be handling each other. It makes Mark want to gag but he holds himself back. The other writers that seemed to have been dragged along by their insistent editors are experiencing the same fate as him, though, so maybe he’s not entirely alone in spirit.

“Hi,” says a voice, startling Mark. The accent is thick, the owner is clearly not Californian, maybe not from America at all. “You’re Mark Lee, right? I could recognize you right away.”

Fuck his whole life. Mark has, quite frankly, had enough of people knowing him before he introduces himself. He’s definitely not the kind of person who should be recognized by people as the same Mark Lee in the about the author section of his book, he’s almost a completely new person. Reimagined, just not yet reinvented.

But he turns to face the man anyway with what should be a sufficiently inviting smile. “That’s right. I, uh, don’t think I got your name?”

Sungchan. Jung Sungchan is his name, he looks young and bright and like he knows just how to write about good love, right love. But what does Mark know, not everybody wants to write about good or right love or love at all. What does Mark know about writing, or anything. 

Sungchan’s been obsessed with Mark’s first novel, he says. Read it over and over until he could practically recite every line, he couldn’t believe it was written by someone only a few years older than him. He was sixteen when it came out and it changed the trajectory of his whole life because that’s when he started writing and got his first book out at twenty-one, a bit later than Mark. His second one just came out this year, it took a while because it was wildly different from his first but it didn’t do too bad.

Mark looks into Sungchan’s eyes and sees galaxies, sees the future of writing. He looks at Sungchan and sees a typewriter, a manuscript, a pen, and all of them look right next to him. Mark thinks Sungchan fits being a writer like Chenle does a florist, Johnny a repairman.

Sungchan takes another shot, blush creeping up his cheeks and it makes Mark wonder if he could’ve ended up the same way if he wasn’t holed up in Maryland for the better part of his life.

“Tell me about your novel,” Mark says, pouring himself and Sungchan both another one. “The second one. You change your style or something?”

He smiles, probably starstruck and a little too drunk to control it. Fingers tap the glass, then the table, then he gathers himself together and speaks. “Well, so, my first novel… it was like, kind of a motivational story, I guess. The second one changed because I went to… uh, somewhere in, uh, Europe? Yeah, Europe. I met this guy, and I didn’t really want to write that kind of stuff anymore… and….”

He’s going to throw up, Mark can tell. Sungchan is about to puke like crazy right now and Mark has no idea what prompted it, but there’s this plumpness in his cheeks that he’s trying to repress and Mark knows it all too well. And he’s not really in the mood for being responsible but he supposes he’s even less eager to go home covered in vomit, so he drags Sungchan out to a spot behind the bar, the edge of some dumped up alleyway.

“You shouldn’t drink so much if you can’t handle it,” Mark lectures the boy. He’s not so much older than him to be doing that but he does it anyways.

Sungchan laughs. “It’s something of a habit now. The guy I met, he was a huge drinker when he went out. I just wanted to be able to keep up with him, y’know?”

Mark doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he and Sungchan are similar at all. He doesn’t think Sungchan is the kind of guy who was a bitch all throughout high school and a bum during adulthood. And maybe that’s for the better. Mark is the kind of guy that’s better off inspiring sixteen-year-old boys to write like him, not be like him.

“Fuck, I’m tired, man.” He’s sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, legs dangling off the curb, cheeks pink like bubblegum, words coming out garbled and indecipherable. Twenty-three but he looks inconceivably sixteen, speaks like he can’t write. Mark knows the feeling, so he kneels down beside him. “He was bipolar,” Sungchan confesses, and Mark doesn’t mention how he thinks he’s going to throw up now, “but I really thought I could make it work. Obviously, I couldn’t.”

Mark looks away, averts Sungchan’s eyes, and then he’s freshly twenty-one, crying like a baby, hyperventilating into Johnny’s arms, vomit collecting in the back of his throat. Then it’s Christmas, sophomore year of college, and he’s drinking up a storm, doesn’t look so different from Sungchan right now. Then he’s seventeen in the backseat with Donghyuck, hand inappropriately far up his thigh, and he’s so in love he thinks it could kill him.

“I don’t know if he’s dead or alive right now,” he continues, “and I don’t care. It’s bad, right? I only care enough about him to write some book about it. I’m really… the worst, aren’t I?”

Mark’s room, junior year of high school, Donghyuck on the bed, not big enough for two people, not a problem, never a problem. Kissing on the mouth, the ears, the neck. The mouth. Donghyuck’s eyes, red and glassy, high as a kite, tears wet on Mark’s chest. Always a crybaby. Mark’s room, staying up late to write, Donghyuck smoking up the place like he really wants it to burn. I love you until my body aches, until the sun explodes. 

“But I had to save myself. No one will save you from a love you don’t want to leave. Don’t you think so, too?”

Mark should say something, but he doesn’t have words. He never does when he needs them most.

He pats Sungchan on the back. “I’ll call you a cab.” And he does just that, sits him inside and wishes him well and hopefully they’ll get to meet again one day, the usual empty promises.

Mark doesn’t think he and Sungchan are similar at all but he can understand why Sungchan might think so. Mark, too, used to think that people are more than the places they’ve been, used to think that enough success could change anything. 

Now that he’s twenty-six, Mark doesn’t think anything can change anyone. Not people, not places, definitely not time. We are who we are. And Mark is ten toes down trying to get used to it.

He notifies his leave to an extremely unwilling Doyoung — clearly, not even alcohol can change his obstinate nature — and heads outside to make for his own hotel. There’s less than twenty-four hours until he’s back on the plane again, gone as soon as he came, probably forgotten in the minds of everyone he met, except maybe Doyoung.

The hotel room is not so different from his own place back home except for the fact that it somewhat makes him want to write, even with the paralysis. He isn’t sure whether to attribute this change of mind to the hotel room or Doyoung’s insistence or Yuta’s workshop or meeting Sungchan so he just settles on the room. 

Mark reopens the draft from today and he does so voluntarily. His head aches a bit and eyes blur the words a little, a side effect of the alcohol, but it’s not so bad. Not bad enough to peel his fingers from the keyboard, anyways, though Mark thinks anything that can make him write is worth surviving. 

The image is still fresh in his mind, end of sophomore year for Mark. Freshman for Donghyuck. How Mark made him swear he didn’t have a final coming up anytime soon. Feigning responsibility. Little Mark was a damn liar like that.

So it goes: Mark, Donghyuck, and some others in the back of someone’s car, Saturday night. Mark’s mom, unwell again, homesick, probably. Donghyuck said he’d be with Mark all weekend to help him out, it was only half a lie. A white lie. Mark squeezes Donghyuck’s hand for lack of words but he probably means Please don’t do this.

Donghyuck smiles back, perfectly fourteen with all his teeth bared, but he probably means Fuck off, I can take care of myself. Mark doesn’t really think he can but he’s in love and love changes you, might be the only thing that changes you. So: Mark takes a drag out of the joint that was slick between Donghyuck’s teeth a minute ago and passes it back. Wonders if that’s how he will taste tonight and every night after tonight.

Mark was a real bitch when he was a kid and he deserves to die for it. But Mark doesn’t know, even now, how much he could have changed if he tried. He’s not the savior type but God he doesn’t know how to leave well enough alone.

Even now, Mark is writing. Even now, Mark is reliving sophomore year of high school. He knows its futility but Mark is at the point where he thinks anything that can make him write is worth reliving.

The sun threatens to rise and Mark is typing like he can change the fact if he just writes fast enough. Half of this will have to be deleted tomorrow anyways, he knows that, but what does he care. For him, even two words is a two hundred percent increase in ability.

He finally decides to retire, dragging the thick curtains over the window and turning his phone on for the first time since the alcohol wore off. He didn’t even drink that much but he somehow ended up with two missed calls and a voicemail, all from Chenle, plus a text from Johnny.

Mark can feel the frown on his face, feels the unconscious dip of his eyebrows, the way his neck instinctively bends towards the screen. Last he was received like this was when his mom got transferred to the tertiary care center while he was at a tennis game on the other side of the country. 

Needless to say, it couldn’t possibly be good news.

“I hate to see you go so soon,” Doyoung says when Mark shows up at the office later that afternoon. Nothing in his demeanor suggests that he had gotten hammered down the night before and Mark wonders how he does it. Perhaps that’s how he’s so laid back all the time. “I hope you’ll be back soon.”

“Yeah, me too.” A pause. Then, “Um, but, could I send you something? Just some random stuff, really, but after yesterday, well….”

Doyoung’s face lights up like the Hollywood Sign is behind Mark, finally open to the public after seven years of construction. Mark can’t help but think that Doyoung looks like Max Brod when he’s in this office, circular glasses hooked on his nose and all too much belief in his beady eyes. He has enough faith in Mark for the both of them.

“I would love to, really,” Doyoung insists. “Actually, you can just show it to me now. I’ll drive you to the airport anyways, we can just discuss it on the way if you want.”

Mark really, really doesn’t. But he doesn’t know a thing about writing, definitely not like Doyoung does. He just writes. He just trusts Doyoung to know what’s worth writing.

They drive to the airport and Mark says his goodbyes and see you soons and he isn’t sure if he means it or if he even wants to be seeing him soon or ever again. But he says it anyway and Doyoung pats him on the back and sends him off with a big smile and promises that LA will be waiting for him patiently the next time he comes. 

He highly doubts that last part. LA isn’t the kind of place that waits for as much as your Saturday hangover to go away, much less an indefinite writers’ block. 

Mark wonders how Sungchan is doing.

Surviving, probably. That’s what people in LA do — survive. Survive the writers’ block, survive the bipolar boyfriends, survive suburbia and survive big city claustrophobia. And Mark, he was never the surviving type. 

So he closes his eyes and imagines a deadstick landing, the engine losing all power and the pilot guiding them down into an empty field, uncut grass and infinite thrill. He imagines holding his breath, watching the white inside the clouds turn to a pale blue sky to a soft, olive green as the plane is engulfed by weeds.

He opens his eyes. The seatbelt sign is on and the crew is coming around to tell everyone to straighten their seats and pull their shades up. Not an emergency landing. It never is.

Maryland isn’t as hot as California but it burns completely different, or maybe it’s just Mark’s nerves. He used to have the same feeling in high school when the Welcome to Maryland sign pulled up outside the window and they were all cooped up in Sooyoung’s family car. Like his lungs were being filled up with some kind of toxin that existed only within the state. 

The familiar darkness of Mark’s own house draws him in, the habitual path he takes, the same sidewalk he always ends up at. He can vaguely remember being ten and trying to balance on the curb with Chenle, walking forward until they both fell off. He can’t remember at all what the curb in LA felt like when he peeled Sungchan off of it the night before.

He raps on the door a few times, taking note of the faint light behind the drawn curtains. He can feel how still the night is, can hear the shuffling of footsteps behind the door.

A hauntingly familiar face greets him in lieu of his usual roommate. “Oh, Mark, you’re back! Chenle told us you were on a trip. We didn’t know you’d be coming back so soon and so rudely asked if we could get dinner with you guys. I’m really sorry for intruding. Are you okay with this, though?”

Jaemin speaks fast as always, maybe even faster than Mark remembers. He finds himself nodding dumbfoundedly through the guy’s speech. Mark doesn’t remember the last time he’s had a proper conversation with Jaemin. He might’ve blamed it on Jaemin moving a few blocks down but even he knows that’s just an excuse.

“‘We’?” he repeats, distracted as Jaemin helps him haul his suitcase up the staircase and wheel it into the storage room. Mark can’t help but notice how he still remembers this place like the back of his hand.

He just smiles like he’s in eighth grade all over again. “Yeah, we.” His voice perks up, then slows down as if he finally found something, rather, someone worth slowing down for. “I’ll introduce you.” 

He grabs Mark by the arm and pushes him into his own living room where Chenle and another guy Mark can’t quite recognize are gathered, laughter freckling their expressions. Sunset Boulevard is playing on the TV and Uno cards are scattered all across the floor, couch pushed over to the side to make more room.

Jaemin kneels down between the two and introduces his fiancé Jeno — Mark watches the blood rush to his cheeks when Jaemin uses that word — and then invites Mark to join them. Chenle fixes up a spot for him, complete with Mark’s favorite cushion, giggling and asking him how the trip was. For a second, and just a second, it really feels like he’s gone back in time.

“Actually, we wanted to invite you all to our special day,” Jeno says, clearly flustered at the idea of a wedding. “So at first, we were just going to slip an invitation in your mailbox. But then, well, we ran into Chenle, and here we are.”

“Right,” Jaemin agrees. “Really, we weren’t expecting to sit down with you all, but we figured, since our whole group is back in town, it wouldn’t be bad to catch up.”

Mark likes the way they talk. He looks at Jeno’s face and he likes how he can’t take his eyes off of Jaemin, can’t untangle their hands if he wanted to. So much love. Good and right and enough. The kind of love Jaemin deserves for all time.

Chenle drags Mark to the kitchen to help him fix up the food. After years of living with him, Mark has learned how to make a mean mac and cheese, although he’s not perfectly sure that’s the best choice to present to a couple that’s about to get married.

Instead of discussing the menu, though, Chenle asks him: “Did you get my message?” Then, when Mark’s expression makes it apparent he’s got no idea about any message, he stresses, “The voicemail. You know I don’t send voicemails, Mark.”

He nods. “Yeah, you don’t.”

Chenle rolls his eyes, too much urgency for someone who’s indifferent about almost everything. “Really, you should pay attention to what I send you.”

Mark doesn’t have time to frown before he hears a knocking on the door, synonymous with the pace at which his heart is beating. He can feel how still the night is, can taste the blood that’s going to be in his mouth. There is a sinking feeling in his chest that he always feels when he’s right about the wrong things. He felt it for the first time when he was twelve and saved up all his money and bought a new skateboard.

He follows the sound of Jaemin’s “I’ll get it” to the hallway and Mark doesn’t know the difference between him opening that door and running him over with a bus.

Mark must’ve been in the sixth grade when he did a science project on desert climate and learned about mirages. He can’t say he ever understood it, at least not until he took his first physics class three years later and learned what exactly refraction was. So, Mark knows about mirages, knows exactly how they’re formed.

And for the record, Mark knows about hallucinations too. He actually did attend his psych classes in junior year even if he wasn’t in his most perceptive state. He knows schizophrenia and epilepsy and dementia. Knows bipolar. Mark knows hallucinations and mirages and he’s yet fooled.

There he is, real as an oasis, facing Jaemin as if he never left. As if six years never happened, rather, as if sixteen years didn’t happen, if life and death and everything in between didn’t happen. Lee Donghyuck, twenty-five, Beach Street, Bethesda, Maryland. It’s like he never left. It’s like Mark is dead and in heaven, rather, purgatory. They’re the same to Mark.

Terror rises in Mark’s chest, and not the kind that he felt when Doyoung chides him about writing or when Chenle scolds him about not eating. The kind that makes him relive eleven, twelve, thirteen, all the way up to nineteen and then twenty-six, the kind that makes him realize how old he really is.

Mark is staring. It is quite rude.

Jaemin takes the polythene packet out of his hands, peering into it and exclaiming something about it being from his favorite chicken store when he used to live here. Mark knows the one, all four of them would go there after school when they were kids, when they had it in them to eat two bags of fried chicken.

He ushers Donghyuck in mindlessly, searching for some part of him that wouldn’t remind him of his own heart but he quickly realizes there’s nothing like that in Donghyuck’s entire being.

“Hi, Mark,” he says, taking off his shoes by the door. The kind of thing you would do when visiting a friend whose mom is extremely particular about these kinds of things. The kind of thing you would do in your own home with a husband.

There was a time Mark dreamed about this day. He would go to sleep every night and pray that Donghyuck would show up at his door and say Hi, Mark just like that. He doesn’t quite remember when or why he stopped praying.

“Hey,” he says, leading him to the living room. Mark has no words right now or ever. Mark’s words seem to fail him in every scenario recently.

The couple are clearing up the cards off the floor to make space for the food and Chenle’s back in the kitchen, pulling something out of the oven or the fridge, Mark isn’t quite sure. His mouth fails him, his feet fail him, even his fucking eyes fail him because they keep turning back to look at Donghyuck and then retreating at the last second.

Mark wonders if he’s still as beautiful as he remembers or even more. Probably more. Age always looked better on Donghyuck.

“It’s… been a long time,” Donghyuck says, hesitant. His voice lands on Mark’s ear like a plane, a deadstick landing. No amount of years could make Mark forget it, the shouting at him and moaning his name and crying at his feet. Mark always hears his voice but never quite as clearly as this. “Have you been well?”

Mark has not.

“Just as good as I look,” he deflects, finally looking Donghyuck in the eyes, and Mark only has God to thank for his existence. Twenty-five, all grown up since the last time Mark saw him, but some things never change. The soft pout of his lips, the dip of his eyes, the pool of blood surrounding him. All love, all liquid. “I’ll go help Chenle out a bit. Make yourself at home,” he says, retreating to the kitchen.

He watches Chenle pull cornbread out of the oven but he’s distracted. Of course he’s distracted. Lee fucking Donghyuck is here, inside his house, alive, walking, talking — surviving. Against all odds. And Mark thinks he could throw up right here, in the kitchen, next to Chenle’s cornbread, loud enough for everyone to hear but he doesn’t.

Chenle pats him on the back twice and tells him it’s okay if he wants to call it off and that he’s sorry but Mark doesn’t care, barely even registers it. He’s still thinking about Donghyuck, laughing and giggling with Jaemin and Jeno and how that should be him but he doesn’t know if Donghyuck will ever want to laugh with Mark again.

He grabs a tray and places five glasses of water on them before following Chenle out and laying the food along the ottoman table. They’re arguing about what movie to watch next and it’s so natural. There’s a space next to Donghyuck and Mark feels like he could fit there perfectly, fit there like Chenle fits a florist and Johnny fits a repairman.

Instead, he squats beside Jaemin and leans against the leg of the couch behind him. His heart is bursting at the seams, veins collecting all the blood in his body like they’re preparing to burst, splatter all over the floor and stain Jaemin’s jeans. Mark ignores all the unease in his body and shifts his focus to the TV.

“Chenle, what do you want to watch?” Jaemin says, arm casually interlinked with Jeno’s. District high school kind of love, Mark can’t help but think. The kind of boys that would kiss in the back of the school bus for a millisecond on the way to a basketball game. All love, all mushy and breakable but still palpable. Mark doesn’t know for a second what that could feel like.

Chenle says he doesn’t care what they watch and tosses the question to Jeno, who scans all of their eyes with a newcomer’s trepidation before suggesting a random one on the screen. In the Mood for Love.

The movie plays in the background over their conversation as they catch Jeno up to years of history, only up until the senior year of high school. It’s not as awkward as Mark expected, as long as he doesn’t look at Donghyuck or talk about anything they did.

But Mark is curious, so fucking curious. He wants to know what Donghyuck looks like chewing the chicken from the store they used to go to, wants to know what kind of face he makes when Chenle talks about the French midterm they helped each other cheat on and still ended up almost failing, wants to know if he’s looking at Mark too. He is so curious and it is so unfair.

Jeno and Jaemin tell them how they first met, show them their wedding invitations, and it suddenly feels like they’ve known Jeno just as long as they have Jaemin. It makes Mark feel like a kid. He thinks he could get used to it, though.

“God, is it already this late?” Jaemin says, double-tapping his phone. “I swear, the sun stays around so long it doesn’t even feel like time is passing.”

“We’ve overstayed our welcome,” Jeno observes, lifting Jaemin up easily. “Thank you all so much, really. I’m so happy to get to know Jaemin’s childhood friends like this.”

“Of course,” Chenle responds, equally courteous. “We’ll be looking forward to seeing you around.”

The two get up, bickering as they step into the porch, Jeno wrapping Jaemin in his coat while walking away. Mark cringes a bit while watching them but who is he to say anything. There is a strange silence in the air when the three of them are left and Mark can feel how still the night is, taste the cornbread he’s about to puke out.

Donghyuck laughs. “I know this was really sudden, and I’m sorry for that, but… really, thank you guys for receiving me so nicely. It might’ve been more than I deserve.” He speaks with an awkward smile on his face. Like he’s a stranger. Mark hates it.

Thankfully, Chenle has the response under control. “Of course not. It was good to see you again. We’ve missed you a lot.” He’s inexplicably calm. Like he’s talking to a stranger. Mark seriously hates it.

Because words always fail him anyways, Mark speaks out of turn. “Where are you staying?”

Donghyuck is stunned for a moment, eyes flitting to Mark, reflecting the moon with his gaze, gentle and biting at the same time. Just down the street, he explains, describing a vague location. But Mark nods.

“I’ll go with you. You uhm… you probably don’t remember the roads well, right? And it’s dark.”

Mark doesn’t even want to think about the kind of face Chenle is making at him right now. Probably the kind of face his coach made at him before he cut him from the team but Mark knows that if it weren’t for that damn drug test then he’d still be on.

All Mark wants to do is look at Donghyuck, memorize his every pore. He has to make up for years of not seeing him somehow, even if it’s not right.

He smiles shyly, it’s like he’s nine and meeting Mark for the first time and doesn’t know they’re fated to die in each other’s arms. Mark knows but he advances anyway. “Sure, I’d appreciate that.” Mark hates how formally he talks but at least he’s saying something.

The asphalt is loud, grating, even, against the soles of their shoes. Donghyuck’s face is stolen by the night but Mark can draw a picture in his mind of what it looks like, can write a book about what this feels like. He’s a barely stable isotope being bombarded by particles, preparing to become twice as radioactive.

“Mark,” Donghyuck says, soft and hard at the same time, like a kiss, like a punch to the face. They haven’t spoken the whole way here. “This one’s my house. With the peonies out front.” 

Mark can barely see the flowers, but he nods regardless. “Oh, okay.” He offers a reserved smile, unsure if Donghyuck can even see the expression he’s making. “I guess I’ll, uh, see you around.” Hopefully. Mark prays he will. He thinks he’ll pray every night.

He watches until Donghyuck is halfway up the driveway. He’s a movie scene, a magic show, something you shouldn’t be allowed to see without a reservation. Mark loves him like an addict loves alcohol, he thinks the withdrawals could actually kill him. Mark knows loving Donghyuck is like injecting morphine once, twice, ten times at once but he’s survived twenty-six years and a whole world of awful things and he thinks loving Donghyuck doesn’t even scratch the surface of terrible things Mark’s capable of.

“Mark!” Donghyuck calls out from next to his door just as Mark’s turning around to leave. “Can you come here for a sec?”

Mark is fifteen again. He moves like it’s automatic. Like now that he’s cut from the team his legs have nowhere to go except for Donghyuck and there’s nowhere he’d rather go with them. He wants to be in the backseat with Donghyuck or the front seat, wants Donghyuck to crash his car with them in it and see which bones they can break, how they might fall on the concrete, Mark’s hand on his waist while blood fills his periphery. Just like before.

He’s hopelessly selfish, he knows it.

But he’s next to Donghyuck before he knows, so natural, so right. The only place in the world he’s ever felt right. “What’s up?”

Donghyuck averts his eyes slightly. “I’m sorry.” He pauses, chewing on his lips until they’re pink and glowing. “Really, I am. I’ll explain it all soon, okay?”

Mark frowns. “That’s it?”

“For now.” He presses his lips into a line. Mark wants to knock his teeth out and rip the hair right off his head.

Mark can see him well under the automatic light of Donghyuck’s porch, yellow and warm like the sun is shining on his face. He’s a summer boy through and through, you can just see it in his eyes. If summer hits like a bus, then Donghyuck crashes like a wave. Unavoidable, inevitable.

Mark doesn’t think. He doesn’t know how to. The light goes out for a second above them and he leans in, too close and terribly rushed, letting the edges of their lips skim each other for a second, just a second and no longer. Just long enough for it to register.

Armageddon. The Cold War. Destruction and with it life; love and with it death. The imperfectly perfect way in which Donghyuck’s lips slot into his own, brief touch still ghosting over his breath. Violence that persists all throughout time. Radiation that is felt long after you die. 

“Fuck, sorry,” he mumbles, hurriedly trying to come up with some kind of explanation but he doesn’t have one at all. He can’t even begin to understand himself.

Donghyuck frowns a bit, but smiles and stops him. “It’s okay, Mark. Let’s meet again soon, okay?”

Somehow, in some way, Mark thinks he’s done something terrible. He thinks about the original sin and all the things he had done wrong the second he was born, how he escaped the womb already tainted and made it his life goal to taint everything else he touches. Mark Lee, suburbia’s Midas straight from Hell.

Mark wonders if it’s all a dream. He wakes up at half past nine and Chenle’s frying sticks of bacon on the pan, sap green apron slack around his waist. 90s band music is humming on the speaker and the sun is pouring into their kitchen from the outside like a waterfall into a stream. Chenle barely acknowledges him and gestures to set up the table for breakfast. Mark wonders if it was all a dream.

That might be better. But, judging from the curious look on Chenle’s face, it probably wasn’t. And maybe Mark owes it to Chenle to let him know. After all, Donghyuck was his before he was Mark’s. 

Mark was ten when he first came here, didn’t know a damn thing about Maryland or Beach Street or the people that lived here. It was summer break and almost everyone was out of town because who would want to stay in the sweltering Maryland summer. Besides Mark and all the other kids who didn’t have a choice, probably no one. 

As opposed as he was to it at the start, Mark found himself with no other choice but to hunch down into the grass with Chenle, who plucked at weeds and told him about the others on their street. Jaemin, slightly strange but very sweet and his mom makes the best Thanksgiving turkey he’d ever eaten. Renjun, lives a bit further down but he always goes to China every summer and gets them all treats. Sooyoung, Sehun, Yukhei, Yerim. Donghyuck.

“Donghyuck lives the closest to you after me,” Chenle had noted. “He’s a bit of a prankster. I think you’ll get along well with him, though.”

Mark did, but probably not in the way Chenle was expecting, close friends who walk to school hand in hand and tutor each other on the weekends. Mark tried but he wasn’t really into holding hands or tutoring, he needed something meaner, more rough around the edges, something — anything — that would make him bleed like a bitch. Like the bitch he was, the bitch he still is.

Chenle has a way of knowing things, he knew things when he was eight and twelve and he knows things now when he’s twenty-four. A Geiger-Muller counter picking up on the background radiation. 

So Mark caves, hands hugging his coffee cup, the liquid inside already lukewarm, cold by the time he’s done explaining himself. It’s not his fault Donghyuck looks like that all the time, he justifies. It’s not his fault Mark is a fucking idiot when it’s late. If anything, it might just be Chenle’s fault for not dragging him back inside the second he offered to walk him home, because Chenle knows better than anyone how stupid an idea it is to let the two of them be alone. 

Chenle accepts these slanderous accusations with grace. No one can save Mark from spiralling.

He does, however, apologize. “I should’ve told you he was here.” His lips are a line on his face, actually shameful for once. A shiver runs down Mark’s spine when he adds, “Or maybe I just shouldn’t have let him in?”

“It’s fine, really.” Secretly, or not so secretly since Chenle kind of has a way of knowing things, Mark is eternally grateful that he didn’t turn him away. He slams his forehead against the granite. “Chenle, I’m fucked, aren’t I? Absolutely, completely, royally fucked, right?”

He doesn’t have to look up to know that Chenle is nodding but he does anyway, just in case. Mark releases a loud sigh and knocks his forehead against the kitchen counter again, letting Chenle’s rhythmic patting of his back numb the impact pain.

The thing about summer in Maryland is that it doesn’t ever really start or end. One day snow is pouring endlessly from the heavens and suddenly it’s not and Mark never knows what to do. He can’t remember the last time it felt like spring in March, can’t remember the last time their yellow flights survived the April heat.

Peonies are summer flowers, though; start flowering at the end of May and thrive in the boiler that is Bethesda. Of course, Mark only knows this because Chenle had been droning on about it around this time last year. A new regular at his store seemed hellbent on growing them in his yard, so he experimented with some seeds and helped the guy out.

Mark now knew this regular as Park Jisung, moved into the town maybe two years ago, into a house a little further down the street from Mark’s own. They might’ve crossed each other a few times, the name seems familiar enough to him, but that isn’t saying much when you live on a ten-person street.

Park Jisung gets frequent maintenance for his Lexus. He drives back and forth between D.C. and here so he’s got to make sure it’s in good shape, so says Johnny. Mark doesn’t exactly know what that means but he’s not really tempted to get lectured by Johnny about diagnosing car issues.

So Mark knows that Park Jisung moved to Beach Street maybe two years ago, has been growing peonies in his yard every summer with Chenle’s help, and lives only a few houses down from Mark’s. He knows that Park Jisung drives back and forth between Bethesda and D.C. so he’s got to keep his Lexus in good condition and he does, he gets it maintained frequently.

See, Mark does know things about his neighbors.

What Mark did not know for the longest time is that Park Jisung, the fucking bastard, is Donghyuck’s second or third or fourth cousin, has been his cousin for all twenty-three years of his life. Mark doesn’t know much about Donghyuck’s family, only ever greeted his mother and father and occasionally grandparents when they came to visit, so it really isn’t surprising that he didn’t know.

Still. It’s annoying. Mark thinks, with his luck, he’ll definitely be running into one of the two every time he steps out of the house and, with his wit, he’ll be making a fool out of himself again. It’s annoying, but it’s twice as frustrating. Mark thinks he’ll never ever leave this spot on his couch now. He doesn’t look half bad cooped up in this corner.

It really is unfortunate to Doyoung that he won’t be writing anything for the rest of the summer. Probably the rest of forever, for as long as Donghyuck is here and just out of reach. Mark can close his eyes and draw like Michelangelo with the specks of color on the inside of his eyes, The Creation of Adam on his eyelids, hesitant hands, never touching. 

So he holes himself up under a sheet on the couch, sunlight filtering through the windows and hitting his eyes in ways that disrupt his dreams. He slings an unsleeved arm over his face and lets the skin shield swallow the violence of the sun as he floats in and out of consciousness. Mark has a feeling he’s going to dream of Donghyuck, of peonies, of high school, or some combination of the three. 

The soft click of the door and the sound of shoes being kicked off make him stir, arm still limp over his face. The position of the sun shifts significantly when afternoon hits, enough that it’s recognizable even to a half-asleep Mark. Slowly, he lifts off the couch and follows the sound of Chenle’s footsteps to the kitchen.

Another unproductive day. It’s hitting him that that’s all he’s going to have for the rest of his life. He has to face it, him and Doyoung both, the fact that he’s never going to write again. And even though Donghyuck is back, now that Mark is surging with love so intense it’s almost bursting from his fingertips, he still can’t find it in him to translate that into words.

Mark is always at a loss for words and it’s always been a problem but now it’s starting to register.

He thinks it started maybe when he was in high school and he would fight with his mom, rather, she would bombard him with a barrage of insults that he couldn’t even begin to comprehend in his blitzed state. And because she wasn’t the type to believe in freedom, the tongue-lashings only got more frequent as he got older. His mom had probably stolen all the words right from his mouth by the time she left.

So Mark has unproductive days, buckets of them, and everybody knows it. He goes out sometimes to buy groceries and take his walks and visit Johnny on the other side of town. He slows his pace when he sees peonies and hastens when they’re out of sight but he really shouldn’t.

Mark and Chenle have a visitor.

The only visitors Mark and Chenle ever get are Johnny, the recycling guy, and the somewhat recent addition of Jaemin. It makes sense, Mark’s probably the town’s most dysfunctional member that isn’t yet senile, and whoever wants to see Chenle can just do it at his workplace. 

But today they have a visitor, or something like one. Mark, who had pushed aside the curtains in the living room just a moment ago, stares outside the window, squinting at the figure hovering by their driveway.

Bright red camisole on flared jeans, long black hair pulled into space buns at her sides. Mark thinks she looks familiar but he can’t quite remember where he knows her from. He waits patiently for Chenle to finish dumping miscellaneous items into his bag, opening the door to the girl only upon Chenle’s leaving.

Her eyebrows fly up, avoiding Mark’s eyes, clearly caught by surprise. 

“Yizhuo?” Mark asks, finally recognizing his previous underclassman. For a second, the space between them is all high school, all Mark visiting her mom’s library and helping out, all her telling him that her parents don’t think he’s a good influence anymore. 

She laughs awkwardly, fiddling with the sides of her jeans and scratching an itch in her scalp. Mark conceals a smirk when he invites her inside.

“I know you might not want to, but please hear me out,” she says all too quickly. “The library — maybe you don’t want to hear about it, but it’s urgent, I swear — we were supposed to have an event, and so many schools are coming, and my mom — she really has been sorry these past years about what she said, by the way — but we can’t — and pardon my language — fuck this up, Mark, we can’t.” All in one breath, and Mark counts. 

“Slow down,” he directs. “I don’t get it.”

She nods, sipping the cup of water so that it leaves a clouded stain. She tries again: “We were going to host schools from all over the county at the library tomorrow afternoon. It was going to be a big thing, really. The biggest thing we’ve ever done. But the guest author, that scum, he cancelled on us.” She takes a pause, a longer one, probably to gauge Mark’s expression. Then, “I know you must be mad about… everything, and you have every right, but could you please…?”

She doesn’t finish the sentence but Mark doesn’t need her to. Could you please fill in for the real author we wanted?

Yizhuo’s mom was always nice when they were friends in school, always thought Mark was a good role model for her daughter with the grades and the tennis and the taking care of his mother. She was a bit iffy about some of the other kids on the block, but she always had good things to say about Mark. Her husband wasn’t too different either, always started up a conversation with him when they ran into each other and welcomed him to their library.

He wasn’t sure when their minds changed, but he couldn’t really find it in himself to be mad at them. What kind of parent would want their kid to be talking to a kid who they caught hotboxing behind a pawn shop with his friends?

So Mark stopped frequenting the library, stopped making conversation with Yizhuo’s dad, stopped accepting small Tupperware containers from her mom. He stopped greeting Yizhuo when he saw her around, not that he did very often after going into high school. And that was that. 

Mark doesn’t realize he’s been silent until Yizhuo continues, “My parents didn’t understand back then, uh, everything that was going on with you.” 

“Yeah, it’s whatever. Most people didn’t,” he affirms, waving it off. There wasn’t anything to understand, though, he was just sixteen and acting up. 

“I really do feel bad,” she promises, balling her fingers into tight fists resting on her knees. “And nothing you ever did could change their mind that your book was… really, really good.”

He nods. He knew that one. “That’s why they let my ass lecture some eleven year old. And I guess that’s what you want me to do again?”

She sighs with her whole body, face scrunching up, shoulders dropping. “Just come over later today if you’re up to it. If not, well, so be it.” She stands up to take her leave, hair slightly undone and bouncing behind her. 

Mark’s mouth opens when the front door does. He doesn’t know if she hears him when he calls “I’ll be there” weakly. But she pauses for a second before he hears it click into place, her presence immediately replaced by the perceivable lack of it.

Mark dips his head into his hands and massages his forehead. He can already feel the headache he’s going to have when he comes back tonight.

In the month that Mark got published, he was just about sure that nobody on Beach Street had actually read the book; at least, no one who was congratulating him on it. Not until Yizhuo’s mom asked him if he’d be willing to do a talk with some of the middle schoolers in the library that he’d effectively been kicked out of for being a junkie.

“It was a….” She had paused, a pause so long that Mark remembers wondering if she was going to continue at all. She looked away from him, as if she didn’t even want to think about him despite approaching him first. “I think it’ll stick with me for a long time,” she decided in the end.

Mark doesn’t remember what his face looked like in that moment but he remembers feeling, maybe for the first time, what Doyoung described as recognized. She didn’t bother saying it was beautiful or well-written or extremely interesting or other things that Mark knew it wasn’t. He didn’t know what it was but it felt like maybe someone on Beach Street had read his work.

Anyways, Mark accepted her invitation. Maybe he’s just the kind of person that can’t turn people down and it’s only so often someone asks him for a favor anyway, or maybe he was just feeling extra kind or super bored, or maybe he just wanted an excuse to not be at home anymore. Whatever it was, he accepted. And now that he thinks about it, that might’ve been the last time he saw Yizhuo’s parents properly.

So, now Mark gets to see what seven years of Bethesda look like on someone that’s not himself. He pushes open the library doors and lets the cool wave of the AC blow over him, winding out the sweat his shirt collected on the walk over. He scans the various sections on the way to the front desk, studying how the collection has grown.

Yizhuo’s father stopped working at the front desk a while back, he realizes as he approaches the cozy corner in which a man with soft brown hair is tucked behind. Mark recognizes Renjun in a heartbeat. The clicks on his mouse sound like bombs in the silence of the environment. A taller guy is leaning against the wood, voice barely audible but clearly saying something. He turns around when Mark is close enough for them to notice.

Mark frowns. Pitch black hair, pale skin, dark denim jacket with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Hand the size of someone who drives a Lexus to Washington and back frequently.

He shifts his attention away, refocusing back on Renjun. “Oh, hey,” he says, immediately breaking out into a smile when he notices Mark standing a decent distance away from them.

“Is… Yizhuo here?” he asks awkwardly, fiddling with the hem of his shirt.

Renjun straightens his expression, but there’s still something endearing in his eye. Mark tries to ignore it and forget anything about their plans to renovate the abandoned convenience store into a Chinese food place. “They’re on a short restock trip right now,” he explains. “The guys will help you out. Don’t worry, they know what they’re doing.” He laughs again with a certain lightness Mark isn’t sure he could replicate in his life.

“Hi,” says Jisung, hand hovering in a shy wave. “Mark, right?” He waits for a nod, then leans down and picks up a basket with a bunch of books dumped in them, leading him to an inner room of the library.

“Are we doing it over here?” Mark asks, inspecting his surroundings. Wooden furniture is decorated with multicolored sidepieces and shelves of books spanning genres, lengths, and authors.

Jisung dumps the basket on a desk alongside a few similar ones and dusts his hands off. “Ah, I guess she didn’t explain it in too much detail?” He pauses again and Mark nods, so he continues with a shy, reserved smile. He  talks, and Mark is listening, he really is, but his eyes keep flickering down to the sag in Jisung’s trackpants, the dark black fading into a reddish-brown at the edges, folding up at the base of his Nikes.

“Is everything okay?” he asks.

Mark looks up immediately. He’s about to say Yeah, sorry, my bad or something else like that. But — it’s automatic, knee-jerk reflex — “You’re Donghyuck’s cousin, right?” comes out instead, and Jisung almost looks taken aback for a second, but he recovers quickly.

“Well, cousin is a bit of a stretch, but yeah, we’re related,” he admits. Mark files this information away for later, looking back at the younger boy.

Jisung looks like there are words at the tip of his tongue and he’s not sure whether he should say them or not. Mark wants to tell him to spit it out and make it quick, rip the band-aid off. Mark can handle it, he can handle anything, he’s not a baby. He spent two whole days in LA, and if that didn’t kill him, and sixteen years in Beach Street didn’t kill him, then nothing that comes from Park Jisung’s mouth can kill him.

But maybe it can. “I’ve heard a lot about you from him,” he says, obviously hesitating.

Mark pauses. “What… does he say?” he asks tentatively. He’s not really sure if he wants to know but he asks anyway.

A complicated expression appears on Jisung’s face. “Ah, that —” 

“What are you gossiping about now?”

Mark is almost caught off guard when Donghyuck’s voice slices clearly through their quiet conversation. Almost. He doesn’t immediately turn to face him, lets his memory fill in the gaps of his face. Tanned skin and pink lips wet with spit, dark hair sweeping over his forehead.

“Nothing, sorry…,” Jisung trails off, scratching the back of his head and fiddling with the arrangement of some of the books, probably trying to avoid dealing with Donghyuck’s annoyance at being exposed.

Mark knows the feeling. Ignoring his fits just because he was too tired to deal with it again, looking away, falling asleep to the sound of his shouting. It felt like puberty had never hit anyone as hard as it had Donghyuck and the thought sends shivers down Mark’s back.

He doubts it feels anything like that for Jisung, though. But he knows the feeling, kind of.

Donghyuck waves his cousin over and whispers something that sounds all too much like a threat, if Mark knows him at all, before waving him off just as easily to help organize the new stock of books that had just come in. He takes in a deep breath and stretches, shirt sliding off his shoulder slightly. A few years ago Mark would’ve tackled him, pushed him against the door and stayed there for a disgustingly long time. He doesn’t, but just because you don’t do something doesn’t mean you don’t think about it. 

“I didn’t know you worked here,” he says, attempting to make small talk.

“Just helping out last minute,” he brushes it off. “You too, I’m assuming?”

Mark chuckles. “How’d you know?”

“Well, I did drive down to the nearest big city to get, like, a million copies of your book.” Not a hint of the awkwardness Mark had expected is to be found in his voice. “Kind of expected this was a spur of the moment arrangement.” He points to the baskets behind them when Mark gives him a confused look, each of them filled with copies and copies of the familiar cover. He didn’t realize there were so many intricacies to the book cover. He doesn’t think he ever looked at it properly.

Mark inspects them carefully from a distance and doesn’t even feel Donghyuck’s gaze following him. He has gotten out of the habit of perceiving Donghyuck, of recognizing his presence seconds before he actually makes himself known. Not that he’s outgrown it, maybe just forgotten with time. He’s willing to relearn.

Donghyuck turns to leave, saying something about helping Jisung with the setting up outside. One hand on the wood frame, holding it out so he could get through, a sneaker fully on the dark gray carpet outside. Going, going, gone. Not if Mark could help it.

“Wait,” he says, freezing when Donghyuck actually stops. 

Mark sees wars worth fighting and empires worth saving in his eyes, sees violence and allows it to exist. If Chenle was the kind of boy you went to war and died for, Donghyuck was the kind of boy you developed weapons for, blew up the whole universe for. The Chinese fire lance, the Gatling gun, a shotgun warm in his hands, full with pistols. All that’s left is to shoot. 

“Can we, um, talk?” Mark shoots, albeit weakly. 

Donghyuck catches the bullet right in his hands. “Now? We’re on the clock, though,” he notes, looking all around them. At the wood, at the books, at the carpeted floor. As if any of it means anything to Mark, any of it besides him. “How about” — he draws out the word infuriatingly — “we go for dinner after this?” 

His words are low, barely a whisper, but still pleading with his tone. Mark knows exactly how that sounds on him and it always, at least when they were younger, ended with them, a sticky, tangled mess of bodies. When he couldn’t form words Donghyuck could just as well argue with his insistent moans against Mark’s hand. 

Donghyuck could build a bomb just by himself if he wanted to but he really doesn’t. He’s not violent by nature, not really. Knowing how to fight back and hit hard doesn’t make you violent as much as it does in need of protecting, Mark thinks, but maybe that’s just him.

People are a testament to the history that is not worth writing down or erecting statues for, Mark thinks. Donghyuck is a living, breathing reminder of the history that ended decisively but not entirely. Mark is not a big risk-taker but he is a writer, kind of, and he should see things through to the end.

“Just us?” he clarifies. “There’s… things I want to say.”

Donghyuck smirks a bit but doesn’t push it. “Of course, Mark.” 

In the time Mark takes to decide if he’s even more in love than he was as a teenager, Donghyuck closes the door and takes his leave.

And, despite what it looks like, Mark is also here to get some work done. Jisung and another library helper Mark doesn’t remember seeing before assist him in the flow of events tomorrow. They run him through a list of things they’ll be doing. It goes in one ear and out the other but he doesn’t bother asking again.

Mark is not, by any means, used to this. The closest he might’ve come was the online interview he did for some magazine’s Recently Published section. Interacting with a real crowd is a different thing altogether, requires more skill than Mark has. It’s more suited for someone like Sungchan, who published two books already, or better yet Yuta, who already knows just how to present in front of people.

He doesn’t say this out loud, of course. There’s not really anyone else they could have asked, and it obviously took a lot of balls on Yizhuo’s part as well as her parents having to concede their library to Mark. Not that they ever really kicked him out explicitly. Just exercised the same caution everybody in that place did, the kind anyone would do if they didn’t want their family sullied by someone like him.

Now that he thinks about it, the reasoning is nothing short of absurd and egotistical. To assume that someone is capable of ruining you, Mark thinks, is to assume that you haven’t yet ruined yourself. It’s conceited to want to save yourself. 

But maybe that’s just Mark, because people do it anyway. People do plenty of things regardless of what Mark thinks about it. 

Exhibit A being Donghyuck, of course. After Mark is done awkwardly catching up with Yizhuo’s family and trying to ignore the obvious pity in their handshakes and stares, he finds Donghyuck engrossed in conversation with Renjun at the front desk. From what he can make out, he’s telling him about how he feels Beach Street hasn’t changed at all, but there’s so many new faces, so many more kids, and he used to be that young here too. 

Mark shudders at the thought of Donghyuck being one of those boys in the field, shirt wet with sweat and slung over a bench, instead of in Mark’s room late at night with the door locked behind him. He thinks he might throw up. 

Renjun says something and taps Donghyuck’s wrist, directing him towards Mark with a small smile. Mark hopes he’s not staring but Donghyuck’s jeans are ripped by his knee and the shirt he’s wearing is too big for him so Mark can see his collarbone and Mark, Mark is just a man and not a particularly strong one. The sight of him could make anyone melt on the spot but Mark is not just anyone, he’s a bomb and he’s about to explode. 

He thinks he really does when Donghyuck approaches him, saying bye to Renjun as he walks, smile only growing bigger. He pretends he doesn’t but Mark notices the unmistakable way in which Donghyuck almost links their arms together instinctively and then doesn’t, looking down the whole way outside. Awkward. But somehow still familiar. 

Mark wants to hug him until his body has imprints in the shape of Mark’s hands, wants to kiss him until he bleeds from the gums. Remind him that there was a reason, no matter how much Donghyuck shouted at him and threatened to leave, he always found his way back into Mark’s arms, his rightful spot next to Mark. 

But Mark is civil, somewhat, so he tries to push these thoughts away and appreciate that this is really happening. That he just spent a whole afternoon talking to Park Jisung, who really wasn’t as much of a brat as Mark would’ve expected of someone related to Donghyuck, and that he agreed to being a guest author. That he’s getting dinner with Donghyuck and maybe they’ll talk about whatever the fuck happened back then.

But even if they don’t, it’s fine. Even if it just ends with Mark dropping Donghyuck to his porch again, waving goodbye, not knowing anything, it’s fine. Mark isn’t that curious of a person anyways. 

He shoots Chenle a text that he won’t be back until after dinner so go ahead and eat without him or invite a friend over. The immediate thumbs up reaction he sends back means Mark has to prepare for an interrogation when he gets home. 

“So,” he says finally, turning to look at Donghyuck watching the clear sky with a blank expression, still bright at seven-thirty. He isn’t sure where to start. “You up for some vending machine pizza?”

Donghyuck grins. “I never say no to vending machine pizza.”

Few things had changed on Beach Street since Donghyuck left, the vending machine filled with microwaveable pizza included. It was something of a staple for them anytime they drove around this side. Buy two pizzas, one pepperoni and one plain cheese, split them down the center and join them, eat one in the parked car behind a shady store, and bring the leftovers back for their friends the next day. One look at Donghyuck tells Mark that his pizza preference hasn’t changed over time.

Donghyuck assures Mark that Jisung won’t mind them using his car, that’s the whole reason he told him to leave it behind, plus he’s probably roaming around and exploring this side of town. He climbs into the driver side with a youthful edge Mark never thought he’d see again, pushing open the door to the passenger seat from the inside.

Donghyuck’s hands are tight on the steering wheel, Mark watches. He hums a tune quietly, the only sound filling up the claustrophobic atmosphere of the car. Mark stares outside of the window, stares at the road, the trees, the dust being kicked up by the wheels, anywhere that’s not Donghyuck. He is filled with the kind of dread someone would have if they knew they were about to commit a crime. That may be, in part, because everything to do with Donghyuck feels illegal to Mark. 

They pop their cash into the machine and listen closely for the sound of the convection oven starting. Leaning in to hear the click against the wind, faces a bit too close and position slightly compromised if you look from far away. Obviously, none of it means anything, but Mark has to conceal a smile on his face when he sees Donghyuck, eyes closed, wholly dedicated to catching the sound.

But, Mark realizes, no one is looking. The road by where they are standing is deserted, them and Jisung’s car and the machine the only real inhabitants in this area. The kind of place known only to the owner and kids who wasted time in this spot behind the diner. 

He’s seventeen again, a pack of cigarettes warm in his pocket, one hand clenching the lighter tightly. Smoke blows from all sides of him, twirling around into long chains before flying up, up, up. Cigarettes in one hand and a shotgun in the other, Mark has to make a choice. To die happy or quickly, he’s got to make a choice.

The oven makes a ding sound and pushes out a tray, causing them both to startle. Donghyuck recovers first, scooping it up onto a box and watching for the second one. Mark follows, maintains his distance this time, grabbing a stack of tissues from the side and helping move everything into the car carefully. He can be a gentleman too.

Donghyuck tears the pizza down the middle and surgically attaches them together, pulling at the cheese immediately. He takes a big bite and, mid-chew, says, “Are you good, Mark?”

It shouldn’t feel like a loaded question but somehow it does. It feels like being at the counselor’s office, being told there are no wrong answers but Mark isn’t stupid and he knows there definitely are. “Same as always,” he shrugs off, biting into a slice with pepperoni. He chews, lets the silence settle around them. Then, slowly, “You can… explain when you’re ready.” He uses Donghyuck’s words from that night, trying not to sound too pushy.

The statement seems to catch Donghyuck off guard. He lets himself swallow before he opens his mouth, but even when he does, it feels like he’s half unsure of what he’s saying. “Oh. I’ve, uh, been getting better. You know?”

He can’t say he does, but he squints and Donghyuck searches for nonexistent stains on his shirt, so maybe he can make a guess. 

Still, he doesn’t dare speak. Doesn’t think this is the kind of thing he’s allowed to speak about. Sometimes he closes his eyes and still sees Donghyuck with red peppering his eyes, laying next to him, still as a dead man, not ready to talk yet, to talk at all. He shudders every time the image crosses his mind.

Mark’s become a cautious man now, he knows exactly when he’s allowed to speak and when he’s not. Or maybe he still doesn’t know and has just become better at staying quiet. 

“Do you remember when I first told you?” Donghyuck asks, extra quiet now, lips forming a small pout against the dough. 

Mark raises an eyebrow in surprise. “About the…?”

He nods. “Yeah, that.” A deep breath. 

Mark shouldn’t be too sure but there’s not many things that leave Lee Donghyuck this wordless. He can make a list: his elementary school teacher’s leaving party, Thanksgiving dinners with the community, kisses on the collarbone, his doctors, the condition he swears — swore? — he doesn’t have, never had, won’t have.

He winces. Mark used to think that his discomfort for this topic had slowly faded with time, but clearly not. He half expects Donghyuck’s expression to be the same, uncomfortable, unbelieving one it was seven years ago. But it’s not, just completely blank; he looks ahead at the view of small, closed-down shops.

Mark is too tense to even chew. He doesn’t know what Donghyuck is thinking and that is so, so new to him. Donghyuck stares outside the windshield, letting strings of cheese dribble down to his shirt, his jeans, one fat glob falling slack on his thigh.

Mark doesn’t think, he just moves. Pulls a tissue from the side of him and reaches out but then all too suddenly his hands feel at home. He tries to complete the action naturally but Mark is a man, not particularly strong, and a complete and utter pervert. He drops the tissue on Donghyuck’s lap, pulling his own hand away.

Donghyuck’s eyes follow Mark’s hand until they ball up into fists and he ignores it. Opens his mouth to try and revert the conversation. Searches for words, tries to make them up. There is nothing. Mark is filled with things to say but no way to get them out. He closes his mouth.

“Why did you kiss me that day?” Donghyuck says more than asks, sending back any of the neurons that were working to form syllables in Mark’s mouth.

Mark can be a bitch. He has it in him, he does. He could say: When exactly, because  I kissed you loads of times. I kissed you every time you asked. I kissed you when you were high and when you wanted to get high just because you practically begged me every time. I kissed you and fucked up your life because you asked and you let me and why.

Mark could, theoretically, say that but he doesn’t want to be a bitch to Donghyuck. He doesn’t want to hear about how it wasn’t really his fault because he knows it was. It was and it wasn’t. Mark doesn’t know if he blames the disease or the doctor who told him about it. Does a person’s mother or their God have more agency over their failures? Asking Mark is like asking an atheist and an orphan to agree.

“I don’t… I don’t know,” he answers honestly. Mark thinks all the beautiful words were stolen from him, ripped  straight from his bleeding throat. All he has now are maxims, ugly ones that come out in stutters and with stolen glances. 

Donghyuck doesn’t push it; he doesn’t cry, doesn’t shout, doesn’t do anything but nod. His focus shifts to wiping the orange stain off his pants.

“It felt right.”

It’s the kind of thing Donghyuck would say. It’s the kind of thing he probably has said before if Mark searches through his memory. The kind of spontaneous, thoughtless strike that could only be made by someone who doesn’t know better. And yet it escapes Mark’s mouth, comes out in his voice, blade dragging across skin, Mark’s hand at the base of the knife. Sadistic. 

Shotgun or cigarette, Mark chooses the cigarette every time. He lets smoke darken his lungs until they’re the color Donghyuck’s hair was on that boiling summer day when they first met, lets himself turn into paper mâche in Donghyuck’s presence. 

Shotgun or cigarette, Mark chooses whichever one will let him keep Donghyuck with him longer.

“It was unexpected,” Donghyuck notes curtly. All too polite for someone Mark was considering taking to the floor a second ago. 

Mark doesn’t want to think of them as strangers but isn’t that what they are? And if they are, then he’s sitting in a stranger’s car, eating pizza with a stranger, wiping stains off a stranger’s thigh. He’s expecting a stranger to bare his heart to him. And to think Mark thought he was any different from the rest of rotten Americana.

Donghyuck clears his throat. “I’m not saying it was bad.”

When Mark chooses the cigarette, Donghyuck chooses the shotgun, and when Mark takes his time decorating the air with clouds of grey smoke, Donghyuck fires in a hurry, like he’s running out of time, like the rounds will disintegrate if he doesn’t. He doesn’t mean to hurt him, Mark knows it, he just has to shoot somewhere. At someone. And Mark just always happens to be around, just within reach, a magnetic pull on the gunpowder. Mark doesn’t know if Donghyuck loves him from the heart or the muzzle of his gun but he’ll take it either way.

He chuckles, cheekbone lifting visibly. There’s no point pretending it doesn’t phase him when it’s already so obvious. “That’s —”

“I’m not joking.” Of course he’s not. “You, uh, still got it.”

Mark wants to roll his eyes or burst into laughter but instead he does a weird combination of both, his whole head turning like a middle schooler blushing from some low-grade flirting. “Yeah, just like you still got terrible eating etiquette.” He nods to another string of cheese threatening to color Donghyuck’s white shirt a lovely chili oil color.

He makes an annoyed noise. “I thought you out of all people wouldn’t be a priss about dining etiquette.”

“I am when we’re not in my car,” he defends, scarfing down another bite.

“Oh, what’s Jisung of all people going to do if I spill some cheese on his seat? Tell my mommy? Not like we’re fucking in his car.”

Mark pauses, lets silence blanch his brain of the image. “Dude,” he tries. Opens his mouth, licks some tomato sauce off his lips. “We’re eating.”

He nods matter-of-factly, like it was just his intention to say something uncomfortable, like uncomfortable things are the only things he knows how to say. A boy made of ice in the scorching Maryland heat, of course he’s filled with uncomfortable things. “It was just an example.” He shrugs. “Point is, Jisung doesn’t care. He’s got more pressing matters to deal with.”

Mark wonders what kind of busy you have to be to ignore that but maybe that’s just a side effect of being related to Donghyuck. What would he ever know. He just smirks, feeling the tension between them lighten up a little, like climbing down a mountain until the air pressure is low enough that you can speak again. 

“Mark,” Donghyuck says, a little whine in his voice. Like a little boy pleading with his mom for ice cream, like a sixteen year old in Mark’s bed. It makes him want to throw up.

Instead, he guzzles down a bottle of water, raising an eyebrow as a gesture to continue. Mark doesn’t trust his own mouth when he gets too comfortable.

“I’m better now.” He says it with one hand on the steering wheel, fingers drumming rhythmically on the leather, looking expectantly at Mark. “Really better now.”

Mark nods, has nothing better to do. But the disbelief must be clear on his face, because Donghyuck rolls his eyes a little, clearly frustrated. Mark would be frustrated too.

Still, no amount of frustration or insistence on Donghyuck’s part can make him forget that night. Donghyuck on his bed, fiddling with the sheets and the blankets and the pillows, looking everywhere but at Mark. “I have to tell you something,” he had said, inviting Mark to the spot next to him, the only place Mark had ever felt was right for him in his life.

Mark nods, slinging an arm across his back, gesturing for him to continue. Donghyuck looks away, lips barely moving when he speaks.

“I’m seeing a doctor. A real one.” He pauses. Takes a breath. Can’t continue. Continues. “Some fucking… psychologist.” Red in the conjunctiva, blood pooling under the veins. “For, uh, bipolar.” Knife under skin, hand against underwear, Donghyuck on his bed, diagnosed and already dead.

Mark reaches out, holds his hand as if looking for proof that Donghyuck, his Donghyuck, is still there. He squeezes once in return as affirmation then smiles; it feels real but Mark doesn’t know.

He says: “Pretty fucking stupid, right?”

And Mark, Mark doesn’t know how Donghyuck can come to that conclusion, doesn’t think he could ever be stupid, bipolar or not. He tightens his grip around Donghyuck’s hand as if it could hold him down right now and forever.

Mark doesn’t believe in forever places like the Lava Java and the tennis court in Chicago where he played his first set, but he thinks he can believe in forever people like Donghyuck. Forever love like he has for Donghyuck. The kind of love that doesn’t change with time or people or places. The kind of love that’s good and right and enough.

“Not at all,” Mark says, pulling Donghyuck close, closer if that’s possible, bare skin against bare skin. Mark thinks he can touch the red in Donghyuck’s conjunctiva from this distance if he tries but he doesn’t, isn’t much for trying things out. “I already knew you were fucked up the moment we met.”

Mark and Donghyuck would make it work, they always did. Hand on blood, hand as gauze; hand on scar, hand as sleeve. Love as bomb. Mark as Trinity, Donghyuck as Oppenheimer. 

So Mark thought. But here they are, almost seven years later, all blown up, all the uranium and plutonium decayed into something almost harmless. All he can feel now is background radiation. All he can feel now is the expectant, pleading look on Donghyuck’s face. Try as he might Mark can’t ignore the pout settling on his lips, the uneasy tapping of his fingers. Mark is cursed to care about Donghyuck.

“Say something,” Donghyuck says, probably intending to come out confident, but his tone softens and cracks and he’s not so different from the little boy whose tears Mark used to wipe using the sleeve of his going out clothes. “Or do you not believe me?” he almost snaps. “Do you really not?”

Mark knows he can never understand Donghyuck’s frustration of being brushed off over and over again just because he was a little whack in the head. He knows he’ll never have to watch all his friends go on high school trips across the country for school while he’s holed up in someone else’s room, mixing Zyprexa with Benadryl and tobacco and dry swallowing a whole fistful. Mark will never, in his whole entire life, know what it feels like to never be taken seriously and be told it’s the medicine or the mania talking by everyone in his fucking life.

And he can sympathize with Donghyuck for that. But he’s old enough now that he can’t just believe him when he says that he’s better. He’s not freshly twenty and stupid as hell so he can’t just assume that enough time and treatment will make things better. He can’t, no matter how much he wants to.

“You don’t,” Donghyuck decides for himself. He releases a deep, helpless sigh.

“I didn’t say that,” Mark interjects.

“You didn’t say anything,” he hisses back.

“How the fuck am I supposed to say anything to that, Donghyuck?” Mark catches himself snapping but cannot stop. “You want me to sing you a song, do a little dance, and then take you back to my house and suck you off just ’cause you tell me you’re all better now? Yeah, right. Fuck off.” He sucks in a breath as soon as the words leave his mouth, trying to eat them back up, shove them down his throat. He should stitch his mouth together so he can never speak again.

To his surprise, Donghyuck lets out an amused huff, then bursts into a full-blown fit of laughter. Piercing, echoing off the walls of the car. Probably reaches the vending machine outside. “I love that,” he says, and he really looks like he means it. “Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re not as easy as you used to be.”

Mark wasn’t easy, he wants to clarify, he was just weak for Donghyuck. Had no choice but to listen to him, give in to his every demand when he asked and whined and shouted for it. He still is like that a bit but it hasn’t kicked in yet. Mark is still half trying to play the good samaritan.

“But!” Donghyuck declares decisively, full of energy. “I am better. You’ll see.”

Mark doesn’t really know what there is to see. He wonders, he really wonders, if it’s actually possible for Donghyuck to get better. But he shrugs, smiles, lets him have this one. Mark is already getting too comfortable with succumbing. Just one day existing alongside Donghyuck is enough to make him feel younger and foolishly so.

They pack up the leftover pizza and throw it into the back, start up the car and they could easily take the route that reaches their street in twenty minutes but when Mark is with Donghyuck he becomes a tourist in every city and he never knows where to go. He watches outside the windshield, the dark navy finally settling in, silence filling up the car and the whole night. 

Mark pulls down the window and feels the breeze slapping his face like a wake up call, like his mom the night after senior prom when he picked Donghyuck up at seven like a gentleman and didn’t come back at all. She could put two and two together, anyone could, everyone did. What did Mark care, it’s not like a slap or two would change anything about anything.

When Mark thinks of his mother, he thinks creased bedsheets and cold towels on foreheads and lights out and all the pedestal fans on. He thinks going down to the drugstore every Friday to restock and buying a pack of Camels with the change. Seldom does he think about the bursts of energy she summoned to pelt him with words and recap in detail every little thing Beach Street was saying about him. As if he didn’t know already.

He was seventeen. God knows what she expected him to be doing.

They pull over at the frontage by Donghyuck’s house, the petals on the pink flowers closed up now, moon glowing in the sky. Mark had insisted he could make the five house walk from Donghyuck’s but he doesn’t know how he feels about leaving just like this.

In the end, they never talked about anything they were supposed to. Honestly, Mark doesn’t know what he was expecting. He must’ve forgotten who he’s dealing with.

He says his goodnights and see you around, maybes, and does not really look at Donghyuck’s face because Mark doesn’t trust himself anymore. But he does turn back for a moment, smile ripe on his face, when he hears Donghyuck’s voice. 

“It was fun today, Mark!”

And so Mark is seventeen and his mother is going to slap the shit out of him when he comes back home. His God is going to abandon him when he comes home because he’s just undone years of supposed progress, but he doesn’t mind. 

Chenle, surprisingly, isn’t at home when Mark returns so he takes the liberty to take an early rest. It probably wouldn’t be professional to be late at his first job in years. But he wouldn’t know. Mark is new at this kind of thing.

He dreams that night and maybe it was the pizza or the car ride or just Donghyuck, but he really feels like he’s a kid again. He dreams of Donghyuck in his 2016 Toyota Corolla before he rammed the side into the garage door, Donghyuck in his backyard during fall kneeling next to a heap of leaves, Donghyuck in his room, under the porch light, meeting him halfway, in his space, under him, meeting his lips.

Mark dreams in color that night. He dreams like he’s seventeen, like he’s writing a new book. He dreams like a real writer. Mark thinks he might understand now why people say a writer is nothing without a muse.

When Mark sleeps on the bed, Chenle pulls the curtains closed and open every night and morning even though Mark can sleep through all the moon’s light and all the sun’s shine. He stays asleep long enough to miss Chenle both times. He wakes up in the afternoon, blanket kicked off and still all too hot. He’s used to lazy mornings but he supposes he doesn’t have much of a choice today.

He is a bit late. Yizhuo reminds him of this the second his toe crosses the threshold, an admonition he promptly ignores purely because he knows she’s desperate enough to let it go. Besides, she’s busy enough to simply brush him off and direct him to the general direction of some of the other workers. 

He catches Jisung reorganizing some books by the historical non-fiction section. Nuclear Folly, Thirteen Days, One Minute to Midnight. Mark wants to scoff a little too loud for the library but he struggles to find his voice. Instead, he waits until the guy finishes emptying the stack of books from his hands and turns around to face him, flinching a little out of surprise.

Mark raises an eyebrow, concealing a laugh at his clumsiness. Jisung recovers and directs him to the room they were in yesterday, all decorated with a chair set up for him. A seemingly endless bucket containing copies of his book is dumped next to it and Mark is tempted to throw up in it. His mind involuntarily flickers with the thought of Donghyuck carrying a carton of books in his hand and all of a sudden he doesn’t feel so strongly about it.

He wonders where Donghyuck is now, eyes searching the surroundings as he makes his way across the library. He doesn’t miss the way Jisung turns around a couple times, probably immediately able to tell what he’s looking for, depending on how much his cousin told him about the day before.

Mark doesn’t know the extent of their closeness, didn’t even know Park Jisung was a person in Donghyuck’s life until just a few weeks ago, but he can feel things. He can make assumptions. Educated guesses.

“You, uh, might want to reread your book, maybe? Refresh your memory a bit…,” Jisung suggests, awkward as ever. Mark’s starting to see how it’s endearing.

“Did Yizhuo make you say that?” he asks, breaking into a smile at the way Jisung’s face appears to fall. He doesn’t respond directly, only moving his eyes back and forth around the room, scratching his skull. Mark can take a hint. “Never succumb to your employer, Jisung,” he jokes, finally releasing him to return to his actual job.

So now it’s Mark and the book that made his life worth living and worth ending. The book that he doesn’t remember being a love letter as much as a suicide note dressed up. He’s tempted to tear it up and leave this place for good. If he wasn’t kicked out of the place before, he definitely would be now.

But he doesn’t. He closes his eyes and he thinks of uncut grass in the community park, thinks of sitting in a circle with his sixth grade homeroom and playing Chinese whispers in the gentle warmth of the sun before afternoon comes and overwhelms them all. Mark thinks of being one of the kids that don’t run into the shade and let the sun swallow and brand them.

Mark opens his eyes when he hears a knock on the door. The light isn’t quite bright enough to feel like being swallowed by the sun but it’ll do, he supposes.

One of the staff Mark can’t recognize ushers in a group of students, wearing jackets with their school emblems proudly engraved on the back, along with two supervisors, who promptly sit at the back. The kids flood the room, filling the space in like a paint-by-number drawing, the kind of thing only therapeutic to someone already in sound mind.

It feels claustrophobic, like summer always does. Mark draws his lips into a small smirk. Maybe this has always been his calling.

The assistant — Mark learns his name is Jihoon — does most of the introduction, so Mark scans the room. He remembers Jisung telling him yesterday that the kids would take most of the lead so there wasn’t really much for him to mug up. Just know the book and answer from his heart. Or something like that.

“So, we’ll begin taking questions now,” says Jihoon, placing a handheld mic to the side of Mark.

He expects he’ll have to do a good amount of introduction, of egging them on until they develop their own questions, but he doesn’t. The moment Jihoon closes his mouth and steps aside, hands shoot up like blades. Mark can almost hear the sound of them slicing through the air around them.

He points at a girl in the back, hair tied back into a slick ponytail, round glasses low on her nose, the kind that remind him of Doyoung, yellow jacket zipped up all the way to the top so that the slider digs into her neck. She opens her mouth, speaks with all her teeth, “You published this when you were nineteen, right?” Mark nods. “So when did you write it?”

“I finished my first draft when I was maybe eighteen,” he says. “But it technically came out when I was almost twenty.”

“Okay, I have two questions.” She doesn’t wait for Mark to nod this time. “First, when did you find all the time to write this when you were going to school?”

Mark wonders if he should be honest and tell her that school was the least of his concerns when he was eighteen. “I was in college,” he says, “and it was freshman year, so I didn’t have that many classes. I had a lot of time.”

“So when exactly did you send it to the editors?”

“In the summer after that year. Like, during my finals, I guess. But for the record, a friend of mine sent this work to them, and he probably did so way earlier than that.” He wonders if his face shifts at the mention of Yukhei.

She nods, says thank you politely, scribbling something into the notepad resting on her thigh. Hands rise up in Mark’s view again. He picks a boy towards the front this time, sweater taken off and resting in his thigh, revealing a band tee underneath.

“I understand that you wrote this a long time ago,” he observes eloquently. “Could you tell us a bit about what you wanted readers to take away from it then, and how that might’ve changed now?”

Mark hums. “Back then… I was really young, and I wrote a lot. But I never showed anyone specifically what I wrote. They just knew that I wrote something. I don’t think I thought a lot about what someone else would perceive it as because I knew, or I thought, that I was writing for myself. It was more a way for me to process the things that were going on in my life.” He takes a long breath. “Now, I would say there’s no one thing you should definitively catch on from reading it. Death of the author, you know?”

“Is there anything you edited out?” one girl towards the back simply shouts out.

“Yeah, a bunch,” he answers.

“What’s one part you wished you didn’t cut?” another one calls.

He laughs. “The end.” Mark takes a breath, a long one, and with it he takes in hot summer, blood pouring down a wrist like raspberry popsicles color their sticks on a too-hot day. Too hot, like the broke-down bus on the day he was coming back from the tennis tournament in Plano and Donghyuck was probably up waiting. Waiting, like he always was, until he couldn’t anymore. “I wish I didn’t cut the end.”

The kids can see it in his face, he’s sure of it, but maybe they can’t because a child’s stupidity can surprise you. And you can think you know just how stupid a child is, Mark used to, but you don’t, you never fucking do until you’re visiting them in the hospital and you have no words, never have words. And you think maybe if your bus didn’t break down on the way, this could’ve been avoided. You think, maybe if you didn’t make it to the semis and held back the whole team, this wouldn’t have happened. If you were there and knocked the pills out of his hand, if you had sealed the window shut. If you hold on tight enough is it possible to still lose it?

Mark didn’t hold on hard enough, it’s the only explanation. “My draft ended the same way it started.”

With a bomb. A fucking explosion, field covered in blood and pieces of skin. Red hot like the sun up close.

“So… the cancer kills him?” one of the kids asks.

Mark begins a nod. “Yeah.”

“Why?” a girl blurts out. “Why did you write it like that?”

Mark wonders. Why did he choose to write something so horrible, so wicked? “It’s an easy way to end a story when you’re confused,” he decided, even though that was decidedly not the reason.

“Why do you wish you didn’t cut it?” a different boy spits.

Mark wonders if he’s allowed to teach these seventh graders that it’s impossible to recover from certain things, that your hair still smells like trash even when you get your head out of the gutter. He’s about to open his mouth, say this verbatim because someone’s got to teach them eventually, but Jihoon beats him to the mic. He says they’re going to take a break, the kids can get lunch, and come back later for signing. Mark was not aware they were going to have an autograph session but here goes nothing.

Jihoon gives him a look as the kids slowly proceed out of the corner room in an unsettling silence. Mark decides to ignore it, decides to close his eyes and breathe. The tightness in his body doesn’t register until he releases it. 

Yizhuo had definitely chosen the wrong person for the job. Mark can’t sit here and tell these kids about how he used to fantasize about dying and not living and how he still feels the same. How he’s still the same, can’t change, won’t. How the character in his damn book went through heaven and hell and was still the same, but that was the only critique Doyoung had. And Mark trusted Doyoung with his life, more than he trusted his mom or anybody on their block. 

A knock on the door and the subsequent click of it pushing open snaps Mark out of his spiral and he could almost laugh. Of course this would happen to him out of all people. Of course he would stop thinking about Donghyuck and then be face-to-face with him.

Mark can’t say he doesn’t imagine Donghyuck walking into his room and taking up his space like he used to before but this isn’t quite the same. He’s awkward, unfamiliar, a tourist in a city he’s never seen before.

“How are you holding?” he asks, attempting casualness. 

Mark doesn’t respond, doesn’t need to. He can think of precisely one reason why he would be here, and it’s to fix him up. Make him presentable again. Maybe watching them leave in the same car gave the library workers the wrong idea. The plain and simple truth is that Mark’s not ready to talk about this book with anyone, certainly not a bunch of middle schoolers, and least of all Donghyuck.

“Sorry,” he says, stiffening up at the sides. Mark tries not to look at him but his eyes keep on following him, like a car crash you can’t look away from. If Donghyuck is the crash then Mark wants it to happen late at night so his organs can burst outside of anyone else’s sight. No one deserves to see him explode if not Donghyuck. “I’m sorry, Mark.”

The words sound so wrong coming out of his mouth, like stepping into a field of snow and looking up at the sky to find the sun cut in half with molten rock charging towards you at the speed of light. Saying something he should never be saying unless he was paid a million dollars to, and maybe even that wouldn’t be enough. 

He continues, “I’m sorry you had to write about things like that.” And he doesn’t look at his feet but he can’t quite look into Mark’s eyes.

Mark finds his voice hoarser than he remembers it. “‘Things like that?’” he repeats. “Why would you be sorry?” Really, he means, what do you even know about being sorry. “I didn’t write it about you.” 

Donghyuck nods. “But you did write it about something. And I just….” he balls his hands into fists and Mark can picture the half moons being printed into his palms.

“I don’t think we should talk about this right now,” Mark says, standing up, uncertain right down to his knees. He pushes the door shut and even though Donghyuck moves to the side so there’s two more feet between them, it’s negligible. 

Mark can’t feel anything anywhere except for the erratic pulsating under his veins and the throbbing of his heart under his ribcage. Mark can’t see anything except for Donghyuck’s constipated expression and his eyes, those fucking eyes, staining red like a little kid and still facing Mark with too much courage. So much love. Mark has so much love and only the words to describe suffering. It’s a damn good thing they feel the same to him.

Donghyuck’s voice comes out quiet and sulky but Mark can still hear it. “I wasn’t good to you.” 

The Ship of Theseus. If you remove all the original boards, is it still the same ship?

Mark knows mirages and oases and schizophrenia and epilepsy and bipolar and hallucinations. He knows things, and for the things that he doesn’t, he can make assumptions and educated guesses. But this is completely unfamiliar to him: Donghyuck, shoulders stiff, meandering away from him instead of clobbering him, saying all of this. Meaning it. Possibly meaning it.

And if the ship is no longer the same, when did it stop being what it once was?

Mark takes a step or two closer. “You were good enough,” he says, soft and gentle wind against Donghyuck’s flame. “It was good enough for me.”

Tentatively, he takes one of Donghyuck’s hands into both of his own, waiting for him to flick it away or tell him to knock it off but he doesn’t, just lifts up his other hand and grazes the insides of his eyes with it. Mark has so much love he thinks he could melt or explode or both, like a volcano or a geyser or both. He has almost as much anger as he does love but it’s a damn good thing they feel the same to him.

Everything is love. When it comes to Donghyuck, everything is love. His fingers feel small in Mark’s palms, and it is love. His eyes are red with guilt, and it is love. He is here with Mark, in Bethesda, at the Davis Library, acknowledging his shortcomings, saying he’s sorry, and it is love. Seven years later, it is still love.

“M-Mark,” he splutters, usual confidence nowhere to be found. His mouth is open but nothing leaves it, frozen, but Mark knows how to deal with this side of him too. 

He makes a shushing motion. “Don’t,” he directs. “Let’s not talk about it now.” A hand unconsciously runs through his hair, clears away the bangs drooping over his face, his eyes. “And stop crying,” he says with a laugh. He hopes it doesn’t show on his face how smitten he is.

And because Donghyuck always has to have the last word, he says, “Only when you stop writing about boys who want to kill themselves.” 

Mark’s eyebrows jump up. “You read it?” he asked, disbelief in his eyes and nose and mouth. And just about everywhere else possible. 

Donghyuck smirks, about to say something, but a knock on the door cuts him off. Jisung pushes it open, looking at the spot where their hands join with zero subtlety. Mark pulls back reluctantly. 

Jisung says they should go outside for the book signing, that there’s a bigger space, some other stuff that Mark doesn’t care enough to think about. He watches him and Donghyuck haul a basket of books each outside of the room, Jisung directing him over to the opposite side. He makes eye contact with Donghyuck exactly once and his eyes are still glassy but he manages a small smile. 

“Why did you change the ending?” a girl asks, handing a book to Mark.

“My editor didn’t like it,” he responds with a laugh. Then, more seriously, “And it didn’t fit the message I was going for.”

He doesn’t know if that’s a good enough answer but he thinks it’ll do. At the very least, it’s not a lie.

The other kids ask him questions and talk casually to him and Mark, despite how overwhelmed he felt mere moments ago, feels a wave of calm rush over him. He’s out of practice with his signature, he notices quickly enough, but after the first twenty or so kids, he gains momentum and speeds up. He gets more time to look at each of the students and talk to them, all aspiring writers like he once was, the kind Bethesda loves so much. He hopes they don’t end up like him. 

He doesn’t even feel the time passing until the two supervisors that accompanied the students organize them up and start sending them to their buses. They thank him for his insights, and Mark wonders how they can hold back their curses for instilling such hopelessness in their students. But maybe this was to be expected.

Yizhuo, unfortunately, did not think so. The second they leave, she approaches him and attempts a forehead flick, which he swerves away from smoothly. “Why would you say all that? All that depressing shit….” She palms her forehead with her hand, frustration red like the blush on her cheeks. 

He just laughs with his whole chest. “I told you I was the wrong choice for this shit.” He really was. He wonders what those thirteen-year-olds will think when they read it for the first time, what their parents will say when they find out what they’re reading, what the psychologists will do when they realize they’re enjoying it. But what does it matter to him. 

“Thank you for doing this,” she says honestly. “My parents are really —”

“Don’t,” he cuts her off with a wave of the hand. “Let’s just forget about it, okay? The past is in the past and all. Your parents are good people. Don’t let them feel sorry to me for too long.” 

She gives him a small smile as he turns to gather his things. Then, her voice calls out again, barely audible, “You’re a good person too, Mark.”

He laughs, bitterly this time. Maybe he is, maybe twenty-six year old Mark Lee is a good person. He’s eating three meals every day and he goes outside for a walk every day and he does his chores and he writes maybe a paragraph every day, and that might just be good. But nineteen year old Mark Lee was a bitch, a weed stinking, mother failing, boy kissing, college failing, suicide writing bitch. And he was not a good person by any standards but he was the best he’s ever been.

So if twenty-six year old Mark, a good person, still wants to go back to nineteen knowing all this, then he is not really a good person. He’s rough around the edges, a molecule waiting to complete reaction, and the summer heat might be enough to catalyze his destruction. Mark Lee at twenty-six is no better of a person because he locks eyes with Donghyuck in the back of the library scanning some books and even though it’s been so fucking long he does it automatically. 

Mark Lee is a terrible person, he really is, but Donghyuck makes him feel like he doesn’t have to be better. 

There is a space right in the middle of summer, about two months long, where school’s out and sunflowers grow the best and Mark and Donghyuck are the same age. It’s catastrophic. Every year, it’s a fucking mess of elementary schoolers all over the place riding their scooters and skateboards and bikes and breaking their noses and arms and legs. 

Mark can’t stand all of summer, but he especially detests this part. He is a book of memories that can’t help but get flicked open when this kind of weather comes around.

Mark’s room, night of Donghyuck’s fifteenth birthday. A little under two months for them to both be fifteen. Donghyuck’s parents threw him a party, with a movie and cake and the whole damn neighborhood in their backyard, Mark had to double-check if he was turning fifteen or seven. He outgrew movies and cakes a long time ago.

But he was nice about it, never let show on his face that he was waiting until everyone got tired and went home. He accepted all the wishes and the presents with a gentle smile, games he’d probably never touch and books he wouldn’t read if he had the time. Donghyuck was good like that, willing to put up with it.

Mark’s room, Donghyuck on the bed, always room for one more. Not really. But they didn’t mind. Donghyuck with his eyes, red eyes, about to combust. Any time now. Occasionally Mark thinks he kissed away the violent parts of him, hard enough for it to go away a while. Hard enough to make him cry.

Mark’s room, fifteen and fifteen, kissing on the mouth and chewing on the lips until they were pink and battered. Bodies pressed against each other under the buzzing AC, cold and hot and hot and cold. Donghyuck in Mark’s sweater, smoking his cigarette, stronger than his usual. It’s going to make him cry but maybe that’s not so bad. Mark wants to drink the tears right out of him.

Chenle is helping Jisung grow sunflowers in his yard now, helping him on the weekends and leaving Mark to literally die of boredom because Johnny’s doubly occupied now that moms are driving their kids all around the city and breaking their cars and motorbikes. Doyoung calls sometimes but never pushes him, in fact, he doesn’t even talk about writing until Mark brings it up first. And Mark is grateful but he’s really not used to being babied like this.

“Just come with me,” Chenle says for the umpteenth time, only this time it’s more a demand than a suggestion. His arms are crossed and a big blue IKEA bag dumped next to him is filled with dirt and seeds and whatnot. 

“Who do you think I am?” he responds in mock disbelief.

“Probably a better gardener than Jisung,” he spits out immediately. Mark had failed to process how close they had gotten through this whole gardening thing. “Plus, the others are going to be there too. Jaemin and Jeno and….” He trails off, letting Mark’s memory fill in the gaps. 

Mark wonders if Donghyuck still has violence left in him for Mark to kiss and bite and chew and pick at. He doesn’t know if he wants the answer to be yes or no and he’s so scared of seeing him again and finding out. 

“That’s the problem, dude,” he says, sitting up on the couch all of a sudden. “I can’t act like a normal fucking person when I see him. I literally become a monster. A gross, perverted, mildly suicidal monster. And none of that is an exaggeration.”

Chenle rolls his eyes at his dramatics and reaches over the table for his visor. “Suit yourself,” he finally agrees. “But you’re never going to be able to survive Jaemin’s wedding if you can’t look at Donghyuck without becoming a — what was it? — ‘gross, perverted, suicidal monster’? Yeah, good luck.”

Fuck. Mark had completely forgotten that was going to happen this month. God, he could actually die. 

He groans audibly to make Chenle stop in his tracks. He puts down a water bottle he was lifting from the table and looks at Mark, already exhausted from his antics. 

“It’s almost his birthday soon…,” Mark observes absentmindedly, almost about to lean back before he notices Chenle starting to pack up again. “Okay, okay, fine, I’ll go. Jeez. You’re so demanding.”

“I didn’t say anything.” But he pulls Mark up with one hand and begins handing him small bags to hold, preparing him for the ten minute walk in the heat.

The sun is a big balloon over their heads, straight out of a movie scene or the insides of a writer’s brain. The peonies in Jisung’s yard are still thriving, a gorgeous pink and Mark is seriously trying to focus on them. Because mere centimeters away is Donghyuck, chiding Renjun for something, kneeling down into the sharp blades of uncut grass, wearing shorts loose enough to bunch at his thighs and a white tee so big it sags into the dirt.

“I brought a guest,” Chenle says, patting Mark on the back so forcibly that he takes it as more of a warning than an introduction. “And the stuff we need. Mark, go help Renjun with this strip. And are those two not here yet?”

Mark thinks Chenle will never truly know the respect he has for him. To be so sure in what you do, to never have to call and check in with anybody, to have the ability to enclose your passion within your wrist and carry it with you, Mark doesn’t think he can do that. He takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but he is still left with the river. He takes his sadness and throws it away but he is still left with his hands. 

Mark doesn’t know if he’s made entirely of love or sadness because they feel the damn same to him. He doesn’t know if he looks at Donghyuck and feels love or sadness. He kneels down next to Renjun somewhere he can’t look at Donghyuck at all, grass poking through his sweats, listening closely to Chenle’s directives. 

And Mark is terrible at this kind of dirty work, but he slaps a pair of gardening gloves onto his hands and begins digging up the frontage. They work the soil until their hands and knees and behinds hurt, until Renjun remembers that he forgot to wear sunscreen, until Jeno shows up with a case of jelly donuts and everyone could use a fucking break so they strip the gloves and go inside. Jaemin shows up a little later and slides comfortably next to Jeno like it’s the only spot he ever considered sitting in. 

And Mark swears he’s not usually this awkward but when Donghyuck appears out of the kitchen and sits next to him casually, hands him a drink casually, just looks like that casually, Mark knows he’s a goner. Now would be a good time for him to get struck by lightning and die.

“By the way, Mark,” Renjun says, snapping him out of his thoughts and making him realize he’s been quiet for the past ten minutes. “You were so good last week. Really, I had a parent come to the library and tell me that they liked your book so much.” 

His eyes widen. “Really? That’s… fucking weird.”

Chenle rolls his eyes. “You always say that when someone says your work is good.” Then, to Jisung and Jeno specifically, “I tried to read it sneakily so many times, but he just wouldn’t let me.” 

“It’s really not worth reading, that’s why,” he says. “I should’ve killed everyone off, honestly.”

“You did,” Donghyuck intervenes. “Didn’t you? Except for the main kid, which is weird as hell by the way. Everyone dies except for the guy who’s terminal?” He says it so casually while taking a bite out of his donut, like it’s the most obvious thing ever.

“I was going for some kind of dramatic irony,” he defends halfheartedly. 

“You let him read it?” Chenle says, circling back to Donghyuck’s words. “You’re a crazy force of nature.”

Donghyuck makes a mocking face at him, then straightens it before saying, “He didn’t let me read anything. I was just there when he was writing it. Remember?” Mark almost thinks it’s the truth but he knows how smoothly Donghyuck can lie and the specificity of his knowledge about the book. Not something he could remember in his state anyways.

Jaemin shudders. “Ew.”

“Don't ‘ew’ me,” Donghyuck retorts immediately. “There’s nothing even disgusting about that.”

Mark isn’t quite sure where this conversation is going but he really doesn’t want it to continue.

“There’s definitely something about that,” Renjun agrees, “but that’s not the point. Everyone really liked it.”

He nods. “Thanks for letting me know.”

The conversation continues, strays into some other topic, and Mark is surrounded by giggles and laughs and movement. He doesn’t even realize when his own laughter pierces through and joins the chorus. Everything inside him feels like love and he hopes all of it is.

They stay like that until the sun calms down and they can stand to be outside without their visors and sunglasses anymore. Renjun piles on his sunscreen and all of them get down into the dirt for round two of picking weeds and allowing Chenle to yell at them or call them stupid endearingly. 

By the time he calls it off for the day, Mark is just about done with gardening for his whole life. Jisung better not decide to plant any more different flowers for a good long while. The sunflowers and peonies are more than enough color than his yard could ever need.

Renjun catches a ride with Jeno and Jaemin since he lives on the same side as them; they all say their goodbyes and how they can’t wait to meet more often before two of them are officially newlyweds and they wave through their rolled-down car windows all the way until the end of the road. It makes Mark feel like the kid he was supposed to be when he was sixteen only he’s ten years late and too much of an adult to experience it properly.

Jisung offers to help Chenle take his gardening tools down to their house, insists even when Chenle says it’s fine, and sets off to their house ten minutes down. Mark watches Chenle hand him the smaller bags deliberately so he doesn’t trip over them. He’s about to follow them into the heat when a hand grabs onto his shirt with purpose and pulls him back under the shade.

“Not so fast,” Donghyuck says, directing Mark’s head to follow the two of them until they disappear into the mess of suburban landscape. When he lets go of his hair, Mark tries not to feel disappointed, turning to face him. “Are you okay with my clumsy little cousin having a crush on your housemate?”

Mark does a double-take. His eyebrows go up. “You mean…?” He doesn’t finish the thought. “Chenle?” It sounds absurd, but for some reason, the peonies and the sunflowers and the awkward conversations he forced himself to have with Mark all make sense now. “Like, our Chenle?”

“Poor baby,” Donghyuck observes with a pout. “Think Chenle’s going to break his little boy heart?”

“He’s never even going to know Jisung likes him. Not even if he says it out loud.”

Donghyuck rolls his eyes. “Please, he’s obvious as hell.” When Mark looks at him incredulously, he matches it with a more forceful, “Anyone can see it. Except you, maybe, since you’re too busy overthinking everything.”

The statement makes Mark pause. Open his mouth and close it just like always, except this time he’s not searching for words, rather trying to see which one would be the best to use for what he’s trying to express. But as always, Donghyuck beats him to it, always thinking one step ahead of him.

“I want us to be comfortable again,” he says, gulping immediately after like he’s trying to take back the words. He continues, “I miss being with everyone. And being with you.”

Mark resists the urge to put his hand around Donghyuck’s arm and pull him closer because he is civil. He nods and stares at their shoes next to each other, white and black, yin and yang. “I miss it too.”

“And I don’t deserve it — don’t say I do, because I don’t — but I want to experience that again so bad. I hate” — his voice catches — “Mark, I hate everything I did. I don’t know why I was like that. I really didn’t know anything. It’s not an excuse, obviously. I’m just telling you that I… didn’t know.”

Mark notices the way his fingers flutter with the weight of the words and directs him to sit down on the steps. He sees a boy who’s ten years too late to his own life and who could ever blame him for all the crimes he admitted to. Not Mark. “Hey,” he says softly, “it’s okay. You don’t need to do this.”

“You always say that,” he interjects, voice thick and pouty, and for a second Mark thinks he’s about to cry again. But he doesn’t. “But I do. I don’t know why — why you don’t — I swear, why do you always treat me like this? Like — Like I’m a baby. I ruined your fucking life, I ruined my life, I ruined us, I ruined everything. And you won’t even let me feel like I’m in the wrong. What the fuck is wrong with you, Mark? Why don’t you just get mad at me?”

Mark’s brain stops working. The sun is still out and somehow it feels hotter than it did this morning, so he wonders if maybe that’s to blame for the venom he’s spitting out of his mouth. But even if it is, he’s not sure he could ever know how to respond to that. Donghyuck, waiting to be blamed, to be called out. And all Mark could ever do is let him be.

But Mark never ever had it in him to get mad at Donghyuck. All his anger from their shouting matches simmered down into nothing, nothing but love when he felt him, when he released his heart into Donghyuck’s mouth and he spit it right out onto the naked muscle by Mark’s shoulder. Anger was never something he felt for Donghyuck. It was never even a question.

“I’m not mad at you,” he says plainly. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It is to Mark. What would he even be mad about? That he’s bipolar and he shouted at him when they were kids and jumped on him and cried to him? That he’s bipolar? Mark isn’t his mother.

“You’re demented,” he states astutely.

God, Mark is so in love and it fills every corner of him, combusts in his chest and destroys the ribcage, leaking out and infiltrating all of him. “Look who’s talking.”

“Mark,” Donghyuck says, more seriously, but Mark’s a bit occupied trying to slow his heart rate with the way he says his name. It’s like he’s a little kid with a crush again. But he has a feeling Donghyuck’s words are going to hurt. “I’m better. I don’t have… I’m not like that anymore.” He lets out a shaky breath and rubs his arms and turns away from Mark, but he can see goosebumps forming on his skin and he can feel his heart aching. 

This may be the first time in seven years he’s heard those words, but he heard them enough to develop a resistance of some sort to them. The first time was two weeks after he met a therapist, decided he would start seeing her weekly, and things were looking up, really, until he was pulled out of class one day looking like he fought a war on his forearm. He had rolled his eyes and said it’s not a big deal and, sure, it wasn’t, he wasn’t even in the hospital overnight, but still.

The second time, it had been longer and he promised that he really wasn’t acting out of it. Still, he showed up through the open window in Mark’s room at all the ungodly hours of the night and woke him up just to tear off all his clothes before school the next morning.  And it happened a third, fourth, fifth time before Mark stopped keeping count.

“Donghyuck,” he says, unable to think of anything else to say. A hand flutters shakily by Donghyuck’s arm, avoiding the direct touch but still felt, still connected by the static.

“I really am. It’s been so many years, Mark. I know how to deal with myself.” He holds up his two hands as if that’s proof of anything. “And I can make things right.” Mark nods, releasing his hand before he speaks again. “Just give me a chance. Please.”

And Mark has only heard him beg like this a few times, never before for the prospect of forgiveness like this, never before so sober like this. And Mark is terrified. He has so much love for Donghyuck that it turns into fear and consumes him from the inside, like a worm that eats your brain and by the time you realize it’s there you’re already paralyzed in the lower half of your body.

Mark nods with his heart rather than his brain, drops his hand onto the bluestone landing behind Donghyuck, too unsure to put his arm around him but a little more willing when he leans his head on Mark’s shoulder. Mark isn’t strong enough to look at his expression but he can probably picture it well enough in his head.

“Is Jisung still not back yet?” Mark observes. “Is your cousin fucking hoeing up Zhong Chenle? In my house?” He’s only half joking.

Donghyuck feigns a surprised gasp, lifting himself off of Mark and covering his mouth with an unconvincing palm. “He wouldn’t,” he plays into it, smacking his shoulder lightly. It’s so small but Mark loves it so bad. He’s on a seven year sober streak but he is so bad with self control. Mark knows taste buds fall out every few weeks and now that he’s got Donghyuck here he wants to teach all of his cells what he tastes like. 

“Mark?” Donghyuck says, and he is forced to tear his eyes away from his lips.

“Hm?”

“You’re staring.”

Of course he is, Mark feels like saying, because just look at him. His slender frame lost in baggy summer clothes, sweat collecting at his nape, mouth so clean and dry and nothing like Mark is used to seeing on him. Anyone would go absolutely insane at the sight of him. Anyone would offer to tear the sun down for him but Mark’s the only one that would actually try.

Instead, he says, “Yeah. I know.”

Mark feels in his bones before he checks his calendar at home that June is coming, that the sunflowers they planted today will be blooming in just a few weeks time, that the space where Donghyuck is twenty-six and Mark is twenty-six will be upon them sooner than he expected. And before that space ends, Jaemin will be married and Chenle might get to the hand-holding stage with Jisung. Before that space ends, Mark could try to fix things with Donghyuck and try to understand him or he could fuck it all up. 

He whiles away his time on his laptop, trying to make sense of the mess that is his life on a document that is growing in size. Sometimes, he even sends Doyoung a text that he’s making progress, and when he’s extra confident he attaches the draft to the message. So Mark’s not completely stuck anymore. He’s making progress.

And he goes out and crosses Jisung’s house and sees peonies and finds them so beautiful. He sees Jisung’s car parked in the yard and wonders where he is, where both of them are. Renjun visits on occasion and he tells him about work at the library and how things are at home. And everything is okay. Good, even.

But all too soon, he’s feeling the Maryland heat up in his brain. Chenle is busy in his weeds as usual and Doyoung’s got the summer rush at his office to deal with so Mark is left with his rough thoughts alone. He doesn’t dare go outside and work at the Lava Java, thinks the heat will be too much for him to even walk there. He sits and waits for Chenle to come home so he might have some form of entertainment.

And Chenle does, he comes home and tells him about the strange customers he ran into at work and some more plant trivia that Mark would do his best to remember. He tells him the gossip he obtained from the older ladies and high schoolers that he gets along with. And he does this willingly, so Mark doesn’t feel bad about tiring him out until his mouth practically falls off.

“Oh, and Jisung said he’s going on a trip again. It’s his first one in a while,” he says one day, tearing into a bowl of rice with enthusiasm. Still chewing, he adds, “He seemed a bit nervous but it’s nothing he hasn’t done before.”

Mark watches him talk about Jisung and tries to find a trace of him recognizing the intentions Donghyuck mentioned a few days ago. Yeah, Chenle really is oblivious. 

“But you know what he said? You won’t believe this.” He scarfs down another bite before he continues. “Oh, you know how Jisung’s an event planner, right?” Mark did not, but he nods regardless. “He said the wedding he’s working on, it’s in Washington by the way, they need a florist. And he wanted me to come along with him.”

Mark’s eyes widen. “So? You said yes, right?”

Chenle scoffs. “Fuck no. I’m not going anywhere.”

Mark is almost about to ask why and say that he’s so screwing up his chances but he knows exactly why. It occurs to him that maybe Chenle is just as scared of what Mark is capable of as Mark is scared of Donghyuck. He reaches out for the hand cupping his bowl of rice.

“Chenle, do you like Jisung?”

He frowns, eyes Mark with intent, slowing even the pace of his chewing. “He’s just fun. Besides, with how much he bothers me about planting this flower and that flower, I don’t have much of a choice other than to get along with him.”

Mark wants to laugh in his roommate’s face but he doesn’t. He looks at Chenle and knows he is a boy worth going to war for and he thinks if it’s Jisung he could come back victorious. He thinks of Jisung and thinks he’s a boy who would tear down the sun from the sky, or at the very least try. He doesn’t know if Jisung’s love is that forceful and savage yet but maybe it can be.

“I’m saying,” he interrupts, “do you like him the way I like Donghyuck?”

Chenle rolls his eyes. “First of all, that’s disgusting,” he says, spitting out a chicken bone in his mouth as if to show that it really was so gross to be compared to him. “And second of all, me and Jisung aren’t like that. God.”

“Okay, okay,” Mark relents, even though he doesn’t really believe him. “But you really don’t want to go to… uh, wherever Jisung’s going?”

“Washington,” Chenle corrects. “And no. I like it here just fine.”

Just fine, Mark thinks, is no way to live life. He thinks about the first time he met Chenle and how Beach Street was all he ever loved and knew, and how he’s the same now. How he was eight back then and he’s twenty-four now but he’s the same too-happy kid. How he could do nothing but sit and watch two of his closest friends destroy each other and then themselves. Friar Laurence.

Mark owes a lot to Chenle and he doesn’t think about it enough, mostly because Chenle never lets him. But, even though he doesn’t act much like it, Mark is the older one, he’s an adult, he’s capable of surviving without someone babying him all the time. Maybe it was different when he was twenty and they’d just moved in together and Mark couldn’t sleep for nights on end. But it’s been literal years since that and he’s sick, so fucking sick, of thinking that he’s holding Chenle back.

“Please, Chenle,” he finds himself saying, and it comes out more of a request than he intends it to. “You should see somewhere outside of here.”

“I’m right where I want to be, Mark,” he assures. “I would have said yes if I wanted to go. I referred him to some of the other people in the shop I’m training instead.”

“But Jisung wanted you,” he reminds him. “He’s been an event planner forever. Don’t you think he would have connections in D.C. to arrange flowers? Can’t you just humor him, please?” 

Mark is practically begging now. He can see the gears turning in Chenle’s mind, and maybe he’s putting two and two together and coming to a realization.

“I’ll be okay, Chenle,” he promises and thinks he means it. “When do you have to leave?”

There is a long pause and Chenle lets the words sit in his mouth for a bit, chewing on them so that they come out rough and tough. “Like, tomorrow morning?”

Mark’s eyebrows rise and he pushes them down immediately upon feeling how his muscles contract on his face. He tells him to text Jisung, say he’s coming, and if he doesn’t Mark will take his phone and do it himself. He can see the look on Chenle’s face, the same one he wore when he came over on prom night and watched all of them suit up. Mark wished he could sneak him in and mentally cursed the school for their stupid juniors and seniors only rule. As if the whole high school wasn’t fifty people max.

But then again, he didn’t know if the drinking and the rolling blunts was very much up Chenle’s or any sophomore at that time’s alley. Even he got sick of it.

Anyways, Chenle has that kind of look on his face. The one where he wants so bad to do something but is hesitating. Mark isn’t used to that kind of thing. He just taps his shoulders once, twice until Chenle finally submits with a drawn out Fiiiine and goes to the next room over to call Jisung.

Mark isn’t used to Chenle acting boyishly cute but he thinks it suits him. He deserves all the flowers and soft grass and acidic soil where blueberries can grow and he thinks, if it’s Jisung, maybe he can give him that. All Mark can do is blunt his sharp edges and try to reach him. All Mark can do is blunt himself so he doesn’t poke or prod anything.

Chenle says he’s going to be out until next week and Mark promises to behave. He pats his shoulders and tells him to go sleep so he’s well rested for his journey tomorrow. He ruffles his hair just to annoy him.

Anything, pretty much, to stop himself from mentioning that it’s Donghyuck’s birthday in two days. In less than forty-eight hours.

Mark is selfish and horrible and everything he wants, he wants it for himself. And it’s unfortunate that Chenle and Jisung are out of town but it’s really not his fault their schedule turned out like that. Even if he did strongly encourage him to leave.

Chenle isn’t much of the sentimental type, doesn’t celebrate his own birthday or Mark’s besides going to work an hour or so late. But Donghyuck is different. They haven’t met in so damn long, and God knows the lengths Chenle has been going to reorganize their childhood friend group whenever he gets a chance. It’s so unfair to him, Mark knows, and Chenle has been nothing but good and right to him, so he really should go die for this. 

But he thinks it’s not so much of a crime when he says, “Thanks, Mark, for this.” And he thinks Chenle is everything that lives or breathes, a bite of every sweet thing, a cool breeze in the summer, a sunflower blooming at the start of June. 

He sleeps and thinks of Jisung, who can make Chenle happy, really happy. Jisung, who Chenle cares about before loving. Jisung, who offers to hold Chenle’s bags and asks him to help plant seeds that he could just as well do himself. Jisung, who invited him on a weekend trip to Washington with a work opportunity in hand in case Chenle didn’t feel like he should go on vacation.

He thinks of Jisung and then of himself and realizes how severely lacking he is, how he could never do any of this no matter how badly he wants to. He wonders how far apart Jisung is from Donghyuck for them to have turned out so differently. For Jisung to be so proper and clean and Donghyuck to be this messy and wild and all over the place.

Mark would never let anyone know but he is eternally glad Donghyuck didn’t turn out like Jisung. 

He makes the ten minute walk with Chenle in the morning to see him off and tell him to be well and stay safe and call often and don’t bother Jisung too much. He doesn’t get many chances to nag him like this so he’s got to take what he gets.

Donghyuck is there too, looking like he waltzed right out of his bed, hair all messed up and shirt all wrinkled. He stuffs his hands into the pocket of his sweatpants until Jisung rolls into the road and they wave through one open window, Chenle leaning over the gear shift, getting all up in Jisung’s face and making him blush. Donghyuck has to point and laugh at that, tired but still summoning some energy to poke fun at his cousin’s embarrassment. 

They watch the two of them drive away into the gentle morning until they’re all the way down the road, turning the corner, going, going, gone. And Mark is left with what feels like all the world’s matter concentrated into the space between him and Donghyuck. Mark wants to take his heart and bury it right in Jisung’s garden. 

“Mark,” he says with ease. “Come in?” 

Mark is weak, so weak when it comes to Donghyuck. So weak when he says things like that. A hand waves him over and Mark thinks of almost kissing, just barely grazing lips, in the dark light of his porch. He thinks about Donghyuck’s head on his shoulder and him begging for a chance and how they haven’t spoken since. He thinks about seven years and wonders how much they can really change a person because Mark is the same, the exact same.

He comes in. He strips his shoes at the door and walks over to the kitchen and gets two glasses of water while Donghyuck puts bread into the toaster without even asking if Mark ate yet. And it is natural. You would think they do it every morning, like students in a dorm or siblings in a house or a married couple in a home.

He slaps the image out of his mind immediately. Mark stands opposite Donghyuck, leaning against the granite counter. It’s cool to the touch but Mark is on fire. He thinks of all the stupid things that could leave his mouth and fill the space but he doesn’t think any of them are worth saying. He breathes in the silence and lets his throat catch on the movement around him. He watches the way air bends around Donghyuck as he moves.

Mark drinks in this sight, registers it and files it in his memory for later, just in case he decided to disappear for seven years again. Mark is a terrible person and Donghyuck only makes him worse. He brings one plate over to the table, pulling Mark by the arm to join. Mark lets himself be dragged by him, just like always.

“Eat,” he says, folding over a piece of toast. He finishes chewing and then adds, “I haven’t seen you at all lately.”

Mark nods, cheeks full with bread. “Could say the same to you.”

There is a long pause and for the first time the silence feels unnatural. Like there are words on Donghyuck’s tongue that he’s not saying. And this is hardly a new situation for them so it is fine, really fine. But Mark is an adult now and he’s sick of the same old situations. “Just spit it out,” he says with a sigh.

“I thought we were going to try again.” He’s quiet, so quiet it’s at a wavelength that can’t be detected by seismometers, but Mark hears it, of course he does. His brain is coded to be in tune with Donghyuck’s. Mark is cursed to feel him in his veins every time he opens his mouth, to hear him any time he takes a step. Mark thinks his heart finds Donghyuck’s ribcage and tears through it to sit next to it. The only place Mark ever belongs is next to Donghyuck. The only place Mark belongs is here, in his kitchen, trying to try again.

Mark nods. “Yeah,” he says, jaw tight. “Yeah, we are.”

Donghyuck looks at him, unamused. “Are we?”

No, they’re not. Mark knows it. He’s been watching the outside of Donghyuck’s house for days and not knocking on the door, not trying at all. But in all fairness, they were both equally hesitant. 

“Mark,” Donghyuck says, throwing his forearm over the table and tugging at Mark’s exposed skin with the tips of his fingers, “stay here.”

He freezes, a bite of undigested carbs still filling his mouth but Donghyuck wraps his slim fingers around Mark’s wrist as if trying to physically root him into Jisung’s kitchen. Mark leans into the touch, consciously or unconsciously, he’s not too sure, what matters is that he lets it happen. Mark doesn’t get up and leave or shake his head vehemently or choke on his food while trying to say no, and he doesn’t say yes, but it is enough.

Mark says nothing but he has a feeling Donghyuck hears: I want you to spit your heart out and let me feel it beating in my hands. Mark says nothing but he wants to say: I want to weather every storm with you and hold your rain-soaked body close to mine, hear your heart beating all over your body and mine, too, and remind me we are alive.

“Okay,” he says, and even though he doesn’t really know what it means to try again, or to try at all, because he’s never had to do anything like try when it comes to Donghyuck, he’s willing to learn. 

“Stay until they come back.”

Before Mark can feel unsure, Donghyuck encloses his wrist with two hands, fingers tracing lines up and down his forearm. It comes out of his mouth as an order but he’s begging. He’s asking. With a tense nod, “Okay.”

“But not on the couch. And not in Jisung’s room.”

Mark sucks in a sharp breath. “Donghyuck —”

“My birthday,” he interjects, eyes still focused on where their hands meet. “It’s my birthday wish.”

Exhale. Mark will start trying, or trying again, or whatever it is that they’re doing right now. Mark exhales with his mouth and his whole chest and the thumping, pumping bomb under it. “You know I can’t say no to that.”

He knows. He knows, and that’s why he said it, because Donghyuck doesn’t play games he can’t win. Donghyuck knows Mark is weak and the hairs on his skin stand up at the sight of him, that his whole body and mind and soul is overwhelmed simply by their hands touching, that if this is what trying again means then Mark would be all too good at it.

Donghyuck knows all of this and he is just waiting for it to sting.

Mark has to peel his fingers off with his free hand, not missing the way Donghyuck’s lip forms a pout. Mark doesn’t know what he wants. Mark can’t translate his movements anymore, doesn’t know what he’s asking for, if he’s asking at all.

But he can try. He makes guesses. Suggestions, if you will. “Do you want to watch a movie?” His first guess. He recalls movie nights at Jaemin’s house before he moved a few streets down in the middle of high school and they never really arranged one of those again.

Donghyuck makes a sound, dissatisfied and unimpressed with Mark’s attempt. Okay, so maybe not. It’s fine. Guesses can be wrong.

“Go outside?”

He shifts in his seat. “It’s too hot,” he counters. Mark could argue that they can go somewhere indoors, or just for a drive, but he has a feeling that’s not the objective here.

“We can… play a board game?”

“We don’t have any here,” he retorts immediately.

Mark sighs. “What do you want to do, then? Tell me.”

He doesn’t answer immediately. Mark takes the time to trace all of him with his eyes, to swallow what he can for now. He is right in front of him and Mark misses him so, so much already. He memorizes it and then blinks and forgets it immediately. Now that Mark has the liberty of looking at Donghyuck whenever he wants, he is left with little use for his brain.

“Let’s watch a movie.”

“I literally just said that.”

“I didn’t say no.”

“Fuck you,” he says, giving him the finger, which makes his face morph into mock offense.

“Anytime,” he says with a grin, sticking his tongue out. Mark thinks, rather, he knows that Donghyuck will never know just how crazy he drives him.

“No wonder everyone thinks we’re disgusting,” he mumbles under his breath. Donghyuck picks up on it and raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t push it but he definitely catches on to the way Mark refers to them as we and he hopes it’s not too much. But Donghyuck isn’t weak like Mark, he wouldn’t fold at something like this.

Donghyuck puts on a movie on their big TV in the living room and once they figure out how to turn over the sofa bed, it is comfortable. More than comfortable, it’s enjoyable, even. He tries to focus on the animated characters and their exaggerated speech and how their thoughts are visible on their mouths and wishes he lived in a world like that. The movie is not terrible by any means.

So Donghyuck puts on another one and pulls out a blanket from the storage closet even though it’s not cold enough to warrant one. He makes himself comfortable in the fabric and invites Mark to join and who is he to say no. Mark’s used to putting up with whatever Donghyuck wants so this is not a big deal for him. And the movie is… just fine, he supposes, not that he was paying much attention.

And they put on another. And another, and a few more until Donghyuck hovers over The Hunt for Red October. Mark slaps the remote out of his hand and is met with an annoyed look. All he can do is look at him and try to understand.

“What are you trying to do?” he asks, eyeing the remote which has wound up back in Donghyuck’s hand.

“Watch a movie,” he answers plainly. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Sure, maybe. If you said that five movies ago. The sun is literally going down.” Mark points at the clear glass of the windows, unobstructed by blinds or curtains, with twilight pouring over the sky, purple like punch at the back of the gym during senior prom. Mark wonders how long it’ll be until Donghyuck’s twenty-six and Mark is twenty-six and they’re all too close to being fifteen again.

He hisses. “You’re no fun.” He uses the remote to maneuver around the screen and find something else, pausing over some 2000s rom-com before looking at Mark once for confirmation. He sighs, which Donghyuck apparently takes as a go-ahead. 

For the first five minutes, he watches closely, and Mark wonders how his eyes don’t hurt and how his head doesn’t hurt after watching all this cinematic slop for hours on end without even saying a word about how stupid the plot is or how bad the actors are. But what does he know, maybe seven years in God knows where gives you a new perspective on this stuff.

For all but five minutes, Donghyuck stares at the screen with terrific focus as they introduce the self-insert protagonist, and then Mark feels it, the plastic of the remote dropped between them, Donghyuck’s fingers slithering down his arm from the elbow, intertwining with Mark’s. He isn’t looking at the movie anymore but Mark, on the contrary, cannot take his eyes off of it, following Julia Roberts intently across the screen.

“I was in Newark, by the way,” he says casually, squeezing Mark’s hand.  “It was for, uh, treatment.” He stares into the screen and avoids the eyes on him. “I was there the whole time being watched like an animal in a zoo by some bums. It really wasn’t exciting.”

He says it like he’s recapping what he had for breakfast yesterday, but his hand is tight around Mark’s, sweat forming in his palms and rubbing onto Mark’s fingers.

“I’m just saying,” he clarifies, obviously uncomfortable with the silence, “in case you wanted to know why I just packed my shit up and left like that. My parents were fucking insufferable about it, okay? Insisting I get some fucking help and shit. Not my fault.”

“I know,” Mark responds immediately. He had felt a lot of things in the days after Donghyuck left but never once did he blame him. Beach Street is the kind of place you leave and Mark is nobody to say who gets to leave and who doesn’t. He may think Sooyoung is crazy for going to New York but he’s just as crazy for staying here and Donghyuck is crazy for coming back. So maybe one thing about Bethesda, Maryland is that it knows it’s crazy.

Donghyuck rolls his eyes. “You’re doing that again.”

“What?” Mark frowns.

“Fucking believing everything,” he complains, a whiny edge to his voice, which he raises so it overcomes the TV. Despite the front he is putting on, Mark isn’t watching it at all either. “What if I’m lying about all of that? And I just ran away because I’m sick of you?”

Mark had thought about this exact scenario before. Any apocalypse Donghyuck could conjure up, Mark had already been through it. “I don’t care,” he says finally. “That’s your business. At least you’re alive.” He wonders if it comes out as desperate as it feels, wonders if Donghyuck can translate that Mark is saying he would lick the bubbling blood from any opening if Donghyuck asked him not to tell his mother.

Mark has his needs, and so does Donghyuck. If what Donghyuck needed was to get away from Mark and Maryland altogether, then so be it. If what Donghyuck needs now is for Mark to pretend he doesn’t notice the way he is pulling himself too close to Mark then so be it. Mark is trying to do everything right this time.

“I can give you proof,” Donghyuck offers, already fishing around the couch for his phone. Mark squeezes his fist once.

“I don’t need any proof,” he promises.

“But you still don’t believe me,” he accuses.

“I believe you,” Mark swears, and he does, really.

“You don’t think I’m better yet.” The movie buffers for a second and Mark does too, trying to figure out what to say.

Mark grew up perfectly healthy and cried a normal amount and ate a lot and went outside and studied hard. He spoke and the older ladies in town listened to him if not doted on him, the younger kids looked up to him, and his mom at the very least needed him. Mark was normal, always. 

He doesn’t know if he can say the same for Donghyuck. He thinks about what the older ladies said when word got out about his illness, thinks about how parents told their youngest children to avoid him, thinks about his own mother and all the terrible things she said and the ripe red she colored his face when she found out all the things they were doing together in cars and locked bedrooms. He knows Donghyuck never had it easy like him. 

But Mark wasn’t like those ladies or kids or his mother, he didn’t care what was wrong with Donghyuck. Donghyuck is just Donghyuck, always has been, no matter what anyone says about him. Mark has enough love to fight the whole town. 

“I believe you,” Mark repeats, soft but firm, leaning into the way Donghyuck moves closer into him so that their knees touch.

“But not enough to…” Donghyuck trails off. Mark knows what he’s saying but he wonders what it would sound like coming out of Donghyuck’s mouth. Not enough to save us, he means. Replication is closer to impossible than making the original piece.

“I don’t know what you want,” he says finally when his mouth is done faltering. 

“Lying is a sin, Mark Lee,” he deadpans, just impatient enough to avoid going unnoticed.

Sure, Donghyuck tells Mark when he wants pizza and when he wants to watch movies, but he doesn’t ever really say what he wants. He says he wants to try again but he doesn’t say he wants to try again, to have Mark imprinted onto his hands and legs and everywhere else, to cut out his vestigial organs and draw initials onto the soft tissue.

When Mark doesn’t speak, Donghyuck continues, “Or… do you not want to go back to how it was?”

It’s the stupidest question ever. Asking Mark if he wants to do it all again — it’s like asking a kid who’s already nauseous if they want to go on another rollercoaster. It’s impossible to say no. But he has to take a second, or in Mark’s case, a painful minute of silence before he can hear his voice drumming in the air.

“It’s not that simple,” he says, twisting one arm out of the blanket so that it rests on the cushion above Donghyuck’s head. The movement pushes them both closer and Mark sees smoke signals and hears death knells in their foreseeable future. “You know it’s not that simple.”

“You’re making it complicated,” he snaps back immediately, crawling up and stabilizing his position on the couch. “I want us to be us again.”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t us. We can’t just go back to being fifteen and fucked in the head just because you’re better and I’m great and it’s been a long ass time since then so maybe we’ll get it right.” He doesn’t mean to be rude. It just comes out that way.

Not that it deters Donghyuck. He moves closer, puts one hand on Mark’s shoulder and climbs up onto the arm above him, and Mark forgets there was ever a time when they were on opposite ends of the couch. 

Mark knows this Donghyuck, the one that can’t get his hands off of him, the one that always has something to say in response. He’s scared shitless of all the things he is and isn’t capable of. He’s terrified of Donghyuck when he gets like this.

“I didn’t say I wanted to go back to fifteen, dumbass.” Venom in his mouth, box cutter in his hands, his fingertips are blades and they’re all sharpened. Mark is dying and it’s already been decided. “I’m saying I want to do it all again. It’s different.” He can feel the air that leaves Donghyuck’s mouth and protrudes into his own.

“You don’t even know what you want,” Mark tries at a scoff, but it comes out all too breathy and nervous.

Donghyuck takes the blade in his hands and traces a line down Mark’s jaw, scoring it like clay, not yet peeling it open. “Shut the fuck up.” He takes the venom spilling out of his mouth and joins it with the uncertain trembling of Mark’s lip. He takes the bewildered noise right from Mark’s throat and swallows it whole.

And Mark is dying because he is drinking poison and a blade is pressed slack against his bone and he doesn’t think he cares. His mouth fights back against Donghyuck’s and he draws him in with his free hand, fills in all the gaps between them. Mouth to mouth and heart to heart and gun to his head. 

He pulls away reluctantly, practically has to drag his face out of Donghyuck’s reach. Mark softens his grip but doesn’t really let him move. He captures the soft pink of his cheeks and the vibrant cerise of his bottom lip, pout accentuated with spit and Mark is so tempted.

“What’s your deal?” Donghyuck complains. “I was just getting started.”

“Gross,” he shoots back.

“Have you seen yourself? You’re practically drooling, Mark.”

“Yeah, because you fucking sprang on me like a crazy person.”

“Like a crazy person?” he repeats, an edge to his voice. “Or a bipolar person?” Donghyuck is all turbulent wind and raging storms, he speaks and it’s all biting cold.

“Oh, fuck off. You know I don’t give a shit about any of that.” 

Donghyuck laughs softly, all the harshness present in his voice a second ago wiped clean. “Yeah, I know.” He shifts up to press another kiss to Mark’s lips but he moves to avoid the touch. “Ugh, what gives?” he groans.

“Later,” he says, lifting them up from their spot on the couch, untangling their legs and arms and sliding off. He leaves towards the kitchen without looking behind to see if Donghyuck is following and calls behind him, “You haven’t eaten since breakfast. Get over here.”

He stays on that spot for a minute but meets Mark in the kitchen after the blood is done rushing back to his head. He pushes Mark to the side and tells him to cut up some vegetables, and Mark follows diligently because he’s never really been one for cooking. He watches Donghyuck, follows his hand touching the pan, studies his foot tapping rhythmically on the ground, inspects every curve and crevice of him and thinks about a simple death, heart slowing to a stop late one night.

Mark pushes the plates over to a clean counter and pokes and prods at his food, not hungry despite only having eaten a light breakfast. Probably because they did nothing the entire day. He stares at the clock attached to the smart oven. He doesn’t remember it being so close to midnight.

Donghyuck positions himself next to Mark, stretching out all the limbs that went limp after wasting away the whole day in the living room staring at the TV. Mark is staring like he’s a celebrity. He laughs when Donghyuck blushes and blushes when he laughs and swerves his head when he tries to kiss him again but stands down when he throws his arms around him.

He ignores Donghyuck’s insistence to just dump the dishes in the dishwasher, that’s what it’s for and cleans off their plates with dish soap, borrowing their rubber gloves. Donghyuck sits himself down on the table and rests his head against the ceramic, eyes fluttering shut every few seconds before he shakes himself awake.

Mark leans down and ruffles his already messed up hair to stir him, pulling out one of the chairs to sit closer to him. “Hey,” he says, voice soft but loud in Donghyuck’s ear right next to him. A small hum escapes his mouth. Mark continues, “Happy birthday, Donghyuck.”

He lifts his head off the cool material, double-checking the time. Midnight on the dot.

“I’m glad you’re back.” Mark says it even quieter, like even he doesn’t know if he wants to say it or not, but he says it and that’s what matters. Mark is getting used to speaking, opening his mouth and getting real words out. And it is a process. 

One day, he will be able to say to Donghyuck: Thank you for giving me the courage to become everything that I did. Thank you for giving me a reason to exist when I thought my life ended the moment it began. One day he will say all that and more, but for now, he just reaches for the exposed part of his arm.

The touch forces Donghyuck’s eyes towards him, a film layer forming on the surface, red on the outsides like someone took a crayon to his face. Mark frowns, but doesn’t try to conceal the giggle that appears on his face. “Dude,” he says, throwing an arm around him, “you can’t cry first thing on your birthday.”

That really seems to really do it, his coup de grâce. A tear rolls down his cheek; slow, at first, and then all at once, and Mark thinks maybe some things don’t change with time. Once a crybaby, always a crybaby. He clears off the sticky remains of salty droplets from Donghyuck’s face with his thumb before he drops his face down into his hands out of shame.

Mark runs a hand up and down his back. “It’s okay,” he says. “You’re fine, okay?”

He wonders how terrible things must have been for him wherever he was staying while receiving treatment. He thinks about all the nights Donghyuck would’ve had to spend alone and how fucking scared he must’ve been. He pulls himself closer, consciously or unconsciously, God only knows.

“It’s been seven years since you said that to me,” Donghyuck finally manages, albeit weakly, lifting his head out of his hands to reveal his pinking nose and the torn and bitten parts of his lips.

Mark pauses, wonders how he should go about this. “Yeah. But — if you want — it doesn’t have to be the last.”

Donghyuck smacks him lightly on the shoulder for that. “Why are you always putting shit on me? Why don’t you ever want anything?” It’s a fairly reasonable question, but it sounds extra sulky with his current tone.

“I…. Isn’t it obvious?” When Donghyuck looks at him with a half confused, half annoyed expression, he clarifies, “I just want whatever’s best for you.”

Mark was born in a hospital in White Rock exactly one month early with a triple nuchal, according to the doctors, he had gotten his little baby head wrapped in the umbilical cord thrice over like a garland. It wasn’t enough to kill him, though, just trap him in the incubator for a few weeks before being sent back an hour away to his family house in Vancouver.

Point is, Mark was born trying to kill himself. He was searching for good heights and ledges from the skin of his mother’s belly, kicking when he felt the altitude change as the elevator went up. He was born only because the doctors are taught all about following the Hippocratic Oath and loving life but Mark doesn’t know how to learn that, never did.

Mark can’t remember the first time he looked over the ledge of their second floor balcony but he can remember his mom barring all their windows shut after she saw him dangling one leg over the side just to see if gravity would yank the other side of his body up and over the guardrail and into the downstairs neighbors’ garden. It didn’t, obviously, but his mom decided to take it a bit more seriously when he said they should get out of there.

And they did get out of there, moved to a house with no balcony and no means for little, ten-year-old Mark to climb up to the window and jump out, where Chenle lived across the street and Donghyuck was two houses down. But Mark was born a grave digger and he can dig one anywhere he goes, and he can dig one in Donghyuck’s heart and snuggle right up in the cavity.

He can do it, he could have done it then and he can still do it now but he doesn’t want to become a tumor that festers in Donghyuck’s body. As much as Mark wants, and wants, and wants, there is nothing he wants more than Donghyuck. You are summer solstice and I hope you never end.

That night, they pull over a spare mattress to Donghyuck’s room because Mark insists it — yes even if the bed is queen sized, yes even if he promises to keep his distance — but he wakes up with Donghyuck next to him anyways. Pushed himself off the side of the bed and made a space for himself, filled in the gaps next to him and clung there.

Mark lets him be. It’s his birthday, for God’s sake. He’s twenty six and so is Mark. And just being able to spend it with him is more than enough.

Jaemin stops by later in the day and when Mark opens the door wearing an oversized shirt that definitely isn’t his, he gives them a sly smile and shuts the door on himself and leaves. Mark half thinks Chenle and Jisung will pull up any time, coming back early from their outing, but of course they don’t.

And Donghyuck doesn’t seem to be too big on celebrating so they stay at home again and play Monopoly and it really feels like they’re kids that just met. It feels like that every day Mark stays over and it feels like his own house is an entire spatial dimension away when really it’s just a ten minute walk. They blast music on the speaker and cook the strangest recipes and every time Donghyuck’s hands search Mark a little too close for comfort, he pulls away and instead kisses his lips.

He wishes he could be stuck in a time loop, just seven days again and again and again, but of course he can’t. He falls asleep on the couch with Donghyuck on his chest in the middle of the afternoon and dreads the sound of a car pulling up in the driveway. They didn’t say exactly what time they’d be back, and Mark didn’t ask, so they might just be showing up any minute now.

He’s scared he’ll never get this chance again so he brushes Donghyuck’s bangs to the side and leans down, he kisses his exposed forehead for just a millisecond but it’s enough to make him go completely alert. Mark is certain Donghyuck would be on him in two seconds if the click of the door didn’t send them scrambling for distance.

Jisung pushes it open, hauling up a suitcase clumsily, Chenle right behind him and lecturing him about something in true Chenle fashion. He pauses when he catches sight of them and lets out a deep sigh.

“Oh, hi Mark,” Jisung says, holding the door open so Chenle can pull himself through. He goes straight to the kitchen, not even sparing the two on the couch a second glance, even looking a little annoyed. Jisung, now just as confused, follows him a moment later.

Donghyuck looks at Mark for clarification, but he just shrugs. “He’s easy to piss off.” He hopes it’s just that and ignores the feeling that Chenle’s got a grasp on their situation. What the fuck is Mark supposed to do when Chenle knows anything and everything he wants to?

The four of them gather in the kitchen and the disparity between them is clear. Mark and Donghyuck who are still in their PJs at three in the afternoon and Chenle and Jisung who are fully dressed with dark eyes to match. They tell them about how the clients were so demanding and pissed them off so bad, and Jisung says he’s so grateful Chenle came along because otherwise he might’ve had to stay ten more days, and Chenle says Jisung needs speech therapy immediately because he can’t communicate at all. 

The sun starts to move aside without care for all the catching up they have to do, and Jisung suggests staying over a while. Chenle refuses immediately, saying he’s had enough of living with him over the past week, hauling a lazy Mark out of the house and into their own.

He says nothing as they make dinner together, something simple because Chenle has become sick of extravagant meals. He swears he’ll never go anywhere Jisung drags him ever again while beating in some eggs to the concoction brewing in the pan. 

“Did you enjoy yourself?” he asks once they’re finally seated and the sky is black outside. 

Mark nods. “It was chill,” he tries, hoping Chenle is tired enough to not notice the way his voice catches. But of course, he’s way too perceptive for that. 

“What’s going on with you guys now?” he probes as if it’s casual. As if he’s asking Mark what he ate for breakfast. 

“I, well, a few things.” He doesn’t specify anything out of fear of getting into an extremely uncomfortable conversation about how he undeniably stayed over for seven days in that house and kissed Donghyuck a billion times over like someone with no self-control. And Mark used to pride himself on his self control.

But Chenle is a rip-the-band-aid-off kind of guy, so he says, “Are you… back together?” He hesitates slightly before the label, not looking up from his food once.

“Umm,” Mark starts. He thinks about Donghyuck begging for a chance on the landing of his house, about watching movies with him the whole day, making him cry at midnight. He laughs a little and says, “Yeah?” It comes out as more of a question than intended, so he tries again: “Yeah, I guess?”

Chenle nods through slow bites. When he’s done, he says, “I’m glad. I mean, I’m happy for you. Both of you.” 

Mark pauses a moment. It’s never that simple with Chenle. “But?” he prompts.

“But…,” Chenle starts, then stops. “I don’t know. Just be careful, okay? You don’t have to, you know, lose your shit if it doesn’t work out. Seven years is a long time. But it doesn’t mean… yeah, I don’t know. Just forget it.”

Mark gets the idea. He thinks Chenle is the kind of boy you fight wars for and love long into your death. He knows he means well but warning Mark about Donghyuck is telling a seasoned surfer to be careful of every medium-sized wave. He doesn’t care even if it could kill him.

“I know, Chenle. Thanks.” He pats his head once. “You? Have you made any progress with Jisung?”

His eyes go wide in surprise, almost offense at the implication. “You’re so weird, man. I already told you, it’s not like that.”

“Come on. One week together and nothing happened?”

“Nothing besides me losing my shit over that insane couple!” he defends. 

“You really don’t feel anything for him?”

“Yeah, I don’t.” He says it like he doesn’t have to think for two seconds about it. 

“Why?” Mark probes. “Like, how are you so sure?”

He shrugs. “I just am. I don’t know, he’s just a fun guy I want to hang out with without making out sloppy style. Sorry, I know that’s not your cup of tea.” 

“Um. That was uncalled for,” Mark says but he really doesn’t have words for how endearing he finds him. “And besides, you don’t have to make out sloppy style.” He clears his throat, slightly awkward.

He laughs, a big one. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But honestly, I don’t think he wants to be like that.” Mark wants to slap him sometimes. “Besides, I just have too much right now that I’m already focusing on.”

Some part of that statement feels like a knife against Mark’s skin. He thinks about all the years he’s spent with Chenle ever since his mother stopped living in Maryland. He thinks about how well Chenle deals with shit that comes his way and, conversely, how Mark cannot do that at all. He thinks about Chenle being there whenever he needed him.

Mark doesn’t remember when he became the kind of person that holds people back but it’s clear to him that that’s who he is. He swallows hard and then says, “Yeah, sorry about that.” He says it as casually as possibly, but his throat still catches a bit.

“Hm?” Chenle asks, confused.

“Nothing,” Mark replies immediately. “I just don’t want to, you know. Make shit harder for you.”

He rolls his eyes. “You never make shit harder for me. If it wasn’t for you, who would I complain to about all the crazy people I see at work?”

His tone is light but Mark remains serious. He lets silence simmer around them for a while before speaking again, organizing his words. “Really, I’m not a baby anymore. You should go do some more things… you know, for yourself.”

Back in seventh grade, Chenle joined the middle school debate team based on an off-hand statement that Jaemin threw out in the air when they were hanging out one day. Except he actually made it to the octofinals on his first time and he enjoyed it, so he continued with it for two years. Then, in the second semester of ninth grade, he gave in to Sehun’s chiding about joining the basketball team, and just like that, his debate days were far behind him.

He dipped his feet into a few other pools as well, like when he hopped along with maybe five other students to watch a proper steeplechase race in Virginia, or joining the school’s dance team at Seolhyun’s insistence, just for one year while they reorganized their members. Anyways, he did a lot. It’s impossible to believe that, after all those explorations, the only thing that stuck was gardening.

Mark is petrified by the thought that he’s holding Chenle back from something amazing, something that could get him the fuck out of Bethesda, Maryland, something that could put his name next to all the other stars. Mark is petrified.

But Chenle just chuckles, then throws his head back and deepens the sound into a rich, hearty laugh, clapping his hands and dipping his face in his palms and everything. “You guys really rub off on each other,” he mumbles, collecting all of their dishes and moving to dump them in the sink.

“What are you talking about?” Mark asks, stunned by the reaction. To think he was being serious for once.

“Do you hear yourself right now, Mark?” Chenle says, half bewildered. “Who do you think you sound like?”

He doesn’t say anything more, leaving Mark alone in the kitchen. He thinks about everything that’s happened since May ripened and bloomed into July. He thinks about Donghyuck waiting for him to get mad, to say something, to fight back but Mark had stopped fighting back in his junior year of high school, just got so fed up with all the screaming and arguing. He thinks about how he’ll never blame Donghyuck, not as long as he’s trying.

And he is trying. Has been trying for seven years even if he had to kill Mark to do it. So he deserves a chance, a real one.

Mark thinks he’s been trying since he was ten and moved to Maryland, or better yet when he was two days old and his heart kept beating because it wanted to even after almost strangling itself, and he has had nothing but chances. The doctors and their Hippocratic Oath gave him a chance and his mother gave him a chance and Chenle gave him a chance too, probably a million chances.

He wonders who will give Donghyuck a chance if not himself. He wonders who will hold him by the glittering dermis, where the cracks are still lined like stickers on notebook margins, if not himself. He wonders who will love him after death if not himself.

He thinks there’s a chance Chenle just never enjoyed the things he experimented with in school and had to come back to what he knew best. Inevitable return to place of belonging. There is a reason the only place in the world that Mark feels he belongs is next to Donghyuck. Inevitable return to natural environment. 

Maybe people do change, Mark decides. Maybe people do survive and rebuild themselves. Maybe it is possible to be saved and maybe Chenle knows this because he has been witness to Mark being saved. 

Maybe, Mark is saved. 

Maybe, Donghyuck can be saved too. They won’t know until they try.

The next time Jisung offers to help Chenle out with his work is when he’s got a big order from Baltimore, an order big enough to keep the entire staff and their friends who came to help out occupied. He sent a text to their entire group and Mark only saw it after he got off the phone with Doyoung — he likes to think he’s making fair progress on this manuscript — and rushed over immediately.

Upon arrival, he is greeted by Donghyuck approaching the store with a strawberry smoothie in his hand, sucking on the straw. The sunlight makes his eyebrows stretch into a frown as he glares Chenle and Jisung through the window before meeting Mark’s eyes. He makes a disgusted expression in their direction and says, “Can you believe they’re not boyfriends?”

Mark snorts. “Yeah, what is Chenle doing? Where’s he ever going to find a boy that likes him the way Jisung does?”

“Jisung’s got to get his act together too,” he adds. “At this rate, Chenle’s going to think he’s just extremely passionate about flowers. Just imagine if they don’t get their shit together by Jaemin’s wedding.”

“Fuck, yeah, that’s soon,” Mark observes. 

“Not just soon,” Donghyuck corrects. “It’s in two fucking weeks. I’ve gotta get a suit made before then, God.”

“Mrs. Na would really go crazy if she sees Chenle that single.”

He shoots him a judging glance. “She would go crazier if she sees Chenle with a real man and not a bunch of flowers.”

“Well, I don’t know if Jisung could beat the flowers for first place in Chenle’s heart. That might be hard,” he laughs, thinking of all the pursuits he gave up just to dedicate more time to growing his plants. Donghyuck sucks the last of his smoothie out of the straw and throws it out in the trashcan outside the store, and Mark waits before he says, “Um, Donghyuck?”

He turns back to look at him and fuck, those eyes, Mark thinks he could die right now and it wouldn’t even matter. But he’s got to stay alive to save the crumbling stronghold encasing Donghyuck’s heart and ribs and body and lips, he’s got to save him, to the best of his ability. He hums at Mark’s question and Mark has to file the vibration for later.

“Where do you usually get your suits made?”

He scoffs. “Why, you gonna take me down to get it done? Yeah, I —”

“Yeah,” Mark cuts him off. “I’ll drive you.”

Donghyuck is bewildered for a moment, an expression Mark thinks he could get used to seeing, just like every other face he sees him make. Then, it contorts into a wild grin. “Oh, Mark, you really know how to make a guy swoon.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says through a laugh. He feels like himself again when he’s like this with Donghyuck. “So where do you usually go?”

He frowns. “Not sure, actually. I think Jisung goes to the actual city and stays there the whole time it’s being made, but I’ll have to see. Think you can drive me there and back?”

“Sure,” he says immediately. Then, because Chenle gave him all too much confidence that this was the right choice, he places an arm on Donghyuck’s back and leads him forward. He ignores the smug look he receives and pushes forward into the store, where Chenle and Jisung are busy squinting at one set of flowers.

When they see the two, Chenle immediately complains about how long they took but brushes it off as soon as they start working on arranging the next bouquets. He directs them to the dethorned roses and the rest of the stripped plants. It’s confusing at first — plants were never Mark’s thing, he just got more used to them after years of living together — but they figure it out. By the time they clock out, the sky is casting pink and purple hues over the town and Mark is probably capable of making a wreath with carnations and lilies with his eyes closed.

They walk down to their street. Mark wants to wipe the humidity right off his skin but at least it’s not the blasting cold of the AC on his exposed forearm. He walks side by side with Donghyuck and their fingers brush occasionally and it sends shivers down his spine and it makes his heart beat so, so fast. He doesn’t feel hot or cold when they touch, just feels like he’s being restored to his normal state, homeostasis.

And Mark even cooks noodles without burning them because Chenle’s too tired to cook anything but he is starving so Mark makes himself useful for once. Mark even edits his draft based on Doyoung’s messages that came in a few hours ago and when he closes his screen he finds he doesn’t hate everything about it. Mark even sleeps on time and finds he’s not dreading tomorrow as much as he thought he would be.

So Mark can do some things. He can save himself, or at the very least try to.

Mark keeps his promises. He starts up his car again and pulls it out of the garage very carefully, still a bit anxious but he drives it down to the front of Donghyuck’s house just fine. He knocks on the door in the mid-afternoon and ushers him into the passenger seat, leans over to do his belt because he knows how stiff his car can get. Mark can be a gentleman, too.

He doesn’t say much on the drive down to Virginia but he boots up a song he thinks Donghyuck will like and keeps his eyes on the road. He tries not to imagine swerving right suddenly and throwing them both into whatever remaining farmland is left, no matter how fitting it feels for him.

And, in spite of everything, Mark makes it there safely. Donghyuck is shaken awake from the light sleep he had fallen into by the sound of the car stopping in the parking lot a few feet away from the huge tailor shop near them. He takes in a slow breath, adjusting to the new scenery before pushing open the door.

He interlocks his arm with Mark’s, making sure their elbows touch with every minor movement all the way until they reach the store. They look through the fabrics together, every color, every pattern but all Mark cares about is the warmth he feels next to him, he feels like Icarus right before he fell to the ground and died. He thinks crashing and burning is so worth it. Icarus must have thought so too with the way he laughed. Mark thinks he laughs like that when he suggests a navy blue instead of the signature black Donghyuck has been looking at.

One of the store staff shows up to assist them, pulling out fabrics from their display cases and showing them in more detail under the bright white light. They’re the only ones in the entire store right now and it feels like it belongs to them. Mark watches as they take Donghyuck’s measurements and sling different fabrics over his shoulder but Mark thinks he looks perfect in every single one, he really does.

He settles on a plain black, something simple, in the end. They thank the staff and head towards the car. It’s almost a perfect day. And then, right before he unlocks his car, Mark hears a call from further down the parking lot.

“No way, it really is you,” the voice says through breaths, and it’s familiar but Mark can’t exactly put his finger on it. He has to turn around to take in the casual, tracksuit-clad appearance of the guy before him. “Small world, huh?”

Mark offers him a small smile. “Hey, Sungchan,” he greets. “It hasn’t been long, has it? Hopefully you’ve been well this past few weeks.” He observes the sweat running down the nape of his neck and, paired with his outfit, comes to the conclusion that he’s out for a run.

“Yeah. Yeah.” He scans over Mark and then Donghyuck next to him and the car they’re approaching. “Umm, do you guys want to come over for dinner, by any chance?” Mark frowns, about to say something but he gets cut off by Sungchan’s next words. “If you live decently far, you’ll definitely get caught in a storm. This time of year, you know. It’s really not safe.”

The concern seems genuine, and Donghyuck puts one hand on Mark’s shoulder and nods so maybe this is okay. Sungchan tells them about Virginia on the way and he says he lives in a flat with some other guys he knows from college. Mark is only half-listening, staring at the evening sky and wondering how it could deform into a swirling, whirling gale that fucks their car all the way over.

But Mark’s not stupid. He’s twenty-six, almost twenty-seven, and he knows clear skies that twist and tumble in their spot in the heavens can turn into fierce forces of nature. Mark’s not stupid and he knows that stepping into Sungchan’s house to avoid the raging storm outside is like all three pigs staying in the same straw house to hide from the wolf. 

It’s going to catch them at some point. It doesn’t catch them while they’re thrown across his living room with a random music show playing in the background, catching Donghyuck up on how they met and talking about almost everything. Mark finds the two can actually get along quite well, but he wouldn’t expect anything less from Donghyuck who’s a bit too forward about everything. Apparently, that’s good for these kinds of situations.

But Mark knows the storm is going to catch them, he has this feeling in his chest that he can’t suppress and it’s like pus is filling in the blanks in his lungs. He is fighting the coughing fit that he could be having right now out of politeness to Sungchan.

It doesn’t catch them while they’re having dinner — Sungchan offers them a grand meal, fresh and warm and everything they need in the moment that even Mark loosens up for a while — but it is imminent. The sky is darkened, colored only by flashes of light, and thunder is loud in their ears when all of them have nothing to say.

And dinner is done, and Mark’s insisted that he’ll do the dishes because it’s the least he can do after all the kindness he’s shown them today, so he does. And the other two watch an old Chinese soap opera on the TV because Sungchan promises it’s worth their time. And the dishes are done and so are the first two episodes of the show but the storm is not, not done terrorizing the roads outside Sungchan’s apartment and drenching all the cars in the parking lot, including Mark’s.

The storm is never done. If all three pigs had stayed in the straw house, the wolf would have found them all and killed them all and chewed them up and spit out the bones, but he would not be done. The wolf is never done taking.

“You guys can stay here,” Sungchan says readily as if he doesn’t have to think about it. Like he really doesn’t mind. “There’s a guest room. I swear it’s comfortable.”

Donghyuck laughs easily. “Would that really be okay?” he says, and Mark can’t hide the look on his face.

“Of course,” he says, leading them through the hallway to a room.

The room is nice, objectively. It’s spacious, well-maintained, filled with the faint scent of citrus, which Mark realizes can be attributed to the peppermint scented diffuser on the study desk. The bed has to be queen sized and is big enough for them to build a wall between them and still sleep comfortably, limbs spread over the mattress and all.

For how appealing the space is, Mark can’t ignore the rising tension in his chest. It doesn’t go away even when Donghyuck takes him by the shoulders and tells him to relax. He can hear his heart beating at a decibel close to the muffled thunder outside.

“Be honest, Mark,” says Donghyuck once Sungchan is gone, experimentally splaying his hand over the bed to see how bouncy the mattress is, “are you scared of thunder?”

Mark snaps out of his visions of dark nights in his old room and light winds with the window open in high school. “What?” he says, slightly dazed. “Obviously not.”

“Then why are you being so” — he gestures vaguely with his hands — “weird?” he practically whines, shifting his focus to scanning the desk full of papers.

“I’m not,” Mark refutes, following his eyes. He wonders how he should shape his thoughts into words. He wonders how he might take the liquid in his brain and break it down for release into the rest of his body. He wishes he would cooperate with himself for once. He swallows once and then twice and then decides to just spit it out in the most crude and coarse way he can, “Do you have your meds with you?”

It comes out fast enough that it doesn’t seem to register immediately but at the same time slow enough to feel like a punch in both of their faces, the kind of punch that comes with recoil velocity so you know just how much it hurts. Mark can see in his body how it makes Donghyuck feel, can see it in the way he rises slowly from his position leaning over the desk, can feel it from across the room and he’s pretty sure Sungchan can feel it from his room down the hall too. 

He looks at Mark and his eyebrows bend into a frown but his hands aren’t balled into fists and his lips don’t fall into a pout so maybe there’s still something he can do about it. But Mark looks into his eyes and there’s nothing there, nothing he can reach for. Mark isn’t scared of storms or the dark or anything, really, except for Donghyuck, some of him, this part of him.

“Is that what this is about?” he deadpans, trying to be lighthearted about it. “Dude, it’s been a long ass time since whatever you know about happened. Relax, Mark, really.”

Mark would love to if he could. But his ears latch on to a single idea in that entire statement. “So you don’t have them.” Mark wonders what happens to people like them who bounce the radioactive materials right off each other. Mark wonders if immortalizing Donghyuck’s suffering is the same as immortalizing him. He doesn’t think it is.

“Hello, did you just hear me at all? I’m not a baby. It’s just some fucking lithium.”

Mark can hear him, he really can, but his mind is running through the options. He can still drive back, he can, it’s not that far and the rain has calmed down quite a bit since dinner. There hasn’t even been much lightning in the past hour. Or he could run down to the nearest pharmacy and beg for the pills from the person manning the counter, he’s pretty skilled in that right.

“Mark, chill. Like, actually calm the fuck down. You’re getting way too hype about this.”

He nods, then he does it again for good measure, and then again just so he has something to do with his head. “Okay, yeah,” he breathes out, “I trust you. We got this.” He spews out meaningless affirmations because something has to change his mind. How did Mark ever think he would be able to save Donghyuck if he can’t even walk away from the shadow of his twenty-year-old self?

Donghyuck just rolls his eyes, not even pretending to believe Mark’s blatant lie. Not that he has any reason he should.

Mark probably shouldn’t, but he offers to drive back home anyways and he can feel more than hear the sigh that leaves Donghyuck’s mouth. He can feel the black hole between them sucking out all the oxygen from the air, threatening to take them too, but Mark doesn’t know which one of them is going down first. Probably him. It usually is.

“Do you actually not have an ounce of faith in me?” Donghyuck starts, trying to keep all his words at the same volume, trying to keep his face at the same expression.

“I do, of course I do,” Mark tries before being cut off.

“Then what’s the deal?” he snarls. “I know my limits. I told you I know my limits. Why are you still fucking doubting me?”

“No, I — I’m not trying to doubt you,” Mark splutters. He doesn’t get to finish again, his brain doesn’t make the connections fast enough; he’s not fast enough, never fast enough. Donghyuck is too far ahead for him to understand what’s going on in his head, too angry for Mark to process. Mark’s not fast enough and Donghyuck is too fucking fast, he’s going to trip over the air and fall flat on his face.

And Mark is not fast enough to save him.

“It’s one day, Mark. Not even, actually, it’s one night. It’s… it’s nothing in the grand scheme of things.” He slows down, places a hand over his chest and breathes. In and out, and Mark doesn’t say anything to interrupt.

“I know,” he says finally, softer and quieter, but he knows that’s not going to make a difference. He can never stop the shouting and the fighting, can never pull out the heart because it’s not a vestigial organ. He wonders what language Donghyuck understands when he gets like this and how he’s supposed to translate himself right. It’s not fair that Mark doesn’t know when he knows every other thing about Donghyuck, he knows everything that doesn’t matter. “I just want to make this easier on you.”

Mark doesn’t know if that’s right or wrong but judging by his face it’s probably wrong. Judging by his fingers drumming on the wood of the desk it’s wrong. Judging by the heavy feeling in Mark’s heart that’s all too familiar it’s wrong. And he doesn’t understand chemical imbalances quite like he did when everything he studied in high school was fresh in his mind so he can’t explain why but he can tell it’s wrong, just so fucking wrong.

“I can take care of myself,” he says, voice low and hoarse, looking at the floor while approaching the bed.

“I know,” Mark bounces back immediately because it’s true. He knows more than anything that Donghyuck can take care of himself, professional treatment or not. He knows, he knows, he knows. And yet. “But please don’t shut me out.” 

He sighs again. “I’m not,” he insists. “I’m not shutting you out because there’s nothing to shut you out over. God.” He leans down in the bed, exasperated and unusually tired. Mark should wonder if Sungchan can hear them argue but he doesn’t have the energy to worry about anyone besides Donghyuck right now, and maybe that makes him awful. What would he ever know.

Mark should say something more but he can’t find anything to say right now that wouldn’t make the situation worse. He should say something but instead he pulls the curtains shut and blocks out the rainy night, turns off all the lights in the room and lies down in the bed, leaving a good amount of space between them. He’s not sure if Donghyuck will appreciate it or not but Mark can only do what he thinks is right.

He tries to keep his eyes open but all the strenuous activity he did today seems to catch up to him and he flutters off to a tense sleep. He dreams of jungles and deserts and high mountain peaks, dreams of searching for a place that would be able to kill him harder and meaner than Donghyuck’s mouth could, but he can’t find one, his mind can’t even make one up. He thinks about all the medicine that must be in Donghyuck’s room, thinks about how he used to gag when he took Ibuprofen for the flu, thinks about how cruel it is for someone like that to be subscribed to this kind of life forever.

Mark is used to fighting with Donghyuck, is used to surrendering and taking every punch, is used to being left a cripple. He’s used to that kind of dangerous love they have but that doesn’t mean it gets any easier. A full recovery doesn’t mean a relapse cuts no ice. He thinks of Donghyuck and the Titanic, how Jack could’ve fit on the board but maybe he didn’t want to be saved. 

Mark wakes up and the curtain is drawn open, the door ajar, blanket kicked over onto him so it doubles up and makes his toes sweat more than they should. His arm is tense and cramped when he stands up and he has to shake off the strain as he makes his way to the hall.

He finds the door to the balcony pulled open, and he can make out Sungchan’s frame in a chair, sipping a cup of something and talking. He has to roll his eyes and heave a sigh where Donghyuck can’t see him before he approaches them, knocking tentatively on the glass panel that has been slid over. Donghyuck doesn’t look at him but Sungchan ushers him over graciously, pulling over another chair and beckoning him to sit down.

They’re just having some drinks, he explains, and he was explaining to Donghyuck the things he did while he was in Europe. Mark curses in his head and hopes he hasn’t gotten comfortable enough to talk about what he revealed to Mark in LA. That would really hammer the nail in the coffin, a clincher, a KO.

“Is that… coffee?” he asks nobody in particular, looking out at the view, though he expects the answer to come from Sungchan.

But Donghyuck corrects him: “It’s tea.” Mark whips his head around to meet his eyes and Donghyuck doesn’t avoid them. “Earl grey, if you must know.”

“Ah, did you want some?” Sungchan asks, but Mark shakes his head immediately. He says something about having coffee too but Mark doesn’t even care. Can’t bring himself to care about anything but the fact that Donghyuck is here, against all odds, chattering Sungchan’s mouth off in the morning, sipping on his tea. Mark has got to get him home so he doesn’t miss the morning dose or, at the very least, a second night in a row.

Sungchan slips out into the kitchen for a second and Mark takes the chance to ask Donghyuck when he woke up today and he just rolls his eyes. “Trying to remember everything you Googled in college, are you, Dr. Lee?” he says, but it’s not as biting as he would’ve expected. “I’m fine. Please fuck off, Mark.” He says it with a smile on his face and Mark really doesn’t know how to respond.

Thankfully, he’s saved by the prospect of having to because Sungchan appears again with breakfast. He talks to Mark about some new investigations he’s been doing into the place his new novel is going to be set in over eggs benedict and as interested as Mark is in another writer’s process, he is desperate to get them both out of there right now. Donghyuck joins in the conversation when he sees an opening, finds the gaps and says something mildly related.

Mark can feel the gentle tapping of Donghyuck’s feet on the leg of the coffee table, can feel the offhanded expression he’s making when he looks down into the park in front of Sungchan’s apartment, can feel the sinking of the Titanic in his own chest, blood spilling and spreading, tissues as floating pieces of debris. It can only save one of them but Mark’s ready, has always been ready to die if it means Donghyuck can live.

He reaches his hand over the table to meet Donghyuck’s free fingers and he doesn’t flick them off completely but Mark is still careful, watching his face intently for any sign of discomfort. But his lips don’t purse, his eyes don’t flicker around, his nose doesn’t scrunch up; he just sits there and scans the scene around them. And Mark doesn’t know what to make of this, God, he’s so terrible at everything to do with — this whole situation.

He can remember high school when everyone said this would be hell for both of them but hell was all Mark had ever known since he was ten years old and after spending nine years in hell the earth seemed all the more scarier. He was happy where he was, happy in his room with Donghyuck yelling at him again, punching his fist into the floor. It wasn’t ideal but he was happy with it but he knows better now. He never knew anyone who puberty had hit harder than Donghyuck until he told him it wasn’t puberty to blame.

Mark exchanges numbers with Sungchan, thanks him profusely for letting them stay over and treating them to so many good meals, says they should definitely catch up since they stay so close to each other and that he’s always got a place to stay if he visits Beach Street, and then he bolts out of there, starting up his car as soon as he can. The sun hasn’t dried off all the wet, dirty splotches off the car but it’s nothing he can’t deal with.

“Can we take a little detour?” Donghyuck says before his seatbelt is even fully secured. He flicks the windshield on, eyes following the wipers back and forth as they clear off the wet remains from the window. “Sungchan was saying — while you were asleep — that there’s a really nice aquarium around here. I’ve never been to an aquarium before.”

“You don’t even like fish,” Mark observes, ignoring his face while fiddling with some of the settings on his car to avoid being moved by that pout he does. “You said they make you uncomfortable.”

“There’s turtles, too, according to Sungchan. And I’ve never been to an aquarium before.”

He sighs. It’s small, but still there. “I heard that bit.” Then, while pushing the car out of the parking lot, he adds, “I’ll take you to the aquarium another time.”

He sulks at that for a bit, or at least tries to, rests his cheek on his fist and stares out the window for as good as five minutes before he turns to Mark again, points to an In-N-Out drive-through on the side and begs him to pull over. Mark says they just ate, he won’t be hungry enough for it, but he just rolls his eyes, he’s not actually listening. He thinks of Howard Hughes and washing hands until your skin bleeds, thinks of his germaphobia and staying locked in his apartment for four years, thinks of boys who will just do whatever they want. And he is getting used to it.

But Mark is terrible when it comes to this, to Donghyuck, to arguments like these that don’t mean anything except for everything they do mean. Mark never knows when it’s the meds or the mania talking but he doesn’t care, he’ll love Donghyuck if it means his skull gets torn by the sharpness of his words and he’ll love Donghyuck if he has to die for it. Mark will never know how it feels to live like that but Donghyuck will never know what it means to love like him.

Mark doesn’t care if it’s the meds or the mania talking as long as he’s saying something. He loves him so hard and he knows it’s not fair to love him like that but he really can’t help it, he can’t. He loves him so much he knows it could kill him, kill them both, but thank God that’s never been a concern.

Donghyuck demands some more things on the way. He says they should visit the Air Force Memorial because when would they ever have the chance to come around here again, says they should take it easy and try a different route, says they should pull over, Mark should let him try the drivers side. And Mark would be lying if he said that he didn’t fantasize about crashing his car completely, busting it beyond repair, but now is not the time. Now more than ever, he wants to keep them both alive.

He’s got to have patience. He has to, can’t let this Donghyuck drive him insane, never mind that every Donghyuck puts him in a slightly less capable state than normal. He thinks about Howard Hughes and the plane crash that crushed his jaw and collarbone and seven of his ribs and Mark knows that Donghyuck can do worse on two-wheel drive when he gets like this. So he’s got to have patience. He’s got to let the love travelling in his veins decompose into its most primitive, chemical form and reconstruct patience from scratch out of the amino acids floating around in his body.

Mark’s going 55 on the 60, getting overtaken left and right, and he can feel the exasperation from the other cars but he doesn’t care. He can feel the exasperation from Donghyuck next to him but he doesn’t care, he’s too fucking scared. Fight or flight or freeze, Mark does all three in his own special, violent, slow-on-the-highway type of way. And he has a tell when he’s scared, just like he does when he lies, or when he walks out of the bathroom, still alive with blood on his wrist, just like every emotion on his face is plain and obvious. He looks in the rearview mirror and it’s a terror like he didn’t know he was capable of displaying.

He wonders how Rose did it, how she had it in her to let Jack go. He wonders how her cold, tired body could process his warmth leaving her to freeze into the dark waters forever, knowing he would never come back, knowing this was the end. Knowing you were supposed to be the one hidden under that tide but instead making it out alive and persisting, living, until the very end.

Mark knows he can’t do it. He’s not strong enough. He’s not a particularly strong man, Donghyuck knows this, but he still puts a hand on Mark’s leg, drums on his kneecap through the fabric of his pants. Mark tries not to let it distract him.

“Mark,” he whines, stretching out the vowel in a way that scratches Mark’s ear just right, “you wanna pull over?”

He doesn’t, he really doesn’t.

“What are you getting at?” he says, tense, trying not to let it show. He follows the feeling of Donghyuck’s fingertips as they move up and settle on his thigh and he tries to convince himself this is normal, at least for them. It’s their twisted kind of normal. It’s Donghyuck’s normal kind of twisted.

“You’re not really going to make me say it, are you?” he says, and Mark can see one foot thrumming against the insides of the car impatiently. “I feel so fucking good right now, can’t you just indulge me this once?”

He gulps. “Sure, sure, I’ll do everything once we get home.”

But he’s so restless, so fucking jumpy and Mark doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. Or, he knows what’s wrong with him but doesn’t have it in him to say a hard no, he’s too scared to get yelled at again. He doesn’t know how much he can take in one car ride.

“Liar,” he argues. “You’re making that face.”

“I’m not making any face.” He glances in the mirror and straightens his expression, but he really can’t tell.

Donghyuck takes one hand — takes the index finger — he takes it up to Mark’s chin and brushes it lightly, for barely a second but he’s so much closer now that it actually hurts. “You look absolutely fucking horrified, Mark.” The laugh he lets out is half mocking, half disbelief and zero parts genuine. “Like you think I’m going insane. Do you?”

“I don’t,” he says.

“Good. Because I’m not. This is just how I am sometimes. And starting my morning off with Sungchan just put me in a good mood.”

“Yeah, I know.” Mark is a terrible liar but it’s a good thing Donghyuck doesn’t care most of the time. He’s always off doing his own thing, thinking up something new, something confusing and well beyond Mark’s understanding.

“So pull over, would you?”

Mark’s going to swerve, going to crash, they’re going to die and Donghyuck is just drawing his hand up, up, up, on the seatbelt, pushing the button, blocking the emergency break with his wrist. There’s a smile on his lips but this kind of look in his eyes that’s fucking ready to die. Mark isn’t Howard Hughes and he can’t make the crash casualty-free.

He shifts Donghyuck over gently, the change in focal weight making him slip in his seat a little. “Not now,” he says, trying to sound as calm as possible as he does his belt up. “I’m a bad driver when I’m distracted.” As if that’s any sort of justification, but Donghyuck just stares outside the window, sulking or wallowing in anger or some combination of both. He forgets all of that by the time Mark makes the next exit, pointing to some exotic flower that reminds him of all the plants native to Jersey that he saw when he was in Newark. And he sounds fine enough but what the fuck would Mark ever know. 

Actually, Mark knows some things, knows enough to be terrified at the very least, no matter how okay it seems. He knows better than to assume things are okay when he thinks they are. He’s terrified all the way into Jisung’s driveway, thinks his anxiety can be felt in his palms, the palms Donghyuck holds onto while they go inside, the palms that tremble slightly when he prepares a glass.

Donghyuck takes the pill, swallows it well and good and Mark watches it go down his throat. “Happy?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. “Think I’m any different from literally two seconds ago?”

“No,” Mark spits out immediately. “I’m still scared.”

But that’s just how it has to be. Mark is still petrified at the very mention of Donghyuck’s name, still overcome with a fear he won’t admit he has because it always turns into love. Donghyuck gets Mark’s insides so hot that all his enzymes denature, that everything inside him melts and stops working properly, everything inside him turns into hard and soft love collecting under the epidermis.

He stays inside for the rest of that week and doesn’t respond to Sungchan’s greeting for a full day before he finally gathers the guts to do it, calls up Doyoung and writes and writes and writes and emails the file back, hears from Chenle that Jisung drove down to Virginia and picked up the suit. He doesn’t hear from Donghyuck or about him and he thinks that’s a good thing, maybe. No news is good news but Howard Hughes’ plane that crashed into Beverly Hills and fractured his skull and shifted his heart over didn’t kill a single person.

Which is to say, you can’t really know how a person’s doing until you see them, hear it from their own mouth. And the next time Mark sees Donghyuck, he’s doing good as always, better than ever, as if nothing even happened. As if Mark’s heart didn’t almost fall out of his chest and cause a big, oily stain on the leather of his car because he was so horrified.

Mark is a little biased. Okay, Mark is a lot biased. After all, Mark is one of those boys that watched his mom stay on the same stupid pills that were supposed to fix her but only made her more insufferable. He knows he’s not supposed to be thinking like that, not about his own mother, but he’s already not making it into heaven so what’s the point of trying to be good.

Anyways, Mark is biased. He can’t help it. It’s not like him to believe in the power of the little pills that diffuse chemicals into your bloodstream and break the bonds and change the structure and edit your brain and fix you. It’s an absurd concept, it’s not his fault he has a hard time believing it. But maybe Mark’s used to placebos and fake panaceas because taking medicine really does seem to do something for Donghyuck.

The next time Mark sees Donghyuck on the floor of Renjun’s living room with a cushion under his butt. They’re sitting in a circle, Mark sandwiched between him and Jisung, listening intently to Renjun as he reads off the paper in front of him. With Jeno and Jaemin knee deep in wedding preparations, the five of them agreed to help out, but only after they got their speeches practiced.

He claps when Renjun finishes, Chenle patting him on the back before pulling out his phone to ask when the couple was picking them up.

“They’ll come soon,” Chenle explains after cutting the call. “Caught up in some complications with the cake, I guess?” He shakes his head in mock disappointment. “God knows. Weddings are complicated.”

They sure are, Mark agrees, but they must be worth it if so many people are willing to go through all of that to enjoy the moment. Chenle shoots him a strange look and, before he can respond to it, grabs the TV remote from Renjun’s hands and switches something on. It’s A Wonderful Life, Mark recognizes immediately, and he wonders when he will get to live like that.

He slips away for a moment, goes to get a glass of water and maybe take a piss too, sit in silence with his own thoughts without the movie playing over them. Like there is always noise in the backdrop of Mark’s consciousness, always something that never lets him get a free moment. He doesn’t notice Donghyuck behind him, can’t recognize the sound of his footsteps behind him or he’s just not tuned in to anything around him.

He’s not used to being in Renjun’s kitchen, or his house at all, so when he turns around and sees Donghyuck, he has to recoil a bit and slam his foot against the counter. He makes a small sound that’s not quite a curse and looks away in embarrassment.

“Are you okay?” Donghyuck asks.

Mark wishes he could say that he doesn’t know what it means to be okay, that the last time he was okay was the last day he was in Vancouver, that he hasn’t been okay since they met because everything he does drives Mark absolutely, batshit balls-to-the-walls insane. He wishes he could tell him that it burned through all his sanity to last a week without hearing from him but that doesn’t quite make sense.

Instead, he says “Yeah” and nods so vigorously that it hurts his neck.

“Sorry,” Donghyuck says, drawing out the words as Mark retrieves a glass from the cabinet. Sorry, he says in a way that catches Mark off guard and threatens to make him drop the glass right onto the ground. Sorry, he says, and Mark’s still not used to hearing that word or anything like it come out of his mouth.

His mouth is so, so dry when he says: “What for?”

Donghyuck shrugs, pulling up a chair from the dining table to the opposite end of the counter, facing Mark as he searches the kitchen awkwardly for something, not even sure what he’s looking for. “Going all crazy on you.”

Mark wonders what exactly Donghyuck defines as crazy and whether it’s the fighting with him before bed or waking up and talking Sungchan’s ass off at God knows what time or trying to go commando on the highway. Mark wonders if Donghyuck knows he’s not going crazy, it’s just the chemicals playing with his brain, it’s not something he needs to be sorry for.

“It’s not —”

“It is that big of a deal,” he cuts off. “I almost killed you. I’m sorry.”

Mark is silent for a second but he’s thinking this wouldn’t be the first time, he’s thinking you don’t need to be sorry. Mark was born trying to kill himself so maybe anything Donghyuck does to kill them only makes him feel more alive. Finally, he says, “You’re good. I’m not mad, and I don’t blame you.”

Donghyuck has to roll his eyes at that. “You’re annoying as hell, Mark. You can’t just keep letting me go. You have to… hold me accountable at some point.” His voice quiets as he goes on, initial irritation coming to a standstill.

“You said you’re sorry,” Mark states plainly, because to him it really is that simple.

“And you didn’t care!”

“I believe that you meant it.”

“You don’t know that I did, though.”

He sighs, settling down across the counter from Donghyuck. “I trust you, Donghyuck.” And he sees his face falter for a millisecond, sees the gleam in his eyes that he blinks away immediately and thinks it must hurt so, so much to have to live like him. But nothing can make Mark unlove Donghyuck, least of all the fear of his illness.

“It won’t be the last time,” he says instead, switching tracks.

“Okay.”

“I could seriously hurt you. Like… like before. I could do stuff like that again.”

Mark doesn’t know exactly what he’s referring to because there is so much he’s done but none of it matters. All of it is mush, all of it is liquid in Mark’s body, everything gets burned and charred by the fire inside him and it all feels the same. See if he cares.

“Mark, you’re not understanding me,” he says, frustrated. “You can’t just say ‘he was manic so it’s okay’ every time something like this happens. That’s not — that’s not a different part of me. That’s just me. I… I am who I am. You said it yourself, didn’t you? Or, wrote it, I guess. ‘We are who we are, and we just have to live with it.’”

Using words against a writer is evil. Using Mark’s own words against him is ten times worse than any hellish fantasy any medieval philosopher turned writer could produce.

Mark’s mouth falls open. He tries to counteract, tries to say something in response, but he’s too late. Donghyuck keeps going, he’s an endless stream of thought right now and Mark is a rock in the water, getting pummelled by the ebb and flow, trying to keep himself in one piece as he is assaulted by words.

“That’s me, Mark. I don’t have bipolar, I fucking live it every day, I have to. You can’t separate the person from the disease. They’re the same fucking thing.”

“I know.” Mark reaches over the table and joins their fingers. “But I’m not trying to.” I don’t want to cure you, he means, it’s not my place to, it’s not my job. “I just want you.” I love you with my whole heart and every other organ and muscle that means something, he means. “And you can’t hurt me in a way that matters or makes me want to try any less.” Your fingers in mine is the gentleness that comes not from the absence of violence but despite the abundance of it, and that much is enough. For me it is enough. 

We are who we are and we just have to live with it, Mark remembers writing. We do what we do and what I do is love you, he remembers writing one line before that.

The doorbell rings and the grooms-to-be crash on the ground of Renjun’s hallway, exasperated and tired before hauling the others into the nine-seater they rented and driving forty minutes to the venue. They spend the day setting up tables, managing the guest list, fixing the seating arrangement to accommodate the last minute guests. The usual wedding shenanigans, not that Mark is used to this, but he helps out where he can.

By the time they’re done, everyone is exhausted and Mark understands why the two were so irked when they came over, why Jaemin immediately throws himself and Jeno by extension into the very back and demands water from the front. Chenle takes the driver’s seat and Mark doesn’t miss the way he observes but doesn’t question Jisung slipping into the passenger’s seat beside him and sure, maybe it’s just for convenience, but he doesn’t seem to mind it anyways.

Mark doesn’t know much about weddings but he does know that every day in the week before is inconceivably difficult to get through. He knows that if he’s this occupied then he can’t imagine what it’s like for the people that are actually getting married. The second he gets home from all the fuss, he crashes into his bed and sleeps until the sun intrudes from his window.

And he does it all again until he wakes up and Chenle is in the next room over getting suited up. And a part of him struggles to believe the Jaemin wearing a fitted navy blue suit standing with his family is the same one he used to know when he was young, the one who welcomed him with a box of cookies after coming back from his summer vacation, the one who hosted Thanksgiving meals for the whole community and helped his mom make the turkey that was always the talk of the town. But another part of him knew this was a long time coming, knew that Jaemin would end up on the right side of Beach Street’s short history, end up standing next to a man like Jeno that knows how to treat him right and love him well. Mark thinks they can weather any storm together. 

The ceremony itself is small, but Mark spots familiar faces everywhere. Of course he does, the both of them were Maryland born and bred, and Maryland is only so big and Mark was big on exploring when he was a kid. He looks at all the young men and women around him and recognizes a damn large number of them. The reception is anything but intimidating but he’s not big on socializing with people, especially not when Chenle dips to talk to some of Jeno’s friends that he remembers seeing in a debate tournament.

“Mark,” he hears a voice behind him. So familiar, too familiar, but a little different — different enough that he can’t put his finger on it and identify the speaker immediately but familiar enough that he feels years of memories weighing down on his skull and ribcage. He turns around as he hears, “Long time, huh? Who thought I’d see you here?”

Brown hair combed into a side part, cut short at the nape but Mark still mentally corrects him as having sweeping bangs that are wild and unruly like his disposition and his whole life. “Yukhei?” Mark says and it comes out as a whisper, like any louder would blow away the illusion of his existence.

He laughs, that stupid laugh that Mark would recognize anywhere, with all his teeth and his whole body. “That’s me.”

“You…. Have you been well?” Mark tries, making Yukhei laugh again.

“You know, for a writer, you’re kinda bad with words,” he jokes, patting the side of Mark’s arm. Then, straightening out his expression with ease, he adds, “Are you still… doing that?”

Mark chuckles. Can’t help but chuckle when Yukhei is here like this, talking to him like it’s normal. “Well, something like it. Trying to live up to the stage you set for me before disappearing forever.”

He rolls his eyes. “Um, it’s called going to college,” he corrects. “Sorry not all of us know exactly what we like when we’re fifteen.”

Yukhei says he’s a talent scout now, works with a real nice agency down in New York, says his life is good and everything he wanted when he moved out of his father’s house. And Mark is happy for him. He says it’s not his fault they fell out of touch, that life happens, shit goes down, and maybe it’s fated for them to meet like this.

“You ever releasing a second novel?” he asks offhandedly, reaching over and picking up a piece of cheese from the smorgasbord.

Mark takes a second to consider the variety of things that could mean. Then, more sure than he thinks he’s ever been about his life, he opens his mouth and finds that the words come out immediately. “Yeah. Maybe something I actually want published this time.”

Mark colors the space where he is twenty-six at the same time Donghyuck is twenty-six on his calendar, tints it a light pink like new capillaries, like blood is flowing again. Like the body is built to save itself and always finds a way to restore itself. Inevitable return to homeostasis. Mark thinks his body returns to Donghyuck’s like it’s his natural state.

He’s in the Davis Library again even though he never thought he’d be here, especially not so soon. But Doyoung is fast when he wants something done, when he wants a book out to the world. He’s supposed to be talking to a crowd of high schoolers this time, kids who have probably seen him at his worst and heard about him from their parents anyways. He’s standing with a tablet in his hand, prompting him with random things Yizhuo wants him to talk about. She’s reminded him numerous times how he absolutely cannot mess this up because this is the first event she’s got completely control over and she’s got to prove herself to her parents.

She stands next to him the entire time as Jisung leads the group of high school students into the area, taking the mic out of his hands the second he’s done with his introduction. Usually, Mark would fight back but — maybe it’s because he’s growing older — he doesn’t have the energy to do things like that anymore. He waits patiently until the children start raising their hands into the air, fists concealing the violence well, nothing like the high school he remembers.

“Can you tell us one line that stuck out to you in this book?” asks one of the kids and Mark is stunned for a moment. He quickly reaches for the copy to the side of him, ignoring Yizhuo’s glare as he takes his time searching the pages and recites a sentence. When the body begs forgiveness from the brain for eating it, we provide it, perpetuate the synaptic vendetta again and again and again because that is all we are. And you can’t change what you are.

Mark remembers writing it with Donghyuck lying flat on the bed, queuing up songs on the speaker, goosebumps on his skin because the AC was pointed right at him and he was out of the blanket. Mark remembers writing it mostly because Donghyuck had said he liked the line when he leaned over and squinted at Mark’s laptop.

There is a special place in his heart for things like summer and tulips and peonies and Donghyuck and publishing books and all the things that are hard but so worth it. All the reminders that Mark is alive, that he made it to this big age, survived everything the world threw at him starting from White Rock, British Columbia down to Bethesda, Maryland, and he continues to survive, to fight against the summer sun and winter snow and everything in between. Mark was born for this, to fight, was born fighting his own body and its imminent desire to die.

And Mark is twenty-seven tomorrow and readier than ever before to keep fighting.