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Minseok avoids the sight of the stations. Once the announcement comes on, he shuts his eyes, and continues in his mind the landscape to his right, growing into dim contours beneath dusk descending. Listens to the train growing quiet as it comes to a halt, a storm’s noisy abating, leaving room only for the sounds of footsteps, fabric brushing past rows of seats, something clacking against them too. A loud exhale when something is manoeuvred into the compartment overhead. The train falls back into quiet, before shuttering its doors again to the outside.
When Minseok lifts his eyes to the window, sinking sunlight pricks through the edges of clouds, the way the foreign urge to cry pricks at his nose. He pinches it firmer than necessary, closes his eyes again. Sees behind his eyelids grey bleeding pink, the dark green of the mountains growing into a firm shadow at the horizon.
The ride used to be familiar, some ten years ago. Southwards, he’d stand for hours, or sit on the steps by the door, each stop scaring him up, only to be put to work at the end of it. Grandmother, he suspected soon, saved things for him to do: leaking sinks, wood to split, benches to paint, acorns to collect, leaves to rake and meadows to mow. Minseok would leave the evening after, feet and shoulders sore, a stack of banchan containers in his care that he could only hope wouldn’t leak again. He never did well in the abandoned quiet of the train ride home, used to bite his lip raw as he had to let the dark eye of night stare at him from the outside.
He notices his worrying at the seam running along his fingertips now. Glove tugged back into place, he opens his eyes to the window turned opaque with the ceiling light having come on low, tenuous, and finds the doubled outline of eyes looking back at him, of a smile breaking.
“Hyung.”
Doh Kyungsoo is bent over the table, as if he’d been in comfortable conversation with Minseok all this time. He sits back against his seat, gives a small nod, and turns his gaze to the window where it slides up against Minseok’s, rounded, insistent.
Minseok would have preferred a stranger. As little as his face betrays, Kyungsoo is wringing his hands in his lap, so maybe he wishes he had picked a car further at the front, too. Still: “Where are you coming from?”
One of his hands settles on the jacket pocket nestled against his thigh, its flap giving way to the edge of a notebook he pats. “Lots of small restaurants to visit on this line.”
Minseok wishes he could turn his face wooden, with Kyungsoo’s voice growing softer with each word, into a wisp of smoke, with his gaze falling onto his cheeks that feel tense when Kyungsoo returns the question. “My thread,” he says, lifting his hand. Beneath the glove, the string sits tight around his finger, a scar biting at itself.
“Oh, it was time again.” The smile turns curious on Kyungsoo’s face. His hands now sit on the narrow table between them, the wringing turning out to have been stroking, as if he was smoothing out skin and straightening the paths of muscle along bone.
“Two days ago.” As every year before it, he’d gotten a ticket to somewhere not too far away, not too unfamiliar. As every year before it, he’d arrived early and flitted about, until his head felt clear and his heart firm. It never wavered, before midnight, then pulsed in his chest when he tried to sleep in a bed with an unfamiliar view, beneath an unfamiliar roof of noise until with the morning came the verdict, the calm of another year ahead. “You still haven’t even looked?”
This pulls a smile across Kyungsoo’s face, the corners of his mouth turned down as he contemplates. “It wouldn’t lead me anywhere I need to be,” he says eventually. “Did you find him this year?”
The certainty strikes Minseok speechless. He searches Kyungsoo’s eyes, their corners, his uncreased brows, finds more of this confidence when he returns to the endless black tugging at his gaze. “When I was ten,” he says, “there was a boy. Gifted me every insect under the sun, and my parents took to him soon. He’s in our family portraits. For my fifteenth birthday, he forgot to get me a gift, and gave me a kiss instead. My father saw, and that was the end. I’d need to grow up, he said, and that I was bound to a woman anyway. I had no reason not to believe him, none of my ancestors had a soulmate who . . . none. So I lied to my parents about getting my ticket until I was twenty-six.” He’s still lying to them, a decade later, feels rotten with the relief of not finding someone he couldn’t love every year. Feels still, some days, bruised black and blue by his ingratitude, by taking his parents’ gift and making nothing of it.
“Why do you still want a soulmate, hyung?”
For as recent as a friend Kyungsoo is, his face lies unguarded, simple in invitation. That he doesn’t always remember well what he’s told—Minseok turns his head towards the window, the silhouettes of flattened industrial buildings creeping past. “I’ve always liked the idea that I was capable of loving anyone. That I wouldn’t accidentally dismiss someone, based on a wrong impression.” That he’d know someplace for his love to go, detached from worries. It never felt right, but he likes the easy comfort of it.
Kyungsoo’s eyes grow wide, erratic with the brief fever of passing a rake through his thoughts. “You’re not looking for your other half?”
“I don’t feel very lacking,” confesses Minseok.
The door slides open, a few rows behind Kyungsoo. Minseok, met with a nod from the ticket inspector, watches as Kyungsoo extricates his ticket from the notebook, glances over the neat notes on the pages it falls open on. Kyungsoo’s smile is small when their gazes meet, and so frank Minseok feels it as a spark to the tips of his ears. With the door at the rear end of the car closing, sequestering them again, he wonders. There isn’t much for him to break yet, with Kyungsoo. “Have you loved anyone before?”
Kyungsoo takes the question in like a dumpling, an odd delight coming to occupy the corners of his mouth, his gaze holding onto Minseok’s, melting into his, ice to water. “Of course. Isn’t it inevitable?”
“You’re thinking about food.” A thoughtless remark that took less than nothing to say, but the laugh Kyungsoo lets out, that ruffles his hair with how it shakes him against the seat—Minseok has to gather himself, face in his hands.
“My grandparents,” says Kyungsoo, voice gentled by lingering breathlessness. “Love may be in everything, but, hyung, I wouldn’t want to get married to food. Are you looking?”
“To get married?” Like a bulwark against the rising opposition to the soulmate exception for gay couples, he’d imagined it so often he could at times feel the ring that would replace the string: a thin, simple band, silver, an inlaid flower of rubies on its inside. A dream turned ghost. “If my soulmate is a woman.”
It archives the smile on Kyungsoo’s face. He hasn’t stopped smiling for a while now, Minseok notes as he places his hands back into his lap, as he finds his teeth worrying at the scar tissue of his lip piercing.
“Don’t you think your soulmate is looking for you?”
It wrings a shrug from Kyungsoo. “They’d know not to, if they were mine.”
“You’re not even curious?”
Another shrug, the line of his shoulders falling into boredom. “Love is everywhere, and we all die one day. Why wait for one person?”
Is it boredom? It looks tense in isolation, stable when Minseok takes in all of Kyungsoo, running a hand through his hair, the knuckle of a thumb over his mouth with abandon, then purses his lips, a moon hemming each corner.
“I don’t like falling in love,” he says. “It’s—when the best part comes first, and you find yourself walking through ruins one day. It’s so tedious. It would be like that with a soulmate, right?”
For all Minseok can tell— ”It would. Without the rude awakening.” Unless the rude awakening came first. He grips his wrist instead of his finger; a soulmate like that would make his family happy, more people than he could count, and he owes them as much.
“Here’s the thing, hyung. I don’t believe them. None of us are that good. And if people aren’t good, and we can love them anyway, why not just give the ones already in your life a try?”
Even in the dull light, there’s a brightness to Kyungsoo’s eyes, a jauntiness—
All this time? Minseok thinks, at the same time as Kyungsoo says: “Let me make you ramyeon. At my place.”
Something spreads in Minseok’s chest. He’d thought Kyungsoo intense since the day they first met; seeing it for what it is . . . he hadn’t thought Kyungsoo had noticed either, the way he would take his eyes off him, keep him at arm’s length. A blistering, sticky heat climbs up his spine, singes the remnants of hesitation at his nape. Kyungsoo lives a few stations further down the line. “My ticket, it only—”
Kyungsoo’s loosely holding onto his own elbows now, his face sweet with an expectant mischief. “You won’t be caught. And if you are, we’ll split the fine.”
Minseok bends over the table, to knock his fist into Kyungsoo’s arm. “Take responsibility, Doh Kyungsoo.”
The laugh again, the one that has him curling into himself, around his delight, that shakes hair into his eyes. “It’ll be fine, hyung.”
Their eyes meet, over the table, and Minseok’s breath comes to a halt as the train pulls into another station, as the doors shudder against the train, weary wings folded away: he’s never been one to live with regret. He lets go of Kyungsoo’s gaze only once the train is startled into movement again, once he can be sure no one else has entered their compartment, and studies the shape of his hands against his thighs, beneath long sleeves, the fingertips on his right swallowed by the black glove.
“Hyung, can I sit next to you?”
His face is open, calm. Kyungsoo is one to take rejection well, this much Minseok knows, but Minseok—he lifts his bag from the seat next to him, lets it sit in the cradle of his feet. And when Kyungsoo slides into the seat and his hand arrives searching at the sill of Minseok’s thigh, Minseok’s hands take it between his own, grasp for his heat through glove and sleeves. Another year ahead—he wouldn’t mind for it to be a long one, thinks Minseok.