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When Seungmin was five, he broke the unfortunate news to his shiny-eyed, smiling parents: Santa isn’t real.
It was sad to demolish their hopeful illusion, but it had to be done. He couldn’t have them plopping him on some impersonator’s lap in the middle of the mall, or leaving milk out to spoil overnight for no good reason. And if anyone should get those extra cookies, it should be him.
When he lost his first tooth at six-and-a-half and his friend Felix asked if he was going to leave it for the tooth fairy, Seungmin told him tooth fairies don’t exist and he was going to do the far more logical thing and throw his old, dumb tooth in the garbage.
Felix almost cried.
“But it’s your first tooth!” he exclaimed, clearly distressed. “And- and the tooth fairy-”
Seungmin sighed, and patted his friend’s head reassuringly. It wasn’t the kid’s fault that he was gullible, but was better for him to know.
It should be no surprise, then, that eight-year-old Seungmin does not believe in monsters under the bed. He’s way too old and smart—if he does say so himself, which he does—for such nonsense.
So when he's tucked in one night with a book—his reading lamp set to turn off automatically in twenty minutes—and he hears a scuffling sound underneath him, he isn't afraid to check it out.
It’s either an unwelcome rodent (he hopes not, but he must face the possibility with fortitude), or his pet hamster that’s escaped (unlikely, seeing as he’s meticulous about locking the cage and trusts himself more that anyone in the world), or some entirely vague and harmless feat of physics. Like the air vent causing currents to flutter a stray paper under there, as rare as stray papers are in his tidy room. Or it could be someone in the basement sliding a laundry basket, and the sound waves traveling and distorting through the walls and floorboards.
Therefore when he lifts the overhanging edge of his comforter, he's entirely shocked to find…
A little boy?
The boy jumps, and bumps his head on the underside of the bedframe with a yelp.
"You weren't supposed to see me!” he cries, rubbing the sore patch of his skull and looking around frantically. “I'm going to be in such big trouble!"
The boy's yellow eyes are wide, and as Seungmin's vision adjusts to the dark shadows, he notices small horns poking through straight, reddish locks of hair.
Eight-year-old Seungmin is way too rational to believe in monsters under beds, but he’s also too rational to deny the cold, hard evidence sitting right before his eyes. He slaps himself in the face—the boy cocks his head in confusion—to try to wake himself up, just in case.
Well.
The boy is still there.
And either a kid broke into his house dressed for Halloween on a random Wednesday in March, or Seungmin is about to believe in something crazy.
"Are you…" he can't believe what he's about to ask, but a discovery like this could change the world. The thought of being the one to make it sends a thrill through him. "...a monster?"
The boy—thing—looks nervous at the question. His bony shoulders, clad in a dark green polo shirt, rise to his ears, and he glances to the side as though planning his escape.
"You can't tell anyone I'm here! Please!" the boy begs. He seems to be about Seungmin's age, but he acts younger, all timid and afraid. “I won’t hurt you, promise!”
If Seungmin is supposed to be scared, he’s not. The boy is doing a downright terrible job at being scary. Seungmin wonders if he should tell him. Constructive criticism and all.
“Who would I tell?” he challenges.
Felix would probably cry if he found out, and while Seungmin puts the pursuit of knowledge over most other things in the world, maybe it’s okay to allow his friend some merciful ignorance for a few more years. In this particular case.
“Um, your parents?”
Seungmin shrugs. “Why?”
The boy pauses, confusion wrinkling his features—his narrow eyes and soft cheeks.
“Because… because you’re scared of me?”
Seungmin grins. “Do I look scared of you?”
“Well, no, but…”
“Hey, why don’t you come out from under there?” Seungmin offers, scooting back to make a better opening for him and still holding up the comforter in what he hopes is a friendly gesture. “It seems kinda squishy.”
Eight-year-old Seungmin has a lot of questions, and he plans to have them all answered. Which will be easier if he doesn’t have to lie on his stomach or crouch and duck his neck under there.
The boy-monster shakes his head rapidly, his lower lip sticking out. “No. I can’t. I won’t.”
“I’m not going to do anything to you. I just want to ask you stuff,” he explains, but the boy plants himself in place, fists clenching and frown deepening, like he’s about to cry or something. “Are you worried about my parents? I can lock the door so they don’t come in and find you.”
He goes and does just that, with a quiet little click, to make a point.
“See?”
But the boy still won’t move.
Seungmin sighs; the kid reminds him of Felix. You would think monsters wouldn’t get so nervous, but this one is very emotional.
So he does what he has to do, in the valiant pursuit of knowledge, and slides right under the bed with him to begin his interrogation.
“My name is Seungmin. What’s yours?”
“J-jeongin.”
Jeongin scoots all the way to the other corner of the underbed, but Seungmin doesn’t care, so long as he answers his questions.
“How long have you been under my bed?”
“Do you have parents?”
“Do your horns grow or do they stay small like that forever?”
“Are you supposed to be scary? Because you’re not scary at all. No offense.”
“Do you have any siblings? I don’t.”
Jeongin’s answers are cautious and short, but at least he gives them. Seungmin could read every book in the world (he’s already working hard on that), but this information would be impossible to find in print. He’ll have to be the one to record it. Maybe he’ll even become the world’s leading expert at monsters under beds, writing dozens of papers on them and earning a Nobel Prize for his discovery and his comprehensive, meticulous research.
When his reading lamp flicks off at eight PM, turning their shadowy cave pitch black, Seungmin hums pensively. He wishes Jeongin a good night and informs him that he will be back tomorrow, at seven-forty.
He crawls back out and climbs into bed, a faint sliver of moonlight the only thing to break through the dark. As he drifts off to sleep, he listens closely, and he thinks he can make out Jeongin’s breathing ever so faintly.
The next night at seven-forty, Seungmin returns, clad in cotton pajamas with his teeth flossed and brushed. He turns on his reading lamp timer and grabs his notebook, already filled in with everything he could remember from the previous night’s interview.
“Hi, Jeongin!” he smiles brightly, pleased to see his new companion is back.
Jeongin chews his lip, and Seungmin makes a note about the sharpness of his teeth, back on the page where he’d written about the yellow eyes and burgundy hair and the horns (“a little,” Jeongin had said, about whether or not they’d grow).
Pointier than human teeth. Not as pointy as sharks.
He asks his questions—he started keeping a list of them and has been adding to it all day—until the lamp flicks off, then bids him good night again.
The same happens the next night, and the next.
Slowly, Jeongin’s answers grow longer, from a few words to full sentences to entire stories—like the one about his tall uncle who was sent to lurk under a low trundle bed for three months. That one has them both snickering with laughter, muffled by their arms so Seungmin’s parents don’t come knocking.
Somehow, Seungmin’s notebook gets forgotten after the first couple weeks, abandoned in his second desk drawer, sixteen pages filled in with his neat, small lettering.
Seungmin doesn’t track the data precisely, but he’s pretty sure there’s a correlation: the less the notebook comes out, the more Jeongin’s smile comes out instead. Yes, it’s pointyish, but it’s also big and beaming and bright.
It’s the kind of smile that makes him start to feel like a friend.
Eventually, Seungmin forgets so wholly about the notebook that it doesn’t even occur to him to add that monsters under beds know how to make jokes, or enjoy playing Uno, or that their favorite snack (human snack, as Jeongin calls the various treats that Seungmin starts sneaking into his room) is cheese puffs.
These things just happen. Just are.
The first time Jeongin comes out from under the bed, he spends twenty minutes peering at every figurine and school book in the entire room before settling into Seungmin’s navy blue beanbag chair, with a pleased grin and a proclamation that this is his favorite human thing ever.
After that he starts coming out all the time, and Seungmin starts leaving the closet light on instead of his reading lamp. He still he refuses to stay up past eight thirty, but staying up that extra half hour—and sneaking in the snacks—marks a milestone for Seungmin’s rule breaking.
When Seungmin gets a chess set from his grandparents for his ninth birthday, Jeongin is the first one he plays with. It becomes their new thing, Uno cards gathering dust on the top shelf of his closet.
His bedtime as nine-year-old is pushed to eight-thirty, so his half hour extension (unsanctioned) now lasts him until nine o’clock. Somehow, it’s never enough, he and Jeongin getting lost in deep thought and strategy well beyond then. Seungmin has never felt as undisciplined as he does in those moments when he finally goes to sleep, the clock reading nine eighteen one night, nine thirty-one the next.
It’s thrilling.
Seungmin passes along everything he learns in chess club, which his parents had signed him up for as soon as he got the set. He and Jeongin make formidable opponents for one another, crunching away on their illicit late-night snacks all through their tournaments. Pretzels and Doritos and sour gummies and Twizzler bites.
Seungmin has to sneak down the hall to floss and brush again afterwards without his parents catching him.
The summer before Seungmin turns ten, Felix moves to faraway Australia. They email pretty often, but it doesn’t fix his newfound loneliness when school starts. When he’s not focused on his studying and work, he’s wishing he were back home with Jeongin.
That next year, Seungmin places into the middle-school chess championship semifinals, and Jeongin doesn't talk to him for a week.
He sits under the bed with crossed arms and a stiff expression, all the more striking as his features have begun to lean out and sharpen over the past couple years. He presses his lips tight together whenever Seungmin tries to engage him in conversation, or tell over a joke he heard in school.
Seungmin knows he's jealous. Because Seungmin gets to compete and he doesn't. And because chess had been their thing.
But aren't friends supposed to be happy for each other?
After three days of Jeongin’s icy stare, Seungmin finally gets angry, too, and he doesn’t so much as peek under there for days.
It's their first real fight, and it only gets resolved when Seungmin hears sniffling under his bed one night—at eight twenty-two, with the lights already off because he gave up trying to focus on his book.
He hears sniffling and hiccups, and concludes that fights are stupid and he wants his friend back.
Wordlessly, he clicks his lamp back on, flings off his comforter, and pads out of the bedroom, returning a few minutes later with a bowl of cheese puffs.
He crouches down.
“Playing chess with you is more fun anyway,” he says by way of apology, pushing the bowl forward.
Jeongin crawls out, eyes rimmed in red, glowing even brighter than usual. Seungmin’s breath catches for a moment, surprised by their luminescence.
Jeongin crunches on a cheese puff. Two, three.
“So… wanna play?” Seungmin offers.
Jeongin nods, and neither of them exactly says sorry, but they know they both mean it.
The chess phase doesn’t last that much longer anyway. They try out other games, some lasting for little more than one intense week (Monopoly), and others coming out here and there over the next months, whenever the mood would strike (Rummikub, Scrabble, Risk).
As they get older, they find themselves chatting more than they play games, and before either of them really feels prepared for it, their early teen years are upon them.
By then, Seungmin has so much homework that all he can muster the energy for afterwards is lying on his hardwood floor, staring at the ceiling and talking about all the things that are already running through his mind anyway.
Jeongin lies parallel to him, and together they stare at Seungmin's ceiling, dotted with the glow-in-the-dark stars he'd arranged in proper constellations when he was younger. He’s sure he’s outgrown them by now. One of these days, he should take them down.
It’s there on the floor, mind drifting through the slog of preteen peer pressure and angst, that he tells Jeongin about the boys at school who make fools of themselves to get girls' attention. They both agree it's dumb.
Seungmin explains that there are more important things than girls, like grades and self-respect.
Jeongin agrees that there are more important things than girls, like friendship and cheese puffs.
It makes Seungmin laugh, something he doesn’t do so often anymore.
When he looks over at Jeongin next to him, residual chuckles still huffing lazily from his diaphragm, he sees Jeongin staring at the stars on the ceiling, a goofy, toothy grin on his face.
That night, he gives Jeongin the stars. They peel them off one by one, taking turns standing on Seungmin’s desk chair while the other holds it steady. Jeongin happily arranges them on the underside of the bed. Seungmin tries to give him a constellation chart to follow, but Jeongin rolls his eyes.
“That’s not what makes them pretty,” he says, sticking them on with all the randomness and chaos of splatter paint.
Seungmin doesn’t agree; he firmly believes that order and structure are what make most things beautiful. But he doesn’t push it.
Once in a while, on bad days when he’s inexplicably angry at the world and the slam of his bedroom door echoes menacingly through the house, he crawls under there and lies with Jeongin on his back, staring at the chaos of those stars in silence. It feels more like hiding than the rest of his room does. Confined and dark aside from the faint greenish-white glow of the stars, and the yellow glow of Jeongin’s sympathetic eyes. Those times, when he’s filled with all that frustration and pressure and uncertainty, he somehow finds solace in the chaos of those stars. Of giving up on order and expectations.
When he’s fourteen, he comes home from school one particularly bad day, locking himself in his room and refusing to talk to his parents.
He crawls under the bed, where the world doesn’t feel like it’s going to swallow him whole, and he tells Jeongin about the horrible things the other boys said to him and called him when he wouldn't kiss a girl at recess on a dare.
"It's not even that I don't like girls!” he exclaims defensively. “I just think it was a dumb idea. Dares are stupid."
“Did you want to?” Jeongin asks. “Kiss her, I mean?”
His voice seems hesitant, and Seungmin wonders if he’s thinking about kissing girls. If there’s someone he sees in their time apart—another monster, that is—who he wants to kiss. The thought bothers him.
It sometimes feels like everyone and everything around him is changing, tossed into a foggy swirl where nothing is predictable and everything is upside down, and they’re all just waiting to be spat out at the other end. Unrecognizable.
He and Jeongin talk all the time about the rest of their lives, apart from one another. Their daytime lives. But it doesn’t feel real, most of the time. It doesn’t feel like it matters, not more than their games and snacks and laughter.
But now, suddenly, Seungmin worries that Jeongin will be changing, too. His last point of stability upended. He imagines, briefly, a Jeongin that goes moony-eyed over someone pretty, batting long lashes that frame glowing yellow eyes.
Not at all like his plain old brown ones.
“No,” Seungmin grumbles emphatically. “I didn’t want to kiss her. I don’t even know her; she’s not in any of my classes.”
Seungmin is in all honors classes, of course.
“But they shouldn’t have said those things anyway!” he emphasizes.
The memory alone makes him steam. The name-hurling, the cruel teasing. He doesn’t care what they think of him—or, he knows he shouldn’t, even when it feels like being pummeled by physical blows from every side, with nowhere to cower away from them. But on principle, too, it boils his blood that they reacted like that.
“Why are teenagers so… so mean?” he says, feeling helpless. “Throwing around insults like being different is wrong!”
Jeongin hums, and pats his knee.
Seungmin isn’t sure what to say after that—it’s all uncharted territory—so they drop the topic for the night.
When Seungmin turns sixteen, he's still not girl-crazy, or boy-crazy. Sure, he feels flutters in his gut once in a while when someone handsome or pretty pays attention to him, and sure, he can indulge in the occasional thoughts of kissing and such. All things that can be explained away by the science of hormones.
But he decides that love is kind of like Santa and the tooth fairy. Nice to imagine, but it doesn’t really exist. While all his peers are chasing a fantasy and pretending they’re in fairy tales and trying to get the girl or Prince Charming, he stays grounded in reality. Too reasonable for all that by nature. It’s just not… him.
Even if he’d try to break the news to them, like he did to his parents and Felix all those years ago, they’d be too hormonal to listen.
He vents about this to Jeongin all the time. Sometimes pacing in his socked feet when he’s too pent up to lie still on the floor.
All his classmates, with their crushes and gossip and distraction. With their flirting and drama and detention because they were caught making out in the gym equipment closet.
Jeongin laughs at that one, the round, throaty sound of it fizzling in Seungmin’s belly.
Jeongin wants to know the gossip, so even though Seungmin hates it—it’s prying and it’s superficial and it’s vapid, utter brainrot—he listens in and reports back just to get that smile and that eager lean forward.
Seungmin spends Valentine’s Day of his second-to-last year in high school buried in his History textbook, while all his classmates chase one another and get their hearts broken or their silly, romantic dreams indulged. The school is too pink and frilly that day, Seungmin bemoans.
“You’d think high schoolers are old enough to be past that,” he sighs. But he’s long stopped expecting maturity from his peers.
He wants no part of it, and feels entirely indifferent to everyone he could possibly be interested in there. And since he isn’t interested in anyone at school, he wouldn’t call the feeling that creeps up on him jealousy, per se.
But two nights later, lying back on his bed with Jeongin at his side and feeling like a zombie after the day’s practice AP test, he wonders aloud—almost bitter—if anyone would even want to kiss him.
There’s no one he wants to kiss. It’s not about that.
It’s about an empty locker—not a single note or chocolate or anything (even if he’d cringe to get one from any of the girls or boys that might give it)—and it’s about starting to question if all along there’s been something wrong with him.
When Jeongin doesn’t answer—how do you admit to your friend that he’s completely unwantable?—Seungmin knows he’s right.
“Whatever,” Seungmin grumbles, turning away to face his door. “It’s dumb anyway.”
Santa, tooth fairy, wanting to be wantable.
“Besides, kissing is unhygienic and-”
“I want to," Jeongin interrupts.
Seungmin falters.
Jeongin? His Jeongin, his monster under the bed? Thinking about kissing?
He’d wondered, but hadn’t really thought… he didn’t even know if monsters under beds did that stuff at all. It wasn’t on his list of questions back when he was eight.
“You want to kiss?” Seungmin repeats.
He hears rustling behind him, and a creak of the bed frame. He watches the sliver of light under his locked door—Seungmin’s parents would never come in unbidden anymore, but the habit stuck from when they were kids and afraid of being discovered.
“I want to kiss you.”
The confession stutters through Seungmin’s chest, wafts steadily around the air of his bedroom, coaxed by the slow spin of the ceiling fan.
He sits up and turns to Jeongin, criss-crossing his legs and quirking his head. Assessing and analyzing Jeongin’s face for any sign that he’s messing around.
Jeongin sits up, too, flushed, burgundy hair falling into his eyes. He needs a haircut. Seungmin knows his own hair isn’t much better.
“You… do?”
Jeongin’s blush brightens all along his high cheekbones, visible even in the dim lighting of the room.
It’s answer enough.
The kiss is light, a sweet, cautious press of their lips.
It’s nice. Much nicer than Seungmin ever expected.
He brings a hand up to Jeongin’s neck. When his fingertips find the row of small, hard spines along the back of it, he feels Jeongin tense beneath his touch.
But Seungmin doesn't flinch or recoil, just rubs along them curiously.
They both glow red as coals afterwards, and don’t talk about it, retreating to their own spaces to sleep. Sleep doesn’t come easy to Seungmin that night, his mind racing in circles for hours like an overexcited puppy chasing its own tail before finally fading into nothingness.
Little changes for them, besides the blushes that appear when they catch each other’s eye a little too often or a little too long. Seungmin starts noticing more accidental brushes, too. Shoulder to shoulder, hand on wrist. Things they both ignore, but he can’t help wondering if Jeongin feels that small, electric thrill when it happens, too.
When Seungmin is nineteen and both stressed and excited about the future, he comes home one night with a six-bottle variety pack of soju. He and Jeongin taste through all of them, cross legged on his bedroom floor.
With Jeongin—alcohol or no alcohol—Seungmin can forget the stress of college entrance exams and the big decisions about his future that ten years ago, he’d assumed would be easy to make.
Seungmin finds he likes the green grape soju best, and Jeongin can’t decide between peach and strawberry, so he alternates between them until his face flushes and his eyes seem to have gone more electric green than yellow. He’s beautiful, Seungmin thinks hazily, and he still feels like he learns new things about him to this day. He wonders what else there is to learn, and for the first time, he wonders how much longer he has to learn it.
The thought is sobering, so Seungmin guzzles more soju until the pleasant calm and the fuzzy edges come back. Until his muscles loosen and his grin comes easier.
He asks anyway.
“We stick around as long as people believe we might be there,” Jeongin shrugs, not bothered in the least. Seungmin can smell fruit and alcohol on his breath, and he scoots in closer to try to get more of it on his next inhale. “You believe I’m here, right? So I get to stay.”
Jeongin seems happy about this—a sly sort of happy, like he’d planned it all along. Seungmin tackles him to the floor and blankets him with his body, feeling Jeongin’s laughter quiver through him, soft and warm.
“Good. Stay,” he demands.
“You really think I wouldn’t?” Jeongin scoffs.
They don’t drink often after that, the appeal of alcohol significantly diminished after experiencing the headaches that follow. Poor Jeongin’s lasts for three days straight, his anatomy clearly struggling much more with the drug than a human’s. He doesn’t come out much during that time, so Seungmin gives him space, pushing bowls of hearty, spicy soup under the bed for him. Even though he can probably get his own wherever else he spends his days.
On the fourth night, Jeongin crawls out, eyes a dull orange-yellow—any tinge of green thankfully gone.
“I could really use some cheese puffs,” he announces, bringing a relieved smile to Seungmin’s face.
So that night, they munch on cheese puffs, play a low-stakes round of Uno, and Seungmin feels like he can breathe again.
When Seungmin gets his college acceptance letter, there’s only one person he really cares about telling. He barges into his room, unable to keep from beaming as he holds up the paper.
Jeongin reads it, mouth hanging slightly open the way it does when he’s focused. As soon as he realizes, he crushes Seungmin into an enthusiastic hug. Seungmin laughs and squeezes him back, high off the news.
When Jeongin pulls away, proud grin splitting his face, all Seungmin can think is how happy he is to be sharing this with his best friend. Right here, right now, like this.
And how he wants it to stay like this forever.
He pulls him in again and captures his lips in a kiss. Jeongin kisses back hungrily, erasing any hesitation or doubt from Seungmin’s subconscious. Seungmin’s hands run eagerly along the ridges of Jeongin’s back, and Jeongin’s fingers thread over and over through Seungmin’s soft hair as they devour one another’s taste.
When they finally pull apart, mouths red and faces glowing, Seungmin asks a very important question.
“Are you able to leave this room?”
“Able? Yes,” Jeongin says, breath still coming heavy. “Allowed? No.”
“Oh-” Seungmin starts, but before he can say anything more, Jeongin is yanking him by the arm into the hall.
Seungmin runs back to grab a beanie for him, to at least hide the horns, but Jeongin is laughing and unbothered as they run out into the fresh air and down the steps.
“You’re crazy,” Seungmin smiles, holding his hand tight so he won’t slip away.
“One of us has to be,” Jeongin grins back.
“Hey!” Seungmin cries defensively. “I broke so many rules because of you!”
Jeongin rolls his eyes.
“Yes, you stayed up past your bedtime,” he teases, breaking his hand out of Seungmin’s grip and dashing down the street.
Seungmin races after him, grabbing him by the shoulders once he starts to wear out.
He’s already stewing up grand plans. First he’ll take Jeongin to his favorite barbecue place, and maybe a gaming cafe, or the library, or everywhere.
It all depends if this is Jeongin’s only time out.
But Seungmin, once so bold with his questions, is afraid to ask him. Or to be more accurate, he’s afraid of the answer.
So he pulls Jeongin onto the bus, where they huddle in the back seats sharing secrets and stories until they reach their first stop. Jeongin does get a strange look or two, but everyone is too polite to stare, so they’re left alone.
At the barbecue place, Jeongin decides he likes spicy chicken better than cheese puffs, but Seungmin argues it’s hardly fair to compare a proper dish to a snack, leading to a heated, beer- (Seungmin) and apple juice- (Jeongin) fueled debate. At the gaming cafe, Seungmin has to practically drag Jeongin out by his collar; the monster would have stayed there for a week straight if he could.
By the time they arrive at the library, it’s long closed, which Seungmin could have and should have predicted. The disappointment doesn’t prickle too badly, though. There’s something magical about meandering around its streetlamp-lit perimeter, sharing the familiar area with Jeongin.
Somewhere towards the back, where the shadows are heaviest and the soil is riddled with weeds, they find themselves kissing again.
Definitely worth the trip.
Seungmin explores the texture of Jeongin’s scaled upper arms, and Jeongin marvels at the smooth plane of Seungmin’s back and the faint scratch of stubble under his jawline where his razor must have missed that morning. The smell of damp brick and spicy barbecue smoke fill Seungmin’s nose, and he presses Jeongin closer, feeling his lean frame responding eagerly.
Even the cool night air can’t combat the heat that simmers rapidly beneath his skin, and Seungmin’s rational mind interferes then, citing concerns of public indecency.
Hardly public, he decides, Jeongin’s tongue pressing greedily into his mouth and his thoughts blinking black and red. They’re nearly secluded. No one has passed by this entire time.
Or, he thinks no one has passed by. To be perfectly fair, he has been rather-
Jeongin’s nails graze low on his back, just below the waistband of his pants before curling around to the front, to his lower abdomen.
-rather distracted.
Regretfully, he retreats, chest heaving and hair fluttering in the breeze. Jeongin’s beanie—or his beanie, really—must have come off at some point, so he picks it back up and brushes off the dirt. When he looks back at Jeongin, he nearly faints at the hungry look on his face.
His structured, strong jawline and cheekbones, the dark, symmetrical slashes of his brows, the steady glow of his eyes. The even striations of his horns, the shimmer of the scales around his collarbone, where the neckline of his t-shirt had been pulled askew.
Seungmin has always found beauty in structure, and Jeongin might just be the most beautiful.
But they’re in public, technically, and while Seungmin has some rules he’s willing the break, the law is not one of them. So they sit on a bench in one corner of the library’s lot, waiting for their breathing to steady and exercising monumental self-control. The light pollution of the city is unfortunate, but there’s a crescent moon tonight, and Seungmin can make out a few of the more prominent constellations from their spot on the bench. He points them out to Jeongin as they sit there, and Jeongin gazes up, mesmerized.
What Seungmin would give to take him out to the countryside, where he could really see the stars.
All the chaos of them.
Eventually, they make their way back to the bus stop, and Seungmin feels jittery as they wait. He thinks about all the things he knows and doesn’t know about life, and wonders if maybe love isn’t on his list of impossible things, with Santa and the tooth fairy.
It certainly feels real, in that moment as he glances over at Jeongin’s lamplit profile beside him.
On the bus ride home, Seungmin recalls the feeling of scales beneath his fingers, and teeth on his tongue, and breaking rules to visit each other’s favorite places. And the curiosity consumes him, Jeongin consumes him, mind and body. Every knowing look they flash back and forth under the harsh bus lighting feels like a secret, a confession.
Seungmin wants to know it all, with Jeongin.
Not for research papers or Nobel Prizes.
Just for him.
So, on the bus ride home, thighs pressing together and mouths kissed red and hearts light and free, Kim Seungmin starts a brand new list of questions.
And he can’t wait to spend the next years answering them together.