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“We really don’t get along, do we?”
After finishing the interview with the production team, Kim Jinhwan jabbed his elbow lightly into his ribs. He vaguely felt a twinge of pain, though perhaps it wasn’t real pain at all, just emotion playing tricks on him. That indescribable irritation never showed on his face. Kim Jiwon quietly caught his hyung's forearm to stop the attack, still wearing that easy, smiling expression.
“Whatever you say, hyung.”
It was precisely that this compliance that made Jinhwan more irritated. The Jiwon who didn’t retort was as rare as a four-leaf clover. Had this kid mutated? Or was he running a fever? No matter how he thought about it, something felt off. Suspiciously, he placed a hand on Jiwon’s forehead, lingered there to feel his temperature, then pulled back to touch his own.
“No fever,” he muttered. “Did you get some kind of shock?”
Jiwon laughed, sounding a little helpless. “Is that really how you see me?”
Jinhwan nodded solemnly, his face clearly saying don’t even try to fool me.
“It’s nothing,” Jiwon said. Catching sight of a stubborn tuft of hair sticking up, he couldn’t help rubbing it twice. “Hyung, you should trust me.”
The more he said that, the more suspicious it sounded. Jinhwan narrowed his eyes, scanning him from head to toe, staring long enough to make Jiwon uneasy, then suddenly broke into a knowing smile.
“You fought with Hanbin, didn’t you?”
“Sometimes,” Jiwon said after a pause, “knowing each other too well can be a burden.”
He fell silent for a moment, realizing there was no point hiding it. Then he let out a dramatic wail, raking his fingers through his hair, turning an already messy head of hair even wilder.
Jinhwan knew well that Kim Hanbin and Kim Jiwon could be close enough to share a pair of pants, or cold-shoulder each other for ages without a word. In moments like these, he had to step in as the glue between them. He is their emotional anchor.
“It’s really nothing,” Jiwon said, surrendered at last. “You know exactly what Hanbin’s like.”
Hanbin is a kid who hadn’t grown up yet but loves pretending he had, wrapping himself in sharp edges to look strong. Jinhwan understands his temper perfectly, just as he sees clearly Jiwon’s almost excessive protectiveness toward Hanbin.
“We can talk about it when we get back.” Jinhwan said, giving his brother’s hand a reassuring squeeze.
Compared to Hanbin, Jiwon is always better at situations that required emotional honesty.
As for the part about not getting along, they hadn’t lied.
When they first met, they were sixteen or seventeen, an age when you believed the whole world should revolve around you. The friction born of that arrogance far outnumbered the times they’d sat down calmly to talk about life. Jiwon, who had returned from the U.S. with an air of unrestrained freedom clinging to him, naturally handled things differently. Yet the ease with which he carried himself only made everyone else look foolish by comparison.
“Why do you care so much, hyung? Just mind your own business.” Jiwon said once after practice. Jinhwan had deliberately stayed to help him clean up, only to be met with a look of genuine confusion.
“Hey,” Jinhwan’s face darkened instantly. “I was trying to help. Is that your attitude?”
“I didn’t ask you to stay,” Jiwon replied, “everyone just needs to do their own part. Why do we need to make it complicated?”
Jinhwan laughed in disbelief. “That's easy for you to say. If everyone thought like that, no one would keep the team running.”
Jiwon yawned, clearly still not taking him seriously. That self-directed calm made Jinhwan want to punch him.
“Relax,” Jiwon said, “you worry too much and that’s why you didn’t grow any taller.”
“Are you asking to die?” Jinhwan swung a fist at his shoulder without hesitation. Jiwon grinned, caught his hand, and dragged him down to the floor.
They rolled from the mirror to the bench, limbs tangled, clinging to each other like octopuses, neither willing to give in. By the time they were done roughhousing, Jinhwan suspected the studio floor was cleaner than before.
Being smaller meant having less strength, and the younger ones could always pin him down easily. His back throbbed faintly. Jinhwan wiped the smile off his face and kicked Jiwon lightly in the shin, signaling him to let go.
Catching the change in expression, Jiwon instantly realized his hyung was angry again. But he is the only one who is not afraid of Jinhwan’s furious face, however, he leaned in closer.
Always like this, Jinhwan thought. How is this guy so good at wearing a smile that made it impossible to stay angry?
“Enough,” he said, “your smile is too ugly. Your eyes are small already, now they’re completely gone.”
Instead of getting up, Jiwon wrapped an arm around his waist and held him tightly. The intimacy wasn’t unusual, they are both the type who likes physical contact. Just below Jiwon’s ear was Jinhwan’s heart, thumping steadily against his eardrum. For a moment, he couldn’t tell whose heartbeat it was.
So strange.
Jiwon lifted his head. How could their heartbeats be almost perfectly in sync?
Propping himself up, he pressed a hand to Jinhwan’s left chest, then to his own. There was no mistake. He knew rhythm as instinctively as the body knows water.
Two hearts resonating in unison left him at a loss.
Probably just because we exercised, he told himself, then rolled aside to sit up.
Finishing a shoot and returning to the dorm in the middle of the night was nothing unusual. Dragging their exhausted bodies into the bathroom, they followed a habit formed long ago. It was showering together. Yet both of them shared an unspoken agreement: whenever they were alone, things were bound to go wrong.
The first fight.
The first time they slept together.
All of these were not supposed to happen. Untimely. The most inappropriate.
“Hyung, do you remember your vow of chastity before marriage?”
Steam filled the room as Jiwon giggled, clearly having no intention of stopping.
“Do you think I’m like you?” Jinhwan replied with a tight smile, then bit down on Jiwon’s shoulder in retaliation.
Jiwon bared his teeth, nearly crying out, then abruptly remembered they were in the dorm. He forced himself to steady his breathing, swallowing the sound. Under the showerhead, the rush of water never stopped, and all that heated emotion evaporated into unspoken secrets.
“So what are we doing right now?” Jiwon asked curiously.
“A perfectly reasonable act of sexual liberation?” Jinhwan guessed.
They both laughed.
It was ridiculous. Jinhwan pressed himself against Jiwon’s narrow back, his heavy breaths brushing the side of his neck. He hooked his thumb under Jiwon’s jaw, turning him around for a kiss.
“A little disgusting,” one of them murmured, he wasn’t sure who said it, “that this feels so tender.”
No one spoke after that, as if they had silently agreed. They kept kissing. Skin against skin felt unreal, almost melting into butter. At the tail end of desire, both of them thought the same thing:
This was too inappropriate.
They are not gay. During adolescence, neither had ever desired the other. And yet this moment was so profoundly misplaced that it felt as though one of them must already be dead, was he sharing a room with a ghost?
“So,” Jinhwan’s voice cut through the sound of running water, “what was it this time?”
Jiwon shrugged, squeezing a generous amount of body wash into his palm, focusing on burying himself in foam. “I don’t understand him.”
There was no answer to that question. Even though the three of them had trained together the longest, faced with the seemingly readable yet ultimately incomprehensible book that was Kim Hanbin, Jiwon was helpless.
“He’s probably mad because you’re always like this,” Jinhwan said, closing his eyes as water streamed over his face. “That time you didn’t comfort him the way he wanted, he said he hated you.”
“No one can fully understand another person.”
“Yeah,” Jinhwan scoffed. “But you two often gang up on me.”
Jiwon frozed for a moment, then stepped forward and wrapped his arms around him, kissing his cheek with ingratiation. “The person who loves you most is me, remember?”
Jinhwan rolled his eyes, though the smile never left his face. Pushing Jiwon away, he rinsed the foam from his hair, a strange feeling rising quietly in his chest.
This confusion and mistake had lasted too long. Too long for him to tell what kind of love Jiwon was talking about. Jiwon could say the word love to anyone, never caring how it was received. If it meant happiness to him, then so be it. And if they were not gay, if they were something else, then that was even more inappropriate.
He didn’t want to think any further. There was no clarity to be found, whether in his relationship with Jiwon or the bond among the three of them. The water was still running. He pulled Jiwon back under the stream, hoping it would wash everything away.
The world soaked in water, as if returning to its most primitive state. Touching each other’s bodies, he let out a quiet sigh.
So be it.
As long as they never spoke of it, this “most inappropriate” relationship would continue, until the end of time.