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"Will you… come here?"
Spoken into the quiet room, between the pauses of the air conditioning unit, as a whisper.
There's no response, and Jisung thinks that maybe Minho is asleep, that he'd missed him. He listens to Minho's even breath, the slow cadence as familiar to him as his own. He stares, up at the still ceiling fan — there's a round glass light cover in the middle, and faintly, he can see the outline of his roommate in the glass. Outlined by the soft moonlight and unmoving.
Jisung opens his mouth to whisper again, but stops — there's the click of a door handle somewhere else in the hotel, and then the creak of a door opening and closing.
Every time.
Every time… Jisung's heartrate still rabbits with anxiety.
There's no way his whisper, just above the sound of breathing, could make its way past Minho's sleeping form and out the door to the hall to anyone. And yet, he can't help imagining the words, once out of his mouth, somehow exploding into the news unbidden and tearing everything down.
There's no way — but Jisung still closes his mouth and bites his tongue.
He rolls over, facing away from Minho and towards the window. There's a sliver where the curtains let through the streetlight, and it glares right into his eyes.
It's okay, Jisung tries to affirm to himself.
But… it would also be okay to get up and close the curtain all the way. So he can sleep.
Soft covers shift with barely any sound as Jisung shifts. His bare feet hit the cold floor, slippers nowhere to be seen.
Jisung gets up and closes the curtain, so that the room darkens another shade deeper.
Then, he turns back to the bed. To Minho's sleeping form.
It hits him unexpectedly, the tightness seizing his chest and clutching his lungs — he stays there standing — and his mind kicks into overdrive, flooding with demanding questions from the part of him that always throws a tantrum at times like this.
Why can't he just call Minho's name? Why can't he just walk over and lay down next to him, and then the two of them can walk out of the hotel hand-in-hand, why must everything be veiled as "secret"?
It's funny, really, how annoying it is. Fans every day tell him how much they want to be him, to be with him, how they envy him so… and yet…
There was one fansign, where a fanboy gushes at him, so full of admiration— and all Jisung can focus on is the polaroid of the fanboy kissing his boyfriend in his phonecase.
That's cute, Jisung wanted to point at it and ask. What's it like walking around with your boyfriend in your phonecase every day? Do you know how much I envy you?
But with a hundred cameras on him and multiple manager's eyes, Jisung can't even do that.
It's not fair. It's not—
There's shuffling outside their hotel door again, footsteps coming straight towards them — Jisung's head snaps up towards the glowing crevice, alarm spiking.
They fade, they always do, but the anxiety doesn't. It persists.
Jisung shuts his eyes hard against the burning feeling that rises, the kind of frustration that only tears can begin to relieve. He exhales intentionally, trying to control his breathing. The cold hardwood floor under the soles of his feet ground him a little bit; the cold bite of the air on his bare arms and legs bring him down from the thought spiral.
It's not enough though. It's not enough when his breathes start to get shallower, each aborted breath forcing him to suck in air faster, shallower. Nausea rises. His heart pounds, and his legs feel weak, like he's going to fall to the ground. He should reach for the bed, no, he should drink some water, sit down, he should—
"Jisung?"
He gasps, shaken out of his own thoughts.
"What are you doing?"
Minho sounds groggy, voice raspy with sleep, and far too loud. His hair swishes against the satin pillowcase as he lifts his head to look at Jisung.
"Minho—" Jisung whispers. He swallows hard, mouth dry — he tries to inhale, hand fisting the front of his shirt, tries to take a deep breath—
The bed creaks as Minho gets up, awake in an instant. In two strong strides, he's at Jisung's side.
"Come here," he asks. "Come back to bed."
A simple request. Minho makes it all so simple.
The mattress sinks as they sink in. Bedsheet, comforter, then Minho's arm over his back as a final touch.
Jisung syncs his breath to the strokes of Minho's hand. He presses close, as close as he can — warm skin against warm skin — until he's convinced he can feel Minho's pulse, too, just a distant echo of his own. He's convinced that the crook of Minho's neck is made for him, why else would his chin fit so perfectly in that coveted space?
It's so comfortable here, it feels so right.
For a moment there in the dark, everything feels like it's the way it was meant to be, fate and all that.
And then something clinks in the hallway, and it —
It all.
Falls.
Apart.
Tears begin welling, uncontrollable, embarrassing; it's a lot, hot and salty, straight into Minho's skin, but Jisung doesn't dare make a sound.
"Jisungie?"
"It's not fair!" Jisung whispers, then cowers at how loud it sounds. Paranoia roils, and he glances at their phones like they are listening. "It's not fair, hyung."
Minho just reaches over him, pulls a tissue out of the box on the nightstand, and wipes away his tears. He doesn't say anything for a moment. What could he even say? They'd had this conversation a hundred times, and a hundred times more they would have it in the coming years.
Jisung asks a question that has echoed in his head a thousand times, letting it out into the real world for the very first time.
"Why would the universe make this feel like fate… and then torture us so terribly?"
Minho is quick to respond. "You can't think like that, Jisungie. You'll think yourself down a pit."
Jisung presses on, he can't help it. In the absence of a higher wisdom to ask, he can only look to Minho. In the light of day, he can keep such depressing questions at bay, but it's after midnight and all his mental strength has come crumbling down.
"I can't stop thinking like that. I can't," Jisung swallows, Adam's apple bobbing painfully with how dry his throat feels. "It… hurts. In my chest, my head, it hurts my heart."
The space between them is quiet.
There's nothing to say.
Minho is never one to weave empty words, also known as lies, into sentences for Jisung, anyways. He's silent, because he's as desparate for something true as he is for something comforting to offer Jisung.
"I hurt, too," he says softly. "And I don't really know why, or what to do, either."
Jisung knows.
"But… I hurt a little less right now. Right in this moment. Don't you?"
A finger taps the space between his shoulder blades. Jisung nods, skin brushing skin.
"Tomorrow, it's going to suck all over again. It's going to be hell, but tomorrow night, we'll be in bed, and you come right back here. To this exact spot," Minho murmurs. He pats Jisung, molded into his side. "Come back here a hundred times, a thousand times. Forget fate and all that, it's all stuff we can't think too hard about, or it will drive us mad."
"Just come back to my side, night after night…"
"…and one day, you won't have to leave it at all."