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Hong had never been big on anniversaries. Birthdays made sense to him—celebrating yourself once a year felt earned, even if it seemed like a lot of fuss. But marking the exact date you first got together? Who genuinely cared?
That being said, when Nut told him he'd be on set all day and coming home late, something small and uncomfortable settled in Hong's stomach. An honest look at himself would have revealed the truth he preferred not to voice: he liked being spoiled. Not in ways he'd ever admit out loud, but Nut had a particular talent for making him feel like the center of his entire world, and after five years, Hong had grown used to the warmth of it. Addicted to it, maybe. Nut was like that every single day—hovering, attentive, devoted, a little too clingy in ways that made Hong feel guilty for loving it, but not returning it—but anniversaries had always meant an excuse to push things further. A nicer restaurant than usual, a little more tenderness. Hong would complain all throughout the dinner, fork in hand, insisting none of it was necessary, while knowing Nut had made the reservation because he knew perfectly well that Hong loved good food.
So no, he wasn't upset about the anniversary itself. He was upset about losing an opportunity to be thoroughly cherished while pretending not to notice and giving himself an excuse to be clingy.
Waking up alone in their big bed was unpleasant. The sheets on Nut's side were cold—not just cool, but fully cold, like a surface that had been empty for hours. Last year, Nut had woken him with feather-soft kisses pressed along his jaw, a breakfast tray balanced between them. Now there was only stillness and too much space. Hong stretched a hand across the empty side and pulled it back quickly. He'd been the one to say anniversaries were pointless. He had only himself to blame.
He couldn't bring himself to linger. Usually he'd stay buried under the blankets until guilt or hunger drove him out, but the bed felt wrong today, too large for just him, so he rolled out and reached for the first thing that smelled like Nut—a hoodie draped over the chair, worn and soft from too many washes. He pulled it over his head and breathed in for a second.
The slap of his slippers against the floor marked each slow step toward the kitchen. He didn't bother lifting his feet.
He stopped at the threshold.
There were post-it notes everywhere.
The fridge was covered in them, small yellow, blue, green and pink squares pressed edge to edge, each one marked with a hand-drawn heart. The coffee machine had one. And in the center of the bar table sat two plates, both carrying notes in Nut's familiar handwriting.
Hong moved to the bare plate first. Don't pout! (Don't lie, I know you miss me). Happy anniversary ♥ I love you.
He stood there reading it twice. The tightness in his chest loosened just slightly, the way a fist unclenches one finger at a time.
The second plate was hiding something. The note on its cover said for your beautiful tummy ♥ . He lifted it and the smell hit him first—warm, faintly sweet. Pancakes. Still warm somehow, or close enough to it.
Hong stopped pouting. He started smiling instead, which he found mildly irritating.
The coffee machine's note made him laugh out loud, alone in the kitchen: don't burn your tongue, I'mma need it. And the fridge—among all its layers of sticky hearts—declared in Nut's smug handwriting: found your favorite strawberry marmalade, khun basic!
There had been a time, not so distant, when this kind of display would have made Hong's skin prickle with second-hand embarrassment. He used to wince at grand gestures, at anything too openly sentimental. But standing in the kitchen in Nut's hoodie, reading bad jokes off sticky notes while warm pancakes waited for him, Hong felt nothing but a full and uncomplicated fondness. He couldn't remember when the shift had happened. Somewhere along five years, Nut's sweetness had stopped feeling like something to guard against and started feeling like something he ran toward.
He poured his coffee and drank carefully, mindful of his tongue while munching happily on pancakes.
He promised himself he would stay awake. Nut had said late, and Hong had interpreted that as a challenge, something to outlast through sheer stubbornness. He managed a full evening of it—the cooking competition show Nut found unbearable, more coffee, a slow scroll through his phone and phone call with Lego that lasted way too long for Hong's attention span—but they had only just returned from tour, and his body had its own ideas about schedules. The clock read 11:40 when his eyes last closed. He didn't feel them do it.
What woke him was cold.
A hand, pressing flat against his stomach under the fabric of his shirt. The chill spread outward in a ring from where it touched him and Hong flinched hard, a full-body shudder that rattled him awake before he'd even registered what was happening.
"Sorry, babe," came Nut's voice. A kiss landed on his cheek—brief and apologetic, trying not to disturb. "I didn't want to wake you."
But Hong was already turning over. He wanted to be awake. He wanted this, even half-asleep and blinking against the sudden lamp light he'd switched on. He sat up and looked at Nut properly: the heaviness around his eyes that meant his body was running on willpower alone.
The clock on the nightstand said 2:07. Hong exhaled slowly. Their anniversary had slipped past while he slept.
He sat with that feeling for a moment—not quite grief, but something adjacent to it, a small mourning for the day they hadn't shared. Then he got up.
The massage device was still in its box, where he'd left it after the impulse buy that afternoon. He'd seen it in a video, some clip about recovery tools for tired muscles, and Nut's name had appeared in his mind so immediately that he'd clicked purchase before finishing the thought. He set the headrest on the bed the way the video had shown him, placed the bottle of lotion beside it, and turned to find Nut watching him with cautious, puzzled eyes.
"Shirt off," Hong said. "Face down on the headrest."
Nut looked at the setup. "You know I'll fall asleep."
"I don't care."
And that was true. Hong didn't need Nut awake. He needed to do something, to balance some unspoken ledger between morning pancakes and post-it notes and all the ways Nut spent himself on him. He needed his hands to say the things his voice found difficult.
"What time did you get up this morning?" he asked, uncapping the lotion.
Nut had settled face-down as he replied "Four in the morning." His bare back was visible now, the muscles along his spine and shoulders pulled tight like rope under tension. No matter how many he'd seen the muscles at work, Hong still found it captivating and salivating.
Hong pressed his palms together, working the lotion between them until it turned warm and released its smell into the air—lavender first, clean and soft, the kind of scent that made you think of fresh linen and open windows, and then something cooler beneath it, like wet leaves, like a forest after rain. He breathed it in. Let it settle him. Then set his hands on Nut's shoulders.
The tightness he felt there was immediate and dense, like stone wrapped in skin. Not entirely unfamiliar—he'd pressed a thumb into that spot between Nut's neck and shoulder before, absentmindedly, while they sat together on the couch watching something Hong had put on, Nut's head bowed over his phone, and felt Nut go still and grateful under the touch. But this was different. This was everywhere, layered and deep, the kind of tension that builds up over weeks and gets ignored because there isn't time to address it.
His thumbs found a knot near the base of Nut's neck and stayed there, applying slow, steady pressure until something gradually gave way beneath them—a millimeter of softness, a small release.
"You're carrying a lot of tension."
Nut made a sound low in his throat—not quite pain, not quite pleasure, somewhere between the two. A sound Hong had never heard from him in any other context.
"Four in the morning," Hong said again, almost to himself, finally registering the word, and began to work outward from the spine toward the curve of each shoulder. The skin beneath his hands was warm and smooth except at the edges of muscle, where the surface changed texture in a way that was difficult to describe. He could feel the shape of the body beneath it clearly, the landscape of it, ridges and valleys made by years of training. They went together to the gym most mornings when schedules allowed, or had before the tour—something that living together had made easier, a shared routine where before there had been only visits and temporary rearrangements of each other's space. Hong complained every time Nut dragged him to the facility. He went anyway, because there were things in life worth enduring discomfort for.
"Are you insane?" hong asked, realizing how early Nut had gotten up for him.
"Wanted it to be special," Nut said, his voice gone soft and muffled against the headrest.
Hong didn't answer right away. His fingers moved in slow, deliberate circles, following the grain of muscle, feeling each layer of tightness respond and release under sustained attention. The room was very quiet. Outside, the city made its distant nighttime sounds—the occasional car, something indistinct, nothing insistent. Inside there was only the soft friction of skin against skin, and the lamp throwing a warm circle of light over Nut's back, catching the shallow dips between muscles, the small movements of his breathing. The rise and fall of it was already slower than it had been.
"I did nothing today," Hong said eventually, keeping his voice light. "Watched your least favorite show. The cooking competition one."
A faint sound of displeasure from below.
"Ate your pancakes. They were different—better, actually. What did you do to them?"
"Coconut milk." Nut's voice was getting heavier. "Found it on YouTube. Practiced last week."
Hong's hands paused for just a fraction of a second—barely long enough to count as a pause, more a catching of breath translated into stillness. He thought about Nut, alone in their kitchen getting it wrong and starting over, all while Hong had been at some event across the city not knowing any of it was happening. He thought about the kitchen that was now unmistakably theirs: the fancy coffee machine Nut had insisted on buying before they moved in that Hong still didn't fully know how to use, the small magnetic notepad stuck to the fridge where one of them wrote down whatever they'd run out of and the other silently restocked it.
He leaned down and pressed his lips between Nut's shoulder blades. The skin there was warm and smelled faintly of his usual smell beneath the scent of the day that clung to him.
Hong moved lower, to the broad muscles of Nut's mid-back where everything accumulated after hours spent seated between takes, waiting for lighting adjustments and script changes and all the small suspended moments that made up most of a shoot. He knew this part of Nut's body as a catalogue of recurring complaints—the left side always worse than the right, something Nut had explained once while Hong half-listened from the other side of the bathroom door getting ready for bed. He pressed with the heel of his palm now, following the natural architecture of the body beneath him, and felt the resistance there—deep and stubborn, old tension that had been sitting since well before today.
He worked at it patiently. The lotion had fully absorbed now, leaving the skin soft and warm under his hands, and the lavender had faded into something quieter, a base note rather than a presence. The eucalyptus lingered slightly, cool at the edges of each breath.
"Waking up alone was bad," Hong said quietly. "I didn't like it."
Nut turned his head just enough to look at him from one eye, the other still pressed to the headrest. His face was flushed slightly from the warmth and the pressure, his expression open. The same one he'd been looking at him almost ever since they met. Unguarded devotion and love. It was a lot to take in sometimes, but Hong never tired of seeing it directed at him.
"I missed you too," Nut murmured. "Every hour."
Something settled in Hong's chest—a weight finding its right place, a thing slotting in. He kept moving his hands without breaking the rhythm, not trusting his face to arrange itself into something unreadable.
"Next year," he said, after a moment, "I don't care if we're both working. We need to be together for part of it. Promise me."
Nut's shoulders moved with the ghost of a laugh, and Hong felt it through his palms before he heard it. "Listen to you," Nut said, voice roughened with tiredness. "Asking me to promise you an anniversary."
"Don't make it weird."
"Tee." The warmth in his voice was unbearable. "Five years ago you told me anniversaries were invented to sell flowers."
Hong pinched his side, gently, at the soft place beneath his ribs. "Promise me or I stop."
"I promise." Nut reached back, found Hong's wrist without looking, and held it for a moment with loose fingers. He let go. "Morning together. At minimum. Even if I have to restructure the entire week."
Hong nodded and returned to his work. His hands moved to the base of Nut's spine, to the deep hollows on either side where the tension concentrated itself and stayed, hour after hour, day after day, and he pressed there with both thumbs and held the pressure until he heard Nut exhale long and slow into the headrest. The sound of relief. The sound of something finally being allowed to rest.
He stayed there a while. The rhythm of it had become almost meditative—for both of them, he thought, feeling his own shoulders drop, his own jaw unclench. There was the soft evidence of a shared life accumulated around them: the extra pillow Nut had bought because Hong hoarded them, the charger on Hong's nightstand that Nut had replaced twice after Hong destroyed the cables because of carelessness. There was the half-read book on Nut's side that had been face-down on the same page for three weeks now, because he'd started reading and memorizing his script instead. All of it was ordinary, but theirs and Hong loved every sign displayed thoughtlessly.
Later, when Nut had turned over, Hong took one of his hands instead and began again from the beginning. Fingers first, each one separately, working into the joints with gentle rotations, feeling the small pops and releases. Then the palm, broad and calloused at the edges from gym equipment. The wrist, where the tendons shifted beneath the skin when Hong flexed it carefully back and forth. The forearm, the muscle there dense and warm, jumping slightly under his thumbs as he pressed in.
Nut's skin was warmer on the side that had been against the mattress and cooler where it had faced the air. Hong moved between them without preference, cataloguing the difference. He could feel the pulse at Nut's wrist when he passed over it—steady, and slowing.
"I have the solo fanmeet tomorrow," Hong said softly, pressing his thumb into the space between the small bones of Nut's hand.
"Mmm." Nut was losing the fight with sleep.
"They'll ask about today."
"Tell them about the pancakes."
"They'll want more than that." Hong worked his way up to the inside of Nut's wrist, tracing the blue line of vein there lightly before moving on. "Since we confirmed things publicly, they notice everything."
"Love notes," Nut suggested, faintly. "Tell them about the love notes. They'll love that."
"They'll think I fabricated it. No one believes I'd find that charming."
"You did find it charming."
"I know," Hong said. "That's the problem."
Nut said nothing else. His breathing had already changed—that slight deepening, that quality of quiet that meant he was no longer choosing to be still but simply was. Hong kept going anyway, slower, lighter, the touch no longer working at anything but simply present. There was a difference, he had learned, between touching someone to get something and touching them for its own sake. He had learned it gradually, over years of late nights shared with Nut.
When he finally stopped and cleaned his hands with the towel, the room felt peaceful. He looked at Nut's sleeping face and felt the full quiet mass of five years settle over him. What a journey it had been.
He moved Nut under the covers carefully, arranged him gently, and leaned close. "I love you," he said, at a volume meant only for the space between them.
Nut slept on.
Hong turned off the lamp and got in beside him. The bed was warm now, the opposite of what had greeted him that morning, and when he pressed himself against Nut's side and rested his head on his chest, the heartbeat he found there was slow and even. He closed his eyes. The sound of someone breathing was not something he had ever imagined could mean this much to him. He could not now imagine falling asleep without it.
He would plan something better for next year. Something that would make Nut's face do whatever it did when he was trying not to look too pleased about something. The thought arrived as easy as his eyes grew heavy, and he followed it down into sleep.