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The fact of the matter is that Seojun is a touchy person. He nudges people to get their attention instead of calling their name, he likes hugging people to show his affection, and when walking down the school hallways you could often find Seojun’s arm slung over the shoulders of his younger sister, Jugyeong, Kim Chorong, or one of the other minions that earned his favor. This physicality sometimes translates into fights, but that’s just how Seojun operates - his opinion of you is directly correlated to the type and amount of skin-ship he shares with you.
Considering Seojun socked him in the face in the cafeteria, Suho figures that he’s very low on the Seojun Opinion Scale. This does not deter him even though maybe it should, and although he feels an underlying sense of guilt in regards to what happened with Seyeong (murderer, Seojun once said, and it left him feeling rattled and hollow ever since), he firmly maintains that Seojun is his friend regardless. They’re friends (?), and friends do things for each other, and Suho has never had that many friends but he knows the basics.
Suho is also not a particularly touchy person. Sujin calls him a walking romance novel cliche, what with the icy demeanor combined with a general aversion to touch and the strained father-son relationship and tragic past and all the other damn things that have happened in the soap opera of his life. Jujitsu is an exception because it’s a way to vent his anger. Otherwise, he’d prefer keep people at a arm’s length distance like a proper young man.
A part of it is that he’s just not used to it. Maybe there was his mother, once upon a time, who stroked his hair and held him. Maybe his father did the same. His touch-aversion was more of a learned reflex and less of a natural inclination. Somewhere down the line it turned to starvation.
Then he lifts Seojun into his arms during a baseball game and all hell breaks loose.
Suddenly it’s all about Seojun’s waist, Seojun’s hands clutching onto his shoulders, Seojun’s weight on his arm, Seojun’s incredulous expression; generally being in Seojun’s personal bubble without being punched. He’s literally woken up in a cold sweat about this. He finds himself thinking about it and struggles to concentrate afterwards. This has real-life adverse effects and the only cure is crushing Han Seojun into a massive hug.
He’s held Jugyeong’s hand before. He’s hugged Sujin on rare occasions because that girl is equally as emotionally constipated and touch-starved as he is. And yes, he wants to keep doing those things, but more so in the vein of friends being close, not I want him pressed onto me all the time forever.
In a sudden stroke of previously unfounded emotional intelligence, he also admits to himself that this sudden desire to touch him is just another part of missing their friendship. He wants to touch Seojun because only Seojun’s friends touch Seojun and are touched in turn, thus he wants to be acknowledged as one of his friends. Only, he investigates further, it’s not that he wants to go back to the past - Suho wants to build something new with him. Something different from before. Yes, their wounds have only barely scabbed over, and they’ll fight and shout at each other instead of doing the mature thing and having an actual conversation, but Suho remains uncharacteristically optimistic that one day, they’ll sit down in their old practice room in Suho’s apartment, and they’ll talk. Music, Suho’s dad, the company, the rooftop, that last phone call, dreams of becoming an idol, murderer; all of it will come pouring out. Then they'll be able to figure out a way to move forward, together.
Seojun makes Suho think and act in the most unexpected ways. He doesn’t know what to make of it.
However, he needs to address the problem at hand: there’s an explicit lack of his hand and/or other body parts touching Seojun in a way that’s friendlier than normal (though normal in this case refers to touching in an antagonistic way); this lack has caused him distress; he needs to engineer some way to get closer to Seojun and maybe solve their relationship crisis along the way.
“And you’re telling me this why?” Sujin asks over the phone.
“Jugyeong’s not picking up,” he explains. “I need an opinion on what I should do next.”
“Haven’t you been hanging around Sua’s boyfriend as of late? Why don’t you ask him?”
“I don’t have his number.”
The silence that follows after feels very judgemental. Then:
“Do you like him?”
Suho frowns. “You mean romantically?”
“What else what I mean? From the looks of it, you seem pretty fixated on him.”
“Um. I’ve never thought about it.”
“Then think some more. I’m hanging up now.”
“No, wait,” he says desperately. “What do you mean? What does any of this mean?”
Sujin sighs in a resigned manner. She of all people should know about his incompetence with feelings. “Have you ever thought about kissing him?”
Suho, who has never kissed anyone ever, considers this in the HD theater of his imagination. They’re at the baseball game. He leans in. Seojun leans in. There are at least four different shots of them kissing at different angles, a melodramatic love ballad swells in the background, and the brand logos start rolling.
Wow. He touches his lips, then instantly pulls away the second he’s regained self-awareness. It’s certainly a thought. Not even a terrible one.
“No,” he pauses. “But now that you’ve brought it up, yes.”
“Awesome,” Sujin does not sound the least bit enthused. “And what’s the verdict?”
“Kissing is perfectly acceptable.” Honestly, it’s more than acceptable, but he doesn’t think Sujin wants to hear that.
“Do you normally want to kiss your friends?”
He considers Sujin, and immediately wrinkles his nose. “If you’re talking about yourself, then no.”
“Flattering. What about Jugyeong?”
“We’re friends?”
“I’d be concerned if you two weren’t.”
He understands that his perspective on friendship is highly skewed, but maybe if he had more data (friends) to work with, then he’d get it. “Also no. It’s just Seojun.”
“Right. Why don’t you think that over and come back to me once you’ve reached the obvious conclusion?”
“What’s the conclusion?”
Sujin groans. “You’re literally the smartest kid in our grade but you’re so stupid. Google it or something. I’m hanging up.”
Suho turns to the internet forums.
I (19M) want to touch my former best friend (19M). We are classmates. Our mutual friend committed suicide and he blames me for it. That is why we are no longer friends. But recently we’ve started to rekindle our friendship, and I got excited during a baseball game and we hugged and I lifted him into my arms, and now I want to kiss him. What does this mean?
The list of responses boils down to this has to be fake/you are in love with him, congrats/sorry your friend did what??/haha touch him where. He disregards all other comments to focus on the ones proclaiming his love for Seojun. He starts to think they may be more accurate.
But here’s the thing: he’s never managed to get a proper grasp on love in all of its squishy, floaty abstractness. His father never did either, apparently, and Suho’s worried the problem might be genetic. Like father like son, or whatever the tabloids say, and there’s always the looming fear in the back of his mind that if he continues down this cold, distant path of his, then he’ll start to freeze on the inside and become an absentee towards the world instead of a child. Sujin helps. Jugyeong helps. Even Taehoon helps, in his own way. And he’s trying, by god he’s trying, but one of his favorite people is dead and the other wants nothing to do with him.
He’s been confessed to by girls and boys alike, but being the recipient of love feels suffocating instead of freeing. He no longer feels pity when they cry after a rejection they should’ve seen coming from a mile away. When horror protagonists fall in love, or start off already in love, their love interest usually dies. That does not bode well for his relationships, he thinks.
There’s also the matter of his overwhelming guilt. What right does he have to pursue happiness when Seyeong’s death was his fault, much less a happiness with the person who blames him for it? He’s not deserving. There’s nothing he could do as penance for his crime.
Killing himself wouldn’t bring Seyeong back, anyway.
But when he thinks of acquiescing to this guilt and cutting ties with Seojun forever, a panicky, scrabbling feeling in his chest shakes him down to his bones and shouts a resounding NO. Suho’s life would be markedly worse without him in a way that’s different than if Sujin or Jugyeong disappeared, and he paces around his living room in frustration as he tries to untangle how it’s different. He tries to think about whether or not he’s held the same feeling of intensity towards Seyeong, but the memories are so mired in grief that it’s hard to properly dissect them.
Still, Seojun and him have the sort of history and understanding that he’s never had with almost anybody else. He knows that some part of his heart is built upon the steady bedrock of affection for Han Seojun, platonic or otherwise, and even though he’s tried to terraform the stubborn thing into something easier to swallow, it’s never gone away. It beats like a drum. It sings.
He’s reached the obvious conclusion. He reassess the problem: There’s an explicit lack of his hand and/or other body parts touching Seojun in a way that’s overly romantic; this lack has caused him distress; he needs to engineer some way to get closer to Seojun, confess his feelings, and solve their relationship crisis along the way.
He calls Sujin again.
“What.”
“I like Seojun romantically. I want him to be my boyfriend.”
“Okay.”
“What do I do?”
“God, I don’t know. Doesn’t he have some of the worst grades in the class? Offer to tutor him. Get Jugyeong involved if you have to. I’m really going to hang up now. Good luck.”
Sujin might be a genius.
“Your grades suck,” Suho tells him in the bathroom. He’s been searching for a moment to get Seojun alone, but it’s hard trying to talk to him without his posse of delinquents getting in the way. To get around this, he’s been discreetly stalking Seojun down the halls for the entire school day.
It would be so easy to reach out and tap him on the shoulder, or hold him by the arm. He does none of those things. He tries to play it cool and pretend like he hasn't been actively craving the weight of Seojun’s body on his own.
“And why do you care, asshole?” Seojun grumbles. He turns the faucet off and flicks the suds onto Suho’s jacket. Suho ignores this and continues pestering him.
“I’m sure your mom is concerned about how bad they are. You got a 50 on Korean literature.”
“She doesn’t know about my grades and I don’t plan on telling her. Also, 50 isn’t a bad grade, you first-rank prep-school fucker.”
“Parent-teacher conferences are coming up,” Seojun glares at him, and Suho blinks innocently. “The math test next week is the last grade they’ll add before they’re finalized, and I only have your best interests at heart.”
“Math is my best subject.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“What’s your fucking deal?” he snaps, and Suho’s taken aback by how blatantly angry he is. He shouldn’t be, considering Exhibit A (punching him in the cafeteria) and Exhibit B (when he found out Suho helped with his mother’s hospital bills), but he doesn’t have any ill will. He never did. It was always Seojun assuming the worst of him. “Why do you keep pushing this on me?”
Suho is terrible at lying, and Seojun knows this. “You’re my friend,” he says earnestly. He wants to be more, apparently, but he’ll settle as a friend for now. Ease into it. “I want to help.”
A few seconds of silence pass. Seojun has this incredulous look on his face like he’s a gaping fish. Then he spins around, aggressively yanks open the bathroom door, and slams it behind him. There’s a distinct tinge of red to his ears.
Suho thinks that went well. He’ll place a sticky note on his desk with the time and place to meet him after school.