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“If you could love anyone, who would it be?”
Gyuvin laughs, golden as the day. Sunspots dance over his pretty face, highlighting the curve of his jaw, the toffee-brown flecks in his eyes. If Hanbin were a braver man, he’d reach out and let the universe in Gyuvin’s gaze spill into his palms. “I do love people, hyung. I love my parents. I love my siblings. I love you.”
That old familiar ache tears open the floodgates of his chest, a stop sign buried in the marrow of his bones, but Hanbin clamps it shut in favour of delivering a light punch to Gyuvin’s arm. “You know what I mean. I’m talking about that kind of love.”
The kind that gives you butterflies in your stomach. The kind that clings to you like a bruise, yellow and purple and blue against the surface of your skin. The kind that reaches into the fissures of your skull and wraps itself around your brain until all you can see, hear, feel is the hum of the void, and the cold of the universe, and them, them, them.
“That kind of love, huh?” Gyuvin balances his chin over the curve of his knuckles, brow furrowing in thought. “Like picking a crush at a sleepover?”
No, Hanbin wants to scream. Like skydiving into a bottomless ravine without a parachute. Like flying too close to the sun. Like wanting, craving, needing something you can never have.
Instead, all he says is, “Sure.”
“Hmm. Never really thought about it.” A grin spreads across Gyuvin’s face, stretching from ear to ear. “I guess if I could love someone like a lover, it would be you, hyung.”
He’d expected it. It’s a bullet to his head, all the same.
“Why?” Hanbin can’t help asking. Between his fingers, daisy petals snap off their delicate stalks and float into the breeze, leaving the world behind, and he instantly feels bad. Tucks his hands back into themselves and folds them into his lap.
Gyuvin shrugs, unfolding his long, lanky limbs across the grass. The cotton of his loose white tee fans across the ground like a halo, jeans riding low over his hips. Hanbin wants him so much he might die. “Dunno. Just seems like it would be the logical progression. I mean, you’re good-looking, you’re always really nice, you’re like…special, you know?” Tilting his face up to the sky, Gyuvin breathes in the afternoon sun with a chuckle. The wind rustles through his dark hair, a summer kiss pressed to each strand. He lies there like a dream, all sweet and gorgeous and completely oblivious to the thing searing its way through Hanbin’s chest, incinerating all his common sense away. “You’d be a good boyfriend. You’re already so good to me and we aren’t even boyfriends, so I think if I could love someone like that, I’d love you.”
It’s almost worse when Gyuvin looks at him with that lopsided little grin and tacks on (a poor consolation, to the saltwater filling Hanbin’s lungs until it drowns him alive), “Don’t worry, hyung. I already love you.”
Just not that way, his dancing eyes seem to say. Hanbin knows it isn’t personal. That Gyuvin doesn’t love anyone that way. That he doesn’t know how every time he looks at Hanbin like that, thorns sprout down Hanbin’s throat, stained vermillion with all the words he’s held back for so long. That he doesn’t feel the thing in Hanbin’s chest, doesn’t know that Hanbin would gladly rip it out and give it to him if he asked.
“I know,” Hanbin replies. A cop-out. It’s easier that way. He’s always been a coward.
Gyuvin stretches lazily, pockets of gold bouncing off the studs of his belt loops, the tousle of his hair. Hanbin wonders if Gyuvin feels the pulse of his myocardium like an earthquake beneath his feet, threatening to swallow them both whole. “Why’d you ask?”
He stares up into the sky, blue in his bones, Gyuvin’s fist around his heart. The world spins on. “Just curious.”