Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

When Ahn Keonho crossed the threshold of the classroom that morning, he did so in a legendary mood. Not the kind of bad mood announced by slamming doors, firm footsteps, and withering glares (that would still require a certain amount of energy, and he didn't even have that) but a quieter, denser, more viscous one: the kind of someone who drags their body as if carrying invisible weights sewn to their ankles, someone who has stopped fighting the world because they no longer think it's even worth the effort to raise a fist. It was the weariness of someone who has lost so many times in a row that defeat has ceased to be an event and become an atmosphere.

On any other Thursday, the very nature of the day—that rusty hinge that is not yet Friday but already smells of accumulated exhaustion, broken promises of rest, the sticky remains of Wednesday—would have been enough for him to wake up in a bad mood. He would have done so with his jaw clenched even before opening his eyes, cursing under his breath at the knot of his uniform tie that resisted him again and again, as if the entire universe had decided to amuse itself at his expense with that small act of textile sabotage. On a normal Thursday, he would have shrugged, bitten his lip, and waited. Because Friday always comes. And on Friday, somehow that Keonho had never bothered to analyze, everything weighs a little less. Gravity loosens its fingers. The teachers seem more tired than he is and give up earlier. Even the hallway light changes, taking on that yellowish, lazy hue of someone who knows the weekend is just hours away.

But that Thursday was not normal. That Thursday was the prelude to a Friday that promised to be catastrophic: a Friday strategically placed at the end of a week that had already been a complete disaster, as if someone, somewhere, had decided to top it all off with a tarnished golden brooch. And Keonho, who used to be a good player, who used to know how to pull himself together after a bad set, entered the classroom that morning with the feeling of having lost the game before it even started. With the certainty that the board was poisoned and that all his pieces, somehow, were already down.

It had all started on Monday, at the edge of the afternoon, at the campus swimming pool.

Keonho had managed to become captain of the Seoul University swimming team in a short amount of time and knew the water better than his own breathing. For years—since elementary school, after deciding, following several failed attempts, that other sports were not for him—he had been cutting through it, bending it, making it pay for every centimeter that dared to stand between him and the opposite goal. In theory, after weeks of obsessive preparation for the semifinals between the swimming clubs of the country's different universities, that afternoon should have broken his record. In theory.

But theories, as that week was teaching him with almost didactic cruelty, do not float.

The moment his palms sank into the surface for the first stroke, he noticed something strange. A dullness in his right shoulder. Not a clean pain, the kind that warns you and goes away, but a strange sensation, as if his muscles, instead of being tense and electric fibers, were soaked ropes that refused to stretch. The first turn of his head to breathe tasted like effort. The second, like alarm. By the third stroke, he already knew: something was wrong. Very wrong. The water, which had always been his ally, his accomplice, his clear territory, had turned thick that afternoon. Heavy. Personal. Each stroke was a second slower than the last, as if the clock had decided to speed up just to mock him. Each movement came late, clumsy, out of sync, as if his body had forgotten the exact angles he had repeated ten thousand times to the point of exhaustion. The sound of his own breathing became rough, offbeat, and the echo of his strokes sounded like defeat mixed with small explosions of pain in the shoulder ligaments that definitely had not been there before.

When he finally surfaced gasping, his hands white from squeezing the water as if he could strangle it, and his frantic gaze fixed on the scoreboard, he found himself in third place. And with the coach's gaze nailed to the back of his neck.

The older man didn't need to say anything. It was just a gesture: a slightly arched eyebrow, arms crossed over his chest, mouth pressed into a thin line like a fresh scar. But that gesture weighed more than any shout. It was pure disappointment. The kind that doesn't bleed but settles into the bones and hurts more with every movement. Keonho knew that look. He had seen it directed at other teammates, at those who didn't make it, at those who ended up in second place. Never at him. He was the one who received nods, pats on the shoulder, and "well done, captain." That arched eyebrow was new territory, and Keonho discovered he did not like inhabiting it at all.

Third.

He qualified for the finals, yes. Technically, he was still in the running and could participate in the final that would take place in a month. But his record over the last year wasn't just technical: it was about top spots, about medals hanging in an orderly row on the wall of his room, about records bearing his name written in indelible ink on the announcement boards in the university news. Third place was, for anyone, an achievement. For Ahn Keonho, captain of Seoul University's swimming team, it was a crack in something he had believed was solid. A fissure in the self-image he had built with every early morning, with every numb arm after training, with every sacrifice of going out with friends because the next day there were sets in the water.

Keonho stayed floating for an extra second, his chest burning, legs trembling, and his right shoulder sending him small electric warning shocks, and he knew Monday wasn't over. It had barely begun.

If that humiliation in the pool had been the only thing, maybe he could still have salvaged the week with a little dignity, a hot shower, a painkiller for the ache, and the promise of coming back stronger the next day. But the coach, hours after the competition, with a sour face and that way of saying nothing that sounded worse than any scolding, ordered (forced) him to rest. So Keonho spent the following days without touching the water. And that, for someone like him, for someone who had turned chlorine into a second skin, drove him crazy. He felt desperate, as if he were rusting from the inside, as if his muscles were slowly forgetting the language they had spoken for years. And to top it off, the bus that passed in front of his house and dropped him off at the university station started arriving late because of construction work on the route's main street. So he was late for three classes during the week, and his attendance record, which was almost perfect—a clean record he was secretly proud of, as if punctuality were an invisible medal—now had three stains that burned his eyes every time he opened the university's official app on his phone. Three little red stamps that seemed to laugh at him and that, if he wasn't careful, could affect his sports scholarship, which he had been maintaining for over a year.

And then there was Wednesday. The day before. Keonho had planned everything with meticulous care. For two weeks, he had been chasing a popular girl from the Design faculty, the one whose nails changed color every week—this week they were bubblegum pink with glitter—pretty and small. Feminine. The kind who laugh covering their mouths with their hands and smell like something between flowers and candy. He chose the place, the time, and even the table at the café in central Seoul with a patience he didn't know he had. He had put on his best jeans, the ones that fit him well but without making it look like he was trying too hard, his favorite navy blue jacket—the one that made his shoulders look broader—and styled his hair three times until each strand fell into place with that "I just woke up like this, accidentally on purpose" look. He arrived early, as always. Too early. He waited for her with his hands glued to his coffee cup, running through his head, over and over, what he was going to say, the silences he would leave, the exact moment he would smile. When she appeared, with that perfect-toothed smile—white, aligned, toothpaste-ad style—Keonho felt that everything was going as he had dreamed. Even better. Even brighter.

Until the girl took out her phone.

"You look so handsome, Ahn," she said, and for a second Keonho thought it was a real compliment, the kind you keep in your chest and they warm you from the inside. "Let's take a picture together."

She didn't ask if he wanted to. She didn't look him in the eye as she said it. She just raised her phone, adjusted the angle—she always looked better in photos than everyone else, Keonho noticed then—and smiled for the picture. Keonho smiled too, out of inertia, out of habit, out of not knowing what else to do. The shutter clicked. She lowered the phone, checked the photo, nodded with satisfaction, and without letting go of the phone, glanced at her watch.

"What a shame, it's quite late now, I have to go. But hey... I really enjoyed this moment, I'll text you so we can meet up later, okay?" she said, as if she really meant it, as if she hadn't only arrived half an hour ago. She put her phone in her back pocket, blew him a kiss in the air, Keonho felt the brush of her lips five centimeters from his cheek, that emptiness that is worse than a no, and left. Clicking her heels. Quickly. Without looking back.

Keonho was left alone at the café table, with his cup still full, with his navy blue jacket suddenly feeling too big, with the words he had rehearsed for two weeks stuck in his throat like thorns. He paid the bill. Went out into the street. The Seoul air smelled of car exhaust and roasted chestnuts from a street stall on the corner, and Keonho thought that none of it made any sense.

And to top it all off, that Thursday morning it started to rain.

Not a light, decorative rain, the kind you can bear with a hood and that's it, but a vertical, merciless downpour that turned the sidewalk into a broken mirror of puddles. Keonho didn't have an umbrella, of course. Who would bring an umbrella when the forecast had said ten percent chance of precipitation? That ten percent had fallen entirely on his head. He arrived at the classroom with his hair puffy, despite all the straightener and treatment he had applied that same morning to keep his hair from curling again, to keep its original shape at bay, the one he fervently hated, and with his wet lashes sticking to his eyes, bothering his contact lenses. He blinked and felt the tiny film of water moving over his corneas, as if the rain had decided to settle behind his eyelids too, because he would never, ever wear glasses in college. That was a red line he had drawn at fourteen, when a classmate told him that glasses made him look like "an idiot," and since then he preferred to suffer heat, cold, rather than wear the thick-framed glasses he kept in a drawer, for exclusive use on Sunday rest days in his living room, in pajamas, when there was no one around to see him. That was the uncomfortable truth: Keonho wasn't afraid of glasses; he was afraid of what glasses said about him. Afraid that people would look at him and not see the popular guy, the promising swimmer, the one who always had an easy smile, but someone more fragile.

That's why, that Thursday morning, when he crossed the classroom door, Keonho was already drained of all strength.

His body felt heavy from the lack of pool water, that muscular deficiency felt in the bones after days without training, as if his limbs had forgotten what they were for. His pride still stung from the coach's disappointed look when he told him his time wasn't good enough yet, that he had to push harder, that he couldn't get complacent. And still fresh in his mind was that moment from the previous night's date, where he had only served as decoration, and then, to top it off, while trying to jump over a puddle getting off the bus, he had failed spectacularly and felt the water seep through the edges of his shoes. His wet socks reminded him of his failure with every step, that cold, damp rub that became a sentence.

So he didn't even bother to pretend.

The classroom was half full. Students were scattered around, some standing leaning against the walls, others searching for folders and pens at the bottom of their backpacks with the urgency of those arriving just in time. Most greeted him as he walked in: the conditioned reflexes of popularity, those automatic gestures triggered when someone important walks through the door. Keonho responded with a broad wave of his hand, without looking at anyone in particular. A greeting for everyone, but without wanting to stop for any of them. He let out a "what's up" barely moving his lips, like someone fulfilling an obligation and that's it.

Because he was one of the popular ones, of course. And he had a reputation to maintain. Popular people have to greet everyone, even if your vertebrae are screaming at you to be left alone, even if all you want is to melt into your chair and have no one look at you. He dragged his feet to his spot, on the right side of the classroom, near the window where you could see the wet courtyard and the puddles that kept growing, and let himself fall into the chair as if he were a sack of cement. He didn't even bother to sit properly. He dropped his backpack on the floor, rested his head on his arm, and fixed his gaze on the empty blackboard, as if all the answers he didn't have were written there.

"Good morning to you too, Keonho."

The voice came from his left. It had that tone of reproach disguised as mockery, the kind that only someone who truly knows you can use, someone who has seen all your versions: the put-together one, the defeated one, the one who laughs wholeheartedly, and the one who falls silent on a terrace any given night and still stays. Keonho looked up and met the eyes of Eom Seonghyeon, the closest friend he'd made since starting university. They were looking at him with amusement but also with something else. Something that almost seemed like concern, though he would never have admitted it out loud. He had one eyebrow slightly raised, arms crossed over the desk with studied calm, and in his posture was the patience of someone who has already seen that face many times and knows it's best to wait without applying too much pressure. Without demanding. Without asking for explanations Keonho might not be ready to give.

"Seonghyeon," Keonho murmured, the name coming out with more weariness than he intended to show. It sounded almost like relief, too, because saying his name was a reminder that there was at least one person in that classroom who didn't expect him to be fine all the time.

He saw Seonghyeon's eyes narrow just a little, just enough for him to know that there was more going on than he was telling. Not a big gesture, not a direct question. Just that small adjustment in his gaze, that millimeter of extra focus.

"Please," Keonho continued, and this time his voice sounded exactly how he felt inside: unfocused, as if someone had emptied his chest with a spoon. "Let me sleep for five minutes. I haven't slept well all week."

His friend, who was already moving to get closer to him with that habit of his of invading personal space as if the world belonged to him, paused. Seonghyeon looked impeccable, as always. His uniform jacket ironed with the stripes in place, the hood of the gray sweatshirt underneath adjusted over his head with that casual precision only he could pull off. And that gesture of his, wearing the hood so snug that only a few messy strands peeked out over his eyebrows, managed to make him look ridiculously handsome even when he was dragging the bad mood of someone who had been dragged out of bed too early. Keonho looked at him from the edge of his own exhaustion and thought, with a hint of affectionate resentment, that his friend could show up to class in pajamas and still look great.

And for an instant, he had a glimmer of hope. Seonghyeon stayed quiet. Silence stretched between them like a freshly made bed, clean and warm, and Keonho could almost taste the possibility of closing his eyes and disappearing for five minutes. Maybe his friend would leave him alone until the bell rang. Maybe the English teacher would start class late because of the rain and he could keep dozing with his head on the desk. Maybe, for once, the universe would grant him that small reprieve.

That calm lasted five seconds.

Then, as always, Seonghyeon's urge to talk overcame any compassion.

"Is it about the girl from the Design department?" he blurted out, with the same naturalness with which others ask about the weather. Not caring about the muffled growl that came from Keonho's chest, that rough, deep sound that seemed to say leave me alone. "You still haven't finished telling me what happened that day."

Keonho let out another whimper. Longer. More pathetic. A sound that didn't entirely belong to him, that came from somewhere deep in his chest, from the same place where the small, unseen defeats accumulated. He let his forehead fall onto the table; the desk's wood was cold and slightly sticky, and he rested his cheek there, surrendering.

All the weight of the week had settled between his ribs. A slab. Something dense and hot that wouldn't let him breathe properly, that got worse every time he thought about the pool, about the stopwatch, about the coach's face when he didn't make the time.

"Please, don't remind me," he murmured. He looked up with a resignation that hardened his features, as if he had aged suddenly, as if those days without training had ripped something from him that he still didn't know how to name. "These days without training have been awful."

He didn't say: my shoulder hurts. He didn't say: the water feels heavy. He didn't say: I'm afraid this is gone forever. But Seonghyeon looked at him with wide eyes, he always did that, as if he could read the truth in some crease of his face, and for a second Keonho thought he understood.

His friend hesitated. Keonho saw it in the small movement of his mouth, in the way his fingers tensed on the table. He didn't know whether to scold him or give him a hug. In the end, he did a bit of both: first he raised an eyebrow, half-jokingly half-seriously, and then he gave him a light tap on the shoulder. Nothing hard. Just a dry, quick touch, an I'm here without needing to say it.

"Is it because of the competition on Monday?" His voice changed when he hit close to (partially) the mark. He lost that teasing tone, became lower, more careful, as if walking on glass. "Come on, relax. It's not the end of the world. Sometimes you can't be perfect at everything, and that's okay. Really. You'll do better in the finals."

Keonho didn't respond. He stared at a fixed point on the table, some old pen scratch, and felt Seonghyeon's words slide over him without finding purchase. He wanted to tell him this was different. That it wasn't about a bad night or a bad day. That this time the seconds weren't coming, that the water felt heavier than normal, that the muscle fibers in his right shoulder ached with a strange intensity and kept hurting despite having taken painkillers in the following days, as if something were wearing away inside. That in the weeks leading up to the competition held on Monday, the coach didn't even smile at him anymore, just nodded and wrote numbers in his notebook with a red pen.

But saying it out loud would have been like admitting it. And he wasn't ready for that yet.

"I know," he said finally, more to the scratch on the table than to Seonghyeon. "It's just that…"

He opened his mouth to continue, to complain about all that had been stuck in his throat for days, that mass of words that couldn't find a way out. But he didn't have time.

Someone interrupted him.

A voice. Powerful. Too powerful. A voice that cut through the classroom noise, the murmur of classmates, the screech of chairs, the hum of the fluorescent lights like a hot knife through butter. And Keonho felt the same as always, the same thing he felt every damn time since he'd known its owner: an overwhelming urge to stand up abruptly, cross the classroom in one go, and tell that guy to shut his mouth. And if he could disappear forever, even better. Or from the entire planet. Either option seemed fine to him.

Either option seemed perfect to him.

Because that voice, of course, could only belong to one person: Martin Edwards Park. And if Keonho was certain of one thing in life, as sure as water is wet and chlorine stinks, it was that he couldn't stand that idiot.

"Good morning!"

Keonho looked up just in time to see him cross the classroom door with an umbrella in his hand. Every morning, at the same time, with the same irritating punctuality, he appeared.

And then he saw him.

Martin looked up just in time to catch him in the doorway. There he was: tall, well-planted in the middle of the room as if the world owed him something, walking with that mix of carelessness and too much confidence that few manage to perfect. His uniform tie hung crooked—deliberately crooked, Keonho would have sworn—and his blond hair, tousled in a way that on anyone else would have looked sloppy, on him became a unique style. The contrast was almost obscene: that perfect schoolboy image marred by his nails painted black, the polish chipped at the edges, as if Martin had gotten bored halfway through and decided it looked good that way too. And then the smile. An enormous smile, full of white, straight teeth, splitting his face in two. So big, so happy, that Keonho felt like breaking something on him. Just to annoy him. Just to see if that smile would fade and something other than that irritating confidence would appear behind it.

"Good morning!" he repeated, and Martin's volume would have deafened a normal person. His voice bounced off the walls of Keonho's skull, and he noticed several classmates around him startle. But Martin didn't even seem to notice. He stood planted in the middle of the aisle, arms open as if about to receive a standing ovation, slowly turning to encompass the whole classroom with that smile. And this was always how it was: he arrived, placed himself in the center as if he were the blond sun and the others just planets orbiting around him, and shouted good morning as if anyone cared. As if the whole world were waiting for his greeting to start functioning.

"Good morning, Martin," Seonghyeon murmured beside him.

It was automatic courtesy, that conditioned reflex of someone who responds to a greeting because that's what they were taught at home, because saying "good morning" is what polite people do even if the person on the other side is a peacock in a school uniform. Keonho frowned so hard it almost hurt his forehead. Because responding to a guy like that wasn't courtesy. It was fuel. It was encouraging someone who already walked through life with an excess of it. And encouraging Martin Edwards Park had never, ever been a good idea.

But the rest of the class didn't think the same. Some eagerly, others half-asleep, some without looking up from their phones, everyone, one way or another, answered his greeting. Everyone except him. Keonho kept his head resting on the desk, his eyes fixed on a vague point on the table, and let silence be his response. He felt Martin's gaze sweep the room, pause for an instant on him, and then continue on with an ear-to-ear smile—if that was possible, a smile that lit up even his ears—as he walked to his seat at the back of the classroom. Like a big kid who had just found a new toy at Christmas.

"You should greet him someday," Seonghyeon said, almost scolding him, just as Keonho closed his eyes again with a frown, trying to sleep. From behind came the rustle of Martin's backpack hitting the floor, the screech of a chair being dragged. The blonde was too tall, and when he sat up front, he blocked the view of half the class—that's why he always sat in the last rows, by the window, though Keonho suspected he also did it to have the full panorama, to see everyone from his elevated spot. "Every morning he stares at you. You're the only one who doesn't say anything to him."

"And I don't plan to start today. So, no."

"It's just a greeting."

"For you. For me it's..." Keonho paused, searching for the exact word. "A declaration of intent. Greeting someone means saying 'you exist and I care enough to say your name.' And I don't care about him."

Seonghyeon was about to respond, Keonho knew it by the way his lips parted, by the little sigh of exasperation that always preceded his arguments, but the entrance bell cut off the conversation. The noise drilled into Keonho's eardrums like an electric spike, and for a moment his whole body tensed. Just as the echo was still vibrating in the air, the door opened again and Professor Kim, the English teacher, walked in barely five seconds later, with a giant brown bag under his arm, a tightly closed folder in his hand, and an umbrella leaving a trail of drops behind him as he headed to the desk. The teacher's punctuality was almost as irritating as Martin's.

They only had English classes on the last days of the week. Thursday and Friday, to be precise. Two days a week when Keonho had to cross the entire campus to sit in a classroom where he didn't know most of the faces.

That's just how English was. It was the wildcard subject, the one that brought together students from different faculties: music, design, business, engineering. And athletes too. Keonho was part of the university's elite sports program—the one that gave him flexible schedules and a scholarship that kept him afloat—but that didn't mean he was exempt from the core classes. English, math, and history. The three required subjects that everyone had to pass, whether they were swimmers, musicians, or engineers. No shortcuts. No exceptions.

And to his misfortune, it was the only class he shared with Seonghyeon and Martin.

So they shared a classroom two days a week. Keonho had gotten used to ignoring him. Or so he thought. But every time Martin opened his mouth—to answer a question, to read a text aloud with that Canadian accent that made even the simplest sentences sound elegant—Keonho felt a small tug in his chest. As if his body recognized something his mind preferred not to see.

The rest of the week, however, they didn't have to see each other. Keonho spent his mornings in the pool and his afternoons in the gym or in the sports science building, where the walls were covered with athlete posters and the hallways smelled of sweat and willpower. Martin (and Seonghyeon too), for his part, disappeared into the music building with its recording studios and soundproofed rehearsal rooms. They were two different worlds that only collided in the English classroom, like two tectonic plates grinding against each other without ever breaking.

Keonho let out a silent groan and buried his face in his arms. Goodbye to any hope of sleeping. The teacher dropped the brown bag on the table with a dull thud and flipped through the folder without looking at anyone as he greeted, and the room filled with the sounds of chairs scraping, backpacks and pens opening, computers connecting, and the metallic sound of a thermos of coffee being set on the table.

"Let's review the exercises on page twenty-seven," he said, in that flat voice that made any phrase sound like an obligation. "We'll start with the first sentence. Someone read it and translate."

Fingers flipping pages, then silence. The typical silence of morning classes, even though it was Thursday. No one wanted to be first.

Keonho looked down and began to take out his books and notebooks, thinking that maybe, if he didn't make eye contact, the teacher wouldn't call on him. That was the rule.

"Ahn Keonho," he was called, because the universe had a very twisted sense of humor. "You go first."

Keonho sighed inwardly. He grabbed the book, opened it to the indicated page, and read the sentence aloud, with his best pronunciation:

"She go to the library yesterday to study for the exam."

He paused. The translation was easy, but the sentence had sounded strange to him as soon as he said it. He didn't know why. The verb was there. The subject too. What else was needed?

The professor nodded slowly, but he didn't say "good." He made that gesture he made when something wasn't quite right, that small head movement that neither confirmed nor denied anything, like an indecisive pendulum. Keonho felt a tingle at the back of his neck. Bad sign. He bit the inside of his cheek.

"The translation is fine," the professor said, and Keonho almost sighed with relief until he heard the "but" that always came after. "But the English sentence has an error. Does anyone see it?"

Silence. An uncomfortable silence, the kind where people lower their gaze to avoid being called on. Keonho ran the sentence through his head again. She go to the library yesterday. It sounded fine to him. Or not. Suddenly, he wasn't sure of anything anymore. The grammar rules he had studied the night before were jumbling in his head like scattered dominoes.

And then, from the back of the classroom, a voice came.

"The verb," Martin said. It didn't sound triumphant or provocative. It sounded almost distracted, as if he were thinking out loud without fully realizing what he was doing, as if the answer had left his mouth before his brain had time to stop it. "In the simple past, with 'she,' you use 'went.' Not 'go.' It would be 'She went to the library yesterday.'"

Keonho felt the blood rush to his cheeks. An uncomfortable heat that burned his ears and tinted his cheeks a red that surely everyone could see. Not because the correction was humiliating—it was a little, especially in front of the whole class at their level—but because Martin had said it so easily. So naturally. As if speaking English were as simple as breathing. And the worst part was that Martin didn't even seem to be showing off. He had corrected because he knew the answer and it had slipped out, like someone pointing out that it's raining when they see drops on the window. He hadn't sought the spotlight. He hadn't raised his hand arrogantly. He had just... said it.

"Correct," the professor said, and this time he nodded properly, with a wide smile that lit up his face. "Very good, Martin. The past tense of 'go' is 'went.' Ahn, keep that in mind for next time."

Keonho almost rolled his eyes. Because it was unfair. Martin was half Canadian. He had grown up hearing English at home, watching cartoons in English, dreaming in English. For him, the language was like breathing. How was he supposed to compete with that? He tapped the edge of the book with his finger, more abruptly than necessary, and the pages shifted a little.

But out of the corner of his eye, he saw Seonghyeon beside him, his mouth slightly twisted, as if holding back a smile that threatened to escape.

"Don't say anything," Keonho murmured through clenched teeth, his jaw tight.

"I didn't say anything," Seonghyeon replied, his voice too innocent to be true, with a hint of poorly concealed amusement.

Keonho pressed his lips together. He grabbed his pen more tightly than necessary and jotted down the correction in the margin of the book, in handwriting larger and darker than usual, as if writing the words with anger could make them stick in his memory. And without being able to help it, he glanced back.

Martin, from the back, had leaned back in his chair, arms crossed behind his head, his black nails glinting under the white fluorescent light. He didn't have that expression of quiet satisfaction Keonho expected. Actually, he seemed to be looking out the window, distracted, as if he had already forgotten what he had just said. His eyes followed the clouds passing slowly behind the glass, gray with the water they carried, oblivious to everything. He hadn't sought the correction. He hadn't expected applause or a pat on the back. He had just answered because yes, because the answer was there and it hadn't cost him anything to give it.

He never had been.

The professor continued with the next sentence. Keonho stopped looking up. He decided that, for the rest of the class, he was going to make himself invisible.

But he could feel Martin's presence at the back. He couldn't see him, but he could feel him. Like background noise you can't ignore. Like a fly that won't go away.

And he hated that feeling.

The cafeteria bustle enveloped him like a wave. Not a clean, orderly wave, but that chaotic foam of peak hour: overlapping voices that don't listen to each other, metal trays clashing with a noise that goes straight to his teeth, chairs scraping against the tiled floor with that screech that would make anyone else's hair stand on end. Keonho, for some reason, found all that noise comforting. It loosened a bit the pressure that had been hunching his shoulders since Monday. Here, among so many people, he could blur. Become another smudge on the canvas of noise, lose his sharp outline. Just for a while.

He was hungry. Not that mild urge to eat out of obligation, no. A hunger that genuinely hurts, a fist clenched at the bottom of his stomach, the kind you forget about when you're too stressed and suddenly remember your body exists. The four full hours of advanced English (with a 15-minute break) had been unbearable; at some point, Keonho just resorted to jotting down words that slipped from his mind the next second. Now, tired and drained, he stood in line, calculating how many people were left before reaching the counter—six people, four minutes if the guy who had been ordering for three minutes didn't mess up or change his mind again—with Seonghyeon so close to his shoulder he could feel the brush of his uniform fabric and the warmth of his arm, both of them staring at the menu on the wall as if it were a treasure map.

"Noodles or rice?" Seonghyeon murmured without looking at him, his breath brushing Keonho's cheek.

When Keonho was about to respond, a heavy arm fell across his neck.

Not just any arm. An arm with the weight of a baseball bat, hours in the gym, shoulders trained to throw 140-kilometer-per-hour fastballs. The pressure compressed his trachea just enough to make him cough, a small, choked sound that perhaps no one heard above the murmur of the cafeteria. His fingernails dug into the skin of his palms as he reflexively clenched his fists.

"Ahn! Good to see you."

The voice reached him directly in his eardrum. So close that the bone behind his ear vibrated, an uncomfortable vibration that ran down his jaw. Keonho was about to complain, to let out a growl and pull away—his fingers were already closing around the other's wrist with the intention of pushing it aside—but the grip felt familiar before his brain finished processing it. The smell of sports deodorant mixed with that cheap cologne that all the baseball team guys used because it was sold at the convenience store closest to the university, and the roughness of the palm against his nape, that skin toughened by hours of pitching, irritated his skin, but he bit his tongue as he looked up.

It was the university baseball team captain, Park Jaehyun. The same one who once lifted him up after a winning game—Keonho and Seonghyeon were there cheering, their throats raw from shouting—and carried him across the field as if he weighed nothing, Keonho's legs dangling in the air and a mix of embarrassment and nervous laughter rising to his cheeks. Another one of those popular guys, big, loud, with more celebration soda than brain in their bodies, the kind who think affection is shown through painful pats and wrestling holds that leave your neck twisted for two days. Typical jock idiot. Keonho had spent half his life surrounded by them. He knew how to navigate this territory. He knew that resisting only made things worse.

So, against all his instincts and irritated nerves, he didn't move. He let himself be shaken a bit, let those shoulder slaps that sounded more violent than they were thump, thump, thump happen, because that was what you did. Because among popular jocks, this was practically a hug. He even managed a smile, the one he had perfected without realizing it by repeating it at parties and presentations and awkward encounters: the corners of his lips slightly up, his eyes half-closed with feigned confidence, as if he were delighted to see him.

"Jaehyun, what a surprise," Seonghyeon's voice came out tense, in a friendly falsetto too fake, too high-pitched, as if trying to distract from Keonho's irritation before it exploded. "I heard you won the last game. Heading to the finals, right?"

Jaehyun finally let go, but the heat of his arm left a mark on his skin, a red line that Keonho rubbed without thinking, as if he could erase the sensation. The captain leaned toward him with those big, self-assured eyes, eyes that didn't accept no as an answer. As if he had already decided the answer for him before asking the question.

"That's right! Twelve to five," Jaehyun said, puffing out his chest with pride. "To celebrate, my girlfriend Minnie is organizing a party."

"The one from med faculty?" Seonghyeon asked, one eyebrow raised.

"Nope, that's my ex. Long story," Jaehyun waved a hand as if shooing away an annoying insect. "We need to catch up. She's from the fashion faculty now."

"Oh," said Seonghyeon, his tone unclear whether he cared or not.

"Please tell me you're coming," Jaehyun insisted, shoving his hands into the pockets of the exclusive university team jacket that Keonho hated because the swim team didn't have one. "It's tomorrow. It's going to be great."

Keonho ran a hand over his neck, where he could still feel the pressure, the invisible mark of someone else's affection. His skin burned slightly, as if Jaehyun's arm had left a bruise that would take hours to fade. But he smiled. Because that's what you did. Because he was popular and people expected that of him, just like Seonghyeon. They were the university's star boys, the ones who appeared in official Instagram photos with crossed arms and measured smiles, the ones invited to all the parties, the ones who had to be everywhere. The handsome twins. The ones who couldn't say no without someone raising an eyebrow and asking: Are you okay? Is something wrong? And then they didn't know what to do with the answer. Then they'd just stare with that look of that wasn't a real question, I was just saying it to say it.

"Sure," Keonho said, and his voice came out in that tone he had unwittingly rehearsed so many times, that relaxed, confident tone, as if accepting invitations was the easiest thing in the world, as if he didn't have to jot it down in a mental calendar and then find the energy to smile for hours among strangers. "Send me the address and time by message, and we'll be there."

"Bro, you're the best!" Jaehyun exclaimed, his eyes shining with genuine excitement.

Jaehyun gave him another pat on the shoulder thump flashed him a wide smile, and disappeared into the crowd without waiting for confirmation, because for him it was already done. People parted as he passed, some patting him on the back as they crossed paths, others shouting captain! from the tables in the back. Keonho watched him walk away, blending into the river of students coming and going with plastic trays in their hands, and felt the air he hadn't realized he was holding rush out of his lungs. His whole body deflated a little, his shoulders slumped, the smile vanished from his face. And he realized the knot in his stomach had returned. Or perhaps it had never left. Perhaps it had been there for months, for days before he even knew how to name it.

Keonho exhales.

He didn't know he was holding his breath. The air rushes in, cool and sudden, and he realizes his shoulders had crept up almost to his ears. He lowers them slowly, vertebra by vertebra, as if unfolding an accordion.

"Are we going?" Seonghyeon asks beside him.

One eyebrow is raised. Not the one he usually lifts when he's mocking him, but the other one, the one he reserves for when he already knows the answer but wants to hear it anyway. And he doesn't ask "are you going." He asks "are we going," because it's well known—by them, by everyone who knows them—that wherever Keonho is, Seonghyeon will be there too. And vice versa.

Ever since they started university, they've shared everything: drunken binges where Keonho ended up sleeping on the bathroom floor while Seonghyeon held his hair back; Sunday hangovers with cold pizza and bad TV shows at Seonghyeon's place; awkward silences where they both pretend not to have heard something they should have said; and, above all, the few confessions Keonho has let slip when he couldn't take it anymore. Those confessions always come out in the early morning, on the fire escape, with the city below like a necklace of lights. Seonghyeon never judges them. He just listens, nods, and the next day doesn't mention them again.

So yes. Seonghyeon already knows the answer. He senses it before Keonho even opens his mouth, just as he senses when Keonho is going to skip breakfast or when he needs alcohol in his system. But he still asks, because he likes watching him squirm. Keonho has a specific theory that there is a small secret pleasure in watching his best friend wrestle with his own feelings, in seeing him twist between what he wants and what he thinks he should want.

"Of course not," Keonho says.

The phrase comes out weaker than he intended. It lacks strength, conviction. As if the refusal were made of painted cardboard, the kind of school theater decorations that crumble as soon as someone blows on them. Because deep down—in that corner of his chest that Keonho has learned not to look at too much, a dark, damp place where he keeps all the things he doesn't want to acknowledge—the idea of having a drink, of letting go, of forgetting for a few hours the disgusting week he's been dragging around like a stone tied to his ankle… doesn't sound bad at all. The stone has a name and a shape: the small shoulder pain that appears with certain movements, a treacherous pang reminding him that his body isn't as invincible as he thinks; the seconds that don't arrive, those tenths that slipped away in the last competition and that the stopwatch spits out with relentless coldness; the coach who no longer smiles at him, who looks at him as if he's doing calculations, as if he's deciding whether it's still worth investing time in him. He needs to laugh at something. He needs not to think. He needs, though he would never admit it out loud, to feel light even if just for one night.

Seonghyeon looked at him for a moment. Just a moment. But it's one of those looks of his that knows everything, that works like a silent scanner. He doesn't need to ask are you okay? because maybe he already knows the answer. He sees through Keonho's popular facade: the guy who laughs loud, who knows everyone's name in the faculty, who never misses a party and sees the boy who is truly exhausted. He sees the dark circles that concealer can't quite cover, the tension in his jaw, that way of breathing he has when he's on the edge of something he can't name. Then, like someone dropping a bomb without meaning to, as if it were no big deal, Seonghyeon nods and then drops:

"This morning in the bathroom I heard it's going to be a big party. Almost the whole university is going. Even the music faculty, and you know… even Kim Juhoon has confirmed he's going."

He doesn't say it with emphasis. He doesn't need to. The words fall into the conversation like a small stone in a puddle—so small it almost seems insignificant—but Keonho feels the ripples reach him all the way to his bones, feels the water rise up his legs, up his chest, to his throat. He stops breathing. Just a second. Just long enough for his stomach to lurch, that uncomfortable flutter he knows all too well. For his mind to go blank, erased by that specific name.

Kim Juhoon.

That famous music student who used to be a model. Beautiful, from a good family, the kind that appears in newspapers for donating to libraries and having compound surnames. He doesn't usually attend university parties, and the rumor that he might go to one meant a 90% chance of him showing up. Keonho tries to play it cool. He puts on a blank face. The same face he puts on when a professor says something he already knew, or when they ask about his performance in the pool and he doesn't want to give details. A porcelain mask: pretty, impassive, useless.

But Seonghyeon has already noticed. Of course he has. With Seonghyeon, he's never been able to pretend completely, and that's perhaps the most terrifying and most comfortable thing at the same time. Terrifying because it means he can't hide. Comfortable because it means he doesn't have to.

"Oh, really?" Keonho says, and he sounds more nonchalant than he feels. His voice comes out a little high-pitched, as if someone had squeezed his vocal cords with an invisible hand. The off-key note falls between them, and Seonghyeon catches it mid-flight.

An awkward silence follows. Keonho realizes he answered too quickly, that perhaps he showed too much interest or too little, and that unsettles him more than anything else. He doesn't know what to do with his hands. He runs them through his hair—his fingers get tangled in the ends that have curled from the morning rain, it was ironic that the sun had now come out—, he adjusts his tie around his neck, anything to avoid looking Seonghyeon in the eyes. Because if he looks at him, Seonghyeon will read everything written in the folds of his pupils, and Keonho isn't sure he wants anyone to read that. Not even himself.

"Oh, well then... it wouldn't hurt to go for a while, right?" he corrects, and this time he sounds more decisive. As if he'd made an important decision. As if he hadn't been sure before and now, suddenly, he was. As if that decision hadn't already been made from the exact moment he heard Juhoon's name. From before, perhaps. From the first time he saw him at the book club, sitting in a corner with his legs crossed and a book in his hands, oblivious to the world.

Seonghyeon smiles. That knowing smile of his. The one that doesn't need to ask because he's already guessed the answer long before Keonho opened his mouth. It's a smile that says I know you and also you're an idiot.

"Do you really like him?" Seonghyeon asks, and the question is innocent but it isn't. There are invisible quotation marks around the word like, a wink that Keonho chooses to ignore because if he doesn't ignore it, he'd have to face what it means. And he's not ready for that.

"He's nice," Keonho replies, shrugging, the words coming out with a tone that tries to be casual, light, like someone talking about the weather or cafeteria food. As if he were choosing between chicken or beef. But he doesn't quite pull it off. There's a tremor at the end of the sentence, something like a small crack in the armor. A tiny, almost imperceptible tremor, but it's there. Like an off-key note in the middle of a perfect song. Like a leak in the ceiling of a freshly painted house. Something that threatens to collapse if not fixed soon.

Nice.

What a silly word to describe someone like Kim Juhoon. Pale, perfect, beautiful, quiet. Like something out of a novel. As if someone had gone to a fictional character store and ordered the quietest one, the one with dark eyes and calm hands, the one who reads in corners while the world makes noise around him. Keonho met him at the book club—because, even though it doesn't seem like it, even though no one would imagine it seeing him at parties or in the pool or receiving pats on the back from people like Jaehyun, Keonho likes to read. A lot. It's his best-kept secret, that corner of himself that doesn't fit with the rest of the mosaic, the piece that doesn't quite fit in the puzzle. He joined the club almost by chance—one day he was bored, a poster on the bulletin board caught his attention, a decision made in a second that changed more than he imagines—and then Juhoon appeared.

The book club meeting was in a small room on the third floor, with windows overlooking the courtyard and a long wooden table that had seen better decades. That afternoon there were only six people. Keonho arrived late (a swimming session that went on longer than it should have) and sat in the only free spot: directly across from Juhoon.

He hadn't planned it. Or maybe he had. He was no longer sure.

Juhoon looked up from his book for a moment—just a moment, long enough to recognize him—and then looked back down. He didn't say anything. Keonho found himself staring at his eyelashes, the way he held his pencil, the blue ink stain on his index finger. All of that in less than two seconds. Then he looked away, because staring too long was suspicious, and because something about Juhoon's stillness made him uncomfortable. It wasn't a bad discomfort. It was like being in a library and feeling that any noise was too much.

The discussion revolved around a chapter Keonho hadn't finished. Someone said something about the main character, someone else contradicted them, and the voices overlapped until Juhoon raised a hand.

He didn't lift it forcefully. He didn't say "silence." He just raised it, fingers slightly apart, like someone asking for the floor in a very quiet meeting. And the murmur stopped.

"I think," Juhoon said, and his voice was soft, but it was perfectly audible because everyone had learned to be quiet when he spoke, "that the character isn't running from the conflict. He's running from having to name it."

There was a silence. Not an uncomfortable silence, but the kind where people are processing. Keonho processed. And he didn't fully understand, but something about the phrase tickled his brain, like an idea trying to be born that wouldn't quite come out.

"Isn't that the same thing?" someone asked.

Juhoon shook his head. The movement was small, almost imperceptible. Keonho couldn't stop looking at his hands. They rested on the open book, fingers still, nails short and clean. He wore no rings or bracelets. Nothing distracting. Everything about him seemed designed to make everything else fall silent.

"Running from conflict is cowardice," Juhoon said slowly, as if each word were a coin he counted twice before letting go. "Running from naming it is something else. Sometimes we don't know how to name what hurts us. And that's not cowardice. It's not having the words."

Keonho felt something strange in his chest. It was deeper. As if Juhoon had described something he'd been feeling for years without knowing how to say it. And he'd done it calmly, with that soft, steady voice, as if it were obvious. As if Keonho had been the only one not seeing it.

He wanted to say something. He wanted to participate, contribute, prove that he'd also read the book even if he hadn't finished the chapter. But the words wouldn't come. He stayed quiet, looking at Juhoon, and for a second—a ridiculously long second—Juhoon looked up and met his eyes.

He didn't smile. He didn't make any gesture. He just looked at him, with those dark, calm eyes, as if Keonho were just another page he was reading. And Keonho, the captain of the swimming team, the popular guy who knew what to say in every situation, went completely blank.

Juhoon looked down. Went back to his book. And the meeting continued as if nothing had happened.

But Keonho couldn't concentrate on the rest of the discussion. He spent the next twenty minutes staring at the blue ink stain on Juhoon's index finger, wondering what to name what he felt. And he discovered that, indeed, he didn't have the words.

He was there, in his own world, turning pages with long, calm fingers, and Keonho couldn't stop looking at him. He hadn't been able to stop looking at him since then, even though lately he hadn't had time to attend the club as regularly because of exams and training.

"Nice," he says. And they both know he's lying. But Seonghyeon doesn't hold it against him. Not this time. He just nods, with that patience he has developed after everything they've been through, that way of knowing when to push and when to let go.

"So... rice?"

Keonho nods, and feels that the stone tied to his ankle weighs a little less. Or maybe he's just stopped noticing it because he's thinking about something else. Because he's thinking about long, calm fingers, about a library corner, about a silence that doesn't need to be filled with words despite the fact that he really doesn't know the boy beyond the few words they've exchanged.

But with that fragile, newborn conviction, still warm in his chest like an ember that doesn't know whether it wants to ignite or die out, Keonho begins to search with his eyes.

The cafeteria is boiling. The yellow plastic trays, the remnants of sauce and kimchi drying on the edges, the poorly concealed dark circles of exchange students. The tables stretch out before him like a labyrinth of bodies and noise. There's an exclusive one for teachers in the back—where Keonho is almost certain they talk while criticizing students—and then the sea of the rest: men, women, some alone, buried in their phones while chewing with mechanical movements, like puppets that have been wound up only for that function; others sitting on the tables, legs dangling, gesturing with their hands as if conducting invisible orchestras.

The noise is a solid wall. Keonho has learned to recognize its layers: at the bottom, the metallic clatter, a sound that reminds him of coins falling into an empty piggy bank; above that, the rhythmic scraping of chairs, that squeak some students produce on purpose, as if wanting to leave their mark on others' silence; and above it all, the fragments of conversations that overlap without meeting—a strangled laugh, a half-whispered confession, an argument about a deadline that has already passed and that no one will get back.

His eyes wander from table to table, navigating the labyrinth of backpacks hanging on chair backs, of arms raised to greet someone in the back, of heads bent over phones with fingers moving in that silent urgency. Searching. He doesn't quite know what he's looking for. Or maybe he does. But saying it out loud would be too much.

Then he finds it.

Keonho's gaze stumbles upon the figure like someone stepping on a stair that isn't there, and something inside him stops: his heart, his breath, his thoughts—everything freezes for that tenth of a second while the brain still hasn't decided how to react, only to resume at double speed, like an engine that nearly seized up and suddenly accelerates out of control. His stomach clenches, folds in on itself, and an invisible hand squeezes his insides from within. Irritation begins to bubble in his throat, acidic and hot, rising up his esophagus like a nauseous reflex that never quite completes but leaves a metallic aftertaste on his tongue.

Because Martin is there too.

Sitting at the table in the back, the third one from the window, the one where the sun's rays illuminate his hair, turning it golden, Martin eats with that lack of ceremony that makes him look foolish. His blonde hair falls over his forehead in that fringe he never bothers to push aside, he eats with chopsticks gripped like a dagger, sauce staining the edge of his tray, his lips slightly parted as he chews. There's a grain of rice stuck to the corner of his mouth.

And next to him, sitting beside him with that quiet elegance that seems to defy the laws of the university cafeteria, as if noise and plastic and crumbs couldn't stain him, is Kim Juhoon.

Keonho feels as if someone has emptied his lungs with an air pump. That's not an exaggeration. He literally stops breathing for two seconds, and when the air returns, it does so with a barely audible whistle that only he hears. Juhoon is sitting with his back straight, shoulders relaxed, uniform in perfect condition, hands resting on the table with fingers interlaced as if he's posing for a portrait someone is painting somewhere. His uniform fits him perfectly—the blazer, the immaculate white shirt, the high collar that other classmates wear wrinkled and he somehow makes look like an exclusive design, almost a silent provocation. He doesn't have a tray. Maybe he already ate, maybe he hasn't gone for his tray yet, and maybe he's just there because Martin convinced him with that skill he has for dragging people into his orbit without anyone knowing how he does it, like a cheap magnet that somehow works.

The two of them share something that looks like an easy conversation. Too easy. Juhoon says something in that measured, unhurried tone of his, as if each word weighs just enough not to break the balance, and Martin laughs. Not a polite laugh, not a smile of compromise, but a real laugh, the kind that wrenches his body, throws his head back, and reveals his Adam's apple. Keonho has heard that laugh hundreds of times in English class, and he hates it. He knows it like the melody of a song he's heard to the point of exhaustion. But he'd never heard it directed at Juhoon.

And Juhoon has a small smile on his lips.

It's not the small, discreet, dazzling smile that Keonho has seen in the brief moments at the book club. Nor is it the polite smile that Juhoon gives people when they approach him, that measured, exact curve, rehearsed to the millimeter. No.

This is another one. An intimate smile, almost secret, as if he just remembered a private joke or as if Martin had said something only the two of them can understand. It's there, real, and Keonho has never managed to see it up close. Never.

He has rehearsed a thousand times the right moment to approach Juhoon. He has practiced phrases in front of the bathroom mirror with his toothbrush as a microphone and his voice in falsetto. He has feigned nonchalance, quickened his pace to cross paths with him when he goes to the music faculty looking for Seonghyeon, hoping Juhoon would turn and look at him. But never, not once, has he managed to get Juhoon to look at him like that. For his lips to curve like that. For something in his face to soften.

And Martin is talking to him as if they were old friends. Did they know each other? Since when? As if it were the most normal thing in the world. He even gestures, waves his arms with that carefree attitude.

And then Martin laughs again.

That loud laugh of his, the one that fills an entire room to the corners, that bounces off the walls and seeps through the cracks, and yet Juhoon doesn't seem annoyed. On the contrary. He tilts his head a little, like a curious bird that has just found something shiny and precious on the ground, listens, nods.

His hand rests near Martin's, just a few centimeters away. And from his spot, Keonho can't stop looking at that empty space between the two hands. A space they could close with a single movement, with a single careless gesture, and yet it remains there, intact, like a promise that Keonho and the people around them are not invited to understand. The distance between them is an abyss he crosses with his gaze again and again without finding a bottom, a precipice over which he leans and sees only his own reflection, tiny, pathetic.

His mouth goes dry.

Not his throat, his mouth. His gums, his tongue stuck to his palate as if he'd been chewing cotton for hours, as if someone had poured an entire bag of sand inside him.

Juhoon laughs now. He also laughs, and it's worse than Martin's laugh, much worse because Keonho realizes he had never heard him truly laugh before. He had only seen him smile. But to laugh like that, with his shoulders forward and his eyes closed and wrinkled, is a version of Juhoon that doesn't appear in any image he had of him. It's a new version.

He doesn't know why it bothers him so much.

"Keonho," Seonghyeon says beside him.

The voice reaches him as if through thick glass, muffled, displaced. Keonho doesn't react immediately. His eyes remain fixed on that table, on that tiny scene that no one else is looking at, that he shouldn't even be looking at.

"Keonho," Seonghyeon repeats, and this time there's something different in his tone, a note of warning or perhaps barely contained amusement. "It's your turn to order."

Keonho blinks. Once. Twice. Three times, until the world comes back into focus, until the blurry edges regain their sharpness and the colors stop mixing like watercolor on wet paper. He looks away and when he looks back he realizes that in front of him, the counter is empty because his turn has finally arrived, and the woman serving the food looks at him with poorly disguised impatience. Her eyebrow slightly arched beneath the white cap in a universal gesture that seemed to say, are you going to stand there all day? Her foot tapping the floor with a dull rhythm, tap-tap-tap, like a metronome marking the time Keonho is wasting.

Keonho doesn't know how long he has been staring at that table. Too long. Long enough for the queue of people to have moved without him, for Seonghyeon to have had to call him twice. Long enough for the image of Juhoon and Martin to have burned itself into his retina like a poorly developed photograph.

"Keonho," Seonghyeon says again, quieter this time, and his voice sounds like a hand touching his shoulder to bring him back. "The food. Order something, there are more people waiting."

"I'm sorry," he finally articulates, the words tasting hollow on his tongue, and then he orders anything. The words come out on their own, without passing through his brain: rice, jangjorim, a bit of gimbap. It doesn't matter.

The woman nods, relieved that he has finally made a decision. She takes one of the trays and begins to place the ordered food on it. Keonho exhales because in that space before they hand him his food tray, his gaze, like a magnet he can't control—as if someone had installed an invisible thread between his pupils and that corner—drifts again toward the place where Martin and Juhoon are sitting.

Martin is looking at him.

Directly into his eyes.

Keonho feels the impact like a tile coming loose in his chest. Not a sharp blow, but that silent sinking of something that held the floor and suddenly is no longer there. Martin's gaze pierces him and runs through him, and instantly, Keonho looks away quickly. Too quickly. The movement is a lash, a jerk of his neck that leaves a small strain lost in the heat of the moment.

He feels the heat rising to his cheeks. Not a pretty blush, the kind you hide with a smile and blame on the warm cafeteria atmosphere. No. It's a treacherous burn, the kind that starts in the chest and rises without permission, tinting his cheekbones an intense red that burns all the way to his ears. His ears sting as if he'd rubbed them with dry ice, as if someone were squeezing them between their fingers. And the worst part isn't the heat. The worst part is knowing he's been caught. That Martin saw him looking, and now he's paying the price for his carelessness.

He curses inwardly with every word he knows. In Korean, in English, a cascade of silent insults that don't relieve anything but give him the illusion of doing something. Because surely Martin noticed, surely he felt the weight of his gaze and perhaps Keonho even seemed like some kind of stalker and...

And wait. A moment.

A thought kicks him in the stomach, straight to the diaphragm, leaving him breathless for a second. Was he running from Martin? Did he just look away because he couldn't hold his gaze?

The thought churns his insides. Keonho doesn't run from anyone. He's never run from anyone. Not from rivals in the pool, and certainly not from that idiot. Keonho doesn't run. Keonho stays and stands his ground and holds gazes until the other blinks. He's not the type to turn his face away like a child caught stealing cookies from his grandmother's pantry.

No. He's not like that.

He forces himself to breathe deeply. The air comes in through his nose, slow, controlled, and exits through his mouth with the same measure. A swimmer's breath, the kind he uses to calm his nerves before a start. The heat in his cheeks begins to subside, though his ears still sting. He turns his head. Slow. Controlled. With the dignity of someone wounded but intact, reclaiming lost ground. Each degree of rotation is a declaration of intent. He's not going to hide. He's not going to give him that satisfaction.

When he looks again, Martin is no longer looking at him. On the contrary, he continues his conversation with Juhoon, his head slightly tilted, his lips moving calmly, as if nothing had happened. As if Keonho's eyes hadn't just crashed into his just ten seconds ago. As if that impact never existed.

Nothing.

The thud of the tray full of food startles him. The yellow plastic tray hits the metal surface of the counter with a hollow sound that brings him back to the present. Keonho mutters a quiet thanks—a clipped word, a hoarse thank you—and slides the tray aside to get out of line.

"Are you okay?" Seonghyeon asks beside him, when his friend finishes ordering his food.

Keonho takes a second to respond. A second that shouldn't have existed.

"I'm just hungry" 

He picks up his tray with both hands—feeling the cold plastic against his palms, a tiny anchor in the midst of dizziness, something solid to cling to while the rest of his head floats toward that corner where Martin and Juhoon are still sitting—and waits for Seonghyeon's food to be served before moving to follow him. He needs Seonghyeon to go first. He needs not to have to decide where to look.

When his friend picks up his tray, they walk together toward the table where they've sat for the past few months. The big one that extends to the center of the cafeteria, right where the light from the windows hits directly and allows no hiding. The table of the most popular and influential faces on campus. The table others look at with envy and desire, not knowing the chairs are hard plastic and the food always gets cold before you finish telling the last anecdote.

Keonho knows that table well. He's been sitting there for months, learning its unwritten rules: who laughs first, who interrupts, who nods while others talk. It's a noisy table, full of people who smile and talk loudly—Physical Education students comparing protein brands, some Business majors talking about internships they don't have yet, a Design girl who always carries a notebook full of doodles and never shows what she draws—people Keonho has learned to coexist with without trusting. Without telling them anything. Without letting them get too close to the cracks.

Of course, no one there knows he's on a scholarship except Seonghyeon (a confession Keonho let slip while drunk). But Seonghyeon is the only person there who has seen his face without a mask. The only one who knows that when Keonho falls silent, it's not because he has nothing to say, but because he has too much, and the words get stuck in his throat like thorns.

The rest are pure facade. Cardboard friendships, the kind that fall apart as soon as you get them a little wet. He's seen them crack before: a slightly lower grade on an exam, an out-of-place comment, a glance that lasts a second too long. Smiles that freeze. Silences that fill with knives. Alliances that reconfigure in the blink of an eye. Keonho has learned to swim in those waters without getting wet. To smile without committing. To be there without really being there.

He straightens his back as he approaches. He feels his muscles tense, his spine align in that position he's rehearsed so many times. The mask returns to its place, piece by piece: a measured smile, the exact curve that says I'm fine, I'm happy to see you; relaxed shoulders, even though inside they're stiff as boards; a gaze that sweeps the table as if he's choosing where to sit, though he already knows his spot is the usual one, second from the left. He greets with a gesture the classmates who call out to him—a Physical Education boy who raises his hand, a Business girl who gives him a wide smile—and his voice sounds normal. Warm, even. As if his head weren't somewhere else.

But inside, something has shifted. Something he doesn't know how to put back in its place. A gear that has jumped out of position and now spins falsely, scraping, making a noise only he can hear.

Something that, as he sits down—the cold plastic of the chair against his thighs, the weight of the tray as he sets it on the table with a dull thud—as he listens to Seonghyeon ask him something about the English homework the teacher Kim assigned, the trending topic of the party to be held tomorrow, Keonho can't stop turning one question over in his mind. Sharp as a splinter stuck under a fingernail. Insistent as a mosquito on a summer night.

Why the hell was Juhoon with Martin? 

• • •

Keonho's forehead is pressed against the bus window. He has his headphones on, volume high. Thank heavens he managed to get a seat—the bus was packed to the brim, people pressed against people, backpacks blocking the aisle, and he was about to resign himself to standing when a girl got off at her stop and left the seat empty for him, still warm.

Not too high—he's not fifteen anymore and doesn't want to go deaf before thirty—but loud enough not to have to hear the world. Songs play one after another, all chosen from his specific Oasis playlist, along with a stray ballad or two. He doesn't mind. He needs the noise. He needs to fill his head with something other than the thoughts that have been circling all day. Since that look. Since the corner of the cafeteria.

His shoulder aches a little. The bus brakes at a traffic light and his body sways forward, his forehead sliding a couple of centimeters across the cold glass. The ride is tiring. His backpack feels heavier than usual, or maybe he's just weaker. The lack of hours in the pool, the sleepless nights. It accumulates. Like an invisible backpack that no one sees but he carries everywhere.

He takes his hands out of his uniform pockets just to adjust his headphones. The afternoon wind hits his face through the slightly open window, cool, almost cold. It smells like rain, like earth and wet pavement, that scent that precedes storms. The rain has calmed down now, but it's left behind the feeling in the leaves of the trees moving with a noise he can't quite hear—the headphones isolate him, put him in a bubble—but he imagines. A dry crackle, like butcher paper. Everything looks quieter with background music. Like a movie with the dialogue erased, as if the world were a moving image and he the only spectator in an empty theater.

Liam Gallagher screams in his ears. You and I are gonna live forever. A beautiful lie. A promise no one can keep. But Keonho needs it all the same.

He just wants to get home. Shower. Lie down in bed. Not think about anything. Close his eyes and let the world disappear, even if just for a few hours.

And then he feels it.

He doesn't hear it—the headphones block out the bus sounds, the screech of brakes, the murmur of passengers, the beep of the door opening—but he feels it. It's a strange sensation, the kind you can't explain. Like when someone stares at you from behind and an ancient instinct warns you. Something at the nape of your neck that prickles. Something in your shoulders that tenses. Something in your chest that tightens without permission.

Keonho turns his head, just a little, out of the corner of his eye. He doesn't want it to be obvious. He doesn't want to look like he's looking for something. Or someone.

And he sees him.

Martin.

He's sitting several rows back, on the opposite side of the aisle. His head is resting against the window, he also has headphones on—black ones, large, the kind that shut out the world—and his gaze is lost in the landscape passing on the other side of the glass. His blond hair falls over his forehead, messy from the wind or from running his hand through it, and his arms are crossed over his chest, his backpack on the floor between his feet. He's not looking at Keonho. Or at least, he doesn't seem to be. But the feeling doesn't go away. That tightness in the chest, that acute awareness that Martin is there, a few meters away, breathing the same air.

Keonho turns his head back toward the window. He tightens his fingers around the edge of the seat. The song has changed—now Champagne Supernova is playing, slower, sadder—and he breathes deeply, trying to calm something he can't name.

The bus continues its route. Stops come and go. People get on and off. And Keonho counts the minutes until his stop, the back of his neck still prickling, his heart beating a little faster than normal.

The bell rings and the robotic voice of the woman announces the next stop. His stop.

Keonho stands up, slings his backpack over his shoulder—the right one, the bad one, and the weight makes him wince—and walks down the aisle without looking back. He feels Martin's eyes on the back of his neck the whole way. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just his imagination playing tricks on him. But the feeling doesn't leave. It accompanies him to the door, down the steps, onto the sidewalk.

He walks about ten meters. And then, unable to help himself, he turns around.

Martin is behind him.

Getting off the bus too. Hands in his school pants pockets, blond hair moving in the afternoon wind, gaze lost on the ground. He still has his headphones on, the cord hanging over his shoulder. He walks slowly, as if in no hurry. As if the world could wait. His steps are long, unhurried, the rhythm of someone who isn't chasing anything because he already has what he needs.

Keonho turns his head forward. He quickens his pace. He doesn't want Martin to think he's going with him. He doesn't want anyone to see them together. He doesn't want to have to greet him, or worse, have to pretend he hasn't seen him.

But he feels his steps behind him. The same unhurried rhythm. The same distance.

They had never coincided on the bus. Never gotten off at the same stop at the same time. Never walked the same sidewalk, separated by ten meters of asphalt and a silence that weighs heavily because normally, on normal days, Keonho would be at his swimming practice. In the pool. In the water.

He clenches his teeth. His jaw tenses until he hears a small crack near his ear, that noise it makes when he clenches too hard.

What a coincidence, he thinks. And then: what bad luck.

He quickens his pace. Not much. Just enough to make it clear he doesn't want company, shoulders straight, gaze forward, arms pressed to his body as if he wants to take up as little space as possible. But he doesn't run, because running would be admitting it bothers him, and he's not about to give him that satisfaction even if paid for it.

The earbuds keep playing. Liam Gallagher keeps yelling something about the sky and the stars. But Keonho isn't listening to the music. He's too aware of the footsteps behind him.

Shoe against sidewalk.

Shoe against sidewalk.

The rhythm is steady. Neither faster nor slower. Martin isn't trying to catch up. He just walks, at his own pace, at a distance that could be casual or could be deliberate. Ten meters. Not one more, not one less. As if he'd measured the exact distance between them and decided that was the right one. Keonho doesn't know which of the two options bothers him more.

They cross a street. The neighborhood becomes more residential, the houses lower, the trees older. Hedges grow unchecked, fences are painted in colors that the sun has worn down until they become mere shadows of what they once were. Keonho knows this route by heart. He's walked these sidewalks thousands of times, alone, backpack on his shoulder, head elsewhere. He knows exactly how many houses are left until his, knows where the speed bumps are and where the broken sidewalks are, where the cobblestones lift up and can make you trip if you're not looking. He knows which streetlamp always flickers and which gate creaks in the wind.

He passes the first house. The second. The third. The number of steps separating him from his door counts down like a reverse timer.

Finally, he reaches his. He crosses the garden that is more dry, dead grass than anything else, the lawn his mother waters when she remembers, that summer has turned into a yellowish carpet, and walks toward the dark wooden door. Yet, standing in front of it, he stops.

He doesn't know why. His hand trembles slightly. He doesn't look back, he doesn't want to look back, but his ears are on alert, catching every sound, every step, every breath coming from behind.

He waits.

He hears the tall one walk a few more steps. One. Two. Three. The brush of his sneakers against the asphalt. Then, the creak of the gate to the house two doors down, the one with the white facade and blue windows, the metallic thud of the outer door, and finally, the beep of the code unlocking the entrance.

Keonho doesn't breathe until he hears the door close.

A dry, definitive click.

And then, only then, he exhales.

All the air he didn't know he'd been holding leaves his lungs in a long, trembling sigh that leaves his chest empty and light. The tension drains from his shoulders like water.

He stays a moment longer on the threshold, listening to the silence Martin left behind. The neighborhood is quiet. The birds have begun to fall silent, because the sun is no longer what it was and the afternoon is dying somewhere behind the rooftops. The wind moves the tree branches, and a dry leaf crosses the sidewalk, dragging itself as if looking for a place to hide.

The house is empty.

Keonho notices it even before he punches in the right code to unlock the door, the high-pitched beep echoing in the silence. He knows before he looks. He knows from the silence, from from the stale, dusty smell that greets him as soon as he crosses the threshold.

The entryway is dark. His parents' slippers aren't in their usual spot—his father's on the right, his older sister's on the left, a domestic choreography they've never had to verbalize—but actually, it's early. Too early. Having a break from training, he's come home before the sun has fully risen over the rooftops, and the daylight still has that pale yellow tint, but that doesn't erase the feeling of a void that doesn't need to be seen, only felt: an absence that breathes in the doorframe, that seeps through the crack of the hinges, that has settled into every corner of the house like a dampness that won't go away.

There's no light in the entryway. No sound of the television that his older sister always left on even when she wasn't watching it—the constant hum of some reality show or midday drama, that domestic buzz he learned to hate and then, from a distance, to miss with a nostalgia he didn't expect to feel. No smell of hot food floating from the kitchen, no background clatter of dishes moving on the counter, no shuffling of house slippers dragging to the bathroom with that tired step his father has—a habit that by now, he won't manage to break.

Only silence.

The air smells stale, of a house empty since morning, as if the walls had been holding their breath all day, waiting for someone to return so they could exhale. Keonho takes off his headphones and sets his backpack by the shoe rack, leaning it against the wall, and takes off his shoes without looking, movements automatic, his body running on autopilot.

And then he hears it.

A click-click-click of nails against the floor. A small, fast sound, coming from the living room and approaching at the speed of an enthusiastic little locomotive. Then a small snort, a kind of excited whine, that sound only dogs make when they're so happy they don't know how to express it. And Cookie appears from the living room, wagging his tail as if he hadn't seen Keonho in a whole year, as if every separation, no matter how short, is an eternity to him, and now he approaches with clumsy little hops, his front paws slipping on the wooden floor, rubbing his snout against Keonho's calves, leaving a trail of warmth and something akin to devotion.

Keonho crouches down. He pets Cookie's head, scratches behind his ears, where the fur is softest and the dog closes his eyes in pure pleasure. The tail keeps wagging, thumping a happy rhythm.

"Hey there, little guy," he murmurs. His voice sounds hoarse, worn, as if he'd been silent for too long.

Cookie licks his hand. The rough tongue runs over his fingers, and Keonho feels something inside him come undone.

He stays like that for a moment, crouched in the dark entryway, the dog wriggling with joy at his feet. And for a second—a ridiculously small second—he almost forgets what happened today and yesterday and Tuesday and Monday. Almost forgets the shoulder, the scholarship, the heavy stares, the crushing expectations.

Almost.

But then the silence returns. And the empty house reminds him of everything.

However, the sensation of Cookie licking his fingers again manages to draw a smile from him. It's a small smile, fragile, but real. One of those that escape before you can stop them, that are born somewhere in the chest.

"Have you been alone all day?" he says to the dog, and his voice comes out softer than he expected. "Wow, so brave."

Cookie whines softly, a long, trembling lament that ends in a sigh, as if he's telling him how hard it is to spend hours waiting for someone to come back. His ears flatten back, two brown triangles pressed against his head, his eyes wet and shiny, and for an instant Keonho sees himself reflected in him (and no, not because his family and Seonghyeon say Keonho looks like Cookie) but in the feeling of waiting without knowing for what. Wagging his tail with the hope that this time, yes, that this time the person who comes through the door decides to stay. Not knowing how to name that emptiness, only feeling it, and lying on the floor until it passes.

He gives him a couple more pats, his hands sinking into the dog's fur, feeling the warmth of his trembling body, then straightens up and walks toward the kitchen. Cookie follows at his heels, his nails making that rhythmic sound on the wooden floor, and the sound becomes a small but insistent company. A presence that doesn't ask or judge, that's just there, with his tongue out and his breathing quickened, waiting.

Keonho opens the fridge. The white light hits his face, cold, surgical, and he takes out a bottle of water and drinks directly from it. The water is cold, almost too cold—it numbs his teeth, makes his gums tingle—and he feels it go down his throat in a thin stream, settling in his chest like a momentary relief. As if he could put out something from the inside.

He rests his hands on the counter and closes his eyes.

The counter is cold under his palms. It smells of detergent and the leftovers from his parents' dinner the night before, something with garlic, something with soy, a smell that has stuck to the tiles. He breathes for a few moments. Just breathes. Feeling Cookie's nails dig into his shins as he barks: a sharp, demanding bark that says I've waited long enough, now look at me. The dog's vibration runs up his shin, a tiny anchor holding him to the present. Prevents him from floating too far away.

Then, Keonho moves again. Not because he wants to, but because his body follows orders his head no longer gives. Because if he stays still too long, maybe he won't move again. He makes himself food out of inertia, like someone executing a choreography rehearsed a thousand times without listening to the music. His arms move on their own. His hands open drawers and cabinets without consulting his brain.

He opens the fridge and the pantry with half-closed eyes. The pantry light is warmer, yellowish, and the cans and packages pile up in a disorder that hasn't been fixed for months. He takes out the first thing he finds: a packet of instant noodles—the kind in a silver bag sold five for a thousand won at the corner supermarket—an egg, some vegetables that are starting to get overripe, the edges of the leaves yellowish like old paper, the tips dry and brittle. While the water boils, the pot he sets on the stove with a dry thud, the gas lighting with a click, he rests his hands on the counter and stares at the opposite wall.

There's a tiny, almost imperceptible stain next to the outlet. No bigger than a pinhead. He's seen it a thousand times, in the thousand meals he's prepared without thinking. Today he looks at it as if he could decipher something in it. As if in that tiny dot of moisture or grease or accumulated time were written the answer to all the questions he dares not ask.

He doesn't think about anything specific. Or he thinks about everything at once, which is another way of not thinking about anything. Kim Juhoon. The scholarship. The shoulder. Seonghyeon's smile when he said do you really like it? All those things float in his head like ice cubes in a glass of water, bumping into each other, melting before he can grasp one.

He knows this isn't the best meal for an athlete. His nutritionist, a woman with thick glasses who talks so fast it always sounds like she's scolding him, as if Keonho were a child who needs to be told off for not eating his vegetables, has repeated ad nauseam what he should and shouldn't eat. Lean proteins, slow-absorbing carbohydrates, leafy greens, avoid ultra-processed foods. The list is etched in his memory, like multiplication tables or spelling rules, but sometimes knowledge isn't enough. Sometimes knowing what you should do and actually doing it are separated by an abyss that can't be crossed with willpower.

And Keonho really doesn't feel like preparing something healthier and more elaborate. It's not laziness, or not just laziness. It's more a tiredness that fills him completely, that weighs on his bones and clouds his vision. A white noise inside his head, like when your ears feel clogged after a concert and everything sounds like cotton and distance. A tiredness that sleep doesn't cure, because he's tried sleeping and woken up just the same. A tiredness that has a first and last name, but that he doesn't want to pronounce.

Cookie sits at his feet, wagging his tail with the infinite hope of dogs that something will fall to the floor. His tongue hangs out to one side, his eyes fixed on the pot starting to boil, and Keonho smiles again. A smaller smile than the first, but real too. Because Cookie doesn't know anything about scholarships or championships or blonde boys with heavy gazes. Cookie only knows that his favorite person has come home.

"Nothing's going to fall for you," Keonho tells Cookie, in a voice he doesn't even recognize. It sounds softer than usual, more tired, as if the words have to go through a layer of something thick before coming out. But he still takes a piece of boiled egg and breaks it between his fingers—feeling the hot, crumbly texture, the yolk dissolving on his fingertips, the white breaking into irregular pieces—and gives it to him. Cookie licks it all up, even the invisible crumbs, even Keonho's fingers.

He changes into something more comfortable (a pair of baggy pants and a T-shirt with cartoon characters on it) that was way too big for him and when the ramen is ready, Keonho empties it into his favorite ceramic bowl from high school and eats standing up, leaning against the sink, because sitting at the empty table feels too sad today. The table is small, round, with a checkered tablecloth his mother bought at a second-hand store and already has stains that won't come out. There are four chairs. The one across has been unused for months, his mother says to put it away, that there's no point in having an empty chair taking up space, but Keonho hasn't had the courage to move it away or ask why, but he hasn't had the courage to store it. Perhaps because removing it would mean admitting something he's not ready to admit. Perhaps because as long as the chair is still there, there's a possibility, however remote, that his older sister will sit in it again. The noodles are bland. Or maybe it's him, who doesn't feel like tasting anything. He chews out of obligation, his teeth cutting the soft pasta, his tongue pushing it toward his throat, swallows out of inertia, and the only flavor he really registers is the egg and broth leaving a greasy layer on his palate. The chopsticks feel heavier in his hand than they should.

He looks at the kitchen clock. It's barely six. The green numbers blink with that worn-out light of old appliances, a hypnotic blink that seems to say time passes, time passes. A week ago, at this time, he would be in the pool, cutting through the water with his arms in that phase of training where the body no longer hurts because it's crossed the threshold of pain and entered a kind of trance. Cold water hitting his face, the sound of his own breathing, the echo of the coach's instructions bouncing off the pool walls. Body turned into machine, thought suspended.

Now he's here, eating, in a kitchen that smells of ramen and egg and cheap dish soap.

When he finishes, he washes his dishes, the pots, and the chopsticks he used. The hot water when he turns on the faucet burns his fingers a little, the stream hits the porcelain and splashes, small hot drops that crash against his knuckles, and he likes that sensation because at least it's real. Because it burns. Because it hurts.

Then he serves Cookie some kibble in his ceramic bowl that once had some kind of paw-print pattern but is now blurred from use and washing, brown spots on a white background that can no longer be distinguished. The sound of the kibble falling into the bowl is dry, metallic, almost violent. Cookie pounces on it as if he hasn't eaten in days—he's lying, he ate this morning, he always eats, but he acts as if every meal is the first and the last at the same time—and Keonho watches him for a moment, envious of that ability to enjoy something so simple.

He goes to the entrance to get his backpack and then he heads to his room.

As he enters, he trips over a slipper. It's one of his, the left one, the one with the most worn sole. It's there, in the middle of the hallway, like an obstacle he himself placed and forgot. The room is a mess Keonho knows by heart: posters of his favorite bands—Oasis, of course, and some other group he liked in high school and no longer listens to but hasn't bothered to remove—stuck with double-sided tape that is already peeling at the corners, the corners of the paper curling like dry leaves. Clothes on the floor forming small dunes of cotton and polyester, mixed colors, items he doesn't know whether they're clean or dirty. The cotton beanie he likes to wear hanging from the doorknob like strange fruits to choose from—navy blue, gray, that fluorescent orange one Seonghyeon gave him that he never used.

And then there are the medals.

He has them all, even that first one from a children's competition where he came in last but they gave him a participation diploma and a faded blue ribbon, a plastic medal that imitated bronze. They hang on the shelf where he still keeps some of his childhood toys: a stuffed white tiger, a red race car with peeling tires, and a Lego-style F1 car that still has details and pieces to assemble, a project he started one summer and never finished. The other medals he's won throughout his career shine under the lamplight, some gold, some silver, none dusty. Trophies of a Keonho who believed winning solved everything.

Today he only glances at them in passing. A quick, almost disdainful look, as if he doesn't want to dwell on what they mean. And he sits down on the rug.

The rug is old, a color that was once blue and is now gray, with frayed edges and a stain from something he doesn't remember spilling, and he stares at the wall opposite. There's nothing special about that wall. Just a poster of Liam Gallagher with his arms crossed and a defiant stare. But Keonho looks at it as if he expects the wall to give him something back. An answer. A sign. An everything will be alright that never comes.

He puts on his headphones. Noise-canceling and thought-canceling. He chooses an English study playlist and lets the anonymous voices talk to him about modal verbs and conditionals. The words enter his ears and float somewhere in his brain without fully anchoring, like ships without a port. He takes out his notebook, the blue pen that's the only one that writes well (the black one stopped working at the end of class), the one with smooth ink and perfect thickness, and starts doing exercises. Professor Kim's homework is boring, mechanical, just what he needs. He copies sentences without thinking about what they mean. Fills in blanks with words that come automatically. Underlines terms he doesn't recognize with a shaky stroke, mentally promising himself to look them up later. At some point, his head empties and only the rhythm of ink on paper remains, a constant, almost hypnotic scratching, the brush of his wrist skin against the paper, the slow breathing that synchronizes with the cadence of the English phrases.

For a while, that's enough.

When the muscles in his back and backside protest because staying in the same posture for so long, with his spine hunched like a question mark is difficult (and for sitting on the floor instead of at the desk at the end of his room but oops, there's clothes piled on the chair), Keonho decides that's enough. The page is full of blue ink, some incomplete exercises, others solved in handwriting that has deteriorated as fatigue set in.

He takes off his headphones.

The silence of the house envelops him suddenly, like a thick blanket falling over his shoulders without warning. For a blink, his ears still ring. A faint, constant beep, the ghost of the language he was listening to remains vibrating in his eardrum after the recording is gone. He stretches his arms upward, ignoring the slight pain running through his shoulder, palms facing the ceiling, back arching until something cracks somewhere it shouldn't—a bone, a vertebra, a tendon, it doesn't matter. He sighs. The air comes out warm, and he feels his shoulders drop a few centimeters, the tension accumulated over hours dissolving in his spine. And then he looks toward the bed.

Cookie has finished eating. At some point in the last while, the dog has left his bowl empty (probably) and climbed onto Keonho's bed without permission, as always, as if the bed were his and Keonho just a tolerated guest, and now he snores peacefully on the gray bed. Well, on Keonho's bed. But it's more the dog's than his now. One front paw hangs off the mattress, his tongue slightly out, and every so often his ears move as if he's dreaming about something exciting. A run through an endless park. A world of new smells.

"You're lazy," Keonho murmurs, but he doesn't mean it. His voice is soft, almost a whisper, and there's an undercurrent of affection in it he couldn't hide even if he wanted to. No one seeing the way his gaze fixes on the dog could believe he means it.

Cookie doesn't stir. He keeps snoring. His chest swells and deflates in a calm rhythm, and his hind legs give a little kick in the air, as if he's chasing something in his dreams.

That's when he hears it.

An electronic beep, brief and sharp. The front door lock.

Keonho freezes.

The pen hovers over the notebook, halfway between one word and the next. He doesn't breathe. He doesn't know why he stops, why the sound of his own parents arriving home causes that small startle in his chest. Maybe it's the habit of having been alone for hours. Maybe it's the fear of being asked things he doesn't want to answer. Maybe it's just that the silence has been broken, and returning to noise is always hard.

Then, the familiar sound of the door opening. The creak of the hinges. The soft thud of the wood. Voices. Two tired voices, dragging words like dragging feet after a long day. His mother's voice, higher, with that hint of fatigue noticeable at the end of each sentence. His father's voice, deeper, with long pauses between words, as if he needs to catch his breath before continuing.

His parents.

Keonho looks at the clock on the side table. Quarter to nine. Later than other days. Maybe there were problems on the subway. Maybe they didn't come straight home and had to stop somewhere else.

Cookie wakes at the noise and lifts his head suddenly. Ears alert, stiff, turning like antennas toward the source. The dangling paw repositions on the mattress in a clumsy, half-asleep movement, nails scratching the fabric of the sheet. He sniffs the air—his snout moves, his nostrils expand and contract. And then, as if someone pressed an "on" button inside him, he shoots off the bed. His paws dig into the floor, his nails make noise, and he disappears through the bedroom door toward the entryway, leaving behind a trail of contained joy.

Keonho hears his parents greet the dog. His mother's voice, suddenly higher, cooing at him, while Cookie barks excitedly. His father's, deeper, telling him something like alright, alright, get off my legs, my knees are shot, but in a tone that's not angry, just tired, the same tiredness as always.

He smiles.

He gets up from his spot on the floor and stretches his arms again—fingers pointing to the ceiling, spine stretching like a waking cat. He runs a hand through his hair, it's a mess, as always after hours locked away with headphones on and his head somewhere else, and heads out to the hallway.

His parents are still at the entrance. His mother has taken off her shoes—they're lined up, toes pointing toward the door—and his father is hanging his jacket on the coat rack, the work one, the one that smells of office and paper, with slow movements, as if each gesture costs him a little effort. As if his arms weigh more than they did in the morning.

"Hi," Keonho says. He sounds casual. He wants to sound casual. He's not sure he's succeeding.

"Keonho?" His mother looks up and smiles at him, but her voice has that edge of surprise she can't quite hide. She didn't expect to see him awake this late. They never do. "What time did you get home today?"

"I got home early," Keonho says, shrugging one shoulder. The left one, the good one. He keeps the right one still, rigid, as if the simple gesture might activate the pain sleeping in the tendon. "There was no practice today. The coach canceled it due to lack of time."

That's true. But not the whole truth.

While it's true he hasn't touched the water in three days, since his coach imposed mandatory rest with that voice that brooked no argument, that voice Keonho has heard used on other swimmers and always thought would never be directed at him. I don't want to see you in the pool until Monday. The phrase spun around in his head, however, the problem is he hasn't told them that. Nor about the third place. He hasn't told them he lost first place, he hasn't told them his coach looked at him after the race with an expression he's seen before, on other swimmers, on those who are about to stop being prospects and become memories. That mix of pity and disappointment that hurts more than any shout. He hasn't told them any of that.

He also doesn't tell them that the coach's rest hasn't been just for today. It's been three days since he received the order not to set foot in the pool until Monday, and every one of those mornings Keonho has left the house at the usual time and pretended normalcy: classes, practice, coming home. He's pretended so well he almost believes his own fabrication.

On Tuesday after university, he wandered through the clothing stores in Myeongdong. He went into three, tried on a jacket he wasn't planning to buy, looked at it in the mirror for a long minute, turned around, looked at his profile, hung it carefully back on the hanger, and left without the sales clerks saying a word to him. The mannequin at the entrance wore the same jacket. It looked better on him. He thought that. It didn't do him any good.

When the clock struck nine, he went home.

Wednesday brought the disastrous date (he doesn't want to remember it, thank you), and today he didn't feel like wasting more time. However, the point is that every afternoon that week he has arrived, right around nine—sometimes ten to nine, sometimes a quarter past, but always around that time—he has crossed the threshold of this door with dry hair because he hasn't touched the water, because he hasn't sweated, because he hasn't done anything worthwhile, because his body is clean of chlorine and that feels almost like a defeat, and he has said I'm back with the same naturalness. As if it were true. As if he hadn't spent the entire day pretending to be someone who was still a swimmer. His parents would nod from the sofa—his mother with her notebook of numbers, his father with the TV remote in his hand, both trusting, both not asking—and he would lock himself in his room to stare at the ceiling while his shoulder silently ached. Without complaining. Without crying. Just staring at the cracks in the ceiling and counting the days until Monday. Until returning to the water. Until becoming who he's supposed to be.

His mother looks at him for a moment, and Keonho feels the weight of that silent examination. It's a look that weighs more than it seems, that settles on his shoulders like an invisible hand. She's always been able to read him (at least better than his father), and there's something in her eyes that tells him she's not swallowing the story entirely. A tiny wrinkle between her brows. A tension in her jaw. Something that asks without words.

But she doesn't ask.

She never asks. Not since Keonho stopped being a child and became someone who could answer with lies. She just nods, with that mix of relief and resignation Keonho has learned to recognize in her since he was a teenager—the same gesture she made when overnight there was no money for new sneakers, when the washing machine broke and they had to stretch the budget, when Keonho arrived late from practice and dinner grew cold on the table—and she keeps walking toward the living room. Cookie follows close behind, pressing his snout to her calves, and then his father also moves in the same direction.

"Thank goodness," the older man says once he sits down in the armchair, and his tone is neutral, the kind that could mean anything. It could be relief. It could be indifference. It could be tiredness disguised as words. "At least you get some rest."

The "some" tickles the back of his neck. 

"Have you eaten?" his mother asks.

"Yes. Ramen noodles."

"Just ramen?"

"An egg too."

His mother rolls her eyes. That gesture he's known since childhood, the same one she made when he said he wasn't hungry or that he'd already done his homework in class. The same one she made when he came in with scraped elbows from a fall in the yard and said it didn't hurt.

"That's not food," she replies, and her voice has the edge of someone who no longer negotiates. "Give me a minute, I'll make dinner."

It's not an offer. It's a sentence. Keonho knows it's useless to argue. His mother is already unbuttoning her formal shirt, allowing herself to collapse on the sofa next to his father to rest her swollen feet for a moment, her neck rigid, turning her head with a slowness that betrays hours in front of the computer, her neck stiff from poor posture, from monitors that are too low, from years of not complaining.

It's then that Keonho notices.

His father didn't leave his briefcase at the entrance where he normally does; instead, he opens it with a clean pull and begins taking out and placing papers on the living room coffee table. They're brochures. They're being spread across the coffee table, peeking out from the edges of the cardboard folders, and even his mother takes more from her formal pants pocket and places them on the sofa beside her, forming a fan of glossy paper that reflects the lamplight. From where Keonho stands, he can make out the flashy lettering: Banquet halls with fake columns and white tablecloths trying to look luxurious but clearly cheap. Outdoor ceremony gardens with canvas awnings that mimic silk. Budgets with big, flashy numbers trying to hide what they really cost, because if the numbers were smaller, they'd hurt less.

His mother sits up straight and takes one of the brochures and looks at it as if she's learning to read a foreign language, flipping through the pages with thick fingers, knuckles swollen from years of work. Keonho can see the numbers peeking out between the pages. Provisional invoices with official stamps. Bank statements that his mother probably printed at work because the printer ink at home ran out months ago. And then a sheet with numbers written by hand, crossed out, rewritten, in that cramped handwriting of his mother's that he knows from the notes she'd leave on the fridge: the milk is on the second shelf, don't forget to call your sister, the bread is running out. The cross-outs are many, some done with such force they've torn the paper, and the final numbers—the ones enclosed in a trembling circle, as if the hand hesitated before drawing it, as if she held her breath while writing—don't seem sufficient. They never seem sufficient. They never have been.

"What are you doing?" Keonho finally asks, though he already suspects. Though his heart already knows the answer before his mouth finishes forming the question. There's a knot in his throat that wasn't there a minute ago, and he clenches his jaw to keep it from showing. To keep nothing from escaping.

His mother looks up and smiles. A tired smile, the kind that tries to be reassuring and fails. Her lips curve upward, but her eyes stay still, as if they didn't get the order to follow along. She has a blotch of red ink on her index finger from going over figures, from pointing at lines, from keeping track of something that never quite adds up.

"Uh... we're doing accounts," she says, and the pause is small but significant, as if she's deciding how much to tell, how far to let him in. "Calculations. Some adjustments."

His father runs a hand over his face, top to bottom, that gesture of his when things aren't going well. The wide palm, fingers spread, the path from forehead to chin, as if he wants to erase something written on his skin. Keonho has seen it hundreds of times throughout his life. The gesture he made when the washing machine broke and there was no money to fix it, when Keonho asked for specific swimming goggles that cost two weeks' worth of groceries, and his father made that gesture—that same gesture, exactly the same—before saying yes, he would buy them, but not to ask for anything else until the end of the year. Keonho never forgot the way his fingers swept across his face that afternoon, nor the weight behind the movement.

"Your sister's wedding," his father says, and his voice is a hoarse whisper, as if the words weigh more than they should, as if he's pulling them from a deep, dark place. "We're figuring out... how to make it work."

Keonho's mother looks at the man harshly. Not with hatred, not with anger—she's never known how to truly get angry, never raised her voice beyond a soft scolding despite everything—but with that silent warning that years of marriage have taught them. Don't tell him more, that look says. He doesn't need to know the details. He doesn't need to carry this too. But his father doesn't see it, or chooses not to see it, or is simply so tired he no longer has the strength to read the signals. And Keonho is caught in the middle of that battle of glances that lasts barely a second but feels like an eternity to him, an invisible pendulum swinging between his parents with him at the center.

And yes. His sister's wedding explains everything. Keonho nods, and the movement travels from his neck to his right shoulder, where the pain is now an insistent pulse, a small alarm reminding him that his body is not what it used to be. His older sister, the one who practically raised him when everything fell apart and his parents had to work late, the one who made him snacks when he came home from school, the one who helped him with math homework even though she hated it herself, the one who taught him to tie his shoes and not to cry over every little thing, is getting married in three months.

To a guy from a good family.

That's what no one says out loud, but Keonho knows it. He breathes it in the air of the house, in the silences that stretch through dinner, in the hushed conversations his parents think he doesn't hear from his room. He's seen it in the way his sister started dressing differently when she met him—tighter clothes, finer fabrics, colors she didn't wear before—in the restaurants they invited her to and from which she returned naming the dishes as if they were words in another language, her eyes bright and her mouth full of flavors they couldn't afford. He's seen it on his parents' faces when they talk about the in-laws, that tremor at the corners of their lips that isn't happiness but vertigo, that mix of pride and fear that shows on their foreheads. The groom's family has money. Not the kind of wealth you see on TV, not yachts or mansions, but enough to notice the difference. Enough to make polite comments about the bride's career—an administrative assistant, nothing special, could have studied more, their glances say—or about the house—small, but cozy, it has charm, their smiles say. Comments that aren't malicious, that might even be sincere, but that still sting because they carry an implicit comparison. Because they remind you where you come from and how far you can go.

And now the wedding. And now the numbers. Because a wedding isn't just a party: it's a statement of intent. It's proving that you can too, that your family measures up, that you're not giving your daughter less than she deserves even if the other side has more. His parents know that. That's why they're here, with the glossy brochures and the crossed-out numbers, trying to make ends meet, trying to stretch the budget until it creaks, trying to keep their daughter from being ashamed of them on the most important day of her life.

His mother looks at him. And there's something in that look, something he knows well—a tenderness that hurts, a worry she doesn't dare name, a question she doesn't dare ask—that warns him that what comes next won't be pleasant.

"Keonho," she begins, and her voice is soft but firm, that firmness she has when she's about to say something necessary even if it hurts, even if the words scratch her throat on the way out. "Your athletic scholarship... do you have it secured for next semester?"

The question falls on him like a slab. It's not the first time he's heard it. He's heard it at other dinners, in other living rooms, at other times when the numbers didn't add up and his parents needed to know how much they could count on him. But it weighs more each time, and this time it carries the added weight of the shoulder that isn't responding as it should, of the third place that was a warning, of the coach who asked him to take a week to think. Think about what, Keonho wonders now, as the pulse in his shoulder quickens. Whether it's worth it. Whether he can keep going. Whether all of this—the afternoons in the pool when the water is so cold it hurts, the sacrifices of not going out with friends, of giving his body to the water—makes any sense when in this house the numbers don't add up and his sister's wedding threatens to devour everything.

Because as mentioned before, he's on a scholarship, and that's his biggest secret. He's not the captain of the swim team because his family has a name or money. He's on a scholarship. He's there because his times in the water opened a door that would otherwise have remained forever closed. The only one who knows—the only one who has seen the acceptance letters, the test results, the scholarship conditions that require maintaining above-average performance—is Seonghyeon. Seonghyeon, who found out almost by accident, one night when Keonho came home drunk from a party and said too much. Seonghyeon, who has never made him feel ashamed, quite the opposite.

"Yes," Keonho lies. Not entirely. He has the scholarship, for now. The paper with his name and signature is still in effect. But the condition is maintaining performance. And performance, lately, has been harder than anyone imagines.

His mother and father look at each other again. They exchange that silent language that years of marriage have taught them: an eyebrow raised, a lip pressed together, a contained sigh that hangs in the air. It's a dialogue of minimal gestures, of small muscle contractions that Keonho has learned to read like reading a book in a language not his own but that he understands anyway.

And beneath all of that, floating in the air like the dust dancing in the beams of light coming through the window, is the pressure of not being less. That his daughter's wedding not be a reminder of what they lack. That relatives not whisper at the reception comparing the banquet hall to the other side's. That the in-laws not have to smile that polite smile that hides a grimace. That life, at least for one day, not weigh so heavily. To be able to look his daughter in the eyes and know they've given her what she deserves, even if it meant stretching every won until it almost broke.

But this time Keonho sees something more in his mother's gaze. Something he had only glimpsed before at the edges of their hushed conversations when they thought he wasn't listening, in the too-long pauses before answering questions, in the sighs that got trapped in the kitchen. It's not just worry about the wedding. It's not just fear of what people will say. It's something older, deeper. It's the certainty that there's a chasm between who they are and who they should be.

Because there was a time when nothing was lacking. He was smaller then—a teenager with the age when summers lasted forever and scraped knees had no consequences—and his father had an electronics component company that was doing well, very well, enough that his mother didn't have to work outside the home and that on weekends they ate at restaurants where the menu didn't show prices, only dish names in cursive script. Keonho remembers the smell of his father's new car, of leather and that pine-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror that he would swing with his hand every time he got in. He remembers the skateboard they gave him for his birthday, a red one with silver wheels that sparkled in the sun, and the way his father would lift him in his arms after his first swim meets—water still dripping down his back, arms tired, legs shaky—as if he were the most important child in the world, as if all the trophies in the universe could fit in his smile.

But the company went under. Keonho never really knew why. The explanations came to the dinner table in fragments, in words the adults said in low voices when they thought he was already asleep. Something about a partner who ran off with money, something about a contract that was signed wrong, something about a debt that grew like a water stain on the ceiling, spreading until it covered everything. His father stopped laughing as easily. His smile became rarer, briefer, as if he had to save it. And they both started working in an office, first in the mornings, then also in the afternoons, and their hands, once soft, became covered in small calluses from constant typing. They sold the car, and the red skateboard disappeared one day too, the way things disappear when there's no money to keep them, when you have to choose between eating and having.

Keonho doesn't hold a grudge. Or maybe he does, but he doesn't know at whom. Sometimes he thinks at his father for not being smarter, for trusting the wrong person. Sometimes he thinks at the partner who ran away, that suited man who once patted him on the head and said you're a champion. Sometimes he thinks at no one, that things just happen and he was lucky enough to grow up on the line between before and after, getting to taste abundance just long enough to know how much it hurts to lose it. To know there's a void that nothing fills.

His father clears his throat. He's never been good at these conversations. He prefers silence, the background noise of the television, the routine of days that pass without surprises. But now there's no TV on, only the ticking of the kitchen clock and the held breath of three people who know they're in a minefield, where any word could explode.

"Look, son," his father says, not quite looking at him, his eyes fixed on the sheet of crossed-out numbers. The cross-outs are so many that the paper looks like a battlefield, a trench of figures that won't surrender. "We don't want to pressure you. But your sister needs us to help her with the wedding, and..."

"I know," Keonho interrupts him, and it comes out harsher than he intended, and he regrets it instantly. Guilt creeps up the back of his neck like hives, an invisible itch he can't scratch. His father doesn't deserve it. His father works overtime, back bent and feet swollen, just like his mother, and all they're trying to do is make ends meet as best they can. Make ends meet and, on top of that, pay for a wedding. Make ends meet and, on top of that, keep their son from having to drop out of university. Make ends meet and, on top of that, not sink. The knot in Keonho's throat tightens a little more, until swallowing becomes an act of will.

But then his father adds, and his voice has that clumsiness of someone who doesn't know how to say things without them sounding like reproach, that inability to find the right tone between advice and demand:

"Is it so bad to consider the idea of pausing... your semester at university? I mean, a few months. You could pick it up again later, when things calm down. It wouldn't be forever."

The silence that follows is so dense Keonho can hear his own heartbeat thundering in his ears. Or maybe his mother's. Or maybe all three, mixed together, forming an uneven, nervous rhythm beating in time with the crossed-out numbers on the table.

And then his mother looks at his father again. But this time it's not the silent exchange from before, that dialogue of eyebrows and sighs Keonho has learned to decipher. This time her look has an edge. A hard gleam in her eyes, a tension in her jaw that he knows well because he sees it every morning in the mirror when he doesn't want to face something.

"We said that's not an option."

The phrase cuts through the air. It's not a shout. It doesn't need to be. The firmness of his mother's voice has the density of concrete, that mix of patience and hardness only acquired after years of having to hold what others have dropped. Keonho has heard her use that tone very few times: when at work they tried to make her sign something she shouldn't have and she said no even though it cost her overtime; when Keonho was seven and a classmate said something so cruel that his mother had to go to the school to set things straight, with that same voice, with that same steely look wrapped in calm.

His father lowers his gaze. He doesn't argue. Keonho then understands that his parents had already had that conversation alone, probably in bed before sleeping, with the lights off and that tone of someone weighing the impossible, spreading across the mattress the worries that don't fit into the day. And his mother had won. Or so it seems. Although Keonho wonders if in those nightly conversations, his mother also had to give in on something. If the decision not to ask him to pause university had the price of another sacrifice he doesn't see.

Keonho blinks. The world goes blurry for a second, just long enough for the words to pierce his defenses and lodge somewhere deep, where he keeps the things he doesn't want to hear—defeats, fears.

"You're not even studying anything specific," his father suddenly blurts out, and it's not a reproach, but it sounds like one. Perhaps because his father's voice has a tremor that isn't anger, but poorly channeled worry, that fear of not knowing how to say I love you without it sounding like you're doing it wrong. "Swimming is fine, it's a nice sport, but... it's not a guaranteed career, Keonho."

The phrase enters his chest like a small nail, the kind that doesn't kill but hurts plenty. And the worst part isn't the pain. The worst part is that his father is right. You're not even studying anything specific. It's true. He got into university because of his times in the pool, not through an entrance exam. He never had to prove he knew anything other than swimming faster than others. The entrance exams were a formality, a paper they signed barely looking at it, because his name was already on the admitted list before the process even began. And while his English classmates—those who don't have chlorine stuck to their skin like a second layer—talk about engineering, administration, design, internships at companies with names that sound like the future, while some already have job offers before graduating, while others graduate with honors and their names appear on honor roll lists, he remains in a general program, undecided, not really sure what he wants to do when the water stops being his refuge. When his shoulder can't take it anymore. When his body says enough.

Keonho closes his eyes for an instant. He sees the empty pool—the still water, without ripples, like a sheet of glass. He sees the stopped stopwatch on the wall, the hands motionless. He sees his own silhouette reflected in the still water, blurry, as if it were someone else. He opens his eyes.

"I'm going to keep it," he says, and his voice comes out colder than he intended. It's the coldness of knowing he's alone in this, that no one else is going to swim his strokes or carry his fatigue. But it's also the coldness of determination, the kind he's felt in the moments before an important competition, when all the noise of the world fades away and only the water and he remain, and his body knows what it has to do even if his head is afraid. "The scholarship, university. I'm not going to drop it."

His mother and father look at each other. They exchange that silent language, a raised eyebrow, a pressed lip, a contained sigh that hangs in the air like a bubble before bursting. Keonho has seen that mute dialogue hundreds of times, at dinners, during TV nights, in the moments of waiting before bad news. But he's never quite managed to decipher it, because it's not made of words but of unspoken things, tacit agreements, shared defeats. Today he thinks he detects pity. And pity is worse than a reproach. Because pity implies they've already decided he's going to fail, and they're just waiting for him to realize it, for the water to rise to his chin and for him to stop kicking.

"Well," his mother says, with a sigh that comes from some tired place, the kind that drags years of silent renunciations, of personal dreams stored in drawers that are never opened. "If you think it's best."

She doesn't think so. Keonho knows it. He reads it in the way her fingers have stopped squeezing the paper, as if the numbers had suddenly lost all importance. In the way his father has loosened his tie a little more, as if he were breathing through it, as if the knot were too tight. But his mother stopped arguing with him years ago, since that time he wanted to drop out of high school to dedicate himself full-time to swimming and she said no, that he should finish his studies first, that swimming could wait, that the body doesn't last forever. There was a whole week of uncomfortable silences and averted glances. In the end, he gave in. He finished high school and even entered University. But he never quite forgave her for it. And she knows it. That's why now the rope has loosened, and his mother no longer pulls, she only holds.

And then, as if nothing had happened, as if they hadn't just asked him if he could disappear from university for a few months so the money could go to his sister's wedding—as if he were an expendable expense, a number in the adjustments column—his father adds with an almost obscene normality, the kind that sometimes hurts more than silence:

"So how are classes? Everything okay?"

The change of subject is so abrupt that Keonho feels dizzy. As if he had been walking on a tightrope and suddenly someone moved the safety net. But he's grateful. He's grateful because he doesn't know how much longer he could stay in that room without breaking, without his voice trembling, without his eyes getting wet. He's grateful because normality, even if feigned, even if it's a patch over a wound that won't stop bleeding, is a lifeline.

Keonho feels the pain in his shoulder. A dull, deep beat that only he notices. A beat that reminds him that perhaps his body isn't the unbreakable machine it used to be, that tendons have memory and memory sometimes hurts. But he smiles. He nods. The gesture comes automatically, like turns in the pool, the push off the wall, the body rotation, the starting kick, like bilateral breathing, three strokes, one inhale, three strokes, one exhale, like everything he's repeated so many times he no longer needs to think about it, his body does it on its own while his mind is elsewhere. The smile pulls at the corners of his lips and doesn't reach his eyes, but his parents aren't looking at his eyes.

"Everything's fine," he says, and the lie tastes of chlorine, of stagnant water, of fatigue accumulated in his bones. "This week wasn't so hard."

And yes, he doesn't tell them about the third place, the shoulder pain, the rest.

He doesn't tell them any of that.

He stays on the threshold of the living room, the fingers of his right hand pressing into his left shoulder—the good one, the one that doesn't hurt, the one that reminds him that there's still something that works, even if it's not much—and watches his parents as the night darkness lights up Seoul and the words get stuck somewhere in his throat, right where the knot begins. He wants to ask if they really think swimming isn't enough. He wants to ask if they've ever thought that what he does in the pool—the hours, the chlorine-wrinkled fingers, the burning lungs at the end of every set—is also something, even if it doesn't have a name written on a diploma, even if it can't be hung on an office wall. He wants to ask if, when they say they're proud of him, they really mean it or just so he won't feel bad, so he won't sink completely, so he'll keep swimming even though the water is getting colder.

But he doesn't ask.

Because he's afraid of the answer.

His father clears his throat. That dry, familiar sound, which Keonho has heard thousands of times at the dinner table, in the car on the way to practice, in the uncomfortable silences of family dinners when no one knew what to say after he recounted a defeat. His father has never been good at these conversations. He dodges them like someone dodging a puddle on the sidewalk: taking a detour, looking the other way, pretending it's not there, that he doesn't see the murky water under his feet. He prefers silence. The background noise of the television. The routine of days that pass without surprises, without difficult questions, without having to look his son in the eye and say things that hurt, that might break something already cracked.

Keonho knows this. That's why he expects nothing. That's why it doesn't hurt so much anymore, or so he tries to believe.

"You know what, Mom?" Keonho says, and his voice comes out softer than he intended, almost a thread that could break with the slightest breeze. He feels the words stumble over the knot in his throat before coming out. "I'm not hungry."

He lies. He is hungry. His body demands food with that dull urgency of someone who has already digested the ramen. His stomach growls, his muscles ask for protein, his bones ask for rest, his entire being asks for something he can't name.

Because it's not dinner hunger. It's something else. It's an emptiness that can't be filled with noodles or rice or anything in the fridge. Perhaps before, perhaps the day his father came home with his tie undone and the face of someone who has lost more than money. It's a black hole in the center of his chest, and Keonho has learned to live with it, to orbit around its gravity without fully falling, but there are days—like today, like tonight, like every time the numbers pile up on the table—when the distance shortens and the void starts to pull, to suck, to want to swallow him whole.

His mother stops moving the papers. She pauses, and the silence that follows is almost heavier than the noise. She turns to him, and in her eyes there's something Keonho doesn't know if it's worry or tiredness or both mixed together, that mixture they've inhabited for so long they can barely tell one from the other. She still has the red ink stain on her finger, and Keonho realizes she hasn't eaten anything since she arrived. Maybe since noon. Maybe since yesterday.

"Are you sure?" his mother asks, and her voice has that soft edge of someone willing to get up and do something even if she has no strength left, even if her legs are heavy and her arms ache. "I'm almost done, I can make you something quick. Whatever you feel like."

"Sure. Thanks," he says.

The word tastes like a lie, but his mother nods without insisting, and Keonho feels a small, petty relief, the relief of not having to sit at the table with them, of not having to look at the numbers—those crossed-out numbers that seem to scream at him from the paper—of not having to pretend to chew while his father stirs his food without enthusiasm and his mother presses her lips every time she thinks about the price of his sister's dress or the banquet menu or the flowers they haven't paid for yet.

And suddenly, without really knowing why—though he knows, though he knows very well, though the answer is there, throbbing in the center of his chest like an open wound—he wants to be in his room.

Not anywhere he has to keep pretending he's fine when he's not, where he has to hold the *everything's fine* smile for one more minute. Not in front of them, who already have enough worries without adding their son silently crumbling, breaking inside while on the outside he nods and smiles and says he's not hungry.

"I'm going to take a shower and then sleep," Keonho says, and the excuse is so poor, but his parents don't argue. His mother just nods, her head already half-turned toward the papers, as if the gesture of saying goodbye to her son were automatic, as if it didn't require thought. His father raises his hand in a vague wave, fingers spread, and lowers it again.

No one tells him not to go.

"Good night," Keonho says.

And he leaves.

He doesn't look back. He knows what he'd see if he did: his mother hunched over the papers, his father rubbing his face again. He knows that if he looks back, he might not leave. And he needs to leave. He needs the weight of the closed door, the silence of the four walls, the darkness that doesn't ask for explanations.

He walks down the hallway. It's a short hallway—barely five steps from the living room to his door—but each step is heavier than the last, as if the floor were getting softer, as if his legs were apologizing for moving away from the only conversation that should matter to him, as if every centimeter were a small betrayal. He reaches his room.

Click.

The sound is small, dry, but definitive. It's not a slam—he doesn't have the strength for a slam, nor the desire—but that intimate noise of the latch fitting into place, the metal tongue sliding into the hole. It's the border between what he has to be and what he really is.

He stays leaning against the door for a moment. The wood is cold even through the fabric of his t-shirt, and that coldness sticks to his back like a reminder that no warmth lasts forever. He closes his eyes. He listens to the beats of his heart, which are beating too fast for someone who's only been talking to his parents, as if his body hadn't received the order to calm down. And then, beneath those beats, he listens to the silence of the house: the hum of the refrigerator in the background, that white noise you never notice until everything else goes quiet; the water in the pipes coming down from some upper floor, a liquid murmur that seems to travel from very far away; his father's dry cough, that cough he's had for years, the same as always, muffled from the living room through the thin walls. He listens to all of that and feels, for a moment, lonelier than ever. As if the whole house were a ship adrift and he the only passenger who can't swim.

Keonho slides down the door until he's sitting on the floor. He leans his back against the wood. He pulls up his knees and hugs them, wrapping his arms around his shins as if he wants to make himself small, as if he wants to occupy as little space as possible so the void can't find anything to hold onto, anywhere to put its hands to open a bigger breach.

He stays like that, sitting on the floor of his room.

The hallway light filters through the crack at the bottom, a thin yellow line that draws itself on the floor like a border, like the line that separates the pool into competition lanes. On the other side of that line are his parents, the numbers on the table, his sister's wedding, the scholarship hanging by a thread, everything he doesn't want to face, everything he can't fix with a faster stroke or better-controlled breathing. On this side, there's only him, with his shoulder that hurts and his chest that burns and the desire to cry that won't come out because swimmers don't cry. Because captains don't cry. Because the children of families who have already lost too much can't afford the luxury of falling apart.

He just breathes.

But the knot doesn't loosen. It's there, tight, hard, like a stone lodged between his ribs that refuses to move, that refuses to be swallowed or expelled, that just wants to stay. Keonho places a hand over his chest. He feels the heartbeat beneath his palm. He feels the warmth of his own skin. He feels how small his heart is compared to everything it has to carry.

And he waits.

He waits for the knot to loosen a little. Though deep down, he knows it's not going to loosen. Not today.

Perhaps not tomorrow. 

• • •

It's finally Friday.

Keonho has been waiting for this moment all week. Literally, since Monday he has been counting the days like you count the days before an exam or after a breakup: one by one, with obsessive precision. And now that it's arrived, it doesn't feel like he expected. There's no euphoria, no clean relief. Just a heaviness that runs through his bones as if someone had replaced the water in his body with lead, as if the liquid pumping through his heart were thicker than it should be.

After yesterday—the conversation with his parents, the numbers on the table, the question about dropping out of university hanging in the air like a balloon that won't quite burst—he couldn't sleep well. He tossed and turned in bed until two, changing position every few minutes, the pillow warm under his cheek, the sheets tangled between his legs. Cookie, who slept at his feet, snorted a couple of times impatiently before jumping to the floor and taking refuge in his own bed. And when sleep finally came, it was a fragmented sleep, full of images that broke before he could catch them: an empty pool with green water, his mother's face saying if you think it's best, his sister screaming at him how could he be so selfish, specifically with her, in a voice that meant just the opposite. He woke up several times with his heart racing, his breath cut short, his gaze lost on the dark ceiling until he fell back, exhausted.

Friday is Friday. Even if it doesn't feel like it. By now, the days barely mean anything anymore, just a succession of hours to survive like you survive a current in the sea: without fighting too much, without letting yourself sink completely, letting yourself be carried with your arms close to your body to save energy. But Friday is the last day of the week. The day that separates the have to from the can. The border between obligation and rest, even if rest is just another way of waiting.

And maybe next week he can return to the pool. Maybe four days of rest have been enough for the tendon to calm down, for the inflammation to go down, for the coach to look at him with different eyes when he gets back in the water. Maybe his shoulder has stopped hurting at night, that dull pain that wakes him up when he accidentally turns to the right. Maybe everything will go back to how it was. That's the word that repeats in his head like a mantra: maybe. A small word, of three syllables, that can hold up the world or bring it crashing down.

But it's also the day he can go to that party he was invited to yesterday and get lost a little. Drink enough so his head stops thinking. Dance enough so his body stops hurting. Be around people enough to feel less alone, even if only for a few hours. That, at least, is something.

English class drags on for what feels like centuries. Professor Kim explains something about verb tenses—present perfect continuous, lesson number something or other of a course that seems endless, stretching out before them like an infinite highway—but Keonho isn't paying attention. Not deliberately. It's not that he decided to disconnect. It's more that the professor's words come in one ear, bounce off the white noise of his head, and go out the other without leaving a trace.

He still takes notes. His notebook is open to today's page, the blue pen, the only one that writes well, rests between his fingers. He's learned to simulate attention, to move his hand across the paper while his mind is elsewhere, and fortunately he hasn't had to participate today. He writes scattered words, disconnected phrases he won't be able to read later, small doodles that fill the white space without committing to any meaning. He nods when appropriate, when Professor Kim tosses a rhetorical question into the air and someone answers and he moves his head as if agreeing with something he hasn't heard. He keeps his eyes open even though inside he just wants to close them and disappear, to merge with the back of the chair, to become invisible like those insects that change color to avoid being devoured. To become part of the furniture. To stop being seen.

Beside him, Seonghyeon draws little monkeys in the margin of his notebook. He does it with that feigned concentration Keonho knows, his head slightly tilted to the left, his tongue sticking out between his lips barely a millimeter, his pen tracing circles that become round ears, long dangling arms. He's not paying attention to class, no one is, perhaps because of the day that turns the classroom into an oven of scattered thoughts, of heads leaning toward desks and eyes closing without permission, but he's not completely absent either. He's in that middle ground, the one of waiting.

Keonho knows that Seonghyeon feels something is wrong with him. Not because he told him—he hasn't told him, he won't tell him, because the words get stuck in his throat every time he tries to get them out, as if they had thorns—but because of the bond between them, and his friend noticed from the instant he saw him enter the classroom. But Seonghyeon hasn't asked in depth yet. He only did so, in the exact moment Keonho sat in his usual spot, and his voice was a whisper almost lost in the noise of scraping chairs: "Are you okay?"

Keonho just nodded. A short, dry movement, the kind of someone who wants to close a door before anyone tries to cross it. The kind of someone who doesn't have the strength to explain. And he knows Seonghyeon doesn't believe him. He knows it because he knows him better than anyone: because when Seonghyeon doesn't believe something, he frowns in a specific way—barely a millimeter, almost imperceptible, a small vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows—and looks away toward some indeterminate point on the wall, as if searching the void for an answer he can't find in the other. But he doesn't ask. He doesn't insist. He just glances at him sideways, with that gesture of his that is half worry and half resignation.

The bell rings.

The relief is almost physical. A torrent of cold air running down his spine from his nape to his tailbone, loosening his shoulders even though the right one protests with a dull beat. Keonho closes his notebook, puts the pen in his pencil case with mechanical movements, and stretches in his seat. The bones in his back crack as if he were eighty years old.

Around him, classmates start getting up. They close backpacks with squeaky zippers. They speak louder now that they don't have to be quiet. The noise grows in seconds, that warm and chaotic murmur that fills empty classrooms, and Keonho lets himself be enveloped by it.

"Shall we go?" Seonghyeon says, and his voice is calm. Too calm. He gathers his things without hurry, closing the notebook with the monkeys in the margin with a delicate gesture, and does everything with a calmness that Keonho finds almost theatrical. As if he were waiting for the moment when Keonho would vomit all the repressed feelings he's been holding in. We have a party to get ready for.

Keonho nods. He puts his backpack over his shoulder—the left one—and stands up. His legs respond, though his knees crack a little. Everything cracks today. Everything weighs on him. Everything costs him an effort he didn't need before.

And then he hears his name.

"Keonho."

Professor Kim is standing by his desk, a sheet of paper in his hand and an expression Keonho can't quite interpret. It's not anger. It's not disappointment. It's something more neutral, more professional, even a hint of expectation, and that's almost worse because it gives him no clues about what's coming, because the lack of information leaves too much room for imagination to fill the gaps with the worst scenarios.

"Yes?" Keonho says, and his voice sounds more alert than he intended. A bit sharper. A bit quicker. The word escapes him with an edge he hadn't planned.

Professor Kim clears his throat. That dry sound all teachers make when they're about to say something that requires a minimum of solemnity. He reads the paper aloud, as if delivering a sentence.

"Ahn Keonho and Martin Edwards Park. You are both requested at the university administration office right now."

The silence that follows is brief but dense. Keonho feels several classmates turn their heads toward him—some discreetly, others with the blatant curiosity of those who have nothing to lose. He hears some murmurs, some stifled laughs, not malicious, just curious, but they feel like daggers to him. What has he done?, more than one is surely wondering. Because when you get called to administration, it's never for something good. Everyone knows it. He knows it. Calls to administration are for those who misbehave, for those who fail, for those who break the rules. Not for the captain of the swim team.

Martin.

The name lands in his stomach like a stone. A smooth, cold stone that rolls inside him without knowing where it's going. It's not the first time his name and Martin's have appeared together in a sentence, but the other times had been in news articles, on selection lists, on things that made sense. This doesn't make sense. This is the administration office. This is both of them. What could he and Martin possibly have to do with each other? What could they have done together? They don't do anything together. They don't talk to each other. They don't look at each other. They barely breathe the same air if Keonho can help it.

Martin is on the other side of the classroom, his backpack hugged against his chest like a shield, also ready to leave. He has that posture of someone who is here but not entirely, his weight resting on one leg, his gaze lost somewhere on the window where clouds pass slowly, oblivious to the drama brewing inside the classroom. When he hears his name, he raises an eyebrow and then turns his head toward Keonho. Surprise paints his features with broad, almost exaggerated strokes, as if he's just been woken from a deep sleep he's struggling to emerge from. He blinks once. Twice. His lips part slightly, as if he's about to say something, but he says nothing.

"Sure, thank you, professor," Martin finally says, and his voice sounds more carefree than the situation seems to require. As if going to administration were something that happens to him every day. As if it had nothing to do with him. As if it were a mere formality, a minor nuisance in the middle of his perfectly planned afternoon.

"Well, well," Seonghyeon murmurs from his desk, and although his tone is mocking—that tone Keonho has learned to identify as a defense mechanism, not real mockery, but a way to disguise concern—he looks at him with a raised eyebrow, his head slightly tilted to the left, his fingers drumming on the desk in a nervous rhythm only Keonho recognizes. There's something in his gaze that isn't just curiosity. It's a silent interrogation, a question he doesn't dare voice aloud because he already knows he won't get an answer. What have the two of you done, Ahn? And also, beneath that question, another smaller one: Are you mixed up in something you haven't told me about?

Keonho doesn't answer him. Not because he doesn't want to—though that too—but because he doesn't know what to say. He has no idea why the English teacher has called him along with Martin. He has no theory that isn't catastrophic. Possibilities crowd in his head like flies around a light, buzzing, colliding with each other, none managing to land long enough to be calmly examined. Scholarship problems. Some complaint from another professor. Grades that won't take off. The academic performance that's always there, hanging over his head like a sword. The forced rest the coach imposed on him, which might have reached ears that shouldn't know. Maybe everything. Maybe nothing. Maybe it's just a mistake, and at the administration office they'll tell them there's been an error, that they can go back, that they're sorry for the inconvenience.

But he can't think about that now. Now he just needs to get out of this classroom, far from Seonghyeon's gaze, far from that curiosity that stings more than it should. Far from the murmurs of classmates starting to whisper, to point, to speculate. Far from Martin, who's looking at him from the other side of the room with an expression Keonho can't read, concern? annoyance? curiosity? and that he prefers not to try to decipher.

He stands up. His legs tremble slightly, but he walks anyway, head high, mask in place. The captain's mask. The mask of someone who isn't afraid. The mask he's worn for so long he no longer knows where it ends and he begins, where the boundary lies between what he feels and what he pretends to feel. He leaves the classroom without looking back. He knows Martin will come behind him. He knows it because they've been called together, because Professor Kim said both their names in the same sentence, because destiny or chance or whatever pulls the strings of his life has decided they can't be separate, not even in this.

"I'll see you at the university entrance," Keonho says, and his voice comes out sharper than he intended. He doesn't wait for a response. He turns to the professor, nods once, and leaves the classroom with steps that try to seem calm. The calm steps are a disguise he's rehearsed many times: heels first, then toes, measured breathing, relaxed shoulders even though they're stiff as boards. At least he can escape a little from Seonghyeon's questioning gaze, still stuck to the back of his neck like a wasp on a windowpane. At least he can breathe outside that space.

Behind him, he hears Martin's shoes following him. They're not ordinary steps. Martin walks with a kind of studied nonchalance, the soles brushing the floor as if there's no hurry, as if the world could wait sitting down for him to arrive. There's no urgency in his step, none of that tension Keonho feels in his own legs, that contained tremor rising from his knees to his hips. The hallway is almost empty. Most students have already left—some have gone down to the cafeteria, where the smell of bread floats up the stairs and seeps through the door cracks; others have scattered across the courtyard, taking advantage of the sun's rays before the afternoon cold drives them back inside, hands in pockets and breath fogging the air; others have simply used the class break to disappear into the bathroom or some corner where they won't be found, where they can be alone with their phones or their silences. The metal lockers lined up against the wall reflect the fluorescent ceiling light in blinding flashes. Keonho walks quickly, gaze fixed ahead, up and down stairs, as if walking faster could make Martin disappear, as if speed could dissolve the uncomfortable presence walking behind him.

It doesn't work.

"Hey," Martin suddenly says at his side, and Keonho hadn't noticed he'd caught up. He hadn't heard the change in the rhythm of his steps, the silent acceleration that allowed him to close the distance Keonho had tried to maintain. "Do you have any idea what this is about?"

Keonho startles.

It's a small movement, barely a stiffening of the shoulders, a blink faster than normal, a contraction in his jaw that he hopes Martin didn't notice. But he feels it run down his spine like a low-intensity electric shock, a tingling that rises from the base of his spine to his nape and makes the hairs on his arm stand up. It's not just Martin's voice that caught him off guard. It's the fact that Martin is talking to him. They've gone months—years? Keonho has lost count, the days have piled up like dry leaves without exchanging a word beyond the obligatory greetings (which Keonho avoided making) of any conversation.

"No," Keonho replies, and his voice comes out drier than he intended. Sharp, definitive, inviting no further questions. He doesn't look at Martin. He keeps his eyes fixed ahead, on the hallway stretching toward the principal's office, on the gray tiles that seem to stretch under his feet as if they'll never end. But he feels the weight of Martin's gaze on his temple, a light but insistent weight, like a mosquito that won't quite leave, buzzing around his ear without fully landing. It's a physical sensation, almost uncomfortable: a hot spot on his skin, right where the temporal bone curves toward his cheek, as if a gaze could have temperature and could burn. Keonho forces himself not to raise his hand to that spot, not to rub his temple as if he could shoo away the other's gaze, because that gesture would be a confession. It would be admitting it affects him. And he can't afford that.

"And you're not curious?" Martin asks, and his tone remains neutral, but there's something in the pause before the question, a tenth of a second in which the words hang suspended in the air, something that suggests he genuinely cares about the answer. Or maybe not. Maybe he's just bored. Maybe Keonho is overinterpreting because he's nervous, because the knot in his stomach won't stop growing, because the principal's door is getting closer and he still doesn't know what's behind it.

"No," Keonho repeats, and this time the word is shorter, sharper. A chop.

Keonho presses his lips together, feels them dry, sticky, as if he'd been breathing through his mouth without realizing it, and quickens his pace. He wants to reach the principal's door as soon as possible. He wants this conversation—if it can even be called that, this exchange of monosyllables that seems taken from an absurd play—to end. He wants to stop feeling that gaze on his temple, that mosquito that refuses to leave, that question floating in the air between them: Do you know what this is about?

No, he doesn't know. And he hates not knowing. And he hates that Martin asked him. And he hates, above all, that Martin's voice was so neutral it gave him no clue as to whether he should be worried or not. Because if Martin had sounded mocking, Keonho could have ignored him, could have shrugged and kept walking. If he'd sounded worried, Keonho could have rejected him, could have told him he didn't need his pity. But that neutrality... that neutrality leaves him disarmed, without a rehearsed gesture to cling to, without a prepared response. That neutrality is like a smooth wall with no handholds.

He's lying. He's as curious as can be, and also has a knot in his stomach he doesn't quite know the source of. It's a cold knot, the kind that settles just below the diaphragm and grows with every inhale, that expands like a damp stain on the ceiling. Has something happened? Some problem with his scholarship? Some complaint from a teacher about his absences—the ones he accumulated over the week? Has the swimming coach said something about his performance, about the forced rest week that's become an open wound? Possibilities swirl in his head like flies around a light, buzzing, colliding with each other, their wings sticky from so much crashing, none managing to land long enough to be calmly examined.

Martin, beside him, says nothing more. He walks with his hands in the pockets of his navy blue uniform jacket, a low whistle between his teeth. It's not a recognizable melody, just a thread of air rising and falling with the rhythm of his steps, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, as if he's improvising. Creating a rhythm, a melody for a song. And perhaps it's true: Martin has always been like that, with a lightness Keonho finds almost offensive, as if life didn't weigh the same for everyone, as if the world were a red carpet unfurling before him and he just had to walk, and along the way, he's capable of creating unique and novel melodies that have helped build the reputation he now has in the Music department.

"Relax," Martin says, and Keonho hates how relaxed he sounds, hates that ease he has of saying things as if they were true, as if he knew something Keonho doesn't and wants to share it but in his own cryptic way. "I'm sure it's nothing bad."

"I didn't say I was nervous," Keonho blurts out, and it comes out more defensive than he intended.

Martin shrugs. It's a shrug not of apology but of disengagement, as if to say your nerves, your problem, I've done my part.

"You don't have to say it," Martin says, and then he pauses. A measured, calculated pause, like an actor who knows that silence can be more eloquent than words. Keonho feels that pause stretch, the air grow denser, his heart give one stronger beat, like a punch to the inside of his chest. And then Martin finishes the sentence, his voice so low Keonho has to tilt his head slightly to hear him. "It shows in your jaw."

Keonho clenches his teeth. The masseter muscle tenses, that muscle he didn't know could hurt until he started clenching his jaw without realizing it, during training, during exams, during sleepless nights when the ceiling felt like it was collapsing on him. And he realizes that, indeed, his jaw is tense. It has been the whole time, since he left the classroom, perhaps since he heard his name in English class. He releases the air he didn't know he was holding—a long, shaky sigh that comes from somewhere deep in his chest, from that hollow where he keeps the things he doesn't want to feel—and his jaw loosens a couple of millimeters. But the damage is already done. Martin saw it. Martin pointed it out. And now Keonho can't stop thinking about it.

Damn it.

They continue walking in silence. The hallway shortens. The principal's door is just a few meters away. Keonho can see the brass plaque, the black letters on a silver background, the dim light seeping through the crack underneath. And then, without thinking—or thinking too much—he risks a sideways glance at Martin.

He shouldn't. He knows he shouldn't. But his body moves before his brain can stop it, like in pool turns, when inertia is stronger than will.

Martin is looking ahead, his eyes narrowed against the fluorescent ceiling light. His blonde hair falls over his forehead, disheveled, as if he'd run his hand through it a moment ago. The light casts shadows under his cheekbones, marks the line of his jaw. He looks calm. He looks like he has no worries. He looks, as always, like he's somewhere else.

Keonho turns his gaze forward and raises his fist to knock—two sharp raps, neither too loud nor too soft—but Martin steps ahead, and after Keonho's knocks, the taller one turns the knob and enters.

"Ma'am," Martin says, addressing the secretary sitting behind the auxiliary desk, typing something on a computer. She's a middle-aged woman, with black plastic-framed glasses and short hair, and when Martin gives her a smile—a wide, easy smile, the kind that seems sincere and disarms people—she returns the gesture. Keonho finds that smile exaggerated for what it is. Too wide. "Professor Kim mentioned that the Principal wants to see us."

The secretary nods, her fingers still suspended over the keyboard, and gestures toward the door at the back with a tilt of her head. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't even ask for their names, as if she had simply been waiting for them.

Keonho follows Martin into the Director's main office and closes the door carefully, making sure the latch clicks into place without making noise. It's an automatic gesture, learned from so many times he's had to close doors silently to avoid waking his parents when he came home late from practice. But here, in this office with its impersonal walls and smell of stale coffee, that same gesture feels like a kind of vulnerability.

The office is large, obsessively orderly, with a particleboard desk in the center, covered in perfectly aligned papers, as if someone had placed them with a ruler and square, the edges forming precise angles and metal shelves full of colored folders peeking out in millimeter-perfect rows. It smells of paper, of printer ink, of that characteristic odor of coffee that's been sitting in the pot for hours and has started to turn bitter. The blind is half-lowered, and the light coming in draws stripes of pale sunlight across the vinyl floor, like a prison cell, like a soccer field seen from above.

Keonho swallows. The knot in his stomach has become something more solid, heavier. A stone. And he doesn't quite know why, because nothing has happened yet, because no one has told him anything yet, because the walls haven't closed in on him. But his body warns him that something is coming, that something is about to happen.

He stands next to Martin, shoulders slightly hunched, the right one more than the left, because of the pain, because of the habit of protecting it, as if shrinking could make him smaller, less vulnerable and waits.

The campus Director—a middle-aged man with black plastic-framed glasses that slip down the bridge of his nose, an incipient bald spot he tries to hide with a forward-combed hairstyle—is sitting behind the desk. His hands, neatly clasped, rest on a thick cardboard file, as if he were in a family photo or a life insurance advertisement. When he sees them enter, he stands up with a leisurely movement, the kind of someone who has their time perfectly scheduled, who isn't used to being kept waiting, and offers them a professional smile: his lips curve just the right amount, neither too warm nor too distant. A smile that doesn't reach his eyes. A smile that could be in any university protocol manual. It's the smile of a prestigious university, one of those Korean institutions whose name weighs as heavily on a resume as an Olympic medal. Everything in this office reminds you of that: the recognition plaques lined up on the shelf with their gold edges gleaming under the light, the framed diplomas with imitation wood moldings, the smell of printer ink and expensive wood that barely disguises the particleboard underneath.

"Ahn Keonho. Martin Edwards Park," he says, reading from a sheet of paper he holds with his fingertips, as if afraid of staining it, as if the paper were more important than the people he's naming. "Please, sit down."

Keonho sits in the left chair. It's a standard office chair, upholstered in gray fabric, the armrests slightly worn from the use of so many students who have passed through here before him. But the rigidity of his back turns it into an instrument of torture. Each vertebra aligns against the backrest as if he were on the edge of the pool, waiting for the starting signal, but here there's no water, no competition, nothing he can control with a stronger stroke.

Martin, on the other hand, drops into the right chair with a fluid gesture, crossing one leg over the other—right ankle resting on left knee. His shoelaces are untied, the tips brushing the floor, and the tongue of his sneaker has tilted to one side, as if he had put his shoes on in a hurry or without enthusiasm. Keonho finds himself unable to stop looking at those untied laces. It bothers him that Martin can be so relaxed in a place where he feels like a convict in the dock. It bothers him that Martin breathes as if this has nothing to do with him, as if he's just a spectator, as if his name on the paper were an administrative error they're about to correct at any moment.

"Has something happened?" Keonho asks, because he can no longer stand the uncertainty. His voice comes out harsher than he intended, as if the words have to scrape his throat to get out, as if they carry barbs. The silence of the office amplifies the sound, makes it larger, more accusatory.

The director clears his throat.

"No, nothing bad has happened," the director says. And then adds, with an inflection meant to be light, almost comical, that clumsiness of someone who can't read the room and thinks a bad joke might relieve the tension. "At least, not yet."

The ensuing silence is awkward. The director seems to instantly regret his own joke; he clears his throat again, this time harder, a dry sound that echoes in the office, and straightens the papers already perfectly aligned on the desk, moving them a millimeter to the left and then another to the right, as if that small task could erase what he just said.

"I've called you because I need to speak with you about a matter that has come to us from the country's university education ministry," he says, and now his voice has recovered its official tone, the one of someone reading a statement. He leans back in his chair, interlocks his fingers over the file, and looks at both of them over the top of his glasses.

Keonho feels the ground open slightly beneath his feet. It's not a physical sensation, not entirely, but his center of gravity shifts a few millimeters, like when the pool wall is farther than you calculated on your turn and your fingers brush the tile without quite gripping it. The Education Ministry. Those two words carry weight. At a prestigious university, the federation isn't a distant body, not an acronym that appears in the footnotes of official documents. It's the all-seeing eye, the hand that grants or withdraws resources, the invisible referee that decides which teams deserve funding and which students deserve scholarships, which projects move forward and which remain in the drawer of oblivion.

"About what?" Keonho asks, and his voice comes out more controlled than he feels.

The director opens the file. The creak reminds Keonho of the sound of his fingers gripping the edge of the pool before a start, that tension of white knuckles against rough tile, the imminence of the water. He takes out a sheet, slides it across the polished desk toward them. The paper glides smoothly, almost floating, and stops right at the edge, as if it wants them to take it but doesn't quite dare to get closer.

Keonho looks at it without touching it. He sees the official letterhead—the ministry's emblem, an abstract design meant to symbolize knowledge and progress, with crossing lines and geometric shapes that mean nothing but seem important. He sees his name printed in black characters, sharp, without cross-outs. He sees Martin's name right beside it, separated only by a comma and a space. A comma. A space. That's all that separates them on that paper.

"Your application has been put forward to represent the university in the national team learning championship," the Director says, with the same intonation he would use to read the weather forecast. Flat. Monotonous. As if he weren't, at that very moment, changing the course of Keonho's coming months, as if the words coming out of his mouth weren't an earthquake but a mere weather update. "First, it's a team competition of general knowledge against other universities. Then, in the second section, if you advance, it's individual. You, swimming,"—here he lifts his gaze to Keonho, and there's something in his expression, a small tilt of his head, as if he needs to confirm that he's understanding, that the message is getting through—"Edwards, music." His index finger shifts toward Martin, who still has his arms crossed, his gaze fixed on the director. "The winner receives a full scholarship to continue their studies in Los Angeles. And you have both been selected."

Keonho doesn't breathe.

He doesn't know how much time passes. A second. Ten. His entire life condensing into that instant where his name and Martin's appear on the same paper, in the same sentence, in the same future. Los Angeles. The word reaches him like a distant echo, as if someone had spoken it from behind a closed door, in another language, in another country. Los Angeles means indoor pools all year round, no winter closures, no excuses. It means coaches who speak English, who use technical words he'll have to learn to translate. It means leaving this country, this university with its prestigious walls and hallways that smell of expensive detergent, this city. It means a future. It means a way out.

But it also means Martin. It means sharing hours of preparation, of mental training, of team strategies before the individual phase arrives. It means having to talk to him, having to coordinate, having to find a way to function together even if they can't stand each other. It means the forced intimacy of competition. It means competing against him in the end. It means having to put up with his whistling through his teeth, his untied shoes, his insolent carelessness, that way he has of occupying space as if it belonged to him.

"What?" Keonho says, and it's the only thing he manages to articulate. The word comes out in a thread of a voice, barely audible, as if his vocal cords had fallen asleep and could only produce a whisper.

Beside him, Martin sits up a little in his chair. His crossed leg uncrosses, his right ankle leaves his left knee, his feet search for the floor with a small thud of his heels against the vinyl, and the chair back emits a creak, a groan under the shift in weight. He's no longer relaxed. His eyes are bright... not with excitement, not exactly, but with a sharp, almost predatory interest, a spark Keonho hasn't seen in him before. Martin, the idiot Martin, the one who never seems to take anything seriously, who laughs too loud and walks with his hands in his pockets and whistles through his teeth as if life were a stroll, is suddenly completely awake. Attentive. Absorbed.

"We're going to compete together?" Martin asks, and his voice has lost all its carefree tone. Now it sounds almost serious, with a gravity that Keonho finds strange. Something out of place. Something that shouldn't be happening.

The director nods. The gesture is slow, deliberate, as if he were granting a blessing, as if he had the power to bestow opportunities and was choosing who to give them to.

"Based on their results, we believe your combination can yield very good results," the vice principal says, and his fingers drum once on the file before coming back together in the center of the table. "The captain of the swim team,"—he looks at Keonho, and there's something in his gaze, a calculated respect, the recognition that he's speaking to someone who has put the university's name at the top of national competitions—"and the national university champion in music,"—he looks at Martin, and his tone rises a fraction, because the national music championship is, at this prestigious university, almost as important as the Olympics, and Martin has a plaque in the main hallway to prove it—"In theory, they are the ideal pair."

In theory.

The phrase floats in the office air, mixes with the smell of stale coffee and paper, lingers spinning around the ceiling lamp. In theory. As if reality were something else. As if they knew that in practice, Keonho and Martin don't speak to each other, don't look at each other. But the numbers, the results, the academic and athletic records, say they should work. And prestigious universities live on those theories.

Keonho feels his shoulder. That dull, deep beat, not yet pain but announcing its arrival. The shoulder that got third place and the coach forced him to rest for a week. The shoulder that whispers to him, with every stroke, that time is running out, that bodies aren't eternal, that promises have expiration dates. And alongside the shoulder's beat, another beat, warmer, more uncomfortable: the idea of having to share something with Martin. Not just a classroom, not just a hallway, not just an entire university where they've learned to ignore each other.

"Is there a problem?" the director asks, looking directly at Keonho. The question is neutral, but Keonho knows that at a prestigious university, neutral questions are never entirely so. There's a weight behind them, an expectation. Behind is there a problem lurks are you capable of rising to the occasion?, do you deserve the opportunity we're giving you?, do you want to keep being captain or would you rather step back now before we push you?

Keonho opens his mouth. He wants to say yes. He wants to say there are many problems. That his shoulder hurts, that the tendon is inflamed despite the painkillers he's taken, that he's been on mandatory rest for a week and isn't sure he can perform, can win, can be the swimmer they expect him to be. That he deeply dislikes Martin—not just dislike, he profoundly dislikes him, with that visceral discomfort he can't explain but that tightens his chest every time he sees him, that speeds up his heart in a way he doesn't want to analyze. That it all seems like a bad joke, a cruel irony of the universe that decides to pair him with the one guy who could make his life impossible for the coming months. That he didn't ask for this. That he doesn't want this.

But he closes his mouth.

Because he needs the scholarship. Because his parents, in the living room, with the banquet hall brochures and the crossed-out numbers on the table, have asked him, without saying it, but it was heard just the same, it seeped into the folds of his skin like chlorine after hours in the pool, to keep the scholarship. Because his sister is getting married in three months and the money isn't enough, and every won he can contribute is a won they won't have to borrow. Because this opportunity, this championship, this door to Los Angeles, might be the only way out of this hole he's been sinking into for months, out of the routine of pretending, of the lies he tells his parents every night. Because if he says no, if he rejects this, if he lets the only chance to change something slip away, what's left of him? A swimmer who gives up? A captain who can't handle the pressure? The guy who lost his shoulder, his scholarship, everything in the same year, and when they offered him a way out said no, thanks?

"No," Keonho says, and the word costs him more than it should. It's a coin he pulls from somewhere deep, from the bottom of the pool. "There's no problem."

Martin looks at him. And in that gaze, there's something Keonho can't read. Something that looks like surprise that Keonho agreed, that he didn't raise any objection, that he's willing to put up with him. Or maybe it's not surprise. Maybe it's something else: a calculation, an evaluation. Or maybe neither, and Keonho is only seeing what he wants to see, projecting his own doubts onto Martin's face because it's easier than facing them alone. Or maybe, simply, Martin is as stunned as he is and doesn't know what face to make.

"Good," the director says, closing the file with a dry, definitive thud, the sound of a door closing behind them, the sound of something beginning without anyone having asked for it to begin. "The meetings for the lessons on the topics that will appear in the competition will begin next week. The student president will give you instructions and explain the dynamics in more depth." He pauses, looks at them both over his glasses, and adds in a tone that tries to be encouraging but comes out rather tired, "If you have no more questions, you may leave."

Keonho stands up. His legs tremble slightly, an almost imperceptible tremor, the same one he gets after a series of two hundred meters freestyle at his limit, when his muscles beg for mercy and his head just wants to close its eyes and stop thinking, but he walks anyway, head high, mask in place. The captain's mask. The swimmer's mask who doesn't give up. The son's mask who doesn't cause problems. The mask he's worn so long he no longer knows where it ends and he begins, where the border lies between what he feels and what he pretends to feel.

He leaves the office. He doesn't look back. He doesn't want to see the director's face, nor the aligned papers, nor the closed file on the table. He doesn't want to see Martin, though he knows he's right behind him, following him with that carefree way of walking, the soles brushing the floor, long, slow steps. Behind him, he hears that measured rhythm, sole against tile, silence, sole against tile, and he doesn't turn around. He doesn't want to see his face. He doesn't want to know what he's thinking. He doesn't want to discover that, perhaps, Martin isn't as scared as he is, that perhaps Martin sees this as an opportunity while Keonho only sees another burden. He doesn't want to confirm that he's alone in this vertigo.

The hallway smells of disinfectant and books, and Keonho walks toward the university exit, pressing his fingers against his palm, feeling his nails dig into his skin, and the pain in his shoulder, that dull, constant beat, reminds him that he can't afford to hesitate. Not now. Not when everything hangs by a thread.

At a prestigious university, second chances don't exist.

And he's already used up almost all of his.

"I didn't think you'd agree."

Keonho stops. The halt is abrupt, as unexpected for himself as for Martin. His feet plant on the floor, his shoulders tense, and for a second the world pauses. He turns his head and looks at him. Martin is there, a few steps away, his tie crooked and his blond hair disheveled, those strands that fall over his forehead and he never bothers to push aside, as if disorder were part of his style. He has a strange expression on his face. It's not mockery. It's not defiance. It's none of what Keonho expected. It's something quieter, more attentive, as if he were waiting for something, as if Keonho were an equation he hasn't yet solved and was about to find the unknown.

"It's not like I have another option," Keonho says, and it sounds colder than he intended. The cold settles in his mouth, on his tongue, in his vocal cords, and turns his words into ice shards that cut as they come out. "And I'm not going to let you get in my way."

The phrase comes out sharper than he wanted. Get in my way. That word is a minefield, and Keonho has just stepped on one. Because it's not just that Martin might get in his way in the competition, in training, in the meetings with the student president. It's that Martin already gets in his way. He gets in his way in the hallways when they cross paths and Keonho feels the need to look the other way. He gets in his way in the cafeteria when he sits nearby and his laughter sneaks into the conversations. He gets in his way with the way he walks, the way he whistles, the way he exists with that lightness that feels like a provocation to Keonho, a constant reminder that there are people who navigate life without the weight of things crushing them.

Martin stands still for a second. He doesn't blink. He doesn't move. He just looks at him, with those big eyes Keonho has known since he was seven years old. Then, slowly, he nods. But it's not a nod of submission, the kind you make to avoid conflict. It's a nod of acknowledgment, as if they've just agreed on something without needing to sign any paper, without needing to shake hands. As if he understood something Keonho didn't say.

"Fine," Martin says, and in his voice there's something Keonho can't name. It's not warmth, but it's not coldness either. It's a kind of spark, an edge that barely shows, the beginning of something that could be a smile or could be a warning. "But in the end, don't let it be you who gets in my way."

And then he leaves.

He resumes his walk and passes beside Keonho with that fluidity of his, relaxed shoulders, hands sunk in his pockets, and starts walking down the hallway. The whistle returns to his lips, and the steps fade away, softer and softer, until only the echo of soles on tiles remains.

As if nothing that just happened had affected him.

As if it had all been an inconsequential conversation, the kind you forget around the corner, that gets lost in the noise of the day and never returns.

Keonho is left alone in the hallway.

The silence, now that Martin is gone, is dense, sticky, like the stagnant water of a pool that hasn't been cleaned for days. The evening lights flicker with a hum, somewhere in the building a door closes with a distant slam, and the sound bounces off the empty walls like a warning.

Keonho leans his back against the wall, the contact of cold brick through the fabric of his uniform, gives a firm, real sensation that anchors him to the present, and lets gravity hold him, lets his legs stop making the effort to keep him upright. He closes his eyes. The world darkens behind his eyelids, and in that darkness, Martin's words continue to echo.

He breathes deeply.

The air comes in through his nose, cold, fills his lungs, and exits through his mouth in a trembling exhalation. He repeats it. Once. Twice. Three times. Like in training, when his body asks for oxygen.

He stays in the hallway for a moment, leaning against the wall, after Martin has left. The wall is cold, even through the fabric of his jacket, and that cold seeps into his bones, mixing with the throb in his shoulder and the echo of the words he just heard.

Los Angeles.

Full scholarship.

Ideal pair.

The words repeat in his head like a broken record, spinning, colliding with each other, unable to find an order that makes sense. He closes his eyes. He rests the back of his head against the wall and stays like that, eyelids squeezed shut, breathing slow, the fingers of his right hand pressing into his left shoulder—the good one—as if he needs to anchor himself to something that still works.

His shoulder throbs. That dull, deep throb that isn't pain yet but will be if he's not careful. The shoulder that whispers to him, with every passing hour, that time is running out, that bodies aren't eternal, that promises have expiration dates.

His head spins. The possibilities, the worries, the fears swirl in a whirlwind he doesn't know how to stop. The scholarship. Los Angeles. His parents doing math on the table, the banquet hall brochures, the printed bank statements. His sister's wedding and the pressure not to be less. The director's smile, which was a professional smile but was also an examination. And Martin.

In theory, they're the ideal pair.

The phrase spins in his head like a knife. In theory. In practice, they don't speak. In practice, they've been crossing paths in the hallways for years like two strangers who share a past neither wants to remember. In practice, Keonho doesn't know how he's going to spend hours with Martin without wanting to rip his head off.

But he has to.

Because he needs the scholarship.

Because he needs to win.

Because if he doesn't, what's left?

He opens his eyes.

The hallway light hits his pupils like a needle, and he blinks several times, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, until the world stops being blurry and the edges of things come back into focus. The hallway is still empty. The metal lockers are still lined up against the wall, reflecting his own distorted image in the shiny metal. The wall is still cold against his back. The throb in his shoulder is still there, insistent, like a reminder that his body has limits he refuses to accept, that his body is screaming enough while his head keeps saying a little more.

"Damn it," he mutters. His voice comes out hoarse, broken, as if he'd just swallowed sand, as if the words had to scratch his throat to get out. The sound bounces off the empty walls of the hallway, gets lost among the lockers, and no one hears it. No one has to hear it.

He straightens up. His back protests with a crack in his vertebrae, and he adjusts his backpack strap on his left shoulder and starts walking toward the exit. His steps are heavy, dragging, very different from Martin's insolent lightness, who seemed to float above the ground while Keonho sank. Each stride costs him, as if the floor were made of freshly trodden mud, as if his legs weighed more than his entire body.

His heart is a mess. He doesn't know if it's rage—against Martin, against the director, against the entire universe—frustration—because his shoulder isn't responding, because the scholarship is hanging by a thread, because everything is falling apart and he doesn't know how to stop it—or all those things mixed into a thick paste that rises up his chest and tightens his throat, that clouds his vision and dries his mouth. He needs to get out of here. He needs to stop thinking about the water, the competition, Martin, his shoulder, the numbers, everything. He needs something to drown out this noise, even if only for a few hours, even if only to remember what it feels like not to have a tight chest.

He needs to go to that party.

He needs to drink.

He clenches his fists inside his pants pockets, feels the damp fabric under his fingers, and quickens his pace. The party awaits him.

And he needs, more than ever, to get lost for a while.

When Keonho leaves the university, exhaustion weighs on his shoulders like an invisible backpack. The afternoon light hits him directly in the face and he has to squint to get his bearings, to distinguish the silhouettes amidst the orange glow tinting the horizon. And then he sees him.

Seonghyeon is leaning against the usual lamppost, in front of the gates that separate the university zone from the regular street. He has an acai bowl in each hand, two transparent plastic bowls, the purple of the fruit peeking over the edges like a secret, two white spoons stuck into the mixture like little antennas searching for a signal, and when their eyes meet, Seonghyeon smiles. Not a wide or loud smile.

A calm smile, the same one that now tells him that Seonghyeon has been waiting here as agreed, perhaps even feeling the need to somehow lighten the burden he has perceived in Keonho all day. As if there were an invisible thread sewn to their ribs, and every tug at one end could be felt at the other.

"Here," Seonghyeon says, handing him one of the bowls. "The usual. You took a while. I had plenty of time to buy them."

"Sorry, and thank you."

Keonho doesn't ask how he knew he would need it. He doesn't ask those things anymore. He takes the bowl, plunges the spoon into the purple mixture—the frozen fruit crackling slightly under the pressure—and for a moment the world shrinks to the pleasant cold of the plastic against his palms and the first acidic taste of acai on his tongue, that taste that reminds him of all the afternoons they've spent like this, of all the times Seonghyeon has shown up with food just when he needed it most. And then, they start walking.

Together, they lose themselves in the streets leading to Seonghyeon's house, their voices bouncing off the narrow walls of the alleyway they know by heart. It's a narrow alley, the kind that barely allows two people to pass side by side, with walls covered in old graffiti, some blurred by time, others layered in colors, and electrical cables hanging like vines, trembling in the wind. The afternoon sun has turned orange and stretches their shadows over the cracked asphalt, drawing two long, thin figures that walk in rhythm, that turn at the same time at the corners, that seem like one thing split in two.

Seonghyeon walks beside him and doesn't push. He's just there, with his half-empty acai bowl and his lips stained purple—a small circle of color near the corner of his mouth—and every now and then he points at something on the sidewalk—a dry leaf with a strange shape that looks like a country, a crack that opens like a map of an unknown territory, an insect scurrying past that makes them jump—or stops for a second to complain about a stone that got into his shoe, resting a hand on Keonho's shoulder for balance. And so they remain, even on the bus ride, sharing earbuds and music in silence.

When they reach their destination, Seonghyeon drags him inside with the urgency of someone getting ready for the fashion department party. But the urgency is just an excuse, another disguise for what's really happening, and they both know it. The house is empty (Seonghyeon's parents are traveling) and it's large and welcoming, one of those residential neighborhood homes that have belonged to the same family for decades, with high ceilings that swallow sounds and wooden floors that creak in unpredictable places, as if they had their own memory, and silence accumulates in the corners like fine dust, like something that breathes without making noise. The stairs echo as they climb to Seonghyeon's room, each footstep returning a hollow echo that travels up the stairwell's resonance chamber and disappears into the empty foyer, like a coin falling into a very deep well. Keonho counts the steps as he climbs: fourteen. Always fourteen. It's a number he's memorized without meaning to, after so many afternoons going up and down, after so many times he's placed a foot on each one without thinking, until they became part of his routine when they go out partying.

Seonghyeon's room is a cozy mess. The walls are covered in posters—bands Keonho recognizes, movie stills, an illustration of an astronaut floating against a galaxy background that Seonghyeon bought at an art fair and never quite hung straight—and clothes accumulate on chairs, on the headboard of the bed, on the floor by the closet door, forming small mounds that look like islands in a sea of fabric. It smells of fabric softener, that clean, slightly cloying scent of freshly washed sheets mixed with something sweeter, and the vanilla candle Seonghyeon lights when he wants to concentrate or when he needs the world to become a little smaller, a little more manageable, a little less overwhelming. The flame flickers on the desk, casting dancing shadows on the ceiling that move with hypnotic slowness, like seaweed on the ocean floor.

Keonho sits on the edge of the unmade bed—the wrinkled sheets forming mountains and valleys, a pillow on the floor next to a pair of mismatched socks that seem to have escaped from somewhere, the blanket tangled at one end as if someone had rushed out of it, chasing a dream or fleeing from one—and rests the almost-empty acai bowl on his thigh, the bottom of the plastic covered in purple residue the spoon can no longer reach, drawing abstract shapes as it tilts.

Meanwhile, Seonghyeon is already in front of the wide-open closet, hands on his hips, head tilted, examining the contents as if it were a museum from which he had to choose a single masterpiece to take home. The closet is large, one of those built-ins that take up an entire wall, with sliding doors that sometimes come off the tracks, but it's so full that some hangers crowd against each other and shirts hang at impossible angles, as if fighting for space. Seonghyeon reaches his hand among the garments, pulls a sleeve, takes out a shirt—a blue-and-black plaid one, the collar a little worn from use—looks at it for a second, wrinkles his nose, and tosses it over the back of his desk chair. Then another, horizontal stripes, too wide for him, which also flies toward the chair and lands half-folded. Then a third, this time black, plain, which he holds against his chest, turning a little to the left, then to the right, evaluating.

And it's at that moment, with Seonghyeon holding the black shirt against his body and his head tilted like a curious bird, that Keonho begins to tell him what just happened. The words come out jumbled at first—stumbling over each other, rushing ahead, overlapping—as if they had been waiting behind his teeth for a long time and were now pushing to get out all at once. Then, little by little, they become more fluid, more ordered, as if telling someone who doesn't judge—someone who just listens, who doesn't interrupt, who doesn't make pitying faces—could lighten the news a little, as if sharing the burden could make it more bearable.

Seonghyeon doesn't interrupt. He holds the black shirt against his chest as he listens, and his fingers play with the edge of a sleeve, rolling and unrolling it in a mechanical gesture. When Keonho gets to the part about the championship, the scholarship, Los Angeles, Seonghyeon's fingers stop. The sleeve remains half-rolled, a small knot of black fabric between his fingers.

"Oh my god, Keonho," Seonghyeon says, poking his head out between two hangers, his face framed by sleeves and collars, his hair a little tousled from the movement, his eyes wide open when Keonho finishes telling everything, the words still floating in the room's air. "Are you serious? Have you really been selected, and you'll be competing alongside Martin?"

Keonho looks down at the empty bowl. The plastic is covered in tiny droplets of condensation, and he traces them with his fingertip, drawing invisible lines, making maps that no one will read. He doesn't know why he can't look at Seonghyeon while saying this. Maybe because in Seonghyeon's eyes there are always too many things he doesn't want to see. Maybe because if he looks at him, he'll break.

"I told you," Keonho murmurs, dropping the spoon into the bowl with a metallic tap that sounds louder than it should in the silence of the room, as if he wanted the whole world to know about this heavy joke that has fallen on him. "For some reason I can't understand, out of everyone, we've both been selected."

"Keonho..." Seonghyeon says, and his voice has that affectionate edge he uses when he wants to soften an uncomfortable truth, when he wants to put sharp words inside a pillow so they don't cut. He brushes the hair from his forehead with a quick gesture, his fingers sliding through the strands, letting them fall back into place, and as if at this moment he can't concentrate on choosing clothes for the party for both of them, as if the news has disorganized him too, he steps away from the open closet and sits on the edge of the desk, crossing his arms over his chest. The desk creaks a little under his weight, and a stack of papers slides a few centimeters. "Are you sure you understood what the director said? Because I honestly still don't understand how all of what you just told me is going to work."

Keonho sighs.

"Yes... something like that," he replies. "He and I have never been compatible," he protests, and his voice breaks between hurt and angry, as if the injustice of the universe were something that could be measured in meters and stopwatches, as if the universe owed him something and wasn't paying up. "I don't know how we're going to manage to work together."

Seonghyeon is silent for a few seconds. He gets down from the desk, a smooth, unhurried movement, and approaches the mirror hanging on the wall—an oval mirror with a dark wooden frame and a small stain in one corner that looks like a cloud—and begins fixing his hair with his hands. His fingers go over the ends, tuck a strand behind his ear, smooth the back of his neck with his palm. The gesture is almost automatic, as if he needs to do something with his hands while he thinks. And then he pauses. His hand remains suspended in the air, fingers slightly apart, as if searching for words in a language not his own and not finding them, as if the dictionary of what he wants to say had been misplaced somewhere between the closet and the bed.

"I've never fully understood it," Seonghyeon finally says, and his voice is lower now, more intimate. He turns, leans his hip against the mirror frame, and looks at him with a frankness that Keonho finds uncomfortable because it's one of those looks that see things one hasn't said. "Ever since I've known you, you've always detested Martin. But he, at the beginning of university, treated you almost as if you were his friend or an acquaintance. Why do you hate him so much?" He leans forward slightly, as if getting closer might help him understand better. "I know he's your neighbor or something, right? Did he do something to you when you were kids, or...?"

Keonho shakes his head. The gesture is slow, as if moving his head from side to side could make the question disappear. But the question doesn't disappear. It floats in the room's air, mixing with the scent of vanilla and clean laundry, rising to the ceiling with the candle's shadows. He looks down at the empty acai bowl—the transparent plastic, the purple residue, the white spoon that seems to be waiting—and tries to explain himself rationally.

He finds himself remembering.

He had first heard of Martin over thirteen years ago. Thirteen years is an eternity when you're only twenty, a span of time that covers almost your entire conscious life, but for Keonho it's still a present tense, a wound that never fully heals because it's never stopped bleeding entirely. He was seven years old. When the good economic times still held, when money wasn't a concern that floated through dinners like a ghost, his sister still lived at home, his father still had his business, and his mother had come into his room with the breakfast tray: scrambled eggs steaming on the plate, a glass of warm milk with a thin wisp of vapor rising toward the ceiling, those round cookies he liked, the ones with a shiny layer of sugar on top, and had told him, with a lightness that still feels offensive to him, as if the information deserved no more than a passing comment: A family with a son a year older than you has moved two houses down from ours. They come from Canada. The word Canada had sounded like something else to him—infinite snow, forests of towering trees, a country so distant it hardly seemed real, a place from maps and nature documentaries, not from neighbors.

At first, the news had seemed wonderful to him. Seven years old, and he had already designed in his head a perfect friendship, the kind that appears in Korean movies from the nineties, where children meet by chance and become brothers forever. Finally he would have a friend to go to class with every day, backpacks hanging from their shoulders, synchronized steps marking the same rhythm on the sidewalk, the morning sun warming the backs of their necks as they walked to school; someone to play with after school in the dirt park behind their neighborhood, that park where the swings squeaked and the slide was chipped but he didn't care; someone to beat at video games, over and over. He could already see it: he would introduce him to the rest of his classmates at the start of the school year, and everyone would be intrigued, they'd crowd around the new kid with that voracious curiosity of elementary school children, like ants around a sugar cube. But the new kid would be more friends with Keonho than with the rest, because they were neighbors, because they shared the same sidewalk, the same corner convenience store where they bought ice cream in summer, the same noise of cars passing through the neighborhood every night that he had learned to ignore. Because he would have met him before anyone else could.

That whole scenario had seemed wonderful in his mind—a postcard, a fairy tale, a seven-year-old's dream woven with the naivety of someone who doesn't yet know that things don't always turn out as planned—and Keonho had insisted to his mother for entire days. Days of tugging at her sleeve while she fried something in the kitchen, of putting on a serious face at dinner, sinking his lips into the rim of his water glass and looking at his mother over the edge with eyes bigger than normal, of mentioning the new neighbors every time someone said the word weekends. Are we going to visit them? What if we go this afternoon? Why not today, right now, before they go back to Canada? His mother had endured the litany with a patience that now, remembering it, seems superhuman to him, that patience of parents who know that children will soon forget what they so desire, but who also know that there are battles not worth fighting.

When, finally, they had bought a cake—a cream and strawberry cake, with a red ribbon tied around the transparent plastic box, the kind you saw in the display window of the corner bakery and that Keonho had pointed to with his index finger as if he were choosing the most valuable treasure in the world—along with a card that said welcome in Korean—and they had shown up at the new neighbors' door, the disappointment couldn't have been greater. Keonho had expected to meet the perfect friend. And he had found a strange kid.

Keonho had expected to meet the perfect friend: calm, serene, with that maturity he assumed children from another country must have because they had seen the world, because they had crossed oceans and that must show in the way they existed in the world. Good at activities—not necessarily better than him, but good enough that competitions would be fun, that there would be excitement in winning and dignity in losing. Maybe just a little—just a little—taller than him, considering his mother had told him he was a year older, and well, Keonho didn't feel lesser since at seven years old, he already measured a few centimeters taller than most of his classmates. A year older and just a little taller: that was the equation he had made in his head, the image he had built with the data he had.

What he had found instead was a strange kid.

Too tall, a head taller than him, maybe more, arms hanging like long branches at the sides of his body, as if he didn't quite know what to do with them, all arms and legs, as if someone had stretched a normal child and didn't know when to stop, as if the universe had decided to play a joke on proportions. His face round, too round, a full moon in the middle of a dark tangle of disheveled hair that seemed not to have seen a comb in weeks, growing in all directions as if each strand had decided to go its own way. And the eyes. Especially the eyes. He had looked at him with ridiculously wide eyes, so wide that Keonho could see the white around the pupil, a full circle of astonishment, and Keonho had felt a shiver run down his spine, a tingle that rose from the base of his spine to the nape of his neck and made the hairs on his arms stand up.

He hadn't liked him. Not at all. Not one single thing. His legs were too long—they seemed to end in knees that pointed outward, at angles that didn't look natural, like the legs of a newborn foal that hasn't yet learned to control its own body—and his eyes too big, like those porcelain dolls his grandmother kept in the display cabinet that he had always found unsettling, with those fixed stares that seemed to follow him around the room. However, the other boy had overlooked his frown, that frown Keonho had rehearsed in front of his bedroom mirror, frowning and unfrowning until it was perfect, which usually worked to keep older kids from messing with him, to make adults ask if he was angry so he could say no, just focused—had broken away from his mother with a sudden movement, almost a jerk, letting go of her hand as if there were no time to lose, and had approached him. And then he had observed him. He had observed him as if he were the most wonderful person he had ever had the pleasure of seeing on the face of the planet. As if Keonho were a comet crossing the sky, a unicorn in an enchanted forest, a shooting star in the middle of a living room that smelled of moving boxes and packing plastic.

Barely a second later—maybe less, maybe the time it takes a child to decide whether he likes another child or not, that instant when the brain makes an invisible calculation and spits out an answer—the strange kid had smiled at him. A smile so enormous and so strange that it had scared Keonho. It wasn't a normal smile, the kind you see in milk commercials or family photos. It was a smile that seemed to take up his whole face, that wrinkled his eyes into two half-moons, that lifted his cheeks as if someone were pulling his cheekbones from inside. And when he smiled, you could see a row of teeth still mixed between baby and permanent, some small and tight, others large and spaced apart, as if they hadn't agreed on the order they should follow.

"Hi, I'm Martin!" he had said to him, with a voice that, back then, was still stupidly high-pitched. A squeak, almost. The voice of a child whose vocal cords don't yet know what they're supposed to do. He spoke in a strange Korean, with words paused in the wrong places and vowels too long, as if he were translating from another language in real time. "Are we going to be friends?"

And Keonho had stepped back a step, the tip of his shoe brushing the doormat, his heel finding the cold tile floor, and he had looked at him as if he had gone crazy. As if he had just been spoken to in an alien language. As if the simplest question in the world was also the most absurd.

Are we going to be friends? Who said that? Who asked something like that, out loud, without any shame, with open arms as if he were welcoming a relative after years of not seeing them? Kids didn't ask if they were going to be friends. Kids sat together in class, borrowed each other's colored pencils, pulled each other's hair at recess, shared snacks on the bench in the yard, and somehow, without ever saying it, without a single word about it, they became friends or enemies. But they didn't ask. Not like Martin. Not with that high-pitched voice, those wide eyes, that smile that seemed to want to devour him whole, to swallow him up in his enthusiasm without asking permission.

If the first impression had been terrible—and it had been—as the days went by, Martin had proven to be anything but what he had expected from his project of a perfect friend for the upcoming school year. He wasn't calm or mature for his age, as he had wanted. He wasn't serene, he wasn't calm, he wasn't that ideal playmate he had imagined in his seven-year-old dreams. He was a kind of chaos in human form. He reacted with too much intensity to everything: to a dog barking in the street—he would crouch down to pet it without fear, even if the dog growled at him—to an ice cream falling on the ground—he would look at it with a tragedy worthy of a funeral—to a test that had gone well—he would jump and shout as if he had won the lottery. He laughed too loudly, a laugh that seemed to fill small spaces and make them vibrate, bouncing off the hallway walls and seeping under doors. A small part of Keonho—a small, shameful part, which he would never have admitted out loud even under torture—had hoped that, at the very least, he would be good at games. That he would have some talent, some skill that would redeem so much strangeness. But the poor idiot seemed to have the grace of a newborn giraffe. His long arms and clumsy legs tangled together when he tried to run, as if he hadn't received the instruction manual for coordinating his limbs; the ball bounced off his fingers as if it were made of rubber and he of cement, always going in the opposite direction to what he intended. He was even incapable of riding a skateboard without it slipping out from under his feet and crashing against the wall, leaving a black rubber mark that his mother took a week to scrub off.

And that had only been the beginning.

Because a week after meeting him, Keonho had already decided that Martin was a lost cause.

It wasn't that he had done it without getting to know him, no. He was a reasonable person. He had given him a grand total of three opportunities to prove that his first impression was wrong. Three. Like the three little pigs, like three wishes, like the three acts of a play. A round, symbolic number that made it clear he had been fair, that he hadn't acted on a childish whim. But Martin, being the disaster in human form that he was, had made sure to ruin them all. One by one. Enthusiastically. With that kind of clumsy joy that seemed to accompany every one of his movements, as if failing was also a way to have fun, as if the whole world were a game and he the only one who hadn't learned the rules.

The first opportunity was in the neighborhood park, a Saturday afternoon with the sun beating down on the asphalt and the shadows of the trees drawing elongated spots on the dirt. Keonho had gathered his friends—the neighborhood kids he'd known since they started going to school together—to play soccer on the little dirt field behind the supermarket. They were his troop, and Keonho, with the authority of being the fastest and the best, had decided to invite Martin. A gesture of goodwill. A sincere attempt to integrate him.

Martin had been so excited—eyes bright, enormous smile, hands clenched into excited fists—that several of his friends had ended up pulling Keonho aside, nudging him away from the group and tilting their heads, to ask him quietly, their lips almost to his ear and their eyes darting toward Martin every few seconds, whether his neighbor had to keep hanging out with them. Keonho remembered the weight of their stares, the discomfort that floated in the air like the smell of wet earth after rain. He remembered his friends' whispering, their furrowed brows, the way they avoided looking directly at Martin, as if looking at him might infect them with something.

"He's very... intense," one had said, a skinny kid with glasses, in a tone that tried to be neutral and failed. He had pursed his lips, wrinkled his nose, as if he'd smelled something unpleasant.

"He doesn't stop talking; you can tell he's a foreigner," another had said, frowning, head slightly tilted, as if Martin were a problem to be solved or a question whose wording he didn't understand.

Keonho had nodded, shrugged, made that what can you do gesture that children learn before they know what it means. He hadn't defended Martin. He hadn't said he was just excited, that he hadn't been in the country long, that maybe he just needed a little patience and someone to explain how things worked. He had nodded. He had shrugged.

The second occasion had been their first day of class together. Keonho had agreed to walk to school with Martin—because his mother had asked him to, the night before, while preparing dinner with her hands still damp from washing vegetables, and because saying no would have meant a long, tedious conversation about "being a good person" and "giving chances" that he didn't feel like having on an empty stomach, and because even though he was a year older, since he was joining the group, Martin had to restart the grade—but the idiot had dawdled so much along the way that they'd both arrived late. The morning was cool, with that damp smell that precedes colder days. Keonho remembered looking at his Minions watch—the yellow strap, the face with Bob's picture, the one with eyes set apart—again and again, feeling the minutes slip through his fingers like water, like sand, like something he couldn't hold onto no matter how tightly he clenched his fists. The reason? Martin had stopped to look at a beetle lying on its back on the sidewalk—"look, look, it's alive, we have to flip it over," he'd said, kneeling on the ground without caring that his uniform pants would get dirty with dirt and tiny pieces of concrete—and then had stopped to help an elderly woman with her grocery bags—three white plastic bags slipping from her hands, the contents pressed against her chest, the veins standing out on her forearms—and Martin had run toward her like an action hero, leaving Keonho stranded in the middle of the sidewalk.

And then he had stopped to tell Keonho the whole story of how his parents had met in Canada, with unnecessary details like the weather—"it was very cold, but not a dry cold, a damp cold that seeped into your bones," Martin had said, gesturing with his hands—and the food—"my mom says poutine is the best thing she's ever tried, even though I didn't like it much," he'd added, a grimace on his lips that was meant to be disgust but that Keonho had found almost comical—and the smell of the airport—"it smelled like coffee and new plastic, like CD wrappers when you open them for the first time," Martin had said, eyes bright, "and I was scared my suitcase would get lost, because that's where I had my first sound mixer, the one my dad gave me on my last birthday before we came, but it didn't get lost, luckily."

Keonho had walked beside him with his jaw so tight his teeth hurt, his molars clenched as if chewing glass, his hands in his pants pockets so he wouldn't do something he'd regret later. When they finally got to the classroom, the teacher had already started the class. The sun came through the windows and drew quadrilaterals of light on the white tile floor. The green chalkboard was half full of words Keonho hadn't copied. She forgave Martin because he was new and because he smiled that wide smile of his that seemed to disarm anyone. But Keonho, who wasn't new and had no excuse, had to apologize and stay after school as punishment. Sitting in silence, staring at the empty chalkboard, chalk dust floating in the sunbeams coming through the window, moving slowly like little colored snowflakes; the ticking of the wall clock marking seconds like a sentence that admitted no appeal, while outside he could hear the laughter of his classmates heading out to the yard. The laughter faded, grew small, became a distant murmur that barely reached his ears, and Keonho was left alone with the echo of his own breathing and the certainty that everything was Martin's fault. Everything. Absolutely everything.

That afternoon, walking home with his backpack heavier than usual—the pages of his notebooks seemed to weigh more, as if they had absorbed the moisture of his disappointment—and his hands cold from the air, Keonho decided that Martin didn't deserve a second chance. Or a third. Or any. But life, and his mother, gave him a third anyway. Because life has that cruel sense of humor, and his mother had that way of looking at him that brooked no argument.

It was a Sunday. His mother had practically forced him to take his neighbor to the basketball court in the park, that dirt court behind their houses, with the cement bleachers cracked by the sun and the nets missing from the hoops that creaked when the wind moved them. Keonho remembered protesting—"Mom, I don't want to, he's annoying," "Mom, I don't like him," "Mom, please don't make me do this"—but she had looked at him with that expression of hers that allowed no reply, that mix of infinite patience and unshakable authority she had perfected over the years. "He's a new kid, he doesn't know anyone, be kind," she had said while tying his sneakers, as if he weren't seven and didn't know how to do it himself, as if he needed his mother to remind him how to be a good person. Keonho had frowned, crossed his arms over his chest in a gesture meant to be angry but was more like surrender, but he had nodded. Because he was a good son. Because he had no choice. Because sometimes being a good person means doing things you don't want to do.

Martin was tall for his age. Taller than Keonho, even—a head, maybe two, that uncomfortable height of kids who grow too fast and still don't know what to do with their own bodies, who trip over their own feet and bump into doorframes. So, in theory, the idea didn't seem bad. Basketball was a sport of height. A sport of long legs and long arms. Maybe, Keonho thought as they walked to the park with the orange ball under his arm—the rough leather against his side, the smell of rubber and sun and someone else's sweat, the rough texture of the black hexagons under his fingers—maybe Martin had a hidden talent. Keonho was terrible at playing, of course. He knew it. He'd accepted it. His classmates laughed at him in gym class when he tried to dribble and the ball slipped out of his hands as if coated in butter. But maybe, despite appearances, despite the arms that hung like broken branches, despite the too-loud laugh that echoed in empty hallways, despite the endless monologues about beetles and airports and sound mixers, Martin was good at something.

Or, at least, it hadn't seemed like a bad idea until they started playing.

Keonho still remembers the scene with painful clarity, as if it were a photograph seared into his memory, the kind that doesn't fade even if you spend years looking away. Martin, with his long legs and long arms, moving as if each limb were independent and none agreed with the others. The dirt court, with its white lines faded by sun and rain over so many years, blurry in some sections, invisible in others. The basket without a net, the rusty metal rim that creaked when the wind moved it, a sharp, plaintive sound that resembled the whine of an animal. Martin grabbed the ball with both hands, too tightly, his fingers white from the pressure, as if the ball might escape if he didn't hold it with all his might, as if it were a wild animal that needed taming. He aimed at the basket with such intense concentration that he closed one eye and stuck out his tongue, a gesture so absurd and so serious at the same time that Keonho felt a pang in his chest he couldn't identify. And he threw.

The ball shot off in a direction that wasn't even remotely correct. It wasn't a shot. It went upward, to the left, described an impossible arc that seemed to defy all the laws of physics, as if it had decided gravity was a suggestion and not a rule. It bounced off the backboard with a dry thud pock and came back, spinning on itself, following a trajectory that obeyed no human calculation. And then, with almost miraculous precision, it hit Martin square in the face. Right on the nose.

The sound was spongy. A dull, wet pumph. Like a fruit falling to the ground. Like a slap on a pillow. Like something that shouldn't hurt that much but does.

"Ow!" said Martin, bringing his hands to his face, his fingers spreading like a fan over his cheeks, his palms covering his nose, his eyes peeking above his knuckles with an expression of comic disbelief.

Keonho stood frozen. The ball rolled lazily until it stopped against the base of the basket, spinning two or three times on itself before coming to a halt. The scene was so absurd that he didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He stood in the middle of the court, hands on his hips, mouth slightly open, feeling incredulity run through his body from head to toe like a low-intensity electric current.

But Martin, the next second, without complaining, without cursing, without even blinking more than necessary, crouched down. His knees cracked with a dry sound, that noise joints make when they're still growing and haven't quite settled. His black bangs fell over his eyes, tangling in his lashes, and he brushed them away with a sharp movement of his head, like a dog shaking off water after a dip. He picked up the ball with a dignity it didn't deserve, with an almost ridiculous solemnity, and tried again.

He positioned himself in the same stance. Feet apart at the same distance, fingers stiff on the ball's rough surface, the same tension in his shoulders betraying that he had no idea what he was doing. He aimed with the same concentration—tongue peeking from the corner of his lips, eyes narrowed, breath held—as if willpower could make up for what he lacked in technique.

He threw.

The ball hit him in the face again.

"Again!" Martin exclaimed, and this time he did laugh. An enormous, loud, uncontrolled laugh that echoed throughout the empty court, bouncing off the walls of the surrounding buildings, rising toward the clear sky of that Sunday. It was a belly laugh, the kind that comes out without permission and lingers vibrating in your chest. "This ball has something against me!"

His nose was red, a bright circle in the center of his face, like a circus clown. His cheeks were red, flushed from effort or embarrassment or perhaps just the cold of the afternoon. His eyes were wet, perhaps from laughter, perhaps from pain, perhaps from both at once, mixed into a single incomprehensible emotion, and he was laughing, laughing as if the funniest thing in the world had just happened to him, as if the ball that had hit him twice in the face was the best joke he'd ever heard in his life.

Keonho brought a hand to his forehead. He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath, so deep he felt the air fill his lungs to the brim, felt his ribs expand like the ribs of an umbrella opening. Why?, he asked himself. Why did this have to happen to me? But when he opened his eyes, Martin was still there, with the ball in his hands and his reddened nose and his disheveled bangs, smiling at him as if nothing bad had ever happened in the world, as if the only thing that mattered was that they were together on that empty court.

On the way home, Martin didn't stop talking. It was an absurd, endless monologue, a river of words that seemed to have no end or direction. About how lucky he'd been not to break his nose—"I've heard noses bleed a lot, have you ever seen blood? I have, once I cut myself with paper and it was horrible, a lot came out and wouldn't stop, and my mom got very scared even though I wasn't scared, it was just blood, right?"—About how in Canada basketball was different and that actually hockey was played more—"the hoop was lower, I think, or maybe it was that I was smaller, I don't remember well, but in Canada everything is different, even the trees, you know? The trees in Canada are taller, or so it seems to me"—About how for sure next time he'd get it right—"third time's the charm, right? So next time will be the third. Or the fourth. Or the fifth. It has to go in sometime, don't you think? It's a matter of statistics, the odds are in my favor."

Keonho walked beside him in silence, hands in his pockets, eyes fixed on the ground, jaw tense, teeth clenched. He said nothing. Not because he didn't want to, but because he didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to tell Martin that he didn't want to be his friend, that he hadn't asked for his company, he didn't know how to tell him that that enormous, uncontrolled laugh made him feel embarrassed for him, that his ease at laughing at himself seemed almost obscene, that his perseverance in trying again after failing seemed, simply, exhausting.

At that moment, as they crossed the street and Martin was still talking—"do you think if I practice a lot I could get good? Well, I don't need to be good, but at least not get hit in the face, right? That would be a good goal. That the ball doesn't hit me in the face. A realistic goal, I think"—Keonho decided that he definitely wanted nothing to do with such a person.

The following week, when he found out that Martin had signed up for the school's Music Club—the weirdest club, the one for kids who brought their own instruments and locked themselves in the music room to make noises no one understood, the club for those who sat on the hallway floor during recess because they had no one to play with, the club for those who lived in their own world and didn't seem to need anyone to join them—Keonho felt confirmed. He had made the right decision. He and Martin had nothing in common. They never had. They never would. One was noise, the other was silence. One was chaos, the other was discipline. One laughed at his own failures, the other had learned to hide them.

And yet.

There was a small problem.

A problem shaped like a meddlesome neighbor with a too-wide smile, shaped like footsteps that approached uninvited and hands that knocked on his door on Friday afternoons.

While Keonho was very clear that the farther away from Martin he was, the safer his mental health and his reputation would be, and his patience, and his capacity not to explode, and the delicate balance of his perfectly ordered life, his dear neighbor didn't seem to think the same. For some strange reason that Keonho never came to understand—and that even today, years later, he still didn't understand, although sometimes, in the privacy of night, when insomnia spread its nets and thoughts became liquid, he suspected that perhaps he didn't want to understand, that lack of understanding was a form of protection—Martin had decided on his own that the two of them were destined to be the best friends in the world.

So, to Keonho's dismay, Martin took to including him unilaterally in all his plans. Without asking. Without waiting for an answer. Without even considering the possibility that Keonho might have other plans, or simply want to be alone.

"I thought we could go to the movies on Saturday," he would say on Friday afternoons, showing up at his door unannounced, hands in his pockets and with that smile of his that seemed not to know what rejection was, that seemed made of rejection-proof material. "I bought two ice creams, one for you," he would offer on summer afternoons with the chocolate already half-melted running down his hand and staining his fingers, the cone crunching under his teeth while he devoured his own with a happiness bordering on obscene. "I saved you a seat next to me on the field trip bus," he would announce with genuine joy, as if he didn't notice—or perhaps as if he actively decided to ignore—that Keonho had never asked for any of that, that Keonho would much rather sit alone by the window with his headphones on, the noise of the world reduced to a distant, tolerable hum.

He followed him everywhere. Whether Keonho wanted him to or not. He was like a shadow, but a noisy, meddlesome shadow that didn't know when to be quiet and that didn't seem to care about the discomfort it caused.

At first, Keonho thought he would get tired. That all that enthusiasm, so excessive, so loud, so exhausting, would eventually fizzle out over time, like a candle when the wax runs out, like the sea calming after a storm. That Martin would find other friends—real friends, friends who would actually want to listen to his monologues about beetles and airports, friends who wouldn't stand silent with their hands in their pockets while he talked, friends who would return his smile with the same intensity—and leave him alone. Give him space. Forget about him.

But Martin, it turned out, was the most irritatingly persistent person on the face of the earth. And Keonho, without knowing it yet, was about to discover that some people don't get tired of trying. Some people keep throwing the ball even if it hits them in the face again and again. Some people don't know how to give up.

And that was, perhaps, the most irritating and terrifying thing of all.

Martin continued following him during recess. He continued offering him half his lunch—a piece of the gimbap his mother prepared on Mondays, a tangerine he peeled with his long, clumsy fingers, a cookie broken in two with a cleanliness that contrasted with the chaos of the rest of his person. He continued showing up at his door on weekends, his pockets full of rocks he thought were pretty—"look at this one, it has a weird shape," "this one shines when the sun hits it," "I found this one in the river in Canada, do you think it's a fossil?"—or with endless stories about nothing: the movie he'd watched with his parents, the neighbor's dog that had run away three times in a week, the taste of a new ice cream flavor they'd released. For entire years.

And all of that had been unbearable. Truly unbearable. Keonho had come home some afternoons with his head full of Martin's voice, buzzing in his ear like a mosquito just before falling asleep, repeating senseless phrases he hadn't asked to hear, that lodged in his thoughts like splinters. He had dreamed of moving to another planet—Mars, perhaps, or some place without neighbors, without adjoining doors, without whistling between teeth—just to have a little silence. Just so his name would stop sounding in that high-pitched voice that, over the years, would become deep and warm and much harder to ignore.

But he had endured it.

Because he was patient. Because his mother had told him that being kind costs nothing—and he wanted to be kind, he really did, even if it cost him dearly sometimes, even if he had to bite his tongue until it almost drew blood. Because deep down—though he would never, never, never admit it out loud, though the mere idea of admitting it churned his stomach in a way he couldn't explain, as if the words tangled in his throat and refused to come out—when he got home and the house was empty and his sister still hadn't returned from school and the only sound was the ticking of the hallway clock, sometimes he missed the noise.

Only sometimes.

Very rarely.

But sometimes.

Until they reached puberty.

Keonho was fifteen when things began to change. It wasn't a specific day; there wasn't a clear before and after, sharp as the cut of a stopwatch. It was more of a slow process, like water heating up without you noticing until it starts to burn. Suddenly—or not so suddenly—he was no longer just the boy who swam well. He was the tall boy, with broad shoulders beginning to form from the hours in the pool, the one that girls and boys glanced at sideways in the hallways—that kind of sidelong look, quick, as if it burned, as if looking directly could be dangerous. He started receiving attention. Heart-shaped folded notes appearing in his locker on Monday mornings, with trembling handwriting and cheap perfumes that soaked the paper. Whispers behind his back that cut off abruptly when he turned around, leaving behind a guilty silence, a smoke screen that dissipated too slowly. Invitations to dates he never accepted because no one interested him, or because he didn't quite know what to do with all of it, with that attention falling on him like a wave too big for someone who just wanted to swim in a straight line, keep his head down, not stand out more than he already did for his times in the water.

And then what happened with his father.

Keonho didn't talk about that. Not even with Seonghyeon, who would arrive years later and become the only person who managed to make him lower his guard. The family business went bankrupt overnight. There was no warning. No time to prepare, to save, to say goodbye to the life they had. No mourning period before the loss. On an ordinary Tuesday, a Tuesday like any other when Keonho had gone to practice and returned with sore shoulders and his hair still wet, his father came home with his tie crooked and his hands empty. And his mother stopped buying the cookies Keonho liked, the chocolate ones with hazelnut pieces that were only sold at the corner supermarket. She didn't say anything. They just stopped appearing in the pantry. And Keonho understood, without anyone explaining it to him, that the cookies were just the beginning.

His father, who had always been a quiet but present man—who took him to the pool on Sundays before anyone else arrived and sat in the stands with a coffee in hand, who nodded with pride when Keonho came home with a medal around his neck and kept it in a shoebox under the bed—became even quieter. He spent hours watching the turned-off television, the remote control on the armrest, his eyes fixed on a black screen that returned nothing, not even his own reflection. As if he were waiting for something to appear. As if the television were a broken mirror. His mother started working, first in the mornings, then also in the afternoons, then on weekends, and the fatigue showed in her purple dark circles and slumped shoulders, in the way she walked as if carrying invisible weights hanging from each limb, in how her smile had become rarer, briefer, as if she had to save it. And Keonho's older sister, the one who had almost raised him single-handedly—who made his snack when he got home from school, who helped him with his math homework even though she hated it herself, who defended him in the yard when some older kid picked on him—left her studies to help at home. Keonho heard her cry one night, through the thin wall separating their rooms, a muffled, contained crying, the kind of someone who doesn't want to be heard but can't help it. And he didn't know what to do. He lay still in his bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sobs seeping through the wall like leaks. He never knew what to do with others' crying.

Keonho was angry. At everyone. At his father for not having known how to keep the business, for having sat staring at the turned-off television as if it could give back the life they'd lost, for having made that gesture of running his hand over his face so many times Keonho had lost count. At his mother for never being there, for coming home late with swollen feet and glassy eyes, for kissing his forehead with dry lips when night came and then disappearing again the next day before he woke up. At his sister for having to sacrifice herself, for having said it's okay when it wasn't, when everything was happening, when life was crumbling around them and she kept smiling with that smile that didn't reach her eyes. At the entire universe for having chosen him, for placing him right in the line of fire, for giving him a before only to take it away.

But above all, he was angry with Martin.

He couldn't explain why. There was no clear reason, no precise moment he could point to and say there, that's when it all started. Maybe because Martin was still the same as always. The same noisy disaster. The same enormous smile that seemed to have no filter. The same irritating perseverance, that ability not to give up that in anyone else would have been admirable but in him was simply unbearable. While Keonho's life was crumbling in slow motion like a building having its pillars removed one by one—first the facade, then the windows, then the walls you thought were load-bearing—Martin kept showing up at his door on weekends, kept offering him half his lunch with that naturalness that hurt, kept acting as if nothing bad could ever happen. As if happiness were a right and not a luxury, something he deserved by the mere fact of existing. As if the world were a safe place and Keonho just hadn't learned to see it, as if the problem were him and his inability to be happy.

And that made him angry. A dull, hot anger that boiled inside him with nowhere to go. An anger that rose up his esophagus and burned his throat, that clenched his fists without him deciding to clench them, that tensed the muscles of his jaw until his teeth ached. Because Martin didn't have to worry about money. Because Martin didn't have to watch his father turn into a shadow—that shadow that moved through the hallway with a lost gaze, that sat on the sofa without turning on the television, who no longer laughed with the same ease and, like his mother, began to kill himself by starting to work again. Because Martin didn't have to listen to his sister cry behind a wall, muffling her sobs with a pillow so no one would hear her, and pretend the next day that nothing had happened. Because Martin didn't have to feel like a burden every time he asked for something.

Because Martin was happy. Or at least he seemed to be. And Keonho, at that moment, had forgotten what that felt like. He had forgotten the light weight of joy, the way the chest expands without pain, the ease with which a smile forms without having to rehearse it first in front of the mirror.

It was a Saturday afternoon when Martin knocked on his door.

Keonho had been locked in his room all day, the curtains closed—the thick fabric, a beige that once seemed warm to him and now only seemed dull, like everything else—the music loud, something with distorted guitars, something to fill his ears so he wouldn't have to listen to his own thoughts, his homework on the table undone, the blank sheets staring at him in mute accusation, waiting for answers he didn't have. He didn't want to see anyone. He didn't want to talk to anyone. He just wanted the world to leave him alone, for the world to stop for a moment so he could get off, so he could breathe without his chest hurting.

But Martin didn't know how to read those signs. Or maybe he did, but he knocked anyway. Because Martin was Martin. Because Martin had never understood that no sometimes means no, and other times means leave me alone, and other times means I can't take it anymore, can't you see I can't take it anymore. Or maybe he did understand, and he knocked anyway because he didn't know what else to do. Because Martin wasn't good with silences. Because Martin needed to fill the voids with noise, with words, with presence, even if that presence wasn't welcome.

"What?" Keonho said when he opened the door, with a dryness that would have frozen anyone's blood. His voice sounded rough, worn, like a rope about to snap after bearing too much weight. It wasn't even a complete word; it was a sound, a growl, a warning.

Martin stood behind the door with his hands in the pockets of his gray sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was a little big on him—too big for his thin body, as if it belonged to someone else or as if he'd bought the wrong size on purpose—the sleeves covered his fingers up to his knuckles, and the neck was slightly misshapen from so much wear, from so much pulling on it on cold days. He had the hood over his head, with black strands sticking out falling over his forehead in a dark, messy mass, and a small blue ink stain on his cheek—from a burst pen, probably, because Martin always carried pens in his pockets, in his pants pockets, his jacket pockets, his backpack pockets, to write down song lyrics that occurred to him in the moment and that he later lost because he never found the paper, and they almost always burst, leaving stains on his clothes, his fingers, his face. That blue stain on his cheek was so Martin that Keonho's stomach lurched, though he didn't know why.

"Hi," Martin said, and his voice sounded more insecure than usual. Less noisy. Lower. As if he were measuring each word before releasing it, as if each syllable had to pass quality control before leaving his mouth. Something in Martin that was as strange as seeing rain fall upward, as seeing a fish fly. Martin never measured his words. Martin threw them into the air like confetti, not caring where they fell. "Are you busy?"

"Yes," Keonho lied. The lie came easily.

Martin nodded, as if he expected it. As if he already knew that would be the answer and had decided to come anyway. There was no surprise in his expression, no disappointment. Only a kind of confirmation, as if he had just verified a hypothesis he already took for granted. But he didn't leave. He stood there, on the threshold, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, with an awkwardness Keonho had never seen in him. Martin had always been clumsy, yes, with that physical clumsiness that made him trip over doors and spill drinks. But never awkward. Never so aware of his own body, his own space, the fact that he was there without permission. That was the difference.

"Look," Martin finally said, pulling one hand out of his pocket with a slow, almost cautious movement, as if he were offering something he wasn't sure would be accepted. His fingers were also stained with blue ink, the same from the burst pen, and his thumbnail was bitten down to the quick. "I know it's not the best time... but we've organized a party at my house. Maybe you don't remember, but next Saturday is my birthday. And... well"—he paused, ran his hand over his hair over the hood, a nervous gesture Keonho didn't remember ever seeing—"I thought maybe you'd want to come."

Keonho looked at him without saying anything. His jaw tight—that jaw that always tensed whenever he didn't want to show what he was feeling, that stood out like a warning—his arms crossed over his chest, his body weight leaning against the doorframe as if he needed something solid to keep from falling. The wooden frame pressed against his back, a point of support in the midst of vertigo.

Martin kept talking, because he didn't know how to be quiet. Because silence, for Martin, was an enemy to be defeated with words, a monster to be chased away with sounds. The words piled up, trampling each other, as if he were in a hurry to get them all out before someone slammed the door in his face.

"Some guys from music class are coming," he said, his gaze wandering back and forth, not focusing on anything in particular. "And some friends from the neighborhood. There'll be pizza and soda, and my mom said we could use the basement. The big one, downstairs, not the upstairs one that's full of junk. It's going to be fun, I think. Or I hope so. Last time I organized a party I forgot to buy drinks and everyone left after two hours, but this time I wrote everything down on a list"—here his eyes lit up a little, as if that were the definitive proof that things would be different—"a real list, on paper, so I wouldn't forget anything. I have the list stuck on the fridge with a cow magnet. And I know it's definitely not the best time for you with everything that's going on... but it might help you get distracted and we could even talk about it... if you want, of course. If you don't want to, we won't talk. We can just eat pizza and not say anything. Or say silly things. I don't care either way. Whatever you prefer, I..."

The last sentence escaped in a whisper, almost like an apology, and Keonho saw something in Martin's eyes that he couldn't identify. A kind of silent plea, the kind that isn't said with words because words wouldn't be enough.

Then, at that moment, Martin stopped to search for something in his sweatshirt pocket. He rummaged for a moment, the sound of fingers rubbing against fabric, the crinkle of something that seemed like paper, that characteristic sound of someone searching for something they know is there but can't quite find, and took out a folded card, handing it to Keonho with a trembling hand.

It was an invitation. The kind you buy at neighborhood stationery stores, with little drawings of balloons and confetti printed in overly bright colors—garish yellow, fairground red, sky blue from a commercial—and a blank space to write the guest's name. Someone... the handwriting was Martin's, shaky, irregular, like someone not used to writing neatly but who had put all their effort into it, like someone who had traced the letters several times to get them right, had written Keonho in blue marker, and below it a date and time. And, in the corner, a drawing attempting to be his face. A circle with two dots for eyes and a curved line for the mouth, and above the eyes two thick strokes mimicking his eyebrows. His most characteristic feature, the one Martin had decided to exaggerate to the point of ridiculousness. The blue ink had slightly bled through the paper, leaving a faint stain on the back, like a fingerprint, like a confession.

Keonho looked at the card.

And something inside him broke. Or loosened. Or filled with a fury that had been accumulating for months, like water behind a dam that could no longer hold. A fury that didn't have to do with Martin—not entirely—a fury that came from further away. A fury that had been building for weeks, months, perhaps years in some dark corner of his chest, and that had chosen Martin as its destination because Martin was the only one still there. The only one who hadn't fled. The only one who kept knocking on his door, handing him invitations with little drawings of balloons and exaggerated eyebrows, when everything else was crumbling.

A party? Was Martin really inviting him to a party? With balloons and soda and friends from the neighborhood? As if he were still a child. As if life were as simple as a cardstock invitation. As if he had as few problems as Martin, who could afford the luxury of drawing smiley faces in the margins while Keonho's world collapsed brick by brick. After everything that had happened, everything Keonho was living through in his house, his family, his own skin, his bones.

The dam broke.

He snatched the card from Martin's hands. Without thinking. Without measuring the consequences. He just grabbed it—the rough paper under his fingers, the slightly sharp edge like a blunt blade—and tore it in two in front of him with a dry, definitive crack of cardstock giving in, ceasing to be an invitation and becoming two pieces of nothing, and threw the pieces to the floor. They fell on the entryway floor, one next to the other, the name Keonho split right in half. The K remained on one piece, large, proud; the rest of the name, eonho, on the other, incomplete, like an echo of itself.

"Why don't you understand it once and for all?" Keonho said to him. His voice came out louder than intended. It echoed in the narrow hallway, bounced off the dirty white-painted walls, slipped through the open door into his empty house, where silence had grown dense. The echo returned his own words, distorted, like a mockery, as if the house itself were laughing at him. "I'm not going to your party. I don't want to go to your party, or anywhere else you are. Can't you see I've never been able to stand you? Why don't you leave me alone?"

The silence that followed was worse than the shout.

It was a dense, thick silence, like something you could touch. A silence that filled the hallway, that crept through the cracks of doors, that settled on the furniture like a layer of invisible dust. A silence that weighed, that pressed, that got into your lungs and made breathing difficult.

Martin stood there, without saying anything. He didn't move. He didn't even blink. His eyes, large and round, those eyes Keonho had known since childhood, that had even been behind glasses with tape on them for a while and now looked at the world without protection, looked at Keonho with an expression he couldn't read at that moment. It wasn't sadness, though it could have been. It wasn't anger, though he would have every right to be. It wasn't even surprise, as if the broken invitation were something he had already imagined, a possible scenario among many others. It was something emptier, colder. As if Martin had gone somewhere very far away inside himself, very deep, and had only left his body there, on the threshold, receiving the blow without resistance. As if he had already expected it. As if, in some corner of his head, he had always known this would happen. As if the invitation weren't a hope, but a formality. A last attempt before giving up.

A second passed. Maybe ten. Keonho couldn't measure the time. Time had stopped, or had become elastic, or had simply ceased to matter. The only clock that worked was the beat of his heart, accelerated, guilty, too late to apologize even though his lips didn't move.

Then, almost in slow motion, Martin crouched down.

The gesture was careful, almost reverent. His long fingers, those fingers Keonho had seen writing in the margins of notebooks, now brushing the floor with a delicacy that hurt just to watch, picked up the two pieces of the invitation. He held them in the palm of his hand for a moment, as if they were something fragile, something that could still be saved with patience and glue, as if the torn cardstock could be restored and become what it once was. He looked at them. The torn K. The blue marker that had bled through the paper. The drawing of the eyebrows, now divided into two halves that no longer matched.

And when he stood up, when he finally raised his eyes to Keonho, he was smiling.

It wasn't his usual huge smile. It wasn't that smile that filled his whole face and wrinkled his eyes and made him look dumber than he was, more accessible, more human. It was a small, tight smile that didn't reach his eyes. A smile that said it's okay, no problem, I understand. A smile that said I deserved it even though he had done nothing to deserve it. A smile that was more painful than any insult, because it didn't ask for forgiveness or offer explanations. It just accepted. It just gave up.

"I'm sorry," Martin said, and his voice was barely a murmur, a thread of air that dissolved before reaching Keonho's ears, as if the words were also breaking, like the invitation. "I won't bother you again."

He turned around. He walked toward his house, two doors down, still holding the pieces of cardstock in his hand. He didn't run. He didn't collapse. He didn't let his shoulders droop or drag his feet. He simply walked, back straight, as if nothing had happened. As if something hadn't just been broken in front of his face. As if the pieces of invitation he held weren't the remains of something he had built carefully, with hope, with that naive faith.

The door of his house opened and closed with a soft click. A small, insignificant sound, yet to Keonho it seemed like a slam. The echo of that click lingered in the empty hallway, mixing with the smell of earth and accumulated dust, with the silence that was now denser than before.

Keonho closed his own door.

He rested his forehead against the cold wood—the rough paint under his skin, the brush of the wood grain marking his forehead—and stayed there, motionless, not knowing what to do with the knot that had grown in his chest. A hot, tight knot that made it hard to breathe, that pressed on his diaphragm, that rose up his throat as if wanting to scream but not knowing how. He closed his eyes. He saw Martin's face. The small, tight smile that didn't reach his eyes. The empty, cold eyes, like two glass coins. The way he had picked up the pieces from the floor, one by one, with that delicacy of someone handling something broken.

He stayed like that for a long time. Time became liquid, slippery, impossible to measure. Maybe five minutes. Maybe an hour. His knees started to ache from standing so long, but he didn't move. His forehead grew numb against the wood, but he didn't pull his face away.

That night, safe in the darkness of his room, with the streetlight filtering through the cracks in the curtains, drawing pale lines on the floor, with Cookie—who was still just a puppy, a ball of brown fur his sister had brought home a few weeks ago from a friend's house to cheer him up, who still couldn't do anything right and peed on the rugs and nibbled shoes and got lost in corners crying until someone came to find him—sleeping on the floor beside his bed, with that small, wet snore of a dog, Keonho felt for the first time like a horrible person. Not uncomfortable. Not angry. Not even regretful, because regret implies having learned something. Horrible. One of those times you look in the mirror and don't recognize the face looking back at you, because the eyes are yours but the expression belongs to someone else, someone crueler, someone you don't know and don't want to know. One of those times when the disgust isn't directed at the other, but at yourself, and it's worse because you can't get away from yourself. Because you carry yourself everywhere. Because there's no door you can close to escape your own face.

But the days passed. As they always pass. As they always will, relentless, indifferent to the pain of those who inhabit them. And Keonho, who wasn't good at staying in uncomfortable emotions, who had learned to swim to escape them, to submerge himself in the cold water of the pool until his thoughts froze and his muscles burned and there was no room for anything but the next stroke, the next breath, the next meter, eventually forgot about the incident. Or so he told himself. Memory is generous to those who want to forget. It offers them distractions, fills their heads with noise: training, exams, parties, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, anything that can occupy time and leave no room for thinking, convinces them that the past doesn't weigh as much as it seems, that wounds heal on their own if you don't look at them, that time heals everything even if it's not true.

After all, it didn't even take Martin a week to return to his usual hyperactive state. Keonho saw him at school, laughing with his friends from the music club—a band of strange kids who carried instruments on their backs and talked about scales and chords as if they were a secret language, as if music were the only thing in the world worth it—talking loudly in the yard, gesturing with his hands as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra, as if the whole world were his stage. He seemed the same as always. The same noisy disaster. The same inexhaustible energy, the kind Keonho found so exhausting just to witness. As if nothing had happened. As if the broken invitation had never existed.

But there was a difference. A small difference, almost invisible, that Keonho noticed from the first day.

Martin had stopped following him everywhere.

He no longer showed up at his door on weekends with a huge smile and some excuse—did you see the game?, do you want to try these cookies I made?, can I help you with your homework?—. He no longer offered him half his lunch in the cafeteria, sliding the tray toward him without saying anything, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to share food with someone who hadn't even invited you to sit down. He no longer saved him a seat on the bus, his backpack on the seat next to him so no one else would sit there, and then a clumsy excuse when Keonho appeared: oh, I forgot this was here. When they crossed paths in the hallway—the sound of metal lockers opening and closing, the smell of disinfectant and leftover food someone had thrown in the trash, the commotion of class changes with their shouting and laughter and hurry—Martin looked at him, sometimes. A quick, almost furtive glance that retreated before Keonho could catch it, like an animal hiding in the undergrowth. But he no longer approached. He no longer smiled at him. He just nodded—a small head movement, dry, almost imperceptible, like a military greeting but without the respect—and continued on his way, lost among the crowd of students moving back and forth without looking back, absorbed by the anonymous current of the hallway.

And that, Keonho thought, was what he had always wanted. Peace. Silence. For Martin to leave him alone. For Martin to forget him. For Martin to find someone else to follow, someone else to offer half his lunch to, someone else to annoy with his irritating persistence, his too-loud laugh, his inexhaustible energy.

So he had no right to complain.

He had no right to feel that strange emptiness in his stomach every time Martin walked past, as if a small magnet had detached from his chest and now something was missing, even though he didn't know what. He had no right to wonder, in the darkest moments of the night, when insomnia draped its gray blanket over his shoulders and thoughts looped like a broken record, over and over, the same song, the same chorus, whether he had broken something that could never be fixed. Whether he had cut a thread that could never be tied again. Whether Martin's indifference wasn't a victory, but a defeat in disguise. He had no right to miss something he had never wanted. Something he had always rejected. Something he had broken with his own hands.

So life went on. Like the current of a pool, relentless, indifferent, pushing you forward even when you don't want to go. Martin devoting himself to being annoying to everyone else—to anyone but Keonho—and Keonho devoting himself to hating Martin, as always, out of principle and habit. Or so he pretended. Because hatred, sometimes, is easier than guilt. Because guilt weighs more, hurts more, stays longer. Because guilt is a stone in your pocket that you can't throw away no matter how hard you try, that accompanies you everywhere, that rubs against your thigh every time you walk, reminding you it's there.

And Keonho had spent the following years swimming with that stone. Not really knowing why. Not really knowing how to let it go. Not really knowing if he wanted to let it go, because the stone, after all, was already part of him. Because without it, perhaps, he would float too high. Because without it, perhaps, he wouldn't know who he was.

And at some point, Keonho had come to believe that he might rid himself of his neighbor upon starting university. Hope renewed itself with the naivety of someone who hasn't learned that the universe has a cruel sense of humor, of someone who believes that crossing the border into adulthood also erases the uncomfortable presences of the past. But to his surprise—and his horror, that silent horror that ran down his spine like a cramp, like when the water is colder than you expected and your body takes a few seconds to react—Martin had not only appeared at the same university, but had also caught attention as the youngest music producer in the country since his first year. Since the first semester. Since the first weeks, when Keonho was still learning the names of the hallways and Martin already had an article in the university's digital newspaper.

Keonho had found out through an article that his female classmates passed from phone to phone in the cafeteria, whispering and pointing at the screen with ring-adorned fingers, their eyes shining with that mix of admiration and desire he knew well because he was usually on the other side. He's handsome and so cool, one had said, and another had added have you heard his latest song? I heard he gave it to someone very famous, and a third had sighed something about his eyes and height. Keonho had looked away with studied indifference—the same one he used when he didn't want anyone to notice something was affecting him—pretending that the name Martin Edwards Park didn't produce any echo in his stomach. But it did. A small, dull echo, like a drop falling into a very deep well and taking a long time to reach the bottom.

And then they ended up together in English class.

Since then, every morning, when Martin entered the classroom making noise—the door hitting the stop with a dry click that made those reviewing notes look up, his backpack falling to the floor with the weight of poorly closed books and half-open zippers, a laugh that could be heard above the general murmur, that noise that seemed to fill empty spaces—everyone seemed more than willing to greet him enthusiastically. Heads turned, hands rose in vague waves, smiles appeared effortlessly. As if it were normal. As if he weren't the same child who had once hit himself twice in a row in the face with a ball, even though now, remembering it, the scene seemed almost tender to him, and that made him even angrier.

The worst of it all was his voice. Because, decidedly, it had become deep. Keonho remembered that high-pitched, screechy voice from childhood, the one that drilled into his ears like a mosquito on a summer night, impossible to ignore, impossible to shoo away, that slipped through the open windows of his room when Martin played in the garden despite being two houses away. Now, when Martin spoke, his voice sounded warm, the kind that makes people stop to listen even when he's saying something banal. A voice that seemed to wrap around words before releasing them, as if each syllable had been caressed before being spoken, as if the air leaving his lungs carried an extra intention, a hidden purpose. And it angered Keonho to admit that it wasn't unpleasant. It angered him because he had verified it against his will, in the hallways, in the few times Martin had addressed him directly—do you mind if I sit here?—and his voice had done something strange in his chest, a tingling he didn't want to identify, a small electric shock that dissipated before he could examine it. Quite the opposite. It was a voice that seemed made for radio, or for the songs he produced—those slow ballads that played in the university cafeteria and that Keonho hated to admit he knew, that he hummed without realizing while doing warm-up exercises before training—or for whispering things in someone's ear in the dimness of a room, with the lights low and the world outside, waiting.

But Keonho didn't think about that. Of course not.

Because it seemed hard to believe for someone who had been so strange as a child—so clumsy, so noisy, so too much in everything, too tall, too expressive, too present—but Martin was an incredibly sociable person. Where Keonho had to make an effort to maintain his popularity—smile when he had to even if he didn't feel like it, accept invitations he would rather decline, remember names of people he barely cared about, all that social theater he learned to put on in high school and that now came almost automatically to him, like a rehearsed algorithm—Martin seemed to do it effortlessly. As if friendliness oozed from his pores, as if he knew no other way of being in the world. He sat with anyone in the cafeteria, regardless of the group, regardless of the invisible hierarchies that students built around themselves with glances, whispers, and silent exclusions. He spoke to professors as if they were old friends, using a tone of confidence that would have cost Keonho a reprimand for disrespect. He organized music club events and everyone wanted to participate—even people who had never shown interest in music, just because it was Martin asking, just because Martin knew how to make even the most boring thing seem like an adventure.

Moreover, he was inhumanly tall. Keonho didn't end up short—his final height wasn't bad at all, a respectable height that gave him an advantage in the pool when pushing off the walls and allowed him to look at most people—but next to him, he felt like a kind of hobbit. A sensation he detested with all his soul. Martin had had a definitive growth spurt in high school that had left him over six feet, a growth so fast that sometimes he walked with that clumsiness of someone not accustomed to their own size, bumping into door frames and ducking under lamps. Now, however, he had settled into his body. He moved with a fluidity that seemed mocking, as if the universe had granted him that grace just to annoy Keonho, as if every gesture of his were a small provocation. And every time Keonho was forced to stand next to him—in the cafeteria line, with plastic trays in their hands and the smell of kimchi floating in the air, people pushing to get by; in the hallway, when they were both late to English class and had to navigate the same bodies, the same conversations blocking the way—he felt a physical discomfort. A pressure in his chest, a desire to move away, to reduce a distance that wasn't just centimeters. As if Martin took up too much space. As if his mere presence were an invasion, a constant reminder that there were things Keonho didn't control, ending with the effect his voice had on his stomach.

And to top it all off, at some point in high school, Martin had decided to dye his hair blonde. Not that dirty, dull blonde, that color that seemed to have been abandoned halfway between brown and wheat, but a light blonde that suited him surprisingly well. He had also cut his hair, leaving it shorter on the sides and a bit longer on top, that messy but intentional style that so many tried to copy and few achieved. So at least he no longer looked like he'd stuck his fingers in an electrical socket. Keonho had noticed, with a mix of irritation and something he didn't want to examine too closely, something that throbbed at the back of his consciousness like a cavity, that hurt if you touched it but also if you didn't, that although Martin was by no means part of the elite of handsome, popular boys that he and Seonghyeon belonged to—that elite of perfect faces and worked bodies and measured smiles for official Instagram photos—everyone knew him. And many seemed to like him. Not in the same way they liked Keonho—not with that silent, distant admiration that students felt for the captain of the swim team, that mix of respect and desire that stayed on the surface, that didn't dig beyond the abs and the times on the stopwatch. They were fond of Martin. They smiled at him genuinely, with their eyes, with their teeth, with their whole bodies. They said hi, Martin in the hallways with a warmth that Keonho found almost obscene, as if they were sharing a secret he wasn't invited to know, as if there were an access code to Martin's world that Keonho had never received.

So, at that point, each had their own life. Keonho with swimming—the training, the smell of chlorine stuck to his skin that even the longest showers couldn't fully remove, the finals he won or lost, and a line of suitors—boys and girls alike, because in university that was no longer a problem—fighting to date him, though none truly interested him, though none managed to stay, though sometimes, in the darkness of his room with Cookie sleeping at his feet, he wondered if the problem was him, if there was something broken in his way of feeling that prevented him from connecting with anyone. Martin with his songs—the sheet music scribbled on pages torn from notebooks, the recording sessions that lasted late into the night in the music department's studios, the friends from the music club who seemed to adore him with a devotion bordering on cultish, and whatever he did in his free time, which Keonho didn't know and didn't want to know, though sometimes his eyes would linger on the blonde's window as he passed by.

Except for that constant kind of hatred that Keonho still professed for him, a hatred he had been feeding for years, like a plant that grows in a dark corner and perhaps no longer needs water to stay alive, that has become self-sufficient, that lives off its own shadow, nothing else united them. They hadn't even exchanged more than two words (by his own intention) since that day at his front door, when Keonho had torn the invitation in two and had seen Martin smile with that smile that didn't reach his eyes.

Years. Years without speaking. Years of crossing glances in hallways and looking away at the last moment, when it was already too late and they had seen that the other was looking. Years of hearing his name in other people's conversations and pretending it didn't produce that small spasm in his stomach, that involuntary contraction that betrayed that something was still happening even though he didn't want to admit it. Years of building a distance that had become a habit, a reflex, a second nature.

And now, someone had come up with the splendid idea of putting them together. Making them compete together, study together, share hours and fatigue and that forced intimacy of teams where there's no room for wounded pride or childish squabbles. That was simply wonderful. A cosmic joke. An endurance test he hadn't asked for and wasn't prepared for, as if the universe had decided he'd had enough rest and it was time to test him again.

"Keonho," Seonghyeon's voice—who was still looking at him with narrowed eyes—brought the boy back to the present. His friend had his left eyebrow slightly raised and his lips pressed together in that expression he used when he was offended precisely because Keonho was ignoring or not taking his words seriously. "Are you listening to me?"

Keonho blinked. Somewhere in his mind, he was aware that his friend had asked him something, but he couldn't remember what. Seonghyeon's words had gone in one ear, bounced off the white noise of his thoughts, and come out the other without leaving a trace. He had been too busy reconstructing more than twelve years of hatred in his head, like someone revisiting an old wound to check that it still hurt. Like someone pressing a bruise with their finger to make sure it's still there, that it hasn't healed without permission. And it hurt. Not like a fresh wound, not like a cut that bleeds and stings, but like a badly healed bone that hurts when the weather changes, when the air becomes more humid and joints begin to ache before the storm.

"Can you...?" Keonho said, and his voice came out hoarse, as if he had been silent too long, as if the words had to force their way through sand and a dry throat. "Repeat what you said."

Seonghyeon raised an eyebrow gently. That gentleness of his that could be tenderness or sarcasm, depending on the day and the lunar phase, depending on who was in front of him and how much he had slept the night before. He was standing in front of the mirror, with a shirt hanging from his arm, but his eyes didn't leave Keonho. They were performing an X-ray on him, and Keonho knew it. He felt the scanner running through his bones, looking for cracks, fissures, the places where the enamel had cracked and revealed what lay beneath.

"Martin," Seonghyeon said slowly, like someone talking to a distracted child or a patient who needs to hear the words one by one because otherwise they won't retain them. "Remember? I asked you why you hate him so much. Or even if there is a reason. Because if there were a reason, everything would be much simpler. You could point your finger at it, say this is what he did, and I would nod and agree with you. But what you've told me over these years, since we've known each other... it's not a reason. It's a collection of anecdotes from when you were seven years old. A collection of random moments that don't form an argument. That's not hatred. It's... I don't know what to call it." He paused, and his voice became softer, almost tender, as if he were saying something he knew would hurt but needed to be said. "Obsession? Habit? Unjustified hatred?"

Keonho felt the heat rising up his neck, a red tide burning his ears and coloring his cheeks. It wasn't shame, though shame was there, crouched in some corner. It wasn't anger, though anger was also rearing its head. It was something worse: the recognition that Seonghyeon might be right, and Keonho wasn't ready to accept it. He couldn't. Because if Seonghyeon was right, if there was no solid reason behind more than twelve years of hatred, then all that time had been a farce. Then he had been feeding a bonfire with empty branches, warming himself with a fire that served no purpose.

"It's not!" he protested. His voice came out louder than intended, an outburst that bounced off the walls of the room, crashed against the posters on the wall, and came back to him distorted. Seonghyeon didn't even flinch. He stood there, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, with that patience of his that was sometimes exasperating, that calm of someone who has already seen all the storms and knows you just have to wait for them to pass. Keonho tried to find a reason, a single reason weighty enough to defend himself against that accusation. Something solid, something recent, something that wasn't a seven-year-old child or a ball in the face, or a broken invitation at his front door. Something he could hold in his hands and say this. This is why I hate him.

But he found nothing.

The emptiness resonated in his head like a bell, a long buzz that lingered, that didn't stop, that reminded him he had no proof, only feelings. He had no facts, only wounds he himself had kept open.

He crossed his arms. Clenched his jaw. Shook his head vehemently, as if denying hard enough could turn lack of evidence into certainty, as if truth were a matter of intensity and not of facts, as if wanting something hard enough could make it real.

"He's been unbearable since he was a child," he finally said, and it sounded weak, so weak it was barely a whisper, and the weakness of his own words made him angrier than anything else. Because he knew it wasn't enough. Because he knew unbearable wasn't a reason. Because he knew he was losing the argument even though Seonghyeon hadn't raised his voice once.

Seonghyeon looked at him for a moment in silence. Just long enough for Keonho to feel the weight of that gaze on his shoulders, like a hand that neither caresses nor strikes, only holds. Then Seonghyeon sighed, a long sigh, the kind that seems to expel the accumulated tiredness of days, of weeks, of years of knowing Keonho, and finally turned back toward the closet. He rummaged for a moment among the hangers and took out a red jacket. A mid-season jacket. The one he knew Keonho liked, the one Seonghyeon had let him wear other times when they went out together and the night suddenly turned cold. He tossed it through the air, without warning, and Keonho caught it on the fly by pure reflex.

"Okay," Seonghyeon said, with that tone of *I'm not going to win this argument and besides I can't be bothered to try anymore*, that tone Keonho knew from all the times they had argued about unimportant things and Seonghyeon had decided it wasn't worth continuing. "Then keep hating him. That's your right. But while you hate him, you're going to have to compete with him. Study with him. Train with him, even." He approached Keonho and put a hand on his shoulder. The hand was warm, weighed just right, and Keonho felt how that contact anchored him to the present. "Win or lose with him. So you'd better start making peace with that idea."

Keonho looked at the red jacket in his hands. The fabric was soft, worn from use, and smelled of Seonghyeon's fabric softener.

"I'm not making peace," he murmured, and his voice sounded firmer now, though the firmness was only a shell, a thin layer over a sea of doubts. "I'm going to win. And then I'll never have to see him again."

Seonghyeon smiled. That smile of his that knew everything, that saw beyond what Keonho said and also beyond what he kept silent, that read between the lines what wasn't even written. A smile that said sure, champion, whatever you say without needing to open his mouth.

"Sure," Seonghyeon said. "Whatever makes you feel better."

Keonho clicked his tongue. The sound was dry, sharp, like a small explosion of impatience in the air heavy with the room's tension.

"It's already seven," he said, and his voice had that edge that appears when time slips through his fingers, when the hours become liquid and slippery. He got up from his spot on the bed and walked to the trash can in the room to throw away the empty acai bowl container. "We're going to be late."

Seonghyeon turned his head toward the digital clock resting on the desk—red numbers blinking on black plastic, that shade of red that seems more urgent than any other color, now reading quarter past seven without anyone having asked permission, without anyone having ordered time to move so fast—and his eyes opened wide with an expression of comic horror. His eyebrows shot up, his mouth fell open, and for a second he looked like an actor in a silent film.

"Shit!" he exclaimed, and the word came out so loud that Keonho almost laughed. Almost. The laughter rose up his throat, tickled his tongue, but got stuck somewhere in between, turning into a stronger-than-normal exhalation, a tremor at the corner of his lips.

But there was no time to laugh. Fortunately—and Keonho would use that word later with gratitude, because he wasn't sure he could keep talking about Martin without something hurting inside, without the image of the broken invitation reappearing behind his eyelids—Seonghyeon dropped the subject. For now. Without looking back, without asking if there was anything left to say, without insisting on that crack that had opened between them when Keonho had mentioned Martin's name. He simply turned toward the pile of clothes he had been accumulating on the chair—an Everest of fabric and textile dyes, a geology of garments ranging from lightest to warmest, a testament to last-minute doubts—rummaged with the determination of an archaeologist searching for treasure, and extracted from among the layers a pair of jeans.

"Here," he said, tossing them to Keonho.

The pants hit Keonho's chest with a dull thud, a thump that resonated in his ribs. They were dark, almost black, made of that thick denim that takes years to tame, that is stiff and rough at first but over time becomes soft as a second skin. He held them for a moment in his hands, feeling the rough texture against his fingertips—that small tactile pleasure of new, or almost new, clothes—and then Seonghyeon also threw him a t-shirt. The fabric flew through the air, unfolded, and Keonho caught it with one hand.

He recognized it instantly. It wasn't Seonghyeon's—the size was his, the neck slightly worn from use, the sleeves flared from years of washing—but one he himself had left in that room months ago, on one of those nights when he had slept over because going home seemed too far, because the silence of his room weighed more than any conversation, because he needed to be near someone who wouldn't ask for explanations. It was from a band he liked, one of those rock bands no one knew—whose name only appeared on obscure internet forums, whose albums had to be imported because no one sold them in Korea—but whose songs played in his headphones. The logo was faded, the ink almost erased by washing, the letters barely visible like a ghost of what they had been, and Keonho felt a tingle in his chest seeing it.

They set about dressing. Without talking, or barely talking, with the efficiency of two people who have shared a wardrobe enough times not to need words. There was a rhythm to their movements, a synchronicity that came from the months they had shared more than just a table in the cafeteria. Seonghyeon put on tight black pants and a silk shirt that he changed twice before settling on the third: a navy blue one, open at the collar, revealing the beginning of his collarbones. Keonho took off his uniform—the buttons of the white shirt, one by one, with fingers that still trembled a little—and his shoulder protested with a dull throb, a reminder that it was still there, waiting, crouched in the tendon. He put on the band t-shirt. It fit him well, snug just enough to define his shoulders without looking like he was trying too hard, to hint at the shape of his torso without displaying it. Then the jeans, which fastened with a metallic click that sounded like a promise, a determination, a now it's on, now the night begins.

Then, the cologne.

Seonghyeon went first. He took his bottle from the nightstand—a thick glass container with a minimalist design, the name in silver letters that could be read when held to the light—and sprayed his wrists, his neck, behind his ears, with a movement that seemed choreographed. A learned gesture, repeated so many times it no longer required thought. The scent filled the room: something woody, with citrus notes and a leather-like base, the kind of fragrance that costs money and shows it, that lingers in the air after the wearer has left. Then he handed the bottle to Keonho, who took it with both hands—the cold glass against his palms, the sprayer slightly damp from previous use—and sprayed himself once on the chest. Just once. Enough for whoever approached to talk to him to notice something, for the fragrance to stay on his clothes and accompany him through the night, but not so much that it seemed like he had planned it, that he had made an effort, that he cared.

Once ready, shoes on (Keonho wearing black boots Seonghyeon had lent him that fit him half a size too tight), hair styled with their fingers because neither had the time or patience for more, because combs and waxes and hairdryers were for other nights, nights with less hurry—Keonho stood in front of the mirror.

He had a small purple stain on the upper right corner of his lips from the spilled acai, as if someone had tried to wipe it off with a damp cloth and had left a mark, a blurry circle visible when the light hit it from a certain angle. But Keonho wasn't looking at the stain. He was looking at the boy staring back at him from the other side of the glass.

It wasn't the same one who had looked at himself that morning, hours earlier, when dawn light came through his bedroom window. It wasn't the same one who had left home with his backpack on his left shoulder and a lie on his lips. This boy had brighter eyes—perhaps from the cologne, perhaps from the anticipation of the night, perhaps from something he couldn't name—his cheeks slightly flushed, his lips redder than normal. The band t-shirt fit him well, the jeans defined his legs, the black boots gave him a couple of extra centimeters of height he didn't need but appreciated.

The boy in the mirror was twenty years old and had the body of a swimmer: broad shoulders, narrow waist, defined but not exaggerated arms, that long, functional musculature that comes from pushing water thousands of times. A sharp jawline, dark eyes.

Yes, Keonho thought, and the thought was cold and calculated, like a race strategy. I'm definitely going to get someone tonight.

It wasn't vanity. Or not just vanity. It was a certainty built on years of being the center of attention, of receiving glances in the hallways, of hearing whispers as he passed. But it was also a need, an urgency that scraped at him from the inside like sandpaper wearing him down from within. He needed to feel desired. He needed to forget, even if only for one night, even if only amidst the roar of the music and the brush of a body he didn't know and the arms of someone he would never see again. He needed not to think about Martin, not to think about the competition, not to think about Los Angeles as a promise he didn't yet know if he could keep, not to think about the numbers his parents added up on the table while the clock ticked like a metronome marking the rhythm of his failure.

He needed it.

And the boy in the mirror, in those clothes that weren't entirely his but fit him as if they were (he and Seonghyeon always shared clothes), the red jacket he had finally put over his shoulders because it was cold outside, seemed capable of getting it. He looked like the kind of guy who walks into a party and everyone turns their heads. He looked like the kind of guy who doesn't need to introduce himself because his reputation precedes him.

"Are you going to stand there all day?" Seonghyeon asked from the doorway, with a smile that tried to be impatient but was more affectionate. "You said we were going to be late, didn't you? And I don't want to be the one who has to listen to Minnie complain that her guests of honor aren't showing up."

Keonho blinked. The spell was broken. He was just Ahn Keonho, a twenty-year-old boy who didn't know what he was going to do with his life, getting ready for a party as if that party could save him.

"Let's go," he said, and his voice sounded firmer than he felt. He ran a hand through his hair, brushing the curls from his forehead, and took a step toward the door.

They left Seonghyeon's house and walked toward the street. The air hit their faces, fresh and damp, with that smell of recent rain and wet leaves. Keonho put his hands in the pockets of the red jacket while Seonghyeon looked up the address on his phone. The screen illuminated his features with a bluish light, highlighting his high cheekbones, the line of his jaw.

"It's a twenty-minute walk," Seonghyeon said, his fingers sliding across the touchscreen, the map zooming in and out. "Or ten if we take a taxi."

"Taxi," Keonho replied, without hesitation. His voice was sharp, definitive, like a turn in the pool. He wasn't in the mood to walk. He wasn't in the mood for anything other than arriving, drinking, and letting the night do the rest. He wasn't in the mood to feel the cold air on his face for twenty minutes, to have time to think, to let doubts slip through the cracks in his determination.

As they waited on the sidewalk with Seonghyeon's hand raised to hail a taxi, headlights passing over their bodies like spotlights, illuminating them for seconds and then leaving them in the dimness, Keonho felt the weight of the last few hours accumulating on his shoulders. The director's office, the file on the table, the sheet of paper sliding toward them like a sentence. The scholarship. Los Angeles. The word selected still echoing in his head like a bell. Martin. Always Martin, appearing in the places Keonho thought were safe, at the edges of his consciousness, in the margins of his life, like a weed that grows back no matter how many times you pull it out, no matter how many times you tear it in two like a cardstock invitation.

He definitely needed some alcohol.

Not to get drunk, but he needed the warmth of alcohol going down his throat, that first drink that loosens the muscles (although with the pain in his shoulder he probably shouldn't drink, because alcohol inflames tendons and delays recovery, though he already had enough things against him to add one more) and makes things hurt a little less. He needed the noise of the party, the loud volume of the music drowning out his thoughts, the constant movement of bodies dancing so they wouldn't have to be still, so they wouldn't have to be alone with their heads. He needed not to think.

A taxi turned the corner, the green lights of the sign blinking like a promise in the night, and the car stopped beside them with a screech of brakes, the engine roaring for a moment before settling into idle.

"Where to?" asked the driver, an older man with reading glasses perched on his nose and gray hair combed back, his voice hoarse, worn from years of talking to strangers.

Seonghyeon leaned toward the driver's window and showed him the address on his phone, the screen glowing in the dimness of the car. The driver nodded, a dry movement, and the two got into the back seat. The leather was cold and slightly cracked—the cracks forming small maps of an unknown territory—and it smelled of pine air freshener and something that might have been a spilled soda long ago, a sweet smell mixed with the driver's tobacco.

The taxi pulled away. Seonghyeon leaned toward the window, resting his forehead against the glass—the gesture gave him a melancholic, almost cinematic air—and Keonho stared at the urban landscape speeding by. The buildings, tall and anonymous, their windows lit in perfect grids, like dominoes. The neon signs of bars and karaoke places, tinting the street in reds and blues. The traffic lights changing from red to green as if the world followed a rhythm he couldn't hear, as if the whole universe were synchronized except for him. The headlights of cars crossing paths, the turn signals marking turns that led nowhere.

I'm going to get someone tonight, Keonho repeated to himself, this time like a mantra, like an instruction to give to his own body, like a duty. I'm going to drink, I'm going to dance, I'm going to find someone who looks at me like I'm worth it.

He almost believed it.

• • •

The party was in a large house, one of those with a garden and a pool and enough space for people to get lost among the rooms. A mansion, almost, the kind that appears in movies about rich students, with a light stone facade that shone under the spotlights and enormous windows that reflected the colored lights hanging from the trees like liquid mirrors. There was a long table full of bottles—soju, beer, and more foreign alcohol Keonho couldn't identify, with labels in languages he didn't know—and red plastic cups stacked in unstable towers that someone had built as if it were a parallel competition.

The music vibrated through the floor, a catchy song that seeped into your bones and made people move without thinking, bodies swaying to the beat of the bass. People. Lots of people. Some familiar faces from university: the guy from the campus cafeteria near the design faculty who always smiled when he ordered his Americano, the administration girl who had helped him with the paperwork for his competition registration last week and who now wore a silver dress that didn't match her classroom image—others Keonho had never seen in his life, anonymous faces lost in the crowd before he could fix their features. All talking, laughing, dancing, clinking their cups in the air with that universal cheers gesture that needs no translation, that crosses borders and generations like a secret code everyone understands.

Keonho entered with Seonghyeon pressed to his side, so close he could feel the warmth of his arm against his own through the fabric of the jacket. The moment they crossed the doorway—an arch of dark carved wood, with garlands of LED lights blinking in blue and pink like a party electrocardiogram—he already had a red cup in his hand. Someone—he didn't know who, an anonymous hand that appeared from the crowd as if out of nowhere—had placed it between his fingers, and he had drunk without asking. Beer with soju, or maybe something stronger. The drink burned his throat a little on the way down, a liquid heat that left a trail of gentle fire from his mouth to his stomach, but he liked the sensation. He liked how the heat traveled through his chest and loosened his shoulders, as if someone were massaging the knots in his back from the inside, unraveling the tension accumulated over days, weeks, months. It was the alcohol doing its job, that job Keonho knew well: blurring edges, softening corners, making the world a little less heavy, a little more bearable, a little more habitable.

The captain of the baseball team, the same one who had told him about the party in the cafeteria, the big, smiling guy named Park Jaehyun, saw them as soon as they walked in. He was by the pool, with a very beautiful girl on his arm. His girlfriend, Keonho assumed. The party hostess. She wore a short red dress that seemed to glow under the lights, and heels that made her almost as tall as him. She smiled a wide, white smile, the kind that looks like it came out of a toothpaste commercial. Her straight black hair fell over her shoulders like a silk curtain, and she wore gold bracelets that jingled every time she moved her hand.

"Ahn! Eom!" Jaehyun said, dragging the girl with him toward them. "I knew you guys would come!"

And then he hugged them. First Keonho, then Seonghyeon, without distinction. An aggressive hug, the kind that lifts you half a centimeter off the ground and shakes you like a cocktail shaker, Jaehyun's arms wrapping around their shoulders with a force bordering on uncomfortable. Keonho laughed—because the alcohol was already taking effect, because that's what you do—and returned the pat on the back. Jaehyun's hand was big and heavy, palms rough from hours of batting, and the dry thud sounded like a wooden plank against another.

"I said I'd come, didn't I?" Keonho replied, and his voice sounded more relaxed than he felt. The alcohol had loosened his vocal cords, given them that hoarse tone as the muscles in his throat relaxed and words flowed without the filter of anxiety. He pulled away from Jaehyun and took a step back, just in time to see Seonghyeon receive his own hug with a more restrained, more measured, equally uncomfortable smile.

Jaehyun stepped back and looked at them both with a huge grin, from ear to ear, as if they had just granted him a wish.

"Well, well, I have to introduce you to someone," he said, and turned toward the girl in the red dress, who had been patiently waiting to the side, her hands clasped behind her back and an expression trying to be neutral but not quite hiding a hint of curiosity. "This is Minnie. My girlfriend."

Keonho and Seonghyeon exchanged a quick glance, the kind that lasts less than a second but says everything. How many girlfriends have we known already? said Keonho's look. I've lost count, Seonghyeon's replied. 

"Nice to meet you," Minnie said, extending a hand adorned with silver rings. Her voice was soft, softer than Keonho expected, almost a whisper that didn't quite match her appearance of a woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it. The rings sparkled under the light of the garlands, small stones that could be diamonds or could be crystal, it didn't matter. "It's an honor to have you at my party."

"Thanks for inviting us," Seonghyeon said, with that ease of his for breaking the ice, for making people smile effortlessly. He shook her hand with a courtesy that seemed genuine, and Minnie laughed, a small, polite laugh. "The house is amazing," he added, looking around with those eyes that took everything in, that absorbed details like sponges.

"From Minnie's parents," Jaehyun confirmed, speaking for the girl, puffing out his chest with pride, as if the house were his. "But they're traveling, so we have total freedom. Well, almost total. The top floor is off-limits. Private family rooms, you know."

"Right," Keonho said, though he didn't care. He didn't plan on going upstairs. He didn't plan on moving from the pool, from the heat of the bodies, from the rhythm of the music. He didn't plan on doing anything other than drinking and dancing and not thinking.

"The party is yours. Drink, dance, have fun," Minnie said, bringing a hand to her chest, right where the red dress curved, in a gesture that was almost theatrical but somehow worked. "The bar is in the back, the pool isn't heated so I don't recommend falling in, and the upstairs rooms are off-limits. My family isn't home today, but their things are, so... you know."

"Have fun," Jaehyun repeated, hooking his arm through the girl's, looking away, greeting someone else who had just arrived with a pat on the shoulder and a laugh, repeating the situation, showing off the pretty girl even more.

"I hope this one lasts," Seonghyeon said, raising his glass in a silent toast toward the baseball captain's back, who was already disappearing into the crowd.

"I hope so," Keonho repeated, and clinked his glass against Seonghyeon's. The plastic made a hollow, unsatisfactory sound, but it served its purpose.

They drank. The music changed to something slower, stickier, and people started moving in a different way. Someone shouted his name from the pool—a girl from the swim team, the one who always sat next to him at team meals, who saved his spot even when he arrived late. Another person raised their glass in his direction, a guy he didn't know but who smiled at him as if he were his best friend, as if they shared secrets that had never existed. And suddenly, in the blink of an eye—in the time it takes for the bass to hit the floor once—Keonho was dancing. Or moving, at least, to the rhythm of a song he didn't recognize but liked anyway, one of those songs that get into your bones without asking permission.

The noise rumbled in the floor and seeped up through the soles of his feet, making his leg bones vibrate, his kneecaps, his ankles, everything below his waist. He drank another glass. And another. The taste of soju had become familiar, almost pleasant, like the chlorine of the pool after so many years stuck to his skin. He talked to people from the university he didn't know—a design girl with black thick-framed glasses and a nose piercing that sparkled under the colored lights, an engineering guy who turned out to be the cousin of someone who had gone to high school with Seonghyeon, a couple of teammates from the swim team who congratulated him on his performance with pats on the shoulder—the right one, the bad one, and he smiled so they wouldn't notice his wince—and shouts of champion! that disappeared into the air like flares—and the alcohol loosened his tongue to the point that he said things he didn't remember thinking. Jokes that weren't funny but made people laugh anyway, because alcohol also loosens others' laughter. He laughed with Seonghyeon until his stomach hurt, doubled over, leaning on his friend's shoulder as tears welled in his eyes, from laughter or something else, he could no longer tell. He let himself go. It was easy to let go when the world became blurry and warm, when worries dissolved in alcohol like sugar in hot coffee, when the edges of things rounded and everything hurt a little less.

At some point, he started talking to a girl. He didn't know her name—something with a Y, or maybe a J, or maybe it was a foreign name that slipped away like water between his fingers—nor what she was studying—medicine? computer science? something with art? The words tangled in his head before reaching his mouth—nor why she had ended up so close to him, their arms brushing every time the music pushed them together, her hair moving with the night breeze, long dark hair that smelled of coconut shampoo. But she was there, smiling a wide, white smile that seemed straight out of a toothpaste commercial, touching his arm when she laughed—her fingers were cold, but his skin was burning—and Keonho thought that maybe, if he tried a little, he could like her. He could be normal. He could forget everything. The girl smelled of some floral perfume, something sweet that mixed with the scent of freshly cut grass and alcohol and party sweat. Keonho focused on that smell, on the way his fingers closed around the red plastic cup—the plastic creaking slightly every time he squeezed—on the rhythm of the music that was already starting to all sound the same. He didn't think about the championship. He didn't think about his shoulder. For a moment, he almost succeeded.

But then he felt the signal from his bladder. An insistent, urgent pressure, the kind that can't be ignored, that slips into consciousness like a messenger bearing bad news.

"I'll be right back," he said to Seonghyeon, who was beside him talking to another girl—a tall girl with short hair, gesturing enthusiastically while Seonghyeon nodded with that patience of his that was sometimes genuine and sometimes feigned—half leaning against a wall with another glass in his hand and his eyes slightly glassy, his gaze lost somewhere between the girl and the bottom of the cup.

"Do you need help?" Seonghyeon asked, arching an eyebrow. He knew him too well. He knew his alcohol tolerance, his limits, the way his eyes narrowed when he'd had more than enough and started losing control of his own expression. He knew Keonho wasn't in any condition to walk alone through a house full of strangers, full of dark corners and stairs that could betray a misstep.

"No," Keonho replied, perhaps too quickly. The word came out sharp, defensive, as if he needed to prove he could take care of himself even if it was a lie, even if his legs felt heavy and his head was spinning. "I'll be right back." He gave the girl an apologetic smile and started moving.

He broke away from the group. He walked toward the interior of the house, where the noise of the music dampened a little, the bass becoming a distant murmur, like thunder in the background, like the echo of something that had already passed, and the air smelled of perfume and waxed wood and fresh flowers from some vase he couldn't see. The walls were decorated with landscape paintings—mountains, rivers, sunsets in unreal colors—gilded frames reflecting the dim light of floor lamps, creating small sparkles at the edges. He found the ground floor bathroom without trouble, following the basic instinct that pointed him down hallways. What he hadn't expected was the line. A long line, the kind that moves slowly, with people leaning against walls looking at their phones, screens illuminating their faces from below, giving them a ghostly appearance, or talking quietly, in that tone of those who have accepted their fate and are just waiting. Four people. Five. A girl in a silver dress typing furiously on her phone, her fingers moving at what seemed an impossible speed. A guy in a Hawaiian shirt swaying slightly on his feet, like a ship adrift. Keonho looked at the line, and his need to pee suddenly intensified, as if his bladder had been waiting for him to confirm the obvious before issuing an ultimatum.

The pressure became urgent, insistent. He felt his lower abdomen tense, his body demanding a solution the line wasn't going to give him in at least ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.

The alcohol continued running through his veins, hot, insistent, a little demon whispering in his ear as the physical need became more pressing. Come on, Keonho, what's the worst that could happen? That you get caught? That you get kicked out? So what?

Keonho clenched his jaw. He looked at the line again. He looked toward the stairs leading to the upper floor, where the lights were off and only darkness was visible. The wooden handrail glowed faintly under the light coming from below. And then, with his bladder pressing and the alcohol pushing him to the edge of decision, he grew bold.

Discreetly and carefully—soft steps, shoulders hunched, eyes forward as if he weren't doing anything wrong—checking that no one was watching, that no one had their eyes on him, he climbed the stairs leading to the upper part of the house.

The steps creaked slightly under his weight, a groan of old wood that at another time would have frozen his blood, but now barely registered. The alcohol had wrapped his senses in a layer of cotton, dulling the edges of things, turning warnings into mere whispers lost in the background noise. His legs felt a little heavy, as if he had lead sewn into his thighs, and the wooden handrail was cold under his palm, a cold that stuck to his skin and reminded him, vaguely, that he was doing something he shouldn't. He knew it. Somewhere in his consciousness, a small voice among the crowd—his mother's voice, perhaps, or his coach's, or his own before soju made him brave—told him that the upper floor was off-limits. They were the bride's family's rooms, the baseball captain's family's rooms, the family that wasn't at the party that day but whose belongings were still there, behind those doors. Messing with them or causing discomfort would result in a sure punch from Jaehyun, in being thrown out of the party, in a problem he didn't need. Private. Out of the party's boundaries. But at that moment, Keonho cared very little. The alcohol had silenced that voice, pushed it into a dark corner of his mind where it couldn't bother him, where it couldn't remind him that actions have consequences.

He kept climbing.

Once upstairs, the hallway was empty and dark. The only light came from the ground floor, a faint glow filtering through the railing and casting long shadows on the carpet. Everything was silent, except for the muffled hum of the party below, a distant buzz that barely reached. Doors lined up on both sides, all identical: dark wood, brass doorknobs gleaming faintly in the dimness.

He tried the first one. Locked. The knob didn't budge.

The second. Also locked.

The third. The knob turned with a soft creak, a metallic groan that seemed to say finally.

Bathroom.

Keonho walked in without thinking twice. He closed the door behind him. The latch clicked with a dry, satisfying sound. He rested his forehead against the wood for a second, just one, and took a deep breath.

The bathroom was large, with walls papered in a small floral pattern—pale roses on a beige background—and an oval mirror above the sink, filled with skincare products, creams, and perfumes, its wooden frame slightly worn from humidity. There was an air freshener in a corner filling the air with a sweet, cloying scent, and the smell of lavender soap mixed with something else, something clean and slightly bitter, perhaps the product used to clean the tiles that same morning.

Then he did what he needed to do.

When he finished, he stayed for a moment leaning against the wall, feeling its coolness against his back through his clothes, under a warm, orange light coming from the bathroom ceiling lamp. He closed his eyes for a second. Or two. The world swayed gently, as if he were on a boat instead of in the upstairs of a home, as if the floor were a liquid surface moving with a rhythm he couldn't predict. The wall was an anchor, a fixed point in the midst of dizziness, a reminder that there were still solid things to lean on. The relief was immediate. His body, which had been protesting for the last ten minutes, finally calmed down.

Keonho closed his eyes for a moment—he didn't know exactly how long—and then moved to rest his hands on the porcelain sink, feeling his shoulders drop a couple of centimeters. The faucet dripped slowly, ploc, ploc, ploc, a hypnotic rhythm mixing with the beating of his heart.

He looked at himself in the mirror.

His hair was slightly damp at the temples, stuck to his skin from the sweat of the makeshift dance floor—that sweat that wasn't from exercise, but from alcohol and human heat, stickier, denser. His cheeks were flushed from the alcohol, two round spots giving him an almost childlike appearance, as if he were younger than he was, as if twenty years didn't weigh so much. His lips were a little redder than normal, slightly swollen, as if he'd been biting them without realizing it. Sweaty, yes, but handsome. That's what he thought, at least. His head was spinning, but at that moment, with the warm light of the mirror illuminating his face, he felt good. Attractive. Desirable. As if he were worth looking at. Although it was hard to focus. Although the mirror returned two overlapping images—one slightly displaced, like a ghost of himself, a blurry twin looking at him from the other side of the glass—and he had to blink several times, rub his eyes with the back of his hand, to make it stay still.

He turned on the faucet. The water came out cold, almost icy, hitting the bottom of the porcelain sink with a sharp sound that resonated in the space. He washed his hands slowly, enjoying the sensation of the water and soap slipping between his fingers, cooling his burning palms, carrying away the sweat and heat and the trace of the people who had touched him at the party. The silence of the upstairs was a luxury after the noise below—the thundering music, the bass vibrating in the floor, the shouting, the laughter, the constant clinking of plastic cups sounding like an out-of-tune percussion—and Keonho allowed himself a few extra seconds, just to be alone with his thoughts, just to let the world stop for a bit. He dried his hands with a white towel that smelled of fabric softener, a clean scent that reminded him of freshly laundered clothes on Sunday mornings when the sun came through the kitchen window and the air smelled of detergent. The fabric was soft, fluffy, much nicer than the rough, cheap towels they had at home, and he dried his fingers one by one, with a calm he didn't know he had left, hesitating. He could stay up here for a while. No one would find him. He could sit on the edge of the bathtub, close his eyes, and pretend the party didn't exist.

But the party did exist. And downstairs, Seonghyeon was waiting for him, along with the girl and the red cups and the music that wouldn't stop playing.

He stepped out into the hallway and closed the bathroom door with a soft movement, making sure the latch clicked into place without making noise. Nothing. No one had come up behind him. No one had seen him enter the forbidden zone. No one would ever know he had been there, using the family bathroom while the hostess warned them with a polite smile that the upstairs rooms were off-limits.

A small victory. Insignificant, perhaps. Childish, surely. But his.

He took the first steps in the darkness, walking back, secretly victorious that no one had discovered him.

And then he heard a voice.

It was a voice he knew too well. A deep, warm voice, one he had tried to ignore for years without ever quite succeeding, one that crept into his ears like a catchy song you can't stop humming no matter how hard you try. A voice that made him turn his head in the hallways even though he swore he didn't care, even though he repeated to himself that he had no reason to look back. A voice he hated. It wasn't a distant sound, not an echo muffled by distance. It was clear, close, as if the person speaking was only a few meters away. Too close. A voice coming from behind one of the closed doors in the hallway, one he had accidentally left ajar, a triangle of yellow light cutting across the wooden floor, an invitation to look, to listen, to stay, and the words reached him like knives wrapped in velvet: sharp, but with a soft touch that deceived.

"…and then, maybe it's not the right time. And maybe I'm being a coward because you're drunk and probably won't remember this tomorrow, but… I really like you, Juhoon hyung."

Keonho felt a stone drop into his stomach. Not a small stone, but a large, heavy, sharp stone that lodged deep in his gut and stopped him from breathing. The lightness vanished, replaced by a cold weight that fell into his chest like a slab. The small victory—the secret bathroom, the broken rule, the tingle of adrenaline—suddenly became ridiculous, insignificant, a grain of sand against the mountain of what he had just heard.

Martin.

That voice belonged to Martin.

I really like you, Juhoon hyung.

Martin's words floated in the hallway air, suspended between the walls and closed doors, and Keonho caught them unintentionally, without asking permission, and stood there, frozen, not knowing whether to move forward or backward or make himself small and disappear.

Juhoon.

The beautiful, serious, quiet Kim Juhoon. Seonghyeon had told him he would be at the party—had mentioned it in the cafeteria, with that casual tone he used when he knew the information mattered to Keonho. But after what had happened—Keonho scanning the dining hall tables, searching faces with an urgency he didn't want to acknowledge, only to find Martin's gaze fixed on him, steady, unexpected—he hadn't thought much about it. Or he had thought too much and decided to think no more, had put the thought in a box and pushed it to the back of his mind, where it couldn't bother him, where it couldn't hurt him. What he didn't know—what he didn't want to know, what he now knew with an intensity that surprised him, that scratched at his chest from inside like a sharp claw—was that Martin would also be there.

Because Martin never came to this kind of party. Keonho knew it. He had confirmed it since they entered university together. Martin didn't go to end-of-semester parties, or music department parties, or the ones sports teams organized in the dimly lit basements of neighborhood bars. Not even to the ones with free food and cheap alcohol, the kind other students would have traveled kilometers not to miss. Even when he was offered money—real money, fifty-thousand-won bills that other students would have killed to earn—to go DJ at private clubs, he said no. He always said no. Not my thing, Martin had said with that shrug of his, so light, so unconcerned, as if turning down opportunities others dreamed of was the most natural thing in the world. Too many people. Too much noise.

But now Martin was there. At a party. At a big house with a pool and garden and colored lights hanging from the trees. Upstairs, where no one was supposed to be. In a room. Alone. With Juhoon.

And it seemed Martin had just confessed his love.

The stone in Keonho's stomach grew heavier. It became a block of concrete, an anchor pulling him down, toward the ground, toward the void. A feeling of vertigo, of the floor moving beneath his feet, of the rules of the game having changed without warning, without anyone giving him an updated instruction manual. Martin didn't go to parties. Martin didn't stay alone with anyone in dark rooms. Martin didn't confess his feelings, because Martin was that strange, too-tall kid who laughed too loudly and seemed to live in his own world, safe from other people's complications. Martin was the one who sat on the edges, who observed from a distance. But there he was.

He didn't know what drove him. The alcohol, yes, partly. That liquid cowardice that gives you the courage to do things you'd never dare to do sober, that pushes you to act before thinking, that turns fears into sparks and sparks into fires. Anger, too. An anger that had begun to brew somewhere deep in his chest, old, accumulated, that had been fermenting for years in some dark corner of his consciousness, like wine turning to vinegar over time. An anger he didn't quite know who it was directed at—whether at Martin, for having dared; at himself, for not having dared to talk to Juhoon before—but that needed to come out. His feet moved on their own, without consulting his brain, crossing the hallway carpet with steps that barely made a sound, like a predator stalking its prey in the darkness. His hands pushed the door—too hard, the sound a dry creak that broke the intimacy of the moment, that tore the silence like a fingernail on a blackboard—and suddenly he was there, in the doorway, illuminating the dimness of the hallway with the brief light coming from the room.

The silhouette of his body stood out against the brightness, an elongated shadow spilling onto the wooden floor like an announcement of his arrival, as if his own shadow had arrived before him to warn of his presence. His eyes took time to adjust to the interior light of what seemed to be the younger brother's room of the party hostess, judging by the details that began to emerge little by little, as if the darkness were a veil slowly being drawn from his eyes: superhero posters on the walls—Spider-Man, Iron Man, an Avengers montage with the actors' faces—a shelf full of futsal trophies, small and large, some gold plastic, others cheap metal, all covered in dust. A mobile of paper airplanes hanging from the ceiling, still spinning slowly, pushed by the draft of air that had entered with the door, as if time inside there were slower, thicker. On the nightstand was a rocket-shaped lamp, turned off, and a couple of graphic novels stacked messily. Everything smelled of childhood, of a child's room.

And in the middle of that child's room, in that warm dimness, were Martin and Juhoon.

Martin startled. His body reacted before his mind—a jerk backward, shoulders tense as guitar strings about to snap, the hands that had been guiding Juhoon suspended in the air for an instant, fingers spread, as if they had just dropped something hot. He was helping Juhoon sit down, who was wearing a black leather jacket over a tight white t-shirt that clung to his torso, ripped jeans at the knees showing patches of pale skin, boots that looked freshly polished, so shiny they reflected the dim light of the rocket-shaped lamp. But the contrast between his outfit—that cool-guy outfit, of a model who knew he was being watched—and his state was almost comical. His cheeks were flushed, two red patches spreading from his cheekbones to his ears, coloring the tips like a reversed sunburn, as if the alcohol had risen to his face and refused to go down. Drunk. Very drunk, judging by how he swayed slightly—a hypnotic swaying, like a human pendulum unable to find its center, oscillating between the bed and the floor without deciding on either—and how hard it was for him to keep his head straight, as if the weight of his own forehead were too much for his neck, as if at any moment he might topple forward like a puppet whose strings had been loosened. His eyelids closed more than normal, and every time he opened them, his pupils took a second to focus.

Martin was holding him by one arm, his fingers wrapped around the sleeve of his shirt with a gentleness that struck Keonho as unexpected. He wasn't gripping him tightly—there was no violence in his gesture, no roughness—he was just accompanying him, holding him, guiding him with a patience that didn't fit the image Keonho had of him. That patience was new, or perhaps it had always been there. He was helping him stay upright, because without that support, Juhoon would surely already be on the floor, curled up among the soccer shoes and the trophies.

The bed was half-made, the rumpled sheets forming mountains of tangled fabric, a pillow on the floor next to a stuffed penguin that had fallen from the headboard, and a school backpack hanging from the back of a chair. On the desk, an open pencil case spilled markers across the surface and notebooks scribbled with childish handwriting.

And then, as if in a moment of weakness, his feelings had escaped without permission. Without control. Without the safety net of his easy smile and studied nonchalance, those weapons Martin used to keep his distance, so that no one could hurt him. Keonho had arrived just in time to hear him. Or just in time to interrupt him. He didn't know which was worse. He didn't know if what he felt was anger at having heard something not meant for him, or relief at having arrived before Martin could say anything more, or a poisonous mix of both that burned him from the inside like acid.

Martin looked at him. And in his eyes, in that fraction of a second before the mask fell back into place, Keonho saw something he had never seen before: vulnerability. Naked, raw, unadorned. The fear of having said too much. The fear that his words meant nothing to the person who had received them. The fear that they meant everything and there was no way to take them back, to put them back in the box they had come from, to pretend they had never been spoken.

Keonho looked into Martin's eyes. And something in that gaze froze his blood.

It wasn't hatred he saw. He would have known how to handle hatred. Hatred was familiar, comfortable, the terrain where Keonho had moved for years with the confidence of someone who knows every stone, every bump, every danger. Hatred could be returned with more hatred, could become hand-to-hand combat where at least both were on equal footing, where the rules were clear and the blows could be measured. Hatred had a shape, a color, a taste. Keonho knew hatred like he knew the chlorine of the pool.

But what he saw in Martin's eyes wasn't hatred.

It was something worse.

It was disappointment. A deep exhaustion, the kind that doesn't come from a bad day but from years of enduring, of swallowing, of smiling when you're supposed to and staying quiet when it hurts. An exhaustion that said I'm not surprised anymore, this is what I expected from you, I never imagined you would be any different. And there was also something else, something harder to name, something that seemed to say really?, now?, you?. As if Martin had been building something delicate, something fragile, something that required silence and care, something he had perhaps been building for years without Keonho knowing, and Keonho had just burst in with his muddy shoes and trampled everything. He had broken what couldn't be fixed, again. He had come in uninvited.

Keonho felt as if he was ruining the moment.

Not just any moment. The moment. The moment when Martin had gathered his courage to say something important. The moment when he had let his guard down, opened a small crack in his armor, let someone see what was inside. And Keonho, among all the people at the party—among the fifty, the hundred people dancing, drinking, laughing, kissing in corners unaware that something was happening upstairs—had been the one to hear those words. The one who had pushed the door open. The one who had broken the spell.

It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that it had been him. Anyone else would have kept walking, would have gone down the stairs, would have returned to the party and forgotten by the next day, or the next hour, or the next drink. Anyone else wouldn't have recognized the voice. Anyone else wouldn't have felt that stone in their stomach. Anyone else wouldn't have pushed the door open. They would have stayed behind, listening in silence, and then left without making a sound, taking the secret with them.

But Keonho did. Keonho had recognized it. Keonho had felt the stone—felt it fall, felt the impact at the bottom of his stomach, felt it expand, steal his breath. Keonho had pushed the door open. Without thinking. Without measuring. Without turning back.

And now he was there, in the doorway, with the light illuminating his body and Martin's face halfway between shadow and clarity, as if fate couldn't decide whether it wanted him to be seen or hidden. And in Martin's expression, in the way his eyebrows furrowed, in the way his lips pressed together until they paled, in the way his shoulders tensed as if they had just received a physical blow, as if the words he had just spoken were a punch to the gut, Keonho read something he would never forget.

I wish it hadn't been you.

He didn't say it out loud. Martin didn't say anything. Martin didn't even move his lips. But Keonho heard it all the same. He heard it in the silence that spread between them like a crack in the ground, like an abyss opening without warning, like everything they hadn't said to each other for years and that now, suddenly, weighed more than ever, more than all the accumulated unspoken words, more than the silences in hallways and the averted glances and the years of pretending not to see each other.

And the worst part wasn't that Martin thought that. The worst part was that Keonho, deep down, agreed.

He wish it hadn't been him. He wish it had been anyone else, a stranger, someone who didn't know Martin's voice, someone who didn't have a stone in their stomach every time they heard his name. He wish he had stayed in the bathroom one more minute, drying his hands with that soft towel that smelled of fabric softener, he wish he had looked at himself in the mirror a little longer, he wish he hadn't walked out into the hallway at that exact moment, in that fraction of a second that separated not knowing from knowing. He wish his ears weren't so good, he wish the music downstairs had been louder, he wish the door had been completely closed. he wish he didn't know Martin's voice. he wish he didn't care. he wish he could hear those words and feel indifference instead of this punch to the chest.

But he cared. Damn it, he cared. And that was the problem. The problem was that he had spent years telling himself he didn't care, that Martin was just a nuisance, an insufferable neighbor, a university classmate to be tolerated. And now, in this dark room, with Martin vulnerable and Juhoon drunk and the confession floating in the air like a bubble about to burst, he could no longer keep lying to himself. He cared. And he didn't know what to do with that.

So he did the only thing he knew how to do: attack.

"Well," Keonho said, and his voice came out sharper than intended. A blade. A knife. Something to hurt before he could be hurt, something to strike back even though no blow had been landed. "I'm sorry, did I interrupt your love confession?"

The words came out with venom, with a contempt he didn't entirely feel but needed to fake. It was easier to seem cruel. It was easier to hurt. He had learned that a long time ago, in the years following his father's bankruptcy, when he discovered that the best defense was a good offense and that wounds hurt less if you inflict them yourself before they can be inflicted on you.

Martin blinked. His eyelashes moved slowly, as if the gesture cost him immense effort, as if he were processing not just the words but everything that came with them. And when his eyes opened again, the vulnerability was gone. That flash of nakedness Keonho had seen—the fear, the hope, the fragility—had retreated somewhere deep, to a locked room. In its place, there was something colder. A wall. A barrier Keonho knew well, because he had built it on his own face thousands of times, brick by brick, lie by lie.

Martin said nothing. He just looked at him, eyes narrowed, jaw clenched until a muscle stood out in his cheek, that tic Keonho remembered from childhood, from when Martin got truly angry and didn't know how to express it, when the world became too big and too unfair and the only thing he could do was clench his fists and grit his teeth. He didn't look away. He didn't blink. He just stood there, in the dimness, with his arms still extended toward Juhoon—a gesture that now seemed more protective than helpful—like a guardian unwilling to give up his post.

And in that silence, in that fraction of a second when Martin chose not to respond, Keonho knew he had just crossed a line from which he wouldn't be able to return. But he also knew, with a certainty that hurt more than he expected, that there was no other line he could have crossed. That this was the only thing he knew how to do.

Keonho felt the rage run down his throat like hot liquid, as if he had drunk acid instead of soju. It was the same cruelty from that afternoon, years ago, at his front door, when he had torn the invitation card in front of him—the paper crackling between his fingers, the pieces falling to the floor like dirty snowflakes—and had seen Martin smile with that smile that didn't reach his eyes. The same rage. It hadn't gone away. It had just been waiting, crouched in some fold of his consciousness, feeding on his silence, on his defeats, on every time Martin had looked at him and he had looked away, until now.

He didn't stop. He couldn't stop. It was like a car without brakes going downhill, like a swimmer who has lost their rhythm and doesn't know how to get it back. He turned to Juhoon, who was looking at him with a confused expression—his eyes trying to focus on his face, as if seeing through fogged glass, his mouth slightly open, his cheeks still flushed—and the words came out on their own, without him being able to stop them, as if someone else were pulling the strings of his mouth, as if his body had decided to act without consulting his brain.

"Don't listen to this idiot," Keonho said, and his lips moved with a ferocity he didn't know he had, addressing Juhoon. "Better go out with me, hyung."

The silence that followed was so dense it could almost be cut with the edge of a hand. A three-layered silence: below, the muffled noise of the party—the bass of the music, the laughter, the clinking of plastic cups—a distant layer that seemed to come from another world; above it, Martin's ragged breathing, that back-and-forth of air betraying his nerves, that irregular rhythm he couldn't control; and above all, the beat of Keonho's heart pounding against his ribs like a caged bird, flapping against the walls of his chest, searching for an exit it couldn't find. A silence that filled the room, that seeped through the cracks in the windows, that settled on the furniture like a layer of invisible dust.

Juhoon blinked. His eyelids moved slowly, as if they had weight of their own, as if every time they closed they had to make an enormous effort to open again. And then, he smiled. A drunken, clumsy, uncoordinated smile that lit up his face in a way Keonho had never seen before. Serious Juhoon, the quiet one, the one who read with his headphones on, the one who seemed to live on another planet, smiling like a child who had just been given candy, with white teeth and eyes bright with a happiness that had nothing to do with the situation. A smile that said I don't understand anything that's happening but I like it, that was so pure and so oblivious to the tension floating in the air that it almost hurt to look at.

"So..." Juhoon said, dragging his words as if each syllable weighed a ton, his eyes moving from Martin to Keonho and back to Martin, a hypnotic back-and-forth reminiscent of a swinging pendulum. "You both like me? Really?"

He blushed even more, if that was possible. The flush rose from his neck—where the white t-shirt hugged his skin—to the tips of his ears, tinting his skin an intense red that the dimness of the room couldn't hide, that seemed to glow. He laughed. A light, almost childish laugh, a cascade of high notes that didn't match the serious, quiet image Keonho had of him. A laugh that said this can't be happening and how fun at the same time, a laugh that seemed to come from a younger, freer place.

Oh my god. Juhoon was definitely very, very drunk.

His eyes could barely maintain focus—they drifted to the side, wandered, as if he were seeing two of everything—and every time he blinked, his eyelids seemed to take an eternity to open again, as if gravity had multiplied just for him. He smelled of soju and something sweeter, perhaps some liquor they'd mixed poorly, and he had a stain of something red on his shirt collar—tomato sauce, maybe—that betrayed he had drunk more than his body could process.

Martin looked at Keonho. And in that look, in that crossing of eyes that lasted barely a second but felt like an hour to Keonho, there was something he couldn't quite read. Tiredness, perhaps. The tiredness of someone who has been carrying something for years and no longer knows how to let it go. Tiredness of having to deal with this absurd situation, of having to share this moment with the only person who shouldn't be there. Or resignation, that certainty that things weren't going to turn out well because they never turned out well when Keonho was involved. Or irritation, pure and simple irritation, as if the mere fact that Keonho was speaking for the sake of speaking about Juhoon—about someone he didn't even know well, about someone who hadn't mattered to him until five minutes ago—bothered him greatly, made his blood boil, made his fingers clench. As if Keonho had invaded a territory that didn't belong to him, that had never belonged to him, that he didn't even have the right to step foot on. As if his presence there, in that room, at that moment, were a personal offense, an insult, a fist slammed on the table in the middle of a dinner that was going well.

Then, Martin looked back at Juhoon. He looked away from Keonho as if he were a nuisance, a stain on the wall, something not worth a second more of attention. His voice, when he spoke, was calm but firm. There was no hesitation in his words, none of those nervous fillers people use when they're unsure of what they're saying. Every syllable was in its place, every pause measured, every word chosen carefully. As if he had rehearsed this moment in his head hundreds of times. As if each word weighed as much as a promise, and he was willing to keep it.

"I like you," Martin said, insisting, as if he needed to emphasize his words, as if he were carving a statement in stone. Emphasizing that, unlike Keonho's words—those that had come from alcohol and anger and not wanting to be left behind, empty words thrown into the air like aimless knives, words that meant nothing—his were serious. They weren't a outburst. They weren't a provocation. They weren't an attempt to win a competition no one had started. They were the truth, spoken aloud because he could no longer keep it silent.

Then, he slid a sidelong glance toward Keonho, quick as a lash, as a blink, as a stab in the dark. A look that said this doesn't involve you, this is mine, you have no right to interfere. And also, perhaps, something more: a flash of challenge, as if he were measuring Keonho, testing his limits, waiting to see if he dared to say anything more, to keep hurting, to keep breaking what was already broken. As if he were saying there, I've said it, what are you going to do now?

"Though I wouldn't be so sure about Ahn," Martin added, and his voice took on a hint of disdain, "considering his reputation on campus."

The phrase hung in the air of the room, mixing with the smell of alcohol and that childhood scent emanating from the blue-striped sheets. Keonho felt the words enter his ears and lodge somewhere in his chest, right where rage and pride met, where the oldest wounds remained open. His jaw tensed. His fingers clenched into fists inside his jacket pockets, his nails digging into his palms, a small pain that helped him keep from losing control.

Reputation. As if it were an insult. As if being popular, having friends, being well-liked were a crime, a stain on one's record, something to be ashamed of. As if everything Keonho had built—all the smiles he had rehearsed in front of the mirror, all the conversations he had participated in even when he wasn't interested, all the nights he had gone out even when he didn't want to because he had to maintain his status, because in this world if they don't see you, you don't exist, if you're not in the official Instagram photos, you're nobody—were just an empty facade, a house of cards that any breath could knock down.

And the worst part was that, deep down, Keonho knew Martin wasn't entirely lying. He knew that his reputation was, in part, a construction. He knew that sometimes he accepted invitations from people he didn't care about, that he smiled when he didn't feel like smiling, that he said yes when he wanted to say no. He knew that he had kissed girls at parties whose names he couldn't even remember afterward, because he needed to feel desired, because he needed to fill a void he didn't know how to fill any other way. But he wasn't going to admit that. Not there. Not in front of Juhoon, who was looking at him with glassy eyes and a drunken smile, not understanding anything of what was happening. Not in front of Martin, who had that way of looking at him.

"Reputation?" Keonho spat, and his voice came out louder than he wanted, an outburst that bounced off the walls of the small room and came back to him like an accusing echo. The words escaped him without filter, pushed by the alcohol and that old rage that had been accumulating for years in some dark corner of his chest, like water behind a dam about to burst. "Since when is being friendly a crime? At least I'm not an idiot like you."

It wasn't enough. He knew it. The words tasted like defeat, like not having said what he really wanted to say. So he continued, because once you start sliding down a slope, the only thing you can do is keep falling.

"And at least my reputation," he said, and the phrase came out with an edge he didn't even know he had, as if he had been sharpening this knife for years without realizing it, "isn't that of someone who confesses their love in a dark room, taking advantage of the fact that the other person is drunk."

The blow was low. Keonho knew it as the words left his mouth, he felt them leave one by one, like stones thrown into the void. It was an unfair accusation, and he knew it. Martin wasn't taking advantage of anyone. Martin was helping Juhoon, holding him by the arm, guiding him toward the bed so he wouldn't fall. But Keonho needed to hurt. He needed Martin to feel something similar to what he felt: that punch in the chest, that knot in the throat, that rage that didn't know where to direct itself. It was too late to stop them. The words were already out, floating in the air like dead flies.

He saw Martin's eyes narrow. Saw his jaw clench until his knuckles turned white—those long, slender hands that Keonho had seen play the piano, that he had seen write in the margins of notebooks, that now trembled slightly at his sides. For a moment, he thought Martin was going to shout at him. Or punch him. Or let out everything he had been keeping silent for years, all the words Keonho had been waiting for. Or worse: that he would stay quiet, swallow his rage, and that silence would be more hurtful than any insult, any shout, anything that could come out of his mouth.

But Martin didn't stay quiet.

"You're talking nonsense," Martin said, and his voice was low, controlled, but trembled slightly at the edges, like a string too taut about to snap, like ice cracking under the weight of footsteps. "I'm not taking advantage of anyone. I was just helping him lie down because he's drunk and can barely stand."

He paused. A pause that lasted a second, maybe two, but that felt like an abyss to Keonho. And when Martin spoke again, his voice was lower, more tired. As if he no longer had the energy to be angry. As if the rage had transformed into something heavier, deeper, harder to carry.

"I'm not the one going around kissing half the campus and forgetting their names the next day," Martin said, and his words weren't a shout, weren't an attack. They were an observation. A fact.

Keonho felt the blood pounding in his temples, an insistent hammering that blurred his vision. He wanted to respond. He wanted to say that wasn't true, that he wasn't like that, that those were just stories people told, rumors, exaggerations, hallway gossip that grew like snowballs rolling downhill. He wanted to say that he also had feelings, that he also felt lonely, that he also wanted someone to look at him as if he were worth it. But the words wouldn't come out. They got stuck in his throat, right where the knot began, and there was no force to push them out.

Because, in part, it was true. He didn't kiss half the campus—that was an exaggeration, an urban legend that had grown over time—but he had gone out with a lot of people. And yes, sometimes he didn't remember the names of all the girls he had danced with, had drunk with, had shared a dark corner with at some party.

But that was none of Martin's business. That wasn't something Martin had the right to use against him. Keonho hadn't asked for his opinion, hadn't asked him to judge him, hadn't asked him to look at him with those big eyes that seemed to see more than Keonho wanted to show. Martin had no rights over him. He never had. And yet, there he was, talking about his reputation as if it were a newspaper headline, as if he had some authority to point fingers.

"And you're a fucking loser," Keonho shot back, feeling the heat rise up his neck, turning his ears a red that Martin could surely see. The words piled up on his tongue like stones on a hillside about to give way, and he let them fall one after another without thinking, without measuring, without caring who they might hurt, without caring that the echo of his own words might return to him like a boomerang. "What? Can't I like Juhoon hyung? Do you have some exclusive right over him?"

"You're not very trustworthy, to say the least," Martin said, and each word seemed measured, weighed, chosen with the precision of a surgeon who knows exactly where to cut to inflict the cleanest, deepest wound, "when it comes to feelings."

So low. So low that Keonho had to lean in slightly to hear him, drawing closer to Martin without realizing it, as if his body obeyed a law of gravity he couldn't control. He invaded that personal space they had always maintained between them like an unbreachable border. The intimacy of that gesture ran down his back like a chill, making the hairs on his arms stand up, accelerating his pulse in a way he didn't want to analyze. Keonho swallowed. He felt the knot in his throat, hard as a stone, like a bone lodged crosswise that he could neither swallow nor spit out.

"You don't look very trustworthy either, to say the least," Keonho replied, and his voice came out hoarser than intended, more trembling. He crossed his arms over his chest in a defensive gesture, a physical barrier against what was coming, against Martin's words that still floated in the air like suspended knives. But his arms couldn't protect him from the words, and he knew it. They never had. "What are you trying to do to Juhoon hyung in that state? What gives you the right?"

Martin let out a short, incredulous laugh. An exhalation of air through his nose, a sound that said I can't believe you're saying this and how ridiculous you are at the same time, a sound that had nothing joyful about it. It was a bitter laugh, the kind that doesn't cheer anything up, that doesn't invite anyone to join in, that only serves to show the absurdity of the situation. As if the mere insinuation that he could do any harm to Juhoon were not only false, but offensive on a personal level, an attack on everything Martin considered important.

"I've known him longer than you have!" Martin said, and his voice trembled slightly. It wasn't a tremor of fear, Keonho knew that. It wasn't from cold or weakness. It was a tremor of contained rage, of injustice.

Then Martin took a deep breath. Keonho watched his chest expand under the black shirt he was wearing, his shoulders rise and fall with the effort of containing what was inside him, of not letting the dam break completely.

"Besides," Martin continued, and his voice was lower now, more tired, as if the rage had dissolved into something heavier, sadder, as if the fire had turned to ash, "I was helping him lie down somewhere before calling a taxi to take him home, because he drank too much. He took the wrong glass and..."

He paused. A long, uncomfortable pause, in which his eyes scanned Keonho's face as if searching for something, but Keonho didn't know what to offer him. His face was rigid, lips pressed together, arms still crossed over his chest like a useless armor that protected nothing, that only served to keep distance, to remind them they weren't on the same side. His jaw trembled slightly, an almost imperceptible movement, but he felt it. He felt it as if it were an earthquake.

"...What the hell do you care?" Martin finished, and his voice broke slightly on the last word, a tiny crack through which something Keonho couldn't identify slipped. The question hung in the air of the room, mixing with the smell of alcohol and Juhoon's cologne and that electric something that always seemed to surround Martin.

And Keonho didn't know how to answer.

Because it was a good question. A question that resonated in his chest like a bell toll, that bounced off his ribs and stayed vibrating somewhere deep. What the hell did he care? Why was he there, arguing with Martin in a dark room while a drunk boy watched them with glassy eyes and a stupid smile on his face? Why did his chest burn, that burn that wasn't his shoulder, that wasn't the alcohol, that was something more visceral, more ancient? Why, when Martin had said you're not very trustworthy when it comes to feelings, had he felt something more than rage? Something hotter, more uncomfortable, that writhed in his stomach like a snake and whispered things he didn't want to hear, things about why he cared so much about what Martin thought of him, why it hurt that Martin saw him that way, why he couldn't just turn around and leave like any normal person would.

He didn't respond. He couldn't. The words got stuck in his throat like thorns, like fish bones he could neither swallow nor spit out. Instead, he looked away—as he always did when he didn't know what to say, when words failed him, when the knot in his throat became too big—and stared at the rug. The pattern on the rug. The embroidered soccer balls repeating in a hypnotic pattern, a design he hadn't noticed until now but that suddenly was the most interesting thing in the world. Anything that wasn't Martin's eyes. Anything that wasn't that mix of rage he had seen in his gaze.

That question—what the hell do you care?—spun in his head like a catchy song, like a broken record repeating over and over without finding the groove. He didn't know how to answer it. He had no right to interrupt. He had no right to anything. And yet, he was still there, his feet planted on the floor of a child's room, staring at the rug as if it might save his life.

This was, Keonho realized, the longest conversation they'd had in years. Now, suddenly, they were there, arguing like two children in someone else's room, with a drunkard as a witness and a confession in between. The irony wasn't lost on him. The universe had a very twisted sense of humor.

"Guys!" Juhoon's voice cut through the atmosphere, breaking the tension with the clumsiness of someone who doesn't know they're interrupting something important, who has no idea of the emotional earthquake that had just shaken the room. "Come on. Don't fight over me like this."

Juhoon sat up a little, letting go of Martin's arm with a clumsy movement, like a puppet whose strings had been cut suddenly, without warning. His feet tangled and for a moment he seemed about to fall, his arms spread like windmill blades searching for a balance he couldn't find, his hands open, fingers spread. But he didn't fall. He just stood there, standing as best he could, his body weight unevenly distributed between his legs—one further forward than the other, as if he were about to take a step that never came—and slid his gaze from Martin to Keonho. Slowly. Very slowly. As if he were weighing something, comparing, evaluating. As if in his drunken head a complex calculation was taking place that neither of them could follow, an equation whose variables were two boys who hated each other and a child's room and the alcohol running through their veins.

For an instant, silence reigned.

Only the muffled music from downstairs could be heard, the dull throb of the bass vibrating in the floor and walls and bones, and the breathing of the three in that room. Keonho's breathing was fast, shallow, like that of a cornered animal. Martin's was deeper, more controlled, though Keonho could feel the tension in his shoulders, in the way his fingers pressed against his thighs. Juhoon's was irregular, with small hiccups breaking the rhythm, with inhalations that sometimes came too late.

Juhoon looked at them both as if trying to decide between two equally tempting desserts, as if life were a menu and he could order whatever he wanted without consequences. Martin's jaw tightened a little more. Keonho's throat moved as he swallowed with difficulty, feeling the knot in his stomach rise to his throat and stay there, squeezing, preventing him from breathing normally. But neither of them looked away. Neither of them blinked. It was like a staring duel, a silent competition neither was willing to lose, though neither really knew what they were competing for.

Then Juhoon sighed. A long, deep sigh that seemed to come from somewhere very deep in his chest. He dropped his hands to his sides, a gesture of surrender that made his shoulders slump, his chest deflate, his whole body become a little smaller.

"I can't choose," he said, and his voice sounded pitiful, almost childish, like a child asked to choose between two toys and not wanting to leave either. "You're both so handsome."

Keonho felt the blood rush to his face. An intense heat burning his cheeks, his ears, his nape, a blush that Martin could surely see. He didn't know if it was the alcohol—by now, probably, though he wasn't so sure anymore, though his head was spinning but his thoughts were clearer than they should be—or the absurd situation he'd gotten himself into, or the fact that Juhoon had just called him handsome in front of Martin. Maybe all three at once. Maybe also the awareness that, in the midst of all this, there was a part of him that felt flattered. And that part embarrassed him.

"So I have an idea," Juhoon continued, raising an index finger as if about to reveal a great secret, the gesture trembling but determined, as if he'd just had a divine revelation in the midst of his drunkenness. "At the end of the competition you've been selected for"—and here he looked at Martin, only at Martin, as if he had told him—Martin and Juhoon had conversations, shared secrets, an intimacy that had been built "The one who wins... that one I choose."

And then he began to babble nonsense. Something about a princess and two knights, a confusing story mixing Korean fairy tales with fragments of Western movies, with dragons and castles and happy endings that never came. Something about a story he'd read when he was little, about a distant kingdom and a promise sealed with a kiss and a princess waiting atop a tower. Something about destiny and stars and paths crossing at just the right moment. The words tangled on his tongue, mixed together, lost meaning mid-sentence, became impossible to follow. Juhoon wasn't really there anymore. Not the serious, quiet Juhoon Keonho knew from reading club meetings. Only his body remained, staying upright by sheer inertia, by force of habit, and his mouth moving on its own, like an automaton wound too tight that keeps talking even though no one is listening anymore.

Keonho and Martin looked at each other.

Over Juhoon, who kept babbling about princesses and knights, unaware that his words had changed something in the air. And in Martin's eyes, Keonho saw something he hadn't expected. It wasn't hatred, though he'd had reasons to hate him—the broken invitation, years of silence, the averted glances in hallways. It wasn't mockery, though the situation was so ridiculous that anyone else would have laughed until they cried, would have pointed and said look at these two. It was something more tired, more complicated. Something that seemed to say look what we've done.

It wasn't just any look. It wasn't that studied indifference Martin usually wore when they crossed paths in hallways, nor that empty kindness he used with everyone, that smile. This was one of those looks that weigh, that stick to the skin like a drop of hot grease, that pierce through you and leave an invisible mark somewhere deep, where you can't scratch or clean. Keonho felt it run through him, down his back, squeezing something in his chest he didn't know if it was alcohol or rage or both mixed into a single incandescent ball burning him from within. But he didn't look away. He would never look away, not in front of Martin. That would be admitting defeat before starting, would be acknowledging that Martin had some power over him, and that was something Keonho wasn't willing to concede even if his life depended on it, even if the ground opened beneath his feet and swallowed him whole.

So he stared back. Defiant. Chin slightly raised, arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the doorframe as if the room belonged to him, as if he were the owner of that territory and Martin an intruder he could throw out whenever he wanted, whenever he felt like it, whenever he got tired of his presence.

"Fine," Keonho said, and his voice sounded more confident than he felt. Arrogant, even. With that trace of superiority he used when he wanted others to believe he didn't care about anything, that nothing could hurt him, that he was stronger than anything they threw at him. As if victory were already his. As if competing with Martin were a piece of cake, an afternoon in the park, a walk on the beach. As if his shoulder didn't hurt, as if third places were just a bad dream he'd already woken from fully recovered, as if the coach hadn't looked at him with that expression of pity he'd seen before on other swimmers, on those about to stop being prospects and become memories. "I accept."

Martin shrugged. The gesture was so light, so careless, so I don't care about any of this, that Keonho wanted to cross the room and shake him. Grab him by the collar of that black shirt and rattle him until he took things seriously, until he stopped pretending nothing mattered, until he admitted he was also afraid. Because for Martin, everything seemed easy. The music, the songs he produced in his room, the people who loved him without him having to try, without having to smile when he didn't feel like it, without having to be who he wasn't. As if beating Keonho—him, who had been captain of the swim team, who had put the university's name on the map of national competitions, who had left his skin in the pool every single day—were just a formality, a stepping stone, one more rung on a ladder he'd already climbed effortlessly. Another small obstacle on his path to whatever Martin wanted. As if Keonho were just a name on a list, another rival, someone to surpass and forget.

"Okay," Martin said, and only that. One word. One syllable. But the way he said it, with that half-smile that wasn't quite mockery but wasn't friendship either, that stayed in an intermediate territory where Keonho didn't know how to read it, where he didn't know whether to feel attacked or ignored or simply seen, made him clench his fists.

The silence that followed was brief but dense. Juhoon, oblivious to everything, kept murmuring something about a princess and a dragon, his words tangling on his tongue like sticky candy. But Keonho and Martin no longer heard him. They were trapped in their own bubble.

Keonho wanted to say something more. He wanted to shout that he wasn't going to lose, that he was going to train harder than ever, that he was going to show him who he really was. He wanted to tell him that his reputation meant nothing, that he wasn't just that, that there was much more beneath the surface.

But he said nothing. He just stood there, in the doorframe, fists clenched and jaw tight, and let Martin have the last word. Because sometimes, he discovered at that moment, silence is also a way of fighting.

Juhoon took a step back. Or rather a stumble, because his feet weren't responding as they should—they tangled with each other, the left tripping over the right, ankles crossing like two snakes fighting—and his movements had that drunken clumsiness of someone who has already lost control of their own body, who has handed command over to the alcohol and the alcohol isn't doing a good job. His arms extended to the sides like windmill blades, spinning slowly, searching for a balance he couldn't find, that slipped through his fingers like water. Hands open, fingers spread, palms up as if asking something from the sky. For a moment he seemed about to fall backward, to crash into the floor and take the rocket-shaped lamp and the penguin plushie with him. But no. He let himself fall onto the bed, onto the white pillow, and stretched his arms out in a cross as if he were making a snow angel in the snow or a sand angel on the beach, as if he wanted to leave his mark on this moment before sleep took him away. His eyes were closed—eyelids still, dark lashes on rosy cheeks—his cheeks still flushed from the alcohol, his lips slightly parted as if he were about to say something more, as if the last word had gotten trapped in his throat.

"Good," Juhoon said, and his words came out slow, syrupy. "May the best man win."

And then, without further preamble, he fell asleep.

There was no transition. No intermediate moment where eyelids grow heavy and breathing deepens and the body slowly relaxes, surrendering to sleep like giving in to a gentle current. Juhoon was talking and the next second he wasn't. He just left. As if someone had flipped a switch and turned off the light of his consciousness. His chest rose and fell with a calm that seemed almost insulting amid the tension floating in the room, that tension that had first and last names and years of history. His lips were parted, his hair messy on his forehead—a light brown strand had fallen over his eyes, moving softly with each exhale—one hand hanging off the bed as if he'd tried to grab something—Martin's hand, perhaps, or his own—and gotten stuck halfway, fingers slightly curled, thumbnail bitten. He looked like a drunk angel. He looked like a painting in a museum, the kind you stare at without knowing why, caught by something you can't name. He looked like everything Keonho had been silently watching for months without daring to say anything, keeping his feelings in some dark corner of his chest where they couldn't bother him, where they couldn't hurt him.

But now wasn't the time to look at Juhoon. Now he couldn't afford that distraction. There were more important things at stake, even if he didn't quite know what they were.

Martin stepped forward. Not toward Keonho—his eyes didn't look at him, his body moved as if Keonho weren't there, as if he were invisible, as if he were a stain on the wall—but toward the bed. With an almost tender movement, he took Juhoon's hand hanging off the bed and placed it on his stomach, carefully, as if it were something fragile, as if Juhoon were made of porcelain and could break if not treated gently, as if physical contact were a language Martin mastered. His long, slender fingers rested on Juhoon's hand a second longer than necessary, making sure it wouldn't fall again, that he was comfortable. Then he turned. He looked at him.

"Get ready to lose, Ahn," Martin said.

There was no anger in his voice. No mockery either. There was something colder, calmer. A certainty that froze Keonho's blood, that ran through his veins like ice water in winter, that rose from his toes to the crown of his head. Martin spoke as if he already knew the end of the story. As if he had already read the last chapter and Keonho was still on the first, turning pages with trembling fingers, not knowing what awaited him, not knowing that the hero wasn't him.

Keonho rolled his eyes. The gesture came automatically, like a reflex.

"In your fucking dreams, idiot. I'm not going to lose," Keonho finally said, and his voice sounded lower now, less defiant.

More human.

"Not to you."