Archive of Our Own

The café is one of those places that tries very hard to look like a Parisian patisserie but accidentally lands somewhere closer to a grandmother’s living room, all doilies and mismatched teacups and the faint, perpetual smell of burnt sugar. Hyunjin loves it here. He has been coming here for three years now and has never once been disappointed, which is more than he can say for most of the decisions he has made in his adult life.

Today, he has a strawberry cream cake and a growing sense of unease, because Lee Minho has asked to meet him before the party, and Lee Minho never asks to meet anyone before anything unless something has gone wrong, or is about to go wrong, or has been wrong for so long that Minho has decided to make it everyone else’s problem.

Hyunjin is on his third bite of cake, the kind of bite that is more cream than sponge and requires a moment of silent, private reverence, when Minho slides into the seat opposite him. The chair legs scrape against the floor with a sound that feels deliberately ominous, like the opening note of a symphony composed entirely of bad decisions.

Minho pushes an iced americano across the table. It leaves a wet trail on the wood like the silver trace of a snail, and Hyunjin watches it with the same vague distrust one might afford a gift from a known arsonist. He does not reach for the drink.

Minho does not bother with a greeting. Instead, he says: “I need you to be my fake boyfriend.”

Hyunjin freezes. The fork is halfway to his mouth, a perfect dollop of whipped cream balanced on the tines, and for a long moment he simply stares at Minho over it, his brain cycling through several possible responses and discarding each one as insufficient for the magnitude of what has just been said. And then he completes the journey of the fork to his mouth. He chews. He swallows. He dabs at his lip with a napkin and says, “Absolutely not. I haven’t even finished my dessert, and you’re already giving me indigestion.”

Minho waves a hand dismissively, the gesture elegant and entirely unconcerned with Hyunjin’s digestive health. “It’s a tiny favour. Microscopic. Just for tonight. We make Chan-hyung a little jealous, he finally cracks and admits he’s been in love with me since the dawn of time, and we all live happily ever after. Curtain falls, audience applauds, I name my firstborn after you in gratitude.”

Hyunjin sighs.

He knows about Chan. Not everything, because Minho guards his softer feelings the way dragons guard gold in fairy tales, coiled around them and breathing fire at anyone who gets too close. But Hyunjin has eyes. He has seen the way Minho’s gaze follows Chan across crowded rooms, the way it catches and holds and then, with visible effort, lets go. He has seen the way Minho laughs at Chan’s jokes a beat too quickly, as though his body has been waiting for permission to respond and seizes it before his brain can intervene. And he has seen Chan, too, the way Chan looks at Minho when Minho isn’t looking back, which is always, because they have perfected the art of never looking at each other at the same time. It is exhausting to witness. Hyunjin imagines it must be exquisitely painful to live.

But the plan is still stupid and childish.

“This sounds stupid,” Hyunjin says so out loud. He points his fork at Minho, the tines catching the light. “I know Channie-hyung. You know Channie-hyung. If he thinks you’re dating someone, especially one of us, he will be supportive and step back. He will probably offer to officiate the wedding. That’s just who he is. Why don’t you just tell him outright what you feel for him?”

Minho’s expression does something complicated. It is not quite a flinch, because Minho does not flinch, but it is the emotional equivalent of a flinch, a brief flicker of something raw and unguarded before the mask slides back into place.

“Because I already did,” he says, and his voice is matter-of-fact in the way that people’s voices get when they are trying very hard not to let anything show. “Maybe it wasn’t ‘I’m so in love with you please be with me forever,’ but it was the closest thing possible. Multiple times. In multiple ways. He even kissed me once and has been pretending ever since that it never happened, because he was ‘drunk.’” Minho makes air quotes around the word, his fingers sharp and contemptuous. “He gets all giggly and touchy when he’s drunk, everyone knows that, but he was very serious and so obviously not drunk that it was almost insulting. He kissed me like it was the last thing he would ever get to do, and then he said ‘sorry, I’ve had too much,’ and I could smell his breath and there was nothing on it but mint gum and cowardice. He thinks he’s unworthy of me, or some guilty bullshit he keeps coming up with in that beautiful, brilliant, completely useless head of his. And he’s masochistic enough to keep it going, and sadistic enough to keep me just close enough to feel it every single day. So.” Minho picks up his own coffee, something caramel-coloured and probably sweet enough to strip tooth enamel, and takes a sip. “Maybe if he sees that I can move on, he will finally get his shit together. Or maybe not. But I am running out of ways to suffer, and this one at least has the virtue of being proactive.”

Hyunjin considers it. He does not want to consider it, because considering it means acknowledging that Minho’s logic has a certain twisted coherence, like a knot that looks impossible until you pull the right thread and the whole thing unravels. But he has known Minho for a long time, long enough to recognize that when Minho gets this look in his eyes, the look of a general planning a campaign with casualties already accounted for, arguing is mostly a formality. The battle has already been decided. Hyunjin is just being given the courtesy of a briefing.

“Okay,” Hyunjin says slowly. “Whatever mind games you’re playing, fine, but why me? Why not literally anyone else on the entire planet? I’m sure there are people who would pay for the privilege of being your fake boyfriend. You could probably charge admission.”

“Nah, involving someone unfamiliar is too messy, and out of our friend group who else if not you?” Minho shrugs, the movement elegant and entirely unapologetic. “Changbin, Felix and Jisung have their weird three-something thing, and I am not getting in the middle of that, because I don’t want to end up as a fourth corner to a shape that already has too many sides.” He pauses, ticking names off on his fingers. “And Jeongin is like my child. I practically raised him. I can’t do this to him. It would be unethical.”

Hyunjin waits for the third name, the obvious name —

“And Kim Seungmin is off the charts for obvious reasons, which I am not going to spell out because I am capable of tact, occasionally.”

— and still flinches when it’s said.

The thing about mentioning Seungmin is that it always does something to the air in whatever room Hyunjin is standing in. It changes the atmospheric pressure, rearranges the molecules, makes everything feel slightly thinner and harder to breathe. Hyunjin has spent nine years learning to live with this form of oxygen deprivation, and he has become very good at pretending he doesn’t notice it, but right now, with Minho looking at him across a café table with something that is beginning to look uncomfortably like pity, the pretence feels threadbare.

Hyunjin looks down at his plate, at the last bite of cake he has been saving, the one with the perfect ratio of sponge to cream to strawberry. The strawberry glistens under the café lighting, glossy and red and slightly tragic, like a heart that has been sliced thin and left out too long.

“Okay,” Hyunjin says, and his voice comes out quieter than he intended. “But you know Seungmin will be there. You know that. And I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. Or any idea, really. He’ll do that thing where he looks at me with those judging puppy eyes, and I’ll just melt into a puddle of shame right there on the floor, and someone will have to mop me up, and it will ruin the whole party.”

Minho’s expression changes. It is subtle, the way his gaze gentles, the tension around his mouth easing into something almost tender. It is terrifying, because Minho being sharp and sarcastic is normal, expected, the natural order of the universe. Minho being kind means something has gone very wrong, or very right, and Hyunjin has never been good at telling the difference.

“Hyunjin-ah.” The name lands softly, a feather that somehow still manages to weigh a tonne. “It has been nine years. Nine entire years. Civilisations have risen and fallen in less time. If he felt the same way, you would know by now. Some things you just know. Maybe it is time to give up. To let it go.”

Hyunjin stares at the iced americano sweating a perfect ring onto the table.

He thinks about nine years of hoping, nine years of holding his breath every time Seungmin smiles at him, nine years of watching Seungmin’s mouth shape the words “just friends” without ever having to say them out loud. Nine years of telling himself that this is enough, that friendship is enough, that the quiet ache in his chest is just a structural feature of his life now, like the scar on his knee from when he fell off his bicycle at twelve.

He thinks about all the times he has almost said something, the words piling up behind his teeth and all the times he has swallowed them back down because the alternative, the possibility of losing what little he has, feels like staring over the edge of a cliff and being asked to jump. He thinks about the way Seungmin looks at him sometimes, quick sidelong glances that Hyunjin catches only because he is always, always watching, and how he has spent nine years convincing himself that those glances mean something when they probably mean nothing at all.

He thinks about the cruelty of being in love with someone who treats you with nothing but kindness, because kindness leaves no scar to press on, no wound to point to, nothing to prove it ever hurt at all.

Minho leans forward. There is something almost conspiratorial in the angle of his body, the way his voice drops even lower, a secret passed between them like contraband. “But maybe he needs a little push, too,” Minho says. “Jealousy is a universal key. It either opens the door, or you finally accept the door was never locked for you in the first place. Either way, you have your answer. Win-win.”

Hyunjin looks up. Minho is watching him with an expression that is equal parts challenge and invitation, and beneath that, so far down it is barely visible, something that looks a lot like hope. It occurs to Hyunjin that Minho is not asking him for a favour. He is asking him to be an accomplice, a co-conspirator in a scheme that is either going to save them both or blow up so spectacularly that they will be picking shrapnel out of their friendship group for years.

It is, objectively, a terrible idea. It is the kind of idea that belongs in a romantic comedy, the kind where everyone is beautiful and makes terrible decisions and somehow stumbles into happiness by the closing credits. Real life does not work that way. Hyunjin knows this. He has nine years of evidence.

But nine years is a long time to be in love with someone who does not love you back. Nine years is a long time to hope. And if there is even the smallest chance, the narrowest sliver of possibility, that Seungmin might look at him differently if he thinks Hyunjin is no longer available to be looked at, then Hyunjin is not sure he can say no to that chance. He is not sure he wants to.

He shoves the last bite of cake into his mouth. He chews deliberately, drawing out the moment, because once he swallows, he will have to give Minho an answer, and once he gives Minho an answer the whole precarious architecture of his evening will come crashing down into place.

“Fine,” Hyunjin says, the word slightly muffled by cake. He swallows. “Win-win. But you’re paying for my cake.”

Minho’s smile unfurls slowly. It is not his usual smile, the sharp, teasing one that he deploys like a surgical instrument. It is smaller, softer, almost grateful. “Obviously,” he says. “What kind of fake boyfriend do you think I am?” He reaches across the table and swipes a smear of cream from the corner of Hyunjin’s mouth with his thumb, and then licks the cream off his thumb with a deliberate, theatrical slowness.

“Don’t do that,” Hyunjin says, swatting his hand away. “Save it for the audience.”

“I’m practising,” Minho says, and the sharp smile is back, the familiar one, the one that means he is already three steps ahead in a game no one else knows they are playing. “Method acting. Very important.”

Hyunjin groans and drops his forehead onto the table.

In a few hours, they will arrive at Changbin’s party, and Hyunjin will have to pretend to be in love with Lee Minho while being actually, terribly, catastrophically in love with Kim Seungmin, who will be standing somewhere in the same room, probably looking at him with those judging puppy eyes, and Hyunjin will have to smile and laugh and let Minho put his arm around his waist like it belongs there. It is, without question, the worst plan Hyunjin has ever agreed to, and he once let Jisung convince him that bleaching his own hair at home was a good idea.

“A few hours,” Minho says, reading his mind the way he always does. “We should probably coordinate our outfits. I refuse to be seen with someone who clashes with my aesthetic.”

Hyunjin lifts his head from the table. His forehead has a red mark from the wood grain, and he is fairly certain there is still cream somewhere on his face, and none of it matters, because he has already said yes, and Hyunjin is not the kind of person who goes back on his word, even when his word is going to ruin his life.

“Your aesthetic is ‘rich widow at a funeral,’” Hyunjin says. “I don’t think I can clash with that.”

Minho considers this. “Accurate,” he says, “but hurtful. Now finish your coffee. We have a party to weaponise.”

Somewhere across the city, Chan is probably agonising over what to wear to the party, wanting to look good but not like he tried, wanting Minho to notice but not to know he wanted it. And somewhere else, Seungmin is probably getting ready too, completely unaware that in just a few hours, Hyunjin is going to walk into the room on Minho’s arm and set in motion a chain of events that might change everything, or nothing, or something in between that none of them have the language for yet.

“Let’s go,” Hyunjin says, and stands up before he can change his mind.

***

The villa in Namhae, that Changbin rented for whole weekend, sits on a hill like a secret the ocean told the land and the land decided to keep. It is exactly as white as the Airbnb listing promised, a stark, geometric clean against the riotous green of the hillside, and the sea below stretches out in a thousand shifting shades of blue, and slate, and silver, and, where the dying sun catches it, something close to rose gold. Hyunjin hates it immediately. Not because it is not beautiful, but because it is, and beauty of this magnitude feels like a demand, an expectation that he should be feeling something profound, something worthy of the view, when in fact all he feels is carsick and vaguely sweaty and about three seconds away from a nervous collapse.

The drive from Seoul has taken nearly four hours, four hours of August heat pressing through the windows like an unwanted houseguest, four hours of Minho’s playlist cycling through what Hyunjin can only describe as “songs to commit minor crimes to,” four hours of trying very hard to be normal about the fact that he is about to pretend to be in love with someone who is not Kim Seungmin while Kim Seungmin watches.

That wasn’t his initial plan for this weekend. His initial plan was to pick up Minho because Minho’s car was in repair shop and Hyunjin, so happens, lives closest to him, come to party and actually enjoy it.

Minho, to his credit, has been delightful company, in the specific way that a cat who has decided to sit in your lap is delightful company: you are grateful for the attention, but you never quite forget that it is a predator, and that the claws are always, always just beneath the surface.

“You’re gripping the steering wheel like it owes you money,” Minho observes, somewhere around the three-hour mark. He is reclined in the passenger seat with the boneless ease of someone who has never experienced a moment of genuine anxiety in his entire life, which Hyunjin knows is a lie but resents anyway. “Relax. You’re not driving us into battle. You’re driving us to Changbin’s birthday party. The most dangerous thing there will be Jisung’s karaoke selections.”

“Jisung’s karaoke selections have been known to cause emotional damage,” Hyunjin mutters, but he loosens his grip on the wheel a fraction. The highway unspools before them, a grey ribbon stitched across the landscape, and the GPS announces that they have forty-seven minutes remaining in a voice that sounds far too cheerful for the circumstances.

Minho turns his head to look at Hyunjin, and the weight of his gaze is a physical thing, a hand on the back of the neck, a pressure at the base of the spine. “Are you nervous?”

“No,” Hyunjin lies.

“Good,” Minho says, and does not believe him for a single second. “Because you shouldn’t be. We’re just two people who have suddenly realised they’re in love after years of friendship. It’s a classic narrative. Very believable. I’ve already workshopped our origin story.”

“You’ve workshopped it.”

“Of course. What kind of amateur do you take me for?” Minho ticks points off on his fingers, his rings catching the late afternoon light. “We started getting closer about six weeks ago, after you helped me choreograph that piece for the showcase. Late nights at the studio, shared takeaway, the usual. Emotional vulnerability occurred. Feelings were caught. I confessed first, because obviously I would, and you were surprised but not unreceptive. We’ve been keeping it quiet to see if it was real before telling everyone. It’s simple, it’s sweet, it’s boring enough to be plausible. No one will question it.”

Hyunjin takes his eyes off the road for just long enough to glance at Minho’s profile, the clean line of his jaw, the way his mouth curves into a smirk even when his face is at rest. “You’ve really thought about this.”

“I’ve been thinking about this for almost ten years,” Minho says, and for a moment the mask slips, the smirk faltering into something raw and unpolished, something that lives in the hollow of his throat and the set of his shoulders. “Well, this specific plan, only a few days. But the problem it’s trying to solve, the person it’s trying to reach, that’s been in my head for so long I’ve worn grooves into my own brain. I just want it to be over, one way or another. I want to know.” He pauses. The GPS murmurs something about an upcoming exit. “Don’t you want to know?”

Hyunjin does not answer. He cannot answer, because the answer is yes, desperately, achingly yes, and also no, never, he would rather live in the limbo of not-knowing forever than face the possibility of knowing the wrong thing. It is the central paradox of his existence, the knot he has been trying and failing to untie for nine years, and Minho has just reached into his chest and pulled it out like a magician producing a scarf, casual and a little bit showy and utterly, devastatingly accurate.

They drive the rest of the way in a silence that is not quite comfortable and not quite tense, a silence that feels like the moment before a storm breaks, when the air goes still and heavy and the sky turns a colour that has no name.

The villa appears at the end of a winding road, exactly as advertised and somehow more so, a white house on a green hill by a sea, and the sight of it fills Hyunjin with a complicated emotion that is equal parts anticipation and dread. There are already cars parked in the gravel driveway, Jisung’s sensible sedan and Chan’s slightly battered pickup truck and Seungmin’s recently bought SUV. The windows of the villa are lit from within, golden squares of warmth against the deepening twilight, and Hyunjin can hear music spilling out into the evening air, something with a heavy bassline and a melody that catches in the chest.

Minho gets out of the car first, stretching with the theatrical deliberation of a cat who knows it is being watched, and Hyunjin follows, his legs stiff from the drive, his heart doing something complicated and arrhythmic behind his ribs. The sea air hits him immediately, salt and something green, something living, and for a moment he just stands there, breathing it in, trying to remember what it feels like to be a person who is not about to lie to everyone he loves.

“Ready?” Minho asks, appearing at his elbow with the suddenness of a ghost. His hand finds the small of Hyunjin’s back, light and casual, the kind of touch that has always been commonplace in their friend group, the kind of touch that means nothing and everything. Except now it feels like a brand. Now it feels like a promise, or a threat, or possibly both.

“Ready,” Hyunjin says, and they walk into the villa together.

The interior is all warm wood and soft lighting, an open-plan space that flows from living room to kitchen to balcony to patio without any clear boundaries, the kind of architecture that suggests the house itself wants everyone to get along. And everyone is already there. The scene resolves itself in pieces, a mosaic of familiar faces and familiar chaos, and Hyunjin’s heart does a strange little stutter-step as he catalogues each one.

Seo Changbin is mid-laugh, his whole body thrown into it, a paper crown sitting askew on his head. The crown is gold and slightly crumpled, and someone has written “BIRTHDAY BOY” on it in what looks like Felix’s careful handwriting. Han Jisung is draped across him like a particularly energetic koala, his arms looped around Changbin’s neck, his face pressed into the curve of Changbin’s shoulder, and Felix is perched on the armchair, his legs tucked under him, watching them both with an expression of such fond exasperation that Hyunjin feels, for a moment, like he is intruding on something private.

Bang Chan is by the speaker, a beer bottle in one hand and his phone in the other, presumably curating the playlist with the same meticulous attention to detail he brings to everything. He is wearing a soft-looking linen shirt the colour of oatmeal, and his hair is pushed back from his forehead, and he is smiling that serene, dimpled smile that makes him look like someone who has never had a single dark thought in his entire life. Hyunjin knows this smile is a lie. He knows Chan’s darknesses, or some of them. But looking at him now, golden and peaceful in the lamplight, it is almost impossible to believe.

And Kim Seungmin is on the sofa.

He is sitting next to Yang Jeongin, their heads bent together over something on Jeongin’s phone, and he is laughing at whatever he sees, a real laugh, the kind that scrunches up his nose and shows his teeth and makes him look about five years younger than he actually is. He is wearing a pale blue shirt that brings out the warmth in his skin, and his hair is slightly tousled, and he looks perfectly, utterly, devastatingly content, which is exactly how he always looks, which is exactly the problem. He does not look like a man who has spent the past nine years pining for anyone. He does not look like a man whose heart could be broken by the sight of Hyunjin walking in with someone else. He looks like a man who is having a pleasant evening with his friends and has not a single care in the world.

Hyunjin’s stomach drops. It is a small drop, a private drop, the kind of drop that no one else in the room could possibly notice, but it feels seismic, tectonic, the deep internal shift of something that has been holding itself together for too long and is finally beginning to crack.

“You’re here!” Felix’s voice cuts across the room, bright and warm and unmistakably Australian in its vowels, and suddenly everyone is looking at them, and Hyunjin has to rearrange his face into something that is not quiet devastation. “We were starting to think you got lost. Or that Minho-hyung convinced you to run away together. Which, honestly, would be very on brand.”

“We didn’t run away,” Minho says, his hand still on Hyunjin’s back, a steady, grounding pressure. “We brought snacks. Priorities.”

The mention of snacks triggers a general migration towards the dining area, and in the commotion Hyunjin allows himself to be swept along, accepting a beer from Felix, exchanging a fist bump with Jeongin, avoiding Seungmin’s gaze with the practised ease of someone who has made an art form out of not looking at the thing he most wants to see.

“You look nice,” Seungmin says, and Hyunjin’s entire nervous system short-circuits.

He turns, and Seungmin is right there, close enough that Hyunjin can smell his laundry detergent, something clean and faintly floral, and his expression is perfectly friendly, perfectly neutral, perfectly Seungmin. There is no subtext here. There is never any subtext. That is the problem. That has always been the problem.

“Thanks,” Hyunjin manages. “You too. The shirt. It’s nice. Blue. You look. Blue.” He closes his eyes briefly, praying for death. “I mean, you look good. In blue. You look good in blue.”

Seungmin’s mouth twitches, the almost-smile of someone who is trying very hard not to laugh at you and mostly succeeding. “Thanks. I’ve had it for years. You’ve seen it before.”

“Right. Yes. Of course.” Hyunjin wants the floor to open up and swallow him. He wants the ocean to rise and carry him away. He wants Minho to appear and do something dramatic and distracting, which is not a thought he ever expected to have, but here he is, desperate for Lee Minho’s theatrical intervention like a damsel in a period drama awaiting rescue.

As if summoned by the sheer force of Hyunjin’s desperation, Minho materialises at his side. “Hyunjinnie,” he says, his voice pitched low and intimate, “you didn’t eat enough on the drive. You should have something before you start drinking.”

It is such a small thing, such a mundane thing, the kind of thing any friend might say to any other friend, but Minho delivers it with a particular weight, a particular tenderness, and Hyunjin sees Chan’s head turn slightly, sees the almost imperceptible flicker of attention, and he understands, suddenly, that the performance has already begun. It has been beginning this whole time, from the moment they walked through the door, from the moment Minho’s hand found his back. Every glance, every touch, every carefully chosen word is a line in a play they are writing together, and the audience does not even know they are watching.

“You’re right. I should eat something,” Hyunjin says, and leans into Minho’s space just slightly, just enough, the way a person might lean towards a lover without thinking. He licks his lips he tastes something sweet — the ghost of the strawberry cream cake from the café, the last real thing he ate before this whole charade began. “My lips are still sweet,” he murmurs, more to himself than anyone, a private observation that was never meant to leave his mouth.

But Chan, stationed by the speaker with the preternatural awareness of someone who has spent years learning to hear everything, glances over. His expression is open, curious, entirely without suspicion. “You had a dessert before coming? We’re about to eat enough meat to put a small nation into a food coma, and you stopped for cake?”

Minho does not miss a beat. He does not even blink. He simply turns, a lazy smirk sliding into place like a blade being drawn, and says, “No. He kissed me earlier.”

The room erupts. It is the only phrase for it, the way the laughter and the groans and the shrieks detonate all at once, a cacophony of delighted disbelief. Jisung shrieks so loudly that Changbin claps a hand over his own ear, and Felix nearly drops his drink, and Jeongin makes a face of exaggerated disgust that is entirely undermined by the grin threatening to break through.

“Oh my god,” Jisung wheezes, collapsing against Changbin and Felix in a fit of giggles that seems to involve all of his limbs at once. “Oh my god, no wonder Hyunjin’s mouth is sweet, then, hyung.”

Minho fixes Jisung with a flat stare, the kind of stare that has made lesser men crumble. “Jisung-ah, don’t even try to flatter me into this weird three-way thing you have going on. My heart is taken.”

It is a perfect throw, a perfect line, delivered with the impeccable timing of someone who has spent his entire life learning how to land a joke. Everyone laughs, dismissing it as classic Minho absurdity, the kind of outrageous statement he makes all the time because he finds other people’s discomfort entertaining and their attention even more so. Hyunjin forces a laugh along with the rest of them, the sound scraping its way out of his throat, and his eyes dart instinctively to Seungmin.

Seungmin is not looking at him. Seungmin is leaning over to show Jeongin something on his phone, his brow furrowed in concentration, his mouth curved into a small, private smile. He has not even glanced up. The joke has passed over him like weather, unremarkable and already forgotten. The relief that washes through Hyunjin is cold and settling, like being doused in seawater, like being pulled under by a wave and discovering that drowning is not as warm as the poets promised.

Outside, the evening sun drips gold and amber across the hills, and inside, the smell of barbecue drifts in from the patio where Chan has stationed himself, tongs in hand, because some things in the universe are simply constants. Gravity. The speed of light. Bang Chan at the grill.

Minho, meanwhile, has taken over the kitchen with a similar intensity, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his rings set aside on the counter, his hands moving through the preparation of side dishes with the same fluid precision he brings to choreography. There is something hypnotic about watching him work, the quick flick of the knife, the economical grace of his movements.

The evening unfurls like a flower opening, petal by petal, drink by drink. The second beer goes down easier than the first, and the third easier than the second, and by the fourth Hyunjin has stopped counting, has stopped tracking the way the room has gone soft and golden at the edges, the way Minho’s hand keeps finding his shoulder, his wrist, the small of his back. The touch is constant now, a steady hum of contact, and Hyunjin leans into it without thinking, because it is easier than not leaning, because pretending to want something is easier when you are drunk enough to almost believe it yourself.

There are games, chaotic and loud and punctuated by accusations of cheating that are almost certainly true. There is karaoke, Jisung belting out a ballad with such theatrical anguish that Changbin has to physically remove the microphone from his hands before someone’s ears start bleeding. There is more drinks, more side dishes, more laughter, and through it all, Chan keeps emerging from the patio with platters of perfectly grilled meat, his dimples deepening every time someone compliments his cooking, which is often, because the cooking is genuinely excellent and also because everyone knows Chan blooms under praise like a sunflower turning towards light.

And then, somewhere between the fifth drink and the sixth, the topic loops back around. It is Jisung who brings it up, because of course it is, Jisung who has never met a thought he did not immediately vocalise, Jisung whose brain-to-mouth filter is more of a gentle suggestion than an actual barrier.

“Seriously,” he slurs, pointing an accusing finger between Minho and Hyunjin with the unsteady aim of the truly intoxicated. “You’ve been weird. Weirder than usual. And that’s saying something, because you’re both very weird people. What’s the deal? What’s actually going on? Are you dying? Is someone dying? If someone’s dying you have to tell us.”

The room goes quiet. Not silent, not entirely, but the noise dips, attention shifting, and Hyunjin feels the weight of eyes on him like a physical pressure. Minho looks at him across the coffee table, and there is a question in his gaze, silent and electric. This is the threshold. This is the moment they talked about in the car, the line they have been inching towards all evening. Once they cross it, there is no going back.

Hyunjin gives an almost imperceptible nod.

“We’re dating,” Minho announces, his voice clear as a bell cutting through the noise. “Or, decided to try it out, anyway.”

The silence that follows is a living thing, brief and stunned, and then the group swamps them like a wave breaking. Questions come from every direction, overlapping and urgent and entirely unanswerable. When did it start? How did it start? Who confessed first? Was it romantic? Was it awkward? You were friends for so long, how did you not see this coming? Is this why you’ve been acting so strange? How long have you been keeping this a secret? Why didn’t you tell us sooner?

Felix’s eyes are wide and sparkling with joy because he loves love and is being given fresh material. Changbin has taken his crown off and is holding it in his lap like a concerned monarch receiving troubling news. Jisung is practically vibrating, bouncing in his seat with the manic energy of a small dog who has just been promised a walk. Jeongin looks sceptical but entertained, his eyebrows raised in an expression that suggests he is reserving judgement.

And Seungmin. Seungmin has looked up from his phone. His expression is polite, attentive, mildly curious. It is the expression of someone who has been told some interesting news about acquaintances he is fond of but not particularly invested in. It is the expression of someone who wishes them well and will probably not think about it again tonight.

Minho and Hyunjin answer as best they can, weaving a tapestry of half-truths and careful omissions, their responses overlapping and intertwining until it is impossible to tell who is saying what. They are a united front, a duet, two voices in harmony, and the performance is so seamless that Hyunjin almost forgets it is a performance at all. Minho’s hand is on his knee now, warm and steady, and Hyunjin’s shoulder is pressed against Minho’s, and somewhere in the back of his mind a small, traitorous voice whispers that this would be so easy if it were real, so easy to just let himself fall into the shape of being loved.

But then Jisung snorts. It is a very specific snort, the kind of snort that precedes a deeply unhelpful observation, and Hyunjin braces himself. “Hyung,” Jisung says, gesturing expansively with his beer bottle, “come to think of it, you two have like, zero compatibility. Zero. None. You’re both too pretty and too mean. It would never work.”

Something flickers across Minho’s face, a flash of genuine annoyance, perfectly channelled, perfectly timed. “I’ll show you our compatibility,” he says, and his voice is a dark, playful promise, the kind of promise that makes the air in the room go tight and electric.

He turns. He cups Hyunjin’s face with a deliberate, theatrical slowness, his palms warm against Hyunjin’s jaw, his thumbs resting on the crests of his cheekbones. The world narrows to this single point of contact. Hyunjin can see the pores on Minho’s skin, the flecks of gold in his dark eyes, the almost imperceptible curve of his mouth. And then Minho leans in and kisses him.

Except he does not actually kiss him. There is a thumb strategically placed over Hyunjin’s lower lip, a clever bit of misdirection, a magic trick performed at close range. But Minho sells it like a promise of much more, the tilt of his head, the press of his body, the way his eyes flutter closed and then open again, slow and deliberate. The whoops and hollers from the others are a distant roar, a wave crashing against a shore Hyunjin cannot see, because he is drowning in the performance, in the heat of Minho’s hands and the nearness of his mouth and the terrible, wonderful, unbearable intimacy of being looked at like this by someone who is only pretending.

Minho pulls back a centimetre. His breath is warm against Hyunjin’s cheek. And then he whispers, so soft that only Hyunjin can hear, “Hyunjin-ah. Is Channie-hyung watching?”

Hyunjin’s eyes, dazed and unfocused, flicker over Minho’s shoulder. The room swims back into view. Jisung is clutching Changbin’s arm with both hands, his mouth hanging open. Felix has his hand pressed over his heart like a Victorian heroine witnessing a scandal. And Chan is stock-still, his beer bottle suspended halfway to his mouth, his expression a fascinating, unreadable mask that is cracking at the edges, that is showing something beneath, something raw and startled and unmistakably wounded. He looks like a man who has just been struck and is trying to remember how to breathe.

“Yes,” Hyunjin breathes back, and there is a delirious, guilty victory sparking in his chest, a terrible gladness that the plan is working, that Chan is watching, that Minho’s suffering might finally be worth something. “Yes, he’s watching.”

And then, because he cannot help himself, because hope is a weed that grows in the most inhospitable soil, because he has been in love with Kim Seungmin for nine years and he cannot stop now, he asks, “Is Seungmin watching?”

Minho’s gaze, hidden from the room by the angle of their bodies, moves. The moment stretches, elastic and unbearable, and Hyunjin watches Minho’s face, watches the way his expression shifts into something that is not quite pity and not quite sorrow and is somehow worse than either. Seungmin is deep in conversation with Jeongin again, his shoulder turned, his attention entirely elsewhere. He has not even noticed the kiss. He has not even looked up. The most dramatic moment of Hyunjin’s evening, the most dramatic moment of his entire recent existence, and Seungmin missed it, because Seungmin was not looking, because Seungmin is never looking, because Seungmin does not care enough to look.

“No,” Minho whispers, and his voice is gentler than Hyunjin has ever heard it, gentler than Minho knows how to be, gentler than Hyunjin deserves. “No, he isn’t.”

And because Hyunjin is a bit drunk already, he feels the wetness gather in his eyes before he can stop it, a sudden, treacherous prickle of heat, and he blinks rapidly, trying to force it back, trying to keep his face from crumbling. But Minho sees. And before anyone else in the room can notice, before Hyunjin’s carefully constructed composure can shatter entirely, Minho pulls him into a hug, tucking Hyunjin’s face against his shoulder, one hand coming up to cradle the back of his head, making it look like Hyunjin’s just shy because of the kiss.

“It’s okay,” Minho murmurs into his hair, so quiet that the words are more vibration than sound. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

Hyunjin presses his face into the silk of Minho’s shirt and breathes, in and out, in and out, until the burning behind his eyes recedes and the world stops feeling quite so much like it is ending. Minho holds him through it, steady and solid and entirely, unexpectedly kind, and Hyunjin thinks, with a clarity that cuts through the alcohol and the heartbreak and the exhaustion, that Lee Minho is a much better friend than he ever gets credit for, a much softer person than he ever lets anyone see.

Minho pulls back, just enough to check Hyunjin’s face, and whatever he finds there must be acceptable, because he turns to the room with a smirk already sliding back into place, seamless and devastating. “Is that enough compatibility for you?” he asks Jisung, his voice dry.

Jisung raises both hands in surrender, his earlier scepticism replaced by something approaching awe. “Okay, okay, I take it back. You’re compatible. Incredibly compatible. Please stop looking at me like you’re going to demonstrate further.”

Everyone groans. Changbin says something about having to rearrange the sleeping arrangements now, which triggers a loud and chaotic debate about who is sleeping where, and Jeongin states, with the firm conviction of the youngest, that he is still sleeping alone, no matter what anyone else is doing, and the room dissolves back into its usual cacophony, the moment already fading into memory.

Hyunjin extracts himself from Minho’s arms carefully, like a person stepping away from a ledge, and reaches for his beer. It is warm now, the condensation long since dried, but he drinks it anyway, because it gives his hands something to do, because it gives his face a reason to be turned away from the room. Across the sofa, Seungmin is still laughing at something on Jeongin’s phone, his profile limned in lamplight, his smile as easy and uncomplicated as a summer sky. He has no idea what just happened. He has no idea what he missed.

Hyunjin finishes the beer in three long swallows, and the bitterness coats his tongue, and somewhere outside the window the sea keeps crashing against the shore, indifferent and eternal, and somewhere in the kitchen Minho is looking at Chan with an expression that Hyunjin cannot see but can imagine, can feel, a gravitational pull that has been building for years and is finally, finally reaching its breaking point.

The party goes on. The night goes on. And Hyunjin sits on the sofa with an empty bottle in his hands and a kiss-shaped bruise forming on his heart, waiting for a door that may never open, hoping anyway, because hope is all he has left, and he has been running on it for so long that he has forgotten how to stop.

***

A week passes. It is the kind of week that feels simultaneously endless and brief, the way time always moves when you are living inside a lie and waiting for it to either collapse or become true.

The August heat does not break. It sits over the city like a lid on a simmering pot, and Hyunjin moves through the days with the strange, suspended feeling of being underwater, where everything is muffled and slightly distorted and requires more effort than it should.

Him and Minho commit to the bit with the kind of dedication that would be admirable if it were not also slightly unhinged, because, of course, they’ve decided to continue.

They bicker like an old married couple over text chains so long and so full of creative insults that Jisung starts screenshotting them and posting them to his Instagram stories with captions like “couple goals???” and “this is either true love or a murder in progress.” Everyone notes that this is barely different from how they behaved before the alleged relationship began, which is either a testament to their acting skills or a quiet indictment of how they have always been with each other, and Hyunjin is not sure he wants to examine that distinction too closely.

They post vaguely suggestive comments on each other’s social media. Under a photo Hyunjin posts of his latest painting, a watercolour seascape that took him sixteen hours and a minor emotional breakdown to complete, Minho writes, “the things this man can do with his hands, incredible,” to which Jisung replies with a string of vomiting emojis, Felix replies with a string of hearts, Changbin responds with strings of exclamation marks and Jeongin comments with a single, disapproving “disgusting” that everyone knows is a term of endearment.

Minho posts a picture of sleeping Hyunjin, surrounded by Minho’s cats, on Instagram with the caption “the betrayal is real but so is the love” followed by three heart emojis and a knife emoji, because Minho’s emotional vocabulary has always been equal parts sincere and threatening. Hyunjin posts a slideshow of their “date”, which is his usual compilation of random aesthetical shots, with one of them being of Minho.

The performance is flawless. The performance is exhausting. The performance is, Hyunjin thinks, possibly the most functional relationship he has ever been in, and that realisation is so depressing he decides not to examine it at all.

It is late on a Friday night, or possibly early on a Saturday morning, the kind of hour where time loses its shape and the world outside the window feels like a rumour someone started that no one quite believes. The city is a constellation of lights beyond the glass, distant and indifferent, and inside Minho’s apartment the only illumination comes from a single lamp in the corner, its shade tilted at an angle that casts long, soft shadows across the walls. The room smells like coffee and cats and something faintly floral, Minho’s bodywash or his shampoo or maybe just the particular alchemy of Minho himself.

They are decompressing after yet another group hang-out at which they performed the now-familiar choreography of their pretend relationship. They have showed up holding hands, their fingers interlaced with a casual ease that Hyunjin finds genuinely unsettling.

The dinner itself was, by all objective measures, perfectly pleasant. The food was excellent. The conversation was lively. Jisung did an impression of his old university professor that made Felix laugh so hard he nearly choked on a piece of lettuce.

But beneath the pleasantness, beneath the laughter and the shared plates and the easy camaraderie, Hyunjin felt something curdling, something sour and metallic at the back of his throat, and it took him most of the meal to identify what it was.

Chan was nothing but aggressively supportive, which was driving Minho slowly and visibly insane. He told Minho he’s happy for him, really happy, with a clap on the shoulder so firm it bordered on chiropractic adjustment, and his dimples were in full force when he said it, carving deep parentheses around his smile.

“He said we look good together,” Minho says. “He said we make sense. He said he always thought I needed someone who could keep up with me, and you’ve always been good at that, and he’s so glad we found each other.” Minho closes his eyes. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him and then I’m going to bring him back to life so I can kill him again.”

Hyunjin, who is lying on the floor because Minho has claimed the couch and Hyunjin has learned to pick his battles, makes a sympathetic noise. How can someone be so transparent and so opaque at the same time? How can Chan look at Minho with all that unspoken something swimming in his eyes and still manage to say “I’m happy for you” like it’s the easiest sentence in the world?

And Seungmin was equally supportive, which was somehow worse.

It should not be worse, Hyunjin tells himself. Seungmin’s supportiveness is the natural outcome of his personality, which is fundamentally kind and fundamentally oblivious and fundamentally incapable of seeing what is directly in front of his face if what is directly in front of his face is Hyunjin’s decade-long devotion.

Seungmin spent most of the dinner sitting across from Hyunjin, close enough to talk to, far enough to feel like a distance that could not be crossed, and he was perfectly, utterly, devastatingly normal about the whole thing. He passed Hyunjin the soy sauce without being asked, because he remembered that Hyunjin always wanted extra soy sauce. He laughed at Hyunjin’s jokes, the real ones and the nervous ones and the ones that were not actually jokes at all. And then, somewhere between the second round of meat and the third round of drinks, he leaned across the table and said, in a voice that was almost but not quite casual, “I’m glad Minho-hyung found someone who tolerates him.”

Hyunjin opened his mouth to respond, some automatic deflection already forming on his tongue, but Seungmin kept going, his eyes flickering down to his plate and then back up again, and there was something in his expression that Hyunjin could not read, something that flickered and vanished before he could catch it.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Seungmin then said, and his voice softened, became something gentler and more careful and infinitely more painful. “I’m glad you found someone who makes you happy. That’s what I meant. Obviously. You deserve that.”

Hyunjin laughed it off. He said something about how Minho is tolerable in small doses, and Seungmin smiled, and the conversation moved on, and the whole time Hyunjin could feel something inside him splintering, a hairline fracture spreading somewhere inside his ribcage.

Now, on Minho’s floor, the fracture is still there.

Someone who tolerates Minho. Someone who makes Hyunjin happy. The two phrases are not the same, and the fact that Seungmin corrected himself, the fact that he thought about it at all, that he caught himself and adjusted and made it kinder, is the kind of small and devastating detail that Hyunjin has been collecting for nine years. He has a museum of these moments, a gallery of almosts and nearlys and if-onlys, and he walks through it every night before he sleeps like a curator checking that all the exhibits are still there.

“Can I ask you something?” Hyunjin says. His voice sounds strange in the quiet, too loud and too soft at the same time.

Minho hums from the couch. It is a noncommittal hum, the kind of hum that could mean “go ahead” or “I’m listening” or “if you ask me something embarrassing, I will throw this pillow at your head,” but Hyunjin has reached the point of tiredness where embarrassment feels like a distant concept.

“How do you know?” Hyunjin asks. “That it’s mutual, I mean. With Chan-hyung. You said you knew for a fact. How?”

The silence that follows is long and dense, and complicated. Hyunjin can hear the distant, mechanical hum of the city outside, the constant background noise of millions of people living millions of lives. He can hear one of the cats grooming itself with the wet, methodical sound of a tiny creature taking itself very seriously. He can hear Minho breathing, slow and steady, and he wonders if he’s overstepped, if he’s poked a bruise that Minho has been carefully hiding under long sleeves and sarcasm.

When Minho speaks, his voice is softer than Hyunjin has ever heard it, softer than anything Hyunjin expected from a man who has built his entire personality around being sharp and untouchable and just a little bit dangerous.

“My third year of university,” Minho says. “That makes it your first year. You were still a baby, all big eyes and bigger feelings, you wore those terrible oversized hoodies and you followed Seungmin around like a puppy and you thought no one noticed, but everyone noticed. And you had that terrible haircut you refused to admit was a mistake.”

“It was a stylistic choice,” Hyunjin murmurs.

“It was Chan’s birthday. We had a party at his old apartment, the one with the radiator that made that clicking sound all night, do you remember?”

Hyunjin nods, even though Minho cannot see him from the couch.

“Everyone else had passed out,” Minho continues, and his voice has taken on a distant quality, the texture of a memory being handled carefully, turned over and examined like a photograph pulled from an old album. “Changbin was face-down on the sofa. Jisung and Felix had made a nest out of cushions and were sleeping in it. Seungmin had gone home early, because he had an exam the next day, because he was always the sensible one, even then.” A pause. “Even you had left already. You had that cold, the one that lasted for weeks, and Chan made you go home because you kept coughing and he said it was making him sad.”

Hyunjin remembers that too. He had been furious about it, wrapped in three blankets and texting the group chat increasingly dramatic updates about his impending death, and Chan had responded to every single one with a sad face emoji and a reminder to drink water.

“Everyone drank too much. I drank too much, more than anyone, probably, because I was twenty-one and I thought being drunk would make it easier to be near him without doing something stupid. It did not make it easier. It made it worse.” Minho’s mouth twists, not quite a smile, not quite anything else. “Eventually, it was just me and Chan, standing on his balcony in the freezing cold because he didn’t own any chairs and we were too drunk to care. And then he said he would walk me home even though he could barely stand up straight. That was just how he was. How he is. Always taking care of everyone, always making sure everyone else is okay before he lets himself fall apart.”

Minho pauses. His hand, still dangling off the couch, curls into a loose fist and then uncurls again. The gesture is small, almost unconscious.

“We walked. It was cold, although it was only beginning of October, but October was cold that year, and I remember the way our breath made clouds, the way the streetlights looked through the haze. And when we got to my door, he just… looked at me. For a long time. Too long. And then he said, ‘Minho-yah, sometimes I wish we could just skip to the good part.’”

Minho’s voice catches on the last word, just slightly, just enough to betray how many times he has replayed this moment.

“I said, ‘What’s the good part?’ I was so drunk I could barely focus on his face. But I remember this. I remember every single word. He smiled this sad, stupid smile, the one he does when he’s trying to make a joke out of something that isn’t funny, and he said, ‘You know what I mean.’ Then he just walked off. Just turned around and walked away, back down the street, and I stood there in my doorway watching him go, and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t call after him, I couldn’t do anything except watch him disappear around the corner.”

Minho picks at a thread on his sleeve. The thread is loose, a small imperfection in an otherwise pristine garment, and Minho worries at it with the kind of absent, repetitive motion that suggests he is not entirely present in his own body, that some part of him has drifted back to that night, that doorway, that cold street with the sodium lights painting everything orange.

“I asked him about it a week later, very casual, you know, just slipped it into conversation like I wasn’t dying to know. And he laughed it off, said he’d been too drunk to remember anything after the third round of shots. He said he probably said something embarrassing and I shouldn’t hold it against him. He said it with that smile, the one where his dimples show and you can’t tell if he’s actually fine or if he’s just very good at pretending to be fine. And I thought, okay. Okay, he’s not ready yet. So I waited.” Minho’s voice drops, almost to a whisper. “I’ve been waiting for him to catch up ever since.”

The silence that follows is vast and tender.

Hyunjin thinks about Seungmin. He thinks about all the almost-moments over nine years, the near-misses and the might-have-beens, the constellation of tiny, ambiguous gestures that he has spent nearly a decade trying and failing to interpret.

He thinks about the time Seungmin fell asleep on his shoulder on a late-night bus, his breath warm and even against Hyunjin’s neck, and his hair smelled like rain and Hyunjin missed his stop on purpose, rode the bus all the way to the end of the line just to feel the weight of Seungmin’s head, just to pretend for a little longer that this was something it wasn’t. He had to pretend he had fallen asleep too, and they had to take a taxi back. And Seungmin wasn’t even angry at him about wasted time or money, he just called Hyunjin a fool with the gentlest smile.

He thinks about the time Seungmin sent him a text at two in the morning that just said, “I think you might be my favourite person,” and then, three minutes later, before Hyunjin could even process the words, much less respond to them, followed it up with, “Sorry, drunk. Ignore that.” Hyunjin never ignored it. He screenshotted it, cropped out the second message, and saved it to a folder on his phone that he has never shown anyone. He looks at it sometimes, and he tells himself that drunk words are sober thoughts and then immediately tells himself that he is an idiot and then looks at it again anyway.

“I get it,” Hyunjin whispers, and the words are so quiet they barely disturb the air. “The waiting. The hoping they’ll just figure it out. The way you hold onto one stupid moment because it’s all you have, and you tell yourself it’s enough, but it’s not. It’s never enough. But you keep holding on anyway because letting go feels like giving up, and giving up feels like admitting that you spent all those years hoping for nothing.”

Minho does not respond.

Soonie, the bravest of the three cats or possibly just the most curious, pads over from the cat tower with the silent, deliberate grace of a small, furry assassin. He steps onto Hyunjin’s chest with a surprising weight, and Hyunjin makes a soft oof sound but does not move to dislodge him. Soonie circles once, twice, and then settles, tucking his paws beneath him and fixing Hyunjin with a stare that seems to say, “You are a disaster, but you are warm, so I will allow you to continue existing.” Hyunjin lifts one hand and scratches behind his ears, and Soonie closes his eyes in what Hyunjin chooses to interpret as approval. A warm weight of solidarity, a small, purring reminder that the world continues even when your heart feels like it has been wrung out and hung up to dry.

Hyunjin thinks about Chan walking Minho home on a cold night years ago, saying something he does not remember, something that has been living in Minho’s chest ever since like a seed waiting for spring. He thinks about Seungmin’s text, still glowing in the dark of his phone screen, a message sent and unsent, a truth spoken and swallowed. He thinks about all the ways people find to tell each other they are in love without ever actually saying the words, and all the ways those messages get lost in translation, misinterpreted, explained away, buried under layers of fear and doubt and the terrible, human inability to believe that we might be loved the way we want to be loved.

“Hyung,” Hyunjin says, after a long moment. “Do you think it’s going to work? All of this. The pretending. Do you really think it’s going to make either of them do anything?”

Minho is quiet for so long that Hyunjin thinks he might have fallen asleep. Then, from the couch, a voice, dry and tired and somehow still sharp at the edges: “I don’t know. But I’ve tried everything else. I’ve tried waiting. I’ve tried dropping hints so obvious they might as well have been anvils. I haven’t said the words yet, because I know for a fact, that he would’ve just rejected me, because I know him, and I know the way he thinks. He should be the one to say them. He should believe in them, in the first place. So now I’m trying this. It’s stupid and it’s desperate and it’s probably going to blow up in my face, but at least I’m doing something.” A pause. “What about you? Is it working yet?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think he cares at all.”

Minho does not say anything to that. There is nothing to say, really, nothing that would not sound hollow or patronising or like the kind of platitude people offer when they do not know what else to offer.

“Do you think I’m a coward?” Hyunjin asks. “For not just… asking him? Telling him everything?”

“I think you’re one of the bravest people I know,” Minho says, and the words are so unexpected, so uncharacteristically sincere, that Hyunjin turns his head to look at him. Minho is still staring at the ceiling, his profile sharp against the lamplight, and his expression is unreadable. “You’ve been in love with the same person for nine years. You’ve been rejected, implicitly, every single day for nine years, every day that he hasn’t said something, every day that he hasn’t looked at you the way you look at him. And you’re still here. You’re still hoping. You’re still showing up for him, being his best friend, being whatever he needs you to be, even when it’s killing you. That’s not cowardice. That’s a kind of courage most people will never understand.”

Hyunjin feels the words like they’re actually weigh something. He does not know what to do with them. He does not know how to hold this version of himself that Minho is describing, this brave, patient, long-suffering figure who bears his heartbreak with grace. It does not feel like courage. It feels like inertia.

“You can stay over,” Minho says, his voice returning to something closer to its usual register, dry and slightly mocking and undercut with a tenderness he would never admit to. He passes him one of the cushions from the couch. “You’re already on the floor. The cats like you. It would be cruel to make you move now.”

“The cats like everyone,” Hyunjin points out, but he does not get up. He does not want to get up. He wants to lie here forever, with the weight of the cat on his chest and the warmth of the apartment around him and the strange, unexpected comfort of knowing that someone else in the world understands exactly how he feels, has felt it for just as long, is waiting for the same impossible thing.

“Not everyone,” Minho says. “Dori hates the delivery guy. He hisses at him every time.”

“Dori is an anarchist.”

“He is. I raised him well.”

Hyunjin laughs, a small exhale of breath that does not quite become a sound, and closes his eyes.

“Hyung.”

“What.”

“If this works. If Chan-hyung finally says something. What are you going to do?”

Minho does not answer immediately. When he does, his voice is so quiet Hyunjin almost misses it, almost loses it under the purring of the cat and the distant noise of the city outside. “I’m going to kiss him. And then I’m going to yell at him. And then I’m going to kiss him again. And then I’m going to make him promise to stop being an idiot, which he will, and then he will break that promise approximately forty-eight hours later, and I will yell at him again, and that will just be our life now. That will be the good part.”

Hyunjin smiles at the ceiling.

“The good part,” Hyunjin echoes, and Soonie purrs against his chest, and somewhere in the other room Dori knocks something off a shelf with a clatter that Minho ignores with the practised resignation of a man who has accepted chaos as a permanent houseguest.

“The good part,” Minho confirms. “Now go to sleep. You’re thinking too loud. It’s annoying.”

Hyunjin closes his eyes. The floor is hard and the room is warm and the cat is heavy, and somewhere across the city Seungmin is probably asleep, probably dreaming, probably unaware that Hyunjin has just spent an hour lying on someone else’s floor trying to find the courage to keep hoping. But hope is all there is, in the end. Hope and cats and friends who let you sleep on their floor while they pick at loose threads on their sleeves and tell you stories about the people they have been waiting for. Hope and almost-moments and texts that say “ignore this” but really mean “please don’t.” Hope and the slow, stubborn, possibly delusional belief that somewhere down the line, all of this waiting will have been worth it.

“Goodnight, hyung,” Hyunjin murmurs.

Minho makes a sound that might be “goodnight” or might be “stop talking”. It is hard to tell with Minho. It has always been hard to tell. But Hyunjin does not mind, not really, because the ambiguity is just part of the package that Minho is.

***

Three weeks into their “relationship” Minho wants to scream.

This is not a new feeling, exactly, because Minho has wanted to scream at various points throughout his life for various reasons, most of them involving Han Jisung’s complete disregard for personal boundaries or the existential horror of a cancelled dance class. But this is a new flavour of scream, a specific and concentrated frustration that has been building since the moment Chan smiled at him and said, “I always knew you two would be good together,” with the serene confidence of a man who has never once in his life correctly interpreted a single romantic signal directed at him.

Chan has been delightful. This is the problem. He has been delightful in the way that makes Minho want to shake him by the shoulders, delightful in the way that makes Minho want to press him against a wall and demand to know how someone so intelligent can be so comprehensively stupid about the one thing that matters. He has been so earnestly supportive, so genuinely pleased, so completely and infuriatingly blind, that Minho has developed a permanent bruise on the inside of his cheek from biting it.

Chan has been delightful in the most aggressive way possible, aggressively supportive, aggressively encouraging, aggressively happy for them, as if he has made it his personal mission to prove that he is fine, absolutely fine, completely and totally fine with the fact that Minho is dating someone else.

He has even, and this is the part that makes Minho want to lie down on the floor and never get up, offered to cat sit Soonie, Doongie, and Dori if Minho and Hyunjin want a weekend away. A weekend away. As if the idea of Minho and Hyunjin disappearing together for two nights of presumed romance fills him with nothing but cheerful, avuncular enthusiasm. Minho had stood in his kitchen, phone to his ear, staring out of the window at world outside for a full three minutes while Dori wound figure eights around his ankles and meowed for his dinner, and Chan had asked if he’s still here. Minho had bitten the inside of his cheek again until he tasted iron, the sharp, metallic tang of his own thwarted machinations, and said, “Thanks, hyung. We’ll think about it.”

To be honest, Minho had thought jealousy would look like anger, like possessiveness, like something sharp and hot and undeniable. He had not anticipated this: the agony of watching the person you love cheerfully wave you off into someone else’s arms.

He calls Hyunjin that night and says, apropos of nothing, “I’m going to commit a crime.”

Hyunjin, who has become accustomed to these calls, doesn’t miss a beat. “What kind of crime?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Something that will make him feel a single emotion other than enthusiastic support. I’d settle for mild irritation at this point. I’d settle for a frown even.”

“He doesn’t frown,” Hyunjin says, and his voice is tinged with the exhaustion of someone who has also been on the receiving end of relentless, weaponised kindness. “He’s physically incapable of frowning. His face doesn’t have those muscles. I checked.”

Minho lies on his couch, Dori perched on his stomach like a tiny, judgemental sphinx, and stares at the ceiling. “This was a terrible plan,” he says. “I’m a genius, and this was a terrible plan. Those two things shouldn’t be able to coexist, and yet.”

“You are a genius,” Hyunjin says. “But you’re in love and love makes us do stupid things.”

“Chan-hyung must be so in love with me, because his level of doing-stupid-things is astonishing,” Minho says, and hangs up.

The group dinner happens because Felix suggests it, and Felix suggests things the way the sun suggests mornings: with an inevitability that makes resistance feel foolish and slightly petulant, and with the breezy optimism of someone who believes that getting eight adults with eight different schedules and eight different sets of dietary restrictions around a single table is a simple matter of goodwill and a group poll. Miraculously, everyone is free, which Felix takes as a sign from the universe and Hyunjin takes as a sign that the universe has a vindictive sense of humour and is setting him up for an evening of exquisite torture.

Minho and Hyunjin arrive together, because they always arrive together now, their coordination a silent, unspoken thing that has become as natural as breathing. They have not discussed the logistics of their arrangement, still, but somehow they have fallen into a rhythm that feels less like performance and more like habit. Hyunjin waits outside his apartment building at the agreed-upon time, his hair slightly damp from a last-minute shower, his jacket collar turned up against the evening chill. Minho pulls up in his freshly repaired car and Hyunjin gets in and they do not talk about the fact that Hyunjin’s hand automatically reaches for the aux cord before his seatbelt, or that Minho has adjusted his passenger seat to the exact angle Hyunjin prefers, or that the car smells like the air freshener that Hyunjin once mentioned liking in passing six months ago.

The restaurant is already loud when they push through the door, the air thick with the smell of grilling meat and garlic. Their group has claimed the long table in the back corner, the one with the slightly wobbly leg that someone always has to stabilise with a folded napkin, and everyone is already there, scattered around the table in their usual configuration. Jisung is gesturing wildly with a pair of chopsticks, nearly taking out Felix’s eye. Felix is laughing, his head thrown back, the sound bright and unselfconscious. Changbin is trying to eat a piece of kimbap, but Jisung keeps colliding with him, which makes Changbin miss his mouth entirely. Jeongin is filming the whole scene on his phone, presumably for blackmail purposes. And Chan and Seungmin are seated on opposite sides of the table, two islands of relative calm in the storm, Chan with his gentle smile and Seungmin with his watchful, quiet attention.

There are two empty seats next to each other, saved with the casual assumption that Minho and Hyunjin will sit together, because of course they will, because they are dating, because the entire friend group has accepted this as fact the way they accept gravity or the unreliability of Jisung’s timekeeping. Minho slides into his seat with the fluid grace of someone who has never sat down awkwardly in his life, and Hyunjin settles in beside him, their thighs pressing together under the table in a way that is both familiar and strange, intimate and performative, real and not real and somewhere in between.

The meat arrives in a parade of platters, and Minho, ever the performer, seizes control of the grill. The first batch sizzles to perfection, the edges crisping, the fat rendering into translucent gold, and Minho selects a piece with his chopsticks, dips it in the sauce with a deliberate, almost ceremonial care, and holds it up to Hyunjin’s lips.

It is a gesture so intimate, so performatively tender, that it should feel ridiculous. It should feel like a parody. But Minho raises an eyebrow, a silent challenge, a private joke shared between co-conspirators, and Hyunjin, committing to the bit with the reckless abandon of an actor who has forgotten where the stage ends and real life begins, opens his mouth and lets himself be fed. The meat is perfect, salty and rich and slightly sweet from the sauce, and Hyunjin chews slowly, deliberately, holding eye contact with Minho the entire time, because if they are going to do this, they are going to do it properly.

Minho’s eyes are dark and amused, and there is a tiny smear of gochujang at the corner of his mouth that Hyunjin has the sudden, absurd impulse to wipe away with his thumb. And so he does.

Jisung, seated on the other side of the table, makes a gagging noise, elaborate and theatrical. “This is disgusting,” he announces to the table at large, gesturing wildly at Minho and Hyunjin with a pair of chopsticks that still have a piece of kimchi attached to them. The kimchi wobbles dangerously. “I’m physically ill. I’m actually going to be sick. My stomach is turning. Changbin-hyung, hold me, I’m fading fast.”

Changbin, who is seated next to Jisung and who has been constructing an elaborate ssam with the single minded focus of an architect building a cathedral, obliges with a grunt. He lifts one arm so Jisung can burrow against his side without looking up from his lettuce wrap, which now contains approximately seven different ingredients arranged in a colour coordinated stack. “You’re not fading,” Changbin says, his voice flat and entirely unsympathetic. “You’re fine. Your stomach is made of industrial steel.”

Felix pats Jisung’s head with the gentle, soothing motion. “There, there,” he says, his voice dripping with exaggerated sympathy. “It must be so hard, watching people be happy. You’re so brave.”

“I am brave,” Jisung agrees, still not moving from his position against Changbin. “I’m the bravest. No one appreciates my suffering.”

Hyunjin swallows his pork and reaches for his soju glass, and as he does his gaze flickers across the table to where Chan is sitting. Chan, who has been quiet for most of the meal, quieter than usual, his contribution to the conversation consisting mostly of nods and smiles and the occasional murmured agreement. He is watching Minho and Hyunjin with a soft, fixed smile on his face, the kind of smile that has been ironed into place and will not move no matter how hard the wind blows. “They’re cute,” he announces to the group, his voice a little too bright, a little too deliberate, the vocal equivalent of a light bulb that has been screwed in one turn too tight. “It’s nice. Minho’s never been this… attentive.”

He says “attentive” like it is a foreign word he is trying out for the first time, testing its shape in his mouth, and the effort of it, the careful neutrality, makes Minho want to reach across the table and shake him. I am attentive to you, he thinks. I have been attentive to you for years. I have paid attention to you the way a person pays attention to the one thing in the world that makes all the other things bearable. But he says none of this. He just smiles, a small and private smile that he directs at Hyunjin, and Hyunjin smiles back, and the performance continues because it must.

Chan’s smile doesn’t falter, but he suddenly becomes very interested in refilling everyone’s soju glasses, his movements precise and mechanical, the movements of a man who needs something to do with his hands that isn’t clenching them into fists.

He moves around the table with the bottle, topping up glasses. Jisung holds his glass up with a cheerful “thanks, Dad,” and Changbin covers his with a protective palm because he’s pacing himself. Felix accepts a refill with a sunny smile. Jeongin declines with a polite shake of his head. And then Chan reaches Minho. Their fingers brush as Minho holds his glass steady, the briefest touch of skin against skin, and Chan pulls his hand back as if burned. The soju bottle wobbles in his grip. A single drop spills onto the table, a tiny, glistening bead of clear liquid that catches the light and then is gone, absorbed by a napkin that Chan produces from somewhere with the speed of a stage magician.

“Sorry,” Chan says, and the word comes out breathless, too quick, too quiet. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine,” Minho says. His voice is steady. His face is steady. Everything about him is steady except for his heart, which is attempting to batter its way out of his ribcage like a trapped bird. “Hyung. It’s fine.”

A beat of silence, too long to be comfortable, too short to be acknowledged. Then Chan claps his hands together with a crack that makes Jisung jump. His smile is back, fully operational, dimples deployed at maximum wattage. “Alright,” he says, his voice booming with forced cheer. “Who needs more meat? Hyunjin, you’re too skinny. Eat more. Minho, stop hogging the grill and feed yourself for once.”

Across the table, Seungmin is conducting his own quiet warfare, and Minho is observant enough to notice. Seungmin has always been the hardest to read, his face a masterclass in composure, his emotions locked away behind a firewall of politeness and propriety. But Minho has spent years learning to read the fine print of his friends’ expressions, and there’s something in Seungmin’s posture tonight that snags his attention. The way his chopsticks move through his plate with mechanical precision, separating components of his meal that don’t need separating. The way his gaze keeps drifting to Hyunjin and then snapping back, as though Hyunjin is a bright light he can’t look at directly. The way his jaw tightens almost imperceptibly every time Minho leans in to whisper something to his fake boyfriend, a tiny muscle flexing beneath the skin and then smoothing out again so quickly that no one else would ever catch it.

And then there is the sauce. Hyunjin, mid-bite of the perfectly grilled meat Minho has just fed him, drips a bit of sauce on his chin. It’s a small thing, a tiny smear of brown against the pale skin, the kind of thing that happens to everyone at a barbecue and is usually laughed off or wiped away without thought. But Seungmin’s hand twitches. It’s an aborted movement, a gesture that starts and stops in the space between two heartbeats, his fingers reaching for a napkin before he catches himself. Minho watches it happen in slow motion, the instinct overridden by something else, some internal restraint that clamps down like a steel trap. Instead of handing Hyunjin the napkin, instead of leaning across the table and wiping the sauce away himself — which is what his hand clearly, desperately wanted to do — Seungmin curls his fingers into a fist under the table. Minho can’t see it, but he knows that fist is there, knows it the way he knows the shape of his own longing, knows the tension of a hand that wants to reach out and isn’t allowed to.

Seungmin pushes the entire napkin dispenser across the table with two fingers. The gesture is efficient, impersonal, the kind of thing you do for a stranger who has dropped their glove on the bus. “You have something on your face,” he says, and his voice is so flat it could be used to level furniture. Then, before Hyunjin can respond, before the sauce is even wiped away, he turns to Felix and asks a question about work. His body angles away from the table, away from Hyunjin, a dismissal so complete it’s almost elegant.

Hyunjin blinks. The napkin dispenser sits on the table between them like a tiny, cardboard insult. He picks up a napkin and wipes his chin with slow, deliberate movements, and his eyes linger on Seungmin’s profile for a moment too long.

“Thanks, Seungminnie,” he says, and his voice comes out light and casual and entirely unbothered, because Hyunjin is also an excellent actor when he needs to be. Seungmin does not turn back.

Minho watches him watch Seungmin, watches the hope and the hurt chase each other across his face like clouds across the moon, and feels something in his chest tighten. They are both, he thinks, so spectacularly bad at this. They are both so busy performing indifference that they can’t see how obviously, how painfully, how irrevocably they are giving themselves away.

But then, Minho supposes, that’s the whole problem. That’s the whole problem for all of them.

“More meat?” he says aloud, reaching for the tongs, and Hyunjin turns back to him with a smile that’s only slightly cracked at the edges. “You heard Chan-hyung. You’re too skinny. I’m a neglectful boyfriend. I need to feed you more or I’ll be reported to the authorities.”

“The authorities,” Hyunjin repeats, and the smile stabilises, becomes something closer to real. “Is that what we’re calling Jisung now?”

“I heard that,” Jisung says from the other end of the table, where he has somehow acquired Changbin’s ssam and is holding it hostage. “I’m absolutely an authority. I’m the authority on everything. I’m the president of this table.”

“You’re the court jester at best,” Minho says, and the table dissolves into bickering again, the easy, familiar rhythm of eight people who love each other in ways they don’t always know how to say. The meat sizzles. Chan refills the soju glasses again. Jisung is telling a story that involves increasingly implausible sound effects. Changbin is building another perfect ssam. The evening continues, as evenings do, a river of noise and smoke and grilled meat carrying them all toward whatever disaster or deliverance awaits on the other side of this performance. And across the table, Seungmin does not look at Hyunjin for the rest of the meal, which is fine, which is absolutely fine, which Hyunjin does not mind at all. He tells himself this several times, and each time he believes it slightly less.

***

Septembers in Seoul have always existed with a certain indecision, as if the city itself cannot agree whether it is still clinging to the last humid threads of summer or finally surrendering to the crisp, golden edge of autumn. The trees have not yet begun their annual transformation, the leaves still holding onto their green, but there is a shift in the air, a subtle sharpening, a sense that the world is drawing in a breath and preparing to let it out as something colder. The mornings are cool, the kind of cool that makes Hyunjin want to linger in bed a few minutes longer, his blankets pulled up to his chin, his phone ignored on the nightstand. But the afternoons still belong to the sun, hazy and warm, and the evenings are a compromise, a negotiation between two seasons that have not yet learned to share the sky.

Hyunjin has never been particularly good at reading the sky, he has never been good at interpreting the visual cues that other people seem to process instinctively, the shade of grey that means rain in twenty minutes, the specific heaviness in the air that promises a storm. He does not check the weather app on his phone, partly because he forgets, and partly because some stubborn, romantic part of him believes that weather should be experienced rather than predicted, that there is something beautiful about being surprised by the sky.

Today, the sky is the colour of a bruise, a deep, mottled purple-grey that has been gathering all morning while Hyunjin was inside the art supply store, lost in the trance that always overtakes him when he is surrounded by tubes of paint and stretched canvases and the clean, sharp smell of turpentine.

He has been in the store for nearly two hours, moving through the aisles with the slow, reverent pace of a pilgrim visiting a shrine, picking up bottles of acrylic ink and setting them down again, comparing three nearly identical shades of cerulean blue with an intensity that the other customers probably find baffling.

He has bought things he needs and things he does not need, a new set of filbert brushes and a tube of cadmium red and a sketchbook with paper so thick and textured that it feels like fabric under his fingers. The purchases are wrapped in brown paper and tucked into a bag that is now growing heavy in his hand, and Hyunjin is standing in the doorway of the shop, staring at the rain, wondering how it is possible that the sky has transformed so completely while he was indoors.

The rain is not a gentle rain. This is a downpour, a deluge, a sudden and violent opening of the heavens that turns the street into a river and the gutters into waterfalls and the awnings of the shops across the road into drums, beating out a frantic, arrhythmic percussion. The kind of rain that soaks through clothing in seconds, that plasters hair to foreheads, that makes umbrellas seem like optimistic suggestions rather than practical instruments. The kind of rain that Hyunjin, who is wearing a thin cotton sweater and has no umbrella and lives two hours walk away, looks at with something approaching despair.

He contemplates waiting it out. The doorway of the art supply store offers a small overhang, a narrow strip of dry pavement, and Hyunjin leans against the doorframe and watches the rain with the patient resignation of someone who has made poor choices and is prepared to accept the consequences. But the rain shows no sign of stopping. If anything, it intensifies, the drops growing fatter and more numerous, the puddles in the street expanding and merging into small, temporary lakes. A car passes and sends a wave of water cascading onto the pavement, and Hyunjin steps back just in time to avoid being drenched, his heart doing a small, startled stutter in his chest.

He contemplates making a run for it, but the nearest subway station is a ten-minute walk, and the rain is the kind of rain that would soak him to the skin in thirty seconds flat.

He contemplates, briefly and dramatically, simply lying down on the pavement and letting the elements take him, but that seems like an overreaction even by his own generous standards.

He pulls out his phone instead. The group chat is, as always, a chaotic scroll of inside jokes and shared memes and Jisung’s increasingly unhinged commentary on whatever television programme he is currently binge-watching. Hyunjin types out a message, half-joking, the way he types most things, because sincerity is easier to deliver when it is wrapped in the protective coating of humour.

“so i may have forgotten to check the weather. anyone nearby with an umbrella? currently stranded outside the art supply store near myeongdong station. will pay for rescue in coffee and eternal gratitude”

The responses come in rapid succession, a cascade of unhelpful sympathy. Minho sends unhinged “would rescue you, princess, but your knight is halfway to gimpo to visit his parents”, and Hyunjin snorts. Jisung sends a string of laughing emojis followed by a message that says “rip” and a GIF of a cat being swept away by a flood. Felix responds with a string of crying emojis and the information that he is across the river visiting his grandmother, and then offers to call him a taxi, which is kind but impractical given that there are no taxis to be had in a downpour like this. Jeongin sends a photo of himself indoors, holding a mug of something steaming, with the caption “warm and dry, can’t relate.” Changbin replies with a single thumbs up, which is either moral support or a pocket-text, Hyunjin cannot tell. Chan offers to drive over himself, which is so aggressively kind and so logistically impractical that Hyunjin tells him not to bother, the rain will pass, he is fine, he is absolutely fine, he is not standing here feeling sorry for himself at all.

And then Seungmin responds. The message is brief and efficient and so utterly Seungmin that Hyunjin can hear it in his voice as he reads: “I am two blocks over. I have an umbrella. Do not move.”

Do not move. As though Hyunjin could. As though Hyunjin has ever been able to move from any spot where Seungmin has asked him to stay.

He types a response. “you don’t have to. i can wait it out.” Then he deletes it, because Seungmin has already said he is coming, and arguing with Seungmin is like arguing with gravity. Then he types, “okay. thank you,” and sends it, and then he stands in the doorway of the art supply store with his heart beating too fast and his bag growing heavy in his hand, waiting.

Seungmin appears out of the downpour like a character in a film, the kind of film where the love interest arrives at exactly the right moment and the music swells and the audience collectively sighs.

He is slightly out of breath, which means he walked fast, which means he was hurrying, which means something, or maybe it means nothing, maybe Seungmin is just the kind of person who walks fast everywhere, maybe the slight flush on his cheeks is from the cold and not from exertion, maybe Hyunjin is reading signs into static again, making meaning out of coincidence the way he always does, the way he cannot seem to stop doing.

He is holding a single umbrella, a large black one, the kind of umbrella that is designed for practicality rather than aesthetics, and he is wearing a navy raincoat that makes his shoulders look broader, and his hair is damp at the edges where the rain has found its way past the umbrella’s perimeter. He looks, Hyunjin thinks, like every hopeless daydream he has ever had, distilled into a single, rain-soaked moment.

“You’re an idiot,” Seungmin says, by way of greeting. His voice is flat, almost annoyed, but there is something underneath it, something that Hyunjin has learned to recognise over nine years of careful observation, a particular warmth that Seungmin only deploys when he is trying very hard not to show affection. “Who leaves the house without an umbrella when the sky looks like this?”

“I thought it would hold,” Hyunjin says, which is not true. He did not think about the sky at all. He was thinking about cerulean blue and the way it looks when it is layered over burnt sienna, the depth and richness it creates, the way it makes him feel something that he cannot name.

Seungmin gives him a look, the one that says he knows Hyunjin is lying and is choosing not to press the issue. “Come on,” he says instead. “There’s a café around the corner.”

They walk. The pavement is slick and dark with rain, reflecting the grey sky and the neon signs of the shops in shimmering, distorted ribbons. The rain drums against the umbrella with a sound like fingertips on a table, a restless, arrhythmic percussion, and the streets are nearly empty, everyone else having had the good sense to stay indoors or the good luck to have brought their own protection against the storm. It feels, absurdly, like they are the only two people in the world.

The umbrella is big enough for two, but only just, and they have to huddle close to stay under it, their shoulders bumping with every step, the fabric of Seungmin’s raincoat rustling against Hyunjin’s sweater. It is an awkward, intimate, unbearable kind of closeness, the kind that makes Hyunjin hyperaware of his own body, the length of his legs, the swing of his arms.

And then Hyunjin notices something that makes his heart clench in his chest like a fist closing around something fragile.

Seungmin is tilting the umbrella. Not evenly, not fairly, but noticeably, deliberately, angling it so that the canopy covers Hyunjin more than it covers himself. The rain is falling on Seungmin’s left shoulder, soaking through the dark blue of his raincoat in a spreading patch of wet, and Seungmin is not acknowledging it, is not complaining, is walking as if nothing is happening, as if it is perfectly normal to sacrifice his own dryness for Hyunjin’s comfort.

“Yah,” Hyunjin says, stopping. “You’re getting soaked. What’s the point of having an umbrella if you’re just going to stand in the rain anyway?”

He reaches up to push the umbrella back, to redistribute the shelter more equitably. His hand lands on the handle, on top of Seungmin’s, their fingers overlapping in the narrow space between them. The contact is electric in the way that small and unexpected touches always are, a spark that travels up Hyunjin’s arm and settles somewhere at the base of his skull. Seungmin’s hand is cold from the rain, his knuckles chilled and slightly damp.

Seungmin does not pull away. Seungmin’s hand stays where it is, under Hyunjin’s, motionless and patient and, for one wild, impossible moment, almost tentative, as if Seungmin is not sure what happens next but is willing to wait and see.

Seungmin looks at his own shoulder as if noticing it for the first time. “Oh,” he says, and his voice is carefully neutral, carefully casual, the voice of someone who has been caught doing something they did not want to be caught doing. “I didn’t notice.”

“You didn’t notice that your entire left side is drenched.”

“I was paying attention to the road.”

“The road is in front of us. Your shoulder is attached to your body. How do you not notice your own body?”

Seungmin makes a small, noncommittal sound, something that might be amusement or might be exasperation, and then, very slowly, very deliberately, he adjusts his grip on the umbrella handle. The movement shifts his hand out from under Hyunjin’s, but before Hyunjin can feel the loss, Seungmin’s fingers find his instead, a brief, glancing touch, a tiny squeeze. And then Seungmin adjusts the umbrella slightly, bringing it back toward centre, and Hyunjin lets go of the handle, and they are walking again. But Hyunjin notices that after a few steps it has drifted again, tilted just a fraction toward him.

The café is a small, narrow place wedged between a bookshop and a vintage clothing store, the kind of establishment that Hyunjin has walked past a hundred times without ever noticing. It specialises in sandwiches, the menu handwritten on a chalkboard behind the counter, the options ranging from the classic to the slightly experimental. The air smells like fresh bread and toasted sesame and something sweet. The rain streaks down the windows in silver rivers, blurring the world outside into a watercolour wash of grey and neon and the occasional flash of headlights.

They shake off the umbrella at the door, stamping their feet on the mat, and Seungmin’s left shoulder is visibly soaked now, the dark blue fabric of his raincoat turned almost black with wet. Hyunjin opens his mouth to apologise, to thank him, to say something about the umbrella and the tilting and the way Seungmin’s hand felt under his own, but Seungmin is already walking towards the counter, scanning the menu with the brisk efficiency of someone who has a sandwich to order and a schedule to keep.

“Find us a seat,” Seungmin says over his shoulder. “I’ll order.”

“Shouldn’t I order? I said I’d pay.”

“You can pay. I’m ordering. Go sit down.”

Hyunjin goes. He chooses two stools at the counter by the window. He sets his art supplies on the floor between his feet and watches the rain and tries very hard not to think about Seungmin’s fingers, the way they curled around his own for a fraction of a second, the way Seungmin’s hand was cold and steady and utterly, devastatingly familiar.

Seungmin returns with a tray. On the tray are two sandwiches, two coffees, and a small packet of the kind of biscuits that Hyunjin likes, the ones with the chocolate filling, the ones he always buys at convenience stores when he is stressed or sad or simply in need of a small, edible comfort. Hyunjin stares at the tray. Then at Seungmin. Then back at the tray.

The sandwich is exactly the sandwich Hyunjin would have ordered for himself: turkey and brie on ciabatta, with the tomatoes and the cranberry sauce on the side because Hyunjin hates when the tomatoes make the bread soggy and is very particular about how the cranberry sauce is distributed and prefers to apply it himself. The coffee is an iced americano, even though it is raining and cold and a hot drink would make more sense, because Hyunjin drinks iced americanos regardless of weather, a habit that everyone else in the group teases him about and that Seungmin, apparently, has noticed.

“How did you know?” Hyunjin asks, and his voice comes out quieter than he intended, almost reverent.

Seungmin is already unwrapping his own sandwich, something involving chicken and almost every kind of vegetables and teriyaki sauce. He glances up, his expression perfectly neutral, his eyebrows slightly raised. “Know what?”

“What I wanted. The sandwich. The coffee. The biscuits.” Hyunjin gestures at the tray, at the evidence of Seungmin’s attention, at the quiet, devastating proof that Seungmin has been paying attention, has been keeping track of Hyunjin’s preferences.

Seungmin shrugs. The gesture is casual, almost dismissive, but there is something in his eyes that Hyunjin cannot quite read, something that flickers and vanishes before he can catch it. “I know everything about you,” Seungmin says, and his voice is matter-of-fact, the voice of someone stating an obvious and unremarkable truth. “You get turkey and brie every time we go anywhere that serves sandwiches. You hate tomatoes on the bread because you say it makes the texture ‘unstable,’ which is a ridiculous word to use about a sandwich, but I’ve accepted it. And you only drink iced coffee no matter what the weather is, because you said once that hot coffee makes your tongue feel ‘lonely,’ and I still don’t know what that means, but I remember it. Also, you talk about yourself constantly, so it’s not exactly detective work.”

The last sentence is a deflection, a deliberate undercutting of the moment, and Hyunjin recognises it for what it is because he has been doing the same thing for nine years. But the words have already landed. I know everything about you. Not I know a lot about you, not I’ve picked up a few things over the years, but everything. Everything.

“I don’t talk about myself constantly,” Hyunjin says, because it is the easiest thing to argue with, the safest thread to pull.

“You absolutely do,” Seungmin says, and takes a bite of his sandwich. “Last week you spent forty-five minutes explaining the difference between two shades of blue that looked identical to everyone else at the table. Jisung fell asleep with his eyes open. It was impressive.”

“They were completely different shades,” Hyunjin protests, but he is smiling now, the smile spreading across his face without his permission, and Seungmin is smiling too, that small, scrunched-nose smile that makes him look five years younger and infinitely more dangerous. “One was cerulean and one was ultramarine. They’re not even close.”

“They’re both blue.”

“That’s like saying you and Jisung are both human. Technically true and completely meaningless.”

Seungmin laughs, a real laugh, the kind that surprises its way out of him before he can stop it, and the sound is so unexpected, so unguarded, that Hyunjin feels it like a physical blow, like the air has been knocked out of his lungs and replaced with something lighter, something that fizzes and sparkles, something that might be joy or hope or simply that particular pleasure of making Kim Seungmin laugh.

They sit at the counter and eat their sandwiches and watch the rain. The storm has gentled somewhat, the earlier violence softening into a steady, rhythmic fall, the kind of rain that is almost pleasant to watch from the safety of indoors.

The café is quiet, the other customers huddled at their own tables, the only sounds are the occasional hiss of the espresso machine and the steady, relentless drumming of water against glass, and Seungmin’s damp shoulder presses against Hyunjin’s dry one, a point of contact that is small and incidental and utterly, devastatingly deliberate. Hyunjin knows it is deliberate because Seungmin could move. There is space on the other side of his chair, room to shift away, to create a polite distance between them. But he does not move. He stays exactly where he is, his shoulder against Hyunjin’s, his attention apparently fixed on the rain outside the window, and Hyunjin stays too, because moving would mean breaking the spell, and he is not ready for the spell to be broken.

They talk about everything and nothing. The conversation drifts like the rain, from topic to topic with no direction or urgency. Seungmin talks about work, about his boss that seems to think that “flexibility” means “psychic ability.”

Hyunjin talks about his latest painting, a seascape that has been fighting him for weeks, the colours refusing to cooperate, the composition stubbornly resisting his attempts to wrangle it into coherence.

They talk about the group, about Jisung’s latest obsession with learning the bass guitar, about Changbin’s ongoing feud with his neighbour who keeps parking in his spot, about Felix’s determination to teach Jeongin how to bake and Jeongin’s equal determination to remain entirely unteachable.

The conversation is easy, the way it has always been easy.

Outside, the sky is beginning to lighten, the bruise-coloured clouds thinning at the edges, a pale, watery sun trying to break through.

Soon they will have to leave. Soon Seungmin will have to go back to whatever he has been doing before coming to rescue Hyunjin, and Hyunjin will have to go home, to his canvases and his paints and the empty apartment that always feels emptier after he has been with Seungmin.

But for now, for this small, suspended moment, they are here, shoulder to shoulder, watching the rain, and Hyunjin lets himself believe that this means something. That everything means something. That after nine years of hoping and waiting and reading signs in static, the universe might finally be sending him a message he can understand.

***

The gym is Chan’s territory, has always been Chan’s territory, the way the barbecue grill at group dinners is Chan’s territory and the space behind the wheel of any vehicle carrying more than three members of their friend group is Chan’s territory. Changbin tried to overthrow his position once, in the gym specifically, a coup attempt that lasted for almost a year. Changbin came close. Closer than anyone expected, closer than Chan probably expected. But in the end, Chan’s territory held. Chan’s territory always holds.

It is not a fancy gym. It is a small, slightly rundown facility tucked into the basement level of a building that has seen better decades, all fluorescent lights and mirrored walls and the faint, permanent smell of sweat and industrial cleaning products that never quite manages to mask the sweat. Chan has been coming here for years, long enough that the owner greets him by name and asks about his work and pretends not to notice when he stays past closing time, still working through his sets with the dogged determination of a man who believes that physical exhaustion is a valid substitute for emotional processing.

The equipment here is slightly outdated, the rubber mats are worn thin in places, and the music playing over the speakers is always six months behind the charts, but it is their place, has been their place since Minho was a first-year university student and Chan had taken him under his wing with the gentle determination of someone who collected strays as a matter of principle.

Minho had been a stray once.

He had not realised, at the time, that being collected by Bang Chan was a permanent arrangement, that once Chan decided you were one of his people you would never not be one of his people, that his care was a net cast wide and never pulled back empty. He had also not realised, at the time, that being one of Chan’s people and being in love with Chan were two circles on a Venn diagram that overlapped almost completely.

Minho has not been to this gym in nearly two months, not since the fake dating began. He has been making excuses, claiming schedule conflicts and minor injuries and a sudden, unconvincing passion for home workouts that no one believed.

The truth is simpler and more embarrassing, which is that Minho has been avoiding Chan. Not obviously, not in a way that anyone else would notice, but in the small, subtle ways that add up over time, the declined invitations and the delayed text responses and the careful positioning at group gatherings that keeps at least two people between them.

It is not that he does not want to see Chan. It is that he wants to see Chan so badly it has become a physical ache, a constant, low-level thrum of longing that he has learned to live with the way people learn to live with chronic pain, by pretending it is not there until the preteens becomes almost convincing. And seeing Chan now, in this new configuration of their lives, with the fake relationship hanging between them like a gauze curtain, is its own particular kind of torture. Chan is so supportive. Chan is so happy for him. Chan claps him on the shoulder and asks how things are going and smiles that bright, fixed smile that makes Minho want to grab him by the collar and demand to know what is really going on behind those dimples, what is really happening in the depths of that infuriatingly generous heart.

So when Chan texts him on a Thursday morning, a simple message that says “Gym today? Just us, like old times?” followed by a string of muscle emojis that Chan has clearly added in an attempt to seem casual and has only succeeded in making seem desperately, endearingly uncool, Minho stares at his phone for a full minute.

“Just us.” That could mean nothing. It could mean Chan misses their routine, the easy camaraderie of spotting each other on the bench press, the shared suffering of leg day, the comfortable silences between sets. It could mean Chan wants to talk. It could mean Chan is about to sit him down on a gym mat and deliver a gentle, devastating speech about how happy he is for Minho and Hyunjin and how he hopes they will be very happy together, and Minho will have to smile through it and pretend his heart is not being fed through a meat grinder.

Minho thinks about saying no. He thinks about inventing another excuse, another scheduling conflict, another minor injury. He thinks about all the reasons why spending two hours alone with Chan in a confined space is a terrible idea, an emotional minefield, a disaster waiting to happen.

He texts back, “What time?” because he is, as he has always suspected, a masochist.

The human capacity for self-destruction is a remarkable thing, Minho thinks. It rivals even the human capacity for loving someone who refuses to love you back.

The gym is quiet when he arrives. Chan is already there, warming up on one of the mats, his movements fluid and practiced, the movements of someone who has been doing this long enough that his body knows what to do without his brain needing to intervene. He looks up when Minho approaches, and his face breaks into a smile that is so genuine, so warm, so utterly devoid of any of the complicated emotions that Minho has been projecting onto it for weeks, that Minho feels something in his chest crack cleanly in half.

“Minho-yah,” Chan says, and his voice echoes slightly in the nearly empty space. “You came. I was starting to think you’d forgotten where the gym was.”

“I was giving you a chance to catch up,” Minho replies, the banter coming easily, automatically, the way it always has between them. “Didn’t want you to feel inadequate when I out-lift you on every set.”

Chan laughs, a bright, surprised sound that bounces off the mirrored walls and comes back multiplied. “Bold words from someone who hasn’t touched a barbell in a month. Let’s see if your muscles remember what to do. Warm-up first. Ten minutes on the treadmill. Don’t skip it. I know you skip it when you’re alone.”

“I don’t skip it,” Minho lies. “I simply believe that the body can warm itself up through the power of intention.”

Chan snorts, a small, undignified sound that makes Minho’s chest ache with its familiarity. “Get on the treadmill, Minho-yah.”

Minho gets on the treadmill. It is easier than arguing. It is easier than standing still in the fluorescent light, watching the muscles in Chan’s back flex as he adjusts the settings on his own machine.

They run. Side by side, their paces matched, their breathing falling into a rhythm that is almost synchronised. The treadmills hum beneath them, a low, mechanical drone, and the gym’s sound system is playing something upbeat and forgettable, the kind of music designed to make people feel energised without ever actually listening to it. Minho watches Chan in the mirror, the way his reflection moves, the way the sweat begins to gather at his temples, the way his jaw is set with the quiet determination. Chan catches his eye in the mirror and smiles, a small, quick thing, and Minho looks away too fast, his heart rate spiking in a way that has nothing to do with the treadmill.

After the warm-up, they fall into their old rhythm the way dancers fall into a familiar choreography, without thinking, without trying, the steps encoded in muscle memory. Chan hovers nearby while Minho occupies lat pulldown. Minho spots Chan on the squat rack, watching the careful, controlled descent and rise with an appreciation that is purely aesthetic and entirely professional and nothing more, he tells himself firmly, nothing more at all.

They compare reps and adjust weights and trade good-natured insults about each other’s form, and for a little while, for a precious, fragile little while, it feels like before. And Minho almost forgets. For the space of a set of squats and two rounds on the leg press, he almost forgets that anything has changed, that there is a lie sitting between them like a third person on the bench, that Chan’s supportive smile at the barbecue was a knife wrapped in silk. He almost forgets that he is supposed to be in love with Hyunjin, that Hyunjin is supposed to be in love with him, that this entire elaborate construction is a house of cards waiting for a strong wind.

Almost.

Then they take a water break, and everything tilts.

“So,” Chan says, and there is something in his voice, a weight that makes Minho’s attention sharpen despite himself. He is leaning against the wall, his tank top dark with sweat, his hair pushed back from his forehead. He looks like an advertisement for something, athletic wear or sports drinks or the brand of masculine competence that has always made Minho’s brain go slightly fuzzy at the edges. “How are things going? With Hyunjin?”

Minho has fielded this question a dozen times in the past few weeks, from Jisung and Felix and Changbin and Jeongin and even, on one memorable occasion, from his mother, who had somehow heard about his new relationship through the incomprehensible grapevine of Korean parent communication and had called to express her cautious approval. He has a script for this question, a set of carefully prepared responses that reveal nothing and suggest everything, the verbal equivalent of a magic trick that directs the audience’s attention away from what is actually happening.

“Good,” he says, falling back on the simplest version of the script, the one that invites the fewest follow-ups. “We’re figuring things out. Taking it slow. You know how it is.”

Chan nods, a slow, deliberate motion, and takes a long drink from his own bottle. His throat moves as he swallows, and Minho watches this happen and then immediately looks away, fixing his gaze on his own reflection in the opposite mirror. His reflection looks back at him with the expression of a man who is trying very hard not to look at something, which is a difficult expression to maintain when you are the only other person in the reflection.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Chan says, and the words are quiet, almost offhand, but there is something in them, a weight, a pressure, a significance that makes Minho look over sharply.

Chan’s face is unreadable. This in itself is remarkable, because Chan’s face is usually the most readable face in any room, an open book with large print and helpful illustrations. He is a man who wears his heart not on his sleeve but on a billboard, his emotions broadcast in surround sound and high definition for anyone who cares to look. But now his expression is closed, neutral, the face of someone who has carefully arranged every feature and is holding them in place by force of will. He is staring at the water bottle in his hands, turning it over and over, the plastic crinkling faintly with each rotation.

Minho waits. The fluorescent lights continue to buzz overhead, a steady, insect hum. Somewhere in the back of the gym, a weight clanks against another weight, a metallic sound that echoes through the empty space. Chan’s jaw tightens, just slightly, a tiny movement that Minho would not have noticed if he were not watching so closely, if he were not always watching so closely, if watching Chan had not become as natural to him as breathing.

“I just mean,” Chan continues, and now he sounds almost frustrated, as if the words he wants are not the words that are coming out, “relationships can be complicated. People can get hurt. I don’t want either of you getting hurt. You and Hyunjin, I mean. Both of you. You’re both important to me.”

Minho stares at him, and the weight of all the things he wants to say presses against the inside of his chest like a fist pushing against a door. He wants to scream. He wants to shake Chan by the shoulders, wants to demand what the hell that is supposed to mean when Chan has spent years looking at Minho like he hung the moon and all the stars and possibly several lesser celestial bodies and never once done anything about it.

He wants to ask if Chan thinks Minho does not know that relationships are complicated, that feelings are messy and difficult and terrifying, that loving someone who does not love you back is a special kind of torture and loving someone who might love you back but refuses to say so is even worse.

He wants to know if Chan is being deliberately cruel or just spectacularly stupid, and he’s not sure which answer would be worse.

He wants to say, “You told me you wanted to skip to the good part and then you forgot you ever said it and I have been waiting for you to remember for eight years, eight years, do you understand how long that is, do you understand what it feels like to hold onto a single drunk sentence like it’s a life raft in the middle of the ocean?”

He wants to say, “I am fake-dating one of my best friends because I am so desperate for you to feel even a fraction of what I feel every time you smile at me that I have resorted to emotional manipulation, and it isn’t even working, because you are too busy being supportive, because you are too good, because you are the best person I know and also the most infuriating and I am so in love with you that I cannot see straight.”

Instead, Minho says, “I know what I’m doing,” and his voice comes out flat and steady, the voice of someone who is lying through his teeth and has had years of practice doing it.

He stands up, the water break clearly over, the conversation clearly finished, and walks over to the bench press. He adds more weight to the bar than he can safely handle, because he is angry, because he is frustrated, because the burn of overworked muscles feels like a relief, a distraction, a way to translate the chaos in his chest into something manageable.

He lies back on the bench, the vinyl cool against his shoulders, and wraps his hands around the bar. The weight is too heavy. He knows it is too heavy before he even lifts it, knows it in the way his arms tremble slightly as he pushes the bar off the rack, knows it in the way his shoulders protest, knows it in the way the bar begins to descend toward his chest with a speed that is slightly too fast, slightly too uncontrolled, slightly terrifying. He pushes up, and his arms shake, and the bar wavers, and then Chan is there, materialising at the head of the bench with the speed of someone who has been watching, who has been waiting, who has never really stopped paying attention. Together they guide the weight back onto the rack with a clang that reverberates through Minho’s bones.

But Chan does not let go. His hands come to cover Minho’s over the bar, squeezing tight.

“Yah,” Chan says, leaning close, and his voice is different now, stripped of its careful neutrality, raw at the edges. “What are you doing? That’s too much. You could have hurt yourself.”

His hands are still covering Minho’s, their fingers overlapping on the metal, and his face is very close, closer than it needs to be, close enough that Minho can see the individual eyelashes framing Chan’s dark eyes, the faint sheen of sweat on his forehead, the way his lips are slightly parted, as if he is about to say something and has forgotten what it was.

The moment stretches, elastic and unbearable, the fluorescent lights humming overhead, the distant thump of someone else’s treadmill providing a steady, oblivious soundtrack. Minho can smell Chan’s sweat, clean and faintly salty, and beneath it the scent of his shampoo, something woody and warm, something that Minho has smelled a thousand times before and has never learned to be immune to.

He could move. He could pull his hands out from under Chan’s, could sit up, could make a joke, could break the tension the way he always does, with a sharp comment and a dismissive smirk. It would be easy. It would be safe. It would be exactly what he has been doing for years, deflecting, retreating, protecting himself from the possibility of rejection by never fully extending himself in the first place.

But he is tired of easy. He is tired of safe. He is tired of deflecting and retreating and protecting himself from a rejection that has already happened, implicitly, every single day that Chan has looked at him with those dark, unreadable eyes and said nothing.

So he does not move. He stays exactly where he is, lying on the bench with Chan’s hands wrapped around his, and he lets the moment stretch, lets it become something, lets it fill the space between them like water filling a vessel, until Chan blinks and pulls away, his hands retreating, his face closing, the mask slamming back into place with an almost audible click.

“I was thinking I could handle it,” he says. “I was wrong.”

“Good thing I was spotting you,” Chan says. “You almost crushed yourself.”

Minho sits up, his heart still racing, his hands still tingling where Chan’s fingers had pressed against his own.

They do not talk about it. They finish their workout in a silence that is not quite awkward but is not quite comfortable either, the easy rhythm of earlier replaced by something more careful, more measured. Chan spots Minho on his remaining sets, and Minho spots Chan, and they compare reps and trade comments about form, and everything is normal, everything is fine, everything is exactly the way it has always been.

They part ways outside the gym, the evening air cool against their sweat-damp skin. Chan’s car is parked to the left, Minho’s bus stop is to the right, and they stand on the pavement for a moment in the awkward limbo of two people who do not know how to say goodbye.

“Thanks for coming,” Chan says finally, and his voice is soft, softer than it needs to be. “I missed this.”

Missed this. Missed me. The words are adjacent but not identical, and Minho does not know which one Chan meant.

“Me too,” he says, and then he turns and walks toward the bus stop before he can do something irreversible, like press Chan against the side of his car and kiss him senseless, or like cry, or like both, which would be a very difficult sequence of events to explain.

Behind him, he hears Chan’s car door open and close, hears the engine start, hears the sound of tyres on wet pavement. He does not turn around. He keeps walking, and the bus stop is cold and empty and entirely without answers, and Minho sits on the metal bench and waits and tries very hard not to think about the weight of Chan’s hands on his.

***

It is past midnight, the hour when the world peels back its skin and reveals the tender, sleepless thing underneath; it’s the kind of midnight that feels less like a time and more like a condition, a state of being, a quiet, suspended limbo where the world outside the window has gone dark and still and the only things that exist are the glow of a phone screen and the weight of a cat on your chest and the particular ache of a heart that has been running on hope for too long and is beginning to run out of fuel.

Minho lies on his couch in the dim glow of a floor lamp he has not turned off because turning it off would require moving, and moving is currently not an option. Three cats are arranged on and around him like furry sentinels guarding a fallen king.

Soonie has claimed the prime real estate of his chest, a warm, purring weight that rises and falls with his breathing. Doongie is curled in the crook of his knees, a perfect circle of orange fur and quiet contentment. Dori, the youngest and most chaotic of the three, is perched on the back of the couch directly above Minho’s head, occasionally reaching down to bat at his hair with a paw, just in case he was in danger of forgetting that he is merely a guest in this apartment and the cats are the true owners.

His phone rests on his chest, balanced on Soonie’s flank, the speaker crackling softly with the sound of Hyunjin’s breathing.

They have been on this call for nearly an hour, the conversation looping and meandering through the familiar territory of two people who have become accidental confidants. The fake relationship was supposed to be a performance, a bit of theatre staged for an audience of two, but somewhere along the way the rehearsals had turned into something else.

Late night phone calls.

Genuine laughter.

The strange and unexpected intimacy of sharing a secret that was originally just a scheme.

Minho had not anticipated that pretending to be in love with Hyunjin would result in actually liking him more, would result in this quiet and comfortable friendship that has become one of the few things keeping him sane. The irony is not lost on him. Lee Minho, master strategist, undone by his own plot.

“He sent me a playlist today,” Minho says. “A whole playlist. Curated. With a title. The title was ‘For Minho.’ With a heart emoji. A heart emoji, Hyunjin. I want you to really sit with that.”

“I’m sitting with it,” Hyunjin says, his voice crackling through the speaker, tired and strained. “What was on it? What songs?”

“What does it matter what songs?”

“It matters. If he put ‘Just Friends’ on there, I’m going to lose my mind.”

“He didn’t put ‘Just Friends’ on there. He put ‘Congratulations’ by Day6. Among other things. He put ‘Congratulations,’ Hyunjin. Tell me that’s not unhinged. Tell me I’m overreacting. I want you to tell me that I am overreacting and that this is normal supportive behaviour from a man who definitely does not have feelings for me.”

Hyunjin makes a sound that is somewhere between a laugh and a wheeze, the kind of noise a person makes when their body cannot decide whether to be amused or horrified. “He did not.”

“He did.”

“Oh my god. The man made you a mixtape to celebrate your imaginary love life.” Hyunjin’s voice drops into something almost reverent, the tone of a scholar discovering a new and particularly baffling species of insect. “That is genuinely impressive. I am almost in awe. I want to study him in a laboratory.”

Another pause.

“‘Congratulations’ is a song about congratulating your ex on their new relationship. It’s the most passive-aggressive song in the history of Korean popular music. And he curated a playlist just to tell you he’s happy for you, and he snuck in a song about watching your ex move on, and he probably thought he was being so subtle about it.”

“He’s not my ex,” Minho says, and the words come out quieter than he meant them to, softer, stripped of their usual armour. “He’s never been my ex. He’s never been anything except the person I’ve been waiting for, and he doesn’t even know he’s the person I’ve been waiting for, and instead of figuring it out he’s sending me playlists with heart emojis and songs about moving on. I’ve created a monster. I’ve created a supportive monster, and the monster is wearing a tank top and has dimples, and I’m going to lose my mind.”

“Is it a good playlist?” Hyunjin asks. “Musically speaking. Ignoring the emotional terrorism.”

Minho considers this. “It’s excellent. The transitions are seamless. He put the Day6 song in the perfect position for maximum emotional impact. If he wasn’t using his powers for evil he could be a professional DJ.”

“Of course he could. He’s Bang Chan. He’s good at everything.” Hyunjin’s voice fades slightly on the last word, and Minho can hear the familiar sounds of Hyunjin’s bedroom through the speaker, the creak of his bed frame, the rustle of fabric. Hyunjin is probably lying on his bed too, staring at his own ceiling, having his own late-night crisis. The parallel is almost comforting, two insomniacs united by terrible decision-making and the stubborn refusal to give up on people who have given them no reason to hope.

Minho groans, draping his free arm over his eyes. The crook of his elbow presses against his forehead, and the pressure is grounding, a small anchor in the sea of his own frustration. Soonie shifts on his chest, resettling his weight with a small, disgruntled sound, and Minho absently scratches behind his ears by way of apology.

“I should end it,” he says, and the words come out muffled against his own arm. “The fake relationship. I should call it off. This has gone far enough. We’ve made our point. We’ve performed our little drama for weeks, and what do we have to show for it? A playlist. A supportive playlist. He’s not jealous. He’s not going to be jealous. He’s just going to keep being wonderful and generous and completely oblivious until I actually lose my mind and do something catastrophic, like kiss him in the middle of a group dinner and ruin some else’s birthday like I did with Changbin’s.”

“You didn’t ruin Changbin’s birthday. Changbin had a great birthday. He told me it was his third favourite birthday ever, after his tenth and his twenty-fifth.”

“His third favourite. See? I’m underperforming. I should have made it his first.”

Hyunjin does not laugh at this. The silence on the other end of the line stretches, elastic and heavy, and when Hyunjin speaks again his voice is smaller, quieter, the voice of someone who has been holding something back and has finally decided to let it go. “Seungmin cancelled on Saturday.”

Minho’s arm drops from his eyes.

The Saturday friendly dates. Minho knows about the Saturday friendly dates the way he knows about all the secret architecture of Hyunjin’s heart, the load-bearing walls and the hidden rooms and the places where the structure has been patched and reinforced over the years.

They started as a way to reconnect after the drifting-apart years, the strange, painful period after university when everyone had scattered to different corners of the city, different careers, different lives, and the easy closeness of their school days had suddenly become something that required effort and intention and the willingness to admit that you missed someone.

Hyunjin and Seungmin had drifted further than most, their easy intimacy eroded by distance and busyness and inertia that sets in when you stop reaching out and tell yourself it’s just temporary, it’s just for now, you’ll call next week, you’ll text tomorrow, you’ll fix it later. And then suddenly it had been nearly a year of silence, and Hyunjin had found himself staring at Seungmin’s contact photo at three in the morning.

Post-university, they had all been a little lost, a little lonely, stumbling through the early years of adulthood with the bewildered exhaustion of people who had been promised that growing up would feel like freedom and had discovered, instead, that it mostly felt like being tired all the time and never having enough money and wondering if this was really all there was. Hyunjin had felt it more acutely than most, his art degree simultaneously the best and worst decision of his life, his days filled with part-time work and studio time and the creeping sense that he was falling behind everyone else, that his friends were building careers and relationships and futures while he was still trying to figure out how to be a person.

He had been the one to reach out. Minho remembers this, remembers Hyunjin telling him about it afterward, his voice bright and fragile and full of a hope he was trying very hard to disguise as casualness. A tentative text, sent at two in the morning after a particularly bad day, the kind of text that you write and delete and rewrite a dozen times before you finally hit send. “I miss you. Is that weird?”

Seungmin had replied within seconds. Seconds. As if he had been waiting, as if he had been hoping, as if his phone had been in his hand and his heart had been in his throat and the text had been the answer to a question he had been too afraid to ask. “No. I miss you too. Coffee?”

That first coffee had lasted four hours. Four hours in a café, a quiet corner and a sticky table and two cups of coffee that went cold while they talked and talked and talked about everything they had missed in the years they had been drifting apart. Hyunjin had cried a little, not the ugly, cathartic kind of crying but the quiet, leaking kind, the kind that happens when you are trying very hard to hold yourself together and your body betrays you. And Seungmin had not made it weird. Seungmin had handed him a napkin and made a dry, understated joke about the quality of the coffee and waited, patient and steady, until Hyunjin was ready to keep talking.

And at the end of those four hours, Seungmin had said, “We should do this again. Regularly. I do not want to lose you again,” and Hyunjin had nodded and agreed and gone home and screamed into his pillow with the specific and unhinged joy of a person whose hopeless crush had just been handed a lifeline.

Since then, they have guarded their weekend time together like something sacred.

Saturdays belong to Seungmin. The rule is unspoken but absolute. Saturday afternoons are for galleries and cafés and walks along the river, for trying new restaurants and revisiting old ones, for sitting in comfortable silence and for talking until their voices go hoarse. They are not dates. Hyunjin knows they are not dates. Seungmin has never called them dates, has never suggested they were anything other than two friends spending time together, has never once looked at Hyunjin across a table and said the words that Hyunjin has been waiting nine years to hear. But they are something. They are the closest thing to something that Hyunjin has ever had, and he has built a small and fragile temple around them, and now Seungmin has cancelled.

Minho stills on the couch, his body going tense in a way that makes Soonie lift his head and regard him with a slow, unimpressed blink. “He what?”

“He said he had a work thing,” Hyunjin says, and Minho can hear the forced nonchalance, the careful, studied casualness of someone who is trying very hard not to sound as devastated as he feels. “A work thing. On a Saturday. He’s never had a work thing before. He’s an IT guy, not a heart surgeon. No one’s servers are crashing on a Saturday afternoon. No one’s database needs emergency maintenance at brunch. Or if they do, he’s never mentioned them. He’s never cancelled. Not once. Not in over a year.” Hyunjin’s voice catches, just slightly, a tiny hitch in the rhythm of his words. “I think our plan is working, hyung. I think it’s working, just in the wrong damn direction. He’s not getting jealous. He’s getting distant. He’s pulling away. He’s going to stop being my friend entirely, and it’s going to be my fault, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

The words tumble out in a rush, a flood, a dam breaking, and Minho closes his eyes against the ache of them, the familiar, mirrored ache of wanting someone so badly and watching them slip further away with every move you make.

“Or,” Minho says, and his voice is gentler now, stripped of its usual irony, “it’s working exactly as intended, and he can’t handle watching you with me. He can’t handle sitting across from you every Saturday, pretending he’s fine, pretending he’s supportive, pretending he doesn’t want to be the one holding your hand instead of me. So he’s cancelling. Because it hurts too much to be near you and not have you.”

The silence on the other end of the line is thick and heavy, a living thing, and Minho can hear Hyunjin breathing, can hear the slight tremor in his exhale, the sound of someone who is trying very hard not to cry and is not entirely succeeding. Minho can picture him so clearly it is almost like being in the same room: Hyunjin on his bed, his long limbs sprawled across the mattress, his phone clutched to his ear, his face wearing that expression it always wears when someone says something that cuts too close to the truth. He is probably biting his lip, the way he does when he is about to cry. He is probably staring at his own ceiling, which Minho knows is covered in those glow-in-the-dark stars that Hyunjin put up years ago and has never bothered to take down, because Hyunjin is sentimental about the strangest things, because Hyunjin cannot throw anything away, because Hyunjin’s entire life is a museum of moments he cannot let go of.

“Then why won’t he say anything?” Hyunjin’s voice cracks on the last word, a tiny fissure in the forced composure, and Minho feels his heart, which he had thought was too tired and too frustrated to feel anything else, crack a little more in sympathy. “Why won’t either of them say anything? Chan-hyung has been looking at you like you’re the most important thing in his life, and he still won’t say it. Seungmin cancelled our Saturday date, our date, the thing I look forward to all week, the thing that keeps me going, and he did it with a text message, hyung. He didn’t even call. He sent a text. ‘Sorry, work thing came up, rain check?’ With a question mark. As if I might say no. As if there’s any universe in which I would say no to him.”

“Maybe they’re scared,” Minho says, and the words feel fragile, a hypothesis he is not sure he believes. “Maybe they’re just as scared as we are. Maybe more. We’re the ones who took action, remember. We’re the ones who hatched an insane scheme and committed to it. They’re just reacting. They’re just trying to be good people in a situation they don’t fully understand. Chan thinks I’m happy with you, so he’s being supportive. Seungmin thinks you’re happy with me, so he’s giving us space. They’re being decent. It’s the most infuriating thing about both of them.”

“Great,” Hyunjin says, and his laugh is humourless, a dry, hollow sound that echoes through the speaker. “So, Chan-hyung is on his way to reach nirvana, and Seungmin’s either truly seeing me as only a friend and is politely extracting himself from my life so I can focus on my new relationship, or he’s secretly in love with me and is in so much pain watching me with someone else that he can’t bear to be around me. Those are the two options. Those have been the two options for nine years, hyung. Nine years of rotating between ‘he doesn’t love me’ and ‘he loves me but won’t say it,’ like a demented game of Russian roulette where every spin lands on ‘more suffering.’ We’ve made zero progress. We’ve actually made negative progress. We’re further from an answer than we were when we started.”

Minho, for all his scheming, has no comfort to offer. This is the part of the plan he had not thought through, the human cost of his clever little jealousy scheme. He had been so focused on Chan, on the possibility of finally cracking that serene and oblivious exterior, that he had not fully considered what it would mean for Hyunjin. Or perhaps he had considered it and dismissed it, convinced that the plan would work, that jealousy was indeed a universal key that would unlock both their doors. And now here they are, and Chan is sending congratulatory playlists and Seungmin is cancelling Saturday plans, and the universal key appears to be jamming in both locks simultaneously.

“I am sorry,” Minho says, and the words feel inadequate, a single bandage applied to a wound that requires stitches. “This was my idea. I dragged you into it. If it is making things worse with Seungmin, we can stop. We can tell everyone it did not work out. Mutual decision. No hard feelings.” He means it. He is surprised to discover that he means it, that Hyunjin’s happiness has become important enough to him that he is willing to sacrifice his own scheme for it. The realisation is unsettling and also strangely warm, a new room added to the house of his heart that he had not known was under construction.

“No.” Hyunjin’s voice is muffled, probably because his face is pressed into his pillow, but the word comes through clearly enough. “We cannot stop now. Chan-hyung is clearly losing his mind. The man made you a mixtape. He is one bad decision away from becoming the next Dalai Lama or writing you a sonnet. We are so close.” He pauses, and when he speaks again his voice is steadier, the exhaustion still there but layered over with something that might be determination. “Besides, I do not think I can go back to pretending everything is normal. At least this way I am pretending with a purpose. It is the most direction my love life has had in nine years.”

Minho huffs a laugh, and Soonie, offended by the sudden movement of his sleeping platform, digs his claws gently into his shirt in protest. “That is the saddest thing I have ever heard. And I have heard Jisung try to explain his feelings for Changbin and Felix.”

“You know what,” Hyunjin says, his voice is still muffled by the pillow, “I’m really just ready to give up on everything. On the plan, on the waiting, on the hoping. Let’s run away together. You and me. Let’s change our names, marry each other, and spend the rest of our lives on a small farm somewhere. We can have goats. Goats are supposed to be therapeutic. We can make cheese and sell it at a local market and never think about Bang Chan or Kim Seungmin ever again.”

The proposal is absurd. It is completely, utterly, magnificently absurd, the kind of thing that Hyunjin says when he has passed beyond genuine despair and into a kind of giddy, delirious fatalism. But Minho considers it. He considers it the way he considers all of Hyunjin’s terrible ideas, with a kind of fond, exasperated seriousness, because Hyunjin’s terrible ideas are often more interesting than other people’s good ones.

“We don’t have enough money for a farm,” Minho points out. “Goats are expensive. Land is expensive. Cheese-making equipment is probably expensive. We’re both artists, Hyunjin-ah. We can barely afford our apartments.”

“But you’re not opposed to this? To the general concept? To running away with me and becoming goat farmers and never coming back?”

Minho considers this too. He thinks about the alternative, the endless cycle of hoping and waiting and pretending and being disappointed, the gym sessions that feel like interrogations and the playlists that feel like passive-aggressive warfare and the way Chan’s hands felt on his, warm and steady, before Chan pulled away and the moment shattered. He thinks about the way Hyunjin’s voice sounds in the dark, tired and strained and full of a longing that has nowhere to go. He thinks about how tired he is, how tired they both are, how long nine years can feel when you are spending them waiting for someone to catch up.

“Sounds like a far better plan than the one I came up with, honestly,” Minho says, and he means it, or means it as much as he means anything at this hour, which is to say partially, which is to say enough to make the words feel true. “At least goats are straightforward. You feed them, they make milk. They don’t send you curated playlists with hidden meanings.”

Hyunjin laughs, a real laugh this time, surprised out of him, and the sound is bright and cracked and slightly hysterical, the laugh of someone who has been crying and is not quite finished but has found something funny anyway.

“Then let’s rob a bank,” he says, the words tumbling out in a rush. “Like Bonnie and Clyde. Except prettier. And with better fashion sense. We’ll rob a bank, and then we’ll run away together, change our names, marry each other, and spend the rest of our lives on a small farm. It’s the perfect plan. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Unlike our current plan, which is just a beginning that keeps going.”

“Maybe,” Minho says, and he can feel his own mouth twitching into a smile, the first real smile he has felt in days, “let’s hold on a little longer. I don’t want to be killed. Bank robbery has a very low success rate. And I look terrible in prison clothes.”

“You’d look good in anything. That’s the problem. You’re too attractive to go to prison.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Hyunjin is laughing again, properly laughing now, the kind of laughter that bubbles up from somewhere unexpected and takes over before you can stop it, and Minho finds himself laughing too, a quiet, helpless sound that vibrates through his chest and makes Soonie lift his head in dignified protest at being jostled.

The laughter is not a solution. It is not a fix. It does not change the fact that Chan sent a playlist with “Congratulations” on it, or that Seungmin cancelled his Saturday plans for the first time in over a year, or that Minho and Hyunjin are still trapped in the same impossible, absurd, self-inflicted predicament they have been trapped in for weeks. But it is something. It is a release, a relief, a small bright moment in the middle of the long, dark night, and Minho holds onto it, lets it fill the space between his ribs, lets it remind him that whatever happens, he is not alone.

“We’re disasters,” Hyunjin says, when the laughter has subsided into a kind of breathless, hiccupping aftermath. “We’re complete disasters. We’re two disasters who are fake-dating each other to make two other disasters jealous, and none of it is working, and we’re just going to die alone, aren’t we?”

“Probably,” Minho agrees. “But at least we’ll die alone together.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“None of this makes sense. That’s the point.”

Hyunjin yawns, a long and unguarded sound that crackles through the speaker. “I should sleep. I have to figure out what I am going to do with my Saturday now. Maybe I will paint. Maybe I will stare at a wall for six hours. The possibilities are endless.”

“Paint,” Minho says. “Staring at a wall is my territory. I have been doing it all evening.” He pauses, and then, softer: “He will come around, Hyunjin-ah. One way or another.”

The line goes quiet again, but it is a different quiet this time, a softer quiet, a quiet that feels less like an absence and more like a presence, like something settling into place. Minho listens to Hyunjin breathe, the slow, steady rhythm of someone who is finally, after hours of tension, beginning to relax, and he lets his own breathing match it, in and out, in and out, until the weight on his chest feels less like a burden and more like an anchor, something holding him steady in the dark.

“Minho-hyung,” Hyunjin says, and his voice is drowsy now, the exhaustion finally catching up with him, pulling him down towards sleep. “If the bank robbery thing doesn’t work out. If we don’t get the farm. Will you still marry me?”

“Ask me again in the morning,” Minho says. “When you’re not delirious.”

“I’m not delirious. I’m sincere. I’m always sincere at one in the morning. It’s my most sincere time.”

“Go to sleep, Hyunjin-ah.”

“Fine. But the offer stands. Farm. Goats. Matrimony. Think about it.”

“Go to sleep,” Minho repeats. “We have that thing tomorrow at Changbin-and-The-Twins’. You’ll need your energy to pretend to love me.”

“I don’t have to pretend to love you, hyung,” Hyunjin says, and there is a ghost of real warmth in his voice now, the first Minho has heard all night. “You’re my favourite disaster. I just have to pretend to be in love with you. There’s a difference.”

“Flatterer. Goodnight, Hyunjin-ah.”

“Goodnight, hyung. Tell the cats I said goodnight too.”

“They heard you. Soonie just twitched his ear. That’s cat for ‘acknowledged but not impressed.’”

Hyunjin laughs again, and the line goes quiet one last time.

***

The apartment belongs to Changbin, Felix, and Jisung in the way that all shared apartments belong to their inhabitants, which is to say that the legal names on the lease are almost irrelevant compared to the organic, chaotic distribution of space that has evolved over the years.

The kitchen, for example, is primarily Felix’s domain, the cupboards stocked with baking supplies and exotic spices and at least three different kinds of vanilla extract, because Felix believes that vanilla is not a single flavour but a spectrum.

The living room is shared territory. It is a patchwork of personalities, a quilt made of mismatched furniture and competing aesthetics: Changbin’s weights in the corner, arranged with military precision; Jisung’s hoodies draped over every available surface like shed skins, evidence of a creature that moves through the world leaving soft cotton trails behind it. There is a neon sign in the shape of a dinosaur above the television, a gift from Jisung to himself that no one else understands. There is a wall of speakers that Changbin has been curating since university, each one acquired with the fierce dedication of a collector who believes that the right bass drop can solve most of life’s problems. There are Felix’s plants everywhere, trailing from shelves and hanging from the ceiling and occupying every available windowsill, a slow and gentle invasion of greenery that the other two have long since stopped resisting.

And the balcony, small and slightly rusted and overlooking a courtyard that always smells faintly of someone else’s laundry, belongs to whoever needs it most at any given moment.

Tonight, it belongs to Kim Seungmin.

Hyunjin does not know this when he slides open the glass door and steps out into the cool October air. He knows only that the living room has become unbearable, the noise and the heat and the press of bodies too much for his overstimulated nervous system, and that he needs a moment of quiet, a moment of stillness, a moment to breathe without the weight of performance pressing down on his shoulders.

The gathering is in full swing behind him, the usual chaos of their friend group amplified by the enclosed space.

The karaoke machine is blasting a trot song that Changbin is performing with the aggressive enthusiasm of a man who has been told he cannot sing and has decided to make that everyone else’s problem. Felix is in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on a cake that he has been working on since the early afternoon and that he has forbidden anyone from seeing until it is complete, a prohibition that Jisung has violated approximately four times already, each time resulting in Felix chasing him out of the kitchen with a spatula.

Jeongin is perched on an armchair that he has claimed as his own, scrolling through his phone with the serene detachment of the youngest member of a chaotic friend group who has learned, through years of exposure, to simply tune out the madness. Chan is on the sofa, leaning back with a beer in his hand, his laughter cutting through the noise every few minutes in bright, involuntary bursts. Minho is on the floor, because Minho always ends up on the floor at gatherings, not because there are not enough seats but because he claims it is better for his back and also because it allows him to lean against the sofa in a way that positions him in Chan’s peripheral vision without being obvious about it. He is nursing a drink and contributing to the conversation with the dry, cutting remarks that everyone expects from him.

And Hyunjin should be there with him, should be playing his own role, should be leaning into Minho’s space and laughing at his jokes and selling the fiction they have built together. But he is tired. He is so tired, bone-deep and soul-weary, tired in a way that sleep cannot fix and coffee cannot mask and even painting, his usual refuge, has failed to soothe.

He slides the door shut behind him and the noise cuts off abruptly, replaced by the distant hum of traffic and the soft rustle of the wind through the courtyard’s single, struggling tree. The balcony is small, barely large enough for two people to stand without touching, and it is occupied.

Seungmin’s leaning against the railing, his back to the door, his face tilted up toward the sky. The stars are barely visible — the city produces too much light, too much noise, too much of everything — but the few that have managed to pierce through the haze are scattered across the darkness like drops of milk on a black countertop. Seungmin’s silhouette is sharp against the blur of the city beyond, the line of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw, the way his hair lifts slightly in the breeze. He’s holding a drink, a glass of something clear and probably alcoholic.

He doesn’t wear his jacket despite the evening chill, and his shirtsleeves are rolled to his elbows, and the line of his spine is straight and still, the posture of someone who has been standing here for a while, who came out here for the same reason Hyunjin did and found the same insufficient solace.

Hyunjin freezes with his hand still on the door handle. The sensible thing would be to go back inside, to retreat into the warmth and noise of the party and pretend he never saw Seungmin standing alone in the dark. The sensible thing would be to protect himself, to avoid the particular and exquisite torture of being alone with the person he has been in love with for nine years, the person who cancelled their Saturday plans, the person who is probably avoiding him and who has every right to avoid him because Hyunjin is supposedly dating someone else and Seungmin is supposedly just a friend and everything is supposedly fine. The sensible thing would be to leave. Hyunjin has never been sensible when it comes to Kim Seungmin.

He lets go of the door handle and steps forward, his shoes making a soft sound on the concrete, and Seungmin does not turn around. He does not need to. He has always had an uncanny awareness of Hyunjin’s presence, a sixth sense that Hyunjin has noticed and catalogued and tried very hard not to read into.

“It is cold out here,” Hyunjin says, because he cannot think of anything else to say, because “I have been in love with you since I was seventeen” is not an appropriate conversation opener for a casual balcony encounter.

Seungmin shrugs, a small and elegant movement of his shoulders. “The cold is nice. It clears the head.” He is still looking at the sky, at the handful of stars that are visible through the city’s light pollution, a scattering of pale and distant pinpricks that seem to be trying very hard to be noticed despite the odds against them. Hyunjin leans against the railing beside him, leaving a careful distance between their bodies, a gap of perhaps fifteen centimetres that feels like a chasm.

For a moment, neither of them speaks. The silence is not uncomfortable, exactly, but it is not comfortable either, the way a held breath is neither inhalation nor exhalation. Hyunjin looks at the stars, which are unremarkable, and at the car park, which is even less remarkable, and at Seungmin’s profile, which is silhouetted against the dim glow from the living room windows and which Hyunjin could draw from memory, has drawn from memory, has filled entire sketchbooks with variations on the theme of Kim Seungmin in repose.

“You seem happy,” Seungmin says. His voice is quiet, so quiet that Hyunjin almost does not hear it, almost mistakes it for the wind or the distant traffic or the sound of his own wishful thinking. But it is not the wind. It is Seungmin, still looking at the sky, his hands resting on the railing with a stillness that seems deliberate, a stillness that is taking effort to maintain. “With Minho-hyung. You seem happy.”

He does not know how to answer. The truth is too complicated, a knot of half-truths and outright lies and genuine emotions that have become tangled beyond recognition.

He is happy, in some ways. He is happy when he’s painting, when the colours bleed together on the canvas and the world narrows to the point of his brush. He is happy when the group is together, all eight of them, the easy chaos of their friendship filling whatever empty spaces he’s carrying inside him. He is happy when Minho makes him laugh on the phone at midnight, when the cats deign to acknowledge his existence, when the first bite of a really good dessert dissolves on his tongue like a small, sweet miracle.

But he is also miserable. He is miserable in the way of someone who is constantly performing a version of himself that isn’t true, who is lying to everyone he loves, who is using his own heart as bait in a trap that might never spring. He is miserable in the way of someone who has been in love for nine years with a person who is standing fifteen centimetres away from him on a balcony, telling him he seems happy. He is miserable because the person he wants to be happy with is the reason he can’t be happy at all, a paradox that circles endlessly in his head like a fly trapped in a jar, buzzing and buzzing and never finding a way out.

He is miserable right now, standing on a balcony with the man he has loved for nine years, listening to that man tell him he seems happy in a voice that sounds like it is being dragged over broken glass.

“I am,” Hyunjin says, and the words taste like ash. “I am figuring it out. It is still new.” He pauses, and then, because he is a coward, because he cannot bring himself to tell the truth and cannot bring himself to tell a convincing lie either, he adds, “Are you happy?”

The question hangs in the air between them. Seungmin turns to look at him, and in the dim light from the living room windows, his expression is unguarded in a way Hyunjin rarely sees.

The careful neutrality that Seungmin wears like armour has slipped, just slightly, just enough to reveal what’s underneath. And what’s underneath is soft. Tender. A little sad, maybe, or a little lost, or a little of both, the way someone looks when they’re standing on the edge of something and can’t decide whether to jump or step back.

There is something in Seungmin’s eyes, something tired and tender and almost bruised, and Hyunjin wants to reach out and touch his face and smooth away whatever has put that look there, and he cannot, because he is supposed to be dating Minho, because Seungmin is just a friend, because the fifteen centimetres between them might as well be a continent.

He’s so beautiful.

It hits Hyunjin like a physical force, the way it always does, the way it has been hitting him for nine years without ever getting softer or easier or less devastating. Seungmin is beautiful in the way that art is beautiful, in the way that music is beautiful, in the way that something can be both perfectly familiar and endlessly surprising at the same time.

He’s beautiful and he’s soft and he’s tender and he’s the best damn person Hyunjin knows, the kind of person who remembers coffee orders and runs two blocks through the rain with an umbrella and cancels Saturday plans for the first time in over a year and doesn’t explain why. He is the best person Hyunjin knows, and looking at him hurts, has always hurt, will probably hurt for the rest of Hyunjin’s life.

“I’m glad,” Seungmin says, and his voice is strange, rough around the edges, the voice of someone who is trying very hard to mean what they’re saying and isn’t quite succeeding. “I’m glad you’re happy. You deserve to be happy. Minho-hyung is… he’s a good person. He’ll treat you well. I’m glad.”

He says it like he’s trying to convince himself. He says it the way someone recites a fact they’ve memorised but don’t quite believe, a line from a textbook, a truth that exists on paper but not in the heart. He says it, and his eyes meet Hyunjin’s for a single, searing moment, and then he looks away, and the moment is gone, and the ghost between them opens its mouth and swallows whatever almost happened whole.

“Seungmin-ah,” Hyunjin starts, and he does not know what he is going to say next, does not know if he is going to confess or deflect or simply say Seungmin’s name again because saying Seungmin’s name is the only thing he wants to do, the only thing he has ever wanted to do.

But Seungmin is already moving, already turning away, already sliding the glass door open and stepping back into the noise and the warmth and the safety of the party. The door closes behind him with the same soft click, and through the glass, Hyunjin watches him cross the room. He watches him accept a drink from Jisung, something colourful and probably too sweet, and he watches the way Seungmin’s face rearranges itself into a smile, a perfectly normal smile, the kind of smile that says nothing is wrong and everything is fine and I am completely, totally, one hundred percent okay. But it looks carved on. It looks like something made with a knife, something shaped by force, something that does not belong to the face it is sitting on.

Hyunjin has known Seungmin for nine years, and he knows his real smiles, the scrunched-nose ones and the surprised ones and the ones that creep up on him slowly like a sunrise. This is not one of those. This is a smile that is being held in place by sheer willpower, and Hyunjin wants to slide open the door and cross the room and take Seungmin by the shoulders and demand to know what is wrong, what is really wrong, what is happening behind those dark, guarded eyes.

But he does not. He stays on the balcony, frozen, watching, and then something else catches his attention, a different drama unfolding on the other side of the glass.

Chan lifts his eyes and meets Minho’s gaze.

It is the kind of look that would be invisible to anyone who was not paying attention, a brief, electric connection that lasts no more than a few seconds. But Hyunjin is paying attention. Hyunjin has learned to pay attention to these things, the hidden currents and the secret glances and the quiet, desperate signals that people send each other when they think no one is watching. And what he sees in Minho’s eyes, in the set of his jaw and the tension in his shoulders and the way he holds Chan’s gaze without flinching, is something desperate and furious and longing all at once, a storm compressed into a single glance, a scream rendered silent by the pressure of everything it contains.

Chan looks away first. Of course he does. He has been looking away first for years, deflecting, retreating, protecting himself from the thing that terrifies him most. His head dips, his attention shifting to the drink in his hand, and the connection breaks, and Minho’s expression flickers, just for a moment, into something that looks like defeat before he masks it, before he raises his glass and downs his drink in one long, deliberate swallow.

Hyunjin watches it all from the balcony, a silent observer, a ghost at the edge of the party, and he feels the weight of both stories pressing down on him, Minho’s and his own, two parallel lines of longing that refuse to converge, two doors that refuse to open, two hearts that have been beating against the same wall for so long that they have forgotten what it feels like to rest. The glass door is cold against his back now, and the stars are still faint overhead, and somewhere inside the apartment Jisung is laughing and Felix is pouring drinks and Changbin is probably reorganising his skincare products, and life is going on, is always going on, indifferent to the small, private disasters unfolding in its midst.

Then Minho’s gaze finds him through the glass.

It is a small movement, a flicker of attention, but Hyunjin catches it, because he has learned to catch these things, because he and Minho have become fluent in the silent language of co-conspirators. Minho’s face is still carrying the residue of the moment with Chan, the frustration and the longing and the barely suppressed fury, but something shifts when he sees Hyunjin, something that might be recognition or solidarity or simply the relief of not being alone.

Hyunjin, without thinking, without planning, without any conscious decision at all, lifts his hand and points at his ring finger.

It is a stupid gesture. It is an absurd gesture. But Minho understands that Hyunjin is referencing their conversation, their escape plan, their shared joke about running away from all of this and never coming back.

And Minho laughs.

It is not a big laugh, not a dramatic laugh, not the kind of laugh that draws attention or interrupts conversations. It is a small, startled, genuine laugh, the kind that bubbles up from somewhere unexpected and escapes before it can be stopped. It transforms his face, just for a moment, the tension cracking, the mask slipping, the real Minho shining through the layers of performance and frustration and heartbreak. He lifts his own hand, just slightly, a tiny wave, a tiny acknowledgment, a tiny promise that says I see you and I understand and we are in this disaster together.

Hyunjin feels something loosen in his chest, a knot that has been tied too tight for too long finally beginning to ease. The balcony is still cold, and Seungmin is still inside with his carved-on smile, and Chan is still avoiding Minho’s eyes, and nothing has been solved, nothing has been fixed, nothing has changed. But somewhere in the middle of all the mess, there is this: a friend who laughs at his stupid jokes, a co-conspirator who understands his ridiculous references, a person who is just as trapped and just as hopeful and just as foolish as he is.

Hyunjin turns back to the railing and looks up at the stars. They are still faint, still distant, still indifferent to the small, human dramas unfolding beneath them. But they are also still there, still burning, still holding their tiny points of light against the vast, impossible darkness. And Hyunjin thinks, not for the first time and probably not for the last, that maybe that is what hope is: a faint, distant light that refuses to go out, no matter how long the night lasts.

***

The phone rings at two in the morning, and Hyunjin, who has been drifting in the shallow waters of a half-sleep, the kind where dreams and reality blur together, reaches for it automatically. His hand fumbles across the nightstand, knocking over a glass of water that he does not remember leaving there, and the cold shock of it against his fingers jolts him further toward wakefulness.

The screen glows in the darkness of his bedroom, with such brightness that leaves afterimages burned onto the back of his eyelids, and the name that appears on it sends a jolt through his chest like a defibrillator.

Seungmin.

Seungmin never calls this late. Seungmin is the kind of person who goes to bed at reasonable hours and wakes up at reasonable hours and lives his life according to a quiet, internal schedule that he has never felt the need to explain to anyone. Seungmin sends texts that say things like “I’m heading to bed, talk tomorrow” and then actually goes to bed, a level of follow-through that the rest of their friend group finds both admirable and deeply suspicious.

Kim Seungmin does not call at two in the morning.

Hyunjin answers the call, his thumb swiping across the screen before his conscious mind has finished processing the information, because it is Seungmin, because Seungmin never calls this late, because something must be wrong, something must be very wrong, and the thought of Seungmin being wrong somewhere across the city, alone in his apartment, is enough to override every other instinct.

“Hello?” Hyunjin’s voice is rough with sleep, the syllables blurring into each other, and he pushes himself upright against his pillows, his heart beating too fast, his free hand reaching automatically for the lamp on his nightstand. The light clicks on, a warm yellow glow that does nothing to dispel the sudden, sharp clarity of his anxiety. “Seungmin? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

There is a pause. It is not a long pause, not the kind of pause that signals hesitation or evasion, but it is a pause nonetheless, a small, breath-sized gap in the conversation, and in that gap Hyunjin’s imagination runs wild, conjuring car accidents and hospital visits and all the terrible things that can happen to a person in the middle of the night. He is already sitting up in bed, already throwing off the covers, already preparing to pull on whatever clothes are closest and run out into the night like some kind of sleep-deprived knight in shining armour.

And then Seungmin speaks, and his voice is quiet. Raspy. The voice of someone who has been lying awake for a long time and having their own internal debate about whether or not to dial this number.

“Hyunjin-ah,” he says, and the way he says it makes Hyunjin’s chest constrict, a fist closing around his heart. “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Hyunjin’s heart, which had been racing with the panicked urgency of anticipated disaster, stops. It actually stops, a full cardiac arrest in the middle of his darkened bedroom, and then it starts again with a lurch that he can feel in his teeth. He presses the phone harder against his ear, as though proximity will clarify what he’s just heard, as though Seungmin’s words will make more sense if they’re delivered directly into his brain without the interference of speakers and distance.

I just wanted to hear your voice.

The sentence is simple. It’s the kind of thing friends say to each other, the kind of thing anyone might say to anyone they’re close to.

And yet.

And yet Seungmin has never said it before. Seungmin has never called at two in the morning. Seungmin has never admitted to wanting anything from Hyunjin that couldn’t be neatly categorised as friendship, as casual affection, as the ordinary fondness of two people who have known each other for nine years.

“You wanted to hear my voice,” he repeats, and the words come out flatter than he intended, more disbelieving. “At two in the morning. You just wanted to hear my voice.”

“Is that weird?” Seungmin asks, and there is something in his tone, a vulnerability that Hyunjin has rarely heard from him.

“No,” Hyunjin says, and the word comes out too quickly, too urgently, the verbal equivalent of reaching out to catch something before it falls. Hyunjin lies back down, pulling the covers up to his chin, curling onto his side with the phone pressed to his ear like a lifeline. The darkness of his bedroom is soft and close, the curtains drawn against the streetlight outside, the air cool from the fan that whirs quietly in the corner. “No, it’s not weird. It’s not weird at all. I’m glad you called. I was just surprised. You never call this late. You’re usually asleep by now. You’re the most aggressively well-rested person I know. You once lectured me for twenty minutes about the importance of REM cycles.”

A soft sound comes through the speaker, something that might be a laugh or might be a sigh, something that is too quiet and too tired to be either.

“I know. I couldn’t sleep.” Seungmin pauses, and Hyunjin hears the faint rustle of fabric, the sound of Seungmin shifting in his own bed, in his own dark room, on the other side of the city. Hyunjin knows Seungmin’s bedroom almost as well as he knows his own. He knows the navy blue sheets and the stack of books on the nightstand and the small, framed photograph of the two of them from university, the one where they are both laughing at something off-camera, their faces young and unguarded and full of a hope that Hyunjin had not yet learned to be afraid of. He wonders if Seungmin is looking at that photograph now. He wonders if Seungmin ever looks at it. He wonders if Seungmin keeps it there as a decoration or as a reminder or as a question he has not yet figured out how to ask. “I had a weird dream. Woke up around one and couldn’t fall back asleep. My brain wouldn’t shut up. So I called you.”

 “What was the dream about?” Hyunjin asks, and he tries to keep his voice casual, tries to sound like a friend asking a normal question instead of a man who is desperately, pathetically hungry for any scrap of information about what goes on inside Seungmin’s head.

The pause that follows is long, longer than it should be for a simple question about a dream. Hyunjin counts the seconds, a habit he developed in university when he was trying to teach himself patience, trying to learn how to wait for things he wanted desperately and could not have. One, two, three. The silence stretches. Four, five, six. Hyunjin can hear Seungmin breathing, a soft, uneven rhythm. Seven, eight.

“I don’t really remember,” Seungmin says finally, and his voice is careful now, too careful, the voice of someone who is choosing not to remember rather than someone who genuinely cannot. “It was jumbled. You know how dreams are. They don’t make sense when you try to explain them.” Another pause, shorter this time. “But you were in it.”

Hyunjin closes his eyes. You were in it. Seungmin had a dream, a weird dream, a jumbled dream that he claims he does not remember, and Hyunjin was in it. And instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, instead of dismissing the dream as a random synaptic misfire, Seungmin called him. At two in the morning. Because he wanted to hear his voice.

“I’m flattered,” Hyunjin says, and he means it as a joke, a lighthearted deflection, but it comes out softer than he intended, more sincere. “Were my dream-self’s contributions at least interesting?”

“Your dream-self was very annoying,” Seungmin says, and there is a ghost of his usual dry humour in the words, a flicker of the familiar rhythm of their banter. “Kept interrupting me. Wouldn’t let me finish a sentence.”

 “Well,” Hyunjin says. “I’m here now. If you want to talk without me interrupting. About the dream, or about anything else. Or if you just want to not talk and listen to me ramble about nothing until you fall asleep. I can do that. I’m very good at rambling.”

Seungmin laughs, a soft, surprised sound that crackles through the speaker. “I know. I’ve been on the receiving end of your rambling for nine years.”

And just like that, the tension breaks. The rubber band releases, snapping back into something easier, something familiar.

“Tell me about the cat,” Hyunjin says. “The stray. The one you have been feeding. Has it let you pet it yet?”

So they talk about the stray cat. It is a small grey thing with one torn ear and eyes the colour of old copper, and it has been visiting Seungmin’s building for three weeks now, appearing at the back door every evening with the punctuality of a dinner guest who has memorised the schedule. Seungmin has been feeding it tins of tuna and talking to it in a low and gentle voice, and it has not let him pet it yet, but it has stopped running away when he opens the door, which Seungmin considers progress.

“It sits on the step and watches me,” he says, and his voice is soft, softer than it has been all night, softer than Hyunjin has ever heard it. “It does not trust me yet. But it is thinking about it. I can tell.”

“It will trust you,” Hyunjin says. “You are the most trustworthy person I know. If I were a stray cat, I would let you pet me immediately. On the first day. I would walk right up to you and put my head in your hand.” He means it as a joke, but it does not come out like a joke, comes out instead like something else, something that hovers in the space between humour and confession and refuses to commit to either. “You should name it. If you name it, it’s officially yours. That’s the rule.”

“I’m not keeping it. My building doesn’t allow pets.”

“Your building doesn’t allow pets that live inside. An outdoor cat is different. It’s not a pet. It’s a neighbour. A furry neighbour who you happen to feed and care for and probably love more than most of your actual neighbours.”

Seungmin laughs, a soft, tired laugh, the kind of laugh that happens when you are too exhausted to resist the humour of a situation. “I’ll think about it. Maybe I’ll name it after you.”

“You can’t name a cat after me. I’m not a cat. I’m a person.”

“You’re both dramatic and you both expect to be fed on a regular schedule. I’m not seeing a significant difference.”

Hyunjin makes an indignant noise, a splutter of protest that is only partly performative, and Seungmin laughs again, and the sound is so warm, so familiar, so painfully dear, that Hyunjin has to press his hand against his chest to keep his heart from escaping.

And then they talk for an hour more. It is the kind of conversation that has no structure, no purpose, no agenda, the kind of conversation that meanders from topic to topic like a river finding its way downstream, unhurried and unforced.

They talk about a drama they are both watching, a historical romance that Hyunjin has been live-texting Seungmin about for weeks, his commentary growing increasingly unhinged as the plot has spiralled into increasingly improbable territory.

“The male lead is supposedly a genius strategist,” Hyunjin says, “but he just walked into an obvious trap that I, a person with no military training whatsoever, saw coming from three episodes away. I’m losing respect for him. I’m losing respect for the writers. I’m losing respect for the entire Joseon dynasty.”

“You have no respect for the Joseon dynasty to begin with,” Seungmin points out, his voice dry but warm, the familiar, affectionate sarcasm that Hyunjin has been cataloguing for nearly a decade. “You once asked me if King Sejong was the one who invented ramen.”

“That was a joke. I was joking. You have no faith in me.”

“I have infinite faith in you. I just also have an accurate memory of the things you’ve said.”

They talk about Changbin’s terrible new haircut, the one he got last week at a barbershop near his gym, the one that makes him look, according to Jisung, “like a very muscular mushroom.” Hyunjin has not yet had the courage to say anything about it to Changbin’s face, because Changbin is sensitive about his hair in a way that he is not sensitive about anything else, and also because Changbin could probably bench press Hyunjin without breaking a sweat. Seungmin, who has no such fears and considerably less tact, apparently told Changbin directly that the haircut was “a choice,” a comment that Changbin has still not forgiven him for.

“He’s been sending me passive-aggressive memes about betrayal,” Seungmin says, and there is a hint of genuine regret in his voice, regret of someone who knows he was right but also knows he should have been kinder. “I didn’t think it was that bad. I was just being honest.”

“Honesty is not always the best policy,” Hyunjin says. “Sometimes the best policy is lying. Lying is the foundation of civilisation. If everyone told the truth all the time, we’d all have killed each other by now.”

They talk for a while longer, circling back to the drama and the haircut and the cat, filling the space between them with words that mean nothing and everything, and neither of them mentions Minho. Not once. Seungmin doesn’t ask how things are going with Minho. Hyunjin doesn’t offer any updates.

When Seungmin finally says goodnight, his voice is softer than Hyunjin has ever heard it. “Goodnight, Hyunjin-ah,” he says, and the way he says Hyunjin’s name is different, is new, is something Hyunjin has never heard before. Seungmin says his name like it hurts him. Like it’s a bruise he can’t stop pressing on. He says it like it is the most important word in the world and also the most dangerous.

“Goodnight, Seungmin-ah,” Hyunjin says, and his voice is steady, which surprises him. “Try to sleep. And dream of less annoying people next time.”

Seungmin laughs, a small, tired sound that is more breath than laughter. “I’ll try. No promises.”

The line goes dead, and Hyunjin lies in the darkness with his phone clutched to his chest, warm against his skin, the silence of his bedroom rushing back in to fill the space where Seungmin’s voice had been.

He does not sleep. He cannot sleep. His mind is too full, too loud, too busy replaying the conversation over and over again.

Seungmin called him at two in the morning. Seungmin said he wanted to hear his voice. Seungmin dreamed about him. Seungmin talked to him for an hour about cats and haircuts and terrible television dramas, and not once did he mention Minho, not once did he ask about the relationship he’s supposed to be so supportive of. And then Seungmin said his name like it hurt him.

It’s not proof. Hyunjin knows it’s not proof. It’s just words, just a phone call, just the kind of thing that friends do all the time. Friends call each other late at night. Friends say they want to hear each other’s voices. Friends dream about each other and don’t remember the details. There are a thousand innocent explanations for everything that just happened, a thousand ways to dismiss the hope that is blooming in Hyunjin’s chest like a flower forcing its way through cracked concrete.

Outside his window, the sky is beginning to lighten, the deep black of night softening into the grey of early morning. The streetlights are still on, but they look paler now, fainter, their glow overpowered by the slow, inevitable approach of dawn.

The phone is still warm against his chest, the call log showing the duration of their conversation: one hour, seven minutes, and thirty-two seconds. Hyunjin stares at the numbers until they blur, and then he closes his eyes, and then he waits for the morning, and then he hopes, helplessly, hopelessly, the way he has been hoping for nine years, that this time, finally, something will be different.

***

The noraebang is the kind of establishment that has no business being as fun as it is, a basement-level warren of mirrored hallways and soundproofed rooms. The room the group has claimed is at the end of the corridor, the largest one available, which is still not large enough to comfortably contain eight grown adults and their combined chaotic energy but which the management has assured them is perfectly adequate for parties of up to twelve, a claim that Hyunjin now understands was wildly optimistic. The disco ball in the centre of the ceiling spins lazily, casting fragments of coloured light across the walls and the faces of his friends, and the tambourines that came with the room are already being deployed with an enthusiasm that borders on weaponisation.

Felix is in the middle of a ballad, the kind of sweeping, emotionally devastating love song that requires the singer to close their eyes during the high notes and clutch the microphone with both hands as if it is the only thing keeping them tethered to the earth. His voice is surprisingly good, the kind of good that makes you wonder why he does not sing more often, and he is delivering the lyrics with the theatrical sincerity of a man who has lived every word of the song despite Hyunjin knowing for a fact that Felix has not experienced romantic tragedy in at least three years.

Jisung is on the floor, because Jisung is always on the floor, providing backup harmonies from a position that appears to be approximately half yoga pose and half emotional collapse, his head tipped back against the vinyl cushion of the bench seat, his eyes closed in what might be musical ecstasy or might be the early stages of beer-induced unconsciousness.

Hyunjin has his phone out, because Hyunjin always has his phone out at gatherings like this. His camera roll is a sprawling, disorganised museum of their friendship, thousands of photos spanning years of barbecues and birthday parties and nights exactly like this one, blurred shots of Jisung mid-laugh and Felix mid-dance and Changbin mid-bite of whatever food he is currently demolishing.

He snaps a candid of Minho.

Minho is laughing at something Changbin said, his head thrown back, his mouth open, his eyes crinkled at the corners in a way that makes him look younger, softer, more like the boy Hyunjin met years ago and less like the sharp-edged, scheming, emotionally constipated man he has grown into. The disco light catches his face at the perfect angle, painting his skin in shades of blue and pink, and the photo is good.

Hyunjin stares at it for a moment, at the softness in Minho’s expression, the boyish joy that he so rarely lets anyone see, and feels a surge of affection for his co-conspirator, his fake boyfriend, his friend who is just as lost and just as stubborn and just as hopelessly in love as he is.

“Hey,” he says, leaning over to show Minho the screen. “Look. I caught you being human. I’m going to start charging you for these. You’re the most photogenic person I know when you’re not trying.”

Minho takes the phone, and his expression does something complicated. The laughter fades, replaced by something softer, something almost sad, a flicker of an emotion that Hyunjin cannot quite name before it is smoothed away, packed back into whatever internal compartment Minho stores his feelings in. He looks at the photo for a long moment, the coloured lights from the disco ball sliding across his face, and when he hands the phone back his voice is steady, carefully casual, the voice of someone who is trying very hard to sound like they are not affected.

“You take good pictures of me,” Minho says, handing the phone back. “I didn’t know you had actual talent. I thought the painting thing was a fluke.”

“It’s not hard,” Hyunjin says, pocketing the phone. “When the subject is photogenic.”

“Yes, thank you, I’m very photogenic.”

“It’s genetic. You can’t take credit for it.”

“I can take credit for everything. I’m Lee Minho.”

“That’s not how credit works.”

“That’s exactly how credit works. I’m the one who decided to be born with this face. It was a very deliberate choice on my part.”

“Actually, I forgot to mention, that the photos are only good when you’re not making a weird face. This part is crucial. You make a lot of weird faces.”

“I do not make weird faces. My face is a masterpiece of controlled expression.”

“Yeah, right. Your face right now is doing something that I can’t even describe. It’s very expressive. Very controlled.”

Minho swats at him, and Hyunjin ducks, laughing, and for a moment they’re just two friends bantering the way they always do. The performance, the fake relationship, the elaborate scaffolding of lies they’ve built around themselves, all of it recedes into the background, and they’re just Minho and Hyunjin, bickering in a noraebang while Felix hits a high note that rattles the speakers. It’s nice. It’s almost normal.

And then Minho glances across the room.

Chan is standing by the song catalogue, his back half-turned to the chaos, flipping through the laminated pages with the unhurried focus of someone who has no intention of actually selecting a song. The disco lights catch the curve of his jaw, the slope of his shoulders, the way his hair curls slightly at the nape of his neck where it’s starting to grow out. He looks, Hyunjin thinks, like a man who is trying very hard to appear occupied, to appear normal, to appear anything other than what he is.

Minho’s voice drops. It’s barely a murmur, barely loud enough for Hyunjin to hear over Felix’s singing and Jisung’s harmonies and the distant thump of bass from the room next door.

“He used to take photos of me like that,” Minho says. “Back in university. Candid ones. When I wasn’t looking. I never knew he was doing it. He never showed them to me. But I saw them once, on his laptop, when he asked me to fix something. He’d left a folder open.” Minho pauses. The disco light spins, scattering blue across his face, then pink, then green. “A whole folder. Labelled with my name. I never said I know about it. And he never mentioned it either. For all I know, that folder is still there. For all I know, he’s still adding to it.”

“Hyung,” Hyunjin says, and he doesn’t know what else to say, doesn’t know how to process the image of Chan, years ago, quietly collecting photographs of Minho like pressed flowers, like evidence, like a secret he was keeping even from himself.

Minho catches himself. The mask slides back into place, smooth and seamless, the way it always does. He laughs again, but this time it’s the performance laugh, the deflection laugh, the laugh that means the conversation is over and the vulnerability has been sealed back up behind its walls. “Anyway,” he says, and he’s already standing, already reaching for the tambourine on the table. “Ancient history. Felix needs accompaniment, and I’m the only one here with any sense of rhythm.”

He joins Felix at the front of the room, tambourine in hand, shaking it with the enthusiasm of someone who has never had a single sincere emotion in his life. Felix beams at him and launches into the chorus with renewed vigour, and just like that, the moment is over, and Minho is performing again, and no one else in the room has noticed a thing.

Chan is no longer looking at the song catalogue. Chan is looking at Minho. His expression is naked, unguarded, stripped of all the careful neutrality and the aggressive supportiveness and the deflections that he has been wielding like weapons for weeks. He is looking at Minho the way a person looks at the ocean, the way a person looks at the stars, the way a person looks at something vast and beautiful and terrifying and completely, utterly out of reach.

Hyunjin has to look away, because looking at Chan right now feels like intruding on something private, something that was never meant to be seen.

The songs get progressively more unhinged, the kind of unhinged that can only be achieved by a group of people who have known each other long enough to abandon all pretense of dignity. Changbin delivers a rap verse with such aggressive sincerity that Felix falls off the bench laughing, and Jeongin, who has been quietly observing all evening, finally takes the microphone for a rendition of a trot song that he performs with the deadpan solemnity of a funeral dirge, which somehow makes it the funniest thing that has happened all night.

And then Jisung, emboldened by alcohol and a general disregard for social norms that has only intensified over the course of the evening, points a wobbly finger at Minho and Hyunjin. His aim is questionable. His intent is not.

“Couple song!” he announces, his voice carrying the particular authority of someone who has decided something is true and will not be convinced otherwise. “You have to do a couple song. It’s the rule. I just made it up, but it’s the rule. It’s a very important rule. It’s the most important rule. Changbin, back me up.”

“I’m not backing you up,” Changbin says, still breathing heavily from his rap performance. “You’re drunk.”

“I’m inspired,” Jisung corrects. “Minho-hyung, Hyunjin, couple song. Now. The people demand it.” He gestures broadly at the room, which consists of the eightof them and no one else. “Look at the people. They’re chanting.”

Felix, sweet, suggestible Felix, begins to clap. “Cou-ple song! Cou-ple song!” The chant is taken up by Changbin, who has apparently decided that if he can’t beat Jisung he might as well join him, and then by Jeongin, who contributes a single, sardonic “woo” that somehow conveys more judgement than a ten-minute lecture.

Minho raises an eyebrow, the picture of composure, as if he has not been drinking steadily for the past two hours, as if he is not currently sitting close enough to Hyunjin that their shoulders are touching and their thighs are pressed together and the warmth of his body is a steady, grounding presence. “We don’t have a couple song.”

“Then pick one!” Jisung is relentless, a force of nature, a small, determined hurricane in an oversized hoodie. “Improvise! Show us your chemistry!”

Hyunjin looks at Minho with genuine panic. They have not prepared for this. There is no script, no choreography, no carefully constructed backstory to fall back on. They have been faking a relationship for weeks, and in all that time, they have never once discussed what their song would be.

Minho, however, is a creature of chaos. He has always been one, thriving under pressure, flourishing in the unexpected, treating every curveball as an opportunity to swing harder. His expression shifts from scepticism to something else, something darker and more playful, the glint in his eye that Hyunjin has learned to recognise as the precursor to a very bad idea. He grabs Hyunjin’s hand and pulls him up from the bench with a grip that is surprisingly strong, surprisingly sure.

“Fine,” he says, and his voice carries over the chanting, cutting through the noise. “You want a couple song? We’ll give you a couple song.”

He cues up the track before Hyunjin can protest, before Hyunjin can even process what is happening, the opening notes of “Trouble Maker” fill the room, that familiar, sultry whistle, and Hyunjin’s brain short-circuits.

Of all the songs Minho could have chosen, of all the couple songs in the vast catalogue of Korean popular music, he has chosen the one that is essentially three and a half minutes of barely contained sexual tension set to a beat, complete with choreography that is famous specifically for its almost-kiss. It is a choice. It is an insane choice. It is, Hyunjin realises as Minho pulls him into position with the smooth confidence of a professional dancer who has been performing for his entire adult life, the most Minho choice possible.

And then they’re performing. Minho takes the lead, his body moving with the fluid precision of muscle memory and innate talent. Hyunjin, who also knows this choreography, who has watched the music video an embarrassing number of times in the privacy of his own bedroom, falls into step beside him. The muscle memory kicks in. They move together with a synchronicity that they haven’t earned, and the room erupts in whoops and hollers that feel distant and unreal.

The almost-kiss, of course, is the highlight of the whole performance. The group is hollering, whistling, Jisung screaming something that might be encouragement or might be shock.

The song ends. Hyunjin collapses back onto the seat, his heart pounding, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts. Minho lands beside him with the satisfied smirk of a man who has just proven a point, though what point he was proving remains unclear. The group is still cheering, the noise a wall of sound that Hyunjin lets wash over him without really hearing it.

“You’re insane,” Hyunjin gasps. “You’re actually insane. You need to be studied.”

“I’ve been told,” Minho says, and he’s not even out of breath, which is infuriating. “But you have to admit, that was good. That was very good. Jisung’s not going to be able to look us in the eye for a week.”

“I’m not going to be able to look myself in the eye for a week.”

It is Seungmin’s turn next. Jisung, still riding the high of his successful coercion, tries to demand another couple song, but Seungmin silences him with a look, a single, flat glance that contains more authority than anything Jisung has ever managed in his life. “I’m picking my own song,” Seungmin says, and his voice is calm, controlled, the voice of someone who has made a decision and will not be moved from it. “No requests.”

He picks a song that Hyunjin recognises immediately. The opening notes of Colde’s “War-r-r” fill the room, and Hyunjin’s heart clenches in his chest. He knows this song. He loves this song. He has listened to it a hundred times, late at night, alone in his apartment, letting the melancholy wash over him like a tide.

It’s not a love song. It’s not a breakup song either. It’s something in between, something that exists in the grey space where love and pain and longing all blur together until they’re indistinguishable.

Seungmin’s voice is beautiful. It has always been beautiful, clear and controlled and full of an emotion that he rarely allows to surface in his speaking voice. He sings with his eyes fixed on the screen, the lyrics scrolling past in bright, unforgiving letters, and he does not look at Hyunjin. Not once.

But Hyunjin sees, with a clarity that feels like being doused in cold water, that Seungmin’s hands are shaking on the microphone.

Then, halfway through the song, a second voice joins in.

Chan, who has been standing by the machine, who has been watching Seungmin with an expression of quiet, knowing sympathy, picks up the spare microphone and begins to sing the harmony.

It is a rescue mission disguised as participation, a way of supporting Seungmin without drawing attention to the fact that Seungmin needs support, and it is so typical of Chan, so utterly, quintessentially Chan, that Hyunjin feels a sudden, unexpected surge of affection for him.

Chan looks at Minho as he sings. It is not a glance, not a flicker, but a steady, deliberate gaze, the kind of look that means something, the kind of look that is a message delivered in a language that only two people understand. His smile is soft and sad, a small, wistful curve of his mouth, and his voice weaves through the melody like a thread through fabric, binding the song together, binding the room together, binding all four of them together in a strange, dissonant quartet.

The song ends. The final note fades into silence, and for a moment, no one speaks. The disco light spins, scattering blue and pink and green across the quiet room, and the weight of what just happened settles over them like a blanket, heavy and warm and slightly suffocating.

Then Jeongin’s voice cuts through. “Wow,” he says, flat and deadpan, from his corner of the room. “That was somehow both the best and worst thing I’ve ever witnessed.”

Jisung is looking between Minho, Hyunjin, Seungmin, and Chan with the dawning, confused horror of someone who has just realised that something significant happened and is not sure what it was. “Wait,” he says, his voice rising with each word. “Wait. What just happened? Was that weird? That felt weird. Felix, was that weird?”

Felix, sweet, perceptive Felix, who has been watching the entire evening with the quiet attention of someone who notices everything and says very little, reaches over and pats Jisung’s arm with a gentleness that is almost maternal. “I think,” he says, very quietly, “we should pick a different song now.”

The evening continues, because evenings like this always continue, because the only way out of an awkward moment is through it, because the soju is still flowing and the tambourines are still available and the night is still young enough to be salvaged.

Jisung cues up an energetic dance track, something loud and bright and utterly devoid of emotional subtext, and Felix pulls Changbin up to dance, and the tension in the room dissipates like fog burning off in the morning sun.

But Hyunjin does not stop thinking about Seungmin’s shaking hands. He does not stop thinking about Chan’s voice blending with Seungmin’s. He does not stop thinking about the way Minho looked when he said “he used to take photos of me like that,” the way his voice dropped, the way his fingers tightened on the tambourine. He does not stop thinking about any of it, and he suspects he will not stop thinking about it for a very long time.

After karaoke, the group spills onto the street like a wave breaking against a shore, loud and uncoordinated, their voices echoing off the buildings and startling a cat that has been sleeping in a nearby doorway. The cold night air is a shock after the stuffy, soju-warmed confines of the noraebang, and Hyunjin feels it hit his face like a slap, a sudden, bracing clarity that cuts through the pleasant haze of alcohol. The street is mostly empty, the shops closed, the neon signs flickering in that particular way they do in the small hours of the morning, when the city is holding its breath and waiting for dawn.

Someone suggests a convenience store run, because someone always suggests a convenience store run at this stage of the evening, and the group migrates en masse towards the glowing white beacon of the GS25 on the corner.

The fluorescent lights are blinding after the dim, disco-lit cave they have just left, and Hyunjin blinks against the sudden brightness, his eyes watering slightly. The store is a liminal space, a waypoint between the night they have just had and the morning that is waiting for them, and the group scatters among the aisles like seeds tossed from a hand, each person following their own hungers.

Changbin and Jisung make a beeline for the ramen selection, their heads bent together in intense consultation. Felix drifts towards the refrigerated section, his fingers trailing over the rows of drinks, his brow furrowed in concentration. Jeongin, ever efficient, has already acquired a melon ice cream bar and is heading for the checkout, his mission complete, his priorities clear.

Hyunjin finds Seungmin in the snack aisle.

The aisle is narrow and bright and lined with an overwhelming variety of chips, puffs, and crackers, a wall of sodium and carbohydrates that stretches from floor to ceiling. Seungmin is standing in front of this wall with the intensity of a man making a life-altering decision, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slightly hunched and his gaze fixed on the bags of crackers as though they might offer him some kind of guidance. He does not turn when Hyunjin approaches, but his posture shifts almost imperceptibly, and Hyunjin knows that he has been noticed.

“Hey,” Hyunjin says, soft, the word a small offering placed on the altar of the fluorescent lights.

Seungmin does not turn. He is still staring at the chips, still performing the role of a man who is deeply invested in his snacking options.

“You do not have a couple song,” he says, and his voice is flat, controlled, the voice of someone delivering a factual observation rather than an emotional one. “That is the first thing you figure out. When you are dating someone. You find a song. It is, like, the most basic thing.” He gestures vaguely at the wall of chips, as though the hierarchy of relationship milestones is somehow connected to the price of onion rings. “You have been dating for weeks. And you do not have a song.”

Hyunjin swallows. The soju is still humming in his veins, a low and persistent buzz that makes everything feel slightly unreal, slightly underwater, and he is not sure if this conversation is actually happening or if it is a strange and vivid dream that he will wake up from in a few hours.

“We have not gotten around to it,” he says, and the words sound weak even to his own ears. “It is still new. We are figuring things out.”

Seungmin finally looks at him. The movement is slow, deliberate, the turning of a page that might reveal something neither of them is ready to read. His face is tired, the sharp edges softened by alcohol and something sadder, something that lives in the shadows under his eyes and the slight downturn of his mouth. He looks at Hyunjin, and for a moment his expression is unguarded, the mask slipped, the careful neutrality replaced by something raw and honest and almost unbearable to witness.

“I would have picked one for us,” Seungmin says, and his voice is quiet, barely above a murmur, the voice of someone confessing something they’ve been holding onto for too long. “If it were me. If we were—” He blinks, and something flickers across his face, a micro-expression of regret, of horror at what he’s just admitted. “I mean. Never mind. Forget I said that. Forget it. I’m drunk. And tired. Forget it.”

He grabs a random bag of crisps from the shelf, a flavour that Hyunjin knows he doesn’t even like, and walks away. His footsteps are quick and deliberate on the linoleum floor, the footsteps of someone who is fleeing the scene of a confession they never meant to make, and Hyunjin is left frozen in the snack aisle, his heart pounding so hard he can feel it in his temples.

I would have picked one for us. Not some hypothetical future relationship. Us. The word is a grenade with the pin pulled, and Hyunjin is holding it, and he has no idea if it is going to explode or if it is already too late.

The bag of crisps that Seungmin was staring at, the one he almost picked up, the one his hand had hovered over for a moment too long, is Hyunjin’s favourite. The one Seungmin always keeps stocked in his apartment, even though he doesn’t eat them himself.

Meanwhile, by the instant coffee, Minho finds Chan.

Chan is standing in front of the small, unassuming shelf of canned coffee, holding two cans of cold brew, one in each hand, staring at them with the blank, unfocused expression of someone who has forgotten what he came here for and is trying to remember. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, a faint, electric hum, and the refrigerated case beside him hums in harmony, a duet of artificial sounds that fills the silence between them.

“You sang to me,” Minho says.

Chan doesn’t deny it. He does not deflect, does not make a joke, does not retreat behind the mask of supportive friendship that he has been wearing like armour for weeks. But he doesn’t look up from the cans, his grip on them tightens slightly, his knuckles whitening against the aluminium.

“It was a good song,” he says, and his voice is quiet, almost defensive, the voice of someone who has been caught doing something they can’t explain. “Seungmin picked a good song. I just… joined in. That’s all.”

“Chan.” Minho’s voice is sharp, sharper than he intended, sharp enough to cut through the careful neutrality that Chan is trying to maintain. “Hyung. Look at me.”

Chan doesn’t look at him.

“Chan.”

Minho does not know what he is asking for. He does not know what he wants Chan to say. He only knows that he cannot keep doing this, cannot keep living in the space between what he knows and what Chan will admit, cannot keep performing a fake relationship while the real one he wants is standing in front of him holding two cans of cold brew and refusing to meet his eyes.

“Minho.” Chan finally looks up, and his eyes meet Minho’s, and the moment stretches between them, elastic and unbearable, full of everything they have never said.

Someone in the next aisle knocks over a display of crackers with a crash that echoes through the store, followed by Jisung’s voice shouting, “That was Changbin-hyung, not me, I swear, Changbin-hyung did it.”

Changbin’s indignant response is muffled by distance and shelving.

The cashier at the front counter sighs audibly.

The moment passes. Chan looks away, looks down at the cans in his hands, and the door swings shut again, leaving Minho standing in the coffee aisle with his arms still crossed and his heart still pounding and the taste of an almost-confession bitter on his tongue.

At the checkout counter, Jeongin is paying for his melon ice cream bar. He has watched Minho emerge from one aisle looking vaguely shell-shocked, and Hyunjin emerge from another looking like he has just seen a ghost, and Chan follow a moment later with two cans of cold brew and the thousand-yard stare of a man who has been through a war and lost. Seungmin is already outside, visible through the glass door, standing on the pavement with an unopened bag of chips in his hand and his face tilted up toward the featureless night sky.

Jeongin unwraps his ice cream bar. The packaging crinkles, loud in the quiet of the checkout line. He takes a bite, the green melon flavour cold and sweet on his tongue, and looks at the scattered, emotionally compromised hyungs gathering at the front of the store like survivors of a shipwreck.

“You know,” he says, to absolutely no one in particular, “I’m the youngest. The maknae. I’m supposed to be the messy one. I’m supposed to be the one who doesn’t have their life together, who makes terrible decisions, who causes chaos and then looks cute while everyone forgives me. And yet.”

He takes another bite of his ice cream. The melon flavour is artificial and perfect and entirely satisfying. Minho stares at the floor. Hyunjin stares at the ceiling. Chan stares at the cashier, who is politely pretending not to notice any of this.

“And yet,” Jeongin repeats, and he does not elaborate. He just walks out into the night. The automatic doors slide open and then shut behind him, and the cool air of the convenience store settles back into its usual hum. Behind him, the chaos continues, but Jeongin is already gone, a silent, knowing fox leaving destruction in his wake.

***

The call from Minho’s cousin comes at seven thirty in the morning on a Saturday, which is the kind of hour that should be illegal for non-emergency communication, but which parents of small children apparently consider the middle of the working day. It is an ungodly hour for anyone and a particularly ungodly hour for Minho, who has built his entire life around the principle that nothing good happens before ten.

His cousin’s voice is harried and apologetic, the voice of a woman who has been awake since four in the morning with a toddler who has decided that sleep is a capitalist construct and is staging a one-child rebellion against it. The babysitter has cancelled. The backup babysitter has also cancelled. There is a work emergency, the kind that could not be ignored or rescheduled or handled remotely, and she is out of options, out of favours, out of the particular kind of energy that parents seem to manufacture from thin air and also run out of at the worst possible moments. Could Minho possibly, maybe, if he is not too busy, watch Minjun for the day?

Minho says yes before he is fully awake, because he always says yes to Minjun.

Minjun, with his round cheeks and his sticky fingers and his inexplicable conviction that uncle Minho is the most interesting person in the entire world. Minjun, who had once told Minho, with the absolute sincerity that only a three-year-old can muster, that he wanted to be a cat when he grew up so he could live with uncle Minho and Soonie and Doongie and Dori forever. Minho had pretended to be allergic to the sentiment, had made some dry comment about the impracticalities of feline existence, but he had thought about it for weeks afterward, the image of a small, earnest face declaring its intention to transform species for the sake of proximity. He has been, he sometimes thinks, a lost cause since the moment the child was born.

Minjun arrives at nine in the morning, bundled in a yellow jacket and clutching a stuffed bunny named something unpronounceable that Minho has learned to simply call “the bunny” to avoid the toddler fury that comes with mispronunciation. His cousin deposits him with a flurry of instructions and apologies and a bag of supplies that appears to contain everything a small human could possibly need for a twelve-hour period, including but not limited to three changes of clothes, a variety of snacks with varying degrees of nutritional value, and a small, battered children’s book. Then she is gone, and Minho is alone with a four-year-old, and the quiet, empty Saturday he had imagined dissolves like morning mist.

The first hour is fine.

Minho, who despite his inherent menace and his carefully cultivated reputation as a man of chaos, is genuinely good with children. He has always been good with kids, a fact that surprises people who know him only as the sharp-tongued, scheming, emotionally constipated dance instructor with three cats and a fake boyfriend. Children like him. Cats like him. There is a pattern here, something about small, unguarded creatures responding to something in him that is also small and unguarded, something that he keeps hidden beneath layers of sarcasm and strategy.

Minjun is a delightful child, charming and curious and possessed of an imagination that is frankly intimidating, but he is also a four-year-old, which means he has the energy of a caffeinated hummingbird and the attention span of a goldfish with a head injury.

He has been in the apartment for approximately forty-five minutes and has already managed to relocate every cushion from the sofa to the floor, attempt to befriend Dori, and ask Minho roughly three hundred questions, most of which begin with “why” and none of which have easy answers.

“Why is your cat looking at me like that?” Minjun asks, pointing at Soonie, who is perched on the cat tower with the expression of a monarch who has been gravely insulted.

“He’s not looking at you like anything,” Minho says, attempting to extract a cushion from underneath the coffee table. “That’s just her face. She has resting judgement face. It’s a medical condition.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a cat. Cats are born judgemental. It’s evolution.”

Minjun considers this with the solemn intensity of a philosopher. “Why?”

By eleven o’clock, Soonie, Doongie, and Dori have retreated to the highest platform of the cat tower, their eyes tracking Minjun’s movements with the wary, unblinking focus of gazelles watching a lion circle the herd. By half past eleven, Minjun has asked “why” another three hundred times, and Minho has run out of answers that are both truthful and age-appropriate.

By noon, he has accepted defeat and sent a message to the group chat, a single, desperate flare launched into the void: “Emergency babysitting situation. Minjun is winning. Send reinforcements.”

The responses come in rapid succession, a cascade of excuses and apologies. Felix is working a double shift at the café. Changbin is fighting against a deadline. Jisung, apparently, is “busy,” a claim that Minho finds deeply suspicious but does not have the energy to investigate. Seungmin is visiting his parents. Hyunjin is at an art supply store across the city, a pilgrimage that Minho knows from experience cannot be interrupted once it has begun. Jeongin responds with a series of emojis that Minho cannot interpret and does not try to.

And then Chan responds. “I’m free. Give me twenty minutes. Do you need me to bring anything?”

Minho stares at the message for a long moment. Chan. Of course it is Chan. It is always Chan, showing up when Minho needs him, offering help before Minho has to ask, being reliable and steady and infuriatingly wonderful in a way that makes Minho want to shake him and kiss him in equal measure. He types back, “gummy worms. also maybe coffee. for me. not for the kid.” Then he puts his phone down and turns to find Minjun attempting to use Dori as a pillow, an endeavour that Dori is tolerating with the long-suffering patience of a cat who has decided that small humans are a mystery best endured rather than solved.

“Your uncle is a disaster,” Minho tells Minjun, who is now trying to build a tower out of cat toys. “A complete, catastrophic disaster. You should know this about him early, so you’re not disappointed later.”

“Why?” Minjun asks, not looking up from his tower.

“That,” Minho says, “is an excellent question.”

Chan arrives in eighteen minutes, which is two minutes earlier than promised and which is the most Chan thing imaginable. He is holding a bag of gummy worms and cup of takeout coffee in one hand and a plastic dinosaur in the other, a small green triceratops that he must have stopped to buy on the way, and his face is slightly flushed from hurrying.

“I am sorry I am late,” he says, even though he is not late, even though he is early, even though he has clearly sprinted from his car to the front door and is still slightly out of breath. “I stopped for the dinosaur. There was a queue at the shop. Some kind of promotion on trading cards. I did not understand it.”

Minho takes the gummy worms and the dinosaur and the apology and the coffee and files all of them in the cabinet of his heart labelled “Reasons I Am Pathetically in Love with Bang Chan.”

“Minjun-ah,” Minho calls, his voice steadier than he feels. “Look who’s here. It’s uncle Chan. He brought you worms.”

Minjun, who has been absorbed in his cat toy tower, looks up and sees Chan and immediately abandons his construction project, scattering cat toys across the floor in a cascade of jingling bells and feathered things. “Uncle Channie!” he shrieks, launching himself across the room with the unerring trajectory of a small, guided missile. Chan catches him with the practiced ease of someone who has done this before, swinging him up into the air and then settling him on his hip, and the sight of it, Chan with a child on his hip and a smile on his face and a smear of something that might be jam on his collar from breakfast, and Minho’s heart does something complicated inside his chest, a kind of gymnastic routine that ends in a dismount of pure, unrequited longing.

Minjun, upon being presented with the triceratops, accepts it with the solemn gravity of a king receiving tribute, and then immediately asks Chan if he knows why the sky is blue.

Chan says, “Because blue is the colour that light wants to be when it grows up,” and Minjun considers this for a moment and then nods, apparently satisfied with this answer in a way he was not satisfied with Minho’s attempt to explain Rayleigh scattering.

And then Minjun asks Minho: “I like uncle Channie. Can we keep him?”

Minho, who has been watching this exchange with an expression that he hopes is neutral and suspects is anything but, swallows the lump that has formed in his throat. “He’s not a stray cat, Minjun. You can’t just keep people.”

“Why?”

“Because people aren’t cats.”

“Why?”

What follows is an afternoon of pure, domestic chaos, the kind of afternoon that feels both endless and fleeting, both exhausting and precious. The kind of chaos that feels less like a disaster and more like a secret glimpse into an alternate universe, a life that Minho has never allowed himself to want and has always wanted anyway.

They build a pillow fort, large and ambitious, with load-bearing cushions and a blanket roof and a designated entrance that Minjun insists on calling the “worm door.” The fort collapses halfway through construction, burying Dori beneath a landslide of pillows and blankets.

“Dori!” Minjun shrieks, half-laughing, half-horrified. “Uncle Minho, Dori was under there! Is he okay? Is he dead?”

“He’s fine,” Minho says, extracting the cat from the blanket pile with the practiced ease of someone who has done this many times before. Dori glares at him with intensity of a creature who is already plotting her revenge. “Cats are very durable. They’re basically liquid. He’s just embarrassed.”

“Why?”

“Because his dignity has been compromised.”

“What’s dignity?”

“It’s the thing cats have that humans don’t,” Chan says, and Minjun nods as though this makes perfect sense, which it probably does, to a four-year-old.

They make a disastrous attempt at baking cookies. The kitchen becomes a war zone. Flour drifts through the air like snow, settling on every available surface, and Minjun manages to get chocolate on his forehead, his elbows, and somehow the back of his neck, a feat of messiness that Minho finds genuinely impressive. At one point, Chan leans over to help Minjun measure the sugar, and when he straightens up, there is a perfect smudge of flour on the tip of his nose, a small, white comma against his skin.

Minho watches him wipe it off, laughing at himself, his head thrown back, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and his heart aches with a longing so profound it feels like a sickness, like a fever, like something that has settled into his bones and will not let go.

This is what he wants. This is what he has always wanted, what he has been too afraid to name, what he has been trying to trick Chan into admitting through a scheme so convoluted it would be funny if it were not so desperate. He wants this. He wants the chaos and the laughter and the quiet moments in between. He wants to build a life with this man, a real life, a life that is not a performance or a scheme or a carefully constructed lie. And the wanting is so big and so overwhelming that he does not know what to do with it except stand in his flour-dusted kitchen and watch Chan laugh and feel himself come apart at the seams.

They go for a walk to the playground next to Minho’s apartment building, because after cookies Minjun is vibrating with a sugar high that needs to be burned off before anyone’s furniture is permanently damaged. The playground is nearly empty, just one other family on the far side of the sandpit, and the October sun is pale and watery, casting long shadows across the grass. Chan pushes Minjun on the swings, his hands gentle on the small of the boy’s back, and Minjun shrieks with delight, his legs pumping, his voice rising higher and higher with each arc of the swing. Minho sits on a nearby bench and watches them, and the image of Chan with a child, their child, is so vivid and so painful that he has to close his eyes against it.

After the playground, they return to the apartment for lunch, a simple meal of rice and vegetables and the last of the cookies for dessert.

Chan does silly, exaggerated voices for story time, and Minjun laughs so hard that he nearly chokes on his cookie, a deep, belly-deep laughter that is the most beautiful sound Minho has ever heard. Chan catches Minho’s eye over the top of the book, and there is something in his expression, something soft and questioning, something that looks almost like hope, and Minho has to look away before he does something stupid, something irreversible, something that will shatter the fragile, precious thing they have built this afternoon.

In the late afternoon, when the sun is beginning to sink towards the horizon and the apartment is filled with the golden, honeyed light of early evening, Minjun finally falls asleep. It happens suddenly, the way it always does with small children, one moment a whirlwind of energy and the next a limp, warm weight, his thumb tucked into his mouth, his stuffed bunny clutched against his chest. They are on the living room floor, a pile of blankets and limbs, the remnants of the pillow fort scattered around them, and Minjun is nestled safely between them, his breathing slow and even, his face peaceful and unguarded in the way that only sleeping children’s faces can be.

The apartment is a disaster zone. There is flour on the kitchen counter and cookie crumbs on the floor and a stack of storybooks piled haphazardly by the couch. Dori is sleeping on the armchair, Soonie is perched on the windowsill, watching the street below, Doongie is curled in a ball on the rug, his tail twitching occasionally in his sleep. The pillows are everywhere and nowhere, scattered across the floor like fallen soldiers, and the blanket that served as the roof of the fort is draped over the back of the couch like a flag of surrender.

The moment feels fragile and huge, a soap bubble balanced on the tip of a finger, a single breath away from either floating or bursting.

Minho cannot take it anymore.

The blankets rustle beneath him, a soft, intimate sound, and Chan looks up from where he is lying on the other side of Minjun, his head propped on his hand, his eyes sleepy and warm, and then he closes them again, fighting his own battle against sleep. His face is perfect. Not perfect in the way that magazines mean perfect, not flawless or airbrushed or impossibly symmetrical, but perfect in the way that home is perfect, in the way that a favourite song is perfect, in the way that something can be exactly what you need at exactly the moment you need it.

Minho leans over the sleeping child and presses his lips to Chan’s.

The kiss is soft and desperate, a question and a confession and a plea all at once. It lasts only a moment, a brief, electric contact, and then Chan’s eyes fly open, his body jerking back, his hand coming up as if to push Minho away and then stopping, hovering in the air between them, uncertain and trembling. “Minho,” he whispers, and his voice is bewildered, lost, the voice of a man who has been woken from a dream and is not sure if he is still dreaming. “Minho, what are you doing?”

“This,” Minho chokes out, and his voice is thick with unshed tears, the tears he has been holding back for weeks, for months, for years, the tears that have been building behind the dam of his composure since the first moment he realised he was in love with Bang Chan and could not find a way out. “This can be us, Channie-hyung. All the time. We can have a family. We can have this, the pillow forts and the burnt cookies and the story time and the flour on your nose and the kid falling asleep between us on the floor. We can have all of it. Just say a damn thing. Or tell me you don’t feel it too, and I’ll stop. I’ll stop pretending. I’ll stop hoping. I’ll stop loving you. Just tell me, and I’ll figure out how to stop.”

The words hang in the air, raw and unpolished, the most honest thing Minho has ever said, and Chan stares at him with wide, glassy eyes, his mouth opening and closing, his expression a battlefield of emotions that Minho cannot read and does not try to.

“But,” Chan says, and his voice is barely a whisper, a fragile, trembling thing. “But you. You and Hyunjin. You’re dating Hyunjin. You’re happy with Hyunjin. I’ve been trying to be supportive. I’ve been trying so hard to be supportive. I thought you’d moved on. I thought I’d missed my chance. I thought I deserved to miss my chance, because I’m not good enough for you, I’ve never been good enough for you, and I thought you’d finally realised that and found someone who was. And I thought if I could just be happy for you, if I could just be a good friend, maybe it would stop hurting. Maybe I could learn to live with it. But it never stopped. It never stopped hurting, Minho. Not for a second.”

Minho closes his eyes. “There is no me and Hyunjin,” he says, and his voice is cracked and broken and somehow still steady, still clear, still finding the words he has needed to say for so long. “There never was. It was fake. The whole thing was fake. I asked him to pretend to date me so you would get jealous and finally admit you had feelings for me. It was a plan. A stupid, desperate, idiotic plan, because I’ve been in love with you for years, Chan, years, and you kept looking at me like I was something precious and then pretending you hadn’t looked at all, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t keep waiting for you to catch up. So I made Hyunjin pretend to be my boyfriend, and I pretended to be happy, and you sent me a playlist with ‘Congratulations’ on it and I wanted to die.”

He laughs, a wet, humourless sound, and opens his eyes. Chan is still staring at him, but something in his expression has shifted, the shock giving way to something else, something that looks almost like hope, something that looks almost like relief. “It was fake? The whole thing? The kissing, the hand-holding, the way you looked at him?”

“Fake,” Minho confirms. “Well. The kissing was fake. We never actually kissed. There was a thumb involved. It was very clever. The hand-holding was real, but it didn’t mean anything. The way I looked at him was acting. I’m a very good actor. I should have been an idol.”

Chan stares at him for another long, breathless moment. And then he laughs. It is not a happy laugh, not quite, not yet. It is a broken, relieved laugh, the laugh of someone who has been holding their breath for years and has finally, finally been allowed to exhale. He reaches across the sleeping child and pulls Minho into a proper kiss, a real kiss, a kiss that is not blocked by a strategically placed thumb, a kiss that is not a performance for an audience of their friends, a kiss that is just the two of them, finally, after all this time, being honest with each other.

“I thought you’d moved on,” Chan murmurs against Minho’s lips, his voice thick and unsteady. “I thought I’d waited too long. I thought I didn’t deserve you, and then you found someone who did, and I had to be okay with it because I wanted you to be happy more than I wanted anything else. I’ve always wanted you to be happy. Even if it wasn’t with me.”

Minho pulls back just far enough to hit him. It is not a hard hit, just a small, sharp smack on the shoulder, the kind of hit that says I love you and you’re an idiot and I can’t believe we’ve been suffering for the same reason this whole time. “Don’t say that,” Minho says, his voice fierce and trembling. “Don’t ever say you don’t deserve me. You’re the best person I know. You’re the best person anyone knows. You’re kind and you’re patient and you’re good with kids and you brought gummy worms to a babysitting emergency and you sing harmonies when people are struggling and you make playlists for your friends even when your heart is breaking. You deserve everything. You deserve me. And I deserve you. And if you ever say otherwise again, I will hit you harder.”

Chan laughs again, a wet, shaky laugh, and pulls Minho back into his arms, and they stay like that for a long time, wrapped around each other on the living room floor, Minjun sleeping peacefully between them, the cats watching from their various perches with the mild, detached interest of creatures who have seen it all before.

They talk until the light fades, their voices low and urgent, figuring out the shape of what they are now, what they have always been, what they are finally allowing themselves to become. Minho tells Chan everything, the whole humiliating, hopeful truth, the years of pining and the gym sessions and the way Chan’s hands felt on his during the bench press and the playlist and the way he almost gave up a hundred times and never did, because he couldn’t, because giving up on Chan was like giving up on breathing, something his body simply would not allow him to do.

Chan tells Minho about the folder. The folder on his laptop, the one labelled with Minho’s name, the one full of candid photos from university, Minho laughing, Minho dancing, Minho asleep on the library couch with his mouth slightly open and his hair in his eyes. “I thought if I couldn’t have you,” Chan says, his voice barely audible, “at least I could have the memory of you. At least I could keep you with me somehow.”

“That’s the creepiest and most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” Minho says, and Chan groans and buries his face in Minho’s shoulder, and Minho holds him, finally, after all this time, allowed to hold him, allowed to keep him.

They talk for hours, or what feels like hours, though it might only be forty minutes, the strange, elastic time of confessions and revelations and the careful construction of something new from the ruins of something old. Minho tells Chan everything, every detail of the fake relationship, every moment of the performance, every night he spent lying awake wondering if the plan was working or if he was just making everything worse. He tells him about Hyunjin, about the nine years of unrequited love, about the Saturday dates and the cancelled Saturday dates and the two-in-the-morning phone call that Hyunjin had never told him about but that he had guessed at anyway, because he knows Hyunjin, because he knows what it looks like when someone is trying very hard not to hope and failing.

Chan listens, and nods, and somewhere in the middle of it his hand finds Minho’s and does not let go. When Minho finishes, when the whole humiliating, hopeful truth is laid out between them like a map of all the ways they have been foolish, Chan is quiet for a moment. Then he says, with the faintest hint of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth, “You pretended to date Hyunjin to make me jealous. You faked an entire relationship. For weeks. You let Jisung make you do a couple song at noraebang. For me.”

“I let Jisung make us do ‘Trouble Maker,’” Minho confirms, and the absurdity of it hits him all over again, the sheer, staggering ridiculousness of the past several weeks. “With choreography. And an almost-kiss.”

“I know. I was there. I nearly swallowed my own tongue.”

“I saw your face during the song. You looked like someone had punched you in the stomach.”

“It was the worst four minutes of my life. Hyunjin’s hands were on you, and I had to just sit there and clap like a supportive friend, and I wanted to die.”

“He’s a very good dancer.”

“He’s an excellent dancer. I’ve never resented anyone’s dance skills more in my life.”

Minjun stirs in his sleep, his small hand reaching out to pat Chan’s arm, and they both fall silent, watching him, this tiny, oblivious witness to the most important conversation of their lives. When he settles again, Chan looks at Minho with an expression that is soft and serious and slightly mischievous, a combination that Minho has learned to be wary of over the years.

“I really don’t want to say it, but you should pretend you’re dating Hyunjin just for a little while more.”

Minho frowns. “Why? I’ve spent weeks pretending to date Hyunjin. I don’t want to pretend anymore. I want to tell everyone. I want to scream it from the rooftop. I want to post it on Instagram with a really obnoxious caption and at least eighty heart emojis.”

“Because the plan might still work,” Chan says, and there is a knowing glint in his eye, the glint of someone who has figured something out and is waiting for everyone else to catch up. “For Seungmin and Hyunjin. If we announce that we’re together now, Hyunjin loses his cover, and Seungmin goes right back to pretending he’s fine when he’s not. But if we wait, if we let the fake relationship run its course a bit longer, the jealousy might actually work on Seungmin the way it was supposed to work on me.”

Minho considers this. He thinks about the noraebang, about Seungmin’s voice shaking on the microphone, about the song he chose and the way he did not look at Hyunjin once during the entire performance. He thinks about the Saturday dates, the cancelled one and all the ones before it, the careful, sacred ritual of their friendship, the way Seungmin has been pulling away, retreating, falling back in the face of Hyunjin’s supposed happiness with someone else.

“How can you be so sure?” Minho asks.

Chan smiles, a slow, gentle smile, the smile of someone who knows something precious and is waiting for the right moment to share it. “Because I know Seungminnie,” he says, pulling Minho closer, his arm warm and solid around Minho’s shoulders. “Better than anyone. I’ve known him since he was a kid, since before any of you met him. I know how he thinks. I know how he feels. I know the way he loves, quietly and stubbornly and all at once, without ever saying a word. He’s fighting the same war we were. He’s just fighting it in his own way.” He presses a kiss to Minho’s temple, a small, tender gesture that makes Minho’s heart ache with the newness of it, the precious, fragile newness of being allowed to receive affection openly, without pretence, without fear. “Give him time. Give them both time. They’ll figure it out.”

Minho looks down at Minjun, still sleeping, still clutching his stuffed bunny, still completely oblivious to the fact that he has spent the afternoon in the company of two people who have just, finally, after years of waiting, found their way to each other. The apartment is still a mess. The flour is still on the counter. The cookies are still slightly burnt. But something has shifted, something fundamental, something that Minho can feel in his bones, a door that has been locked for so long finally swinging open.

“Fine,” he says, and leans into Chan’s warmth, into the solid, steady presence of the man he has loved for so long and is finally, finally allowed to love openly. “We wait. But not too long. I don’t think Hyunjin can take much more of this.”

“Neither can Seungmin,” Chan laughs, a quiet, contented sound. He presses a kiss to the top of Minho’s head, and the gesture is so tender, so domestic, so exactly what Minho has been dreaming about, that he has to close his eyes against the sting of fresh tears. “Give him time. They’ll figure it out. We did, eventually.”

“It took us almost a decade,” Minho points out.

“Better late than never,” Chan says, and Minho can hear the smile in his voice. “Besides, we got there in the end. That’s what matters. Not how long it took, but that we got there.”

Outside the window, the October sun continues its slow descent towards the horizon, painting the sky in shades of gold and amber and rose, and inside the apartment, on a pile of blankets and limbs and sleeping cats and flour-dusted memories, Minho closes his eyes and lets himself, finally, rest.

***

Time, as Chan predicted, comes calling three days later. It arrives with a text message, the most mundane of modern miracles, a few lines of plain black text on a screen that Chan reads three times just to make sure he is not hallucinating. Seungmin’s name at the top, and beneath it, a question so carefully casual that it might as well have been wrapped in bubble wrap and marked fragile: “Hyung, are you free for a drink on Friday? Work has been insane. I need a beer and possibly a lobotomy. The beer first, though.”

Chan texts back immediately. “Sure. The usual place? Eight o’clock?”

“Eight o’clock,” Seungmin confirms. “Thanks, hyung.”

Their usual place is a quiet bar, the kind of place that understands the sacred relationship between a man and his lager and does not interrupt it with loud music or aggressive lighting or any of the other sins that lesser establishments commit.

Chan arrives first, sliding into a booth near the back, the one with the slightly sticky table and the excellent sightlines to the door. He orders a beer he does not particularly want and waits, his fingers tapping an irregular rhythm against the condensation-beaded glass, his mind turning over the possibilities of the evening ahead.

Seungmin arrives fifteen minutes later, which is late for Seungmin, who is punctual the way gravity is reliable, an unshakeable constant in a chaotic universe. He slides into the booth opposite Chan with the stiff, controlled movements of someone who is holding themselves together through sheer force of will. His hair is slightly damp, as though he showered recently, and he’s wearing a plain black jumper that makes him look younger than he is, softer, more vulnerable. There are shadows under his eyes that suggest sleep has not been a reliable companion lately. He orders a lager before Chan can ask what he wants, and the server brings it with the efficient indifference of someone who has seen too many people drink too many beers for too many reasons.

“Work,” Seungmin says, before Chan can ask. The word comes out clipped, definitive, a door closing before it’s even fully opened. “It’s been insane. You wouldn’t believe the week I’ve had. There’s this new project manager who doesn’t understand basic server architecture, and I’ve had to explain the same thing to him four times. Four times, hyung. He still didn’t get it. I think he might be deliberately obtuse. I think he might be a psychological experiment designed to test my patience.”

For the first hour, Seungmin rambles about work. The servers have been misbehaving. The new intern has somehow deleted an entire database and then attempted to fix it by turning the computer off and on again. He talks about his boss, the one with the font size opinions, who has apparently developed a new obsession with margin widths and has been sending passive-aggressive emails about it. He talks about the commute, the weather, the rising price of coffee, the inexplicable disappearance of his favourite brand of instant noodles from the convenience store near his office. He talks and talks and talks, his voice steady and controlled, his hands wrapped around his pint glass, his eyes fixed on some indeterminate point in the middle distance.

Chan nods, makes sympathetic noises, asks the right questions in the right places. He’s good at this, the listening, the waiting, the careful art of letting someone talk themselves toward the thing they actually want to say. He’s had years of practice, years of being the person everyone comes to when they need to unburden themselves, and he’s learned that the most important skill a listener can have is the ability to recognise when someone is talking around something rather than about it. Seungmin is talking around something. Seungmin has been talking around something for the better part of an hour, his words circling the invisible shape of whatever is actually bothering him like a moon orbiting a planet it can never quite reach.

He knows Seungmin. He has known Seungmin since Seungmin was just a kid next door, a bright-eyed, sharp-tongued boy who was too clever for his own good and too guarded for anyone else’s. He knows the rhythms of Seungmin’s speech, the way his voice rises and falls, the way he uses words to build walls and to hide behind them and, occasionally, when the walls come down, to say something true.

Tonight, the walls are very high. But they are also very thin, and Chan can see the cracks forming, the places where the rambling falters, the moments when Seungmin’s gaze drops to his glass and stays there too long, the way his fingers pick at the label on his beer bottle, peeling it away in small, methodical strips. Chan waits.

On the third pint, the rambling stops.

Seungmin stares into his glass, his clever, sharp face looking lost, and the silence that fills the space between them is heavier than any of the words that came before. The golden light catches the planes of his face, the sharp line of his jaw, the slight furrow between his brows, and Chan is struck, not for the first time, by how young Seungmin looks when his guard is down, how much he still resembles the teenager self, the one who was so determined to seem invulnerable and was, in fact, the most vulnerable person in any room he entered.

“Hyung,” Seungmin says, and his voice is different now, stripped of its earlier animation, stripped of the defensive energy that had been powering his work complaints. It’s quiet. Careful. The voice of someone who is about to say something they’ve been holding onto for a long time and aren’t sure they’re ready to release. “Do you think Minho-hyung treats Hyunjinnie right?”

Chan’s heart soars. It actually soars, a ridiculous, elated lift in his chest, because this is it, this is the crack, this is the moment he has been waiting for. But he keeps his voice level, his expression neutral, the mask of the supportive older friend sliding into place with the ease of long practice. “Why don’t you ask Hyunjin yourself?”

Seungmin’s jaw tightens. A muscle flickers in his cheek, a tiny seismograph of tension that he can’t quite control. “I can’t.” The words come out as a raw scrape, dragged over something sharp and painful. “I can’t ask him. I can’t talk to him about it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s awkward.” Seungmin’s fingers tighten around his glass, his knuckles whitening against the condensation-beaded surface. He still isn’t looking at Chan. He’s staring at the table, at the ring of moisture his glass has left on the wood, at the small, insignificant details that become fascinating when you’re trying not to look at the person you’re confessing to. “I can’t talk about it with him because it makes me want to be less supportive of their relationship. Every time I try to be happy for him, every time I tell him I’m glad he’s found someone, I’m lying. I’m lying through my teeth, and I hate it, because Hyunjin deserves someone who’s genuinely happy for him, and I can’t be that person. I can’t. Because every single second, every single moment of every single day, I want to be in Minho-hyung’s place. And that makes me a horrible friend. That makes me the worst friend. What kind of person wishes for their best friend’s relationship to fail?”

The words spill out of him like water from a cracked vessel, a flood of confession that he’s clearly been holding back for weeks, months, maybe years. His voice is raw and uneven, his shoulders hunched, his whole body radiating misery of someone who has been carrying a secret so heavy it’s begun to warp their spine. He looks, Chan thinks, exactly the way Chan felt for all those years: exhausted by the weight of wanting something he didn’t think he was allowed to have.

“You’re not a horrible friend,” Chan says, and his voice is gentle now, the voice he uses when one of his friends is falling apart and needs someone to hold the pieces. “You’re not a horrible friend at all. You’re just in love with him. That’s not the same thing.”

Seungmin flinches at the word, the way people always flinch when someone else names the thing they’ve been trying not to name. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Seungmin looks up at him, and his eyes are wet, the tears gathering at the corners but not yet falling. He looks like a man who has been holding his breath for years and has finally started to exhale.

“It feels like I am drowning. And I have to stand there and watch Hyunjin be happy with someone else and clap and smile and tell him I am glad for him. And I am glad for him. I want him to be happy. I just.” His voice cracks, a fissure running through the carefully maintained composure. “I want him to be happy with me. And I hate it. I hate that I can’t just be happy for him. I hate that I want him to look at me the way he looks at Minho-hyung. I hate that I’ve had nine years to say something and I never did, and now it’s too late.”

Chan reaches across the table and puts his hand over Seungmin’s. The gesture is simple, steady, the kind of gesture he has made a thousand times before

“I’ve been in love with him for nine years,” Seungmin whispers, as if the confession is a secret even now, as if saying it too loudly will cause the world to shatter around him. “Nine years. And I never said anything because I was scared. I was scared of ruining what we had. I was scared of losing him. And now he’s with Minho-hyung, and I’ve lost him anyway, and it’s my own fault. I did this to myself.”

The silence that follows is heavy, but not uncomfortable. It’s the silence of a dam breaking, of water finding its natural level after years of being held back.

And then Seungmin drinks more. A lot more. The careful, controlled Seungmin who measures his words and his alcohol with equal precision dissolves into someone messier, someone rawer, someone who has been holding himself together for so long he’s forgotten what it feels like to let go. He orders another pint and then another, and his words begin to slur at the edges, his sentences running into each other.

“He’s so beautiful,” Seungmin slurs, his head propped on his hand, his elbow sliding slowly across the table. “Have you noticed how beautiful he is? Of course you’ve noticed. Everyone notices. He’s the most beautiful person in any room he walks into. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that someone can be that beautiful and also that kind and also that talented and also that funny. He’s so funny. He doesn’t think he’s funny, but he’s hilarious. He makes me laugh until my stomach hurts. Who gave him the right? Who decided one person could have all of that? I love him. Seungminnie loves Hyunjinnie.” He frowns, his brow furrowing with the particular confusion of the extremely intoxicated. “Why is Seungminnie talking like this? Why am I talking in third person? This is weird. I’m weird. Hyung, am I weird?”

“You’re very weird,” Chan agrees, pulling out his phone. “I’m going to text Hyunjin.”

Seungmin’s eyes fly open, a flash of panic cutting through the haze of alcohol. “No. No, don’t. Don’t text him. He’s busy. He’s probably with Minho-hyung. He’s probably being happy somewhere. I don’t want to ruin his happiness. I just want to ruin my own.”

“I’m texting Hyunjin,” Chan says, firmly but gently, the voice of someone who has made a decision and will not be moved from it. He opens the camera app and aims it at Seungmin, who is now attempting to stack beer coasters into a tower and failing in a way that is both tragic and deeply endearing. “Smile. You’re about to become photographic evidence.”

“What for?” Seungmin squints at the phone, his expression suspicious. “Are you sending that to the group chat? Because I will kill you. I am very drunk and I have no impulse control. I will commit a crime. I will go to prison. Hyunjinnie won’t visit me in prison. He’ll be too busy being happy with Minho-hyung. And then Seungminnie will be alone forever.”

“I’m not sending it to the group chat,” Chan says, snapping the photo. Seungmin looks, in the image, like a particularly mournful puppy who has been left out in the rain: his eyes are red-rimmed, his hair is a disaster, and there is a beer coaster balanced precariously on his head, placed there by his own hand for reasons that will probably remain a mystery even to him. “I’m sending it to Hyunjin. He needs to come get you.”

The effect is immediate and slightly alarming. Seungmin’s entire face transforms, the suspicion and the misery replaced by a sudden, luminous smile, the kind of smile that makes him look, despite the red eyes and the coaster hat and the general aura of intoxicated despair, almost incandescent.

“Hyunjinnie is coming? Hyunjinnie is coming to get me? My Hyunjinnie. He’s so wonderful. He’s so delightful. Did I tell you he called me at two in the morning two weeks ago? No, wait. I called him. I called him because I had a dream about him. I always dream about him. Every night. For nine years. It’s exhausting. Being in love with Hwang Hyunjin is the most exhausting thing in the world. But I can’t stop. I’ve tried. I can’t stop. He’s everything. He’s everything, and he’s with Minho-hyung, and I’m trying so hard not to love him, but I can’t. I can’t. I love him so much. I love him so much it’s ruining my life. I love Hyunjinnie. Hyunjinnie is so beautiful. He’s the most beautiful person in the world. He’s like a painting. He’s like all the paintings. He’s like a museum. He’s like if a museum was a person and also really tall and really kind and really good at art. Do you think Hyunjinnie knows he’s a museum? I should tell him. I’ve never told him. I’ve never told him anything. I’ve been a coward for nine years and now he’s dating Minho-hyung and Minho-hyung is very handsome and very talented and I hate him a little bit even though he’s my friend and that makes me an even worse person than I already am.”

Chan types out a message to Hyunjin, attaching the photo and a brief, urgent caption: “He’s drunk. Very drunk. Come get him. Now. He’s been talking about you for an hour and I think he’s about to start crying. Also he might throw up. I’m not equipped for this.” Then he puts his phone down and returns his attention to Seungmin, who has abandoned the coaster tower and is now staring into his empty glass with the philosophical contemplation of someone who has just discovered the meaning of life and is deeply unimpressed by it.

“Hyung.” Seungmin’s voice shifts, the slurring receding for a moment, replaced by something clearer, something that sounds almost like the old Seungmin, the sharp, perceptive Seungmin who notices everything and says very little. “Thank you. For listening. For not judging. For being here. You’re a good hyung. The best hyung. I don’t tell you that enough.”

Chan feels his throat tighten, a sudden, unexpected swell of emotion. “You don’t have to tell me. I know.”

“You should know. People should tell you things. Good things. You deserve good things.” Seungmin’s eyes are drooping now, the exhaustion and the alcohol finally catching up with him. “Minho-hyung should tell you good things. Minho-hyung should tell you everything. But he’s stupid. You’re both stupid. Everyone is stupid except Hyunjinnie. Hyunjinnie is a museum.”

“You mentioned that.”

“It’s important. It’s the most important thing. Hyunjinnie is a museum and I am just a person who wants to live in it forever. Is that too much? That felt like too much. I’m going to stop talking now.”

He does not stop talking. He continues to ramble, a soft, meandering stream of consciousness that touches on Hyunjin’s hair and Hyunjin’s hands and Hyunjin’s laugh and the particular way Hyunjin looks when he is painting, the focused intensity of his gaze, the way he bites his lower lip when he is concentrating, the way he talks about colours as if they are living things, as if they have feelings and histories and secrets that only he can understand. Chan listens, his heart breaking and mending and breaking again, and he thinks about Minho, about the way Minho’s hand felt in his, about the promise they made to each other on the living room floor, about the two people who are, at this very moment, hurtling towards each other like comets in the dark.

Hyunjin arrives in twenty-three minutes, which is seventeen minutes faster than the drive should take, which means he was speeding, which means he dropped everything the moment he got Chan’s message and raced across the city with his heart in his throat.

His face is etched with panic when he pushes through the door of the bar, his hair windswept and his coat only half-zipped and his eyes scanning the room with the desperate intensity. He finds them in the corner booth, Chan sitting with the patient, slightly haggard expression of a man who has been listening to drunken confessions for the better part of two hours, Seungmin slumped against the leather seat with his eyes closed and his mouth moving in what appears to be a whispered monologue about the way Hyunjin’s eyes crinkle when he laughs.

“Oh my god,” Hyunjin breathes, sliding into the booth across from them. “Is he okay? What happened? How much did he drink? Chan-hyung, what did you do to him?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Chan says, holding up his hands in a gesture of innocence. “He did this to himself. He asked me for a ‘work-stress’ drink, and then he drank approximately six pints of lager and confessed his undying love for you for two hours. I’ve been very supportive. I deserve an award. I deserve several awards. I should be canonised.”

Hyunjin stares at him, his brain struggling to process the words “confessed his undying love for you” while simultaneously trying to figure out how to get a very drunk, very limp Kim Seungmin out of a bar booth and into a car. “He what?”

“Not now,” Chan says. “He’s all yours. He’s been asking for you. Well. He’s been talking about you. To me. For two hours. But I think the general sentiment would apply if he were conscious enough to know you were here. Which he isn’t. So. Take him home. I’ll settle the tab.”

“Hyunjinnie,” Seungmin says, only now noticing Hyunjin, and his voice is a sigh, a sound of such pure, unfiltered adoration that Chan has to look away for a moment, has to give them the privacy of his averted gaze. “Hyunjinnie is here. You came. You came for me. Even though you’re with Minho-hyung. Even though you’re happy. You still came.”

“Of course I came,” Hyunjin says, and his voice is fierce and tender all at once, a contradiction held together by the sheer force of his feeling. “I’ll always come. What are you talking about? Seungmin-ah, what are you talking about?”

But Seungmin has reached the stage of intoxication where sentences are difficult and emotions are easy, and instead of answering, he simply leans into Hyunjin’s touch, his eyes closing, his face going slack and peaceful, the way a child’s face goes slack when they finally fall asleep after fighting it for too long. “You smell nice,” he mumbles. “You always smell nice. Like paint and flowers. Museum.”

Hyunjin looks at Chan over Seungmin’s head, his expression a tangle of confusion and hope and terror. “What is he talking about?”

Chan stands, gathering his jacket and his wallet, the weight of the evening settling onto his shoulders and then lifting, the way a burden lifts when you hand it to someone else, the person it was always meant for. “He’ll tell you,” Chan says, and his voice is gentle, the voice of someone who has carried a secret and is finally allowed to put it down. “Or he’ll tell you in the morning. Just get him home. Get him safe. The rest can wait.”

Hyunjin nods, his jaw setting with determination, the panic receding and being replaced by something steadier, something that looks almost like courage. “Thank you, hyung. For taking care of him. For calling me.”

“Always,” Chan says, and means it. “Text me when you’re home.”

Between the two of them, they manoeuvre Seungmin into the passenger seat of Hyunjin’s car. Seungmin is a mumbling and pliant mess, his limbs uncooperative and his head lolling against the cool glass of the window, and he smells like lager and sadness of a man who has spilled his heart onto a bar table and is now too drunk to pick it back up.

Hyunjin has never seen Seungmin this drunk. Not at university parties, not at birthday celebrations, not at any of the hundred gatherings where alcohol flowed freely and Seungmin always remained the sensible one, the one who drank water between rounds and went home at a reasonable hour and woke up the next morning with his dignity intact. This Seungmin is a different creature entirely, a Seungmin stripped of his defences and his careful control and his unwavering composure. This Seungmin is soft and pliant and murmuring something under his breath that Hyunjin cannot quite hear.

This Seungmin tries to put his seatbelt on upside down and gets genuinely confused about why it won’t click. Hyunjin leans across him to do it properly, and Seungmin’s hand comes up to pat his cheek with the clumsy affection of a toddler. “You smell nice,” Seungmin mumbles, his eyes half-closed. “You always smell nice. It’s very unfair. You should smell worse. It would make this easier.”

Hyunjin’s hands tremble slightly as he buckles the seatbelt. “What would make what easier?”

But Seungmin has already drifted off, his head lolling against the cool glass of the window, his breathing evening out into the slow, steady rhythm of the deeply unconscious.

The drive to Hyunjin’s apartment is a blur of streetlights and silence and the soft, steady sound of Seungmin breathing in the passenger seat.

By the time they reach Hyunjin’s apartment building, Seungmin seems to have sobered slightly, a focused, burning clarity replacing the fog. It is not true sobriety, the kind that comes with sleep and time and hydration, but something else, something stranger, a temporary sharpening of the senses that alcohol sometimes grants before it pulls you back under. He allows Hyunjin to guide him out of the car and into the elevator and down the hallway to the apartment door, but his steps are deliberate now, his eyes tracking Hyunjin’s movements with an intensity that makes Hyunjin’s skin prickle.

Hyunjin guides him into the living room. He gets him a glass of water from the kitchen, presses it into his hands, makes him drink. He digs through his drawers and finds a pair of sweatpants and an old t-shirt, the soft, worn kind that Hyunjin sleeps in when he wants to feel comforted.

Seungmin takes the clothes and, with the matter-of-factness of someone who has lost all sense of social inhibition, begins to change right there in the middle of the living room. Hyunjin’s brain registers what is happening approximately half a second before Seungmin pulls his shirt over his head, and he spins around so fast he nearly loses his balance, his face burning, his heart doing something complicated and arrhythmic in his chest. He has just enough willpower to look away, to fix his eyes on the wall, to count the paint strokes in the corner near the ceiling until he hears the rustle of fabric settle and Seungmin’s voice say, “Done.”

Then Hyunjin offers to make up the bed, to sleep on the couch himself, to do whatever Seungmin needs to feel comfortable.

Seungmin refuses all of it. He refuses to sleep, refuses to do anything until he has answers.

“Sit down,” he says to Hyunjin, and his voice is slurred but insistent, the voice of someone who is not going to be deterred by something as trivial as his own intoxication. “Sit down. I have questions. I need to ask you questions.”

He sits Hyunjin down on the couch, his hands firm on Hyunjin’s shoulders, pushing him into the cushions with a strength that is surprising for someone who could barely walk in a straight line ten minutes ago. Then he stands over him, swaying slightly, his feet planted wide for balance, his arms crossed, his expression fierce and interrogatory, a prosecutor preparing to cross-examine a witness, a detective who has finally cornered the suspect he has been chasing for years.

“Does he treat you right?” Seungmin demands, and the question is so unexpected, so absurd, so completely out of nowhere, that Hyunjin can only stare up at him, his mouth opening and closing without producing any sound. “Minho-hyung. Does he treat you right? Does he take you on real dates? Not just group dinners and coffee runs. Real dates. The kind where you dress up and he holds the door for you and you talk about nothing for hours and neither of you wants it to end. Does he do that?”

“Seungmin-ah.” Hyunjin’s voice is barely a whisper, a thread of sound in the quiet apartment. “You’re drunk. You should sleep. We can talk about this in the morning.”

“No.” The word is sharp, definite. Seungmin leans forward, his hands braced on the back of the couch now, caging Hyunjin in, his face close enough that Hyunjin can smell the beer on his breath and see the red rims of his eyes and count the individual eyelashes that frame his dark, burning gaze. “Does he cuddle you when you’re feeling down? You always need to be held when you’re sad. You hold it in for days, weeks, you pretend you’re fine, and then you just collapse. You collapse and you need someone to catch you. Does Minho-hyung know that? Would he even notice if you were falling apart?”

Hyunjin’s throat is tight, his eyes stinging with tears he refuses to let fall. “Seungmin-ah, please.”

“Does he know how you take your coffee?” Seungmin continues, relentless, his voice rising, cracking, splintering into something raw and desperate. “Does he know that you drink iced americanos even when it’s snowing because you like the way the cold feels in your throat, and you once told me it makes you feel alive, and I’ve never forgotten that, I’ve never forgotten anything you’ve ever told me? Does he know that you cry at films, not the sad ones but the happy ones, the ones where people find each other and stay together, because you think that kind of happiness is too big to hold and it spills out of you? Does he know any of that? Does he know you?”

The questions keep coming, a flood, a torrent, a dam that has been holding back nine years of longing and observation and quiet, devoted attention and has finally, catastrophically collapsed. Seungmin’s voice is shaking now, his whole body shaking, and Hyunjin can see the tears spilling over his cheeks, tracking silver lines down his face, and still he does not stop.

“Does he know you’re scared of thunderstorms? Not just scared, terrified, the kind of terrified where you can’t move and can’t speak and just sit there frozen until someone comes and sits with you? Does he know about the time you missed your stop on the bus because I fell asleep on your shoulder and you didn’t want to wake me, and you rode an extra forty minutes just to let me sleep, and you never told me, I only found out because I checked your phone when you were in the bathroom and saw the text you sent to Felix about it? Does he know that you’re the kindest person I’ve ever met, that you’re so kind it hurts to look at you sometimes, that you give and give and give and never ask for anything back? Does he know you? Does he love you? Does he love you the way I—”

He stops. The word catches in his throat, a sob cracking through the drunken anger, and his face crumples, the fierce, interrogatory mask dissolving into something soft and broken and unbearably young. “Does he love you the way I love you?” Seungmin whispers, and the question is so quiet, so fragile, so utterly without defence, that Hyunjin feels his own tears finally spill over, hot and silent, running down his cheeks and dripping onto his hands.

“Does he kiss you like this?”

And before Hyunjin can process, before he can think or speak or breathe, Seungmin is there. His hand is clumsy but gentle on Hyunjin’s cheek, his palm warm and slightly unsteady, his fingers spreading across the curve of Hyunjin’s jaw with a tenderness that is at odds with the intensity of his gaze. And then he leans in and kisses him.

The kiss is soft. It is tender. It is trembling, the way a leaf trembles in the wind, the way a flame trembles in the dark. Seungmin’s lips are slightly chapped and taste of lager and salt, and his hand on Hyunjin’s cheek is warm and unsteady, and the whole thing is so fragile and so perfect. Hyunjin cups the back of Seungmin’s head, his fingers threading through the soft hair at the nape of his neck, and holds him there for a moment. A single, perfect, aching moment. The kind of moment he’s been waiting nine years to experience. The kind of moment he was beginning to think would never come.

And then, because he is still Hyunjin, still the person who has been in love with Kim Seungmin for nine years and wants to do this right, he gently pulls back. It is the hardest thing he has ever done, harder than nine years of silence, harder than weeks of pretending, harder than any of the thousand small sacrifices he has made in the name of loving someone who did not seem to love him back. He pulls back, and he looks at Seungmin’s face, at the confusion and the hope and the fear all mixed together, and he whispers, his voice shattered and whole all at once, “Seungmin-ah, you’re drunk. You’re very, very drunk. Let’s just… let’s talk about this in the morning, okay? If you still feel like this in the morning, we’ll talk. I promise. I promise we’ll talk. But not tonight. Not like this.”

Seungmin stares at him. His eyes are wet and unfocused, but there’s something in them that looks almost like relief, as though he’s been carrying a burden so heavy he’d forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight. “In the morning,” he repeats, and the words come out slow, deliberate, the words of someone who is trying very hard to commit them to memory. “You promise?”

“I promise.”

Seungmin nods, a stubborn, puppy-like motion that Hyunjin has seen a thousand times before, in a thousand different contexts, and has always found devastatingly endearing.

Hyunjin lays Seungmin down on the couch, tucking a blanket around him, making sure the glass of water and the painkillers are within easy reach for when he wakes up.

Within minutes, Seungmin’s asleep, his breathing slow and even, his face relaxed in a way Hyunjin rarely sees when he’s awake.

Hyunjin stands over him for a moment, watching the rise and fall of his chest, the way his face goes slack and peaceful in sleep, the way his hand curls around the edge of the blanket like a child holding onto a favourite toy.

Then he sits down on the floor beside the couch, his back against the cushions, his knees drawn up to his chest, and he watches Seungmin sleep. He watches the way the streetlight outside casts shadows across his face, the way his lips are still slightly parted, the way he looks younger and older and exactly the same as he did when they were seventeen years old and Hyunjin fell in love with him at first sight and never, not once, not for a single moment, fell out of it. He watches, and he hopes, and he tries very, very hard not to hope, because hope has been a dangerous thing for nine years, a fragile thing, a thing that breaks and mends and breaks again. But tonight, sitting on the floor of his apartment with the taste of Seungmin’s kiss still on his lips and the echo of Seungmin’s confession still ringing in his ears, he cannot help it. He hopes. He hopes so fiercely it feels like a fire, like a fever, like something that might consume him entirely if he lets it. And for the first time in nine years, he thinks it might be worth the risk.

Morning light fills the apartment with the soft, grey-gold glow of autumn, the kind of light that makes everything look gentler, kinder, more forgiving. It filters through the curtains Hyunjin forgot to close and spills across the floor in pale rectangles, illuminating the dust motes floating lazily in the air, the half-finished painting propped against the wall, the man stirring on the couch with a groan of someone who has just discovered exactly how much they drank the night before.

Seungmin wakes in stages, his consciousness surfacing from the deep, dark well of sleep like a swimmer pushing towards the light. His head aches with the particular, throbbing intensity of a hangover that was earned honestly, six pints of lager and two hours of emotional confession exacting their predictable toll. His mouth tastes like something died in it and then decomposed, and his stomach is performing a complicated, queasy manoeuvre that he does not have the vocabulary to describe. The couch beneath him is unfamiliar, the blanket tucked around him is unfamiliar, the clothes he is wearing are unfamiliar, and for a long, disorienting moment, he has absolutely no idea where he is or how he got here.

Then the memories arrive. They do not arrive gently. They arrive all at once, a tidal wave of mortification that crashes over him with the force of a physical blow: the bar, the beers, the confession spilled across the table like a deck of cards thrown into the air. The interrogation in Hyunjin’s living room. The kiss. Oh, God, the kiss.

He sits up too fast, and his head protests with a spike of pain that is almost certainly divine punishment.

He finds Hyunjin in the kitchen.

Hyunjin is standing at the stove, his back to the doorway, and he is making breakfast. The scene is so ordinary, so domestic, so utterly at odds with the catastrophic nature of what happened the night before, that Seungmin stops in the doorway and simply stares. Hyunjin is wearing a soft, oversized sweater in a shade of pale blue that brings out the warmth in his skin, and he is humming something under his breath, some melody that Seungmin does not recognise but finds himself wanting to learn. The kitchen smells like coffee and eggs and something sweet, something that might be pancakes or might be French toast, and the morning light is catching the edges of his silhouette, and he is so beautiful, so impossibly beautiful, that Seungmin forgets, for a moment, how to breathe.

And then Hyunjin turns around.

“Hyunjin-ah,” Seungmin says, and his voice comes out cracked and rough, the voice of someone who has been shouting or crying or both. “Last night, I. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have done any of that. I shouldn’t have said any of that. I was drunk, and I was stupid, and I had no right to.” The words tumble out in a rush, a flood, a desperate, tangled apology that he has been rehearsing in his head since the moment he woke up. “I know you’re with Minho-hyung. I know you’re happy. I should have been more supportive. I should have been a better friend. Instead, I got drunk and I kissed you and I asked you all those questions and I made everything weird, and I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry, and if you never want to speak to me again I completely understand, I would deserve it, I would—”

Hyunjin holds up a hand.

The gesture is simple, almost casual, but it stops Seungmin mid-sentence, his mouth still open, his apology still half-formed on his tongue. And then Hyunjin smiles. And it is a real smile, a genuine smile, the kind of smile that reaches his eyes and softens his whole face and makes him look like the boy Seungmin met at seventeen, the boy with the nervous hands and the too-bright eyes who asked Seungmin if he wanted to share a coffee and then spent four hours talking about everything and nothing.

“Stop,” Hyunjin says, and his voice is gentle, so gentle, the voice of someone who is holding something precious and is afraid of breaking it. “It’s okay. You don’t need to apologise. There’s something I have to tell you.”

Hyunjin takes a deep breath.

“There was never anything between me and Minho-hyung,” he says, and the words come out steady, clear, the truth finally allowed to exist in the open air. “It was fake. The whole thing. From the beginning. It was a plan. A stupid, ridiculous, desperate plan that Minho came up with because he’s been in love with Chan-hyung for years and Chan-hyung has been in love with him for just as long and neither of them would do anything about it. Minho asked me to pretend to be his boyfriend to make Chan-hyung jealous. That’s all it was. Pretend. Performance. There was never anything real between us.”

Seungmin stares at him. His expression cycles through a series of emotions, one after another, like clouds moving across the sky: confusion, then disbelief, then something that looks almost like the first pale light of understanding, and then, beneath all of it, a dawning, radiant hope that he is trying very hard to suppress and not quite succeeding. “Fake,” he repeats, as if the word is a foreign language he is learning for the first time. “The whole time. The hand-holding and the feeding each other and the couple song and the. The kissing. The kiss at Changbin’s party. That was fake?”

“There was a thumb,” Hyunjin says, and he cannot help the small, slightly hysterical laugh that escapes him. “Minho’s thumb. Over my lips. It was very clever. No actual contact occurred. I’ve never kissed Minho-hyung. I’ve never wanted to kiss Minho-hyung. The only person I’ve ever wanted to kiss is you. For nine years. Nine years, Seungmin-ah. Since the first day I met you, when you were seventeen and wearing that terrible green hoodie. I’ve been in love with you since that exact moment.”

The silence that follows is enormous. It fills the kitchen, fills the apartment, fills the entire world, and Hyunjin stands in the middle of it with his heart laid bare and his hands still gripping the spatula. Seungmin is still staring at him, his eyes wide and bright and wet, and his shoulders are dropping, the last bit of tension bleeding out of them.

A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, a real one, the one he usually hides, the small, scrunched-nose smile that Hyunjin has been cataloguing for nine years and has only seen a handful of times.

“I didn’t know how to love you right,” Seungmin says, and his voice is quiet, almost wondering, the voice of someone who is discovering something as he speaks it. “I didn’t know how to do it. You’ve always been— You’ve always been you. Wonderful, talented, beautiful you. And I’ve always been a fool for you, from the very first day. I didn’t know how to tell you without ruining everything. I thought if I said it out loud, it would change things. It would make things weird. And I couldn’t lose you. I couldn’t.”

He looks down at his hands, and Hyunjin watches him, watches the way his fingers uncurl, the way the tension leaves his palms, the way he seems to be letting go of something he has been holding onto for so long he has forgotten what it felt like not to carry it.

“I’ve been bracing myself,” Seungmin continues, “for when you found someone. I thought it was inevitable. You’re you, and someone was going to see that eventually, someone was going to love you the way you deserved to be loved, and I was going to have to watch it happen and be happy for you. And I thought I’d made peace with it. With being just your friend. With loving you from a distance. But then Minho-hyung happened, and you were holding his hand and laughing at his jokes and looking at him the way I always wanted you to look at me, and I wasn’t at peace. I wasn’t at peace at all. I was furious and desperate and insane with jealousy, and I didn’t know what to do with any of it. So I cancelled our Saturday. I pulled away. I tried to protect myself, and I hurt you instead, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Hyunjin whispers, and his voice is breaking. “You don’t ever have to be sorry. We were both idiots. We were both idiots who loved each other for nine years and never said a word. We were both so afraid of losing what we had that we never tried to have something more.”

Seungmin looks up, and his eyes are clear and bright and finally, finally, fully on Hyunjin.

“So it worked,” he murmurs, and there is wonder in his voice, a kind of awed disbelief. “The stupid plan actually worked. Because I tried so hard to be supportive. I tried so hard to be happy for you. And every single day, I just felt more desperate and insane. Every time I saw you with him, every time I saw him touch you, every time I saw you smile at him, I wanted to scream. I wanted to grab your hand and run away with you and never come back.” He laughs, a small, shaky sound. “I was jealous. I was so jealous. I’ve never been jealous of anything in my life, and then suddenly I was jealous of everything. Of Minho-hyung’s hand on your back. Of the way you looked at him. Of every second he got to spend with you that I didn’t. And the whole time, you were waiting for me. The whole time, you were pretending, and I was too blind to see it.”

“We were both blind,” Hyunjin says. “We were both pretending. I’ve been pretending for nine years. Pretending I was okay with being just your friend. Pretending I wasn’t in love with you. Pretending every smile and every touch and every late-night phone call didn’t mean the world to me. I’m tired of pretending, Seungmin-ah. I’m so tired.”

“Me too,” Seungmin says. “Me too. It was always you. From that first day at seventeen. I sent you that text at two in the morning, the one that said you might be my favourite person, and then I panicked and told you to ignore it, but I meant it. I meant every word. I just didn’t know how to tell you with words.”

Hyunjin does not need words. He has spent nine years drowning in words, in hopes and fears and what-ifs, in the endless, exhausting cycle of wondering and waiting and never quite knowing. He has spent nine years talking himself into and out of hope, nine years cataloguing every glance and every gesture and every almost-moment, nine years trying to decode a language that Seungmin was speaking all along, a language not of words but of actions, of small, quiet, consistent acts of love that Hyunjin was too afraid to recognise. He does not need words now. What he needs is on the other side of the kitchen, wearing his clothes, looking at him with an expression that is so open, so vulnerable, so full of everything Hyunjin has ever wanted, that it feels like staring directly at the sun.

He crosses the room in three strides, his feet carrying him forward before his brain has fully decided to move, and he pulls Seungmin into his arms with a force that is almost violent, that is desperate and relieved and triumphant all at once. He buries his face in the crook of Seungmin’s neck, and Seungmin’s arms come up around him, and they stand there in the middle of the kitchen, holding each other, the smell of coffee and familiar scent of Seungmin’s skin filling Hyunjin’s senses until there is nothing else, nothing but this, nothing but them, nothing but the impossible, miraculous fact that after nine years of waiting, they are finally here.

“I have the screenshot,” Hyunjin mumbles into Seungmin’s neck, his voice muffled and thick with tears he is no longer trying to hold back. “The text. The one you told me to ignore. I screenshotted it. It’s still on my phone. It’s in a folder labelled with a seedling emoji. Because hope is a small green thing. That’s what I told myself. Hope is a small green thing, and it keeps growing, even when you try to prune it back.”

Seungmin laughs, a wet, shaky laugh, and his arms tighten around Hyunjin, pulling him closer, holding him tighter. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he says. “A seedling emoji. You’re unbelievable. You’re absolutely unbelievable.”

“You love me,” Hyunjin says, and the words are not a question. They are a statement, a declaration, a truth that has been waiting for nine years to be spoken aloud. “You said so. You said you loved me. You said it was ruining your life. Chan-hyung told me. He texted me. He said you talked about me for two hours.”

“I’m going to kill Chan-hyung,” Seungmin says, but there is no heat in it, no real threat, just the exhausted, relieved affection of someone who has been seen and known and accepted anyway. “I’m going to kill him, and then I’m going to kill Minho-hyung, and then I’m going to kill everyone who knew about this before I did.”

“You can’t kill everyone. Then we’d have no friends.”

“We’d have each other.”

“That’s very romantic, but also impractical. We need witnesses for the wedding.”

Seungmin pulls back just enough to look at Hyunjin’s face, his eyes still red-rimmed and slightly swollen, his expression caught between laughter and disbelief. “The wedding? We’ve been together for approximately thirty seconds, and you’re already planning the wedding?”

“I’ve been planning the wedding for nine years,” Hyunjin says, and he is smiling now, a wide, unabashed smile, the kind of smile that he has been hiding for weeks, for months, for years, the kind of smile that belongs only to this moment, only to Seungmin, only to the impossible, wonderful reality of being loved back. “I have a Pinterest board. It’s very organised. It’s sorted by season.”

“Of course it is,” Seungmin says, and he kisses him again, not the clumsy, desperate kiss of the night before but something slower, something surer, something that feels like a beginning rather than an ending. The coffee continues to brew, and the morning light continues to pour through the windows.

Somewhere across Seoul, in the quiet of his own apartment, Minho wakes up tangled in Chan’s arms. The cats are arranged around them in their usual formation. Chan is still asleep, his breathing slow and even, his face relaxed and peaceful and entirely unguarded, and Minho looks at him and feels the full and overwhelming weight of what they have finally allowed themselves to have. His phone buzzes on the bedside table. He reaches for it carefully, trying not to disturb the cats or the boyfriend or the perfect and fragile peace of the morning.

It is a text from Hyunjin. It is brief and incoherent, and it says: “It worked. He kissed me. I told him everything. He said it was always me. MINHO. IT WORKED.” Minho stares at the message for a long moment, and then he laughs, a quiet and breathless sound. And then he presses a kiss to Chan’s forehead, soft and brief, and Chan stirs, his eyes fluttering open with the slow, confused blink of someone who isn’t quite awake yet.

“Minho?” he mumbles, and the word is slurred with sleep, and it’s the most beautiful thing Minho has ever heard. “What is so funny?”

“Nothing,” Minho says, and he leans in and kisses Chan’s forehead again, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. “Everything. The plan worked. Hyunjin and Seungmin. They figured it out.”

Chan smiles, a slow and satisfied smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes, and he pulls Minho closer and says, “I told you so,” and Minho says, “Shut up,” and kisses him properly. The cats, collectively affronted by the movement and the disturbance of their sleeping arrangements, disperse with the dignified protest of creatures who have been personally wronged. The morning light grows stronger, filling the room with gold.

“Go back to sleep,” Minho whispers.

Chan’s arm tightens around his waist, pulling him closer, and within moments his breathing has evened out again, his face relaxing back into the peaceful expression of someone who feels safe. Minho lies there, wrapped in the warmth of the man he loves, and thinks about Hyunjin and Seungmin, somewhere across the city, probably having their own long-overdue conversation.

It’s a mess. A complete and utter disaster of a plan. And it worked.

***

The group finds out in stages, the way they find out about most things, which is to say chaotically, incompletely, and with a great deal of overlapping and contradictory information that takes several days to sort into anything resembling a coherent narrative.

Jisung is the first to know, because Jisung has the self-preservation instincts of a lemming and the luck of a man who has been chosen by the universe as its primary vehicle for comic relief. He arrives at Minho’s apartment unannounced on a Tuesday evening, letting himself in with the spare key that Minho had given him years ago for emergencies and that Jisung has interpreted as a standing invitation to appear whenever he feels like it. He is holding a bag of tangerines and a DVD of a horror film that he has been trying to convince someone to watch with him for weeks, and he is already talking before he has fully crossed the threshold, a running monologue about his day and his neighbour’s cat and the existential dread of being in his mid-twenties that does not stop until he reaches the living room and freezes.

Chan is on the couch. This in itself is not unusual. Chan is often on Minho’s couch. Chan has been on Minho’s couch approximately once a week for the entire duration of their friendship, and Jisung has walked in on him there dozens of times, usually holding a cup of coffee or a gaming controller or a cat. What is unusual, what causes Jisung to stop mid-sentence with his mouth still open and the tangerines dangling from his fingers, is the position Chan is in. He is lying down, his head in Minho’s lap, and Minho’s fingers are carding through his hair with the absent, tender rhythm of someone who has done this a thousand times and intends to do it a thousand more. They are watching something on the television, some drama that Jisung does not recognise, and neither of them looks up immediately, and Jisung stands there in the doorway for a full five seconds with his brain attempting to process the visual information it is receiving and failing spectacularly.

“What,” Jisung says, and the word comes out flat, the word of a man whose brain has short-circuited and is attempting a hard reboot.

Minho looks up. Chan looks up. Neither of them moves. Neither of them creates distance or does any of the things people do when they’re caught in a situation they’re supposed to be ashamed of. Instead, Minho raises an eyebrow with the particular, infuriating calm of a cat who has been discovered on the kitchen counter and has decided it doesn’t care.

“Jisung-ah,” Minho says, and his voice is perfectly level, perfectly unbothered, the voice of someone who has been waiting for this moment and is almost relieved it’s finally arrived. “Have you heard of knocking?”

“I have a key! You gave me a key for emergencies!”

“This isn’t an emergency. We’re watching a drama. Nobody’s dying. Except maybe the second male lead, but he brought it on himself.”

Jisung points at them with the accusatory finger of a prosecutor presenting evidence to a jury. “You’re supposed to be dating Hyunjin. You fed him samgyeopsal at the barbecue. You sang ‘Trouble Maker’ at the noraebang. You did the almost-kiss thing. I had feelings about it. I had to process those feelings. And now you’re— you’re—”

“I’m what?” Minho asks, and there’s a glint in his eye now, the glint of someone who is enjoying this far more than they should. “Happy? In love? Watching a drama with the man I’ve been pining after for the better part of a decade? Which part is confusing you, Jisungie? I can explain it in smaller words.”

Chan, who has been watching this exchange with the expression of someone who would very much like to sink into the couch’s cushions and disappear, clears his throat. “It’s a long story,” he says, and his voice is apologetic. “The thing with Hyunjin was… not real. It was a plan. A bad plan. A very bad plan that we should probably explain properly when everyone is together. And sober. Ideally both.”

Jisung stares at them. Dori yawns, a tiny pink mouth opening wide, entirely unimpressed by the emotional crisis unfolding in front of him. “A plan,” Jisung repeats, and the word comes out hollow. “A fake-dating plan. To make Chan-hyung jealous. Which worked. You’re telling me the fake-dating plan to make Chan-hyung jealous actually worked.”

“Technically it didn’t work,” Minho says. “Chan-hyung was being aggressively supportive. It was infuriating. We had to resolve things manually, through direct communication, which was honestly a last resort. I don’t recommend it.”

“Manual resolution,” Jisung says, and his voice is climbing now, approaching the register it reaches when he’s about to have a lot of feelings very quickly. “You manually resolved your feelings. Through direct communication. You. Minho-hyung. The man who once told me that emotions are ‘private information that other people don’t have security clearance for.’”

“People change,” Minho says serenely. “I’ve grown. I’ve evolved. I’m a new person. This new person is dating Chan-hyung and would like you to stop yelling, because you’re upsetting the cats.”

Jisung puts the tangerines down on the nearest surface, which happens to be a stack of dance magazines, and takes a deep breath. Then he takes another. Then he pulls out his phone. “I’m texting the group chat,” he announces. “This is a group-chat-level event. This is the most group-chat-level event that has ever happened. I’m going to—”

“You’re going to put the phone down,” Chan says, and there’s a gentle warning in his voice, the voice of someone who knows that chaos is coming and is trying to manage its arrival. “And you’re going to let us explain before you tell anyone else. Please. As a favour. To me.”

Jisung hesitates, his thumb hovering over the screen. Chan is looking at him with those eyes, the earnest, dimpled eyes that have been getting Jisung to do things he doesn’t want to do since they were teenagers. It’s deeply unfair. It’s a weaponised form of emotional manipulation. It works immediately.

“Fine,” Jisung grumbles, pocketing his phone. “But you owe me. You owe me so much. You owe me an entire explanation and also probably therapy. I’m going to need therapy after this. You’re paying for it.”

“I’ll add it to the tab,” Minho says, and settles back into the couch, pulling Chan closer with the casual ownership of someone who has been given permission and is going to enjoy every second of it. “Now. Do you want to stay for the drama? The second male lead is about to make a terrible decision, and it’s very satisfying.”

The second thread comes loose the following Saturday, at the group dinner that was supposed to be a normal group dinner.

The group dinner begins innocently enough. Changbin has made a reservation at the barbecue place, the same one they always go to, the one with the slightly wobbly table in the back corner and the owner who knows their orders by heart.

Minho and Chan arrive together.

This is not unusual. Minho and Chan have been arriving together to things for years, their apartments being relatively close to each other and their schedules being relatively aligned. But there is something different about the way they walk in tonight, something in the angle of their bodies, the space between them, the way Chan’s hand hovers at the small of Minho’s back without quite touching, as if touching has become so habitual that not touching requires conscious effort. They slide into the booth next to each other, which is also not unusual, but the way they sit is different, closer than necessary, their shoulders brushing, their thighs pressed together under the table, the kind of casual, unconscious intimacy that belongs to people who have been sharing a bed and a life and a future.

Hyunjin and Seungmin arrive together, which is not unusual either. They’ve been arriving together to things for over a year, ever since the reconnection, ever since the Saturday “friendly dates” became a sacred institution. But tonight Hyunjin’s hand is resting on the small of Seungmin’s back as they walk to the table, a light, casual touch that lingers a beat too long. Tonight, Hyunjin pulls out Seungmin’s chair for him, and Seungmin rolls his eyes but accepts it, and the eye-roll is so fond, so saturated with affection, that it’s basically a love confession in micro-expression form. Tonight, when Hyunjin sits down, Seungmin’s thigh presses against his under the table, and neither of them moves away.

Felix notices first. Felix notices everything, has always noticed everything, has been watching his friends stumble toward each other like comets caught in each other’s gravity for years. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes go wide, and he exchanges a glance with Changbin across the table that contains an entire conversation in the space of a single heartbeat.

Changbin, who has been too busy grilling meat to notice anything else, catches the glance and follows Felix’s gaze to where Seungmin’s hand has migrated to Hyunjin’s knee under the table, and his eyebrows lift approximately three centimetres.

Jeongin, seated at the end of the table with the strategic positioning of someone who has learned to observe chaos from a safe distance, watches the whole thing unfold with the serene, knowing expression of a prophet who has seen the future and is waiting for everyone else to catch up. He’s eating his ssam with the methodical precision of someone who is getting fuel for the emotional revelations ahead. He’s been ready for this since the convenience store. He’s been ready for this since the melon ice cream bar. He’s been ready for this for years.

“So,” Jisung says, and his voice is too loud, too bright, the voice of someone who has been keeping a secret for five days and is about to combust from the pressure. He arrived at the restaurant already twitchy, already vibrating with the particular energy of someone who knows things, and he’s been making increasingly unsubtle eye contact with Minho and Chan all evening. “Is anyone going to explain anything? Or are we all just going to sit here pretending everything is normal while the emotional infrastructure of our friend group quietly rearranges itself?”

“Jisung,” Chan says, and there’s a gentle warning in his voice.

“No, no, let him finish,” Changbin says, setting down his tongs with the deliberate care of someone who has decided to pay attention. “I want to hear what the emotional infrastructure is doing. I wasn’t aware we had emotional infrastructure. I thought we just had group chats and shared trauma.”

Minho looks at Hyunjin. Hyunjin looks at Minho. Something passes between them, a silent conversation conducted in eyebrow raises and slight shrugs, the kind of wordless communication that can only develop between two people who have pretended to be in love for weeks and somehow emerged from the experience as better friends.

“We’re not dating,” Hyunjin says, and the words come out in a rush, a confession and a relief all at once. “We were never dating. It was a plan. A stupid plan. Minho’s plan, to be clear. I just want that on the record. It was Minho’s plan.”

“It was a collaborative effort,” Minho counters, but there’s no heat in it. “Hyunjin agreed to it. He got free cake out of the deal. Multiple cakes.”

“The plan,” Chan interjects, because Minho and Hyunjin are clearly about to start bickering about pastry and the table deserves an actual explanation, “was to make me jealous. Minho and I have been— we’ve had feelings for each other for a long time. Years. And neither of us was doing anything about it. So Minho decided to force the issue. By fake-dating Hyunjin. Which was a terrible idea that somehow worked.”

“It didn’t work,” Minho says, and there’s a fond exasperation in his voice, the exasperation of someone who has told this story before and still can’t quite believe it. “Chan-hyung was aggressively supportive. He sent me a playlist with ‘Congratulations’ on it. He offered to cat-sit so Hyunjin and I could go on romantic weekends. He was so delighted for us. It was sickening. I had to kiss him to get him to admit he had feelings for me. It was very undignified.”

“We’re dating now,” Chan adds. “We were going to tell you. We were building up to it. There was a process.”

“A process,” Jisung echoes, and then he turns to Hyunjin and Seungmin, his eyes wild, his finger pointing at them with the accusatory energy of a prosecutor delivering a closing argument. “And you two. You two. What is this? What are you? Is this also fake? Is this another scheme? Are you fake dating too? Is anyone in this group actually dating anyone, or is it all just lies and deception and betrayal?”

Seungmin looks at Hyunjin. Hyunjin looks at Seungmin. And then Seungmin lifts their joined hands and presses a kiss to Hyunjin’s knuckles, a small, deliberate, devastatingly tender gesture that makes Hyunjin’s face flush pink and Jisung’s mouth drop open and Felix let out a soft, involuntary “oh” of understanding.

“This is real,” Seungmin says, and his voice is quiet but clear, the voice of someone who has spent nine years not saying what he feels and is finally, gloriously, done with silence. “This has always been real. I’ve been in love with him since I was seventeen years old. I just didn’t know how to say it. And then Minho-hyung’s stupid plan made me jealous enough to finally crack.” He glances at Minho, a small, wry smile on his face. “So. Thank you, I suppose. For the emotional manipulation. It was very effective.”

“You’re welcome,” Minho says, with the magnanimous air of a king accepting tribute. “I’m a genius. I should be a relationship counsellor. I should charge for my services.”

“You should be in prison,” Changbin mutters, but he is smiling, a reluctant, grudging smile, the smile of someone who has been outmanoeuvred and knows it.

“I already knew,” Jeongin says, and takes a slow, deliberate sip of his soju.

The table goes silent again. It is an even rarer silence than the first one, a deeper silence, a silence that contains within it the dawning, horrified realisation that Yang Jeongin, the youngest, the maknae, the one who is supposed to be innocent and oblivious and generally uninvolved in the machinations of his elders, has been ahead of them all along.

“You knew,” Minho says, flatly. “You knew. How did you know. When did you know. What, exactly, did you know.”

Jeongin shrugs, a small, elegant movement of his shoulders. “I knew you and Hyunjin weren’t really dating. Your chemistry was wrong. You bicker like siblings, not like people who are in love. Also, I saw you do the thumb thing during the kiss at Changbin-hyung’s party. Very clever, but not clever enough.” He takes another sip of soju, his expression serene. “I knew Chan-hyung was in love with you. Everyone knew Chan-hyung was in love with you. Chan-hyung looks at you like you personally hung the moon and also the stars and possibly several planets. It’s been obvious for years. He’s not subtle.”

Chan makes a small, strangled sound and buries his face in his hands again. Minho pats his back with the gentle, slightly condescending affection of someone who is enjoying this far too much.

“I knew Seungmin-hyung was in love with Hyunjin,” Jeongin continues, and Seungmin’s head snaps up, his expression caught between surprise and indignation. “He’s not subtle either.”

Changbin, who has been quietly processing all of this while mechanically grilling more meat, finally speaks. His voice is gruff, but there’s something soft underneath it, something that sounds almost like pride. “So everyone’s happy, then. That’s the end result. Four of you have figured out your feelings, and the rest of us have been emotionally whiplashed for weeks, and now we’re all going to move forward as a group, with significantly more hand-holding and significantly fewer fake relationships.”

“That’s the plan,” Chan says, and he’s smiling now, the full, dimpled smile that he usually reserves for particularly good concerts and particularly bad jokes. “If that’s okay with everyone. If we haven’t traumatised you too much.”

“Oh, we’re traumatised,” Jisung says. “We’re deeply, profoundly traumatised. I’m going to be talking about this in therapy for years. But I’m also happy for you. Both couples. All four of you. The trauma and the happiness are coexisting. It’s very complicated.”

“That’s called being an adult,” Felix says, patting his arm.

“It’s exhausting. I want a refund on adulthood. I want to go back to being nineteen and oblivious.”

“You were never oblivious,” Minho says. “You were just better at ignoring things. It was one of your core competencies.”

Jisung opens his mouth to protest, then closes it. “That’s fair. That’s actually very fair. I’m going to drink my soju and process that.”

Later, much later, when the soju bottles are empty and the meat is gone and the restaurant owner is beginning to give them the gentle, pointed looks that mean it is time to leave, the group spills out onto the street in their usual formation, loud and uncoordinated and slightly unsteady on their feet.

The November night is cold and clear, the stars faint overhead, the city humming its endless, electric hum. Jisung is draped across Changbin’s shoulders, still muttering about conspiracies and betrayal and the fundamental injustice of being the last to know. Felix is walking beside Jeongin, their heads bent together in quiet conversation. And the four of them, the four who have been waiting for each other for so long, have naturally, unconsciously, arranged themselves into pairs.

Minho and Chan are walking slightly ahead, their fingers interlaced, their shoulders bumping with every step. Chan is saying something, his voice low and amused, and Minho is laughing, his head thrown back, his face illuminated by the neon glow of a convenience store sign. As Hyunjin watches, Minho stops walking, tugs on Chan’s hand, and pulls him into a kiss. It is not a performance this time, not a scheme, not a clever bit of misdirection. It is just a kiss, a real kiss, Chan’s hands coming up to cup Minho’s face, Minho’s arms winding around Chan’s neck, the two of them swaying slightly on the pavement as if the rest of the world has temporarily ceased to exist. Jisung makes a gagging noise behind them. Changbin throws a shrimp cracker at their heads. Neither of them notices.

Hyunjin and Seungmin are walking more slowly, trailing behind the others, their own hands intertwined. The night air is cold against Hyunjin’s cheeks, but Seungmin’s hand is warm in his, and the warmth seems to spread through his entire body, a slow, honeyed heat that has nothing to do with the soju. Seungmin is quiet, his face thoughtful, his thumb tracing small circles on the back of Hyunjin’s hand, and Hyunjin knows him well enough now, after nine years of friendship and two weeks of something more, to recognise that this particular quiet means he is thinking about something, turning it over in his mind, trying to find the right words.

“What is it?” Hyunjin asks, his voice soft, meant only for the space between them.

Seungmin is quiet for another moment. Then he stops walking, and Hyunjin stops with him, and they stand there on the pavement, the rest of the group moving ahead without them, their voices fading into the distance. The street is empty and still, the shops dark, the neon signs flickering, and Seungmin looks at Hyunjin with an expression that is open and tender and full of something that Hyunjin is still learning to believe is real.

“I was just thinking,” Seungmin says, and his voice is quiet, almost hesitant, the voice of someone who is still learning how to say things out loud. “About all the time we wasted. Nine years. Nine years of being in love with you and not saying anything, and you were in love with me the whole time, and we just… We just didn’t know. We were both so sure the other person didn’t feel the same way, and we were both wrong, and I keep thinking about all the things we could have had. All the time we could have spent together. All the mornings like this morning, waking up next to you, making breakfast together, all the ordinary things that we could have been doing for nine years instead of just. Waiting.”

Hyunjin steps closer, close enough that he can feel the warmth of Seungmin’s body, close enough that he can see the individual lashes framing his eyes, the faint scar on his chin from a childhood fall, the way his lips part slightly on an exhale. “We weren’t waiting,” he says, and his voice is steady, steady and sure, the voice of someone who has had time to think about this, to make peace with it, to find the shape of the answer. “We were becoming the people we needed to be. The people who could do this right. If we had figured it out at seventeen, we would have been terrible at it. We would have been clumsy and scared and we probably would have broken up within six months and ruined everything. But now.” He lifts his free hand and cups Seungmin’s cheek, his thumb brushing the edge of his jaw. “Now we know how to do this. Now we know how to be patient, and how to be kind, and how to fight without hurting each other. Now we know what we want, and we know how to ask for it. We didn’t waste nine years. We were just. Practising. For this.”

Seungmin stares at him for a long moment, his eyes bright, his expression unreadable. And then he laughs, a small, shaky laugh, and leans into Hyunjin’s touch. “That’s either the wisest or the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said,” he says. “I can’t decide which.”

“It can be both,” Hyunjin says. “Most things are both.”

And then he kisses him. It is not their first kiss, not their second, not even their tenth, but it feels new every time, feels like a discovery, feels like something that is still unfolding, still revealing itself, still teaching him things about the shape of Seungmin’s mouth and the taste of his lips and the way his breath catches when Hyunjin’s fingers slide into his hair. This kiss is slower than the desperate, drunken kiss of that first night, and surer than the trembling, disbelieving kisses of the mornings that followed. It is a kiss that says I am here and I am staying and I have been waiting for this for nine years and I am going to spend the rest of my life making up for lost time.

Seungmin’s hands find Hyunjin’s waist, pulling him closer, and Hyunjin makes a small, satisfied sound against his mouth, and somewhere in the distance, Jisung’s voice rises in an indignant wail. “They’re kissing too! They’re both kissing! Everyone is kissing except me! Changbin-hyung, kiss me! We can’t be the only ones not kissing!”

“I’m not kissing you,” Changbin’s voice replies, flat and unimpressed. “You have garlic breath. You ate an entire head of garlic. On purpose. As a dare. You don’t get to be kissed after that.”

“Felix! Felix, kiss me! You love me! You’ve always loved me! You said so!”

“I do love you,” Felix’s voice floats back, warm and amused and endlessly patient. “But Changbin-hyung has a point about the garlic. Maybe after you brush your teeth.”

“Jeongin! Jeongin, you’re my last hope! Kiss me for the sake of the group’s romantic solidarity!”

“Absolutely not,” Jeongin’s voice replies, calm and final. “I’m the youngest. I’m supposed to be the innocent one. I can’t be seen kissing people on the street. Think of my reputation.”

“You don’t have a reputation! You’re a menace! You’re the most menacing person I’ve ever met! You’ve been manipulating all of us for years and you just admitted it!”

“And yet,” Jeongin says, serene and untouchable, “no garlic breath.”

Hyunjin pulls back from the kiss just long enough to laugh, his forehead resting against Seungmin’s, his breath misting in the cold air. “We should catch up with them,” he says, but he does not move, and neither does Seungmin.

“In a minute,” Seungmin says, and kisses him again.

 fin.