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Being a “weird kid” was lonely sometimes, humans evolved by living in a community. Being a loner was counterintuitive according to multiple psychological studies, behaviorists everywhere would agree.
And that’s why Taesan refused to act on his feelings towards Dohoon.
Because Dohoon was his oldest friend, his person, and if things went sour, he wouldn't be able to live with himself.
His innocent crush on his best friend had evolved into a temptation. Like Dohoon was the red, sweet, and ripe apple in the Garden of Eden of Taesan’s mind. The thing he craved most and knew he could never have.
You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.
Except Dohoon was not hanging from a tree, but instead he was busy kissing all the boys he could manage.
There's a reason for that, in this world, everyone has a soulmate. It's the cosmic joke that the universe plays on every single person.
Everyone is born with their five senses toned down, muted colors, minimal hearing, and, in some cases, people don’t even have a sense of hot and cold. You only get enough to get by like the eight colors of the rainbow, a small frequency of sounds (not too high, not too low) and to make out what's dull and what's sharp.
When you kiss your soulmate, you get all the rest.
Colors get brighter and life stops being dull and boring. You feel everything at once, and it stays with you forever, meeting your soulmate literally means living a fuller life.
Taesan thinks it’s really poetic but can’t be bothered to go around kissing anyone just for that, most people go their whole lives and never find it. His soulmate could be anywhere in the world, and he'd rather not get his hopes up. He was just a basket case, the emo freak who loved My Chemical Romance and the dark corners of crowded rooms.
Dohoon was the complete opposite, he was the campus It-Boy, the most popular face at every frat party, the sun everyone orbited around.
They shouldn't even be friends, by any social metric, this would be insane. But they met in school when they were just kids without labels, and they'd never separated since
Even now, when Dohoon is dragging him around a frat house party by the wrist and throwing him into a couch while babbling about his boy crush of the week
"Shinyu is an idiot!" Dohoon groaned. "He's completely ignoring me, he only has eyes for Youngjae. I need to get his attention."
"Good luck with that," Taesan muttered, dropping onto the cushions with his beer and taking a long sip.
"I'm serious. He might be the one, and I won't know until he kisses me."
Ah, yes.
Dohoon and his unhealthy obsession with finding The One.
It was exhausting.
Taesan sometimes wished Dohoon would just catch mono or literally any disease that made kissing temporarily impossible so that he’d take a break from all the saliva exchanges. His count must be going into triple digits by now, and no soulmate in sight.
"If he doesn't want to kiss you, then he's probably not your soulmate," Taesan said with a shrug. "Your person could be in Germany or some shit, you know? Hell, maybe it's a girl."
Dohoon gave him a look.
"I'm gay."
"...Fair."
"My soulmate is definitely not a girl." Dohoon's lips twitched like he was holding back a smile.
Taesan nodded, taking another sip of his drink in silence while Dohoon stared intently across the room at Shinyu and Youngjae. His expression was anything but subtle.
For five agonizing minutes, Taesan let the silence stretch between them, and then Dohoon opened his mouth and said something absurd.
"We should kiss."
Taesan choked, the beer suddenly burning its way up his throat and into his nasal passages. He coughed violently, eyes watering.
"What?" he wheezed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Kiss," Dohoon repeated, like it was the most logical thing in the world. "You and me. It would make him totally jealous. He'd see us together and realize what he's missing."
After recomposing himself and discreetly wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes, Taesan shook his head firmly.
"No. Absolutely not." His voice came out harsher than he intended. "I'm not letting you use me to make your boy of the week jealous. That's messed up, even for you."
Dohoon deflated slightly, his lower lip jutting out in a pout that Taesan had seen a million times before. It was the expression that usually got him whatever he wanted.
"I'm not using you," he insisted, scooting closer on the couch until their shoulders touched. "Best friends kiss all the time. It's just a kiss, Taesan. It doesn't have to mean anything."
"It means something to me," Taesan wanted to scream. It means everything to me, you oblivious, beautiful idiot.
Instead, he just stared at his beer bottle like it held the secrets to the universe.
"If you do this for me," Dohoon continued, his voice taking on that tone that always made Taesan's resolve crumble, "I'll buy you lunch tomorrow. "Scout's honor."
Taesan let out a bitter laugh. "You were never a scout, you got kicked out for setting fire to the troop leader's tent."
Dohoon's face split into a grin, the smile that had always been Taesan's downfall. "Details, details. Come on, Dongmin, please? Just one kiss, for old time's sake."
Old time's sake and the use of his real name… that’s low even for Dohoon.
As if Taesan hadn't been dreaming about kissing Dohoon since they were fifteen and Dohoon had fallen asleep on his shoulder during a movie marathon. As if every casual touch didn't send electricity racing down his spine. As if this wouldn't ruin him completely.
Because kissing Dohoon would be like his own fall of men, like unleashing the knowledge of good and evil in their relationship, ignorance was a comfort he didn't want to part from. You can never know what you’re missing if you never even had it.
But Dohoon was looking at him with those big, hopeful eyes, and Taesan had never been able to say no to him.
He was so, so screwed.
“Fine, one kiss.” Taesan says in pure defeat.
You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
“Thank you, thank you!” Dohoon gleams, scooting closer on the couch, until his thighs brush against Taesan’s
"Just relax," he murmured, and there was nothing cruel in it, just Dohoon, warm and close and completely unaware that he was about to detonate something. His hand found Taesan’s jaw, tilting it up and caressing it.
Taesan had spent years telling himself not to want this. That the apple stayed on the branch, untouched, because some things weren't his to take. But right now Dohoon wasn’t just the apple, he was the serpent itself, deceiving and persuasive in his tricks, and every psychology study in the world couldn't have stopped Taesan’s hand from coming up to rest against Dohoon's chest.
"Okay," he breathed. "One kiss."
Dohoon smiled and closed the distance.
It started light. Careful. Just the press of Dohoon's mouth against his, dry and brief, the kind of kiss you could laugh off afterward. A joke. A favor between friends.
Taesan meant to pull back there. He really did.
But Dohoon didn't move away, and neither did he, and the second kiss was slower than the first, testing, like they were both waiting to see who would stop it. Neither of them did. Dohoon's fingers slid from his jaw into his hair, and then he was moving, shifting his weight without breaking the kiss, swinging a knee over Taesan's lap until he was settled there instead, like his body had made the decision before his mind caught up.
It didn't feel like a favor anymore.
Taesan's hands found Dohoon's waist, not quite believing it, and kissed him like six years of silence were finally allowed to speak. Dohoon kissed him back like he meant it too, mouth parting against his, a low sound catching in his throat that Taesan felt more than heard, his fingers curling against the back of Dohoon's neck.
And then the world cracked open.
Sound rushed in first, the bassline from the speakers suddenly had texture, someone's laughter three rooms away landing sharp and clear as a bell.
Dohoon's weight in his lap wasn't just pressure anymore, it was heat, warmth, and a hundred individual points of contact he could map with his whole body. His taste became sweeter than anything Taesan’s ever tasted, he could make out the cheap beer he’d been drinking with Dohoon’s cherry lip balm. It was the best taste he ever had.
Taesan's eyes were closed, but he could feel color arriving anyway, could feel the dark, familiar gray of his whole life starting to bleed into something enormous.
He broke the kiss to breathe and opened his eyes to a world on fire.
The lamps weren't just light anymore, they were gold, actual gold, warm and alive. The red cup someone had left on the coffee table was the reddest thing he'd ever seen.
And Dohoon above him, straddling his lap, lips parted, cheeks flushed, was in color, fully, devastatingly in color, and he was so beautiful it physically hurt.
Taesan let out a wrecked, disbelieving laugh. "Dohoon—"
He looked up, ready to say it, ready to say, "It's you, it was always you."
And stopped.
Because Dohoon wasn't laughing. Dohoon wasn't looking at him like the world had just cracked open into color for him too. He was staring down at Taesan with his mouth still parted, but his eyes had gone wide and stricken, flicking rapidly around the room like he was searching for an exit that didn't exist. His hand, still curled at the back of Taesan's neck a second ago, dropped like it had been burned.
"No," Dohoon said, so quiet it barely carried. Then, louder, panicked: "No, no… that's not—"
"Dohoon," Taesan's voice cracked on the name.
"I need—" Dohoon shook his head hard, scrambling off his lap like Taesan was something dangerous, putting distance between them that hadn't existed a moment before. "I have to go, I need air."
He didn't look back before he disappeared into the crowd.
Taesan sat there on the couch, alone, drowning in a world that had just turned violently beautiful but where none of it mattered at all, because the one person he'd wanted to share it with had looked at him like he was a mistake.
He set his beer down with a hand that wasn't quite steady. Nobody stopped him as he pushed through the party and out the front door, into a night that was, for the first time, actually black instead of gray, cold air biting at his face in a way he'd never been able to feel before.
He didn't cry until he was three blocks away.
He bit the apple, and it did in fact get him kicked out of paradise.
The next morning, Taesan felt like shit.
He'd spent the entire night falling in and out of sleep, staring at the new colors in his room and on his phone screen, trying to ignore the new smells in the air and the small noises that had turned loud, like his damn refrigerator humming. Who decided that was okay?
Finding his soulmate was supposed to feel liberating. Instead, he felt overwhelmed and irritated, standing in his kitchen and sipping black coffee like it had personally offended him.
Cursed is the ground because of him—where before only good was produced, now thorns and thistles grow as well. A loner he was, and to loneliness he would return.
He was pulled out of his melancholy by three knocks on the door, in a pattern he'd recognize anywhere.
"Taesan? It's me. Open up... please."
Dohoon. Obviously, it had to be
Taesan didn't move.
He stood there with his coffee going cold in his hand, staring at the door like it might swallow him whole, like if he just didn't breathe, Dohoon might give up and leave.
"I know you're in there." A pause. A softer knock. "Please."
Please. Like it wasn't the exact word that had gotten him into this mess in the first place
Please? Just one kiss, for old time's sake.
Dohoon had always known exactly which doors that word could open.
Taesan crossed the room and yanked the door open so hard it nearly cracked against the wall.
Dohoon stood there in yesterday's clothes, hair a disaster, eyes red-rimmed like he hadn't slept any better than Taesan had. For one unbearable second neither of them said anything. Taesan just looked at him, really looked, with all the new colors and smells his body learned to identify last night.
It made him angrier.
"What do you want?" Taesan said. It wasn't a question.
"I want to talk—"
"No." Taesan's voice cracked down the middle like dry wood. "No, you don't get to do that. You don't get to kiss me, discover I'm your soulmate, run away like it just ruined your life, and then want to talk, it’s not fair."
"Taesan, I —"
"I have been in love with you since we were fifteen." It came out of him like vomit, as if now that he started he couldn’t stop. "Since before either of us had the words for any of this. I have watched you chase after every idiot on this campus hoping one of them would unlock something in you, and I sat there and smiled and told you good luck, because that's what best friends do, and the entire time I was screaming inside my own skull that I couldn’t want you, that I would ruin our friendship or worse..." His voice died down, completely broken. “But I wanted you all this time, and when I had you, when we kissed and the world changed, I was so happy, and I thought maybe you’d be happy too… but you looked at me like I just cursed you, and then you ran away!”
Dohoon flinched at every word, but he didn't step back. If anything, he stepped closer, into the doorway, into the space Taesan hadn't given him permission to enter.
"You think I don't know that?" Dohoon's voice broke too, raw and furious, but the fury wasn't aimed at Taesan, it never had been. "You think I ran because of you? I ran because for six years I told myself you were the one person in my life I couldn't ruin. I built my whole stupid soulmate obsession around the idea that my person was some stranger out there, because if it was a stranger and it went wrong, I'd survive it. But if it was you…" His voice gave out.
"If it was you and I ruined it, there'd be nothing left of me."
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.
Taesan didn't remember deciding to move. One second there was a doorway between them, and the next there wasn't, and the kiss he gave him wasn't soft like last night. It was furious. It tasted like six years of silence and one truly awful morning, teeth catching on lips, Dohoon's hands gripping his hips hard enough to bruise, both of them stumbling backward into the room until the door swung shut behind them.
"You don't get to be scared of me," Taesan bit out through his mouth, not quite letting go.
"I know." Dohoon kissed him again, messier this time, apologizing with his whole body the way he never could with words. "I know, I know, I'm sorry—"
"Stop apologizing and just—"
Dohoon shut him up by walking him back into the desk, and Taesan let him, hands sliding up into his hair, finally, finally allowed to touch what he'd spent years pretending not to want. The coffee cup hit the floor somewhere, and neither of them cared. Every point of contact lit up sharp and technicolor, the world was still too loud, too bright, too much, but for the first time since last night, Taesan didn't want it to be quiet again.
Cursed is the ground, his mind had told him this morning.
But it turns out that humanity had to leave Eden to create earth, and Dohoon's mouth against his throat, Dohoon's hands fisting desperately in his shirt like he was afraid Taesan might vanish, felt less like an expulsion and more like finally creating something that was theirs.
"Say you're not running again," Taesan said, breathless and undone.
"I'm not going anywhere." Dohoon pulled back just far enough to look at him, eyes wet, mouth kiss-swollen, color blazing between them like something holy. "I was an idiot. You're it, Taesan. You've always been it."
Taesan kissed him again, and this time he didn’t feel cursed or ruined at all.