Work Text:
Sangwon had rehearsed a dozen graceful ways to tell his mother he wasn't going on the blind date. He'd practiced them in the shower, in the elevator, once out loud to his own reflection while brushing his teeth, each version calm and reasonable and adult. In the end, none of them survived contact with her voice.
"I can't go, I have a boyfriend," he said, and the sentence left his mouth with the horrible, irreversible momentum of a cup slipping off a counter.
Silence crackled down the line all the way from Busan. He could picture her exactly—standing in the kitchen with the phone wedged between shoulder and ear, one hand still moving through some chore, the other going still.
"You have a what?"
"A boyfriend," Sangwon said again, because apparently he had decided to commit to this, the way a man mid-fall commits to hoping there's water at the bottom. "I've been meaning to tell you."
"For how long?"
"...A while."
"A while," she repeated, tasting the phrase like it might be off. "Does he have a name, this boyfriend of a while?"
Sangwon looked around his apartment, empty except for the delivery containers he hadn't taken out yet, as though a name might be hiding among them. His eyes landed instead on the office building four blocks down, visible through his window even at eight at night, where at that exact moment a certain coworker was, statistically speaking, almost certainly still at his desk, because Anxin was always still at his desk, methodically closing out spreadsheets like a man laying siege to a city no one else could see.
"Anxin," Sangwon said. "His name is Anxin."
There was a pause with real weight to it, the specific gravity of a Korean mother mentally filing away a name, cross-referencing it against a future she was already redrafting.
"Bring him to Grandmother's eightieth birthday. Two weeks from Saturday. We'll finally meet him properly."
"Mom, that's really not—"
"Two weeks, Sangwon-ah. Don't disappoint your grandmother. She's been asking why you never bring anyone home. Now you have a reason to."
She hung up before he could assemble so much as a syllable of protest, which he reflected, staring at the dead phone screen, was extremely on brand for her. She had negotiated three separate business deals for his uncle's restaurant chain using roughly this exact technique: announce the outcome as though it were already agreed, then leave before anyone could contest the premise.
He set the phone down very carefully on the counter, as if it might go off again, and put his face in his hands.
There were, he told himself, options. Option one: call her back immediately, confess the lie, take his lumps, and go on the blind date with the dentist's son his mother had already described three separate times as having "a good jaw" and "a stable job," neither of which Sangwon had ever once cared about in a partner but which his mother clearly considered load-bearing qualities. Option two: manufacture an actual boyfriend from scratch in fourteen days, which even accounting for dating apps and sheer desperation seemed logistically implausible. Option three: whatever this was, this thing he was apparently already doing, elbow-deep in a lie with a name attached before he'd even finished deciding to tell it.
He picked his phone back up and texted the only person whose name had escaped his mouth in a moment of blind panic, and tried very hard not to interrogate why that name, out of every name he knew, had been the one sitting closest to the surface.
Sangwon: this is going to sound insane
Sangwon: are you free this weekend
Sangwon: also. hypothetically. are you free to be my boyfriend for two weeks
The three dots appeared almost instantly. Disappeared. Appeared again, vanished again, as if Anxin were composing and discarding several replies in a row, which, for a man whose text messages usually arrived pre-edited and grammatically flawless, was itself alarming.
Anxin: I need you to understand that I have read that message four times and it has not improved with rereading.
Anxin: Also it is 8:41pm on a Tuesday. What happened.
Sangwon: can we talk tomorrow. in person. it's a long story and I don't want HR flagging our slack for weird keywords
Anxin: Now I am extremely concerned and will be getting very little work done for the rest of the evening. Thank you for that.
Sangwon smiled despite himself, which was, he thought, the first sign of trouble.
Anxin agreed to meet him the next afternoon at the café near the office, mostly, he would insist later, out of professional concern and not at all out of curiosity, a distinction Sangwon found unconvincing given that Anxin had shown up seven minutes early, which for a man who treated punctuality as a competitive sport meant he'd left the office the second lunch technically started.
He arrived to find Sangwon already seated with two coffees ordered, wearing the particular expression of a man who has already lost an argument he hasn't started having yet.
"So," Anxin said, sitting, arms folding almost immediately into what Sangwon had learned, across eight months of sharing a cubicle wall, was not a hostile posture but a listening one — Anxin simply processed information more efficiently with his arms crossed, the way some people thought better pacing. "Explain. Slowly. Starting from a place that makes sense."
Sangwon explained. The blind date his mother had been threatening for months. The panic. The lie that had fallen out of him with a name already attached, as though some subconscious part of him had been keeping Anxin's name loaded and ready for exactly this kind of emergency. His grandmother's eightieth birthday, in two weeks, at the family apartment in Busan, where an entire extended network of aunts, uncles, and cousins would be gathered specifically to inspect this previously unmentioned boyfriend for structural integrity.
Anxin listened without touching his coffee, which Sangwon recognized now as full engagement rather than distraction.
"So you told your mother you are dating your coworker," Anxin said when he'd finished, in the careful, deliberate tone he used for restating a problem before solving it, "who you have — and I want to be precise here, because I remember this conversation specifically — described to me as, quote, 'aggressively unromantic.'"
"I didn't say aggressively."
"You said, and again, quoting directly, 'Anxin proposed to a spreadsheet error like it was a legal contract, he cried actual tears of joy when the formula worked.'"
"That's not the same as unromantic. That's just — thorough. Passionate, even. In a specific domain."
Anxin exhaled through his nose, which Sangwon had come to understand was the closest thing he had to a laugh, a small controlled release of air that nonetheless changed the entire shape of his face for half a second. "One weekend," he said finally, setting down terms the way he set down project deliverables — clearly, with margins. "The birthday party. I meet your family, I perform the necessary theater, we drive back Sunday night, and the arrangement terminates. I am not doing two weeks of check-in texts and hand-holding in the break room in front of Ji-eun from accounting, who already thinks we're insufferable together as coworkers."
"One weekend," Sangwon agreed, far too fast, relief washing through him so visibly that Anxin actually paused and looked at him a beat longer than the moment required.
"Why me," Anxin said, and it wasn't quite a question, more a loose thread he was pulling at without much force. "Out of everyone you know. Why was my name the one that came out."
Sangwon opened his mouth. Nothing useful arrived. He closed it, tried again. "You were the first name I thought of," he said, which was entirely true and which he was fairly sure was not, in fact, the entire answer, though he could not for the life of him have said what the rest of it was, only that it lived somewhere behind his sternum and made itself known at inconvenient moments, like right now, watching Anxin turn his coffee cup a slow quarter turn on its saucer with the same precision he brought to everything.
Anxin held his gaze a half-second past comfortable before looking away first, which was unusual enough that Sangwon filed it away without knowing what to do with it.
"Fine," Anxin said. "One weekend. Terms: no unnecessary touching, no calling me anything embarrassing in front of your relatives, and you owe me — substantially — for whatever emotional damage your family inflicts on me over the course of forty-eight hours."
"Deal," Sangwon said, and they shook on it across the little café table like it was a merger agreement, which, Sangwon told himself firmly, absolutely was all this was.
The drive to Busan took just over four hours, most of which Anxin spent running Sangwon through a spreadsheet — an actual spreadsheet, color-coded, shared to both their phones the night before — of family details he'd apparently compiled from a week of increasingly specific questions disguised as small talk. Names. Ages. Occupations. Known grudges, categorized by severity. Topics not to raise under any circumstances, chief among them his cousin's divorce and his uncle's failed noodle shop.
"Your cousin Minji is nine and thinks I should call her 'noona' even though she is nine years younger than me," Anxin read off his phone, in the flat, dry tone he used for reciting anything absurd with total seriousness.
"She's very committed to the bit. Just go with it, it's easier than fighting her on it."
"And your grandmother." Anxin set the phone down. "Tell me about your grandmother specifically, because you have avoided every direct question I've asked about her for a week and that is, statistically, not nothing."
Sangwon watched the highway unspool ahead of them and tried to find the right words. "She's sharp. Sharper than anyone gives her credit for, because she's small and she smiles a lot and people mistake that for soft. She'll like you or she won't within about thirty seconds of meeting you, and there's no changing her mind after that, not with charm, not with gifts, nothing. Also she doesn't believe in personal space as a concept, so — brace yourself."
"Comforting," Anxin said, and for the first time since agreeing to any of this, he looked faintly nervous — not performing nervousness for the family's benefit later, but genuinely, privately unsettled, fingers tightening slightly on the strap of his bag — which did something warm and entirely unhelpful to the region of Sangwon's chest just below where his seatbelt crossed.
The apartment was already loud when they arrived, sound spilling out into the hallway before Sangwon had even gotten the door fully open — aunts arguing amiably in the kitchen over whether the japchae needed more sesame oil, cousins fighting over a Switch controller with the total-war intensity only children bring to shared electronics, his father out on the tiny balcony grilling something despite three prior small fires that had each, according to family legend, required a different fire extinguisher.
Sangwon's mother spotted them from clear across the living room and crossed it in what felt like four seconds flat, moving through the crowd of relatives like water finding the fastest route downhill.
"So this is him," she said, stopping directly in front of Anxin and looking him up and down with the frank, appraising eye of a woman inspecting produce at a market she trusted but still checked personally. "You're taller than I pictured. Sangwon said you worked at a desk all day, I assumed you'd be — smaller, somehow."
"It's very nice to finally meet you, Auntie," Anxin said, bowing with a politeness so unimpeachable, so precisely calibrated, that Sangwon watched three separate relatives within earshot visibly relax their shoulders, the tension of vetting a stranger dissolving on contact. "Sangwon speaks about you constantly at the office. I feel like I already know your kimchi jjigae recipe secondhand."
His mother's whole face changed. "He talks about my cooking?"
"Extensively. I believe the word he used was 'unmatched.'"
Sangwon had, in fact, said this exactly once, six months ago, in an entirely unrelated context, and he stared at Anxin with something between horror and genuine, helpless admiration at the speed with which the man had weaponized a stray fact.
By the time dinner started, Anxin had been fed by no fewer than four aunts, each pressing food on him with the specific urgency of women who had decided, collectively and without discussion, that this stranger looked underfed and it was now their personal mission to correct it. He'd been interrogated gently about his salary by an uncle who pretended the question was about the weather. He'd been informed by nine-year-old Minji, with total solemnity, that he had "good hair for a boyfriend," to which he'd replied, without missing a beat, "thank you, I get a lot of feedback on it, mostly from HR," which made Sangwon choke audibly on his rice and required his mother to pat him on the back three times.
It was, against every reasonable expectation Sangwon had walked in with, going well. Unnervingly well. Anxin, who catalogued spreadsheet errors like personal grievances and treated small talk in the office as a tax he paid reluctantly, was sitting cross-legged on his mother's floor cushion charming an entire extended family with the same methodical precision he brought to a quarterly report, and Sangwon found himself watching this unfold with a warmth in his chest that had nothing at all to do with the room being crowded.
Then the door to the back room opened, and the entire gathering rearranged itself, conversation dimming by degrees like a room noticing a change in air pressure before anyone consciously registered why. Sangwon's grandmother emerged, small and imperious in the pale gold hanbok she'd had tailored specifically for tonight, moving through her own birthday party the way a queen moves through a hall she already owns.
She found Anxin with her eyes before she'd even fully entered the room. She looked at him for exactly as long as Sangwon had warned would happen — a slow, unhurried thirty seconds that felt, to Sangwon, roughly the length of a full fiscal quarter.
"You," she said finally, pointing one small, ring-laden finger directly at Anxin. "Come sit next to me."
Anxin went. He sat next to her for the entire meal, and Sangwon held his breath through most of it, watching his grandmother lean in close and murmur things he couldn't quite hear over the noise of the room, watching Anxin's face shift through several expressions — surprise, something like delight, something more careful — while his own heart did something complicated and unauthorized in his chest.
It was nearly midnight, the apartment finally quieting into the particular hush of relatives falling asleep in shifts on couches and floor mats, when Sangwon's mother found him in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom and delivered the single sentence that would go on to ruin his composure for the remainder of the weekend.
"Grandmother says you and Anxin will take the guest room. Together. She says it's silly for a couple to sleep apart under her roof, especially on her birthday, of all nights."
"Mom, that's really — we don't need to—"
"She already made up the bed herself," his mother said, in the tone of a woman relaying an unappealable verdict handed down from a higher court, and then she was gone, drifting back toward the kitchen to argue with an aunt about leftovers, leaving Sangwon standing alone in the hallway with his pulse doing something unhelpful.
He found Anxin a moment later, apparently having just received the identical news from a different aunt via a slightly different route, standing very still with the expression of a man doing rapid mental math and not liking any of the totals he was arriving at.
"One bed," Anxin said, without preamble.
"One bed," Sangwon confirmed.
"There is no couch anywhere in this apartment."
"There is a couch. It's occupied. Uncle Dae-ho has been asleep on it since roughly eight-fifteen and based on prior birthday parties will remain there until sometime after breakfast."
Anxin looked up at the ceiling as though it might, if stared at long enough, produce a fire escape. "This was not part of the agreement."
"I'm aware."
"I specifically listed 'no unnecessary touching' as a term. In writing. You agreed to it."
"I know, Anxin, I didn't plan this, do you think I wanted—" Sangwon caught himself as his voice climbed, abruptly aware of the paper-thin walls and the number of relatives currently within easy earshot, and dropped it to something closer to a hiss. "It's one night. We'll build a wall out of pillows. It'll be completely fine."
It was not, in fact, completely fine.
The guest room was small, the bed smaller than either of them had hoped, and the pillow barricade Sangwon constructed with the grim, methodical determination of a man building levees against a flood did absolutely nothing to disguise the plain fact that they were lying eight inches apart in the dark, both of them very obviously awake, both very obviously pretending otherwise, the ceiling fan ticking overhead in a rhythm neither of them was actually listening to.
"Sangwon."
"Mm."
"Your grandmother asked me today, while we were sitting together, whether I was good to you." Anxin's voice, in the dark, had lost its usual clipped office precision; it came out lower, less armored, which was somehow far more unsettling than if he'd sounded embarrassed about the whole situation. "I said yes. Immediately. I didn't have to think about the answer at all." A pause, longer this time. "That's the part that's been bothering me since dinner."
Something in Sangwon's chest turned over slowly, like a page. "What do you mean, bothering you?"
"I mean I have never in my life answered anything without thinking first. I check my coffee order twice before I hand over the cup. I proofread text messages to my own mother. And your grandmother asked me a question about you, and the true answer just — arrived, before I'd given myself permission to have one."
Sangwon turned his head against the pillow. In the thin wash of streetlight leaking around the curtain he could just make out the line of Anxin's profile — the same face he'd spent eight months looking at across the low wall of their shared cubicle, the same face that had apparently, at some point without formal notice, become the first name his mind reached for in a full-blown crisis.
"Anxin," he said, quiet enough that it barely carried the eight inches between them. "Can I tell you something that's going to make this weekend considerably more complicated than it already is?"
Anxin didn't move, but something in his stillness sharpened, attention narrowing entirely onto Sangwon in the dark. "You have already told your entire extended family, including a nine-year-old with strong opinions about hair, that we are dating. I think the ship marked 'complications' sailed sometime around dinner."
"I don't think I was lying. Not about all of it." His heart was going hard enough now that he could feel it up in his throat. "I think I've had a genuinely inconvenient, deeply unprofessional feeling about you for a while now, and panicked, and it came out as your name, and I honestly don't know anymore whether that was the panic talking or whether the panic just finally said the thing out loud."
The silence that followed stretched long enough for Sangwon to begin, in his head, drafting both an apology and a contingency plan involving a request to switch floors at work.
Then Anxin said, "I told your grandmother yes without thinking, Sangwon." His voice had gone very careful, very deliberate, the tone he used when he was choosing each word like it cost something. "I calculate my coffee order. I do not answer personal questions from strangers about my emotional life without a full internal review first. I don't think that was the panic talking, on my end, either."
Sangwon reached across the narrow space between them and moved one pillow out of the wall he'd built. Then a second. Anxin watched him do it, unmoving, and didn't stop him, which felt, in the dark, like its own kind of answer.
"For the record," Anxin murmured, close now, close enough that Sangwon could feel the warmth of his breath, "this is a direct violation of several terms of our original agreement."
"I'm aware of the terms."
"There is a specific clause. About unnecessary touching."
"I'm reclassifying it," Sangwon said, low, closing the last of the distance himself, "as necessary."
Anxin made a small sound that was almost, almost a laugh, and met him the rest of the way.
Sunday morning arrived with the smell of grilled fish and the sound of someone's phone alarm going off three rooms away, and Sangwon woke to find Anxin already awake beside him, propped up on one elbow, watching him with an expression Sangwon had genuinely never seen on his face before — not the careful neutrality he wore in the office, not the polite performance from dinner the night before, but something unguarded and slightly bewildered, like a man recalculating a total he'd been sure of and getting a different number every time.
"You're staring," Sangwon said, voice still thick with sleep.
"I'm auditing," Anxin said. "There's a discrepancy between how I felt about you Friday and how I feel about you now, and I'm trying to identify when exactly the error was introduced."
"Was it an error?"
"I haven't finished the audit."
Sangwon laughed, a real one, loud enough that it must have carried through the wall, because a moment later there was a soft, deliberate knock and his grandmother's voice, entirely too pleased with itself, called through the door.
"If you two are decent, breakfast is getting cold. If you're not decent, breakfast is still getting cold, so hurry up either way."
They dressed in a scramble that involved a genuine, unstaged laugh from both of them over Anxin trying to locate his other sock, and by the time they made it to the kitchen the whole family was already assembled around the low table, passing bowls of rice and grilled mackerel and a truly enormous quantity of banchan that Sangwon suspected represented the combined efforts of every aunt in the building.
His grandmother patted the cushion beside her without looking up from her rice bowl, which both of them had learned by now was not a suggestion, and Anxin sat.
"You slept well?" she asked, in the same tone she might have used to ask about the weather, though her eyes cut briefly, knowingly, toward Sangwon.
"Very well, thank you, Grandmother," Anxin said, with a composure that Sangwon privately thought was a genuine professional achievement given the circumstances.
"Good," she said, and reached over without preamble to move an extra piece of fish onto his plate. "You'll need your strength. Sangwon's mother is making him drive back tonight, and my grandson drives like he's still twenty-two and immortal."
"I do not," Sangwon said.
"You do," said three separate aunts, in unison, without even looking up from their food, and Anxin laughed so suddenly and so genuinely that Minji, still in her pajamas and clutching the Switch controller she'd apparently slept beside, declared from across the table that Anxin had "the best laugh of anyone's boyfriend she'd ever met," a category she then admitted, when pressed, contained a sample size of exactly one.
The rest of breakfast dissolved into the particular chaos Sangwon had grown up inside and never quite learned to describe to outsiders — his father recounting, for what Sangwon suspected was the four-hundredth time, the story of the balcony grill fire of two years prior, embellishing a new detail each telling; his mother interrogating Anxin gently about his family, his hometown, his five-year plan, in the specific circling way she'd once used to vet a business partner; his grandmother saying very little and watching everything, the way she always did, filing every small interaction away for later use.
When it finally came time to leave, the goodbye took nearly forty minutes, as goodbyes in that family always did — a rotating series of embraces, food pressed into bags "for the road" that neither of them had asked for and both of them knew better than to refuse, Minji extracting a solemn promise from Anxin that he would return for her birthday in the spring, which he gave without hesitation and which Sangwon noted, with some private amusement, Anxin did not seem to regard as a burden at all.
His grandmother was the last one at the door. She took Anxin's hand in both of hers, small and dry and surprisingly strong, and held it a moment.
"I liked you within the first thirty seconds," she said, without any particular ceremony, as though stating a fact about the weather. "I want you to know that's rare. My grandson has brought exactly no one home in thirty-one years, and then he brings you, and you sit next to an old woman at dinner and actually listen when she talks instead of nodding at the wall behind her head like the last one did." She paused, glancing sideways at Sangwon with something sharp and knowing in her eyes. "Whatever this is — however it started — don't let it become nothing. I'm eighty. I don't have patience left for nothing."
Neither of them said anything to that in the car for the first twenty minutes of the drive home, though Anxin reached over at some point around the toll booth and rested his hand, loosely, on the console between them, and Sangwon covered it with his own without looking away from the road, and that, more than anything either of them had said in the dark the night before, felt like the actual beginning of something.
They came back to the office Monday morning eleven minutes late, having left Busan later than planned and hit traffic neither of them particularly minded, and settled into their respective sides of the shared cubicle wall doing absolutely nothing to explain the matching expressions of two people who had spent the entire four-hour drive home carefully not discussing the very large thing both of them had clearly been thinking about the whole way.
At 9:47, a sticky note appeared over the top of the cubicle divider, written in Anxin's precise, engineer-neat handwriting.
The weekend arrangement has expired per original terms. Please advise on renewal.
Sangwon looked at it for a long moment, turning it over once in his hand, and then wrote beneath it and stuck the note back up over the wall.
Terms of renewal: indefinite. Non-negotiable. Effective immediately, no further review period required.
There was a pause on the other side of the partition — long enough that Sangwon half-worried he'd overplayed it — and then, quiet enough that only he could hear it over the office hum, Anxin said, "Acceptable," in a voice that was not nearly as level as he'd clearly intended it to be.
Sangwon put his head down on his desk and grinned like an idiot for the better part of the morning, ignoring Ji-eun from accounting's pointed look as she walked past, and thought that whatever paperwork, real or invented, came out of this office from now on, at least this particular deal wasn't one either of them wanted out of.
His mother called that evening to ask when they'd be coming home again, this time for Chuseok, already halfway into planning what dishes to make and which relatives to seat where, as though the matter of their relationship's authenticity had never been in question at all — as though she'd simply been waiting, all along, for the paperwork to catch up to something she'd already decided was true.
"We'll be there," Sangwon said, and realized, with a small, private jolt of something like relief, that for the first time since this entire ridiculous scheme had begun with a panicked phone call and a stolen name, he wasn't lying at all.
He hung up and found Anxin still at his desk on the other side of the wall, visible through the gap where the shared file cabinet didn't quite meet the divider, methodically working through what looked like an actual spreadsheet — not a bit, not a joke, an honest quarterly report — with the same unhurried thoroughness he brought to everything he cared about getting right. Sangwon watched him for a moment, the careful line of his shoulders, the small furrow between his brows as he checked a figure twice before moving on, and thought that this was probably, if he was being honest with himself, the exact posture he'd fallen for in the first place, months before any of this started, long before a blind date and a panicked phone call had ever given him a reason to say it out loud.
"What are you doing," Anxin said, without looking up, in an uncanny echo of Sangwon's own words from Sunday morning.
"I'm auditing," Sangwon said.
That got him a look — dry, amused, entirely too fond for a Monday afternoon in a fluorescent-lit office — and Anxin set down his pen. "Discrepancy?"
"None so far," Sangwon said. "Still checking."
"Take your time," Anxin said, and went back to his spreadsheet, and Sangwon went back to pretending to work, and neither of them moved to close the gap in the file cabinet that let them see each other from their desks, which Sangwon suspected neither of them was ever going to fix again.