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Jeongguk will always take the last because he knows how much it hurts to be first. Kim Taehyung is both his first and last, and he comes crashing into his life like this:
When it is dark and quiet, his mind is more at peace. Winter days are short. The snow on the slopes is soft and powdery, gives way for a bit until you hit hard ground, but the roads are icy and he slips more than once even after two decades of forgetting to buy non-slip shoes. He’s the only one left in the shop. It doesn’t make sense to turn on all the lights even if the sun is setting. So it’s dim, barely any light at all, and he likes it that way. The dark is comforting and the quiet greets him like an old friend.
And this is when a boy enters, one with a loud exuberant laugh and the resounding slam of the glass door, a flurry of white slush in his wake. It doesn’t make any sense that there seems to be an actual halo behind him, illuminating his silhouette, casting him up on a pedestal that Jeongguk didn’t know he still had. He is wide eyes and bright smile.
He introduces himself as Taehyung, as he shakes the snow out of his hair, and then asks Jeongguk if he knows that night skiing will start in two days and if he’s excited. He ignores Jeongguk’s relatively more subdued response in favour of taking his skiwear off and wiping off his skis and practically jumping out of his ski boots, complaining about how tight they make his calves. Does Jeongguk know that Taehyung got blisters the first two weeks he started skiing? No, Jeongguk replies, he doesn’t.
Taehyung misses skiing. He’s been on skis since he was in middle school, but the city sucked the soul out of him, and now he’s finally getting it back. The thrill of racing down the fastest way possible, leaning left and right and carving through the snow. Of throwing yourself into a fall and shivering when snow finds its way under the waistband of your pants.
The snow is bright even as the sun sets, but the boy is dark. Taehyung barely notices him under the shroud of dust and dimness.
He sits, eyes wide and focused. Doe eyes. Long fingers curving over a ballpoint pen and writing away, veins of his forearms visible. He doesn’t wear a sweater even though it’s below freezing point. Teeth sink into a plush, pink bottom lip. The residual steam from a rapidly cooling cup of something hot curls up beside him and into the air.
When he looks up, his mouth goes taut and his eyes go curious, so Taehyung talks. It’s mostly Taehyung that talks, but the boy talks a little, too. His name is Jeongguk and he works here.
Jeongguk knows Taehyung through nights, not days. The snow gradually gets heavier in their small mountain night and they open up the night skis, and the night is no longer Jeongguk’s own. There are fewer staff than in the day, but still more than Jeongguk expects, so he holds any moments of his own close to his heart. He grips them in the heart of his palm and doesn’t let go.
Nights are barely sleepless, and Jeongguk spends his time writing when business is slow. He misses the scratch of pen on paper and mulls in the sound whenever he can.
Taehyung is here on a night, as usual. The fourth night, Jeongguk thinks, since he burst into Jeongguk’s life with a trail of flower blossoms in winter and a smile that rivals the evening sun on a summer’s day. He always gets scheduled the evening classes, Taehyung explains, because he always sleeps so late he can never wake up on time, and he’s too lazy to drag his body out of bed. He likes teaching in the evening anyway, at that point where the sky turns purple, because he never expected the mountains to be this beautiful and wants to see it as often as he can. He really likes skiing too, he says, but never thought he would make a good teacher. Look at him now.
Throughout it all, Jeongguk takes in the rest of him: the light in his eyes as he talks about the sculpting elective he’s taking back in the city, the curve of his lips that shifts and changes with each syllable so fast and rapid Jeongguk can barely keep up, the way his eyebrows move strong and animated under the beanie.
It’s nice having someone his age here. The town is small; the people are old. The average age goes down by ten years when holidays come around and the young people return. Taehyung is the only one still in university and he’s a breath of fresh city air in a mountain town.
Jeongguk is quiet and patient. Taehyung isn’t exactly loud, but he’s talkative. Then again, anyone would be talkative next to Jeongguk. It takes a lot to pry anything out of the Creative Writing major, and sometimes he wishes Jeongguk would initiate a conversation for once. Usually, Taehyung helps out during closing and makes conversation then, right before he enters another sleepless night.
There’s a certain charm to the boy. He’s quiet, but he listens. He remembers the name of Taehyung’s favourite character from ‘Spirited Away’ even though he never watched it himself, and Taehyung makes him pinky promise to watch it together.
He doesn’t see Jeongguk much outside of the lodge. He figures Jeongguk is busy working, and Taehyung—Taehyung is too busy sleeping during the day. The town is quiet, anyway. You would think a small town makes you less anonymous, but that’s not the case. Almost everyone is either working or a tourist at the lodge, and the streets are near-silent. He could fall into the river and no one would know. He doesn’t have to care as much as in the city, no nasty sneers or side-eyes or pitiful smiles. But there is Jeongguk, there with the quiet tug of his lips and the grin in his eyes.
The mountain is a funny thing. It’s fickle and indecisive, but on the best of days, it is your best friend. The snow tonight is smooth beneath Jeongguk’s feet and the wind is harsh as it cuts against his cheek. He leans forward into the downhill; but not too fast, not so much so that his hip will flare up again. The mountain made it that way, once upon a time, a burn in his pelvic bone that refused to go away and showed up, a stark white line on the scan.
He can’t see anything. It is night to begin with, but there’s a thick fog over the mountains that only an idiot would want to ski in. Jeongguk has been skiing since he could walk, and Jeongguk is an idiot. It snows six months a year here, it’s so far up north.
Some parts are harder and more compact after so many people have skied over them, but the slope is still rather skiable. He chose to be the last, anyway. He expects this.
When he heads back to the rental area, Taehyung is already there, panic flashing in his eyes. He asks why on earth Jeongguk would ski during a white-out, is he asking for death, and Jeongguk replies with a shrug. He hasn’t skied in a while anyway, might as well do it while he can barely see a few meters in front of him.
That night is the first night Taehyung pulls him into a hug, before flicking his forehead for being so stupid and frowning at him. He makes Jeongguk clean all the skis and nurses a cup of coffee as he watches, only to offer the rest of it once Jeongguk is done.
Whenever Taehyung asks Jeongguk to hang out outside of their allotted time, the one hour of closing before they really close up, Jeongguk says no. But Taehyung is persistent, and one night that they both have off, Jeongguk is curled up on his couch with a cup of coffee and a giant sweater, and Taehyung thinks that it’s a miracle.
Taehyung’s aunt is not in. She’s up in the city visiting a friend and they have the house to themselves. Outside, the rooftops are capped with snow. A few meters tall, the cars buried deep, and it’s still snowing. It doesn’t snow nearly this much up in the city.
Jeongguk asks him what he’s thinking about over the sound of another too-obscure producer blasting from his laptop, and he replies honestly: the snow is pretty. Then Jeongguk laughs, and he realises it sounds like little bells chiming in the wind. The kind that signal the shy arrival of something new and exciting. A burst of gold in the midst of white. A bit like Jeongguk, he thinks, the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles and his cheeks flush red in the cold. He is adorable, swathed and drowning in a sweater that curls around him like a blanket.
It’s a sleepless night again, and black blends into the darkness. He makes Jeongguk listen to all the producers he’s found online, the kind with less than two thousand followers and create music with no lyrics. He tells Jeongguk he wants to make music but sound engineering is really hard. Jeongguk agrees, and tells him that writing is not much better.
One night as Jeongguk’s arranging the ski boots according to size and Taehyung sorts out the helmets, Taehyung asks him why he doesn’t ski as often, seeing as he likes it so much. He says that Jeongguk glows when he hears the click of his skis. Jeongguk explains about his injury. He had been close to going pro, until a stress fracture in his hip put him out of competition for a year. A week out is a week too long, and a year out is to fall so far behind you can never get back up.
Taehyung comes close and pulls him in and his embrace is warm, like his rectangular smiles and his echoing laughter and his wide eyes. The storage room is dark but Taehyung is light. The night is black but it doesn’t seem that way any longer.
They walk back together. Taehyung holds Jeongguk’s hand without thinking; his fingers are slightly worn, pads callused because he’s been trying to learn guitar, long and slightly curved when relaxed. Thin wrists, strong knuckles, a ring on his left thumb.
He can barely see anything. The streetlamps don’t help much. The moon is up ahead, bright and full, but the clouds bathe everything in a blurry fog.
Their feet pad lightly against the ground. It’s snowing again. The snowflakes end up in clusters on Taehyung’s black coat. It’s funny; you’d think they were giant snowflakes, but they’re just many tiny ones packed loosely together, translucent, landing feather-light against a dark background. One particularly large clump gets caught in Jeongguk’s bangs and he raises a hand to brush it away, but it melts against his thumb.
Jeongguk leans into his hand and his hair is dry but yielding against his palm. He looks to Taehyung with large eyes and red cheeks.
It’s a little funny. Two bodies strolling across a near-empty town in the dark of the night, the snow persistently falling down. Their feet collide with each other as they walk and they make no move to change it. They can’t see clearly, lines of their faces fading into dark shadows, but everything feels sharpened and distinct. They tremble, but they’re warm.
They kiss slowly, but they smile quick and shy and nervous. They frame each other’s faces with careful hands, but they do so with racing hearts. They lean into each other, but they leave a small gap between their bodies, like they will fall apart if they go any closer.
That night, they stumble into each other with the wide-eyed amazement of two boys falling into—not into love, not necessarily, but into something.