Archive of Our Own

It began, as change often does, with boredom. 

Not the petty kind, the one that children struggle with, throwing their brand new toy over their shoulder or pushing around their food in their plate with blown cheeks and jutting out lips —it was something else entirely that had started taking over Sion the past months, a pure weariness with life pulling down his limbs like gravity, a permanent languor plaguing his body. 

It was his manager at work constantly throwing passive aggressive remarks his way at best, downright humiliating him in front of the entire office at worst ; it was the neon lights of the always overflowing Seoul subway inflicting him migraines that had become part of his daily life ; it was the apathetic expression of the convenience store worker by his house scanning his articles (a pack of instant microwaveable rice and a single ice cream bar) ; it was his boyfriend of two years breaking him up with him by calling him dreary and aimless. A shell of a person. 

It’d been obvious for a while that Sion’s boyfriend, who was six years older than his own twenty-nine years of age and always thinking of the rest of his life, had started finding fault in Sion’s lower-level position at his company, in his cramped two-room apartment he seemed to have no ambition to move out of, even in his choice of groceries, ever the same. 

Sion had pretended not to notice his boyfriend’s restlessness, he’d chosen to ignore his not so subtle remarks suggesting he asked for a promotion at work or that they moved in together. He wasn’t sure why. He’d loved his boyfriend, probably, at least in the beginning, but that relationship felt alien to him now. It had become a responsibility, a habit. 

So when his boyfriend broke up with him, it wasn’t heartbreak or anxiety he felt, but rather relief. As if someone had been stepping on his lungs all along and they’d finally stepped off. Sion had to tell himself the flutter moving in his chest was due to surprise at being broken up with.

His boyfriend tried making the breakup dramatic, cinematic even, as if by obligation, as if he’d learned love through movies and he thought it was how breakups should go.

“You’ve got a very deep sadness in your eyes, Sion.”

“What?”

“I thought I could help you get better but I don’t think you even want to.”

The drama of the statement earned a laugh from Sion. This obviously wasn’t the reaction his boyfriend had expected and he flushed in a mixture of anger and embarrassment. He opened his mouth, a spiteful glint in his eyes that Sion knew the meaning of. His boyfriend was good at being mean. He braced himself for the barb that was sure to come, but then his boyfriend seemed to change his mind. He closed his mouth and shook his head, a hint of defeat painting his features.

“You just seem so bored all the time. Your life’s not going anywhere.”

This was somehow worse than any insult he could’ve thrown at him. Maybe because Sion knew he meant it, that this was, in a way, his last act of kindness. Letting him know that his life was meaningless and everybody could see it. 

As Sion went home that day, he munched on the words. Your life’s not going anywhere. Of course it wasn’t. Sion was right here. Why should his life go away from him?

The statement, though it was more an accusation, stayed with him all throughout the night, clinging to his pillow and weaving itself into his clothes. Maybe he should go somewhere after all. Maybe he had to. Now that his perpetual boredom had been put into words and thrown in his face, it felt impossible to ignore. It wasn’t like he had anything tying him back —he no longer had a boyfriend and his family had never been here in the first place.

That only left one last thing.

He wasn’t actually expecting to quit his job. He’d never been the type to act on impulse. His entire life up to that point had been meticulously planned, following a strict schedule. 

But it was a particularly sunny day. As soon as Sion got to his desk in the morning, a ray of sun hit his face, momentarily blinding him. Sion squinted his eyes and raised his hand to block it. That’s when he saw it: specks of dust, floating in the air, almost glittering in the sun. Insignificant, infinite tiny specks of dust. Sion looked down at the laptop he’d just taken out of his bag and placed on his desk, at the post-it notes covered in his own handwriting that he'd scattered as reminders for today when he left the office yesterday, already thinking of the next day’s load of work. His discarded pen, whose cap he’d lost some weeks ago, almost empty of ink.  

By mid-morning, Sion was out of the office and of a job. By noon, he was on a bus to Angok, a small coastal town he’d never even heard of before getting to the overflowing bus station. He watched the people running around the hall, the girlfriends scooting into their boyfriends on military leave’s sides, the tourists squinting at the displays in hangeul, the mothers waving good-byes and see-you-laters to their kids. Everyone was going somewhere after all, he realized. 

Well, so could he. He jumped on the first bus with a seat available, not even checking its destination. An unfamiliar thrill ran through him as the bus departed with his small suitcase in its belly and him sitting near the window in the back. The bus was almost empty except for him, something that would’ve alarmed him only yesterday, but he wasn’t the same person as yesterday. He was single and jobless and, he realized with an excited thump, aimless, but this time, he’d chosen it. 

Screw his boyfriend. Screw his manager. Sion didn’t want to turn out like either of them anyway. 

It was the summer solstice, the beginning of a new season, one that Sion would make his own for the first time in his life. 

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Angok is smaller than he expected. Sion gets off the bus at the station (it’s not even a proper station but a singular stop down the road, which is the first thing to tip him off) and looks around him, confused. Nothing’s here. Now that he thinks about it, nothing’s been here for miles: he stared out the window the entire bus ride and for the last hour, he saw nothing but wide empty fields and uninhabited-looking houses with drilled roofs and worn down facades. He almost missed his stop —surely, this couldn’t be it. 

Unfortunately, no one else got off with him (the two other passengers of the bus, an elderly man sitting at the very front who fell asleep as soon as the driver turned the ignition on, which Sion knows because he could hear him snore like an engine even from his seat, and a young girl who didn't look up from the textbook in her lap once, didn’t even glance up when the bus stopped and the driver warned whoever it was that had bought a ticket to Angok to get off before he drove off), so the only thing he can do is helplessly watch as his bus drives away from him. When it disappears down the road, Sion reaches for his phone to call for a taxi, only to find he doesn’t have any reception. Considering the absence of cars driving down the road, he doubts taxis even run here anyway. 

He doesn’t let that deter himself, though. He starts walking, dragging his suitcase behind him, until he thankfully reaches a small, run down convenience store fifteen minutes later. Thank God for that because he was starting to sweat. 

He’s not even sure the store is open at first. The bright afternoon sun shines on the glass door in a way that makes it impossible to see what’s going on inside. From the little he can see, nothing is going on inside —the lighting is minimal and the air itself seems very still. He can hear something, though, the faint melody of a song that he doesn’t recognize. He tries the door handle and sighs with relief when it opens for him.

The tiny jingle of the door chime welcomes him. Sion hoists his suitcase through the door, not without difficulty, and abandons it in a corner to explore the shop after finding the counter empty. 

It’s a small convenience store, far from the CU’s and the 7/11’s he’s used to in Seoul. Now that he thinks about it, this one didn’t even seem to have a name: the sign at the front of the store only displayed the straightforward “convenience store” words in slightly deteriorated red and green letters. 

As Sion browses the aisles, whose racks barely even reach his head, he realizes he’s not familiar with most of the brands. He only recognizes some of them from his childhood spent in the Mokpo countryside, cheap brands that most convenience stores in Seoul don’t carry.

Quickly, he’s gone around the entire shop and he finds himself back at the counter, scratching his head. It doesn’t look like anyone’s here. He did glimpse a door in the back, which he assumes might lead to someone, but he was too shy to open it or even knock. Shouldn’t the employee have seen him on the CCTV cameras by now? Though, a quick look above his head reveals no apparent cameras. Did the employee on shift leave and forget to lock the door behind them? 

Sion takes a step back towards his suitcase, defeated, and knocks into a shelf by accident. Unfortunately, that shelf is home to approximately a dozen tin cans (corn and peas and beans) that all jiggle dangerously close to the edge at the collision. Luckily, only one tumbles to the ground, but it makes such a deafening sound when it hits the floor that Sion jumps.

He jumps again when he hears someone yell from behind him. He whips around, heart hammering in his chest, and lets out a scream of his own as the top of someone’s head appears behind the counter. 

The boy —the store employee, Sion presumes— climbs to his feet slowly, grasping the counter edge arduously, then hoisting himself up by resting his elbows on the surface. The whole affair seems to take him great effort. Sion watches it all happen as if he were witnessing a werewolf transformation or another supernatural shift, slightly terrified but also a little fascinated. 

Once the boy is on his feet, Sion gradually feels himself calm down. It’s obviously a normal boy: he’s got thick, unruly dark hair that almost completely covers one of his eyes, pink, plump lips that make him look like a cartoon character, and a crumpled short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the top that contrasts comically with the eccentric earring Sion can see dangling from his right ear. He looks like he just woke up from a very deep sleep. 

“Hello,” the boy says. The voice that comes out of his mouth, scratched from slumber, is a lot deeper than what Sion expected from the cherub face staring at him. “May I help you?”

Sion blinks at the boy, the polite “No, thank you” already at the tip of his tongue like a habit, before remembering that yes, he can in fact help him. “Hello, yes. How do I get to Angok?”

“You are in Angok, sir.”

“No, yes, I meant the center of Angok.”

“Eh…” The boy scratches his neck. He tilts his head to glance at Sion’s discarded suitcase behind him. “Are you walking? It’s pretty far from here. What are you looking for exactly?”

“I’m—” Sion begins before stopping. What is he looking for? He didn’t really think about it. He only jumped on that bus on a whim. He’s never been the kind of person to just do things on a whim before. He likes to think ahead, to make lists, to plan. Fuck. Should he just go back now? No. Okay. He just needs to think. He’s good at that. He wants to spend the summer here. What does he need? “Just a hotel.”

The boy barks out a laugh that has Sion flushing. “A hotel? You’re not going to find that here, sir.”

“I’m not?”

The boy shakes his head and clicks his tongue twice. “No, no.”

Sion’s shoulders drop. Well, that’s that. His plan is completely foiled already. There’s no way he can stay here without a place to live. He should’ve thought more thoroughly about it. He should’ve made a list. He shouldn’t have quit his job. He should’ve—

Ddi-ring.

“Sakuya!”

“Hey, Ryo.”

Sion turns towards the door through which a boy just burst like a hurricane. He’s wearing the same white shirt as the store employee, leaving Sion to wonder if it might be the uniform before he spots the tiny name tag on his chest.

Right. A school uniform.

Only then does the newcomer seem to notice Sion’s awkward presence hovering in the corner. “Hello,” he says with a polite bow of the head, wariness immediately taking over his smile.

“Hello. Well, anyways, thank you for your help, I’ll—”

“Wait!” the employee— Sakuya stops him. “I’ll call my auntie. She’ll know how to help you.”

“Hm?” Ryo perks up. “Help with what?” 

Sakuya walks around the counter, scrolling through his phone. “None of your business,” he says before going outside, sticking his tongue at the boy. 

“Help with what? Hey! Hey!” Ryo yells at the door, reminding Sion of a small maltese dog barking into empty space. He lets out a quiet laugh that seems to remind Ryo of his presence. He turns around and narrows his eyes at him. “Do you know Sakuya?”

“Me? Oh, no.” Sion shakes his hands in front of him, taken aback by Ryo’s sudden hostility. “I’m not from here.”

“I know.” Ryo gets behind the counter so casually that Sion wonders if he does work here, and drops in the stool abandoned to the side. “I would’ve seen you around. What are you doing in Angok?”

Sion watches as Ryo grabs a lollipop from the display by the counter and effortlessly takes off its wrapper before unceremoniously popping it in his mouth. Sion glances outside but he can only vaguely make out Sakuya’s silhouette as he walks back and forth with his phone pressed against his ear (which reminds Sion —how does Sakuya have any reception? His own phone was completely useless earlier).

Sion opens his mouth to ask if Ryo’s allowed to do that before deciding against it. It’s none of his business, after all. From what he saw, Sakuya and Ryo seem friendly enough. Ryo’s probably not a shoplifter.

He takes a few seconds thinking about how to answer Ryo's question. He doesn’t feel like telling him the whole story. It’s not like there’s really one either.

“I’m looking for a place to live,” he finally decides on.

Ryo lets out a laugh awfully similar to Sakuya’s earlier one. He’s starting to see why those two are friends. “Here? Why?” he asks around his lollipop, sounding incredulous.

Sion shrugs. “I just want some quiet. This town looks peaceful.”

“Peaceful?” Ryo muses, weirdly wistful out of a sudden. “I guess it is.”

Before Sion can ask what he means, the door chime jingles with Sakuya’s entrance. “I just got off the phone with Auntie. She’ll be here in ten minutes.”

Sion blanches. He doesn’t know who “Auntie” is, but she sounds like a responsible adult who probably has better things to do than bother with a complete stranger. “You didn’t have to—”

“It’s fine. Auntie’s kind, you’ll see,” Sakuya cuts him off. Seemingly done with that conversation, he turns to Ryo. “I just saw Daeyoung outside.”

Ryo hums. “Eh… He could’ve driven— what’s your name, by the way? Sion? Oh Sion? Nice name. Easy to pronounce— He could’ve driven Sion hyung.”

Sakuya shakes his head. “He already had, like, three watermelons strapped to his bike.”

Sion watches the whole exchange with barely concealed confusion written across his face. The two high schoolers running this almost abandoned convenience store, the ease with which they accepted Sion’s half-assed story, the mysterious Auntie coming to help him, the fact that neither Sakuya nor Ryo saw anything strange about the boy on the bike driving Sion, an adult man with a suitcase. 

What a strange little town, Sion thinks as he sits on the stool Sakuya offers him —he insists he can stay standing up— waiting for help to come. Sakuya and Ryo start bickering about something, quickly switching to a fast-paced Japanese Sion’s three years of high school level classes can’t follow. He tunes them out and instead focuses on the nice song playing over the radio, somewhat nostalgic sounding though he’s pretty sure he’s never heard it before. 

“My, you sure are a pretty boy!”

“Auntie”, as it turns out, is Sakuya’s aunt on his father’s side. Sakuya is fully Japanese but his parents divorced when he was in elementary school and his mother remarried a few years later to a Korean man —Auntie’s younger brother. He’s been living in Angok for around five years now and he goes to the high school in the neighboring town. 

Ryo is Sakuya’s childhood best friend and, apparently, he was so heartbroken when Sakuya left for Korea that he convinced his parents to let him follow. He was only supposed to study here for one year but he’s going on three now and it looks like he’s going to complete high school here. 

Auntie has one son of her own but the whole car ride from the convenience store to the town center, she keeps referring to her “kids”, plural, which Sion later understands means Sakuya, Ryo, and her son —the real one. 

“How old are you, dear?” Auntie asks after rambling on for fifteen minutes about how proud she is of Sakuya and Ryo for doing so well in a foreign country. 

“Twenty-nine, ma’am.”

“No need for that, call me Auntie. My son’s twenty-six, you should get along well.”

Sion laughs awkwardly, unsure of what to say. Thankfully, it seems like they’ve reached their destination. Auntie parks in front of a small house with a red gate whose paint is mostly chafed. Behind it stands a magnolia tree so tall Sion can barely glimpse the house. 

In a second, Auntie’s out of the car and dragging open the rusty gate with a huff. “All right, come on in.”

Sion hurriedly gets out of the car and steps after Auntie carefully. The magnolia tree shades a small courtyard with patches of grass here and there and a single picnic table in the middle. A couple of plastic stools lie around, one of which is missing a leg, and a few fissured terracotta jars line the fence. The slightly elevated wooden porch looks like it goes around the entire house, reminding Sion of his grandmother’s house in the Mokpo countryside. The front of the house has two sliding doors, both of which look to be condemned. 

This doesn’t seem to be an issue for Auntie. She easily takes down the wooden plank blocking the doors and slides one open. She steps into the house and fumbles for the light switch on the wall for a few seconds before seemingly remembering something and walking to the middle of the room. She raises a hand and pulls a little chain dangling from the ceiling. 

Light floods the dark room. Sion slips off his shoes and steps inside. He’s immediately attacked by a cloud of dust that makes him cough loudly. When he finally manages to blink away the tears that sprung in his eyes, he glances around the room. Both the parquet floor and the paper walls are completely bare.

“Are you sure I can live here ma— Auntie?”

Sakuya was right. Auntie is kind, exceptionally so. If Sion wasn’t desperate, he might be worried about getting human trafficked. As soon as he explained his situation to her, Auntie immediately offered to house him. She said she had a spare house and that if Sion was only here for a few months anyway, it didn’t matter to her. She couldn’t leave him on the street, after all. 

Sion let her drive him here, but now that he’s actually in the house, he’s starting to feel bad. How is he supposed to just accept this?

“Why, do you not like it? I know it’s a bit rusty but once you’ve settled in, it’s a very nice house. There should be a futon somewhere in one of the closets and my—”

“No, no, it’s not that. I love it,” Sion hurries to say. 

It’s not a lie. The house might be old and dusty and painfully empty but… it’s warm. There’s a spot of light on the floor where the shadow of the magnolia tree dances in the wind. Birds are singing outside, their song barely heard under the loud chirping of the crickets hidden all around the courtyard. There’s a smell in the air, wood and dust and sun. 

It’s a perfect house.

“What’s wrong, then?”

“I just— I can’t live here for free.”

Auntie clicks her tongue. “I already told you not to worry about that.”

“Still…”

“Well, if that really bothers you…” Auntie looks around the room pensively. “You could always help out at the public library downtown. I know we’re missing an assistant.”

“‘We’? Do you work there?” Sion tilts his head. He’d kind of assumed Auntie didn’t have a job, considering how she seems to own multiple buildings (the convenience store turned out to be hers as well, which is why Sakuya works there after school three times a week). 

“No, but my son does. The other library assistant quit a couple of weeks ago so my brother and I have been helping out from time to time, but we could use a proper assistant. My son’s been struggling recently.”

Ah. The son, again. Sion doesn’t know why, but he’s kind of anxious about meeting that guy. Sakuya and Ryo were okay since they’re only kids, but Sion’s not sure he wants to meet someone his age. He came here for peace and quiet. He doesn’t want to have to answer questions about why he left his entire life behind or what he intends to do with the rest of it. 

It’s not like he has a choice, though. He can’t turn down Auntie’s offer, not if he intends to stay here. 

“I’d love to help. I’ll do my best,” he says with a strained smile.

“Perfect, then!” Auntie pats him on the shoulder. “I’ll let you settle in. I’ll have Sakuya drop by with some food in the evening.”

“Oh, you don’t need to—”

Auntie shushes him with a wave of the hand. She’s already half across the courtyard, hands tucked behind her back. Sion watches her go until she’s out of sight, then he turns around, taking in the wallpaper frayed at the corners, the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, the little bit of kitchen he can see peeking from the ajar door on the side.

His home for the next three months.

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Sion decides to start at the library two days later. Auntie told him he could just go whenever, obviously not taking that job seriously unlike Sion, who takes it very seriously. He intends to earn his keep. 

He spends the entire previous day working around the house, cleaning the floors and airing every room out. He digs through all of the closets for furniture he could use, which is how he finds not only the aforementioned futon (he kind of thought Auntie had made that up but there’s actually one), but also all sorts of things: blankets, a kettle, some rolls of toilet paper, a singular chopstick, two mugs, and the jackpot, a low wooden table to have his meals at as well as a few cushions he can sit on. The table is wobbly and the cushions are so thin he might as well be sitting straight on the floor, but he doesn’t mind. He finds an old-looking notebook with yellowed pages to wedge the table in place, and he can always pile up the cushions. 

There’s a small fridge in the otherwise empty kitchen that lights up with a faint light and a low buzzing when Sion plugs it in. He’s so happy the fridge works and he doesn’t need to buy a new one that he doesn’t even mind the fact it only has two levels that each barely offer enough space to fit two containers side by side. He’ll figure it out. 

He goes on his first grocery run that afternoon. As promised, the previous evening, Sakuya came over with containers full of kimchi and spicy cucumber salad and egg rolls and potato pancake and seasoned beansprouts and fish stew and cooked rice —so much food that Sion thought it’d last him at least for three weeks. However, Sakuya actually hung around for a few hours, looking around the house curiously and asking all sorts of questions about Sion’s life that he pointedly danced around, and he ate most of the food throughout the evening. Sion barely even saw him but if he took his eyes off the table for a single moment, he always found it missing another dish when he looked again. 

Despite that, his little fridge is still full with Auntie’s containers. The reason Sion decides to head to the grocery store is because he’s missing one crucial thing —sweets. He’s only been in Angok for two days but he already craves the sugar he so easily indulged in back home. 

There’s no actual grocery store here, though, at least not within walking distance. He still goes out, assuming he’ll find a convenience store at some point, and almost immediately comes across a familiar looking boy humming to himself as he sucks on a popsicle.

Sion stops in his tracks and even starts veering towards the nearest tree to hide behind, but the boy spots him. He takes out the ice cream from his mouth with a loud “pop” and points at Sion.

“Sion hyung!” he calls loudly, making Sion come out of his hiding spot with an awkward wave.

“Hi, Ryo,” he says with a smile, trying to pretend he didn’t just attempt (and fail) to hide from him. “Are you on your way home from school? Where’s Sakuya?” he asks almost automatically. He’s not sure why but seeing one without the other feels weird. Maybe it’s because Sakuya spent around 70% of the previous evening talking about Ryo. 

“Still at school. He’s got soccer practice,” Ryo grumbles, obviously not pleased at having to go home by himself. 

“You’re not in any club?”

Ryo shakes his head. “I don’t have the time. I need to study.”

They fall into step naturally, making small talk that, for the first time in Sion’s life maybe, doesn’t feel awkward or forced. It’s strange but there’s something about Sakuya and Ryo that’s easy, comfortable. Maybe it’s because they’re still in high school and their little troubles sound cute to him, or maybe it’s because they have that small town vibe about them, slow and relaxed. 

“Where were you going, hyung?” Ryo asks after a while.

“Oh, right.” Sion had almost forgotten. He’d started following Ryo without realizing. “Is there a convenience store nearby? I need to buy some food.”

Ryo arches an eyebrow at him. “Didn’t Sakuya bring you an entire month’s supply of food yesterday? I saw him head to your place. I thought he was going to dislocate his shoulder with that enormous bag.”

Sion scratches his neck. “I just want to get some other things.” When Ryo stares at him, he clarifies, “Ice cream. Chocolate. Candy. Soda.”

The plain judgement on Ryo’s face, growing steadily as Sion drones on, would almost be funny if it wasn’t directed at him. Sion clamps his mouth shut and flashes an abashed smile that has Ryo shaking his head with a click of the tongue. 

“Do you even have a rice cooker, hyung? A microwave? Toilet paper? Sweets should be the least of your—”

“Of course I have toilet paper!” Sion says, outraged. “What do you take me for?”

Ryo shrugs. “Who knows. I saw you as a responsible adult but maybe you—”

His phone rings in his pocket, sparing Sion from the rest of his nagging. Ryo glances at him and when Sion gestures for him to take the call, he raises his phone to his ear.

“Yes? No, I’m on my way home. Eh? Can’t you ask Sakuya? Hm… Okay, but you owe me a pack of chips. And a mango ice tea. And you have to lend me your Nintendo Switch for— okay, okay. I’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Bye bye.” 

Sion doesn’t mean to eavesdrop on the conversation but, well, he’s right there. When Ryo hangs up, he looks at Sion, who averts his eyes awkwardly, feeling caught in the act. “Do you need to go somewhere?”

“Daeyoung asked me to buy him a few things, so I’m going to the convenience store with you,” Ryo answers, seemingly unbothered by Sion’s eavesdropping. “When do you start work, by the way?”

“Did Sakuya already tell you about that?” Sion can practically see the “duh” on Ryo’s face. “Tomorrow. I’ll call Auntie later to let her know.”

Ryo hums. “I’ll visit you!”

“I thought you needed to study.”

“It’s okay, I can just study there. Besides, I already go with Sakuya every other day, so I’m used to it.”

Fair enough, Sion thinks. After all, it is a library. They probably don’t have study cafes or academies around here. Angok’s public library might be the best they can do.

Angok’s public library might be all they can do if Sakuya and Ryo really willingly choose to study there.

Sion has to check the half erased inscription on the building three times to make sure he’s at the right place. Honestly, he doesn’t know what he expected, but it certainly wasn’t this: a one-storey building tucked a few streets away from the town center (which, to be fair, only consists of one elementary school, a small park, and a few scattered shops) that barely looks bigger than the house Auntie lends him. 

Sion brings his face closer to the glass door, trying to take a peek inside, but all of the lights are turned off. 

Of course, they are. It’s 8:55 AM now and, though no one told him anything, Sion thought it safe to assume the library opens at 9 AM, which seems to be the case. He tried looking up the actual opening hours on his phone yesterday, but he couldn’t even find the building on Naver Maps. 

Sion sticks his forehead against the glass and cups his face with his hands in an attempt to see better inside. He manages to make out shapes: tables, chairs, shelves. It looks bigger than what the outside suggests.

He doesn’t hear the footsteps coming up behind him, too busy assessing his new workplace. 

“Can I help you?”

Sion yelps and whips around, hand over his heart. He finds himself face to face with a man slightly taller than him with soft-looking brown hair, kind eyes, and an even kinder smile. He looks at Sion with his eyebrows slightly raised in an encouraging look that reminds Sion of a kindergartner teacher.

“I— I’m—” Sion opens and closes his mouth like a fish. He’s completely pressed against the door behind him, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the man standing over him. 

He should probably introduce himself but— Who even is that guy and where the hell did he come from? He doesn’t look menacing (quite the opposite, actually), and, if anything, Sion’s the one who probably looked like a creep sticking his face against the library window, but still. Sion’s not used to strangers just striking up conversations with him. That seems to be a thing here, though, so he might have to get used to it quickly.

The stranger doesn’t seem annoyed by Sion’s lack of answer. He keeps smiling at him kindly as if he didn’t mind Sion staring at him stupidly. As if he had all the time in the world. He does scan Sion’s face quickly —though so subtly Sion might not even have noticed it if he wasn’t staring at the guy’s eyelashes— and something flashes across his face. 

“Sion-ssi?”

Sion jumps again at the sound of his name leaving the stranger’s mouth. “How do you…”

“I’m Daeyoung,” the man says, pointing at himself. When Sion doesn’t react, he lets out a quiet chuckle. “I work here.”

“You work at— You’re Auntie’s son?!” Sion blurts out. So much for giving his future coworker a good first impression. Besides the embarrassment, there’s something else working in his head, a memory crawling to the front of his mind. Daeyoung… He’s heard that name before. He racks his brain for a second before it hits him. “The guy with the watermelons? Who owes Ryo a mango ice tea?”

“Hm?” Daeyoung tilts his head, his gentle smile not leaving his face for one moment even though he probably doesn’t have a single clue what he’s talking about. 

Sion gapes at him, trying to put the pieces together. He thought “Daeyoung” was a classmate of Ryo and Sakuya! The way they talked about him, he would’ve never expected Daeyoung to be Auntie’s son, aka his new coworker slash boss! 

“Nevermind.” Sion clears his throat and extends his hand. “Nice to meet you, Daeyoung-ssi.”

Daeyoung laughs as he shakes Sion’s hand. Sion’s not sure what’s funny about what he said but Daeyoung’s laugh doesn’t sound mean-spirited. It’s low and light at the same time, a pleasant sound that travels all throughout Sion’s body. 

A gust of wind rustles through the cherry trees of the courtyard and a leaf hits Sion in the face, forcing his eyes shut. When he blinks them open, Daeyoung’s standing a step closer, a hand in his hair. Sion freezes and holds his breath. He stares at Daeyoung’s face with trembling pupils, at the mole on his cheek, at his lowered eyelashes, at his lips pursued in concentration. 

A thought crosses his mind so furtively he barely catches it. 

He’s handsome. 

Daeyoung retracts his hand after what seems like an eternity and shows Sion a small leaf tucked between his fingers. “You had this in your hair,” he says with a smile. 

“Thank you,” Sion answers. He hopes he doesn’t sound as out of breath as he feels. 

“Should we go inside now? Kids usually swarm in as soon as I open.”

“Sure,” Sion agrees automatically, entranced. 

It’s only after they’ve entered the library, when he watches Daeyoung go around the whole room, turning on lightswitches and replacing chairs, that Sion snaps out of it.

Kids? 

──────────────────────

It turns out Angok’s public library is mostly visited by children. “Mostly” being closer to exclusively —the first week Sion spends working there, he doesn’t see a single person over the age of eight, except for Daeyoung. The streak comes to an end when Sakuya comes to visit on Friday afternoon. 

“Boo!”

“Ah!”

Sakuya shushes him obnoxiously. “Quiet. This is a public library, hyung.”

Sion hits him in the head with the book he’d been putting back on the shelf Sakuya found him hidden behind. Sakuya whines dramatically and Sion rolls his eyes. “I didn’t hit you that hard.”

“I’m going to tell Daeyoung hyung,” Sakuya threatens, rubbing his head. 

Sion glances around nervously, as if the sole mention of Daeyoung’s name would have somehow summoned him. 

Sakuya doesn’t miss it. He drops in a comically small chair obviously meant for a child and stretches his legs out in front of him, a smile on his face. “Where is my cousin, by the way?”

Sion shrugs. “I don’t know. Around, somewhere, probably.” Sakuya arches an eyebrow at him and Sion turns back towards the shelf, avoiding his gaze. “He’s reading a story to the kids in the back.”

Sakuya hums, picking up a children’s book from the table in front of him. “He’s pretty good with children, right?”

“They love him,” Sion agrees. 

This has been an apparent fact from the first day Sion started working here. Kids stream in and out of the library all throughout the day despite it not being summer vacation yet and the only time they ever come up to Sion’s desk is to inquire after Daeyoung. None of them even asked him who he was. 

The whole day, Daeyoung can’t catch a moment to himself —he’s always picking a kid up to help him reach a book on the upper shelves, comforting a little girl who’s struggling to read her first book with big words, reading a picture book to a group of children who can’t read by themselves yet. Sion watches him run around all day every day, unable to do anything.

He tries to help as much as he can, of course, by taking care of the paperwork, the admission cards, the late returns, or by replacing the books like he’s doing now, but as for actually helping with the kids, he’s useless. All they want is Daeyoung. 

“Ah, hyung!”

Sion looks up at the sound of Sakuya’s voice. The tenderness of his tone lets him know immediately that he’s not addressing him, which only leaves one other “hyung”.

“Saku,” Daeyoung says as he approaches them, a tired smile on his face. “You’re here.”

“I’m keeping Sion hyung company.”

Sion rolls his eyes but as soon as he meets Daeyoung’s gaze, he looks away, embarrassed. He grew comfortable with Sakuya and Ryo pretty immediately —they drop by his house almost every day, unannounced most of the time, and bother him until Sion kicks them out, which often means late in the evening when the sun begins to set and Sion starts worrying they’ll have to go home in the dark. He lets them hang out in his courtyard and on his rooftop until then, though, for some reason. As annoying as they are, he quite likes their company. He wonders if that’s how having younger brothers of his own would feel. 

He hasn’t achieved that level of closeness with Daeyoung yet, and truth be told, he doesn’t think he ever will. Daeyoung’s too kind, too honest. They’re too different. He’s not sure why, but he doesn’t feel comfortable showing Daeyoung his real self, the flawed, unfiltered person he has no problem being with Sakuya and Ryo. 

Before Sion can start feeling embarrassed about being caught showing attitude, a little girl comes up to them —or rather, to Daeyoung. She clings to his leg and looks up at him with stars in her eyes.

“Oppa! Can you read us another story?”

“Hm? I just read you one, Jisoo,” Daeyoung says in that quiet voice he only uses with the kids. He raises a hand to Jisoo’s head and gently caresses her hair. 

“Pleaaaase, please, please, just one more! Just one!”

“Fine.” Daeyoung’s hand slides to Jisoo’s cheek, which he pinches softly once, teasing. Jisoo erupts into delighted laughter and grabs Daeyoung’s hand to drag him back to the nap room. 

Sion understands why the kids love Daeyoung so much. He treats them with care and affection, he never refuses them anything, he lets them walk all over him, all the while keeping that huge, stupid smile on his face. He lifts them in his arms with ease, he tickles them in the sides, he puts them to sleep in the nap room, he wipes their tears with his bare hands. 

Sion’s only been around for one week but he’s already seen Daeyoung in at least a million situations that would have had him at his wit’s end. Daeyoung never runs out of patience, though. It’s like he was made for this.

Daeyoung waves at Sion and Sakuya with an exhausted smile. Sion waves back and stares at the back of Daeyoung’s head until he disappears behind the shelves. When he turns back to Sakuya, he flinches at the look in his eyes, all knowing and smug.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Just then, the door chime jingles. Sion starts walking towards the entrance to see who just came in, but before he can reach it, Ryo appears around the corner, jogging.

“Hey, no running,” Sion warns him.

“Ugh, you’re like a real librarian now,” Ryo complains, but he slows down. When he reaches Sakuya, he wraps his arms around his neck from behind, bending his body to accommodate the small chair Sakuya’s sitting in, and rubs his cheek against the top of his head like a cat trying to mark his territory. “Sakuya.”

“Let me go.” Sakuya grabs his arms in a pathetic attempt to push Ryo away, but his heart’s not in it. If anything, he’s holding onto Ryo more than he’s pushing him away. 

Sion stares at them until Sakuya raises his eyes to look at him. When they meet eyes, he flushes. “What?”

“Nothing,” Sion sing-songs. 

“Hyung,” Ryo begins, oblivious to their little exchange, “did Sakuya tell you yet?”

“Tell me what?”

Ryo and Sakuya share a meaningful look before turning back to Sion, looking very serious all of a sudden.

“This library…” Ryo says conspiratorially, lowering his voice. “It’s haunted.”

Sion rolls his eyes and goes back to his task of organizing books, forgotten since Sakuya made his entrance. “Right.”

“I’m serious. They say there’s a ghost roaming at night.”

“Who said that?”

“People.”

“Who? Little Jisoo? Do the five to eight year olds regularly spend the night here without me knowing? Who’s your source exactly here, Ryo?”

“You can ask Daeyoung,” Sakuya jumps in. “He saw it in the nap room once.”

Sion ignores them, not rising to the bait, but he does steal a glance towards the back of the library. There, he sees Daeyoung sitting cross-legged on the floor with two kids in his lap and another two in front of him, eagerly listening to the story he’s reading. It seems like a scary part has come up in the book because suddenly, Daeyoung tightens his hold on the kids and raises his voice, which has the children laughing uncontrollably. 

The sounds reach Sion all blended together —the kids’ laughter, Daeyoung’s soft voice. There’s also Ryo and Sakuya’s conversation, already in their own world again. If Sion strains his ear, he can even hear the soft tap of the cherry trees’ branches against the windows, swaying in the wind. 

The moment, though it’s still ongoing, feels so nostalgic, so peaceful, that a strange realization falls upon Sion. 

Even if Ryo and Sakuya were telling the truth, even if this library was haunted by a ghost, he wouldn’t mind staying here. 

Later that day, when Sion’s halfway home, he realizes he forgot his phone at the library. It’s not the first time it’s happened —ever since coming to Angok, he’s been spending less and less time on his phone, partly because he barely gets any reception outside of his house, and partly because he just doesn’t feel the need to when he’s either at work or taking walks down the beach or eating his own weight in ice cream on his porch, listening to Ryo and Sakuya’s babbling. 

Still, he can’t shake the Seoul man in him. He feels uneasy leaving his phone behind for an entire night, so he slowly makes his way back to the library, waving around the duplicate key Daeyoung gave him some days ago. 

When he gets to the library, he’s not surprised to find all the lights turned off. Daeyoung probably left not long after him. Sion lets himself inside and doesn’t bother looking for the light switch. He’s almost certain he left his phone in one of the book carts in the back. 

He walks to the English language books aisle, the last one he was in earlier, and starts fumbling around for his phone. As expected, he finds it on top of the last pile of books he was working his way through before Daeyoung told him to go home. 

Sion straightens his back and turns around, eager to get home and eat the chocolate he remembers storing in his fridge a couple of days ago, when suddenly, he freezes. 

There. In the nap room. 

He’s pretty sure he just saw something move. 

He squints his eyes but it’s so dark he can’t see anything. There’s a noise this time, though, a quiet thump that Sion’s ears barely catch. It raises the hairs on his arms. 

Sion takes a step closer, strangely bewitched. Ryo’s ridiculous story from the afternoon comes back to him and he lets out a huff. That’s all it is —a ridiculous story. And yet…

“You can ask Daeyoung. He saw it in the nap room once.”

Slowly, Sion opens the door of the nap room. The hinges squeak loudly in the silence of the night, so much so that Sion can’t help but cringe. He can hear his heart beating furiously in his chest, feel the goosebumps running along his arms. 

He’s no scaredy cat, but well. He’s only human. 

He decides to turn on his phone flashlight. White light floods the room, lighting up the futons lined on the floor and creating shadows that almost look scarier than the pitch black from earlier. He directs the flashlight in all corners of the room, slowly, carefully, until he’s sure that, yes, it was all in his head, it’s completely—

“AAAH!”

“AH!”

Sion jumps back, phone slipping through his fingers and tumbling to his feet. He knocks into the shelf behind him and a few books tumble to the floor. One of them hits his toe and he winces, jumping to the side. 

“Oh, it’s just you, Sion-ssi. You scared me.”

“I scared you? You scared the shit out of me!”

Sion stares at the man blinking up at him on the floor, clutching at his heaving chest. What the hell is Daeyoung still doing here? And why is he laying on the floor in the dark like a creep?

Daeyoung’s sitting on one of the futons further down the room, which must be why Sion didn’t notice him. The blanket, which had been raised over his body, now pools around his waist from the suddenness with which he sat up. His hair is sticking up in all kinds of directions and drowsiness paints his features. He raises a hand to his face and rubs his eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” he says with an embarrassed chuckle. “I must have fallen asleep.”

Sion shakes his head, slowly regaining his composure as his heartbeat slows down. “No. Sorry for raising my voice. You just surprised me.”

“I’m sure I did.” Daeyoung scratches his head and glances around him, looking slightly dazed, as if he really couldn’t remember falling asleep or even coming in here in the first place. “What are you doing here, Sion-ssi?”

That’s when Sion remembers his phone. He bends down to pick it up and waves it around to show Daeyoung. “Forgot my phone.”

He accidentally blinds Daeyoung with his flashlight in the process, so he turns it off and switches the light of the room on, which makes Daeyoung squint his eyes with a groan. Sion mumbles an apology that Daeyoung waves away. 

“Anyways,” Sion says, feeling the beginning of an awkward silence settle in. “I’ll get going. I’ll leave you to… Uh… Yeah.”

“Wait,” Daeyoung says, stopping Sion who was already half out the door, eager to leave this bizarre interaction behind. He turns around and watches as Daeyoung struggles to stand up, feet tangled in his blanket. “Ryo told me you didn’t have a rice cooker.”

“What?”

“He also told me you didn’t have any toilet paper but I assume that’s—”

“No. I mean, yes. I do have it. I don’t— Ahem. So?”

“So, there’s a flea market in a few towns over this weekend. I could take you if you need to get anything for the house.”

Sion shakes his hands in front of him. “Oh, you don’t need to bother—”

“It’s not a bother at all,” Daeyoung says.

“What about the library?”

“It’s closed on Sundays.”

Sion bites down on his lip, hesitating. It’s true he’s been missing a few appliances. A rice cooker, for one, but a microwave would also be nice. Maybe he could even find some dishes other than the two cracked bowls he’s been eating out of every day. 

But a full day with Daeyoung? Just the two of them? That sounds like the most awkward day of his life. 

Yet, there’s also a strange thrill running through him at the prospect, one he can’t exactly put his finger on. He sees Daeyoung every day, but only at work. He’s kind of curious about the other Daeyoung, the one Auntie keeps praising, the one Ryo and Sakuya somehow can’t stop talking about all the time. 

It might be a good opportunity to get to know him. He can’t exactly keep Daeyoung at arm’s length forever, not when he’s such an integral part of his everyday life. 

It might not even be that awkward. Their little horror experience just now kind of broke the ice, honestly. 

“Okay,” Sion agrees after a moment of silence. “If it’s really fine with you.”

Daeyoung smiles then, so big that, for once, he reminds Sion less of a kindergartner teacher and more of a kindergartner himself. 

──────────────────────

“So you do have a car.”

It’s more of a pickup truck, with three seats in the front and a large bed in the back, which Sion peeks into and spots a few watermelons rolling around. Does he always carry those with him?

Daeyoung tilts his head. “Why did you think I didn’t have one?”

As ridiculous as he realizes it sounds, when Sion got Daeyoung’s text telling him he was here, he kind of expected him to have pulled up on his bike. For some reason, he’s been unable to shake the image of Daeyoung riding his bike down the road with watermelons strapped in the back, especially since he sees said bike parked in front of the library every day. The possibility of Daeyoung having a car, or even just his license, hadn’t crossed his mind until now, even when he made the offer to drive him to the flea market. 

But when Sion comes out of his house, there is a car, and Daeyoung’s just getting out of the driver seat. He smiles and very unnecessarily opens the door for Sion, who has no choice but to thank him and step inside.

Sion kind of dreaded the ride, already expecting meaningless small talk to turn into awkward silence quickly, but Daeyoung very naturally turns on the radio, from which begins playing a lively pop song, as he starts talking.

“So,” he says as he backs out of his parking spot with a casual arm around Sion’s headrest that has him squirming uncomfortably to the side, “how are you finding Angok so far?”

“It’s nice. Calm. Peaceful.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Daeyoung casts a sideway glance at Sion and laughs when he sees the frown on his face. “That’s how Ryo describes it, but he doesn’t really like it here. He wants to go back to Japan, to the city.”

“Why doesn’t he?” Sion knows the answer to that question before it even leaves his mouth. Daeyoung smiles at him knowingly and Sion presses his lips together, feeling stupid. “It’s not like they’re going to stay here forever anyway. They’ll have to leave at some point.”

“I don’t know.” Daeyoung reaches for the rear-view mirror and moves it slightly to the side. “I left to go to college but I ended up coming back.”

“Where did you go?” Sion asks, suddenly curious. He’s never thought about Daeyoung living anywhere else other than Angok. He just seems so anchored here. 

“Seoul.” Daeyoung smiles when he sees the look on Sion’s face. “Hard to imagine, eh? It wasn’t really for me, so I came back as soon as I got my degree.”

“That’s nice,” Sion says, slowly growing uncomfortable with the turn the conversation is taking. He doesn’t really want to have to start talking about his own past. 

He starts fumbling with the crank handle (how old is this car?) of his window to give his hands something to do but it’s weirdly stuck. He tries turning it in both directions, he pulls, he pushes, but nothing works. Just as he’s getting frustrated, Daeyoung’s head suddenly materializes in front of him. Sion jumps and presses himself against his seat, surprised by the sudden proximity.

“That one’s a little hard to work,” Daeyoung mumbles as he reaches across Sion’s seat to help. 

Sion stares at the top of his head and inadvertently catches a whiff of fig and shampoo. He whips his head to the side and his gaze falls onto Daeyoung’s hand around the handle. It looks like he’s putting some force into his fingers because veins have appeared on the back of his hand, running up his arm. Sion’s eyes follow their path and he finds himself staring at the side of Daeyoung’s face, right below his own chin. 

Daeyoung finally manages to work the window open and glances at Sion. When their eyes meet, Daeyoung flashes him a smile while Sion averts his gaze awkwardly. 

“Sorry, this car doesn’t have any AC,” Daeyoung says as he rights himself up.

Sion clears his throat. “It’s okay. Thank you.”

“Anyways, what were we saying?” Daeyoung taps his finger against the wheel. “Right, and how do you like working at the library?”

“It’s nice so far.” 

“You can be honest,” Daeyoung jokes.

“I am.” It’s an easy job, probably because all he has to do is replace books and keep track of the borrowings while Daeyoung does all of the difficult tasks on top of having to entertain the children. 

“I’m glad.” They stop at a red light and Daeyoung turns to him. “I’m really thankful for your help, Sion-ssi.”

“It’s nothing,” Sion mutters. “I’m the one who should be thankful for Auntie’s help —and yours, of course,” he hurriedly adds.

“Let me guess —my mom wouldn’t let you help.”

“Yes! She offered me the job but she completely ignored me every time I tried asking her about when I should start. I had to ask my neighbors —Mr. and Mrs. Heo, you know them? Right, of course you do— I had to ask them where the library was. Even Sakuya wouldn’t help me, but I suspect that’s just because he wanted to tease me.”

Daeyoung laughs. “It’s true I wasn’t expecting you that day.”

“How did you know who I was, though?” Sion asks, remembering the flash of recognition that had shown on Daeyoung’s face that day in front of the library, back when they were still strangers. 

Daeyoung shrugs. “My mom told me the new guy coming in to help was handsome.”

He smiles at Sion, who doesn’t have time to react before the light turns green again and Daeyoung turns back towards the road —thankfully not witnessing the lightning speed at which Sion’s ears turn red. 

“So, are we looking for something in particular?”

“A microwave. A rice cooker. Oh, and a fan would be nice too, I guess. I get pretty hot at night.”

“We probably won’t have any problem finding all of this.”

Sion doesn’t doubt it. When Daeyoung mentioned the flea market, he expected a small affair, a couple of stands and a few passerbys. He was wrong —the place is big, so much so that he doesn’t even know where to start. The market seems to cover a few blocks and all of the streets are overflowing with people, vendors yelling deals to try to attract customers and potential buyers strolling through the stalls, stopping every so often to haggle prices. 

Sion’s never seen a market so big before, not even when he used to live in Mokpo. It seems like people from villages all over the area have gathered here, and it’s only ten in the morning. 

They begin looking around too, Daeyoung leading the way and Sion trailing behind. Almost immediately, Sion spots a nice enough looking rice cooker but Daeyoung stops him from getting it, saying that they can find much cheaper if they keep looking. If he’s being honest, Sion’s always been the type to favor convenience over cheap. If he could get the first appliances he finds and go home before noon, he would. But Daeyoung insists and Sion doesn’t have the heart to fight him, so they keep walking around, looking for the best deals. 

A while later, as they’re bent over a linen lampshade trying to gauge if it’s worth the five thousand won, a middle-aged woman suddenly greets Daeyoung with a tap on the shoulder. She looks happy to see him and they quickly settle into a conversation that Sion stays out of. He even takes the lampshade in his hands to keep himself busy, waiting for Daeyoung to wrap up his conversation. 

“Auntie, this is Sion-ssi,” Daeyoung suddenly introduces him, “he works with me at the library.”

Sion almost lets go of the lampshade he’d been closely inspecting the stitching work of as he straightens himself to greet the woman, who looks him up and down with a steadily growing smile on her face. 

“What a handsome man!” She winks obnoxiously at Daeyoung. “He must be popular with the ladies in town, eh?”

Daeyoung laughs. “What ladies?”

“Well, you know my daughter’s still waiting to hear from you.”

Daeyoung coughs awkwardly into his fist and sneaks a glance at Sion, who pointedly averts his eyes. 

They quickly wrap up the conversation after that and Daeyoung practically drags Sion away from the woman, looking eager to leave. 

“You seem popular, Daeyoung-ssi,” Sion says once they’re far enough.

His teasing gets the reaction he expected. Daeyoung flushes, red spreading from his ears to his nape, and shakes his hands in front of him. “I’m not. She was just joking.”

“Did she make up a daughter too?”

“No,” Daeyoung amends. “I do know her daughter but we’ve barely ever talked. The last time must have been over six months ago.”

“Must’ve been a pretty intense conversation if she’s still waiting for you.”

“Don’t tease me, Sion-ssi,” Daeyoung whines with a pout on his lips. 

Sion laughs at that, which only manages to make Daeyoung pout harder. He even pushes Sion’s shoulder lightly, mumbling a quiet “stop laughing”. Sion keeps giggling so Daeyoung starts speed-walking away from him. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sion says as he jogs after him, his apologies not quite sounding half-convincing considering he can’t stop laughing. 

He’s never seen Daeyoung like this before. He’s so used to seeing him handling the children at the library —or Sakuya and Ryo, whom he treats like younger brothers— that he’d kind of pushed Daeyoung into this mature, adult case without realizing. Seeing him like this, shy and whiny, is refreshing, in a way. 

There’s another word that crosses his mind, one that he chooses not to linger on.

Cute.

──────────────────────

Not only does Sion manage to find a microwave and a rice cooker at that flea market, he also gets his hands on an almost intact set of pans as well as a beautiful ceramic water pitcher that doesn’t have much use but that Daeyoung insisted on getting for him —as a house-warming gift, he said. He unfortunately couldn’t find a fan at the market but a few days later, he miraculously spots one on the side of the road as he walks home from work. He brings it to his house and almost jumps in the air when he plugs it in and it works perfectly.

Close to three weeks have passed since he first came to Angok. He can hardly believe it —three weeks feel like both such a long and short time. He’s started to get accustomed to the house, which is slowly turning into a home, to Ryo and Sakuya’s daily visits, to his work at the library, to the town, but it all still feels so unfamiliar at the same time. It’s not exactly an unpleasant feeling. It’s heart-fluttering, like falling in love. 

He’s also grown closer to Daeyoung. That day they spent at the flea market just the two of them helped ease the awkwardness between them: they spent the entire morning rummaging through every single stall at the market and went on to have a late lunch together at a sundubu jjigae restaurant that didn’t look like much from the outside but turned out to be one of the best meals of Sion’s life before heading home. Since then, their stiff, clumsy exchanges at work have naturally grown into more laid-back interactions, something almost akin to friendship. 

Now that Sion’s more familiar with the work, he’s also started taking on more tasks to help Daeyoung. He’s memorized all of the computer files' passwords and where every book goes, which means he can finally do more than just replace the books the kids leave all over the place. There’s still some stuff he doesn’t know, though —like how the printer works— so he still needs to ask Daeyoung for help from time to time. 

He can’t find Daeyoung now and he desperately needs to get those forms printed by tonight. He’s searched for him all over the library, which isn’t even that big in the first place, but there’s no sign of him. Sion knows he has to be here somewhere because he would never leave Sion by himself without telling him, so he keeps looking.

He ends up finding him in the nap room, putting kids to sleep. He’s reading them a story but it doesn’t look like it’s working: all of the kids are still running around the room excitedly, completely unstoppable. Even from his spot, Sion can see that Daeyoung’s exhausted. He keeps trying to have the kids calm down but none of his attempts are working. 

Daeyoung lets out a long sigh and tilts his head to the side, cracking his neck. As he does so, he meets eyes with Sion through the window and immediately perks up, gesturing for him to come in. Sion obliges, but he’s honestly not sure why Daeyoung’s calling him. He only ever takes care of the administrative stuff around here. Taking care of the kids is Daeyoung’s thing.

“Sion-ssi, you’ve come at the perfect time.”

“I have?” Sion says as he shuts the door behind him, looking unsure. He hovers near the door, ready to bolt at any moment, and glances at the tornado of kids yelling and running around the room like overexcited puppies. 

Daeyoung hands him the book he was reading. Sion stares at it, not sure what Daeyoung’s expecting of him. 

“I think the kids are sick of my voice. You read them the story, Sion-ssi.”

Sion scoffs. It’s a ridiculous idea. Not only is there no way the kids are sick of Daeyoung, Sion’s also the last person on Earth to request something like this from. He’s never read a bedtime story to a kid before. He has no idea how to do it. 

He does take the book when Daeyoung waves it again, sitting down next to him. He eyes the cover and flips through the pages slowly, trying to delay the inevitable. None of the kids are even paying attention to him. 

“I don’t think that’s—”

“You can do it,” Daeyoung interrupts. He then proceeds to lay down on the kid sized futon and pats the spot next to him. “Come on, kids, Sion-ssi is going to read us a story.”

Surprisingly, this does seem to get the kids’ attention. They stop running around and gather around Sion expectantly, holding blankets and pillows in their arms. 

Sion clears his throat, unsettled by the sudden focus on him. He glances at Daeyoung only to find him with his eyes closed. 

He starts reading the book, tentatively. The awkwardness he feels at the unfamiliar task he’s been pushed into obviously translates into his voice. Even to his own ears, he sounds robotic. 

“‘Please, don’t eat me, Mr. Wolf, I’m so scared!’”

“You don’t sound scared at all, oppa.”

“I am,” Sion argues, ignoring the kids’ complaints about his bad reading. Daeyoung shushes them from the side, eyes still closed, and Sion clears his throat. “‘I’m so scared!’”, he reads again, trying to put more fear in his voice.

Daeyoung snorts, a smile on his lips, but Sion ignores him. The kids look more satisfied than before, which is enough for him. 

He keeps reading the book, trying to mimic the way Daeyoung does it, making his voice more dramatic when necessary and sometimes stopping to show the pictures to the kids.

It’s when he flips the book around to show the picture of a dragon near the end that he notices that the kids are already fast asleep, arms thrown over their heads and legs tangled into each other’s. 

Sion turns to the side to tell Daeyoung only to find him also asleep, chest rising and falling slowly to the rhythm of his breaths. He’s got a hand on his stomach and another one in Jisoo’s hair, the little girl who never leaves his side. 

Sion reaches out to wake him up but stops mid-air before retracting his hand. Even from here, he can see the dark circles shading Daeyoung’s face. He’s looked particularly tired the past few days —now, though, he looks peaceful. At ease. 

Jisoo somehow looks even more comfortable, snuggled up against Daeyoung’s side, and as he looks at them, a strange, ridiculous flash of jealousy courses through him. It only lasts for a second before Sion catches himself. He probably also needs a nap. 

He’ll let Daeyoung have that one, though. He stands up as quietly as possible and sneaks out of the room on his tiptoes so he doesn’t wake anyone up. 

──────────────────────

A few days later, July is here with its elongated days and its suffocating heat, and Daeyoung shows up at his doorstep.

He’s not alone —he’s got Sakuya and Ryo in tow, or rather, Sakuya and Ryo have him in tow. 

The sound of the doorbell rose Sion from sleep. It was his day off work today and he spent all of it falling in and out of sleep, completely drained by the heat. The fan he found on the side of the road after coming back from the flea market turned out to be a blessing —it’s been blowing nonstop the whole day, offering a sweet reprieve from the searing temperatures. 

He wasn’t expecting anyone today. Auntie and the old couple that lives in the house next door are the only people that ever ring the doorbell —Ryo and Sakuya don’t bother anymore. They just barge in as if they own the place, which they as well might do. At least, more than Sion does, so he doesn’t really say anything. 

He drags his feet to the gate, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, and almost hiccups in surprise when he sees who’s at the door. It is Ryo and Sakuya, but it’s the first time they’ve come with Daeyoung. Daeyoung, who stands awkwardly a few feet behind, as if he didn’t really want to be there. 

“What— What are you doing here?” Sion blurts out.

He’s staring at Daeyoung, but thankfully, it’s Ryo who answers. “Our finals start tomorrow. We need to study so we won’t come around for a while.”

“Aren’t you supposed to study before the—”

“Okay, coming in now!” Sakuya pushes past him, ignoring him. Ryo’s quick to follow, leaving Sion and Daeyoung alone.

“I’m sorry for coming by unannounced, Sion-ssi,” Daeyoung apologizes, looking embarrassed. “The kids dragged me here.”

“No, it’s—” Sion starts before stopping. He stares down at himself, the shirt he stained when having lunch earlier and didn’t bother changing out of, his worn out shorts, his bare feet. He can only imagine the state of his hair. He glances over his shoulder and spots his messy futon, fully exposed by the sliding door he left open, the inside out socks he took off in his sleep earlier and carelessly threw to the side. 

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He slams the door in Daeyoung’s face and runs back inside, ignoring Ryo and Sakuya’s questions. In under five minutes, he’s got his futon rolled up and shoved back into the closet, his floor cleared of all dirty clothes, and he’s changed into a more appropriate outfit —another T-shirt and pair of shorts, but cleaner, newer. He drops by the bathroom to wash his face and fix his hair hastily. 

When he comes back out, Daeyoung’s standing in the middle of his courtyard while Ryo and Sakuya are halfway up the stairs leading to the rooftop. 

“I understand if you don’t want me here, Sion-ssi, I can—”

“No, no. It’s not that. At all,” Sion interrupts him. “I’m happy you’re here. Mi casa es tu casa, after all. Literally. Let’s go up.”

He pushes Daeyoung towards the stairs and immediately regrets it when he feels the hard panes of his back under his palms. As they climb up the stairs, Sion looks Daeyoung up and down —his white short-sleeved shirt, thinned from washings, his knee-length baggy shorts, his slippers. There’s a chain around his neck that Sion stares at until he starts feeling funny in the stomach. 

Though it’s not the first time Daeyoung’s come to his house, it’s the first time he’s ever been inside. As often as Ryo and Sakuya and Auntie and the neighbors (and basically everyone Sion’s made the acquaintance of since coming here) come over, Daeyoung’s only ever been someone he sees at work. A colleague. That one time at the flea market did bring them closer but not so much so that they hang out outside of work.

Sion can guess why Sakuya and Ryo brought Daeyoung over. They probably just want their brother (Daeyoung’s not really either of their brother but it feels like it) and their new friend to get along. They can probably tell Daeyoung and Sion (especially Sion) need a little push for it to happen. It’s a nice gesture, endearing even, but it still puts Sion in an awkward position.

Which is something Sakuya and Ryo wouldn’t understand —rightfully so. Sion himself has trouble understanding why he feels so tense around Daeyoung. Sure, they’re polar opposites, but he’s also pretty different from Sakuya and they get along just fine. There’s just something about Daeyoung that Sion can’t quite put his finger on.

When Sion gets to the rooftop, Ryo and Sakuya are already spread over the picnic table, setting down all sorts of dishes Sion recognizes as Auntie’s cooking and snacks that Sakuya definitely snuck in his bag when Auntie had her back turned. They’re chatting loudly about something that happened that day at school —Sion overhears the words cafeteria and cleaning duty and he smiles, momentarily reminiscing on his own school days. 

He quickly comes back to the present, though, when he notices Daeyoung standing near the edge of the rooftop, looking down with an absent look on his face. Sion wants to call him over but he feels strangely shy to do so. Instead, he sits at the table with the kids and rummages through the various packs of chips, looking for his favorite he knows Sakuya would have gotten for him. 

“Hyung, come sit with us,” Ryo ends up calling Daeyoung, who turns around and smiles before walking over. 

There’s a short moment of awkward silence when the four of them find themselves all sitting together, though Sion might be the only one who feels it. Sakuya and Ryo don’t look that bothered, and as for Daeyoung, it’s hard for Sion to tell. 

Thankfully, it doesn’t last long. Ryo starts going on about a teacher he can’t stand, which leads to Sakuya talking about how hard his soccer coach was on him today, and from there, the conversation keeps flowing until even Sion begins to relax.

They spend the evening sampling the hundred dishes Auntie made (Daeyoung reports her saying how worried she is about Sion’s health, even though his fridge is always full of the containers Sakuya brings over every other day), and trying to help Sakuya and Ryo review their lessons one last time before their exam tomorrow —an attempt that has Sion slightly concerned about those. 

After a few hours, Ryo stands up abruptly, complaining that he’s had enough of studying and he needs to clear his head or it’s going to explode. Sakuya decides to follow him, because of course he does, and they leave to get ice cream at the convenience store down the street. 

Once Daeyoung and Sion are left alone, Daeyoung reaches down to the bag at his feet. “Sion-ssi, actually… I brought some beers but I didn’t think it was appropriate to have them in front of the—”

“Give it here,” Sion says with a wave of the hand.

Daeyoung laughs and places the pack on the table, handing one to Sion, not before carefully opening it for him first. Sion chooses to ignore the gesture and brings the can to his lips, taking a big swig. The cold liquid slides down his throat pleasantly and he takes another sip with an appreciative hum. 

The alcohol helps to make him relax. As he sips on his beer, he finds that he doesn’t find the silence all that awkward anymore. He begins rocking side to side unconsciously, quietly humming to himself as he enjoys the light caress of the breeze in his hair.

“Sion-ssi.”

Sion takes his eyes off the wandering cat down the road he’d been watching to look at Daeyoung. His face is slightly flushed already and his hair is swept back, giving Sion a rare sight of his forehead. It’s a nice one. Flat and wide and shiny and—

“Can I ask you something?”

Sion snaps out of his thoughts. “Huh? Sure. What?”

“Why did you move here?”

Sion dips his gaze. “I told you. I just wanted some quiet.”

“Didn’t you have a job in Seoul?”

There it is. Of course, Sion didn’t really expect to be able to go through the entire summer without ever having to speak about himself, to barge into these people’s homes and become part of their daily lives without letting them into his. But he’d managed to avoid it until now and the illusion had been so sweet, so comfortable, that he’d almost deluded himself. Into forgetting about his old life, which feels like a thing of the past already but that he still has to come back to at the end of the summer after all, into thinking that this, this could be his life. That it always had been. 

He’d confided in Sakuya, briefly, about his old job, his tiny apartment. He can see on Daeyoung’s face, now, that Sakuya told him about it, probably in passing. After all, Sion made it sound like nothing more than a banality, an insignificant detail to glaze over. There’s a curiosity in Daeyoung’s eyes, though, an eagerness to know more.

A part of him wants to give in, to tell Daeyoung about his pointless existence. To seek comfort. But a bigger part of him is already cowering on itself in fear, bringing up walls and slithering away from view. 

“I quit. It wasn’t a very good position anyway. I’ll look for something better when I go back.” Lie.

Daeyoung hums. “So you had a mid-life crisis, basically.”

“I’m twenty-nine.”

“I’ll visit you in the nursing home.”

Sion kicks him in the shin under the table and Daeyoung laughs, bringing a smile to his own lips. They settle into a comfortable silence again, though Sion can see Daeyoung fidgeting with his beer from the corner of his eye.

“Can I ask you something else?” Daeyoung says. Sion nods. “Are you uncomfortable with me?”

Sion tenses. “What? Why?”

Daeyoung shrugs casually but his smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Just a feeling.”

“I’m not,” Sion hurries to say, aware the hastiness in his voice only makes it sound like a lie. 

“I just feel like—” Daeyoung chews on his lip as if unsure whether or not to keep talking. “You’re a lot more comfortable with Ryo and Saku than with me.”

Sion stares at Daeyoung silently. Is he uncomfortable with Daeyoung? If he’s being honest, yes, he is. Not too much, but enough. He can never really be at ease when Daeyoung’s around, weirdly. He’s always being hyper-aware of his every move, his every word. He moves stiffly, like a robot, and trips on his words. He can’t meet his eyes for more than a few seconds. 

It’s not an inherently bad discomfort, though. Sion can’t really explain it but it’s not that he dislikes Daeyoung or that he finds him hard to deal with. If anything, it’s more the opposite. Maybe that’s the thing. Daeyoung’s too easy. Too nice. Too comfortable. Sion doesn’t know what to do with it. 

“I just…” Sion begins carefully, “It takes me a while to get comfortable with people. I hope you won’t take it personally.”

Daeyoung pouts and even puffs his cheeks slightly, making him look like a child. “I won’t,” he says, sounding completely insincere. 

Sion laughs at that, louder and brighter than usual, probably due to the alcohol flowing in his system. The pout disappears from Daeyoung’s face —he stares at Sion wordlessly with such intensity the laughter dies in Sion’s throat.

“I thought this before but you have a really nice smile, Sion-ssi,” he says. 

Sion chokes on his spit stupidly. “What?”

“You seem a bit cold usually but you look completely different when you smile,” Daeyoung explains as if that was what Sion was asking. “It’s cute.”

Sion feels his face heat up in real time. Daeyoung’s still staring at him and his eyes even flicker to his lips for a second. Sion grabs his beer and throws it back without a second thought, swallowing all of it in one swig. 

He hears Daeyoung laughing and he shuts his eyes. He doesn’t know why, but he feels like he’s in trouble. 

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Apparently, Sakuya and Ryo were serious about their finals, because for the next two weeks, Sion really doesn’t see them. They barely even respond to his texts now even though they used to be the ones to send him stupid Instagram reels unprompted in the middle of the night. 

He gets some updates through Daeyoung, but despite living next door to them, it seems like he doesn’t see much of them either. 

“I’m just glad Sakuya seems to be taking his exams seriously this time,” Daeyoung says with a shrug.

It’s day four of Sakuya and Ryo going radio silence and Sion is starting to get slightly worried. Daeyoung, on his part, doesn’t look concerned in the slightest, which kind of reassures Sion. After all, he knows them better than him. 

They’re organizing books together in the back of the library now. It’s a Thursday morning, twenty minutes to opening hours. The heatwave from the beginning of July is finally over and the sunlight that filters through the library windows is a pleasant warmth instead of a suffocating heat. 

Sion likes this time of day best: the few minutes of peace they have together before the clock strikes nine and hordes of children swarm through the doors, running and screaming everywhere. He likes the quiet, the soft lighting, the tidiness, the short conversations he’s able to have with Daeyoung before he gets dragged away by the kids.

It’s the only time they can really talk. The only conversation they can have after that is through exchanged smiles across the room as Daeyoung struggles with the children and Sion sends him pitiful looks above the rim of his computer screen. On the rare days they’ll go home together, they’ll often be too tired to really talk until they reach the intersection where they part ways. On those days, Sion will walk home munching the inside of his cheek, trying to come up with a conversation topic for next time. 

It’s not that he minds the silence. He doesn’t find it awkward anymore —he’s even grown to find some comfort in it— but there’s just a restless energy inside of him, something that makes him want to know more about Daeyoung. Now that Sakuya and Ryo are gone, it’s even more prominent than before since he can’t rely on them to provide him with information anymore. 

As much as he loves Sakuya and Ryo though —and he’s a bit ashamed to admit this, even to himself— he would be lying if he said he isn’t a little bit happy that they’re too busy with school to hang out anymore. It’s just different when they’re here and when he’s alone with Daeyoung. He’s different, but so is Daeyoung. 

That’s something that Sion only noticed recently. He didn’t know before because Sakuya and Ryo were pretty much always there, but when Daeyoung and he are alone together, Daeyoung’s softer, more gentle. He pouts and he whines and he giggles and he tilts his head —all sorts of things that Sion has never seen him do in front of Sakuya or Ryo. Sion wants more of it. 

Even now, Daeyoung has his lips pursued in a focused pout as he organizes the books on the shelves. Sion first steals a glance at him then full-on stares, unable to look away. The sun is hitting Daeyoung’s face in just the right way, coloring his eyes a shade lighter than usual. 

Daeyoung looks up from the book in his hands and catches Sion staring. He starts to smile but Sion, embarrassed that he got caught, jumps and grabs the first book he gets his hands on, trying to pretend he was doing something else even though it’s too late. In the process, he slides his index finger along the side of the book and pain flashes in his finger. He winces and drops the book back in the cart, holding his finger before him.

“Are you okay?”

Before Sion can reply, Daeyoung’s reached across the cart and taken his hand in his own. There’s a bead of blood at the tip of his finger, so small in size it’s laughable. Sion tries pulling his hand back but Daeyoung’s grip is firm.

“Careful, you’ll stain the books,” he says.

Let me go, then, Sion wants to say, but the words stay stuck in his throat. It’s like all of the blood in his body has rushed to the spot where Daeyoung’s holding him, fingers lightly wrapped around his hand. While his fingertips are rough, the skin of his palm brushing against his wrist is softer than he expected. 

Sion lifts his gaze to Daeyoung’s face, heart hammering in his chest. Daeyoung’s staring at his finger as if wondering what to do, worry creasing his brows. Sion could almost laugh —he’s barely hurt— if he didn’t feel so breathless. 

When Daeyoung looks back at him, Sion doesn’t think he imagines the light, barely there pressure Daeyoung applies on his hand. As if he was surprised to find Sion looking. 

Seconds pass before Daeyoung finally drops Sion’s hand, turning his head to the side. “I’ll get the first-aid kit.”

“Thank you,” Sion stammers.

In an instant, Daeyoung’s gone, rushing out of the room as if someone was chasing him. Sion watches him leave in a daze, pulling his hand back towards his chest. He can still feel the warmth of Daeyoung’s hand around his. In his chest, his heart is beating furiously, a loud but steady rhythm against his ribcage. 

Thump. Thump. Thump. 

When Daeyoung comes back to the room (ten minutes later even though Sion knows they keep the first-aid kit in the bathroom just down the hallway), Sion’s heart has just barely come back to its usual pace. 

If it picks up again at the sight of Daeyoung’s flushed face, that’s not something that Sion wants to linger on.

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If you walk all the way down the beach near Sion’s house, there’s a secluded spot with large rocks lining the shore that offer some shade right when the sun’s at its highest point in the sky. Sakuya and Ryo were the ones to show him that place (of course they were), talking about how one of the rocks is so tall that you can even jump from it into the water. Sion himself has never jumped —he’s never even climbed that high— but he likes to settle against a lower rock and sunbathe as he watches Ryo and Sakuya running around like excited kids. 

Today’s one of those days. Sion, eyes closed, listens to the sound of Sakuya and Ryo’s laughter, finally relieved from the stress of exams, and of splashing water. They’re arguing about something —or maybe just playing. Sion can’t actually hear what they’re saying. They shouldn’t be too far away but their words are getting muffled by the wind whipping in his ears, by the waves crashing against the shore, by the birds crying in the sky. Only the melody of their voices reaches him, Ryo’s high-pitched complaints and Sakuya’s sing-songy retorts. 

It’s peaceful. A piece of rock is stabbing Sion in the back where he chose to lay down and wet sand is stuck to his calves but he’s comfortable. He could almost fall asleep. 

A droplet of water falls on his cheek. He cracks an eye open. 

“Sorry. I thought the sun was bothering you.”

Daeyoung’s standing over him. Sion thought he was in the water with the kids but now that he thinks about it, he stopped hearing his voice a while ago. He must have gotten out while he was dozing off. 

He also must have taken his shirt off sometime after Sion laid down. Sion’s pretty sure he had one on before —he remembers staring at Daeyoung’s white tank top, or rather at his collarbone and arms. He can see everything now: collarbone, arms, chest, stomach. He’s not even sure where to look. 

Daeyoung drops beside him with a grunt and shakes his head from side to side, inadvertently getting some more water droplets on Sion, who flinches at the attack. He sits up, feeling somewhat awkward laying down, and wraps his arms around his knees protectively. 

“Are you done swimming?” 

Daeyoung stretches his legs out before him and settles on his elbows. “I might go back in later if the kids are still in.”

“You like it that much?” Sion asks. He’s the type to get bored after ten minutes in the water. 

“I do. I could spend the entire day in there.”

“Why’d you come out?”

“I was wondering what you were doing.”

Sion casts a sideways glance at Daeyoung only to find him already smiling at him. He attempts to smile back but he catches himself lowering his gaze down Daeyoung’s body and he turns his head to the side, mouth suddenly dry. 

“Are you not going in, Sion-ssi?”

“Maybe later. If the kids are still in,” Sion repeats. 

“What if I’m in?”

“What?”

Daeyoung smiles brightly, as if he’d just told a joke that only he was in. “Nothing.”

Sion presses his lips together. It only took one month of knowing him for Sion to figure out that Daeyoung’s the type of person who wears his heart on his sleeve. He doesn’t play guessing games or beat around the bush. If Ryo goes too far with his teasing, he starts pouting and whining. If Sakuya makes a joke he finds particularly funny, he laughs with his entire body. If Sion compliments him, he puffs his chest proudly.

It’s that inherent sincerity of his that makes it even more confusing when he gets that secretive look about him. Despite being so completely honest, it’s like he’s always keeping some of himself hidden away, somewhere Sion can’t see. It’s messing with his head. 

“Sion-ssi,” Daeyoung says quietly, pulling Sion out of his thoughts. “You’ve got some sand on your cheek.” Sion raises his hand to his face but Daeyoung beats him to it. “I’ll get it for you.”

Though Daeyoung’s fingers are still wet from being in the sea, their touch on Sion’s cheek feels like an open flame. Daeyoung rubs his skin gently, a focused look in his eyes that Sion stares at, hypnotized. From here, he can see very faint freckles on Daeyoung’s nose. He can count his eyelashes.

Sion stops himself from even breathing. He finds himself wishing time would freeze in this moment, with Daeyoung’s fingertips on his cheek. 

But time doesn’t wait for him and when Daeyoung looks up into his eyes, a soft smile pulling his lips, Sion’s heart squeezes. 

“All done.”

Sion snaps back to reality. “Thank you,” he stammers. 

Daeyoung hasn’t lowered his hand yet. He’s almost cupping Sion’s face now, so gently it feels like a dream. The air between them feels thick, charged with a tension that’s probably been here for a while but that none of them have started to acknowledge yet. It’s getting difficult to ignore now with the way Daeyoung’s looking at him, with the way he’s caressing his cheek. Though it’s his face that Daeyoung’s holding, he might as well be cupping his heart.

“Oppa!”

They both jump at the sound of a little girl screaming. Sion’s the first to straighten, slipping out of Daeyoung’s hold. Further up the beach, a kid is running up to them, mother in tow. Sion squints his eyes and recognizes Jisoo, the little girl who never leaves Daeyoung’s side at the library. 

It seems Daeyoung’s recognized her too. He sits up and waves at her before turning to Sion, his gaze stripped of the heaviness from before. “I should go say hi. I don’t want her climbing here, it’s dangerous.”

Sion nods dumbly and watches as Daeyoung makes his way down the rocks carefully. Only after staring at the way the panes of Daeyoung’s back shift as he climbs down does he realize that Daeyoung’s still barefooted and, more significantly, barechested. Jisoo’s mother, who barely managed to catch up to her hyperactive daughter, visibly flushes at the sight of him. 

As Sion squints at their interaction, Daeyoung’s polite greeting and the mother’s shy smile, a tornado of water droplets suddenly hits him in the face, forcibly taking his attention off the pair.

“Hey!” he complains as Sakuya keeps shaking his hair like a dog above him. Ryo’s just a step behind him and he traps Sakuya in a headlock, which only manages to make Sion, caught in the crossfire, even more wet. 

“Oh,” Ryo says, “is that Sebin noona?”

“Who?” Sion asks distractedly, wiping the water off his face. 

“Sebin noona, Jisoo’s mom.”

“You know her?”

“She comes over to our house often,” Sakuya says.

“Really?” Sion turns to the beach again. Daeyoung’s holding Jisoo in his arms now as he talks to her mother. “Is she a family friend?”

“Not really,” Ryo says. He sounds like he’s hesitating to say more. “The other moms don’t really like her. They gave her a bit of a hard time a few years ago and Auntie helped her a lot.”

“Why don’t they like her?”

Ryo turns to Sakuya, who shrugs. “She had Jisoo pretty young and the father left. They were still in high school, I think.”

“She’s even younger than you, hyung,” Ryo adds.

“She is?” Sion asks absentmindedly. He can’t take his eyes off Daeyoung, Jisoo, and her mother. They look like a family.

“She was Daeyoung’s senior in high school. I heard he was always very nice to her,” Sakuya says proudly. 

“I bet he was,” Sion mutters. He stands up abruptly, gathering his things. He suddenly can’t stand being in the sun anymore. It’s too bright, too hot. He wants to go home. 

“Are you leaving already, hyung?”

“Aw, you’re no fun,” Sakuya half-heartedly complains, digging through his bag from which he takes out a greenish banana. 

“I’m bored.” Sion starts making his way down the rocks but he might have climbed higher than he thought. He looks down and his head starts spinning at the height. Why’s the ground so far? 

It’s kind of too late to go back now, though, with the little drama act he just put on. Also, he does really want to get out of here. He’ll jump from the damn rock before he has to keep watching Daeyoung chatting it up with some random woman right in front of him. 

He takes a deep breath and continues with his descent, albeit very slowly. He makes it safely to the ground a few moments later, but he only has the time to take a couple of steps before he’s stopped by someone calling him.

“Sion-ssi!”

Sion doesn’t want to stop, he shouldn’t stop, but his body betrays him. He slows down and turns around. Daeyoung’s jogging up to him, hair flapping against his head like puppy ears. 

“Are you leaving?” he asks once he’s reached him. 

Sion sinks his foot in the sand and kicks some of it around, trying to act nonchalant. “Yes. Why?”

“I thought… Nevermind. I wanted to ask you, do you— Are you— Are you doing anything tonight?”

Sion looks up. Daeyoung looks unusually tense, one hand rubbing his nape and the other clenched at his side. 

“Tonight? No. Unless Sakuya and Ryo have planned to come by, I’m not sure yet. Why?”

“Do you want to come to my house?”

“Your house?” Sion asks back, confused. “You mean, with Ryo and Sakuya?”

“No,” Daeyoung takes a step closer, “ I mean, do you want to come to my house tonight?”

Sion gapes at him, at a loss for words. Him? In Daeyoung’s house? It’s true he’s curious about the place Daeyoung lives in, and Auntie did invite him over a thousand times before, but he always made up excuses not to go. He’s always felt strangely nervous about stepping into Daeyoung’s space. 

“What about Auntie?” 

Daeyoung shakes his head. “She’s gone until tomorrow.”

“What about— what about Sebin-ssi?” Sion blurts out. 

“What?”

Sion flushes. He can’t believe he just said that. Daeyoung’s going to think he’s a weirdo, for sure. “Nothing. I just thought you might have made plans with her since you talked for a while. Ryo and Sakuya told me you were friends.”

Very weirdly, Daeyoung smiles. “We are. She’s my friend from high school. That’s it,” he says, looking straight into Sion’s eyes. 

“Okay,” Sion mutters.

“Okay? So are you coming?”

Sion stays silent for a few seconds before nodding. “Sure. I’ll come by.”

Daeyoung beams, his entire face lighting up with a wide smile taking over the uncharacteristic uneasiness that painted his features. He starts walking backwards towards the rocks, one hand raised in a wave. “See you later, then!”

Sion waves back at him, unsure what just happened. It was only seconds ago that he was about to stomp home, ready to spend the night wallowing in bed, and now he’s made plans with Daeyoung —the reason he was in such a bad mood in the first place. 

That’s over now, though. His heart flutters at the thought of spending the evening at Daeyoung’s place, just the two of them. He should hurry home, he realizes with a start, if he wants to have time to get ready before. He also probably needs to drop by the store to buy some stuff. He can’t just show up empty-handed. 

He turns on his heels and practically runs to his house.

Sion turns up on Daeyoung’s doorstep with cheap store-bought beers and a try-hard looking box of chocolates that the convenience store clerk definitely judged him over. To Sion’s defense, it was really all the store by his house had to offer and the packaging looked decent enough to get as a gift under the neon lighting. He started having some doubts about it on his way to Daeyoung’s house, but the surprised smile that brightened Daeyoung’s face as soon as his eyes landed on the box put them all to rest. 

“Is that for me? I’ve always wanted to try that brand,” he says, obviously trying to make Sion feel better about his cheap gift. 

“For you and Auntie,” Sion says, following Daeyoung into the house.

Daeyoung disappears into the kitchen with a laugh, saying something about how his mother was going to love it, and Sion stands awkwardly in the middle of the living room, rubbing his socked feet together.

As awkward as he feels, Daeyoung’s house has a soothing quality to it that quickly puts Sion at ease. The layout is almost identical to that of the one Auntie lends to him but it’s got a warmth to it that only years of living can create. The walls of the living room are lined with bookshelves and cabinets filled with all kinds of memories that Sion’s eyes can barely register individually. A porcelain tea set covered in a fine layer of dust. A wooden boomerang with a red kangaroo painted on its side. A vinyl turntable with the lid left open. A velvet jewelry box which the chain of a silver necklace hangs from. A homemade dreamcatcher whose cluster of beads matches its white and blue feathers.

The doors to the porch are slid open, letting in the evening breeze, which ruffles through the books and plants scattered all over the room. There’s a faint jingling sound in the air. Sion lifts his head and spots a wind chime hanging from the porch, a tiny glass thing, fragile and beautiful. It swings back and forth softly, carried by the wind. 

Sion crouches down next to a bookcase full with records, head tilted to the side to read their names, and startles at the sound of Daeyoung calling him from the kitchen.

“Did you have dinner yet, Sion-ssi?”

Sion glances towards the kitchen lit up with a bright yellow light and catches a glimpse of Daeyoung’s head peeking from the top of the fridge door, covered in drawings and magnets. 

“I ate a little bit of seafood pancake,” Sion says, shifting his gaze back towards the vinyls. He recognizes some of his mother’s favorite singers —Lee Moon Sae, Kim Wan Sun— and smiles at the idea of Daeyoung and he growing up hearing the same songs playing in the house.

“The one my mom made that Sakuya brought you?”

Sion hums distractedly. He’s moved on from the records and is now busy examining the picture frames hung on the wall. There’s a few pictures of Sakuya and Ryo (sometimes with Daeyoung, more often just the two of them), but most of the frames hold photos of Daeyoung as a child: hugging a dog twice his size, going down a slide at the park, throwing a piece sign with his tiny fingers at the camera. He looks completely different from now (his skin is tanner, his cheeks chubbier), and yet, he’s so irrevocably Daeyoung that Sion can’t help but smile. 

From the kitchen, Daeyoung clicks his tongue and rummages through the fridge. “That’s not a meal, though. I’ll make us some ramen.” 

Sion lets him, knowing that declining would be useless. He does offer to help but Daeyoung shushes him and shoos him back into the living room, talking about how he’s almost done anyway. 

He does come back a few moments later, steaming pot in hand. He sets it on the table between them and hands Sion a bowl and a pair of chopsticks before sitting down. 

Sion’s stomach grumbles when the ramen smell hits his nose. He pretends he doesn’t notice Daeyoung grinning at him and digs into the pot. 

They slurp their ramen in silence for a while until Sion looks up and his gaze lands on something on the wall behind Daeyoung. 

“Did you draw this?” he asks, pointing at a drawing of a cat that was obviously done by a child hanging between a picture of Daeyoung missing his two front teeth and his college diploma. 

Daeyoung looks over his shoulder, chopsticks stuffed in his mouth, and shakes his head. “No, that was a gift from one of the library kids.”

“Who?”

“He doesn’t come anymore. He’s in middle school now.”

“Do you keep all of the drawings they give you?”

Daeyoung laughs. “If I did, I’d be drowning in them.” He raises his bowl to his mouth and drinks the last of his soup. “I just keep some of them. As memento.”

After they’re done eating, they decide to sit on the porch (Sion cross-legged and Daeyoung with his legs stretched out in front of him) to get some fresh air, but not even ten seconds later, Daeyoung stands back up and heads somewhere in the courtyard, muttering something about lights and mood. He disappears behind a tree and Sion cranes his neck, trying to figure out what he’s doing, when suddenly, dozens of little lights light up all around the courtyard, running along the walls and up the trees. Sion hadn’t even noticed the tiny garlands. 

Daeyoung runs back to the house and turns off the living room light. Darkness falls around them except for the tiny spots of light all around the yard. They look like stars, like if a giant mirror was hovering right above the house, reflecting the night sky into the garden. 

When Daeyoung sits back down next to Sion, he grins at him proudly. “How’s that?”

“Better,” Sion agrees.

They go through the first couple of beers Sion brought quite quickly, talking about everything and nothing. Daeyoung shares the story of when he first decided he wanted to be a librarian and Sion tells him about his crazy roommate from freshman year. Daeyoung says it’s not that he doesn’t want to move out and get a place of his own but that he’s worried about leaving his mother alone and Sion talks about his little sister he wishes he could see more. 

It’s easier for Sion to open up when he’s drinking. He might regret it in the morning but for now, in that moment, he’s enjoying all of Daeyoung’s reactions, the oohs and the ahhs, the clapping, the laughs, the looks. There’s a light flush on Daeyoung’s cheeks that’s probably mirrored on his own face —he’s reached just the right level of tipsy, the one where everything feels simpler, lighter. 

“My mom’s been trying to get me to date for years,” Daeyoung says as he opens his third beer of the night, completely unaware of the way Sion’s heart just sped up. “She’s always setting me up with her friends’ daughters even though I tell her I’m not interested.”

“You’re not?” Sion asks carefully after a few seconds of hesitation. He sneaks a glance at Daeyoung, not quite daring to look at him properly. 

Daeyoung shakes his head, a pensive look on his face. “I don’t want it to be forced. I want it to happen naturally.”

“Have you— Have you ever been in love before?” Sion blurts out. “I mean, or, dated,” he amends when he realizes how serious his question sounds.

Serious, and stupid. Daeyoung’s twenty-six. Of course he’s been in love before. For some reason, the idea makes his stomach churn unpleasantly. He must have had one beer too many already. Getting upset over Daeyoung’s past is silly, especially considering he has his own. 

But he’s never felt like this before. None of his past relationships has ever managed to make him the giddy, clumsy person he always seems to turn into in front of Daeyoung. He’s always been the sensible, level-headed one whenever he dated, but not with Daeyoung. No, Daeyoung’s the first one to ever make him feel like this.

The thought of not being the first for Daeyoung… Sion doesn’t want to think about it. 

Daeyoung, thankfully, doesn’t seem to find the question strange. He hums and throws his head back to gaze at the night sky. He seems thoughtful for a moment.

“I did,” he finally answers. “Once, back in college. It’s funny, actually, because it was an acquaintance of Sakuya and Ryo.”

Sion’s not finding any of this funny at all. His stomach’s been hurting since before and he even feels like throwing up now. He swallows it down and asks, “From Japan?”

“Mh-mh. He came to Korea as an exchange student and the kids asked me to help him get adjusted. One thing led to another and we ended up seeing each other for two years. It might have been three.”

“I see.”

Sion’s heart, which started beating erratically in his chest when he heard “he”, seems to stop completely before dropping to the pits of his stomach at the mention of three years. Three years. Quick math is enough for him to figure out that that relationship couldn’t be from that long ago. Nevermind that his own relationship only ended two months ago. It’s all already erased and forgotten for him.

That doesn’t seem to be exactly the case for Daeyoung. His fond smile into space as he recalls his ex-boyfriend is enough to send Sion’s stomach into knots. He stares into the tiny opening of his beer can, looking at something he can’t see, waiting for the ordeal to pass.

“What about you, Sion-ssi?” Daeyoung asks, bringing Sion back to the present. 

“What?” Sion tosses down the rest of his beer and reaches for another one in an attempt to distract himself. He wasn’t planning to get drunk tonight, but he might as well. 

“Are you in a relationship?”

Sion stops in the middle of his sip and looks sideways at Daeyoung. He’s twisting his hands in his lap. 

“No. I broke up with my boyfriend before coming here.”

Sion doesn’t know if it was the right thing to say —was there even a right thing to say? He’s not sure what he wants to come out of this conversation, or what Daeyoung’s thinking. It’s hard to tell from his face, which is usually so easy to read. He simply nods and looks over the courtyard silently. 

Maybe it’s that silence, or maybe it’s the slight distance Sion suddenly feels between them, but something has him feeling the need to clarify.

“I didn’t like him that much, though. It wasn’t serious.”

He’s not sure his ex-boyfriend would agree with that statement but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter that Sion himself considered that relationship serious before they broke up and he realized he couldn’t find it in himself to care. None of it matters —he just feels the need to clarify. To tell Daeyoung. To let him know. 

He only belatedly realizes that it makes him sound like an asshole when Daeyoung chuckles awkwardly. Sion bites his lip. Fuck. None of his words are coming out right tonight. Maybe he should go home. Hopefully, Daeyoung will have forgotten all about that conversation in the morning. 

“Are you hot, Sion-ssi? You’re red,” Daeyoung says.

This has Sion flushing even more. And he just has to look stupid, too. Great. He’s not even hot. Well, he’s starting to be a little warm now, but it’s half because of the embarrassment, half because of the alcohol, not really because of the heat. 

Before he can say anything, Daeyoung stands up and heads into the house. Sion turns around only to see him run up the stairs without an explanation. He comes back down a few minutes later a lot less quickly, slowed down by the standing fan in his arms. 

He settles it behind Sion and plugs it in before turning it on. The cold air hits Sion’s face like a gust of wind. Sion snaps his eyes shut and turns his head to the side.

“Oops. Sorry, that’s the strongest setting,” Daeyoung says with a laugh. He presses another button and, this time, the fan starts blowing a nice, light breeze in Sion’s back. Daeyoung reaches out and smoothes his fingers against Sion’s hair, all messed up from the wind.

“Thank you, Dae— What are you doing?”

Instead of sitting back in his spot from earlier, Daeyoung sits down right next to Sion, shoulders to shoulders. “I’m also a little hot. Is it okay if we share?”

It’s not okay. It doesn’t even make sense because the close proximity of their bodies is completely counter-effective, but that’s not really the issue. The problem is that every time Sion does so much as inhale, his shoulder brushes against Daeyoung’s. The problem is that the air of the fan ruffles through Daeyoung’s hair and carries his fig scent straight to Sion’s nostrils, who has half a mind to hold his breath so he doesn’t have to smell it. Daeyoung shuffles around and his knee softly bumps into Sion’s. 

There are droplets of sweat rolling down his neck (which Sion definitely isn’t staring at), though, so Sion can’t really say no. What he could do is offer the fan to Daeyoung, who seems to need it more than he does, but he doesn’t do that either. His body’s stuck in place, taking in all of Daeyoung’s warmth. 

They sit there for a couple more hours, watching the moon travel across the sky and listening to the harmony of the crickets’ song and the wind chime. None of them move, not even when their palms grow moist with sweat. 

──────────────────────

Summer vacation starts a week later, which is good because it means Sakuya and Ryo are finally free from the shackles of school, but also bad because according to Daeyoung, this is when the library’s attendance really gets crazy.

Sion chooses to focus on the first part. He’s kind of missed having Sakuya and Ryo around, their antics, their bickering, and the gossip from school. There’s only so much going on at Angok’s public library, after all. 

They both come to visit the library, proudly waving their report cards in Sion’s face. Well, one of them looks proud at least.

“What the hell? You got first place?” Sion snatches the paper from Ryo’s hands, incredulous. 

Ryo puffs out his chest, a smug look on his face. “Of course I did!”

Sion glances between Ryo’s report card adorned with perfect marks and his satisfied smile, not quite believing his eyes. It’s not that he thought Ryo was dumb or anything, but he did witness his and Sakuya’s last minute study session. Let’s just say it wasn’t looking good for either of them.

“Were you just pretending not to know the material or what?”

Ryo shrugs. “I just crammed everything the night before. It’s always worked out fine for me.”

“What about you, Sakuya?” Sion asks.

He might not need him to answer. Sakuya’s draped over the kid-sized table beside them, face down. He grumbles something undecipherable and Sion shoots a confused look in Ryo’s direction, who simply shrugs again.

“He did okay.”

“Okay???” Sakuya sits up suddenly and Sion jumps at his loud voice. “How come we studied the same amount of time and you got first and I—” He cuts himself off and slams his head back against the table with a loud groan. 

“Come on, it can’t be that bad,” Sion tries comforting him. He approaches Sakuya and grabs his report card peeking from under his crossed arms. “I’m sure you— Oh… Well, there’s always next time.”

Sakuya groans again and Ryo erupts into laughter from behind, earning himself a stern look from Sion. 

Sakuya sits up again, launching himself into a series of complaints (Why are you smarter than me? I came to Korea before you. How do you always get perfect grades? You’re the one who keeps distracting me in class when I’m trying to listen. This is all your fault.) that Ryo pointedly ignores. Instead, he turns to Sion.

“Where’s Daeyoung?”

“Taking a call outside, I think.”

“Go get him. I need to brag.”

“You go get him. I need to watch the—”

“Please, please, please, please, I want to surprise him, please, please, please, plea—”

“Fine, oh my god.”

Sion sets down the book he was holding and heads for the door, walking past a despaired-looking Sakuya still mumbling to himself like a crazy person. Poor kid.

As soon as Sion steps outside, the sunlight blinds him, forcing him to squint his eyes. He raises a hand to shade his face and looks around the courtyard, looking for Daeyoung. All of the picnic tables where they usually sit to have lunch or to take calls like what Daeyoung’s supposed to be doing are empty. 

Sion walks down the stairs and scratches his neck. Where could Daeyoung have gone? Now that he thinks about it, he’s been gone for quite a while. His phone must have rung twenty minutes ago. Why is he not back already? 

Just then, Sion hears a voice. He turns around but no one’s there. The voice rises again and Sion walks around the library, trying to find its owner. There, tucked behind the building, is Daeyoung, half hidden in the shadows. Sion starts walking towards him, then notices he’s got his phone to his ear. 

Ah. Still on the phone.

He takes a step back to give him some privacy, but something in Daeyoung’s face stops him. He’s turned to the side so Sion can’t see very well, but Daeyoung’s smiling in a way he’s never seen before. 

“Really? Of course, I miss you.”

It’s like someone’s just punched Sion in the stomach. If the smile on Daeyoung’s face wasn’t enough, the tenderness in his voice leaves no room for misinterpretation. Sion doesn’t know who Daeyoung is talking to, but he knows he shouldn’t be hearing this. 

“No, I’m serious,” Daeyoung says with a laugh, completely unaware of the turmoil Sion’s going through just behind him. “I can’t wait to see you. The kids are going to—”

Sion stupidly knocks into a trashcan as he backsteps, trying to leave as quietly as possible. Daeyoung whips around and his eyes widen slightly when he spots Sion, who just barely caught himself on the wall. Sion thinks he smiles but he honestly has no way of knowing. 

“Erm… I’ll talk to you later, hyung. Yes. Me too. Bye,” Daeyoung says into his phone before hanging up. He steps towards Sion with a worried look on his face. “Sion-ssi, are you okay?”

“What? Yes, why wouldn’t I be?” Sion replies, dusting his sleeves even though it’s completely unnecessary.

“Didn’t you just almost fall?”

“Me? No. Well, yes, but I didn’t.” Sion clears his throat. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were on the phone. I mean, I knew, but I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“It’s all right,” Daeyoung says, grinning in a way that makes Sion feel sick. It’s the first time Daeyoung’s smile has made him feel anything but good, and it doesn’t take much thinking for him to figure out why: this smile’s nothing more than a remnant of his smile from earlier. It’s not really meant for him. “Did you need something?”

“Ryo and Sakuya are here,” Sion says, looking away. “They got their grades back.”

Daeyoung claps his hands. “Was that today? Oh, this is great! We all have good news to share, then.”

“Good news?” Sion repeats foolishly. 

Daeyoung’s already walking away, though. He says something about having to speak to Ryo and Sakuya immediately and for Sion to come in when he’s ready, and just like that, he’s gone. 

Sion stands there in a daze for a few seconds before he decides to follow Daeyoung inside. He doesn’t know why but he’s got a bad feeling about this. 

He only comes back inside the library a minute after Daeyoung and yet, he already feels out of the loop. Daeyoung, Sakuya, and Ryo are all talking together excitedly, report cards forgotten to the side. Sion hovers to the side, unsure of how to jump in the conversation. He only catches a few words here and there, “Fukui”, “summer break”, “Korea”, nothing very straightforward. 

After a while, someone finally notices him. 

“Hyung! Did Daeyoung hyung tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Sion asks, uneasy. 

“Our friend from Japan is coming to visit next week,” Ryo explains. “He’s so cool, you’re going to love him.”

“Really? That’s nice.” Sion finds he means it. Both Ryo and Sakuya look so excited, it’d be hard not to be happy for them. “You probably haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“Last time was, what, two years ago? When he came to our middle school graduation,” Sakuya says. “It was pretty awkward, though, since he’d just broken up with Dae— Ouch!”

There’s a few seconds of awkward silence. Sakuya rubs at the spot Ryo just elbowed him in while Ryo himself glances between Daeyoung and Sion, looking uncharacteristically nervous. 

As for Daeyoung, he flashes Sion an abashed grin. “I told you about him.”

“Right,” Sion says quietly. “I’m excited to meet him,” he lies.

Daeyoung frowns slightly at that, but Sion doesn’t linger on his face. He turns to Sakuya and ruffles his hair more roughly than necessary, letting out some teasing about his grades that Sakuya responds to with a whine. 

This seems to defuse the awkwardness a bit. Ryo laughs and joins in on the teasing while Daeyoung stands back, a smile on his face. Sion pointedly ignores him until he slips away, making up some excuse about having to go check up on the kids. 

Sion’s heart sinks as he watches Daeyoung’s retreating figure. He can’t help but recall the smile on Daeyoung’s face as he talked on the phone, the softness of his voice.

Sion bites down on his lower lip.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. 

──────────────────────

The day before Maeda Riku, Daeyoung’s ex-boyfriend, arrives in town, Daeyoung unexpectedly shows up at Sion’s house. 

It’s just a little before 7 PM. Sion only got home half an hour ago and he’s just come out of the shower. Droplets of water fall from his hair onto his floor, the wooden porch, the courtyard ground, following him all the way to the gate, which he opens warily, begrudgingly. 

Daeyoung didn’t ring the doorbell. He called Sion’s name a few times, louder and louder, until Sion couldn’t ignore it anymore. 

Because he’d been ignoring it. When Daeyoung first called his name, Sion hid behind his curtains, waiting for him to leave. When it became apparent that Daeyoung wouldn’t leave until Sion showed his face, he resigned himself.

He knows it’s childish but he’s been kind of giving Daeyoung the cold shoulder for the past week. It’s not like Daeyoung has done anything wrong —he’s been nothing but his usual gentle self the whole week, even when Sion blatantly ignored him at work. 

Sion just can’t help it. Ever since Daeyoung’s ex’s visit has been a thing, he’s been in a bad mood every time he’s been in Daeyoung’s presence, which unfortunately is almost all the time. He keeps recalling the excitement on Daeyoung’s face as he’d talked about the upcoming visit with Sakuya and Ryo, he keeps wondering what kind of person his ex might be, what type of relationship they had, why it ended, why it ever began. If it could begin again. 

It’s ridiculous. He hasn’t even seen the guy. When he tries imagining Daeyoung’s ex, he only manages to come up with a vague, blurry silhouette. Someone shorter than him probably, kind-looking and cute. He’s probably shy, but in the right way, not like Sion who comes off as cold and off-putting. No, Daeyoung’s ex is probably delicate and well-spoken. 

Either way, it’s been driving Sion crazy. He can’t look at Daeyoung without coming up with a thousand scenarios for the upcoming week, none of which go well for him. So he’s chosen to avoid Daeyoung all together. It was no small feat considering they work together in the smallest library known to man but, somehow, he’s managed it. 

Which is why when Sion opens his gate and sees Daeyoung, he has no idea what to do. He only manages to look into his eyes for two seconds before averting his gaze, feeling a pang in his chest. 

“Daeyoung-ssi,” he starts, “what are you doing here?”

“Sion-ssi.” Sion hadn’t noticed when Daeyoung was calling him earlier, but he sounds slightly out of breath. “Are you free right now?”

“Erm…” Sion thinks of lying for a second but he’s clearly in his pajamas and he still has the towel he used to dry his hair hanging around his neck. He’s obviously going nowhere. “Yes, why?”

“Could you come with me?”

“What?”

“Please,” Daeyoung says on an exhale. “Just… Just come with me. It won’t take long.”

Sion eyes Daeyoung silently, biting the inside of his cheek. They’ve barely talked in a week and Daeyoung just shows up at his house to ask him to go… somewhere with him? And he’s just supposed to follow? 

There’s something in Daeyoung’s face, though, that prevents Sion from simply closing the door and going back inside his house. His chest’s still heaving as he tries to catch his breath and his fingers are curled in the hem of his shirt, as if he were nervous. About Sion turning him down or about coming in the first place, Sion has no idea. 

He’s always been weak to this Daeyoung, the one who steps out of his caretaker role only to remind Sion that he’s still just a twenty-six year old, after all. A boy three years younger than him that he catches sometimes looking at him with wonder, with respect. He’s never been able to say no to that Daeyoung. 

He nods and tries to ignore the pang in his chest at Daeyoung’s smile, face brightening in relief. 

“I’ll just get my shoes,” he mutters as he turns on his heels and hurries back into his house. 

Daeyoung yells at him to take his time, that he’ll wait, but Sion’s already head deep into his closet, looking for clothes to change into. His heart’s thumping his chest while his mind’s reeling at the fact that Daeyoung’s here, at his house. What does it mean? If he had to tell him something, he could’ve just waited until tomorrow. Unless he’s already expecting to not have time for Sion anymore with his ex coming to visit. The idea leaves a bad taste in Sion’s mouth.

He comes out a few minutes later in a more presentable outfit (a pair of jean shorts and a light blue striped polo) and slightly falters when he notices Daeyoung eyeing him from head to toe. 

“What?”

“You changed clothes,” Daeyoung points out simply. 

Sion flushes. “And?”

“Nothing.” Daeyoung shakes his head before turning around. “Follow me.”

Sion closes the gate behind him and tries to pretend he isn’t disappointed that Daeyoung had nothing to say about his appearance. He even styled his hair (as best as he could in the five minutes he gave himself) instead of just leaving it wet. 

He steps after Daeyoung and asks where they’re going, but Daeyoung only smiles. You’ll see, he says. 

They walk in silence, Daeyoung one step ahead of him, the only sound being that of their feet shuffling on the ground. At one point, a cat scurries across the road in front of them and Sion slows down to pet it, but Daeyoung doesn’t seem intent on stopping. In fact, it even seems like he’s walking faster than before. He keeps glancing between Sion, who resisted the urge to pet the cat and is obediently following after him, and the sky, which looks perfectly ordinary. 

At no point does he ever tell Sion to hurry, though, not even when he stops to tie his shoelaces. He doesn’t tap his foot or sigh even though Sion can tell he’s in a hurry to get to the place he’s taking him, wherever that is. 

After a while, Sion starts recognizing where they’re heading, the white sand, the rocks in the distance. 

“Is this where you wanted to take me? The beach?” Sion asks as they near the stairs. 

Daeyoung hums. He glances at the sky again as he starts down the stairs and Sion follows his gaze but nothing’s there. The sun’s just starting to set in the sky, casting a light pink hue on everything: the sand, the glittery surface of the sea, Daeyoung’s hair. 

Sion’s never been here at this time of day, he realizes. The beach is completely empty except for the two of them and the sea, usually so calm, sounds a little more alive. Tiny waves crash against the shore before retreating back, leaving behind a blanket of foam. 

They walk along the beach side by side. Daeyoung’s slowed down and he looks noticeably less angsty, probably since they’ve reached their destination. Sion wants to ask what they’re doing here exactly, why Daeyoung wanted to bring him here now of all times, but the moment’s so peaceful that he’s reluctant to shatter it with words. It’s only been a week since he started avoiding Daeyoung and yet, he realizes he’s missed this, being in his presence. Daeyoung’s just… comfortable. Easy. 

As they stroll along the shore, Daeyoung’s hand knocks into his. It barely lasts a second and it’s obviously accidental but the short contact sends shivers all over Sion’s body. He stiffens and sneaks a sideways glance at Daeyoung but as soon as they meet eyes, he looks away, a flush spreading across his neck. He doesn’t retract his hand, though, and when Daeyoung’s hand brushes against his again, it doesn’t seem so accidental this time. Sion looks at Daeyoung again, heart beating so fast in his chest he can hear it in his ears, but this time, Daeyoung’s not looking at him. He’s got his head turned the other way, giving Sion a perfect view of his reddened ear and nape. 

“Daeyoung-ssi,” Sion says quietly. He can barely hear himself speak. He feels dizzy and a lot more courageous than he probably should be, as if he were drunk. “Why did you bring me here?”

Daeyoung stops in his tracks and kicks at the sand. He still won’t look at Sion. There’s a small smile on his lips though, half shy, half anxious. “I just… I feel like we haven’t talked in a while.”

Sion laughs awkwardly, starting to feel ashamed. “I guess we haven’t.”

Daeyoung finally looks up. He looks quite gorgeous with his hair falling in his eyes, the sea painted orange as his backdrop. It’s only then that Sion realizes Daeyoung’s also wearing a striped shirt, one that stupidly matches his own. 

“Were you avoiding me?”

“No,” Sion answers, too quick for it to sound true. He attempts to laugh to make his lie seem more convincing, but it sounds fake even to his ears. 

Daeyoung believes him, though, or at least he pretends he does. He always does. He never presses or asks questions, as if he can tell Sion won’t answer anyway, not unless it's of his own volition. “That’s good, then. I just miss spending time with you.”

“You— You shouldn’t say things like that, Daeyoung-ssi,” Sion says. Not if you don’t—

“Why not?” Daeyoung asks, looking genuinely confused. “I mean it.”

Sion lowers his gaze, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. He can’t seem to get a grasp on Daeyoung— no, that’s not true. It’s his own feelings he can’t seem to understand. Daeyoung wears his heart on his sleeve. He laughs when he’s happy, he pouts when he’s disappointed, he sighs when he’s tired. He only says things he means. 

That’s why it’s so hard for Sion. His heart flutters every time Daeyoung looks at him tenderly or tells him stuff like that because he knows Daeyoung means it, that he’s being sincere, but he also remembers the obvious fondness on Daeyoung’s face as he talked on the phone with Riku. That was also real. And despite what Daeyoung and he have right now, who’s to say it won’t change tomorrow, when Riku arrives? How’s Sion supposed to measure up to years of history? 

Sion’s stomach churns as his mind keeps making up scenarios, feeding him treacherous thoughts he can’t ignore. He should put an end to this now, before it’s too late to—

“Sion-ssi! Look!” 

Sion looks up. He could already hear the smile in Daeyoung’s voice but seeing it on his face, so wide and carefree, is another thing entirely. Now that he thinks about it, it feels like forever since he last saw Daeyoung smiling so big. The past week, he’s looked uncharacteristically gloomy every time Sion stole a glance at him. 

He stares at Daeyoung’s face, entranced, until Daeyoung speaks again.

“Isn’t it so beautiful? That’s what I wanted to show you.”

Only then does Sion tear his eyes off Daeyoung to look at what he’s pointing at. The sun’s fully setting now, a perfect orange half circle lay over the shimmering sea. It is beautiful and Sion blinks at the sight, shortly forgetting everything else.

“You’ve probably already seen it before, but I just thought it would be nice if we could see it together. Not that you need me to show you, of course, but…” 

As Daeyoung rambles on, Sion looks back at him. Daeyoung looks so beautiful basked in the warm light of the sunset, a light blush on his cheeks, wind blowing through his hair, and a wave of affection, of anxiety, of happiness, of something washes over Sion so hard that he almost topples over. His hands reach out of their own will and, cowardly, he ruffles Daeyoung’s hair, who whines but lets him. 

“It’s beautiful,” Sion says. “Thank you.”

Daeyoung smiles at him, messy hair sticking out in all directions, and Sion smiles back. He might be worried about what tomorrow will bring, but today— Today, he’ll let himself enjoy it.

──────────────────────

Maeda Riku’s visit turns out to be a bigger affair than Sion expected. 

He already knew he wouldn’t be able to evade it considering it’s all Ryo and Sakuya have talked about for the past week, but he hadn’t expected for Riku to be nothing short of an Angok micro celebrity. Forget Ryo and Sakuya —Riku’s name seems to be the only thing on everyone’s lips: Auntie’s, his neighbors’, even the old lady who sells him stir-fried morning glory at the market’s.

As soon as he opens the doors of the library, he’s greeted by a horde of hyper kids, all running around and yelling excitedly. This wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary if he didn’t hear Riku’s name come out of some of the older kids’ mouths multiple times over the course of the morning. 

“How do you all know Riku?” Sion asks after randomly grabbing one of the kids. 

“Riku hyung’s the best!” the little boy says. “He’s my favorite!”

“No, he’s my favorite!” another little girl jumps in, which leads to an argument about who loves Riku more that Sion quickly tunes out. 

First of all, that didn’t answer his question. How the hell do these children from tiny, unknown Angok know Riku, Daeyoung’s Japanese ex-boyfriend from Seoul? Second of all, how is it possible they somehow seem to like him even more than they like Daeyoung? They’ve barely warmed up to Sion and he’s worked here for two months now. 

There’s no one Sion can really ask, though. Daeyoung exceptionally asked him to take the morning shift so he could go pick Riku up, a request that Sion reluctantly agreed to (not that he could’ve refused anything to Daeyoung yesterday, on the beach). He’s all alone until the afternoon, when Daeyoung will supposedly come into work. He did text Ryo and Sakuya, asking if they wanted to come hang out, but neither of them answered. 

Sion looks up from his phone and spots one of the kids sitting in a corner, not mingling with the others. It’s Jisoo. She’s usually a bright kid, not much of a loner, so Sion frowns as he watches her drawing by herself. 

“Hi, Jisoo,” he says with a wave as he approaches her table. Jisoo barely looks up from her drawing, a pout on her lips. “What are you doing?”

“Drawing,” she mumbles.

Sion sits in the small chair next to her, tucking his knees under his chin. He looks over Jisoo’s shoulder and squints at her drawing. It’s nothing more than stick figures, but he can tell it’s a drawing of her and Daeyoung. “That’s pretty. Who’s that?” he asks, pointing at a third stick figure in the corner of the paper.

Jisoo finally looks up from her paper to blink at Sion with her big eyes. “It’s you, oppa.”

“Me?” Sion asks back, strangely flattered. Jisoo never really gave him the time of day, not when she had Daeyoung to be all over. 

Jisoo nods. Sion’s about to ask more about the drawing (Why did she draw him so much shorter than Daeyoung? And why is he exiled in the corner of the page?), but Jisoo’s faster. “Where’s Daeyoung oppa?”

“He had something to do. He’ll be here later.”

“Is he with Riku oppa?”

“How do you—” Sion begins before giving up. It doesn’t matter. He can never keep up with these kids. “Yes, he is. You’ll probably see him soon, too. Nice, right?”

“No!” Jisoo yells suddenly, making Sion jump in his tiny seat. “I don’t like Riku oppa!”

“You don’t?” Sion asks, struggling to conceal his excitement. Finally, someone who doesn’t seem to worship that guy. It doesn’t matter if it’s a little girl. He’ll take whatever allies he can get. “Why?”

“I just don’t.” Jisoo pouts and crosses her arms across her chest. “Daeyoung oppa doesn’t pay attention to me when he’s here. And he’s loud. And childish.”

“Right. And he’s annoying,” Sion says.

“Yes! And he’s bad at drawing.”

“And he’s ugly.”

“No, he’s very handsome.”

Shoot. Well, he tried. 

“You shouldn’t talk like that about people, Jisoo,” Sion says, remembering that he’s in fact a mature adult talking to a kid and not just a mean guy shit talking his crush’s ex with his friends.

“I don’t care!” Jisoo yells. “I don’t like him! I don’t want him to come!”

That makes two of us, Sion thinks. He doesn’t say that, obviously, but he does spend the rest of the morning with Jisoo, who seems to tolerate his presence a lot more than usual today. The lesser of two evils, probably. 

That’s how he learns that Riku made quite an impression when he visited Angok two years ago. From what he gathered from Jisoo’s precarious memory, Riku spent a lot of time with the kids at the library, helping Daeyoung out, and they all fell in love with him. Not Jisoo, though, who apparently didn’t miss the way Daeyoung looked at Riku. Sion realizes those might be Jisoo’s mother’s words, not hers, and huffs. How many rivals does he have exactly? 

Daeyoung shows up in the middle of the afternoon, hours after the time he was originally supposed to arrive. 

He’s not alone. Both Sakuya and Ryo follow behind him, bickering about something only they understand again, and then, Riku walks in. 

“Hello, Sion-ssi! Sorry, I ended up taking a little more time than planned. We sort of lost track of time,” Daeyoung apologizes with a laugh.

Sion’s not listening. He stares at Riku across the room, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. It has to be Riku, all things considered, but… he’s not what Sion expected. At all. 

He’s got tanned skin, sharp, almond eyes that make him look like a cat, straight black hair parted in the middle, and approximately a thousand piercings in his ears. Sion stares at the silver earrings adorning his ears, the hoops and jewels, before trailing his gaze down the rest of Riku’s body, taking in his clothes, a tight black T-shirt and large grey sweatpants that fall over a pair of sneakers Sion recognizes as a pretty expensive brand. He’s lean in a way that makes him look like a model despite not being that tall and he carries himself with a sort of confidence that can’t be faked. 

If Sion felt out of place here, Riku definitely looks out of place in Angok. His entire existence screams “city boy”. 

Sion looks between Riku and Daeyoung, feeling a pit forming in his stomach. If that’s Daeyoung’s type, Sion might as well give up now. He has no idea why Daeyoung would even look at him twice. 

“You can go home early if you want, Sion-ssi,” Daeyoung says, pulling Sion from his thoughts, “since I was late.”

Sion watches as the kids in the library, having now noticed Riku, swarm him completely, yelling excitedly and clinging onto his legs. Riku picks a little girl up and swings her in his arms, making her erupt into a delighted laugh while all of the others beg for their turn to be next. On the side, Ryo and Sakuya look on with a fond look on their faces. Belatedly, Sion realizes that the reason none of them replied to his texts is probably because they went with Daeyoung to pick Riku up and they were all together until now. 

Sion turns his gaze back to Daeyoung, only to find him also looking over at Riku. There’s that smile on his face, the same one he wore when he was on the phone, the one that makes Sion want to throw up. 

“All right,” he says. “I’ll go.”

“Let me just—”

Sion doesn’t stay to hear what Daeyoung has to say. He walks over to the reception desk and grabs his bag, in a hurry to leave. He suddenly feels like if he stays just one second more in here, he might actually get sick. 

He can’t help but note as he walks out the door that neither Ryo nor Sakuya seem to even notice him. Daeyoung calls him once but he doesn’t run after him, even though Sion actually slowed down once he was outside. Just in case. 

That evening, Sakuya barges into his house.

It’s not like Sion isn’t used to Sakuya and Ryo’s unprompted visits, but this time, he was actually wallowing in bed pretty pathetically, so when Sakuya slides the door open and sees him curled up in his futon before the sun’s even set, he does feel a little embarrassed. 

Wallowing’s one word for it. He was half feeling sorry for himself, half beating himself up about leaving without even greeting Riku. How rude is that? Sion wanted to make a good impression (or rather, he wanted to impress Riku), to show Riku that he’s worth standing by Daeyoung’s side. He can probably forget about that now. 

Not that it was even a possibility in the first place. He’s never felt as invisible as earlier today when Riku walked in the room. 

Still, Daeyoung can’t have missed how rude Sion was. He’s probably re-thinking his entire opinion of him. 

“Why are you already in bed?” Sakuya asks as he pulls the covers off Sion’s body, plain judgement tinging his voice. “It’s not even eight yet.”

“I’m tired,” Sion lies. He tries taking the covers back but Sakuya’s got a strong hold on them and Sion doesn’t have the strength to fight him. He sighs and sits up, running a hand through his hair. 

Sakuya plops down on the floor, crossing his legs. “I barely saw you today.”

“I’m surprised you saw me at all,” Sion bites back before pressing his lips together. Taking it out on Sakuya won’t do any good. “Daeyoung-ssi told me to go home.”

“Eh… You didn’t even say hello to Riku hyung.”

“I know,” Sion says, feeling genuinely bad. “Did he say anything?”

Sakuya shakes his head. “No. You’ll see him tomorrow, don’t worry.”

“Is he coming to the library again?”

“Probably not. But there’s a summer festival in the next town tomorrow night. Daeyoung hyung’s taking us.” Sion looks at him blankly and Sakuya rolls his eyes. “Us, as in you too.”

“Me too?” Sion repeats. Me, Riku, and Daeyoung, all together? That doesn’t seem like a fun night for him. 

Sakuya only hums, oblivious to Sion’s internal turmoil. “He’s looking forward to it, you know.”

“Who, Riku-ssi?”

“No, Daeyoung. He meant to invite you before but he took too long working up the courage, so here I am.”

Sion’s heart jumps in his chest. It’s hard to be rational when he hears things like that. Things that make it seem like maybe, maybe Daeyoung’s feeling the same. 

“He might not want me to come anymore,” Sion mutters, fidgeting with the blanket Sakuya ended up dumping at his feet. 

Sakuya rolls his eyes so hard it somehow manages to make Sion feel a little better. “That’s stupid and you know it. I was talking about it with him just this afternoon.”

“You were? What did he say?”

Sakuya sticks his tongue out at him. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Sion begins to complain but Sakuya stands up, dusting his pants dramatically. He slips on the shoes he threw to the side when he came in and jumps off the porch. “All right, I’m leaving. See you tomorrow, hyung.”

Sion waves at him, defeated. Sakuya turns on his heels and walks all the way to the gate before turning around, as if remembering something.

“You know, Riku hyung wants to get to know you too.”

“I’m sure,” Sion grumbles. He’s probably curious about the parasite that’s been hanging around his ex-boyfriend the past few weeks. 

“Really,” Sakuya says. “Before he was Daeyoung hyung’s boyfriend, he was mine and Ryo’s friend. Be nice to him, please.”

Sion doesn’t have anything to say to that. Sakuya leaves with one last wave and Sion flops back on his futon with a loud sigh, staring at his ceiling. Why does he have to get told off by a high schooler? 

He can’t even complain about it. Sakuya’s right. If anything, Sion should at least be cordial towards Riku. He doesn’t know what he would’ve done without Sakuya and Ryo ever since coming to Angok. The least he can do is be polite to their friend. Even if said friend also happens to be the ex-boyfriend of the guy he might or might not have a little crush on. 

Sion makes a resolution. Starting from tomorrow, he’ll try with Riku. Who knows? Riku might not even be interested in getting back with Daeyoung. Maybe Sion’s just working himself up for nothing. 

As for Daeyoung… Well, if he really still has feelings for Riku, there’s nothing Sion can do about it. He’ll just have to move on. 

──────────────────────

The next day is hot and sticky, the kind that’s best spent at home, sitting in front of a fan and eating as much ice cream as possible.

Unfortunately, Sion’s a grown man who has to go to work. Even more unfortunate is that the whole day is spent painfully awkwardly with Daeyoung hovering just outside of his orbit, as if he were afraid of getting too close. 

Sion gets it. He did leave quite hastily the previous day and they haven’t really been able to talk since. Daeyoung’s as busy as ever running around the library to take care of the kids and Sion’s never been one to take the first step. Instead, they spend the entire day stealing glances at each other, both of them jumping and averting their gazes hastily as soon as they happen to meet eyes, which happens quite often. 

It gets even more awkward when the day draws to a close and they end up all alone in the courtyard, each wondering what to do. They usually walk home together when they get off at the same time, and Sion unconsciously found himself waiting for Daeyoung to finish closing up before remembering the previous day. 

It’s too late to go their separate ways now, not when they both know that they take the same path home for the first ten minutes. They start walking and Sion mentally thanks the crickets for being so damn loud. If not for them, the silence between them would be stifling.

It’s only when they reach the intersection where they go their separate ways that Daeyoung finally speaks up.

“Should I— Should I pick you up at your house later?”

“What?”

“To go to the festival,” Daeyoung clarifies.

The clarification wasn’t really needed. Sion could’ve forgotten about the festival even if he’d tried. It’s all he’s been thinking about the whole day: what should he wear, how should he introduce himself to Riku, how would Daeyoung introduce him, would he have to watch Riku and Daeyoung be close together. 

“Riku hyung and the kids are probably ready already,” Daeyoung continues, “so we can pick you up in… one hour? If that’s okay with you?”

“Okay,” Sion says quietly, once again reminded that it’s Riku hyung and Ryo and Sakuya and Daeyoung versus Sion now. He doesn’t belong there. 

Daeyoung scans Sion’s face, looking like he wants to say something, but he only ends up shaking his head. “See you,” he says with a smile.

As Sion walks home, he wonders if maybe he should’ve made up an excuse, a sickness or a phone call to avoid going. He tries reminding himself of what Sakuya told him yesterday but he just can’t help but feel like he’s intruding. 

Too late now, he thinks.

After maybe the most uncomfortable car ride of Sion’s life, they finally make it to Yeopjae, the slightly bigger town where the festival is taking place. 

When Daeyoung came to pick him up (in Auntie’s car, not his pickup truck), Sion opened the door to find Ryo in the passenger seat and Riku and Sakuya sitting together in the back, which meant that Sion had to very awkwardly squeeze in next to Riku. They exchanged polite smiles and Sion spent the entirety of the ride trying to put as much distance as possible between them. Thankfully, Ryo and Sakuya kept talking back and forth for the entire ride, so no awkward silence could settle in the car and Sion spent the whole time staring out the window, stealing glances at the GPS to see how much longer they had until their destination. 

Yeopjae is another seaside town, one that looks like the more lively version of Angok. They only need to walk for a few minutes from their parking spot to reach crowded streets lined with food stalls overflowing with loud vendors and steamy pastries. Sakuya immediately heads towards one, hypnotized by the promise of “the sweetest bread to ever grace the Earth” the sign boasts. Ryo follows after him, flanked by Daeyoung, which leaves Riku and Sion trailing behind.

“Riku-ssi,” Sion starts, his conscience still poking at him. “I’m sorry for not introducing myself properly earlier. I’m Oh Sion.”

Riku waves his hands in front of him hastily. “Don’t apologize! I’m Riku.”

He has a thick Japanese accent when he speaks, probably from being away from Korea for so long, that Sion can’t help but smile at. He’s gotten so used to Ryo and Sakuya’s perfect Korean that he sometimes forgets they’re not from here. Even hearing the three of them talking to each other in Japanese earlier in the car was a fun surprise —Ryo and Sakuya barely ever switch to their mother tongue, at least not in front of Sion. Just with his high school level Japanese skills, Sion could tell they were more casual without the constant need for awareness. 

“Daeyoung told me a lot about you,” Riku says.

Sion chews on his lip. “You guys talk often?”

Riku shrugs. “Just from time to time. We keep in touch.”

Sion doesn’t like that. Why do they need to keep in touch? Sion hasn’t talked to his ex once since breaking up. He hasn’t even thought about him. There’s no need to— once something’s over, it’s over. Regrets are useless. 

Sion risks a glance at Daeyoung, now standing next to Ryo and Sakuya at the food stall, looking over the pastries. His back is bent and yet, his head barely fits under the tent. He laughs at something Ryo says and knocks his forehead into Sakuya’s shoulder.

Does Daeyoung regret breaking up with Riku? Is that why he’s been so happy the past couple days? Because Riku’s in town and he gets a chance to win him back? 

Only belatedly does Sion realize he forgot to ask Riku what Daeyoung said about him. He opens his mouth to do just that but then, Ryo calls them over, talking about how Sakuya’s taking forever to choose and he needs their help. 

Daeyoung turns around to look at them and waves. Sion raises his hand to wave back before catching himself. Daeyoung might have been waving at Riku. Scratch that, he probably was. Sion averts his gaze and walks up to the stall, where he sticks to Sakuya’s side, as far away from Daeyoung as possible. He misses the way Daeyoung’s smile drops. 

After getting their food (Sakuya ended up getting a simple cream bun, meanwhile Sion found some extravagant pastry filled with chocolate paste and topped with whipping cream and chocolate chips), they start making their way down the streets, looking at the various stalls. Sion stays close to Ryo and Sakuya, which does lighten his mood but also means leaving Riku and Daeyoung together, which manages to bring him down again every time he sees them laughing together or stopping a few feet behind to look at something. 

Sion tries to focus on having a good time. He’s got a sweet pastry in his hands and the evening breeze feels nice on his skin and the good mood of the festival is contagious enough to make him happy. Beside him, Sakuya and Ryo are making stupid jokes that he snorts at from time to time before pretending he didn’t laugh when Ryo points it out. 

“Hey, isn’t that Junhee?” Sakuya elbows Ryo, who looks up from his phone to look at where Sakuya is pointing.

“Where do you— Oh, wait, it is!” Ryo turns to Riku. “Riku hyung, you’ve got to meet him, he’s so funny.”

Ryo grabs Riku’s wrist and begins dragging him away, Sakuya in tow, and before Sion knows it, he’s all alone with Daeyoung. 

The two of them exchange a look and Daeyoung breaks into an awkward smile. “Guess it’s just us.”

Sion swallows, suddenly feeling like his mouth has dried up. “Guess so.”

A passerby lightly shoves Sion from behind and he stumbles forward. Daeyoung catches him with a hand on his shoulder and tilts his head, trying to get a look at his face. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Let’s get out of the way.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for them here?” Sion asks with a glance over his shoulder. 

Daeyoung shakes his head and reaches for Sion’s hand, fingers tentatively wrapping around it. “They’ll be fine.”

Sion looks down at their joined hands, feeling heat spread through his body. Daeyoung’s hand is significantly bigger than his and the sight reminds him of that time in the library when he cut his finger. This feels different, though. Less accidental and more purposeful. Daeyoung’s touch seems to carry some sort of meaning that Sion’s scared to delve into. He wants to, though. He wants to read the lines of Daeyoung’s palms and see what he’s thinking, to reach into his chest and hold his heart. 

He squeezes Daeyoung’s hand once, hoping it’ll convey all of it. Maybe it works —Daeyoung threads their fingers together, a newfound assurance steering him. He pulls Sion towards him, just a little, and they naturally fall into step together. Daeyoung’s just one step ahead of him and as they walk, Sion can’t take his eyes off their hands. At a glance, it’s hard to tell where his begins and where Daeyoung’s ends. 

They walk at a leisurely pace, sometimes stopping at a stand to look at the over the top food options or to watch a kid play hook-a-duck. They draw their fortunes at one —Daeyoung draws “Bad Luck” and immediately pouts like a child.

(“Aw, that sucks!”

“You’re superstitious?” Sion asks with a giggle.

Daeyoung pauses. “Am I? I guess so. What did you get, Sion-ssi?”

Sion smiles and shoves his “Perfect Luck” strip in his pocket with a shake of the head. “Just ‘Average Luck’.”

He closes his fingers around the little paper secretly, the fortune repeating over and over in his head —”Your feelings will be received gently.”)

A breeze starts picking up even though it’s the middle of summer and the day was so hot Sion thought he was going to melt at work. The light wind, blowing through the paper lanterns hung at the front of the booths and creating plays of light against people’s faces, is welcomed, though unexpected. Sion didn’t bring a jacket and he unconsciously shivers in his thin shirt. 

“Are you cold?” Daeyoung asks him when he notices him rubbing his arms.

Sion crosses his arms in front of him. “No.” After a few seconds of silence, Daeyoung wordlessly takes off his flannel shirt and hands it to Sion, who shakes his hands in front of him. “I’m not—”

Daeyoung clicks his tongue, effectively shutting Sion up. He takes a step closer and reaches behind Sion to drape his shirt over his shoulders. As he does so, his fingers brush against Sion’s nape, his bare shoulders and arms. They linger there a beat longer than necessary before he drops his hands with a smile. 

“Better?”

Sion glances up at him before averting his eyes and nodding stiffly. There’s a gentle glint in Daeyoung’s gaze, one that turns his stomach upside down. 

Surely, he has to be right about this. He’s not entirely stupid. He’s way past teenage crushes and insecurities. He knows how to read a room, how to interpret glances and smiles and touches. There’s no way he’s wrong about this. 

“Daeyoung-ssi,” he begins tentatively, “do you—”

Ddi-ring.

“Ah, it’s Ryo. They want to know where we are.”

Sion stares at Daeyoung’s lips, pursued in concentration as he types out a reply. He lifts his gaze up his forehead and his heart inexplicably squeezes as he watches Daeyoung’s hair ruffle in the wind. Sion’s never felt like this before —it feels like remembering a memory, a moment in time that you can never go back to. But it’s all happening in front of him. It’s all happening right now. 

So why? Why does he always feel like this when he’s with Daeyoung? Like he’s missing out on something? 

“They’re meeting us at the—”

“Should we just not go?”

“What?”

Sion bites down on his lower lip, but it’s too late. His heart’s already spilled out of his mouth. “I want to spend more time with you, Daeyoung-ssi. Just the two of us. What about you?”

Daeyoung opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. Sion could almost laugh if he didn’t feel so nauseous. He’s never seen Daeyoung at a loss for words before. His face has turned an endearing shade of red and he’s even avoiding Sion’s gaze. 

“All right,” he mutters. “Me too.”

Sion smiles. “Good.”

Daeyoung looks up and when their eyes meet, they both break out in a fit of giggles. 

“Should we go sit there?” Daeyoung suggests, pointing at a little park off the road. 

Sion nods. “I’ll just drop by the bathroom first,” he says. Daeyoung tries suggesting they go together but Sion shakes his head and pushes him towards the park. “Just wait for me there.”

“Be quick,” Daeyoung says.

Sion practically runs to the bathroom he remembers passing earlier, feeling his heart thumping against his chest. Once there, he frantically splashes water on his face, hoping it’ll reduce the flush he can feel in his cheeks. The reflection staring back at him in the dirty mirror of the bathroom is nothing but a fuzzy depiction of himself, making it hard to tell what he actually looks like. He whips out his phone camera and turns his head from side to side, looking for anything amiss. He smoothes his hand against his hair and clears his throat.

By the time he’s done, he must have left Daeyoung for a good ten minutes. He starts heading towards the park where Daeyoung is waiting for him, a light spring in his step, and speeds up when he spots him from afar, sitting on a bench by a vending machine. 

He stops in his tracks, though, when he notices someone else next to him. Someone that’s sitting particularly close to him. Someone that he recognizes. 

Riku. 

What comes over Sion is so heavy, so immediate, that he doesn’t even need to think for it to register. Riku’s hand on Daeyoung’s cheek. Daeyoung’s body completely turned to Riku. His back facing Sion. 

Of course. This was always going to happen. From the moment Riku came into the picture, it was going to happen.

No, that’s wrong. It’s not Riku who came into the picture. He was always there. Sion was the one to crash into Angok, into Daeyoung’s life. He was always the intruder. He only deluded himself into thinking that this could be his life, too. That he deserved it. But all he did was temporarily take someone else’s place, take on a part that isn’t his. 

Sion watches them, feet stuck in the ground. When Riku brings his face closer to Daeyoung’s, he takes a step back, then another, before fully turning on his heels and walking away from his heart crashing to the ground.

But it follows him.

──────────────────────

Ryo and Sakuya are the ones to come find him.

The day after the festival, they very uncharacteristically ring his doorbell before finally letting themselves inside when Sion doesn’t open the door for them. They find him laying on his porch, one leg hanging off that he swings back and forth repeatedly, absently. An ice cream bar wrapper flutters near his head. 

“Hyung,” Ryo says as he approaches. He sits at Sion’s feet while Sakuya stays standing up in the middle of the courtyard. “How’d you get home yesterday?”

“I got a ride,” Sion answers distantly, staring at the patterns of the wooden posts holding his porch. This one looks like a smiley face. That one, like a penguin. 

“From who?”

“Jisoo’s mom. I ran into them.”

The silence that stretches after that drips of bewilderment. If Sion’s being honest, he was also pretty surprised yesterday when he found himself asking Sebin for a ride home. He’d come across them on his way to Daeyoung’s car, right after realizing that it was pointless. He couldn’t drive himself home, and he didn’t want to wait for everyone else to come back to the car. Sebin had showed up just then, holding Jisoo’s hand. They’d talked for a bit, banalities about the library, about Jisoo’s school, and when it’d looked like Sebin and Jisoo had been about to leave, he’d asked them to please drive him home. 

He’d texted Ryo in the car, who had in turn tried calling him a dozen of times. He’d turned off his phone when he got a text from Daeyoung asking where he’d gone. 

“We were worried about you,” Sakuya says, speaking for the first time. 

“I texted Ryo,” Sion defends himself before amending. “Sorry. I wasn’t feeling well.”

“Does it have anything to do with Daeyoung hyung?”

“Sakuya!” Ryo hisses.

Sion glances between the two of them and notices the look that passes between them. It’s not the first time they’ve had this conversation, he can tell. Sakuya seems to be over it.

“What? I don’t know why we’re all tiptoeing around it,” Sakuya says.

“It’s not any of our—”

“It’s okay, Ryo,” Sion jumps in. He sighs and sits up, leaning his back on the post behind him. “Sakuya’s right.”

“Right? I told you, I knew—”

Ryo picks up a pebble from the ground and throws it at Sakuya’s chest, who whimpers at the impact. “Did something happen yesterday?”

Sion lowers his gaze, hair falling in his eyes. It hurts to even recall yesterday’s events. Riku’s smile. Daeyoung’s stillness. He also remembers Daeyoung’s hold on his hand, the warmth of his gaze, and that somehow hurts even more. It’s hard to believe all of it happened in the same night. 

“No,” he mutters under his breath.

Ryo narrows his eyes at him, obviously not believing him, but he doesn’t press. “Daeyoung hyung was worried about you too.”

“Okay,” Sion says, pretending this doesn’t send his heart into a race. 

“Ugh, since when are you so gloomy?” Sakuya kicks at the pebble Ryo threw at him earlier and shoves his hands in his pockets.

“I’ve always been gloomy,” Sion retorts, thinking back of what his ex told him. Dreary. Lifeless. “This is who I am.”

Sakuya shakes his head. “That’s not true. I mean, you were, at first, kinda. But you changed.”

Sion kicks his feet together halfheartedly. Did he? It’s true he started feeling different at some point. No longer bored or defeated but revitalized. As if a hole inside of him had been filled. By Angok, its rocky beaches, its slow mornings, its old neighbors, its old-fashioned convenience stores. 

By its people, too. By Ryo and Sakuya’s constant presence, by Auntie’s cooking, filled with care and expertise, by the kids at the library calling him “hyung” and “oppa”. By Daeyoung, leaning over him to show him something on the computer, delivering watermelon to his house in the evening under the pretense his mother had bought too much, attempting to teach him how to ride a bike behind the library until Sion gave up with an embarrassed huff. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Sion says. “I’ll leave this place soon enough.”

Sakuya and Ryo exchange another look, one that Sion has no idea how to interpret this time. He’s sure it has something to do with Daeyoung —he recognizes the slight concern that shades their eyes every time Daeyoung’s involved— but he doesn’t know how. 

He doesn’t want to know anyway. 

──────────────────────

Sion lets out a deep sigh as he stretches out his hand past the convenience store’s blind and droplets of rain fall onto his skin. He retracts his hand and wipes it against his side before scratching his forehead. 

The sky was completely clear when he stepped into the store earlier. How did it start pouring so fast?

He glares at the plastic bag in his hand, holding the reason why he’s in this predicament. Him and that damn sweet tooth. He wouldn’t even have stepped out of the house today if it wasn’t for this. This is all Daeyoung’s fault —after spending the past two days thoroughly avoiding him and drowning his misery in chocolate and ice cream, he finally ran out of sweets today. He first intended to leave the errand for tomorrow but as he lay on his floor under his fan, he kept remembering Riku leaning in towards Daeyoung and Daeyoung staying still. He’d sat up with a groan. Leaving his house could do him some good. 

Sion takes out one of the chocolate bars he just bought and makes quick work of unwrapping it before shoving half of it in his mouth. The sugar dissolves slowly on his tongue and he munches on, watching the rainfall get progressively harder in front of him. It doesn’t look like it’s going to stop soon. 

He sighs again and glances up at the sky. The clouds don’t look too bad. Maybe he could make a run for it. He grimaces at the idea —it’s still a ten minute walk to his house. He’ll get completely drenched. 

He’ll just wait it out, he decides. He drops on the little bench behind him with a grunt and swallows another piece of chocolate. 

Riku’s only in town for two more days, but that doesn’t really matter. Sion’s been bracing himself for when he goes back to work tomorrow and Daeyoung inevitably tells him they got back together. The possibility that Daeyoung might not even tell him crosses his mind, and that hurts even more. 

He tries finding some comfort by reminding himself he’s only here for another month or so. He might cut his trip short and just go back home early, spare himself the hurt. 

Home. The word feels wrong in his mouth. His tiny apartment in Seoul isn’t home. It’s never been. His house here in Angok, his creaky porch, his wobbly dining table, his ceramic water pitcher, the crickets in his courtyard —that’s home. He hasn’t felt like this anywhere since moving out of his parents’ house in Mokpo.

But the house he lives in here isn’t his house at all, and he’ll have to leave at some point anyway. Why not make it easier for himself and just get it over with now? It’s not like he’ll be missed by anyone. Daeyoung, Sakuya, Ryo, Auntie —they’ll all forget about him quickly enough.  

The sound of a car coming up the road pulls Sion out of his reverie. He turns towards it and immediately squints, blinded by the car’s headlights. Maybe he could ask the driver for a ride. He’s kind of getting depressed just sitting here wallowing in his dark thoughts. Not that it’ll be better at home, but at least he’ll be in the comfort of his futon. 

He stands up and steps forward, hand half-raised, but the car unexpectedly stops in front of him. Nice, Sion thinks before the driver’s face comes into focus and Sion’s heart drops. 

“Sion-ssi. Should I drop you off?”

Fuck. So much for avoiding him. Sion’s heart does a somersault in his chest at the sight of Daeyoung. It’s kind of ridiculous the effect he has on him. It’s only been two days, for God’s sake. 

Daeyoung’s looking at him cautiously, one hand gripping the steering wheel with more force than what seems necessary. Sion’s gaze lingers there for a moment before dropping to the ground. 

“I’m all right, thank you.”

“Are you sure? I don’t think the rain’s going to stop any time soon.” Daeyoung leans forward and glances at the sky through his windshield. 

“I’ll just wait it out,” Sion says. “No need to bother.”

“It’s no bother,” Daeyoung insists. “Get in. It’s on my way.”

“I really don’t—”

“You’ll catch a cold. Just—”

“I said it’s fine!” Sion snaps.

Before Daeyoung can say anything else, Sion starts walking away from his car, straight into the rain. The water immediately leaches into his clothes and Sion shivers uncomfortably as rain droplets run down his back and his bare arms and legs. He clenches his teeth as he feels the rain completely drench his feet, barely protected by his thin socks and slippers. He marches on, ignoring Daeyoung yelling something at him from behind. He pushes the hair out of his eyes and wipes the rain from his face, as useless as it is. He catches a glimpse of his plastic bag and curses under his breath. His chocolate’s completely ruined. 

“Sion-ssi.” Sion jumps at the sound of Daeyoung’s voice, suddenly a lot closer than before. He looks to the side and lets out a huff of disbelief when he sees Daeyoung slowly driving next to him, window open. “Don’t be ridiculous. Just get in.”

“I’m fine,” Sion mutters childishly. He uselessly picks up the pace, as if he could outspeed Daeyoung’s car. 

“Why are you being so stubborn? You’ll get sick,” Daeyoung says, voice becoming louder. At first, Sion thinks he’s yelling at him and his heart pangs painfully in his chest, but then he realizes the rain’s getting so hard he can barely hear Daeyoung over it. 

Sion tries focusing on where he’s walking so that he doesn’t very embarrassingly slips and falls in front of Daeyoung. It’s taking all of his concentration for him to not lose his slippers. He ignores all of Daeyoung’s pleas to get in his car.

There’s a few seconds of silence from Daeyoung, and Sion stops himself from turning around. He keeps going, fists clenched at his sides and lower lip caught between his teeth, stupidly disappointed at Daeyoung giving up. 

Suddenly, there’s a hand around his wrist and Sion almost falls backwards. 

“Take this at least.” Daeyoung sounds out of breath. His car is forgotten behind him, the door wide open, and he’s holding a bright yellow umbrella above Sion’s head. 

Sion inhales sharply and pulls his wrist from Daeyoung’s hold. He pushes his hand holding the umbrella to the side. “I don’t need it.”

“Why not?” Daeyoung doesn’t bend down to pick up his umbrella, now rolling on the ground. He doesn’t even look at it. “Did I do something to you, Sion-ssi?”

Sion startles at the tone of Daeyoung’s voice, colder than he’s ever heard it. It’s miles away from the gentle voice he uses with the kids at work, from the kind one he takes when he’s talking with Ryo and Sakuya. It’s nothing close to the overflowing affection Sion heard in his voice when he was talking on the phone with Riku. 

“No,” Sion blurts out, suddenly a little intimidated. 

“So why are you acting like this? Why have you been acting like this? These past few days you’ve been—” Daeyoung stops himself with a sharp inhale, as if he’d suddenly changed his mind. “Nevermind. You don’t owe me anything. I just thought…”

“You just thought what?” Sion asks, angsty.

“Will you just get in the car, please?” Daeyoung says with a sigh, looking very tired. He drags a hand down his face and only then does Sion notice his hair’s completely drenched. He’s only been holding out the umbrella for him. 

The sight brings up an inexplicable anger inside of him. That’s not fair. Daeyoung can’t just act like this with him —sweet and considerate and perfect— if he’s going to turn around and do the same with other people. It’s just not fair. 

“Are you— Are you crying?” Daeyoung sounds so completely bewildered Sion could almost laugh. 

“I’m not.” He wipes his sleeve across his eyes. “It’s just the rain.”

“I’m sorry for raising my voice,” Daeyoung apologizes anyway. He raises a hand to Sion’s face and brushes his hair to the side. “I’m sorry if I said anything wrong. I just don’t want you getting sick.”

“What if I get sick? How is it any of your business?” 

“What?”

“Why do you care if I get sick?”

“Because— Because I care about you,” Daeyoung stammers out. 

“I saw you with Riku-ssi,” Sion mutters. “At the festival,” he explains when Daeyoung frowns at him. 

After a moment of confusion, understanding flashes across Daeyoung’s face. He doesn’t look ashamed as Sion expected, which Sion isn’t sure how to interpret, but rather determined. “Whatever you think you saw, it was nothing. Riku hyung’s just my friend.”

“Your friend who you happened to date for three years,” Sion mumbles, bitter. 

There’s a moment of silence where the only sound that echoes between them is that of the rain hitting the ground. Daeyoung’s umbrella is long forgotten, rolling on the ground from when it slipped out of his hold earlier, and Sion’s wet plastic bag sticks to his leg uncomfortably. The sky, completely streaked with dark rain clouds, almost makes it look like nightfall even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. The headlights of Daeyoung’s car are still on and they backlight his face in such a way that Sion almost misses the way his lips twitch upwards. 

“Sion-ssi,” he says, amusement in his voice, “are you jealous?”

Sion turns bright red. “Me? Jea—Jealous?” 

“If I’m mistaken, then it’s—”

“I just don’t understand,” Sion cuts him off with a shrill, suddenly feeling very wronged, “why you did everything you did if you don’t feel the same as me!”

“And what did I do?” 

“You— You always smile at me and you held my hand and you invited me to your house and— and— and Sakuya said that thing about you being nervous to ask me to the festival, and you always look at me when you think I’m not looking at work and you showed me the sunset and—” Sion rambles on, tears coming up his eyes again. “And you called me handsome!”

Sion sort of yells that last part, partly to be heard above the rain, partly because the more he thinks about it, the more unfair it all feels. Why on Earth would Daeyoung call him handsome? Because he’s kind? Because handing out compliments doesn’t mean anything to him? Screw that!

Daeyoung lets out a quiet chuckle that turns into a full on laugh as Sion watches him, mortified. 

“Are you laughing at me right now?” 

Daeyoung shakes his head, still laughing. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.”

“You could always stop.” Sion frowns and crosses his arms in front of him.

“I’m just—” Daeyoung lifts his hand to his face and wipes a droplet of rain (or a tear of laughter, who knows?) from his eye. “You’re just so cute.”

“Wha— See, this is what I mean. Don’t say things like that if you don’t mean it.”

“I mean it.” Daeyoung finally stops laughing. He takes a step forward and grabs Sion’s hand, gently. “Sion-ssi. I meant all of it. I also have two days off a week, just like you. Why do you think I show up to the library every day? Why do you think I tag along every time Sakuya and Ryo go to your house? It’s all just to see you. I bought a stupid vanilla air freshener that makes my head hurt for my car because the scent reminds me of your shampoo. I even forced Sakuya to go on runs with me.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I wanted to look good when we go to the beach together. For you.”

“That’s stupid,” Sion sputters. 

“Isn’t it?” Daeyoung chuckles. “It’s the kind of things you’ve got me doing ever since you’ve moved here. I feel like a teenager with a hopeless crush.”

“It’s not hopeless,” Sion mumbles.

“What?”

“I said it’s not hopeless,” he repeats, louder. “How could you think that? I’m the one who always loses my composure when we’re together.”

Daeyoung squeezes his hand. “I was hoping you liked me too. But you’ve been acting so distant the past few days… I was thrown off.”

“That’s because you’ve been all over Riku-ssi!” Sion blurts out before he can think better of it. “Ever since he called, it’s only been “Riku hyung this”, “Riku hyung that”, and now that he’s here, it’s like I barely exist anymore.”

Silence. “...So you are jealous.”

The smile in Daeyoung’s voice makes Sion’s blood boil. He takes a step back and snatches his hand from Daeyoung’s hold. “If you think that’s so funny, you can always go back to—”

“I don’t think it’s funny.” Daeyoung takes another step towards him and before Sion can evade him again, he wraps his arms around him and pulls him into a hug so tight Sion lets out a huff of surprise. “I think it’s sweet,” he says in Sion’s hair. His lips brush against his ear as he speaks and Sion freezes. 

“You do?”

Daeyoung hums, sending Sion’s stomach into knots. “And silly. Riku hyung’s just my friend. He’s also got a boyfriend in Japan, if that reassures you.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Sion retorts with a pout as he rests his chin on Daeyoung’s shoulder and tentatively wraps his arms around his back. 

“Does it mean anything that I like you?” Daeyoung pulls back from their embrace just enough to look at Sion’s face. “I’m not sure why we’re even talking about Riku hyung right now.”

“Why was he touching your face at the festival, then?”

“In the park? When you were gone?” Daeyoung rubs his hand up and down Sion’s back slowly, soothingly. “He was helping me get something out of my eye. Ryo and Sakuya sent him to find us.”

“Still, you didn’t have to let him touch you,” Sion mutters, not satisfied by Daeyoung’s answer.

“I’m sorry. I should’ve just let myself go blind,” Daeyoung says very seriously. “But I don't think I could bear never seeing your face again.”

Sion punches him in the chest halfheartedly and Daeyoung laughs brightly, forcing Sion to hide his face against the crook of his neck again to hide the flush spreading across his cheeks. 

“Will you please get in the car now?” Daeyoung’s hands slowly travel down Sion’s back to his waist, tracing his spine. “I’m freezing.”

“Okay,” Sion agrees. He keeps his arms around Daeyoung for another two minutes though, and Daeyoung waits for him. 

Daeyoung doesn’t take him home as he’d first offered. Instead, he brings him to his own house. He doesn’t say anything about it and Sion doesn’t ask. 

“Where’s Auntie?” is what he asks when Daeyoung slides the porch door open and darkness welcomes them.

“Visiting her college friend in Jeonju. She’ll be back in two days,” Daeyoung answers as he shakes off his shoes and kicks them to the side. 

As Sion does the same, Daeyoung disappears into the house, leaving behind a trail of water droplets. Sion stares at the footprints his wet feet leave on the floor and peels off his socks, shoving them inside his shoes. He attempts to dry his feet by rubbing them against the sides of his legs but it’s no use —he’s completely drenched from head to toe. 

Daeyoung returns with a bunch of mismatched towels in his arms. He keeps a lilac one in his hand and drops the rest next to him before crouching in front of Sion, who stares at him, confused. 

Daeyoung lightly taps his calf. “Give it here. I’ll dry your feet.”

Sion hastily takes a step backwards. “You don’t have to—”

Daeyoung clicks his tongue and jokingly takes a stern voice, the one he uses when he scolds the children at work. “Quickly.”

“I can do it myself.”

Sion reaches for the towel in Daeyoung’s hand but just as he does so, Daeyoung grabs his ankle and lifts his foot off the ground, making him lose his balance. Sion gasps and grasps Daeyoung’s shoulders with both hands so he doesn’t fall forward. Daeyoung looks up at him through his damp hair and flashes him a grin that has Sion clenching his fingers in Daeyoung’s shirt. 

Daeyoung wraps the warm towel around his foot and rubs it gently until it’s completely dry. Sion has to avert his eyes from the sight of Daeyoung’s big hands around his tiny foot. 

After Daeyoung’s dried both his feet, he stands up and grabs another towel that he places on Sion’s head. “Dry your hair before you catch a cold.”

“What about you?” Sion eyes the water droplets falling from Daeyoung’s hair. 

“I’m fine.” Daeyoung smiles and rubs Sion’s hair with the towel once, as if encouraging him to do the same. “I’ll get the shower ready for you, Sion-ssi.”

He starts walking away but Sion grabs his arm, making him turn back towards him. He remains silent and Daeyoung tilts his head at him curiously. Sion munches on his lower lip, eyes fixed on a spot right below Daeyoung’s chin. Only after a few seconds of silence does he lift his gaze to Daeyoung’s face.

“Can’t you call me hyung?”

“What?”

The very air around them seems completely still. The living room’s still plunged into darkness so Sion can’t see Daeyoung’s face very clearly but he notices the way his gaze moves from his eyes to his lips, the way his mouth parts open in a silent question. He hears the jingle of the wind chime dangling above them, but it’s merely background noise to the sound of his heartbeat, a deafening thumping in his chest.

“Why is everyone else Riku hyung, Saku, Ryo-chan, Sebin noona, and I’m just Sion-ssi?” Sion mutters childishly. He fumbles awkwardly with Daeyoung’s sleeve. “Call me hyung too.”

Outside, the rain’s finally started to let up. The heavy rainfall from before has turned into a steady patter that Sion’s heartbeat seems to sync up with. Thump. Thump. Thump. Drip. Drip. Drip. It’s hard to tell which is which. 

“Sion hyung.” 

Sion looks up at Daeyoung with wide eyes, his breath caught in his throat. Daeyoung’s standing closer to him than before and his hands, which rested at his sides, are now cupping his face and slightly tilting his head back. His fingers thread into his wet hair and he gently thumbs at Sion’s jaw, raising goosebumps all over his body. His touch, though hot enough to burn, is like a whisper softly caressing his skin.

He doesn’t lean in. He simply looks into Sion’s eyes, calmly, kindly. Just like he’s always done. Waiting for Sion to move, to assent. 

So Sion does. He rises on his tiptoes and places his hands on Daeyoung’s shoulders and closes the distance between them, lightly pressing their mouths together. Daeyoung’s answer is instant: he tilts his head to the side and tightens his hold on Sion’s neck, pulling him closer. 

It only lasts for a blissful moment before Sion hastily pushes Daeyoung’s shoulders. He only manages to catch a glimpse of Daeyoung’s confused face before he whips his head to the side and erupts into a loud sneeze that makes his entire body shake. 

Fuck, he thinks. How embarrassing. He sniffles and risks a glance at Daeyoung only to find him smiling widely.

“That’s what you get for not listening to me, hyung,” he teases. 

“Shut up,” Sion mutters, wiping his sleeve against his nose. 

“Gladly,” Daeyoung says, cupping Sion’s face again and pulling him back into another kiss.

Sion leans into it fully, wrapping his arms around Daeyoung’s neck and pressing their damp bodies together. He barely registers the towel falling from his head, too focused on the feeling of Daeyoung’s large hands spreading across his lower back, under his wet shirt. 

The taste of their first kiss is of rain and chocolate.

──────────────────────

Sion’s rooftop has never been this full. 

It wasn’t his idea to invite everyone but when Sakuya and Ryo learned of his decision to stay in Angok, they made it a point to tell everyone they could, which included Auntie, but also Mr. and Mrs. Heo, the elderly neighbors who always shared some of their crops with Sion, Sebin and Jisoo, their friend Junhee from school, and some people Sion had never thought paid any attention to him despite being part of his daily life: the store clerk near his house, the old man with his dog he often runs into on his way home from work, the lady working at the post office he’d sometimes had to walk into just to get some reception for his phone.

They all show up at his house one by one, carrying packs of beers and food containers, climbing the stairs to the rooftop as naturally as if they were in their own house, all under Sion’s confused stare. He only gets an explanation when Ryo and Sakuya make their entrance, still in their school uniforms, talking about celebrations and whatnot. 

Sion only understands that he’s the one being celebrated, his staying, when Auntie pats him in the back, saying that she knew he’d fit right in from the moment they met. 

A weird, unfamiliar feeling courses through Sion. He glances around his rooftop, at Sebin watching her daughter running around with another little boy, at Sakuya attempting to do a handstand in a corner while Ryo laughs at him, at Auntie forcing some of her homemade kimbap on a helpless looking Mrs. Heo. 

He turns his head to the other side and watches the sky, slowly turning a shade of orange as the sun dips below the horizon. The leaves of the magnolia tree shading his courtyard, which seemed like they were still vibrant green just yesterday, are slowly turning into a profound orange color, merging with the sky. 

Autumn’s just around the corner. It’s hard to believe summer’s almost over —Sion still remembers the day he first came to Angok, sun beating down on his face and sweat running down his back as he dragged his suitcase behind him. It seems like a lifetime ago —the cumbersome weight of his own body, the constant monotony dragging him down. He can barely see himself in that man anymore. 

There’s a ring at the door and Sion practically launches himself down the stairs, heartbeat immediately rising to a pace he knows who to associate with. 

He opens his gate and, yes, Daeyoung’s here, Daeyoung in his plain T-shirt, Daeyoung with his soft brown hair, now cropped short after Sakuya cut it with kitchen scissors in Sion’s tiny bathroom two weeks ago, Daeyoung smiling softly, tenderly, the way he always does for Sion. 

“You’re late,” Sion says even though he wasn’t even aware of the party until one hour ago. 

“Was there a specific time?” Daeyoung tilts his head. “I came right after my shower.”

Sion pulls him inside and watches as Daeyoung carefully closes the door behind him instead of letting it slam. “I was waiting for you.”

“I’m here now.”

Daeyoung bends down to give him a kiss and Sion goes on his tiptoes to meet him, fingers clutching at his collar. Daeyoung slides an arm around his waist, pulling him closer, but their kiss gets interrupted by Ryo and Sakuya hollering at them from the rooftop.

“Ew, we can see you!”

Both Daeyoung and Sion look up to find Ryo and Sakuya leaning against the edge of the wall side by side. Sakuya pretends to gag and Ryo covers his eyes with his hands with an expression of mock disgust. 

Sion rolls his eyes and sticks his tongue out at them while Daeyoung laughs good-naturedly. He doesn’t remove his hand from Sion’s waist and Sion sticks closer to him. 

“Get up here, we brought fireworks,” Ryo says before disappearing behind the wall, Sakuya just behind. 

Daeyoung and Sion glance at each other and erupt into a fit of giggles at the same time when their eyes meet. Sion’s heart is thumping against his chest and when his laughter dies down, he stares at the smile on Daeyoung’s lips before going in to kiss him again. 

“Hyung,” Daeyoung says against his mouth, “shouldn’t we go?”

“Why? Do you have anywhere to be?”

“No.” Daeyoung laughs. “Don’t you?”

Sion pulls back just enough to trace Daeyoung’s features with his eyes, his badly cut bangs, the slope of his nose, his almost invisible freckles, his slightly chapped lips. 

“No,” he answers, feeling something settle in his chest. “Nowhere.”