Chapter Text
Thirty days was long enough to learn how to avoid someone sitting six inches away.
Outside the lecture hall it was thirty-four degrees, and the heat that wouldn’t leave clung to the windows like a damp towel. Inside, the air conditioning had been set for some colder country.
The room smelled of old carpet and of vending-machine coffee drifting up the stairwell, scorched and sweet.
Eom Seonghyeon kept his eyes on the chalkboard and his jaw clamped until his back teeth ached.
The seating chart had made Ahn Keonho his neighbor for the semester, and he suspected the university thought this was funny.
He had gotten good at avoiding.
He answered when asked and never first.
He no longer sent Keonho the things he knew would make him laugh, or asked whether he’d eaten, or walked him to his bus stop after class with a bag of something fried. The daily video had shrunk to one second of a blank frame, which the app still counted as an answer.
The hardest habit to break was the reflex: something would happen, and his thumb would already be moving toward Keonho’s name.
What he allowed himself instead were the smallest words that could still be called replies.
Yeah. Probably not. Sure.
With everyone else he was fine. That was the trick of it.
He laughed at Martin, whose jokes tended to arrive before their setups.
He argued with James, who kept a ranked list of restaurants in his Notes app and defended it like scripture.
He answered Juhoon’s messages within minutes.
No one could have named the day the temperature dropped. Only the person six inches to his left got the version of Seonghyeon with the heat turned off.
And Keonho let him.
He had tried for a week. A joke, a saved seat, one 'u alive’ sent at eleven at night. Then he went politely quiet, the way you lower your voice around someone who’s sick, and Seonghyeon could not tell whether that was kindness or cowardice. After thirty days he still couldn’t tell, and that had started to feel like the real injury.
He didn’t corner him in a hallway or demand to know what he’d done.
A small handheld fan was clipped to the edge of his bag. In the front pocket was a portable charger he’d carried since September for the train, and kept in that pocket now because Keonho’s phone never made it to evening.
Keonho’s phone lay face-up on the desk at nine percent, its red sliver glowing. Seonghyeon’s hand knew exactly where the cable was, and stayed in his lap.
"Earth to Seonghyeon."
Juhoon, across the aisle, pushed his glasses up with a knuckle.
"You’re thinking. That’s weird, even for you."
"Shut up."
The laugh came out dry.
Seonghyeon pitched it low so it wouldn’t cross the gap on his left, but Juhoon’s eyes had already sharpened behind his frames; he’d caught the laugh and the shoulders both.
He turned back to the board looking pleased with himself, and the lightness left Seonghyeon’s face the moment he did.
He took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
He couldn’t do it anymore.
It wasn’t courage, it was exhaustion.
Without looking left, he pulled out his phone, opened the Notes app, and typed one line. He went back and deleted the capital letter so it would look like it didn’t matter.
Then he slid the phone across the desk until its edge tapped Keonho’s knuckles.
He kept his eyes on the board and watched anyway, with the whole edge of his vision.
Are we gonna talk abt it?
Keonho blinked, read it, and his shoulders came down half an inch.
about what?
That night. 10:45. Don’t tell me u forgot
seongieee just tell me already hhahah
It was the voice Keonho used on landlords and professors and anyone he’d kept waiting: a joke-shaped answer that meant please let this be small.
Seonghyeon pressed hard on the glass.
Don’t fucking play with me. Aren’t you even confused why I’ve been avoiding you?
Something almost amused crossed Keonho’s face, as though he really believed this was banter. Whether it was the real smile, Seonghyeon couldn’t say.
i thought you were just sad hahahaha
is this abt eun-seo?
if it is she was just mad or sulking. shes been like that forever. always jealous of you HAHAHA
Seonghyeon read it twice. He hadn’t typed her name.
He scrolled up to check, and he hadn’t.
There it sat in the note, two syllables Keonho had reached for before anyone offered them, the way a hand finds a light switch in a house it already knows.
He wrote a long answer. It had the time stamp in it, and one line he’d memorized without meaning to. It ran past the bottom of the screen, and then he deleted it a letter at a time, because the only way to send it was to admit how he knew.
This shit isnt funny Keonho.
It wasnt just her was it?
huh. what’d i do now
Seonghyeon looked at that one for a long time. Then he typed the only thing small enough to fit under a desk.
Was i just a joke?
Keonho went still.
Up front, the professor said something about partial derivatives. The air conditioning went on running.
When Keonho finally started typing, he stopped, and the cursor ate backward through what he’d written. Seonghyeon caught a single word before it vanished:
search
He knew exactly what that word was doing there.
At 10:45 that particular night at James’s, with a microphone his dad had dug out for them, Keonho had been on his phone when it became his turn to sing, thumbs going, and he’d passed it over without looking up.
"Hold this, one sec."
By the time Seonghyeon looked up, the screen had gone dark.
"It’s locked," he’d said, and held it out.
Keonho’s hand closed over the top of it, his thumb pressed to the glass, and the screen woke where Keonho had left it: a search bar with his own name typed into it, cursor still blinking, and under it a column of lines in the chat’s gray and white, his name in every one, in date order.
He should have looked away. He knew the polite number of seconds, and he counted past it. By four he had read a line he couldn’t unread, and he was still holding the phone out with the face of a man wiping his feet.
Keonho’s face hadn’t changed.
That was what Seonghyeon remembered most: how completely it hadn’t.
He still didn’t know whether Keonho had left it like that by accident.
Keonho’s new line appeared.
bro no. she was just jealous since we’re always together
i said that stuff to make her feel better. everybody was in those chats lol, james too
ok sure it was wrong. and we’re not even together anymore so
Across the aisle, James was wheezing at something on Martin’s screen, the happy, unguarded wheeze of a man who had never been told he was in anything.
James, who was in a different program, was only in this general elective because Keonho had talked him into it.
Seonghyeon looked away.
So it was wrong now. It hadn’t been wrong when Eun-seo was still around to be reassured.
At least take accountability ???
sorry yeah. i shouldnt have done it
it was just to calm her down. i really didnt think it meant anything seonghyeon-ah
im sorry. were ok tho yeah?
There were a hundred things he could have said.
He knew the first line and he knew the last. But Keonho kept glancing from the phone to his face and back, his thumbnail dug into the edge of the desk, wearing the look of someone waiting to find out whether he’d be punished, and Seonghyeon had never once managed to hold a verdict against that face.
Alright, we good?
yeah. nothing personal just humor. sorry again
Don’t worry, we’re all good fr.
♡
Seonghyeon locked the phone and shoved it to the bottom of his bag.
Three sorries, and not one of them had a noun in it.
Beside him, Keonho shifted and offered a small, tentative smile: the tilt of the head, the curve he used whenever he’d done something stupid and wanted to be let off. Seonghyeon had always believed it worked because it was so good. Now he wondered if it had only ever worked because he wanted it to.
Across the aisle, Martin whispered something to James that folded them both over their desks.
"If numbers have limits," Martin managed, "surely people do too—"
"I’m about to reach mine," Juhoon hissed, "if you two don’t shut up before I throw my laptop."
Seonghyeon’s mouth almost moved.
At the front, the professor had moved on to limits in two variables. A limit exists, the professor said, only if every path toward the point arrives at the same value. If two paths disagree, the limit does not exist.
The last four words were underlined twice. Seonghyeon copied them down.
Beside him, Keonho shifted again. Their knees touched beneath the desk.
Neither of them moved away.