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DAY ??? - fics i k*lled
maybe when i figure out how to continue them, they will come back to life!!
LIVESTREAMING THE FINAL DAYS OF ROME
HENDERY/XIAOJUN/YANGYANG
Yangyang's a terror with a smile that shows at least forty teeth and a mouth that goes a mile a minute. Hendery and Dejun find themselves talking about him occasionally, without context and at the most random times of day. Presently, they're on the tenth of their thirteen hour flight from Taoyuan to Los Angeles, and Dejun's idling in the aisle next to Hendery after using the bathroom even with the fastened seat belt sign glowing in the dark.
"He says he drives now," Dejun says, waving his arms around like an airport conductor on the tarmac. He'd been the one to remind Hendery to buy his ticket last month, but Hendery ended up in a cushy emergency exit seat while Dejun was stuck sitting next to a family bouncing a wailing newborn on their knee. "Would you place your life into Yangyang's hands like that?"
Hendery shrugs. He's paused his movie for so long that the screen turns off. "Better him than you." Dejun makes a face. "Or me," he adds, to placate. It's worthy to note that neither of them were ever able to beat Yangyang in Mario Kart. "I trust in American-approved airbags."
Seems like Dejun doesn't. "Jesus Christ," he says, all but climbing into Hendery's lap to let someone past him in the aisle. "We're going to die."
"You're exaggerating," Hendery smiles, pushes Dejun away. "We'll be fine. Go sit back down before you go hitting your head from the turbulence." Also, the flight attendant is glaring at them from her own seat down the way.
Dejun prods a bony finger into his shoulder. "I'm gonna start drafting my will after I fill out my immigration form. See if I leave you with anything."
"Looking forward to it!" Dejun manages just enough dexterity in between waddling through limbs spilling into the aisle to give him the finger. Hendery eats a mouthful of scratchy in-flight blanket laughing about it.
True love is picking someone up from LAX. At least, that's what Yangyang says. They get a first-hand taste of his road rage seven minutes in, and then he cuts someone else off the exact same way the driver he'd cussed out previously did to him.
"Means you must really love us, huh?" Hendery grins in the passenger seat. It's dark, and the traffic before them is a sea of red tail lights, and the July evening air through the rolled-down windows is hot but this is Yangyang's uncle's old Camry and the air conditioner stopped working two years ago. Dejun hasn't stopped gripping the handlebar in the backseat since he put the car in drive.
Yangyang makes an unprotected left without turning his blinker on. "A little," he allows, in time with the honking car behind them. Hendery watches as he mouths fuck you, loud and clear and in English, towards the rear view mirror.
Dejun must've seen it too, because he suddenly starts laughing uncontrollably. Yangyang's face splits into that enormous forty-toothed smile then, in almost slow motion. It's predatory, as always.
And Hendery, Hendery wants to hold onto the three of them. Like this, framed by the magenta sunset in that singular moment, forever.
CARNIVORE
JISUN/MINHO
"Is that my shirt?"
Jisun pauses in the middle of tying her hair up to turn towards him, the pinstripe button-down hanging off her two sizes too big. There's a toothbrush between her lips that suspiciously looks like his, too. "And is that my toothbrush?"
She grunts in assent, finishes tying up her hair, and goes back to brushing her teeth. On her feet are also the orthopedic slippers Hyunjin gave him during a holiday gift exchange, the back of her neck smells like the body wash he watered down yesterday. When Minho presses his lips against the collar of his own shirt, his chin pushes it down so he sees double of a bruise he'd sucked into the side of her neck.
"Did you finish the eggs?" Jisun mumbles through a mouth full of his frothy toothpaste. The vent's on in the bathroom, rattling, and the mirrors are still fogged up. Her ponytail gets him in the eye when she leans over the sink to spit, gets him again when she stands back upright and wipes her mouth with his sleeve. He just washed that shirt, he thinks. It'd gotten creased in the machine and Jisun told him he should iron out the wrinkles. He just washed that shirt.
"Tastes better when you make them," Minho says, mouth still pressed against her nape, otherwise motionless.
On the other hand, Jisun's moved on to reaching for his lotion. His shirt rides up on her until the hem grazes the top of her thighs. "But that doesn't mean you shouldn't make them," she replies.
Minho feels the residual motion of her smearing his lotion onto her cheek, rubbing it in using a circular motion, her elbow pressing against his chest. "So I should shouldn't make them?" he grins.
Jisun meets his gaze in the mirror. Annoying, she mouths. His own mouth smiles into her shoulder. "Annoying," she repeats aloud.
"You love me," Minho reminds her.
Jisun turns around in his arms to face him. "I love your dick," she corrects, eyebrow raised, a little too serious.
Minho shrugs. "Close enough," he says. And then Jisun reaches up and swallows the rest of his words between her minty fresh teeth.
It started like this: they were friends. Mutual. Minho helped her with a CompSci assignment and then Jisun helped him assemble his new dresser and then, in a logical turn of events, Jisun found herself in Minho's bed with his tongue in her mouth, insistently pushing her hips against his.
Jisun thinks that's pretty standard in terms of how relationships in uni go. Gyuri thinks:
"He sounds like your pet cat," she says through chewing an ice cube from her iced coffee, contemplative. "You know, if, like, fucking your cat was the norm." She makes a face.
Jisun laughs. "And if cats knew how to code." They don’t, or at least she’ll think until Minho finds a viral video about it to prove her wrong.
But Minho's got these dopey, slightly uneven front teeth that're more rabbit than cat-like when he smiles. One time Jisun absentmindedly traced the bottoms of them with her index finger when he fell asleep with his mouth open on the couch and wiped the residual saliva onto the sleeve of his shirt.
He blinked at her, groggy, woken up by the sensation. "What was that?" his voice thick and deep from sleep.
She feigned nonchalance. "What was what?" And then he pulled her down to his chest and kissed her with his gross morning breath, anyway, and Jisun rolled her eyes but let him.
DIVERS IN A HURRICANE
WONWOO/JUNHUI
DIVERS.docx [date modified: 2019-02-26]
You've told so many stories that you often find yourself stuck in the space between reality and your dreams. These stories may have started out true, only later to become fictionalized, or started out fiction, only later to become true. And more and more, in that cursory, precipice moment immediately after breaking the surface for air, you awaken with your mouth awash with the taste of the lingering dream, and you fear that it will slip away from you with every exhalation.
The only way to trap the dream in your lungs, you reason, is to hold your breath. Likewise, this is how you are constantly finding yourself these days, caught in the midst of two such dimensions, repeating this same story back for your own ears to listen, over and over again.
Wonwoo calls Junhui on a midnight between a Tuesday and Wednesday.
"Do you have time right now?" he asks, in lieu of greeting, over the violent crackling of the line. He's had the same phone since high school, a brick of a thing, all the way through university until now, and months ago, he'd told Junhui with an unwarranted pride how his provider threatened to discontinue his service unless he switch devices.
Junhui, honestly, doesn't remember how that had ended exactly, and Wonwoo told him the same story about it twice. "Technically yes." He looks at the elevation he'd been working on after-hours, due in the morning. "Hypothetically, no."
"Oh," Wonwoo steamrolls on. "Well, I'm still in Daegu. And, well," there's the ominous thunderstorm of him moving the phone to his other ear, "I think I've fallen in love."
"Oh," echoes Junhui. For a moment, he has no idea what to say and to fill the silence, laughs instead. What sounds like a motorbike passing by comes from Wonwoo’s side, too loud in the nostalgic quiet of the night. Junhui swallows once, then again. Then: "With who?"
To fully understand the context of this story, you’d have to know that every few months Wonwoo goes back to Changwon to visit family. He'd grown up there until he was sixteen, when he moved to Seoul, and then his parents had moved back to take care of his grandparents after his younger brother graduated high school. Several things are constant in this world as Junhui sees it – the passage of time, lying awake in the dark of his small bedroom contemplating his own mortality in place of sleeping, and Wonwoo's filial need to convince his parents he's still breathing out from under that stuffy studio apartment of his he never opens the blinds of.
One time, Wonwoo forgot to tell Junhui he was leaving for the week, and Junhui had even contacted his landlord in a frenzy after he wouldn't pick up his calls. "Sorry," Wonwoo told him the next day, though he didn't sound so sorry at all. It wasn't like Wonwoo to sound apologetic even when he was, and it used to piss a lot of people off back when they were in university. Despite Junhui knowing this, it sometimes still caught him off-guard. "My battery died, and my mom let me sleep in, and I guess I kinda forgot about it, until now."
"That's okay," Junhui laughed. "I'm just glad you made it there safely." He paused, wondering if this was too intimate to say. Either way, he continued – "Isn't it funny, how you go back home to convince your parents that you're still alive and well, and then the day you leave, I think something horrible's happened to you?"
He heard Wonwoo breathing through the receiver. He was thinking about it carefully, or at least Junhui hoped he was. Most of the time, Junhui laughed at Wonwoo's jokes and Wonwoo would sit there, oddly pensive after Junhui told him one of his own. He'd then sometimes erupt into a scrunched-nose kind of laughter about it ten minutes later, when Junhui had forgotten exactly what he'd said, and Wonwoo would repeat it back to him through wheezing. "I won't forget again," Wonwoo promised a little too seriously when he finally spoke again.
In any case, Wonwoo originally goes up to Daegu after five days in Changwon to see Seungcheol. He'd been a year ahead of them in university, and Seungcheol had been the president of the organization for Wonwoo's old major before he switched over to Literature. Even then, Seungcheol had the kind of too-big heart that only grew to accommodate any wayward junior struggling through their first year. They'd kept in touch through graduation, and after Wonwoo half-jokingly deflected Seungcheol's insisting that he come visit whenever for years, he finally gave in.
"Seungcheol's niece always chooses songs too challenging to successfully play," Wonwoo points out suddenly. "For an eight-year-old, I think that's admirable, but the Liszt was honestly pretty damn unbearable."
Junhui taps the end of his marker against his cheek. "What does that have to do with anything?"
Seungcheol had promised his sister-in-law that he'd take his niece to her piano recital that afternoon. That afternoon just happened to coincide with Wonwoo's train arriving fifteen minutes early, and then he'd been stuck sitting in the backseat next to a precocious first grader because Seungcheol had piled all his work-related junk shotgun.
"I don't like your glasses," she remarked after three minutes of meditative silence and Seungcheol fiddling with the GPS. "They make you look like a fish."
Wonwoo considered that. Maybe the circle frames were too much. "Well, this ahjussi needs to wear them or else he'll go blind," he replied, "Even if they make him look like a fish."
Seungcheol had given an over-enthusiastic standing ovation after she'd hit the last off-key chord and they waited outside the hall for her, reviewing the footage Wonwoo had taken on Seungcheol's iPhone. As Seungcheol's niece replayed the section she was struggling through for a second time, an incoming call interrupted the video. Jeonghan, the contact on the screen read.
"Sorry," Seungcheol said with a sheepish smile, "Let me take this." Wonwoo shook his head and leaned back against the wall, pressing his palms against the embossed wallpaper. It was startlingly cold compared to the auditorium filled with parents that they'd walked out of not long ago.
"Hey," Seungcheol snapped into the phone, but it lacked any bite. "You're really late, you know? Gaeun already finished performing."
Wonwoo could hear the tiny voice on the other side of the line laugh at that. It was a free kind of laughter, the kind that made you wonder if what you had said had really been that funny, or if you would ever truly know the purpose of it. "I saw. I was standing in the back, though."
Wonwoo watched as Seungcheol opened his mouth again, but Jeonghan cut in. "Wait. I think I see you now. You're standing in the hallway, right? I’m hanging up.”
“Hey!” Seungcheol laughed. “Hello? Hello?” The screen had resumed playing the video, right where they’d left off. “Is he serious?”
Wonwoo shrugged, though he wasn’t sure if Seungcheol really wanted his opinion. “He seemed serious.” At this time, he could see a shiny pair of dress shoes approaching out of the corner of his eye. They stopped before them, and Wonwoo looked up.
“Sorry I’m late,” this stranger – Jeonghan – said. He turned his gaze to Wonwoo, too, after a moment with an even smile on his lips. He was shorter than him and admittedly quite handsome, and the languid curve of his mouth seemed to hold a series of secrets. Wonwoo suddenly wondered if he would ever hear them from him, this stranger of a man.
As if he noticed Wonwoo staring, he laughed, showing his teeth. He held out his hand with what had to be the expectation Wonwoo would surely take it. “I’m Yoon Jeonghan.”
Wonwoo felt it then, just as their fingers brushed. What it was, was this: an all-consuming, and ultimately irrational, instantaneous head-first dive into the deep end of love.
Wonwoo, who had never been in love before, had never realized how violent the sensation would actually be. It had teeth, and it gnawed at him sitting across from Jeonghan that night at dinner, and even more so when he finally boarded his train back to Seoul, palm covering his mouth as he stared out the dark window to nothing but his own self, reflected back to him, watching as the distance between them grew. No amount of love stories could prepare him for the appetite to pull apart every word they exchanged from their respective bones, desperately speculating a pattern from the sinew.
They said first love was supposed to be a gentle spring that you ached for more and more as the years passed until, suddenly one day, you would forget about it completely. Maybe the longer you bottled that feeling in, the stronger it fermented, and the more fervent the flavor turned. And when you finally removed the lid, it just became the storm you'd lose yourself in.
On Junhui's way to work the next morning, the rain begins.
The day Junhui met Wonwoo, it rained.
LIVESTREAMING THE FINAL DAYS OF ROME
HENDERY/XIAOJUN/YANGYANG
Yangyang's a terror with a smile that shows at least forty teeth and a mouth that goes a mile a minute. Hendery and Dejun find themselves talking about him occasionally, without context and at the most random times of day. Presently, they're on the tenth of their thirteen hour flight from Taoyuan to Los Angeles, and Dejun's idling in the aisle next to Hendery after using the bathroom even with the fastened seat belt sign glowing in the dark.
"He says he drives now," Dejun says, waving his arms around like an airport conductor on the tarmac. He'd been the one to remind Hendery to buy his ticket last month, but Hendery ended up in a cushy emergency exit seat while Dejun was stuck sitting next to a family bouncing a wailing newborn on their knee. "Would you place your life into Yangyang's hands like that?"
Hendery shrugs. He's paused his movie for so long that the screen turns off. "Better him than you." Dejun makes a face. "Or me," he adds, to placate. It's worthy to note that neither of them were ever able to beat Yangyang in Mario Kart. "I trust in American-approved airbags."
Seems like Dejun doesn't. "Jesus Christ," he says, all but climbing into Hendery's lap to let someone past him in the aisle. "We're going to die."
"You're exaggerating," Hendery smiles, pushes Dejun away. "We'll be fine. Go sit back down before you go hitting your head from the turbulence." Also, the flight attendant is glaring at them from her own seat down the way.
Dejun prods a bony finger into his shoulder. "I'm gonna start drafting my will after I fill out my immigration form. See if I leave you with anything."
"Looking forward to it!" Dejun manages just enough dexterity in between waddling through limbs spilling into the aisle to give him the finger. Hendery eats a mouthful of scratchy in-flight blanket laughing about it.
True love is picking someone up from LAX. At least, that's what Yangyang says. They get a first-hand taste of his road rage seven minutes in, and then he cuts someone else off the exact same way the driver he'd cussed out previously did to him.
"Means you must really love us, huh?" Hendery grins in the passenger seat. It's dark, and the traffic before them is a sea of red tail lights, and the July evening air through the rolled-down windows is hot but this is Yangyang's uncle's old Camry and the air conditioner stopped working two years ago. Dejun hasn't stopped gripping the handlebar in the backseat since he put the car in drive.
Yangyang makes an unprotected left without turning his blinker on. "A little," he allows, in time with the honking car behind them. Hendery watches as he mouths fuck you, loud and clear and in English, towards the rear view mirror.
Dejun must've seen it too, because he suddenly starts laughing uncontrollably. Yangyang's face splits into that enormous forty-toothed smile then, in almost slow motion. It's predatory, as always.
And Hendery, Hendery wants to hold onto the three of them. Like this, framed by the magenta sunset in that singular moment, forever.
CARNIVORE
JISUN/MINHO
"Is that my shirt?"
Jisun pauses in the middle of tying her hair up to turn towards him, the pinstripe button-down hanging off her two sizes too big. There's a toothbrush between her lips that suspiciously looks like his, too. "And is that my toothbrush?"
She grunts in assent, finishes tying up her hair, and goes back to brushing her teeth. On her feet are also the orthopedic slippers Hyunjin gave him during a holiday gift exchange, the back of her neck smells like the body wash he watered down yesterday. When Minho presses his lips against the collar of his own shirt, his chin pushes it down so he sees double of a bruise he'd sucked into the side of her neck.
"Did you finish the eggs?" Jisun mumbles through a mouth full of his frothy toothpaste. The vent's on in the bathroom, rattling, and the mirrors are still fogged up. Her ponytail gets him in the eye when she leans over the sink to spit, gets him again when she stands back upright and wipes her mouth with his sleeve. He just washed that shirt, he thinks. It'd gotten creased in the machine and Jisun told him he should iron out the wrinkles. He just washed that shirt.
"Tastes better when you make them," Minho says, mouth still pressed against her nape, otherwise motionless.
On the other hand, Jisun's moved on to reaching for his lotion. His shirt rides up on her until the hem grazes the top of her thighs. "But that doesn't mean you shouldn't make them," she replies.
Minho feels the residual motion of her smearing his lotion onto her cheek, rubbing it in using a circular motion, her elbow pressing against his chest. "So I should shouldn't make them?" he grins.
Jisun meets his gaze in the mirror. Annoying, she mouths. His own mouth smiles into her shoulder. "Annoying," she repeats aloud.
"You love me," Minho reminds her.
Jisun turns around in his arms to face him. "I love your dick," she corrects, eyebrow raised, a little too serious.
Minho shrugs. "Close enough," he says. And then Jisun reaches up and swallows the rest of his words between her minty fresh teeth.
It started like this: they were friends. Mutual. Minho helped her with a CompSci assignment and then Jisun helped him assemble his new dresser and then, in a logical turn of events, Jisun found herself in Minho's bed with his tongue in her mouth, insistently pushing her hips against his.
Jisun thinks that's pretty standard in terms of how relationships in uni go. Gyuri thinks:
"He sounds like your pet cat," she says through chewing an ice cube from her iced coffee, contemplative. "You know, if, like, fucking your cat was the norm." She makes a face.
Jisun laughs. "And if cats knew how to code." They don’t, or at least she’ll think until Minho finds a viral video about it to prove her wrong.
But Minho's got these dopey, slightly uneven front teeth that're more rabbit than cat-like when he smiles. One time Jisun absentmindedly traced the bottoms of them with her index finger when he fell asleep with his mouth open on the couch and wiped the residual saliva onto the sleeve of his shirt.
He blinked at her, groggy, woken up by the sensation. "What was that?" his voice thick and deep from sleep.
She feigned nonchalance. "What was what?" And then he pulled her down to his chest and kissed her with his gross morning breath, anyway, and Jisun rolled her eyes but let him.
DIVERS IN A HURRICANE
WONWOO/JUNHUI
DIVERS.docx [date modified: 2019-02-26]
You've told so many stories that you often find yourself stuck in the space between reality and your dreams. These stories may have started out true, only later to become fictionalized, or started out fiction, only later to become true. And more and more, in that cursory, precipice moment immediately after breaking the surface for air, you awaken with your mouth awash with the taste of the lingering dream, and you fear that it will slip away from you with every exhalation.
The only way to trap the dream in your lungs, you reason, is to hold your breath. Likewise, this is how you are constantly finding yourself these days, caught in the midst of two such dimensions, repeating this same story back for your own ears to listen, over and over again.
Wonwoo calls Junhui on a midnight between a Tuesday and Wednesday.
"Do you have time right now?" he asks, in lieu of greeting, over the violent crackling of the line. He's had the same phone since high school, a brick of a thing, all the way through university until now, and months ago, he'd told Junhui with an unwarranted pride how his provider threatened to discontinue his service unless he switch devices.
Junhui, honestly, doesn't remember how that had ended exactly, and Wonwoo told him the same story about it twice. "Technically yes." He looks at the elevation he'd been working on after-hours, due in the morning. "Hypothetically, no."
"Oh," Wonwoo steamrolls on. "Well, I'm still in Daegu. And, well," there's the ominous thunderstorm of him moving the phone to his other ear, "I think I've fallen in love."
"Oh," echoes Junhui. For a moment, he has no idea what to say and to fill the silence, laughs instead. What sounds like a motorbike passing by comes from Wonwoo’s side, too loud in the nostalgic quiet of the night. Junhui swallows once, then again. Then: "With who?"
To fully understand the context of this story, you’d have to know that every few months Wonwoo goes back to Changwon to visit family. He'd grown up there until he was sixteen, when he moved to Seoul, and then his parents had moved back to take care of his grandparents after his younger brother graduated high school. Several things are constant in this world as Junhui sees it – the passage of time, lying awake in the dark of his small bedroom contemplating his own mortality in place of sleeping, and Wonwoo's filial need to convince his parents he's still breathing out from under that stuffy studio apartment of his he never opens the blinds of.
One time, Wonwoo forgot to tell Junhui he was leaving for the week, and Junhui had even contacted his landlord in a frenzy after he wouldn't pick up his calls. "Sorry," Wonwoo told him the next day, though he didn't sound so sorry at all. It wasn't like Wonwoo to sound apologetic even when he was, and it used to piss a lot of people off back when they were in university. Despite Junhui knowing this, it sometimes still caught him off-guard. "My battery died, and my mom let me sleep in, and I guess I kinda forgot about it, until now."
"That's okay," Junhui laughed. "I'm just glad you made it there safely." He paused, wondering if this was too intimate to say. Either way, he continued – "Isn't it funny, how you go back home to convince your parents that you're still alive and well, and then the day you leave, I think something horrible's happened to you?"
He heard Wonwoo breathing through the receiver. He was thinking about it carefully, or at least Junhui hoped he was. Most of the time, Junhui laughed at Wonwoo's jokes and Wonwoo would sit there, oddly pensive after Junhui told him one of his own. He'd then sometimes erupt into a scrunched-nose kind of laughter about it ten minutes later, when Junhui had forgotten exactly what he'd said, and Wonwoo would repeat it back to him through wheezing. "I won't forget again," Wonwoo promised a little too seriously when he finally spoke again.
In any case, Wonwoo originally goes up to Daegu after five days in Changwon to see Seungcheol. He'd been a year ahead of them in university, and Seungcheol had been the president of the organization for Wonwoo's old major before he switched over to Literature. Even then, Seungcheol had the kind of too-big heart that only grew to accommodate any wayward junior struggling through their first year. They'd kept in touch through graduation, and after Wonwoo half-jokingly deflected Seungcheol's insisting that he come visit whenever for years, he finally gave in.
"Seungcheol's niece always chooses songs too challenging to successfully play," Wonwoo points out suddenly. "For an eight-year-old, I think that's admirable, but the Liszt was honestly pretty damn unbearable."
Junhui taps the end of his marker against his cheek. "What does that have to do with anything?"
Seungcheol had promised his sister-in-law that he'd take his niece to her piano recital that afternoon. That afternoon just happened to coincide with Wonwoo's train arriving fifteen minutes early, and then he'd been stuck sitting in the backseat next to a precocious first grader because Seungcheol had piled all his work-related junk shotgun.
"I don't like your glasses," she remarked after three minutes of meditative silence and Seungcheol fiddling with the GPS. "They make you look like a fish."
Wonwoo considered that. Maybe the circle frames were too much. "Well, this ahjussi needs to wear them or else he'll go blind," he replied, "Even if they make him look like a fish."
Seungcheol had given an over-enthusiastic standing ovation after she'd hit the last off-key chord and they waited outside the hall for her, reviewing the footage Wonwoo had taken on Seungcheol's iPhone. As Seungcheol's niece replayed the section she was struggling through for a second time, an incoming call interrupted the video. Jeonghan, the contact on the screen read.
"Sorry," Seungcheol said with a sheepish smile, "Let me take this." Wonwoo shook his head and leaned back against the wall, pressing his palms against the embossed wallpaper. It was startlingly cold compared to the auditorium filled with parents that they'd walked out of not long ago.
"Hey," Seungcheol snapped into the phone, but it lacked any bite. "You're really late, you know? Gaeun already finished performing."
Wonwoo could hear the tiny voice on the other side of the line laugh at that. It was a free kind of laughter, the kind that made you wonder if what you had said had really been that funny, or if you would ever truly know the purpose of it. "I saw. I was standing in the back, though."
Wonwoo watched as Seungcheol opened his mouth again, but Jeonghan cut in. "Wait. I think I see you now. You're standing in the hallway, right? I’m hanging up.”
“Hey!” Seungcheol laughed. “Hello? Hello?” The screen had resumed playing the video, right where they’d left off. “Is he serious?”
Wonwoo shrugged, though he wasn’t sure if Seungcheol really wanted his opinion. “He seemed serious.” At this time, he could see a shiny pair of dress shoes approaching out of the corner of his eye. They stopped before them, and Wonwoo looked up.
“Sorry I’m late,” this stranger – Jeonghan – said. He turned his gaze to Wonwoo, too, after a moment with an even smile on his lips. He was shorter than him and admittedly quite handsome, and the languid curve of his mouth seemed to hold a series of secrets. Wonwoo suddenly wondered if he would ever hear them from him, this stranger of a man.
As if he noticed Wonwoo staring, he laughed, showing his teeth. He held out his hand with what had to be the expectation Wonwoo would surely take it. “I’m Yoon Jeonghan.”
Wonwoo felt it then, just as their fingers brushed. What it was, was this: an all-consuming, and ultimately irrational, instantaneous head-first dive into the deep end of love.
Wonwoo, who had never been in love before, had never realized how violent the sensation would actually be. It had teeth, and it gnawed at him sitting across from Jeonghan that night at dinner, and even more so when he finally boarded his train back to Seoul, palm covering his mouth as he stared out the dark window to nothing but his own self, reflected back to him, watching as the distance between them grew. No amount of love stories could prepare him for the appetite to pull apart every word they exchanged from their respective bones, desperately speculating a pattern from the sinew.
They said first love was supposed to be a gentle spring that you ached for more and more as the years passed until, suddenly one day, you would forget about it completely. Maybe the longer you bottled that feeling in, the stronger it fermented, and the more fervent the flavor turned. And when you finally removed the lid, it just became the storm you'd lose yourself in.
On Junhui's way to work the next morning, the rain begins.
The day Junhui met Wonwoo, it rained.