Chapter Text
The loaded dice of storms roll over
the cleft sides of the island.
In the breast the heart throws itself
at an unseen and boltless door.
Sea, take me with open arms,
deft sleeves, frothy collar.
Let thinned weeds flag shell-
cowled mysteries. Bilge-crested
hulls of sea are luring me.
Dawn breeds dusk, horizon’s
the same. Next tide’s reprise
is when I leave. To sing’s to pray,
Island. Sing of me no more.
- Edwin Gallaher, Dreams of Ferdinand
When the Shark steps off the humid street and into the little Italian restaurant, Jinki is the first to notice. Even before the host sees him, Jinki does, something odd and uncomfortably electric prickling across the back of his neck at the sight of that maw bared in a toothy grin that, once upon a time, Jinki had fallen in love with. It feels like a threat now, as most of Seo Sangwoo’s traits and mannerisms do.
Of course, it doesn’t help that Jinki has taken to referring to him as the Shark, a little out of spite and a lot out of a desire never to say his name aloud again, but there it is. It’s fitting for Sangwoo anyhow, Jinki thinks, because once you’re in the water with no lifejacket, once you’ve begun to drown, everything feels like a predator. Jinki had long felt destined to become prey, and so he had.
On the Shark’s arm is a Lamb, or at least that’s how his date appears to Jinki. She’s wearing a white dress that feels like an unsubtle harbinger, and she’s the type of small and soft and pretty Sangwoo had always had a liking for. Not so long ago, Jinki had been the Lamb, and not so long ago, he’d been deemed unfit and tossed aside. Sangwoo’s slaughter had been swift; there’d been little room for argument or appeal. They had simply just been over.
“He’s here,” Jinki blurts out now, fork trembling in his clenched fist, his eyes still fixed on Sangwoo as the host leads him and his date to their table. As they pass, Jinki notes his hand fixed on the small of her back. His mouth is dry suddenly, his appetite gone, and something that feels like bile and tastes like jealousy sits heavy in the back of his throat.
“Who’s here?” Kibum asks from beside him, craning his neck around to follow Jinki’s gaze. All they can see now is the back of Sangwoo’s head as he settles into his seat, but Kibum’s sigh tells Jinki he knows exactly who it is. Minho, sitting across from them, leans over to get a glimpse of his own.
Straightening back up with a frown, Minho thumps his glass down on the table a little too hard in annoyance. “The shark dies at the end of Jaws, you know. I can make that happen.”
Jinki hiccups out a small laugh, maybe to keep himself from crying, and hurriedly lifts his glass of wine to finish it off. It doesn’t serve to make him feel less choked up, but it gives him a moment to think of something to say that isn’t an encouragement of Minho’s thinly-veiled threat of homicide.
“Karma will come,” Jinki says after a moment, which is perhaps too measured and fair a response. Karma tends to take its time and maybe Minho is right that a more prompt punishment is deserved. Instead, Sangwoo lives at leisure, while Jinki hurries toward the brink.
Up until this moment, Jinki had thought he’d been healing. In fact, tonight’s dinner was dedicated to his healing, the latest in a series of outings that were part of Operation Cheer Up Jinki, Minho and Kibum’s mission to soothe the ever-present pain of the end of his relationship. A few months before, the night Sangwoo had thrust his hand inside Jinki’s chest and shown him how a heart breaks, Jinki had cried himself to sleep on Minho and Kibum’s couch. In the morning, Kibum had made him breakfast and forced him to take Comme Des and Garçon for a walk.
“The first step in healing is fresh air,” Kibum had said.
“You’re making that up,” Jinki had retorted, with swollen, red-rimmed eyes and a headache the size of Seoul. All he’d wanted was to lie down again, until the ache in his chest went away, however long that took. But his protest went ignored.
“Comme Des prefers to shit in the park east of here.” Kibum had pressed compostable waste bags into one of Jinki’s hands, the dogs’ leashes into the other. “Don’t come back until they’re ready to.”
Jinki had gone grumbling, and was both relieved and irritated to find that Kibum had been right. Fresh air was helpful, both to clear his head and to soothe the burning in his lungs, which might have been psychosomatic, an illusory response to the emotional agony of his life crumbling around him like so much warm pastry. When he’d returned, Kibum and Minho had already worked out a plan to see Jinki through the worst of the pain, to do their best to help ease it.
I was sure it was working, Jinki thinks now. Hours-long marathons of The Great British Bake Off with Kibum cackling beside him, translating dry English wit that was lost on Jinki; endless dinners out and visits to plant nurseries until Jinki had a garden blooming in his apartment to shift his attention from what was missing; no gift too expensive or coffee that wasn’t “on me,” Minho would say, slapping Jinki’s hand away and presenting his own credit card.
It’s obvious now that too much of it was distraction only, palliative care of sorts, and very little had prepared him for the inevitability of seeing Sangwoo around. Of not just seeing Sangwoo, but seeing him with someone else. The wound had gaped open again in an instant; maybe it had never begun to close at all.
Across the table, Minho mutters something under his breath about personally orchestrating a karmic act of terror upon Sangwoo, while Kibum slips his hand into Jinki’s and squeezes. “I’ll pay and we can just go, okay?”
Jinki tries to shake his head, to argue that they should stay and finish the last bit of their meal, but he can’t get his mouth to move. As much as he wishes he could bear it, to sit there with Sangwoo a breath away, the anxiety weaving its way through his nervous system and twisting his stomach into knots says otherwise. So he nods, Kibum rises to his feet, and five minutes later, Jinki is tucked between Kibum and Minho, their arms around him, making their way back to his friends’ place.
There’s no suggestion that Jinki should go home. Jinki hardly wants to be alone at the moment, and there’s always been a place for him with his two closest friends. Ever since Kibum had run headlong into Jinki on his first day at university a decade ago, they’d been attached at the hip. Kibum had been trying to make it to a lecture on time and Jinki, then in his final year, had offered him directions. When Kibum bought him a meal as a thank-you later that week, he’d dragged his friend Minho along, and even then, when they were still just friends, Jinki had gotten the distinct impression they came as a package deal.
They were both his juniors, but it somehow felt like fate to Jinki that they should meet. After he’d quickly broken them of the habit of calling him sunbaenim, which felt far too formal for the speed and ease of their friendship, they’d all been inseparable. Kibum had always been all the quiet parts of Jinki but out loud, the buried brashness and boldness Jinki rarely let show. Minho was charming and affable, outwardly an athletic powerhouse and secretly a drama nerd who loved film and the theater, the easier complement to Jinki’s quiet nature. Jinki knew then and knows now how lucky he is to have them.
Even after Minho and Kibum had finally eased past the flimsy and all but invisible wall between them and become a couple, Jinki had never felt like some kind of third wheel. In fact, he’d been single and fairly content for years before he met Sangwoo, a lithe and handsome accountant who’d come in to do a routine audit of the taxes of the publishing company for which Jinki was the editorial director. He’d lingered around Jinki’s office door a bit too long after their first meeting, eventually asking him out once his audit was complete and there was no risk of conflicted interests. Jinki had accepted with little hesitation. On the surface level, Sangwoo had seemed exactly his type.
The first red flag hadn’t come until months in, when Sangwoo drunkenly admitted their relationship would have an expiration date. He didn’t know how or when, only that eventually, he would have to fulfill the duties of a real man, as he had phrased it: to settle down, to marry, to have children. By then, Jinki had already been in love. Stubbornly, stupidly, he’d thought that as the months wore on and Sangwoo hadn’t left, perhaps he had changed Sangwoo’s mind about what constituted a real man, a real relationship. Then, quite suddenly, he’d been crushed by the weight of the knowledge that he hadn’t changed a thing.
Sangwoo had been cruel that night. He’d always been a little sarcastic, a little bit biting in a way that Jinki had often quietly suffered out of love for him, but that night, he’d turned it on Jinki in a whole new way. There were new insults about Jinki’s intelligence, his writing, his peculiar habits that he’d once thought Sangwoo had found endearing but had apparently become barely tolerable.
I knew that things had changed, Jinki had said. But not this much.
Changed? I told you a long time ago, Jinki-ya. You were temporary. You knew this. If you made something else up in your head, that’s not my problem.
But you moved in with me, Jinki had said, trying to appeal to the Sangwoo he thought he knew, rubbing anxiously at his chest where it felt like his heart was imploding. But even as he’d said it, he realized how silly it was to have seen this as a sign of commitment. If anything, it represented an allegiance only to the bed he’d shared with Sangwoo and the things they did there. And even that bore some of Sangwoo’s contempt, much to Jinki’s mortification.
By the time Sangwoo had packed his things and gone, Jinki felt a shell of himself. Sangwoo had broken whatever existed of his confidence, and the impact reverberated even now. Without Sangwoo’s support, Jinki already hadn’t written in months, and it had only become worse after the breakup. He didn’t feel any longer like a good enough judge of anyone else’s work, either.
He’d been gutpunched by every romance manuscript that found its way across his desk until he finally fielded them to a newer editor eager to offer input in her favorite genre. He’d slept on a combination of friends’ couches and his own, until his back hurt too much to put off any longer sleeping in his bed where someone else’s scent lingered. Then he’d gone and paid to replace the mattress. He’d done all he could, with the help of his friends, to mitigate the hurt, but it had still crept back in from the far corners of his mind, never quite having gone to begin with.
Once again on Kibum and Minho’s couch, which must have molded to the shape of him by now, Jinki blinks at the blinding light of the sitting room lamp, trying to disguise his tears and failing.
“It’s okay to wallow,” Kibum says, curling up next to Jinki while Minho takes the dogs out. “I think we were trying to keep you from doing that before, and I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Jinki says, waving off Kibum’s apology. “You can’t be sorry for trying to help.”
“No, but I am,” Kibum says. “We kept you so distracted, you didn’t have a chance to feel it.”
“But I don’t want to feel it,” Jinki says, and there’s a childlike, desperate note in his voice, a plea for continued distraction, or maybe a total lobotomy, he’s not really sure.
“I know,” Kibum says, pulling Jinki into his arms. “But you have to, hyung. That’s the real first step in healing.”
Jinki buries his face in Kibum’s shoulder. He lets the pain flood in.
~ (ᵔᴥᵔ) ~
The idea is perfectly formed, partly in dream, before Jinki is even fully conscious. It’s 3am, which in Jinki’s experience, is the perfect time for ideas to come, unfettered and unchecked by the rationale of being actually alert. Indeed, before he can think better of the impulse working its way through his tired mind, he reaches for Kibum’s nearby laptop and sets to work, opening multiple tabs so he can do the wild thing quickly before he’s too awake to think better of it.
Jinki’s never really been the adventurous type. He likes to travel, sure, but an innate sense of responsibility has always guided those exploits. He’s never left on anything longer than a day trip without a carefully made itinerary, everything timed down to the hour. Minho, who likes to leave things up to chance, and Kibum, who falls somewhere in the middle, had always done their own things when they went anywhere as a trio. Jinki could spend hours in a museum or garden and still be there when his friends returned, unaffected by their fear of missing out, enjoying the quiet comforts of his status quo.
Seeing Sangwoo, however, seeing him happy, undisturbed by the wreckage left in his wake, had made something in Jinki snap. He can feel it; whatever had just yesterday tethered him to long-established routines and customs, is gone today. The abrupt need to flee is a powerful one, only aggravated by the unforeseen and sudden death of the old Jinki in that restaurant. He’d been clinging, he realizes now, by a fraying thread and a half-hearted prayer, to the life he’d lived with Sangwoo. Even at its most unpleasant, it was the kind of comfortable life Jinki had grown up expecting and therefore easily tolerated. Yet in a single moment, over a plate of pasta and a glass of wine, it had become violently unbearable.
Now, somehow, it feels like much more is on the line than just the state of Jinki’s emotions. A nasty breakup, a shattered heart—these were to be anticipated from time to time, and maybe, if it had been a mere lack of compatibility, a standard conscious uncoupling as certain Western celebrities had taken to calling it, it would have been easy to move on. Minho and Kibum’s distractions would have been an effective balm. But it hadn’t just been an ordinary breakup. It had been a ruthless culling of everything that Jinki was, the flesh of his whole being torn from the bone of what constituted normalcy in Sangwoo’s eyes.
If it hadn’t come at great personal cost, Jinki might have pitied Sangwoo for the way he conceived of his own sexuality, the way he caved to limited perceptions and the things expected of him. It had occurred to Jinki the night Sangwoo cleaved him in two that the conditioned desire to be a filial son had broken Sangwoo long before the two of them had ever met. Jinki had just been a stopover, the final stepping stone to Sangwoo’s intended life, which was, in its own way, pathetic. Jinki remains unconvinced, even now, that Sangwoo’s conviction in settling down isn’t simply settling.
And what have I been doing, all this time, my whole life?
With the mirror turned on himself, Jinki heeds the restlessness in his chest, and begins searching for a place to find himself.
By 4am, Jinki has booked a flight and accommodations. By 5am, he’s drafted and sent an email to his boss to cash in on his truly insane amount of unused vacation time. By 6am, Jinki is up and making breakfast in Kibum’s beloved and well-stocked kitchen, which is perfect because by the time 7am comes and Minho and Kibum are swapping concerned looks and staring at him over the rims of their coffee cups, Jinki has managed to kill the urge to cancel all his arrangements.
This will be good for him.
“This will be good for me,” he says aloud, though it hardly seems to temper his friends’ worries.
“You’re sure?” Minho asks, for maybe the third time. “It’s a long time away, hyung.”
“You can take that much vacation time?” Kibum adds. “Two months is ages. More importantly, you’ll miss my birthday.”
Jinki pouts prettily at Kibum, aegyo being the surest way to guilt him back for his guilt trip. “Don’t make me feel bad, Kibum-ah, or I won’t send any presents.”
Kibum laughs and holds up his hands. “Alright, alright, let’s not go that far. I need that jacket I already know you bought for me.”
Here, Jinki levels a glare at Minho and his loose lips. Minho looks pointedly away and sips his coffee, and Jinki makes a mental note not to shop for Kibum’s birthday in front of him next year.
“Anyway,” Jinki says, “it’s really a working vacation. Things have slowed down a bit and all upcoming publications are already scheduled, so my boss has been trying to get me back to doing some writing of my own. We haven’t published anything of mine since my first book, and he wants to, so he emailed me back pretty quickly and said the trade-off for me taking this much time away is that I use it to write.” Jinki pauses. “Actually, now I think of it, it’s more like a punishment, since writing has been difficult these days.”
“That’s because some little bastard told you your writing isn’t good when it is,” Minho says. He’s never had trouble cursing furiously when the need arises; where Sangwoo is concerned, the need has apparently never been greater.
“I know,” Jinki sighs. “I know.” Minho doesn’t say it, but Jinki knows he’s been wondering how Jinki could possibly have believed it to begin with. Minho is a different sort of being, though, one not easily swayed by the opinions of others. If someone told him he was bad at something, he’d either disregard it, or do it until he got good. But where Minho has the good sense to overcome the fickle perceptions of others, Jinki has a lifelong battle with imposter syndrome. A person like Sangwoo has always been more than capable of destroying his self-esteem, though maybe no one else had ever relished in it so much.
“I want to write again,” Jinki says. “I do. I just think it will help to be away. I haven’t been able to process anything here. The thing I was most scared of finally happened and I’ve realized I was living in such fear of that moment, of seeing him, that I haven’t taken any actual time to figure out how to pick up the pieces of this mess he made of me.”
Kibum chews on his lip. “And you can do that in Jeju?” His eyes give voice to all the concerns he hasn’t said out loud.
“I like the sea,” Jinki offers after a moment, which isn’t really an answer, nor strictly true, but it’ll have to do. His mind is made up.
“There are sharks in Jeju too, you know,” Minho tells him, but with it comes pursed lips that say he’s resigned to Jinki’s decision, even if it makes him sad.
Jinki smiles wanly. “Well, I’ll just have to learn to swim faster.”
Two days later, just outside the Gimpo departures terminal, Minho squeezes Jinki so tight that Jinki is sure his lungs will burst like balloons. “You swim fast, you got me? And if anything happens, you call and we’ll come running.”
Jinki has to laugh. Sometimes, despite being their senior, it feels like he found a second set of parents in Minho and Kibum. His actual parents had just been relieved to hear Jinki was going to try and pull himself together. This set is far more reluctant to let him go.
“I’m not going to call,” Jinki says, “precisely because I know you’ll come running and this is something I have to do on my own.”
Kibum pokes him in the ribs, then pulls him into another back-breaking hug. “Okay, well, you better still call though, so we know you’re doing okay.”
“Alright, alright. You have the schedule for watering my plants?”
“You emailed it to both of us and wrote it down,” Kibum reminds him. “Don’t worry, we have it.”
“Keep a close eye on the syngonium, she’s started to vine so make sure she has plenty of space, okay?”
“Keep her in the closet, got it,” Kibum jokes, yelping when Jinki flicks his arm.
“Take care of yourself, hyung,” Minho says, and with one last hug from each of them, Jinki pulls his luggage inside before he can be talked into calling the whole thing off just looking too long at Minho’s puppy eyes.
It’s a short flight, an hour give or take a few minutes, but Jinki finds it difficult to get comfortable, both in the terminal while he waits, and on board the plane. He feels cramped everywhere these days when he’s around too many people, claustrophobic, like he can hardly think without an audience to every nervous notion that passes through his mind.
For a moment, just before takeoff, he does a double take on a dark head of hair with a familiar shaggy cut a few rows in front of him. Only when the man turns his head to look out the window does Jinki’s heart unclench at the sight of an unfamiliar jawline. He forces himself to take some deep breaths, and by the time they land in Jeju an hour later, he thinks he’s managed at least one or two proper, big inhales.
And okay, he’s not quite as calm as he’d pretended to be for the sake of his friends. There’s a riot going on in his chest, a prickle of fear in his gut that he’s doing something stupid. A people pleaser, prioritizing himself? Who would have thought? And yet, there’s determination, too, something inside that feels lighter already, knowing that he’s about to step off a plane and not be surrounded by the vacant space left in the wake of broken things. It’ll be good to be alone and search his soul, to get to know himself again, to find the things that were lost in constant acquiescence to someone else’s whims.
He’d been honest with Minho and Kibum. The thing Jinki wants back the most is his writing. Not just because someone expects it of him, but because he loves to do it. He’s filled notebook after notebook, document after document with his ideas, some of which he knows will never see the light of day, but many others with enough promise to turn into something if he can nourish them well enough. Maybe it’s that the air quality is better in Jeju, or maybe it’s that there’s no chance of running into Sangwoo here, but the moment Jinki is off the plane and climbing into a taxi, he feels sure he might be able to feed an idea or two, and grow them in a garden of salty seawater and perhaps the first deep sleep he’ll have in months.
The journey to the little rented cottage is short, and the unfamiliarity of the streets on the way is a relief. Jinki has been here a time or two, but he’d been a child then. He has little memory of anything but a beach, his mother helping him shape a sandcastle, her soft hands wrapped around his small, pudgy ones. He’d cried when their work had washed out with the tide, and Jinki thinks that’s probably the day he decided the ocean was not for him. Strange that he should make his way back now, though he supposes castles crumble just as well in Seoul as they do here. It’s much cleaner, in the end, to be taken by the sea.
The cottage is a small but roomy two-bedroom with overly opulent windows that allow a brilliant view of the water nearby. Per the photos on the booking website, the way the sunset bathes the sitting room golden in the evenings is more than worth the extra money Jinki had shelled out to get the place on such short notice. His options for long-term rentals had been limited, but this had been the gem among them and it’s easy to see why. It feels cozy, well-loved, and as long as he looks after it, he has free run of the place, his new home away from home.
Jinki unpacks in the sparsely decorated bedroom almost as soon as he’s through the door, not wanting to put it off in fear of living directly from his suitcase for two months. Besides, Jinki is certain Minho would be summoned directly to him if he were to throw his things about, the same pinched and exasperated look on his face as when, for the eighth time in a week, he’s folding Kibum’s jeans.
By the time he’s done, the bed is beckoning. It’s been freshly made, and Jinki is loath to wear even moderately dirty clothes into it, so after a quick shower, he crawls beneath the duvet and buries his head into the pillows. It’s been a while since he’s indulged in an afternoon nap, but even light travel makes him sleepy, and the sheets smell like lavender laundry soap. Jinki reaches for his phone, sends a quick here. safe. to his group chat with Minho and Kibum, and hardly sets it down again before he’s out like a light.
~ (ᵔᴥᵔ) ~
The water rises up and swallows Jinki whole. One moment, he’s standing on the beach, watching a crab make its slow way across the hot sand; the next, fighting for his life. He can feel himself sinking even as he struggles to surface. Surely, he’s not that far down, he can see the sun shining through the water above him, and yet his legs and arms feel too heavy. His whole body feels too heavy, and his lungs are beginning to burn, and he’s going to die down here, where he can’t make a sound, where nobody would hear him anyway.
“Take a deep breath,” someone says behind him. “This is how you heal.”
Jinki fights to turn around, and when he does, there’s nobody there.
“Come on, deep breath now.”
Jinki succumbs. His mouth opens, water rushes in, and—he can breathe. His lungs inflate. He isn’t drowning. In fact, he thinks he might be floating. He stops trying to fight, stops kicking his feet in a desperate attempt to tread water, and immediately, everything eases.
There’s the sound of laughter behind him, impish, juvenile. He turns, smoothly this time, to find an enormous set of black eyes, watching him through the dark.
“I’ll be seeing you around.”
Jinki jerks awake, breathless, a little shout of surprise bursting out of him before he can ground himself in reality. His hands are digging into his pillows and slowly he unclenches them, rolling over to root around for his phone in the duvet.
The screen is blurry for a moment and Jinki blinks, bleary-eyed, at the brightness. 7:03pm. He’d slept for four hours? It feels like moments ago that he’d fallen asleep. And what was that dream he’d been having?
He flops back against the sheets, chasing the threads of it, trying to piece it together in a linear way. But the more he clings to it, the faster it slips through his fingers until he can’t remember it at all. There’s only the way he’d woken gasping, heart racing, strands of his hair clinging to his forehead with sweat.
After a long few minutes of lying in the darkened room, Jinki makes his way from the bed to the bathroom and back, then fumbles around in the bureau for something to wear so he can go out in search of dinner. He’d spied a little restaurant earlier in the taxi, tucked on a little side street not far from here. Their sign had mentioned chicken, which is all Jinki really needs to know.
On the walk over, Jinki opens the group chat to a dozen messages, most of them from Minho containing variations of how are you, how is it there, are you having a good time yet accompanied by a truly astonishing amount of emojis, even for him. Kibum has interjected in the middle: leave hyung be, he’s probably sleeping. Jinki smiles and lets them know all is well and about to be better, sending them a quick photo of the restaurant as he approaches.
The ahjumma behind the counter very nearly coos at him, charmed no doubt by the bags under his eyes and his very obvious need to be fed. It strikes Jinki in a tender place and in a way that makes him want to run back to Seoul, back home to the people who will pinch his cheeks and ruffle his hair and care for him. It hadn’t always been this way. Before Sangwoo, Jinki had been the nurturer, the caretaker, ever the one to buy a meal or a gift or flowers for somebody just because he could. He’d realized, in the aftermath, how nice it is to be the one coddled, just a little, just for a while.
Of course, the whole point in coming here is to curb these urges before they root themselves too far deep in him. Letting himself be cared for is a kindness Jinki thinks he owes himself, but just the same, there’s little to gain without first feeling the ache.
Jinki leaves the restaurant with more bibimbap than he’d ordered, extra banchan and drinks tucked into the bag and who knows what else. He’d assured the ahjumma that he’d eat well and certainly be back, though judging by the heft of the bag, he won’t need to go back for days. He makes his way back toward the cottage on a different street he thinks leads close to the beach, deciding that there’s no better place to enjoy his first meal in Jeju.
With the sun going down, a breeze rolls off the sea, and Jinki parks himself in the sand halfway down to the water. The beach has emptied out save for a young couple and their toddler, a soft-cheeked boy of no more than two who stumbles around the sand, trampling a half-built sandcastle, shrieking at odd intervals, flinging fistfuls of seaweed and pebbles in all directions. His parents laugh, chasing him, and Jinki watches them fondly for a moment, before turning his attention to his dinner.
You can’t blame him for wanting that, says something guilty in the back of Jinki’s mind as he removes the lid from the bowl of bibimbap, cradling it in his lap and taking a few big bites of rice. An awful sense of shame gnaws at him then, before he makes an effort to shove it down. Jinki reminds himself that, in fact, he hadn’t ever blamed Sangwoo for wanting a family. What Jinki blamed him for, still blames him for, is his failure to realize that there’s more than one way to make a family. That if you love someone, you find a way.
And therein lay the crux of the thing: Sangwoo hadn’t loved him. Not really. Not the way he’d said he had at the start. Jinki, adept at falling fast and easy, had walked down that road alone for more than a year, never fully understanding it only ran one way until he came to the end and realized he’d had no company the entire time. Sangwoo had moved in to have easier access to Jinki, to the one need Jinki could satisfy, at least for a time, and considered little else.
Even before the breakup, when something had begun to shift that Jinki couldn’t then put his finger on, he’d wondered if there was anything he could have done. If he was a bit more this or that, would Sangwoo have changed his mind? Would the thing between them that had already begun to fizzle out by then be reignited if only Jinki could be good enough, either inside or outside of their bedroom?
It was a dangerous line of thinking then and it remains so now, Jinki realizes suddenly, pausing mid-bite to reassess. The guilt in his chest shifts from its focus on Sangwoo’s life, as if Jinki had ever been responsible for that, to guilt over ever letting Sangwoo dictate how he feels about himself.
It’s easier said than done, to hold oneself in high enough esteem that the opinions of others could be disregarded so simply. Jinki’s never been good at it, but he supposes it’s never too late to start being gentler to himself, especially where Sangwoo and the circumstances of the last few months are concerned.
Once his belly is full of enough bibimbap to feel borderline uncomfortable, Jinki ties the bag with the remaining food and leaves it sitting in the sand. He leaves his sandals next to it and walks down to the water’s edge, crouching down and letting the tide lap over his hands and feet, breathing in the scent of sea life and salt water for a long minute before he stands abruptly, the feeling of being watched suddenly creeping up the back of his neck.
The little family with the toddler is gone and no one has come to take their place, yet the nervous energy remains. Jinki turns in a little circle, seeking out the source of the feeling, but the beach is empty save for him and a tied up bag of one little ahjumma’s love. Jinki takes a deep breath, trying to let go of his worries on the exhale. Perhaps he’s hallucinating; at this point, it would hardly come as a surprise.
Jinki turns back to face the water.
“Are you afraid of her?” comes a voice. “She’ll know if you are.”
Jinki whirls around. Not five feet behind him stands a man, where hardly a moment ago, there’d been nobody. Jinki squeezes his eyes shut, trying to send the hallucination back to wherever it came from, but when he opens them again, there stands the same man.
He’s barefoot and barechested, Jinki’s hallucination, pale white-blond hair only just giving way to darker roots, dripping water over his shoulders. His shirt is slung over one shoulder, and Jinki follows those little droplets as they make their way down the other. He almost expects them to pool in this man’s sharp collarbones, but they carry on and so do Jinki’s eyes. Jinki can count each defined muscle in his abdomen then, cheeks heating when he zeroes in on the little trail of dark hair under his navel. The blush probably spreads to the tips of Jinki’s ears when he spies how his shorts are clinging and bunched up a bit between his thighs, what must be a half mile of sun-golden skin peeking out from beneath the fabric.
“How did you—” Jinki begins, before it occurs to him that whatever he finishes his sentence with will probably sound rude. Instead, still fixated on this lost son of Poseidon who clearly crawled out of the waves to stand before him, he settles for something only marginally less impolite. “What?”
“The sea,” clarifies the god, or whoever. “You look afraid of her. She can tell, you know.”
“Oh,” Jinki says, as if these words are supposed to make any sense to him, as if he’s at all convinced he hasn’t gone entirely mad, that he isn’t just talking to a figment of his imagination. In writing, his mind’s eye had always been good at conjuring beauty, but never so good as this. Bless his tired and dissolving little brain for rewarding him with something so lovely to look at as he slips quickly over the edge of his sanity.
The man closes the short distance between them until he’s standing close enough that Jinki thinks if he concentrated, he could probably count his eyelashes. That wouldn’t be so terrible, really, considering how pretty they are, how pretty he is, big brown puppy dog eyes that shine even in the dim light between sunset and moonrise.
But Jinki is afraid, in fact, less of the sea than of the feeling in his stomach. He would put it down to stuffing himself full of bibimbap, but it isn’t a fullness. It’s an emptiness, really, a hollow place inside him aching with something both familiar and forgotten. Those first twinges of attraction that feel brutal now, like a sick joke, a reminder of the consequences of the last time he felt them. Jinki tries to avert his eyes, to look at something else, something that will appeal less to his baser senses and more to the good sense he hopes he’s developed over a lifetime of mishaps and unfortunate circumstances.
He can’t seem to break their gaze.
“Oh, I get it,” teases the man. “You can’t swim, can you?”
Jinki is so surprised he laughs, clapping one hand over his mouth as he does, like he’s just said some kind of dirty word. There’s an alarmingly charming lopsided grin on the other man’s face, and Jinki can feel himself caving already to the magic of it, how easy it seems to come to his face, how it makes the back of Jinki's neck feel warm.
He’s not real, Jinki tells himself. You made him up. You’re talking to a mirage. Nevertheless, if he can’t defend himself against the thing making his heart race, he feels somehow compelled to try and disabuse this apparition of the idea that he can’t swim.
“Of course I can swim,” Jinki says smoothly. It’s not really a lie. He does know, theoretically, how to move his body in water and not immediately drown. But if that was all it really took, Jinki would have several Olympic gold medals by now. Still, this man doesn’t need to know that he would die more easily than live in any body of water larger than a bathtub.
“Ah,” says the other, nodding, knowing. “Okay. Afraid of the sharks, then.”
The words are like a knife in Jinki’s chest somehow, and it’s what breaks the spell. He manages to look away finally, to put his eyes somewhere not on the body of a man he doesn’t know and almost certainly conjured out of several months worth of sleeplessness.
“Sure.” Jinki nods, lower lip suddenly trembling, and he forces his face into a smile. “You caught me. It’s the sharks.” He goes to excuse himself from the conversation, however rude it might be to just walk away. He has to get out of here, has to go back to the cottage and back to sleep, before he imagines himself into an alternate universe inhabited only by pretty people who say unintentionally true things that sting an already battered heart.
But then, his hallucination holds out a hand to him, and Jinki’s never felt weaker, so he takes it like it’s a lifeline. He’s surprised to find it’s made of flesh and bone. That whoever is standing in front of him right now is a living and breathing person and not a delusion, though he doesn’t know if it’s better that he’s not talking to nobody or worse that the somebody he is talking to is so stunningly attractive.
“Kim Jonghyun,” offers the stranger, holding onto Jinki’s hand for longer than is strictly necessary, a little bow accompanying the handshake. “And I’m sorry to have snuck up on you and quite possibly insulted you, judging by the look on your face. You seemed like maybe you needed a smile but I really just have a habit of running my foolish mouth.”
A half dozen thoughts spring to mind about Jonghyun’s mouth, not one of which can be voiced in polite company, let alone to his face. Jonghyun running his mouth is actually the least of Jinki’s worries when such a mouth exists at all, perfectly plump and kissable in a way that somehow feels like a threat. Maybe it is a threat, if to nothing else than Jinki’s desire for peace and healing. There can be nothing peaceful about a cupid's bow and a jawline like that.
“It’s alright,” Jinki says, reluctantly pulling his hand back when Jonghyun lets go. There’s a lot to be said for having one’s hand held, and admittedly, Jonghyun’s is soft and warm and large and so unusually, oddly comforting—
No, Jinki chides himself. Have some self-control. As if there’s any use in trying to control attraction. He thinks there ought to be some kind of alarm bell going off in his brain, a warning to quickly pack away the affectionate warmth that for some reason, Jonghyun’s smile brings to bloom in his chest. But then, Jinki’s always been a little too indulgent of his own heart, allowing himself far too much clemency for the way a pair of pretty eyes looking his way can stir up a distressing amount of feelings. Jinki is quite sure this is indirectly what led him here in the first place: the joy of being looked at and it feeling akin to floating away on a cloud.
“Ah, it’s alright to tease you when we’ve just met?” Jonghyun asks. “Noted.” There’s a playful eyebrow raise that deals a critical blow to both the strength of Jinki’s knees and his resolve.
He should maybe say that it isn’t okay, that Jonghyun’s right and they’re strangers, but for some reason, Kibum comes to mind just then. If he’d been uptight, rigid with the prescribed rules for social interaction when they’d met, perhaps they’d never have become so close. It’s a reminder that maybe not every man with lovely features and a sharp tongue is out to hurt him. So instead, Jinki just smiles a bit, folds his arms over his chest in a last ditch effort to protect his traitorous little heart which seems hellbent on ignoring his head, and gives Jonghyun his own name.
“Lee Jinki,” he says. “Me, I mean. I’m Lee Jinki.”
“A pleasure,” Jonghyun says. “Are you here on vacation, Lee Jinki?”
Jinki laughs, wondering what the giveaway is. “Am I so obvious? My friends say I look a bit lost everywhere I go.”
Jonghyun shrugs. “Nonsense, you just have a mind that’s elsewhere a lot, don’t you? I can relate.”
That Jonghyun seems to be able to see through him this way should be off-putting, but Jinki finds himself appreciating that the truth of who he is can be sized up so well and so quickly.
“Yeah,” Jinki agrees. “I guess you could say that.”
“Anyway, it’s the way you carry your shoulders. Lots of big city stress. Smacks of Seoul.”
Jinki sheepishly rubs the back of his neck and laughs. “Are you psychic or something?”
“Maybe,” Jonghyun says, shrugging. “Or my mom and noona live in Seoul and I’ve visited too many times not to know the specific way it weighs on a person.”
“And is that why you live here?" Jinki asks. "Escaping the weight?”
Jonghyun laughs, too loudly at a personal joke Jinki clearly doesn’t get. “Leaning into it, I think. Or—halfway between.”
“Well, good, that makes one of us,” Jinki says, and out of the corner of his eye, he spots a large gull inching toward the bag of food he’d left up the beach. “And listen, I’m sorry to run, but if I don’t, that seagull’s making off with some of the best bibimbap I’ve had in years, so—”
“No, no, of course, don’t let me stop you. I couldn’t come between a man and his bibimbap.”
“Very thoughtful of you,” Jinki says, giving Jonghyun a little bow and getting one in return, accompanied by another of Jonghyun’s pretty smiles.
“I’ll be seeing you around, Lee Jinki.”
Jinki blurts out a quick goodbye and hurries away to grab his food, something familiar about Jonghyun’s words nagging at his memory as he goes. It’s like he’s heard them before but can’t place where. It feels like when he’s watching a movie with Minho and can’t figure out in where he’s seen an actor already. It’s going to bother him until he can recall the source of the odd sense of deja vu, but it’s already past time he returned home and put distance between himself and this strange day.
Jinki’s approach spooks the gull away from his food and he grabs the bag and slips into his sandals, heading on up the beach. Ostensibly, Jinki had bought the bibimbap to settle himself down, something simple and familiar and filling to ease the sudden transition to the quieter nature of the island and all the residual bad energy he’d been saturated in for months. Yet something in his stomach is clenching, unsettled, at Jonghyun’s sudden appearance and how easy it had been to fall into conversation with him. It’s not that Jinki intends to avoid all human interaction, just that most people don’t stir up such a tornado in him like that, and he’s been caught off guard enough lately as it is.
When he reaches the street above the beach, Jinki looks back and finds Jonghyun at the water’s edge now, sitting just where Jinki had been when he had first approached. It looks like he’s talking to the sea itself, and for all Jinki knows, maybe he is. Shaking his head as if that will clear it of someone like Jonghyun, Jinki continues down the street. He hopes he’ll be able to sleep again tonight.