Chapter Text
Fucking Jisung.
I need to reconsider my choice of friends. Maybe I will move to Kansas and find new ones who do not describe to me in detail how hot Hwang Hyunjin is and why he is the most perfect human being on earth and that he has abs, Jiyu, because now I'm standing in front of my door hallucinating said Hwang Hyunjin because Jisung put his face into my head and now I can't get it out.
I'm not hallucinating him because I'm in love with him, just for the record. I can't get him out of my head because it's two in the morning and I've been studying for the past six hours straight because I have a physics exam tomorrow. My brain is the equivalent of a half-finished jigsaw puzzle with a third of the pieces missing. Hyunjin—or, as Jisung calls him, Hwang Fucking Hyunjin—was on my mind before I started studying and drifted off, so it makes sense that my brain would use him and his so-called six-pack as hallucination material.
When I'd first heard the rattling at my door, waking me up from drooling over my study guides for the third time, I'd been scared. After all, Seungmin and I have binge-watched far too many horror movies for me to not know how this stuff goes down (we can't watch them with Jisung because he'd start crying). But instead of a serial killer at my doorstep, it's my brain dreaming up Hwang Hyunjin, who I have only ever interacted with when he passed me in the halls and I got an unwarranted blast of his perfume. The dude layers it on so thick you'd think he'd be some kind of Victoria's Secret model. Salacious jasmine mixed with overwhelming testosterone and a hint of BDE arrogance...
I need help, I think.
It is at that moment, however, that the dream-vision before me wrinkles his nose in distaste, and my nose is accosted by something harsh and sharp and unmistakably alcoholic, and I realize that this is not, in fact, a hallucination.
"Why are you in my room?" Hyunjin demands, and for a solid three seconds, I can only gape at him in utter shock. This might be the first multiple-word sentence Hyunjin has ever said to me, and the look on his face—like he'd just smelled a particularly nasty clump of dog shit—is really offensive, especially considering he's the one at my doorway. Hyunjin isn't the kind of person I would ever talk to; we're both opposite stereotypes of college students. I study my ass off, dislike the general human population, and call my brother every month. Hyunjin ... doesn't.
"This is my room," I tell him after I've taken a second to recover and question my life choices. "Your room is across the hall." I point for good measure.
Hyunjin turns his head to look, then winces and stops. "Ah," he says with as much dignity one can have while swaying on their feet. Which is, now that I realize it, odd. Hyunjin usually moves like water; I've seen him pass through halls and have students part around him, his chin angled and shoulders set. But now, his dark hair falls ragged over his face, and he keeps narrowing his eyes at me, like he's trying to get them to focus.
I squint at him, putting two and two together. "Are you drunk?"
Hyunjin doesn't blink. His eyes are darker up close, almost uncannily so. "No." He tries to cross his arms and lean against the doorframe, but misses the wall and stumbles towards me. I have a sharp, sudden vision of episode six of Business Proposal where Youngseo falls drunkenly into Sunghoon's arms and they end up making out. My brain revolts, and I quickly step back, letting him catch himself on the door handle with a wince. Good try, Business Proposal.
Either way, my suspicions are confirmed: he's wasted. It makes sense, too; he probably drank too much at some frat house party and now can't tell his room from mine. He is also still talking. "I mean, not in this sense. Drunkenness is a very ... loose term. I'm not in a position to debate it. Am I drunk? Possibly. Am I high? Also possible."
I frown. "How high are you?"
He rolls his eyes at me, like he didn't just almost eat shit on my carpet. "Five ten."
I open my mouth and pause. "You know what, I think we'd better get you to your room."
Hyunjin frowns at me. "This is my room."
"Sure." I gently take his arm and loop it through mine, guiding him across the hall. It feels extremely awkward, but my discomfort is completely one sided: he follows me agreeably, like we're two girls out on a lunch date, not minding my touch in the slightest. He actually leans into me a little, swinging our arms together. I try to breathe shallowly, but the smell of alcohol still ripens my nostrils, pungent and sharp and bitter as memories I'd prefer to forget.
I clear my throat. "Do you have a roommate?"
"Who, Minho?" The name rings a bell in my mind; I draw up faint glimpses of a boy with dark hair—not nearly as dark as Hyunjin's, though—and cheekbones that caught the light sharply enough I'd stopped and decided to remember them. I knock on the door, wondering if he would be Jisung's type.
There's no answer.
I turn to Hyunjin expectantly. He says, "Oh, Minho's not here right now. He's at Changbin's flat with his girlfriend."
I pinch the bridge of my nose. "Do you have your key, then?" Please tell me he has his key.
He nods—I sigh in relief—and rifles around in his back pocket, keeping his arm looped with mine even though it means he has to work one-handed. He digs around for a couple seconds, then triumphantly hands me a gum wrapper.
I stare down at it, then back up at him. "Hyunjin."
He blinks at me. "What, did you want a fresh one?"
"I wanted your key."
"Ohh," he says, and I decide not to ask what he heard me say the first time. "Hold on." More rifling around. Finally he switches out the gum wrapper with the actual key. I unlock the door for him, gently distangling our arms. He pouts, reaches for my arm again, misses. I catch him before he can fall again and push the door open.
I'm not sure what I expected Hwang Hyunjin's room to look like, but this ... isn't it.
I've never taken Hyunjin to be the academically responsible type—the events of tonight only proved me right—but his room is tidy, his desk organized, and his bed made. He might even be on the neat-freak side of the spectrum (I am on the other—I haven't been able to find my lava lamp for a week). He has pictures hung on the walls, and I realize as I turn on the light, Hyunjin grimacing, that some of them aren't pictures—they're paintings.
I stop for a second, taking them in. There's one of a golden flower, half-blooming; one of a person with their back to the camera, facing the sea; and one of a few people I recognize and Hyunjin's frat buddies, sitting together laughing. The paintings are all incredibly lifelike. I had no idea Hyunjin even cared about art, but apparently he does, because his signature decorates the bottom corner of each of them. Two looping H's curving around one another like lovers, the lines imbued with a delicate, borderline-romantic carefulness I didn't know he possessed.
"You paint?" I ask, the words out of my mouth before I realize I hadn't just said them in my head. I instantly want to kick myself in the shin. Of course he paints; I'm standing right here looking at his paintings. Any more dumb questions from my mouth and it'll be hard to tell which one of us is the drunk one.
But Hyunjin nods, finding nothing idiotic about my question at all. "For as long as I can remember."
"I didn't realize you ... were this good," I say, which is an understatement. His paintings are the kinds of stories you hear around campfires, blanketed by moonlight; the kinds of tales woven by generations passing them on as candles burn low behind their silhouettes. The kinds of worlds that leave you breathless, broken and bright.
He yawns and scratches the back of his neck. "Yeah, they're okay."
I turn to look at him, remembering the task at hand. "Are you tired?"
"No," he says immediately, as indignant as a child. Somehow Hyunjin can make throwing a temper-tantrum because it's past his bedtime look like an eloquent argument he's bound to win.
"I'm not here to be your mother, so don't throw a fit," I tell him. "I meant to say, are you still buzzed?"
"Oh, please don't be my mother," says Hyunjin. He goes over to the kitchen, rifling around in the tiny fridge. "She snores and calls me by my full name and makes this dreadful tomato soup that I have to pretend to like every time I have a cold and she brings it to me." I blink in surprise at him, speechless, as he pulls out a jar of nutella and sets it on the counter.
"Hyun—"
"She says she got it from her mother, you know," Hyunjin adds, turning towards the cabinets. "I never knew my grandmother, but I'm pretty certain she would have to descend into hell to be able to assemble a recipe that demonic. I swear Satan feeds his children that soup." He smacks a box of Cheerios on the counter triumphantly, then winces at the sound. "And I had to eat it every time I was sick ... I bet it made me sicker. And no, I'm not still buzzed. I'm just really hungry. But not for tomato soup." He turns back towards me at last, leaning casually against the counter with one hand elbow-deep in the cereal box. "I'm off tomato soup until I die, go to hell, and it's the only thing they're serving at the cafeteria."
I watch him, gaping, as he considers a deformed Cheerio and then dunks it in the Nutella, popping it into his mouth with a pleased hum. I have never heard that many words come out of Hyunjin's mouth, and they were all about—what? Fucking tomato soup?
I open my mouth to voice my indignancy, but instead the thing that comes out is this:
"How do you know you're going to hell?"
Hyunjin raises an eyebrow at me elegantly, like I've just insulted his breeches. After a moment, though, he says in an almost resigned tone, "I know what an angel looks like when I see one. Good people exist on this earth, and I'm not one of them."
I regard him, leaning against the counter holding a box of Cheerios, his hair loose and as black as raven feathers, his eyes dark and his shirt sharply white in the dim lighting. There's a freckle under his left eye. I don't know how I haven't noticed it before.
And then Hyunjin tries to put another Nutella-dunked Cheerio in his mouth and misses, and it ends up stuck to his cheek. He frowns, as if wondering where it went and why his face suddenly feels sticky; I decide to intervene, striding over and grabbing the cereal box before it can spill all over the floor. "Let's be done with this."
"I'm not done," Hyunjin protests, reaching for the box back, and I slide it further down the counter, away from him. He reaches for it again, but underestimates how far away it is, and ends up staggering. I catch his elbow, then realize he's standing inches away from me, and his shirt had ridden up when he'd moved and I'd caught a glimpse of his abs.
Huh. Jisung was right.
I wonder, dimly, about the sheer number of girls that fawn over Hyunjin as he walks through the halls and would probably plot my murder if they knew I was here, in his room, this close to him. I could probably sell a picture of his abs for a hundred dollars on the school's black market, or better yet, for two copies of last year's physics exams.
I've always thought it was weird to fantasize over a person as much as some people do, but I guess Hyunjin is good-looking. Though it's hard to take him seriously now that he's so drunk he can't stand upright, and there's still a Cheerio glued to his cheek.
His skin is hot through his shirt—almost enough to burn—and I quickly drop his arm, searching for anything to say that will hide the fact I'd just been thinking about his attractiveness. "Are you full yet?"
Slowly, Hyunjin's tongue flicks out, pulling the Cheerio into his mouth. He swipes his thumb languidly along his cheek, licks the remaining Nutella off it, and meets my eyes.
"Now I am."
My face is on fire, and I thank the stars that he didn't turn the kitchen light on and I have the darkness to hide my heating cheeks. "Okay. Bed?"
"Bed," he agrees. I cap the Nutella and push it, along with the cereal box, aside. He can put it away in the morning.
"Do you want to change?" I ask as we walk over to his bed—around five steps, considering this is a tiny-as-hell college dorm. Still, I'm careful to shadow him in case he trips again. He nods, looking down at himself.
I swallow hard. "I'll get you some aspirin." And then I quickly flee to the small bathroom. It takes me a while to find the bottle, because for some reason there aren't any mirrors, but I spend at least ten extra minutes examining his drapes and reading the labels on his shampoos. Twice.
When I emerge a healthy amount of time later, Hyunjin is waiting in a sleeveless black shirt and fuzzy penguin pajamas, and I can't help a laugh. "Sick pants."
He grins in a way that makes his mouth tilt lazily to the side. "You, too."
That is when I realize I am in my pajamas, as well.
My Hello Kitty ones.
I purse my lips and contemplate the merits of moving to Kansas.
Hyunjin doesn't appear to care, thankfully, climbing into his bed. I grab him a bottle of water, then stand as he drinks all of it and swallows the aspirin dry. "You're going to feel like hell tomorrow, but this will help a little. Keep drinking water when you wake up."
"Maybe I won't wake up, then," Hyunjin says, rolling over onto his back and tossing a hand over his eyes. He lets out a stifled groan. "God, it already hurts."
"You will, even if you wish you hadn't," I say, and take the water bottle, turning to go. "I'm leaving your key here."
A hand flashes out, catching my wrist. I jerk to a stop and spin around, surprised.
His eyes fix on mine, his fingers tightening over mine, searing and strangely desperate. His eyes ... there's something dark, something hollow, something vulnerable there, like a kid in a playground when they look around and realize they don't know where their mom is. His gaze is bright enough to burn.
I swallow, my throat suddenly sharp. A feeling floods over me that I can't quite name, something between surprise and sympathy. I know his face; I know how that feels, to be afraid that the only person who's here for you might be gone.
He lets out a heavy breath, fingers loosening around my wrist. His gaze moves downward. "Sorry."
"It's okay," I whisper, not wanting to speak too loudly, to break this odd vulnerability revealed to me in his dark eyes. I have the sudden urge to stay, to come closer, to wrap my arms around him. It's powerful enough I know I need to leave. "I'm still across the hall. But if you wake up puking in the middle of the night, don't come to me. I hate vomit."
"Got it," he mutters, closing his eyes. That's my cue.
Still, I find myself watching him a beat too long than is safe, his long arms splayed out around him, hair fanning out against the pillow like a dark halo.
"Goodnight, Hyunjin," I whisper, not wanting my last words to him to be about vomit. There's a probable chance that he won't remember any of this tomorrow, and things will keep going like they always do, both of us living our separate lives in the same world. The glimpse I got tonight of a scared boy who didn't want to fall asleep alone will be as good as forgotten. For some reason, that thought falls flat in my chest, forcing all the air out of my lungs in a whoosh.
Just as I slip through the door, so quiet I almost miss it, his words find me.
"Goodnight, Jiyu."
-
When I was eight I was going to be a writer. That was what I whispered to myself, every morning when I woke up, like a prayer: I'm going to be a writer.
I'm not sure why it appealed to me so much, but I do know that for a solid year of my life, I would write my name on everything. At first, it was just practice, for when I'd be famous and I'd have to have a perfect signature for book signing. I'd loop the J, because I thought that looked prettier than just a hook; then the i, dotted at the top, then the y (I'd always liked Y in my name, I thought it was unique) with another loop and finally the u, loose and curving up.
I wrote it everywhere. I filled pages and pages of lined-paper notebooks; I traced the letters in the sand with a stick, in the dirt on the side of the playground, in mud puddles and foggy windows and the edge of my dinner plate, my fingers dipped in sauce. Jiyu. Jiyu. Jiyu.
Something about that. Something about someone years and years from now being able to walk to just the right spot on the beach and find my name, still there, carved into the sand. A way to place my mark on the earth, to carve my life into the endless spiral notebook of time with a felt-tip pen. A way to say, I was here, I was here once, don't forget about me.
It was the forgetting, really. The thought of living and dying and after a while having no one left in the world that remembered my name. Because then, how would I know I had ever really existed at all?
I was eight, and already I knew my life wasn't long enough for anything to get done. I had to make something that lasted. So I wrote my name, anywhere and everywhere I could, wrote it like a mantra of some holy, sacred prayer, wrote it like it was divine. I must have signed my name a thousand times.
And yet, as I close my eyes that night and looping H's dance behind my eyelids, all I can think is that my signature looks like a child's work next to his.