Archive of Our Own

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.

Chapter Text

The next time it happens, I'm studying for calculus.

The clambering in the hallway had been much more interesting than derivatives, and I'd already had a hunch on who it was banging into the walls outside my door.

I peek through the peephole, then open the door fully, poking my head into the hallway.

"Hyunjin?"

He is sitting on the floor, his back pressed against his door, head tipped back. His throat is bared, his jaw angled sharply under the fluorescent hallway lights. My mind instantly flashes to dark, fallen angels; shooting stars burning through the night; crow's feathers and raven's wings, black as shadow and falling like ash.

I push it away.

Hyunjin turns his head at the sound of my voice with a wince, frowning at me. I wonder if he knows who I am—if he's either too drunk to see me properly or ... or if he doesn't remember our encounter two nights before. The thought fills my stomach with a sour feeling, though I'm not sure why.

I'm also not sure why it is replaced with buzzing warmth when he says, after a second of great effort, "Jiyu."

I cross my arms, leaning against the doorframe. Hyunjin just blinks up at me, arms resting on his knees, half his hair tied in a ponytail, two strands falling over his cheekbones. "Fun place to sit," I say.

He rubs his temples. "Floors are more comfortable than you would think. God, my head is ringing." He frowns up at me through his fingers. "I'm not locked out of my room."

"I didn't say you were."

"Good, because I'm not."

I raise an eyebrow. "Where's Minho?"

Hyunjin shrugs one shoulder, eyes going to a crack on the floor.

I sigh. "You can crash on my couch for the night."

"I don't need a place to crash," Hyunjin says, lips curving downwards, but I am already walking back into my dorm, leaving the door open.

It takes one minute and forty-three seconds for him to swallow his pride and walk in, closing the door behind him. I know, because I count each one as I head over the kitchen to fill up a glass of water. "You shouldn't just leave the room open like that," he mutters. "Some loco jerksack could wander in and steal your bio notes."

I look over my shoulder at him, one brow arched. "Like you?"

He snorts. "Like I would need your notes."

I cast him a dry look. "You know, most people are bubbly and overly happy when they're tipsy. You act like a spoiled child when it's past their bedtime."

He crosses his arms. He's sat himself down on my floor, having not made it to the couch. "I'm not tipsy."

"I bet you're not tired, either. Is it not fair that you should have to share your toys?" I cluck my tongue disapprovingly.

"You're very funny."

"And you're very drunk."

He glares up at me. I walk over, setting the glass down on the coffee table. It turns out that I'm willing to cross many lines to ensure that Hwang Hyunjin has a place to stay the night, but serving him while he's sitting on my floor is not one of them.

Hyunjin pouts - it makes his lower lip stick out annoyingly distractingly - but manages to stand and go over to the couch. He's not as unbalanced as the first night I found him; it makes me think he must be in the hangover stage already. "Where were you?"

"Changbin's flat."

"With Minho and his girlfriend?"

"They broke up," he says impassively, like he expected better of me to know the relationship status of his friends, who I have never met.

I switch tactics. "How much did you have to drink?"

He picks at a loose thread on the couch cushions.

"Hyunjin."

"I don't remember." He takes a sip of the water, saying nothing more.

I know better, now, than to push him on this. "Do you remember when you stopped?"

"Two hours ago."

Enough for the buzz to be starting to die down, then, I hope. He doesn't seem like he's too drunk...

Hyunjin sets the water down with a wince and stands, knocking on his temple with the base of his palm. "I swear there's an untalented goth teenager failing to play the drums inside my skull."

"I'll get you an aspirin."

He waves a hand at me. "No, no, it's fine. It's actually quite endearing, once you get used to it. I'm naming him Ron."

I blink. "Naming who?"

"The wayward youth using my brain as cymbals to cope with his 'pain'," Hyunjin says matter-of-factly, making a beeline for the kitchen. "Come on, Jiyu, keep up."

I scramble after him, wondering if this is all a fever dream induced from multivariable calculus at one a.m.. "Please just let me give you an aspirin—"

"Where do you keep the Coco Puffs?" Hyunjin calls over his shoulder, already elbow-deep in the cupboards. For fuck's sake, how does someone as intoxicated as he is move so damn quickly? He finishes looking through the top cupboards and moves on the bottom ones until all I can see of his head is his half-up ponytail.

"I don't have any Coco Puffs," I say, closing the cupboard he left open. "Hyunjin, could you please—dude, stop—"

He straightens up fully, almost knocking into me, and whips open the fridge. "You're a college student double-majoring in theoretical physics and multivariable calculus, and there's no coffee pot on the counter. If you're not sustaining yourself on caffeine or dry cereal, then the only other option is the blood of little virgin children and you're far too much of a goody-two-shoes to know where to hide a body." He slams the door, looking around wildly. Strands of hair have fallen out of his ponytail, the whole thing now tragically lopsided. "Dammit, at least tell me you have Fruity-O's."

I'm a second away from tackling him. "Hyunjin, stop moving—" He goes for the freezer, and I grab his arm, intent on going down with the ship to stop him from tearing apart the rest of my kitchen. Half the cupboard doors are hanging open, their contents spilling out onto the counters like intestines.

Hyunjin writhes in my grip, but I hold on fast; he resorts to shouting. "Let me go—I hope you know this counts as non-consensual physical violence—"

"You're on my property, idiot!" I snap, grabbing his other wrist before he can wrangle free. "And I don't have any cereal! Stop tearing apart my kitchen!"

"You monster!" Hyunjin gasps, wrenching free of my grip. "Where have you hidden the children?" He whips around, chucking a dish towel at my face; in the precious seconds it takes me to yank it off, he escapes me by diving behind the island. I raise the dish towel, completely ready to knock him out if I have to: this is way more than I asked for at one in the goddamn morning. I can feel my already thin and wrought-out sanity slipping from my feeble grasp.

I stare him down across the island. He fakes left; I guess the move and jump for him; he's still too quick, my hands brushing his hair. It makes his already-askew hairdo come undone, and his hair swings wildly around his face, dark and loose, what's left of the ponytail hanging off the side of his head in a lopsided mess. He glares at me from across the countertop, reaching behind his head to try and right the ponytail. It's a fruitless effort; he gives up quickly, yanking the hair tie free while maintaining death-glare eye contact with me.

"I don't sacrifice human children," I grit out. "So stop acting like a crazy person and take your fucking aspirin."

His eyes narrow. "Drop the towel first."

I do. "Happy?"

He slowly comes around the island, stopping in front of me. I hand him the pill.

"I wouldn't have been able to sacrifice you anyway," I say as he pops it into his mouth, still watching me warily. "You're not a virgin."

I'm not actually sure of this, but the guy parties every night, gets drunk, and has a new girl crying over being dumped by him every week. The evidence isn't really in his favor.

Hyunjin makes a little hmph, but doesn't deny it, and an unwelcome pressure finds its way over my throat at that, although I'm quick to push it down. "You could've used Ron."

I raise an eyebrow at him. "Swallow."

He does, begrudgingly. "Bossypants."

"You really are pissy when you're drunk," I say, angling my head to the side.

"Bold of you to assume I'm not pissy when I'm sober."

He's close to me now, enough that I can feel the heat of his skin. I wonder, dimly, if his body temperature is this hot because he's inebriated, or if it's always like that. His eyes are fixed on me, darker than the night outside my window.

"I don't know what you're like when you're sober," I point out, my voice quiet. "I don't know you when you're sober at all."

I don't realize that those words sting until I feel their weight on my chest. In the days between the first time I found Hyunjin and this one, we'd passed in the hall, but each time his eyes had flitted over me like he did before I found him drunk outside my room. I still don't know him, despite us being roommates, despite me caring for him on a long night when he couldn't care for himself.

I'm not sure exactly why that's stuck with me. I don't think anything of it—I've been caring for people since I was eight. Caring, I can do. I can monitor someone's body language and make sure they eat when they're supposed to and clean up after them and wake myself up during the night to check on them. I'm good at caring.

Loving? Not so much.

I don't know you when you're sober at all.

Hyunjin doesn't blink, eyes dancing over my face in that uncanny way of his. "You can count yourself lucky for that."

I blink in surprise. "It can't be worse than how you are now."

He grins, a crooked kind of smile that can fall off of your face at any second. "How am I now?"

My face flushes, and I'm all too aware of how close our bodies are, how I could touch him if I moved my hand just an inch - just one little inch. "A pain in the ass."

He hums in agreement, like I've just complimented him. "And what else?"

"I..." I struggle for words. They're annoyingly hard to find right now, in this tiny space where our breaths are mingling like old friends. "Batshit crazy."

"Well now you're making me blush."

"Stop it."

"Stop what?" He tilts his head at me in the same way I did a second ago, his hair falling over his face, and I hate how attractive that single act looks on him, hate that he probably knows it.

What are we doing? This is Hyunjin. Hwang Fucking Hyunjin. No matter how insistent that little voice in my head telling me to see how my body would line up with his is, I have much more sensibility than to listen to it.

And a part of him ... a part of him is initiating this. This closeness. I can see it in his eyes, the hungry way they flit over me; the sly, lip-biting recklessness in his expression, like someone reaching towards a fireplace because they want to feel their skin burn. I'd say he wants me, but that's not right—I could be anyone. I could be a faceless, emotionless figure, and it wouldn't matter, because this is all he cares about: the heat of his body pressed up against another. Not me.

I know this—I know his reputation, the stories my peers have told me of falling hard for someone as shallow as a rocky ground. I've heard it a thousand times over.

But I guess I never thought it would happen to me, because it still hurts.

Stop what?

I, however, have not fallen. I can still save myself. Nevermind the catch in my breath when our gazes met. Nevermind the soft, looping signature decorating the paintings on the wall. Nevermind the flicker in his eyes as he looks at me now, something that cuts through the recklessness and the inebriation and the arrogance and almost looks ... vulnerable.

I look away. "Just ... tell me if your head still hurts." It's a stupid question. The aspirin will kick in in twenty minutes, and we both know it.

There's a beat of silence before he says, voice different now, "Like hell. I doubt that Ronald has ever had an actual drum lesson in his life. Not that that will stop him from trying to play like John Bonham."

I swallow hard as he pushes off from the counter, going to sit on the couch and giving me a much-needed break. The air is cool against my skin and I gasp for it desperately, like a drowning man, even as it makes me shiver. I force myself to walk, to move, to grab a waste basket and set it in front of him. "If you need to throw up, do it here, please, so you don't wake me up." I'm gone before he can reply, scooping up the papers from the desk I'd been studying. I'm sure as hell not going to keep poring over calculus with Hyunjin in my living room.

A stray piece of scratch paper falls loose as I move towards my room. I mutter a curse—and then bite back another, more colorful one as Hyunjin picks it up.

He blinks down at the problem for a second, and I'm about to ask for it impatiently when he says, "It's undefined."

"What?"

"The answer." He hands the paper back to me. "X is undefined. DNE. I was helping Felix with this problem yesterday."

I open my mouth and close it, struggling to wrap my head around the fact that Hyunjin just solved a multi-step problem I'd been working on for over an hour. "But—integrals and derivates are never clean answers. And Professor Kennedy would never give us a problem that easy. There's no way—"

"It's a trick question," he says. I haven't taken the paper from him, so he retracts his arm, opening one of the drawers and grabbing a pen. I wonder for half a second how he knows it's there, but then my brain fixates instead on the fact that he uncaps it with his teeth to circle a part of the equation, and I forget for a second that I'm supposed to be looking at the paper. "You can use the quotient rule for this, see? But then you'd have to write the function as a fraction over X, and anything over X is automatically—"

"Undefined." I stare at the problem, frustrated I'd missed it and even more frustrated Hyunjin hadn't. "Fucking Kennedy."

"Felix says he feeds off of the souls of tormented freshmen," says Hyunjin.

I let out an undignified snort. "I'm inclined to agree."

"Here." Hyunjin hands me the paper, and this time I take it. In doing so, his hands brush mine. It's normal, completely normal—something that would occur between me and Jisung, and me and Seungmin, and I'd never think twice about. But for some reason, that small patch of skin ignites like a flame, and I am suddenly and painfully thrown back into a minute ago where I looked into Hyunjin's eyes and wondered if the hunger in them would turn me into another one of his break-ups.

That should've been the end of it. I told myself that was the end of it. I made myself clear; he backed off.

So why am I so sure that, in that tiny second where we touched, his eyes flashed with the same fire I felt?

I wonder ruefully if maybe the answer to my math problem isn't the only thing that's undefined.

"Thanks," I say stiffly. The pen cap is still hanging from his teeth, the blue a contrast against the soft pink of his lips; I clear my throat. "If you can solve multivar while drunk, I'm kind of scared about what you can do when you're sober."

Hyunjin waves his his hand at me dismissively. "I only knew it 'cause I remembered working on it with Felix."

"Still." I frown at the paper. "I didn't realize you were good at math."

His shoulders stiffen, almost imperceptibly. "Why not?"

I shrug. "I don't know if you're good at anything. We're strangers."

I think I see his body relax a bit—as if he was expecting something worse from my answer—and he says easily, "No we're not."

"We are. You don't even know my surname," I point out, and he can't say anything to that.

A little part of me is victorious, not only because I made a point, but because now we have this rift between us. He doesn't know my last name, I can pretend I don't know his, so there. My brain decides firmly that this means we'll never be a one-night stand, problem solved. I put the homework away and bring out a blanket for him, as well as another glass of water. I can't bring myself to tell him goodnight as I turn back to my room.

It's then, though, that he says, "Bahng."

I blink, turning back around. "Huh?"

I can barely make out his form in the darkness. "Your name is Bahng Jiyu."

Now I'm the one who doesn't have anything to say. "How...?"

"You were in my World seminar for two days last year. Then you switched out and I never saw you again until you moved in next door."

My mouth hangs open. There had been over eighty students in that class. I hadn't even noticed him before I transferred out of it, and he was Mr. Popular.

His voice comes again, reading my thoughts. "On the first day, you gave up your seat in the front row to a freshman who was nearsighted. Even though I'd watched you get there early so you could pick a good spot."

My throat is dry. I remember that, but it's faded to the back of my mind so much I've forgotten the student's face. If Hyunjin remembered...

"Good people exist on this earth," he says softly. "That day I realized one of them was you."

I know what an angel looks like when I see one.

"I didn't realize you were there," I whisper.

He laughs hoarsely. "I know."

And because he'd just admitted to noticing me before, because he'd allowed himself to be vulnerable in that way, and because it was dark enough I couldn't see his reaction, I let my traitorous mouth open.

"Why do you drink, Hyunjin?"

He's quiet for a long time, enough that I wonder if he's fallen asleep; and then I hear him shifting on the couch.

"All my life," he says—holding those three words as tenderly as glass and as resentfully as a grudge—"no one has ever considered me important enough to ... choose. What I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, who I wanted to be. All of that was decided for me before I could walk. My parents, see ... they grew up being taught that a child's duty is to serve. To serve the parents, the family, the legacy. So they knew exactly what they wanted from me when it became their turn." I hear him exhale. "Sometimes I wonder if they see a son when they look at me or just a chunk of clay to mold into a carbon copy of who they used to be.

"When I pick up a bottle is the only time I know for certain that it's my own hands, not theirs."

My mouth parts, forming a soft, shocked O. "I'm sorry."

He doesn't respond. The seconds pass by, and I'm just about to say his name when I hear a delicate, enunciated snore from the couch—because of course Hwang Hyunjin can't snore normally and embarrassingly like the rest of us and has to make even fucking snoring sound dignified.

I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding, and carefully shut the door.

-

The problem with making hasty decisions late at night is that you go to bed and forget them by the morning.

Such is the reason why I walked into my living room late for a study session with Jisung and almost screamed.

My mind flashed to maybe twenty different serial killer scenarios - a few of which where I was the serial killer - before I remembered that Hwang Hyunjin was sleeping on my couch because I had let him sleep on my couch. 

I tiptoe over to check the trash can I left by his side, breathing a sigh of relief when I see that it's empty. I'm just about to turn to the door when I realize he's shivering.

Stupid of me. Of course he'd be cold - why hadn't I thought of that? I duck back to my room, ripping my blanket off the bed while cursing my foolishness. 

He looks almost unrecognizable in his sleep, something guarded and angry and stiff gone from his expression. There's an ease to the tilt of his lips, a smoothness to the space between his brows; I can't tell if its from the sobriety, the vulnerability that comes with being asleep, or the fact that his shivering subsides as I tuck the blanket around his shoulders. Either way, it stills my fingers, trapping me in this fragile moment.

I feel like I'm breaking something, stepping over some unseen line.

I'm so sure that if I touch him right now, one of us will shatter.

Get a grip, I tell myself, but even with common sense on my side it takes an excruciatingly long second to pull myself away from the soft sleeping boy in front of me and make my way towards the door.

It occurs to me as I slip into the hallway that whatever I am doing here, with him, I no longer have any control over it.

-

"You saw Hwang Hyunjin's abs and didn't call me first thing?!"

"Keep your voice down," I hiss, leaning across the cafeteria table and glaring down a few interested freshman girls. Jisung widens his eyes at me unapologetically, still fixed on the situation at hand.

"Is the spot for your roommate still open? Because if he finds his drunken, gorgeous, jacked self knocking on your door again tonight, like hell am I not going to be the one answering—"

"No, it's not," I tell him promptly. "There's a transfer student moving in next week, and even if there wasn't, I'm not sharing a room with you and your acrid socks so you can crush on a stranger you'll forget in a day."

"Forget?! Jiyu, this is fate! Was I or was I not mooning over him to you all but two days ago—"

"Yes, yes, you were very adamant in your mooning," I say, clapping a hand over his mouth. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I just ... it was personal, okay? He was drunk and in a bad spot. It didn't seem like the kind of thing you would share with your friends."

"You could've shared the abs part," Jisung points out.

I raise an eyebrow at him. "We both know you wouldn't been able to not ask questions if I told you I'd seen Hyunjin's abs but not how, where, or why."

Jisung is quiet for a moment as he considers this, which is a small blessing. "Okay, maybe you're right." He recedes his interrogation of me, leaning back in his chair. "I won't be mad that you wanted to protect Hwang Hyunjin's privacy. Even though it's not like his drinking problems are in any way a secret."

"Whatever," I mutter. I don't really want to talk about Hyunjin's drinking problems. His words from last night are still as fresh in my mind as they were after I went to bed, searching for sleep and finding only echoes of his voice, over and over again.

I wonder why I'd been so surprised when he'd admitted his issues with parents; there was a reason why someone would drink themselves into a stupor every night, of course. It's just hard to fit this new piece of information about Hyunjin into my head now; I've always believed he floated through life with complete ease, the concept of struggling or even trying hard at something completely beneath him, as reckless and careless as the girls that trailed behind him like flies over a 179 centimeter Prince Eric-esque surprisingly-good-at-art-and-calculus piece of turd.

I only told Jisung because ... well, Jisung is my friend. My best friend, since my first round of final exams in college when I'd stumbled into him in the library at one a.m—literally. He'd agreed not to press charges for his bruised ribs if I gave him the last slice of pizza I still had in my backpack from three days ago, and our friendship was born. Jisung and I tell each other everything; keeping this from him would only make it feel like some embarrassing, dirty secret. And it's not. It's nothing. Just my neighbor needing a place to crash for a night and me offering one. That was probably how Hyunjin saw it, anyways: as nothing. Even if it was definitely not how Jisung was seeing it, considering the fact that I'd witnessed (or, in his opinion, been blessed by) Hyunjin's six-pack.

However, Jisung once declared war on me over an Uno game, so I know to take his opinions with a heavy grain of salt.

"And he also managed to solve the derivatives problem you've been regarding as the homework they assign in hell?" Jisung asks, putting on his wise-person face.

"In less than five seconds," I say grimly.

"Well, that does it." Jisung slams his hands down on the table. "He's insanely attractive, tall, sharp, humored, and apparently is also smart as fuck. If you're not down bad by now, I am."

"I'm not," I assure him, taking a second to repeat that to my brain until I believe it. "Hyunjin is also arrogant as hell and just as irritating. You can have him."

"We both know I can't." Jisung sighs. "He's straight."

"You don't know that for sure," I say, even though I don't really believe myself. "He could be bi."

"Nah." Jisung's gaze catches on the window, looking outside at the autumn day. It's still warm enough you can go outside, and that perfect time of the year when the trees weep red and gold and the ground is strewn with bright-colored leaves over green grass.

"I wonder if there's gay people in Beijing," Jisung says, effectively ruining the moment. I shoot him a look, choosing not to answer.

He shrugs. "I guess you're going to find out soon enough."

"Hey, knock on wood," I say quickly; he does not, because Han Jisung was sent into this world to ruin my life. "We don't know if I'm actually going yet."

"You'll be accepted. Don't worry." Jisung raises his eyebrows at me. We've had this conversation before: I worry that I misspelled something on my application to intern for SYA, the study-abroad program I applied to for my next year of college, and I won't be able to go. SYA is my dream—my ticket out of this place. My way to escape this life and start something new. Something better. I've wanted it for almost as long as I've been falling in love with the city of Beijing - the lights, the language, the life that seeps from every streetlamp. They say that in Beijing, the sky is closer than anywhere else on the planet. They say that in Beijing, you can touch the stars.  

I've wanted it for long enough I know for certain that Hwang Hyunjin and his recklessness have no place in that future.

"What we should be worrying about is how we'll stay in touch," Jisung continues, offering me a grin. "I don't want you forgetting about me or Minnie in China."

I laugh, and because I know there is real concern behind his smiling eyes right now, I tell him, "I'll call. And if I don't remember, you'll call for me."

"Are we really putting our friendship in the hands of my ability to remember things? Because that will not end well."

"I'm confident." I flash him a smirk. "Who else am I going to host ramen-eating contests with?"

"'Contest' is a strong word, considering I beat you seven to four," he points out.

"Hey, my packets were spicier than yours—"

"But you got beef flavoring, too, which makes them way more appetizing." Jisung tips his chair back, leaning on two legs in a way that will surely end in him crashing to the floor and possibly breaking the chair in the process. "When do you hear back from them, anyway?"

"The deadline is next Saturday." I still haven't heard anything—it's cutting it close, but that just means they're considering my application more seriously, right? It might even be a good sign. I sigh. "Let's change the subject." I tap my pen against my temple, searching for something to take my mind off the upcoming decision that may determine my future. "Hey, do you know Seo Changbin?"

"He's in a couple of my classes, yeah," Jisung says, turning his attention back to me. "Gym bro, captain of the lacrosse team, biceps that could put me in a headlock. Painfully my type, but he's dating..."

"Everyone is your type," I point out. "Does he own a flat?"

Jisung does not deny this statement. "I'm not sure." He presses his tongue into his cheek. "You know who will know, though? Yang Jeongin."

I follow his gaze to the boy sitting a couple rows away, studying with his freshman friends. I frown, knowing Jisung is right. Jeongin's barely into his first year here and already has the entire student body wrapped around his finger. And most of the teachers, too. Something about his smile. It's infectious.

He's also not as innocent as he seems. Jeongin knows the first thing about everyone, which I know he's used to his advantage in the past. I don't know if I want to tell him why I'm interested in Seo Changbin.

But then again, he would know...

I lean back in my chair. "Hey, Jeongin?"

It's a library, so I'm speaking normally, but he hears me. I motion for him to come over, and he offers a shrug to his friends, padding over with that cute little smile.

"What's up, Jiyu?"

"We have a question for you," Jisung jumps in, clasping his hands together. "About Seo Changbin."

"Dating," Jeongin says immediately. "They had their two-month last week. Sorry."

"No," I say, wondering just how many people Jisung has been telling his type to. "I was wondering ... do you know if he owns a flat, or lives on campus?"

Jeongin perks up, taking a chair. "He does. The Seo family's alum, so he has special treatment from the school board—and money. Why?"

"No reason," I say, my brows creasing. Seungmin owns a flat, too, so maybe they know each other. Would it hurt to ask them to reach out to Changbin and tell him to keep an eye on Hyunjin's drinking the next time he has a party?

Probably. There's no need for me to do something like that, anyway; Hyunjin's habits are his to deal with.

"Please," says Jeongin, and I blink back to the present. He folds his hands under his chin, still smiling. "I'm interested now. This is much more interesting than chemistry. What's up with you and Changbin?"

"Nothing," I say quickly, wishing I had majored in decision-making skills and foresight instead of physics. This is the price for Jeongin's word: his ear. "I - it's not even about Changbin, anyway."

"It's about Hyunjin," Jisung blurts. I shoot him a death glare, to which he responds with a guilty look.

Jeongin's interest is piqued now. I struggle to find a good explanation. "I was just thinking ... Hyunjin's my roommate, which means he lives in a tiny dorm, but all his friends have expensive housing. I thought he..."

"Was rich, too?" Jeongin shrugs one shoulder. "The Hwang family is, supposedly, loaded, but ... there are rumors that Hyunjin isn't on speaking terms with his parents. Hasn't been for a while. It's possible they disowned him."

My mind flashes to last night. When I pick up a bottle is the only time I know for certain that it's my own hands, not theirs.

"Thank you, Jeongin," I say. my voice comes out more hoarsely than I'd intended.

Jeongin whips out that smile again. "I like you, Jiyu, so I won't tell anyone you've been looking into Hyunjin's background. Although I do wonder." He's gone the next second, bowing to a passing teacher as she walks by. I think I hear her sigh.

Jisung watches him go almost respectfully. "Yang Jeongin could burn this place to the ground and the principal would thank him."

I clear my throat, trying to turn my mind back to what's in front of me. "Yeah."

Still, though, in the back of my mind, I make a note to talk to Seungmin about reaching out to Changbin the next time I see him.

Chapter Text

"Maybe I should make you a spare key."

Hyunjin rolls his eyes. Tonight, he is wearing black instead of his usual lighter colors, with dark blue jeans and his hair curled back behind his ears. It suits him more than I'd like to admit—I'd also rather not admit that I stayed up for him, no longer having homework as an excuse. But I did have things to do, like cleaning. And laundry. And ... other things. Staying up two and a half hours past when I usually go to bed to clean the bathroom and fold my fitted sheets is perfectly normal, right? Right. I do that all the time.

"Very funny," he snipes, though he says it to the wall, so it doesn't really have the desired impact. The top two buttons on his shirt are undone, revealing the point where the curve of his throat meets his collarbones. I clear my throat and decide the wall looks very interesting right about now.

"Where were you tonight?"

Hyunjin pushes his tongue into his cheek. "I'm ... not sure."

Lovely. Except I can't really judge him for it anymore, now that I know his reasons behind drinking—know that it's not the same foolish release so many of our classmates drown their lives in. Instead, I hold the door to my room open wider in response, a gesture for him to come in.

He eyes it ruefully, but he's swallowed this particular pill before and we both know it. As he brushes past me I think eating your pride must be bitter the first time, but by now I bet he thinks it tastes like honey.

Each step he takes inside is far too confident than they should be considering none of them are in a straight line. It's maybe for that reason why he steps a little too close, and I get a whiff of cheap alcohol. A cold shiver rattles down my back, and I step back involuntarily, pressing my spine against the door.

"To be clear, I'm not coming in here because I need your help holding my hair back while I vomit," he announces.

I cross my arms, focusing away from the memories and onto the present. "Oh?"

"I'm here," he says, looking around then back at me, "because I need to make sure your room is secure."

My eyebrows raise. We both know he's spewing bullshit, but I'll allow it for his dignity's sake (what's left of it, anyway). "Secure?"

"Yes," he says indignantly. "From drunk assholes who could get into your room and put you in danger."

I snort. "You're definitely not putting me in danger in this state."

He frowns, but he knows he can't deny it. I doubt Hyunjin could seriously hurt a snail right now. He'd probably end up injuring himself instead.

Not that he's going to admit that. "Not only could they put you in danger, but they could also woo you into letting them into your room."

"You're not wooing me."

"I'm not?" Hyunjin grins wryly. "Because it looks to me like you were waiting for a ... certain someone tonight."

I was, but I'll be damned before I admit that to either of us. "That's ridiculous."

"Is it? Then tell me, Jiyu—" he pauses, drawing out my name, and for some reason it sounds different on his lips, and I think of words on sand and dinner plates—"Where are your math problems, or your physics textbook?" He prances over to my desk, clicking his tongue at the lack of papers there. "Where is the show you were watching, then, or the popcorn?" Now he's at the couch, peering down at it with mock concentration. "A friend, perhaps, who you were hanging out with? No?" He turns back to me, grinning lazily. "There's just me. A rugged-handsome prince, capturing your fancy with my stunning good looks, making you so lovesick you let me into your humble abode. It's almost as if I ... what's the word..." he snaps his fingers. "That's it. It's almost as if I wooed you."

I chuck a pillow at his head.

Sadly, he catches it before it hits him in the face, smirking. "Don't ruin your pillows, please, I do like your couch."

"Why don't you like your own damn couch?"

"I don't have one," he replies, then adds on afterthought, "Felix set it on fire."

My eyebrows shoot up. "Care to tell me more about this Felix of yours?"

"Oh, Felix isn't mine, he's Changbin's," he says mildly.

"I—you know what, let's get you some aspirin."

Hyunjin doesn't protest, which I take as progress. I sit him down on the couch, popping open the little white bottle - I have one designated for him now - and dropping it into his open palm, careful not to let our hands touch. "Are you tired yet?"

He tilts his head back, dark hair falling like a feathered halo over his cheeks, throat bobbing as he swallows. I watch his Adam's apple move up and down, and then he lowers his head and his gaze meets mine. He draws the back of his hand over his mouth, eyes hooded and heavy. "I don't feel like sleeping."

Maybe I'm imagining the way his voice dips lower, but heat rises to my cheeks all the same, and I jerk back. "Don't do that."

Now he just looks curious. "Do what?"

Surely it's on purpose, right? The tone of his voice, the way he touches his lips, the glint in his eyes. He knows he's attractive; he's said it himself multiple times. He has to be using it now.

And yet he is sitting before me still, his head cocked to the side in confusion, and I am suddenly aware of the prospect that sometimes beautiful people don't know what beauty looks like at all, and Hyunjin truly might not know the effect he has on people.

I swallow hard and say the first thing I think of, scrambling to reorient my brain down a path that isn't wondering if his hair would feel as soft in my palms as it looks. "Nothing. Do you—how do you feel about ... about playing Scrabble?"

He stares at me for a second, and my face heats even more. Crap—he thinks I'm an idiot—shitsticks, why did I say Scrabble, of all things, of course he doesn't want to—

"Fuck yes I want to play Scrabble."

We play Scrabble.

And as it turns out, Hyunjin is formidable at the game. Which is in reality better than formidable, considering he's drunk enough to have locked himself out of his room.

"Fergalicious is not a word," I snap.

Hyunjin gasps, offended. "How dare you! You're only mad because you didn't get 'zesty' before I did."

I open my mouth to argue back before his words reach me, and I snort into my hand, laughing. "You got zesty before I did, huh?"

Hyunjin gives me a dry look. "Your humor is impeccable."

I laugh harder. "No, no, Hyunjin. By all means, you can get zesty. I won't stop you. You can have all the zestiness you desire—"

"It's thirty-one points, so maybe I will," he says primly, grabbing the scrabble bag. "Fergalicious leaves me with a hundred and sixteen, and you with ... ninety-two."

"If you get Fergalicious, I get Jiyu," I say, putting the tiles down.

"Proper nouns aren't allowed," Hyunjin retorts. "Fergalicious isn't a proper noun, it's an adjective and a lifestyle." He adds after a second, "but if we are doing proper nouns, then I'm taking Jesus for twelve points."

I throw up my hands. "You can't have Jesus!"

"—tell that to the Morman solicitors who keep showing up at Changbin's flat—then you can't have Jiyu." Hyunjin tilts his head, defiant. "Do you really want to embarrass yourself by making me look it up in the Scrabble dictionary and have to tell you that you're not a real word?"

"How is Jiyu not a real word and Fergalicious is?" I shout, upending the rack and scattering tiles over the board. "What is happening in your brain right now?"

He crosses his arms. "Well, now I have Fergalicious stuck in my head because you keep saying it so much, so thank you for that."

I freeze. "Please, please do not sing it."

"Sing what?" he asks innocently.

I widen my eyes at him, pleading. "Hyunjin, don't."

"Sing 'Fergalicious,' you say?"

"Hyunjin—"

"'Fergalicious definition make them boys go loco'—"

I fling a pillow at his head for the second time tonight.

He's grinning before it hits him, only halfway managing to stop it from thwacking him in the face. "Hey, don't hate on the pillows! They're quite lovely."

"Fine, then," I say, and tear off one of the couch cushions, chucking it over my head like a cannonball. It sails across the coffee table and whacks into him, knocking him clean off his feet.

The expression on his face makes me double over with laughter, and it only intensifies as he stands with a murderous look in his eyes that I cannot take seriously because of how his hair is sticking straight up. "Oh, you asked for it," he says, before launching the pillow back at me with his stupid muscled throwing arm; it hits me square in the face, and I eat shit.

Hyunjin is wise enough to already be retreating down the hall as I rise with vengeance and bloody murder in my face. "That's my bedroom, you idiot, get out of there!" I yell at him, chasing him in.

"Too late!" He shouts back, chucking a pillow at my head. I catch it and use it as a shield as he throws another one, moving to the far wall and putting my bed between us. He whips his head around, hair fanning out like a dark halo, searching for a weapon, something to use against me—

I see his eyes land on my stuffed animal collection the same second he reaches for the one on top.

"Not Kuromi!" I yell, but it's too late—he's already thrown it. I dodge, still screaming. "Don't touch my stuffed animals! Hyunjin, I swear to god—Hyunjin, if you lay a single goddamn finger on Totoro—"

Totoro whips across the room and smacks me in the forehead.

I lose any semblance of control I have and go all out. So he's drunk and isn't able to care for himself? Fuck it. He used my own fucking Kuromi plushie against me. The dude is gonna pay.

I leap across the bed like a flying warrior and body tackle him, both of us going down. We slam onto the ground; he retaliates, but I have sobriety and pure wrath on my side, and I manage to shove my pillow into his face and hold him down while he bats it away. He tries to wrangle free, but I straddle his hips, pinning his wrists down on either side of his face with my hands.

His hair has completely come loose from where it had been carefully tucked behind his ears, falling across his face and around his head like streaks of ink. He glares up at me, giving up. "Let me go."

"Only if you admit you lose." I pant down at him, savoring this victory. His chest rises and falls heavily enough I feel it where we touch, where our skin collides. He's helpless right now, and he knows it.

He's also stubborn, though, and he purses his lips, saying nothing.

I lean close, letting my hair fall over his cheek. His body is hot, his hip bones pressed into mine, our legs intertwined. My nose brushes the shell of his ear.

"Tell me I won," I whisper.

His breath hitches, a movement that reverberates all through my body. It startles me, for a second, that I did that—that I can have that effect on him. But I do, at least here, at least now. I can hear his heartbeat thundering in his chest, matching mine; our gazes are tangled together like lovers, his pupils dilated so much I can't tell where his irises begin. There is something dark and burning rising through me, and it scares me almost as much as it consumes me.

His gaze feels like fire, so intense I want to look away, but I hold it. If I was less impulsive, I would be moving back right now, as I should, but fury and adrenaline and that something else I'd rather not name are still pumping through my blood and I realize that I don't want to move away. His eyes narrow as he fights himself, not wanting to accept defeat but knowing I have him pinned.

As soon as I don't know if I can take the heat of his gaze any longer, he bites out, "You win."

I roll off him and fall onto my back with a whoosh of breath, grinning my head off. Victory is sweet.

Hyunjin doesn't move, both of us catching our breaths, looking up at the ceiling. "You're ruthless," he pants. His head is close enough to mine I can feel his hair brushing my cheek.

I smile at the faded plaster on the ceiling fan, wondering when ruthless started to sound like a compliment in my dictionary, then point out, "You threw my Totoro plushie."

He snorts. "Don't touch Her highness's stuffies. Got it."

We're quiet for a moment, our chests rising and falling in sync. "If you tell anyone about my stuffed animals," I say, turning my head towards him so that my cheek rests on the floor, "I will ensure that you regret it."

He turns his head too, hair shifting over his eyes, lips curving. "Your secret is safe with me."

"Thank you," I say honestly. Some part of me—the sick, foolish part that still dreams of true love and happy endings—wants to trust him, inherently. Wants to believe that he's taken these little moments with just us in his hands as carefully as I have and tucked them into his pocket as gently as I have, safe and protected from the outside world, from greedy dirty hands.

"Don't thank me yet," he says, that smile turning wicked. "Tomorrow you might find photocopies of you hugging your Studio Ghibli collection taped up all across the cafeteria."

I slit my eyes at him. "Don't you dare."

He turns his head back up the ceiling, eyes closing, and hums.

I sit half-up onto my elbows, glaring down at him; I then quickly realize this is pointless, as his eyes are still closed, and blow out a breath, switching tactics. "You have to tell me something, then."

"Mm?"

"As leverage." I watch his chest rise and fall, looking maybe a little too much at the way his shirt lifts each time, exposing pale-golden skin. Focus, Jiyu. "That way, if you ever tell my secret, I can tell yours. And then we both go down."

He yawns, sitting up fully. "Seems a little anarchical, don't you think? That in the end, we're still both going to lose?"

I ignore the dubious eyebrow he arches my way and cross my arms, waiting.

After a second, Hyunjin gives in, hooking the crook of his elbows around his knees.

"I hate my hair."

My body stiffens in surprise. Whatever I was expecting, it wasn't this.

"I hate my hair," he repeats, holding my gaze, "because the first girl I ever loved would always run her hands through it. Said it was her favorite part about me, right up until the day I walked in on her fucking my cousin." He fingers a strand, examining it with a cool nonchalance that completely does not match the quiet brokenness of his words. "That was the first time I understood that although I've always known I'm attractive, the people I attract want me in all the wrong ways. I thought desire was the first step towards love then—I didn't know that wanting someone could be ugly, and selfish, and sick."

Selfish. I think of the way his hips felt pressed into mine, the feeling of his hair brushing my cheek when I leaned down to whisper in his ear, and I can't help but silently agree.

"When I was a freshman, we had this big research paper at the start of the year," he continues, eyes fixing on that long piece of hair in his hands. "I'd been hoping to get this one professor I thought was really good—he was like me, see. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, but he loved teaching too much to give it up. But they cut him off for it, made him pay the bills and find a house and start his life himself. And he made it. And I got him. So I threw my whole heart and soul into that paper, because I wanted to make a good impression, because I wanted to be like him. But I made the mistake of turning it in in person. I used the bathroom after I gave it to him, and as I left I heard him in the hallway telling his colleague he wouldn't even need to read my paper, because he already knew I would be a terrible student. 'I know his type,' he said. 'Pretty boys and jocks never do good work. Their heads are filled with hair, not brains.'"

My jaw falls slack. My mind conjures an image of Hyunjin as a freshman, green and hopeful and probably just as gorgeous, waiting in the hallway to give his teacher that piece of himself he'd worked so hard on ... only to be rejected by the one he looked up to the most. I think of how he must have felt when he found out about his girl, how he must have wondered if the hands that had touched his hair so lovingly were now entwined between the arms of his own family.

I hadn't ever imagined. That people had the capacity to be so quick to judge, so harsh to assume. Though I could've guessed—I just hadn't for Hyunjin.

One thing, though, I know to be true: this does not match up in any way with who I thought he was. This person lying here ... he is not the wild boy who sleeps around with whoever he fancies for the night and drinks himself dizzy so as not to face the consequences. That boy I would have hated, and avoided, and carved carefully and cleanly out of my life like an infected wound whenever it arose, so it could not hurt me.

But I am slowly starting to believe that that boy, that easy, stereotypical, shallow person, is not as real as I assumed, and definitely not as real as the boy in front of me—this boy who is soft, and raw, and paints like it's the only thing in the world and is blind to kindness in himself but always notices it in other people and could also definitely hurt me more than anyone else.

In a way, I think, I have done exactly what his parents did to him, exactly what scarred him so bad he turned to alcohol to shut it out: I have replaced him, replaced who he truly is, with who I thought he should be.

"Sometimes I wonder," he says softly, "If I chopped it all off—cut my face, tore my clothes ... sometimes I wonder if they still would've given me the internship that got me into this college. If I can say, with complete conviction, that my mind—not my looks—is the only thing creditable for everything I've accomplished, all the work I've done. I want..." he stops. Laughs bitterly. "I want so many things. I want to cut my hair off at the roots. But what scares me is that I don't know what will happen if I do."

I look at him, really look at him, my eyes flitting over every hollow, every curve, every shadow on his face in the dim light of my bedroom. "Don't cut your face," I say, my mind lingering somewhere else, across the room on Hyunjin's eyes. "It wouldn't do anything. You'd still be beautiful."

He presses his cheek to the side of the bed, eyes crinkling in on themselves like tearstained paper. "That's what I'm afraid of."

Something like a smile slips across my face, sad and aching, and I know him better than I ever have in that moment, because I know his fear. I know what it feels like to be scared of yourself.

So I take a deep breath and whisper, "One night when I was in high school, sophomore year, my father got really drunk and broke two of my fingers on a door." I hold up my hand to show them. "I was never really sure if it was an accident, but my mother never believed he would hurt me. I hated him after that—wanted him gone—but she decided to forgive him because he paid for the splints. He left us anyway, a year later." I twist my palm, showing him how they bend, slightly, in the wrong direction. "They never really healed right."

Hyunjin is silent, his eyes fixed on me—swallowing me whole. I can't read his expression, and I wonder briefly, in a bleating panic, if I've shared too much—said the wrong thing. If he's regretting ever coming to my door.

Then he leans forward, so swiftly and suddenly I don't have time to move away. His hands catch my palm, still raised to the light, folding over my crooked fingers.

Warmth seeps into me, spreading from my hand through my body. He runs his thumb over the back of my head—not quite an apology, but ... an acknowledgement. I see you. I see how you've suffered.

I'm here.

I smile, wondering how we got here: sitting on the floor of my bedroom, trauma-dumping to each other, at somewhere around midnight. The absurdity hasn't quite sunk in yet, and I'm willing to wait until it does, because Hwang Hyunjin is the kind of person worth admiring.

Hyunjin and I are similar, I realize. We both are bent and crooked from our pasts, wild, spinning tops, fighting for control over the things that go on in our minds; we each have our methods. Hyunjin's is to drown it; mine is to bury it, and then on top of it, build something new.

Ocean waves and sandcastles. Numbly, it occurs to me that, together, we make a full day at the beach.

"Jiyu," Hyunjin says, and something about the roughness of his voice sounds like coming home. I try to imagine him with a beer bottle in his hand, the kind you leave a note in and cast into the sea. It's too easy; his eyes already have that flushed, blazen look, mouth wet. The look of someone who breathes that special, sour kind of poison. I know that expression; it's the exact same one that cast itself over my father's face twelve years ago and never left. Maybe if Hyunjin's wasn't so beautiful, I would look at him and see my father and my father's demons and finger splints and I would finally be able to stay away.

But as much as my mind drags up those scab-scrusted, chronic-pain memories when Hyunjin stumbles to my room drunk every night, I still can't help but feel pulled in by him. A tide returning to the shore.

I choose not to dwell on that thought and instead focus on what's in front of me. Which is, unfortunately, also Hyunjin. His bottom lip is unreasonably full—a sort of dark, pink color. I touch my own lips regretfully; they're always dry, which I hate, so I try to use chapstick whenever I can, but I'm 100% sure they don't look like Hyunjin's.

His breath catches softly, and I realize I'm still looking at his lips, and our hands are still intertwined. My eyes snap to his, praying he doesn't think I'm some kind of creep—

I could swear my heart jumps like it's trying to break free from my chest when I see his expression, because he's watching me.

And his eyes are like fire.

There is nothing but scorching, inky-black desire in them, sending a line of heat directly to my face; and I am sharply reminded of why Hyunjin has a reputation, why whispers follow him in the hall. It's because of those eyes—those dark, depthless eyes, absorbing my entire being in them, utterly consuming. That gaze has dropped to my mouth, where I'm still touching my lips. His thumb brushes over my hand again, but this time there is nothing gentle, nothing soft, nothing sweet in it. This time, it sends sparks shooting through me like fireworks.

I swallow, quickly dropping the hand touching my mouth, painfully aware of how little space is between us. My cheeks feel like his eyes look: burning. Hyunjin's face is like that tiny moment when you've just burst out of the water after holding your breath as long as you possibly can—angelic, intense, making me want to gasp for air.

I need to go. I need to go now. This is very, very bad; this is the path I told myself I wouldn't go down, the one that paves Hyunjin's reputation and is lined with sobbing girls begging for fruitless second chances.

But my body seems to be ignoring the rational part of my mind. And some part of me wants it to.

Slowly, ever so slowly, his eyes drag up to meet mine. As he does that, the hand still holding my own slips down, pressing his fingertips lightly against the inside of my wrist. And I almost think he'd look guilty for how unabashedly he's staring at me—how un-refrained the way he slides his gaze up from my lips is—until I remember this is Hyunjin, and he's as arrogant as he is drunk right now.

But I still want desperately to believe that it isn't only intoxication that brings his hand up to brush his knuckles, featherlight, against the curve of my cheekbone. Brush my hair out of my eyes with impossible, fragile grace.

I don't think either of us are breathing.

Foolish words and drunken haze half-form in my mind and find their way past my lips, slippery with wine and tears, before I can stop them.

"What if I asked you to stop?" I breathe. His gaze flickers; I swallow hard and decide to regret starting this conversation later, knowing my pulse is pounding and he can definitely tell. "Stop drinking, I mean."

He watches me almost carefully, one hand still grazing my cheek, the other drawing slow circles along the back of my palm, making it difficult to think straight. Studies me as I study him.

After a long, heavy second, he tells me, "You wouldn't be the first."

"Would I be the last?" Would I be enough? Enough to quiet those demons inside you, the ones that drive you towards drinking, force you to avoid love—commitment—in fear that it will tie you down the same way your parents did. The ones that were born because you loved too much, and can only be healed by loving too much again.

Please, tell me I could do it. Tell me I could save you from yourself.

Raw honesty shines along the curve of his mouth, the furrow of his brows. Stiffly—as if it's taking him physical effort to do so—he pulls his hands away.

"No."

I look away. I don't know why I expected something else—why I expected that I could possibly make a difference in his habits, his demons, his life choices. Why I thought if it was me asking, it would matter.

But it doesn't. Of course it doesn't; how could anything matter with Hyunjin?

"What if I told you," I say quietly, my eyes fixed on the small thread on a corner of the carpet space between us, "That I was tired of only seeing you in the dead of night, with your brain so muddled you forget it all in the morning? If I wanted ... if I wanted to see you, truly see you, in the daylight, sober?" I look up, needing to watch his reaction—needing to see his expression.

If I wanted. These days, with him, all I ever seem to do is want.

Hyunjin's gaze shutters at my words. "Then you would be waiting a long time."

I blink.

Then his words slam into me like a sheet of ice, banishing the dusty-pink fog that has been lingering in the room and my mind ever since I breathed into Hyunjin's ear. I swallow thickly past the sudden pain in my throat, rivaled only by the sharp, decisive one in my chest: a pain that sounds like heartbreak and feels like fear. I think of window sills and waiting, and around me, sandcastles crumble like ash into the ocean waves.

I'm sitting up before I know it, my face cold.

"Jiyu," Hyunjin says, following me, his expression pinched tight. I know he regrets telling me the truth, but I don't care. I don't want to hear it.

"Then you might as well leave, Hyunjin," I tell him stiffly, "because I'm sure as hell not waiting for anyone. Least of all you."

His eyes close, lashes sweeping against the line of his cheekbone. "Would it really be that bad?" He says softly. "Waiting for me?"

I stop in my tracks at the softness in his voice, and it steals the bite from my reply. "Yes," I say, my voice emotionless—tired. All of a sudden all I want is for him to go, to leave me with my bed and my Totoro plushies and the faint memory of him still clinging to the cloth, to wrap my arms around him, to hit him and scream at him for not being willing to change himself for me, to go back to five minutes ago where his hand was on my cheek and we'd never had this conversation.

"You're addicted to alcohol by choice. You're destructive, Hyunjin. You destroy everything around you, and I'm not stupid enough to take that risk. I've already had my life destroyed once by someone who chose drinking over me. I wouldn't survive it if it happened again."

I'm standing as I speak, feeling at once ridiculous because I've spent the past god-knows-how-long lying on my bedroom floor and aching that I can't stay longer in that quiet, hazy warmth. But then I shift and see his face and realize what I've just said—that I've spilled too much, too soon, and it's too late to take it back as his face closes, closes, closes, like a door slamming shut—and I know I've ruined us in the worst, sharpest, most unavoidable way.

"Who?" he rasps.

I bite my lip. "Hyunjin—"

"Who?"

"My father," I tell him, hating how fractured my voice becomes. Hating the look on his face as he hears it—hate that now he's probably thinking of the other information I've told him about my father, thinking of my two crooked fingers, and equating himself with—with that. Realizing that the hands he caressed my broken one with were as good as the ones that broke them in the first place.

I open my mouth, wanting to say something, but all that comes out is silence.

I hate more than anything, I think, that I can't tell him he's wrong.

"Why am I here, then?" he asks. His eyes are hollow in the light. "Why take me in? Why care for me tonight, and the night before that, when I—when all I've ever done—is remind you of him? You said it yourself. I'm destructive."

I blink at him, surprised he even has to ask. "What kind of person would I be if I left you locked out of your own room or so sick you couldn't walk? You may be destructive, Hyunjin, but you need a place to go when it's dark just like everyone else. I'd let you destroy me a little bit every night to give you that. I'd do the same for anyone."

I silently pray Hyunjin doesn't see straight through my last words—see through the obvious lie in them. The truth is, he's not anyone. He hasn't been for a while, maybe not ever. Not since I found myself wondering what it would be like to kiss him, to be more to him than the person he seeks out when he's drunk enough he can't remember which side of the hallway his room is on.

But those are dangerous, dangerous things to wonder. Dangerous paths to follow. Partly because he's gotten himself drunk enough he can't remember where his room is. And partly because he's already made it clear I'm not worth going down them.

I've drawn lines in the sand, and he's crossing them all, all my red flags and warning signs, including the biggest one:

Never date a boy that can break your heart.

Never date anyone, really, who you feel too seriously about. Who can ever be more. Because then you will start to feel love creeping in as you sleep, wearing itself along your threadbare edges and scribbling itself neatly into the margins of spiral-bound notebook pages cutting paper cuts into your skin. Love grows like a weed, and spreads like a poison, and is best taken in small, harmless doses, isolated and immunized. Those are my lines, and I know I have them for a reason.

Never date a boy that can break your heart.

I think I may be breaking us both.

But it's for the best; it has to be. I've known we were wrong for each other since the first night I found him outside my door. He knows it too.

And yet...

And yet now, watching cold fire burn in his eyes, I know Hyunjin is exactly the kind of person that can remind me of the lines I've drawn in the sand—and cross them. Despite the demons inside him, the same ones that took my father, that manifest in bottles and bitterness and glass. Despite the reputation that follows him, the type of school boy he is that I've always been careful to stay away from. Despite his arrogance and destructiveness and everything I should be repulsed by.

Foolishly, selfishly, uglily, I still want.

That's the thing about attraction: it's like a light switch. Once it's on, there's no way to turn it off. There's no way to shove everything back into the shadows.

So I turn away instead, breaking his gaze like shooting a bullet through glass, shift away from him so I don't have to notice how close we are, don't have to see the shape of his lips or feel the heat from his skin or the hurt on his face.

My eyes are focused on a spot on the wall when I say, "Are you tired yet?"

I feel, more than hear, him move beside me. He leans back lazily, but his posture doesn't match the tight, hollow tone to his voice that almost sounds like sadness. "No."

I'm too much of a coward to ask what he wants to do now. I'm too much of a coward to do anything but clear my throat like an idiot, brush off broken glass and gunpowder, and leave the room as quickly as I can without running.

Chapter Text

The worst part is, I understand him.

Years ago, my older brother once said to me bitterly, people broken in the same places fit together best.

I know why Hyunjin drinks. I know because it's the same reason why, every full moon, I drive my car into a deserted parking lot, pop the trunk, and sit and watch how the stars stretch across the night sky: no beginnings, no ends. Just me and infinite starlight. I know because it's the same reason why I tell no one where I'm going, tell no one where I've been when I get back, not even Jisung and Seungmin. Why I abandon whatever homework assignments or evening classes or emails from teachers to do that ritual, even though any other time it would kill me to receive a notice from a professor and not respond promptly. That time—those quiet, stolen hours where I can convince myself I'm the only person in the world ... I need it like I need air. Because in those moments, I am completely and utterly alone, and therefore I am safe. There is no one who knows me, and therefore no one who can hurt me, no one I have to guard myself against.

I am the only person I know, I think, who relishes being no one.

Either way, those moments are my own—completely and wholly—and the rare times when I allow myself to let down my walls and breathe and not feel like there are clouds of smoke infesting my lungs.

It's a rebellion, in a way. A defiance against all the pressures that mount against me daily, all the voices that pound a mantra into my head. Get that good grade, impress that person, do that well, become that perfect girl you look for every day in the mirror. My midnight drives are the ways I remind myself that I'm alive—that I am not my mother, chained to her silent vigil every night, standing in the same spot looking out the window for a husband who would never come back. Driving away from windows, from houses, from grief, and turning my gaze upwards is how I reassure myself I will never end up like her.

Pressure mounts. And Hyunjin feels its weight just as much as I do—he just bears it differently. Alcohol is his release, his late-night drives to abandoned places to look at the sky. All this time, I'd thought he was trying to lose control by drinking, when he was actually regaining it, one sip at a time.

Because they tell me to be good, but even when I'm the best it's never enough. So I will earn my credit by being the worst.

Hyunjin and I are broken in the same places. Our demons rage the same, burn the same, draw the same blood.

Maybe that explains why when I look at him, I see empty parking lots, and endless stars.

Chapter Text

"Oh, you owe me so much money."

I twist my head to glare at Jisung. "Ten bucks is what we agreed on. And I still think I wasn't completely wrong."

"The bet was whether or not they'd have installed those boujee bidet Japanese auto-toilets that sing songs when you come near, wasn't it?" Seungmin says.

"Yes, so we won't know for sure until we see it," I reply weakly.

"Jiyu, if they have stone lions and a jacuzzi, they have seat-warming toilets."

I mutter my defeat and look up at the house, drinking it all in. It's not unusual for students to live in flats off-campus; it just costs money, which we generally don't have. That is part of the reason why I've never visited one: most of the kids who live in them are inherited assholes who don't mix with people who attend school fairs to stock up on meals from the free buffet. Namely me.

Well, they say it's good to try new things.

The flat is secluded in the front, but I glimpse the back wall is made purely of glass, facing the trees. There are potted plants on the porch next to actual stone lions, and fucking hedges—because of course these people get hedges—and the whole thing is big enough to fit half of the dorm house I live in.

"I bet they drink puppy tears," Seungmin mutters under his breath.

I snort, looking at him incredulously. I should be used to it now. Most people assume Jisung is the snarky, uncalled-for-judginess in our friend group, out of all us three, because he's so loud. But the kind people aren't always the quiet ones. And Seungmin is maybe the most savage person I've ever known.

I'm glad for it, though, because in every other way, Seungmin is a good person. He sends his grandparents gifts every month and writes down everything he's grateful for in a journal and picks up trash on the side of the road when no one is looking. If he didn't have such a savage personality, he would be one of those people you hear about in hospital stories and neighbor newspapers, and I wouldn't be able to stand him.

I have this thing about good people, you see. Nice people I'm fine with. Sweet people and I get along great. But it's the good people—the heartfeeling, selfless just-wants-to-make-the-world-a-better-place people who are motivated by the endless droves of genuine kindness welling inside their chests—that I don't trust.

Maybe it's my fault that I don't believe people are inherently good, that perfect human beings don't exist. But if I know one thing, it's that kindness is learned.

Seungmin's dog saved his life when he was a kid—dragged him out of the swimming pool when his parents had forgotten to check on him. He volunteers at pet shelters four times a week.

After Jisung came out of the closet, his father refused to talk to him for the whole year up until he was sent to boarding school. He hates silence—talks as much as he can to avoid it, makes music when there's no one to talk to. Now he makes it to share with the world—to show his dad that if he won't be proud of his son, he'll be proud of himself.

And I ... I witnessed directly what alcohol could do to a person. Watched it consume my father piece by piece, taking all the angry and sad parts of him and making them wither and curdle like spoiled milk. Watched its residue eat at my mother until she spent every day standing in the same spot by the windowsill, staring rigidly down the driveway, waiting for my father to come back.

Now, I am someone who finds people suffering the same poison sitting in the hallway by my room, and I let them inside my door.

Kindness is our scars. Kindness is the still-bleeding wounds marring our flesh; kindness is the golden medal we have earned for making it this far. Kindness is the price we are paid for surviving the worst things that can be done to us. The promise of no one else will have to endure what you have endured.

Kindness is learned. It cannot be inherent, cannot be genetic, cannot be there simply because it feels like it.

They have no idea how much it took me to become kind.

Maybe that's why I feel so drawn to Hyunjin, the quiet gentleness hiding behind his arrogance and anger I've only glimpsed in paintings and remembered surnames. After all, if kindness is written in our scars, and measured by our falls from grace ... he could rival Lucifer.

"Jiyu?" Jisung says, and I blink, pushed back to the present.

I shake my head, clearing the thoughts from my mind. "Sorry?"

"We were just saying we should go in there, instead of waiting around all day," Jisung says gently.

Good point. But, also, it reminds me why I'm here.

Six days. Six days from our last conversation, in which I left him on the couch with a bottle of Gatorade and a bucket and woke the next day to find him already gone. Six days of pacing, sleepless nights, hating myself for waiting for him, hating myself for being too much of a coward to just knock on his door like he had to mine, ask him where have you gone? Did you listen to me? Did you decide to stop drinking? Or did my words finally push you over the edge?

By now, my worry-slash-guilt for what might have caused him to stop visiting my room every night is equalled by my fury at him for giving me all of this worry-slash-guilt. I want to find him if only so I could grab him by the shoulders and shake him and yell, don't you know what you've been doing to me? I can't sleep now because of you. I can't think now because of you. Who gave you the right to affect me like this?

But there is also the option that Hyunjin is completely fine, and I have been worrying over nothing, and if I find him and shout at him everyone will think I am a crazy, sick idiot.

"I don't know," I blurt, my gaze fixed on the flat. "I mean, what if he's just in—in Hawaii or something? Or if he's decided to attend a Six Days Sober club, or—"

"Jiyu?" says Seungmin.

I turn to him, trying futilely to smile. "Yeah?"

"I've been listening to you come up with excuses as to why this is a stupid idea for the last day and a half since you suggested it, and I did not drive both of you idiots out here to the flat of someone who may or may not be a rich serial killer because Jisung can't be bothered to get a license and you would be so nervous you'd get us lost in three minutes so you could chicken out at the last second. The majority of our ideas are stupid; this is not anything special. It's not even in the top five. Knock on the damn door."

I take a deep breath, steeling myself. Seungmin's right; this isn't anything special. Just a friendly neighbor checking up on someone she has a right to be worried about. Totally normal, right? Right.

He's probably not even there. Not that I was hoping for that. I could've knocked on Hyunjin's door myself if I was seeking him out, since it's so close to where I live. But I didn't because I'm not seeking him out and I am, also, very much a coward.

Come on, Jiyu. I set my shoulders, walk up to the door, and raise my hand to the doorbell.

That is when I realize that there isn't a doorbell.

Not as in there just wasn't one installed. As in it's been physically ripped off of the wall and only a few scraps of plastic are remaining.

I frown, lowering my hand. "What the—"

"Can I help you?"

The voice makes me startle, and I spin around. Crouching in the lawn is a boy about my age, elbow-deep in the flower bed lining the house, Airpods in both ears. He's blocked by one of the ridiculous hedges, which explains why I couldn't see him until I was right at the door—and also probably means he heard all of Seungmin, Jisung and my conversation. Shit. Heat rises to my face as I remember all of the embarrassing things we've just said, and I blurt, "Did you hear us?"

He frowns, leaning back to pull out his Airpods. "Huh?"

Relief washes over me, and my shoulders relax. He didn't hear. "Nothing. I, uh ... do you live here?"

Before he can answer, I hear Jisung shout behind me, "Jiyu, what are you doing?" The boy in front of me stands, looking for the sound of the voice, and I hear Jisung let out a surprised yelp as he seemingly appears from nowhere.

Now that he's standing, I get a good look at him, and I feel a jolt of surprise. He's leaner than I expected, with a narrow waist and long arms that tell me he must be a dancer, or do some form of martial arts or tae kwon do. He looks familiar, and it takes a second before I remember where I've seen him before: in one of the paintings on Hyunjin's wall. This boy's fluffy blond hair and bright smile is as unmistakable as the one in the portrait.

"I do live here," he says, sounding a little confused but otherwise welcoming. "My name is Felix."

"I'm Jiyu. Bahng Jiyu," I reply. "Oh, and that's Jisung and Seungmin." I quickly wave them over. "Sorry to intrude on your ... gardening."

"Oh, you're good!" Felix beams, dusting off his clothes, and I think, yeah, definitely the guy in the picture. "I think I know you, Bahng Jiyu ... you're taking multivar with Professor Kennedy, right? You sit a few rows behind me."

I nod. "Oh, yeah ... Hyunjin told me about you."

Felix blinks in surprise, and his voice shifts. "You ... know Hyunjin?"

"Yeah," I say slowly, wondering why his expression has soured. "I was actually wondering if he was here...?"

Felix blows out a breath. "Um, look, Jiyu. I'm sure you and Hyunjin are close, but if you've had a hard time reaching him, it's probably because he doesn't want to see you."

I lurch backwards. "What?" How does he know? Did Hyunjin—god, did Hyunjin tell him about us?

Felix smiles apologetically, looking like he'd rather be literally anywhere else. Hell, maybe. "I'm sure he doesn't want to break up with you. He probably just wants a little time to—"

"Oh my god, no," I blurt, cutting him off. Suddenly everything makes sense. "No, I—I'm not—Hyunjin and I are not dating. I'm not here to stalk him because he ghosted me."

Felix looks surprised. "Oh!" His ears turn pink. "Shit, I'm sorry—I didn't mean to assume. It's only—I mean, it's just that usually..."

Usually that is the case. I feel my own face heat. Of course Hyunjin has broken-hearted freshly-dumped girls showing up at his friend's doorstep looking for him—and that's exactly what I look like, isn't it? My cheeks burn.

"What's going on?" Seungmin says. He and Jisung have just walked up, looking over at Felix.

"Nothing," Felix and I say at the same time.

I lock eyes with him, surprised, and feel a smile tug at my lips. Felix offers me an embarrassed grin. "You know—how about you guys come inside? Hyunjin's not here right now, but Changbin or Minho might know, if you want to talk to them."

I pause, unsure. "I don't want to intr—"

"We would love to come in, actually," Jisung interrupts, practically pushing past me in an effort to get through the door. "Thanks so much!"

"Great!" Felix says happily, opening the door—it's unlocked. "I just baked cookies and I need people to eat them, so this is actually perfect timing..."

In a second, they're gone. I let out a groan and turn to Seungmin.

He shrugs, stepping through the threshold. "Don't blame Jisung. You want to see their fancy rich-person toilets, too."

I sigh and follow him through the door.

Seungmin is right. The flat is spacious, plenty of room between the living room on my left and the kitchen on my right. The glass wall before us is half-covered by pale curtains, but the light streaming through the uncovered part illuminates the space and makes it feel cleaner and brighter. I turn right, finding myself in the kitchen as Felix pushes a plate of cookies towards us on the counter. "I hope none of you are allergic to cats?"

"You have cats?" Jisung asks eagerly, taking a cookie. "I thought students weren't allowed to keep pets!"

"Only if they live on school-owned property," Felix replies just as eagerly. "But Changbin owns this flat, so he gets to do whatever he wants with it."

"What about me?"

We turn as a boy walks into the room, about the same age and height as Felix, clad in a black tank top and a gold chain hanging from his neck. Seungmin's brows shoot up; Jisung's eyes nearly pop out of his head; and I wonder if model-looking people are somehow attracted to one another, or if Hyunjin is just a magnet for them, because this boy's face is nothing like I've ever seen. On top of his ridiculously buff shoulders, his skin is perfect—another reason why I hate men—and he has a soft jawline that ends in a sharply angled chin, highlighting the curve of his lips.

Seo Changbin. The owner of this flat, and probably a foodie too, based on how quickly he makes a beeline for Felix's cookies.

"Thank god, I'm starving. Except—" he stops, narrowing his eyes at Felix. "These aren't like the brownies, right?"

"That was one time, and I didn't even know it wasn't normal butter," Felix replies, exasperated.

"You got the entire dance team st—"

"Anyway, back to our visitors," Felix says loudly, turning to us. "Binnie, this is Jisung, Seungmin, and Jiyu." He speaks with all the familiarity of knowing us since he was a child, despite the fact that the first time we exchanged words was two minutes ago on his front porch. "They're here for Hyunjin."

Changbin's gaze flits to me. "Here for Hyunjin or here for Hyunjin?"

Seungmin blinks. "Huh?"

"I'm not dating him," I blurt, wishing I could get some of whatever Felix put in his brownies. My face is on fire. "I'm not a stalker. I promise."

"Ah." Changbin shifts, embarrassed. "Sorry, then, Jiyu. We've just had a lot of ... instances, especially with Minho and his girlfriend."

"Didn't they break up?" I ask, the word coming out of my mouth before I can think to stop them.

"They broke up?" Jisung echoes, sounding a bit too happy than is polite. I hear an oof as Seungmin subtly elbows him under the counter.

Changbin stares at me, surprised. He exchanges a glance with Felix. "Yeah. How did you..."

"Hyunjin told you," said Felix. He wasn't smiling anymore. "Didn't he?"

I nod, deciding now is as good of a time as any. "I wanted to stop by because he ... well, I'm..." I force the words out. "I'm worried about Hyunjin."

Felix's face fills with something I can't name—a mix of understanding and sympathy and something tinged bitter. "Surprisingly, you're not the first."

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. Whatever this reaction is - whatever he means by it - it's not what I was expecting.

A blink passes, and Felix's easy smile is back, meeting my gaze coolly. "I've found that everyone who encounters my friend emerges from it with a story, for better or for worse." He offers me his hand, something out of an angelic renaissance painting, the sunlight coming through the windows behind him painting his face in gold. "Come with me to the backyard, Bahng Jiyu, so you can tell me yours." 

-

The walk to the backyard, looking for Minho, turns into a tour of the whole house. We leave Changbin, Seungmin and Jisung behind at one point—probably for the best, given how much Jisung was ogling Changbin in that tank top—and I find that although I was scared to come here alone, the solace with Felix is needed.

I tell him everything.

Well, maybe not everything. The moment on the first night when Hyunjin had unknowingly pressed me up against the counter, his cheek smeared with Nutella, and the moment a week ago when I'd leaned over him on the floor and whispered in his ear, I keep out of the story. I'm still trying to pretend they don't exist, or at least keep them locked away in a cavern inside the depths of my heart only to be taken out on my worst, loneliest nights.

But I had a feeling Felix guessed—or at least something along those lines—because he never asked why I was so worried about Hyunjin I'd seek out his friends, or why my voice took effort to stay steady when I recounted how I hadn't seen him for a week.

That, if nothing else, made me tremendously thankful it was Felix I'd found when I entered this door.

"First, Jiyu, I want to thank you," Felix says once I'm finished. "Hyunjin is ... stubborn, and unpredictable. Whenever the others or I try to help him, or intervene about his drinking, we get nowhere, so the only thing we've been able to do is make sure he's safe. He has a habit of going where he prefers, however much we try to stop him. I'm glad he's been able to make it home, thanks to you."

Home? I start to correct him, then pause. I've never considered my dorm to represent anything of a home for Hyunjin, but ... I guess that depends on how you define it. I definitely wouldn't know. I doubt I'd be able to tell someone what a home was if they pointed it out to me in a dictionary.

"But if I'm being honest, Jiyu ... I'm also going to need to ask you to stop."

I freeze mid-step, choking on what I was about to say. "What?"

"Stop whatever is going on between you and Hyunjin, while you still can. It's the best thing for you both," Felix says, his voice low. We're standing in a hallway, a floor above the only other people in this house, but somehow it still feels like talking about this kind of thing in a loud voice is dangerous. His gaze burns into me, that strange bitterness returning, the light refracting over his face like broken glass. "I've been looking out for Hyunjin since he first picked up a bottle—before then. I know what he looks like when he's spiraling again, and he is—ever since a week ago. When he met you. He's wilder, more unstable. More careless."

I think of how Hyunjin only showed up at my room once in the first week, then steadily more and more, his intoxication level increasing each time. 

My blood turns to ice in my veins.

"I know neither of us want to see him getting hurt. You might not think so, but Hyunjin is—fragile." Felix's voice catches. "People like him are made to break. And as someone who cares about him very, very much—more than you could ever know—I have to ask you to break it off, while you still can, before it ends up killing you both ... because it very well may." There is something dark, something unholy, in Felix's eyes, and it stops my heart.

"Things like this are made to destroy us."

-

The whole drive back, Jisung pauses talking only for breath, and I thank the stars for it.

"—or the literal angel we met in the garden like something out of a Bible fanfiction—'Adam and Eve but Adam has freckles and Eve is wearing a wifebeater' or something—rising out of a seemingly-mundane piece of shrubbery with an actual halo of light around his gorgeous but also definitely damaged blindingly bleached hair. Did you see that too? Seungminnie, you saw it too, right? There was an actual halo around him from the sunlight coming through the glass window. Speaking of, who has an entire wall of their house made out of glass?"

"I saw it," Seungmin says minimally, and I feel his eyes on me; I pretend not to notice, and instead press my cheek against the passenger-side window.

Both of them must have noticed something was off when I returned to the kitchen with Felix suddenly not wanting to stay and wait for Minho to arrive, because Seungmin was by my side every step it took for me to stumble down the driveway to the car, and Jisung made no protest to linger in the flat despite the bare-shouldered painfully-his-type boy there willing to talk to him about the best methods of cookie eating. However, neither said anything, which makes me endlessly happy about my choice in best friends.

I just needed—I just need some time to think, to let my thoughts sort themselves out, without overthinking. I need to be alone without actually being alone, so I wouldn't have to be lonely.

Which is how we spend the drive back to the dorm: Jisung and Seungmin easily filling the silence, being there if I decided to talk about what had happened with Felix; and me, not saying a single word, struggling to process everything he had said to me.

I know what he looks like when he's spiraling again, and he is—ever since a week ago. When he met you.

Hyunjin's drinking problems ... I'd been trying to assuage them. Or I thought I had. But if what Felix was saying was true, ever since we'd met, he'd only been getting worse.

I don't know why I expected anything else. I'd known from the start that seeing Hyunjin would be like poison for me. Why wouldn't it be the same for him?

I didn't know that wanting someone could be ugly, and selfish, and sick.

The best thing to do was clear, then: distance myself. No more late-night rendezvous; no more thinking about him so much my head hurt sometimes from it all. Break it off, like Felix said, and leave both of us for the better.

Except I couldn't stop returning to a certain thing Felix had said: that Hyunjin was fragile. Easily broken. And that made him worth everything—worth protecting at all costs, in Felix's mind.

I think of a boy sitting on the hallway floor, spine pressed against the wall, chin angled up as he looked at me through clouded eyes. I know what an angel looks like when I see one. Of how I thought he looked akin to a fallen angel then, all dark hair and long lashes and rumpled clothes, shirt unbuttoned just enough to show the tops of his collarbones, but maybe that was just what he wanted us to see—maybe under it all, under the fluorescent lighting with emotion staining his face like ink, what he really looked like was desperately, agonizingly human.

I think of a boy that stumbles through life, who feels everything too deeply and finds that the best way to numb it is with a bottle clutched in one hand. I think of a boy who grew up with the weight of unflinching expectations on his shoulders, a boy who grew up starved, like me, for the kind of love every child wants: the kind that is not the food in front of you or the clothes on your back or the roof above your head, but simple, unconditional love, given not because you are deemed worthy of it, or because you feel obligated to provide it, but just because. Someone to say, you can go now, it's okay, I'll be here when you come home. Someone to accept every aspect of who you are. Someone to treat you like you are special, worthy, a piece of art. Someone to hold your hand for no reason other than that they want to.

And, lastly, I think of a girl who drives out every night of the full moon to somewhere abandoned, like her, and looks at the stars.

Felix was wrong about one thing, I decide as Seungmin parks the car and we head back to our respective dorms. It's not just Hyunjin that's fragile.

It's people like us both that are made to break.

After all—as my brother Chan once said—people broken in the same places fit together best.

Chapter Text

I'm almost glad when I hear him in the hall the next night.

Almost glad, because despite everything Felix had said, despite all my resolutions to listen to him, despite the clear, obvious fact that the best option for us both was for Hyunjin to find a new place to crash when he drank himself into blackouts, in the past twenty-four hours my thoughts have incessantly turned to the exact shape of his eyes when they ghosted over my lips and refused to leave.

His words, too, have burrowed themselves deep in my mind, as well as my response to them. Almost as much as Felix's. Perhaps because they had been achingly true; perhaps because they had been said with such quiet vulnerability; perhaps because it had been him who had said them. Perhaps all three.

Would it really be that bad? Waiting for me?

Yes.

You're destructive, Hyunjin. You destroy everything around you, and I'm not stupid enough to take that risk. I've already had my life destroyed once by someone who chose drinking over me. I wouldn't survive it if it happened again.

I wince, setting my pen down. Even now, a week later, the words echo through me, reminding me of how much could've been salvaged if I had just kept my mouth shut. Damn him for introducing vulnerability into the situation—for being honest. Damn him for making me do the same, and then ghosting me and leaving me with my thoughts and regrets and my empty couch.

He'd left an imprint on said couch, just slightly. It had been warm when I'd pressed my hand to it. That night—we'd left things cold and bleeding. I'd retreated to my own room, leaving him with a blue Gatorade and unresolved tension, and woken up the next morning to find him gone, like always, the remnants of all our stiff unspoken words hanging in the air like stale crusts of bread.

I can see him everywhere, now, and it's infuriating. His smell clings to the air like a lover's embrace, his cologne mixed with the faint, musky scent of alcohol; his touch is everywhere, from the new divot in my couch cushions to the empty water glasses in the sink and open prescription bottles of aspirin. I see him in my math homework and my Scrabble set and even my goddamn Totoro plushie.

Leave it to Hwang Hyunjin to ruin Totoro for me.

Maybe I'll tell him that, once I can look at him without feeling that muted flash of guilt I've come to consider an old friend. (But not the kind of old friend you have nostalgia with. More like that one old friend who you kind of know and you've seen around but you also probably wouldn't invite them over to your house or let them touch your nice flower vases).

I shake my head, wondering if Hyunjin is so contagious I'm starting to think like him too now, and make my way over to the door to let him in; he's making quite a ruckus in the hallway, starkly clear through the thin walls.

My hand is on the doorknob when I hear the voice.

The voice that is low and dripping like honey as it asks if he still has his key, breathless and high-pitched and utterly, utterly female.

The doorknob turns to ice in my hand.

Hyunjin's reply is soft enough it's hard to hear, and I can't help myself from pressing my ear against the door even as it fills me with a sick feeling inside. He's saying he does, it's here, and then he's unlocking the door with a laugh, and she's laughing too and I can hear them tumble inside, probably already wrapped in each other, their hands tangling in one another's clothes. The door shuts with a resounding clang, echoing hollow through my bones.

I don't realize my hand is shaking until the doorknob makes a rattling sound. I've never heard him laugh before, I realize with a shard of ice straight to my chest. Chuckle, or snicker, maybe, but not—not laugh. Not like he just did with ... with her. Whoever she was. A classmate? An ex, maybe? I'm sure it could be anyone; there are a thousand girls he could choose from, after all, girls who are thin and pretty and fun and—

I cover my mouth with my hand and fight to breathe evenly, struggle past the syrup coating the inside of my throat slick as blood. That he'd ... he'd brought someone home with him tonight—was probably kissing her behind the door right now, laughing with her in that stupid, careless, light way I didn't know he was capable of—it hurts in a way I didn't realize it could.

For some reason, I'd begun to believe, during all those nights, that Hyunjin and I ... I don't know. That during those nights, there was only us—like that was our time, since we never interacted in daylight, when the rest of the world had gone dark and quiet and made us shine in comparison, silver and glowing and starlike. But I guess Hyunjin didn't think of it that way—or even if he had once, he certainly wasn't now. Definitely not, if he'd brought someone else to his dorm with him.

Did he know? Did he know I would be up waiting for him like I always was, every single night, worrying myself sick? I'm not as self-centered to think he would do this to get at me, but god, he has. I feel foolish for thinking he might be hurting, thinking our angry words affected him as much as they affected me. He's probably forgotten it all by now, while I'm sitting here unable to even breathe.

I squeeze my eyes shut and turn away from the door, not wanting to hear anymore, lest I recognize the girl's voice. I don't want to know who, exactly, it is that he's bringing into his bed.

Still, though, endless faces flit through my head like slowed-down movie tapes as I stagger to my bedroom, endless people who might be with him now. I curl my arms around myself, trying to ease some warmth back into my chest. Every breath is a swallow of liquid ice, frosting over the inner corners of my ribcage and the fragmented veins running beneath my skin.

I am such a hypocrite. I have no right to feel this ... cold. I imagined this exact situation the last time Hyunjin was here, lying with him on the floor by my bed, our cheeks pressed to the carpet, inches apart. He has every right to dally around with whomever he sees fit, sleep around with whichever person he decides to like for the night. He could bring Jisung into his bed and I shouldn't feel any reason to care, other than the fact that Jisung is my friend. It was inevitable that Hyunjin would find someone more interesting than me during these past days and decide to take them home.

None of this, however reasonable it is, explains why I still fucking hurt so much.

I let out a sigh, changing into my pajamas and taking off my bra. There's no reason to wait up for him anymore now. He's certainly not going to come to my room with a girl in his bed to keep him entertained.

Whoever she is, she can keep him safe now.

I hate that thought with sudden, vicious venom, hate the cold bitterness of it in my mouth. Before I even realize it, my hands are wrought with fury, searching for a victim; they land on Totoro. I fling him across the room as hard as I can. Hate Hate Hate. When did caring for Hyunjin start feeling like a routine instead of a burden? A routine that has now been ripped from my hands by none other than Hyunjin himself.

I don't think I'll be able to sleep, so I take a few melatonin before getting into bed. Hopefully, it'll only be thirty minutes or so of wallowing in my pathetic misery and the chaotic speeding of my mind down the rocky highway of every single conversation I had today and every other possible outcome that could have occurred before the pills work their magic.

Maybe they'll even do something for the cold, hollow ache in my chest that refuses to go away. But I doubt it.

I turn over, pulling the covers tighter around me, and want to cry even though I don't feel sad. I rarely cry, which is why I'm surprised by the sudden ache behind the backs of my eyes, and it's even rarer that I need to cry in a place that is not public and embarrassing to cry in, like my seventh-grade gym class or in front of my boss.

But no matter how hard I try, my tears evade me, and my pillow stays dry the whole time it takes the melatonin to kick in and me to fall asleep.

Figures. I can't cry even when I want to. Even my own tears think I'd better be left alone.

God, I'm pathetic. How did I get myself into this mess? Two weeks ago the only thing I knew about Hwang Hyunjin was a pretty face and a much less pretty reputation. Now ... now, I think I would know him blind, deaf, mute, or possibly some combination of all three. Now I think I know him only as well as I know myself. Only as well as I know my own boundaries, my own lines and sandcastles, my own demons.

Never date a boy that can break your heart.

Turns out I didn't even need to date him.

I pull the covers over my head and pray for the drugs to be swift.

-

I'm walking through my old house, and the only reason I know instantly where I am is because of the tang of alcohol that arrests my nose, haltingly familiar and sharp enough I know I will still be able to smell a faint whiff of it when I wake up, clinging to me like memory.

The pungent odor also tells me I'm dreaming, because in reality, my house never really smelled like alcohol at all. My father did all his drinking at the pub, and my mother was a stoic teetotaler, even after he left, when she was gone and broken inside. The stench only coats the walls of this house like perfume in my mind.

I don't give any thought to where my feet are taking me, but I end up in the kitchen anyway. There were only ever three places in this house that imprinted themselves into my brain: the foyer, because I would always hear it tremble when the front door slammed and know to stay in my room; my brother's bedroom, which I would run to when my father's shouting got the worst because it had a lock and reminded me of him; and the kitchen, where the window was.

She's there again, standing with her back to me, looking down at the drive. My memory has outdone itself, here; everything is exact from the peeling pale-yellow wallpaper to the little crack on the window frame to the perfect stillness in my mother's posture, her back rod-straight as always, chin lifted and proper. She looks like she could be in a painting; she looks beautiful; she looks like she is whole.

I know—because she taught me—that true brokenness knows how to hide.

It's always the eyes; that's the way you tell. I suppose I should be good at it, at seeing it, but I'm not, because I'm not really sure what true wholeness, true healing, looks like. I've only ever seen it from far away: across the street maybe, or through car windows, forcing me to squint my eyes and press my face against the glass. Never up close.

"Mom," I say, even though I know it's fruitless. She never turns; nothing is important enough to tear her gaze from the window. It took me a while to understand that, as a child; at first, I'd tried raising my voice, then tugging on her arm. She'd just swatted at me like a fly.

This time, though, she does turn, and it catches me by surprise so much I stumble a step back. Her face—her face is not her own.

It's mine.

My reflection smiles back at me, and I remember this horror, this grappling, scrambling fear that overtakes my body as I try to move and find my legs glued to the floor. I know this dream. It returns to haunt me every once in a while, to remind me why I can never fully heal. Remind me why I do everything I do.

Usually the dream ends now, and I wait to wake up, but then she takes a step towards me, smiling horribly. Her red mouth opens.

"He isn't even yours to lose."

I twist away, struggling to run. Her face is changing again; I blink, and it is no longer as if I'm looking into a mirror.

Instead, I'm meeting Hyunjin's eyes.

I let out a gasp, my world jerking, and we both fall to the floor until my cheek is pressed against the carpet—which is wrong, my house was only ever creaky wooden floorboards—and I feel Hyunjin's hand brush my face, my hair, and it is all wrong, everything is wrong; I can still smell the alcohol, infesting my lungs, choking me, cutting off my breath—

I blink, and I'm back to standing, but now I'm the one at the windowsill, looking down the drive, unable to turn my head away. Slowly, my feet melt into the floor, my hands freezing on the windowsill, holding me here forever—I can never leave—

There's a sharp crash, and I jerk back as an object crashes against the window inches from my face. Blood stains the glass as its body falls; I look down.

It's a sparrow. Tiny and barely-fledged, its little wings bent horribly crooked, body crushed from flying straight into the glass. I watch as the life seeps out of it, broken and dying, and there's something human in its eyes—something familiar about the shape of them, and it reminds me horribly of someone I know, but the harder I try to tell, the more the sparrow fades, sinking away into the ground; then the ground, too, sinks away, and I try desperately to stop it because something is telling me that this is very, very important, that I need to know who the sparrow is; but it's too late and I'm falling back into consciousness, leaving behind only the bright burst of blood on the window.

Chapter Text

It is times like these, when I am at my very worst, ugliest, most pathetic state of self, that I miss my brother the most.

Chan has been gone for a while, of course. Ten years and counting to be exact. He's not even in the same country as I am. (Leave it to my brother to become an idol, of all things).

I don't remember him enough. I had nine years and it was too little.

But what I do remember is that the nightmares would come for both of us, and so he was the one who helped me when they first started, because he knew why I kept waking up in the middle of the night, sobbing and sweating and scared to go back to sleep. He taught me how to swallow melatonin pills, how to lie on my stomach when I slept so I wouldn't wake up thrashing, how if I listened to music right before bed, the melody would follow me in my dreams and drown out the noises.

My parents, of course, did not. What kind of child is afraid of falling asleep? But they had Chan to take care of me, so they didn't worry. My father, by then, was already losing himself to the pub most nights, my mother falling apart like a loose thread as a result.

If I had not had a brother like Chan, I think, I would not have survived it—especially not what happened after he left.

Chan was—is—a good big brother. One of the first nights the nightmares came, he found me sitting in the hallway, my feet cold and bare, shivering with my spine to the wall. He took me into his own room and told me I could always come there if I needed anything and he would make sure to unlock the door. And he did—even when our father took to drunken rampages across the house that shook the walls and the only way to keep him out was a sturdy lock. Even then.

I miss Chan, but more so I miss those days where I could rely on other people to take care of me. Even if it was never who it should've been.

After he left was the hardest—when my father's drinking and the nightmares got particularly bad. Then, I would sleep in Chan's room, locking the door and enveloping myself in the closest thing to his presence: his memory.

Maybe that is why I miss him the most on the days I feel like a child again—lost and scared and wishing someone would open their door for me and whisper, it's okay, I've got you, we can hide away together.

I examine the dark glass bottle of alcohol before me, still thinking about Chan, and run my fingertips over the rim.

Then I take another swig.

Is it illegal? Technically. I'm nineteen. But also, this is college, alcohol is everywhere, and no one's going to care when it's just some sad sophomore having a pity party in her room by herself on a Saturday night.

Also, whatever this thing that I snagged from the dorm house's hidden stash is, it's mighty fine liquor. Burns like hell.

I examine the bottle. Ah, yes. Beer.

I take another, long drag, finishing the bottle. It's my third. I'm at the point where I can't remember when I started, but hey—I've got the whole night to myself, because some stupid god-awful terrible excuse for a neighbor decided to ghost me for a week and then—and then hook up with another girl where I could clearly hear. So fuck him, so there.

I think ... I might be a little drunk.

God, the thought is absurd. All my life I've hated alcohol, known that I hated alcohol; I still do. I've seen what this foul, bitter concoction does when other people swallow it. But I've never really considered what would happen if I did. So tonight I thought, why not see what all the fuss is all about, huh?

Maybe I would taste it and everything would make sense. That was what I was hoping, secretly, when I picked up this bottle: that I would drink it, and finally understand what it is about alcohol that's worth ... it. Worth abandoning your family, giving your children nightmares, destroying your life—giving up everything.

Giving up me.

But as far as I know, alcohol is bitter and burning and I choked on it the first sip I took.

I pick up a new bottle, glaring down at it. Alcohol: 2. Me: 0.

At least, though, my body feels looser now. Warmer. That coldness that had crept under my skin is thawing with every swig, giving way to a musky headiness that I'm not sure I enjoy, but definitely prefer to the empty hole it replaced.

Maybe this, this looseness, is why. Why my father. Why Hyunjin.

Maybe I'll never know unless I'm truly addicted to the stuff.

I glance down at the fresh bottle before me—my fourth—quizzically, unscrewing the cap and tilting it to my lips, feeling like I'm drinking fire. Only one way to find out.

The thought does not strike me as hollowly, terribly, as it should, and I recognize this with a dim, muted sense of responsibility, but I am also suddenly, sharply furious. At my math worksheet, which is not getting any easier to understand (drugs helping you focus is officially a myth, kids), at Chan for dreaming of something better and leaving me with a nightmares and a cold house, at my mother, at my father, and at Hyunjin most of all.

It had all been—it had all been so much quieter, until him. Simple. Clean. Uneventful and unimportant.

And then he slammed into my life like a human cannonball of dark-silk hair and arrogance and obnoxiously pink lips and now the walls of my mind feel sticky and messy and soft, and I hate him for it, hate him for making me feel like this, changing me like this. Without even giving me a warning!

I stand, the ground sliding deliciously under my feet, the bottle falling from my lap to the floor. I gasp in irritation, bending down to pick it up, but my vision darkens and I see stars for a moment and I decide that leaning over is not a good idea.

Fucking Hyunjin. I'm so pathetic—about to get on my hands and knees to clean my carpet so the smell won't haunt me in the morning. He should be doing this himself. In fact, yes—yes, he should be cleaning my carpet right now. This is his fault. I hate him. He can march right up and knock on my door and clean every inch of alcohol out of this goddamn carpet, I'm going to—I'm—

Suddenly, I'm falling, and I grab the door handle to hold myself up. Was I walking? I don't remember, but I'm at the door now. Right—I'm going to find Hyunjin and make him come clean up the mess I-he-we have made.

I frown. First, though, I have to pee.

I'm walking out of the bathroom when I decide that I will face Hyunjin sober, so I do not make a fool of myself. Fortunately, I still have Gatorade in the fridge. And it's the orange kind, which is the fucking worst kind, but of course Hyunjin drank all my blue—

I chug the Gatorade in three seconds, decide I am sober now, wrench open the door and march into the hallway.

It is very bright. I shield my eyes as I stumble across the hall. Hyunjin better have a good excuse for making me come all this way. Maybe he's with another girl, and I'm intruding. The thought gives me savage satisfaction. Serves him right. The fucker.

The banging on the door is startlingly loud, and I wince, looking for the source of the noise until I realize oh, right—it's me. I'm knocking.

It's very loud. I cover my ears with my hands, and then the door swings open.

I squint. It's dark inside, compared to the bright fluorescent lights of the hallway, and for a second I forget what I'm doing here. But then—

"Jiyu?"

I know that voice.

Hyunjin steps into the light, looking utterly shocked. His hair is down, and I notice it's a little longer than when I last saw him—brushing his shoulders, now. He's wearing pajama pants and a gray T-shirt with some writing on it I can't see clearly enough to read.

The thought flings unbidden into my mind that here, in this light, with his face an open book of surprise and his hair loose ... he looks oddly human. Touchable. Tangible. Unlike the unattainable, ethereal possibly-a-hallucination thing he's been in my mind all this time.

Something pings at my memory—something someone said to me a long time ago, about angels and good people—but it is evaporated by the sight of Hyunjin and the stale anger reigniting in my chest at the sight of him.

"You're in—" I start to say, but then I realize I can't remember why I was so intent on finding him. Something about my ... room? I needed him to come with me... "my room..."

Hyunjin's brows shoot up. "This is my room," he says. "Yours is over there." And then—

A smile flicks up at the corners of his mouth, unwarranted and annoying and beautiful. "You know, something about this seems familiar."

I just glare at him. "You drank all my blue Gatorade."

I didn't think his eyebrows could climb any higher, but now they do, slipping his smile off his face. "I drank ... Jiyu, are you drunk?"

I consider this for a moment, trying to count back to how many bottles I've had. "One, three, four..."

I can no longer remember what comes after four.

Something in Hyunjin's voice changes—becomes concerned. "Why ... I thought you—with alcohol...?"

"I wanted to see," I tell him, and hiccup. A giggle bursts out of me, and I blink, surprised. I didn't realize I was the kind of person who giggled. "I wanted to see what about it is so much more important than I am."

He breathes in sharply. I close my eyes, blissful. I feel like I'm floating.

Then something presses against my arm, right above my elbow. It's warm and I don't realize it's his hand until he's leading me into his room, shutting the door behind him.

I bat at his arm, pushing away. I don't want to be near him; I'm mad at him. I remember that, if nothing else, remember the fire that licks at the bones of my ribs when he's around. "Get your hands off me," I snap, striding away from him in a relatively straight line and going to sit on his couch.

Except there's not a couch there, and I remember, dimly: something about Changbin setting it on fire.

I sit on the chair instead.

By the time I'm settled, Hyunjin is walking up to me, pouring a few tablets into his palm. He sets them on the coffee table before me, along with a bottle of water, and lets out a little, incredulous chuckle. "How the tables have turned."

I look up at him, grinning without any real warmth. "Should I start my spiel about the horrors of tomato soup now?"

His brows furrow elegantly. "I did that, didn't I?"

I might have laughed, once. Now, I look at him and I remember the way the honey voice of the girl last night echoed through the walls.

So I look around instead of replying, taking the water if only because it's something I can take from him, when he's taken so much from me. "Your paintings," my mouth says, though I'd just resolved not to say anything. I study the ones I can see hanging on the wall, the one of him and Felix and the others. "Why aren't there any of you?"

He blinks at me, eyes guarded, but then again we've never been very good at being guarded—not with each other.

"Why would I want to paint myself? I have mirrors for that."

I make a point of looking around. "No, you don't."

It's true. And it's not just because these are piss-poor tiny college dorms; even mine has a mirror in the biggest room, and another in the bathroom. But Hyunjin doesn't have any, which I know without having to look inside his bathroom—I've already been there.

He says nothing. I hug my knees to my chest, picking at the plastic label on the water bottle so my eyes don't stray to the pale, corded muscles of his forearms revealed by his T-shirt, and repeat my question. "Why, Hyunjin?"

He looks away from me, jaw locking, and admits, "I wouldn't know where to start."

I look up at him through my eyelashes and think, I would, I would, because I've always been shit at drawing but I just know anybody with Hyunjin as a muse would end up with a masterpiece. I know exactly how I would do it, too: I'd start at his eyes, make them dark enough to swallow the whole page, shadow his cheekbones, sketch golden euphoria into each line, angle his body half-turned away, maybe even wings spreading out behind him, gorgeous and dark as crow's feathers; I think I've always been shit at painting, but if it was you, I would be Picasso, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, I would put them all to shame. I could be famous if I figured out how to put the you in my head on paper.

But because I am drunk and selfish and a fool, the words come out of my mouth instead as, "What's her name?"

He blinks. "What?"

"Her name," I repeat, staring steadfastly at the rim of the water bottle. I am not sure what exactly I am talking about, but I can't seem to make myself stop. "The girl you took to your room last night."

There is shocked, frosted silence, but I cannot bring myself to meet his eyes. I didn't even realize I cared who she was.

I feel him shift closer, even in the blurred air, pulling my senses taught like a rubber band. In the next moment, his fingers are curling over my jaw, not painful but firmly enough that I don't think I'd be able to pull free if I tried. He tilts my chin up, giving me no choice but to raise my gaze.

I do; and my heart leaps into my throat. He's leaning over me, one arm braced on the armrest of the chair, hair falling over his brow, reminding me once again that this is closer than we've been in a long time and my body knows it. I feel his breath ghosting over my cheek, and it sends tiny prickles spinning through my veins, but I stay still. Watch him as he studies my face with all the intensity of looking at a splatter painting in an art museum—like I hold some ephemeral, mystical secret only he can find.

His eyes widen at what he sees—I watch his irises expand, their darkness catching the light, his hand going slack on my chin. I think again of paintings of fallen angels, shadows cascading in wave-like crashes over golden shores.

Shock is laced delicately into every syllable as he breathes, "You're jealous."

I yank my chin out of his grasp, clutching my water closer to my chest and looking at him through narrowed eyes. "Why do you sound so surprised?" My voice sounds petulant even to my own inebriated ears. "It's not like you didn't know you ... didn't ... didn't know I would know."

"Because—because it's you." He's still staring at me. "You want nothing to do with me. You think I'm destructive and a jackass and you're only partly wrong. You only take care of me out of kindness, even though I remind you of—of him." He spits out the last word.

Now I'm the surprised one, as I remember—he still believes that. Still believes that, because I told him so, six nights ago.

"Everything you're saying is true," I say quietly. I lift my chin to meet his eyes, this time on my own accord. They shine like falling stars.

"You hurt me," I whisper. "Last night, when I heard you with someone else. It hurt. So, please, give me one good reason why you did it. Just give me a reason. So I know."

He swallows—I watch his throat move—and I think I see the end of the world in his eyes. Somewhere in a corner of my mind, I think that my mama always told me that the best thing to do was to tell the truth, but god do I feel like the truth has brutalized me. When did the truth get so much power to hurt us? Tell me a lie, I want to beg. Tell me that we're okay. That everything is okay. That the pain will fade, soon. Tell me something, anything, and I'll believe it. I'll believe whatever you say. Just make it good.

Eyes glittering, he rises. He pushes himself up slowly, filling my vision, until all I can see is him. I close my eyes as the warmth from his body flows over me.

With all the gentleness in the world, he presses a kiss to my brow.

"My reason," he says. "My reason is you. I was doing everything I could not to think about you."

Something muddled in me blooms with warmth.

"But, the problem is, there's never been anything harder to do in my life. I tried to forget you the usual way, but for some reason alcohol wasn't cutting it. I couldn't get you out of my head. I knew you when I was so drunk I was almost pissing myself, and somehow, I remembered you as soon as I woke up that morning after—even though I was so hungover I could barely walk. You were the only thing that was clear. I couldn't remember a single thing, but I remembered you. Somehow." His voice holds all the raggedness of a starving man. He rests his forehead against mine like it's the only thing holding him up. "I've known for a while now that you're the only person I think of when I go to bed, and the only one in a long time who I'm still thinking about when I wake up."

I don't think I'm breathing. The water bottle slips from my hands, dropping into my lap; I've forgotten it as soon as it falls.

"But then ... then you told me about your father." Suddenly, he draws back, his warmth gone. "And I realized that all I've been doing is hurting you. All I'll ever do is hurt you. And no matter what—what this is, if I let it continue, I wouldn't be able to live with myself.

"It has to end. So I'm ending it." His hand brushes my hair back from my brow, once, as tenderly as a husband to his wife; and it is only then that I recognize the gesture for what it truly is, that I understand why he has been acting like this the whole evening, touching me, coming close to me: not because he is giving in to the attraction that simmers between us, but because he is relishing in it one last time before he lets it go.

A goodbye.

"I'll call Minho. He'll be here in about ten minutes to watch over you. I'm going to Changbin's flat."

My eyes shoot open—"What?"—but it's too late; he's already standing, making his way towards the door.

And that, that simple action of him turning away ... something bloody and primal rears its head from deep, deep inside me, opens its mouth and hisses, wrong, wrong, wrong. Utterly evaporates the slightly-pleasant, heady warmth that has fogged my mind since I first opened that beer bottle, replacing it with a mindless storm of ice that dumps down my spine with as much fury as an avalanche. My vision sharpens painfully, then tunnels again, until all I can see is his back, heading towards the door.

"Hyunjin, stop."

It takes a second before I realize it was my voice that said the words, because I am distracted by the overwhelming, bone-crushing relief that sinks through me when he turns back around. That animal, hissing thing roiling under my skin calms ever so slightly, its echo sending tremors along my skin.

"What?"

I shake my head, my lips suddenly cold and numb. "You—you can't leave."

His gaze shutters. "Jiyu, I am possibly the least fit person in the world to be taking care of you right now. This is what's best for the both of us."

His words filter into my ears and right back out of them. I shake my head again, so vigorously it makes me a little dizzy. I'm standing again, the water bottle abandoned on the chair. I don't think I took one sip of it. "No. You have to stay."

Confusion and irritation spark in his gaze, as well as—curiosity. Maybe concern, too. "Why?"

I open my mouth, intent on giving him an answer ... but nothing comes out, and I realize I don't know what to say.

Because I liked being alone until you made it feel lonely.

"Because..."

Because before you walked into my life through that same door, I was made of sand, but you turned me into glass. And now I don't know how to go back—I don't know if I want to—but I do know that if you let go, I will shatter.

"Because..."

Because everyone always leaves me, but you—you. You made me shine.

Because I care about you, and I don't want to be alone.

I need you to stay.

I almost say it, then. I do. Almost let the words brimming on my tongue spill out into Hyunjin's ears. So simple, and yet they are overflowing with the most rotten, pathetic pieces of my heart.

And then I remember.

Never date a boy that can break your heart.

In that instant, my lips clamp shut. I've already said these things once, confessed to these crimes. Already let go of my inhibitions, my hesitance, and allowed myself to be vulnerable. To ask him to stay with me—face his demons and his drinking and his darkness. Ask if he would be willing to let me save him from himself.

And he said no.

And that rejection is still too raw, too cold, too real for me to ignore it. If I told him the truth of how much he mattered to me, and he left anyway ... even the thought is too much to dwell on for too long.

The truth, it seems, has become my greatest enemy, and my greatest fear.

Hyunjin is still watching me, eyes open, earnest—waiting for an explanation. Tell me. Give me something—anything.

But I remain silent. And the words that could change everything slip back down into my throat, my gut, down to that place where I can lock them away and keep them from ever escaping again.

As if he can see my cowardice, Hyunjin's gaze hardens. He lets out a little scoff—more disappointed than angry.

And then turns back around and strides for the door, his long legs eating up the distance faster than I can blink. His hand finds the doorknob.

I stop thinking. That primal instinct in me completely takes over, because I've seen this before, the stench of alcohol in the air, the anger in his eyes, his hand closed around the doorknob. I've seen this scene play out a thousand times, and every single one except the first has been in my head, a replay of the same cursed memory again and again to try to get it to hurt less.

I didn't know what it meant, then. I didn't understand irrevocability; didn't understand that things could last forever, and fathers could leave, just like that, and never come back no matter how hard I wished, no matter how long my mother waited by the window, staring at the drive he walked away on.

But I learned.

I think of windowsills, of empty driveways, of waiting. I think of cheap whiskey and doors slamming and the ringing finality of losing something you didn't realize you could lose.

My body is moving before my mind registers it.

Suddenly, I am standing in the little space between Hyunjin and the door, shoving his hand away from the doorknob. He blinks, as surprised as I am, and his irritation fades for a moment as he looks at me, eyes widened. I realize how close we are now in the same moment that his gaze flickers to my lips, that dark light I have come to know like an old friend entering his eyes. He tears them back up to meet mine before that light consumes them, a wall snapping up over his features, like he's been down this road before and already knows how it ends, and says shortly, "Let me go."

"No," I bite out, willing my voice not to betray to skittery, flashing fear coursing through my veins, the deja vu that hounds the backs of my eyelids and tunnels my vision, the animal inside me that has taken over control.

He glares at me and tries to step around me, but I move and block him again. I can no longer feel my body—everything has narrowed down to the pounding in my head, my heart, of he must not leave again. His gaze narrows, and he reaches again for the doorknob, but I catch his hand in mine and push it back down. "Stay," I order him, sharpening my tone in order to hide the plea. I might be begging underneath, but Hyunjin doesn't have to know that.

His eyes flare in anger at the command, something feral curling over his face, and I feel a spark of guilt that cuts through it all, because I know—I know. He's told me how he hates being judged, being ordered around, hates feeling like he doesn't have control over his own life. I was so sure I would never do that to him—never remind him of his parents, of the reason why he drinks. But now I am, and I can't help it even as I know I am the reason he looks like a cornered animal right now.

"Stay," I repeat, because I am ugly and selfish and scared.

And he snarls, "Make me."

I swallow hard, because my traitorous mind is going immediately to bad, bad places at his words. I am all too aware of his breath against my face, his body trapping mine against the door, his hand still curled in my own, soft and delicate.

My reason is you. I was doing everything I could not to think about you.

But this time, I don't push them away. Because his other hand is still on the door, and there's still anger in his eyes.

I think, I know I've seen those eyes before and now I remember them. I should've known the first second I saw his face that he was the leaving kind, the kind that would always be gazing off towards the next whimsical station of life. Hyunjin's face screams temporary, screams transient, screams brief, like a heart-wrenching movie that you know will come to an end, like the brittle sweetness of fall, like the last glimpse of the sun as it ducks beneath the horizon. Hyunjin defines his life by defying permanence, by living solely in the moment, by drinking and dancing and reveling in his own ephemerality. And I know as I look at him that asking him to stay would be like asking a movie to suspend its climax, never resolving; to beg the leaves to keep their colors, remain red and gold for a little bit longer; to throw my hands up to the sun and try to push it back into the sky, stop it from setting and leaving me in the dark. Hyunjin found his freedom in the ever-changing - ever-moving from one place to the next. He took control of the uncontrollable nature life can have.

If I cannot control my choices, then nothing will.

Fragile—just like Felix warned. And I ... I have only ever wanted someone who could be the opposite of that. Someone who would stay. And it was foolish of me to ever open my door and ask it of someone, but especially, especially him.

Because Hyunjin is falling stars and whiskey breath and fragility personified. He is everything I do not need right now. And yet I still let myself take him in, let that quiet weed grow inside me, the one that whispers more, more, more, the one that wants...

And now we're here.

Him with his hand on the doorknob, ready to leave, like we both always knew he would.

Me begging him to stay.

Make me.

Some part of me knows that if he goes tonight, he won't ever come back. The part of me that grew up walking through a house littered with pieces—empty beer bottles in the trash, dark strands of hair on the couch, rumpled clothes shoved into the back of the closet—but never a real father. Never what there should have been. Instead, I found the pieces he'd left behind in his haste to get away, and my mother, a piece herself, standing by the window until her feet bled, her skin a shell with nothing but emptiness inside.

No. Whatever measure of fondness I've grown to hold for the strange, twisted, unnamable thing that lies between Hyunjin and me, that curls around me like a lover in the moment before sleep catches me up in its grasp ... I will not change myself, destroy myself, to keep it alive. I will not go through that again. I will not follow the exact same path as my mother, will not wither away until I am made of thin sparrow bones and regret, all because of some boy I couldn't bring myself to keep away from. I will do anything to stop myself from becoming my mother.

I will do anything to make him stay.

It occurs to me, through the haze of panic and memories, the power he has over me. I think I would have set fire to the world, then, to get him to take his hand off that door.

Instead, however, I set fire to us, and that is enough.

Make me.

I watch Hyunjin as he notices my throat bob, sees my lips part. Notices the shift in my expression, my body language. Watch him blink in surprise—then blink again, as if trying to clear the fog from his mind, clear his thoughts—and look at me so completely I couldn't move if I wanted to. His gaze pins me in place, dark and unholy in the shadows from the overhead light.

We've walked this path before—toed this line of darkness and desire. But this time, it's me who's initiating it, rather than pulling away.

My reason is you.

Slowly, carefully, I shift my grip on his hand, wrapping my palm around his wrist and bringing his arm over my waist, his hand searing against my skin through the thin fabric. His breath becomes shallow, unsteady, but he stays still—waiting. Watching me with those dark eyes. Letting me make the first move, holding back from pushing himself on me, even though I can see the desire written plainly, painfully, across his features.

His fingers still curl over the hem of my shirt and the bare skin beneath, though, and it sends a shiver through me that I feel all too clearly down to my toes.

I don't think. If I think, this fog will clear, this deliciously cloudy heat that blocks the real world from coming into focus. I don't want the real world anymore. It's harsh and it's scary and it hurts and if this will stop me from having to go back to it, so be it.

I think I might hate myself more than anything else by tomorrow. But here, right now, tomorrow is far enough away that I can pretend it doesn't exist if I try hard enough.

My back is pressed up against the door, which means Hyunjin has to hold himself over me to keep us apart. I feel the strength it's taking him—feel his body shudder. He has better self-restraint than I do. We are so close. God, we are so close, and it is making my body sing, my very being straining to knit our skin together. To line his body against my own.

So I do.

And damn us both if it doesn't feel like coming home.

I press against him everywhere, pinning my body to the door and sending waves of electricity down to my toes. I have never been this close to anyone before, ever. We fit together perfectly, just like I always knew we would, like puzzle pieces. No—puzzle pieces are brittle and made of cardboard and half the time a third of them are missing anyway. We fit together like rain, like fireworks, like the tide pulling in to rest its weary head along the sand.

Heady adrenaline pumps through every inch of my body, making my skin respond like sparks to his touch. I reach up and slip my arms around his neck—more, more, more, my mind sings—until the distance between our mouths is almost completely gone. I feel his body let out a quiet sigh, shoulders loosening a fraction. Our bodies mold together like molten gold, from the line of his hips to the echo of his rapid heartbeat, resonating through me from where our chests are pressed together.

I tilt my mouth over his—and pause. Rationality hits me, finally, in an ice-cold wave. What am I doing? Hyunjin is ... Hyunjin is personalized danger, an arrow pieced together with everything I've taught myself to guard my heart against. Am I really about to throw all of it to the wind for him? For this?

"Jiyu?" Hyunjin whispers against my mouth, and the uncertainty in his voice breaks my heart.

I was doing everything I could not to think about you, because it hurt too much.

I've known for a while that you're the only person I think of when I go to bed, and the only one in a long time who I'm still thinking about when I wake up.

I couldn't remember a single thing, but I remembered you.

You were the only thing that was clear.

"Do you want this?" I ask, my voice more air than words, breathy and silken in a way I don't recognize, brought out by the heat of his body where our skin touches, my muted pain and fear, the intoxicating, sweet little bit of space between our lips, so easily closed.

He closes his eyes, and when they open again, his gaze is burning coals and tidal waves and crow's wings, cutting into me.

"Do you?"

I curl my fingers around the nape of his neck and bring my lips to his.

The feeling of it is enough to make me forget that neither of us said yes.

-

After, when dawn breathes through the fabric of my curtains and stains the room red and gold, he rolls against my side and tucks his chin behind my ear. Can you feel this? he whispers to me, voice soft as sparrow's wings, roughened by sleep.

I close my eyes and listen to the sound of his breath, of his hands tracing lazy whorls over my skin as if I was stained glass, his greatest masterpiece, and not a stolen night poisoned with the sweetest, deadliest kind of emotion we have built far too many walls against to let them come crashing down for no reason but each other. I let myself forget for a little longer and nod against him and whisper back, Everywhere.

He makes a soft sound that echoes through the hollow shell of my body, my brittle, empty bones, and it almost convinces me that what we are doing is good, is healthy, is lasting. It almost convinces me that we are worth fighting for. That this hazy drunken almost-love is enough to throw away my entire life, my entire world, to try and make it into a new one with him.

And god, I know even as I remind myself why that is stupid and foolish and the exact same mistake my mother made that it would be so, so terribly sweet.

-

I slip out of his bed before the sense of my own cowardice can overwhelm me, leaving him tangled in the sheets with the sunlight seeking his cheek.

I don't have it in me to search for my clothes naked, so I grab the first thing I can find—a dark brown shirt with buttons down the front—and go through the room, removing any trace of me.

I'm at the door when he speaks.

"Jiyu."

It would be easy, so easy, to run—to grab the door and slip out now, before he has the chance to open his eyes and remember. I'm so close. But the finality in his voice, the way he says my name—not a question, but a fact, like he knew it would be me before he opened his eyes, like somewhere in his mind, it is always me he wakes up next to ... it pauses me from my escape.

I can't yet bring myself to turn around. To look upon his sun-streaked face, hair tousled from my own fingers, skin bare. I would lose my resolve in an instant.

"What are you doing?" He asks, voice rough and almost wondrous. I wonder what he's seeing right now. If he's seeing a girl wearing his shirt or a girl trying to leave before he wakes up.

"I'm going back to my room," I say, and as quiet as I make my voice it still rings like a tolling bell in the air. I close my eyes with a wince. Better to rip off the bandaid. "Last night—" I stop. Breathe. "Last night should never have happened."

I hear the breath he sucks in, sharp in my ears. "Jiyu..."

But I am already gone.

-

It is around an hour later when it hits me—the guilt, the consequences, the sour taste in my mouth. All of it rivaled only by the immense self-hatred that slithers at my ankles as I walk, curling against my bare skin like a ghost until it is stuck to me like paint, like ash, like blood.

I've known for a while that you're the only person I think of when I go to bed, and the only one in a long time who I'm still thinking about when I wake up.

When I open my email, I see the message sent last night, unread.

Dear Bahng Jiyu,

Congratulations! You have been accepted into the year-abroad program of SYA Beijing. Please confirm

I click out of the tab before I can read the rest.

Chapter Text

I am avoiding everyone who cares about me.

I don't have the energy to lie to myself and say I'm just tired or processing, because I'm not. There is nothing left to process; I am instead avoiding my friends because they will know instantly something is different and attempt to help me through it.

The last thing I want is help.

I push my body through normal, mechanical functions. My head is killing me; I take an aspirin. My body is dirty; I strip off my clothes from the night before and shower, moving through the motions—shampoo, condition, rinse—without thinking about them. My room is a mess; I grab some Clorox and start with the beer stain on the carpet, then the rest of the space.

Not once do I let my mind in. Not once, in the entire two hours it takes before my room is unrecognizable, do I let my thoughts inhabit my physical tasks. If I do, I will see him. In the aspirin that I had only bought for him, in the memory of his hands tracing up and down my skin, in the alcohol that started this entire goddamn fiasco.

I cannot let him in.

I have already allowed too much.

Jisung and Seungmin call me for the fourth time as I am starting to clean out my kitchen, so I silence my phone and leave it in the bathroom. It's best that they do not come close to me, now. Not here or ever.

I am a terrible friend, I think, for letting them in this much. For pretending that they could ever rely on someone like me, crashing through life pretending to be whole.

This is what's best for all of us.

I know that my avoidance, my withdrawal, is only feeding into my self-loathing, but I cannot help it. If I was a better person, I would never have left that room with some shabby explanation of regretting what had happened. If I was a better person, I would have stayed. Talked to the other person in the bed and explained to them why we had been foolish. Why I had been foolish.

I didn't know that wanting someone could be ugly, and selfish, and sick.

If I was a better person, I would have gone to see my friends immediately afterwards. Told them all about it like friends are supposed to do, let them support me and tell me it's okay, we're here for you.

But I learned that words could lie the first time someone told me everything would be okay, and now I think I have grown deaf to that specific piece of comfort. I am not a better person; I'm not even a good person. I am cracked and bleeding and broken inside, and Hyunjin—

Hyunjin put his fingers on either side of my chest and wrenched it open with his bare hands.

And now I am kneeling on the kitchen floor, my elbows deep under the cabinet under the sink, blaming him for my own selfishness and attempting to sew myself up with thread as thin as a sparrow's wings.

I do not think I could hate myself more.

-

After a couple hours, it begins to fade.

Not completely, but in the wake of everything that happened last night—the quiet of my room, the solitude ... it slows things down. Forces the roiling mess of my mind that I am holding at arm's length to calm with every passing minute, if only a tiny amount.

By afternoon, I have become a dull, easy numbness. My loathing, my guilt, my selfishness, have dimmed, and I am immensely thankful for it.

And then the knock comes at my door.

My mind implodes. In an instant, my body has filled itself with voices screaming, surging, shouting it's him, it's happening again, he's here and you will have to face everything that you've done—

"Jiyu?"

The voice is muffled through the door, but it is unmistakably, definitely, disappointingly not his.

My knees wobble, and for a moment it is all I can do to breathe. To press my thoughts, cresting like the tide, away from me again, press my body into clean stiffness.

I open the door.

For a second, I am tremendously grateful that it is Felix.

Because, in that second, the sight of him is so surprising that my vision tunnels—a distraction. I stop seeing the background, stop seeing the outline of the door just across the hall, so close I could reach it in four steps.

Then it hits me that it is Felix, and my mind surges once again.

I push it away—I am becoming quite good at pushing things away—and muster my best smile.

"Yes?"

Felix's eyes miss nothing, and for a moment he just stands there, taking me in. His brows knit together, but ... thank the stars, not with concern. I wouldn't be able to look at him if it was concern on his face.

This is who I am, I want to scream. Don't be concerned for me. I am the evil one. I am the one who breaks things and leaves them bleeding, the one who hurts inside, the one who cannot heal. I am the one you warn people about. I am the one you warned me about.

I am the one who was easy to break.

But I am still numb, so I lock those voices far away. And I let Felix in.

-

"This is the cleanest college dorm I've ever seen."

My smile sticks to my face like plaster, but I force warmth into it as I look at Felix. "I've been re-organizing."

He casts me that same look again, not quite concern, but ... something else. Something thoughtful.

It unsettles me. I say, "What can I help you with, Felix?"

It's bullshit. We both know it. I am completely ignoring the elephant in the room—really, the elephant in the room across the hall—even though there is no reason why Felix would be here in the first place if not because of said elephant.

But, for some reason I thank the stars for, he decides to humor me. "I wanted to check on you. Jisung and Seungmin stopped by Changbin's flat this morning. They seemed pretty concerned."

I picture them in my mind, trying to imagine their eyes and their faces, creased with worry, without it sending a knife of guilt straight to my gut and twisting. "You're very considerate."

Felix snorts. "This was only half my doing. If I hadn't offered to talk to you, I think Jisung might have resorted to coming at your door with a chainsaw."

"Seungmin confiscated his chainsaw last year, though," I murmur, the response slipping out from whatever rational corner of my brain is left.

"Seungmin would have helped."

I am suddenly, sharply annoyed with Felix, for knowing my friends this well. For coming here with all his warmth and smiles and familiarity and reminding me of everything I have locked myself out of. I wish I could find the courage to tell him it is too late. I have already swallowed the key.

"Well, thank you for stopping by, but I'm doing fine," I tell him with a wide, bland smile that feels glued on with wet plaster. "I just needed some time to myself."

Felix's face does not falter, and I wonder how much of me he is seeing through, as surely as tissue paper. "He's not."

I swallow too quickly and almost choke. "Sorry?"

"He's not," Felix repeats. "Doing fine. In case you were wondering."

My walls are beginning to crack. I desperately wish I could shove Felix out of the door, cover him before I splinter and my emotions roar forth and engulf him as surely as they have engulfed me. Don't you see I'm trying to protect you? Don't you see I'm trying to protect him? I am a bomb. I only know how to destroy. This is me putting up caution tape. This is me putting up hazard signs. This is me being a coward.

"Oh."

Felix smiles, a real one—the kind I've almost forgotten the look of—and the understanding on his face makes me want to scream. He tilts his head to the side, and then he says smoothly, "Do you know how Hyunjin and I met?"

That name. It splinters through me, rendering my voice useless. It is all I can do to shake my head.

Felix's eyes curve up, just slightly—another smile. A small part of me turns bitter with envy at that, that he can smile so much, so readily, so naturally. But the rest of me is just grateful. If Felix stopped smiling at me, I would know for certain that I had truly become a monster.

"He had just transferred to my school. We were both in the eighth grade. I didn't even know him then, but—he was getting into fights. A lot of them. I was walking to the bus one day and found him sitting on a bench, alone, with several different bruises and a split lip."

My mind is both spinning like a plastic top and blank at the same time. I don't know where he's going with this. I'm not sure if I want to.

"I wasn't planning on approaching him," Felix says, and this time there's definitely a smile in his voice. "But something about him ... well, I'm sure you know how it is.

"He was watching me the whole time I was walking over, but he didn't say anything. I asked him, 'does it hurt?'. I remember this exactly—remember every word, because he then told me, 'it always hurts.'" Felix casts me a dry look. "We were eighth graders, mind you. Way too small to be overflowing with teenage angst."

Something that might have once been a smile brushes at the edges of my mouth.

"So I laughed, because I thought he was funny, and then I sat down. He was so surprised; I don't think anyone had ever reacted like that before. Come closer, I mean, instead of walking away.

"I asked him if he was waiting for his ride, but he didn't answer, so I offered to have my dad drive him home. I thought he'd agreed, but when my father came to pick me up he just waved and started walking away, down the street. That was when I realized that he could've left at any time—that he was the one waiting with me, not the other way around. I called out to him and said, because I could think of nothing else, 'Wait—what's your name?'

"'Hyunjin,' he said. 'It's Hyunjin.'"

I let out a breath as quietly as possible, but Felix still hears it shudder. He offers me a sad smile. "I should've known then to stay away, but of course I didn't. We became best friends. I pulled him away from fights before he got in trouble, which a lot of times meant that I would be drawn into it along with him—I should've known then that being with him was as good as setting yourself on fire.

"But he fought for me, no matter what—and he knew how to laugh. Even though he didn't do it often. At the time I thought he was worth burning for."

I look up at his face. Something from this conversation has ravaged me, leaving me ragged and raw, even though I have said little throughout it. I think of Hyunjin sitting on that school bench, with his dark hair and his eyes ringing with defiance, daring the world to try and manage him. I think of how Felix must have seen him then, maybe somewhat similar to how I had: like that one painting in an art museum that catches your eyes above all the others, mystifying and endlessly intriguing. One that lures you in—portraits are best appreciated close-up, after all.

I wonder briefly if Felix thought Hyunjin was beautiful enough to be an angel too.

"And now?"

Felix shrugs. "Now, I guess I'm ash on the wind."

And at that, my mind finally quiets.

I can see Felix is about to turn to go—whatever he came here to say, he has said it, although I am still not sure if it was a second warning or an attack or some form of blackmail. Despite the fact that all those options contain malevolent intent, I suddenly and desperately want to believe none of them held malevolent intent from Felix. The realization barrels into me that I do not know what I will do if he goes. There is no more laundry to fold, no more dishes to clean, nothing to occupy my thoughts any longer. That—and the fact that I have not spoken to a single other soul today—prompts my next words.

"You were right, you know."

Felix turns, blinking in surprise; I can tell he wasn't expecting me to speak.

"When you told me to end it while I still could."

For a moment, he looks confused, and then his face crinkles in understanding. That day—that day and those words he said to me, his warning that has lingered in my mind ever since like the last glimmers of a sunset over the horizon.

I have to ask you to break it off, while you still can, before it ends up killing you both ... because it very well may.

Things like this are made to destroy us.

He dips his chin—not a nod, not gloating, but ... understanding. Acknowledging. "I'm sorry."

I attempt to smile, but I cannot remember how to turn and twist my features in the right directions, and it just ends up hurting, so I stop. It's okay breathes over the seam of my lips and is gone before I can think to open them.

"But just so you know, Jiyu..."

Now I am the one looking up in surprise. He catches my gaze from across the room, and I think that maybe Hyunjin isn't the only one who looks like he could have angel's blood running through his veins.

"I regret what I said to you, that day," Felix says softly. "My words were more jealous than truthful. For all my talk of looking out for Hyunjin, I was really just looking out for myself."

His words hit me like cold water, ripping the careful wall I have constructed between my body and my mind to shreds. The thoughts come pouring in with such intensity I want nothing more than to fall to my knees and curl up into a ball on the ground.

I open my mouth to address Felix, but then I look up to see the room, and realize that he is already gone.

My words were more jealous than truthful.

And then, in a sudden flash of clarity, I finally understand.

Immediately, I feel like an idiot, but as of right now the list of all the reasons I should despise myself is already long enough I just search for the O's and tack on oblivious. I had been so consumed by my own haze of panic I hadn't even stopped to wonder why Felix had listened to my friends and came to me in the first place. Why he thought he was the best person to talk to me. Why he'd sought me out—not once but twice.

But now ... I think, again, of that look on his face, the one that colored his features as soon as he saw me opening the door. Not concern—no, of course not concern. Something more.

Recognition.

Maybe Felix's words to me that day held a different meaning than what I'd assumed. Maybe, rather than some sage-like, sudden spark of wisdom, or even a snide remark trying to make me think ill of Hyunjin, Felix had been doing what he always told me he does:

Protecting the person he cared about.

Not Hyunjin, like I'd thought ... but me.

Because Felix and I are the same. That was why he spoke to me then, and why he came to me now.

I'm worried about Hyunjin.

Surprisingly, you're not the first.

I wasn't the first. Felix was.

Because Felix loved Hyunjin, too.

I think of the quiet gold lilting Felix's voice, the way his eyes softened when he talked about Hyunjin, the careful weariness when we first met and he thought I was another of Hyunjin's heartbreaks asking for a second chance. I remember seeing something familiar in that gaze, something I recognized but couldn't quite place. True brokenness knows how to hide.

Maybe, in his eyes, he was helping me—helping me from ending up like him. Sparing me from the pain he'd felt, the heartbreak. Sparing me from the torture that was loving Hwang Hyunjin.

These kinds of things are made to destroy us.

Which he knew—after all, they'd destroyed him, too.

I should've known then that being with him was as good as setting yourself on fire.

For the first time since I can remember, some wrangled form of a laugh escapes me.

If Felix was trying to warn me ... trying to stop me from hurtling down the same path he did when he met a boy with bruised knuckles and dark eyes in eighth grade ... he didn't do a very good job of it.

I am not afraid of fire; I am not afraid of getting burned.

And either way, it's still too late.

I am already ash on the wind.

-

That night, I wait until it's dark enough that no one will hear me slip from the dorm house to the communal garage.

Then I get in my car and drive. I pull into the first parking lot I see, walk around to the back, and pop the trunk.

And then I lie back and watch the stars.

-

You have to tell me something, then.

Mm?

As leverage. That way, if you ever tell my secret, I can tell yours. And then we both go down.

Seems a little anarchical, don't you think? That in the end, we're still both going to lose?

Chapter Text

I feel ridiculous.

I honestly do not know what I'm doing here. Or what I'm wearing. But I was struck with the monstrous task of choosing an outfit to throw on today, and because I am so nervous my knees literally wobbled when I opened my door to step out into the hallway, every single item in my closet looked hideous.

I finally settled on a summer dress that is gorgeous but has been slowly wilting in the back of my closet all the same. Beauty has no marker against bad habits, it seems.

Maybe that, in truth, was why I chose to wear it today—as something symbolic. A way of taking into my hands the soft things that I had never thought myself capable (worthy) of holding, and telling them I'm sorry it took me so long.

All in all, it itches like hell.

I guess there's no going back now.

Because I'm standing at Hyunjin's door, my fist raised to knock ... but it's already opening.

I am speechless for a moment—I'd assumed I would have a few precious seconds between when I knocked and when the sight of him undoubtedly knocked me off my feet to collect my thoughts, but here he is, no warning, no preparation time, as usual. Hitting me full-on in the face.

I brace myself for the overthinking to slam in, but instead, all that my whiplashed mind comes up with is fuck, he's beautiful.

Every time I see him, it never lessens. My gaze is swept into his and I am instantly flung back into sunlight-stained rooms, the feel of his sheets sliding over my skin, the soft, quiet vulnerability in his eyes. Hope whispered into my ear like a secret with all the desperation of a falling star.

The Adam's apple in his throat glides down and up, forcing my attention back to the present. "Felix told me you'd be coming," he says by way of explanation, his voice low and rough as sandpaper—as if he hadn't spoken to anyone in a while. 

Right. Of course. Felix.

I hadn't seen him since that day—that day of aftermath, of repercussions, when I thought my emotions might very well eat me alive and Felix had sought me out to give me some much-needed advice.

That day was a week away now.

A week I had spent entirely at Seungmin's dorm, eating ramen and my feelings on his couch. No longer hiding from my thoughts, my guilt, my fear, but—processing them. Taking the time to breathe, to talk to my friends, to sort myself out. Clean up all the messy bleeding bits and pieces I had been torn into, dutifully as a mop on the floor, scrubbing away the stains.

I knew I'd need to be at my best when I faced Hyunjin.

And yet, even with that week, even with all that time devoted solely to gathering myself...

I look at him, and I am once again unraveled.

"Right," I say to Hwang Hyunjin, and nod, folding the hem of my dress between my fingers. "Can I come in?"

-

His room hurts to look at.

The memory of that night pierces me like a knife in the gut everywhere I look. I wish I had been drunker, so I would not have to recall every part of this in vivid detail: the chair, the door, the pictures framing the walls, the signature that once captivated me so much accosting my gaze as brightly as a meteor in the sky.

I think if I see his bedroom, I will fall apart.

So I stand, knowing I must look as stiff as hell but not being able to help it. Not being able to make myself sit in that exact same chair, the same start of that night—

There is a puff as Hyunjin drops into the chair instead, leaning back and hooking his elbows over the armrests like some lounging prince. He looks up at me through hooded eyes.

There is nothing that I can read in that expression. Nothing familiar. A slate wiped clean.

It seems I am not the only one who has spent the last week preparing.

Before I can look at him too closely—analyze that gaze like evidence in an English essay—I clear my throat and launch myself into the lines I've spent the past week rehearsing.

"I made a speech." My voice comes out too high, too wavering; I falter, but it's too late to stop now. "As to why we can't ... continue this."

His eyebrows arch. "Oh?"

The sarcasm in that one, calculated word invites a bite into my tone. "Yes, and I spent a lot of time on it, so you're going to listen."

He folds his hands and leans back, waiting. Still watching me with that cool, blank gaze. It feels like a punishment, but I realize I deserve it.

"I don't want to hear your speech, Jiyu," Hyunjin says quietly. "Not if it's just going to be excuses for why you came to my room drunk, kissed me like it meant something, slept with me, and then told me it never should have happened and ghosted me for a week."

God, he's gotten good at hiding his hurt. If I didn't know him better, I'd see his cold, calm expression and think he felt nothing at all. But I know Hwang Hyunjin. I know that his real, authentic self is so burdened by emotion the air is thick with it, and anything less means something is definitely, definitely wrong.

"It's not an excuse," I say. I have decided I will not be anything but honest with him from now until the last time our eyes meet. "It's ... an explanation. You deserve one."

His eyes flash dangerously, but he says nothing—granting me permission to continue with his silence.

I take a deep breath and barrel forward. "We are, by far, the most toxic relationship I've ever heard of." Good start, Jiyu. "We're—you and I—we're not healthy, okay? We both know it. We do things for all the wrong reasons. And I know you don't think that matters, but ... I want you to understand what that means for me.

"All of my life, falling in love has been my greatest fear. Because when I was ten my father left for the pub one night like he always did, except he didn't come stumbling back home reeking of seven different kinds of alcohol and slurring his words so much he couldn't speak. He didn't come back at all.

"I watched my mother die inside every day she had to live without him. I watched her try to piece herself back together after he left, take all of her heartbreak and shove it into a neat little corner she didn't have to think about. I watched her lose herself, waste her life and then waste mine when she didn't have any of hers left. My college fund went down the drain after she was fired; she stopped caring about my education, stopped taking care of me. Just ... stopped. Like a record player if someone had ripped off the needle.

"But she still loved him. She still waited every night, even after he left us and left only ruin behind, hoping he would remember us and come home so she would have the chance to forgive him. She had this—this certain spot, right by the window, with a perfect view of the driveway. She stood there so much she made divots in the floor. I thought that was what love was, okay? I thought love was a weapon designed to cut you in the worst ways and poison you until your heart stopped beating and you stopped playing music.

"So I guarded myself against it. I never let myself love, because I was so, so scared of turning into my mother. Of turning into someone who waited at windowsills for their killers to walk right back in and stab them in the back again. Someone who gave up on their child, their life, someone who just—gave up.

"But somehow..." I choke off, steadying my breath. "Somehow, you walked in without asking and I fell for you anyway."

Hyunjin isn't blank anymore. He's sitting impossibly still, rigid, his languid attitude gone. Instead, his attention is completely, wholly focused on me. On that terrible word that has meant the downfall of nations.

"And it scares me," I tell him, my voice breaking. "It scares me so much, Hyunjin. And then that night ... that night, everything I'd feared would happen happened, and you were going to leave, and I did the only thing I could think of to get you to stay.

"And I ... I knew it would work. I knew kissing you—crossing that line with you—would work. Because I already loved you. And you ... you loved me too. And that was what I thought it meant—please understand me. I thought love was meant to be a way to use people. That's all I'd ever known.

"And I'm so fucking sorry that I did that to you. I was so, so afraid of becoming my mother, and everything I'd done and worked for had turned out to be for nothing because you slipped past every single wall I put up faster than I could keep building them, but it turns out I was never becoming my mother after all—I was becoming my father."

Tears slip past my cheeks. "I used you like he did. Everything I've been doing was what he did. I've been so—god, I've been so fucking consumed by my fear, by my selfishness, that I let my love be cruel. I let it ruin us both.

"We're toxic, okay? Because—because of me. Because you only ever wanted something to make you feel again—something short and sharp and temporary and beautiful—and I only ever wanted to stop myself from falling. To stop myself from wanting you. I knew it would be wrong to ask more of you, to ask you to change for me, but I did anyway.

"And I realize I could've accomplished the same task today by just avoiding you forever, but it felt wrong to have 'this shouldn't have happened' be the last thing I ever said to you. And I wanted to tell you that I'm sorry, and we can't continue—this. Whatever it is. It'll end up breaking us both."

I set my shoulders, done, and exhale deeply through my mouth; I wait for his reaction.

It does not come.

Instead he is completely silent, such a mess of emotions roiling behind his dark eyes I know not even the best hider, the thickest mask, could conceal the brokenness there.

For a long time—long enough my knees threaten to wobble again, and I think I might die if I stand there any longer—Hyunjin says absolutely nothing.

I almost miss it when he says, his voice as soft as sparrow feathers, as soft as sunlight, "Everything you're saying is true."

I let out a forced breath.

In health class, they told us that to minimize injury after a bad fall, the best thing you could do was to roll upon impact. I was dubious then, but now I know for a fact that all the stop, drop and roll shit was a lie: I am rolling, and rolling, and rolling as hard as I can, and yet I still barely manage to swallow the pain that engulfs my bedraggled heart.

"So you agree with me, then? That we should break it off?"

His eyes catch mine, and he flashes me something cracked and chipped and beautiful, some semblance of a grin. "Oh, not at all."

My body screeches to a halt. Every word I'd been thinking of to tell Jisung and Seungmin when they asked what happened to spare myself from the horrible pity I'd see in their eyes vanishes. Just empties right out of my head.

"What?"

"You forgot one part of this story, Jiyu." He stands and steps close to me in one fluid motion, and every bone in my body melts a little bit because it's missed him, and I've missed him, even when I didn't let myself realize it. I could have been cold my whole life but here, with him, I finally feel warm.

"If you've become your father, then I'm your mother. And unlike her, I know what love is." His eyes are burning, burning like coals, flames I can't help but reach for. "And I'm more than happy to wait by a windowsill for you to return."

I have stopped breathing. Somewhere inside my chest, what is left of my heart has ceased to beat.

All I can feel is him.

His raises his hand, gently, and brushes his knuckles across my cheek. "So that's all you have to do, okay? Break the cycle. Make our love better than your parents'." His gaze searches mine in earnest, stars lighting and falling in the spaces behind his eyelids. "I don't care if you break us both. Break me. Ruin me. Ruin me a thousand times—I don't care. Just come back."

I clench my teeth against my sob. "Hyunjin—"

"It's your choice," he says, softly, calmly. Brushes his knuckles against my cheek again, heartbreakingly familiar. Mirroring the movement he'd made all those nights ago, as I was falling, lying together on my bedroom floor. "You don't have to return to me. I know there's not much for you here—just bad decisions and the beer smell you've tried so hard to forget. But no matter what you do, I'm still going to wait, alright? Wherever you are, I'll still be there for you, waiting. I don't mind. I could stand waiting my whole life, in fact, as long as it's for you."

I can't breathe. This—him—it's too much. I had a plan when I came here; it was good, too. I had practiced what I would say, practiced how it would go—how it was supposed to go—and now...

Now, I am on my knees at the mercy of Hwang Hyunjin yet again, my heart in his hands, not knowing how it got there or which one of us placed it in his palms.

I hate that somehow he still can say exactly the thing that will make me break. Exactly the thing that will make me yearn with my whole being to fold myself into his arms again, to give in and let us ruin ourselves. I hate that the only thing I have ever wished for my whole life is to have someone who is willing to wait for me on the other end, someone who will be there no matter what, and now he chooses to offer it, when I am already so weak.

Weak, because every night since three weeks ago I have slept among the memories of Hwang Hyunjin's body between my sheets, his hair spilling over my pillow, and his voice whispering sleep-softened promises in my ear. And since then I have not been able to fall asleep without feeling cold.

I know what an angel looks like when I see one.

You don't even know my surname.

Never date a boy that can break your heart.

People broken in the same places fit together best.

Things like this are made to destroy us.

He isn't even yours to lose.

I know I've seen those eyes before.

But something about him ... well, I'm sure you know how it is.

I could stand waiting my whole life, in fact, as long as it's for you.

Chapter Text

There is a word, in Chinese, that does not quite translate into any other language. I learned it when I was traveling last summer, preparing for the trip to Beijing I had hoped so badly to be able to take the next year.

缘分. Simply put, it describes the connection between two people that is written in the stars. Fate, I guess. If a couple has 缘分, destiny has tied them together.

I, of course, consider myself long above believing such foolish notions. Star-crossed lovers and soulmates and love at first sight are for people who believe in love, and we all know she abandoned me when I was thirteen and the only thing I have left of her now is shivering moments of longing for her like a blanket to draw over my aching, empty body.

And yet, some frivolous, weak thing inside me that I should've killed long ago awakens at the thought of fate and whispers, stained glass, sandcastles, full days at the beach.

And that part of me, as much as I try to silence it, wonders if maybe there was something else that pulled Hyunjin to my room that first night, that first fateful meeting that sent my life spiraling into chaos that burned like falling angels. Something other than drunken, oblivious chance.

Chance that he would be suffering the same inner turmoil of the man who had given me so many scars.

Chance that he would be the kind of person that blazed through life like a fallen star, never settling, never stopping to rest—fragile in a way I had only ever seen before in my mother.

Chance that he would be able to make me fall for him as easily as the rain, take my crooked fingers and cover them with his own, despite everything I'd built up against that very idea—all the jagged words and broken pieces of my soul I'd used as a barricade from love. From the very whisper of it.

And god, he did, with his twisted, cunning sunlight-stained bedrooms and lopsided grins and empty promises that still echo in my ears.

Do you want this?

Do you feel this?

Yes, I yearn to scream. Yes, and it's all your fault.

For all his echoes of my past—all the ghosts of my shattered family he summoned up for me as surely as a sparrow slamming against glass—Hyunjin does an awful good job of reminding me of the future.

Never date a boy that can break your heart.

And maybe ... maybe that was why. Maybe, if I was humoring all of this destiny and fate shit, someone up there had decided that my boundaries weren't as good for me as I'd thought, and sent someone to break them down.

Maybe he truly was a fallen angel, something divine, sent to my door for a reason.

Maybe I was always meant to be ruined by Hwang Hyunjin.

The thought is so absurd I could almost laugh. I guess that would explain why I've never been able to get rid of him.

Or why I've never truly wanted to.

Or, of course, the world is sensible and cynical and even if destiny and fate were real once, they certainly knew well enough to die out a long time ago, and Hyunjin is just a boy with dark eyes, and I am just someone who is lonely, and hollow, and searching for something to fill myself with so I don't have to live alongside my own emptiness all the time.

The logical part of me, the hard and brittle part, knows that the latter is almost certainly the truth.

However, that other part—the one composed of voices that whisper and beg and dream...

That other part is tired of being chewed up and spit out—brutalized—by the truth. And it wants to believe that even though Hyunjin and I are wrong for each other, even though we are both meteors spinning dangerously out of control, there is something, somewhere, that is rooting for us. Fighting for us. Hoping we'll win out, in the end. That little piece of me wants more than anything to believe in 缘分.

Selfishly, uglily, desperately.

It does.

-

Despite however you define love, or whatever I might have learned about it these past few weeks, one things transcends all definitions:

It gets in the way.

And while having my life ruined by love is practically in my genetics, it is not in Hyunjin's.

I am selfish, and foolish, and my love is the same. But I refuse to let it ruin him, too.

He will learn how to deal with his demons without me triggering them—without me forcing him into spirals and anguish-fueled hookups.

He might be waiting, but at least he'll be whole.

I send my acceptance application to SYA Beijing through email that night.

And in the morning, I go to find Hyunjin for the second time.

-

Hyunjin is not here.

Every damn time he manages to foil my plans, and he's gotten to the point where he doesn't even need to be present for it. That is high-level foiling. I bet he's out having tea somewhere thinking of how irritated I must be.

I try to picture Hwang Hyunjin drinking tea and muffle a snort.

I raise my hand to knock one last time, even though I know it's fruitless—I've been banging on his stupid door for the past five minutes—but then it creaks, and all my bravado sprints from my body and out the window like it's jumping hurdles.

But the face that I am greeted with has brown hair, not black, and angular cheekbones that catch the light like a snapshot.

"You're Lee Minho," I say.

He looks me over, missing nothing. "And you're Bahng Jiyu."

I swallow hard. "I—"

"Should probably come in."

"Yes," I hedge, "I think that might be best."

He closes the door behind me, and I get my second good look at Lee Minho. He wears a charcoal-gray sweater with a white collar peeking out, and worn denim jeans. His hair is brushed to one side, a few silver rings adorning his fingers. He moves with a quiet precision that tells me he must be another one of Hyunjin's dancer friends. His eyes are shaped like a cats', with the same feline surveillance—a gaze that could surely skewer me apart, if he wanted to.

It occurs to me acutely that he is very much Jisung's type. And, now that I think about it, probably mine too.

Maybe in another life. Maybe if I hadn't already been drowning in hair like raven's wings and stupidly round lips and eyes that resemble endless stars.

"I've heard a lot about you." I stand by the kitchen as Minho pours me a glass of water, tidying as he goes. It's clear he is the sole reason why the dorm does not strongly resemble a pig sty.

"From Hyunjin?" I have the nerve to ask.

"Felix, actually." He turns, sliding me the glass down the countertop. I nod in thanks and take a sip. "Hyunjin is ... not usually talkative about his romantic life."

"Ah." I clear my throat. "Then, I guess you wouldn't be hearing this from him anyways, but ... I am ending things with him." For real this time.

Minho just arches an eyebrow. "'Things'?"

I open my mouth, then realize I have no further explanation. "Yes," I say stupidly, then add, "I'm traveling abroad to Beijing in a few months. I won't be back for ... a while."

For as long as I can, if I have any say in it.

I can tell Minho is surprised by this, but surprise on him appears as dignified as a cat licking its paw. "Studying?"

I nod. "It's my dream."

Strangely, the words fall hollow in my ears. I repeat it in my head. It's my dream. It's my dream. I know it is. Beijing is another world, another place, the ticket out of a life that's never quite fit me. I've wanted it for years, if only because it's not here. Any love I still had for my home left with Chan. Now I count down the days until I can leave like he did, escape the sour streets and empty walls of my childhood. Beijing is freedom, safety, life. In Beijing, I could touch the stars. I was addicted to it the first time I saw pictures from my friends' vacation.

It's my dream.

So why do those nights spent scrolling through pictures on the internet seem so far away now? Of doodling Beijing, city of stars over my notebooks and papers? Why is it so hard to picture the city in my head, the laughter and the lights and the lives, and so much easier to picture someone else?

I shake it off. Beijing is my dream, I tell myself. Hyunjin is— was. Hyunjin was my nightmare.

"I see," Minho says.

I blink, startled back to the present. "Really?"

For the first time since we met, I see a flicker of a smile cross his face, and I think, if I got to know him, Lee Minho might prove to be a very good friend indeed. "I see why he enjoys being with you so much, I mean."

This catches me off guard, and I am caught choking on my water. "He doesn't," I manage to say around a cough. Hyunjin was my nightmare. "I ... we aren't the right people for each other. We amplify each other's problems. You'll see—once I'm gone, he'll be able to work on giving up drinking, and then—"

I stop, my words trailing off, because Minho's expression has shifted drastically. "What?" I say.

"Hyunjin's drinking..." he says, brows knitting together, and for a second my vision goes white and all I can think is, it got worse, something happened, he finally hurt himself past recovery. "You didn't know?"

My mouth is as dry as sand. "Didn't know what?" I demand.

He surveys my expression, still confused. "Hyunjin doesn't need to give up drinking," he tells me. "He already has."

I blink. Stare at him completely unabashedly, thinking I must have heard wrong. "What?"

"The last night he crashed at your place—almost two weeks ago, I think—was the last time he ever picked up a bottle," Minho says slowly, each word sending a knife into my chest. "He called Felix to tell him he was officially giving it up, but it was a couple days before any of us believed him—we'd been trying for years, and then just like that..." he trails off, noticing my face. "Sorry, I ... I thought you knew."

I barely hear him. My mind is spinning, spinning, whirring off course, connecting all the little bits and pieces I'd noticed but hadn't ever thought more on.

The lack of alcohol on his breath that night where everything changed.

The lack of noises I'd heard in the week that followed—no late-night coming home, no drunken banging. Just silence.

The lack of drinks in his room, the cleanliness. The full bottle of aspirin he'd offered to me—like he hadn't needed to use it in a while.

I tried to forget you the usual way, but for some reason alcohol wasn't cutting it

What if I asked you to stop? Stop drinking, I mean.

He'd said he wouldn't. He'd told me I wouldn't be enough.

But ... it turns out I was.

It's too much. That thought—that thought that could change everything, just as I'd made my final decision—I can't bear it. I think I might collapse.

Minho must see it on my face, because he says, voice breaking into my mind, "The bathroom's over there."

I already know where it is, but his words send me stumbling through the dorm. I can't breathe—I can't think—

I find the bathroom door and grasp blindly for the handle, shoving it open.

And have to stifle my scream.

Because sitting there, right before me, is me.

My thoughts are so disoriented it takes a second before I realize what it is.

A painting.

And then, another, delayed beat later, I realize what that means.

Hyunjin.

He's not quite finished with it—not all the way. There's a bit of color missing at the bottom, a blank spot at the top corner ... but it's me.

I'm sleeping in a bed, my hair splayed over white sheets—I think they might be his. My eyes are closed, but ... more than that. I look calm. Peaceful. Steadying. Just looking at the warmth etched into the features eases the spinning of the room, until all I am focusing on is the painting before me, lying propped by the sink—probably here because he wanted privacy, somewhere sheltered, so it wasn't visible to anyone who just walked into the dorm.

A treasure.

That only he could have created.

I swallow, hating how evident it is. Hyunjin is drawn into every line, every crease, every shadow of the paper as surely as I am—from the broad strokes of whatever brush he used to the careful, delicate lines sweeping across the planes of my cheek. Gentleness in every shade. I can almost imagine him, standing in his room bent over this painting, spending hours on every detail trying to get it right. Get me right.

It speaks of time and effort I never imagined someone would put into something like this. Something about me.

That is when I realize—softly, simply, as if it the prospect had always been lingering in my mind, waiting for the right moment to raise its voice—that maybe love is not one definitive, tangible thing, like I have always thought of it as. Maybe love is far more abstract. Maybe love looks different for everyone.

Maybe for my father, it looked like distancing himself before he brought the people he cared about down with him; maybe for my mother, it meant never giving up on the hope that people could change themselves. And maybe that's painting them in a better light than they deserve—maybe love is a way to justify the horrible things people have done—but maybe love is also forgiveness. Maybe it's all of those things.

And I'm not sure what my own love looks like, but it's there, god, it's there—great heaps and buckets of it whenever I see Hyunjin. And maybe I already know what his love manifests as—already know that his love is little hidden paintings and soft dawn mornings and letting yourself give up control. Maybe love is finding a stranger in the middle of the night when you have nowhere else to go. Maybe love is having someone to wait for you, wherever you may be.

And I decide then that I think it would be nice, to have someone willing to wait for me. That I don't want to give it up. Not even for Beijing. After all, it wasn't really the city that I wanted - it was the stars.

And as bright as a life in Beijing would be, it could never shine brighter than him.

Nightmares are dreams too.

I don't know what my love will look like. But I think I'm willing to find out, if it's with Hwang Hyunjin.

So I pick up the painting as gently as I can, clutch it close to my heart, and go to find Hyunjin—go to return to a quiet place littered with fallen stars, where a broken boy with dark hair and darker eyes is waiting, maybe by a windowsill, for his heart to come home.

And this time, she does.