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“He who steps in my blood, may it stick to them
Like hot oil.” (Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth)
Chanyoung's not jealous.
Eunseok never graduated but has the magical ability to make everyone forget all about it. Sure, people say, college just wasn’t for you. Higher pursuits and the like. Don’t worry about your BSc, come say hi to auntie, remind her again of your handsome face. Used to be the star of his school’s chess team, even. Let him fix your computer. It’s so nice that our Eunseok and Sungchan are still friends after all this time. Joint wedding. Does Sungchan’s illustrious, long-socked, anaemic girlfriend have any Korean friends that could appreciate the illusive, quasi-mythological charms of Eunseok, adored son?
At least nobody’s trying to set Chanyoung up anymore. CompSci is too greasy for dating. Over cubed watermelon, his mother’s friend informs him of this and says he should wait until he’s at least twenty-five to start looking for a girlfriend. She can be younger. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re dating somebody fresh but you have to be careful that they’re not too fresh that they don’t have a circumspect five-year plan on the books. He hates CompSci, but this is its one benefit. Music, classical or contemporary, would make him too arty and irresistible; no college at all, following Eunseok’s recherché path to social acceptability, is pheremonal.
Sungchan’s girlfriend isn’t around. Instead, he’s serving food and smiles. Summer’s crescendo is romantic and sudden, with weeks upon weeks of sunny weather, so everybody and their cousin has swarmed to their house — even him. Here, Sungchan broke Eunseok’s nose during a play-fight. There, Sungchan walked in on Chanyoung having a shower two years ago. Last night, in the pool, the three of them swam and drank beers, icy, a bit of a drowning risk but who cared, not them. Certainly not Eunseok.
“Chanyoungie,” Sungchan says. “Aren’t you helping your dad with the grill?”
“I’m not allowed near it.”
“Why? Are you flammable?” he laughs.
He only says Sungchan’s name in English. It’s too heavy to call him a brother. Sungchan’s diligent about this, Eunseok always says. It’s important to him. The preservation of culture. Bowing, honorifics.
“Sungchan,” he says, then gives up. “I need to replace the tray for Mom. There’s more japchae in the kitchen.”
Later, Chanyoung plays the cello tightly, restricted without reason, and through these rigid censorships everything he knows how to coax out of the bow is the same. Brahms’ Cello Sonata 1. Saint-Saëns’ The Swan. It’s not that everyone isn’t impressed but obviously there’s a limit to it, like there’s a limit to everything. His skill has been measured by this for years, over clattering dishes and guests’ chatter, so the distraction of silence is what bothers him the most. Sungchan insists that everyone shuts up — politely — and nobody even folds a napkin. It’s amazing how he pulls it off.
Eunseok is nowhere to be found. Sungchan follows the notes with practiced little nods of the head like a backseat conductor.
He’s good and he knows he’s good, but that doesn’t mean he’s good. There isn’t an excuse for feeling like this. Everything, even the smallest things, have a way of working themselves out, but the creases and wrinkles in Chanyoung’s musical career have only deepened with age. You never forget how to swim or ride a bike but sure you can skip notes and watch everyone think a little bit worse of you.
Sungchan claps. Eunseok disappears from his own life like this and Chanyoung is left to receive compliments in the shape of insults. Even Sungchan is gone by the time he’s tidied away his cello, tucked it right under his bed with all the other party tricks and high school ambitions. His suitcase is half-packed, mostly strewn across the edge of his childhood bed, and the posters on his walls are peeling at the corners. Everything is faded. Copy of a copy. A Xeroxed memory that loses more and more definition with every reproduction. Even the deflated basketball that’s been wedged behind his drawers, hidden from his mother, for almost ten years has lost its colour. Medals are tucked away. Some metals are OK, but since he turned twenty his body started breaking out in hives at the mere thought of nickel.
For a while it seems like he’s lost it. The road ends for a second but all he wants to do is keep on driving. It’s impossible to relax in that room now. Huge, sprawling, American houses. Bleached walls. Shutters on the windows to finger. Everything takes on a surreal square shape because the shards of light reveal no shadows or imperfections. Through the gauzy mesh of trophies, blue sheets, and folders of his old drawings, wooden furniture marks the corners. Nostalgia catches in the air like a wire net.
Chanyoung sits on the rug, legs crossed. Another family’s chintzy colonial glistens through the window, raw diamonds. The pool is in clear view, exhaustingly busy. Eventually he closes his eyes and listens to the music, the gossip, the splash of his cousins diving into the pool.
By the time he realises he’s blinking, Eunseok and Sungchan are leaning over him, brushing his sweaty bangs out of his eyes and asking if he wants to swim with them again. No pressure. No biggie, Eunseok says, but because he’s a good older brother he doesn’t belabour the whole ‘seriously, don’t worry about it, we can go without you,’ angle, even if he wants to. Truth is, Chanyoung is sure Eunseok sees him as a wedge between him and Sungchan, but the thing about wedges is that eventually if you keep shoving the door you can make them jolt out of place.
Night swimming makes the water taste different, less chlorinated. From the garden decor you would've never guessed a hundred people were filtering through their house a few hours ago. Chairs dusted. Barbecue swept. No floaties or leaves left bobbing or sinking.
Sungchan says, “When do you go back to Massachussetts?”
“Soon,” Chanyoung says, “maybe.” Sungchan swims in a circle, spins underwater, like a shark. “I’m not scared about it anymore.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Eunseok says. He splashes Chanyoung. “What you should be scared about is me coming to visit you. I want to see all the good bars.” He says this every year but never makes the effort. This year, Chanyoung worries, might be different. The air is doing laps around him, transient and anticipatory. If nothing happens, the energy will be misplaced and flow into awkward lapses of destiny. “Who are you living with? The kid with OCD?”
“Wonbin,” he says, swallowing, trying to stay afloat, “yeah.”
“Does he actually have OCD? I watched a documentary about it,” Sungchan says. “It was late at night. I wasn’t really sure what I was watching but they kept on showing this guy who wouldn’t breathe around ovens. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember why. OCD, I guess.”
“Is it really bad?” Eunseok asks. “Like, does he wash his hands a bunch?”
“Shut up, Eunseok,” Sungchan says. “You’re being, like, totally insensitive.”
“It’s okay. He does everything in sevens.” Chanyoung starts to swim towards the ladder. He hasn’t been moving. He’s freezing anyway. If he can towel off and shower before he passes out from exhaustion, he’ll be satisfied. “I’m going in now.”
The moon travels further than usual. In peaceful, blueish white, Chanyoung rubs his wet hair with a towel and looks out at the pool below. The lawn chairs circle a small table. The grass is shiny. Sungchan kisses Eunseok but it’s nothing. It’s nothing, Chanyoung reminds himself. Eunseok gets bored of everyone. Even if they’ve been friends for more than a decade, there are no limits to Eunseok’s depravity. There are no glimpses of anxiety — for once, Chanyoung is sure about something, and it has to be this. It’s a jut of radical unfairness that he finds his zen, his calm, in a moment where it would be perfectly natural to want to kick somebody or himself or crash right through the glass.
They’re kissing because they’re both there. Eunseok is everyone’s favourite, but he’s not Sungchan’s.
*
New Jersey, mid-winter, where the snow is so deep you can’t feel your ankles, 2019. Anton is fifteen and shovelling his drive. Sungchan is a geeky eighteen-year-old who throws snowballs at Eunseok, who is ambitious he’ll almost definitely graduate with the best grades in the whole state. Valedictorian (maybe he’ll be second to Sungchan, but that’s no sweat). They’re both wearing glasses. Sungchan’s red scarf in the wind is flagging danger from afar.
A snowball hits Chanyoung square in the face. Within it, a small stone is buried and makes blood spout from his nose like — like a kid. He can’t stand it. When there’s snow everywhere, you can’t hide it.
Eunseok shouts something incoherent. Chanyoung stares at the asphyxiated sky. Sungchan shakes his shoulders and says, “Chanyoungie, Chanyoungie, I’m sorry, do you want a soda or something, you can tell your parents if you want, say I did it, not Eunseok,” and he wraps that scarf around Chanyoung’s face to soak up all the blood.
*
Fall makes Chanyoung’s fingers feel numb. His classes pick up relatively slowly, which is a shame — living with Wonbin is nice, clean, but he can get sore in a moment’s notice about the smallest thing. Tuesday’s trouble is a hook-up from last year who keeps returning, stepping in and out of his life like a vampire who won’t be let in, and is ruining his life, Chanyoungie. Wonbin is his own centre of gravity. Planets spin around him. He’s got devastingly good hair, he sobs, and therefore everyone wants him except this one person, which isn’t fair.
Eunseok does visit but he brings Sungchan. The sentiment is there; he offers booze. A classmate crosses them on the way out of Chanyoung’s kitchen, saying, “Bye, Anton,” and Eunseok scornfully presents his brother with a six-pack, muttering in a simpering voice bye, Anton. Unprepared for the early arrival, Chanyoung attempts to clean up all the papers across the kitchen table into neat piles like leaves. He shuts his laptop. They only were playing Connections anyway.
“He’s nice,” Chanyoung says.
“Defensive,” Eunseok says. “Where’s your roommate?”
“In his room.”
“Can I go knock?”
Sungchan laughs and whispers something obvious into Eunseok’s ear. He rolls his eyes but then seems to soften up a little, walking around the chairs to rub Chanyoung’s shoulder. “They miss you, back home,” he says.
“Really?”
“No. We’re throwing a party every day you’re gone. Of course they do; who wouldn’t?” he laughs. “Can I go knock now?” This time, he’s asking Sungchan.
“If he throws you out, don’t panic,” Chanyoung says.
“He won’t. I’m charming, see?”
Sungchan shrugs off his coat and hangs it up carefully, then his gloves, his hat, his scarf. He’s overdressed but he doesn’t seem to care.
“Do you care when people call you Anton?”
“Don’t be so sentimental,” Chanyoung says. “It doesn’t suit you.”
Eunseok clearly has an eye for Wonbin’s hair, or maybe his legs, his smile, his suffocatingly erotic personality, but Sungchan is content to sit and share a beer with Chanyoung on his single bed. There’s a grey blanket tossed across the sheets that Chanyoung hides his bare feet beneath. They talk about Sungchan’s future plans: job searching is tough, his parents are supporting him, maybe he’ll go to grad school, his girlfriend broke up with him, it’s been months since his last haircut, when did Chanyoung-ah get his hair styled last? It looks very cute.
Chanyoung bites the rim of the bottle. “What was her name?”
“My girlfriend?”
“No, your goldfish.”
“I don’t know if you know her.”
“Does she go to another school?”
“I’m protecting her identity from opportunists,” he says, glancing towards Wonbin’s room through the wall. “It all got too much in the end, Chanyoung. I wasn’t that kind of guy. I want to get married but it’s complex.” He strokes an old wormy scar on Chanyoung’s knee, just beneath where his shorts end. “I don’t want to confuse you.”
Chanyoung says nothing. He lets Sungchan’s thumb wander. He’s staring out into the yard where an old tree is starting to die at the roots.
“It’s okay,” Chanyoung whispers.
Sungchan is shockingly warm. Handsome from far away, but up close is another thing entirely. His skin is clear. His hair is shaggy around the neck but Chanyoung really likes it. For somebody who should be torn up about his dissolved relationship, his eyes are bright and his blood is pumping with violent intensity beneath his skin. His face turns red. His lips are damp.
“It’s okay?” Sungchan asks.
He doesn’t ask twice because Chanyoung is nodding, a little shy, but it’s all there. When they kiss, Sungchan is weighing down on his chest, biting his lips and eventually their tongues touch. The panic is totally electric. Empires are built and empires fall. A spasm of desire twitches in Chanyoung’s stomach. Sungchan’s teeth are crooked like a childhood action figure.
Sungchan lifts up Chanyoung’s sweatshirt a little and pulls down his shorts where he’s been leaking against the supple fabric, soaking through his boxers. When he hooks a finger beneath them, Chanyoung holds his breath and squeezes his eyes shut because he knows it’ll bounce out and the mental image of it, the cringe, is too much to bear. “Look,” Sungchan says, so he does. He watches his own cock, no longer a semi, curl upwards as his boxers are peeled down. It’s too red and makes too much mess. He pulls his sweatshirt collar up to his eyes but doesn’t cover them.
Sungchan is a little bigger and he has a freckle on his stomach that Chanyoung noticed when they were swimming together once. He presses their cocks together and jerks confidently, like he’s done this before, rubbing the tips, spitting a thin line of saliva that runs down the centre line. Chanyoung can’t watch or he’ll cum right away. There are sweaty patches on his bed from where he’s gripping at the sheets. His eyes flicker open and shut.
“Do you like me?” Sungchan asks.
“Of course,” Chanyoung says.
“Do you like this?”
“Of course,” he repeats.
“Can you cum with me?”
“Of…Course…” His eye twitches. Sungchan cums right across his stomach with exhausted pants, still wearing his jeans wrenched down his thighs, and when Chanyoung has cum across Sungchan’s cock they clean up briefly with tissues and sleep exactly like that, semi-naked, midday, Sungchan snoring into Chanyoung’s chest as he adjusts the overgrown strands of his hair.
Chanyoung wakes him up in the middle of the night, wondering where he is even though it’s his own bed, with a small shake. Sungchan garbles something from his dream. “You’re heavy,” he says.
“I know,” Sungchan mutters.
“I’m going to graduate at some point,” Chanyoung says quietly, avoiding eye contact. “And you’re going back to New Jersey without me.”
“You’re only in Massachussetts,” Sungchan complains, a little petulant, scruffing Chanyoung’s hair. “I can visit you all you want.”
“But it’s…” He laughs slightly. “Doesn’t it feel like arrested development? It can wait. Everything can wait.”
“But I really like you, Chanyoung. I’m being serious. Not Eunseok. You. Lee Chanyoung. Anton Lee. You know that.”
Chanyoung swallows. “I know you do,” he says. "Come visit me in Spring.”