Archive of Our Own

Give me a call if you ever get desperate /
I'll be like one of your girls .
— Troye Sivan, “One of Your Girls”

**

now

The club Wooyoung picked is less of a club and more of a bar and, sitting across from Mingi, half a bottle of soju in and half the shared bowl of peanuts and anchovies gone, he leans forward and gives Mingi a look that’s entirely too perceptive for comfort.

“So,” Wooyoung says, his cheeks pink and his voice just starting to increase in volume from the alcohol. “It’s just a date. Why are you being so weird?”

Mingi squirms and tries to become smaller than he is. In such a tight, overcrowded space, it’s not an easy task.

“I’m not,” Mingi says. “He’s allowed to go on as many dates as he wants to.”

“Huh,” says Wooyoung. “Is he?”

“Obviously,” Mingi says. There’s a sulky edge to his voice. “What do you think I am, the arbiter of his love life?”

Wooyoung shrugs and knocks back another glass of soju. Jongho, the last of their group to finish his military service, has two months left before discharge and therefore a return to group activities, and Yunho has been using the temporal limbo between his own discharge and Jongho’s to, as far as Mingi can tell, sleep his way around Seoul.

“I think you want to be,” says Wooyoung bluntly. He refills Mingi’s glass and pushes it towards him. “Here,” he adds. “Drown your sorrows with me.”

“What sorrows have you got to drown?” asks Mingi, drinking half the glass and setting it back down. Even after years on the same medication, he still tries to take drinking slow. “Did you and San only have three orgasms between you last night instead of four?”

“As if I would ever overshare in that way,” says Wooyoung, a complete hypocrite whose sex noises Mingi had to overhear too many times to count when he lived with Seonghwa and San. “Stop checking your phone.”

Mingi, surprised and guilty, shoves his phone back into his pocket.

“I wasn’t,” he says, but it’s a lie. He’s been checking his phone every five minutes all evening, in case Yunho’s texted to tell him that the date’s off and he’s heading back to his apartment, does Mingi want to come over and game? The fact that Mingi’s terrible at all Yunho’s favorite video games and a sore loser to boot has never deterred either of them and the domestic fantasy of it all — that he and Yunho might live together separate from group dorm arrangements, that they might go home to one another after work and fall asleep against one another in a home that they share — makes Mingi’s chest hurt in a dull, embarrassing sort of way. It’s been a month since he and Yunho have exchanged more than a casual text exchange or met up outside of a group. There’s no chance Yunho would be keeping Mingi up-to-date on the progress of his evening.

“He’s not going to cancel the date,” Wooyoung says. “He’s going to take — wait, what’s her name?”

“Jieun,” says Mingi, miserably.

“Right,” says Wooyoung. “Jieun. Anyway, he’s going to take Jieun out and they’re going to have a lovely evening and at the end they’re going to fuck.”

Mingi almost chokes on a peanut. “Shut up,” he groans. “Why would you phrase it like that?”

“Because it’s true.”

And that’s part of the problem, if Mingi’s honest with himself. Yunho, by all accounts, is an incredible date. The women he goes out with, even if he only goes out with them once, seem satisfied by their experience, ten out of ten would bang again. When Mingi’s run into them leaving Yunho’s apartment on weekend mornings, the sun properly risen and everyone properly dressed, they’ve smiled at him, kissed Yunho on the lips, and thanked Yunho sincerely for a nice time. Yunho is considerate and discrete and respectful. Yunho is famous and handsome. Yunho cares very deeply that the people around him are happy. Mingi drinks the rest of his glass of soju and seethes.

“Maybe not,” Mingi says. “Maybe they’ll fight in a restaurant and she’ll storm out and he’ll have the worst night of his life.”

“First, that’s a horrible thing to wish on your friend,” Wooyoung says disapprovingly. “Second, you know that won’t happen, because anyone would be lucky to go out with Yunho. He’ll probably pull her chair out for her and make sure she gets every dish she wants.” There’s a long pause, during which Wooyoung takes another bite of peanuts and anchovies, and something must happen on Mingi’s face, because when Wooyoung looks back up, mouth full, his expression shifts to something stricken.

“Mingi-yah,” Wooyoung says, half-chewed peanut visible on his tongue. “I was teasing! You know that!”

It’s dark in the bar, long strips of neon lights lining the junctions where wall meets ceiling, and the shelves of liquor bottles behind the bar glitter in the dim red of the illumination. It’s busy enough that Wooyoung and Mingi have melted into the crowd, another pair of friends lost in the crush of locals and tourists, and Mingi’s wrist sticks to the wood of their table when he lifts it up to refill his glass.

“I just don’t want him to be on a date,” Mingi blurts out. He feels his face getting hot. He hears the whiny note in his voice and can’t bring himself to care.

“Because you want him to be hanging out with you?” Wooyoung asks. “He dated before enlistment, too. Not this much, but he did, and he’s always gonna make time for you! You’re his best friend! You just don’t need to worry this much, you know? We’re all bonded for life. Eight makes one team. Except when Hongjoongie-hyung’s mad at me at then it’s seven makes one team, but whatever.” He’s tipsy, Mingi can tell, his cheeks properly red and his face slack and open. Mingi can feel the soju creeping in at the edges of his own consciousness too, a loosening of his tongue and a blurring of his boundaries, and that’s the only reason he can bring himself to say what he’s about to say.

“Because I want him to be dating me!” Mingi hisses, quiet but emphatic, and then snaps his mouth shut as an almost immediate wave of post-confession regret floods his insides. Wooyoung’s own mouth hangs open, slightly, for a second too long.

“Yunho’s straight,” Wooyoung says, and it’s softer than before. Gentler. “He likes girls.”

“I know he likes girls,” says Mingi, because he’s not about to deal with the first part of Wooyoung’s statement. “Apparently he likes them extra lately, because he never used to date this much.”

Wooyoung seems to consider this. He pours the last of their soju bottle into his glass and leans over when a waiter passes to ask for another, although he seems to change his mind halfway through speaking and orders two whiskeys instead.

“I’m not that pathetic,” says Mingi, but Wooyoung just raises an eyebrow at him in a way that clearly says, Yes you are and you know it.

Mingi stews in the silence that falls while they wait for their whiskey. Yunho has, incontrovertibly, been dating more than he used to lately, in the last month especially, and Mingi can pinpoint the exact moment that change started, even though he wishes he couldn’t.

“He has, yeah,” says Wooyoung eventually, sipping on his whiskey and picking the conversation right back up from its previous stopping point. “It makes sense, I guess. It’s way harder to date when we’re actively promoting. He’s gotta spread his seed while he can.”

“Have I mentioned,” says Mingi, “that I hate you?”

“You have,” Wooyoung says. He pauses, giving Mingi the uncomfortably perceptive look again. A couple of tourists bump into Mingi from behind as they shuffle sideways between tables and apologize in drunken, broken Korean. “Look. I know this was kind of a last-minute hang out, but I didn’t want you to be alone while Yunho was out.”

“Did you know, then?” asks Mingi. “Have I been, like, hiding this thing for years for no reason?”

“Well,” Wooyoung says. “I didn’t know you liked him like that. I just thought you were super possessive of him as a friend. But those things aren’t really that different, are they?”

Mingi considers this. It’s a very Wooyoung thing to think: that the boundary between friendship and romance is a simple matter of sex or no sex, that the emotional differences are scarcely worth mentioning. It’s how Wooyoung’s always operated with everyone he loves, unbounded in his adoration and unabashed in laying claim to a tract of another person’s heart. And, Mingi supposes, Wooyoung’s not wrong in this case either. When Mingi and Yunho were in high school, long before auditions or KQ or Ateez, Mingi had been desperate for Yunho’s attention, had wanted Yunho to walk home from school with him, and it hadn’t occurred to him until later that the way he felt about Yunho was different from the way he felt about anyone else. He doesn’t think he could identify the point at which he recognized he wanted Yunho in other ways, too, and even then, it had been Wooyoung more than anyone who forcibly made space in their group for that kind of desire and refused to entertain any resistance.

“I guess not,” Mingi says eventually, and Wooyoung nods, as though this is what he’d known Mingi would say.

“You could date too, if you wanted,” Wooyoung suggests. “It’s not gonna fix anything, but it might be distracting. I bet I could find you someone to hook up with.”

Mingi wonders if this entire evening would be less agonizing with someone like Seonghwa. Wooyoung refuses to let Mingi wallow in self-pity and Mingi really, really wants to wallow. Seonghwa, he thinks, would join him in his misery swamp. Seonghwa would give Mingi Lego to build and tell Mingi nice things about himself.

“I don’t want you to find someone for me to hook up with,” says Mingi. “I don’t want to hook up with anyone.” It’s true with one exception. He doesn’t want to hook up with a stranger. He wants to hook up with Yunho.

“Guy?” asks Wooyoung. “Girl? Neither? Both? I’ve got lots of friends. There’s plenty of queer people in Seoul who’d go nuts for the chance.” He sips his whiskey. “Always better to sleep with other queer people,” he adds, a little more seriously. “They’re way less likely to tell.”

“Wooyoung,” says Mingi. “No.” He’s let Wooyoung find him partners before, and they’ve always been lovely — gorgeous androgynous people; tomboyish girls;, once, a six-foot-three k-drama lead who reminded Mingi too much of Yunho — but the thought of it right now makes him feel slightly sick. He thinks about the night a month or so after Yunho’s discharge, and then about the night four weeks ago. He thinks he might actually be sick.

“You could hook up with me and Sannie,” Wooyoung continues. His smile is just sloppy enough to make it clear to Mingi that he’s bordering on drunk. “I’ll ask him. We’ll have a threesome and you’ll forget all about Yunho.”

“You,” says Mingi, with as much dignity as he can manage, “are the most disgustingly monogamous person I know. Don’t talk to me.”

Wooyoung tries to drink whiskey and eat peanuts at the same time, resulting in a significant quantity of the peanuts ending up in the whiskey glass. He shrugs and finishes it anyway.

“Your loss,” says Wooyoung. “I’m a great conversationalist.”

Mingi rolls his eyes and, when Wooyoung isn’t looking, pulls his phone out of his pocket again. The screen remains blank. Yunho’s name is nowhere to be seen.

**

three months ago

When Yunho calls Mingi at 9 pm on a Sunday night, Mingi has no idea what to expect. There was a time in their lives — multiple times, maybe, throughout the years — when Mingi and Yunho had been inseparable. In school, Mingi glued to Yunho’s side and watching everyone trip over their feet in his presence as though he were a k-drama lead; as trainees, Mingi watching Yunho teach Hongjoong their choreography with his patient, singular focus; as idols, Mingi going with Yunho to parties and clubs and then fading into the background when Yunho met a new woman or a new friend. Mingi knows that he, too, has succeeded, that he is as much a rapper as Yunho is a dancer, that they are both part of the same successful group, but in the months since their enlistments ended, Yunho has felt like a stranger. They’d met up at the company with the rest of the discharged members and it had been like looking at a beloved face across an uncrossable ocean.

“Hey,” says Mingi, as Yunho’s apartment door beeps in response to the code Mingi’s had memorized for years. He peers around, looking for Yunho and unsure what he will find. He doesn’t remember the last time Yunho asked to hang out just the two of them like this, alone and in private and in one of their homes. “You here?”

“Living room,” calls Yunho, and Mingi kicks off his shoes and follows his voice. Yunho’s apartment is clean and generic, simple neutral furniture and walls that are largely bare apart from a few framed art prints Mingi knows he didn’t pick out on his own, and when Mingi finds him, hunched over his gaming PC with his legs spread, he’s playing Valorant. The living room is dim, the only light sources a lamp in the corner and the eerie glow of Yunho’s massive monitor, and Mingi stands still in the doorway for a second, unsure why he’s even there. The disappointment in his gut is palpable, although he feels stupid for having wanted Yunho’s attention so badly in the first place. Of course Yunho, his platonic best friend of over a decade, wants him to come hang out and play a video game. That’s extremely normal.

“One sec,” says Yunho, gaze fixed on his computer screen.

Unbidden, Mingi imagines what Yunho’s like with the girls he sleeps with. Surely, Mingi thinks, Yunho doesn’t play Valorant when he has a girl over. Surely he takes her back to his apartment after a candlelit dinner, surely he pours her a glass of wine and kisses her with her back against the bedroom door. Surely he doesn’t wave a hand at her absently as his agent’s machine gun moves across the screen, target fixed in its crosshairs.

“It’s fine,” says Mingi, in a moment of passive aggressiveness. “I’ll wait.” But Yunho doesn’t look up or seem to hear him, and Mingi settles on the couch, hands between his knees. The sound of automatic gunfire fractures the atmosphere of the apartment like glass dropped on tile.

“Sorry,” Yunho says, still focused on the game. “I really didn’t think I’d still be playing when you got here, I’m so sorry.”

Mingi nods, although Yunho can’t see him. He's thirsty from the walk over, and he’s hungry, and the blue light from the computer screen is strangely unsettling. Before he can stop himself, he’s standing up.

“It’s fine,” he says to Yunho again, although this time Yunho seems to hear him. “I’m just gonna get us something to eat.”

“Thank you,” Yunho says, the frantic clicking of his mouse fading as Mingi makes his way to the kitchen, but he still sounds distracted

Yunho’s kitchen is as utilitarian as the rest of his apartment, fridge stocked with the essentials of an athlete-idol diet: chicken breast, kimchi, protein shakes, a few mysterious containers of leftovers. Yunho makes a quiet noise of distress from the other room and Mingi rummages in a cupboard for chips. It’s an odd feeling, a mixture of domestic comfort and simmering resentment: that Yunho should have called him over and then not had time for him, just as he never has time for Mingi anymore; that Mingi should feel this comfortable in someone else’s home, that his life should exist parallel to someone else’s in such a simple way. He fishes two beers out of the fridge and gathers several bags of salty, interchangeable snacks in his arms. What had he expected, he asks himself, that Yunho would be discharged from the military and run into his arms? That Yunho would suddenly want Mingi in a way Yunho has never wanted Mingi before?

“Found this,” he says, when he gets back to the living room. Yunho’s stopped playing, the screen reading 어센트 as Yunho waits for another match, and this time, when Mingi enters, Yunho actually seems to see him. He logs out of the Valorant server and turns his chair towards Mingi.

“Hi,” he says, eyes warm and dark, and Mingi forgets, in spite of himself, how to be angry. The full force of Yunho’s attention is something Mingi’s never been able to resist. “I really am sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Mingi says, and Yunho laughs, a little sadly.

“That’s the only thing you’ve said since you got here,” he says.

“You were gaming,” Mingi says, still holding the chips and the drinks. Yunho stands up to take them from him and the backs of his knuckles brush Mingi’s forearms.

“Sit down,” Yunho says, gesturing to the couch. It’s oddly formal, as though Yunho is playing host at an official event. “Please.” He cracks open one of the beers and hands it to Mingi before dropping back down on his gaming chair so it faces the couch and adding, “Maybe you’re my good luck charm. I haven’t played that well in ages.” Mingi refuses to let himself go down the path of imagining flirtation in Yunho’s voice, because he knows better. Yunho is straight. Yunho is Mingi’s best friend.

“Can’t have been me,” Mingi says. “I haven’t even been here that long.” He takes the beer and sits and stares at his knees, entirely too aware of Yunho next to him, of the familiar scent of Yunho’s shampoo and cologne, of the warmth coming off of Yunho’s body. Yunho, in his sweatpants and his t-shirt, his face open and bare and painfully handsome; Yunho, the perfect boyfriend, the perfect idol, the perfect actor, everything Mingi is not and does not get to have. Someday, Mingi thinks, Yunho will get married to a beautiful woman and it will be so precisely how marriage is supposed to be that wedding venues could advertise with his picture. Every mother encouraging her daughter to get married is probably, without knowing it, thinking about Yunho.

“You’re mad,” says Yunho. “Because I was gaming?”

“No,” Mingi says, aware that by asking the question Yunho’s automatically gotten Mingi to agree with the statement, something Mingi otherwise would’ve resisted doing. “I just don’t know why you wanted me to come over.”

“We used to do this all the time,” Yunho says. “Play a game. Watch a movie after a schedule.”

“We don’t anymore,” Mingi says in retort. “You’ve barely called me since you got out of the military.”

“Neither have you,” Yunho points out, one eyebrow raised. “Last time I checked, you also have a phone.”

Mingi opens his mouth to answer and closes it again. There’s too many things he wants to say — I’ve always been the one who calls, or I need you to prove that you love me, or, incongruously, would you say that to a girl? — and he decides on none of them.

“It’s just weird,” he says, eventually. “Being out of the military. Being home. It’s like I don’t quite remember how things used to be and I’m not sure I could go back even if I did.”

“I know,” says Yunho, immediately, latching onto the chink he’s spotted in the armor of Mingi’s sullenness. “I miss you. I miss how easy it used to be, with all of us.”

“Do you do that to your dates, too?” Mingi asks, before he can stop himself, recognizing Yunho’s push towards intimacy and unwilling to be done feeling angry. “Call them to come over late like this?”

Yunho blinks. He takes a long swallow of his beer and then sets it down. Based on the steeliness of Yunho’s expression, Mingi’s pretty sure he’s miscalculated the impact of what he’s said.

“Why would you ask that?”

“I just hate being second place,” Mingi says, and the anger swells in his belly like a rising tide. He feels something in himself rising with it. “I just want to matter most.”

“You do matter most,” Yunho says, and here they are, having the argument they’ve had so many times over the years. Mingi asking and Yunho giving, Yunho refusing to ask for the things Mingi is desperate to give. “What do my dates have to do with anything?”

“You’ve been on dates since you got out of the military, right?” Mingi says. “Did you meet up with them before dinner? Did you pick them up? They didn’t walk to your apartment in the dark, did they?”

“What the fuck?” says Yunho. “Since when do you even care if I date?”

“I don’t!” says Mingi, and it’s a lie that feels likely to split him open. He cares so, so much. He doesn’t want to imagine Yunho with a woman. He wants Yunho in ways that are impossible and if he can’t have Yunho in those ways, then he doesn’t want anyone else to have him that way either. He wishes, in a quieter, calmer part of himself, that he were the sort of person who could hope that the unrequited love of his life might find joy with someone else, but he’s not. He wants Yunho to love him, or to love no one.

“Then what!” says Yunho, and his voice is getting louder now. It’s still so deep. It still makes Mingi’s stomach ache with a pointless sort of desire. “Do you want me to pick you up too? Do you want me to take you out to dinner before you come over?”

“Maybe I do!” says Mingi. “Maybe I fucking do! What then?”

Yunho freezes where he’s sitting on his gaming chair. He’d been spinning himself ever so slightly back and forth with one foot and he stops. He becomes completely motionless.

“No you don’t,” Yunho says. “No, you don’t, because I’d know. I would know.”

“Apparently not,” Mingi says, throat constricting. “Apparently you wouldn’t know.”

Yunho sets his beer down and gets to his feet. He takes a step towards Mingi, and Mingi stares up at him, so wrong-footed that it’s as though he’s watching himself from a distance. “I’m going to kiss you now,” says Yunho. “If you don’t mind.”

Mingi can’t speak. He stares at Yunho, waiting to see if he’s joking, and Yunho stares back, fixedly, with an intensity to his expression Mingi’s never seen before. Mingi nods.

A moment ago, the world had been a movie, playing continuously from one second to the next, and now the movie has been replaced by some sort of disjointed slideshow, fragmented images blurring together with no clear transitions between them. Mingi’s being pulled into Yunho’s arms. Yunho’s cupped Mingi’s face in one hand. Mingi’s eyes are falling shut and Yunho’s mouth is on his mouth and he’s dissolving from a person into a collage of sensation.

“Why,” Mingi manages to ask. “Why are you — ?”

“Because I want to,” Yunho says, his lips redder than normal, his hair messy from where Mingi’s run his hand through it, and it’s so perfect that Mingi cuts him off right there, goes back to kissing him so Yunho can’t keep speaking. If he keeps speaking, he might say something Mingi doesn’t want to hear. Might say something like, This is casual, or, I’m just experimenting. Might say something like, I don’t love you.

Yunho’s bedroom is dark when they make their clumsy way into it, Yunho kicking the door open with his heel while pulling his own shirt off with one hand and tugging at the hem of Mingi’s with the other. It’s not elegant. Yunho, for all that Mingi had assumed he’d be chivalrous and gentle, is such an onslaught that Mingi almost doesn’t know what to do with it. Yunho bites Mingi’s lower lip until it’s sore, shoves Mingi back onto the duvet and gets his knee in between Mingi’s thighs with astonishing single-mindedness, climbs on top of Mingi and presses their hips together. Mingi takes him, takes everything Yunho gives him, but even as he lies there, arms and head and heart full of Yunho, Yunho’s tongue in his mouth and Yunho’s hand between his legs, he’s startled at how quickly they’re moving. He’s startled at himself, for not appreciating this miraculous gift he’s been given, for wishing for something different.

“You can slow down if you need,” Mingi says, when Yunho pulls back for a second. “It’s okay, you can take your time.”

“Don’t want to take my time,” Yunho says. He kisses Mingi again and their teeth clatter together. In any other situation, Mingi would find it hot. In this situation, he wants Yunho to show him gentleness. To show him anything he could pretend was love.

“Have you ever?” Mingi tries to ask. He’s panting slightly. “With a guy?”

Yunho’s eyes open wide. “No,” he says, “why, am I doing it wrong? Wait, fuck, am I bad at it?”

Mingi shakes his head. Yunho’s not doing anything wrong. Naked, Yunho’s as gorgeous as anyone Mingi’s ever seen and his own desire is so immense that there’s barely room for anything else in his body. Mingi has wanted Yunho so badly and for so long that he’s not entirely sure he’s not dreaming. But as Yunho unzips Mingi’s jeans and tugs them down Mingi’s hips, as wraps his hand tentatively around Mingi’s cock and starts stroking, Mingi wonders at the impersonality of it. He wonders if he, to Yunho, is just a body, if Yunho got out of the military and wanted sex and knew Mingi would be easy and ready and waiting. If Yunho had wanted a stand-in for a woman, or if he’d wanted to try sleeping with a man without having to risk anything more important than a friendship he knew Mingi would rather die than throw away. The way Yunho is touching Mingi is rough and fast, none of the careful consideration Mingi’s always imagined when, in the shameful dark, he’s pictured Yunho sleeping with the girls he’s dated. Yunho touches Mingi and all Mingi can think about is how much more he loves Yunho than Yunho loves him.

“Good?” Yunho asks, when they’re done. “How was it? Was I okay?”

“You were great,” says Mingi. His mind is hazy from the orgasm that no amount of anxiety could have prevented his body from having. “I’ve always — yeah. You’re amazing.”

“You’ve always what?” asks Yunho, but Mingi shakes his head and tries not to make an undignified noise when Yunho tweaks his nipple to get him to talk. After a long pause, Yunho asks, “Can we do it again?”

“Right now?”

“If you want,” Yunho says. “But I meant later. Tomorrow. Next week. Whenever.”

Mingi thinks he should say no. Should say, I can’t do this unless you feel about me how I feel about you, or, I can’t do this if it’s casual. Instead, he says what he knew immediately he was going to say. He says yes.

**

now

Mingi regrets, upon waking the morning after drinking with Wooyoung, having agreed days ago to go shopping with Yunho. His head pounds as soon as he opens his eyes. His stomach roils slightly when he rolls over and checks his phone and he knows that this is not the version of himself best suited to talking normally with Yunho about the date Yunho went on the night before.

He gives himself a tragic pep talk in his bathroom mirror — be normal, don’t sulk, don’t shout, don’t throw up on his shoes — and takes a cab to the designated meeting spot on a street in Seongsu-dong where every other building seems to house the flagship location of a small Korean fashion label. If Mingi weren’t nauseous and in a terrible mood, he’d probably be about to enjoy himself, and he tries to get all his sulking done before Yunho arrives by sullenly buying himself kimbap at the nearest convenience store and eating it while he staring morosely at his phone. It doesn’t work.

“Sorry I’m late!” Yunho says, climbing out of his own cab in front of a sleek, glassy storefront displaying brightly colored unisex clothing. Yunho, unlike Mingi, looks fresh-faced and fully alert, his hair softly swept back off his forehead and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up halfway to his elbows in a way Mingi’s always found unreasonably attractive. There are no bruisey circles under his eyes. Mingi peers at him, trying to determine how much he can glean about the success or failure of Yunho’s date from Yunho’s mood, but the polished, reflective surface of Yunho’s good-natured public persona is impenetrable. Yunho could have had the worst night imaginable and he’d still be here, put-together and affable, as promised.

“You’re not that late,” Mingi says. Even his voice sounds tired and he wonders how much his sunglasses are capable of hiding. “Is this the store you wanted to try?” He gestures at the building behind him, the store’s name tastefully displayed over the door in neat, sans-serif font. Calming, Mingi thinks. The kind of store where nothing loud or upsetting will happen.

“One of them, yeah,” says Yunho. He sounds aggressively chipper, as though he’s unwilling to allow for anything else, and Mingi once again wonders why Yunho bothered inviting him. They’ve barely spoken at all in the past month. “Thanks for coming with me. I got out of the military and I feel like half my clothes don’t fit. Or they feel like a very old version of me.”

Mingi nods. He’d been a social worker, so can’t entirely relate, but Yunho, coming off his time in the marines, had walked into their company building for the first time after his discharge broader and more muscular than Mingi had ever seen him.

The store is spacious and airy, the articles of clothing spread far apart on the racks, and they largely have it to themselves save for an employee adjusting the clothes on the mannequins in the front window and a young couple shopping. The woman leans her head on the man’s shoulder, her arm linked through his, and Mingi breathes through a quick wave of nausea.

“You okay?” Yunho asks, catching Mingi’s exaggerated exhale. “What’s up?”

“Wooyoungie took me out drinking last night,” says Mingi. Yunho rests a hand between Mingi’s shoulder blades and Mingi’s stomach churns again. “I wasn’t prepared.”

“I see,” says Yunho, his voice warm with suppressed laughter. “Is anyone prepared for drinking with Wooyoung?”

“You,” says Mingi. “You’re a tank. You and Jongho, you never show up the next day looking like something on the bottom of a shoe.”

“Water,” Yunho says. “It’s key.” He meanders between racks of pants and hoodies, touching the fabric here and there. He holds up a pair of gray distressed jeans and considers them, head tipped sideways, and doesn’t look at Mingi when he says, “You sure that’s it?”

This brings Mingi up short. “What?”

“I haven’t heard from you a lot lately,” Yunho says. “Right after we got out of the military I saw you a lot, and the last month or so you barely text. I don’t even remember the last time I had to text you in order to see you.”

“You saw me a lot,” Mingi repeats, flatly. As a euphemism, it’s doing a spectacular amount of heavy lifting.

“Yeah,” Yunho says. He’s flushing, his neck red just above the collar of his jacket and his ears pink beneath the ends of his hair. Mingi registers how fast Yunho’s hair has grown out since his discharge. How much more like an idol he looks again. “Well.”

Mingi holds himself back from saying what he wants to say, which is that Yunho should have been texting him more often for years. If Mingi hadn’t been so deeply committed to their friendship, Yunho might have had to learn that the hard way. Instead, Mingi thinks about Yunho drunk in a hotel room a month before, about Yunho’s blank refusal to admit to remembering any of it, and says, “How was your date?”

From the look on Yunho’s face, it’s not a question he wants to answer. He shifts from foot to foot, inspecting the label on the gray jeans again, and he looks in Mingi’s direction without actually looking at Mingi.

“Fine,” he says. “It was…she was nice.”

“That’s it?”

“Do you want the gory details?” Yunho asks, eyebrow raised, and Mingi knows he’s in dangerous territory. He still remembers, in a hallucinatory sort of detail, what Yunho had said the first night they’d slept together — Do you want me to pick you up too? Do you want me to take you out to dinner before you come over? — and he remembers too what he’d said before leaving the hotel room. He remembers all of it and he knows that what he should do now is be quiet. Let Yunho buy some new clothes, get a coffee, wander around Seongsu-dong before saying a brief, slightly distant goodbye while a taxi driver idles at the curb.

“I’m just saying” Mingi says. “Usually you want a date to be better than nice.”

“Mingi-yah,” Yunho says. His expression is pleasant and his voice is not. “I’m not going to describe my date to you.”

“Fine,” says Mingi. “I just thought, since we were — ”

“Mingi,” Yunho says again, interrupting Mingi before Mingi can say fucking. “What is going on with you?”

“Nothing,” says Mingi. It’s comical, having this argument in a clothing store, speaking so quietly that they’re essentially whispering. It’s comical, having this argument at all. He sees himself as he imagines the couple shopping might see him, hunched over and sulking, hissing under his breath surrounded by overpriced hoodies. It occurs to him how stupid he’s being, the risk he’s taking by discussing this in public. “Nothing,” he repeats, and he does his best to sound sincere. “Sorry.”

Yunho shuts his eyes. He takes a deep breath and holds it for several seconds before releasing it. “If you want to do this,” he says, “we are not doing it here.”

“Then — ” Mingi starts, but Yunho shakes his head. He puts the gray jeans back and the denim is slightly wrinkled from where he’d been clutching it.

“I’ll buy you a coffee,” Yunho says, “and we’ll talk.”

**

one month ago

The staff member getting married, a KQ camerawoman who worked with Ateez countless times, had been determined, in her own words, to avoid a wedding that felt too traditional, and Mingi, stumbling back to his and Yunho’s Busan hotel from the final bar of the night, can’t help but feel she succeeded.

“This one,” Yunho says. “Hey. Quit walking. It’s this one.”

Yunho grabs Mingi’s wrist and Mingi stops so abruptly that Yunho nearly crashes into him from behind. They’re the last two members of the group to return — San and Wooyoung left at least an hour ago, presumably to have sex in their hotel room, and Hongjoong and Seonghwa and Yeosang had followed them, relatively sober, in a taxi fifteen minutes later — and Mingi’s head is spinning. It’s dark, the stars a little bit brighter here than in Seoul, and his suit feels too restrictive, and he’s drunk enough that he’s not sure if it’s pleasant anymore.

“This was a mistake,” says Mingi. “From now on, no weddings. No one gets married.”

“What about love?” asks Yunho, fumbling in his pocket for his keycard and dragging Mingi through the lobby and into the elevator. “Why can’t people fall in love?”

“People can fall in love,” says Mingi. “You’re being traditionalist. They can be in love, they just can’t get married.”

Yunho seems to consider this. “I like weddings, though,” he says. “I like the ritual.” He pauses as the elevator door slides shut. “I always wanted to get married.”

The elevator is lined with mirrors and Mingi watches their reflections standing shoulder to shoulder, endless angles of their bodies in proximity. Their heights are evenly matched. They look handsome together, Mingi thinks, with their suits and their flushed cheeks, and for a brief, deranged second, Mingi imagines some impossible future, some different country in some alternate timeline, where they’re returning to a hotel from their own wedding.

“Your wife’ll be lucky,” says Mingi. He might as well be punching himself in his own gut. He can hear the alcohol on his voice, how it makes it deeper and raspier and how his words blur together at the edges.

With a dinging sound, the doors open to the fifteenth floor. Yunho doesn’t move until Mingi nudges him. He’s busy staring at Mingi.

“My wife,” Yunho says, in a tone of voice Mingi doesn’t understand. It’s been a very, very long time since Mingi’s seen Yunho drunk, but he’s not sure he’s ever seen Yunho this disconcertingly unguarded. All the things that make him so outwardly Yunho — his warm smile, his easy laugh, the way he bows his head politely to every worker in every shop they go into — are gone now that they’re alone, and the person left feels raw and unknown to Mingi, the mysterious core of a familiar fruit.

“Of course your wife,” Mingi says. He waits while Yunho keys open the door to their room, Yunho’s eyes still fixed on him. “Are you kidding? Look at you. I knew when you were fifteen that you’d be some handsome idol or actor with a perfect wife. Girls used to wait around corners to look at you, Yunho, remember?”

Personally, Mingi feels like he’s doing a good job imitating the way straight men tease their straight friends, but Yunho’s stricken face makes him wonder if he’s missed the mark. He knows he himself isn’t straight, and until very recently, he’d thought Yunho wasn’t straight either. They’ve been sleeping together for nearly two months, one of them turning up at the other’s apartment late in the evening once a week and then waking up naked with the first sting of the dawn, and Mingi’s still not sure that Yunho’s not somehow still straight anyway. When Mingi’s seen Yunho with girls, at the beginnings or at the ends of their dates, Yunho’s careful. He’s a gentleman. With Mingi, Yunho’s always as rough and as wordless as he had been the first time, and Mingi can’t stop wondering if maybe Yunho’s working through some biological urge, something like hunger or thirst or the animal need to move his body until it collapses, rather than touching Mingi because Mingi is Mingi. At the very least, Mingi’s certain that Yunho’s not falling love the way Mingi’s been in love since they were both seventeen.

“Sorry,” Mingi says, once they’re inside their room and Yunho’s expression hasn’t shifted from unconcealed distress. He kicks off his shoes and stands between their two queen beds in his socks and wishes, not for the first time, that he hadn’t let Yunho convince him to share a room. They’re grown men, he thinks. They’re not dating. What are they doing. “Hey, no, I’m just teasing you. Those girls were definitely waiting for me.”

“I never cared about that,” Yunho says. He’s undoing his tie, letting the silky end of it slide through his collar. “I didn’t care about being popular. I wanted to be an idol with you.”

“I know,” says Mingi, soothingly. “Wild choice back then, huh? I literally could not have looked worse next to you.”

“Stop,” Yunho says. “Stop it. Come here.”

Yunho reaches out for him and Mingi steps into his arms without thinking. Yunho’s hands are on Mingi’s hips immediately, although the way he’s touching Mingi is unusually gentle, and Mingi wonders if Yunho’s drunker than he’d first seemed. His pupils are so wide that his eyes look black. His body is warm, the back of his shirt slightly damp with sweat, and the scent of his skin is tangy with soju and fading cologne.

“You were handsome back then,” Yunho insists. “I was so lucky that you wanted to hang out with me. When we were auditioning, I thought if you went to some company without me I’d be so lonely.”

“Of course I wanted to hang out with you,” says Mingi. It’s sincere. It’s too sincere. “You’re my favorite person.”

“Stop,” Yunho says again, tone impenetrable, and sits back on Mingi’s bed. His face is level with the fly of Mingi’s dress pants and he licks his lips without seeming to realize he’s doing it. He pulls the zipper of the Mingi’s trousers down and tugs at the waistband until they fall to the floor in a pool at Mingi’s feet.

“You don’t have to,” Mingi breathes. He can feel the warmth of Yunho’s breath against his cock through the tight black fabric of his underwear. Yunho’s never done this, never gotten on his knees for Mingi, and it’s everything Mingi can do to give Yunho an out. Sucking dick, Mingi thinks, is different than what they’ve done before, handjobs and grinding against each other and Yunho fucking Mingi until Mingi’s close to tears. Sucking dick, like bottoming, seems particularly not-straight to Mingi, and even though his body is on the razor’s edge of desire, threatening to tip any moment into incoherence, he wants Yunho to know he doesn’t have to do this.

“It’s okay,” Yunho says. He presses his face to Mingi’s crotch, nose to the head of Mingi’s cock, and inhales.

“But if it’s your first time — ”

“I want to,” says Yunho. He pauses and looks up at Mingi through his eyelashes and Mingi wonders if it’s possible to come from a visual alone. “Please.”

“I just don’t want you to feel like you have to,” Mingi says, but Yunho’s already kissing Mingi’s cock through his underwear, lips wet and open. The fabric dampens and clings and Mingi begins to harden rapidly, his cock swelling and stiffening until it’s angled nearly upright.

“Can I?” Yunho asks, sliding his fingers underneath the waistband of Mingi’s underwear, and when Mingi nods, Yunho pulls them down in one motion, the head of Mingi’s cock catching on the elastic and then springing free. Yunho visibly swallows.

Mingi’s first instinct is to cover himself, although Yunho’s seen him naked before. Something about the quiet anonymity of the hotel room, about the heavy sounds of his and Yunho’s breathing, about the dim fluorescence of the city lights filtering through the window coverings, makes Mingi feel as though Yunho might, for the first time, be seeing the reality of Mingi’s body and deciding that he doesn’t want it. Mingi lets his hands hang at his sides and clenches his fists, nails scraping the skin of his thighs.

“Don’t,” Yunho says, running his hands up and down over Mingi’s hips. “Don’t be shy.”

Yunho’s still fully dressed apart from his tie and Mingi can see the shape of his erection through his dress pants. Mingi’s tempted, for a minute, to abandon the impending blowjob so he can sit on Yunho’s lap with his legs spread wide, feel the bulge of Yunho’s cock against his ass, but Yunho keeps looking up at Mingi with an awestruck tenderness that Mingi’s never seen on his face and Mingi wants to keep seeing that expression more than he wants any physical experience. The hotel room is slightly stuffy and a little too warm but Mingi shivers anyway, because Yunho is touching him like it’s Mingi he wants to be touching: not a woman, not an anonymous, faceless body, but Mingi.

"I’m gonna — I’m gonna try this now,” says Yunho, like he’s explaining to Mingi the next piece of half-finished choreography he’s thinking through, and then his mouth is on Mingi’s bare cock, and Mingi’s brain short circuits. Yunho wraps his lips loosely around just the head of Mingi’s cock, going so slow that it’s almost thoughtful, and then brings one hand up to wrap around the shaft, keeping everything at the right angle for him to sink his mouth further down. He pauses briefly, just for a moment, as though assessing his strategy, and it’s this, more than anything, that unlocks something enormous and adoring in Mingi’s chest. This is Yunho, who doesn’t do things he doesn’t want to do and who refuses to be kept back from things he does. This is Yunho, who approaches every task with a single-minded drive to excel. Yunho, who knows Mingi as well as anyone on earth and still wants to touch him like this.

“Fuck,” Mingi groans. He can tell that they’re both still drunk — if he moves his head too quickly in any direction, it’s as though the room takes a few seconds to catch up with him, and if he closes his eyes he feels blissful and fuzzy — and Yunho grazes Mingi with his teeth a couple of times, saliva gathering at the corners of his mouth. He’s not used to holding his jaw open this long, Mingi thinks, and he’s not as coordinated as he usually is, and his grip is a little dry, but it’s still incredible, still an incredible shock, to realize that it’s Yunho in front of him like this.

“Good?” Yunho asks, pulling off for a second to catch his breath. He licks his lips, where Mingi’s sure the salty taste of his own skin must still be lingering, and when Mingi nods, chest heaving, lost for words, Yunho resumes his efforts, slicking up the palm of his hand with his spit and twisting his wrist as he strokes. He’s taken several inches of Mingi’s length into his mouth and Mingi can feel the head of his cock brush the back of Yunho’s throat occasionally, can feel Yunho’s throat clench as he tries not to gag, and the resulting tightness ratchets Mingi’s arousal higher every time. Yunho might never have done this before but he’s good at it anyway, as he’s good at most everything he tries.

“I’m so close,” Mingi rasps, after a few minutes. It’s getting sloppier and as it gets sloppier it gets better, every stroke slicker and every swirl of Yunho’s tongue against the head of his cock wetter and less reserved, and Mingi wonders if he’s been ruined for all over blowjobs after this one — not because this is the most technically proficient one he’s ever received, but because he feels cherished in a fragile, unfamiliar way. He and Yunho, over the past two months, have never discussed the boundaries or rules or shape of their relationship. They are best friends and they fuck and they never, ever talk about it. When they have sex it’s rough and intense and Mingi struggles, sometimes, to locate the way Yunho feels about him specifically in the frantic snarl of their bodies. Now, Yunho is caressing Mingi’s hip and making soft little moaning sounds in his throat and Mingi loves him, loves him like he has never loved anyone. Yunho opens his throat, takes Mingi down a little bit further, and Mingi’s stomach clenches involuntarily. He makes a strangled, inhuman noise.

“I’m gonna come,” Mingi gasps, “pull off if you don’t want to swallow,” but Yunho just grabs onto Mingi’s hip and digs his fingers into Mingi’s hip bone. He keeps the pace of his strokes even but cradles the head of Mingi’s cock with his tongue and sucks his cheeks in until Mingi’s eyes roll back in his head. Mingi tries to hold on as long as he can, relishing how good it feels to be cared for like this, to be given this enormity of pleasure, but Yunho’s mouth is too hot and too wet and Yunho’s hand around him is too tight and he crashes into his orgasm with a startlingly intensity. Yunho doesn’t pull off. He swallows twice and stays steady as Mingi starts to slump forward into him, his knees pressing into Yunho’s knees, his legs starting to tremble. Yunho runs a hand gently over Mingi’s flank and guides him down onto the bed.

“God,” Mingi says,“that’s not fair, how was this your first time doing that?”

“I watch porn,” Yunho says, grinning and obviously pleased with himself. He’s on his side, propped up on his elbow with his head resting in his hand. Mingi, flat on his back beside him, can feel Yunho’s eyes on the sweaty bare skin of his chest and stomach. “I thought I could figure it out.”

“I can’t believe you studied,” Mingi says. “You studied for a blowjob.”

“Shut up,” says Yunho, and Mingi looks into his face and is reminded again that they’re both still drunk. The room spins distantly around them and Mingi shuts his eyes to make it stop. He feels Yunho’s warm hand resting against his ribs and then sliding over his belly as Yunho lies down and presses himself into Mingi’s side. It’s not something he’s ever done before.

“What’s up?” asks Mingi, eyes still resolutely closed. “If you give me a minute, I can — ”

“I love you,” Yunho says, interrupting Mingi mid-sentence. “I just wanted to say it.”

Mingi’s eyes fly open. He rolls over on his side so he’s facing Yunho, his naked body nearly flush with Yunho’s clothed one, and examines Yunho’s face for a sign that he’s making a horrible, poorly thought-out joke. All he finds is sincerity, a bottomless pit of it that Mingi worries he might lose himself in. He’s spent so long pretending that Yunho doesn’t feel that way and the idea that he might feels like a wrong turn along a memorized path.

“What the fuck,” Mingi says.

“I love you,” Yunho repeats. The flush on his cheeks has spread down his neck and to his collarbones. His eyes are wide and a little unfocused.

“You’re drunk,” Mingi says. “Aren’t you? You were drunk when we got in.”

“I’m drunk,” Yunho agrees, “but I mean it. I know I’ve never been with a guy before, and I know we’ve been friends for fucking ever, but I love you. I like sleeping with you.”

“Those are two different things,” Mingi points out, even though there’s something huge and buoyant coming to life in his chest, swelling to fill every available space in his body. This is what he’s always wanted to hear, this is the gift he’s always wanted to be offered, and reaching out to take it feels like the beginnings of a trap. If he lets himself have this, it will break. If he lets himself believe Yunho means this, surely he’ll be disappointed later.

Yunho is undeterred. He kisses Mingi, stripping himself out of his remaining clothes, and even though he’s hard and leaking between them, even though he hasn’t so much as touched himself all night, he seems unwilling to stop making out or to let Mingi out of his arms long enough for Mingi to take care of him. He throws one leg over Mingi’s hips, wraps his arms around Mingi’s neck, and kisses Mingi until they’re both too stupid with it to do anything besides press their mouths together as though they’re sharing breath, to lick at each other’s lips. They kiss until Mingi forgets how time works, until they’re barely awake and still disinclined to stop, and when Mingi slides sideways into sleep, their lips are still touching in the dark.

“Hey,” Mingi whispers when he comes to again. The night has dissolved into the pale of morning and his mouth is against Yunho’s ear. “Hey, we’ve gotta get going soon.”

Yunho’s body is still pressed against Mingi’s, his mouth half-open and his eyes squeezed closed against the sun, and Mingi, as he shifts underneath the sheets, feels clammy all over. The room is too warm and it smells like sex and stale sweat. It’s impossible, Mingi thinks, that Yunho’s still here, and he hears Yunho’s voice saying I love you over and over in his head.

Yunho makes a distressed sort of grunting sound and peers at Mingi. His face is pale and the way he winces when his eyes open makes Mingi suspect he’s got a raging hangover.

“Hanging in there?” Mingi asks, and he hears the treacherous tenderness in his own voice. “I don’t think we were sober before we fell asleep.”

“Jesus,” Yunho says. “I’m too told to drink like that.” He lies still for a while, staring at the ceiling, and then seems to decide that staying still isn’t helping matters. He wriggles backwards towards the edge of the bed and stands up on shaky legs, not actually making eye contact with Mingi, before pressing a hand to his forehead and shuffling to the bathroom. Mingi hears the sink turn on and for a long, protracted moment, there’s no sound in the room besides the splashing of the water. Eventually, Yunho clears his throat.

“Do you remember what we did last night?” Yunho asks. The way he says it is unusually hesitant, as though he’s waiting for Mingi’s response before he decides how to feel, and when the bottom of Mingi’s stomach drops out, it isn’t even surprising. Of course, Mingi thinks, it would go like this.

For several seconds, during which the bathroom sink provides a steady stream of white noise, Mingi says nothing. He cycles through several options — yes, wasn’t it funny? or yes, and I love you too or no, I was wasted, let’s never speak about this again — before he lands on what he thinks will do the least damage.

“Do you?” he asks, shifting to the edge of the bed and leaning over to fish around for his underwear. He can’t have this conversation naked. He can’t let Yunho see him like that.

“I was pretty out of it,” Yunho says, and Mingi knows. He knows that he’s going to go forward lugging around the weight of Yunho’s drunken, insincere confession on his own and that there will be no one who can help him carry it. No one knows they’ve been sleeping together. He hasn’t told anyone, has always suspected that when the group resumes activities it would all fade away into the past, and he supposes this just speeds up the process, because he knows himself too well to think that he’ll ever be able to sleep with Yunho casually now that he knows what it feels like to hear Yunho say what he said. Now that he knows what it sounds like when Yunho says I love you, he doesn’t think he can go back.

“Yeah,” says Mingi. He gets to his feet and starts dressing. Something like shame takes root deep in his gut. “Me too. I had way too much at that wedding. And my meds always make it worse.”

Yunho still hasn’t emerged from the bathroom but he turns the tap off before he speaks again. Mingi can hear a strange, strangled note in his voice. “A mistake, then,” Yunho says, and it could encompass so many things. The drinking, the sex, the words said and forgotten. The foolish decision Mingi had made to sleep with someone he’d been in love with for half his life.

“Yeah,” Mingi manages. “A mistake.” He shoves his feet into his shoes and tries to make his voice sound like his inner world isn’t collapsing in on itself. “I feel like shit, honestly. I’m gonna go get a coffee from the convenience store, if you want anything.”

“No,” says Yunho, “I don’t want anything.”

Mingi grabs his phone, five percent of its battery left, and grips it so tightly that the plastic of the case as it digs into his palm actually hurts. He can’t do this anymore. He can’t fuck Yunho knowing that Yunho doesn’t know what he told him. He can’t be the only one who remembers.

“You know,” he says, “I don’t want you to feel, like, stuck. Because of me.”

“Stuck?”

“I mean,” Mingi pushes on, and it’s like he’s still half-asleep, like he’s speaking to Yunho in a daze. He can feel the jagged beginnings of his future regret taking shape. “You’re not committed to me. You know that, right? You can sleep with other people.”

The silence this time is interminable. All Mingi can hear is his own breath.

“I don’t — ” Yunho starts, but he seems to cut himself off before he can finish. He takes a shaky, audible breath. “Sure,” he says instead. “I know that.”

Mingi leaves him like that, naked in the bathroom on the other side of the wall, and walks out of the hotel into the Busan morning. We’re never doing this again, he tells himself, as a gull screams and swoops low in front of him before wheeling back up into the sky. It’s something he’s told himself every morning after he’s slept with Yunho, even though it’s been nothing but a comforting lie, a mantra he can repeat to himself for a few days until his battered heart believes him and then a useless promise he can throw away the next time Yunho texts to ask what he’s up to. This time, though, he means it.

**

now

Mingi follows Yunho down several side streets until they reach a coffee shop nestled between two restaurants. It’s distinctly aesthetic, potted plants draped with fairy lights decorating the small wooden porch out front and the glass panels on the doors framing the patrons inside like photographs, and Mingi lets Yunho buy him a sweet, cream-topped iced coffee before they seat themselves at a corner table. The sun pours in through the window and catches every highlight in Yunho’s hair.

“So,” says Yunho. “You wanted to talk.”

Mingi resists saying that he had not actually told Yunho anything of the sort. His head is pounding and he closes his eyes, takes a long sip of his coffee in the hope that it will magically fix him. It doesn’t, although it does taste indulgently good. Yunho picks at the corner of the little loaf cake he’d bought for the two of them to share and Mingi also resists commenting on the visual connotations of sharing a cake.

“Sorry,” says Mingi, after a few moments. “For earlier. I was being a dick. I know we were in public.”

“We still are, technically,” says Yunho, although the coffee shop is considerably louder and swallows the sound of their voices, and no one inside is paying them any attention. “Believe it or not, that’s not really what I was upset about.” When Mingi doesn’t answer right away, he continues, “You’ve been weird about me dating since we stopped…doing what we were doing, and in case you need reminding, you told me to see other people.”

Mingi wishes, quite profoundly, that he could deny that. He cannot.

“I know I did,” he admits, squirming in his seat slightly.

“I didn’t do anything you didn’t seem to actually want me to do”

“I know,” Mingi says again.

“And I wouldn’t have slept with anyone but you for as long as you wanted to sleep with me except you kind of broke everything off without warning while I was naked in the bathroom.”

Mingi opens his mouth to say, for a third time, that yes, he knows, and then he registers what Yunho’s just said.

“What,” says Mingi, “are you talking about.”

“What are you talking about?” Yunho retorts. He shoves a bite of the loaf cake into his mouth and swallows almost without chewing. Earlier, in the store, Yunho had seemed polite and annoyed, conscious of being in public and irritated with Mingi for his behavior. Now, he looks almost petulant, a sulky expression on his face that Mingi’s primarily seen on his own. “The last time we were together was the night in the hotel and you walked out the next morning like you never wanted to see me again, after telling me you hoped I knew that I wasn’t committed to you. I never said I wasn’t committed to you. You did.”

The coffee and kimbap in Mingi’s stomach seem to have formed a strange, coagulant paste. He’s beginning to wonder if perhaps he’s made a wretched and humiliating mistake.

“You said,” Mingi starts. He opens and shuts his mouth a few times like a fish. “You said you didn’t remember.”

“You said you didn’t remember!” Yunho hisses. “What was I supposed to do, remind you?”

“Technically,” Mingi protests, “I didn’t. I just didn’t actually answer you when you asked me.”

“Okay,” Yunho says. He shakes his head back and forth a few times. “To clarify. You do remember what we did that night. And you remember what I said.”

“I remember you were drunk,” says Mingi, “and told me you loved me, and it was the only time you’d ever been gentle or affectionate with me like that, and apparently you have to be drunk to treat me that way.” He feels his eyes getting hot and he looks up the ceiling. He bites his lip as hard as he can without doing damage.

There’s a long silence. Yunho looks into Mingi’s eyes and then away. He stares out the window and takes a deep, shaky breath.

“I’ve never dated a guy before,” Yunho admits, finally. “I don’t know how it works." He pauses to swallow again and it’s the most unsure of himself Mingi can remember him being. When they auditioned for companies, when they did trainee evaluations, before their debut stage: Yunho, in all those situations, had willed himself into a kind of confidence that he doesn’t seem able to manage this time.

“What do you mean, you don’t know how it works?” Mingi asks. He lowers his voice so it’s barely audible even to Yunho. “We were doing pretty well with the sex.”

“That part I could figure out,” Yunho says. “The rest of it — it’s like I always knew how everything worked. I’m conventional, you know? Not in a bad way, but I’m handsome. I like women. I go out with women and it’s like we’re in a drama. When it’s so easy to be exactly what you’re supposed to be, it feels like it’s that much harder to be something else.” He doesn’t say it with arrogance, because he doesn’t need to. Yunho goes through life like the male lead who gets the girl and if it were anyone else, Mingi thinks, it would sound unbearably cocky. For Yunho, it’s just true.

“You’re so fucking chivalrous with girls,” Mingi says. “I’ve seen you and it’s like you said, you treat them like you’re in a drama. I just — you never did that with me, and I wanted you to. I wanted you to so badly and you just wouldn’t and I thought maybe for you I was just…” He trails off, his eyes getting hot again.

“Just what?” asks Yunho, very soft.

“Just a substitute,” Mingi finishes. “Just a stand in. Just someone to sleep with while you waited for someone better.”

“Mingi,” says Yunho, and he sounds almost hoarse. “Not to be, like, an asshole, but I found other people to sleep with when you told me to. I never needed a stand in. I wanted you.” He takes a breath and seems to force himself to look Mingi in the face. “I know it came out of nowhere, when I kissed you the first time, I know I didn’t exactly give you any clue what was happening, but when I was in the marines and had basically nothing to distract me, all I could think about was you.I missed you. And I can be chivalrous, if that’s what you want. I can spoil you. I just, I didn’t know — I know how to date girls. I don’t know what I’m doing with guys.”

“Yeah,” says Mingi, “but I’m not just a guy. I’m me. You know me.”

You know what I like, Mingi means. You know I want to feel like I matter.

Yunho nods. “And I didn’t know how you felt,” he adds softly. He crumbles a piece of the loaf cake between his fingers and lets the crumbs fall to the plate. “I still don’t know how you feel.”

At this, Mingi gapes. “That’s not possible,” he says, before he can stop himself, and the two of them stare each other down.

“It is possible,” Yunho says eventually, eyes wide and owlish, “because I don’t.”

“I don’t understand.” Mingi takes an enormous swallow of coffee and thinks he might choke on it. “I’ve been so obvious. Everyone knows.”

“You were like that when were teenagers, too, though,” Yunho protests. “You’re like that with all your friends — you want them to pay attention to you. You want them to value you. You don’t like it when they don’t call you or make plans.”

“It’s not the same when it’s you,” Mingi says.

Yunho nods. He’s quiet for a moment, looking out the window down the street, and wipes the sweat that’s gathered on his forehead after sitting in what amounts to a greenhouse. “I know now,” he says. “Is that enough?”

Mingi’s quiet for a moment, studying the familiar lines of Yunho’s familiar face, and the future feels tremulous and newborn. Soon, Jongho will be discharged from the military and the group will resume activities. Soon, they’ll be back to recording and practicing, touring and promoting, and Mingi and Yunho’s time together will have to be stolen from the hours left between schedules, from the quiet predawn they get to the themselves. Soon, if they’re really doing this, they’ll have to tell the other members about it. Yunho will have to come out. Soon, Mingi thinks, but not yet.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s enough.”