Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The soft blue glow of the water had always felt like home. From the bottom of the ocean, watching the light play with the shifting surface in a sapphire dance of golden stars, breath tight in his lungs, his body weightless in the rolling current of the gentle waves, from the prow of the Marina, bare feet dangling above the licking floods, sun-clear and deepest azure, from right here, the bench in front of the curved glass, flitting shapes and languid figures drawing arcs and patterns through the depths beyond, chatter of too many strangers floating in the air.

There, entranced by the ineffable flutter of caged sea, he was just another creature of the earth, bound by nothing, a timeless thing invisible to careless eyes. He sat largely unmoving, only the heave of his chest and an occasional blink betraying him as alive, and his mind quietened to a mellow stream of detached thoughts and names, flagging every creature flitting through his field of view with soundlessly whispered syllables that said ‘I know you’.

He recognized them all. He could’ve watched them forever.

But, like always, the clusters of strangers thinned, their chatter fading away until he was left with those precious few minutes of utter silence; his soft breath in the jewel glow of the tank, the building sighing in relief, the piece of the sea behind the glass waltzing on like it did every moment of every day and every night. Relishing in that rare piece of being alone with the whirling creatures, he fought the creeping disappointment of being made to leave soon, any time now, pleading with himself to simply enjoy it while it lasted.

Much too soon, there it was, the lazy tread of steps, approaching, and he sighed deeply and closed his eyes, unfolding his motionless body, stretching the stiffness from his slumped back and shoulders. His time was up.

“Hey.” A warm, cheerful, but polite voice. “We’re closing. I’m afraid I have to kick you out.”

He turned to face its source; a young man, part of his black hair carelessly gathered into a small ponytail, strands slipped from it to frame his face and neck, the azure light softening his hard jaw and high cheekbones and hooked nose and sharp eyes, a regretful smile gracing his pretty face.

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” he replied, standing up, stretching his stiff legs. His voice sounded foreign.

“I’ve seen you around here,” the man continued, ambling closer. An interested spark lit up his eyes.

Well, yes, that made sense, considering that he’d been coming in every day for the past month. He smiled sheepishly, glanced at the blacktip reef shark passing by as if it could give him comfort, but it disappeared, with a sharp turn, into the depths of the tank and left him without something to reply.

The man considered him for a moment. “Actually, I’ve seen you here pretty much every day for the past weeks.”

He almost winced, heat creeping into his face, making him eager to leave despite his aversion to it just a moment ago. “I, uhm, I kinda like marine life,” he said, weakly defending himself. His hands slid into the pocket of his hoodie, hiding their nervous fidgeting.

The man raised an amused eyebrow at him. “Kinda?” He chuckled, undoubtedly noticing the flush on the other’s cheeks. “Don’t worry, me too. But isn’t paying the entrance fee every day a little expensive?”

The other shrank a little, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, the need to be polite drilled too deeply into him to allow him to follow his desire of disappearing from this utterly awkward conversation. “It’s manageable.”

“I’m sure.” The man smiled conspiratorially. “But what if I told you there’s a way to spend hours here every day for free?”

He perked up at this, hope flooding his heart like a tidal wave. “Really?”

The man hummed affirmatively. “You’d have to do something, of course. We’re not letting just anyone in here.” Inexplicably, he winked as he said this. “Some maintenance, chopping bait, cleaning this place, you know what I mean. I’m assuming you’re free in the afternoon and evening, considering how consistently you’ve been showin’ up.”

He paused, repeating all that in his head, took an embarrassingly long time to realize what the man meant. His eyes widened when he did. “Are you offering me a job? Here? At the aquarium?” It would probably be the closest thing he ever got to his dream, if he could really work here, oh that would be wonderful!

His excitement must’ve shown on his face, because the man smiled at him with something close to a grin. “Yep! Someone quit, and tomorrow’s their last day, so I’ve been meaning to put up an ad, but if you want, you can have it.” He tilted his head aside, once. “We could do a little interview right now, if you want.”

The other straightened himself, trying to suppress the smile threatening to take over his whole face. His chest was tight with joy, excitement humming through his veins, and he swore he would burst at his seams every second now; a job at the aquarium! Basically getting paid for spending time here, with the odd thing to do here and there, he couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity. “Sure,” he agreed, trying so hard not to sound overeager, but he failed miserably.

“Alright!” The man reached into the pocket of his baggy pants, wrinkling his big, sun-bleached blue shirt, producing a crinkled piece of paper and a ballpoint pen from it, clicking the pen, gaze darting about before it settled on his right forearm; a blacktip reef shark of jagged black ink lines prowled over his skin. After testing the pen on his palm and finding it working, he lifted his expectant eyes to the other.

For a moment, they simply regarded each other, then the man lightly tilted his head. “Well?” he prompted, “Why don’t you tell me a few things about yourself?”

“Oh! Sorry, yeah, uhm-” Internally, the other shuddered. Awkward. “-My name is San, Choi San, I’m, uh, I’ve loved the sea since I was a little kid, I used to go fishing with my grandpa, so I don’t have any reservations about handling dead fish, and, uhm.” He swallowed, put off by the man plastering the piece of paper against the glass tank and writing something down, serious, pretty face illuminated by the soft sapphire glow. “I guess I know a few things about marine life?” He’d eaten everything he could find about it whole. “I know how to fix stuff, and I’m probably a pretty decent cleaner.”

The man hummed, acknowledging, slender hand dancing over the paper as he finished whatever he’d been writing down; his handwriting was much too scrawled to be legible. “Do you know your way around a boat?”

San smiled. “Yeah. I can sail, operate a motor boat, and I can absolutely do any heavy lifting you might need.”

The man wrote something down, paused mid-sentence and struck it out violently. He shook his pen when it stopped working. “Very good. How flexible are you about time?”

“As flexible as you need me to be.”

The man grinned. “Now that’s what I like to hear.” He considered his piece of paper, then took it off the glass and turned back to him. “I’ll get to the interesting bit in a moment, but let me tell you a little about myself, just so you know what you’ll have to deal with.” He switched his pen to his left hand, then extended his right, smile widening as they shook hands. “The name’s Jung Wooyoung. I’ve loved the sea since I was a kid, too. Studied marine biology, just got my PhD a few months ago, and I’ve been working here ever since!”

Oh. A pang of jealousy shot through San’s heart, immediately followed by something like awe; a PhD? This guy couldn’t be older than twenty-three. How the fuck did he do that?

Jung Wooyoung leaned forward with a little smirk. “Officially, I’m just one of the two mandatory scientists they hire, but I’m pretty much running the place. The boss hasn’t been here since last month.” He sounded very satisfied with himself, almost cocky, but when he leaned back, the smirk washed off his face to be replaced by a pleasant smile. “But enough about me. You’re the best candidate for the job we’ve had!”

The other blinked, confused. “Am I not the only one? I thought you hadn’t put up an ad yet.”

“Exactly!” The man giggled, maybe at him, maybe at his own joke. “Anyway. You’d work around twenty-five hours a week, plus the cleaning every evening, for twenty bucks the hour. Sounds good?”

He would’ve worked that job unpaid. “Yeah.” He prayed it wasn’t too obvious how hard he tried to hide his beaming grin, that he buzzed with excitement. “Sounds good.”

Jung Wooyoung beamed at him. “Well, congratulations!” He extended his left hand. “You got the job!”

San shook his hand, trying so hard to keep his joy down, but it flowed from his tight chest and out through his face, his own smile just short of matching the other’s. What a development. Did he really just get a job at his favorite place in town? Just like that? Insane.

“When can you start?” his new boss asked jovially, shoving the piece of paper into his pocket, pen disappearing with it.

‘Right now.’ he wanted to reply, but he didn’t. “Uhm, tomorrow?”

“Nice.” The man turned on his heels and headed down the way he’d come. “Follow me!”

San hesitated, the languid but somehow worryingly quick gait of Jung Wooyoung putting more and more distance between them, but then he made himself hurry along the glass wall, along the exhibits in the concrete wall curving on the other side of the hallway, passing wolf eels and the giant pacific octopus and seahorses and- he tore his gaze away from the shimmering tanks, picking up his pace. How was that guy so fast? He looked like he shouldn’t be moving any faster than a bored stroll.

They left the exhibition through a steel door that read ‘Staff Only’, entering the glaringly white hallway beyond, their steps echoing along the picture-hung walls, and he felt, somehow, as though he stepped into a forbidden world, some sacred place he didn’t belong, like a kid that had lost his way. The man ahead of him didn’t seem to share any of these sentiments, cheerfully chatting with him as he led him through a maze of hallways and doors that smelled distinctly like fish. He didn’t know what else he’d expected, really.

Eventually, they arrived at the end of a hallway that led directly into an office. Jung Wooyoung pushed the door open, stepping aside to let the other inside as he gestured at the small, dim daylight-lit room with a flourish. The place was a mess. Loose papers and folders and objects cluttered the desk, much of the floor disappearing beneath boxes upon boxes, stacked or thrown open, contents displayed on their flayed lids, one corner occupied by an ancient printer, the shelves crammed with only partly labeled ring binders, photographs of marine life littering what few parts of the walls weren’t hidden behind boxes or occupied by the calender and maps of oceans and seas, a hoodie carelessly thrown over the back of the office chair, the monitor displaying some sort of analysis of… something?

How anyone could work there was beyond him.

Jung Wooyoung dropped himself into his chair, eliciting a worrying creak from it, then tore open the drawers of his desk with such violence that San feared they would break; but they just screamed in the way old metal did, clanged shut and left a rustle of paper behind when the man found what he’d been looking for. A contract and a key card. He thrust the contract at the other.

San skimmed over the pages, but he knew that he’d sign this thing no matter what. A job in the aquarium, for heaven’s sake, there was nothing that could make him even so much as think about reconsidering whether he wanted this. When he’d reached the last page, he looked up to find the other studying him, though he turned away immediately and handed him a pen, gesturing at a stack of boxes to use as a surface to write on. Keys of the keyboard clicked in inhuman speed as San drew his signature onto the paper.

Hesitantly, he stepped back from the stack, clutching the signed contract in his hands like letting go of it would reveal all of this to be some strange daydream, his head swimming with a dizzying mix of joy and disbelief and excitement as he exchanged the contract for a shiny new key card. On the blue plastic, the stark orange tendrils of the giant pacific octopus curled around the printed gold lettering of the aquarium’s name – Wonders of the Sea, as old-fashioned as the aquarium itself – and it laid cool and sleek against his fingers.

This didn’t feel real.

“If you turn that around-” Jung Wooyoung plucked a permanent marker from a mug with a faded iteration of the aquarium’s logo, some machine whirring somewhere between desk and wall. “-You’ll find a blank space. Just write your name on there, so we know whom to return it to if we find it.”

San took the pen, holding the card between the fingertips of his left hand like some holy relic, uncapped the marker with his teeth and took a secret, deep breath before he dared to deface the card. In his best handwriting, he sketched his name onto the white stripe, black ink clinging to the plastic, and then he returned the pen and admired this card, this key to the aquarium to enter whenever he felt like it, for free. He would protect this scrap of plastic with his life.

“Neat, huh?” The man clicked a key, then the printer whirred to life with a worrying groan. “Had the locks redone two months ago. Designed the card too, actually.”

“It’s…” San flipped the card over, regarded the sprouting, vibrant corals and the octopus against the deep blue. “Beautiful.” Why did he sound reverent? God, this was so embarrassing. He slid his hand into his pocket, never letting go of the card, averting his gaze to the desk; it bore two framed photos, one of a brown and white border collie, one of Jung Wooyoung and a boy, much younger than him, who was the spitting image of him. And then there was the PhD certificate.

God, he was jealous. What wouldn’t he have given to study marine biology too? He’d worked his ass off in high school to get the best grades so he could go to university, but then he didn’t have the money or the time, taking care of his grandparents, and then they were gone and it was too late. But he had this now, the aquarium, nearly if not completely unlimited access, and that was enough. More than enough.

“It’s such a gorgeous thing, isn’t it?” Jung Wooyoung said, fondly, and when San looked at him, the man gazed at the certificate. Fuck, had he been staring?

“Yeah,” he agreed, heat creeping into his face, “I’m impressed, honestly. A PhD, so young, you’ve got to be some sort of fish genius.”

The man snorted. “I mean, sure, twenty-six is comparatively young, but not that young. I’m not a prodigy, even though I see why you might think that.” His eyes twinkled with a teasing spark.

“You’re twenty-six?” San hated how audible his surprise was. That made more sense, admittedly.

The printer stuttered to a moaning end. Jung Wooyoung bolted from his chair, winding past him and through the clutter of the office with a naturalness as if he did this a hundred times every day. He probably did. “Yep!” he called from the printer, gathering a stack of paper, then added, amused: “How old did you think I am, twenty? I know I look young, but damn.” There was a joking air to his voice, one that lit up the dusk-dim room.

“Anyway-” he continued, slipping back to his desk chair that shuddered under the force of his carelessly falling body, picking a stapler from the mess with astounding precision and joining the pages in his hands with a click, “-I’ve got a copy of the contract for you.”

San took the contract from him, barely processing that he was now officially employed again, and then Jung Wooyoung whirled past him like a gust of wind and disappeared through the door. Left alone, unsure what to do now, he listened as a door somewhere along the hallway, pretty close, opened, shifting on his feet. He glanced at the picture frames; he really was handsome, this energetic man, all hard edges and clear-cut features and prominent lines, but somehow his beaming smile that wrinkled his eyes and carved into his cheeks and showed off his teeth softened him the way many hands wore down the sharp edges of old photographs.

He shook his head lightly, produced his new key card from his pocket. It gleamed dimly in the fading light of the day, drew a smile onto his face and tightened his chest with joy, and he couldn’t wait to tell his friends about this, about finally getting a job that he would like, that he would love, and god he still couldn’t believe it. Everything had happened so quickly. His friends wouldn’t believe him either, but he could send them a picture of the key card, his name on its back, he could-

The door swung open, nearly made him jump out of his skin, and Jung Wooyoung was back and saying something about how he was the only person in this godforsaken place who knew how to keep order as he dumped a collection of items onto his messy desk. San raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

The man brushed paper clips shaped like fish and several pens off a notebook that was bursting at its seams, puffed up, sticky notes and pieces of paper sticking over the edges of the pages, the once sky blue thick cardboard cover bent and disfigured by water stains, the whole thing kept from bursting by a bright red rubber band that looked like it belonged on a Mason jar. The notebook sighed in relief when the man took its restriction off, bloating to its full, glorious fatness.

San wanted so badly to read that thing. During the brief glance he got of its contents as its owner leafed to the back, he saw that it was filled to the brim with notes and charts and paper clippings and drawings – even the limited glimpses he got of those were gorgeous – and photos, a piece of a whole life crammed into the seemingly much too tight space of a single book.

Jung Wooyoung stopped on one of the very last pages, already mostly filled by a watercolor and colored pencil painting of a school of manta rays, sun-golden wave pattern like lace over their dark gray backs. “Can you give me your phone number and e-mail?” The tip of a red fineliner hovered over the paper.

“Yeah, sure.” San produced his phone from his pocket, considered for a second before he slid the wonderful key card under the case, then turned it around and opened his contacts to search for his own phone number. When he looked up, briefly, the other had scrawled what looked like a spidery rendition of his name and something else onto the page. He dictated his phone number to him, then his e-mail, and a giddy little feeling coursed through his veins as he typed that pretty man’s private phone number into a new contact.

‘In case you need me specifically,’ the man had said, ‘The website only directs you to Georgie.’

Because he could, San saved the man as ‘Dr. Jung Wooyoung’, resisted the urge to add a little shark, as that really would’ve been unprofessional, and damn near hummed with joy as he followed the man through the maze of hallways and doors, back to the main showroom. The way seemed much shorter this time, somewhat less foreign, and then he was back in the soft cerulean glow of the main tank. He did still have one question before he left. “Miste-”

“Wooyoung,” the man interrupted him, “Just Wooyoung.”

Oh. Alright. Maybe he could add that shark. “Wooyoung,” he amended, “When should I be here tomorrow?”

“Right!” Wooyoung stopped, so abruptly the other almost bumped into him. “We open at ten, as I’m sure you know, but everyone gets here around eight or nine, so it’s best if you’re here about then too. So Jon and his boyfriend, uhm, what was his name, Martin, can start teaching you before the first visitors are here.”

Boyfriend, huh? “Okay.” He paused, watched two nurse sharks glide past them, had to tame his smile at the thought that this was going to be part of his job. How was he so lucky? “Thank you,” he told Wooyoung, “For the job, I mean. Thank you.”

The man shrugged. “Couldn’t let you keep paying those eleven dollars every day.” He smiled a conspiratorial little smile. “I know a sea lover when I see one. And it’s always good to have people with actual muscle on the crew.”

San returned a sheepish smile that didn’t quite leave his face until he sat in his car, stationary heater turned on, key card in hand. It was replaced, then, by a beaming grin, and he allowed himself to let his joy bubble from his throat with giggles before he quietened himself and picked up his phone. When he saw the time, he realized that the aquarium had closed over half an hour ago, and then he giggled and dialed his best friend’s number.

“Seonghwa-” he said in lieu of greeting when they’d picked up, “-You’ll never believe what just happened.”

The next day, he arrived at eight thirty sharp. A few other cars speckled the pavement, and he scanned the parking lot to be sure that he was alone before he fixed the collar of his winter jacket with the help of the side mirror, breath fogging the cold early February morning air, fixed his hair too and adjusted his glasses and forced himself to stop worrying. He already had the job. What were they gonna do, kick him out because his hair didn’t sit exactly right? Sure.

Standing before the closed main entrance, he opened his wallet, carefully sliding that gorgeous key card first from its leather pocket, then its plastic protection, and as he stuck the card into the lock, waiting for that soft click of it opening, his heart leapt in his chest. And then there it was, that beautiful little sound, and he lit up and suppressed a quiet squeal of excitement. Dutifully returning his card to its rightful place, he opened the door and slipped into the building.

Past the steel door to the backrooms, he was confronted with a woman with short, choppy blonde hair and a face with a glower that could make a hippo tremble with fear. He only barely survived the short, mistrustful interrogation that she put him under with crossed arms and pointedly displayed muscles before he was shepherded off to what he could only assume to be the break room. The welcome was much friendlier there, and over the course of a conversation with a terribly obviously queer man called Tim and a friendly but straightforward woman called Sasha, he learned that that terrifying woman was called Daisy (of all things), and that him and Wooyoung were the youngest employees by at least five years.

And then he was taken around the aquarium and introduced to and taught his tasks by Jonathan (a man with black, graying curly hair who looked in his fifties but was, as he learned, in his mid-thirties), who seemed like he would rather be anywhere else, and Martin (a nervous man with ginger hair and freckles on every inch of his skin), who was much nicer and kindly answered any questions San had. By the end of Daisy’s tutorial on chopping bait, his hands smelled like mackerel and he’d had to find out and she was the only other person on the crew who could do any actually heavy lifting.

The only glimpses he got of Wooyoung the whole day were a hurried shape disappearing from the break room with a coffee mug and a flutter of carelessly tied up hair and paperwork, a half-eaten sandwich and a pen chasing over a page on the man’s way to the not yet finished new showroom. Each time, he couldn’t help his curiously following gaze, and then he had to snap himself back to the matter at hand before he lost the thread of what was being said to him entirely.

In the evening, Gertrude, a no nonsense older woman, taught him the exact ways in which he had to clean and what to use and what he should absolutely avoid, and he realized only halfway through that she was the one whom he would replace. He prayed he would be able to remember everything she’d told him.

And when she was gone, when he was the only person left, he sat on his bench before the main tank and sank into a small eternity of watching that caught ocean, its whirling colors and languid majesties and azure timelessness, its graceful dances and suspenseful hunts and restless feasting, its perpetual motion and coral reef flickering and softly gurgling breaths. In the silence of the abandoned building, he felt almost like a thing at the bottom of the sea, watching wild nature play its acts before him.

At home, he failed to remove the smell of fish from his hands, fell into his bed both somewhat exhausted and glowing with joy, and he hummed as he slipped through the aquarium door the next morning. He’d looked forward to work.

☆🦈☆

The next few weeks were amazing. Every morning, he woke up more or less smiling, humming to himself as he got ready for work, drawing up a to do list in his mind as he shaved, often sang along to his music as he drove to the aquarium, closer and closer to the pier and its view over the churning gray late winter ocean. His free time – of which he had far too much, for his taste – he spent tearing through books and articles or honing his questionable drawing skills.

Within the first week of this wonderful job, he’d made sort of friends with his coworkers and half-jokingly concluded that he didn’t really have to go to the gym anymore. It was incredible how much heavy lifting an aquarium had to offer. Increasingly irritated with his hands that wouldn’t stop smelling of fish, he got himself thick rubber gloves to use while chopping mackerel and herring and whatnot, which, stained with blood, sometimes made him look like some serial killer, but at least he could leave the smelly gloves at the aquarium and his hands were once again fish-free. The lemon and vinegar of cleaning clung to his clothes, though.

By the end of the second week, he’d gotten used to this marvelous privilege of having access to the aquarium whenever he wanted to, took his friends to see it too, once, before he cleaned, and he became familiar with all the small intricacies of the showrooms and tanks and pump rooms, and though he took almost two hours to clean it all, he always thought that it was over too soon. He would’ve lived there if he could.

Technically, he had a free day every week, but he never made use of it. He loved his job. He liked his coworkers, and he loved the aquarium, loved it dearly, and he had to admit that he always lingered in places longer in hopes of seeing Jung Wooyoung.

Because Wooyoung was hard to get a hold of. Always on his way to somewhere, always in motion, always deeply sunken into his work, his hair always tied up and messy and not rarely carrying a pen the man seemed to have simply forgotten, never without some sort of book or document, often sweeping into a room like a brandishing wave in a mildly irritated search for his sticker-drowning laptop or new notebook, cursing under his breath like a sailor when he was reminded that he had a guided tour to do or forgot something somewhere or found a task that had slipped from his mind. Even sitting at his desk, in that creaky old chair, he never stayed still, spinning a pen between his fingers or typing at the speed of light or sipping on his third coffee or bouncing his leg or fidgeting with something or letting his pen chase over a page.

Despite his deep eye bags, messy hair, carelessly thrown together assortment of wrinkled clothes and always present mess, he always seemed to spark with energy, flashed a bright smile those rare times he noticed the presence of someone else, always gave his full attention to any question or statement addressed to him, even if he was neck-deep in work, always in a good mood when he wasn’t actively frowning at something. The more glimpses San got of him, the more short interactions he had with him, the prettier Wooyoung seemed to become.

Because he was a good-looking man. With his hard jawline, his high cheekbones, his hooked nose, his sharp eyes, his feathery black hair that, though messy, always seemed to frame his face and neck perfectly, his warm honey skin, the jagged blacktip hunting on his right forearm, the solar system bracelet and festival wristbands on his left wrist, his wiry arms and prominent collarbones, the moles dotted about his skin, the ink words and dance of tiny fish below his nape, his nimble, slender hands that were often stained with ink or paint and that smile that lit him up like sunlight. Really, such a good-looking man.

And, naturally, San’s curiosity about that pretty man only grew. First it was that notebook, then his work at the aquarium, then his research, and then him. Him, him, him, a terribly interesting person, intelligent and creative and hard-working and open and energetic and knowledgeable, so much of him that it seemed too much for a single body to contain and spilled over the edges of him and clung to everything it touched, and there was so much to be known about him, god, so much to learn about him. So of course San’s head turned the moment he heard Wooyoung’s confident steps or bright voice, his appetite for pieces of that gorgeous man increasing with every sliver he got.

He really, really wanted to befriend him.

And the perfect opportunity for this arose, strange as it was, one late night some two and a half weeks after meeting him. He arrived at the aquarium around nine in the evening, as usual, entered with the key card he by then carried in his phone case, relished in the absolute quiet of the empty building. So devoid of any other human, it had a beautifully ghostly air, only an echo of the hundreds of people traversing its floors remaining.

He put in his earphones, turned on his music, gathered what he needed from the supply closet and began the familiar routine of mopping the floors and wiping the glass surfaces of tanks and info plates. Thoughts swirling about the blue-bathed space, mouth sometimes moving along to lyrics, methodical and quick in his motions except for the occasional short dance break, he sank into what had become a sort of daily ritual that he looked forward to.

When he reached the main showroom with its enormous cylindrical shark tank, thirty-two foot in diameter and over forty in height, a towering coral reef structure at its very core (three foot thick at its thinnest, widening slightly towards the top and tapering out into a hill towards the bottom), two blacktips drawing their languid royal arcs through the azure depths, five – once seven – nurse sharks ambling about the corals, he, like always, took out his earphones and stowed them away. This room deserved awed silence.

Thus dedicating himself to the floors, the glass and his thoughts, stealing long glances at the jewel of the room, he worked his way around the circular room, whispering a ‘good night’ to the citizens of every exhibit embedded into the wall. So occupied with this, he paid few attention to the benches – until it was time to wipe one down – and perhaps that was why he saw him so late; he stopped dead at one end of a bench and regarded the man on it.

Wooyoung looked deflated. Head turned to face the shark tank, eyes closed, hair tumbled onto the lacquered wood in a mess of tangled black strands, chest heaving softly beneath a dark hoodie, hands loosely locked over his abdomen, ankles and feet sticking over the other end of the bench, the entirety of him bathed in the cerulean glow, and for the first time since San had met him, he was still. Only movement his breath, his gorgeous face quiet as the undisturbed surface of a lake, relaxed downtilt of the corners of his mouth, softly shimmering lashes on his warm skin, hands unwound and unmoving.

It was odd as much as it was beautiful.

He thought, perhaps, that he shouldn’t be staring like this, but before he could move on, a deep breath heaved Wooyoung’s body and his eyes fluttered open, head tilting until he faced the distant ceiling; when their eyes met, a smile shifted his features, but it didn’t quite look real. “Oh,” he greeted, “Hey. Sorry, I’ll get out of your way.”

The other intended to tell him that it was alright, but then the man pushed himself up and his open hair slid to curtain his clear-cut profile with sloping, tangled, blue-gleaming jet and gently curved on his shoulders and softened him infinitely, and for a moment, San couldn’t say a word. Then he caught himself, suppressing a smile at finally having caught the man unoccupied and by himself, discarding the cloth he’d held on the cleaning cart, and tried his best to be casual about sitting down next to Wooyoung.

To his luck, he did not have to agonize over finding a way to start the conversation. “You were onto something,” the man told him, eyes on the tank, “Always sitting here. It’s nice.”

San hummed, agreeing. “It is.” He watched the slightly smaller blacktip, with the sandy skin and wider white beneath the black fin tips, dive in a sloping spiral, sleek, sinuous body weightless in the water. “It’s calming, isn’t it?”

Wooyoung chuckled. “A little too calming, maybe. I fell asleep.” He sighed, shifted his weight, leaned onto his hand between them; from this short distance, his presence was warm, tugged at the other’s mind. “What time is it, anyway? You weren’t cleaning when I laid down.”

San shrugged. “Past ten. Dunno how much, though.” He shifted, didn’t mean to bring himself even closer to the man beside him, but then the sleeve of his sweater brushed the sleeve of Wooyoung’s hoodie and he swore he heard the fabric whisper things to each other. Why was he so aware of this? Nerves, probably, because he always did get nervous when attempting to make friends.

A sigh sounded from beside him, deep and weary. “Already?” Wooyoung asked, regret in his voice, tiredness seeping into the usually light tone. “Fuck. The crabs are comin’ tomorrow, right when I’m supposed to do a guided tour, I was gonna ask Basira if she can step in for me.” He ran his free hand through his hair. “But she’s probably out of town tomorrow. With Daisy.”

The other hummed, acknowledging, unsure how to respond. What did one say to that? But he was happy to hear that the crabs would arrive as scheduled, with the opening of the new exhibition in a few days having been proudly advertised for a while now.

Wooyoung shifted away from him, produced a large coin from the pocket of his hoodie, leaning back onto the arm on his other side as he let the coin jump over the fingers of his other hand. “You know a thing or two about our exhibits, don’t you?”

Averting his gaze from the glowing tank to the jumping, gleaming coin, San confirmed this sheepishly. He was always embarrassed to admit how much he loved all this, even – or maybe especially – to someone who was just as bad as, if not worse than, him.

The man hummed, considering. “You think you could take the tour?”

San’s eyes snapped up to Wooyoung’s face, wide with surprise. “Me?” Wouldn’t someone like Sasha, who had worked here for a long time, be more suited for that? “But I’ve only been here two weeks.”

Wooyoung shrugged, caught the coin, traced the edge with his fingertips. “I’m pretty sure you know the most out of us, aside from me and Basira.” He turned to him, then, with a conspiratorial little smirk and an amused glint in his eyes. “And, besides, you look like a fucking nerd. They’d believe you if you told them threshers hunt whales.”

“Why would I-” He interrupted himself, heat crawling into his cheeks as he processed the first sentence, bringing his eyes back to the tank. “I don’t look that much like a nerd,” he tried to defend himself, his face heating further as he realized how flustered he sounded. He adjusted his glasses, felt the raised eyebrow, decided that he had to do something to save face. “I think they’d believe me ‘cause of my spectacular convincing skills and nice voice.” His tone was light, joking.

The man snorted. “Uhuh. Sure.” The coin jumped over his fingers, slipped from his grasp, clattered to the floor with a startling volume that nearly made San flinch. “I take it you’ll do the tour, then?” the other continued, bending down to pick the coin up, “It’ll be an elementary school class, so I’d expect a lot of questions.”

Oh god. San absolutely could not do this. “Yeah, sure, why not,” he agreed, “Do you have like a list of things that have to be covered, or…?” Why the fuck was he doing this?! He wasn’t qualified! He was just some random ass guy who happened to like the sea, Jesus, he absolutely could not do this.

Wooyoung ran his hand through his hair, lingering at the back of his head, shorter strands of his bangs slowly sliding from his fingers. “Nah, not really.” Supported himself with his other hand too, leaned back, tilted his head back, exposing the lines and curves of his golden, azure-drenched throat, eyes closing. “Just say whatever comes to mind. Has never failed me so far.”

“Okay.” That was going to be a gigantic disaster. “When do I gotta show up?”

“Ten.” The man lifted his head, regarded him with one of his sunny smiles, then, for no discernible reason, giggled quietly. “Relax, man. You’re gonna be fine. It’s easier than it sounds.”

“For you, maybe,” San replied, doubtful, “But I didn’t study marine biology.”

“Yeah, why didn’t you?”

He shrugged, not wanting to dive too deep into his personal things just yet. This reply successfully terminated the conversation, and he winced internally at the silence ensuing, searching his mind for literally anything to say, to keep talking to him, to create a sort of connection that he could fall back on to build a friendship, but he couldn’t come up with a thing. It was a theme that drew itself through every early stage of acquaintance with another person.

“You should, y’know?” Wooyoung told him, and when the other gave him a confused look, elaborated: “Study it.” His smile widened, shifted into a playful smirk. “Actually, nevermind. We need you here. It’s so good to finally not be the youngest anymore.”

San raised an amused eyebrow at him. “I’m your age. Born in July.”

The man groaned. “Damnit. I’m November twenty-sixth.” His regretful face shifted into a flirtatious little smile, fingers jokingly pointedly twisting a strand of his hair. “But aren’t I lucky? Finally found a hot older man.”

For a moment, confusion clouded the other’s face, then he realized both the compliment and the teased dig and experienced a confusing mix of flushing cheeks and light, surface-level annoyance. “Four months,” he said, “I’m four months older.” Additionally, he belatedly realized, this meant that the man was at least in some way attracted to men, and he didn’t know why, but his heart was lighter.

Smirking, Wooyoung raised an eyebrow at him. “Who says I’m talking about you?” He accompanied this with an obvious down and up look at him, bit the inside of his lower lip. There was a jovial air about him that made it clear that he was teasing, and that he didn’t mean any of it, not really.

In return, San crossed his arms, regarding him with an expression that said ‘seriously?’ but unable to keep the little smile from tugging at the corners of his mouth. It made sense for that blustering man to be like this, easy with his words, lighthearted with compliments and flirts, and San found that it only intrigued him more, made him want to find out what it was like when the man was completely comfortable around him.

Wooyoung giggled like a ripple of soft waves. “Wanna help me with the crabs tomorrow?” he asked, joy winding through his words.

“Of course.” He’d do anything to get to work with the animals themselves. “Whatever you need me for, I’ll do it.”

The other made a satisfied hum, lifted his weight off one hand, hesitated, as if about to raise it, then leaned on it. “Good. I’ll wait for you, so don’t let the tour go on too long, hm?” This last sentence was accompanied by a teasing tone.

San smiled, equal parts excited for and dreading the next day. “I’ll see what I can do.”

☆🦈☆

Thus, he couldn’t stop fidgeting when he came in the next morning. At the break room table, a mug of coffee in his hands, leg bouncing under the table, he relayed the cause of his antsy state to Melanie, Tim and Georgie, and while Georgie and Melanie at least tried to give him some sort of advice, Tim used the chance to shamelessly flirt with him. He was somewhat used to it by now, but he didn’t think that it would ever not fluster him.

It did distract him successfully, which was nice as long as it lasted; then it was five to ten and he adjusted his freshly cleaned glasses as he slipped through the steel door and into the main showroom, fixing strands of his hair, tugging on his marine blue sweater, smoothed the white collar of the dress shirt he wore beneath it over the collar of the sweater, ran his fingertips between the cuffs and his wrists, over the buckle of his belt, slid his grandfather’s ring off his ring finger and played with it. He slunk around the shark tank, glancing at the two nurse sharks huddled in an alcove of the structure as if they could somehow get him out of this situation.

The moment he entered the for now empty lobby, his gaze darted to the windows and settled on a restless group of kids pouring from a bus at the perimeter of the parking lot, shepherded by two women. Damnit. He’d hoped they wouldn’t show up. Why had he agreed to this? Oh god. He couldn’t do this. But he couldn’t back out now either, he’d told Wooyoung that he’d do it, and Basira and Daisy would be eating breakfast somewhere in Idaho, leaving him as the only possible option.

He was going to fuck this up so bad.

Chewing his lower lip, fidgeting with his ring, he pretended to be busy just beyond the door to the lobby, straining to listen for the door, pointlessly adjusting his watch before checking it for the time; two past ten. Michael passed him with an empathic, pitying glance as they went to open the front door to visitors and then took her place in the small room of the ticket booth. It was almost time.

Trying not to watch, San observed one of the women of the group enter the aquarium behind an elderly couple and what looked like two women with their grandchildren, and the teacher – a young one, perhaps in her mid-twenties, tall and slender – held a short conversation with Michael before she paid and left with a stack of tickets. From the corner of his eye, he saw the distribution of the tickets among the kids, and then he let go of his pretense of work and fixed his glasses and collar and slid his ring onto his ring finger.

The class burst into the aquarium with a flood of chatter, echoing in the bright, tiled foyer and bouncing off the faux marble pillars, the river of kids pouring towards the cloakroom as the older of the two accompanying women fruitlessly attempted to quiet them. Among the indistinct gurgle of conversations, he heard both excitement and exasperation, which was assuring and daunting.

He took a deep breath, briefly closed his eyes, smoothed down his sweater, and then he plastered a hopefully easy smile onto his face and approached. Putting on his absolute best socializing facade of an extrovert – and failing miserably at it – he greeted the two teachers, internally wincing at the awkward hesitancy in his voice, praying that they didn’t notice his nervosity, gladly letting the apparently actually extroverted younger woman take the lead of the conversation. God, Wooyoung would’ve been so much better at this.

When the class seemed ready to depart, he escaped the conversation and instead turned to the kids, beginning the guided tour with the little introductory speech he’d memorized, mentioning a thing or two about the history of the aquarium before he got to the interesting things. He took care to keep his relaying of information a sort of dialogue, interactive, allowing those who already knew something to share their knowledge.

He relaxed some, throughout the tour, growing more confident in himself and his ability to do a decent job of it, and by then the whole thing was almost a conversation with one of the kids, who was, very obviously, some kind of neurodivergent with an interest in the sea. They kind of reminded him of one of his father’s students, whose parent had taken them out of the taekwondo classes for a reason he never got to know, and when he considered the size of Ray Harbor and its population, he thought that it wasn’t all that unlikely that he’d taught the kid currently answering one of his questions in a few lessons of martial art. Small world, wasn’t it?

This was the good thing about the tour.

The bad thing, aside from how often he stumbled over his words, was the fact that he grew increasingly aware of the younger teacher watching him more than what he talked about. He didn’t notice at first, too caught up in the exhibits and talking and trying not to make a disaster, but once, in the main showroom, when he gestured at the shark tank while explaining something, his gaze brushed over the woman, making brief eye contact, and from then on, he felt her eyes on him.

It was distracting, made him trip on his sentences even more often, and then heat crept into his face, embarrassed that he was losing his ability to talk and embarrassed by being watched. He never should’ve agreed to this, oh god, couldn’t he have taken care of the crabs’ arrival instead of Wooyoung? He could’ve signed it and everything, then he wouldn’t have had to endure this, god, he knew he’d still think about this when he went to bed.

So when he was finally done, when he’d finally finished the tour, releasing the kids into the aquarium, watching the one who had talked with him most grab the arm of someone else and drag them somewhere, he was ready to breathe a sigh of relief. He still wore the sheepish little smile induced in him by the chorused, semi-enthusiastic ‘thank you’ when, to his horror, the young teacher made her way towards him. Oh god.

She thanked him again for the tour, conducted small talk with him that he went along with despite his increasing wish to flee and finally return to his work, and a minute or two into the conversation, he realized quite startlingly that she was flirting with him. He flushed crimson, then, unable to meet her gaze or so much as look at her, his voice growing embarrassingly flustered, tips of his ears and cheeks burning, and he prayed for rescue. It wasn’t nearly this embarrassing when Tim or even Wooyoung flirted with him, because he knew that they were mostly if not entirely joking, but her?

She was saying something about the pier and the weather and the sea when a movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention, and then he spotted Wooyoung and his lazy gait, approaching with some sort of paperwork in one hand and a pen in the other. “Hey,” the man greeted when he was close enough, cutting the woman off, “I’m so sorry to interrupt-” He gave the teacher an apologetic smile, then turned back to San. “-But I really need someone with muscles, and with Daisy gone…”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” San replied, hoping his relief wasn’t too obvious, then he apologized to the teacher and followed Wooyoung from the room, his embarrassment ebbing away. “Thanks,” he quietly told the man when they reached the lobby, and upon being met with a questioning glance, he added: “For getting me out of there.”

Wooyoung snorted. “That bad? I had a guess you wanted to be somewhere else, but damn.” He pushed the front door open and led him outside. “Not into women?”

“Huh?” The late February sun flooded the world, warm on his body, made him shield his eyes against its brightness. He didn’t really get the connection between the question and what had happened.

“She was asking you out.”

Oh.

“Uhm,” he replied eloquently, his goddamn face heating up again, “I knew that.”

Wooyoung smirked at him. “Sure you did.” They rounded another corner, closing in on the rectangular one story complex at the back of the round aquarium building that housed all the rooms not belonging to exhibitions, approaching a small mountain of plastic crates and sandbags. “But good to know I didn’t take away your chance on a date.”

San hummed affirmatively, scanning the heap. “Do I have to carry all that inside?”

“Yep. I would’ve asked the driver to unload on the parking lot, but it was too late. I need all of that in the new showroom.”

The other knew before starting that he’d get hot in his clothes, stopping before the heap, and he sighed before he took the hem of his sweater and pulled it over his head in one motion, cold air replacing the soft warmth of the fabric, and he sighed even deeper as he threw his sweater over one shoulder and got to rolling up his dress shirt’s sleeves. He shivered when he’d had one rolled up to his elbow.

Wooyoung raised an amused eyebrow at him. “Why are you stripping?”

San sent the heap a regretful look. “I’ll be too hot if I don’t.” Other sleeve rolled up to his elbow as well, he took his sweater off his shoulder and held it out to the man. “Can you take this back inside for me?”

The man agreed happily, taking the sweater from him, chatted with him as San carefully picked up a crate labeled with a big, bold ‘live animals inside’, then followed the ceaselessly talking, spirited young man with his sweater slung over a shoulder back to the front door, propping it open as he replied to a question, and he thanked Wooyoung then, when the door between lobby and darkened aquarium hallway was opened and when the door to the new showroom clicked into its open position.

Setting the crate down exactly where Wooyoung told him to, he memorized the points in the room the man vaguely gestured at while telling him what to put where. Then, sighing, he made his way back out, running his hand through his hair as he moved through the main showroom, checking his watch to look busy and wouldn’t be approached; the young teacher and half of the class still remained at the shark tank.

When he returned to the new showroom with another crate of live animals, Wooyoung sat hunched over the first, now open one, just finishing tying his hair up anew, an open box with an assortment of vaguely familiar objects beside him, a glittery pink plastic clipboard with some sort of paperwork and a pen in hand. He no longer had the sweater, and when he finished whatever he’d been doing with the paper, he discarded the clipboard and moved to stick the pen into his ponytail, under the hair tie.

“Don’t,” San said before he could stop himself, and the man halted and gave him a questioning look. Averting his gaze, he added: “You’ll forget you put it there and search for it in five minutes.”

Surprised, Wooyoung lowered his hand, placing the pen onto the clipboard. “I do that, don’t I?” Smiling almost softly, he turned to the horseshoe crabs. “Thank you, San.” The name was sweet on his lips, like honeyed milk and his mother’s yakgwa and golden sunlight.

Feeling dismissed, San left the room, a silly little smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. It wasn’t often that he heard his name pronounced entirely correctly, as simple as it was, and there was just something about the way Wooyoung’s warm voice said it that made him stupidly giddy. He ruminated on this as he carried crate after crate inside, less careful now that they no longer contained animals, the sun almost too warm on him, shirt getting sticky with a faint sheen of sweat building despite the late February cold, the stacks in the new showroom growing steadily while Wooyoung, haloed by a milky sunlight haze, went about whatever it was he did.

On the last sandbag, San entered the room stupid and bumped into the door, barely able to catch himself with a sidestep, and he cursed under his breath as he moved the sandbag to its destined place in a far corner of the room, cursing louder when the weight of it dropped onto the stack swayed the precious balance and he just barely managed to prevent the whole thing from toppling over. He called it a lot of things, this sandbag, and good wasn’t one of them.

When, finally, after far too much time and far too much heavy lifting, he was done, he stretched and turned to face the middle of the room and ran a hand through his hair, tilting his head in questioning confusion when he found Wooyoung staring at him with almost hopeful wide eyes. What was up with that?

The man’s gaze darted down his body, back up, and he swallowed before he asked: “You speak Korean?”

For a moment, San didn’t realize that Wooyoung had asked this in Korean, but then he smiled wider. “Yeah,” he affirmed, switching to Korean, “You too?”

And Wooyoung lit up. Like the sun had come to life, he beamed at him, all wrinkled eyes and smile-line dipped cheeks and teeth, his voice brighter when he returned an answer in Korean, warmer, and San wasn’t sure how, but he knew that it wouldn’t be long until they were friends now. Funny, wasn’t it? All it took was a language.

☆🦈☆

He was right. The few times they saw each other in the break room, Wooyoung wrapped him up in a conversation that wasn’t always Korean, and when he cleaned in the evening, Wooyoung sooner or later showed up and talked to him as they moved through the building. The man softened in those nightly hours, if not much, relaxing against doorframes and onto benches and leaning against walls, his hair undone and freely falling to just below his shoulders, his smiles less bright, his voice quieter.

It was marvelous to see. A man of curling wind and crashing waves turned warm summer days, easy to be comfortable around, their conversations flowing from light jokes and joined interests and little flirts to more serious topics and back like the tide, leading them closer to each other with every late night spent in the dim blue glow of the aquarium until, one day in mid March, San overheard Wooyoung referring to him as a friend on a phone call with someone. It made him smile stupidly wide as he chopped herring, earning him one of Daisy’s judging glances.

Later that day, in the cerulean glow of the shark tank, when he was finished with cleaning and Wooyoung lamented about how tired he was and how few sleep he’d had last night and how much he still had to do, he sighed sympathetically and opened his arms in a silent offer. Gladly, his friend took him up on this, sinking into his arms, and the moment San wrapped his arms around him, the man melted against him and relaxed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He let out a long, deep breath as he returned the hug.

San had a feeling that this hug wouldn’t be ending any time soon. He didn’t mind; Wooyoung was warm, his embrace pleasantly tight, his unwinding body fitting perfectly into his arms, against his chest, and then the man dropped his head on his shoulder and his soft, warm breath brushed over his neck. He was nice to hug, and San had to admit that he felt a little special, to see such a relaxed version of the usually so tense man.

They stood like this for a long time, Wooyoung slackened in his arms, San’s thumbs drawing gentle circles on his back, only their quiet breaths and the distant gurgle of water pumps in the silent building. He was pretty sure it was close to twelve when the pretty man still melted to him sighed, almost happily.

“Do you know-” Wooyoung told him quietly, not quite whispered, “-how comfortable you are?”

San chuckled, smiling, one of his hands moving up to the other’s head, fingertips tangling in his hair. “Yeah?”

Wooyoung hummed affirmatively. “I’d stay here for days,” he sighed out with a little smile, lightly adjusting his head on his shoulder in what could almost be snuggling, and San’s heart did a little thing. He hadn’t expected that the man could be so… cute.

He chuckled. “Then I’d have to take you home.” His voice was perhaps a little too soft.

His friend giggled tiredly. “Oh nooo,” he sang, audibly smiling, “Whatever would I do?” With a light sigh, he somehow melted even further, growing heavier in his arms, and for a little while, it was just this, their embrace and the soft blue of the water and the comfort of holding each other.

San thought that he could get used to this. Melted into each other, weight and warmth against him, arms wrapped around his friend, the soft heave of Wooyoung’s chest, the light brush of his breath, his steady heartbeat, feathery black strands of hair twisting between his lazily moving fingers, the warm presence of him. Was this normal? To be so content to hug a man he’d only really been friends with for, what, two weeks? It wasn’t, was it?

Well, not that it mattered. When Wooyoung eventually peeled himself away from him, ending the hug, his absence left a strange sort of cold emptiness behind, leaving San suddenly exposed; to fight it off, he crossed his arms, and then the conversation and moving his cleaning stuff to the supply closet distracted him from the feeling and before he knew it, he sat in his car and drove home in the dark, listening to music, smiling lightly.

Alone in his bed, as always hugging his large shark plushie to his chest, he thought about the day, about the new showroom and its horseshoe crabs and sturgeons and broadnose catsharks, about his conversation with Wooyoung, wincing at the memory of something weird he’d said, that hug. And then he wished, for a moment, that the shark in his arms was Wooyoung, that he could return to the comfort of holding him, that he could fall asleep to the steady rhythm of his soft breath and wrapped in the warmth of him.

The next day, he talked to Martin as he drank his coffee in the break room, as Georgie didn’t seem inclined to talk to them, and when the door opened with an energy only one of their coworkers could muster up so early in the morning, his gaze snapped to it almost automatically. And, sure enough, Wooyoung came in like a crashing wave, dumping his notebook – already puffy again – a handful of pens, loose pieces of paper and fish-shaped paperclips onto the table, moving to the coffee maker with considerable noise.

Like it was the most natural thing in the world to do, he joined the conversation, rumble and crackle of the machine ignored as he leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms, hair tied up, sweater sleeves pushed up to his elbows, only the tips of the fins of his blacktip reef shark tattoo visible on his golden, mole-dotted skin. His left wrist sported a new bracelet, San noted, black lava stone beads and one white bone or stone one shaped like a little whale. It kind of looked like one of those ‘track an animal’ bracelets.

He also wore what looked like a watch on his right wrist, comparatively thin black leather band and golden watchcase the size of a quarter, that somehow accentuated the already clear-cut lines of his forearm and wrist and hand. San had never realized how attractive a simple watch could make someone.

Just as quickly as Wooyoung had joined the conversation, he left it, sat at the table with his coffee, jotting something down, fingers of his right hand stained with blue ink, adding the pieces of paper to the page – with the help of the paperclips – seemingly at random, writing at an inhuman speed that explained his scrawled, spidery, illegible handwriting. His face relaxed into an expression that would be mean if it wasn’t just how he looked.

San found that he had to tear himself away from the man to properly continue talking to Martin, and he blamed his goddamned curiosity for it. Against his expectations, Wooyoung grew more interesting the more he found out about him, the longer he talked to him, which left him eager to talk to him and infinitely more curious about the notebooks and their contents. The old one, containing his e-mail address and phone number, had disappeared the first week of him working at the aquarium, followed by the one now on the table, and once, he’d seen the man consult an even older one for some thing or another.

Sometimes, in brief moments, San imagined that his friend had an entire shelf of them at his apartment, and he imagined flipping through their packed pages that cracked the spines and fluffed them up to three or four times their original width, all the thoughts and art and notes he’d find, a singular period of such a terribly interesting life, and then he always shook his head at himself and made himself think of something else. Maybe one day.

Before Wooyoung left, he tidied away his mug and came to stand beside San, hand resting on his shoulder, the other forced to look up at him as they held a brief conversation about some of his tasks, the man’s thumb almost absentmindedly caressing. Even when he had gone, the room empty without his presence, that touch lingered on San’s shoulder, warm beneath his clothes. He blamed it on not getting as much physical affection as he needed.

These touches, casual and yet lingering, experienced a considerable uptick over the next week, and once, on Friday night, when he was done with cleaning and they sat on one of the benches and watched the shark tank, his friend even rested his head on his shoulder and leaned into him. He kept his breath flat, himself still, so the man wouldn’t move away, and though he didn’t feel him relax, he heard it in his softening voice.

He’d come to love those late nights of conversation.

On Saturday, when he met up with his friends, driving them the two hours up to Seattle, Seonghwa in the passenger seat, he was endlessly teased about the way he talked about Wooyoung, and when he, flushed red, threatened to drive them into a tree and swayed the car, all it got him was laughter and more teasing. Then, Yunho cooed at him and told him ‘It’s okay to crush on someone every once in a while, Sannie’ and he barely managed a brief glare at him through the rear-view mirror.

“I don’t have a crush on him,” he insisted, and this was true. Sure, Wooyoung was an attractive man, and sure, he fit his type almost exactly, but he didn’t like him, at least not like that. They were friends. And he didn’t want them to be anything else, not right now; who knew what the future would bring, though?

Luckily, the conversation shifted away from his friendship with Wooyoung, and it only briefly returned to it when his phone, sat screen up on a restaurant table, lit up with a notification from ‘Wooyoung’ – with a little shark emoji – and he had to listen to his friends making teasing comments as he opened the message and affirmed that he would be in to clean that evening and that he would fix the stool in one of the pump rooms that had broken.

‘what are u up to rn?’ his friend asked him when they were done talking about the work stuff, ‘we could get food n walk along the pier’

It pained San that he couldn’t say yes to this, to this first hang out outside of work. ‘I’m in Seattle,’ he replied, ‘With my friends’. Said friends snuck a look at his phone, and then there was snickering and faux-sympathetic comments about how they were robbing him of a date, and so he, unwillingly pouting, texted Wooyoung: ‘They’re being mean to me :(‘

The man laughed at him over text, called him a loser, and five minutes later, they’d agreed that they would go to the harbor the next day and eat fish sandwiches or something together. Secretly, San planned to reveal the Marina to him that day, planned that he would be all casual about it, planned that he’d offer him a little tour of the sailing boat, planned that he’d introduce the idea of a little trip with the boat to the man, and he got a little excited about it.

Sunday was fun. A lot of fun. They met up at the old dolphin fountain, strolled to the harbor, found a cute restaurant made to look like it had been there for a few decades, bought fish sandwiches and fries and ate as they wandered along the low stone walls bordering the basin, talking and joking and maybe flirting a little – all joked, of course, as friends did – and his eyes kept flicking to his boat, as much as he tried to prevent it.

When they’d finished eating, sat on a bench facing the water, San took Wooyoung’s trash from him and stood up, heading to the closest trash can to throw it away, and then he waved the man over to himself and headed for the dock the Marina lay at. Curious, his friend followed him, giving him a questioning look when he descended the stone steps and walked right onto the wooden planks, and then he expressed his doubts about the legality of the matter when San vaulted himself onto his boat.

San, grinning, strolled to the stern and crouched down at the railing, now about eye to eye with his friend, laid his forearm on the gleaming metal rod and proudly joked: “I should hope it’s legal to get on my own damn boat.” First, Wooyoung didn’t believe him, but he came around quickly, and then he regarded the ship with a sort of awe, visibly impressed. The other couldn’t quite hide the satisfied little smirk at it.

He was still a little smug about it when he unlocked the door to his house hours later, Wooyoung’s expectant gaze flitting about the facade and wooden door. Neither of them had expected that their hang out would go on for so long and have them end up there, but perhaps they should have suspected it, perhaps San should’ve known that this was where they were headed when Wooyoung visibly relaxed the moment they’d greeted each other.

He wasn’t even sure why they were there. Somehow, his friend had simply ended up in the passenger seat of his car, playing with a hair tie that San couldn’t remember the man taking out of his hair, brightly telling one of his seemingly countless stories from his field research in Antarctica – this one featuring a diving encounter with a killer whale (of which the other was admittedly jealous) – stopping every now and then to take a sip of his soda. In the late March sunlight, lit golden by the setting sun, glowing with that gentle light and the brightness so inherent to him, Wooyoung looked like summer.

Now, he’d taken off his shoes and ghosted through San’s house, socked steps whispering over the wooden floor as he eagerly followed him from room to room, taking in the decorations, the rocks and fossils and seashells on shelves and windowsills, the books he’d left in places they didn’t belong, the art supplies scattered about the shelves and cabinets, absolutely delighted to find out that San liked to draw and paint and make things too, all the while smiling and commenting on things. He joked that he wanted to move in with him when he saw the large library windows overlooking the forested coast and the ocean beyond, and when San joked back that he’d still have to pay rent, Wooyoung smirked and laid his hand on his shoulder and told him that he’d find a way.

That touch lingered even when his friend had moved on, its warmth seeping through his hoodie and shirt, and as he watched that pretty man inspect the shelves upon shelves of books, he thought that it was really time they hugged again. How long had it been? A week? In any case, it was too long.

“Oh!” Wooyoung exclaimed happily, just as the other began working up his courage, pulling a glossy ice blue paperback from a shelf, “I co-authored this!”

San’s gaze flicked to the title – ‘Antarctica: records of an overwintering on the research station NSF Palmer’ – then the bent cover wearing an illustration of a Weddell seal with which he had fallen in love the first time he’d seen it. A strange sort of pride filled him then, spread through his chest as Wooyoung leafed through the book and found the first page of the part written by him, proudly tapping on his name beneath the title in bold.

Expressing his impressed awe, San approached him, and then he realized that his friend was seconds away from discovering his annotations, and he took the book from him just as the man moved to touch one of the sticky notes poking out from the side. He ran his fingertip over the printed ‘Jung Wooyoung’, then flipped to one of the sketches a few pages later. “Did you do all the illustrations?”

“Most of them, yeah!” the man chirped, “Klara, uhm, an older colleague, did a few too, but I think the editors liked the vibe my sketches give the whole thing more than her acrylic paintings.”

“Understandable.” San, noting the other’s curious glances at his pencil annotations, gently closed the book. Now, when he looked at the cover, he recognized the realistic but somewhat scrawled style immediately. “Was this your first publication?”

Wooyoung hummed affirmatively, and then they descended into conversation. San placed the book back on the shelf, fingertips lingering on the spine before he led the other to the kitchen, offering to make dinner, and he fell into a sort of listening quiet as he drew up his best rendition of japchae and Wooyoung talked and talked and talked.

He liked it, though. He liked listening to him. Not only was it terribly interesting, but the bright, warm melody of his voice filled the kitchen and danced with the dimming dusk light and the man ran his slender hands over sun-bleached wood and paced on worn wooden floorboards and stood close beside him and peeked over his shoulder to see how far the cooking had processed and he leaned against the counter and searched the fridge like he’d been using that kitchen for years. And he fit right in.

Sat across from him at the old wooden table, bowl of steaming japchae in front of them, San took a moment to take him in. His golden skin, his ink-stained fingers tucking his hair behind his ear as he blew on the glass noodles, beef, savory-sweet sauce and sesame seeds on his chopsticks, his sharp features graced by a soft smile, his blacktip reef shark tattoo and bracelets, his two rings, the marine blue sweater that was a little too big on him and seemed weirdly familiar, his rolled up sleeves, the subtle lines of veins sneaking up his hands and forearms, the mole beneath his left eye, the one on his lower lip, his sharp, working jaw, his lashes fluttering as he closed his eyes, his pretty throat jumping as he swallowed.

Blinking, San reminded himself to look away, averting his gaze to his own bowl. He picked up some of the food with his own chopsticks and ate it, his eyes flicking back to the pretty man before him when Wooyoung sighed happily and adjusted his fingers on his metal chopsticks.

“Tastes like my dad’s,” his friend told him, pausing briefly to tuck the other side of his hair behind his ear as well before he ate another bite.

San swallowed. “Is that good?”

Wooyoung nodded, and then the strangest thing happened; he became quiet. His mouth only moved to eat, his free hand resting at his bowl, forearm and elbows on the table, his weight leaning onto them, and even stranger, he relaxed. Softening into the warm light of the lamp on the windowsill, melting in his chair, leaning and supporting himself, silent as he ate, every now and then sighing lightly and closing his eyes.

It was weirdly beautiful. As though the surface of the sea had calmed to tiny hints of waves, bathed in soft sunlight, as though a wild summer day had come to a mellow end and now hummed only with gentle tiredness, as though the whirling wind had simply slumped. And San thought that he liked this quiet version of the man too much for its mundanity.

Unwilling to be the murderer of this unheard of quiet, he kept silent as well, which gave them a comfortable silence that he wouldn’t mind seeing more of. Though he wouldn’t mind seeing more of any part of Jung Wooyoung, so perhaps this wasn’t the most significant of things to think. Had he been this eager to know more about his other friends when he’d first started talking to them? He couldn’t remember.

When they were done eating, they discarded their dishes in the sink, headed to the living room as their conversation slowly picked up, and then San dropped himself on the couch, arm on the backrest. His friend followed shortly after, and the man could’ve sat down on his right side, where his arm lay perfectly normal against his side, but Wooyoung chose to plant himself to his left, maybe a little too close to him, shoulders almost touching, leaning back and into the other’s arm.

He took this as his sign to do something. TV remote in hand, he told his friend about a movie (he’d probably already talked about; was this why they were at his?), and as he began to adjust his arm to better lay it around the man, Wooyoung turned his head back and made a movement as if he was going to bite him. What the- honestly, he should’ve expected something like this.

Expectantly, the man looked at him, as if trying to gauge his reaction, gaze flicking to where he would’ve bitten his bicep through his hoodie and back to him. San blinked, glancing at that very spot, and then he raised a playful eyebrow at the man as a little smile made its way onto his face. “What was that?” he asked, but his voice sounded a little too bright.

Wooyoung smiled a sinister little smile, then bared his teeth. “I’ll bite you.”

San smirked. “Do I look that delicious?”

“Yeah,” the other replied, as was to be expected, smirking right back at him, “I wanna eat you up.”

“That’s gay.”

“I wonder why.”

Immediately after saying this, Wooyoung snapped his head back and threatened with almost digging his teeth into his arm, and though San flinched, he didn’t remove his arm from the backrest or his friend’s shoulders. He didn’t want to be bitten, obviously, but he wanted the man to be so comfortable around him that he’d do it without a second thought, so he would stay strong. And he must be on a good path if it took the man just three weeks of friendship to start almost-biting him.

They talked, Wooyoung melting into his side, the long forgotten TV quietly going black, and it was one of those rare evenings where their roles were reversed and San did most of the talking. His friend, with his head on his shoulder, yawned every now and then, and as the minutes flew by like seconds, his replies and comments slowly grew shorter and quieter until they were barely more than little hums, the man himself curled into his side, bent legs on the couch and resting against the other’s thighs, arms loosely crossed in his own lap, feathery strands of his black hair sliding through San’s absentmindedly playing fingers.

Then the replies subsided entirely, but he didn’t notice until, halfway through a retelling of a book’s plot, he asked a question that didn’t get an answer. He turned to look at his friend, pausing his hand’s movements, and a light, fond smile tugged at the corners of his mouth when he found the man asleep; eyes closed, steady breath brushing over the fabric of his hoodie, completely relaxed against him, all his energy gone.

Like this, when no expression distorted his features, his eye bags were deeper, his faint smile lines more prominent, his clear-cut features harsher, his mouth downturned, and he looked older. Exhausted.

Suddenly, all San wanted to do was carry him to bed and turn off all alarms and let him sleep for twelve hours and make breakfast for him and take care of him. But because he could do none of that – except the last part, maybe – he just sighed and brushed a strand of hair from his face and let his fingertips ghost over the mole beneath his left eye. He wanted to kiss his head, wrap him in his arms, hold him until all his fatigue was gone.

Instead, he checked his phone for the time (just past ten) and thought that this must’ve been the earliest Wooyoung had fallen asleep in weeks, if not months. He glanced at him, and then he thought that there was something cute about it too, how he’d cuddled up to him, how quiet he was, and he took a picture of them like this before he discarded his phone in the pocket of his hoodie and regarded his friend’s sleeping figure a moment longer.

Three gentle shakes of his shoulder later, Wooyoung drew in a deep breath and stirred. Disoriented, he blinked his eyes open, and San just knew that his own smile looked stupid. He couldn’t help it. He liked his friend, quite a lot, and him waking up was objectively an adorable thing to witness, and, and this was the biggest reason, in response to being woken, the man made a disagreeing grimace and cuddled closer to him.

“Hey,” San addressed him when his friend sighed and closed his eyes and relaxed, his voice amused but soft, “You’re gonna fall asleep again.”

Wooyoung made a non-committal, tired hum.

“Bro.” He pat the man’s shoulder. “Get up.”

No reply whatsoever came to this, so he sighed and figured that he’d have to take drastic measures. As much as he didn’t want to lose the warm content of his friend cuddled up to him like that, Wooyoung really had to get some actual sleep, and this wouldn’t do. Carefully, he retracted his arm and slid from the couch, and the moment his support was gone, the man audibly regained consciousness.

Two steps away from the couch, San turned around to find Wooyoung looking at him with an expression of absolute betrayal, one leg slid off the couch, leaning onto his arms, strands of his hair sticking up at odd angles, bathed in dim warm yellow light that caught on his rings and reflected in his hurt night ocean eyes. Adjusting his glasses, San freely let his smile widen, opening his mouth to speak, but before he ever got a word out, the other had pushed himself off the couch and sunken into his reflexively lifting arms.

Well.

That was a convincing argument.

Chuckling, he hugged the readily melting man to himself, pulling him closer, and Wooyoung sighed contently and dropped his head on his shoulder and hugged him back so loosely there was barely any tension in his arms at all. San really did almost kiss his head then. He’d always had a thing for affectionate people, especially when they were sleepy, especially when they were as pretty as him.

Still, when the man’s breath grew too steady, when he leaned into him too much, he found himself forced to intervene. “Come on,” he demanded quietly, only noticing now that he’d been speaking Korean, “Wake up. I’ll take you home.”

Wooyoung sighed. “Jus’ five more minutes,” he slurred, “Promise I’ll stay awake, hyung.”

It took San approximately two seconds to realize what the man just called him, and then his heart stumbled over its own feet and a beaming smile lit up his face. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called him hyung, and even though it probably shouldn’t have, it tightened his chest and warmed it beyond the physical heat seeping from the man sunken against him. Maybe it was just that it confirmed a certain degree of closeness between them, maybe it was that he so rarely got to speak Korean to someone who wasn’t his family, maybe it was just how the man’s voice softened on the word.

“Fine,” he agreed, briefly wondering how his fingers had ended up in Wooyoung’s hair again, “But then you’re not going to work before nine tomorrow.”

For a second or two, a regretful expression visited the man’s face. “’F I could.” He sighed. “Delivery’s comin’ at eight, ‘n I’m meetin’ the boss at ten ‘n still have a lot t’do b’fore that.” As if realizing something important, his eyes snapped open, his head lifting from the other’s shoulder, body tensing in his arms, face shifting into a worried grimace. “Fuck.” He sounded suddenly very awake. “I was supposed to start with that today, it’s a shit ton of work!”

San raised an eyebrow, never loosening his hold on him. “It’s Sunday.”

Wooyoung groaned. “Fuck you, actually.” Contrary to his words, he settled against him.

“What did I do?” Frowning, he turned his head to look at him, which brought his mouth temptingly close to the other’s cheek. “I thought you were finally relaxing.”

“That’s the fucking problem,” his friend complained, “You gotta stop doing that. I keep forgetting I have a fuck ton to do when I’m with you.” He made it sound like that was a bad thing. “Stop bein’ so goddamn comfortable.”

“I’m sorry?” He tried to tame his wide smile, his soft heart, but in truth, he loved being the reason someone was comfortable and could relax and forgot the things weighing on their mind. He could’ve kissed the man on the mouth for this.

“You better be,” Wooyoung huffed, and then he sighed deeply and nuzzled into him and the tension left him. “Actually,” he added, slipping back into that tiredness that made his words slurred and his voice soft, “I don’t care ‘nymore. ‘M too tired.”

San chuckled. “Whatever you say.” He would be thinking about this for a while. How could he not, with a compliment like that? Phrased as a complaint or not, Wooyoung had just told him that he often – if not always – relaxed in his presence, and that he could forget about his workload when they were together, and that he was ‘so goddamn comfortable’, and he really didn’t know how he kept himself from giggling and kicking his feet and twirling his hair.

He did somewhat stray from those thoughts when he felt the weight leaned against him increase, the other’s breath and heartbeat steady, and then his smile softened and he allowed his fingertips to move from his friend’s hair to his cheek. “Are you falling asleep again?” he asked, amused but fond, and even though this was adorable, he really thought that Wooyoung should get at least eight hours of sleep, if he had to be up at seven and so much work to do.

The man in question just made a sort of hum that could’ve meant anything, and only upon being bothered twice more for a reply, he reluctantly said: “Wanna keep huggin’ you. Five minutes.”

And who was San to deny him that?

It might have been ten minutes, or fifteen, until he gently pushed a very unwilling Wooyoung away from himself, but if it was, only the clocks ever knew. The two men detached from each other with much sighing and forced movements, the loss of each other cold against them, and Wooyoung ran his hands over his face and through his hair before he blinked rapidly and shook his head, likely to get himself to wake up.

“You sure like hugging me, don’t you?” San teased him, leading him from the living room to the kitchen, and his friend averted his gaze and fidgeted with his rings. Cute.

“Uhm.” Wooyoung stopped by the table, watching him begin packing the leftovers of dinner into a plastic box. “Yeah. Sorry about that. I get double clingy when I’m tired.”

Looking over his shoulder, a hopefully reassuring smile on his face, San attempted eye contact with the man. “Don’t be sorry.” His smile widened lightly. “I like clingy.” What a gigantic understatement.

To avoid seeing a potentially flustering reaction, he returned his gaze to his hands, a fresh memory of his friend lighting up like a little sun upon being asked whether he wanted to take the leftovers home drawing a silly little smile on his face, and he only really noticed how quiet Wooyoung had gotten when the man cleared his throat and, with some stammering, told him that he liked clingy too. San kept himself from teasing him, but only because he didn’t want to scare the man off.

In the dark of the car, illuminated only by the yellowed headlights and the passing orange glow of street lights, Wooyoung rested his elbow at the window, hand supporting his head, eyes closed, and listened – presumably – as San told him about the things he’d learned in a paper about sea lions he’d read recently. His voice carried over the hum of the motor, their destination inching closer and closer, and he already drove the longer route, already dragged this time with the man out as long as he could, but it still didn’t seem enough.

“Hyung,” his friend interrupted him five minutes from his apartment, “Stop talking. ‘M gonna fall asleep again.”

“Wow, am I that boring?” San joked, faking hurt, but there was a real little sting to it. There always was when someone told him to shut up about his interests.

“No,” Wooyoung replied, contradictory to his previous statement, “’S just your voice. It’s so nice.” A little sigh. “’F you had a podcast I’d listen to it every night to fall asleep.”

Oh.

With his heart considerably lighter, smiling, San briefly glanced at that pretty man, still half-asleep in the passenger seat like he hadn’t just said one of the sweetest things the other had ever heard. He didn’t think he’d ever been complimented on his voice before, let alone like this, and with embarrassment, he noticed heat creeping into his face. Thank god it was too dark to be seen.

And he didn’t mind the silence, those last minutes. He was too busy internally expressing his flustered joy, and too busy looking at his friend at that one red light, and too busy disliking the fact that they would have to part in no time at all. There it was already, the street, and the house number grew closer and closer, until his phone told him that they had arrived and he parked reluctantly.

Sighing, his friend unfolded himself, patting down the pockets of his jacket before he laid a hand on the handle of the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, quietly, “If I don’t die first.” He took the plastic box of leftovers handed to him, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth that was soft with tiredness and maybe something else. “We gotta hang out again, by the way.” The streetlight orange gleamed on his black hair that bent against the collar of his jacket, nightly haze over his features, warm, tired eyes dimly lit, the light smile and the alien light making his lips terribly lonely.

“Yeah,” San agreed, meeting his unusually, beautifully gentle eyes, “We’ll find a time tomorrow.” Did late night light always look so gorgeous on people?

A silence crept into the cooling car, a silence in which they lingered, savored each other’s presence, remained unmoving, even though they knew that it was time to say goodbye. It was the kind of silence that said ‘stay’.

They didn’t listen to it, of course. Rarely anyone ever did. San watched his friend leave the car, breath dripping white clouds into the freezing air, watched him heave himself to the door, running a ringed hand through his hair, watched the black leather back of his jacket until the front door of the building shut and he’d lost the last glimpse of him.

The drive home was a different kind of silent. Empty. The passenger seat wore a trace of Wooyoung, clinging to its worn fabric, the orange-gold slivers of the streetlights slid over the empty space as though cutting through a ghost, his quiet, lonesome breath near inaudible beneath the rumble of the motor, the warmth of Wooyoung’s presence slowly but surely fading until it had disappeared from him entirely. He sighed.

At home, only in his pajama pants, he crept from his bathroom to his bedroom and halted as he passed the desk. He reached, paused, then picked up a silver bracelet of a sculpted steel shark that would wind around the wrist, caudal fin just ahead of the snout, tracing the elegant slopes and lines of its smooth chrome body and fins, wondering, for perhaps the fifth time, what had overcome him when he’d bought it Saturday. It didn’t quite fit him, being non-adjustable, but then again, it had never been meant for his own wrist, had it?

His gaze fell onto a sheet of yellowed once-white paper, slipped to his little travel case of watercolors, and suddenly he sat at his desk wrapped in a blanket, Shiba Inu plushie in his lap, and his hand chased a fountain pen over the paper. Without thinking much, he wrote two pages, neatly folded the piece of paper up and improvised an envelope with brown packing paper, and then a bad watercolor rendition of a semi-realistic sea lion proudly decorated the paper and he tucked the folded letter into the envelope, followed by a little cut-out and felt tip colored doodle of a mackerel, two random stickers he found on his desk and an old bookmark that used to be an advertisement gift but had been made unrecognizable by a collage – the creator of which he couldn’t remember – and his doodles of stars.

Because he knew that he’d never do anything with it if he allowed himself to reread the thing the next morning, he sealed the envelope with glue, stuck a little sticker on the back to function as a silly little seal and turned it around. On the front, in his best, slanted handwriting, he wrote ‘Dr. Jung Wooyoung’ beside the sea lion, regarded his work for one final time, then set it down on the desk and placed the silver shark bracelet on it.

He didn’t bother to tidy up his desk, just turned off the light and slid into bed, barely remembered to set himself an alarm before he drifted off, as always his large shark plushie in his arms. Strangely, he dreamed of white sheets with tiny blue shapes and warm morning sunlight and quiet laughter and golden skin, and he dreamed of a water-drop glittering world and mugs of steaming coffee and slender hands on sun-bleached wood.

☆🦈☆

After a whopping four hours of sleep, his morning was, predictably, underwhelming. Bleary, he stumbled into the bathroom, half-asleep as he acted out his morning routine, frowning as he considered himself in the mirror and ran his hands over his chin and jaw and pondered whether he had enough motivation in himself to shave. He did, but only because he thought that he looked stupid with a shadow of stubble.

It was a morning as any other, really. Checked his phone once back in the bedroom, stood before the closet for a good minute before he shrugged and pulled out whatever got into his hands – here, he briefly wondered where his marine blue sweater had gone – got dressed while dutifully reading and watching everything his friends had sent him since… since last afternoon. Damn.

He paused, however, when he passed the desk and the shark bracelet glinted at him. He probably should do the exact same thing he’d done the last five times, which was to keep the thing on his desk and forget about it because it was much too early on in that particular friendship for things like this, and he should probably read that damn letter to make sure he hadn’t said anything embarrassing in it last night, but his past self had prepared for this exact moment. Fuck that guy.

Of course, he could just let the letter rot on his desk with the bracelet, but he’d put so much work into it, that would just be sad. And the sea lion wasn’t as bad as he’d feared.

Hesitantly, he picked bracelet and letter up, and then he just sighed and took them with him on his way downstairs. When they sat in his bag, secure between his notebook and his laptop and his pencil case, ominously enthroned on the passenger seat of his car, he paused to clean his glasses and tried not to pay too much attention to those two terrible objects, but he failed miserably. If he recalled correctly, the letter contained a… poetic, so to speak, presentation of his opinions and feelings of the matter of those far too short hours on Sunday, and this was one of the rare times in which he cursed himself for being an art person. He always threw literal writing out the window in instances like these.

Well, what was done was done. He’d just hope for the best.

At the aquarium, about to get to work, he scrolled through his music library, and when he found a podcast, he thought of Wooyoung’s pretty words; ‘If you had a podcast I’d listen to it every night to fall asleep’. Safe to say the smile didn’t leave his face for a while, fish stink be damned.

Some time past ten, he took a short break from work, quietly approached Wooyoung’s office, cracking the door open when he heard nothing from within, breathing a sigh of relief when he found the room empty. Two minutes later, he returned with letter and bracelet in hand, snuck into the office, arranged both on the messy desk and fled. Now all that was left to do was wait.

A nerve-wracking two hours later, he ate lunch and spoke with Basira and Michael, finally distracted, but they left him to continue work before he was done eating and so he spent a few minutes in thought-filled silence. When he was done with his sandwiches, he turned to the last few of his mother’s yakgwa, noting that he would have to ask her for more that evening, and he savored each bite of the sweet honey biscuits like he wouldn’t get to eat them again for years.

His last one saved for later, he left the table and made himself a coffee, leaned back against the counter as the machine did its rattling duty, and then the door to the break room opened and Wooyoung entered. His face quiet, eyes downcast, he dumped his notebook on the table in passing, headed straight to him; San barely caught a glimpse of a silver steel shark curled around his right wrist and just managed to uncross his arms before his friend sank into his chest.

“Oh, hello,” he greeted him quietly, wrapping his arms around him as his friend buried his face in the crook of his neck, “How’d the meeting go?”

The man made a sort of suffering sound in his throat, which San took as a sign to ask again later. For now, he pulled him a little closer, warm breath brushing over his neck, that pretty man relaxing against him, and he sighed a secret little sigh of relief; he’d missed this. Absentmindedly drawing small circles on his friend’s back, freely relishing in this embrace, he zoned out.

They stood there for god knows how long until a movement near the door caught his eye, made him avert his gaze to it, and then the handle dipped and the door opened and Wooyoung tensed in his arms. Tim moved to enter, but then he met San’s eyes, paused for a second, and quietly closed the door, likely disappearing down the hallway. As he should. But why- ah. San corrected his expression; he’d been glaring.

As his friend relaxed into him, he carefully rested his cheek against his head, and Wooyoung let out a sigh and held him a little tighter. San loved it. He was such a clingy person himself, once he was comfortable, and to meet someone who matched that was so rare he doubted whether it had ever happened before at all. Perhaps that was why he so quickly liked the man so much: they matched each other well.

Far too soon, for his taste, Wooyoung lifted his head, leaving a sudden cold at his neck, and slowly loosened their hug until he stood before him entirely detached. San smiled at him, resisting the urge to take his hands, touch his arms, his shoulders. “Feel better?”

His friend smiled right back at him. “Much.” Smile widening lightly, he stepped aside, removing the other’s coffee from the machine to make one for himself. “Thanks, Sannie.”

For some reason, that nickname sounded much softer, sweeter, from him than from any of his other friends, and San found himself suppressing the movement of the corners of his mouth so he wouldn’t look stupid with how wide he smiled. “Any time,” he replied, and damnit, his voice made it far too obvious how delighted he was. He glanced at Wooyoung’s arm, at the steel shark resting against his skin, wondered why the man hadn’t said anything about the letter yet. “Was the meeting okay?”

Wooyoung groaned. “Don’t remind me.” And then he descended into a rant that grew increasingly vulgar and exasperated, saying that the boss had first complained to him about the lacking reports like he hadn’t had five thousand other things to do and then told him that they might have to fire a person or two because of budget cuts, which the man knew wasn’t true because he was the one handling the finances, and that the boss had bragged about how well the aquarium was doing and how good the new exhibit had landed like it was his work that had done that, and so on and so forth.

By the time he was done, they had both finished their coffees. San offered his last yakgwa to him as he replied, and the man lit up like the sun and paused his foul-mouthed complaining to take a bite and sigh happily and tell him how good it tasted. The other thought that he should ask his mother to make some for him too.

The conversation shifted after this, turned to more pleasant topics, and then it was decided that Wooyoung would come over to his place on Thursday so they could watch that movie, the man insisting that he would cook for them. After, San would drive to the aquarium and clean, and though neither of them said it, they knew that Wooyoung would go with him, and that they would talk as he cleaned like they always did.

His friend asked him for his address, wrote it down in his notebook, and San caught a glimpse of the sea lion envelope between the pages of that book. Somehow, it warmed his heart, to know that a part of him would be made permanent in something so intimate as that notebook, and it made him want to look through it infinitely more. He wondered, then, whether he had ever been mentioned on one of those pages, whether his friend had written about him, and he told himself that, one day, he would ask whether he could see the contents of those books.

For now, he supported his chin with his hand and watched his friend, those five minutes until the man sighed and regretfully told him that he had to get back to work. They left the break room together, but Wooyoung continued right, to his office, and San left, towards what he’d dubbed the butchery. He had a whole lot of fish to chop up.

☆🦈☆

Wednesday, he came home to a letter in his mailbox. A letter, specifically, in a sapphire blue envelope with an inked thresher shark that, when compressed, dipped too odd to contain merely one sheet of folded paper. He regarded it as he went inside and slipped his shoes off, the penguin stamp, the scrawled, spidery handwriting, the dark blue wax seal on the back, the address written on the flap of the envelope.

At the kitchen table with a mug of tea, he gently pried the letter open, careful not to destroy anything, and he was met with seemingly self-made stickers of dried flowers and little drawings, a cut out doodle of two piling nurse sharks and a bag of strawberry tea. The letter itself had been written on beige paper, lined on one side only, sporting printed corals in shades of red and blue and orange at the bottom and up the sides, the script tight and slanted and sometimes intertwining between lines, and it began with ‘San’.

It was sweet. Sweet, and a little soft, and full of Wooyoung’s joy over the letter and the bracelet and that Sunday, and it was honest, more than spoken words would have been, and sometimes it was funny, and a little flirtatious, a little teasing, and it was so very Wooyoung that San could perfectly imagine him saying any of the things written in it. His smile widened slowly as he read, and by the end of it, he grinned at the little ‘Yours, Wooyoung’ in the middle of the third page.

His eyes wandered to the bag of tea. ‘Put honey in it and it tastes like your hugs,’ Wooyoung had written. ‘It’s been my favorite lately.’

It wasn’t easy, being on the receiving end of words as pretty as that for once. That comment about his voice still hadn’t left his mind, and now this one simply attached to it and added to the small but beautiful chorus of soft-voiced compliments that sang in his heart every time he thought of them.

In an attempt to avert his thoughts to something else to lessen the heat in his face, he picked up the gouache doodle of the nurse sharks, but then he turned it around and found the small, inked ‘us’ on the back and it all got even worse. Taming his smile with his left hand, he reached for his phone with his right, and then he snuck the the sharks under his phone case so he could take them out and look at them whenever he wanted to. Then he wondered what it would be like to really cuddle with Wooyoung, and the thought followed him for the rest of the day.

Thursday, he came to the aquarium already excited for the evening, humming to himself as he went about his work, every now and then visited by a bout of smiling that surely made him look silly. In the early afternoon, helping Melanie with disassembling one of the large metal shelves in one of the storage rooms, he sighed to himself and thought that it was really a crime that he wasn’t sitting on the couch of his library cuddling with a pretty man and watching the ocean together right now.

As if he had heard him, Wooyoung peeked through the open door to the storage room. “San?” he called, lifting a battered and worn cigarette pack when the other turned to him with a questioning expression, “Wanna step outside for a few minutes?”

San glanced from the man’s face to the pack and back, slowly lowering the screwdriver he’d been working with. Cigarettes, huh? “Sure,” he agreed, even though he didn’t like the smell of them, and as he followed him from the building, his friend tucked the pack into the back pocket of his pants. “Didn’t know you smoke,” he told him.

Wooyoung sent an amused look over his shoulder. “I don’t.” He retrieved the pack, waiting for the other to catch up to his side before he opened it and revealed kraft paper pages perfectly cut to fit into it, sewn into the bottom. A little sketchbook. “That’s just my excuse.”

San pushed the door open, leading them into the late March sunlight, cool air battling the warmth of the rays. “Then why are we here?”

His friend stopped a few steps from the door, turned to him, a shy question in his eyes, and when the other didn’t understand, he rolled his eyes, pretended to be annoyed with him, took him by the shoulder and pulled him into a hug. San chuckled, wrapping his arms around him, for the first time consciously noticing his smell; something warm and citrusy and faintly floral, like orange juice on a summer day. It suited him well.

Wooyoung sighed happily, melting into him, chin on his shoulder, and San rested his head against his and smiled lightly. “Is this gonna be a regular occurrence, Mr. Jung?” He added a teasing note to his voice, but his audible smile nullified it pretty much entirely. It wasn’t that his heart grew so light because of a hug, it was just that he stood in the early spring sun with a pretty man soft in his arms, watching a mellow breeze rustle through the budding trees of the small wood ahead of them, and that he’d always liked seeing the progress of a friendship in little things like this.

His friend hummed, considering. “Would you be cool with that?”

“Of course.” Honestly, San was kind of offended he’d even ask that. “Didn’t I tell you? I love clingy.”

“Hell yeah.” An audible smile colored Wooyoung’s voice.

He didn’t say anything after, and the other didn’t intend to end that comfortable silence any sooner than necessary. Thus, they stood like this for several minutes, silently embracing, relishing in each other’s presence, and San thought about the things Wooyoung had said about him always relaxing with him, forgetting his work for a while, and then his smile widened stupidly and he pulled him a little closer and sighed happily. He looked forward to more of this already.

A few hours later, he stood knee-deep in the water of a secluded little bay a minute or two from his house that only he seemed to know about. His skin had gone numb from the cold a while ago, but the sun glittered on the gentle waves and the flitting silver bodies of a school of surf smelt that danced about the water, an old, fold-out leather bag somewhat filled with freshly picked sea glass, shells and even a belemnite hung from his belt, his bare feet finally dug into the wet sand of the ocean again, the chatter of pairs of gulls and the occasional call from one of the two majestic black cormorants sounded over the cool wind, and the air smelled like salt and sea and freedom.

What more could a man want?

Sometimes, when he was lucky, he’d come down here just when the harbor seals lazed about on the elevated rock platforms near the low cliffs framing the bay on both sides, and he already had the start of their pupping season marked in his calendar. He could show them to Wooyoung.

Oh, and now that he thought about it, his favorite three days of the year were coming up! One and a half months now, mid May, when he could get on the Marina and sail south to that magical bay again, lie on the deck for hours, watch the school of humpback whales, come so close to creatures so breathtaking, so utterly beautiful he never knew how to describe it to anyone who hadn’t been there to witness it themselves. His friends called it Whale Weekend, where he disappeared for two to three days and returned a richer man.

Now, he lifted his gaze from the smelt and gazed out over the ocean, towards the horizon. Endless, churning depths, stretching to meet the pale spring sky, wearing a glittering gown of light, a gorgeous thing whispering promises and temptations with waves lapping at the shore, daring him, luring him deeper, farther into its cold embrace, kindling that longing deep, deep in his chest, caressing his sun-warmed face with gentle salt wind hands, rippling water purring ‘come home’. The sea, the beautiful sea; his first love.

If it wasn’t for the buzz of his phone, he might have stood there forever. As it was, he lightly shook his head and fished his phone from his pocket, briefly halting to admire his new blacktip reef shark wallpaper – he’d developed a particular fondness for those sharks – before he unlocked it and spotted new messages from Wooyoung.

‘bro where are you??’ the first one read, then: ‘ive been out here ringin the danm doorbell for like 5min’

Ah. Right, of course, he should’ve set himself a timer; he always forget the time out here. ‘Go around to the back of the house’ he texted back, ‘I’ll be there in a sec’. Then he slid his phone back into his pocket and sighed, sending the ocean one last glance. It took some forcing himself to retreat from the water, even the spring air warm on his cold-numbed skin as he crossed the sandy beach to pick his sketchbook and pencil case up, sand sticking to his wet skin.

With his free hand, he reached for a low-hanging branch of an ancient, gnarly tree, pulling himself up the otherwise only with difficulty scalable rockface leading to the only path through the forest, made quick by years, if not decades, of practice, bare, sandy feet on the cool soil. Around him, the world greened, budding trees and bushes, reaching herbs, the first wildflower specks of color among the brown leaves residue from last fall, and he took a small detour over a patch of sun-warmed moss that gave beneath his steps like the softest bed.

He spotted his friend when he arrived at the hedge of his garden. Standing on the roofed porch, one hand in the pocket of his hoodie, the other holding his phone, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, alternating between impatiently looking around and scrolling or typing on his phone. He didn’t seem to hear the old wooden gate creaking open, didn’t seem to notice San passing the old wooden shed, trailing a hand along the lichen and moss growing on the boards, slipping through the fairy gate of the two ancient apple trees whose crowns intersected, making his way along the raised beds and vegetable patches.

“Hey!” San called when he was about two dozen foot away from the man, causing his friend’s head to snap up. He knew that he looked kind of stupid, with his pants rolled up past his knees, his sandy, bare feet, the open leather bag dangling from his belt, his old, washed out, white graphic t-shirt that depicted a drawing of a plate of lemon and butter and fried fish, his green cap, his dirty glasses, his wind messy hair sticking out from under his hat, the wide smile. But if Wooyoung would be sticking around, he’d get to see him look stupid most of the time, so this was really just a start.

Wooyoung raised an eyebrow at him, eyeing him up and down, but a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, and he looked awfully happy to see him. “You sure took your sweet time,” he accused once the other had joined him on the porch, “Where the hell were you?”

San discarded his sketchbook and pencil case on the low table before the garden couch. “Down at the beach,” he replied, getting to removing the dried sand from his feet and ankles and calves and shins, “Drawing the wildlife. You should come with me some time.” Because he bent down to un-sand himself, he didn’t notice his friend move until his cap was snatched right off his head, instead placed on Wooyoung’s, and a hand ruffled through his salt-afflicted hair.

“Cutie,” Wooyoung commented lightly, beaming at the other’s pout, which, predictably, only deepened it, and then he whipped his phone out and took a picture of him and giggled like the rippling sea at San’s scandalized expression. “I’d love to go with you. If I ever find another free afternoon, that is, there’s so fucking much I have to do, I shouldn’t even be here right now.”

“Why don’t you just get a manager?” San asked, the pout not quite having left him yet, “You’re working way too much. Do you even get paid for all that extra shit you’re doing?”

The man sighed, suddenly weary. “If I don’t do it, it won’t be done properly. You heard the boss, he wants to fire people just so he can buy that holiday home in California faster, and it takes at least some understanding of our animals to do this, and where am I gonna find someone to fill that position?”

The other shrugged. “I think Jon would do a good job.”

Wooyoung opened his mouth, then closed it, surprised. “Yeah,” he agreed, “He would do a good job, wouldn’t he?” He went quiet for a few seconds, considering. “I’ll think about it.”

San smirked at him, close to finishing the process of brushing the sand off himself. “You’ll get to hang out with me more, y’know. We could spend all Sunday at the beach, or here, or even at yours.”

His friend grimaced. “Oh no, you don’t wanna be at my place, trust me. It’s a mess.” He lifted his hand, hesitated, then rested it on San’s head, fingers slipping between strands of hair. A smile fought its way onto his pretty face, joining the late golden sunlight in lighting him up. “And I love your house, it’s so cozy.”

San beamed at him. “Thank you, sunshine.” He used that nickname partly to tease him, partly because the sun glowed on his soft skin, partly because he looked so sweet, but when he saw the way it elicited a silly grin from the man and made him avert his gaze and flushed his cheeks, he silently promised both of them that he’d use it much more often. “Imagine all the things we could be doing here if you weren’t so busy.”

At this, Wooyoung blushed deeper, taking his hand back to himself, hiding his fidgeting fingers in the pocket of his hoodie, and he didn’t meet the other’s eyes until they were in the kitchen and San watched him sort the ingredients he’d brought into the fridge. He himself sat at the table, sketchbook, pencil case and the contents of his now folded up leather bag before him, pausing his sorting to observe how his friend moved about his kitchen with confidence and a light, hummed melody, sure steps on the worn wooden floorboards, the dancing sunbeam shape of him in this old room that seemed to glow anew with his presence.

It still amazed San that the man could just do that. Look like he belonged to a place he’d only been once before.

It amazed him, too, how gorgeous he was in the golden sunlight streaming in through the windows, how pretty he looked even in his simple baggy cargo pants and black hoodie (with a whale shark on the back) and his open hair spilling out from beneath San’s green, wrong way around worn cap and his many ear piercings that glittered with his every movement and the blacktip tattoo on his right forearm and the gleaming steel shark wound around his right wrist and the bracelets and festival wristbands on his left wrist and his chunky silver rings on his pretty hands and the wide smile dipping his cheeks and his handsome, hard features softened by his joy and the sun. Wooyoung amazed him.

The man was talking to him, he noticed distantly, his own eyes tracing the jagged lines of the inked shark, and then he looked up and took in that face with its high cheekbones and sharp jaw and hooked nose and asymmetrical eyes and two moles and plush lips and deep brown eyes that glowed amber in the sunlight. “You’re pretty,” he told him, undoubtedly interrupting him, and his friend’s eyes widened lightly before he visibly flustered.

It was cute, how shy he got. Averting his gaze and tucking his hair behind his ear and trying to suppress his growing smile and all. “You’re so corny,” the man accused him.

Grinning, San supported his chin with his hand, leaning onto the table. “You like it.”

“Shut up.” Wooyoung reached behind himself, increasingly red, then presented the other with two different packs of meat. “Pork or chicken?”

That evening, San found out just how much he liked flustering that pretty man. He didn’t always manage to do it, of course, and sometimes he was a victim himself, but by the time they started eating, he’d figured out a few things that worked reliably. This dinner, unlike their first one together, was far from quiet, though mostly because Wooyoung told riveting story after riveting story, animated and underlined with gestures and sometimes even accompanied by pictures, and San ate and listened and didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Additionally, he found out that his friend was a much better cook than he was, and that, unlike him, who cooked out of sheer necessity, the man loved doing it. He thought to himself that he should get him to come over and make food more often.

And then they sat on the living room couch together, San getting the movie started, Wooyoung removing all his jewelry, dumping it on the couch table in a clattering, glittering heap until he was left only with the three festival wristbands. The man complained that it was too warm in the house for March, pushing his sleeves down, taking off San’s cap before he slipped out of his hoodie; the shirt beneath rode up with the motion, baring his stretching midriff, the pulled taut plane of his abdomen, his navel, the lines of his waist, his warm skin.

The other made himself avert his eyes, studying the bracelets and rings and necklaces and ear piercings heaped on the table, pointedly ignoring the wanting hum in his painfully empty hands. He picked up the remote as his friend dumped his hoodie on the far armrest of the couch, unable to prevent his gaze from flicking to the man beside himself when said man leaned into the backrest and stretched, head tilting back.

The dimming daylight cast soft shadows on his unblemished, golden throat, just barely illuminated his content smile and closed eyes, and San had almost forced himself to look away again when he got a good look at the t-shirt. Black, decorated with a trout and a white-lettered ‘fih’ above the fish. “Your shirt’s stupid.”

Wooyoung gasped in offense, dropping his arms, turning to him with a scandalized expression. “You take that back! My little brother got it for me, it’s perfect!”

Ah, the little brother; San had heard him speak fondly of him once or twice before. “The kid in the picture on your desk?”

And just like that, they were back to their conversation, until San remembered that they were going to watch that movie and they halted their talking, as interesting as it was. Over the course of the movie, the last daylight fading beyond the windows, Wooyoung sank into him, relaxing and leaning more and more as the minutes went by, until, about halfway through, he gave up his undoubtedly uncomfortable position half on his shoulder half on his chest and settled in his lap, crossed arms supporting his head.

As his friend pulled his lower body onto the couch and bent his legs, San hesitantly rested one hand on his shoulder and the other at his waist, lightly smiling down at him. Then he went back to watching the movie, and before he knew what he was doing, one of his hands had slipped halfway beneath Wooyoung’s shirt and drew absentminded patterns on his soft, warm skin, his waist and lower back, sometimes lazily traveling up his side. In fact, he didn’t even notice this until the man shifted into his hand and sighed happily.

To no one’s surprise, Wooyoung fell asleep. Again. When the movie had ended, San lowered his eyes, and there he was, peacefully sleeping in his lap, his torso heaving softly with his steady breaths. He chuckled, mouth tugging into a fond smile, hand stilling on his side, thumb brushing over his skin, and for a moment or two, he simply regarded him; dimly lit by the TV, slackened, all his sparking energy gone, calm like the dark ocean depths.

Sighing, he eventually shook his shoulder to wake him, gently at first, somewhat rougher when he didn’t seem to get a reaction from him, but when even his soft demands and lightly slapped attempts didn’t come to fruition, he accepted that he would not be able to wake his friend up. And, honestly, the man deserved all the sleep he got.

Carefully maneuvering himself from the couch, he freed himself, regretting it when a light frown creased Wooyoung’s forehead at the movement. The frown disappeared when San returned with a soft blanket and a pillow, draping the blanket over him, gently lifting his head to stuff the pillow under it, and then he lingered at the couch, fingertips in his friend’s hair, caressing, the house quiet except for their breaths and, eventually, the rustle of his clothes as he stood up, the whisper of his barefooted steps on wooden floor.

Without Wooyoung there to distract him, he made quick work of the aquarium, listening to a playlist he hadn’t heard in a while. At one of the jellyfish tanks, wiping down the glass, watching their ghostly bodies float through the deep sapphire water, his thoughts halted to make space for a song that sounded like warm sunlight and young summer and coming home, and when ‘And we will sleep by the ocean’ sang in his earphones, suddenly the person taking shape in his mind gained a face.

He paused cleaning, took out his phone, created a new playlist, added the song to it and named it ‘songs that remind me of him’. It sounded a little too romantic, though, didn’t it? Oh well. Wasn’t like anyone beside him would ever see it.

Back home, he took care to be as quiet as possible, discarding his shoes, washing his hands, creeping into the living room. He crouched down in front of the couch, at eye-level with his now as before sleeping friend, a smile tugging at his mouth when he realized that the man had relocated the pillow and wrapped his arms around it, brushing strands of hair that must’ve come loose in the process behind his ear, and like always, his fingertips lingered as he regarded that night quiet face. Was that normal? To like looking at someone so much?

Sighing, he eventually averted his eyes and stood up. It would be fine for the man to sleep here, right? He wouldn’t be mad that he hadn’t tried harder to wake him up?

Well, he’d find out tomorrow. For now, he snuck upstairs, acted out his evening routine yawning and deep in tired thoughts about the man asleep on his couch, and as he slipped into bed, pulled his big shark plushie into his chest, he thought that it was really such a shame Wooyoung wasn’t in this bed with him.

The next morning, he woke up to the soft patter of rain. About to turn off his alarm entirely, snuggle as deep into his blanket and shark as possible and come into work when his bed stopped being so terribly cozy, he remembered that he wasn’t alone in this house anymore. Sighing deeply, he dragged himself out of bed, yawning as he lifted the big rock on the windowsill and opened the window to let fresh air and the wonderful wet soil smell of the rain into the room – securing the window with the rock – and then he left his bedroom running his hand through his messy hair.

The moment he stepped into the hallway, the scent of freshly brewed coffee hit him, and he smiled to himself and went into the bathroom. How long had it been since anyone had slept over at his? He couldn’t remember.

In addition to the coffee smell, a cool breeze met him at the bottom of the stairs, blowing in from the kitchen windows, his quiet, barefooted steps on the old floorboards drowning in the melody of the rain, the soft wind curling into the room, in through the wooden porch door and out through the windows, taking the thin white curtains with it, fabric fluttering in the morning rain. Wooyoung stood at the counter, gazing out at the dim world, the dark clouds and vibrant earthy tones of the garden and the forest beyond, a steaming mug untouched in front of him.

The man sighed lightly, plucking his phone from his pocket, smile decorating his pretty face, a soft ray of light on a moody morning. “Good morning,” San greeted just as his friend began typing, and the other immediately discarded his phone and turned around.

It was kind of funny, the way his face changed. First his eyes widened, flicking down and up his body, the smile slowly dropping, looking perhaps a little longer than would be considered normal, then he averted his gaze entirely, a rosy blush creeping into his skin, and picked up the mug as if to distract himself. Cute. “Mornin’,” the man greeted back, but he didn’t look at him. “Hope you don’t mind I made myself coffee.”

“As long as you made some for me too.” Lightly smirking to himself, San approached, making a last minute detour to the coffee pot on the counter as his friend turned back to the window and his phone. “Did you sleep okay? I know the couch can be a dick.”

Wooyoung hummed. “My back hurts, and my shoulders are stiff as hell. Other than that, it was fine.” Then he turned to texting, and San left him to it.

He was terribly curious, though. And on a morning like this, where it was cool and rainy and breezy and he’d been forced from the comfort of his bed, his body felt empty without someone else pressed to it, and there was a pretty man who surely wouldn’t mind the affection right next to him, so he really didn’t see what could stop him.

Setting his newly filled coffee mug down, he moved behind his friend. As he wrapped his arms around him, he caught a glimpse of the screen, barely able to read the other person laughing at Wooyoung over text and the man’s ‘im so cooked’ before the phone was shut off and disappeared, and as San rested his chin on the other’s shoulder and tightened his hold on him, hands at his waist and side, the tension in Wooyoung melted away.

As San sighed happily, closing his eyes, his friend rested his own arms over his, and he pulled him closer to himself and relished in the way they fit together. Just beyond the open window, the rain pattered away, the curtain flapped and fluttered in the breeze, the morning garden and seaside forest rustled, a lone bird sang its melody, but he had a surprisingly warm man in his arms and absentminded caresses on the back of his hand and it was all so terribly cozy. Leaving this would be considerably worse than leaving his bed.

When he shifted his head, snuggled the lower half of his face in his friend’s nape and hair – he still smelled a little like orange, though mostly like something warm and homely that he liked much more – Wooyoung let out a long breath. “You’re clingy too, aren’t you?” the man asked, something in his voice that the other couldn’t quite place.

San snorted. “Wherever did you get that idea?” Already, his mind quietened, his body softened, as if they thought that they could fall asleep exactly like this, growing tired. His friend opened his mouth. “Now shut up. I wanna listen to the rain.”

Wooyoung closed his mouth, whatever had been on his mind going unsaid, and for a wonderful while, they simply stood like that. Some time throughout, Wooyoung picked up his mug of coffee, took a sip or two, consulted his phone, lifted his hand and arm as if taking a picture, thumbs tapping on the screen like he was texting someone, and he was wonderfully warm and relaxed in the other’s arms. Personally, San thought that they should do this much, much more often.

But even good things came to an end. He sighed, tortured, when he eventually detached himself from his friend, the cool breeze icy on his bare chest and abdomen, though it was alright, then, because their conversation returned as they made breakfast side by side. Once, Wooyoung stood in front of the drawer San needed, so he laid a hand on his waist and gently moved him aside, and the man stumbled over his sentence, smoothing over it with a comment on the taste of the apples.

While Wooyoung ate, San stood behind him and did his best to massage the stiffness from his shoulders and upper back, occasionally taking a sip of his coffee, talking as he worked, paying close attention to any winces or pained little moans so he could adjust accordingly. Wooyoung joked that he’d hog the bed when they had a sleepover, then giggled and flirtatiously sang that he’d let San into the bed with him in exchange for a kiss, to which San rolled his eyes. He was smiling, though.

During breakfast, the rain worsened, forcing him to close the porch door and windows, barely remembering to close the window upstairs too, and his friend eyed the rain regretfully, lamenting that he’d have to bike home in it. Of course he offered to drive him home on the way to work.

In the car, Wooyoung in his hoodie and decorated with all his jewelry, they listened to music, singing along when they could, joking with each other when they couldn’t, and then a song like childhood summer rang through the joy warm air of the car and Wooyoung lit up and laid his hand to his arm as he began singing along, dramatic gestures and expressions included. He sounded like hot wind and lapping waves and late-night parties on the beach.

At a red light, San stealthily added that song to that playlist. He managed to return to the currently playing list just before his friend glanced at his phone, suddenly rather shy about it, but then the light turned green and Wooyoung’s hand found his thigh and he no longer had the capacity to dwell on it.

Parked outside his friend’s apartment, waiting for the man, he opened his notes app and began typing up his next letter to him. The rain drummed on the roof, the windshield, the presence of that beautiful, vibrant man lingered in his heart, the stationary heating made the car cozy and a light smile lit him up as he typed away on his phone.

The car door opened, startling him away from his phone, and Wooyoung dropped himself into the passenger seat considerably more energetic than when he’d left. A faint cloud of his sweet orange blossom smell wafted into the car with him, immediately followed by a brandishing wave of light-hearted talking, and the car was so full of him so suddenly that it took San a moment or two to adjust. By the time they were back on the road, music blasting from the speakers, Wooyoung singing along like he had something to win, San was convinced that he’d somehow managed to befriend summer.