Archive of Our Own

The thing about working with Lee Minho was that he was always right in the most irritating way possible. He didn’t gloat. He didn’t need to. He just waited until the situation proved him correct and then continued existing at a frequency specifically calibrated to drive Han Jisung insane.

“The timeline doesn’t work,” Minho said, for the third time, without looking up from his screen.

“The timeline works fine,” Jisung said, for the third time, looking directly at Minho.

“If we submit Thursday, the client has two days to review before the Monday presentation. That’s not enough time for revisions.”

“They’re not going to ask for revisions.”

“They always ask for revisions.”

“Not always.”

Minho finally looked up. He wasn’t unkind or contemptuous, just painfully patient and he gave Jisung that look now, like he’d done it many times before.

“The Harim project,” he said. “The Seoho account. The March deliverable that you also said they wouldn’t revise.”

Jisung opened his mouth.

“And the April one,” Minho added.

Jisung closed his mouth.

Seungmin was three desks over, very obviously pretending not to listen while eating his lunch. Changbin had stopped even pretending, his chair swiveled approximately thirty degrees in their direction, chin in hand.

“Fine,” Jisung said.“Wednesday. But I want it noted that I think Wednesday is unnecessarily conservative and we could absolutely submit Thursday.”

“Noted,” Minho said, already typing. “Wednesday it is.”

“I just said ..”

“I heard what you said. Wednesday.”

Jisung made a frustrated noise, which did not count as arguing because no actual words were involved and went to get coffee. By the time the machine finished, he had concluded that Minho was impossible to deal with and, infuriatingly, right about the timeline.

He was on his way back, coffee in hand, running through the Wednesday submission schedule when Minho appeared beside him in the hallway with the sudden quiet materialism of a cat.

Jisung was startled badly enough that the coffee sloshed.

“Do you have a minute?” Minho asked. 

“I have several, now that we’ve apparently decided to submit Wednesday like we’re..”

“Not about work.”

Jisung looked at him. Minho’s composure was intact, outwardly perfect, but Jisung had spent eight months close enough to recognize the strain underneath. Minho was controlling himself. Jisung stored that information for later.

“Okay,” Jisung said.

Minho glanced back toward the office, then at Jisung. “Not here.”

They ended up in the small meeting room at the end of the hall, the one nobody booked because the projector had been broken since November and facilities kept closing the ticket. 

Minho closed the door. Jisung sat on the edge of the table because the chairs were awful and watched Minho stand in the middle of the room in silence for a moment.

It was something that would have seemed dramatic from anyone else, but from Minho it only meant he was arranging his thoughts.

“My family has a gathering every year,” Minho began. “My parents, my extended family. It’s a weekend thing…we stay at my parents’ house.”

“Okay.”

“This year my aunt has apparently decided that it’s unacceptable that I’m..not seeing anyone. She’s been coordinating with my mother. There’s someone they want me to meet.”

“A setup,” Jisung said.

“A setup,” Minho confirmed.

Jisung looked at him. The outline of the request was visible from a considerable distance but he still wanted Minho to have to say it out loud. 

“Okay,” he said again, invitingly.

Minho met his eyes. He had very attractive eyes, which was both irritating and wholly unrelated to the situation. Dark, steady eyes that gave Jisung the persistent impression of being read more closely than he had agreed to.

“I need someone to come with me,” Minho said. “As my boyfriend. For the weekend.”

Jisung let the silence sit for exactly long enough.

“No,” he said.

“I haven’t finished.”

“You don’t need to finish. The answer is no. You want me to spend a weekend lying to your entire family about being your boyfriend, which — and I want to be clear that I’m saying this as someone who has to sit across from you five days a week — sounds like an experience I would not recover from.”

“Two favors,” Minho said. “Whatever you need. Work-related or otherwise.”

“No.”

“I’ll take the Daehwa client.”

Jisung paused. The Daehwa client was a significant and ongoing source of misery that he had been trying to redistribute for three months. “The whole account?”

“The whole account.”

Jisung looked at the ceiling. The ceiling, predictably, had nothing to contribute.

“How long is the torture for?”

“Friday evening to Sunday afternoon.”

“How many family members?”

“Enough.”

“That’s not a number, Minho.”

Minho let out a sigh which was an answer in itself.

Jisung drank his coffee. It had gone slightly lukewarm in the course of being startled and negotiated at. 

“Ground rules,” he said. “If I do this — and I want it on record that I think this is a catastrophic idea and I reserve the right to say I told you so on the drive home — we establish ground rules in advance. What we’re telling them, how we met, how long we’ve been together. I’m not walking in there improvising.”

Something shifted, almost imperceptibly, in Minho’s expression.

“Fine,” Minho said.

“And you owe me the Daehwa account regardless of how it goes.”

“Agreed.”

“And if your family asks me something I don’t know the answer to I’m going to make something up and you don’t get to contradict me.”

“Within reason.”

“That’s not a condition I’m accepting.”

“Jisung.”

“Minho.”

The broken projector sat in the corner witnessing all of this with the impartiality of broken equipment.

“Fine,” Minho said, like the word cost him something. “Within your version of reason.”

“Great,” Jisung said, and finished his lukewarm coffee. “Send me your family’s names and a brief relationship history by tomorrow morning. I’ll do prep work.”

Minho blinked, very slightly. “Prep work.”

“I’m not going in there underprepared. I have a professional reputation.”

“You have a reputation,” Minho said, which was not the same thing, and left the meeting room with the satisfaction that he had gotten what he wanted.

Jisung sat on the edge of the table in the empty meeting room for a moment longer than necessary.

“Daehwa account,” he said to himself, firmly, as a reminder of why this was a reasonable decision.

It didn’t entirely work, but it was something to hold onto.

The document Minho sent that evening was a single shared spreadsheet with three tabs: Family Members (Key), Family Members (Extended), and Talking Points. Jisung opened it at his kitchen table and stared at it for a long moment. He then  burst out laughing at the astonishingly particular breed of human being Lee Minho was.

The talking points tab contained, in clean bullet points, a suggested origin story for their relationship — they’d been coworkers for eight months, things had shifted gradually, it had taken time for both of them to acknowledge it — and a list of things Minho’s family was likely to ask. 

There were notes on his mother’s personality (warm, perceptive, will ask follow-up questions), his aunt (the architect of the setup, skeptical by nature, will require convincing), and his grandmother (will try to feed you constantly, accepting food is non-negotiable).

At the bottom of the Talking Points tab, in a separate cell, Minho had written: You don’t have to memorize all of this. Just don’t contradict the timeline.

Jisung read that twice. Then he opened a new tab on his own spreadsheet, titled it Additional Talking Points (Better Version), and started filling it in.

He told himself he was being thorough. He was a thorough person. This had nothing to do with the fact that he was, apparently, going to spend a weekend pretending to be in love with Lee Minho, and wanted to be convincing. 

He closed that line of thinking with a follow-up task. He had a family tree to memorize. He had a timeline to internalize.

He had a professional reputation.

.

The car ride on Friday evening was awkward in a way Jisung hadn’t prepared for. They were rarely alone without work happening around them, without  conversations being interrupted by meetings, emails, or other people. Stripped of all that, the silence between them felt newly visible.

“You put the wrong exit in the GPS,” Minho said.

“I put the exit you told me.”

“I told you exit fourteen.”

“You said exit forty.”

“Why would I say exit forty, we’re not going to..”

“I don’t know, Minho, I’m not a GPS, I just input what people tell me.”

“I texted you the address.”

“Then why did you also tell me verbally if you texted it? Pick a communication method and stick to it.”

Minho reached over and changed the route in three taps, apparently abandoning the navigation argument in favor of getting there before nine. In the enclosed quiet of the car, even that minor act of competence felt strangely noticeable. 

“Twenty minutes added,” Minho said.

“Great. We can use the time to go over the story again.”

“We’ve gone over the story.”

“We’ve gone over your version of the story. I have notes.”

Minho glanced at him from the side. In the shifting highway light, the look was softer, less guarded than Minho usually allowed under office fluorescents.

Jisung tucked the moment away with the rest of the things he’d learned about Minho over eight months and deliberately refused to think too hard about.

“What kind of notes?”

Jisung pulled out his phone. “Your version is too clean,” he said. “It reads like a project proposal. Nobody falls for someone the way you described it.”

Minho was quiet for a moment. “It’s accurate.”

“Accuracy is not the point. The point is that your aunt needs to believe it and your mother needs to feel it and your grandmother needs to decide I’m good enough for you by the end of Saturday dinner, and none of that happens with your sad excuse of a story.”

The highway unspooled ahead of them, dark and ordinary.

“Let’s hear your version then.”

“My version,” Jisung said, settling back into the seat, “is that you complained about me to someone for months before you admitted you actually liked me. Which — based on available evidence — is probably not far from the truth.”

Minho drove in silence, not giving a response to Jisung’s brazen assumption.

The city gave way to the spaces between cities and neither of them said anything for a while, which was also, Jisung thought, not entirely unlike them.

.

The house wasn’t big or especially impressive, but it had the settled warmth of somewhere that had been cared for consistently and for a long time.

The garden was tended to, the lights were warm, the shoes by the front step were aligned with suspicious precision. Jisung found himself thinking, involuntarily, that of course this was where Minho came from.

 Jisung took all this in from the passenger seat as Minho pulled into the driveway and felt something shift slightly in his understanding of him. 

“Ready?” Minho asked.

“I was born ready,” Jisung said. “Also, I made flashcards.”

Minho turned to look at him. “You made flashcards?”

“Your cousin Jeongin is twenty, studying fashion. Your uncle makes the same joke about his golf handicap every family gathering and you’re supposed to laugh. Your grandmother’s name is…”

“Okay,” Minho said.

“I’m just saying I prepared.”

“I see that.” Something flickered across his face. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know I didn’t have to but I wanted to be convincing.” Jisung unbuckled his seatbelt and picked up his bag from the footwell. “Also I was bored.”

He got out of the car before Minho could respond to that, which was a technique he’d developed over eight months of working together and found consistently effective.

The front door opened before they reached it.

Minho’s mother was a small woman with Minho’s eyes and an expression of such genuine, unguarded warmth that Jisung felt it land on him like something physical. 

“You’re late,” she said to Minho, and then, with seamless efficiency, turned to Jisung. “You must be Jisung. Come in, come in, it’s cold. Did you eat? There’s food, plenty of it. Minho never eats enough on long drives..”

“Mom,” Minho said.

“I’m just saying. Come in.”

She ushered them inside with effortless familiarity, the motion quick and practiced. Jisung ducked slightly at the doorway out of reflex and stepped into a hallway thick with the smell of cooking, warmth, and something faintly floral.

 A television murmured somewhere in the house. Conversations blended together in another room. Three cats emerged from around a corner and looked at him with the concentrated attention of beings conducting a formal evaluation.

Jisung crouched down immediately. One of the cats, orange-ish, with the self-possessed bearing of an animal that considered itself the actual head of household , sniffed his outstretched hand and then consented to be touched with the air of someone granting a significant favor.

“That’s Soonie,” Minho’s mother said.“He usually doesn’t like strangers.”

“We have an understanding,” Jisung said seriously.

When he stood up Minho was looking at him with an expression he’d never seen before in eight months of sitting across from him, and Jisung didn’t want to think too much about what it meant.

The family, it turned out, was exactly as Minho had advertised .

They arrived at Jisung in overlapping waves: Minho’s father, a quiet man with a firm handshake who looked at Jisung once and then at Minho with an expression of subtle private approval that Minho appeared not to notice; a pair of aunts who arrived as a unit and asked questions with the sole purpose of extracting information out of him. 

And then there was the cousin Jeongin, who was exactly as described in the flashcards. He looked at Jisung with the frank curiosity of someone who was going to have opinions about all of this and wasn’t going to bother concealing them.

Jisung thought the nightmare of the never ending introductions was over when Minho’s Aunt Soojin, who was the architect of the setup, materialized at Jisung’s elbow about seven minutes into his arrival.

She was maybe fifty, sharp-eyed, with a smile that was genuinely warm and also somehow simultaneously assessing, the two things coexisting without contradiction.

“So,” she said pleasantly. “Minho’s boyfriend.”

Jisung gave a polite nod.

“He didn’t mention you. Not once, until last week.”

“That’s very on-brand for him,” Jisung said, with a confidence that came from eight months of empirical research. “He also didn’t mention to me that we were submitting the Harim project on Thursday until approximately twelve hours before it was due. Communication is a journey we’re on together.”

Aunt Soojin looked at him for a moment. Then she laughed and Jisung felt the evaluation tip slightly in his favor.

Across the room, Minho appeared at his shoulder out of nowhere. This family had a huge problem of sneaking up on people. 

“Hello, Aunt Soojin,” Minho said.

“Your boyfriend,” she said, “is very funny.”

“I’m aware,” Minho said and handed Jisung a glass of juice and then turned to his aunt to ask about his cousins.

Jisung stood beside him holding the juice and considered the fact that Minho had noticed he didn’t have a drink. That was the sort of thing you noticed when you were paying attention to someone, which was not, Jisung decided firmly, a line of thought to pursue in a living room full of people.

He drank the juice. It was good. 

Dinner was loud and structured around a table that fit everyone only through a combination of extra chairs and collective goodwill, and Jisung, who had grown up as an only child in a quiet apartment, found it overwhelming in a way that was almost entirely pleasant. 

Food arrived in quantities that suggested Minho’s mother operated on the assumption that everyone at the table had been recently rescued from somewhere with no access to meals. Conversations ran parallel and occasionally merged and split again.

The uncle made the golf handicap joke and Jisung laughed with the natural timing of someone who had been briefed and Minho, beside him, went very slightly still in a way that no one else would have noticed.

“How did you two meet?” This question came from Aunt Hyejin.

Jisung felt Minho shift fractionally beside him. This was the moment they’d unabsentmindedly prepared for. 

“He complained about me,” Jisung said. “To a mutual friend. For months, apparently. I didn’t know about it until much later. I just thought he didn’t like me, which to be fair was a reasonable interpretation of the available evidence.”

He glanced at Minho. “Then one day I overheard him telling the same mutual friend that I was the most frustrating person he’d ever worked with, but that he couldn’t stop..” He paused, letting it do its work. “Thinking about me.”

Several family members were smiling. Minho didn’t know what to do with his face.

“He tried to backtrack when he realized I’d heard,” Jisung continued. “But by then I’d already gotten the general idea.”

“That’s not ..” Minho started.

“What?” Jisung asked.

The table was watching with the collective attention of people who were very much enjoying themselves.

“That’s accurate,” Minho said, after a moment, through what appeared to be significant internal effort.

His mother made a sound of deep satisfaction and passed Jisung more rice.

Later, with the dishes done and the household settled into its evening arrangements, Jisung ended up in the kitchen with Minho’s grandmother, who had decided that he needed a second dessert. She set a fresh piece onto his plate with the immovable determination of someone long accustomed to winning these negotiations.

“Thank you,” Jisung said, accepting it, because the spreadsheet had been very clear.

She sat across from him and looked at him directly, the way old people sometimes did, without the intermediary courtesies.

“You make him nervous,” she said.

Jisung looked up from the dessert. He had no idea how to respond to that.

“I watched him at dinner. Minho is not usually nervous.”

Jisung didn’t have a prepared answer for this, which was new. “We argue a lot,” he offered. “At work. Maybe that.”

She made a sound that was not in agreement but didn’t say anything to counter Jisung’s statement.

Jisung looked at her for a moment. She looked back, her face breaking into a faint smile. 

“The dessert is good,” he said.

“I know.”

Minho found him on the back porch twenty minutes later, sitting on the step with his jacket pulled around him. He sat beside him without asking permission, near enough that their shoulders hovered just short of touching, and let the silence settle between them. 

Jisung had once found this specific Minho behavior profoundly aggravating — the assumption of shared quiet, the refusal to rush toward conversation. Somewhere along the way, without consulting him in the matter, it had started feeling familiar instead.

“My grandmother likes you,” Minho said.

“Your grandmother is terrifying.”

“She’s really not.”

“She looked at me like she could see right through me.”

Minho made a sound that was almost a laugh. It happened rarely enough that Jisung always noticed it without ever knowing why.

“Your story at dinner,” Minho said, after a moment.

“What about it?”

“It wasn’t what we discussed.”

“I told you your version was lame as hell.” Jisung pulled his jacket tighter. “It worked, didn’t it? Your aunt laughed. Your mother looked satisfied. Your father..”

“My father nodded at me like I’d done something right,” Minho said, very evenly, “which has not happened in recent memory, so.”

Jisung turned to look at him. Minho was gazing at the garden, the kitchen light catching the clean edge of his profile, and something about him had shifted. It was the absence of some familiar tension Jisung had apparently become accustomed to seeing.

He looked, Jisung thought, like someone who had come home. Which was an obvious thing to think, given that this was his home. But the specific reality of it struck Jisung more deeply than he’d anticipated.

“Your aunt was going to introduce you to someone,” Jisung said.

“Yes.”

“Was it ..I mean. Was it just an inconvenience, or ..”

“I didn’t want to be set up,” Minho said, simply. 

Jisung nodded. He looked back out at the garden. “Okay,” 

“We should go in,” Minho said, without moving.

“Probably,” Jisung agreed, also without moving.

They sat there for another few minutes in the dark, shoulders almost touching, and didn’t talk about anything important.

Jisung told himself this was just what the job required — proximity, performance, the necessary texture of a convincing fiction. He was a thorough person. He’d made flashcards. This was simply due diligence.

He almost believed it.

.

The guest room had one bed.

Jisung stood in the doorway and looked at it before looking at Minho, who had gone very still. Apparently, this had not been part of the plan.

“Your mother planned this,” Jisung said.

“I know.”

“When you said guest room I assumed ..”

“I know.”

“There’s a couch downstairs.”

“There’s a couch downstairs,” Minho confirmed, “and my aunt Soojin walks past it at six in the morning on her way to make coffee, and if one of us is on it the entire fiction collapses before breakfast.”

Jisung looked at the bed. It was a reasonable size — not large, but not small. It could plausibly contain two people who were not actively trying to occupy the same space. He was a reasonable person. He could be mature about a bed.

“Fine,” he said. “Perimeter.”

“What.”

“Down the middle. Invisible line. You stay on your side, I stay on mine, nobody crosses it, we wake up, we have breakfast, we survive.”

“It’s a bed, not a diplomatic border.”

“Minho.”

“Fine. Perimeter.”

The perimeter lasted, as a formal agreement, until approximately one in the morning, when it became apparent that the perimeter had never been the real problem.

The real problem was the room: quiet, dark, very far from the office, stripped of meetings and every familiar structure that usually absorbed the edges of whatever this was between them.

They lay on their respective sides in the dark. The house had settled into nighttime sounds around them.

“Your grandmother told me I make you nervous,” Jisung said, because apparently he was incapable of leaving things alone.

“She said that?”

“She said that.”

“She’s eighty-one.”

“She seemed pretty lucid.”

“She also told Jeongin that his aura was the wrong color for architecture school.”

“Okay but didn’t he drop out of architecture to pursue fashion?”

Minho made a sound that might have been a reluctant acknowledgment. Jisung put his phone face-down on his chest and looked at the ceiling, where the shadow of the window frame made a faint cross in the dark.

“She said you’re usually not nervous,” Jisung said. “As a person.”

“I’m not.”

“I know. I’ve watched you tell a client their entire brief was wrong like it was nothing.”

“The brief was wrong.”

“That’s not the point.” Jisung turned to face him.“The point is that your grandmother has known you your whole life and she seemed pretty confident that I make you nervous..”

A silence stretched between them,long enough that Jisung thought Minho might have decided to simply opt out of the conversation. It was a technique he also employed at work and which Jisung had never once respected.

“You’re different here,” Minho said finally. “Than at work.”

Jisung considered that. “Different how?”

“I don’t know yet.”

It was such an unexpectedly honest answer that Jisung didn’t have an immediate response to it, which almost never happened. He lay there in the dark not knowing what to do with the sudden quickening of his heartbeat. 

“Your family is nice,” he said eventually. 

“I know,” Minho said. Something in his voice had gone quieter. “They like you.”

“I’m very likable.”

“Well, you’re definitely something,” Minho said.

Minho and his subtle way of patronizing Jisung. It irked him beyond belief. But he had been nicer today than he had ever been to Jisung since their paths had crossed so he counted his blessings and decided not to counter him. 

Jisung lay there in the dark listening to the distant sound of the home settling into sleep around them.

He thought about the Daehwa account. He thought about the flashcards. He fell asleep eventually, without deciding to, which was the best he ever managed.

.

He woke up to the sound of someone downstairs doing something energetic with a pan.

The room sat in the pale grey light of early morning, not quite night anymore but not fully day either. Jisung surfaced into consciousness with immediate confusion. Then recognition assembled itself in stages. Minho’s family home. Right.

He turned his head to find Minho’s side of the bed already empty. It was a little too neatly made and Jisung simply stared at it for a moment.

He got up, found the bathroom, and retrieved the spare toothbrush from the cabinet, precisely as instructed in the comprehensive text Minho had sent Wednesday evening.

Minho’s mother was the one with the pan. She was making something that smelled extraordinary and didn’t look up when Jisung appeared in the kitchen doorway except to say, “Sit, sit, coffee’s on the counter”.

Jisung sat and poured himself coffee. Soonie appeared from under the table and rested his chin on Jisung’s foot. 

“He usually doesn’t do that,” Minho’s mother observed, glancing down.

“We established a connection last night.”

“He bit Jeongin last Chuseok.”

“Jeongin has the wrong energy,” Jisung said, and she laughed and flipped whatever was in the pan. 

The kitchen was warm and smelled really good, and Jisung sat there with his coffee and Soonie resting on his foot and felt, strangely and inconveniently, at ease.

Minho came in from outside a few minutes later with his nieces trailing behind him and mud on his shoes — a combination Jisung had never previously associated with Lee Minho, who kept his desk immaculate and had once reorganized the shared project drive without prompting.

He was also, Jisung noted, wearing an old sweatshirt and looking distressingly more like a human than he usually did.

Minho saw him at the table and came over automatically, moving with the quiet ease of familiarity. As he passed, he let his hand rest briefly on Jisung’s shoulder and reached around him for his coffee.

It was a simple, thoughtless gesture,the kind of proprietary touch people in actual relationships deployed without conscious thought. Jisung had not anticipated how convincingly Minho would inhabit it.

For the family, Jisung reminded himself firmly. Maintaining the integrity of the premise.

“You’re up,” Minho said.

“Incredible observation.”

“I didn’t think you’d be up before nine.”

“I’m always up before nine.”

Minho’s mother set a plate in front of Jisung without comment. His nieces, Jiwoo and Nari, had already dispersed, apparently fueled by some internal engine that didn’t require breakfast.

Minho sat down across from him with his coffee, looking at the plate and then back at Jisung.

“She doesn’t usually make that for breakfast,” he said, at low volume.

Jisung looked at the plate. “Is that a problem?”

“It means she likes you.”

“I told you I was likable.”

Minho wrapped both hands around his mug and said nothing, but the corner of his mouth did something small and involuntary that Jisung had seen maybe twice before in eight months, always when Minho thought no one was paying attention.

Jisung paid attention. He ate his breakfast. He was very focused on the breakfast.

At some point mid-morning, Aunt Soojin appeared at Jisung’s elbow while he was refilling his coffee.

“Walk with me,” she said pleasantly.

They walked. The garden in the morning was different from the garden in the dark.

It seemed smaller somehow, the careful tending of the beds suddenly obvious, a persimmon tree at the far end bearing the quiet permanence of something that had been there longer than anyone currently living in the house. 

Aunt Soojin walked beside him with her hands in her cardigan pockets and said nothing for a while, which reminded Jisung of Minho. 

“So,” she said. “Coworkers.”

“That’s how we met, yes.”

“And now?”

“And now we’re here,” Jisung said, trying his best to plaster a fake smile on his face.

She studied him from the corner of her eye. “He never mentioned you,” she said. “Not once, before last week.”

“That’s Minho,” Jisung said, with an ease that was entirely genuine because it was entirely true. He smiled at her. “He’s not really a mentioner.”

Soojin was quiet for a moment. Then, almost against her will, her mouth curved. “That’s fair,” she said. “He never told us about his first boyfriend either. We found out when he came to Chuseok.”

“See,” Jisung said.

“The persimmon tree is his grandfather’s,” she said, changing registers smoothly. “Minho used to climb it when he was small. Drove everyone insane.”

“He doesn’t seem like a tree climber,” he said.

“He doesn’t seem like a lot of things he is,” Soojin said, lightly, and turned back toward the house. “Come in before the little ones eat everything.”

Jisung followed her, and didn’t think about what she’d said and why she’d said it.

He found grandmother in the living room in an armchair with a cup of tea and a photo album. She  beckoned him over and Jisung sat on the footstool beside her. 

She started flipping the pages of the album and Jisung realized that it was a childhood album of Lee Minho. He was prepared to be so annoying about it and to torment the living hell out of Minho.

The first picture showed Minho, maybe seven or eight, squinting into the sun on what looked like a beach, ice cream bar in hand.

“He was very loud,” his grandmother said, with deep fondness. “Always moving. Always bumping into something.” 

Another photo: Minho perhaps ten, up in the branches of the persimmon tree with the self-satisfied expression of someone who had made it further than anyone thought he would. “His mother said he’d fall and break something. He never did. He was always more careful than he looked.”

She flipped again. Minho at what looked like a family dinner, maybe thirteen, sitting beside an elderly man who had his eyes and Minho was looking up at him with so much adoration it almost spilled out of the photo.

“His grandfather,” she said. “They were the same, those two. Quiet in the same way.”

“He’s like that now,” Jisung said, before he’d decided to say it. “When someone’s talking. He gets very still.”

“Yes,” she said simply, and flipped to the next photograph.

After spending quite a long time looking at photographs,  Jisung passed the slightly ajar door of the playroom and stopped without meaning to. It was because the sight he saw in front of him was one he’d never heard seen before and his brain needed a moment to process it correctly.

Minho was on the floor.

Minho was literally on the floor, on his back, with his nieces sitting on him. Nari was attempting to braid his hair and Jiwoo was explaining something to him with great seriousness. Minho was listening with complete focus, like this was the most important briefing he’d received all week.

“And then,” Jiwoo said, “she said I was wrong but I wasn’t wrong because I checked and the dinosaur was definitely not that kind .”

“What kind did she say,” Minho said.

“The flying kind.”

“Pterodactyl.”

“Yes but that’s not even a dinosaur, that’s a..”

“Pterosaur,” Minho said. “You’re right. Technically not a dinosaur.”

Jiwoo pointed at him with the vindicated energy of someone who had been waiting for external validation. “See.”

“You should tell her that.”

“I did and she didn’t believe me.”

“Do you want me to tell her?”

There was a pause while this was considered. “No,” she decided. “I’ll tell her again myself.”

“Good,” Minho said, with complete seriousness, and Nari patted his face with one hand in what appeared to be approval, and Minho let this happen with the patience of someone who had made peace with all of it.

Jisung stood in the hallway and felt something strange taking flight in his chest.

He must have made a sound, or shifted, because Minho looked up then and found Jisung in the doorway with an expression that Jisung could not arrange into anything neutral fast enough.

Minho looked at him for a moment.

Jisung looked back.

“Pterosaurs,” Jisung said, because it was the only thing available.

“Not dinosaurs,” Minho confirmed, gravely, and Nari turned around to look at Jisung. It was almost as if she was evaluating whether he was an ally or a problem.

“He’s right,” Jisung told Nari, pointing at Minho.

Nari considered this. Then, apparently satisfied, turned back around and resumed the briefing.

Minho’s eyes stayed on Jisung for just a moment longer before he looked back down at the small serious face explaining dinosaur taxonomy.

Jisung stood there in the doorway with the unnamed thing still moving through him and thought, with some clarity:

Oh.

Oh, this is going to be a problem.

.

It was Jeongin who suggested it, which meant it was Jeongin’s fault, and Jisung was going to remember that.

By afternoon, the backyard had tipped into organized family chaos — music, snacks, children prosecuting a private war along the garden perimeter. 

The balloon game had emerged from a box of party supplies in the storage room that Minho’s mother had sent Jeongin to find something else in entirely, and Jeongin had returned with the box with a smirk that did nothing to hide the fact that he was up to no good.

“Teams of two,” he announced, holding up the bag of balloons. “The balloon goes between you, chest to chest, no hands. The first pair to pop it wins.” He scanned the yard, assigning pairs with alarming confidence. “Minho-hyung. Jisung-hyung.”

“No,” Minho said.

“Absolutely not,” Jisung said.

“You’re a couple,” Jeongin said, with the cheerful mercilessness of someone who was twenty and therefore had nothing to lose. “It’ll be cute.”

The family was already fully invested. Minho’s mother was smiling with unmistakable anticipatory warmth. The grandmother sat with her tea and the calm expression of someone who had seen this outcome coming several moves ago. Even Soojin looked entertained, which Jisung considered a betrayal after the garden conversation.

Jisung looked at Minho. Minho looked at Jisung with the expression he reserved for situations that had escalated beyond containment.

“Fine,” Minho said.

“Fine,” Jisung said.

Jeongin inflated a balloon with great ceremony and held it out. Around them two other pairs were already assembling: Aunt Hyejin and her husband and Minho’s parents, everyone treating this as a normal and reasonable activity.

It was not a normal and reasonable activity. It was a balloon that two people had to crush between their bodies until it exploded, and Jisung was going to do it in front of Minho’s entire family with a completely straight face because he was a professional and he had made flashcards.

Minho positioned the balloon between them and Jisung stepped in. Around them, several family members made approving noises.

Jisung kept his arms at his sides, looked determinedly at a point over Minho’s shoulder, and was, by his own rigorous assessment, handling this with complete normality.

“On three,” Jeongin said. “One ..”

“You’re not centered,” Minho said, quietly.

“I’m centered.”

“You’re leaning back.”

“I’m standing straight.”

“Jisung, if you lean back the balloon just ..”

“Two ..”

“I’m not leaning.”

“You’re leaning..Just…” Minho touched a hand briefly to his back, shifting him by a few inches. Jisung’s spine did something involuntary and, in his opinion, profoundly unprofessional. “There.”

“Three!”

They squeezed. The balloon, it turned out, possessed impressive structural integrity and no interest whatsoever in cooperating. It compressed alarmingly, then bulged sideways.

Jisung made an undignified noise. Minho made no noise at all, but his expression suggested a crisis being managed internally. The family was already laughing.

“More,” Minho said, through his teeth.

“I’m trying..”

“Use your arms to pull in..”

“I AM using my arms..”

“Not like that, just ..”

Minho grabbed his arms and repositioned them, bringing them approximately one inch closer together. The balloon had less room.

Jisung now found himself extremely close to Lee Minho in his parents’ backyard, in front of his entire family, attempting to pop an orange balloon through applied body pressure, and every aspect of this situation was completely fine.

“Together,” Minho said, eyes somewhere above Jisung’s head with the focus of a man who was going to win this garden game if it was the last thing he did.

“Together,” Jisung confirmed.

They pushed in simultaneously and the balloon gave a squeal. The family screamed in anticipation and then..

Nothing. It didn’t pop.

“This balloon is defective,” Jisung said.

“It’s not defective.”

“It’s been ages, it should have popped by now.”

“It takes as long as it takes, just focus.”

“Are you two arguing?” Jeongin called out.

“No,” they said, simultaneously, in the exact tone of people who were arguing.

Minho’s parents' balloon popped with a sharp crack across the garden and they erupted in victory. Jeongin immediately declared them in a tiebreaker with Minho and Jisung, which Jisung felt was genuinely unfair given that they hadn’t even popped theirs yet, and then it happened.

Minho made a decision with his whole body and pulled them together properly. No more logistics. No more minor adjustments. He just closed the remaining distance entirely. 

The balloon had nowhere left to go and surrendered to the situation with an explosive bang that made several nearby relatives flinch, the children shriek triumphantly, and Minho’s mother laugh with the unmistakable delight.

The silence immediately after was about half a second long. They were still standing close enough that Jisung could feel the warmth of Minho’s sweatshirt. Minho hadn’t stepped back yet and for some reason,Jisung hadn’t either. The orange balloon existed in scattered remains on the garden grass between their feet.

“We won,” Jisung said. His voice came out normal. He was proud of that.

“We won,” Minho said. His voice came out normal too. Jisung chose not to examine whether he was also proud of that.

The moment dissolved under the immediate force of family reaction — Jeongin talking about a rematch, Minho’s mother laughing and touching his arm, voices overlapping around them.

Jisung smiled and moved through it all on instinct. Most of him was there. A small part remained behind, caught in the quiet half second after the balloon burst, when the space between him and Minho had still existed only in theory.

He thought about that part for the rest of the afternoon and didn’t do anything useful with it, which was on brand for him.

The house in the evening felt different from the daytime version with the family settling into its natural resting state after the afternoon’s chaos. Someone turned off the overhead lights and switched the lamps on instead, softening the room into something smaller. 

The children, fed and exhausted, were draped across adults and sofa cushions in various stages of collapse. The adults talked without direction or urgency now and Jisung let this serenity wash over him. 

He sat on the floor with his back against the sofa because it was occupied and because he had always been a floor-sitter, to the perpetual confusion of people who preferred chairs.

Soonie had settled into his lap sometime in the last hour and fallen asleep there.Jisung was therefore anchored, and found he didn’t particularly want to move.

Minho was on the sofa above and behind him, close enough that Jisung was occasionally aware of his knee near his shoulder when he shifted. They weren’t talking. They didn’t need to . The room was full enough that silence between them wasn’t a gap that needed filling.

Across the room Jeongin caught his eye and gave him a look of frank assessment that Jisung returned with his blandest expression until Jeongin, dissatisfied, looked away.

“You’re moving,” Jisung said, without turning around.

“I’m sitting.”

“You keep shifting.”

“The cushion is uneven.”

“Then move to a different cushion.”

“This is my spot.”

“Your spot is making my shoulder..” Minho’s knee brushed against his shoulder again. “That. That is what it’s doing.”

“I barely touched you.”

“You’ve touched me four times in the last ten minutes.”

“I’m sitting on a sofa.”

“Sit still on the sofa.”

Jeongin, across the room, had stopped pretending to look at his phone.

“I sit how I sit,” Minho said and shifted again, and his knee settled against Jisung’s shoulder and this time it stayed there.

“You’re doing it again,” Jisung said.

“I’m comfortable,” Minho said simply.

Jisung opened his mouth, then closed it again. Soonie shifted in his lap and made a small sleepy sound. Jisung looked down and forgot what he had been about to say.

“He likes you,” Minho said. His voice was quieter now, the argument having apparently run its course without a formal conclusion.

“I told you.We have an understanding.”

“He bit Jeongin.”

“It was because I startled him,” Jeongin said, from across the room.

“You reached for him without letting him sniff you first,” Minho said.

“I’ve known him for years..”

“He still has to sniff you first, that’s just how he works..”

“I’m his family.”

“He doesn’t care about that,” Jisung said, running his hand lightly over Soonie’s back, “he cares about the sniff. It’s a respect thing.” 

Minho made a sound above him that, by any honest definition, could only be described as fond.

Jisung didn’t know what to do with that.

A few minutes passed. The room moved around them softly. Someone turned the television down. Aunt Soojin said goodnight and the room rearranged itself slightly around her absence.

Minho’s knee was still at his shoulder.

Jisung didn’t say anything about it.

“Your family is very loud,” he said.

“I know.”

“I mean that as a compliment.”

“I know that too.” A pause. “You fit in well.”

Jisung said nothing. He wasn’t sure there was a response to that which wouldn’t land somewhere he wasn’t ready to land yet, so he let it sit.

Later, the kitchen felt like a room finally at rest. Everything was cleaned up, the leftovers stored away, the day reduced to a dish rack of drying things and a vase of flowers on the windowsill Jisung hadn’t noticed that morning. He came down for water around eleven-fifteen, when most of the house had already gone to bed.

Minho was already there, leaning against the counter with a glass in his hand, looking out the dark window at the garden.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Minho asked.

“Didn’t try yet,” Jisung said.

Jisung got a glass of water and leaned against the counter a few feet away. They stood in the kitchen in silence for a moment, a silence that wasn’t empty or uncomfortable, just full of things neither of them said.

“Your mom hugged me for a long time at dinner,” Jisung said.

“She does that.”

“Not with everyone, I think.”

Minho looked into his glass. “No,” he said. “Not with everyone.”

Jisung turned his glass in his hands. “She asked me if I was good to you,” he said. “While you were helping clear the table.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I tried to be.” Jisung kept his eyes on the window.

The dish rack dripped once, steadily, into the drying tray.

“Jisung,” Minho said.

“I know we’re not…” Jisung started, then stopped. There were too many possible endings, and he wasn’t sure which one he meant.

What he’d said to Minho’s mother was still true, whatever it meant. He was tired enough, and far enough from Seoul and himself, that the truth felt less dangerous than usual. “I try to be,” he said. “At work. Even when it doesn’t look like it.”

Minho was quiet for a long moment.

“I know,” he said. His voice was stripped of its usual composure. “I know you do.”

Jisung nodded and drank his water. The garden stayed dark and still outside.

“Why me,” he said then, because it had been living in him since Friday. He was tired of carrying it alone. “Out of everyone you could have asked… why me?”

The question landed in the kitchen and stayed. Minho looked at the window then sideways at Jisung, his expression carrying too many things to read cleanly in the low kitchen light.

“You were the most convincing option,” Minho said.

Jisung looked at him.

“You’re good with people,” Minho continued. “You’re quick. You don’t panic. You would have prepared.” A pause. “You did prepare. The flashcards..”

“Minho,” Jisung said.

Minho stopped.

“That’s the practical answer,” Jisung said.

The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere deeper in the house a clock ticked through several seconds.

Minho looked at him with the expression that had no name yet, the one Jisung had been trying to decipher for months, and said nothing.

The silence felt full. Jisung stood in it. Minho looked away first.

“We should sleep,” Minho said. 

“Right,” Jisung said.

He followed Minho up the stairs and into the guest room. He got into his side of the bed in the dark, and lay there listening to the sound of the house and the faint sound of the sea beyond it.

He thought about the silence that had been very full, and what he was going to do with it.

He didn’t have an answer. But for the first time since Friday he wasn’t sure he needed one yet.

He fell asleep still holding that thought loosely, like something he wasn’t ready to let go of.

.

Sunday felt different the moment Jisung opened his eyes. The light, the sound of the house, or just the knowledge that it was the last day — that by evening they’d be driving back to Seoul and the weekend would already be over in the practical sense.

He lay in bed longer than necessary, listening to the house wake up, and didn’t think too hard about why he wasn’t getting up.

Minho’s side was empty again. Jisung stared at it and then got up.

Breakfast was quieter than Saturday’s .The  energy was softer, the conversation slower, everyone moving like they already knew the gathering was ending.

Jisung ate what was in front of him, talked when talked to, and felt the weekend sitting around him like something he was about to leave behind, which was strange for something that was, technically, not real.

Minho’s mother made him take a second helping without asking. He took it.

He found Minho in the garden by accident, the way he most often found him, not looking for him and then suddenly becoming aware.

He’d come out for air, the house feeling too warm with too many people in a small space. The garden was still and bright, the dew not yet gone, everything carrying that early Sunday feeling of a world not fully awake.

He stood by the back step for a minute or two before noticing Minho at the far end of the garden, standing by the persimmon tree, looking up at it.

Jisung crossed the garden quietly. The grass was a little wet under his shoes. Minho didn’t turn when he came closer, which meant he had heard him and chose not to react.

He stopped beside him and looked up at the tree. It was old up close — the bark deeply textured, thick branches held low with age.

“How old is it?” Jisung asked.

“Older than the house,” Minho said. “My grandfather planted it before they built it. He said he wanted to know the tree was already there when they moved in.” He took a pause. “He was like that. He liked things that had already proven themselves.”

Jisung looked up at the tree and thought of the photo Minho’s grandmother had shown him — Minho as a child up in the branches, small against something that looked much larger then than it did now.

“Your grandmother showed me a photo,” he said. “Of you up there.”

Minho glanced at him. “Which one?”

“You looked very pleased with yourself.”

“I’d made it higher than my cousin.” Something moved through his expression, not quite a smile, something quieter, inward. “My grandfather used to stand right here and watch me climb. Never told me to come down. My mother was convinced I’d fall and break something and he’d just…” He stopped, looking back up at the tree. “He’d just stand here.”

Jisung said nothing. He understood, in the way he understood most things about Minho, that this wasn’t a moment that needed filling.

“He died three years ago,” Minho said. The composure was still there but thinner now. “I kept thinking there was more time. I was always going to come home more, call more, visit on weekends.” He paused. “And then one day my mother called and there wasn’t more time, and all those weekends were just gone. Used on other things.”

The garden was quiet around them.

“He used to stand exactly here,” Minho continued, looking up at the branch. “Right here. Every time I climbed. He never said be careful, never said come down. He just stood here until I did.”

Something in his voice had loosened. “When I was maybe nine, I slipped. Got about two thirds of the way up, lost my footing on the wet bark, and slid down. Scraped my arm pretty badly on the way. I was trying not to cry because my cousin was watching and I was nine.”

Minho paused for a second, almost as if saying it out loud felt too heavy.

“My grandfather didn’t say anything. He just looked at my arm and went inside. He came back with something for it, cleaned it up. Then he looked at me and said, ‘You were almost at the good branch. Try again tomorrow when it’s dry.’”

Jisung looked at him.

“That was it,” Minho said. “That was the whole thing. Try again tomorrow when it’s dry.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’ve thought about that a lot. More than makes sense, probably, for such a small thing.”

“It’s not a small thing,” Jisung said.

Minho glanced at him.

“Someone deciding you don’t need to be protected from the thing you’re trying to do,” Jisung said. “That’s not small.”

Minho was quiet, looking at the branch. 

The clouds moved, and the garden went briefly gold before softening again.

“He was the only person I’ve ever known,” Minho said slowly, “who never tried to make me into something more manageable. Everyone else, even people who love me, they want the edges smoothed a little. He just… he let me be exactly as much as I was. Even when it was inconvenient.” He paused. “Especially when it was inconvenient, actually.”

Jisung thought about that. He thought about eight months of sitting across from Minho, of finding him infuriating and occasionally so completely himself that it was almost aggressive. 

Minho never softened his opinions to make people comfortable, never pretended to be warmer than he was, never acted like anyone else’s discomfort was his responsibility to fix.

“You’re still like that,” Jisung said. 

Minho looked at him properly then.

“Inconveniently yourself,” Jisung clarified. “Constantly. It’s genuinely a lot to deal with.”

Something shifted in Minho’s expression and for a moment, his mouth curved into the kind of almost-smile Jisung had only seen a handful of times in eight months.

“You’re one to talk,” Minho said.

“I’m extremely manageable.”

“You reorganized the shared drive because you didn’t like my folder naming system.”

“Your folder naming system was insane.”

“It made sense to me.”

“It made sense to no one, Minho, I asked three people.”

“You asked Seungmin, who agrees with everything you say because he finds conflict exhausting, and Changbin, who didn’t even know we had a shared drive..”

“I asked a third person.”

“Who was the third person?”

“It doesn’t matter who the third person was,” Jisung said, with dignity.

Minho looked at him for a moment longer, and this time the almost-smile became a real one, small and brief, and Jisung felt it like the ground shifting quietly beneath him.

“He would have liked you,” Minho said. “He liked people who said exactly what they thought without worrying too much about how it landed.”

“I worry about how it lands,” Jisung said.

“I know. But you say it anyway.”

“Tell me something else about him.”

Minho looked at him, briefly surprised — not by the question itself, but by the way Jisung had asked it, by the quiet wanting underneath it.

Then he looked back at the tree and fell silent for a moment, like he was sorting through his answer before giving it.

“He grew this tree from a sapling he bought at a market somewhere, carried it home on the bus. My grandmother said it was the most impractical thing he’d ever done as he was the furthest away from being a green thumb.” 

He paused. “He used to come out here in the evenings and just sit with it. Not doing anything. Just being near it. I asked him once what he was doing and he said he was keeping it company. I thought that was strange when I was young. I think about it all the time now.”

Jisung looked at the tree and thought about an old man sitting with it in the evenings. Keeping it company. Decided he understood that completely.

“I think about the things I didn’t ask him,” Minho said. “When I had the chance. I thought I had more time so I was .. I was saving the questions. For later.” His voice was slightly shaky.“There is no later, with some things.”

“Minho,” Jisung said quietly.

“I’m fine,” Minho said. 

“I know you are,” Jisung said. “I didn’t say you weren’t.”

Minho looked at him. In the morning light, his expression was more open than Jisung had ever seen it — nothing guarded, none of the usual distance he carried at the office. Just a person standing in the garden he grew up in, missing someone who used to stand there too.

“I don’t talk about him much,” Minho said. “It’s not..I don’t know. It’s easier not to.”

“I know,” Jisung said.

“You don’t have to..” Minho started.

“I’m not doing anything,” Jisung said. “I’m just keeping you company.”

The garden was still. A bird passed through the top of the persimmon tree and was gone. Somewhere in the house a door opened and closed and the sound reached them faintly, distantly, belonging to a different world.

Minho looked at him for a long moment, and there was something settled in his gaze — a clarity Jisung wasn’t entirely comfortable with, except that right now, in this garden, on this Sunday morning, he didn’t mind being seen. 

He stayed still and let it happen, and looked back. The space between them had been narrowing for a while now without ceremony or warning.

Minho’s eyes dropped to his lips. The moment was so quick that Jisung barely registered it. 

“Jisung,” he said very quietly. 

“Yeah,” Jisung said, equally quiet. 

The space between them was almost nothing now. The morning light was gold and soft, and the persimmon tree stood above them, old and patient. 

Minho lifted his hand and gently placed it against Jisung’s cheek. Jisung felt the rest of the world fall away at the contact, even the sound of his own breathing becoming secondary to the simple fact of being held like this. Minho’s thumb shifted slightly, as if he was memorising him in real time.

Minho leaned in.

Jisung’s breath caught, and he closed his eyes, instinctively, like his body had decided for him before his thoughts could catch up.

“UNCLE MINHO!!!”

The voice came from the back door. Both of them turned. Jiwoo was standing on the back step with her arms crossed and an expression of profound grievance.

“Jeongin uncle  says we can’t put that many sprinkles on the cake,” she announced. “But we can. Tell him.”

Behind her, Nari appeared, nodding vigorously in confirmation.

Minho looked at them, then back at Jisung briefly, an expression passing over his face so quickly Jisung didn’t get the chance to hold onto it before it was gone.

“Coming,” Minho said.

He made his way toward the house. The nieces greeted him with the satisfied energy of people who had successfully recruited an adult, and he disappeared inside with one of them already tugging at his sleeve.

The door swung shut behind them, and the garden fell quiet again.

Jisung stood by the persimmon tree for a moment longer.

He pressed two fingers to the bark, briefly, without knowing exactly why.

Then he went inside too.

.

The goodbyes took the better part of an hour, which Jisung had not anticipated but probably should have.

It started in the kitchen, where the family had gathered. Minho’s mother was packing food into containers and every few minutes she pressed something into someone’s hands and told them when to eat it and how.

Jeongin found Jisung first, appearing at his elbow with his hands in his pockets and the evaluating look he’d worn all weekend finally resolved into something warmer.

“You’re alright,” he said.

“High praise,” Jisung said.

“He’s different when you’re around.” He said it lightly but his eyes were steady. “Less..” He made a vague gesture that somehow communicated everything.

“Less what.”

“Less like a robot, you bring out the human side of him.” Jeongin said and wandered off before Jisung could do anything with that.

Grandma found him next, in the hallway, appearing with the same calm inevitability she’d carried all weekend. She pressed a container into his hands, something carefully wrapped and still faintly warm, and held onto his hands a moment longer after. 

“You came back to the tree after,” she said.

Jisung went still. “I was just…”

“I saw you from the window. You put your hand on the bark.”

Jisung had no response to that.

She patted his hands once and let go. “Eat before Monday,” she said, and went back to her chair, and that was that.

The aunts said goodbye the way they had done everything else — all at once, warmly, with overlapping questions about when he would visit again and a pointed look from Aunt Soojin that wasn’t quite a comment but lasted just long enough to make it clear she had reached her own conclusions and approved of them.

Minho’s father shook his hand and then he said quietly, not quite meeting his eyes. “It was good to meet you. Come back.” 

Then he went to talk to Minho, and Jisung stood there with the handshake still lingering in his palm, thinking about what Minho had said in the kitchen. My father nodded at me like I’d done something right.

The nieces had to be extracted from Minho individually, which took some time. Jiwoo delivered a formal goodbye to Jisung that included a detailed summary of everything they had discussed over the weekend.

Nari simply held onto Minho’s leg and had to be gently peeled away by their mother, who mouthed an apology over her head that Minho waved off.

The bags were by the door. The car was in the driveway. Jisung was carrying his bag out when Minho’s mother appeared beside him and took it from him before he could object, which was so thoroughly her that he didn’t try.

She set it in the trunk, then stood with her hands clasped, looking out at the garden — only the top of the persimmon tree visible over the roofline, its old, patient crown against the afternoon sky.

Jisung stood beside her and waited.

“You know,” she said, “when Minho called me last week to say he was bringing someone, I thought  finally.” She smiled at the tree. “I could hear him choosing his words very carefully.” She paused. “Minho is careful about most things. But he is very careful about the things that matter most to him. That’s how you know.”

Jisung looked at the tree. His heart was doing something he was pretending not to notice.

“He told me you work together,” she continued. “That you’d been working together for almost a year.” She turned to look at him, warm and direct. “My son is not someone who does things halfway. If he brought you here, it’s because something in him already knew why. Whether the rest of him has caught up yet…” She tilted her head slightly. “That I can’t tell you.”

“We argue,” Jisung said. “Constantly. About everything. Folder naming systems and project timelines and..”

“I know,” she said. “I watched you all weekend.”

Jisung had nothing to say to that.

“I’m not asking you what this is,” she said. “I don’t need to know. I’m just..” She looked at him with Minho’s eyes. “You’re a good person, Jisung-ah. I could see that from the first five minutes. Whatever this weekend was for you — whether it was just a favor or something else — I think you already know the difference. I think you’ve known since before you even got here.”

She reached out to straighten his jacket collar and then patted it once to flatten it.

“Eat something on the drive,” she said. “There’s kimbap in the bag I put in the backseat. Don’t let Minho forget to eat either.”

She went back toward the house. Jisung stood by the car and didn’t move for a moment. The afternoon sun fell gently on his face, her words slowly settling inside him and shifting into place, pressing gently against the things he had been keeping very still.

He was still standing there when Minho appeared, keys in hand, and stopped when he saw Jisung’s face.

“What’s wrong?

“Nothing,” Jisung said. “Your mom gave us kimbap.”

Minho nodded, not prying further.

“Ready?” Minho asked.

“Yeah,” Jisung said. “Ready.”

They were twenty minutes out of town when Jisung said, “You could have warned me about the bed situation.”

Minho glanced at him. “I didn’t know.”

“You grew up in that house.”

“The guest room used to have two beds. My mother must have..” He stopped. “I didn’t know.”

The road was quiet, the town falling away behind them in the side mirror. Jisung watched it disappear, then turned his gaze to the landscape that replaced it — hills, highway, the occasional cluster of buildings that didn’t quite become a town — and stayed silent for so long that Minho started to think he might have decided to leave it alone.

He should have known better.

“Your aunt,” Jisung said. “She pulled me into the garden.”

“She pulls everyone into the garden.”

“It didn’t feel like an everyone conversation.”

“What did it feel like?”

“Like she was telling me something.” Jisung shifted in the seat, pulling one knee up and resting his chin on it. “About you. About.. I don’t know. She was very..” He made a vague gesture. “Pointed.”

“She’s always pointed.”

“Minho.”

“What?”

“I’m trying to…” Jisung took a pause.“I’m trying to say something and you keep answering the wrong part of it.”

Minho looked at the road. He was aware, with the particular awareness he’d built over eight months of sitting across from this person, that something was coming, that everything else was only the warm-up.

Jisung was circling around the real point because he hadn’t figured out how to say it directly yet.

“Then say the right part,” Minho said.

“I’m getting there,” Jisung said, irritably.

“Okay.”

“Stop saying okay like that.”

“Like what.”

“Like you’re judging me.”

“I am judging you.”

“Well stop making it so obvious,” Jisung said.

Minho almost smiled. Almost. He didn’t, because he was driving, and because if he looked at Jisung right now he would lose the thread of everything else.

He kept his eyes on the road instead, but he was very aware of him beside him. Eight months of reasons had started to feel a lot less solid after one weekend of Jisung slowly, carefully undoing them without even seeming to try.

“The garden,” Jisung said finally, louder now, like he’d been holding something out at arm’s length and his arms had given out. “Okay? That’s what I’m talking about. Not the bed, not your aunt, not the balloon game or dinner or any of it. The garden. That’s the thing.”

Minho’s hands stayed steady on the wheel.

“I know,” he said.

“Then why are we talking about everything else?”

“Because you started with the bed.”

“Because I didn’t know how to start with the garden,” Jisung said.

Then he turned to the window like he could escape the moment by looking away, his knee pressed against the door.

Minho drove. The road moved beneath them, steady and indifferent. Still, he could feel the garden lingering in the car — not as a memory, but as something unfinished.

The persimmon tree, the morning light, the moment that had been so close it might as well have already happened, until two small voices broke it open and it closed again just as quickly.

They had both gone inside after that and acted normal. It was, Minho thought, one of the harder things he had done recently, and he had a fairly high bar.

“It almost happened,” Jisung said, speaking to the window. His voice was quieter now, the outburst gone, leaving the air in the car strangely clear. “And then it didn’t. And I spent the rest of the day pretending I wasn’t thinking about it, which, fine, I can do that. I’m good at that. I’ve been doing that for eight months. But now we’re in this car and there’s nowhere to put it..”

He pressed two fingers to his temple. “I don’t know what to do with it, Minho. That’s all I’m saying. I don’t know what to do with it, and you’re just sitting there being calm, and I can’t tell if that means it didn’t mean anything or if that’s just you.”

“It did mean a lot,” Minho said.

Jisung stopped, turning to look at him.

“Okay,” he said, after a moment.

“Okay,” Minho said.

“So.”

Minho kept his eyes on the road for a few seconds longer, then said, without looking over, “I’ve been thinking about it since it didn’t happen. Since I heard them, I knew the moment was gone, and I had to go inside and act like nothing had happened.”

He paused.

“I’m not good at pretending. I don’t think you’ve noticed because at work there’s always something else to focus on. But this weekend I was..”

He stopped, his jaw tightening for a second before he let it go.

“I was pretending a lot less than you think I was.”

The car was very quiet.

“What does that mean?” Jisung said.

“It means,” Minho said, carefully, “that I asked you to come home with me and I told myself it was practical. That you’d be good at it. That it made sense.” He exhaled through his nose slowly. “And all of that is true. But it’s not..” He stopped. “It’s not why.”

Jisung said nothing. Minho could feel him looking.

“I wanted you there,” Minho said. “I wanted to see …I wanted to see if it looked the way I thought it would. You, there. With my family. In that house.” A pause. “It looked exactly the way I thought it would. That was the problem.”

A rest stop appeared and disappeared. Jisung was very still in the passenger seat, which was unusual enough that Minho noticed it distinctly.

“You’ve been thinking about it,” Jisung said. “For how long?”

Minho considered lying. He eventually decided against it, mostly because Jisung had a face that made lying feel pointless.

“A while,” he said.

“How long is a while?”

“Jisung.”

“I’m asking.”

“Since the Harim project,” Minho said. “The all-nighter. You fell asleep at your desk and I..” He stopped. “I put your jacket over you. And then I sat back down and looked at you for probably longer than I should have and thought…”

He didn’t finish that sentence. He didn’t need to.

“That was four months ago,” Jisung said.

“I’m aware.”

“You put my jacket over me and then sat there for four months not saying anything..”

“You weren’t exactly saying anything either.”

“I would have said something,” Jisung said, with a sudden intensity that made Minho glance over despite himself. “If I’d known, I would have.. Minho, I prepared for a fake weekend like it was a real one because somewhere in the back of my head I..” 

He stopped, letting out a short helpless laugh.“I told myself it was thoroughness.”

“I know,” Minho said. “I know it wasn’t.”

“You knew..?”

“I hoped,” Minho said. 

Jisung was quiet for a while after that.

Minho kept driving, but he could feel the silence in a different way now, like it had edges.

When he finally glanced over, Jisung was still looking at him, not drifting away, just fully there in a way that made it hard to look back at the road the same way again.

“I’m not calm about it,” Minho said, before Jisung could say whatever he was about to say. “I want to be clear about that.”

“You’re telling me right now, under that very composed exterior..”

“There is a lot happening under this exterior, yes,” Minho said, flatly.

Jisung laughed in a way that was a little too loud and completely unrestrained.

And something in Minho’s chest did that familiar thing again, the one he kept trying to push down and somehow still couldn’t seem to make it quiet.

“I’m just..” Jisung looked at the road. “I’m thinking about walking into the office and sitting down across from you and pretending the last forty-eight hours didn’t happen.”

“Don’t,” Minho said.

Jisung looked at him. “Don’t what.”

“Pretend.” He said it simply, the way he said the things that were just true. “Don’t pretend.”

The word sat in the car between them, taking up exactly the space it needed.

The city came closer and the weekend sat between them in the car like something warm and completed and also, somehow, just beginning.

Jisung fell asleep somewhere in the last stretch, his cheek against the cool glass, one hand loose in his lap. Minho didn’t wake him up. He drove through the city carefully, taking  the longer route without deciding to.

He parked outside Jisung’s building and turned the engine off and sat there in the quiet for a while.

Jisung woke up suddenly, his body failing to register where he was. Then reality crashed in and he let out a breath. 

“You let me sleep,” he said.

“You needed it.”

“You must have taken the long way.”

Minho said nothing, which was its own answer.

Jisung looked at him in the orange city light spilling through the windshield, the same way he had in the garden, with nothing held back or shaped into something safer, just Jisung looking at him like he was worth looking at.

Minho didn’t look away. He let it be there between them.

The car felt suddenly small, and very, very quiet.

“You’re still insufferable,” Jisung said.

“I know,” Minho said.

Jisung held his gaze for one more moment. Then he grabbed his bag from the backseat and got out.

“Monday,” he said.

“Monday,” Minho said back.

Minho watched him go through the windshield — through the building entrance, into the lobby, until the elevator doors closed and he was gone.

He sat there for another minute in the parked car outside Jisung’s building and did not examine what he was feeling because he was tired and because he knew what it was anyway.

He drove home.

.

Monday morning Jisung got in at eight fifty-two.

He never got in at eight fifty-two. He got in at nine, or nine-oh-five, or that one time in February at nine-seventeen when the trains had been terrible and he’d had proof.

Eight fifty-two was not his time. Eight fifty-two meant something. He knew that. He got his coffee, sat down, and opened his laptop like he arrived at eight fifty-two every day.

Minho got in at nine on the dot.

He looked up. Minho looked over.

The weekend was right there between them. The garden, the almost kiss, all of it, just sitting there, unavoidable and enormous.

“Morning,” Jisung said.

Minho’s expression did something brief and complicated. “Morning,” he said.

Changbin looked up from his desk. Looked at Jisung. Looked at Minho. Looked back at his screen very slowly.

Jisung turned back to his laptop. Fine. This was fine. They were coworkers. They had always been coworkers. He would work and Minho would work and everything would be completely normal.

At ten forty-five Minho’s phone rang. He answered it and talked about the Daehwa account in his usual calm and composed voice.

Jisung sat three feet away, stared at the same paragraph for twenty minutes, and absolutely did not listen.

He listened.

He couldn’t help it. 

When Minho hung up Jisung said. “Do you need the Daehwa files? I have the updated ones.”

Minho looked at him. “I have them.”

“Right.” Jisung nodded. “Good.”

“Is there anything else you need?” Jisung asked. He could feel the smile on his face. It felt like something he’d borrowed from a stranger. “For the account. Or anything.”

“I’m fine.”

“Great,” Jisung said. He turned back to his laptop. The paragraph was still there. He still couldn’t read it.

Changbin had put his sandwich down.

Seungmin’s head had turned approximately three degrees toward them.

Nobody said anything.

Wednesday, something happened that Jisung was not prepared for. Minho held the elevator.

Jisung turned the corner to find Minho standing there with his hand on the door, waiting, and briefly forgot how walking worked before recovering and continuing forward at a normal human pace.

“Thanks,” he said, getting in.

“Of course,” Minho said.

The doors closed. The elevator hummed. They stood side by side with a foot of space between them, the floor numbers ticking upward, the morning’s silence pressing against the walls of the small metal box.

Four floors.

“The weather’s been nice lately.” Jisung tried.

“Yeah,” Minho said.

Three floors.

Jisung pressed his lips together and looked at the numbers. He was painfully aware of Minho beside him — the warmth of him in the cramped space, the smell of his jacket that Jisung had been around all weekend and was, apparently, still not over.

Two floors.

“After you,” Minho said, when the doors opened.

“Thanks,” Jisung said.

He walked to his desk, sat down, and stared at his screen. With some clarity, he concluded that this was unsustainable. Something was going to give.

Four more days of this would end in either an early grave or a deeply inconvenient HR conversation.

Across the desk, Minho was already working, composed and focused, giving absolutely nothing away.  It was either genuine or the most impressive performance Jisung had ever seen. He honestly could not tell which.

.

On Thursday, The Daehwa meeting was at two.

Jisung had been in client meetings with Minho before. Plenty of them. He’d always found Minho’s meeting mode faintly irritating and that irritation had been a useful thing, something to organize himself around.

He was not finding it irritating today.

This was a problem he became aware of approximately four minutes into the meeting, when Minho said something to Jang about phase transition timelines and Jang’s entire skeptical demeanor shifted . 

Jisung sat there thinking that was really good before he could stop himself, and then spent the next thirty seconds trying to locate the irritation and finding only its absence, which was somehow worse.

Jang was the director — sharp, skeptical, the kind of person who asked questions she already knew the answers to. Park was her junior, quiet and observant, taking notes with the focused energy of someone who would be running things in five years.

Minho had assessed both of them in the time it took to sit down.

Jisung had watched him do it and thought about how annoying that was and then thought about how he’d watched Minho do that exact thing for eight months and somehow it was hitting differently today and that was fine, that was completely fine, everything was fine.

“The Q3 timeline,” Jang said. “Phase transitions have been a problem before. What’s your mitigation?”

“Already built in,” Minho said, and turned his laptop, and walked her through the revised schedule with unhurried certainty.

Jisung looked at the laptop screen with great interest and told himself it was professional appreciation. Appreciating good work was a normal thing colleagues did. He was a normal colleague appreciating good work.

Jang asked a follow-up question. Minho answered it without looking at his notes.

He didn’t even look at his notes.

Jisung told himself that was also fine and not at all doing anything to him and turned back to his own copy of the deck.

The meeting room was warm. The building’s AC had been unreliable all week, and by two in the afternoon the small south-facing room had reached a steady state of mild discomfort. Jisung had loosened his collar before sitting down. Jang had taken off her jacket.

Minho, mid-sentence and still focused on Jang, reached up and undid the top button of his shirt. One button. Completely automatic. The kind of thing someone did when they were warm and barely thinking about it.

But Jisung was thinking about it. Something about that mere gesture had made heat pool low in his stomach.

Before his thoughts got out of hand, he mentally started listing all of the annoying traits in Lee Minho. If anyone had asked him to do this a week ago, he probably could’ve come up with an entire novel. But whatever magic transpired over the weekend had rendered him incapable of coming up with even a single point.

He was an insufferable, pedantic, folder-renaming coworker and Jisung let that push down any other thoughts he was having.

Jisung was a professional. He had sat in hundreds of client meetings and been completely fine and this meeting was no different from any of those meetings except that Lee Minho was sitting next to him with his top button undone being competent and..

Jisung was losing his mind. 

He became aware, distantly, that Minho had asked him something.

He looked up. The table was watching him. Minho had his usual meeting face on, calm and unreadable, except for something faint at the edges that Jisung knew too well and that was not helping.

“The content calendar,” Minho said. “Did you want to walk them through it?”

“Yes,” Jisung said, with the full confidence of a person who had been paying complete attention. “Absolutely.”

He walked them through the content calendar. He was good at this. Good with clients, good with pacing, good at making people care about things they hadn’t planned to care about. The work settled back into place around him. Park took notes. Jang nodded.

Jisung was fine. He was completely fine and present and not thinking about anything except the meeting.

Then Minho started talking about the risk mitigation framework.

The thing about Minho talking about risk mitigation was that he never sold it too hard. He explained it quietly, with that unhurried certainty that made everything sound straightforward.

And Jang, who had arrived skeptical and stayed that way for most of the meeting, was listening. Leaning forward slightly, pen still, looking far too close to being convinced.

Jisung sat there and watched Lee Minho convince a difficult client through sheer composed competence and felt something in his chest do a long slow thing that he would have preferred not to feel at a client meeting on a Thursday afternoon.

He had, he realized with deeply unhelpful clarity, a type. He had always had a type. He had been sitting across from his type for eight months calling it infuriating, which was technically true and also apparently incomplete.

This was extremely inconvenient information to be receiving right now.

Minho glanced at him briefly . The professional meeting face was still there, but so was the something underneath it. The thing that had been there all week. The thing making Jisung’s thoughts impossible.

Jisung looked at his notes.

Content calendar. Asset library. Final approvals. Content calendar. Asset library...

Why was Lee Minho like this?

Why had he always been like this and why was Jisung only now having the full experience of it and why did it have to be during a client meeting with Jang from Daehwa who would absolutely notice if Jisung stopped functioning…

The meeting ended at three-fifteen. Handshakes, next steps, clients heading out looking satisfied. Minho walked them to the elevator. Jisung lingered in the meeting room, packing up more slowly than necessary and trying to reset his brain.

When he looked up, Minho was in the doorway.

Top button still undone. Looking at him with that same unreadable expression that had been making Jisung’s week significantly harder.

“Good meeting,” Jisung said.

“Good meeting,” Minho said.

“Jang liked the timeline mitigation.”

“She liked the content calendar section.”

“Yours more.”

“No, yours more.”

“Yours more,” Jisung said, picked up his bag, and walked out.

He sat at his desk. Opened his laptop. Looked at the screen.

He was smiling.

He noticed about ten seconds in, which meant it had been happening unattended  for ten full seconds. Ten seconds too many.

He pressed his lips together and redirected his attention toward quarterly projections, the Daehwa timeline, and phase three deliverables.

He was smiling about the phase three deliverables.

He gave up, let it happen, and looked at his screen smiling at no one in particular.

“Right,” said Changbin, from beside his desk.

Jisung looked up. Changbin was standing there with crossed arms and a coffee, wearing the look of someone who had been waiting since Monday to say something and had finally found his moment.

Seungmin was nearby, leaning against his desk with his headphones around his neck, clearly here by choice but not necessarily in support.

“I’m working,” Jisung said.

“You were smiling at your screen,” Changbin said.

“Good idea about the pitch.”

“It’s the Daehwa meeting recap,” Seungmin said. “I could read the subject line from my desk.”

Jisung looked at his screen. The meeting recap was open. He had been smiling at the meeting recap from the Daehwa clients about a meeting he had just come from.

“I like closure,” he said.

Changbin pulled over a chair and sat down. He put his coffee on Jisung’s desk and looked at him like this conversation was happening whether Jisung cooperated or not.

“The weekend,” he said.

“Nothing happened at the…”

“Jisung,” Seungmin said, from his desk, not even looking up.

Jisung looked at the ceiling briefly. Then back at Changbin. Then at his screen.

“Something happened at the weekend,” he said.

Changbin nodded, once, with the satisfaction of a man whose hypothesis had been confirmed.

“And then Monday came and we both panicked and started being ..” Jisung made a gesture. “Nice. To each other.”

“He held the elevator,” Jisung said.

“I know,” Changbin said. “I was behind you. I’ve been behind you twice this week for significant Minho-related moments and both times I’ve had to act like I didn’t see anything and I want you to know that’s been very difficult for me personally.”

Jisung looked at him. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was waiting for you to come to me,” Changbin said. “I didn’t want to push.”

“You pushed literally thirty seconds after I sat down..”

“Because you were smiling at a meeting recap,” Changbin said. “That’s a cry for help.”

Seungmin made a small sound that might have been a laugh, quickly suppressed.

Jisung looked at his screen. At the meeting recap. At the subject line.

He had been smiling at that.

He had been sitting at his desk in a professional office smiling at a recap email because the meeting it summarized had contained two things: Lee Minho being competent and Lee Minho undoing one button. Apparently that was enough to sustain an emotional reaction.

“He undid his button,” Jisung said, to the screen.

He was met with silence.

“His shirt,” Jisung continued. “It was warm. He undid the top button mid-sentence. Without looking. Like it was nothing. I lost track of forty-five seconds of the meeting.”

“Forty-five seconds?” Changbin said, with the careful neutrality of a man choosing his words.

“I read the same line of my notes for forty-five seconds. Content calendar, asset library, final approvals.” Jisung turned to look at him. “It was one button, Changbin. One button and I was gone for forty-five seconds. That’s the situation I’m in.”

Changbin pressed his lips together. He was very clearly not smiling. He was working extremely hard at not smiling and Jisung respected the effort even as he found it unhelpful.

“And then,” Jisung continued, because apparently this was happening, “he convinced Jang. You know what Jang’s like. She walked in ready to find a problem and he just… talked to her. Quietly. With the voice. And she was convinced.”

He looked down at his hands.

“I’ve been calling that irritating for eight months. I’ve been sitting across from that for eight months calling it irritating and apparently what I actually meant was —”

“Was,” Changbin prompted.

“Something else,” Jisung said.

Changbin and Seungmin exchanged a look over his head. The look of people who had been waiting a long time to exchange exactly this look.

“The weekend,” Changbin said again, more gently this time. “Are you… is it good? Whatever happened.”

Jisung thought about the garden. The almost. The car. Sunday night outside his building watching taillights disappear around the corner.

“It’s unfinished,” he said. “We said Monday and then Monday came and we both panicked and now it’s Thursday and nothing has..” He exhaled. “It’s unfinished.”

“Friday,” Seungmin said, from his desk. 

“What about Friday?” Jisung said.

Seungmin looked at him over his monitor. “You’re staying late to finish the pitch.”

“How do you know about the pitch?”

“Minho told me this afternoon that you guys would be staying late Friday to finish it,” Seungmin said. “He came over while you were in the bathroom. He was very casual about it.”

Jisung stared at him.

“Very casual,” Seungmin repeated, with emphasis.

Changbin stood, slid the chair back into place, and picked up his coffee. “Finish the pitch,” he said, in the tone of someone who believed he had just said something profound. “Take that however you need to.”

He went back to his desk. Seungmin put his headphones on. The conversation, apparently, was over.

Jisung sat at his desk, looked at his screen, and thought about Friday, the pitch, and Lee Minho being very casual about staying late. The week felt like it was quietly arranging itself toward something.

Across the office, Minho looked up.

Their eyes met.

It wasn’t dramatic. Nobody else in the office would have noticed anything worth remarking on. Two coworkers looking up at the same time across a shared workspace. A thing that happened in offices constantly.

Except Jisung knew immediately, with the unpleasant certainty of someone who had spent an entire week becoming aware of very specific things, that this was not feeling particularly neutral to him.

Friday the office emptied by six-thirty.

Seungmin left first, with a carefully ordinary goodbye. Changbin followed, pausing at the door long enough to give the two of them a look that communicated, without ambiguity: deal with whatever this is.

Then the door closed and they were left with deafening silence.

It was just Jisung and Minho and the pitch and the accumulated momentum of the week.

Or maybe not just the week. Maybe Sunday night. Maybe the moment Jisung had stood outside his building watching Minho’s car pull away and felt, with immediate and unhelpful clarity, that the weekend had ended without actually concluding.

They worked.

Properly. Back and forth. Building the pitch the way they always built things together.

This had never been the difficult part. The difficult part was everything wrapped around it now.

The careful politeness of the week was still hanging on, but only just. Underneath it sat the weekend and the unresolved feeling of it.

“The opening line,” he said.

Minho read it. “It works.”

“It doesn’t work.”

“It’s clear and direct.”

“It’s the same line we agreed was wrong two weeks ago.”

“We didn’t agree it was wrong, you said it was wrong.”

“And you didn’t disagree.”

“I said it needed refinement ..”

“That’s just another way of saying it was wrong ..”

“It’s really not.”

“Minho,” Jisung said.

Something in his voice made Minho stop.

Not the actual word. Just the absence of everything that had been layered over it all week. No careful niceness. No calibrated professionalism. Just Jisung, saying his name like himself.

Minho looked at him.

“I can’t,” Jisung said. “I cannot send you one more formatted email. I cannot tell you your ideas are good when they’re only half good. I cannot..” He pressed two fingers to his forehead. “This week has been the longest week of my life and nothing has even happened. That’s the insane part. Nothing happened and I’ve been losing my mind.”

“Something happened,” Minho said, quietly.

“Yeah,” Jisung said. “One thing. And we’ve spent the whole week pretending that acknowledging it would destroy the earth.”

“I was following your lead.”

“My lead?”

“You came in on Monday being..” Minho gestured at him. “Nice.”

“You held the elevator for me.”

“Because you looked like you needed a moment..”

“I didn’t need a moment, I needed you to be normal..”

“I was being normal.”

“You have never in eight months held the elevator.”

“I’ve held the elevator plenty of times.”

“Name one time,” Jisung said. “One specific time.”

Minho opened his mouth only for nothing to come out.

“October,” Jisung said. “You watched me run for it. From ten feet away. You looked directly at me and let it close.”

“You were further than you think you were.”

“I was right there,” Jisung said.

He was standing now. The heat in his voice wasn’t new. It had been building all week. Since Monday morning. Since the email. Since the elevator. Since the conference room and the unbearable professionalism of their every interaction this week.

“I’ve been right there, Minho. All week.”

He dragged a hand through his hair.

“I’ve been acting like someone I’m not. You’ve been acting like someone you’re not. And it’s been awful. Seriously awful.”

His laugh came out short and frustrated.“Tell me my line is wrong. Tell me my argument is weak. Don’t tell me it’s really helpful like we’re strangers in a training seminar.”

“Your line is wrong,” Minho said.

“Thank you,” Jisung said, with complete sincerity.

Minho held his gaze. Something loosened in his face. The composed version of him, the one that had been getting them through the week, seemed to fall away in a single quiet movement.

“I didn’t know what you wanted,” Minho said. “After Sunday, I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it, or not talk about it, or if it was something you wanted left alone entirely.”

He stopped, visibly dissatisfied with the sentence. His jaw tightened and released. “You came in on Monday being nice, careful, acting like everything was normal, and I thought maybe you’d decided the weekend was just the weekend.”

“I came in Monday being nice because I panicked,” Jisung said. “Because I didn’t know how to walk into this office and sit across from you and pretend nothing had happened, but I also had absolutely no idea how to walk in and behave like something had, so I panicked and went nice, and then you went nice back, and then somehow we were trapped in this unbearable cycle of professionalism like two people with no prior history whatsoever.”

“I hated it,” Minho said.

“I hated it so much,” Jisung said.

They looked at each other across the desk.

“The line is wrong,” Minho said, and came around the desk.

Jisung turned to face him, immediately ready to disagree on principle.

“That is not the point,” he said. “The point is that we’ve been doing this weird, unbearable version of ourselves all week and apparently neither of us had the basic communication skills to..”

Minho stopped in front of him.

Jisung broke off for half a second but deemed it fit to continue his rant.

“No, because genuinely, this whole week has been ridiculous, and if your takeaway from what I just said is that my line is wrong, then I need you to be more specific than..”

“Jisung.”

“No, you don’t get to ‘Jisung’ me. We’ve spent four days behaving like polite strangers and I’m still technically in the middle of making a point..”

“You are,” Minho said.

Jisung opened his mouth to continue arguing.

Minho looked at him for one brief, exhausted second, as though reaching the end of a calculation.

Then he kissed him.

And it was not nice.

It was nothing like nice. It didn’t feel like anything careful or considered. It felt like four days of restraint finally breaking at once, like something that had been held too tightly and had stopped being sustainable.

Jisung made a sound against his mouth and grabbed his shirt with both hands. Minho’s hands were in his hair, then at his jaw, then at his waist, like he couldn’t quite decide where to settle because there was suddenly too much that needed to be held at once.

Jisung kissed him back, and in doing so stopped being able to separate anything anymore. The week. The weekend. The careful distance. The effort it had taken to act normal when nothing about it had been normal at all.

Minho pressed him back against the desk and Jisung went, hands moving from his shirt to his shoulders to the back of his neck. They kissed like people making up for time, like people who had been careful for too long and were done being careful.

 Minho’s tongue pressed into his mouth and Jisung opened for him immediately, the kiss turning deeper, desperate in a way that made Jisung’s knees weak.

Minho’s hand slid down from his waist, lower, and then grabbed his ass—possessive and completely unambiguous.

Jisung jerked back, breaking the kiss. “What..?”

They stared at each other, both breathing hard. Minho’s hand was still on his ass, gripping tight, and Jisung’s brain was trying to catch up with what had just happened.

“What are you doing?” Jisung’s voice came out breathless.

“What does it look like?” Minho’s grip didn’t loosen.

“We’re at work.”

“I know where we are.”

“Your hand is on my ass.”

“I know where my hand is too.” Minho’s gaze was dark, pupils blown. “Problem?”

“Yes..no..I don’t..” Jisung’s brain was short-circuiting. “We can’t do this here.”

“Why not? The office is empty.”

“That doesn’t mean..what if someone comes back? What if..”

“Then we stop.” Minho pulled him closer, and Jisung could feel he was hard. “But right now there’s no one here except us.”

“Minho..”

“Tell me to stop.” Minho’s other hand came up to Jisung’s jaw, tilting his face up. “Tell me you don’t want this.”

Jisung opened his mouth to say exactly that. To be reasonable. To remind Minho that this was inappropriate, that they could get caught.

But what came out instead was: “Lock the door.”

Minho’s eyes flashed. “Yeah?”

“If we’re doing this..” Jisung’s hands were already working at Minho’s belt. “Lock the fucking door.”

Minho crossed to the door in three strides, twisted the lock, and was back on Jisung before he could take another breath. Kissed him harder this time, more demanding, and Jisung gave as good as he got.

They were going to regret this. Absolutely going to regret this.

But right now, with Minho’s hands on him and four days of tension finally breaking, Jisung couldn’t bring himself to care.

Eventually, slowly, by degrees, they slowed down.

“Hi,” Jisung said.

Minho huffed a breath that was almost a laugh. “Hi.”

“That was incredible..”

“Yes,” Minho said.

“We should probably work..”

“The pitch,” Minho said.

“The pitch,” Jisung agreed, without moving.

“In a minute,” Minho said.

“Yeah,” Jisung said. “In a minute.”

Minho’s hands were all over Jisung again, pulling him closer. It was almost like he was drunk on the taste, the feeling of finally getting to have Jisung all to himself. 

Jisung had to physically shove him away to get him to actually work. The pitch was still not finished. Minho sulked as he opened the laptop again. 

“The line,” Jisung said.

“Still wrong,” Minho said.

“We’ll fix it together,” Jisung said.

“We’ll argue about it.”

“Obviously,” Jisung said. “That’s how we fix things.”

Something moved through Minho’s face — warm and unhurried.

“Obviously,” he said.

They fixed the line. It took forty minutes and three arguments and at one point Jisung said something about semicolons that nearly derailed everything entirely.

The version they landed on was something neither of them had written alone, which felt, as it always did, like the most honest possible outcome.

They left at eleven. Empty hallway, slow elevator, Minho’s shoulder against his on the way down.

“Monday,” Jisung said.

“What about it?”

“Are we done being nice?”

Minho looked at him. The elevator opened. They walked out into the cold bright night of the city together.

“I never started,” Minho said.

Jisung laughed. “Liar,” he said.

“The elevator was a one-time thing,” Minho said.

“It absolutely was not..”

“It was circumstantial.”

“You were so nice to me, Minho.”

“That was professional courtesy.”

“You thanked me,” Jisung said. “In writing. With a signature.”

Minho was quiet for a moment.

“That was a low point,” he admitted.

“Don’t do it again,” Jisung said.

“I won’t,” Minho said.

They walked into the city together, arguing about semicolons, and it was the best Jisung had felt all week.

.

Three months later, Nari turned five.

This was, according to Nari herself, a very important number.

She explained this to Jisung on the phone after Minho handed him the call without any warning, which Jisung was starting to realize was something Minho did often.

Five was different from four. Five was big.

Five needed a specific cake, specific decorations, and specific guests. Jisung was apparently one of those guests, which Nari informed him of with utmost seriousness.

“I’ll be there,” Jisung had said.

“With Uncle Minho,” Nari had said. Not a question.

“With Uncle Minho,” Jisung had confirmed.

She’d hung up without saying goodbye. Minho said that meant she was satisfied.

.

The house was louder than Jisung remembered, which was saying something.

A five-year-old’s birthday party with the full extended family had a very specific kind of noise — layered and high, coming from every direction at once.

Children’s voices cut through the adults’, a balloon popped somewhere in the back of the house, and Nari moved through all of it like a small force of nature in a party dress she had apparently chosen herself. 

Jiwoo, older and more measured, moved through the chaos with quiet authority, as if she had decided she was in charge of making sure things went correctly and was taking that responsibility very seriously.

Jisung stood in the hallway and let it all sink in, thinking about the first time — the spreadsheet, the three tabs, the talking points — and feeling the distance between then and now like something physical. 

Minho’s mother had his jacket before he’d finished taking it off.

She looked at him the way she always did now — warm and unsurprised, like seeing him there was completely normal. 

She gave him something to eat before he said hello, told him he looked tired, and pointed him toward the living room like she’d been doing this for years and didn’t need to think about it.

“Nari has been talking about you since Tuesday,” she said.

“She called me,” Jisung said. “To brief me.”

Minho’s mother smiled, patting his arm. “Go. She’ll find you.”

Nari found him in forty seconds. She appeared at his side, took his hand without asking, and pulled him toward the living room to inspect the decorations.

Jiwoo appeared at his other side a moment later, and told him which decorations had been her ideas, which Nari immediately disputed.

Jisung walked between them through the decorated living room listening to them argue and felt something in his chest do the warm helpless thing it did around the two of them.

Minho was across the room. He caught Jisung’s eye over the top of Nari’s head and his mouth curved into a smile. Jisung looked back at him for a moment before Nari pulled his hand to demand his full attention and he gave it.

The afternoon moved in waves — food and noise, the family coming together and breaking apart again. The children ran through the house until they were sent outside, and the adults talked over each other easily, without needing to finish their sentences.

Jeongin found Jisung by the snack table.

“You’re back,” he said.

“I keep coming back,” Jisung said.

Jeongin looked at him with an evaluating expression that had softened over the past few months. “Well, it’s always nice to have you around. We get to see the side of Minho hyung who smiles differently.”

“And how exactly does he smile differently?” 

“I can’t explain it even if I try.” Jeongin took a chip. “It’s good though. Don’t tell him.”

Jisung looked across the room to where Minho was crouched down with Nari, nodding seriously at whatever she was explaining. He felt the thing in his chest again, the warm one, the one that had been there for months and showed no signs of leaving.

“I won’t tell him,” Jisung said.

“Thanks. Also, grandma was looking for you.”

Grandma sat in the armchair by the window, the same one she’d been in all day with her tea in hand. She watched the chaos with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had seen many afternoons like this before.

Jisung sat on the footstool beside her because it was the only available surface and because she was already looking at him like she’d been expecting him to come over.

She didn’t speak right away. She just looked at him with those seeing eyes, the ones that seemed to understand more than he said, the ones he no longer tried to explain himself away from.

They both looked over at Minho.

He was on the open patch of floor where the children had claimed space as their own, one hand lightly guiding Jiwoo through an exaggerated spin while Nari waited her turn with serious patience. 

Minho bent slightly as he adjusted Jiwoo’s balance, said something Jiwoo responded to with an immediate, delighted laugh, then shifted without hesitation to Nari, who took his hand immediately.

It wasn’t careful the way he moved with them. It was easy. Familiar in a way that didn’t ask for attention.

Grandma watched from her chair, her expression softening in small increments as if it was happening without her permission.

“He’s always been good with them,” she said.

Jisung didn’t answer immediately. He just kept watching Minho steadying Nari when she wobbled, then letting go once she was fine on her own.

“Yeah,” Jisung said quietly. “He is.”

“He goes out to the tree,” she said. “In the evenings, when he visits. Just stands there.” She looked back at Jisung. “Like his grandfather used to.”

Jisung nodded slightly.“He still misses him,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” she said to no one in particular, and picked up her tea, and that was that.

By late afternoon, the party was winding down. The children were tired, and the adults were starting to think about leaving. Nari and Jiwoo had been in and out of the garden several times, collecting leaves and arranging them in patterns Jisung didn’t fully understand.

The third time they came back in, Jiwoo stopped at the garden door and looked at Jisung with the same direct expression she’d had since the first weekend.

“You should go look at the tree,” she said.

Jisung looked at her. “Why?”

“Uncle Minho is out there,” she said, like she was passing on information that mattered. “He’s just standing there. It looks like he’s missing you.”

Then she went inside after Nari, and the door swung shut behind her.

He went out.

The garden in October was different from the garden in summer. The light was longer and lower, shadows stretching across the grass.

The persimmon tree was heavy with fruit now, small orange shapes among thinning leaves. The air was cool and still, the party noise softened behind the closed door.

Minho stood at the far end of the garden by the tree, hands in his jacket pockets, looking up into the branches.

He stopped beside Minho. Their shoulders touched. Neither of them said anything for a moment, just looked up at the tree together, at the fruit among the leaves, at the branches that had been growing patiently since before either of them existed.

“Jiwoo sent me,” Jisung said.

“I know,” Minho said. “She told me she would.”

Jisung looked at him. “She told me you’re missing me.”

Minho was quiet for a moment, then glanced back at the tree. “She also told me you were standing at the door looking like you didn’t know what to do with yourself.”

“She’s terrifying,” Jisung said.

“Very.”

Jisung looked back at the tree.

The persimmons were small and orange in the October light. The bark was old, cut with deep lines. 

He thought about the photograph Grandma had shown him. Minho as a child, in this same tree, up in the branches. Higher than everyone else, looking pleased with himself.

He thought about a man named Hyunwoo carrying a sapling home on a bus, then standing here in the evenings to keep it company, and about Minho doing the same thing now.

“He would have liked today,” Jisung said.

Minho was quiet for a moment. The evening light moved through the branches above them. “Yeah,” he said. “He would have. Nari would have had him completely wrapped around her finger in about thirty seconds.”

“She has everyone wrapped around her finger in thirty seconds.”

They looked at each other in the evening light. The garden was still around them, the party behind the glass of the back door, the tree above them old and patient and full of fruit.

Minho stayed looking at the tree for a long time before he spoke. When he did, it came out quiet, like he wasn’t fully sure he wanted it to become real in the air between them.

“The morning of the day he died, he called me,” he said, and then after a moment, “I didn’t pick up.”

Jisung didn’t respond immediately. Minho kept his eyes on the branches as he continued, voice still steady but thinner now. 

“I was at work. It didn’t feel urgent. It was just a call. I remember seeing it later and thinking I’d call him back after I finished, like it could wait.” A short breath left him. “But it didn’t.”

Jisung stepped closer before he spoke. “Minho,” he said, softer than usual, and Minho finally looked at him.

Jisung didn’t overthink it. He just reached for him and hugged him, simple and direct, like there wasn’t anything else to do with what had just been said.

Minho went still for a second, caught in the surprise of it, and then slowly, like something giving way under pressure, he let himself lean into it.

“I keep thinking I should’ve known,” Minho said into the space near Jisung’s shoulder, quieter now. “That I should’ve just picked up.”

“I know,” Jisung said, holding him a little more firmly. “But you didn’t know. And you don’t have to keep this inside just because you’ve been doing that for a long time.”

Minho didn’t answer right away. His grip on Jisung tightened slightly, almost unconsciously.“It doesn’t go away,” he said after a moment. “That feeling.”

“It doesn’t have to go away,” Jisung replied. “But you don’t have to carry it by yourself all the time.”

Inside, through the glass, Jisung could see the party still going. Jiwoo was standing at the doorway with her arms crossed, watching like she was in charge of everything.

She met Jisung’s eyes for a moment with a serious look, then it broke into a small smile, like she was satisfied with what she saw.

Then she turned away and went back into the party and the garden was theirs.

Minho was still standing by the tree when Jisung looked back at him. For a moment neither of them spoke, like the space that had just been emptied needed to settle first.

Jisung took a small step closer, not rushing it, just closing the distance that was already gone in every other way.

Minho looked at him properly this time. Not past him, not around him. Just at him.

“Hey,” Jisung said, quietly.

Minho didn’t answer. He lifted his hand instead, slow enough that Jisung had time to stop him if he wanted to.

He didn’t.

Minho’s hand settled against his cheek, steady and warm, like he was checking something real. Jisung didn’t move. He just held his breath for a second that felt too long and not long enough at the same time.

Then Minho leaned in.

It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t hesitant either.

Jisung closed his eyes.

The space between them disappeared completely.

The kiss was soft, unhurried. It didn’t rush toward anything or pull away from anything either, just settled into the space between them like it had always belonged there.

Minho stayed close, steady, like he was giving the moment time to exist properly instead of trying to control it. Jisung’s hand found his lapel and stayed there, not pulling him in, just holding on as if that was enough.

Above them, the persimmon tree stood quiet in the October light. Behind them, the house carried on with the party, voices and movement softened by distance, like it was happening somewhere else entirely.

And in that stillness, everything they had been — the arguments, the distance, the careful pretending at indifference, months of sitting across from each other without ever really looking away — stopped feeling like separate pieces and started feeling like they had all been leading here.

When they broke apart, the light had shifted deeper, the gold turning amber, the garden settling into itself around them. Minho’s forehead rested against his, and for a moment neither of them spoke. 

Above them the persimmon tree held its fruit, patient and heavy, the way it had held everything else — the summers and the winters and the people who had stood under it over the years, keeping it company, being kept.

“Minho! Jisung!” his mother’s voice carried from inside the house, warm and completely unaware of anything that had just changed in the garden. “Dinner is ready. Come in before it gets cold.”

“In a minute,” Minho yelled out. 

“In a minute,” Jisung agreed.

From inside, someone called again, longer this time.

Jisung sighed. “We’re getting summoned.”

Minho nodded. “We are.”

Jisung looked at him. “Do we have to go in or can we just stay here forever?”

Minho considered it. “The second option seems tempting.”

“Be serious,” Jisung said, but he was smiling.

Minho looked at him properly then, calm and sure. “I am serious.”

Jisung rolled his eyes slightly. “You’re impossible.”

Minho squeezed his hand. “You’re still holding my hand though.”

“Yeah.”

Minho started walking, pulling him gently with him. “Dinner.”

Jisung followed immediately. “Fine.”

And they went back inside together, their hands wrapped around each others’.

Later, the house settled into silence. The laughter was gone, but the warmth stayed. The party slowly thinned out until only the kitchen light remained, along with the sound of dishes and Minho’s mother moving calmly as she cleaned up.

Jisung ended up at the sink beside her without really being asked, drying plates she handed him while she talked about everything and nothing at once, like he had always been part of the routine.

He nodded when it made sense, laughed when it didn’t, and reached for the next plate before she even passed it over. 

Behind them, the house was dimming, footsteps passing through once or twice before disappearing upstairs.

Minho came in quietly through the back door, pausing just inside as he looked at them. His mother glanced over, unimpressed in the way only mothers could be, then turned back to the sink.

“What are you doing here?”

Minho hummed. “Just watching.”

Jisung looked over his shoulder at him, expression softening before he could stop it. Minho saw it, of course he did. He always did.

He walked over like he had nowhere else to be and stopped beside Jisung at the counter.

Then he leaned in and kissed him.

The kiss was quick,stolen in the smallest possible space between passing moments, like it had happened on instinct before either of them could think about it. Jisung made a small sound of surprise against it, then didn’t move away.

Minho’s mother didn’t look up right away.

There was a pause.

Then, very calmly, she said, “Minho.”

Minho pulled back slowly.

“Yes,” he said.

She finally turned, took in the two of them, at the very obvious lack of effort from either of them to look innocent.

Her expression didn’t change much. It just settled into something faintly resigned and amused.

“I raised you better than to do that in my kitchen,” she said.

Jisung choked on a laugh he tried very hard not to make obvious.

Minho, entirely unbothered, glanced at her. “You raised me exactly like this.”

That did it. Her mouth twitched.

And then, because she was clearly done pretending otherwise, she sighed and turned back to the sink. “Dry the plates properly, Jisung.”

Jisung, still slightly red, nodded quickly. “Yes, Mrs Lee.”

Behind him, Minho leaned just a little closer again, voice low enough only Jisung could hear. “Did my spontaneity do something to you?”

Jisung paused for half a second, then let out a quiet breath that was almost a laugh, but he didn’t turn around right away. He just kept drying the plate in his hands like it suddenly required serious focus.

“You’re unbelievable,” he murmured.

Minho hummed softly, like that was fair.

From the sink, his mother made a small sound, not looking up. “Jisung, that one goes in the cupboard.”

“Yes,Mrs. Lee,” he said quickly, and reached for it like he could reset himself through routine.

Minho stayed close behind him, not moving away, just watching the way Jisung tried very hard to act normal again.

Then, quieter, like he hadn’t finished speaking yet, he added, “You didn’t answer me.”

Jisung finally glanced at him over his shoulder. “Because you’re distracting.”

Minho tilted his head slightly. “That’s not new.”

“It is when I’m holding a plate,” Jisung said, but his voice had already softened again.

Minho gave a small hum, satisfied like that was the point.

Mrs. Lee moved between them without comment, entirely unimpressed and entirely aware.

Minho reached out, taking the towel from Jisung’s hand as he finished the plate. Their fingers brushed. Neither of them moved away.

Then, from the sink, his mother said without turning, “If you two are done flirting, wipe the counter properly before you leave.”

“…we’re not flirting,” Jisung said automatically.

His mother finally glanced over her shoulder. “Mm.”

That one sound said enough that Jisung immediately stopped talking.

Minho, on the other hand, just leaned slightly closer again like nothing had happened at all

In the kitchen light that felt too soft, Jisung didn’t stop smiling. He tried to hide it in small things — the way he stacked the plates, the way he looked away when Minho got too close — but it didn’t really work.

Minho didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t need to.

He just stayed there beside him, close enough that it wasn’t an accident anymore, and far enough that it still looked like they were behaving.

And somewhere behind them, the house finally settled completely, as if it had decided there was nothing left to interrupt.