Work Text:
Then — someday
The night is late and the convenience store lights are buzzing a little too loud, flickering between white and something yellowish that makes everyone look slightly unwell. Jaehyun has been sitting on the curb outside for forty-three minutes. He knows because he checked his phone at forty and then counted, because that's the kind of thing he does when he's bored and also when he's waiting for Taesan, which is often the same thing.
Taesan went in for two bowls of instant ramyeon, a bag of shrimp crackers, and two cans of peach soda. He has been in there long enough for Jaehyun to watch an old man walk his small dog past twice, and for a couple to come out with matching tote bags, and for the automatic doors to open and shut about six times for no one in particular.
When Taesan finally drops down beside him — knees popping, because he is twenty two years old and already falling apart, which Jaehyun finds both concerning and hilarious — he hands over the peach soda and also a banana milk that Jaehyun didn't ask for but accepts immediately.
"You were in there forever," Jaehyun says.
"Card machine was slow." Taesan opens his soda. It hisses. "Also the man at the register wanted to talk about baseball for six minutes."
"Do you even like baseball?"
"Not even a little." He takes a long drink. "But he didn't know that."
Jaehyun laughs — the real one, the unguarded kind that comes out before he can make it smaller — and Taesan smiles at the parking lot, satisfied. He's been collecting that laugh for years. There's a polite version Jaehyun does at events, which is nearly silent. There's a surprised one that comes out too loud and makes Jaehyun cover his face immediately. And then there's this one, which is warm and a little helpless and sounds like letting go of something. Taesan likes this one the most.
They sit with their shoulders pressed together the way they always do. It started because of practical things — small dorm rooms, cramped backseats, waiting rooms that were always too cold — but it's not practical anymore. It's just how they sit now. Neither of them mentions it.
Above the parking lot, the sky is too washed out for real stars. There might be one — Jaehyun watches a faint point of light for a moment to see if it moves. It doesn't. Star, then.
"Taesan."
"Mm."
"What do you actually want." Jaehyun rolls the cold can between his palms. He's been thinking about asking this all day. Not the career answer or the industry answer — the real one. "Like, later. When things calm down. What do you want your life to look like?"
Taesan goes quiet for a moment. He does this when something is close to something real — not avoiding it, just being careful with it, the way you're careful with things you've been holding for a long time.
Then, simply: "A house."
Jaehyun waits.
"With a backyard," Taesan adds. "It doesn't have to be big. Just — actual space outside that's ours. Some grass. Maybe some garden beds." He pauses. "I want to try growing things."
Jaehyun smiles, "You've never grown anything."
"I know. That's why I want to try." He picks at the tab on his can. "I want to be somewhere long enough to plant something in the fall and see it come up in spring. I've never had that."
Jaehyun doesn't say anything. He is working very hard at seeming normal.
"And a dog," Taesan says, like this part goes without saying. "A big one. Something with ears that flop. Not the kind that fits in a purse — an actual dog. The kind that takes up half the couch and you pretend to be annoyed about it but you're not."
"Have you picked a breed?"
"Bernese mountain dog, maybe. Or a golden. I keep going back and forth." He says this the way he says most things he's been thinking about for a while — easy, considered, like the thought has been given time to settle. "And a real kitchen. Not a dorm kitchen. Counter space, good natural light, a stovetop that actually works. The kind of kitchen where everything has a place." He pauses, and glances sideways. "And a big counter."
Jaehyun goes still. "For what."
"For you to sit on." Taesan says it like he's reporting a simple fact. "While I cook."
The parking lot hums quietly. A car pulls out of the lot. Somewhere down the road, traffic.
"Would I?", Jaehyun says carefully.
"You're doing it right now," Taesan points out. "You've been sitting on the curb instead of the perfectly good bench literally six feet away. Last week you sat on the back of the couch for an entire movie. You sat on the sound engineer's railing that one time and he nearly had a breakdown." He finally looks at Jaehyun directly, and there's something warm in it, something fond. "It's a thing you do. I'm accounting for it."
Jaehyun wants to argue but can't, because every single example is accurate. "Fine," he says. "What else."
Taesan looks away again. When he speaks, his voice is quieter. The easiness is still there, but the lightness is gone. It's just the real thing now.
"Two toothbrushes," he says. "By the sink. Not just for weekends, not just when we're visiting just— always. Both of them, every morning." He runs his thumb along the rim of the can. "I think about that more than I probably should."
Something settles in the center of Jaehyun's chest, warm and heavy at once.
He doesn't answer right away. He looks at the star again. A couple comes out of the convenience store laughing about something, and the sound fades away down the street.
"That's a very specific dream," Jaehyun finally says.
Taesan shrugs, but his ears are pink. Jaehyun can see it even under the bad lighting. "You asked."
"I did." Jaehyun looks at him — really looks, the way he usually rations carefully. The line of his profile. His hands on the can. The pink of his ears. "I want that too," he says. "All of it."
Taesan is quiet for a second.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He doesn't say anything else. But the corner of his mouth moves, and the smile that follows is small and real and aimed at the ground, like it's something he doesn't quite want to share with the whole parking lot.
They eat the ramyeon while it's still lukewarm, sitting on the curb, and talk about nothing important all the way back to the dorm — a movie they only half-watched, a song that had been stuck in Taesan's head for three days, a dream he'd had about a dog that could speak but only ever said reasonable things. They fall asleep on the same narrow bed without discussing it. The toothbrushes in the communal bathroom belong to neither of them.
But someday.
______
The second conversation happens on a Thursday afternoon in November, in a green room that smells like old coffee and a candle someone lit to cover it up. They have forty minutes before call time.
Jaehyun is lying on the sofa with his legs over the armrest, re-reading the same page of a book he hasn't been able to concentrate on. Taesan is on the floor for reasons that made sense when he got down there and now feel like a commitment he can't walk back from. He was on his phone until it died, and now he's lying flat with his hands folded on his chest, looking at the ceiling.
"I found a neighborhood," Taesan says.
Jaehyun lowers the book. "What?"
"For the house." He says it casually, the way you mention something you've been thinking about for months. "I drove through it last spring for that shoot. Quiet streets, big old trees, some of the lots are actually decent size." He pauses. "There was a house on a corner with a magnolia in the front yard and a wooden fence around the back that had been repainted so many times it looked like white on white on white. You could see through the gate that there was real space back there."
"You've been thinking about it since spring," Jaehyun says.
"I've been thinking about it since the parking lot."
Jaehyun sets the book down fully.
"I looked up the vets in the area," Taesan continues. "There are three. One has great reviews. One is closer. The third one's website hasn't been updated since 2014, so I'm unsure about them."
"You researched the vets."
"For the dog." He says it plainly. "I also checked which direction most of the kitchen windows face, based on the street layout."
Jaehyun is quiet for a moment. Outside the green room, someone is doing a sound check — a low repeated bass note that comes through the walls every few seconds.
"Tell me about the kitchen," Jaehyun says.
And Taesan does. He talks about counter height and wanting stone that stays cool to the touch in summer. He talks about open shelving so you can see all the glasses lined up, and a spice rack that's actually used, and a knife block with knives that are worth sharpening. He talks about a window over the sink so there's something to look at while washing up — the backyard, ideally, whatever he manages to grow there. He talks about the dog's bed near the radiator. He talks about the counter — wide enough, the right height — and says again, easily, that Jaehyun would sit on it while he cooked. That this is part of the plan. That he's already accounted for it.
Jaehyun lies on the green room sofa and listens and the ceiling is beige and water-stained and none of that matters at all.
"We should start saving properly," Jaehyun says, when Taesan goes quiet. "If you're looking at neighborhoods. We should actually plan for it."
A pause. Then: "Yeah?"
"Property in those areas isn't getting cheaper." He says it calmly, like this is a practical observation and not the most important thing he's said all month.
Taesan smiles at the ceiling. Jaehyun can't see it from the sofa, but he knows. He always knows.
"Okay," Taesan says.
"Okay," Jaehyun says back.
Forty minutes later they go to work. They don't talk about it again for some time, but it's there between them — something they've both agreed to keep, like a key on a hook by the door.
_____
Now — this one
It's a sunday in October, and the kitchen is full of good light.
It comes through the south-facing window — Taesan spent a solid three months being specific about that before they made any offers — and lays itself out in a wide, warm stripe across the counter, moving slowly as the morning goes on. By eight o'clock it reaches the bowl of tangerines near the edge. By nine it's climbed to the wall above the stove.
Taesan has been up since seven-fifteen, which is when Mochi decided morning had arrived. She announced this by standing next to the bed and breathing on his face until he opened his eyes, then sitting on his feet while he tried to get up, then leading him downstairs with the urgency of someone who has been waiting patiently since midnight and needs him to understand that patience has a limit.
Mochi is a Bernese mountain dog. She is thirty-four kilograms and has never in her life grasped that this is large. She has one white paw and three dark ones and a chest like a small bear, and both Taesan and Jaehyun are completely ridiculous about her. This is not discussed but it is understood.
Taesan feeds her and refills her water and stands at the back door for a moment looking out at the yard. The garden is mostly done for the season — the tomatoes are finished, the raised beds are cleared and mulched and waiting. But the ornamental grasses along the fence are still rustling in the October air, and the maple in the corner has turned fully red and is dropping leaves onto the grass in a way that is genuinely beautiful and also means someone will have to rake.
He makes two mental notes: rake this afternoon, and convince Jaehyun to help.
He puts the kettle on. Gets the barley tea from the third shelf on the left — where it lives — and measures two portions into the pot, one slightly more generous because Jaehyun drinks more of it. He does this without thinking. There's a lot he does without thinking now. He knows Jaehyun runs cold and prefers the bedroom warm. He knows Jaehyun will walk past the fruit bowl all day and then eat four tangerines at nine at night while watching something on his phone. He knows the exact sound of Jaehyun's footsteps on the stairs — the pace, the weight of them — and can tell from the landing whether he's tired or not.
He knows these things the way he knows the kitchen. Completely, without effort, because he's been paying attention for years and at some point paying attention became the same thing as just knowing.
He gets the doenjang from the fridge — the good kind, in a ceramic crock — and sets it on the counter. Gets the anchovy stock from the freezer, portioned into flat bags the way his grandmother used to do it. Gets the tofu and the zucchini and the green onions from the little cup on the windowsill where they regrow, which Taesan started doing six months ago and is now simply how things are.
He's cutting the zucchini into thin half-moons when he hears the stairs.
Mochi hears it first. Her ears come up and she trots to the kitchen doorway and sits there like she's been stationed.
Jaehyun appears a moment later. He's in sweatpants that have been washed soft and a long-sleeve shirt that belongs technically to Taesan but has been in Jaehyun's rotation long enough that ownership is no longer a useful concept. His hair is going in several directions. His eyes are barely open. He looks like someone who has agreed in principle to be awake but hasn't fully committed yet.
He reaches down to pet Mochi when she appears, and she leans into his hand with her full thirty-four kilograms, nearly knocking him sideways. He steadies himself on the doorframe and keeps petting her.
"Morning," Taesan says, not looking up.
Jaehyun makes a sound. It contains no actual words but communicates that he has acknowledged morning and will participate in it shortly.
He gets his mug from the upper left cabinet — he knows exactly where it is, the wide brown ceramic one he picked from a market stall last spring — and pours barley tea and holds it with both hands. He stands at the counter for a moment, warming his palms.
Then he sets the mug down, puts both hands flat on the counter, and pushes himself up to sit on it.
Taesan doesn't look up. But he smiles.
"You're in the way," he says.
"I'm not in the way." Jaehyun picks his mug back up, settles it in his lap. "I'm watching."
"You're sitting directly in front of the gochugaru."
"The what?"
"Red pepper flakes." Taesan reaches past him — arm brushing his knee — and retrieves the jar from where it was tucked behind Jaehyun's thigh. "See."
"I didn't know that was there."
"It lives there."
"Poor placement."
"It was fine before you sat on my counter." But there's no irritation in it. Taesan says it the way you say things to someone who has been in your space long enough to become part of how the space works. He turns back to the stove, checks the broth, adds the doenjang and presses it through the strainer so it dissolves in properly.
Jaehyun tucks one foot under himself and rests the mug in his lap and watches Taesan cook. He has always liked this — watching Taesan in a kitchen. Even back in the dorm days, making ramyeon on a two-burner hot plate, Taesan brought a kind of focused care to it that Jaehyun found oddly calming. Like the thing being made mattered on its own terms. Like it was worth doing properly.
The kitchen smells layered and warm: the fermented depth of the doenjang, garlic, zucchini going soft in the broth, something faintly sweet underneath all of it. Mochi is asleep under the table with her chin on Taesan's foot, which she does constantly, as though losing contact would be a risk she's not willing to take.
"What time is it?" Jaehyun asks.
"Almost nine."
Jaehyun looks at the stripe of light across the counter. It's reached his knee. "The light in here is so good."
"I know." Taesan adjusts the heat on the pot. "South-facing."
"You chose it specifically."
"Yes."
Jaehyun looks at him with a small, soft expression. "Of course you did."
Taesan wipes his hands on the dish towel tucked into his waistband and turns around, leaning back against the stove so he's facing Jaehyun. He crosses his arms. His eyes are warm and a little tired and he is looking at Jaehyun the way he has been looking at Jaehyun for years — like something he chose deliberately and would choose again.
"We need to rake today," he says.
"I know."
"The maple has dropped a lot of leaves."
"I believe you."
"Mochi keeps reorganizing them, which isn't helping."
Jaehyun looks down at Mochi, who is now facing the wrong direction with her paw draped over Taesan's foot. "She's helping," he says. "In her own way."
"She is making new piles in new locations, which is the opposite of helping."
Jaehyun smiles into his mug. Then he tips forward slightly and loops one hand around Taesan's wrist — an easy, unhurried gesture — and tugs him a half-step closer. "Come here for a second."
Taesan comes. He always does.
Jaehyun presses his forehead against Taesan's shoulder, just for a moment, eyes closed, mug still warm in his other hand. Taesan brings one hand up and rests it in Jaehyun's hair, gentle, not making anything out of it.
"Good morning," Jaehyun says, muffled slightly by Taesan's shirt.
"You already said morning."
"I was half asleep before. That one doesn't count."
Taesan laughs quietly. He stays where he is, hand in Jaehyun's hair, while the pot simmers on the stove behind him. Mochi shifts under the table. The maple light comes through the glass door and lands on the floor in a soft square.
This is a Sunday. This is what Sundays look like.
After a moment, Taesan pulls back just enough to tilt Jaehyun's chin up with one finger, and kisses him once — warm and easy, the kind of kiss that belongs to people who have time, that doesn't need to be more than it is.
"Jjigae will be ready in ten minutes," he says.
"Okay," Jaehyun says, and lets him go.
________
The jjigae is good and they eat it at the kitchen table with Mochi stationed at Taesan's elbow, nose working, deeply invested.
"Off," Taesan says.
She moves her chin approximately one centimeter.
"She's invested," Jaehyun says.
"She's hopeful. It's not the same as being allowed."
"She can be hopeful."
Taesan looks at the dog. The dog looks back at him with enormous brown eyes. "Fine," he says, and she keeps her chin on the table edge for the rest of the meal.
They eat slowly, the way Sunday breakfasts go. Jaehyun steals a tangerine from the bowl in the middle of the table and peels it while Taesan pretends not to notice.
"Those are for after," Taesan says.
"There's no such thing as after tangerines. You eat a tangerine when you want a tangerine."
"I specifically put those out for after the meal."
"I want one now." Jaehyun puts a segment in his mouth. Chews thoughtfully. "Actually these are really good."
"I know they're good."
"I've been sleeping on tangerines." He eats another segment. "I think I've been wrong about them."
Taesan looks up. "What do you mean you've been wrong about them."
"I just didn't think they were that remarkable before. But these are good."
"I have been telling you for three years that tangerines are a good fruit."
"And now I believe you." Jaehyun offers a segment across the table. "Here."
Taesan takes it, because he can't actually stay annoyed, and because being handed something by Jaehyun first thing in the morning, at their own table, on a Sunday — there's nowhere else he'd rather be and nothing he'd rather be doing, and he knows this very clearly every single morning when he wakes up. He just doesn't say it in so many words, because he doesn't need to. It's in everything else.
After breakfast, Jaehyun lingers at the table while Taesan washes up. This is their division of labor, loose and never discussed: Taesan cooks, Jaehyun dries. It evolved without planning, the way most of their arrangements have. Jaehyun comes and stands beside him at the sink with the drying cloth over his shoulder, and when Taesan passes him the first bowl, their hands overlap for a second.
"The garden did well this year," Jaehyun says.
"Better than last year. The tomatoes especially."
"You were so stressed about the tomatoes."
"I was appropriately concerned. They were showing signs of blight."
"They were fine."
"They were fine because I addressed it." Taesan passes him the pot. "Six articles about tomato blight. Worth it."
"The basil was fine too."
"The basil bolted in July."
"It still tasted like basil."
"Bolted basil is bitter." He pauses. "It was still fine. But it could have been better." He looks out the window over the sink at the garden beds, cleared now and mulched, waiting. "I'm planting garlic this fall."
"When does garlic go in?"
"Before the ground freezes. You push the cloves in and they overwinter and come up in spring." He rinses the last bowl. "I want to see them come up in March."
"You said that about the tulip bulbs and we ended up with sixty tulips in April."
"They were beautiful."
"We had to give them to the neighbors."
"The neighbors loved them." He turns off the tap. "And we still had plenty. It worked out perfectly." He turns to look at Jaehyun, who is drying the pot with an expression of fond sufferance that Taesan has been on the receiving end of for years and never gets tired of. "What."
"Nothing." Jaehyun sets the pot down and hangs up the drying cloth. "Let's go rake."
________
They rake in the October afternoon, and it takes longer than it should.
The main problem is Mochi, who treats every finished leaf pile as a personal challenge. By the time they've bagged the third one she's redistributed, Taesan has given up on the area near the fence and relocated operations to the center of the yard. Jaehyun, meanwhile, is raking with a leisurely quality that Taesan would describe as deeply unhelpful and Jaehyun would describe as being present in the moment.
"You're barely raking," Taesan says.
"I'm raking."
"You've been moving that same section for ten minutes."
"I'm being thorough." Jaehyun stops and leans on his rake, looking at the yard. The maple is fully red now, all of it, lit up in the low afternoon sun like something that knows it's beautiful and doesn't care. "Look at that, though."
Taesan looks. He always does when Jaehyun says look at something, because Jaehyun has a way of noticing things that Taesan would otherwise work through without pausing for.
It is, genuinely, a remarkable tree.
"Okay," Taesan says.
"Okay?"
"It's a good tree." He goes back to raking. "Keep going."
Jaehyun laughs and keeps going.
By four o'clock the yard is mostly done. Taesan bags the last of the leaves while Jaehyun hoses off Mochi, who found something in the far corner of the yard that she has declined to explain and now smells terrible on one paw. There is a brief standoff in which Mochi sits in the spray with the expression of someone being deeply wronged, while Jaehyun talks to her in a low, patient voice and Taesan watches from five feet away, pretending to fold up a garbage bag and actually just watching Jaehyun.
The way he talks to her. The way he holds the hose with one hand and keeps his other free to touch her ear so she knows she's not in trouble. The way he says her name like it's its own full sentence.
Taesan has been in love with Jaehyun for a very long time. He does not always say so in exact words. But he watches him talk a dog through getting her paw washed on a Sunday afternoon in their backyard, and it is very clear.
They come inside smelling like autumn — cold air, cut grass, wet dog — and Jaehyun kicks his shoes off at the door and immediately goes for the stairs. "I need a hot bath," he announces.
"I know."
"I've been cold since eleven."
"I know." Taesan goes to the kitchen, puts the kettle on. Upstairs, he hears the bathroom taps running. Then, faintly, Jaehyun's playlist starting — something slow and unhurried.
He makes two mugs of tea and carries them upstairs. The bathroom door is open a crack, steam already curling out into the hallway. He nudges it open with his foot and sets one mug on the edge of the tub without being asked, because Jaehyun always wants something warm to hold in the bath, and Taesan has known this for long enough that it doesn't require discussion.
"Thank you," Jaehyun says from the water.
"Mm." Taesan sits on the closed toilet lid, mug in hand. He's not going anywhere. The mirror is fogged, the light is soft, and the playlist is in the middle of something with a slow piano line.
"We're almost out of barley tea," Jaehyun says.
"I'll order it tomorrow. The good kind."
"From that same place."
"Yes."
The water shifts. Outside, through the small window, the light is going golden and lower.
"We should plant the garlic next weekend," Taesan says.
"You already mentioned the garlic."
"I want to make sure we actually do it."
Jaehyun considers. "We'll do it." A pause. "How much are we planting?"
"I was thinking two full heads. Maybe three."
"Last time you said *maybe three* we ended up with sixty tulips."
"Garlic isn't tulips."
"The principle is the same."
Taesan smiles at his mug. "We'll plant a reasonable amount."
"Thank you," Jaehyun says gravely.
Taesan stays until the tea is gone and then goes down to start something simple for dinner — not a project tonight, just rice and whatever's left — and the house is quiet around him in the specific way it gets on Sunday evenings, a settled, full kind of quiet. The creak on the second stair that they both step over now without thinking. The living room rug Mochi has already claimed again. The light switches all in slightly different positions because they each move through the house differently, two patterns layered on top of each other until they're just one pattern, just home.
________
Dinner is easy and they eat it on the couch because the table still has a tangerine peel on it that neither of them has moved. Mochi occupies the middle cushion and receives no pieces of food despite asking very sincerely.
After, Jaehyun falls asleep sitting up, which happens on Sundays when the day has been full and warm. Taesan notices when his head starts to tilt and reaches over without looking, the way you do things you've done a hundred times, and guides Jaehyun's head down onto his shoulder.
Jaehyun stirs slightly. "Not asleep," he says.
"Okay."
A pause. "What are we watching?"
"I don't know. You had the remote."
"Hmm." He doesn't move to get it. He settles more comfortably against Taesan's shoulder instead, and Taesan puts his arm around him and they stay like that on the couch — Mochi draped across both their feet, the TV showing some cooking show that neither of them is watching — while the October evening goes dark outside the windows.
This is something Taesan used to imagine, on that parking lot curb and in that green room and in the car during long drives between cities, trying to picture what it would actually look and feel like. He never got the specifics right in his imagination — he didn't know about the creak on the stair or the particular way the kitchen light looks at nine in the morning or the fact that Jaehyun has a system for his shoes that makes no apparent sense but is apparently deliberate. He didn't know about Mochi's specific weight on his feet or the way Jaehyun's playlists drift into slower and slower songs as the day winds down.
He didn't know any of the details. He just knew he wanted it, and he was right to.
He presses a kiss into the top of Jaehyun's head, soft and unhurried. Jaehyun makes a small sound and doesn't move.
"Hey," Jaehyun says, quiet.
"Mm."
"I was thinking about the convenience store earlier." He doesn't look up. His voice has the soft quality it gets when he's almost asleep but not quite. "The one with the bad lights."
"You were counting how long I took."
"Forty-three minutes."
"It was twenty at most."
"It was forty-three." Jaehyun pauses. "You told me you wanted two toothbrushes by the sink."
"Among other things."
"All of it came true." He says it simply, as a fact. "The house and the yard and the dog. The kitchen with the good light." A pause. "The toothbrushes."
Taesan is quiet for a moment. Mochi shifts on their feet. On the TV, someone is plating something.
"Yeah," he says. "It did."
Jaehyun turns his face slightly into Taesan's shoulder, and Taesan tightens his arm around him once, brief and certain.
"Good," Jaehyun says.
That's all. Just that.
They stay on the couch until Mochi decides she's done with being a footrest and relocates to the center of the rug, and then they move upstairs in the easy way of people who have done this a thousand times — lights off in a particular order, the second stair stepped over, Mochi negotiated out of the exact center of the bed with the patience of people who have accepted that this negotiation is simply part of the routine now.
They brush their teeth side by side. Jaehyun on the left, Taesan on the right, because that's where they landed and that's where they've stayed. The mirror is clear tonight, no steam, and they can see each other in it — Taesan catching Jaehyun's eye in the reflection, Jaehyun raising his brows, both of them brushing their teeth and trying not to smile like two people who find each other quietly funny even at eleven o'clock on a Sunday night.
Taesan spits and rinses and looks at the ceramic cup on the counter. Two toothbrushes in it. Green and blue, side by side, the way they've been for three years now. The most ordinary thing. The thing he thought about on a cold parking lot curb a long time ago and didn't say out loud and then said out loud and then waited for, carefully, for years, the way you wait for things that matter.
He turns off the light.
"Good night," Jaehyun says in the dark.
"Night."
And upstairs the maple is dropping another leaf into the yard where the garlic will go in next weekend and Mochi is asleep sideways across the foot of the bed and the house is holding them both the way it always does — quietly, fully, like it was made for exactly this.
Which it was.
______
The in-between things
There is a list, though it's never been written down, of all the small things that make up a life together. Neither of them made the list consciously. It accumulated the way most true things do — without fanfare, without anyone saying mark this down, this is the kind of thing you'll want to remember.
It goes something like this:
Taesan wakes up first, almost always, because Mochi has decided he is the morning person and there is no appealing this decision. He feeds her and stands at the back door and has five minutes to himself before the day properly starts. In those five minutes he almost always looks at the garden, whatever state it's in. In January, just the bare dark beds. In April, the first thin green lines of whatever he planted in fall. In July, the chaos of it, everything tall and tangled and urgent. He looks at it every morning and it is never the same and that is the whole point.
He always makes the barley tea before Jaehyun comes down. This is not an agreement. It is just what happens. He measures one portion for himself, one and a half for Jaehyun, and sets the pot on the counter, and there is something in this simple act — this anticipating, this preparing a space for someone before they arrive — that feels to Taesan like the most honest expression of love he has. He's not a person who says I love you loudly or often. He says it in barley tea, in the way he always remembers that Jaehyun runs cold and puts an extra blanket at the foot of the bed before winter really sets in. In the way he notices when Jaehyun is having a harder week and makes the things he likes for dinner without mentioning that's why.
Jaehyun, for his part, says it in the way he pays attention to what Taesan is excited about. He reads articles about whatever Taesan is currently interested in — garlic planting depth, the best way to prune the ornamental grasses, whether Bernese mountain dogs are prone to a particular kind of joint issue — and brings it up casually days later, asking a question, letting Taesan explain. He knows Taesan likes to explain things to people who are genuinely listening. He listens genuinely. He always has.
He says it in the way he buys the specific kind of soy sauce Taesan's mother uses, after watching Taesan spend ten minutes in the grocery store aisle comparing labels, and presents it to him later like it's nothing. In the way he will watch forty minutes of any documentary Taesan turns on, even the ones about ancient agricultural practices or the migratory patterns of birds, and ask real questions.
In the way he sits on the counter while Taesan cooks, not because he has to be there, not because the stool at the island isn't perfectly comfortable, but because this is how they got through a lot of long evenings a long time ago — in each other's space, talking about nothing, the fact of being near each other enough — and some habits are load-bearing. Some habits are what the rest of the structure rests on.
They do argue sometimes. They argue about the temperature of the bedroom and about whether Mochi should be allowed to sleep on the bed (Jaehyun: yes, obviously; Taesan: she takes up three-quarters of it; Jaehyun: she would not do this if you moved over), and about how often the car actually needs washing, and once, at length, about a lamp. They argue the way people who know each other very well argue — quickly, and with access to each other's complete history of opinions, which means the arguments are specific and occasionally unfair and usually over within twenty minutes, followed by someone making tea and sitting near the other person and the whole thing dissolving.
They make up in small ways. An arm around the shoulder. The specific kind of peace offering that involves showing up with the other person's preferred snack. Mochi, sensing tension, pressing herself bodily against whichever one of them seems to need it most, which she has a genuine gift for.
Once, early on — the first winter in the house, when everything was still a little new and a little tentative — they had a disagreement that stretched past twenty minutes, past the tea stage, past the comfortable radius. Jaehyun went quiet in a particular way, which is the one that means he's pulled back somewhere and needs to be coaxed forward. Taesan sat beside him on the couch — not touching, not talking, just beside — for a while. And then he said, in the same plain voice he uses when he says the things he means most: I want to be here. With you. In this house. That's not up for discussion, none of this changes that. And Jaehyun looked at him for a long moment and then leaned over and pressed his face into Taesan's shoulder and stayed there, and that was the end of it.
They don't talk about that evening much. But Jaehyun thinks about it sometimes. He thinks about how it felt to be told something so simply and so completely, without any decoration, without the words being made bigger than they needed to be. Just: I want to be here. Just: you're not going anywhere.
Just that.
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The seasons go like this:
In spring Taesan is in the garden more than he is in the house. He has mud on his knees by March and comes in tracking it, and Jaehyun has given up on the doormat situation and accepted it as the cost of living with someone who is genuinely, completely happy when things come up out of the ground. When the garlic pushes through in late March, Taesan takes a photo on his phone and sends it to Jaehyun, who is three rooms away. The message says: it came up. Jaehyun comes to the back door and looks at the small green shoots for a long moment and says, "Nice." Taesan glows about this for the rest of the day.
In summer they eat outside when it's warm enough, on the small patio, which has two chairs and a table they bought at a flea market and repainted. Mochi lies on the flagstones because they're cooler, and the evenings are long and slow, and sometimes they don't talk much — just sit in the garden Taesan built, with the dog they chose, in the house they saved for, and the quiet between them is the comfortable kind. The kind with no empty space in it.
In fall they rake leaves, philosophically and otherwise, and Taesan preserves things — tomatoes, the herbs that can be dried, the garlic braided and hung in the pantry, which Jaehyun photographed the first time without saying why and now has as the background image on his phone. Taesan noticed this on a Tuesday in October and didn't say anything about it for three weeks and then, lying in bed, said: "You have the garlic as your wallpaper." And Jaehyun said, "Yes." And Taesan said, "Okay." And that was all, but neither of them forgot it.
In winter the kitchen is the best room in the house. The light is low and golden all morning and the stove makes everything warm and there is almost always something going slowly on the back burner. Jaehyun spends more time on the counter in winter, which is the coldest surface in the room and therefore slightly irrational, but also means he's near the stove, near Taesan, which is the actual point. Taesan cooks and Jaehyun talks or doesn't talk and Mochi sleeps in her spot by the radiator, and outside the bare maple stands in the yard waiting for spring, patient the way things are when they've learned how to wait.
This is all of it. This is what they built, between the parking lot and here, through all the careful saving and the neighborhood research and the three months being specific about window placement. This is what Taesan saw, sitting on a cold curb with a can of peach soda, his ears going pink in the bad light, wanting something so much he was afraid to say it too loud.
A house. A yard. A dog with flopping ears. Morning light through a south-facing window. Someone to cook for.
Two toothbrushes in a cup.
All of it.
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