Chapter Text
The first time Teetee saw Por laugh wholeheartedly was during the filming of “Your Sky”, the kind that crinkled his whole face and made his eyes disappear entirely. Teetee thought he was ruined.
Much later, when they were a few months into filming Duang with You, the whole cast had crammed into a small barbecue restaurant after a gruelling shooting day. Someone had made a terrible joke, Teetee couldn't even remember who, and Por had thrown his head back and laughed like he'd forgotten anyone else was in the room. His eyes vanished into twin crescents. His shoulders shook. The sound of it was warm and unguarded, and it hit Teetee somewhere behind his ribs with the precision of something that had always been meant for him.
He'd looked away before Por could catch him staring.
It wasn't supposed to happen like this. It was never supposed to happen at all.
He still remembered, with the kind of clarity that embarrasses you in the dark, that one afternoon he'd overheard Por talking to James and Auau at the company cafeteria. Teetee had rounded the corner with two cans of iced coffee, intending to drop one on Por's tray the way he always did, when he'd heard his own name.
“Eh, what about you and Teetee? You two are so close these days.”
He stopped.
“Yeah, you two look like a real couple sometimes,” James's voice, teasing and bright.
“Teetee?” Por had made a sound, almost like a laugh, but smaller, caught off guard. “No way I could date him. Can you imagine? No way.”
Teetee had stood in the corridor for a full thirty seconds, both cans of coffee sweating in his grip.
No way.
He'd turned around and gone back the way he came. He hadn't stopped walking until he found an empty stairwell where he sat down on the third step, pressed his back against the concrete wall, and stared at nothing for a very long time.
He told himself it was fine. He told himself he hadn't been hoping for anything anyway. He told himself Por and he were barely close yet, that this was just the early days of filming, that these kinds of feelings dissolved on their own if you starved them of enough attention.
He was very, very good at lying to himself.
The problem was that starving it didn't work.
What happened instead was quieter and more damaging. He learned to redirect it. Two months after filming wrapped and Duang with You had blown up beyond anything their management had projected, Teetee met a girl at a party hosted by a mutual friend. She had dark eyes that crinkled at the corners when she smiled. He had been talking to her for twenty minutes before he understood why he had stayed.
He hated himself for it. He pursued her anyway.
She lasted three weeks.
The one after her lasted two and a half. A guy this time, soft-spoken and patient, with the kind of quiet observational humour Por had. It was so close and so wrong that Teetee had felt nauseous by the fourth date. He ended it over text and spent two days not thinking about why.
None of them lasted over a month. He'd always had a reputation for it.
Teetee, who gets bored easily, Teetee, who doesn't commit.
And he let people believe that was the truth because the real one was worse. The truth was that every time he got close to someone, close enough to see them clearly, the illusion he'd drawn over them started to show through, and the distance between the copy and the original was unbearable.
He was aware, in the abstract, that this was deeply unhealthy. He simply didn't know what to do about it.
It was Auau who broke it open, though he didn't know he did.
They were in the waiting area backstage at a show, all six of them jammed onto a couch and floor cushions while the event ran long, when Teetee mentioned offhand that he was seeing someone new. Her name was Ploy. She was a graphic designer. She had such a cute laugh.
Auau had looked up from her phone with a tilt of her head. “A cute laugh, how?”
“Like—" Teetee tried to find the words. “Like her eyes disappear when she really laughs, and she likes to squint her nose when she laughs.”
The silence that followed was short. Almost unnoticeable.
Then Auau said, very carefully, “That's funny.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just — that sounds like Por.” He glanced across the sofa without thinking, to where Por was sitting against Yim, head bowed over a script, utterly unaware of being discussed.
Teetee had said something dismissive and changed the subject.
But Por, from across the sofa, had gone very still.
He hadn't been looking at them. He hadn't appeared to be listening. He had a script in his hands and his eyes on the page. But something in Auau's words had landed with surgical precision in the centre of his chest, and he sat with it, quietly, while the conversation moved on without him.
That sounds like Por.
He turned the words over. Looked at Teetee from the corner of his eye, who was laughing now, leaning toward Auau with his elbows on his knees.
Open, easy, and warm.
The way Teetee always was. The way Teetee was with everyone and always would be, and that was exactly the problem, wasn't it? That Teetee was like this with everyone. It didn't mean anything specific. It couldn't.
He looked back down at his script.
He didn't read a single word of it for the next fifteen minutes.
After that, Por started noticing things he had no business noticing.
The next girl Teetee brought around had a habit of tilting her head when she was confused, that Por had seen in his own reflection. The guy after her wore the same obscure brand of sneakers Por had been loyal to for three years. Little things. Small overlaps. He catalogued them in the back of his mind the way you register something you're not ready to believe yet.
And every time he got close to letting himself think — maybe, just maybe — he heard his own voice.
No way I could date him.
He'd said it himself in the cafeteria, casual and reflexive, to shut down before it could embarrass him.
He'd said it because he’d been flustered, mostly. Because James had been giving him a knowing look, and Por had hated how easily he'd been rattled. Because he hated even more that the idea of Teetee being attainable, something more than a quiet, private longing, had sent a nervous ache through his chest.
Por was not someone who got the best version of things most of the time.
He learned that early. He had trained to debut since he was 14, survived on meal plans and feedback that ranged from indifferent to actively discouraging.
We don't see an artist in you.
Someone had said that to him once, a mid-level executive at a label he'd auditioned for, and Por had walked out of that building and stood on the pavement in the afternoon heat and decided, very quietly, that this was simply how it was going to be. That his life would always cost more than other people's lives, that he would work three times as hard for two-thirds of the result, and that this was not unfair, it was just his.
The group debuted. The group disbanded two years later. Por had cried exactly once, in a bathroom stall, and then washed his face and started again.
Duang With You had been unexpected. The success of it, the warmth of it, the way people received it, he hadn't been prepared for. He still wasn't sure he believed it, fully, even now. It felt like something on loan that he was waiting to return.
So, the idea that Teetee, who was everything bright and magnetic and effortlessly beloved, could look at him and see something worth wanting?
Por knew better than to want the best version of things.