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“I was under the illusion that you hated attending weddings,” Felix hears an achingly familiar voice say, warmth from a much taller body grazing him lightly.
The air around them is fragrant with the vibrant flowers arranged in expensive looking vases, the surface painted in a lovely blend of white and blue.
A wince finds home on his forehead as the heel of his shoes lift and turn to the other side, revealing the sight of a grown up Hwang Hyunjin to his dull eyes.
He had initially wrinkled his nose at the colour scheme included alongside the dress code but now as he drinks in the sight of Hyunjin dressed in a dark maroon suit jacket and a white dress-shirt buttoned up to his throat, he is considering that maybe it isn’t all that horrible.
He runs his thumb over an engraved button sewn on the edge of his own plum coloured jacket. He worries that his eyes might be sparkling with unshed tears even before the ceremony has commenced.
It wouldn’t be the first time Hyunjin’s mere presence has reduced him to tears but it has been years since he’s let that happen.
“I don’t hate them,” Felix says, a soft whisper lost in the din of the moving guests and last minute modifications and what-not.
“You always refused to go to them with me,” Hyunjin recalls, the smile on his face not quite set in. It appears a little unsettling to Felix. There is a quiet storm brewing in his childhood friend’s face and he is burdened with the knowledge that ultimately in the face of the storm, he is powerless.
He hates this . The flickering flames under their tongues, the grey clouds in their irises, the rage that trembles in the joints of their knuckles all stemming from a single spot, their origin deeply rooted in the words Felix had fled from instead of facing, the words he burnt, the words he replaced with friend and buddy and mate instead of lover and boyfriend and darling. He hates the confrontations where the silence deafens them and they are left with cavities of sound, pockets full of things they have never said but wish to, but have to.
“I was a kid. I didn’t like having my cheeks pinched,” he deflects instead of saying I hated how it wasn’t me, wasn’t us because to say that, to say that he’s wanted to more than friends, is to admit that all those years ago when Hyunjin was still soft as the moon and devastating as the starlit night sky, his affections were returned. It is to confess that he is brave when he is not. He still has to paw at the floorboards to find his heart, he still has to rearrange himself to feel his pulse.
A shadow falls upon Hyunjin’s features and a pang of regret pierces itself through his heart. Felix, by nature, was a poet and he’s always loved words except for when he was in Hyunjin’s vicinity.
Sometimes Felix had wondered, all scraggly teenage boy and growing body and creaking bones, where he had slipped and found himself with a strange desire unfurling in his marrow, where the gold of the sunlit evenings began to fester itself in Hyunjin and illuminate him in a way that made it impossible for Felix to cast his gaze away.
Beautiful, moon-kissed Hyunjin glimmering under the chandeliers, a gossamer veil draped over his face to mask the true nature of his emotions, glares at him with the longing and contempt of a thousand births of supernovas, he sees his reflection as the very terrible thing he had run away from.
“We’re together,” Hyunjin suddenly speaks, the short declaration freezing him up, limbs locking.
Felix peers at him only to find his profile slanted in pale yellow light. He, too, turns his head around, and sees one of the people from the agency who are bustling around helping people find their seats at the tables.
Disappointment curls in his gut and Felix feels the urge to berate himself. He was the one to reject Hyunjin, he was the coward and yet, here he is, twenty eight and single and still in love with his childhood friend — it is a bold statement to even claim they are friends , they were friends. The friendship had turned to ashes the day Felix decided to leave, to run away, uncaring of the glowing ember he had left behind that grew into a large fire which later burnt the existence of everything that bound them together.
“Should we sit?” he asks, clearing his throat to chase away the sudden lumps of acidic remorse.
Hyunjin stares at him for another long moment. The usher looks ready to tell them off and drag them to the seat but before another less than thrilling experience could be added to their history, Hyunjin decides to answer him with a curt nod.
Felix had selfishly hoped he would stay still a moment longer so he could lead him away, his fingers circled around Hyunjin’s wrist, thumb pressing into his lifeline. Like those dreamy scenes he’s fond of in the media he sees on screen, on paper and on the silver screens.
Hyunjin pulls the chair out for him. Felix hopes the pink on his cheeks or the loud thumping of his heart is not audible to him.
“I didn’t know you were even back in Korea,” Hyunjin admits, toying with the ribbon wrapped around the daisy placed right over his name card.
Felix shifts, his fingers bend into shapes to lock themselves in each other. “I’m here for the holidays. Summer is nicer here,” he says, half hoping Hyunjin finds the things he’s said in between his sentences.
The way his face crumples, he has found them. He jerks his head back and lets the flower fall carelessly onto the tabletop. A dry, humourless chuckle tumbles past his lips. “You really do know to hit where it hurts, huh.”
Felix wants to erase this misunderstanding, the chip away at the rot and wait for rebirth but — but the lights dim and the soft notes of the music begin to play.
The tension continues to hang heavily around them and the wedding lights continue to sparkle brightly.
— ♡ —
“Are you really staying for the summer?” Hyunjin questions after the ceremony, a piece of honeyed carrot speared on the tip of his fork.
Felix pushes around the peas in his plate. His stomach is still a pit filled with venomous snakes. “Yes,” he answers, digging the heel of his shoe into the ground.
For a moment, it seems as though there has been a breakthrough and Hyunjin is going to say something that will be the first step in mending the relationship he ruined but, but he simply nods and chews his food quietly.
“The ceremony was beautiful, I didn’t expect you to cry,” Felix awkwardly mentions. It was indeed very beautiful, it made the strings of his heart twist and tug.
Hyunjin snorts. “You were crying worse than me,” he chooses to say.
Felix hides the surprise flared on his face behind the napkin. He was sure that his comment would be received with another stinging barb thrown back. He almost expected Hyunjin to say you would know if you had accompanied me and this turn of events, although positive, has his head spinning slightly.
Hope breaks through the surface of the soil in a sprout of lively green.
The animosity sizzling between them has gone down to a light simmer. Its presence is never forgotten yet it has become easier to neglect it in favour of wearing a mask made up of false bravado that is as muggy as summer evenings.
Felix wants to extend an olive branch, he wants to ask Hyunjin about his life and what has become of the space he’d left behind in him, whether the shape of his shadow is still dear to him just as it was ten years ago.
Yet, asking them, giving life and sound to the words stuck to his mottled mouth bear consequences that he doesn’t know the weight of.
Their amicable, quiet little dinner, gets interrupted by other guests eventually swarming around them to make conversation about the years Felix hasn’t shown his face in the town and about Hyunjin who only seems to get prettier and prettier.
It only strikes to Felix that he is indeed grown up, that the world has spun around the sun for years and years and he hasn’t seen these people. They look older, more sharper than they were in his memory, glossed over in a glaze of honey youth.
His heart cracks a little more. He has missed this sense of belonging and he has longed to find it in places that never were entirely kind to him. He longed to hear the familiar voices and see the age-softened faces of the people that helped him grow into himself.
“You’ve grown up so well,” one of the ladies say and Felix thinks of his hands and the words he’s written and the places he visited and the people he met and everything he left destroyed in his wake and maybe there is something about him, about the way he’s sat or the way his wrist is delicate or the rasp of his voice that shows them that he did grow up.
“She’s right. You did grow up well,” Hyunjin adds under his breath and his eyes widen, big as craters on the moon and Felix chews on the inside of his cheek. He feels like an intruder, like he heard a thing that he wasn’t supposed to.
His spoon makes a loud clunk when it falls to the empty corner of the plate but no one bats an eye at them. “I’m sorry,” he blurts out his apology in a rush of courage and pink light coursing through his bones.
Hyunjin stills, face draining of the happy rouge and becoming pale. He resembles a ghost, pale hair, pale face and slight red rimmed eyes, a haunted thing flitting behind amber-brown eyes. “Felix, please. Don’t do this to me. Not here, not like this,” he begs, voice pained and eyes glittering with the tears of a hundred stars.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, clueless. He doesn’t know what else he could say to wipe that painful expression off his face. Felix feels lost and the bitterness of nostalgia rises to the back of his throat.
History repeats itself and they are back to being two boys facing each other trying their hardest to phrase things in a way that won’t irrevocably break their fragile hearts. History repeats itself and here he is, straining their already strained thread of friendship until it snaps, both of them dressed in twin shades of bruise.
This is the very circumstance he was afraid their reunion would end in.
Felix pushes his plate away and stands up, fully intending to leave midway. He can surely visit the newly married couple some other day, after all he would be busy scrambling for any and all opportunistic excuses to avoid running into Hyunjin.
“You’re the worst,” he says wetly but it isn’t scalding.
“I’m going to go get some air. It’s suffocating in here,” he half-lies. He doesn’t need to explain what exactly is suffocating him.
“You always run away. Why won’t you stay?” he bitterly asks and Felix hears his heart get crushed. It sounds like hard candy ground against molars.
“Hyun, please . I can’t bear to see you hate me.”
Hyunjin shakes his head. “I don’t hate you, Yongbok. I never fucking hated you so stop running away! I’m tired of never being able to follow,” he spits, furious and acrid.
His hands are visible. They are trembling, just the way Felix’s are.
“Come with me then. Come with me to the garden,” he invites, finally extending the olive branch.
“Not even a day since we’ve reunited and you’re already asking me to run away with you?” Hyunjin teases, trying to hide the pleased grin from appearing on his face so blatantly.
Felix smiles, corners sharp and teeth clean white under the lights. “Yes,” he earnestly replies.
Hyunjin smiles back and pushes his chair back, ready to accompany Felix to find a secluded corner to finally talk.
It feels like redemption.
— ♡ —
Felix wants to swallow the moon, he wants to drink the universe and become something constructed by the cosmos. He wants to sparkle in Hyunjin’s eyes too.
“That chair looks like it would collapse if you even set a foot on it,” Hyunjin giggles, pointing a pink tinged finger at the ugly white chairs pushed into a corner near the bushes.
A laugh bubbles out of Felix as well and it is the lightest he has felt all evening. The irony is not lost on him but he accepts this small gesture of kindness from the heavens quite gratefully.
“I was jealous of them,” Hyunjin confesses. “The bride and the groom, I mean. I wanted that too you know,” he hums, the mood darkening into a gloomy blue.
Felix understands, he has spent years trying to quench the very same thing. He’s wanted those things too and the yearning for a sweet, domestic life only increased, multiplied tenfold after he realised that he likes boys and their rough hands and soft swells of their throats. The forbiddance had made the unattainable fruit seem much sweeter than usual. It is a strange thing, to yearn so strongly for something but also resigning yourself to a tragic, lonely, regret stricken ending.
“Me too. That’s the main reason why I avoid coming to weddings. Receptions are fine, though, it is just the ceremony that makes me both devastatingly sad but also makes me green with jealousy,” he rambles, hands slicing through the dark of the night, creating a storyline for Hyunjin to follow.
Hyunjin’s face is split up in a rueful smile. “You want to get married?” he quizzes, the dash of astonishment not lost between them.
“Yes, I want to. I want it so much, it’s a little funny at this point. My mates in Australia would tease me about it but it never bothered me much. I knew I wanted to get married a long time ago,” he spills his heart down the grassy path and watches his truths and honesty trickle down to bushes and cling to the legs of the ugly, malleable, dirty white plastic chairs.
Hyunjin makes a noise of understanding or at least Felix hopes it is one. He is softened by the moonlight and the dark and the edges of his silhouette don’t seem so pointy and sharp anymore. It almost feels as though if Felix were to touch him now, he wouldn’t get his hand back with blood staining it. He can be brave and uncurl his arm to touch without there being pain clinging to it.
“I don’t find it silly, Lix. I never did,” he softly murmurs, words floating sweetly in the air. Felix has once inhaled the scent of white jasmines in full bloom and remembers finding himself intoxicated, he recalls that feeling being similar to this, this heady rush of acceptance, of not being laughed at and mocked upon.
“Thank you,” he says, very quietly. It might not even have been audible but it really is insignificant. The words reach Hyunjin either way. They always have and that is enough to soothe his agitated heart.
“I want a husband,” Hyunjin reveals, quietly, a secret held between cupped palms like a pulsing mass of life and more, cheeks staining with hues of red, so startling that his eyes are drawn to it even in the dim of the dark.
His heart clenches again and Felix thinks this twinge of twin pin pricks of pain is one that is birthed from a deep rooted understanding. They both know the price for these desires, for the hope they feed and nurture and perhaps in its bleakness is where they are to meet, amidst a streak of tired resignation and angry rebellion.
“Me too. Maybe if I had been braver, um, never mind. Do you want to go back in? The party must be starting…” he trails off, off-balance after once again losing control over himself and coming so darn close to spilling his ugly guts out, right on the pointed toe of Hyunjin’s expensive looking shoes.
Hyunjin holds him by his wrist. “Finish the thought, Yongbok,” he urges, voice far too gentle than he thinks it should be, petals of a lily, inside of a wrist and the soft dip of a throat.
A songbird warbles in his chest. “Maybe if I had been braver, I could’ve had it. Maybe I can have it,” he corrects, almost as an afterthought.
The grip around his wrist tightens imperceptibly. Felix wonders if his pulse is giving away the panic that is welling up in his throat, swelling and swelling, ready to tip down and soak him whole.
“You can still have it, you can always have it, Lix,” he says and Felix hates it for how it gives him hope.
He must despise Hyunjin for how he can seem to love Felix unconditionally, uncomfortably. How he can see the ugly and the incomplete and still choose to offer him love love love . He wants the summer from his memories to come back, wants to experience the hot cheeked and wild hearted love to keep him running and running until his legs are aching and his face is tanned brown all over again.
He wants to love differently, more openly, a little braver.
The music has begun already, it’s faint and the tinkling is barely audible. If they stomp their feet hard enough or speak even a bit louder than usual, it would be inaudible.
Felix tilts his head up and blinks at the star dotted midnight blue sky. “Wanna dance?” he asks, his jaw angled and make-up washing away with sweat.
Hyunjin’s inhale is sharp and cuts through the faint notes of music. “I’d like that.”
Felix can’t bear to look at his face but he takes a peek nonetheless and feels his entire world tilt on its axis. Hyunjin has his hands bent in the softened shapes like the vines of shy lilies.
He offers his palm and Hyunjin stares at it for a beat longer than normal but before the heat of shame can set in, he accepts it.
“I don’t know how to dance,” he whispers, lips brushing against the shell of his pinkened ear.
Felix feels the fluttering of the butterfly wings in his belly. He feels seventeen all over again, dust motes filtering through glazed golden sun rays of the evening sun, the floor warm under the soles of their sweaty feet, palms slippery and hair matted to their foreheads, dark and damp and both of them growing and growing and growing with cracking voices and pimple covered faces and hair in awkward places and having a crush, falling in love — or what he had thought of love to be, the notion of it edging from known to unknown territories — making the misshapen pearl locule of time and summer to create a thing that he will always miss.
“Me neither. Just don’t crush my toes,” he whispers back, his heartbeat loud loud loud, marrow of his bone shaking.
Hyunjin snickers and pulls back, the edges of his face covered in a thin sheen of sweat, shining under the moon. Felix wants to taste the salt lining his upper lip. He wants to taste him.
“I’m glad you came,” Hyunjin tells him fondly and Felix viscerally realises the shrinking of the terrible thing that had been previously occupying all the space of his body.
“So am I. I feel like I’m home again,” he replies, the tiredness of the day settling into his bones, fatigue weighing down on his muscles. He lays his sweat slick forehead on Hyunjin’s shoulder and Hyunjin’s hands slip from his rib cage to waist to his hips and everything feels okay.
They sway to the music tentatively trickling in.
This is another memory Felix will preserve in a pocket of time, just for himself.
“Welcome home,” Hyunjin says, pressing a hasty kiss to his temple, bodies still in motion.
Here, wrapped in the embrace of a friend from forever ago and a lover from somewhere after, he feels at home.
They stay locked in the awkward embrace. Felix wonders if Hyunjin is bothered by the smeared foundation and sweat leaving a stain on the dark fabric of his suit.
“This’ll leave a stain, don’t you care?” he mumbles into his shoulder, trying not to fidget just in case Hyunjin does care about his suit and his movements may cause the stain to get bigger and darken worse than it might already be.
Hyunjin chuckles. Felix senses the vibrations against his mouth. He wants to swallow them and replace the tremors in his hands with them.
“No, I don’t care. It’s my Yongbokie Felix, after all.”
The childhood nickname beckons a rush of hot tears to his eyes. Felix thinks of how large Hyunjin’s love must be for him to keep discovering it hidden in every memory.
“I think I might cry,” he warns, wobbly and nose already red as a cherry tomato.
Hyunjin laughs, a warm sound that breaks him into clean pieces. “It’s okay. I might too,” he replies and leans forward until his cheek is pressing into Felix’s bony shoulders.
“That makes me happy,” he says, a wet laugh forcing its way through the lump in his throat.
Hyunjin is smiling.
Felix is aware that Hyunjin is smiling because he feels the shift of the muscles, the stretch of his mouth, the quiver of his body.
Hyunjin is smiling with him.
The tears slip down. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he keeps repeating into his shoulder, desperate and a little lost, needing to be forgiven, to say he’s repented enough.
“You did well, Felix. You did.”
Two boys, both dressed in the shades of a pulsing galaxy which is a bruise which is to say, that they are standing pressed into each other, crying about the bruises that are still tender to touch.
The music eventually stops and the banquet comes to an end. Felix’s heart drops to the pit of his stomach where it lays, heavy as a stone, reluctant to reach the bottom.
Their fingers brush with each step they take. Hope and dread are entwined with the lines of their fates. Felix wonders if they were doomed to even begin with.
They move apart, trying to fix their mussed up appearance, the awkward creases on their clothes and the puffy red of their face.
“You look like you’d just wept your heart out,” Hyunjin quips, pulling a spring smelling handkerchief and gently patting his face, drying off the sweat and the leftover tears.
Felix is too worn down to fight him, bat at his hands and proclaim that he is a grown up man and how he can take care of himself but being offered such gentleness, such tender warmth melts the cold in his body and he sags a little, leaning shamefully — the high points of his cheekbones are flaming pink and red — into the touch.
“I have to admit, as weird as it sounds, but I am suddenly jealous of everyone who’s seen you like this,” Hyunjin tries to off-handedly declare, fingers awkward now that the light is no longer pink.
The loud cries of cicadas and the persistent buzzing of blood thirsty mosquitos surround them. Felix relies on these sounds to truly acknowledge the onset of summer.
“Like what? Crying like a snotty kid?” he retorts, words light, a smile dancing on the curve of his cupid’s how.
Hyunjin doesn’t reply and Felix doesn’t dare to prod and poke. Not yet. They are still delicate and in the laborious process of piecing themselves back together.
“Of seeing you be vulnerable,” he replies after long, when they are almost done and stepping out into the deserted, glimmering streets, rows and rows of golden lights hung up.
“It’s nothing to be jealous over.”
“Maybe so but I’m a little unreasonable, baby,” the endearment slips out and Felix can feel his mind go blank.
The silence is back and so is the tension and Felix had been hoping for a chance at redemption ever since the night began, or more aptly, ever since the night all those years ago ended and he now realises one truth about the core of their relationship.
There is no redemption for them, only rebirth, swaddled in all their hurt and ache and ask for another chance.
He’s still not brave but he holds on to Hyunjin’s arm and begs his brain to let him remember this.
“You have the entire summer for that,” he says, ambiguous and a tad cowardly.
Hyunjin halts in the middle of the street and lays his sweaty palm over Felix’s curled fingers. “Do you mean it?”
Felix is being uprooted from his past demons and the ghosts that reside in the spiderwebs of his veins. He is not being brave when he asks, when he begs, ugly and bare and open,“Can we try again?”
But, the reality of it is, Hyunjin is just as bare and open and ugly as he nods, still harbouring affections for him, accepting whatever Felix can afford to give.
“Yes, Lix. We can,” he answers.
A firework bursts in the sky and bathes them in translucent silver-blue and emerald-green.
Hyunjin leans in, Felix doesn’t run away.