Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jeonghan doesn’t avoid Seungcheol after the breakup. He has this theory — exposure therapy, or something like that. A way to blunt the blade. It makes it easier.

Seungcheol does avoid him, though.

Not completely — things are ostensibly normal between the two of them. They share too many mutual friends to allow for a complete separation. Jeonghan had worried, months ago now, that Seungcheol would choose to cut and run from the whole thing rather than stay in Jeonghan’s orbit. Make a clean start for himself. It’s not Seungcheol who runs, though; he hasn’t ever run.

So Seungcheol doesn’t run, but he keeps his distance. He protects himself. Jeonghan can’t blame him for that.

Seokmin’s apartment is not particularly large, but Seungcheol manages to keep the space of a room between them for most of the night. They don’t make eye contact, because Seungcheol isn’t looking. He drinks his way through too many bottles of beer and gets loud, like he usually does, hanging off Mingyu’s shoulders and thumping Hansol’s back far too firmly when he laughs.

He announces, with more projection than he probably realises, that he’s going out on the balcony to have a smoke; Jeonghan can’t resist the chance.

“Seungcheol,” Jeonghan says by way of greeting, sliding the glass door closed behind them. It’s cold outside the warmth of the apartment, and goosebumps curl their way around Jeonghan’s arms.

Seungcheol doesn’t seem particularly surprised to find himself alone out here with Jeonghan, despite his best efforts. He returns the greeting with a nod, and he doesn’t look away. His cigarette sits lit but not smoked between his pointer and middle finger.

Each time they see each other, Jeonghan likes to catalogue the small differences. Seungcheol must have gotten a haircut some time in the last few weeks, because the hair is no longer curling around his ears. He’s also wearing a new bracelet — a simple brown beaded thing.

Jeonghan doesn’t offer anything further and neither does Seungcheol. Eventually, he lifts the cigarette to his mouth and the two of them stand in silence while he smokes, the sound of the party muted behind them. Six months ago Jeonghan would have had Seungcheol’s jacket around his shoulders. Six months ago Jeonghan would have been asking Seungcheol to take him home, please, because he’s tired and he’s cold, and Seungcheol would be ordering them a taxi.

Jeonghan reaches out, then, and runs a finger over the cool brown beads of the bracelet where Seungcheol’s wrist is hanging off the balcony railing. He’s careful not to touch the skin.

“Who’s this from?”

Jeonghan knows he has no right to ask what they both know he’s asking. He’s always been selfish like that, though. If anything, being apart from Seungcheol has made him more selfish than he’s ever been in his life. He knows what it means to want, now, and not to have.

“My mother,” Seungcheol answers, with only a few beats of hesitation, because he always gives himself away when Jeonghan asks him to. He’s looking right at Jeonghan, and Jeonghan knows he wants to ask why. He also knows that Seungcheol thinks he wouldn’t get a straight answer if he did. The part that makes it funny is that if Seungcheol asked him, right now, Jeonghan thinks he would tell the truth.

“You’re cold,” Seungcheol says, after the silence has stretched on too long. The you should go inside part is implied.

“I want to stay,” Jeonghan says, which is as close to honest as he’s gotten in a long time. He’s expecting to see frustration in Seungcheol’s expression, maybe even anger — he’s been careful to stay away, and Jeonghan is choosing to step over the line he drew for himself in the sand. There’s nothing like that, though.

“Okay,” Seungcheol says, and then he’s shrugging off his jacket and fixing it around Jeonghan’s shoulders. His hands fall away as fast as they came, and Jeonghan catalogues that, too.

Seungcheol smokes his cigarette down to the stub and flicks it off the edge of the balcony. Jeonghan imagines a different kind of night, one where he would’ve teased Seungcheol for doing that. Pretended to scold him. Seungcheol would have whined, gotten defensive about it even though he knew Jeonghan was teasing. Sulked until Jeonghan made it up to him.

As it is, they watch the little red light disappear and say nothing. There’s no reason for either of them to be out here now, and Jeonghan can see the goosebumps on Seungcheol’s own arms. He’s cold, and Jeonghan has his jacket.

“Thanks,” Jeonghan says, letting the jacket slip from his shoulders. He passes it back into Seungcheol’s hands, and the moment is over.

The immediate hush that falls over the room the second he steps back inside is predictable, of course, but Jeonghan lets himself briefly picture telling them to fuck off. It’s a particularly satisfying fantasy. A few of them, namely Jihoon and Hansol, have the decency of avoiding eye contact completely and making a fairly good show of pretending there wasn’t an active group discussion analysing what was going on out on the balcony. There are others — Seokmin, Mingyu — who stare outright.

What Jeonghan actually does, rather than tell each person individually to fuck off, is give the entire group a benign smile and make his way to the kitchen for another beer.

It’s Seungkwan who trails after him, of course. His urge to meddle is unparalleled.

“Are you guys talking more?” Seungkwan asks, his eyes like two little laser pointers. Jeonghan flips the bottle cap off and tosses it onto the counter, rather than into the trash, and is rewarded by the displeased pinch to Seungkwan’s mouth. Cute.

“A little,” Jeonghan says, although the correct answer is no. They are not.

“That’s good. That’s really good,” Seungkwan says. He pats Jeonghan’s arm — a little awkward, but genuine. For the first few months, Seungkwan had been visibly on the verge of panic any time the two of them were in the same room. His natural urge to fix — to fuss and organise and smooth things over, create harmony — butting up against the knowledge that there was nothing he could do and nothing he could say. The only thing they could do was wait. Seungkwan was never any good at waiting, but Jeonghan always has been. “I’m really glad to hear it.”

Jeonghan makes a small noise instead of committing to any actual response.

“Be careful, okay?” Seungkwan says, and Jeonghan knows that he means be careful with him.

There’s not a whole lot left for him in the evening, after that. He got his chance — more of one than he’s gotten in a long time, actually — and now the noise and the general activity of the party is more irritating for him than anything. He is tired, and he is cold, and he can get himself home.

He stays for a little under an hour and the only time he feels Seungcheol’s eyes on him is just before he leaves, Seungcheol watching him make his excuses from a safe distance across the room.

The part that everyone gets wrong is thinking Jeonghan was the one who ended it. He wasn't, though. Potentially the greatest humiliation of Jeonghan's life is that it was Soonyoung, actually, who told him it was over.

They'd had the fight — what turned out to be the fight — and Jeonghan had left knowing he'd fucked it up but figuring that Seungcheol would call him the next day once he’d calmed down, and Jeonghan would come over with his tail between his legs and make things up to him like he always did. That's not how it happened.

He'd gotten home, and he'd taken a shower, and then Soonyoung had called him almost in tears and he’d said that he couldn't believe the two of them had ended it. Jeonghan can’t remember what he said after that, now.

If Jeonghan were in the mood to laugh about it, he'd say it was funny. Soonyoung, of all people. He knew before Jeonghan did.

There's a worse version of Jeonghan that would resent him for it, but. Soonyoung is Soonyoung. It's impossible to hold a grudge against him, and Jeonghan doesn't hold onto things like that besides. He's never seen the point. Doing anything but letting it roll off your back only means you're the one carrying the weight of it around.

"How about these ones, hyung?" Soonyoung asks, holding up a pair of entirely hideous cargo pants. The back half of them are camouflage print and the front are an eye watering orange.

"They're a definite yes," Jeonghan says. Soonyoung, pleased, tucks them over his arm on top of an already fairly considerable pile.

They continue down the row of pants, Soonyoung digging through each pair with single-minded focus. Shopping with him always means looking at each individual item in the store while Jeonghan himself flicks through the occasional piece with no particular interest. It's entertaining, though. Jeonghan enjoys watching Soonyoung build his outfits in real time. The process is fascinating.

They spend a good forty minutes in the store, carefully combing the aisles, and Soonyoung leaves with two heavy bags straining the limits of their paper handles. They don't need to go far — the street is lined with cafes, and Soonyoung picks the first one that advertises smoothies.

"So," Soonyoung says, in that particularly clunky way he does when he'd like to subtly introduce a topic but can't come up with any segue. "There's this new guy at work. I think you two would hit it off."

"Soonyoungie," Jeonghan says, "you're devious, you know that?"

"He's handsome! He's really tall," Soonyoung says. He holds one hand up as high as he can reach, presumably to illustrate the guy's height.

"I'd hit it off with him because he's tall?"

"No! He's really nice, he has a cute cat, and he's funny," Soonyoung says, using the fingers not occupied with his smoothie to list off the items. "His sense of humour is kind of like yours."

Jeonghan makes a non-committal noise and attempts a strategic misdirection. "Did you ever ask out that guy from your gym?"

"Not yet. I could set up a blind date, if you want. He said he's free this Saturday," Soonyoung says, not misdirected. There's a stubborn set to his jaw.

Jeonghan hums. "I'm busy this Saturday. Decoupaging."

"You made that up. That's not even a real thing," Soonyoung whines. He digs out his phone and pulls up an Instagram profile he clearly already had open in preparation.

The guy is handsome. Nice eyes. Lots of photos with a sleek black cat strategically curled in his arms for prime cuteness.

"His hair is weird," Jeonghan says, scrolling past eight photos of this guy's perfect hair. Beach picture, cafe picture, a picture with what Jeonghan guesses is his mother holding a bouquet of flowers and beaming. He hands the phone back and Soonyoung pouts.

"It's not weird," he says. There’s a brief pause in which Soonyoung visibly wrestles with wanting to say something else. There’s uncharacteristic hesitance in his voice when he adds, "it's been five months, hyung."

Which is wrong. It's been just over six, now. Jeonghan shrugs.

"You know Seungcheol-hyung is..." Soonyoung says, trailing off at the end and, yes, Jeonghan knows. He knows that Seungcheol has been on some dates. Mostly setups, friends of friends. No one told him, obviously, but they did tell Joshua, and Joshua told him.

"It's fine,' Jeonghan says, wishing he'd gotten an ade instead of a smoothie. It's thick and too sweet and not doing anything to make his throat feel any less dry. "I'm not looking right now."

For the most part, he escapes the full brunt of their concern. He's fine, and they all know he's fine, and they usually don't tread gently around him. Soonyoung has that look on his face, though. The little crease between his eyebrows.

"I'd have to wear real pants," Jeonghan says, plucking at the sweatpants he's wearing that are probably not date-appropriate. It does its job — Soonyoung laughs, and the crease between his eyebrows disappears.

"I really admire you, hyung. I wanna be more like you. We don't need to date anyone, right?"

The only thing to do is laugh, so Jeonghan laughs.

“Right, right. We’re independent,” he says, despite the fact that Soonyoung has never been single for more than two months as long as he’s known him.

He does follow that guy’s Instagram, later on in the evening once he gets back home. He doesn’t respond to the message the guy sends the next day, though — he lets it sit unopened and unread at the top of his inbox.

Jeonghan's never been all that bothered by hospitals. It's not as if he likes them, obviously. He's not a maniac. But they don't make his skin crawl like they do for a lot of people. His sister still dreads their visits even now, despite it being a weekly event for months at this point. The tension in the way she holds herself is so obvious that even their dad probably notices it — maybe, anyway. When he's awake for it. If he does, he never mentions it. It might be the guilt of that dread that always makes her stay longer, even on days like today where their dad is awake for no more than a handful of minutes; just long enough to say hello before slipping away again.

"I'll tell him you were here, honey," his mom says, stroking her fingers over the back of his hand and tutting when she notices how dry the skin is. She digs into her purse and fishes a tube of hand cream out of one of its zipped compartments, squeezing a generous dollop into his palm. "Really, Jeonghanie. You need to take better care of yourself."

His sister, on the other side of the bed, makes a sharp noise of agreement. She casts a critical eye over Jeonghan's outfit which, admittedly, he did pick out of the selection available on his bedroom floor this morning. Jeonghan pulls a particularly hideous face at her and earns himself the exact disgusted grunt he was hoping for.

"Your eyes," his mom says, taking his face in both hands and letting her thumbs rest just below the dark skin of his under-eyes. "I have a cream for you, okay? It's vitamin C. Will you use it?"

"Okay, eomma," Jeonghan says, pitching his voice into a cute tone, which seems to be enough to satisfy her. She pats his cheeks and then kisses both of them in turn.

The one thing that does bother Jeonghan about hospitals is the lighting — the fluorescence inside always makes his eyes ache when he gets out. It's late afternoon, so the sunlight is on its way out, but it's still enough to make him squint and use a hand to shield his eyes.

There's a line of taxis queued up at the rank just outside the hospital, but the weather is nice and Jeonghan figures he could probably use the fresh air and vitamin D. He can walk until the sun sets and take a bus the rest of the way home, save his money to waste it on delivery for dinner instead.

He stops in at a CU a few blocks away from the hospital and spends longer than probably necessary contemplating the beer selection in the fridge. He picks an imported brand he doesn't usually drink and is pretty sure he hated last time he tried it, and he grabs some onion rings on the way to the counter. The attendant is entirely nonverbal and they conduct their exchange in grunts and vague hand waves, which is exactly how Jeonghan prefers his customer service interactions to be.

He barely registers the bell above the rear door jingling until he turns to leave and it's Seungcheol standing there, scanning the rows of ramyun on the wall shelf.

He does see him, obviously. It's just that the sight of him is so unexpected — so incongruous — that it takes a minute to sink in. Which means he's still standing there blinking like a fucking idiot when Seungcheol notices him, and it also means he's able to see the full progression of Seungcheol's surprise, and then his wince, and then the careful smoothing of his expression.

"Oh, hi," Seungcheol says, almost pulling off casual, and Jeonghan returns the greeting.

He looks more or less the same. It's only been two weeks since the party, so. His hair is shoved under a beanie, meaning he probably hasn't washed it in a few days, and the brown beaded bracelet is gone from around his wrist. The only real difference Jeonghan sees now is that Seungcheol looks like he might've put on a little weight — he couldn't tell at the party, either because of the lighting or Seungcheol's outfit. It suits him.

Seungcheol glances down and seems to notice the beer Jeonghan's holding in one hand.

"I thought-," he starts, and then Jeonghan remembers. They tried this beer together last summer, along with a few others they'd never tried before. Jeonghan had hated it — they'd both hated it. Seungcheol must remember it too, because he changes tack. "Were you visiting your dad? He's at the hospital nearby, right?"

His father was first admitted to hospital around two months after they ended things, so Jeonghan would have absolutely no clue how Seungcheol knows specifically which hospital he's at. A few of the others know — maybe Mingyu told him, for some reason. Mingyu likes to tell many people many things.

"Yeah, over by the park," Jeonghan says. He wants to ask what Seungcheol is doing here. He wants to ask Seungcheol which ramyun he's looking for, what else he's here to buy.

"How's he doing?"

"He's great, really good," Jeonghan replies, and there's a fist wrapping its way around his heart, "he'll probably be home soon."

"That's great," he says, which Jeonghan knows is genuine. Seungcheol and his father always got along well. "Tell him I said hi?"

“I will, yeah. Of course.”

Jeonghan wonders, briefly, if Seungcheol might ask a little more. He could tell him about his dad’s latest treatments, if he wanted to know. He could tell him about how much his sister hates their visits. He could tell him about how much longer this has been than Jeonghan prepared himself for; Jeonghan wants to tell him that. Seungcheol might even want to call his mother, if he knew how tired and worried she’d been lately. They used to talk on the phone every so often.

"Do you, um," Seungcheol says, visibly hesitating, "do you want a lift home? I'm parked around the corner."

Jeonghan allows himself a few seconds to picture it. He’d get into the front seat and close his eyes. Seungcheol has a soft pad wrapped around the passenger seat’s belt, thick enough that Jeonghan can rest his head against the window without having the vibration of the door disturb him. He could fall asleep like that. They might pick up some food on the way, order some better beer with it. The thought of it alone is enough to give Jeonghan this weird sense of relief even as he knows he'll turn it down. Maybe the relief is just in knowing that Seungcheol will always be Seungcheol, even after having his heart stomped on. He'll always offer to get you home.

"Nah, I'm good," Jeonghan says, because Seungcheol doesn't want to be trapped in a car with him for twenty minutes. He doesn't even want to be trapped in this CU with him. If Seungcheol is going to offer, the least Jeonghan can do for him is turn it down. "I feel like walking."

Which is not an answer Seungcheol would have ever accepted before — it's not one he'd accept from anyone else, either. He lets it go now, though.

"Sure. See you around, then," he says, and Jeonghan makes a noise that in his head was supposed to be a definitive goodbye kind of noise but in reality came out as more of a sick bird kind of noise.

He leaves Seungcheol behind and walks until his feet hurt enough to sit at the next bus stop and wait the twenty minutes it takes for the bus to show up. It’s only an eight minute ride from there — he could’ve walked home in the time he spent waiting, really. But there’s a point of exhaustion he seems to reach shockingly quickly, after which he knows he can’t push his body further than it’s already gone.

It feels unreasonable and frankly undignified to be the age he is and be taken out by a light walk. He doesn’t even make it to bed when he gets back — he walks into his apartment and goes straight for the sofa thinking he might actually just fall asleep there. He doesn’t, of course. He watches three episodes of some absurd drama about flight attendants, not picking up a single character’s name in the process, and then switches to an oddly soothing cooking channel. It’s the cooking channel that reminds him he hasn’t eaten, and he’s inspired enough to order a limited edition flavour of tteokbokki he hasn’t gotten around to trying.

He’s considered, quite a few times over the last handful of months, whether he should get a pet. That guy from Soonyoung’s work had such a soft-looking cat, one that seemed content to curl up in your arms. Jeonghan would like something that does that. A little creature that would meow at him when he got home, sit with him on the couch while he watches a chef prepare meals he knows full well he’ll never attempt himself. The responsibility of its care is too much, though. The responsibility of his own care is frankly too much.

He flips channels until he finds something related to animals — some show about celebrities and their pets — and he watches it idly until it’s a reasonable time for a man under the age of fifty to go to bed.

Jeonghan knows exactly how pathetic it is, but—

There are nights when he can’t sleep. It’s not something he ever used to have much of a problem with. It can be hours now, though; hours of lying there with his eyes closed willing himself to go the fuck to sleep. He’d expected it for a while after everything happened. Considering the fact that he’d spend the majority of nights for the past five years sleeping beside Seungcheol, who was not a quiet sleeper by any means, his body had gotten used to a particular rhythm. The sound of Seungcheol’s heavy breathing. The way he would snore until Jeonghan poked at his side enough to make him snuffle and huff and eventually stop, indignant even in sleep. How fucking warm he always was; uncomfortable in summer and extremely welcome in winter.

It was natural, then, to have trouble sleeping for a while. It’s never really gotten better, though — if anything, it’s only getting worse. All the things Jeonghan can mostly ignore while he’s moving through his day come out full force when he has nothing to do or think about other than sleep. He’s never, ever thought of himself as a dramatic person, but if he had to describe the feeling to someone else, which he does not plan on doing, he’d say it feels a little like dying. It feels a lot like something heavy is sitting on his chest, and no matter which way he lies it crushes his ribs at a different angle. The pressure of it feels like it’s slowing his heart down, like it’s closing his throat

Jeonghan is man enough to admit that he really hasn’t done much to attempt to fix it, up to and including asking a friend or perhaps a medical professional for advice.

Back to the pathetic part — there is one thing that always helps. Only one thing. Once he’s tired enough that his brain is willing to accept the delusion he lets himself picture it. He could roll over and pick up his phone. He could message Seungcheol, say he can’t sleep. Say he wants Seungcheol to come over. It’s a little like counting sheep, maybe, except instead of imagining sheep he imagines that the message is sent. Seungcheol is on his way, he’s in the car already. He’s ten minutes away. Jeonghan only has to close his eyes and wait.

It’s not something they’ve spoken about outright, ever, but things with Joshua had been a little strained since it happened. Since before that, actually.

It was a stupid fucking accident, but Jeonghan didn’t have the energy to explain it at the time and the shreds of his dignity are too thin and tattered now to risk admitting something like that to Joshua of all people.

The way it happened was this: they’d had some ridiculous argument the week before, as they often do, and then the fight with Seungcheol had gone down, and the official story was that Jeonghan had ended things, more or less calm and clear-headed. Like everyone else, Joshua didn’t find out from Jeonghan. He’d never said as much directly, but Jeonghan knew that he couldn’t understand why Jeonghan had made a decision like that ahead of time and said nothing at all about it to him either before or after the fact.

The truth was that, obviously, Jeonghan hadn’t made any kind of decision, that he’d stepped blindfolded directly onto a landmine and blown himself the fuck up.

Anyway — it was kind of strained for a while, and they saw less of each other, and it’s only within the last month or so that things have tentatively been returning to normal. There’s still a sheen of something strange over it, though, which neither of them are particularly willing to acknowledge. If either one of them had a different personality they would probably have a single straightforward conversation about it and clear things up, but neither of them do, so they don’t.

Joshua does make an effort, though. It’s him that extends the proverbial olive branch in the first place and it’s usually him to invite Jeonghan to lunch or to drinks or to some new boutique he wants to check out, and so Jeonghan always says yes.

Joshua asks him over on a Sunday, so Jeonghan breaks tentative plans with Soonyoung in favour of showing up at Joshua’s apartment with a plastic bag full of pastries from the Paris Baguette around the corner.

This part, at least, is mostly the same as it always is. They lie on the couch and divide their time between scrolling SNS and discussing the ways in which their mutual friends have recently embarrassed themselves. Jeonghan is just about to bring up the incident with Junhui at the barbecue restaurant last Saturday when he glances up and notices the way Joshua is looking at his phone.

“Who is it?” he asks, reaching out to poke at Joshua’s side. His ears are visibly pink at the tips.

“It’s no one important,” he says, with that carefully mild voice he always uses when he’s lying.

“Fuck off,” Jeonghan says, poking harder. “Who is it?”

Joshua ignores him point blank, his grip on his phone preemptively tightening in case Jeonghan goes for it. Jeonghan switches from poking with the pad of his finger to digging into the skin of Joshua’s side with his nail.

“Who, who, who, who,” Jeonghan chants, punctuating each who with a poke.

“It’s just Myungho,” Joshua snaps, and then purses his mouth shut again.

“Oh my God,” Jeonghan says. Minghao. “You wanna kiss Myungho.”

Joshua sighs heavily, pointedly not looking at Jeonghan.

“He’s just asking if I wanna go to this exhibit with him.”

“An exhibit,” Jeonghan crows, actually propping himself up properly now. “Like, an art exhibit? He’s gonna take you to a gallery and then he’s gonna tell you some bullshit about art and then he’s gonna fuck your brains out.”

“Can you shut up,” Joshua says, finally snatching at the hand poking at him and wrenching it away. The pink in his ears is bleeding into his cheeks, now. He slaps at Jeonghan’s hand again for good measure.

“Fine. I’ll shut up about your date,” Jeonghan says, just to see the way Joshua’s face pinches.

They fall into an enjoyably loaded silence and Jeonghan turns his attention back to his phone, opening up Minghao’s Instagram profile. He has an absurd amount of followers, actually. He gets at least two thousand likes on any given post — lots of vague arty photos and the occasional subtle thirst trap. The comparison between his profile and Joshua’s, which contains mostly brunch pictures and very carefully posed selfies, is kind of stark.

“Um,” Joshua says, after at least five minutes of silence. “Could you tell me if this sounds stupid?”

He seems a little reluctant to hand over his phone — don’t press send, seriously — but he does it anyway, and Jeonghan is treated to the message Joshua clearly spent the last five minutes crafting.

I don’t know his work
But it sounds really good :)
I’m free on Saturday?

Jeonghan very diplomatically says nothing while he fixes the spelling, Joshua hovering anxiously over him the entire time.

“Okay,” he says, “you need to flirt a little, though. If you don’t tease him he’s gonna think you don’t wanna fuck.”

“You’re so gross,” Joshua says, but he makes no move to retrieve his phone, so Jeonghan is free to make edits to his liking.

I don’t know his work
But I’d like you to teach me… :)
I’m free on Saturday~

Jeonghan hands the phone back to Joshua to inspect.

“It’s kind of slutty,” Joshua says, his thumb hesitating over the screen.

“You’re insane, seriously.”

Joshua huffs; he exits the app, then opens it again, and finally hits send.

“Slut,” Jeonghan says, and squawks when Joshua hits him directly in the softest part of his stomach. He does look pleased, though. It’s kind of cute.

He puts his phone face down on the coffee table, presumably to avoid the temptation of checking for a reply every six seconds, and announces that he’s going to make them coffee.

Jeonghan’s own phone is still open to Minghao’s Instagram and, before he can allow himself three seconds to recognise what a bad decision it is, he’s opening Seungcheol’s profile. It’s not something he indulges in very often, embarrassing form of self-flagellation as it is. Seungcheol unfollowed his own account ages ago.

It’s the same type of stuff Seungcheol always posts. He’s never been all that careful about posing, unlike Joshua; most of his photos feel real in the worst possible way. Stupidly warm and weirdly familiar despite Jeonghan not having been present on any of the days he’s scrolling past. The only major difference is that there’s a fluffy white dog in all ten of Seungcheol’s most recent posts; Jeonghan’s never seen it before. She’s there in his lap, and curled up in his bed. He’s taking her for a walk around his neighbourhood, down the street Jeonghan recognises as the one they used to take to get to the bar with the best pajeon and cheap drinks.

“Did Seungcheol get a dog?” Jeonghan asks, once Joshua comes back with two cups of coffee. Joshua seems to be surprised by the question — they never talk about Seungcheol. Joshua doesn’t even see Seungcheol one-on-one, as far as he knows, given Joshua’s perceived proximity to Jeonghan.

“Yeah, he did. Her name is Kkuma.”

She’s small and carefully groomed, her thick white fur trimmed like a neat little hedge. She’s wearing at least one pink bow in almost every photo. It’s obvious just from this how much he spoils her.

“She’s cute.”

“Yeah, she is,” Joshua says, giving into the urge to check his phone. “His therapist suggested he get her.”

Which- fuck. Jeonghan’s stomach cramps, like the impact of Joshua hitting him is only just now taking effect. Seungcheol has a therapist. Jeonghan broke his heart and now he has a fucking therapist.

“Ah,” he says, incapable of forming anything that more closely resembles a sentence.

“Myungho hasn’t replied yet,” Joshua says, chewing at his bottom lip. “Do you think it was too much?”

“I think he just has a job,” Jeonghan replies, swallowing around the feeling of bile climbing its way up the back of his throat.

Joshua makes a worried little noise and tucks his phone under his thigh. They had been watching whatever happened to be on, mostly as background noise, but now Joshua queues up some reality show Jeonghan knows he watches religiously.

Jeonghan puts his own phone facedown on his chest and the heat from its overworked battery bleeds through the fabric of his t-shirt, warming up the skin underneath. He doesn’t pick it up again.

Minghao doesn't reply for several hours, which gives Jeonghan ample opportunity to convince Joshua to try the mint chocolate flavoured soju. It's predictably repulsive, but it does mean that Joshua is sufficiently unclenched that he doesn't even notice Minghao's message for twenty minutes or so, which in turn means he doesn't have to fight the urge to reply embarrassingly quickly.

It calls for a second bottle in celebration, plus some beer Joshua finds at the back of his fridge leftover from the last time Jeonghan was here. It also calls for a deep dive of Minghao's Instagram and a thorough analysis of what they find.

Jeonghan ends up ordering a taxi at around midnight. He's in the exact sweet spot between not drunk enough and too drunk — he feels light, he feels like he's floating. It means that getting himself to bed feels like less of a chore than it usually does, because it doesn't really matter whether he's showered or brushed his teeth or changed into pyjamas.

It also means that when he pictures texting Seungcheol it feels real. It feels like he's already told Seungcheol how much he had to drink, and that he's going to wake up to three scolding messages in a row and a glass of water left out for him on his bedside table. Seungcheol will be there in the morning — awake first, because he didn't drink, and appalled at the lack of food in Jeonghan's fridge.

Jeonghan had felt mostly fine when he woke up in the morning, despite the two bottles of soju he polished off by himself the night before. A little headache, a disgustingly dry mouth; nothing that couldn't be fixed with a few tylenol and a toothbrush.

The sun is admittedly bright, though, and Seungkwan insisted they sit at an outside table. Jeonghan had employed his sunglasses to hold back and subtly camouflage his greasy hair — one of his most tried and true methods. He slides them down his nose now, the dregs of the morning's headache niggling at the back of his skull.

Ordering is a nightmare, as it always is, and Jeonghan goes for eggs benedict despite Joshua's pointed comments about cream sauces mixed with a hangover.

"I thought Mingyu was coming?" Soonyoung asks once the food makes it to the table. There's around half of them here — it's always difficult to assemble them all for a Sunday morning brunch, much to Seungkwan's dismay. Friday night dinners are a safe bet, typically, but anything pre-11AM is a challenge. Jeonghan has never seen Jihoon at a single brunch for the entire time he's known him.

"No, he's "busy"," Seungkwan says, using actual air quotes and giving Soonyoung a significant look which passes directly over his head.

"Is he working?"

"He means he's with a guy," Hansol supplies.

"Oooh," Soonyoung says, punctuating the noise with a ridiculous wink. "That Youngmin guy? I like him. He's sexy."

Seungkwan scoffs, fussing with arranging his napkin on his lap. "I don't like him. He doesn't take Mingyu seriously."

"Who does?" Jeonghan asks, which earns him a snort from Joshua and an unimpressed huff from Seungkwan.

"I'm serious. I don't want Mingyu to get hurt again," Seungkwan says, appealing to Hansol for a supporting nod. "I wish he'd be more careful."

This kicks off a round table discussion on Mingyu's frequently misguided romantic choices, which Jeonghan doesn't contribute to but does enjoy while he eats. Part of why Jeonghan always makes it to brunch is that they're a goldmine of gossip. An indispensable intel-gathering opportunity, and also deeply entertaining.

"Speaking of," Seokmin says, wagging his eyebrows in the way he always does when he has gossip to contribute, which is rarely, "I know why Seungcheol-hyung isn't here. He spent the night with Mingyeol."

Heat washes down Jeonghan's skin and settles in his stomach, thick and acidic. He knew Mingyeol's name, that Seungcheol had been on a few dates with him. He knew the names of the other people Seungcheol had seen once or twice before they fizzled out, too. But none of them had- none of them had gone far. None of them were serious.

Jeonghan had thought he'd been bracing himself for it, this entire time, and now he knows he wasn't.

There’s a chorus of noises Jeonghan can't manage to identify in his head, and then Wonwoo is looking at him, and then everyone is, and Seokmin's eyes are popping round and wide.

"Oh, hyung. Fuck. I'm sorry," he says. "I forgot. I shouldn't have said it like that."

Jeonghan laughs. He can't imagine what the noise sounds like to the rest of them. "You know it's fine."

Jeonghan doesn't look at anyone other than Seokmin, and he sees the moment that Seokmin accepts that it's fine. That Jeonghan is fine, like he has been this entire time, and that they don't need to be careful around him like they do around Seungcheol.

Soonyoung is pressing for more details, then, and Jeonghan is grateful for the ringing in his ears that drowns Seokmin out until he realises that the ringing is a surefire signal that he's about to throw up.

"Bathroom," he says to Joshua, quiet enough that it doesn't disturb the conversation, because he can't just get up and leave without saying something. He can't make it look like he's leaving because of this. He walks like he's in no rush, like he can't feel the bile climbing its way up his throat. His skin feels cold and clammy and he can feel the shake in his hands already and if there's someone in the bathroom he genuinely doesn't know what he'll do — is there a back door? Is there a conveniently large flower pot?

He thumps on the bathroom door loud enough to startle the well-dressed women at the closest table. There's no answer, thank fucking God, and he has just enough time to slide the lock home and get to the toilet before everything is coming up.

He wonders, briefly, if the women can hear him retching, if it's ruining their french toast.

Once he's finished — once he thinks it's finished, anyway — he rests his head in the circle of his arms over the bowl, spitting until the last string of drool and bile snaps.

Jeonghan would very much like to curl up next to the bowl and stay here for the next hour, but. He's already been in here for too long, and if someone has to come get him from the bathroom he'll have to die on the spot, so. He gets up, and he washes his mouth out in the sink, and he lifts his sunglasses up to survey the damage.

He looks like complete shit. Obviously. The sunglasses will hide how bloodshot his eyes are, at least.

Chan is, mercifully, in the middle of a particularly enthusiastic story about something work-related by the time Jeonghan gets back, and everyone is too engrossed in it to really look at him. Bar Joshua, of course. Joshua was always going to notice. He's the worst in that way.

"I told you not to get the eggs," he whispers, a judgemental little twist to his mouth. Joshua has never thrown up in public to Jeonghan’s knowledge. That’s another one of his negative traits. He digs in his purse for a tin of breath mints, passing it subtly under the table into Jeonghan's hand.

The headache creeps its way back in, and Jeonghan lets Seokmin finish his eggs benedict. He’s grateful to get the smell of them out from under his nose.

It’s not always the same thing every time. It usually depends on how long he’s been awake for — the more desperate for sleep he is, the more detailed the fantasy. On nights he’s been awake for hours he imagines he’s told Seungcheol that he’s sorry, and that Seungcheol is on his way over to hear everything. That’s not always actually comforting, though. Sometimes that’s worse than nothing. For the most part it’s simple, mundane shit; the kinds of things he used to text for when they were together.

He imagines he’s asked Seungcheol to pick up some food, that he didn’t have time to make a proper meal. He imagines that he’s told Seungcheol he has a fever and needs him to make a run to the 24-hour pharmacy. He can fill in the blanks more easily that way, because he knows exactly how Seungcheol would respond — the same way he did a thousand times before. The whining, the pouting dog emoticon he favoured when he felt truly hard done by. The be there in 20 min he’d send before Jeonghan had a chance to reply to any of that.

Jeonghan fills in the blanks, and it’s enough to get him to sleep.

The next time he visits his dad is awake the entire time. It's like that, sometimes. It's always hard to predict. He's more or less the same way he always has been, and they talk for a long time before his dad starts to flag a little.

He asks about Jeonghan’s job, which doesn’t yield all that much conversation given how little Jeonghan cares about his job. His dad wants him to, though. Before he got sick he used to press on the point constantly, always finding a new angle for it. He’d not-so-subtly drop into conversation the new jobs his coworkers’ sons had gotten, or university courses they’d started. He doesn’t do any of that now. The relief of it should probably make Jeonghan feel more guilty than it does.

"How's Seungcheol?"

It's not memory loss. The doctors say it's just a combination of how tired he is and the amount of medications he's on at any given time; he gets confused on certain details, but he always remembers them later on. It's things like this especially — things that were one way for a long time, and his brain just got used to them being that way, even if they aren't anymore.

"He's good. He wanted me to say hi," Jeonghan says, which isn't a lie. Seungcheol did say that.

"Are you guys up to anything fun this weekend?"

Jeonghan could easily brush the question off with something nondescript. He could also tell the truth.

"We were thinking we might drive out to Ganghwado," he says instead, fussing with a corner of the blanket that's come untucked, "stay at a motel by the water, maybe. Or we could camp in the car."

"You should camp, before it gets too cold," his dad says.

They used to camp in the car fairly often growing up. Both Jeonghan and his sister had always hated it for various reasons. Jeonghan's reasons were mostly leg space-related; he's fairly certain his sister's reasons were mostly Jeonghan-related.

It was different with Seungcheol, though, for even more glaringly obvious reasons up to and including car sex. Seungcheol used to make it this whole romantic thing, bring string lights to hang up on the open boot of the car.

"I think we will, yeah. Seungcheol wanted to grill meat," Jeonghan says, which his dad appears to be satisfied by. It's the type of news fathers like to hear.

"That's the first thing I want to do, once I'm out," he says. Jeonghan can see the way his eyelids are drooping, just a little. "I want to go camping. Down south, maybe. Do you think your mother will agree?"

His mother had, much like Jeonghan and his sister, certain objections to car camping. He's pretty sure they were more bug-related than anything.

"She will if you guilt trip her," he replies, which draws a laugh from his dad.

"Who raised you? I don't know," he says, all faux-ruefulness.

They manage another ten minutes or so of talking before his eyes really start to droop in earnest. Visiting hours are coming to a close soon anyway, so Jeonghan makes his exit while his dad is still awake enough to say a proper goodbye.

His actual weekend plans are this: go home, clear out the vegetables too rotten to ignore from the bottom drawer of his fridge, and go to Soonyoung's house for chicken and beer. Fall asleep on his sofa. Wake up on Sunday morning with back problems. Order McDonalds to ease the hangover. Leave once Soonyoung regains his strength (around an hour after the McDonalds) and wants to go out again. Nap on his own couch.

He’s around twenty minutes late to Soonyoung’s, due to the horror of liquified vegetables, and what he’s not expecting when the door opens is for Mingyu to be there. Mingyu is difficult to miss at the best of times, and Soonyoung’s body in the door frame doesn’t do all that much to conceal him hunched over at the coffee table, perched on one of the cushions tossed off Soonyoung’s sofa. There is what Jeonghan would describe as a palpable aura of misery wafting off him in waves.

“Uh,” he says, waving over Soonyoung’s head. “Hi, buddy?”

“Mingyu came for chicken,” Soonyoung announces loudly and then, in a whisper that is really more of a stage whisper than anything, “he got dumped.”

Mingyu heaves out an incredibly loud sigh and Jeonghan does his best not to laugh. It’s not that it’s funny, it’s just— the dramatics of it all. He ruffles Mingyu’s hair on his way past and doesn’t miss the way Mingyu leans into his palm.

Mingyu wastes no time once Jeonghan lays the chicken out on the coffee table. He launches directly into both the food and his story, not willing to concede on either of these things.

“He said I’m too clingy.”

“Clingy how? Did something happen?” Soonyoung asks.

“Kind of, I guess. He said I texted him too much,” Mingyu moans. “And I wanted to go on vacation with him.”

Something must show on Jeonghan’s face because Mingyu immediately adds, “just for the weekend! Not even far away. I wanted to go to Gapyeong, stay in a pension. That’s all I said.”

“Gapyeong is so nice,” Soonyoung says, as if that’s the point.

“It’s nice! I just thought it would be nice.”

There’s a brief lapse in which Mingyu cleans the last scraps of meat off the bone of a chicken wing.

“How much did you text him?”

“Not that much,” Mingyu insists, reaching for a wet wipe to clean his fingers off before he goes for his phone. He opens up kakaotalk before handing it over. “Aren’t you supposed to want to talk all the time, if you’re dating?”

Soonyoung leans over Jeonghan’s shoulder and they peruse the chat log together. There’s kind of a lot from Mingyu, admittedly — far more messages from him than there are from Youngmin. They’re all sweet things, though. A lot of Mingyu asking how his day is, if he’s eaten. Some selfies. Mingyu doesn’t make any attempt to cover or hide anything from them, not even the messages at the very bottom — of course Youngmin ended it over text, asshole. There’s Mingyu arguing his case, insisting that Youngmin call him to talk about it properly. Then begging. Then nothing. The last message Youngmin ever sent was the breakup text.

This is one thing Jeonghan has never quite understood about Mingyu. Being completely frank, he would rather actually die in real life than have any of his friends witness this kind of humiliation. He would never voluntarily show anyone messages like this. He would never beg any person to call him, let alone some shitty guy who doesn’t want to go on vacation with him.

After every single heartbreak — and there have been many — Mingyu always shares all of it like this. He never really hides any part of it to save face. Jeonghan has seen him pouring out the details of his latest breakup to Jihoon, of all people, who wouldn’t have been able to come up with a response if he had been paid to do so. And no matter how many times it happens Mingyu always, always tries again, and he tries just as hard as he did the last time.

“Mingoo-ya,” Jeonghan says, passing the phone back. “He’s an asshole. If he really liked you, he’d want to hear from you.”

Soonyoung nods emphatically, opening up a fresh bottle of beer for him. “You deserve a guy who would reply to a thousand messages a day. A billion messages.”

Mingyu seems to be a little mollified by this, the look on his face edging closer to decisive than miserable.

“I know this guy. He works at that place I took my laptop after it got fried,” Soonyoung says, which is an interestingly passive way of describing the time he spilled an entire carton of juice on his desk. “I could give him your number?”

“Okay, yeah,” Mingyu says, without asking for a single identifying detail beyond him being a guy who works at a computer place that Soonyoung went to one time.

Things kind of devolve from there.

There’s a lot more beer, followed by soju. There’s a lot of talk about exes — Mingyu and Soonyoung’s, anyway. Neither of them ask about Seungcheol, for which Jeonghan is eternally grateful. He already knows what Mingyu thinks. He already endured a solid month of pointed silences and weird looks. He knows that Mingyu thinks he was the asshole ex in this scenario. It’s fine, and it’s easier to just be how they are now. Jeonghan has always been fantastically skilled at ignoring the elephant in the room.

He does crash on Soonyoung’s sofa and he does, as predicted, wake up with back problems. It’s easier to leave after the McDonalds, because Mingyu has a similarly short recovery time to Soonyoung and the two of them are already making plans to head out to a new pancake restaurant.

Jeonghan scrapes himself up off Soonyoung’s sofa and endures two bus rides before he makes it back to his own sofa, where he spends the remainder of his Sunday blissfully alone.

"So how'd the date go?" Jeonghan asks, watching Joshua fuss with the placement of what cannot be more than five strands of hair.

"It wasn't a date," Joshua says. He avoids making eye contact in the mirror. "We were just hanging out."

"Uh huh."

Joshua does make eye contact then, because he has to in order to curl his lip at Jeonghan effectively. "We were."

"And that's why you've changed outfits five times in the past fifteen minutes," Jeonghan says. "Because you’re gonna see your buddy who you hang out with tonight."

Joshua makes a small noise of disgust and largely ignores him, turning to see himself at a different angle in the mirror.

Jeonghan leaves him to it, having been ready for the past half hour. He's refreshing his Instagram feed for the third time when Joshua asks, "do I look okay, though?"

He's in an entirely safe outfit of jeans and a white t-shirt with a loose checked shirt over the top of it. He's wearing a single tasteful necklace and no other accessories. He's insane, as always.

"You look sexy."

"Fuck off," he says, and Jeonghan knows he thinks he's being teased. Which — he kind of is, but only because he's acting like a freak.

"Seriously. You look good," Jeonghan insists. "But you need to actually flirt with him tonight."

"I'm not doing that in front of everyone," Joshua scoffs. The five strands of hair continue to cause him mental distress.

"Just do it subtly. Like, you need to make eye contact with him while you're drinking through a straw. Stuff like that."

Joshua looks highly dubious of this advice, so Jeonghan hunts around for anything resembling a straw. He grabs a pen off the side table and demonstrates the method with it between his lips — a look down, and then a slow gaze up through his lashes.

"Yuck," Joshua says, and then, "will that work?"

Jeonghan throws the pen and misses Joshua's head by about an inch. "Yes, dumbass. It's foolproof."

Joshua looks at the pen where it's fallen, like maybe he's contemplating practising the technique. "I don't think Myungho likes stuff like that. He's more, like," he says, gesturing aimlessly with both hands, "he's different."

"He's not different. He's just a guy and you're freaking yourself out over nothing," Jeonghan says, edging into exasperation.

It's possible he's being unfair. It's been more than five years since he's had to worry about things like dates and crushes and whether or not someone likes him back, although he's fairly certain he never wrapped himself into this many knots about it, but. Still. Joshua's anxiety is obvious. He untucks and then re-tucks his shirt, trying to decide which one looks best. The urge to torment him is incredibly strong.

"He has a dick and he wants you to suck it. I promise," Jeonghan says, which is about as comforting as he's capable of being.

Joshua huffs, but there is a little smile at both corners of his lips.

He takes another twenty minutes to finish getting ready, somehow, but it’s not really the kind of event you have to be punctual for anyway. It’s probably embarrassing to arrive early to an art function.

It's not a gallery, exactly. Minghao only referred to it as a "space", which Jeonghan personally found ridiculously vague, although when they arrive he does have to admit that the word is fitting. It's kind of just a space. Stark white paint, a high ceiling with exposed pipework. It's almost certainly described as "architectural" on its website.

It's also uncomfortably quiet. It has that weird hush that every museum has; the feeling that you're doing something you shouldn't be doing.

"I told you not to wear sweatpants," Joshua half-whispers to him, passing over a paper ticket. The event is free, technically, but there's a donation box strategically placed at the door advertising community art initiatives and Joshua drops some money in for both of them.

"I'm here to make you look good by comparison," Jeonghan replies.

Joshua seems to be genuinely pleased by this answer, although he does still fuss with Jeonghan's hair to make it lie flatter at the back. Jeonghan lets him finish, because he's very patient and kind, but as soon as he turns away Joshua is wrapping a hand around his elbow to stop him before he can take a step.

"Wait, wait," he says, eyes wide like a little animal's. It's a very particular look that's usually very effective on people who aren't Jeonghan. He seems reluctant to say the next part, chewing on his lower lip. "Please don't embarrass me, okay?"

"I won't," Jeonghan says. Joshua looks unconvinced, which is kind of insulting, but whatever. "Relax. Eyes on the prize."

They spot the prize himself more or less immediately, all the way across the room and chatting to someone who looks to be event staff. He's in this effortlessly cool outfit looking like absolutely no one else in the room and yeah, Jeonghan can see the appeal. He's never been that into skinny guys, though. Or guys that talk about art.

Joshua seems to believe it's embarrassing to go directly to Minghao, despite having been invited here by him personally, so they head for the little makeshift bar first.

"Two ciders, please," Jeonghan says, before Joshua can order them glasses of wine. He mouths straws when Joshua casts him a sideways glance, and Joshua attempts to communicate what is probably I'm not doing that and also fuck off with his eyes.

The paintings are of extremely varying quality. They start a slow loop around the room, and there are one or two Jeonghan kind of likes — freaky ones with vaguely threatening auras. Ones with thick globs of paint that stick out from the canvas and make him want to reach out and touch, see what he can get away with before he gets kicked out.

"Oh," Joshua says, stopping in front of a huge green canvas. He points at the little paper placard stuck to the wall next to it. "This one is Myungho's."

It mostly just looks like colours and lines, to Jeonghan. There's a heavy, deep green at the bottom of the canvas and he can track the movement of Minghao's brush travelling upwards, the colour thinning and the little hairs of the brush fanning out until it's so pale it's almost white.

"You made it," Minghao says, appearing beside them with that slow, warm smile that’s definitely making Joshua's knees weak at this very moment.

"Hey. Nice painting," Jeonghan says, buying Joshua's brain time to catch up to his mouth.

"Thank you," Minghao replies, an amused little twist to his mouth. "I wasn't going to submit this one, actually. I'd been working on something else for months. I started this one last week out of nowhere and it just, you know," he says, holding both hands out wide, "happened."

"Sure. That happens," Jeonghan says, although he wouldn't know the first thing about sudden painting inspiration.

"It's beautiful," says Joshua.

This seems to please Minghao more than the nice painting he got from Jeonghan, although Jeonghan personally feels it wasn't all that much more descriptive. "Yeah? What do you see?"

Joshua turns back to the painting, his face entirely placid. Jeonghan knows for sure he's at critical levels of internal panic, but his face really is remarkably still.

"The sea back home," Joshua says, after a pause just this side of too long. "Sorry, I mean. Obviously it's not meant to be L.A."

"No, no. There's no right answer," Minghao says. "I like that. I like that it made you think of home."

Joshua smiles, then, one of his little curled polite ones, but the redness of his ears gives him away completely. Jeonghan notices Minghao noticing the tips of them, flaming red in the brightness of the overhanging lights. Notices the way Minghao smiles in turn.

It's sick, it's foul. It's repulsive. Jeonghan will tell Joshua later.

"What do you see?" Minghao asks, directing the question at Jeonghan.

"Green stuff," Jeonghan says.

Joshua huffs, as if his own art critiquing abilities are any better, but Minghao doesn't appear to be bothered at all.

"It's very green," he agrees. "Let me show you the rest?"

"I have to pee," Jeonghan says, because he is an excellent wingman. "You guys go ahead."

He casts a very significant and meaningful glance at the straw in Joshua's cider before leaving them to it, walking off in a direction which is probably not towards the bathroom. He doubts either one of them will notice.

The amount of exhibitions Jeonghan has been to in his life could probably be counted on a single hand. The ones he remembers were more or less traditional, though — he went a few times for school to see historical exhibits, and once with his father to a folk gallery down in Busan. This one is looser, more casual. A lot fewer paintings of identifiable objects.

He's in the middle of examining a painting of what might be a rotten pear when he's startled by Junhui coming up behind him, as quiet as a fucking cat like always. Jeonghan doesn't know how he even managed to approach so quietly in a basically silent gallery.

"Hi, hyung," Junhui whispers, quite cheerfully.

"Hey," Jeonghan says, matching Junhui's hush. "Did you see Myungho's green thing?"

Junhui nods. He's chewing very audibly on a stick of gum. "I did. Very cool. What's this?"

Jeonghan turns his attention back to the painting. It's one of the ugliest in the room, in Jeonghan's personal and generally correct opinion. "No idea. I think it's a pear."

The two of them survey the painting in silence for a minute.

"It kind of looks like a butt to me," Junhui says. Jeonghan snorts, and the sound of it echoes down the room and reaches the woman handing out paper tickets, who looks distinctly unimpressed.

Jeonghan has to bite down very hard on his bottom lip to avoid actually laughing. The way he can feel Junhui's shoulders shake behind him doesn't help, either.

"Come on," Junhui says, pushing at Jeonghan's shoulder to move him on to the next painting. "What about this one?"

It's colourful, at least. It also looks like it couldn't have taken more than twelve minutes to make.

"Porridge. Abalone porridge," Jeonghan says. "After it's been left in the fridge for, like, a week."

Junhui lets out a little huff of laughter. "I know the artist, actually. So it's probably boobs."

"I think you're just a pervert, actually," Jeonghan says, which gets a particularly inscrutable smile from Junhui.

They continue down the row of paintings like that, taking it in turns to interpret the images. A bunny, a pile of old earwax. A three-legged dog with a horn. More boobs.

At the end of the aisle, there's a painting smaller than all the other ones.

"Okay, this one. What do you see?" Junhui asks.

Jeonghan likes the colours of it: warm blues that melt into greens. There's more of a shape to it than there was to any of the others. It looks like two people, maybe. Lumps under a blanket. If Jeonghan were the type to analyse paintings, he would say it feels familiar. Safe, even.

"I don't know. Nothing," Jeonghan says, suddenly tired of the game. It's fucking cold in here — why is it always so cold inside galleries? — and he's tired, and he never wanted to come in the first place. He only came for Joshua, and now that's done. He's off eye-fucking with Minghao while Jeonghan is here studying squiggles and lines with Junhui.

"I'm kinda tired, actually. I'm gonna head home," Jeonghan says, which is not even a lie. There's definitely a headache building directly behind his eyes. The lights in these places are always bright as hell.

"Sure," says Junhui, who never finds things like abrupt exits strange. Jeonghan can know for sure that this interaction isn't going to be discussed and analysed with anyone else, which is weirdly comforting.

Junhui's probably the only person in their general social group who doesn't have any opinions on the breakup. He's never made any attempt to express one or even suggest one through subtle facial expressions. Jeonghan's not even sure he's aware it happened at all.

"Enjoy the boobs," Jeonghan says, patting him on the shoulder as he passes.

On his way out, he does spot Minghao and Joshua. They're sequestered off in a corner, bodies angled in towards each other. It looks like Minghao is explaining something — he's gesturing very emphatically with his hands. Joshua is gazing at him, all moony and doe-like. Nodding way too much, blinking way too much. Jeonghan doesn't bother to say goodbye.

The next weekend, Seokmin hosts a party. He got some kind of promotion at work — Jeonghan doesn't really know what theatre job titles mean, but Seokmin is obviously excited about it, and there is a party. So.

It's the kind of party everyone attends because Seokmin, bless him, is a known grudge-holder. References to your absence would be often and pointed and probably go on for weeks, if not months. Jeonghan doesn't bring a gift, but he does bring wine, and he says congratulations when Seokmin opens the door, grinning wide enough to show off every single one of his gleaming teeth.

"Thanks, hyung. Wine! I love wine," he says. He steps to the side and, into the apartment, he yells with an impressive amount of projection: "Jeonghan-hyung is here!"

There's a light cheer from inside, and it's immediately apparent that around two-thirds of the guests are drunk already. The room is pretty packed and overly warm. He gets a handful of greetings, a few waves. Seungcheol, in conversation with Wonwoo, doesn't look up at all.

Jeonghan, not particularly in the mood for socialisation, begins the work of catching up to everyone else's level of inebriation. It's easy enough to just stand with Joshua and let the conversation flow around him, easing himself past lightly tipsy to fully buzzed to enjoyably drunk. He half-listens to Mingyu’s very extensive rant, which Joshua is politely responding to, and half-watches Seungcheol.

These days Jeonghan finds himself focusing on small details he's not sure he ever noticed before. Or maybe he did notice and his brain used to sift them out, unimportant as they were at the time. It didn't matter so much when he had all of Seungcheol to himself. Now he mostly only sees Seungcheol from across the room, so yeah. He notices the little things.

Seungcheol's holding court with about half the room. It would be impossible to ignore his voice even if Jeonghan wanted to, which he doesn't. He's got a beer in one hand that he seems to have forgotten exists for anything other than shaking emphatically and all Jeonghan can focus on is the shape of his thumb against the glass.

He's certain he must have noticed the shape of his hands before this — he always liked Seungcheol's hands. The way they felt on the small of his back, at the nape of his neck. Seungcheol used to touch him like that without thinking, like Jeonghan might need the guidance. He'd had an enthusiasm for holding hands that Jeonghan honestly hadn't encountered since high school. Still, he's not sure if he would've been able to even describe Seungcheol's hands before this. Now he thinks he could draw them from memory, if he were asked.

It's way too warm inside the apartment, and Jeonghan watches the way the flush spreads from Seungcheol's ears to his cheeks, red and splotchy.

“Hyung?” Mingyu says, interrupting Jeonghan’s train of thought. “What do you think?”

He’s looking at Jeonghan expectantly. Joshua is also looking at him, although he looks more amused than anything. He definitely knows that Jeonghan was not listening to a single word.

“I think that’s great,” Jeonghan says, and Mingyu’s face falls in what is honestly a comical fashion, “or that’s terrible.”

“You weren’t even listening,” Mingyu says, now deeply offended. Jeonghan tries to take his wounded feelings seriously.

“I was distracted, sorry,” Jeonghan says. “I really need the bathroom.”

He leaves Joshua to mop up that particular glass of spilled milk and heads to the bathroom. He doesn’t need to use it, actually, but getting up and walking makes him realise he’s more drunk than he thought he was.

It’s kind of nice, anyway, the quiet of the bathroom. He takes a minute to just stand at the sink, splash his face with cold water from the tap.

He only realises he forgot to lock the door when it opens, and it’s Seungcheol who walks in.

“Oh, shit,” he says, and Jeonghan watches him blink in the mirror. “Sorry, I thought it was empty.”

“It’s fine,” Jeonghan says. He shakes the excess water off his hands, patting the remainder of it into his t-shirt. “I’m just washing my hands.”

“Ah. I, um. I spilled a drink,” Seungcheol says, and it’s then Jeonghan notices exactly how drunk he is. It can be hard to tell, sometimes. Seungcheol can drink more than anyone else Jeonghan knows — he can drink easily twice what it takes to knock Jeonghan out and remain upright. He never really gets hangovers, either.

Right now he’s a little past fun drunk and edging into messy drunk. There’s a stain all the way down the front of his shirt, quickly turning an ugly dark brown, and he’s almost certainly lacking the coordination required to wash it.

“You did. Sit there,” Jeonghan says, pointing at the closed toilet lid, and Seungcheol is drunk enough that he does it without protesting.

Jeonghan rifles through the cabinet under the sink until he finds a bottle of liquid laundry soap and a cloth. He goes for the darkest part of the stain first, careful to lift the fabric of the shirt off Seungcheol’s skin before he starts to dab.

In almost seven months, this is the closest Jeonghan has come to him. The closest he’s come to an actual touch. Seungcheol’s been at the party long enough that he can mostly only smell beer and cigarettes on him but there is, underneath that, the hint of the cologne he’s worn religiously for years.

Seungcheol is quiet while he works. He watches Jeonghan’s hands for a little while, at the way the cloth lifts the stain, and then he’s looking up at him. It’s impossible for Jeonghan not to look, too. Seungcheol’s eyes on him, round and wide and not looking away. The curl of his lashes this close, how long they are against his cheeks when he blinks. He says nothing at all.

Jeonghan tolerates the gaze for as long as he can and then he steps back, letting the damp shirt fall against Seungcheol’s chest again.

“Look, see?” he says, and Seungcheol looks down. “All gone.”

“Wow. All gone,” Seungcheol repeats, smoothing the damp wrinkles out of the fabric.

They got to it fast — Jeonghan is pretty sure the shirt won’t stain, now.

“I’m very helpful,” he says. It’s pitched as a joke but doesn’t seem to land as one on Seungcheol, who only nods. He’s still inspecting his shirt. “Maybe we can be friends after all.”

That part is a joke, too. Seungcheol looks up from his shirt. He’s not smiling, although he doesn’t look angry either. Looking at him from this angle is agonising; his eyes big and sad and staring right up at him.

“I could never be friends with you,” he says. There’s no malice in it. It’s just the truth.

“Right. Yeah,” Jeonghan says, before his throat has time to close. “Okay.”

It is, without a single doubt, his limit. He leaves the soap and the cloth on the sink and Seungcheol where he sits. He walks out of the bathroom and directly across the room to where Joshua is talking with Mingyu. He hands over his half-finished beer — which Joshua definitely won't touch, but Mingyu certainly will — and announces that he's tired, and he's got family things to do tomorrow, so he's going home.

He doesn't bother with saying goodbye to anyone else. It doesn't particularly matter, anyway. He gets out the door and then he's blissfully, blissfully fucking alone, the muffled sounds of the party receding into nothing by the time he makes it out onto the street.

The bus stop is at the corner, a tiny shelter just barely blocking the wind. Jeonghan thinks the cold should probably be doing more to sober him up. He still feels mostly drunk, though, the light of the streetlamps swimming groggily the longer he looks at them. He wants to have a single point to stare at; something that won't move. Something that will help keep the puke in his stomach, where he'd prefer it remains.

It feels a little bit like parts of him are shutting down. Jeonghan tries to catalogue which parts of him still feel like they’re there and which parts feel like they’ve been scooped out.

He's given around three minutes to enjoy that blissful solitude before he hears footsteps, and he knows it's going to be Jihoon before he even turns to look.

Sure enough, there he is: all five feet and four inches of him hovering uncomfortably at the edge of the bus shelter. Jihoon has this strategy — at any given social gathering, he waits until the first person leaves and takes that as his permission to make his own socially acceptable exit. He's done it at every single event Jeonghan can ever remember seeing him at. There's something kind of admirable about it.

"You're taking the bus," Jihoon says, the sentence not really delivered as a question.

"Yup," Jeonghan replies, not having much more inside him than that.

The two of them shift their gazes to the timetable screen above their heads. It lists three different buses he could potentially take home and at least one he knows Jihoon could take, but there's no arrival data on a single one of them.

Jihoon perches on the other end of the bench and slips his phone out of his pocket, either to check the schedule himself or avoid having to interact with Jeonghan.

The two of them were never friends, particularly. They got along well enough and did end up spending a fair amount of time together, given the whole I'm-dating-your-best-friend thing. Jihoon never really got his sense of humour, though, and he didn't have the type of personality to go along with things he didn't understand. Jeonghan had always found him kind of boring, honestly, although he did enjoy the challenge of trying to draw a reaction out of that little stoic face.

It's not as if they really spoke before, as such, but they haven't had a single conversation since the day it happened. Out of all of them, it's Jihoon that Jeonghan finds to be the most uncomfortable to be around when no one else is there. It's Jihoon that Seungcheol would've cried to, after it happened. He would've heard everything. Every detail of Seungcheol's pain, every single thing Jeonghan said that night that was the wrong thing to say, in the end. He can't imagine what Jihoon thinks of him now. Or — he can imagine, and that's kind of the problem.

Jeonghan is quite busy thinking about how he isn't going to say a word to Jihoon, so he doesn't notice he's actually doing it until the words are already leaving his mouth. "How's the job going?"

"It's good," Jihoon says, his voice completely neutral. He doesn't look at Jeonghan.

Jeonghan slumps back against the glass of the shelter and rests his head against it, tilting until he can look directly at Jihoon's profile. The red glow of the timetable is reflected on his cheek, high up enough that it almost looks like blush.

It was never a possibility, asking him how Seungcheol was doing. Even if Jeonghan wasn't afraid of the answer, he knows he can’t ask. Jihoon almost certainly wouldn't answer. He doesn't ever gossip, not even about inconsequential things, and he doesn't do anything behind a person's back. He has particular beliefs about the way things should be and he sticks to them without faltering, especially when it comes to loyalty. He takes care of Seungcheol in his own way, and Jeonghan can only be grateful for that.

He knows none of them really took his side, but no one else could come close to resenting what he did as much as Jihoon has to.

"You must really hate me, huh?"

Jihoon actually turns to face him, then, and the shock is obvious enough on his face as to be almost funny.

"Me?" he asks, his eyes round like saucers and his mouth dropping open into a little O shape. It makes Jeonghan laugh, and the sound of it is more strangled than he was expecting it to be.

"You," he says, almost feeling guilty for putting Jihoon in what has to be the most uncomfortable social situation of his life. He should smooth it over. It's not Jihoon's fault — really, Jeonghan doesn't blame him at all. "I know. It's okay."

Jihoon doesn't say anything for a while. He only looks. Jeonghan follows how Jihoon's eyes track his face, then how they take in the way he's relying on the glass to remain upright. He probably looks startlingly similar to an actual sack of shit right now.

"I don't hate you."

He says it very simply. He looks incredibly uncomfortable, but one word that could always be applied to Jihoon is honest. Jeonghan has never known him to lie.

“Oh,” Jeonghan says, and there’s a little prickling feeling building behind his eyes. “That’s so weird.”

Jihoon looks stricken enough that the prickling sensation starts to fade in favour of what is probably a laugh. If he cried in front of Jihoon that really would be the end, anyway — for both of them.

They’re rescued from the moment by the arrival of the bus, almost completely empty aside from a middle-aged man asleep in the very back seat, and they’re more than halfway to Jeonghan’s stop before he realises that Jihoon is on the wrong bus.

“This isn’t your bus,” he says.

Beside him, Jihoon is watching an anime Jeonghan doesn’t recognise on his phone. He makes a little grunt of agreement and seems to be already aware of the fact. He doesn’t look at Jeonghan, but now that Jeonghan is looking at him, he does tilt the phone screen so that they can both watch.

They pass the last fifteen minutes or so like that, and when they get to Jeonghan’s stop Jihoon gets off with him, hovering directly behind him with one hand outstretched like he’s worried Jeonghan might fall down the bus stairs. It’s not entirely unfounded, to be fair.

His apartment is only on the second floor but there’s absolutely no way he can manage a staircase in his current state, so the two of them wait for the elevator together.

“How will you get home?” Jeonghan asks, the thought suddenly occurring to him. Jihoon still has to get home. “Do you want to stay here? You can, I have. There’s a sofa.”

“It’s fine,” Jihoon says, trailing behind Jeonghan all the way to his front door. “I can get the bus from here. It’s not far.”

He wants to protest the issue — insist Jihoon stay the night here, even take his bed if he wants. He’s younger than Jeonghan. It shouldn’t be him making sure Jeonghan gets home safely. He already knows there’s not much point to it, though; Jihoon is immovable once he’s made up his mind.

Jihoon seems to be waiting for Jeonghan to actually open his door and get inside before leaving. It takes two tries for him to get the code right, but he does manage it.

“Um. Thank you, really,” Jeonghan says. That little prickle is back. “Thanks.”

Jihoon nods firmly, and then he’s reaching out to give Jeonghan the stiffest, most unnatural shoulder pat he’s ever received.

“Good night, hyung. Drink some water.”

He stands there until Jeonghan closes the door, and Jeonghan listens for the ding of the elevator before moving. He doesn’t have even close to the amount of energy required to wash his face, but he does collect a bottle of water from the fridge on his way to bed.

Jeonghan is absolutely certain, right before falling asleep, that he is going to spend his entire Sunday in bed. Possibly not even get up for either food or the bathroom. He does, though. He gets out of bed before noon, because none of his work clothes have been washed and there's no edible food in the house and he has to go to the store for garbage bags anyway.

He does all the things he's supposed to do on a Sunday and then he goes to bed and doesn't sleep and then he gets up in the morning and he goes to work, because he has no more sick days left, and because he isn't sick.

The week is long — although it's not really longer than his weeks normally are — and he gets progressively more exhausted until Thursday night, when the accumulated lack of sleep is enough for him to sleep through the entire night. He thinks often about sending Jihoon a message, something to say thank you, but he doesn't have his kakao ID and he's pretty sure Jihoon hasn't logged in to any social media site in the past three years at least.

Joshua asks if he's free on Saturday, and the idea of staying in his house all weekend is equally as unpleasant as the idea of getting dressed and going outside, so Jeonghan says yes. Might as well. Joshua's asking more often these days, and he doesn't want to fuck with it. Joshua is just as prone to giving up as Jeonghan himself is.

It's nice, besides. It's nice to have someone to just sit with and not have to say all that much to.

"So, um," Joshua says, about twenty minutes into a very agreeable silence. They'd ended up in his bedroom, the laptop propped up on a little box at the foot of his bed. "Myungho kissed me last night."

He's trying to sound casual, as if he's mentioning it offhand. He doesn't take his eyes off the laptop and makes a decent show of pretending to watch the movie they put on.

"Holy shit," Jeonghan says, grinning wide enough to make up for the way Joshua is fighting his smile. "What happened?"

So Joshua tells him: they'd been talking all day, and he'd mentioned having forgotten his umbrella. Minghao showed up at the end of the day, waiting there at the front doors of Joshua's office building under the arc of his own umbrella. They'd walked to a wine bar in the neighbourhood — of course it was a wine bar, Christ — and Joshua let Minghao choose the wine, and they'd talked until they were the only two left and the owner kicked them out, impatient to start closing up. Minghao had kissed him there, on the curb, under the umbrella in the pouring rain.

Disgustingly romantic, and absolutely the kind of thing he knows Joshua spends hours fantasising about if his taste in dramas is anything to go by.

"Dude," Jeonghan says, and then again, "holy shit."

“It was nice,” Joshua says. He’s the most ridiculous person Jeonghan has ever met, and Jeonghan deeply wants to tease him for it. There’s a significant amount of material already. He wants to ask what Minghao’s line was — and he knows for a fact Minghao had one loaded up and ready to go for that moment. Something poetic and corny as hell that probably made Joshua all flustered and shy. He wants to pry out every last detail until Joshua is squirming with it, but. It’s been a while since Joshua came to him with something like this.

"Myungho's the best," Jeonghan says, instead of needling him. "Better than all the other shitty guys you've dated and forced me to interact with."

“Shut up,” Joshua snorts, without any heat behind it, because they both know it’s true.

"I mean it. He'll be good to you," Jeonghan says, and it comes off about as awkwardly as he’s expecting it to. They don't do this, really; they never have. They don't say things like that to each other. He does mean it, though.

"Yeah, um. Thank you. Like, for your help," Joshua says, obviously struggling with the attempt at sentiment as much as Jeonghan did.

"Sure," he says. "It was the straw thing that did it."

It breaks the weird tension of the moment and gets Joshua to laugh, pushing at Jeonghan's calf with his feet. "Yeah, you're an expert." There's a curious little tilt to Joshua's head, and then he's asking, "have you been getting practice?"

Jeonghan knows exactly what he's asking: is there someone you're flirting with, is there someone you're dating? It's not a question he's actually been asked by anyone at any point in the last seven months, but it still shouldn't really come as a surprise. It does, somehow. It seems like such a ridiculous question to ask.

"Oh, no. I'm done with all that.”

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know," Jeonghan says, flapping his hand vaguely, "I had it, and now I don't."

Joshua props himself up on both elbows to get a proper look at Jeonghan, his own face entirely serious. "But that's insane?"

It's a weird overreaction, especially coming from Joshua. The easiest thing to do is pass it off with a laugh, so Jeonghan does.

"Jeonghan, you're twenty seven. That's the kind of thing sixty-year-old widows say," Joshua says.

"I have a surprising amount in common with sixty-year-old widows," Jeonghan says, shoving at Joshua until he loses balance and falls back onto the mattress, breaking their eye contact. "I've been thinking about getting a cat, actually. So there's another thing."

They're both quiet for a little while, and he can feel Joshua's eyes on the side of his face. Jeonghan reverts his attention to the movie they had playing, although he's behind by several plot points by now, and he flattens his expression into something entirely neutral. Joshua will let it go, if Jeonghan doesn't engage. He always lets it go.

"But it was your choice. You wanted to break up with him," Joshua eventually says, tentative. He sounds borderline upset, which. Jeonghan can't quite figure out how what he said came off as intense enough to warrant that. He didn't mean it in a dramatic way. It's just how things are; that's all he really meant.

For the most part, Jeonghan wants him to stop. Not this — he doesn't want to be pushed on this. He wants to watch this stupid fucking movie and order some food and possibly fall asleep here, rather than going home. Joshua probably wouldn't mind if he spent the night.

There's another part, though, that would've told Joshua this back when it happened. If he had asked.

"I didn't," he says, and it's the first time he's said it out loud to anyone. "I didn't think we were breaking up. I thought it was just a fight."

There's a few beats of complete silence in which Jeonghan cannot bear to look at Joshua. It doesn't feel better to have said it aloud, actually. He kind of thought it might.

"But you didn't want to live with him. You said you didn't see the two of you together in the future," Joshua says. The mattress dips a little as he turns carefully onto his side, and Jeonghan lets the movement rock him onto his back. He looks straight up at the ceiling.

"I didn't say any of that," he replies, surprised by the bitterness of his own voice. It does feel bitter, though. It feels really fucking bitter to be saying it this many months later, when he knows they all think they know the story back to front. "I just- I don't think about things in the same way that he does. Or did. I don't think about the future like that."

Here's how it had happened: Seungcheol asked Jeonghan to move in with him. Jeonghan hadn't realised, at the time, what the question meant to him. That it was this romantic thing, a symbol of them starting a life together. To Jeonghan it had been a matter of practicality — they'd been together for five fucking years, and they spent every night at one of the two apartments already. Their places were a fifteen minute drive away from each other, and both of their leases had less than six months left before running out. It only made sense to wait, to just see where they were at in a few months. They could look then, if they still wanted to. There was no point in losing money on two broken leases when it made no real difference either way.

They already had a life together, and Jeonghan was happy, and that had always been enough for him.

Seungcheol had been upset from the jump, and everything spiralled from there. Jeonghan was never good at that part — soothing him when he was worked up, knowing what to say. What he's supposed to do when Seungcheol starts to cry. Seungcheol kept pressing him about the future, about why he couldn't say what he'd want in a few month's time, or in a year from now, or five years — and Jeonghan didn't have the answers he wanted to hear. He did what he always does when they fight. He let Seungcheol say what he wanted to say, and he didn't push back, and then he left.

Seungcheol had asked him if he even saw the two of them together in a few months' time, once the leases had run out, and Jeonghan had told him that he didn't know. He really doesn't know why the fuck he said that, now.

"Have you told him this?"

"I tried. I called him," Jeonghan says, which is true. He does remember that part of the night with perfect clarity. After Soonyoung hung up, how the phone kept ringing out every time he tried to call Seungcheol. How sure he felt at the time that Seungcheol would call him back the next day, and then the day after that. How long he waited for it — an embarrassingly long time, in retrospect. "He didn't want to talk to me."

"Okay. But have you told him? Like, after?" he asks, with a patient voice Jeonghan has never heard Joshua use on him.

“He doesn’t want to talk,” Jeonghan repeats.

“Did you try?”

"Trust me. He can barely be in the same room as me," Jeonghan says. Of this he is absolutely certain. He knows, far better than anyone else, the way Seungcheol reacts to him now. "He didn't pick up then and he wouldn't now."

"Um, I mean. I've seen, like," Joshua says, "the way he looks at you."

Jeonghan does look at him, finally, because that is far too absurd to go without an incredulous stare. Joshua blinks back at him like what he said was reasonable and not insane.

"Yeah, so have I. He looks at me like I kicked his therapy dog."

"No. He looks at you like he's still in love with you," Joshua says, and Jeonghan wishes he'd said basically anything other than that. He doesn't need it — platitudes and empty bullshit designed to make him feel better. It doesn't help anything at all.

"Yeah?" Jeonghan asks. He's aiming for flippant and is genuinely surprised by how angrily it comes out. "I spoke to him last week, actually. He told me he could never be friends with me again, so."

Saying that part aloud does not feel good, which he definitely could have predicted himself. It feels remarkably similar to what he imagines eating glass is like, actually. The pieces of it slide down his throat and settle at the base of his stomach, sharp and sick and heavy.

"I mean, yeah. Like," Joshua says, as eloquently as ever, "yeah."

“This is dumb. It doesn’t matter,” he says. He wanted to say it and now that he has it’s worse, it feels worse.

Jeonghan stares resolutely at the laptop screen. He wants out — he wants the fuck out of this conversation, and he knows Joshua will stop pushing at the first real signs of resistance. The silence between them is deeply uncomfortable, but it is effective. After a minute or so Joshua turns his own attention back to the screen and they finish the movie without another word.

Once the credits roll Joshua asks him if he wants to stay the night, and the question sounds genuine. Jeonghan had been gearing himself up to leave and he surprises himself by saying yes. He doesn’t bother with washing his face; he just accepts the pyjamas offered to him and watches Joshua putter around getting ready for bed. It’s kind of fascinating to watch, actually. Jeonghan’s pre-sleep ritual consists of plugging his phone into the charger and taking one last pee.

"I just think you should talk to him," Joshua says, not even directing the words at Jeonghan. He's focused on patting a cream into his cheeks, like maybe he thinks Jeonghan is less likely to startle that way. "That's all I'm gonna say."

Jeonghan turns over to plug his phone in. He stays like that until the bed dips behind him, and then Joshua switches off the lamp.

The thing that stops Jeonghan from sending those messages now on nights when he can’t sleep is not entirely pride, actually. It took a long time to admit that part to himself. It’s also hope. There’s a tiny bit of it left, underneath everything else, and the only thing Jeonghan can do to hold onto it is to not send the message. If he did send it, and Seungcheol told him no — or to fuck off, or just ignored it point blank — then Jeonghan would know. And then it would really be over.

Of course he tried — he did, that night. He called. Three times. Seungcheol never called him back. At the time it seemed like all he had to do was wait; if he just waited long enough, then Seungcheol would calm down. He'd want to talk about it. It didn't feel like there was any point in continuing to call, or in blowing up Seungcheol's phone with messages.

It’s still the only thing he can think about all week. Joshua’s voice in his head: Did you try?. Did you really try?

It pisses him off enough to ignore Joshua’s messages for days. Jeonghan had been doing a spectacular job of not thinking about it — because it’s useless, because it achieves absolutely nothing — until Joshua decided to dig it all back up.

It also makes him glad to have an excuse to turn down Joshua’s invitation to some new cafe in Hongdae on Saturday. He can’t; he’ll be visiting his dad.

Both his mother and his sister are already there by the time he arrives. His father is halfway between awake and asleep. He gets this way, sometimes — just aware enough to try and fight for consciousness. It means that they’re able to talk to him, but most of what he says barely makes any sense. They just talk for the sake of talking, to keep him occupied with it.

It doesn’t upset him like it does his sister. Jeonghan’s always been good at talking about nothing.

They make it about an hour before he falls asleep properly, not stirring even when they talk quietly around him. Jeonghan’s hips are kind of stiff from the hard plastic of the chair, so he takes his chance to get up and stretch his legs. He wanders out of the room and around the corner in search of a drink.

"We need to organise to bring Grandma up to the city," his sister says, materialising beside him at the vending machine. Jeonghan would love to know why all hospital vending machines exclusively stock the kind of snacks no one wants to eat. "We've been putting it off. She needs to see him."

"Yeah, I guess. But if he's home by Seollal, we could just drive down to visit her," Jeonghan says idly, mostly distracted by the choice between a fanta or a cider.

"Jesus, Jeonghan. I wish you would stop fucking doing that," his sister snaps, so suddenly and with enough venom that it actually shocks him.

"Doing what?" he asks, immediately defensive. He is quite literally just standing here and contemplating drink choices.

"Acting like he's coming home," she says. "It makes it harder. It makes everything so much fucking harder when you won't stop pretending."

There's real anger on her face. The way she tends to get angry hasn't changed much since childhood — it appears like a bolt of lightning, out of nowhere, and she was never all that good at containing it once it arrived. Jeonghan used to like to tease her into a frenzy, see how red her face could get. See what he could goad her into doing. He doesn't want to do that, now. He doesn't even want to look at her.

"Even if you run from this, eomma and I have to face it," she says, loud enough that a pair of aunties down the hall turn to look. There's a little shake in her voice that sinks straight into the base of his stomach.

Jeonghan isn't sure if she wants a response or not, but even if he did have one — which he doesn't — he's fairly sure his throat would be too constricted to get it out. The only thing he gives her is a nod, which is pathetic, because he's the older one. He should be taking care of her. Taking care of his mother where his father can't anymore. Reassuring them both, making arrangements. But he isn't; he's not doing any of that.

She takes the thousand won note out of his hand and feeds it into the machine, smacking the button for cola, and then she's storming off, disappearing around the corner of the hall.

One thing Jeonghan has always, always been good at is letting things go. He's never been one to hold onto things — he doesn't cling to grudges, and he doesn't overthink. He's never seen the point in any of that. There are things you can't change, no matter how much you go over what you did and what you could've done in your head. There are things that are out of your hands point blank. In the choice between torturing himself and just moving the fuck on, moving on has always won out. It was always a choice, too. It always used to be a choice.

A single sip of the cola is enough to make his stomach lurch, so Jeonghan dumps the entire can in the trash. There is, actually, a lot that he hates about hospitals. He hates the lights and he hates the way every single seat in the entire building is designed to be uncomfortable and he hates the way the rooms are only ever too hot or too cold and he hates that his father is dying here in a bed that's too small, in a room that only looks out onto a fucking parking lot.

He contemplates walking out. His father won’t wake up for the rest of the visit; there’s no chance they’ll be able to talk.

He doesn’t, though. He goes back to the room. He drags the chair up until it’s close enough for him to fold himself over, lay his arms beside where his dad is sleeping and rest his head in the circle of them. He stays like that until he falls into a sleep shallow enough that he knows when his mother and sister are leaving, his mother’s hand running lightly down the length of his back as she goes.

There’s a certain line of exhaustion that leaves Jeonghan’s entire body aching once it’s crossed. Like he’s actually sick, even though he knows for sure he isn’t. He knows that all he needs is just to sleep — sleep through the whole night, without waking up, and then he’ll feel better. Everything will work again. The more his body aches, though, the further he gets from sleep. It makes him more alert. It makes his brain zero in on every sound: a muffled conversation being had on the street outside, the cars passing. The sound of his own body moving against the sheets. It’s fucking unbearable.

Jeonghan very rarely reopens his old messages with Seungcheol, partly because there’s nothing really to agonise over even if he were the type to do so. He never sent any messages after that day, and neither did Seungcheol. Not once. The chat log does show his three outgoing calls — all unanswered — but other than that it’s more like a weird memorial of what things used to be like. Gathering dust. The last actual message is from Seungcheol, asking him to pick up milk on his way over. A relic from some ancient civilisation.

Did you try?

What is there to lose, at this point?

If it’s pride — if it’s only pride, then Jeonghan should be willing to let it go. And if it’s hope, maybe it’s better to lose that now.

Jeonghan’s brain is several steps behind his hands, which means he’s able to type out and send a message before it activates any failsafe measures. I think I need you to come over.

And there’s no time — no time to reconsider, no time to delete the message, because the little 1 beside the message blinks off the screen in seconds.

He has a few more seconds to feel what is maybe elation or potentially actual insanity before the response comes.

What? Why?

Fuck. Oh fuck.

He could try to send an explanation, but what is there to say?

Jeonghan shoves the phone face down under his pillow. He can face it tomorrow, send an apology text. Pretend he was drunk. Pretend he was high. Pretend he meant to send the message to someone else. Maybe — honestly, maybe he can just pretend he never sent it, and Seungcheol won’t ask him about it, and everything will be like it has been.

He didn’t try; not really. And this is why. He’s not like Mingyu — he’s not willing to humiliate himself, lay himself down at someone’s feet when he already knows the answer he’s going to get. There’s no fucking point in it. Before he had that little scrap of hope, something to entertain himself with on nights where he couldn’t sleep, and now he has nothing. Now he knows for sure that he has to do all this alone.

Jeonghan rolls himself onto his back. It’s the position that hurts the least, allows his spine to flatten itself out. There’s nothing he can do now to shut off his brain; he can’t even manage to focus on one thing. Everything comes at once, wraps around his brain like a python and squeezes.

It can’t be more than ten minutes later that he hears the beep of the door code being entered, the smooth tone of the code being accepted. The door opening. Which means that someone is in his fucking house. It could be his sister, maybe — maybe something happened to his dad. She’s coming to take him to the hospital. Joshua knows the code, too, but Jeonghan cannot think of a single reason why he’d be showing up at his house after one in the morning.

Light spills out from the living room, and Jeonghan bolts out of bed fast enough to make himself dizzy.

“Jeonghan?” Seungcheol calls out — it’s definitely Seungcheol. It’s Seungcheol’s voice.

It’s also Seungcheol standing there when Jeonghan emerges from his bedroom, still wearing his shoes. Car keys in hand, as if he’s here to take Jeonghan somewhere.

“Jeonghan? Fuck,” Seungcheol says, taking a few steps further into the room. He looks Jeonghan up and down, like he’s surveying for something. None of it feels real. “I thought you’d be on the floor or something, Jesus. Fuck. What’s wrong?”

“What?”

Seungcheol stares at his face now, apparently done with his survey. He looks stricken, actually. Jeonghan can see how pale he looks in the living room light. His hair is a wild mess, like maybe he’d been in bed before he left. “You weren’t answering. Why didn’t you answer me?”

“Oh, I didn’t-” Jeonghan says, trying to remember why he didn’t, actually. He goes to check his messages before he realises he doesn’t have his phone in hand. “My phone is under my pillow. Sorry.”

Seungcheol only stares at him.

There’s a few beats of painful silence before Seungcheol asks, his tone tightly controlled, “why would you send me something like that and then not answer me?”

“Sorry,” Jeonghan says. His heart is beating fast enough to make him feel sick, his head swimming a little with the rush of his blood. “I didn’t think you’d come. I’m sorry.”

“Why would you- okay. Is nothing wrong with you?”

There’s actual anger there, now. Seungcheol is getting angry. Jeonghan hasn’t seen him properly angry since it happened, and the sight of it twists something sharp in his gut. He made Seungcheol panic for no reason. He made Seungcheol come all the way over here — he’s here, actually here, in Jeonghan’s apartment. Jeonghan doesn’t know how he even got here so fast. He owes him an explanation; he owes him something, at least.

“No, no. I’m fine,” Jeonghan says. He tries to gather his thoughts, organise them into something that might make sense to Seungcheol. He’s really fucking tired. “It’s just something I think about sometimes. I didn’t think you would come,” he says, well aware he’s repeating himself. He really needs Seungcheol to know that part, though.

He can’t really tell what he’s reading in Seungcheol’s face, anymore.

“You sometimes think about asking me to come over?”

“When I can’t sleep, it’s easier,” Jeonghan says. It’s not really coming out right, he knows it isn’t.

“What do you mean?” Seungcheol asks, obviously upset. “What does that mean?”

It’s humiliating — deeply, deeply humiliating, but there’s nowhere to run from it now. He can’t do that to Seungcheol.

“I shouldn’t have. I know you have- I know there’s Mingyeol,” Jeonghan says. He opens his mouth to continue, try to explain more, but nothing actually comes out. Just a croak, actually, because his throat is kind of closing up now. He takes a breath and it draws in ragged, the sound of it startling them both.

“Okay. Okay,” Seungcheol says. He still looks lost, but he doesn’t sound angry now. He sounds a little like he’s talking to a spooked animal. “Should I go?”

Jeonghan doesn’t trust his voice. He only shakes his head — which is selfish, and he does know that, but Seungcheol is here. He’s already here. And Jeonghan has always been selfish.

Seungcheol moves to walk further into the room before seeming to realise he’s wearing shoes. He toes them off and kicks them back towards the door, not taking his eyes off Jeonghan. For the first time, Jeonghan notices that he’s wearing what he typically wears to sleep. Sweatpants, a huge threadbare t-shirt. He didn’t even change.

“Are you sick, Jeonghan?” he asks, his voice very gentle now. He gets close enough that Jeonghan can feel the heat from his body, the scent of his shampoo. He’s looking very closely at Jeonghan’s face. “Does it hurt?”

Jeonghan has never been much of a crier, even as a kid. He never really cried over any of this. It’s kind of too much, though, having Seungcheol close like this. Having Seungcheol look right at him. Yes, it fucking hurts.

“I just can’t sleep,” Jeonghan forces out.

Seungcheol is reaching out before Jeonghan can even really register the movement, and then he’s pulling Jeonghan into him.

“Okay. Let’s just sleep, okay?”

There’s a second or two where Jeonghan stiffens at the touch. Seungcheol doesn’t pull away, though; he has one arm around Jeonghan’s shoulders, and he brings the other one up to cup the back of his head, and Jeonghan sags into the feeling of it. Relief; complete and total relief.

None of it felt even close to real until this — Seungcheol’s body solid against his. Seungcheol’s hands on him, the heat of his palms. The way Jeonghan can feel Seungcheol’s chest rising and falling against his own. It can’t be mistaken for anything other than real.

“It’s alright,” Seungcheol says. It’s the same voice he always used to use whenever Jeonghan was sick, or when he’d had too much to drink and was camped out next to the toilet bowl. Soothing, gentle. “Let’s go to bed.”

Jeonghan's not exactly sure how long they stand there for. He doesn't even understand what Seungcheol is waiting for until his breathing evens out and he realises it was uneven in the first place. Seungcheol's hand is on his back, rubbing in slow circles. Jeonghan doesn't want to move; he doesn't ever want to move. He thinks he could fall asleep like this, standing up in the middle of his living room.

"Come on," Seungcheol says, and then he's pulling away. He guides Jeonghan towards his bedroom with a hand on his hip, and it feels both real and surreal enough that Jeonghan lets it happen without a word.

"I'll be back, okay? I'll come back in a minute," Seungcheol says, once Jeonghan has climbed into bed. He's honestly not sure if that's true — he can't tell if Seungcheol is really coming back or not, but he nods anyway.

The light is still on in the living room, spilling in through the door Seungcheol left only halfway closed. Seungcheol's in the kitchen now — Jeonghan can hear him filling what he guesses to be the kettle, opening and closing cabinets. His socked feet padding back and forth. Just that sound alone is enough to unwind some of the knots in Jeonghan's stomach.

He'd tried white noise, on nights when it was hard to sleep. He'd left the TV on. He'd left his windows open to hear the conversations of the middle-aged men congregating around the 7/11 by his building until it got too cold to do so. None of that compared, though. None of that felt like it does now to have Seungcheol walking through his apartment and opening doors with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what's behind them.

Seungcheol appears in the doorway then, briefly blocking out the light until he wedges the door open with his elbow. His hands are both occupied — one with a cup of tea, and the other with a hot water bottle.

"It's chamomile," Seungcheol says, as if Jeonghan has any kind of tea in his house other than chamomile. It's Seungcheol's, actually. He quit drinking coffee after noon about a year or so back and had brought a stack of boxes on sale, leaving half of them at his apartment and bringing the other half here. Chamomile calms you down, supposedly.

Seungcheol sets the tea down carefully on the bedside table. He peels the covers back and slides the hot water bottle in, pressed up against Jeonghan's stomach. He's just fussing, after that. Fussing with the sheet and with the position of the cup. Jeonghan only looks at him.

"Drink," Seungcheol says, which means Jeonghan has to prop himself up on one elbow and take a few sips of the tea. It seems to satisfy Seungcheol well enough and he wanders out of the room again, switching the main light off before coming back.

That same tightness coils itself around his chest again when Seungcheol climbs into bed himself, the mattress dipping with his weight. Jeonghan had thought, given how fucking fast his heart is beating, that it would be impossible to sleep with Seungcheol this close, but. The effect is immediate. It feels like sinking into a hot bath, or something. Seungcheol is warm and solid next to him and when Jeonghan closes his eyes, he feels the pull of sleep straight away.

Jeonghan wakes up in the morning not to an alarm but to the sun, bright and piercing even through closed eyelids. More than that — he wakes up to Seungcheol. Seungcheol beside him, warm and breathing heavily in sleep. It’s been forever. It’s been so fucking long since the last time he saw that.

There’s a few beats where it feels completely, utterly normal. It should feel strange, probably. But it feels the same way it always did. It feels like Seungcheol will wake up at any moment, start complaining about how early it is. Ask Jeonghan to massage his neck where he slept on it funny. Tell Jeonghan he’s hungry — he was always hungry first thing, Jeonghan never got how that was possible — and ask what they’re going to order for breakfast.

Seungcheol stirs a little, then. Jeonghan must have made more noise than he realised. He’s snuffling, and then his eyes are blinking open, and then they’re immediately squeezing shut.

“Urgh,” Seungcheol groans, which is possibly an attempt at a word.

“Sorry,” Jeonghan says, his heart squeezing stupidly. He’s never been bothered by the light, personally, but Seungcheol hates it. Insists on sleeping with blackout curtains drawn. “I forgot to close the blind.”

Seungcheol is close enough that the urge to curl into him is magnetically strong. Jeonghan could wriggle into his side, lay his head on his shoulder. Press his nose into Seungcheol’s neck.

“S’ok,” Seungcheol says, now able to half-form words, but still unable to open his eyes.

Jeonghan takes the edge of the blanket and pulls it up over both their heads, blocking out most of the light.

Seungcheol’s frown recedes, the little line between his eyebrows smoothing out. He opens his eyes.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Jeonghan replies.

Seungcheol is never at his best first thing in the morning. It takes a long time for his brain to kick into gear. It typically requires more than one alarm, also. He seems content to just lie there and look at Jeonghan, big eyes blinking.

It’s bizarre, how comfortable the silence is. Jeonghan wants to stay inside of it all day.

“My dad is sick. Really sick,” he says, not realising he’s going to say it until he does. “He’s not coming home.”

Seungcheol shifts, turning his body to face Jeonghan fully. He doesn’t touch him, quite, but he does lay his hand beside where Jeonghan’s is lying on the mattress. Jeonghan can feel the warmth coming off his skin.

“I really wanted to tell you that,” Jeonghan says. “And I wanted to tell you that I didn’t know we were breaking up,” he continues, because now that he’s started he doesn’t seem to be able to stop himself, “and I thought it was just a fight. I thought that you would call me back. And I know I did everything the wrong way.”

“You thought-” Seungcheol starts, rusty with sleep. “You were waiting for me to call you?”

“You always call me. You always call,” Jeonghan says. It feels kind of like what he imagines bloodletting would feel like, or maybe when people suck the poison out of a snakebite. He has to get everything out now. “I thought that if you still wanted me, you would call.”

He couldn’t give less of a fuck how pathetic it sounds. It doesn’t matter anymore — he can’t even remember now, why he was bothering to try and save face.

“I want you all the time,” Seungcheol says, his voice thick with emotion. “I’m gonna want you forever.”

He looks like he’s about to say something else, but Jeonghan isn’t certain he’d be able to hear it if he did. Blood rushes through his ears so fast he swears he can hear his actual heartbeat, if that’s a real thing that can happen.

Jeonghan won’t miss it, this time. He doesn’t want to wait. He crawls into the gap between them and closes it, too quick to be graceful about it. He wants it too much for that. He kissed Seungcheol a thousand times and never, ever thought it would be the last time, until it was.

He doesn’t even have time to panic before Seungcheol is opening his mouth to it, curling his body around Jeonghan’s and cupping the back of his head like he’s keeping him there.

“Baby,” Seungcheol says into his mouth, like it’s a reflex, and the sound Jeonghan makes in response is startlingly close to a sob.

He lets Seungcheol pull him all the way in and then their bodies are pressed up together, and Jeonghan can feel Seungcheol’s warm skin through his t-shirt. It’s that warmth, more than the kiss, that makes him frantic. He wants to put his hands everywhere he wasn’t allowed to touch. He wants to crush Seungcheol into him.

The blanket is kicked down and off — Jeonghan doesn’t even know which of them does it. Seungcheol’s hands are in his hair now, his fingers tight enough that Jeonghan doesn’t think he could move away even if he wanted to. The crush of it is almost so much that he can’t breathe through it.

“I’m not with Mingyeol. I just had to, you know. The thought of someone else touching you,” Seungcheol says, getting it out in pieces between kisses, “I had to try and get over it.”

“No one’s touched me since you,” Jeonghan says. It’s not really meant as a line, or whatever — it’s just the truth — but Seungcheol has to pull away from the kiss to suck in a breath, pressing his forehead to Jeonghan’s.

“Fuck, really? Fuck. Okay.”

He stays like that for a moment, just breathing in. Seungcheol’s close enough that Jeonghan can feel his eyelashes on his skin.

The pattern of his breath is steady and deliberately slow like he’s trying to control himself, which is more or less the opposite of what Jeonghan wants him to do. Seungcheol’s got his hand on Jeonghan’s hip, the heat of his palm seeping in through the material of the t-shirt. It’s that feeling that makes it unbearable to have a layer between them when he could have Seungcheol’s hands on his skin.

“Take my clothes off?”

Which does it — Seungcheol makes a noise in the back of his throat, and then he’s stripping Jeonghan’s t-shirt up and over his head, tossing it off somewhere to the side. He yanks Jeonghan’s sweats down fast enough to tug him down a little with it. Jeonghan grabs at Seungcheol’s shoulders for balance, lifting his feet up to get the tangle of his sweats down and off, and then Seungcheol is back up and over him and pressing him into the mattress with a kiss.

It’s backwards — Jeonghan knows everything is backwards, and what they’re supposed to do is talk about everything, figure out what the fuck they’re doing. He can’t bring himself to care about it, though. Even if this is all he gets; even if it’s just once, he’ll take it.

“Nothing? No one?” Seungcheol asks, and in another universe he might sound possessive, even cocky. The way he sounds now — Jeonghan doesn’t know how to describe it. Like he needs the answer, like maybe he’s going to cry.

“No one,” Jeonghan says, “so touch me.”

Seungcheol flattens one hand over Jeonghan’s ribs, his thumb just brushing over his nipple. It’s not much, but it’s enough to make Jeonghan jump a little, squirming at the touch. He watches Seungcheol watching him — the way Seungcheol’s eyes go dark when he brushes the pad of his thumb over again, more deliberately this time. The same hand travels down, dipping into his waist and then the bones of his hips, across the sensitive skin at the base of his stomach.

He only looks up once he reaches Jeonghan’s cock, lets the backs of his fingers stroke over him and watches like he wants to see Jeonghan’s reaction, and it’s only then that Jeonghan realises he’s naked. Or, rather — he realises that he’s naked and Seungcheol isn’t. There’s the weight of Seungcheol, the heat of his body and the heat of him resting on Jeonghan’s pelvis and he’s looking right at him, and only Jeonghan is naked.

“Up, up,” Jeonghan says, grabbing at the hem of Seungcheol’s sleep shirt. “Off.” He feels nervous, almost. It’s so stupid to feel nervous. He’s been naked in front of Seungcheol more times than he could ever count.

“You wanna touch me?”

“Yeah, stupid, of course I do,” Jeonghan says, rucking the fabric up under Seungcheol’s armpits.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting, exactly, but it’s not for Seungcheol to get up entirely, shuffle back off the bed and undress like that, his clothes dumped unceremoniously on the floor.

It’s greedy, but Jeonghan has to break their eye contact. He has to look. He pushes up on his elbows and looks his fill; every inch of skin he didn’t get to see for months. Soft skin and soft hair and everything the same as it always was, and Jeonghan wants to touch him everywhere.

“Hi,” he says, because he can’t manage much more than that. Seungcheol is naked and in his room and Jeonghan can touch him.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

The sound of the name is almost too much; Jeonghan almost closes his eyes, but then he’d miss everything.

“Not you,” he says, with a pointed look down at where Seungcheol is filling up against his own thigh.

It makes Seungcheol huff, offended and amused and turned on, and it breaks the weird tension of the moment. He covers himself with one hand, which is so ridiculous that it makes Jeonghan laugh and reach for Seungcheol’s wrist, tugging him back down to the mattress.

It’s so much better, after that. It’s a thousand times better. He has Seungcheol’s skin against his and his tongue in his mouth and they’re pressed together, Jeonghan rolling his hips up into Seungcheol’s. He has Seungcheol reaching into the drawer when Jeonghan tells him to, fishing out a tragically untouched bottle of lube.

“You want — yeah?”

“Mhm,” Jeonghan says, and then he has Seungcheol pressing a finger in too.

The intrusion should feel like too much, after this long, but it doesn’t. Not even when it’s two, Seungcheol cooing at him like this is something new for them, kissing over Jeonghan’s cheeks and over his nose. Jeonghan is pretty sure this is all he needs — he could finish like this, just pushing up into Seungcheol’s hips, until Seungcheol is pressing down and putting his mouth to Jeonghan’s ear and saying, “how do you want me?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, you can’t-” Jeonghan says, because it’s hard to think straight like this, with Seungcheol all over him and heat filling his entire body, “you can’t just-”

Seungcheol only hums an affirmative, like he’s understanding something Jeonghan is pretty sure he isn’t communicating, and then he’s rolling off and moving Jeonghan with sure hands until he’s cradled back against Seungcheol’s chest.

“Like this?” he asks, tugging Jeonghan’s leg up by the thigh.

Seungcheol lets him settle back into his chest and it’s perfect — it’s too hot and it’s perfect, and Jeonghan doesn’t care that the first push hurts. Seungcheol’s arms are around him, and his chest is tacky and warm against Jeonghan’s back, and Jeonghan thinks he could take anything if it meant having Seungcheol like this.

It’s hard to stay still — pinned and pushed open in a way he hasn’t been in months, nothing even close to this, and he can’t stop himself from squirming away from the feeling until Seungcheol’s hand comes up to press into his stomach, his fingertips digging in.

“I missed you, I missed you,” Seungcheol gasps, his mouth pressed so close to Jeonghan’s cheek that he can feel the drag of it against his skin, and Jeonghan lets Seungcheol’s hand press him back down.

All the times Jeonghan had imagined this — which he had, over and over again — he’d pictured himself apologising. Laying himself at Seungcheol’s feet, being flayed open. It’s nothing like that. Seungcheol holds him into his chest and he kisses his cheek and Jeonghan can’t bear it, suddenly, not being able to see his face.

“Let me see you,” he says, pressing his fingers insistently into Seungcheol’s jaw. “Let me. Turn over, Iet-”

And Seungcheol — Jeonghan isn’t even quite sure how it happens, but Seungcheol pulls back enough to roll him over and hook Jeonghan’s leg over his hip and then Seungcheol is on top of him, he’s looking right down at him, and Jeonghan loves him so much.

“Seungcheol,” he says. He brings both hands up to hold Seungcheol’s face, clumsy and uncoordinated, and he’s pretty sure Seungcheol knows, but he has to say it anyway. “Love you so much.”

Seungcheol chokes out a noise and it’s too much for both of them, then, because Seungcheol’s face is crumpling and he’s hiding it in the crook of Jeonghan’s neck.

Jeonghan can still hear him, only just — I love you, I love you — and he holds him there, one arm wrapping around his ribs and the other squeezing into the soft muscle of Seungcheol’s ass, like there’s some way to pull Seungcheol in further than he already is.

“I’m- fuck, wait,” Seungcheol says, pulling back a little. His arms are shaking with the effort of keeping himself up and that’s how Jeonghan knows he’s close — he moves like he’s going to pull out, so Jeonghan locks his legs around Seungcheol’s back and squeezes tight.

“No,” he says, “stay,” and then he’s there, digging his fingernails into Seungcheol’s skin with the shock of it. It prickles down his spine and curls his toes and he feels so good, he feels so fucking good that it isn’t too much — even when Seungcheol keeps going, even when his rhythm edges into frantic. Jeonghan holds the back of his head and kisses the shell of his ear and then Seungcheol is still, too, grinding in deep before he goes boneless and heavy.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Jeonghan says, because the crook of his neck is wet and Seungcheol is still hiding, his breath ragged and loud.

It takes a few minutes, after that. Maybe longer than a few minutes. Jeonghan just focuses on breathing, and on the feeling of Seungcheol’s weight on him. The smell of him this close. He strokes his fingers through Seungcheol’s hair and times their breathing to match, both of them slowing down.

It sends an achy little jolt up Jeonghan’s hip, when Seungcheol starts to shift. Seungcheol reaches down blind with one hand, fingers pressing clumsily at the mess. It does, admittedly, feel kind of gross.

“Should I?” Seungcheol asks, rolling his head back on the pillow just enough that he can see Jeonghan’s face. He’s a mess — his cheeks are bright red and splotchy, his hair all over the place. His voice is wrecked, too.

“Just a few more minutes?”

Their faces are close enough that Seungcheol doesn’t have to move, really, to kiss him.

They spend more or less the rest of the day in bed, minus a shower and a trip to the convenience store for supplies. They sleep, on and off, and they talk, and Seungcheol makes plans.

They're going to visit his dad on Saturday, apparently. They're going to wake up early and Seungcheol will drive them down to his grandmother's house and the three of them will come back up together.

Jeonghan tells Seungcheol that he wants to go camping, and they make plans for that too.

It's night time again before Jeonghan really realises it, and Seungcheol makes no mention of going back to his apartment, so Jeonghan doesn't either.

“I have to be up at seven,” Seungcheol pouts, setting three disgustingly early alarms before he locks his phone.

“Poor baby,” Jeonghan coos, because it gives him an excuse to stroke Seungcheol’s hair.

“Whatever,” Seungcheol says, now definitely sulking for real. It’s cute. Jeonghan wants to take a picture of the way his cheeks puff out, how his brow gets heavy. “Not all of us can take a Monday off.”

It’s debatable whether or not Jeonghan “can” take a Monday off, but. He is doing so regardless.

“Are you gonna come back?”

He does try to say it as if it’s a joke, like maybe he’s just teasing. Seungcheol still takes it seriously. “Of course, yeah. I’ll come back after work. I can bring dinner?”

The thought of it — of waiting at home, of Seungcheol coming over with dinner and the same complaints about work as he always has — makes Jeonghan’s chest squeeze.

“Sure, yeah.”

He settles back against the pillows and pats at his breastbone until Seungcheol gets the hint, shuffles in under the covers and rests his head there. He’s too heavy and he’s far too warm; Jeonghan will probably wake up in an hour or so feeling smothered. It doesn’t matter. He likes the thought of that, too.

It’s afternoon before Jeonghan remembers to respond to Joshua’s messages, ignored since Saturday. He figures it’ll be easy enough to skip the part where Joshua is pissed at him if he mentions the whole Seungcheol thing.

Sure enough, Joshua responds in minutes.

??????

I’m coming over

Jeonghan hasn’t actually had Joshua over to his apartment in a long time. They only ever meet at Joshua’s place, or else they meet out somewhere. That fact becomes apparent when Joshua walks in and is immediately horrified, albeit in his very mild Joshua fashion.

“What happened?” he asks, looking very pointedly at a pile of laundry that made it out of Jeonghan’s bedroom but did not make it to the washing machine.

Jeonghan isn’t exactly sure if he’s referring to Seungcheol or the state of the apartment, but he goes with the former.

“I texted him to come over,” Jeonghan says, “and he spent the night here.”

Joshua’s eyes go wide. It’s pretty satisfying.

“Um, okay. But you didn’t sleep with him, right?”

There’s a long and somewhat painful pause. “Not at night.”

“Oh my god,” Joshua says. He seems to be struggling to figure out what to say next, so Jeonghan fills the silence by grabbing them both glasses of water. He does browse the contents of the fridge to check for any viable snacks, but finds nothing. “Um. I’m really happy for you. Are you happy?”

It’s sweet. Joshua is trying to be sweet.

“I’m happy. Stop being corny.”

Joshua definitely wants to ask more, but neither of them really know how to proceed, so Jeonghan ends up ordering them delivery and switching on the TV for some semblance of an activity. They make it through about half the food and two episodes of two different dramas before Joshua asks him if he has a vacuum.

“Uh, yeah?”

“Okay,” Joshua says, resolute. “Let’s clean, then.”

It probably shouldn’t be entertaining, the way Joshua is appalled at the state of his bedroom (”you slept with himhere?”). He admittedly cannot remember the last time he washed the sheets.

Joshua leaves him to deal with the laundry and busies himself with vacuuming the front area. It’s weirdly easier to get through it, with someone else there. He bundles up his sheets and the pile of laundry and shoves them both into the washing machine. He collects some of the things he left lying on the bedroom floor, finding actual places for them inside his closet. He can hear Joshua moving on to the kitchen, making little tutting noises as he wipes down the counter.

“So. You texted him and he came over, just like that?” Joshua asks him, later, when they’re both sorting through the stack of mail Jeonghan left untouched for what’s probably been several months.

“Basically, yeah,” Jeonghan says, well aware that he’s leaving out an enormous chunk of vital information. It feels like kind of too much to explain it all. He does want to talk about it, a little, but he wants to keep most of it for himself.

“Please tell me you guys actually talked about stuff.”

“Of course we did,” Jeonghan scoffs. “We’re adults.”

“So you agreed you’re dating again? In actual words?”

Which does give Jeonghan pause. He didn’t ask — he didn’t ask outright.

“Not exactly.”

Joshua fixes him with a stare.

“Jeonghan. You need to ask him if you’re dating again. Like, in those words.”

“We’ll talk about it,” Jeonghan hedges. Seungcheol said he’d come back tonight, once he went home for a change of clothes. He’d tasked Jihoon with taking care of Kkuma, apparently, but he wanted to check on her too.

Joshua lays his stack of mail down on the table and holds out a hand, imperious, apparently waiting for Jeonghan to pass his phone over.

“Are you serious?”

Joshua only shakes his hand impatiently.

“Don’t send anything,” Jeonghan says, although it’s not as if Joshua would without double- and triple-checking. Sending romantic messages is extremely serious business to him.

Joshua spends maybe a minute or so drafting the message before holding it up to show Jeonghan the screen. There’s a selfie sent earlier in the day — Seungcheol pouting at work — and below that, typed in the dialogue box:

You’re my boyfriend now, right?

Jeonghan looks back at Joshua. He looks entirely serious.

“Can I send it?” Joshua asks.

"We're not in middle school," Jeonghan says.

"Fine. Then think of something better."

Jeonghan does have to admit, there's not really any better way of asking someone if they're your boyfriend than doing exactly that.

"I mean," he says, stalling for time but coming up with nothing. "Ugh, I guess."

Joshua looks excessively smug as he hits send. It only takes a few seconds for the screen to light up — not with a reply, but with a call. Joshua, startled, answers immediately, passing the phone over to Jeonghan.

"Um, hey," Jeonghan says.

"Hi. Yes, you're my boyfriend."

"Okay," Jeonghan says. It's so middle school. It's so stupid. He does kind of want to cry, but it's fine. "Great, cool."

The rush of it makes Jeonghan kind of giddy, or maybe just reckless. He turns around, as if that gives him any kind of privacy with Joshua standing on the other side of the kitchen counter.

"Will you move in with me?” he asks. “Or, like. We should probably find somewhere new, because both our places are small and there’s Kkuma, right? There’s Kkuma,” he continues, apparently unable to stop. “So we could get somewhere bigger. Or not. We don’t have to. If it’s too soon, you know.”

On the other side of the receiver, Seungcheol’s voice is warm and sure. "Yeah, I will."

"She was napping," Seungcheol calls from the bedroom.

Jeonghan had been expecting to be greeted by her at the door, yapping and scrabbling like most little dogs do. She wasn't there, though. Seungcheol had snuck quietly into his room — he'd said she usually likes to sleep on his pillow when he's out.

He can't hear much. A few soft little puppy whuffs, the sound of Seungcheol cooing to her. In another few moments, Seungcheol is bringing her out.

She's as fluffy and as perfectly white as she'd looked in her pictures. She has two little lavender bows in her fur, tied close to her ears. Seungcheol holds her like a baby, his hands carefully tucked under her paws.

She's pretty placid, possibly still half-asleep, but she perks up once she notices a new person is in the room. She does yap then, just a little one, and she starts to squirm determinedly in Seungcheol's arms.

"She likes to meet people," Seungcheol says, keeping his grip on her firm as he crosses the room. "She's really friendly."

He'd said as much before they'd come, and on the way over as well. Seungcheol had been completely certain that she was going to love him. Jeonghan still had this little fear at the back of his mind — that she wouldn't like him, that she would bark and run away when she saw him.

When Seungcheol gets close enough she starts to really squirm in earnest, her little paws scrabbling against Seungcheol's arms.

"Here, here," Seungcheol says, holding her out carefully.

They exchange her gingerly, mostly because Jeonghan is deeply terrified of dropping her. She's lighter than he expected her to be though, perhaps because of all the fur, and she settles into his arms easily. She doesn't try to get away. If anything she tries to burrow in closer, licking at his chin.

"Kkuma," Seungcheol says, stroking her ears. "This is Jeonghan."