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“This pasta tastes like… like…”
Johnny looks up, quiet as Yuta trails off. The rain remains relentless in its heavy pour, cool air whooshing through the space.
After a few more seconds, Johnny bites. “Like what?”
Yuta’s face is unreadable, his smile never giving much away. The pasta still gets curled onto his fork, basil pesto clinging to noodles while the pine nuts fall onto the plate. He doesn’t really answer. The chubby stray cat that keeps brushing against their shins under the table brings more reactions out of him than Johnny does.
“This is the part where you use your writer-brain to come up with a fancy little word,” Yuta picks back up, staring from across the table after he’s given the cat a french fry. “Those big, really specific ones that ordinary people don’t actually use in real life.”
Johnny huffs a laugh, a bordering-on-bitter sound. Yuta was always amused at his ‘writer-brain’ before. Poetic little sentences with the edge of an old soul, the kind that Johnny never noticed until Yuta pointed it out. He apparently held both the mind and vocabulary of someone who’d lived either twenty lifetimes or a thousand years.
“Nothing,” Johnny utters, fork gliding silently on the plate between them. The words don’t come to his head so easily these days. “It tastes like nothing.”
Yuta stares. For all of three seconds, Johnny wonders if he’d question, or tease, or push back. There’s a quality to his fiery gaze that time cannot change. But if one could discern another’s story solely through the lines on their face, then the two of them wouldn’t even be here anyway—this dimly lit restaurant, a cold, rainy night. A space with no clocks, an impasse of time.
Johnny has no idea how they’d managed to meet in this secluded corner of this ambiguous mountain city, cold air and harsh rain and no streetlights on even with all the inclines and sharp turns. The Italian place is small, open-air. Family-owned and popular, but currently desolate while the rain rages on. The lights are orange and sleepy, turned down low enough that the two of them cannot really decipher what’s changed over the years, can still believe that they’re the same people in the same skin who went their separate ways all those years ago. Johnny reaches down to pet the cat, and pouts when he feels that the fur’s wet. The weight of Yuta’s stare is palpable through the side of his head. Johnny almost doesn’t dare look back.
“You haven’t changed.”
Johnny looks up for a brief second, finds Yuta sipping on his lemonade. It’s difficult to not want to find pieces of the person he knew in this orange-haired mystery in front of him, his voice and mannerisms still the same. It’s cathartic to know that Yuta at least thinks of him a little bit in the same way, but also frightening to wonder if it means that he still sees Johnny as that same person that left. If he wouldn’t want Johnny to think that Yuta is still the same person that got left. It feels simultaneously as if nothing and everything had changed with time.
“You have,” Johnny utters back, just a careful observation. “You’ve changed quite a bit.”
“Really? Taeyong says I’m still the same.”
Johnny breathes out. The sound of his own heart is almost drowned out by the raindrops falling off the side of the roof’s shingles. “You’re still seeing Taeyong?”
Yuta chuckles. A brief, bittersweet little huff of a sound. “Only with my eyes.”
Johnny smiles back. Smartass. “You two still talk?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“You seeing anyone new?”
Yuta looks up with hooded eyes. “You. Right now.”
“Yuta.” Johnny says sternly, all too caught-up in the familiarity of it all for that brief lapse in time. Yuta doesn’t seem to fault him for it. Johnny takes it back anyway. “Never mind. I shouldn’t be pushing. Sorry.”
Despite the bitten back tone of it, it’s true. Even after all these years of learning gradually how to live and not know him, Johnny finds himself stumbling now that Yuta’s right in front of his eyes. All the years crash into each other and it’s a little too difficult to accept that they cannot just pick up where they left off, that Johnny has no right to these little pieces of his old best friend’s life anymore. He’d forfeited them when he went off on his own way.
“The garlic bread’s good.” Yuta says, in lieu of any real acknowledgment. “Try it.”
“I don’t eat garlic bread.”
“Why not?”
Johnny laughs. Yuta looks genuinely curious for the first time tonight, leaning forward over the table with a tilt of his head. It’s reminiscent of their old days, regardless of how much they’d both like to insist that they’re no longer the same people. It hurts a little bit.
But even back then, it was the same. When Johnny had Yuta, and knew him, he also knew that he loved him—and so being with him always hurt a little bit. Just enough for him to remember it even now.
“This is the part where I make up some story,” Johnny jokes, looking at him with fond, hopeful eyes. “You always said I spoke in metaphors. This is where A tells B that the garlic bread symbolizes some obscure thing in their life, like, Yuta, I just remember never liking garlic bread and I guess I never even try it anymore because I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna be any different, like the way I’m afraid of doing bigger, better things because I still think that failing will make me a failure.”
Yuta blinks. He laughs and looks down at the plate, nudging the offending piece of bread further towards Johnny. This time, when he laughs, the smile on his lips reaches his eyes. Just a little, but it’s enough.
“Then try the garlic bread, Johnny,” he commands simply. “Overcome your fear.”
It’s a little too on the nose, the comicality of it all. He takes the garlic bread, fingertips slippery with melted butter, and the rain only gets stronger. The lights could go out or the roof could cave in but it wouldn’t matter. The bread is how he expected it to be, good and salty but nothing special. At least it tastes more than the pasta does. Yuta gives the cat another french fry, and Johnny gulps when he sees him smile. He wishes he could turn back time.
“I’ve read some of your stories,” Yuta admits sheepishly, and Johnny feels the lump forming in the back of his throat. It’s a little too much to grapple with the possibility that Yuta still knows him, after all this time, even just a little. Even just like this. “They’re good. They’re you.”
Johnny laughs again. It’s a little pained, all too exposed. “Yeah?”
“Your photos, too. Yeah.” Yuta leans back into his chair, never breaks the line of their locked gazes. “Did you see the world like you wanted to? Was it pretty?”
Johnny can’t put a name to the gripping, painfully warm feeling in his chest, burning behind his eyes. It’s love. It’s homesickness. The weightless kind of pride that reaches you from afar. “I’ve seen prettier things.”
Yuta’s expression is unreadable, lost in the lowlight and the mist of the rain from outside. It’s a familiar reckoning, a slice of who they used to be, what they might have been able to become if only—
“Do you plan on visiting anytime soon?”
Johnny looks down. He thinks of their hometown, sunny and bright. He had to go all over the place, just to realize that the most beautiful place was the very same one that he had left. Good people and lighter rains. It’s not so different from the here and now.
“I wish I never left.”
But Johnny knows that this place will seem empty again, the moment Yuta leaves.
Yuta purses his lips, eyes downcast. “Wish you hadn’t said that.”
Johnny gulps. “Why?”
“Because I want to believe it.”
“It’s true.”
“Lots of things are true until they’re not.”
Yuta lets out a long exhale, and Johnny follows suit. They leave it at that, all the other unsaid words lost to the rain. They take turns giving the cat their leftover french fries, and they talk about normal things for the remainder of the evening. Johnny tries not to flinch too much when Yuta stands up to sit next to him instead of across, hands brushing against each other when the food runs out and all they can do to the cat is pet it. Johnny looks at him and smiles (I love you), Yuta looks at the cat but rubs a thumb across Johnny’s knuckles (I love you, too). It goes on and on this way, raindrops without words, and eventually, the cat goes to leave.
The clock still moves, and eventually, they have to leave, too. Johnny pays the bill (I love you), walks them both to the door (I love you). The two of them stand next to each other for a moment, looking out at the dark street, pouring rain illuminated only by the restaurant’s orange light.
Yuta’s the only one with an umbrella. When Johnny steps forward, he holds it over them both.
(It’s only a whisper, drowned out by the rain hitting asphalt. I love you, too.)