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There were two of them before there were three. They met in business school, a junior and a senior, and they met because they needed to split costs and share rent. Their relationship was one held together by a contract. They had been paired together by a process of elimination, a necessity of spending less. After some trial and error, some missed meals and waking the other up at odd hours, they made their busy schedules and particular routines work, in a too well-organized, almost in sync dance so as to not step on each other’s feet. There was always a school project, a loud friend, the occasional date, or an internship, so they were never sharing the same space for too long. When they did, there was a muted conversation about a book they were both reading in the small space between their beds. It was a book about investments, and they never got to discuss the last chapter. Not at least until they meet Soonyoung, but that wouldn’t happen until a year later.
They got a freak, wet snowstorm that dumped thirty-eight centimeters of snow in a part of Seoul with basically no snow removal equipment. It was the biggest snowstorm in years, and everyone had seen it coming but them. They were never prepared for things like this, or much at all. They didn’t have enough food and silently blamed each other for it. The blizzard stiffened their faces and melted their awkward smiles. They had never argued, but in those days it seemed like they were looking for reasons to. They were passive-aggressive, glowering at the mere sight of each other. For three days, they argued over who ate the last of the kimchi, over the dishes and toilet paper, over a beanie that according to their logic didn’t belong to either of them but they kept stealing from each other when the other wasn't looking. They argued over the air conditioning and sat on separate sides of the room, each of them silently fuming in their dissonant outfits: beach shorts in one corner, a winter coat in the other.
The weather woman gave them instructions on how to stay warm and warned them of the night’s all-time low temperature. They sat on their beds for hours on end when the electricity went out. Outside, everything was a pristine white. Inside, they had nothing but each other’s warmth, so they ceased their fighting and closed the space between their beds, pushing them together, away from the windows and close to the safety of each other. Their relationship was one of necessity. When objects thudded against their roof and walls, they reached for each other’s hands. Held on tight. They gripped one another, limbs clutched.
The sounds halted and the panic vanished and all that was left was an absence. No school projects, no friends, no internships. Absence fed desire — one could not exist without the other.
How could they stay together, that close, holding on, with his sweaty warm skin, and his sleek polyester coat?
Mingyu leaned forward and kissed Wonwoo. He was aware he was the one who separated their they into Mingyu and Wonwoo when he did it. There were only a few words Mingyu could have said to Wonwoo then, but everything he had to say to him got him tongue tied. Wonwoo didn’t say anything either. Instead, he kissed him back.
What they liked most about each other were their shared interests. There was the gym and spotting for each other, and the movies they watched together on the nights Wonwoo found Mingyu drinking by himself in the kitchen, bored to death. These were all superficial things, though, and Mingyu was running out of things that connected them in any other way that wasn’t physically.
There was business school. To Mingyu, business school was a way to escape his family’s curse. Everyone in the Kim family was terrible at investing and even more terrible at managing money. He was trying to learn, and escape. Wonwoo, on the other hand, had been born into a family of businessmen. “So it runs in the family,” Mingyu told him once. After, he wished he could turn back time and never mention a thing because that had been the first time Wonwoo had shared something with him about his family, and it’d be the last. The room went heavy and quiet with what Mingyu had just said, like a weighted blanket falling over them. Family talk was off the table, just like every other kind of serious talk. Mingyu was the only one sharing things anyway, eager to open himself up and let Wonwoo take a look inside.
If someone else witnessed their relationship, they would’ve said Mingyu was getting nothing from Wonwoo. They would’ve been wrong. Having someone listen was enough. It was enough for him.
There was photography. Mingyu liked portraits. He practiced with a lot of friends he made through the years, but mostly with him. At home, at the park, while grocery shopping, when doing laundry, when he sat on the counter of their kitchen and was too busy eating, taking the smallest of bites and looking out of the window, to notice the camera.
Click.
“Déjà vu,” Mingyu whispered the first time he took a picture of him, the words lingering like a kiss on his lips. Wonwoo had gotten coffee and got him one as thanks for helping him set up his new desk. Mingyu had done most of the work and although he didn't mind, Wonwoo insisted on getting him coffee. He hated to be in debt.
They were walking in silence down the familiar sidewalk on their way home, and Wonwoo caught him looking at him through the lenses.
His brows cemented into bricks. “Sorry?”
“Just a feeling that I’ve dreamed this before, hyung. That’s all.”
He always heard the click, a little slow to realize Mingyu took a picture of him. And he always looked a little betrayed. Mingyu asked again and again if it was alright to catch him in a picture, to preserve him in his life in the only way Mingyu knew how to without asking for too much, but his doubts seemed to upset him; Mingyu stopped asking altogether. He thought Wonwoo just didn’t want to be captured at all. He was peculiar about many things and this was one of them. But he was handsome, cut as clear and sharp as a cameo brooch, and Mingyu liked to capture him watching the world, was that so bad? Did that make him selfish, to want to keep him?
The closest Mingyu ever got to seeing everything the way Wonwoo did was through his photography. It evolved a lot, changed slightly every time he learned a new technique and that happened often, though it might have not been noticeable to others. He would only take pictures of places, because to him, they held parts of people only hidden to them. Memories take root in certain places, he’d say. “It’s like wanting to capture a feeling, you see, Mingyu?“
He was trying to.
Once Mingyu asked him why Wonwoo didn't like portraits. It was his way of avoiding what he really wanted to ask him. (Why he’d never take pictures of their apartment and their beds that had become a shared space; of the coffee shop a few blocks away from home that they’d go on Saturdays to study, orders memorized and the hum of the city their only companion; of the park where Mingyu used to wait for him after class so they could walk home together, sharing a cigarette, shoulders brushing.) Wonwoo said that was the problem he had with photography and why he could never make a living out of it. It was a reminder of what was missing.
Wonwoo was about to graduate business school and Mingyu was about to drop out, and they had found a love that existed beyond ‘friends’ and on the outskirts of ‘lovers’. If anyone asked them back then what they were, they would say they were ‘housemates’. Mingyu wanted more but after he had told Wonwoo they should, maybe, start searching for a new place before the lease expired and Wonwoo told him he wasn’t sure what he wanted, Mingyu stopped pushing. No one wants to be pushy. Especially in your twenties.
But during their second winter together, Mingyu began to unravel at each bump of their raspberry noses, like the crochet blanket Wonwoo carried around their apartment over his shoulders when it was still cold for him and starting to get warm for Mingyu. There was a comfort to the familiarity of togetherness, where the hurt was certain and the pleasure enough. They spent their last days as two inside, a shared secret. Mingyu weaved his fingers through Wonwoo’s and he weaved his fingers through Mingyu’s open gaps. It was enough.
After Wonwoo graduated, just the night before the ceremony, Mingyu kissed the knob of his shoulder and glanced up at his regalia hanging on the door of his closet. Wonwoo laid on the bed next to him, relaxed and beautiful as a Siamese cat, when Mingyu asked him if he’d ever been in love. He didn’t know what took over him—must have been the finality of it all. There were many questions they could have asked each other, but there was never a need for questions. Until there was. He was sure Wonwoo knew then that Mingyu had found his need to voice them.
“Yes,” Wonwoo said, “and no. I don’t think I’ve lived enough to experience what true love is yet. Is it like running into a hurricane? Or is it just warmth? I still don’t know. Either way, I’d like to think it’s a conscious choice.”
They lost themselves entirely. Wonwoo had graduated from business school with honors and landed a very nice job. With the very nice job, came a very nice apartment and less time to hang out with a boy like Mingyu, who just dropped out and was splitting at the seams at every touch and every sweet nothing whispered in the crook of his neck. Wonwoo would not say he was running out of space for him—he was not cruel, had never been. That was why Mingyu thought he kept seeing him: he was not cruel. And yet, he wouldn't point out the lack of space and Mingyu’d never bring it up when Wonwoo was always canceling, always busy, making other plans, or making up excuses. He’d still let him come over. Maybe he simply didn't like being alone. And Mingyu hoped. Mingyu hoped that whichever way they split, they’d stay together. Wonwoo gave him the code to his apartment, and Mingyu cooked for him when he visited him on the weekends and noticed the takeout boxes had collected and filled his kitchen bin; made a new routine where loving him was easy and not another responsibility on top of the ones he already had. He kept his working area clean while they waited for the food to cook, though Wonwoo wouldn’t let him do the dishes, said Mingyu was doing too much when he tried to. They had dinner together, exhausting all topics of conversation, and spent the last hours of their evening the only way they knew how to, loudly, skin to skin, breaths mingling, momentarily in sync. They were forgetting how to dance with each other, and learning how to dance around each other instead. “What are we doing?” Wonwoo asked him, after. It was an impossible question to answer. He had caught Mingyu staring at him in the dark and Mingyu could tell he knew what was in his mind. The moonlight softened all the hard lines of his body and all Mingyu could think of was taking a picture of him. What were they doing? He wished he had an answer that wasn’t a question: "What do you want us to be doing, hyung?”
“Not this.”
Mingyu met Soonyoung before Wonwoo did. She was a friend of a friend, sort of, or that's how Mingyu remembered it, you know how these things go: strangers, coworkers, former lovers that never deleted his number. He connected with so many people that at some point faces from the past started to merge together like a collage of loneliness.
Soonyoung was not one of those blurry people. She was explosive, and looked almost at home under the fluorescent lights of the bar where she worked as a bartender. The place served a very specific brand of rice wine Wonwoo enjoyed and the only soju he could stomach straight up, so it was a place they frequented often, but Mingyu had gone there with other friends that night, guilty about telling others about the bar on the corner of their little world. He was angry at himself for worming himself into Wonwoo’s very nice life, too eager. He’d wanted to go even further, to force Wonwoo open and reach inside his gaps the way Wonwoo had done with him, pinch the most sensitive parts no one else could ever reach. That was when Mingyu met her at the bar.
She was a new hire. She slid a drink on a coupe glass to his corner and winked. A cocktail sat in front of him. It was fruity, sweet and sour, and he knew from just looking at it because he had had it before. He told her he hadn't ordered it. “On the house,” she said, even though she was a new hire and shouldn’t have offered him anything. A corny but sweet gesture that made him really look at her. Her hair was choppy and bone white and absorbed every light and color that reached it. “You look lonely,” she added as an explanation, and maybe she was too. There was a welcoming to her, an unparalleled curiosity and eagerness. Mingyu had never been one to deny anyone of anything, so he drank and as the night progressed and the people at the bar got loose, they chatted about all the things they didn’t have in common. Mingyu liked indie films and Soonyoung liked Pixar movies, she liked to dance and he was known for losing his rhythm when he got too into it, she was a lightweight and he was on his third drink as sober as he could be, he used Instagram to advertise his photography and she hated Instagram, didn’t know how to use it, didn’t see the point of it. She showed him her profile and it was filled with candids, most of them taken by her sister. She told him she would love him to take a picture of her, if only he had his camera with him, and he laughed, said he never offered to photograph as a way of flirting. She asked him if he was flirting then, giggling. His face lit like gasoline fire. She was pretty and she was smiling at him the way Wonwoo used to smile at him when he thought he wasn’t looking. Mingyu was always looking, that was why he was here, giving him his space, at the place they knew, sharing it with some people who barely knew them as a whole, flirting with Soonyoung and thinking about how much Wonwoo wouldn’t like her. She reminded Mingyu of the parts of himself they, Mingyu and Wonwoo, didn’t like.
Mingyu walked Soonyoung home after her shift was over. She invited him up, and when he said no because his heart belonged in someone else’s apartment, she pouted. He had only flirted with her because it was fun and the natural thing to do, not because he was expecting something out of it. She looked like she wanted to say something else, but he would learn soon that it was because she always looked like that. They exchanged numbers and the promise of seeing each other again. “Maybe I could teach you how to make a proper The Flirt cocktail,” he said and she sealed the deal with a kiss on his cheek.
Wonwoo and Mingyu caught colds before the final tear. Painless but bothersome. They sneezed and shivered, kissed with chapped lips and put the blame on each other for making each other sick. They didn’t much anymore but fall into each other’s beds, and too much air had slipped between Mingyu’s threads, filling him with a cold emptiness that worsened each night with the tension from all that pulled them apart. They didn’t know who to attach the blame to, neither for the colds nor for losing Soonyoung’s second-last train back home. Needless to say, the blame would be on the person who fell behind.
They raced through the energy, grit, movement and sheer unpredictability of the streets of Seoul, and Mingyu got too careful trying not to bump into people. Way too careful trying not to trip. All he had to his advantage were his long legs and what are those worth for if they feel too big to inhabit? Soonyoung would always stress the things she liked about him, which were the things that Mingyu hated: he was big and handsome in a broad, unthreatening way, and most importantly, he was always game. But crashing into things, that was his signature. And what do you do when your biggest strength is also your biggest weakness?
He ran even if he wasn’t sure why—he wasn’t taking the train. Just seeing Soonyoung off.
They rounded the corner and Soonyoung looked behind her without stopping, moving like a light, laughing, panting, “Hurry up!”
He bumped into someone but Soonyoung and Wonwoo hadn’t noticed. He stared at their backs and when he turned around to bow apologetically, the man was gone as if there had never been just 0.01 centimeters between them. The story of his life. When he looked back in front of him, so were they: gone. They had kept going so he kept going, but this time slower. He didn’t catch up.
When he saw the train leaving the station from a block away, he sighed in relief, still a bit breathless. He was sniffling, sick. Wonwoo walked back to where he was waiting for him, and Mingyu noticed him first, approaching, and smiled. Wonwoo didn’t smile back when he said, sniffling too, “Soonyoungie said goodbye. She was a bit disappointed that she didn’t get to tell you that.” He took Mingyu's hand, as he often did when they were outside and he couldn’t kiss him goodbye. “She’s a nice girl, Mingyu-yah.”
Mingyu was confused by the implications of what he said, whether it was a warning or an advice. Did Wonwoo know Mingyu had to set an alarm in June to remember Soonyoung’s birthday, but he had been thinking about Wonwoo’s July birthday since May? Mingyu’s mood hardened into something gloomy. "I don't see her like that, hyung," he mumbled on their walk back home when he had nothing else to ask and Wonwoo had nothing else to say.
They were never three. Their love was a circle; they constantly bumped into each other, splitting into one and two which wasn’t the same as three, and somehow wasn’t the same as two either. Soonyoung was light on her feet and she caught on fast. “Are you two a thing?” she asked one night out.
“Sort of…”
“Not really,” Mingyu corrected. Wonwoo didn’t even try to rebound or echo his correction.
When they lost sight of Wonwoo in the crowd, who left to get drinks for them, she raised her voice to be heard over the band performing a mellow song. “‘It is complicated.’ Every gay man I meet tells me the same thing. I think I get it.”
“I’m not—I’m bi, noona!”
Her eyebrows shoot up. She licked her lips, her smile turning predatory. Mingyu was afraid she would crawl her way inside his sternum, acrylic nails playing with the neck of his polo. She wasn’t really touching him but Mingyu felt her everywhere. He sank down even further to be at eye level, made it easier for her to be listened to. “Aw, honey! What about Wonwoo, is he into women?”
“We never really talked about it. We never really talk about those things. It is complicated.”
“Loud and clear, Gyu-yah. I can never hear what you’re saying!”
“I think he is!”
Wonwoo was trying, too. Mingyu didn’t notice, or more like, he misunderstood. What with his clumsy steps guiding him through his early twenties. One night, they stayed after Soonyoung’s graveyard shift, helping her clean up so they could walk her home. Though Mingyu can’t remember who was supposed to walk her home. They made orange juice and Mingyu spilled some of it on his pants. They laughed—that was all there was to it at that moment. They were happy. Then Soonyoung took another step across the bar in her floral dress because she was bold. She didn’t care if things broke. She loved everything in the whole wide world and all of it loved her back. She took Mingyu’s hand and stood on her tiptoes to make him spin to the music coming from her phone. The two of them danced, laughing in a giddy, childish way. One, two, three, one, two, three. Mingyu bent over, and she clung tightly to him as he kissed her cheek.
Click.
Mingyu looked at Wonwoo looking at him through the lenses, and then at him, holding the camera. He looked at Soonyoung who was looking at Mingyu. Eyes meeting, hearts apart.
When Mingyu saw it, the picture reminded him of this puzzle Wonwoo had once bought, one of his favorite paintings that the more Mingyu looked at, the less Mingyu understood. A woman offering her cheek, a man about to kiss her, the two of them painted in gold, embraced together. Later, Wonwoo attached the picture to an email with no subject, sent it to both Soonyoung and Mingyu without editing it, and wrote: Found this while cleaning my storage. Thought you might want to keep it.
Wonwoo left for a business trip after, but that didn’t stop Soonyoung from asking to meet up at the bar, at her place, at his. Once they got so drunk that she asked to go someplace to rest and they went to Wonwoo’s because that was the closest place they could walk to. Later, Mingyu didn't know why they simply didn’t call a cab. Maybe it was because when she had said ‘rest’, she had meant it; she let herself go and dropped to Wonwoo’s bed. From the wide windows of his room, as Soonyoung slept, Mingyu watched the city. He rarely got to, like this—the widest window at his apartment faced a wall and it wasn’t that wide. The moon was barely visible that night, but he couldn’t help but remember Wonwoo’s voice, soft as cotton in his ears when he talked about it. The moon and its relative distance. Mingyu took Wonwoo’s camera, the one he hadn’t touched in a long time, and pointed it outside, upwards at the night sky. Focused. Found his shot—
Soonyoung cleared her throat behind him and took him somewhere else.
Déjà vu without the click that usually accompanied it.
They sobered up and ordered Chinese food and ate it from the carton over Wonwoo’s bed, collecting silly topics of conversation in a mountain on the rug. Beyond the safety of this apartment, the world was a blur of graveyard shifts, bills piling up, clingy one night stands, people who don’t keep the door open, too many to count.
How could they keep themselves in one piece, limb-locked in bed, half drunk, half asleep, half full?
Soonyoung began to undress him, and Mingyu encouraged her.
Hands roamed above the cracks of his skin, where the cold emptiness could be felt. The touch intoxicating. Mingyu should’ve noticed it when she began to unfurl under his fingers, with each drag of her nails above his clothes and then below them, reminding him of the worn crochet blanket, a memento he still kept in his closet. The dredges of summer melted him to his knees at the edge of the bed where he helped her out of her skirt. Her smile emboldening him.
Long before they were two, Mingyu had dreamed of being one with someone. Portraits of desires and fears laced with love that held absurd familiarities often found in fevers and wishes. He surrendered to the dream then. His mouth on the soft of her thighs, his name on her mouth. This was the start of the end, where there was a comfort to their clinging, to the wrongness of togetherness on a bed that wasn’t theirs, where the pleasure was certain and the hurt enough. They spent their first days as two inside, and as Soonyoung raked her hands through his hair, Mingyu held on to the exposed parts of her heart.
She asked him once why he was drawn to portraits with a vulnerability Mingyu knew well, a human flaw so deceptively original. She asked while looking at his pictures of Wonwoo. His answer, which wasn’t really an answer, made her as defensive and jumpy as boiled milk. “Why are you asking now, noona?” he demanded even though he barely knew how to demand anything. “You’ve never asked before.”
She thought of hanging out with him as hanging from his neck and the more time they spent together, the more their dissimilarities densified. This was all made obvious when they tried to watch that movie Mingyu thought Wonwoo would’ve loved. He could hardly pay attention to it and all her questions: What’s going on? Did he kill her? Which one of us do you think would catch the other kissing someone else in the bar? And who would fake their death to fuck with the other? Why not me? Why not me?
Mingyu dismissed all these in favor of shutting her up with a kiss. They never got to the denouement of it.
When Wonwoo came back, Mingyu made him watch it with him. He wished he had waited instead of jumping straight into something he had thought was worth it for the feeling. Laying on his bed with him was the opposite of that familiarity Mingyu had known; he could feel his body dipping into dishonesty. The credits rolled and Mingyu asked Wonwoo the same questions Soonyoung had asked him. Wonwoo stopped kissing his neck to ask back, “Why are you asking me this?”
“Entertain me?”
And so he did. “I’d rather be the one who gets cheated on and fakes his death. Easier to live with the knowledge than not knowing what could’ve happened to you. I never don’t want to know.”
Mingyu should’ve seen it coming, how Wonwoo missing him would give him the push to ask him to be together, to cut this circle that wasn’t taking them anywhere. He was as sure as Mingyu had been, once. He should’ve seen it coming, the guilt burying the yes somewhere in his chest, the guilt saying no instead.
All they knew was falling into each other’s beds, into each other, and when it looked like all they were doing was tripping, they fell apart.
“It’s our song,” was the first thing Mingyu heard when Soonyoung called him at two in the morning. It was too loud on the other end of the call to understand what she was babbling about. He couldn’t hear what their song was or understand why she was crying, but he called one of her friends to ask where they were so he could pick her up and see she got home safely. Once there, he helped her out of her heels and made her lie down under the covers. Because she asked, he slept on her couch and made her breakfast in the morning. A last attempt at salvaging their friendship. He told her good morning and she grumbled about not being able to deal with him so early in the day. “Can you stop?” She put her hand on his chest and withdrew it just as fast. “Just stop. You’re making it worse.”
He wished he had just left without telling her where to.
“You’re always going back to Wonwoo. But me? He invited me out for dinner last month— oh, you didn’t know? Well, now you do, and you know what I said? No. I rejected him,” she spat like it was an answer to a question he’d asked her. Like he had asked her to do it. “Why can’t you do the same?”
Her face crumbled when she found out Mingyu already had, but she built up a wall of bricks just as fast. “Mingyu, I think it’s better if you don’t pick up next time,” she muttered as she saw him out, not telling him what she really wanted to tell him. There was no need to. He already knew. “Sorry. I’ll try not to call again.”
Mingyu will always remember the last house party he ever went to. It only happened because all of the housemates were best friends and he only went because he was a friend of a best friend of a cousin. It was the kind of party where Mingyu didn’t really know anyone but was familiar with almost everyone. He knew faces, names and gaits but he didn't know anything beyond the superficial. Every room he walked into, someone was interacting with someone who in turn recognized his face and name and gait, and that led to catching up. He kept repeating the same phrases: No, I dropped out of business school. Photography, weddings mostly. Jeon Wonwoo? I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a while. With each half-hearted repetition, Mingyu found himself missing his old life more and more. He knew comparison was a deadly trap but he was in its grips that night, comparing old laughs, seeing familiar faces on strangers. But the thing about comparison was that once he was stuck in it there was no severing its grip, he gave no chances to the new circumstance it was being compared to. So he walked around with an occupied mind and an empty smile. While it was still early, he did what he did worst and tried to sneak out unseen. That was when he saw them, because he was bound to. Though the closer he observed, the less he understood what he was seeing. It was like staring at portraits, trying to figure them out. A hand on a waist, a few words whispered in an ear, hints of intimacy that you could only find if you were looking for them. He didn’t know who caught him staring first but it was Soonyoung who waved him over and Wonwoo who brushed his arm with his hand, like old friends that didn’t know if it was alright to hug or not. He will remember finally thinking it made sense: Wonwoo had an aversion to being alone, and the thought made him loathe himself more. Soonyoung was not just an easy fix, even if he had treated her like one at the time. No wonder why he hadn’t been missed. Because it was clear he hadn’t, not really, as they composed half-hearted plans to catch up with him before he left. His drive back home, alone, was a private postmortem.
Even if Mingyu wasn’t sure what he was clinging to, if he was holding on to the same people or a memory, he couldn’t let go. Separation hadn’t healed, time hadn’t healed either, and they were condemned to never be strangers. He thought back then that he might as well embrace the pain he recognized them by, a familiarity.
Soonyoung’s hair had regained color—she was brunette and the sight was as striking as it had been the first time Mingyu met her. She took his hand once they went out for coffee, and then she did something he had not expected her to do: She apologized for cutting him off her life. But this wasn’t something he could accept. He shook his head because everyone did what they could with what was given to them and Mingyu hadn’t given her anything. I should apologize, Mingyu wanted to say. “Tell me noona, are you in love with him?” he asked instead.
“What kind of question is that?”
He rephrased, “Do you love him?”
And this time, she didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
He squeezed her hand in understanding, in communion. And that was all there was to it— “Sorry I made things hard for you, noona.”
Her eyes sparkled brighter than her earrings, like she was about to cry. “I won’t accept apologies, if you’re not accepting mine.”
He asked her how they got together, and she joked it was more like an eye for an eye for them at first. Only when she set him up with one of her friends he came close to getting the punchline.
It was a strange thing, to be uprooted and severed from old relationships and try to submerge yourself solely in a new one. It asks a lot from somebody, to be completely cut off and exposed at the same time. Mingyu thought it wouldn’t be obvious just how much he was struggling but Jeonghan, Soonyoung’s friend, put her hand over his, and so because he thought he should, he put his over hers, stacking them as if trying to win the upper hand. Jeonghan said, “I know you don’t want me, Mingyu.”
“Excuse me, noona?”
“Aw, Mingguri, don’t pout, it’s fine. I’m not upset.” She smiled, all dreamy, like moonlight. “I don’t want you, either. We should start looking for people who do instead, shouldn’t we?” She looked at Soonyoung across the bar, who was trying to get Wonwoo to leave early, and her smile turned a bit sour. “All of us.”
Mingyu’s eyes followed Soonyoung and Wonwoo, leaving early again without letting them know a thing. They always saw them, though, their gazes trailed them everywhere they went. Then Jeonghan would smile at him and ask him to go for a walk because she didn’t get to do that by herself, not at night. And it was simple as that, a walk at night, nothing else, nothing more.
What does it mean when you dream about someone you’ve never met, but a few years later, you meet a person that closely resembles the person in your dream? It means you haven’t woken up. They only see faces in dreams they already know. But, what does it mean when you don’t remember your dreams but you recognize someone from one of them? She was like that.
For a while, she became part of their patchwork we. He didn’t think Soonyoung noticed the secretive way Jeonghan looked at her though. It was hard to. She was a threat of elusiveness, scared of permanence, and preferred her feelings towards Soonyoung to go unseen. If she acknowledged them, then they’d be real and she didn’t want that. She told Mingyu all this with the calm that came with acceptance. Perhaps it was easier for her, he thought bitterly, because Soonyoung was into many things but women were not one of them.
He liked her though. Her company was familiar and warm and Mingyu found himself clinging to her in a way that was difficult to describe. It wasn’t a crush exactly, but his stomach seized and lurched forward when she sent him a text, like he was about to speak in front of a full auditorium. He found himself hanging onto her words.
She’d pose for his camera and he would pose for her, putting on a smile without having to tailor it to look real. She laughed effortlessly and constantly made eye contact, held it, putting her hands on him purposefully when she responded to him. Mingyu loved her, for a while. Back then he genuinely believed that every next person would be the last one.
She knew this about him. She understood everything. She made everything seem like it wanted her back.
“Minggu, you are the best man someone could ask for,” she sing-songed once as a joke, and then it stuck and she repeated it like a mantra. Like she was trying to believe it, too.
There was a comfort to their knowing, to their clinging, for a while. It was the deal they struck, where their pain was shared and the love traded was enough. Then, she left. That was the point, wasn’t it? Look for people they wanted, and be wanted back?
Mingyu sat on the kitchen table, eyes locked with Wonwoo’s, when the ceiling of his world split.
Soonyoung’s sister was getting married, and Mingyu had almost been the photographer before he became one of the groomsmen. He had thought Wonwoo didn’t have plans for the wedding, at least not the ones Mingyu did: assembling his formalwear, preparing a speech, co-planning the pre-wedding bashes, thinking of the gift, getting some rest, showing up to the engagement party, couples shower, bachelor party, rehearsal dinner, being there for the couple to raise the glass and the roof. Then it hit him on the face, an event so big he couldn’t begin to measure and plan for.
Soonyoung would tell everyone after the wedding that she was marrying Wonwoo.
Wonwoo locked his phone and hesitated to leave it on the table or put it back in his pocket. He was nervous, Mingyu knew this. Mingyu knew him. But he couldn’t pay attention to these details when the picture of the engagement ring adorning Soonyoung’s hand was burned into his retinas. Wonwoo had been the one to propose. Them keeping this secret between them shouldn’t have come as a surprise because this is what they did, kept things from each other until they were completely sure the news wouldn’t sever their circle.
The sight of the unassuming ring on Wonwoo’s finger, now impossible to miss, wrapped itself around Mingyu’s throat and wouldn’t let him speak.
Wonwoo gazed at him, asking with his eyes first, then his words. “Will you be my best man, when the time comes?”
Mingyu had never told Wonwoo he took Soonyoung to his bed, but Soonyoung must have told Wonwoo everything. She didn’t care if things broke. And yet, there he was, asking the impossible out of him.
“I thought you hated me,” Mingyu confessed and felt the admission hit his head like a nail.
Wonwoo got up begrudgingly without saying anything when it was clear Mingyu didn’t have any affirmatives left in him. Wonwoo did the dishes, and, stupidly, the sound of the faucet running behind Mingyu made him cry. Wonwoo was joined and tied with a thread to his mind, one that Mingyu could easily follow— he could find this scene easily, from a time when Mingyu had made it easy for Wonwoo to love him. When he used to cook for him, and Wonwoo used to clean after the mess Mingyu made without him asking him to. A duty that seemed ingrained in them. When Wonwoo was done, he came to Mingyu’s side and stared. Mingyu refused to look at him, upset at the what-ifs and could-have-beens, grieving the future. Then Wonwoo gave him one last hot-wax kiss on his forehead. It left a mark, just like every other kiss he had given him.
Mingyu arrived at the realization that out of all the kisses that were given to him, he could only recall Wonwoo’s. His love stuck to the memory of Wonwoo like a magnet.
“Mingyu-yah,” he sighed, almost regretfully, before brushing his pinky finger against his. “I hate all of my habits but I never hated you.”
Soonyoung’s sister got married in autumn. The hours of that week fell from the day as trees shedding their leaves. Mingyu laid awake the night before the wedding, and thought of freedom. He felt mad enough to not show up but he also felt guilty all at once at the thought. He wanted to scream until there was nothing left. Not even him. But he was the best man, unfortunately, and he had his duties.
The day lasted so long, filled with terrible music and shallow conversation, that by the time night fell, he had forgotten that this morning was this morning. It seemed a life away. At some point, Soonyoung brought him a drink because she noticed he had come alone. He drank it fast even if he was well on his way to getting drunk. Soonyoung stood apart, with purpose, if not a bit toned down because it was not her day. Not yet. But she had a date— a fiance that grated at Mingyu with his pointed gazes— and so eventually she left and forced that fiance to dance with her. Mingyu teared his gaze away, paid attention to alien silhouettes bathed in white, long and lean. Their faces shifted as he stared, adopting the eyes of strangers, coworkers, friends, former and new. As they neared, he held on to his camera, around his neck as always. In their eyes there was a childish eagerness that made him think of his own when they asked to have their pictures taken, and Mingyu told them yes every time their arms reached toward him.
The day unfolded the hours, and Mingyu escaped outside for fresh air, found an empty spot under a gazebo. The wind sent a warning, and he thought about flying away with the white curtain sheers that were barely holding on to the iron bars of the gazebo. Through the camera screen, he went through the pictures he had taken that day, and the day before, and the day before that. What an empty life he led. Wasting opportunities and hoping to remember them later. As if he wanted to prove the loss was his with all the pictures he refused to delete from his hard drive. All he could call his were all simply a compilation of irretrievable moments. All he could call his was loss.
The tiredness tugged him down, and he let it because there was nobody around.
Wonwoo found him like that, drunk and upset. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
Mingyu chuckled wetly. What a foolish question.
He had thought he’d never leave Wonwoo but here they were, and Mingyu couldn’t even look at him. He hadn’t changed and that was what hurt the most. Everything around them had changed but Wonwoo.
The autumn breeze blew at his back, insistent, a storm brewing on the horizon. But no lightning lit up the sky, no thunder rumbled until Mingyu started speaking.
“I thought about it, Wonwoo-hyung, and— I can’t do it,” Mingyu said and began to apologize, “I can’t be your best man. I’m sorry.”
“Can I ask why?” Wonwoo hesitated to sit next to him and that was even further proof of why this could never be. They had broken something and the cost had been too high. But Wonwoo acted like he didn’t notice, like this was salvageable. His stare on Mingyu, waiting for an answer, cut through the gaps that had formed between them and for a moment— Mingyu had thought about this before, and he thought the guilt stemmed from what he had done with Soonyoung, but that was not exactly it.
“I was in love with you,” he apologized again and dared to look at his face, static as a photograph. “I didn’t mean to fall for you.”
Wonwoo’s frown was immediate.
Mingyu reached out, trying to apologize again. But what he got was a flimsy excuse. “If you had said something before—” Wonwoo whispered, his face morphing into something Mingyu couldn’t understand at first because it had never been directed at him. But once it tore his calm features apart, the regret became easy to recognize. Mingyu knew the words for what they meant: Not now. Like waiting for a bus, and deciding to walk instead when it was taking too long, only to miss it as you’re leaving. All their relationship, Mingyu had always been the one to stand still for too long and he had been the one to wait until he let go. All of it lost, and not because Mingyu had walked away, but because of a failure to communicate something that mattered, a mistake that belonged to both of them. Had it been a choice, or a mistake? Did it matter, now? He prayed to grow wings to flee, or guts to say something that could turn back time, but what else could he say when he had already confessed the reason why it hadn’t worked: Mingyu loved Wonwoo to the point of remorse.
He gripped the straps around his neck, searching for balance. “You didn't say anything either.”
“I always did, just not in the way you wanted.” Wonwoo looked around, confirming it was just them. “Mingyu, what the fuck? I’m engaged. Why are you saying this now?”
Why not before?
And Mingyu told him about Soonyoung. About that night in his apartment when Mingyu had broken his trust, taken her to his bed.
“I knew about you sleeping with Soonyoung— back then, I knew,” Wonwoo retorted and he flinched. It was not like him to raise his voice, but he did it now before realizing where they were, what they were. “Did you think I cared? I chose not to.”
Mingyu was with Soonyoung before he was. Mingyu was with him before he was with Soonyoung. Their love was a circle and inevitably, Mingyu always came back to him.
“Inevitably,” Wonwoo hissed the word like it burned him. “That’s exactly it, Mingyu. I never loved you by accident.”
How could Mingyu hold on when there was nothing to hold on to? He severed his grip on him and walked away. Back up the path and past the door of where the reception was dying down, into the house and through. The music swirled behind him, making him feel drunker than he was. The back door swung in the night breeze, and he stood on the threshold alone, watching the rain, still holding his camera. No one called his name, no one noticed, because sometime in all these years he became good at leaving unseen. At some point, without him taking notice, it had became instinctual. He stumbled out, and ran.