Chapter Text
“Ocean. Ocean—
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed.”
- Ocean Vuong, Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong
The first time Seungcheol remembers being really, truly anxious, he was only eight years old. His father had knelt down in front of him in his mother’s hospital room and handed him his newborn sister.
“Make sure you support her head,” his father said with a proud smile. Seungcheol looked down at Dahyun’s pink, blotchy face. He thought about the picture book his mom had read to him about babies. There had been a whole page dedicated to how frail baby’s necks were, how easily breakable they were.
Seungcheol had wordlessly handed her back to his father and hidden his shaking hands behind his back. His dad hadn’t said anything, just brought Dahyun back over to his mom.
He remembers that image, his father standing steady next to the hospital bed, rocking Dahyun in his arms and smiling at Seungcheol’s mom. Even now, when he pictures a “family”, he sees the three of them, his father at the center.
It’s still dark when Seungcheol wakes up, and the air in his bedroom is so cold he can almost see his breath. He fumbles around for his phone, which is buzzing insistently on his bedside table. The screen blinds him momentarily, but when his vision clears he sees he has four new texts from his boss.
bagel
iced coffee
a nice shirt
please? :)
He sighs and rolls over, typing out a response with one eye still closed. He pulls his blanket higher and tries to conserve some body heat.
it’s 7:00
The response is almost immediate. And expected.
and?? I said please!
Seungcheol groans. He doesn’t know why he bothered. He knows Jeonghan. If he’s awake now, it means he’s been awake all night. Otherwise, he wouldn’t hear anything from him until well after noon. And if he’s been awake all night, he’s working.
Seungcheol rolls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling.
“I don’t know why you put up with him,” his roommate, Jihoon, says. He’s watching Seungcheol fumble through his morning routine from his spot at their tiny kitchen table. He’s drinking his coffee and eating breakfast with the serene energy of someone who intended to be awake this early.
Jihoon’s a music teacher at a high school downtown, and he’s usually already left for work when Seungcheol wakes up.
“He’s not that bad,” Seungcheol says, zipping up his winter coat. Jihoon just blinks at him over his morning coffee. Seungcheol sighs, “Okay, but I need this job for my tuition.”
“Good luck!” Jihoon calls after him as he heads out the door. Seungcheol waves with one hand over his shoulder, his wallet in his mouth as he juggles his keys and his phone.
He types out a quick, spiteful text to Jeonghan as he walks down the stairs.
is starbucks okay? Running late.
is that a joke?
Seungcheol chuckles. He’d expected that response. His phone buzzes again.
hurry up I’m hungry
He steps out into the icy New England morning just before 7:30. The cold air has a hint of ocean salt, and he can hear the seagull’s calls from the river. He burrows his face in the fur of his hood and begins the mile-long walk to campus, stopping only to grab breakfast for himself and Jeonghan.
Jeonghan Yoon, Professor Yoon to his students, had not been what Seungcheol was expecting when he’d moved up north to get his PhD.
The first time Seungcheol read one of Jeonghan's poems, he was in the breakroom at his shitty job in his hometown. He'd gotten his acceptance email a week before, along with his acceptance into the university's grad assistant program. The dean of the department had emailed him and asked if he'd be willing to work with a new professor.
He recognized Jeonghan's name but wasn't familiar with his work. He searched his name, read a poorly written Buzzfeed article from four years ago about "Everyone's New Crush: Stanford University's McArthur Grant Winner". There were a handful of photos of him at the award ceremony, at press events for his book of poetry. In all of them except his posed headshot, he was accompanied by an almost-as-handsome soft-cheeked man who the captions identified as "Yoon's fiancé, Korean model Kai Kim". He was always looking at Jeonghan like he thought he walked on water.
Seungcheol had clicked through, found Jeonghan’s poetry, and felt his world grind to a halt.
Sometimes you’re just going about your day, and you encounter the exact right words you need to feel whole, and for a few minutes, you’re half in love with the writer who wrote them. Seungcheol finding Jeonghan’s poetry was like that. It felt like one of those moments right at the start of a journey, the rumblings of something significant beginning. Gandalf at Bilbo’s door, Lucy’s hand brushing up against the fir trees in the back of the wardrobe.
When he got home, he’d stayed up half the night in his childhood bedroom, too big for his twin sized bed, reading and re-reading the poems and dying to know this person, this man who could write words that made him ache.
The Jeonghan that Seungcheol had met almost two years ago was not the same person from the Buzzfeed articles. He was newly single, far too skinny, and in a perpetually sour mood. They’d fought a lot, at the beginning, and Seungcheol had threatened to quit several times, but he was never quite able to.
Jeonghan’s office is cramped and dusty, tucked away in a top-floor corner of Pembroke Hall. It’s packed with an assortment of mis-matched antique furniture that had already been there when Seungcheol helped Jeonghan move in a year and a half ago. Any space not taken up by the shabby couch or Jeonghan’s desk is filled by bookshelves of various shapes and sizes.
In the middle of all this clutter is Jeonghan, fast asleep on the threadbare rug, his laptop open next to him and his cheek pillowed on a heavily annotated edition of The Portrait of Dorian Grey.
Seungcheol rolls his eyes and kicks the office door firmly closed behind him, the sound loud in the quiet office. Jeonghan wakes up with a jump, frowning at him.
Seungcheol raises up Jeonghan’s coffee and shakes it, the ice rattling in the cup. Jeonghan grins sleepily and Seungcheol’s stupid, aching heart kicks in his chest.
“You’re a lifesaver.”
Jeonghan sits up, wincing. He bows his head, rolling his neck from side to side. He holds one hand up without looking and Seungcheol smacks the coffee into it. He flops down onto the couch and unwraps his own bagel.
As they are sitting there eating, the sun starts to rise on the hill, turning the sky outside the windows an icy blue. Seungcheol licks cream cheese from his thumb and allows himself this moment, eating breakfast with Jeonghan.
“I brought you a shirt,” Seungcheol says when he’s finished, wiping his hand on his pants and dragging his backpack over.
It’s one of his own, expensive and white and far too big for Jeonghan, but it was all he had. Jeonghan smiles his strange, inscrutable smile as he looks it over.
Seungcheol steps out into the hall while Jeonghan changes, and when he comes back, he’s faced with the troubling image of Jeonghan in his shirt, rolling the sleeves up to his elbows. He’s wearing it tucked into his high-waisted dress pants, and it’s a little too big for him, but somehow that makes it look better.
“How do I look?” he asks, turning side to side, arms raised.
Exhausted. Overworked.
Striking.
Lovely. Always, lovely.
“Very professional,” Seungcheol says, and Jeonghan cuts him a strange look before laughing gently.
“Thanks,” he says, “The freshmen will notice if I wear the same shirt two days in a row.”
There are several things Seungcheol could say now, he could reprimand Jeonghan for sleeping in his office again, but that doesn’t exactly fall within his list of job responsibilities. To be fair, neither does waking up early and bringing him breakfast. He settles on something neutral, a subtle change in subject that directs him away from dangerous waters.
“Have you heard back from the department about the trip yet?”
Jeonghan and his other doctoral student, Sana, have had a research trip to Dublin planned for months, and in January Jeonghan requested more money from the department in order to take their whole 500 level Oscar Wilde class. It’s a long shot, but Jeonghan is dangerously persuasive and still very much the rising star of the department.
Jeonghan shakes his head. He’s fiddling with the front of Seungcheol’s shirt, trying to make it fall correctly on his skinny shoulders.
“I’ll convince them,” he says, “Don’t worry."
It’s just after nine when Seungcheol ducks out of Jeonghan’s office, leaving him and Sana there to discuss her dissertation. Sana ignores him when he goes, but Jeonghan looks up and gives him a tired smile before he shuts the door.
His own office that he shares with the other doctoral students in his year is down the hall, and when he pushes the door open, Mina and Wonwoo are already there, setting up for the day. They have office hours this morning, but it’s Friday, so it’s doubtful that any students will show up.
“Morning,” he says, and Mina returns his greeting. Wonwoo just waves without looking up from his desk.
Mina and Wonwoo have the desks for the morning, so Seungcheol takes a seat on the floor. It’s cramped in the small room. With his back against the wall under the bay windows, Seungcheol’s feet almost touch Mina’s desk.
There are other places he could go, of course. There’s the library, and Providence has more than enough quaint coffee-shops to choose from. But Seungcheol likes their tiny space, with its dark wood paneling and dusty stained-glass windows. There are plants in there that Wonwoo keeps alive somehow, and a worn woven rug that Mina found at a flea market. Above the desk Wonwoo shares with Jun and Sana, there’s a poster of the map from the original The Hobbit, its edges curling around brass thumbtacks.
Last September, Wonwoo had assigned them each a half-shelf on the singular bookcase, marking them out neatly with his label-maker. It had taken only a few months for them all to overflow onto other surfaces. Mina’s poetry books were interspersed with Sana’s copies of Oscar Wilde’s works, some on loan from Jeonghan’s collection. Wonwoo had seven different copies of Wuthering Heights, all in various states of disrepair. Jun’s shelf was packed with queer theorists and was encroaching on Seungcheol’s own sparse Ishiguro collection.
Seungcheol takes out his laptop and opens the word document on his desktop titled Dissertation Outline. The black line of the text cursor blinks at him from the empty page. He quickly covers the blank screen with web pages full of his research.
Mina sighs and spins in her chair, fighting with her silky black hair until she gets it situated in a ponytail at the crown of her head. She looks down at Seungcheol, but he can tell she’s thinking about her writing. She has that faraway look that she only gets when she’s thinking too deeply about symbolism.
“Vaginas,” she says, frowning, and Seungcheol looks at her quizzically, “And flowers. Flowers as vaginas. Is that anything?”
Wonwoo laughs without turning.
“I think you’ve been spending too much time with Jun,” he says, scratching over something in his journal. Mina rolls her eyes and looks expectantly down at Seungcheol. He shrugs.
“I mean sure,” he says, scratching the back of his neck, “Isn’t that just a little played out?”
Mina pouts.
“Unless your heart was set on it,” Seungcheol says apologetically. Mina waves a hand at him.
“No, no,” she says, her gaze sliding off into the distance again, “You’re right. They’re just everywhere. Sappho can’t go three lines without mentioning a hyacinth, and Dickinson-”
“-Bashful, sip thy jasmines as the fainting bee,” Wonwoo recites. Seungcheol and Mina stare at him for a moment, and he looks around with a sheepish smile, “Mina’s been quoting that one in her sleep.”
Seungcheol laughs as Mina makes a small squeak of protest.
“Why are you listening to me sleep?” she asks with a frown. Wonwoo spins and looks at her, pushing his glasses up his nose.
“You keep falling asleep on the couch.”
Sana breezes in then, catching the door just before it bashes into Wonwoo’s knees. She edges around him and perches on the edge of Mina’s desk with a smile and a cheery, “Good morning!”
Mina’s gaze returns from that faraway place and settles on Sana’s face instead. Seungcheol ducks his head to hide his knowing smile. There’s only one other thing that can hold Mina’s focus as well as long-dead lesbian poets.
“Professor Yoon liked my chapter,” Sana says with more than a hint of pride, scooting back on Mina’s desk so that just the toes of her pristine leather boots are touching the ground. Mina looks up at her with a toothy smile.
“That’s great!”
“Thanks!” Sana says, returning her smile, and for a moment, the two girls are somewhere else entirely, “He says I have enough material to finish my first chapter by March.”
Seungcheol’s stomach churns. He thinks of his own dissertation, which mainly exists in his mind and in the forty or so JStor articles he has downloaded to his computer. Back in October, he’d been ready to finally start writing, and his professors, Jeonghan included, had been excited by the direction his research was taking. But now it was February and he had made no progress.
A notification pops up on his computer and he sighs and takes out his phone. He texts Jeonghan more often than he texts his own mother, these days.
meeting with department heads at noon
I’m aware. Jeonghan replies. It’s a lie, and they both know it.
really? Seungcheol texts back, gritting his teeth in irritation, good! then i don’t have to tell you where it is
rude
I think you meant to say “thank you Seungcheol, what would I do without you, please tell me where my meeting is because I have forgotten”
Someone’s cranky today, Jeonghan replies, and Seungcheol wants to strangle him.
“Who’s Seungcheol texting?” Sana asks, and her eyes are on him, but her hand is on Mina’s shoulder, “He looks like he has a migraine.”
Wonwoo glances up for a moment and giggles.
“Oh, that’s his Professor Yoon face,” he says simply, peering at Seungcheol through his round glasses. Seungcheol frowns, putting up his middle finger at Wonwoo, which only makes him laugh again.
someone got woken up at dawn because you needed a bagel
And I thanked you profusely for it
Did you? I don’t remember that
Jeonghan just texts him back a very professional frowny face, and then,
thank you thank you thank you Seungcheol you are the best assistant and the only man in my life now please can you tell me where my meeting is
Seungcheol chews on his thumb, re-reading the text two or three times before replying.
70 brown street, room 310
Thanks ;)
Seungcheol puts his phone down on the floor, facedown, and tries to get back to work.
Providence is bitterly cold in February. It’s a wet cold, and icy winds blow rain in from Block Island sound. The wind is worse downtown, always cutting sharply between buildings, but Seungcheol still feels it as he walks the three blocks to Hope Street.
The café where Mina and Wonwoo work is a warm respite from the weather, and it’s before eight, so the only other customers there are a few commuters waiting for their morning coffee. Mina’s behind the counter, and she gives Seungcheol a small, queenly wave. Seungcheol beams at her and drops his bags at his usual table by the windows.
He waits until he’s the only customer in the store before going up and leaning on the counter, smiling sweetly up at Mina.
She thwacks him in the forehead with a takeout menu, which he takes as a greeting.
“Coffee, please,” he says, placing his travel mug on the counter and sliding it over to Mina. She never lets him pay, usually, but when she turns around to fill up his mug, he slips a five into her tip jar.
Wonwoo joins him after a few minutes, coming in from the cold and blowing on his hands.
Wonwoo is serious, beautiful in the way old things are beautiful – Greek statues, maybe, or a John Singer Sargent painting. Being around him is like being in a museum gallery. When he does speak, his voice is deep and slow, his words carefully chosen.
Back during their very first week together, Sana had whispered in Seungcheol’s ear that Wonwoo was someone to watch out for, that he’d been top of his class at Yale, that he’d already been published.
Once he’d gotten to know Wonwoo, however, Seungcheol discovered that he was about as intimidating as a Pomeranian. Oh, everything Sana said was true, and more, but Wonwoo didn’t seem to care about any of that. He wasn’t particularly interested in the competitive side of academia. He loved his books, loved his Brontës, and that was basically it.
He’s delightfully weird, too, handwriting out everything in a notebook he carries with him, then typing it into his computer later. He has a horribly behaved cat named Branwell that he loves like a son, a fact that is driving Mina, his roommate, quietly insane.
After setting his stuff down with Seungcheol, Wonwoo steps behind the bar with a practiced familiarity and makes himself a complicated, tiny drink. When he starts in with the milk steamer, Mina and Seungcheol lock eyes from across the room and start giggling.
Seungcheol and Wonwoo spend the morning together, working, hunched over laptops and papers rustling. At some point it starts to snow; big, clumpy flakes that hit the pavement and melt.
Seungcheol is doing work for Jeonghan; which mainly entails answering emails from nervous undergrads and grading papers. McArthur genius grant recipient or no, Jeonghan was still the youngest professor in the department, and he had gotten stuck teaching the 100 level course this semester. For Seungcheol, this mainly meant having to read a lot of terribly written papers and try to grade them fairly.
He gets to a particularly harrowing one, a ham-fisted attempt at psychoanalysis done on Sylvia Plath’s Daddy, and he’s halfway through when he hears Wonwoo laugh.
“What?” he says, and it comes out as a half-whine.
“You look like you’re about to cry,” Wonwoo says. Seungcheol looks up at him in desperation. He’s always worn his feelings close to the surface. He turns his laptop around so Wonwoo can see the paper.
“White boys should be banned from writing about Plath,” Seungcheol says, pressing his knuckles into his forehead and trying to massage away his growing headache. From behind the counter, Mina makes a strangled cry.
Wonwoo’s face falls as he reads, and by the time he reaches the end of the page, he’s frowning, his forehead pinched.
“Well. I see here that not only has he misspelled ‘Sylvia’, he’s also, um, claiming that she’s a misandrist?”
“What!” Mina squawks, spinning around and splashing milk all over the counter. Wonwoo shakes his head and hands the laptop back to Seungcheol.
He’s about to dive back in and demolish this kid’s overblown confidence when he gets an email from his dean with the subject line “Missed Dissertation Deadline?”.
His stomach clenches. The first draft of his chapter had been due on Monday. He’s had the deadline circled in his planner for weeks, but he still has nothing concrete to show his dean, nothing written other than a thesis statement and a handful of research notes. It’s bad, really bad, and he knows, but he’s tried to write and nothing comes out.
Panic claws at him, and he tries to remember the breathing exercises that his sister Chaeyoung had sent him. He watches the snow disappear on the sidewalk outside, eyes following one snowflake at a time, measuring out even breaths. Once he’s calmed himself back down, he closes his computer and pulls out his copy of The Remains of the Day. He’s trying to write about Marxism and class consciousness, which should be easy enough given the source material.
He gets a few pages in, underlining and making notes in the margins, when he hears a tap on the window. He looks up and right into Junhui’s eyes. Jun grins all crooked and goofy, exhaling his hot breath on the cold window, letting it fog up. He draws a heart, leans back and smiles, then goes back in and turns it into a dick.
Seungcheol rolls his eyes as he can hear Jun’s maniacal laughter through the glass. He comes in the front door, bell tinkling, and Mina looks up at him with a frown.
“Please don’t draw genitalia on my windows,”
“Oh, Mina,” Jun sighs wistfully, drumming his fingers on the counter, “Don’t stifle my creativity. Got any muffins?”
She tosses him a muffin and he catches it effortlessly, taking a big bite as Mina rolls her eyes. He drags a chair nosily across the wood floor, pulling it up to sit at the table with Wonwoo and Seungcheol. They make room for him, scooting papers into folders and moving books.
If Wonwoo is classical art, Junhui is modern, kinetic, a Rube Goldberg machine of a person. Just as beautiful, if confusing to look at, and harder to understand.
If Mina and Wonwoo were one side of the delicately balanced scale that was their cohort, Jun and Sana were the other. Mina and Wonwoo kept them all sane, and Jun and Sana kept them all on their toes. Seungcheol wasn’t sure where he fell on that spectrum, but he suspected it was somewhere in the middle.
“I need some help,” Jun says, mouth full of muffin as he rifles through his backpack, surfacing with his battered laptop, “I’m submitting a paper for a conference, but I need one of you to read it before I show Hannie so I don’t embarrass myself.”
“Professor Yoon,” Wonwoo corrects without looking up from his notebook, “Don’t be weird.”
Jun sticks his tongue out at him, and he pretends not to see it. Seungcheol closes his book with a sigh. He likes Jun a lot, but once he’s around it’s hard to focus on anything else.
“I’ll read it,” Seungcheol says, holding his hand out. Jun slides his laptop in front of Seungcheol, smiling gratefully.
“I knew you’d say yes.”
“Just… do you mention taints in this one?” Seungcheol asks, scrolling through the first page. Jun is suspiciously silent. Seungcheol looks up at him, frowning.
“Only once!!” Jun protests, picking at his muffin sheepishly, “And it’s contextually important!”
Seungcheol pretends to be more annoyed than he is, and starts to read.
Jeonghan’s apartment is laughably nicer than Seungcheol’s. The first time he’d texted Seungcheol the address, Seungcheol had assumed he was kidding. It’s near campus, on the top floor of a 19th century row house near the Athenaeum. The building itself looks like it belongs in Covent Garden with its dark red brick and neat lines, black shutters flanking each window.
Jeonghan doesn’t make nearly enough money from the university to afford this place, so Seungcheol assumes that his parents help pay for it, but he’s never been brave enough to ask. Jeonghan doesn’t ever really talk about his family. Seungcheol knows he’s an only child, knows his parents are wealthy New England academics. His father is retired now, but he used to work at their college. That’s about all he knows.
At the building’s front door, he kicks the snow off of his boots. He climbs the stairs and lets himself in, shifting his bag of groceries to his other arm so he can unlock the door. Jeonghan had the key made for him back in August, dropping it into Seungcheol’s hand without a second glance and explaining that it was for emergencies only.
“For emergencies only” had become “come do research in my living room, If I’m in this office for another hour I’m going to scream” which had slowly become “you can use my kitchen anytime”.
And if the days where Seungcheol “needs” to use Jeonghan’s kitchen just so happen to coincide with the days when Jeonghan is the most stressed, they don’t talk about it.
“Hey!” Seungcheol calls out into the apartment, and gets no response. He rolls his eyes. He walks into the kitchen and deposits the groceries on the counter before leaning through the door into Jeonghan’s office.
Jeonghan’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, his papers spread out in semi-circle around him, an uncapped highlighter in his mouth. He’s got his pajamas and his glasses on and it’s something Seungcheol has seen a hundred times over, but it still bowls him over.
“Hey,” he repeats, quieter this time. Jeonghan looks up and smiles and Seungcheol thinks he could survive on that alone, “Have you eaten?”
Jeonghan shakes his head, still smiling. Seungcheol frowns at him. Jeonghan pulls the highlighter out of his mouth and rolls it in his hand.
“What’d you bring?” he asks, his eyes wide and teasing. One day Seungcheol will deal with the fact that Jeonghan had obviously been expecting him. What that means is beyond him, right now.
“Stuff for fried chicken,” he says, and Jeonghan smiles.
“Brilliant,” he says brightly.
“Have you noticed you only compliment me when I bring you food?”
“Do you need more compliments?” Jeonghan asks with a curious tilt to his head. Seungcheol feels outmaneuvered. Sometimes conversations with Jeonghan are like this, a chess game where Seungcheol is still trying to learn the rules.
“It’ll be ready in half an hour,” Seungcheol says lamely, and Jeonghan laughs.
He goes through the motions of preparing the chicken easily, music playing in his headphones. It’s an old recipe, one his mom taught him when he first learned how to cook, and he’s made it countless times since then. It was Chae’s favorite, and what his youngest sister wanted, she got.
When he’s cooking, everything else falls away, and he can just focus on the movement of his hands. He starts some rice cooking and preheats the oven to roast some broccoli. When he’s breading the chicken, he hears Jeonghan’s voice from the doorway.
“Did you ever consider being a chef?” he asks, one hand on the doorframe. Seungcheol wonders how long he’s been standing there. There’s something about the slant of Jeonghan’s shoulders that says it’s been longer than a few moments.
Seungcheol doesn’t know what to make of that, so he turns back to the counter, dredging a piece of chicken in egg and dipping it into the breading.
“No,” he says honestly, “Why?”
He hears Jeonghan cross the room, sit at the small table in the corner.
“You always look at home in the kitchen.”
Seungcheol looks over his shoulder at him, and Jeonghan is looking back at him, curiously.
“Thanks?”
“Oh, that one wasn’t a compliment,” Jeonghan says, turning in his chair and putting his chin on the back, watching Seungcheol with a startling focus he usually reserves for nineteenth century novels, “Just a fact.”
Seungcheol turns back to his food. For a few minutes, the only noise in the kitchen is the sizzle of the oil in the pan. Then Jeonghan sighs and starts talking about the conference he’s attending this weekend with his best friend Joshua, and Seungcheol feels the world snap back into place around him. This is familiar territory, what they should be talking about.
Seungcheol sets a plate in front of Jeonghan, who grins appreciatively and starts eating, talking in between bites about Oscar Wilde. Seungcheol listens and smiles at all the right places, nodding encouragingly.
“My request got approved,” Jeonghan says later as Seungcheol puts on his coat. He freezes with his hand on his zipper. He looks up with wide eyes and Jeonghan is actually smiling.
"For Dublin?" Seungcheol asks, and Jeonghan nods, his smile widening, “No way. And you waited all night to tell me?”
Jeonghan shrugs.
“I forgot,” he says casually, but his eyes are shining. Seungcheol can tell he’s proud of himself, “You’ll tell the kids?”
“Yeah, of course,” Seungcheol says, “Jun’s gonna be so excited. He hasn’t stopped talking about flying hawks since you first mentioned Ireland.”
“You’ll help me plan the trip?” Jeonghan asks, which is his way of asking Seungcheol to do it himself, but Seungcheol is so excited for once that he lets it go.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. For just a moment, they're not professor and student, they’re just a pair of kids with a secret, leaning in and laughing in Jeonghan’s front hallway.
When Seungcheol thinks about how he’s gotten here, how if he had the chance he’d go back and warn himself away from Providence, from Jeonghan. But he knows, too, that even if he had gotten a warning about Jeonghan, he would have taken one look at Jeonghan’s face and known that all of it was going to be worth it.
The old wood of the staircase complains as Seungcheol climbs to the third floor. Whenever it rained, their old building got creakier, and the damp-dust smell that hung around got stronger.
He unlocks his apartment and shakes his red hands to warm them up. His knuckles are still stiff with cold. Jihoon is nowhere to be seen, but there are traces of him in the kitchen. A stack of plates and a half-full pot of coffee in the machine, still hot.
Seungcheol pours himself a cup and wraps his hands around the mug. Outside the window, the rain pours down harder, echoing against the glass.
Once he’s warm, Seungcheol makes his way carefully up the spiral staircase in their living-room. He’d laughed, the first time he’d seen it, a strangely elegant piece in an otherwise drab one bedroom. It was more of a hinderance than anything, and its presence meant that they had nowhere to host guests, but they rarely had guests anyway.
Seungcheol pokes his head up into the loft and taps his knuckles on the hardwood floor in lieu of knocking. Jihoon rouses from his spot on the bed and waves him up.
The rain is louder here, pinging against the roof and running down the skylight in thick rivulets. This was the compromise. Seungcheol got the room with a door, and Jihoon got the skylight and the view of the river.
He’d built a passable studio up here over the past year and a half. Seungcheol sits down at the desk where Jihoon keeps his mixing equipment.
“What are you listening to?” Seungcheol asks, nodding at Jihoon’s headphones.
He pulls them down around his neck and smiles his tight-mouthed crooked smile.
“Listen,” he says, “Unplug these.”
Seungcheol unplugs the headphones and lets the song filter out into the loft. It’s peaceful, fits the mood of the day with heavy synths and elegant echoing tones. Seungcheol nods.
“This is good,” he says, “Yours?”
Jihoon shakes his head, his smile spreading.
“One of my students,” he says with more than a hint of pride, “I’m helping her with her senior project.”
Seungcheol whistles, “She’s almost as good as you.”
“I know, right?” Jihoon agrees without any irony. He lays back, pillowing his head on his arm and watching the grey sky through the skylight, “I barely touched this. She’s gonna get in wherever she wants.”
Seungcheol smiles as he takes a drink of his coffee. Jihoon is more invested then the average high school music teacher, but that dedication is one of the things that Seungcheol loves most about his best friend.
“You look like shit,” Jihoon says, unprompted, squinting at Seungcheol, “You work too much.”
He does that, sometimes, he’s too blunt and it leaves Seungcheol reeling.
“Look who’s talking,” Seungcheol says, gesturing at Jihoon’s computer, “It’s Friday night.”
Jihoon sits up, leveling Seungcheol with a rough look.
“Up,” he says, waving a hand at Seungcheol, who gets up out of the chair and sits on the bed instead. Jihoon takes his spot at the desk.
Seungcheol wonders if he should leave, if the conversation is over, but then Jihoon speaks.
“I do this because I love it. And I know when to stop.”
“I love my job,” Seungcheol bites back, too harshly. Jihoon puts his hands up.
“I didn’t say you didn’t. Just- “ he pauses, choosing his words carefully, “Make sure you’re pushing yourself because its what you want,” he pauses again, watching Seungcheol’s face curiously, “Not what he wants.”
There’s no need to explain who he is. Jihoon’s never liked Jeonghan.
“He needs me,” Seungcheol says, his voice small. Jihoon looks at him for a long moment, then turns back to his computer screen. Jihoon’s just worried about him, and he doesn’t blame him. Seungcheol knows he looks exhausted. But that’s his own doing, not Jeonghan’s.
“I want to hear that again when its finished,” he says, gesturing at the computer screen. Jihoon just nods. Seungcheol heads for the stairs.
“Get some sleep,” Jihoon says over his shoulder before Seungcheol disappears around the curve in the stairs. Seungcheol laughs.
“You, too.”