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Jongin brings home a cactus. Small, bulbous and nearly shriveled into an unsavory ball of brown wrinkles. He found it outside on the sidewalk. Someone had left it out in the open to die and Jongin decided to bring it home. He likes plants. He likes resurrection. He likes playing God.
Taemin thinks it’s the ugliest thing he has ever seen.
Soojung picks it up and examines it beneath the bare fluorescent light bulb hanging in the middle of the living room. Cold white reflects off a small patch of rheumatic green. “It’s still alive,” she says, walking over and putting the pot onto the windowsill. “Let’s give it a home.”
They decide to call it Po.
“Like the teletubby?” Taemin wrinkles his nose.
“No, like the fat panda in Kungfu Panda.”
Truthfully, Jongin brought home the cactus hoping that it would spruce the place up a bit. Their small, one-and-a-half-bedroomed apartment is, for all intents and purposes, a hellhole that’s been deemed livable only because the economy is down, and even poor, teeth-scraper-by college graduates need to live somewhere.
Jongin’s an assistant dance teacher at the studio couple blocks down south. Soojung’s an intern at some fancy ass design firm that’s snooty enough to trademark it’s own poster layouts but stingy enough to pay her a salary that doesn’t even qualify for income tax. Taemin’s unemployed (Excuse me, I do freelance), still trying to make the whole “English major” thing work out. So no, they do not have the disposable income for frivolities like decorative shrubbery, paper towels, and central heating in December.
Which is also, conveniently, the reason that Soojung finds Taemin up in Jongin’s double bed instead of his own futon on the ground.
“What’s going on here?” she asks, her voice gargled by the toothbrush in her mouth and the cloud of foam bubbling from her lips.
“We’re cold,” Jongin tries explaining, “And the heat got shut off, again.”
“There is nothing wrong with self-preservation,” Taemin argues, sticking his head out from the covers before snuggling back in.
Soojung walks back into the bathroom.
The bed dips five minutes later and Jongin suddenly starts feeling very claustrophobic when another body, shivering but still warm nonetheless, presses up against his back.
“Soojung?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m cold too, asshole.”
Neither Soojung nor Taemin make another sound afterward and instead Jongin flips onto his back. He looks up and thinks that the ceiling paint is chipping in odd ways tonight. Taemin curls into his side and even Soojung, who was never much of a cuddler, squirms closer so that her cheek rested on the junction between Jongin’s arm and chest. The paint is chipping in odd ways tonight. The moonlight, it carves shadows into plateaus. Breeze lifts the chiffon curtain into a pirouette, Jongin falls asleep trying to understand why instead of how.
Habit is an evil thing. They sort of tumble into it, headfirst, too weak and too cold to resist its gravitational pull.
Jongin doesn’t sleep alone the next night, or the one after that, or the one after that, even though the heater is already up and running by then. He notices Soojung tumbling into his bed first thing after work. He finds Taemin catnapping there on weekends. His bed is a terrible habit that’s hard to break. The bed with action figure blankets and food-stained sheets. The bed that smells like him. The dancer’s sweat, an artist’s essence, like chrysanthemums at the tail-end of autumn. The anamnesis of Eden’s embrace. Celestial and then earthy and tactile between abrasive fingertips.
Jongin doesn’t realize that they’re not falling into the bed. They’re falling into him.
Tonight he sleeps holding Soojung’s hand beneath the sheets. He sleeps with Taemin’s arm slung around his waist. Tonight he can’t see the ceiling paint because his face is buried in the damp intoxication that is Soojung’s hair.
He clenches his eyes shut but somehow he can’t seem to fall asleep. Maybe it’s because Taemin’s fingers are tracing mindless hieroglyphics into his bare skin. Soojung’s hair smells like sea breeze and fresh cotton and Jongin could lose himself in the capriccio of her breathing and the heat of her back pressed against his chest. He doesn’t realize that none of them can fall asleep tonight, so he closes his eyes with a prayer staining his lips.
Taemin looks out the window one morning and remarks, “Po looks as ugly as ever today. Although, I daresay, he does look a little greener.”
Soojung grunts in agreement. Her fingers tap against the plywood table.
“You okay?” Taemin asks.
“Hm?” she looks up, distracted, “Oh right yeah. Mid-year evaluations today. All of the interns are presenting their portfolios today to see who gets to stay at the firm.”
“Damn,” Jongin puffs his cheeks and Soojung reaches over to pop them. “That sucks. I’m sorry. Well, good luck then.”
“Yeah,” Soojung looks up at the clock and her legs are bouncing again, “I’m going to need all the luck I can get.”
—
When she comes back to the apartment several hours later, Soojung walks past Taemin and Jongin, who’re sitting on the couch watching a game of soccer, and throws her stuff into Jongin’s room. Her bag, hardened by the plastic portfolio still inside crashes into the drawer and tumbles catastrophically onto the floor.
Taemin looks at Jongin and then back again. He mouths “Oh no” before standing up off the couch to go check on Soojung.
She’s sitting at the edge of Jongin’s bed, her hair piled into a careless bun at the top of her head, her hands quavering on the ridges of her knees.
“Don’t—“ she cautions when Taemin opens his mouth to say something. “Just leave me alone.”
Taemin obeys, closing the bedroom door when he leaves.
“How is she?”
“Not good.”
“Those people are blind assholes.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Tonight, Soojung snuggles even deeper into Jongin’s body, as if she wanted to carve a niche in his flesh for herself. Jongin curves his spine to accommodate and Taemin grunts in disapproval when he takes up more space than he should. This time Jongin berates himself for hesitating, so he extends his arm, wraps it around Soojung’s midsection and pulls. His skin tingles when he feels her against him, body heat simmering through thin fabric that does little to hide the intimacy of two humans pressed up against each other. He pulls Soojung into him and whispers into her hair, “I’m sorry.”
An apology of all the right proportions even when night is cruel and dawn is ruthless. The small fleur blooming in a pool of ennui. The hidden promise of a tomorrow that will be filled with warmer waters and bluer skies.
“How much water does a cactus need to survive?” Soojung asks while standing in front of Po with an open water bottle in hand.
“Not much,” Taemin says, “They live in the desert after all.”
“That’s good,” Soojung says quietly, letting a few drops fall before capping the bottle again. She finds a seat between Jongin and Taemin on the sofa.
“Listen guys.”
They look at her.
At Taemin’s insistence, Soojung stops paying her full share of the rent. Jongin picks up some extra classes at the studio and Taemin starts submitting more articles to a small, indie newspaper, hoping that the next paycheck will tide them over.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not comfortable. It’s harsh and brutal but it’s real, so real, because sometimes Soojung will hold both of their hands and she’ll whisper, “Things will get better. It can’t always be like this.” Life can’t always be this bad. It can’t always be about leaking ceilings and chipping paint and half-dead cactuses. Maybe one day it’ll be about the first streak of sun stretching across a velate soul, the glories of lush carpet and working heat, and a glance across the shoulder at the bridge they had once walked across blindfolded and barefoot.
Sehun says poverty is making them delusional.
Soojung says it’s hope. And they will continue to survive despite it all.
Both of their faces soften into identical smiles. A small seed of espoir thrives in a desert deemed too barren for life, and Soojung momentarily forgets about chipping paint and the half-dead cactus still sitting on the window sill back at home.
But even with Jongin’s extra tap classes and Taemin’s article on the abysmal state of botany in New York City. It isn’t long before they realize that they have to start making sacrifices. Cutting corners and making budgets, la vie en rose spirals comically into black numbers on white papers, meticulously calculated figures, regiments, compromise. Even water becomes a luxury, every droplet counted, saved and then recycled.
It isn’t until they’re still fifty dollars in the red that Taemin steps into the shower with Jongin on the inky evening of an average Sunday.
“What are you doing?” Jongin mutters with his back facing Taemin and his face beneath the shower stream.
“Saving water, of course.”
Inside the shower stall it’s all small movements and hesitation, Jongin keeping his eyes and hands to himself, and the short, torturous bursts of Taemin’s elbows accidentally brushing against his back. Little touches, most of them unintentional, and shorter breaths, it sounds like rain in here, sounds like something strange and different but Jongin still leans his head back and lets Taemin massage his scalp. Fingers pulling against Jongin’s hair, tilting his head back, exposing his neck, and Jongin closes his eyes, not because he’s tired but because every inch of him is so painfully alive that he tries to find solace in the darkness.
Taemin switches with Jongin to get to the shower head. Water drips through the small sliver of space between them, when they meet somewhere in the middle.
Jongin looks up at Taemin and Taemin right back at him. One of them, don’t know which, reaches forward and brushes his hand against the other’s fingers, and they intertwine before letting go.
The shower extends longer than it should, logistically speaking. They leave the bathroom with skin still tingling with adrenaline and steam and the sweet juices of forbidden fruit.
Soojung falls into bed last, and before she closes her eyes she says, “You two smell nice.”
There’s something dangerously tantalizing about the way Taemin always slips into the shower after Jongin. He presses against Jongin’s back and melts him, warms him even better than the hot water can, because skin-against-skin doesn’t always have to be so graphic and so sexual, instead it’s the intimate press of blood vessels and flesh, the gliding sensation of someone else’s life sail right across the surface of yours, bouncing and gliding and plunging. The Jongin help I can’t stop myself and the Taemin no please don’t ever stop. Before they even fuck against the tiled wall, Jongin’s already dancing in the euphoria, submerging himself in the ebb and flow of Taemin’s wandering hands, coming up, gasping for air, and then diving in again, head first, eyes closed. Caught in the minimalistic symphony of just water, breathing and the barely audible susurrus of oxygen passing between mouth to mouth.
Jongin’s leaning against the shower wall with Taemin pressed up against him, tongue in his mouth, when he wonders how long it’ll take Soojung to find out.
“Po’s looking pretty green today,” Jongin observes.
Soojung turns around with a proud smile on her face, “You think so?”
“Yeah,” Jongin smiles, “He looks beautiful today.”
Taemin finds a job at a small newspaper company and they celebrate by popping a bottle of six dollar champagne. They drink more than they should. Overused clichés trying to find answers at the bottom of a bottle. Answers only dwell in Dom Perignon, instead they find a riddle with a punchline that stopped being funny a long time ago.
Taemin grabs Jongin by the elbow and pulls him into the shower. Without even thinking Soojung follows along and somehow the secret that only included the two of them stretches to include their beautiful best friend.
None of them know what they’re doing. They fumble along, like toddlers in an overly crowded playground, pulling each other’s hair, squeezing each other’s flesh, biting each other’s necks. It’s a mad scramble for corporeal real estate. Jongin finds his hands tangled in Soojung’s hair with her tongue halfway down his throat and Taemin’s teeth nibbling along the column of his neck.
This is insane.
This is so insane.
His world combusts into tiny fragments, spins with delirium, drunk on the feeling of a single moment crystalizing into raindrops. Soojung’s fingernails dig into the flesh of his shoulders. Like he’s sprinting through a thunderstorm.
Soojung’s lying on the couch with her head in Jongin’s lap and her legs swung across Taemin’s. They watch reruns of an old comedy show with glazed over eyes.
“We should talk,” Jongin starts.
“About what.”
He gestures to the three of them, on the couch, collectively as a nebulous whole. “This.”
“What about it?” Soojung asks, unconcerned.
“Are we just going to continue doing what we’re doing right now?”
“Why not?” Taemin asks. His fingers tickle Soojung’s bare feet and she giggles. “I like it. Don’t you?”
“I do,” Jongin says but his voice gets caught on the vague feeling of unease. “But, what are we going to do in the future when we have to—“
Soojung’s hand reaches up and cuts the rest of his sentence off. “Stop thinking so much,” she whispers, “If you like it, then go for it. Do what you love. There is nothing wrong with us. Don’t let the unknown frighten you, Kim Jongin. You’re braver than that.”
From behind her palm, Jongin blinks, and then nods.
“Good.” Soojung smiles. “I love you too much to just let you go.”
“What about me?”
“You too, Taemin.”
This thing between the three of them, whatever it is, the intertwining, the separation and the reunion, the warm rosy glow of Saturday night extending into Sunday morning, breathless and playful and chasing. Skipping and running and being in caught in two separate embraces that are all the same. The arch of a back, skin that still reflects leftovers of an oily sunset and broken webs of capillaries where lips once trailed.
Jongin drowns himself in it. He stops thinking so much, stops listening to the intracranial echo of just thoughts bouncing from bone to bone.
He lets Soojung take the lead. He’ll dial himself down to the lowest setting and just let fall. He’ll fall, because he knows that he will be caught at the bottom. He lets Taemin kiss and touch and fuck him and Jongin can’t believe that he’s been missing out on this for so long.
He’ll live for the nights when Soojung catches his hand beneath the foam when they’re washing dishes together. When Taemin walks up behind him and wrap his arms around his waist and leans in to whisper sweet-somethings into his skin. When he finally realizes that his heart is big enough to love not just one person, but two.
“I wish time could just stop,” Taemin murmurs.
They lie on a small rectangle of carpet in the living room, staring at an unbelievably bland ceiling. Even when his world insists on waxing mundane puddles of mediocrity, Jongin stills finds the romance, the poetry; he still looks for bizarre, chipping patterns in the ceiling. He’ll still look for life in a landscape of sterility.
“I have never been this,” Taemin pauses, looking for just the right term, “at peace with myself before. I feel like I could live like this forever. I feel immortal.”
Soojung intertwines her fingers with his. She closes her eyes when she says. “But you’re not. And we’re not.”
“Does it matter?” Jongin asks, “Does it matter what the facts are, when this is what I—what we, feel? When my only truth is the life I’m living at this very moment, right now? Does anything else matter?”
She thinks for a bit.
“No, no I guess not.”
The new year waltzes in time with a metallic sunrise, with flamboyance, coming in thick tubes of neon colors that spread like disease across corroded flesh.
Soojung’s found a job at an up and coming tech company as a graphic designer. Taemin’s a regular contributor to the newspaper with a couple of articles written here and there in various botanical magazines detailing proper care of various succulents and cactuses. Jongin’s been promoted to dance teacher instead of assistant and as he kisses first Soojung and then Taemin when the ball drops on Time Square, he thinks he’s never been happier before.
They continue to live in the little appartment, although eventually they do replace the three-legged coffee table with a much, much nicer one. Flimsy chiffon gives way to industrial blinds that are much, much better at blocking sun in the morning. Walls get repapered. Furniture is replaced.
Po starts growing flowers.
They grow older, into sharp cheekbones, and sculpted opinions too loud for public consumption. An obsession for definitions and a simple yearning to find the ground they once laid on.
They argue and breakup, kiss and makeup. Years whip before their eyes. But here they remain, in the albeit slightly nicer, hole in the wall.
“Why don’t we ever think of moving?” Jongin asks one day.
“Because.”
“Because, this is home.”