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The cherry was red. Unnaturally so. On top of the white frosting, it reminded Jisung of a drop of blood on untouched snow. Audacious in its tarnish of something so pure and clean. Shameless with its grotesque obscenity.
There was a glaze to it, as if clarity had left it long ago. As if its judgement was blessed to be clouded from alcohol, or sweet smoke, or something so much more cruel and painful.
Sitting there, in the black tuxedo that he had bought for his grandmother’s funeral two years ago, Jisung wanted nothing more than to rip into the cherry, to dig into its flesh and destroy it until there was nothing left but its bare core. He wanted to put the pads of his thumbs on either side of the fruit and push until it was forced to feel like him; ripped open, vulnerable, naked.
He wanted to do to that cherry what Lee Minho had done to him.
xxx
When he had first met Lee Minho, his grandmother had still been breathing. Jisung had been helping her in the kitchen when his sister had introduced the stranger as one of the dancers on her team in college.
That day, imprisoned by kitchen tiles that had once been white, Jisung had thought about the absurdity of eyes you could get lost in. How strange, that in all the tales and songs he had heard about them, he had imagined expanse, the same kind of infinite endlessness the universe’s very fabric was woven from.
Never would he have thought of umber eyes that at first glance seemed inviting. Reminiscent of how soft ground gave a warm welcome to the shovel as it engulfed it for the first time. The soil doesn’t trap you there, you’re free to take your shovel and walk away. But there is something about that soft brown that holds you captive. You can’t see through it, and yet you know that there is something on the other side.
You stand there and search the brown. You search and search until you find a minute speck of gold. Just the smallest amount of light. But it’s enough to seduce you into staying willingly. It’s enough to propel you to dig the shovel in, again and again.
However, no matter how far you dig, all you uncover is layer after layer of deep, dark brown. You begin to ask yourself whether you might have imagined the gold. But then you get another glimpse of it and the temptation of potential is too big. You dig and dig, until sweat is dripping off your nose, until your arms are covered in bug bites and you have killed more worms than you can count. You dig and dig until you can’t find your way out anymore.
Those were Lee Minho’s eyes, brown, unreadable and so deep you could get lost in them.
Even in that first moment, Jisung had known that Lee Minho was not someone who would casually touch his life, someone he would go on to forget about. No. Even back then, Jisung knew that at the slightest contact, he would burst into flames. And he knew that when he did, there would be nothing to sustain the fire, nothing but Lee Minho himself.
Jisung was a simple moth. Wrapped in the smell of kimchi and fish, he was already reaching out a hand towards the man before him, undeterredly flying towards indubitable death, no matter how many he had watched burn. Jisung was Icarus, with wings made of feathers and wax, and his head full of warnings of flying too close to the sun. His crash into the sea was inevitable and yet, he had a smile on his face.
In that claustrophobic kitchen, Lee Minho had regarded him with a look that was infinitely intense and yet utterly unreadable. Back then, he had been nice enough to offer Jisung help with his uni assignments. He had placed himself behind Jisung’s chair in his childhood bedroom and looked down at him in a way that reminded Jisung of a pre-schooler. It was the same intensely curious stare that an inquisitive little boy would use to look at a bug that he had trapped in a glass. Right before he shook it and killed the helpless animal inside.
On occasion, Lee Minho would lean over the desk to explain something and Jisung would be left to stare at how he switched pens back and forth between his left and right hand as if the concept of struggle was foreign to him. He found himself doing that a lot. Staring.
Looking at Lee Minho was like gazing directly into the sun, fascinating and yet utterly destructive. It hurt, yet somehow Jisung couldn’t stop himself from doing it over and over again. Every time he caught a glimpse of him, it just got more and more addicting. There was a rush to being around Lee Minho and Jisung was craving the high.
After that first meeting, Lee Minho had smirked meanly and sardonically remarked that Jisung could use a lot more help with his assignments. Jisung had found himself enthusiastically agreeing immediately. Japanese was one of his strongest subjects after all.
So, Lee Minho returned. He came back, week after week, to leave goosebumps on Jisung’s neck and send shivers down his spine - just by standing silently, stoically behind his chair. He would never sit down, even though Jisung had offered to bring an additional chair for him more times than he could count. On occasion however, he would lean closer to where Jisung was hunched over his desk.
In those moments, Jisung tried everything in his power to make himself appear smaller. He curled in on himself, he ducked his head and he even inadvertently tried to pull his legs closer to his chest.
His reaction was purely instinctual, and he could not have said whether it was a response born of fear or the guttural need to appeal to the older or whether it was an exhilarating blend of the two. What he did know was that it was downright intoxicating to lean into the feeling.
Meanwhile, Lee Minho clearly made an effort to have his behaviour seem casual, nonchalant, indifferent even. Or maybe he really was truly uninterested and apathetic. At times, however, Jisung found himself convinced that, at the very least, the older thoroughly enjoyed seeing him struggle. That, if nothing else, he liked watching him squirm in place and stumble over his own words.
Jisung’s breath hitched every time he felt him shift closer to listen carefully, as he breathlessly recited Japanese honorific constructions. More often than not, he would find himself shaking furiously, helplessly staring up at a map of Japan that an uncle had gifted to him, unable to make a single intelligible sound. He would stare at the map, as if the creature painted meticulously in the harsh ocean around the mainland would whisper exactly the right things to say into his ear. Not the answer to whatever question Lee Minho had asked him, but a phrase, a query, maybe a single breathlessly uttered word. Something that would change his reality with the older entirely.
But the map stayed stubborn in its unalive nature. Still, Jisung decided that he liked it as he kept staring. He decided that there was a whimsicalness to the way it was painted, that it nicely contrasted the way the only ship on it had been precisely titled. To Jisung the map had always been a perfect blend of reality and fantasy, of distorted borders and imagined details. There was a roughness to it, but it was one of pirates and sea monsters, not of the acidic nature of the modern realities of the world. It was the sort of roughness Jisung craved so endlessly.
Once, Lee Minho had followed his powerless gaze and chuckled darkly. “It’s a nice map.”, he had commented in a voice much huskier and deeper than the one he usually used. “Can you translate the poem written at the bottom of it?”
Jisung’s features had turned crimson, and he had hastily averted his eyes. He had felt caught and been both absolutely terrified and inexplicably enthralled by the notion of being at Lee Minho’s mercy so completely.
“I…”, he stuttered, not looking up from where he was picking at his hands. He didn’t need to read the words the older had asked him to translate. He knew them by heart. “I wish I were close to you as the wet skirt of a salt girl to her body.”
The words rolled off his tongue, in the effortless manner only the most familiar lyrics and poems could. Still, his voice had never shaken quite as much while saying them. It struck Jisung in that moment, that he had never repeated them to anyone out loud. It was as sad of a truth as it was plain, that he had only ever whispered them as a quietly desperate prayer in the late hours of countless unmoving nights.
He had always thought that the words fit the map in the way they blended rough natural untamedness with delicate beauty. But it felt remarkably fitting that he was now repeating them for Lee Minho, at his request nonetheless. That he was saying them to the very person who had taught him what the desperate longing in the poem described. To the very person Jisung would have given anything to be close to like a wet skirt, clinging onto him with all his might, forcing him to feel him in every single one of his movements, leaving nothing but a sad and pathetic trail of tears wherever he was taken.
It seemed fitting that Lee Minho was as stunningly beautiful as salt crystals could be. That salt could be used to preserve and to purify, how it had therefore been sought after for millennia. And that it was the very same thing that had forced people to die of dehydration surrounded by the endless water of magnificent oceans.
“I think of you always.” Lee Minho’s words seemed to simultaneously reverberate through the room and pierce through every inch of Jisung’s very being. He winced and stared up at those entrancing eyes, that traitorous little bird inside his chest called Hope, already ruffling his feathers, readying itself to spread its wings.
But Lee Minho just arched a brow. “What?”, he asked coldly. “You forgot to say the last line.”
And Jisung didn’t even get to mourn the death of his little birdy. There was another creature already rearing its ugly head inside of him. A creature much darker and much deadlier. A creature called Satisfaction. Because this… this left no doubt that Lee Minho liked to see him suffer.
He had an air of devoted condescension about him when he leaned over Jisung’s cowering form again. So close that if someone would have walked into the room, they wouldn’t have spotted Jisung at first. So close that his body was hiding Jisung’s completely. So close, so painfully close, carefully pushing the younger to his breaking point and beyond because he leaned in… so, so, so, so close and yet never ever touched him.
It was the purest and sweetest form of torture Jisung had ever experienced.
In that very moment Jisung realised that the way Lee Minho was standing behind him wasn’t indifferent in the slightest. He was calm, but not in the way someone was when they were bored but, in the way an experienced killer was, right before he took another shot. The way Lee Minho was standing behind him was predatory. Jisung was nothing but a mouse trapped right at the paws of a cat.
And yes, he knew that the cat would inevitably kill him. He knew that eventually he would get consumed. But his heart was still racing with the impression that this specific cat enjoyed playing with its food.
xxx
The first time Lee Minho touched him, a few weeks later, Jisung wished that he was clay so that the older could take every part of him and form it to his liking. He wanted him to pull him apart and put him back together, he wanted to become something he desired, something he would want to look at.
The first time Lee Minho touched him, he just lightly let his fingers rest on Jisung’s arm to get him to focus on the exercise at hand. And yet he changed Jisung’s life entirely by it.
Jisung had never known what it was like to feel electrified by a simple brush of skin against skin, that you could completely lose yourself in a single feather light touch. He had already been ready to give Lee Minho anything, everything he had. And even still, it was as if he burst into flames the moment his calloused fingers met his tainted skin.
That night, Jisung took his notebook and wrote a song. A song about the perfect culmination of pain, loss and desperate longing. A song about wanting something so badly that you were willing to give up anything - even yourself - to get it. A song about what it was like to be in love with a volcano, with someone who was larger than life, wildly beautiful and so, so utterly destructive.
“It's okay if everything burns down” - he had written, to soothe a shadow that wasn’t there. “Even if I go back hundreds of times, my choice is always you.” Salt had dropped onto the page at those words, forced out of his eyes and down his cheeks by the sheer plainness of the truth in that statement.
It was maybe the most honest song Jisung had ever written. “So I can melt into you.” Admitting it left a bitter taste in his mouth. Knowing that it wasn’t even meant to be a metaphor, that he truly desperately wished that somehow the heat, the untamed fire Lee Minho exuded would one day be enough to make Jisung melt into him. That he truly craved nothing more than to just be absorbed by him completely.
One single touch and Jisung hadn’t lost himself, he had given himself up. Sacrifice. Giving yourself completely to the one you so desperately long for, even if you knew that it was going to be painful beyond your most vivid nightmares. Just because you couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful. “You can burst into flames. You can wound me next to you. If you like, I can be anything.”
In front of Chan, he had pretended that the song was about a movie he had recently watched. That he didn’t actually mean it when he said: “You can hurt me, I don't care. You can burn me.” Even though he had never uttered anything that he had meant more in his entire life.
In front of Chan, he had pretended that the song wasn’t based on his real experiences. Even though he had vividly heard Lee Minho saying: “I think of you always.” And had tasted salt and felt wet fabric sticking to his legs, as he was desperately praying to a map, when he had written: “You're a poem.”
In front of Chan, he had pretended that the song wasn’t about anyone in particular. Even though he knew exactly whose touch he had remembered when he had written: “- Your arms, my home, my breath, my God. I'll give you everything.”
But how could Jisung help himself? When Lee Minho’s lips were of a soft red that gradually got more intense towards the middle. When the corners of his mouth were always pulled down ever so slightly. When his top lip was marginally bigger than his bottom one. When they sometimes parted shyly to reveal his front teeth, in a way that was almost reminiscent of a rabbit.
Lee Minho’s mouth devastatingly contrasted the rest of him. He was harsh lines and intimidating features, built like a panther - all muscle and lethal elegance. And then there was his mouth.
His mouth that had Jisung wanting to crouch down and reach out a careful hand in the way you would approach a small bunny. It reminded Jisung of being younger, of how he and his best friend had spent hours after school, gathering greens for his neighbour’s ‘snowball’. It reminded him of skin that had been left glowing after hours of kisses by the sun, of dirt under fingernails, sparkling eyes and wide grins. It reminded him of softness, of cuteness, of pure white fur. It reminded him of simpler times.
How fascinating, that every little thing about Lee Minho screamed danger, and then there was the bunny-like mouth to draw you in. And how pitiful that Jisung would have burned down cities for it. That he would have walked over dead bodies to reach it. How wretched that it was the one mouth in the world that Jisung would have killed to kiss.
But how could he have possibly helped himself? When Lee Minho’s mouth tasted like stale coffee and unbrushed teeth and sometimes of the cherry candy his sister liked to buy.
He and Lee Minho were monsters walking among men. Two deplorable creatures who had both been at the wrong place at the same time and witnessed the other surrounded by bugs and dirt in the middle of a cold-hearted night. They had each seen the other burying something and pulling unspeakable things from the earth.
They were nothing but two monsters who recognized the other for what they were and yet silently agreed not to ask, never to talk about it. Because what was the use in voicing the horrific things they were doing? What would it have helped to acknowledge what they already knew?
So, instead of talking, they just clung to the other. They just pretended that they were normal and kissed like real people would.
Lee Minho was forbidden fruit. And Jisung was standing in front of the only tree that he wasn’t allowed to eat from, staring up at him with a watering mouth. Everything around him was screaming at him not to touch. Yet Jisung didn’t need a snake to tell him to bite. All he needed was one glimpse at Lee Minho. And suddenly he was desperate to get a taste - even at the price of eternal damnation.
Or maybe it was worse. Maybe Lee Minho wasn’t just forbidden fruit. Maybe he was poison - thick and sweet and deadly. Poison that Jisung drank happily every single time.
He often wondered whether his newfound fearlessness in the face of danger was a symptom of his true and real love. Because just one touch from the older felt like heaven taking the place of something evil. Because when Jisung closed his eyes, he tasted of cherries and wine and rosemary. But he knew better. He knew that he was falling to pieces when he was with him and yet he would face a firing squad with a wide smile on his face if he asked him to.
Just because Lee Minho kissed him like he wanted to consume him. And oh, how badly Jisung wanted to be consumed.
He had spent his life numb and desensitized, wandering through his days as if separated from them by a thin but durable veil that was enveloping everything around him. It was as if everything he touched was covered by this layer of darkness, by this thing that kept him from truly living as part of this world. Jisung had always kept doing what he was supposed to be doing, but he had never quite felt anything but a sense of necessity.
He had always wondered what point there could be. What he was taking all of this pain for. The only time he felt truly at peace had always been the few precious moments right after he woke up, right before the realities of the world threatened to crush him again. It just felt so cruel. He had never slept easy, and nights were often horrors for him. Claustrophobic, lonely, brutally endless. And then, to finally be at that point of peace and softness, only for it to get brutally torn away? It was the reason why Jisung had always hated early mornings.
And for what? Only to go through every day like a mechanical doll whose battery was quickly running out. Performing like you needed to, despite the constant dread of the inevitability of everything ending, being cast aside and it all being for nothing.
But Lee Minho had come and picked him up. He had ripped through the fabric of Jisung’s depression like a lion ripped into his prey. Relentless, inhumane, endlessly cruel but fascinatingly majestic. Lee Minho had him shaking from the way he was talking and yet anything he said only fuelled Jisung’s lungs. He polluted every room he entered with his filthy tongue and yet Jisung would soak all of it up until he was left spilling his guts.
Because now, for the first time in his life. Jisung could truly see colour. It might have been the red blood of Lee Minho’s prey, but it was more vividly pure than anything Jisung had ever been exposed to before. For the first time in his life, and certainly for the last, he understood what it was like to touch someone in a way that meant the world, what it was like to feel.
Lee Minho wasn’t his to lose. And even still, Jisung was terrified at the prospect of never getting to be close to him again. The older had become his oxygen, the basis for Jisung’s existence. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that he was sugary sweetness. Sure, it might have been possible to live without sodas, ice cream, pastries, chocolate and cakes, to live without any candy at all. But really, what was the point?
Sometimes, when the older was close to him, Jisung found himself praying that the older would just take a knife and cut open his chest. He wanted Lee Minho to wrap his pale hands around his wildly beating heart and cradle it softly. He so desperately wanted him to pretend that his heart was the most precious thing in the universe and not something to be broken and shattered time and time again. He wanted the older to see that it kept beating, for him and him only.
Jisung wanted Lee Minho’s hands to be covered in scarlet as he dug into his chest. Because only that complete surrender underneath his hands could have possibly shown him even a spec of the devotion Jisung had for him. He wanted the older to see him as helpless as possible. To really see how much Jisung wanted him, needed him, craved him. He wanted Lee Minho to see that he was ready to give himself up entirely for him.
And maybe, maybe Jisung would get lucky, and the blood covered man would lean closer. Slowly closer and closer until his lips were brushing the place where Jisung’s chest was cut open. That would be like Lee Minho. To tenderly kiss where he had mortally wounded. Jisung shuddered at the thought.
He closed his eyes and imagined that Lee Minho would still continue to get closer. Close enough to bite into the flesh of Jisung’s wretched heart. Because if Jisung couldn’t have him, he at least wanted to become a part of him. He wanted to be of any use to him at all. Jisung had once heard that a human inevitably died if they ate the brain of another human, but that most other body parts were fine. He remembered documentaries of plane crashes and shipwrecks, of stories where the few survivors had resorted to eating their dead to stay alive. He was reminded of made-up scenarios in which you were stranded on a deserted island and had to decide between eating your partner or dying.
And oh God, how much Jisung wished he could be that for Lee Minho. How much he wished that he could be the reason he stayed alive. How pathetic that Jisung so desperately craved to nourish him, to sustain his energy. Because how could Lee Minho possibly ever forget him if he consumed him in his entirety? How could he ever slip away?
So, Jisung begged for it every time the older was inside of him. He cried it over and over again. “Have me! Have me! Have me!” And sometimes he almost felt like he had finally succeeded. Sometimes the look in Lee Minho’s eyes became so dark that Jisung felt himself inadvertently brace for the sweetest pain there could be.
The older couldn't have stuck his tongue down the throat of somebody who loved him more. Jisung was his completely. He had given himself up entirely and Lee Minho took and took and took. He humiliated him, tortured him, took everything from him that could have been confused with even just a spec of dignity. He marked him up, inside and out. He punished him for failures but occasionally rewarded him for being his muse. Whatever he did, Jisung just wanted him more and more every time.
Lee Minho, however, never stayed. When he had enough of Jisung, he would simply pull himself together and pop one of those cherry flavoured candies into his mouth. One of those that Jisung’s sister liked. He would smile in that way only Lee Minho could, condescending and yet so sweet.
Meanwhile Jisung would remain spread out and naked. Used and ruined. Pathetically staring up at the older, wishing he could be the small red thing between his teeth. He wanted the older to eat him up until his teeth were rotten and still lick the wrapper hoping to get another taste. He wanted Lee Minho to at least like him, if love was impossible.
But the sound of the hard candy being crushed between his teeth just served as a reminder time and time again that Jisung was nothing to him. That he was lower on his list than some cherry candies. Because they were at least given the privilege of serving Lee Minho, of being crushed for his benefit.
Jisung didn’t even get to do that. When the older was done with him, he wouldn’t ever touch him. He would never even spare him another glance. Jisung just laid there. Right next to the tissue that Lee Minho used to clean his dick with.
Usually, when the older had left, Jisung would end up staring at the dirty, crumbled up paper on the ground beside him and reflect on just how alike the two of them were. Used, and then tossed aside. Pathetic and deserving of nothing but pure disgust from others.
Inevitably, however, Jisung would find himself envying the tissue. Because at least it had served its purpose. At least it would get to be thrown in the trash having fulfilled its reason… At the very least it did not have to pull itself together and make sure it was at Lee Minho’s disposal again.
xxx
Jisung was still able to feel Lee Minho on him as he stared at the cherry on top of the cake. His thighs were still throbbing with the ghost of his teeth. His chest was still sensitive where it was brushing against fabric from hours of relentless attention. He was even still able to feel traces of him, despite the thorough shower he had taken. Jisung felt utterly, pathetically claimed. But he knew that no one else could tell.
All they would have been able to see was a scrawny young man, weak looking and so painfully clearly out of place in his suffocating tuxedo. They could have never guessed the depths of decay behind those dark eyes fixed upon the cherry in front of him.
The cherry was red. Unnaturally so. But Jisung wanted it to be rotten. He wanted its juices to seep through the pristine cake and poison it with it. Jisung wanted it to be everything Lee Minho tasted when he took the silver spoon into his mouth. He wanted him to choke on it, for it to be the only thing he could feel when he collapsed for that final time, right next to Jisung’s sister, who had handed him the bite in her beautiful white wedding dress.