Work Text:
The backroom fridge stops whirring when Suho hits it, the cool metal hard against his back. A flush runs up his neck; the air’s rushing away from his lungs, knocked out of his chest. Bitna’s hands are busy in his hair, her face contorted in concentration as she stands on her toes to get a movie-still view. A rock and a hard place.
Under the white fluorescent backroom lights, Suho takes in a shaky breath. Lilies and scotch. He squirms like a schoolboy as Bitna’s attention moves down to his collar. Static and heat race up and down his skin. There’s a moment of silence—bass thumping through the metal, air warm and flower-scented—before Suho swats her away, catching both her wrists in a hand. “Do you have to be so violent?”
Bitna’s a head shorter than him, with a pink-streaked fringe and gem pendants dangling over a crisp white shirt buttoned up to her neck. Cool and bright against her pale skin, bangs framing her onyx eyes. Neat.
Suho doesn’t have such luxuries. Bitna’s got other skills. The strongest: managing her ragtag band of wandering twenty-somethings. Managing this bar for an absent boss. She pretties up her little army, lending jewelry and straightening hair and reapplying mascara. Ironing shirts, in Suho’s case. Rumpling them beyond recognition, in Suho’s case.
“You asked for this,” she hisses through pearly teeth.
“I asked for help, not to be manhandled.” Suho squeezes his eyes shut in a mix of agony and humiliation as Bitna slithers out of his grasp and resumes her beautification. His heart beats bass. “Are you sure you don’t have a thing for me?”
This gives her pause. Wordlessly, Bitna steps back to admire her handiwork.
Suho opens one eye, and then the other. “What? How am I for fashion school field practice?” He breathes out through parted lips, wavering under her scrutinizing gaze.
“We usually get prettier models,” Bitna mutters, no doubt referencing the assortment of faceless mannequins that rest in good company in the depths of her phone’s camera roll. “Quieter, too.”
Suho closes his mouth.
“But this is alright. You’ll make some bank in tips, that’s for sure.” She taps a finger against her thoroughly glossed lips. Pink glitter. “Your attractiveness rating would shoot up a couple points if you learned how to stop talking back to your boss, though.”
“You got promoted last week! To fucking shift manager!” Suho knows Bitna’s been working this job since the day she arrived, keeping this tight ship floating underground.
“Shift manager, president, CEO, same difference. I’m still your boss, and I say if you’re not out at the bar in...” Bitna checks her watch. “19 seconds, I’m gonna start cutting from your paycheck.”
“You can’t do that.”
Bitna says nothing. Her irises are black and unmoving.
“You can’t do that, can you? Fuck.” With a rev and a fresh beat, Suho’s heart sparks back to life—strong again. He scrambles.
“12 seconds, Ahn Suho!”
Suho pushes through the swinging door and breathes in the hazy purple air.
Most nights are like this. Squirming under artificial light. Shaking and stirring and whispering and smiling under this neon glow, skipping through songs and dimming lights and making eyes at pretty strangers. It pays the bills, after all.
If Suho thinks about it, everyone here has their quirk: the thing that gets them an extra couple thousand won to keep them warm through their mid-morning slumber. Some can make even stone-cold sober office workers laugh with well-timed quips, and others know just how to compliment college girls on their daddy’s-money designer clothing. A select few actually went to bartending school (Gangnam’s a pretty high-end place, after all).
This is all Suho has. He’s 25 with a GED and no college degree, and in a place like this, that means he’s had to learn how to flirt without perplexing his heart.
(At least he lost the fringe. Maybe the version of him that took this job three years ago would be proud of how Bitna sets his hair to fall over his forehead now, how his eyes curve at bad jokes, how he sets his jaw to look just a little bit older than 17. God, it’s like he got stuck at 17.)
Suho works nights selling rumpled-chic snapshots of himself, painted in dim, refracted light, grinning a little too wide, three buttons on his shirt undone. And drinks, sometimes. It would be a lie to say he doesn’t like it. He likes knowing he’ll never see any of these people again after sunrise, likes the smell of fresh fruit and alcohol.
Best of all, though, he likes the music. Speakers in the ceiling, in the walls. It’s the one thing they can afford to give for free, this Spotify playlist on a cracked tablet behind the bar.
벨벳123
Numb · Men I Trust
⌾ NUMB
“Ahn Suho, we need you over here!”
Most nights are like this. Suho takes a second to listen to the synthesizer, feeling a lazy pulse travel through the damp floor and then through his still body. Then he locks eyes with a girl across the bar. Low cut top, gold bracelet, auburn hair.
She’s looking at him like she wants to devour him. 20,000 extra won at the very least.
Suho doesn’t know what he’d say to her if they weren’t here—if they’d met at a cafe, or bumped into each other on the street, or brushed past on a college campus—but this is all he has. Velvet. A bar six steps below ground on a packed Gangnam street, neon sign glow washing like waves over rain-soaked concrete. He’s glad for it.
Suho has nothing else, and this girl is so easy—so willing to give.
He feels the music in his chest—steady. This is Suho’s place, after all. It’s simple enough to lean over the marble counter and open like this: “Can I get you a drink?”
+++
Three girlfriends, one boyfriend.
It’s half past five in the morning when Suho kicks off his worn oxfords at the door. They’ve lost their shine completely, dull and smooth. At least now they fit neatly into the row of old sneakers and rubbed loafers that line the wall. It had been absurd when his shoes were fresh, coated in black gloss—when they looked out of place beside his roommates’.A hint of grandeur, swallowed up by practicality.
Practicality, Suho had quickly learned, was the truest sign of wealth. His roommates: two office workers, fresh out of college. One in finance, one in computer science. KAIST guys, big shots, best friends.
Suho’s a bartender. He’s had three girlfriends and one boyfriend. The shoes were a gift from his grandmother, a prize he’d won for saying he’d go back to school. The simple act of committing to something. She always gave more than she should have, and Suho never made good on the promise he’d made to pay it all back to her.
Another thing Suho quickly learned is that life isn’t fair.
Two of the girls, he’d met at work—one was an outspoken college graduate trying to scrounge up the money to pay for a masters in Business Administration. She cut them all off once she’d had her fill of paychecks and private affection. The other was an overzealous customer Suho took out on two dates before the blood in his veins rebelled against her noise and he called it off.
The third was his first: a girl at the hospital. Car accident. She was a tennis player at a sports college and taught herself to walk again in two weeks. She disappeared without a trace while Suho was still trying to train his body out of its vegetative state. Those two weeks were all Suho kept of his youth. The warmth of early summer.
But by the time those two weeks passed, Suho felt the heavy fog of adulthood settling over his still shoulders. An autumn morning. He had just turned 18.
The boyfriend was not quite a boyfriend. A high school dropout at Suho’s GED test academy. When they kissed for the first and last time, a little drunk on a rooftop in the dead of night, three days before the exam, Suho had felt like he was flying and falling at the same time. Like he’d slipped off the edge into the cityscape below and left his insides—his heart and brain and stomach, all raw and real and bloody—behind on the gray cement of the terrace.
19-year-old Suho had felt whole but empty for a month. Hot but not warm: rum dripping down his throat, skin stinging in the dead cold of winter. Clean but not polished: those oxfords, slowly settling into their place by the door. Worn but not loved.
Suho passed his exam and got a job. Six years came and went. He’s a bartender now, living with strangers and barely making rent.
It was worth it. It was all worth it. Life isn’t fair, but Suho’s isn’t half bad.
Most mornings, Suho just barely makes it in through the door before collapsing on the frumpy leather couch, a great hollow imitation of a person—an empty nesting doll—and falls asleep. He dreams of things he can’t remember when he wakes in the mid-afternoon after his roommates have left for work. Then, at about half past three, he connects his phone to the little blue JBL speaker on the counter and prepares to do it all over again.
+++
Suho hits Sunjae across the back with the sopping towel after he wipes down the bar, moving to the opposite side and resuming his task like nothing happened. He pretends not to hear Sunjae yelp, high pitched and startled, but can’t hide his laughter when the boy turns on his heel and trips on the edge of the black rubber mat, falling to his knees in surrender.
He’s a doe, with wide eyes and long limbs and ears that stick out a little too far. He’s 19 at oldest: a fresh hire. Kangmi trained him and complained for a month that they needed to stop hiring klutzes.
This, of course, was directed at Suho whose magnum opus at the age of 22 was shattering a fresh bottle of vodka by swinging it around like a baseball bat on his break. He’d had to wash the pungent smell out of his hair for an hour and a half.
Suho extends a hand. Sunjae scowls at him for a few seconds before taking it.
It’s a quiet night, a Sunday, and just barely past eight. Bitna probably thought this was the safest possible time to leave the two of them on the bar alone. Seonok’s in the back taking stock, but that’ll keep her occupied for at least another hour.
Looking back over his shoulder, Suho watches Sunjae beam as he serves a middle-aged woman with curled hair a martini, wiping the runaway grains of salt off the sides of the glass. He’s meticulous, Suho notes, with the kind of face that old people love—he’s going to be a winner. Suho wrings out the washcloth over the sink and tosses it in its sani bucket in the cupboard below, wiping his hands on his pants.
The bell over the door jingles and a gust of cool air rushes in. It dissipates in the heady air before it can reach Suho, who busies himself with the tablet once again.
벨벳123
A Night to Remember · beabadoobee, Laufey
⌾ A Night to Remember
The overhead lights stream down onto the black wood floor like thin spotlights, blue and pink and purple. Suho watches specks of dust flutter to the ground between barstools. They dance as they fall, coupling and separating, curling around nothing.
His gaze travels from the lights to the shadowed, vacant tables in the back. The swirling paintings attempting to escape their silver frames on the parallel wall, the floor-to-ceiling windows displaying the gold-painted steps to the entrance like a museum exhibit.
As though moved by the passing glance, the figure standing stationary by the door jolts and walks towards the bar, steady but without intention. Stone-cold sober.
Sunjae pokes Suho in the side in retaliation, and Suho flinches before shoving him off. Sunjae laughs alone for a second, staring up at Suho’s still face. Then he pauses, smile starting to fade, before asking, “What?”
Obstructing Suho’s view of the strobe lights and dancing dust, a man—a boy in a pinstriped gray suit, sans tie—sits unceremoniously at the bar. Suho’s eyes unfocus before latching onto the stranger’s face, gently curved. Soft brow, full lips, tired eyes. He’s looking intently down at the marble of the counter, gaze darting between the flecks of silver and gold in its pattern. The top button of his white collar is undone, and it’s just enough.
The words on Suho’s tongue fall back down his throat, losing momentum. Sunjae’s attention drifts from Suho’s face, and within seconds, he’s recharged: bubbling with energy once more. His boyish voice crackles as he smilingly asks for an order.
The stranger’s gaze flicks up, first to the base of Sunjae’s throat and then, slowly, up to his eyes. Partially obscured, Suho tries in vain to busy himself with something else—but despite the protests of his mind, his feet stay rooted to the rubber floor. Suho’s attention fixes itself arbitrarily on the bags below the stranger’s empty eyes.
“Water?” He asks in a hoarse voice. Sunjae’s on the move in an instant.
The stranger glances without warning to Suho in all his frozen glory, his irises gray and soft in the dim light. His eyes widen, and it’s a sight to behold—like the moon in orbit, or shooting stars, or those neon reflections on the rain coated sidewalk above the steps to the bar.
Finally, Suho finds it within himself to look away.
“You?”
A whisper.
And now Suho doesn’t know how to look back. His heart loses its count and he swallows thickly, shifting his attention to the paintings on the wall. Squiggles in vivid color. Hallucinations. Suho blinks, shaking off the feeling—he wants a drink. “Sorry?”
In his periphery, the stranger’s lips fall to a close in silent apology. His gaze falls back down to the counter as Sunjae sets a glass of water on a napkin before him and stands back, tall and proud as ever.
Someone calls to Sunjae from the other side of the bar—Suho hadn’t even heard the doorbell jingle—and the poor boy turns on his heel, unceremoniously knocking over his handicraft with the back of his hand and spilling water all down the stranger’s front. The upended crystal catches LEDs like a prism, casting fragments of color onto the man’s white shirt.
Sunjae freezes in place and Suho sparks to life, righting the cracked glass and initiating a haphazard search for paper towels. “Go help the other customer,” he mutters to Sunjae, slapping him lightly on the back in a feeble attempt to counteract the stiffness of his tone. Then he disappears into the back room, bumping into Seonok and tripping over his feet as the door falls closed behind him.
When he emerges once again, hands full of brown paper towels and sweat gathering on his brow, the stranger is gone. All that’s left behind is the broken glass on the counter, beads of cool water crawling down to the marble, and a downturned phone buzzing on a barstool.
+++
Suho’s second life started at 17.
When he opened his eyes in the sterile fluorescent light of that hospital, it felt like rebirth. Color and sound had flooded freely in and Suho—new to existence—was defenseless against it all.
There was a lot of talk. Loss of oxygen, traumatic injury, nerve damage. Suho’s favorite was little to no chance of survival. Breathing in that thick, steely air became an accomplishment. Something for his grandmother to be proud of, something to reward.
Accident. That was how she explained it to him, slow and quiet—her soft voice almost lost in the static.
Many things can be accidents, Suho had hastily concluded. He might have been run over on a crosswalk. He might have fallen off his bike and cracked his skull on the pavement. He could have slipped off the edge of the school roof. Someone could have shot him. By accident.
The possibilities were numerous and wonderful and terrifying. Suho was just foolish enough to love them all, lost in the allure of his own personal mystery.
But there was also the everlasting mystique of the rest of Suho’s past, the blur that became of it. There was not one memory he could pick out from the rest—no name, no image, no sound, no song. All he could remember on his own, after weeks of rehabilitation and strain and lovelorn rage, was this:
My name is Ahn Suho. I am 17 years old. I live with my grandmother. I attend Byuksan High School.
And this was what he learned over the course of the few months he spent in the hospital:
I get very bad grades in school. I have three jobs. I have no parents. I have a few friends. My grandmother’s undeniable favorite is a boy called Yeon Sieun.
“You could have stood to follow Sieun’s example more,” she had sighed once, watching Suho scarf down the only homemade meal he’d gotten all week. He was just a teenage boy—an animal. “He studies well, has good manners, and knows when to talk and when to stay quiet. With all the time that you two spent together, I thought you might have taken after him at least a little bit.”
“If he’s so much smarter and politer and kinder than I am,” Suho had replied gruffly, “Then I understand why he hasn’t come to visit me.”
And that was the end of that.
Within a few weeks, thoughts of Yeon Sieun faded into the blur: that great swirling void that was Suho’s youth. Suho continued to recover alone and uncomplaining. He picked himself up. The blur grew to a black hole—endless, expansive, and unknown—but far away from home. It ceased to exist in the immediacy of Suho’s mind by the time he turned 19.
Here and now, Suho is 25 years old and the spotless screen of Yeon Sieun’s phone, lighting up with texts and missed calls, is flickering in and out of existence on his coffee table. It’s real as the blood coursing through his veins. Hot as his skin. The default lock screen—a fraction of the earth, water rushing and white snow curling, forever in motion—is hidden behind the din.
Ahn Suho’s JBL
this is what space feels like · JVKE
⌾ this is what space feels like
Suho shouldn’t have taken it. He consoles himself by imagining it might have been stolen otherwise.
(Gangnam can be dangerous.)
It’s a quarter to 6 in the morning and Suho’s been watching Yeon Sieun’s phone light and calm like waves crashing to shore for half an hour. His eyes are red-rimmed and twitching, exhausted and dry. It’s almost habit. Suho’s body is powerless against his will.
Someone saved as “Baku” sends his 56th text of the night; it, like the past 17, consists solely of the poor stranger’s name, copy and pasted into oblivion like an incantation.
Suho watches it flicker over the space-black screen. In the great emptiness of his brain it echoes and echoes: Yeon Sieun Yeon Sieun Yeon Sieun Yeon Sieun. Do you not care about me or something? Prick. Sieun-ah Sieun-ah Sieun-ah Sieun-ah. Check your fucking phone for once, asshole. The group chat’s alive again! Do you know how fucking rare this is? And then it starts again. Yeon Sieun Yeon Sieun Yeon Sieun Yeon Sieun.
Suho’s a statue in the loud lamplight—hair filled with static, white shirt rumpled a little more than Bitna would allow. Outside the drawn blinds, pink and orange paint a slow moving skyline in a hazy dawn glow.
He must be going crazy.
When Suho woke up in that cold hospital eight years ago, all his belongings were gone. There were no dregs of his past life, no dots to connect. No image of Yeon Sieun in all his scholarly, empathetic, morally adept glory.
Here and now—tonight—Yeon Sieun is a boy at a bar with a face like a memory, and Suho feels like he’s dreaming when he tries to conjure up the tired glow of his still eyes.
Soon enough, he really is. Passed out on the living room floor to the lullaby of a buzzing phone, Suho sees something like this:
The hazy golden glow of dawn streaming through open hospital blinds. Flecks of dust floating aimlessly, falling against his warm skin. His hospital gown is gold thread and his hair is cut short; he feels its absence on his forehead. It’s perfectly silent, endlessly warm.
And then Suho hears a voice—his own, from somewhere deep within his chest.
“Sieun-ah. Are you asleep?”
+++
The bike, a gray Cordi that was released in Suho’s birthyear and subsequently sold and resold six times, has been his most loyal companion for the past several years. Certainly more faithful than his KAIST flatmates. Probably more faithful than Bitna, but he wouldn’t dare admit it in her presence.
It’s garishly boring to look at, with peeling Daelim decals and a uniform, dull color, but at least Suho keeps it clean. The best he could scrounge up by way of decoration was a ten year old bumper sticker he’d gotten from some MMA competition, and suffice it to say he felt less than minimally connected to its sentiment.
Suho loves his bike. His hair goes flat under his helmet and his palms sweat relentlessly against the handlebars, but when he feels the air against his warm skin, it’s like the dusk is washing over him, painting him, giving him color and life. He loves the way the neon blurs and the wind stings, loves the control.
Bitna’s standing by the steps, leaning on the black railing spanning their stretch of sidewalk with her arms crossed when he arrives. Suho catches wind of her flat expression and parks with a flourish, skidding to a heart-stopping halt before lifting his stupid helmet off his head and shaking out his hair.
“56 seconds, Ahn Suho,” Bitna says, uncrossing her arms. Today, her streaked hair is in space buns and her necklace boasts a collection of silver charms. Without further explanation, she holds out a crisp white shirt, folded department store style. It looks blue under the moonlight.
“You’re on a power trip,” Suho sighs, approaching her. He glances down at the shirt. “And you need to stop doing this.” Still, he accepts it. Casting off his jacket, he speedily buttons it over his white tee, fighting against the cold.
“Buy an ironing board,” she says through her teeth.
“I haven’t given you a shirt to iron in months,” he says, exhaling a visible breath and hastily tucking his shirt into his black pants. A car rushes by, bouncing to the beat of some R&B he can’t hear. “There is no reason for you to be blowing your hard earned cash buying me new ones.”
Bitna has the good sense not to look caught. Instead, she meets Suho’s eyes and gives him an almost affronted look. The makeup on her eyelids glitters in the artificial light. “I’ll stop after five. You work every day and don’t even have five white shirts.”
“I do my laundry very frequently,” With a swift motion, Suho pops the top button of his shirt, pulling it away from his neck. It doesn’t take too much for him to feel suffocated.
Bitna doesn’t acknowledge this, instead eyeing Suho’s hair. “The helmet is doing good things for you.”
“I look like a wet dog,” he says through a laugh.
“Chicks dig that.”
“Chicks dig me, I think, is what you mean by that.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Suho runs a hand through his bangs, doing his darndest to arrange his mop of hair into the movie-star style Bitna prefers. Anything for some extra cash. “Stop buying me shirts. People are going to mistake the relationship between us.”
“Ugh,” Bitna wrinkles her nose. “Point taken.” She turns on her heel and starts down the warmly lit stairs. Suho races after her, still fiddling with his hair. He feels the second phone in his pocket, a foreign presence, and fights off stray thoughts.
“You’re in the back today,” Bitna says without looking back. Her words are nearly drowned out by the alt K-Rock streaming through the speakers at top volume.
“Oh, fuck no,” Suho says, looking up to make sure he’s out of earshot of the few customers giggling together at the bar. “Are you punishing me for something?”
Bitna turns back, giving him a taut look. “I wasn’t aware you liked bar time that much. Weren’t you complaining about it last week?”
“I complain about everything,” Suho reasons, smiling down at her. His weapons are few but effective. “Just let me have this for tonight. Please.”
Bitna sets her shimmering lips in a thin line, but her steel eyes go soft. “I suppose I could take stock for today.” She glances sideways. “You’re going to have to handle Kangmi, though.”
In that moment, Suho feels his heart swell with love for the dark-haired college student rocking out behind the bar. “Awesome.”
That love dissipates within the hour, fading into the moist air and wearing away against the grit of Kangmi’s hard rock. Suho can’t take it anymore. Between wary glances, accidental jokes, and sporadic bursts of energy, he manages to stretch himself far enough to reach the tablet.
벨벳123
Hurts Me · Tory Lanez, Trippie Redd, Yoko Gold
⌾ Hurts Me
Kangmi, her short hair now half-up and half-down (the seventh configuration she’s attempted all night), whips around in alarm. Her eyes scan the bar, darting from Yongsan to Sunjae to Suho. “Really, dude?”
The disrespect Suho routinely receives from her should merit some form of protest, but he’s unsure how to peer pressure her into honorifics without coming off as a freak. He sticks to shaking his strawberry daiquiri with a little more force than necessary; he feels that stray comma-like strand of hair bounce against his forehead.
“This is a little more universal than K-Metal, Kangmi-ah,” Suho says neutrally, pouring and serving the drink to a glittering twenty-something with a pleasant smile.
“You’re only saying that because it’s in English,” Kangmi says with a frown. She’s 21, a visual arts student at a nearby women’s college, and was hired a matter of months after Suho. They never got used to each other.
“People love English!” While Suho’s comprehension of the language rivals that of a toddler’s, he relishes in the oblivious feeling he gets from English music. It’s the sound that swallows him up: the words simply pique his curiosity. It’s the unknown rushing through him like electricity.
This is the busiest Monday night Suho’s seen all year. He just barely gets the words out before someone’s waving him over. Kangmi can’t argue much anymore: she’s too busy preening as some deep-pocketed college girl compliments her dangling earrings.
He smiles privately. The night goes on.
Things start to calm a little after midnight. Yongsan steps out for a smoke, evidently having exhausted his bartending school tricks. Sunjae and Kangmi attempt a TikTok dance challenge in the back room. Bitna, bored with numbers and figures, comes out to help Suho handle the four customers they currently have.
“Is bar time living up to your expectations?” She asks with a Chesire cat smile, bowing her head five degrees forward as a pair of couples walks in, laughing raucously.
Suho looks at her blankly. The recollection of begging her for this rises hazily to the surface, slowed by the fog in his mind and the thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. He feels slow, drained, unattractive—but as usual, his rolled sleeves draw in a satisfactory smattering of furtive glances. He straightens up. “Oh, absolutely.”
For a moment, Suho’s acutely aware of the second phone in his pocket once more. He slides it onto the counter, feeling relieved of some extra weight.
Bitna gives him a quizzical sideways look before taking orders from their new customers.
Suho thinks about his dream as he pours a row of shots. He remembers the golden lights and sparkling dust, how they felt almost familiar. Heat creeps up the back of his neck, curling around his throat and warming his face. He swallows dryly.
Sunjae and Kangmi reassume their places, swatting each other and giggling carelessly. A fresh gaggle of customers walk in, sending the doorbell jingling in a craze. Soon, the bar is swarmed. Yongsan reenters with a sigh. They carry on. Suho cuts a lime.
벨벳123
All The Stars (with SZA) · Kendrick Lamar, SZA
⌾ Black Panther The Album Music From And Inspired By
The bar dissolves under smoke and din. Kangmi fiddles with controls, making the LED strobe lights dance, orange and pink. Suho laughs at all the right moments. When he finds a second to breathe, he spends it looking out at the warm steps. The cool cement, the sun-like glow. Then there’s someone coming down alone.
Suho looks away.
Almost everyone is accounted for when the doorbell jingles again—Bitna walks backwards into the back room, watching Sunjae with a bewildered smile as he adjusts a garnish with bar tweezers—and a sole figure in a gray suit walks straight to Suho without a moment’s hesitation.
He’s got a tie today. Black. Shirt buttoned all the way up. His hair, however, is swept by the late-night breeze, and falls dangerously close to his eyes. Eyes like burning coals.
“Hi,” is all Suho can manage, voice a little higher than usual.
The man is of a small stature, unimposing, but when he looks up, he makes Suho feel small. He doesn’t say anything more, just picking up the phone on the counter and bowing his thanks before turning to leave.
“Wait,” Suho’s voice cracks, but it’s hidden by the din. His muscles tense, his heart stutters. “Just a moment—Sieun-ssi!”
Suho doesn’t know why he’s stopping this poor stranger. He doesn’t know what to say next—but miracle of miracles, the man pauses. He looks back over his shoulder, a cross between desperate and exasperated, and his gaze is so full of feeling that Suho feels for a moment like he doesn’t deserve it.
After a moment’s silent debate, the stranger walks back. He doesn’t speak for a second, just looks up with curious, incriminating eyes. Suho feels warmth run to the tips of his fingers.
“How do you… know my name?”
Yeon Sieun’s voice sounds like crashing waves. A little rocky, a little rough, but somehow serene.
Suho’s hands flex uselessly around nothing. He squares his jaw and steels his heart, well-practiced. “You should probably check your texts. Your phone was buzzing like crazy until 6 AM.” Too specific. “Or something.”
Sieun looks down at the phone like he forgot it was there, lighting the screen with a thoughtless tap. He doesn’t quite sigh, but his shoulders sink. He looks wearily back to Suho, and the dark circles under his eyes look like watercolor. “Thank you for keeping it safe. I really appreciate it.”
“It’s nothing, Sieun-ssi.” And then, as an afterthought: “I’m Suho.”
“Sorry?”
“My name. It’s Ahn Suho. You know, like Guardian Angel?” The words are just rushing out now on a sudden and misplaced surge of confidence. His body burns with anticipation for something he can’t name, and his thoughts fade to silence. Suho drums his overactive fingers against the marble of the bar. “You went to Byuksan High School, didn’t you?”
Yeon Sieun looks at a loss for words. His eyes haven’t moved from Suho’s face since he started talking. “No. Eunjang.”
“Makes sense. I would have remembered you a little better if you had.”
It’s half flirtatious and half self-effacing—it reveals a little too much. Suho bites his tongue but manages a closed-lip smile.
“Is that so?”
Now Suho feels both Kangmi and Sunjae staring at him—Yongsan’s probably talking shit with Bitna in the back. Sieun follows Suho’s gaze to the offending pair for a moment before his attention darts back and fixes itself on Suho once again. Finally, Suho allows himself to stare back. In this silent moment, he takes note of a few things.
First: Yeon Sieun is good-looking in a strange, tired way. Perhaps too good-looking to be the pretentious model student type Suho imagined back when he was 17, but tired enough to be. Dark circles and plush lips.
Second: Yeon Sieun is not at all a common name for a boy.
Third: Those starlit eyes are swimming with something a little more than recognition. He can’t be anyone else.
Fourth: Suho wants to know what he remembers, but he doesn’t know how to ask.
Despite himself, Suho exhales a laugh. “Dude, what’s with your expression?”
Sieun’s lips part and then fall closed again, and Suho watches them without much thought.“Could you step out for a second?” His voice never fully breaks through the surface—always soft, always low. Like he’s daring Suho to lean in a little closer.
Swallowing thickly once again, Suho casts a glance back to Sunjae and Kangmi who nod in tandem. He narrows his eyes at them before looking back, and every cell in his body screams in the affirmative. His mind is riddled and lost. “Yeah. Sure.”
They don’t stray far, lingering just outside the door. Warm lamplight paints them in shades of gold, and Suho can’t meet Sieun’s eyes.
There’s a long pause before he speaks. “Do you remember me at all?”
Suho senses that there’s a right answer to this, but can’t get the words out. Can’t lie. He looks down at his dull oxfords and listens to Sieun’s breathing in the silence; the very sound of it sends electricity rushing through him. “We were friends.” Now Suho looks up. “Weren’t we?”
Sieun nods minutely, lips pressed together. Crickets chirp in the distance.
“Would you like to be friends again?”
“What?”
Suho exhales, watching his breath fog before allowing himself a smile. He looks at Sieun with unbridled curiosity, and the words fight their way out. “If we got along once, we should try again now. Right?”
There’s something akin to surprise in Yeon Sieun’s wide eyes. It makes him look younger, almost to the point of familiarity. But this is a face that Suho can’t differentiate from his dreams. “Why?”
“You look a little lonely, Sieun-ssi.”
A beat and then a scoff. Suho watches Sieun swallow a retort, watches it catch in the smooth column of his throat. “You know nothing about me.”
“So teach me,” Suho squints up the stairs, needing some kind of reprieve. He doesn’t know where any of this is coming from.“I’m a fast learner.”
There’s a long pause. Suho looks back, only to gauge the distance between them.
“Hey, give me your phone.”
“Again?”
“Yes, again. You really don’t have many friends, do you?” It’s not like Suho does either, but he at least stands with his shoulders back and smiles like he means it.
Sieun hands over his phone, unlocked, looking Suho up and down with a muted skepticism. Suho presses his lips together and types his number in, saving his contact as “수호천사”. Guardian Angel. There’s no meaning behind it, but he exhales a laugh as he types it in.
Suho’s confidence comes in waves—the rise and fall of Sieun’s breathing. He hands the phone back with what feels like a terribly juvenile smile—the corners of his lips go taut and dimpled. He feels helpless: his body is no longer his own to control.
“You should get back to work,” Sieun says. His eyes look clouded and suddenly devoid of light; that warm neon glow is gone. Still, Suho can’t do anything but stare. “Your coworkers will be upset with you.”
Suho glances back into the bar, at the silent strobing lights and Kangmi and Sunjae slapping each other’s shoulders. He wants to protest, but knows he shouldn’t. If he stayed, what more would he say? “You’re right,” he says with a click of his tongue. “You get going first, I’ll…” It’s an illusion of reverence, some lazy semblance of a patron-server relationship. Nothing can hide Suho’s intrigue, his confusion.
They stand in heavy silence, looking inquisitively at one another until Sieun’s gaze falls to the ground and he nods. “Yeah, I should…” His black tie looks stifling. Suho wants to reach forward and loosen it.
He’s still lost in that thought when Sieun turns and starts up the stairs. “Shit,” Suho mutters for no reason, his fingers brushing the metal of the bar door. His fingers just wrap around the handle when Sieun pauses in his periphery, six steps up, and looks back over his shoulder.
Suho looks up at him, and the curves of his face from the side look almost Renaissant. Sieun exhales a glimmering fog, looking everywhere but back down at Suho. “Don’t fight anymore,” he says, a little weary, and then continues up the steps without a glance back.
Perplexed, Suho yanks the door open with a disjointed jerk and is overwhelmed by sound.
+++
Four days pass before Suho cracks and sends a text. Four days. Four long shifts of drunk old businessmen singing trot over the R&B and high school kids smoking weed at the base of the steps. Bitna and Yongsan get in a fight. Sunjae contracts the worst cold known to man and takes a couple of days off. Kangmi convinces Seonok to grow her hair out for the first time in six years.
Now it’s Friday, and Suho has an early shift. 4 PM to midnight. The bar is flooded with people once again; Bitna and Suho trip over each other for hours until things calm for a matter of minutes at 11:30.
Then he cracks.
벨벳123
Silly · Troye Sivan
⌾ Something To Give Each Other
Bitna’s dancing behind the bar, her pigtails bouncing cheerfully. She took two shots of tequila half an hour ago to tide her through the shift and they seemed to have kicked in.
(Technically, that’s not really allowed, but it happens to the best of them.)
She peers over Suho’s shoulder as he stares at the text for the fifth time in the past twenty minutes, wishing he’d said something a little smarter. Bitna’s breath is hot down his neck. He nudges her away.
“Sieun?” She says, almost incredulously. “Who’s Sieun? Ahn Suho, have you found a girlfriend?”
“He’s not a girl,” Suho says, like it should be obvious. It really isn’t. He looks back down to his glowing phone screen, decorated by a single yellow bubble that reads, I’m bored, Sieun-ssi. Come back here and say something weird again, I’ve been sleeping too well recently.
It’s desperate and pathetic, but Suho supposes it’s appropriate. It has taken a grand total of one chance encounter for Suho to start feeling somewhat desperate and pathetic himself.
Bitna’s cheeks are a youthful red. She’s a bit of a lightweight. “A boy named Sieun?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re funny.”
“That’s his name, dude. I’m serious.”
“It’s fine, Suho-yah,” She grasps at his arm. “I won’t tell anyone you have a girlfriend, you should… you should trust me a little more.”
The doorbell chimes and they spring apart. Sieun stands in front of the glass door looking like he forgot what he came in for. He’s wearing a knit sweater over a button down today, an unassuming manila, and his hair has arranged itself in a flat fringe over his forehead.
Something about the sight of him makes Suho’s throat feel dry and sore. Parched. He waves, smiling crookedly, but doesn’t trust himself to speak.
Sieun takes a seat at the bar, his expression blank, and says, “What?” He looks less tired today, just around the eyes, but his voice is as motionless and perfunctory as usual.
Bitna looks at him, scrutinizing. “You’re Sieun?” She says, too informal.
Suho tries to push her away to no avail.
“Yes.”
Now Bitna’s expression melts into confusion. “Why the hell did your parents name you Sieun?”
“Sieun-ssi, I’m so sorry, she’s a little dru—”
“That’s a question for them, not me.” He looks at Bitna with a removed kind of intensity, halfway between condescension and amusement. It’s the type of look that would make Suho, for all of his seasonal arrogance, wither like a dying flower.
“How do you know Suho?”
“Do you know me?”
The conversation ends. Bitna slithers out of Suho’s grasp, looking a little sheepish and throwing her hands up in gentle surrender before putting on her customer service smile to serve some middle-aged man.
Sieun looks at Suho, an eyebrow raised. “Your girlfriend?”
“Oh hell no.” He laughs, shocked, hands fiddling for something to do. “Are you kidding me? Me and her?”
Sieun’s gaze travels back to Bitna, seemingly tracing up and down a pink highlight in her hair. Then he looks back to Suho. “Why did you text me? Do you want something?”
Now Suho senses an opportunity. “Yes, actually.” He could ask anything in the world—what Sieun meant when he told Suho not to fight, how close they were in high school, what really happened to Suho—but instead his voice breaks as he asks what Sieun does for work.
“You’re… always wearing a suit,” Suho notes astutely, eyes glazing over as he stares at the cream of his sweater. “Well. Not today, but usually.”
“I’m a scientist.”
“Wh-what kind of scientist?”
“I do research.”
“Research on what?”
Sieun looks up, gently irritated. “Astrophysics.”
“What? No doctor-lawyer-engineer for you?”
“I wanted to do something I actually liked for once.” It comes out a little sharp. Suho’s on thin ice, but not quite afraid of falling in.
“Sick. So you make rockets and stuff? Sick.”
Sieun doesn’t bother correcting him, but something in his eyes tells Suho that he wants to. Instead, he sighs, resigning himself, and asks, “What time do you get off today?”
“Like, now. Like in two minutes. Wait. What?” A hyperactive rush travels through Suho’s body, and it dooms him. “Why? What? What are we doing?”
Another sigh. “Never mind.”
“Sieun-ssi, please.” Suho can’t collect himself; he feels as though the part of his brain that remembers Sieun, the part he can’t access, has taken the wheel. He grits his teeth as soon as the words leave his mouth, silently searching for something to ground himself. Remember some more. Please.
He’s pathetic and desperate. It’s been four days.
“I have work to do.”
“Really? At 11:59 PM?”
“You’re working at 11:59 PM.”
“Not anymore, I’m not!” Suho grins, feeling seasonally arrogant, and slaps Bitna on the shoulder as he disappears into the back room.
By 12:07 AM, they’re staring at the bike.
Suho, now in his default outfit (jeans, a T-shirt, and a windbreaker that cost 50% of his last paycheck), beams as the neon lights paint the bike’s dull gray metal a prismatic rainbow. “What are you doing? Hop on.”
Sieun looks wary, his lips set together. His cheeks are round and brushed red in the cold.
“You can tell me where to turn and everything. I’ll listen well.” Suho smiles again—that stupid, boyish smile—even though Sieun isn’t looking at him. Then he’s moving, popping open the seat to grab his stupid helmet, and before he can think the better of it, he pushes it down over Sieun’s head. His fringe is flattened against his forehead, and his eyes dart up through the clear plastic to meet Suho’s.
It’s strange; Suho feels like some younger version of him—some entity he doesn’t recognize—has taken control of his 25 year old body and refuses to relinquish it. He’s powerless, and it makes his heart race. In this moment, it’s wonderful.
When Sieun finally concedes, settling behind him on the bike, Suho’s the one to grab his arms and lace them around his waist. He’s too caught up in the feeling to be embarrassed, too eager to leave. To learn. “Lead the way.”
They race down the rain-stroked, light-bathed streets, stopping and starting and cutting across like they’re playing a game, and Sieun’s arms keep Suho anchored.
DAELIMCORDI-STEREO
Apocalypse · Cigarettes After Sex
⌾ Cigarettes After Sex
As the wind whips Suho’s hair back from his face and the cold bites against his skin, he pleads with himself. Remember more. Please. He feels like he’s rushing against the wind, driving headfirst into the blur, like the black hole is about to suck them both in.
For a second, getting lost in memory doesn’t sound half bad.
They finally stop a little ways off from the city buzz; a few twists and turns bring them to a sole building, large and domed, circled by bare trees. Suho can still hear the traffic.
“Come on,” Sieun says simply, and Suho follows him to a small door. Sieun unearths a card from his pocket and scans it against the entrance key, and with a welcoming ding, the door unlocks.
It’s pitch dark inside. Suho’s shoes scuffle against the tile of the floor. Sieun’s footsteps are soft, so soft that Suho almost loses them—he lingers close, has to stop himself from grabbing hold of Sieun’s sweater like a kid.
They push through doors, climb up stairs, race down halls, until they’re in an empty room once again.
A gust of cold air sends Suho stumbling back; a rectangle in the nearby distance glows night-blue. Suho approaches it, blind. Sieun is holding the door open, moonlit, and his dark eyes reflect the stars above.
They’re at the foot of a white cement staircase wrapping around the building. A fluorescent light above flickers; moths dance.
Wordlessly, they climb. The wind feels sharper up so high—the night looks closer. For a second Suho thinks about reaching up to grab a handful of stars. He could do it. He’s just barely raised his hand off the metal railing when they reach the top, and Sieun’s leaning back against a heavy door to prop it open.
Suho squeezes past and feels a static shock on his arm where it brushed Sieun’s front. The door falls with a slamming crash, and a light flicks on.
Sieun flattens himself against the wall to get to Suho’s other side.
A rectangle cutout in the domed white ceiling shows a wide strip of purple sky, dotted with glowing stars. Pinpricks in paper. Before them, a sizable telescope points up through the gap into the heavens.
“What is it?” Suho asks dimly. The ceiling is so high above their heads; the telescope is twice his height; the night is streaming through. White beams stretch across the dome, imposing and stiff. Suho’s almost afraid to disrupt the silence. He’s out of place. The tile floor is clean enough to see his own reflection, flecked with black and gold.
“What does it look like?” Sieun asks flatly, leaning back against the wall beside Suho. Suho feels Sieun’s gaze on his skin—a series of electric shocks traveling from his temple to his Adam’s apple to the base of his throat. “It’s a telescope. Go over there.”
Sieun points to its base, where a short set of metal steps lead to the eyepiece.
Suho doesn’t move. “Why… did you bring me here?” He shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t see this—it’s beyond the bounds of his world.
“Just do it.”
A little unsteady, Suho complies. The steps groan under his weight, and all he sees through the eyepiece is black and fuzzy. He hears a click—purple and fuzzy. A series of softer clicks, and he sees crosses. A large white and blue cross freezes in his view. “What the hell is that?”
Sieun sighs. “That’s a star.”
It looks like it’s exploding into a mess of glitter—bits of light flecking off into the dark oblivion. Suho squints at it; it looks like it could fit in the palm of his hand. He barely hears the steps creak again as Sieun approaches behind him. “Why is it so big?”
“Because you’re closer to it.”
Suho looks back, eyes narrowed. A step below, Sieun looks up with something like mirth in his eyes. It’s foreign. His lips are set in a flat line, his hair a little disheveled.
“Was that a joke?”
Sieun says nothing.
“Why do you look like that?” Suho asks, looking back and forth between Sieun’s eyes. Then he turns back to the telescope. “It looks like it’s moving.”
He feels Sieun reach around him and jolts back, nearly slipping off the platform. Frozen, Suho watches him adjust something under the eyepiece and move it just slightly to the left. “Tonight…” Sieun mutters, finding the space to brush past Suho and look through the glass.
Suho’s pressed up against what appears to be a very flimsy railing, unable to speak. His heart is a drumbeat, fast and frenzied.“What are you doing?” He asks quietly.
“Look again.”
Suho leans forward, and Sieun steps back. Now, Suho sees a small sphere—a dusty yellow in color—surrounded by concentric circles. It looks like a marble, streaked with pink and blue.
“Oh—oh! It’s this!” Suho’s basic astronomical knowledge is escaping him. “Jupiter!”
“It’s Saturn.”
“Yeah! It’s that!”
He tears his gaze away from the telescope to look through the opening in the ceiling, unreasonably shocked when he finds no semblance of the planet he just saw. “How?” Suho looks back through the eyepiece. “How?”
“I don’t make rockets,” Sieun says simply. Then, after a pause, “Do you know why Saturn has rings?”
Maybe Suho did at some point, but right now… this is one thing he can stand to not remember. “No. Why?” He squints at the marble, at its perfect rings, close enough to touch.
“Everything shatters once it reaches its gravitational field. It’s all ice and rock, trapped in orbit, reflecting sunlight.”
Now Suho looks back. Still one step behind him, Sieun’s gazing up at the gap, into the purple nothingness above.
Suho doesn’t dare to breathe. “Your hair’s a mess,” he says finally, and Sieun’s gaze flicks back to him. Your eyes. Words claw at the inside of Suho’s throat. All ice and rock, reflecting those pinpricks of starlight.
“It’s because of your helmet,” Sieun says simply, not moving to fix it. A piece of his fringe stands upright, curling into an arch.
“At least try to fix it, you weirdo,” Suho replies, gritting his teeth, but before Sieun can move, he’s reaching out to flatten the stray piece of hair against Sieun’s forehead. His skin emanates warmth, and he doesn’t so much as blink.
“You’re the weird one,” Sieun says, and suddenly it’s a fact.
Suho turns back around to gaze through the telescope again. “Man. It looks so close.”
“It’s lightyears away.”
“How much is a lightyear?”
“Around 9.461 times 10 to the 12th kilometers.”
Suho breathes out a laugh. “So a little bit further away than Gangnam.”
“We’re still in Gangnam. This is SNU’s building.” Sieun’s voice gets quieter. “They bring the kids in the Astronomy Intro class up here.”
“So you’re a professor?”
There’s a moment of dumbfounded silence. “I graduated last year.”
“From Seoul-dae?”
“No. Well, yes.”
Suho makes a face, looking back. “Yes or no?”
“I got my Master’s here.”
“And for undergrad?”
“Why do you need to know?”
Suho’s the one to sigh, now. “Move a little.” He steps down from the platform, unceremoniously sitting on the tile floor beside the telescope. Just under the panel in the ceiling. He pats the floor, motioning for Sieun to join him. “I prefer to be this far away. Space scares me.”
Sieun, unmoving, raises his eyebrows a centimeter. “Why?”
“It makes me feel a little too small.”
“You are small, though.”
Suho laughs, a little too carefree. The sound bounces off the walls. “Funny coming from you.”
He swears he sees Sieun roll his eyes.
After a second, the smile quickly numbs on his face, and Suho looks down to the tile. “I didn’t graduate high school.”
“I know.”
“Right.” What else do you know? “Right.”
“The bar.” Sieun’s voice is a little louder—his footsteps are gentle. “Do you like working there?”
Suho shrugs, tracing his reflection on the floor with his pointer. “Yeah, I mean, it pays the bills. And it could be a lot worse, I only need to throw out, like, two drunk old men a week.”
He feels Sieun settle next to him. He smells like laundry detergent and bergamot. “But do you like it?”
“Sure.” Suho says, but then pauses to consider it. “Well, yeah. It’s a good job.” He swallows, working up the courage to look up. “Did I… have a different dream?”
Sieun meets his eyes, and Suho feels like he’s opened Pandora’s box. Then it’s Sieun’s turn to stare at the floor. “You didn’t want to go to college. You thought it’d be stifling.”
“Hmm. Sounds like me.”
Suho glances up, and the skies are staring down. The pair of them are alone in this building at 1 in the morning, and the stars are asking what they’ll do next.
“You wanted the perfect attendance award, though.”
Suho’s hands go still against the tile. For a second, he wonders what it must have been like—rushing straight to school after his second part-time job, showering in the teachers’ bathroom, passing out on his desk before the bell. With that stupid fringe.
He can see it, if he strains hard enough: the curtains fluttering into the classroom, early-morning light streaming in over tables and chairs. Sieun with a bowl cut and a hoodie over his uniform, standing by the open window and looking at him with that distant contempt.
Suho laughs a little, maybe just to break the silence. “Why the hell would I want that? God, I sound ridiculous.”
“You were.”
“You must have been too, then.” There’s a moment before he looks at Sieun, caught off guard by the weight of his gaze.
Sieun’s looking at the gold and silver in the tile floor. At his silhouette, soft and smooth around the edges, warmth and electricity radiating from him. “I was.”
“First and last in the class, huh. I don’t know how we put up with each other.” This is all Suho knows about their relationship. This is all the candor he can afford. He looks at Sieun out of the corner of his eyes, imploring him to smile just a little. To waste a laugh on Suho’s memory.
It feels like the sky will swallow up the excess sound—like the purple rectangle overhead will forgive them for their stupid questions and meaningless joy, welcoming them into its depths. This is the closest Suho might ever get to touching stars. He feels free.
Sieun doesn’t look at him. “Let’s leave.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s getting late. We should head back.”
“Oh…” Suho fumbles for his phone, scrambling off the floor. “Right. Yeah. Let’s go.”
So they file out, turn the light off, and confine the sliver of night sky to beyond the locked door. The stars protest—glittering, exploding—but to no avail. Suho thinks endlessly of Saturn’s rings encircling him as he drives home. Only when he’s splayed out on the couch at half past three does he feel it. Coming back to the present. Coming down from a high.
Suho tries not to think about it as he falls asleep, but he dreams of unmistakable warmth.
+++
수호천사
Come back tonight, Sieun-ssi
I wan
“Fuck! Fuck!” As Suho fumbles to delete the half-baked message, his phone decides on self-sacrifice and slides tragically out of his hands onto the pavement. “Ah, fuck.”
Bitna takes a drag from her cigarette, unamused. “What?” She asks, blowing a cloud of smoke and crystalline air at Suho as he kneels pathetically to gauge the damages. “Your girlfriend again?”
“He’s a guy, Bitna. And he’s my friend.” Suho groans, wiping at the screen with his sleeve and finally swiping the text away. Now, a cheerful, “수호천사 has deleted a message” rests in its place. He feels Bitna hovering over him and looks up.
“I wan.” She repeats forlornly, exhaling out another puff of smoke as she laughs. “What do you wan, Ahn Suho?”
Suho stands with another groan. He must be getting old. “None of your business.”
“This Sieun character is causing you a lot of agony of late, isn’t he?” Bitna casts a glance out towards the road and leans against the brick wall of the bar again. This little alley is her favorite hiding place, and Suho more often than not has to do the duty of standing by her and looking protective as she fuels her addiction. He supposes he’s repaying some debts. She looks at him as if sizing him up, which is a great feat for someone who stands 160 centimeters tall. “First you disappeared for ten minutes on the job, then you ignored a handful of customers, then you started asking for early shifts…”
“I can—I can explain it all, I promise,” Suho sputters. He shoves his phone into his pocket and busies himself with his mussed hair—another reflection of Bitna’s skepticism. “He’s… an old friend, or something.”
“Or something?”
“Bitna.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Noona.”
“Oh my god, I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.”
“You love me,” Suho says with a cursory tilt of his head. He’d be powerless if not for her, but now, it’s as though the student has become the master. He’s proud, he can’t deny it. “Just turn a blind eye for a little longer.”
“Why should I?” Bitna’s hair is braided around the crown of her head. She looks about five years younger. She snuffs out her cigarette butt against the wall and pulls out another, faltering before she offers it to Suho.
He stares at it, then at her. “Dude, no.”
“Suit yourself.” Bitna flips open her butterfly-printed Zippo lighter, and that’s that. Her rosy lipstick leaves a stain around the paper; a younger Suho had been fascinated by it. “So, explain what’s going on.”
“What? Explain what?”
“What’s going on with this Sieun guy.”
Suho’s lips fall closed. He thinks about how he’d start: When I was 17, I went into a coma for eight months… Actually, I don’t know how it happened… “Later.”
“Suho, I am your boss.”
“You’re straight up not.”
Suho’s phone buzzes, making them both jump. When he pulls it out of his pocket, Bitna leans over to read. Suho doesn’t even mind it.
연시은
?
what did you delete
i’ll be there in 20
Suho feels his face warm. Bitna looks at him through narrowed eyes. “You get off at 11 today. Give me updates and I’ll let it slide. Don’t make this a habit.”
“Bitna, I could kiss you.” He really would if she didn’t smell like cigarette smoke.
“Save that for Sieun.”
“Hah!”
When they finally go back inside, it’s a little past 10:30 and the bar is packed. The Saturday night rush has brought in patrons of all ages and makes, and Suho is not equipped to deal with them—not while his hands are still shaking.
벨벳123
Compass · The Neighbourhood
⌾ Hard To Imagine The Neighbourhood Ever Changing
Wordlessly, Yongsan slides him a shot without looking up from the tablet. Suho stares down at the clear liquid, already considering 10 possibilities for what it could be. Then, with a conceding flourish, he pushes open the door to the back room and knocks it back in a second.
As he swallows with a grimace, Suho opens his eyes to the sight of two figures—Sunjae and Kangmi, almost undoubtedly—crammed conspicuously into a corner and making out in a fashion Suho can only describe as violent.
He stares for a second, willing himself not to scream bloody murder. The shot, most probably a questionably portioned mix of gin and vodka, burns a clear path all the way down to the pit of Suho’s stomach. He breathes in, and his exhalation escapes him. “Oh, Jesus!” Suho finally looks away, blinking hard in a feeble attempt to erase the sight from his retinas. “Can you guys at least wait until after rush hour?”
The pair springs apart in his periphery; Sunjae, an impressive red, bows 90 degrees. Kangmi squeaks and kicks him in the shin. They give their apologies in perfect sync, looking at each other like they might have cooties.
Suho looks up at them and feels a little warm behind the collar. Sunjae’s shirt is unbuttoned and his hair is tousled to the point of standing straight up—Bitna would be so proud.
“Jesus,” Suho says again, useless as ever. “Didn’t know either of you had play like that.”
“Do you think I’d be kissing him if I had play?” Kangmi says flatly.
“Bro, what?” Sunjae squeaks.
“Well, I… No, I guess you guys suit each other. Yeah, that. Congrats?”
“Hyung, what?”
“I don’t know! Ah, whatever. What the fuck. Let’s just go out before we get killed.”
On cue, Yongsan pushes open the door. “Bitna and I can’t do this alone, guys. Why do you all… look like that?”
Suho sighs, pushing past him. “I’m going to need another shot.”
By 10:50-something, the crowd has fallen to a temporary lull. Bitna and Yongsan have left to go smoke another pack. Kangmi and Sunjae are living in self-inflicted quarantine at either end of the bar. Suho, with his cheeks flushed and his smile a little numb, is standing in the middle and reloading his KakaoTalk once every five seconds.
As embarrassing as it is to admit, Suho’s a bit of a lightweight. It’s not disastrously bad, not nearly to Bitna’s level, but he’s four shots deep and certainly looks it. Still, his voice is crisp and clear as he says, “You guys can stop doing that.”
“Doing what?” Kangmi asks, bordering on offended.
“That. Stop that.” A beat. “Guys, look at me. Does it look like I give a shit who you fuck in your free time?” The words come out a little loud. Suho looks down at his phone as if he might be able to hide from them.
He receives no reply for a long moment. “Hey, you kids, what—” Then Suho looks up.
Sieun is looking at him funny. “Are you drunk?”
“Oh! Sieun-ssi!” He’s vibrating. His heart is vibrating.“When did you get here? I didn’t notice you. I like your shirt.”
Sieun’s shirt is almost identical to Suho’s—white, crisp, boring. But in the LED lights and heady haze, Suho sees something almost holographic.
“Are you even allowed to drink on the job?” Sieun’s gaze darts between Kangmi and Sunjae, who look pointedly away. Suho swears he hears Sunjae start whistling.
Against his better judgment, Suho raises a finger to his lips. “I’m not drunk,” he says from behind it, grinning.
Sieun’s lips fall closed. His eyes are wide. He looks like he’s slept. Maybe the eyebags are just a fixture on his face: a working man’s aegyosal. His dark hair is parted down the middle, and it’s a little odd. He looks like an actor.
Suho tilts his head.
Black suit jacket. Bitten lips.
Something snaps within Suho. He exhales a laugh. “Let’s go.”
A gust of cool air envelops them as soon as they step out, and in a silent conference, they conclude that they have nowhere to go. Suho’s bike is a blurry mess of cool metal and worn leather under the neon lights—Suho feels a little off-kilter, a little happy, far from able to drive. He feels Sieun behind him, his gaze on Suho’s skin. He’s exposed. That one blown fuse is on full display, and Suho doesn’t even have a name for it, but he’s terrified.
Thus, Suho arrives at the only obvious solution.
SEVENTH_HEAVEN_BAR
Loveholic’s hangover (feat. Sam Kim) · BIBI, Sam Kim
⌾ Lowlife Princess: Noir
“Did you really bring me from one bar to another bar?” Sieun asks, almost amused in his disbelief as Suho leans his weight against the heavy door. Returning a favor.
This one is above ground, across the street—a little flashier, a little louder. Half club and half bar. Suho came here once on the eve of his hire, dragged by a crazed Bitna after her boyfriend dumped her.
He was 19. He liked her, in the way most guys like pretty girls they’ve never spoken to, but some part of him felt guilty for it. He had remembered the rooftop of the academy, the cheap beer cans toppling in the wind, the way his hand shook against the exam paper. It had seemed just moments behind him.
He had wondered if she had felt worn but not loved.
“Do you drink?” Suho shouts over the thrumming bass, trying to will the color from his cheeks.
Two girls, drunk beyond sentience, are swaying in the vast empty space between the counter and the wall with their wrists slung over each other’s shoulders. A group of college boys are playing High/Low in a booth. A few couples are huddled around in the dim light, some laughing at the bar.
There’s a kind of din here that makes the place feel full. Where Suho works, he feels the silence penetrating even at rush hour. Dust falling through the strobe lights.
Sieun’s following his gaze. “Not frequently,” he says quietly, staring up at Suho. A question rests in the space between his eyebrows, in the dip of his cupid’s bow. Suho feels a little more drunk just looking at him.
“Well, let today be one of those occasions.”
“Any reason why?” Sieun asks, eyes fixed somewhere below Suho’s eyes as he joins him at the bar. Then he looks up and ahead: the warm yellow lights reflect off the glass bottles, and the bartenders in their black tees are slapping each other and laughing. Overhead, a simple neon sign reads “Seventh Heaven” in English. Suho has no clue what it could possibly mean. Wouldn’t there only be one heaven, if any?
“Sieun-ah, look at me.”
Sieun turns to him with his eyebrows raised, his mouth half open as if about to say something. But he doesn’t. Just stares his usual stare, jarring but mesmerizing.
“I’m drunk,” Suho confirms with an air of secrecy.
“Thank you for the clarification,” Sieun replies without blinking.
“Don’t make me be drunk alone.”
“How is that my problem?”
Suho smiles intelligently and orders Sieun a row of shots. Sieun looks down as the bartender fills identical glasses, and then purses his lips. “Why do you like things like this?” He asks Suho with a sudden air of exhaustion.
“If you’d rather a fruity little cocktail with 40% alcohol content, that can be arranged.” Suho clicks his tongue. “Just say the word.”
“It’s fine,” Sieun says flatly, turning his head away as he knocks the first back, unflinching.
The process of getting drunk is mostly unromantic. It burns, makes you squint and cough and feel a bit stupid. Your cheeks go red, your hair goes damp, and the collar of your shirt starts to feel too close to the nape of your neck.
But after a few minutes of waiting, it feels quite pleasant. Running through a haze, far away from reality. In Suho’s case, soaring through the stars.
Suho begs Sieun to dance. Sieun glares at him with heavy eyes and scrunches up his nose. They’re tied 4-4.
SEVENTH_HEAVEN_BAR
Like Crazy · Jimin
⌾ FACE
“You never do anything fun,” Suho sighs, watching a large group of friends travel to the makeshift dance floor, laughing and hitting each other. They’re frozen streaks of light. Suho wonders if he should have gone to college.
“Not if this is your idea of fun.”
“Come on. I’m asking politely.”
“You really want to stand in that crowd and jump around like an idiot that badly?”
“I am an idiot, Sieun-ah,” Suho says proudly.
“Don’t say that,” Sieun replies with a sudden coldness.
“But I am. It’s not a problem, kinda. I’m good. I’m really good. I have you, right? My smart person.”
Sieun blinks slowly, and it looks like he’s nodding off. “Your smart person.”
“Yeah. Won’t you dance with me, my smart person?”
“No thank you, my idiot.”
“You just told me not to call myself an idiot.”
“It’s fine if I do it.”
Suho looks at Sieun, fascinated. He wonders about a lot of things, many of which can’t be verbalized very easily. “Are you miserable, Sieun-ah?”
Sieun considers it and then shakes his head. “Why are you calling me that?”
“It’s your name.”
“Yes, but—”
“Shall I return to Sieun-ssi?” Suho bows his head. “‘Welcome, dear customer’?”
Sieun looks at him as though astounded at Suho’s stupidity, glowing in soft yellow light. “I’m crazy,” he says calmly, and suddenly it becomes a hallowed truth. “I’m crazy.”
“Probably, yeah.”
Sieun shakes his head, almost preoccupied. “In all the time you knew me, you barely ever called me that.”
“What did I call you, then? Bookworm?”
Suho receives no reply, but now his mind is racing in search of lost memories. He thinks of the hospital bed, the open windows, the dreams. They always open with his voice. Sieun-ah.
The rest is swallowed up by an explosion of light.
“Sometimes.”
“What?”
“You did call me that sometimes.”
Suho laughs as though fondly recalling the behavior of an old friend. “I would, wouldn’t I?”
Sieun presses his lips together.
That blown fuse begins to plead. Remember more. Please. It’s of no use.
Blinking hard, Suho looks into the slow-growing crowd. His gaze settles on a girl with round glasses and a long fringe, laughing with her head thrown back. “Are you single?” The words surprise him. Slowly, he turns his head back to face forward.
Sieun looks at him skeptically, his voice accusatory. “Why do you ask that? Why would you care?”
“I’m just curious, smart person. I’m making conversation. I’m good at that.”
“Yes.”
“I know. That’s why I said it.”
“No, stupid. I meant yes, I’m single.
“Yes? Why?”
“... ‘Why?’” Sieun repeats, looking at a loss. His still eyes dart down and up within a second, brow furrowing almost imperceptibly.
“Um. Yeah. Why?” Suho runs his finger along the rim of an empty shot glass. “I’m sure girls like you well enough, what with your…” He stops here and swallows thickly.
“My what?”
“Jesus. I’ve opened Pandora’s box.”
“You’re the one asking me all these questions.”
“Is there any reason why you refuse to answer them?”
Sieun looks sideways at the scattered dancers, blurring under yellow light. He doesn’t look back at Suho for a long moment. “I’ve never had much interest in dating.”
“What, do the stars keep you company?”
“Who says I need company?”
“If you don’t, why do you come back to the bar whenever I ask?”
“Because I’ve missed you.”
There it is. It lingers in the space between them like something electric. Suho etches this moment into his memory, hoping the bubbling, vibrating feeling in his chest might replace all the sensations he’s lost. “Please dance with me.”
“You can’t make me do anything.”
“I could.”
“Would you, though?”
“No. That would be mean.”
“You’re not mean enough to make me do anything.”
“Would you prefer it if I were mean?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I can be mean.”
“That’s not what I said. Why do you think girls like me?”
“I can’t say that in a mean why, Sieun-ssi.”
“Say it in a nice way, then.”
Suho feels slow but not languid. His fingers pulse, his heart craves, his mind swims with liquid emptiness. Ether. He’s afraid of what’ll come out of his mouth—he can’t let himself speak. “I shouldn’t.” He shakes his head. “I won’t.”
The doorbell chimes, mechanical but bright, and a large slew of glittering twenty-somethings comes pouring in. The volume increases almost exponentially, and suddenly Suho feels too quiet. He looks at Sieun, who’s staring up at the crowd again, frozen. His golden eyes dart from side to side in silent calculation.
“Do you want t-o go somewhere?” Suho asks, hiccuping just once in the middle of the sentence and not once after.
Sieun nods, and soon they’re leaned against the exterior wall, cold brick biting through Suho’s thin shirt. Sieun looks tired, almost slumped back, his head falling dangerously close to Suho’s shoulder. The winter wind is harsh, but Suho barely minds. The neon lights across the street swim and dance, and it’s almost beautiful but a little shy.
“I don’t want to go home,” Suho exhales, watching his words cloud.
“Why?” Sieun asks. Barely a question, barely sound. He lifts his head a little against the brick, just enough to see Suho’s face.
“My roommates are going to put me in the shower.”
A pause. A car rushes past. “What?”
“They don’t like me falling asleep drunk, because—because—” Suddenly the idea of narrating Suho’s previous experience of choking on his own vomit in his sleep feels like an unsavory choice. In his defense, he reasons to himself, he was a lot younger. Alcohol was much stronger. “I—If I die they’ll have to pay more rent.”
“Oh.” Sieun says succinctly.
Suddenly Suho feels like he’s about to cry. “Do I look like I’m about to cry?”
Sieun strains a little further to squint at Suho. “You look like yourself,” He says, and then tilts his head away from the wall. “You could cry. Crying isn’t bad.”
“You cry a lot, Sieun-ssi?”
“Not really. But sometimes it’s necessary.”
“I bet. I bet studying astronomics and rockets and shits probably makes you need to cry sometimes. Probably gives you headaches like a bitch.”
Sieun exhales something that might be a laugh, but his lips are downturned and his eyes are heavy. “I do get headaches.”
“Right? I’d be sobbing.”
“No headache—no pain will ever make you cry the way love does.”
Suho swallows a mouthful of cold air. He’s a ticking time bomb. When he looks down at Sieun again, he can’t stop the recollection of Sunjae and Kangmi grasping at each other like people starved in the back room.
“My coworkers were making out,” he blurts.
“Good for them.” Sieun says seriously.
Suho wishes he could delete that image from his mind, but slowly, it starts to chip away at him. Soon he’ll be gone. A shell of himself. Maybe to Sieun, he already is.
“Come home with me,” Sieun says with a sudden conviction.
Suho thinks of his accidental text. I wan. Now, he thinks he understands what he meant. If only he knew how to put it into words. “What?”
“Don’t get put in the shower.”
“Okay.”
“Paying rent is good.”
“Okay.”
“Alright. Are you going to cry?”
“I don’t know. Do I look like I will?”
“You look like you would taste of salt,” Sieun says simply, and then hails a cab.
“You’re a psycho,” Suho says brightly as he gets into the car and closes the door behind him. He would probably taste of vodka.
+++
Sieun’s footfalls against the sandy tile are sharp, cutting through the static air. Suho clutches the railing, hoisting himself up the stairs. His free hand is going clammy from the condensation on his unopened beer, and the lights are too bright.
The apartment smelled like laundry detergent and bergamot. Suho was only there for a second, lingering awkwardly in the doorway, but that was enough to overwhelm his senses; he imagined it was a chamber of Sieun’s heart. Dark, minimal, a little worn. Quiet and still.
“Follow me,” Sieun had said, footsteps echoing. Suho had been trapped in the doorway.
Now they’re going up the stairs, and Suho can’t tell where he’s putting his feet. Distantly, he thinks it’s not much different from how he feels sober.
On the top floor of this building is an indoor swimming pool, walled in by glass and framed with blue mosaic tile. It’s like a cage, the criss-cross of clear tiles overhead—the expanse of purple sky, dotted with constellations. Window lights from nearby buildings glow blue and orange and white, streaming through and painting patterns on the floor.
The glass door falls softly behind Suho. He looks around, unable to fully comprehend his surroundings. Everything looks like crystal. The water is endless, and Sieun is a shadowed fixture at its edge. A statue, washed in distant streams of light.
Suho sits wordlessly beside him, crossing his legs. He looks at Sieun, and his fingers tingle in his lap. “Do you like music?” He asks, disturbing the silence. His words come out all as one.
Sieun doesn’t look at him. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“Play something.”
“Play what?”
“Something you like. Anything you like.” Suho swallows. “Something slow.”
Suho watches Sieun’s thumb trace lines up and down his foggy phone screen before settling, a little hesitantly.
시은
Definition of ugly is · The Rose
⌾ HEAL
There’s a bare voice, shaking through the empty air. It’s slow, almost trembling in the darkness. Through the tinny phone speaker, it sounds far away.
It’s a collection of words. Suho’s not used to understanding music.
When I see myself reflected in the waves, I can see what I’m lacking.
It’s almost overwhelming in its emptiness until a soft drumbeat hits. A soft guitar, a soft piano.
Suho’s throat feels dry. He wants to drink the song.
He cracks open his beer and winces at the sound. Sieun turns to identify the source, almost jolting. Slowly, his gaze travels up to meet Suho’s eyes.
They’re inches apart, Suho notes dimly. Inches, miles, years.
How easy it would be to close the gap.
Suho squeezes his eyes shut as he turns to take a sip. He sees stars and constellations behind his eyelids, a galaxy against black. “You’re Saturn,” he says. It makes perfect sense; it feels like a confession. His shoulders feel heavy.
“I’m Saturn?” Sieun repeats, incredulous. “What are you?”
Suho looks up through the glass ceiling, chasing shooting stars. He sees nameless constellations, distant reflections. What am I?
“You forgot everything, didn’t you?” Sieun asks, his voice low. It’s almost harsh against the sound of the song, but it bounces off the water before reaching Suho’s ears. Softens. “You forgot what you used to be like.” The guitar starts to swell around the singer’s voice, gradual but inevitable.
In the few seconds Suho takes to respond, it’s almost deafening.
Is it wrong to be different? The singer asks, desperate.
He turns around to face Sieun, reaction delayed. “What makes you say that?” It’s been obvious, he reckons. But it’s been impossible to tell for sure.
“You look weak.”
For some reason, Suho doesn’t take offense to it. Maybe that’s what girls like to see in a man—maybe that’s why Bitna scruffs him up before sending him out. An illusion of vulnerability, of trust. Like he’s a secret ready to be shared. “I used to look strong?” He asks, but it’s barely a question.
“You were strong. Much stronger than me.” I was the weak one.
“You liked that.” Now something starts to hurt, a distant ache deep within. Suho looks into the water.
The version of Suho that would protect Sieun from harm is gone forever, replaced by one that shakes like a leaf under Sieun’s gaze. One that looks away to protect himself. Small, pathetic, and unrecognizable.
“I liked you,” Sieun says hesitantly.
The song streams out into silence for a moment too long. Suho waits for it to hit, bracing for impact. “Of course you did. We were close, weren’t we?” He can’t bring himself to look back up. “How did we meet?”
“In class. You knocked over my pencil case.”
“And we were best friends from then on?”
“You… you barged into my house,” The words rush out all at once, filling the quiet with color, and Suho almost smiles. He knows what it feels like to relinquish control, recognizes the dip between Sieun’s eyebrows like he’s looking at a lost lover. “I tried to hit you with a chair. You yelled at me from your bike in the street. ”
“All at the same time?”
Sieun exhales something like a laugh. “No. There were a few hours in between.” He pauses. The light reflecting off the pool casts shimmering waves across his face like strobe lights. “Everything happened fast with you.”
Even just to look at him fills Suho’s heart with curious weight. “So when did we actually become friends?”
“I don’t know,” Sieun finally breathes. It’s almost beautiful, the fraction of a second where Sieun falters. He’s dragging Suho down with him.
“I guess we’ve both forgotten.” Suho’s voice feels like a hum in his chest.
“It’s been eight years.”
“I’m very different, aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Do you hate it?”
“No.”
Finally, Suho gathers the courage to look up. Sieun’s eyes are wide and glistening, his lips pressed together in something that’s not a smile but not a frown. He’s a contradiction just to look at, a blur—a mystery.
“It would be nicer if I was the way I used to be, though. Stronger than you.”
“I didn’t say that.” His voice wavers, and the sound of the song kicks Suho’s heart into motion.
There’s something Suho wishes he would say. I like you, not liked, not missed. But that’s impossible to hope for. This weaker incarnation of his past self is still a stranger to Sieun. A mystery.
Maybe they’re both mysteries, or maybe they’re just two boys in crisp white shirts at the edge of a pool. Two boys who didn’t quite make it past 17.
“I took your phone on purpose, you know.”
“I know.”
“Who’s Baku?”
“Old friend. We rarely ever talk anymore.” Sieun looks up, tilting his head with incomprehensible meaning.
There’s a moment of silence. The song quiets, crests, and dissolves into nothingness. Another starts, and no one can be bothered to stop it.
시은
Snow 눈 · SURL
⌾ Aren’t You?
The melody, sounding almost liquid, skims across the glass, the surface of the water, their skin. Echoing guitar shimmers in the darkness like crystal. An airplane passes overhead.
The water below is dancing to its sullen melody, swaying against nothing.
“Why did you come to the bar that day?” Suho feels himself ask.
“I was trying to run away.”
“From what?”
A beat. Their breathing is quiet, lost in the echo of the song, and Sieun smiles.
He smiles without warning, and his lips downturn, and his cheeks are dusted red. “My mother,” he says, almost embarrassed. “My mother, she—she dragged me to this fancy restaurant and started grilling me about marriage.” He won’t stop laughing, and it shakes his whole body. He’s in motion, glittering, catching moonlight. “That was the first I’d seen her in a year.”
Suho’s entire body is on fire. He feels feverish, delirious, euphoric. “You’re so…” Oh, god, where are the words? How does Suho say what he means: that he wants the world to fall away, wants to step away from 17, wants to remember every single moment from now until he falls asleep, wants? “God.” He drags his hands down his face, helpless and aching. “Fuck.”
“What?” Sieun’s smile starts to level, but his eyes are still curved with something fond. Tears linger on his lower lashes. It may just be a trick of the light.
“You’re so…” You’re Saturn, and I’ve been trapped in your orbit for eight years without knowing. “You’re just so weird.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“You’re weird,” Suho repeats as though assuring himself. A mess of words and feelings wage war within him. “And your face is so…”
“So?”
“Your face is so good. You have such a good fucking face. Is that weird?”
“Good how?” Sieun asks, suddenly analytical.
Suho hesitates, trying to find the words. His gaze travels, almost shyly, from Sieun’s glinting eyes down the perfect slope of his nose to his lips. The divot of his cupid’s bow.
It’s visceral, the feeling that rushes through Suho. Danger. Fight, flight, or freeze.
“Oh, god,” says Suho simply. His impulses fight against each other, and it sends a rush of color to his face. Sieun looks at him quizzically, and Suho chooses flight. The moments between him grabbing Sieun’s arm and the water engulfing them, frigid and pitch dark, blur in motion.
Suho’s worn shoes slip against the wet tile of the pool floor, and his ears fill with water. He feels Sieun’s hands, searching for grounding. His worn soles are useless against the tile floor: he slips backwards, and Sieun’s falling with him.
In the darkness, Suho opens his eyes. There’s no source of light, just the water rippling above them. For a second, he doesn’t feel the cold. Doesn’t feel the water. Sieun’s trying to grab hold of him, and every unsuccessful brush lights a spark against Suho’s skin. Every drumbeat pulses through the water, rippling towards them.
Sieun grabs him by the collar, and they break through the surface, gasping and coughing.
“Are you crazy?”
Sieun’s hair is a flat curtain over his face, obscuring his eyes. He lets go of Suho to push it back. Suho laughs, useless as ever. He’s afraid he might lose his footing again. He laughs and closes his eyes and pretends he doesn’t notice how Sieun’s shirt clings to his skin.
“Yes.” It’s freezing. Suho is useless, but happy. His heart hums through the cold, and his body is overwhelmed with sensation; It’s blinding, numbing. “I’m crazy, Yeon Sieun.”
“What is wrong with you?” Sieun’s voice finally breaks through—it’s deep, sharp around the edges, reverberating like an electric pulse through the tile pool floor.
“I’m perfect, Sieun-ah. I’m wonderful.” Suho’s breathless. “Maybe you’re the one who’s fucked up, have you considered that?”
“You know nothing about me,” Sieun says. A few strands of wet hair curl over his forehead. It’s familiar but foreign all the same, like warm light across the steps. Like Suho looking in the mirror at 5 AM, stone-cold sober, and asking his reflection all the wrong questions.
“So let me know things,” Suho says. At this point, he’s begging; his smile is numb and wavering. He’s overcome with need, can’t spare an ounce of energy on shame. Sieun knows him: his heart is on full display—alive and hungry. “I want you to tell me who you are. Who I am. Sieun-ah, please.”
Sieun looks at him with heavy eyes, weighed down by what looks like a strange amalgamation of guilt and desperation. Their hands brush underwater; Suho reaches in, Sieun pulls back. It feels like a habit. “It’s cold, isn’t it?” He says.
There's a black river between them. Suho’s looking for light, lost in the depths. “Yeah.” He takes a deep breath, and the water wraps around his ribs. “It is.”
+++
“Sieun-ah, are you asleep?”
“Yes, I’m tired.”
Tonight, Suho’s vision gets a little clearer, and he sees Sieun under the golden light. Slumped over in a stiff chair at the foot of the bed, the top button of his school uniform undone. His face is restless and tired, streaked in tears and blood. It makes Suho’s skin feel too hot, makes the air feel too alive—
Suho’s eyes open involuntarily to the sight of a bare ceiling, to early-morning sun peeking through closed blinds.
Suho’s in a bed. Certainly not his own.
He smells like Sieun.
There’s a moment of silent, stationary panic that runs through Suho’s body like a current. He wills himself not to breathe in too deeply for fear of passing out. Within a second, he’s upright, looking around in a frenzy—his hair is covering his eyes, and his clothes feel a size too tight, and his head feels too heavy. He’s alone.
The room is plain, simply furnished, with a full bed and a nightstand and a desk in the corner framed by colored post-its on the walls. Suho assumes a door on the other wall leads to a bathroom. There’s a succulent on the nightstand. Carpet on the floor.
It’s all Sieun, and it overwhelms Suho’s senses. He stands shakily, shuffling to the bathroom as though afraid the walls might cave in on him. They don’t, not until he switches on the bathroom light and sees his reflection in the mirror.
Gripping the counter, Suho squints to read the lettering across his chest: OPTIMIST CLUB.
The clothes are just a little small on him.
Suho hangs his head in defeat. “Fuck my life,” he sighs, filling his lungs with terrible sweetness.
By the time Suho has freshened up and pep-talked himself into leaving the room, he’s still not quite equipped to see Sieun in his miniature kitchen arranged an array of small dishes on the island. A meal for one.
Suho’s throat goes dry. Sieun’s hair is wet. He looks up like a deer in headlights—freezes right there on the border between the kitchenette and the living room.
“Ah, uh,” Suho clears his throat. He sees two white shirts on a drying rack by the door. “Good morning.” He looks up at the cylindrical ceiling light, at the black marble of the counter, at the blankets strewn across the worn couch, at the tile floor. Then he closes his eyes.
“Good morning.” A beat. “I got you hangover soup.”
Suho looks up, equal parts touched and horrified. “Wow.” He looks at Sieun meaningfully, but he’s sure it just comes off as nauseated. He is a little nauseated.
Sieun sighs, and his eyes narrow. “Just eat, will you?”
It becomes clear that Suho has no choice in the matter. He drags himself into the kitchen.
시은
tokyo · RM
⌾ mono.
“What about you?”
“I’ve eaten.”
“At least sit with me, will you? I feel awkward.”
“How is that my problem?”
“Please?”
“Fine.”
Suho takes a sip. It burns its way down his throat.
Sieun’s looking at him with calm eyes, hands crossed in his lap. Suho wants to thank him, but doesn’t know where to start. He’s worried he’ll never be able to.
“You can’t cook, can you?”
“Why do you ask?” Sieun asks, a little affronted.
Suho looks down at his soup, biting his cheek and swallowing a smile. He’s still reeling from last night’s influx of sensation—every surge of misplaced emotion thrums its way through his throbbing head. His memory is fragmented, but the feelings all remain. “I’ll make you a meal sometime, okay? Pay you back.”
“No reason to.”
A beat passes. Suho feels very warm.
“Are you always this nice?” He asks. This sweater is soft.
“Hmm?”
And what’s with that gaze? Suho wants to ask, his thoughts stumbling over themselves and bursting to the surface. Gasping for air. That empty, glistening gaze. It’s been haunting me for a week, you know that? At five in the morning when I’m trying to sleep. I feel it piercing through me. Like I’ll open my eyes and you’ll be there.
He shakes his head and lifts his spoon to his mouth. “You. You’re so…”
Once again, the word doesn’t come to him. He’s almost grateful it doesn’t.
“You are too,” Sieun says flatly.
“I didn’t even finish my sentence.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“You know me that well?”
Sieun falls silent, looking up at the wall.
Suho laughs, a little off-kilter. He feels close to insanity. “I suppose you know me better than I know myself.”
A pause. A clock ticks out seconds.
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, you know… you know a lot about me.”
He feels Sieun look back at him. There’s no question, no uncertainty, just static in the air between them. Suho’s skin feels electric, and he wants to tamp it down. He can barely move.
“You know what happened to me. No one told me the truth, you know that?” Something surges within Suho again, and he’s helpless against it. He looks up. “You’re the only person left who remembers.” He puts down his spoon, looks around in a quiet search—a hopeless figure eight—before meeting Sieun’s eyes.
Sieun presses his lips together, brow furrowing, and the feeling morphs into a kind of phantom pain in Suho’s chest. “Are we going to talk about it, Sieun-ssi?” He asks timidly. “Ever?”
For a second, Sieun’s eyes flicker steel and cold. “Does it have to be now?”
“No. No, it doesn’t have to be now.”
“Good. Then eat.”
Suho breathes in deep, feels the fleece of the sweater shift against his skin. There’s something within him that protests against the moment—the food on the table, Sieun’s glistening eyes, the quiet music. “You don’t want to tell me.”
“Suho.”
It’s the first time Sieun’s said his name. It’s barely a whisper, a little hoarse, and it makes Suho’s throat dry. He shakes his head, denying himself the ecstasy. “Come on. Tell me the truth. Or else you’re going to be stuck doing this forever.”
“Doing what?”
“This.” Giving me things I did nothing to deserve. Apologizing without words for shutting me out.
The distance between them crests and closes like a beating heart, instantaneous. Impossible.
“I don’t think I’m… the person you missed,” Suho says gently. “Am I?” His head feels like it’s splitting itself in two.
There’s a long pause. Sieun’s looking at the table. “No. Not at all.”
Suho’s skin stings. He nods, gaze wandering away. Figure eights. “I’m a stranger, then. You’re… You’re a stranger.”
Sieun nods minutely. “We have nothing in common anymore.”
There’s a part of Suho that disagrees. That knows they have something to hold on to, despite the blanks in his memory and Sieun’s sudden silences—there’s something that bowls Suho over, even now. “Right.” There are no words for it; it burrows under Suho’s skin, silenced.
“It’s unfair of me to use you as a stand-in for someone I’ve lost.” Sieun presses his lips together. They look soft. “We’re not those people anymore, after all.”
Even in Sieun’s eyes, there must be some similarity; maybe beneath the new haircut and the pressed shirts and the customer-service smile, Suho’s soul still feels the same. Maybe it’s his laugh, his voice, his eyes. Maybe what feel like sparks to Suho are embers to Sieun. They must have given him enough hope to keep him coming back.
That similarity—the bridge between 17 and 25—must have been what made Sieun come back to him. Suho knows it exists. He just wishes he could find it.
His head hurts.
“And I know nothing about you, really.” You’re a different person. “Maybe this isn’t…” Sieun trails off, and it sounds like he’s imploring. “This isn’t something we should try to…”
You’re the wrong person.
“Yeah. Maybe not.” Suho wants to take the words back, but he’s numbed by the overflow. He wants to say that they’ve just met, that they could still learn, that they should search for that bridge between 17 and 25. But that’s the very same thing that’s been eating away at Suho since they first met. Liked, not like.
Maybe if they’d met at a cafe, or bumped into each other on the street, or brushed past on a college campus, Sieun would want him to stay. Maybe Suho would have deserved to.
Suho looks at the door, wondering if he should leave now.
“Finish eating first.”
Suho nods, feeling static. The clock picks up speed.
His shirt, still damp, sticks to his skin as he drives home.
+++
Ahn Suho’s JBL
Some Things Never Change · Bathe Alone
⌾ Fall With The Lights Down (Louise)
The shoes have gone brown around the edges. Suho’s sitting on the living room floor at half past five with a hair dryer plugged into the wall; the floor lamp has sacrificed its place in the outlet for it. The room is cool and dark, and the sunlight outside the open blinds is starting to wane.
Soaked through with pool water, the shoes are resting on two pieces of newspaper that probably predate them. The pink plastic handle of the hair dryer is slippery in Suho’s hand, and warm air blows a little past his face towards the door.
He feels vacant, and it’s growing more and more unbearable. At some point, it has to hit a peak. And from there he can only come back to normalcy.
Suho has the day off. It’s rare. He’s wasting it on his living room floor, wasting electricity on a hair dryer he’s forgotten to turn off, wasting daylight.
These oxfords, battered and water-damaged beyond recognition, wreck themselves a little further with every second Suho wastes.
He’s not thinking of much of anything. He stopped beating himself up by a quarter to two, shut out the thought of the gray emptiness in Sieun’s eyes by four, gave up on hypotheticals about half an hour ago.
What if we’d never met before this? was one that he’d worn thin. He’d thought of college campuses, chance encounters, high school friends. Would he still like me?
How silly of Suho to pretend he didn’t know the answer. What a good liar he’s become—now, he even fools himself.
He drew the curtain over himself half an hour ago. Back to reality. To wasting time, money, himself.
Was Suho made for more than this?
He laughs at himself, almost delirious, and both of his roommates burst in with generous amounts of liquor in tow. Suho shuts off the speaker, unplugs the hair dryer, and gets wasted with them around their old kitchen table. Just to make things feel a little more complete.
He turns away from them with every shot. They ask if he’s having girl problems. He says, something like that, and smiles.
Suho doesn’t remember falling asleep, but he wakes up on the stretch of cool tile right in front of the door, surrounded by discarded shoes. It’s 4 in the afternoon, and he feels like he’d much rather be dead than get up.
He wonders what it must have felt like to be in a coma.
He gets up.
Ahn Suho’s JBL
ur so pretty · Wasia Project
⌾ how can i pretend?
Suho’s not entirely sure how many days pass after that. They all start to blur into one. An endless loop of graveyard shifts, of convenience store meals, of silence. He can’t fall asleep, and the dreams go away.
Sometimes Suho stays out all night for the hell of it—not drinking, not dancing, not laughing in the arms of a stranger like he should be. He just roams about the familiar streets, perhaps jetting around in a pathetic imitation of someone with somewhere to be. He chases that old feeling, of the sunset painting itself across his skin—but night only comes quicker. He’s chasing the color away.
Then he starts taking melatonin. A new month starts. Suho knocks himself out, wakes up, and goes to work.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?”
He flips open Bitna’s Zippo lighter and watches the flame dance. The butterfly printed on the cool metal splits itself into two with no protest.
“Suho, are you…” Bitna peers at him, a blur in his periphery. Tendrils of smoke dissipate in the space between them. “Are you high?”
“What the fuck? Bitna. I don’t…”
“I know you don’t, but like—”
“Dude, no. Chill. I’m fine.”
“No, dude, you’re not. You haven’t been for at least a week now.”
She seems to have a better handle on the passage of time than Suho does. As expected.
Suho looks at her, letting his eyes travel her face. He takes note of the concern in her narrowed eyes, the red tinge to her nose and cheeks, the perfect cupid’s bow she’s painted in scarlet. The pink-streaked hair framing her face.
He wonders what she sees.
“Is the quality of my work suffering?” He asks quietly.
“Sorry?” Her eyebrows raise.
“I asked, is it impacting my work?”
“No, but—”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Bitna’s face contorts in affronted question. She searches for the words for a moment, eyes fixed on his face. “You are my friend, Ahn Suho, whether you like it or not. That’s the problem.”
Suho blinks a few times and shuts the lighter with his thumb. He looks at the ground. It’s cold. “You’re right. Sorry.”
“Now what the hell are you apologizing for?” Bitna hits him feebly on the arm. “I just… I just want you to know you can talk to me. Always.”
Suho can’t remember the last time he took her up on that offer.
He imagines how he would start, how he would grab her by the shoulders and search desperately for her humanity. For words. Answers. Do you think it’s unreasonable for me to want to know why I was in a coma for almost a year? Do you think it’s possible to fall in love with a complete stranger? Do you think you can describe what it feels like to remember who you are?
And Bitna’s pink lips would close around her cigarette, and her perfect brow would crumple.
Suho nods and presses his lips together. “I appreciate that.”
He’s suddenly struck by a realization of his utter loneliness.
Suho starts to ask for even earlier shifts. It only takes a few nights of disorientation for him to realize he should probably stop taking melatonin. Whenever he feels the bike swerving out of his control, he waits for a recollection that never comes. Trauma that never renews itself. Fight, flight, freeze.
Remember something. Anything. Please.
He throws out the bottle and goes to work at noon on a Tuesday.
벨벳123
Passing By (prod. Primary) · ron
⌾ Primary Presents PAKTORY MIXTAPE VOL.1
“Korean music? You?” Kangmi asks, perching at the edge of the bar and blowing a sizable bubble of pink chewing gum. Her skirt is pleated like a schoolgirl’s.
“Get down from there,” Suho hisses. “A customer could see you.”
There are a grand total of two customers at the bar right now, both lost in their empty glasses. Nevertheless, she raises her hands in surrender and slides off, combat boots hitting the floor with a thud.
“Not just any Korean music. Indie K-R&B.” Sunjae says distantly, his eyes almost wistful below thick brows. He got a haircut. Lost the fringe. Now, he actually kind of looks his age. “And you want us to believe you aren’t a male manipulator?”
Suho rolls his eyes. “If you actually paid attention to the lyrics, that image you have would go straight down the drain.”
When you pass by, I pretend I don’t know you. I’m satisfied.
Understanding lyrics was something Suho missed without realizing it. Now, he leans against the counter and plays dumb as this song he found by chance lays him bare.
“Ah!” Sunjae exclaims, straightening up. “Heartbreak was my second guess. But frankly, hyung, I can’t imagine some girl chewing you out. It does nothing for your image.”
Suho looks at him incredulously. “Shut up, will you?”
“My bad,” Sunjae chirps with a sheepish (but not quite remorseful) smile. “You just look so…”
“Broody,” Kangmi supplies. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it makes you look kind of sexy, but—”
Suho feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He holds back a shudder. “Really? You’re going to say that to me in front of your boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“You’re not a threat,” Sunjae whispers gleefully. Suho elbows him in the side and busies himself with wiping down the counter for the fourth time. Those poor falling specks of dust don’t stand a chance.
“You kids are so weird,” he mutters, turning their exchange over in his head a few times before abandoning his washcloth and looking between the pair of them. “As far as I’m concerned, you two are both in a sweet, healthy, and loving teenage relationship.”
“Bro. I’m 21.”
“He’s not!”
“I’m going to be 20 in nine days, hyung.”
Suho swats at him. “You're still a teenager for nine days, then. And what does it matter? 18 through 22 all feel about the same.”
“That’s terrible,” Kangmi breathes. “I can’t cope with another year of this.”
“Oh, you can. You’ll turn 23 and realize you haven’t seen shit yet.”
“Do we ever have any fun?” Sunjae asks a little shakily. He leans back against the counter, propping himself up on his hands and looking at Suho inquisitively. “Have you had any fun?”
Suho thinks of his three girlfriends and one boyfriend. “Eh, well. It comes and it goes.” He sets his hand on the washcloth again, but doesn’t move. “It’s not all bad, though. I can say that. Don’t worry too much about what’s to come, just…”
“Enjoy ourselves now?” Kangmi deadpans, assuming her place on the counter again.
“Nah. Just stay in the now. Feel every moment, even if it fucking sucks.” Suho doesn’t really know where the words are coming from. “This time won’t come back.”
“Woah,” Sunjae sighs. “I just knew you got your heart broken.”
Suho hits him with the towel. Sunjae laughs like a little kid, and looks up at Kangmi with glittering eyes. Kangmi looks at the floor, hiding her face.
Suho misses being 17. It’s like homesickness for a place he’s never been.
How wonderful it must have been to have something to love.
By the time the clock strikes 8, Suho’s already halfway out the door. “Yongsan will be in in 10,” he says, not caring that no one hears.
He pushes open the door and the cold air stings his skin, drawing tears from his eyes. Suho sniffles and gets on the road.
Neon lights, flickering and fading, paint the streets in quiet color. Suho relies on muscle memory to carry him home, exhausted by everything. He makes it about halfway before the rain starts.
Suho doesn’t pay it much mind at first, but then it’s thundering and he’s soaked through in the spotlit darkness, surrounded by cars. He feels small and stupid. “Fuck,” he mutters, clouding up the inside of his helmet. It takes him far too long to pull off the main road.
Seven minutes later, Suho’s shivering under the green fluorescent lights of a half-empty parking garage. He leans forward, bracing himself against the white plaster to peer through a square window in the wall. The air smells like frozen petrichor.
He can barely see anything. Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance, and there’s no lightning in sight, but the sky is purple and his hands are white with cold. The streets are hidden behind a curtain of rain, beaming lights blurred around the edges. Leaves on a nearby tree shudder with every falling raindrop in an involuntary dance.
Suho leans away, pushing his damp hair out of his face and zipping his windbreaker up over his button-down. The lights hum overhead, steady and shallow.
For the first time in his life, Suho thinks he needs a smoke.
He wanders his way into the adjoined building, one of those big multi-level department stores doused in diamond lights and fake luxury. Suho travels in a figure eight, up and down two escalators, loading and reloading the weather app on his phone and trying to look preoccupied enough to ward off a number of identical store clerks in pencil skirts.
Afraid of seeming conspicuous, Suho puts away his phone and begins to look around aimlessly. Within about fifteen minutes, he attracts the attention of three clerks; he clumsily pretends to be a clueless boyfriend trying to buy his girlfriend a birthday gift, then a clueless wedding guest trifling through expensive kitchen appliances, and finally, the type of person who says, “I’m all set, thank you, just browsing.”
By the time Suho’s weather app lights up a bright blue, it’s a quarter to nine. He races back up the escalators, attempting to slip away unnoticed, but he feels the inquisitive gaze of a fourth clerk from behind.
He’s in the Men’s section. He looks about, bordering on desperate, trying to find something he can blow a couple thousand won on as fast as possible.
Suho settles on a gold Zippo lighter in the check-out line, silently trying to rationalize cultivating a smoking habit and sheepishly dragging himself up to the cashier. “Hi, um. Just this today.”
He’s fumbling for his wallet when he hears a sound, almost a gasp. He fumbles a little faster, and he hears it again.
When Suho looks up, the cashier’s wiping at her face. Her hair, a fading blonde, is escaping from a bun at the nape of her neck. She squeezes her eyes shut, and tears race down her cheeks. She covers her mouth with a hand.
“Excuse me,” Suho says quietly, a little mortified. He feels rooted to the ground. “Are you… alright?”
The clerk tries to hold back a sob, but a strangled sound escapes her throat. Like a caged animal. She waves her free hand, trying to signal that it’s alright.
Suho stammers, hands starting to shake. He wants to get out of here, but can’t seem to move. He looks down at her crooked nametag: 손희영. Son Heeyoung.
She sobs again, both her hands flying to cover her face. It’s like something out of a nightmare—that warm static feeling before the ceiling comes crashing down.
“I’m sorry,” Suho says hurriedly, almost panting. His heart is beating in sudden bursts, and his brain is the loudest he’s heard it in weeks. Run. “I’m so sorry.” He bows halfway, useless and numb. “I’m so sorry.” He’s already backtracking, stumbling over his feet. “Really.”
Suho sprints out of the store.
+++
벨벳123
End of Beginning · Djo
⌾ DECIDE
Suho isn’t very close to Seonok. She’s the oldest of them all, only a year or two shy of 30, but looks about 14. Her boyish haircut doesn't help matters much. Suho used to wonder if that was why she never grew it out.
They don’t talk much, but when they do, it’s never about the things that matter. She shares his penchant for English music, so the heavy silence they share is tolerable. Almost peaceful.
It’s 9 PM, and Suho’s laughing politely as a girl in a turtleneck cracks relentless jokes in his general direction. Her cheeks are a lively red.
Suho feels like he’s lost his touch; it’s almost unbearable to keep forcing laughter, to keep faking glances—his steely eyes go soft and tired, his fingers drum endlessly against the marble, his smile loses its edge. No matter what he does to his hair, it falls flat in two sections over his forehead.
Suho looks 17, and he feels 22. The past is chasing him, and he can’t do anything but relent.
He turns away from the customer, humming to Seonok’s song choice and trying to look busy. He entertains himself by slicing a lemon paper-thin, listening to the knife fall against the board. Bitna’s in the back singing along to SEVENTEEN, and her high-timbred voice cuts through the haze every few seconds.
Absentmindedly, Suho pops a round of lemon into his mouth. The doorbell sounds, and a woman sprints inside. Her blonde ponytail jumps as she fights against her momentum, finally skidding to a halt before Suho and bracing herself against the counter.
Suho bites down slowly. His mouth fills with juice—sour, bitter, sweet. He blinks a few times, waiting for her to stop panting. “Can I get you anything?” He manages, mouth full.
“You,” The girl starts venomously. Her face is a mess of juxtapositions: sharp eyes and round cheeks. Suho wants to look away, but they’ve already locked eyes. “Ahn Suho, do you know how fucking long it took for me to find you?”
Suho swallows the sliver of lemon and feels a cough lodge itself in his throat. He can’t hold it back; he hangs his head, propping his hands on the cutting board and hacking hopelessly. Tears spring to his eyes.
Wordlessly, Seonok hits him square between the shoulder blades with the heel of her hand. Suho rights himself, clearing his throat loudly and fighting to look the girl in the eye. “I’m sorry?”
Something in her gaze shifts. The top button of her uniform blouse is undone, and her name tag is hanging vertically. Son Heeyoung, on the verge of collapse.
Suho feels a flash of empathy, tempered with belated surprise.
“It’s me,” The clerk says quietly but insistently, gripping at the satin of her blouse. Her fist settles over her heart. “Youngyi.”
Youngyi?
Suho wracks his brain for any recollection of her name, and finds one on the event horizon: the periphery of the blur. A passing mention in his grandmother’s voice, an eight-year-old memory. Faded with time.
What are the odds? Suho looks at her blankly, petrified with stinging shock.
He watches Youngyi's grip loosen, hears her shakily exhale. “Do you remember me?”
Suho forgot about this part. He doesn’t think he can stand it.
He wants to tell the truth, wants to lie, wishes he was spared from having to choose. He wishes she’d never come in to see him. For a second, he wishes he’d never woken up.
He glances back to where Seonok is standing frozen, looking between the pair of them in silent confusion and sighs. “I’ll be back in five.”
벨벳123
Let Down · Radiohead
⌾ OK Computer
Suho grabs Youngyi by the arm and drags her out into the cold. For some reason, she doesn’t protest; the rubbed-out soles of her flats skid against the floor, and she slips along quite merrily. Her free hand comes up to grasp at Suho’s wrist for extra traction, and suddenly he’s stuck doing all the heavy lifting.
Only when the door falls closed behind them with a muted jingle does Youngyi wrench herself out of Suho’s grasp. She looks at him with an overfamiliar air of exasperation—her eyebrows furrow, peeking out from underneath a curtain of honey-blonde hair, and her red lip curls in disgust. She looks him up and down, almost scrutinizing, and her resulting exclamation is suspended like a puff of smoke in the thin air. “Holy shit. You haven’t changed at all.”
Suho looks at her hopelessly. Sweat and adrenaline can’t protect him anymore; the winter cold burns against the exposed skin of his forearms, his neck, his face. Even his damp hair feels like it could freeze. He ruffles it with a hand, probably for the worse.
Youngyi’s in her uniform—short sleeves and a skirt—but doesn’t seem to notice the cold. Her face looks like spring. She looks up towards the top of the stairs, her eyes wide and thoughtless.
“Youngyi-ssi,” Suho starts slowly, flinching as she whips her head around to face him and inadvertently slaps him with her rose-scented ponytail. Then he forgets what he was going to say. “Ow. Jesus.”
“‘Youngyi-ssi,’” Youngyi mimics, somehow emulating even the slight tremble in his deep voice. Her gaze is flat, and her eyes look black and endlessly deep. She straightens up. “I know it’s been eight years, but really? We lived together, Suho-ssi.”
Suho is too exhausted to be shocked by that. He drags a hand down his face, pausing over his mouth. “I don’t remember you,” he says into his palm.
“What?”
“I said I don’t remember you.” Now Suho’s hand comes up to rest aimlessly at the back of his neck, absorbing heat.
“Oh,” Youngyi says simply. Her small mouth falls closed, twitching once before she starts to speak again. “That’s awkward.”
“I-It’s not personal,” Suho blurts. “I forgot, like, everything.” Now he exhales a laugh, which clouds in the air between them. “Everything between, like, 12 to 17 is gone, and everything before that is just blurry.” A pause. “I even forgot algebra.”
“I find it hard to believe you knew algebra in the first place.”
Suho considers this. An embarrassed smile forces itself onto his face, bringing warmth and color to his cold cheeks.
Youngyi unearths a purple cigarette case, laughing privately as she lights up. “I find it harder to believe that Yeon Sieun didn’t re-teach everything you missed while you were out.”
Suho’s smile goes sour. Youngyi turns away to blow out a puff of smoke and looks back up at him, cigarette pinched absurdly between her thumb and forefinger. Her eyes widen almost imperceptibly. “Don’t tell me you forgot Yeon Sieun.”
“I forgot everything, Youngyi-ssi,” he says perfunctorily.
“Yeah, but Yeon Sieun isn’t just everything.” She turns away again, taking a drag. Suho wonders why she keeps doing that. “I’m everything. Math classes are everything. Yeon Sieun is…”
“Nothing?”
“Something.” Youngyi looks at him curiously. “Yeon Sieun is something to you. Or he was, anyway.” She searches his face and presses her lips together. “We’re going to have to start from square one.”
“Square one?” Suho parrots dimly. He wants to run his hand through his hair again, but doesn’t trust himself to move that much.
“Yes, square one. I’m going to explain it all in gory detail, just you wait. It’ll probably take a few hours, a handful of beers, maybe tteokbokki. What do you say?”
Suho opens and closes his mouth like a fish. “But—”
The door opens suddenly with a ferocious jingle. Suho flattens himself against the cement wall, greeted by the sight of an incensed Bitna. She’s giving him a look halfway between poisonous and incredulous, and Suho starts to wonder if she really can cut from his paycheck.
Bitna’s attention shifts to Youngyi, and Suho watches words die on her tongue. They look at each other in anticipatory silence, suddenly disoriented. It’s almost like recognition, but just shy.
Bitna looks back at Suho with pleading eyes and closes the door. Youngyi’s still frozen with her hands crossed over her heart, ashes fluttering to the ground. Slowly, she turns to Suho. “Dude,” she whispers, “she’s hot. I had my hair just like that, you know? These ridiculous pink streaks. And the ugliest fringe ever, oh my God. She pulls it off way--”
“Youngyi, why?”
“Why what?”
Suho wrestles his thoughts down, tries to grab hold of them. “Why would you do that? For me?”
“What? Explaining everything?” She looks at him like he’s stupid. “What else am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t think you reali—”
“It’s been eight—”
“I don’t even know how it happened.”
Youngyi’s expression shifts. Spring, summer, fall, winter. She sniffles. The cigarette is burning through in her hand. “No one told you? Not even your grandmother?”
Suho shakes his head.
“What, and you can’t call her up and ask now that everything’s over?”
“My grandmother passed away three years ago.”
Youngyi sniffles again. She looks down at the ground, eyebrows raised. “I’m sorry. Didn’t know.”
“Not your fault.” Suho’s too trapped in this train of thought to lose Youngyi in grief. He swallows, wringing his hands. “So, the point is, you’re the only one left who… knows.” You and Sieun.
He pretends not to see a tear fall from her cheek, staining the cement like rain. She wipes it away in a hurry, clearing her throat loudly. “Ah, sorry. I’m done crying. I got through with it all last night.”
Suho never saw Sieun cry. Did that make him stronger or weaker than Youngyi?
“What were we?” He asks quietly.
Youngyi laughs shortly, still wiping at her face. “Like siblings. Well.” She laughs again, a little haphazard. “I did have a crush on you for about a week, but it went away when I saw you not wash your hands after taking a piss.”
Suho laughs. How strange it is to imagine his past self, all sharp edges, all a mess. He feels a rush of secondhand embarrassment that really should be firsthand. “I’ve learned since then, don’t worry.”
“Good,” she says, her grin tear-streaked. “I couldn’t handle you breaking my heart like that again.”
As Suho’s smile starts to calm, his mind grows addled. “What are you going to do if I’ve changed too much?” He presses his lips together in a feeble attempt to seal them shut as soon as the words leave his mouth.
Youngyi looks at him curiously, and for a moment, they’re silent. Suho hears the crickets chirping, the cars rushing past above, sparse leaves fluttering in the breeze. The air smells sweet, but stings like a cut. The stars are too high to touch.
“Do you think I haven’t changed?” Youngyi asks finally. “We’ve all changed. We’re young. Time moves fast. But now we have a chance to… change in tandem. The way we used to, you know? The way friends do.”
It makes perfect sense to Suho, and yet it makes no sense at all. He looks at her and wonders endlessly, trying to burrow in the depths of her dark eyes.
“For right now, Suho-yah, just put your number in my phone. We’ll deal with the rest later. Your hot boss is probably going to kill you.”
Suho sparks back to lucidity. “Yeah. Right.”
It’s easy to imagine Youngyi a little younger, he thinks as he types it in. Easy to imagine them being friends.
Suho watches her run up the steps, breathing ice. No goodbye, no see you later, just a pat on the arm. He knows what it means: this is far from over.
+++
영이
next monday at 8? lmk ^^
[Address Attached]
btw i forgot to tell you i missed you
i missed you ㅎ
ok gross. bye
Suho laughs a lot after that. An absurd amount. It’s as if every joke muttered in passing triples in intensity, viewed through Suho’s own special lens: abstract shapes and colors in his mind’s eye—sharp edges, soft curves. He feels drunk, feels like the thick haze in the bar is starting to fuck with his brain. He sleeps without dreams and wakes without rest, but gets up every afternoon without much complaint.
The temperature’s rising a little—nothing to get too excited about, but the sun peeks out from behind the white and paints prismatic patterns on the streets, bouncing off of shop windows. The birds, hapless and confused, wake to chirp again. They’ll be disappointed by the returning cold.
Suho had forgotten how nice it was to have something to look forward to. How long and painstaking the days become, how pleasant it is to work through them without focus.
He feels new. Drunk and new.
벨벳123
sleeplessness(不眠) · OVAN, VAN.C
⌾ sleeplessness(不眠)
“You’re learning,” Bitna mutters. The music is muffled under the hum of the fridge. She flicks a curl of his hair away from his forehead, hitting him square between the eyebrows. Suho winces.
“Ow. Jesus.”
Bitna pays him no mind. She settles her hands on her waist and steps back, looking up at him with an unreadable expression. Her mouth opens as if to say something, but she swallows it down like a bitter pill.
Suho feels like he’s under a microscope. Scrutinized. He tilts his head at her, then looks at the tile floor. The dull beat of the song pulses through the metal against his back. “How’s fashion school?”
“Graduating in four months.” She wipes her hands unthinkingly on her pants. “Reckon I’ll find a job?”
“You’ll be golden.”
A beat. Bitna’s hands still, and Suho starts to worry at the inside of his cheek with his teeth.
“Suho?”
“Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you graduate high school?”
A surprised laugh escapes him. “What? Why now, all of a sudden?”
“You never told me,” she says quietly. Matter-of-fact. “I was just curious.”
“I, uh.” Suho’s tongue feels like sandpaper. He bounces between the truth and a lie, shakily finding his place. “I flunked. Missed too many days.”
You wanted the perfect attendance award.
Suho feels his eye twitch. Something in the back room takes up whirring, filling the silence with empty sound. He laughs again. “I was trying to work three jobs, and it was… it was all just too much.”
“Oh,” Bitna says. She clears her throat. “Sounds like you.”
“Right?” Suho sighs, the smile feeling odd on his face. “I guess I haven’t changed.” He nods. “Right.” At a loss, he turns and pushes through the swinging door to the bar.
Bitna follows him out.
That bothers Suho for a while. A still image of the look in Bitna’s brown eyes, bordering on disappointment, renews itself every few hours. Still, he laughs through his shifts with unusual ease, and entertains himself with the notion that he might be returning to 22. To thoughtless work and thoughtless happiness.
Only when he’s lying awake in bed—his bed, not the couch, in the spirit of attempting normalcy—does he realize how horribly his memory is clouded.
Even now, time is slipping away from him, into the black hole. It’s inescapable and paralyzing, and Suho’s nostalgia is a ruinous liar.
At 22, Suho was weighed down by grief and guilt. At 25, Suho lies awake at 6:45 in the morning, powerless and immoble as loneliness washes over him like cold water. It envelops him from head to toe.
Suho floats in the emptiness of night and waits for daybreak. For abstract shapes and colors, for haze. Smoke and mirrors to hide the blur.
He thinks endlessly of Bitna’s brown eyes, real and earnest below her bright makeup. For all the pressed shirts she has bought him, all of the inside jokes and alleyway conversations, the fashion school field practice, the years of uncomplaining companionship, Suho still doesn’t trust her. He probably never will.
Smoke and mirrors. It’s all Suho has.
+++
“I don’t really have a family name at all,” Youngyi says through a mouthful of tteokbokki, swaying as she chews. The fabric of her sweater draws static from the neon orange cloth of the pocha wall. “Ran away from home at 14. Had to have a last name to get a job. Stole one from Son Heungmin.”
“You like football?”
“No. It was Sungchan’s idea.”
“Sungchan?”
“My son.”
“You have a son?”
“No, dude, I’m 25. We sort of adopted him. He’s 20. We’re trying to put him through college, and it’s going about as well as you could imagine.”
“‘We?’”
“Me and Seokdae. You know, the tall one who beat the shit out of y—?” She sighs. “This is going to take a while, isn’t it?”
“Well, that’s why we’re here.” Suho feels like he’s deflating. He looks at the assortment of food on the checkered table between them, wafting warmth and salt and spice. Suho’s breath clouds. “I don’t know the last time I had food like this.”
“You don’t have many friends, do you?”
Suho looks up, narrowing his eyes. Youngyi’s hair is growing out at the roots, and her lips are stained orange. He stares at them. “I have tons of friends.”
“Right.” She leans back in her plastic chair. Suho hands her a napkin. She accepts it skeptically. “You’ve changed for the better.” A beat as Youngyi wipes her mouth. “So, why don’t you have any friends?”
“What are you, my therapist?”
“Just answer the question, smartass.”
“How am I supposed to answer that!?” Suho sputters.
“Think.”
Suho’s hands clench and unclench in his lap. He looks curiously at Youngyi, who’s giving him an expectant glare.
“I’m scared,” he finally concedes.
“Of what?”
“That’s enough for today. You’ve gotten an answer.”
“Okay, jeez. Secretive much?” Youngyi sniffles, lifting her chopsticks to her mouth. There are a few friends, a few couples nestled underneath this orange tent. The old lady cooking in the corner is playing some soft jazz Suho can’t recognize.
“It’s so strange seeing you like this.”
Finally, something Suho knows enough about to agree with. His hand comes to rest on the back of his neck. “It is. It’s like… meeting someone from a past life.” His gaze flicks up to meet hers. “My eyes don’t recognize your face, but something else does. And I don’t know what.”
Youngyi shakes her head at him, bewildered. “How long were you out?”
“Almost a year.”
“They said you wouldn’t…”
“Wake up? Yeah, they did say that.”
“You always were a rule breaker, huh?”
“Hey, now. I’d call it ‘rising above expectations.’”
They share a moment of comfortable silence, just looking at each other. Suho tries to make sense of her face, with all its contrast. Her bright, glistening eyes, the bottle blonde hair, sharp edges blurred against her skin.
Suho sees a flash of Sieun’s eyes, the way they shone so curiously up at him. Stars against the darkness. He tries to blink it away. “How did we, uh, meet?”
“Oh, long story.” Youngyi says through a mouthful.
“Everything’s a long story, dude.”
“No, but this really is.”
“So what isn’t?”
A beat. “Fine. I’ll explain.”
“I’m all ears.”
Youngyi takes a sip of her forgotten beer, making a show of wiping at her lips before raising her eyebrows and saying, “I was in a gang.”
“You? You were in a what?”
“By ‘gang’, I mean ‘sadistic middle aged man abducting teenagers and forcing them to do his bidding,’ but it’s pretty much the same. We had to beat people up a lot.”
Suho is shocked silent. He hadn’t any idea where this story was going to start, so he supposes it’s his right to be surprised. He seals his mouth shut and listens, eyebrows furrowing.
“So Seokdae—my roommate, best friend, et cetera—he was stuck in this thing with me, right? And his, like, rich asshole cousin offers him some cash to beat up this other guy, so we—”
“Youngyi?” He blurts, unable to stop himself.
“Yes?”
“Are you, like, good? Like, mentally?”
“Bro, shut the fuck up and let me fucking tell this story. Jesus. Anyways, Seokdae sees the cash and he’s like, ‘Okay, fine, whatever.’ So we all end up going with him, just to make sure things don’t get too crazy, and then we see the kid, and the poor thing’s, like, 170 centimeters. Like, small. With a bowl cut. He just looked like a nerd.”
Suho’s mind sparks with recognition, like an engine sputtering to life. Then he starts to feel a little nauseous. “Why did… the rich asshole cousin want to…?”
“Oh, that’s a completely different story.”
“Give me the short version.”
“The little nerd beat the shit out of him. Broke his nose.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he was a little bit psycho. That was Sieun, by the way.” A beat. “He wasn’t special, though. You were both psychos.”
“I was what?” Suho’s on a roller coaster without a seatbelt. Free falling.
“Okay, so, anyways, we take poor Sieun and there’s like, I don’t know, six of us? I was keeping watch so honestly I don’t know what happened but I assume Seokdae started pummeling him. Dunno. Then you—you just, like, run by me. Usain Bolt type shit. First time I ever saw you. You and Beomseok.”
“Who the fuck is Beomseok?”
“Asshole number two. Like, extreme. There’s a lot of assholes in this story. So, again, I didn’t see it, but I think you guys, like, teamed up on Seokdae and saved Sieun? Seokdae thinks it’s kind of funny now. But that was the first thing that happened.”
“There’s more?”
“Oh, man, it just keeps going. I’ll only give you the highlights. Next time I saw you, you and Beomseok got yourself kind of kidnapped? You were trying to catch the sadistic middle aged man, kind of, and he pretty much rocked your shit. So he—”
Suho’s going to throw up. “Youngyi.”
“Hmm?”
“Can we pause?”
“Paused. What’s up?”
“Youngyi, I didn’t…” Suho doesn’t know how to articulate it. He’s grasping for something he can’t find. “I didn’t do any of that.”
He imagines it all playing out like an action manhwa—the type he might have relished in back in his MMA days: slick, fast, impossible. And his 17-year old self: the weakest hero to grace the page.
“Yeah, you did,” Youngyi says matter-of-factly.
“Why would I?” In Suho’s mind, his younger self was a loser who worked three jobs and slept through class and never had much of a life, never had much of a cause to wake up every day and fight, never—
“For Sieun. Obviously.”
Suho looks at her, unmoving. “We must have been pretty good friends,” he says mechanically.
Youngyi gives him an unreadable look, somewhere between pity and realization. It rests on her face for a moment too long. “Beomseok paid someone to beat you up.” She swallows. “To kill you, actually.”
“That seems to be a common theme,” Suho says, his voice high-pitched. Then he pauses. “Wait, what?”
“That’s how you…”
“Oh.” Suho’s going to throw up. “Oh.”
Knowing this feels like tilting the world on its axis. Moving everything out of its natural order. It was supposed to be a fact of life, the blur. Now Suho’s changed irrevocably, and his universe has taken on a new shape.
Suho’s heart is beating out of sync. He tries to calm it, tries to tell himself that it’s not real, because it sure doesn’t feel it. It’s like his heart knows. It’s in a panic, overloaded with feeling, and that’s how Suho knows it’s all true. “Why?” He asks quietly.
It had once entertained him to imagine being hated. Antagonized without reason. But now Suho’s 25, and he’s afraid he might have deserved it.
“Because Beomseok was an asshole, that’s why.”
“But what… what did I do?”
Youngyi looks at him, lost, before her eyes widen. “Oh my god, no. You didn’t do anything. It wasn’t your fault at all. It was just… him. He was jealous.”
“I can’t imagine I had much to be jealous of.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Suho laughs, and it feels like relinquishing control. Sensing it to be the right moment, the ajhumma starts a new song.
논현포차뮤직!
Give You My Heart · IU
⌾ Crash Landing On You OST Part 11
It’s absurd. Suho wants to keep laughing and never stop.
Youngyi squeezes her eyes shut and searches for the words in a frenzy. “He wasn’t jealous of you. He was jealous of Sieun.”
“This Sieun character keeps coming up,” Suho says flatly.
Youngyi looks at him with something that might be exasperation. Frustration. Spring to summer. “You know when I said I was everything, and he was something?”
“Yeah?”
“You and him were… in a different world. You let me stay with you in your fucking house for two months and I still couldn’t come close.”
“Why would you think that?” Suho asks. It feels like the question wrenches itself out of him.
“Well, before you… before it got really bad, Beomseok and the other idiots tried all this other shit on you. Cut the brakes in your bike—”
“I had a bike? Sick.”
“Shut up, oh my god. They did that, and, on your birthday, they tried to, you know, corner you. But Sieun went instead, and they broke his arm.”
Suho shudders. He’s never done very well with violence. Youngyi stares at him in empty shock, and he feels like he’s disappearing. Phasing in and out of existence.
“What? It’s cold.” He forces out a laugh, and it vibrates through his ribcage like an electric pulse.
“You saw that and got pissed and went after them.”
“Like a fucking idiot,” Suho says shakily.
“Yes, like a fucking idiot. But what else would you have done? It was Sieun.”
Suho goes quiet.
“Then it got bad. You know.” Youngyi pauses, flicking her finger through the condensation on her half-empty beer glass. She doesn’t look at him. “I cried so much in the hospital that day. Every tear in my body.” She sniffles and furrows her brow. “But I didn’t see Sieun cry a single tear.”
“So…” This time, the question lodges itself in Suho’s throat and stays, bringing tears to his eyes. He tries to swallow it down, but can’t. It’s real.
“You guys had exams that day. I told him to go back to school, and… he did. He left.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t see him for years after that, but I knew what he’d done. Your grandmother got word that he’d been blacklisted from every single fucking school in the area, and we knew what he’d done.” She exhales. She looks at Suho. “It was for you.”
Suho’s skin is on fire. He remembers what it felt like when Sieun was grasping for him in the pool. How he felt like he could burn through the water.
It felt like he’d just been waiting all this time to feel it again. Eight years. It felt transcendent.
“And I wondered, what made him do that? What made him snap like that, when all I did was cry? And then… then I realized.”
“Realized what?”
“You were the only thing he’d ever loved.” It’s the way Youngyi says it, so carefully. Like a confession that was never hers, like something that’d been weighing her down. It’s at that moment that Suho realizes how long Youngyi has been holding all this within her, waiting for him. Knowing she might never have been able to say it all aloud. “You were… everything. You were the only reason he’d ever need.”
He thinks about Sieun’s eyebags, his flat gaze. The weight of his crime, pushing him to the ground and forcing his silence. The reason for his crime, begging for sound.
“I met him,” Suho breathes out. He watches it fog between them.
When Youngyi looks up at him, her bright eyes are glistening with tears. “What? When?”
“Maybe a month ago?” Suho’s nausea hits a peak, and his heart starts to beat so fast it hurts. He pauses, looks down at the checkered tablecloth, and grits his teeth. “He walked into the bar,” Suho says into the table. “He didn’t have any idea I was there. It was… just… a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Youngyi says.
Suho gives her a look. “I don’t believe in fate.”
“Out of everyone, I think you have the most reason to.” Youngyi sniffles again. “You know, he’s one of the reasons I stuck around here.”
“Yeah?” They must have more to share, Youngyi and Sieun. “You guys keep in touch?”
“Kind of,” Youngyi says, almost sheepish. “We met a few years ago. It’s tough.” She looks at him, eyes round. Tough without you. “But what about you? Did you guys talk, or anything?”
“We, uh, did. We did, a few times.” He pauses, trying to think through the fog. “But I don’t think it was right.”
Youngyi looks at him in silent question.
“I think… I changed too much for him.”
“Oh.”
Suho’s struck by a feeling of disarray. Of confusion.
How could the type of feeling he used to fight for turn into this? How could he change away from it? Repel it? Kill it, when he probably would have killed to keep it alive?
Suho’s not sure how much time passes after that, in conversation without thought. He’s looking at Youngyi, wondering what to name this feeling. He thinks she’s beautiful, but her face makes him feel like crumbling. He’s so happy, so lost.
Youngyi gives Suho a hug before they leave, standing on her toes and wrapping her arms around his neck. Suho feels her, warm as spring.
“Don’t leave me again, you idiot,” she says. “Don’t let me leave you again.”
Suho locates her, a glowing pinprick deep within the blur, and it gives him no pain.
He thinks of her as the wind stings his skin on the ride home, and wonders why it couldn’t have always been this easy.
It’s 3 in the morning when Suho arrives home to silence. The city lights paint his dark living room in a gray glow, hollow like the lamplight on the bar steps. It strips the color from him, framing him in monochrome as he sits on the couch and buries his face in his hands.
He’s tired. Of fighting, of hiding, of lying.
Suho lets the truth swallow him up, lets it make him weak, lets it burn his eyes and sting his face. Hot but not warm.
He remembers something said in the cold, something he couldn’t forget even if he were to go into a coma for another year and wake up to a fresh wave of nothingness. No pain will ever make you cry like love.
Suho will remember Sieun through every life and death.
+++
At midnight, Yongsan flips the sign on the door to read Closed. Be back soon!
They have twenty minutes to make this happen, and Suho’s in the back room marveling at his handiwork.
The cake reads, in an aggressive indigo, “Hap Birth Sunji.”
Bitna whacks him three times over the head with a towel, and he yelps with every hit. “Jesus! What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?! Do you even know how hard Kangmi and I worked on this?”
Suho peers at the cake, scrutinizing the uniform layer of petal pink frosting coating the cake. He can see streaks from the spatula catching fluorescent back room light. “Listen. You could have just gotten one from the sixty-six bakeries down the street.”
“You have no sense of sentimental value,” Yongsan says, needlessly biting. Suho looks back at him as though betrayed.
“Thank you,” Bitna replies emphatically, spinning on her heel to nod at Yongsan. Suho shoots Seonok a desperate look, and only receives a wry smile in response. “It’s the thought, Ahn Suho. The effort. And to think you’ve had more girlfriends than I have.”
“You’ve had girlfriends?”
“Boyfriends, I meant.”
“Well, I haven’t had boyfriends.”
She gives him a venomous look, lifting her plastic-gloved hands and strangling the air between them. It crinkles as it succumbs. “Sometimes I just want to…”
“Kill me? Wouldn’t be the first to.” Suho grins, and then feels the color draining from his face. He blinks a few times, feeling crazed—like he’s been caught in a dream for far too long. He braces for an alarm, a ray of sunlight through open blinds, his arms going stiff.
Wake up.
Kangmi bursts through the swinging door. “What’s taking so long?” She hisses. “He’s not fucking stupid. This is only going to be a surprise if it happens in the next, like, one minute.” Her very own Sunjae-Special Playlist is a warm hum from the front.
벨벳123
Wishlist · TOMORROW X TOGETHER
⌾ minisode1: Blue Hour
“Point taken,” Yongsan says dimly, sticking a single candle reading “2” into the cake. “What? I couldn’t find a zero.”
Suho turns away to laugh, covering his mouth with a hand.
“Men,” Bitna seethes, and there’s a burst of white flame from her butterfly lighter glowing in Suho’s periphery. “Can’t do anything fucking right.” She lifts the cake with an uncharacteristic grace and marches out behind Kangmi.
Suho and Yongsan share a look before following, hanging their heads.
Lovely Sunjae is standing behind the bar, watching the procession with a mildly queasy look about him. He’s frozen in place, arms dangling at his sides, his brown eyes narrowed and his cheeks going pink. “Guys.”
Bitna elbows Suho in the stomach. He doubles over as the others begin to sing “Happy Birthday” over the music in precarious harmony, pausing a little too long between phrases. Suho stays folded in half, bowing to Sunjae from across the bar—a makeshift apology for this display.
The singing comes to an overdue close, and there’s some sparse applause. Kangmi slides the cake across the bar with a flourish; Bitna and Suho yelp their protests as they helplessly watch it glide against the gleaming marble. It arrives about a foot past Sunjae, flame wavering in and out of existence—he looks at it almost mournfully, taking a sideways step to center himself. “You didn’t have to do this, you know.”
“Of course we did,” says Kangmi, skipping towards him and perching at the bar across from him, the rest of the crew trickling to follow her. “It’s not every day our youngest hits double digits.”
“Ten is a double digit, Kangmi-ah,” Bitna says sweetly from her right.
“Okay? So is 20!”
“Aren’t you going to blow out the candle?” Suho asks, drumming his fingers against the marble from Kangmi’s other side. It’s strange to have to look up at Sunjae: he looks defenseless against his height.
Sunjae considers it, and the wary flame warms the soft amber of his irises. “Don’t think so.”
“Huh?”
Under his strong brow, Sunjae’s eyes curve. “At home, I used to just wait for them to go out on their own. Every birthday. I don’t like to force it.” He looks between them all, smiling sheepishly, as though struck by his youth. “Change. I’m 19 until the flame goes out.”
“Then what the fuck are we celebrating for?” Yongsan asks flatly.
Sunjae smiles again, looking down at the cake. The blush spreads up towards his temples, and he looks up at Kangmi, who’s nodding as though in deep rumination. “Well, it’s the beginning of the end, isn’t it? The last few seconds of 19. Of being a teenager.”
Bitna looks up at him with something almost motherly in her gaze. “You sentimental prick.” She smiles, soft and red. “Now we won’t have any teenagers left in this joint. Just jaded adults.”
“What brought you here?” Suho blurts. All eyes go to him, and he looks at the counter. Golden flecks. “I mean. How did you wind up here?” That’s no better. He concedes.
“Suho, that’s personal shit.”
Suho looks at Bitna a little too weakly to be affronted.
“I don’t mind,” Sunjae says cheerily. “We all know a little bit too much about each other as is, and I’d rather not pretend we don’t.” He looks at the burning candle, droplets of blue wax floating on an undisturbed pink sea. “I, uh, was an athlete. In a sports college. Long distance running.”
“That explains a lot,” says Yongsan.
Kangmi scrunches up her face. “Shut up, will you?”
Sunjae blinks, schooling a smile. “I fucked up a tendon, kind of. I can still walk, obviously, do everything just the same, but I couldn’t strain it any further.” He looks at Suho, now, without warning. “I hadn’t actually gone to school enough to know where to go from there—you know, with practices and all that. But while I was in the hospital, I got really into… this.”
“Bartending?” Bitna asks incredulously.
“It’s kind of romantic,” Sunjae says. “Something about it. Making strangers smile.”
Suho watches the LED’s dance in Sunjae’s eyes like stars. Fresh, young, and bright. A glow that’ll last a few millenia beyond these 20 years.
“Anyways, that’s me. I have my ups and downs, but most days, I’m happy to be here. Really happy.” He looks down to the counter. Kangmi’s toying with his fingers. “So, what about the rest of you losers?”
Everyone laughs, a little out of sync. It’s foreign, a burst of sound, a ray of sun.
Sunjae grins like a proud performer, and tendrils of burnt-out smoke curl up towards him, making their home in his smile.
+++
Suho’s laughing at something Youngyi’s texted him, a shakily drawn reaction meme from her seemingly bottomless arsenal, when Bitna calls his name.
They’re back in the dim alley, rain-soaked and glowing in distant streetlight. Cold and damp enough to hurt. They’re making the most of the time they have before opening again, hiding in the shadows and holding their breath.
The song, Sunjae’s choice, is stifled through the wall. A distant pulse, a heartbeat.
벨벳123
Scenery · V
⌾ Scenery
“Ahn Suho,” she says again, as if trying it on for size. “Suho. Suho-ssi. Suho-yah.”
Suho tilts his head away from the screen to look at her, then unceremoniously slides it back into his pocket. “What?”
Her red lips downturn slightly. Suho looks at their print on her cigarette paper, like dry watercolor paint. The smoke rises up between them like a screen.
“What?”
Bitna says nothing. Her gaze stays fixed on his face—not searching, not memorizing, just resting.
Suho wonders what it is, but can’t be moved to ask. She looks at him like she’s traveling, moving through time—all the way back to 21, the first time they met, and he’s the key.
He remembers sitting at the bar with her the day he got hired, remembers how it felt when she turned towards him for the first time, all bright-eyed and soft-lipped. Seventh Heaven.
He remembers sitting there with Sieun, only he was in her place and Sieun was in his. Glowing. Suho feels a dull throb somewhere near his sternum.
“Bitna, you’re scaring me.”
She shakes her head, laughing without humor and looking back to the bare wall before taking another drag. Suho’s hand comes up to rest at the site of his pain, thumb absentmindedly tracing a clear button.
“Bitna?”
“You don’t get it,” she says simply.
“What don’t I get?” The pang in chest becomes a pit in his stomach, a premonition. He’s fascinated and terrified at the same time. He needs to know.
Bitna looks at him, and it’s almost broken. There’s a crease between her brows, something heavy in her eyes.
“What?” Suho asks, almost desperate. “Spit it out, dude.”
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid. I know you wouldn’t—”
“I love you.” It rushes out, knocks the wind out of her. “Alright? It is stupid. But it’s true.”
Suho feels incredibly still. Mind, body, heart. “You love me?” Still and mute.
“Do you think people do the things I’ve done for you for people they don’t love?” Bitna doesn’t look at him, just running a hand through her hair and staring at the wall with her eyes glazed over.
He’s silent, thoughtless. A part of him wants to grab her by the shoulders and ask her what it feels like to love.
“I don’t want you to feel like you have to do anything with it. I just wanted to say it.” She exhales another cloud. “Wanted you to know, because God knows it’d take you another three years to realize it for yourself.”
“Do you…” Suho looks at her, searching desperately. Trying to find her face in the blur, trying to locate what it feels like to love her. “Is it, like…” He finds nothing. No match, no memory, no warmth. He watches the crease between her brows deepen and wishes he’d never met her, if only to spare her from this.
“I don’t know what it is,” Bitna says. It’s like she’s talking to herself, like Suho’s just a void. A mirror. “I don’t want us to change. I mean, I… I’m not trying to be one of your little girlfriends, or anything.”
Suho exhales an empty laugh.
“I just want you to… love me,” she says, like her courage is waning. She turns away from him completely, to the far wall, and Suho stares at the back of her head. Her black roots are painting over streaks of pink.
“What do you mean by that? How would you want me to prove that I love you?” Even the word fits wrong in Suho’s mouth, makes him feel bitter. Like a liar.
“I don’t know,” Bitna says helplessly into the far wall. “I just feel like you’ve been testing the waters since we first met, and I just… dove in headfirst.”
Suho looks at the back of her head. To the jagged edge where her hair falls against the crisp white of her shirt. He feels his muscles tense, remembers Youngyi’s gaze on him, feels the truth echoing in his head: I’m scared.
“I’m sorry,” Suho says weakly. He wants her to turn back around. “I’m so sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Bitna says quietly.
“No, no, I do. I haven’t been fair to you.” The truth is that some part of him had known. Between ironed shirts and forced insults and cool hands, Suho had felt it in all its entirety, and it had bowled him over. “I should have talked to you, should have told you what was going on with me—”
“It’s not that,” she says, and he hears her sniffle. “It’s not even that. You never had to tell me anything, I just… wanted to feel like you knew you could. To trust me.” She sniffles again. “It’s pathetic, I know.”
“It’s not pathetic.” Something’s clawing at Suho from the inside, trying to fight its way out, but his shell is too strong. “It’s not pathetic at all. I—thank you for telling me, I just… I’ll be better. I’ll treat you better.”
Bitna shakes her head like he’s still not getting it. Her shoulders shake, and she tamps the cigarette against the wall, letting it fall to dust.
“Hey,” Suho says, hands flexing around nothing at his sides. “Hey. Bitna.”
She shakes her head again. “Just trust me,” Bitna says, voice shattering. “Just a little.”
“Bitna,” Suho says uselessly, and he’s reaching out towards her. His hand is on her shoulder, and she’s liquid. Formless. She molds to him, leaning in, curling into his chest, and he wraps his arms around her. It’s an apology, a confession. He buries his face in her shoulder, and her tears streak the white of his shirt.
She’s warm. Small. She’s shaking like a leaf, holding on like she’s afraid of what she might lose if she lets go. It’s strange; Suho’s always been afraid of what’s there to lose if he holds on. He breathes in, straightens up, tries to look down at her. “You’re my best friend, you know that?”
“You’re my best friend,” she says, so wetly that they both laugh in shaky silence.
“You want to know the truth?” Suho asks, and the words feel like a hum in his chest without sound. She nods against him. “I think I’ve been afraid.”
“Of what?” Bitna asks, muffled.
“Love.”
She breaks away, looking up at him, her eyes red and soft.
“I’ve been afraid of… putting all my secrets and all my trust in someone and then losing them.”
“You’re not going to lose me,” she whispers.
“What if I do?”
“You’re not going to lose me.”
“Bitna.”
She sniffles, gives him the furrowed-brow glare she’s perfected since her promotion. “Listen. Even if I leave this shithole bar and you get promoted up to my spot, or if you disappear and we never talk to each other again, or if we have some massive fight and cut off contact, you… Even then, your secrets won’t go anywhere. They won’t be lost.”
“Where will they go, then?” he asks, almost childish.
“They’ll stay with me. And we’ll meet again, somewhere down the line, and you’ll realize I never forgot them. Never got rid of them.” Bitna steps back, wiping at her face and breathing in, refreshed, Stronger when she looks up at him.
Suho’s still standing there, cold and weak, staring down at her.
“That’s what love is, you idiot.” Now Bitna smiles, tear-streaked and beautiful. She slaps him on the arm, gentle. “It’s okay, I promise. You’ll get it eventually. For right now, though, we should go back in before I have to start cutting from my own paycheck.”
“Yeah,” Suho says, almost numb. He looks at her and feels something cresting within him, something quiet and new. “Yeah, let’s go in.”
“In we go, you big baby.” She wipes at her face with the heel of her hand and pushes through the door, looking back with a smile. Undimmed by her sorrow. Brightened by her love.
There’s a second where Suho stands alone in the darkness, breath freezing and muscles tensing. Damp shirt growing cold. He’s overwhelmed, welling up, full of feeling. He’s frozen in time, lost in the blur, looking for home. For love.
Suho wipes his face on his starchy white sleeve and opens the door.
+++
“Sieun-ah, are you asleep?”
“Yes, I’m tired.”
Warmth bubbles up inside Suho’s still chest. He smiles, straining to see through golden haze and watercolor blur. “You psycho,” he says, just because it feels right.
He knows what Sieun’s done. There’s blood on his cheek, staining his uniform, and Suho knows him.
“I’m sorry,” Sieun says, burning like a white flame in the dark. To Suho, he is the sun. The flecks of dust falling through the air around him are dying stars.
“For what?”
Sieun’s swollen eyes don’t stray from him. He barely breathes, barely moves. His lips are dry, and his voice is hoarse. “Just everything.”
+++
Suho’s half an hour late, and there’s iced coffee running down the smooth blue nylon of his windbreaker, dripping onto the cement steps. He’s frozen—half above ground and half below.
His phone screen dims in his stiff hand, drowsy.
It’s been days, maybe a few weeks, since he last met Youngyi; the time just seemed to slip past, happily monotonous, with heavy slumber and easy shifts. Suho sent late night texts to lost old friends, got wine-drunk with his roommates, and spent half his tips on cigarettes for other people. Bitna found a job—tentative, terrified—for after graduation. Seonok’s girlfriend came in to visit. The bar was ever-changing, always the same.
These past few weeks, Suho’s been feeling far from 17, far from 22—present. Here and now. He’s been remembering the thoughtless advice he gave Sunjae and Kangmi, lost in the sound of a muffled beat and an empty voice. Korean lyrics. Feel every moment.
He’s been trying to live by it. He’s been trying to find music in silence, color in darkness, joy in loneliness. It’s been working, at least a little. The sun is cresting a little higher every day: it’s almost spring.
Yesterday, at half past three in the afternoon, Suho got a text from Youngyi.
영이
brother im so bored. pls hang out w me. take the night off tmrw ur hot boss will understand
[Address Attached]
i’ll meet u at the station at 8 we’ll have a little excursion
(i am losing my fucking mind at this job. pleek. i dont have a car and am not getting on ur death trap)
ok dawg i’ll see u when i see u (tmrw)
The coffee is ice cold through the fabric of Suho’s windbreaker. A stranger goes still in his periphery—silent shock. Suho unzips the coat, blinking hard before shaking it weakly and draping it over his arm. A few steps below, a train is passing by with motion-blurred sound. No harm done, he supposes, looking up at the offending stranger with a furrowed brow and a tight smile.
The train is passing, deafening, perpetual—there’s a breeze from above, biting but soft, and Suho is in a dream. This one’s a little different from the usual, but still tinged gold.
“What’s this?” His voice is a hum in his chest, unfamiliar, close. “Reparations?”
Sieun’s lips set themselves in a thin line. He looks well-rested again today: his narrowed eyes glimmer with recognition, maybe something softer. His dark hair curves over his forehead, parted straight down the middle. It’s been over a month, by Suho’s faulty estimation, but it feels like it’s been longer. Like this is another life, another incarnation, another chance.
They’re frozen on the metro station steps, half above, half below.
How right this feels, Suho thinks nonsensically. His heart is thrumming, reverberating—an electric guitar in his chest, prismatic color. He wants to smile, to fall, to say, I think I kind of missed you. Isn’t that weird?
“You’re going down the up stairs,” Sieun says quietly. Like he’s afraid to interrupt the din swirling up to the surface.
Now Suho’s lost. “I’m not, though?”
Someone from behind Sieun barks that they’re blocking the exit, and Sieun’s eyes go wide with knowing pride. An eight ball sunk on the break, a perfect score on a test, an array of stars.
Suho, a jumbled mess of limbs and feelings, mutters an apology and starts down the steps. Sieun starts up. They collide, precarious, and within seconds they’re stumbling against a crush of people, reaching out for something to hold, flattening themselves against the wall, one entity. Then they’re in the station. Underground.
Suho’s breathless, laughing haplessly as Sieun dusts himself off. The remnants of his coffee don’t seem to have survived the journey: he looks down at his empty hand in alarm for a moment before turning to Suho, skeptical. His gaze darts up and down before settling. It’s almost accusatory. “Why are you here? Don’t you have a bike?”
“Figured it’s time to be more environmentally conscious,” Suho chirps. His hands don’t know where to go. He shoves them in the pockets of his jeans, fighting his fluttering heart. “Sorry. Actually, I was meeting a friend here.”
Sieun watches Suho sweat and fidget with a hawk’s focus, eyes narrowed. “Me too,” He says cautiously. A cowlick falls back into place at the crown of his head. He gestures back to the steps, then illogically towards the tiled floor of the entry below them. “Hence the coffee.”
“What, you don’t drink coffee?”
“Hate the taste.”
“Weird.” Suho grins, and it feels like his face is splitting. He looks forward to the turnstiles, the fluorescent white emptiness beyond. “Your friend must be quite late. You don’t think she’ll show?”
Sieun doesn’t say anything, following Suho’s gaze.
“I wouldn’t read into it,” Suho says. “I guess she’s the unpredictable type.”
“How do you—” Sieun’s brow furrows, and Suho feels a rare kind of success. “How do you know who—?”
“Youngyi, right? I think she’s doing the same to me. Asshole.” Suho’s fingers are drumming inside his pockets, unheeding of his silent protests. He looks back at Sieun. “Hey, you want to go somewhere?”
“Where?”
“Dunno. Hop a train?”
Sieun looks at the turnstiles again. A few people enter, a few people leave—a slow trickle passing around their corner. “When did you meet Youngyi?”
Suho is already walking backwards through a ticket barrier, a little far for Sieun’s voice to reach. “Oh, sick they’re automatic now!” The barrier scans his phone and lights green with a warm beep. Sieun gets smaller in Suho’s view. The bags under his eyes look a little heavier from this far away. “Come on, dude.”
Sieun deflates, eyes searching the thin crowd before he catches up to Suho. They’re facing each other now, and Suho’s stumbling backwards, slowing. He can’t see where he’s going. The barrier glows green behind them, and Sieun’s looking up at Suho, amused and weary.
Suho stops short in the middle of the empty corridor. He feels the smile numbing on his face, melting away. The energy is draining away from him, and he lets it happen.
The white tile reflects their silhouettes, gray and blurred around the edges. There’s a quiet bustle of people moving around them—entering, leaving, moving endlessly, in transit. The pair of them are still, alone, silent.
“What?” Sieun asks.
Suho remembers a meal growing cold on Sieun’s kitchen table, starry-eyed questions, wordless demands. Disappearing. Coming back. He wants to apologize, but the words are rushing away from him.
“Nothing.”
Suho knows deep down that all that agony, all that burning curiosity and misplaced rage, was necessary to bring him to this moment. Standing in a metro station 10 steps underground under white fluorescent lights, watching Sieun watch him.
To Suho, it was all worth it.
“Let’s go.”
So they do. They wander aimlessly, urged along by the PA announcer’s saccharine voice and the bits and pieces of conversation that float to the surface. A woman arguing with her boyfriend over the phone, a man in a suit on a work call, two teenage girls locking arms as they discuss the newest episode of a K-Drama. There are a few cafes littered through the endless tunnel, a few neon-painted tiles. Fake potted plants, metal benches, the rushing sound of trains.
“Do you keep in touch with Youngyi much nowadays?” Suho asks, not quite looking at Sieun. He feels like a tourist: eager, lost, and a little frightened by the expanse that lies before him. He feels Sieun’s gaze boring into him, unrestrained.
“It’s hard,” Sieun says simply.
“What’s hard?”
“It’s… It feels strange. There’s a lot that’s hard to talk about.” A beat. “Are you alright?”
Suho pauses, looking back over his shoulder. Sieun’s expression is still, brow furrowed with suspicion. It makes Suho want to laugh. “What?”
“Stop that.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re being weird.”
“This is weird.”
“Do you hate it?”
“No!”
“Then?”
Suho bites his tongue. The truth is fighting its way out, whether he wants it to or not.
Sieun gives him the same look from the planetarium—bitter but warm. Weighed down with meaning. He takes a step forward, daring Suho to step back. “What are you so scared of?”
To anyone passing by, that question is a meaningless fragment. Lost in the cacophony of transit, faded to nothing.
To Suho, it’s paralyzing. He sees a flash of Youngyi’s exasperated gaze. Bitna’s tear-streaked smile. He thinks of the lies he tells his roommates, the upturned phone on his coffee table.
The truth will swallow him up, he knows, but he needs to set it free.
Sieun is in the forefront of Suho’s vision. There’s a potted plant behind him, a blur of people, walking in all different directions, washed in bright light—only Sieun, with a soft glow around him, rings white as the stars and purple as the night.
“Do you know,” Suho starts, “how wrong it felt to be away from you?” His own voice feels like a vibration through his body, like he’s surrendering.
Sieun’s eyes rise to meet his, glimmering. He’s silent for a moment, gaze fixed on Suho’s face, and the words are floating in the emptiness between them.
“You remember me,” he says finally, so quiet it’s almost lost in the rush of the trains.
“I remember how I felt,” Suho says unsteadily. “It terrified me, so I ran from it.” He breathes in deep, and it feels like the smoke and mirrors are falling away, like it’s only them, in all their stillness and wonder, all their imperfect, petrified beauty. “I remembered only you.” I know only you.
Everything around Sieun blurs. His hair is falling into his face, and his eyes are brimming with light.
Suho feels free enough to listen to the words echoing in his head, to the Morse code secrets of his heart. The truth. It terrifies him. “I kind of lost everyone, you know.”
“Well, you’ve found me now.” Sieun’s not smiling, but it looks like he wants to. Tears glitter on his lashes. “So don’t try to disappear again. Idiot.”
“I’m not going anywhere, you psycho. But you can’t leave either. You’re stuck with me.”
Sieun rolls his eyes, face tinged a soft red. “I wouldn’t dream of leaving.”
“Good. That’s all sorted out.” Suho smiles, and his chest feels heavy. “I’m still sorry, though.”
“For what?”
“Just everything.”
If 17-year-old Sieun had felt even a fraction of what 25-year-old Suho feels now, an apology won’t make up for much. But it still feels right to give it.
Sieun sighs, silent. His eyes dim and brighten like a flickering bulb in darkness. “Me too. I’m sorry.”
It lingers above the din for a few seconds. Reverb. Suho turns away from Sieun, grabs him by the wrist and starts up the nearby steps to the next platform. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere.”
“Do you even know where you want to go?” Sieun appears at his side, wrenching himself out of Suho’s grasp, and they break through the surface together.
Before them lie two tracks, separated by the cement platform they’re standing on. It’s cold: the night sky breaks through on either side, starless and blue. People stand in clusters under the flickering fluorescent lights, waiting.
“Just humor me, will you? You never do anything fun.”
“I’m fun.”
“Cute, maybe. Not fun.” Suho looks up at the announcement screens, face warming.
Sieun doesn’t respond. When Suho looks back, Sieun’s looking dead at him, frozen and blank.
“Okay. My bad.”
“That one,” Sieun says suddenly, pointing up at the screen Suho was looking at, “Goes straight to where our high school was.”
Suho looks at Sieun quizzically. “You want to go there?”
“Fuck no.”
Suho laughs, warm from the inside. “I’ve never heard you swear.” His breath fogs in the thin evening air, but the tips of his fingers are tingling. “That one, then?” He nods towards the other side.
Sieun nods, glancing up to read the screen.
Suho looks down at him. He feels almost euphoric, but still grounded. Still scared of feeling too much, of getting too close, of losing. Falling asleep, waking up, dreaming.
He’s going to be bad at this, but he’s going to learn. It’s going to be like working an atrophied muscle. Calm and slow.
My name is Ahn Suho. I am 25 years old. I remember what it feels like to love, and that’s kind of all I need.
It’s going to take some time. A good amount of help.
The train rushes into the station with a breeze and a hydraulic sigh. People push through to leave, to get on, undistracted.
“Come on, you,” Sieun mutters, exasperated and lovely. Suho follows him, blind, to the steely white interior of the metro. It’s cold and blue and crowded, so they grab hold of the same bar and stand in silence, anticipating movement. Sieun’s hand is above, Suho’s below—there are centimeters between them. Less. They’re facing each other, content to wonder.
Even under the stark white of the overhead light, Sieun is a Renaissance painting—a lover’s portrait. There’s affection in the curve of his eyes, familiarity in the shape of his lips, warmth in the roundness of his cheeks.
This is the feeling Suho remembers.
“Hey,” Sieun says under the silence.
“Yeah?”
“I’m scared too.”
Suho thinks about the mystery in Sieun’s eyes as he’d said, Don’t fight anymore. It echoes in the cool emptiness of Suho’s mind, morphing and blurring and taking on a new shape. I’m not going to let myself lose you again.
Suho must have been blind back then, squinting in the golden light. He must not have wanted to see the truth: that he wasn’t alone.
“I know.” Suho smiles. “We’ll figure it out, though.”
Sieun presses his lips together. “I know.”
Without warning, the train jolts backwards and sets on its way. Suho stumbles, Sieun doesn’t; they laugh in silence and find their footing. It only takes a second, and then they’re racing through space and time.
Suho glances back to the front of the train. Outside the windows, a familiar blur. Endless, terrifying, unknown. He feels like he’s diving in headfirst, powerless against the past.
Sieun’s following his gaze, brow furrowed with perplexed wonder. Suho looks forward again, eyes resting on him, and smiles. He was never truly alone.
They might both be a little weak, but they’ll find their way together.
+++
“I don’t really want you to leave,” Suho says in a rush, the metal of the fridge cold against his back. “I can’t deal with these idiots alone.”
Summer is overwhelming. There’s a sheen of sweat on his skin, and his throat is dry and parched. The frigid aircon in the backroom is welcoming, but makes the hairs on the back of Suho’s neck stand on end. He can’t win.
Bitna steps away from him, feigning disgust. Her brown eyes betray her delight. “I’m not going that far,” she says, schooling her gaze. “Would you rather I stay in this shithole until the end of my days?”
“I’m staying in this shithole until the end of my days, aren’t I?”
“No one’s forcing you to.”
“True.”
“It’s almost like you like it.”
“True.”
“I, on the other hand, am going to have the time of my life drowning in a team of 120 stylists for a band no one’s ever heard of.”
“After you’ve done your part, everyone will have heard of them,” Suho grins cheekily.
Bitna narrows her sharply lined eyes. The pink in her hair, freshly redone, is vivid against her pale skin. “Okay, pipe down. And stop wasting our time.” She nods at the door. “Your boyfriend’s waiting for you.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Suho whisper-wails.
“Whatever. He’s waiting.”
“I’m scared of him.”
“No way,” Bitna sighs, flicking him weakly in the center of the forehead. “You just have a little crush on him. You’re almost 26, I think you can deal with that.” She drops her hand and smiles with tight lips, eyes traveling along his face.
“Bitna?”
“Hmm?”
“Don’t leave me alone here.” Suho’s voice is small and timid. Honest. He’s had to get used to feeling like this.
Bitna just scoffs. “You’re not going to be alone, you big baby. I’m going to be a phone call away until I die.” Her smile is tentative. “You’re never really alone, you know. Even if you think you are.”
“Okay, now that’s scary.”
“You know what?” She throws up her hands in surrender, storming towards the door. “I hate you. Goodbye. Hope you die alone.”
“Bitna?”
“What is it now?” Bitna leans back to look at him, eyebrows raised and hair slipping off her shoulders.
Suho smiles, feeling fondness pulse within his chest. “I love you.”
“Fuck off!” Hiding her blush-brightened face, Bitna pushes through into the bar. Suho follows with his head held high.
벨벳123
Nosebleed Seats · Vansire
⌾ The Modern Western World
The bar air is cool and clear, carrying the familiar scent of fresh fruit and alcohol. Under dim lights and LED rays, Sunjae and Kangmi are laughing like kids, caught up in a game of tag. They weave between empty tables, footsteps echoing against the dark wood, looking at each other as if hoping to get caught.
“Hey!” Bitna crosses her arms, glaring through the charged air. “How old are you guys?”
“22 in three months!” Kangmi screams, her face painted in blue and purple under the lights, grinning hopelessly at a blue and green Sunjae. They push clumsily into the back room, colliding with a series of clattering noises and peals of high pitched laughter. Their voices almost sound like one.
“Just two more weeks,” Bitna mutters, looking back at the swinging gray door, her red lips a pinched line. “Two more weeks.” She glances at Suho, who’s occupied elsewhere.
Youngyi is peering over at Sieun’s phone, uncharacteristically focused. Suho sees only the tops of both of their heads as they stare at the screen, arms braced on the cool marble of the bar. They’re like mirror images, horror movie twins. Suho’s lovely friends.
Sieun’s sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, and Suho stares uneasily at the golden skin of his forearms for a long, silent moment. “Hey.”
Both look up in search of the intruding sound. Youngyi’s bangs, a haphazard blend of black and blonde, settle in an unflattering fringe over her forehead. Sieun’s eyes reflect the multicolored streams of light above. He’s worrying at his lower lip with his teeth, eyebrows raised expectantly.
Suho’s shoulders sink. He feels Bitna’s presence just by his side, her smug gaze focused on him. “Not going to say hello, or anything? You hate me.”
“Yeah, I do,” Sieun says quickly, and immediately looks back down to the phone on the counter. Youngyi’s attention lingers for a moment, traveling towards Bitna. As is her habit.
Bitna snorts, needlessly loud. “Great start, tiger.” Suho looks at her, aghast.
“I have a job, you know,” Sieun sighs into the marble.
“A job that requires you to be working at 11 on a Thursday night?”
“You think the stars clock out at 5?” A glance up through his lashes, and then back down. “Plus you’re working at 11 on a Thursday night.”
“You’re literally the only two people here.” Suho groans, looking between the pair of them.
Youngyi’s still, catlike gaze darts towards Suho. “You say that like you want us to leave. We can leave if you want us to.”
“Please don’t leave,” Bitna blurts. Then she bites her tongue.
“Ha!” Suho crows, pointing a victorious finger at a reddening Bitna.
Delighted, Youngyi faces Bitna with glittering eyes like a cartoon character. “What was that, unnie?”
“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”
“You can admit it. You love us.”
“Sieun’s fine,” Bitna says pointedly.
“I’m great,” says Sieun to no one in particular.
“And me? What about me, unnie?”
“You’re…” Bitna’s hopeless. “You’re… ugh.”
Suho decides to tune the girls’ usual mortifying hate-flirting out in favor of looking wordlessly down at Sieun, ill at ease. With their renewed friendship came a familiar rush of feeling that’s been eating away at Suho for the past several months. He feels juvenile, immature, and delusional—it’s been a very unfamiliar set of sensations.
Bitna’s been pointing and laughing at him since he took three shots of tequila on a fateful Sunday night and wound up crying on the damp paved ground of their usual hideout.
Sieun looks up, finally, focus wavering like a current. His gaze is familiar, almost dismissive, and Suho’s heart sings almost pitifully. “What are you looking at?”
“You.”
“Notice anything new?”
Suho notices something new with every glance. He thinks this feeling won’t ever leave him. It’s horrifying and wonderful all at once. It’s brand new.
“You look lonely.”
In all honesty, Sieun looks anything but lonely. There’s half a smile scrawled across his face, his eyes wide with curious affection. He looks happy. Quiet, but happy. “You’re the bartender. Shouldn’t you know what to do about that?”
In the silent millisecond it takes Suho to process the words, a new song hums to life. Suho’s playlist on endless shuffle.
벨벳123
About You · The 1975
⌾ Being Funny In A Foreign Language
Suho’s gotten used to the world falling away around them. Probably a symptom of young love. But that’s a conversation for another time.
For right now, they’re in Suho’s place. It’s his move, his second chance, his own staccato-pulsing, English-music-blaring heart pounding as he leans over the bar and starts like this: “Can I get you a drink?”
Sieun laughs, a watercolor blush on his cheeks, eyebrows raised in soft surprise. He’s every planet, every star, everything, glittering in the night. Lightyears away, or maybe just a few centimeters. Just close enough.
This bar six steps underground is Suho’s home. It hasn’t failed him yet, and probably never will.
+++
Somewhere in the blur, 17-year-old Suho opens his eyes to a flood of light. Yeon Sieun at the front of the classroom has pushed open the curtain, and the sun is streaming through.
It's seven in the morning. Suho doesn't know when he fell asleep, when he got in last night, what day of the week it is. He squints up at the window; the dawn is painting golden streaks over Yeon Sieun's still form.
Sieun turns to look back at him, a mix of condescension and apathy in his eyes, and Suho feels something strange. Something new. Like flying and falling at the same time.
Suho props his chin on his pillow, lets his eyes flutter closed again, and waits for the feeling to return to him. It might take days, months, years, but it'll come back. He knows it. He'll remember this rush of light, this explosion of color, this sound in the quiet.
This is Suho's first life, after all, and it's barely begun.