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Day One
Even though the Korean Air flight from Seoul to Sydney landed at two in the afternoon, it’s evening by the time Chan sees Minho and Jisung walk through the door of the bar. Chan’s been waiting for them for fifteen minutes, tucked into a booth in the corner, and he’s already halfway through his first beer. Even though he doesn’t normally drink, it’s a mildly refreshing change to enjoy alcohol without worrying about whether or not it will make his face bloat.
“Sorry we’re late,” Minho says, sliding in across from Chan and scooting over to make room for Jisung. “Jisung was navigating and he got confused.”
“The name of the bar makes it sound like it’s a hotel,” Jisung complains. “Why would they put hotel in the name if it’s not a hotel!”
Chan ignores this. He’d told Jisung the name two days ago and Jisung had been excited by the promise of a Western sports bar. But Jisung is tired and jet lagged, and Minho rolls his eyes fondly at Chan, and Chan is too happy to see them to care.
“How’s the shoulder?” asks Minho, as Jisung picks up Chan’s glass of ice water and chugs it.
Chan goes to shrug and stops himself out of habit. His arm’s not in the sling anymore, and he has limited range of motion back, but the occasional twinge of pain when he moves the wrong way has made him cautious.
“Fine,” he says. “Lots better.”
“Liar,” says Minho, casually. He’s pulled up the menu on his phone and is squinting at the questionable Korean translation his browser has provided. “You’re only moving one arm.”
“I had surgery,” Chan says, more sharply that he means to. “What do you want me to do, tell you every single thing that makes it hurt? It’s fine. It’s healing.”
Minho raises his eyebrows but doesn’t push it. He points at several items on his phone. “These,” he says. “And something greasy for Jisung. And beer.”
“I suppose I’m ordering?”
Minho grins. “I don’t speak English, hyung,” he says, and Chan caves. Minho helps him carry their beer and fries and wings and nachos back to the table and Jisung descends upon the food.
“I’m starving,” he says, barbecue sauce smeared across his lips. “I’m starving, and the concert isn’t for like five days, and I’m eating as much as I want.”
Chan watches him for a while, sipping his beer and eating the carrot sticks and celery included as garnish alongside the chicken wings. Because of his shoulder, he hasn’t worked out properly in months, and the physical changes — the softening of his stomach, the flattening of his chest — are becoming more noticeable. He looks at Jisung, and then at Minho, and feels, not for the first time, an agonizing, searing jealousy at the stability of Minho’s body, at the sort of physical constancy that Chan and Jisung will never have. There’s no threshold at which the way Minho is perceived might tip over from man to woman, at which he might lose his precarious and hard-won hold on his own identity.
“Where’s everyone else?” Chan asks, as Jisung happily excises the meat from a chicken bone with his teeth. “Sleeping?”
“Changbin and Jeongin are exercising,” Minho says. “Seungmin and Hyunjin are avoiding human contact in their rooms. And Felix — ”
“Didn’t want to come,” Jisung finishes for Minho. “Obviously.”
“Up to him,” says Chan. “He can make his own choices.”
There’s a long pause, during which Jisung takes too large a swig of his beer in the silence and coughs. Minho rubs his back absently, and Chan tries not to think about the fact that he’s going to miss a concert in his hometown. That he’ll be on medical hiatus while his entire group performs. Part of him wants to be happy that at least he’s in Australia with them; the rest of him is just frustrated that their tour means he can’t even distract himself from his injury by making Changbin and Jisung work until dawn with him every night.
“You’re not seriously going to ignore Felix this entire week,” Minho says. “That’s absurd.”
Chan’s right hand finds its way to his left shoulder without any conscious effort and he probes for the three tiny laparoscopic incisions, now mostly healed, that form a triangle under his t-shirt. Several months ago, the t-shirt would have fit tighter. It would have stretched over delts and traps and biceps that have started to shrink for lack of gym time, and the knowledge that he’ll get the definition back eventually does nothing to stave off the growing dread Chan feels at waking up and existing in his body. Every day, when he gets out of bed and settles into the physical fact of himself, he’s forced to confront the reality that this is the most afraid of his own body and its inherent capacity for change he’s felt since he started taking T.
“It’s none of your business, is what it is,” Chan says. He sounds snippy. He hates himself for it.
“Hyung,” says Jisung, more softly than normal, and it’s the voice he uses in the studio when Chan gets stressed. He’s managing Chan, managing Chan’s feelings and moods, and Chan hates that almost as much as he hates that it’s his fault Jisung is doing it.
“Sorry,” Chan says. He sips his beer again. “I’m just — it sucks. Being on the sidelines.”
“I get it,” says Jisung. “I’ve been on hiatus before.”
Embarrassingly, this brings Chan up short. He’d forgotten, in the swamp of his own self-pity, the months Jisung had taken to deal with his panic attacks, and he wants to reach into his own head and strangle the voice reminding him that at least Jisung’s body had remained the same. That no matter what happened in Jisung’s head, no matter the lies his brain told him, he woke up every day with the same body he’d had the day before.
“I wanted to meet you at the airport,” Chan says. “I asked the staff, but they said it’d be too much, trying to meet me somewhere safe and get you guys to the vans at the same time.”
Minho nods. “It wasn’t too bad,” he says, “but the mob is always there. Especially in Australia.” He pauses, as though he’s not sure if he should keep going. “Lots of people had signs for you,” he adds, eventually. “Get well signs and stuff. They miss you.”
Chan can picture it, a swarm of fans crowding in on the members like water, filling in the smallest gaps between them. He looks at Jisung, who isn’t saying anything. He knows how much Jisung hates those crowds, and he doesn’t miss the way Jisung’s hands are clenched around his sweating glass.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” says Jisung. “The usual. Panicked in the bathroom later. Par for the course.”
“It’s not your fault,” Minho says. He isn’t touching Jisung the way they would touch in private, not when there’s a chance that someone might recognize them, but he puts a hand on Jisung’s shoulder and squeezes. They’ve been sleeping together for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t.
Jisung shrugs, and Chan hates that he’s had to get used to panic attacks whenever they arrive in a new country, to dry-swallowing his anti-anxiety medication in the van on the way to the hotel and washing it down with water that he takes from the staff with a shaking hand. Jisung shifts into a beam of light and the momentary sadness on his face makes Chan want to change the subject.
“Your nails,” Chan says, gesturing to Jisung’s hand, and Jisung lights back up.
“Yeah!” he says. “I’m playing around with polishes.” He holds his hand up like he’s showing off an engagement ring. “The makeup noonas say I’m bad at it, though.”
“Tell hyung about your costume for your solo stage,” says Minho, raising an eyebrow at Jisung in a way that feels to Chan somehow filthy despite not being explicitly sexual.
“It’s a skirt,” says Jisung, grinning. “I’ve got this, like, black mesh top and these leather pants, and there’s this gauzy kind of skirt that goes over them.” He glances at Minho and smirks. “Hyung likes it a lot.”
“Can the two of you refrain from fucking at the table?” Chan asks, fond and under his breath, and Jisung cackles delightedly. It makes something twang in Chan’s chest, a rubber band pulled taught and released.
As happy as Chan is for Jisung — and he’s very happy, he’s thrilled — the idea that Jisung is enjoying the trappings of femininity while Chan is left to fend it off on his own is hot and sour in his stomach. When Jisung joined JYP, he’d been early in his transition, earlier even than Chan, and his masculinity had been strident and angry and alien, every opportunity for softness rejected because the risk of seeming like an asshole was less dangerous than the risk of seeming like a girl. Jisung’s raw talent had been enough, in the end, to prevent the company from kicking him out, as Chan’s had been as well, but for years, he and Chan had been allies in their constant, exhausting insistence that they were men.
“I would never fuck in front of you,” says Minho, “and I resent the implication.”
“You have absolutely fucked while I was in the same apartment, and that was bad enough.”
Minho rolls his eyes and Jisung plasters himself to Minho’s side, chin resting on Minho’s shoulder. “Jagiya,” he says, with an exaggerated whine that Chan knows Minho finds cute. “Jagiya, we’re almost out of beer.”
“Astute,” says Minho. “Well spotted.”
“Oppa,” Jisung persists. “Get us more.”
“Say please.”
“Oppa.”
“You are the worst,” says Minho, coaxing Jisung out of the booth so he can get to his feet, “and I indulge you too much.”
“Hey,” says Chan, as Minho heads towards the bar. “I thought you said you couldn’t speak English,” and Minho grins widely at him over his shoulder.
In Minho’s absence, the silence is uncharacteristically sticky. Chan, who still hasn’t made it through his first beer, stares at the tabletop before glancing up at Jisung.
“I like your skirt,” Chan says, eventually. “It’ll look good on you.”
“Yeah?” asks Jisung. “You think?”
“Definitely.” Chan sips, squirms, settles. Jisung watches him with his head tipped sideways and he looks, in that moment, surprisingly like Minho.
“What aren’t you saying?” Jisung asks. “You seem weird.”
“I’m not weird,” Chan says, reflexively, before shaking his head. “Sorry. I mean — I’m just envious sometimes.”
“Of my skirt?” Jisung asks. His cheeks and his ears are flushed bright pink and his movements are loose and easy. He’s not drunk but he’s tipsy, and it makes him softer somehow. “You can have a skirt too if you want, hyung. I just asked the stylists.”
“I know,” Chan says. “But it’s not just the skirt. It’s like — it’s all of it. The skirt, the nails. You call Minho oppa. Doesn’t any of that bother you? Doesn’t it make you anxious at all?”
“I guess,” says Jisung. “A little, sometimes. But it feels good. I like it. And I deserve to feel good.” He pauses, and when Chan doesn’t answer, continues, “So do you, hyung. You deserve to feel good too. If you want to wear a skirt, you should. If you want to paint your nails, you should. No one’s gonna think less of you.”
“You don’t know that, though,” says Chan, slightly too loud. He glances towards Minho, waiting in line at the bar, and lowers his voice. “There’s no way to know that for sure. It’d be so easy to slip up, even after all these years. Anyone could find out.”
“Sure,” says Jisung, “but I don’t think wearing a skirt is going to be thing that changes anything. Lots of male idols wear skirts these days. Fans like it.” He drains the last of his glass. “And if you wanted to do it, they’d like it even more, cause you’re so buff. They like the contrast.”
Jisung means it as a comfort, Chan knows, but it feels like someone’s just punched him in the stomach. For as long as he’s been a working idol, the thing that’s kept him the safest has been the obvious physicality of his own body: his narrow waist, his broad shoulders, the definition in his pecs and abs. When he’d gotten top surgery, years ago during a three-month trip back to Australia as a trainee, his chest had been small enough for keyhole incisions, and it’s now nearly impossible to see the scars around his nipples. It’s certainly impossible to see them from the audience when Chan’s on stage. His body has always been his simplest passport to manhood: look at me, it’s always said, and try to tell me I’m not who I am. His body has allowed him access to a certain kind of perception, and now, injured and sidelined, it’s slipping out of his control.
“It really doesn’t bother you,” Chan says again, “that someone might think you don’t look like a guy?”
Jisung seems to contemplate this. “Look,” he says quietly, after a moment. “I know I’m a man. Minho’s gay, and he fucks me regularly because he knows I’m a man. Ask anyone else in this bar right now and they’d tell you that I’m a man. Unless I pull my fucking pants down, there is no reasonable way to tell that I’m not cis, and sometimes that in itself feels bad — I’m not cis, and that’s a part of my life. It’s a part of who I am. But if I can present myself in a way that makes it clear that I’m a man and also that femininity is part of my gender, then that feels good. It feels better than good.”
Chan feels sweat starting to bead at his lower back. He feels his heart start to pick up speed. “What if it wasn’t so obvious?” he says. “What if you asked everyone in this bar and they didn’t tell you that you were a man?”
Jisung blinks at him. He opens his mouth and closes it again. “Hyung,” he says. “What’s going on with you?”
But before Chan can answer, Minho returns to the table, a fresh beer in his hands.
“Here you go, you monster,” Minho says, putting the glass down on the table and nearly sloshing some of it over the side. “You’re an expensive date.”
“You like it,” Jisung says, refusing to scoot over so Minho has to squeeze into the available space and his entire torso is pressed against Jisung’s. “Don’t lie.”
“What did I miss?” asks Minho, as he finds Chan’s eyes with his own. He doesn’t look away until Chan does.
“Not much,” says Jisung. “We were talking about gender.”
“Ah,” says Minho, lowering his voice to match Jisung’s. “You’ve been liking yours lately, right?”
Chan remembers Minho at age nineteen, quiet and talented, an unexpected strand in the thread of their group. He remembers the solemn look on Minho’s face when he told him. I’m trans, Chan had said, sitting on his hands to stop them shaking, every muscle in his body tense. I wanted you to know. If you don’t want to be in this group, I understand. He remembers the way Minho had peered at him, his little downturned mouth drawn tight, before saying, That’s okay. I want to do this.
“Yeah,” says Jisung, contentedly, resting his head on Minho’s shoulder. “Yeah, it’s good. I like being a little girlier sometimes, now that I know I’m not a girl.”
Minho pats Jisung’s thigh reassuringly and hums. Chan remembers, too, the way serious little Minho had taken one look at Jisung and loved him. Chan hadn’t been there when Jisung came out to Minho but, at the same time, he had always known that he didn’t need to be. Based on Minho before and Minho afterwards, it would have been impossible to tell that he and Jisung had been discussing anything more intense than the weather.
”I know you’re not a girl,” Minho confirms.
“You really never questioned it?”asks Chan, looking at Minho. “Your gender? It always felt good to you?”
Minho cocks his head. He seems to consider this. “I mean, it feels fine to me,” he says. “I’m good with what I got assigned. I’m a man. But gender just isn’t super relevant to me. Mine, yours, Jisung’s — it matters to you so it matters to me, but on its own, I don’t care very much.”
”You’re gay, though,” Chan says.
“Yeah,” says Minho, “but if Jisung died in a tragic parasailing accident and I met a gorgeous woman during my mourning period, I wouldn’t be mad. It wouldn’t, like, throw off my sense of self.”
“During your mourning period?” squawks Jisung. “That’s unbelievable.”
Chan watches them, Jisung plastered to Minho’s side and gaping in indignation while Minho blinks slowly at him in affection, and doesn’t know how to breathe around the horrible jealousy filling his lungs. Minho, who has understood himself so well and for so long. Minho, who occupies his body with a fullness that Chan has never mastered, who simply refuses when the stylists ask him to show his abs. It’s my body, Chan has heard him say so many times, and I don’t want to. Minho, who could walk away from all of this and understand, still, how to go on living.
It’s my body, Chan thinks to himself, and it only feels halfway true. It’s his body, but it doesn’t belong to him in its entirety. It’s his body, but fans and detractors alike analyze it, dissect it, post zoomed-in close-ups of his chest and stomach with a fervor that wakes Chan up in the night on the nights he gets sleep at all. bang chan trans, he’s searched so many times at three, four, five in the morning. bang chan gender. It’s his body and it’s also a secret that could ruin him. It’s his body and it exists so often as a threat to him, to his career, to the only way he knows how to be. If he is feminine, even at all, he is ceding ground in his war against the body he was born with; if anyone looks at him and doesn’t see man, then he has lost a battle he’ll never recover from losing.
Later, when Minho has coaxed a happily tipsy Jisung to his feet, they walk three in a line out of the bar and into the parking lot. The rented car Minho and Jisung borrowed from the staff is parked next to Chan’s dad’s station wagon and it’s a surreal feeling, watching his members prepare to go back to a hotel that Chan isn’t staying at with them. The muscle memory of touring — never returning to his room before nightfall; washing his face in a hotel bathroom, his eyes red from night after night of eyeliner; falling asleep in the fifth identical hotel bed of the month — is so strong that returning to his childhood bedroom at his parents’ house feels like a parallel universe some other Chan is living in. A universe where he is Chris and he transitioned in Australia and meets up with his friends from university at this sports bar in Strathfield every few weeks or so.
”Hyung,” says Jisung, as Minho climbs into the driver’s seat. “I just think you should know that I get it, yeah?”
“Get what, Jisung-ah?” says Chan, watching Jisung lean against the passenger side door of their Camry. He’s gonna stain his clothes, Chan’s mind supplies, unbidden. And we only bring so much on tour. Ever the leader, even now.
“When I was on hiatus,” Jisung says, “I didn’t really work out. The gym made me panicky.” Through the back window of the car, Chan can see Minho stiffen, and Chan remembers, not for the first time, how Jisung’s hiatus had affected Minho in ways it hadn’t affected anyone else. “My body changed too. My arms and my shoulders got so thin. You could see my chest scars so much better. I just — it was bad, hyung. It made it all worse. It was such a dark place already, and I thought some really — ” Jisung breaks off. “I thought some really dark things. So I just wanted you to know that I get it.”
”I didn’t say anything,” Chan says, hopelessly. “I didn’t say anything about any of that.”
”I know,” says Jisung. “But you didn’t have to. I know you.” He smiles, lopsided. “I was your first kid.”
”Jisung-ah,” says Minho, softly. “We’re in public.”
Jisung nods and gets in the car, waving to Chan as Minho pulls away, and Chan stands foolishly in the parking lot for several minutes as they shrink into the distance. Jisung’s body had remained the same, he’d thought earlier, unkind and small, and Jisung had in return understood the thing Chan has simply refused to say out loud for months. Maybe Jisung had understood even back before the hiatus and the surgery, when Felix had done what he did. Maybe Jisung had always known why Chan had been so resistant to get help.
Sorry, Jisung-ah, he thinks, in useless penance, and then drives himself home in silence, the springtime roads of his hometown familiar and unknown all at once.
Day Two
The backyard is dim in the gathering dusk, the strings of fairy lights draped along the fence giving it a warm, inviting sort of glow, and it’s the first time Chan’s looked Felix in the eye for months.
“The tour’s been great, yeah,” says Felix in Korean, to Chan’s dad. He’s sitting at the long outdoor table Chan’s parents set up on the grass earlier in the day, looking particularly beautiful to Chan in the way he always does when they’re in Australia, and he keeps trying to sneak looks at Chan over the plates piled high with meat. “We miss Channie-hyung, though.”
The tour is on its last month. Soon, Chan will be back in Seoul, not cleared to dance but at least able to work on music with Changbin and Jisung. He came to Australia after his surgery, his parents and his members and several managers having persuaded him that it would probably be healthier to stay with his family for a bit than to spend his days alone, going from studio to apartment and back, and ever since arriving, it’s been like living in an unfamiliar world.
“We understand that one,” says Chan’s dad, flipping ribs of lamb over on the grill to char both sides. “But your loss is our gain. It’s been great having him around, even if the circumstances are unfortunate.” Chan’s dad, who has been irritatingly positive ever since Chan’s surgery, looks to Chan and gives him a quick smile. “Help me with the meat? I’ve got more stuff to get from inside.”
Chan’s about to stand up, relieved to have both a task and reason to avoid looking at Felix, when his mom shakes her head. “Don’t encourage him to overuse his shoulder,” she says, glancing at Chan with a worried expression.
Chan, who’s finally able to lie on his bad shoulder again, had slept strangely on it the night before and he’s wearing his sling again today to take the weight off the joint. His mom eyes it pointedly and he hates it, more viciously than normal. He hates this uncomfortable, intrusive, medical reminder of his own inability to do his job and to be part of his team. He hates feeling useless, and helpless, and weak. If it were any other visit, any other evening at Chan’s family home while on the Australia leg of a tour, Chan would have been cooking for ages already. He’d be doing what a son is meant to do and, even though neither of his siblings are home, he’d still be playing the role that’s always felt right to him. His parents’ boy. The oldest son.
“Felix can help,” Chan says, sudden and petulant, even as Minho gets to his feet and moves automatically towards the barbecue.
“Hyung,” he hears Minho say, a note of warning in his voice. Chan knows he’s pushing it. He knows how protective Minho is of Felix, and he knows Minho has no problem calling him out, but Felix is smiling strangely at a place above Chan’s head and joining Chan’s dad. Chan’s dad claps Felix on the shoulder and Chan thinks that if he didn’t know Felix as well as he does, he wouldn’t be able to tell anything was wrong.
Jeongin, half a leaf of lettuce sticking out of his mouth, looks back and forth between Minho and Chan with his eyebrows raised and then gets up to help Felix. Minho watches the two of them push meat around on the grill with a pained look on his face, but he clearly isn’t willing to tell either of them that they’re doing it wrong and keeps his mouth shut. Chan’s dad reappears from the kitchen with raw vegetables on a plate and politely takes Jeongin’s place. Everything carries on easily without no help from Chan at all.
When Chan can’t take it anymore, he stands up from the table and starts gathering empty plates. He can do this, at least. He can contribute one single solitary thing to this gathering, at which he feels like a guest when he usually feels like a host. He’s stacked three plates when he feels a hand on his back.
“Hey,” Changbin says. “Let me, yeah?” He reaches out for the stack of dishes and Chan thinks that if he hears one more person say let me, he’s going to fucking scream.
Changbin’s clearly trying to keep his voice quiet, but everyone looks up anyway, and Chan tries not to dwell on how quickly Felix’s head snaps around. I’m not useless, he wants to yell. You don’t have to treat me like I’m broken.
“Hyung,” Changbin says again. “We’ve got this. Let us take care of you for a change.”
But Chan can’t. It’s not who he is. Changbin’s hand is warm and reassuring through the fabric of Chan’s t-shirt and Chan knows that there’s nothing he could say to Changbin that would make Changbin love him less, but he holds the plates closer to his chest with his good arm and takes a step back towards the house anyway. He feels like a child clutching a toy. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him and he doesn’t know how to stop.
“I’m fine,” he says, and he’s lost track of how many times he’s said it. “It’s fine. I’ve got it.”
“You don’t have to — ” starts Changbin, but Chan’s already gone. He opens the screen door with his foot and takes refuge in the blessedly empty kitchen, setting the plates down on the counte and bracing himself against the edge of the sink with his good arm. He takes several deep breaths. The conversations outside feel like a headache, pulsing in his temples. He wants to feel normal. He thinks, for a moment, that he wants to feel like himself, but that would only ring true if he were the kind of person who liked himself, and suddenly he’s overcome with the desire to throw something. To upend the entire table of banchan and grilled lamb, every glass half full of beer. A distant part of himself wonders if that would make him feel more like a man.
From behind him, he hears the sound of the backdoor opening and closing, followed by bare feet on a tile floor. He expects it to be Changbin, and he’s unsure if talking to Changbin right now would make him cry or become more defensive, but it’s not Changbin’s voice that speaks from the doorway of the kitchen.
“Hey,” says Seungmin, quiet and steady. “You good?”
“No,” says Chan. “Sure. Yeah.”
“Convincing,” says Seungmin. He leans against the counter next to Chan, his lower back resting beside Chan’s elbow. “You gonna talk to any of us about it?”
“Not much to talk about,” Chan says. “I’m recovering, like everyone keeps saying. I just want to get back to the group.”
Seungmin’s posture seems to soften. “I know that,” he says. “That’s not what I meant. Sorry.” He shifts side to side a little, clearly on edge. “We miss you,” he says, eventually, not looking Chan in the eye. “Tour’s not the same without you.”
“You seem to be doing okay,” Chan says.
“Well, yeah,” says Seungmin, and Chan appreciates enormously the fact that Seungmin doesn’t sugarcoat things. He isn’t going to lie to Chan just to make Chan feel better. “We’ve been doing this for years, and we can get by without a leader. But we like it better when we don’t have to.”
“I don’t even feel like I’m good enough to be a leader right now,” Chan says, surprising himself. It bubbles up from within his body and spills out of his mouth unwanted. “I don’t even think the public can see me right now.”
“Because of your shoulder?” Seungmin says. “The public has seen lots of idols while they’re recovering from surgeries. Fans would just tell you to rest and get better and stuff.”
“Not my arm,” Chan says. “My, like…body.”
Seungmin, once again, doesn’t lie. “You’re thinner,” he agrees. “You’re less muscular. But that wouldn’t surprise anyone. And no one’s gonna suspect anything, especially if you’re in baggy clothes.”
Chan knows all of this objectively. He also knows that the situation he’s in right now has always been a risk, since the day he debuted. He knows it’s always been possible that something might happen to prevent him from taking his hormones or working out or maintaining his gender presentation in some other way, and that seven other peoples’ livelihoods would still depend on how well he passed. His body has always been a liability. In becoming their leader, he became a threat to their future.
He knows all this objectively and it still doesn’t make it less nauseating, standing in the kitchen of his childhood and listening to someone who loves him assess the danger level of his appearance. Seungmin is offering the exact reassurance Chan asked for, and he’s correct in what he’s saying, and all Chan can hear is, You look fine now, but if you change more, then forget it.
“I have a favor to ask,” Seungmin says, after several moments of silence. He’s still not looking Chan in the eye.
“Okay,” says Chan. His voice is a little rough. He wonders if he’s going to cry after all.
“I need you to talk to him,” Seungmin says. “To Felix. Please.”
“Why?” Chan asks, wrong-footed by this change of topic and by Seungmin’s insistence. Seungmin usually stays out of conflicts between members of the group. “I’m not even in Korea right now.”
“He’s a wreck,” Seungmin says. “He hasn’t been himself for months. He fucking misses you, and he’s feeling so fucking guilty, and I need you to fix it.”
Something about the phrasing — I need you to fix it — gets Chan’s hackles up. He’s on hiatus. He’s injured. He’s on the sidelines, he’s trying to recuperate, and someone is still asking him to fix things, someone is still asking him to put aside the snarl of emotion that’s rotting him from the inside out and smooth everything over for everyone else. They won’t take his help with dishes or grilling, they won’t let him decide what’s right for his own broken body, but they want him to fix things with Felix?
“I can’t,” Chan says, after several beats. “Not right now. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not serious,” Seungmin says. “You’re the leader.”
It’s like someone’s opened a floodgate and every petty, selfish impulse deep inside Chan is now free. “Not right now I’m not,” he says. “Go to Changbin or something.”
“That’s what we’ve been doing,” hisses Seungmin, “but Felix doesn’t want Changbin. He wants you, and you’re punishing him.”
“I’m not punishing him,” Chan says. “I just need space.”
“Why?” Seungmin presses. “Why do you need space so badly?” He lowers his voice. “Felix is your favorite. Don’t try to tell me he’s not. I’m not saying you don’t love us all, but Felix is Felix. We all know it.”
Chan doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t know how to separate what he feels for Felix from what he feels for Australia, from the nostalgia that blossoms in his chest when he thinks about his past and the past he might have had if he weren’t trans. He imagines, sometimes, growing up a boy with Felix, their voices dropping and their beards coming in, and he knows he’ll never be able to untangle it all. Felix will always be part of his sense of self: to exist as Chan without Felix would be to exist as a different person entirely. Being betrayed by Felix is different than being betrayed by anyone else.
“It’s his fucking fault I’m on hiatus,” Chan says finally. “None of this would be happening if it weren’t for him.”
”No, it isn’t,” Seungmin says, and he looks so familiar, there in Chan’s family’s kitchen. He’s been here so many times before, the different continents of Chan’s life slotting together simply and without friction. “It’s no one’s fault. You fucked up your shoulder. It happens.”
“You say that like it’s no big deal,” Chan says, peevish. He remembers Park Jinyoung asking him to come into his office, concerned and well-meaning but more than a little annoyed. He remembers the look on Felix’s face when Chan emerged half an hour later, trying not to cradle his bad arm to his torso, and remembers knowing what Felix had done. “You say that like nothing bad happened.”
”Hyung,” says Seungmin, clearly exasperated. “You tore your labrum. You got surgery. You’re doing your rehab and you'll be back soon. No one likes being injured, but everyone gets it.”
I get it, Jisung had said in the parking lot, and Chan wants to yell and to freeze Seungmin out at once. Jisung might understand, but Seungmin doesn’t. Felix doesn’t. They don’t understand what it means to have given your entire life to an industry that doesn’t want them. They don’t understand what it means to sacrifice their entire youth for a career that’s dependent on the tenuous ability of a body not to change, when changing is what bodies do best. Chan is a man, but he’s not a cis man, and Seungmin and Felix will never understand what that means.
When Chan stays silent, Seungmin stares at him with the kind of flat, anticipatory look that is somehow more effective than twenty minutes of wheedling. “Let me just clarify,” he says. “You’re planning to ignore Yongbok until possibly the end of time because he prevented you from causing potentially irreparable damage to your body?”
Chan ignores this question, because any answer he gives will make him look foolish and he is well aware that was Seungmin’s intention. “My shoulder wasn’t any of his business,” he says instead.
“It was,” Seungmin says. “It was his business because we’re in a group together, and for what it’s worth, if he hadn’t done it then I would have. Changbin would have. Minho would have. You were in so much pain all the time and you weren’t going to do a damn thing about it on your own.” He runs a hand through his unstyled hair and Chan feels suddenly and hugely protective towards him, followed by a rush of impotence, because what can he do to protect anyone when he’s being lectured in his family’s kitchen by someone it’s his job to take care of? “Yongbok knew you’d be furious. He knew you wouldn't want to look at him and he did it anyway, because he’d rather you hate him than hurt yourself so badly you couldn’t do this job anymore.”
“He could’ve talked to me,” Chan says, and he knows as he says it that it isn’t true. He remembers the inside of Felix’s bedroom, nearly a year ago, and Felix’s hands on his body in ways he never lets himself be touched, and knows that his fear of Felix understanding the unmappable expanse of his vulnerability has always been too enormous for words.
“Could he have, though?” Seungmin presses. “Would you have listened to him?”
Chan takes in a breath to argue and then lets it all out in one shaky exhale. “Fine,” he says, after a beat. “Maybe not.”
Seungmin doesn’t look triumphant, which Chan appreciates, and Chan imagines if it had been Seungmin who’d told the company his shoulder was injured, rather than Felix. He imagines Seungmin’s serious face, across from Park Jinyoung in a conference room or messaging a staff member from an empty practice room after another hour of Chan gasping in pain. He knows he wouldn’t have listened to Seungmin any more than he would have listened to Felix — he knows he wouldn’t have listened to anyone, because if he’s not Bang Chan from Stray Kids, then he’s put himself through the agonies of transitioning in public and hiding that transition for nothing. If he’s not Bang Chan from Stray Kids, then he doesn’t exist at all.
“So you’ll talk to him, then?” Seungmin asks. “You’ll sort this out?”
The roiling anger in Chan’s chest recedes slightly, a wave pulling back from the shore. He doesn’t have the luxury of indulging in it and doing so will only feel good for so long — part of him knows, distantly, that if the group leaves the country and he hasn’t talked to Felix, the constant shadow of his own self-hatred will begin to circle even lower. “Yeah,” he says, after a minute. “Sure. I’ll meet up with him before the show at some point.”
Seungmin sights in obvious relief. “Thanks,” he says. “That’s — that’ll help.” He shuts his eyes for a minute, as though he’s letting go of weeks or months worth of tension, and then adds, “I know sometimes it’s weird with you and Felix. I know I’m asking you for something big here.”
“Weird how?”
Seungmin lowers his voice. “Like with sex and stuff,” he says. “I know it’s complicated.”
Chan tenses. He knows that the members of their group kiss and fuck and date in varied and changing combinations: he knows that Minho and Jisung started messing around long before they said they did and that Changbin is more in love with Hyunjin than he’s ever going to admit; he knows that Felix and Jisung watch movies and get tipsy and kiss and that Jisung and Hyunjin sometimes have an awestruck sort of sex after they fight. He’s always assumed everyone else knows he sleeps with Changbin on a regular basis and it’s not a surprise to him, in any way, that the rest of the group is aware that he has been wretchedly, unspeakably in love with Felix since their debut. What is a surprise to him is that anyone, barring Felix, might know about the singular, disastrous time he and Felix tried to sleep together.
“What do you mean?” he asks Seungmin, in a strangely flat voice. “What are you talking about?
“I just mean,” Seungmin starts, and then cuts himself off. He shakes his head and starts again. “I know it’s a little different for me, cause I don’t really mess around with any of you, but it’s not, like, a secret that you and Felix hooked up. And I don’t know exactly what went down, but I know you two were super weird with each other after that, and I know you’ve been hung up on him for basically eight years. I just thought, you know — that can’t make this easier.”
It’s not a secret that you and Felix hooked up. Chan feels the words like the kind of winter cold that cuts through sweaters and blankets and woolen coats, that settles deep in the bone and won’t be shaken. It should be a secret that he and Felix hooked up. He never told a single person. He never breathed a word of it, not even to Changbin, and he’s carried the snarled humiliation of that night in Felix’s bedroom ever since, a foreign object the body seals off to prevent the damage from spreading. He knows the shape of the encapsulation like he knows the shape of his own hands.
“Hyung,” Seungmin says. “You okay?”
“It’s not a secret?” Chan repeats. “Of course it’s a fucking secret.”
Seungmin peers at him. “Sorry,” he says, “I think I’m missing something here,” but Chan’s already on his way out of the kitchen. He’s not sure where he’s going, just heading towards the barbecue as though by going back to where he’d been physically before this conversation he can erase the horrible knowledge Seungmin has just given him. Felix, at some undetermined point in the past, told someone what happened.
Before Chan can leave the house, though, he’s brought up short by the presence of Felix at the backdoor, standing a little too still, as though he’d been waiting for Chan the entire time Chan had been talking to Seungmin. Because he knew what Seungmin was going to tell you, says a nasty voice in Chan’s head. Because he knew you were going to find out. The expression on Felix’s face still hits Chan like a fist to the gut.
“Hi,” says Felix, in English. They often speak English to each other and something about it feels intimate now in a way that makes Chan want to run. “Chris, I just — ”
Felix hasn’t called Chan Chris in years. It’s a habit leftover from before he was fluent in Korean, from when speaking to Chan was the only time he got to truly speak, and right now, it’s the worst thing he could have said. No one in Korea calls Chan Chris except for Felix and it feels like one more raw, unprotected thing between them that’s been brought out into a world it was never meant to survive.
“You told him,” Chan says. He doesn’t mean to say it. He doesn’t feel like he’s in charge of his own body.
“Park Jinyoung PD-nim?” Felix says. He screws up his mouth into a stubborn line. “I know, and I’m not sorry.”
“Not that,” Chan says, and at this Felix looks openly surprised. Standing there, in jeans and a t-shirt with the neck of a beer bottle in his hand, he looks so beautiful that Chan feels slightly nauseous. He swallows and Chan watches the skin of his throat slide over his Adam’s apple. “Seungmin. You told Seungmin.”
“I told Seungmin what?” Felix says. They’re still speaking English and both their accents seem to thicken as their emotions rise. “I didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know! You almost screamed in the practice room when Lee Know-hyung adjusted your shoulder!”
Behind him, Chan dimly registers Seungmin appearing from the kitchen, but he doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t want to see the concern or the exasperation on Seungmin’s face. “No,” he says, and he hears his own voice rising. “You told him about what happened before my shoulder!”
“Hyung,” says Seungmin, before switching to English to match Chan and Felix. “I think we need to back up here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Felix, but his voice is louder now too, and Chan realizes that everyone in the backyard, separated from them by a screen door and not much else, can hear that they’re fighting.
“Everyone’s treating me like I’m not fucking real,” says Chan. “Like I’m not even here! Everyone’s talking about me and deciding what I can and can’t do and no one’s asking me! No one’s asking what I think I can and can’t do, or what I want. You’re all always telling me to take time for myself and set boundaries and not work so hard but when I do make decisions about my own fucking body, no one’s listening to me!” He’s not yelling, but it’s a close thing. He watches over Felix’s shoulder as Changbin gets to his feet, eyes wide. Changbin makes a reassuring gesture towards Chan’s parents and the other members before turning towards the house.
“Hyung,” says Changbin, when he makes it inside. He looks genuinely worried and it occurs to Chan that it’s the same expression he wore so often back when it was becoming clear Jisung needed to go on hiatus. It’s this, more than anything else, that forces Chan to take a deep, regulating breath.
Changbin reaches out for Chan, brushing Chan’s forearm with his fingertips, but Chan takes a step backwards. “Sorry,” he says, “sorry, no, I can’t do this. I can’t do this right now.” And he doesn’t look back as he disappears into the depths of the house and the quiet dark of his bedroom.
Day Three
“What’s in the bag, hyung?” asks Changbin, greasy and smug, when Chan walks into his hotel room. Changbin pointedly looks up and down the hallway before letting the door swing shut and does an admirable job keeping his face neutral, as though he hadn’t watched Chan storm to his bedroom like a teenager the night before.
”I’m allowed to be here,” Chan says, indignantly. “You’re not sneaking a boy into your room.”
”Habit,” says Changbin. “You know how it is.”
Chan appreciates the teasing for its sheer normalcy. Earlier in their career, Changbin had absolutely brought people back to the dorms, beautiful girls and beautiful boys, and Minho had taken Chan to task when Chan balked at the breach of contract. Now, Changbin’s too deeply invested in fucking Hyunjin into oblivion in their two-person apartment to sleep with strangers, and when he wants to be fucked himself, he knows Chan is ready and willing to do the job.
“You know full well what’s in the bag,” Chan says archly. “But if you're going to be a dick about it, then I’m happy to keep it to myself.”
”The only dick I want to be is on yours,” Changbin says. “Wait. That doesn’t work. The only dick I want to be on is yours? Fuck.”
It’s enough to loosen the tightness that’s become a regular feature of Chan’s whole body. His shoulders slump forward a little and he drops his leather tote on the floor beside Changbin’s bed before collapsing onto the blank white bedspread himself.
“Room service?” Changbin asks. “I’m fucking starving.”
”Yeah,” Chan agrees. “Whatever you want.” He pauses, asks the question he normally wouldn't have to ask. “What’d you get up to today?”
“Filmed a few interviews,” Changbin says, peering at the phone on the bedside table. “Made Yongbokie do all the talking.” Either unaware of Chan’s discomfort or unwilling to care about it, he picks up the phone and speaks into it as though continuing his and Chan’s conversation. “Two steaks, please,” he says, in English. “Medium rare. Yeah. Yes. And…two beers? And the potatoes. Room 316. Yeah. Thank you.”
“I could’ve done that,” Chan says. “You didn’t have to.”
”I’m practicing English,” says Changbin. “When all we have is Seungmin and Jisung and Yongbok, we seem a lot less professional.”
This time, Changbin gives Chan an unimpressed look when Chan fails to contain the pinched sort of wince on his face at the sound of Felix’s name.
“You want to tell me what was going on last night?” he asks, sitting down on the bed next to Chan. His shorts are riding up his thighs and Chan goes a little dizzy with a combination of envy and desire.
“I’m just tired,” says Chan. “I’m tired of being injured and not being able to do things like I normally do.”
“Sure,” says Changbin. “But you were yelling at Yongbok.”
“Yeah,” says Chan, “and you know why.”
“Do I?” asks Changbin. He’s watching the side of Chan’s face and Chan’s staring fixedly at the abstract print hanging on the wall of the hotel room. The sterile hotel air is too cold against his skin. “I may not be fluent in English but it sounded like you were saying it was not, in fact, about Felix telling Park Jinyoung about your shoulder.”
Chan squirms, and he feels Changbin lock in. “Let me ask a different question,” he says. “Would you have been as mad at me as you are at Yongbok, if I’d been the one to tell the company?”
Chan desperately wants to say yes and to have it be true. He wants it and he knows he can’t have it, because he and Changbin both know he wouldn’t have been. He’s wanted Felix since he was a teenager, homesick and desperate. He’s wanted Felix more and for longer than he’s wanted anyone, and when he and Felix have kissed, tipsy or tired or too worn down to resist, it’s never felt like it feels with Changbin. The way Chan craves Felix is a private, unnameable thing. When Chan kisses Felix, it’s like giving in to the roots of himself.
“He should have known better,” Chan says, eventually. “He should have known what getting me kicked out would mean.”
“You haven't been kicked out of anything,” Changbin says, not unsympathetically. “You’ll be back in Seoul in less than a month.”
”Yeah,” Chan admits. “But that’s not — it’s not that it’s a really long time away. It’s everything else. It’s just that in a month it doesn’t feel like I’ll be me anymore. I won’t look like me. I’ll look like who I used to be.”
”Oh,” says Changbin. “Oh. Like — who you were before — ?”
”Yeah,” Chan says. “Before I transitioned.”
Changbin reaches out and rests a hand on Chan’s knee. “Can’t you take T while you’re recovering?”
“I can,” says Chan. “But T’s not everything, you know? I put so much work into my body every day to keep it looking how it looks, especially my upper body, and I can’t do that right now. Not the way I normally do it. I’m losing muscle. I’m losing definition.” Someone’s going to see through me, he doesn’t add.
“Hyung,” says Changbin, the use of the honorific as intentional as dropping it had been. “We just want you to let us take care of you sometimes. It doesn’t make you less of a man.”
Chan’s throat is tight and swollen. “That’s easy for you to say,” Chan says, “because you’re built like a tank. No one’s ever questioned how masculine you are.”
This time, it’s Changbin’s turn to flinch. “Yes, they have,” he says. “I know it’s not the same, but they have. Why do you think I bulk like this? Why do you think I haven’t stopped? We’re idols. I know how much the way we look matters.”
“It’s not the same,” Chan says, still throaty, because Changbin’s the only person in the world he gets to be selfish with. He knows that Changbin has spent years of his life doggedly working his body into a shape that no one can question. He remembers the uneven angles of Changbin’s jaw when they were younger, the defensiveness just beneath Changbin’s skin. He knows how much they’ve both envied Hyunjin and Felix over the years, the willowy, muscular ease of their genetics. He knows how much Changbin has struggled and it still isn’t the same, because Changbin’s not hiding a version of himself in photo albums locked in a basement. “It’s not.”
“I know,” says Changbin, softly. “I do.” He pauses, squeezes Chan’s knee again. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth. About your shoulder, your hiatus. All of it. I know it’s not fair.” He rubs his thumb in circles over Chan’s skin. “My question stands, though. Why is it worse that Yongbok told the company rather than someone else?”
Chan shifts ever so slightly closer to Changbin so they’re touching from hip to knee. Changbin’s warmth is comforting. “Did you know Felix and I hooked up?” Chan asks, after a moment of silence.
Changbin looks taken aback. “Yeah,” he says. “I think we all do.”
The confirmation doesn’t feel like a surprise. It settles over Chan like his body had already prepared itself to carry the extra weight and had simply been waiting for it to be placed. Chan nods. “Okay,” he says. “Cool.”
“Cool?” says Changbin. “That doesn’t really answer anything. Everyone knows you and I hook up, too.”
Chan pulls his legs up onto the bed and wraps his arms around them, dislodging Changbin’s hand. “It was bad,” he says. “With me and Felix. It was really bad, and I didn’t think anyone knew.”
The tension in Changbin’s body is obvious. He doesn’t touch Chan but he turns to face him, one leg bent on the bed between them and one leg still hanging off the side. “Bad how?”
Don’t you already know? Chan wants to ask, but he also feels the urgency of confession at the base of his throat. He could tell someone about it. He could tell someone about it right now, and maybe afterwards he’ll forget he ever said a word. Maybe afterwards Changbin will hold him and he’ll wake up to a new world where he and Felix have never fucked and never fought and he never hurt his shoulder and the day is tender and new.
“You know how we always fuck, like…rough?” Chan asks. He hears himself give a strange, high-pitched laugh that he barely recognizes.
Changbin nods beside him. “I thought you liked it like that.”
“I do,” Chan clarifies, a little too fast, even though he’s not lying. He does like how he and Changbin fuck, the way Changbin spreads his legs and takes Chan into his body, the way Changbin’s fingers dig into Chan’s hips and the way the bulky muscle of Changbin’s arms and thighs gives way, just a little, when Chan bites it. “I do. But I wanted — with Felix, we wanted — ” He can’t quite get himself to say it. It’s not shameful, it’s not embarrassing — not with Changbin, anyway, not with someone who knows and loves his body the way Changbin does — but it feels enormous anyway.
“To try something else?” Changbin prompts, and Chan shuts his eyes.
“I asked him to fuck me,” Chan finishes, finally. “We’d only really made out before, and we were cuddling in his room and we were so tired, we were just kind of melting into each other, and I was so comfortable, and I wanted him so bad, and I trusted him so much, and I just…asked him. And we tried.”
Changbin makes a face that verges on pained. “I am so sorry to be asking for this clarification,” he says, “but when you say fuck you…”
“In my cunt,” says Chan, sharp and quick on an inhale. “Not in my ass.”
“Got it,” says Changbin. “I guess that just surprises me. I didn’t know that was something you were interested in, at all.”
“I didn’t either,” says Chan. “I’d never tried it before, even on my own. But I wanted it so bad right then. I wanted him to see me.” I wanted him to take care of me. “Halfway through I just panicked. I fully lost it. He was like…in me, and I shoved him off.”
“Because you didn’t like it?”
Chan shakes his head. For years, for his whole life, that part of his body had been private. He’d never been ashamed of it, and he’d never hated it when he was alone, but he’d given up the right to be touched there when he’d decided to become an idol. He’d bartered away his pleasure. When Felix had fucked him, it had been the same as being cleaved in two.
“Because I did,” Chan says. There’s a long pause, during which Changbin seems to be considering what he’s just heard, and Chan stretches his legs back out, feels the stiff ache in his knees as he straightens them. “And then after, I just didn’t know what it meant. I mean, he and I used to make out and stuff, but it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t what some of the rest of you have.”
“Hey,” says Changbin. He scoots up onto the bed so he’s sitting cross-legged facing Chan. “Hyung. This is serious to me. You and me, you know that, right? I know neither of us want to be in a committed relationship with each other, but it’s still serious. It still matters.”
Chan can’t bring himself to face that sincerity, and he just shrugs instead. “I know,” he says, although his own suspicion that no one would ever think sex with him was serious makes his stomach ache. “I know, it’s just — it got weird after that. With me and Felix. We never talked about it. We just pretended it didn’t happen.”
“Felix never talked about it?” Changbin asks. “Or you never talked about it?”
Chan doesn’t answer that, because he knows Changbin knows the answer.
“I wanted it to be serious,” Chan says, in the silence left behind by Changbin’s question. “I really, really wanted it to be serious, and I just freaked out. I just fucking bailed. And so when he told the company, I thought he’d know what it would do to me, losing the control I had over my own, like…masculinity.” He rolls his eyes when he says it, although it isn’t a joke. “No one else has ever seen me like that, so fucking vulnerable. And he did see it, and he saw how bad it was, and he should have known that it’d be even worse if I lost control of my own fucking body.”
“Is it possible he didn’t know?” Changbin asks. “Did you tell him why sex went so badly for you?”
Chan shuts his eyes. He hadn’t, even though he knows he should’ve. Sorry, he’d said, pushing at Felix’s shoulders until Felix pulled out and knelt by his hips. I can’t do this. I’m sorry. It’s me. He remembers the way the arousal on Felix’s face had turned to worry and then to a blank, closed-off neutrality, the way his expression had slipped one side of his mouth at a time. He remembers the sound of Felix’s bedroom door closing behind him, the imaginary ghost of Felix’s breath in his ear as he’d walked, raw and exposed, to the front door to take himself home. It had been an ending, he’d thought. The final gasp of a possibility he’d spent his adult life cherishing.
Answering Changbin’s question feels too exhausting and Chan pulls himself all the way up onto the bed instead, shifts forward until his knees touch Changbin’s shins. He rests a hand on Changbin’s leg and slides it just underneath the hem of the faded gym shorts Changbin wears to bed. Changbins’s skin is smooth and warm, his body hair nothing but a fine down this high up his thigh, and he shivers a little at Chan’s touch. It makes something pleasant and anticipatory settle at the base of Chan’s spine.
“Can we just — ” Chan slides his hand further up Changbin’s leg, fingers finding a sensitive spot on Changbin’s inner thigh and making Changbin draw in a sharp gasp of breath. “Will you just touch me?”
“Are you sure?”
Chan nods. “I’ve missed you,” he says, and it’s true. He can grudgingly admit, at this point, that staying with his family during his recovery had been the right call, but he’s used to Changbin in his bed once a week. “It’s been ages. I want this.”
“Okay,” says Changbin, and it’s the same soft voice he uses with Felix or Hyunjin when they’re upset and he pets their hair, when he smiles at them and says okay baby. Chan wishes, sudden and startling, that Changbin would call him baby.
Chan climbs off the bed and unzips the bag he’d brought with him to the hotel, exposing the black nylon fabric of his boxers and the pale silicone of his cock. He pulls his sweatpants down his legs with one hand, letting his right arm hang loose in the useless sort of way he’s gotten used to, and then tugs his t-shirt off, resisting an urge he hasn’t felt in years to hide his chest and his stomach. He’s not wearing his packer, having opted instead for his sweatpants with nothing underneath them, and he steps into the boxers and feeds his cock through the opening, adjusting the base of it against his pelvis until the underwear holds it in place. It presses against him in a weighty, familiar way.
“Fuck,” says Changbin, staring at Chan’s hips and groin. “You’re hot. I’ve missed you.”
“Take off your clothes,” says Chan. “Get on your back.”
This is how he and Changbin always do this — a little rough, a little harsh, Chan telling Changbin what to do in a way that Hyunjin would never. Hyunjin likes to be praised and and pampered, likes to lie back and be fucked till he screams; he likes to grab the headboard and arch his back and dig his heels into the mattress. In return, when Changbin has sex with Chan, he wants Chan to do to him what he does to Hyunjin, and it’s Chan’s job to fuck him until he’s sensitive and whimpering, until he can’t take any more.
Changbin grabs the hem of his own tank top with both hands and pulls it slowly off over his head, and Chan’s chest warms the way it always does when he thinks about how different Changbin is now than he’d been when they started doing this, how much more willing Changbin is to show off his body. Chan looks at the hard swell of Changbin’s pecs, the bulge of his arms, the soft flesh of his belly, and Chan wants to touch. He wants to touch and, surprisingly, he wants to lie on his back and reach up and palm at every inch of Changbin he can reach. He wants to be the one digging in his heels and grabbing the headboard and the intensity of his desire startles him.
“Good,” Chan says, instead of anything else he’s thinking. He has a role to play. “Underwear.”
Changbin pulls his underwear off too, a faint red line on his skin from where the wide elastic waistband had been digging in. His cock, thick and slightly short, springs free, already halfway hard.
But instead of doing what he’s told — instead of climbing naked onto the bed and lying on his back, instead of letting his legs fall open — he tips his head sideways and gives Chan a look that’s a little too probing to be sexy.
“I have a question,” he says, “and you can say no. But like…we could try it gentler. You can still fuck me, but we could go slower. Be softer. Since you liked that, with Felix.”
It comes out a little slow and uncertain, as though Changbin’s not sure how Chan will react, but his expression is open and earnest, and the voice in the back of Chan’s head telling him that Changbin’s only saying this because Chan’s injured and pathetic is quieted by the hum of arousal in his groin and the dizzying euphoria he feels at the idea of doing exactly what Changbin’s suggesting.
“Okay,” says Chan, a little breathless. His hips twitch automatically and his cock rubs against him more firmly, sends sparks up into his belly. He wants Changbin on top of him. He wants what Changbin’s offering so badly.
“Good,” Changbin says, voice rough. “Try something for me, okay? Lie down. Let me ride you.”
Chan thinks about Jisung’s nails, about Jisung’s gauzy black skirt, and nods. He climbs onto the bed and props his head and upper back up with pillows, the soft downy hotel kind that seem to give way beneath any weight. He spreads his legs, almost without thinking.
“Here,” Changbin says, handing him a bottle of lube from the duffel bag. “I wanna watch.”
Chan wraps a dry hand around his cock first, reacquainting himself with the shape and feel of the silicone. It warms slowly under his touch and he strokes the length of it, letting it spring back towards his belly every time the tip of it slides through his palm. After a few minutes, during which Changbin watches him hungrily and presses his own hand against his own erection, Chan squeezes lube into his palm and brings it to his cock, careful not to let any drip onto the boxers. He slips a few slick fingers between his cock and his body and rolls them over his clit.
“Do you want to open yourself up?” Chan asks. “Or do you want me to?”
“I’ll do it,” Changbin says. “I want you to watch me.”
Chan wonders if Changbin’s doing it to keep him from using his arm, but he can barely bring himself to care. All the blood in his head seems to rush to his cunt as Changbin lies down beside him and opens his legs, as Changbin reaches a slick hand down past his cock and begins to press at his hole. Changbin’s efficient, working himself open methodically and intentionally, and by the time he’s loose and ready, Chan’s whole body is damp with the sweat of his arousal.
“Fucking Christ,” says Changbin, sitting up slowly and getting to his knees. “I need you inside me so bad. It’s been so long.”
“I’m ready,” says Chan, a little breathless. He adjusts himself on the mattress and stretches his legs out slightly, keeping them just bent enough to cup Changbin’s ass when Changbin straddles him. Changbin strokes along Chan’s waist and hips, bends down to lick a stripe up Chan’s cock and press a kiss to the tip, but when his hands find their way up to Chan’s chest, Chan makes an involuntary noise of embarrassment.
“Sorry,” Chan says, as he crosses his arms over his pecs. “I’m just — ”
Changbin shakes his head. “Don’t be sorry,” he says. “Do you not want me to touch there?”
Chan shuts his eyes. “No,” he says. “Yes. I don’t know.”
Normally, Chan loves having his chest touched. Ever since he recovered from top surgery, he’s loved the feeling of a palm cupping his pec, loved the instant overwhelm of a finger circling and digging into his nipple. His chest — the definition of it, the distinctly masculine cut of his muscles — has always been a source of pride and of gratitude, evidence of both the work he’s put into his body at the gym and the immediate legibility of his body itself. So many hours bench pressing and dead lifting and every time, whenever he caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror, it had been so clear to him and therefore to everyone around him that he was a man. He passed so easily, and no one asked him for justification, and it was that passing that made his life possible. Now, with Changbin’s warm palm cupping his pec, he isn’t so sure. He passes, he knows that, but it’s not as obvious, and it erodes at the foundation of his entire career.
“Chan,” Changbin says. “Hyung. Where’d you go, huh? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Chan says. His brain is going a hundred miles a minute but his body is loose and hot, his body wants Changbin to touch him. He knows Changbin sees him as a man. He knows Changbin will take care of him. “Touch me. You can.”
Changbin obliges, pressing his thumbnail in a little x-shape over Chan’s nipple. “You’re so fucking hot,” he says. “So fucking hot and strong,” and something in Chan melts at the praise. He never had sex pre-transition, never had sex pre-Stray Kids, and lying there, letting Changbin do whatever Changbin wants to him, makes Chan feel like the string of a bow cut suddenly loose. Changbin guides Chan’s cock until it’s lined up with his entrance and then guides it inside of himself.
“Oh,” says Changbin, sweet and desperate. “Oh, oh, fuck, that’s good.” He sinks himself lower and lower, goes torturously slow until he’s settled with his ass flush against Chan’s pelvis. He shifts a little, feeling Chan inside him.
“Please ride me,” Chan whispers, before he realizes what he’s saying. “Please, I want you to ride me until you come, okay? I want to see you.”
Changbin’s eyes go wide and he nods, once. Then he leans forward, bracing himself with a hand on either side of Chan’s head, and kisses Chan’s jaw. Kisses Chan’s neck. Kisses along Chan’s collarbones.
“Whatever you want, baby,” says Changbin, and Chan thinks his head might explode. He holds the base of his cock steady as Changbin starts to move, wraps a hand around it and presses it against himself, and the rhythmic motion of Changbin’s hips causes the base of it to rub against Chan’s clit until Chan can’t stop himself from throwing his head back. He thinks about the way he would have done this if Changbin had ridden him any other day — thinks about reaching for Changbin’s hips and holding him still, fucking up into Changbin and keeping Changbin steady while he takes Changbin how he wants him — and feels strangely distant from that version of himself. He likes it like this, he realizes. He likes feeling like someone he trusts is holding him, caring for him, using him like something precious and beloved. For once, he’s not worrying about what’s expected from him; for once, he’s just trying to be good.
Changbin starts out slow and languid but eventually picks up speed. Beads of sweat gather on his forehead and he squeezes his eyes shut, his cock leaking precome in smears on his belly. He wraps one hand around himself and it only takes a few strokes before he’s trembling with the effort of holding back.
“You too,” Changbin says, to Chan, leaning down and kissing Chan’s jaw again, trapping his cock and his hand between their bodies. “You can have this.”
Usually Chan requires more than this — a vibrator, often, pressed hard against his clit while he’s buried in Changbin — but it’s been so long since he’s had sex that he’s close to coming from nothing but the friction of the base of his cock against his clit and the feeling of Changbin’s ass against his cunt. He feels it deep in his belly, feels it building into something he won’t be able to stop, and it’s a surprise when they come almost together, Chan tipping over the edge and then Changbin, Changbin’s weight against Chan’s chest as he groans and goes limp. They remain motionless for several moments, breathing heavily, until Changbin gets too sensitive and rolls over, letting Chan slip out of him with a wet, obscene sort of noise.
“I am getting so old,” says Changbin, hobbling to the bathroom for a washcloth. “My hips are sore.”
“You’re not old,” Chan says. “You’re just used to me doing the work.”
Changbin must hear something in Chan’s voice, because he stops midway through cleaning himself. He sets the damp washcloth down the bed and sits, wincing slightly.
“Was it okay?” he asks. “Doing it that way?”
They’ve never talked about it before tonight, the reason they fuck how they fuck: the way Changbin’s always seemed to understand that by giving Chan space to fuck him, he gives Chan space to play a role he grew up wondering if he’d ever get to play. Chan’s never needed to explain to Changbin that he’s a man who fucks men, and that’s always been hard enough — that if he’s a man who lets men take control, if he’s a man who lets men ride him or lets men fuck his cunt, then his own claim to masculinity feels that much harder to hold onto. He thinks of the boys he went to school with in Sydney, the boys he was a trainee with in Seoul, and remembers listening to them talking about girls. If I’m a man, then I have to be like that, he’d thought, and if they knew, then they’d do that to me.
“I just don’t want you to get bored of me,” Chan says, a sideways sort of half-truth. “I know you like getting fucked, and not having to do all the work, and getting to be — ”
“If you say getting to be the man, I will smack you as soon as I have the energy,” Changbin says. “We’re both men. I clearly love having sex with you. Riding your cock until my brain leaks out my ears isn’t a hardship for me.”
“So you liked it?”
Changbin pauses for a moment, staring at Chan, before rolling his eyes affectionately and lying back down on the messy bed. He pulls Chan tight against him.
“I liked it,” he whispers, as Chan breathes in the sweaty smell of his hair mixed with the clean detergent scent of the duvet beneath them. His voice is softer now. No one on earth knows Chan better than Changbin. “I liked it a lot. You’re sexy and hot and extremely good in bed.”
“If you say so,” Chan says, squirming a little, and Changbin clamps his arm down to stop him from moving.
“Take the compliment,” Changbin says, “or I’ll make you come again while you’re still sensitive.” When Chan opens his mouth, Changbin groans. “Fuck,” he says. “I walked right into that.”
After several peaceful moments, Changbin remembers their room service with a triumphant yelp, and brings it inside shirtless and in his underwear. They eat voraciously and in total, companionable silence, and as Chan watches Changbin bent over his plate, chewing happily on steak, he wonders what it would feel like to have been born into a body like Changbin’s.
In isolation from being an idol, Chan likes his body on T — he likes how wiry his muscles come in, likes the triangle of his shoulders to his hips. In isolation, Chan has no real desire to have any body other his own, and yet his body can’t exist separate from the industry he’s chosen, and he finds himself thinking about Felix and Hyunjin, about how even their most feminine styling does nothing to detract from their immediate legibility as men. Chan loves Felix, and he wants Felix, and he’s not sure how to let himself have Felix, even if Felix wants him back. Felix would exist without Stray Kids, without Chan, without the entire life they’ve built, and Chan has always suspected that he himself would not.
As a boy, Chan’s understanding of what it meant to be a man had hinged on the importance of self-sacrifice. A man takes care of the people around him. A man doesn’t show weakness and doesn’t talk about pain. Masculinity fed so naturally into who Chan has always been as a person, because nothing has ever been easier for him than putting someone else’s needs before his own. Now, Chan doesn’t know how to let Felix see the sore, ragged edges of his own needs without the foundation of himself falling away.
Chan lets Changbin finish eating and lies on Changbin’s bed while Changbin showers. When Changbin crawls under the covers and curls up against Chan’s side, he’s asleep within minutes, his nose pressed awkwardly into Chan’s armpit. Chan tries to readjust himself but Changbin just holds on tighter, and Chan eventually shuts his eyes, drifting in and out of a dream. Changbin’s body merges with Felix’s and Chan’s skin becomes transparent, the edges of his body washing away until the messy snarl of his organs becomes visible to the world.
Day Four
When Chan arrives at the zoo the next day, less than five hours after slipping out of Changbin’s hotel room and driving himself back home, his entire body feels heavy with exhaustion. He’d agreed to come on a vlogging trip not because he’d wanted to be in a vlog but because he’d been lonely, and he’d told Hyunjin and Changbin multiple times that he had no intention of being in their footage.
“You can be in it, hyung,” Hyunjin says anyway, holding his phone out in front of him on the end of a selfie stick, scrunching up his face at the camera. He and Changbin are sitting at a table in the otherwise empty cafeteria when Chan joins them.“The staff said it was fine.”
“And even if they didn’t,” Changbin says, “I think you could still get away with it.”
Hyunjin’s examining himself on his screen, trying to adjust his hair to his liking. Changbin, his own hair still damp and frizzing at the ends, grins into the lens of Hyunjin’s phone.
“Make sure you get my good side,” he says, greasily. “And by my good side I mean my biceps.”
Hyunjin tries to snort but it turns into a giggle. Chan rolls his eyes.
“Nah,” Chan says. “It’s fine. I’m not exactly ready to be on camera right now.”
Hyunjin shrugs. “Me either. I don’t have any makeup on.”
“Okay, but that’s a terrible comparison for the rest of us,” Changbin says. “You look like that when you roll out of bed. You came out of the womb looking like that.” He himself looks like he’s trying to get his expression to settle somewhere in the vicinity of exasperated, but all he manages is smitten.
“It’s fine,” Chan says again. He knows they’re trying to help and he knows also that it won’t help to be filmed. It won’t make him feel normal. When he watches the footage back later, it will just remind him how different he looks now than he’s used to, even if those differences don’t show so much on camera. He imagines fans scrutinizing clips of him, zooming in on the slivers of his face visible between his hat and his mask, and wonders what they’d be able to see. The idea of being perceived at all feels shockingly invasive, like waking up to find a stranger standing at the foot of your bed.
“Suit yourself,” says Changbin, in an easy tone of voice that seems totally normal in public, but Chan feels Changbin’s worry like it’s physical. “When do we want to get going? Hyunjin wanted ice cream.”
“It’s like ten in the morning,” Chan points out, but Changbin’s already talking into his phone, explaining that they’re at the zoo and that his wife needs something to eat.
“I’m not your wife,” says Hyunjin, loudly enough to be heard, and Chan stays quiet, a ghost in the empty food court. He sits in silence while Hyunjin chatters away to Stay and by the time Hyunjin’s finished, Changbin’s already returned to their table with a scoop of gelato in a cone. Hyunjin takes it happily and licks a little ring around the widest part of the gelato scoop to stop it from dripping.
It should feel normal, Chan thinks. They’ve vlogged like this, as a group and in combinations and solo, hundreds of times over the years, the easy energy of their videos a direct result of the years they’ve spent becoming as comfortable together as they are alone, and this shouldn’t feel different. Even if Chan’s not vlogging himself, this should still be familiar, the three of them enjoying a day out with the half-open eye of a phone camera watching them, blinking to life when they do something interesting and falling shut again when they lapse into normalcy. Instead, he feels like he used to be afraid he’d always feel: just on the outside of a tight-knit group, so close to fitting in and yet somehow still unsuited to belonging.
As a boy in Sydney, this is what it had been like when everyone saw him as a girl. He’d liked his friends, he’d liked their company, and yet he’d never understood why even when he did all the same things they did, he’d never felt like one of them. On a sleepover, lying awake between two sleeping bodies, cataloging his behavior from earlier in the day like a scientist observing an elusive animal; sandwiched between a car door and his friend’s shoulder and staring out the window, uncomfortable and feeling like every single bump in the road might shake him out of his body.
“Where are we going?” he asks Hyunjin and Changbin finally. He doesn’t want to sit in this food court any longer, watching Hyunjin prop his phone against his purse on the table to get a good low angle of his profile as he licks his gelato from the sugared cone.
“Doesn’t matter,” says Changbin, even as Hyunjin says, “Tigers.”
“Tigers works,” Changbin agrees amiably, and Hyunjin gets to his feet and gathers his things. Even on an off day, even unstyled and dressed in his own clothes, he looks ready for the runway. His jeans ride low on his narrow hips and the top few buttons of his shirt are undone to show off the mismatched stack of necklaces glittering between his collarbones. Chan doesn’t want him like that, but he does want to look that good, and it sends a shudder of jealousy down his spine. It’s a kind of masculinity that feels fundamentally inaccessible. If he were to look as willowy and androgynous as Hyunjin, he doesn’t believe he’d look like a man at all.
Hyunjin rotates the paper map of the zoo around several times, trying to figure out which direction they’re facing. Changbin takes it from him, confident and sure, and then has no more luck than Hyunjin. Eventually, defeated, he gives the map to Chan.
Chan leads them outside into the sun, which beats down on his shoulders and neck with what feels like physical pressure. They follow the curves of a packed dirt path, winding between various fences and rock formations meant to imitate the savannah, and Chan listens to Hyunjin explain their plans to the camera.
“They take us in a plane,” Hyunjin says. “To a special part of the park where we can see the tigers. I’ve never seen one before, but I’m sure they’re beautiful. They’re endangered, did you know that? I didn’t know that, and it makes me so sad. There must be so many creatures we’ll just never know about.”
Changbin sidles close enough to Hyunjin to squeeze his head and shoulders into frame. “What do you think, Stay?” he asks. “Am I as strong as a tiger?”
“No,” says Hyunjin, “not even close,” and Changbin makes a sulky face at him. Chan tunes them out, allowing their squabbling to wash over him and then fade away, and lets them get a few steps ahead of him so he can check the map again without worrying about being in their footage.
It feels strange to be avoiding the camera this strenuously, when usually he lives half his life in front of it. Chan wonders if this is how his non-idol friends always feel when they hang out with him, like they’re dodging an all-seeing eye. He’s watching Changbin and Hyunjin ahead of him, their bodies carefully angled towards Hyunjin’s phone as though they’re seeing how other people will see them, when his eyes catch on a group of three strangers. They’re walking near Hyunjin and Changbin, just behind them and slightly off to the side, and something about their pace and the hush of their voices sets off an alarm in the back of Chan’s head. It’s the kind of itch he gets in an airport when someone’s following them too closely and too precisely to be going in the same direction by coincidence.
Chan takes a quick, purposeful step closer to Changbin, hoping to get Changbin’s attention, but Changbin’s already clocked the group of strangers himself. He stops walking and reaches his arm out sideways, grabbing Hyunjin’s wrist, and they both slow down, adjusting their trajectory so their backs are to one of the wooden fences lining the path. Hyunjin taps a button on his phone screen and lowers his selfie stick and Chan watches to see if the group keeps going towards the entry to the tiger exhibit. He’s unsettled but unsurprised when they don’t.
Instead, the strangers stop on the other side of the path, directly across from Hyunjin and Changbin. One of the them stares over at Hyunjin for a second too long before shifting his gaze to the gray rock wall above Hyunjin’s head, as though it had been an accident he’d been watching Hyunjin at all.
Changbin’s just turned to look at Chan, mouth open, when the person who’d been staring at Hyunjin peels away from the group and crosses the path. Chan shifts his weight from one foot to the other, torn between wanting to conceal his identity and wanting to put his body between a stranger and his members, but before he can decide, the stranger is right in from of Changbin.
He’s wearing baggy jeans and chunky sneakers, earrings in his ears and a baseball cap shading his face, and he’s smiling in a shy sort of way that brings his threat level down considerably. A fan, Chan realizes. Just a fan, wanting to say hi, and here Chan is, available to be perceived. The exact thing he hadn’t wanted.
“Hi,” says the guy, in unaccented Korean. “I’m so sorry, but are you Stray Kids?”
His two friends sidle closer, abandoning their post at the fence across the path, and they’re both smiling when they approach. One of them looks to be a girl, her hair in pigtails, dressed in a skirt that hits her halfway between her knees and her ankles. The third friend is so visibly androgynous that Chan wouldn’t even want to hazard a guess as to their gender. Changbin gives Chan one last startled look before he slips into the easy, professional tone of voice he adopts in public when Chan’s not there to be the leader.
“Yeah, we are,” he says. “You spotted us!”
“Sorry,” says the guy who’d started speaking. He glances over at Chan, following Changbin’s gaze, and Chan feels sure he’s been spotted, but the guy just gestures to his friends behind him, one on each side in a v-formation. All three of them look East Asian and all three of them are letting their eyes rove over Hyunjin and Changbin in poorly disguised awe. “My friends don’t speak Korean, but we’re all fans. We’re coming to your concert this weekend — we came in from Newcastle.”
Changbin, who clearly has no idea where Newcastle is, nods enthusiastically. Hyunjin smiles at them, a little taken aback but genuine. “It’s so nice to meet you,” Hyunjin says. “Thank you for supporting us.”
The androgynous friend looks up from their phone, where they’ve been furiously typing. “Do you sign — ?” they ask in Korean, checking the screen after the first word, and Hyunjin looks touched at the attempt at translation.
“Sure,” says Changbin. “We can sign something for you.”
All three friends pull photocards out of their bags. The girl digs around in hers until she finds a pen and Changbin and Hyunjin scrawl their names across two photos of Hyunjin’s face and one of Felix’s. The guy who initially said hi, the guy who had glanced over at Chan when Changbin did, gives him another curious look, and Chan grits his teeth, waiting to be clocked. He waits for one of the questions he usually receives — will you sign too, probably, or one of the phrases like I’m your fan or I love your music that are often delivered as questions but that Chan never knows how to respond to — but no questions come. The guy, apparently deciding Chan is not nearly as interesting as the two members of Stray Kids in front of him, looks away, returning his attention to the signed photocard Hyunjin’s just handed back to him, and Chan feels himself fade into the background. He has not been recognized.
“I’ve never seen you in concert before,” says the girl, in English. She’s clearly Australian. “I’m so excited.”
Hyunjin seems to understand most of this. “We’re excited too,” he says. He hands her back her photocard, his own beautiful face winking up at him.
“감사합니다,” the girl says, in slow and deliberate Korean, and Hyunjin beams at her. Chan stays still and quiet, a few feet away, and the very fact of his body somehow becomes less solid. It’s an odd feeling, one he hasn’t felt in years, and he thinks he might like it. It’s not dissimilar to freedom. Somehow, in his mask and his hat and his oversized clothes, he has become invisible.
“Yes, thank you so much for stopping to talk to us,” the guy says. “I know you’re busy.” All three friends start clustering closer together, clearly vibrating with excitement, in preparation to depart.
“Please enjoy the concert,” Changbin says. “Cheer extra loud for us.”
The three of them nod and then set off back down the path. Chan watches them go, holding their signed photocards in their cupped hands and giggling, and when they’re out of sight, safely beyond the entrance to the tiger exhibit, he takes several feather-light steps to rejoin Changbin and Hyunjin. Changbin’s entire body seems to physically relax when he sees him.
“Fuck,” Changbin says. “I guess it could’ve been worse.” He examines Chan’s face, walking his fine and careful line between letting Chan be and refusing to leave Chan alone when solitude is bad, and Chan doesn't know how to exist in the spotlight of his scrutiny.
"All good, right?" Chan says. "They’re happy."
Changbin chews on his lower lip, clearly trying to decide what to say, but Hyunjin speaks first.
“Are you okay?” Hyunjin asks. “They didn’t recognize you.”
Chan starts walking again just so they don't have to stand still and face each other while they have this conversation.
"I’m fine," Chan says. "I liked it, actually. I liked that they didn’t know me."
"Really?" Hyunjin says, disbelieving. "Why?"
Changbin reaches out and puts a hand on Hyunjin's upper arm and Hyunjin turns to him in something close to alarm. Changbin just shakes his head.
Something in Chan rears up on instinct — how dare Changbin try to manage him, how dare Changbin treat him like he’s fragile — and then it's as though the raging animal just runs out of steam. It collapses to the ground of his chest.
“It just felt good to not have to worry,” Chan says, and it feels both incredibly true and much too simple. “I just got to exist.”
This is the first time in his life, Chan thinks, that he's been in Sydney as a full grown man without feeling so immediately recognizable as Bang Chan of Stray Kids. When he grew up here, he'd been transitioning, or pre-transition, and every other visit home, he's been conspicuously famous to the right sort of people. Every other visit home, he suspects he would've been clocked by the fans who just clocked Hyunjin and Changbin. But the fans don’t know that he’s not in Korea, and his hiatus is public news, and all the guy saw when he looked at Chan was a stranger. He looked at Chan and saw someone who existed, separately, from Bang Chan. He didn’t see Bang Chan at all.
“I think it would bother me,” Hyunjin says, lost in thought, and Chan shrugs.
“That’s okay,” Chan says, and he hears his own voice lighter than he's heard it in months. The color of it shifting and settling. He bumps his good shoulder sideways into Hyunjin and adds, "You wanted to see tigers, didn't you?"
Chan and Hyunjin and Changbin walk side by side to the entrance to the tiger exhibit, Hyunjin in the middle with his phone camera angled to capture just him and Changbin. All the fans watching this, Chan thinks, will see Changbin and Hyunjin and assume that the two of them were filming alone, and that Chan was never there at all. He is a man alone in the city, and there's something he loves about that.
"We're almost there!" Hyunjin's saying into the camera. "It's right up here." He turns the camera around to show a large painted sign of a tiger, careful to keep Chan out of the shot but reaching over to rest a hand on Chan's lower back anyway, and maybe, Chan thinks, he exists. Maybe, in the absence of work, in the absence of being filmed and watched and styled and assessed, he exists, and maybe that’s okay.
Day Five
The in-venue rehearsals take up most of the following day, and the staff is busy enough that they let Chan skulk in the wings and at the sides of the stage like an obvious, intrusive ghost. Watching his team rehearse without him hurts both more and less than he expected and he stares at them with a sort of hunger, a ravenous pride that makes him feel at once hollow and full.
“You're in the way, you know,” says Seungmin, dropping down into a squat beside Chan at the very front of the stage. “You’re gonna get hit with a flying mic or something.”
“Or Lee Know’s shoe,” Chan suggests, nodding at where Minho is hopping on one foot, shoving his foot back into his sneaker. “If he does that during the show and it goes into the crowd, some fan is going to have a gross keepsake.”
“They could sell it,” Seungmin says. “Make a fortune. Lee Know-hyung’s foot sweat’s gotta be expensive.”
“I hate this,” says Chan.
Seungmin sits all the way down, his bangs pointy and damp with his sweat. They’re almost done, running through their solos one by one to set the lighting and sound cues, and the sun has mostly set. The little pieces of spike tape stand out against the dark of the stage like confetti.
“You seem better,” Seungmin says. “Are you?”
“I guess,” Chan says. “I talked to Changbin.”
“That usually does it,” Seungmin agrees.
“It’s just weird,” Chan says. “Everything I know about being a man relies on, like…looking like a perfectly jacked male idol.”
“It’s okay,” says Seungmin. “I’m a male idol and I haven’t voluntarily gone to the gym more than two weeks in a row for most of my life.”
It’s an exaggeration, but one that Chan appreciates anyway. He leans sideways to lean against Seungmin and they turn to watch as the music for the final solo performance starts.
Felix is dressed in a white gauzy button-up shirt cropped well above his waist and his pants are low-slung and leather. His hair is long and blond and his makeup catches the stage lights and Chan’s throat aches with want that doesn’t fit in his belly.
Seungmin politely pretends not to notice Chan staring. “For what it’s worth,” Seungmin says, “and I know this isn’t, like, the point or whatever, but you do look like a jacked male idol. Since that’s what you are.”
“Huh?” says Chan, too fixated on the way Felix’s sweat glistens at the high points of his collarbones and the shadowed lines of his abs.
“I said, you still look like a man. You’re not as buff, but you pass. You pass easily. You’ve spent way too many years working on that for it to go away in a month or two. You’re still on T.”
“Hyunjin and Changbin and I went to the zoo,” Chan says. “Some fans didn’t recognize me.”
“Let me guess,” says Seungmin. “You were skulking in the back, fully covering your head and face?”
“Well,” says Chan. “Yeah.”
“I would probably put that down more to your fashion choices than your body, then,” Seungmin says. There’s a long pause during which Chan tries and fails to tear his eyes away from Felix lying on his back on the stage, reaching for the sky with one elegant arm. “Hyung,” Seungmin says, softer. “We miss you. It’s not the same without you. I don’t want you to implode while we’re waiting for you to come back.”
This time, Chan’s throat is tight for different reasons. He can’t bring himself to look at Seungmin and he just reaches out, fumbling, until he finds Seungmin’s knee. He squeezes it awkwardly. “You still want me to sort things out with Felix?” he asks, even though he knows the answer.
“Yes,” says Seungmin, acerbic, a laugh gathering at the edges of his voice. “But don’t pretend that whatever you do with him tonight is for my sake.”
*
Chan doesn’t have a plan when he shows up, for the second time that week, at the hotel the members are staying at. He texts the staff to let him up onto the floor they’ve rented out.
Felix is two doors down from Changbin, a staff member in the room between them, and Chan sends a silent apology to the makeup artist who presumably had to overhear Chan and Changbin going at it two nights ago. It occurs to him, as it often does, that their staff members know more than feels entirely safe, and a nondisclosure agreement, no matter how ironclad, still relies on someone finding the prospect of money not worth the consequences. The knowledge sits, like it always has, in the pit of Chan’s stomach and won’t go away. Who he is and who he sleeps with could bring the whole group down, if someone wanted to sell him out badly enough. They all sleep with each other, but only Chan and Jisung are trans, and only Chan is the leader. Body as weapon. Body as sword of Damocles.
“What, hyung!” yells Felix through the door, when Chan knocks. “I already ate! I don’t care how hungry you are!”
But the door opens anyway, and Felix starts when he sees Chan.
“Oh,” he says. “I thought you’d be Changbin.”
“I’m not,” says Chan, uselessly. “Can I come in?”
Felix steps aside and Chan enters the room with Felix’s eyes fixed on his back. He sits on the edge of the bed in a strange echo of sitting on the edge of Changbin’s, although in Changbin’s room he’d been expecting sex and surprised by conversation, and now he’s expecting conversation and will be surprised if he gets sex.
“I’m not sorry,” Felix says, just as he’d said in Chan’s parents’ kitchen, before Chan can even open his mouth. “I know you’re mad at me, for telling the company. I honestly didn’t think you’d be this mad, but even if I had, I’d still have done it. I love you more than I don’t want you to hate me.”
Felix is standing in front of him with his arms crossed and his jaw set in a way that indicates he’s fighting off tears. Chan wants to reach out and touch him.
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” Chan says, and he sounds a little hoarse. “And I don’t hate you.”
“You literally haven’t been speaking to me,” says Felix. “And you can’t pretend it’s just about your shoulder, either. You’ve been weird since we slept together.”
“I know,” Chan says. “I’m sorry. That was — that was shitty of me. Ignoring you.”
“And I know you don’t want me like that,” Felix continues, “but I thought we’d at least still be friends after. I thought we’d still be close, after a little bit. Like, I used to sleep with Changbin-hyung and we’re still close, even if it hurt us both a little bit when we stopped.”
This brings Chan up short. “You used to sleep with Changbin?”
“Yeah,” says Felix. “Did you seriously not know that? For a few years, right after we debuted.”
“What changed?”
Felix paces up and down the room a few times. His stage makeup hasn’t worn off or been washed off and there’s still gel and hairspray in his hair, but he’s in sweats and tank top and he looks so beautiful and so casual and so soft and Chan wants him more than Chan’s ever wanted anything.
“You,” Felix says. “You changed.”
“I didn’t — ”
“No, shut up,” says Felix. “Let me finish. You were so hard on me when we started, remember? You were so intense and you pushed me to be better and I could never get totally comfortable. You’d be so soft and gentle and then you’d yell or you’d get mean.”
“And I changed?”
“Once we’d been around for a few years and it was clear things were working, yeah,” says Felix. “You got calmer. You were less scared all the time. You hated yourself a little less, I think. And I’d always been pretty into you but after that I just stopped being into anyone else.”
“I didn’t hate myself any less,” Chan says, because it seems like the most salient point. “That’s why I was so mad, when you told the company about my shoulder.”
“Hang on,” Felix says. “I just told you I was so into you that I didn’t want to sleep with anyone else, including Changbin, and you’re telling me about how much you hate yourself?”
“It’s relevant!” Chan says, and there’s just enough levity in his voice that Felix seems to relax. This isn’t Chan angry. This isn’t Chan about to blow. “I promise it’s relevant.”
“Okay,” says Felix. He still doesn’t sit down. “Keep going.”
“When we fucked, it freaked me out because I’ve always been hated myself,” he says, “and it was too intense having someone else see me like that. Not because I didn’t want you. I’ve just always hated how hard it is to be an idol when this is the person I am, and it’s easier to hate myself than it is to hate anything else. And when you told the company, I was mad because you meant more to me than anyone and you telling felt worse than if anyone else had done it. I was mad because we’d fucked, and you’d seen how bad that was for me, and it felt like that meant you should’ve known how bad it would be if I was totally out of commission.” He pauses, and adds, “If I didn’t have control over my body.”
He finishes on a long, desperate exhale, and then he looks at Felix and tries not to seem too pathetic.
“I saw how bad it was for you when we fucked,” Felix says, slowly, “so I was supposed to know how bad it’d be if you got shoulder surgery? How does that make any fucking sense?”
“Because I thought you knew why us fucking was bad! I thought you knew it was because no one had ever fucked me before and it was big and it was huge and I freaked out because it felt like you were going to think I wasn’t a man. I felt like my body was all wrong and I thought you’d think it was all wrong too.”
Felix gapes at him. “Oh no,” he says.
“What, oh no?”
“I can guarantee you that’s not what I thought. I thought it was bad because you didn’t want me, and I have spent months agonizing over how this guy I’m in love with thinks having sex with me is so gross that he panics and asks me to leave.”
“Ah,” says Chan. “Well. Fair enough.”
The silence between them is very stiff, and very uncomfortable. Felix shifts his weight from foot to foot. Chan clears his throat.
“To be clear,” Chan says, “I do want you.” He stops. He takes a deep breath. He thinks about how disappointed in him Changbin will be if he bails on this conversation. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anyone the way I want you. I don’t think I’ve ever felt about anyone how I feel about you.”
Felix doesn’t move, but Chan can see him soften, his muscles loosening fractionally.
“Chris,” Felix says, and he sounds stricken. “Do you really hate yourself that much?”
“No,” says Chan. “Yes. Sometimes. Before I hurt my shoulder, not so much. When I could control how I looked more.”
“When you thought you looked more like a man?”
Chan nods. Felix takes several steps closer and Chan spreads his legs automatically, unthinkingly, to give Felix room to stand between them. He remembers being thirteen and on a plane to Korea. He remembers looking out the window and realizing, for the first time, that he’d committed himself to a life of guarding a secret. He remembers meeting Felix and aching, suddenly, for a boyhood in Australia he never got to have.
“Why did you ask me to fuck you, then?” Felix asks. “We could’ve done something else. We could’ve done anything you wanted.”
Felix’s body is close enough to Chan’s that Chan’s skin is prickling from Felix’s radiating warmth. There’s a small smudge of shimmering eyeshadow underneath Felix’s left eye and Chan wants to reach up and wipe it away with his thumb. It feels impossible that this is happening, that Felix is this close to him, when he has spent months trying not to imagine this: trying not to want the things that he wants because they’re so different from what he’s always wished that he wanted.
“I asked you to fuck me because I wanted you to fuck me,” Chan says. “I didn’t think I’d freak out like that. I thought I was past that stage.”
Felix closes the last of the distance between them and cups a hand around the back of Chan’s neck. His thumb grazes the curve of Chan’s jaw. “I don’t think it works like that,” he says. “You don’t just get over hating yourself and never do it again.”
Chan almost asks what Felix means, and then he thinks about how much pressure there’s always been on Felix to look as pretty as he does. To be as thin as he is. Chan turns his head sideways until he could almost press his lips to Felix’s soft inner wrist.
“I wanted it,” Chan says. “I wanted to be touched like that.”
Felix’s breath catches a little, the way it does when he’s being kissed.
“Do you still?” Felix asks, and Chan nods before he can stop himself.
“Yes,” Chan says, and it’s breathy and pitchy and embarrassing. “I like — I like things gentler sometimes. I like — I want — ”
“You want to be taken care of?” Felix finishes. “You want me to take care of you? It seemed — ” He pauses and swallows. “It seemed like you liked it last time. Before you, like…”
“Panicked,” says Chan. He shuts his eyes and tips his forehead forward to rest against Felix’s stomach. “I did, though. I liked it.”
“If we try things again, will it be okay?” Felix asks. "I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you to be weird around me again.”
Chan thinks about Changbin riding him. His body is reacting to the idea of Felix inside him with no input whatsoever from his brain, heat gathering in his belly and between his legs, and he puts his hands on Felix’s waist.
“I won’t be,” he says. “Please.”
Felix bends down, the palm of his hand still pressed to the back of Chan’s neck. He kisses Chan as though they haven’t kissed hundreds of times before this, as though Chan doesn’t already know how Felix shudders a little when Chan’s tongue presses against his lips, how Felix makes a whimpering noise when Chan slides his hands lower to squeeze Felix’s hips.
“I missed you,” Chan says, surprising himself with his own vulnerability. He sounds younger than he usually does, like he’s in his early twenties and writing a song for Felix alone in the studio, like he’s a teenager and telling Felix to find him after Felix has been cut from the group. Before he moved to Korea, when he was still living in Sydney, he’d imagined having a boyfriend, and he’d told himself that meant that he was a girl. He feels impossibly tender towards that version of himself, that terrified thirteen-year-old Christopher who hadn’t understood that being bisexual was an option. Who hadn’t understood that being trans was an option.
“That’s your own fucking fault,” says Felix, and shoves at Chan’s shoulders until Chan scoots far enough back onto the bed that Felix can climb on too. Felix settles himself with his legs bracketing Chan's hips, his arms draped around Chan’s neck and his ass pressed against Chan’s crotch.
This is the part, Chan thinks, when he’s supposed to take control. He’s supposed to grab Felix’s little waist and flip them, he’s supposed to get his cock out and settle it against his body and then fuck Felix with it. He’s supposed to open Felix up with his fingers and his tongue, he’s supposed to work Felix over until Felix is slick and dripping and ready, and then he’s supposed to fuck Felix until the bed is slamming against the wall and Felix is almost crying from stimulation. This is what he has learned: that if he is a man then he is in control. He has something to prove and Felix does not.
Instead, Chan lets Felix take the lead. He lets Felix roll his hips against Chan’s stomach, the obvious hardness of Felix’s cock bumping against Chan’s abs even through the fabric of his sweatpants. He lets Felix bring his hands up until one hand is cupping Chan’s chin and the other is cradling Chan’s head, he lets Felix set the angle and the pace of their kiss. Chan sighs, without meaning to, and he can feel muscles deep inside of him relax. He is a body, and Felix wants him, and he will let Felix have him in whatever tender way Felix wants.
Felix keeps kissing him, pressing forward until Chan’s forced to lean backwards and support himself on his elbows. His injured shoulder registers the stretch but doesn’t hurt, and he tips his head up. Felix’s chest is pressed against his. Felix’s hands are in his hair and on his waist and sliding under his shirt. He exists, primarily, as someone who is desired by Felix, and it feels easy and it feels impossible. Everything Felix is doing seems geared towards making Chan feel good — he’s kissing Chan the way he knows Chan likes, slow and languorous, and he’s running his nails over Chan’s skin until Chan shivers and rolls his eyes back — and Chan’s not sure what he himself is supposed to do in turn.
“Lie back,” Felix says, and Chan obeys, letting his head fall onto the pillow and his arms fall to his sides. Felix rucks his shirt up until his chest is exposed and then lowers his lips to Chan’s nipple, sucking it into his mouth with shocking care. He doesn’t bite or tug — he just swirls his tongue around it until it hardens. Chan gives a tortured, pathetic little moan.
Felix’s gentleness, Chan thinks, is a weapon: if Felix were being rough with him, Chan wonders if it would be easier. If Felix were being rough, then there would a clearer role for Chan to play, it would be simpler for Chan to understand how to slot himself into the scene Felix was constructing. He would let himself become loose and submissive, he would wait for Felix to do what he wanted and he would shape his desires to fill the spaces left by Felix’s. Those would be the options available to him: to take control or to be taken control of. Nothing would exist in the worlds between. Now, with Felix spread on top of him, sucking and kissing and licking with such obvious affection that it makes Chan want to cry, Chan has no idea how to react.
“How much foreplay do you want?” Felix asks. “I could fucking do this for hours.”
Chan shakes his head, because it’s the only thing he can think of to do. He wriggles into a sitting position, back against the headboard, and then drags Felix closer to him, cups Felix’s ass with both hands and squeezes. He shoves at the hem of Felix’s tank-top until Felix pulls it off and then reaches into Felix’s sweatpants and pulls out his hardening cock. Felix’s cock is long and elegant, slender enough for Chan to wrap his entire hand around, and Felix gasps, head tipping forward to rest on Chan’s shoulder. This feels easier, to Chan. He knows how to jerk a man off.
“Lube,” Felix chokes, and Chan leans over sideways to grab it off the bedside table. He squeezes a generous amount into his hand, not caring this time that some of it runs down his wrist to stain his pants, and falls into a rhythm that he understands. He wrings a series of guttural noises out of Felix, little whimpers and moans that are as surprisingly deep as Felix’s usual voice, and feels each one go to his crotch. He feels himself getting wet and swollen, feels his hips start to twitch. This is familiar. This is easy.
“Wait,” says Felix, after several wordless minutes. They’re both sweating, their foreheads glistening, and Chan doesn’t want to stop. He doesn’t want to stop listening to Felix feeling good, he doesn’t want to ever forget how Felix sounds when he’s like this — he’s touched Felix this way only once before, only seen Felix naked and wanting like this on that disastrous first night they tried to fuck, and he doesn’t want to give it up again.
"Chris,” Felix says. “I want — I don’t want to come yet. Please.”
Reluctantly, Chan lets Felix’s cock slide out of his fist. Felix is heaving.
“Why?” Chan asks, even though he knows the answer. He knows what he told Felix that he wanted, and he knows how much he still wants it. He just doesn’t know how to let himself have it. He remembers being fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, remembers the way his high school friends talked about sex; he remembers the group chats and the conversations on walks home in the afternoons, remembers clutching so hard to the secret of his transness that he was afraid the entire structure of his selfhood would shatter with the force of his grip. He remembers at fifteen, his friend leaning over to him on the bus and whispering in his ear what he’d done with his girlfriend the weekend before, and he remembers deciding that to have sex as a man was to never let yourself be weak. I’m a man, he’d reminded himself, still a boy. No one can think that I’m not.
“Chris,” says Felix again, swinging one leg over until he’s kneeling at Chan’s side. “I still want to try again.”
Chan swallows hard around the knot of arousal and confusion and fear in his throat, and then reaches for the zipper of his pants and yanks it down. He shoves his pants over his hips and thighs and kicks them off. Without meaning to or thinking about it, he reaches down and palms at himself, cupping his crotch and grinding into his own hand.
“Yeah,” Chan pants, squeezing his eyes closed. “Yeah, me too.”
“Okay,” says Felix, softly, eyes sparkling with the hint of a laugh. “So if I come now, then it’s harder for me to fuck you, yeah?”
Chan nods. He slides further down the bed again and lets his legs spread. He feels as exposed as he’s ever felt in his life and somewhere, beneath the self-consciousness, his own desire quivers and shudders and grows. He’s going to take care of you, it whispers. He’s going to fuck you, and you’re going to like it.
“Can I?” Felix asks, hand hovering over Chan’s clit, and Chan bites his lip and nods again.
The first touch of Felix’s fingers is the most intense thing Chan’s ever felt. Felix presses his thumb to Chan’s clit, working the pad of it in a circle over the sensitive nerve endings, and lets his index and middle fingers slide down along Chan’s cunt, getting slick and teasing at Chan’s opening. Chan clenches down on nothing. He wonders if he’s going to come just from this.
“Yeah,” he says, “yeah, fuck, please.”
He looses himself, briefly, as Felix fingers him. Felix slides his two fingers into Chan’s body and quirks them forward, rubs them against Chan’s inner wall, and Chan doesn’t understand how it can feel this much better when Felix does it than when he’s done it to himself. He fucks his hips up a few times, trying to draw Felix’s fingers deeper into his body, when Felix makes a pained, desperate noise.
“If I don’t fuck you soon,” Felix says, “I’m going to come just from this.” Chan opens his eyes and looks at Felix’s face, his flushed cheeks and his blown pupils and his full, pink lips. He considers how hot it would be to watch Felix come just from jerking him off, but decides against it.
“Condom?” he asks, and Felix nods.
“Obviously,” Felix says. “I’m a gentleman.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Chan says, voice too breathy and wrecked to tease Felix effectively, and he watches as Felix leans over to the bedside table and grabs a condom from next to where the lube had been. Felix opens the condom with his teeth and rolls it on with a visibly shaking hand before working himself over for a moment, although he’s still as hard as he had been when Chan had stopped jerking him off. Then he kneels between Chan’s thighs.
Automatically, entirely without consideration, Chan wraps his legs loosely around Felix’s waist, and it’s this image, more than anything, that makes him realize exactly what he’s doing.
He is a man, he realizes, and he’s lying on his back with his legs spread, about to let another man fuck him. This is everything he’s always felt certain he wasn’t allowed to want, because what could be worse, his high school self whispers, than letting himself be controlled like this? He is Chan, wanting someone he loves to make him feel good, and he is also Bang Chan from Stray Kids, ruining his own career in the sordid anonymity of a hotel room. There is no difference between the two of him. He exists only as a vehicle for his success, and to let go at all, to give in to his pleasure, is to throw that success away.
“Tell me if you like this,” Felix whispers . “I want you to feel good.”
The head of Felix’s cock presses against Chan’s opening. He spreads his legs wider on instinct. He wants Felix inside him and at the same time he wants to panic again. He wants, for the second time, to push Felix off of him and leave. He’ll repeat history, he thinks, to avoid having to confront himself like this.
“Doesn’t matter,” Chan gasps. “I just want what you want,” but Felix is already shaking his head.
"Tell me what you fucking want, Chris,” Felix says, and his nails dig into Chan’s ribs as he tries to stop himself fucking into Chan’s body. “This isn’t just about me.”
What do you want, as though it’s a question Chan could conceivably be expected to answer. He wants a thousand things. He wants to experience his body as easily as Felix seems to experience his own. He wants to be young again, for sex to be as uncomplicated as it is in his imagined Australian boyhood, two bodies pressed together in the backseat of a poorly hidden car; he wants to be past the part of his life where it feels this impossible to understand the language of the body he’ll spend the rest of his days living in. He wants to run. He wants to give in. He wants to wrap his arms around Felix and pull him closer, he wants Felix buried inside him until they are one person.
“Call me baby,” Chan says, before he can stop himself. He doesn’t know where it comes from but he’s dizzy, suddenly, with wanting it. It’s the simplest thing he can think of.
“Yeah,” Felix says, “yeah, course, baby. Whatever you want. Do you want me to fuck you, baby? Do you want me to make you feel good?”
Chan doesn’t have words any longer. He wraps his legs more tightly around Felix’s waist, locks his ankles until he can pull Felix closer, and Felix finally stops holding back. Chan is so wet and so turned on that Felix can fuck into him in one smooth, easy motion, and Chan’s back arches automatically. Something slots into place, the long-held image of this as something he wants and the fact of it as something he is currently experiencing overlapping into one blurry, out-of-focus reality, and he makes a noise that he knows he’ll later be humiliated to remember.
“That’s good,” he manages to say. “That’s so good.”
This, it seems, is all the encouragement Felix needs. He begins to fuck Chan with a fervor, with a focused and fixated rhythm that causes the bed to bump rhythmically against the wall behind it. Chan spares a moment to send yet another a silent apology to the staff member in the adjoining room, and then he stops thinking at all.
“How are you so good at this,” he gasps, feeling tears welling in the corner of his eyes from the intensity of the stimulation. The head of Felix’s cock is rubbing against his g-spot and he can feel his cunt starting to clench in waves.
“I’m bi,” Felix pants. “I’ve worked with all kinds of equipment."
“I’m bi too,” Chan says, “and I’ve worked with, like, two people.”
“That’s because you’re a workaholic who never comes out with us,” Felix says. His head drops forward, his neck bending in a lovely arch, and he digs his fingers into Chan’s pecs. “You could’ve gotten laid all you wanted. Fuck.”
Chan wants to protest. He couldn’t have gotten laid, he wants to tell Felix, because he is trans, and Felix is not. The freedom Felix has enjoyed, to date and fuck and go out, is down to the fights Chan has had with their company on the group’s behalf and Chan, even after those fights, never got to enjoy the same freedom, because one leaked encounter would bring them all down.
“God,” Felix says, and Chan can hear in his voice how close he is to coming. “You’re so fucking hot, you feel so fucking good,” and suddenly Chan doesn’t care at all about the sex he wasn’t having before. He is not Bang Chan from Stray Kids, in this moment. He is Chan, and Felix sees him, and Felix knows him, and Felix is reaching between their bodies to rub Chan’s clit with one slick hand.
“I’m close,” Felix says, his thrusts becoming more erratic. His rhythm stutters. Chan arches his back and clenches his cunt, the increased tightness wringing a gorgeous moan out of Felix, and the pressure of Felix’s pelvic bone against his clit and cunt has him close to the edge as well.
“Me too,” he whispers, almost soothingly, into Felix’s ear, “me too,” but Felix doesn’t seem to find that good enough. He takes a deep breath, holding back his own orgasm, and rolls Chan’s clit between his fingers until Chan thinks he might leave his body altogether.
In the end, Felix lasts about thirty seconds longer than Chan does, and then he gives up and comes. He’s not quiet about it. He bites Chan’s collarbone and keeps fucking Chan, soft little thrusts, until they’re both oversensitive and exhausted. There’s no sound in the room besides the heaving gasps of their breathing as it settles into something calmer and more measured. Chan’s entire body is boneless. He can’t move. He doesn’t want to move. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt more relaxed in his life.
“Was that okay?” Felix whispers, lips moving against the skin of Chan’s throat. He’s pulled out and tied off the condom but then immediately flopped back down to drape himself over Chan’s chest. Chan never took his shirt all the way off. It’s still rucked up under his armpits. The desperation inherent in the image — two people so frantic for each other that they didn’t even get all of their clothes off before devouring each other — is sexy enough that Chan doesn’t mind the discomfort of the bunched-up fabric.
Chan doesn’t know how to answer this and so he doesn’t, for a few beats too long. Felix is starting to sit up, face creased with obvious concern, before Chan figures out what to say.
“When I thought I was a girl,” Chan says, finally, “I thought one of the only good parts was that at least I’d get to be fucked like that. Men didn’t get to be fucked like that, but girls did, and at least I would too. When I realized I was a boy, and when I decided to be an idol, I just put it all away. All those things I wanted. I gave them up for this life, and this group, and this job, and I thought it was worth it.”
“It wasn’t?” Felix asks.
“It was,” says Chan. “And I’d make the same choice, even if I’d been right.” Felix hums softly and Chan adds, “I was wrong. Just to clarify.”
Felix nods. “So it was good, then,” he says. “I’m good in bed.”
“Shut the fuck up,” says Chan. “Shut up and get off me, because I have to pee before I get a fucking UTI.”
He hauls himself to standing, legs trembling, and watches Felix’s smug smile grow wider as he waddles to the bathroom.
Later, when they’re mostly asleep, Chan remembers the question he’d forgotten to ask.
“Hey,” Chan says, into the darkness. “Did you tell Seungmin about…you know. The first time we tried this?”
“Not really,” Felix says. “But I was crying that night, after you left. And he walked past my door and heard me. And he heard you leaving, and the bed was all messy, and I wasn’t really dressed. So he knew something was up.”
Chan feels his own guilt like an electric shock, running from the tip of a finger through all the connecting tissue. “Fuck,” he says. “Felix. I’m sorry.”
Felix shrugs, although pressed up against Chan in bed, it’s more sort of a squirm.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I get why you freaked.” He pauses. “I just wish I’d known. I wish I’d known how big it was for you, what we were doing. I wish I’d known it was the first time.”
“You got to know this time, though, right?” Chan says. “You still got to be the first.”
“Have you decided the first attempt just doesn’t count, then?” Felix jokes, turning his head to press his nose, cold from the air conditioning, against Chan’s good shoulder.
“Yep,” Chan says. “This was a complete do-over. Starting from zero.”
Felix is silent for a moment. “You promise you liked it?” he says.
Somewhere, separate from himself, Bang Chan, leader of Stray Kids, muscular gym rat and chronic workaholic, is preparing to return from hiatus. He’s at physical therapy. He’s going back to the weight room and adding weights to a bar, he’s drinking a protein shake, he’s checking that the scars on his chest are as just as invisible as they were before. He’s drafting a statement to post, thanking the fans for waiting for him, and he’s taking a selfie to go with it. He knows that strangers will repost it — welcoming him back, telling him to leave the music industry, telling him he’s handsome, telling him he’s ugly — and that they’ll notice all the ways he looks different now than he did a few months ago.
But at the same time, Chan is in bed with Felix and no one in the world besides the two of them gets to witness it. Chan will fall asleep here, in the soft pile of pillows, and he might drool in his sleep. He runs hot and he’ll drape an arm and a leg over Felix’s body until Felix gets too warm, and even then Felix won’t shift away. The pain in his shoulder is a distant ache, as much remembered pain as existing pain, and soon he can go back to Korea and work on music and no one will pay attention to him as he walks home from the company building in the dark, the first chill of winter settling low over the lights of the city. He’ll buy a snack from a street vendor, so hot that he’ll be able to see the aroma in the air, and no one will ever know — not because it’s a secret, but because some experiences belong only to him. Chan, as well as Bang Chan, as well as Chris, will exist.
“I liked it,” Chan says. “I want to do it again.” He pauses, adds, “Just with you, though. Not with anyone else.”
Felix gives a contented hum and rubs his face against Chan’s arm like a cat. “That sounds good,” he says. “Just with me.”
Day Six
The morning of the actual concert is a strange one. Chan wakes in Felix’s bed and drives himself home and then waits, oddly restless, for the start of a show he won’t be performing in. He scrounges for breakfast that he doesn’t eat, changes out of one black t-shirt and into another three times. He fiddles with his jewelry and fiddles with his hair as though he’s never dressed himself before, because it’s the day of a concert and no one is telling him how he should look. He doesn’t remember the last time he attended a concert. He doesn’t remember the last time he wasn’t the one on the stage.
His sister, in town for the weekend, wants to come with him, and he drives them both to the venue, parks in a spot reserved for staff and crew, and loiters in the shadows until the staff let him in the back entrance. He’s asked the group not to shout him out during the show itself — he doesn’t want the spotlight trained on him, doesn’t want to be displayed larger-than-life on the jumbotrons — but he doesn’t think he would have been able to make it through the day without seeing the members, and he also would have gotten mobbed if he’d been spotted in the general crowd entering the stadium. His and his sister’s tickets are for seats in the front of the seated section — good tickets, but not conspicuous — and he’s dressed in his usual clothes, styled to look like an off-duty version of his normal public self. He’s prepared to be seen, even if he’d rather not be.
In the green room, Minho’s napping on a couch in the corner, Jeongin is vlogging, Seungmin is doing vocal warmups, and Jisung is getting his makeup done, one leg bouncing so much that the makeup artist has to pause occasionally and stare at him until he stops threatening to disrupt her precise eyeliner application.
“Hey,” Chan says, sitting down next to Jisung in an open chair. “Nervous?”
“Always,” says Jisung. “Every single time. You think I’d be used to it by now.”
The makeup artist has covered Jisung’s eyelids in a soft, rosy shimmer and she blends a soft dark brown below his lower lash line before pronouncing him done.
“You look pretty,” Chan says, without thinking, and is about to backtrack when Jisung beams.
“Yeah?” he asks, peering at himself in the mirror. He does look pretty, Chan thinks — his delicate makeup is a lovely contrast to the muscles of his arms, the delicate mesh of his shirt a lovely compliment to his narrow waist. He looks like Jisung, masculine and handsome, and also like a performer, like a layer of femininity has been draped over the surface of his casual, boyish self. Jisung is different from Han, each entity distinct from one another, and yet they are also the same. The painted nails, it occurs to Chan, belong to them both.
“Yeah,” Chan agrees, and he sticks close to Jisung’s side as Jisung thanks the makeup artist and wanders off to find a quiet place to sit. He joins Jisung on a collapsing loveseat in a secondary waiting room.
“Why are you acting like velcro,” Jisung asks, flatly, once they’re settled. “What happened?”
“I just thought you should know that I talked to Felix,” Chan says. “We’re good.”
Jisung gives an enormous sigh of relief. “Thank god,” he says. “I’m anxious enough all the time as it is.”
“And I wanted to say, like…thank you,” Chan says. “For what you said at the bar, about your hiatus, and the gender stuff.”
“I was tipsy,” Jisung says. “I’m gonna need you to narrow it down.”
“I was so envious when you were talking about your nails and your skirt,” Chan says. “Like you got to play with your gender in all these ways and I just couldn’t.”
“Because you’re the leader?”
Chan nods. “Yeah,” he says, “and cause I tried to sleep with Felix before and it was a catastrophe. My body just…got in the way.” I got in the way, he doesn’t say, but he thinks Jisung knows anyway.
“Huh,” says Jisung, although not in a way that indicates he’s surprised. “I mean, I figured.”
“You did?”
“You’re not subtle,” Jisung says. “At all. We were all pretty sure something went down there.” He clears his throat and lowers his voice. He keeps his eyes trained forwards, not really looking at Chan. "It took me a year to let Minho-hyung touch me like that,” he says. “I just paid attention to him and then took care of myself on my own.”
This brings Chan up short. Minho and Jisung have been together, in whatever way they are together, for years. Chan, after he’d given up on his strident insistence that none of the group members get involved with each other, had assumed that meant they were sleeping together as well for most of that time. He remembers the first time he saw Jisung with Minho, remembers the way Jisung had transformed into someone much gentler and kinder in Minho’s presence with seemingly no effort from Minho at all, and it surprises him that the obvious trust he’d recognized so instantly had perhaps not always been absolute.
“Why?” he asks, matching Jisung’s volume. They’re more or less whispering.
“He’s cis,” Jisung says. “He’s gay. He’s everything I wanted to be back then — handsome, comfortable with himself — and I knew he loved me. I knew he wanted me. But I was so sure that if he saw me naked, or touched me naked, that he’d realize he’d made a huge mistake. We tried a few times and I never made it more than a minute or two before I had to stop.”
“Did that bother him?”
“You know hyung,” Jisung says. “He just went with it.”
Right there, Chan thinks, is why Minho and Jisung work. Minho goes with it. He meets Jisung exactly where Jisung is and then adapts, adjusts, continues on his steady way. When Jisung was been at his worst, when he was the least well, the rest of them stretched out hands that Jisung refused to take while Minho, unfazed, simply sat down next to Jisung and made a quiet space for him to exist as he was.
“And he loved me,” Jisung adds, even more softly. Love is not something Jisung speaks about very often, with respect to any of them but especially with respect to Minho. Jisung and Minho’s love is their comfort with one another. Their delight in one another’s presence. “After a while, I stopped trying to run away before he could.”
“And he never did.”
“Course not,” says Jisung. “It got easier, eventually. The sex. I like it now — it feels good, and it requires a lot less lube than — ”
“I get it,” Chan says, holding up a hand with a faintly pained expression. He loves Jisung, and he loves Minho, and he does not want to hear details about what they like to do with each other.
Jisung laughs. “It’s like you and Felix,” he says. “You love him. He loves you. You’ll figure it out.” Something must happen on Chan’s face, because Jisung kicks his ankle. “Or you already did, I guess.”
“We figured it out,” Chan agrees, cheeks hot. “But it’s not, like — it’s not the same as you and Minho. I sleep with Changbin, he sleeps with other people. We’re all kind of up in each other’s business.”
Jisung looks at him, unimpressed.
“I sleep with Hyunjin sometimes,” Jisung says. “I’ve slept with Felix. Minho is still, like…” He trails off. It surprises Chan sometimes, how easy lyrics seem to come to Jisung even though in conversation, it’s like the words get lost. “He’s it for me,” Jisung finishes. His cheeks are flushed, too. He’s staring fixedly at the delicate bracelet glinting on his wrist. “Like Felix is kind of it for you.”
“It’s not the same, though,” Chan protests, but it’s a weak protest, and Jisung shakes his head.
“I know it’s not,” Jisung says. “But it’s not the same with any of the rest of us as it is with him, either. Not for you.”
Chan opens his mouth, and Jisung kicks his ankle again. “Just let it happen,” he says. “Don’t fight it.”
Go with it, Chan thinks, and he nods. He lingers in the green room, dodging cameras filming SKZ Talkers, until it’s close enough to show time to take his seat. He settles next to his sister, who smacks him on his good shoulder for leaving her alone, and watches the crowd filling in around them.
The man who sits down on Chan’s other side doesn’t seem in danger of recognizing him — he’s staring at his phone from the moment he’s seated and the woman he’s with, sister or girlfriend or wife or friend, occasionally grabs his arm out of excitement. He largely ignores her, even when she hits him gently with a plush dwaekki, and as Chan stares at him, he realizes who he reminds him of.
When Chan was fourteen, still relatively new to JYP and still willing to open himself up to trainees and idols he didn’t yet know would be gone before he would, he’d befriended an older idol who went by the stage name Kang. Kang was handsome and friendly and seventeen, a year and a half past his debut, and he’d let Chan hang out at his dorm sometimes when Chan had free time. He’d feed Chan the snacks Chan wasn’t supposed to have and show Chan the sorts of video games Chan thought an older brother was supposed to show him. It was comfortable. It was reassuring. Chan told himself, day in and day out, that he didn’t have a crush on Kang — it had been fine, when Chan thought he was a girl, to like boys, but it wasn’t fine anymore.
Chan never figured out if Kang had wanted him to discover his testosterone or not. He never figured out how Kang had clocked him. But when he saw it, sitting on the bathroom counter between an electric razor and an open tube of communal toothpaste, he stared at it for so long that Kang came looking for him.
“You have to hide it better than this,” Kang said, putting the vial and syringe in a black zippered bag and tucking the bag under the sink. “You’re always going to have to hide it.”
Chan looked at Kang’s face, at the hard set of the only mouth Chan had ever really wanted to kiss, and understood: to be an idol, he would hide himself. That he might exist both as himself and as an idol did not occur to him then, and it would not occur to him afterwards.
“Your bandmates will go hook up and have sex,” Kang continued. “You can’t do that. They’ll date, even though they’re not supposed to. You can’t do that either.” He put a hand on Chan’s shoulder, still bony with youth, and Chan’s whole body quivered with something between fear and need. “I’m not telling you this to scare you. I just think you should know, before you go too far. If I could walk away now, I would. You still can.”
But Chan knew he would never walk away. He wanted to succeed with every cell in his body. If he had to kill every tender fragment of the person he could have been and build a new self from the wreckage, then he would, because if he walked away, then he would be failing, and failing felt the same as death.
In the present, something falls to the ground and lands on Chan’s foot. He looks down, and sees a wallet.
“Sorry,” says the guy next to him, and Chan’s startled out of his thoughts. Head on, the guy doesn’t look like Kang at all.
“No worries,” says Chan, handing him the wallet. The guy gives him a tired smile.
“She a fan?” he asks, gesturing at Chan’s sister. When Chan, unsure how to respond, says nothing, his sister grins and nods, and he tries to kick her in the shin without being noticed.
“Big fan,” says his sister. “Huge.”
“Hang in there, man,” says the guy beside Chan, and then turns away back to his phone. The most recent Stray Kids MV starts playing on the giant screens flanking the stage and the entire stadium erupts into screams as Chan watches himself pull the hem of his tank top up and flash abs he does not currently have. The digital version of Chan, glistening with carefully choreographed sweat, finishes the pre-chorus and vanishes, replaced by Felix. The real version of Chan continues existing.
Day Seven
Chan meets the harried group of members and staff and managers in the back parking lot of the hotel, suitcases piled on the ground in front of the vans that will take them to the airport. Jisung’s got a hoodie on with the hood pulled up and he’s glued to Minho’s side. Seungmin watches them both like a hawk.
“Just wanted to see you off,” says Chan, as Changbin abandons whatever conversation he’d been having with a staff member and comes over to stand next to Chan. “It felt too weird staying home.”
“You could’ve come over after the concert last night,” Changbin says, but Chan shakes his head.
“You guys were doing a live,” Chan says. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“And by that you mean, we were doing a live, and therefore you weren’t going to get laid by either of the two people who might fuck you.”
Chan doesn’t dignify this with a response, although Changbin’s only partially correct. It hadn’t felt right, sitting just out of view of the cameras again, watching the rest of them come down from the post-concert adrenaline high. It hadn’t felt right and he knew it would hurt, that reminder of non-belonging. It had been better, in the end, to wait until most of the crowd had dispersed and then walk with his sister back to the car. It had been better to let her blast old Stray Kids songs just to embarrass him and give him her rundown of the show. It had been better, for the rest of the night, to be Chris, his sister’s dumb brother and concert attendee, than it would have been to be Bang Chan.
Changbin rolls his eyes at Chan’s silence and Felix, apparently hearing their voices, emerges from one of the vans to join them.
“You sure you don’t want to come with us?” Felix says. “Be our groupie?” He’s joking, but part of Chan wants it. Part of Chan is still unsure that he will go on existing if he is alone. He reminds himself that he will. That if all of this went away — the group, the tours, the albums, the comebacks — he would still be a person, and as a person he would still have a life that belonged only to him.
“Sure,” says Chan. “Got an empty suitcase? I’ll climb in.”
Felix laughs, but it’s tinged with desperation the way goodbyes always are, an adamant attempt at pretending no one’s feeling any kind of hurt.
“We’ll all be back in Seoul in a few weeks, right?” Felix says. He reaches out for Chan’s hand and Chan takes it, runs his thumb over the thin skin on Felix’s inner wrist. No one pays them any attention.
“Yeah,” Chan says, a little throaty. “Soon.”
“It doesn’t feel very soon,” says Felix, as one of the managers starts trying to corral the members. Chan gets it. It feels almost unnatural, having been so close to Felix and then letting him go. “I want more time.”
“Next tour,” Chan says, and the idea, rather than feeling like a reminder of what he doesn’t currently get to have, makes him feel slightly buoyant. There’s another chance to do this. There’s always another chance to try again. “We’ll find a day just for us, yeah? Enjoy being home.”
“Talk to me this time,” Felix says. “Call me.”
“I will,” Chan says. He pulls Felix into a hug that’s much more brotherly than he would like, given the circumstances. He knows what Felix isn’t saying. Don’t go away from me again, he’s telling Chan. Don’t go somewhere I can’t come with you.
There are places Chan has been, and places he will go, that will remain alien to Felix. Felix and Chan grew up so close to one another, thirty minutes apart in a shared city, but Felix’s boyhood was simple in ways Chan’s was not. They joined the same company, lived in the same apartments, slept in the same rooms, but Felix did not have to navigate the habits, justified or otherwise, that Chan did — hiding his testosterone in a bag under the sink, refusing to let anyone into the bathroom when he showered, navigating doctors and staff members who, by the act of knowing Chan, were given access to a piece of knowledge Chan wished they never got to have. Chan carries a weight with him and as long as he remains an idol, he does not get not put it down.
But it occurs to Chan, maybe for the first time, that the wall between those places and the world he shares with Felix are permeable. They are not immovable. He can shift them and let Felix see what’s on the other side.
“Passports!” says a manager, holding a stack in the air. Felix steps back from Chan, startled, and takes his, a slightly different shade of blue than the others. He picks at one of the white stickers plastered to the back and keeps his eyes on Chan like he’s afraid Chan might vanish.
A few staff members start hoisting suitcases into the vans and Chan backs up to get out of their way. His movement takes him from the full sun of the parking lot and into the shade of the awning over the doorway leading back into the hotel, and it feels to Chan as though he’s stepping somehow into shadow. Sliding out of view. Becoming again the anonymous version of himself who gets to live a life unimpeded.
Chan doesn’t kiss Felix, because he can’t. He doesn’t reach out and take his face into his hands, just as he doesn’t reach out and squeeze Changbin’s ass or press his nose to Jisung’s cheek. He presses his fingers to his lips instead, keeping his eyes on Felix’s, and Felix mouths, Soon.