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“Zombies," Wooyoung answers. There's no hesitation in his voice.
It's long before San. They're eighteen and drunk with summer and Wooyoung's gotten it into his head that they should both finally get good at fishing. He gets bored in the first hour, collapsing back into the lawn chair wobbling on the riverbank, and so it’s Yeosang holding the fishing rod, waiting for a bite to put them both out of their misery.
"I'm being serious," Yeosang tells him.
"Yeah, so am I." Wooyoung tries and fails to skip a rock over the water from where he's sitting. "Like, plague zombies. Or animal zombies. Probably animal zombies, actually. Whatever happens to those deers that eat other deer brains."
"That's not really,” Yeosang starts, and then decides that explaining prion disease is a waste of both of their time.
"What about you?"
"I think war, probably," Yeosang says.
"Yeah," Wooyoung says, his voice languid. "War with the zombies."
Yeosang, who has long since given up on staying vigilant for fish, turns to look at Wooyoung. He seems unbothered, tilting rocks this way and that in the sun to try to find another flat one to skip.
"You know what?" Yeosang says. "Sure."
"But hey," Wooyoung says. "At least if it happens in our lifetimes, we'll know how to fucking fish."
No, they won't, Yeosang figures, not if Wooyoung refuses to learn and the fish refuse to bite. He doesn't fight back, though. And Wooyoung's next rock actually does skip: one, two, three, and—
Here is something they don't tell you about the end of the world: the first time you think it's ending, you'll be wrong.
When Wooyoung had said he was dropping out of college, everybody but Yeosang had been very surprised.
"Did you know?" Yeosang's mother asks him when the news breaks. Secrets are hard to keep here. Wooyoung doesn't even get twenty-four hours of privacy before Yeosang's mother is on the phone.
"No," Yeosang answers, by which he means that he got the call on the same day as Wooyoung's parents. What he doesn't tell her—or anyone—is that he saw it coming. It's not about the academics; Wooyoung has always gotten fine grades. It's just that Yeosang knows Wooyoung wasn't built to be contained by anything. Sometimes he imagines that Wooyoung isn't even supposed to be indoors, that he doesn't even look right with a ceiling over his head. College was never going to pan out for him, especially not so far away from home.
So, yes, Yeosang knew. He's always known.
"God, it's good to be back," Wooyoung says when Yeosang goes to pick him up at the airport. "Missed you." Yeosang helps him wrestle his luggage into the trunk, and when they start driving, it's like Wooyoung was never gone.
At the start of the second hour of the drive home, Yeosang says, "Hey, so."
"So?" Wooyoung asks.
"People are talking about you," Yeosang decides to say. "Just a heads up."
When Yeosang glances at him to see how he'll take this, Wooyoung is grinning back with his tongue in his teeth, playful. "People are always talking about me."
"I mean, about this," Yeosang says. "About you dropping out."
"I know," Wooyoung says. "Wouldn't have done it if I gave a fuck about that."
Sometimes Yeosang wishes that Wooyoung’s inability to feel shame or embarrassment had rubbed off on him a bit more over the years. Other times, he’s glad at least one of them has those things.
In the second hour of the drive, Wooyoung makes Yeosang roll all the windows down. He reclines the seat and leans back on it, face tipped towards Yeosang and his eyes closed, his hair whipping about his face even in the corner of Yeosang’s vision. It’s an unusual state of calm. Yeosang waits for the drop for ten, twenty minutes.
When it comes, Wooyoung doesn’t even open his eyes. He says, “My parents are kicking me out of the house, though. Just a little.”
Yeosang hadn't really understood what just a little had meant, not at first. It turns out to mean that all involved parties had thought it would be best if Wooyoung had his own place. There used to be more people renting here, years ago when business was a little better nearby, and one of the old ladies that still owns one of the subdivided places gives Wooyoung a fair, off-the-books price on her nicest unit.
"You should see what off-campus prices were like at that fucking school," Wooyoung says when Yeosang asks how he's going to make the money for rent. "This shit's pocket change."
He pays for it by working a few jobs part time. Everyone knows him, everyone likes him, and most places would be hard-pressed to say no to an extra set of hands around. And anyway Wooyoung makes some ridiculous fraction of his hourly in tips, beaming at customers like they're long-lost friends. He said he'd find the money, so he does. That's just how Wooyoung is.
Wooyoung drops out in January. He moves into his new place in February; Yeosang hauls far more than half of his belongings up the stairs personally. In March, the weather turns a bit and the two of them start getting out more: river, forays into the city, catching up with high school friends. It makes Yeosang happy that they have a rhythm, that they've slipped back into the easy, endless days that they've shared for over a decade.
Then, in April, Wooyoung tells him he'll have a friend from college visiting.
"For how long?" Yeosang asks.
Wooyoung shrugs. "Most of the summer. I think you'll like him," he continues, grinning now. "He's heard a lot about you.”
If Yeosang were a better person, any friend of Wooyoung's would be a friend of his. Unfortunately for all three of them, Yeosang is not a better person. His mind and body are going very quiet.
Wooyoung mistakes Yeosang’s silence for skepticism. “Hey,” he continues. “All good things.”
“Doubt that,” Yeosang says.
“Relax,” Wooyoung sighs. “I wouldn’t bring him if you two wouldn’t get along.”
It’s a kind sentiment and a jarring one, too. Yeosang can’t think of anything appropriate to say except for “When’s he coming?”
In May, they go to pick San up at the airport. Yeosang drives.
Yeosang wonders if it would seem odd from the outside: Yeosang, driving Wooyoung’s car to pick up Wooyoung’s friend to bring him back to Wooyoung’s house. But Yeosang and Wooyoung go hand-in-hand; what comes for one of them comes for both. They were always going to do this together. Wooyoung rolls the windows up and down, puts on music, laughs, gets bored, flips off bad drivers, tells Yeosang the same story for the fifth or tenth time, and Yeosang drives.
He thinks he’s not doing a very good job at playing calm.
“What’s he want to come here for?” Yeosang had asked, all the way back in April. There’s nothing about their hometown that screams ‘destination summer.’ He’d figured that the kids from Wooyoung’s ex-college would spend their vacations fighting over fancy job offers, traipsing along isolated beaches, interning in big cities with their shirts all ironed stiff. Flying out to your dropout friend’s hometown in the middle of nowhere for months—well, it can only mean one thing, really, about what that dropout friend might mean to you.
Yeosang's not stupid. Neither is Wooyoung.
Neither, presumably, is San.
And all the way back in April, Wooyoung, with his smile hard-set like he knew what Yeosang was afraid of, had said, “The company.”
It starts with San, but it also starts with the river.
Yeosang has a recurring daydream about the end of the world. It sounds morbid, but it isn’t, because it’s less about the end of the world and more about what comes afterwards. On principle, it assumes that there will be an afterwards. So it can't be that depressing.
Over the course of the years he's been thinking about it, Yeosang has come to believe that almost everything can be categorized into one of two groups: ‘will survive the apocalypse’ or ‘might survive the apocalypse.’ The list of the things in the former category is very short. Yeosang only has three things on it. Or four, maybe, but it all sort of depends on how he counts.
First: the river.
I would tell people at school I was from a small town, Wooyoung says once. But I feel like they weren’t getting it. I’d say, small town. Like that. He draws out the soft vowel for emphasis. But you know how it is.
Yeosang does know. It’s impossible to explain where they’re from unless you’ve stood in the river.
When he and Wooyoung survive the apocalypse, they’ll live on its banks. They’ll fish for sustenance, assuming the fish survive. They’ll build a house out of cut-down trees, assuming the trees survive. They’ll drive around looking for survivors in Wooyoung’s piece of shit car. No need to wonder if that’ll make it. The river, Wooyoung, Yeosang, that fucking car. And cockroaches, probably.
They won’t find any. Survivors, Yeosang means, not cockroaches; he’s sure they’ll find plenty of cockroaches. Anyway, they’ll drive back to the river together, Wooyoung and Yeosang, starting fires or foraging or doing whatever it is people will have to re-learn how to do when the world ends. It’ll be easy. Everything is easy with Wooyoung.
The unfortunate truth of the matter is that this daydream has always been more of a fantasy than anything else.
Regardless, the important thing is that when the entire world is decimated, the river is still there. The river will always be there. Like this: once upon a time, there was the river. Then, the world. Then, the apocalypse (zombies, war, meteor, plague; Yeosang hasn’t decided yet). Then, the river.
The end.
Wooyoung launches himself into San’s arms.
He made Yeosang park just so the two of them could go inside the airport to meet San, rather than having him come to them. Baggage claim is sterile and crowded. Yeosang wishes briefly that the flow of people would sweep him away.
They see him before he sees them. Or, rather, Wooyoung sees him, and Yeosang follows his gaze. As Wooyoung darts from his side to close the distance, Yeosang has a few seconds to take in the boy he’s only seen in a few blurry pictures on Wooyoung’s phone. San has neatly-trimmed hair, a pair of silvery headphones wrapped around his neck, and a shiny suitcase tucked to his side. He looks clean. Yeosang feels a flicker of shame. Their town is going to soil this boy, somehow. Yeosang wonders if seeing the rawness of it will change San’s mind about being here.
And then Yeosang sees the way San smiles when he catches sight of Wooyoung, who’s a blur of motion across the white airport floor, and he realizes that probably nothing is going to change San’s mind about Wooyoung.
It’s a long hug. San spins the two of them around a little, joyful, and Wooyoung’s cheeks are round with the force of his laughter.
Yeosang’s mind is very, very quiet. He’s had about a month to refine the metaphor, so now he recognizes it as the woods falling silent before a storm, in the face of a predator. Threat.
“You must be Yeosang,” San says when Yeosang catches up with them. He still has a hand resting between Wooyoung’s shoulders.
“Yeah,” Yeosang says. “Hey.”
“Really good to meet you,” San says. It’s possible he’s putting on an act to impress Wooyoung. That’s what Yeosang’s decided to do, anyway: play nice.
“You too,” Yeosang lies.
On the drive back, they explain to Yeosang how they met.
The story’s innocent; they’d gotten locked out of their building on the first weekend after classes started, both drunk enough to find the situation funny. So it’s an innocent story, but it’s also a sweet one, the kind of meet-cute that Yeosang can’t imagine happening in a place like this.
Yeosang tries to stop picturing it, but he has hundreds of sensory memories of a tipsy, touchy Wooyoung laughing on a summer night. It’s easy to imagine.
Wooyoung asks if San’s hungry and seems unwilling to take no for an answer, so Yeosang pulls off the highway in the more-populated airport town. They pay for their gas station sandwiches; they sit outside at a hot metal table and the benzene practically clings to the air. “Fine dining,” Wooyoung says as he unwraps the paper, and he’s joking, but Yeosang thinks this is probably a good way to lower San’s expectations.
He wants San to hate his food, but also he doesn’t. He wants San disappointed with everything here, except it would make him feel embarrassed. The entire thing is going poorly already, Yeosang thinks, and he crams another bite of his mediocre sandwich into his mouth.
Once Yeosang resigns himself to being in a bad mood, the rest goes surprisingly quickly. San falls asleep almost immediately on the car ride back. Wooyoung says, “Long flight; let him rest,” even though Yeosang hadn’t been planning on interrupting anyway. It’s like this that the drive goes in silence, with Yeosang driving and Wooyoung bouncing his leg in the passenger seat and San’s head tilted against the back window, legs tucked behind Wooyoung’s chair.
Wooyoung reaches around to slap San’s calf upon arrival, a wake-up call. He’s not quite gentle, Wooyoung; he never has been. If this perturbs San, he doesn’t show it. San and Yeosang play a little game of chicken about the larger of San’s suitcases—let me get it for you, and no, it’s mine, I’ve got it—and eventually San wins. Playing nice, both of them. Wooyoung shows San where to dump all of his stuff in the small living room; Yeosang sits in the tiny kitchen and scrolls on his phone without reading any of the words on his screen. Bad, bad, bad.
When San goes to shower, Wooyoung saunters into the kitchen. “What do you think?” he asks.
This is not a conversation Yeosang really wants to have. Too bad; he’s having it.
“He’s cool,” Yeosang says.
Wooyoung sticks the back end of his fork into the jar of chocolate spread he keeps above the fridge and pulls it out, the whole motion unimpressed, somehow. “So you think you’ll like him?”
“Wasn’t aware I had a choice,” Yeosang says.
He knows instantly he’s made a mistake. That wasn’t a particularly nice thing to say, and Yeosang rarely says anything left of polite to begin with. Wooyoung’s got a sharp mind and he knows Yeosang too well, and now his eyes narrow in thought as Yeosang tries to figure out how to climb out of the hole he’s just dug.
Before a dangerous conclusion can start to fill up the silence, Yeosang says, “Didn’t mean it like that.”
“Better not have,” Wooyoung says. He sticks the back of the fork between his lips, and his jaw works around the metal for a moment. He scrutinizes Yeosang the entire time. When he’s finished, he says, “You are gonna like him, though.”
Wooyoung has this habit of saying things and then waiting for the world to fall in place around him. It’s endearing. Wooyoung’s rogue little grin, his too-long hair—it’s all so familiar that Yeosang could pretend it’s just the two of them, as per usual. Could pretend, except for the running-water sound of the shower in the other room. And the suitcase against the far wall.
“You sound sure,” Yeosang says.
“Just have a feeling.”
“You and your feelings,” Yeosang says mildly.
Wooyoung sticks his makeshift spoon back into the jar.
“Well,” Yeosang says, closing his hands around the keys in his pocket, “I’ll let him settle in.”
“See you tomorrow,” Wooyoung says pointedly.
Yeosang almost laughs. It would get him right back in trouble, though, so he doesn’t. “See you,” he says, and he lets himself out the front door.
The drive from Yeosang’s house to Wooyoung’s house—and vice versa—is six minutes long. It always has been. The road they both live on winds here and there and changes names halfway through, but it’s really the same road, and Yeosang knows it by heart.
Today, it’s a long six minutes. Sometime in the middle of them, Yeosang realizes what he still has going for him: he was born with the river, and San was not. At the end of the day, Yeosang can hope that Wooyoung will have to choose San or the river, and that will not be a hard choice.
It’s not much of a victory, but Yeosang’s not much of a fighter. It’ll have to do.
“What do you guys normally do for fun?” San asks.
“Swimming, drinking, grilling, drinking,” Wooyoung says. “Fishing. Drinking.”
“He doesn’t fish,” Yeosang tells San.
“We fish sometimes,” Wooyoung lies.
Yeosang shakes his head.
“It’s hot out,” San says. “I’d swim.”
Wooyoung shrugs. “I’d drink.”
They look at Yeosang.
There’s worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon. There’s also better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon; namely, doing this without San, the way it’s always been, but what’s Yeosang supposed to do about that?
“Yeah,” he says. “Sounds fun.”
Wooyoung marches straight down into the water, feet and chest bare.
"I'm looking for fossils," he says. "San told me they'd be here."
"I said they might be here," San says. "I don't even know what you're looking for.”
Yeosang wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Prehistoric teeth and bones, lying in wait. Maybe that's why the river feels older than old. The river, the dinosaurs, the meteor, and then still the river.
Yeosang has to respect that San hasn’t questioned anything all day—if he’d had anything to say about Wooyoung refusing to drive his own car or Yeosang parking at a dead-end in the woods or hiking ten minutes through the undergrowth, he’d kept it to himself.
By the time Yeosang sits next to San, the six-pack sweating condensation between them, Wooyoung has waded out to knee-height water. Yeosang watches him for a moment. The river’s wide enough here that the trees on either bank can’t block out the afternoon sunlight, which glitters upstream, downstream, over Wooyoung’s bare shoulders. He’s crouching, his whole lower body submerged. Yeosang has time to think that at least this is his Wooyoung—his Wooyoung, not San's, easy in the water, and then Wooyoung's head snaps up to them.
"Are either of you going to help?" Wooyoung calls.
Yeosang squints at him. He calls back, "Do you want help?"
"No," Wooyoung decides immediately. "I don't want either of you to steal my fucking research."
San huffs at Yeosang's side.
"Okay," Yeosang says. "Good luck."
"Research," San repeats, amused.
"You never know. Maybe there's a scientist in him," Yeosang says.
San laughs. Yeosang cracks open a beer just to have something to do with his hands.
"You know, when I was little, I wanted to be a scientist," San says, staring out at where Wooyoung is crawling around in the current. "For, like, a week. I liked the way it looked in the movies."
"They do make it look cool," Yeosang says. "In the movies."
"Yeah," San hums. "What about you?"
"Dream job?" Yeosang says. San nods. "Not sure. Probably a lawyer, or something. I don't know."
"Yeah?" San asks.
There's nothing interesting about wanting to be a lawyer, or even anything nostalgic like what San's shared. But it had been the honest answer. He hadn’t meant to get into it; it had just slipped out, and now he can hear that San’s interested.
San asks, "That what you're studying for?"
"No," Yeosang says.
"Why not?"
Yeosang blinks.
Lawyer, doctor, celebrity, executive—those are careers for boys who were born on dry land. It's not totally impossible, Yeosang knows. Every one of them spends a year or two daydreaming about some high-rise, white-and-black studio apartment in a city large enough to be its own sun, and once in a blue moon someone's parent's friend will tell you about oh, don't you remember, you used to play together all the time, anyway, she's doing something with computers now and lives in this skyscraper, a real city girl. And when they come back to visit family, they'll have all this newfound pity in their eyes that makes Yeosang's skin crawl a bit.
"It's just," Yeosang starts. "It's not that easy. Not from here.”
Yeosang knows how it’s going to go. San's going to give an impassioned speech about the power of hard work and determination, and Yeosang’s going to say yeah, you’re right without meaning it, and then they’ll move on.
“Yeah," San says. “But, I don’t know. I don’t think you have to be some bigshot lawyer.”
"What do you mean?"
San shrugs. "Like, it's not all or nothing," he says. "You know? Start small."
"I guess," Yeosang says. He thumbs at the neck of his beer.
"Take a year," San suggests. "Do some internship or whatever they're called when you're post-grad. Get some experience. Can't hurt."
Yeosang doesn't respond. It could hurt. Wasting his time, wasting his money, wasting his young years on a bad education to be a bad lawyer. And what does San know? He's getting a real degree. Things are simpler for him.
"I mean," San says, misinterpreting his silence. "Sorry. I know we don't—you don't have to take advice from me."
He's pretty sure San was about to say something along the lines of I know we don't know each other. They have to both be thinking it.
"No," Yeosang says, "It's okay. I—yeah. It's just…" San waits for him to continue, patient. "A lot to think about," Yeosang finishes. "It's not a bad idea."
San smiles at him, maybe surprised, like he was expecting to be dismissed. Yeosang figures that's fair. "Yeah?"
Yes. Because it’s not what he thought San would say. It’s not the way he thought San would act. Yeosang can see the foundation of why Wooyoung likes him, which is disturbing.
"Why not?" Yeosang says.
San is still smiling. Maybe he thinks they're friends, now, or at least well on their way to becoming friendly. Apprehension settles atop Yeosang's shoulders.
"Come fucking look at this," Wooyoung shouts.
Yeosang, saved by the bell, puts his untouched beer upright in the dirt and kicks off his shoes. San copies him. It makes Yeosang’s skin crawl a bit.
They pick their way over the rocky banks to join Wooyoung in the water. San gets there first, and he doesn't flinch when the water eddies around his knees and chest. He doesn't cringe when Wooyoung knocks into him carelessly, pushing him deeper. The sun catches his face when he holds Wooyoung's little rock up out of the water, and he doesn't squint into it. Yeosang stops and stares and watches them bend their heads together in the light.
"Yeosang," San calls. Yeosang snaps back into his body, the current tugging at his ankles. "Come here. Need you to break a tie."
Yeosang wades out to them. He kicks water at Wooyoung on the way, partially because he always does and partially because he doesn't know what else to do with the extra energy knocking around his muscles. San places the rock carefully into his palm.
Yeosang's no paleontologist, but some things don't need a trained eye. "Not a fossil," Yeosang informs them.
Wooyoung scowls and shoves San over.
San comes up laughing, soaked through. "Thanks," he says, and it takes Yeosang a second to realize that San's talking to him.
“Anytime,” Yeosang says.
He knows what’s bothering him. Yeosang has never thought twice about his clothes or his hair soaking through with muddy water or stains on his skin. Wooyoung has probably never thought once about it. But San—well, San was supposed to.
Yeosang drops the rock back into San’s outstretched hand. San gives it an overhanded fling downstream, the motion athletic. Between his soaked shirt clinging to his skin and the length of the throw, Yeosang sees for the first time that San is strong, his muscles defined in a way that suggests barbells or medicine balls or whatever expensive lifting machines they're inventing these days. Well, Yeosang thinks, of course.
"Oh, fuck you," Wooyoung says. "That very rare fossil was going to make us all rich, and now it's gone forever. Great work, San."
"As if you would have shared the money," Yeosang says.
Wooyoung doesn’t miss a beat. "Not with that attitude,” he says, and Yeosang laughs in time with San. Wooyoung glances between them, pleased with the reaction, and starts picking through the rocks at his feet again.
Well, Yeosang thinks, at least this summer’s going to do wonders for Wooyoung’s ego. It’s not like he needs it.
“Here,” Wooyoung says. “Check this.”
He holds another rock out of the water. It’s not a fossil. There was never any chance it would be. But, for Wooyoung, Yeosang takes it seriously anyway.
“Still no,” he says after a moment of examination.
“You wait,” Wooyoung says. “I’ll get one.”
Yeosang had believed that San and Wooyoung were both in their first year of college when they met, but it turns out that San is in the same year as Yeosang; this is his second-year summer. That means it’s not some first-year codependency that’s brought San here. Whatever feelings he has must be stronger.
So that’s worrying, but not necessarily bad. Ultimately, there are really only two terrible, distractingly-bad things about having San in town. Yeosang can get past a lot by refusing to think about it, but these two things are inescapable.
The first is that San becomes their designated driver. It’s not for any reason other than the fact that he lives with Wooyoung. If they’re all going somewhere together, San is the one that drives Wooyoung’s car to pick up Yeosang, who spends the entire drive glancing at San’s hands on the wheel. Wooyoung makes it worse by sprawling across the backseat whenever the three of them are together, leaving Yeosang and San up front alone.
It’s not personal. Wooyoung’s not trying to hurt him. Why would anyone think Yeosang is jealous of driving Wooyoung’s shitty car? He can’t say the real reason, which is just—it’s Yeosang’s car, too. His driver’s seat. His Wooyoung. There’s no getting around the fact that right now, all of it belongs to San. So, the first terrible thing is the driving.
The second—and far more terrible—thing is that San is tolerable.
It's hard to dislike San. It's something in the smile, in the eyes. He’s the type of boy that parents would call a “good kid.” Yeosang knows Wooyoung wouldn’t have befriended San if he wasn’t decent. Still, it would have been nice for there to be something to latch on to. A bad habit, a little condescension in his voice, some fundamental flaw that could reassure Yeosang that the end of the world isn’t as imminent as he believes it to be.
If Yeosang was a better person, he would like San because San is kind and friendly. Yeosang is not a better person. When all three of them are in the room, Yeosang feels a twist of fear every time San speaks. He can’t help it.
When they get bored of swimming every day, Wooyoung starts actually looking up things to do. It puts Yeosang off balance. The Wooyoung he knows, the real Wooyoung, is relaxed, easygoing. The Wooyoung in front of him now is a boy with someone to impress.
Wooyoung drags them to a bar. Wooyoung finds a hiking trail. Wooyoung gets them day-drunk, gets them to a movie theater, gets them out of the house in ways Yeosang doesn’t even think interest him. Wooyoung digs up a local crafting market an hour away and insists they make a day trip of it.
San drives them there. Wooyoung props his forearms on the front console, worming into their space, and says, “I saw online that there’s gonna be a lady who sells, like, realistic crochet organs.”
“What organ are you buying?” Yeosang asks.
Wooyoung grins and says, “You think she’ll make me a dick and balls if I ask nicely?”
Yeosang sighs.
They arrive, and Wooyoung sets the pace. It’s nice. Wooyoung has a God-given sociability that would put most celebrities to shame, and Yeosang likes to soak it up behind him. They walk between booths, and even when Wooyoung doesn’t buy anything, he greets everyone head-on and asks questions and makes sure he runs an eye over every little thing at every little stall. It would be tiring for most people to walk with him. Not Yeosang, though, because Yeosang very much likes the feeling of being quietly curious at Wooyoung’s side.
Not San, either.
This is part of what makes San so tolerable, that second awful, unavoidable thing: San is gentle with Wooyoung. Not everyone knows that Wooyoung needs gentleness, but Yeosang, who’s seen Wooyoung through pretty much every formative moment of his life except for his actual birth, understands it well. Yeosang wonders if it’s something San managed to learn in a few short months at school, or if San comes with the gentleness built in.
When San starts thumbing delicately through little handmade bags, oohing and aching at the intricate designs despite the fact that none of them would ever carry one, Yeosang starts to think it’s probably the latter.
They reach Wooyoung’s crochet organ stall, and San raises an eyebrow. “You gonna ask?”
“Well, that would just be inappropriate,” Wooyoung says, disapproving, which makes San snort.
Yeosang looks down at the table. He can relate to the little yarn models, he thinks, with his guts all twisted up and on display.
“They’re cool, right?” San asks him. He passes Yeosang the soft anatomical heart he’d been turning between his hands, as if thinking that Yeosang will want to examine it, too. It’s almost funny. Yeosang resists the urge to crush his fist around it.
“Yeah,” Yeosang says. “Very.”
In mid-July, they run out of things to do.
“Fishing,” Wooyoung says, and there’s no more putting it off. They load up Wooyoung’s car with a bunch of old supplies from one of Yeosang’s neighbors. Wooyoung hands San the keys to the car, as usual.
“Wooyoung?” Yeosang asks. He and San are standing at the water’s edge, each of them holding a fishing rod. San is hooking a piece of bait. Yeosang had considered showing him how to do it, but San’s smart and Yeosang isn’t exactly looking for reasons to help him. Yeosang has turned away from him, back towards Wooyoung. “You gonna join us?”
Wooyoung is sitting a distance back from the water in a little patch of shade. He already looks very comfortable, drink in his hand and legs stretched out. “I’ll think about it,” he says, which means he’s not moving.
“I thought this was his idea,” San says. It’s low enough that only Yeosang can hear it. Yeosang doesn’t know how to explain that Wooyoung isn’t so straightforwards. Just because he wanted to fish doesn’t mean he wanted to fish. Instead, Yeosang shrugs.
When San casts his line, Yeosang double-takes.
“The fuck?” Wooyoung calls.
“You’ve done this before,” Yeosang says.
San’s smile is a little sheepish. “Once or twice, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Wooyoung asks.
“I don’t know,” San says. “Nobody asked.”
“Teach Yeosang,” Wooyoung says. It’s a command.
So San gets closer, and Yeosang tries to keep his heart from sinking into his stomach. The worst part of the whole thing—and Yeosang could have predicted this, knew it would be true—is that San is a good, gentle teacher. He places his hands over Yeosang’s to demonstrate, leaves a reassuring palm on his back when Yeosang continues to fail at catching anything. Even when Yeosang’s hand shakes when he tries to slide the hook through a piece of bait, when he tries three, four times, San just watches serenely, no signs of impatience.
It gets to a point. Yeosang is frustrated with the fishing, the boy next to him, the summer, the world.
“Gonna get a beer,” Yeosang says.
“Bored?” San asks.
“No,” Yeosang deadpans. “I love fishing.”
It makes San laugh. Wooyoung’s ears practically perk up at the sound. Yeosang considers diving headfirst into the water and letting himself be carried away. Instead, he sits besides Wooyoung, who’s already cracked open the drink for him.
“What’d you learn?” Wooyoung asks. “Anything you can teach me?”
Yeosang shrugs. “Requires some patience,” he says. “So, maybe not the hobby for you.”
Wooyoung huffs. Ahead of them, San flicks his wrist, recasts.
“You think he’s showing off?” Yeosang asks.
Wooyoung’s gaze drags from San, whose silhouette shimmers in the sun, to Yeosang.
Yeosang is overwhelmed by the fear he sometimes feels when Wooyoung looks him in the eyes—he knows, he knows, he knows—but it passes like it always does.
“Yeah,” Wooyoung says. “See? He’s trying to impress you.”
“Ha ha,” Yeosang says, flat, and they both raise their drinks to their mouths at the same time.
San, of course, catches a fish.
Second: Wooyoung.
Wooyoung has never gone down without a fight. It's not in his nature. As a child, he even fought the river, wrestling the currents until he could swim across the narrower stretches and some of the wider ones, too. Dangerous, maybe, but nobody told him not to. Either you're born riverside, or you're not.
When they were both twelve, Wooyoung broke his wrist on a bad fall. Someone else's mother, whoever had been watching them that day, took them both to the hospital: Yeosang and Wooyoung, because even then, what came for one came for both. Wooyoung had laid in the backseat of their friend's mother's new hatchback with his head in Yeosang's lap. If he’d been in pain, he had showed it by complaining all the way to the emergency room. And as soon as the cast came off, Wooyoung was tumbling around outside again like he'd never been hurt before in his life.
Well, that's Wooyoung. That's how people say it. Born in motion, charging headfirst into the world. "Thank God he has you," someone says to Yeosang when they're ten, fifteen, nineteen, as if Yeosang is responsible for holding him down. As if Yeosang could, even if he wanted to. Nothing ever will. No man, no ceiling, no apocalypse.
In Yeosang's soft future, it's always been Wooyoung. The coarse wave of his hair, his sun-deepened skin, the playful edge in his expression when he looks at Yeosang sideways—these are not things Yeosang can run from.
It's always, always been Wooyoung.
Yeosang decides he’s going to take matters into his own hands. He’s had enough of San in the driver’s seat, Wooyoung in the back; it’ll be better to rip off the bandaid and spend the rest of the summer lying out in the water alone, waiting for the asteroid to take him.
Wooyoung has a dinner shift, but he’s making something quick and microwavable for San to eat while he’s gone. San is upstairs, presumably showering after their too-long hike—Wooyoung got them all lost—and Yeosang is digging his car keys into his palm, trying to figure out how to be diplomatic.
“Hey,” he finally says.
“Yeah?”
“If you want to spend time with San alone, you can tell me,” Yeosang says. There’s a bitter, restless part of him that hates saying it, but he shoves it down where it belongs.
Wooyoung turns away from his chopping so that Yeosang can get the full effect of his skeptical expression.
“I just—“ Yeosang starts. “He came here for you, not me.”
Wooyoung stares at him for two, three, four heartbeats.
"San," he yells over his shoulder.
"Wooyoung, don't—"
"Coming," San calls, and then he’s padding down the narrow stairs, his expression expectant.
When they’re all face-to-face, Wooyoung jabs his knife in Yeosang's direction. "He just told me that he gets it if we want to stop hanging out with him," Wooyoung says, and Yeosang holds his breath and tries to sink into the floor. "Which is funny, because last week you—" the knife is brandished at San, now. "—told me you would get it if Yeosang and I wanted to spend more time together."
Yeosang and San exchange a humiliated glance.
"You two get along, don't you?" Wooyoung asks.
Well, Yeosang thinks, they do. But that’s somewhat transparently because they both want Wooyoung to be happy.
”Don't you?" Wooyoung repeats.
"Yeah," San says, and Yeosang nods.
"No objections to hanging out with each other?" Wooyoung asks.
"No," Yeosang says, and San shakes his head.
"Okay, good," Wooyoung says, returning to his slicing. "So neither of you are going to get weird about it anymore."
"Wooyoung," Yeosang says, pained.
"Don't 'Wooyoung' me," Wooyoung says. "I just fucking fixed everything." He throws his concoction into a re-used takeout container, slaps the plastic lid on it, and tosses it into the fridge. “Hey,” he says when he sees Yeosang turning to follow him out the door. “Where are you going?”
“Home?” Yeosang asks.
“I made dinner for two,” Wooyoung says, no-nonsense.
“Oh,” Yeosang says.
San looks a little mortified. “Dinner for me and him?”
Wooyoung grins, pleased, and jingles his keys at them. “Be good, boys,” he says, and then he’s gone, the door rattling in its frame behind him.
"God," Yeosang says. "Sorry."
San laughs. “You hungry?”
“I could eat,” Yeosang admits.
“Okay,” San says. “Let’s eat.”
When Wooyoung comes back from work, they’ve moved to the couch.
“Well?” Wooyoung asks. “What’d you learn?”
“San, uh, wants to get a cat,” Yeosang says.
San says, “Yeosang’s more of a dog person.”
“You guys are fucking useless,” Wooyoung says.
“Sorry,” San says, all sweet. “We were mostly talking about you.”
Wooyoung’s eyebrows raise. “Oh, good save.”
It’s not untrue; they did talk mostly about Wooyoung. But Yeosang, while learning about Wooyoung’s life at school, had learned some other things about San, too. They’d split dinner at the kitchen island and then thrown a game on the TV, San’s hometown team. So Yeosang would say he knows San’s favorite baseball team and the way his face contorts when they play poorly, and also he knows how San bends over his meals, elbows on the table. That’s not nothing.
(Yeosang also has learned to recognize the soft look in San’s eyes when he tells a story about Wooyoung, and he doesn’t really want to know if San has noticed anything similar in him.)
“Suck-up,” Yeosang says to San.
“You could try it sometime, you know,” Wooyoung advises him.
Yeosang tilts his head back on the couch to look Wooyoung in the eye. “Thank you for dinner,” he says. “You’re a great cook. It was really good.”
Wooyoung flicks him hard on his exposed forehead. Yeosang recoils with a yelp, ducking down, and sees San’s lips pressed together thin.
“It's fine,” Yeosang tells him, hand pressed to his temple. “You can laugh.”
San texts him. The notification is so unexpected that Yeosang sits up in bed. Of course, Wooyoung spams them both in a group chat whenever it strikes his fancy, but this is the first message in their one-on-one history.
Hi where is the closest best burger to here
While Yeosang tries to reason out why he’s being asked, San follows up with: so hungryy
Yeosang sends him a location. The next text comes through.
Wooyoung took his car to work so i’m stranded :(
Are you asking me to drive you? Yeosang asks.
San says, yes :)
Seven minutes later, Yeosang finds himself on Wooyoung’s front step in a clean shirt, thumbing over the ridges of his car key.
“Wow,” San says, climbing into Yeosang’s passenger seat. “Feels weird to have all this room.”
Yeosang snorts. The differences are admittedly stark. Yeosang’s car is comfortable and docile and, as of right now, full of the scent of San’s shampoo, which is actually Wooyoung’s shampoo, masculine and fresh. When Yeosang twists the key in the ignition, the engine doesn’t sound like it’s going to shatter apart under the hood.
Yeosang’s car also makes the drive quieter. He pulls onto the main road and rolls down the front windows; half force-of-habit and half just to hear something that isn’t San’s soft exhales at his side.
“Look at us,” San says, letting his hand drift out into the air. “Bonding.”
Yeosang half-laughs, half-sighs, and then says, “Maybe today I’ll tell you what breed of dog I want.”
Now San half-laughs, half-sighs.
Yeosang wishes he had the foresight to put on music. He didn’t, and so they hit the main road in relative silence but for the rush through the cabin every time a car passes in the opposite direction. It’s not unpleasant, but Yeosang’s slightly on edge. It’s because of this that the flicker of motion at his side makes him glance down.
San’s dropped his hand to the cupholder, nudging Yeosang’s earbuds around where they’re tangled in a ball.
“Wired,” he comments.
Yeosang shrugs. “Yeah. I’d lose the wireless ones.”
“No, I like it,” San says. “Feels retro.”
“Do you like yours?” Yeosang asks. “Your headphones, I mean.” Yeosang can’t deny that he eyes them from time to time. The headphones are seared into his first-ever impression of San, and now Yeosang also has memories of them folded on Wooyoung’s couch, on the kitchen counter, wrapped around San’s neck over his sleep shirt.
“I do, yeah,” San says. “You thinking about getting a pair?”
“I keep meaning to,” Yeosang says. “But then I just...” He just forgets, mostly. Also, they’re expensive; also, Yeosang thinks his wired ones are reliable enough. Still, he does like the way San’s look.
“I’ll send you the link,” San says, already pulling his phone out, and it’s nice of him even though Yeosang probably won’t end up buying them. San’s just nice. Genuine. For the hundredth time, Yeosang thinks it’s really no wonder Wooyoung likes him.
They sit outside on the sole picnic bench with their burgers (and a shake for Yeosang; if he’s going to come all the way out here, he’s going to have his freezer-burnt vanilla milkshake). The burger is so good that the feeling of impending doom that Yeosang has been carrying around with him fades a little bit. Actually, it’s probably a bit more than the burger contributing; San is easy company without Wooyoung present, and Yeosang likes to be outside. The milkshake is also good. There’s not much to be upset about in general.
“Can I dip?” San asks, holding out a french fry.
Yeosang wrinkles his nose. “You’re just like Wooyoung,” he says, but he pops the plastic lid off the shake and sets it between them.
“Why, you don’t like it?” San asks.
“It’s not bad,” Yeosang says. “I just think there are better options.”
San dips the fry into the shake and holds it out to Yeosang.
“No,” Yeosang says, but there’s a playful glint in San’s eyes. He waves the fry a little bit in Yeosang’s face. It starts to splatter melted ice cream across the table, and then a few drops across Yeosang’s jeans. It’s something Wooyoung would do. Yeosang squirms backwards, but he’s laughing and San knows it.
“Fine,” Yeosang says, trying to smile a little bit less, and snags two fries out of San’s basket. He drags them through the shake and pops them in his mouth before San gets the chance to comment on it. “You win,” he says, mouth full.
San tilts his head. “Verdict?”
Yeosang has always known the appeal of it: salty and sweet, warm and cold. He’s just never cared for it. He doesn’t want to admit that it’s better than he remembers it being.
“You like it,” San accuses.
He looks glad to have won, and Yeosang finds himself amused.
This is a bad thing, he supposes, that he enjoys the boy who’s inevitably going to take Wooyoung from him, but Yeosang’s feelings about Wooyoung have never been exactly hopeful. Maybe this is better than disliking San. If Yeosang doesn’t have a chance—and he has known forever that he doesn’t—then at least someone decent should, instead.
“Whatever,” Yeosang says, and steals another pair of fries.
It gets hotter. They get lazier. The days stretch paper-thin in the sun. After Yeosang allows himself to admit that he enjoys San, the flavor of his dread changes. The first month, Yeosang had spent dreading every single day; the second month, Yeosang spends dreading what happens when the days start to change.
Whatever is happening between San and Wooyoung is slow. Yeosang had thought the apocalypse would be immediate, and when it wasn’t, he thought it would happen in July, and now it’s August and still, nothing. The two of them are so often with Yeosang and always unchanged in front of Yeosang, and eventually Yeosang starts to think maybe, somehow, it won’t ever happen.
Yeosang’s brought back down to earth the first time Wooyoung calls San Sannie.
It comes without warning. San is driving them to the convenience store, the farther-away one that has Wooyoung’s preferred shampoo, and Wooyoung points at a sign off the side of the road.
“Sannie, pull in,” he says. “Wanna see if they’re open.”
Sannie. Yeosang, needing to see, glances at San across the console. He’s surprised to find a mirror in San’s eyes. All of the alarm is reflected back at him. All of the knowing, too.
So, they both know. About Wooyoung, about each other. It’s this neat little spiderweb of knowing, and Yeosang isn’t actually sure which of them is the spider and which of them is the wriggling insect in the center, or if Wooyoung is one of those two creatures and someone else is the web. One way or another, it’s tangled, now, San and Yeosang inextricable from the mess.
It’s just funny, Yeosang thinks later, that he and San now have a secret between themselves, too.
“Hey, check this one,” San says.
Yeosang reaches his hand out. He always indulges them, as if he knows what he’s talking about, as if either of them will actually get lucky. All in the name of entertainment, he supposes. As San drops the rock into his palm, Yeosang rolls his eyes, grinning.
“No, look at it,” San says.
“I am looking at it,” Yeosang says dryly. “And it looks—“
He pauses.
“What?” Wooyoung asks.
“Well,” Yeosang says.
Wooyoung stands so quickly that water douses the side of San’s face. “No way.”
Yeosang, who is still not a paleontologist, says, “I’m not sure.”
“But it looks like a fossil, doesn’t it?” San asks.
“It doesn’t not look like a fossil,” Yeosang decides.
“No fucking way,” Wooyoung says.
“Are you jealous?” San asks, smile splitting his face.
“Fuck you; it’s my fucking river,” Wooyoung says. He snatches the rock or maybe the fossil from Yeosang’s hands and turns it over with careful, fast fingers, squinting at it.
“Maybe your river likes me,” San offers.
This does not seem to impress Wooyoung, who holds the rock in the air. “I’m gonna throw it,” he threatens.
“It’s probably not a fossil,” Yeosang says in an attempt to defuse the situation.
They both ignore him. San lunges forwards to take it back. He manages to close his fingers around the stone, but Wooyoung tips backwards and decides to take San down with him.
“Catch,” San calls to Yeosang, right before he goes under. Somehow, Yeosang does.
They play-wrestle in the water, each of them trying to regain their footing. San’s stronger, but Wooyoung won’t fight clean; Yeosang knows firsthand how he’ll target your side and armpit if he thinks he’s losing. While they grapple, Yeosang runs his fingers over the edges of San’s rock again. It’s still warm from all their hands and damp from the water.
Yeosang pockets it. It feels wrong to just drop it back onto the riverbed.
In front of him, Wooyoung spits water in San’s face, at which point San gives up the win with a disgusted yelp. They all climb onto land and find that Wooyoung has scraped his calf raw. In the midst of San apologizing and Wooyoung laughing it off with bright eyes and Yeosang trying not to look at the blood, they all forget about the rock.
Wooyoung limps a step when he gets out of the car. San winces but says nothing, and then later, when they’re alone in the living room, he turns to Yeosang.
“You think I hurt him?” San asks.
It’s nice to be asked. It’s nice that despite everything, San can still see that Yeosang knows Wooyoung best.
“He’ll be fine,” Yeosang says. He knows it's true.
The day before San is supposed to go back home, Yeosang gives the rock back to him.
“Forgot I still had it,” Yeosang says. “But here. Just in case it really is worth something.”
It’s not. They both have to know it’s not. Yeosang’s not even sure why he kept it in the first place, let alone why he’s giving it back.
San’s hand closes around it, tight. “Well, if it is,” he says, “you and I can split the profit.”
“Not Wooyoung?” Yeosang asks.
“He tried to sabotage us,” San says, grinning. “No mercy.”
“I guess you’re right,” Yeosang says.
San says, “‘Course I am.”
Yeosang knows it’s not the last time he’s going to see San. They’ve spoken in broad strokes about next time, a nebulous future in which San comes back here and they have to figure out how to waste another summer. It doesn’t feel like an empty promise; Yeosang knows that Wooyoung will see it through.
“Wanna help with my bags?” San asks.
“Nope,” Wooyoung says, popping the ‘p’, and San laughs and jiggles the latch of Wooyoung’s shitty trunk until it opens.
When Yeosang approaches, San has just finished sliding his two suitcases neatly together in the small space.
It’s funny. Yeosang has gotten used to seeing him next to and inside of and around this car. The first time he’d laid eyes on San, he’d been so sure they’d dirty him. San doesn’t seem all that soiled. If anything, his skin and eyes and hair are brighter now than they were the first time Yeosang saw him. He wonders if Wooyoung could sense it even when they were at that faraway school together.
“What’s up?” San asks, slamming the trunk.
Yeosang tosses him the keys. San catches them with one hand, his reflexes sharp even if his lips are parted in mild surprise.
“One last time,” Yeosang says, and San grins.
So San winds the car two hours down to the airport. The trees are blissfully unaware of autumn approaching; everything is still bright green and thickly waving in the windshield.
Wooyoung is in a rare moment of contemplation. He’s mostly silent in the backseat save for some peppered questions about San’s upcoming semester. San seems mostly unbothered, but Yeosang finds himself slipping down to meet Wooyoung at his level, recessing a bit into his thoughts.
He spends the last hour of the drive trying to convince himself that two facts can be true at the same time, even though it feels like they should contradict one another: first, that San leaving will make Wooyoung Yeosang’s again, even if it’s only for a little while, and second, Yeosang will miss having San around. A few months ago, the former would have been relieving and the second impossible. But now the second is possible, and if he will miss San, then losing him for a while can’t be so relieving anymore, can it? Yeosang thinks himself in nonsensical circles about this. When they do arrive at the airport, he realizes the car must have been very quiet for a very long time.
Instead of pulling up to departures, San parks. Yeosang figures it’s because he wants them to walk him inside, but it quickly becomes clear it’s because San wants to thank them profusely for letting him stay with them. “San, oh my God, it’s okay,” Wooyoung says when San’s speech hits the two-minute mark. “We liked having you.”
“You know we want you to come back,” Yeosang says.
“I know,” San says quietly, but he’s looking at Yeosang like maybe he didn’t.
“Gonna miss your flight,” Wooyoung says, and so Yeosang helps San unload his suitcases and they exchange a quick, unexpected hug, San’s arms as strong and solid as they look. San and Wooyoung’s hug is a little longer. Yeosang mostly succeeds in not thinking about it.
“Study hard,” Wooyoung calls after him.
“You too,” San answers, and Wooyoung flips him off.
And then it’s the two of them again, shoulder to shoulder.
“Think these are yours,” Wooyoung says, and Yeosang looks down from San’s shrinking silhouette to see Wooyoung dangling his own car keys between them.
“That they are,” Yeosang says.
It gets dark on the drive back home. “Stay,” Wooyoung says, before either of them even get out of the car. “It’s gonna feel empty in here.” So Yeosang lies down on the couch. It cradles him in a way it hadn’t in the spring, semi-permanently deformed with the phantom weight of San’s body.
It takes Yeosang a long time to get comfortable.
He does fall asleep eventually, though, and then wakes from a dreamless sleep to the clatter of a pan against the stove. Wooyoung’s making breakfast. Yeosang waits for alertness to creep in, his limbs all heavy, and when he sits up he realizes for the first time that his pillow has been a balled up sweatshirt, and it’s not in a color Wooyoung would ever wear.
When he pads into the kitchen to wait for the meal, Wooyoung looks away from the eggs to flash him a smile. “Just like old times,” he quips, the consonants all crisp with his teasing.
How could Yeosang not have realized, about the sweatshirt? It had been too dark. Maybe it hadn’t smelled like San, but Yeosang doesn’t totally know what San smells like. He’d been too caught up in thought to notice. It’s an inconsequential thing. But Yeosang had wanted to put San aside for a day, maybe two, and now he can’t divorce San from this house, from this kitchen, from the boy at the stove.
“Yeah,” Yeosang says. “Old times.”
Here is a less important thing they don't tell you about the end of the world: the chaos goes long and excruciating, but the peace goes fast.
Autumn, peacetime, is pleasant and uneventful. Wooyoung toys with the idea of making a resumé and then laughs about it all the way down to the water. His hair gets long enough to pull back behind his neck, the waves of it coarse and uneven. He snatches reddening leaves off of the lower boughs of trees and holds them up like prizes. Yeosang drives up to his classes, takes them, drives back. He gets mud on his skin and he rinses it off. He examines the leaves Wooyoung shows him, green and then curling with yellow and then orange, brown, falling.
They don't talk about San.
Autumn, peacetime, is fast-moving water. It slips them by. Yeosang and Wooyoung bump into each other, both of them making for the passenger seat of Wooyoung's car because Yeosang's forgotten that he's the one that has to drive.
They don’t talk about San, but sometimes they text. San or Wooyoung will send something in the group—a picture from San of some campus locale, followed by a picture of Wooyoung’s cooking. Yeosang will react to all the images with a little heart or a thumbs up, to be nice. He doesn’t send much himself. He doesn’t think about what kinds of texts are happening privately when he sees Wooyoung grinning at his phone.
When winter finally staggers into being, Wooyoung and Yeosang spend a lot more time indoors. Yeosang drives straight from class to Wooyoung’s house, even when he’s not home. You’re lucky I don’t make you pay rent, Wooyoung chides, which is his way of saying he likes to come home and find Yeosang hanging around.
In November, Yeosang is checking up on everyone they went to high school with via the internet, seeing which of them have parted with this town for good. He’s pretty sure Wooyoung is playing games on his phone. They’ve got a show on in the background that neither of them particularly care about. Yeosang can’t even count the days he’s spent with Wooyoung at his side like this. A hundred, a thousand.
Then, the text comes through. It’s an image attachment from San, which is, at this point, not unusual. Yeosang glances at Wooyoung and opens it.
It’s a screenshot of a plane ticket.
Presumably Yeosang has missed some of the planning leading up to this, because Wooyoung reacts with very little surprise. He sticks a little heart on the image and writes back finally.
Yeosang reacts to the image too, to be nice, and then he breaks the cardinal rule.
"Winter break, too?" he asks. It’s a lot of questions in one.
“Guess he missed us that bad," Wooyoung says.
This answers none of them, of course. But Yeosang isn't going to push it.
San’s upcoming return lifts the unspoken ban on his name. He comes back to their conversations in pieces—a remembered joke here, an idea for a day trip there.
It’s different this time. Yeosang isn’t scared of his return, per se, at least not the way he’d been scared of San’s first arrival. He spends the majority of November trying to name the feeling. Anticipatory might be too positive. Apprehensive is too negative.
In early December, he asks Wooyoung, “Do you think restless is a good or a bad feeling?”
Wooyoung says, “Huh?”
“Like, does it feel positive or negative to you?”
“Negative,” Wooyoung decides, almost immediate.
“No, not the word,” Yeosang says. “The actual feeling.”
Wooyoung tilts his head, blinks slow. “Oh. Uh, maybe neither, then. I think it’s just a feeling.”
“Yeah,” Yeosang says. “I think so, too.”
Wooyoung's character takes an unshielded hit.
"Fuck," he sighs, unsurprised.
It’s mid-December, now. They’re sitting on the floor, backs against Wooyoung's couch, losing at their video game. It's nice to play with Wooyoung because both of them are pretty bad at most games. Their characters, an orc (Wooyoung) and an elf woman with a physics-defying bust (Yeosang), are both currently downed.
Wooyoung tosses his controller to the floor.
"Do you think San's hot?" he asks.
Yeosang hears the question. He goes very still. He watches his character's idle form as the stage restarts: her low-cut dress and the armor snapped over it, the impossible swell of her pixelated curves, her permanent, lifeless fuck-me eyes.
"For a guy, yeah," Yeosang settles on.
"I didn't ask if you thought he was hot for a guy," Wooyoung says, voice dipping low at the end in an imitation of Yeosang's. "I asked if you thought he was hot."
Yeosang turns, tilting his head back against the couch, and meets Wooyoung's eyes.
Yeosang has known that Wooyoung is gay forever. It's not something they ever had to address. When they started talking about crushes, it was boys for Wooyoung, girls for Yeosang. Relationships, hookups, and then sex: boys for Wooyoung, girls for Yeosang.
The screen finishes loading, waiting for one of them to confirm, and neither of them reach for their controllers. Wooyoung raises his eyebrows. Impatient.
Yeosang, like he does every once in a while, fleetingly wonders if Wooyoung looks down on him for not being into men. He knows it's ridiculous. It's just that when Yeosang talks about girls, sometimes Wooyoung gets this hard, stubborn set in his eyes. It makes Yeosang think that maybe Wooyoung won't care about his sex life. Wooyoung'll think it's stupid, or something, because he thinks sex with girls is stupid, or something.
It sounds weak even in Yeosang's head. Yeosang doesn't think Wooyoung's sex life is stupid, even though he doesn't like boys himself.
That's a flawed comparison, though. Because: first, Yeosang likes girls.
Second, there's Wooyoung.
"Why?" Yeosang asks.
"Just curious," Wooyoung says. "So? Do you?"
Does he?
Yeosang tries to compare San to Wooyoung, who is—unfortunately, disastrously—his only point of reference for male attraction. San is broader and a little taller. San's hair is always neatly trimmed, and Wooyoung treats haircuts the way most people treat getting a tooth pulled, which is to say that he'll only do it when medically necessary. San is hard-won muscle where Wooyoung is lean. San is soft-eyed, and Wooyoung is sharp-eyed.
"Take your time," Wooyoung comments, sarcastic.
The comparison is starting to feel clinical, so Yeosang starts over. What can he say about the way San looks? San is expressive. It had been easy to get to know him because of it. Even when Yeosang had wanted to dislike him, he couldn't bring himself to. It's something in the smile, in the eyes.
"Sure," Yeosang says. "He's hot."
"Knew it," Wooyoung says.
His grin is inscrutable. Yeosang's stomach drops.
When had Yeosang known what he felt towards Wooyoung? Somewhere between Wooyoung breaking his wrist and Wooyoung leaving for college. It doesn't really matter. If he had to pinpoint it, though, it was probably in their senior year of high school. Yeosang had had a girlfriend at the time, a lively, extroverted girl that made everyone say wow, opposites really do attract. Pickings have always been slim in this town, but Yeosang thought he'd been lucky to find her. She'd dyed her hair from brown-black to white-blonde right after Yeosang had asked her out, and everyone had thought it was cool; people aren't normally adventurous with style here. It had made Yeosang feel good to date someone people thought highly of. He thought maybe he'd been in love with her.
You gonna try to swing it through the first year of college? Wooyoung had asked, two months away from graduation.
Yeosang had already decided to try, is the thing. He'd already talked about it with her. But when it had been Wooyoung asking that question instead of her, he'd tried to envision that pretty girl he loved in the apocalypse and realized he couldn't. The bleached white hair, the sweet, tempered laugh—that's not what the river in Yeosang's head was demanding of his future.
In the midst of this world-shattering revelation, he'd panicked and said, Uh, I think so; I mean, no, and Wooyoung had laughed and said, Well, that's not promising. Yeosang broke up with her a week later. No hard feelings; she'd seen a wider world for herself in college anyway.
So. If Yeosang had to choose when he knew for certain that Wooyoung had ruined him, he'd probably say then.
"What do you mean, 'knew it?'" Yeosang asks.
"I mean, I knew you thought he was hot," Wooyoung says, bringing his controller back up into his hands.
There's something Yeosang has been thinking about for eight months. It makes him a bad, selfish friend. But Yeosang has long been comfortable with being a bad and selfish friend, so he thinks it anyway.
The only reason San would come back to this town on every break is if he was in love with Wooyoung. Wooyoung has to understand that, too. But if they're together, Yeosang doesn't know about it, and the two of them had spent most of their days with Yeosang, and San had unfailingly slept on the couch. So they aren't together. They can't be. But, at the same time, they both have to know San is in love. They all have to know San is in love.
San, though, might not know this: Wooyoung's not one to drag things out if he doesn't reciprocate. He doesn't like to lead people on.
So Wooyoung has to be in love with San, too.
"Do you?" asks Yeosang.
Wooyoung's hands still. "Do I what?"
"Think San's hot," Yeosang says.
Wooyoung smiles. It's a little mean. He never goes down without a fight, but Yeosang doesn't know what they're fighting about.
"Yeah," Wooyoung says. "Obviously."
Third: Yeosang.
He can't bring himself to a decision about how the world will end. He just thinks that after it’s all over, when the mutant apocalypse vultures come to pick apart his body, this is what they will taste on the way to his heart: Yeosang's soil-damp skin; his muscle and bone; a sweet, flaky sliver of Wooyoung's laugh beneath his sternum; freshwater.
San is at the airport. He is real and boyish and worn-down from travel, and Wooyoung thinks he’s hot. Obviously. Yeosang takes one of San’s two suitcases. Before he can walk away with it, San throws an arm around him in a side hug. Yeosang returns it. What else is there to do?
“Do you want me to drive?” San asks.
“You’re not driving yourself home from the airport,” Yeosang says.
“I don’t mind,” San says.
“I know you don’t,” Yeosang says. “Just let me.”
And San laughs softly, even though Yeosang isn’t totally sure what he’s finding funny, and they all climb into the car. Wooyoung immediately demands updates on what he’s missing back at school; San explains everything that’s happened since they last talked. There’s a part of their life Yeosang won’t ever fully understand—it might be the only part of Wooyoung’s life that Yeosang won’t ever fully understand, by the simple virtue of not being present—but it’s nice to listen to them talk about it anyway. Wooyoung’s his best friend, and San’s considerate, and they both seem to know that he wants context about their stories explained to him even if he’s not talking much. The ride goes quickly.
San tosses his backpack onto the couch when they arrive and unzips it. "I brought you some things," he says.
“You didn’t have to,” Wooyoung says.
“Oh, okay,” San says, starting to zip it back up. “Then I’ll just—“
Wooyoung swats his wrist.
“Gracious,” Yeosang says, and Wooyoung bats at him too.
Most of the space in San’s backpack is taken up by gifts for Wooyoung. Some are silly, trinkets from their old shared school, but one or two are really thoughtful: small kitchen appliances Wooyoung’s too flighty and/or determined to get for himself. Wooyoung affects nonchalance, but Yeosang knows him, and there’s a sweet, shining light in his eyes that means he’s touched.
It’s another point for San, but it’s nice to see Wooyoung cared for. ‘Tis the season, or something, he thinks.
San reaches back into the backpack, fingers wrapping around what’s clearly the heaviest item left in the bag. Maybe Yeosang spoke too soon; there’s a line between thoughtfulness and spoiling, and Wooyoung won’t take well to spoiling. Yeosang‘s conflicted: he doesn’t want it to be awkward, doesn’t want to see San deflated, but it’ll be good to prove that nobody knows Wooyoung like Yeosang does—
"Here," San says, holding the box out in front of him. But he's not looking at Wooyoung.
Yeosang blinks back at him.
“Here,” San says, insistent. “Take it.”
"I didn't get you anything," Yeosang says. It's all he can really think to say.
San grins, a little bashful. "Wasn't expecting you to."
Yeosang looks down at the box between them for the first time.
They're headphones. Nice ones, noise-canceling, that fit over the ears. They're exactly what Yeosang had offhandedly mentioned wanting all those months ago.
"I can't take these," Yeosang says, taking the box.
"Oh, shut up," Wooyoung says. "He wants them. Look at his fucking face."
"They're expensive," Yeosang tries, but Wooyoung's right; he does want them—
"I wanted to get you nice ones," San says.
"It’s not just that, San. I still didn't get you anything." He doesn't even know what San would have liked to receive. Does this make Yeosang a terrible friend or San an attentive one, or both? Are they actually friends outside of Wooyoung? Friends on their own? He guesses they must be now. Maybe even good friends.
"You let me stay with you," San says.
Yeosang is about to say that San stays with Wooyoung, not him. But San's right, even if he doesn’t fully know it. San has parked himself directly on the spot in Yeosang's heart that Wooyoung has occupied for over a decade, and Yeosang, who doesn’t know how to fight, has let him stay. It has to be a bad trade, taking the headphones in exchange for Wooyoung.
"Thank you," Yeosang says.
San's face splits in a smile, all joy. "You like them?"
"Yeah," Yeosang says. "Yeah, they're awesome. I can't believe you remembered.”
San says, “I texted Wooyoung, like, twice a week to make sure you hadn’t ordered them for yourself yet.”
“Thank God that’s over,” Wooyoung quips, but he doesn’t look very bothered.
Yeosang runs his thumb over the shiny plastic front of the box. Something very strange is happening in his throat. It’s because it’s been so long since he’s seen San, and he’d forgotten what kind of boy Wooyoung had brought home. It doesn’t matter that Yeosang has a good reason to dislike him. He’ll never be able to. He doesn’t even want to.
“Well,” Wooyoung asks, “What are we doing first?”
As it turns out, the first thing they’re doing is eating dinner. While they eat, Yeosang charges his new headphones, and afterwards he turns them on.
They cancel noise so well that it startles him, which cracks Wooyoung up, which cracks San up, which makes Yeosang’s face hot. Then Wooyoung insists on a turn. Yeosang likes what the band of the headphones does to Wooyoung’s long hair, pushing it away from his forehead, out of his face. On San’s shorter cut, the headphones don’t make any difference. Yeosang wonders what they’re doing to him and his respectable, medium-length hair. Probably nothing flattering.
When he gets back to his own house, he places them carefully on his bedside table. They look nice there. They make him feel like San, but in a weird, sort of existential way. Yeosang doesn’t hate the feeling.
“Can you skate?” San asks. “If the water ever freezes?”
“If you have a fucking death wish, maybe,” Wooyoung says.
Yeosang says, “You’re about to find out how little there is do to here in the winter.”
San shrugs. “Well, good thing I didn’t come to skate,” he says.
San’s trip isn’t long. The only real plan Wooyoung’s made is to go the same New Year’s celebration that Wooyoung and Yeosang have been going to since they could walk, but other than that, they don’t need much to fill up the days.
Before New Year’s, in late December, they watch a lot of bad television. They go on a few walks to 'jog the muscles' (Wooyoung’s words), and Yeosang’s lips become semi-chronically chapped. They’re very, very careful with Wooyoung’s car, which famously has a bad temperament in the cold.
“He’s got a mind of his own,” Wooyoung says, patting the hood.
“I thought it was a girl car,” Yeosang says.
“Think again,” Wooyoung says testily, and Yeosang shrugs at San.
It just goes so fast, Yeosang thinks. Every night spills into the next. It’s a sharp contrast to the summer, when they’d had so long together that Yeosang had started forgetting how they’d spent the earliest days. It’s slipping away so quickly that Yeosang starts thinking ahead to the next visit before they even hit the new year.
Surely, if San’s been here for the summer and the winter, he’ll come here on his spring break. And then he’ll probably come for another summer. And, by that time, Wooyoung and San will have figured out whatever is between them.
That future doesn’t seem so imminent, though. Right now, it just feels like this could go on forever. Improbable, Yeosang knows, but he can’t keep himself from wanting it to.
“It’s cold,” San says.
“You’ll get used to it,” Yeosang tells him.
“Alcohol blanket,” Wooyoung calls, passing him a beer.
Yeosang shrugs. “Or that.”
It’s not that cold, though. San’ll toughen up. They walk around the grass and drink and introduce San to everyone they see and walk around some more. Wooyoung’s parent’s friends are always responsible for the fireworks, and after they unload their truck, Wooyoung goes to greet them. Yeosang and San follow.
Yeosang barely has time to say, “Woah, incoming,” and then the twins are crashing into their legs, a boy and a girl who Yeosang first saw when they were still little alien creatures in their cribs, right out of the hospital. They’re lanky now, long-limbed like their parents. Wooyoung scoops the boy up into his arms mid-conversation, so Yeosang puts the girl on his shoulders before she can start crying about being left out.
“Kids like him,” Yeosang says to San, trying to dodge the foot kicking at his throat.
“I can see that,” San says. Clearly, the two of them don’t have quite his touch. They spend all of Wooyoung’s social-butterfly time passing the girl between them; she goes from Yeosang’s shoulders to San’s arms, San’s arms to Yeosang’s waist. San’s never been anything but patient for as long as Yeosang’s known him, but eventually even he looks at Yeosang with a little bit of despair.
“What are they feeding her?” San asks, holding his arm out straight as the girl hangs off of his bicep and kicks her feet and squeals.
Of course her brother is perfectly docile in Wooyoung’s arms. Yeosang can’t hold back a laugh. It’s funny: big, strong, San shivering in his sweatshirt with this small child using him like a jungle gym, and Wooyoung chatting up the adults in the background, looking halfway to fatherhood himself. Yeosang laughs until it’s his turn to hold her, at which point he gives her what she clearly wants, which is to be dangled upside down until she screams.
“You two looked like you were having fun,” Wooyoung says when he returns to them and the kids return to their friends.
“My arm hurts,” San says, and Yeosang starts laughing again.
The parents have started to load the fireworks, so Wooyoung hops up to sit in the laid-out bed of their truck, his feet dangling off the end. Yeosang and San follow him, one on either side. Within a minute, he gets it in his head that he wants to light one of the fireworks, which Yeosang probably would have let him do, but San laughs instead.
“You’re hammered,” he says, and puts an arm across Wooyoung’s chest. Wooyoung’s not hammered and they all know it. Yeosang finds this oddly endearing on San’s part.
“And you’re no fun,” Wooyoung says, but he makes no effort to move.
And then the first firework goes up screaming, a small golden burst over the tree line, and Wooyoung hums low in satisfaction, and the children screech and hold their hands up to the sky. Yeosang, against all his better instincts, glances to his side to look at Wooyoung under the lights.
His gaze falls on San.
There’s more impressive new year celebrations in the world than a bunch of small-town parents setting off sporadic fireworks in an averagely scenic field. You wouldn’t know it, though, looking at the wonder in San’s eyes. The light from the fireworks shifts over his skin like the moon on the river, warm and then cool, yellow and then gold. His eyes glitter even in the darkness.
Yeosang can’t believe he’s real. How did Wooyoung, in his bare handful of months away from this town, find this flawless, kind boy? Here’s Wooyoung, too, the side profile that Yeosang knows from a lifetime of staring when he shouldn’t. The slope of his nose, the half of a smile that he can make as crooked or as soft as he needs it to be, that unthinking surety in his brow. When Yeosang considers it again, he realizes that meeting someone like San is exactly the kind of thing that would happen to Wooyoung. Wooyoung, who Yeosang knows is special, meets San, who Yeosang can see is special. Like that, it’s not so unbelievable.
Yeosang’s chest hurts, but kind of in a good way. He likes San for Wooyoung. It’s not hard to admit to when they both look so happy.
Yeosang drives them home. Wooyoung’s tired himself out, so he’s dozing in the back; San also seems far-away and tired. The intermittent streetlights flood the front windshield. That’s what Yeosang is going to remember from tonight: the light on San’s face. The fireworks. The streetlights.
“Have fun?” Yeosang asks.
“Mm,” San hums.
Wooyoung hikes up to his bedroom, barely able to stop yawning long enough to say goodnight. Yeosang stays behind to raid the fridge. When he makes to leave, it’s just San downstairs, perched on the arm of his couch.
“Hey,” San says.
Yeosang pauses at the door. He looks back at San. He can’t help it: he wonders if San doesn’t have anywhere better to be over the holidays than this nothing-town, having gotten seemingly nowhere in his pursuit of the boy at the top of the stairs. The feelings that keep San here are bone-deep. They have to be. Yeosang’s chest hurts again.
San opens his mouth, closes it, and then says, “Happy New Year, Yeosang.”
“You, too,” Yeosang says.
When it’s time to take San back to the airport, Yeosang doesn’t even make an attempt to get in the driver’s seat.
“Got used to having a chauffeur, huh?” San asks.
Yeosang puts a little force into tossing the keys at him. San catches them at his shoulder without flinching.
Wooyoung is already in the backseat. “Easy to get used to,” he says.
“He’s a spoiled brat,” San says to Yeosang, tugging the door open.
“Don’t we know it,” Yeosang says.
Every few hundred million years, there is an apocalypse. This is something Yeosang learned in a museum when he was very young. By apocalypse, he really means “major extinction event,” but the former is punchier. It sounds better in his head.
(There were likely a lot of minor ones in between the major ones. And, well, the Holocene extinction. Technicalities always muddy the meaning of the apocalypse, which is another thing they don’t tell you about the end of the world.)
The point is this: nothing lasts forever. Not even if Yeosang really, really wants it to.
San goes back to college. Yeosang readjusts to the driver’s seat, to having Wooyoung to himself, to the community college commute and the light business that comes with it.
“Gonna be a while until spring,” Wooyoung says once, thoughtful.
“Not that long,” Yeosang says.
In January, Yeosang thinks about San a lot. In his head, San is still in the back of that truck, under the fireworks. Yeosang wonders what happens when San gets a real job next year and it takes him far, far away from them. From Wooyoung, mostly. It all gets unsettling. Yeosang is almost less worried about his own post-degree plans.
Still in January, after Yeosang has exhausted a lot of troublesome thoughts on San and Wooyoung and what may or may not happen to their relationship, a girl from one of his classes asks him on a date.
He says yes.
She’s exactly the right kind of girl, checks all the boxes. Kind, thoughtful, pretty. After Yeosang goes on that date, he learns that spending time with her is easy. They get coffee near campus, and the next day they get dinner, and then she invites him to her apartment on the weekend for a movie and wine.
Yeosang goes. He doesn’t tell Wooyoung.
The first time they have sex, Yeosang thinks he might actually be getting somewhere. It’s the first time he’s seen anyone in a while—since before San, meaning since before losing Wooyoung became a tangible possibility—and he starts to think that this would have solved his problems a long time ago.
When Yeosang is with her, he isn’t thinking about Wooyoung or about San. It’s not relieving, necessarily, but it is a weight off his shoulders.
He sees her most days for four weeks, then five. She asks to come to his place, but Yeosang says no again and again. He lets her believe it’s about the fact that he still lives with his parents. It’s not, though; he doesn’t want to bring her somewhere she won’t understand. He doesn’t want to bring her to somewhere that belongs to someone else. She isn’t too bothered by this, and she smiles that lovely smile and links their fingers together when they leave campus every day, and Yeosang believes that he’s finally, finally freeing himself.
They don’t need the pretense of movie night for Yeosang to stay over anymore, so he packs an overnight bag and drives up to her apartment on a chilly Saturday afternoon. They have sex and order takeout and then actually do end up watching a movie on her laptop, and when the movie ends Yeosang lets her start to show him all the music she likes to listen to. She’s got a much wider horizon of taste than he does, so it’s interesting.
Yeosang’s playing with her hair and she’s explaining the history of a band that nobody’s ever heard of. She says oh, can I try these? and Yeosang says yeah, sure without even knowing what she’s asking for. She reaches over him and he’s momentarily distracted by how warm and soft she is and when she sits back up, she’s clutching San’s headphones—his gift to Yeosang—in her hands.
She slips them over her ears and starts to connect her phone to them. When she’s finished, she glances down at Yeosang.
“What?” she asks, grinning sly.
Yeosang realizes two things at once. One, he’s been staring. Not at her, exactly, but at the brush of her hair pulled back by the band of the headphones. Two, she thinks he’s staring for some sickeningly-sweet reason, that he finds the sight of her beautiful.
That’s not—she’s pretty, and he’s so attracted to her, but that’s not why. Yeosang doesn’t know why, actually. The feeling in his chest is confusing and definitely not positive.
“What are you looking at?” she asks again, and her voice is sweet and amused and she’s lifting Yeosang’s headphones off of her ears and she’s said it exactly the way Wooyoung would have said that line, all that confidence, and Yeosang doesn’t know how it got this bad this quickly, doesn’t know how a single association with San led to Wooyoung led to Yeosang falling all the way off the ladder, losing all that progress instantaneously.
“Nothing,” Yeosang says quietly. If her face falls a little bit, they both ignore it.
The next day, he types out an awful apology to her. It’s not exactly a breakup letter because it’s only been, what, six weeks, and they weren’t dating in the first place. It’s difficult to figure out what to cite in the note because there’s nothing about the relationship itself that Yeosang can blame it on.
He decides to keep it self-deprecating. She probably takes it well. Yeosang wouldn’t know; he doesn’t hear from her again.
It’s a terrible and selfish thing, the relief. But for Yeosang, feeling terrible and selfish is like coming home.
“Good to have you back,” Wooyoung says.
Yeosang ignores the way his blood runs cold and asks, “What do you mean?”
Wooyoung shrugs. It displaces the running water lapping around his bare collarbone. He’s crouching in the river, his lithe frame too too close for comfort, too far to touch.
“Just feels like you’ve been busy,” Wooyoung says.
Yeosang hears it in the cadence of his voice. Frustration, maybe, that Yeosang hasn’t told him anything. It’s hard to be known so well. There’s very limited room to keep secrets in a friendship like this, and Yeosang’s secrets aren’t small.
Yeosang opts for a truth. “Yeah, been busy,” he says. “Won’t be anymore.”
Wooyoung’s dark eyes narrow as he stares Yeosang down. It makes everything sharper, the planes of his face, his shoulders.
“Hm,” Wooyoung says.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Wooyoung says, and he tilts his head back into the water.
Every few hundred million years, there is an apocalypse. Yeosang happens to believe that, roughly speaking, the next one is overdue. Here is the list of things that will survive it: first, the river. Second, Wooyoung. Third, Yeosang.
And then what? It’s always been on the tip of Yeosang’s tongue. The car, the cockroaches, the swelling sun. The river again, because the world will always begin and end with the river. Something else. Yeosang knows it.
Fourth:
On Saturday, Yeosang wakes up on Wooyoung’s couch. Wooyoung’s been in a patently bad mood for a few days, but Yeosang knows what it feels like when Wooyoung is mad at him, and this is something else. They haven’t been talking much, just playing video games, really, and driving obscene distances to get Wooyoung’s favorite foods.
This morning promises to be more of the same. Yeosang climbs down onto the floor, Wooyoung puts their leftovers on the side table, and they both sit with their backs against the bottom of the couch to power up Wooyoung’s console.
He’s been expecting Wooyoung to get better as time goes on, not worse. But Wooyoung isn’t even in the mood to shit talk him during the game. Maybe Yeosang should try to distract him, instead, give him something to look forward to.
"Hey," Yeosang asks the next time the game fades to black. "When is San's spring break?”
Wooyoung doesn’t respond immediately. Yeosang looks away from the screen, curiosity turning to alarm when he sees the backwards amusement on Wooyoung’s face.
"Week after next," Wooyoung says. "He's not coming here."
Yeosang frowns. This might explain something.
"Oh. What's he doing instead?"
"He's spending it with his boyfriend," Wooyoung lilts.
The engine of Yeosang's brain hitches, sputters, stalls.
"What?" he asks.
Wooyoung's mouth quirks up in a grin. His eyes are all wrong, though.
"His boyfriend," Wooyoung repeats. "Isn't that sweet?"
"I didn't realize—" Yeosang closes his mouth, opens it. He's hyperaware of everything he's touching, suddenly: the scrape of the carpeted floor, the warm plastic controller in his hand, the brace of the couch against his spine. "How long?"
"Beginning of the semester.”
Yeosang says, "You didn't tell me."
"Not my fault," Wooyoung says, still grinning. "He didn't tell me until this week.”
It can't have happened like this, Yeosang thinks, bewildered, unmoving. It just can't have.
"Are you," Yeosang starts, and then he wants to take it back, but he can't. "Are you mad at him?"
They've always been transparent to each other. So Yeosang knows that Wooyoung's lying when he says, "Just 'cause he said he'd come, and then he ditched us."
"Right," Yeosang says.
Then, Wooyoung, who has never been capable of taking a hit without throwing one back, says, "I think it's weird he was hiding it, though."
Yeosang, heart still sinking and sinking, says, "Yeah. That is weird.”
Here is the most important thing they do not tell you about the end of the world: it never happens all at once. The apocalypse always staggers.
They do expect you to reason this out for yourself, though, which you can either do by learning about dinosaurs or by having your heart broken. Yeosang prefers the dinosaur method. First, the meteor; second, the ash cloud; third, the ecosystem collapse, and then:
"Let's get fucking drunk," Wooyoung says on Monday.
Something uneasy coils in Yeosang’s gut. "Wooyoung," he says.
"What, you have other plans?"
"No," Yeosang admits. "But if this is about—" He cuts himself short. He's used to self-censoring around Wooyoung, but not in this way. The whole thing is wrong, impossible to swallow.
"It's about," Wooyoung says, stepping in close, “us having a good fucking time."
Wooyoung’s hot-blooded and as beautiful as he’s ever been. Yeosang was never going to say no to him. There’s beer inside of Wooyoung’s fridge and vodka above it, and Yeosang doesn’t miss how he reaches for the strong stuff first. It’s unlike Wooyoung to take shots with nothing to chase them. Yeosang knows how he dislikes the burn.
Yeosang could and probably should stay sober, but there’s been something terrible in the air since last Saturday. It crawls into his mouth every time he breathes in. He wants to drown it. He takes the handle after Wooyoung’s finished with it.
So they drink and they turn on some new game on Wooyoung’s console, and then they’ve drunk too much for it to be any fun, so they switch to cards. They play Wooyoung’s favorite game—it’s a reflex game that involves a lot of slapping—and they’re drunk and heavy-armed and their hands keep colliding, hard, until Yeosang’s palms are red and stinging. He starts to try and hold back, but it’s like Wooyoung wants it to hurt.
Yeosang wins. When he does, Wooyoung has his whole body angled over the coffee table, swaying, slurring a complaint that Yeosang doesn’t really hear because their heads are bent too close together. And that’s what Yeosang wants. It’s what he’s always wanted.
“Sore loser,” Yeosang says.
Wooyoung says something like, “Fuck you,” and then he’s half falling, half climbing over the table. He collapses onto the couch—more urgently, he collapses halfway on top of Yeosang, one leg and one arm pressing Yeosang down, down, down.
"You're a brat," Yeosang whines, but really Wooyoung's weight is perfect in his lap. And wrong. "Get off."
"No," Wooyoung says.
Wooyoung's touchy sober and downright handsy drunk. That's always been true. But this doesn't feel like drunk Wooyoung, not in intensity or sadness or the heat of his skin. Yeosang is just thinking he should put an end to this, separate himself, when Wooyoung pulls himself up, leg flexing over Yeosang's lap. "What—" Yeosang starts.
Wooyoung straddles him. He overshoots it a little, unsteady, and Yeosang reflexively catches his hip. The feeling of his hand on Wooyoung's waist is so good it's almost sickening, worse than the alcohol, and he doesn't pull away. He can't.
Wooyoung tilts their foreheads together. Yeosang can smell the alcohol on his breath, see it in the wild depth of his dark, dark eyes.
"My best fucking friend," Wooyoung says, almost to himself.
"Thanks," Yeosang whispers.
"Say it back."
Yeosang's skin is hot, cold; the sun on the horizon is swelling with red, impending cataclysm.
"You know you are," Yeosang says.
"Yeah," Wooyoung admits.
They’re sharing the air. Wooyoung is drunk, but his eyes are still sharp, and Yeosang’s hand is still on Wooyoung’s waist. The slip of bare skin where Wooyoung’s shirt has ridden up is scalding Yeosang’s palm. He doesn’t know what’s happening; the only thing he knows and has ever known is wanting Wooyoung, and if this goes on any longer he’s going to do something catastrophic, world-ending—
“I’m kinda nauseous,” Wooyoung whispers.
It’s like cold water down Yeosang’s spine. He remembers San, Wooyoung, himself. He tears his hand off Wooyoung’s waist.
“You want to go to bed?” he asks.
Wooyoung nods.
“Need help with the stairs?”
“You can’t help with shit right now,” Wooyoung says, which is probably true. He’s still in Yeosang’s lap and starting to shift around. A delayed jolt of panic strikes Yeosang, and he finally has the wherewithal to shove Wooyoung to the side.
“You asshole,” Wooyoung groans as he collapses into the couch. “If I threw up on you…would have fucking deserved it.”
“You still gonna?” Yeosang asks.
Wooyoung thinks about it for ten, fifteen seconds, his eyes plastered wide open, hands on his stomach.
“No,” he decides.
It takes another few minutes for Wooyoung to haul himself off the couch and up the stairs. Yeosang knows he’s expected to stay over and doesn’t bother getting up; once he’s fairly certain Wooyoung can take care of himself, he lies down.
He’s on San’s couch. He can’t stop thinking about it that way. It’s stupid, so stupid. San’s couch.
Yeosang's drunk.
The ceiling tilts above him, gently enough that it's not really disorienting, and in the funhouse mirror lens he doesn't have to pretend not to think about what he's thinking about.
He's thinking about San. He's thinking: it was supposed to be Wooyoung.
For San, the relationship can’t be like Yeosang’s, that failed, selfish attempt at using someone to get over Wooyoung. San is too good, too kind. It must be real.
How did they meet? In class or at a party or on a dating app or introduced by another faceless mutual friend? It must be an objectively nice thing, to be dating someone as gentle and as strong and as thoughtful as San. Yeosang bets the boyfriend feels lucky. Yeosang bets San's a good partner, attentive and kind. Yeosang bets the sex is good.
None of that's important, though. What is important is that Yeosang had somehow been believing that time stopped for San outside of this town. Logically, he knows that San experiences every day that they do, but he hadn't been able to envision him anywhere else, having a different daily routine and smiling at other people. Yeosang and Wooyoung are riverside, unchanging, but maybe San is not. San is in love with Wooyoung; he has to be, but maybe he could be in love with someone else.
But then—Yeosang should be relieved. He doesn't know what he's feeling, but he's sure it's not that. Something is wrong. This is a good thing, and Yeosang feels bad. Wow! The zombie apocalypse survivors are saying. We just found a cure for zombieism! And the scientists are saying they just figured out how to permanently reverse every effect of global warming. And the sun has decided it likes its life, thank you very much, and no longer intends to turn into a red giant and swallow up the earth. And Yeosang feels nothing but bad, sick to his stomach.
He thinks he’ll have nightmares. Sometimes, being drunk gives him those. But when Yeosang does fall asleep, it’s very, very dreamless.
“You feel any better?” Yeosang asks on Tuesday morning. Tuesday afternoon, really.
Speaking for himself, Yeosang does not. He feels exactly like he did before, that heaviness in his stomach, except now he also has a pounding headache. Wooyoung is sprawled on the armchair, his water bottle tucked to his chest, half-moon circles stamped dark under his eyes. He looks terrible.
“Yeah,” Wooyoung says. “Much better.”
On Wednesday, the sky crashes open like someone’s dropped a wrecking ball through it, dumping rain on everything until the streets grow gutters. Wooyoung and Yeosang, who were both born part-water, part-boy, kick a ball around in front of Yeosang’s house for about half an hour of the deluge.
Wooyoung finally gets fed up with slipping and calls off the game. Yeosang retrieves the filthy ball, and then they sit side-by-side on the front porch, soaked through and thighs pressed together, watching everything flood. Yeosang feels ten years old. He feels older than the river.
“Bet San’s beach is better than this,” Wooyoung says.
“Same amount of water, probably,” Yeosang says. Wooyoung scoffs but doesn’t offer up a response, so Yeosang says, “You think he’s having fun?”
“Bet he’s drinking,” Wooyoung says. “And fucking. So, yeah. Probably.”
For a split second, Yeosang feels comforted that he’s not the only one that’s thinking about San having sex, but then he remembers that Wooyoung is thinking about it because he’s jealous of San’s boyfriend and Yeosang is thinking about it on Wooyoung’s behalf, which is objectively way weirder for Yeosang than it is for Wooyoung. The whole thing is weird. Yeosang hasn’t felt right in days. He has the sudden urge to punt the ball right into the storm.
“Well,” Yeosang says, “At least we’re doing half of that.”
“The less fun half,” Wooyoung sighs. He’s holding his chin in one hand, his elbows on his knees, hair still plastered wet to his skin.
“Nothing stopping you from having sex,” Yeosang says. He not something he’d say under normal circumstances. It’s a little tight-edged, bitter.
Wooyoung’s eyes slide syrup-slow from the water rushing in the street up to Yeosang’s face.
“Guess not,” he says.
hey, San texts them both, exactly one week later. we broke up. i'm fine just letting u guys know.
Yeosang, heart skipping a beat, looks up to where Wooyoung is stirring their lunch over the stove.
"Hey," he says, "Wooyoung. Check your phone."
Wooyoung glances at him, frowning. He leans away from the heat to grab his phone off the top of the fridge where he's left it. Yeosang watches his eyes blow wide and unblinking.
Yeosang reads Wooyoung's text on his own phone: damn spring break that bad?
Yeah actually, San replies.
short ass relationship, Wooyoung adds.
"That's not helpful," Yeosang mutters, but he can't help typing out: You should have come here after all!
Exactly what I realized halfway thru the trip haha, San says.
Yeosang releases a breath. When he looks up, Wooyoung is grinning. "Well, thank God," Wooyoung says.
Yeosang catches himself before he can agree. Instead, he says, "you're burning our food," which is true; the edge of the pan has started to smoke alarmingly.
Wooyoung whips back around to the stove. "Jesus, Yeosang, fire hazard, not funny," he says, fumbling to turn down the heat.
But that's confusing, because Yeosang hadn't been—oh. He had been smiling. He can feel it high in his cheeks.
They’ve been too harsh with San, Yeosang thinks, attempting to reroute himself from whatever backwards train of thought he’s clearly been having. He’ll do some damage control. Wooyoung and his pan clatter around the stove, and Yeosang fires off a text in the group.
We are sorry though, he sends. He doesn’t run it by Wooyoung first; he knows Wooyoung would not co-sign that message.
Believe me, San replies, and then a new message: nothing to be sorry about.
Yeosang vaguely recognizes the sound of the video call ringing in the background. He doesn’t think anything of it until Wooyoung snatches his wrist and presses his phone into Yeosang’s hands. “Here, you hold it,” Wooyoung is saying, and then suddenly Yeosang is holding a phone that’s not his and staring at San.
Yeosang’s heart thumps against his ribs.
“Hi,” he says.
San grins. “Hey,” he says. He’s in a black t-shirt. His hair looks soft, maybe a little longer than it used to be. Yeosang has the sudden, fearful thought that he’d started to forget what San looked like, or at least he’d forgotten how warm his eyes were, even through the pixelated screen. San does not seem similarly perturbed by seeing Yeosang’s face. “What are you guys up to?”
“Nothing,” Wooyoung says, airy. “Same as always.”
“Sounds nice,” San says.
“No, it doesn’t,” Wooyoung says. “When do your exams end?” Straight to the point, Wooyoung is.
Yeosang’s never seen San from the angle he’s holding the phone at, slightly underneath his jaw. It shouldn’t be a flattering angle. He’s managing to make it look alright.
“The eleventh,” San says.
“Okay, so we’ll see you on the twelfth,” Wooyoung says.
San smiles, bemused. “I have to move out,” he says. “Probably can’t turn it around in one night.”
“The thirteenth,” Wooyoung counters.
Yeosang is about to try to signal for Wooyoung to stop. San doesn’t want to come, after all; he has another boyfriend, maybe, or he’s going somewhere better than here, or—
“How about the fourteenth?” San says through a laugh. “Gives me a chance to get organized.”
“I suppose that’s fine,” Wooyoung says haughtily.
“Yeosang?” San asks. “Okay by you?”
Yeosang wasn’t aware he had a say in the matter. What’s he going to say, anyway? No?
“Yeah,” Yeosang says. “Okay by me.”
It’s like the first time Yeosang saw him: his soft clothes, the headphones around his neck, his smile and his suitcase.
A few emotions flicker up in Yeosang’s chest: assuredness that San still likes them, excitement that they have so much longer than they did in the winter, annoyance at that nameless, faceless boyfriend for stealing their spring—
“Who’s driving?” San asks during their quick hug, rubbing a palm over Yeosang’s shoulders.
“You want to, don’t you?” Yeosang asks, and San holds his hands out for the keys.
Wooyoung decides they’re going out.
San insists on being the designated driver. Wooyoung tries to tell him that that’s stupid, that he wants San to have a good time, but San laughs and says he just wants to hang out with them. He says it like that, hang out. If he were anyone else, it would sound like he’s going along to get along. But he’s San, so Yeosang believes him.
Wooyoung ushers them towards a crammed little table in the back of the bar where Yeosang had his first legal drink. Yeosang and San end up in the booth, and Wooyoung ends up in the chair across from them, his legs propped against San’s and his elbows folded on the tabletop.
They drink. San tells them about his life and asks them about theirs, carefully redacting any mention of romance, and neither of them press him on it. It’s warm and very dark, and there’s a faint haze on the air from the cigar-smokers up at the front, and it makes San’s voice more tactile, like Yeosang’s hearing is compensating for the low light. San’s nice to listen to.
Yeosang’s head is pleasantly fuzzy. It might be a little more than fuzzy.
"Yeosang and I need another round," Wooyoung announces, grandiose, and he pushes out of his chair and saunters off towards the bar and Yeosang is both watching him and knowing that San is also watching him and it doesn’t feel so bad, now, because at least San is here. At least they’re together, watching Wooyoung.
San slides closer to Yeosang in the booth. Last summer, he wouldn’t have done that. Last summer, Yeosang wouldn’t have let his head fall onto San’s shoulder. He does now.
“Tired?” San asks.
“Yeah,” Yeosang sighs. “I’m an old man.”
“No,” San says. “You’re young and spry.” He tilts his head onto Yeosang’s. The liquor hits, warming Yeosang’s chest, rippling down.
“Old,” Yeosang argues. “Tired, old drunk.”
He feels San’s laughter through the curve of San’s cheek, pressed against his crown.
"It's good to see you," San says.
He's not saying it for Wooyoung's benefit. Wooyoung’s not there.
"You too," Yeosang says quietly.
He pulls himself up off of San's shoulder, wanting to see his eyes when he asks the question. He's not sure what question it'll be yet. Too many options: are you happy here or do you still love Wooyoung, because I know that once you must have or maybe who was that boy, and how did it start, and how did it end?
"San," Yeosang starts.
But when he meets San's eyes, all he thinks is, This is it.
San is here, with no boyfriend tying him to some sanitized, picture-perfect beach. Looking at him feels like standing in the water. It feels like looking at Wooyoung. Yeosang knows he's staring. It's just—the relief. He wasn't expecting it.
"You never go down," Yeosang ends up saying.
San's perfect face distorts. "What?"
"You never go down," Yeosang repeats. It's so simple in his head, and so complicated to explain out loud. Yeosang doesn't fight, San doesn't go down. Wooyoung goes down fighting. That makes three, but in a very four kind of way. It's like a pyramid, which is triangle and also square. Or like a delta, which is triangle and four and river all at once. Doesn't San get it? It's San, Wooyoung, Yeosang, sign on the highway: THE END IS NEAR.
It makes perfect sense to Yeosang, anyway.
"You drunk?" San asks.
“Probably," Yeosang says.
San laughs. He's got a nice laugh. It makes Yeosang warm. "Maybe I'll tell Wooyoung to cut you off," he says, and they both turn at the same time to look for him.
Yeosang picks him out first, thanks to years of practice. But—
“Go, go," Yeosang says, urgent, grabbing San's thigh, and it takes San only a moment to catch up, and then they're both moving, the table rattling as they stumble to their feet.
They're too late, though.
Wooyoung is drunk and stubborn and has never, not once in his life, gone down without a fight. He's already swung by the time they get to the bar. Twice, actually, but he doesn't land the second one.
The last thing Yeosang sees before San shoves himself between the stools is the man's lips shaping the word again. And then the world narrows to San shouting stop, Wooyoung, stop it and Wooyoung laughing all crooked and the barest brush of red on his knuckles, and someone else is yelling and Yeosang doesn't care who, doesn't care about anything but the piece of his soul in San's arms, wild-eyed and hurting.
San is so gentle that Yeosang forgets what he's capable of. The lock of his arms around Wooyoung's chest looks entirely unyielding, Wooyoung unable to do much of anything but snarl. "Outside," Yeosang tells him through the panic thick in his throat, and San listens. He wrestles Wooyoung backwards towards the door.
Yeosang doesn't fight. He doesn't know how. So what he does instead is closes their tab, hands shaking so badly that his card clatters to the bartop twice. The man is saying something to him. Yeosang doesn't look and doesn't hear it.
He registers that it’s gone quiet, that San’s successfully wrested Wooyoung outside. He forces himself to go through the motions, not to shake or start running. He ducks his head when he leaves the bar and raises it as soon as he’s outside, scanning the parking lot in slight desperation.
There they are, their faces contorted: Wooyoung’s angry, San’s frantic. When the door falls shut behind Yeosang, locking him out into the night, they both look directly at him.
This is it, Yeosang's thinking. This is it. The end of the world.
"Stop, Wooyoung, please," San is begging. It's a losing battle for Wooyoung. That's the thing, though, about Wooyoung. He doesn't care.
"Let go of me, asshole," Wooyoung says.
"He's not worth it," San says.
"Don't you fucking think I know that?" Wooyoung snaps, and in his struggle, he finds Yeosang's eyes again in the darkness. "Tell him to let me go."
"No," Yeosang says quietly, and so San doesn't.
Yeosang steps forwards and pries Wooyoung's fists open. He rests their clasped hands on San's forearm. It all slides together, San holding Wooyoung, Wooyoung clinging to Yeosang, Yeosang leaning on San.
"Wooyoung," Yeosang says. "Enough."
There's a beat.
"Whatever," Wooyoung says, and he slumps back into San's chest.
San exhales, long and slow. He and Yeosang exchange a lingering glance over Wooyoung's dark head. Yeosang finds a surprising mirror in San's clear-water gaze. They're both thinking about Wooyoung. Wooyoung, and—
They have to both be thinking it, don't they? They both know.
"Yeosang," San whispers, and Yeosang feels it, feels it, feels it: this is it.
Yeosang lets go of Wooyoung's hands. "Let's go home," he says.
It takes San a few more seconds to be convinced they're in the clear, but when he is, he releases Wooyoung and shoves a hand into his pocket for Wooyoung's keys. They cross the parking lot. Wooyoung stares at the pavement the entire time, but he doesn't complain when Yeosang herds him into the backseat and then follows behind him.
"Good?" San asks, and Wooyoung forgoes his seatbelt to put his head on Yeosang's thigh, his body curled at an odd angle across the seats.
"Yeah," Yeosang says.
San fights the rustle of the engine, creeping out of the parking lot—he's trying not to jostle Wooyoung, his hands careful at ten and two.
The drive to Wooyoung's house is fifteen minutes long. In Yeosang’s vision, the streetlights illuminate each of them in turn: the sharp cut of San's eye and jaw, Wooyoung in his lap, San, Wooyoung, San. Wooyoung's brow furrows when they hang a hard turn onto his street. He curls deeper into Yeosang; Yeosang strokes his long hair.
San parks. He glances at Yeosang in the rearview. "You two, uh," he says. "Take your time. I'll go inside." He leaves the keys in the cupholder.
Once he's gone, Yeosang whispers, "We're here."
"I know," Wooyoung says, his voice still a little cold.
San is hovering at the bottom of the stairs like he expects to have to carry Wooyoung up to his room. "I'm fine," Wooyoung says when they both reach out for him as he heads up. "Seriously," he says. "I'm fine. Not even drunk."
"If you need—" San starts.
"Like you guys are my fucking parents, or something," Wooyoung mutters as he rounds the landing, no heat in it at all.
Yeosang looks at San. Then he looks past San: the couch molded to the shape of San's body, the the two large suitcases lying messily against the wall.
"Stay," San whispers.
It ricochets in Yeosang's chest. "It's fine," he says, not looking back to San's face because he can't. "Just drive me home."
San does. Yeosang knew he would.
The world is ending.
Yeosang's known it since the second he stepped outside of that bar. The wet tension of it makes him uneasy. It's so thick he thinks could bite down into it, his jaw filling with water. He rolls the windows of Wooyoung's car down in the hopes that the air will lift it off his skin, and it doesn't. He doesn't look at San in the driver’s seat.
Yeosang knows what that man said to Wooyoung; the vitriol was clear even if the words were inaudible from so far away. The part that’s bothering him—because Yeosang is a terrible, selfish friend—isn’t so much that it was said, but that he doesn’t know who it was about.
San and Wooyoung are transparent, their desire for each other written all over their bodies. It could have been that. Yeosang has forever been afraid that the way he looks at Wooyoung is unmistakeable. It could have been that.
But when Wooyoung had gotten up, when it had actually happened, it had been Yeosang’s head on San’s shoulder. It had been San smiling at him with their faces close together. It had been—
Terrible. Selfish.
Yeosang drums a fist on the door handle, desperate for something to do with the energy inside him. The apocalypse, when it arrives, will hurt. Yeosang can feel himself tensing in preparation for the blow.
San drops him at the short driveway of his childhood home.
"Thanks for helping," San says. The car is dark and warm and quiet. Even the bugs are hushed, for once, listening. No light, no sound, no rush of the river.
"Thanks for driving," Yeosang says.
When Yeosang gets out of the car, he sits on his front step. He waits for San to execute a precise—and noisy—three-point turn. The six-minute wait feels like a decade. It’s probably seven minutes, if Yeosang factors in the time for San to leave the car and reach the living room. Sitting on that sanded wooden step, Yeosang counts his breaths until his phone finally buzzes, loud against a background of nothing at all.
San: think he's in bed! thanks again see u in the morning?
No worries see you tmrw, Yeosang replies.
He locks his phone. He looks out over the grass, the street. He sees San in the booth. He sees Wooyoung at the bar. He sees—
"Fuck," Yeosang whispers.
You will be wrong the first time, but the first time Yeosang thought the world was going to end, it was before he’d understood anything about it. It was before Wooyoung broke his wrist. It was before everything, except for the river.
In the grand scheme of this town, it wasn’t even a particularly bad storm. But it was the first one that Yeosang can remember having lightning and thunder and wind that actually howled, like a wild animal. At the time, he was so young that he hadn’t understood how lightning worked, or that the sound of thunder couldn’t touch you. He’d wedged himself behind the couch and cried; he had thought the whole town was going to be swept away clean.
Not even an hour after the rain stopped, Wooyoung’s parents had brought him over for their playdate. Yeosang had been almost ashamed to see him. Wooyoung, born headfirst into the world, clearly had not spent the day crying behind furniture. There’d been light in his eyes. It was the first time Yeosang had realized how different they were, but also the first time he had realized, in his young and limited perspective, what Wooyoung would become to him. It’s one of Yeosang’s most formative childhood memories: the storm that should have ended everything, and Wooyoung on the other side of it.
You will be wrong the first time. Yeosang was. But this is how he knows what will survive.
"So," Yeosang says the next morning, because San is still easy to talk to despite the fact that he is now the black-hole center of something Yeosang is refusing to think about. "How was your semester?"
Wooyoung's little kitchen can accommodate two people moving around at once, or maybe three if you all really like each other. San and Yeosang are alone, and they aren’t moving, but it still feels cramped. San sits at one of the rickety barstools, absently blowing steam off of his microwaved bowl. Yeosang leans on the counter opposite him and nudges his cereal around. The morning sun refracts off the dull granite between them.
San hums. "Mostly good," he says. "But this year’s been boring. You know, since Wooyoung left.”
"Yeah," Yeosang says. "I bet."
They eat, quiet, and eventually Wooyoung comes into the kitchen just as quietly. He doesn't seem upset anymore. He looks at them both coolly, like a cat, something smug in it.
"Morning, sunshine," San says.
"Hey," Wooyoung says. "You guys are up early."
"So are you," Yeosang says. “What do you remember?”
"It's a little blurry," Wooyoung admits. "Did you drag me out of there?"
"Yeah, you weren't very cooperative," San says, tracking Wooyoung's path around the countertop and to Yeosang's side.
"Wasn't I?"
"Don't act surprised," Yeosang tells him.
Wooyoung dips a clean spoon into Yeosang's bowl. Yeosang lets him. "Sorry," Wooyoung says. He doesn't look at either of them, just shoves Yeosang's cereal into his mouth.
"It won't happen again," San shrugs.
"Wouldn’t count on that," Yeosang says, grinning despite it all. "He's good at getting into trouble.”
Wooyoung’s eyes slide up to San, then Yeosang.
"Yeah," he says. "I like trouble.”
You might be wrong a few times. The apocalypse, as you know, staggers.
Yeosang wants to think that things go back to normal, but it’s not true. Wooyoung, who’s usually the first to shake off everything, is changed. Some of that wildness from the bar has stayed in his eyes for days and days, and it flashes now when he rolls over on the couch to face the two of them.
"Most embarrassing sex you've ever had," he says. "Go."
"Does getting walked in on count?" San asks.
"Eh," Wooyoung says.
Yeosang knows Wooyoung's games. "Just tell us what you want to tell us," he says.
Wooyoung laughs. "He came in my eye," he says. "I started crying and, like, not in the sexy way. Sorta hard to come back from."
Yeosang's heard this story before. He has also long-since realized the best way to get through Wooyoung's sex stories is to just pretend they all happened to robots, instead, and that the robots all have very ugly faces and inhuman bodies. Now, he concentrates very hard on visualizing the robot sex so as to avoid the minefield of visualizing Wooyoung having sex.
"Ouch," San says absently.
"Anyone else?" Wooyoung asks.
Yeosang's never had anything humiliating happen to him, he doesn't think. Sure, he's had awkward and mediocre sex, but nothing truly bad.
He and San seem to be doing the same calculation in their head. Wooyoung rolls his eyes.
"You guys suck," he says. "Next question. Would you fuck your clone?"
"No," San says. "Would you?"
"Obviously," Wooyoung says.
Robots, Yeosang thinks forcefully. Robots, cold metal, tin cans, stupid light-up buttons that don't do anything—
"Yeosang?" Wooyoung asks. "Your clone can be a girl, if you want."
"I don't think that's how clones work," Yeosang says.
"But it's not gay if it's your clone," San offers helpfully.
Wooyoung squints at him. “I think it is," he says.
Yeosang doesn't really want to think about any of the ramifications of this. "Depends," he decides, hasty.
"On?"
"I don't know," Yeosang says. "Like, how I'm feeling in the moment."
Wooyoung says, "Seriously?"
"Why am I the only person who wouldn't fuck their clone?" San asks. Yeosang has to wonder the same thing. He doesn't know why he didn't shut that down. He was thinking too hard about the robots, maybe.
“You’re so vanilla, San," Wooyoung teases.
San frowns from where he’s tucked into himself at Wooyoung’s feet. "How come you're not saying that to Yeosang?"
Wooyoung's tongue flashes out between his teeth, his eyes almost feline with mirth. "Because I know all of Yeosang's dirty little secrets," he says, sarcastic.
No, Yeosang thinks, not everything has returned to normal. Because that’s not something Wooyoung would have said a month or a year ago, and certainly not in front of anyone else. And a month or a year ago, Yeosang would have responded to that with wide eyes and maybe a long, mortified silence, just for good measure.
Instead, he looks back at Wooyoung and says, “Not all of ‘em.”
"Gonna rain," San says, offhand.
Wooyoung licks his lips. "Gonna pour," he corrects.
Wooyoung's right, of course. He and Yeosang can both forecast rain by touch in this town, can taste the swell of the river before it spills over.
When Wooyoung directs them all to the car, San doesn't question it, getting in the driver's seat even as the first drizzle sighs over the windshield. With perfect patience, he lets Wooyoung backseat-drive them off the main road.
Yeosang knows where they're going.
It’s another place he and Wooyoung had played as kids, but Yeosang doesn’t think anyone else from their childhood goes back to it so often, or at all.
It’ll rain, or it’ll be sunny, and Wooyoung will get this look in his eye that means he wants to be closer to the sky and they’ll drive out together and they won’t talk. And that’s when Yeosang feels the most like himself, when he feels like Wooyoung doesn’t belong to anyone else, like the apocalypse really has come and this is it, the end of the world, the river, Wooyoung and Yeosang all that’s left.
It’s one of the last places untouched by San. So what, though? He’s already tasted, seen, felt everything else. It doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore.
San pulls off the road, and Wooyoung slams the back door shut when he climbs out of the car. It doesn't catch; he slams it harder. In just this amount of time, his shirt darkens with water. His hair is getting a little too long—still pretty, just so long, and now it starts to fall jagged and flat around his neck and to drip down his jaw. Yeosang tilts his head to the gray sky.
"Oh, God," San says, wobbling around the front of the car, bare feet an inch deep into a patch of mud.
Wooyoung laughs. Yeosang laughs. They were both born wet and filthy.
Wooyoung is already scaling the small rise, hands and feet pressed gently into the earth for purchase as he slips upwards, so it's Yeosang who grabs San's hand and guides him in Wooyoung's footsteps. San laces their fingers together tight enough to hurt. Their skin slides, wet wrists and palms, and Yeosang laughs again, freshwater in his mouth.
San's eyes are on the ground, but Yeosang raises his to the sky. Through the hazy sheet of rain, Wooyoung is standing at the crest of the rise. He watches them hike towards him hand in hand, San putting his weight on Yeosang to keep from slipping.
When they reach Wooyoung, he’s sitting. Yeosang crouches beside him. San half-falls to the ground, throwing an arm around Yeosang's shoulder to catch himself. The temperature difference between Yeosang's soaked t-shirt and the radiative heat of San's body sends a shiver down Yeosang's spine. He huffs a laugh and steadies San with a hand to the side to keep them from falling on top of each other.
“Are we gonna get sick?” San asks.
Wooyoung is already sprawled on the grass. “No, it's good for you," he says. They all have to yell a little bit to hear over the downpour. "For your immune system."
Yeosang fully sits next to Wooyoung, arms around his knees. It’s nice to have his face turned to the sky. He lies back. He doesn’t mind being dirty so much when Wooyoung is doing it, too, and anyway it’s only mud, only water and earth.
It’s just easy to be next to Wooyoung like this. At the end of the world, assuming the rain hasn't turned into acid, he and Wooyoung will do this often. Every time it rains, they'll be here.
San copies Yeosang. It’s sort of flattering. Yeosang watches him tilt his head back and wince when his shoulders hit the ground, but he settles down quickly.
Yeosang, without really meaning to, keeps watching him.
San shouldn't want to come back to this town again and again. Not even for Wooyoung. San shouldn't want to lie in their mud and their rain and let himself fill up with both, and Yeosang should be embarrassed to let San see them like this, wet and wriggling in the water. You have to be born riverside, and San wasn't. Here he is anyway. He catches Yeosang staring at him, and his face breaks into a dazzling smile.
Thunder rolls far, far away.
San doesn’t break eye contact, so Yeosang informs him, “We’re meditating.”
“Becoming one with the earth,” San says, eyes still shining, black hair starting to drip over his temple, hands folded on his stomach.
“Yeah,” Yeosang says. “Pretty much that.”
San’s gaze is getting to be a bit intense. Yeosang closes his eyes. Even though San was joking, it’s not a bad idea, becoming one with the mud and the earth and the water. Yeosang tries his best to do so.
It’s hard, though, with Wooyoung singing what must be a terrible sea shanty on his left—Yeosang has no idea where he learns these things—and San giggling on his right. Eventually San says be quiet, Wooyoung, he’s meditating, very insincerely, after which both Wooyoung’s singing and San’s laughter increase in volume.
“Joke’s on you,” Yeosang says, turning so that San can hear him over Wooyoung, who’s basically just yelling. “I find this very relaxing.”
Before he can successfully melt away his physical form, the rain lets up. Yeosang knew it wouldn’t be long, and Wooyoung probably knew, too. It fades into a drizzle and then a mist, and Yeosang sits up, hands propped in the earth.
“Time to go home?” San asks.
"We're not going home," Wooyoung says. They both look at him. In the grey, diffuse light, his skin glows just so; he's an angel cast down hard into the river. "Wanna go up to the city. We can spend the night, make a whole day of it.”
It’s unexpected, but it gives Yeosang a moment’s pause.
It's a good, inexpensive trip. Yeosang and Wooyoung waste a day there every once in a while. Yeosang's taken a girl there once—everyone has. It's a tactic a lot of the younger parents use when the kids get too antsy in the summer: burn their energy with all the new sights and sounds, walk the river, buy them ice creams, that sort of thing. Yeosang’s surprised they haven’t taken San there yet, when he thinks about it. Maybe Wooyoung hadn’t wanted San to see brighter pastures, like he thought San might try to run away while he still could.
"Our clothes," San says.
"Dollar store," Wooyoung says.
"A shower," Yeosang says.
"Motel." Wooyoung is grinning in earnest, now. "Come on, I wanna show San a good time."
"Your car?" San tries, gesturing at their bodies.
"My car," Wooyoung says, clearly offended, "can handle it."
It's true. Wooyoung bought that car when it was already filthy and loud, and that's the kind of boy it takes care of best. Yeosang doesn't feel any shame about the dirt when he climbs into the passenger seat.
It's not right to have San driving when he doesn't know where they're going, but he drives anyway. It's not right that Wooyoung should be in the backseat of his own car, but there he is; stretched out across both seats. They have to roll down the windows because they all smell like dirt, and Yeosang sticks his head out to greet the clean, damp air.
They hit the mostly-empty freeway. In the side mirror, Yeosang can see Wooyoung leaning his head back against the open window frame, eyes closed and long hair whipping across his face and skin all smudged. At Yeosang's side, San has turned on music and is humming along to it. He's got a nice voice. Sweet. The air is heavy in Yeosang's throat, everything newly green.
After a while, San sees a promising exit sign, and they meander around in the car looking for a change of clothes. They nominate Wooyoung to shop: his hair and shirt and gym shorts and shoes were already black before the mud. His wardrobe is dependable that way. Wooyoung scrubs his skin down roughly in the parking lot and they all watch the dry dirt flake onto the asphalt. With his long hair pulled back, he looks almost presentable.
"Let's just hope nobody smells you," San says.
"They've smelled worse in there," Wooyoung says, easy. Yeosang enviously thinks that maybe Wooyoung has never been embarrassed about anything in his life.
While Wooyoung shops, San makes Yeosang pull out his phone and show off his music library. He cups Yeosang's big hands in his smaller ones, holding them steady to read off of Yeosang's playlists. "Put something on," he says. “Whatever, I’m not picky.”
So Yeosang puts on something warm and glittering and then Wooyoung emerges, triumphant and dirty, from the sliding doors of the store in front of them. They both squint at him, trying to see what he has, and the setting sun breaks under the clouds in front of them and washes everything bright orange, refracting fire: Wooyoung's silhouette, the windshield glare, the clean patches of San's skin. San tugs down both of their sun shades. "Pretty," San says, and Yeosang doesn't ask what he means.
What Wooyoung has is plain black t-shirts, the really cheap ones that come in a plastic pack, and similarly poorly-made gym shorts and boxers and socks. "Something for the lady," he says, tossing a pack of sour candies at Yeosang.
"Nothing for me?" San asks.
"Yeosang will share," Wooyoung tells him.
San gets them back to the freeway, his jaw flexing around the candy. They'll be on the road for another hour or so. It's still warm out even after the sun goes down, the wind whipping through the car as San settles in to an easy pace.
Yeosang watches the trees and towns go by and thinks that this could have been a day trip—leave at dawn, return at dusk. Except it couldn't have been, because Yeosang can feel the way that the rain washed them down that rise and all the way out to the road. They couldn't have gone home. It wouldn't have been right.
"There's a motel, like, two exits from here," Wooyoung announces after some time. "Really cheap. But one of you has to pay, since I got clothes and gas."
"I can get the rooms," San says graciously.
"Plural?" Wooyoung asks. San shoots him a questioning look in the rearview mirror. "We don't need two rooms," Wooyoung dismisses.
"I mean, there's three of us," San says.
"They're not gonna ask questions. They're gonna assume you and Yeosang are spicing up the relationship," Wooyoung says. "Or that we're cheap, but probably the first thing."
San's eyebrows draw together. "Why—"
"Because I'm the youngest and the hottest," Wooyoung says.
"Not what I was gonna ask," San says, the corner of his mouth twitching up.
"You're not even really younger than us," Yeosang says.
Wooyoung laughs. "Notice how you didn't say I wasn't hotter than you."
"Thought that was obvious," Yeosang says, and then, "Ow," when Wooyoung scuffs him on the back of the head.
"Settle this," Wooyoung says, suddenly facing the other way. "Who's the hottest?"
"Yeah, San," Yeosang says. His face aches with his grin. "You decide."
San takes one hand off the wheel, holding it up in mock appeasement. "Woah, hang on," he says.
"Be honest about it," Wooyoung advises.
"I think," San starts, "since I'm dating Yeosang in this scenario—"
"You're married," Wooyoung corrects.
"Since I'm married to Yeosang in this scenario, I have to say Yeosang," San says.
Wooyoung scowls. "It'll be me eventually, though," he puts in. "You know, when you can't stop thinking about the sensual night of lovemaking you shared with your young, hot paramour."
"Lovemaking?" Yeosang asks incredulously.
"Yeosang," San says. "Final answer."
Wooyoung claps Yeosang's shoulder. "Enjoy your pity win."
"I will, thanks," Yeosang says, and he means it, his chest warm.
And then Wooyoung yelps, "Shit, San, you missed the fucking exit," which is definitely Yeosang's fault, but he can't find it in himself to be sorry, not with how light he feels all over. San groans and says at least we settled that, and Wooyoung says no, I don't think we did, and Yeosang is still laughing, and the whole world is wet and green and alive.
Wooyoung calls dibs on the first shower while they're still in the car. San calls dibs on the second shower right afterwards. Sometime during San's turn, Yeosang starts to wish he was a little more aggressive in fighting for an earlier pick. He's perched on the radiator, skin grimy, while Wooyoung is already curled under the cheap bleached sheets of one of the two beds, his hair leaving a wet patch on the pillow.
When the water shuts off, Yeosang waits a polite thirty seconds before he knocks on the door. He doesn't care if San's indecent, he just can't stand feeling sticky anymore. "You done?" Yeosang calls.
"Yeah, you're good," San answers.
Yeosang opens the door. The humidity hits him first, steam curling to meet him, and then he sees San.
"Oh," Yeosang says, "Sorry. Hey."
San's decent, but only just.
His broad, bare shoulders taper to a waist Yeosang could practically fit his hands around. The planes of his body are sharp, but all the angles that put them together are soft, somehow. He's running his hands through his wet hair, flicking droplets onto the floor, towel tied low on that impossible waist and water still dripping towards his navel. It's like lifting the hood on a car and seeing all the pieces that make up the engine: there's all the muscle and bone that moves San around the world, the mountain melt that feeds the river.
Had Yeosang actually struggled, once upon a time, to decide whether or not San was hot? That's laughable. It doesn't matter that he's not Wooyoung—San's objectively hot. Alarmingly so.
"Hi, honey," San says when their eyes meet in the fogged-up mirror. "He's pretty, isn't he?"
Yeosang freezes, thoughts stuttering to a halt, until he sees the broad grin on San's face and hears the dripping sarcasm in his voice and remembers the ridiculous lie: Yeosang and San, duly wedded, inviting Wooyoung to this shitty hotel for cheap sex.
"You're weird," Yeosang says, trying to quiet his pulse.
San laughs and makes for the door. "I'll go get him ready for you," he says, and the floor tilts under Yeosang's feet. San continues, "Sorry, he really put the idea in my head," and he's still laughing like he thinks it's funny or ridiculous or gross.
Yeosang should think it's funny or ridiculous or gross. He grew up with Wooyoung; he should be able to take a sex joke.
He showers cold.
When he emerges, brand new shirt tugged down over his shoulders, Wooyoung and San are both in the same bed.
Before Yeosang can freeze up about it, Wooyoung says, “Come sit. We’re gonna watch something.”
“Oh, sure,” Yeosang says, and he goes to sit.
Wooyoung kicks a leg aimlessly at him. “Come sit here, idiot. I made San tilt the TV over this way.”
Well, that’s true; the television is at an angle that’s almost unwatchable from the empty bed. “There enough room?” Yeosang asks. He’s delaying the inevitable and he knows it.
"We don't bite," Wooyoung says.
Yeosang makes for the bed and silently thanks the universe that San and his extraordinarily bare chest are not in the middle.
There is not enough room. The beds are decidedly fulls, not queens. Yeosang settles himself down with only one ow, fuck you from Wooyoung; San gets elbowed. They all smell the same, the cheap fresh scent of the generic brand shampoo in the bathroom. And with Wooyoung between them like this, all Yeosang can hear is he's pretty, isn't he?
"What are we watching?" Yeosang asks.
Wooyoung's body heat seeps through the thin sheet between them. "Nothing yet," he says. "San hates everything."
"Your options suck," San says. They flick through the last of the channels. Wooyoung is interested in a horror movie; San keeps asking to stop at something less rough. A bit of brattiness creeps into Wooyoung's voice.
"Okay, enough," Yeosang says, and tries to snatch the remote out of Wooyoung's hand.
Wooyoung's fast, though. He yanks his arm away, accidentally elbowing San again in the process, so San joins the fight. Yeosang and San are both stronger than Wooyoung, so it isn't fair for them to work together, but Wooyoung makes up for it by threatening to scream. San claps a hand over his mouth; Wooyoung licks it, and San is the one who yells. In the confusion, Yeosang comes up with the remote.
"Boo," Wooyoung says, but he's laughing, a little winded.
Yeosang puts on a middle ground, some detective show. He can still feel the solid, live-wire line of Wooyoung's body where they'd pressed together in the scuffle. And, briefly under Yeosang's fingers as Wooyoung had twisted away, the hard flex of San's bare stomach. The downpour has done something to his skin, he thinks, heightened all his sensations. He's too hot. Sensitive to the touch. He tries to back slightly away from Wooyoung, but he doesn't have anywhere to go.
It gets quiet. San and Wooyoung seem content with his choice. Yeosang doesn't look at them. In the show, two of the detectives get into a highly unrealistic gunfight, and Yeosang thinks about warm-bloodedness. When he's done thinking and the detectives are done shooting and the case is solved and the lead has gone home to his loving, faceless wife, Yeosang finally looks to his left.
They're both asleep.
Their faces are both turned towards Yeosang, soft and expressionless, San's head tipped onto Wooyoung's shoulder. Yeosang is relieved that he doesn't have to pretend not to stare at them, to take in the familiarity of Wooyoung's even breathing and the revelation of San's. They look like they belong together, a matched set, dark hair and peaceful brows.
If Yeosang was a better person, he'd crawl out of this bed and into the other one. He'd leave them like this, warm and sleep-soft, and he'd let them wake up wrapped in each other's arms.
Yeosang is not a better person. This is well-established. He leaves the television on to make it look like an accident, and he stares at them for a long time. The electric current from the television. Wooyoung's lithe frame cradled by the sheets. Yeosang's too-hot skin. San, the silhouette of his bare shoulder.
Eventually, Yeosang closes his eyes.
When the door bangs open, Yeosang jolts out of sleep and up onto an arm, heart racing. Below him, San startles as well.
Oh, Yeosang thinks.
The way he's sitting, the way San would have been lying, the way their calves are still thrown over each other, it's obvious that San was tucked into Yeosang's body in sleep. There's an empty warmth along Yeosang's chest where San must have been pressed against him. Their eyes meet, just for an instant, and then—
"Breakfast," Wooyoung is saying. "Up." In his arms he's balancing a coffee holder and a few white paper bags. As all three of them pretend San isn’t extricating himself out of Yeosang’s personal space, Wooyoung distributes the bags across the bed.
San peers into his and raises an eyebrow.
"I didn't say it was nutritious," Wooyoung shrugs.
But it is good, at least in the way that greasy, cheap breakfasts always are. They eat quickly.
It’s a good day to be outside. They get back in the car—Wooyoung says, I’ll clean it tomorrow, just sit—and drive into civilization. In the daylight, Yeosang's shorts and San's shirt are too tight, and every piece of Wooyoung’s outfit is too big. When they all disembark, Yeosang feels like he’s in high school again, the sun on his face and feet on the ground and a driver’s license making the world big.
They walk along the riverside and watch the boats. It's hard to believe this is still their river, blue and commercial as it is here. They wander down to the park that’s too small to really be a park and join a pair of boys about their age in kicking a soccer ball around. Wooyoung offers to sit out so they can have an even number of players, and San and Yeosang and the other boys play a two-on-two, goals marked by the edges of the grass.
It’s fun to play against San. He’s a good-spirited opponent and, for the first time, not gentle with Yeosang. He crashes their shoulders and elbows and hips together to steal away the ball. Every time he does, Yeosang remembers the phantom heat of San’s body, pressed against his in the soft morning. It makes the game feel like flying. He thinks Wooyoung might be taking photos.
“You’re faster than you look,” San pants at him, beaming.
“I know,” Yeosang says, and San hip-checks him again.
They switch teams, and it’s even better to play with San. It’s a game within a game, looking up, turning, trying to find San’s silhouette in motion across the field. They score a few goals back to back, and San talks him into a chest bump that makes both of them lose their balance.
San is the first to stumble to his feet. “Bet it looked cool, though,” he says, reaching out a hand to help Yeosang off the ground.
“I’m sure it did,” Yeosang says dryly, cheeks aching.
When they’re finished, they trudge across the grass back towards Wooyoung, both sweating. “Smile,” Wooyoung says—so he was taking photos—and San puts a hand on Yeosang’s back for the camera.
"Closer," Wooyoung demands, and so Yeosang presses into San's side. He thinks something about the way San feels is different, recognizable, like maybe he really did fill up with the river and the rain yesterday.
By the time they hit the road again, they have another meal and a few more hours of walking behind them. Yeosang’s whole body aches in the way that means he’ll sleep well. Wooyoung insists on having aux from the backseat, and neither of them fight him for it.
“Nice out,” Wooyoung comments when they put the windows down.
“This was a good idea, Wooyoung,” San says. Yeosang had been about to say something similar; he’d known Wooyoung wanted to hear it.
“Thanks,” Wooyoung says, mild but pleased, and Yeosang rests his temple against the window frame and thinks of nothing but air.
San does get sick. It’s a three day thing, harmless, but it means he spends most of those three days taking fever reducers on Wooyoung’s couch.
“So much for my immune system,” he says on the second day.
Yeosang, from the rickety chair where he’s carrying San through the early stages of his favorite game, shoots him a grin.
“No, he was right,” Yeosang says. “This is making it stronger.”
San recovers. The weather stays gloomy, and Wooyoung says, you poor delicate thing; let’s keep you inside. It works out in San’s favor in the end, because Wooyoung lets him choose their next movie.
Yeosang’s been waiting for them to sit down, and in the meantime, he’s stretched his whole body over San’s couch. The day so far has been golden even though the sky’s been gray, warm from morning to evening. They’ve done a lot of nothing. Yeosang doesn’t want it to end.
San pulls up the movie and ambles to the couch. "Scoot," he says, and Yeosang forces himself to move down, legs dangling off the armrest. San sits, his thigh so close that the cushion dips underneath Yeosang's head. Suddenly, Yeosang’s looking at San’s face upside down, the underside of his jaw, the shadows of his eye sockets.
“Hi,” Yeosang says, and then wonders why he said it.
San looks down. He grins. “Hey.”
"Okay," Wooyoung says, "and where am I supposed to sit?"
"There's a chair right there," Yeosang says.
"Yeah, with a shit view," Wooyoung says, and then he's scooping Yeosang's head off the couch, his fingertips all pressure points along Yeosang's crown. He sits himself down right between them, putting Yeosang not-so-gently back on his thigh. And now they're all connected, Wooyoung snug under San's arm and Yeosang's head in Wooyoung's lap.
It’s that fast. Yeosang’s blood goes hot, cold, hot again.
It’s nothing like the motel bed. For starters, they’re all conscious, Yeosang thinks wildly. But the woman on screen has started speaking, her voice harried, the click of her heels enhanced in post-production. Yeosang could sit up and break the delicate spell they’re all under. He could do it quietly. He could sit up and leave San and Wooyoung together, touching. He could sit up; he doesn’t want to.
He doesn’t want to.
Yeosang doesn’t even try to distract himself with the movie. He focuses on keeping his muscles still, on monitoring them one at a time—Wooyoung breathing evenly underneath him, San’s arm loose around Wooyoung’s shoulders, every minuscule adjustment he has to make to stay comfortable. It’s either a very short movie, or Yeosang’s brain is running at triple speed. The credits roll, accompanied by a terrible pop rendition of one of the love songs that Yeosang assumes was in the score at some point.
It’s not five seconds before Wooyoung says, "It's a stupid movie.”
"It's romantic," San says.
"Of course you think so," Wooyoung says.
"Yeosang?" San asks.
Yeosang, who could not name a character from the movie if his life depended on it, says, "I thought it was fine." It's slurred a little where he's muffled by Wooyoung's thigh. Wooyoung sighs and doesn't move.
The music fades. It's dark, and everything is quiet.
Yeosang sees them from above, bird's eye: San holding Wooyoung holding Yeosang, skin on cotton on skin. No plausible deniability, not for any of them. Yeosang can’t speak. Every muscle in his body is going tense, and Wooyoung doesn’t seem to be breathing. Yeosang can’t even tell if San’s moving. Probably not. No way out and no way forward, at least not for Yeosang, who won’t ever speak first—
"Wooyoung," San says, and his voice is so urgent that Yeosang darts his head up.
Wooyoung is crying.
Oh, Yeosang thinks. This is it.
"I know how you both feel about me," Wooyoung says.
The end of the world.
"I've been leading you both on because I can't fucking possibly choose between you," Wooyoung says. "So, there."
Yeosang freezes. It’s not what he thought it was going to be, but he knows instantly what’s happened.
Yeosang, until roughly ninety minutes ago, had never, never allowed himself to seriously want this, to even think about wanting this. It’s an impossible thing, too much to ask for. To hope for it is shameful. And that’s all it is; that’s why Wooyoung can’t see what’s happened between Yeosang and San in the summer-winter-summer he gave them together.
Simple. Complicated, but simple, at least in Yeosang’s head. Most things about the three of them are.
“Wooyoung,” San says, slow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t fucking choose, okay? I couldn’t. I just wanted to do—" Wooyoung throws a hand up, angry and sharp. "This forever. I don’t know. I thought it would be fine, and it’s not fine. It was stupid. So, there. Now you both know.”
"Can we talk about it?" San asks, but he sounds shaken. Yeosang steals a glance at him, needing to see, and meets San's terrified gaze with his own.
"I'm already being honest with you," Wooyoung murmurs. "I can't—I can't drag it out any more than this. So don't make it any worse than it has to be."
San does not respond to this. The air conditioning unit rattles at the wall, a labored wheeze.
"If you pack tonight," Wooyoung says to San over the noise, voice uneven, "I can give you a ride to the airport tomorrow."
"Wooyoung," San tries.
"Don’t," Wooyoung interrupts. "I can't—it's not fair for you two to, like, fight over me, and I don't want to lead either of you on anymore. I guess it's not really leading you on if I fucking want you both. But it would still make me a piece of shit, and it's not—Jesus. Fuck. I knew it was going to be bad."
It’s the first time he says it directly, that he wants them both. That he wants Yeosang. Yeosang knew where it was going, but hearing it still knocks the air out of him, like he’s slipped on ice.
"Okay. Well, I'm gonna be fucking sick if either of you keep looking at me like that," Wooyoung says. "So you should both leave."
Even though Wooyoung's bleak eyes are nauseating, Yeosang's heart hurts with affection. Wooyoung, going down hard and still swinging, the only way he knows how.
“Go,” Wooyoung says, urgent, when neither of them respond. “Go, take my car; I don’t give a fuck.”
Yeosang knows what has to happen.
“Okay,” Yeosang says. “Okay, we’ll go.”
“Good,” Wooyoung says. “Just—text me tomorrow. I don’t know. Have a good fucking night.”
“We’re going to come back,” Yeosang tells him.
“Don’t do that,” Wooyoung says. He’s been making his way to the stairs since he told them to take his car, and now he rises onto the first step, white-knuckled on the banister. “Don’t.”
“Wooyoung—“ San tries, but Wooyoung is moving faster, brushing a hand furiously across his cheek as the stairs creak under him.
“Let him,” Yeosang murmurs, and San stills, and Wooyoung disappears. They all hear the slam of his bedroom door.
Yeosang almost feels like he’s watching the scene from outside himself. It’s just Yeosang and San, now, looking at each other in the almost-darkness of Wooyoung’s living room.
They both know.
San says, “Yeosang.”
"Yeah," Yeosang says.
"We should talk."
"Yeah," Yeosang repeats. “Not here.”
San’s brow furrows. Yeosang knows what he’s going to say before he says it.
“He’ll be fine,” Yeosang says. He knows it's true.
“Okay,” San says. “I trust you.”
They take Wooyoung's car. Yeosang drives. It's wrong: windows closed, backseat empty.
"Where are we going?" San asks.
"Not far," Yeosang answers, and that's the extent of their conversation. San stares out the window. Just once, their glances at each other coincide in timing.
For any of this to work, for any of them to survive the meteor bearing down on them, Yeosang needs San to himself for just a few minutes. There’s a few reasons why. Firstly, there’s something in Yeosang’s chest that rattles the cage of his ribs every time he looks at San, and Yeosang needs to set it free somewhere far away from Wooyoung. Secondly, it’s all math, a pyramid; it’s not San and Wooyoung and also Wooyoung and Yeosang. It’s San and Wooyoung and Yeosang, and Yeosang is responsible for closing the loop back around to San.
All this to say: Yeosang knows where to go.
Everyone calls it The Barn. Misleading, since it's not a barn. It's someone's old farmhouse, probably, deserted for longer than Yeosang's been alive. The windows and doors have been boarded up with wooden slats; the deck has a nasty hole in it. Everyone says the inside is haunted (or carries some ancient plague, or has bats; people can't really make up their minds). Nobody needs the inside, though. They just need that dilapidated deck and the beautiful, empty yard.
This porch has seen everything: rogue birthday parties, hookups, copious amounts of underaged drinking. Wooyoung's thrown up here. Yeosang took his first girlfriend here to make out with once—rite of passage, everyone's done it—and she had shivered when they'd stepped into the infinite yard, clearly frightened of the ghosts/plague/bats/other looming inside. Yeosang's never been scared here, though. Yeosang's never been afraid of anything in this town. As long as the river is with him, and it is, nothing really bad could happen.
Yeosang parks and lets San follow him into the night. He walks around the side of the farmhouse to the porch. It’s familiar ground; San stumbles, but Yeosang’s feet keep time with the katydids, landing on every downbeat, one-two-three, one-two three-four. He sits down on the second wooden step. It's comfortable. San sits next to him.
"So," San says, and he exhales long and low.
Yeosang thinks they should start somewhere easy.
"How long have you been in love with Wooyoung?" he asks.
"Don't even know for sure," San says. "Long time. You?"
Yeosang sighs. "Longer."
He doesn't say it to outdo San. He says it to emphasize that to know Wooyoung for a day, a month, a year, is to love him, and Yeosang's known Wooyoung forever. He knows San understands this.
“I feel like,” San starts, and then he starts over. “I feel like you know what I want to say.”
“Yeah,” Yeosang says. “But you should probably say it.”
He does know. He does. In Yeosang's peripheral, San turns towards him. Yeosang turns back.
"I woke up when Wooyoung left," San says.
It’s not what Yeosang expected. "What?"
"In the motel," San continues. "Wooyoung left to get breakfast, and I woke up but you didn’t, and you rolled over in your sleep and started holding me. I pretended not to wake up. I—yeah. That's when I knew."
Gorgeous, gentle San. The dam in Yeosang's heart collapses. “Oh,” he says.
“Oh, what?”
"I left the TV on," Yeosang says. "Wanted you both to think I fell asleep on accident, but I—" Yeosang lets a breathy laugh catch him, and then a self-conscious little noise, unable to contain the lightness, the rush, the heat on his cheeks. "Wasn’t an accident. Wanted to be—okay, this is embarrassing."
"Don't," San says. He catches Yeosang's arm before Yeosang can bring his hand to his face. "It's sweet."
There's silence but for the faraway katydids and their unrefined song. San doesn't remove his hand from Yeosang's arm.
"So," San starts, and his voice catches. “Do you—I mean, if you want…”
He sounds a little disbelieving. Yeosang understands. He’s always understood this part. It's impossible, too much to ask for, and happening all the same.
Yeosang isn't good with words. Wooyoung, who's never been embarrassed by anything, has taken care of that part of their friendship for over a decade. But Yeosang can do something, instead, to show San want he wants. He pulls San's hand up to his face, letting San cup his jaw.
San sighs, a low, boyish exhale that Yeosang feels against his cheek, and strokes Yeosang's skin with his thumb. Yeosang isn't nervous at all. His pulse beats time with the river; his skin is the same temperature as the damp night air.
"What?" Yeosang asks, low, because San looks like he wants to say something.
"Just thinking I should have done this back then," San whispers. "Would have saved Wooyoung a lot of trouble."
"He likes trouble," Yeosang says, and then San kisses him.
Everything slips away, the whole world narrowing to the warm weight of San's mouth and his hand at Yeosang's nape. It's a gentle thing, and the only thought Yeosang can form through the haze is that San is softer than he thought a boy would be, and sweeter, too. It threatens to end, but Yeosang presses forwards and it spills over into another kiss. And another.
Every time their lips part, San kisses him again, his fingers light over Yeosang’s skin. It stays quiet, just lips and the barest brushes of San’s tongue. Yeosang’s never been kissed like this. Yeosang’s never kissed anyone so softly, so surely, for so long.
The realization strikes him, lightning: he's going to be in love with San, soon.
It makes him gasp into San’s mouth. San’s grip on his jaw tightens reflexively, and suddenly what was once soft is now sleek and wet and creeping into Yeosang’s gut. All of his senses are going blurry, liquid; San groans a little when Yeosang, emboldened, licks into his mouth. The sound lights up Yeosang’s chest. This is what he and San are supposed to be doing, what they should have been doing this whole time; San is perfect and he’s Yeosang’s, and he’s Wooyoung’s, and Yeosang wants to—
San pulls back.
His shoulders rise and fall in Yeosang’s peripheral. He looks—Yeosang can’t think about it. He has to close his eyes.
“Hey,” San breathes.
It occurs to Yeosang that he has no idea when he halfway climbed into San’s lap.
“Sorry,” he says.
San starts to laugh.
“Stop,” Yeosang whines, but he’s laughing, too. It’s not that anything is particularly funny, it’s that everything is so airy and light and dreamlike. It can’t be happening, but it is happening. Yeosang can still feel the kiss.
“What the fuck,” San sighs, and lies back on the deck, Yeosang’s legs still tangled over his. Yeosang thinks this is a pretty concise statement. If he’d been told exactly a year ago that he’d kiss San before Wooyoung—well, it’s a terrible hypothetical. It would have been so far outside of the realm of possibility that he wouldn’t have even entertained it.
“Yeah,” Yeosang says.
“Yeosang,” San whispers, tilting his head sideways, towards Yeosang. Yeosang thinks that San might like saying his name. That’d be good, because Yeosang likes hearing it.
Yeosang really looks at him, at the length of his torso stretched over the dilapidated wood. San is not Wooyoung, and he’s a man, and now Yeosang knows what he tastes like. Kissing San was good. Better than good. Yeosang thinks they should probably get back to it sooner rather than later.
Not now, though.
“San,” Yeosang whispers back.
San says, “Let’s go home.”
San drives them back to Wooyoung's house, windows down. When they hit the main road, he reaches across the console. Yeosang laces their fingers together carefully. San's hands are un-calloused, so everything is soft: his touch, his breathing, the air spilling into the car. They don't speak at all until they're parked in Wooyoung's spot, and when the engine goes silent, neither of them move.
In all of the ways that this could have gone right or gone wrong, Yeosang would never have imagined this: he and San clutching each other's hands in a quiet prayer that Wooyoung will want them, too.
And yet, Yeosang thinks. Here they are.
"I don't know why I'm scared," San says.
"San," Yeosang says. Everything is bubbling to the surface too quickly, and San needs to know. "I have to say something."
"Yeah?"
"I don't want to do this without Wooyoung," Yeosang says. "It's not—I want you, too, but without him—"
San cuts him off with a brief, gentle kiss, as if they've been together for years instead of minutes. He leans over the console to give it, hands cupping Yeosang's face, holding himself up with that graceful strength. "Hey," he says, "I know, me neither."
"Okay," Yeosang whispers.
"You ready?" San asks. He doesn't move his hands from Yeosang's jaw.
"Wait," Yeosang says. "Can I ask you something?"
"You're stalling."
Yeosang ignores this. "Do you think I'm a good kisser?" he asks.
A sharp laugh punches out of San, and Yeosang’s chest goes feather-light. "Seriously?" San asks.
"Don't laugh. You're the first guy I've ever kissed," Yeosang says. "I'm just trying to get some feedback before the second one."
"I think kissing is mostly the same," San says. "Like, across genders. But yeah, you're good at it. What do you want, a score out of ten?"
It’s then that they both catch up to the implications of what Yeosang has said. At least, that’s what Yeosang thinks is the reason they’ve both stilled, muscles going tense everywhere they’re touching. They’re both thinking about Wooyoung and Yeosang, Wooyoung and San.
"No, I'll take that," Yeosang breathes.
"Okay," San says. "Good."
Now, there’s no putting it off any longer. San settles back into the driver's seat.
“I don’t think he’ll let us in the door,” Yeosang says.
“Probably not,” San agrees.
Yeosang breathes in, breathes out. “Do you want to call, or should I?”
“You,” San says.
So Yeosang calls. It goes to voicemail. He calls again.
The line crackles to life immediately. "Please don't," Wooyoung says.
"We're outside," Yeosang says. "Will you let us in?"
Wooyoung sighs, loud and static; he wants Yeosang to hear it through the phone. He says, "I told you to go."
Yeosang can still feel the weight of San's lips on his. He doesn't have anything to be scared of, not in this town. "San and I talked."
"Great," Wooyoung says flatly.
"No, Wooyoung, we talked about you, and—"
"Look," Wooyoung says. His voice, even hazy through the line, is worn-down. "I don't want a lecture right now. Or a decision or something, Jesus. Just come back tomorrow. Then you can both yell at me and I'll take San to the airport. Yeah?"
"Wooyoung," Yeosang says, loud, feeling his face and ears heat. It's unbelievable that Wooyoung is making him say this out loud. "We kissed."
The line goes silent.
Yeosang's heart, for the first time all night, squeezes with adrenaline. "Who kissed?" Wooyoung says after a moment.
Yeosang looks to San for support. San is wide-eyed and unhelpful. "Us," Yeosang says. "Me and San."
Wooyoung hangs up on him. The three-beep tone, the dark screen, the silence.
"He hung up," Yeosang says. It’s a little redundant; San's also heard the line go slack. The two of them squint at each other across the console for a long second.
"Oh, shit," San says, realizing, and Yeosang's heart kicks into a gallop, and they're both moving.
Yeosang scrambles for the door handle, but his hands are shaking and he has to try twice. He climbs or maybe spills out onto the pavement, and a few things happen at once: San rounds the back of the car and stumbles to a stop at his side, clutching at him; the insects pause in their song; Yeosang clutches back, linking his fingers with San's; Wooyoung's front door bursts open.
They're frozen, but Wooyoung's not. He flies down the three steps and keeps storming towards them, full-force hurricane. The only thing keeping Yeosang tethered to the ground is San's solid presence at his side. Yeosang's heart is pounding, and pounding, and Wooyoung comes to a hard stop in front of them, just barely out of reach.
"You have five fucking seconds to tell me that was a joke," Wooyoung says, his voice sharp. "Don't fuck with me, Yeosang, this isn't—"
He must glance down to see their clasped-together hands, because the words cut short in his throat.
“Wooyoung,” San says. “We—“
Wooyoung holds up a hand to pause San’s words, still staring at their linked fingers. There’s a long moment of silence. For the first time in years, Yeosang has no idea what Wooyoung’s thinking, his expression solid stone and half-hidden by the night.
“You’re serious?” he finally whispers. “Both of you?”
Yeosang nods. Wooyoung sways on his feet a little bit, rocking forwards; Yeosang tenses in preparation for the blow.
San’s grip on Yeosang’s hand tightens, impossibly. "Let's go inside," he says.
"Yeah," Wooyoung says. "I just—"
Wooyoung's eyes are dark, miles deep, and trained on Yeosang. Yeosang knows Wooyoung better than he knows anyone else in the world, and he can finally, finally see he’s had it the wrong way around the whole time: it’s been Wooyoung waiting for him, years on years on years.
"I have to do this first, sorry," Wooyoung says, words tumbling over each other, and Yeosang, who knows, is already reaching out to catch him.
It's messy. In terms of technique, it might be the worst kiss Yeosang's ever had, uncoordinated and desperate. It's also the best thing that's ever happened to him. It’s nothing like kissing San. It’s all tongue, all teeth, Wooyoung pressing him into the car door like he wants to put Yeosang clear through it. Yeosang's knuckles start to ache, and he realizes he's clutching at Wooyoung's collar tightly enough to hurt them both. He is hurting them both. The entire kiss hurts, head to toe; it hurts perfect, right where Yeosang has always wanted it to.
Wooyoung pulls away as abruptly as he’d leaned in. He tucks his face into Yeosang’s neck; he’s trembling, and Yeosang comes back to his body still clutching San’s hand. He’s breathing hard. He brings his other arm up to hold Wooyoung close, reflexive, but he knows his brain hasn’t totally caught up to the idea that he’s holding the Wooyoung he’s wanted since he knew what it was to want.
“Fuck you,” Wooyoung says into Yeosang’s throat. “Fuck. You scared me.”
“We scared you?” Yeosang asks.
“We really should go inside,” San repeats. He sounds calm, but Yeosang can feel the twitch of his fingers. “And talk, probably.”
Wooyoung straightens up, away from Yeosang. He stands in Yeosang’s arms, and his gaze, as it so often does, slides from Yeosang to San, San to Yeosang. Something familiar is creeping back into his expression.
“Alright,” he says. “Let’s go inside.”
Yeosang quickly realizes there won’t be much talking. At least, not the kind San seems to be hoping for.
Wooyoung has his hands fisted in San’s sweatshirt as they stumble over the threshold. Yeosang steps in last and forces himself to lock the door behind them, hands shaking. While he’s facing away from them, he takes the best steadying breath he can manage. He knows what he’s about to see.
He turns around. Wooyoung has San pressed against the wall, hands bracketed on either side of San’s jaw. They’re both very still. Wooyoung’s eyes are slitted to the side, tracking Yeosang in his peripheral, just to make sure he’s watching.
Yeosang couldn’t look away if he wanted to. San’s chest is rising, falling, his gaze unfocused. Yeosang’s breath shallows like he’s the one waiting for Wooyoung to kiss him, and Wooyoung turns his attention fully back to San, sliding a hand around the back of San’s head.
“Since the second I fucking saw you,” Wooyoung breathes, the answer to a question that Yeosang’s not sure anyone asked, and then he’s crushing San’s lips to his.
Yeosang, in one way or another, has been envisioning this moment for over a year. And it does make him jealous, but not in the way he always assumed it would: he wishes he’d known the second he saw San. He wishes they’d been doing this last summer. He wishes he was San, yes, but he also wishes he was Wooyoung, and also he doesn’t want to be either of them because that would mean he couldn’t have both of them. It’s almost too much, the way he can see Wooyoung’s tongue slide against San’s. Almost too much, and not even close to enough.
Wooyoung parts their lips just long enough to murmur, “Sannie,” and Yeosang actually sees San’s restraint snap. San’s arms tighten, and Wooyoung’s whole body melts against him, and Yeosang knows exactly where this night is going. In the back of Yeosang’s brain, he thinks: well, that’s Wooyoung, headfirst and confident, all that momentum taking San with him. The front of Yeosang’s brain is ultimately preoccupied with watching Wooyoung tug at San’s lower lip with his teeth and the wounded sound San makes in response.
San drops his mouth to Wooyoung’s jaw, his throat, and Wooyoung tips his head back and sighs. He flutters his eyes open, eyebrows pulled together and lashes long, grinning at Yeosang when their gazes meet. Yeosang has never wanted him more.
“That’s called voyeurism, Yeosang,” Wooyoung says, his voice airy despite the teasing.
“Yeah,” Yeosang says, because it probably is.
But San’s had a good idea, and after years of thinking about it, Yeosang needs to know what Wooyoung’s skin tastes like. It’s intuitive to step close to them, to press his front against Wooyoung’s back and hold his waist, to mirror what San’s doing. “Shit, fuck,” Wooyoung whispers, and his body goes taut between them. Heat ripples through Yeosang’s chest every time he gasps.
Yeosang feels it under his lips when Wooyoung’s head tips farther, letting San kiss at the center of his throat, and then San’s cheek is against his and Yeosang slides their mouths together over Wooyoung’s shoulder because he missed kissing San. San opens up immediately because he’s perfect, his lips warm and slick from Wooyoung’s skin and his hand coming up to clutch at Yeosang’s bicep. Yeosang licks into his mouth and San moans and Wooyoung mutters something like fuck, oh my God. When Yeosang finally pulls back to look at him, Wooyoung’s eyes are all-black heat, his jaw slack.
Yeosang can’t resist. “That’s called voyeurism, Wooy—“
“Shut up,” Wooyoung says, and then he’s kissing Yeosang and the whole world starts to get blurry. Yeosang loses track of everyone’s hands. It’s just all sleek and heavy and Yeosang has never, never felt the way he does with his mouth on San and his body on Wooyoung, every inch of him molten with the same rushing current of need. Wooyoung starts making these high, sweet noises, and Yeosang realizes that they’re sort of all pressing in desperately for friction, Wooyoung trapped in the center of it all.
“Bedroom,” Wooyoung rasps. “Please.”
San blinks his eyes open and inhales deep. For a second, Yeosang thinks he actually is going to insist that they all sit four feet apart in Wooyoung’s living room and discuss this.
Instead, San pushes off the wall and says, “Yes. Yeah.”
Wooyoung laughs all breathless and throws himself up the stairs beside them. Yeosang is a half-second away from chasing him, but the flicker of motion beside him makes him pause. He turns to see San tug his shirt over his shoulders. In Wooyoung's dark entryway, he's a statue, cut clean from marble, perfect waist, perfect shoulders, skin glowing.
San lets the fabric drop from his hand to the floor, and when Yeosang tears his eyes back to San's face, San is looking at him questioningly.
Yeosang realizes he's gone still.
"You're…" Yeosang starts, wanting to compliment him and not even really able to begin.
"Yeosang," San mutters. He takes two steps forwards and catches Yeosang around the waist.
They are not going to make it to that bedroom, Yeosang thinks, dizzy, and then San is sighing into his mouth and Yeosang remembers he's allowed to touch and so he does, running his hands up San's sides to his chest. It's one thing to look, but to feel the tightness of San's musculature underneath the skin makes Yeosang's stomach white-hot with San's inherent strength, the iron line of his body.
San’s hands become purposeful at Yeosang's sides. Yeosang lifts his arms to let San pull his shirt off in one smooth motion. Their eyes meet, and the heat in San's gaze is just—Yeosang has a split second to think that people don't look at each other the way San is looking at him, it just doesn't happen outside of movies and porn—and then he hears himself moan as San presses hard back into the kiss.
"Oh, fuck," Wooyoung breathes, above them. Yeosang's back hits the wall, but he hears it more than he feels it. He's practically outside of his body, his skin burning and mouth slick against San's and cock hard against San's thigh. "Fuck, this isn't happening."
But it is happening, and the sound of Wooyoung’s voice makes both of them remember what comes next. They follow him up the stairs.
In transit, Yeosang has the time to appreciate that this is where it’s going to get very different from hooking up with girls. He's mostly just surprised at how not scared he is. His first time with a girl, he'd been terrified of getting it wrong, that she'd laugh, that he'd embarrass himself. But this is Wooyoung. It's San. It won't matter if it's bad. It won't be bad. Yeosang isn't scared of their bodies, not their shape or their feel.
He’s not scared when he tumbles Wooyoung down into the mattress, or when a lot more clothes come off, or when San whispers his name for the tenth time and grips Yeosang’s bare thigh when their lips meet. It just all feels good, and Yeosang relaxes into it.
Yeosang’s not scared, but he also has no idea what to suggest they do or where to put himself. The logistics of sex seem like they’ll be pretty different with two boys than they were with one girl. San, as he so often does, solves this problem by moving first. He drops his mouth from Wooyoung’s lips to his shoulder to his chest, and Yeosang’s whole body burns as he realizes what San’s intentions are.
Wooyoung curses. He looks up at Yeosang for a second, eyes incredulous, and Yeosang is relieved that he’s not the only one who still can’t fully comprehend what they’re doing. Wooyoung tugs Yeosang closer and rests his other hand on the back of San’s head in encouragement. San doesn’t waste any more time. He nudges Wooyoung’s legs apart and settles between them, dragging kisses across Wooyoung’s thighs and stomach and hips.
"Oh, fuck, look at him," Wooyoung moans, tilting his head against Yeosang's chest.
Yeosang is looking. He's not sure how he's supposed to not look. Yeosang can't believe there was a time in which he wasn't blindingly, dizzyingly attracted to San. Even after everything that's already happened tonight, the image of San, his broad shoulders between Wooyoung's legs, his lips pressed reverently against the curve of Wooyoung's inner thigh, is the most sensual thing Yeosang's ever seen. He reaches out to stroke San's cheek, just to feel him, and San shoots him a sweet, melting smile.
Wooyoung squeezes at Yeosang's arms and blindly turns his head to the side, searching for a messy kiss that Yeosang gives to him without thinking. Wooyoung likes kissing, Yeosang’s learning, and he likes it open-mouthed and slick. Part of Yeosang wants more than anything to watch San do this. But he has a lot more chances to see it, he figures, and only one chance to kiss Wooyoung through their first time. So he does. He kisses Wooyoung even when Wooyoung can’t focus on reciprocating anymore, his breathing turning jagged. Yeosang doesn’t see when it eventually happens, but even just swallowing all the cracked, soft noises Wooyoung makes as he tenses and comes feels like too much, too sacred.
San crawls up the bed to join them. He tastes like Wooyoung. It makes Yeosang shaky. He’s not trying to be impatient, but he barely knows what to do with himself. Every inch of his skin is oversensitive and they’re both touching him and he wants everything, all at once—
Wooyoung tangles a hand in his hair, sudden, and brings their foreheads together.
“Let me suck your dick,” Wooyoung says, voice rough. “I’ve wanted to for, like, years, Yeosang, please—“
Yeosang isn’t exactly sure what he says in response to that, but he means for it to be affirmative, and it seems like the message gets across just fine. Someone guides him to the edge of the bed and Wooyoung slides off of it, onto his knees.
Yeosang has had dreams about Wooyoung’s dark eyes looking up at him like this. Not a single one of them managed to capture how gorgeous he really is. And none of them had ever included San, which seems like a terrible oversight now; San presses his front against Yeosang’s back, lips brushing the back of Yeosang’s neck, the underside of his jaw. Then his tongue, warm over Yeosang’s pulse. It’s overwhelming; Yeosang can’t help the sound he makes.
“Oh, that’s good,” Wooyoung says, his hands braced on Yeosang’s thighs. “Wanna hear you.”
Yeosang wants to protest, but it’s sort of the hottest thing anyone’s ever said to him, mostly because it was Wooyoung who said it. It’s Wooyoung between his legs. Yeosang keeps remembering it, and it keeps knocking the wind out of his lungs. He has no idea how he’s supposed to survive this.
“Do you know?” San asks, lips brushing Yeosang’s skin as he speaks.
Has Yeosang missed something? It’s possible. His brain is a little hazy. “Know what?” he gets out.
“Your voice,” San murmurs. “‘S so hot, Yeosang.”
“Oh,” Yeosang says, but it comes out in an embarrassing sigh when he feels San’s teeth scrape against his throat.
“I thought I was, like, desensitized to it,” Wooyoung puts in, conversational, “but that was before, you know. This.”
Wooyoung’s chatty, even during this, even now. He’s unbelievable. “Hurry up," Yeosang says, embarrassed, and then he adds a “please,” because he's aching to be touched and it hurts and his heart is so full of Wooyoung-San-Wooyoung-San that he thinks it might burst.
Wooyoung bites down into the muscle of his thigh in retaliation, and the noise that falls from Yeosang’s lips is pornographic. There’s no way around it. He clamps his mouth shut, but it’s too late; San is already cooing about it in his ear, delighted. Yeosang wants to cry, it’s so good.
“See? That wasn’t so hard," Wooyoung says, and then he takes Yeosang into his mouth.
The consequence of spending thousands of days with Wooyoung is that Yeosang knows too much about him. He knows too much about Wooyoung’s habits and noises and sex life. And Wooyoung has never explicitly said that he's good at giving head, but some of the stories he's told have made Yeosang suspicious that he might be.
He is.
Yeosang knows instantly that they’re going to get what they want; he’s not being quiet. Wooyoung’s mouth is wet and hot and perfect and so are his hands, his throat, his voice when he hums as he works. Yeosang registers belatedly that he can’t move because San is holding him still without even trying, hands firm at his waist, which makes everything impossibly worse and better and hotter and more urgent.
Yeosang thinks he has to convey the feeling to San, somehow, so that he’s not missing anything. He finds the clarity to choke out so good, San, he’s so good, not even recognizing his own voice, and San’s grip on Yeosang tightens at the same time Wooyoung moans a little, and San says oh, he liked that, and Wooyoung pulls back to fire off a quick go fuck yourself. Yeosang can’t believe either of them.
Eventually, it's too much—the indescribable heat of Wooyoung's mouth and his shadowed eyes, the dig of San's fingers at his waist and the ache of his teeth on Yeosang's skin. Yeosang comes loudly, maybe louder than he’s ever been, his heart racing, and they both work him through it until he’s shaking, perfect and perfect.
When he comes back to his body, San has Wooyoung pressed into the sheets. They’re beautiful together, warm skin, dark hair. Yeosang watches them, his head still spinning, and tries to shake the feeling of disbelief. Maybe he never will, he thinks, maybe every time he sees this it’ll be just as gorgeous. After a while, Wooyoung murmurs, “What do you need?” into San’s mouth.
Yeosang lies next to Wooyoung, under San, his whole body aching and relieved.
“It would make the most sense if I sucked your dick,” he puts in. It’s true from a purely transactional perspective, and also Yeosang is finding that he wants to. Not that he’s expecting to be that good at it—especially not after experiencing Wooyoung—but he does want to start learning.
“We’ll both do it,” Wooyoung says, voice low and languid. “I’ll teach him.”
San’s breathless. “Don’t say that,” he says. “I can’t. I’ll come in, like, five seconds.”
“Which will make Yeosang feel good about his first blowjob,” Wooyoung points out.
San exhales a laugh, a little desperate. “We can do it another time, promise, just—fuck, Wooyoung—“
Wooyoung, impatient, has licked his palm and slipped it between their bodies. Yeosang watches San’s expression crumble and decides that the promise of another time is good enough if he gets to see San like this now.
San’s a little more talkative towards the end than Yeosang had expected him to be. He groans curses into Yeosang’s skin. Wooyoung talks him through it, filthy. Yeosang, as his contribution, skates his hand down to meet Wooyoung’s, drags his nails back up San’s back; he holds San until all of those gorgeous features go slack and he cries out. It doesn’t take very long.
Oh, Yeosang thinks as San trades long, soft kisses with them afterwards, this is it.
Wooyoung sits up and stretches. He looks incredibly pleased with himself, which is endearing. He snatches a shirt off the floor—Yeosang squints at it to make sure it’s not his shirt—and tosses it at San’s chest. “Gross,” San says, but his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. He cleans himself up and tosses the shirt a little more delicately back onto the floor.
And then it’s very silent except for the hum of the air conditioning unit in the window. It’s finally just San and Wooyoung and Yeosang, pressed side-to-side in the sheets.
"This is," Yeosang starts, and then he stops, because none of the words he had had in his head are good enough. He didn't know his body was capable of holding this much affection. It's a little bit frightening.
"We should probably talk about it," San says. “At some point.”
"You and your talking," Wooyoung says.
San says, "Brat."
Wooyoung mock gasps. He's unreasonably attractive like this, sated and still flirtatious. Yeosang can't look away from him, not his dark hair or his heat-flushed skin.
"This is our first fight," Wooyoung lilts.
"This is your first fight," Yeosang corrects, but suddenly Wooyoung is very quiet but for the little pleased noise he hums into San's mouth. And then things go soft and gauzy for a long time, during which Yeosang tries to commit the feeling of San's waist under his palm to memory.
“Okay,” San says when Wooyoung climbs off of Yeosang at the end of it. “But I really do want to talk about it.”
Wooyoung throws himself back against the pillows in a way that seems to mean he’s willing. "I just got, like, everything I've ever wanted," he says. Yeosang’s heart twists so brightly that he almost misses Wooyoung’s next words, which are: ”I don't know. This makes sense to me."
"Yeah," San says.
"And I want to do it for a long time," Wooyoung continues. "This is serious for me. I know I'm, like." He gestures vaguely at himself, here. “But you guys know, right? I'm really, really serious about this."
San brings both their hands to his mouth, presses them together, and lays a soft kiss on their knuckles. They're going to have to do something about him, Yeosang thinks. He's so overtly romantic. Yeosang is disturbed by how much he likes it.
"Me too," San says against their skin.
Yeosang has always known it was serious. Yeosang thinks he might have known before either of them. It’s hard to tell through the lingering disbelief, but he thinks this might be it. The most grounded, the most right, the most serious anything could be. He could tell them that, but he thinks they might be figuring it out for themselves.
“Well, that wasn’t a lot of talking,” Wooyoung says.
“You were very articulate,” San says.
Wooyoung rolls his eyes. "Yeosang?" he asks. "Anything to add?"
”No,” Yeosang says, meaning it. “That covers it.”
Fourth, first, last: San.
San tastes like freshwater and holds Yeosang and Wooyoung so carefully. That's not where the similarities end. Yeosang should have known the second San set foot into the river that he was the river, and that Yeosang's been waiting for him, and also that he's belonged here forever, at the beginning and the end of the frame.
It's alright that Yeosang was late to this realization. San, like the river, is patient.
San is gone already.
Yeosang has woken up second, as usual. Since they started sleeping together, Wooyoung’s been waking up in the late mornings. Maybe it’s because Wooyoung’s sleeping terribly, what with the limited bed space and San’s fidgeting and the fact that they all get slightly distracted every time the lights go out. Maybe it’s because he likes faking unconsciousness so he gets to be the little spoon in the mornings. Yeosang wouldn’t put it past him.
Anyway, San’s left. Yeosang knows he’s gone to make breakfast before Wooyoung commandeers the kitchen. Yeosang slips out of the bed to follow him, stealing one of San’s shirts on his way out of the bathroom. It’s not his fault that Wooyoung’s shirts don’t fit.
San, as it turns out, is not wearing anyone’s shirt. He’s standing at the counter, spreading something on slightly burnt toast. He turns when Yeosang sidles up beside him. "Morning, sweetheart," San murmurs, pulling Yeosang into a lazy kiss.
San gets worse the longer this goes on. Sweet boy, sweetheart, honey, angel. It's bad enough that he has no shame about any of the nicknames and worse that he knows which ones make Yeosang flush.
They're still wrapped in each other when Wooyoung pads into the kitchen. He doesn't say anything about it, just gropes at Yeosang's ass blindly on his drive-by to the fridge.
"Oh my God," he exclaims moments later. "Which one of you finished the eggs?"
"Me, sorry," San says, keeping Yeosang in the circle of his arms. "You're ruining our moment."
"You two tongue each other in my kitchen every morning, don't complain," Wooyoung says. He points back at the empty space on the shelf. “Fuck you.”
“Right now?” San asks.
"I don't like when you use 'tongue' as a verb," Yeosang tells him.
"That's why I do it," Wooyoung lilts. He hops up to sit on the counter besides Yeosang, palms pressed into the surface, leaning forward so his hair falls into his face. “What are we doing today?”
They all know how this conversation is going to go. Yeosang is going to suggest something, Wooyoung is going to say they've already done it, San is going to deflect, Wooyoung is going to suggest they have sex, and in the end, they're going to have sex and then do the thing Yeosang suggested.
“Hot out," Yeosang says. "We could swim."
"We always swim," Wooyoung complains. "Something else."
They look at San.
"Don't look at me," San says. "You guys are the ones that live here."
"At some point, you're going to have to stop playing that card," Yeosang says.
"Well," Wooyoung singsongs, "If we can't think of anything else, we could just—"
"Hang on, what card?" San asks.
It throws a wrench in the conversation. And to think, Yeosang had actually been curious to hear what Wooyoung was in the mood for.
"The 'I don't live here' card," Yeosang says. "You practically do."
"Do not," San says.
Wooyoung shrugs. “Feels like you do,” he says.
“I spend less than half the year here,” San argues. “Way less.” But something about the conversation is making him smile in that soft, pleased way that lights up the world, happy from the inside out. It stays with him even when they end up back in Wooyoung’s bedroom an hour or two later. Yeosang fucks San slow and steady, the way they’re all learning San likes it, easy enough that San can still focus on the blowjob he’s giving Wooyoung.
Even Wooyoung is docile today, his body liquid against the cushions and his full lips parted on heavy sighs. Yeosang is still coming to terms with the fact that this is his, now: all of it, the broad planes of San’s back, the noises Wooyoung makes when he’s close.
Wooyoung dozes on San’s chest when they’re finished. When he stirs again, the first thing he says is, “You’re sweaty.”
“’S hot out,” San says.
“Maybe we should swim,” Wooyoung suggests.
Yeosang says, “Good idea.”
Wooyoung grins, eyes mischievous even in the haze. “Thanks.”
So they swim. San dunks his hair, which is still short but growing longer, and then shakes it at them like a dog. When Wooyoung dives out of the way, he takes Yeosang down with him. Yeosang’s eyes stay open. Underwater, the whole world is green, shifting like a dream, and the light glittering over the surface is as warm as the press of Wooyoung’s chest against Yeosang’s shoulders. In the middle of the tumble of light and water and the small rocks under Yeosang’s feet, fingers hook under Yeosang’s bicep. San’s going to pull him to the surface and Wooyoung’s going to come with him, clinging to his back.
And Yeosang’s smiling. He can feel it high in his cheeks. He reaches out a hand in the current, not knowing which of them will take it. It won’t matter. They’re all in the sun, all in the water.
Depending on how Yeosang counts, there are four things that will survive the end of the world. They are: the river, Wooyoung, Yeosang, and San. Or: San, Wooyoung, Yeosang, and the river.
And, admittedly, probably Wooyoung's awful car. It's actually sort of important that the car survives. Because no matter how the world ends—fire, war, plague, meteor, zombies, flood—they'll need the car to drive away in. Up the river, windows all down; San at the wheel, Yeosang leaning out of the passenger side window, Wooyoung lying across the backseat.
Cockroaches. The sun, the fish, the trees. Yeosang doesn't care what else makes it. When the vultures come for whatever's left, they'll find him full of freshwater.
San parks at the very back of the airport lot. Yeosang doesn’t have a lot of time to wonder why; the second he’s tugged San’s suitcases out of the car and onto the pavement, San sighs his name and pulls him into a kiss. Yeosang cups his face and tries to convey his thanks by kissing back. And it wouldn't ever end, except then Wooyoung says, "This is just depressing to watch, Jesus.”
“You could have just asked for a turn,” Yeosang says, and so Wooyoung winds his fingers into San’s hair and takes Yeosang’s place. It actually is depressing to watch, despite the fact that Wooyoung is overtly trying to make it sexy and San is laughing too hard to really reciprocate. Yeosang is heavy anyway with the idea of being separated from San for longer than a day, an hour, a minute.
They’ll see San soon. That’s what’s making it easy, even though it’s hard. San is theirs. Also, now that there’s an excuse for them to visit him at school, Yeosang figures there’s going to be a lot more San per year than there has been. Apocalypse: survived; forecast: San. These are the nonsensical, happy thoughts that Yeosang thinks lately.
The kiss Yeosang is watching turns calm and sweet. San gives Wooyoung’s car keys back to Yeosang when it’s over; Yeosang pockets them. Yeosang misses San as soon as he turns his face away from them. It’s a physical ache in his shoulders and chest. He and Wooyoung watch, leaning against the car, as San becomes very small at the other end of the lot and the airport doors close behind him.
"Guess we'd better start working on those sex tapes," Wooyoung says, to which Yeosang elbows him.
Yeosang drives: one hand on the wheel, one hand in Wooyoung’s lap. They’re going to have a good fall, he thinks. A peaceful, slippery fall, and Wooyoung’ll cook and Yeosang will take his courses and they’ll drive and they’ll call San and they’ll fuck (probably, they’ll do those last two things at the same time). They’ll wait for San to come back.
It’ll be good.
“Don’t want to go home yet,” Wooyoung says, a bare twenty minutes into the drive. Yeosang knows what this means, so he pulls off the highway and routes them back into the city. They get dipped ice cream cones and walk along the riverside.
Ice cream drips onto the back of Yeosang’s hand, and Wooyoung licks it off. Yeosang says that’s disgusting, Wooyoung, and they’re in the twilight between two lampposts, so Wooyoung says I like it when you call me names and proves this point by kissing him a bit too thoroughly for the public eye.
Wooyoung kissing Yeosang, and Yeosang missing San. What an unimaginable world Yeosang lives in. The two of them stand up against a railing overlooking the river; Yeosang pops the rest of his cone into his mouth and presses his shoulder into Wooyoung’s.
"I just have this feeling it's going to work out," Wooyoung says after a gentle silence. "Is that stupid?"
Yeosang looks from the river back to Wooyoung. “What’s gonna work out?”
“Me, you, San,” Wooyoung says. "I just think we're gonna make it."
Yeosang almost laughs. Instead, he presses his lips to Wooyoung's hair, the scent of him familiar over the water.
“Yeah,” Yeosang says. “Yeah, we’ll make it.”