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If Mingi was going to learn something from it—as the saying goes—it would be that nobody is what they seem. He's not sure that's the life lesson these well-meaning small talkers have in mind, though. It doesn't bode particularly well for putting himself out there again, which is exactly what everyone says do next.

He flops back onto his bed. The third Saturday in a row where he finds himself at home, listening to the old pipes whirl and sputter from the upstairs apartment like they're showering in the next room. His mother's weekend is in the middle of the week, so it's just him, and everything is so still he can't quite tell if he's laying in the air or if it's laying on him. He wonders, eyeing an old cobweb on his ceiling, if anyone who's giving that advice actually believes it, or if there are people who really do become wise soothsayers after they leave. Reach enlightenment or whatever, third-eye opened. Maybe it's just him that wound up with low-level agoraphobia. 

More likely, he thinks, that's just what people who've never been through it tell themselves to feel better. Nobody likes feeling bad; nobody wants to carry that weight, if they can choose not to. So it's easier to believe everything happens for a reason than to feel bad for someone. And maybe that's why she spent half their relationship telling him he did it to himself.

Mingi presses the corner of his phone between his brows, frowning. In a home he hasn't lived in for years, in the now-guest bedroom where he can still map the spots their old photos were when he came back. Seven months later, he stares at Wooyoung's message on his phone and still almost deletes it. It's fucking ridiculous.

(This is why she was jealous, concerned, angry, upset, (whatever iteration appeared on the day), you wanted this, you're proving her right.)

His phone buzzes against his brow bone. Wooyoung's a double texter: my treat! :]  

Dinner, his treat, at his place. Mingi's eaten at his place plenty of times under plenty of pretexts. His apartment has seen birthdays, New Year's parties, Halloweens. He hosted when they celebrated Yunho getting accepted for that dance programme in America, sometime last year. And then there's several times where he just wanted to shove a new recipe in front of someone—as of late, that's been him.

Mingi's thumbs start to go numb at the thought today. Guilt. Misplaced, maybe, at his interest and at his reluctance and how both can exist at once, but guilt all the same. Better some days, which is to say something he can put out of mind; but now, he feels its drag down his centre as it de-cores him, tastes its bitterness in the back of his throat. For all the jokes about being a T-type, he still manages to spend a lot of his time arrested by his feelings.

He holds his phone up in front of him and lets his hands run cold. Fucking– okay. Here's to putting himself out there.

*

Mingi spent years sharing a bed with his mother. B'n'Bs, the kindness of old friends, and, once, his uncle's place while he was on a business trip, which is the only one Mingi really remembers. He had a balcony you could see the river from, a king-size bed, and a million TV channels. The apartment they would move into a month later had damp in the corner of the living room, bubbles under the kitchen lino, and, importantly, two bedrooms. Even then, his mother says she'd still wake up to him sleeping in her bed every so often, before the stubborn grip of sleep paralysis kept him locked in his own.

It's one of the things his grandparents like bringing up—along with almost every decision his mother made after the divorce—to explain the kind of man he's become. Mingi stopped giving weight to their opinions several years ago, but they still crop up sometimes, like stubborn weeds. 

Because maybe if he wasn't so terrible at toeing the line between being alone and lonely, if he didn't have weird attachment issues or his anxiety didn't go into overdrive at night, he'd have realised sooner. But there's something to be said about sleeping next to a person for a year, no matter how terrible they may be. Because it means, at one point, there was enough cause to pull the blankets back and say, I want you here, I want to wake up to your face next to me. It means it wasn't always so bad. Before, however vague and undeterminable, it was never that bad. So even when it was, she had an alibi. 

No matter how those nights ended up—neutral, dubious, terse, sometimes terrifying—he had a way of only remembering the warmth of a body holding him, to the omission of how he was only held for two reasons: as a reward, or a reminder.

Who are you seeing, Mingi? Still touching him, spent and flaccid, his back to her chest, her arm around his waist. She was leant up on her elbow, watching his face. Mingi tried not to twitch, because she was watching his face. Five hours ago, he tried to break up with her for the first time. She wanted to talk when she came back home, and Mingi, who had long since known how to talk to her without getting it wrong, had been almost relieved when she kissed him instead.

Don't lie, Mingi, it's not like we're together. (Don't lie, Mingi, I know when you're lying.)

He wasn't seeing anyone. He spent most of the last week mustering up the face to message friends he'd left on read for a month, but that wasn't the answer she wanted.

Ah, I see. Silent treatment. You know, I just wanted to talk. I wanted you to tell the truth so we can make this work. But you don't have to talk to me now you've got what you wanted again. Right? Mingi made the mistake of flinching. She laughed in a way that could be playful, but he could feel her nails. Tell me, jagiya. Do you think of me when you're out fucking men, too?

(You started kissing me. You took my shirt off, you stopped me when I opened my mouth. Mingi didn't say this.) "I'm sorry." (He remembers how thick his tongue felt, swollen like a tumour. He doesn't remember how it all became a reconciliation or apology. But when you apologise enough, it begins to feel like you've done something wrong regardless.) "There's no-one else. Just you."

Do you think of me? she asked again, anyway.

It would be five months until he next tried to leave. Maybe he really is his mother's son.

*

Wooyoung's lived in the same apartment building since their second year of uni, and he still doesn't remember the apartment number. He knows it's four flights up and the eighth door on the right when you leave the elevator, but he has to search through their chat to remember what number to put in every time he comes over. 

Because it's on a corner, he has massive windows, but still only gets good sun in the morning. There's an exact spot where Mingi puts his shoes, an exact place for his jacket. The space itself is nothing special—it's a bit awkward,  even, and Wooyoung's not much of an interior designer, so it has the same geometric new-build feel it did when it was actually new—but he has a four-hob stove top and an in-unit washer-dryer, so. It's nice. And Mingi has good memories there.

Wooyoung's kept an orchid alive behind the kitchen sink, on the world's smallest window sill. Perfectly framed by the square of the window frame, like a hyper-realistic painting. Mingi keeps making eye-contact with it, then Wooyoung, then the flower again, this little organic dot in the background behind his friend's head. 

And Wooyoung pretends, mostly, that he doesn't notice.

*

"You've been back a month already?" Yunho asked, sitting beside him in his mother's living room, visibly surprised. The last time they saw each other, his hair was bleach-blond, damaged as hell, and his roots were dark. He'd dyed it all black again. He had a new leather jacket with him that squeaked when he moved a certain way. Mingi would find out later that Jongho had given it to him, and that they had already been dating for six months. 

It had felt like a sick joke then, the two of them back home, over-large on the two-seater couch. The apartment felt like a TV set. Rewind several years, to when he was still growing and Yunho's hands were too big for his body, and their teenage selves would be sitting in their exact places, laughing, and everything would be doused in film grain. 

(He still doesn't know if he would warn a younger him. Or if a younger him would've listened. Or what the point of thinking in impossibilities is, which is all he ever seems to do now: run in circles of what ifs.) 

"Yeah," Mingi had replied to the loose grey of his yoga pants. Needless to say, he wasn't doing yoga back then. They were just the only thing other than sweatpants he could stand the thought of putting on. 

"You should've let us know. We could've come over sooner," Yunho told him, light-hearted. Maybe nudging his arm, though he could've made that part up. 

Mingi didn't reply, anyway. Gave maybe half a hum, at most, still looking down. He felt Yunho shift his arms back behind the metaphorical barrier, and didn't know how to grab his hands and stop him. It was like he'd forgotten how the two of them worked. 

It's weird, the things people can forget under the right circumstances. He was good, once, at saving face, but the veneer had cracked in some fundamental way he hadn't yet figured out, and he couldn't find the end of his tongue to unknot it, either. He couldn't remember how to be in a conversation without a leash on his words. (Yeah, he thinks—the teenaged Mingi on the couch would've never believed him.) 

"We haven't heard from you since, like, November," Yunho rephrased. Almost as a question, but more of a statement, acknowledging the elephant of their friendship with a polite bow. "It's been a long time. We're in August now." 

"I know." Mingi barely glanced up. "I've been going through something, I guess." 

Out the corner of his eye, Mingi saw Yunho's expression fold: worry, sympathy, trepidation, and a held-back something that still gnaws at him on the wrong day. Chewing his lip, thinking of what to say—or, more accurately with Yunho, how to put it across—as Mingi willed him to just come out with it. Rip the band-aid off, be mad and upset, hurt him in a way he could understand for a change. 

"I meant to reply," Mingi added, as an admission to whatever Yunho didn't want to verbalise. There was too much saliva in his mouth; he thought he might choke swallowing it. "I wanted to." 

"Does this mean you two...?" Yunho started to ask. 

"We broke up, yeah." He caught Yunho's leg bouncing—his oldest tell—and his body mirrored the tension, a frigidity running right up into his jaw. Mingi realised he wasn't saying what he should, either. Instead of pent up apologies and guilts and all of the things she said and did and didn't do, all that came out was a limp and familiar, "Are you angry with me?" 

Yunho sighed quietly. "Not– No, Mingi, it's more... I mean, we just don't know what's been going on with you, you know? We were more… worried." Yunho wet his lips. His eyes darted about Mingi's side-profile like an untrained sniper. Mingi remembers the distinct urge to itch his cheek; he's never known what to do with other people's concern. "It's kind of like you got your place together and forgot about us," he half-joked. 

All at once, everything she ever took from him crowded around his teeth. 

Every special occasion he left early, every conversation she deleted and person she hated, all the reasons he gave her to trust his friends and all the ways it was his fault she didn't. In the midst of it, there was nothing else: life was blinkered and small and scripted. It was wool pulled over his eyes labeled a safety blanket, a series of words to say exactly right, a trust-fall that never, ever landed right. But life is so much bigger than that, and the world was still spinning all that time he spent stuck, and the aftermath—sitting next to his best friend like there were trip wires between them, unsure of his hands, of himself and his permissions—was fucking merciless. 

Mingi pressed his thumbnail into his palm until it hurt, one of many freshly-adopted bad habits at the time. He only had to look at Yunho to realise exactly how large this whole thing reached, or remember his mother's face the day he showed up with his bags. He could spot infinite little fractures that meant he'd never quite know the people he loves the same way again. And he didn't know how to fix any of it. 

"It wasn't like that," he said weakly, so his voice wouldn't crack. 

"...Mingi?" Still, Yunho questioned his twisting chin, his squeezed-shut eyes. Mingi pressed his lips together and tried to ignore it. Hoped he wouldn't incriminate himself by making a sound. He can't remember ever crying as much as he did that first month home, not even during the worst of it. "Hey, what– Mingi-yah?" 

Yunho shuffled up to his side and put an arm around him, all instinct and muscle memory; it didn't take much more than that for Mingi to fold like he did his first day back, when his mother asked him what happened and reality crystallised for the first time in months.

Mingi, Mingi, my baby. Curled up to fit under her arms, her chair scraped up next to his at their wobbly kitchen table, and her firm hand rubbing his back. Don't let anyone make you this unhappy again.

"Mingi…" Yunho always had an inkling, like Wooyoung always had an inkling. They had met her enough times, before things changed—in Mingi's mind, before things changed, but that benchmark kept getting pushed back. "Did something happen? Like, did she… do something?" Wooyoung asked the same question later on, but characteristically straight to the chase: what did she do?  

Hindsight's twenty-twenty and all that. Hard to see red flags when someone's in your ear telling you they're green. 

*

They're three hours deep in a YouTube rabbit hole. On the screen, a man is restoring a rusted kitchen knife he ordered off eBay, and Mingi, full and sated, feels quiet in a way he hasn't for a while, in a way he doesn't want to cross-examine. He keeps his own peace in his peripheral vision; with Wooyoung, cozied up to his left-side, and the running commentary muttered to his shoulder.

"If I stuck with that YouTube channel I made in uni," he murmurs, "I'd be so rich now."

Mingi has a vivid memory of filming Wooyoung as he opened the oven door in their dorm's kitchen, poked a fork in the middle of a friend's intended birthday cake, and watched in horror as it deflated. He's pretty sure it's saved on a USB somewhere. "Then why'd you stop?"

Wooyoung jostles him with a shrug that has a little too much elbow involved to be accidental. Mingi takes him out of his periphery, turns his head and looks down at him instead, at the fun reveal of his front teeth as he starts to grin, his eyes still on the screen. "Fuck you, don't bring that up. I was devastated. Yah–" He gestures at the screen from under the blanket. The knife is shiny and sharp and, as the man cuts through a piece of A4 with ease, Wooyoung's hand lands back on Mingi's leg. "That should be me."

When Mingi only hums, Wooyoung flits his eyes up, and they squint in glee when they find him looking. "What?" he gnashes, quick and playful like a small animal whose teeth are still friendly. He digs his fingers up Mingi's torso like a piece of dough. "You don't support my dreams?"

Mingi does his best impression of his mother, circa four years ago: "Your dreams won't pay the bills. What about law?" 

Wooyoung laughs. "Speak for yourself. Umma was gonna let me be an idol." 

The next video auto-plays. It opens with a wide shot of neatly ploughed rice paddies somewhere in Japan, but Mingi barely pays attention. He knows the idol story already. He remembers when Wooyoung showed him his try-out tapes, drunk in his uni room. Back then, he didn't look all that different from his high school self. Now, eighteen feels like a lifetime ago, a different world entirely from being a twenty-something graduate.

"We wouldn't have met," Mingi says quietly.

"Probably not." Wooyoung bites his shoulder, almost like an afterthought. Mingi doesn't even blink at it. Then he adds, "Actually, you never know. Fate and all."

"I don't know if I believe in fate," Mingi replies. "It's more like luck."

Wooyoung adjusts out of his slouch, rising to Mingi's eye-level. "So you're glad my dreams failed?" he asks, looking at his whole face at once, mouth to nose to eyes in quick-step sequence. His grin reaches his ears. "So you think you're lucky to know me?"

Mingi offers a crooked smile and leans into his peace as he looks back. He's hoping it supports his weight tonight. "Yeah," he says. Then, "What're you looking at?"

"You," Wooyoung admits easily. "Did you shave?"

"Nah."

Wooyoung giggles. He brings his hand up to brush over his stubble, and Mingi tries not to preen, or flinch. "It's sexy."

*

The first time Wooyoung kissed him was in the second week of uni.

He thinks they knew each other all of three days before he considered Wooyoung a real friend to him, one of his people. Almost as bad as when Yunho dropped the equivalent of Mingi's combined birthday-Christmas money on dinner with him after school, and had Mingi glued to his side every day since. He doesn't think he could do that with any other people. 

He lived in the room right above Mingi's in first year. Mingi found out as much that first weekend, when he came down to let him know he was having people over, and offered to either apologise for the noise or welcome Mingi to join them. Wooyoung became something bright and familiar in a sea of odd, sprawling shapes and freedoms he hadn't adapted to yet.

He kissed him waiting for the post-night-out bus back up to campus. It was pissing rain and neither of them brought a jacket. Charcoal skies and the light of the arrivals board reflecting distorted in gutter puddles, drunk and hanging off each other. They were the last to leave, as they would often end up being, and Mingi was about seven minutes into a twelve minute voice note to Yunho accusing him of abandonment, probably, amongst whatever tangent or song-break Wooyoung would drag him into. 

He put both hands on Mingi's cheeks and kissed him, prompted only by being happy and giggly and loose. Mingi figured out he was bisexual somewhere between getting on the bus back and ending up in Wooyoung's bed.

He doesn't remember why they stopped messing around. Wooyoung had a string of almost-boyfriends those first two years, but neither of them considered anything more between them. By the time she came into the picture, at the start of third year, as innocuous as any other crush, they hadn't done anything for a while.

Wooyoung would kiss him again on a normal afternoon in late-November, five months after he came home and years since they were eighteen, on his couch, with a loading screen left unattended in the background after Yunho hung up their call. It will be overcast outside, barely threatening a drizzle.

Mingi won't know why it makes him cry.

*

"She just wanted things to go her way." Mingi stared at his hands in his lap, his trimmed nails and their messy beds, across at Wooyoung's. There was a cuticle on his thumb that he kept picking at. Something in the anxious metronome of his index finger, scraping back and forth, caught Mingi's eye. 

His face still hurt, oversensitive from being scrubbed raw in his efforts to calm down. They were futile, anyway. When panic blooms, it flowers. 

A kiss. A hand on the back of his neck and a tongue ran kindly along his lip. Nothing more than what Wooyoung had gingerly asked permission for, nose-to-nose on the couch twenty minutes ago; than something Mingi had seen coming for the past month, in hopeful and terrified silence. They've always worked. (Half the time, her issue was just how much they've always worked.) 

Being kissed out of something more than a means-to-an-end again, or being kissed again full-stop, or being kissed by Wooyoung– It felt like being taken by the throat and slammed into his body. (It felt like, just for a second, she'd found him again.)

When the initial panic subsided, it was the look on Wooyoung's face when Mingi broke away that got him: startled, and concerned, and guilty. Mingi could deal with the anxiety—he had been swallowing this specific anxiety every time Wooyoung had sat near him for a while, nauseous with want or worry or both—but he couldn't deal with Wooyoung thinking it was his fault. 

Mingi zeroed in on that as he forced his mouth to move. "So if I said no, there had to be a reason, and the reason had to be good. And like, I'm very– I just don't want to, you know, it's not like I always... Sometimes, you just don't want to." He wet his lips. Eyes still on Wooyoung's thumb. "But 'cause I'm not good at explaining myself, it was just easier to agree." 

Most of the time, Wooyoung is good at thinking before he speaks, but he has never been good at keeping his thoughts off his face. Mingi glanced up and he saw the serious line of his brow and jaw, the lively concentration in his eyes as he oscillated. What he said was, "Agree to what?" and what he meant was, how much more should I hate her? 

Yunho is much better at sugar-coating. An expert eggshell-er, really. When Mingi told them both that they'd worked things out the first time, Yunho had said he hoped things would be better after they'd talked them through, and Wooyoung had just asked, what changed? 

"I mean. Anything. Stuff around the apartment, where we ate, or... Yeah, anything. Going out, like, seeing people. As in you guys." He shrugged a shoulder, aimed for casual, ignoring the collective bruise in the room. He saw Wooyoung bite the inside of his lip. Remembered, You're not going to talk to him anymore. "Sex stuff," he added. "Not– So if I wasn't into something, she got weird about it. Like– I don't know." Fuck. He sighed and rolled his shoulder back, uncomfortable and mentally sore. He didn't know how it sounded until it was out of his mouth, and he didn't know how not to make it a big deal. (Maybe, he reasons, if it wasn't one.) "Nothing crazy," he muttered anyway. "Doesn't matter. Sorry for– freaking out." 

"Of course it matters," Wooyoung said. Perfectly quiet and equally outraged. He has that skill of measurement. Mingi felt like he could laugh—he did, a little, a jump of his chest and a dry smile, before he rubbed his hand over his face again. For fuck's sake, he thought, you're fine. It was just his heart, tight and beating against his throat, that didn't quite get the memo. "What's funny?" 

"Nothing," he stated. Nothing, his trusted motto. His mouth twisted on itself and he dropped his hand. It's not a big deal. "She had this thing about me being bi, so, like, if I didn't want to– try something out, lets say– She was sure I was just, I don't know, that I wasn't into her, that I was out seeing men, and I had to– prove myself, I guess, so I just. Agreed. I didn't realise–" He laughed again, because his body wouldn't let him do anything else. "I guess that's kinda fucked. But I didn't realise." 

Wooyoung took in a breath. Mingi heard it, but he didn't look. His hands were busy toying with an unravelling thread on his sleeve, and the pause was making him sweat, hot and uncomfortable under his arms. 

"I'm going to kill her," was his verdict. 

"No, you're not," Mingi laughed, clipped. His skin was itchy, too tight. Talking will make you feel better has always been such bullshit. It just gives it voice again. Makes it real, gives its ghost hands and teeth. 

He could feel Wooyoung watching him. He paused with the thread wrapped tight around his index finger, every movement suddenly sharpened and loud. "Are you okay?" he asked.

Mingi hummed nominally. Watched his skin go white and puff out between each criss-cross. 

"Mingi-yah." In his peripheral, he saw Wooyoung adjust how he sat. "You know we don't have to do anything you don't want to, right?" 

Mingi snapped the thread off his sleeve. He knew how he should've reacted. Wooyoung has always been attentive and conscientious, diligent in his intimacy. It still felt like being brushed the wrong way to hear it. 

"I'm not a–" He stopped himself, grinding his teeth. Gestured, vague and stiff, at nothing. Victim, child, idiot, he's still not sure what he is or isn't, what she made of him or what he's made of himself by giving it a name. He doesn't know the expiries. How late is too late to realise why something hurts before you stop being able to claim it? 

(And sitting knee-to-thigh with Wooyoung in his apartment, he was exactly aware this was what she always suspected. Wooyoung was always the first name in her mouth. She didn't like how touchy they were, how loud they made each other laugh, that they messed around in their first year of uni.) 

Mingi shrugged a shoulder, and guilt, as resilient as any other invasive species, dug her claws into him. 

"I'm not saying you're anything," Wooyoung said when it became clear he wasn't elaborating. Mingi felt almost too sick to listen. "That's just how it is. How it should be, anyway. It's not special treatment, Mingi, it's fucking– basic respect." 

"I should go," he said. (Mingi imagined saying it, all of it, as it floated to the top of his mind. Or climbed, yawning, from dormancy in the back of his mind, where he still tries to store the worst of it.) 

"Mingi-yah, please," Wooyoung said when he got up off the couch. When Mingi glanced back, he was half-standing, one knee still on the cushion, with a look on his face Mingi's self-preservation didn't want to discern.

He wanted to kiss him again. Drown it out, pretend. Instead, he shouldered his bag. "Thanks for dinner."

*

Mingi's earliest memory is his father smoking out the window of their car. He remembers the silhouette of his mother in the passenger seat, the firm cross of her hands in her lap, and their locked eyes in the rear-view mirror. The shape of his father's voice drowned out the road noise, but he can't remember what he was angry about. 

Cigarette smoke will always remind him of that old car and the house they shared with his grandparents. His mother would fling the windows open to waft it out, but it never really left until they did. 

The nicotine-stained yellow of his parents' room matched the colour she chose for the kitchen. 

*

"Can you stop pushing it?" 

The quiet between them was only stilted, stale air. Old news sitting in it like bad memories. By that point, he was fed up with bad memories dressed up like bad omens. He'd memorised all their faces. He could pick them all out in a line up, looking out the corner of his eye. 

Looking at them directly makes them real.

"Mingi-yah, please don't snap at me," Wooyoung said. Mingi remembers searching for the razor blades of passive aggression, and when he couldn't find them, he just imagined they were buried deeper. Somewhere in the soft plush of Wooyoung's care, a limit not yet baring its teeth. He knew there must be one, even though Wooyoung had never done anything but be good to him, in all these years of knowing him, as a friend and as... 

Mingi chewed on his lip. That thought fell through him, heavy: Wooyoung had only ever been good to him, and up to that point, Mingi had repaid that with cagey non-answers whenever he drifted too close to wanting him.

"Sorry," he croaked to the made-up beast watching him. But it was just Wooyoung and the damp emptiness of a bus station at night. Wooyoung left his apartment and followed him there. To make sure he was okay. For fuck's sake. 

His fingers were shaking in his pockets, how they used to when he lost track of time before. A sweaty grip on his phone, still expecting calls from a blocked number, like they were still together and she still scared him. It had been nearly six months. Six months, and he was still looking for her in the shape of everyone around him; a decade, and he was staring at the pavement slab in front of him like a child in front of his father, the position easily assumed like no time had passed. (Maybe his body's just good at this.)

Wooyoung told him not to apologise. Mingi's throat clenched up; when he said it again anyway, his voice cracked. 

"Okay, I'm gonna push it," Wooyoung said, stepping up close to him. He eased his hand into Mingi's pocket and stroked over the backs of his knuckles. "Just a little bit. Because I don't want you to think I'm angry or something, 'cause I'm not–" 

"I don't, it's–" Mingi shut his eyes, shook his head. Wooyoung's hands were so gentle. They always are. "It's stupid, I don't. It's." That I panic when you touch me, because I want you to touch me. That I know you're not her, but that I never really knew what was her and what wasn't. 

"It's not stupid," Wooyoung murmured. The line of him at his side was firm and sturdy, and Mingi wanted desperately to fall into his body. He hooked his thumb over Wooyoung's in his pocket. "I know, I get it. I'm just telling you I'm not angry. You can always talk to me, Mingi-yah." 

"She made me feel like I was imagining it all," Mingi got out past the tooth guard of old anxiety and taboos. Truths he would've never spoken before. "Or like I was doing it to myself, I… I don't know. I don't know what to do now." 

"It wasn't your fault," Wooyoung said, like it was that simple. Like it was true. His other hand found Mingi's waist and reeled him in close. "Please let me show you that, Mingi-yah. You can say no a million times and I won't be angry. Say yes, then no, then yes again, then no again–"

"I don't want to keep saying no," he muttered, still looking down. He toed a loose stone on the pavement like it'd distract from the way Wooyoung made his chest feel. (Full of air, thick with light, something the shape of trust that he so badly wanted to grip onto.)

"Then you can try saying yes, jagi," Wooyoung murmured, squeezing him. "Either way, I'm still here."

Mingi closed his eyes for a moment. "Yeah," he replied when he opened them again, turning his head towards Wooyoung, with his beanie shoved on and raindrops on his fucking glasses. Real, and now, and really fucking good to him. "Would be a start."

Wooyoung just hummed, lifting his mouth into a gentle smile and said a light, "Would be." He extracted his hand from his pocket to pinch his cheek.

*

This is the third or fourth time Mingi's ended a dinner at Wooyoung's with his friend on top of him. 

Unfortunately, as Mingi has discovered, he's obsessed with it. 

He's obsessed with Wooyoung touching him, and how much he fills in conversations with a hand on the back of Mingi's neck, a squeeze of his thigh. He likes the callused graze of his fingertips. He likes his tongue along the shell of his ear. His body is so warm, and Mingi can never be warm enough, and it’s exactly because he’s so obsessed with it that it also makes him feel like throwing up—an urge he's been less scared of leaning into lately, the knife's edge where anxiety turns to excitement.

He's not sure where he'll end up today. He thinks maybe it's enough to want Wooyoung's mouth on his neck.

"Have you met Jongho yet?" Wooyoung murmurs to his jaw, amused by his tipped-back head and shaky breaths. They barely fit on the couch. Or Mingi barely fits on the couch, and Wooyoung has sandwiched himself on top of him. "I can't remember."

He likes the talking, too. It's old friends catching up but with more kissing. It helps him be a bit more normal about the kissing, they've discovered. 

"Kinda," he murmurs. Wooyoung's nose pushes into his neck, his throat bobs next to it, and he lets his eyes flutter shut. "Well, we met once."

"He's coming down the end of next week," he tells him.

"I know." Mingi catches whatever noise Wooyoung's shifting weight was about to unearth, just within the cage of his teeth. "Yunho messaged me. I need to reply."

"You do," Wooyoung agrees. It's an acknowledgement. Maybe, at most, a gentle chiding. "You've gotta meet your best friend's boyfriend."

"We met once," Mingi reiterates, urging Wooyoung back up when he gets over-enthusiastic with his teeth. Wooyoung grins, barely sorry. Mingi feels like he should roll his eyes, or maybe just kiss him again, but they’re on this topic now. "He thought I was weird."

"You thought you were weird. Jongho's weird, anyway, he just masks it."

"You weren't there," Mingi says, stubborn in the face of Wooyoung's raised eyebrow, ever-sceptical of his self-perception. "I left after, like, twenty minutes. I was weird." 

Yunho and Jongho hadn't even started going out when Mingi met him. Mingi suggested this Japanese place in the neighbourhood when Yunho wanted to introduce them, a double-date of sorts, since Jongho lived near Mingi, and Mingi never really went out without his girlfriend anymore. 

It was the restaurant he took her to when they first moved in, before they unpacked the kitchen, when they were sleeping on a mattress and hurriedly-assembled bed frame amongst a million moving boxes. Small, loads of smooth dark wood, free miso soup. She called just before Mingi got there and said she wasn’t coming. 

Mingi knew that meant he shouldn’t, either, but he still stayed for a while anyway. He hadn't seen Yunho since he came back from America, trip cut short for reasons he wouldn't find out until he'd already been back home for three months. (I messed up my hip in class. Landed wrong. Yunho said it like Mingi hadn't missed out on much. It didn't hurt much more than usual, but when my leg started going numb, I was like... Ah... That's weird. Haha. So it was better to come back home for treatment, and– Yeah, the programme wouldn't hold my place until I recovered.

Why didn't you tell me? Mingi asked him, his voice curled up small in his throat. He already knew the answer.

Yunho twisted his face how he does when he doesn't want to tell the truth. I tried when I saw you, but. You left early, and then I didn't see you for so long, I… I guess I just forgot.)

He had one hand on his phone under the table, waiting for her to call and tell him there was some emergency to attend to. There wasn't, but he always left when she said that, just in case. Yunho tried to tell him it was fine, but Yunho's never been good at being upset with people; and Mingi doesn’t think he’s good enough at first impressions for Jongho to not think he was being an asshole.

"You know why he's coming, right?" Wooyoung asks next, pulling him back some of the way.

Mingi blinks. "Is there a special reason?"

"Did you even read the message?"

"Yes." Mingi had pulled the notification down and read as much as he could from the preview. Yunho, unfortunately, sends texts in paragraphs. He thinks he got the gist of it, though. Get to know my boyfriend please, also leave your room or I'll show up at your mother's place (again), it will be fun, Jongho will like you, I miss you, ㅠㅠㅠㅠ, etc.

"Soo… Do you want to?" Wooyoung meets Mingi's blank expression with humour. "A double-date, Mingi-yah. Location T-B-C," he sounds out in English.

It's put lightly. Likely deliberately. Mingi knows that, but he still can't help cringing a bit. “Double-date?” he repeats; then, it clicks: “Oh. Valentine’s day.”

"Ding ding ding." Wooyoung's doing that thing where he watches his face like a puzzle. Mingi feels the attention on his skin like burn marks. He doesn't know what his face is doing. The more he tries to keep it still, the less in control of it he feels.

"Sure," Mingi says, utterly monotone.

Wooyoung's tries to catch his gaze. His efforts to dodge it make him feel too small for his skin. "Are you sure?" he queries.

Mingi rolls his tongue around his mouth. Can you be sure of anything? he feels like asking, just to be difficult. "Can we sit up?" he asks instead, his body weight turning from warm to suffocating.

Wooyoung eases back. They sort out the tangle of their legs, and Mingi retracts his under him, to sit back on his heels against the corner cushion. He watches Wooyoung lean sideways against the back of the couch, long arm stretched out, just a few inches short of Mingi's shoulder.

"What're you thinking about?" he asks when Mingi falls quiet. "Is it too much?"

"Are we dating?" Mingi blurts out in answer. 

He's tactful and delicate with his anxieties as always. But Wooyoung just blinks at him, calmer than Mingi anticipates. (He's working on it.) "We don't have to call it a double-date, you know. We can just be third and fourth wheels. Friends at dinner, gays at brunch. If that's what's bothering you."

"But do you want to call it a double-date?" Are we dating—Am I taking too long—Are you angry with me—?

Wooyoung bends his elbow, and Mingi half-takes it as punishment before he just rests his cheek on his hand. Relaxed and open. " I just want us to all hang out. I don't mind what we call it. Genuinely, I wasn't trying to imply something, but I can see why you took it that way." He offers Mingi a small smile, a smaller shrug. "I told you before, we can take our time. I get it. It's a lot."

Mingi thinks he believes him. The rational part of him, maybe, he believes him, but he's staring at Wooyoung's right ear instead of looking him in the eye, his hands crossed in his lap, and he's not sure the rest of him wants to hear it. It doesn't make sense that someone like Wooyoung, who could have anyone, wants to wait around for him. But he feels like that's not something for Wooyoung to reason him out of. More of an actual him-problem.

He's not even sure it's why he's coiled himself up, anyway. Maybe it's just a bad day, and bad days are opportunists for these kinds of thoughts. He's tired of trying to understand his stupid fight-or-flight system. He's tired of old guilt and the bad days and all these multitudes between him and what he wants.

"Mingi, you have this thing, like…" Wooyoung sighs, extends his arm again, and drums his fingers along the back of the sofa. Searching. "An oh, nobody wants to hear it thing. You think nobody wants to hear it. That's not true, you know."

Mingi huffs, something resembling a laugh. "Do you enjoy hearing about it?" he asks, maybe too flat and rough-edged for Wooyoung's kindness. 

"Of course I don't enjoy it. But that's not the same thing as, like, covering my ears to it." Wooyoung breaches the mental bubble Mingi's set up around him, takes his hand and squeezes. Stubborn, Mingi doesn't meet his gaze, but, despite that, it feels like Wooyoung's looking him in the eye; in some fundamental way, he's still able to see him. "I want to know, because I feel lucky that you let me know what you're thinking, and 'cause I know it's hard, and 'cause then we can figure it out." 

Mingi rolls his lips together. Pressing his tongue to his bottom teeth, he's quickly realising he doesn't have it in him to be abrasive. "Nobody wants to hear the same old shit, Young-ah," he mutters. "I'm tired of fucking thinking about it."

"Same old shit? Abuse, Mingi?" 

Mingi feels the steel-toed edge of his tone like a press into his skin. Firm enough that he has to shut his eyes, almost chastising. But he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to call it what Wooyoung does. The admittance is towering, inevitable, but he doesn't know if he can do it.

Wooyoung sighs and squeezes Mingi's hand again. "Sorry," he says, softer, still with something strung behind it. Mingi recognises it as care. He's talked like that enough to Yunho when he plays pin-ball with his emotions, too. It's only fair, he supposes. "I'm not trying to tell you how to feel, you know that, right? I just. Hate that you beat yourself up for not being over it, because that's not your fault. Of course it takes time. I'm expecting it to take time. I don't know how to prove that to you except for, like, telling you over and over again." He smiles again. "And listen, I'm cool with repeating myself."

"You don't have to do that." Mingi thaws despite himself. Self-preservation be fucked—it never helped him before—he links their fingers together. "You're not even a little frustrated?" he asks. "Be honest, it's fine if you are."

"It's not frustration, I just like you. Maybe I can feel impatient, sometimes? But that's because I like you. That's all. It's not a real thing, you know, I'm not actually frustrated, I just–" He gestures with his free hand, mimes squeezing Mingi like putty, or digging his claws into his cheeks. Same difference, Mingi reasons, as he smiles. "You know?"

"Right." Mingi hums. His thumb brushes weakly over Wooyoung's. "I'm trying," he adds quietly. "I like you a lot."

"I know, jagiya," Wooyoung says easily. "I'm not going anywhere."

Mingi sighs. I don't want to keep saying no. He can't keep saying no. "What's their plan for this double-date, anyway?" he mumble-asks. Wooyoung's eye-smile tells him that's yes-enough for now.

*

Where are you?

Mingi answered the phone from the back of a coach. Two bags in the overhead, one at his feet. He'd given his two weeks at the internship twenty minutes away, a job she told him to go for because it was local and a good opportunity for you and not because it was a wage he could barely parse out into rent and bills, and she needed more leverage. (I want to see your mother, too, but you want to spend money on trains when we're already struggling?) (Of course you can go out, but can you afford it?)

Their lease was up in a month. He didn't know what he'd do if they signed again, and he wanted to be gone by the time she came back. He was surprised his legs even carried him this far. 

Where's your stuff, Mingi? she asked, even-keeled, which scared him more than when she yelled. Giving some to charity?

"Please don't do this again," he mumbled into the receiver. His hands were sweaty, his throat was thick. It didn't work the first time, it didn't work five months later—it had to work now. He had to stay on this coach, no matter what strings she pulled. "I'm sorry. I can't do this."

You can't even say it. Let alone to my face. Come home and talk to me. At least talk to me, jagiya.

He brought his bag closer to himself with his feet. "I'm sorry." Repeated like a safeword.

We sign the lease in two weeks, are you heartless? Do you want me to be homeless? You hate me that much? She paused. Oh my god, did you plan this?

"I don't hate you," he said. “I’m sorry.”

I don't deserve this. I don't– Where are you going? Tell me where you're going, Mingi. You're not thinking straight. Let me help.

Mingi almost dropped his phone. Sweaty hands. The coach started to move, and it felt like he was leaving his stomach behind. "Don't."

I have your mother's number. I'm going to call her. 

He remembers the sun setting outside the dirty coach window. He barely caught a silver of it from the back seat, but it was strong enough to cut orange across his lap, burning through each break in the trees. 

Do you think you're making her proud, doing this? Running out on your relationship?

Suddenly, he was ten years old again, watching his grandparent's house get swallowed by the sun in the rear-view window. The coach driver was his mother, just over a decade younger, driving into the dark of late evening and pulling into an old friend’s driveway hours later. A stranger to her son then—still mostly a stranger to him—who wrapped her up in a hug the moment the car door opened.

Yeah, he thought. Quiet, but real, and honest, the first real sound of his voice in months. I do.  

"We're not in a relationship anymore," was the last thing he said before shutting his phone off.

*

The bus back crawls through the traffic. Wooyoung has his head on Mingi’s shoulder, sleepy and rocking just so with every incremental movement, and Mingi's cheek rests lightly in his hair. They each have an airpod in. Mingi holds the phone steady between their laps as their downloaded show of choice plays.

Wooyoung and Yunho were right, of course: Jongho is weird, and Mingi does like him. The double-date was an indoor laser tag arguably too well-suited to four competitive adults, then dinner with too much alcohol. Seeing Yunho as a giggly, playful drunk is a rare gift that Mingi will forever savour in his camera roll, and Wooyoung's rapport (bickering) with Jongho shows many months of unseen bonding, or could have happened in five minutes. Jung Wooyoung has that pull. Mingi's never quite got the grasp of it, and gave up trying back in high school with Yunho. The part of him that's still an insecure fifteen-year-old stepping into self-awareness has gotten smaller and smaller, and he's happy to watch now. To be reeled in and laugh at his own jokes, to get to hear Jongho's sincere, straight-faced puns while Wooyoung falls sideways onto his arm. 

It was like a clean slate. Mingi had half an apology prepped under his tongue for him, for both of them, but Jongho didn't bring up last time beyond a comment about how his hair's grown out. Yeah, Yunho probably told him not to, but he acted natural enough that Mingi didn't even think about that until he took a bathroom break. And now they have each other's numbers. Overall, a success.

"What if I shaved my hair off?" he asks Wooyoung now. It has nothing to do with the episode; Wooyoung makes a confused, tired sound in his throat. "Shaved it and bleached it." 

"You'd look sexy," he says without looking up. 

"How'd you know?"

"'Cause you've got a sexy face." Wooyoung adjusts at his side. Noses his way into the comfortable crook of Mingi's neck. His hair tickles. "You can pull off anything."

Mingi thinks, pursing his lips. "If I shaved it, bleached it, and dyed it pink?"

"Pinki Mingki? Yunho would never live it down." When Mingi opens his mouth again, Wooyoung half-heartedly hits his stomach. "Stop trying to bait me, it won’t work."

"I'm brainstorming."

Wooyoung taps pause on the screen, and turns his head so his lips are on his neck. "You're annoying," he murmurs. The bridge of his nose brushes his throat. Mingi smiles, unfazed, when the heat of his open mouth settles behind his ear. "Want to walk the rest of the way?"

Mingi left his bag at Wooyoung's before they went out: part-convenience, part-incentive, but mostly to sneak the flowers in. After the twenty minute walk back, Wooyoung condemns him to the hyeon-gwan when he's only half-way out of his shoes, and is in the kitchen with his slippers on at lightning speed. When Mingi is finally, graciously invited in, it's to the sight of Wooyoung by his sink, a half-uncovered brownie—cake?—set aside on the counter next to him as he stares down a fresh vase of baby's breath that magicked itself onto the sill. It just about fits beside his (now deflowered) orchid.

"When did– Yah, don't laugh at it!" Wooyoung says to the little hitched giggles escaping Mingi, entirely outside of his volition, as he eyes the circle-mould brownie. It’s complete with a heart in wonky icing. It’s perfect. "If you laugh you're not getting dessert! Where did the flowers come from?"

"Did you film making this one?" Mingi asks, ignoring all threats as he steps closer.

Wooyoung grabs the nearest tea towel and whips him with it. "Mingi! Did you put these here?"

He reaches under Wooyoung's arms to wash his hands, ignoring the exasperated grin budding in his cheeks, too. He shrugs, takes the towel from Wooyoung's grip, and dries his hands with it. "You're so annoying! When did you do that? What the fuck? Do I even own a vase?"

“When you were ordering the taxi," he says at last, leaning on the counter. He folds the tea-towel over the oven door handle. "The cake's cute."

“Fuck the cake," Wooyoung laughs, slapping his bicep like an excited child, then curling his fists up and wiggling them about, as if to stop himself from doing it again. "Did you get me Valentine's Day flowers?"

His voice pitches up, airy and delighted. Mingi feels himself grin, open mouthed, tongue to his cheek. He doesn't try to stop the spread of joy. No part of him wants to. "There's a note, you know."

Wooyoung's brows shoot up, then furrow at the vase, then shoot up again when he sees the small envelope sandwiched behind it. "What does it say?" he asks before he's even got the flap open.

“Your smile is like a gypsophila." 

Wooyoung pauses with the card barely open, flitting his eyes up to Mingi's. "Does it really?" he asks, softening, words rounded out by his grin. His rows of happy teeth.

Mingi nods. He feels warm from his throat deep into his stomach, like he’s glowing. "And some other stuff, yeah. Do you like them?" he says, gesturing to the flowers. 

"They're pretty," Wooyoung replies. He plays with the flap of the card, eyes darting all over Mingi's face. When Mingi hums his agreement, it makes him laugh, duck his head and bring his arms in, then knock his shoulder into Mingi’s chest. “Shut up.”

"Are you gonna read the note?" Mingi asks, amused.

"Fuck you." Wooyoung opens it up close to his chest. "Don't watch me," he adds. "Cut the cake or something."

Mingi giggles, moving around him with a hand on his lower back. He slides a knife off Wooyoung’s fancy magnetic rack, tucked up under the cabinets. He gets two small plates off the bottom-right shelf inside, then digs through Wooyoung's freezer for ice-cream. It’s with the same practised ease he has at his mother’s that he serves them two even slices, with two scoops of vanilla, and shuts the freezer door with his foot after he puts the tub back. Comfortable. At home.

When Mingi turns to get out two spoons, Wooyoung's got the card trapped open on the counter under one hand, and his sleeve pulled over the other, pressed to the corner of his eye.

His smile really does look like new blooms of baby’s breath, twined together into full, flowering bouquets. It really does look like something Mingi wants to slow down and look at for a while. To water and watch open up.

Wooyoung sniffs and laughs when he sees Mingi looking at him, tucking the card safely back behind the vase. "It does say that, doesn't it?" he mumbles, blinking quickly.

"I mean, I wasn't lying," Mingi says, scooting closer as Wooyoung winds his arms around his waist.

"I know you weren’t," he tells him, as Mingi's eased back against the counter. Their plates clink together behind him, but Wooyoung guides him towards his mouth when Mingi goes to look over his shoulder.

The kiss is slow, thorough, the kind Mingi feels in his toes and fingertips first. An articulation of what he wrote, of how much he meant it. There's too much teeth, because there's so much smiling. Wooyoung nips Mingi's tongue and his apologies turn into fits of giggled mianhaes with several consoling kisses to punctuate them. 

"The ice-cream will melt," Mingi reminds him in-between a press of lips to his cheek and jaw.

“I’ll eat you instead," Wooyoung says immediately. His fingers knead up his back, eager, greedy, loving, squeeze his waist. "Thank you," he murmurs, tipping his head back to have sight of his face again. "You're so sweet."

Mingi's arms frame him, slung loosely over his shoulders. "Thank yourself," he says, and Wooyoung digs his fingers into his side in reply, pulling a high, sharp laugh out of him.

"No, let me thank you. You make me happy, too, you know," he tells him, smoothing his palm over the damage. "You do know that, right?"

Mingi hums. He lets his chest jump with the last tendrils of ticklish laughter until it peters out, and the air becomes soft with the silence. "Yeah," he murmurs, meeting his sincerity head on, holding Wooyoung’s gaze. His eyes crinkle into crescents when he nods. "I think I do." 

*

Wooyoungie,

Thank you for your patience, care, and gypsophila-like smile. I bought you some to match. You can dry them out if you want to keep them.

Thank you for making me happy. Sometimes, the lost time gets to me, and I wonder what would’ve happened if we figured this out three years ago. Most of the time, I’m just happy I get to sit by you and eat your food, hear you laugh and kiss you.

Happy Valentine’s. Please lean on me, too.

—Mingi