Chapter Text
You have been doing this job long enough to know that you are not supposed to have favorites.
You have known Chan since he was seventeen and terrifyingly talented and still had the particular quality of softness that very young men have before the industry either polishes it out of them or weaponizes it. You were twenty then, maybe twenty-one, working a junior position you were probably too inexperienced for, and your first assignment had been to sit in on a trainee evaluation session and take notes. He had walked out and performed with the kind of focus that made the air in the room change, and when it was over he had looked immediately at the floor, like he could not bear anyone seeing him want to know if it had been good enough.
You had written in your notes: remarkable instincts, probably knows it, definitely afraid of knowing it.
That had been the beginning.
Now you are thirty, or thirty-one depending on when you are counting, and you have a small apartment in Seoul with too many plants and a specific mug that you use for tea and no one else is allowed to touch, and Chan has a key because he comes over often enough that it seemed absurd not to give him one. He texts before he uses it. Always. Even though you have told him he does not have to.
That is the kind of person he is.
---
You hear the key in the lock at around nine in the evening on a Tuesday, which is not unusual. What is unusual is the silence after the door opens. Normally there is some kind of sound, a greeting, a question about whether you have eaten, a comment about something he heard on the drive over. Normally Chan takes up sound the way good music takes up a room.
Tonight there is nothing.
You come out of the kitchen with your hands still a little damp and find him sitting on your couch with his elbows on his knees and his face tilted slightly down, and he is looking at his phone with an expression you do not like.
"Hey," you say.
"Hey." He puts the phone face-down on his thigh.
You dry your hands on the nearest dish towel and sit down next to him. Not too close. You have learned over the years to read the particular geometry of his distress, and right now he needs someone in his orbit but not in his space.
"You look terrible," you say.
"Thanks." A beat. "You look nice."
"Chan."
He exhales. Picks up the phone. Sets it back down. Picks it up again and holds it out toward you and you take it without looking at him.
The screen is open to what appears to be a thread. You scroll. Then you stop scrolling because you have seen enough.
You hand the phone back.
"How long have you been reading this," you say. It is not really a question.
He shrugs with one shoulder. "A while."
You sit with that for a moment. Outside your window a delivery scooter goes by and its engine makes a small distant sound and then it is gone.
"Can I ask you something," Chan says.
"Always."
He is quiet again, for long enough that you begin to wonder if he has changed his mind, and then he turns to look at you and his eyes are a little too bright and his jaw is doing the thing it does when he is working very hard to sound casual about something that is not casual at all.
"Do you think," he says, "that I'm pretty enough? To be an idol?"
You blink.
"You are an idol," you say.
"That's not what I asked."
You look at him. He looks back at you, and you see it clearly now, the thing underneath the question, which is not actually a question about his face but about whether his face is the right kind of face, whether it produces the right kind of want, whether he is seen in the way he quietly and never-admittedly needs to be seen.
You have known him for thirteen years. You know the shape of every insecurity he carries. This one is not new. But tonight it did not come to play.
"Tell me," you say.
And he does.
---
It comes out in pieces, the way things do when he trusts you enough to be incoherent. He is not a man who is usually incoherent. He built himself into someone who leads clearly and speaks carefully and holds the room steady when other people cannot, and you have watched him do it at enormous personal cost for most of his adult life. When he is incoherent with you it is because you are one of the very few places he has decided he does not have to perform.
He talks about the comment threads. About the way Stay speak about Hyunjin in particular, the reverence in it, the way they describe his features like they are describing something sacred. About Felix and the way people seem to almost grieve with longing when they talk about him, like wanting him that way is itself a kind of art. About Lee Know and the cool precise desire that follows him everywhere.
And then about himself.
"They talk about me like I'm," he stops. Starts again. "Like I'm useful. Like I'm good for something. But it's always the same thing. It's always just- "
He picks up his phone again and reads something aloud and then puts it back down.
"They call my lips," he says, and his voice is doing something strange and careful, "a." He finds the word. "'Fuckstrument.'"
The word sits in your apartment and neither of you touches it for a moment.
"They talk about them like the only things they're good for are depravity and graphic things," he says. "And I know I should be used to people saying things. I know I've heard worse. But it's like they can't." He stops. "They can't just want me. They have to take something from me to do it. Like I’m a cow and have to earn my keep by being of service. I’m not making sense. Fuck. I’m sorry."
He puts his phone down on your coffee table, very gently, like he is setting down something heavier than it looks.
"Does that make sense," he says.
"Yes," you say. "It makes complete sense."
He nods. He looks at his hands.
"I'm not," he starts, and then shakes his head.
"You are," you say.
"You don't know what I was going to say."
"I know what you were going to say."
He makes a sound that is almost a laugh.
You let the quiet breathe for a moment, because he has given you something real and it deserves real consideration, not a quick reassurance that also looks like dismissal, not the kind of thing that sounds good and means nothing. You have given him enough of those over the years when you were trying to maintain the careful professional distance that seemed, at the time, like the right call. You are tired of the right call.
"Chan," you say.
He looks up.
"I also like your lips."
He goes very still.
"I like them," you say, "because of every kind and supportive thing they have ever said to me. Because of the way they move when you're excited about something you're making and you can't get the words out fast enough. Because when you smile at me, and I mean when you actually smile at me not the performance of smiling, it's the best smile I get from anyone. It has been, for a long time."
He is watching you now with an expression you have never quite seen on him before. You continue because you started and you are going to finish.
"And because," you say, "the few times we've said goodbye and you've kissed my cheek or my temple or wherever, they are gentle. And they are soft. And they linger a little. In a way that makes me feel like I am worth the extra second it takes to linger."
You stop.
"I assumed," you say, and your voice is steady but only just, "that you had people at home. People who got more of that. And I wasn't going to say anything about any of this because you didn't need to know and I didn't need to know that you knew. But you asked me about your lips and that is my actual answer."
The room is very quiet.
Chan makes a sound.
It is very small, and it comes from somewhere in the back of his throat, and then his face does something complicated and he is not crying yet but he is going to cry and you can see the exact moment when he stops trying not to.
He leans forward and puts his face against your shoulder and you bring your arm up around him before you have made any conscious decision to do so, and he is shaking slightly, the way he sometimes does when he is very tired and has been holding things for too long, and you hold him the way you would hold something you did not know you had been afraid to lose.
He cries quietly. He has always cried quietly. You have seen it twice before, in thirteen years, and both times it was because something enormous had happened and he had nowhere else to put it. You hold him until the shaking slows, and then until the tension goes out of his shoulders, and then until he breathes in a long and unsteady way that means he is coming back.
You don't say anything. There is nothing useful to say. You just hold him.
---
Eventually, he shifts.
He lifts his head from your shoulder and straightens up and you let your arm fall and he uses the sleeve of his hoodie to deal with his face, which under any other circumstances would make you tease him. You do not tease him. He looks at you for a long moment, and his eyes are red and a little swollen and he looks like himself in the way he only does when there is no performance left.
"There's no one at home," he says.
"Oh," you say.
"There hasn't been anyone at home." A pause. "I didn't think I had the right to want there to be. When things are the way they are."
You nod slowly.
"And I didn't think," he says, "that you. I didn't let myself think that."
"Neither did I," you say.
He is quiet for a moment, and then the corner of his mouth moves, just slightly. It is not the performance of smiling. It is the other one.
"You think my lips linger," he says.
"I stated a fact," you say. "Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it weird." He turns to face you more fully on the couch. "I'm just." He looks at you. "I want to know if you'd like to find out. If they actually do."
You look at him. He is your best friend and he has been your best friend since you were twenty years old and he was seventeen and still soft in the way that very young men are before the world gets its hands on them, and the world has gotten its hands on him in a thousand ways since then and somehow here he is still, on your couch on a Tuesday night, looking at you like you are the answer to a question he has been too careful to ask.
"Yeah," you say.
"Yeah?"
"Chan. Yes."
He leans forward slowly, giving you time, which is so entirely him that you almost say something about it. You don't. You let him close the distance and when his lips meet yours they are gentle and they are soft and they are warm and they linger.
They absolutely linger.
When he pulls back he is close enough that you can see the red still around his eyes and the small careful way he is watching you to see if this was right, if you are okay, if the thing he just did was welcome and not too much and not too late.
"Hi," he says, very quietly.
"Hi," you say.
He smiles. Not the performance. The real one.
"I've had a key to your apartment for two years," he says.
"I know."
"I want a different key."
You understand what he means. You look at him for a long moment in your apartment with its too many plants and its one mug no one is allowed to touch, and the city going about its business outside the window, and thirteen years of things unsaid finally taking up the space they were always going to take up.
"Okay," you say.
He exhales like he has been holding that breath for a very long time.