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Chapter Text

Euijoo has known how to swim ever since he knew how to use both of his legs. If he had been born a girl, maybe he would’ve learned how to dive, too. 

Instead he was raised as the pearl of the family, the only son, their saving grace: precious enough to send to the prestigious all-boys school up the road (despite his persistently mediocre grades).

He’s never liked school. 

Case in point, he stayed up late last night helping his mother and the rest of the haenyeo ahjummas sort through mollusks, and he’s paying for it now; everyone in his class avoids him like the plague the next day because he smells like salt.

They never say it aloud, not anymore. They’re too afraid of the boy with the strange accent and hair-raising stare. 

The first time another student made fun of the smell on Euijoo, he got a punch straight to the nose, sudden and bloody.

The second time, it was a kick in the gut.

The third, a full-blown tussle in the hallway, all because some kid who didn’t know better tried to take Euijoo’s protector on. 

“Yixiang-ah,” said their teacher once, “count your lucky stars that this school isn’t co-ed. When you’re in college, you’ll be scaring off every girl within a five foot radius.”

When it’s early in the morning and Euijoo’s one of the few students in their seats, he gets the brunt of what they’re too afraid to say later on in the day. 

Today, the boy who sits in front of him, the one with a head as big as a basketball, is making an unnecessarily obnoxious fuss. “Look, he’s waiting for his boyfriend, ” he’s sneering. 

One of his friends mutters, “Couple of freaks,” to immediate snickering from the rest of the group.

Euijoo keeps his mouth shut, eyes glued to his pencil and paper. Not like it’ll make him any smarter, but at least it gives him something to do. 

Big-headed boy opens his mouth to no doubt offer more pleasantries, but gets elbowed by his friend and promptly goes silent. 

Euijoo doesn’t have to look up to know who just walked in. His fists clench.

The truth is: Euijoo has never spoken a word to Wang Yixiang, the foreigner delinquent who sits in the back of the classroom with a resting glare on his face—his unsolicited guardian and defender. 

He isn’t sure if Yixiang has made things better or worse for him. Sure, he isn’t bombarded with comments about the sand perpetually covering his shoes or knees, but it’s because no one tries to talk to him anymore.

It’s not like Euijoo seeks out conversations with other kids, anyhow. He thinks of school as a necessary means of pleasing his parents—a half-day of grueling nonsense before he can run back to the circle of ahjummas who ruffle his hair and pinch his cheek, the salt-winds of the sea whipping him to and fro, the blue-black of the rocks where he waits with his heart choked in his throat for his mother to resurface. 

Even now, it’s still halfway up his esophagus, his heart. Last night had been too close of a call. His mother, she’s stubborn; Granny Hallim has been begging her to take a break from diving for the past couple of weeks because of the state of her lungs, but she’d just smiled in answer, that small martyr’s smile that everyone says she shares with her son.

Later, when he was halfway to sleep, he’d overheard the low conversations murmured between his mother and father. The certainty in his mother’s voice, even when whispered: “We don’t have to worry. We have Euijoo.”

So Euijoo has too much on his plate to worry about the boy who stepped up to become his guardian angel.

Yixiang meets him on the rooftop during lunch with blood dripping down his philtrum. Without a word or glance towards him, Euijoo swallows the slices of croaker his mom has packed for him. She’d saved up enough to buy a special lunch box for him, a metal one from Japan that keeps food warm throughout the day.

He finally flicks a look towards Yixiang, who is perched precariously on the edge of the wall overlooking the courtyard, biting into his own lunch. It’s not a surprise to either of them when Euijoo lets out a breath and crosses the distance to hand him a napkin for his bloody nose. They’ve still yet to say a single word to one another, but maybe Yixiang likes the silence, because he comes up here every day.

Euijoo doesn’t ask where the blood is from. He watches him slide the napkin across his top lip, just barely swollen. Some of the blood has tinged his upper teeth pink and rosy. Euijoo looks away.

There’s an extra tangerine packed in with his lunch, so he gets to work peeling it. The familiar burst of citrus blooms in his face, wafted along by the slight breeze. When he looks up, that same breeze is blowing through Yixiang’s hair: like this, with less of his face covered, his features are inexplicably softer, especially his sharp eyes.

He holds out half of the tangerine in his hand like he would to a cat. It’s routine now, so it isn’t awkward when Yixiang flits his eyes up towards Euijoo’s for a brief span of seconds before he takes the offering, fingertips grazing Euijoo’s palm. 

For a delinquent, Yixiang has surprisingly soft hands. His fingernails are clean and prim, almost like a girl’s. Underneath Euijoo’s are the pulp and rind of the tangerine.

When school is over, Euijoo starts his journey home just as silently, with Yixiang a couple of steps behind. 

Most days, Yixiang follows him around like this. Euijoo has no idea why. 

Usually, he isn’t in the way—he just plays on his own a couple of feet away from Euijoo, kicking rocks around—but today, he walks a few steps closer. It’s unnerving.

“Euijoo-yah, is that you?” one of the ahjummas calls out when she sees him cross over onto the sand. 

“And his watchdog!” chuckles another, gesturing towards Yixiang, who has finally fallen back again to trace things in the sand with his shoe.

Euijoo ignores this and opts for a polite bow, the one they love to praise him for. “Where is my mother?” he asks.

The ahjummas fall quiet for once, which is such a rare sight that a lump immediately forms in Euijoo’s throat. 

His hand clenches tight and tense; he’s done it so often lately that the muscle in his arm is sore. He asks lowly, “Did she dive again today?” 

Auntie Soomi throws up her hands and blurts, “Look, now the kid’s scolding us!” The others explode into their characteristic sniping.

“I told her not to do it, I did, it was you that–”

“Oh, me? All I’ve been doing is staying out of her business!”

“And look at what good that did her!”

“It’s the spirit of her mother clinging to her! I tell you, one day it’s going to drag her body down along with it–”

“Soomi!” the oldest of the ahjummas, Auntie Mikyung, cuts in with a ruthlessly fierce look. 

Amidst the sound of admonishing clucks, she lets out a long sigh and rubs at her freckled face. Her hands are busy setting aside clams and mollusks and whatnot in a big brown bucket with netting lining the bottom. 

“Come, child. Why don’t you make yourself useful and help us set some of these aside for her? She’s resting at home,” she says, and something in Euijoo’s chest seizes with dread. It must’ve been her breathing problem cropping up again. 

He inclines his head and kneels down to help. Yixiang, who has been listening from a few feet away, approaches tentatively to join. 

The ahjummas titter like excited chickens, but Auntie Mikyung only shakes her head. “No use making all the kids do work. Go have some fun! We’ve never seen you swim, little watchdog.”

Yixiang sways awkwardly in the wind. Euijoo feels a crawling sensation up his neck and sure enough, when he looks up it’s to Yixiang’s intense gaze on him. 

“You can swim, can’t you?” an ahjumma cackles. “If you want to protect our precious Euijoo, you gotta know how to do that, at least.”

A look crosses Yixiang’s face from where he’s staring at Euijoo, his brows knitted together, and then out of nowhere he swivels around and leaves them.

Euijoo forces his gaze back down to the clams in his hands. His mother likes the smaller ones because they’re easier to chew. 

His attention is so focused on finding the best ones that he doesn’t hear it at first, the splash. He doesn’t process the whooping and cheering from the ahjummas, nor does he look up from his work when they start to quiet.

And then: “Hey, son, you sure your friend knows how to swim?”

Euijoo’s head whips up. He looks out towards the open, rolling blue waves, uninterrupted. There’s no sign of Yixiang anywhere. He scrambles up just as Auntie Mikyung starts to stand to get a better look. He’s already halfway to the rocks before he knows it.

He’s had a dream like this before. In it, the same sea that swallowed up his mother’s mother has pulled his own into its grasp. His sister and father are watching and waiting somewhere closeby, but he never reaches the shore—he’s always a thousand feet away, running towards nothing, all of his cries smothered by the sound of water crashing onto the rocks. 

In his most terrible dreams, he is useless. 

He remembers his grandmother’s funeral. He remembers his mother on her knees, body wracked by grief. She was bent in half in the same way when his sister ran from home to live with her boyfriend up in the mainland. Both times, he remembers being pulled into her arms, listening to her whisper into his hair, over and over: At least I have you, at least I can count on you.

He doesn’t waste any more time, diving in fully clothed. Cuts into the water like a knife. Ignores the sting of opening his eyes underwater to search for the telltale dark blue of their school uniform. 

There—something floating in the distance, a cloud of black hair, red knuckles and knees. 

Euijoo pushes his way towards him, lungs constricted. When he pulls him into his arms and breaks the surface, Yixiang is still motionless. He’s not heavy, but Euijoo has never before carried someone his weight in the water like this, so he takes a few seconds to gulp breath back into his lungs, the waves relentlessly slapping at his face, before he begins to carry them both back to shore.

Most of the ahjummas are waiting for them at the rocks, jumping and waving and hooting. They watch enough of their own children play in the water to be truly fearful, but the shortest one, Auntie Gyeongja, wades in to receive Yixiang from Euijoo once he’s close enough. She slaps his back heartily.

Yixiang thrashes a bit and coughs up seawater, but it’s clear he’s completely fine. The ahjummas cluck their tongues and return to their work.

Euijoo spits out water from his own lungs and then rounds on Yixiang, still sprawled across the rocks with sand in his hair.

“What’s wrong with you?” Euijoo demands breathlessly, fists clenched. He’s shivering, and not because he’s thoroughly drenched. His adrenaline-fueled heartbeat is throttling him, like he really did just wake from another nightmare. “Why do you do these things? Are you sick in the head?” 

He’s never said this many hostile words aloud before. Briefly it winds him, so he stops to focus on his breathing instead.

From below, Yixiang’s chest rises and falls rapidly. He’s squinting up at Euijoo through the glaring sunlight. Laid out on the surface of a rock like this, water lapping at his side, he looks incredibly small.

“I want…” he starts, but it’s croaked out. His accent curls softly around his words. He coughs once, more seawater. “Want to be your friend.” 

Euijoo stares down at him, bewildered and angry and exhausted. They stay like this for a while, the sun working hard to dry them both. 

Finally, Euijoo slides down next to him, hands braced on the warm heat of the rock. Deflated, he says for lack of anything better to say, “Stop getting into fights, then.”

“Why?” Yixiang gives him a confused look, like he’s genuinely wondering.

A sigh rattles out of Euijoo’s throat. “Just don’t. You use up way too many of my napkins.”

A snort, small but clearly pleased. “Okay.”

“Yixiang—” Euijoo starts, but the boy bristles at his own name, the tops of his cheeks going red. “What? Aren’t we the same age?” says Euijoo, misunderstanding. 

“You should just call me Nicholas. It’s my nickname,” he says.

“Nicholas?” An English name.

“Yeah.” He dips pretty fingers into the push-and-pull of the tide. “Easier to say, probably.”

It’s not, not really, but Euijoo just hums. “Nicholas, then.”

──────

After that, Nicholas stops being a silent thorn in Euijoo’s side, and becomes a loud one instead. 

It’s not until they move to Japan for university that Euijoo finds out just how loud.

He explodes when he laughs. He hits whoever is in his vicinity (usually, Jo or Harua) when he loses during a card game. He yells “Juju!” wheedlingly from across the room just to get his attention.

The only time he’s relatively quiet anymore is in the dead of morning before they head to class, or hours into a social gathering without enough sugar in his system.

“Were you just half-asleep during all of high school?” asks Euijoo one day, unable to suppress a smile at the state of Nicholas’s morning hair. He licks his own thumb to press down the back of it, something he learned from his sister. 

Nicholas gives him a sulking face. “I wasn’t good at Korean yet,” he answers groggily. 

They both know this is a half-truth. The reality of it is somewhere between the lines. Nicholas became a more expressive—happier—person the minute they moved to Japan and were folded into the world’s most unlikely, chaotic friend group. 

Euijoo still isn’t sure if he himself had any effect on Nicholas’s slow bloom into his most authentic self. He’s never asked.

They’ve started the old high school conversation up again, so Euijoo takes the opportunity to ask an easier question, even though he knows Nicholas never answers it fully. “Why did you like to fight so much, anyway?” 

“Where’s the salt,” Nicholas just grumbles, proving him right. “Stop interrogating me, it’s barely 6 A.M.”

“It’s 6:40,” Euijoo says cheerfully, pushing the big container of sea-salt across the table, the one his parents send him every few months or so. 

“Is this seriously the only salt we have right now?” 

After years of living with him, Euijoo’s used to this morning grouchiness, so he opens the container to sprinkle salt on Nicholas’s eggs himself. “Tastes better anyways.”

“Sure it does, sea boy,” Nicholas mumbles, but he bites into the egg without more of a fuss. 

The reminder of his home, even this small nothing, bites another hole into Euijoo’s chest. The old hollow longing, the restless itch. Sometimes, late at night, he’ll walk out to their tiny porch crowded with boxes and old albums and strawberry plants, and he’ll close his eyes to try and remember what it felt like to breathe ocean air. 

Throwing a glance at his watch, Euijoo slides into the chair next to him with a contemplative exhale. Predictably, it catches Nicholas’s attention. 

“What’s up?”

He just slides his phone across the table, Kakao chat with his uncle pulled up on the screen. Nicholas’s eyes open infinitesimally wider to absorb this new information. 

Euijoo fiddles with his rings, both gifts from his best friend. “He’s offering an all-expenses paid trip back home for the summer. A week in Jeju, in one of those nice houses right by the beach,” he says, even though said best friend is still in the middle of reading this himself. 

“Damn…” Nicholas squints down at the screen. “What’s the catch?”

Euijoo has to bite down on the inside of his cheek so as not to laugh. He says, “I have to bring a girlfriend with me.”

The egg falls out of Nicholas’s mouth and lands on his plate with a comical splat, so Euijoo ends up laughing anyway. 

“This is that uncle who’s obsessed with finding a girlfriend for you, isn’t it?”

“Mhm.” 

It’s also the only close relative of his who has stayed in Jeju over the years. When his mother’s condition had gotten especially bad she’d moved to Seoul for treatment, and naturally the rest of the family had followed. 

“He told me over the phone that if I didn’t have a girlfriend, he’d set me up with someone he knows. As a favor.”

“I remember when he tried setting you up with Granny Hallim’s granddaughter,” Nicholas snickers, which means he’s awake enough to feel evil. Euijoo shoots him a warning glare, but it never really works on him. “You were so awkward around her, god.”

“Things just didn’t work out between me and Seohyun,” is all Euijoo says, weirdly defensive. 

“Well no shit, you never answered her calls. How are you gonna do long-distance with someone who doesn’t like to video call?”

Euijoo grimaces at the memory. “Guess I’m just too used to someone spamming me all the time with voice messages,” he throws back, to which Nicholas just beams like a little shit. He huffs out a breath. “Anyways…I’ll just have to tell him I’m busy this summer.” (They have nothing going on this summer.)

He pulls the basket of tangerines at the center of the table towards him, gets started on peeling one just to give his hands something to do. 

Halfway through, Nicholas’s head lifts from his breakfast like he’s just thought of an idea, which is not a good sign for anyone involved. 

“How badly do you want to go back home?” he asks, something lighting up his eyes in that mischievous way of his. 

The chasm deepens, sharpens. 

Euijoo just looks at him. “You know the answer to that,” he says quietly. 

They’d both been trying to think of ways to feasibly visit Jeju for the past few years, but neither of them were able to justify the expense of a trip like that, especially now that Euijoo doesn’t have his old house to go back to. He feels the loss of that house so severely sometimes it feels like grief.

Nicholas’s brow visibly softens in understanding. A smile spreads across his face like syrup. “Then let’s go.”

Euijoo is aware that his expression is slowly morphing into something more exasperated. “What are you talking about–”

“I’ve been told my whole life I’m pretty like a girl,” Nicholas shrugs with a grin. His knee is bouncing under the table, betraying his nerves. 

“Are you saying…” Euijoo starts, his eyes widening the more his brain catches up. He chokes out a bewildered laugh. “Nicho, you–?”

“Yeah, why not,” he says with a laugh of his own, slumping back into his seat with crossed arms, a satisfied cat. “I wear a couple dresses and skirts and whatnot; you tell your uncle your girlfriend can’t speak Korean and then, boom. You and I get to live it up on the beach, a literal paid vacation… Besides, I know how much you miss it there.” He clears his throat, but his voice cracks anyway when he adds, “What kind of best friend would I be if I didn’t do this for you?”

Something pinches in Euijoo’s chest, sharp and familiar. “Right,” he says softly, moving his gaze back down to the tangerine in his hands. 

For a moment, unchained and elliptic, Euijoo feels a resurgence of that old sense of fear and, inexplicably, self-consciousness. Does he know?

Thankfully, Nicholas doesn’t let it go silent for long, his fingers tapping restlessly on the table as he thinks. Euijoo takes the opportunity to place a few pieces of tangerine onto his plate and watches as Nicholas pops them into his mouth without a thought; it’s more of a routine than anything, since it’s not his favorite fruit. 

“Shit,” he says out of nowhere.

“Mm?”

Nicholas shivers with preemptive fear. “I’m gonna have to ask my sister for help.”

──────

Packages show up on their doorstep throughout the months that follow, nearly all of them from various clothing shops online and a few from Nicholas’s sister.

Euijoo isn’t completely convinced this will actually happen, despite sending the message to his uncle himself (who was beyond excited to hear about this new “foreigner girlfriend”). 

It’s not until the last week of June and their joint living room is covered in clothes that Euijoo begins to grasp the reality of the situation. 

The sofa is laden with most of it, layers of clothes all secured on polished black hangers. A few pieces are ones that Euijoo has seen before—like the long denim skirt Nicholas likes to pair over jeans—but most are either new or inferably from his sister’s closet.

“You’re serious about this?” Euijoo asks him. “You know I’m a bad liar. Are you sure we can pull this off?” Nicholas stops in his tracks from where he’s been pacing around the room to give him a nonplussed stare. 

“Are you kidding? We’re not passing this opportunity up,” he huffs, so Euijoo just acquiesces, though he’s still half-convinced Nicholas will back out last minute and say it was all a joke.

Even through packing, the process takes on a surreal, dreamlike quality. It’s like for the first time, Euijoo can’t gauge the weight of his own actions. It would almost be freeing if it wasn’t so terrifying. 

The chaos of the airport doesn’t help at all; his head gets so singularly focused on making sure Nicholas hasn’t forgotten anything that he misses the fact that he left his own passport at home. They have to make an incredibly hurried trip to their apartment and back, nearly missing their flight.

Thankfully, the dimmed lights of the plane offer a blessed cooling effect on Euijoo’s nerves. He hasn’t been on a plane in a while, surprisingly. He can count on one hand the amount of times he’s visited Korea ever since he moved out, and each one had been with the sole purpose of checking in on his family. 

There’s a spike of remorse in him at the thought that this trip is inherently selfish—until he looks over and sees how happy Nicholas looks at this moment with his hand pressed up against the darkened window, eyes drinking in the way their city compartmentalizes into darting lights and lines. 

His head ends up leaned against it minutes later with sleepiness. If they were at home on the couch, watching one of those sappy tear-jerker romance animes Euijoo likes, he’d move Nicholas’s head onto his own shoulder. To prevent cramps in his neck. Or something. 

But the plane isn’t nearly dark enough for that kind of bravery.

Instead, he nudges one of their neck pillows in the space between Nicholas’s cheek and the window, pulls the hood of his sweatshirt over his own head, and tries to sleep too. 

Jeju International is relatively empty when they land at around four hours before midnight, but Nicholas still waits for people to clear out from the vicinity of the bathroom before he throws a grin at Euijoo and disappears into a stall. 

“Juju, how’s the weather tonight?” he calls. 

A running bit; lately he’s been asking Euijoo for the weather report like you’d ask Siri. Regardless, he answers dutifully, “Humid. Maybe a bit windy, so bring a jacket.” He hears the rustling of clothes, the sound of a zipper. “I’ll wait for you outside.”

He steps out, lugging both of their suitcases and Nicholas’s extra duffel with him, and sits on the bench with his neck craned back and legs stretched. It really must’ve been a long time since he’s flown if he’s this sore after a mere two hours of it. 

After a while, he forces his heavy eyes open to check his watch. 

“Nicho,” he calls, to no answer. He sighs. “My uncle is going to be here in less than five.”

Another minute passes, during which Euijoo’s eyes fall closed again. They flutter open at a sudden touch to his shoulder.

“All the grandpas in Jeju are gonna get the hots for me in this, you know.”

Euijoo turns to look, but his brain summarily shuts off.

Nicholas has always been someone who rides the line between his own masculinity and femininity with ease. Even in a skirt over jeans, he’s always exuded the natural confidence of someone who understands what it’s like not to conform. 

Euijoo doesn’t know what he expected, but it’s certainly not this: Nicholas in a flowy skirt, light and airy, a simple shirt cinched in at the waist. There’s a soft scarf tied around his head, probably to hide his shorter hair, and it’s at once old-fashioned and wildly endearing.

The undeniably masculine parts of him are still there, though somehow muted; they show when Nicholas plops himself onto the seat next to Euijoo with his legs spread carelessly.

“It’s not exactly…my usual style.” When his lips move, the fluorescent lights of the airport reflect off of them, lightly glossed and rosier than usual. It’s not like Nicholas never does his makeup, but this is a different look altogether. His eyeliner is a little smudged, somehow softening the sharp edges of his eyes, blush rounding out the angles of his cheekbones. “Hey, I’ll need to borrow your jacket by the way. None of mine match this outfit; plus, it kinda sells the, uh, thing we’re going for.”

Euijoo’s eyes dip down to notice that his skirt isn’t long enough to cover his shins. His legs look completely smooth. His mouth dries out all at once when he realizes—Nicholas must have shaved for this.

“Earth to Juju,” Nicholas laughs, but there’s a nervous hitch to his voice. It slams Euijoo back into the moment. He realizes he’s been gawking. 

“Yeah, yes,” Euijoo says, blinking rapidly. “You look p–” He cuts himself off, that same mix of emotions swallowing his next words like usual: something that cuts deep inside of him, and that awareness, always that awareness.

He forces himself not to look, but he sees, anyways, when Nicholas deflates. It’s possibly one of the worst feelings on Earth. 

His phone starts buzzing urgently; when he fishes it out and presses it to his ear, he’s still a little disoriented. 

It’s his uncle, waiting in the parking lot a floor below. “We’ll be there in a moment, thank you,” says Euijoo, and avoids looking Nicholas’s way. 

Once they’re outside, Euijoo’s weather prediction comes true; the scarf around Nicholas’s head whips in the wind, obscuring half of his face from view. Euijoo shrugs his jacket off and leans over to drape it over those strong shoulders. The dark blue of it goes nicely with Nicholas’s choice of summery white. 

They’re relatively the same size, but Euijoo likes his jackets longer at the sleeves whereas Nicholas likes his cropped or fitted, so it’s the first time he’s ever seen Nicholas wear something that makes him look small. He has to pull his gaze away when Nicholas wiggles into the sleeves, his scarred arm swallowed up beneath fabric, now a secret between them.

“Euijoo-yah! Is that you?”

His uncle is his father’s brother, which means he’s just as warm, though ten times louder. Euijoo isn’t as familiar with—or partial to— his father’s side of the family, but his uncle is sort of an exception. He’s the one who helped their family save up for a fishing boat back when his mother first quit diving and they’d been desperate to put rice on the table. 

Euijoo is shocked to smell the faint hint of the sea on his uncle when he’s pulled into an enthusiastic embrace. His fingers twitch like they’re searching for a fishing net to hook onto.

Beside him, Nicholas bows politely. Some time during their walk downstairs he’d put on sunglasses for some reason, and Euijoo has to bite back a delirious laugh. Complete with the silk scarf, he looks like the spitting image of Audrey Hepburn. 

Predictably, it’s a winning look, especially for Korean elders—Euijoo’s uncle claps his hands together in rapture. “How beautiful! What’s her name?”

Nicholas stands comically still, doing a fantastic impression of either an awkward foreigner or a swaying tree. 

Euijoo has to bite harder into the inside of his cheek, especially when he answers, “Yiyi,” and he can feel the hot glare of Nicholas’s eyes from behind those sunglasses. 

“Ah right, she’s from Taiwan, isn’t she! You know, girls fro–”

With a plastered-on smile, Euijoo interrupts, “Sorry Uncle, Yiyi is a little tired from the trip. Shall we…?”

“Oh, yes! Come on in, my car is that gray one there.”

Nicholas starts in that direction, stiff and silent. It’s so uncharacteristic that Euijoo feels a sudden stab of guilt.

“Aw, am I making you two shy?” His uncle chuckles, punching Euijoo’s shoulder. “Euijoo, go open the door for her! Don’t be so cold.”

His pulse rabbits and that familiar sense of out-of-body self-consciousness seizes him like death. 

But Nicholas is frozen in front of the car, eyes big behind those completely unnecessary sunglasses, waiting. 

So he goes. He brushes past Nicholas, opens the door like a gentleman, like—a real boyfriend would, maybe. He doesn’t meet Nicholas’s heavy gaze and just presses a brief hand to his lower back to help him get in before shutting the door. As he walks mechanically around to the other side, his uncle steps in himself with an old-man sigh. 

The car ride is equally as awkward, though his uncle thankfully doesn’t go on another tangent on foreign girls or something else vaguely offensive.

“Thank you again for this,” Euijoo says, genuine. “We’re really grateful.”

“Of course! It’s my honor to do your mother this favor.” His uncle throws him an inexplicable smile in the rearview mirror.

Euijoo goes still. “My mother?” 

“Oh, she didn’t tell you? She did say it’s been hard to reach you lately.” Euijoo stares down at his own fingernails biting into his palm. “I get it, kid, I was just as busy back when I was in school–”

Before he starts to monologue about the past, Euijoo politely cuts in, “Did she, ah, say anything in particular?”

His uncle sucks his teeth, turning the corner. “Well, she’s been worried about you. Says all you seem to do these days is stay inside and study all day. I told her, hey, I’ll take care of it! I know how to get any guy to come out of his shell: spend a week on the beach with a pretty girl.”

Euijoo nearly winces, but somehow reins his expression in to give a dutiful nod of his head. In his peripheral view, he watches Nicholas shift his eyes away from where they’ve just been on Euijoo. Euijoo is good at watching without being noticed.

He watches Nicholas tug absentmindedly at the sleeves of Euijoo’s jacket, the lights blurring past reflected in his sunglasses. He’s licked and bitten his lip gloss off, but his lips have always been very pink. So much of Nicholas is his favorite color: his knees, his knuckles, his cheeks and arms after a long day in the sun. 

When the car pulls onto what sounds like sand or gravel, his uncle tapers off whatever story he’s been telling to announce that they’ve arrived.

“Now, it’s no five star hotel,” he chuckles when they step out of the car, “but it’s less than a ten minute walk away from the beach. Maybe you’ll even recognize it, Euijoo; it used to belong to one of the haenyeo .”

It’s an old, traditional home: a low thatched roof, pebbled stone walls giving way to wooden panels, even a wide, flat table at the center of the yard. It’s nearly identical to his childhood home save for a few modern renovations. 

The moon is nearly full tonight, washing the house in a mellow, cold blue. Despite this, an aching warmth floods Euijoo’s body so intensely that he’s almost surprised at his body’s ability to stay in one piece.

Quietly, Nicholas comes up to stand by his side, face tilted up to take in the house as well; his hand ever so softly grazes the back of Euijoo’s, a tether to reality. At once, he’s washed in gratitude. Nicholas has always had an uncanny sense of Euijoo’s nerves, the miniscule shifts in his moods, even when no one else notices. Especially so.

This tactile habit specifically was born out of those days when things got too difficult to speak aloud. One of them would reach out absentmindedly, a touch on the other’s arm or shoulder or wrist, as if to make sure they were both there and present and real. Alive.

“Are either of you hungry?” his uncle interrupts, though not unkindly. 

Nicholas’s lips twitch as if to answer like he’s forgotten he isn’t supposed to know much Korean. It’s what unfreezes Euijoo to say, “No, thank you, Uncle. We’ll probably just call it an early night.”

“Now, there’s only really one place to sleep, but that shouldn’t be a problem for you two, right?” 

Euijoo breaks into a coughing fit; his uncle just pats him with a knowing smile, and then steps closer to take Euijoo’s hand in his and slip a folded white envelope into his palm. “Since I won’t be able to see you until Friday, this should be enough to cover all the fun things you kids might do.”

Euijoo’s eyes widen. “Uncle, we can’t–”

“I owe a lot to your parents,” he insists with eyes wrinkled into crescents. “Treat Yiyi well, hm?”

They part amiably, his uncle shaking Nicholas’s hand with fervor and badly concealed awe. When he finally drives off, Nicholas collapses dramatically onto the low table in the yard, arms splayed like a starfish. His sunglasses skitter to the ground.

“Do you want to change?” asks Euijoo sympathetically, sitting down on the other side. He leans back to look up at the plethora of stars stretching before them. He’s surprised to have missed looking up at so many. 

When Nicholas doesn’t answer, Euijoo says, “You only have to pretend two more times. Wednesday, when we meet up with the ahjummas , and Friday, for my uncle and aunt.”

Nicholas mumbles something, so Euijoo looks over and nudges his hand away from his face. “I said, let’s go swimming.”

Euijoo raises a brow. “It’s past nine,” he says, though he knows that’s not late at all for Nicholas. “And we’re hiking early tomorrow.”

Even in the dim moonlight, he can see a dangerous spark dancing in Nicholas’s eyes. “Juju,” he sings, and the hairs on Euijoo’s arms raise. His teeth are sharp and white in the night. “You shouldn’t be so cold to your girlfriend.”

A hot flash of— something travels through Euijoo at that. He just pushes himself to stand, glad his skin doesn’t redden as easily. Lets out a sigh, because that’s how this game goes, and then jerks his head. “Let’s go, then.”

They aren’t the only ones on the beach when they get there, but the ocean itself is dark and empty enough for them to find a corner of it where Nicholas can safely strip out of his flowy clothes and swap into swimming trunks. Euijoo keeps watch anyways with his back turned, suddenly paranoid, but the only other people on the beach are elderly couples on their nightly walks.

Nicholas doesn’t warn him when he’s finished, simply darting past him with a burst of laughter before he crashes into the water. Euijoo can just barely catch the moonlight gliding off the back of the exposed skin of his torso before he dives fully in. 

The irrational urge to hold his own breath—the way he used to do as a child on this same shore as he watched his mother dive—renders him temporarily useless. Nicholas became a good swimmer in high school once he really befriended Euijoo, but a breath of relief leaves Euijoo’s lips nonetheless when he resurfaces.

“Come on in, Juju!” he calls, splashing around with a dazzlingly bright smile. Euijoo pretends to war with himself, but the internal battle has already been won. He starts to pull his sweatshirt off, conscious of the way Nicholas doesn’t avert his gaze until the very last second, choosing to whoop at him instead. 

It’s still thick and hot at this time of night in Jeju, but this close to the shore the winds are nice and cooling. There’s so much memory in every sensation that it’s nearly knee-buckling: the muddy graininess of the sand unique to this beach clinging to his toes, the salt spray of a crashing wave against his shins when he’s close enough.

Normally, Euijoo likes to swim in long-sleeved surfer tees, but they’re stowed somewhere deep inside his suitcase. Even back in high school, he preferred to swim clothed. 

Nicholas, who’s never seen Euijoo swim shirtless, openly gawks at him when he wades in. It’s one of his most endearing traits, his inability to hide his expressions. 

The water is a welcome shock to his senses. Once he’s fully submerged, he feels his face break into a smile. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Nicholas smiles back, bobbing along with the waves. “Good?”

Euijoo closes his eyes, takes a long, deep breath in. Feels that hole in his chest thin in real-time. “Good,” he whispers.

Nicholas tests out a small splash to Euijoo’s face, to which he immediately retaliates. They go back and forth, instantly racketing up a storm of loud splatters and obnoxious laughter. As usual, Nicholas tries to slither his arms around Euijoo to push him underwater, but he’s never been successful. They both end up in the depths together, tussling with one another like they’re kids again, though it’s more skin-to-skin than they’ve ever really had. 

Nicholas is so warm to the touch. When Euijoo breaks the surface again, yanking him up with him, Nicholas briefly falls into the circle of his arms, hot-blooded and thrashing with laughter. With a push to Euijoo’s chest, he moves away, and at once the water feels a few degrees colder.

 “Well? Are you gonna swim?” Nicholas grins, flopping onto his back to start floating like an otter. Euijoo resists the urge to grab his ankle and pull him back into his orbit. “Everyone says you have a swimmer’s body, anyway.”

He looks down at himself, his long, bare torso submerged in the water. Shrugs, then says, “I’ll swim up to the markers,” referring to the orange buoys bobbing at the edge of the depths. They were added later on when tourism here spiked in popularity. 

Nicholas hums out an answer, looking utterly at peace for once in his floating form. 

Water is freedom , Euijoo thinks. It’s the one place where he’s really truly weightless.

When he’s far out into the depths, the bottom of the ocean nowhere near his feet, he stops to lift his face towards the moon. Expectedly, a memory hits him like a kiss: one of the rare times his mother allowed him to swim alongside her, both of them yelling into the night. 

The ocean is loud , she’d said, it’ll drown out anything you say. You can tell the ocean, the Dragon King, all of your heart’s desires. He will keep it all a secret. Just shout it out.

He breathes around the pang in his chest. Turns his gaze downwards to where Nicholas has made his way back to shore. He’s sitting at the edge of the tide, neck craned back to take in the stars, so open and exposed it feels almost like Euijoo shouldn’t get to see it. 

And yet, that was Nicholas: someone who gave you all the things you didn’t deserve. The watch, the rings. The sound of laughter, easy, beaming, instantly brightening a bad day. The grounding touch to the wrist, the signal for— I’m here, you’re here, you aren’t alone . The softest look of what could only be described as admiration.

“I’m sorry,” Euijoo chokes out, feeling his eyes sting. It’s not even close to a shout, but he doesn’t think he can manage that. 

The ocean swells around him as if in answer, relentless and gratifyingly noisy. 

Even into high school, he used to come here just to shout into the ocean air. He remembers screaming until his throat was raw, buoyed by the waves, something like Please don’t take her from me, too .

But he can’t ask the same for Nicholas, because Nicholas would stay no matter what. He has stayed no matter what, for all these years, by Euijoo’s side. That watchdog from high school was only ever the clingiest housecat, the most annoying thorn in Euijoo’s life, a solid nuisance, the utter bane of his existence. 

The ocean pushes and pulls on him; the moon beats down on his shoulders. His next words, spoken as loud as he dares, are quelled by the crashing of the tide. He says: “I wish I was brave enough for you.”

Chapter Text

These days, Euijoo has a different recurring dream. 

He’s still running, still on that beach, feet skidding across smooth black rock, sand all the way in his ears. But his mother is laughing somewhere safely from the shore. Nicholas is waiting for him in the water, flushed face tilted up to the sun like a flower. These things can somehow coexist, but only in his dreams.

There’s a bright, overwhelming feeling that fills his chest like death—it might be happiness, or freedom. Or maybe those things are interchangeable. 

Either way, he grieves it when he wakes.

Tuesday

Nicholas told him once that looking at the world through a camera lens made him feel safe.

With the camcorder in his hands for once, pointed at the sweat dripping down Nicholas’s face burnt pink from the sun, he thinks he understands. It’s safer to look at him this way. 

“You’re crazy,” Nicholas is saying, pointing at the camera. “You film all your torture subjects like this?”

“You’re the one who said to start filming,” Euijoo hits back, but both of them are too winded to bicker much. 

It’s strange to return to his hometown as a tourist. Even as a child, he’d never gotten to visit one of the number one tourist attractions here, a lush green volcano with a crater at the top that’s said to offer the world’s best view of the sunrise. 

“So anyways,” Nicholas continues at the camera, wiping at the excess sweat on his neck as he walks, “we woke up at the asscrack of dawn because Euijoo wanted to see the sunrise from the top of this place.”

“5 A.M.,” Euijoo clarifies.

“Exactly. Asscrack of dawn.” Nicholas is the more athletic of the two, but Euijoo’s the morning person, so he has to nudge Nicholas to walk faster when he starts to lag behind.

“We have to get there on time,” Euijoo insists. “Keep talking to the camera if it keeps you awake.”

Nicholas’s eyes fall into slits, but he eventually obeys. 

“This is the famous…Seongsan…Ichubong,” Nicholas says slowly, glancing at Euijoo for approval.  

“Ilchulbong,” he corrects gently.

“Seongsan Ilchulbong,” Nicholas follows smoothly, receptive as usual.

“Eum,” Euijoo nods with a helpless smile, the camera shaking along with him. 

The sky is overcast, a little too gray to truly make the sunrise as beautiful as all the articles say it’ll be. The highlight of the hike ends up being a baby goat that they stumble across halfway through descending. Nicholas snatches the camera from Euijoo and veritably films an entire nature documentary then and there, eyes widened with wonder and mischief and everything good in the world. 

They take the car they’d rented using Euijoo’s uncle’s money and drive down to eat black pork as if they’re really just two tourists. The whole time, the back of Euijoo’s neck prickles with dread and anticipation, but surprisingly no one bats an eye at two young men traveling alone together, and they don’t run into anyone Euijoo used to know.

At night, Nicholas goes for another swim while Euijoo stays on the sand for once, watching. He’s good at watching.

And both of them are too exhausted and swamped with the wet heat by the time they get home to think closely about the way their bodies knock together in the night, laid out on the floor with all the doors and windows open to let in the breeze. It’s not like they’ve never slept in the same bed before. They’re broke college kids, and also best friends.

This thought rings in Euijoo’s head, dim and faraway, as his legs intertwine stickily around Nicholas’s. He doesn’t know who moved first. All he knows is he doesn’t disentangle them, just presses as close as he dares towards the fading scent of sunscreen and summer off the back of Nicholas’s neck. Dreams that same sweet, painful dream.

Wednesday

Nicholas makes Euijoo evacuate the premises while he’s getting ready, because he has a love for the dramatics.

Today they’ll be meeting up with a few of the haenyeo ahjummas, specifically Auntie Gyeongja. He’s sure they’ll see a few others on their way, since they usually move together, but it’s Auntie Gyeongja’s husband he’d promised to help out for the day. 

Nicholas had asked, “Why don’t you just say no? It’s not like you’re staying long.”

Euijoo had shaken his head with some weight, and somehow, Nicholas had understood instantly.

“You miss it, don’t you,” he’d said. “You miss fishing.”

Sometimes Nicholas terrifies Euijoo. It’s like he slips underneath Euijoo’s skin, when he does that.

“Euijoo! Where’d you go?” calls Nicholas now, as if he didn’t force Euijoo to wait outside just half an hour before.

“I’m here,” answers Euijoo, turning towards the house. 

He sees a foot first, then a frankly obscene expanse of skin—holy shit, is that thigh —and then the culprit, a loose black skirt that flutters softly in the breeze, reaching somewhere vaguely above the knee. He really can’t move past that. It’s all a little insane.

“You can’t wear that,” Euijoo says immediately around the dryness of his useless mouth.

If Euijoo looked up, he’d see the annoyed set to Nicholas’s lips. “What, are you dress-coding me right now?”

There’s sweat beading down the side of Euijoo’s temple. “It’s– They’ll–” What can Euijoo even say? The elderly people here will faint. You’ll get dirty looks. Weird guys will hit on you. Nicholas will no doubt have a rebuttal ready for everything. 

“Relax, man,” Nicholas says with a barely concealed snort. “It’s too hot for something modest, seriously.”

Euijoo has to squeeze his eyes shut for no reason at all. In the time it takes for him to collect the last dregs of his sanity, Nicholas has moved past him, humming the whole way. 

“Hey, Juju. Is this one a tangerine tree too?”

Reluctantly, Euijoo opens his eyes and turns towards him. He instantly regrets it. 

The tree that hangs over the entrance to the yard stretches far into the air like a vivid, fragrant green arm. Underneath it, Nicholas reaches up towards the characteristic five-petaled white flowers of Euijoo’s childhood, unique to the island’s tangerine trees. The humid morning has rendered him already sweaty, pieces of hair escaping the silk scarf around his head and sticking to his rosy skin, curled with the heat. 

The thing shoved down so deep into Euijoo’s bones rattles up his chest like a storm all at once, hungry and livid and wanting. 

“Hey, you okay?” Nicholas takes a step his way, and a flash of hurt crosses his face when Euijoo instinctively steps back. 

Something wars in him, but before the guardedness wins over Euijoo blurts, “You look nice. Yes, that’s a tangerine tree. We should get going.” He wheels around to retrieve their bags, and out of the corner of his eye he’s relieved to see Nicholas’s smile reappear, softer but more genuine than before.

──────

The ropes of the fishing net bite into his fingers, at once painful and gratifyingly familiar. Those few years he was allowed to fish, he hadn’t cherished each moment enough. 

It’s not that fishing itself is his dream. It’s simply a part of it, like everything on this island is.

The waiting is a long, quiet process, and like watching, Euijoo is good at this too. The boat gently rocks side to side as Auntie Gyeongja’s husband moves across it, hitting his aching back with his own fist. The air is crisp and misty with salt in Euijoo’s lungs. 

When Euijoo finally heaves his catch onboard, the muscles in his arms scream with effort; it’s been so long.

“Another full net!” exclaims one of the crewmates. 

Auntie Gyeongja’s husband does something with his hands at the front of the boat, a flapping signal, which most likely means for Euijoo to come closer. So he does.

“Son,” he pants. “Why don’t you take this galchi back with you? You’ve caught enough as it is.”

Right when Euijoo starts to refuse politely, the man presses the smaller netting into his hands, so he just takes it with a smile.

The sun is sliding downwards across the sky when he returns with his catch in hand, feeling like there are wicks inside his skin, lit up and burning him alive. He might be beaming, a little. 

“Euijoo-yah!” waves someone near the bustling movement of the outside market. It’s full of noise and chatter and various people shouting things like Freshest clams around, fresh and fresher here!  

He gets close enough to see that the source of the voice calling out to him is Auntie Mikyung, who looks somehow not a day older than he’d last seen her, and yet as wisened as ever. Her brown freckled face is lit with a grimace, so he knows she’s pleased.

“Our handsome Euijoo, all grown up! And so tall! ” This is Auntie Gyeongja, still short and fussy. She’s crouching in front of a big bucket of stuff she probably also caught earlier in the day. And beside her—

“Your girlfriend is a pro with the abalones!” giggles Auntie Gyeongja. “So many people stopped by just to have a look at her! It’s great for business.”

“You two should visit all the time,” agrees another auntie on the other side, but Euijoo is too busy trying not to laugh at Nicholas’s please-save-me expression. His arms are clad up to the elbow in ahjumma-style rubber gloves, submerged in abalone water. 

Auntie Mikyung turns a terrifyingly knowing look up at Euijoo. “Are you sure we haven’t seen Miss Yiyi somewhere before?”

A sweat beads up Euijoo’s neck, but she just leans back to throw a laugh into the air.

“I mean, on the television. She’s tall enough to be a model. Thank the stars Euijoo is a long beansprout himself!”

Auntie Gyeongja points at the netting in his hands. “What is that, Euijoo? Did you catch that?”

As if on cue, her husband appears from somewhere behind him, hunched over and kind-faced. “Oh, the kid’s got a knack for it, alright. Say, why is it that you can’t come fish with me for a living? I really could use a young pair of hands like you.”

The ahjummas immediately cluck their tongues in disapproval. Even though Euijoo knows the answer, his own heart sinks a little at being reminded. He can tell Nicholas is paying full attention now, even though his eyes remain trained on the abalones he’s washing. 

“Husband!” hisses Auntie Gyeongja, and even though she hisses nearly everything, this one is particularly intense. “Don’t you know how many years Euijoo’s mother spent diving just so she could send him to university?”

The aunties quiet a little at the thought of Euijoo’s mother. Everyone used to say he was a carbon-copy of her: just as polite, just as patient, just as careful. 

He thinks about those weeks of applying to universities, possibly the most stressful ones of his life. Japan had felt like an impossibility, except that he and Nicholas were both offered insane scholarships to go abroad. People say it’s a product of there not being enough schools in Korea for the amount of students it houses, which is why the government’s pushing kids out and away, but the specifics hadn’t mattered to either of them. Of course they’d taken the opportunity. 

He just hadn’t imagined he’d never be able to come back in the same way. 

“Do you regret it?” Nicholas asked once. Possibly they’d both been a little drunk for Nicholas to have asked something so vulnerable.

“Sometimes,” had been Euijoo’s reply, but he isn’t sure if that’s the full answer. 

Regardless, it had hurt Nicholas to learn it.

Before they leave, Auntie Mikyung catches Euijoo’s elbow. She appraises him like she used to do his mother, quick flashes of eyes across parts of him to make sure he’s still in one piece. He’s unsure of it himself, lets it happen with his breath stuck in his throat. 

Finally, she says, “You should see Granny Hallim.” Something drops into his hands, a lumpy bag. He keeps getting gifted things from people here. “And grill Yiyi some abalones.”

──────

The night winds get ever so slightly chilly enough to justify grilling tangerines instead.

Nicholas stays in his skirt, though he changes out the summery top for a loose black t-shirt. Euijoo doesn’t ask about it, mainly because he’s trying not to look at all that smooth muscle and skin laid bare.

“I remember doing this,” Nicholas chuckles, watching from the porch as Euijoo prepares the yeontan . The little coal briquette came with the house, but the tangerines they’d bought on their way here, from the very same market they were selling at. 

Weirdly, Nicholas’s characteristically deep and smooth voice matched with his uncharacteristically feminine outfit doesn’t feel incongruous at all. To Euijoo, it’s all the same Nicholas, still a pain in the ass.

Case in point, Nicholas uses his bare feet to dig into Euijoo’s lower back, insistent and unnecessary. Absentmindedly, Euijoo bats at him.

Then, out of nowhere, Nicholas asks, “Is that why your mother stopped letting you fish?”

Euijoo flicks a glance towards him. In only the flickering light of the yeontan and the moonlight streaming openly into the yard, Nicholas’s face is half obscured. His lashes cast shadows across the tops of his cheeks, pinker than yesterday.

“Did you put on sunscreen today?” Euijoo asks, distracted.

Nicholas scowls. “Yes. I just burn easily. Answer the question.”

Euijoo turns his gaze back towards the tangerines. He pushes them with a stick.

When he doesn’t answer, Nicholas slides off the porch, a warm hand on Euijoo’s shoulders, its weight both gratifying and troubling. “Hey. Wanna talk about it?”

Euijoo pretends like he spends all his waking hours managing and attending to Nicholas, but the dreaded truth of it is that it goes both ways. 

He swallows around a million things he wants to say. Instead, what leaves his mouth is, “She wanted me to stay away from the ocean. Her dream has always been for me to settle down with a wife and kids somewhere in the city.”

Nicholas nods in understanding. He doesn’t have to say anything in return. Merely this is enough: having said it, and having it listened to. Speaking a wound into the world makes it less fresh. Speaking it to someone you love makes the stitches easier to bear.

The tangerines are smoky and sour and just sweet enough that Nicholas eats a few slices without complaint, though he says he misses the honey Euijoo’s mom used to pour over it. They chew quietly, contemplatively, under a million blinking stars for company. 

Some time in the process, Nicholas shifts closer towards him, warm to the touch, like he’s soaked up all the sunlight from the day. Their knees kiss. Euijoo has the brief, destabilizing thought that it would feel nicer if his legs weren’t clothed either.

Their wrists touch, too. The minute he feels Nicholas’s rabbiting, nervous pulse, a mirror to his own, he pulls back and away, another ugly instinct rearing its head. 

A look crosses Nicholas’s face, something hesitant and knowing and then, terribly, resigned. He stands.

“Going to bed early,” he says softly, and then he leaves Euijoo sitting outside, bereft and abruptly cold all over.

Thursday

The tension from last night thaws somewhat in the heat of the daytime, but some of it still thrums low in Euijoo’s veins even throughout their visit to the cliffside sea.

In the evening, they grill the gifted abalones. At the first salty touch to his tongue, Euijoo feels broken all at once with the memories of his old life, of his mother. 

When Nicholas catches his expression, too pained to hide, he sidles close and allows the warmth of his body to thaw the rest of whatever unspoken argument had happened between them. 

Things like this happened all the time, and yet this is new: while getting ready to sleep, Nicholas says something like I’m cold , and Euijoo allows himself to pull him into his arms. 

Friday

The yard of his uncle’s house is a noisy, cheerful hubbub when they arrive. 

The gathering was “impromptu” according to his aunt, but they all know she’s the one who ran around town excitedly talking about her nephew and his beautiful girlfriend.

Many of those present aren’t even relatives, or close enough to be counted as such. They’re all just people from around, people his uncle or aunt know, excited to have a look at the (by now infamous) Yiyi.

“It’s true she’s beautiful!” an unfamiliar lady exclaims while they’re all eating, and a guy nearby turns to give Nicholas—in a sweet red one-piece today—an obvious once-over. Something pinches unceremoniously in Euijoo’s throat.

It makes no sense. Euijoo is used to people being attracted to his best friend. He experiences it often enough on campus—approving looks and stares in the library, the scribbled phone numbers on coffeeshop receipts, the occasional daring girl who approaches him face-to-face. 

It’s not like it pinches any less all those times. In fact, he used to think he was jealous of Nicholas’s popularity back when it first started, because of the sting. 

But at least on campus he expects it to happen, knows how it’ll play out by heart. Nicholas cleans up well, dresses well, for the sole purpose of pleasing himself. 

This? Possibly it’s no different, except Nicholas can’t very well speak for himself here. It falls on Euijoo, for once, to do that. All those other times, Euijoo could just watch from the sidelines as Nicholas sent a winningly pretty smile to whoever was admiring him and got away with rejecting them. Now, Nicholas is clearly busy trying to keep himself from snarking at the old man nearby eyeing him too closely. 

Gently, Euijoo slips a hand down Nicholas’s back towards the dip of his waist, fingers lighter than he feels. Nicholas’s eyes dart up towards his in surprise, but Euijoo looks away. He can’t meet that gaze for long or something terrible might happen, like obeying his urge to pull Nicholas into the bathroom to get them both some alone time, finally, and then—

“Well don’t you two look close?” grins an auntie somewhere from his father’s side of the family, though he can’t remember who exactly she is. “How long have you been dating again?”

Euijoo smiles, though it feels strangely like metal. “Since Chuseok, ma’am.”

He lets her do the math to give him a chance to look around. His gaze snags on a man approaching them with an unsteady stagger to his steps. Oh no.

“Why don’t I show the pretty lady over to where we’re dancin’? We’ve got the music on!” He gestures wildly towards the few people clapping and dancing in the center of the yard. It’s actually quite homey and endearing.

“That won’t be necessary,” Euijoo says with all his teeth showing, as polite as can be, keeping his voice even. “We’re still eating, you see. But we’ll be happy to join you later.”

“I’m sure the lady won’t mind–” he insists, pushing closer to encircle a hand around Nicholas’s forearm. Euijoo is about to open his mouth when the next sequence of events happens in an utter flash: one moment the man is standing there, the next he’s wheezing on the ground, clutching his wrist.

Euijoo gapes like a fish. The man wails something about his arm, but he must be a well-known drunk around here, because people just roll their eyes and go on chatting. 

It’s only the woman who was speaking to them earlier—and had thus witnessed the wonder that is Nicholas up close—who is rendered just as speechless as Euijoo. 

“W-where did you learn to do that?” she asks, eyes wide. 

Nicholas affects obliviousness, happily crunching down on another lettuce wrap, despite having just twisted a grown man’s arm hard enough to leave him reeling on the ground just minutes before. With his left hand alone.

“Ah,” Euijoo says faintly. The smile on his face is becoming more and more strained. “She knows judo.”

──────

“Please remind me to never say anything bad about women. Ever,” grumbles Nicholas under his breath as they leave. 

“If I have to remind you to do that, you must be a pretty bad person,” says Euijoo, secretly equally as glad to be leaving.

“That includes my sister.”

“Well, you’ve never really badmouthed her on purpose. All you’ve said is that she used to boss you around as a kid.”

Nicholas sighs magnanimously. “I guess I have to stop saying that too, then. The life of a woman is truly hard. They should be allowed to boss people around.”

Euijoo’s arms are so full of gifts that he can’t really see where he’s walking, which is why he jumps in surprise when someone stops him in the middle of the road.

It’s Seohyun.

Her cool, pretty face stares unflinchingly at him underneath the starlight. “Granny wants to speak with you,” she says curtly, and then turns swiftly back towards the house nearby.

He deserves it after the way he treated her (which is to say mostly well, if completely distantly) but he still shoots Nicholas a warning glare. Nicholas is halfway to bursting into laughter.

Still, he just whispers, “Here, give me those. I’ll wait outside,” before scooping all the gifts into his arms.

When Euijoo steps onto the porch of Granny Hallim’s house, he’s at once hit with memory in the form of olfactory senses. There’s the smell of incense, of red beans, of that old-lady aroma he can’t place his finger on.

Hallim isn’t just the town’s most well-respected shaman because she’s lived for so long. It’s also because she isn’t completely bananas about it.

“Come in,” she says serenely from further inside, so Euijoo toes off his shoes, pulls off his baseball cap, and enters. The incense smell sharpens within. He has to duck his head to enter, as he usually does in these old huts.

“Your ancestors watch over you,” Hallim says in lieu of an actual greeting, but everyone knows that’s just how she is. Still, Euijoo’s nerves skitter like beans.

He does a formal bow and then sits in front of her on his knees. She has a baby’s shirt in her hands, needle moving ever so slowly on its stitching, no doubt for one of her many grandchildren. He wonders if she holds it against him for not helping to sire her some more. With Seohyun.

“Talk to me about your worries, child,” she says tremblingly. He has no idea how old she really is. Legend says she’s immortal. His mom says she’s eighty-seven.

Euijoo bows his head. “I am doing well, grandmother,” he says.

She tuts. “Don’t lie under my roof. I can see how your shoulders shake.”

Conscious, Euijoo rearranges himself. He takes a deep breath. And then another. And another. It’s a long, long time before he speaks, but Hallim’s needle never falters.

“There’s someone I care for,” he finally says, feeling sick already by saying it aloud, making it even truer than it already is. “I can’t reconcile myself with… That is, I…”

“You’re afraid,” says Hallim, hooded eyes sharp on him. Her hands have finally stilled.

Euijoo’s breath rattles through him. Can he say it? “Yes.”

“You and your mother are twin spirits,” she hums. A spidery wisp of her white hair flutters in the breeze from the open window. “Both full of love and very afraid of it. Always watching over your shoulder for the judgment of your ancestors.”

The truth of it shocks Euijoo. He wonders if it has less to do with Hallim’s purported connection with the spirits and more to do with just how well she knows his family; she’s known his mother since she was a child, and was a witness at his own birth. She watched his mother elope with a poor fisherman’s son. She swaddled Euijoo in cloth during the winter. 

He wants to ask if she’s disappointed with how he’s grown, if she thinks he’s become cowardly. He wants to ask whether all the feelings inside him will ever stop choking him. He wants to ask if his mother would ever forgive him if he gave into them.

Instead, he asks quietly, “How do I stop the guilt?”

When Hallim turns her gaze on him, her expression is hard, knowing. It sets Euijoo’s nerves on edge just as much as it comforts him. 

She gestures for him to come closer. To do so, he has to scoot on his hands and knees, because his head nearly touches the ceiling.

“You have so much you’re holding on to,” she says, clutching his hands in her shaking, wrinkled ones. “You have to learn to let go or you’ll never know the weight of your own wings. What mother could sleep at night knowing her son will spend the rest of his life with his wings tied behind his back? Wouldn’t she rather he fly, even if he might disappear into the sky?”

──────

They’re both restless that night. It’s reminiscent of all those nights in high school when they’d stay up together, bickering about nothing or laughing so hard his dad would come in and scold them.

“Nicho,” Euijoo says into the night, hushed. Bugs sing around them, possibly cicadas.

Nicholas turns his head towards him, nuzzling his temple into the hard circular pillow underneath him so it will give him some leniency. “Mm?”

“If you could choose anywhere to live, where would it be?”

Nicholas doesn’t make fun of him for asking something this corny or unwarranted, just hums to show he’s considering. 

He and Euijoo used to stay up talking about far more senselessly profound things. A surge of endeared warmth fills him at the thought: Nicholas takes our every conversation seriously.

“I honestly don’t know. Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve found a way to be happy.”

Euijoo turns onto his side, too, so he can see if this is the whole truth. And it is. Nicholas’s face is too easy to read.

I wish I was more like you , he wants to say. He admires this Nicholas so much, not because he is carefree, but because he’s the opposite, and yet is free. It’s resilience.

Their faces are close enough that Nicholas’s eyes cross a little when he squints down at Euijoo’s nose. Euijoo has no idea why he’s looking at his nose.

“It’s not the place that matters to me, anyways,” continues Nicholas. The corner of his mouth quirks up as he says it. “It’s the people.” 

Euijoo thinks about Nicholas’s laugh, brighter and livelier amongst the seven other people they sometimes call family. 

Beside him, Nicholas stretches out like a cat, moving onto his back again. Even in the dim moonlight, Euijoo’s eyes catch on the bare expanse of skin on his midriff exposed by his shirt riding up. He thinks about the curve of it. The possibility of his hand, there, holding it down gently like love. He thinks about the hot rush of wanting, wanting, always wanting—

He turns onto his other side, bruises his lip with his own teeth, and tries to fall asleep.

Chapter Text

Saturday

Euijoo wakes early enough for the sky to be washed in an almost-pitch-black purple. There’s a band of stars directly above his head like a smile, cradling the moon. It feels almost wrong for him to light his way with a cheap iPhone flashlight, but he is his mother’s son, as practical a person as they come.

The kitchen of this little home is small and only contains the necessities. Luckily he’s prepared for that and packed a few other tools. He gets started.

By the time the sky has lightened into a blazing red-orange-yellow, he’s finished with the first half of his project; the real problem is the second.

The sky is a cloudy blueish-yellow when he cuts his hand on the knife he’s using to chop up green onions. He swears under his breath, something so rare he half expects Nicholas to wake up and tease him about it, but thankfully Nicholas’s sleep is notoriously hard to break.

The sun, though shrouded by clouds, is fully in the sky by the time he’s finished and standing victoriously at the edge of the kitchen, surveying his hours of work.

Either finally awoken by the sounds or the smells, Nicholas appears in the doorway with a hand scrubbing at his left eye.

“Mm, Juju? Why didn’t you wake me up?” 

As if on cue, thunder rumbles the house from outside, and then all at once it begins to rain. And not gently—it sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime downpour.

Euijoo blinks. That’s not quite the atmosphere he’d hoped for for this surprise, but nevertheless.

He steps back, revealing a small table laden with bowls of rice cake soup and extra long noodles and soaked quail eggs and radish leaf kimchi. There are other side dishes too, but those were bought.

Nicholas’s eyes have widened enough to show their whites. “What is this? Juju!” he yelps, at once confused and pleased.

It’s so endearing that Euijoo can feel a muscle in his jaw jump. “Happy birthday,” he says softly. He’s just standing there. They’re both just standing there. He realizes that his former plan of eating outside in the warmth of sunlight has just been ruined.

“Let’s move it into the bedroom,” suggests Nicholas, suddenly energized. He crouches to examine the table’s contents, lips parted. “Euijoo, did you make– are these–” He says something in Mandarin first, and then pauses to think of the word in Korean. “Longevity noodles?”

Euijoo’s ears burn, but he nods. “Usually it’s seaweed soup for birthdays in Korea, but you hate that. So I made rice cake soup. And I learned that it’s a tradition to eat longevity noodles for your birthday where you’re from.” Actually, he’d feverishly googled Taiwanese birthday customs, but most of them had just been generally Chinese, so he’d tried to go for what most of the forums talked about the most, which was noodles. He’d made sure not to cut any of them: a long, long life for Nicholas, uninterrupted.

The utterly awestruck look on Nicholas’s face makes everything worth it. His eyes flit towards Euijoo’s and back to the table, fast and unbelieving. “Let’s eat,” he says.

They have to fold the blankets and set the pillows up against the wall to make enough room for them to move the table in and eat, but once they do it goes silent for a while with the frenzy of it. Well, mostly Nicholas in a frenzy eating, and Euijoo watching. 

Nicholas’s eyes flutter shut and his cheeks hollow out when he eats his noodles, head bent over his bowl. Euijoo moves his gaze somewhere safer, like his own spoon.

“Haven’t had something like this in so long,” Nicholas says when he’s finished chewing. His smile is turned inwards, a secret thing. “My mom used to make it for me when I was small.”

They ransack the house for shot-glasses after they’ve eaten. If seaweed soup is a birthday tradition here, alcohol is a no-brainer.

Nicholas makes a dissatisfied hiss at the soju burning down his throat, and Euijoo just laughs. Reaches up with a hand dewy from the condensation of the bottle and cleans something off Nicholas’s chin. 

They don’t get drunk. They rarely do, mostly because Nicholas can’t handle much of it. But they’re tipsy enough to forget all the unspoken rules between them, like the one that says Nicholas can’t press his face into Euijoo’s neck. Euijoo hates it when he does that. It’s so vulnerable. It makes him want to sob, a little.

“I’ll tell you something I’ve never told you,” Nicholas breaks the quiet after a while. The rain beats down around them, muffled and fuzzy. “About why I used to fight.” 

It’s so rare that Nicholas keeps something from his childhood a secret. Euijoo sits up to pay closer attention, jostling Nicholas’s head onto his collarbones. Nicholas doesn’t move, his lips moving across them like a whisper. The wet-dryness of his lips sends electricity down Euijoo’s entire body, but he doesn’t move either.

Nicholas says, “You don’t remember the first time we met.” Euijoo makes a questioning noise. “It was the day I first moved to Jeju. Didn’t know enough Korean for shit. Some kids stole my lunch, not even to eat it, just to trash it.”

Euijoo imagines it, younger, smaller Nicholas sitting alone without his lunch, shaken by the injustice of it. 

“And then,” Nicholas whispers, leaning back to give Euijoo a look so sweet his teeth ache. “A quiet, skinny ass kid sat in front of me and gave me some of his kimbap . And he peeled his tangerine, and gave me half.”

Euijoo searches through the murky water of his high school memories, but he can’t quite remember any of it the way Nicholas seems to be able to, in vivid color. His brows knit together in frustration.

“It’s okay, I know you can’t remember it. That’s why, actually… It was such an easy thing for you to do, like you did this every day. You just sat with weirdos and gave them some of your tangerine and went on your way.” Nicholas chews on his bottom lip, rolls his head against the back of the wall to stare up at the low ceiling. “But I remembered you. With my bad Korean, I read your nametag. I used to write it in all my notes for practice, seriously, you can check, it’s so funny. 변의주, 변의주, 변의주…”

Something incredibly suffocating, anguishing, holds Euijoo’s words from him. He has to close his eyes against it, but he can see it in his head, his own name in the margins of textbooks and notes and readings, written a thousand times over in Nicholas’s fast, elegant handwriting.

“Anyways, I couldn’t really bring myself to talk to you. I didn’t know enough Korean. So I just followed you around. And then I really couldn’t just watch you get pushed around by other assholes. I learned to box when I was younger, so I thought…this is something I can do, I can just. Yeah. I’m sorry, Juju. I didn’t know I made things worse.”

Euijoo shakes his head, a little agonized. Alcohol loosens up everything tense in his body, but it also makes him forget all the finer details of his self-control, cultivated over years and years. He says, out of left-field, “I don’t regret it, Nicho. I don’t regret any of it.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Sometimes.”

“I just…” Euijoo tries to breathe around the feeling. Nicholas’s face is turned towards him, the way it’s turned towards the sun in his dreams. “I…” He feels so deeply undeserving of that look. “I can’t say it,” he confesses quietly, which is almost like saying it anyway. 

Nicholas looks at him a long time. Euijoo doesn’t know what or who he’s seeing: is it the Euijoo who pretends like nothing has changed, or the Euijoo on the other end of the push-and-pull?

Something wild jumps into Nicholas’s eyes. “Let’s go swimming,” he says.

“Nicho–”

“I don’t care that it’s raining. Let’s go.”

Euijoo blames his acquiescence on the alcohol, but really the rain beating down on them is starting to sober him up. Nicholas grabs his hand and runs, really runs, whooping in the air, and it’s like Euijoo’s dreaming again. 

The ocean is seething and roiling in the downpour. They crash into the frothiness of it and get immediately tossed this way and that. It’s so incredibly dangerous and stupid that Euijoo almost turns back.

But Nicholas is laughing openly, throwing water at Euijoo’s already soaked face and soaked shirt, lashes wet and dark against his skin. The rain is making everything blurry and blue. It’s all a little addicting. 

He wades further in; to keep his balance, he has to reach out to grasp Nicholas’s arm. Nicholas just pulls him deeper. Even in the dark, his lips are so, so red. 

Euijoo says, “Nichol,” a breathless, helpless thing that he hopes gets drowned out in the rain and the waves. Nicholas misses nothing, though. The intensity of his gaze melts into something sweeter, softer. 

“Can you say it now?” Nicholas says, half-shouting to make himself heard. 

Even out here, Nicholas knows him too well. The ocean is so much a part of Euijoo that in it, he feels a little more alive, a little more daring. He half-suspects that the next time he gets his blood drawn, it’ll come out salty and blue-green like the sea.

His heart is a thrashing bird, its wings beating against his chest, his pulse points, his throat. Lightning lights up the sky like an urgent warning. 

“Wouldn’t she rather he fly, even if he might disappear into the sky?”

“I think I’m in love with you,” Euijoo repents, voice terrible. It’s barely a shout, but it guts his throat from the inside out. He doesn’t know if the wind or the water or the Dragon King himself has swallowed it up. “Have been, for a long time.”

He doesn’t even realize he’s shut his eyes against the shame of it until he feels Nicholas’s hands on his cheeks, fingers at his jaw. He allows himself to press his forehead against Nicholas’s, has to bend down to do it, and it feels like everything in him has finally stilled. Even the waves around them become milder, more forgiving. 

Another confession: “You scare me,” he says. “The way you make me feel.”

“Euijoo, Juju,” Nicholas whispers, warm in his arms. They sway in tandem with the churning water. “I’m glad you don’t regret it.”

They don’t kiss. They can’t even talk, with the way the storm rackets up. They run back home, the pour worsening with every step of the way, and then Nicholas disappears into the bathroom. He’s in there for a long time.

Euijoo just collapses onto the bare floor of the single room, drenched and breathless and disoriented, the same feeling he gets after waking from his most beautiful dreams. Without the light on, surrounded by the dark storm outside, he feels strangely suspended in time. 

When Nicholas steps out of the bathroom, mostly dry except for his newly washed hair, his gaze darts away from Euijoo’s. “Bathroom’s yours,” is all he says.

Something sinks in Euijoo’s chest. 

In the shower, he presses his forehead against the wall, blank inside. He feels like he’s just scooped everything that lived within himself and laid it bare at Nicholas’s doorstep, the whole beating mess of his heart, a bloodied bird. There’s nothing left, and there’s nothing that can be done. Nevertheless, he’s gratified to be weary enough not to feel the brunt of the shame. 

The room is quiet when he leaves the bathroom, the lights still off. Surely Nicholas doesn’t mean to sleep this early?

But the blanket has been laid across the floor, neat and meaningful. Nicholas lays in the center of it, the pupils of his eyes big and dark. 

“Hi,” he says.

Euijoo blinks. “Hi.”

“Come down here,” he says. So Euijoo does, his heartbeat all the way in his mouth. 

There’s something tilted to Nicholas’s expression, like he’s holding himself back from saying something. 

Euijoo is helplessly amused. “Why are you being so shy?”

Predictably, this sets Nicholas off. “Will you just– Come closer!” So Euijoo does.

It’s not like this is new for them, either; they’ve slept this close together before. But the weight of the confession that hangs in the space between them is. 

Finally, Nicholas snaps irritably, “Are you going to kiss me?” which elicits such a big smile on Euijoo’s face he has to push in close to hide it, and then they’re close enough to kiss, and then they’re kissing. 

Euijoo has kissed before. He remembers each one scientifically: his awkward first kiss in middle school, akin to butting heads, prompted by a girl who then leaned back and said, “Eh,” and never talked to him again—the hesitant, at-arm's-reach, there-and-gone ones with Seohyun in the Seoul airport.

This is nothing like them, and yet just as familiar somehow. 

Nicholas’s mouth tastes like rain and the salt of the ocean, like home. When Nicholas presses hesitantly closer, Euijoo pulls back so he can see the flush on his cheeks, the dazedness of his sharp eyes, his lips even redder than they usually are. He can also see Nicholas getting more and more nervous with every second that passes, so he presses back in, swallowing the gratified sigh from Nicholas’s mouth. 

It’s a little filthy for a first kiss. There are tongues and teeth and spit involved. Nicholas hooks his fingers into the back of Euijoo’s freshly cut hair and pulls a little, and an embarrassing sound leaves his mouth, so of course Nicholas does it again. He bites into the plush give of Nicholas’s bottom lip to take the edge off of what he’s feeling, but it only makes it worse.

When they separate, chests heaving, Nicholas blurts, “I don’t usually put out on the first date, but, well.” He adjusts himself on the blankets, tugging Euijoo over him.

Like this, Euijoo stares down at him, arms caging him in. “You…?”

Nicholas rolls his eyes, even though he’s blushing hard. “What do you think took me so long?”

At once, heat floods Euijoo’s body, a rush of it. His ears might be on fire. He presses a thank you into the inside of Nicholas’s neck, and then downwards, along the neckline of his shirt. Their fingers get tangled as they rush to pull Nicholas’s clothes off, messy in the dark. Underneath the thin blanket covering them, Euijoo’s fingers brush up against–

“Are you wearing that skirt?” Euijoo blanches, freezing. It’s unmistakably the skirt from Wednesday, loose and short and evil.

Nicholas’s teeth are sharp when he gives him a breathless grin, cheeks flushed. He switches to Japanese, maybe because he doesn’t know the right words in Korean. “Easier access.”

He takes Euijoo’s hand and pushes it underneath so he can feel the slickness there. Euijoo can’t really breathe. He doesn’t remember the last time he’s breathed. 

“Can you hurry up?” Nicholas asks, but it’s not bitchy this time. It’s soft, a whisper, a plea. He’s not smiling anymore, just panting, looking away. Euijoo has a flash of Nicholas, just him and his fingers, in the shower half an hour before. 

Understanding, he softens, leaning down to kiss the rim of Nicholas’s heated face. “I’ll take care of you,” he promises quietly.

They keep the skirt on. Euijoo has to bow his head into the heat of Nicholas’s neck so he doesn’t stare the whole time at his own fingers disappearing inside of Nicholas like a freak, and still he feels close to rupturing at the evidence of Nicholas having prepared himself for him. The sacrifice, the care of it. He feels unmoored by that alone.

“Ju– Please–” Nicholas writhes, eyes squeezed shut. “I’m ready, I told you–”

Making love is expectedly messy. 

Nicholas is a little unruly underneath him, sometimes telling him to stop moving, then biting his shoulder when he does. He kicks Euijoo in the chest on accident halfway through. His noises, instead of being as loud as Euijoo always imagined, are insistent and breathy and sweet, choked back whines and curses. He’s sweaty and slippery, and every time he tightens around him Euijoo has to bite his own lip bloody to keep from making another unforgivable noise. He’s perfect.

Euijoo can’t say that aloud, not yet, but something close to it leaves his mouth when he gets close. He is overwhelmed by the feeling of being this close to Nicholas, this wrapped in heat and warmth and feeling. It leaves him in mumbles, something along the lines of “pretty,” which makes Nicholas keen in answer, and then with his open, hot mouth against the line of his neck, he pants “ Yixiang ” like a prayer, and Nicholas comes apart beneath him.

There’s sweat sliding down his own back. Nicholas moves a hand down it, collecting it, dragging it underneath his nails. Euijoo trembles against the tenderness, so Nicholas holds him closer and mouths along his neck in turn. “Let go,” he says. “Euijoo, it’s okay, you can let go.”

So Euijoo does. He gives. He falls. The world is dizzying and white. Nicholas is the tightest, most destructive embrace. He thinks his eyes might roll back in his head, but they’re squeezed so tight he wouldn’t even know. 

The whole time, Nicholas holds him close, almost gingerly. He presses kisses on Euijoo’s chin, left eye, the corner of his mouth. “Stay inside, I want to feel it, want to feel you,” Nicholas is panting, senselessly urgent. Euijoo can’t hold back the terrible sound that escapes him, somewhere from deep inside. Is this what it feels like to fly?

When he’s collapsed on the floor again, Nicholas draped over him like the world’s laziest, most beautiful cat, he can’t form actual thoughts. He just closes his eyes and breathes. The storm is still raging around them.

“I want to try it the other way around tomorrow,” Nicholas whispers, squirming in Euijoo’s arms. He has a grin on his face. Euijoo is already halfway to sleep, but indulgently allows Nicholas to worm his way on top of him. “Or I can ride you?”

Euijoo’s heart skips a traitorous beat. “Right now?” he asks wearily.

Nicholas’s teeth are moonlight-white when he smiles. 

──────

“Euijoo?” There’s a surprised rustling on the other line.

“Hi mom,” Euijoo says quietly. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”

“It’s alright. I’m happy just to hear my son’s voice.”

Twin spikes of happiness and grief twist inside of him. By his side, Nicholas threads his fingers through his, a warm and steady point of contact. Euijoo takes a deep breath. 

Mom, do you still believe in me, the way you used to all those years ago?

“Did you want to talk about something, my love?”

“Mom, I bought our old house in Jeju,” he says, and the breath temporarily leaves his lungs. He has to slowly coax it back in. “I’m still in school, but I’ve been paying it off by fishing with Auntie Gyeongja’s husband whenever I visit.” 

Two funny things: no one calls him by his actual name, just “Auntie Gyeongja’s husband”. Another: no one suspected a thing when he and Nicholas returned to Jeju months later and Euijoo introduced everyone to his very close friend, Nicholas. 

An ahjumma had squinted and asked, “Is he Yiyi’s brother?”

And another ahjumma had hit her shoulder and scolded, “No, this is Yixiang, the little watchdog!”

There’s a shaky breath on the phone. For a long time, his mother is quiet. It doesn’t unnerve him too much. Both of them tend to think in silence.

She says, “Are you happy? My son, that’s all I want.”

Nicholas stretches out and flops his head into his lap, stares up at him from there. The sunburn on his cheeks is still fading, a reminder of their most recent trip. Euijoo says, “I’m starting to be.”