TRIUMPH OF A HEART

[kisoap]

JOGA
555w; pg (wonwoo/jun)
what'll you do then?

Wonwoo stares at him quite seriously while leaning over their apartment units' shared balcony. "What is it that you want, Jun?"

 

They're well into fall at this point, and it's cold enough that Junhui keeps the windows shut all the time now. Wonwoo, otherwise covered ankle to turtleneck in winter clothes, wiggles his bitten-with-cold toes in his sandals, oddly reminiscent of a package of brightly wrapped fish sausages. Junhui studies them carefully from where he’d crouched down, trying to coax a black stray with white paws closer to him with a convenience store can of tuna. 

“All of a sudden?” he replies when he finally remembers Wonwoo asking him a question. The cat’s long gone now and the tuna’s open but untouched. He’ll have to cook it with fried rice for dinner.

 

“No,” Wonwoo points out. There’s a lit cigarette caught in between his index and middle finger. Last month, he’d tilted his mouth so near to Junhui’s that Junhui couldn’t help but kiss him. It’d happened again days later, and again and again, and now Wonwoo’s patience was pulled so thin that he’d become utterly transparent. “You just always walk away before you can answer.”

Junhui hums while tracing the cold aluminum lip of the can. “It’s hard to think of something when you’re put on the spot.”

 

“You could say you’ve had a lot of time to think about it, then.”

 

Wonwoo turns his face away to exhale a cloud of smoke. Junhui averts his gaze before Wonwoo turns back. “Is that what you’re saying?” he laughs toward the innards of the can.

 

“What do you think,” Wonwoo tells him kindly.

 

Junhui hugs his knees and stares at the street outside their apartment building through the slats of the railing. “You should stop smoking,” he starts in a fit of honesty, “what if that’s what I want?”

 

“Then I’ll quit,” Wonwoo says immediately.

 

Junhui shakes his head. “You say that like it’s easy,” it’s his turn to point out.

 

Wonwoo presses the cigarette against his lips again. “Junhui,” he warns with it between his teeth.

 

Truthfully, Junhui thought they’d never become close when he’d first seen Wonwoo’s boxes stacked in the hallway and Wonwoo’s person in a tanktop and basketball shorts walking back out his propped-open door to grab another armful of them with a cigarette in his mouth. Right at the beginning of summer, Wonwoo had been wearing the same sandals he was wearing now and Junhui had stared at him and he’d known the answer to Wonwoo’s question all along, even before he’d formed it on his tongue.

 

“I don’t know,” he lies. The want of it all threatens to claw its way out from his throat.

 

“Okay,” Wonwoo seems to consider. A couple weeks ago, Minghao had come by Junhui’s and said in Chinese, lest Wonwoo could hear them through the walls, He won’t like you forever, you know. He puts out his cigarette. What’ll you do then? “If you say so.” He doesn’t look like his heart’s been broken at all.

 

The Junhui of then could only laugh. Well, he’d simply said. Now he watches Wonwoo walk back into his apartment without a glance back and the ashes from the cigarette butt scatter like a crime scene across the balcony. I’ll just have to get over it, won’t I?

 

 
 

유행가
480w; pg (doyoung/baek yerin)
sing, sing, sing!

Yerin's smoking a cigarette in the back once Doyoung's finished his set. Or, at least she was – there's the smell of smoke lingering, sweet in the cold night air – and the ember's long burned out on the stick between her fingers. Admittedly, they aren't close, just know each other through the brief proximity of these backstage encounters, but he meets her eyes almost instantly through the rush of people.

 

She stands up. A shoulder of the over-sized leather jacket draped around her, beaten-in the way only well-worn and old clothes could take your form, slides off, lopsided. She shrugs it back on, stamps out the cigarette with her combat boot second. Percussion to it, strangely reminiscent of the feel-good hit of the summer that he'd overheard her dragging to someone in her band at the festival they'd both played in in August. She sang a cover of it two months later anyway, and Doyoung remembers the sound of her laugh soaring above the crowd at the bridge when she momentarily forgot the lyrics.

 

"Hey," starts Yerin before she stops in front of him. Doyoung looks around, wondering if she's talking to someone else. Her gaze flits from a point over his left shoulder to the band, packing up their instruments, to his eyes, direct. "Kim Doyoung."

 

Her voice is soft, and the wind blows her hair around her like a storm. "Do you want to record an album with me?"

 

 

 

 

They say Yerin grew up in a cushy neighborhood in Seoul before moving to New York with her family for high school. She'd gotten into Juilliard her senior year but dropped it all to move back to Korea and sing on the streets. That, in two sentences, is why Doyoung can only really be terrified of her.

 

"You write songs, don't you?" Yerin asked him when he didn't say no to her offer. 

Doyoung blinked. "Yeah, but." Whereas Yerin had entire albums on SoundCloud, popular and widely acclaimed by their indie scene peers, Doyoung usually performed covers at festivals. "Only like. Two."

Yerin shrugged. "That's enough."

 

Doyoung finds himself walking up the stairs of her apartment complex a week later. Her one-bedroom is relatively neat and bright for its modesty – there's a mattress on the floor with unmade sheets and she's converted the tiny bedroom into a makeshift recording space, egg cartons taped up on the walls as cheap soundproofing, and a hefty desk facing the window with a microphone and a large monitor, a model that Doyoung recognizes as three years outdated.

 

"How many eggs did you have to eat to cover this?" he asks as Yerin's digging through the closet for a folding chair.

 

"Oh," she says, emerging with it triumphantly. With her sleeves rolled up, he can see the tattoo curling near her elbow. "You have no idea," she smiles, cryptic and somewhat shy.