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MY OLD WAYS
OBJECT PERMANENCE
1,668w, heeseung/winter
Minjeong’s family dog ran away from home when she was twelve years old. It’d rained every day the week following, Minjeong remembers because she sat outside her front door watching the gray deluge after school for all of them, clutching the abandoned leash until her fingers went numb. A freak storm of nature, the forecaster who’d confidently declared fair spring weather less than forty-eight hours prior chalked it up to. We’ll be back to sunny skies before you know it.
“That’s so sad,” her ex said when she’d told her. That felt like a whole lifetime ago, studying abroad in New York, wearing her hair cut close to her chin because Karina offhandedly mentioned once she liked it that way. It was well past midnight and they were squeezed into Minjeong’s twin bed and both smelled like the alcohol and cigarettes of the club that’d hitched a ride home on their clothes.
“I don’t know,” Minjeong knew she must’ve laughed. “It was so long ago.” Then, she had a tendency to swallow the thickness trapped in her throat instead of her vulnerability. “It’s strange, isn’t it? But even now I feel like he still might come back.”
Karina went quiet and motionless for a moment. Her hair smelled like that American drugstore shampoo Minjeong always bought on sale when she buried her head into her shoulder. She’d end up cutting hers short after they broke up, Minjeong knew only because things had ended amicably enough for Karina not to block her on social media. The way you spoke about your dog that one time, she’d cited as one of the reasons when letting Minjeong down. Minjeong thinks it might’ve been raining that day, too. I knew things weren’t going to work out between us.
*************
Heeseung had confessed to her outside the CU down the street from her house two days before his enlistment, six years ago. His eyes had been hidden under the brim of the baseball cap covering his new buzzcut and the tips of his ears were flushed the brightest red. Minjeong had seen the story posted on her old cram school classmate’s Insta, the same classmate who’d probably egged Heeseung on to profess his feelings to her before leaving for the military in the first place.
They’d gone to the same cram school, she and Heeseung, but had never gotten close. The most they’d ever spoken before then was in the periphery of class, maybe about test answers, which is what made Heeseung tripping over his own words and pulling on the oversized sleeves of his plaid shirt all the more disarming and sudden. “What I’m trying to say is,” he started again to Minjeong’s silence, “If you’ve ever looked at me the same way, I—I’d like to ask you to wait for me.”
Minjeong remembers cataloguing the contours of his mouth as Heeseung said all this. The nervousness that weighed down the corners of it the more he spoke, the cracked skin on his bottom lip that she imagined he’d hoped in the best case scenario she’d be willing to kiss, which was funny to her though she wouldn’t be able to explain why if asked. The delicate arch of his cupid’s bow that was quite attractive the more she paid attention to it. He hadn’t smiled once throughout the whole thing, and Minjeong realized she couldn’t even picture what that would’ve looked like on his face. Did that make her a bad person?
Heeseung had laughed about the entire ordeal when she brought it up over coffee. The week prior, Minjeong had finally acquiesced to attending her coworker’s mixer and nearly spit out her drink seeing Lee Heeseung walk into the room with the rest of the men’s group. “I thought we’d never see each other again,” he’d admitted a little too readily. “That’s the only way nineteen-year-old me would’ve had the courage.”
“Do you think about it a lot?” Minjeong drawled late a different night after they’d been out with the same group for some drinks. Heeseung had offered to walk her home but they’d somehow ended up at his. “That I rejected you?”
She saw the corners of Heeseung’s mouth twitch into a frown the same way they had that fateful day years ago, a tell. He turned his face away from hers just as quickly. Minjeong thought she could feel his pulse like a drum beat from where she was playing with his fingers, over the jazz playlist they'd thought to put on the lowest volume setting. “I used to,” he replied in a way that could’ve been the truth but just as easily a lie. “Not so much again until recently.”
She hummed in response. They were sitting on his peeling faux leather sofa, and she really wasn’t all that drunk, but it was more convenient to pretend that they both were. Her eyes were adjusted to the pitch black of Heeseung’s apartment, enough that she could tell how close his face was getting to hers. “Do you wish you didn’t reject me?” he asked hesitantly, tucking a strand of her hair, now as long as it’d been in high school, behind her ear, the corners of his lips downturned in that nervousness all over again. As if he were steeling himself for an answer unchanged despite the fact that their thighs were touching on his couch.
Heeseung’s had been the first and only confession Minjeong had ever received. That was, simply enough, the reason she could never forget. She told Karina about it once, prefaced as a joke, without any other way to logically phrase it.
Karina hadn’t laughed. “It sounds like it mattered a lot to you,” she said instead, rather incisive.
Minjeong thought of getting to the awful heart of the matter. It wasn’t like that, and it wasn’t about regret. Most of all, she liked the giddy rush of power when it came time for her to say I’m sorry, but— and watch the frown set into the sides of Heeseung’s mouth like stone, in finality. The idea that he’d hold onto this day while she could go on living her life, oblivious to the fulcrum he’d pivot the rest of his romantic relationships around: that was what she thought love was as a teenager.
By then, though, Minjeong had learned that not all her candor was so palatable. “Not really,” she echoed in a poor imitation of who she thought Karina wanted her to be.
But, back to that night. She was twenty-five and her pupils were dilated in the darkness. “Yes,” Minjeong whispered.
Heeseung kissed her then like she imagined he’d envisioned it should’ve gone back in front of that convenience store. Like it was his first time, tender and tentative, though she doubted he’d saved himself for so long for her. More than anything, she wondered if past the lingering sweet of alcohol, he could taste her blatant dishonesty.
*************
The morning after, Minjeong cooked eggs over easy and pan-fried two cut-from-the-lid slabs of Spam. It was the kind of overcast day that made the sky look the same at 6AM as it did at noon, the clouds outside Heeseung’s kitchen window heavy with rain. She could hear Heeseung start the shower when she was bent over the cupboard reaching for cups of microwaveable rice.
Heeseung had this way of heaving like he was crying after he came. He hadn’t even taken her jacket off, pressing his keening whines into her shoulder until she could feel the wet spot of where his mouth had been on the cotton. He hadn’t lasted long when she rode him either, hips rolling insistently into hers without a rhythm, and she almost lost her balance on his lap from the brunt of his desperation. Minjeong flinched from the oil popping in the pan and flipped the Spam.
At some point, Heeseung had bit her lip so hard she bled. She hadn’t noticed until she tasted the iron on her tongue and pulled away to feel for the wound.
“I’m sorry,” Heeseung panted. A dark smear across the corner of his mouth matched the offending stain on her fingers when Minjeong brought her hand away from her lip. In the shadows, she could prescribe guilt to the way he was looking at her. She could’ve asked him to make it up to her. She knew the extent of the hold she had over him, and the frown was already trembling on the corners of his lips.
One time, her dog — the one that ran away — had bitten her hand. She couldn’t recall why, but she still had the faint silver scar at the junction of her thumb to show for it. Why would he do that, she’d cried to her parents that night, when we’ve given him everything?
Instead, Minjeong had pushed her bloody fingers onto Heeseung’s tongue and watched his mouth with rapturous attention make a shape she’d never seen him make before.
“I’m thinking about my dog,” Minjeong tried to make conversation when Heeseung sat down across from her. His hair was still wet and his knees knocked into hers under his tiny dining table. She’d managed to wrestle her tights back on, only to find a small hole on her inner thigh, a souvenir of their previous hunger. She uncrossed her legs just so she could feel for the uneven give of it as they picked at their meal.
Heeseung went contemplative for a moment while chewing. Minjeong, for once, wondered how things would’ve gone if she had accepted his confession outright six years ago. She held her spoon so tightly her fingers went numb and felt the phantom cavern of Heeseung’s mouth in the static, wet and wanting. “Do you miss him?” Heeseung finally decided on just as Minjeong shifted in her seat.
She knew she was staring at his lips again. “I don’t think I have to,” she declared, quite simply to that.
VACILLATOR
1,167w, sunghoon/jake
“Wow,” was what Jake said when he saw Sunghoon’s haircut pre-enlistment. “I feel like I’m seeing a whole new side of you.”
Sunghoon rubbed the back of his head, suddenly self-conscious. “It doesn’t look that bad, does it?” Only Riki and Jungwon had been there when he’d buzzed it, both of them begging the stylist noona for a turn with the clippers. Your head is so round, hyung! Riki laughed at the end of it all. Jake had a schedule with Sunoo that day, and Sunghoon hadn’t had a reason to meet him until now.
Jake shut the van door behind him. The seatbelt made a scratchy sound against his padded winter jacket as he buckled himself in. “No,” he reassured quickly, turning to face Sunghoon again. He looked at him like it was the first time he was truly seeing him. “Just… different.”
“I’ve never had my hair this short before,” Sunghoon supplied in the silence as their manager pulled onto the highway.
Jake only smiled at that, blinding as the first snow even after all these years. It was the type of Jake grin Sunghoon could just as easily expect to see on the jumbotron screen in a sold-out venue, weirder scaled down in a moving car like this, like he didn’t quite know how to reformat its aspect ratio for intimacy. “It’s fascinating,” echoed Jake as he sunk further back into his seat. Unconvincing still, no matter how much Sunghoon wanted to believe.
*************
Jake had taken Sunghoon’s virginity somewhere in America, sometime when they were on their third world tour. Sunghoon couldn’t remember the city it’d happened in, or whether it only escalated to that point because they’d been drinking, or much at all about the night they’d had before that because they never talked about it afterwards. It always felt like a secret, the fact they were sleeping together, a code language that only revealed itself to Sunghoon in the manner Jake would look at him when they hung back behind the others. Even then, he barely felt fluent and rather undeserving when he did turn out to be right.
Jake shushed him while petting the back of his head when he first pushed in. Sunghoon hadn’t even noticed the pitched drawn-out whine he’d been making until then. “You’re so tight,” he breathed in awe into the back of Sunghoon’s neck, thrusting into him again. “Does it hurt?”
The weight of Jake on top of him was overwhelming two-fold. First, the pressure against his ribcage from where he was bowed over, and the way his face was pressed far enough into the hotel sheets that his tears wet the cotton. Second, how badly he had wanted it, for Jake to hollow a space for himself inside him, a desperation that had swelled into Sunghoon’s flesh over the years to make room for Jake’s person. “No,” Sunghoon heard himself plead through the pain, digging his fingers further into the mattress until he imagined the crescent indents of his nails tore at the threads, evidence of the starved beast of his heart clawing for reciprocation immortalized physically. “Don’t stop.”
“You know me better than I know myself,” Jake divulged to him once as an olive branch. They were having some petty argument during their second year of debut that comeback stress had blown further out of proportion. Jake had been the first between them to fold, looking him straight in the eye and saying without fanfare, I’m sorry.
At the time, Sunghoon had mistaken the admission for Jake’s tacit vulnerability. Jake was the type to recklessly conflate two entirely separate things with an earnest conviction, and Sunghoon the type who would trust anything he said. “You always say that,” laughed Sunghoon in reconciliation. Only later would he realize how much Jake confused love with the burden of understanding, and while Sunghoon might’ve loved him, Jake had never let him past the front door.
*************
Jake’s own military service send-off went so quietly that Sunghoon almost didn’t know it happened at all. He’d seen the pictures on SNS when he had three months left of his: Jake wearing the standard issue hat, and Riki making a peace sign next to him. You should’ve asked me for more tips on how to survive ㅋㅋ, he sent Jake along with a shared link of the post, pretending not to feel the tell-tale sting of neglect. The 1 next to the message disappeared sometime in the next few days, but Jake didn’t reply back.
“Did he tell you he was going to do it?” Heeseung asked the day their nearly-unanimous contract renewal broke the news. ENHYPEN will continue with six members, with member Jake ending his exclusive contract with BELIFT Lab. We would like to express our gratitude to Jake for being with us throughout these years, and we will sincerely support his future activities.
“No.” They’d been in the middle of negotiations before Jake’s service ended. Sunghoon ran into him once in the Hybe building during it, in between subunit preparations. Oh, Sunghoon-ah, Jake had smiled from where he’d been holding open the door for someone in corporate, as if nothing had changed. Sunghoon hadn’t even known he had leave that week, let alone what he’d been up to the entire year before that.
Heeseung looked at him, pityingly. “I would’ve thought you would’ve known,” he tried to explain. “You were closest to him.”
But that was Jake—so concerned about being kind to passerbys he’d see only once in his life that he was rather careless with those supposedly dearest to him. He’d taken Sunghoon on his hands and knees the same night they saw each other at the company, reopening the wound Sunghoon had nearly forgotten Jake had left gaping behind in the first place. “I missed you,” Jake panted as his fingers bruised the flushed-ripe skin of his waist. A rash confession, once more.
Sunghoon had wanted to accept it out of Pavlovian response. He felt raw and the friction of their fucking felt visceral and that wretched, needy part of himself that he’d put aside for Jake felt tripped like a livewire in the flood of his attention after so long. What more do you want from me? Sunghoon thought to ask then, prostrated beneath Jake again, rutting backwards into Jake’s hips like a dog. Do you love me now? Do you love me like I love you?
Jake had bit into Sunghoon’s right shoulder as he orgasmed. It hadn’t left a scar. Sunghoon knows because he twisted his head in the mirror for weeks after, hoping for the tangible proof that Jake had held a similar ache for him all along.
He put his hand over the site and averted his gaze from Heeseung’s. He ignored the hunger pain that rippled outward from his heart, weakly echolocating for what Jake could never requite. “We grew apart at some point, I guess.”
1,668w, heeseung/winter
Minjeong’s family dog ran away from home when she was twelve years old. It’d rained every day the week following, Minjeong remembers because she sat outside her front door watching the gray deluge after school for all of them, clutching the abandoned leash until her fingers went numb. A freak storm of nature, the forecaster who’d confidently declared fair spring weather less than forty-eight hours prior chalked it up to. We’ll be back to sunny skies before you know it.
“That’s so sad,” her ex said when she’d told her. That felt like a whole lifetime ago, studying abroad in New York, wearing her hair cut close to her chin because Karina offhandedly mentioned once she liked it that way. It was well past midnight and they were squeezed into Minjeong’s twin bed and both smelled like the alcohol and cigarettes of the club that’d hitched a ride home on their clothes.
“I don’t know,” Minjeong knew she must’ve laughed. “It was so long ago.” Then, she had a tendency to swallow the thickness trapped in her throat instead of her vulnerability. “It’s strange, isn’t it? But even now I feel like he still might come back.”
Karina went quiet and motionless for a moment. Her hair smelled like that American drugstore shampoo Minjeong always bought on sale when she buried her head into her shoulder. She’d end up cutting hers short after they broke up, Minjeong knew only because things had ended amicably enough for Karina not to block her on social media. The way you spoke about your dog that one time, she’d cited as one of the reasons when letting Minjeong down. Minjeong thinks it might’ve been raining that day, too. I knew things weren’t going to work out between us.
*************
Heeseung had confessed to her outside the CU down the street from her house two days before his enlistment, six years ago. His eyes had been hidden under the brim of the baseball cap covering his new buzzcut and the tips of his ears were flushed the brightest red. Minjeong had seen the story posted on her old cram school classmate’s Insta, the same classmate who’d probably egged Heeseung on to profess his feelings to her before leaving for the military in the first place.
They’d gone to the same cram school, she and Heeseung, but had never gotten close. The most they’d ever spoken before then was in the periphery of class, maybe about test answers, which is what made Heeseung tripping over his own words and pulling on the oversized sleeves of his plaid shirt all the more disarming and sudden. “What I’m trying to say is,” he started again to Minjeong’s silence, “If you’ve ever looked at me the same way, I—I’d like to ask you to wait for me.”
Minjeong remembers cataloguing the contours of his mouth as Heeseung said all this. The nervousness that weighed down the corners of it the more he spoke, the cracked skin on his bottom lip that she imagined he’d hoped in the best case scenario she’d be willing to kiss, which was funny to her though she wouldn’t be able to explain why if asked. The delicate arch of his cupid’s bow that was quite attractive the more she paid attention to it. He hadn’t smiled once throughout the whole thing, and Minjeong realized she couldn’t even picture what that would’ve looked like on his face. Did that make her a bad person?
Heeseung had laughed about the entire ordeal when she brought it up over coffee. The week prior, Minjeong had finally acquiesced to attending her coworker’s mixer and nearly spit out her drink seeing Lee Heeseung walk into the room with the rest of the men’s group. “I thought we’d never see each other again,” he’d admitted a little too readily. “That’s the only way nineteen-year-old me would’ve had the courage.”
“Do you think about it a lot?” Minjeong drawled late a different night after they’d been out with the same group for some drinks. Heeseung had offered to walk her home but they’d somehow ended up at his. “That I rejected you?”
She saw the corners of Heeseung’s mouth twitch into a frown the same way they had that fateful day years ago, a tell. He turned his face away from hers just as quickly. Minjeong thought she could feel his pulse like a drum beat from where she was playing with his fingers, over the jazz playlist they'd thought to put on the lowest volume setting. “I used to,” he replied in a way that could’ve been the truth but just as easily a lie. “Not so much again until recently.”
She hummed in response. They were sitting on his peeling faux leather sofa, and she really wasn’t all that drunk, but it was more convenient to pretend that they both were. Her eyes were adjusted to the pitch black of Heeseung’s apartment, enough that she could tell how close his face was getting to hers. “Do you wish you didn’t reject me?” he asked hesitantly, tucking a strand of her hair, now as long as it’d been in high school, behind her ear, the corners of his lips downturned in that nervousness all over again. As if he were steeling himself for an answer unchanged despite the fact that their thighs were touching on his couch.
Heeseung’s had been the first and only confession Minjeong had ever received. That was, simply enough, the reason she could never forget. She told Karina about it once, prefaced as a joke, without any other way to logically phrase it.
Karina hadn’t laughed. “It sounds like it mattered a lot to you,” she said instead, rather incisive.
Minjeong thought of getting to the awful heart of the matter. It wasn’t like that, and it wasn’t about regret. Most of all, she liked the giddy rush of power when it came time for her to say I’m sorry, but— and watch the frown set into the sides of Heeseung’s mouth like stone, in finality. The idea that he’d hold onto this day while she could go on living her life, oblivious to the fulcrum he’d pivot the rest of his romantic relationships around: that was what she thought love was as a teenager.
By then, though, Minjeong had learned that not all her candor was so palatable. “Not really,” she echoed in a poor imitation of who she thought Karina wanted her to be.
But, back to that night. She was twenty-five and her pupils were dilated in the darkness. “Yes,” Minjeong whispered.
Heeseung kissed her then like she imagined he’d envisioned it should’ve gone back in front of that convenience store. Like it was his first time, tender and tentative, though she doubted he’d saved himself for so long for her. More than anything, she wondered if past the lingering sweet of alcohol, he could taste her blatant dishonesty.
*************
The morning after, Minjeong cooked eggs over easy and pan-fried two cut-from-the-lid slabs of Spam. It was the kind of overcast day that made the sky look the same at 6AM as it did at noon, the clouds outside Heeseung’s kitchen window heavy with rain. She could hear Heeseung start the shower when she was bent over the cupboard reaching for cups of microwaveable rice.
Heeseung had this way of heaving like he was crying after he came. He hadn’t even taken her jacket off, pressing his keening whines into her shoulder until she could feel the wet spot of where his mouth had been on the cotton. He hadn’t lasted long when she rode him either, hips rolling insistently into hers without a rhythm, and she almost lost her balance on his lap from the brunt of his desperation. Minjeong flinched from the oil popping in the pan and flipped the Spam.
At some point, Heeseung had bit her lip so hard she bled. She hadn’t noticed until she tasted the iron on her tongue and pulled away to feel for the wound.
“I’m sorry,” Heeseung panted. A dark smear across the corner of his mouth matched the offending stain on her fingers when Minjeong brought her hand away from her lip. In the shadows, she could prescribe guilt to the way he was looking at her. She could’ve asked him to make it up to her. She knew the extent of the hold she had over him, and the frown was already trembling on the corners of his lips.
One time, her dog — the one that ran away — had bitten her hand. She couldn’t recall why, but she still had the faint silver scar at the junction of her thumb to show for it. Why would he do that, she’d cried to her parents that night, when we’ve given him everything?
Instead, Minjeong had pushed her bloody fingers onto Heeseung’s tongue and watched his mouth with rapturous attention make a shape she’d never seen him make before.
“I’m thinking about my dog,” Minjeong tried to make conversation when Heeseung sat down across from her. His hair was still wet and his knees knocked into hers under his tiny dining table. She’d managed to wrestle her tights back on, only to find a small hole on her inner thigh, a souvenir of their previous hunger. She uncrossed her legs just so she could feel for the uneven give of it as they picked at their meal.
Heeseung went contemplative for a moment while chewing. Minjeong, for once, wondered how things would’ve gone if she had accepted his confession outright six years ago. She held her spoon so tightly her fingers went numb and felt the phantom cavern of Heeseung’s mouth in the static, wet and wanting. “Do you miss him?” Heeseung finally decided on just as Minjeong shifted in her seat.
She knew she was staring at his lips again. “I don’t think I have to,” she declared, quite simply to that.
VACILLATOR
1,167w, sunghoon/jake
“Wow,” was what Jake said when he saw Sunghoon’s haircut pre-enlistment. “I feel like I’m seeing a whole new side of you.”
Sunghoon rubbed the back of his head, suddenly self-conscious. “It doesn’t look that bad, does it?” Only Riki and Jungwon had been there when he’d buzzed it, both of them begging the stylist noona for a turn with the clippers. Your head is so round, hyung! Riki laughed at the end of it all. Jake had a schedule with Sunoo that day, and Sunghoon hadn’t had a reason to meet him until now.
Jake shut the van door behind him. The seatbelt made a scratchy sound against his padded winter jacket as he buckled himself in. “No,” he reassured quickly, turning to face Sunghoon again. He looked at him like it was the first time he was truly seeing him. “Just… different.”
“I’ve never had my hair this short before,” Sunghoon supplied in the silence as their manager pulled onto the highway.
Jake only smiled at that, blinding as the first snow even after all these years. It was the type of Jake grin Sunghoon could just as easily expect to see on the jumbotron screen in a sold-out venue, weirder scaled down in a moving car like this, like he didn’t quite know how to reformat its aspect ratio for intimacy. “It’s fascinating,” echoed Jake as he sunk further back into his seat. Unconvincing still, no matter how much Sunghoon wanted to believe.
*************
Jake had taken Sunghoon’s virginity somewhere in America, sometime when they were on their third world tour. Sunghoon couldn’t remember the city it’d happened in, or whether it only escalated to that point because they’d been drinking, or much at all about the night they’d had before that because they never talked about it afterwards. It always felt like a secret, the fact they were sleeping together, a code language that only revealed itself to Sunghoon in the manner Jake would look at him when they hung back behind the others. Even then, he barely felt fluent and rather undeserving when he did turn out to be right.
Jake shushed him while petting the back of his head when he first pushed in. Sunghoon hadn’t even noticed the pitched drawn-out whine he’d been making until then. “You’re so tight,” he breathed in awe into the back of Sunghoon’s neck, thrusting into him again. “Does it hurt?”
The weight of Jake on top of him was overwhelming two-fold. First, the pressure against his ribcage from where he was bowed over, and the way his face was pressed far enough into the hotel sheets that his tears wet the cotton. Second, how badly he had wanted it, for Jake to hollow a space for himself inside him, a desperation that had swelled into Sunghoon’s flesh over the years to make room for Jake’s person. “No,” Sunghoon heard himself plead through the pain, digging his fingers further into the mattress until he imagined the crescent indents of his nails tore at the threads, evidence of the starved beast of his heart clawing for reciprocation immortalized physically. “Don’t stop.”
“You know me better than I know myself,” Jake divulged to him once as an olive branch. They were having some petty argument during their second year of debut that comeback stress had blown further out of proportion. Jake had been the first between them to fold, looking him straight in the eye and saying without fanfare, I’m sorry.
At the time, Sunghoon had mistaken the admission for Jake’s tacit vulnerability. Jake was the type to recklessly conflate two entirely separate things with an earnest conviction, and Sunghoon the type who would trust anything he said. “You always say that,” laughed Sunghoon in reconciliation. Only later would he realize how much Jake confused love with the burden of understanding, and while Sunghoon might’ve loved him, Jake had never let him past the front door.
*************
Jake’s own military service send-off went so quietly that Sunghoon almost didn’t know it happened at all. He’d seen the pictures on SNS when he had three months left of his: Jake wearing the standard issue hat, and Riki making a peace sign next to him. You should’ve asked me for more tips on how to survive ㅋㅋ, he sent Jake along with a shared link of the post, pretending not to feel the tell-tale sting of neglect. The 1 next to the message disappeared sometime in the next few days, but Jake didn’t reply back.
“Did he tell you he was going to do it?” Heeseung asked the day their nearly-unanimous contract renewal broke the news. ENHYPEN will continue with six members, with member Jake ending his exclusive contract with BELIFT Lab. We would like to express our gratitude to Jake for being with us throughout these years, and we will sincerely support his future activities.
“No.” They’d been in the middle of negotiations before Jake’s service ended. Sunghoon ran into him once in the Hybe building during it, in between subunit preparations. Oh, Sunghoon-ah, Jake had smiled from where he’d been holding open the door for someone in corporate, as if nothing had changed. Sunghoon hadn’t even known he had leave that week, let alone what he’d been up to the entire year before that.
Heeseung looked at him, pityingly. “I would’ve thought you would’ve known,” he tried to explain. “You were closest to him.”
But that was Jake—so concerned about being kind to passerbys he’d see only once in his life that he was rather careless with those supposedly dearest to him. He’d taken Sunghoon on his hands and knees the same night they saw each other at the company, reopening the wound Sunghoon had nearly forgotten Jake had left gaping behind in the first place. “I missed you,” Jake panted as his fingers bruised the flushed-ripe skin of his waist. A rash confession, once more.
Sunghoon had wanted to accept it out of Pavlovian response. He felt raw and the friction of their fucking felt visceral and that wretched, needy part of himself that he’d put aside for Jake felt tripped like a livewire in the flood of his attention after so long. What more do you want from me? Sunghoon thought to ask then, prostrated beneath Jake again, rutting backwards into Jake’s hips like a dog. Do you love me now? Do you love me like I love you?
Jake had bit into Sunghoon’s right shoulder as he orgasmed. It hadn’t left a scar. Sunghoon knows because he twisted his head in the mirror for weeks after, hoping for the tangible proof that Jake had held a similar ache for him all along.
He put his hand over the site and averted his gaze from Heeseung’s. He ignored the hunger pain that rippled outward from his heart, weakly echolocating for what Jake could never requite. “We grew apart at some point, I guess.”