Archive of Our Own

NOW.

“I’m calling it off,” Yunho says.

Wooyoung is twenty-five, and he doesn’t understand.

He and Yunho are the only two left awake. They’d been sitting in peaceful companionship on the deck of the villa, something sultry still pumping from Mingi’s speaker. The ocean in front of them has lulled Wooyoung into a complacency he hasn’t felt in months. The stars are out. The champagne and beer in Wooyoung’s stomach are drowning the tasteless meal he’d crammed in the airport earlier, but it’s a pleasant sort of drowning, like a lazy river. So Wooyoung is trying to understand Yunho’s words, to find the shape and the meaning of them, but he’s certainly not trying his best.

“Calling what off?” he asks.

“The wedding,” Yunho says.

A laugh slips out of Wooyoung. “Why?” he asks. “You go over budget?”

Yunho doesn’t respond.

Wooyoung, with a concerted effort, turns his head to the left to investigate. Yunho is a good liar. Their college years were soaked through with his half truths; Wooyoung knows all of his tells. He looks for one now.

Yunho’s eyes are as glassy and dark as the water, trained unblinkingly at the invisible horizon. There’s nothing behind them.

“Oh,” Wooyoung says. “Shit.”

He goes silent and very, very still, giving Yunho the chance to take it back. He wants Yunho to take it back. It’s the kind of straight-faced joke Yunho might have made when they were twenty, after which he might have knocked their shoulders together or started laughing to himself, or might have said I can’t believe you bought that.

Yunho does not do any of these things. He doesn’t even move.

“Fuck,” Wooyoung says.

“Yeah,” Yunho says, hollow. “Fuck.”

Wooyoung stands up. He fumbles for and opens the sliding glass door that leads back into the villa. It’s darker inside than it was on the deck: no moon, no residual glow from the resort, no light pollution lining the upside-down bowl of the sky. It’s because of this darkness that Wooyoung almost trips over Mingi’s legs on the way through the lounge, but Mingi is out like a fucking light and reacts to this with nothing more than an aborted snore and a turn of his head. Wooyoung fumbles with the fridge and grabs two more beers. He pauses on his way back outside to throw a blanket over Mingi’s chest.

When he sits back down, the door firmly shut behind him, Yunho’s exactly where he’d been, not a hair out of place.

Wooyoung puts the beers on the low table between their chairs. He’s not sure yet if they’re for drinking or for moral support. Then, he thinks about touching Yunho’s arm in comfort, about squeezing the nape of Yunho’s neck. He thinks about grabbing both of Yunho’s shoulders and shaking them violently. He chooses to sit back in his chair.

“Who knows?” Wooyoung asks.

“You,” Yunho answers.

This is not a good sign. “Yeah,” Wooyoung says. “Your parents?”

“Not yet.”

“What about Eunseo?”

“I’m working on it,” Yunho says evenly.

The silence becomes uneasy. The previous silence hadn’t been. It usually isn’t, not between Wooyoung and Yunho, and so the severity of the problem really starts to sink in.

“You gonna explain why?” Wooyoung asks.

Yunho laughs. It’s a bad laugh.

PROLOGUE.

If the story mattered, it would open with IN THE BEGINNING. Emphasized. That way, Wooyoung would know where to look.

The reality is that the story doesn’t matter, because Wooyoung already knows how it goes. It will be like most stories. There are things that will happen, and there are things that will not. There will be the aforementioned beginning, and also a middle, and also an end. It’s been written down already: Jongho wins his bet, Yunho stays his course, and Wooyoung already has everything he wants.

THE MIDDLE.

Wooyoung is twenty-one, and he knows that Yunho is going to be the first one to get married. This is not because of some dramatic premonition that he’s had. It’s a fact, and everyone who grew up with Yunho is aware of it.

San, the only person in the room who did not grow up with Yunho, has posed the question.

He’s a romantic; he’s probably hoping someone will throw his name in the ring. Instead, Yunho leans back on his hands and grins as the consensus turns their attention to him.

“Not all of us can get married, though,” Jongho says, loud enough to be heard. Jongho knows better, but he’s both a realist and a contrarian. “Not everywhere.”

“Wouldn’t matter,” Wooyoung says.

San’s eyebrows have gone up. He’s realized none of them are joking.

“Wait,” he says. “Eunseo?”

Yunho and Eunseo have been dating for less than six months. It’s no wonder San’s confused.

It’s delicate, and they’re all drunk, and Yunho is sitting right there. Nobody is going to make an effort to spell it out now. It’s something he probably should have picked up on, but San is good, kind, in a way the rest of them aren’t. The responsibility of explaining this to him will be Wooyoung’s eventually. For now, to save them all from an off-beat silence, Wooyoung says, “Probably.”

San mouths her name again, as if it’ll start to make sense. Eunseo.

Wooyoung hasn’t seen her in a while. He doubts any of them have.

Eunseo is not Yunho’s first girlfriend, not exactly. She is the first one he’s allowed to call his girlfriend. Wooyoung hadn’t known what to expect, but she seems fine. Sometimes she posts over-edited, teasing photos of Yunho, his large hands or his jaw just barely in frame, white hearts stamped in the negative space. It’s performative, but what isn’t, these days? Besides, it’s not like Wooyoung knows what compels people to plaster their significant others all over their socials. Wooyoung doesn’t really do significant others.

She’s nice, Wooyoung had said the first time he’d met her. That’s about all anyone got the chance to say before Yunho had changed the subject.

Again, it’s no wonder San is confused. But this is the way life works for Yunho. He is on an arrow-straight trajectory—as is Eunseo, for that matter—and marriage is a point on that trajectory, just another domino between the perfunctory economics degree and the job title and the production of a successor to the family business. This means Wooyoung doesn’t need to know the girl his friend will marry. As a consequence of his very fortunate lot in life, Yunho is a private person, and he keeps his girlfriend separate from their debauchery.

Anyway, they might really be falling in love. That’d be a neat ending for everyone.

Seonghwa readjusts his perch on the end of Jongho’s bed. “Followup question,” he starts, his cheeks flushed red and his smile knowing. “Who’s going to be the last person to get married?”

This is so obvious that everyone starts to laugh. Wooyoung is twenty-one, and it’s not the first time he’s heard this joke. It won’t be the last.

He laughs, too.

“Wow,” he says, mock-offended. “You guys could have pretended to think about it.”

NOW.

When Wooyoung wakes, the awful taste in his mouth isn’t a hangover at all.

It’s a miracle to find himself in the right bed. He’d been early to arrive, and Yunho and Mingi had been waiting for a third to pop the first bottle of champagne on the beach; he’d ditched his suitcase in a random room on the second floor and went to attend to this more important business. What had he said, bare feet in the water, when they’d toasted? Something (terrible, in hindsight) about Yunho’s last few months of freedom. Mingi had laughed. Yunho hadn’t. He’d smiled, gracious, but he had not laughed.

Jesus.

Wooyoung drags himself out of bed and into the bathroom. It’s early; nobody else shows their faces. Wooyoung stares at himself in the mirror, at the dark circles under his eyes, and tries not to think about Yunho. He fails. He gets hungry. He makes his way down to the kitchen to see if anyone’s had the foresight to stock the fridge. The answer is no, unless Wooyoung feels like a beer for breakfast, which he does not.

He texts Hongjoong, and he drops himself on to the living room couch to wait, and he really, really tries not to think about Yunho.

It's hard because Yunho has given him no answers, unless Wooyoung can decipher that terrible laugh. The only thing Wooyoung can be certain about is that he will be expected to keep this secret, and he will be expected to grin and lounge and drink his way through Yunho’s long, picturesque bachelor party like nothing’s wrong.

While Wooyoung is stewing, the other thing he’s trying not to think about trudges in from the outdoor shower with only a towel wrapped around his waist.

“Good morning,” Yeosang says, placid.

Wooyoung keeps his gaze at a respectful elevation. “Hey,” he says.

Yeosang disappears into one of the first floor bedrooms: king-sized bed, en-suite bathroom. Wooyoung wonders if anyone bargained with Yeosang for that bedroom, and if so, how much money Yeosang turned down to keep it. The imagery of it, the fortune of Yeosang being alone in that huge bed and out of earshot of their nosy friends, is unhelpful.

There are things that are safe, and there are things that are not safe. Yeosang has always fallen into the latter category. It’s a hard calculus to have to reason with, because many of their other friends are safe. Yeosang’s new body does not change the facts. Wooyoung can’t let it.

All things considered, it’s not Wooyoung’s finest morning.

Boats, he thinks. Empty, blue pools. Infinite alcohol, courtesy of Yunho’s bottomless bank accounts. These are the things he’d been daydreaming about yesterday on the plane. It’s odd how distant they seem now. In the window, the sun rises opposite the ocean. Wooyoung turns to that light, that water, and tries to recenter.

Just as he’s starting to reconsider his stance on the breakfast beer, Hongjoong walks into the living room.

“Thank God,” Wooyoung says.

Hongjoong doesn’t question it. He’s still blinking sleep out of his eyes. They leave, buy coffee and breakfast that they wolf down on the beach without speaking, and then they hit the tennis courts.

Hongjoong is better than Wooyoung by a significant margin; he’d been on the club team at their college and still has the muscle memory. But Wooyoung’s alright. He’d indulged Hongjoong whenever they had a free enough weekend, and he’d picked up enough to hold his own as long as they’re just rallying, as long as it’s for fun. If they played real games, Wooyoung would lose, and they both know that Wooyoung hates to lose.

They’d decided to make a routine of it even before they’d arrived at the resort. God knows you need to get outside these days, Wooyoung had texted him. It’s Wooyoung, though, who needs it now. It gives him something concrete to focus on. Return one ball, then the next. It feels cathartic to sweat, to gasp for air as Hongjoong puts him through his paces, to run from corner to corner of the court.

Nothing gets past Hongjoong, though. When they join each other at the benches at the end of the hour, he asks, “You alright?”

“Fine,” Wooyoung says, toweling off his forehead to hide his expression. “Why?”

“You seem a little tense.”

Wooyoung doesn’t deny it. Denial generally doesn’t work with Hongjoong. “Good thing we’re on vacation,” he says.

By the time they’ve made their way back to the villa, the rest of their friends are stretching to life. There’s no sense of urgency about the house. Wooyoung knows they have actual plans around the resort; someone’s penciled in hiking and boating and dinners and bars and God knows what else. Today is for settling in. For fucking around, as Mingi’s so eloquently put it. He’s already shirtless and lounging on the couch. Wooyoung can't tell if the sunglasses Mingi’s wearing indoors are for the hangover or the aesthetic. He doesn't need to know.

Seonghwa’s picked up breakfast, and now he stands at the kitchen island, doling out stiff cardboard takeaway boxes that Wooyoung’s sure are full of organic, balanced meals. Wooyoung starts to pick fruit out of the box Seonghwa’s set aside for himself.

“You ready for fucking around?” Seonghwa asks, mocking.

“I heard that,” Mingi calls.

“Yeah,” Wooyoung says. “I love fucking around.”

Seonghwa scoffs.

Before he can comment on it, though, someone drops an arm over Wooyoung’s shoulders. It’s not jarring. Wooyoung would know the weight of this body, the scent of this cologne, anywhere.

It’s hard to live apart from San. College feels like a decade ago. Really, it’s only been about a year and a half. But with San a plane ride away and not a couple-minute walk, it was a chafing, dragging eighteen months, each day a weight at Wooyoung’s ankles.

Wooyoung melts back into San’s hold. “Hi,” he says, sugary, offering San a piece of Seonghwa’s meal.

San says, “What do you want?”

This is what it means to have him back. Wooyoung can pitch his voice just so, and San will know he’s angling for something. He tries not to grin.

“I forgot my sunglasses at home,” Wooyoung tells him.

San sighs and peels his arm away from Wooyoung’s skin. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll save you.”

It’s not until Wooyoung trails him into Yeosang’s bedroom, until he steps over the threshold, that he understands. Both sides of this bed have been slept in; two suitcases are laid out on the luggage racks. This is how Yeosang ended up with the suite: he and San offered to share it.

It’s just unlike Yeosang to volunteer to share a bed. And it’s unlike San to volunteer to share a bed without asking Wooyoung if he wanted to share it.

“You’re sharing with Yeosang?” Wooyoung asks. “Cute.”

San smiles, but it’s bemused. He starts to dig through his suitcase. Wooyoung stares at the back of his head.

Wooyoung’s always wanted Yeosang and San to be closer. It’s part of the reason he suggested they live together. He just assumed that if it had happened, if they had gone from sharing a friend group to being such close friends, he would have known about it. A joint bed and bathroom is a far cry from what Yeosang and San had been comfortable with when they’d all graduated. But that’s what a year and a half of living in a different city does, apparently. It leaves you far outside the loop.

“How do you do it without me?” San asks, pressing the sunglasses into Wooyoung’s hands.

“I don’t,” Wooyoung says, light.

San laughs. It’s quiet.

THE BEGINNING.

Wooyoung is eighteen, and he can’t find Yeosang.

Everyone else is accounted for. Yunho and Jongho have repurposed the dining table for a high-stakes beer pong tournament. Seonghwa, barely visible through a haze of smoke, is curled up with his new friends from school on a long couch. Hongjoong is on aux.

The problem is that Yeosang is with none of them, and Wooyoung’s double-checked. Wooyoung does one more lap of the second floor and a few careful drags of Seonghwa’s cigarette. He’d made a deal with Seonghwa when they were sixteen and seventeen, respectively: Wooyoung is only allowed to smoke when Seonghwa does. Seonghwa swears he’s quitting when he goes back to school, so this might be the last cigarette Wooyoung ever has the pleasure of smoking. He savors it.

As he’s handing it back to Seonghwa, their fingers brushing, he figures it out.

The doors in Yunho’s house are so inordinately heavy. That’s the real wealth differentiator, Wooyoung thinks: heavy doors. The one in front of Wooyoung now, after he’s pushed his way out of the throng and into Yunho’s familiar, long hallways, is an unbroken sheet of glass.

Wooyoung tugs it open.

Nobody else is on the balcony with Yeosang. This house is a maze, and the people inside of it are well-inebriated. And even if any of them wanted to come here, it’s cold. Yeosang’s breath is coming in soft wisps of white. He’s sitting on the pale cement slab, legs between the railings, forehead pressed up against the bars.

Wooyoung slides the door shut and sits next to him.

“You smell like smoke,” Yeosang says.

“Whole place does,” Wooyoung says.

Yeosang shrugs.

His dejection is not surprising. Wooyoung can’t say he’d be thrilled about this party, either, if he were Yeosang. This is the consequence of being so smart: you end up getting into a much better university than the drunk idiots you hang out with, and you ship off to get a real degree while they gear up for four years of drunken idiocy without you.

Yeosang will be fine. He’s quiet, sure, but he’s smart and rich and strikingly handsome. The girls at that school are going to eat him right up. The girls here have already started to, actually, especially since he got in. He just hasn’t figured it out yet. Still, Wooyoung knows why he’s upset. He runs a rough hand down the back of Yeosang’s scalp, rubs across his shoulders. Yeosang doesn’t flinch at the touch.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do college without you,” Yeosang mutters.

The words are a belt tightening around Wooyoung’s lungs. He knows the ‘you’ on the end of Yeosang’s sentence isn’t plural, that it’s for his ears only. It’s been this way since the two of them were fifteen.

“You’ll be okay,” Wooyoung says. “You’ll make friends. I thought Yunho just said he knew a guy who’s gonna go there, too.”

“Name’s Mingi,” Yeosang agrees. “I have his number.”

“He seem like fun?”

“Seems a little weird,” Yeosang says.

“I’m a little weird,” Wooyoung says. “Yunho’s a little weird. Maybe Mingi will be cool.”

Yeosang says, quiet, “He won’t be like you.”

The belt slips a notch tighter.

“I know,” Wooyoung whispers. “Hey,” he continues, when Yeosang turns his face away from Wooyoung, into the darkness. “We’re not really going anywhere.”

“Yeah,” Yeosang says.

Nobody’s going to interrupt them out here, and Yeosang hasn’t shied away from the touches yet. Wooyoung threads his fingers into the hair at the base of Yeosang’s head, rubbing comfortingly at the nape of his neck, the sharp hinges where his ears meet his jaw. There’s a commotion from inside the house—most likely, someone’s just lost an obscene amount of money to Jongho—and Yeosang sighs through it, trying not to be heard, resting his forehead against his arm and his arm against the railing.

“Come on,” Wooyoung says. “Let’s go enter the beer pong tournament.”

“We suck at beer pong,” Yeosang says. It’s watery.

“Yeah, wait until you hear what the buy-in is,” Wooyoung tells him. “It’ll be fun.”

Yeosang falls silent.

“Don’t make me drag you,” Wooyoung says. “You know I will.”

“I know,” Yeosang says. His dark eyes emerge from behind his sleeve. Wooyoung takes this as a sign to slide one hand under Yeosang’s upper arm and the other around the balcony railing, hauling them both to their feet. When he does, Yeosang is facing him, gaze downcast but lips turned in a reluctant smile.

“Good?” Wooyoung asks, just to be sure.

“Yeah, whatever,” Yeosang says. “Let’s go lose my money.”

It’s Wooyoung’s turn to grin. He’s eighteen, and he’s trying not to think about it, but he doesn’t know how he’s going to do college without Yeosang, either. It was all different, with him. They grew up in each other’s pockets. Wooyoung’s never missed anyone the way he knows he’s going to miss Yeosang.

But they’ll manage. It won’t be long.

“In you go,” Wooyoung says, and he pushes Yeosang through that stupidly heavy door.

NOW.

“Seriously?” Wooyoung asks.

Hongjoong has the good sense to look guilty as he slides his work laptop out of the bag he’s brought to the pool with him. Wooyoung knows it’s not necessary. All of them were able to put in for vacation, even Jongho.

“It’s relaxing,” Hongjoong says.

“Sure it is,” Wooyoung says, even though Hongjoong was clearly being earnest about it. He slips San’s shades down over his eyes.

It’s not quite warm enough for Wooyoung to want to get in the water. It’s the off-season, early spring, which is part of the reason that Yunho had this bright idea to bring them all together now in some unholy matrimony of too-early bachelor party and too-late annual reunion and luxury retreat. None of them are strangers to luxury, but this empty resort is another world. They have most of the facilities to themselves.

This includes the pool, which is currently empty of all other guests. It won’t be, though, not for long. San and Yeosang are stripping themselves of their clothes on the opposite end of the water.

Hongjoong’s headphones come out of his bag. This is for the best. Wooyoung needs him distracted enough not to realize two things: one, that Yunho isn’t here, and two, that Wooyoung is unwisely staring at Yeosang behind the cover of the sunglasses.

It's stupid. It’s San’s fault.

Ever since they moved in together, San’s been teaching Yeosang about the miracles of creatine and macros and powerlifting. Wooyoung has known this, and he’s known that Yeosang was taking it seriously, but it’s one thing to see Yeosang’s progress pictures, side-by-side in the mirror with San, and another to have the swell of his biceps within reach under the sun.

When Yeosang pulls his hair back into a barely-there ponytail, Wooyoung decides it’s not so bad of him to look. Ethically speaking, it’s not the end of the world to admit your friend is attractive. Yeosang isn’t safe, and nothing will make him safe, but Wooyoung has eyes. The minor objectification of Yeosang can be his reward, in a way, for being such a good friend to Yunho.

It’s ethical to watch Yeosang strip out of his shirt. It’s ethical to note the flex of his bare shoulders as he pats sunscreen into his flawless skin. It’s completely, entirely ethical to watch his body cut through the breeze as he leans down to kiss the corner of San’s mouth.

Wooyoung’s blood goes cold.

His first thought is heatstroke. His second thought is hallucinogenics. His third thought is that that was not their first fucking kiss, because San is wearing a soft, pleased smile and pulling Yeosang in for another. With a finger along Yeosang’s jaw, San presses their lips together more fully. The contact is closed-mouthed and sweet and familiar.

It’s not possible.

Wooyoung watches, unblinking and stone-still, as Yeosang leaves one last peck on San’s temple and slips into the deep end of the pool for a lap.

The suite. The bed. It’s not possible. There’s a buzzing behind Wooyoung’s sternum, a deep discomfort, a panic. Yeosang and San can’t be together. They’re Wooyoung’s best friends; Wooyoung introduced them.

They can’t be. He would know.

Wooyoung revisits his theory about hallucinogenics. According to Yeosang, Mingi had a phase with psychedelics in college; maybe this is all Mingi’s fault, somehow, and Wooyoung is going to wake up in that soft bed and find out that everything after his first glass of champagne yesterday was a drug-induced nightmare.

He should stop watching them. He wants to stop watching them. It is no longer feeling ethical, or even remotely enjoyable, to look at Yeosang. But he can’t, and so he’s staring them down as San sits on the edge of the pool, his feet dangling in the water, and waits for Yeosang to return to him. Yeosang does. They begin to chat in low voices, Yeosang’s arms folded along the smooth stone edge, San leaning down towards him.

Five minutes ago, Wooyoung would have said he knew every emotion San had to offer, that he knew every facet of those eyes. Now, the expression San wears is somehow new. His attention hangs wholly over Yeosang in the water. It’s obvious what’s coming. Still, Wooyoung’s heart squeezes a fresh burst of shock into his system as San tilts his chin down, wanting.

Yeosang glances over his shoulder. It’s self conscious, but his lips are pursed with a small smile. He must see Wooyoung, who is doing a fantastic impression of unconsciousness under the sunglasses, Mingi, who actually is unconscious, and Hongjoong, who has those industrial-grade headphones clamped over his ears. It’s good enough for Yeosang, apparently. He raises up out of the water to meet San halfway.

No, Wooyoung thinks, it’s not a drug-induced nightmare.

He knows this because it doesn’t stop. It’s as if the sun has melted them together: the glow of San’s forearms draped over Yeosang’s fairer shoulders, their dark hair, San’s legs framing Yeosang’s ribs at the surface of the water. Wooyoung glances around the perimeter of the pool to see if anyone else is reeling. They are not. When he looks back, Yeosang has one large hand firmly wrapped around San’s calf; it’s stayed tame, all things considered, but San is pressing in now for a deeper angle, his fingers threading into the hair at the base of Yeosang’s head—

Wooyoung stands. His thoughts drain out of his head, down his spine, into the off-white tile under his feet. Without glancing back, he makes for the shaded cabana that Seonghwa and Jongho are sharing.

Seonghwa looks like he’s in a movie, white linen shirt open to reveal camera-ready abs, eyes closed and hair tousled. Jongho is both less clothed and less poised.

“Hey,” Wooyoung says, pushing Jongho’s calves aside to sit.

Seonghwa cracks one eye open.

“Question,” Wooyoung says. “How long have San and Yeosang been dating?”

Seonghwa shuts his eye. He hums. “Since…” he starts, fingers twitching as he counts off in his head. “Maybe six months, now. But I feel like you’d know better than me.”

Six months.

“Oh,” Wooyoung says, light, even as his stomach drops. “Well, I think they forgot to tell me.”

“About their anniversary?” Jongho asks. “Does it matter?”

“No,” Wooyoung says. “They forgot to tell me they were together.”

Seonghwa opens both eyes.

He asks, “Are you serious?”

Now they’re both looking up at Wooyoung. The expression on Jongho’s face is easy to read: he thinks Wooyoung is fucking with them.

“I thought you set them up,” Jongho says bluntly.

Wooyoung set them up as roommates, yes, but not as boyfriends. As partners. And he’s opening his mouth to tell Jongho that if he’d known they were going to start dating, he probably wouldn’t have.

He catches himself. It’s a ridiculous thing to say.

“I did not,” Wooyoung settles on.

Jongho’s gaze slips past him. Whatever he sees poolside makes his lips purse in realization.

“That’s a weird way to find out,” he says.

Wooyoung suppresses a panicked laugh to say, “No shit.”

There’s something akin to amazement in Seonghwa’s expression. Jongho’s expression is less affected, but Wooyoung knows this look, too: he’s doing the odds in his head. Wooyoung’s skin starts to crawl.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he says. “It’s freaking me out.”

Seonghwa says, delicately, “Sorry. Well, now you know.”

Wooyoung says, “Shit, I mean, I guess so.”

Jongho, who’s never lost a bet, says nothing.

THE MIDDLE.

“We couldn’t tell you before, or you’d rig it,” Jongho is saying, as if that’s the concerning part.

“Since first year?” Wooyoung asks. Unfortunately, even as he tries to say it with some indignation, he finds he’s not that surprised.

Wooyoung is twenty-two, and he knows what people say about him and San.

The way they act, it would be difficult for anyone not to make assumptions. In their first year, when they were just starting to fold San into their group, Yunho had actually tried to congratulate Wooyoung on the relationship. Wooyoung had laughed his ass off about it. In Yunho’s defense, this was a few months before Wooyoung’s general distaste for commitment became extraordinarily clear, and also a few months before San had gotten himself a hot, third-year boyfriend. It was an understandable mistake at the time.

(That boyfriend of San’s hadn’t liked Wooyoung very much. It’s—well, it is what it is.)

“Well, once every year,” Jongho explains. “It’s always, ‘will they get together this year?’ And we’ve won every time.”

“Who’s—“

“Me and Seonghwa,” Jongho says, anticipating the question. “We always bet against. Yunho always bets for. Hongjoong thinks it’s wrong."

“Jesus,” Wooyoung says.

It is wrong, probably, but it’s also funny. Jongho’s bet on less morally sound things than this before. And if there's someone willing to take them up on it, Wooyoung can’t fault Jongho or Seonghwa for taking the free money. It’s far more shocking for Yunho to—

Something occurs to Wooyoung.

“Yunho bet on us every year?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Jongho says.

“But San had a boyfriend for, like, a little over a year,” Wooyoung says.

“He did,” Jongho agrees.

“Did Yunho put money on us while San was in a fucking relationship?”

Jongho nods, solemn.

Wooyoung asks, “Is he stupid?”

“He’s committed to you guys,” Jongho says. “I’ll give him that.”

He is, apparently. It’s not sitting well with Wooyoung, because Yunho is not stupid, and Wooyoung knows it. With horse racing, sports betting, Yunho’s loose with his money and loves an underdog. But he’s no fool.

“How much money has he lost on us?” Wooyoung asks.

“Well,” Jongho says, “When I say the number out loud, I start to think that maybe Hongjoong is right. You know, morally.”

“Jesus,” Wooyoung repeats. “Remind me not to bet against you.”

“You don’t need reminding,” Jongho says.

Wooyoung isn’t sure if he should laugh; it doesn’t sound like a joke. In the end, though, he does.

NOW.

In Wooyoung’s apartment in the city, there’s always a hum, even in the middle of the night. The villa, tucked into an isolated pocket of an isolated resort, shares its night with no cars or streetlights or clattering neighbors; the electricity that hums through the walls is so well-insulated as to be nonexistent. The quiet is so deep it compresses the air. It makes the glow of Wooyoung’s phone loud, somehow, and illicit.

He’s started with Yeosang, who has always had a tame social media presence. When Yeosang was in college, he was barely posting. There he is with Mingi at graduation; there’s all of them shirtless and drunk at their joint spring break. It’s nothing Wooyoung doesn’t know about.

Post-grad, Yeosang’s only posted a few sparse photo dumps, and Wooyoung is fairly certain he’s seen them all. Gym picture. Cute dog. Sunset. Gym picture. No sign of San yet, but looking at Yeosang’s body feels doubly terrible now that Wooyoung knows who his boyfriend is. Office building. Beach. Gym picture.

And then, San.

The photo is from three months ago. A table for two, a gentle smile, a white tablecloth. San’s in his glasses and a suit jacket; he’s always cleaned up nicely.

With context, it’s obvious.

Without, maybe it isn't. Wooyoung has had meals with both of them that were similar in terms of optics. All three of them have had the money for expensive wine since they were of age, and they’ve probably all had a taste for it since before that. Sometimes they go out to enjoy it. Sometimes Yunho goes with them, and then they don’t pay for the expensive wine, but not always. Not the point. The point is that this singular photo wouldn’t have tipped Wooyoung off unless he had already known to look for it, and he hadn’t.

He clicks over to San’s profile.

Yeosang’s everywhere. The back of his head, the side of his face, in front of flowers, trees, skyscrapers, cafes. Yeosang is shoulder-to-shoulder with San in the gym, tank top taut around the body he’s been building. Yeosang is in their shared apartment. He’s batting away the camera. He’s sleeping on San’s shoulder.

Wooyoung tosses his phone blindly at the foot of his bed.

These are the things Wooyoung has missed: a picture of San at a table for two, and Yeosang scattered throughout a life. The problem is that neither of these concepts are foreign to Wooyoung. He saw the photos, but he had never, ever considered what they might mean. He’d never had a reason to. They would have told him.

They would have told him. When’s the last time San kept a secret from Wooyoung? When’s the last time Yeosang had a secret to keep?

The kiss, the closeness—it hadn’t stopped. Wooyoung had been waiting for it to stop, for someone to tell him they’d decided to play a collective practical joke, and the end had never come. Yeosang and San had been tucked close to each other for the rest of the day: after the pool, and during dinner, and during post-dinner drinks at the resort bar. And then they’d been flushed and giggling and still pressed together on the deck chairs back at the villa—not in a gross way, because Yeosang would never allow it, but in a way that kept that jolting that cold thing in Wooyoung’s chest back to life.

Worst of all, Wooyoung had kept catching Yunho staring at them.

It’s not their fault. It’s not Yunho’s fault, either. But through some sick combination of keeping one secret and not knowing another, it feels like it could be Wooyoung’s, somehow.

Wooyoung grabs one of the pillows below him and shoves it over his head, over his ears. It does nothing. The resort is still just as quiet. The inside of Wooyoung’s head is just as loud.

It was obvious in the way Seonghwa was looking at him. It was obvious in Jongho's long, skeptical silence. Wooyoung was supposed to know.

THE BEGINNING.

Wooyoung is nineteen, and there’s one year of college under his belt. They’ve taken Hongjoong home with them. Yeosang’s back from school, too, and now they’re in Yunho’s pool house like nothing’s changed. Yunho’s put down the bug screens so they don’t get eaten alive—from experience, the evenings out here will make meals of them all—and they’ve settled into a misshapen circle on the couches and floor.

“Wooyoung’s having the opposite problem,” Yunho is saying. “Too many choices.”

They’ve been explaining their life at school to Yeosang, who wasn’t there, and Jongho, who will be joining them in the next semester. It’s warm out even with the sun under the horizon and the screens down. It smells like chlorine and sweat between them, like all the real parts of Wooyoung’s childhood, and it’s familiar to be teased here, lazily poked and prodded by a grinning Yunho and Jongho.

“They’ve all been terrible,” Wooyoung says in his own defense.

“It’s not like you’ve given any of them a chance,” Yunho says.

Yeosang’s eyebrows are drawn in, which is how Wooyoung knows he’s not joking when he asks, “Terrible at sex?”

Wooyoung laughs—really laughs, from his chest. He’s missed Yeosang so badly. When it passes, Wooyoung says, “No.” Some of them had been remarkably good at that part, in fact. “Terrible at the rest of it.”

“A few of them were perfectly fine,” Yunho says.

“Yeah,” Hongjoong echoes. Hongjoong’s been pretty quiet. It’s the first time he’s been to Yunho’s house, which is really enough to silence anyone, even people who are accustomed to the sights and sounds of generational wealth. He’s sitting against Jongho’s legs on the floor; Jongho keeps kicking him in the back, but he doesn’t seem to mind. “I liked…what was his name? With the eyebrow piercing?”

Wooyoung narrows his eyes at Hongjoong in the dim light. “Well, clearly you didn’t like him that much.”

“Some people aren’t built for relationships,” Jongho says, sage.

Jongho’s funny. He’s just graduated high school and has never held a girlfriend for longer than about a month, which means he should have no wisdom to contribute to this conversation. The thing about Jongho is that even when he’s bullshitting, he’s usually right.

“Exactly,” Wooyoung says. "Thank you."

“It’s about the commitment,” Hongjoong says, but it sounds like a question.

“Yes,” Wooyoung says. It’s not the first time they’ve had this conversation. He’s starting to wonder why they have to have it again, and why they have to have it in front of Yeosang. “Can we stop talking about me?” he asks.

“First time I have ever heard you say that,” Jongho puts in, which is unhelpful.

Wooyoung flips him off. “Yeosang,” he says, pointed. “What about you? What do you think about the country’s smartest women?”

“Country’s smartest men,” Yeosang says.

It takes Wooyoung a long, long second to realize he’s being corrected.

When it finally does land, it hits him square in the chest, cleaving right between the halves of his ribcage. He can tell it’s landing for everyone else, too. Yunho’s head snaps to the side, a borderline cartoonish motion.

“Oh,” Hongjoong whispers.

“Don’t make it weird,” Yeosang says. He’s staring resolutely at the wall. “They’re fine, though. Mostly.”

Yunho might be changing the subject. Wooyoung can’t be sure. He’s not listening.

Wooyoung’s not sure when he realized that his friends were different. They’d been tossed together circumstantially, most of them under the large umbrella of Yunho’s family’s social circle. He knows the other boys they could have befriended over the years, and he knows most of them would not have taken so kindly to himself and Seonghwa (and, later, Hongjoong and San). It’s selection bias: some of Wooyoung’s friends are gay men. By necessity, the rest of them have no problems being associated with gay men. It had always been easy to assume that Yeosang fell squarely into that last category.

Maybe not always. There’d been a time, when they’d both been sixteen, when Wooyoung had thought—well, not that he’d really thought about it—but he’d noticed, maybe, that Yeosang hadn’t had much of an interest in girls. Not like Yunho. Not like Jongho. It hadn’t seemed to matter so much. Yeosang was born smarter and quieter than the rest of them, and apparently that had overridden all the other signs in Wooyoung’s head.

He should have known.

At the end of the night, he remembers he’s supposed to drive Yeosang home. The mask of normalcy he’d managed to plaster over his features peels off like a sunburn, patchy and raw, when Yeosang approaches his car. Whatever Yeosang sees in his expression makes him frown.

“I told you not to make it weird,” he complains.

“It’s not—I’m happy for you.” It doesn’t come out right, so Wooyoung adds, “Dumbass.”

They’re staring each other down over the hood of the car. Wooyoung’s just had it washed; it gleams under the lights of Yunho’s house.

“Don’t be happy for me, then,” Yeosang says.

Wooyoung throws his hands up. “Fine,” he says. “Then I don’t care. Better?”

“You’re a dick,” Yeosang says.

Before he can stop himself, Wooyoung says, “Well, you like those.”

Yeosang blinks at him. The corner of his mouth twitches upwards.

“That was better,” he says.

And then they’re both laughing. Yeosang puts his face in his hands. Wooyoung doesn’t remember why he’d been so upset: of course, nothing’s changed. Yeosang’s still his friend, still as wrapped up in Wooyoung’s life as he’s always been and will always be.

“God,” Wooyoung says, trying and failing to wipe the smile off of his face. “Just get in the car.”

NOW.

Wooyoung is going to treat it like it was an accident.

Maybe they forgot. Maybe they, too, assumed he would know. It’s not like their relationship had been announced to their other friends via email or something equally ridiculous. So he’s going to treat Yeosang and San the way he always does, and he’s going to treat Yunho like Yunho is happily engaged, and he’s going to get through the rest of this trip with minimal loss of his own sanity.

He and Hongjoong squeeze in tennis before the hike. Wooyoung can tell, instantly, that Hongjoong’s been informed.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Wooyoung says.

Hongjoong raises his eyebrows but lets Wooyoung get away with it. Tennis does not improve the mood; Wooyoung, who really is passable at the sport, could not hit the side of a barn with a racquet and ball this morning for all the money in the world.

“Some vacation you’re having,” Hongjoong says.

He doesn’t know the half of it, Wooyoung thinks. Literally.

When they get back to the house, Yunho is up and socializing, doing a fair impression of normalcy, talking numbers with Jongho over breakfast. San is chugging pre-workout in the kitchen. Hongjoong starts complaining about nothing in particular. This is a scene from the vacation Wooyoung was expecting, and it seems like a good omen for the hike.

It’s not.

About an hour in, San says, “I didn’t think they’d be this slow.”

Wooyoung lost sight of everyone else a long time ago. Mingi had wanted to stop every few seconds to groan and brush something away from his legs or face, and Yunho had been pausing with him. And Hongjoong, who apparently needs a two-man guard from the wilderness, is holding up both Seonghwa and Jongho even farther behind them.

Wooyoung hadn’t thought he was moving particularly quickly. But here he is, dense tree cover on all sides, a scrape on his knee, entirely alone with Yeosang and San for the foreseeable future. They’ve paused for water. Yeosang and San are sharing a bottle.

“This was advertised,” Wooyoung says, mostly to himself, “as a short hike.”

It was also advertised as scenic and relaxing. The scenery will be at the end, when the foliage opens up to the secluded beach on the other side of the island. Wooyoung is beginning to suspect that the relaxation is not coming.

“Well, they did’t account for Mingi,” Yeosang says, dry. “Or Hongjoong.”

Wooyoung glances at him. Yeosang’s sweating, dark hair plastered to his forehead and neck. They’re all sweating, actually. It’s not so hot, but it is uncomfortably humid. Soupy. It’s harder to ignore now that they’re not moving.

He’s not the only one thinking about it. “Okay,” San says, slipping off his bag. “Hold this?” Yeosang takes it from him, and San is barely free of the straps before he’s peeling his sweat-soaked shirt off of his torso. And Wooyoung’s seen San shirtless hundreds of times in hundreds of contexts, so it wouldn’t be hard to compartmentalize at all if not for Yeosang, whose gaze runs appreciatively down San’s body and up again.

Wooyoung has never seen Yeosang give anyone a once-over in his entire fucking life. It’s so out of character—or, at least, it’s out of character for what Wooyoung thought he knew about Yeosang—that it liquefies something in his stomach, a small molten shock. Admittedly, Wooyoung can understand why Yeosang wants an eyeful. If Wooyoung were San’s boyfriend, he’d be doing a little more than looking.

Wooyoung knows, he knows, that this is an entirely inappropriate thing to think. He’s not even sure which of them it’s more disrespectful to. He wonders if it’s too late to turn around and volunteer to help drag Hongjoong through the trees. Or maybe he can swat the bugs off of Mingi’s legs for him. Anything, Wooyoung thinks, but this.

“Thanks,” San says, reaching his hand out for the bag, and his small, knowing smile mirrors Yeosang’s. “I’m ready if you guys are.”

Once, in college, Wooyoung had to take an exam with the flu. The rest of the hike feels exactly like that: he tunes out the dehydration headache, the body aches, and focuses on nothing but the step in front of him. He doesn’t look up unless he has to, which means he doesn’t even notice when Yeosang’s shirt comes off, too. He lets them lead by a good twenty paces and doesn’t listen to anything they’re saying. He sees some nice, big bugs. They’re great company.

An indeterminate amount of time later, the jungle spits Wooyoung right out onto the sand.

One second, it’s dark and close and damp, and the next, he’s squinting into the blinding blue. It is scenic, after all. Nobody’s developed this side of the island—the resort owners have probably marked it all off—and so everything, from the rough white sand to the seaweed line dotting the shore, feels deserted. There’s not a ship in the ocean, not another soul on the coast. They could be the only people in the world.

San’s already kicking out the beach blanket he’d stuffed into the backpack. Yeosang has his phone out, taking a few quick pictures of the sand, the horizon; he turns his camera around to image Wooyoung, emerging from the jungle. Wooyoung pretends to be preoccupied with stripping off his shoes and socks. By the time Wooyoung reaches San, Yeosang’s already put the phone away and started jogging towards the water. Where he’s finding the energy, Wooyoung has no idea.

“You gonna swim?” Wooyoung asks San.

“Later,” San says. He lets himself fall stomach-down on the blanket, arms folded under his head. “I’ll wait for the rest of ‘em.”

Wooyoung sits next to San, crossing his legs out in front of him.

"Can you do my back?" San asks.

Wooyoung raises an eyebrow at him, and San nudges at the backpack in the sand until Wooyoung realizes that he’s asking for sunscreen.

“You don’t burn that easy,” Wooyoung comments, but he fishes around in the bag anyway.

“Yeosang makes me,” San says. It’s dejected. “No matter how long I’m outside.”

The bottle feels expensive. San has never been cheap, but even Wooyoung can tell that he’s holding something high-quality. “Fancy,” he says, snapping open the cover.

“Yeosang’s,” San says, as if that explains it. “I just listen to him for skin stuff.”

But this doesn’t feel so obvious to Wooyoung. Skin stuff. When had that become an interest, for him?

San’s been in perfect shape for as long as Wooyoung’s known him. His body is impossible not to notice, especially since Wooyoung’s just been asked to put his hands all over it. And then, as he rubs the sunscreen into San’s skin, muscle memory takes over. Wooyoung prods at the swell of his shoulders, trying to relieve some of the tension there. It’s mindless. Wooyoung couldn’t even count the times he’s done it, standing behind San at the chair of a desk or in a library, or on their couch, or on the floor of someone’s common room in a dorm too small to hold them.

"Oh," San sighs, and Wooyoung digs his thumbs in harder, a knot giving slightly under the pressure. "Can you—yeah. There."

Wooyoung glances up, reflexive, to see if Yeosang is watching them. He’s not. But when Wooyoung realizes what he’s done, his jaw tightens. He’s always been on edge around San’s partners. He knows what they’ve all thought of him; he’d have to be an idiot not to.

But that’s Yeosang.

“Thanks,” San says.

“Someone has to take care of you,” Wooyoung says, giving a firm, friendly pat to San’s bare shoulder. It doesn’t totally occur to him until after he says it that someone is taking care of San these days, and it’s not Wooyoung.

San’s eyes flutter open. “You always do,” he says, easy.

Wooyoung hopes his smile doesn’t look forced.

San’s eyes close again; his breathing evens out. Wooyoung sweats and watches Yeosang’s dark head and strong arms bob in the water, the path his body cuts through the shallow waves.

Yeosang’s body. His interests. His mannerisms. His boyfriend. What else has Wooyoung missed of his life, and when did he start missing it? Was it at the beginning of college, half a decade ago, when he hadn’t noticed Yeosang’s sexuality, or was it later, when Yeosang moved in with San? Wooyoung hadn't thought he'd been so oblivious over the past year. He hadn't thought he'd had his head buried in his work, not the way Jongho or Hongjoong normally do. But maybe he has. Maybe he’s been so distant from Yeosang that he’s forgotten what it is to know him.

This is what’s so unsettling, Wooyoung decides. It’s not the fact that San and Yeosang are dating; he has no right to be upset about that. It’s the idea that he might not know them anymore.

Twenty or so minutes later, Yunho and Mingi stumble out of the tree line. Mingi falls to his knees in the sand and then flops the rest of the way over. Yunho hauls him back up, laughing in a way that makes Wooyoung forget all their problems for an instant, and they drag themselves over to collapse at San’s blanket. San lifts his head to greet them.

“That was fun,” Yunho says.

“Where’s everyone else?” San asks.

“Probably dead,” Mingi says.

Yunho shakes his head. “They’re behind us somewhere.”

“I wish I was dead, too,” Mingi adds.

“Alright,” Wooyoung says. “Now you’re playing it up.”

Mingi rolls over in the sand to glare at him. “Fuck you,” he says. “I’m gonna go hang out with Yeosang.”

“Enjoy,” Wooyoung says, and Mingi actually does get up and pick his way down to the waves. The black dot of Yeosang’s head in the water starts bobbing towards him, a quiet call-and-response.

Yunho sits down next to Wooyoung.

“You look good,” Wooyoung tells him. It’s true. Blood from the exercise has flushed his muscles, his even skin; he looks at home in the willowy, athletic body that money can’t claim to have given him.

“The glow of true love,” San adds, slow and teasing.

Yunho’s expression tightens at the edges, but otherwise he plays it off well. Wooyoung follows his lead. The three of them chat lazily. San’s a romantic, but Yunho steers the conversation away from his wedding each time it drifts in that direction. When the rest of their friends arrive on the beach, not too long later, the pressure on Wooyoung’s shoulders eases as everyone gathers to make fun of Hongjoong (Jongho: Well, I wanted to leave him there; Seonghwa: He wouldn’t let us carry him.).

San goes down to the water. Seonghwa makes Jongho take some pictures for his socials. Jongho’s got a steady hand and a surprising knack for good angles, and Seonghwa has an image to maintain. In the foreground of Wooyoung’s vision, Seonghwa levels that siren-gaze at the camera, and in the background, San tackles Yeosang into the arch of a wave.

In the sand at Wooyoung’s side, Yunho squints into a slowly falling sun. With only Wooyoung to observe him, he’s dropped the act.

“How’s the…” Wooyoung trails off.

Yunho doesn’t seem thrilled to be pressed. “How’s the what?” he asks, flat.

“Plan,” Wooyoung finishes.

They can hear Mingi laugh even from the shore.

Yunho says, “I’m leaving soon.”

“Thought you cleared your schedule,” Wooyoung says.

“Last-minute,” Yunho tells him. “I’ll just be gone for the night.”

“And then?” Wooyoung asks.

“And then my parents will have some very expensive catering to cancel,” Yunho says, and that’s the end of that.

THE MIDDLE.

On the coldest weekend of Wooyoung’s twenty-first January, San breaks up with his boyfriend.

The breakup is not San’s idea. To put it lightly, he takes it poorly. San’s not a crier; he never lashes out. When Wooyoung lets himself into San’s dorm after twenty-four hours of radio silence, he’s greeted by perfect darkness and the most depressing song Wooyoung’s ever fucking heard blasting over his speaker.

“Jesus, San,” Wooyoung says.

“I’m fine,” San says. He’s lying right through his teeth. Wooyoung can see it.

Wooyoung coaxes him back into the land of the living. He doesn’t do it alone; he calls Hongjoong when San needs to be walked through why the relationship was doomed (Realistically, he’s graduating this year, and long-distance would have sucked), and he calls Jongho when San needs his phone yanked out of his hand and his head screwed back on (I mean, this is fucking embarrassing, San). But mostly, Wooyoung does the work. He cleans San’s room. He pushes San out the door when it’s time for class—or, more importantly, for drinks with Seonghwa. He learns to make San’s terrible protein shakes to save him from expensive, greasy delivery. He drinks one of the protein shakes. It could taste worse, he says, lying, but it gets a real smile out of San.

One day, San says, “Wooyoung.”

It’s towards the end. Wooyoung is folding San’s laundry. It’s entirely unnecessary at this point, but Wooyoung’s gotten in some embarrassing habits. San so rarely lets anyone take a burden off of him. It’s enjoyable, in an odd way.

Wooyoung stops wringing out the fourth identical tank top from the pile to listen.

“You didn’t have to do this,” San says.

Wooyoung says, “You’d do it for me.”

“You would never be in this situation,” San says, and the humor in it, the smile curving the words, is how Wooyoung knows the worst of it is behind them.

“No,” Wooyoung says. “Guess I wouldn’t.”

San waits for a real answer.

“I don’t like to see you sad, okay?” Wooyoung says. “And going out without you sucks. You’re the only one who dances.”

“Seonghwa dances with you,” San points out.

“He’s picky,” Wooyoung says, by which he means that dancing with Seonghwa is fine, but it’s better with San, who will let Wooyoung drag him into thick crowds and cling to him when they’re both sweaty, who never gets tired or leaves him alone. While he’s wondering how much of this he can say to San without it getting awkward—even for them, it’s a lot—he notices that San is smiling at him in earnest. It’s the first time he’s seen that smile in what feels like forever. It stops his hands in motion, his thoughts in their tracks.

“What?” Wooyoung asks.

“Love you too,” San says, and Wooyoung throws a pair of socks at his head.

NOW.

“Something’s wrong,” San says.

Wooyoung’s hand tightens around his drink. They’d forgotten that they’d all have to do the hike back to the resort, which had destroyed the momentum of the day. They were supposed to cook dinner together, but nobody had wanted to lift a finger to make it happen, so they’d migrated to the resort bar instead. They’ve driven out the only other patrons. The bartenders look pleased.

Wooyoung’s leaning against the bar, watching Jongho and Yunho play pool. There’s no money on the game; Jongho is willing to be generous when Yunho is paying for his drinks. San’s materialized at his shoulder. Wooyoung could tell by the inward pull of his eyebrows that he’d wanted to talk about something.

“I’m fine,” Wooyoung says. “Hike just took it out of me.”

“Not with you,” San says. “With Yunho.”

Wooyoung sets his drink on the bartop.

“What makes you say that?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” San says. He sounds genuinely upset by it. “I just thought—I don’t know, it’s his bachelor party. I thought he would be happier.”

“God,” Wooyoung says. “You know how gross you are, right?”

It makes San smile. “Only you would think being in love is gross.”

“I don’t,” Wooyoung says, not sure if he’s lying. “You’re just…”

“I’m just?”

“Sappy,” Wooyoung lands on. “He’s been with Eunseo forever. He’s out of the honeymoon phase.”

“Four years isn’t forever,” San says.

“Four years is a long time,” Wooyoung says.

Neither of them bother pointing out that the nature of Yunho and Eunseo’s relationship is such that they never exactly had a honeymoon phase.

San hums, and his gaze rises to the opposite side of the bar. Wooyoung doesn’t follow it; he knows who’s over there. The alcohol flush on San’s cheeks deepens. He says, “I guess I can’t imagine being out of the honeymoon phase.”

“Okay,” Wooyoung says. “See, that was gross.”

Wooyoung knows the second it leaves his mouth that it came out harsher than he intended. The words dangle between them, swaying uneasily, and Wooyoung bites the tip of his own tongue.

“Is there something wrong?” San asks. “With you, I mean. Not Yunho.”

Wooyoung laughs. “No,” he says. “I’m good.”

THE BEGINNING.

Yeosang’s brought them out, but the horses brought them here. It’s a bit nicer than some of their usual haunts. It has to be, to support the kind of bets Yunho likes to make. Wooyoung is twenty-two, and he’s still never gambled on anything, no matter how tempting Yunho and Jongho make it sound.

Yunho’s smart with his money most of the time; gambling is really his only vice. And, Wooyoung thinks, for Yunho, it’s not so much about the betting itself as it is about the odds. Yunho likes underdogs. Yunho likes stories. It’s always some horse stumbling along at the back of the pack that he’s telling Wooyoung to keep an eye on, or a young, scrappy sports team on a miracle run.

It’s sweet, in a way. Yunho’s about the furthest thing from an underdog imaginable, and this is one of the only situations where throwing his money around can’t influence the outcome. Wooyoung thinks that might be the point. So much of Yunho’s life is predictable. Maybe the lack of control is the thrill.

Yunho’s alone at one of the machines, mulling over his selections. Horses. Wooyoung is at the bar. Jongho is at his side, attention torn between the bartender and glancing over at Yunho across the room.

“Just go,” Wooyoung tells him. “I’ll get your drink.”

Jongho doesn’t bet on horses. Unlike people, the horses never do what you want them to do. But Jongho is both a realist and a contrarian, and he likes to give opinions. Sometimes Yunho listens. Sometimes he doesn’t.

As soon as Wooyoung’s alone, Yeosang materializes at his shoulder. “I’ll help you carry drinks,” he says.

The two of them find a booth tucked in the corner near Yunho’s machine. Wooyoung looks at Yeosang across the polished table and, not for the first time tonight, is startled by what he sees. Yeosang’s aged more this year at school than in any of the years before. His stature is the same, but his eyes have sharpened; he’s lost some of the roundness in his face. It’s much harder now to imagine him as the statuesque, still boy Wooyoung had met at fifteen. It’s hard to imagine him as a boy at all.

“It’s just horses?” Yeosang asks. He’s looking past Wooyoung, towards their friends at the machine.

Jongho doesn’t bet on horses. He bets on sports only occasionally: Japanese baseball. He says he’s figured out the game. And, once every four years, the World Cup. This was the only time Wooyoung had ever seen him lose money.

“Yeah, Jongho’s just fucking with him,” Wooyoung says. “Why, you want in?”

Yeosang grins. The only thing he plays is the markets. He’s smarter than the rest of them in more ways than one.

This reminds Wooyoung of something.

“By the way, I figured it out for you,” Wooyoung says.

Yeosang raises his eyebrows.

“I think you should live with San,” Wooyoung tells him. “You’re going to the same city. You’d be good roommates.”

Yeosang and San have never met in person.

Up until about a month ago, Wooyoung had almost forgotten this fact. He thinks that probably everyone has almost forgotten this fact. Yeosang and San know a lot about each other, and after so many years of sharing a friend group, everyone assumes their personal friendship is canonized. Not so. The timing has never quite worked out between Yeosang coming home and San coming to visit, which means they’ve never met, which means that living together has not occurred to them.

They’ll both have the means to live alone, but Wooyoung can make an educated guess that neither of them really want to. Anyway, without a roommate, Yeosang would give himself food poisoning within a month. It’s a beautiful solution. And they say Yeosang is the smart one.

Yeosang’s expression doesn’t change. “How do you know?” he asks.

“I know him,” Wooyoung says. “And I know you.”

“I’ve never met him.”

“You’re going to,” Wooyoung says. It’s probably true; Jongho and Seonghwa are throwing together a ridiculous spring vacation as some last indulgence before the remaining six of them graduate, and they’ve been insisting that Yeosang and Mingi skip a week of school to come with them.

“Hm,” Yeosang says.

“Just see if you like him,” Wooyoung says.

It’s important, suddenly, that Yeosang takes this seriously. Wooyoung doesn’t like living apart from either Yeosang or San. He finds that he does like the idea of having the two of them in one place. It’s more manageable, somehow.

In an attempt to seal the deal, Wooyoung says, “He’s kind of like you, you know.”

“How so?”

Wooyoung opens his mouth, and the answer doesn’t come right away.

Their friends are—well, it’s a running joke. Seonghwa’s gentle, but he’s a male model. Hongjoong’s grounded, kind, but he’s an aspiring DJ. Jongho’s in consulting; Yunho has more money than God; Mingi knows he’s hot.

Wooyoung compliments this bouquet of red flags by loving sex and hating commitment. It’s funny, the same way it’s funny when Jongho takes a work call in the middle of the night or Mingi eyes himself in the nearest reflective surface. Wooyoung will be the last one to get married, and everyone will laugh when reminded of this fact, Wooyoung included.

Yeosang has always been difficult to bring down to their level. He’s flawed in a few ways, Wooyoung’s sure. But none of those flaws are funny. None of those flaws, as Yunho might say, make a good story.

San is the same.

“He’s good,” Wooyoung says. “Like you are.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Yeosang says.

Wooyoung’s not sure how else to say it. He shrugs.

Yunho and Jongho join them at the table. Seven, in green, up next, Yunho’s explaining, and Jongho’s talking over him to say he’s already lost, and Yunho’s rolling his eyes and saying I’m telling you, she’s a closer.

Seven, in green. Wooyoung glances up at the big screen over the bar.

“Jongho,” he says, once he’s seen the horse, which is black and imposing, a shadow over the others. “Don’t you think Yeosang and San would get along?”

Jongho turns away from the television. He looks between them—Yeosang, Wooyoung, Yeosang; tennis.

“Yeah,” Jongho says. “Probably. Why?”

Because he’s right about most things, and because Yeosang listens to him. Wooyoung gestures pointedly across the table.

Yeosang exhales through his nose. “I’ll see if I like him,” he says.

That’s the hard part done with. San will give anything a chance; Yeosang’s pickier.

“You’re welcome,” Wooyoung says. “You know, in advance.”

Seven, in green, does not win the race.

NOW.

“I think you should tell them you didn’t know,” Hongjoong says. “It’s starting to stress me out.”

Wooyoung lets the heat from the grill flood his face and neck. He’d volunteered to cook the meat, partially because he knows he’s the best at it and partially because he had been looking for any excuse not to sit around and stare at Yunho and/or Yeosang and San. Unfortunately, nothing gets past Hongjoong.

“It’s going to make things awkward,” Wooyoung says. “If you were me, you wouldn’t want to tell them, either.”

“That’s the point, Wooyoung,” Hongjoong says, and something in his voice makes the hair on the back of Wooyoung’s neck stand up. “It’s not me. It’s you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Wooyoung asks.

“Hey,” Mingi calls. “What are you two whispering about?”

Wooyoung lifts his gaze from the grill to glance around. Hongjoong’s features are drawn tight and tense. Behind him, Yunho’s brow is similarly knit; he’s worried Wooyoung’s spilling all his secrets, maybe.

“You,” Wooyoung tells Mingi, easy, at the same time as Hongjoong says, “Nothing.”

Yunho’s expression darkens further. San has tuned into the conversation, too. Wooyoung has the overwhelming thought that he is far, far too sober.

“You’re all so nosy,” Wooyoung says, as airy as he can manage. This is successful in warding off most of them; they go back to chatting amongst themselves, but Hongjoong’s full attention is still on Wooyoung, his eyes boring a hole in Wooyoung’s temple.

“Let’s talk about it later,” Hongjoong suggests, in a way that implies he thinks Wooyoung’s about to do something stupid.

“No, thanks,” he says. “Now move, or I’ll put you on the grill next.”

Hongjoong moves.

It’s a beautiful night. The day was beautiful, too. Wooyoung’s tennis improved. They’d spent the morning at the pool, but Wooyoung had talked the more competitive of them into a game of water polo. He’d spent most of the day clinging to Mingi, and Mingi had spent most of the day complaining about failing situationships in his new city. (Mingi’s like Wooyoung—too many options.) It had been nice to think about problems involving girls that Wooyoung will never meet in his life. It had been nice to whack balls around with a racquet, with his fists.

Wooyoung’s not going to give up on the one normal day he’s had so far. As soon as the meat is done, he addresses the fixable problem: he drinks.

He matches Jongho’s pace, an old habit which turns out to be quite the challenge; Jongho is one less year removed from college than Wooyoung is and has the tolerance to prove it. As the world warms, things do start to feel more manageable. Or, at least, more distant. Seonghwa tells gossipy, illicit stories from work. Jongho complains about both his coworkers and his clients. Mingi, almost tearful with drunkenness, slings an arm around Yunho’s shoulder and starts pouring out a heartfelt speech about how happy he is to see his oldest friend find love, how grateful he is to be the best man: You’re going to be great, you know? A good husband. I’m not fucking with you, I mean that shit, dude. Yunho is laughing, but his eyes bore into a distant spot on the horizon in a way that makes Wooyoung nauseous.

This, at least, makes it clear that the lesser of two evils is watching Yeosang and San.

They’re paying attention, laughing at all the right times, but Wooyoung knows them both well enough to see they’re in their own world. Yeosang is tucked under San’s arm. He’s had less to drink, and he keeps sheepishly batting San away when San tries to nose against his temple or his neck, but the small smile on his face makes it clear he’s not all that upset. The honeymoon phase, Wooyoung thinks. He reaches for another drink before Jongho does.

While everyone else watches Hongjoong pantomime something incomprehensible, Wooyoung watches Yeosang finally turn and catch San’s lips in a soft kiss. He murmurs something too low for Wooyoung to hear; San nods, and the rise from their seats as one unit, bodies still pressed together.

“He’s tired,” Yeosang says, and San yawns on cue.

They go inside. As they do, Wooyoung realizes that Yeosang is about to slip his hand into San’s.

He closes his eyes. It’s still a beautiful night. There’s a breeze rolling in off the ocean, and the sounds of Wooyoung’s friends are familiar after a year and a half of an unending city, an unchanging office, a thousand mild pleasantries exchanged with a hundred mild coworkers. Wooyoung doesn’t need to open his eyes to appreciate this. He lets the world rustle around him. There’s the scrape of a chair on the deck as Mingi stands and stretches, and there’s Seonghwa’s low laugh tucked under Hongjoong’s higher one. It’s quieter, and then quieter, and then there’s only the rush of water in the near distance and Seonghwa’s footsteps even nearer.

“You coming inside?” Seonghwa asks.

“I’m drying out,” Wooyoung tells him, and Seonghwa pats his shoulder on the way by.

The door slides open and closed again. A new set of footsteps approach Wooyoung.

“Think about it,” Hongjoong reminds him, and then he disappears, too.

The funny thing is that Wooyoung is thinking about it, just not in the way Hongjoong wants him to. He’s thinking about how to never, ever let on how he learned they were together. He’s thinking about how he’ll get over the raw shock of seeing them intertwined. He’s thinking about whether or not he should stop touching San.

He should stop touching San.

None of San’s partners, no matter how serious or short-lived the relationship was, have ever liked Wooyoung. This makes Yeosang the first. Wooyoung wonders if Yeosang will grow to hate him, now; it’s possible that the way Wooyoung interacts with San is too much for anyone to handle. He knows he should pull the thought up by the roots. Yeosang wouldn’t throw away their decade-long friendship because of new jealousy. Anyway, he had to have known what he was getting into, dating San. So it will be fine, because Yeosang is good; Yeosang is reasonable and kind. It’s nice that San is finally seeing someone who will treat him the way he deserves.

If Wooyoung’s honest, he hadn’t much liked any of San’s previous partners, either. Yeosang is all kinds of firsts.

Hongjoong is right. He should tell them.

Wooyoung is already inside the villa before it occurs to him what might be happening in their bedroom. The way they were touching outside, the way Yeosang had asked San if he’d wanted to go in: Wooyoung knows those tones. A wave of something that feels like adrenaline but is denser, slower, sicker, crashes through his chest. His feet carry him to their door anyway.

He listens, and the wave threatens to swell again, but it’s silent on the inside as far as Wooyoung can tell. The sliver of light under the door gives away that they aren’t sleeping, though, so Wooyoung knocks before he loses the nerve.

He’s going to tell them. He owes it to them, and they owe him the explanation. He’s just found the phrasing when the door swings open.

It’s San in the doorway, glasses slightly askew. He’s in a fading t-shirt that he’s liked to sleep in since college. Wooyoung knows, if he were to touch San now, what that shirt would feel like under his palms, textured from so many washes and warm from San’s body. He’s so distracted by this that it takes him a moment to look further into the room.

Yeosang is sitting up against the headboard of the huge bed, comforter pulled to his hips. His chest is bare. Next to him, Wooyoung can see the thrown-back sheets, the imprint of where San’s body had been moments ago. Everything glows warm in the lamplight: their skin, their broad frames, the white linens.

The words Wooyoung had wanted to say melt right out of his mouth. It’s too intimate. It’s worse than if they’d been—

“Hey,” San says, and his voice is sharp, making Wooyoung think that San’s possibly already said something to him and it’s gone in one ear, out the other. “You alright?”

All Wooyoung can think to say is, “I missed you guys.”

“Oh, boy,” San says, and he gets an arm under Wooyoung’s shoulders.

Wooyoung’s not as drunk as San thinks he is. He can walk just fine. He thinks about shaking San off. But Wooyoung is a selfish man having a very confusing week, and he really has missed San and Yeosang terribly, and San’s body is so solid and so warm and Wooyoung needs the comfort of having them both surround him. He needs the reassurance that they’re still his. So he says nothing, and San dumps him onto the mattress.

Yeosang’s profile swims above him, now. His expression is hard to read upside-down, so Wooyoung follows the line of his sight to find San, who’s staring right back at Yeosang with an equally indeterminable look on his face.

“What are you guys talking about?” Wooyoung asks. He can hear the whine in his own voice.

“We’re not saying anything,” Yeosang answers, mild. “How much did you drink?”

They had been talking. They’d just been using their eyes. Wooyoung decides not to argue the point. It’s too much effort, and their bed is so soft.

They’ve probably had sex in this bed, Wooyoung thinks. He looks at Yeosang’s bare shoulders and upside-down face and corrects himself: they’ve definitely had sex in this bed. They probably have sex like they’re in love. Wooyoung assumes that’d be slow, gentle missionary, mouths pressed against each other. But it’s not like he would know.

It’s just ironic, because that’s what Yunho is supposed to have. That’s what they all came here to celebrate.

A thought occurs to Wooyoung. It’s not good.

“Hey,” he says. “Maybe you two will be the first to get married, now.”

San’s gaze snaps down to him. “Hm?” he says.

Wooyoung belatedly registers the mistake. The only thing he can do is play it off and hope San forgets come morning. He lets his eyelids fall shut—this is not hard; they’re very heavy—and turns his cheek into the comforter underneath him. This is another mistake. If they’ve had sex in this bed, which is really far more likely than not, then at least one of them has laid like this, skin flushed, face pressed into the sheets. The vision that occurs to Wooyoung then is of Yeosang, his dark hair spilling over the cotton, his glossy lips parted around a—

Wooyoung sits up so fast that it brings on a fresh wave of nausea.

“I’m sorry,” Wooyoung says. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be in your room, I—this is, like, a couple’s thing for you. I can’t—sorry.” The apologies are not doing anything to erase the images in his head, but he can’t stop them from falling out of his mouth.

“Wooyoung,” San says. “Seriously, are you alright?”

No, he’s not. He’s stiflingly warm and on the wrong side of drunk. He’s doing a bad job of keeping Yunho’s secret. He’s envisioning his best friends fucking each other. Wooyoung doesn’t respond for a moment. He’s not even sure how.

“Do you need us to get someone for you?” San continues. “Hongjoong? Jongho?”

This snaps Wooyoung right back into his body.

“How many times do I—“ he starts.

“Not because of that,” San says. He lowers a hand to Wooyoung’s forehead to show that he’s being serious, not roughhousing, not now. He brushes away the hair over Wooyoung’s brow, which turns out to be slightly damp. “Just because you lived together. You know that.”

It’s all going wrong. Wooyoung can’t lean into San’s touch. Not with Yeosang—not now that San’s said—

Wooyoung is as drunk as San thought he was. He is. He can’t hold a thought down, can barely move without threatening to let the entire world melt through his fingers.

“Do you want us to take you upstairs?” Yeosang asks.

“Yes,” Wooyoung says, immediate.

They do. San leaves a hand at the base of Wooyoung’s spine the entire way up the stairs; it scorches through his shirt. He feels the need to defend himself from Yeosang.

“In college,” Wooyoung says, “this part was usually the other way around.”

It’s true. Part of the reason Wooyoung is so intimately familiar with the weight of San’s body is because he’d had to haul it a few times across campus, around corners, into beds.

“I know,” Yeosang says. His voice is deeper than usual; he’s trying to keep it soft for the benefit of their friends, even though he must know how heavily they all sleep. “I’ve heard.”

“Oh,” Wooyoung says. “Yeah.”

San guides him through his own bedroom door. Yeosang hangs back in the shadowed hall, arms crossed over the shirt he’d thrown on. Wooyoung feels ridiculous, suddenly. He’s not sure why he let them follow him. He knows, logically, that he’d been drunk and needy, but that doesn’t seem to outweigh the strange shame of this moment.

“Sleep it off,” San tells him.

“Goodnight,” Yeosang says.

Wooyoung shuts the door.

THE MIDDLE.

Wooyoung is twenty when he hooks up with Jongho. He’s twenty-one when he hooks up with Hongjoong. He’s twenty-two when he moves in with both of them for his last year of school.

Are you sure that’s a good idea? Seonghwa had asked. Maybe it had been a valid concern, but ultimately, Wooyoung and Jongho and Hongjoong understand each other. They’re all cynics in one way or another. They’re not afraid to disrespect each other. It’s actually easier to live with them after sleeping with them, since there’s nothing for anyone to hide.

Wooyoung doesn’t sleep with either of them again, despite Jongho implying that he’d be down. In theory, it would be fun. In practice, two times is a bad idea.

He’s still twenty-two when San finds out.

San’s half-asleep on one end of the couch in their apartment. Jongho’s on the phone behind his closed bedroom door. Hongjoong is lights-out behind his closed bedroom door. Wooyoung basks in the familiarity of Jongho’s laugh, Hongjoong’s candle; he wonders if he and San will doze off just like this.

“I don’t know how you do it,” San says. The words are slurred a bit through his exhaustion.

“Do what?” Wooyoung asks.

“Hook up with strangers,” San says. “I try, I get there, and then I just don’t want to.”

“Is it nerves?”

“No,” San hums. “I just stop having fun.”

Wooyoung’s not going to say it out loud, but the problem is that San was built for the long-term relationship. It’s sweet. Not Wooyoung’s style, obviously, but sweet. Lately, San hasn’t had much luck with hookups, boyfriends, or anything in between.

“You ever try hooking up with a friend?” Wooyoung asks.

San blinks his eyes open. “Uh,” he says. “What—have you?”

Seonghwa’s the only person who knows. It’s not a secret, necessarily, it just doesn’t come up often.

Wooyoung grins.

San’s head lifts off the back of the couch. “Do I know him?”

“You could say that,” Wooyoung admits.

Now San looks wide awake. He doesn’t throw out any guesses; Wooyoung’s sure he’s trying to do some kind of process of elimination in his head. He decides to throw San a bone. “You’re very warm.”

It takes San a few seconds to figure it out. His eyes flit to the closed doors, his body stills entirely.

“Hongjoong?” he asks.

“Both,” Wooyoung says.

San’s mouth falls open. When he recovers, he says, “Jongho’s straight.”

“Not quite,” Wooyoung says.

San buffers again. “When?” he asks.

“Hongjoong last year,” Wooyoung says. “Jongho the year before that.” San doesn’t respond to this, so Wooyoung grasps for the first reassurance at hand. “Only once each,” he says.

San blinks up at him.

It’s unsettling. Wooyoung doesn’t know what he’d expected San’s reaction to be, but he was hoping for something louder and maybe funnier. It’s hard not to wonder what he’s thinking. He knows San would never judge him—Wooyoung has admitted to far worse things than this—but San is quiet. His expression is almost nervous.

“Who was—“ San pauses and reformulates the question. “Who’d you like better?”

It might be wrong to tell him. But Wooyoung and San are practically the same person, sometimes, living inside each other’s heads. He’s allowed to know.

“Jongho and I were very compatible,” Wooyoung says. In case it wasn’t clear, he adds, “Sexually.”

“Okay, gross,” San says.

Wooyoung laughs. “You asked.”

“I don’t think I wanted to know,” San says, features crumpled in distaste.

“Curiosity,” Wooyoung chides, and San sticks his tongue out and plays a convincing dead cat.

Wooyoung is so lucky to have him. He curls into San, hooking their ankles together under the coffee table, dropping his head to San’s shoulder. The last traces of his familiar cologne still linger: his neck, the hem of his shirt, the pulse behind his jaw.

“So,” San says. Like this, Wooyoung can feel the words reverberating in San’s chest. “You think I should hook up with one of my friends.”

“But choose wisely,” Wooyoung warns him. “Because you can’t get attached to the sex.”

He watches the bob of San’s throat as San swallows. There’s a beat of pure silence; Jongho’s phone call has ended. Wooyoung shivers. He should really shut the window. It’s getting too cold at night to justify the fresh air.

“Yeah,” San says. “Makes sense.”

NOW.

“Where the hell were you?” Mingi asks.

Wooyoung shouldn’t have doubted Yunho’s ability to pull it off smoothly. He’d disappeared from the villa sometime after the drinking last night—it’s likely that he’d chartered a red-eye—and between the vast grounds of the resort and the collective hangover, nobody had realized he was gone until mid-afternoon. Yunho comes and goes at the whims of his family, and they’ve all long since accepted that, so even when they’d realized, nobody had worried.

Then it had become clear he wasn’t answering his texts. Then, his calls. The mood had iced over. Wooyoung had tried to warm his body in the sun, in the water. He’d spent the afternoon alone so as not to have to cover for Yunho. He’d said it would only be the one night. Yunho is a good liar, but he had no reason to lie to Wooyoung, not about that.

He’d kept his word. The sun has just met the horizon, and Yunho has just strolled in the front door in a pressed white button-up and slacks, looking for all the world like the heir he is, like he should still be framed by the glass-and-steel offices of his family’s companies. His arrival has attracted them all to the living room, moths to a flame. Nosy, every last one of them.

“Went to see Eunseo,” Yunho answers, casual.

Wooyoung thinks, fuck.

He’d been hoping, in the back of his head, to be wrong. He'd thought there was a chance that Yunho might see her and change his mind, or that his family might talk him out of it, put their feet down, warm Yunho’s cold feet back up. Now, the situation is slipping permanently, the strings of the sun cut so it tumbles freely into the water.

“Woah, that’s illegal,” Jongho is saying. He’s grinning. Actually, most of them are grinning; Seonghwa’s got an eyebrow raised curiously.

“Well, I went to break things off with her,” Yunho says. “So. Doesn’t really count.”

The silence staggers. Wooyoung sees it reach one, then the next. Everyone is staring at Yunho with varying degrees of disbelief on their faces, save for San, who is staring at Wooyoung.

Someone’s phone rings out of sight. Nobody moves to check.

“Sorry?” Hongjoong finally asks.

“Engagement’s canceled,” Yunho shrugs.

“Why?” Mingi asks.

Wooyoung’s spine stiffens, reflexive. It’s anger, in Mingi’s voice, and he's not trying to disguise it.

“I don’t love her,” Yunho says. “That’s usually why engagements end.”

No, it isn’t. Not for Yunho. They all know this. But Yunho is a good liar, and he makes this sound believable.

Mingi says, “That’s it?”

“Yunho,” Hongjoong says. He’s using that soft, wild-animal voice that Wooyoung’s only heard a few times before. “What happened?”

Yunho’s mouth ticks upwards in a half-grin; his eyes don’t change. He’s fixing one of the sleeves on his button-up, the cuff at his left wrist. Wooyoung’s not sure there was anything wrong with it to begin with.

He answers Mingi, not Hongjoong. “That’s it,” he says. Nobody believes this. Wooyoung doesn’t even have to look around to be sure. “If it makes you feel better, I don’t think she loves me.”

That may or may not be true. Wooyoung will never know Eunseo well enough to determine. But what is true is that Yunho, who has never stepped a toe out of his razor-thin, zero-margins line, would not have broken it off if the issue was as simple as lovelessness.

“Are you being fucking serious?” Mingi asks.

“Mingi,” someone says, warning.

“Very serious,” Yunho says. “If you booked travel already, I’ll reimburse you.”

Mingi stands from where he’d been lounging with all the precision of a snake about to strike. For a bewildering moment, Wooyoung thinks he really might be about to, that he might lunge over the pristine floor and sink his teeth into Yunho’s neck, his fists into skin.

Instead, Mingi says, “You’re unbelievable,” and he shoves past Seonghwa to reach the front door. It’s heavy; Mingi makes sure it slams behind him.

Yunho is still smiling. “Any other questions?” he asks.

There are not any other questions.

“Great,” Yunho says. “Sorry, have to take this. I’ll see you after dinner.”

The phone that’s been ringing, the quiet buzz betraying their silence, has been Yunho’s the entire time. It hasn’t stopped.

When he disappears into his room, the silence becomes complete, and San is still staring and staring and staring at Wooyoung.

He remembers, then, Wooyoung’s slip of the tongue. He knows that Wooyoung knew. Well, good. Maybe this will teach him what it feels like when someone keeps a secret.

It’s the first time in Wooyoung’s life, probably, that he’s ever thought something halfway to vengeful towards San. He decides he’s had enough of being out in the open. He follows Yunho to the suite.

He shoves through the door without knocking. It’s the primary bedroom of the villa, and Yunho looks more belonging here than he does anywhere else on the resort, on the island. His impeccable clothes, the floor-to-ceiling window, the blue glow of the darkening ocean behind him. He’s holding the phone to his ear with one hand, and the other is tucked into the pocket of his slacks. He doesn’t flinch when Wooyoung enters. He waves Wooyoung at the settee opposite the bed.

Wooyoung sits. He listens to Yunho navigate what seem to be two entirely separate conversations; every minute or so, he’ll drop the phone, switch lines, and thread himself back into an old sentence. Mostly, it’s a lot of I’m very sorry and I understand and I’ll call tomorrow, and, over and over again: It’s private. A private matter. I’d rather not say anything else. It’s private.

His voice never raises. Yunho doesn’t yell; he never yells. Wooyoung watches him carefully.

When it ends, Yunho sets his phone gently on the nightstand. He undoes his belt. He sits precisely on the edge of his too-large bed, hands on his thighs, and he exhales long and low.

His spine curls in on itself.

“Private matter, huh?” Wooyoung asks.

“I should turn it off,” Yunho mutters, nodding at the nightstand. “We have about two minutes before it rings again.”

There’s a hundred things Wooyoung could ask, and most of them start with the word ‘why.’ In the end, he lands on something else.

“Yunho,” Wooyoung says. “Are you sure—is this what you want?”

“I know what I’m doing,” Yunho says.

He’s a very good liar, and his eyes are far away.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

Wooyoung is twenty-two, and the story is going exactly the way it’s supposed to.

They all know the rule: Wooyoung only smokes when Seonghwa does. So everyone knows where Wooyoung’s going when he heads inside; the balcony is recessed deep in the shadow of the house, the lights on the second floor all off. Seonghwa is already reaching into his pocket when Wooyoung slides that heavy glass door open, then closed.

“For me?” Wooyoung asks, and Seonghwa scoffs at him.

Seonghwa has technically quit. But they’re at Yunho’s house, and San is in his own home, which is pushed up against a different ocean. If San were here, he’d be saying something like Seonghwa, your body is your temple, even though he’s not religious, and Seonghwa would respond with something like my body is my career, San, even though that’s not true yet. San would say, that’s an even better reason. Seonghwa would roll his eyes and stub out the cigarette.

San’s not here. Seonghwa has technically quit, but there’s an exception to most rules. Wooyoung’s body is nobody’s temple and nobody’s career. Seonghwa lights Wooyoung’s cigarette. He does it carefully, one large hand cupped around the lighter, protecting the small flame from the breeze.

“You get bored?” Wooyoung asks.

“Didn’t want to get dragged into it,” Seonghwa shrugs.

‘It’ is Yunho and Mingi wrestling in the center of the pool. Yeosang is refereeing the match, but there aren’t many rules for him to enforce. It’s possible that Yunho and Mingi might just be trying to drown one another. It’s hard to be sure from above.

Meanwhile, Jongho’s sidled in close to Hongjoong in the shallow end. Wooyoung hopes to God that Hongjoong is not entertaining him. Jongho only puts his money down when he’s sure of both the outcome and his mark and, therefore, never loses a bet.

“You scared of ‘em?” Wooyoung asks. He’s not sure exactly who he’s referring to.

“I’m delicate,” Seonghwa says mildly.

“Well,” Wooyoung says. “We knew that.”

There’s silence and more smoke. Everybody does them the decency of not looking up to the balcony, even though Wooyoung’s sure they’ve all noticed. He doesn’t give them the same privacy. He watches Mingi and Yunho, and he watches Yeosang.

Yeosang would be embarrassed if he knew Wooyoung was thinking it, but it’s nice to see him like this, all carefree. They’re not quite men yet, but being at Yunho’s always turns them into boys again, Yeosang most of all. He was born smarter and quieter than the rest of them. Wooyoung still remembers seeing him for the first time, already statuesque at only fifteen years old and uninterested in whatever stupid conversation Wooyoung and Jongho and Yunho had been trying to impress him with.

Wooyoung realizes just how sentimental he’s feeling. Seonghwa’s fault, probably, with all his cigarettes and graduations. And Yeosang’s.

“So,” Wooyoung asks, but he’s still watching Yeosang laugh indignantly, splash backwards, dodge a stray elbow. “What are you going to do with your life?”

“What kind of a question is that?’

Wooyoung grins. “You know, now that you’re free. What do you want?”

So much for his momentary indignation; Seonghwa has big dreams. He starts to rattle off the names of fashion houses, some of which Wooyoung knows and some of which he can’t even begin to guess at the spelling of. Seonghwa’s always had esoteric tastes. As he speaks, he gets more animated. Wooyoung listens, listens, and watches Yunho’s long limbs blur under the surface of the water.

“What about you?” Seonghwa says, voice curling around the smoke, smoke curling around his voice. “What do you want?”

“I’m not the one who just graduated,” Wooyoung says.

“You will be soon,” Seonghwa says. “And there has to be something.”

Seonghwa lets Wooyoung think about it. He lifts his fingers to his lips again, a long drag, a slow exhale. In the midst of their silence, Yeosang decides that Yunho has won the game. Jongho looks pleased. Hongjoong does not.

See, Wooyoung never would have taken Jongho up on it. Wooyoung hates to lose. He hates to lose.

The song blasting from the speaker comes to an end. Sound pours in to take its place: below, Yeosang’s full-throated laugh, unrestrained; above, in Wooyoung’s head, San chiding, your body, your body, your body.

Wooyoung stubs out the cigarette on the balcony railing.

He’s not lying to Seonghwa, not really, when he says—

NOW.

Jongho knocks out of courtesy, but he doesn’t wait. He lets himself into Wooyoung’s bedroom and kicks the door shut.

“Jesus,” he says.

Wooyoung says, “Yeah.”

Jongho throws himself into the chair. He says, “I didn’t see it coming at all.”

“That’s a first, for you,” Wooyoung says, humorless. He tucks himself up to sitting on his bed.

“I know,” Jongho says.

There’s another knock at the door. Wooyoung knows who it is. “Come in,” he says, because this one won’t shove.

Hongjoong pokes his head inside. “Couldn’t sleep,” he says.

Wooyoung throws a hand up in understanding.

He had a feeling they’d come. It’s a habit they’d developed when they’d shared an apartment. If their friends were all busy or if they were bored or if things were going to shit, the three of them would congregate in Wooyoung’s room and get fucked up. To be more precise, Wooyoung and Jongho would get fucked up, and they’d let Hongjoong do most of the thinking for them.

“This feels like a good time to share,” Wooyoung starts, watching Hongjoong slide down the wall next to Jongho, “that I’ve known about this since we got here.”

“He told you?” Jongho asks. When Wooyoung nods, he presses. “Did he say why?”

“Not at all,” Wooyoung says.

Jongho says, “Well, shit.”

“When do you think he decided?” Hongjoong asks.

Wooyoung knows this.

He couldn’t explain how he’s so completely sure. He’d just noticed that there’d been something shell-shocked about Yunho’s countenance on that first night. And Yunho is pragmatic; if he’d known before anyone got on their flights, he’d have told them. He’d have told Eunseo and his family, and this vacation would have been turned into a consolation party. And he wouldn’t have left in the middle to break it off if it had been premeditated.

The truth is that Yunho—most of the time—does things the safe way, the right way, and this is all dangerous and all wrong. Wooyoung thinks this is proof that he arrived at the point of no return suddenly, and close to the day they arrived. Or maybe just beforehand, with no time to react before they descended on him.

Rather than tell them all this, Wooyoung says, “I think it was recent.”

Hongjoong considers this. “I wonder if he’ll want us to leave."

“Not a chance,” Jongho answers.

“Even if he does, I don’t think we should,” Wooyoung says. “He seems a little, uh, unstable.”

Unstable isn’t the right word. Wooyoung’s not sure what is.

This makes Jongho laugh, though. He says, “He seems more stable than you.”

“That’s not true,” Wooyoung says.

Hongjoong makes a face.

“It’s because of Yunho,” Wooyoung says, realizing that he only has one thing to use as self-defense. “You try keeping that secret.”

“It’s not because of Yunho,” Jongho—realist, contrarian—says.

Wooyoung can’t even deny it, not with Hongjoong sitting right there.

“I told you,” Hongjoong says. “You need to talk to them.”

“Don’t fucking start—hang on,” Wooyoung says, remembering. “What did you mean earlier? That it was bad because it was me?”

“Oh, just the obvious thing,” Hongjoong says. "That out of everyone they could have not told, it was you. That’s…you know.”

Hongjoong shrugs off the rest of his sentence, clearly thinking that’s explanation enough. Jongho does not look confused. The feeling that creeps into Wooyoung’s gut is eerily similar to what he’d felt so few nights ago, the instant he realized that Yunho wasn’t joking.

“I’m missing something,” Wooyoung says.

“I knew it,” Jongho says, immediate; Hongjoong’s head thunks against the wall. “I told you.”

This last part is directed at Hongjoong, who looks like he’s developing a headache. Wooyoung valiantly hopes it’s because of what he's just done. No such luck.

“It cannot be my responsibility to tell you this,” Hongjoong says.

“Tell me what?” Wooyoung asks.

There are people who will try to protect your feelings, and there are people who will not. Hongjoong—most of the time—falls in the former category. Jongho—most of the time—falls in the latter. So Wooyoung isn’t surprised when it’s Jongho who opens his mouth to speak.

“They’re both in love with you,” Jongho says. “Or they were, anyway. Probably not anymore.”

“No, they’re not,” Wooyoung says.

The air disappears from the room.

“No,” Wooyoung repeats. There’s a deep hum rattling the lining of his teeth, his ribs. “They’re not.”

“You had to have known,” Hongjoong says. Wild-animal voice. Wooyoung hears it.

The buzz is morphing into a faint ringing in Wooyoung’s ears. “But you don’t even know that,” he says. “You don’t—“

“Wooyoung,” Hongjoong says, and it’s in the syllables of his own name that Wooyoung realizes what this particular cadence of Hongjoong’s really means: pity. “San told me how he felt about you in college.”

No, he didn’t. He didn’t. Wooyoung knows everything about San.

“You really had no idea?” Hongjoong asks.

“To be honest,” Jongho says, “I thought you set them up together to get them off your back. Which would have been nice of you, in a weird way.”

Wooyoung buries his face in the sheets. This immediately relieves him of having to look at their expressions, but it also makes the heartbeat pounding in his temples much more urgent, a bell tolling against his skull.

“I don’t know about ‘nice,’” Hongjoong mutters.

They’re still both watching him. Wooyoung can tell.

“You said,” Wooyoung starts. His voice is so muffled by the linens that it’s going to be a miracle if they can make out the words. “You said San. But what about…”

“Well,” Jongho says, “I hate to say it like this, but that one’s obvious.”

Hongjoong doesn’t argue this. He doesn’t even push for a gentler phrasing.

“I mean,” Jongho continues, “I think it’s over now, since they’re dating each other.”

“But that’s also why I think you should tell them you didn’t know,” Hongjoong says. “Now, I think they avoided you on purpose.”

Wooyoung wants to defend them. It was an accident, he wants to say. He decided two days ago that it had to be an accident, because the alternative was that they didn’t trust him, and that was so hurtful as to be unthinkable. But now now there’s this awful third possibility: that they’ve assumed what Jongho has assumed, that Wooyoung wanted to rid himself of their feelings for him.

They know Wooyoung, and Wooyoung wasn’t built for relationships. He loves sex. He hates commitment. He doesn’t want their feelings; he doesn’t know what to do with them.

Of course, they avoided him.

“You know what?” Hongjoong asks. Clearly, the silence is making him nervous, because he sounds mostly like he’s talking to himself. “I think, in a year, we’re going to look back on this vacation and laugh.”

Wooyoung lifts his face out of the darkness. He blinks at them. Presumably, ‘this vacation’ includes Yunho’s situation. But Yunho feels so far away, now, a blurry dream slipping away in the morning. It’s all Wooyoung can do to bring the world back into focus.

“Not sure about that,” Jongho says, his eyebrows ticking up. “Mingi doesn’t seem very amused.”

“Yeah,” Hongjoong admits. “I don’t know what’s up with him.”

“Me neither,” Jongho says.

“That’s not like you,” Hongjoong says.

“Yeah,” Jongho says. “I know."

THE MIDDLE.

“I like him,” San says.

Wooyoung grins. “You’re welcome.”

“I hope he likes me,” San continues. “Because I’m getting attached to the idea of living with him.”

Good. That’s good.

Wooyoung has both elbows propped on the railing of the balcony. The house they’ve rented has a spectacular view of the ocean, even in the darkness. Not that that matters, necessarily. They’re mostly there to drink. But Seonghwa has a good eye for beautiful things, and the rest of them have the money to indulge him.

If it were a movie, there’d be a line of text over their heads: spring break, year four. Wooyoung is twenty-something; he feels a hundred ages at once, the beginning and ending all tangled up in graduating and college, job offers, Yeosang meeting San, the sun beneath the water.

“‘Course he does,” Wooyoung says. “What’s not to like?”

San laughs. It’s quiet.

NOW.

They’re not not going to take advantage of where they are.

The boat is waiting for them in the morning, and even Yunho is ready for it. Seonghwa re-enlists Jongho for photo-taking: on the beach with the sunrise washing him orange, on the boat with his forearms propped on the bow, leaning out over the sea. Slightly distasteful, maybe, given the circumstances, but Seonghwa knows when he looks beautiful, and Jongho will always aid with a good business opportunity.

In another story, it would have been a highlight of the vacation. Wooyoung is buzzed before they even pull away from the dock, and the sky is a wonderful blue, the sun nestled in between patches of clouds. In this story, though, the mood is subdued. Nobody knows what to say to Yunho; he gets some reassuring shoulder rubs and not much more. Mingi refuses to even look in his direction, his anger still indiscernible and vibrant. He takes his beer to the stern, away from everyone; the wind whips at him. Seonghwa, who’s on camera, is the only person whose face even remotely suggests a positive emotion.

“I don’t know why we got on this thing,” Wooyoung mutters to Hongjoong.

Hongjoong, who looks a little seasick, groans an affirmative but otherwise doesn’t respond.

San and Yeosang are curled up in a corner of the netting stretched between the hulls. San’s head is in Yeosang’s lap. He has his fingers splayed against the mesh, like he’s reaching for the water rushing below. Yeosang’s eyes are closed, face turned to the sun. His hand rests over San’s crown; his hair flutters loose in the wind.

The words, the memory, claw at Wooyoung. He feels as sick as Hongjoong looks.

Were, Wooyoung corrects himself. It’s the hundredth time he’s thought it. They were in love with him. Now, San and Yeosang are dating each other, are in love with each other, present-tense are holding each other when they fall asleep at night. Wooyoung is in their past.

This part is inconsequential, really. The real problem, even larger than what San and Yeosang may or may not have done with their misplaced feelings, is the implication that maybe everyone thinks Wooyoung has been cruel to them. And not cruel in the light, unserious way that Wooyoung used to be teased for in college, when he’d ghost a hookup or sleep with a friend. Everyone might have known how they felt about him, and therefore they might actually think that Wooyoung’s been toying with them. Toying with them, and then shoving them together when he got bored of the game.

The sun is searing the image of the two of them on the back of Wooyoung’s eyes; he can see them even when he looks away. The sun is also searing his skin. Stinging inside and out, Wooyoung makes his way to the bow, where it’s only Jongho at the railing.

“Hey,” Jongho says. He’s been freed from Seonghwa’s employment. “You look like shit.”

Wooyoung seriously considers shoving him overboard. It wouldn’t be easy. It would be a question of momentum, mostly, because Jongho’s been able to push Wooyoung around since—

Wooyoung freezes.

“I slept with you,” he tells Jongho.

Jongho’s brow furrows. “I know,” he says. “I was there.”

“Asshole,” Wooyoung says. “Jongho, I told San I—oh, God.”

Jongho. Hongjoong. Neither of them would have betrayed San, not in that way; Wooyoung’s sure of that. San must have not told anyone how he felt until afterwards. But that’s not the terrible part. What’s terrible is the way it had been framed to him last night—how long San might have had feelings for him—the things Wooyoung had told San about those hookups—

“Yeah,” Jongho says. To his credit, he does sound a little sorry. “Now you’re getting it.”

THE BEGINNING.

Wooyoung is twenty the first time he meets Mingi. It’s hard to tell, that first time, exactly how Mingi had gotten into that school of his. He’s not sure what it is that Yunho’s been seeing in him all these years. Mingi comes across like the boys in their social echelon that Wooyoung doesn’t like very much.

The second time, he's twenty-one.

Wooyoung and Yunho and Jongho have flown into town together over one of their breaks. It’s the first time they’ve come during the swing of the semester, and they’ve been promised a show—I want to see what a smart school does for fun, Wooyoung tells Yeosang over the phone, a week before they arrive.

“You know that it’s sort of the same,” Yeosang had reminded him when they’d entered, glancing around the crowded house, and then he’d glided into the kitchen for a drink.

“Keep telling yourself that,” Wooyoung calls after him.

He finds, after about ten minutes of following Yunho between two cramped rooms, that it is sort of the same.

Wooyoung slips out of the press of bodies and into the kitchen. Mingi and Yeosang are standing close together near a collection of empty bottles. Wooyoung can’t hear their conversation over the thump of someone’s expensive speaker in the main room, but they don’t look pleased. Mingi’s wearing a lasting, hard-set squint; Yeosang’s mouth keeps twitching down.

Wooyoung hops up to sit on a bare stretch of the counter and takes his time refilling his cup. When Yeosang and Mingi break away from each other, Wooyoung catches Yeosang’s eye, waves him over. Yeosang leans on the counter next to Wooyoung’s thigh, and suddenly Wooyoung is looking down at him. It feels a little strange. They’ve been at eye level with each other since high school.

“You fighting with Mingi?” Wooyoung asks. He’s not sure why he’s hoping that the answer is yes.

“No,” Yeosang says. “He just has bad opinions about platonism.”

Wooyoung squints at him. “Plates?”

“What?” Yeosang asks. “Oh. No. Math thing.”

“Of course,” Wooyoung says.

“Sometimes I think I should have taken set theory,” Yeosang says. His voice is coming fast and focused. “Formally, like, axiomatic. I guess I still could, but you don’t need it for undergraduate econ, so I thought I’d do as much linear—“ He glances up at Wooyoung. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Wooyoung says. “It’s sexy when you get all smart.”

Yeosang tries not to grin. “I’m not ‘getting all smart.’”

“Right, but I don’t know the difference,” Wooyoung says. “You’re supposed to pretend you are. You know, if you want to take me home.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Yeosang says.

He’s changed just slightly, Wooyoung thinks. This sort of teasing used to make him flush. The dryness works well on him. Wooyoung wonders who he’s learning it for.

Wooyoung leans back on one hand and uses the other to comb Yeosang’s hair back, to let the birthmark breathe. “They don’t teach you everything at this school,” he says, lilting.

“Clearly not,” Yeosang says. By this point, he’s usually swatted Wooyoung’s arm away from his face. But now he only blinks up at Wooyoung with those dark eyes of his, patient, and lets Wooyoung arrange him. The world gets a little softer, the bass in the other room not so bone-rattling. Yeosang’s always had that effect.

“Missed you,” Wooyoung whispers, because it’s enough, now, to whisper.

Now Yeosang really does smile. “I missed—“

He stands straighter, suddenly, his eyes shooting sideways, retreating from underneath Wooyoung’s palm.

Jongho is swinging into the kitchen. He comes to a stop at Wooyoung’s other side. “We’re gonna have to airlift Yunho out of here,” he says, grim. “He’s getting shitfaced.”

Not for the first time in his life, Wooyoung wishes Yeosang wouldn’t frighten off from physical touch around other people. Yeosang’s already shifted his attention to Jongho, asking him if he’s being serious, and Wooyoung’s hand falls back to his side.

While they chat, Wooyoung revises what he knows about Mingi. Mingi, surrounded by volumes of alcohol and women, had chosen to stand in a kitchen and talk math with quiet, selective Yeosang. The light in his eyes, which is sometimes hard with arrogance and distant with indifference, is brilliance, after all.

He still knows he’s hot. That’s obvious. Without Yeosang to distract him, he already has a pretty girl pressed against his front in the main room. She’s tall—close to his height, but not quite—slender, dark-haired. He looks like he wants her. Or, at least, he looks like he wants the new game of her. This is something Wooyoung understands.

He does go home with her, in the end. (They botch the Irish goodbye; Yunho catches them at the door and grabs Mingi by the nape, loud and inebriated, laughing.)

“Surprise,” Jongho says, watching them go.

It’s Yeosang who comes to Mingi’s defense. “He’s not like that. He doesn’t even see it. He doesn’t mean to be…” he trails off.

“To be what?” Wooyoung asks.

Yeosang grimaces.

“A heartbreaker,” he says.

NOW.

A night and a morning come and go. Tennis, the beach, a thrown-together dinner: Wooyoung does all his activities in quiet groups of two and three. Yunho sits around the villa. He takes phone calls. He stares at walls. Everyone tries to stay out of his line of sight, but everyone also tries to look over his shoulder.

Everyone, except:

“Don’t you get it?” Mingi asks.

Wooyoung’s stumbled across him on a solo walk down the beachfront. Yeosang and San have visibly tried to tone down the public displays of affection around Yunho, but this is making it worse, somehow. It’s the knowledge that they want to be touching each other, the way San takes two steps towards Yeosang and then one step back. It’s just a lot. Wooyoung is escaping it.

He’s not sure what Mingi’s escaping, but here he is, pacing down the long dock where the resort keeps the sailboats and the catamarans.

“What is there to get?” Wooyoung asks, afraid to hear the answer.

“He’s hiding,” Mingi says. “I’m sure everyone back home is about ready to fucking kill him. He’s waiting it out with us instead, because nobody here has the balls to hold him accountable for it.”

“That’s not fair,” Wooyoung says. “He can’t marry someone he doesn’t want to marry.”

“I know that. I don’t care about that.” Mingi’s getting visibly worked up; it’s obvious in how he’s staring past Wooyoung’s shoulder, the sharp wave of his hand. “But he’s a grown man. You make this kind of a decision, you have to face the fucking music.”

Wooyoung frowns. Mingi doesn’t sound unreasonable, necessarily, but he also doesn’t sound like himself. It feels so unnatural for him and Yunho to be in different corners of the ring.

“Play stupid games,” Mingi continues, “you win stupid fucking prizes.”

Wooyoung, who’s starting to feel like the sky and sea are mirrors closing in on him, says, “I don’t think he’s playing a game.”

“I do,” Mingi says. “And I would know.”

THE MIDDLE.

It’s the first night of their last year of college, and Wooyoung wants to look the part.

“I need to piss, Wooyoung,” San calls.

“You can hold it,” Wooyoung calls back.

San drums the flat of his hand against the bathroom door twice, and Wooyoung tugs it open, still arranging a strand of hair.

“Thanks,” San says, but it’s dry, and on the exhale he meets Wooyoung’s eyes in the mirror.

He pauses. His gaze drops lower.

Wooyoung knows what he looks like. It’s the kind of outfit that used to make Yeosang’s cheeks red in their first few years of college, when Wooyoung was first learning how to pretty himself and they’d see each other over breaks. He’s learned a lot more about prettying himself since then, too. Wooyoung grins, waiting for San to toss him a compliment.

And then, San says, “Look at you.”

Wooyoung’s blood sings hot and then cold. San’s said it casually, but the tone is familiar. Wooyoung’s heard that edge in the voices of everyone he’s ever slept with, everyone he’s ever kissed. He’d heard it in Jongho’s laugh, once; it had been the moment he realized hooking up with Jongho was an option.

Wooyoung can’t. Not with San.

“I am looking,” Wooyoung says. “That’s what the mirror’s for.”

San’s eyes come back up.

“Alright, get out of here,” he says, and relief washes over Wooyoung at the way he sounds, which is the way he always sounds. “Unless you want to see my dick.”

The outfit is a resounding success. Wooyoung never wears it again.

NOW.

Wooyoung creeps around the resort. He’s decided to be alone later rather than earlier; he’s hoping to avoid Mingi, who’s probably crawling around the same way, and also San and Yeosang, who get clingier back at the villa when the sun goes down. The night is unusually warm, like summer has come early, and the grounds are so still that it’s easy to imagine they’re surprised about it, too. Wooyoung winds away from the villa, towards the ocean, then back up to where the sand becomes infrastructure and the water becomes chlorinated. The tennis courts are still stinging-hot under his bare feet. The restaurant is long since shut for the night, the glass in the large windows black and unreflective.

He’s meandering back to the villa on the paths, not the sand, when he hears it. For an instant, he thinks he might have mistaken it for the ocean, but the water that’s made the noise is closer-moving. Wooyoung’s head snaps to the side.

The pool is closed; the low gate is latched to ward off curious guests. Whoever had locked it clearly hadn’t accounted for the honeymoon phase.

Yeosang is raised slightly out of the water, his legs tight around San’s waist. They’re pressed too closely together for water or even light to slip between their bodies. Yeosang is white-knuckled, large hands framing San’s jaw. And Wooyoung’s not sure what had made the noise, which one of them had moved with enough suddenness, but there’s another shift in the water as San stumbles, and then his back catches against the tiled edge of the pool, and Yeosang doesn’t stop, just tilts in deeper, fiercer, and then one of them makes a low noise in the back of his throat—

Wooyoung rattles the gate.

Yeosang startles, and the two of them break apart.

San tips his head back to laugh. It’s the loudest sound in Wooyoung’s night; it echoes off the water.

“Hey,” he says at the end of it, sheepish. “Sorry. What brings you out here?”

“On a walk,” Wooyoung says. He regrets interrupting them. Had he thought it would stop the visual of San’s face cradled in Yeosang’s hands, or the feeling in his throat? Because Wooyoung can still see and feel everything, even with Yeosang turning away in embarrassment and his hands politely settled on San’s shoulders.

“Get in the water,” San calls.

“Not a chance,” Wooyoung says.

“We’ll behave,” San says. “Come on, it’s nice.”

Wooyoung tries to figure out if it’s a joke. Sarcasm isn’t San’s forte. As he sits frozen, San gives Yeosang a toss towards the deep end of the pool and gets a palmful of water to the face in return. They’re both laughing, light and boyish. It’s a good reminder that those laughs are not for Wooyoung, and he does not want to be between them.

“We’re waiting,” San says.

“It’s like Italy,” Yeosang puts in.

Wooyoung immediately knows what he’s referencing. They’d been around twenty. It had been summer; a long flight and twisting drive had deposited them at the Amalfi coast. They’d only just left the car when Yunho had been whisked away. So the two of them, Wooyoung and Yeosang, had spent a long, sparkling afternoon belly-up in the ocean, unbroken turquoise in one direction and the swelling coastline in the other. Wooyoung had been so tired from flying that the world had gone blurry, loud and quiet all the same. It had been good.

How Yeosang’s drawn a connection between that day and this, besides the fact that he’s in the water, Wooyoung has no idea.

“Look,” San says, lifting his hands above the surface. “We’re being good.”

As if Wooyoung needed the reminder.

“Are you just going to stand there?” Yeosang asks.

Wooyoung’s body carries him forwards.

He hops the gate; his shirt is over his head and on the smooth tile before he can think twice about it. “Better not be cold,” he says.

“Just jump,” San says.

Wooyoung jumps. It’s cold.

He surfaces next to Yeosang and shakes his hair out. He’s hoping to shake out some of the terrible, unfamiliar nerves crawling down his spine, too, but the glow of Yeosang’s bare shoulders in the odd lighting makes it impossible. Wooyoung runs his palms down his own scalp, the back of his neck, self-soothing.

Yeosang is watching him, eyes huge and dark.

“Italy,” Wooyoung says, “was warmer than this.”

San’s hand closes his around his ankle.

Wooyoung screeches, but by the time the sound has left his mouth, he’s underwater and actively trying to kick San in the chest. San’s predicted this defense and has his hands firmly clamped around Wooyoung’s calves, tucked to his own body. The touch brings the rest of Wooyoung's senses into high-definition. He finally finds contact with a foot against San’s thigh. By the time they resurface, Wooyoung is warm all over and the pool looks alien, too blue, too dark.

“The fuck was that for?” Wooyoung gasps.

San’s laughing. “We missed you.”

“Been here the whole time,” Wooyoung says.

“Not really,” Yeosang says.

Wooyoung looks back and forth between them. He can’t stand at this depth. He’s treading water; San is between Wooyoung and the wall, and Yeosang is between Wooyoung and the ladder.

“Is this an intervention?” Wooyoung asks.

“No,” San says.

“Yeah,” Yeosang says.

“Okay,” Wooyoung breathes. He has no idea what they know and what they don’t, but he can give them half of the truth, just to see. “It’s weird for me to see you two together,” he says. He hopes the breathlessness is excused by the fact that he’s treading water. “The PDA. We’re friends. I haven’t seen you since you got together. It’s—you know.”

“You would have just told us that,” Yeosang says, flat.

“Alright, who told you?” Wooyoung says. His muscles ache. He doesn’t want to play this game anymore, with everyone telling everyone everything and Wooyoung always out of the loop. “Jongho?”

“Told us what?” San asks.

“Fuck,” Wooyoung mutters, and ducks underwater.

A few paces past Yeosang, he gets his feet back under him. He surfaces, breathes in, and tries again.

“It’s not seeing you together that’s weird,” he says. “It’s that you are together. That's what I have a problem with. I don’t know why it’s weird, and I don’t know why I don’t like it. I feel bad about not liking it. Obviously. That’s all it is.”

“That’s not fair,” San says. He’s grinning so lazily, but his eyes are too dark to discern. “You can sleep with your roommates, but we can’t sleep with ours?”

“You’re not sleeping together,” Wooyoung says. His heart is racing, racing. “You’re dating.”

“I was trying to put it in terms you’d understand,” San says.

It doesn’t matter that it’s a joke. It ices all the blood in Wooyoung’s body: heart, brain, stomach, skin.

He grabs the ladder beside him and hauls himself out of the water.

“Okay, woah, not funny,” San says. “Wooyoung, I’m sorry. Wait.”

Wooyoung’s already shivering, already crossing the deck to the gate. It’s not the first time San’s taken that dig at him. In fact, Wooyoung usually encourages that dig. It’s always amusing, and he’s heard it from more people than just San. But everything is different, now. Everything is wrong.

He can hear them crashing after him. Wooyoung hops the gate again and routes himself back towards the sand, towards the villa, the way he’d come. It’ll be easier to lose them in the darkness of the beach. Of course, San and Yeosang aren’t slow, and Wooyoung’s options are limited, and, predictably, they follow him right down to the water. He’s already hit the sand by the time that San, who’s been calling his name, says the wrong set of words.

“Did we do something?” he asks. “Wooyoung.”

Wooyoung whirls on them. They’re twin broad shadows stepping off of the smooth, low-lit boardwalk. A crescent moon dangles over their heads.

“Are you in love with me?” Wooyoung asks.

San’s lips part. Yeosang eyes snap wide. The wave behind Wooyoung hits the shore left to right, tearing at the sand forever, one continuous, staggering crash.

“I didn’t know anything,” Wooyoung tells them. “I didn’t know how you felt about me. I didn’t know you were together. You didn’t fucking tell me, but I’m starting to think that’s my fault. So just—answer the question.”

He knows he’s only halfway making sense. Somewhere in his gut, though, Wooyoung’s sure they’ll understand what he means and what he needs, because even in the odd lighting, even as adults, they’re still San and Yeosang, and they still know him.

“Answer the question,” Wooyoung repeats. “Just say no, so I can fucking sleep at night.”

Yeosang closes his eyes.

“I think we should explain something to you,” San says.

Wooyoung is breathing manually, forcing the air into his lungs. “That’s not an answer,” he says.

“I can’t,” Yeosang says. It’s quiet, which is how Wooyoung knows that it’s meant for San’s ears only. His eyes are still closed. “San. I can’t do it.”

“Okay,” San says. “You don’t have to.”

He squeezes Yeosang’s hand once, lingering. When Yeosang does reopen his eyes, he’s already turned away from Wooyoung, a moth stumbling across the sand towards the lights of the villa.

Wooyoung watches him go. He doesn’t want to, but the alternative is making eye contact with San. Yeosang’s silhouette blurs, and the too-warm night bites at Wooyoung’s wet skin, and he realizes he’s not getting out of it. He presses his tongue against the back of his teeth and forces himself to look.

San had found the time to grab his shirt in the scramble. Wooyoung feels stupid, underdressed and scatterbrained and trembling, in comparison. San doesn’t look nervous or even particularly upset. He’s studying Wooyoung’s face, searching for something.

Whatever it is, he doesn’t find it. He breaks their gazes to look out over the sea.

“We started dating because of you,” San says. “Because neither of us could get over you. We’d talk about it all the time, and somehow, it was making us closer, and one day it just happened.”

Wooyoung’s lungs are filling with saltwater.

“It hasn’t been an easy relationship,” San continues.“It’s hard to be dating someone and know that you’re both in love with the same person. We got in a few fights. Because, you know, we were reinforcing it for each other, too. Couldn’t get a clean break from you. And none of that’s your fault, but it is about you.”

“San—“

“Just—let me,” San says. “I believe you when you say you didn’t know how either of us felt, okay? So that part doesn’t matter to me. But, Wooyoung, you have to figure out how to get over it. Whatever it is that’s making you upset about us, you have to forget it. I can handle it, but…”

He trails off.

Yeosang. It’s one thing for San to have been in love with Wooyoung. He and San spent pretty much every waking minute of college attached at the hip. But for Yeosang, who hasn’t lived in proximity to Wooyoung since high school, who wasn’t even out then, who’s been watching and listening to Wooyoung fling himself from hookup to hookup for years, who’s smarter and quieter and less selfish than anyone Wooyoung knows—

Wooyoung thinks he really might be sick, this time. After all his days of nausea, this might be what does it.

“He needs the closure,” San finishes. “We both do, but you owe it to him more.”

Then, San shakes his head in a way that implies he’s done talking.

Wooyoung remembers, just a few nights ago, when he’d thought the resort was quiet. It’s not. It’s oppressively loud. It’s not about the ocean at his back. It’s the dark press of the sky against and inside of Wooyoung’s head. This is so loud it’s hard to think through. San’s voice joins Jongho’s and Hongjoong’s in the cacophony. Yeosang’s silence does, too.

“You didn’t answer the question,” Wooyoung forces out.

“I did,” San says. “I said we were in love with you. That’s why we started dating.”

Wooyoung can taste metal in his own mouth. He wonders if it’s the nausea or if he’s bitten through his tongue, somehow, and can’t feel the sting yet.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Wooyoung,” San says, and now he actually does sound mad. “Is that seriously your takeaway from this?”

Wooyoung says, “I have to know.”

San tears a shaking breath into his lungs, sets it loose.

“I don’t know,” he says, harsh. “I would have said we were both over it a month ago. That’s the problem. You have no idea what you—“ he stops himself, so Wooyoung will never know what it is he doesn’t have any idea about. “I don’t know,” San repeats. It’s calmer. “Probably always will be. That’s just how it is.”

“Why didn’t you,” Wooyoung says, and then he’s not sure how to finish the sentence: why didn’t you tell me you loved me, why didn’t you stop loving me, why didn’t you—

San, who’s always known what Wooyoung is trying to say, says, “I wasn’t going to wait for you forever, Wooyoung.”

Another ripping, tearing wave.

“How’s that for an answer?” San asks. He’s grinning, eyebrows drawn in with hurt, watching his own bare foot digging into the sand.

“I don’t,” Wooyoung says, his throat salt-raw. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

“Me neither,” San admits.

Wooyoung, who’s now also watching San’s ankles in the sand, the jerky movements belying all his even words, has the sense that San is searching for something in him again. Wooyoung isn’t sure what it is. He isn’t sure how to give it; he isn’t sure he wants to.

“Well,” San says. “Goodnight, Wooyoung.”

INTERLUDE.

There are things that you know, and there are things that you don’t. And then, more uncomfortable, there are things that you have to pretend not to know in order to protect the things you do.

Category one: Yeosang, San, and Wooyoung himself. How it would feel for the last of those things to lose either of the first two, and, therefore, how the story has to end.

Category two: Why people bet against Jongho, even when they know he’ll win. Why Yunho has decided to leave his fianceé. Why it still feels so terrible when something firmly in the first category works out exactly the way you were expecting it to.

Category three:

You had to have known, Hongjoong had said.

Yes. Wooyoung did.

NOW.

“Where the fuck is he?” Mingi asks.

“Drunk in bed,” Jongho answers.

Seonghwa arches an eyebrow. “It’s nine in the morning.”

Wooyoung says, “I don’t think he slept.”

Wooyoung’s actually sure that Yunho didn’t sleep—he didn’t, either. He had stumbled back into the house an hour after San had left him on the beach and had almost flinched backwards when he saw the light spilling from underneath San and Yeosang’s door, a sure sign that they were awake, holding each other, talking about him, or worse. He’d made his way upstairs, stared at his own ceiling, and thought about nothing except the ache in his mind and body for what might have been hours. When he’d gone downstairs to try to find something to settle his stomach, he’d heard Yunho’s footsteps and his door closing in the recesses of the house. He’d thought about knocking. He’d gone back to his own bed.

So, Wooyoung knows: it was a late night for both of them.

Since Wooyoung is practiced at assuming normalcy on this vacation, he’d figured he could stomach one more terrible day. Better that than to lock himself in his bedroom and make San and Yeosang have to worry about him. Yunho, though, is getting worse, not better. His moods are more frequent, his words more clipped. Mingi is getting more angry. The house is steeping in it.

Everyone except for Yunho is in the living room. San and Yeosang share one seat. Wooyoung doesn’t know if they seem miserable or tired or not; he’s decidedly avoiding them. Everyone else looks tired, tan, bored.

They’re waiting on Yunho. It’s not seeming like he’s coming.

“I’ll go get him,” Mingi announces.

“I don’t think you—“ Seonghwa tries, but Mingi’s already marching off into the hallway, towards the primary bedroom.

Wooyoung thinks maybe Yunho’s had the right idea about locking himself away.

He drops onto the armrest of Jongho’s chair. Jongho has his work phone out, mindlessly checking emails. “Fifty says Yunho yells at him,” Jongho mutters, so that only Wooyoung can hear him.

“Yunho doesn’t yell,” Wooyoung says, but suddenly he’s not certain.

Jongho makes a little, condescending noise.

In the background, Mingi’s voice raises to a very discernible volume. “—moping the fuck around, wanting all of us to feel bad for you,” he’s half-shouting.

“No shit, Mingi,” Yunho says. “My engagement just ended.” He’s not yelling; Yunho doesn’t yell, but his voice is clear as day through the heavy door of his suite.

“You’re the one that ended it,” Mingi shouts.

“That doesn’t mean—“

“You said you didn’t fucking love her.” This is, unfortunately for Yunho, a fair hit. “So what is it? What is this fucking pity party?”

“What else was I supposed to do?” Yunho asks—and, okay. He really is yelling; Wooyoung can admit that. “I don’t want to marry her. Is that not good enough for you?”

“Oh, grow up,” Mingi says. “As if this is my fucking fault.”

“Grow up?” Yunho asks. “Coming from you?”

Wooyoung's teeth click together in his mouth. Everyone’s head has raised to listen, a pack of deer in the same blinding headlight. Yeosang puts a hand on San's shoulder to keep him on the couch.

“Hey, I own up to my shit,” Mingi says. He’s grinning, Wooyoung can hear it. “You just want to play the fucking—“

Maybe Yeosang should have let San go, Wooyoung thinks, panicked, because they’ve all just heard the brutal crash-and-drag of Yunho’s door being flung open. Someone should do something. Someone should have done something thirty seconds ago, probably. But Wooyoung is glued in place.

“There you are,” Mingi says. It’s all faux-pleased, dripping, and he’s still yelling despite the fact that they must be looking right at each other. “You come to blame it on someone else? Go ahead.”

Yunho laughs. It’s a bad laugh.

“Fuck you, Mingi,” Yunho says, his voice ricocheting against the high ceilings. “It is your fault. I ended it for you.”

His door slams shut.

“Oh, God,” someone says; Hongjoong, maybe. And then someone else actually does laugh, soft and delirious, and it takes Wooyoung a moment to realize the sound came from his own throat. He presses his palm over his mouth to hold in the next one, which is already bubbling to the surface, hysterical.

Mingi rounds the corner, back into the living room. He looks like he’s taken a hard kick to the skull. Maybe it’d be better if he had, Wooyoung thinks. Maybe Wooyoung can get in line for one, too.

There’s an excruciating beat, and when Mingi realizes that nobody is coming to save him, that nobody knows how, he turns to the door. Nobody moves to stop him from leaving.

“I’ll, um,” Seonghwa says, “call reception. Tell them we’re not coming.”

Jongho shakes his head. He stays in his seat, still thumbing through his phone, so Wooyoung stays with him, which is a comfort as the rest of them file out unevenly, wordlessly.

When they’re the only two left, Wooyoung tells him, “You would have won that bet.”

Jongho says, “Don’t think I would have wanted to.”

IN THE BEGINNING, Wooyoung is fifteen. Kang Yeosang is standing on the opposite end of a manicured lawn, his white collar stiff around his throat. There is nothing about him that indicates he is going to change the entirety of Wooyoung’s life.

In fact, Wooyoung already knows of him and isn’t that intrigued. Yeosang is very smart. Wooyoung knows this because his mother has mentioned it; they’re at the age where the really smart kids start to pull ahead of the ones who are piggybacking their expensive tutors, and then they start getting held up as examples to the freeloaders. Wooyoung has just moved here, and there are more interesting boys his age to hang out around and be bored with than, well, nerds. Yunho and Jongho, for example, who already have their heads bent together in the garden, grinning about something.

He picks his way towards them. He passes Kang Yeosang on the way. When he does, Yeosang looks at him, and then looks around him.

Wooyoung looks back. Yeosang does not.

Yunho sees him, then, lifts a hand in greeting. “Wooyoung,” he calls. He shows Wooyoung the phone they’re studying as Wooyoung approaches. “We’re looking at the market.”

Even at fourteen years of age, there is an eagerness in Jongho’s eyes that speaks to what he will become. There’s a confidence in Yunho’s stance that says he already knows what he is. Wooyoung hopes that when they look at him, they can see in the set of his shoulders that he’s like them, somehow. That he might want something.

Wooyoung doesn’t know anything about stocks besides the way they make adults act, which is sometimes mildly pleased but most times just brings out the frown lines on their faces. To Wooyoung, it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

“Boring,” he says, light, and it makes them both laugh anyway.

Jongho says, “That’s what I tried to tell him.”

In a few years, they’ll all find out that Jongho means it in a very different way. For now, it solidifies their tenuous bond.

The two of them let Yunho click around the app for their benefit, but the words are going right over Wooyoung’s head. He lets his attention wander around the lawn. Yeosang is floating behind a woman—unassuming at first glance, objectively beautiful at second glance—that Wooyoung assumes is his mother. He’s like his mother, Yeosang, in that Wooyoung keeps trying to look around him but keeps landing on him again, the stillness of his features, the careful, unafraid way he looks adults in the eye.

Wooyoung has a flash of intense jealousy.

It’s just that he was in those shoes, recently. He'd been new to the area, which meant he'd been introduced to a hundred adults using mild pleasantries to figure out if he was more or less impressive than their sons and daughters. Wooyoung doesn't know where he stacked up in that evaluation, but he has to imagine that Yeosang is outperforming him. Yeosang is smart. Everyone knows it. Now, Wooyoung can see that he’s also handsome, polite, quiet.

Wooyoung can’t stop thinking about him, his gait, his body. He hadn’t tried to win over Wooyoung when their eyes had met. When Wooyoung had seen Yunho and Jongho for the first time, just a few short months ago, he’d tried to win them over. It had worked, but he’d needed to try. He’d needed their approval.

It feels like Yeosang is winning, somehow. And Wooyoung hates to lose.

When the conversation lulls, Wooyoung asks, “You guys know him?” He nods across the lawn.

“Sort of,” Jongho says. “He’s fine.”

“Yeah, he’s nice,” Yunho says.

These are both endorsements.

“I want to talk to him,” Wooyoung says.

It’s the first time Wooyoung has ever seen this look in Jongho's eyes. Eventually, he’ll become very familiar with it, and soon after that he’ll learn to respect it. Right now, though, it just feels like a challenge.

“He’s not much of a talker,” Jongho says.

Wooyoung grins.

NOW.

Wooyoung knows where Mingi is. The problem is that Yeosang, who had all those college years to learn him, also knows.

They run into each other halfway down the stretch of sand leading to the dock—Wooyoung is coming from the gym, where he’d looked first, and Yeosang is coming from the villa. It’s dark, but Wooyoung would know Yeosang’s gait, his body, anywhere.

Wooyoung stops in his tracks, but Yeosang shakes his head. He keeps making his way across the beach.

“Let’s just forget it for now,” Yeosang says once they’re in earshot of one another, his voice flat. “I’d rather you be there.”

A sour combination of gratitude and guilt curls through Wooyoung. He says, “Same.” So they walk together, a healthy distance separating them.

“Did you know?” Yeosang says after a moment. “The part about Mingi? San told me you knew about the rest.”

“Not about Mingi,” Wooyoung says. “Honest.”

They hop over the short chain strung over the entrance to the dock. The lights studded along the panels illuminate the boats, sails stowed for the night, and farther down, Mingi’s long spine. His feet dangle off the end of the last platform, over the water.

He must hear them coming, but he doesn’t turn. Still, Wooyoung feels they should warn him. “What’s up,” he says, and then he winces. Mingi doesn’t respond to this, which is probably for the best. They settle on either side of him—Wooyoung on the right, Yeosang on the left.

“Tell me he didn’t mean what I think he fucking meant,” Mingi says.

Wooyoung is not sure there’s another way to interpret it. “He did,” he says.

Mingi grapples with this. A wave catches on the corner post of the dock and bites at Wooyoung’s ankles.

“We can’t,” Mingi finally says. “I’m not.”

He doesn’t finish either of these sentences, but it’s easy to reason out what he means.

“Fuck.” Mingi’s knuckles are white around the edge of the dock. “He’s supposed to get fucking married. And he’s not—“

The direction of the sentence is, again, clear. No, Yunho’s not gay. Neither is Mingi. Wooyoung’s not sure how they’re supposed to reckon with that, here, now, in the middle of the storm. What is there to say to Mingi that will fix this? Wooyoung just watches, helpless, as Mingi’s posture cracks near-imperceptibly, his eyes still fixed a thousand yards away.

“Mingi,” Yeosang says, his voice harsher than Wooyoung thinks is appropriate. “What’s wrong?”

“He can’t not get married. Not for this,” Mingi says.

“Well, he doesn’t want to get married,” Yeosang says. “He wants you.”

Mingi clearly has no idea how to respond to this. It stops Wooyoung’s heart, too, for a beat.

Another silence. Mingi is staring at the waves below his feet; Yeosang is staring at Wooyoung. Wooyoung snaps his gaze forwards. Ahead, it’s black water, black sky; the moonlight glints across the hard line between.

“Do you want to come back to the house with us?” Wooyoung asks.

“Is Yunho still there?” Mingi asks.

“Yeah,” Wooyoung says.

“Then no,” Mingi says. “I can’t.”

“You gonna sleep on this thing?” Wooyoung asks, warning.

Mingi huffs a laugh. “I won’t do anything stupid.”

“I know,” Wooyoung says. “You’re very smart.”

He drapes himself across Mingi’s back for a moment, squeezes his chest. Mingi accepts the hug. Yeosang pats his thigh, and Mingi lies, “I’m fine,” and Yeosang and Wooyoung leave him where he is.

It’s silent until the sand is under their feet again.

“You got quiet,” Yeosang says, wry.

“I thought—“ Wooyoung says. “Were you frustrated with Mingi? Because you can’t be. I mean, what’s he supposed to do?”

“I’m not frustrated,” Yeosang says. A breeze takes his hair away from his forehead, his temples; the birthmark at his eye is only a faint smudge in the darkness. “Not with Mingi.”

Wooyoung understands. “What did San tell you?”

“He told me what you asked him,” Yeosang says.

Wooyoung’s heart sinks.

“My answer is that I’ve been trying to get over it since we were sixteen,” Yeosang continues. “And San thinks you didn’t know, but I’m not sure that I do.”

Wooyoung says, “I didn’t mean for it to end like this.”

“Yeah,” Yeosang says. “That, I am sure of.”

Wooyoung hates this beach, hates the dark and all these mirrors. “I didn’t—you know how much I care about you,” he says. “Both of you. I just want it to go back to normal.”

Yeosang laughs. It’s bad, bad, bad. Wooyoung hears everyone in it, all the pleasureless laughs of the last week of his life: Yunho, Mingi, Jongho. “Wooyoung,” Yeosang says.

Yeosang hates to cry; he always has. Wooyoung realizes what a close thing it is, now.

Yeosang says, “This is normal.”

THE END.

It’s as if the sun has melted them together: the glow of San’s forearms draped over Yeosang’s fairer shoulders, their dark hair, San’s thighs around Yeosang’s ribs at the surface of the water. And it doesn’t stop.

Wooyoung is fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one; he is the right-now of twenty-five, and the only two things he’s ever wanted for himself have slipped out of his reach. He knew they would. He didn’t quite know he’d lose them both at once, not in this way, but he knew how it would end.

He knew how it would end. There are things you can have, and there are things that you can’t. Look at Wooyoung, his friends, the hand they’ve all been dealt. Wanting one of them was greedy. Wanting both, inexcusable.

He’d done it anyway. IN THE BEGINNING. There was no way around it.

“Well,” Seonghwa says, watching Yeosang and San press warm and wet together in the water behind Wooyoung, “now you know.”

NOW.

At the villa, Wooyoung makes straight for that heavy, first-floor bedroom door.

“It’s me,” he says.

He doesn’t get a response. He opens it anyway.

Yunho’s been crying, and he’s not trying to hide it from Wooyoung. He’s tucked his body into a thin comma in the center of his mattress. It’s an impressive thing that a man so big can make himself look so small. The bedsheets are twisted up underneath him, and Wooyoung knows that when he gets closer, they’ll smell like Yunho, expensive cologne and salt and sweat.

“Move,” Wooyoung orders, and he climbs into the bed.

Yunho’s one of the few people on the planet who takes Wooyoung’s physicality in full stride. Wooyoung had acclimated him early, plastering their bodies together at every opportunity until Yunho started reciprocating. It had gotten them a few raised eyebrows in college, but neither of them have ever cared, so it hadn’t mattered. Yunho will always be familiar. Wooyoung knows the touch will give him some semblance of comfort. Selfishly, Wooyoung needs the comfort, too.

Yunho lifts his arm to drape it around Wooyoung’s shoulder, and they settle together. They haven’t touched like this since maybe their first year of college. It would be nice if Yunho wasn’t so obviously miserable.

“I messed this one up, huh?” Yunho asks.

“It’s not that bad,” Wooyoung tells him.

“Feels pretty bad,” Yunho says.

Wooyoung rubs his cheek against Yunho’s shoulder in response.

“What’s he saying?” Yunho asks. Wooyoung hesitates. “I know you talked to him.”

“How?”

“Same way I knew you’d come to me.”

Wooyoung pokes him in the side. He doesn’t get much of a reaction. “You think I’m nosy?”

“I think you’re a good friend,” Yunho says.

This is an acceptable answer. Wooyoung withdraws his hand from striking distance and tucks himself back along the line of Yunho’s body, biting the inside of his cheek as he tries to decide what to say.

“He’s confused,” Wooyoung lands on.

Yunho hums.

“To be honest,” Wooyoung says, cautious, “I think a lot of us are confused.”

“About what?” Yunho asks. “About Mingi?”

Wooyoung asks, “When did you know?”

“When did I decide, you mean?” Wooyoung nods, and Yunho says, “About four hours before I told you.”

“I figured,” Wooyoung says.

“I thought I could do it,” Yunho continues. “I’ve always thought I could do it. Or that I had to, I guess, might be more accurate. But you made that toast, and he was looking at me, and, I don’t know. I couldn’t pretend I wanted it anymore. The wedding, the—the life, whatever.”

It’s what Wooyoung had thought—the snap decision, the frantic overnight—but it’s not the question he really meant to ask. He tries again.

“When did you know it was Mingi, though?”

“Oh,” Yunho says. “It’s been Mingi for a long time.”

There’s quiet. In it, Wooyoung rereads the story. Yunho. His perfect life. His arrow-straight trajectory. And, in his wallet and heart: seven, in green. A scrappy team. A miracle run.

“Yunho,” Wooyoung murmurs. “Is this why you bet on me and San?”

“I didn’t think you knew about that,” Yunho says.

“Jongho,” Wooyoung explains.

The arm wrapped around Wooyoung’s shoulders tightens, releases. Somewhere in the villa, a door opens, closes.

“Yeah,” Yunho says. Wooyoung does him the decency of pretending the word doesn’t waver. “And look how that turned out.”

There’s nothing Wooyoung can say to this.

“It’ll be alright,” Yunho says. It doesn’t sound so convincing. Then he says, “Now it’s in his hands, anyway.”

“Guess so,” Wooyoung says. It’s a terrifying thought, even from an outsider’s perspective. Mingi, of all people, cradling your future in his hands: Mingi, brilliant, a born heartbreaker. Mingi, who might still be sitting at the end of a long dock, looking out over the water. A shiver snakes down Wooyoung’s spine. Has it really only been eight days? The world has turned itself inside out.

Yunho takes a long, narrow inhale. “I’m so tired,” he says.

Wooyoung feels selfish as soon as he hears it. For Yunho, it's been far longer than eight days.

“You kicking me out?” Wooyoung asks.

“Yeah,” Yunho says.

Wooyoung begins to extract himself from the bed. For a moment, the expression Yunho wears is so young and afraid that Wooyoung has the odd paternal instinct to tuck the covers to his friend’s chin.

“Hey,” he says, just before he lets himself out the door. “Whatever happens, happens. It’s—you know. It’ll work out.”

He knows it’s cheap even as he says it.

“Yeah,” Yunho says. It sounds appropriately hollow. “Thanks, Wooyoung.”

THE BEGINNING.

“Do you ever worry about him?” Yeosang asks.

“About what?” Wooyoung says. “The pressure?”

Wooyoung is twenty-one, and a summer night at Yunho’s has turned into a very early summer morning with Yeosang in one of the lounges.

“No,” Yeosang says. “The gambling.”

“Not like he’s not going to run out of money,” Wooyoung says.

Yeosang hums. “You know that’s not the problem.”

It’s crossed Wooyoung’s mind. But it’s about stories, for Yunho, not the thrill of it. At least, that’s what Wooyoung’s been hoping.

Anyway, everyone has their vices. And the rest of Yunho’s life is easy, but Wooyoung could imagine that in some ways, it would numb the mind. To cope, Yunho places bad bets on bad horses and bad teams, and he knows they’re bad. It could be worse.

“I think it’s fine,” Wooyoung says. “He’s allowed to, I don’t know, fly a little closer to the sun sometimes.”

Yeosang doesn’t respond. His breathing deepens.

“You asleep?” Wooyoung asks. They’ve both had their eyes closed for the duration of the conversation. Wooyoung’s body is too heavy to open his own, to check.

“No,” Yeosang says, immediate. “Icarus bothers me. Everyone forgets the other part.”

“Oh,” Wooyoung says. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s—“ Yeosang pauses. “Well, I know you know the myth. You like myths.”

Wooyoung likes history. It’s the only one of his classes that ever felt worth putting more than a cursory effort into. He’s not sure that’s the same thing.

“You mean the ocean?” he asks.

“Yeah. The other half of the warning,” Yeosang says. “That the sea would have killed him, too.”

NOW.

“Get up,” Hongjoong says.

The unforgiving surface of the tennis court cradles Wooyoung’s back and skull and calves. It aches; he likes it. Standing up is unthinkable. Down here, it’s only safe things: the sun, the fresh air, and Wooyoung’s own sweat, sticky underneath him. The manicured trees. The perfume that clings to the grounds. In the near distance, an ocean.

Hongjoong.

Hongjoong is a safe thing, too, but he’s being mean. “You’re being mean,” Wooyoung informs him.

“I want to play,” Hongjoong says.

“I don’t,” Wooyoung says, mostly for the sake of disagreeing. Really, he does. But it’s nice on the ground, where he doesn’t have to think about San or Yeosang or Yunho or Mingi or about what any of them owe to each other.

It’s unfortunate that Hongjoong knows him so well. “Wooyoung,” he says. “Just get up and get the balls, will you?”

Wooyoung turns his head to the side.

There’s the white strip of the base line passing under his ankle, the curve of the racket against his shoulder, exactly as he’d let it clatter to the ground. Then, the tennis balls, tucked bright and still against the fence where they’d rolled to stopping.

“I’m counting to three,” Hongjoong says.

“Relax,” Wooyoung says, stretching his muscles, feeling the ground underneath them. “I’ll grab your balls.”

“You’re not funny,” Hongjoong says.

Despite everything, Wooyoung grins. Here is his body, his body, his body. He stands.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

—so Wooyoung’s not lying to Seonghwa, not really, when he says, “I already have everything I want.”

Seonghwa glances at the smudge on the balcony railing where Wooyoung’s just put out his cigarette. “No, you don’t,” he says. “Nobody does.”

One of their friends yelps in the water below. A breeze threads through the vast yard of Yunho’s estate; Wooyoung turns his face into it. A new song, now, on Hongjoong’s speaker.

“Well,” Seonghwa adds, considering. “Except for Yunho, maybe.”

Wooyoung closes his eyes.

NOW, NOW, NOW—

“It’s me,” Wooyoung says. He’s standing about twenty paces from where he’d said these words just last night.

He doesn’t get a response.

“Please,” he says.

It’s San who opens the door. He’s standing in the frame, fingers tight around the handle. Yeosang is further back, by the bed, expression impassive.

“Come in,” Yeosang says, finally.

Wooyoung slips inside the door on unsteady legs, careful to keep as much distance between his and San’s bodies as he possibly can.

“What is it?” Yeosang asks.

Wooyoung had had something to say. But it’s gone, now, lost in the face of Yeosang’s distrust and San’s obvious sadness, and Wooyoung can do nothing for a moment but stand there and let the black hole in his stomach swallow him. San readjusts his stance, hand still on the door, like he’s going to show Wooyoung out. This is what jolts Wooyoung into action.

In the end, what comes out of his own mouth surprises him.

“Don’t get over me,” he says.

It’s nothing if not efficient. Wooyoung sees it land—for Yeosang, at least, who he’s facing. It comes over his face all at once. Wooyoung doesn’t like the way it looks, there. He braces himself.

“Wooyoung,” he says. “What do you want?”

Wooyoung recognizes the tone from the dock, from Mingi. It’s not belittling. He’s really asking.

He’s really asking. And Wooyoung has an answer, for the first time, that isn’t a lie.

“Both of you,” he says.

“That’s not fair,” Yeosang says, immediate.

San moves towards him, reaches for him, places a hand on the back of Yeosang’s neck. Yeosang doesn’t fight the touch, but his gaze doesn’t falter, either.

“That’s not fair,” he repeats. “You don’t get to do that.”

“I know,” Wooyoung says. “But you asked me what I wanted, and that’s—“

He looks between them.

Instead of finishing his sentence, then, he says, “I didn’t understand why Yunho did it.”

Yeosang blinks.

“Even when I found out about, you know, the Mingi thing,” Wooyoung says, “I didn’t understand why he did it when he was so close to having everything be fine. Not until today. Now, I guess, I do. And I’m—this is my divorce, or whatever. Sorry. I—let me start over.”

Yeosang's expression has gone from stone-faced anger to bewilderment. This is an improvement, Wooyoung tells himself. He presses forwards.

“The way you feel about me is the way I feel about you,” Wooyoung says. “Probably. I mean, I know how I feel. I shouldn't assume.“

“Wooyoung,” San says.

“Sorry,” Wooyoung says. “I know it’s a lot. And terrible timing. And it’s insane to like, invite myself into your relationship, which I realized ten seconds ago is what I’m doing. Not that—we don’t have to do anything that quickly. We shouldn’t, actually. I’m not great at relationships. But you should know I want to do this right, I mean, if you’ll have me. Whatever you want—“

“Wooyoung,” San says, louder.

“Sorry,” Wooyoung repeats. “Nervous.”

“Yeosang’s right,” San tells him, and Wooyoung’s heart drops into his stomach. “It’s not fair. But it’s…“

San closes his eyes. His next inhale, through his nose, is audible.

“Can we talk about it?” he asks, and then he nods at Yeosang. “Just me and him.”

“Yeah,” Wooyoung says. “Anything you want, whatever you want. I’m—anything.”

They—Wooyoung and San—both wait for Yeosang to say something. He doesn’t.

It wasn't supposed to go like this, Wooyoung thinks. He was honest. He'd done the right thing, the thing that all of them have forgotten how to do, by being honest. 

It doesn't feel like losing, though, not yet. And Wooyoung had meant it when he'd said anything. It's in their hands, now. 

“I’ll hold you to that,” San says, not unkindly.

Then, he really does reach for the door.

THE MIDDLE.

“Water?” San asks, and Wooyoung’s stomach turns. Wooyoung is twenty-one, and he’s on the cold tile floor of San’s small, studio-apartment bathroom. He will not remember this.

“Yeah,” Wooyoung groans, because he knows it’s the right thing to do even though he’s not sure he can hold it down yet.

San joins him on the floor with the glass. Wooyoung’s aware of how gross he is, somewhere in the part of his brain that’s letting him string words together, but the much larger and drunker and sicker part of his brain senses a warm, kind body at his side, and he curls into San’s shoulder.

Wooyoung will remember most of what led up to this.

There was San, newly single. Everyone had been encouraging him to dress hotter, smile, try to get over the last of his attachment to his ex by getting under someone new. He’d come out of this bathroom broad and tan and bashful. Then there was the warm basement of the party, the stains on the floor, and there’d been Wooyoung throwing his arms around San’s shoulders, clinging to him, and San had been laughing like Wooyoung hadn’t seen in weeks.

There was the boy.

Wooyoung had spun right into him. Good, strong shoulders; broader than Wooyoung. Tan, healthy skin: an athlete, probably. Dimples when he smiled. He’d been perfect. And Wooyoung was drunk, and it was fun, as usual, until suddenly it wasn’t.

He’d been cruel. There’s not really a better word for it.

He’d called Wooyoung names that, on other occasions, would stoke the heat between them, but somehow just made Wooyoung upset, took him out of his body. He’d been pushy—again, in a way that Wooyoung sometimes enjoys, but there was no light behind his eyes to suggest that he was doing it for Wooyoung’s enjoyment. Wooyoung had been halfway undressed before he realized he couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t do it.

Tomorrow, Wooyoung will remember that he'd excused himself to the bathroom. He will remember how he'd snatched his shoes from the hallway—he’d been brought to a dormitory, not an apartment—and not even putting them on, just tumbling down the stairwell, head spinning as he worked his way from memory through a quiet campus lawn to a bench in the grass.

On that bench, in front of the building he and San had lived in during their first year, Wooyoung had taken his phone out and dialed San’s number. That part will turn out blurry in the memory, but he will retain the image of the headlights of San’s car washing over him, the brightness of them turning night to day. He'll remember San standing over him, haloed in that sun, and he will remember the relief.

He will not remember the rest, which is this:

“Thank you,” Wooyoung says. His voice is scratched to pieces. He sips the water.

“Of course,” San murmurs. “Did he hurt you?”

“No, no,” Wooyoung says. The world is still blurry around him. He has to put his head on San’s shoulder. “No. He was just mean. I could tell.”

San rubs his back. It’s bare; Wooyoung realizes, he’s not sure when his shirt came back off. He thinks he’d shoved it over his head before leaving that dormitory, but now it’s all hazy. San’s nails, his rough fingertips, are a good, grounding sensation.

Wooyoung starts to cry.

It would be embarrassing if it was anyone but San. As it is, San still visibly startles; he thinks Wooyoung’s lied to him, maybe, that he really was hurt.

“Hey,” San says. “What’s—“

“I don’t know why I do it, sometimes,” Wooyoung chokes out.

San’s hand stills on his back.

“Oh, Wooyoung,” he sighs.

It’s pity. But it doesn’t feel so bad, coming from San, so Wooyoung keeps talking.

“I don’t want this to be how it is forever,” he says. “It’s not—I guess it’s fun, but Yunho’s right, and Hongjoong. Everyone’s right. I don’t even like any of them, even when they’re nice. I never do.”

“I know,” San murmurs.

“What’s it like?” Wooyoung asks. He knows the breakup is a fresh wound for San, but everything hurts so much that he can’t imagine how this could make it worse. “To care, I mean.”

“Same as caring about anything else,” San says, slow. “I think you just have to be willing to let yourself get hurt.”

“Yeah,” Wooyoung says. “I don’t think I like that.”

San laughs. Wooyoung laughs, too. It makes him feel nauseous again.

“San,” he says. “Gonna—let me go—“

San doesn’t leave the bathroom while Wooyoung throws up for the second time.

“You’re good,” San says, rubbing at his back again. “Better out than in.”

When Wooyoung has his lungs and stomach under control again, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” San says. He’s gathering Wooyoung back into his arms, leaning them both against the wall next to the shower. Wooyoung tries to plant it in his brain that he’s going to do San’s laundry again, or clean the bathroom until it’s sparkling, or something. “I’m glad you called me.”

“I know, but,” Wooyoung whines, “it was supposed to be your night. You were supposed to be the one that went home with someone.”

“Wasn’t feeling it, anyway,” San says.

“Don’t say that to make me feel better.”

“‘M not.”

“Okay,” Wooyoung says. Then, “Thank you for coming to get me.”

“I’ll always come to get you,” San says, playful. “Don’t you forget it.”

NOW.

San picks him up about an hour before sunset.

The day had been slow and dark. Wooyoung hadn’t played tennis with Hongjoong in the morning; he’d lied and said he overslept. Hongjoong will get over it. He’d spent the downtime lying in bed, mostly. The only person he’d come face-to-face with had been Mingi, which turned out to be a blessing, because Mingi was obviously too bone-tired and shell-shocked to notice that Wooyoung was just pacing the bathroom—half out of boredom, half out of nerves.

“Where’d you sleep?” Wooyoung had asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Mingi had muttered.

In the afternoon, San had texted him a warning. Can I come get you after dinner? he’d said, and Wooyoung had stared at the notification for ten minutes before typing out the affirmative.

In the absence of Seonghwa, who would normally give good, honest feedback about his wardrobe choices, Wooyoung’s taken a page out of Yunho’s book, instead, which is to be prepared for anything.

It’s not a date. In some ways, it’s probably the opposite of a date. But if Wooyoung has gotten this far, he might as well put his best foot forwards. That’s what people in relationships are supposed to do, he’s pretty sure: try. He gets out of the shower as clean as he’ll ever be and with his face hot with embarrassment.

He thinks about kicking down Jongho’s door to bide the time, but the last thing he needs is for Jongho to get any terrible, smart looks in his eyes. Instead, Wooyoung sits in the chair by the window and watches the ocean. One way or another, the end of this is coming. That’s a better situation than he was in yesterday.

And then San eases his door open, and Wooyoung tries not to jolt out of his skin.

“Will you come get a drink with us?” San asks. “There’s that outdoor bar behind the tennis courts. I thought it’d be far enough away.”

“In case Yeosang decides to kill me?” Wooyoung asks. He’s trying for humorous, but his pulse has gone thready.

“Nobody’s killing you,” San says. “Just thought we shouldn’t have the conversation in here.”

It’s a levelheaded thought.

The three of them walk over together in near-perfect silence. It’s cool out, comfortable, and the tennis courts are pleasant enough that some of the other off-season guests have taken to them. Wooyoung distracts himself by watching a couple rally under the soft sunset. They’re a little younger than Wooyoung, maybe. She’s dressed like a doll in her neat skirt and matching visor. He’s tall. Classically handsome, similarly outfitted. They both have the right build for tennis, the powerful legs and good form, like a couple from a sports magazine. The boy tips a ball off the edge of his racket; it flies over the fence, and their white teeth glint when they laugh. Wooyoung feels a tug of sudden envy.

“Hongjoong asked me to play with him this morning,” San offers. He’s watching, too.

Both things surprise Wooyoung: San’s voice in the sudden silence, and also the words. “How’d that go?” he asks.

“Bad,” San admits. “Don’t think it’s my sport.”

Wooyoung gives him a smile. It’s returned.

Yeosang is far stormier. He walks on the opposite side of San, and he keeps a certain distance between them. Wooyoung wonders if they’d fought, maybe, and he’s here against his will. Wooyoung is oddly reassured by this. It means he’s still in the race, because San will give anything a chance, and Yeosang’s pickier.

The bar is mostly empty. They order drinks. Yeosang’s voice is a new sound in Wooyoung’s long, quiet day. It’s jarring.

When the drinks do come, San says, “I’m not asking to be mean.” He keeps his eyes fixed on his low glass, thumbs at the rim of it. “I need to hear you say it, though.”

“Okay,” Wooyoung says, and his live-wire nerve endings twinge, a plucked string.

“This can’t be a one-time thing,” San says. “I don’t think you would do it on purpose, but if you don’t think you can—be serious, then we just can’t do it at all.”

It’s clearly rehearsed. Deserved, too, probably.

There’s a lot of room for error in his response. Wooyoung can’t say what he’s really thinking, which is something along the lines of: I’ve spent all day thinking about the best way to quit my job to follow you home if this works out, because he knows this is so intense that neither of them would think he meant it. And Wooyoung’s not even sure it’s completely true, but it is based in a truth, which is that he never wanted to leave them in the first place.

Instead of any of this, he says, “Tell me what I’m getting into.”

It’s Yeosang who asks, “What?”

“I missed you,” Wooyoung says. “I missed everything that happened. I want to know.”

He's hoping the implication is that he'll never let it happen again. He can’t bring himself to say this, but they give him what he’d asked for, anyway.

San does most of the talking, especially at first. He skates around the hard things—the way they’d fallen together emotionally, mostly, because Wooyoung gets the sense that this was largely unhappy and largely related to Wooyoung himself—to do the mundane, physical stories. Dates. Apartment issues. Yeosang finally starts to crack when San recounts how they’d argued about which of their two bedrooms they would sleep in as a couple: San had preferred Yeosang’s mattress, and Yeosang had wanted to convert his own room into an office.

“It wasn’t worth the fight,” Yeosang says. He’s smiling into his beer.

“He lost,” San explains, cheery.

The sun slips entirely under the water, and the sky lights up briefly with bright gold, red, orange. “Oh, pretty,” San says, and he takes out his phone and snaps a few pictures of Yeosang against the glow of it.

Wooyoung takes one of them together. They both startle when he offers, and then they press themselves together on one side of the table. Wooyoung knows he stares at the picture for too long afterwards. Everything in that image, he wants.

San takes the opportunity of this pause in conversation to excuse himself to the restroom. Wooyoung is sure, positive, that he’s leaving them alone on purpose. Whatever conversation Yeosang and San had without Wooyoung has led them to this moment. Then again, the last nine years of Wooyoung's life have been leading him to this moment.

Yeosang’s quiet for a few moments. He opens his mouth on a false start, once. Wooyoung waits him out. He has all the time in the world.

“If we were on a normal date,” Yeosang finally says. “Right now. What would you be saying to me?”

Against all his better judgement, Wooyoung says, “I would have asked you to come home with me about fifteen minutes ago."

Yeosang stares unblinkingly at the surface of the table, the light wood. Wooyoung is too nervous to look at him, suddenly, and so he slips his gaze past Yeosang, at the ocean. The water will still be gold for a few moments, reflecting the leftover sun that's clung to the clouds.

“I would have said yes,” Yeosang says, quiet.

Wooyoung says, “Oh.”

And then they’re both laughing. Yeosang props his elbows on the table, buries his face in his hands.

“God,” Yeosang says, ears red and eyes covered. “Wooyoung. This is—“

“Hey,” Wooyoung says. Emboldened, he reaches up to pry one of Yeosang’s hands away from his face, away from the birthmark. He does it gently, to let Yeosang shy away from the touch, and Yeosang doesn’t. He clutches Wooyoung’s hand hard enough to ache. “It’ll be fine. It’ll be good.”

Yeosang’s hair catches the breeze coming over the evening ocean. He’s moved his other hand so that his chin rests in his palm, face uncovered. His skin is still flushed with alcohol and slight embarrassment. He looks like he’s been on a real vacation, strong and happy. Beautiful. He always has been, objectively speaking, but Wooyoung’s never been allowed to think about it before.

“You mean it?” he asks.

“Of course I do,” Wooyoung says.

When San returns, he drops a kiss to the side of Yeosang’s head. Wooyoung can see the muscles in his shoulder flex under the tank top as he rubs Yeosang’s back, soothing. He must be able to tell that the air has shifted between them, that Yeosang has decided, one way or another, that he’s going to give it a chance. It’s not a hard thing to tell when you know Yeosang, and San does. He’s quiet, trying to project hesitation, but he has nothing left to guard.

It’s not a hard thing to tell, because Wooyoung knows Yeosang. He knows San, too.

THE BEGINNING.

“You liked him, didn’t you?” Wooyoung asks.

He’s twenty-two, and Yeosang is walking with him on an ocean they’ve never been to before this trip, kicking sand neither of them have ever touched.

“He was cool,” Yeosang says.

“You liked him,” Wooyoung needles.

“Yes,” Yeosang admits.

Wooyoung slips ahead of him, walking backwards in the surf, wanting to get the full image of Yeosang’s suppressed grin.

“Say it. Say, ‘You were right, Wooyoung, and I’m asking San if he wants to move in together just like you said I would.’”

“I’m not saying that,” Yeosang says.

Wooyoung lifts his foot, soccer-style, like he’s going to skim the top of the surf and drench Yeosang’s only-recently-dried tank top. Yeosang yelps, jumps backwards, and then strikes—a boy again, at least today. He wraps his arms around Wooyoung’s chest from behind, holding him still. He’s not as strong as he will be even just a year from now, but he’s more than strong enough to wrestle Wooyoung into submission.

“Say it,” Wooyoung repeats, squirming, laughing.

“You were right,” Yeosang says. Even as he’s saying it, he’s swinging them to the side, trying to get Wooyoung to lose his footing in the few inches of water. The thing is, Wooyoung thinks, if he does fall, Yeosang’s going to fall, too. When he stays upright, Yeosang asks, “Happy?” right against his ear.

“Yeah,” Wooyoung says, out of breath. “Happy.”

NOW.

Wooyoung’s not thinking, not really, when he follows them into their room. It’s hard to think at all. The walk back had been light and airy. San hadn’t let the nerves hang over them: he’d spent the walk pointing out things around the resort they hadn’t gotten to do yet, either because they were never part of the schedule or because of the vacation going to shit, scattering them to the wind. He’d been so effective at this that Wooyoung had forgotten where they were going and had instead gotten invested in convincing Yeosang that he might have the core strength to wakeboard.

It’s because he knows them so well, probably, that it had been easy to forget, but the sound of their door closing behind Wooyoung snaps him back into reality.

He’d thought about it, earlier. He knows what he needs to do.

“We shouldn’t,” Wooyoung says. “I shouldn’t. I meant what I said, about doing it the right way.”

“That’s what I told San earlier,” Yeosang says, soft. "It's smarter if we don't."

San doesn’t say anything.

Yeosang is behind him. San turns to catch his boyfriend's eye. Something passes between them that Wooyoung’s never seen before. When San returns his attention to Wooyoung, the entire set of his body is different. He steps closer.

“I feel like I’m supposed do this at your door, not mine,” San says.

Every nerve in Wooyoung’s body freezes and then reorients itself, needles coming alive in a compass, flowers turning to the sun.

“I wanted to take you on a real date,” San continues, “but we couldn’t figure out—“

“San,” Wooyoung breathes. “Shut up.”

“Yeah,” San says. “Yeah, okay.”

San’s hand comes to his nape, tilting his head up, and then they’re kissing.

For a long, still moment, everything is light.

San’s mouth opens against Wooyoung’s. It’s the easiest kiss of Wooyoung’s life. He lets their tongues brush, lets San touch him, all warmth, all joy. And Wooyoung’s probably not supposed to be smiling or thinking about their friends, not now, but he is. He’s thinking about all that money won and lost on this inevitable, obvious thing.

He bites at San’s lip. He means for it to be playful, but San groans and then they’re stumbling a step backwards into the wall and Wooyoung isn’t smiling or thinking, not anymore, not with San’s arm banded up under his shirt so that their ribs and hips are pressed together; Wooyoung burns from his navel outwards. It’s a different kind of frantic than he’s used to. He knows what it is to have the urgency to move on, to get more clothes off, to get to the main event. But San is crushing them together without caring about any of that, his hands and lips branding, and Wooyoung is desperate to let him do only this forever.

Wooyoung has to part their lips to breathe, to clutch at San’s familiar body, and San pulls back. Not far: he presses his lips to Wooyoung’s temple, his hand holding Wooyoung’s crown.

“Yeosang’s right,” he murmurs into Wooyoung’s skin.

It takes Wooyoung some long seconds to figure out what this means. His palm has settled over San’s chest. He can feel the rabbiting pulse there, and it reassures him.

Yeosang is standing exactly where he’d been before, but now his hand is wrapped securely around the bedpost. He’s bitten his lower lip pale. Wooyoung shivers.

If Yeosang is right (and Wooyoung does think that he is), then San is right, too. Wooyoung needs to leave before he looks at either of them again—if he does, then he knows exactly where it’s going to end. He nudges San away from the wall.

“Tomorrow,” Wooyoung says. He doesn’t mean they should have sex tomorrow, not necessarily, just that he can’t spend another second in this room and not touch them. But that’s a lot to say. They’ll get it.

“Tomorrow,” San agrees. "Goodnight, Wooyoung."

It’s like being drunk. Wooyoung loses all the time between their rooms, just finds himself standing in front of his own familiar bed, his own familiar window. He presses his hand and forehead against the cool glass and realizes how hot he’s running.

He needs to be cooler. He needs his pulse to slow. It’s just that—between the shower and the alcohol and Yeosang’s eyes and San’s kiss, Wooyoung’s brain has tricked his body into believing that he’s about to have sex, and now it’s impossible to turn off the wanting. Wooyoung stares at the grounds of the resort, trying to put it out of his mind. It’s the right thing to do. But he can’t think around kissing San, around not kissing Yeosang, around how long they might make him wait, around—

His phone rings where he’d tossed it, face-up on the nightstand. It’s San. Wooyoung bolts across the room to snatch it up before the vibrations can echo through the walls.

“San?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”

“Come back downstairs,” Yeosang says.

First is the shock of hearing Yeosang’s voice, not San’s. Then there’s the heat. Wooyoung knows that tone.

“Are you sure?” Wooyoung asks. His body is moving without permission, towards the door, already seeking. “Because you were sort of mad at me and—“

“I’m sure,” Yeosang says.

“He’s sure,” San says, more distant.

The stairs fly under Wooyoung. He wants to wait outside their door, just to be certain, to give Yeosang the chance to take it back, but there’s a rustle in the house that lets him know he’s not alone out in the open. He lets himself in, hoping that Yeosang will forgive him, given the circumstances.

They’re in bed together. Yeosang’s eyes are so wide, sweet, like maybe he hadn’t really expected Wooyoung to come. Or if he had, he hadn’t thought about what he would say.

“Hi,” Yeosang says. “I just thought, since you don’t live near us, that we shouldn’t. You know. Waste it.”

San’s lips go thin as he tries not to laugh.

“Right,” Wooyoung says, unmoving. “It’s a perfectly good bed.”

The tips of Yeosang’s ears are red, even in the low light. “Can you just come here?” he asks.

It’s easy to cross the room to him and easier still to lower himself into the sheets, to tuck himself along Yeosang’s body. Yeosang is flushed warm and tense from head to toe; his hand comes to rest at Wooyoung’s side, holding them together, firm. His thumb digs between two of Wooyoung’s ribs.

“Wooyoung,” he says.

If Yeosang were louder or sharper, this is probably where he’d be telling Wooyoung not to fuck it up. As he is, he’s not going to say this. Wooyoung feels the need to reassure him anyway.

“I know,” Wooyoung says. “Promise.”

Yeosang kisses so desperately, needy and messier than San, like he wants to pull Wooyoung inside himself. Wooyoung lets him. It feels like being pulled home. He loses himself in relearning Yeosang’s body, which is new in some ways and the most familiar thing Wooyoung knows in others. As Yeosang’s breath stutters, Wooyoung realizes that San has started to touch him, and the wave of want that seizes Wooyoung brings him tumbling fully into the bed, over Yeosang.

“Take this off,” San breathes, tugging at the collar of Wooyoung’s shirt. Just as Wooyoung gets to his knees on the mattress so he can fumble with the buttons, Yeosang reaches around to do it for him. Good. That frees up Wooyoung to take San’s face into his hands, to get their mouths back on each other. Yeosang’s build envelops Wooyoung’s own—Wooyoung thinks he might make a noise, realizing it, muffled into San’s lips—and then he tugs the shirt down Wooyoung’s chest and arms.

It forces Wooyoung to part from San for an instant, and suddenly there’s nothing but cool air on his skin. His heart stumbles in his chest.

Wooyoung’s been shirtless in front of them hundreds of times in his life, and plenty this week. But something about this exposure is throwing him off-kilter. His next inhale is shallow.

“What is it?” San asks, but it’s in this unfamiliar, soft rasp, so Wooyoung figures he hasn’t fucked it up completely. Yeosang’s lips meet the back of his neck, his shoulder. Wooyoung inhales again, steadier.

He’s not sure what to say at first. He’s not sure what he wants to say makes sense.

This is the problem: Wooyoung is twenty-five, and he doesn’t know how it ends.

It’s terrifying not to know. Wooyoung has always liked sex that doesn’t matter. This matters, because if it’s awkward or bad or they decide they don’t want him or someone gets jealous, then he loses them both. Because he loves them differently than how he loves Hongjoong and Jongho and the rest. He always has. Because when they touch him it feels like it’s the first time he’s been touched. It matters. It all matters with Yeosang and San. The entire story is mixed up in Wooyoung’s head, the beginning and the end all in the same place: Mingi’s lonely silhouette on the dock, the wings melting, Yeosang’s hand on San’s shoulder, everyone holding themselves down, down.

Wooyoung’s not going to lie to them.

“This is going to sound bad,” he warns.

Yeosang is still mouthing at his shoulders, so it’s San who says, soft, “Tell us.”

“I’ve never—“ Wooyoung digs his nails into the skin of Yeosang’s arm to ground himself. “I’ve never slept with anyone who mattered to me.”

“Oh,” San says.

Wooyoung opens his mouth to tell San what a terrible reaction that was, but then San’s lips are on his again, almost panicked, and that’s much better.

“It did sound bad,” Yeosang says. Wooyoung breaks away to scowl at him; Yeosang’s lips are curled up in a smile. Wooyoung can feel it. “Maybe I’ll tell Jongho that he doesn’t matter to—“

“Oh, shut up,” Wooyoung says, reaching back to swat his thigh. “You knew what I meant.”

“Yeah,” Yeosang says. He pulls Wooyoung down into the mattress.

The way they work him over, Wooyoung’s always consumed with one of them: San bites at Wooyoung’s neck while Yeosang strips him out of his loose shorts, and then San makes quick work of his own clothes while Yeosang crawls back up Wooyoung’s body. It’s terribly, unreasonably hot and strangely funny, too; Yeosang bangs his elbow on the headboard loud enough to startle all of them when he takes off his shirt, and Wooyoung and San jump apart. Yeosang is spooked but already embarassed about it, so they have to take a second to laugh at him, and then Wooyoung bites back into San’s mouth so that the end of San’s giggle tapers into a thready, surprised moan. Then he’s under San, and things go liquid for a while.

Nakedness has never bothered Wooyoung, has never even really impressed him. It’s not going to start now. There’s only a resounding ring of finally, finally, finally racing through his body once Yeosang strips the rest of his own clothes off and then returns to him, slotting one of those new steel thighs in between Wooyoung’s legs.

Wooyoung moans and tries to rock up into him, but the angle is awkward and probably doing nothing for Yeosang. It’s still good, though, just being able to feel him. But Yeosang gets impatient with this quickly. The force he uses is almost uncharacteristic when he tugs Wooyoung on top of him, pulling them flush together.

Wooyoung can’t tell where it’s going.

They both know Wooyoung's preferences in bed; he’s never exactly kept that a secret. And while he thinks he has some idea of their dynamic, he can’t be positive. The thought comes to him and then leaves again, because Yeosang’s body is burning and solid against Wooyoung’s and they’ve figured each other out. Or—they’ve figured out kissing, at least. Wooyoung likes the same messy, breathy push-and-pull that Yeosang does, and that’s easy to lose himself in. So he forgets about the near future entirely, really, until he feels San’s hand slide over the curve of his ass and then in between his thighs.

“San,” Wooyoung gasps, trying not to rock too eagerly back into the touch—because he doesn’t know, but San clearly does.

“He wants to fuck you,” San murmurs. “I can tell.”

Yeosang doesn’t deny it. He turns his face into the pillow, instead.

Wooyoung can’t think about that idea directly, so he asks San, “What about you?”

“He likes to watch,” Yeosang says.

“Likes to watch what?” Wooyoung asks. “Who else are you sleeping with?”

“Nothing—nobody, he just likes—“ Yeosang starts, flustered, and then he sees the grin on Wooyoung’s face and makes an indignant little noise in his throat.

Wooyoung can’t laugh about it for too long. San’s fingers edge lower, slippery (Wooyoung couldn't even begin to guess when San had done that, during what moment he'd reached for their nightstand), and Wooyoung buries his face in Yeosang’s neck and tries not to beg.

It’s not easy going. San touches him like they’ve fucked a hundred times before, confident and meticulous. Wooyoung should be no stranger to the sensation, but he can’t remember a single time that someone’s hand, someone’s fingers, felt this good. There’s also Yeosang, who won’t stop grabbing at Wooyoung, at his hair and arms and back, like he’s afraid that Wooyoung will come untethered if he’s not held down. It might be a legitimate fear. Wooyoung’s senses are overfull; he knows he’s whining into Yeosang’s mouth even if he can’t hear himself, grinding down without meaning to. So Wooyoung really could fly off, maybe. He could just rise outside his body on sensation alone.

Also, he thinks, he could have been ready five minutes ago.

“San,” Wooyoung finally gets out, “hurry up, please, fuck.”

“Bossy,” San says, unmoved.

“He’s being nice to you,” Yeosang says.

“I’m always nice,” San says, and he immediately makes Wooyoung cry out with a mean little thrust.

Yeosang says, “You’ll see.” It comes out of his mouth so unthinkingly, distracted, but Wooyoung has to dig his teeth into the pillow underneath Yeosang’s head to stifle the sound he makes as it hits him that there will be a next time, and a time after that; he gets to have this for as long as he can manage not to fumble it.

Wooyoung lets his body go slack between them. He moans into Yeosang’s skin every time he remembers it’s San’s fingers inside him; he feels the weight of Yeosang trapped between their stomachs and lets Yeosang rut up against him. He lets them do the taking, for once. It’s good.

San can’t be bargained with, but eventually he withdraws and kisses Wooyoung’s shoulder. He slides a hand down Wooyoung’s thigh again, and then off of Wooyoung’s skin, lower, and Yeosang’s stomach goes suddenly taut.

“Wooyoung,” he says. His voice is so shaken, so deep. “I need—“

If he finishes the sentence, Wooyoung thinks this is going to come to a very fast end. He kisses the words away.

Wooyoung can make it good for Yeosang. He knows he can. He has to; it has to be so good that Yeosang doesn’t regret inviting Wooyoung into their bed tonight, not even for a second. But when he finally does sink down onto Yeosang, he’s too desperate to drag it out or tease, or even to summon any amount of finesse.

Yeosang’s composure frays anyway. Wooyoung can feel it in the way his hips are twitching upwards, and his mouth, too, seeking; Wooyoung breathes into him and says, I know. I know. And then San says, quiet behind Wooyoung: don’t make him do all the work. Wooyoung has no idea which of them he’s talking to, but Yeosang takes it to heart.

“Oh, fuck,” San mutters, drawn-out, but Wooyoung almost doesn’t hear it. He can barely think around the ache, the warmth; Yeosang is a dream. Each of his noises is a breathy, sweet marriage of a laugh and a moan, so at odds with the way his fingers dig bruises into Wooyoung’s hips. Wooyoung knows that this means delirious happiness.

So Wooyoung’s already sure of the answer, but he tips their foreheads together to whisper, Good? He means the sex, but he also means the two of them. He wants to hear it. And when Yeosang says so good, still smiling, brow creased with sensation, Wooyoung knows he wouldn’t have survived losing this, not wholly. He would have gone his whole life pretending not to wonder what it would have been, and he never would have gotten close to imagining the sweetness, the heat singeing through him.

At some point, Wooyoung wonders distantly if they should be putting on more of a show for San. He turns his head, and San is staring dizzied at where they’re connected, one hand on Yeosang’s calf and the other on himself. He catches the motion and flicks his eyes up to meet Wooyoung’s.

His grin is a little ashamed. As if Wooyoung would be embarrassed about his body in front of San, of all people.

Wooyoung asks for what he wants. “San,” he says, and this time he does remember to pull out all the stops, to soften his voice just so. “Please.”

“Always,” San says, already reaching for him.

The move can only be practiced. San hauls Wooyoung up to his knees from behind, one arm banding them together and his chin on Wooyoung’s shoulder. His other hand wraps around Wooyoung’s length; the new angle has Yeosang deeper, aching inside him, and Wooyoung doesn’t even have the time to brace himself for the heat that snaps through him, the noise torn out of his throat.

It’s never been like this. It’s never, never been like this. San is saying things in his ear that Wooyoung is processing in fractured pieces, like you’re so sexy, Wooyoung, so perfect and making him feel so good and wanted you both like this forever, forever. Hearing these words in San’s new, low timbre is too good, so good that the heat crawls up to Wooyoung’s chest and he has to toss his head back against San’s throat. He’s trying not to make noise—even though it’s a big house with thick walls and doors, there’s only so much good construction can do—but it’s becoming too much. Yeosang’s found the right pace below him, natural as breathing.

Wooyoung bites at the underside of San’s jaw, trying to convey this. San understands. He always, always does.

“We have you,” he murmurs. “Wooyoung. We have you.”

Wooyoung has no choice but to let the world go blindingly, heart-stoppingly white.

When he can see again, he realizes that San’s holding him up. Hands slide down to his waist. “Loud,” San murmurs, lifting Wooyoung’s hips for him. “Gonna get us in trouble.”

“Sorry,” Wooyoung breathes. He collapses at Yeosang’s side, and their arms slide off each other, slick with sweat. He’s distantly aware of San laughing softly at him, muted by the ringing in his ears. “Sorry, sorry.”

Wooyoung becomes aware that Yeosang is trembling, almost, next to him. “San,” he’s saying. “Fuck. Close, San, help—“

“Yeah, me too,” San sighs. He leans that gorgeous body down over Yeosang.

Wooyoung’s stunned still watching them: the perfected way San works them both over with a hand and the soft kick of his hips, and the easiness with which Yeosang slings one arm around San’s neck, bringing them together. Yeosang’s other hand claws at Wooyoung’s forearm, and Wooyoung lifts it so he can mouth at Yeosang’s palm, his long fingers, while he watches.

Before long, that thing passes between them again, that blue-hot spark that Wooyoung had seen before San kissed him. Wooyoung’s not surprised that Yeosang comes then, but he is surprised at how pretty Yeosang is doing it. The soft “oh” escapes Wooyoung before he can help it. Yeosang flushes at the attention, whimpering in protest even as his body tenses and he adds to the mess on his chest. San is right behind him.

San falls to his elbows, then, lets Yeosang take his weight. He leans over to kiss Yeosang’s palm and then Wooyoung’s lips. He’s wearing that sweet smile that Wooyoung has only seen once—when he’d looked down at Yeosang in the water, that first day.

Wooyoung doesn’t speak. He doesn’t want to break the spell. He doesn’t want to stop listening to the heave of Yeosang’s lungs, doesn’t want to stop feeling the pulse in the thin skin of Yeosang’s wrist, doesn’t want San to stop looking at either of them, ever, ever, ever.

San whispers, “Be right back.” He climbs off of Yeosang gingerly, and Wooyoung wonders if Yeosang, too, is watching the flex of San’s thighs, the rolling muscles of his back.

Yeosang stirs, as if to get up after him.

“I wouldn’t move," San says, looking pointedly at Yeosang’s bare, wet torso.

Yeosang seems to realize what’s happened to him. He groans and lets his head flop back on the pillow.

“Just stay,” San says. He’s already moving towards the bathroom. “Wooyoung’ll distract you.”

Yes, Wooyoung thinks. He can do that.

“Hi,” he purrs, tugging at Yeosang’s jaw until their faces are tilted together again. Just because he can, he runs his fingers through the mess on Yeosang’s ribs. He’s expecting to get reprimanded, but Yeosang only inhales shakily, and suddenly Wooyoung can’t help the urge to kiss that air right back out of his mouth.

They’re still pressed together when San returns. Time is difficult for Wooyoung right now, but he thinks there’s a chance that San had been watching them kiss for longer than was entirely appropriate. He glances down and has the suspicion confirmed. But San doesn’t move to do anything about it, just fusses over Yeosang while he wipes him clean, and Wooyoung displays tremendous restraint by not asking if they can go again.

“Tired,” Yeosang mumbles.

“Get used to that,” San tells Wooyoung. A pleasant chill runs through Wooyoung. San moves away from the bed to organize the laundry, and then he asks, “You’re staying the night, aren’t you?”

It’s casual.

Wooyoung looks up from Yeosang’s calm, open face. He’s met with the broad expanse of San’s back. San is standing over his thrown open suitcase, facing away from them, but his hands are fumbling with nothing. He lifts a folded shirt to set it right back down.

“San,” Wooyoung says, heavy.

San has no choice but to turn around and look at him.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Wooyoung says. “I’m staying.”

“Okay,” San whispers.

The bed is big enough for all three of them by a long shot. Wooyoung thinks, once they’re all settled in it, that he’s going to have to convince them to install one of these in their apartment. They have the money. It might be a tight fit, but Wooyoung drives a hard bargain. It makes him smile to himself in the dark, where neither of them can see it.

“This should be weirder,” he says.

“It’s your brain,” Yeosang mutters. He’s barely conscious. “Human brain is good at adapting. Plasticity.”

“Of course,” Wooyoung says. “My bad.”

San snorts.

“Get used to that, too,” he says.

THE MIDDLE.

The wave of graduation looms heavy for months and then crashes over them all at once. The jokes about failing are funny until it becomes clear that they’re all going to make it, at which point it becomes real and therefore quite sad. One day they’re laughing; the next, they’re in full regalia on a manicured lawn.

Hongjoong’s been in and out of tears all morning. You’re so sensitive, Wooyoung had teased, but then he’d caught the faint, unfamiliar glimmer in Jongho’s eye and decided not to engage with either of them for a while, lest they drag him down with them. He can’t afford to cry. The pictures from today are going to be around for a while.

Yeosang came to see them off.

He and Jongho sit together in the audience. Having graduated the weekend prior has made Yeosang oddly grown-up, or maybe that’s the distance talking. There’s no time to see him in the scheduled crush of the morning, but after the ceremony, then it’s pictures on the lawn. (Hongjoong visits the restroom twice before photos, but he can’t get rid of the sadness, the flushed cheeks. Sensitive.)

Yeosang is feeling magnanimous. He lets Wooyoung jump on his back; he spins them around a little for the camera. He lets San, who he’s moving in with in a few short months, wrap him in a full-bodied hug.

When they break from each other to start thinking about a late lunch—hoping Yunho takes them somewhere nice, hoping to get out of the hot robes—Wooyoung finds himself alone on one of the quads with Yeosang.

“Thanks for coming,” Wooyoung says.

Yeosang glances at him. “Didn’t come just for you,” he says.

“Yeah, I know,” Wooyoung says. “But mostly for me, maybe.”

“Maybe,” Yeosang admits.

Yunho agrees to take them all out for lunch. There’s a mad dash for their various apartments and dorms; Wooyoung and Yeosang end up in San’s car. It’s nice, having the two most important people in his life with him. Wooyoung’s excited for the pair of them to live together. He’s probably more excited than they are. There's something funny about that.

Wooyoung runs inside San’s apartment to take a piss. On his way out, he realizes he’s probably never going to see this place again. He walks through San’s stripped bedroom. He places a hand on the window, looks outside.

San and Yeosang are standing next to the car, waiting for him. San’s still in the full getup minus the cap, which Yeosang is turning over in his hands. He finds the front corner and jams it over his head. Even from Wooyoung’s distance, it looks sort of stupid. Yeosang looks up to San for approval, and the two of them last about three straight-faced seconds before they start laughing. Surety washes over Wooyoung’s body, erasing the odd ache of leaving this place.

There are things that are temporary, and there are things that are forever. This school, the degree, the life Wooyoung is going to try to make for himself next month in an unfamiliar city: those things are all fleeting.

Yeosang and San, laughing in the sun, are not.

NOW.

It’s a long four days.

It wouldn’t be right to flaunt their new—well, they’re not labeling it yet, mostly out of the fear that Wooyoung will bolt like a horse—anyway, it wouldn’t be kind to be open about their new situation in front of Yunho. So every night, Wooyoung pretends to go to sleep in his own room on the second floor and then slips downstairs when the coast is clear. It makes him feel nineteen again, inexperienced, sneaking around dark dormitories and angry roommates. But Wooyoung certainly doesn’t feel nineteen when he opens the door and finds them both waiting for him, dark-eyed with hunger. He feels twenty-five and wanted. On the third night, after a long day of lounging around shirtless and hanging off of Seonghwa’s back and shooting lingering, purposeful glances at San over the bridge of San’s own sunglasses, Wooyoung actually gets thrown into their bed when he lets himself into their room. Somehow, after San’s apologized three times and Yeosang’s finished laughing, Wooyoung is still half-hard.

It’s good. It’s more than good, and Wooyoung feels more than wanted. He’s choosing to enjoy the sensation rather than name it. He knows what it is. It scares him, to know that he feels it just a few odd, secret days into the—situation, relationship, liaison, whatever—but then again, he figures, it’s really been about ten years in the making. IN THE BEGINNING, and all that. So maybe it’s alright. It’s a long four days, and by the end of them, Wooyoung is the most certain he’s ever been.

On this last morning, Yeosang stirs at the early alarm, but he doesn’t wake enough to tighten his arms around Wooyoung and keep him in the bed.

Wooyoung steals out into the open.

Everyone’s flights are slated for the same day, just at different times and with different rides to the airport. Yunho’s told Wooyoung privately that he’s not even leaving. He’s going to keep riding the wave out here until he gets in real trouble. It’s concerning, but nobody tells Yunho what to do anymore, Wooyoung figures.

Jongho is supposed to leave early (If I fly straight to work, I think I can expense it), and Wooyoung sits at the foot of his bed while Jongho throws the last of his stuff into a trim suitcase. He gives Jongho a fierce hug and a little scruff on the head, for good measure, and then loads him into the black car waiting at the resort entrance.

He’s barely turned around when his phone buzzes.

Jongho: Hey.

Jongho: Don’t fuck it up.

Wooyoung laughs, disbelieving. He texts back: Yes, sir.

On his way back to the villa, Wooyoung buys three breakfasts and charges them all to the suite. He begins extracting some of the things he’d snuck down to Yeosang and San's private bathroom—he throws out the rest of his face cleanser while he does it; Yeosang says it’s terrible for his skin type. It’s midday when he emerges alone into the kitchen to see if he can scavenge some leftovers.

Mingi is at the counter, arms folded on the marble and head dropped onto his wrists.

“Hey, buddy,” Wooyoung says. “You’ve gotta start packing.”

Mingi lifts his head, bleary. “Oh,” he says. “I’m staying here for a little while.”

Wooyoung stares at him.

Mingi promptly drops his head back down on a groan. “Don’t ask,” he says into the countertop. “I haven’t even told Yunho I’m staying. I haven’t even told my job. Fuck.”

“Wow,” Wooyoung says.

“Stop staring at me.”

Wooyoung cannot stop staring at him.

“Do you, uh,” he tries, “want to talk about it?”

Mingi makes a petulant noise. “No. Fuck.”

Suddenly, Wooyoung’s eyes are stinging. His smile comes from the middle of his chest. Wooyoung, Mingi, lightning striking twice. Maybe anything is possible, Wooyoung thinks. Maybe Jongho will finally lose a fucking bet.

When he re-enters San and Yeosang’s bedroom, he can still feel his far-away, disbelieving grin.

“What’s so funny?” San asks.

“Nothing,” Wooyoung says, and he barely has the word out before Yeosang is on him.

It’s fascinating, the way Yeosang is turning out to be the clingier between the two of them. It’s such a novelty that Wooyoung hasn’t even made fun of him for it yet. Wooyoung seeks out his mouth and is rewarded with a long, slow kiss. Yeosang eventually drops his face to Wooyoung’s throat, breathes in at his collar, still holding him.

“When are we going to see you again?” Yeosang asks, muffled.

Wooyoung squeezes the arm he has wrapped around Yeosang’s shoulders. Across the room, San’s head has ticked up expectantly. Wooyoung sees nerves in his eyes for the first time in days.

He can’t help but smile again.

“Wooyoung,” San repeats, and it’s a little chiding, this time. “Seriously, what’s funny?”

Wooyoung says, “Nothing. This is serious.”

“I like serious,” Yeosang says, sweet.

“Okay,” Wooyoung says. “Good. Here’s what I was thinking.”

PROLOGUE.

Wooyoung is twenty-six.

It’s Yeosang’s birthday soon, and everyone’s flown in to surprise him. Yunho has taken a commercial flight, not private, even though it’s since all blown over with his family. Single and stoic and business-minded is alright for now, everyone’s decided.

Wooyoung had a lot of jokes to make about it when he’d been told. “What’s next,” Wooyoung had asked over the phone, “you want us to pick you up from the airport or something?”

Wooyoung and San had pulled up at arrivals to meet him. Yunho had been easy to pick out of the crowd, what with the height and his uncertain feet. Wooyoung had darted to the entrance to jump on him.

And then, behind by a few paces, struggling with a suitcase, Mingi. Wooyoung had only been able to throw his head back and laugh, still in the circle of Yunho’s arms.

Hongjoong and Seonghwa and Jongho have their own arrangements. Yeosang doesn’t know about any of it, yet, or else he’d be protesting. He’s come home from work unsuspecting. They’re on the couch in their apartment. It’s dark in all the windows, dark in the television. Yeosang has his head in San’s lap; Wooyoung had forced them to move over so he could take up San’s other side. They’ve been like this a while.

The clock strikes midnight; Yeosang turns twenty-seven. “Happy birthday,” San says.

Yeosang hums uncaringly.

“You know,” Wooyoung says, because he’s been thinking about it, “If I’d started dating him when we were eighteen, then we probably wouldn’t have ended up with you.”

“No,” San says, grinning. “I would have grown on you.”

Wooyoung props his chin on San’s shoulder. “You think?”

“He’s like a weed,” Yeosang says, his voice thick with sleep. San thumbs under his eye, dragging across the birthmark, in an odd little gesture of affection.

Looking at the two of them like this, it does seem fairly inevitable. The openness of the world is a strange thing to get used to, and it’s a stranger thing still to indulge in it.

“Okay,” Wooyoung murmurs. “If you say so.”

“I say so,” San says.

“I also say so,” Yeosang says. “And I would know.”

There are things that are temporary, and there are things that are forever. The heat of their bodies—now, now, right now—is a brand new future, a gently used past, all the worn in-between. Wooyoung closes his eyes. He drops his cheek to San’s shoulder and his hand to Yeosang’s nape, where he’s always held them. He lets them do the knowing.