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Hyunwoo doesn’t intervene in Subin’s waking life as much as he does when Subin’s asleep.
He dreams about mundane things, like being late for work and eating dinner, the plates transforming on the table every time he looks at them. He dreams about flights that he is late to catch and rooms he can’t find the door to exit and visits to the dentist, and in so many, he’s there with Hyunwoo.
Hyunwoo is sitting at the dinner table or he’s running through the airport terminal with him, their suitcases rolling behind them, and in these dreams, Subin wonders why he’s here, like dream-Subin, on some level, knows that Hyunwoo isn’t his boyfriend at all. Sometimes, Hyunwoo transforms into Jun and Subin feels an overwhelming rush of relief.
Sometimes he transforms into Jun, and dream-Subin wants to find Hyunwoo again, if only for a few confused minutes.
Usually, he wakes up feeling guilty and conflicted, though he has long come to terms with it. That’s just how life is now—Hyunwoo will always be there, tucked away in the corner of his brain—and it doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s been a long time since they spoke, since there was anything between them, and even when there was something, Subin could never quite grasp what that something was. Everything about their friendship existed in grey areas, neither of them fully understanding the other, or at least pretending not to until it was too late.
Loving Hyunwoo had been a major part of his life for a long time. It was half of his personality by the time Hyunwoo came back from the army, which is embarrassing to admit, but it’s true. He spent all of his formidable years feeling like pining was a journey and being with Hyunwoo would be the end point of it, like that was the only light he could see at the end of the road.
Being with Jun, choosing to be with Jun, was a different fork in the road entirely, and even though it is one of the only choices he has ever made that makes sense, that feels right and good, there is still a part of him that feels like he’s part way between two unfinished journeys, and he always will be.
So, he dreams about Hyunwoo and Jun, and dentists and airports, and then he wakes up to Jun staring at him, mouth slack and eyes soft, from his side of the bed.
“Hi,” Subin slurs, in his worst morning voice, and then he pulls Jun closer and kisses him until they melt into one.
There was a time, at the start of their relationship, before it was a relationship at all, when Subin needed Jun to want him, but needed Hyunwoo to want him too. To want him more.
Subin doesn’t know when things changed, can’t pinpoint one moment in time when Jun meant more than he had (or meant something different, at least) but he does know that it feels good now, having someone to come home to, someone who feels like home themselves.
He’d told Jun once, recently, that he felt like home, and Jun had fucked him so good and so slow that night, like a reward for loving him that it made him want to cry.
They talk about the future, sometimes. Their future. Just one, that they will both share. Jun talks about moving somewhere that they both choose together. Jun talks about Subin meeting his mom, one day. Not yet, but one day, hypothetically, if he tells her.
Subin likes to talk about the future too. He starts conversations about next month and next year, and maybe he’s overcompensating for how much time he’s spent in the past in his mind, and maybe Jun can see through him sometimes, because he’ll say it out of the blue, in the car or the kitchen, or when they’re in bed: “Nam Hyunwoo hasn’t contacted you lately, has he?”
Subin always says no.
Subin thinks that maybe he’s growing up.
Maybe he’s going to be fully grown up soon, transformed in a way he never imagined he could be, and he’ll be a real person with a real partner, in their real life.
He always worried about being too immature for Jun. When they first met he probably was, and he played up to it sometimes, waiting for Jun to get sick of him and throw him out one last time. He found a perverse sort of thrill in worrying about being discarded.
Maybe that’s why he was happy to hang onto Hyunwoo’s coattails, follow him around and wait for him to snap, back then.
Maybe that’s why he went back to Jun even after he was barely given time to get dressed before Jun had shut the door in his face after the first time he stayed the night. He’d thought that it was better to feel wanted than to not, and that the undercurrent of disdain in the way Jun gave him attention was probably normal for closeted office workers.
At least it was attention and it was directed at him and not at some girl, and that was all he could really ask for, wasn’t it?
Jun doesn’t treat him with disdain now, he hasn’t for a long time, just like Subin hasn’t walked out on him in a long time, and Subin knows with certainty that Jun will always come pick him up when he calls.
Jun pays for Subin’s phone now. He pays for vacations to warm climates, where they can lie beside a pool. Where Jun can place his hand protectively on Subin’s bony knee and keep it there. He makes Subin feel loved.
Still, Subin can’t be completely sure it will last, just like he can’t be sure that when he closes his eyes at night he’ll end up dreaming about kissing one man or another.
Jun takes a cooking class and practises his recipes on Subin’s willing stomach, every Friday night, like routine.
They have a lot of routines now, things that Subin would have thought boring a few years ago, but now finds make him content, let him breathe.
“I love you,” Jun tells him every morning, kissing him with toothpaste-cold lips before he leaves for work.
Sometimes Subin pretends to still be asleep because it feels like too much— too much love, too much expected of him, more love than he deserves.
Other times, it’s not enough, and he opens his eyes and kisses Jun back, open mouthed and hungry. Clings to Jun, digs his nails into Jun’s back through his white work-shirt and makes breathy, desperate, noises on purpose.
Sometimes Jun is late for work, and he’ll leave in a rush then, irritated with himself for letting it happen and muttering that they can’t do that again, but Subin knows it’ll happen again, whenever he wants it to, and Jun probably does too.
Dongjun pours more soju and wags a finger in Subin’s face. “You have to warn me if he’s coming in to get his hair cut next time,” he says. He only stops pouring when the soju almost overflows the glass.
Subin knows he’s talking about Jun.
“He’s one of your clients now, I don’t have to do shit.” He leans forward and sucks the excess soju off the top of his glass. Some college students on the next table glance at him rudely, but he doesn’t care.
Dongjun scowls. “When he asks me about Hyunwoo I never know what to say. I feel like he’s testing me.”
Subin doesn’t want to talk about Jun, or Hyunwoo. “Well, whatever. I don’t speak to Hyunwoo anymore, and he’s thousands of miles away, so there is nothing to tell.”
Dongjun eyes him. “Have you really not returned any of his messages?”
“No.” Subin takes another drink, a proper one. “What would be the point? I have nothing to say to him.”
“That’s fair.” Dongjun snorts. “You were insufferable back then.”
Subin flips him off, and then reaches across the table and takes the last piece of blood sausage. He shoves into his mouth, ignoring Dongjun’s complaint as he chews away. He isn’t even hungry.
Later, back at Jun’s, he sits on the edge of the toilet seat, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth, and reads through the messages that Hyunwoo has sent him over the last year and that he’s left on read.
Not replying wasn't something he’d done to make a statement, and it definitely wasn’t because Jun had asked him not to, although he had asked, he asks every few months, and Subin knows that if the situation were reversed, and it was Jun with the complicated ex-friendship, he would be wanting the same reassurance.
The truth is that Subin has replied to every message, multiple times, in his head and sometimes for real. He’s written replies, wondering if Hyunwoo is watching the screen, seeing the notification showing that he’s typing back, but he’s never actually pressed send.
Thinking before he acts might well be another sign that he’s matured, Subin thinks, but then again that might just be cowardness
He has never gone as far as deleting Hyunwoo’s number, though Jun has asked him to do that too.
It feels too drastic, too final, and his chest feels tight when he thinks about doing it. Only once has he been tempted to, and its when Hyunwoo strays from the tentative hellos and cursory check ins, and messages him on a Friday night, out of the blue, saying,
You were going to kiss me back that night, I know you were.
Subin doesn’t even consider replying to this one, neither to argue or agree, because he doesn’t know if was going to or not, and whether that even matters now.
All that Subin knows is that it didn’t happen, and that something that would have once felt like the happy ending of the story in his mind ended up a moment of confusion and guilt and disappointment— in Hyunwoo, in himself, in the way that things never play out in the right way at the right time, or at all.
Not that Subin knows what the right way even means or when the right time would have been, he just knows that it feels like doing the right thing not to give in to the pull of the past and lingering memories of old feelings.
It feels good to be in a relationship with someone who cares, who cooks for him and wipes him down after sex, and begs him to delete other mens’ numbers. Who wants him no matter what, every day and kisses him in the morning even after he’s dreamt about another man. Not that Jun will ever know about that.
Maybe Jun dreams of other men, Subin thinks, but he doubts it.
The last time they had a big argument, Subin had been sure it was over.
He was sure that he wouldn’t go back, and even if he tried to, that Jun wouldn’t take him back this time, anyway.
He’d moved into a rundown studio apartment not unlike the one he used to share with Hyunwoo, and he’d spent more time drinking with Dongjun, had even met up with Yeona-noona, of all people, for a meal.
A couple of days after that, Hyunwoo had messaged him, and it didn’t seem like a coincidence. Subin guessed that Yeona had mentioned their catch-up to Jihoon, who had brought it up to Hyunwoo in a pointed conversation.
Hyunwoo’s message just said, hey and Subin had lay in his bed and stared at it for a long time. He’d felt tears well up in the corner of his eyes and he’d wiped them away with a frustrated cry, and then he’d left his place in the rain and had walked all the way to Jun’s.
Jun had scolded him for getting drenched, had said, “You’ll get a cold,” and had rubbed his hands over Subin’s to warm them up.
Jun had brought him inside, and had fussed over him and scolded him in the way that Subin knows means he cares about him.
He’d towel dried Subin’s hair and had let Subin fall asleep in their bed while he finished paperwork in the kitchen, and Subin had moved back in the next day.
The first time Subin sees Hyunwoo in well over a year is at Dongjun’s birthday party.
Subin knows he’s back from Los Angeles, he has been for a while. Dongjun has even suggested they all go drinking together a couple of times, but Subin never shows up. He tells Dongjun it’s because work is busy, and that’s not a lie, but he’s also reluctant because things are going so well with Jun, and he doesn’t want to rock the boat.
Part of Subin worries that Jun will get mad, but another part of him worries that Jun won’t care at all. He isn’t sure what would be worse.
Subin avoids Hyunwoo for most of the evening, is seated at the other end of the long table while they all eat, and it’s not until he goes outside to smoke between drinks orders that he is faced with the reality that they’re in the same place at the same time and the world is still spinning.
Hyunwoo appears as the door to the restaurant swings shut in a cloud of smoke and stench of booze and grilled meat, like he’s a mirage.
Subin is drunk, and he guesses Hyunwoo must be too, by the way his fingers fumble when he tries to light his cigarette.
“Why do you never text me back?” Hyunwoo blows smoke through pursed lips as they stand, a foot apart, outside of the bar. Subin hasn’t heard his voice in so long, and this is what he says. “Or call me?”
Subin tenses. “You didn’t call me.” He leans against the wall, his own cigarette finished, put out under his sneaker. “In the military, you never returned even one of my calls or messages.”
“You’re not in the military,” Hyunwoo says.
Subin shrugs. “You can pretend I am, if you want.”
Hyunwoo looks at him. “When are you getting discharged?” He asks. “If you’re in the military, when is your discharge date?”
“I don’t know. It’s an indefinite post,” Subin tells him. He looks the same as always. Subin doesn’t know when he stepped closer, but they’re not a foot apart now. “Maybe I’ll stay forever,” he says.
“Maybe.” Hyunwoo’s cigarette is down to a stub. Subin can smell it in the air, and right there on Hyunwoo’s breath when he breathes out. “But maybe not?”
And Subin knows the right thing to do is to shut him down, to ask him to stop the periodic messages, to delete his number like Jun sometimes asks him to. Subin wants to shut him down, he loves Jun and he wants Jun, but to close a door is one thing, to lock it and throw away the key is another thing entirely and Subin doesn’t know if he’ll ever have it in him to throw away the key.
“I don’t know.” Subin sighs and steps back. “How is Jihoon?” He asks, pointedly, and Hyunwoo doesn’t reply.
Take care of yourself, Subin messages him a few days later. Don't get sick because you’re too stubborn to take medicine. Be happy. See you next time.
I’ll try… Thank you, Subin. Hyunwoo replies and that feels more final than any argument or awkward rejection they’ve ever been through.
Subin makes Yeona go shopping with him before Christmas. He wants to buy Jun something special, he just isn’t sure what, or what he has enough money saved up for.
He settles on a watch, dithers when the store assistant asks if he’d like it engraved, and in the end he settles on taking it as it is.
Jun looks choked up when he opens the gift, emotional in a way Subin has never seen, or has previously ignored, and he wonders if maybe this is what it means to really love someone with no obstructions.
Theirs hasn’t been a linear story, and maybe it will never be, but every day feels more stable than the last. He feels more stable, less inclined to run away from feelings and difficult conversations, less inclined to try to drown them out with sex.
Subin used to think that if they were fucking, that Jun would know, surely, what he felt about him, even when he wasn’t totally sure what he felt at all. It’s illogical, he knows that, especially because the very first time they’d ever slept together he’d said Hyunwoo’s name.
Sex and love aren’t necessarily related, and Subin knows Jun had fucked many, many men before him, but it does feel like they’re one and the same when they do it, it does, and he makes sure to tell Jun as much when they’re lying together afterwards.
“I love this,” he says the next time. It must sound like an I love you, because Jun smiles at him softly, helps him pull his underwear back on and offers to cook him fried rice with grilled pork.
Subin lies in their bed, warm and loose-limbed for a while and then joins Jun in the kitchen. He wraps his arms around Jun’s back from behind and rests his forehead against his back, standing on his tiptoes to press a kiss to the faint bite mark on Jun’s shoulder, something he left behind a few nights ago.
Jun shakes him off, but only gently. “Go and shower,” he says, and Subin does.
When Subin comes back after showering, the food is ready and served up, laid out on the table for him.
Jun is already sitting down, waiting for him to eat, and Subin is almost certain he wouldn’t want things any other way.
That night, he doesn’t dream at all, or if he does, he doesn’t remember it, and when he wakes up to Jun’s toothpaste mouth, he pulls him down by his tie and makes him late for work, again.