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Riku wasn’t one to complain.
He was good at sucking it up and being the bigger person. He showed his parents a good face despite what they might’ve thought of his “lifestyle”. He didn’t moan and whine and groan about the typical high schooler woes. He’d never gotten into a stupid fight. His friends praised his maturity. They thought the praise meant something. Sure, Riku was mature, and he didn’t really complain, but that didn’t mean that he was devoid of any reservations.
Keeping them to himself was more difficult than anything else. The tattered wall behind the school knew just how difficult. It was there that he ended up one afternoon, just like all other afternoons.
Riku threw a stone—a chipped-off piece of a brick—at the wall and it fractured on impact, scraping yellow paint off and leaving a grey dent. Between his dusty fingers, a feeble stick of a cigar smoked in wisps.
“What did the wall ever do to you?” Daeyoung asked with a hint of amusement. Distantly, the noise of high school students dispersing gradually simmered as the afternoon crawled slowly on.
Daeyoung didn’t press for an answer, because Riku suspected that he wasn’t really paying attention anyway. He was more fixated on the cluster of wounds Riku had inflicted on the wall. Daeyoung’s eyes were unfocused as he swiped at the sheen of sweat trailing down his exposed neck, his uniform unbuttoned generously. It was a disastrous sight—it made Riku warm in the pit of his stomach, made him want to lay his hands on Daeyoung. Riku wrestled the impulse until suffocated.
Before he knew it, there was a rock in his palm and then it was flying at the wall. Crack-thud.
Daeyoung chuckled, his tongue swiping across the chapped dryness of his lips. Then he took a drag of the cigar Riku offered him, and held gazes through summer sun-touched lashes. Could he taste Riku there, where his mouth rested?
Another rock flew at the wall.
Crack-thud.
Daeyoung was still watching him when he blew smoke through his teeth.
Riku was observant, and with full attention.
He could be in a room of forty people and notice exactly who had just been brushed off in a conversation, who had a lot on their mind, who was looking for something to distract themselves with.
He could be in a room with Daeyoung, his eyes and ears lent to other things, like the endless chatter Yushi always seemed interested in—but still, his full attention would be directed to his periphery. That was where he kept Daeyoung: on the sidelines, in an act of self-preservation he could neither rationalize nor articulate.
Still, that didn’t mean Riku ignored the signs which blatantly announced the fact Daeyoung hadn’t eaten all day. There was a sandwich in Riku’s bag that he had forgotten about—the opportunity to give it away came when the volleyball team decided to take a break.
“Are you sure?” Daeyoung asked when Riku pushed the sandwich into his hand.
“Just eat.”
And Daeyoung did. Tossed him a smile, engulfed him in a half-hug that seemed to swallow Riku anyway. The game went and went, and Riku returned to the bleachers, to Yushi’s droning fixations and all the other distractions.
He didn’t listen to Yushi, not really. In his periphery, a familiar shape walked, ran, spoke, served the ball over the net, exclaimed, drank, breathed, lived—Riku’s breath caught in his throat.
“You’re beautiful, you know that?”
Riku didn’t know what to say. So he didn’t say anything. The bus rattled and the night subdued the city. The empty streets were nothing more, and the distant downtown lights were sleeplessly bright.
Riku chalked up Daeyoung’s rambling to the alcohol. It was a late night, an hour past midnight, and they had spent the last six hours at Chenle’s house gradually getting wasted. A swirling dizziness made the bus window seem more comfortable than usual, and the rattles through Riku’s skull kept him awake enough to listen to Daeyoung.
“So beautiful,” Daeyoung muttered, like an honest afterthought. Perhaps it was.
Riku left him on the bus (his stop came first), said bye, walked down the pavement and waited for the bus to pass him by.
Then he fell to the curb, against the grass of some stranger’s lawn. Blinking wearily up at the void of a sky above, he nursed the aching hope tangled in the mess of his lungs and heart—breath and blood—a beautiful thing misplaced. Why was this churning, breathing, living thing his to own? Why did it beg him for a name? Why did it flare at being called beautiful? Why did it know only Daeyoung’s name? Riku thought his ribs weren’t strong enough to contain this… nor were his hands steady enough to carry it in the open air.
He only went home when the wind turned colder, and then colder.
In bed, twisted in the sheets, he struggled to breathe.
“Do you wanna go out for a movie?” Riku asked. “It’ll be this weekend.”
Daeyoung pondered the question, teeth sinking into his bottom lip. Riku pointedly kept his eyes levelled at the front of the room, where their history teacher droned endlessly on (had been, for the past thirty minutes) about some tragic event that may or may not have altered the course of the world.
“Will it be just the two of us?” Daeyoung asked back.
“Yeah? I didn’t really think about inviting anyone else.”
“Dunno. I’m busy.”
“That’s fine.”
Riku already expected the answer. This wasn’t the first time either. Daeyoung didn’t like being alone with him when it meant something more—at least that was the conclusion Riku had come to. But it was also more than that: it was Daeyoung opening up to him some time ago about liking boys as well as girls, and that he was still figuring it out. It was Daeyoung having so much going on outside of school—maybe he didn’t have time for all of this. It was Daeyoung pushing and pulling, just like this, for all this time… calling him beautiful, keeping him within arm’s reach, kissing him in all the places his mouth had touched, watching him throw rocks at the wall, loving him in all the ways he couldn’t—
(Daeyoung waved a hand in his face and pretended he didn’t know what it meant when Riku grabbed it and entwined their fingers. Then his thumb moved back and forth over the skin of Riku’s hand.)
—and then tearing it all away with a refusal to look him in the eye, with the rejection of a few hours spent together.
Riku wished he could read Daeyoung’s mind when eventually he pulled his hand away.
Riku was understanding—but not to the point of stupidity.
He could only tolerate so much.
And his break came on a random Thursday.
Through the classroom chaos, he overheard a conversation. Chenle, with a piece of toast in his mouth, showing Daeyoung a video on his phone, breaking at least two academic policies but whatever: “I wanna see this movie so bad.”
“Oh, it’s not that good. Ask Sion, we watched it together and the guy was knocked out by the end.”
Riku looked not at Chenle, not even Daeyoung, but at Sion, standing shoulder to shoulder with Daeyoung as they leaned precariously against their desks. His mouth formed words around his charming smile—probably recounting the movie’s events to Chenle. Daeyoung laughed at something he said, his eyes turning into thin joy-creased lines.
The aching hope in Riku’s chest crashed against his ribs, and against his will it turned into something ugly.
Riku knew the distinction between envy and jealousy.
Envy was a little devil sitting on your shoulder pointing out all the things everyone else had that you didn’t. Jealousy was a triangle—when one person was scared of losing someone to another.
How he knew this was a long story.
Part of it might be that envy had always been a part of him, had always had room in his heart and permission to reside there. Riku didn’t think he was a terrible person to be envious… it made him honest, he thought. Honest to himself.
Envy was being a little boy with race cars for toys, but wanting the pretty pink things his cousins would get that he was too scared to ask for. Envy was having the misfortune of being Taeyong’s junior—none of them ever lived up to his achievements both in and out of academics, though they could certainly (enviously) try. Envy was being a witness to Lee Jeno and the little ways he let Huang Renjun take care of him.
Jeno was captain of the volleyball team, and so he always existed in Riku’s periphery beside Daeyoung. During practice, it was the gentle carry of his voice that steered the team in the right direction. There were times in actual games when Riku himself watched helplessly as Daeyoung psyched himself out in silence, and it was Jeno who picked him back up with a firm pat on the back and a few words.
Then there was Renjun, the quiet but bold presence of him, sometimes accompanied by Na Jaemin but most of the time alone on the bleachers. He would watch Jeno shamelessly, as if it was no sin to pay attention, and he would walk down during breaks to dab a towel at Jeno’s sweat. Everyone whispered and whispered and whispered about them, but not Riku. He only witnessed with envy, keeping to himself a memory of seeing the two walking down a deserted alley hand in hand, and in his envy he imagined himself in their place, and—
Jealousy took root.
Ever since the movie incident, Sion saturated Daeyoung’s life, or worse, Daeyoung saturated his life with Sion. There were signs of him everywhere, marks of him in the things Daeyoung did, mentions of his name in sacred spaces Riku thought belonged only to the two of them, but Riku wasn’t petty. He didn’t sacrifice his wits for the whims of his heart. This wasn’t Sion’s fault. The guy was damn fucking charming… and perfect too. There was Taeyong, there was Jeno, and then there was Sion. Hard-working, sincere, humble. Playful. Comfortable with expressing his affection around the boys.
Absolutely straight.
The guy had been sending flowers and love letters to a girl in an upper grade.
And for some reason, he was perfect for Daeyoung.
Seeing a movie, hanging out, talking and testing the border of flirting, touching and teasing and all of it—meant nothing when it came to Sion. He wouldn’t give the hand-holding a meaning. He wouldn’t take the words of affirmation to heart. If he gave Daeyoung a sandwich it was because he didn’t want to eat it, not because he wanted Daeyoung to.
The realization angered Riku at first, and then sobered him up, and by his lonesome he hung himself up to dry after being soaked in that acid vat of a truth. How was it that two people could give one person the same thing and still only one of them would be chosen? How was it that Riku’s crime was honesty and sincerity? How was it that this beautiful thing he nursed must be too much for Daeyoung to carry?
Daeyoung was scared, that’s all he was.
Riku loved him and Daeyoung was scared.
Reading week rolled around and with it came the unofficial opportunity to vacation.
Riku’s family drove all the way out to a quiet coastal town where there was no distant city centre to charge the air with an incessant rumble, no congested rush down the streets, and no familiar faces to remind Riku of what he felt—until the idyllic turned into boring, and boredom set his mind onto things more daunting than the book he was trying to get through.
Suddenly the vacation house, empty, and his bare room, quiet, became too strange. He found himself missing the days when Daeyoung would come over and they’d play games on his bed for hours and hours. A nap was a brief reprieve from the thought of Daeyoung, but when Riku woke up drenched in the late afternoon sun, the monster within his ribs had grown horns and fangs.
In a feeble attempt to escape it, he wandered the streets outside. The small town people looked at him curiously, like he was one of the white-headed gulls lounging by the pier turned into a boy. He walked and walked, slower and slower out of fear that the streets might end and he’d have to go back home—and then the wafting smell of fresh laundry suddenly tinged the air.
It smelled just like Daeyoung.
Riku followed the scent until he found a laundromat, built into the old bones of a well-loved lowrise.
Tired, he walked in with an odd feeling. He didn’t belong here, not at all. A misplaced boy in a well-placed town. There were rows of empty benches against the wall, and there he rested. The cold metal of his seat seeped through his pants, and it kept him awake enough to watch the humming machine in front of him tumble a load of laundry.
Riku closed his eyes and, emboldened by being alone, let the smell of fresh laundry engulf him. It did smell exactly like Daeyoung. Fresh linen that turned the air cool. It was kind to him, not too strong a fragrance, and though the a/c chilled the room it made him feel warm and comforted. The monster in his chest latched onto the feeling, feasting off it like always, growing and growing, until his breaths felt like he was exhaling fire, and heat prickled at his eyes.
Footsteps approached while unfamiliar streams of warm grief carved new creases onto the lines of Riku’s face.
“Can I help you?”
The question made Riku laugh. “Not at all.”
“You can only sit here if you’re doing laundry,” said the owner, probably, and with his eyes closed he gave her the face of a middle-aged woman. She walked away, muttering, “Big city folks. Stranger and stranger they get.”
Riku headed out with a sigh, and another, and another, breathing in the fresh laundry until he was expelling it out for the sea wind to take elsewhere—eventually, Daeyoung was gone, but Riku had already made peace with another truth.
At the beach, sand roughed up the soles of his feet, settling in the calluses between his toes. The ocean roared and crashed against the shore. Riku dragged his fingers through the sand and imagined the brief weight of them as Daeyoung’s hand—always falling through, always impermanent.
Yet, and here was that other truth:
Riku knew there was no escaping this.
The conclusion of finals season came on a random Tuesday. It was a strange feeling, having an entire year of life and all the little moments building up to it reach an anticlimactic conclusion involving walking out a random door for the last time. Riku didn’t care much though; after all, they still had one year left before they were really done with this high school business. Besides, it wasn’t really over yet. There were still two things every junior looked forward to at the end of the school year: the annual trip and the class dance.
Riku remembered actually being excited for those, but now he wasn’t sure.
He hadn’t really talked to anyone in a while, which was made easy by the fact that the days after reading week were just exam days that flew by, with rests in between. Slowly, Riku came to realize just how much of his relationships were tied to Daeyoung. Aside from Yushi, who had always been a distant friend since elementary, he met everyone else through Daeyoung. They hung out because Daeyoung got invited and always wanted Riku to tag along.
It wasn’t a point of ire, not really. Riku didn’t mind being a wallflower. It saved him a lot of energy and trouble. The problem was he missed Daeyoung. Missed him so damn much to the point of guilt. Was it normal to miss someone like this? Was it right for him to miss Daeyoung when he was the one who pulled away? Did he even have the right to miss him?
They still sat next to each other, still talked (but meaningless things too dull to linger in Riku’s mind), and they still saw each other where they usually did, but nothing was the same. Nothing felt the same. At some point, he also stopped coming to volleyball practice. It would have felt weird, so Riku stopped.
But that day was one of the last days of school… and he knew the volleyball team still held practices for the summer tournaments coming up.
Riku missed Daeyoung, wanted to stay away. Wanted to be by himself, wanted his hand to be held. Wanted to sit in silence, wanted to be called beautiful. Wanted to suffocate the monster in his heart, wanted to set it free. Riku wanted so many things, all of them contradictory, but they all made sense.
The one thing he didn’t want, though, was for all of this to lead him past a point of no return. He didn’t want to drift so far away that Daeyoung became a stranger.
So that day, after his last exam, he went to the wall behind the school and shattered rocks for courage.
Then, with his dusty hands in white-knuckled, pocketed fists, he went to the gym. The closer he approached, the louder the familiar noises became. The squeak of shoes and the echoing thud of the ball. The call-outs, a language only the team understood, confident and loud.
Just as Riku was about to step through the door, Renjun appeared out of nowhere to walk out. The older boy yelped at the sight of Riku, jolting his glasses askew.
“Sorry,” Riku apologized quickly.
“That’s alright,” Renjun adjusted his glasses, a breezy smile forming around his words. “It’s my bad, I swung the corner.”
Riku, not knowing what to say and conscious of how he was wasting Renjun’s time, stepped aside to make way. Renjun didn’t move though, occupying the space of the doorway with an easy air about him.
“Riku, right?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“It’s good that you’re back. Daeyoung’s been bummed since you stopped coming.” Then he was moving, walking past, trailing a light but sweet perfume after him, waving, “I’ll see you around!”
Riku breathed, breathed, breathed—and walked through the door scared. The team was taking a break, huddled together by the bleachers. It was Jeno who noticed him first, and soon Riku was walking into a chorus of greetings. Daeyoung instantly looked up at the sound of Riku’s name, and a smile (Riku might have recognized it as relieved) brightened his face.
“You came,” Daeyoung came bounding over, ushering him away from the team.
“Yeah. It’s been a minute.”
“We just finished.”
An awkward bout of silence stretched between them, and Daeyoung shifted in place with an unexplainable restlessness. This time, Riku didn’t offer relief from the discomfort—didn’t ask if Daeyoung wanted to take the bus home together, or grab some food before they went. This time, he dropped the discomfort on Daeyoung’s lap just to see what he decided to do with it.
“Are you coming?” Daeyoung asked, “To the trip?”
“I’m thinking about it. I already went to the sea during the break. Can’t imagine a lake being any different.”
“Right, right.” Again, the fidgeting.
“What is it?” Riku asked, growing annoyed at whatever it was Daeyoung was trying so hard to spit out.
“Nothing—just. You should come.”
That wasn’t really what he meant to say. Riku threw him the bone. “Do you want me to?”
Daeyoung took a deep breath, nodded. “Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“Do you mind waiting for me? We can take the bus home together.”
Riku ground dust between his fingers.
“Okay.”
And on the bus home, Daeyoung talked to him like nothing had changed. Riku, for his own sake, pretended like nothing had changed—but he ached with the desire to point out that nothing was the same. Nothing felt the same with Daeyoung anymore. It all hurt—the conversations, the touching, the falling back into place as if everything was fine. It was all painfully dishonest and Riku was far too aware of his own feelings.
It was suffocating and Riku didn’t know how much longer he could hold his breath.
The trip ended up being more fun than Riku expected.
They arrived in the morning, and Riku was roomed in a cabin with Daeyoung and Yushi, which was a pretty good balance of noise and quiet.
Yushi was Yushi. A white noise machine always talking or snacking. And if not both, then he was napping. Daeyoung was bright and alive. Nature excited him, and they were surrounded. He led a small entourage of their class up a mountain trail, and when they reached the summit, breaking through the thick woods, their two hours of sweat and mosquito bites were rewarded by the rushing fresh wind. The high noon kissed them warm and Riku soon felt rashes erupting on his skin.
“Here,” Daeyoung offered a small tube of something, fanning Riku with a fan he’d obviously nicked from his mother’s closet. “Cream for your rashes.”
Riku softened at the thought behind the action, though he kept his composure.
“Everyone’s planning to go to the bonfire tonight,” Daeyoung said.
“I wasn’t gonna go.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“Oh.”
Daeyoung waited for some of their classmates to pass by and wander away.
“So there’s this little dock on the lake with fairy lights. It lights up at night. But it’s pretty far away from the rest of the camp. I was thinking we could go.”
Riku tried not to read into it too much. Tried not to read Daeyoung’s face (he did) so he could tell that Daeyoung genuinely wanted him there. Would it be so bad, though? The heart wanted what it wanted—and it wanted. Oh, did Riku’s heart want.
So the sunset burned the rippling shimmer off the lake until ash-black night whispered over the forest and the camp, and dinner at the communal hall passed by like a cafeteria lunch affair.
Daeyoung spirited Riku away before anyone else could notice, and when they were far enough down the lake-bound trail, Daeyoung plucked a fragile kind of courage from the shadows and loosely entwined their fingers.
They happened upon the dock almost by accident. The trail ended abruptly and wooden planks stuck out and formed a platform above the lake. The old but sturdy wood soaked in the soft glow of the fairy lights strung across the posts. It looked like a starlit bridge half-built.
Daeyoung set the flashlight down, its beam shining feebly into the vast darkness of the lake, and sat on the dock edge with his feet dangling above the water. He pulled Riku down with him and when they settled, their weights pushed against each other. Arm to arm, shoulder to shoulder, body to body, side by side, two boys each nursing beautiful monsters within their ribs.
They listened to the water murmuring against the rocks on the shore.
“People are saying Jeno is taking Renjun to the senior dance,” Daeyoung said out of the blue.
Riku chuckled. “You came out here to gossip?”
“They’re gonna get so much shit for that.”
“So? That’s part of it.”
Daeyoung looked at him. “Of what?”
“Of boys loving boys.”
Riku feared for a second that he’d said something too shocking—but he swatted the fear away and called it irrational. He shouldn’t have to tiptoe around Daeyoung about this. Still, he worried, because Daeyoung was quiet, and he stayed quiet for a while.
Eventually, “Are you mad at me?”
Riku sighed without meaning to. “Not really.”
“Is it because of Sion?”
“I’m not mad at you.”
“Then what?”
In Riku’s chest, a roaring and raging wreaked havoc. Confusion blinded him. Frustration squeezed into his throat and made him want to throw up and gasp for air all at once. He decided, eventually, on the words he wanted to let go:
“What do you think of me?” he asked. “Do you think of me?”
Daeyoung blinked cluelessly at him. “Why are you—”
“Do you care what I think of you?”
“Yes, of course—”
“Do you care about me?”
“You’re one of my best friends.”
“Do you care when I get hurt?”
Daeyoung stared at him, but Riku watched the water. He continued, “Do you think of me even when I’m not there? Do you miss me, sometimes unreasonably? Do you want to take care of me? Does it hurt when I don’t talk to you, when you don’t see me? If you asked me all these questions, my answer would be yes. Without hesitation.”
Silence, silence, silence. Riku clutched the dock so hard that his hands started to lose feeling.
“I think my answer would be yes too.”
“You aren’t sure?”
“I’m scared.”
“I am too.”
“Will you go to the junior dance with me?”
Riku closed his eyes. Daeyoung’s head became a weight on his shoulder.
“Please,” Daeyoung whispered.
“Of course.”
Of course—I’ll go to the junior dance with you, I’ll hold your hand, I’ll understand you, I’ll stop trying to escape you, I’ll accept your fear, I’ll grow around it, I’ll wait for you, I’ll wait for you, I’ll wait for you. I love you.
Daeyoung had just earned his driver’s license.
Naturally, it was their understanding that Daeyoung would pick Riku up and they’d head to the junior dance together. Daeyoung: Do you mind that I’m driving my mom’s Honda CR-V? Riku laughed. It doesn’t matter, he said. Just come as you are.
Yet—
Riku had been sitting in the living room and it was thirty minutes past the time Daeyoung was supposed to pick him up. The junior dance had already started. The suit he was wearing suddenly felt stupid, but his pride stopped him from taking it off.
His phone buzzed, and he opened Yushi’s message. It was a blurry picture, but Riku could clearly see Daeyoung among the faces. He’s here, came the follow-up text.
And as much as Riku wanted to take the suit off, lock himself in his room, and cry himself to sleep… he decided he’d had enough. He’d had enough of caring too deeply and loving too hard and having to pay for it every single time.
He called a taxi, and in the backseat his chest felt empty. The monster was gone. The monster was in the rearview mirror. The monster was beating, bleeding, beautiful, scorned—
Riku scared himself with his own composure. He arrived at the venue, a hotel near the city limits, and found his way to the dance hall. Indigo and neon pink lights smeared the walls. Music blasted so loud that Riku’s ears started to hurt after just a few seconds of wading through the crowd. It wasn’t hard to find Daeyoung. In situations like that, he stuck close to the corners.
When they locked eyes, Daeyoung didn’t seem surprised to see him, and Riku felt his anger flare. He didn’t care how it looked when he grabbed Daeyoung by the wrist and dragged him away from his circle of friends, didn’t listen to Daeyoung’s protests, didn’t feel remorse for shoving him into the bathroom, didn’t mind the way the door slammed shut behind them.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” was all Riku could say, and sure he sounded abrasive, aggressive. Never in his life would he have spoken to Daeyoung this way, but now all he wanted was a fight. “Say something!”
Daeyoung paced across the room, eyes roaming, roaming, roaming.
“Look at me,” Riku said, surging forward and seizing Daeyoung by the collar. Daeyoung’s weight was hard to balance, and they swayed, they struggled. “Look at me! Do you see me? Do you even see me, Daeyoung? I feel so fucking stupid right now.”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t mean that. You can’t even say it with your whole chest.”
Daeyoung looked at him, and then away, and then paced, and then again, and again—
“What do you want?” Riku asked, and his throat burned from the ferocity of the question. “What do you want from me? Because I have nothing left to give and everything I did give, you’ve thrown back in my face. Sorry doesn’t cut it, not when I’ve fucked myself over a thousand times for you and I know—love is supposed to be selfless, that I’m not supposed to expect anything in return, but god damn… How easy is it for you to take all that I give you and then leave me in the dust? You think I didn’t know what you were doing with Sion? It made me jealous. That’s what you wanted, right? But are my feelings insignificant to you? You think it doesn’t hurt being played with? You think it doesn’t hurt like hell when you give me something to hope for? You think it’s fun being led on?”
“No it’s not—it’s not like that. No.”
“Then what? Because that’s exactly what it seems like to me.”
“I already told you. I already told you that I’m scared—”
“Then love me scared, for fuck’s sake, that’s what I’ve been doing all this time!” Daeyoung looked so small. So scared. But Riku couldn’t get rid of that fear for him. He could only do so much. “Say something.”
Daeyoung shook his head, turned around, put up a wall with his back.
“If you don’t do anything… I’m going to walk out that door and I’m never going to look at you again. You won’t exist to me, and I won’t exist to you.”
Riku watched his back a second longer. One last chance. “Daeyoung.”
Still, nothing.
“Fine.”
Riku burst out the door with a swiftness he could not yet regret, and with a thundering in his ears. He was going to go home. He was going to go home, take this suit off, and bury himself in the sheets. He would stay awake until sunrise and—
A desperate hand latched onto his shoulder with a force that made him turn around.
Daeyoung was crying, and his chest was heaving with unsteady breaths. He held Riku’s face in his hands and Riku instantly reached up to pull them away, but Daeyoung held firm. There were eyes on them, so many eyes.
“You don’t have to,” Riku said without thinking, the guilt having eaten him up in seconds at the sight of Daeyoung’s face. “You don’t have to.”
Yet Daeyoung kissed him anyway, his lips trembling along with his shuddering breaths, and then his weight, that familiar work of gravity Riku could recognize even with his eyes closed, became heavier and heavier against him, until Daeyoung broke off from the kiss and curled into the safety of Riku’s arms.
“Get me out of here,” Daeyoung murmured against his neck.
“We’re going to run, okay?”
Riku found Daeyoung’s hand. He held it tight. And then they ran.
The crowd around them, faces upon faces of strangers and strangers, parted like mist, and the neon-lit walls of the dance hall were soon behind them. Outside, the night was young and the air was hot.
Riku ran down the road, asphalt wearing away at the leather of his shoes. Then the road became a bridge. And the asphalt became steel. And the solid ground became a still river and its steady current. And the weight in his hand tugged and tugged and tugged until they came to a reeling stop.
Lungs burning, Riku crumpled against the bridge railing, barely holding his weight up against it. He looked down at the river and watched droplets of his sweat fall. Then he stared at their entwined hands, dangling over the water. Daeyoung’s breaths washed over the side of Riku’s face in cool waves. He was muttering something, but Riku didn’t understand.
“What?” he asked in between gasping breaths.
“I’ll love you scared,” Daeyoung said.
The world blurred—colors and shapes and lines that became feelings and dreams and aching hopes and the entropy of two people in love—a constant hurtling towards an unknown chaos—monsters living, breathing, bleeding in all their beauty—love—love—love.
Riku was scared, and Daeyoung loved him.