Archive of Our Own

Euijoo’s been… off. Not in the way people get when they’re sad or sick or breaking apart quietly in the corners of their lives. On paper, everything looks fine. Better than fine, actually. He laughs more. He hums while brushing his teeth. He sways a little when the kettle whistles, like there’s a song in his head no one else can hear. Sometimes he sings under his breath—love songs, mostly, the kind that make Nicholas’s chest tighten without knowing why. It’s supposed to be good. This is what people want for each other, right? Happiness. Light. Peace. But watching Euijoo glow like that makes Nicholas feel like someone tilted the world a few degrees without warning. The floor’s still there, sure—but walking feels strange.

It started about two weeks ago. One day Euijoo was just brighter. That’s the only way to describe it. There’s something almost literal about it, too, like light catches differently on him. Like there’s a bulb flickering behind his ribs, behind his teeth when he smiles. It’s unnerving in its own way, how easily joy reshapes a person. And it was infectious. Nicholas couldn’t help but feel it, that quiet warmth that came with being near him. Happiness leaking from Euijoo’s pores like sunlight through thin curtains. It was as though Nicholas had been tricked into seeing the world through Euijoo’s lens, and for a while, he didn’t mind the illusion. But illusions have edges. And lately, he’s been cutting his hands on them.

The first time Nicholas noticed it, Euijoo was getting ready to go out. Not unusual. But what was unusual was how carefully he did it. He spent a full half-hour choosing between shirts, applying cologne Nicholas had never seen him buy, smudging something golden at the corner of his eyes. He’d said he was meeting a friend. Nicholas didn’t ask which one. He didn’t want to. He only watched from the doorway, pretending not to notice the way Euijoo’s reflection smiled into the mirror. Since then, it’s been small things. The way Euijoo keeps checking his phone. The way he laughs at messages Nicholas doesn’t see. Nicholas tells himself it’s stupid to care. That it’s not about jealousy, or fear, or whatever fragile thing his heart is pretending not to feel. But the thought itches at him: if Euijoo’s happy, why does it feel like he lost something in the process?

It gnaws at him all evening, until it hits bone. By the time it reaches his tongue, Nicholas can’t keep it in anymore. The apartment is half-dark, lit only by the glow of the TV he’s not really watching. Past midnight, past the hour for pretending not to care. He’s still up, waiting for nothing—until the door opens and Euijoo stumbles in. Euijoo kicks off his shoes with the precision of someone who’s had a few drinks but not enough to forget how to function. He drops onto the couch next to Nicholas, the cushions groaning under his weight. His face is flushed, his smile too loose around the edges. Nicholas hates that he can’t tell whether it’s alcohol or affection painting that color across his cheeks.

“You’re home late,” Nicholas says, and it’s almost casual, except it isn’t. 

Euijoo hums into the couch pillow, voice muffled. “We went for dinner, a couple drinks, then a walk…”

Nicholas studies him in the flickering light, and it’s unfair how good Euijoo looks even when he’s rumpled and half-drunk. He’s glowing again, that same impossible brightness that makes Nicholas feel like a moth with bad instincts. The air smells faintly of new cologne and city wind. He shouldn’t ask. He tells himself that every night. And then he does it anyway. “You’ve been happy lately,” he says, aiming for offhand, landing somewhere around accusatory.

That gets Euijoo’s attention. His eyes flick up from the pillow—soft, brown, annoyingly sincere—and Nicholas wishes he’d stayed hidden. It’d be easier to talk to the back of his head than that face. Euijoo hesitates, then sighs. “Do you promise not to tell anyone?” he says, voice small in a way that makes Nicholas’s pulse trip over itself.

He doesn’t even know what’s coming, but he already hates it. “Of course.”

Euijoo lifts his head, rests his chin on the pillow like he’s settling in for something big, and his smile softens, turns secret. “Well,” he says slowly, and there’s that glow again, the kind that burns at the edges of things. “I’ve been seeing someone for a while now.”

Nicholas stares at him. There’s laughter somewhere in the background—some sitcom rerun he forgot to turn off—but it feels cruel now, tinny and out of place. He tries to say something, but the words don’t cooperate. His mouth’s working faster than his brain, which is still busy unraveling every late night, every smile, every unreturned question of the past few weeks. “Oh,” he says finally. It’s the most pathetic syllable, and it feels even worse when it’s his.

Euijoo watches him, and Nicholas can tell he’s waiting for some reaction—surprise, congratulations, maybe even curiosity—but all Nicholas can do is sit there, staring at the faint red in Euijoo’s cheeks and wondering how long it’s been there. Finally, Nicholas manages a small noise that might pass for a laugh. “Who’s the lucky one?”

Euijoo’s grin wobbles, just a little. “You don’t know him.”

Of course he doesn’t. Nicholas never does, not lately. He’s been watching Euijoo become someone new from the outside, and now here’s the reason, tidy and devastating.

Euijoo sprawls across the couch like a cat in sunlight, his glow spilling everywhere it doesn’t belong. “We’ve been seeing each other for, like, a month,” he says, the words slurring at the edges, heavy with warmth and alcohol and something Nicholas doesn’t have a name for. “We met at a set, and he gave me his number, and things are just… working out. He’s incredible. I really like him, Nico.”

The nickname slides off Euijoo’s tongue too easily, like a reflex. It shouldn’t hurt, but it does. It’s muscle memory, intimacy worn thin. Nicholas bites down on his tongue, hard enough to taste blood. It’s something to focus on. “Is that really a good idea?” he says finally, aiming for indifferent and hitting somewhere between bitter and cruel. “I mean—dating. Especially a guy, you know, considering…”

Euijoo’s smile falters, then disappears entirely, like someone pulled the plug on it. Nicholas instantly hates himself. 

“You think I haven’t thought about that?” Euijoo says, quiet but sharp. “It’s fine. I’ve got it under control.” He exhales, a thin, measured thing, and Nicholas knows he deserves whatever silence follows.

“Alright,” Nicholas says, because what else can he say? Of course Euijoo has it under control. He always does. Nicholas was just being mean. No excuse beyond that. The silence stretches out, long and uncomfortable. The TV hums faintly in the background, but even that sound feels too loud.

“I thought you’d be happy for me,” Euijoo says finally, sitting up. 

Nicholas swallows, throat dry. “I am,” he says. The lie tastes metallic.

Euijoo lets out a soft, disbelieving laugh, somewhere between a scoff and a sigh. “Yeah,” he says, “you really sound like it.”

Nicholas opens his mouth to say something—to fix it, to make it less awful—but Euijoo’s already leaning back, eyes half-lidded, the conversation closing like a door. He looks different now, softer but untouchable. Nicholas used to know what to do with him in these moments—how to pull a laugh out of him, how to turn tension into something easy. But now he just sits there, useless, his pulse thudding in his ears.

Euijoo glances at him again, and for a moment Nicholas thinks maybe he’ll say something more. Instead, Euijoo just smiles—small, polite, devastating. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, voice low. “You don’t have to pretend.”

And there it is. The clean cut. Nicholas wants to say he’s not pretending, that he’s just slow, that his happiness for Euijoo is buried under layers of something he can’t dig through fast enough. But he doesn’t. 

—

By morning, Nicholas has worked himself into a quiet kind of panic—the sort that doesn’t involve pacing or shouting or throwing things, but instead sitting very still and thinking too much. He’s had all night to spiral, to rerun every conversation, every look, every maybe that now feels laughably one-sided. And somewhere between the fifth and sixth hour of staring at the ceiling, he arrives at a conclusion that feels less like clarity and more like surrender: he’s supposed to be happy for Euijoo. Supposed to be.

That’s the rule, right? When someone you care about finds love, you smile and nod and pretend your insides aren’t doing origami. You clap them on the back, say I’m proud of you, and ignore the part of yourself that’s clawing at the walls. Even if it feels like a breakup you were never officially part of. Even if it feels like being cheated on without the decency of betrayal. Because there was never a relationship, not really—just that fragile, half-lit thing between them. The almosts. The unspoken, the too-long stares, the words that always hovered at the edge of I mean something more.

By midday, Nicholas has decided to play the role. He finds Euijoo in the kitchen, half-dressed and still glowing like someone in love, and tells himself this is what support looks like. He leans against the counter and says, too lightly, “So. Tell me about this guy.”

And Euijoo does. He talks easily, happily, like he’s been waiting for someone to ask. Nicholas listens like it’s his job, nodding at all the right times, smiling with his teeth. He asks the questions a friend would ask—what’s his name, how’d you meet, what does he do, where’s he from, how long have you been seeing each other? Each answer adds a new line to the portrait Nicholas is sketching in his head: the man he hates. The man he’s supposed to root for. Euijoo’s eyes go soft when he talks about him. His hands move when he describes the way the guy laughs, or cooks, or says stupid things that make him grin. Nicholas hates that too—how much animation there is in him now, how his whole body seems to orbit around a name Nicholas can’t even bring himself to repeat.

He keeps his tone light, teasing. “Wow, he sounds great,” he says, and even he can hear the crack in it. “Seems like your type. I’m really happy for you.” The words taste like glass, but he swallows them anyway. Smiles again, wider this time, like he means it.

And maybe Euijoo believes him. Maybe he doesn’t. Either way, he laughs and says something about how he knew Nicholas would understand, that he can always count on him to be supportive. Nicholas nods. He says something else—he’s not sure what. Probably another variation of I’m happy for you. It’s what people say when they’re trying not to bleed on the floor.

When Euijoo turns away to pour coffee, Nicholas studies the curve of his shoulders, the easy way he moves, the hum in his throat that’s been there for weeks. He looks whole. Like someone who’s finally settled into his own skin. Nicholas tells himself this is how it’s supposed to be. That love isn’t ownership, that affection doesn’t have to mean possession. He repeats it in his head like a mantra: You’re supposed to be happy for him. You’re supposed to let him go. Old crushes don’t have to die hard. 

By the time Euijoo leaves the room, Nicholas is smiling so hard his jaw aches. He sits at the table, staring into Euijoo’s half-empty mug, watching the thin ripple of steam twist and vanish. He should move on. He should learn to be the kind of person who celebrates someone else’s joy without wondering why it couldn’t have been his. He should learn to stop measuring his worth against whoever got lucky enough to love Euijoo correctly. But for now, he just sits there, tasting glass and pretending it’s coffee.

—

Nicholas plays the role of the supportive friend. He commits to it like it’s a part written specifically for him—smiles in the right places, laughs at the right stories, asks the right questions. He does it well, too. Convincingly enough that Euijoo doesn’t notice the strain beneath the surface, the way Nicholas’s hands keep curling into fists under the table, or the slight delay before he responds, like he’s buffering. It’s a strategy, really. Being supportive keeps him close. It’s the only thing that does anymore. There’s a kind of intimacy in being the confidant, even if it’s a pathetic one—like being allowed to look at a locked door from the threshold. They still share things. They still talk. Euijoo still texts him first sometimes. And that has to mean something, right? Even if the topic is him. The new guy. The guy Nicholas is supposed to like by association.

It’s funny, in a sick way, how love rearranges itself. Nicholas used to think they were on the same wavelength—half-joking, half-serious, perfectly balanced between affection and something dangerous. They had their rhythm. Their private language. The almosts. The might-have-beens. But now Euijoo’s secret isn’t Nicholas anymore. It’s this new guy—the one who paid on the first date and texted good morning after, the one who remembered Euijoo’s coffee order and probably thinks he invented kindness. The one who kissed him first, apparently. Sweetly. Carefully. Like a man auditioning for the role of forever. Nicholas would like to meet him, just to know what kind of face gets to see Euijoo like that.

Instead, he sits and listens while Euijoo gushes. Laughs at the right moments. Feigns curiosity. Builds a mental dossier on the guy he despises—height, voice, job, birthplace—like it’ll help him understand what Euijoo sees that he doesn’t. Every new detail feels like another thread tightening around his ribs. And God, there are things he wants to remind him of. Things that ache to be said. Remember who knows you better than anyone else? Who’s seen you at your absolute worst—hair matted with sweat, panic in your voice, hands shaking before a live broadcast? Remember who sat beside you in that terrible apartment overseas when neither of you spoke the language, both pretending not to be scared? Who learned the same foreign words just so you wouldn’t have to feel stupid alone? Who once told you—half-drunk, all truth—I’d choose you over anyone?

He wants to say it. He wants to grab Euijoo by the shoulders and shake him and shout You don’t get to give that part of yourself away. But he doesn’t. Because that’s not what supportive friends do. Instead, he bites down on it, swallows the words whole, and lets them rot quietly. He tries to handle it productively, whatever that means. He goes to the gym more. Runs until his lungs feel like punishment. Spends more time with Yuma, who doesn’t ask questions but knows enough to hand him a controller and let him shoot at digital strangers until his head empties out.

He tells himself he’s fine. He tells himself you don’t own him. He tells himself you’re adults now, this isn’t a movie. But then Euijoo texts, and the first word of every message is the guy’s name, and Nicholas feels the room tilt again. He’s trying not to be mean. Not to be jealous. Not to be the friend who starts arguments just to see if the other person will fight back. But every time Euijoo smiles, glowing in that infuriating, love-drunk way, Nicholas feels like he’s watching someone else wear his favorite shirt.

But maybe he’s playing his part too well. That’s the trouble with pretending—it starts to look like truth if you do it long enough. Not that being a good friend is supposed to be a performance, but it feels like one when you’ve spent years acting out a romance with no ending, only to find out the other lead has switched scenes without you. Now Nicholas feels like he’s stuck in a one-man show. The lights are still on, the stage is still warm, but the audience—Euijoo—is watching someone else.

It starts with a bottle of soju passed around at a restaurant. Then another. Then another, because the manager’s not around tonight. The restaurant’s loud—too bright, too warm, too full of people Nicholas loves. And when the night finally blurs to its inevitable, exhausted end, it’s just the two of them left. Nicholas and Euijoo, sitting cross-legged on the bed in some hotel room, passing a final bottle back and forth.  It feels—dangerously—normal. The kind of normal that used to mean something. Euijoo’s thigh is pressed against his, their knees touching. Nicholas can feel the heat from Euijoo’s skin radiating through the thin fabric of his jeans, and it’s unbearable how close they still are. A few months ago, a night like this would’ve gone somewhere stupid. Somewhere electric. Maybe a half-drunk confession, mumbled and slurred, the kind that would hang between them for days after. Maybe a kiss they’d both pretend didn’t happen. Or maybe just one of those silences that said everything they were too cowardly to admit. It could’ve been that kind of night again. It feels like that kind of night again—until Euijoo opens his mouth.

“I miss him,” he says. Soft, almost like an apology.

The words hit Nicholas like a slap. It’s not the words—it’s the ease. 

Euijoo tips the bottle toward his lips, smiling around it, pink-cheeked and a little too happy for someone confessing longing. “Did I tell you,” he goes on, voice lilting, careless in that dangerous drunk way, “that we hooked up?”

Nicholas doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. He just stares at the label on the bottle, watching the light catch on the glass. His throat goes tight, the air sharp and sour. Somewhere in his chest, something folds in on itself. “You didn’t,” he says.

Euijoo’s slurring now, somewhere between drunk and sentimental and something worse—something honest. “It just sort of—happened,” he says, blinking slowly, voice slipping through the cracks of his grin. “We didn’t plan it or anything. But we were at his place, and we were making out, and then we just—did it.” He waves a hand for emphasis, like doing it is something delicate and sacred. “And it was so romantic. Like, stupidly romantic. It was just perfect.” He drifts off with a little noise—half-sigh, half-squeal—and it’s the most alive Nicholas has seen him in weeks.

Nicholas stares at him for a beat too long, face blank, knuckles white against the bottle in his hand. There’s a sick clarity in the way his stomach twists. He thinks, I must like this. The pain. The self-inflicted wound. The ritual of sitting across from Euijoo and letting him talk about someone else like it’s poetry. Maybe that’s why he’s stayed in love for so long—because there’s a perverse comfort in the ache. It’s familiar. Predictable. A kind of masochism dressed as loyalty.

So, instead of shutting it down—of telling Euijoo to stop talking, or laughing it off, or getting up and leaving before he does something stupid—Nicholas leans into it. He digs the knife in himself. “What was it like?” he asks. “More details.”

Euijoo blinks at him, confused for half a second, then laughs—soft and bashful. “You’re such a pervert,” he says, grinning, like Nicholas just asked for gossip instead of torture. “But, um… it was nice. He was… gentle. Kind of shy at first. You’d think he’d be the confident type, but he’s not. He asked if I was okay every five seconds. And afterwards, we just lay there, talking, holding hands.”

Nicholas can feel his pulse in his teeth. Every beat is a knock against his jaw, a reminder that he’s still here, still awake, still stupid enough to sit through this. His mind does what it always does when it’s trying to punish him—it fills in the blanks. Euijoo in bed, skin flushed, the sheets twisted around his legs, his mouth open in that soft, startled way Nicholas has seen before—just never like that. He imagines someone else’s hands on him, tracing the same lines Nicholas has memorized from years of proximity. Imagines the rhythm, the weight, the way Euijoo might whisper a name that isn’t his. Sounds like he’s the romantic type, Nicholas thinks bitterly. He can practically hear the soundtrack—some slow, sentimental song playing in the background while Euijoo breathes out I missed you or God, you’re perfect or whatever people in love say when they don’t know they’re being watched by the ghosts of the people who loved them first. He imagines the scene so clearly it makes his stomach twist. The sheets. The light. The curve of Euijoo’s throat. His voice, soft and dizzy and real. His body—warm, pliant, wrapped around Nicholas, or maybe inside of him—

The thought comes before the filter. “What did you do?”

Euijoo blinks, bottle paused halfway to his lips. “What?”

“Like—were you giving or receiving?”

There’s a silence sharp enough to cut. Then Euijoo scoffs, a disbelieving laugh spilling out. “Seriously?”

“What?” Nicholas says, feigning confusion, as if this kind of interrogation is perfectly normal. “I’m just curious.”

And the way Euijoo smiles at him then—small, private, a little sad—makes him wish he hadn’t asked. Because it’s not just an answer being offered: it’s a piece of something Nicholas doesn’t deserve anymore. “Well,” Euijoo says again, eyes half-lidded. “He wanted to take care of me. So I let him.”

Something stirs hot and sour in Nicholas’s gut, like jealousy laced with gasoline. The kind of feeling that could burn through his ribs if he lets it. “Was it good?”

Euijoo blinks, just once, then looks away, his tongue darting over his lower lip like he’s buying himself time. His throat moves as he swallows. “Yeah,” he says finally, voice small, almost shy. “Yeah. It was… good. A bit weird at first, then—good.”

The word good lands like a stone in Nicholas’s stomach. He wants to know what good means. If it’s soft and slow, or wild and messy. If it was laughter, or moaning, or silence. If Euijoo had that look in his eyes—the one Nicholas has seen when he’s fully somewhere else, unguarded and real.

Nicholas takes the bottle from Euijoo’s hand, the brush of fingers too brief to count as touch, and drinks from it himself. The liquor burns, harsh and deserved. “Did you finish?” he asks, because apparently his self-control has a death wish.

Euijoo’s head jerks up, surprised. Then he laughs—quick, disbelieving, nervous. “What?”

“You heard me,” Nicholas says, pretending to study the bottle instead of Euijoo’s face. 

Euijoo’s cheeks flush. He rubs the back of his neck, grinning like he can’t tell if Nicholas is serious. “You’re such an idiot,” he says, but his voice is softer now, more careful.

Nicholas waits. He doesn’t laugh. So Euijoo gives in. “Yeah,” he says after a beat, voice dropping lower. “I did. Not at first, but later. From my hand, but, um—yeah.”

And that’s it. That’s the moment Nicholas feels something inside him tilt completely off-balance. Because now it’s too real. There’s a picture in his head he can’t unsee—Euijoo flushed and undone, hand between his legs, finishing for someone who isn’t him. The thought punches the air out of his lungs.

“From your hand,” he echoes, because his brain’s on autopilot and apparently the only way out is down.

Euijoo shoots him a look, somewhere between mortified and amused. “You’re insane,” he says, laughing now too, but there’s a nervous edge to it. “Why do you even want to know that?”

“I don’t,” Nicholas lies. It’s the most obvious lie he’s ever told. He leans back against the headboard, spinning the bottle between his fingers. “Just curious how romantic your perfect night was, that’s all.”

Euijoo shakes his head, still smiling, still oblivious to the way Nicholas’s chest feels like it’s caving in. “You’re such a freak,” he says affectionately, like it’s a private joke between them.

And maybe it is. Nicholas laughs, too. He has to. He laughs because if he doesn’t, he’ll say something unforgivable. Something like I’ve pictured you like that a thousand times, and it was never weird until now. Something like You used to tell me everything, but not this—not him—not the parts of you I thought I already owned.

He stares down at the bottle. “Guess it’s official then,” he says quietly. “You’re really in love.”

Euijoo’s smile falters for just a moment before it settles back in place. “Yeah,” he says, and it’s not even a question. “I think I am.”

The words hit like a knife that doesn’t go in all at once—just slowly, with pressure. Nicholas nods, pretending to understand. He knows he should get up, should end the night, should stop letting this spiral, but instead he just sits there. Watching Euijoo glow in the dim light. Watching him trace the rim of the bottle with his thumb like he’s daydreaming about someone else’s hands. He wonders what it says about him—that even now, even bleeding like this, he can’t bring himself to look away. That he’d rather sit here and be destroyed than go to bed and let the image fade.

The silence stretches, fragile and taut, until Euijoo finally sighs. “Are you mad?”

Nicholas blinks, still staring at the bottle. He can feel his own reflection trembling in the glass. His first instinct is to laugh, but it catches somewhere behind his teeth. “No,” he says finally, and it sounds wrong. “Of course not.”

Euijoo doesn’t even blink. “You know,” he says, in that careful, almost teasing tone that lands somewhere between affection and accusation, “I can tell when you’re lying.”

Nicholas huffs out a laugh that isn’t really a laugh. “Well, I’m not.”

It’s meant to sound final, but it doesn’t land that way. It just hangs there, flimsy and obvious, and Euijoo looks at him the way he always does when he’s already seen through him—patient, a little pitying, like he’s watching a child insist he’s not crying. Nicholas wants to say something cutting. Something to shut the whole thing down, to make Euijoo stop being so gentle about it. Gentleness is worse. Gentleness means he knows. Gentleness means Nicholas has lost whatever power he thought he had left.

Euijoo sits up, hair a little messy, eyes glassy, his voice low and frayed around the edges. “We should sleep,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “We’re gonna be so hungover tomorrow.”

Nicholas exhales through his teeth, drops backward onto the bed like gravity’s finally won. “Fuck my life,” he mutters into the ceiling.

Euijoo laughs softly, that same small, stupid laugh that Nicholas would bottle if he could. Then he gets up, collects the half-empty bottle from the floor, sets it on the desk, and disappears into the bathroom.

Nicholas closes his eyes. The world spins faintly behind his eyelids. His clothes stink of alcohol and sweat and something that feels like failure. He doesn’t bother changing. He never does. Euijoo’s used to it—the smell, the mess, the way Nicholas can’t bring himself to be polished the way everyone else seems to be. Euijoo’s never cared. Maybe that’s part of the problem. The light in the bathroom clicks off. Footsteps pad softly back across the room, then the weight of the mattress shifts—Euijoo sliding in beneath the sheets, his movements careful. The sound of the blanket rustling, the quiet sigh he always lets out when he’s finally still. The room goes dark. Nicholas stares at the ceiling. He can smell Euijoo’s shampoo, something clean and faintly floral. The air between them hums with leftover words neither of them knows how to say. It’s unbearable, this in-between—close enough to touch, miles apart anyway. He can feel sleep creeping up on him, slow and heavy. He’s on the edge of it when Euijoo’s voice cuts through the dark, quiet but clear enough to catch.

“You know,” he says, almost whispering. “You’re still my favorite person.”

Nicholas turns his face toward the wall so Euijoo won’t see whatever his expression’s doing. He wants to believe it. Wants to hold onto those words like they mean something, even though they don’t—not in the way he needs them to. He lets out a quiet breath. “Go to sleep,” he says. 

Euijoo hums in response, soft and content. Within minutes, his breathing evens out, slow and steady. Nicholas doesn’t move. He just lies there, staring into the dark, replaying the words again and again. He could reach out right now, and Euijoo would probably let him. He could press his hand to Euijoo’s back, feel the warmth of him, pretend for one more night that this is something shared. But he doesn’t. He lies still, fists curled in the sheets, like restraint might count for grace.

—

Maybe Nicholas overstepped. Maybe Euijoo was too drunk to remember. Maybe they’ve both decided to let the night rot quietly in the compost heap of mutual denial. Whatever the case, asking your best friend—the same best friend you’ve been inconveniently, relentlessly, embarrassingly in love with for years—if he came with his new boyfriend is not something you can play off as casual. It’s not banter. It’s not funny. Nicholas knows this. He knew he lost the moment he opened his mouth, but pride is a hell of a drug. He hates being uncool. Hates being the one fumbling, bleeding sincerity in a room full of people who seem perfectly fine. So here he sits: king of his own small, tragic kingdom. The throne is a folding chair in a dressing room that smells faintly of sweat, makeup remover, and instant noodles. His crown is a migraine. 

Taki is hanging off Yuma’s arm. “But it’s delicious,” he insists, clutching Yuma. 

“We had abura soba yesterday,” Yuma complains, which only makes Taki pout harder.

Across the room, Jo is slurping noodles. Kei is at the mirror, half his face wiped clean. Fuma and Maki are in a flex-off, comparing muscles. Harua sits in the corner, bathed in the glow of his phone. And Nicholas watches. Euijoo laughs at something Maki says, the sound bright and careless, the kind that slices through Nicholas’s carefully maintained detachment. It’s too easy to remember how that laugh used to belong to him—how it used to crack open the heavy parts of his day. Now it belongs to someone else. Maybe to the new boyfriend, maybe to the entire world except him.

“Alright,” Fuma claps once. “Dinner plans?”

“Curry place?” Harua murmurs without looking up. 

Taki’s head shoots up, eyes bright. “Oh—the one with the cheese katsu?”

“Sold,” Yuma says instantly. 

The room hums with lazy chatter. Chairs scrape, phones buzz, someone’s still chewing. It’s a small chaos that smells like comfort. Nicholas sits apart. His phone is lit in his hand, but the words on the screen blur. He scrolls anyway, thumb moving for the sake of motion. He already knows how the night will play out: the usual cars, the same jokes, the ritual complaints about traffic. They’ll eat too much, laugh too loud, forget for a few hours that anything hurts. And Euijoo will be there. Nicholas can already picture it—Euijoo’s smile, half-distracted, phone lighting up his face as he pretends not to care who’s texting him. That practiced, careless grin that lands like a blade between Nicholas’s ribs every single time.

Maki turns to him, tone easy. “You coming, Nichol?”

“Nah. Got stuff to do.”

“Stuff like what?”

Nicholas shrugs, gaze fixed somewhere vague—somewhere safe. “Just stuff.”

Maki’s grin returns, teasing. “Come on. You’re not ditching us again, are you?”

“I might.”

Euijoo’s smiling, smaller now, cautious at the edges. There’s something flickering behind his eyes, something Nicholas doesn’t want to name, disappointment, maybe. Or worse—understanding. Nicholas feels it like a bruise pressed too hard. He didn’t mean to spoil the mood, but maybe some petty part of him wanted to. Misery’s easier when it’s shared, and he’s tired of being the only one choking on it.

Fuma decides to catch the silence before it dies an ugly death on the table. “Curry okay with you, Euijoo?”

Euijoo hesitates, eyes dropping to his phone again. “I… don’t know yet. Might have plans.”

Nicholas doesn’t look up when he speaks. Maybe because if he does, he’ll think first—and lately, thinking just makes everything worse. So he says it without a glance, voice dry and sharp in all the wrong ways, “What, with your boyfriend?” 

There’s that fragile, suffocating stillness that comes right before something breaks. Nicholas feels the air thin out around them, the kind of silence that feels like punishment. He finally looks up, meeting everyone’s eyes but one. Euijoo’s eyes are fixed somewhere else, like the ground suddenly got very interesting. But Nicholas can still see it—the panic shimmering just under the surface, the sheen of something fragile cracking.

“That’s—no. Of course not,” Euijoo says, his voice splintering on the last word. He looks cornered, like Nicholas has just said the one thing he wasn’t supposed to, like he’s holding the gun and doesn’t even realize he pulled the trigger. Euijoo mutters something under his breath that no one catches, grabs his bag, and moves for the door with the kind of speed that only shame can fuel. And just like that, the room is smaller. Colder. Nicholas realizes, too late, that he’s done it again. Another unthinking jab, another line crossed. He didn’t even think about how it would sound, how it would land. Didn’t think that maybe Euijoo hadn’t told anyone. Didn’t think that maybe Euijoo still trusted him enough to believe he wouldn’t say something like that aloud.

The silence stretches again, only this time it’s heavier. Fuma pushes his chair back with a slow scrape that sounds too loud in the hollowed-out quiet. He stands, looking at Nicholas for a second—long enough for it to sting. There’s no anger in his face, just a kind of tired disappointment that feels worse.

“Alright, cheese katsu it is then,” Fuma says, voice level, almost kind, directed towards everyone except Nicholas. “We’ll meet in the car.”

It’s an offering, of sorts. A way out. A decision made for everyone so no one has to stand here and dissect what just happened. The others take it quickly, gratefully. They file out, and the door opens and closes, again and again, until the room empties itself of witnesses. But Fuma doesn’t leave. He lingers near the table, hands resting lightly against its edge, as if he’s considering whether to say something or let the silence do the work. Nicholas stays where he is, anchored by something he can’t quite name—pride, maybe, or the dull inertia of regret.

Fuma exhales softly, not quite a sigh, but close enough.“That wasn’t cool,” he says, stern, like he’s scolding a child. Nicholas has never been particularly fond of being treated like a kid. Now, he can't imagine anything more fitting.

He opens his mouth on instinct, chasing an apology that arrives several seconds too late to matter. Nothing comes out. What could he possibly say that wouldn't sound like another attempt to make himself feel better? Sorry is too small a word for something he has already allowed to grow teeth. Fuma waits for exactly long enough to make it clear that, if Nicholas had something worth saying, he would have listened. Then he gives the slightest nod, more to himself than to Nicholas, turns, and walks away. Nicholas is left standing in the fluorescent quiet, sick with guilt. He had spent so long convincing himself that what he felt was inevitable, unavoidable, maybe even romantic in its persistence. Standing here now, he can finally see it for what it has become: not love, not even hope, but an infatuation left unattended for too long, something that has curled inward on itself until it started to rot.

—

Nicholas is a bad dog. Not in the charming, forgivable way people laugh off, not the kind that chews up a shoe and then looks guilty enough to earn a pat anyway. He’s the kind that snaps when a hand comes too close, the kind that startles at his own reflection and bares his teeth at it. A nervous thing, all instinct and poor timing, all reaction and no restraint. The worst part is that he knows it. He can feel the moment before it happens—the tightening, the flare of something ugly and defensive—and still, he lets it happen. Like it’s easier to ruin something than risk it being taken.

Now it feels like he’s been shut out for it, left pacing somewhere just outside the warmth. No one has said anything outright, which somehow makes it worse. There’s no accusation to argue with, no sentence to serve. Just that subtle shift in the air when he walks into a room, the way conversations pause half a second too long before resuming, the way people look at him not with anger but with something softer and more distant. Pity, maybe. Or caution. The kind you reserve for things that might bite again if you forget yourself. They haven’t barred the door, not exactly, but no one’s holding it open either. He lingers at the threshold of everything, aware of how easily he put himself there.

Euijoo, though—Euijoo is worse than any of that, because Euijoo isn’t just distant. He’s gone in a way that feels deliberate. He just leaves earlier. Comes back later. After schedules, he slips into a different car with an ease that suggests this is the new arrangement, something already decided without needing to be discussed. During interviews, he stands just far enough away, positioned on the other side like it’s coincidence. At the dorm, he’s there less, present in traces—an unmade bed one morning, a charger left plugged in—but mostly absent, and Nicholas can’t help filling in the gaps with assumptions he doesn’t want to examine too closely.

Probably at his boyfriend’s place. The thought lands with a kind of bitter precision, sharp enough to feel deserved. It’s almost impressive, in a grim way, how thoroughly he’s managed to sabotage himself. If there was a plan—if some small, mean part of him had hoped to provoke, to force something into the open, to make Euijoo react—then it has backfired with perfect efficiency. Nicholas hates himself for it, which would be easier to endure if it felt contained, private. But it doesn’t. No one has said it, not directly, but the conclusion hangs there, obvious and unchallenged: what kind of person makes a comment like that? What kind of person says it like a joke and lets it land like a weapon?

Tonight, like most nights lately, Nicholas lies on his back with his phone held just above his face. Light from it pools faintly against the ceiling, a dim, flickering echo that makes the room feel less empty than it is. He tells himself he’s unwinding, that this is normal, that everyone wastes time like this at the end of the day, but there’s a difference between passing time and avoiding it, and he’s firmly on the wrong side of that line. He scrolls past something that might have been funny on another day. The dorm is quiet. He tells himself he doesn’t care that no one asked if he wanted to come along, that it’s better this way, that he wouldn’t have gone anyway. The excuses line up neatly, well-practiced and hollow.

When the door suddenly opens, Nicholas doesn’t look up immediately. Fuma steps in like he belongs there, crossing the room and sitting down on the edge of the bed with a familiarity that feels both comforting and intrusive. His knee knocks lightly into Nicholas’s.

“Hey,” he says, like they’ve had a dozen normal conversations already today and this is just the next one. “How’re you doing?”

Nicholas stares at his phone for a second longer than necessary, thumb hovering without moving. “I’m great,” he says finally, tone flat. “Living the dream. Thriving, actually.”

Fuma makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Nicholas,” he says. “Come on.”

Nicholas shifts on the bed. “What?” he says, already defensive, already bracing.

Fuma tilts his head a fraction, studying him with a look that isn’t unkind, just unavoidably clear. “You can’t stay in here like this,” he says. “Not forever. And you and Euijoo—this thing where you pretend the other one doesn’t exist? That’s not sustainable either.” There’s a brief pause. “You think being jealous makes you the victim,” he adds, and this time there’s an edge to it—not harsh, but firm enough to land exactly where it’s meant to. “It doesn’t. What you did was selfish.”

He stares at a point somewhere past Fuma’s shoulder, unfocused, as if refusing eye contact might dull the accuracy of what’s just been said. It doesn’t. If anything, it sharpens it, strips away any last room for misinterpretation. He wonders, not for the first time, how visible this has all been. Whether it’s been sitting on him this whole time, obvious in the way he looks at Euijoo, in the things he doesn’t say as much as the things he does. Whether everyone else has already drawn the same conclusion and simply chosen not to say it out loud. Whether Euijoo has.

Nicholas swallows, throat dry. “I didn’t mean to,” he says, and the words come out thinner than he intends. “I didn’t mean to just—out him like that.”

Fuma doesn’t flinch at the word. He doesn’t soften either. “Even if you didn’t mean to it’s still a really shitty thing to do. And it’s even shittier to pretend he doesn’t exist afterwards.”

Nicholas exhales. “I thought he didn’t want to see me,” he replies, a little quicker now, the defensiveness slipping back in out of habit more than conviction. “I mean, I’m giving him space. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

“You’re his best friend,” Fuma says, like it should be obvious. “Of course he wants to see you. He doesn’t want distance, Nicholas. He wants you to not make him feel like there’s something wrong with him for being in love. He wants you to be happy for him. Not… this.” Fuma gestures vaguely. “Whatever this is.”

Nicholas presses his teeth into his bottom lip, hard enough to feel the sting. “But I’m not,” he says, and there’s something almost startling about the honesty of it, how cleanly it cuts through everything else he’s been circling. “I’m not happy for him. Not about the boyfriend, anyway. I know that’s wrong. I know it is. But that’s how it feels.”

Fuma watches him for a moment. “Nico,” he says. “I’m going to say this, and you’re not going to like it.”

Nicholas lets out a faint, humorless breath. 

“This isn’t about you,” Fuma continues, undeterred. “Whatever you feel, that’s yours to deal with. It doesn’t get to dictate how you treat him. You don’t get to make him feel bad for moving on just because you’re still… wherever you are with it.” There’s a slight pause, just enough to let that settle before he adds, more pointedly, “You can’t have both. You can’t keep things undefined for years and then be upset when he decides he’s sick of waiting for something that might not even exist.”

Nicholas looks down at his hands now, fingers loosely curled against the fabric of his shirt, as if they might offer some kind of answer. They just sit there, familiar and useless. “I didn’t think—” he starts, then stops. “I didn’t think it was like that.”

“Then what did you think it was?”

“I thought…” he begins slowly. “I thought it was obvious.” The moment he says it, he hears how insufficient it sounds. Obvious is not the same as real. Obvious is not the same as agreed upon.

“To you.”

Nicholas lets out a quiet breath, something in him sinking a fraction lower. “Yeah,” he admits.

After a moment, Fuma shifts slightly.  “So here’s where you’re at,” he says. “You either be honest about it and accept whatever that leads to. Or you decide that you care about him enough to step back from what you want and be happy for him anyway.”

Nicholas’s throat tightens again, sharper this time. “And if I can’t do either?” 

Fuma’s gaze doesn’t waver. “Then you figure it out,” he says simply. “Because right now, you’re hurting him either way.”

That lands. Nicholas exhales, long and low, his head tipping back against the pillow as he stares up at the ceiling again. The cracks in the paint look the same as they did before, but they don’t feel as easy to hide behind.

—

Nicholas lets the days stretch longer than they should, lets them thin out and blur at the edges, as if time itself might make the decision for him. It doesn’t. The obvious thing would have been to go to Euijoo the moment Fuma’s words landed, still warm, still echoing, and say it plainly. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I want to be better. It is, in theory, a simple sequence of sounds. In practice, it feels like stepping barefoot onto something sharp and deciding not to pull away. So he waits. He rehearses invisible conversations that never leave his head. He dissects feelings as if they are problems to be solved rather than endured. But what is there, really, to analyze? Whether he can unlearn the particular gravity that pulls him toward Euijoo? Whether he can take something stubborn and bright and long-lived inside him and quietly set it down somewhere, like it never mattered?

A week passes in this way. Or something like a week. They orbit each other without contact, until, inevitably, the smallness of the dorm intervenes. Nicholas is in the kitchen for something trivial, a reason to stand somewhere that isn’t his room. The light is too bright for the hour.  Suddenly Euijoo is there, down the hallway, half-turned, tying his shoes. His hair is styled, and there’s makeup, catching the light in ways that feel unfair. He looks—there isn’t a better word for it—beautiful. It hits Nicholas all at once, sharp and familiar: the ache, the admiration, the guilt braided so tightly together they are indistinguishable. Euijoo doesn’t look at him. Shoes on, door open, gone. No hesitation. No acknowledgment. A clean exit.

Nicholas stands there a moment too long, yogurt forgotten in his hand, as if something might rewind if he waits. He moves to the kitchen window and tells himself he just wants to know. As if knowledge will grant him some kind of control, or closure, or even just a narrative he can live with. Outside, the night is dark, streetlights carving out small circles of amber light. Euijoo steps into one of them, briefly illuminated, and Nicholas feels that same pull again—ridiculous, persistent, uninvited. A car waits at the curb, and beside it, someone. They don’t kiss. Of course they don’t. Euijoo is careful, always has been, aware of eyes even when he pretends not to be. They settle for a hug, brief but close enough to suggest familiarity, comfort, something loving.

Nicholas watches, and something sharp inside him rearranges itself into something sharper still. The man is—ordinary. Painfully so. There’s nothing striking about him, nothing that demands attention. If Nicholas is unkind, which he is these days, he would say the man is forgettable. The kind of face you pass on the street and immediately lose. No particular brilliance, no edge, no gravity. And yet. He's there. He’s the one Euijoo walks toward without hesitation, the one who gets the pretty smile in return, the one who belongs, however quietly, in this small, illuminated moment. Nicholas lingers at the window longer than he needs to, long after the car door closes, long after the engine hum becomes distant, long after there is nothing left to see.

—

They’re in Osaka for a concert, which already feels like a bad backdrop for anything fragile—too much noise, too many expectations, too little room for things that require care. Euijoo is probably exhausted, worn thin in that quiet way he gets when he’s pushed past his limit, and Nicholas knows this. He knows it, and still he’s here, because waiting feels worse, because silence has started to rot into something unbearable. Because the idea that Euijoo might think he hates him—that’s the one thing Nicholas can’t sit with. So here he is anyway. Fuma had texted him earlier, brief, almost pointed. Said he’d be out for dinner, said Euijoo was still in the room. It felt like a door being held open just long enough for Nicholas to decide whether he was brave or just reckless. Maybe both. Probably neither in the right proportions. Ambushing him like this isn’t fair. None of this has been fair.

Nicholas stands outside the hotel door longer than he should, long enough for doubt to start sounding reasonable. Every instinct in him lines up neatly against this decision. You’re going to make it worse. You already have. Leave him alone. Let him breathe. But then there’s the other voice—quieter, but stubborn. If you leave now, you’ll leave it like this. If you don’t say it now, you won’t say it right.

He knocks before he can change his mind. The door opens almost immediately, like Euijoo had been close by, like maybe he’d been expecting something. He looks the same, which somehow makes it worse. Bare-faced, skin still faintly dewy from moisturizer, hair slightly mussed, like he’d just run his hands through it too many times. But there’s no softness in his expression. No warmth. Just something guarded, something tired, something that doesn’t reach Nicholas anymore. For a second, Nicholas forgets how to move. He just stands there, caught mid-breath.

“So you can finally stomach seeing me?” Euijoo says. It’s not mean, but the bitterness lands cleanly anyway. And he still steps aside.

“What?” Nicholas manages, which is not the right response, not even close, but it’s all that gets past the tightness in his throat.

Euijoo drags a hand down his face, eyes dropping to the floor. “Sorry. Fuck. I just—” he shakes his head. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

Nicholas nods, because that at least is something he understands. “Okay,” he says. “That’s… okay. Because I have a lot to say to you.” He moves without thinking, circling the bed. He ends up in the chair by the desk, sitting too straight, hands clasped. “I want to say sorry,” he starts, and it sounds insufficient the moment it exists. Too small for the damage it’s supposed to cover. “I’m really sorry for… exposing you like that. It wasn’t my business. It wasn’t mine to tell. I didn’t mean to… it just sort of—happened.”

Euijoo sits on the bed across from him, the mattress dipping slightly under his weight. He’s watching Nicholas now, and there’s something sharper in his gaze than before. Not anger exactly—anger would almost be easier. “It just sort of happened?” Euijoo repeats. “It wasn’t supposed to ever happen. I would have told them in my own time. Maybe.” He lets out a small, humorless breath. “If I decided I wanted to. But you just took that from me because you… just happened to.”

Nicholas presses his hands together harder, as if he can compress the chaos inside him into something small enough to survive. “I know. I’m sorry. I know it’s not small—it’s not something you just say and take back—but I was tired. And I was… annoyed at you. You kept choosing him, or that’s how it felt to me, over and over, and I let myself believe I was owed something for that. And then it just… slipped. The moment it left my mouth, I knew exactly what I’d done. That it was not just wrong, but cruel. Pointlessly, deliberately cruel.”

Euijoo exhales. “I appreciate that you’re trying,” he says. “But you should really think about what that sounds like from where I’m sitting.”

Nicholas doesn’t interrupt. He has the sense that interruption would be a kind of theft too.

“You were tired,” Euijoo continues. “You were irritated. You felt… left out, maybe. And because of that, you exposed something I’ve been carrying for years. Something I’ve spent a long time trying to understand, and a longer time trying not to hate myself for,” he says. “I kept it away from the team because I didn’t want it to change how they see me, or worse, give them a reason to. And then you just… decided that didn’t matter. That my timing didn’t matter. That I didn’t matter. You already hate me. I can deal with that. I didn’t need everyone else joining in.”

Nicholas frowns. “They don’t hate you,” he says, too quickly. “They wouldn’t. Not for this. Not for something that… that doesn’t even—”

“Well, I didn’t know that,” Euijoo cuts in. “That’s the point. I didn’t know what they’d think, because I never gave them the chance to think anything at all. That was my choice. And you took it.” He looks at Nicholas then, properly, not avoiding him, not softening. “And I didn’t think you’d ever hate me for it either. I thought if there was one person who wouldn’t make it into a problem, it’d be you. I thought you’d understand. Or at least try to. But then I tell you,” Euijoo goes on, “and you—apparently don’t.”

“What? No, that’s not—” Nicholas shakes his head, words tripping over each other as they try to form something coherent. “I don’t hate you. I don’t. And if you like guys, that’s—there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t have an issue with it, I never—”

Euijoo doesn’t cry, but the restraint it takes not to is obvious. “You don’t have to lie to make this easier,” he says, not unkindly, which somehow makes it worse. “I know what you look like when you’re being genuine, and I know what you look like when you’re performing. You’ve been saying all the right things—He seems great, When do I get to meet him?—and meanwhile you look like you’re disgusted just saying the words. You can’t even hide it.”

Nicholas blinks, caught off guard. He hadn’t realized—hadn’t even considered—that what he felt might be visible in that way, that it could be mistaken, or maybe not mistaken at all but misnamed. “That’s not it,” he says. “You think I’m disgusted by you? Seriously? Euijoo, I’m in—”

He stops. The sentence hangs there, unfinished, as if completing it would require stepping into something irreversible. His throat tightens, the air suddenly insufficient, and for a fleeting second he wonders if honesty is supposed to feel like this—like there’s no ground under your feet, like the only way forward is down. It would be easier to pivot, to soften the edges, to retreat into something vague and survivable. Instead, he lingers in that precarious space, buying himself a second he doesn’t really have.

“I didn’t mean to be such an asshole,” he says finally. “I just—” he exhales sharply, the rest of it pressing against his ribs with nowhere to go. “I can’t stand it. I thought you knew.”

“Knew what, exactly?”

Nicholas hesitates. “That it was you,” he says. “That it’s always been you. I thought you knew. I didn’t think I had to spell it out. I thought the way I— the way I was with you…” There’s a beat of silence that stretches, not empty but crowded with everything neither of them has said properly before. “I can’t undo what I did. I’m not going to insult you by pretending I can. But I can be very, very clear about this: I don’t hate you. I’m not disgusted by you. If anything, I—” he huffs a quiet, self-deprecating breath. “If anything, I’ve been making a complete idiot of myself over you for longer than I’d like to admit.”

Euijoo worries at his bottom lip. It draws Nicholas’s attention in a way that feels both automatic and deeply inconvenient, because there is something unfair about how beautiful Euijoo looks when he’s thinking too hard, when he’s trying to keep himself composed. It’s the kind of detail Nicholas wishes he could unlearn, file away somewhere inaccessible, but it stays, stubborn and vivid, like everything else about him. 

“You’ve never wanted me back,” he says, his voice quiet. “Or—not really. Not in any way that lasted. Sometimes I thought you might. There were moments where it felt like you were right there, like all I had to do was reach out and you’d meet me halfway, and then you’d pull back again. And it’s been like that for years, Nicholas. Years of almost, and then not.” Euijoo exhales, the breath uneven. “But the second I actually try to move on, the second I stop waiting around for you to figure yourself out, you lose it. You hover, you watch me like I’m doing something wrong just by being with someone else. You ask questions you don’t have the right to ask, about things that don’t concern you, and—” he cuts himself off, shaking his head. “It’s so strange,” he finishes.

Nicholas exhales slowly, pressing his tongue against the inside of his cheek. “I’ve liked you for years,” he says, and even that feels like an understatement so severe it borders on dishonesty, but it’s the closest he can get without his voice giving out entirely. “And I think—I think part of me believed I had time. That I could take as long as I needed to stop being afraid of it, of what it would mean, of what it would change, and you’d just… still be there. Like you were constant in a way nothing else was. It was selfish. I can see that now, pretty clearly, actually. I treated you like something inevitable, like I didn’t have to choose you because you’d already chosen me, over and over again. And then you met him, and it wasn’t like you did anything wrong, you just—moved forward. It sounds ridiculous, but it felt like a breakup. Like something ended that I never even had the courage to properly start. And I didn’t know what to do with that, so I did exactly the wrong things instead. I got jealous, and I got ugly about it, and I made it your problem.”

Euijoo shakes his head, but it isn’t dismissive, not entirely. There’s something fragile there, something caught between wanting to believe him and not trusting himself enough to. Nicholas notices the slight tremor in his bottom lip. “Do you?” Euijoo asks.

“What?” 

“Like me?” Euijoo nearly whispers.

Nicholas swallows, sharp and uncomfortable, his throat too tight. There’s a brief, flickering instinct to deflect again, to soften this into something safer, something that leaves him room to retreat if it goes badly, but that instinct feels tired now, overused to the point of uselessness. If he does that again, he already knows how this ends. It ends the same way it always has—with Euijoo stepping back and Nicholas convincing himself it was unavoidable.

“Euijoo,” he says, and his voice shakes in a way that’s impossible to hide, “I’m in love with you. I have been for a long time, longer than I’ve been willing to admit even to myself. And this—” he gestures vaguely.  “This has only made it louder. Worse, in a way, because now I can’t pretend it’s just going to wait for me to catch up.”

Nicholas drops his gaze to the floor. When he finally looks up, it’s reluctantly. Euijoo has leaned back against the headboard, his head tipped upward, eyes fixed on the ceiling. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything, then, finally, “How can you do this to me? Now, that I’m finally starting to get over you? My boyfriend—he’s kind. He takes good care of me, and he doesn’t make me feel like I’m asking for too much just by existing the way I do. And you—” Euijoo’s voice shifts, louder, not harsher. “You’re unpredictable. You’re intense in a way that feels like it should mean something, except it never quite resolves into anything I can rely on. You disappear when it matters and then reappear like nothing happened. You kiss me in dark hotel rooms like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like there’s no question about it, like we both understand exactly what it means—and then you walk out into the light and act like it didn’t happen at all. And still,” he breathes, voice thinner now, stretched at the edges, “you’re the one I want.” A pause, sharp and exposed. “And I feel completely pathetic for it.”

Something in Nicholas snaps. He pushes up from the chair so abruptly it scrapes against the floor, the sound harsh in the quiet, and for a second he just stands there. “Don’t,” he says, too quickly, too intensely. “Don’t say that. You’re not—there’s nothing pathetic about that, not when it’s me. If anything, that’s my fault, not yours.”

Euijoo lets out a quiet, disbelieving breath, not looking at him. “You’re not making a great case for yourself,” he mutters.

“I know,” Nicholas says immediately, almost breathless with it, stepping closer without fully realizing he’s doing it. “I know I’m not. I’ve been doing the opposite of that all night, apparently. But that doesn’t make it untrue.”

Euijoo finally turns his head, his gaze landing on Nicholas with something tired and wary in it. “And what exactly is it?”

“That I like you,” he says, then immediately shakes his head. “No—that I’ve liked you for a while. That I—” he stops, swallows, but there’s no backing out now. “I didn’t realize how bad it was until you started dating him. At first I thought I was just… off. Irritated for no reason, getting annoyed at things that didn’t actually matter. And then you kept talking about him, and I kept pretending I was fine with it, and I was awful at it, apparently, but I thought if I said the right things, it would count. Every time you mentioned him, I felt like I was being edged out of something I didn’t even realize I was trying to hold onto. And instead of dealing with that like a normal person, I just—let it turn into something ugly.”

Euijoo’s jaw tightens slightly, but he doesn’t interrupt.

“I wasn’t disgusted,” Nicholas says again, more firmly, stepping closer, closing the space between them. “I was jealous. Stupidly, embarrassingly jealous. Of him, of the time he got with you, of the way you looked when you talked about him. I hated that I wasn’t the one making you look like that. And yeah,” Nicholas continues, quieter now, but steadier for it, “I handled it badly. I said something I can’t take back, and I hurt you in a way I didn’t have the right to. But don’t stand there and call yourself pathetic for wanting me when I… when I love you.”

The room stills completely. Euijoo’s eyes widen, just a fraction, like he hadn’t expected that. “You don’t just get to say that,” he says, though his voice has lost some of its earlier sharpness. “You don’t get to drop that in the middle of everything else and expect it to—what, fix it? You hurt me.”

“I know,” Nicholas replies immediately, his voice dropping to match it. “I know, and I hate that I did that. I hate that this is the version of me you got when it mattered. I just needed you to know that if I looked at you like that, it wasn’t because I thought you were disgusting. It’s because I wanted you so much I didn’t know where to put it.”

Euijoo’s gaze flickers, something raw breaking through the restraint. For a second, it looks like he might step back, put distance between them again, retreat into something safer. Instead, he closes the space in two quick steps, his hand catching Nicholas’s shirt, pulling him forward before either of them can reconsider. The kiss collides more than it lands, off-center and unsteady, all tension and unfinished thoughts. Nicholas freezes for the briefest second, stunned by the impact of it, and then he’s there, fully, his hand coming up to Euijoo’s wrist, the other finding his shoulder, holding on like this might disappear if he doesn’t.

What surprises him more than the kiss, more than Euijoo’s failure to shove him away and call him the idiot he deserves to be called, is the hunger in it, as though Euijoo’s been starving in plain sight and Nicholas has only just noticed. Euijoo’s hands find the hem of Nicholas’s shirt and drag it up and over his head. Then Euijoo is there again, mouth against his mouth, tongue grazing his lips, and Nicholas doesn’t hesitate—he opens for him at once, before he can think better of it, before caution has the chance to remind him how catastrophically wrong this is.

They fall onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and breath, and Nicholas climbs over Euijoo before he manages to get both of them off desperately, just rutting against each other. His mouth travels to Euijoo’s jaw, then lower, the skin beneath his ear. He catches Euijoo’s wrist against the sheets and threads their fingers together, holding on with a force that isn’t quite rough and not quite gentle either. For one brief, treacherous second, he thinks of Euijoo’s boyfriend. Lucky bastard, he thinks, with a resentment that surprises even himself. Lucky enough to have had this, and somehow foolish enough to not get Euijoo off properly. The thought is mean, and Nicholas knows it’s mean, which is perhaps why it lingers. He should feel guilty. Instead, he feels almost amused.

“Let me take care of you,” he murmurs against Euijoo’s skin, and Euijoo answers with the smallest, most unstable breath.

 Nicholas lets a smile ghost across his mouth before he lowers it to the curve of Euijoo’s neck and bites down just hard enough to leave the faint imprint of teeth. He’s still waiting for the inevitable retaliation, for the sharp shove, the curse, the clean and deserved punch to his ribs, because every instinct he has insists that this is the point where Euijoo should remember better judgment and throw him out of his life, or at least off the bed. Instead, Euijoo only catches at his arms with shaking fingers, nails biting in. He draws Euijoo’s shirt up and over his head, slowly, and the sight of him steals the air out of Nicholas’s chest all the same. He keeps his hands moving, keeps his mouth busy, keeps the feeling of Euijoo close enough to make thought difficult.

He kisses a path down the line of Euijoo’s neck, then lets his mouth travel lower over the sternum, across the flat plane of his stomach. Euijoo exhales again, uneven and soft, and Nicholas feels that sound in him like a hand closing around his pulse. Nicholas moves with quiet urge, fingers working the button of Euijoo’s jeans open before sliding his hands beneath the waistband. The fabric gives way easily, peeling down over slim hips in one smooth motion. He looks up first to meet Euijoo’s gaze. His eyes are wide, darkened with desire but still soft at edges. So Nicholas tugs lower and frees him completely, Euijoo's cock springing against his stomach. He closes his hand around Euijoo’s cock and leans in, his nose brushing along the vein running down the underside. Euijoo makes a sound—not quite pain but something close, strained, almost pained. His hips jerks once, a tiny involuntary twitch upward. 

Nicholas presses his lips together, voice dripping with faux innocence. “What do you want?”  

"Come on," Euijoo mutters—half plea, half complaint—and tries to nudge his hips forward.

Instead of giving in, Nicholas just presses the curve of his cheek along the length of Euijoo’s cock, like a cat nuzzling someone before biting for fun. "No." A single word laced with mock sternness. "Tell me."

Euijoo grits teeth before caving completely, voice dropping into something small and breathless. “God,” he gasps, voice hoarse. “I wanna fuck you, Nichol. Can I? Please?”

Nicholas’s laugh is low and quiet, more breath than sound. There’s nothing soft in it. Nothing sweet. He straightens up, crawls over Euijoo until he’s straddling his hips, until they’re chest to chest. “Yeah,” he says against Euijoo’s mouth, his voice all air and want. “You can.”

Nicholas reaches for the lube he knows Euijoo keeps in his bag. Something he admitted once while drunk, and though Nicholas remembers nothing of that evening, he remembers that little fact like it’s been carved into him. He slips out of his own clothes, and Euijoo looks like he’s already halfway gone—flat on his back, mouth parted, eyes drinking him in like he can’t believe his luck. His hands find Nicholas’s waist automatically, fingers pressing into the soft skin there like he’s grounding himself. Nicholas  shivers at the contact but doesn’t let him go further—not yet.

“I got it,” he says quietly, and Euijoo doesn’t argue. Just watches.

Nicholas slicks up his fingers, then reaches behind himself, jaw clenched as he works one in. He rocks back onto his hand, brows furrowed in concentration, lip caught between his teeth to muffle the sounds that want to slip out. His breath stutters as he adds a second finger, his spine arching just slightly. 

Euijoo groans, eyes dark, his grip tightening at Nicholas’s hips like he’s fighting the urge to take over. But he doesn’t. He stays right there, palms hot and steady, watching with the kind of desperate awe that makes Nicholas’s stomach flip. “You’re so beautiful,” Euijoo says, voice barely more than a whisper. 

Nicholas huffs a shaky laugh, not knowing how to respond to that. 

Euijoo makes a sound like he’s being tortured. “Fuck, Nico, you’re driving me insane,” he says. “I need to be inside you.”

Nicholas finally lifts his gaze fully, locks eyes with him, and pulls his fingers out slowly, his body twitching at the loss. He reaches for Euijoo’s cock and strokes it once, twice, slicking it up without breaking eye contact. He lifts his hips, lining himself up, and pauses—not for balance, not for nerves. For effect. For power. The head of Euijoo’s cock nudges against his rim, hot and blunt, and Euijoo’s lips part with a soft, strangled sound. Nicholas sinks down slowly. Euijoo’s brows knit together and his fingers twitch at Nicholas’s hips, caught between wanting to clutch and knowing better. By the time Nicholas bottoms out, the tension in Euijoo’s face is something close to ruin.

Nicholas angles his hips carefully, experimentally, and then the head of Euijoo’s cock brushes up hard against that spot, the one that turns all his nerves inside out. His breath leaves him in a low, shaking exhale. “God,” he breathes. 

Euijoo makes a desperate noise in return, hips bucking just slightly, hands pressing into Nicholas’s waist now, trying to urge him into motion. “You’re so fucking tight,” he whines, helpless. “I don’t think I’m gonna last long.”

“Yeah,” Nicholas breathes, biting down on a smile he doesn’t bother to hide. “You’re not.”

He starts slow, testing the angle, rocking his hips forward and back in fluid movements. He’s still got some grace left in him—his spine arches, thighs working with precision, his rhythm unhurried. But it doesn’t last. The heat builds too quickly, the stretch and fullness a constant pressure that frays his composure. Nicholas leans forward, braces both hands on Euijoo’s chest, fingers splayed. And then he starts to move—really move. The rhythm shifts into something rougher, less measured. Every bounce now is deeper, messier. 

Euijoo is a mess beneath him. Mouth open, eyes half-lidded, hands clutching wherever they can find purchase—waist, thighs, ribs, as if he can’t decide where to hold on as Nicholas rides him into the mattress. “Fuck—fuck, Nicholas—” Euijoo gasps, his voice broken and scattered. “You feel—fuck, you feel unreal.”

Nicholas is breathing hard now, sweat beading at the back of his neck. He doesn’t answer with words—just grinds down in a slow, punishing circle that makes them both groan, low and involuntary.

Euijoo’s hands reach for his face without thinking, cupping his jaw, thumbs brushing over flushed cheekbones. “You’re—so fucking—” he can’t finish. He doesn’t have the breath.

Nicholas catches one of his wrists and pins it above his head, shifting the angle of his hips in the process. “Yeah?” Nicholas pants, voice rough. “Right there?”

Euijoo nods frantically, eyes wide and glazed. “Right there, right there, right there—”

Nicholas drives down again, and again, until Euijoo is babbling, the only coherent word in his mouth now reduced to his name. Euijoo’s free hand slides down and grabs a handful of Nicholas’s ass, fingers digging in like he can’t stand not touching, not helping. He uses the grip to guide him, to pull him down harder, push him into it deeper, hips rocking up to meet him in stuttering, desperate little thrusts.  Beneath him, Euijoo is wrecked—sweat-slicked and flushed to the point of glowing, his hair sticking to his forehead, lips bitten red. His eyes keep fluttering closed only to snap back open, clearly trying to stay focused, to watch Nicholas, even as everything inside him threatens to short-circuit. And Nicholas would kiss him—wants to, with a sudden, visceral intensity, but he’s too close now, chasing his own high with every roll of his hips that sends sparks all through his spine. He’s breathing hard through his nose, trying not to fall apart just yet, even as Euijoo’s cock inside him makes that almost impossible.

“I’m gonna come inside you,” Euijoo whines, voice wrecked and high. 

Nicholas nods, riding down harder. “Yeah,” he gasps. “Come inside me, Juju.”

Something breaks open in Euijoo. His whole body starts shaking—subtle at first, then all-consuming, like he’s barely holding himself together under the weight of it. His lips part but he doesn’t speak. There’s a look on his face—something close to pain, to awe, like he can’t believe this is happening, like it’s too much and not enough all at once. Nicholas watches it all, soaks it in. He’s dizzy with it, the heat and stretch and intimacy of it. It’s in the way Euijoo touches him, how careful his hands are even now, even when he’s trembling and frantic. His palms come to rest against Nicholas’s lower belly, like he’s trying to feel it—feel himself inside, feel the way their bodies lock together, feel how real this is.

“Inside,” Euijoo says again, and the word’s almost a whisper this time, reverent and lost.

And that does something to Nicholas. His vision whites out at the edges for a second, hips stuttering as the meaning of it lands somewhere deep in his chest and lower, lower, where the need is. He grabs Euijoo’s wrist without thinking and presses it harder against his belly. “Yeah,” he groans, grinding down hard. “Yeah, fuck, fill me up. Come in me.”

Euijoo chokes on a gasp. His whole body arches off the bed, and then he’s coming—hard, helpless, buried deep. His hips jerk as he spills inside, and Nicholas feels it, every hot pulse of it, feels Euijoo’s breath go ragged beneath him. He collapses forward, catching himself just barely on trembling arms. Euijoo’s arms wrap around him almost automatically, and their breath mingles, fast and shallow, sweat slick between them, heartbeats chaotic.

“Fuck,” Euijoo breathes. “Fuck.”

Nicholas closes his eyes. He feels full, and fucked, and so terribly, stupidly close—to Euijoo, to something dangerous, to something that might stick. Their cheeks are pressed together, the heat between them still crackling like static, and Nicholas kisses Euijoo’s cheek without thinking, just a brush of lips over sweat-damp skin.

Then he shifts, carefully, lifting off Euijoo’s cock. He rolls over and collapses onto his stomach with a muffled sigh into the pillow, boneless and flushed. Behind him, Euijoo moves. There's a quiet rustle of sheets, the sound of breath drawn in like wonder, and then Euijoo’s hands are on him again—spreading him open, fingers parting him. Nicholas flinches, hips twitching, but doesn’t pull away.

Then—warmth. Euijoo leans in and presses a kiss to the curve of his ass, gentle and obscene in equal measure. Another kiss, lower now, slower. His tongue replaces the kisses, dragging across the skin of Nicholas’s lower back, then down, over the dip of his spine, over the soft swell of him. Nicholas’s cock twitches against the sheets. He wiggles his hips, subtle and shameless all at once. The first press over his hole is sudden and filthy and perfect. Nicholas jerks, grabbing at the sheets, gasping out a curse. Euijoo licks him open slowly, taking his time with it like he’s not in a hurry, like he could stay there forever.

“Fuck,” Nicholas breathes, eyes fluttering shut. “Fuck, Juju…”

Euijoo hums against him, the vibration making him shiver again. Nicholas grinds down slightly, rutting softly against the mattress. He lifts his hips and Euijoo’s hand slips beneath him, fingers wrapping around his cock. It’s warm, slick with leftover lube and spit, and Euijoo doesn’t rush. His touch is precise, thumb pressing in just under the head, slow, steady circles that make Nichoas’s spine arch and his throat close around a sob he can’t swallow. He presses his face into the sheets and moans. His thighs are trembling already, nerves frayed from how much it is—how Euijoo’s tongue is back on him too, licking into him, lazy and unrelenting. His mouth works him open while his hand works him toward the edge, every slick stroke of his fist dragging Nicholas closer to some devastating, impossible release.

And then the rhythm changes. The bed shifts. Euijoo lifts his head and rises onto his knees behind him, chest pressing down against Nicholas’s back. He curls around him like a second spine, mouth hot and open against Nicholas’s shoulder blades. Nicholas sucks in a breath as Euijoo nuzzles against the base of his neck, and he can feel it now—Euijoo’s cock, thick and damp, nestling between his cheeks, not quite hard again but not soft either. It rubs against him as Euijoo exhales into his skin, like he’s already thinking about the second round. He thrusts gently, not enough to enter, just enough to tease. His cock drags against him in slow, messy slides, and Nicholas whimpers, thighs shaking again as Euijoo’s hand tightens around his cock. 

But then Euijoo grips him by the forearms—stronger than he looks, always has been—and pulls him upright with startling ease. Nicholas follows the motion without resistance, breath caught somewhere between surprise and anticipation, until they’re both up on their knees, bodies aligned. Euijoo behind him, flush to his back, breath ghosting over his neck. Nicholas shudders as he feels Euijoo’s arm snake around his waist, the other coming up to wrap firmly around his chest. His hand wraps around Nicholas’s cock again, and the first stroke is slow but firm, and Nicholas’s entire body jolts forward, stopped only by Euijoo’s chest pressed against his back. He gasps, head falling back naturally onto Euijoo’s shoulder.  His hips jerk involuntarily forward, trying to grind into Euijoo’s fist. The grip on his chest tightens like a warning and it’s so good it makes his toes curl.

“I’m—fuck, I’m gonna come,” Nicholas gasps. He clutches at Euijoo’s forearm, his fingers useless against the strength behind him. 

His hand moves faster, a little tighter now, the rhythm shifting just enough to push him toward the edge. Nicholas’s body starts to curl in on itself, his moans turning high and ragged as Euijoo presses his thumb into that sensitive spot under the head again—cruel, perfect pressure that sends him spiraling. And then it hits, and Nicholas is coming, sobbing out something halfway between Euijoo’s name and a curse. His cock jerks in Euijoo’s hand, thick spurts striping the sheets below them, thighs trembling so hard they nearly give out beneath him.

Euijoo doesn’t let him fall. Not right away. He holds him steady, arm curled tightly around Nicholas’s chest. And then they collapse together, breath knocked out of both as they tumble sideways into the sheets, tangled and sweating and clinging. Euijoo doesn’t let go even now. His arms stay wrapped around Nicholas’s body. Nicholas closes his eyes. He doesn’t think, doesn’t analyze. He just exists. His skin is buzzing, overstimulated and lit from within, but it’s the inside of his chest that’s a mess—raw and full and terrifyingly soft. When he finally opens his eyes, Euijoo is already watching him.

He’s beautiful. Not in that way he looks when he’s posing for a camera or mid-performance. Not in the curated, stylized perfection Nicholas sees plastered all over the internet. But like this. Lit only by the flickering streetlights bleeding through the blinds, with his hair messy and damp, mouth pink and parted, chest heaving. Beautiful in that real, annoyingly human way—sincere and exposed and utterly breathtaking. And Nicholas doesn’t know what the fuck is wrong with him, but his throat tightens unexpectedly. His chest aches in a way that has nothing to do with lust and everything to do with this. With Euijoo. With all of it.

He can’t even look at Euijoo anymore. Not without the emotion threatening to break through the careful barriers he usually keeps locked down. So he does the only thing he can manage—he buries his face in Euijoo’s chest, forehead pressed right into the center of him, where the heartbeat lives. Euijoo makes a soft sound, something low and warm, and wraps his arms around him like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

—

Nicholas wakes with a strange kind of calm lodged in his chest, a feeling so unfamiliar it almost startles him. For once, there is no immediate ache, no familiar stampede of thoughts clawing at the edges of his mind. He blinks and finds Euijoo beside him, naked under the sheets, his body warm where their arms have been tangled together through the night. For one suspended, idiotically tender moment, Nicholas thinks that perhaps this is what happiness has always been: not fireworks, not revelation, but this quiet, impossible ease, this warm weight of another person sleeping inches from his skin. Then Euijoo shifts. Not asleep. Awake. Staring at the ceiling. 

The softness leaves the room all at once. Euijoo turns his face slightly, and in that narrow angle of pale light Nicholas sees it—the look that doesn’t belong to anyone in love. Not really. Not to a man who has just spent the night in bed with someone he loves and should, by all rights, be blushing with either pleasure or embarrassment. This is worse. Euijoo pulls his arm away the moment he realizes Nicholas is awake too, as though touch itself has become evidence. He exhales through his nose, sits up, and begins the awkward, grim choreography of finding his underwear on the floor.

“Fuck,” he mutters, the word so small it sounds embarrassed to be spoken aloud.

Nicholas pushes himself up against the headboard, the sheet sliding down his waist, and the reality of last night comes back in pieces, none of them kind. “What’s wrong?” he asks, though he already feels the answer assembling itself in the room between them.

Euijoo doesn’t turn around. He just shakes his head once, sharply, as if he can dislodge the whole mess by force. “We shouldn’t have done this,” he says, and there is such misery in his voice that Nicholas almost wishes he had lied instead. “I shouldn’t have slept with you. I need to tell him.” A pause, a breath that seems to scrape on the way out. “I need space. From you.”

Nicholas stares at him. He reaches out before he has decided to, but his hand closes on nothing except the wrinkled sheet, white and useless in his fist. “Euijoo, wait,” he says. “Can we talk about this?”

At that, Euijoo finally looks at him, and Nicholas wishes immediately that he hadn’t. He looks worse than pale, worse than guilty. There’s no glow in him, no secret triumph, no aftershimmer of being chosen. He looks sick with it. Sick with himself. Sick with Nicholas. Sick with the boyfriend waiting somewhere beyond this room, in whatever version of the world still made sense before last night. “No,” Euijoo says. “I have to think. Let’s just… pretend this never happened. Please.” His mouth twists, not quite a plea and not quite contempt. “I’m begging you.”

Nicholas doesn’t get the chance to answer. Euijoo is already moving, already dressing with frantic, clumsy speed, already pulling on yesterday’s shirt. He snatches up his bag, winces as he shrugs into the sleeve, and only then does he notice the dark little crescent Nicholas left on his collarbone. A teeth mark, vivid and adolescent and damning. Euijoo’s hand lifts there as if he might rub it away, but he doesn't. He just looks at it for half a second too long, as though struck by the indecency of his own body remembering. Then he leaves. Nicholas is left sitting in the wreckage of the bed, and only then does the shape of the morning arrange itself into meaning.

He bends forward and presses both hands over his face until he can feel the heat of himself through his palms. He’s sick with it, yes, but not just with shame. There’s grief in it too, and anger, and the humiliating, indefensible fact that some part of him is still glad. Glad for the warmth that had been there. Glad for the brief, reckless mercy of being touched like that. Glad, most of all, that for one impossible night Euijoo had become a body in his bed, breathing the same air. He lets his hands fall. Nicholas looks at the crease in the pillow where Euijoo’s head had rested, at the abandoned shirt on the floor, at the half-forgotten shape of last night clinging stubbornly to every surface. For a moment he considers getting up, chasing after him, saying something brave or foolish or both. But he knows, with the bleak clarity that only arrives after the damage has already been done, that there are some exits you can’t block with your body. 

—

Euijoo is the perfect leader, but people don't give him enough credit. They praise his patience, his reliability, his ability to keep everyone together, but they never seem to grasp the extent of it. They see the results and mistake them for effortlessness. Because even now, while his personal life is quietly imploding, while guilt has settled into the hollows of him and made a permanent home there, while he is hopelessly, catastrophically in love with the wrong person, Euijoo keeps showing up. He checks in on the members before they have the chance to ask for help. He remembers appointments, schedules, deadlines. He listens to complaints and frustrations and carries them to management with the same calm professionalism he always has. He notices when someone is tired, when someone is homesick, when someone is trying too hard and pretending not to struggle. He smooths over conflicts before they become arguments. He keeps everything moving. He keeps everyone moving.

The terrifying part is that nobody notices anything is wrong. No one looks at him and sees a man dragging himself through each day by sheer force of will. No one notices the cracks because Euijoo has spent years perfecting the art of becoming indispensable without ever becoming a burden. He performs competence so naturally that people forget it costs him something. Everyone, apparently, except Nicholas.

The first thing Nicholas notices is that Euijoo stays in the dorm for an entire week. Such a small thing, really. The kind of detail nobody else would bother keeping track of. But Nicholas notices immediately because Euijoo hasn't done that in months. Not since he started dating. Since before his weekends developed predictable destinations and familiar excuses. For days, Euijoo doesn't leave unless work requires it. He doesn't disappear after schedules. Doesn't come back late with wind-reddened cheeks and a smile he tries—and fails—to hide. He remains stubbornly present, lingering in common spaces, eating meals at the dorm table, spending evenings curled up on the couch with his phone face-down beside him.

Nicholas finds himself inventing explanations. Maybe he's waiting for the marks on his neck to fade. Or maybe he's rehearsing. Maybe every night he lies awake beside his phone, drafting and redrafting a confession he can never quite bring himself to send. Maybe he starts conversations in his head and abandons them halfway through. Maybe he keeps searching for a version of the truth that hurts less. Maybe guilt is simply eating him alive. Guilt is consuming him too, after all. It sits in his chest from morning until night, heavy and indigestible. Sometimes he wakes up and forgets for half a second, and those brief moments of peace feel almost cruel because they never last. Reality always returns. Euijoo always returns. And Euijoo is different now. Not dramatically, not enough to draw concern, but enough for Nicholas to notice. There are moments during conversations when Euijoo simply drifts away, his attention dissolving somewhere beyond the room before he remembers himself and comes back with an apologetic smile. Sometimes people repeat questions twice before he answers. Sometimes his laughter arrives a second too late.

And still, somehow, he remains flawless. If Euijoo had fallen apart, Nicholas thinks he could have understood it. If he'd missed schedules, snapped at people, forgotten responsibilities, made mistakes—human mistakes, ordinary mistakes—then at least there would have been evidence that this was affecting him. Instead, Euijoo continues being Euijoo. The perfect leader. The reliable one. The person everyone depends on. He arrives on time. He remembers everything. He smiles when cameras are pointed at him. He speaks carefully during meetings. He reassures people when they're stressed. He carries everyone's concerns as though his own heart isn’t already overloaded. Nicholas watches him do it every day and feels something ugly twist inside his chest.

—

Nicholas has begun to feel that he is the worst person in the world. The feeling settles into him before he even opens his eyes in the morning, curdling somewhere deep beneath his ribs, heavy and acidic, as though guilt has become another organ inside him. It rots there patiently. It makes dancing harder than it used to, every rehearsal feeling like he's moving through water, every mistake confirming something he already believes about himself. It makes smiling an act of calculation, laughter something he has to remember to perform a beat too late. Even conversations exhaust him. Existing around other people has become strangely laborious.

Once, Euijoo's happiness had been infectious. He'd fallen in love so openly, so completely, that it had seemed to alter the atmosphere around him. His laughter lingered in practice rooms long after rehearsals ended. His excitement over the smallest things spread through the team with ridiculous ease, catching on to everyone else like pollen. Now the opposite seems true. Nicholas doesn't know whether it's real or whether he's simply become incapable of seeing anything else, but lately it feels like his own misery has begun to cling to everyone around him. He walks into a room and conversations soften. Jokes die a little faster. The silence stretches a little longer than it should. His mood seems to drift from person to person, invisible but inescapable, like radiation. 

It's ridiculous, he tells himself. Everyone is under pressure. They have another comeback approaching, schedules growing tighter by the day, rehearsals stretching later into the night, expectations piling higher than anyone admits aloud. Stress makes people quieter. Fatigue makes everyone more irritable. Maybe nothing has changed at all. Maybe the world isn't turning against him. Maybe he's simply looking for punishment in places where none exists. But then there's Euijoo—and somehow that explanation falls apart.

He barely eats unless someone reminds him twice. Food sits untouched for so long it goes cold before he notices. He laughs less now, and when he does it sounds practiced. Even his smiles have become fleeting things, appearing out of politeness before disappearing almost immediately, as if they cost more than they're worth. Nicholas catches himself watching him constantly, measuring every expression against the person Euijoo used to be, searching for evidence that none of this is as bad as it feels. He never finds any. It makes everything worse.

His sister calls every few days. She asks about him first, then rehearsals, then the comeback preparations. Eventually she asks how the team is doing, how Euijoo is. Nicholas lies every single time. Not because he's protecting Euijoo—and not even because he's protecting himself—mostly because he already knows exactly what she'd say if he told her the truth. So instead he says they're busy. Tired. Stressed. That everyone is working hard. He doesn't say that Euijoo barely eats anymore. He doesn't say that sometimes he catches him staring blankly at absolutely nothing, so still that Nicholas has to resist the urge to call his name just to make sure he's still there. He doesn't say that every day Euijoo looks a little less like the person who once loved so hard and a little more like someone trying to survive the aftermath of it. Because saying those things would mean saying the rest of it.

I did this. I took the happiest thing inside him and twisted it into something he has to carry like shame. I took the way he loved me—the most honest thing anyone has ever given me—and turned it into a betrayal. I made him hurt the one person who has only ever loved him the way he deserved to be loved. The words gather in his throat every time, hot and desperate, before dying there. He swallows them. He tells another lie. Because if he lets himself confess even once, he already knows what his sister's voice would sound like on the other end of the line: exhausted first, furious second, disappointed most of all. You are so unbelievably fucking stupid, Wang Yixiang, and maybe you deserve every terrible thing that's happening to you.

By the time Nicholas gets back to the dorm, it's well past midnight. He'd stayed behind after everyone else had left, replaying the choreography until the music became little more than percussion echoing through an empty practice room. He'd made mistakes he normally wouldn't have made, his body refusing to obey counts he'd known for months, his concentration splintering every few seconds before he had to drag it back again. Practicing with the group has become an exercise in pretending he's still capable of occupying the same space as everyone else without poisoning it. Alone, at least, there's no one watching him hesitate. Fuma had offered to help earlier that week. He always does when someone falls behind. Nicholas had smiled, lied, and said he'd manage. The truth is that he can't quite bring himself to stand in front of Fuma for an hour while he patiently corrects his footwork, knowing what he knows. Looking someone in the eye is difficult enough these days—looking Fuma in the eye feels almost impossible. 

The keypad beeps beneath his fingers as he enters the code to the building. He drops his gaze as he steps inside, exhausted enough to think of nothing except sleep, walking automatically toward the elevators. Then he stops, because someone else is already standing there. For a split second they simply stare at one another, equally startled, as though neither of them expected the other to exist outside carefully orchestrated schedules and accidental glimpses across rehearsal rooms.

Euijoo looks terrible. His eyes are swollen, lashes clumped together where tears have dried and never been wiped away properly. The skin beneath them has turned an angry pink. The tip of his nose is flushed the same color, and there's something hollow about the way he carries himself, shoulders slightly rounded, as though grief has actual weight and he's been wearing it all evening. He isn't crying now—he's simply what comes afterward. Nicholas doesn't need to ask why. The understanding arrives before words do, settling somewhere deep in his stomach with the sick certainty of confirmation. Whatever conversation Euijoo and his boyfriend had today—if they're even still boyfriends at all—is over. And judging by Euijoo's face, so is everything else.

"Euijoo…" Nicholas begins quietly, his voice catching on the name. "Are you—"

The elevator dings. Euijoo steps inside immediately and presses the button for their floor without looking back, then retreats until his shoulders rest against the mirrored wall, folding into himself. Nicholas follows a second later. The doors close. The elevator hums upward. He watches the floor numbers instead of his own reflection. Somehow the tiny metal box feels impossibly crowded despite the silence between them.

He can't leave it like this. He refuses to. They're best friends. Whatever this has become, whatever bad shape they've managed to twist themselves into over the past few weeks, that has to count for something. They were just kids when they met on I-Land, terrified in different languages but somehow understanding each other anyway. They survived eliminations, homesickness, moving to a new country, years of training, years of wondering whether any of it would amount to anything. Friendships aren't supposed to disappear because everything else falls apart. At least, Nicholas desperately hopes they aren't.

"Seriously," he says, softer this time. "Are you okay?"

Euijoo laughs. It's barely a laugh at all—more air than sound, brittle enough to snap apart before it reaches the ceiling. Only then does he look up. His eyes are bloodshot, stripped raw from crying until they have nothing left to give. They look dry, painfully so, like every last tear has already been forced out of him.

He meets Nicholas's gaze without flinching. "Does it look like I'm okay?"

Nicholas doesn't answer. Because no, it doesn't. He opens his mouth anyway, searching desperately for something useful to say, something that doesn't sound selfish or pathetic or catastrophically late. Every sentence dies before it reaches his tongue. I'm sorry. Too small. What happened? As if he doesn't already know. Do you want to talk about him? About the boyfriend who is probably no longer his boyfriend. About the relationship Nicholas helped destroy. 

The elevator stops. The doors slide open. Euijoo is already moving before the chime has fully faded, slipping past Nicholas without another word, walking quickly down the hallway toward the dorm. Nicholas follows several paces behind, deliberately slower, resisting the instinct to catch up, because grief is strange like that. Sometimes the kindest thing you can offer someone is your presence. Sometimes it's your distance. Tonight, Nicholas isn't sure which one Euijoo needs. He's only certain that, somehow, he'll choose the wrong one.

The next day, Euijoo tells the manager he’s sick and can’t make any of the day’s schedules, and Nicholas knows at once that something has gone terribly wrong. Euijoo has performed through pain that would have sent other people folding cleanly in half. He has gone onstage with injuries he never complained about, with sleeplessness carved into the underside of his eyes, with whatever private wreckage he was carrying sealed neatly behind his smile and strapped down with professionalism. So no, this is not a cold, not really. Not a fever, not a sniffle, not some temporary inconvenience that can be slept off with tea and a clenched jaw. Worse than that, he has actually asked for the day off. Euijoo never asks for anything. That the manager relents immediately only confirms it—when Euijoo asks for mercy, people hear the strain underneath it. They hear the edge of collapse before it becomes visible.

The whole team worries in that gentle, helpless way people do when they know something is wrong but don’t know why. Jo wonders what kind of bug he must have caught. Kei asks whether he wants food brought back, whether he’s eaten, whether he needs medicine, whether he’s sleeping. They decide who should call him first, who he might answer, who he might ignore, who is least likely to accidentally sound like a concerned parent. Nicholas doesn’t join in. Their worry is earnest, almost tender, and his is something else entirely, something meaner and more intimate, because he knows Euijoo isn’t at home in bed with a blanket pulled to his chin and a miserable throat. He’s probably curled into himself somewhere with the phone face down beside him, heart hurting so badly it feels like punishment. 

Euijoo lost his boyfriend. The person who made him lighter, brighter, easier inside his own skin. And what did he gain in return? A best friend capable of looking him in the eye while quietly unraveling his life one selfish decision at a time. Nicholas catches his own reflection in the dressing-room mirror while someone fixes his microphone wire. For a moment, he hardly recognizes the person looking back. Not because he looks different. Because, for the first time in his life, he thinks he finally understands that being in love with someone doesn't mean you're good enough to deserve it.

—

Nicholas spends the next few weeks trying to become someone who looks normal. People always say that time heals everything. It smooths the sharp edges, dulls the worst memories, teaches the body how to exist around pain without constantly flinching. Maybe that's true. Maybe healing isn't something you notice happening so much as something you realize, one day, has already happened—so he decides to help time along. There’s no point drowning in guilt when Euijoo won't even let him get close enough to apologize. How do you ask for forgiveness from someone who has quietly removed you from their life anyway?

Euijoo doesn't make scenes. He doesn't glare. He doesn't raise his voice. Somehow that would all be easier. Instead, he simply disappears. Not literally. They still share rehearsals, dressing rooms, airports, stages. They stand beneath the same lights, bow to the same crowds, smile for the same cameras. But Euijoo has become uncannily talented at existing everywhere Nicholas isn't. If Nicholas walks into the lounge, Euijoo remembers he left something in the practice room. If Nicholas sits beside him during makeup, Euijoo gets called away by a stylist. If they're placed together for a behind-the-scenes interview, Euijoo answers politely, smiles exactly as much as professionalism requires, then finds someone else to talk to the moment filming ends.

So he adapts. He eats dinner with Maki. He wanders convenience stores with Jo after schedules. He stays up playing games with Yuma until well past midnight. He performs normalcy with the same discipline he performs choreography. Smile here. Laugh there. Answer questions. Remember your cues. If he repeats the routine often enough, maybe one day it’ll stop feeling like a performance. Maybe he'll accidentally become the person he's pretending to be. Sometimes it almost works. Sometimes he can convince himself that life has settled into a new shape—that this is simply what adulthood is, friendships drifting, people growing apart, everyone too busy to notice the distance. Then reality catches up with him.

This time it happens backstage, fifteen minutes before they're supposed to go on. Nicholas is looking for a bottle of water when he notices Euijoo standing at the far end of the hallway, tucked partially behind a curtain where the cameras won't reach. His hand moves quickly across his face. For a heartbeat Nicholas doesn't understand what he's looking at, then he realizes Euijoo is wiping tears from his cheeks with the heel of his palm, hurriedly, almost angrily, as though he can erase the evidence before anyone else notices. Kei notices anyway. He crosses the hallway without hesitation, says something too quiet for Nicholas to hear, and Euijoo immediately drops his head. Kei listens. He rests a hand gently on the back of Euijoo's neck. He speaks again. Then, without ceremony or awkwardness, he pulls him into a hug. Euijoo folds into it, and Nicholas looks away before he has to watch any longer.

A week later they're overseas, packed into another hotel that looks almost identical to every hotel they've stayed in for the past few years. Same beige walls. Same aggressively decorative carpet. Same windows overlooking a city they'll barely have time to remember. By midnight the lights are off. The room is illuminated only by the pale glow of two phone screens, silence settling comfortably between them in the way it only can between people who have spent years existing in each other's company.

Nicholas is just beginning to drift towards sleep when Harua speaks. "Hey."

"Hm?"

Harua doesn't look up from his phone. "What's wrong with Euijoo lately?"

Nicholas feels his stomach drop so suddenly it's almost physical. Of course Harua is asking him. Who else would he ask? For years, Nicholas has been the obvious answer to every question involving Euijoo. If something happened to Euijoo, everyone naturally assumed Nicholas already knew about it. The irony is almost funny—this entire catastrophe began because Euijoo trusted him enough to let him into the most private corner of his life. Because he'd been in love and wanted, for once, to tell his best friend about something that made him happy. Nicholas had taken that trust apart with his bare hands. He can't do it again. Whatever else he's become, he refuses to be the person who outs Euijoo twice.

"I don't know," he says carefully, forcing the lie to sound casual. "I think he's just tired. We've all got a lot going on."

"Oh," Harua says quietly. Then, almost to himself, "I'm worried about him."

"Don't be," Nicholas says a little too quickly. "He'll be okay."

Harua studies him for another second before nodding slowly and turning back toward his phone. The conversation dissolves. The room falls quiet again. Nicholas stares at the ceiling long after Harua's breathing evens into sleep.

But it was never time that healed anything, Nicholas knew that much by now. Time only moves things around, dulls the edges, teaches people how to live beside what had once split them open, and then has the audacity to call that healing. Still, tonight the dorm is full of a rare, almost suspicious warmth. They have the evening to themselves, a small miracle, and someone has ordered enough food to feed an entire minor nation. Nicholas is laughing with Taki, half listening, half performing the shape of ease, and for a while it almost works. For a while it almost feels possible to sit inside the moment without reaching for the wound beneath it.

Then Euijoo stands up. It’s such a small motion, almost nothing at all, the sort of thing that should disappear into the noise of a room full of people talking over each other, but Nicholas sees it anyway. He sees the way Euijoo’s face shifts, the sudden brightness in his eyes, the color gone strange around his mouth. His hands come up too fast, and then he turns and disappears into the bathroom without a word. The door closes. The room, which had been loose and breathing, goes still. 

“What happened?” Yuma asks.

“I think he just got sad,” Fuma says, and there’s no irony in it, only that steady, older kind of gentleness that makes the rest of them feel like children.

“But why?”

“That’s not really mine to say.” Fuma glances toward the bathroom door, then back at everyone around the room. “But when he comes out, don’t crowd him. If he wants to talk, he'll talk. If he doesn't, then don't make him feel like he has to. Just… be normal. Be here."

Everyone nods. Everyone always nods when Fuma talks like that. Nicholas nods too, though it feels as if the instruction has settled directly over him, as if he’s the only one in the room being asked to understand something and keep his hands off it. His heart has begun its slow, ugly descent, dropping lower with every second Euijoo stays behind that closed door. Still, he tries to keep the atmosphere alive, to laugh at something Taki says, to throw in a comment that lands in the right place, to behave like this is still just a normal night and not the beginning of another collapse.

When Euijoo finally comes back out, the room changes around him. His eyes are swollen now, pink at the rims, and his skin has that damp, recently-washed look, as if he’s splashed cold water on his face. He’s trying, Nicholas can tell, to move through the room like nothing’s happened, but that only makes it worse, because everyone can feel the effort in it. There’s a strange, delicate awkwardness in the air, the kind that comes when everyone loves someone and doesn’t know how to behave around them. 

Euijoo sits down between Kei and Harua and lets out a long breath. He folds his hands together, then unfolds them, then looks down at them. “I, um,” he starts. “I actually wanted to talk to everyone about… this.”

The silence that follows is different from the earlier one. That had been shock. This is attention. The whole room seems to lean toward him without moving. Nicholas feels the air in his chest go thin.

“I know I’ve been off lately,” Euijoo says, voice unsteady. “And I know everyone has noticed. I haven’t been a very good leader recently. I’m sorry for that. I’ve just been distracted.”

Kei’s hand comes down on his arm, firm and warm. “You haven’t been a bad leader,” he says. “You’ve just seemed sad. And we've been worried, that's all."

Euijoo presses his lips together and nods, once, then again, like he’s trying to keep himself from falling apart. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice already sounds tired from having come this far. “I’ve been sad lately because—” he draws in a breath that seems to take effort. Nicholas feels it in his own body. “I was seeing someone, actually. We were together. In a relationship. And it ended recently. It was… a pretty bad breakup.” He swallows, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the room, beyond all of them. “And I really miss him.”

Nothing dramatic happens. No visible contempt, no scandalized laughter, no one flinching away from him. Nicholas can’t make himself look at anyone else. He can only look at Euijoo. The worst part is that Euijoo is waiting, and Nicholas can see it plainly now—the tiny, terrible expectation lodged somewhere in his posture, the flinching readiness for the moment when the room turns strange. When people decide he’s too much, or not enough, or inconvenient. He’s braced for impact. He’s come here prepared to be embarrassed by his own truth. But no one lets it happen.

Kei pulls him into a hug. “Euijoo,” he says softly, and the tenderness in his voice is almost unbearable. “I’m so sorry. That must be really hard.”

And with that, the room tilts, not into collapse but into something gentler, something that feels almost like grace. No one recoils. No one reaches for pity or ugly surprise. Instead, the air seems to loosen, and then, almost imperceptibly, the others lean in. 

“Yeah,” Maki says. “You could’ve told us, bro. You don’t have to carry something like that alone.”

Euijoo lets out a small laugh that breaks in the middle, the sound of it thin and embarrassed, like he’s still expecting to be told this is all too much, too strange “Yeah,” he says, looking down at his hands. “I know. I’m sorry I’ve been such a mess for a while. I mean, even before the breakup, I wasn’t really myself. I just—” he stops, swallows, tries again. “I was really worried about telling you that the person I’d been seeing was… a guy.”

Nicholas feels the words strike him with a force so precise it’s almost physical. This. This is the moment Euijoo had been circling for years, the one he’d been afraid of, the one Nicholas had taken from him without even meaning to. He knows how much those words must have cost Euijoo to say, how badly they must have scraped their way up from somewhere deep and frightened.

“Are you serious?” Yuma says, incredulous in the best possible way. “You thought we’d care?”

Euijoo gives the smallest shrug, still avoiding their eyes. “I didn’t know,” he says. “I just didn’t know.”

“Oh my God. It’s 2026. Who cares if you’re gay or whatever?”

“Easy,” Fuma says at once, though there’s a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth. “Euijoo, we’re really glad you told us. But nothing about who you love changes who you are. None of it does. We love you the same. You're still the same Euijoo who's looked after all of us since the beginning. The same leader who notices when someone's having a bad day before they say anything. The same teammate who stays late to help everyone else practice even when you're exhausted yourself." A small smile. "The same friend.”

Euijoo blinks hard. Once. Twice. As if his eyes are failing him on principle. “Yeah?” 

Harua reaches for him first, a hand landing lightly at his back, then Kei leans in from the other side, and suddenly the whole couch seems to shift toward him, bodies and shoulders and warmth closing the distance.

“Obviously, yeah,” Harua says, soft and matter-of-fact. 

That gets a breathless laugh out of Euijoo, fragile but real this time. Nicholas sits there with his hands clenched together so tightly his knuckles ache, listening to the others crowd around Euijoo with their warmth, their easy certainty, their unguarded mercy. He should feel relief—he does, in some distant and theoretical sense, but it arrives tangled up with shame so acute it might as well be a second heartbeat. He watches Euijoo’s face as the tension begins, slowly, to leave it, and he thinks with a kind of bleak astonishment that there are still kinds of kindness he doesn’t deserve to witness. Not after everything. Not after turning Euijoo’s fear into a catastrophe of his own making.

—

Euijoo is happy, and he deserves it. There’s a lightness to him now that is almost unfair to witness—his steps seem to skim instead of land, as if some invisible hand has eased a burden off his shoulders. His laugh comes easier, too, bright and clear and startlingly unguarded, the kind that makes other people laugh before they even know what the joke was. He leads well. He fills silences. It’s infuriating, in a way, how naturally joy returns to him once it finally decides to. It’s infectious. It should be infectious. Nicholas is immune. Or maybe not immune, exactly. Maybe just pinned beneath something heavier. He idles now, as if he’s become a machine left switched on in an empty room, consuming energy without producing anything useful. He stays in his room whenever he can get away with it, lies still under the thin blanket and lets the hours pass over him like bad weather. He goes out when he has to—for photoshoots, for practice, for appearances that require him to arrange his face into something public and acceptable—but otherwise he remains where he is, watching from the sidelines of his own life. 

Euijoo is happy, and this time Nicholas doesn’t feel jealous. That is the worst part, maybe. Jealousy would at least be simple. Jealousy would mean wanting what someone else has, which would be easy to understand and perhaps even easier to despise. But this flat, aching inability to identify what he feels is more humiliating, because it leaves him with nowhere to put himself. Guilty, certainly. He has no one to blame but himself, and worse, he knows it. He has known it from the beginning, from the first stupid, trembling moment he fell in love with Euijoo and mistook longing for something he could safely keep. From the first kiss that meant too much and not enough. From the way he never managed to stand still inside the thing he wanted. From the moment he outed Euijoo, or became the crack in the foundation of a relationship Euijoo had trusted. It hardly matters where the line is drawn now. He crossed enough of them to make the map meaningless.

Tonight, he’s alone in the dorm. The others have gone out to eat, their voices and shoes and laughter long since disappeared down the hall, and Nicholas had declined with a headache he doesn’t have. So he remains in bed, curled beneath the covers, scrolling mindlessly on his phone while the world goes on without him. Outside his room, somewhere beyond the thin walls and the blank dorm quiet, everyone else is probably eating good food and having a good time and being the kind of people who don’t lie awake calculating the exact shape of their own damage. Then the door opens.

Nicholas looks up automatically, expecting maybe Maki returning for something he forgot, or one of the others checking to make sure the room hasn’t consumed him entirely. But it’s Euijoo who stands in the threshold, and the sight of him still manages, somehow, to feel impossible. His eyes are wide and brown and unreadable for a second too long, and then Nicholas sees it—the uncertainty, the tiny pulse of nerves at the corner of his mouth, the faint crease between his brows that makes him look younger, more vulnerable, painfully beautiful in that unhelpful, devastating way that has always made Nicholas feel as if he’s standing too close to a lit match. 

“Hey,” Euijoo says, and his voice is softer than Nicholas expects. Not fragile, exactly. Just careful.

Nicholas sits up a little, the phone still loose in his hand. “Hey.”

Euijoo glances down, then back up. “Can we talk?”

Nicholas should say yes immediately. He should say anything that proves he’s still capable of being easy, of being safe, of being the version of himself Euijoo used to trust without hesitation. Instead, he says, “Yeah.” It comes out too quickly. Too eager. Like a dog hearing a familiar whistle.

Euijoo steps in and closes the door behind him. Nicholas watches him and thinks, absurdly, that this is what wreckage looks like after it has learned how to wear a beautiful face. 

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Euijoo says.

Nicholas drops his gaze to the blanket in his lap. “I haven’t.”

Euijoo gives him a look so dry and knowing that, under any other circumstances, it might’ve been funny. “You know, you’re a terrible liar.”

A thin laugh almost escapes Nicholas and dies before it can become anything useful. He sits up against the headboard, the mattress dipping beneath him, while Euijoo lowers himself onto the edge of the bed. For a moment neither of them speaks. 

“I want things to go back to the way they were,” Euijoo says at last. 

So do I, Nicholas thinks. But the thought arrives already ruined, already too late to be useful, because something has shifted. Something fundamental has moved out of place, and Nicholas can feel the crookedness of it in every breath he takes. He wants to tell Euijoo that he would give anything to turn back the clock, to undo the sequence of decisions that led them here, but what good would that do?

Instead, he says, “Maybe you should call him.”

Euijoo turns his head. “What?”

“Your boyfriend,” Nicholas says, because there’s no graceful way to say it and no point pretending otherwise. “Tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you want him back. Tell him what happened was a mistake, that you were drunk, that I was pushy—” he stops, swallows, and the words keep coming anyway. “I'll tell him too, if you want. I'll apologize. I'll explain everything. I just hate seeing you like this. You were happier with him.”

Nicholas expects something simple now—resignation, maybe. Hurt. Confirmation that the wound has already hardened into something unfixable. He reads the quiet as acceptance, as Euijoo deciding that this is the part where they become civil in the ruins of whatever they used to be. A truce, then. A careful new arrangement of distance. He can live with that. He can live with almost anything if it means Euijoo doesn’t have to keep hurting.

But then Euijoo laughs. It’s not even really a laugh, not the sort that belongs to joy or relief. It’s softer than that, quieter, and somehow more devastating because of it. “Don’t you get it?” he says. “I did this for you.”

“What are you talking about?”

Euijoo lets out a breath through his nose. “I talked to him a few days after we…” he stops there, and Nicholas hears the silence in the gap. Hears the shame in it, too. “He was hurt. Really hurt. But he forgave me, actually. Said I mattered too much for him to throw everything away over one mistake. He said we could figure it out. That if I still wanted us, we'd work through it together.” Euijoo swallows, and for a moment the room seems to contract around the sound. “He was patient with me. He never made me feel like I was difficult to love. He listened. He remembered everything I told him. He celebrated every stupid little thing that made me happy. I betrayed someone who had done absolutely nothing except love me well, which is part of why this is so humiliating. He forgave me when he had every right not to, and I should've walked out of that conversation thinking I'd been given the greatest second chance anyone could ask for. I should have fought harder for us. I should have wanted to stay. But I realized something, and it took me a while to admit it because it made me feel like the worst kind of person.”

He draws in a shaky breath that barely seems to reach him. “What I wanted wasn’t that perfect, ridiculous, whirlwind kind of love I thought I was supposed to have. It was you. I loved him, yes. I did. I still do, in some way that probably makes me unbearable. But even while I was with him, even while he was holding my hand and saying all the right things, I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

Euijoo doesn’t look triumphant. He doesn’t look relieved either. Nicholas feels something inside his chest begin to collapse.

"I'd be talking to him…" Euijoo says quietly. "And wondering whether you'd eaten dinner. I'd wake up next to him and think about telling you something funny that happened. I'd have the best day with him and still find myself wanting to call you first. I kept trying to make myself stop,” he says, the words coming more steadily now. “I kept telling myself I was just confused, or lonely, or being stupid. But it wasn’t confusion. Not really. It was you, and it had been you for a long time.”

Nicholas feels something in his chest shift, not quite pain and not quite grief, something more humiliating than either because it has the shape of recognition. All this time he had only thought about what he had taken, what he had broken, what he had ruined. But Euijoo’s voice, soft and wrecked, makes the whole thing tilt into a different light. Not absolution. Not forgiveness. Something stranger, and far more dangerous—the possibility that Euijoo hadn’t been destroyed by loving Nicholas, only divided by it. That he had stood at the center of his own life and still found himself looking elsewhere.

“My relationship didn’t end because I hooked up with you,” Euijoo says. “It only exposed what had been ending inside me for a while. It made it impossible to keep lying to myself. And it made one thing terrifyingly clear.” He swallows. “I am so, so in love with you, Nicholas.”

Nicholas lets out a slow breath. When he lifts his eyes, the room is blurred at the edges, softened by the sting gathering behind them, and through that blur he sees it—Euijoo is crying too, quietly. It should be simple, maybe. It should be the kind of confession that rearranges the world neatly, that closes the distance between them with one clean, inevitable motion. Instead it only makes everything feel more precarious. Love is supposed to be the answer, after all. Love is supposed to arrive like a verdict, or a rescue, or a door opening at the exact moment you’ve decided you can no longer bear the room. But standing here now, with Euijoo crying in front of him and the truth laid bare between them like a knife, Nicholas can’t find the clean triumph in it. He can only feel the ache of everything they’ve damaged on the way here, the ruined tenderness of it. 

Nicholas stares at him for one unbearable second longer, waiting for the room to correct itself, for Euijoo to laugh and say he’s been cruelly, ingeniously joking, for the floor to tilt and make the whole confession collapse. None of that happens. Euijoo is still crying, his face bright with it, his mouth trembling. And Nicholas feels something in him give way so completely it’s almost like relief. He reaches out before he can think better of it. His fingers brush Euijoo’s wrist first, then settle there, warm and tentative, and Euijoo inhales at the contact, eyes lifting.

Nicholas swallows, his throat aching with it. “Euijoo,” he says, and his voice breaks around the name. “You have no idea how much I wanted you to say that, and how much I wished you wouldn’t.”

Euijoo’s mouth trembles harder at that, and a tear slips down his cheek. Nicholas catches it with his thumb before he can stop himself, and the gesture seems to break something open between them all over again. Euijoo closes his eyes for a second, leaning into the touch. 

“I’m sorry,” Euijoo whispers.

Nicholas shakes his head immediately. “Don’t.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do. But don’t apologize.”

The silence that follows isn’t empty. Euijoo is crying harder now, not loudly, just steadily. Nicholas feels tears climb hot into his own eyes in answer, and the strange thing is that he doesn’t mind. He has spent too long trying to be composed, trying to be clean, trying to be the sort of person who could survive anything without visibly breaking. He doesn’t want to, not anymore. 

“Come here,” he says quietly.

Euijoo gives the faintest, terrified laugh, as if the words themselves are dangerous. “Nico—”

“Come here.”

Nicholas shifts forward on the mattress, and Euijoo rises enough to meet him halfway, and for one second they only hover there, close enough to feel each other’s breath, close enough that Nicholas can see the trembling at the corner of Euijoo’s mouth and the way he’s trying very hard not to hope too obviously. Then, because hesitation has already cost him too much, Nicholas lifts a hand to Euijoo’s face, cradles his jaw, and kisses him. 

It’s not graceful. It’s not easy. It’s not the polished, inevitable thing people pretend love becomes when it finally gets what it wants. It’s wet with tears, too careful at first and then suddenly not careful enough, a little shaky, a little desperate. Euijoo makes a small sound against his mouth, something between a sigh and a sob, and then he’s kissing Nicholas back with the kind of hungry tenderness that makes the whole world narrow to nothing but breath and heat and the soft pressure of their faces. Nicholas feels Euijoo’s hand slide up into his hair, fingers trembling there. Their foreheads brush. Their noses bump awkwardly. Somewhere in the middle of it Euijoo laughs through another tear, and Nicholas does too, and the sound of both of them, broken and relieved and aching, feels like the only thing left in the room.

When they part, it’s only by an inch. Nicholas rests his forehead against Euijoo’s. “I love you,” he says. “I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to make it less terrible than it already is. But I love you.”

Euijoo’s eyes close again. A fresh tear slips down, and Nicholas kisses it away before it can fall.

“I know,” Euijoo whispers, voice barely there. “I love you too.”

And there it is, at last, the beautiful and stupid and ruinous thing he’s been orbiting for so long—not salvation, not repair, not even peace, but the undeniable fact of being known and still staying. Nicholas tightens his hand at Euijoo’s waist, and Euijoo leans into him as if he’s been waiting his whole life for permission to do exactly that.

—

Euijoo is in love, and the feeling clings to everyone around him like glitter, impossible to fully shake off. Outside, winter sits heavy over Tokyo, all dark afternoons and biting wind, and comeback season has already worn them thin in the particular, elegant way idol life specializes in—taking something human and sanding it down until it can survive on little sleep and less mercy. But Euijoo moves through it as if he’s discovered a hidden pocket of summer inside himself. He walks into a room and, absurdly, the room brightens. He smiles more easily now. Hums under his breath while he cooks. Lets the others go home early when practice starts to fray at their edges. He pays for dinner before anyone else can argue, waves off thanks with a little shrug, laughs when the maknaes groan about it.

It’s almost offensive, the amount of light he carries. As if somewhere behind his ribs there’s a sun that has decided to begin shining. Everyone gets caught in it. Everyone is warmed by it. Nicholas, too. His warmth has a way of settling beneath Nicholas's skin, and love, annoyingly enough, has made him the sort of man who notices things like that. Perhaps that’s what love does to a person—it makes him sentimental in self-defense, tender where he used to be careful, and embarrassingly pleased by the smallest ordinary things.

They've barely made it back from a day spent beneath unforgiving studio lights and endless camera flashes when Euijoo slips into the bathroom, already reaching for the faucet to wash away layers of makeup and glitter. Nicholas gives him precisely three seconds of privacy before following him inside, easing the door shut behind him with all the subtlety of someone who knows he's fooling absolutely no one. They share a dorm with people far too observant for that. If the stolen glances, the inexplicable smiles, and Nicholas's recently impossible good mood haven't already given everything away, then the fact that he trails after Euijoo whenever he leaves a room certainly has.

He circles his arms around his waist from behind, resting his chin on Euijoo’s shoulder as they both face the mirror. Euijoo looks half-finished in the best possible way, a faint sheen still clinging to his skin, the color in his cheeks gone soft and pink from exhaustion or heat or being held by Nicholas. He tilts his head and fixes Nicholas with a look that is clearly meant to be disapproving, though it loses some of its force when his hands settle over Nicholas’s arms. 

“You’re so clingy,” Euijoo says, smiling too hard to sound convincing.

Nicholas hums and presses a soft kiss to the side of Euijoo’s neck, careful with it despite the fact that he has never been especially careful with wanting him. “I like being close to you,” he says, his voice low. "I wish I could stay like this forever." 

That earns him a huff, half amusement and half surrender. Euijoo glances at him in the mirror, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Before I started dating you, I never would’ve guessed you were such a sap.”

Nicholas smiles against his skin, where no one can accuse him of being too earnest. “No?”

“No.” Euijoo twists free just enough to turn and face him, sliding his fingers into Nicholas’s hair. “Not even close.”

Nicholas leans in before the thought can make itself official, before caution has time to sit up in its chair and clear its throat. The first kiss is soft. The second is less patient. “I’m just crazy about you,” he murmurs against Euijoo’s mouth.

Euijoo makes a pleased sound and kisses Nicholas back, backing him into the bathroom door until it thuds lightly against Nicholas’s spine, the impact more amusing than dramatic, though it still sends a sharp little thrill through him all the same. Nicholas’s breath catches when Euijoo’s hand slides to the back pocket of his pants, pushing them together even closer. 

Then, from the other side of the wall, Maki’s voice cuts clean through the heat of it all. “Euijoo, hurry up and use the shower!”

They both freeze at once, foreheads nearly touching, trying and failing to look innocent. Nicholas presses his lips together to keep from laughing out loud, while Euijoo closes his eyes, sighing.

“And Nico,” Maki continues, sounding steadily more outraged by the second, “Get the hell out of there. Seriously. I don't trust either of you."

Nicholas bends his head and laughs then, helplessly and into Euijoo’s shoulder, knowing he’s giving both of them away.