Archive of Our Own

When it comes to Donghyuck, Mark has learned that finding ways to coexist with contingencies is a must. It’s a claim that can be attested by the gathering of numberless tricks that have been sheltered up his sleeve, not out of the goodness of his heart but out of the need to endure prying intent and stubborn drive.

It’s a continuous effort, and time only makes things easier to bear when you, too, move along with it. That is admittedly hard to do with prying, stubborn hands holding onto your own, and even more when you don’t mind them doing so. 

Here’s where Donghyuck manages to make an oxymoron out of him. 

Mark, who hates things being out of his control and far away from reach, constantly trying to keep up with the one thing that is never still for too long, always waiting for you to get comfortable in your seat before springing up and running back the way it came from. Mark, who would be happy to sit in the already drawn lines, seeking someone who can only ever be found outside the margins, no lined paper or tacit boundary too big of an obstacle for him. So all that Mark is left with is figuring out ways to stall and put a brake on both Donghyuck and whatever red-tinted emotion he's hand-picked that day for Mark to try on. 

The one that seems to do the trick most times is closing his eyes and counting down from seven, a combination of all his favorite things: it’s his lucky number lengthened in seconds, he gets to press pause on reason and logic and avoid every content-filled thought, and, when he opens his eyes, he’s always welcomed with Donghyuck’s face, a source of sore eyes and a sight for them too, stubbornness and impertinence untouched laying their hands on Mark’s will and drawing him in. 

Three, two, one, eyes open, and—there’s teal-toned silk pajamas and crossed arms leaning into the rolled down window of his car, fingers rhythmically tapping against the door’s steel and disinterest coming off every pore of a face that is not Donghyuck’s. What’s always minus one?

Donghyuck’s sister remains standing where Mark’s gaze last left her, after he pulled over to their house and watched her walk out the door and down the driveway to the old Honda, greeting words out of her mouth as soon as she poked her head in through the driver's side window. "He told me to tell you he's not getting in a car with you."

The seven count break has its limitations, one of them being it only manages to postpone reality, which welcomes you back the second you quit looking at the back of your eyelids.

"I don't have time for this," Mark says to himself, a lonely forefinger rubbing the corner of his eye back and forth, listening to the crunch of Donghee chewing on her breakfast, torn-off piece of bread still in hand. She's halfway through a second bite when Mark pulls his hand away from his face with a sigh, the back of his head cushioned by the seat’s headrest as he leans back against it, unknowingly spiking up the hair on his nape. "Tell me he's at least dressed up."

Her answering nod has some of the air in his lungs leaving him in relief, shoulders slumping down as Donghee thumbs the crumbs around her lips away. "Googled how to tie a Windsor knot and everything," she adds, eyes busy checking her fingers for any bread remnants while Mark's own hands reach for the ignition and kill the engine with a flick of the wrist.

By the time Mark has unfastened his seat belt, unlocked the car door and put one foot outside, Donghee is already past the driveway, by the entrance hall and three steps indoors, wordlessly holding the front door open for him.

He's expecting a closed bedroom door, probably under lock, and having to waste anywhere from thirty seconds to ten minutes standing on the other side with one hand raised and knocking on wood while calling for Donghyuck to come out. Finding the door open wide should hint at things being easier than he thought, but all it does is remind Mark that Donghyuck is making him work for something that he's gonna grant him anyway. 

Pretending not to notice Mark leaning against the door frame, Donghyuck sits on his bed while looking down at his phone, eyes fixed on a WikiHow article on the screen that is supposed to teach him step-by-step how to tie his tie, floral-patterned wool around his neck crossed over and tangled up by clueless fingers attempting to manage a clean knot. With one of his legs bent at the knee and propped on its twin dangling off the side of the bed, his right shoe rests right over his thigh, what Mark knows to be a mark of dust and specks of mud on his black pants lying underneath the side of the sole of his blucher shoe. It’s the suit that only leaves his closet for job interviews, a perfect fit when he got it at eighteen and jacket already tight around his shoulders at twenty, sitting askew on his frame over a white shirt bordering on fitting too loose and a tie that is currently being coerced into a knot by forever prying, stubborn hands. 

"Why are you getting ready if you're not coming?" Mark says in lieu of a hello, tucking his free hand in the back pocket of his own dress pants in order to avoid fiddling with anything he can get his fingers on and giving away that his stomach is in knots. They haven't spoken since Donghyuck's don't pick me up tomorrow text, though not for lack of Mark trying, if the endless row of various sorrys interrupted by messages ranging from i really didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable to let’s talk it out that were left unanswered are anything to go by. He considers himself lucky Donghyuck’s selective hearing even decides to pick up on Mark’s words, steadily-voiced even through their syllables’ fright of their own shadow. 

"Of course I'm going," he mumbles, an obstinate need Mark knows too well to make himself sound almost unintelligible, for the sake of making anyone on the receiving end struggle not with cowardly syllables but deceptively well-rounded vowels with their secretly sharp canines. His teeth show in a frustrated grimace when one of his nails catches on the needlework at the back of the tie, looking away from his phone to raise his head high, chin pointing to the ceiling as he tries to carefully tug it free and adds, "Just not with you."

Mark's mind juggles with a flock of thoughts, the moment one goes up in the air another one arrives back on its hold: The ceremony starts in three hours and forty seven seconds. His car has been left parked in the sun, invisibly oxidizing paint and overheated leather seats awaiting his return. He won't make it for the family pictures. Will anyone notice he's missing a cufflink? Donghyuck is on the guest list, he's already been paid for, Mark needs him there to get through the day, and he's going to ruin that tie if Mark doesn't help him out.

Turning his hand around inside his pants' pocket, he wipes his palm's sweat against his butt, uncomfortably hot under the sunlight coming from the bedroom's wide open window and the unusual lack of attention from Donghyuck's end. The act is kept up anyways, taking a step further into the room and inciting himself to sound driven by urgeness and not nerves. "What, you're going to take the KTX in that suit? Pay for a taxi to take you all the way to Daegu and get there in time?" 

Donghyuck wastes no time saying yes through a mhm, hands still busy in their persistence, his phone's patience having run out as its screen mechanically goes dark. In the small patch of silence that settles over Donghyuck's murmured cursing and the sound of fabric being moved around, Mark can't stop himself from letting his eyes do the one thing he's been holding them back from the minute he came in through the door and gives them permission to roam around the room. They're looking for something he both has hope he'll find and a certainty he won't, unable to find it resting on the desk in the corner, lying about the floor or stored in wooden, cardboard or glass vessels of any sort.

He forces them to remain still on one fixed point, which is how they find themselves zeroed in on the dirty sole of Donghyuck's shoe pressed to clean pants as he swallows and tucks the inside of one of his cheeks in between gnawing molars. Counting down from seven doesn’t fix everything—if anything at all. Sometimes, he has to resort to bruising up his knees to get down on them. He likes to think of it as bargaining, but he’ll admit to no one but himself it’s something far more along the lines of pleading. 

"Hyuck, for real. We don't have the time. Just come with me." He takes a tentative step forward, and then another, until he gets to where he needs to be, the mattress sinking down under his weight as he takes a seat at Donghyuck’s elbow. He pictures them sitting on the second row of pews in a small church in his hometown, one dirtied up dress pant leg and a cufflink-less shirt sleeve beside each other, under his grandmother’s disapproving glance and anyone else’s watchful eye. It’s a thought that exists far beyond the lines that mark his boundaries, one that scratches at the margins, and Mark finds he wants it. 

He studies a clean-shaven face with a lonely pimple at the curve of its jaw, blackheads from skipping skincare too many nights in a row and freckles from standing under the sun too many consecutive summer afternoons, eyes that are resolute in setting their gaze anywhere that is free of the sight of him and a mouth that refuses to concede to Mark’s begging, who nevertheless goes on with it. "We don't have to talk. Let me drive you there, we sit through half an hour of ceremonial stuff, you get your free cake and alcohol, and then I'll drop you off and you can go on ignoring me or whatever."

The other way to deal with Donghyuck’s lack of fidelity to consistency, third in effectiveness but decidedly Mark’s favorite, is turning Donghyuck’s own words against him, the one person he wouldn't dare openly contradict. Opportunities are rare and far between, but Mark never misses a chance to catch them by the tail. 

Moon-eyed, with one hand hanging onto the toe cap of Donghyuck’s shoe and his voice so subtly manoeuvring tenderness that there would be no solid evidence to accuse it with, he tries once more. "You can't let me ruin my sister's first dance." 

There’s a few more seconds of rustling about before Donghyuck gives up with a huff, prying stubborn hands letting the tie slip free from their grip and allowing it to flop back down against his chest. Mark's own fingers follow their lead, quick not to mess with the tempo Donghyuck has set up in case that being a beat too late means showing up to his sister’s wedding by himself, and they lay hold of the cloth in between skilled fingertips that take over the task. 

"Third dance," Donghyuck corrects him, for once sounding closer to neutrality than annoyance. 

Mark counts it as a win, looping the wide end over the narrower one for a second time with a trace of a smile he attempts to hush up. He feels without needing to look up from his fingers’ work Donghyuck’s eyes, that had settled somewhere over Mark's right shoulder, suddenly flitting down, and hears the frown in his voice when he asks, "Where did you get that from?"

Mark pauses his hands’ movements to look down at the lone piece of bread on his lap he had been holding onto all the while, finding himself unable to keep biting back his smile when he has to say, "Donghee."

The crease in Donghyuck’s brow deepens for reasons unknown, mouth open and most likely ready to protest just as Mark smooths the tie down and pushes the bit of pulled-apart brioche between his parted lips. "Fuel for the road. Let's go." 

Mark can only guess what his neighbor must be able to hear through the walls: muffled sounds of a jazz melody backdropped by a woman speaking aggressively uplifting Spanish, jump-inducing cries of ouch and ow and occasional cursing that walks the line between playful jests and solemn threats.

Pulling the door of the one-room apartment open would clear things up. Luckily for him, he doubts Miss Kim would care enough to want to snoop in—he doesn’t think he’d be able to look her in the eye again knowing she had walked into this one moment, with Donghyuck's hold on a red-faced and nonplussed feet version of himself coaxing him to move in spins back and forth from the bed to the kitchen.

They move in circles around the coffee table that lays amid the spaces, his laptop’s screen sat on its oaken top offering them a Youtube tutorial on How to Waltz for Absolute Beginners. Staring back at him through the lit-up pixels, a woman demonstrates how to box step while painting in a foreign language’s words her feet’s movements, all over the sound of Sinatra singing about two drifters, off to see the world, music coming from Donghyuck’s phone propped inside one of his discarded sneakers. They sit besides Mark’s own pair of shoes by the door, leaving them to get around the laminate floor on socked feet and amateur dance moves.

There's a little less than a month left for his sister's wedding, and he's only recently realized he's lacking feet coordination and a decent suit, both necessary assets for the only two things that are expected of him: to look good in a tailored two-piece and to waltz with his big sister for a good minute before she moves on to follow someone else's lead. 

“I think I got it,” Mark announces, only to immediately step on Donghyuck’s right foot.

That's the source of every complaint and curse Miss Kim is most likely subject to be hearing, coming out of a foul-mouthed Donghyuck whenever Mark's feet decide to trap his own under their step. 

Pressing the sole of his foot to Mark’s bare shin in reprimand, Donghyuck points out, “Your left leg is lagging behind.” He gestures with their joined hands to the tutorial playing on low volume in Mark’s laptop, a mockingly accusing frown sitting on top of an amused smile. “Are you even listening to Carla?” 

Head ducked down to take note of their footsteps, Mark hears their video instructor blindly encouraging them (or so he hopes) to do it con paciencia que sale, just as the song ends and loops on for what has to be the tenth time. 

Dancing has always felt like rocket science in motion. Mark's feet are only good for thinking on them, and not even the quick-wit kind. That's Donghyuck's department, the first one in a sea of people looking at something either upright or upside down who will think of tilting his head and considering things sideways. He’s one to take creative angles and to be taken by them, from the bridge of his nose down to the dip of his waistline—and there it is, Mark’s quick-thinking of his own kind: yearning out loud on demand.

Mark is good at sitting down in front of a blank Word document, laying in bed with a notebook and a pen, pulling out his phone’s notes in the middle of a class or while standing on the yellow lines of a subway platform and writing down nonsense ideas and detached sentences he then builds upon. He can fend for himself with the written word, put up a fight when it comes to the spoken one, and fall short and over his feet in anything where his body doesn’t come second.

Donghyuck is the only one he can think about to ask for help, quick-wit helping him set up this impromptu weekend dance class and some creative angle Mark is unaware of so far promising him he has already found him the perfect suit without need of a rental. 

“I can’t let you ruin your sister's first dance.” Donghyuck talks at the same time as the opening lines ring out once more, managing to sound as if the song is the one intruding on his words and not the other way around. He's always steady feet (never missing a beat or dropping back), prying and stubborn hands (pulling Mark along with him, not allowing him to admit defeat to a music piece and a set of steps) and assuring voice ("Come on, one more time.")

As they resume their spinning across the apartment's only room, Mark untangles his fingers with palms still pressed together and stretches them out, trying to diminish the sweat and crimson-proper temperature that keeps building up in between their fingers and under the normally cold metal of his rings. Donghyuck's own straighten up and bring them back down in a tangle of knuckles and overheated skin.

“I mean, her actual first dance is going to be with her husband. Then my dad and then me. So I’d be, like, her third,” Mark argues, sidestepping a chair as his right foot goes forward while Donghyuck's goes backwards. The moment he dares think he can glimpse a vestige of synchronicity slowly being established between them, he steps back to the left instead of the right and mistakenly drags Donghyuck towards him by the hand, who manages to stumble back into stability on his own accord and with the assistance of Mark's hand on his ribs.

Donghyuck shows him the white of his eyes as they roll in frustration. 

“Even worse. That’s gonna give people something to compare you to."

Mark bends his knee earlier than he should to knock it into Donghyuck's, this time no accident in sight. 

“Right, because I am so worried my grandma will have a frame of reference when she sees me dance.”

Donghyuck ducks his head when they get too close to the kitchen to avoid his temple knocking into the side of a cupboard, right when Mark reflexively takes their joined hands to place them over the threatened spot and cushion the blow. When he raises them back to the side over their heads, he gets to see a smile with lips pressed together on Donghyuck's face, along with a tuft of hair spiking up from where the back of his hand pressed against his scalp. 

“You wouldn’t have asked me to help you if you didn’t care—ow. ”

Mark apologizes not for the first time that afternoon, a cluster of sorrys slipping out with no criteria, drawing his feet back from where they stepped on Donghyuck’s toes once again. 

They wordlessly complete one more clumsily-executed round around the room, and just as Mark loses his footing for the nth time, feet stammering while trying to speak the jargon that is a three-four rhythm, Donghyuck instructs, “Step on my feet.”

Mark frowns, answer on the tip of his tongue and in the shape of aren't you supposed to teach me how to stop doing that? unable to be voiced and leave his mouth stranded with Donghyuck suddenly walking the distance and coming closer.

Mark’s hand loosely placed on his side sees itself compelled to skim through cotton with the motion, finding a new temporary home in the middle of his backbone. It lies underneath his pointer and ring finger, and he wonders what it’d be like to press down on the keys of Donghyuck’s spine, to have fingers set up a rhythm on the black and white vertebrae of a mole-covered piano and play along to the tune of Moon River, velvet voice through the speakers promising wherever you're going, I'm going your way.

It’s Donghyuck who grabs that thought by the collar and yanks it out of the spotlight when his socked toes slip under Mark’s own and attempt to wiggle their way in. 

“Step on my feet,” he insists, and Mark doesn’t have to be told thrice.

He places red-dressed feet on polka dot covered ones, his slight upper hand when it comes to height furthered by the couple extra centimeters he instantly gains, chin now coming up to the tip of Donghyuck’s nose. 

He thinks of leaning in and rubbing his two-day-old stubble over it just to hear him squeal, but Carla is still babbling on about mirarse a los ojos y no al suelo (she seems lovely, but Mark would really appreciate some subtitles) and Sinatra’s voice keeps going down the same spiral staircase of words as the song runs circles around their amateur ballroom dancing, which Donghyuck takes upon himself to resume. 

Mark’s balance gets light-headed when Donghyuck’s right foot moves forward and carries his body along, leading him to give up his sweaty grip on Donghyuck’s hand to curl an arm around his shoulders, palm landing on the upper keys of his spine and splaying over the whole span of an octave in order to remain steady. He makes sure to take his weight off Donghyuck’s foot with the next step Donghyuck takes on behalf of both of them, and once he figures keeping count of the beat helps him find the timing and stay on top of it, he manages to glide along with Donghyuck’s lead quite seamlessly. 

“There you go,” Donghyuck praises, giving the cold shoulder to his hip knocking into the edge of the oven’s handle as their feet successfully draw a four-sided shape on the floor and they spin towards the coffee table, ready to go back to square one. One hand on each of Mark's shoulders, all ten fingers give him a playful squeeze, thumbs digging right over his collarbones as Mark's mind chants one, two-three, one, two-three and their knees bend and straighten up, bend, straighten, bend, up. “Carla would be proud.”

Donghyuck's second step back brings them closer to the room's window than either of them expected, and the cream-colored curtain sneaks in between them and drapes over Mark's face when he opens his mouth to ask, “Are you proud?"

Their next step to the side and the one going forwards puts some distance between them and the curtains, getting them to withdraw and fall back behind them all while they uncover Mark's pout and Donghyuck's enlivened expression.

It's selfish, this thing he does, the one where he plays Donghyuck's game like the lack of a set of rules hasn't stolen his sleep more than once, where he plays along to the song coming from a phone inside a pair of knock-off Adidas calling for a dream maker, you heartbreaker. 

The thing about Donghyuck’s hands, obstinate and meddling to the touch, is that they’ve spent enough time on Mark’s skin by now to have rubbed some of that stubborn will off on him. It’s so homely to lay between the lines—they’ve been drawn with a purpose and right down to Mark’s size—and yet, comfort is only as tempting as the consolation it can offer. Through all the risks the quirk of Donghyuck’s lips seem to suggest, Mark finds himself from time to time thinking that image alone outweighs every other reason to pull back.

“Mucho,” Donghyuck answers, because living outside the lines and in the margins means there’s no protocol needed to obtain fluency, be it in Spanish or in making Mark have to close his eyes to avoid looking down at his smile. His beat count morphs and goes beyond three, climbing up to four, five, six, unable to get to lucky number seven as he mixes up his left and right and brings Donghyuck with him tumbling down to the ground. 

It’s only later, over the sound of water bubbling its way up to its boiling point and the scrape of a wooden spoon stirring around vegetables on a wok, that Mark remembers what he had originally been pep-talking himself into doing all afternoon.

Through the wall, he hears the low hum of Miss Kim's television, making out a reporter's words relaying updates on the bus workers' weekend-long strike, and feels only slightly guilty that he's thankful for the excuse that allows him this tonight: Donghyuck, hunched over his stove, making an early dinner for them with the scarce resources on Mark’s fridge and pantry he could find, limiting Mark’s task to merely sitting on the unwiped countertop by the pot of water and letting Donghyuck know when it begins to boil. 

Mark watches him pop his thumb into his mouth to clean up a speck of spilled soy sauce, humming along to Moon River, even if his phone, still propped inside his shoe by the door, has moved on to a different song. He thinks it's cruel he won't get to miss this piece of plastic domesticity: once it's over, he'll either remember it or he won't, and one can only miss what one's had and knows they've lost. The only way he'd be able to miss this, a moment unabashed and delicious smelling, would be to go on without it long enough that he'd crave for it again. 

Finger removed, Donghyuck’s mouth is free to ask Mark for the salt, thumb wiping itself clean on the front of his t-shirt. 

To have it just to risk losing it. It'd be cruel to go through that. It's even crueler knowing he doesn't get to.

Mark twists around to grab the salt shaker, and as he hands it over he notices the pot for the noodles boiling. Water's ready, he means to say. What he says instead is, "Do you wanna come with me to the wedding?” 

Donghyuck looks up from the stir fry, a wrinkle of surprise on his forehead from eyebrows curving up. Mark can see the wheels turning inside his head, and decides to go on before he can get a word in.

“It's the weekend after your birthday,” he clarifies, as if Donghyuck wasn’t already on the know. "Jen said I could bring a plus one. I haven't seen—well, you know, after my mom—I haven't seen most of her side of the family in years.” His voice gradually quiets down with every coming word, faint by the time he tries to add it would help if you were there, but his plans derail when Donghyuck suddenly goes limp-handed and lets go of the spoon, allowing it to slide down further into sizzling vegetables. Mark's reflexes come in handy for a second time that day when they have him grabbing Donghyuck’s hand by the wrist before it touches the hot rim of the wok. On the cusp of Mark letting go, Donghyuck's fingers slide up and press his thumb to the middle of Mark's palm, every other finger curling around the back—an eager grip. Mark is not expecting it when he looks up and is met with that same keen feeling all over Donghyuck’s face. 

"You're letting me join you on one of your Daegu trips?" The hold around his hand borders on too tight, the smile on Donghyuck’s face threatens to split his face in half, and Mark rolls his eyes with realization once he figures out what all the excitement is about, his own grin unamenable to any argument that could try to convince it to hide. 

Every other one or so of Mark’s weekends are usually spent driving back to Daegu, where he lived from age ten up until he came to Seoul for university, leaving both his dad and older sister behind in everything but in feeling. Three and a half hour trips are needed now in order to get kicked by his sister underneath the table and be told to learn how to drink when he gulps down his water in one go, or to sit by the fire with his dad after dinner sipping on a glass with too little of a liquor too strong for Mark’s taste buds. 

Those trips back home are either spent in a tranquil quiet of lounging around, a perk of having a retired father living in a peaceful neighborhood, or arguing out of care or frustration, a disadvantage of having an aging father living in an awfully serene neighborhood. Donghyuck, however ignorant to how intimate both of those moments are, has called shotgun since day one he found out about Mark making his way back to Daegu every month, making the argument that he’s always wanted to get to know the city and what better way than on a roadtrip with one of his best friends? (Those two words being pronounced back then, when Donghyuck’s summer job at Mark’s still current part-time was coming to its ending term, had put at rest an embarrassingly large number of worries, all of them about Donghyuck not seeing the need to make time for Mark once work shifts didn’t bind them together any longer).

Donghyuck is still babbling on, hands gone back to their original task, jerking the wok back and forth over the high heat. "And I get to see you make a fool of yourself on the dance floor? Wait, free cake. Count me in." 

A lull in the song playing in the background, along with Miss Kim audibly turning off her TV, bring out the sound of the boiling water, patiently waiting to either evaporate or cook up some glass noodles. 

Accusing eyes narrow on Mark and a wooden spoon smacks his forearm in reprimand. “You had one job.” 

It's a wonder, then, how they manage to go from lying on the ground in a heap of limbs as a result of a waltz-induced fall and laughter bouncing off the walls over homemade japchae to a text message the day before the wedding telling Mark not to pick him up tomorrow and a tension-charged silence in a too long car ride.

Or maybe it’s not so much of a wonder, since Mark will reluctantly admit he has a good idea of what exactly went sideways. 

The thin-lined cracks on Mark’s restraint begin to break apart once he takes the highway and not a single word has been said since they left Donghyuck’s house. Staring out the window with one leg resting on the glove box, arms crossed and lips pursed, the picture Donghyuck makes has Mark feeling like something’s gotta give. Curiously, something seems to always be him.

If Mark clearing his throat and letting his eyes stray from the road to the front passenger seat far longer than he should piques Donghyuck’s interest at all, it doesn’t seem to show. Mark fixes his gaze on the Corolla in front of them going a smidge too fast and knows no alternative other than to say, “I’m sorry.”

Donghyuck hums, a tight-lipped sign of indifference. His propped up leg’s bent knee bends further forwards, closing in on Donghyuck’s chest as he slides down the seat. For all his apathetic etiquette, his voice betrays him when it comes out resentful but brittle. “Are you?”

Lying has never been Mark’s forte, and doing it twice in the same breath requires effort he’s not willing to make and disloyalty to both Donghyuck’s trust and his own heart. Donghyuck’s huff at his silence accompanies the one thought that keeps coming back to him, a different set of words every time but always the same idea. He shouldn’t have given him that as a birthday gift. Why did he have to make it all about himself? What was he thinking?

“I just thought we would be fine, no matter what,” he ends up voicing, that being a truth he can avow for. He cuts himself off with a shrug, anxiety-riddled fingers unflexing and tightening their grip around an unsuspecting steering wheel. “I thought we could move past it if it didn’t work out. I wouldn't have done it otherwise.”

It’s quiet as Mark turns on the left blinker and switches lanes, hitting the gas pedal to leave the speeding Corolla behind, along with something else entirely, pent-up and sitting heavy on his chest. He only manages to overtake one of them.  

A moment later, Mark hears the sound of fabric being untied, and catches sight of Donghyuck taking apart his tie’s knot out of the corner of his eye. He swallows down the retort he can feel come up, intent on not ruining the chance at a truce he’s glimpsing at. “I won’t bring it up if you don’t bring it up,” Donghyuck offers, strip of cloth slipping off the collar of his shirt, and Mark takes it, bitten-down nails digging into the wheel. 

It's cruel when the choice is made for him. When he does get to make it, though, it's just plain sad.

“Alright. Sure,” he nods, sealing the deal. He’s too eager to put the strain in the air to rest to focus on mourning the pocket-sized remainder of hope he was still brewing. His brain switches to practical mode: drive, try to be there on time, get through the day, hope Donghyuck has the fun he promised him, drive back. Needless to say, it’s hard to do when it’s always been longing first, reality second in Mark’s head. “So we’re good?” 

Donghyuck’s foot settles back on the carpeted floor to leave the glove box free for his hands to pull open and rummage inside, tie still trapped between uptight fingers. “We’ll see,” he says, distractedly dragging out every syllable as he ducks his head down to look inside the small compartment. 

“Alright,” Mark echoes himself. He waits for a good minute, listening to the rattle of Donghyuck searching for what he usually makes a grab for first thing when he gets in Mark's car. Once he can't hold back the grin that Donghyuck's muted cursing gets out of him anymore, he raises his pinky off the wheel to point at the sun visor on the passenger’s side. "The aux is in there." 

Eyes dutifully on the road, he listens to the sound of Donghyuck pushing the glove box shut and leaving his tie a crumpled up mop on top of the dashboard, before his hands make for the visor. “You’re a bitch.” 

Mark and his sister weren't close when they were younger. 

It can be blamed on their ten year difference, which led to Jen moving out the same day Mark started his first year of middle school and shed his last milk tooth, growing up with their shared issues being limited to avoiding acne, crushing on boys and attempting to find their place in the world. With Jen gone before arrival, Mark barely asks about her, out of lack not of care but of curiosity. He finds something new every time he sees her—a piercing, a haircut, a new fashion style—that makes it hard to recognize her as the same person he last saw months ago. 

Up until age twelve, that's the older sister he grows up with: a constantly different version of a girl he is bound to by blood, who is obliged to text him happy birthday and get him Christmas presents, both knowing close to nothing of each other. Then, Mark turns thirteen, and their mom passes.

There is no one way to carry out grief, Mark knows that well. His dad does it raucously in a soundproof room, silently living in memories and giving into one too many drinks once or twice a week. Mark is ear-splitting sorrow, spiteful bite and on edge all the time, before suddenly lowering the volume all the way down to mute, keeping to himself and avoiding everyone around when he knows he’s prone to snap.

He was never able to figure out how Jen carried on, exactly. With years of hindsight on his side, he’d say she was white ambient noise, constantly there though imperceptible. She moves back in for a while, drowns herself in work and tends to brother and father alike to no one’s request. 

Their one thing in common, though, was the need to keep something of her alive and kicking, and Mark likes to think that's where the tail end of their griefs tied up. Tacitly and on the low, they all took bits and pieces of her personality and made it part of their own, like they were daily chores that needed to be carried out by someone: his dad started picking up on their neighbors' gossip and sharing it over dinner, Mark kept the garden tidy and watered her lilies almost religiously, and once again, he doesn’t realize what Jen picked and chose for herself until years later. 

Even after she moves back out, she’s there on the stand in all his important football games and she’s there to pick him up when his car breaks down further from home than he had ever driven before. She’s there for him to have someone he can duck under their arm for a hug he’d never admit he needs and someone he can shout himself hoarse telling them to back off, swearing he knows what he’s doing while having no idea what that is. 

Jen took their mom’s shoes as hand-me-downs and walked in them for the remainder of Mark’s pain and his teenage years, both one and the same. He lets her wipe his tears and tell him off without taking into account she’s trying to give him the one thing he didn’t get to have when he needed it most, someone else the one gone before arrival this once. 

A hip bumps into his, threatening to make him drop the plate he’s drying. “So, any plus ones I should know about?” 

Mark's snort goes unheard under the sound the plate makes when he stacks it up on top of the pile, officially adding up the last one of them. Bright yellow gloves on and stainless steel sponge on her hold, Jen's scrubbing clean the juncture between the counter and the sink in their dad’s kitchen. Outside the window that’s overlooking the garden, he catches sight of Jen’s fiancé holding onto a ladder’s side rails to keep it from toppling over, their dad standing on the penultimate step to reach over the wall separating his house from his neighbor’s and steal a few lemons from the tree with branches almost outstretching into Mark’s dad’s lawn. 

His dad stands on his tiptoes to stretch further forwards. Mark worries about him. He thinks of telling Jen about it, sees her scrubbing away the rust in between cast iron and granite, and decides against it. The next weekend he comes over, after she’s married and back from her honeymoon—then he’ll let her stress over something other than rust. 

“No ones to plus here,” he shakes his head no. Her energetic scouring abruptly stops, and Mark doesn’t need to turn around to know she’s staring him down. He plays dumb, picking up the pile of plates and getting the proper cabinet door open, standing in the way between his and his sister’s face. “What? I’m not seeing anyone right now.”

Once the plates are placed down with a clank, a hand settles on top of his head to pull him down, Mark only getting to hear the cupboard’s door fall closed with his face angled down. The same yellow-gloved fingers gripping greasy hair tug him back up, and Mark’s complaint at the sudden manhandling dies on his lips as Jen combs his hair back into its regular shapeless blotch style and asks, “What about that friend of yours?” 

Your friend, like it’s the only one he has. Her voice isn’t void of teasing, and he can tell she’s not smiling only because she clearly is avoiding it. 

He doesn’t make an effort to deny he knows who she’s talking about. It’s not his fault Donghyuck seems to come up in every nook and cranny of any and all conversations. Oh, I know that show, my friend made me watch it. Can I take some home? Donghyuck loves chapssal donuts. Let me take a look at it, a friend taught me how to fix that.  

Mark is entirely aware of exactly what it sounds like. It doesn’t mean he can’t try and be difficult about it. 

“You want me to bring an ex coworker to your wedding?,” he questions, eyebrows raising and getting lost in the hair his sister is brushing down and into his line of sight, all done with gloves still on. Downgrading Donghyuck to somebody he used to know is worth it if only to witness the way Jen's face crumbles into incredulity, eyes rolling back for a second as her mouth sets into a thin, derisive line. 

Rubber-dressed hands set themselves on each side of his head and shake him back and forth, making Mark stumble in place when his balance finds it is endangered. “I want you to grow some balls and ask him out,” Jen says, all mock exasperation with teeth pressed together and wide eyes. 

However unbothered and banter-ready his sister’s energy incites him to be, Mark can’t find it in himself to match her in spirit. There’s a box inside his sock drawer, tucked underneath a pile of winter knee highs, that he’s pulled out and studied over a ridiculous number of times in the last few weeks, brooding on whether it would make a good birthday present or not. He pictures the day of bells ringing in the chapel, sitting on the second row of pews in a small church in his hometown under everyone’s watchful eye, and the thought of Donghyuck sitting right beside him both turns his nerves around and forces them back to their kickoff point. 

He has to remind himself to blink and then breathe in through his nose, overwrought enough that generally automatic tasks have been passed over to his consciousness, mind in need of hand-operation. Mark flips the switch that opens his mouth and whacks the buttons on the dashboard of his native tongue at random until he comes up with a somehow coherent thought. “Grandma will probably have a heart attack if I bring a guy,” he ends up mumbling, as if Jen won’t be able to figure out that’s not nearly the half of it. 

If she does, not a word about it is said. Instead, Jen shrugs, looking like she finds the idea to be on the brink of entertaining. “Eh, she’s lived long enough.” 

Mark is turned around towards the window by a demanding hand pushing on his upper back, his sister slipping her gloves off from behind him and letting them flop down on the countertop with a wet sound when she tosses them up in the air and over his head, only then digging her fingers into Mark's shoulder blades. He tenses further up before letting his body droop down with unwinding stress, allowing a grunt to be pulled out of him by a thumb rubbing a painstaking circle on what he guesses to be a knot. “Seriously, loosen up. You’re too young to be getting wrinkles.” 

He's left with no choice but to look out the glass into the garden, at the ladder and his dad and his sister's future husband, at the handful of lemons in his father's hand as he takes the first step down to come back to the ground. 

“Nevermind granny. It’s my day. I want you to be there and have fun.” The spurt-of-the-moment massage ends as abruptly as it began once Jen removes her hands and uses one of them to pinch his side, a jerk and a squeal from Mark obliging the shirt and skin between her forefinger and thumb to bail out from her grip. Her voice lowers, acting secretive as she suggests, “Maybe also cry a little to feed my ego.” 

He smiles down at the ground, thinking she would probably like Donghyuck, only half-aware he ends up saying it aloud once he feels her playfully pat his butt. Eyes traveling up, they settle on the meeting rusted-up line of sink and granite, and he resolves to slip one rubber glove on and make a grab for the vegged out metal sponge. “Sure, okay. I’ll let you know,” Mark nods as he picks up from where Jen’s strenuous scrubbing left off, who slips out of the kitchen after saying, “Damn right you will. I need that RSVP before Sunday.” 

Mark can’t remember there being a time where his body control was apt. Always decent at writing, so-so at using his words and downright laughable at anything that depends on his grasp of physical restraint: no good at dancing, below average at football throughout all his teen years, and dreadful at keeping his eyes away from Donghyuck.

Discouraging them from doing the only thing they know how to do when it comes to the one person that always wants to be seen—Mark doesn’t deem that to be something he’ll ever get fully used to. Donghyuck runs his hand through dye-fried hair, leans in close with both a smile and gossip on his mouth, stares into space with unblinking eyes or bites his fingernails down to their beds, and Mark can’t help but stare every time. 

It’s like Donghyuck knows, in a way, that there’s a hidden catch-22 in all of Mark’s looks, because sometimes it seems like he intentionally tries to make it easier for him to avert his eyes, just as he’s doing now. With his head leaning against the window, Donghyuck sports an assemblage of items he found fumbling through Mark’s glove box: sunglasses long past their usable lifespan sitting low on his nose and letting closed eyes peek out, hand inside a bag of potato chips Mark doesn’t even remember opening and mouth spitting them out when he laughs without constraint at whatever is playing out on his phone. It creeps up on gross even for Mark, whose fingers can usually be found up his nose or covered in salt or oil, but when Donghyuck presses a stale chip to Mark's lips with eyes still shut, he takes it between his teeth with no complaint. 

He’s busy trying to bypass the past sell-by date taste as he chews while digging through his mind to remember if he left any cash laying around for the toll gate coming up, when Donghyuck decides Mark’s already full hands can hold onto one more thing: conversation. 

“Why didn’t we leave yesterday?” Donghyuck’s mouth finds a way to fit the words through his mouthful. “It would have saved you all the hurry.”

They are in a hurry now because Donghyuck had to be coaxed out of his house, and would he have even agreed to come yesterday when he was hard at it telling Mark not to pick him up?. Mark decides not to say a single one of those words, tiptoeing the line between thinking he has no right to be bitter and considering that, perhaps, Donghyuck’s cold shoulder is not all that warranted. Then again, a recap of things Mark couldn’t even earn himself a bronze-medal at if he tried: dancing, cheating himself out of setting his eyes on Donghyuck, lying. 

“There was a dinner last night. For my sister, you know? The extended family kind,” he says truthfully, watching the last exit before toll sign fly past their heads, and after a pause admits, “Didn’t feel like going.”

It’s one thing to stand in a church in a mudded-up suit and a missing-cufflink shirt, to be the subject of staring, judging but wordless. It’s another to expose Donghyuck to his family’s prying, in no way as light-hearted or well-intentioned as Donghyuck’s own, or to lay himself bare to all their know-it-all comments: undisguised criticism over his sister’s marriage delay all the way into her thirties, remarks about his dad left all alone in a house too big for him with neither of his kids near, made-up anecdotes of his mom where they put words in her mouth that make Mark see red. He’s on that list too, though never for the same reason, and he doesn’t want to risk the chance of Donghyuck becoming a new shiny bullet point for them to twist and mold. So, no long table dinner at his dad’s house for them.

He expects Donghyuck to protest, but once again, in a way, he knows. Prying, stubborn, but always well-intentioned, Mark reminds himself as Donghyuck shrugs, pushing sunglasses that aren’t his up the bridge of his nose to hide closed eyelids and say, “Pity. Aunts usually love me.” 

Donghyuck doesn’t allow the silence that follows to stretch out for long, blindly raising a finger to point at where he guesses Mark is and ending up being just a short space off. “I know you’re making a face. Stop that."

Mark’s teasingly ticked-off expression morphs into a smile he all but breaks out into, swatting Donghyuck’s finger away when it sways closer to his face and nearly pokes him in the eye. The car slows down as he nears the toll gates, but their rhythm picks up as they steadily fall back into it. "I don't know about my aunt, but you'd probably get along with Jen."

Donghyuck’s eyes open up for a second, looking at Mark through dark-tinted glass and a bleary squint, smiling back just as gently. "Guess we'll find out."

Mark pats down the pockets of the jacket, the pants, grabs the box on top of Donghyuck’s dresser and gives its empty interior another once-over, pats himself down once more. When he’s sure he won’t come across what he’s searching for by feeling the suit up over and over, he kicks at Donghyuck’s thigh, sat on his bedroom floor and resting against the chest of drawers, with legs splayed and hands over his eyes. “Where’s the other cufflink?”

Angling his face up towards the sound of Mark’s voice with hands unmoving, Donghyuck asks, “Are you done playing dress-up? Can I look now?” 

Mark has just enough energy left to sigh, air drawn out of him as he steps between Donghyuck’s legs and sits on his haunches in front of him, watching his face blindly follow him down with the motion. Mark takes both palms in his and pulls them away from Donghyuck’s eyes, blinking hard at the sunlight that sneaks in through the blind's slats and around Mark's backlit figure. The sight is that brand of adorable that you can only see when wearing glasses tinted pink by infatuation's doing, one's that Mark loves to allow himself to slip on around Donghyuck when he's not busy trying to drive Mark into a frenzy and there's no third party to witness it. 

“I’m missing a cufflink,” Mark repeats, aware of how absurdly worked up he sounds.

It’s not so much not having a matching partner for the copper circle tying together the scuff of his shirt’s right sleeve, but more the thought of losing something that isn’t his. This is why he hates being lent things. At least, if this was a rental, the guilt would be more manageable—apologize, pay it off, turn the page—but this belongs to Donghyuck’s cousin, and it's completely feasible it has some sentimental value. What if they belonged to his late grandfather or something? Was he unknowingly trusted with a family relic? Jesus Christ, did he just—

“Yeah, I think Jeno warned me about that,” Donghyuck drawls, prolonging every sound as he tries to recall his cousin's words, all while Mark feels his soul come back into his body. No family relic’s blood on his hands. 

Donghyuck’s hands slip out of his grip only to grab onto his forearms and bring them up and closer to his face. The sudden pull has Mark falling back on his butt, legs spreading out on their own accord with a thigh landing over Donghyuck’s shin and a heel knocking into the side of his waist. Donghyuck pays no mind to the heap of limbs gracelessly toppling into him, too tied up studying the perfectly kept in place sleeve beside the ajar one, unfastened french cuff with buttons undone displaying pale skin all the way down to the middle point between elbow and wrist. 

“I don’t think you can even tell,” he tries, face peeking through Mark’s raised forearms, showing him a smirk that expects that fully-fledged lie to go unpunished. 

Mark looks at him unimpressed, barefoot toes still propped on top of Donghyuck’s upper thigh and pressed against his stomach digging into the belly underneath, a surprised yelp erasing the smile off Donghyuck’s face only to come back as laugh with its breath knocked out. Alright, so maybe his freak out did also involve the thought of having to walk around with a stray piece of jewelry. 

Donghyuck’s legs bend at the knees as he scoots closer to Mark, body parts rearranging so Mark’s caged between two knees and faced with Donghyuck’s side profile and the left line of his neck, half throat and half nape, as he stretches back to open the bottom drawer of his dresser that was pressed to his lower back only seconds ago. One hand resting on his bedroom floor to lean back on it, he lets the other search around the privacy of his miscellaneous hoard of what's-its-name stuff. His fingers roam around the wood floor base far enough that he has to throw his head back to be able to get a better look of their journey towards the back of the drawer. Mark's eyes, not knowing what to do with themselves, shut close as he begins to count up one, two, three, and by number five they are already back open, doing the one thing they know how to do when faced with the one person that would never mind their presence, six and seven going by with them fixed on Donghyuck's triumphant grin when he finally finds the object of his scouring.

It seems all the effort he put in was in the name of getting his hands on a golden safety pin, color matching the one cufflink he's wearing when Donghyuck takes the unlatched sleeve and passes the open pin through the rightful eyelets. Mark inspects the finished work, turning his wrist around and watching the late afternoon sun bounce off the wire, Donghyuck's voiceover telling him there, good as new.

When Mark's gaze doesn't part from Donghyuck's patch-up work, he lets both his knees on either side of Mark close in on him until they bump into his ribcage and squeeze. "Relax, you're not even a groomsman. Nobody’s going to look at you twice." 

That gets Mark's clean-cut tendency to lower its guard as well as Mark's eyes, which find Donghyuck's already looking at him, forever housing that mischief loaded glint Mark both abhors and can't get tired of. "Thank you?," he frowns, uncertainty getting Donghyuck's smile to run riot. 

Mark travels paths up and down his mind wishing he could come across a credible excuse to get Donghyuck to try his own suit on. He’s only ever seen him wearing the apron of the coffee shop where they both worked over all black outfits, or worn-down t-shirts he doesn’t doubt are hand-me-downs and baggy pants with stains Mark wouldn’t put past being limited to more than one source. Pajamas, hawaiian shirts, cargo shorts and baseball caps, but never suited up nor stripped down. 

He tries to swallow down the thought that, after next Sunday comes around, there’ll only be one more side left to Donghyuck that Mark’s never taken in before, and with it comes a telltale nervous click in his throat and the brown of his eyes setting on the current side he gets to behold now: the orange of Donghyuck’s hand-me-down shirt stretching along with him as he leans back once more, riding up his stomach saved for the small patch where the sole of Mark’s foot remains pressed against; the bone-tired looking red of a scab around Donghyuck’s middle finger (burned it the week before on Mark’s stove, and it’s half inconsiderate and half ridiculous of him not to want the scar to fade away any time soon) that curls around the handle of the drawer on top of the still agape random-stuff-filled one and pulls it halfway open; the tan of his jaw when it moves as he tells Mark, "That's one boring tie, though. I can lend you mine." 

He gets deja vu watching Donghyuck’s side profile—the left line of his neck, half throat and half nape—turn back around with something to offer Mark between his hands. It’s a flower-patterned tie, solid navy blue the backdrop for interlaced bouquets of a flower Mark wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s real or made up. Donghyuck rolls it out, unfolding it to its full length before placing it around Mark's neck. "I'll wear the boring one. No one's gonna pay attention to me, but you are the bride's brother."

While Donghyuck completely foregoes the collar of his shirt and crosses the cloth over itself to tie it as if it were a present bow against his throat, Mark muses on whether he should tell him he couldn't be more far off, that everyone will probably turn heads to look at them once they walk through the church doors, though not for the reasons Mark would like that to be. "I thought no one was going to even look at me," he says instead, feeling Donghyuck do his best to secure the knot, squeezing his throat a touch too hard with the top of it tickling his chin. 

"Who knows? I've never attended a wedding. I'm making shit up as I go." Donghyuck's hands drop back down, seemingly content with their handiwork as they settle down on the ground between them, supporting his weight so he can lean even further forwards to ask, "I'm good, right?"

Mark's toes on Donghyuck's stomach, Donghyuck's legs on either side of him, a thigh on a calf and a shin on a thigh—Mark can't keep track of what part of him is where anymore, where it burns because of the sunlight dozing off on his skin for too long and where because of the touch against orange, bone-tired red and tan. He's only aware that he's too close, a line meeting a margin on an otherwise unwritten page. 

But lines on pages are never alone. There's always one on top and one underneath, the same symmetric amount of space away, looking down on him no matter if they're above or below him. Lines that look, and ponder, and judge. What would they think of this? A cufflink-less shirt sleeve and a flower-covered tie, under his grandmother’s disapproving glance and anyone else’s watchful eye.

For a second, he considers that could be far more tolerable than this right here, having to look into Donghyuck's expectant face, feel the knot around his neck and inside his throat and tell him, "I think I'll stick to the boring one."

Donghyuck's face immediately collapses into a pout, frowning as he loudly boos Mark. It's childlike and banterful, so then why does it sting?

Mark unties the bow and takes it off, reaching out with one arm to lay it on top of the line where Donghyuck’s hair parts, covering up the dark roots amongst bleached strands and letting it hang over his nose, trailing a path all the way down to his chin. "This will look better on you, anyway," Mark says.

Even behind the line of wool Donghyuck’s pout hides behind, he can see it nosedive into a quiet kind of gloom. It's honest and well-meant, but why does it look like it stung Donghyuck then?  

"I mean, that's a given." Donghyuck rolls his eyes, fake confidence Mark knows is not at all fake, and sometimes barely is confidence. He brushes the tie off his face and tucks it behind one ear, and Mark’s laughter patches up the mood with its bright sound and a smile on Donghyuck’s lips, who only grins wider as his eyes flit down to Mark’s lap and then back up. "Do you maybe wanna try on the pants now?" 

Mark looks down at his own bare legs, stopping at the point where his boxer briefs start, Donghyuck's words reminding him that his cufflink freakout had made him abandon his dress pants laid out on the bed and prevented him from getting all the way dressed. 

Donghyuck has seen him in uniform, dressed down, and now, suited up and halfway stripped down. He doubts this is fair play.

Stretching the dress shirt down with one hand trying in vain to cover something up, Mark ignores his ears going red and Donghyuck’s amusement going up. "Close your eyes again?," he asks, even if it wouldn’t stop Donghyuck from witnessing anything he hasn’t already witnessed. 

Still, Donghyuck does as told, taking his hands off the floor and placing his palms back over his eyes, inside of fingers pressed tightly together to cast out Mark’s outline and all traces of sunlight. 

Mark stops mid getting on his feet, back to sitting on his haunches, and takes a heartbeat of time to look at him—never able to stop himself from it: blackheads and freckles and a lonely pimple on the curve of his jaw, orange red and tan all over—and wonder if Donghyuck ever has to count down from seven at the thought of him as well.

Systole and diastole over with, he straightens up and walks towards the bed.

10:27am, the car stereo displays for Mark to read out. He'll be lucky if they get there before the vows. 

Mark taps his one ring against the steering wheel in a quick pace, muted sound a metronome for his body’s motions as he turns his head towards the passenger’s side window and glances at the public bathroom door of the gas station they had to stop at for Mark to fill up the tank, waiting for Donghyuck to step out of it. With all the buttons and the tucking, he gives it seven more minutes before they’re out of here and would bet on his life Donghyuck’s dress shirt will be crinkled from the collar down to the last button.

He tests the waters of his nerves by taking a deep breath in, holding it in and then breathing out, every step of it easier now that he’s alone in the four windowed walls of his car. Donghyuck gave up the silent treatment and sharp retorts half an hour into their drive, but not even that managed to take away the feeling Mark’s been sitting on since Friday night, slowly coming to life the moment he slipped inside Donghyuck’s bedroom to leave his present on his gift-cluttered desk and heavy on his chest when he wakes up late Saturday morning to Donghyuck telling him not to show up the next day as his ride. 

If you don't bring it up, I won't bring it up, Donghyuck had said, and Mark had agreed. Why had he agreed? 

Mark knows leaving it undiscussed is the worst thing they could do, a noxious kind of food for thought. Does Donghyuck secretly hate him now? Maybe he holds no grudge, but he's uncomfortable around Mark still and he’s just great at putting on a convincing facade. How many acts before the show ends and the curtain crumbles?

His gaze plummets from the bathroom door seen through grimy glass to the crumpled-up tie lying on top of the dashboard and right over the glove box. Dark pink and poppy yellow flowers partnered with green leaves, Mark takes it between his fingers and turns it over, deliberating to himself. The wrinkle between his grandmother’s eyebrows judging him without a sound when she sees him walk by, or the downturn of Donghyuck’s sulking mouth when he turned him down. In the end, it turns out it's not that hard of a choice to make.

Donghyuck gets into the car at 10:32am, with a dress shirt marked with lines and a complaint on the tip of tongue, which dies between his lips once he looks in front of him to see a bland black tie with bland black stripes, turns his head just a space to the left and sees navy blue floral down Mark’s chest, looks into Mark’s eyes and hears him half-say, half-ask, “Hope you don’t mind getting stuck with the boring one?” 

And obviously it’s the right choice to make, because how could it not be, with Donghyuck smiling at him the way he is? 

Donghyuck slips his pointer finger inside Mark’s half-Windsor to loosen it up, for reasons unknown to them both. Maybe just to joke around, or to get back at him for Friday night in small disguised doses of disturbance, or perhaps simply to have an excuse to touch Mark. One of them is not like the others. One of them is Mark’s imagination running wild, inciting him to lean with the pull of Donghyuck’s finger and keep falling forwards and down. 

Donghyuck’s hand moves back, leaving behind a messed up knot. “I've been in a car with you for the last two hours. I think I’ll manage just fine.” 

10:34am, tank full and dress shirt creased, they’re back on the road.

“Is that Carla?”

Donghyuck’s finger falters in its endless scrolling down their waltz teacher’s Instagram feed, looking up at the sound of Mark’s voice, finding him with his eyes on the highway as if it could hide the fact he was peeking at Donghyuck’s screen. 

“Shut up. I’m obsessed with her.” He’s back to skipping through Carla’s pictures, stopping before long at the sight of one and proceeding to shove his phone in Mark’s face, the bright light from the screen thrust to the side of his face forcing him to squint one eye in order to make out the road. Once he can move past the daze, his eyes abandon the road, jump to his side-view mirror and then quickly steal a look at the liked Instagram post of two toddlers wearing matching baby-pink overalls with a dog sat between them that comes up to both their waists. 

“She has two kids and a Frenchie and she lets them pick their outfits.” Two of Donghyuck’s fingers place themselves on the screen and move in a pinching out motion, spreading apart to zoom in on the dog-appropriate jean jacket the puppy is wearing. “Even the Frenchie," he stresses. 

Mark laughs at that, letting himself take half his mind off the road with no curves, tolls or cars in front or behind, a quiet moment of mindless driving in a straight line that he can use up however he wishes. This time it's to take in Donghyuck in the same position as before he leaned in, and ten minutes ago, and the ten before that. Phone in one hand, nail of his free middle finger caught between his teeth, sunglasses tucked in between the third button from the top and the one below it of his dress shirt, dishevelled further beyond what Mark had expected him to look by now. He had pictured the no tie, two buttons undone and wrinkled shirt paired with a dirty knee and fringe sticking to his forehead to come around the cake cutting. He should know by now Donghyuck is always two steps ahead and outside the margins, never still for long. 

Quiet mindless moment passing them by in the shape of a four-by-four popping up in his side view mirror, Mark goes back to staring at the road. “You love Frenchies,” he says redundantly, if only to get Donghyuck to talk again, who is absorted on a shot of Carla having a picnic at the beach. 

It does the trick, hearing him deflate with a sigh as he moves down lower on his seat. “I know. I wanna be her so bad.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Mark catches Donghyuck’s thumb stop dead in its tracks at a picture of a small-scale flea market on a narrow street, blobs of brown and red and yellow Mark can’t quite make out except for a sunny day and what he presumes to be Carla’s Frenchie making his way amongst the booths. He’s sure Donghyuck has fallen into another admiration-induced gawking episode when he suddenly speaks up once more, Mark barely being able to hold in the way his body attempts to jump at the sound of Donghyuck saying, “Let’s go to Chile.” 

It’s not an imposition, yet it doesn’t sound like a proposal; it’s as if Mark doesn’t have room to say no, but his yes can’t go by without being said. 

Mark leans forward, eyes looking up at the sky like he’s searching for an invisible road sign, fully expecting the shove to the shoulder he gets in response as he says, “Pretty sure this route ends in Busan.” 

“Come on,” Donghyuck whines, voice clinging into the last sound of the words while kicking out legs and arms in a tantrum fashion. “We move to…” He brings the phone back up to his face and scrolls all the way back up to Carla’s bio, thumb settling over her location as he reads it out. “We move to Santiago, we get a Frenchie and I become a Youtube dance instructor and get to live out Carla’s life.”

Four-by-four gone and back to having their side of the highway all to themselves, Mark risks another glance at Donghyuck, and straightaway wishes he hadn’t. With his neck craned and his head tilted back against the seatrest to show off barely crooked canines that peek through his beaming, Donghyuck adds with a smile, “And you get me.”

It’s selfish, this thing Donghyuck does, where he'll come across something he’ll regard only for a second or two and, for as long as it catches the light just right to look shiny and brand new, he'll swear undying loyalty to it. Most times, it's gone in a blink’s time, a dark cloud passing by that boycotts its shine or something even brighter coming along and monopolizing Donghyuck’s attention once more. 

It goes without saying that, in this constant seesaw of wishes, Donghyuck needs someone else to push their feet against the ground to get him back up when gravity pulls him down—every swiveling new shiny thing involves Mark. And, once again, it’s not imposed on him, but he’s also never been asked. It’s cruel when the choice is made for him, but what about when he can’t say no yet not a move will be made until he says yes? 

Mark makes the constant effort to deal with prying stubbornness, hates things uncontrolled while loving the constant chase, closes his eyes and counts down from seven; it’s all been said and done. But what about what he wants? What about Donghyuck holding something under the light—something that never quits being shiny and new to Mark, dear and close to his heart—and dropping it the second it doesn’t spark the way he wants to anymore? Carla, Chile, a two-kids-and-a-Frenchie picket fence, sharing it all with Mark, whatever comes next.

“I think I’ve moved around enough for a lifetime,” Mark settles for, his way of saying yes while saying no, and it's not bitter only because he says it through a grin and because it’s true.

Born in Canada, an American kindergarten attendee that found himself on Daegu during his middle and high school years before moving to Seoul for college—all and none of those places his home.

It seems like Donghyuck is thinking about it too, because he takes the weight off his voice’s feet for a second by letting out a quiet yeah, you have, before he's springing back up on them, putting down his phone and turning to Mark to ask, "Do you ever miss it? Daegu?” 

Mark blinks in thought, allowing the dark of the tunnel the car takes them under to shelter him from the question for a few seconds, as he mulls it over. When they come out the other end, he starts with, “A little. I mean, cities are cities everywhere.” 

Donghyuck hums as if to show he gets it, inciting him on, and Mark wonders how he knew he was waiting for it, deliberating to himself if he’s making any sense. “I do miss my family’s house back there. Getting home and speaking English,” he goes on, digging the nail of his thumb into the plush of the steering wheel. “Or also, like, the stuff I didn’t get to do. Places I wanted to go to or things I wanted to try out, I don’t know. I miss being able to imagine doing something and not have it be, like, something I know I’m not gonna get to do. Like, putting something off thinking I’m gonna have all the time in the world to get it done, you know?”

He removes his eyes from the yellow lines dictating lanes left and right to search for the encouragement his rambling always needs. He gets his incentive from Donghyuck fully turned to him in his seat against the seatbelt’s best efforts to stop him from doing so with his cheek squished against the cushion, attentive and pliantly silent. He nods and lets a pocket-sized smile grow in his face at the feat of Mark’s eyes on him, which soon turn back to the only view the windshield has to offer him. 

“There was—I mean, it’s probably still there—but there’s this tea house near the park I would always go to in middle school. My mom would drop me off and sometimes—most times—she would cross the street to go have her tea, and when I was done I would meet her there so we could walk back home together. The lady who owned the place would never let me in ‘cause I usually played football with my friends, so my shoes were all, like, muddy and gross. So my mom would sit by the windows and I would press my face to the glass from the outside and knock on it, and the shop owner hated it so much she started charging my mom, like, a thousand won extra on her bill. And so my mom—” He cuts himself off with a laugh. “She used to tell me she would buy the shop off her, ’cause she was pretty old and we thought she would retire soon. And I think she was just joking, but there was this… I know she actually would have liked it. Owning that place. She would spend hours there just reading and eating their—she loved their matcha cheesecake, and I just—I remember thinking I would help her get that place someday.” 

His mouth stops sprinting to try and keep up with the coming of his words in a sudden halt, making his bluntness trip over its feet and land on its face. He refuses to face Donghyuck, who remains quiet, and fights his eyes for the nth time that day not to look at him, which never gets easier. He’s already given him this piece of him, not in these same words but identical in sentiment, in the form of a birthday gift that wasn’t wanted. No part of this is new or shiny to him.  

Mark swallows on nothing, and attempts to carry on like it doesn’t mean much. “I mean, I wouldn’t be able to do that even if I was still living there, but it’s not the same. So yeah, stuff like that. That's what I miss."

He hears the wet sound of lips parting with words willing to leave an eager mouth, but life tends to get interrupted by none other than itself, and he can feel the change in demeanor as Donghyuck seems to notice something and brings it to Mark’s attention. “You have to take the next exit.” 

It’s the last thing Mark expects to hear, making him look at the road ahead like he’s doing it for the first time, unable to hold back from voicing out an incredulous already?. He knows the pathway back home like the back of his hand, thanks to long bimonthly car rides that go back years by now, and yet here’s Donghyuck, making him put on his turn signal in a hurry once Mark realizes he’s right. 

“That’s us.” Donghyuck points to a sign that Mark gets a glimpse of before it slips out of sight, and once again he’s correct. “Or at least that’s the exit you told me to remember we had to take. See? I actually read that little post-it you left me with the info for today. Have I told you before you have the handwriting of a fifty-year-old woman? Literally looked at it this morning and thought my aunt Dasom had sneaked into my room at night and left me a—"

Mark’s hand reaches out for the car radio’s volume knob and turns it all the way up.  

“Not bad for a third dance,” Donghyuck congratulates him with as Mark makes his way out of the crowd circled around his sister and her husband dancing with their relatives, his own turn over and done with. It was a good forty seconds of spinning around the room and getting to have his third conversation of the day with Jen.

Their first was had through the last of the family pictures Mark made it just in time to slip right into, quick hellos traded in the seconds between shots with family members walking in and out of the lens’ reach and subdued bickering exchanged as relatives switched around and they got closer together and then pulled back apart. 

The second is even less of a proper dialogue than the first, with Mark helping her out right before the ceremony starts as he takes off Donghyuck’s safety pin from his cufflink-less sleeve and hooks it over the one button on her dress that keeps coming off. The moment he’s done, there’s a sudden bustle of movement right as he looks up and says, “You look dope.” He hears hurry up and sees someone touching up Jen’s hair one last time, a third somebody from the bridal party pulling him out of the dressing room, his sister’s burst of laughter muffled through the wooden door that shuts in his face. 

And so, after sitting on the second row of pews in a small church in his hometown (all disapproving glances and watchful eyes going unnoticed thanks to the one dirtied up dress pant leg pressed to his) and doing good on his promise to Donghyuck of free alcohol and cake, he finds himself walking towards the middle of the room when his dad lowers his and his sister’s raised hands and steps aside, a smile and a pat to the shoulder as he passes him by. It’s hard to remember what he was so high-strung about once he reaches Jen, who takes his hand in hers over their shoulders, steps back as Mark steps forwards and ruins Mark’s chance to congratulate her by saying, “Nice tie.”

Never one to be able to sidestep brute honesty, he looks at a gold hair pin holding her updo together as he admits, “It’s Donghyuck’s.” 

The smile on Jen’s face takes a turn for the worse, her eyes turning their spin to good account and looking over Mark’s shoulder for someone wearing a bland black tie and a crinkled up dress shirt, seeing her lips move more than hearing her say does he look dope too?, and Mark scrambles for a turn of conversation. All that comes to mind is scrubbing rust off a sink’s edge and a hand reaching for a lemon tree branch. “I’m worried about dad,” he lets out, frowns to himself wondering what happened to not adding anything else to his sister’s already full plate, and immediately attempts to patch it up. “I mean, congratulations. Sorry.” 

Jen snorts, sound loud and clear over their hushed speaking, and for once Mark is the one being stepped on and not the other way around, heels squeezing what’s left of his Oxfords’ unsoiled lifetime as she stumbles through her laugh. Their feet go back to drawing invisible squares soon enough, and Mark does a good job at keeping his eyes on his sister’s amused face. He left Donghyuck leaning against one of the round dinner tables, placed behind the line their relatives stand around them in to almost mandatorily watch their precarious waltzing—it’s easier to turn a blind eye when it doesn’t come to staring back at him. 

Lifting her hand from his shoulder to smooth down the furrow between his eyebrows, she tuts him, “I’m warning you. Premature wrinkles," and before he can get a word in adds, “I’ve been thinking we should get dad a dog.”

Mark's mouth turns into a smile with a mind of its own, all muscle and no coherent thought behind it, and only then does Jen smile back and concede his feet a rest as they take them right back where they began, bidding Mark goodbye with a whisper-yell to go tell your boy he looks dope while one of his cousins steps in to take his place. 

Mark kept his hands to himself during cocktail hour, but he may have forgotten he was the one driving Donghyuck and him back home and had had one and a half glasses of wine through dinner. So once he stands before Donghyuck (who remains exactly where he last saw him, body resting on bone white table linen and hands tucked deep in his pockets), he sets the fifth law of thermodynamics in motion: liquid courage evaporates into breath particles of words, which in turn deposition into a solid request. “Wanna have our own third dance?” 

Donghyuck looks at outstretched arms inviting him in, tips of fingers grazing the cloth of his jacket by his ribs, and Mark finds a green light to take another step forward in the way Donghyuck’s eyes grow smaller in size as his cheeks raise up and in the sound his words take when he says, “That makes no sense.”

He seems to break at the sight of Mark’s hands making grabby motions from where they’re now pressed against his sides, either their tickling or Mark’s raised eyebrows getting him to come close enough, his own hands about to place themselves somewhere in Mark’s body when they’re halted on their movements mid-air by none other than Mark’s voice.

“Wait, step on my feet,” Mark makes a second request, made up thermodynamics and whatnot stripping him bare of any and all timid-infused feelings and allowing him to full on pout in a room full of judging eyes and right in front of Donghyuck’s. “I can lead, I promise.” 

No law of physics, however, could cause him to be so caught up in the moment he wouldn’t notice there’s something missing about Donghyuck’s smile, now on full display and no longer keeping Mark’s gaze privy to it. There’s a single inch less of skin scrunching up around his grin, or maybe one too many teeth showing, but Mark’s thoughts are soon put on hold by Donghyuck climbing on top of his nice shoes, second time that day someone covers with their even nicer shoes the only part of his outfit that isn’t passing itself off as the wedding’s something borrowed. 

As his feet carry them in a zigzag trail through empty tucked out chairs, one of Donghyuck's hands makes a grab for his tie when gravity decides to misbehave and attempts to bring Donghyuck down to the ground. The tug forward forces Mark to curl and arm around the middle of Donghyuck's back, and for a moment he's not dodging a see-through acrylic chair but his battered coffee table, nice Oxfords and even nicer bluchers replaced by red socks under polka dot thigh-highs, a bus workers' strike awaiting to work as an excuse and a question on the tip of his tongue queueing up to be asked.

His sister—no one dare tell her—was right. Donghyuck looked dope then, shoeless and polka-dotted and complaining at every wrong move of Mark's, and he looks dope now, suited up with shoes on and a boring tie's knot close to coming off, head tilted down to glance at Mark's now steady feet begging to waltz them to-and-fro in small-sized steps. 

“Jen looks nice. Laughs a lot like you,” Donghyuck comments, voice hard to make out against the music and with the crown of his head brushing against Mark’s chin. 

All that’s on show for Mark to see of him are grown-out roots framed by a half shrugged off suit jacket, blue wool on one shoulder and white cotton on the other, but he still means it when he tells him, “You do too.” 

Donghyuck looks up with a quiet burst of laughter, question reiterative of the shaking of his chest. “Laugh a lot?,” he wonders, and Mark answers with a shake of his head and a smile of his own—one that rivals Donghyuck’s in having the right amount of scrunched up skin and teeth on display, one that delights itself in knowingly rebelling against their don’t bring it up pact as he says, “Look nice.” 

Everything about Donghyuck appears artificially unaffected, striking as forced both in looks with the roll of his eyes and in tone when he tells Mark yeah, right. Who knew that making your own choices could make you the cruel one?

He’s almost expecting Donghyuck to step down and away, knowing he’s drunk in the moment enough to mesh lines and margins in all the wrong ways and at odds with everything that was asked of him. Instead, he gets a chin hooking over his shoulder and arms going around his waist in a grip that won’t give gravity a second chance at making a pilot study out of Donghyuck. There’s a low-pitched hum coming out of his mouth that Mark feels more than hears, and he has to bite his tongue to keep something aching and tender in once he recognizes Moon River’s melody, close-mouthed singing going crosscurrent against the song playing through the speakers.

As he continues swaying their way through the dance on automatic, Mark’s fingers, settled on the middle and lower end of Donghyuck’s spine with his splayed palms, feel tempted to play along on its keys yet again, incited by the familiar tune making its way into Mark through the vibration of Donghyuck’s humming. He’s about to give in to them, when a sudden burning itch on the side of his face has him looking around the room for the source of his sixth sense going off. His eyes meet his grandma’s, not the only person of the bridal waltz’s crowd that has turned to get a glimpse of them, but definitely the sole one sufficiently unsparing to peer at them with a gaze so openly disapproving fixed on the back of Donghyuck's head. 

It’s a sensation that can’t be scratched away or put out—Mark has tried and failed far too many times before. There’s a concerning lack of momentum for the revelation he has right there and then, which lands gently on his lap alternatively to crashing down on him. Something aching and tender, humming and warm leaning on his chest, that makes him realize all he has to do is smile at her before spinning towards the other end of the room, playing by ear on the keys of a backbone.

A soaked hand and a water spill on the table linen are the result of getting no warning before he feels a hot breath against his ear coming from a cupped mouth, muttering loud enough for him to hear, “Can we go to the tea place?” 

Mark sets the water pitcher back down on the table with a hiss, the hand that was curled around his glass now hanging limp with water dripping down his fingers. Besides him, Donghyuck smiles innocently, pressing a handkerchief to his turned-down palm.  

With most of everyone out on the dancefloor, they're the only people under fifty currently sitting down in the entire venue, the droplets in between his fingers taking on blue red and yellow hues thanks to the lighting as he grabs the cloth offered to him and wipes them away. “The tea place?,” he asks, genuinely clueless about what Donghyuck is up to until he hears himself aloud, realization softening the hard edges of his face confusion brought upon. 

“Yeah, your mom's tea place. I wanna see it.” There’s no art to the way Donghyuck phrases it or escorts his words with a pout in attempted persuasion, and Mark’s taken aback by how genuine it is. 

He’d have thought Donghyuck wouldn’t want anything to do with it, the tea house by his childhood park being an extension of that same piece of him Mark had already given him and Donghyuck hadn’t wanted, fifty year old building with its paint already peeling ten years ago surely in no way catching the light nearly enough to shine the way he likes it to or being able pass up as new.

But Donghyuck is picking up the handkerchief and folding it back into a square to the best of his ability in order to slip it inside the pocket of his suit jacket damp as it is, and then Mark doesn’t care to question how or why Donghyuck wants this too. If whoever owns the shop now carries on tradition, they’ve probably already closed, with the shop front lighting up later than every other business around the block and their blinds being drawn midst peak hours all those years ago, and then Mark can’t find it in himself to care about it either.

"Let me go find Jen to say goodbye," he tells him, pressing the car keys he retrieves from his pocket to Donghyuck’s palm so he can head to the car, and no watchful eyes or disapproving glances can get him to back down from pulling Jen into a hug, wishing her a nice honeymoon and leaving the reception a smidge away from too early.

Sixteen minutes later, as they stand in front of what’s supposed to be a melancholy-cluttered store window, he wishes they had been enough to make him stay. 

The good news is that they are still open. The bad news is that the tea house is now a Starbucks. 

Never having been a big fan of coffee, Mark stares through the large glass windows at the familiar but unfrequented sight of a green logo and color-matching aprons, menu boards with overpriced drinks and a long bar table deserted at half an hour past nightfall. It’s a copy-paste picture of the one round the corner of his university, the one two blocks away from Donghyuck’s current job he has dragged Mark to a number of times, the one in every other sharp bend of Seoul’s roads and the one next to that one.

He tries to comfort himself with the thought that, maybe, the one-of-its-kind interior of the tea house that used to stand in this same place wasn’t in fact the only one, and by some butterfly effect or unknown chain of events there’s another shop in some part of the globe that looks exactly the way Mark remembers his mom’s place in the world to have been. Maybe these sheets of glass are the same ones Mark pressed his face against and knocked on to gain her attention, the same ones her unamused expression reflected on before giving in and breaking into a smile. 

Another choice made in his place, and perhaps the cruelest one of them all. 

"Well, I don’t think it would have mattered if I’d stayed or not.” He’s not sure if he voices it out for Donghyuck to hear or if he’s thinking out loud to himself, but whether that matters is a thought that fades into the background once Donghyuck grabs him by the elbow from where he’s pressed shoulder to shoulder next to him, forcing Mark’s feet to step backwards and away from the coffee shop and dragging him along at the ambiguous order to come on.

Later, in the car, Mark will feel bad as he presses down on the gas pedal with dirty shoes, the result of Donghyuck pulling on Mark’s arm all the way across the street and to the muddiest patch of land he can find, ignoring Mark’s cries of both protest and disgust when one of his feet sinks in deep, waltz stepping a children’s game compared to the mud slipping inside his shoe. It’s not the soil sitting on his insole that he feels bad about, but the poor guy working the night shift at Starbucks that is probably currently mopping up their mess and cursing the two guys in suits who made their way into the shop to order a single Java Chip, leaving behind them a trail of muddy steps in sets of fours. 

“You’re gonna walk in there and picture the face of the woman who owned the tea house in that eighteen year old kid’s body,” Donghyuck had said, hand between Mark’s shoulderblades shoving him forward as they made their way back to the coffeeshop, a determined finger pointing out the barista fiddling with the cash register, “and we’re gonna fuck up their floor, ‘cause you won’t let her tell you you can’t go in there with muddy shoes, and you’ll get me a frap and won’t let her overcharge you a thousand won. Got it?” 

Once they’re back on the road and Mark’s feeling bad and staining his gas pedal brown, he looks over at Donghyuck in the passenger seat, sat criss-cross and barefoot at Mark’s request of leaving his shoes on the trunk to avoid messing up at least one of his car’s floor mats, and thinks to himself sly motherfucker when he realizes how subtly he slipped in his frappuccino order and got Mark to pay for it in the name of a ruined childhood dream’s revenge. 

Donghyuck returns his look with one of his own and swishes the remains of his drink around the plastic glass, asking him, “Feels good, right?”

And Mark, who feels bad with mud under his sock, has never been an apt liar. So when he smiles in spite of himself and nods, there’s some truth to it. 

He had looked at the lanky high school senior behind the counter, conjured up a picture of what he could recall of that woman’s face and said, “A tall Java Chip, please.” He had been charged exactly what the written down price said was worth, and Donghyuck had pinched the skin over his waistline with prying, stubborn fingers that didn’t let go until Mark turned back to him and got a good look at his all-teeth smile (this time nothing about it off, and no fifth law of thermodynamics needed to make Mark courageous enough to pinch him right back), and in the moment he had felt good to an unreliable degree.  

Now, with the stream of dopamine back under control, there’s a trace of distress—towards the poor bastard with the mud and the mop, of course, but also thanks to the grieving of a piece of his life he hadn’t thought about in years and had had it ripped away from him the moment he had attempted to relieve it. His smile takes a downhearted turn, eyes on the road ahead as he shares with Donghyuck, “I wish you could have seen it.” 

For a moment, the only sound inside the car is Donghyuck rearranging himself on his seat after placing down his empty drink, and Mark fixates on the artificial lights showing him the way in the dark of the early night to avoid bursting his own bubble and admitting to himself he’ll never be able to show Donghyuck something that catches the light just right for long enough, always a mere spark off— 

“Describe it to me,” he hears. Looking to the side without moving his head, he finds Donghyuck reclined on his seat with eyes shut, folded hands over his booze-cake-and-frap full belly and fringe falling past his brow. The motorway disappears from sight for an instant as Mark blinks hard with the intent of figuring out exactly what Donghyuck is asking to know, until he adds, "What color were the walls?" 

It’s like a snap of the fingers in a magic trick, the click of thumb against middle finger materializing the inside of the shop he’d always see through windows he would tarnish with his fingerprints and the condensation of his breath. Eleven years old and naive enough to ignore that life is built around moments and not permanence, he hadn’t bothered to take note of the way things were placed and distributed around the room. There’s a vague memory of an antique clock that didn’t work hanging around somewhere on a wall, a tall peace lily that was either part of a painting or on a flower pot, the color of the walls being, "Oh, shit. Green, I think?"

After a second or two of silent laughter making his hands on his belly move up and down, Donghyuck eggs him on, head thrown back and legs stretching out as far as they can reach. "You think? Come on, Markie. Was it bright? Minty? Did your mom have tea in a neon green room?"

Hands sliding to the underside of the wheel, Mark frowns as a means to recall, proving the scrunch to his face works like a reminiscing trigger when he says, "It was, like, olive." 

The shade in his memory morphs and takes on a new tinge, and he’s quick to correct himself. "Or, like, you know camouflage?" ("Do I know camouflage—") "Like the darkest green patches in camouflage? Like that." 

His knuckles hit a coded pattern on the glass of the store, three quick knocks, and his mom finds his gaze across the room and raps her own on the marble of the table, before raising her hand to ask for the bill. "The tables had marble tops with metal legs," he offers without being asked, and it’s appreciated judging by the grin he catches on Donghyuck’s close-eyed face out of the corner of his eye. 

"Where am I sitting?”

The scrunch on his face works longer and harder this time for the image to pop up. "Uh, a leather armchair. Those ones that look like they’re really stiff but then you sit down and they’re actually super cushiony?," Mark describes through a question, and Donghyuck hums in understanding. 

It’s as hard as it always is for him to turn his back on the urge of going back to staring at Donghyuck, Mark's ego and id reaching a compromise and picturing him inside his imagination’s tea shop, with his tie undone and hanging limp on either side of his neck, the damp dark spot on his jacket’s pocket and the day-long dirt stain on his pants’ leg, feet resting on the hardwood floor with floral-patterned long navy blue socks—and well, they’ve been matching all night without Mark knowing, isn’t that nice to know?

It’s a mirage, and it’s cruel and it stings. Nothing new to see there. 

"Uncomfortable but comfortable. Noted." Donghyuck’s eyes blink themselves open, and takes Mark by surprise when he says, "So all we need is green paint and some antique tables and leather armchairs. I'm sure I could come up with a mean matcha cheesecake recipe." 

Allusion clear as day, Mark is aware his right to the soreness that begins to build up inside him has been narrowed down with every time he decided to cross boundaries that same day, and he might not be entitled to be the one that holds the pen that draws where the line is, but this is something else entirely. Donghyuck intrudes and pries, and Mark knows it’s all in the name of fun, but he must already know what this means to Mark. If he doesn’t, then he hasn’t really paid attention to him from the moment they met, and Mark isn’t sure which one he prefers to be true—Donghyuck hurting him out of negligence or ignorance. 

He frowns, this once not with the aim of trying to bring anything to mind, and tries to keep it all in with a renewed tight grip around the steering wheel. "That's not funny."

"I'm not trying to be." Donghyuck remains smiling, not having yet caught up with the shift in the air, tone walking the line between sweet and dismissive as he goes on. "You know I've always wanted to have my own bakery. I'm willing to give and take. I can settle for a tea house if you settle for my pastries." 

"Donghyuck," Mark warns, tone a grey cloud in what Donghyuck had surely thought to be a clear sky. Sitting at the wheel with a good number of kilometers to go, he can't afford to close his eyes shut, but he can still count down. Seven, six.

That seems to pique Donghyuck’s attention, getting him to straighten up and lean over the gear lever towards Mark, dismissing his seatbelt attempting to keep him in place. "What? I'm not—" He frowns, not recalling long lost memories or trying to simmer down his anger like Mark, but plain confused. Negligence or ignorance. "I mean it."

Five, four, three.

“Just leave it.”

One.

Donghyuck does.

It's silent once Mark kills the engine and the car radio goes out along with it, one a.m appropriate quiet reigning in the street of Donghyuck's house. The low hum of well-known radio tunes had felt like a continuous song especially fabricated to keep conversationless spaces jam packed with sound for the rest of the drive after Mark shut down all tea-infused fantasies. He guesses that pins the responsibility on him to say the first word, with Donghyuck’s head down and eyes transfixed on his thumbnail pushing down on his cuticles. He’s barefoot, hair unkempt, tie knotted around his wrist, clothes wrinkled and stained, and whether negligent or ignorant to Mark’s heartstrings, he can’t stand the thought of leaving him like this. 

"Thanks for coming with me even if you didn't feel like it," he tries, and though Donghyuck’s gaze doesn’t part from his hands, Mark sees a curve of a lip rise up and go down.  

"I wanted to go, you know that," Donghyuck mumbles, words seeming to come out of his mouth against his own will, and then his uptight posture lets loose and he's trying along with Mark. "It was nice getting to meet the funnier, prettier Lee sibling."

Mark knows an invitation when he sees one, and this one calls for him to tease Donghyuck right back. He could do just that, wave him goodbye and drive back to his place, but he doesn’t only feel responsible for bringing back on the same mood from today morning they’ve been running from all day long—he's also the reason there was something they needed to move past to begin with. And so he takes a deep breath in, fingernail scratching at the leather of the wheel as he begins a rigorous search for the right words, but before he can even start, he's cut off.

“Don’t bring it up," Donghyuck shakes his head no, after craning his neck up to get a look at Mark and instantly figuring out where his mind was heading. 

Mark's nails digs further in, knowing he's risking leaving a permanent indent the longer he keeps at it. “We’re gonna have to talk about it at some point," he reasons, voice low to keep his nerves under lock.

"Not today," Donghyuck counters, arm unwilling to twist and bend down under the pressure. "Today was good. I had fun, you had fun. Let’s keep it that way.” 

He slithers a finger inside the knot of Mark's not-his-tie and loosens it up just enough not for it to instantly come undone, movements quick as if fearing his fingers could get stuck inside the intertwined garment and be forced to hang onto Mark longer than he needs to. It's a tense attempt at being playful and cutting the moment free of its strain, and it's fruitless.

“Thanks for the ride,” Donghyuck adds with a pat to Mark's chest, discernibly ready to slip out of the car and inside his house, all to potentially leave everything pent up inside them teetering on the edge forevermore, getting told off by Donghyuck's sharp tongue whenever he tries and tips the structure towards one side. Before that possibility starts taking shape, Mark sees a chance and grabs it, taking Donghyuck's hand in his before it can fully leave its place against his chest. 

"Wait. You won’t throw it away, right?” He squeezes the fingers in his hold tight, and wonders if Donghyuck can feel his heartbeat picking up at the thought. Mark remembers looking for and not finding it in any visible crevice of Donghyuck's room that same morning, and his voice colors itself in with a desperate tint. “I just wanna know it’s safe.” 

Because Donghyuck doesn’t have to wear it, and Mark didn't even give it to him with that purpose in mind. He just wants him to have it, whether that is hanging from a post on his bed, clasped around his neck or locked away in the depths of a drawer where he keeps a miscellaneous hoard of what's-its-name stuff. 

"That’s not my choice to make, is it?” Donghyuck says, managing to be the one who bites and yet leaving the sour taste on Mark's mouth, fingers fighting off Mark's grip on them and scurrying away like they've been burnt. “I know I'm not the nicest fucking person, but I'm not that cruel. You actually think I would do that to you? Or to her?" 

Mark's words aren't given the opportunity to give their two cents as Donghyuck scrambles for the unlocked handle, a muttered asshole leaving him before he's stepping out and beelining for the front door of his house, car door left wide open while bare socks fearlessly walk over pavement and grass dew.

Inside the car, Mark blinks. Her?

Men laugh weird and have questionable music taste. 

That is, if the barely legal dozen or so boys taking over the first floor of the house can be called men. Donghee has her reservations. 

It’s not a new discovery (her last boyfriend used to hiccup through a loud belly laugh and would blast dubstep through his earbuds even while studying), but the noise climbing up the stairs and slipping through the gap between the door and the bathroom floor is a constant reminder that men do, in fact, have odd laughs and shouldn’t be trusted with the aux cord. 

Looking into the bathroom mirror, she twists her hair around the slash of her bathrobe, her third try of the week at finding the best way to braid her hair and get overnight curls. Her humming along to the OST that’s been playing on a loop inside her head for days sees itself disrupted by a ruckus of laughter and her brother shouting something entirely unintelligible at the top of his lungs, and because there’s no one to witness her being petty, she lets out a deep sigh. Aren’t twenty year olds supposed to go out for drinks on their birthday instead of staying home?

To be fair, having the house to themselves is an indulgence their parents rarely relent, and the one thought that comforts her through the boys’ night going on a floor below is that her mom complied into allowing her a girls’ night of her own that same Sunday, with her parents going out with their one friend couple until late and Donghyuck leaving the house for a wedding. But first, she has to put up with men’s laughter and objectively bad music, as well as staying on the second floor under any and all circumstances per Donghyuck's request. Actually listening to him is her birthday gift this year. 

When she accepted her brother’s terms and conditions, however, she had expected him and his little testosterone herd to abide by the same rules. Apparently she’s been led by the nose, and finds it out through opening the bathroom door—hair braided around a headband, teal silk pajamas and bunny slippers on, holding her skincare pouch against her stomach—and coming across Mark, probably the only one of Donghyuck’s friends he can put a name to the face. He’s slipping out of her brother’s room, gently shutting the door behind his back whilst coming face to face with Donghee. He smiles at her in that way she always finds a bit funny, like she’s just ran into the one clerk in a deserted clothing store who’s not used to getting shoppers and will follow her around with his customer service smile. She’s sure he’s not actually that creepy, and if she hadn’t already worked out her brother had called dibs on him, she would dare say he’s pretty cute. 

Donghee nods at him with lips pressed tight in an answering smile, a silent hello Mark returns with a nod of his own before dashing back downstairs. She's about to turn around and head towards her bedroom when she stops in her tracks. From where she stands in front of his ajar door, she can make out the shape of a humble number of presents sat atop Donghyuck's desk, a sight that works wonders at helping her remember she has a birthday pass due.

It's one of the few traditions they share as siblings, and like most of them, they were born out of the discovery of these wonderful things called mutual benefits. 

It started when she had walked into her brother’s room a few days after his thirteenth birthday and cursed him out for leaving the gouache paints their mom got him carelessly laying around his room, and he had told her that if she wanted them so bad why didn’t she just take them?, and, needless to say, Donghee had. Once her birthday came around three months later and she had to fake excitement while unwrapping a two-piece cooking set in front of her uncle, Donghyuck had looked at the baby blue nonstick pan with bright eyes and Donghee had given into his begging to please let him have it quite easily, every bit of resistance she did put up merely meant to piss him off. Alas, birthday passes: every year, anything they get they could care less about but catches the other’s eyes is passed on with no conditions attached. 

Last year she managed to snag a great read of a book that Donghyuck would have probably used to tuck under the wobbly leg of a piece of furniture, and the year before that gave her some of the best scented candles she had come across, but today's birthday number twenty still owes her a souvenir that'll help her remember its visit.

Switching her skincare pouch from one hand to the other to free up her right, she reaches for the doorknob of Donghyuck’s room and readies herself to look through gift bags and shake around wrapped-up boxes. If she’s gonna be restrained to the top floor until Saturday morning, might as well make good use of it. 

Besides scrummaging around for her rightful birthday pass once a year, there is only one other reason why Donghee would voluntarily place a foot inside Donghyuck’s bedroom. Her brother knows it as well, which is why when she pushes his bedroom door agape and peeks her head in to ask where is it?, Donghyuck’s hand sneaks out from underneath the quilt covering him from ankle to forehead and points at where the space heater lies knocked over onto its side beside his desk. It’s a pitiful sight the one he makes, lying face down on his bed with only toes and tufts of bleached blonde peeking out, and Donghee’s in a good enough mood she would be willing to defend his honor and claim all men’s bedrooms smell weird and have their curtains drawn on a sunny Monday afternoon, but her last boyfriend had a line of air fresheners atop his dresser and would air out the room any chance he got. She guesses this is not really a man thing, instead something better fitting of whatever had him giving monosyllabic answers during breakfast when their dad asked if yesterday’s wedding was any fun and got him to climb up the stairs and click his bedroom door shut right after coming back from work. 

With the space heater tucked under one armpit and curious enough to want to make a dent on Donghyuck’s sulking, Donghee considers it’s either this or getting started on her history essay, and it’s far easier trying to figure out Donghyuck rather than the long-term causes of the Cold War. That’s just the right amount of persuasion her feet need to tiptoe around a pile of used clothes and an empty water bottle to carry her from his desk to his bed and get her close enough to roughly nudge his shoulder, deliberate in her raising of tone when she wonders aloud, “What’s with the moping?” 

All Donghyuck does is complain over her disrupting his sorrow-filled moment through a grumble and curl further into himself. After a second of silence that endorses she’s not getting an answer, Donghee’s nudges escalate into full-on shoves, instigating in intent and infuriating in nature. "This isn't because I took Aunt Dasom's gift, right?"

It’s a nonsense suggestion meant to cheer him up. Aunt Dasom always makes a point to wonder if Donghyuck is thinking of picking his studies back up or when he’s finally going to get himself a girlfriend, to the extent that even Donghee got to resent her, staring at her across the table during Christmas and Easter dinners and hoping law of attraction still performs as usual despite being vengeful. But men are weird indeed—no ex-boyfriend needed to corroborate it—so it shouldn’t surprise her when it’s that what gets Donghyuck to move the quilt just a space away from where it rests over his face in order for squinting eyes to uncover and gift her a curious look. His voice breaks and rebuilds itself through his words thanks to disuse and what she guesses was a long nap as he asks, "What gift?" 

Every trace of anything languid and disinterested mellowing out on his face flees from sight when Donghee grabs the pendant from the chain that hangs around her neck for him to lay his eyes on, scared off by the bell-going-off alarm that suddenly climbs to the surface. Ignorant to it all, Donghee speaks up with her head angled down to have a look of her own at the necklace. "I know you hate jewelry. You're welcome."

If it’s not the urge in his voice, then it’s the sight of limbs scrambling around and the sound of the quilt falling down to the floor that makes her look up as Donghyuck kneels down on the bed, eyes wide and fixed on glinting silver. "That's your birthday pass?" An index finger draws attention to it quite redundantly. “You’re saying that was for me?"

Donghee tries to find what it is she missed out on that could explain the one-eighty degree turn Donghyuck’s mood does, hope slowly being heated up to its boiling point.

"Yeah, and now it's mine.” Donghee tilts her head, Donghyuck’s doing so as well when her fingers let go of the pendant and his neck droops to the side for his gaze to follow its swing. "It came with a little note that I’m pretty sure was from Aunt Dasom, so,” she shrugs, the space heater under her arm sliding down when her shoulder goes up. “Double welcome."

Donghyuck’s brow furrows, hair sticking up in odd intervals while mouthing Aunt Dasom to himself, and then that rabbit in the headlights look comes back full force. "That wasn't—" He shakes his head, seemingly giving up on giving Donghee a sensible explanation, and honestly, maybe two thousand words on the Cold War weren’t that bad of a deal compared to Donghyuck’s sudden pressing manner. "Where's the note?"

Registering the unexpected request and retracing her steps back to Friday night happen simultaneously in her head, the reason why a taken aback expression lasts only a second before she’s offering an answer that gets Donghyuck up on his feet. "Huh? Oh, I threw it away."

Polka-dotted socks trudge across his bedroom and come out into the hallway, followed by bunny slippers that keep up with his hurried pace towards her room. 

"Is it still in your bin?," he asks, uselessly so, since he’s already down on his hands and knees to blindly reach for the dustbin she keeps underneath her bed (she’s worked diligently on her room’s aesthetic, and the firetruck red mini bin isn’t part of it). Donghee watches him go about it in silent wonder, because since when has Donghyuck cared about being a good nephew? Is there a will they need to start worrying about their names being on and she wasn’t let know? 

Leaving his question unanswered, she crouches down beside him and offers some of her own. "Are you going to look through my trash? For some note from Aunt Dasom?" 

Donghyuck brings his scouring hands that disappear behind the hanging end of her bed's comforter to a temporary stop as his cheek comes down to rest against the rug he’s kneeling on, butt up in the air and a sigh leaving him with eyes falling shut. "It wasn't hers. That was Mark,” he murmurs, and brick by brick Donghee attempts to build up the sense of the situation. 

"But that was her handwriting," she insists, witnessing Donghyuck deflate further with each coming word, flame licking at his hope-infused excitement suddenly turned off and halting its boiling bubbling, and Donghee is undoubtedly lost. 

"It was Mark's,” he claims once again, his foot unwilling to step down from where it was put down as much as his sister’s. “He has the handwriting of a fifty year old woman, but it was Mark's. Because that," he points to the necklace for a second time with eyes still closed, serene expression tipping off the sad edge to his words, “that's—fuck—that's his. It's his mom's, actually." 

Though Donghee naturally knows close to nothing about Donghyuck’s friends other than the first names of the ones that are sixes or up (and it’s not like she’s ever given it any thought, really, but Mark’s a decent eight point five), his tacit dibs on Mark have exposed her to more trivia than she expected to remember: he’s twenty one, a Marketing student, he’s allergic to honey and his mom passed away when he was a kid. Has this necklace always been this heavy, or is it going up by the grams with every new brick added to her almost finished make-it-make-sense wall?

"Mark didn’t give that to you. Is that what you’re saying?" One eye open, he peeks at Donghee, lying on her bedroom floor being on the receiving end of something silver and meaningful and something thrown out and unknown, both unarguably meant for him and intention clearly easy to discern, and yet he’s looking inexplicably brokenhearted. Men. 

Nearing a finger to his eye, the threat of getting poked forces his eyelid to fall back shut. “Why would Mark give me anything, idiot?,” Donghee teases him, crawling on all fours until she’s on the end of her bed opposite to where Donghyuck lies and exactly where her bin actually stands, and after reaching in far with one arm, she brings it out and opens the lid. 

"Empty," she announces, Donghyuck’s body falling on its side with a groan right on beat. “Mom probably took out the trash." 

As she takes a criss-cross seat on the floor next to Donghyuck’s mop of hair and pushes the bin back under the bed, unable to stand it ruining the room’s hues-of-purple theme, she hears Donghyuck speak up through a mumble and with his mouth pressed to her rug, words lazy and dejected-sounding, but with hope placed over a yellow-blue flame once again. “Do you remember what it said?”

“No, I just read like the first line and—”

Men may be weird, but her brother is batshit, proving just that when he cuts her off with, “So you’re sure he didn’t confess his undying love to you, then?”

“What the fuck, Donghyuck.” 

“Do you have the ones with the little cactuses?” 

“Uhm, they’re in the laundry basket, I think. The Corgi ones might be there, though.”

Mark can’t hold back the laugh that comes up when he sees Donghyuck’s eyes lighting up at his words and turning right back to Mark’s sock drawer to dig for his dog patterned knee highs. 

On the other side of the apartment’s wall, Miss Kim is done washing and drying her dishes and has finally settled down with her cup of after-dinner tea on her couch, Mark being able to tell by the sound of her TV being flicked on again and a different news anchor reading out from a teleprompter what the state of negotiations with the bus workers on strike looks like now—the news are there’s no news, and that means tomorrow morning he’ll most likely have to be the one to drive Donghyuck home. A shame, really. 

For now, he scrolls down the Netflix catalogue, trying to come across something to watch, with his laptop propped on the bed pressing against his toes and two steaming bowls of Donghyuck’s japchae balancing on top of a knee and the middle of a thigh, waiting for a cold feet Donghyuck to find his Corgi socks to slip over his own polka dots ones and crawl onto the bed beside him for dinner and… Moana? No, wait, that’s on Disney's Netflix now. 

“Mark Lee, I can’t believe you. You’re proposing to someone and I’m the last to know?”

The clueless huh he lets out is answered when he looks up from the screen to see Donghyuck kneeling before the drawer at the bottom of his single door wardrobe, holding a jewelry box between cupped hands. The bowls on his leg clink together at the small spring his knee gives in to out of surprise, reflexively holding one hand out to stop them from tumbling down and accidentally dipping a ring finger inside the stir-fry. It feels as if his face can’t decide whether to drain from color or redden up, mind shifting between the thought of having ruined his surprise by not finding it a better hiding spot and this being his one chance to find out if this is as good of an idea as he’s been thinking it is for weeks now. 

Taking his finger out of his bowl of dinner, fake casualness doesn’t stop his voice from being a smithereen of its usual self as he says, “Ah, it’s not a ring,” just as Donghyuck pops the box open, and Mark knows the exact sight he’s coming vis-a-vis with: a silver chain with a wide ring hanging from it, a pendant embedded with white replica gemstones, a trinket through and through. 

“It was my mom’s,” he points out, unable to refrain himself from bringing her up, as he recalls the vintage-looking jewelry box sitting on her nightstand for as long as his memory goes back to, through every house and country they moved to. 

Donghyuck pokes one pinky through the ring-shaped pendant and raises his hand high up so the chain stretches long and out of the plated metal box, holding the pendant under the light and tilting it one way and the other. Mark peers at it along with him, and wonders if it’s shiny enough, if the diffused led lights on his ceiling can make it appear brand new. 

“Why don’t you wear it?,” Donghyuck asks, eyes inseparable from the silver chain, and Mark shrugs, pretending he hasn’t had a fixed purpose for the piece of bijoux since he was trusted with it at thirteen. 

“It was an anniversary gift from my dad. Their first one, when they were dating.” He gives up on trying to sound anything close to normal and focuses back on his screen. Penguin documentary or the new season of Grand Designs? “Dad let me keep it.”

A hand slaps against a mouth giving a dramatic gasp, mocking down to the last sound. “Is this like a passed down promise ring?” 

Mark’s face makes up its mind and holds onto any and all blood that dares pass by the apples of his cheeks during this one moment, words making Mark feel just as much of a scrap of himself as his voice has been portraying. Sometimes he feels like he’s making up excuses for Donghyuck’s prying and stubbornness, forever turning the other cheek, but it all crumbles down when he hears the sound of metal clashing on metal as Donghyuck lets go of the chain and allows it to dive back inside the box, voice careful around the edges when he says, “That’s actually really sweet.”

Mark makes a humming sound, skin the color of young wine from beneath dark circles all the way down to where he’s pressing his lips together, unable to make out if he’s doing it to avoid smiling or something far worse.

His sock drawer slams shut with the light push of a Corgi-socked foot. “Okay, Prince Charming. Scoot over.”

Fourteen years old and having had his heart stomped on mere hours ago, Mark had thought nothing would ever come close to being half as mortifying as his all-time crush handing him a torn open letter envelope back with pity in the corners of their smile and a sorry he didn’t stick around long enough to know what exactly it was meant to be an apology for. He was wrong. 

Every bit of embarrassment he felt returns in tenfold amounts when he shares through gritted teeth what had happened that morning at school, spoon jabbing and prodding at the poached egg swimming around his soup, and hears his sister choke on her spoonful of broth before breaking into a chorus of no, oh my god, please tell me you actually didn’t.  

“Here’s a piece of advice,” Jen offers after having had her fun with the hit Mark’s heartstrings took, and to incredulous teenage ears she says, “Never confess.“

His spoon drops inside the bowl, the edge of the silverware piercing the layer holding the yolk together and letting it run wild. “How am I supposed to date anyone then?” He crosses his arms across his chest, defensive out of exasperation and exasperated because everything reminds him of that meager sorry. 

“Things just happen gradually. You’ll see,” she says, patting one of his hands laying palm down on the table, condescending from the bone of her wrist to the ones in all five fingertips. “If you like someone and they like you back, you’ll know. You drop hints, or you ask them out on a date, but life’s not a movie. Confessions and love letters don’t really work most times. They can be…” She trails off and scrunches up her nose in thought, in that way she does that shows she’s not afraid to look ugly in the eye of any beholder. Maybe that lack of fear is hereditary, and he’s scrunched his face up as well to the point of no return, a critical state of unattractiveness that has earned him meager sorrys for what remains of his lugubrious life. 

“I don’t know, overwhelming,” she goes on. “They put lots of pressure on the other person, you know? Relationships just sort of happen. You’ll see,” she ends with, not afraid of reiteration either, and pushes his fairly undistorted bowl of soup closer to him with an insistent knuckle. “Now eat.” 

Mark carries that conversation with him for years to come. He drops hints, asks others out on dates, he overwhelms and he pressures and he eats, but he doesn’t ever see.

Jen may have had friends trip their way into her life and guys fall on her lap, relationships just-sort-of-happening. That’s not the way things pan out for Mark, and it’s certainly not the way his brain is wired, axons linking up with the sole purpose of demanding he share every waking emotion and most thoughts that have been twisted out of shape by his own sentimentality.

It’s the reason why he was a ticking time-bomb when he no longer had his mom by his side and took so long to find it in himself to be considerate of the people he loved, grieving in their own way and at their own pace, and began to conceal what he could of whatever it was that was tangled up deep inside his chest. It’s why he worries about his dad and why he had to let Jen know, honeymoon ahead and all. It’s why he takes the necklace he kept in the depths of varying drawers for close to a decade and wraps it up in a small white gift bag along with a carefully handwritten letter, against all dos-and-don’ts Jen relays to him when he’s young and deems he knows precisely what it feels like to lose and to love. A letter that had two previous drafts and was reread far more times than any paper he has turned in in his entire academic life, one where he goes into overwhelming, pressuring detail and uses words fourteen year old him was told were honestly kind of creepy, Mark.

He feels and falls and gets back up only to do it all over again. He’s built on emotion down to the core, but he can’t deny part of it might also stem from his need to always be in the driver’s seat and call the shots, which grants him the chance to drive down the road signaled by symmetrically separated lines and avoid derailing into the margins. A confession grants him that: he bares his soul out, and no matter if the outcome is acceptance or rejection, he gets to take charge of how he deals with it. There’s no hinting at something bigger, no questions with ambiguous answers nor games to be played.

However that may be, he’s betrayed that entire part of himself since knowing Donghyuck. He plays all of his games and chases him round and round, speaks to him with lips that promise butter wouldn’t melt between them, and it works because that’s what Donghyuck is best at. But nothing between him and Donghyuck just-sort-of-happens like his older sister promised it would to a dejected but starry-eyed earlier version of himself, who believed love and romance were one and the same. Always a continuous effort to be made with everything Donghyuck-related, Mark only knows one thing left to do: pour it all out and gain back control.

Once more, he was wrong. 

He had thought nothing would ever confuse him as much as his sister’s relationships-will-drop-into-your-lap speech, but Donghyuck is one to always attempt to one up every record already set. Because here he is, sat beside Mark on his bed on a Tuesday night after texting him if he could come over for a talk, when two days before he was telling him don’t pick me up and don’t bring it up. A plated metal box he had marvelled at over two weeks ago and rejected that same weekend is currently being passed around his fingers as he fiddles with it, looking down at it with tenderness he isn’t bothering to hide, and Mark doesn’t know what to make of any of it.

Settled down in the silence that had followed after quiet hey and his that complied perfectly with their designated jobs as ceasefires, Mark looks up from Donghyuck’s hands and where they sit almost knee to knee and lets his eyes travel over the expanse of Jeno’s suit and Donghyuck's tie on a hanger perched on the handle of his wardrobe, both smelling fresh from yesterday’s trip to the dry cleaner, and his gaze’s journey ends on a plastic bag by the furniture piece, see-through material allowing him to make out his still mudded up shoes inside. The first word being a ball that always falls on his side of the court, he tries to pick and choose how to tell Donghyuck he doesn’t want the necklace back, that he can do whatever he wants with it but it's his, and when he decides those very words are the right ones, Donghyuck makes the choice for him and speaks up. “I thought it was for Donghee.”

Every word in that sentence seems to have been picked at random, and it’s haphazard enough to beat all dumbfounding big sister speeches. For a moment, all his brain can get him to do is blink, a to-and-fro motion of eyelids the only effort he can get himself to pull through as his mind looks for the first word ball and finds that Donghyuck hit it out of the park. Mark’s eyes meet Donghyuck’s the moment he turns his head towards him, and his mouth hangs open for a second too long before he asks, “How?”

Donghyuck’s lips reach the summit of a smile, thumb blindly playing with the box’s latch. “She took it from my room before I could see it. Birthday pass.” He says it like it explains everything, and Mark is puzzled enough not to want to keep feeding the big question mark growing in between axons and wires, taking the words for what they are. “You stayed upstairs forever that night, and I saw her wearing the necklace the next day, and—” He cuts himself off and ends on a shrug, corners of his mouth having had nowhere to go but down.

There’s a dream he’s had more than once, where he’s fourteen and he stands in an empty school classroom with a twenty year old Donghyuck before him, smiling pitifully at him and saying sorry, a cut to black that carries the sound of a piece of paper being ripped in half and his eyes blinking open as he wakes up. It’s in those dozing periods of time in between sleep and wakefulness where he realized the cruel thing wasn’t whether he got to make the choice, but the fact that, no matter if it was his doing or someone else’s, he didn’t get to have Donghyuck either way. After that followed vigilance, and sleep-induced wisdom naturally slipped away, but the dread of living through a tearing paper sound of a moment remained, knowing real life wouldn’t grant him the smallest comfort a darkened sight could offer and he’d be forced to watch it unfold. 

It’s with that in mind that he climbed up the stairs right after one of Donghyuck’s friends let him in, the excuse of leaving his coat in his bedroom accommodating to his fear and allowing him to drop the gift off on Donghyuck’s desk without needing to look him in the eye or hear a meager apology. Taking quote unquote forever could be blamed on his toes turning freezing cold the moment he set down the small white bag, the threat of getting cold feet having him pull out the letter and reread it from start to finish and end to beginning. Twice. He even got to fix a spelling mistake with one of Donghyuck's gel pens.

The metal box clicks shut only to be unlatched open back again, Donghyuck’s grip around it making his fingertips go pink and pale, and against all odds his words keep getting more and more alien. “You’ve always said she’s nice, and you ask about her, how she’s doing and stuff. Boy meets girl, girl likes boy—"

Mark feels mean for the laugh that escapes through an equally involuntary grin with the way Donghyuck is going white-knuckled and his eyes won’t leave his reflection on the square case. “What the fuck, Hyuck? This isn’t the 1960s. I barely even know her,” he says through more chuckling, heart sinking at the sight of Donghyuck with his head bowed and chalk for fingers, but unable to stop the laughter from making him shake all the way down to his hands, grabbing at his elbow attempting to hearten him through a squeeze. “Why would I even be into Donghee? She’s fourteen.” That gets Donghyuck to look up, raised eyebrows making Mark’s smile freeze in place and squint one eye as he tries again. “Fifteen?”

“Eighteen.”

Mark’s mouth falls open, and it’s mere luck the natural overdramatics to his surprise have always seemed to be one of Donghyuck’s favorite things about him, a laugh of his own coming up to the surface when Mark says dude, she’s tiny far more genuinely than the realization warrants it. 

A blink later, all sound has died down, the only remnants from that one moment in time that prove it actually happened being his hand on Donghyuck and ten tense fingers curling around a jewelry box. His own thumb and forefinger move down until they get to pinch the skin around Donghyuck’s elbow, Mark watching his grip grow laxer by the second until the box rests on a loose terra firma made of hands intertwined, and finds the ball thrown out the court laying by axons and wires, where his big question mark keeps growing taller and wider. "So then what did you think my gift was?" 

He’s not expecting it to be a bickering starter, but apparently it is, with Donghyuck leaning back so Mark can get a good look at the frown beginning to take shape and the disbelief written across every other inch of skin on his face. "You never get me birthday gifts," he counterargues, voice sounding unfairly reprimanding given the fact that—

“You don’t get me birthday gifts. I’ve always given you something," Mark points out.

Donghyuck’s elbow slips from his grasp when he scoots back even further, a finger digging into Mark’s chest that accuses him only half jokingly. "What have you ever gotten me?"

If he were to pull out his phone right now and scroll far enough to reach all buried down chats, he would probably come across a group chat he’s the only remaining member of, everyone else having left right after a chain of twenty or so texts riddled out the conversation’s very name, titled under Donghyuck’s Birthday Bash. Mark was the one to put an end to the fifteen-minute long debate with the rest of his coworkers over what gift to give the fairly new guy, who, with stubborn intent and a very prying mouth, had elbowed and pushed his way inside the Tuesday to Saturday afternoon shift regulars’ kind of close-knit sort of friend group only a month and a half into the job. Now, two years forward, he stands by his generic pick as he says, "Remember the scented candles?" 

And Donghyuck doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, unaware that Mark saved him from getting a coupon for a brand he boycotted years ago or a six-pack eyebrow razor, which is why he’s probably not as thankful as Mark expects him to be. "That was your idea?" The finger pressed to the dip of his sternum jabs greater and farther in strength, and Donghyuck’s fingernail digs into his skin through his shirt when Mark’s own drive unthinkingly had him shift closer as he comes to his own defense. 

"We had only known each other for two months and everyone had to chip in.” His voice climbs higher in pitch with every syllable, suddenly far removed from the metal box now placed down at Donghyuck’s feet and a letter he has yet to catch sight of. “And last year, it was A Clockwork Orange," he adds, back unwilling to slouch and forehead held up high at yet another choice he remains loyal too. His modus operandi, however, he’s not as proud of, shrill pitch going down by the octave and volume dropping far afield as he admits, "I went by your house to drop it off and Donghee said you weren't home, and I suddenly got all, like, freaked out about it, so I asked her to give it to you."

Her name coming into the picture once again has Donghyuck falling back on the bed, body bouncing at the tempo the mattress springs set while a hand settles over both of his eyes to rub at them, mumbling a fucking Donghee. Mark’s reminded of a moment past, maybe in memories or in dozing half-dreams, when he sees Donghyuck’s orange hand-me-down shirt riding up, the bone-tired fading red of a kitchen burn scab around the middle finger slowly kneading the skin between his nose and eye, the tan of a jaw that moves almost lazily when Donghyuck wonders, "Isn't that orange thing a book?” 

Mark mhms, and the hand over Donghyuck’s face moves down in a dragging motion, thumbs pulling down on cheeks and making his words border on a grumble. “A book,” he echos, and not with lack of disappointment. “What’s your excuse then?”

Anything with a hardcover and pages that go over the two digits is categorized as ornamental in Donghyuck’s mind, meant to fill in the gaps of his album shelf or have its pages ripped out and apart to collage his corkboard and bedroom walls, and that’s exactly what Mark’s excuse is: getting to finally hand Donghyuck something that’s the right amount of shiny to make him want to give it a try, enough that a trick of its light could make Mark catch it just the way he needs to to draw Donghyuck’s attention, wanting to find him an exception and then be one. 

Mark goes limp from the waist up to land on his back next to him, head turning to the side to see hands marked by red leave tan skin and come to a rest on top of rolled up orange, a face making a left move to look towards him as Mark murmurs, forever loyal to his picks and choices, "You would have loved it.”

It’s almost tangible the way the fight leaves Donghyuck, the sound of a foot accidentally knocking over something small and metal bringing them back to a birthday and a passed around gift, a wedding and two necks bared so far up they couldn’t see the other doing the very same. Donghyuck licks his lips, preluding a voice coming from a throat that keeps bending back, and it’s well-known by now what constitutes the one liability to Mark’s eyes. 

“You thought I was mad over a love letter? That I would tell you to fuck off after you gave me your mom's necklace?” It comes out rough, letters botched by dull scissors trying their best to make a cut where the spaces between vowels are supposed to be, like Mark has deliberately placed the rust over the inner blade and its cutting edge with the aim to wound. Donghyuck sounds hurt, and Mark wants to tell him no while thinking yes. What else was he meant to think Donghyuck would do when he crossed a line and confessed, overwhelmed and pressured?

Donghyuck seems insistent on pulling Mark two steps back every time he attempts to take a step forward, crescendoing confusion when he tells him, “Mark, I thought you knew. You turned me down years ago, how was I supposed to—” 

Mark’s lips move before he can realize they are doing so, head trying to shake from side to side while resting against his bedspread. “What? No. When? No, I didn’t,” he denies, memory sprinting back the way it came from and turning over every stone in sight, on the lookout for the moment apparently labeled under rejecting Donghyuck. 

Someone bumps hips with him as he scours in his recollection’s racks, forcing him to move out of the way and let a been-around hand reach in the proper shelf and fish out the sought out file, Donghyuck himself being the one to thumb through it and pull out proof-filled loose papers.

“After our first closing shift? I took you out for dinner and you were kinda off whenever I flirted?” He says it like it’s obvious, eyebrows raised in a remember? gesture and tone resembling the one he used to say birthday pass as if it meant something to Mark. Hurt no longer recriminatory but still everpresent, Mark finds a resigned edge to it, brought out without an explanation as if he is once again supposed to be on the know of its source. “You never said you had fun or wanted to do it again, and I—” It must sink in right then, whatever face Mark must be making surely being a tell-tale sign of the question mark growing bigger, higher, threatening to burst at the seams, and the tensed-up everything on Donghyuck’s face falls into oblivion at his disbelief. 

“There’s no way. Shut up. There’s no way you didn’t know,” Donghyuck argues, propping himself up on an elbow to be able to look down at Mark while looking down on him, strayed reprimand returning right back on track. 

Mark hasn’t been fourteen for a long while, well-aware by now love and romance are separate things that don’t necessarily have to walk hand in hand, but he never thought that would mean getting a reproving finger jabbing at him time and time again over birthday gifts and going on a date without knowing it was one. Which, apparently, he has. 

“I thought that was just dinner,” he voices out, because that’s a file that very much exists in Mark’s mind. Flicking through paper sheets, he rereads the main bullet points of that night: the new guy asking if he wanted to grab a bite after they closed for the night, sweeping the floor around where Mark stood emptying out trash cans; getting a seafood dish and desert over good conversation; driving home and laying on his bed thinking he seems really nice. The memory, however, ends there. No flirting thrown in the mix. Flirting?

“Wait, you flirted with me?,” he asks, his wide-eyed look making Donghyuck pinch the bridge of his nose and screw his eyes shut unhealthily tight (to avoid popping a vein, Donghyuck will tell him later). 

“I tried to play footsie with you all night. Had my foot up your thigh during dessert and everything,” Donghyuck recites, voice nasal through his grip but impassive through and through, listing off bullet points entirely missing from Mark’s file. “We shared dessert. I spoon-fed you at one point. What did you think was going on?” 

Mark comes back from a three day long sick leave and has a five minute conversation with Jisung in the backroom, one clocking in and the other out, where his coworker reminds not to put anything inside the Mastrena second from the left because it’s still broken and it will explode—oh, and the new guy started on Tuesday. He’s a lot. “I don’t know. Jisung said you were really touchy. I just thought that was how you were with everyone.” 

His memory wakes from its nap, stretches legs and arms as far out as they’ll go, yawns deep and loud, picks up a pen and begins to take notes it should have committed to paper two years and a half ago. Moving his feet out of the way when he feels Donghyuck’s knock against his shin, worried he might have been manspreading his way into Donghyuck’s space. The hand on his thigh when he leans towards him to see something on Mark’s phone. Donghyuck, rigorous in his philosophy that eating food from other people’s plates always makes food taste off, pointing at a pastry on the menu back then and asking do you wanna share? 

Present Donghyuck rests his cheek on his palm, making his lips pout out as he patiently waits for Mark’s brain to call its tour de force thinking a day. He watches his mouth take a comic-book-like O shape, reliving-glaze blinked away as he takes his time to say, “When you asked if I wanted to go back to your place—”

Donghyuck’s nod cuts him off, a short down and up motion that spells out bygone dejection. “Yeah. And you turned me down,” he smiles with lips pressed together, elbow sliding from place with the glide of Mark’s comforter against smooth bed sheets and taking him down with it. 

Mark is about to share he’s almost sure he was heading back home the next day, the long drive ahead making it hard to have said yes to staying over, when Memory crosses something out and writes it down once more, jotting over the same words but this time in bold capital letters. “You literally spoon-fed me,” Mark interrupts his own thought process to repeat Donghyuck’s gone over words, still dumbstruck by the foot climbing up his calf and the hand on his thigh and the shared dessert. 

Donghyuck shrugs, movement making his arm give up under his weight, head landing on his splayed out arm between elbow and shoulder and tips of his fingers brushing the headboard, and then they’re back to being face to face. "I literally did a lot of things," he says, low and gentle, a change of pace Mark can’t get himself to complain about. "I was your plus one at your sister's wedding and I asked you to move across the ocean with me and get our own bakery. This really shouldn't be news to you."

The thought of it never having been negligence or ignorance, of Donghyuck never having even considered giving him a torn up paper and a meager sorry sweeps him away, getting lost inside his own head long enough that, once his eyes close in a mesh of thoughts and open back up to the sight of Donghyuck’s face, he finds him expectant, gaze roaming around Mark’s face in await of something else to come, something Mark has no grasp on and has him resorting to asking a naive what?.

The curtain closes and opens back again. First act done and over with, Donghyuck moves on to the second, jumping from muddying up the waters by bewildering him out of his mind to dragging him under them, forcing him to swim down to the spot he wants to put him on. Donghyuck moves closer, face to face morphing into nose to nose, and Mark has an oh no moment as he realizes exactly what’s to come. 

“I did my bit. I’m waiting for your grand love confession now,” Donghyuck smiles, waving a hand in the air that is supposed to prompt him on. Oh no. “Go on.”

Mark’s eyes find a spot to fixate on over Donghyuck’s shoulder (a clean suit and tie and dirty shoes inside a bag), the feeling of something buzzing and persistent under his skin growing the longer he keeps looking at him (who is still blackheads and freckles and a lonely pimple on the curve of his jaw, orange red and tan all over once more). 

Regardless of everything that’s been said and done, Mark is not that bad at lying: he’s actually decent at the written word, bad with his body, and downright terrible at speaking up. This wasn’t ever supposed to work, no matter how much he had wanted it to. What happened to life isn’t a movie, Mark? 

A hand curls around his jaw, one thumb and a forefinger setting on each cheek and angling his face down, making it so he has nowhere to look but at Donghyuck (red, freckles, stubborn, pimples, orange, prying, beautiful). The grip doesn’t falter even after his eyes set on his, warm fingers and chafed skin robbing him of coherency for a moment or two, senses needing to be regained to get himself to ask, “Don’t you have the letter?” 

“Donghee threw it out, so.” Another shrug, equal parts careless and teasing. The thumb resting on his cheek that’s not laid down on the mattress rubs a circle, tender pressure dragging the skin up and baring Mark’s canines, and the low and gentle pace mixed with prying hands change the hue of pink Mark’s seeing in to something far more resembling of red (freckles, stubborn, pimples, orange—

“Looks like you’re gonna have to use your words,” Donghyuck says, not quiet but certainly unhurried, dragging out vowels that are no longer botched by rust and lack of sharpness. Third act? Fourth? Which is the one where he goes from being embarrassed to climbing on top of Donghyuck?

"Do I have to?," he whines, and the fingers around his face slacken and leave, a retreat Mark didn’t ask for. “You already know."

He’s betraying anew that same part of himself he gives the cold shoulder to anytime it comes to Donghyuck, the one that demands he rolls up his sleeves and points his chin up to the ceiling to lay everything out, neck, heart and everything in between bared. What happened to pour it all out, Mark? 

Donghyuck, on the flip side, has always wanted him to be true to himself. It’s either that or his inherent need to deride Mark into waxing lyrical about him that gets him to say, "Do I?" 

It’s not a game he’s gonna win, and he swallows around nothing as Donghyuck patiently stares back at him. It took him two drafts and a final copy with a gel pen scratching out a misspelling to get it as right as he thinks he ever will, how is he supposed to—

And then he thinks, two drafts. 

Before he can dwell on it twice, he’s propping himself up on one hand, palm sinking on the mattress as he reaches out for the notebook resting on the chair by his bed, and Donghyuck guesses right when he says through a groan, “Don’t tell me you actually have a copy.”

The something buzzing and persistent under his skin fights tooth and nail its way to the surface when Donghyuck rolls onto his stomach and drapes an arm around his waist, pushing Mark down alongside him with a hand that, for all his mocking and moaning, seems way too eager to take the journal from Mark’s grip. He lays it on the bed in front of his face, attentive eyes watching the pages flicker as five fingers thumb through it while the other five slip under the hem of Mark’s shirt and come to a rest on his lower back’s skin. Throughout it all, Mark lays stockstill with arms gone limp and his chin drowning on a bunched up bedspread, only able to catch up with Donghyuck’s stride once he’s found the right page with Mark’s second draft. 

“Wait, don’t read it now,” he complains, a hand attempting to hide from Donghyuck’s sight his chicken-scratch handwriting, one that lays him bare far more than any throat leaning to the side or wrists offered out ever could. 

And honestly, Donghyuck should know better by now, this time definitely negligence or ignorance being what makes him pull the notebook closer to himself, say too late, hide if you don’t want to see me do it, and expect Mark won’t actually go through with it. 

There’s the click of the bathroom door shutting behind his back, Donghyuck’s muffled voice going, “I didn’t mean literally, I—”, a sigh depriving the phrase of a proper end, and then, silence.

With his back against the vanity and legs splayed out, Mark sits on his bathroom floor and hears the turn of a page, pictures Donghyuck laid belly-down on the bed reading an overly long paragraph where every second sentence is crossed over with stringed along spirals, a series of cursive e letters that overlap each other and attempt to conceal failed gos given at making intelligible each and all thoughts he has of Donghyuck existing outside the margins while Mark remains between the lines, of Mark not being good at dancing or lying or not looking at Donghyuck, of third dances and prying, stubborn hands. 

He unintentionally hits his head against the cabinet when he tries and rearranges himself, and then does it again on purpose, the throbbing it leaves behind doing a decent enough job at stopping him from thinking life is not a movie, love letters never work, and that’s honestly kind of creepy, Mark.

On the third thump of his head against chipwood, there’s a knock, Donghyuck’s muffled voice going, “Mark? I’m coming in,” the click of the bathroom door opening. The logical sequence of events calls for silence, and it’s there for the length of time it takes Mark to let his eyes wander over a doorknob under the grip of a hand, legs steady and gaze set on him and a neck angled down but bared high up, vulnerability in his slouch and the way his knees buckle and his toes bend to brace their landing on the cold tiled floor—and there’s the ruckus, noise going up in arms against pin-drop quiet with the way Donghyuck’s hands follow his knees’ lead and get him to crawl towards Mark in all fours—and there’s the third-fourth act Mark was asking for, the one where one of them climbs on top of the other, with Donghyuck carrying everything but grace in his stance as he reaches Mark’s outspread legs and makes room for himself between them, caging himself in between bony knees and going back to curling a hand around Mark’s jaw and setting fingers underneath cheekbones. It’s too fast, too much, all at once, and Mark’s ready to betray whatever Jen-induced thought or growing question mark decides to come his way and take him away from the feeling of Donghyuck’s face closing in on his. Mark watches his mouth move and only makes sense of the sounds departing from moving lips with the proper delay his haze calls for. “Just so we’re clear, I’m reading this right, right? You want me to kiss you stupid?” 

Donghyuck manhandles him to his liking, Mark going with the pull that angles his face up and the shove of Donghyuck's forehead knocking into his pushing him back, the crown of his head thumping one more time on the cabinet. The dull throb that used to be in charge of keeping him empty-minded doesn't stand a chance when contending with Donghyuck's breath heavy against his mouth, tone bordering on desperate and not lacking tremor as he begs, "Please say yes." 

Fingers sink deeper into his cheeks with Donghyuck's lips receding from his, only a mouth seeking out warmth or a hand tugging a face down away from a kiss. “Say yes,” he insists, words brushing Mark's cupid bow and the underside of his nose, a wet drag of impatient lips that have Mark nodding over and over again. It's the grip of a thumb and a forefinger on either side of his face that get his head to stop moving up and down through the kiss, the slide of a parted mouth slipping from lips and trailing their way across skin down to Donghyuck's chin with the motion. 

The five fingers from earlier return to Mark's lower back, landing on the exact same odd-numbered spots and fitting the scorch marks they left like a glove. Mark whines, and Donghyuck seems to thrive off the swallowed sound, lifting himself up just the right amount to force Mark's neck to crane further back and stretch up, one hand coming up to Donghyuck's nape to keep him there, feel him warm and solid and tangled in between him. 

It feels entirely too much like waltzing, with Donghyuck's hand on his face leading him and setting the tempo, demanding fingers in place of a metronome; with Mark following suit as he comes closer, pulls back, bites the lip that draws over his own bottom one and offers itself to gwaning teeth, licks the seam and the roof of his mouth in a syncopated beat.

“I forgive you,” Donghyuck draws back to say.

The granted apology takes a long blink of a moment to process through Mark's open mouth coursing for air and overheated skin a hairbreadth away from breaking a sweat. He tries to look Donghyuck in the eye and in the act he goes cross-eyed, blobs and blurs of color in his field of vision as he asks, “For what?" Because if he needed forgiving over anything, then he was the one to offer a meager sorry this once, unaware he had even done so. 

“For being dead from the neck up for years.” 

Thump, thud and throb taking place in that order, Mark risks bumping his head onto the cabinet one final time to frown up at Donghyuck, who’s raised all the way up onto his knees and used his advantage on height to get Mark to put in the work in order to look him in the eye, always an effort to be made from his end. 

“I forgive you if—if," Donghyuck stresses, letting go of the hold around his face and leaving five long lines of reddened skin as a parting gift only to hold a finger up to Mark’s nose, who goes cross-eyed out of choice once more, “if next time I flirt you promise to catch on to it, and when I ask you to stay over you say yes,” Donghyuck’s chin raises, leading Mark’s to follow out of tempo as he forgets to count his one two-threes, unable to close his eyes but unneeding to count down from seven, “and if you promise to sleep on my offer of Chile and our tea house.” The hand halfway up his spine slips out from under his shirt to run its way up to Mark’s jaw, two hands cupping it and pulling him away from the wood of the vanity, closer to lips that settle on his chin and senselessly bite onto it, talking with skin escaping their grasp. “Promise me that, and then we’re good.” 

A moment goes by where Mark can only get himself to hum at Donghyuck taking monopoly of all five senses, ten fingers burning every crook of skin they come into touch with and a mouth kissing its way up every cranny around his lips, and then reason manages to crack its door agape and let a sliver of light shine on the room of Mark’s brain where words feel only secondary to feeling but can make themselves heard all the same. “So basically whenever you talk, I have to say—”

“Yes," Donghyuck speaks against his cheek, tracing with his mouth the five long lines that testimony his fingers’ hard work. Even now, Mark finds it hard to avert his eyes or let them slip shut, on the lookout for Donghyuck though half-lidded and far too close to catch sight of anything other than his lips move every time he attempts to bear down on Mark’s will just to mold it to his own taste later on. “Say yes.”

Mark finds his hands have made their way to the middle of a backbone, an octave away each, and he decides he should get to play a piece as well. 

“I'll promise, if—” he says, moving his mouth away when Donghyuck makes to dive back down, and it's worth it to have his eyes go askew if only to watch Donghyuck roll his eyes at Mark’s own set of conditions. “If and only if you promise to ask Donghee for my gifts back, and you use them.”

Donghyuck shows himself unafraid to laugh on his face, over-the-top sound clashing against white tiles and tempting Mark to swallow it down when he talks around his mouth.

“Oh, baby, I’m not reading that stupid orange book.”

“What about my candles?”

“Donghee used them all up last year. Too flowery.” 

“And this year’s gift?”

Donghyuck takes Mark’s hand in his and guides it under the collar of his t-shirt, until he’s sure his fingers have met cold, silver metal. 

"Then yes.” 

White dress, a couple standing amongst trees, bouquets, same couple and same dress with more flowers and less bushes, repeat. 

Hitting the next arrow on Jen's wedding’s Facebook album becomes almost mechanical for his thumb, which presses it down every time he comes across a picture of the newlyweds entirely too similar and only slightly different by the angle of the lens or an inch of a smile to the one that came before it. Automation takes the best of him, and it's only thanks to a finger landing smack middle on the screen of his phone that his thumb stops midair and allows his eyes to settle for longer than a second on a picture. 

It's the first one where there's anyone other than Jen and her husband on frame, coincidentally the one with most people in it, and he realizes the finger bringing it to his attention didn't land haphazardly on the screen, but rather right over the one point a herd of pixels picture the one element that breaks the monotony of the scene in half. 

From his grandmother beside his aunts and uncles all the way down the line to his dad's hand settled on the curve of his neck, the continuous theme of blues and blacks, either plain or pinstripe, is disrupted by someone on the far end of said line, standing with a hand clapping his shoulder. The finger lifts to reveal a floral pattern over a navy blue background, and the snort let out far too close to his ear is followed by a voice pointing out, “Your tie.”

Mark leans his cheek against his own arm, raised high above his head to hold onto a handrail, rush hour congestion gifting them elbows on ribs and feet stepping on feet, leaving Donghyuck to stand with his back against Mark’s chest and trust the forearm  running along his middle and holding onto Mark’s cellphone to stop him from toppling over in a bus that moves at a walking pace. 

“Your tie,” he corrects him, feeling Donghyuck crane his neck back, motion making him lean further against him and rest his head on Mark’s shoulder. 

“My tie,” Donghyuck smiles, staring unabashed at his mouth. Mark has never been one to give up his resistance against affection in public spaces, uncomfortable under any watchful eyes and disapproving glances, but then Donghyuck looks back up into his eyes, warmth in every angle and edge, and Mark’s fully aware of how gross it is even as he gives in, with the elbow-on-his-ribs woman having to hear the wet smack of lips on lips and the feet-stepping-on-his man getting to look nowhere else but at Mark pulling back only to reach back down and kiss the corner of Donghyuck’s mouth. 

Donghyuck is the one to tap through another number of identical pictures, family members removed and added against the same backdrop of trees-flowers-bushes, only stopping when he makes it to a wide shot taken from the catwalk of the venue of the bride waltzing with one of Mark’s cousins. For a second time, his forefinger is the one to point at the part of the whole that pulls the plug on the nuptials humdrum: Donghyuck’s back facing the camera as they spin around the room behind the line of the guests’ tables, camera shutter going off just in time to capture the moment Mark’s grandmother turns to them. It’s disapproving, watchful, and entirely dismissed by the beam Mark sends her way.

Donghyuck double taps the picture to zoom in on them, removing Jen, cousin, grandma and everyone else standing around from sight. “We look good,” he states, and one couldn’t argue it’s not true, because Mark has now seen him in uniform, dressed down, suited up, stripped down and everything else in between. He can assure Donghyuck looks good always—even with his mustered up suit, with a wrongly knotted tie and a creased up shirt, with hair uncombed and bluchers on top of Oxfords—and one couldn’t argue it’s not true, because that’s all Mark’s eyes know how to do.

Donghyuck’s head lolls to the side, ear coming to rest somewhere close to Mark’s heart. “Why didn’t you tell me my pants were stained, though? You had me walking around with mud on my suit in front of your entire family.” 

Mark listens to him go head over heels into a tangent—probably along with the elbow-on-his-ribs woman and the feet-stepping-on-his man—and instead of wondering what was in the mind of every familiar eye he grew up around watching up close, he’s only glad they were looking at them, looking at Donghyuck.

“Your grandma was so giving me the evil eye. No, don’t smile. That shit actually worked. I literally got a stomachache the next day. Take this seriously. Mark, for real, stop laughing—”