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hyuntak throws up. his skin crawls, not from vomiting but the way his mind is hyperfocused on the realization that seongje's spit in his mouth is currently mixing with his vomit.
he clenches his jaw as if gritting his teeth hard enough would expel the thought from his mind but all it returns him is a wobbling chin and a trembling mouth and he's throwing up again. he dry heaves til his throat hurts and nothing comes out anymore but his own string of saliva that persistently, still, reminds him of seongje.
it's horrible. he feels horrible because it's an utter betrayal against his friends, (he feels horrible because he wants to experience it again due to some morbid curiosity,) he feels horrible because he can still feel seongje's teeth on him, he feels horrible because that is the same mouth that remained in an indifferent grin when baekjin pulverized his knee, (he feels horrible because he can still feel the fingers in his hair and jaw and waist and inside his mouth, being completely trapped and startled at finding both distress and comfort in it,) he feels horrible because seongje tasted so vividly of cigarettes that it almost felt like secondhand smoking and his mom would be so disappointed in him.
he feels horrible because despite all of that, there is still only one thing at the forefront of it all: he's a boy who likes a boy.
and isn't that something?
yeah, it is—something. that something bubbles in his stomach like an energy drink, burns under his skin like an army of ants biting him over and over, gets ingrained in his brain, swells against his skull like a brain tumor.
he scrubbed his mouth when he got home. smeared, rubbed, cleaned, til his lips are raw and only remembers the bitterness of the bar soap instead.
he stares at the mirror. a clean slate. he feels better. more like himself. his mouth is reddened from the harshness of the soap. the soap.
absentmindedly, he lifts a hand towards his mouth. pushes the index and middle finger into the two corners of his mouth, past his lips until he can feel their weight on his tongue.
a few minutes pass. his mouth starts watering around his own fingers. right when saliva's about to drip down his chin, he pulls his hand away.
he swallows. once. twice. blinks at his reflection in the mirror. brings the hand up again. using the same index finger, he runs it along his lower gum, snug against his lower lip.
“hyuntak, are you okay in there?” a knock on the door startles him.
“yeah, mom, why?”
“you've been there for like, 3 hours,”
what?
he pulls his finger out of his mouth. stares at it like it's a foreign object.
what?
a few days later, he realizes he let his guard down way too easily. he always walks home either with baku or juntae, but today baku had a group blind date that hyuntak barely managed to escape from, and juntae's meeting with his middle school friends.
and sieun, well. hyuntak doesn't even try stealing his time after school. he only spends it on one person anyway.
mindlessly, on autopilot, he takes the shortcut through the underpass.
it's too late when he sees him, already too deep into the tunnel.
he smells first before he sees the cigarette smoke.
“no boyfriend today?” seongje emerges from one of the shadows skirting the tunnel, almost like an apparition. his face is devoid of emotion, the whites of his eyes gleaming even while he's engulfed by the tunnel's shadow.
and maybe that's what he is. a ghost. maybe hyuntak can walk over and he'll merely go through him. maybe he's just a ghost. a sliver of—what?
what does he want so bad that it'd manifest to him like an apparition?
“baku?” the way seongje's mouth closes around baku's name is too deliberate, like a toddler trying out syllables for the first time.
more than half of eunjang already mocks him and baku over that. it has and will never bother him. his friendship with baku has been going on for too long to ever have margin for doubt or sway between them.
he doesn't know why it fucks with him this time.
“what the hell are you on about?”
“so the glasses guy, then?” seongje tries again, genuine, like he's trying to actually guess an answer on an exam. the cogs in hyuntak's brain slows down even more.
“what?”
“no?”
slowly, seongje's pokerface turns up into a small grin.
“how about that guy from the basketball team who likes holding your hand way too much?”
“what the fuck are you talking about?” hyuntak's voice thunders, bouncing off the walls of the tunnel. who's touching whose hand now?
“i watched your practice game last time, bastard was too touchy with you,”
“he's not—i don't have a—” the word gets stuck in his throat, his breath starting to come short. he was watching him?
seongje's mouth moves. hyuntak realizes only a second later that it's a smile. it doesn't reach his eyes, but his mouth moves, almost mechanically. pulling at the corners too wide, the corners squared, too much teeth and gums, too grotesque to look at, like an exposed flesh from a third degree burn. a caricature trying to imitate a smile of a human.
“oh. so no boyfriend,”
hyuntak huffs, at a loss for words.
“i should've known. the sounds you made that day—you've never been kissed like that, have you?”
what?
hyuntak's knee jerk reaction is to look around, behind him, to the far opposite end of the tunnel to see if anyone's close enough to have heard that.
wrong move. when he moves to look back at seongje, he doesn't get to because there's a blur of movement from seongje, and then movement from himself, and then he feels it—the slam of the wall against his back.
he could almost feel the NO FIGHTING!!! -BAKU sign burning through his shirt.
he does feel the real burn of fingers, and then nails, dig into his shoulders, pulling him off the wall only to slam him back into it again.
“hey. don't take your eyes off me.”
in this new angle, three things happen simultaneously: the orange light from the lamppost slices across seongje's face diagonally, he feels a bruise start to form on his shoulders, and then he sees it: the blood smeared on and in seongje's mouth.
seongje's eyes are opened wide, his face too close that hyuntak can see their reddened rims. the reds look even more vivid under the orange light.
it's too much. hyuntak squeezes his eyes shut just to relieve some of the ache in his head.
“did you not hear me? i said don't take your eyes off me.” seongje's smile drops, his hands moving off his shoulders to his jaw instead, thumbs lightly resting on the top of his cheekbones, right on his eyebags. a wordless threat. for a split second, an image of seongje's thumbs digging into his eyeballs flashes in his mind and it startles him so bad that his right knee flinches.
seongje doesn't even acknowledge it, like he already knows.
“no one's here, go hyuntak. no one will hear.”
hyuntak glares at him. “why are you doing this? you just got into a fight and you looked for me to fight again?”
seongje raises a brow and looks at him with some amusement, like a piece of gum stuck under his desk. “i just got into a fight?”
“there's still blood on your mouth, asshole. the bastard must've done a good number on you,”
seongje actually pffts like he's trying not to laugh at hyuntak. he does anyway. his shoulder shake uncontrollably, his laugh echoing in hyuntak's ears.
“yeah, laugh it off.” he swings a fist and even as the impact whips seongje's head to the side, his laughter goes uninterrupted.
“a fight. that's adorable, go hyuntak,” seongje catches the second incoming fist this time, twisting his wrist not enough to injure but enough to freeze him in place, the implication clear.
“this is human blood,” seongje deadpans, looking bored, like he's had this conversation so many times before.
“obviously. what the fuck else would it be?” hyuntak snaps. he grits his teeth, ignoring the alarms blaring in his head warning him not to run his mouth when his wrist is still just a hair of an angle away from being mangled.
seongje laughs again. an inside joke that hyuntak isn't included in. “you want it?”
“are you crazy?” impossibly, hyuntak frowns deeper. he feels the threat on his angled wrist, but there is also something that contradicts it, something that puts him at ease, as if he knows that seongje won't actually do it.
which is fucking crazy to think since he does know that seongje will do it if he wanted to. has heard tens of stories from different highschools around their district that suffered from seongje's cruelty.
maybe he's the crazy one.
silence blankets them suddenly, and he realizes that seongje is watching him closely, like he's trying to read every single thing in hyuntak's train of thought.
“maybe next time,” seongje leans in, presses a long, wet kiss on his cheek it's barely even a kiss from how sloppy it is. seongje's nose bumps against his temple as he inhales deeply, hyuntak simultaneously holding his breath through it.
he can't move. he can't move.
he feels and hears seongje's mouth open against his skin, lips dragging on his skin wetly, the lightest hint of teeth grazing his cheek. his heart thunders, slamming against his ribs so painfully he's afraid it'll bruise itself.
from fear or anticipation, he's not so sure. the tumor grows in his skull, more ants crawl under his skin. he feels lost, his entire body taut like a tripwire, begging to be tripped at this point when seongje's teeth is still hovering over his cheek.
a beat passes. two.
and then.
nothing happens. the teeth retreat slowly, the squelch of something wet so loud amidst the the quietness of the tunnel. seongje's movements are slow, at first, as if he himself hadn't made up his mind yet.
and then he's completely off hyuntak.
he fixates a glance at hyuntak's cheek, tilting his head.
“see you soon, gogo,” seongje says, each syllable of baku's nickname for hyuntak sounding all kinds of foreign and odd coming from his mouth.
hyuntak doesn't know how he got home. his feet moved on autopilot, not noticing the people in the streets, in the bus, in the convenience store giving him strange looks, only gaining consciousness when he got home and his mom let out a shriek at seeing his face.
“what's all that blood on your cheek?”