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Yunho meets Mingi on a Tuesday that smells like wet pavement and burnt sugar. September has already begun to rot, thick and gold like peaches gone soft in the sun. Mingi leans in, cigarette cradled in his fingers like a promise he does not intend to keep, and asks, “Have you ever seen how it rains in the plains?”
Yunho laughs. He’s barefoot again, his legs folded under him like a child’s, oversized shirt swallowing his frame. He doesn’t say no, he doesn’t say yes, either. He simply watches the curl of smoke disappear into the ceiling fan and thinks, Maybe I have, if you say I have.
Mingi is all clean lines and creased trousers, collar always buttoned even in the heat. He speaks slow, like honey dripping from a broken jar, and Yunho drinks it up like communion. When Mingi says his name, it sounds like a scripture. Yunho wants to marry that sound, bury it in his chest.
The nights bleed together. His mother’s mascara stains the pillow. The radio plays sad country songs about boys who don’t come back, and Yunho closes his eyes and pretends the storm outside is just for them. Mingi says things that sound important—fate, ruin, devotion—but Yunho only listens to the way he says them. Not the words, never the words.
By October, the carpet is strangely damp to his foot’s touch. Rain seeps in even when the windows are shut. Yunho curls up in it, lets it soak through his shirt, thinks maybe this is what love is.
Maybe this is what he is, because Mingi never calls him back. Yunho’s call log is empty. The neighbour upstairs says she has never seen anyone leave his place. But Yunho knows better. He knows the way Mingi’s fingers trace his jaw like they are trying to remember a dream. He knows the smell of tobacco and cologne that clings to the sheets.
He knows the way it rains when Mingi kisses him.
The motel’s vacancy sign buzzes like a dying wasp. Neon pink bleeding into the dust-slick dusk. It’s the kind of place no one checks into unless they have already made a mistake. Yunho walks barefoot across the parking lot, gravel sticking to his soles, shirt flapping like a ghost behind him.
Mingi is waiting inside, leaning against the dresser like he owns the room, like he built it with his own hands. The radio hums low—some FM station out of Amarillo—a woman’s voice breaking into static halfway through a love song. The bed is unmade. The air smells like cigarette ash and wildflowers rotting in a vase.
“You’re late,” Mingi says, but he doesn’t sound upset. He never does, just tired, as if he has seen the world and already begun to mourn it.
Yunho shrugs and says something dumb, something childish. Mingi doesn’t laugh, but he touches Yunho’s wrist, his thick fingers grazing his skin like they were reading braille. That’s always how it starts—the soft, slow unraveling.
The sheets are cool and rough, Mingi’s touch is not. Yunho swears the thunder outside syncs with his pulse. He doesn’t remember when the storm started. He doesn’t remember a lot of things, these days—like what day it is, like whether Mingi ever leaves.
The lightbulb above flickers when he arches into him, like the whole room is watching. His name sounds different when Mingi says it—lower, dirtier, like a prayer said wrong. Yunho comes with his eyes wide open, mascara streaked across his cheeks like warpaint. It feels like falling. It feels like drowning. It feels like—
And then it’s morning.
The bed is cold. The dresser is empty. The radio is dead silent. Yunho lies still, fingers brushing the cigarette burn on the pillowcase like it’s proof, like it means something.
Maybe Mingi had to leave early.
Maybe Mingi was never here.
Yunho pulls on his knickers and a shirt that reeks like motel soap. He walks out into the pale sun, into the rain-slick parking lot, looking for tire tracks that aren’t there.
The only thing that lingers is the scent of smoke and the feeling that he’s just missed something he will never get back.
Yunho lights a cigarette with trembling fingers. He doesn’t smoke—not really—but Mingi used to, and somehow it makes the silence feel less sharp. The motel has been empty for days, or maybe weeks. Yunho stopped counting after he found the little glass vial in the glove compartment of the car that doesn’t run anymore.
Just a pinch of dust. Just to take the edge off.
Mingi appears more often now. No longer in reflections, no longer in dreams—but in the mirror behind Yunho when he’s brushing his teeth, in the seat beside him when he’s driving nowhere. He speaks softer, too, like they are underwater.
“You look tired, sweetheart.”
Yunho laughs, but it sounds like crying. He asks Mingi if they ever went to the plains, the ones where it rains sideways, biblical-like.
Mingi leans in, smooth as ever, and says, ”We never left.”
The motel phone rings that night—sharp and real and wrong. Yunho doesn’t answer it. He’s too busy lying naked on the stained carpet, arms out like a crucifix, mascara smudged, whispering, “I only bleed for you.” The radio starts up again, unprompted, playing the same three notes over and over.
He thinks Mingi’s touching him again, but when he opens his eyes, there is no one there. There was just the hum of the fridge and the shape of a man made out of shadows.
”You need me,” the shadow says.
“No,” Yunho whispers, voice cracked. “I need to forget.”
That’s when it happens—not like thunder, but something gentler, more fatal. The storm lifts, the air sharpens, and suddenly Yunho remembers: Mingi never touched the steering wheel. Mingi never paid the motel clerk. Mingi never answered the door. He only ever appeared after Yunho took the powder.
Yunho stumbles to the mirror. His eyes are rimmed in black, not from makeup but from days of not sleeping. He runs the sink and watches the water spiral.
“If I did weave the thread,” he mutters, “I’d cut your name out of it.”
Mingi appears behind him, hand on Yunho’s shoulder. But this time, Yunho doesn’t lean back into the touch. He meets Mingi’s gaze in the glass.
“You’re not real,” he says.
Mingi smiles, gentle and broken.
“Neither are you, like this.”
The morning spills in through the motel blinds, cutting long lines across the floor like prison bars. Yunho blinks against it, throat dry, every part of him aching—like he’s been dragged back from somewhere far, somewhere not meant for the living.
The vial is empty.
The carpet remains just a carpet.
The silence doesn’t hum with Mingi’s voice anymore. Not even when Yunho calls his name out loud, testing the room like a boy afraid of the dark. Nothing answers.
He sits on the edge of the bed, hands shaking as he pulls on his clothes—knickers, an oversized shirt that doesn’t fit him right anymore, like his body has changed in ways he can’t measure. There’s no mirror now. He smashed it sometime last night, or maybe it had been several nights ago—or maybe it never existed, just like the second toothbrush, just like the tire tracks.
Just like Mingi.
Out front, the sky is a similar colour of unripe peaches, and the pavement still glistens from a rain Yunho doesn’t remember. A dog barks somewhere far off. The world continues like it never noticed he went missing.
He stands there for a while, staring out at nothing as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cigarette. He doesn’t light it. He holds it between his lips, just the way Mingi used to.
He walks.
He walks past the sign with its flickering neon.
He walks past the car that won’t start.
He walks until the motel is merely a speck behind him, swallowed by heat and dust and memory.
There’s no music now. There is only the sound of his own feet, and the echo of a voice that might have never been real, saying, “You can always come back.”
Yunho won’t.
He doesn’t turn around.