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I.
Yunho thinks love tastes like the tangerines Mingi peels for him in the hush between songs, when the studio goes quiet, when the city exhales and the night presses against the windows like a secret—the kind of silence that clings to the skin like sweat. Mingi peels them slowly, with slender, careful fingers, as if he is undressing something sacred. He hands the pieces to Yunho without meeting his eyes. They never talk much when they are together, not about the reality of things and life, not about the kind of hunger that keeps them up at night. Mingi sits at the edge of the mattress, always turned slightly away, like love is a crime he’s still halfway ashamed of. Yunho watches the curve of his spine and memorises the way his fingers tremble when he hands him the fruit.
Yunho eats them anyway. He swallows the sour like he deserves it. He chews and nods, and sometimes smiles, though the citrus burns tiny cuts in his mouth he never knew existed before. He doesn’t say that he prefers apples. He never says anything that might sound like rejection, he never says anything that might sound like leaving.
There is smoke curling from Mingi’s lips like some tired God’s last sermon when he lights a cigarette with the practised flick of his wrist and exhales smoke like a funeral hymn. It drifts into Yunho’s mouth when they kiss when he sits barefoot beside him on the mattress on the floor, knees touching, or when Yunho leans too close just to feel it burn. The air between them smells like ash and sweet fruit and something quieter than sadness. Mingi never prays out loud but Yunho has learned the sound of a breaking heart in the mere inhale of a cigarette. There’s a kind of religion in the way Mingi exhales—careless, slow, like even the air has weight, and he’s been carrying too much of it.
Sometimes, Yunho thinks he’s drinking someone else’s heartbreak just by being this close to Mingi—like every drag is another boy’s name turned into mist. He can taste prayers in the smoke. Regret, maybe, or a longing, trapped in the curl of Mingi’s lips. Still, he doesn’t talk about his past, but Yunho knows it’s crowded. He knows there are ghosts in the space between their bodies. There are some nights, Yunho sleeps beside him like he’s sharing a bed with a burial ground.
And still, he chooses to stay.
He is full of so much love he could split down the middle, but he takes whatever Mingi gives him, every last morsel. The half-finished takeout, the silence at dinner, the way Mingi only touches him in the dark like daylight would shame it. Yunho eats it all. The affection handed to him in crumbs, the tenderness that bruises, the kind of love that doesn’t ask what he needs—it offers what’s left.
He wishes to ask: Why do you love me like you’re apologising for it? But he doesn’t, he can’t.
Yunho presses his mouth to Mingi’s shoulder like it’s an answer, like it’s forgiveness, like it’s something he can keep.
Love, he thinks, is being known and left anyway. Love is eating tangerines that makes his eyes water and saying Thank you. Love is sleeping in Mingi’s arms and still dreaming of being alone.
Mingi sometimes whispers into his ear at odd hours of the night, “You’re too good to me,” and Yunho almost laughs—because Mingi only says that when he’s about to disappear.
The next morning, the bed is empty. Their apartment smells like ashes and citrus.
And Yunho, still full, doesn’t know how to empty himself. He doesn’t know how to stop loving someone who haunts like hunger. He doesn’t know how to tell the difference between being loved and being fed to something that cannot stay.
He peels a tangerine for himself instead, with trembling fingers, and tastes the ghost of someone else’s hands.
II.
Yunho carries Mingi like a secret in his bones. It has been three days, or maybe four? The clocks in the apartment are all wrong. He hasn’t touched the bed since Mingi’s disappearance, he opts to sleep on the couch now, or the floor, or sometimes, not at all. The air tastes and reeks like old perfume and cigarettes gone cold.
The tangerines on the counter are gradually beginning to rot. He can’t throw them away, not when they are the last thing Mingi touched. They are soft now, bruised at the rind, and Yunho stares at them like they might say something if he chooses to wait long enough.
He bites into one, skin and all. The bitterness makes his eyes sting. He swallows it whole, and he doesn’t flinch.
Sometimes, love is just a performance. A performance of survival. Sometimes, it’s swallowing pain with our eyes open. Sometimes, it’s silence ringing louder than a scream.
Yunho walks barefoot through the apartment like a phantom haunting his own body. Every room remembers and smells of Mingi. The kitchen hums with it, the bathroom mirror reflects the hollow where Mingi’s toothbrush sits, bare and dry, the home office still smells like sleep and sweat and songs that never got finished.
He presses his face into the pillow and breathes until his lungs ache. He isn’t sure whether he wants to make a shrine of the scent, or forget it completely.
He does neither, in the end.
Instead, he lights one of Mingi’s old cigarettes, though he’s never smoked before. He coughs, eyes watering, and laughs—soft and broken. He believes maybe this is what love really is. Love is not the sweetness, not the ache, but the aftermath—the ghost of a beloved’s breath in our lungs.
He drinks the smoke and lets it pollute his lungs like it is his communion. He whispers, Amen, and he waits for Mingi to come back like the world might rewind itself if he stands still long enough.
Yet, the more he waits, the apartment stays quiet, the tangerines keep rotting, the ghosts stay loud.
He writes a note on the back of a grocery store receipt and leaves it on the nightstand, as if Mingi might see it, as if any of this means anything now: next time, ask me what i like. next time, stay long enough for me to answer.
Yunho opens the window to let the smoke air out, and to allow a little light in.
III.
Yunho dreams of ash, again. In the dream, it snows inside the apartment, but the flakes are soft curls of burnt paper, falling slow over the couch, over the desk, over the tangerines that never got eaten. He opens his mouth to speak, but only smoke chooses to come out. He tries to breathe and tastes salt, or maybe sugar—he doesn’t know the difference anymore.
He wakes up with the weight of someone’s mouth on his shoulder: warm, familiar, real. Nothing like the dreams.
A kiss came first, then another. Soft as breath, brushing down the length of his spine like a prayer said backwards, like an apology he wasn’t sure if he wanted. Yunho lies still, eyes closed, afraid to break the spell, but the scent is unmistakable—skin and nicotine, something citrus-bright buried under days of distance. The ghost has come back wearing a body.
“Mingi,” he whispers, more out of instinct than belief.
“I saw the cigarettes,” comes the reply, muffled against the back of his neck. “You never smoked.”
Yunho says nothing. Mingi kisses the nape of his neck at the lack of response, then lower over the curve of his shoulder, the dip of his spine, the hollow where he’s learned Yunho carries tension like old grief. Each kiss is reverent, in an attempt that he is reclaiming the ground he abandoned.
Yunho rolls to his side and opens his eyes. Mingi is kneeling beside him at the couch, hair mussed, lips red, his eyes so full of something that might be guilt or hunger or love—or all three. His hand hovers above Yunho’s ribs, not touching, just trembling there.
“I didn’t know if I could come back,” Mingi says. “But I ran out of excuses.” And Yunho, who has always been too full of love, too willing to eat what he’s given, pulls Mingi’s hand to his mouth and kisses the palm like it’s fruit, like it’s the forgiveness he had been asking for.
Their bodies find each other like rivers do—quiet, inevitable. Yunho’s skin sings where Mingi touches him, not urgent, but achingly slow, like he’s remembering a song by his ears. Mingi touches Yunho like he’s touching grief: every fingertip a confession, every kiss a prayer. Their mouths meet in silence, all tongue and want and something more dangerous beneath it. Yunho tastes the sharp ash. Mingi tastes like the end of something and the beginning all over again.
The cigarette pack on the windowsill has only one stick left, Mingi notices. He exhales against Yunho’s throat, then licks a line down his collarbone like it’s scripture.
“Did you light them just to feel me in the room?” he asks, voice thick.
Yunho doesn’t answer him. He only tilts his head back, and bares his throat like an offering, and Mingi takes it—not violently, not softly either. He sucks a bruise just above Yunho’s pulse, and Yunho thinks, this is how I want to be remembered.
He maps Yunho’s skin like he’s trying to rewrite time. Mouth to clavicle, fingers tracing ribs, a tongue that trembles when it reaches the scar above Yunho’s hip, the one from falling off his bike in summer. Mingi kisses it like it’s holy. Yunho flinches—not from pain, but the ache of being wanted again.
Their bodies move together the way smoke curls from a lit match, slow and inevitable, shaping itself around nothing and everything at once. Hands slipping under fabric, breath catching in the dark, Yunho arching into Mingi’s mouth like he’s starving.
And maybe he is.
Maybe he always has been.
Mingi presses his face lower, his hands clinging like he’s drowning in what he left behind. His mouth trails lower, hungrier now, desperate. Not for sex, but to be forgiven, for a way back into Yunho’s breath.
Yunho cups the back of Mingi’s neck. “If this is your apology,” he says, voice frayed and breathless, “then don’t stop.”
Mingi looks up, eyes glassy, wild with something raw. “You’ll forgive me?” he asks, like he doesn’t believe he deserves it. “Even after I…”
Yunho nods eagerly. I’m still full of you. I’ve never not been. If this is what you give, I’ll take it. Again and again, he doesn’t add.
Mingi groans like it hurts more than anything, and he surges up to kiss Yunho, deep and bruising and grateful. His hands are greedy, smoothing down Yunho’s chest in an attempt to try to memorise the heat. His mouth lingers everywhere—over the swell of Yunho’s throat, the soft place behind his ear, the trembling edges of his lips.
“You feel like home,” Mingi whispers, voice hoarse. “Even after everything. You’re still…”
“…yours,” Yunho completes, pulling him closer. “I’m yours, I’m all yours. I’ve always been.”
He shows his devotion in every touch, every exhale, every slow roll of his hips against Yunho’s. He shows it with the way his teeth graze Yunho’s skin like he’s afraid it might disappear. He shows it with his hands pressed to Yunho’s chest like a man desperate to feel a heartbeat and call it a proof that he hasn’t ruined everything.
Yunho forgives him in the way he spreads his legs and lets Mingi in, without hesitation. In the way he arches into his mouth, sighing like surrender. In the way he moans his name, not as accusation, but invitation. Mingi worships him in kind—on his knees, trembling, fucking into his tight, wet hole, groaning and chanting I love you’s into his ear, kissing every place Yunho has ever hurt.
After, Yunho lies against Mingi’s chest, listening to the slow thud of his heartbeat, thinking: I’ve waited whole lifetimes to be held like this again.
Yunho has already forgiven him a thousand times over by the time they collapse together, slick with sweat and love that tastes like penance, because Mingi came back. Because Mingi still wants him. Because Yunho, even broken, has always known how to be full of love.
Mingi plays with his hair, presses his nose to Yunho’s temple, and says, “I’m sorry for every tangerine you didn’t like.”
Yunho smiles, barely. “I’d eat a thousand more if it meant you would come back.”
Mingi kisses Yunho again, slow and sure, like there’s no need to run anymore. He buries into the crook of Yunho’s shoulder, and weeps. Quietly, without shame. Yunho holds him through it like absolution.
They fall asleep that way—clinging, naked, redeemed.
And outside, the sky begins to pinken—as if the world is willing to start over, too.
IV.
The light comes in slow, like it’s afraid to wake them. Pale and golden, it spills across the sheets, over skin still damp with sleep and the salt of last night’s love.
Yunho stirs first.
He doesn’t open his eyes, he only listens: the sound of Mingi breathing beside him, the hush of the world outside the window, the small creaks of the apartment settling like an old body sighing. The silence is no longer hollow. It’s full now. It’s full of presence, of peace, of him.
Mingi is curled around Yunho like a promise kept. One arm slung over his waist, one leg tangled between his own, breath warm against the back of his neck. He’s heavy in his sleep, the way only someone who intends to stay can be.
Yunho turns in his arms, slow, careful. Mingi’s face is soft in the light, lips parted slightly, lashes trembling with dreams. Yunho presses a kiss to his cheek, then his eyelids, then the center of his forehead. Each kiss is a sentence he doesn’t need to speak aloud.
I forgive you.
I love you, still.
I love you again.
Stay.
Stay with me, please.
Mingi blinks awake, eyes sleepy and raw with something Yunho’s too afraid to name. He reaches up, fingers brushing over Yunho’s jaw like he needs to confirm he’s real.
“Hey,” he says, voice rough with sleep.
“Hi,” Yunho replies, a smile sewing onto his lips.
They lie there for a long time, not speaking, just breathing into each other. Mingi draws patterns on Yunho’s back with his fingertips—stars, maybe. Songs, or apologies in a language only they could ever understand.
Outside, the world begins again. Somewhere, a bus sighs down the street. A bird sings from a telephone wire. The sky blooms into something pale and perfect.
Yunho presses his forehead to Mingi’s. “Let’s not ruin this,” he whispers. Us.
“We won’t,” Mingi replies. “We already ruined it once, and now, we get to try again.”
There’s no urgency to move. There’s no need to fill the space with anything more. They have said enough. They have done enough. This is the kind of silence that feels like sanctuary.
Yunho closes his eyes and breathes in the scent of morning and Mingi and something close to forever.
The ash is gone now. The ghosts have left the room. The tangerines have been thrown away.
And in their place: this quiet, this warmth, this body that loves him back.
The light spills on—golden and slow—it means the morning will stay.
00.
he touched my wrist like it was burning and still didn’t let go / he left without a word and i stayed behind with the smoke / i press a cigarette to my mouth later and call it missing him / he returns with hunger in his hands and a name for every bruise / we don’t speak of the leaving, only the staying / this is how we love now / this is how we survive it.