gateway drug

by chanelbodybag

Summary:

at a secluded university for the bright, the difficult, and the quietly scandalized, two students are forced to co-author a thesis on moral collapse.

The first time Donghyuck Lee saw Jaemin Na after his exile, he tasted iron on his tongue—as if the sight of him had cracked some secret molar filled with blood-bright mercury. Months earlier, Jaemin’s parents had shipped him back into the city, away from the limestone towers of St-Agnès-sur-Mer, a coastal academy that smelled of brine and disinfectant, after he’d been caught orchestrating a clandestine baccarat ring in the astronomy dome. The scandal had made the Sunday gossip columns shiver with delight: BANK HEIR BUSTED BENEATH THE STARS.

 

When Jaemin returned, it was just in time for the annual Fall Colloquium, the dining halls filled with lacquered mahogany and breathless scholars. Donghyuck sat in the front row, picked-at plate, notes already spidered with underlines. He felt him before he saw him—a warmth, like a sudden rash across his collarbones.

 

To backtrack: The car ride to St-Agnès-sur-Mer occurred at 7 p.m. on a balmy Sunday evening and Donghyuck was imagining how much funnier he would be if he was dead.

 

“Promise not to hate me forever,” his mother chirped with a cute smile, fanning her face with a university brochure. 

 

She had once worked in publishing but left after her third panic attack at a conference in Florence. Now, she curated “private collections” and made passive-aggressive lists in a Moleskine planner. She was always somewhere else: a soft, cool voice on speakerphone, a perfume trail vanishing into another gallery. Her clothing was architectural—drape, volume, silk—like armor built for someone who refused to raise their voice. She was always throwing thematic dinner parties—one night might be “Midnight in Marrakech,” the next “Underwater Dreams.” She adored Donghyuck with a passionate, thespian flair, often spoiling him with handmade gifts and outrageous surprises—a gilded mask from Venice, a live flamingo for his birthday, a vintage typewriter she insisted he use. 

 

His father was quieter but no less doting. He had made his fortune in the ‘08 collapse—having shorted something nobody else thought to short, and by the time the dust cleared, he was rich enough to start pretending he’d always been a patron of the arts. He wore black cashmere, drank red wine at 11 a.m., and used phrases like “cultural capital” in casual conversation. He liked to argue at dinner and expected everyone to keep up. If you couldn’t, he got bored in a febrile way. He’d call Donghyuck in the morning to read him the news, quoting obscure poetry before breakfast, or send cryptic text messages in Latin just to keep the boy on his toes. His father loved Donghyuck fiercely, though often in ways tangled with his own prides and disappointments.

 

They were unconventional parents—sometimes overbearing, sometimes baffling,—but always unmistakably present in their own extravagant way.

 

Mornings were silent, elegant, detached. Their lives are lacquered and curated—house full of abstract sculptures, linen shirts, rosé in the afternoon. They gave Donghyuck every advantage but very little attention. The housekeeper, Mariana, arrived at 6 a.m. and laid out bowls of citrus and ginger tea. His mother floated through the kitchen in satin robes and offered critiques of Le Monde. His father read economic theory on a leather chaise and made quiet hums of approval or disdain. Neither parent asked Donghyuck about school unless a donor was coming to dinner. Breakfast was served on gray porcelain.

 

After Donghyuck’s third year of university at a private college in New York, it was the first time his father had ever really put his foot down. No amount of tears could sway him.

 

“Donghyuck, you’re out of control,” he had told him in a way that sounded like it really pained him to say. “You’re not meant for the city. You’re just not.”

 

What he had meant to say: I thought you were God’s favorite. You were meant to have a perfect GPA. Be mysterious, quote Kierkegaard backwards. But Donghyuck loved weed. 

 

He was bored of himself and unstimulated by his bullshit classes, a different libation every night. He had lost himself in the maddening hullabaloo of NYC. Total fucking pandemonium. His third year grades nearly made his father weep. Donghyuck was supposed to be the smart one. Cities, Donghyuck realized, were so private. So he had fallen in love with one, and love was nothing if not violent and destructive—and it ruined him.

 

When Donghyuck was high in the on-campus planetarium, narrating constellations like ancient gossip, three girls cried, one boy threw up, and the security guard said, “That was the most honest thing I’ve heard all year.”

 

The next morning, the school told him to take a leave of absence. His parents framed the incident as a “creative miscommunication.”

 

His mother booked him a room at the Hotel Lutetia and said, “Darling, you’re going to be so much better off at St-Agnès. They’ll love your mind.”

 

Donghyuck continued staring anxiously out of the window, his face stiff with anger, light-headed from not eating all day.

 

His mother was snacking on a small, greasy package of lightly-salted peanuts. She would suck on each nut, passing it between her cheeks, coating her tongue with its salt, and chew it slowly until it turned into a bland, peanut-mash. She would eventually swallow after forty-two bites. 

 

Donghyuck’s mother was gorgeous and soft; her hair, her skin, her gaze. It was all soft. She was graceful, kind, and lovely in all the ways a woman was often supposed to be lovely. She loved her children, she loved her husband, she loved her life and thus spread that love into everything. Sometimes, things swelled from her love, but she never cared to clean up when they burst. 

 

The taxi driver kept looking at him through the car’s mirror and Donghyuck rolled his shoulders because he was wearing an extremely loose button-down, and perhaps he wanted to see what color his nipples were. Mortifying. Donghyuck started biting on his lip, hoping that he’d snag a piece of skin and swallow it to alleviate a bit of his hunger. Nothing peeled off, his lips were too moisturized.

 

“Oh, God, this library is gorgeous,” his mother said breathlessly, pointing at a brochure that had gone limp from the humidity.

 

“What if my dorm is horrible?” Donghyuck asked, knowing that it absolutely was, sinking his nails into the skin of his left thigh.

 

His mother looked beside herself. Donghyuck had missed the housing deadline, all his university had left was a double-bed dorm room and co-ed communal showers. All his university had left was horror. 

 

“He’s torturing you,” his mother said angrily. “He's being awful.” This was his father’s compromise: either Donghyuck suffers in the dorms, gets a bitter taste of reality, or he gets cut off completely.

 

Donghyuck planned on living off of his father’s money for the rest of his life, so he didn’t have that much of a choice. It was an illusion of choice, but Donghyuck was rational. Or, at least, he was pretending to be.

 

“What if I hate it?” Donghyuck questioned next, knowing he would, and was suddenly overcome by the reality of his situation. He felt unbelievably disturbed and nauseated. 

 

“What if you meet someone sweet?” his mother offered. “You know I met daddy in college.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I was pregnant with your sister when I graduated.” His mother took a stern look at him. “Don’t do that. That was stupid.”

 

“I’m not going to impregnate anyone at St-Agnès,” Donghyuck whined. Spoken out loud, St-Agnès sounded an awful lot like anguish. He was scaring himself. 

 

To channel an inner calmness, he thought of his only friend, Chenle—a wealthy, cute boy from Tribeca. They were content in their vapid little coterie. They made fun of people and spent money. They had grown up together; they sniffed their first poppers side-by-side in a dimly lit club bathroom at the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris. They giggled as they danced along the Seine and Chenle said he felt his entire body loosen.

 

“I wish you could marry Chenle,” his mother complained, as she often did. She adored Chenle. “I’m going out to dinner with him and your sister tonight, and her friend. He misses me, he said.”

 

Chenle adored her as well. Donghyuck’s mother loved and valued her children’s friendships. She was a cool sort of mom. Warm, inviting. Sometimes she would go shopping with Chenle; there was no part of Donghyuck’s life that his mother had not touched. In many ways, the umbilical cord between them had never been cut.

 

Donghyuck was going to miss many things from his life. The Whole Foods in Tribeca, Stüssy in SoHo, his hair stylist who would talk about her sex life as she gelled and detangled Donghyuck’s curls. He would even miss the homeless man and his soggy micro-penis outside the bodega on his apartment’s corner.

 

St-Agnès had six dormitories on campus. Donghyuck’s dorm, Solange, was a repurposed insane asylum and lobotomy lab from the early 1900s. By 1930, its doors were closed forever.

 

Donghyuck’s mother smiled at him.

 

“It’s vintage,” she said. “Obsessed.”

 

The heat was really starting to affect Donghyuck. He was having strange thoughts. What if he was a lobotomized housewife, he pondered. What if the only thing I had to care about was wiping my drool, cooking dinner, and fucking my husband every night?

 

The thought made him mildly horny and disgusted.

 

/

 

The taxi driver carried with him handfuls of Donghyuck’s luggage; perfectly aged and coated, monogrammed Louis Vuitton travel sets—classic canvas and color way. Among his luggage; two Keepall Bandoulière 60s, three packing cubes, one Horizon 70, a beautifully vintage Sirius 55, one sunglass pouch and a larger toiletry bag.

 

The anatomy of the building was unlike anything Donghyuck had ever seen. It stood at the furthest edge of the St-Agnès grounds, where the cliffs dropped off abruptly into seafoam and stone. The air around it smelled faintly of salt, lavender, and rust—iron from the gull-covered railing, old floorboards warped by years of wet boots and sea fog. The building itself was made of pale stone veined with lichen, its façade the color of bone in some lights, milk in others. Inside, the hallways were narrow and overlong, lit by chandeliers made of sea glass and dim yellow bulbs that buzzed softly, as if they were trying not to disturb the silence. The walls were painted a washed-out blue that peeled in places, revealing layers of cream and gray underneath like pressed flowers. A long oriental rug—frayed but still elegant—ran down the center of the main hallway. It muffled the sound of footsteps, though the floorboards creaked no matter how lightly one walked.

 

Each door was marked with a delicate bronze number plate, slightly tarnished, with ornate keyholes that looked generations older than the students themselves. The doorknobs were cold even in summer. Sometimes, the hallway smelled of the ocean. Other times, it smelled like someone’s cologne from three rooms down—cedar, bergamot, musk,—lingering in the wallpaper like perfume on a wrist. Donghyuck’s room was on the first floor, down the long hallway left of the entrance. Students had already started decorating their doors; they had written their names on mini, velcro white boards in black or colorful marker.

 

He stared at his door: Room 12. Donghyuck and Renjun.

 

From the small gap under the door, Donghyuck knew immediately that there were other people in the room. He heard laughter, low classical music, distinctly male and female voices. It was Sunday night, most people had already moved in.

 

“I have to go now, Hyuckie,” his mother whispered in a thin, emotional voice. Her eyes filled with tears; she was never fond of tough love.

 

“Take me with you,” Donghyuck groaned, a final and lamentful plea for rescue, shooting an evil glance around the high ceilings and bronzy doors. “I can’t stay here. Call dad.”

 

“Thanksgiving break,” his mother breathed. “Maybe even before then. I love you so much, I won’t breathe for three months. I have to leave, okay? Enjoy yourself.”

 

When Donghyuck keyed open the door, he saw three boys, one rocking on the edge of a deskchair, two others on the left-side bed, and they looked stoned out of their fucking minds. Maria Callas was belting a note as the hum of their conversation shushed. “Hey,” the desk boy greeted with a mocking, lop-sided grin. 

 

Donghyuck did not move. 

 

“You must be Donghyuck—I’m Renjun. Those are my friends.” Donghyuck was still not moving, and it was disturbing Renjun minutely.

 

“Sorry my shit is everywhere,” Renjun continued, apologizing. His voice was smooth and modulated; it was a lovely voice, like a flute of champagne in the springtime.

 

Donghyuck did not say anything, but he did proceed with human movement, and began trudging his things inside. He zipped open his duffle bag to find his IQOS.

 

“Um.” Renjun paused, meeting the amused eyes of his friends. “We’re going to get dinner if you want to come. The dining hall closes in an hour.”

 

“I’m fine,” Donghyuck said, his first, beautiful words, and was scornfully angry that he was being spoken to at all. He couldn’t find his fucking IQOS and everyone was looking at him.

 

“I like your bags.”

 

Donghyuck found the possibility of the compliment being directed towards him incredibly small, but after a tinny fit of laughter boomed in his silence, he knew that it was meant for his ears. He looked back towards the voice that produced it.

 

Bed boy, on the side closest to the window. He smiled at him; his eyes pinkened and glazed over. His eyelids were low and dark and Donghyuck felt unwell over his long, thick lashes that tickled his cheeks every time he blinked. The boy was leaning his back against the red brick with his legs crossed at the ankles. He looked lazy and high and pretty. Donghyuck deplored him for laughing at his expense. He was hungry and felt a migraine forming and wanted nicotine and, truth be told, he hated all of them. Without saying anything, Donghyuck located his IQOS and two chocolate rice cakes, then left the room. 

 

“Stop,” Renjun groaned suddenly. The door looked to be wobbling after Donghyuck had slammed it shut. “Don’t flirt with boys like him.”

 

“What?” Jaemin asked, smiling slightly. Carnivore teeth.

 

“He’s obviously bipolar.” Renjun rolled his eyes. “He brought his Ray-Bans in their own purse.”

 

Jaemin laughed at this but didn’t agree.

 

“That’s rude,” Jeno scolded with little actual anger.

 

“He’s not bipolar. He just doesn’t like us,” Jaemin said. “He’s beautiful.”

 

“Yeah.” Renjun and Jeno both agreed. Then Renjun, again, “You know I’m funny about auras. I feel like he’s an asshole. I need to grab my boxes off of his bed.”

 

Jeno closed his eyes and began humming along to the opera in the background. Renjun was cursing under his breath; it sounded sanctimonious. A chill went through Jaemin. He was thinking.

 

Donghyuck was gorgeous, yes, but Jaemin found almost everyone gorgeous in some way. He saw beauty in strange things. He liked looking at unusual, uncomfortable faces because they reminded him of how beautiful he was. 

 

In this sense, Jaemin had to make conscious efforts to keep himself grounded—he excelled at nearly everything. When it came to the realm of affections and entanglements, he had a preference of course; and he liked people like that. Like Donghyuck. He liked his outfit and his knuckles and his long-ish hair and the way he had said ‘fine’. It sounded incredibly archaic, but in Jaemin’s mind, average beauty was nominally depressing and impersonal (despite the truth of beauty still remaining). 

 

When you see beauty like that, like Donghyuck, suddenly you cannot remember the moment before the beauty. Jaemin loved whenever he discovered mathematically gorgeous proofs randomly, and in that, he was motivated to find statistically rare cases of beauty.

 

Today was perfect because the existence of perfection had coalesced together in one room: Donghyuck and Jaemin. 

 

Donghyuck’s beauty asserted itself in proportion, symmetry, dimension, direction, perspective, center, axes, coordinates, reflection, rotation, half-twists, order, periodicity, scale, space, cycles, intersections, continuity, intensity, density, stability, noise, as well as smoothness, curvature, projections, three-fold, and various other notions in which every great artist and mathematician had explored.

 

Donghyuck was Jaemin’s statistically abnormal, living construction of beauty.

 

Jaemin was a quantum mathematics major.

 

/

 

Donghyuck and Renjun were not getting along very well. A few days had passed.

 

The door banged open upon his entrance, and he proceeded to walk in like he’d just rolled out of someone’s bed—hood up, headphones around his neck, half-eaten granola bar between his fingers. He stopped in the doorway, then shut the door with his foot, dropping his bag onto the floor. It made a loud, wet-sounding thump. Renjun flinched.

 

“What’s in there?” Renjun asked, voice clipped. “A body?”

 

Donghyuck shrugged. “Couple books. Charger. Weed.”

 

Renjun wrinkled his nose. “They scan for that here, you know.”

 

“Yeah?” Donghyuck said, peeling off his hoodie. “They scan for mental breakdowns in ethics class, too? Or just drugs?”

 

Donghyuck had teased out the reason for his roommate’s attendance at St-Agnès, somewhat out of boredom and partially due to his fixation for cruel revenge, as he was sure that everyone here was either a societal reject or lacking generational wealth. As it turned out, Renjun toed the line of both. He was prodigal, though, a very promising young mind in the world of theology. He went to school on full scholarship.

 

What had happened was this: 

 

The room was too bright. Fluorescents burned like surgical lights, and Renjun’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

 

He stood in front of the seminar class in a crisp cream sweater, one that cost more than most people’s rent, watching his slides lag behind his voice. He was two minutes into his final presentation on Kantian morality and already losing grip.

 

“Categorical imperative,” he said, throat dry. “Meaning that actions are only morally acceptable if they can be universalized—if the act is—if it’s something you’d will for everyone to do…”

 

The class blinked back at him. One girl sipped iced coffee through a green straw. The TA—James, or Jason, something Midwestern—was tapping a pen against his notepad. No one looked impressed.

 

Renjun cleared his throat. “Which is… foundational. Morally foundational. Because it means you aren’t just doing things because they feel right—you’re doing them because they are right. Which is different.”

 

Someone stifled a cough.

 

He pressed the clicker. The next slide didn’t load.

 

His hand twitched. He clicked again. Nothing. Again.

 

“Just give it a second,” the TA offered from the side, smiling like a babysitter. “Tech’s been a little slow today.”

 

Renjun nodded tightly. His heart started beating too loud in his ears. The silence stretched. Heat climbed up his neck.

 

Then someone—he’d never know who—said quietly, “Guess Kant wouldn’t be a fan of PowerPoint either.”

 

The class chuckled. Renjun’s jaw clenched so hard his molars ground.

 

He flipped his notecards. Out of order. They were out of order.

 

“Okay,” he muttered, flipping again, hands shaking now. “So, if you look at... if you look at the Heinz dilemma—”

 

He blinked. The sentence dissolved in his throat.

 

“I—” He swallowed. His vision fuzzed at the edges. “Fuck. Sorry.”

 

A few students glanced up, surprised. Renjun never swore. Not publicly. Not in front of people.

 

Jason/James stood up slowly. “Hey, you good? You can take a second if—”

 

“I’m fine,” Renjun snapped. “I know the material. I know it. The software is just... useless. And my cards got messed up.”

 

“You can go again later—”

 

“I’m not restarting.” His voice cracked, and the word hit the whiteboard like a slap.

 

Now everyone was staring.

 

Renjun’s hand hovered near the TA’s desk, then suddenly, as if possessed by something deeper than logic—deeper than Kant himself—he swept an entire stack of feedback rubrics to the floor. 

 

They flew like dead leaves.

 

The force of his outburst had knocked a chair over. Someone gasped.

 

Jason/James stepped forward. “Renjun—”

 

Renjun backed away from the desk, flushed and trembling.

 

“I’m sorry,” he said, but it was barely a whisper, “but I’m not doing this absolute goddamn bullshit of an assignment again.”

 

The email came three days later: disciplinary leave for the remainder of the semester. A note from the dean, sterile and self-satisfied, suggested “a change of pace” at his university’s satellite campus. Being by the seaside would help him “regain academic equilibrium.”

 

Renjun read it on the plane, next to a man eating biscoff cookies with his mouth open. He stared out the window for the rest of the flight, thinking: I’m never fucking coming back.

 

Renjun’s jaw tensed. “That was blown out of proportion.”

 

“Sure,” Donghyuck said, kicking off his shoes. “You threw a chair at the TA.”

 

“It tipped. I nudged it.”

 

“Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

 

Renjun turned. “Donghyuck, why are you here?”

 

Donghyuck shrugged again. “Got caught stoned in the planetarium. Was playing Radiohead and talking about the stars, blah blah blah." He paused, considering the moment with a finger to his lower lip. He pushed the plush of it around, flash of dull teeth and spit-shine. It was a sweet memory.  "Apparently the school didn’t find it cute.”

 

Renjun blinked. “That actually sounds like a cry for help.”

 

“It was fucking poetic, actually.” Donghyuck flopped down onto his mattress, trying not to think too hard about bedbugs or lice. He had stuffed five loose sheets atop the bedframe and a fitted cover over everything. He wanted there to be a barrier between him and whatever had lived or died on that bed before. “I made girls cry.”

 

Renjun stared at him. A deep, long look, like Donghyuck was mentally stunted. “I’m serious about the smoking. Not in the room. Open the windows, at least. I don’t want my clothes to reek just because you’re an addict.” 

 

Jaemin and Jeno frequently lit up in the room with him, together. They liked to get a significantly debased amount of high and then start making up fake words and attempting parkour. Renjun was kind of a hypocrite, but it was out of spite and the unwillingness to lose at verbal pommelling. 

 

“Then move in with your little philosophy professor. Share a bed. Moralize at each other.”

 

Renjun inhaled sharply through his nose.

 

“I’m going to shower,” he said. “Try not to break anything.”

 

Donghyuck was already scrolling through his phone, thumbing his e-cigarette, smiling to himself.

 

/

 

Every Sunday night, Jaemin, Jeno, and Renjun would eat dinner together. They never really ate at the dining hall—Renjun had only mentioned it the day Donghyuck moved in because he didn’t want him to know of their actual spot.

 

Chicken and Pie was their favorite restaurant in St-Agnès because it only sold two things: chicken and pie (and on Tuesday nights, their famous chicken-pie). Jaemin found it overwhelming to be in restaurants that offered too many dishes. His mind, which was often overly-critical in nature, would sometimes turn so loud that he would panic. Long menus, he felt, were there to torture him. He liked schedules and organized functions and pre-built paths. “Fais-le sans faille.”  Do it without flaw. Jaemin was told this before breakfast, before bed, before recitals and dentist appointments. He once whispered it during sex.

 

Jaemin didn’t like inventing things. What troubled him most about nature was its unpredictability and constant expansion. But Jaemin couldn’t stay mad at nature, or anything, for too long.

 

They sat in a corner booth and ordered their usual: a family-sized chicken tender platter with fries and three slices of pie. The chicken tenders mirrored their pies; the crust was flaky and golden, sort-of-sweet but not offensively sugary. The cooks used so much peanut-oil on everything that after eating your stomach would feel hard and evil and nauseated, but the flavor was worth it. Their total always came out to sixteen dollars even, and each week someone different would pay. This Sunday, it was Jaemin’s turn.

 

“There’s something deeply embarrassing about seniors living in a freshman dorm,” Renjun said as he dipped three fries into a ketchup-mayo mixture.

 

“Solange is a freshman dorm?” Jeno asked, ripping packets of sugar into his iced glass of Coca-Cola. Whenever Jeno would do this, Jaemin’s heart would start beating erratically. He didn’t like changing things that already had a perfected recipe. In a single, twelve ounce can of Coca-Cola, there were already thirty-nine grams of sugar. It didn’t need anymore sugar. Jaemin tried to push this out of his mind, but the anxiety had already spread through to his soul.

 

“Yeah,” Renjun confirmed, “well, not technically. It’s just really shitty.”

 

“At least your roommate’s hot,” Jeno sighed. “I saw mine mixing pre-workout into a Celsius and then chug it.”

 

“Jaemin, what’s the statistical probability of Jeno fucking my roommate?” Renjun asked. He stole a sip from Jeno’s monstrosity of a soda.

 

It was a notoriously difficult question to answer; sex was often simple, especially at university, but Jaemin knew Jeno was the type to fall in love after it happened. So it wasn’t really a probability of fucking, but rather a probability of love. Jaemin knew many things, but he didn’t know a single fraction of a thing about love.

 

“Stop ganging up on me!” Jeno lamented, grabbing his coke back. “It doesn’t matter anyways. Dating someone your last year always ends in tears. Or a suicide pact.”

 

Both Renjun and Jeno had been in love with Jaemin at some point. Not on purpose, Jaemin didn’t really do anything in particular, he never knew, they never told him. 

 

They had met as freshmen. Nothing at that time was Casablanca or heart-palpation-inducing or even close to causing feelings of longing. Even still, Jaemin possessed a sort of Aphrodisian beauty—smart, confident, and libidinous. He was lean and sun-kissed and white-toothed, with the kind of frothy hair people dream of lowering their faces into, like whipped cream on top of a pie.

 

All of their reasons were the same, they found out, spilling to each other after eating two edibles each. 

 

Renjun finished the last chicken tender. “Do you guys think Donghyuck hates me now?”

 

“Well, he certainly should,” Jeno responded, brows lifted into high arcs as he sipped on his candy-striped straw.

 

“Do you want him to hate you?” asked Jaemin. He was forking at the slice of rhubarb pie, but they all rotated their selection.

 

“I just really fucking despise rich people,” Renjun announced. “No offense. But I need him to do something fucked up so that I can justify my feelings.”

 

Jaemin had no other thoughts about Donghyuck except that he was the most beautiful boy that he had ever seen. Despite this, he wasn’t that interested in getting to know him, and he also, with pride, wasn’t delusional. Donghyuck barely looked at him. Jaemin, at heart, was an academic. The pursuit of knowledge, to him, was always intensely more interesting than the pursuit of girls and boys and the effort that it would take to date someone. None of it tempted him, necessarily. He had mastered the art of being charming and that got him all that he needed.

 

But Donghyuck was good-looking. Exceptionally so. He had looked at Jaemin with eyes so evil, stinging and venomous, that Jaemin must have begun blushing, and the way his lips pursed into a hard, similarly evil line, set his loins afire. He was angry at him. The mutual attraction wasn’t there. Clearly. 

 

Jaemin didn’t take it personally, however, as Jaemin took almost nothing personally. Perhaps all he felt in that moment was a vague disappointment—but that, like every other negative emotion he felt, faded away into nothing.

 

“I have a stats class this semester,” Jeno was complaining; he hated math. “Will you do my homework, Jaem?”

 

Jaemin said, “Yes. Will you write my essays?”

 

“Alright.”

 

Jaemin didn’t know how this cataclysmic event had happened, but his academic advisor warned him at the beginning of his semester that he was a few classes short of his general electives. He ended up in not one, but three heavily writing-based, Romantic, prose-y courses, something in which he consistently avoided (and was dreading, naturally). Jaemin liked numbers; he found words much too difficult. They unsettled him in a way that formulas didn’t. Mathematical theory was something he struggled with because of this; all of that gray space made him unnaturally obsessive in trying—and often failing,—to avoid the uncertainties.

 

Despite the circumstances, despite his apprehension, Jaemin would write his own essays. His inner chakras wouldn’t feel quite right unless he did. No one else could do his work like he could, and if he was going to do something, then it was going to be perfect. If he gave up on perfection, he wouldn’t know how to live.

 

/

 

The Na’s were a banking family—old blood, with estates sold off like memories and boardwalk cotton-candy. Jaemin’s grandfather once owned a vineyard. His great-grandfather a shipping empire. He was taught to speak Italian before English, to ride before read. French was mandatory. So was cello, fencing, and church. He fainted once during mass and vomited during a performance of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. His mother dabbed at his mouth with silk and called him delicate, like a Fabergé egg or a fevered saint.

 

At age eight, he was told he would inherit everything. 

 

When he came home with a 92 on a history paper, his father stared at him and said, “Is there something wrong with your health?” Jaemin nodded, though there wasn’t. Later that night, he had an intense nosebleed that stained a porcelain sink, knelt on the bathroom floor for ten minutes, then washed his face and trimmed his nails.

 

He was not allowed to be average. His cousins were average. They bred dogs and took pills and said things like it doesn’t really matter. Jaemin mattered. That was the problem. He hated it. He loved it. He indulged in it. 

 

/

 

They were asking each other what the worst drug they had ever done was. They were incredibly inebriated.

 

Jaemin thought for a moment. He loved cocaine but everyone in academia loved cocaine. Some of Jaemin’s best work came from a twelve-hour, deranged cocaine binge. Jaemin didn’t do it often, not at all, but when he did do it, he really did it. It had managed to become both his favorite and least favorite drug.

 

“Probably ketamine,” Jaemin said.

 

Jeno gasped. “Isn’t that horse tranquilizer?”

 

“I remember that!” Renjun yelled. “Wasn’t it after you got an A minus on one of your exams?”

 

Jaemin’s eyebrow twitched and he clenched his jaw. It was one of the worst moments of his life, so he took ket and passed out on the floor of his apartment. He blamed himself a lot; averageness mortified him. He can admit now, stoned and twenty-two years old, that it was an incredibly dramatic reaction. Still, he had no idea how to confront his own inadequacy—he could never look too closely at himself without trembling.

 

“I was wronged,” Jaemin said with a smile. Renjun watched him inhale and felt the urge to take him to bed.

 

/

 

In front of a row of sinks at 6:30 a.m., Donghyuck had closed his eyes and prayed to drop dead.

 

His wish was not granted. Instead, he found himself inside the humanities lyceum within the hour. It was a large, grey-stoned building suffocated by rich, verdant veins of ivy. Old but gorgeously maintained, with rich-brown hardwood floors and walls that faded from oak to intricately elegant white crown molding. Prodigiously arched French windows gave it a rather impressive, sweeping view of the campus. So romantic.

 

As if the gates of hell were welcoming him into manic descent, Jaemin appeared, all bone structure and dramatics, and sat right next to him. He was wearing a tailored navy coat, carried a monogrammed leather folder, and looked like the kind of person who got Botox at twenty-five “for maintenance.” 

 

He had only seen Jaemin once after their initial rendezvous, a treacherous first-impression by textbook definition, and it was while Donghyuck was near the administrative wing, arguing with a staff member who clearly didn’t want to be argued with. 

 

“You want to request a new dorm already?” the woman at the desk was asking, trying to be polite. “You’ve barely even moved in.”

 

“I’ve seen the mattress,” Donghyuck said. “I wouldn’t let a dog sleep on it. It’s—what is it? Horsehair? I have sciatica.”

 

“You’re twenty,” she said.

 

Donghyuck ignored her. “And the lighting is horrible. Yellow undertones? Are you serious?" It was psychological warfare, really. 

 

Jaemin snorted before he could stop himself. He was finishing a croissant, spotted Donghyuck by the back of his head—was that disgusting and obsessive?—and began listening with mild fascination.

 

Donghyuck turned—slowly, as if annoyed by the interruption of air,—and looked at him. His gaze was appraising, dismissive, and horrible. 

 

“You think this is funny?” he said.

 

Jaemin shrugged. His smile was wide. “I think you’re having a bad day.”

 

Donghyuck blinked. “Do I know you?”

 

“Nope.” He tossed the rest of the croissant in the trash and walked away.

 

Now, this. A nightmare. Donghyuck felt a bout of neurosis begin to fog up his brain.

 

If this hadn’t been collegiate exile, if it hadn’t been this, perhaps Donghyuck would flirt with Jaemin, or tease him because he seemed so pathetic, but he was too disgusted by him to want anything other than his absolute silence and disinterest. And, strangely, he was doing just that. He had sat down next to him and completely ignored him. Jaemin said hi to one of the students at the table in front of them, and that was all he spoke. He hadn’t greeted Donghyuck, he seemed to only be waiting for the professor to begin lecturing. 

 

This was mildly enraging. Donghyuck was trying not to stare at this evil force beside him, but his side profile was gorgeous; like a Ralph Lauren model or perhaps he was pulled out of a toothpaste campaign. The professor had the windows open, and whenever a faint, warm breeze would pass through the room, Donghyuck could smell Jaemin’s cologne. It was Hermès—he knew it well. This made Donghyuck confused, he thought that certainly Jaemin was poor. There was no indication that he came from money, but when he glanced at his clothing tags a smidge closer, he realized that he was wrong. Jaemin was wearing black-suede Brunello Cucinelli penny loafers, and suddenly Donghyuck looked at him much differently than he had thirty seconds ago. Damn it all. 

 

“Good morning, friends,” said the professor in a soft voice, which hushed all of the students. She wrote her name on the blackboard, and Jaemin cringed. He detested the sound of chalk; blackboards, he thought, were archaic and messy and stupid. 

 

“Do you believe that romanticism has a gender?” she asked all of the students, regarding them with patience but determination.

 

Nobody spoke at first—out of nervousness or confusion, no one could say for certain. One student raised their hand, a pretty-looking girl with puffy cheeks. The professor nodded at her.

 

“I think that Romanticism transcends gender,” the girl said, “but of course biases may be present.”

 

“What’s your name?” the professor asked, sitting on the front desk.

 

“Rose.”

 

“Rose said something interesting in her answer.” The professor took a sip from her mug. “Biases may be present in Romanticism. Here’s another question: why do you think that is?”

 

Again, her question was met with silence. No one at St-Agnès liked being wrong; they’d rather be silent than sound stupid and embarrass themselves.

 

“How about you,” the professor called. “Blue shirt. What’s your name?”

 

Jaemin did not blanch. His teeth looked like they’d been carved from sugar glass.

 

“Jaemin,” he answered.

 

“Alright, Jaemin. Why do you think there might be gender bias within Romanticism?”

 

Donghyuck sat quietly, hoping that he was about to humiliate himself. “Well,” Jaemin faltered, “perhaps all of our constructions of Romanticism have been historically, and I’d argue almost exclusively, built upon the work of men.”

 

“So, you’re saying that Romanticism is unequally weighted under the thoughts and writings of men?”

 

“Historically,” Jaemin replied.

 

“I’m inclined to agree with Jaemin,” said the professor. “Most of our constructions that we have of Romanticism were based around six male poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats.”

 

She placed her mug down.

 

“I want you all to give me names of some of the most influential or widely read females in our literary production. You can shout them out, I don’t mind. Although I ask you to keep them centered around Romanticism.”

 

They did as told, launching into female authors and their impacts, and Jaemin got all four Mary’s. The professor was delighted with this, making a mental note aloud to “pick on Jaemin more”, and this had him blushing and glowing at the cheekiness of it all. Donghyuck was going to projectile vomit. 

 

Something told Donghyuck that Jaemin loved to please. Perhaps he would extend his kindness to everyone but him. And that wasn’t real kindness, Donghyuck thought. Jaemin isn’t a nice boy. Which made him suddenly, maddeningly, more interesting.

 

“Now, let me be clear, this isn’t a lecture-based class. Romanticism’s literary corpus is meant to be shared and spread throughout everything; you’ll be asked to bring a creative mind to each class. This is an upper-level course with a rather intense writing concentration. There will be equal parts group and solitary work. Throughout the semester, we’re going to reveal and tackle thematic concerns, formal practices, and ideological positionings of both male and female Romantic writers.” She paused and glanced down at her watch. “It’s a quarter past, look next to you and that’ll be your partner for this semester. I want you both, together, to go find a spot on campus and take the time to look over the syllabus. I’ll see you all on Wednesday.”

 

Donghyuck stared at his notebook like it was insulting him.

 

Then he glanced at the girl to the left of him, hoping that she would be his partner instead of Jaemin.

 

“Donghyuck,” he heard a voice next to him say.

 

Donghyuck turned towards Jaemin, and he found that he was being looked at expectantly.

 

“You’re mine,” he said.

 

Donghyuck’s eyes widened at him. “What?” he asked, shocked by his audacity.

 

“You’re my partner,” he told him, standing. Donghyuck glimpsed around the room, and he was the only one that had remained in his seat.

 

/

 

Out of the classroom and into the spirals of campus lawns, Jaemin bought a toasted bagel with butter and Donghyuck’s stomach grumbled loudly. It smelled like New York. As they sat at a table in a shadowy corner, Jaemin asked him if he wanted half of it. 

 

“No,” Donghyuck told him firmly, pulling out his copy of the course overview. “Are you going to get your syllabus?”

 

“For what?” Jaemin asked, taking a bite.

 

“So that we can read it together?”

 

He looked mildly confused by Donghyuck. “Yours is right there.” Jaemin took his hand and slid Donghyuck’s syllabus between them. His cuticles were perfectly pressed and oiled, and his nails looked to be manicured by God. Donghyuck wanted to take a sharp knife and cut his hand off so that he could never touch any of his belongings ever again.

 

“Your hand is gross,” Donghyuck murmured.

 

“What?” Jaemin asked.

 

“Nothing.”

 

“Did you say my hand is gross?” He tried not to smile, though he couldn’t help it. Jaemin found many things amusing. “How is it gross?”

 

“And you stuttered in class today,” Donghyuck continued, evading explanation. He didn’t need to justify all the reasons he was beginning to whip up into cream from thin air, all the ones that made it morally correct to hate Jaemin. “You didn’t know what you were talking about.”

 

“Okay,” Jaemin said with a grin. He was patient. “How is that worse than being silent?”

 

“I didn’t feel like talking.”

 

“Or you just didn’t know anything. That’s okay, too.”

 

Donghyuck’s temper flared. He imagined himself standing up and leaving Jaemin at the table, alone and useless, but he felt glued to his seat.

 

“Are you done?” Jaemin pressed, smooth and syrupy, sounding like a father after their child had just lashed out.

 

“I don’t care if you’re friends with Renjun. I don’t want you in our room again,” Donghyuck said finally, just to put a verdict on something.

 

Jaemin looked down and kept eating. “Okay.”

 

/

 

The Bellamy Courtyard Pool wasn’t technically a pool. Not in the traditional, chlorine-scented, whistle-blowing sense. It was rectangular, shallow, almost still—a mirror of blue set between brick walls and citrus trees. Students called it The Bath. Professors pretended it didn’t exist.

 

On warm afternoons, when classes tapered off and the sun hadn’t yet soured, people wandered there like strays, draping themselves across chairs, textbooks open but unread. It wasn’t a place to swim. It was a place to perform idleness beautifully. 

 

As it turned out, even the most precarious of relationships could find common ground in this activity.

 

Renjun sat on the pool’s slick edge with his legs in the water, watching his roommate swim around and around, diving occasionally beneath the surface and staying there for a moment too long. It seemed, to Renjun, that Donghyuck was trying to baptize himself, purify himself, and violently. 

 

The sun was setting above them, yellow and orange, still baking hot upon the stones. Renjun closed his eyes. He thought of beautiful things. He wanted his skin to be sun-warmed, to eat mountains of bread and olive oil, to roll apricot pits around his mouth. 

 

Feeling something grab his foot, Renjun immediately opened his eyes. 

 

Donghyuck burst up, wiping water from his face. “You have the cutest little toes.” 

 

“Thank you,” Renjun said, kicking an aggressive slew of water in Donghyuck’s face. “You're being sweet.” 

 

Donghyuck blinked and coughed and coughed, droplets trembling from the tips of his eyelashes. He was half-drowned.  “I’m sweet.” 

 

Footsteps sounded on the cement, and Jaemin glided forth wearing long white shorts and a threadbare t-shirt. The angel of death with broad shoulders. 

 

Both glanced up as Jaemin neared them, who looked surprised to see Donghyuck, then chagrined, then took a seat next to Renjun. Donghyuck immediately soured; fruit left too long in the sun. 

 

“Hey,” Jaemin said. 

 

Donghyuck ignored this. “What are you drinking?” 

 

“Oh,” Jaemin glanced at the can in his hand. “Just a cherry coke.” 

 

Renjun watched Donghyuck’s eye twitch. Donghyuck hummed before saying, “Those are my favorite.” Then he swam to the steps, and promptly left the pool. 

 

Jaemin smiled. “Did I do something?” 

 

Renjun shook his head. “No—he has a difficult time sharing.” 

 

“Those are his cokes?” He had found them in the common area refrigerator.

 

Renjun nodded. 

 

“Damn.” 

 

“No, it’s okay,” Renjun assured. “It doesn't matter. He has a mental derangement.” 

 

“I’ve never had cherry before,” Jaemin mused, thumbing the rim. “It's very American.” 

 

/

 

Donghyuck was raging, his wet feet slapping over the dorm’s bedroom floor, in search of his phone and the ability to breathe at a stable rhythm. He paced the length of the room, his damp swim shorts growing cold over his skin. As he walked, he grew more irritated with the circumstances of his life—everything was always wrong, all the time. There was never a conclusion to his flusters and torments. 

 

At last, he located his phone and expeditiously dialed his mother’s number. It sounded like she was outside, likely sipping an orange cocktail on her bedroom’s balcony.

 

“I’m so upset,” Donghyuck complained. “I feel unhappy.” 

 

His mother cleared her throat. “What happened?” 

 

“My roommate’s dunce of a friend stole one of my cherry cokes,” he informed. “I smuggled those. I don’t like that stupid boy at all.” 

 

“He probably didn't know,” his mother replied. “Just keep them in your room.” 

 

“My room is hot,” Donghyuck said, petulant. “Everything is wrong.” 

 

His mother clicked her tongue, then softened her tone in that way mother’s did, cooing and coddling. “Should we go somewhere during your winter break? Just me and you?” 

 

Donghyuck leaned into the warmth of her voice. “I want to go back to New York.”

 

“Absolutely not,” was the response. “Your father would have a heart attack and your sister would do something extreme—I’m sick of it. All of you make me feel inadequate.” 

 

/

 

Numerical analysis was being taught by a professor Jaemin had before—Doctor Kim. A well-dressed, relatively youthful gentleman who gave him his first ever A minus. Jaemin figured that he had formed a sort of trauma bond to this man, and continued taking his classes every semester. Or, perhaps it was a degradation kink, but Jaemin tried not to think about that.

 

“Jaemin,” Kim called, “come here, would you.”

 

“Yes?”

 

“I need an assistant this semester.” The professor pushed his glasses up atop his nose, dark swoops of hair falling over his eyes. “I hate this fucking class.”

 

“Okay,” Jaemin said. “Why?”

 

“Two lectures—Monday and Wednesday—and one required, two hour-long lab on Friday,” Kim huffed. “The heaviest material concentration of linear algebra and computation you’ve ever seen. I’ll bet you anything that I’ll have three students remaining after the semester. I mean, it’s just brutal.”

 

Jaemin’s face heated—not from embarrassment, but anticipation. The class, to him, sounded absolutely fucking perfect. He blinked at his professor. They’d come a long way. “You want me to be your assistant?”

 

“Didn’t I just say that?” The man picked up his mug and headed towards the door. “Now go sit down. Give me your answer in a week.”

 

Jaemin took a seat towards the back of the class and read over the course description. Heaven.

 

/

 

Donghyuck had just undergone a traumatic experience in the shower a few moments ago, something about hair-clogged drains and inadequate heating, and now sat on his bed wrapped in a large, fluffy towel. He was going to jump out the window. He was going to cry.

 

Suddenly, in a heart-stopping moment, the world tilted on its axis, and Donghyuck began to yell. There was a humongous spider on the floor. It was bigger than his hand, and probably carried a deathly venom from twenty countries over. The sporadic shouting continued until there was a knock on the door; and Donghyuck hoped that it was someone, some angel, coming to eviscerate the spider for him. He held his towel to his waist and opened the room up.

 

Jaemin’s eyes rested on Donghyuck’s face, then followed a drop of water that was running between his chest.

 

“Why are you here?” Donghyuck seethed, fighting a herculean feat to not smack the door back into its frame and give Jaemin internal bleeding by concussive force.

 

“I left some things I need,” Jaemin said, slightly annoyed, but still polite.

 

“I told you that I didn’t want you in this room.”

 

“I left my textbooks,” Jaemin told him, calmly.

 

“Fine.” Donghyuck stepped to the side.

 

“I can kill that spider,” Jaemin offered. 

 

Donghyuck’s face went incredibly hot. He felt overstimulated. “Just grab your shit and leave. Stop trying to be nice to me, it’s fucking annoying.”

 

Jaemin picked up his books and looked at Donghyuck so meanly that he almost flinched.

 

“I wasn’t being nice,” he said, walking towards the door. “I offered to kill the spider you’re clearly about to slit your wrists over, but now I’m not. Have fun with it.”

 

That snapped him out of it. “Wait,” Donghyuck whimpered, staring at the large, furry thing crawling towards his bed and feeling as if death were impending upon the room rapidly. “Jaemin.”

 

Jaemin glanced at him for a moment and then left, closing the door behind him.

 

/

 

The unexpected coldness that had just chilled Jaemin’s soul was close to ruining him. Not completely, but at least for the rest of the afternoon. The day he never had to see Donghyuck again would be a good day indeed. Perhaps the best day. Jaemin wasn’t the sort to let himself be degraded, or perhaps he was exactly that sort. Was he truly that tragic? Losing his temper after a minor inconvenience, storming off from a boy, attempting a ketamine overdose because of a minutely bad grade that hadn’t actually affected his GPA all that much.

 

Jaemin had been pathetic all along, he was only now coming to understand just how terribly so.

 

On Tuesday and Thursday nights, Jaemin had an hour and a half long philosophy class in the basement of the library. The air would be so stiff in the small, dank room that sometimes Jaemin’s nose would start bleeding. Even his body, the internal organs and what have you, were paltry and inadequate. He prayed for peace of mind and serenity from that demon with shaggy hair.

 

/

 

Being humiliated is a good excuse to treat yourself to something sweet. Donghyuck didn’t mind humiliation, in fact it was one of the few things that really made his blood run hot. He wanted to rip all of his limbs off, let the heat gush out, then sew himself back up tight so that nobody could get inside of him. Donghyuck knew, or at least hoped, in a perverted sort of sense, that Jaemin had to be similar to him in this way.

 

Pastry box in tow, Donghyuck paused when he opened the door to the dormitory; the spider-cup was gone. He had grabbed one haphazardly after Jaemin stranded him like a torture operative, trapped the spider in it, and now both were missing from his line of sight. Renjun was reading in bed and chewing gum when he looked up to glance at Donghyuck.

 

“What’s wrong?” Renjun asked, his hand hovering over the page he was about to flip over.

 

Donghyuck’s palms went sweaty. “Where is it?”

 

“Where is what?”

 

“The spider.”

 

“Oh.” Renjun popped the gum. It was a minty blue. “Jaemin killed it. Thanks for using my cup, by the way. I wasn’t planning on drinking out of it or anything.”

 

“Jaemin was in here?” Donghyuck squeezed the plastic of the bag encasing his eclair.

 

“Yeah. For, like, five seconds,” Renjun confirmed. “He just killed the spider and left. He’s very chivalrous in that way.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Renjun smiled at him like one might smile at a clueless child, and then returned to his book.

 

/

 

It began, as these things often did with Jaemin, at the precise moment attention started to drift away from him.

 

The professor was mid-sentence—something dull about deontology, an unsexy morality Donghyuck could explain backwards in his sleep—when Jaemin tilted his chin slightly, as if to catch the light.

 

And then: a bloom of red.

 

A single drop—ripe, ruinous—slipped from his nostril and landed squarely on the cuff of his silk shirt. Jaemin pressed two fingers, elegantly, to his nose.

 

“Oh,” he said. “God.”

 

He wasn’t embarrassed. Jaemin never embarrassed. He stood slowly, as if in a trance, and reached for the pale linen handkerchief always folded in the breast pocket of his blazer. Blood smeared like lipstick across his knuckles.

 

“I think I need a moment,” he murmured, voice thick with something soft and old and strangely intimate. The professor paused, mouth open, words stalled on the tongue like an apology.

 

A girl in the front row made a strangled sound. Someone whispered, “Is he okay?”

 

Jaemin smiled faintly, the way dying pietists did in oil paintings.

 

Donghyuck, slouched to the side of him, watched with befuddled disgust. He felt that Jaemin must have been doing this on purpose. Bleeding and opening himself up to everyone. It was quite whorish. Not literally—though maybe that too,—but in some larger, metaphorical way. 

 

Jaemin left the room slowly, handkerchief pressed to his face like a veil, as if he might collapse into someone’s arms at any moment. And he would have. Anyone would’ve caught him. Even the professor’s voice was gentler when class resumed. A full minute passed before Donghyuck looked down again, realizing he’d written Jaemin’s name absently in the corner of his notebook. Just once, small, in cursive. He shut it without reading it twice.

 

/

 

Moral Collapse in Enlightenment Thinkers.

 

This had been their assigned topic for a first, collaborative essay project. Jaemin insisted on meeting every other evening in the reading room—an old space that smelled of cloth binding and dried lavender, almost too dim to read by. He came armed with a printed draft, color-coded pens, and a tupperware container of pomegranate seeds. Donghyuck showed up empty-handed, wearing a hoodie that might’ve once cost $600, but now had paint on the cuffs.

 

He had no idea what their topic meant. Jaemin was probably going to kill himself for having him as a partner, Donghyuck thought. He was smart and clever and witty but Jaemin was something entirely different.

 

“You’ve only written two paragraphs,” Jaemin said, scanning the paper in front of him, then cross-referencing with the screen of his laptop and their shared Word doc. “What have you been doing all week?”

 

“Thinking,” Donghyuck said, stretching like a piece of taffy. “You should try it sometime.”

 

Jaemin ignored him and began slicing his edits through the air with a pink papermate. “You misused ‘imperative.' And this entire digression about Rousseau’s mother complex is—what, performance art?”

 

“It’s called insight,” Donghyuck said.

 

/

 

The light in the hallway turned orange by 4 p.m. It was a kind of clementine-shade that made everything look overripe. Sunlit dust hung in the air like glitter from a party someone had left too early.

 

Jaemin sat with one leg tucked under him in the farthest alcove of the room, surrounded by books with titles like Rational Dissent in the Age of Decay and Morality After Coffee. His laptop was open but untouched. Donghyuck was across from him, chair pushed back, long legs sprawled as if boredom were a posture competition he was determined to win.

 

They had been “working” for nearly an hour, which in this case meant Jaemin typing and deleting the same sentence seven times and Donghyuck contributing exactly one sigh, three snarky comments, and a single line of brilliant, unhelpful copy.

 

“Are you trying to get us expelled?” Jaemin asked, rereading it for the third time.

 

“I’m trying to make this project less of a funeral.”

 

“You could at least pretend to be invested.”

 

“I’m relaxed.” Donghyuck flipped a pen through his fingers, eyes half-lidded. “You, on the other hand, are having a meltdown over a paragraph.”

 

Jaemin clicked his tongue and leaned forward. “That’s because the paragraph is bad. It’s not meaningful. It’s just a clot of words pretending to be elegant.”

 

“Like you,” Donghyuck murmured.

 

Jaemin paused. Then gave a slow, horrible grin. “You think I’m elegant?”

 

“I think you’re unwell.”

 

Jaemin tilted his head. “But pretty?”

 

Donghyuck didn’t answer, just reached for his water bottle like it could cool the air between them. It didn’t. The silence settled again—thick, suspicious. Jaemin tapped his nails against the side of the laptop. Donghyuck cracked his neck. Somewhere in the distance, a girl sneezed violently. They both ignored her.

 

Outside the tall windows, the sky had gone a creamy shade of coral. Students crossed the quad in slow motion, holding books and secrets. The shadows in the alcove stretched longer, deeper.

 

Jaemin stood abruptly, his chair scraping slightly. “I’m getting coffee. Do you want anything?”

 

“No.”

 

/

 

After a thirty-minute lecture covering extended class expectations, the professor dismissed students early to gather in their respective pairs and work on their projects.

 

Jaemin left the room before Donghyuck, fetched himself a snack from the nearby vending cart, and didn’t ask Donghyuck if he wanted anything this time. Donghyuck smiled to himself perniciously because he was going to mess with him.

 

At the table, Jaemin ate his vegetable wrap in silence. He didn’t offer any bite to Donghyuck, and in fact, he didn’t speak to him at all.

 

“I wanted something,” Donghyuck said quietly. Jaemin peered upwards with a confused look.

 

“What?”

 

“The snack cart,” Donghyuck told him. “You usually ask me if I want anything. You didn’t today.”

 

Jaemin’s cheeks went pink. He was very much like a kindergarten teacher in that he was always offering Donghyuck snacks and generating things for him to eat, napkins to dab, water to sip. 

 

“You’re right,” Jaemin said, ashamed. “I’m sorry. What do you want?”

 

Donghyuck smiled; he was so easy and predictable. “It’s okay. Never mind.”

 

“What do you want, Donghyuck?”

 

“The fruit cup,” he said, sighing laboriously. Donghyuck wasn’t going to eat the fruit cup. His main goal was to confuse Jaemin, neurologically and emotionally. He also liked telling him what to do.

 

Jaemin got up and walked himself back over to the snack cart, pulling his wallet out of his pocket, and bought Donghyuck’s fruit.

 

“Here,” Jaemin said, handing it to Donghyuck.

 

Donghyuck didn’t thank him, put the fruit cup in his bag with dead-fish eyes and a blank expression.

 

Jaemin didn’t say anything else, but he did smile. Jaemin smiles and smiles. His smile is the scariest thing about him. Donghyuck remembers when he first saw that grin, that sharp pull of gums and lips, and his mouth was so crowded with teeth it looked like he had two sets growing in at once. Total predator. 

 

/

 

Donghyuck sat on the windowsill, eating an overripe pear with the sort of casual aggression that made Jaemin want to throw him out the window.

 

“I don’t understand why you invited me here if you’re not going to work,” Donghyuck announced. “You’ve opened the same document eight times.”

 

“I didn’t invite you,” Jaemin said. “You followed me.”

 

Donghyuck shrugged and took another bite. The juice ran down his wrist. They had been assigned to finish the second section of their joint paper—something about relativism,—but the last twenty minutes had devolved into Jaemin pacing with a pencil behind his ear and Donghyuck finding new ways to look uninterested.

 

Jaemin opened his laptop again, almost resentfully. “Can you do something useful if I beg? Oh, God, please. Please, please—”

 

Donghyuck stood and walked over. He leaned over Jaemin’s shoulder to look at the screen, close enough for his breath to touch the skin of his neck. Cinnamon mint toothpaste.

 

“I think you missed a comma,” Donghyuck said.

 

/

 

The campus library was quite the fantasy. Baroque ceilings, iron spiral staircases, velvet reading nooks. Strict silence policy. ​​

 

It started with a chair.

 

More specifically, the third chair from the left on the top floor of the Séraphine Reading Room—the only one with a view of the cypress trees, and a functioning lamp, and just enough privacy to fall asleep in public without shame. 

 

This reading room was, by architectural design and intention, a place for restraint. Palladian windows. Mahogany paneling. Gold-foiled names etched into wooden plaques above the fireplace: Cicero, Locke, Euripides. You weren’t supposed to breathe too hard in there, let alone slouch. The furniture creaked like old women disapproving of your posture. Donghyuck sat curled in the aforementioned third chair from the left, sockless in loafers, ankles crossed, a hood shadowing his face like a monk in disgrace. He was reading a book that wasn’t his, in a hand that wasn’t his dominant, underlining lines with the end of a matchstick because he’d misplaced his pen. A grape rested on the open page. Its skin glinted like something sacred.

 

He popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly.

 

He wasn’t supposed to eat in the library. He did it anyway.

 

Somewhere across the room, a boy coughed delicately. Dust spiraled in a shaft of light like faint snowfall. The radiator exhaled. There were other rules, of course. No sleeping. No marking up the books. No sex in the stacks. But Donghyuck had always believed—sincerely, not performatively—that rules were for people who lacked charm. 

 

So he sat in that chair, put in headphones, and continued eating his grapes slowly, methodically, while performing marginalia. Then he fell asleep for forty-three minutes.

 

When he woke up, the grapes were gone and two librarians were standing in front of him with expressions that suggested a minor war-crime had occurred. One was holding the empty bag between thumb and forefinger like it was toxic.

 

“Mister Lee,” the voice was soft, clipped, female, and familiar. One of the assistant librarians with a name like Celeste or Margot or something worse.

 

Donghyuck blinked. “Hi.”

 

“You’ve been warned about food.”

 

“I thought fruit was—”

 

“It’s not.”

 

“Okay. Sorry.”

 

“And sleeping.”

 

“Technically, I was meditating.”

 

“Mister Lee.”

 

Donghyuck sighed and stood, brushing nonexistent crumbs from his hoodie.

 

“I’ll leave.”

 

“No. You’ll not come back. Two weeks. Suspension of access.”

 

He blinked again, slower. “You’re banning me from the library.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“For grapes.”

 

“For a pattern of behavior.”

 

Donghyuck turned to the younger librarian. “Would you describe me as threatening?”

 

“You’ve defaced The Passions of the Soul.”

 

He shook his head without conviction. “I don’t think so.”

 

“There’s ink in the margins.”

 

“Are you sure it’s mine?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Donghyuck leaned back again and nodded faintly. “Okay.”

 

“You won’t be able to reenter until your suspension lifts.”

 

He looked at her fully now, eyes clear and gold and bored. Sighed. “Do I need to sign something?”

 

“No.”

 

“Can I finish this chapter?”

 

“No.”

 

Donghyuck paused. “That’s fair.”

 

He left, shoelaces half-undone, Descartes still under his arm.

 

/

 

The library ban had quickly begun to take on the flavor of exile. 

 

For the first few days, Donghyuck told himself he was thriving. He read in stairwells, took notes on his phone in the back corners of lecture halls, and wrote one decent paragraph of their joint thesis from a bench outside the philosophy department, where the pigeons were unusually aggressive. But by day four, it became apparent: he needed a desk. And silence. And maybe a plug for his charger that didn’t spark on contact.

 

They had an advisory meeting with their professor in six days. Their working document had sixteen bullet points and no structure. Donghyuck was beginning to twitch.

 

Jaemin, naturally, had made no comment on the situation. He still floated through classes with his silky hair and late-season sunglasses, scribbling abstract thoughts in the margins of his own book and quoting moral relativists as if he’d invented them. Their last conversation had ended with Donghyuck telling him, flatly, that he would rather swallow thumbtacks than brainstorm with him in the dining hall again.

 

The next morning, Jaemin sent him a text.

 

you can come to mine if you want

i cleaned

i have sparkling water and air

i’ll be good

 

Donghyuck stared at the message for twenty-three minutes. He did not respond.

 

Later that afternoon, after a humiliating attempt to work in the student lounge (someone’s phone kept vibrating against a metal table; it sounded like surgery), Donghyuck packed his bag with performative anger and walked the long way through campus to Bellamy East.

 

The air outside was damp and honey-colored. A pre-rain warmth that made everything smell faintly of crushed stone and weeds. As he reached Jaemin’s building—a stately, vine-covered thing with a brass doorbell and an overgrown hedge of white roses,—he felt a flicker of something too soft to name. Dread, maybe. Or curiosity.

 

The stairwell was tiled. Cool and blue and echoing. Each footstep sounded deliberate. Jaemin opened the door before Donghyuck could knock.

 

“You’re early,” he said, barefoot, hair damp, holding a mug that appeared to be full of warm milk and nutmeg.

 

“I’m not staying long.”

 

Donghyuck stepped past him without flair, past the threshold and into the strange cathedral of Jaemin’s life: plush cushions, unread books, flowers on the sill, a white ashtray with one pink cigarette balanced inside it like a sculpture. There were high ceilings, decorative moldings, a small balcony with wrought-iron railings. The air smelled faintly of amber and lemon balm. Donghyuck felt, absurdly, like a thief.

 

“I only have one chair,” Jaemin said. “But I can sit on the floor and look pathetic.”

 

“You already do.”

 

“Wonderful,” Jaemin replied. “Let’s work.”

 

He dropped his mug on the living-room table and flopped across the carpet, opening his laptop as if this had been their ritual for years. Donghyuck stood awkwardly for a moment before sinking into the corner of the couch, pulling his hoodie sleeves down over his wrists, looking everywhere but at Jaemin’s languid way of sitting in his own space.

 

Eventually, Donghyuck resumed their document and typed a line on the loss of virtue. Jaemin added something about fatalism and gold leaf.

 

After a few moments of solitary keyboard clacking filling the space,  Donghyuck muttered something about Jaemin’s apartment looking like a museum for mental illness. 

 

Jaemin grinned. “I knew you’d love it.”

 

Two tired boys in expensive clothes, lying in an apartment funded by someone else’s money, pretending their lives were harder than they were.

 

/

 

A plum with a side of meloncholia. Jaemin was skulking. 

 

“What’s wrong?” Donghyuck asked, unable to handle much more of the despair pouring out of him.

 

“I sounded stupid,” he said, taking a bite of the fruit, little bursts of crimson-purple. Their lecture had just rung out for the day.

 

“What?” Donghyuck asked, almost a little too enthused. Had he missed the chance to gloat? “When?”

 

Jaemin looked up at him like he was now the stupid one, irrevocably so, and then looked back down. “Five minutes ago,” he answered. “In class.”

 

“What do you mean you ‘sounded stupid’?”

 

“I could’ve answered that one question better,” he said, destroyed. “It was rushed and distracted. It was sloppy and mediocre.”

 

Donghyuck couldn’t believe what he was saying. Was this his sorry attempt to gain pity? The tone of his voice made it seem as though he genuinely believed he were moronic. It was deeply confusing to Donghyuck. He was ricocheting between pride and humiliation.

 

“You didn’t sound stupid,” assured Donghyuck, speaking slowly, as if to a hard of hearing elder. “You actually sounded very smart. Annoyingly smart. The professor’s nipples got hard.”

 

Jaemin laughed suddenly. It was a bright, brassy sound, like bells ringing and clanking together in metal-gold sparks.

 

“I’m not joking!” Donghyuck stressed. Hands up, lip twitch. “I saw them.”

 

“You’re funny,” Jaemin said, smiling to himself.

 

“You really looked like you were about to cry,” Donghyuck pointed out in continuum, prodding. He wasn’t sure if it was to be mean. 

 

“So did you.” Donghyuck watched Jaemin’s Adam’s apple bob each time he swallowed. He made eating seem beautiful even though it was disgusting, because it was him, and Jaemin made normal human movement seem disturbing and uncannily poetic.

 

Donghyuck didn’t know what he was referencing. “When?”

 

“The drink meeting your shirt.” Before class, someone had collided into Donghyuck and spilled their earl grey into his Thom Browne. It stained horrifically and Donghyuck threatened to have the person eliminated.

 

“Oh. Well, that was horrible. It’s ruined now.”

 

Suddenly, without noticing it themselves, they had managed to make each other smile. When Jaemin looked up, Donghyuck dropped his lips back down into a frown, which made him grin even wider.

 

“Minor hysterics, Donghyuck,” Jaemin sighed, finding both of them to be incredibly dramatic people. “Do you want the rest of my pomegranate seeds?”

 

“You’re so fucking annoying,” Donghyuck said under his breath, offended by the gesture.

 

Jaemin’s jaw twitched; he’d heard.

 

/

 

They were supposed to be writing the introduction.

 

Instead, Jaemin was in a bathrobe, eating cherries from a glass bowl and pointing out Donghyuck’s split infinitives while Donghyuck contemplated holding his breath and trying to die.

 

The air was close. Warm. Smelled faintly of Jaemin’s moisturizer—something heavy and green and herbaceous, like pressed basil and candle wax.

 

“I have to go,” Donghyuck said, too loudly, standing up too fast.

 

Jaemin blinked, mid-chew. “Now?”

 

“It’s late.”

 

“So?”

 

“I have things to do.”

 

Jaemin stood, slowly. The robe fell slightly open at the collar. He didn’t move to fix it. 

 

“You’re panicking.”

 

“I’m not.”

 

Jaemin tilted his head, watching him with lazy amusement. “I’ll show you out,” he said.

 

“I don’t need—”

 

But Jaemin was already holding the door. Donghyuck stepped past him, into the stairwell, down the narrow stone steps that smelled like mildew and expensive hand soap. He felt strangely aware of the sound of his own shoes. They echoed too much.

 

Halfway to the exit, Jaemin called down the stairs.

 

“You’ll come back tomorrow.”

 

Donghyuck threw him a dirty look. “You think I’m predictable?”

 

“I think you like my apartment.”

 

Donghyuck opened the door to the courtyard. The air outside smelled of wet trees and rosemary. As he crossed the gravel, he looked up—once—at the light in Jaemin’s window. He really did like his tea selection. Darjeeling and peppermint and even American cherry.

 

/

 

Jaemin knocked on Renjun’s door five times and got so lazy from standing that he rested his head on it as he waited. His body slouched. He needed someone to buy limes with. He had also had a deplorable dream where they had fought and needed to make sure it wasn’t real, because he was paranoidal. When the door opened, Jaemin jerked back and realized the mistake he made.

 

“Shit,” he said softly, looking at Donghyuck, who happened to be wearing a large sweatshirt with perhaps invisible shorts, hair rumpled and mouth glossy from sleep or too much lip balm. He had long legs. 

 

“My fault. I forgot that you live here.”

 

He made an immediate, cowardly turn to leave. 

 

Jaemin had just started walking away from the door when Donghyuck called his name, voice slow and pleased.

 

“What are you doing?” Donghyuck asked with a lazy smile, leaning against the door frame.

 

“I’m sorry for waking you up,” Jaemin apologized, a delirious sort of feeling beginning to tiptoe up his spine. Donghyuck was stroking the hem of his hoodie the way a cat kneads a cushion.

 

“Did you come to see me?” Donghyuck asked with an amatory voice, looking at Jaemin like he wanted to eat him. Jaemin wanted to eat him, too. This cat-and-mouse match—it was demoralizing. 

 

“No.” Jaemin said, chirpy and bright and a little controlling. He continued, already walking, liquid spilling. “Love the lack of pants. Very Grecian. Bye.”

 

/

 

Renjun hummed. “A little obsession never hurt anyone, Jaemin. You should know that.”

 

Jaemin considered this. What would he be if not obsessive? Probably dead.

 

He felt himself spiraling. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Jaemin was being noticed by something above him. Was it God? Was it cocaine? Was it God doing cocaine? He thought about all of these possibilities, felt sick and beautiful. 

 

/

 

Jaemin found it imperative not to look at Donghyuck at all during class, as he’d embarrassed himself so monumentally the other night that he didn’t feel worthy of gazing at him. He was being rude, but it was a necessary evil.

 

Donghyuck wasn’t taking it too well, being ignored.

 

Back at his apartment, Jeno and Renjun were organizing a late lunch rendezvous. Donghyuck was also there because he had claimed to have left behind his laptop charger, proceeded to linger, and had not said a single word to Jaemin for the past half hour. “Ask Donghyuck what he wants,” Renjun said to Jaemin, looking down at a paper menu he pulled from his bag. “This place looks good. It’s ‘make your own waffles.'”

 

Jaemin looked over at the balcony, Donghyuck seemed to be staring down at a book, legs contorted like pretzel dough. He sighed and started to walk outwards.

 

“Donghyuck,” Jaemin said, strolling to his side.

 

Donghyuck closed his book with a degenerate sort of force and glanced up at him. “What?”

 

“We’re ordering waffles,” he said, standing straighter and keeping an appropriate distance, as if the boy before him were a feral animal, “do you want anything?”

 

“I’m not hungry,” Donghyuck responded. “I want a coke.”

 

Jaemin ran a rake of fingers through his hair. It was silky and perfect and bourgeoise brunette, just like all the other parts of himself. “Okay.”

 

“Why would I want a fucking waffle?” Donghyuck snapped suddenly. “Obviously I wouldn’t want one. Why would you even ask me?”

 

Jaemin looked over his balcony and considered jumping off.

 

“Are you serious?” Jaemin asked in angry, calm disbelief. “It’s polite to ask when you’re ordering—actually, nevermind. I’m not explaining this to a child.”

 

“Jaemin!” Donghyuck gasped, amused, feigning insult. “You’re not being nice.”

 

“I don’t feel like being nice to you,” Jaemin said. Simple. Flippant. Tap water. “I have a headache.”

 

“I can make you feel better,” Donghyuck persisted in his ways, the wickedness, his face flushed from the outdoor sun and perhaps silent desire.

 

“How?”

 

“I can be sweeter than that nasty waffle you’re about to eat,” he breathed pruriently, offering himself up to be tasted, whilst simultaneously twisting the knife in Jaemin’s ego and general stamina for living. 

 

Jaemin laughed, a cruel, exhausted bark of a sound. Ha! “When are you sweet?”

 

“Sweet for you,” Donghyuck whispered. 

 

Jaemin knew, quite suddenly, that they were going to have sex, even if only to carry on a bit and be contemptible to one another. Not at this moment. But in a moment. It was a strange game they were playing—old as time. 

 

Jaemin also knew that when they had so-and-so sex, the game would be over. 

 

It wasn’t that Jaemin lost interest after he fucked someone, he simply didn’t know where things could go apart from more fucking. He was not going to provide a real relationship or romance. Perhaps if Jaemin and Donghyuck fucked, he would fall in love, though that wasn’t something he was interested in either. Maybe if they were in their thirties it would’ve been fine; less daunting, less exhausting, less dramatic. 

 

They were both aware that Renjun and Jeno were watching them from inside, and likely had heard everything that transpired.

 

“I should go back to the dorm,” Donghyuck declared.

 

“You don’t have to.”

 

“I want to,” he responded, quick and snapping. “I’m done being around you.”

 

Jaemin’s jaw clenched, some vein throbbing against his temple. 

 

“Fine,” he quipped, and promptly left the balcony.

 

Grabbing a Fiji from the fridge, Renjun and Jeno followed him into the kitchen like lemmings addicted to the poison of gossip.

 

“I ordered the waffles,” Renjun supplied. “And a cherry coke.”

 

“Fuck the cherry coke,” Jaemin murmured, opening his overpriced water bottle.

 

“Huh?”

 

Jaemin was becoming undone. He hated this boy. He also hadn’t had a crush since he was sixteen. All he felt now was detestation and mild self-loathing. If he were any more agonized he’d start writing poetry.

 

/

 

By the time evening rolled around, Jaemin was restored to his normal disposition. He stood off to the side eating a strawberry jam Uncrustable, half-frozen and soggy, as a group of friends and miscellaneous upperclassmen gathered around a bonfire near the lake. After this afternoon’s Donghyuck-induced migraine, he was markedly delicate and malleable, like he’d been tenderized by a large, impressive hammer. He decided to isolate for a moment before returning to the party, lest some force of evil possessed him during such a vulnerable state.

 

Jaemin was just about to open a third Uncrustable when Jeno lumbered drunkenly into his field of vision.

 

“Mark’s here,” he said.

 

Jaemin pushed off the trunk of a tree. “Where?”

 

“By the water.” Jeno took the Uncrustable from his hand. “Can I have this?”

 

“Of course.”

 

Jaemin checked his appearance in his phone camera and wandered through pillow-soft grass that tickled his ankles, shuddering at the smell of campfire smoke. Crickets and frogs chirred in wefted euphony, wafting from the balmy fissures of night. He didn't have to walk far: Mark was sitting on one of the wayward log benches with another friend of a friend. He saw him right away.

 

“Congrats,” he whispered, bending down to give him a hug.

 

Mark laughed, rubbing his back. “I’m having fun.”

 

“That’s great,” Jaemin said, sitting next to him. “You look good.”

 

Mark smiled, rolling his eyes. “You’re still coming to my grad party?”

 

Jaemin nodded. “I got un petit cadeau for you.”

 

“Thank you,” Mark said happily, touching his thigh. “I’ll love it.”

 

“You will,” he agreed.

 

Jaemin had liked Mark since he was twelve years-old. Mark who wrote poetry in bruised cursive and always smelled like cloves. Childhood friends, push and pull, vacations in the French countryside where they picked up the language and traded it often like inside jokes. They had a peculiar relationship; it was never entirely platonic. But Mark was a grade above him. It was always going to end with him leaving before Jaemin.

 

His reasons for never pursuing something more than friendship remained consistent: Jaemin was too young, he was leaving for his masters, he had to focus on school.

 

Mark poked Jaemin’s knee. “Who’s that guy you brought?”

 

“What?”

 

“Everyone is saying you brought some dude here that’s new to school,” he said. “Who is he?”

 

As though conjured, Donghyuck sat down next to him.

 

“Hi,” Donghyuck said, leaning over Jaemin. “I’m Donghyuck.”

 

Mark smiled. “Mark.”

 

/

 

The party continued. 

 

Renjun had mixed some fruity soda and vodka in a water-bottle, shaking it around until it foamed, and poured it into a couple of red plastic cups. Jaemin was now partially drunk, occasionally glancing at Donghyuck and Jeno talking to Mark across the opposite end of the bonfire. Jaemin didn’t mind that they were interacting, at first, until Jeno walked away and Donghyuck remained there. He seemed to be laughing endlessly and endlessly, and eventually he ended up sitting about a fingernail’s width away from Mark’s lap. He took a sip from his cup, listening to him intently.

 

“Is he serious?” Jaemin asked Renjun, becoming annoyed and malevolent.

 

“What?”

 

“He’s still talking to Mark,” Jaemin informed. “They’ve been talking for a fucking hour.”

 

Renjun nodded. “He looks very happy.”

 

“No, he looks…” Jaemin trailed off—he couldn’t even deny it. Donghyuck did look very happy. He glared and finished his drink.

 

Donghyuck had wrapped his fingers around his cup, teetering it around, and his eyes wandered across the flames, catching Jaemin’s gaze. He smiled and quickly looked away, his attention back on Mark.

 

Jaemin let out a deep breath and turned around. He couldn’t watch anymore. “Why is he even here?”

 

“First of all, I don’t know why he’s here. I’ve been asking myself that since the start of the semester. Didn’t you invite him? And also, he doesn’t know anyone.” Renjun said, matter-of-fact. “He’s probably talking to everyone like that.”

 

“I didn’t invite him so he could flirt with Mark all night,” Jaemin argued. “It’s stupid and wrong.”

 

It needed to end. Jaemin marched up to the two of them, excused Donghyuck and shuttled him off to a private corner, where he appeared confused. His hair was fanning against his cheeks and nape, and he smelled faintly of something sharp and herbal, like sage or a medicinal shampoo.

 

An act, Jaemin thought. 

 

“That needs to stop,” he said.

 

“What needs to stop?”

 

“You talking to Mark.”

 

He smiled. “He talked to me first.”

 

“That’s not true and I don't care,” he told him. “You need to dead that.” Jaemin went on, exasperated, “I’m an only child, Donghyuck. I’ve never had to share my things with anyone. I don’t like it.”

 

His brows rose. “Okay.”

 

Then, something shifted in Donghyuck’s expression.

 

“Why did you come to my room the other night?”

 

“It was an accident. And it’s not just your room.” 

 

Donghyuck smirked, unphased. “You were being bad.”

 

Jaemin became amused, a little switch in his brain flipping, felt the warmth filling his cheeks and tugging at the tips of his sharpest canines. It showed on his face. Bright and shiny like farmer’s market produce—alcohol was a powerful aphrodisiac. “Was I?”

 

Mark was nothing. Everything else dissolved. Everything else was nothing.  

 

“So bad,” Donghyuck stressed quietly. “Bad boy.”

 

/

 

It started raining around seven.

 

Not the light, decorative kind that tapped against the window like polite applause. Dark and prophetic, wind sobbing against gutters and rattling the dormitory lamps. Jaemin had lit four candles and moved a blanket to the floor. The windows were open an inch. The smell of wet bark and cold metal slipped in like spongy perfume.

 

Donghyuck had come over an hour earlier for revisions, soaked through at the ankles, coat dripping, hair a little wild. He didn’t speak as he entered. Just tossed his bag into the corner and stood there, arms crossed, wet sleeves clinging to his skin. Jaemin didn’t greet him. Didn’t tease him. Just handed him a dry crewneck and pointed toward the bathroom.

 

“I told you it was going to rain,” Jaemin said from the kitchen, slicing into a pear with alarming precision. 

 

Donghyuck didn’t answer. He highlighted a passage in Rousseau with ruthless force.

 

Now they were working again, albeit slightly less focused. The air was too heavy. The storm was too loud. Jaemin’s handwriting was starting to tilt off the lines of the page like it was slipping downhill. Donghyuck had taken up editing—red pen in hand, mouth a tight line.

 

Jaemin nudged his ankle. Just a brush.

 

“You could stay.”

 

Donghyuck raised an eyebrow. There was music playing faintly from someone’s Bluetooth speaker. Something instrumental. Cello, maybe. Piano played too slowly. “Are you trying to get me to sleep with you?”

 

“I’m trying to get you to not walk home in a thunderstorm.”

 

Donghyuck smirked, and something uncontrollable and feverish returned to his demeanor with little flourish. “Liar.”

 

“Fine,” Jaemin said, flicking his lighter to attend to another candle. “Don’t stay. Get electrocuted. Be my tragic little ex.” 

 

Project partner or romantic pursuit, he didn’t specify.

 

/

 

The two of them were the first to walk inside of the small club room, music falling heavily over lacquered flooring. Jeno was horrifically stressed over exams, and insisted upon going into the next town over for tension-relief and alcoholism. Though he seemed to be agitated around them most of the time, Donghyuck was now in regular orbit with their little circle.

 

Donghyuck stared at Jaemin’s back as he ordered them drinks, tracing his eyes down the bow of his spine. Right as he reached the angular dip where his hips were, Jaemin turned around, shark smile, cups in both of his hands. 

 

“Mojitos,” he announced happily. “Extra mint.” 

 

They walked together across the room to a corner near the smoking cove, nestled between drunk, dancing bodies. 

 

“Thank you for inviting me,” Donghyuck said close to Jaemin’s ear. “I love dancing.” The sudden kindness choked up Jaemin’s throat in a weird, heart-fluttering way. He felt disturbed.

 

“You’re always invited,” Jaemin replied. “Anywhere.” 

 

Donghyuck smiled against the rim of his drink. They were flirting, and he was happy to do it.  “You know, I was so lonely before I came to St-Agnès.” 

 

Jaemin appeared shocked by this admission. “Lonely? Why?” 

 

“I don’t know,” Donghyuck answered, playing coy. “You’re nice.” 

 

Jaemin’s eyes dragged over his face. “I’m nice.” 

 

Then he said, “I think we’ll be good friends, Donghyuck.” 

 

Donghyuck’s entire body clenched, jaw hardening. Had he just been insulted? Had he missed some fundamental clue? 

 

It was mortifying. It was silencing. 

 

/

 

They were seated at the window.

 

A long table in the back of a tucked-away bistro off the farthest streets, where the plates were ceramic and unmatching, and every waiter wore a black turtleneck with such intensity it bordered on ironic.

 

Jaemin knew the owner, because of course he did. He kissed her cheeks when they entered, called her chérie, asked if she’d kept his favorite wine. Donghyuck had never seen him speak French before. It was grotesque.

 

The dinner was for no one’s birthday. Just a Friday. The group included a few scattered names Donghyuck was beginning to recognize—a boy from the student film society, a visiting pianist. Jaemin floated between them, warm and brilliant and casually cruel, the kind of person who made you feel like you had a secret with them even when you didn’t.

 

Donghyuck sat at the far end, sipping wine he didn’t want, listening to a conversation about Bauhaus architecture spiral into a joke about desire. He was in a bad mood. Every few minutes, Jaemin would look across the table at him, as if to check he was still there. As if to remind him.

 

The candles flickered. Someone passed a bottle of something bitter. Laughter moved through the group like a shared hallucination.

 

Donghyuck leaned toward Jaemin finally and said, “I’m leaving in ten minutes.”

 

Jaemin blinked. “Why?”

 

“Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been here for two fucking hours and I haven’t said a single word.”

 

“You could.”

 

“I won’t.”

 

Jaemin looked at him for a beat too long. “I’ll walk you out.”

 

“No need.”

 

“I want to.”

 

Outside, the air was wet and loud with city noise. The cobblestones were slick. Jaemin lit a vanilla cigarette with one hand and handed Donghyuck his coat with the other. Donghyuck didn’t say goodbye, his grip forceful and cold.

 

/

 

The dorm was quiet. Donghyuck stared at the ceiling until it blurred, and when he finally rolled over, he saw Jaemin’s sweater folded neatly on his desk chair. He hadn’t returned it.

 

/

 

“Hey,” Jaemin said, sitting next to him. 

 

His hand went to Donghyuck’s thigh and gave it two pats. Then he removed his pair of sunglasses with a sigh. An overcast afternoon, the poolside vacant.

 

“Alright?” Jaemin asked. 

 

Donghyuck smiled, sticky and misleading. “You made me angry.” 

 

“Again?” Jaemin said. “It seems like I have a talent for this.”

 

“So you agree that I’m angry?” 

 

“You haven’t spoken to me in days.”

 

Donghyuck had a vision of the out-of-town bar, the dinner with the too-sweet wine. “We should be talking every day now?” he asked. “Because we’re such good friends?” 

 

Jaemin’s smile widened slowly. “You’ve got something against friendship, Donghyuck?” 

 

“You humiliated me,” Donghyuck retorted quickly, startling himself. 

 

“How?” 

 

“I don’t know,” Donghyuck said, backing down a bit, frustrated. “I want to bite you.” 

 

Jaemin raised his arm and presented his hand in front of Donghyuck’s mouth. “Bite me.” 

 

So he did, sinking his teeth in the soft flesh of Jaemin. He tasted like salt and dried fruit juice. Donghyuck’s eyelids lowered, dragging his teeth over Jaemin’s knuckle. 

 

Donghyuck pulled Jaemin’s thumb into his mouth, tightening his jaw, then dragged it back out.

 

“That was friendly,” Jaemin said, breathing shallowly. 

 

“I could be friendlier,” Donghyuck replied. 

 

/

 

Jaemin was standing in a dark, empty, off-campus diner parking lot waiting to buy cocaine. He was about to begin what he called a “homework binge”.

 

Jaemin didn’t believe in selective excellence; everything he dedicated himself to had to be perfectly executed. He wasn’t going to neglect his grades for Donghyuck (nor Donghyuck for his grades). 

 

Jaemin’s regular dealer, a soft-faced boy named Jisung, was inching up the street in a shitty 2007, mustard-yellow Honda Civic. The car screeched in agony, the thing was a death trap. Jisung was not an arithmetic genius—though they met in one of Jaemin’s classes. He was a fantastic photography major who needed to satisfy his math requirement. An Alternative Approach to Lie Groups and Geometric Structures. Fascinating, unusual lectures on theory. The class really changed Jaemin’s life—geometry is what gave art, after all. It was how global objects provided a harmonious interlacing and coexistence, and produced the most beautiful, spectacular visions. There were so many complete proofs that healed Jaemin’s soul, class itself became a global object in which transcended locality. Perhaps it was why Jaemin was so obsessed with Donghyuck; he was that global object. In him, Jaemin found parallelism and a covariant derivative. It was an expressive structure not commonly found in everyday life. It was found in art, and Jaemin saw Donghyuck as on par with a Gustav Kilmt. If Jaemin were to study Donghyuck, he’d do it all. He would define the curvature R of the parallelizable (Donghyuck), he’d take the centralizer C(G) of G inside Diff(M) also (Donghyuck), Donghyuck being the basepoint that serves as the identity. It would get too messy in Jaemin’s mind, he’d need to write it all out, but he didn't have time. Or paper. He was buying cocaine.

 

Though, he supposed he could do a little mental math, something to soothe him as he waited in the creepy ass parking lot.

 

If he were to define a geometric structure P (Donghyuck) and its curvature R on M in such a way that R = 0 if and only if P (Donghyuck) is “locally homogeneous” in the sense that any p, q ∈ M have neighborhoods U, V such that P|U (Donghyuck|U) can be “identified” with P|V (Donghyuck|V). Jaemin couldn’t think about it any further, Jisung got out of his car.

 

“Just letting you know,” Jisung announced, “I’m going to upcharge you tonight. Like, ridiculously. I still need to buy two of my textbooks. Three-hundred fucking dollars each. Can you believe that?”

 

Jaemin could believe that.

 

“Fine,” Jaemin said. “How much?”

 

“Uh,” he drawled, “One-fifty.”

 

Jaemin gave Jisung the rest of the cash he was carrying—about two-hundred dollars, and was handed a small, flimsily beautiful packet in return.

 

No one was in his apartment when he got home. This was good. Acceptable. He wasn’t horny at all. Not at all.

 

He took out all of the supplies he needed for the homework binge; textbooks, assigned readings, rubrics, his laptop, pen and paper, a calculator, and, naturally, cocaine. He cut and snorted two lines on his Romanticism and Gender textbook, and thus began working on the easiest assignments first.

 

Forbidden Texts: Censorship, Eroticism, and the Canon.

 

Holistically, the assignment was easy because of its structure. A project/research outline with works cited, a fifteen-page essay with a required index and bibliography (APA format), a presentation of condensed analysis. The rubric was incredibly dense and particular. God, how he hated the liberal arts. 

 

It was two in the morning when Jaemin finished the outline. Eighteen pages; half of the cocaine. He snorted another line and started the essay which wasn’t difficult, only tedious and long. Jaemin, lacking mental stability, suddenly felt as if he knew everything in the entire human universe about forbidden texts. He typed out paragraphs rapidly, erratically, and felt God noticing his hard work. Noticing his dedication. It would have to be heavily edited, but in his current state, it was the best fucking essay he’d ever written.

 

Pausing. Jaemin stalked over to his refrigerator and took out its last energy drink. He opened the can which hissed at him like a jungle snake, poured it into a glass, and sprinkled some cocaine into the liquid. His throat burned with an artificial berry flavor, and as he sipped he felt a million fireflies buzzing over his skin.

 

Topics in Philosophy had no formal homework assignments; participation was the bulk of your grade, and there would be three take-home exams that Jaemin wouldn’t need to study for.

 

He had a feminist poetry class in which his assignments were as followed:

 

• Analyze ten poems of your choice.

• Choose a female poet and write a five-page essay on her works and life.

• Ten-page essay on a topic of your choice (details and requirements outlined in rubric, see p.12).

 

Jaemin began writing once more. He rolled the meter of each poem around in his brain, wrote three paragraphs on “the meaning”—metaphorical, subjective, Jaemin wasn’t a fan. Although, with poetry, he had to admit that he was fond of the math of it all. So many pretty stanzas. He used an absolute fuck-ton of big words, and hoped to Jesus Christ and Mary Oliver that this was enough to make his analyses believable.

 

Addressing topics such as suicidal ideation and melancholic lanquidity, the introspective works of…

 

He snorted more cocaine, drank half the energy drink, and continued typing until he reached the conclusion.

 

…it connects to the, “weeping, beautiful girl [...], who either wishes to die or, even better, ends up dead. The tears are still on her cheeks, her pale face unblemished, beautiful and tragic forever” (Williams). Their work is undeniably aesthetically beguiling, deviating from the usual narritive that talks of death, depression, and suicide in a melancholic stereotype.

 

In his works cited, he typed ‘et al.’ so many times that the letters burned into his eyes and made him think he was beginning to enter a state of paralysis. 

 

The essay was complete.

 

By the time Jaemin finished his math homework, it was twelve in the afternoon on Sunday and the birds were chirping through an open window. By 6 p.m. he had finished the work for the remainder of his classes.

 

The walls of his apartment started to move. The birds were speaking to him. His reflection didn't look like him in the mirror. His face was melting off like heated wax. A Weeping Virgin Mary. 

 

Jaemin had finished his semester.

 

/

 

Jaemin’s hands were shaking so terribly that dressing himself in a sweatshirt was not without a difficult strain of effort. He managed the feat with extraneous torture, pulled the hood over his head, and placed a pair of over-large sunglasses over his eyes. Every part of him felt like loose forms of matter. He was so achingly hungry that the only reason he made it to Chicken and Pie was because of pure, raw determination.

 

Renjun and Jeno stared at Jaemin in shock.

 

“Can I ask what’s wrong?” asked Jeno, nervously.

 

Jaemin didn’t speak, they walked to their normal booth. They watched Jaemin’s head struggle to stay up.

 

The waitress glanced awkwardly between Jaemin nodding off and the others; he could hardly sit straight.

 

“Jaemin,” Renjun started quietly, “are you okay?”

 

Jaemin let out a breath. “I need—” he gagged. “—food.”

 

As their platter was walked to the table, Jaemin was now completely slumped in the booth. Both Renjun and Jeno remained concerned, but they started eating immediately.

 

“Should I poke him?” Jeno asked, in the midst of dipping a chicken nugget into honey mustard.

 

“Yeah,” Renjun affirmed. “I’m so confused.”

 

Jeno reached out his arm and sank his finger into Jaemin’s shoulder.

 

“What?” Jaemin murmured. They couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, unsure of whether he was awake or asleep.

 

“Jaem?” Jeno took another bite. “Food’s here.”

 

They watched as Jaemin pulled himself up. Loose limbs, gummy, like a miracle. 

 

“We ordered you a Sprite,” Renjun informed.

 

Not only was Jaemin starving, he was wildly dehydrated. He fumbled with the glass and started to chug it. Renjun’s eyebrows creased while watching him.

 

At that moment, Jaemin let out a heavy breath of air through his nose, and gagged again. His head was pounding so violently that he considered stabbing himself with a fork. He chewed a singular french fry and figured that this was the end for him.

 

“I have to go,” Jaemin slurred.

 

Renjun and Jeno paused their snacking, concerned.

 

“Do you like— are you— can we help?” Renjun asked, stumbling over his words.

 

Jaemin struggled mightily to get out of the booth, but once he did, he announced, “I’m going to sleep for twelve hours.”

 

And that was that. He made it outside, ignoring Renjun and Jeno trying to stop him from leaving for fear of his imminent and perilous demise. The world swirled around Jaemin like drops of black ink in water; muted, murky, dark. A huge beetle, that was in fact a leaf, flitted down in front of his face, causing him to flinch back slightly. Jaemin was trying so hard to cling to his sanity that once he let go, it would surely have claw marks.

 

It was times like this when Jaemin resented growing older; you know everything and then you’re twenty-two walking on unstable legs with not one single clue. He was such an embarrassing, overgrown child.

 

After what felt like a three-second-long century, Jaemin stared at the front door of his apartment with severe hatred; he had left it open. Irritated by his carelessness, he walked inside and closed the door softly. Even angry, Jaemin was softhanded. He didn’t like touching things with harshness or violence.

 

The walls were still moving and the floor looked about as stable as Esther Greenwood.

 

There were consequences of perfection that Jaemin didn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about, he fell asleep on the floor of his bedroom with his sunglasses smashed into his face because he didn’t have enough energy to make it to his mattress.

 

/

 

The entire class cheered and ran out of the room like excited roaches. Donghyuck stayed sitting at the table; Jaemin had fallen asleep on his backpack and was drooling just the tiniest bit.

 

“Jaemin?” 

 

Donghyuck twiddled his thumbs and took a deep breath.

 

“Jaemin?”

 

Jaemin’s eyebrow twitched. Donghyuck raised his leg and kicked Jaemin in the shin, hard. At that, Jaemin lifted his head and looked at him, then around the room.

 

“Did I sleep through class?” he asked, confusion contorting his face.

 

“Class is canceled,” Donghyuck’s voice was blunt. “We just got an email.”

 

Jaemin grabbed his phone and read the message blearily.

 

“Do you want to work on our project?” Donghyuck then asked, hoping this would lead to the golden ticket of being invited back to Jaemin’s over-luxe apartment. He wanted to touch his cheek, his neck.

 

Jaemin looked at him shyly.

 

“I finished it,” he said, rubbing his eyes and pushing back his hair.

 

“What?”

 

“I finished our project,” he repeated, feeling nervous.

 

“Everything?” Donghyuck’s spine straightened, expression contorted into something bewildered and horrified. 

 

“Yeah.”

 

“And my parts?”

 

“Yes,” Jaemin confirmed. “Everything.”

 

Donghyuck considered this. There was no more excuse to leave his cords and chargers under the guise of paragraph outlining. On the other hand, they could do whatever it was they were doing with each other (Flirting? Insulting? Testing?) without the constraint of responsibility. He decided this was wonderful. “You look sleepy,” Donghyuck noted.

 

Jaemin smiled lazily. “I’m tired.”

 

Then, Donghyuck had the onslaught of an urge to wrap Jaemin in his arms and take care of him. He seemed so worn and pitiable. He could be the mommy today.

 

/

 

Jaemin was sick and then he sat with Donghyuck and he felt stronger than ever.

 

/

 

“Do you want to go to the library with me tonight?” Jaemin asked.

 

Donghyuck met his eyes in shock, the question was so naughty that it sounded like he was asking him to bend over. Of course, none of this was explicitly said. In fact, Jaemin was quite keen on picking out some new paraphernalia. Ennui, as it turned out, was a retroactive symptom of finishing the entirety of your coursework prematurely. He needed books. He needed to read. Donghyuck, on the other hand, was no longer banned from the library, and felt as if this was Jaemin’s proposition of a celebration.

 

“Yes,” Donghyuck said back, sounding lewd. He knew how to make his voice sound like he was getting fucked, a low breath, a crude talent. “What time?”

 

Jaemin’s teeth flashed. So agreeable, he thought. So pliable and willing to compromise, making changes to become a better person and student altogether. He felt proud. “Is eight okay?”

 

Donghyuck nodded. 

 

“Fantastic,” Jaemin stood to leave. 

 

At 5 p.m. Donghyuck was depuffing his face with an ice pack. 

 

/

 

“I like the fourth floor,” Jaemin told Donghyuck as the elevator dinged and slid open. “There’s hundreds of encyclopedias.”

 

The room was earthy and gorgeous. Old, worn spines of books lined neatly within shelves. The light was dim, absorbed by the dark oak walls and deep green rugs. There was no one else inside.

 

“I want to sit behind the stacks,” Donghyuck said. This was how he preferred to study in libraries, when he was truly studying and not performing self-care rites, right on the ground next to the books. It was intimate and romantic to place yourself amongst literary excess. 

 

He chose a spot for them both, tucked behind the shadows of rare encyclopedias and outdated rolls of maps.

 

They sat like this for a while, Jaemin thumbing the hardcovers and flitting through forewords. Donghyuck positioned his backpack behind him and laid his head down on top of it, holding open a huge copy on Grecian architecture like a parasol. His jumper was slouchy and soft, haphazardly reaching above the line of his pelvis, a flash of tummy. 

 

Jaemin wasn’t looking, of course. He was nose-deep in chapter two and adding to his mental shopping cart. 

 

“Jaemin,” Donghyuck whispered.

 

“Yes?” he didn’t look up from his reading. Donghyuck used his foot to kick the book out of his hand. “Okay, Donghyuck. Thank you.”

 

Jaemin really looked at him then, all languid and sprawled on the library floor, basketball shorts far too high on his thighs, a haunting little smile playing on his lips.

 

Donghyuck pulled his legs back up, squeezing them together in a funny imitation of bridge pose. Jaemin had his back against the shelves, watching him, then reached out and pulled his calves down flat to the ground so he could see his face.

 

“What are you doing?” Jaemin asked quietly. Donghyuck didn’t say anything, just stared at the hands on his legs.

 

“Nothing,” he finally answered, soft and low.

 

Jaemin smiled, encouraging and a little twisted, the perfect facilitator. “You have to use your words. What do you want?”

 

“Anything,” Donghyuck told him.

 

Jaemin looked at the time, he had thirty minutes left to make the final shuttle back to his apartment. 

 

He positioned himself in front of the other boy, book abandoned, and placed his two hands on Donghyuck’s knees, pulling his legs back up, then spreading them apart slowly. The color of his shorts were navy blue. His underwear matched. 

 

Donghyuck moaned faintly when Jaemin’s head went between his thighs. Jaemin’s tongue was warm and soft; slow and deliberate, as if he were wiping up a trace of syrup off a plate. Up and down, a thorough clean. Donghyuck’s hands went to his hair, which felt impossibly silken and enraged him only in the slightest. The feeling was quickly drowned out by lovelier sensations. 

 

/

 

Jaemin pulled the hem of Donghyuck’s shorts up and over, soft, spindly fingers, lifting his hips for him. No mess. 

 

“I have to go home,” Jaemin said, grinning with spit-swollen lips at Donghyuck’s enervated state.

 

/

 

Jaemin smiled—but not sweetly, Donghyuck thought. It was the sort of smile that made him feel like he was developing a fever.

 

/

 

On Saturday’s, Jaemin liked to sleep in. 

 

He had particular difficulty falling asleep after the incident in the library the previous night, an anxiety clawing at his chest. Jaemin wondered if he had rushed everything, and that in itself was an odd thought for him. He would have to see Donghyuck again, for reasons related to collegiate duties and their intermingling sprawl of friends—it wasn’t a normal hookup. 

 

Even now, he was having trouble breathing. 

 

His heartbeat was erratic and uncontrollable. It was too soon. Far too soon. It was impulsive and stupid. Things were fucked, he figured solemnly. He had two options: apologize to Donghyuck or go to church and pray. Neither of these choices spoke to him, but he was losing his mind nonetheless.

 

After silent deliberation, Jaemin decided that he was going to ask Donghyuck on a date. If he wanted Jaemin, truly, he may be willing to try. Or, alternatively, this was Jaemin’s perverted, gentleman-ly way of being able to say that he took Donghyuck on a date before fucking him—he deserved at least that ounce of chivalry. 

 

Donghyuck was pretty and a little funny and had fantastic legs, but Jaemin had plans for his life that didn’t involve relationships. Certainly not yet. He was already becoming too consumed from a blowjob, and that took him away from more important matters. 

 

Perhaps, and this was an evil thought, he could fuck someone else tonight and let what happened with Donghyuck be a one-time thing. 

 

It wasn’t going to happen.

 

Jaemin was walking into Solange with little confidence. He felt weird and clingy, creepy even. The further down the hall he got, the sicker he made himself feel. Jaemin sensed he was becoming all of the most unpleasant versions of himself: obsessive, manic, harsh. This wasn’t the sort of man he wanted to be, spending his time thinking about a boy who didn’t even like him all that much. Not consistently, so to speak. More often than not he would tell Jaemin that talking to him made him want to shoot himself in the head. 

 

When he got to Donghyuck and Renjun’s door, everything felt unbalanced.

 

He knocked regardless, heard the rumblings of a show being paused, a bed creak from the right side of the room.

 

Jaemin squinted when Donghyuck opened the door; he was alone in the room, and wearing next to nothing—a towel slung over his waist in a sloppy sarong, his face covered in some sort of white, clayish mask. He was sucking on something that bulged against his cheek. A lollipop, perhaps.

 

“Spa day,” Donghyuck explained.

 

“Hi,” Jaemin said in return.

 

Donghyuck smiled. Rare. A little bit of his facial clung to the bottom corner of his mouth. “Hi.”

 

“Are you busy?” asked Jaemin.

 

Donghyuck kept sucking on his candy and shook his head no, moving to the side to let Jaemin in.

 

Donghyuck’s side of the room was messy but patterned. Colognes and accessories, pillows mismatched, water bottle on the floor. He had a sorrel-colored, rough looking teddy bear sitting on top of a robin-egg comforter. There was a string of polaroids behind his headboard that Jaemin couldn’t get a good look at. His desk was a disaster. The only neat thing in close proximity was Jaemin’s crewneck, which was draped with care over the back of his desk chair. 

 

There was a row of well-loved books lined against his windowsill. Jaemin always loved seeing what books other people kept; this was more intimate than sex for him. He read the title of each cracked spine: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Wuthering Heights, Eros the Bittersweet, Cat’s Cradle, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Letters to a Young Poet, Stoner, The Dispossessed. Looking out of the panes, it was all green.

 

“My space,” Donghyuck said, casual, climbing back into his bed.

 

Jaemin wondered if he had corrupted him in some way.

 

“I’m sorry for being mean,” Jaemin told him. “I do like you but sometimes I don’t.”

 

“I’m difficult,” Donghyuck responded, shoving the stick of red back into his mouth, his face hollowing out with each suck. “I like you, too.”

 

Jaemin felt like he was being pranked. He also felt like he was back in middle-school with the way this conversation was proceeding. However, Donghyuck made him feel comfortable enough to embarrass himself. It wasn’t like he could judge anyone for being weird.

 

“Would you like to go on a date with me?” Jaemin cringed. He didn’t know what he was doing.

 

Donghyuck’s entire face lit up, and his smile was dizzying.

 

“Date,” he repeated, excited. “Yes.”

 

Jaemin started to pace a little then, unrelieved, while Donghyuck simply watched.

 

“We need to talk about last night,” he asserted, anxious.

 

“Okay,” Donghyuck said. “Felt good.”

 

Jaemin stopped moving and looked at him. He was all of his dreams personified. He was a physical manifestation of every desire that he had ever had.

 

Not only was Donghyuck perfect, but the actual state of perfection itself—vicious beauty.

 

He was slightly relieved.

 

“You don’t feel weird?” Jaemin asked. Donghyuck looked confused.

 

“Why would I feel weird?”

 

Jaemin didn’t have an exact answer. He sucked him off before they had even kissed, which could be considered weird. There was meaning in all of these weird little things between them, but Jaemin was too overwhelmed to begin dissecting.

 

“I don’t know,” he said.

 

“Is our date tonight?” Donghyuck asked.

 

“Yes, sure,” Jaemin answered, on autopilot. “I’ll take you to dinner.”

 

“You spoil me,” Donghyuck said sneakily, sparkle eyes. At last, Jaemin smiled at him, feeling amazed that nothing was strained at all. Nothing between them had been lost. He walked closer to Donghyuck’s bed, Donghyuck looked up at him and waited.

 

“I don’t want anything to be awkward with us,” Jaemin was being excessively gentle with his tone.

 

“Nothing’s awkward,” Donghyuck assured, a little peeved-sounding.

 

“What’s in your mouth?” Jaemin asked.

 

The smile returned. “Lollipop.”

 

“What kind?”

 

“Cherry,” Donghyuck answered. “Come here.”

 

Jaemin stood at the side of his bed, watching Donghyuck take the lollipop out of his mouth, handing it to Jaemin.

 

“Lick,” Donghyuck said.

 

Jaemin liked the saccharine, he had no problem trying Donghyuck’s lollipop. He put it in his mouth and then took it back out. They were kissing through candy.

 

“It’s good,” Jaemin complimented. He was thinking about saliva. 

 

“Zero sugar,” Donghyuck said.

 

Horrifically, Jaemin could feel himself getting hard, which meant he had to leave.

 

“I’ll pick you up at seven,” his voice came out quick, breath rush, extending Donghyuck his lollipop.

 

/

 

In a chauffeured, father-funded BMW kept for special occasions, Donghyuck was telling Jaemin how well they got along. 

 

Jaemin couldn’t say anything else; he knew it was true, beyond the surface-level bickering and differing preferences. They were probably soulmates (you could tell these things early on), which made Jaemin angry—why couldn’t they meet when he was thirty-two and ready for marriage? Why now, ten years too early? It was the same feeling he got before mildly overdosing on ketamine. The pressure to please Donghyuck was suffocating him.

 

“Did my lollipop make you horny?” The subject had shifted gracelessly, Donghyuck’s hand beginning to stroke mindless feathers into Jaemin’s thigh.

 

“Everything about you makes me horny,” Jaemin said, immediate regret following. “That was crude. I’m sorry.”

 

“You like me,” Donghyuck mused quietly to himself.

 

“I really like you,” Jaemin confirmed, but the numbing fear returned at once. They were moving too fast, he was sure of it. At this rate, he’d have Donghyuck moved into his apartment by next weekend. Jaemin decided he’d try to scare Donghyuck off by speaking some of his more disturbed thoughts out loud. “I think we’re soulmates, Donghyuck.”

 

Donghyuck’s hand stopped moving.

 

“I think I’m also probably obsessed with you in a way that isn’t healthy.”

 

“Stop,” he said.

 

“All of my thoughts are consumed by you,” Jaemin continued, ignoring him. “You’ve made me want to jump off of my balcony.”

 

“Stop.”

 

“I considered walking into traffic.”

 

Donghyuck put his hand over Jaemin’s mouth. “Soulmate,” Donghyuck said, sardonic and drawn out, little fake smile. “Stop fucking talking.”

 

If Donghyuck wasn’t freaked out by now, he was more psychotic than himself, Jaemin thought. Which was a likely possibility. He was going to let himself burn.

 

“What’s eighty-five times sixteen?” Donghyuck asked, disrupting his moping. It worked temporarily, Jaemin became distracted from his self-imposed torment.

 

“What?”

 

“What’s eighty-five times sixteen?”

 

Jaemin thought for a few seconds. “Thirteen-hundred and sixty. Why?”

 

“What’s ten thousand times three-hundred and forty-eight?”

 

“Three million, four-hundred and eighty thousand.”

 

Jaemin thought that one was easy but Donghyuck didn’t need to know that.

 

/

 

“I’m your friend.”

 

Donghyuck thought of the library.

 

“We’re more than friends,” he corrected.

 

“Best-friends?” Jaemin asked with a smile. He was so slutty, Donghyuck thought.

 

The waitress placed a martini in front of Jaemin and a beer in front of Donghyuck.

 

“I wonder how many girls have gone on birth control for you,” Donghyuck said suddenly, saturating himself in the ideas of Jaemin’s promiscuity.

 

“That’s offensive. And anyways, I can’t get anyone pregnant,” he said. 

 

“What do you mean?”

 

Jaemin took a sip of his drink, swirling the olives around in their vodka bath. “I had a vasectomy when I was twenty.”

 

“What?” Donghyuck exclaimed. “Why?”

 

“Because I don’t want a baby and I was having panic attacks every time I had sex.”

 

“Do you want to get married one day?” Donghyuck asked.

 

“Yes,” Jaemin said.

 

“A wife and three kids?”

 

“Maybe. Do you want to be my little wife?”

 

Neither of them knew if they were speaking to each other’s futures. They were both psychotic enough to elope tomorrow.

 

/

 

Jaemin was missing.

 

And Donghyuck, who pretended not to notice these things, knocked on Jaemin’s door just after dusk with a lemon and DayQuil tablets.

 

The door creaked open slowly—unlocked, of course—and revealed the wreckage.

 

Jaemin lay across the bed in a pose that could only be described as Romantic Deathbed with Minor Fever. The sheets were a mess of linen and sweat. The blinds were half-closed, letting in strips of gray light that landed across his cheekbones like film stills. There were tissues everywhere. A single glass of water sat untouched on the windowsill like an offering to the gods of illness.

 

Jaemin looked up from his blanket cocoon and blinked, glassy-eyed.

 

“I knew you’d come,” he rasped.

 

“You texted me ‘am perishing’ in all caps,” Donghyuck said, stepping over a pile of tissue boxes and what looked like a half-eaten apple.

 

Jaemin sniffled. “Because I am.” 

 

Donghyuck didn’t roll his eyes, but only because Jaemin was somehow glowing with fever, cheeks flushed like smudged roses, mouth chapped and bitten. He got sick beautifully. A goddamn character trait.

 

“I brought you medicine,” Donghyuck said, placing his findings atop Jaemin’s bedside table.

 

Jaemin sat up a little, blanket clinging to his shoulders like a cape. “What kind of medicine?”

 

He took one look at the packet and shook his head. 

 

“I can’t swallow pills,” Jaemin continued, with the guilty voice of someone confessing to tax fraud.

 

Donghyuck stared at him. “You’re an adult fucking man.”

 

“They’re too… solid.”

 

Donghyuck pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled through it. Deep-throating was okay, but pills were not. Okay. “Jesus Christ. Fine. Open your mouth.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I’ll crush it. Mix it with honey or some pretentious jam you definitely keep hidden somewhere.”

 

Jaemin flushed but obediently reached under the bed, pulling out a jar of fig preserves like it was contraband.

 

Donghyuck paused. “Of course.”

 

“I keep it for emergencies,” Jaemin said.

 

“This is not what ‘emergency’ means.”

 

“It’s very European of me.”

 

Donghyuck ground the tablet on a textbook and stirred it into the fig jam with a little, astray silver spoon. Jaemin watched him like he was performing a sacrament.

 

“You’re a little domestic,” Jaemin whispered.

 

“Don’t.”

 

“You could’ve been a nurse. A sexy, cruel one.”

 

Donghyuck brought the spoon to his lips, a steadying hand on his lap, and Jaemin opened his mouth without breaking eye contact. Took it all in, slow and dramatic. Some of the jam clung to the corner of his lip.

 

“Should I give you a kiss?” Donghyuck asked, his voice much lower; intoxicating and smooth. Deep sea siren: evil. He was applying pressure to the spot on Jaemin that he was grabbing, leaning his palm into him.

 

Jaemin’s mind went blank and he felt violent. In terms of health or physique, he could not determine. Donghyuck smiled at him and leaned himself closer, pressed his lips to Jaemin’s cheek, drawing him closer with a hand on the back of his neck. The kiss flooded Jaemin with delight, brightness, like on nights when the moon is in full bloom. He tilted his head towards him, and Donghyuck’s lips went to his mouth. His hand moved higher, fingers slipping into tawny hair. 

 

Jaemin’s chest tightened—all of his boyish machinations welling up.

 

They didn’t talk the rest of the morning but nothing else needed to be said. They were both sufficiently aroused and mildly contagious.

 

/

 

Occasionally Donghyuck found himself aggresively missing his apartment in New York, his own life that was repulsive in its individual way.

 

Flopped amongst his bedsheets, he replied to texts, sleepily drinking a coke, letting the sugar sort out his nerves in a way that felt good. Sugar was productive. 

 

The feeling stunted, a second only to himself before someone was knocking on the door. He sighed, twisted the cool knob, and saw cake. Jaemin walked past him and sat heavily on the bed; Donghyuck smiled and took the plate from him. He loved sweet things. 

 

“My stomach hurts,” he whispered, wrapping his lips around the fork, taking in a mouthful of chocolate. “Did you bring Renjun cake, too?” 

 

“Yes,” Jaemin answered. 

 

Donghyuck’s stomach twisted. He opened his mouth, spitting the clump of half-masticated cake onto the floor, and set the plate on the nightstand. 

 

“It’s not special, then,” he said with a glare. It was degrading—incredibly degrading—to be served a beautiful slice of cake after someone else. But really, it was more like: how could Jaemin see cake, any kind of cake, and not think of Donghyuck first? He loved cake. It was humiliating. 

 

Jaemin looked at the abandoned bite between them, leaking with saliva, and his mouth tilted. 

 

“I don’t want it anymore,” Donghyuck said. 

 

“Fine,” Jaemin replied, undisturbed. “Can I stay over?” 

 

He’s lost his mind, Donghyuck thought. Then Jaemin stood, picked up the wet floor-cake with his fingers, and shoved it inside Donghyuck’s mouth before kissing him fervently, his palms sliding over the wave of his hips, down down down, grabbing him closer. There was that unavoidable tremble—an erotic hysteria that pulsed against a bout of repose. They collided further, he kissed his throat, Donghyuck panted, it was wet, and they went to the bathroom, locked the door, and the desire expanded. 

 

Simply: he loved sweet things.

 

/

 

The collision of Donghyuck and Jaemin could be described only as that of a black hole, generating violent waves and ripples in space-time. The more massive the object, the rougher, the deeper the curve, alternately stretching and squeezing, gravitational waves. Within a million light-years, you’d detect the collision of two distant vacuities: Jaemin and Donghyuck.

 

Jaemin came on Donghyuck’s back, running down into the curve of his thighs.

 

“Why does it feel so good?” Donghyuck asked, swiping hair out of his face. He could hardly speak.

 

“Soulmates, Donghyuck,” Jaemin replied, wiping his cum off of him with a towel that he grabbed from the ground. He tapped his ass two times with his hand and told him, “Get up.”

 

/

 

Jaemin was researching love bombing.

 

“Holy shit,” the curse fell under his breath. He was sitting in the bed of his apartment, Donghyuck was finishing up in the bathroom.

 

He came into the room with soggy hair, wearing one of Jaemin’s Martha’s Vineyard sweatshirts.

 

“Why do you look concerned?” Donghyuck asked.

 

“I think I’ve been love bombing you,” Jaemin said. He appeared physically sick.

 

“What?” Donghyuck smiled at him. He found him to be a silly boy.

 

“I’ve basically done everything on this list.”

 

“What list?”

 

“The fucking love bombing list,” Jaemin replied, exasperated. He read one of the signs out loud. “Professing strong feelings early on. Calling you my soulmate after a couple days of knowing you.”

 

“Jaemin, that’s for narcissists. You’re not a narcissist.” Though Donghyuck couldn’t be sure.

 

“I need help,” Jaemin continued. “I’m clearly insane.”

 

“You’re not insane,” Donghyuck laughed, a bubbly sound like liquor and soda water, jumping in bed. “I’ve been love bombing you, too.”

 

Jaemin glanced at him. “This is bad.”

 

“Who cares?” Donghyuck retorted, not caring.

 

“I’m sorry for love bombing you,” Jaemin apologized. He felt weird about their entire situation now. Had he been manipulating Donghyuck this entire time? He had these tendencies. 

 

“It’s not fucking love bombing!” Donghyuck sat up quickly and stole Jaemin’s phone from his palm, turning it off. “People like each other and have sex and go out together all the time.” It was a gentle, roundabout way of summing up things.

 

“Fine,” Jaemin relented. “We’re not normal, though.”

 

“Who cares,” droned Donghyuck.

 

/

 

Donghyuck held people like he was trying to absorb his body into theirs. He held people like he wanted to consume them.

 

“Why did you finish our project?” Donghyuck’s gaze flitted across Jaemin’s face, button nose; pink lips. “You didn’t want to work with me anymore?”

 

Jaemin looked down, then towards the ceiling—it was a difficult question. Why did he do any of the psychotic things that he did? How could he explain that to someone?

 

/

 

There were thirty-eight midterms. Jaemin had graded eleven.

 

He was perched on the counter in the shared kitchen of Solange, legs drawn up like a sulking gargoyle, sipping red wine mixed with condensed milk out of a mug that said PROPERTY OF THE MATH DEPT. in peeling vinyl.

 

He circled the same mistake for the fourth time. Chain rule error. Again. He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob and reached for his drink. 

 

He flipped to exam #12.

 

It began with:

 

"I’m really sorry in advance, I had a sinus infection."

 

Jaemin closed his eyes. When Donghyuck walked in, barefoot, holding a packet of frozen dumplings, he paused in the doorway.

 

“What the hell are you drinking,” Donghyuck said flatly.

 

“Don’t speak to me,” Jaemin countered this without looking up, sipping slow, pen circling furiously against paper. His floppy-soft hair was pushed back from his forehead in a severe manner, as if he were preparing for surgery.

 

This angered Donghyuck. He didn’t like being brushed aside. Grabbing the mug from Jaemin’s hand, dumplings abandoned, he quickly and efficiently dumped the entire drink down the sink.

 

Jaemin’s nervous system slanted left.

 

“You’re disgusting,” Donghyuck said quietly, his voice filled with heat. Jaemin was aware that Donghyuck often slipped into these malevolent moods that, of which, aroused him endlessly. He was becoming more and more familiar with the particular pleasure of abasement.

 

If he had any less self-control, he’d blow a load in his pants every time Donghyuck said something rude to him.

 

“I’m going to my apartment,” Jaemin informed, suddenly overwhelmed and ashamed by his own deviance. “Come back with me.”

 

/

 

In his bedroom, Jaemin had on a white dress shirt, completely unbuttoned, sitting in a pair of boxers. He got distracted from dressing himself when a professor emailed that he’d graded an assignment. Jaemin’s heart started thumping morbidly, thrillingly, a continuous throb as he opened his student portal.

 

Jaemin Na: 98.5%

 

He sighed internally; he wouldn’t have to kill himself this time.

 

A fresh-out-the-shower Donghyuck wandered into the room, shiny and soaped and dripping. Jaemin was still looking down at his phone.

 

“Jaemin,” Donghyuck said.

 

Jaemin looked him up and down; it just wasn’t fair.

 

/

 

One of Jaemin’s hands slipped between Donghyuck’s legs; touching him in places that Donghyuck didn’t know he had. He started to see glitter in his eyes, his entire body felt it.

 

/

 

Jaemin placed a glassed-in bottle of lavender soda on the stone next to Donghyuck’s face, who then closed his eyes, a gentle agony welling. 

 

“I think this place is going to bore me to death,” Donghyuck said. 

 

“You're bored?” Jaemin questioned, rolling a floral cigarette between his fingers. 

 

Donghyuck stretched out, languid with sun, and said, “You could come back to New York with me.” 

 

Jaemin licked the thin paper, then smoothed down the sticky edges. “That would affect me adversely.” 

 

Donghyuck smiled. “Why?” 

 

“New York instead of this beautiful seaside sanatorium, during autumn?” He pulled a lighter from his swim-shorts. “Aesthetic suicide.”

 

“There’s so many people here,” Donghyuck continued his rant in a mumble. “It would be more beautiful if we were alone.” 

 

Jaemin inhaled a ribbon of smoke, then breathed out. “You could learn French.” 

 

“Do you think your whore mother could teach me?” Donghyuck asked. “She’s in France right now, isn't she? Does she remember that she has a son?” 

 

“Yes,” Jaemin said, almost smiling. “When’s the last time you talked to your father?” 

 

Donghyuck squinted. “I don’t remember.” 

 

“It’s kind of impressive how he managed to give you a lifetime of neurosis,” Jaemin pondered, “without having to talk to you.” 

 

“I don’t have neurosis,” Donghyuck said. “I’m lovely.” 

 

/

 

The party persisted. 

 

The courtyard of Lys hall, the biggest on campus, had been transformed into something gold and humming. Someone—probably Renjun—had strung a thousand feet of wire lights across the beams like a nervous system, and they buzzed faintly, hot against the old plaster columnades. A broken stereo played Robyn from someone’s cracked phone. The air fogged from breath and wine and the press of people in coats too warm to take off and too beautiful to abandon.

 

Donghyuck arrived late, as always. He was wearing a sweater he never wore—mahogany, slightly oversized, something expensive and unassuming,—and he brought a bottle of something neither French nor good, which endeared him to everyone instantly.

 

On a beautiful veranda across the grass, Jaemin lit Jisung’s blunt for him as the rose bushes strewed fleshy petals over the garden. 

 

Jisung coughed. “I’m being sent to the countryside—” another cough, “—after this.” 

 

Jaemin’s brows furrowed, pinky lips exhaling smoke. “The countryside,” he repeated slowly. “Why? Do you have hysteria?” 

 

“Countryside or rehab,” Jisung said, knee bouncing. “My parents are humiliating me.” 

 

“The countryside,” Jaemin echoed, again, eyelids lowering, “isn’t bad. There's apple cider—apple cider doughnuts.” 

 

“What’s an apple cider doughnut?” 

 

“It’s like a doughnut,” Jaemin tried to explain, but his tongue felt heavy, “that has the aura of apple cider.” 

 

Jisung laughed. “What the fuck? The aura?” 

 

Jaemin rubbed his eyes. “They don’t taste like apples.” 

 

“America is funny,” Jisung said, wistful. In addition to being Jaemin’s cocaine dealer/former classmate/chum, he was an international student who spent a lot of time bouncing between Eurasia. 

 

“But I don’t understand why you’re being sent—” Jaemin coughed, then resumed his musing, “—to the countryside. Of all places.” 

 

Jisung inhaled a cascading puff of smoke. “My mother found things in my room; now I have to go to the countryside as a punishment.” This gave Jaemin a bit of pause. It sounded like there wouldn’t be anymore homework binges for the foreseeable future. 

 

“And,” he continued, “it would be bad, you know, publicly, if I went to rehab.” 

 

Jaemin blinked slowly. “That’s really eighteenth-century.” 

 

“You say things that I don’t understand,” Jisung replied, dazed. “What brand are your pants?” 

 

Jaemin glanced down at his black trousers. “Jil Sander.” 

 

/

 

The party was always going to persist, Donghyuck realized. He sat with Jaemin on a wayward bench, watching him inhale from a clove cigarette, the end glowing with each pull of smoke. Gardenia-scented breezes fluttered about their skin, their clothing, the last of winter pansies withering amongst the sea spray. Violet petals freckled the stone pathways, lapped up in the watery flux. 

 

When no one was looking, Donghyuck dragged his tongue across the collar of Jaemin’s shirt, a part of the lick touching his neck. Lust had gripped him—excessively,—and he had no way to articulate this clearly. He brought his hand to Jaemin’s face and turned his head, kissing his lips. Donghyuck’s mouth drew in his tongue, half-frantically, heat spreading from his chest.

 

The trouble was that they were very much in public, despite the atmosphere of inebriation that surrounded them, and so they couldn’t simply run off to the shadows and take. 

 

“Are you hungry?” Jaemin asked, his fingers trailing down Donghyuck’s spine. 

 

“Yes,” he mumbled. “Do you want to go inside?” 

 

“Eat first,” Jaemin told him, pulling another cigarette from behind his ear. “What do you want? Risotto?” 

 

St-Agnès students all had quite luxurious appetites. Bowls of salted French butter and olive tapenade scooped by hand with bread, fingers, or in one cursed case—chopsticks. Dates in a teacup, tiny bottled ciders, a mushroom and truffle risotto stirred for an hour by a philosophy major who insisted on “honoring the rice.” Smelt divine. Lightly oversalted.

 

“Risotto,” Donghyuck echoed. “But I’ll go. I need to use the bathroom.” 

 

“By yourself?” Jaemin asked, sounding uncomfortable.

 

Donghyuck smirked. “Why? Do you want to fuck in the bathroom?” 

 

He thought of their bodies curving over the sink, against the wall. Jaemin sighed out smoke. “Too many people here.” 

 

“Too many people here,” Donghyuck mimicked, rolling his eyes. “Okay.” 

 

About an hour and a half later, the world began to tilt and count, and Jaemin, flushed and sincere and crossed, shout-sighed, ditzy: “Happy birthday, America!”

 

A stunned silence followed. Even the drunkest among them paused.

 

Renjun turned. “What the fuck,” he said. “That’s July.”

 

Jaemin squinted at him, vaguely betrayed. “Are you sure?”

 

“Yes?” he said. “It’s New Year’s Eve.”

 

“Oh,” Jaemin murmured, suddenly overcome with the weight of his error. Then, just as quickly, he didn’t care. He was warm and hopeful, full of prospect and desire. The new year arrived like steam on glass. Small and foggy and already vanishing.

 

/

 

Jaemin grabbed Donghyuck’s face, kissing all around. “You’re lovely.” 

 

“Maybe I should flee the country,” Donghyuck ignored him completely. “Then I won’t have to listen to Renjun complain about organic grocery shopping. No, I’m not coming with you to buy fennel. That’s not a normal craving.” 

 

Jaemin kissed his cheeks, his jaw, the side of his mouth. “You’re beautiful. Sweetheart. Baby.” 

 

Donghyuck blinked.

 

Jaemin kissed his throat, and Donghyuck said, “Maybe after dinner we can take a walk together? Do you want to or should I jump off a roof and kill myself?” 

 

“Don't kill yourself,” Jaemin said. “I’ll walk with you anywhere.” 

 

Donghyuck wrapped his arm around Jaemin’s waist. “I’m overwhelmed.” 

 

“Do you want a soda?” 

 

/

 

Jaemin was on his back, a Gaultier button-up blouse atop his face for shade, silent and still as the waves pushed and pulled. Donghyuck was on his side, facing Jaemin’s body, glimmering with heat. The vernal season was rolling back in again. He reached out, half-asleep, half-desirous, and touched Jaemin’s shoulder, moving upward, pressing his fingers into the tender muscle of his neck. “Are you awake?” 

 

Jaemin’s throat bobbed. “Yes.” 

 

Donghyuck pushed off the silk and leaned closer. “Do you want to smoke?” 

 

Jaemin blinked a few times. “No.” 

 

“Do you only speak in one-word fucking answers?” Donghyuck asked; he sounded so much like a nagging wife sometimes. A crass one. 

 

Jaemin smiled. “Can you get me a beer?” 

 

Donghyuck’s breathing became shallow—and he obeyed, pulling a bottle forth. It was still cold, the amber glass wet with quivering droplets. 

 

“Do you want me to open it?” Donghyuck offered. Jaemin nodded. 

 

So, Donghyuck placed the cap between his teeth and removed it, spitting it out into the grass. 

 

“Do you do that trick for everyone?” Jaemin questioned, his hand resting on the side of Donghyuck’s thigh. 

 

“Just for you,” he answered.

 

Jaemin held the beer in his hand, twirling it slowly around. Donghyuck moved closer. “Do you need help drinking it, too?” 

 

“Yes,” Jaemin said, almost tauntingly. “I’m so helpless.” 

 

Donghyuck took the beer from his hand and sipped a mouthful, not swallowing, holding it between his cheeks before leaning down and wrapping his hand around Jaemin’s jaw, spouting the liquid through his parted mouth. 

 

Perhaps it was the presence of the sea, or the flood of sunlight, but Jaemin shoved his tongue in Donghyuck’s mouth, and kissed him as if being revived from a terrible thirst. 

 

Their mouths crashed together so vehemently, like the current of a storm tide—the flood and ebb of tongues and spit and digging hands. 

 

Donghyuck got on top, planted his knees on either side of Jaemin’s waist, and kissed his throat, licking dried salt water from his pulse. 

 

/

 

It wasn’t even that dramatic, in the end.

 

Jaemin had started the baccarat ring half out of boredom, half out of spite. The astronomy dome was always open late, poorly monitored, and filled with objects that gleamed. The cards were vintage. The lighting was romantic. The thrill wasn’t the money—though some students bet real amounts,—it was being watched. Being adored. Reigning like a fallen angel under artificial stars.

 

They played on Friday nights. Two rounds, sometimes three.

 

The game got out of hand when a junior in business analytics lost a family heirloom ring and tried to steal it back from another player’s dorm. The headmaster was alerted. Suddenly there were names, receipts, printouts, and accusations. Jaemin was front and center, photographed holding a champagne glass beside the cards. There was a bruise on his temple from bumping into a telescope and a nosebleed drying along his collar. He looked criminal and expensive.

 

His parents were summoned. He was suspended for the rest of the term and through summer.

 

/

 

The campus corner shop on always smelled of wilted carnations and over-ripe nectarines—spring tiredness pressed into air-conditioned gloom. Donghyuck stopped there most afternoons to buy licorice and expensive bottled water.

 

On that particular day, the magazine rack glinted like a broken tooth. A tabloid, cheap and glossy, sat crooked behind crossword pamphlets. BANK HEIR KICKED FROM CLIFF-TOP COLLEGE screamed the headline in lacquer-red letters; below it, a grainy photo caught Jaemin sideways in the astronomy dome doorway—hair tousled, collar skewed, a smudge of dried blood under one nostril as if a painter had signed him in iron.

 

Time hiccupped.

 

The humming fridge, the plastic bead curtain at the entrance, the cashier tapping her phone—all of it retreated like scenery in a toy theater. Only the magazine remained, warm from the sun, unsubtle as a confession.

 

Donghyuck touched the page. Paper thin and greasy, it gave under his thumb the way Jaemin’s pulse did when he pressed there, soft and disbelieving after a kiss.

 

“He’s not real,” Donghyuck thought, irrationally. He’s so unbelievably stupid. He’s pulp and ink and somebody else’s adjective.

 

He scanned the blaring sub-text:

 

“Underground baccarat ring—clandestine soirées—disciplinary exile until further notice.”

 

No mention of nosebleeds. No mention of how Jaemin sucked on cherry pits when he was nervous or left toothpaste constellations in the sink. Just scandal-syntax and a blurry flash of those prowling eyes.

 

Donghyuck paid for the magazine, licorice forgotten. The cashier said something polite; he answered in a tongue that tasted like cotton in his mouth. Outside, afternoon heat slapped him—salt wind carrying gull-cries that sounded almost like laughter.

 

He walked to the sea wall, tore the pages out one by one, and read them carefully before folding them smaller and smaller, origami-precise: first into squares, then strips, then a single tight knot he could hide in his fist. The ink bled faintly onto his palm—cheap dye, bright as a cut.

 

A thought landed, feather-light and terrible:

 

Of course he’d turn his own disaster into a stage and forget to reserve a seat for me.

 

The knot sat pulsing in his hand. Donghyuck watched a fishing boat nose through pewter waves and realized the tide was higher than he’d ever seen it. He wondered if Jaemin, wherever he’d been banished—some ancestral villa, probably, with sun-sick marble floors—was looking at a different shoreline and feeling anything like this hollow, sugary fear.

 

Eventually he pocketed the ink-stained pulp, bought another licorice whip out of spite, and started back toward Solange.

 

/

 

The memory of him, the bright, stupid ornateness of him, infected Donghyuck’s hard-walled heart. He couldn’t shake it. His desire for him had been so pure, like a smudgy gel pen smile. He was the only person he ever wanted whom he didn’t immediately want to destroy. This confused Donghyuck, in a way he both never wanted to consider and could not stop thinking about. 

 

/

 

Weeks turned into months.

 

/

 

Like high-tide and flash floods, Jaemin came back just after fall midterms, three weeks into the new semester.

 

No one warned Donghyuck. He walked into the dining hall and there he was—lanky in a grey turtleneck, hair grown slightly too long, flipping through a French magazine like he’d never left. His suitcase sat by his feet, tagged with business-class stickers. He looked impossibly well-rested.

 

Their eyes met across the room. Jaemin smiled like the carnivore he was.

 

He sat beside Donghyuck without a word.

 

After a minute, he asked, “Did you miss me?”

 

Donghyuck poured water into his glass. “You look like a cult leader.”

 

Jaemin grinned, grinned, grinned. “Is that a yes?”

Notes:

I always enjoy divulging in upper-echelon nahyuck and boarding school-isms. this is a fucking smorgasbord. (⁎⁍̴̆Ɛ⁍̴̆⁎) please enjoy <3 the nation has never been stronger!

twt + revo