Recipe for Disaster [2/2]
I.
Kyungsoo has never been one for believing in romantic dramas, but at that moment in time, he thought that maybe, just perhaps, he could go on like this for a while more. Anything to see Jongin’s face lighting up day after day and chasing away the doubt and exhaustion that clouded his young face and added years to his age.
But every night, when he had to return home, to Joonmyun, he would be faced by a completely different emotion. The familiar warmth of Joonmyun’s embrace and the smell of the cologne that he always wore even though Kyungsoo found it a little too harsh as a scent were constants in his life and he wasn’t willing to give up on that either.
Kyungsoo has never been good at making decisions. And now, he found himself trying desperately to strike a balance between two polar opposites.
♨♨
“Who… Is Joonmyun. To you.”
Kyungsoo’s hands paused, hovering over the dish he was preparing, spices caught between his fingers before tumbling down unceremoniously into the stew that simmered slowly.
“Joonmyun is,” Kyungsoo swallowed. “Joonmyun is idiotic. Mischievous, stupid.”
“Joonmyun is kind and trustworthy. Joonmyun is forgiving, understanding, and loving. Joonmyun is comfort. Joonmyun is my pillar. My oasis. My home.”
“Do you really think that he’s that great?” Jongin asked breezily, but Kyungsoo could hear the fragile quality in his tone. “Do you think that maybe anyone would be willing to leave their paradise for a barren desert that holds no promises?” He proceeded to ask.
He had followed Kyungsoo home the following morning, and Kyungsoo hadn’t had the heart to tell him not to. Not when he looked so fragile, like he would shatter into a thousand pieces at the slightest thing. And Kyungsoo was terrified, because he didn’t know how to pick up the pieces when he was broken beyond repair. And now, he found himself choosing his words carefully.
“I don’t know,” Kyungsoo said honestly, and he could see Jongin visibly deflate from the corner of his eye. He bit down on his lower lip and filled a bowl with the stew before setting it down in front of Jongin.
They ate in silence, cutlery clinking softly against their teeth and their bowls.
Jongin left before Joonmyun came home, and Kyungsoo refilled Jongin’s bowl before placing it down in front of Joonmyun when he had taken his seat.
♨♨
Kyungsoo stared at his phone like it was going to explode when it rang and the caller ID read ‘sexy chef<3’. He didn’t remember ever entering in Jongin’s phone number but he remembered handing it over to Jongin’s manager without a second thought before the filming started. Jongin must’ve somehow gotten to it before it was handed back to him.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Kyungsoo’s eyes fixed on Joonmyun, who strode towards him and wound an arm around his waist. He quickly rejected the call to hide the screen from Joonmyun, who only frowned a little, eyebrows tugging down as he stared at the phone that Kyungsoo had shoved into his pocket.
He placed a hand over Kyungsoo’s fidgety one to stop him from nervously drumming his fingers onto the countertop. “I know what’s going on,” he said solemnly, looking Kyungsoo in the eye and giving the younger male a heart attack.
Kyungsoo stared back at him. All of a sudden, he really wanted to pull his hand out from under Joonmyun’s grasp. His hand felt like a cage and Kyungsoo had to fight the urge to wipe his sweaty hands on the side of his jeans. “You do?” He barely managed to squeak, and Joonmyun sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and his forefinger.
“You didn’t really have to go this far,” Joonmyun continued, looking Kyungsoo in the eye, a slow grin stretching across his face.
His words didn’t fit his expression and Kyungsoo looked at him in confusion, mind racing to keep up with the situation and heart simply just racing from sheer terror.
“You invited him over because you wanted to make kimchi spaghetti for my birthday, didn’t you? And because you needed a professional opinion, right? I’m touched, really,” Joonmyun’s eyes crinkled into crescents and Kyungsoo let out the breath that he didn’t even realise that he was holding. “And that night when you didn’t come back home? You were with him again, weren’t you?”
His phone vibrated in his pocket once more, and he quickly silenced it while Joonmyun continued on to ramble on about kimchi spaghetti and how touched he was. He had to end this. He was only lucky that Joonmyun was out on business last night and hadn’t known that he hadn’t come home. He couldn’t let it go on forever.
♨♨
“We have to stop this,” Kyungsoo blurted out when Jongin was in the middle of planning an outing to the new winery nearby. It would be nice to have some red-wine steak at your house, he had been saying. Jongin paused mid-sentence, smile stretched falsely across his face.
“Stop what?” He asked, eyes betraying the fact that he knew what Kyungsoo was talking about. He had suspected it, expected it, even, when he had gone over to Kyungsoo’s house the previous week. He had seen the relationship between Joonmyun and the man in front of him. He had seen, and he had noticed the bond that connected them in the way that he could only hope for them to be. He could tell that in the end, when Kyungsoo was being forced to choose, he would dump Kim Jongin like a hot potato and stick to Kim Joonmyun like glue.
Kyungsoo squeezed his eyes shut, taking in a shuddering breath. He had spent the past two days pondering over this. And yet, no matter how much he thought of Jongin, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He couldn’t be the selfless man that Jongin was. He was a selfish man, and he hated himself for it.
“Don’t,” Jongin said suddenly. His eyes were wide with a mixture of what Kyungsoo recognized as fear and heartache and doubt and an entire ocean of feelings wrapped in a film of moisture. His hands were shaking were they had paused mid-gesture, and his breathing was uneven.
It wasn’t fair, Kyungsoo thought, for someone who has experienced so much to have to be broken all over again. But Kyungsoo has never been a very selfless person, and Jongin could see the truth reflected in his eyes, where apologies were mixed with sorrow. And he returned that with one of his own that spoke volumes of the heart pierced with hurt within him.
Kyungsoo left the apartment, not wanting to look back and suffer a second longer under that heart breaking gaze. Jongin stayed silent as Kyungsoo left, so he decided to say the one thing that had to be on Jongin’s mind.
“It just isn’t fair,” he whispered, voice cracking on the last word that escaped his lips and tumbled to the ground, trodden on and forgotten by the rest of the world as quickly as it had arrived.
♨♨
Joonmyun’s birthday passed without much ceremony. It pained Kyungsoo to even think of cooking the one thing that had brought him to know Jongin in the first place, but it had to happen, if he wanted to keep Joonmyun from speculating.
His heart wasn’t in it, and it showed in his cooking. Poor Joonmyun had to suffer through a large helping of soggy kimchi spaghetti, although the older chalked it up to Kyungsoo’s inexperience.
There were one or two attempts at conversation, those Kyungsoo remembers. Joonmyun looking up from his plate and grinning widely at Kyungsoo with a mouthful of food, and Kyungsoo giving a pathetic excuse for a smile in return.
A frown weighed at the corners of his mouth and he didn’t understand why it would hurt this much for him to leave someone who he had only met three weeks earlier.
At first, he had contemplated changing his phone number when Jongin called the days after. He deleted the contact, and an unlisted number showed up every time the phone rang. But Kyungsoo knew that it was Jongin. Who else would call him other than Jongin?
Over time, the calls simply just stopped, and the device that had been so full of life for the past three weeks seemed to have dropped dead like a corpse. Cold. Unfeeling. Waiting for nothing and everything to happen.
Come to think of it, Joonmyun never called him. It was always he who sought out the other first.
The way that Jongin reached out to Kyungsoo reminded him so much of how he clung to Joonmyun. Maybe, he reasoned, that was why he had taken a liking to Jongin: because the younger male was so much like him.
But even he himself knew that he was just trying to give himself an excuse.
♨♨
It didn’t take long for the news to reach Kyungsoo’s ears.
He had taken extra care to avoid all things related to Kim Jongin. Their cable television no longer had the cooking channels since Kyungsoo promptly telephoned the service to cancel all those channels the day after Joonmyun’s birthday. He had donated the signed cookbook to a secondhand bookstore the week after and he buried himself in housework, cleaning the already immaculate living room and repeatedly dusting the spotless tabletops.
But fate seemed to be unwilling to let go of the cruel game that it was playing and it arranged for Kyungsoo to catch sight of Jongin when he had visited the supermarket for the third time that week - he had taken to buying the bare minimum and hurrying to the supermarket a few times each week just for the sake of something to do.
He had stayed hidden behind a shelf of stiff packs of spaghetti, peering around the corner as he watched Jongin fill a trolley with packages of those frozen dinners and disposable utensils. At that moment, he really wanted to walk up to the boy and put everything back on the shelves.
“You shouldn’t be eating these,” he would say. “They’re not good for you.”
But Kyungsoo is a selfish man and he thinks of himself before others. And so, he stayed hidden behind the racks, watching Jongin’s listless movements as he continued to swipe the frozen dinners from the shelves into his trolley before plodding down the aisle to the cashier.
From then on, Kyungsoo switched to a different supermarket, ignoring Joonmyun’s complaints of the supermarket not stocking his favourite miso paste.
So it seemed unlikely, and even cruel, that Kyungsoo would once again hear about Kim Jongin, nine months after they had lost contact with each other.
Normally, Kyungsoo found happiness in reading the newspaper. Even though it spoke of troubles that were a cause for worry, Kyungsoo still found a little delight in being able to escape his own world, even if just for a moment.
But that morning, Kyungsoo found himself staring in disbelief at the small article at the lower right hand corner of the newspaper. He trails his ink-stained fingers down the thin pulpy material to rest on the article. Then, he tears out the article and pockets it before heading out of the door.
♨♨
Kyungsoo hadn’t thought of what to say on his way there, and it was only when his back was pressed against the wooden door that he regretted not doing so earlier.
The article was in his pocket, already creased and falling apart from the numerous times that he had folded it and unfolded it on his way here.
As he approached the sleek apartment building where Jongin stayed, Kyungsoo caught a glimpse of someone who looked strangely similar to Joonmyun hurry down the block and disappear round the corner. He shuddered and turned his gaze upon the flight of stairs in front of him. It must have been the stress and the anxiety that has been causing him to hallucinate.
The light tapping of his knuckles against the polished wooden door echoed softly in the still air, and Kyungsoo shifted his weight from one foot to another, teeth scraping down on his lower lip, the flesh already raw and bloody from repeated abuse throughout the entire journey here.
He didn’t hear any footsteps, any sign of Jongin walking up to the door, so when the heavy door was pulled back suddenly by a pair of frail, pale hands, Kyungsoo started and took a small step back.
He found himself looking back into the eyes of a man who he didn’t recognize.
“Who’re you?” He asked, eyes wide and darting around as he tried desperately to peer behind him into the dark hallway. “Where’s Jongin?”
“Jongin?” The man croaked, the waxy skin around his eyes sagged terribly, but Kyungsoo couldn’t help but feel a little familiarity in the man’s voice. “I once was that man,” he laughed bitterly. “But not anymore. Jongin has moved on and away. My name is Kai.”
Kyungsoo hadn’t even realised that his hands had been shaking until he brought the article to his face and re-read the headline and the italicized sub-heading beneath it.
Man found unconscious in apartment due to drug overdose
Local celebrity chef Kim Jongin discharged from hospital almost immediately after being admitted
The article talked about how Jongin had managed to pull through safely, and had talked about his strange and violent behaviour in demanding to be discharged from the hospital the moment he had awoken from the operation.
But nothing had ever been said about how small he had become. The article never said anything about how empty his eyes were, and the article never said anything about how much of an empty shell the once lively man is now.
Kyungsoo wasn’t prepared for it. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, really. Maybe a slightly thinner Jongin, but nothing quite like this. He didn’t know what to make out of the man who now stood before him, swaying gently on the steps as if the slightest breeze could push him over.
So he dropped his gaze and wound an arm around Jongin’s waist, allowing the younger man to sigh and lean fully against him while he walked into the apartment, one small step at a time.
As he led Jongin to the couch, he was painfully aware of how small the man had become. Once a tall, strapping young lad, he now walked with stooped shoulders, giving him only a few centimeters over Kyungsoo. Kyungsoo could hardly believe that Jongin used to tower over him, and yearned for those days, when Jongin was healthy and strong, and not the frighteningly wasted soul he is now.
Kyungsoo crouched down before Jongin and took his painfully thin wrist, once lined with muscles and shaded a lovely light brown, and clasped it between his own hands. “Jongin, I-”
“Kai,” he corrected, voice low and gravelly, void of the childish lilt that had once tinged it. He pulled his pale hand out of Kyungsoo’s grasp and rested his hand at his side.
“Kai.” Kyungsoo repeated, taking in Jongin with sad eyes.
He watched as Jongin frowned hard at his hands and then reached for the coffee table. This man. This man is not the person that Kyungsoo knew.
“What happened to you?” Kyungsoo whispered.
Jongin’s lips stretched into a wan smile just as his fingers closed around a porcelain cup. He lifted it to his lips and took a long sip.
“I fell in love.”
Kyungsoo’s hands began to tremble again, and he looked away, unwilling to meet Jongin’s gaze.
“I fell in love with a man named Kyungsoo,” he explained with a sigh. “It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life, letting him in when I knew so well that it wasn’t going to end well. The fact that he was already attached to someone was a bad enough. But the fact that the someone that he was attached to had actually paid me to seduce him was even worse. I thought that it was going to be easy money, especially when I needed to prove to my parents that I was actually making more than I was.”
Kyungsoo fell back onto the cold floor in a daze.
“At first, he seemed pretty easy prey. But after a while, I wondered whether maybe I had gotten it wrong, and whether I was the victim instead. That was when I started to falter, and things fell apart. I ended up letting him know me. I should have never let him know me. But I couldn’t stay away. How do you stay away from the one person who actually knows you when no one else does?”
Jongin set his floral-patterned cup back on the table with an unceremonious crash, as if the cup were too heavy for him to even lift.
“And things… things went out of control,” Jongin licked his cracked lips and took in a shuddering breath.
“When he finally broke things off, I thought that, maybe it was for the best. For him. And for me. But it didn’t feel like the best. I felt terrible,” his voice cracked as he spoke his last word and he retreated into silence.
Kyungsoo’s arms were wound around his head, his knees curled up to his chest. Let everything go away. Let everything be forgotten. Let-
A cheerful ringtone pierced the air, and Kyungsoo blinked hard. He tried to read the blurred name on the screen through tears after he pulled it out of his back pocket and silenced it the moment he read the words ‘Joonmyun’.
He stood up slowly, staring right into Jongin’s eyes as his knees trembled.
“Jongin, who was that someone you were talking about?”
Jongin let out a harsh bark, bitterness etched into the syllables that came next.
“Who do you think it was, Do Kyungsoo?”
“It can’t be him,” Kyungsoo said softly. Or can it? Not Joonmyun, who was his pillar of safety.
“Of course it was Kim Joonmyun. Even the most faithful lover can waver at times, no?”
♨♨
He had rehearsed the moment at least fifty times in his head, but when it came to the crunch, he found that he couldn’t follow the carefully planned script in his mind.
“Tough day?” Joonmyun had asked, looking up from his books and taking in Kyungsoo’s swollen eyes and red nose.
“You bet,” Kyungsoo replied, a thousand biting remarks fighting for dominance on his tongue but dying out quickly before they could even pass his lips.
“Don’t bother cooking tonight, than,” Joonmyun said, eyes crinkling up at him in a bright smile. “Let’s go out for dinner tonight. My treat.”
“How was the bookstore that you went to earlier today?”
“Nothing much, pretty boring,” Joonmyun replied offhandedly, turning back to his book.
Kyungsoo hung his jacket on the clothing rack by the door. “Ah, as boring as it is to live with me, I guess?”
“What did you say?” Joonmyun asked, eyes still fixed on the paperback in his hands.
“Nothing much,” Kyungsoo said quickly. “Just commenting on how you played with both Jongin and I,” he choked out in a rash display of anger.
He had Joonmyun’s full attention now, he could tell. Was it guilt or desperation that played across his face? Or perhaps confusion at the lies that Jongin had spouted?
Kyungsoo turned around to look and was disappointed by the panic that he saw instead.
“When did it start?”
Joonmyun looked down at the book in his hands, and gently set it aside. “Kyungsoo, I swear I wasn’t really trying to get rid of you. I was just a little-”
“Bored? Suffocated? Annoyed?” Kyungsoo interjected, glaring at him so hard that he thought that he might be getting a headache. “When did it start, Kim Joonmyun?”
“Around Labor Day,” Joonmyun answered in a small voice. “I planted the idea into your head and arranged for you and Jongin to meet.”
“So all those months from then to now have been a lie? Are you even able to look me in the eye and say that you still love me?”
Somehow, he had wished for an outright rejection, one that would justify his anger and hurt. But the way that Joonmyun looked at him right now was even worse.
“Yes, I am.”
Kyungsoo broke the gaze first, and bile rose in his throat. He didn’t know who to be more disgusted at. Joonmyun, for this sick plan, Jongin for being a part of this twisted farce or himself for believing in the complicated lies that had been laid out for him.
He had been too quick to believe, he guessed. Too eager to believe the lies that they fed him.
In a way, he too, was like Joonmyun, a cheater because his feelings for Jongin had been real.
“I’m so sorry, I just had a stupid idea, and I thought that it’d die out and get buried by time. And I thought that we’d be together forever and I swear I swear I swear that I still love you Kyungsoo. Will you please give me a chance? I won’t ever stray from your side again.” Joonmyun had gotten onto his knees and was edging towards Kyungsoo, rubbing his hands together in a plea with eyes that were bright with tears.
“But you lied to me,” Kyungsoo retreated a few small steps.
“And you ruined him,” he continued, retreating a few more steps. “And you broke us apart.”
Joonmyun was shaking his head, but he had at least stopped in his tracks.
“Are you proud, Kim Joonmyun? Are you proud of your handiwork? You’ve succeeded now, let me give you a round of applause.” He clapped once, the crack of sound loud and harsh in the apartment.
“Kyungsoo, please don’t do this,” Joonmyun gasped as Kyungsoo pulled his coat off the rack for the second time that day.
He pulled the starched collar of his shirt tight around his neck and stumbled out of the apartment. “You didn’t think of us when you did all that,” he mumbled in reply, staggering out through the doorway.
“He won’t come back to you,” Joonmyun cried out, following Kyungsoo. “He won’t! He wouldn’t even accept my apology or my money, no matter the amount I offered to him. He said he didn’t need it anymore.”
Kyungsoo’s footsteps slowed and he spun around. “What do you mean by that?”
“He said that he doesn’t need the cash anymore.”
“Fuck.” Kyungsoo swore loudly, and then took off running down the corridor. He was long gone in a cab before Joonmyun even made it out to the streets.
♨♨
“He wouldn't,” Kyungsoo chanted under his breath. “He wouldn’t. Absolutely not.”
He pumped his arms by his side as he raced up five flights of stairs when the elevator refused to come down to the first floor. It was like the world was mocking him. First, the traffic jam that made him alight two blocks away and now this.
The door was wide open when Kyungsoo arrived. Everything stayed unchanged, except for the fact that Jongin was missing.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Kyungsoo groaned, as he checked all the rooms and found them empty.
Jongin was always in need of money. Sure, he came from a wealthy family. But they refused to fund his expenses, and while he was fairly well known, most of the money that he made went into lessons where he was taught how to act like a proper chef on television.
Furthermore, now that Jongin has gotten into drugs, how could he not want the money that Joonmyun had offered?
How could he not need it?
The only logical explanation that came to his mind was fiercely objected and he ran the length of the corridor while calling out to Jongin.
The only thing that stopped him in his tracks was when he finally saw the person he was looking for.
Jongin looked completely at peace, his eyes closed, and his arms spread out to his sides, the wind whipping at his hair as he flashed past Kyungsoo and plunged down the side of the building to the ground below.
He was flying, dancing through the air.
The only logical explanation that came to his mind was fiercely objected and he huddled into a ball at a corner of the corridor, ignoring the strange looks that the neighbours gave him as they walked past.
And ignoring the wailing siren of an ambulance that came far too late.