[entry 15] in dreaming [2/3]
II
LET’S PLAY PRETEND
“Tell us about your Valentine’s Day, Kyungsoo.”
Kyungsoo is actually doing work for once, and lulls. “Piss off.”
“No, seriously. Was it-it-slathered in wet flour, or in the middle of the ice rink at midnight, or in the back of an empty, smoky theatre, with cigarettes and popcorn all over the floor, sticking to your backs, or-“
“Please. I don’t kiss and tell.”
“Fuck and tell,” Baekhyun corrects, and another paper plane marks him in the ear.
“When are you going to settle down, hey, Baek?”
Baekhyun declares openly, his hands splayed across unfinished paperwork. “Whenever. But for now, I choose to live a bachelor’s life. No rush.”
“Your New Year’s Resolution is toast, then.” Junmyeon remarks amusedly, and then ducks to avoid a paper plane flittering towards his eyes. Baekhyun tries to chuckle.
(He may as well. Because of course there’s nobody to share this kind of lifetime with; bare sleep, cappuccinos, work, and the sequence monotonously repeats itself, with no breathing room for a stolen kiss between swathed sheets, glamorously lavish sex in the morning’s stolen moments.)
(Not that he ever wishes for that-not at all.)
(He doesn’t voice this out loud.)
Besides, he’s convinced himself there isn’t enough urgency to actively search for a homosexual life partner.
Although, sometimes when the time is right, at daybreak, the French windows are open and Baekhyun stares out at the wan landscape with cold toast between his teeth. When the time is right, he likes to pretend somebody will dart around the worn couch and snake their arms around his waist, press their lips to the nape of his neck and tell him things about love and forever. Almost like a romance movie on television, Baekhyun thinks to himself, and smacks himself immediately after for doing so-how embarrassingly juvenile, for a twenty three year old man to have the psyche of a love-struck adolescent-idiot.
Junmyeon shrugs. “You’d think that being single and insane would be fun, but there’s something special about sharing your life with somebody, you know.”
“You’re just a romantic.”
“Believe me, Baek. You’ll come running back when you’ve found someone special, and tell me that you’ve found the love of your life. You’ll come and prove yourself wrong, you.”
Baekhyun is sceptical. “Mhm. And, ah, when’s the last time you non-single people went out all night without calling home first, hey? Three thousand years ago or something, right-“
“I’m completely serious, Baek. It’s nice to know there’s somebody thinking of you, always. It’s not a bad investment. Just put some time and effort into meeting, making acquaintances.”
Baekhyun frowns a little. “Look. I have…enough.”
“You haven’t dated for a year.”
“I appreciate being single.”
Kyungsoo scoffs. “Right-and you don’t feel even a little lonely on Saturday nights and Sunday nights when you have nobody to cuddle watching reruns of all twenty six episodes of Stairway to Heaven. Ri-ight.”
“Well, nobody to cuddle means more soju for me.”
Kyungsoo murmurs into his arms settles back down again. “You’re a real unromantic person, you know.”
“I’m not unromantic…I just prefer to be practical. Besides, I’m also twenty-three. There should be more time for me to have fun, and less pressure for me to be tied down, don’t you think?”
Kyungsoo sighs. “Yeah, but if you can find the one here and now, that’s more time you can spend with them. I’d think that’s a lot more pragmatic than fluffing around and experimenting.”
“It’s not experimenting. It’s taking a break from romance, alright, so just lay off.”
“Leave it to fate then. Destiny is usually better than people at love, anyway.” Junmyeon remarks.
“The last time I let the universe decide my future, I found somebody who was just as lonely, and just as clueless, and we know how that turned out.”
Kyungsoo and Junmyeon both stop talking. The former kind of murmurs their apologies into the sleeves of his sweater. He settles his head back down into his arms but not because of a lack of sleep.
Baekhyun holds up his hands. “Look, if I do meet someone-and I’m not saying anything will happen, anytime soon-you guys will be the first to know. Fair?”
They both agree half-heartedly. “Fair.”
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.
.
On the way home, Baekhyun takes to sleeping end to end on the train line. He stands poised for a fall, weighted on the handle of his tall umbrella, and perfectly prepared to pass out on his two feet, if he must, he’ll twiddle his thumbs subconsciously rather than consciously.
“Sir, sir?”
Baekhyun opens an eye to look. It closes again as he scoffs.
“You’d prefer to do another trick, maybe with a spoon this time? Oh, hold on, just take my wallet, that’ll probably save us ten minutes, get the process moving a little faster.”
The street magician, the tall man, his chuckle oscillates deep in his throat. “Not quite.” He shuffles closer to the door to make more room. Baekhyun rigidly stows away his umbrella and briefcase, and leans against the train door, intending to Jamiroquai his journey home in peace, but he’s interrupted.
“Long day?”
“Mm. Something like that.”
The street magician nods and adjusts his little paperboy news cap, poised jauntily in his brown tufts of hair like a quotidian crown. It should look a stupid wearing a hat on a subway, Baekhyun thinks to
himself, so he’s annoyed at himself when he realizes how quirkily regal it looks in comparison to his own grey three piece and gelled back mop. He folds his arms over his chest and curls his lip again.
The tall man asks suddenly, “So, you’re a businessman, hey?” He’s nodding in comprehension of an answer he hasn’t yet heard.
Baekhyun scoffs. “Yeah. Of course you’d know that, wouldn’t you?”
“Pardon?”
“I thought con men target their victims based on how rich they are, and jobs and shit. You should know everything you need to know, then.”
The tall man chuckles a little. “That’s true. I can read you like a paperback novel. I can tell you ten things about you from your posture right now; the slouch, the crossed arms, the legs apart. Child’s play, body language 101, my friend.” The tall man asserts. Baekhyun isn’t sure to be offended or attracted in some demonic, weird way that shouldn’t be happening. Maybe it’s in the way he talks, something huskily voiced and tone finely ground, smoothly floating along the phrases as they slither from his lips.
“I’m…closed.” Baekhyun defends his pages weakly, and nearly slaps himself because he feels like he’s being played into acting inadvertently coy.
Somehow the tall man still manages to grin through his teeth and Baekhyun has to grit his a little to stop. Baekhyun says, “You know what, all right, if you think you’re so great. Tell me what you’ve observed, go on. Go on, Sherlock, profile me.”
Sherlock grins. “Nah, nah, that’s too easy. I’d make a fool out of you.”
“And you haven’t already? Two hundred people saw you pickpocket my wallet from me, which by the way, thank you for that spectacularly humiliating experience.”
“Yeah, it felt pretty spectacular.”
“You’re kind of a bastard, you know.” He puts the earphones in his ears in an attempt to drown his companion out, but the tall man leans down to look into his eyes. Those goddamn eyes; they can speak for themselves.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Then stop staring.”
“I’m not. Don’t flatter yourself.”
“You like annoying people on the subway? I feel sorry for this carriage’s regular commuters.”
“No, I actually never take this subway. Today we were just drawn here by fate, that’s all.”
“Fate, huh.”
“Yeah, fate-you sound kind of sceptical.”
“You’re not kidding?”
“Why would I be? Fate is serious shit, sir.”
“You don’t really believe in that stuff, right?”
“That stuff? ‘Magic’? Well, why the hell not? If newspapers can tell my future and I can make magic out of smoke, then fuck, yes.”
“That hocus-pocus, horoscope destiny, quasi-Disney, true love’s magic shit? Please. You’re a magician; you know it’s all just glitter and lying.”
“So what?”
“So…you’re lying. To yourself. All the time. Fate, destiny, love, that kind of stuff doesn’t really exist.”
“Lying is an essential part of life, not just magic. But it doesn’t have to intervene with my 5:15 magic show if it doesn’t have to. I can believe it if I want.”
Baekhyun reels back, his train of thought disrupted. “Wow.”
“What?”
“No, nothing…just what kind of magician says that?”
The magician shrugs. “Me. Park Chanyeol. I’m twenty-three. I’m a cat person. I like the color black and being awake after 3AM. I like cream cappuccinos and the smell of new plastic bags. Being caught in the rain and making origami animals. Playing guitar.”
Chanyeol exhales sharply, smiling.
“Hi.”
It catches him by surprise, that Chanyeol’s smart, fast words strung together, actually sound genuine.
And suddenly Baekhyun wants to know more.
So Baekhyun asks again, and the action becomes less and less reluctant after every question, putting pieces of Park Chanyeol, 23, together like a wayward and nonlinear jigsaw: Park Chanyeol-born 1991, somewhere. Liked a girl, loved a boy, sometime. Listens to some days Jazzyfact, some days American folk and the Beatles. Dreams of conquering space, some nights. On the hour long ride from end to end, the answers meld together into some lopsided, fragmented figure of a soul, lost in the barring boundaries of 6:00 metaphysics, the in-between black hour-too late to start something, too early to call it a day.
Chanyeol, he finds, can talk and talk and talk. Baekhyun just listens.
On the hour ride, he finds himself caught in Chanyeol’s paradox hurricane of pretty syllables and pretty epigrams and beauty for the sake of beautiful things but none of it makes any sense right now.
Chanyeol talks about life like it’s a faraway concept he’s analysed from the clouds, maybe from the untouchable where in the universe they are in his reality. Like Chanyeol’s in his own little world. But then he’ll touch reality again, pulled back down by gravity. And Chanyeol talks about crooked forks and quasi-realistic rabbits like they’re quotidian. Children love it when he pretends that wonder isn’t just found in top hats and disappearing boxes-he can find it in the cracks and crevices of boring and mundane and everyday, everywhere Seoul, even if it’s never really there in the first place. Chanyeol tells him it’s nicer to pretend, prettier in real life-‘real’ life-maybe to see those kids smile, or something fucking cheesy like that, he grins readily.
Baekhyun murmurs. “You’re interesting.”
Chanyeol laughs. “What makes you say that?”
“The way you talk. The way you talk about the world. I’ve never heard anything like it. You think it’s all beautiful and stupid and mundane all at once. I can’t imagine it being anything but boring.”
Chanyeol smiles a little but doesn’t say anything further.
The train is a few stops away from the end; it’s just shy of seven. Chanyeol shifts his feet. “Where are you headed now?”
“Home, I guess.”
“Hey, I know this bar. We could go together, if you’d like. If you’ve got nothing better to do.”
“Together?”
“Yeah.”
Baekhyun hesitates and Chanyeol notices. “Not feeling it?” He asks, leaning in forward, only a little but still enough.
“Not that.”
“Uncomfortable?”
“Hesitant.”
“Why?”
Baekhyun murmurs as he leans back into the door, perhaps out of sheepishness. “Because- basically-we’re going to go out now, aren’t we.”
Chanyeol is taller, by nearly a head, lingers over Baekhyun’s slighter frame pressed against the doorframe, cold through his coat. The latter feels himself claustrophobic between Chanyeol’s chest and the doors of the train as it flies past an insipid Meokgeol, a dully sparkling Junghwa, Sangbong, Myeon-fuck it all, he’s only looking in the one direction anyway.
Chanyeol’s smiling a little lopsided, one hand behind his back, the other resting on the frame above them, and just leaning in so there’s enough space between them to be acquaintances and far too little to be just friendly. One polar to the other, his smile darts and plays between flirty, capriciously mischievous, but both are kind of the same.
“Well-basically? Yeah, we are. Hope you don’t have any problems with that.”
Baekhyun just stares right back up into him, controlling his tone so words don’t slip out too spirited, “I don’t have a problem with that.”
“Well, good, because neither do I.”
.
.
.
The bar is laden with musky air, in it hangs an imbalance of chemicals, as if the patrons breathe in vodka around here, the nitrogen is just there to glitter, an embellishment-it’s a bar, granted, but most bars enshroud themselves in the enigmatic, in slurs of saxophones riffs and the huskiness of men and people who smoke too many cigars.
“Grey goose.” Chanyeol tells the bartender, then turns to Baekhyun. “You?”
“Same, thanks.”
“My shout-if I can show you a trick.”
Chanyeol grins and Baekhyun shrugs and agrees. The magician leans across the bar and asks for a beer bottle, drunk empty and wiped clean. It skitters across the surfaces of the bench and taking it, he turns the shape over in his palms, perceptive.
“Watch carefully. You tell me how this trick is done, it’s my place. If you can’t, it’s yours.”
“Knew there would be a wager.”
Chanyeol grins. “See, we already know each other so well. So, can I borrow your phone?”
“Sure.”
Chanyeol takes it in his hand and inputs his number into it.
Baekhyun scoffs. “That’s a fantastic pick up line. ‘Can I borrow your phone?’ I thought you’d put more effort into getting my number than that.”
The magician smirks. “Look, I have a feeling I’m going to need it.”
And he pushes the phone through the glass. It rattles around in its transparent cage, between
Baekhyun’s bewilderment and Chanyeol’s smooth fingers hitting ‘dial’ to his number, to the pulsing of farewell review discordant against the glass, alerting him to a new call from a strange number.
“That doesn’t happen to be your ringtone, does it?” Chanyeol muses. “Funny, seems like somebody’s trying to call you. It would be a shame if the caller was tall, handsome, enigmatic and you missed out the chance knowing somebody like that.”
Baekhyun murmurs in wonderment, as the bottle vibrates. “Shame.”
Chanyeol laughs. “Any questions?”
“Yeah. How the-actual fuck-did you do that?”
“We don’t reveal the tricks of the trade, us entertainers. It wouldn’t be entertainment any longer if we did.”
“Can I get my phone back, though?”
“If you tell me your name.”
Baekhyun just laughs and tips his head forward into his drink.
Chanyeol shrugs and smirks. “It’s fair game. I’ve told you my entire life story and I don’t know a thing about you.”
“Maybe you can profile it off me, like you tried last time. You were so confident.”
“Still am.”
“Try me.”
Chanyeol cracks his knuckles charmingly, and takes a large swig of the bottle. “You like jazz music.”
“Lucky guess.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson. You were humming something before, that’s all.”
“That doesn’t prove shit.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you look like a jazz person. Maybe not a Jazzyfact person, but jazz barrelhouse, acid jazz, Dixieland person, maybe. Maybe it was the suit.” Chanyeol drinks and deduces again. “Do you own a cat?”
“No.”
“Are you a cat person?”
“Yeah.”
Chanyeol grins, picks up his bottle and swallows, without breaking eye contact. He’s taken off his coat too, underneath Baekhyun has correctly deduced too; he has long thin arms so delicate they nearly shimmer with fragility, as if they might break. His collarbones are long and contoured against a lean frame, prominent even through the opacity of a black button-down. Maybe he has no home, maybe he’s from a place unknown, somewhere far and foreign. That he can’t calculate from a tattered coat, blue bruises on cheekbones, stars in eyes and spirit. Then Chanyeol studies his face, searching the nooks of his eyes, creases in his mouth, contours in his bones, for something. He mustn’t have found anything.
“You’re kind of lonely, aren’t you.”
Baekhyun’s bottle stops halfway to his mouth, but he drinks steadily anyway. “A little. Yeah, lonely.”
“No one special in your life, then.”
“Not anymore. We went our separate ways.”
“Idiot. That girl must’ve been an idiot.”
“That guy.”
“Hm?”
“It was a guy. And he wasn’t an idiot, but I was.”
“Oh.”
Baekhyun shakes his head. “Next question.”
“Alright.” Chanyeol jumps to it. “You kind of want somebody.”
“Yeah…I guess.”
Chanyeol smiles a little, and Baekhyun sees him shift closer along the bar, towards him. “Somebody wants you too.”
Despite himself Baekhyun laughs. “Is that right?”
“Definitely. And you kind of want that somebody to hold you, and sleep beside you, and be there for you when you wake up.”
Baekhyun stares. Then he looks down into his glass. “Bang. Bullseye. A fucking lucky guess.”
Chanyeol leans in close, trapping him one hand either side of his hips against the bar. His smile is darting between the shuffling of raw heels on the bar floor and fucking Saturn, still managing to seem genuine. “Call it luck, or call it…you know, magic.”
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III
ALWAYS AWAKE
Baekhyun wakes to breathing in foreign peppermint, maybe cigarette ash and midnight-old grey goose too. It’s an amalgam of sweet and bitterness, between white linens wrinkled from a three am, too ambitious endeavour.
They had both been shitfaced out of their minds leaving the bar, holding each other by the fingers and stumbling down the isolated road, it had been his place after all. Chanyeol is bipolar under the flow of grey goose, a terrifying combination of two parts happy, one aggravated drunk, he finds. One minute he laughs his ass off at some pigeons, flocking to a fire hydrant (“Look at the grey birds together- they look so happy, boy bird and girl bird…maybe they’ll fuck-“), the next Baekhyun has to stop him desecrating a car he walks into with his broken bottle. (“Y-you clumsy dipshit! Can’t you watch where you’re going?”)
They’re both off their heads, though, and it’s at that ephemeral in-between hour too late to sleep, too early to waste away the stars, drafted in the constellations and creases in the mattress, between halfway dreaming and horny as shit.
Once they’ve stumbled up the darkened stairway, Baekhyun pushes him against the doorframe and attacks his neck with furious kisses that stream under his collar, between his buttons. His goosed tunnel vision paints the room ten times wider, dizzy, in technicolour that assembles in uneven asymmetry, shapes. Everything in the dimension is intangible; nothing feels otherwise except some foreign lips making into the spaces between buttons, working their way to his belt buckle.
Baekhyun doesn’t really remember what happened after that. He just knows that, the morning after, his gelled hair has stiffened, his white Sunday shirt is crinkled and missing buttons, splayed open, and the buckles have come off his trouser belt. Then he looks over at the sleeping figure, coatless, shirtless, soundless, breathing steadily in and out, lying next to him on the mattress. The white linens rise and fall with his quiet heaving. He looks a little too thin, Baekhyun thinks to himself; it’s more noticeable when escaped of the dim pulse of bar fluorescence. He can trace an entire silhouette from where Chanyeol’s rib bones jut and stretch his skin. Perhaps that’s what the quotidian of grey goose and pretzels from the bakery and handfuls of sleeping pills do to you.
Chanyeol murmurs in his sleep, rolls over. Baekhyun gently fits the white sheets over his bare torso and rolls noiselessly out of bed. He makes green tea in one cup, pauses and makes another cup after a moment’s thought, leaving it for his guest. Leaning against the kitchen counter, cold marble contacts his bare skin through his shirt, lips on the cup rim and he’s thinking, hard.
Did they fuck, or did they just do the anything-but? No amount of antioxidants can undo alcohol, that’s what he knows now. Perhaps they’d just been dreaming together, something strange and weird and wonderful. Perhaps they’d leapt into that spur of the moment spontaneity that Baekhyun had never fully embraced, only if for a night.
He hears a scuffling from inside the bedroom and soon a bedraggled, wayward Chanyeol slithers from the sheets into the kitchen, well lit with the daylight luminescence. “Ouch. That’s bright.”
“Morning.”
Chanyeol releases a gentle kind of chuckle. “Hey, good morning.”
“Here’s green tea.”
“Thank you.”
They both stand in the kitchen, taking it in turns filling the silence with sipping.
Baekhyun bursts out laughing. Chanyeol is confused.
“I’m sorry. It’s not you. It’s just…well, yes, it’s you. But it’s me too. It’s us, together, doing this, like this. You’re a stranger. I don’t know you. You don’t know me. We don’t know each other and we just got out of bed together, drinking tea in my kitchen together. This is…” Baekhyun lifts his free hand and drops it again, “…weird.”
Chanyeol’s perplexity fades and at least he laughs too. “You must be new here.”
“New?”
“You’re a good boy, right? I’m not. That’s all I’m saying.”
Baekhyun splutters into his tea. “I’m not…good.”
Chanyeol chuckles and washes up his mug in the sink. “Okay, sure.”
“Sure what?”
“Sure nothing.”
“I hope you know you do that a lot.”
“That?”
“Avoiding answers. You’re not straight.”
“You’re right. I’m gay.”
Baekhyun automatically laughs and shuts himself up immediately after. “Like that! Do you have to be on all the time?”
“I have an off switch. I don’t use it a lot, though.”
“It’d be refreshing if you would.”
“It can only be triggered by a lack of sleep, and alcohol, and the love bug, maybe-otherwise, sorry. I’m a complete dickhead most of the time.”
“All of the time, that’s what I’ve seen. One half dickhead, other half bastard. Park Chanyeol. A great glob of crazy.”
Chanyeol’s smile is almost genuinely apologetic. He dries his hands off on the washcloth. “You have my number, so, this crazy is going to get out of your way now. Thanks for the tea. And for whatever happened last night.”
Baekhyun murmurs into his cup. “About that…so.”
“About last night?”
“Yeah. We didn’t…you know. We didn’t, did we?”
“What, fuck?”
“Tasteful. Yeah. We didn’t fuck, did we?”
Chanyeol rests his hands in his pockets. “No, I think we just fell asleep together. Nothing too crazy. But if we did, you know, you’d remember it, for sure.”
“Oh. Well then.”
Chanyeol smiles and says, “I have to leave. But anytime.” He gathers his coat and gives him a salute.
Baekhyun just stares as he walks out the door. He’s seen a lot of people walk away from him. For some reason, this magician, this tall man, Park Chanyeol, with twinkling eyes and a smile even brighter, is not somebody he wants to see do so. Baekhyun chases him to the stairwell, catching him from three staircases above.
“Byun Baekhyun.”
Chanyeol looks up from three levels down. “What?”
“That’s me. Byun Baekhyun. I’m twenty-three. I’m a cat person. I like Jamiroquai and Maroon 5. The colour grey. The sound of heavy rain and the thought of traveling the world. Green tea lattes and science fiction movies.”
Baekhyun exhales sharply and smiles.
“Hi.”
Chanyeol’s confusion fades and he breaks into a smile that could have illuminated fucking New York City. “Sounds like somebody I want to know.”
“Good. I want you to know me. You said it yourself, right? We don’t know each other, but we could. And we will.”
“I’ll hold you to that, Byun Baekhyun. Goodbye.”
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.
.
It doesn’t take long. They’re barely phone conversations and pillow talk, more like Baekhyun gets lonely at 2AM and Chanyeol arrives at 2:10. And somewhere between fumbling under stretched nylon beneath neon lights and knocking ceramics off their courtesan pedestals in the dark, Baekhyun learns that Chanyeol never plays things linear.
Instead, Chanyeol is creative-he chooses to kiss the ridges of his neck, behind his ears, the coarse swirls on the skin of his bony knuckles, never linear, always formulated adjacently, zig-zagged, jagged, knocking elbows and arches of his ankles together. His light lips land where Baekhyun least expects them. He hasn’t cracked the calculation just yet. It might take a while.
Chanyeol likes to twirl silver coins between his lax fingers when they kiss, only on occasion can Baekhyun get him to drop one, clattering to the floor with a welcome clash. “Just put them down. Put them all down.” Baekhyun murmurs into the corner of his mouth, pressed against the kitchen table.
Chanyeol simply laughs into his cheek but continues to twiddle the coins aimlessly from thumb to pinkie, and then they’ve disappeared. “Please.” Baekhyun slips a hand down his arm to reach for where he knows they’re both hidden in his sleeve and no longer there.
“Give me the coins.”
“Why, whatever do you mean, Baek? When you already have them?” Chanyeol glitters in his rascally queries, though they’re rhetorical, and reaching behind Baekhyun’s ear he flourishes the coins, and they’re back to his palm again.
Baekhyun tries laughing a little. “Can’t you just kiss me?”
Chanyeol muffles a laugh into the corner of his lips. “And we’re not doing that now?”
“Just on the mouth.”
“But that’s so ordinary.” Chanyeol pulls away for a second to smile, then peppers the inside of his wrists with chaste lips and saccharine chuckles.
“Please?”
Chanyeol just makes a murmured noise in response. His lips linger a little on his neck, before gently creeping up, past his jawline, cheekbone, across to the Cupid ’s bow, and finally, they rest on his lower lip. He kisses it once, twice, and electricity. Then quickly as that, Chanyeol’s hands make their way to his belt buckle, laying him back onto the wooden surface and wrapping him up in the tablecloth, laughing, fingers roaming everywhere.
Now it’s all Baekhyun ever needs to feel. (He’ll wash the tablecloth tomorrow.)
.
.
.
“I’ve met someone.”
Junmyeon reacts exactly how he expects. He laughs and whoops loudly, and the rest of the office turns to stare at him. He holds up a hand in apology, but the gleefulness scathes his excited, near devilishly happy eyes.
“I told you that you’d come running back, you dipshit! Who!?”
Baekhyun shrugs. “Just this guy.”
“Well, what’s he like, what’s his name?”
“Chanyeol. He’s interesting. He’s an interesting guy.”
“Cryptic. Where’d you meet?”
“On the…ah, the street.”
“The street?”
“Yeah.”
“Hold on. This isn’t the jerk-ass who stole your wallet, is it?”
“It…is-look, he’s nice.”
“What the fuck, come on, Baek. You can do better than nice, I think. The homeless one?”
“He isn’t homeless, Junmyeon, he’s just…out of a proper job. He’s a street performer, technically.”
Junmyeon raises his eyebrows. “Well, if you’re happy, we’re happy. At least you’re dating. Or friends. Or something. At least you’ve met someone.”
Baekhyun struggles to disprove him. “I don’t know what we are.”
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.
.
As much as he and Chanyeol fool around, the most important thing is they get along. They fuck, sure, but they go back to Baekhyun’s bedroom. It isn’t big, there’s a white mattress on the floor, paperback novels clustered in an unfinished, dog-eared heap in the left corner and a guitar collecting dust in the right. Then they lie on his mattress and murmur until the tiredness turns their talk into metaphysical realities that hang in the precipice, listless possibilities cut out in the stars and their dust turning reality into fantasy and back again.
He doesn’t believe in magic, but 4AM allows for weird thoughts-of yellow elephants and a metropolis made of paper, rose petals falling from the stars, girls with blue hair. They talk themselves stupid until the world doesn’t make sense anymore; it’s just each other that do. Dreaming aloud with
Chanyeol is always better than dreaming asleep, and alone.
“NYC, hm?”
Chanyeol replies. “Always. Ever since I was a kid. It’s the bright lights and the big apple and the star spangled everything. Imagine me performing, a big show, in the middle of Times Square. That’d be real magic. First degree suburban sorcery.”
“Do you dream of living there, someday?”
“Yeah the city that never sleeps. You wouldn’t have to dream because you’d live it, there. You’d be it. You’d be that dream.”
But against all odds, this, now, is first time in Baekhyun’s life that reality is better than fantasy.
Sometimes he wakes up and Chanyeol is already awake; Baekhyun will peek around the bedroom door and see him standing by the French windows with toast between his teeth. He wears a white t-shirt that clings to his lean frame and shows more than it covers up, the rising sun will just make him glow from the inside out, his silhouette iridescent with the white light. He looks like an angel;
Baekhyun won’t say it out loud. Instead, he’ll just dart around the jumble of cardboard boxes and snake his arms around Chanyeol’s waist, kissing the back of his neck. When he doesn’t need words to express his thoughts, it’s the right kind of romance movie.
Sometimes they go out to fancy restaurants that neither of them can really afford, only on special nights, like on their one month anniversary, when Baekhyun learns that Chanyeol is shit at doing things like formal occasions. He fumbles soundlessly with one of Baekhyun’s ties in the corner before
sheepishly asking if he can get some help with it. It’s a good thing that the tie comes off easier than it does to put on, as Baekhyun also learns later that night.
Sometimes Chanyeol worries the fuck out of him. Living in the heart of Seoul Baekhyun hears big noises but none as upsetting as one dark night, when he hears a police parade giving chase to a man in a long coat, all the way up his street. Baekhyun flies down the three levels, out the door, yelling
Chanyeol’s name-begging and pleading for stupid, stupid Chanyeol, who’s probably gotten himself into some shit again-he runs barefoot to the big group of officers, now crowded around an exhausted body on the ground, on tiptoe to praying not to recognize a face. Then he feels a kiss on the back of his forehead and a shockwave of relief as he crumples, Chanyeol pushing through the crowd of people and approaching the man-a friend, he later tells Baekhyun. But Chanyeol spends the rest of the night with him, curled up on the couch, watching Stairway to Heaven and whispering in his ear that he won’t worry him ever again.
(“I trust you.” Baekhyun replies.)
Sometimes he stops by Chanyeol’s 5:15 magic show after work. He forgets that Chanyeol was once a jerk-ass thief, but he also forgets that he does what he does for the kids-makes him sound like a fucking saint but maybe that’s part of the magician act. He’ll drag Kyungsoo and Junmyeon by the arms from their building and into the front row of Chanyeol’s spectacle. They watch as he pulls birds out of empty boxes and handkerchiefs out of his sleeves, but his favourite trick is when Chanyeol pulls a bouquet of flowers out of nothing, gently part the crowd and stops in front of him. Then Chanyeol bows and presents the bouquet to him a radiant smile, plants a kiss on his cheek, in front of everyone. And Baekhyun’s heart swells so much that it becomes harder and harder to breathe.
Sometimes Chanyeol lies on his back, resting Baekhyun’s dusty untouched guitar on his stomach and plucks at the strings until they’re discordant. It’s rare though, Chanyeol’s fingers always seem to find the right harmony to Baekhyun’s melody-jazz cadenzas and eclectically electric glissandi and French show tunes condensed to six strings and humming into pillows.
“You have a voice, you know.” Chanyeol murmurs one day.
“Not really. I don’t sing a lot.”
“You should. Your voice is beautiful.”
“It’s not, really, it’s nothing special.”
“It’s extraordinary. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
So now, whenever he feels Chanyeol tossing and turning in bed at night, he wraps a hand around his torso and hums love songs into his ear until they both fall asleep.
And in the mornings when Baekhyun wakes up, he nestles for five spare minutes into the infinity of
Chanyeol’s long arms. Sometimes they’ll sleep in way past midday, and Baekhyun will find himself wrapped up in the linens, barricaded by the limbs around his waist and shoulders but he never wakes up alone.
It becomes easier to count the nights Chanyeol doesn’t stay over than the nights he does. But when Chanyeol leaves, life is banal again. It’s somewhere between the everyday moments that Baekhyun realizes he wants Chanyeol to stay for longer than the night. Between the goodnight and the good morning mumbled into his ear. Between every hour of the day he spends with Chanyeol and every hour he doesn’t.
It’s 3PM on a Tuesday, under the sheets and entangled in each other.
Chanyeol says. “I need to go, you know. Work-”
“Stay.”
“Really, I do.”
“Don’t.”
So he doesn’t.
.
.
.
IV
WRONG
It moves quickly from there. Chanyeol moves from his small apartment into Baekhyun’s smaller one, after the debate quickly ends (“Yours is homier.”-“But yours is home.”), and on the first night they sleep on the threadbare cotton rug, surrounded by half-unpacked cardboard boxes and his ancient shit everywhere. They’re too tired to move to the bedroom, but they’ve made too much progress to stop. But at least Chanyeol’s right-it’s home.
And Baekhyun learns more about Chanyeol. The more he learns, the less he knows. Which is the saddest part, he thinks to himself. He knows details, like how he doesn’t take sugar with his cappuccino or how he listens to psychedelic rock when he’s sad until he feels better, but Chanyeol is an incomplete map of a human soul Baekhyun tries to read with tunnel vision, as if he can find the cities but lacks the continents.
Chanyeol leaves early and comes home late. Whenever he arrives Baekhyun knows because he can smell the grey goose on him, despite the hushed tiptoes and his noiselessly turning the doorknob. He hears his breathing, it’s almost like panting.
Baekhyun greets him at the door, dabbing his shiny forehead with a sleeve. “Yeol, you’re out of breath, what have you, run a mile?”
He laughs in response, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Something like that-Baek, will you take a walk with me?”
Baekhyun hesitates but agrees.
The streets are quieter and more beautiful at night, illuminated by dull lights cut out in the stars, the overhead lampposts soaks a sepia tone into the whole pedestrian scene. Baekhyun walks ahead,
Chanyeol walks behind. They still hold hands, but Chanyeol’s vitality has lessened. Maybe it’s the cold.
“You’re happy, like this, right, Baek?”
Baekhyun stops, surprised, and Chanyeol’s breath is visibly opaque in the biting chill. He exhales.
“Of course I am. Why would you even-“
He’s cut off. “No, are you really happy-as in, you wouldn’t take an out, if you had one? If there was somebody better…not like me. Would you leave?”
“That’s a stupid thought, Yeol. Why are we talking about this?”
“Because I’m yours.” Chanyeol’s words leak complete, utter sincerity, so Baekhyun doesn’t understand how he can look so pained and so innocent and beautiful at the same time. “But only if you want me to be. You say the word, and I’ll be gone, just like that, if you want me to. Abracadabra.”
“Tell me, why the fuck would I want that?”
“Because we don’t even know what we are…you don’t know what I am. I don’t know. I thought you might want us…me…us…to be clearer. More stable.”
Under muted streetlight the winded road almost looks pretty. It almost makes Baekhyun laugh at how hilariously cliché it is. It’s that romantic film he’s always dreamed of, but the wrong scene. He should fast-forward to the part where both lovers find out they’re happy. Because it feels like Chanyeol is tugging back on his end, and Baekhyun isn’t ready for that yet.
He cups Chanyeol’s face in his palms either side. “You’re so stupid. I love you.”
A rush of happiness follows the words that he’s bottled inside of him. He laughs, expectant of some swooping declaration, affirmation of love, mutual, but it doesn’t come. Chanyeol brings his hands up to trace the shapes of Baekhyun’s fingers with his own, but he doesn’t say anything.
“I’m bad for you. I hope you know that.”
“Doesn’t matter to me-“
“-it should-“
“-it doesn’t.”
Chanyeol laughs a little bit but his eyes shimmer with something like tears. “I’m going to tell you now then, Byun Baek, that we’re never going to marry. We’re never going to have kids. We’re never going to have a proper future together.”
“And what makes you say that?”
“Look at me, Baek.” Chanyeol turns around and stops Baekhyun by the shoulders. “I live day-to-day on the corner of the street, waiting for people who can turn my life around. I make my living three to five thousand won a day. Look-“
Chanyeol pulls out a coin from his pocket, playing it chromatic between his fingers, then it vanishes and reappears behind Baekhyun’s ear. “Do you know long I’ve practiced that trick for, Baek?”
Baekhyun shakes his head with a lip pulled taut. “I don’t know, a month, and I’m sure you’re proud-“
“-six. Six months. Most magicians practice one move, every day, for more than a year to really perfect it. My-friend, he’s been practicing his card shuffle for four years running, still doesn’t always nail the final switch. It’s sad and extraordinary. We make a cup of ramen for that much work. I don’t know how much of a future I can afford for you with that.”
Baekhyun tugs on his hand and pulls him back into step. “Life isn’t about money, Chanyeol. Money is just a thing. Just a material thing. They’re them and you’re you. And I love you. I love you, fucking Park Chanyeol, glob of crazy, you.”
Chanyeol shakes his head, but he’s smiling and tears are falling. “I’m changing it, though, I’m getting more, I swear, so we can have a life together. It might be hard, but I swear it’ll be worth it, Baek, I swear to you, Baek…”
“Shut up, come on. Stop it.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“No, do you really trust me?”
And Baekhyun doesn’t permit him to say any more. He leans forward on tiptoe, and kisses him hard-(“Yes, you dipshit .I trust you with my life.)-on the mouth. They swing hands like stupid little kids all the way home.
“No one’s ever really trusted me before, Baek.” Chanyeol murmurs into his ear that night. “So, I love you for that. Okay? I love you.”