The breakup is as amicable as it can be, considering.

.

Weeks go by.

“So…that’s it?” Jonghyun asks, making a face at the lopsided foam heart drawn on the surface of his latte. “Five years of—”

“That’s it,” Jinki interrupts, tearing listlessly at the corner of the muffin he hadn’t really meant to buy. It crumbles, dry and coarse, and an errant blackberry stains his fingertips a deep purple-red. “We wanted different things.”

“No,” Jonghyun says, slowly, like he’s a child, “you didn’t.”

He squeezes his eyes shut—remembers the gleam of a two-carat diamond and “what are you waiting for, Kibum” and the harrowing, too-loud slam of his front door—and manages to insist, “Yes, we did.”

“If by that you mean that you wanted to continue dating and he didn’t, then, sure, yeah.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

Jonghyun snorts. “Then what was it like?”

He doesn’t answer.

.

More weeks go by.

His friends are on seemingly permanent standby. Taemin drags him to oddly-timed meals, midnight breakfasts and three p.m. dinners, orders him medium-rare steaks and double whiskey sours and vanilla ice cream with his crêpe, options that are bland and boring and safe, always safe, and Jonghyun makes him a Tinder profile and hides his Love, Actually DVD and insists on having bi-weekly sleepovers —and it irks him a little, how they’re so clearly expecting him to fall apart, how sure they are that he’s going to.

Because he isn’t.

He isn’t going to fall apart.

He couldn’t control the screeching screaming chaos of the trainwreck that had been his relationship with one Kim Kibum, but he can control the aftermath. The cleanup. The demolition. 

And he’s alone now. It’s neater this way. He doesn’t have to share counter space in his bathroom— now, he can easily find his aftershave without all of Kibum’s skincare products for his 18-step routine—and he doesn’t have to stock his pantry with weird medicinal herbs and tea, doesn’t have to give up half of his office for closet space or add Nivea lip balm to his shopping list or run interference between him and Minho during their game nights again- 

He doesn’t have to pretend to floss. He doesn’t have to bury his fried chicken receipts in the bottom of the trash. He doesn’t have to put his trot album collection in storage, and he doesn’t have to make sure that the light in kitchen is turned off right after he settles in bed, and he doesn’t have to adapt. He doesn’t have to move. He doesn’t have to change. 

And he’s fine.

He’s perfectly freaking fine.

.

Even more weeks go by.

Taemin shows up unannounced on a Friday evening, leather jacket bunched up around his elbows and gaze flatly unimpressed as he inspects Jinki’s royal blue plaid pajama bottoms—and an hour later, Jinki’s being ushered into an unmarked bar in the outskirts of Seoul, inhaling too much cigarette smoke and drinking too many vodka sodas and angering off the wrong drunk loud group because—

Because one of the guys looks so much like him. 

Tall, high cheekbones, slender, smooth skin and a pair of striking eyes tilting up towards the edges. Delicate features. Pink mouth. He’s wearing an oversized sweater with skin-tight pants and a baseball cap that awfully looks like one he always steals from his closet- 

But it isn’t Kibum, of course it isn’t, Jinki sees that almost immediately, of course he does, he’s not stupid and he’s not blind and he’s not—but the similarities are really undeniable and the split-second before he catches himself, before he understands, it’s like stepping right back into the fire-fueled carnage of that last argument. “What are you waiting for, Kibum?” on an endless loop. Recycled back and forth, over and over. Set to self-destruct in five four three two—

“Hey, maybe I’m just that irresistible,” Jinki hears himself drawl, barely able to detect his own bitterness, and the guy who isn’t him sneers, lunges, a