Pressing my face deeper into the cushions of the couch, I allowed the edge of the blanket tossed over me to fall from the jut of my shoulder and cover the lower half of my face. I watched Woohyun wander around the living room like that, him looking for something and me assaulted by scratchy fibers and the unmistakable smell of Woohyun. How he could sleep with such a painful thing confounded me but, in a way, I felt honored that he draped his own coverlet over me instead of grabbing one from my room instead. He was protective over his belongings, still requiring me to ask before touching or borrowing certain things even though we had been living together for months already. Bunching the uncomfortable cut of fabric in my grasp, I pulled it taut around me, breathing in more of the scent of my roommate. I would never tell him, but he smelled nice.

He came back over to me with a DVD case in hand, suggesting we watch the Disney animation of Hercules, and ran his fingers through my hair with his free hand. Blinking up at him, I felt my face warm, understandably embarrassed at the realization that I just purposely sniffed his blanket. When I nodded, he grinned but didn’t move to start the movie like I thought he would and continued to leaf through my hair, grating his nails against my scalp. Closing my eyes with a sigh more content than annoyed, I told him the disk wasn’t going to crawl out of the case and wiggle itself into the DVD player. The tickling fingers ceased, his hand just a light weight atop my head. I glanced up at him.

“Put the movie on, stupid,” I said, pinching his thigh through the smooth fabric of his sweatpants.

He narrowed his eyes at me, tugging on the strands of my hair. He mumbled something about respect, but I stopped being polite to Woohyun weeks after he moved in. As he shuffled off toward the television, I sat up to allow him space beside me when he came back.

Megara was accepting her feelings for Hercules when Woohyun turned to me and directed our small talk over the movie to serious conversation with the question; “You’re not going to do anything rash now, are you?”

I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to talk about coming home to three fluttering butterflies and a handful of lost souls. I had curled into myself like a pill bug on the couch, wallowing in a tearless melancholy until I fell asleep. When I woke up, Woohyun had already returned home and I was buried under his warm blanket.

“Sungyeol…” His hand was in my hair again and I sighed, shifting close enough to lie my head against the curve of his shoulder.

All I wanted to do was watch the movie. Wasn’t it supposed to be a distraction? Why did he see it necessary to distract me from the distraction to talk about the reason for needing one? “I’m not going to do anything, okay, so shut up. You’re ruining the Disney magic.”

Woohyun scoffed. “Excuse me for trying to be a good friend since I know you care about those butterflies more than you do human life.”

“I do not!”

“If you had to choose between saving me and saving your butterflies, which would you pick?”

Rolling my eyes, I detached my face from his arm and reached across him for the television remote to turn up the volume. “That’s an unlikely situation.”

He slapped the remote out of my reach. “Answer the question.”

“I’m not going to answer the question, Woohyun,” I huffed, raising to my knees and hoping to use my advantage of long limbs to grab the control.

Grabbing my right arm as I reached past him with his left hand, he threw his weight and, caught up in rickety emotions and unstable balance, I could do nothing but let him overtake me and push me onto my back. “Then I’ll assume you would let me croak for the sake of your precious insects,” he said.

“Oh my God, Woohyun, you’re being ridiculous.” Taking my arm back, I tried to raise myself but he easily pushed me down again. “Get off of me.”

“You’re only making things harder for yourself. Me or the butterflies?”

“The butterflies! Just because you’re so damn annoying.” My voice cracked as I yelled and the weight settling over my chest wasn’t from his hand still holding me down. I had the idea that he was trying to get me upset but I didn’t want to give in. My face warmed with something that wasn’t anger.

“Sungyeol,” he mumbled, tongue rolling slowly over the syllables. I could tell he was regretful but it was his fault anyway; he should have felt responsible for the sudden rush of tears I never wanted to let out. As soon as his hand eased its pressure on my chest and his fingers itched their way into the strands of his hair, I sat up, just barely missing a collision with his forehead. He instinctively leaned back, climbing off me. his lips, he seemed disturbed, opening his mouth just to close it soon after, lifting his hand just to drop it to his side. I was wiping at my face, more upset that the skin of my palm couldn’t sponge up the saltine drops sliding down my face than upset over Woohyun purposefully spurring them on, when he called my name again.

My scoff ended up convoluted by the tear-induced mucus catching in my throat and a sob almost broke its way out of my vocal chords. Unwrapping myself from his wonderfully smelling and awfully scratchy blanket, I rolled off the couch. He reached out for me again, fingers brushing against the front of my shirt, and I didn’t bother with backing away because I knew he wouldn’t actually hold me back. He knew his limits and he already crossed the line. Rubbing at my face again, desperate to stop the flow of tears, I bit into a wobbling bottom lip and inhaled deeply. Before I could breakdown into a hysterical mess on the exhale, I told him to screw himself. And I knew he was right; I need to get my emotions out because I would self-destruct if I kept it bottled in, but I wanted to do it on my own time, when I was ready to come to terms with my failing research project and the horrible gut feeling that the passing of my butterflies was an omen warning of the eventual end to something else in my life.

I was waiting outside of class, a half hour early because I couldn’t stand to be in the apartment alone with my thoughts, scrolling through the various menus of my phone. I tried calling Myungsoo, knowing that he didn’t have class until noon and desperately wanting to hear his voice, but he didn’t answer and because I wasn’t calling for anything important, I didn’t bother with leaving a message. I contemplated sending him a text to ask if he was busy but decided against that too. He probably was. His time had been occupied for the most part of the week. He said he was working on designing a lab for Chemistry the one time he answered his phone two days ago.

my teeth, I wondered what I could do for the next thirty minutes. There was a vending machine on the ground floor of the building. I could grab a can of coffee but I wasn’t up to walking down three flights of stairs or waiting for the elevator that moved snail-slow.

I made the decision to quit being lazy and take the stairs of hell downstairs but, before I could even glance in the direction of the doors leading to the stairwell, someone called out my name. There was only one person I knew with a voice so loud and obnoxious it ricocheted off the walls in an echo. Turning to look the opposite way, I smiled at Dongwoo. He was a friend I made back in my first year, when I somehow conjured up the genius idea to join a dance club when I knew good and well that I had the coordination of a baby bird. As the vice president of the club, he did his best to help me keep up to speed during the dance workshops. It was to be expected, but I quit that club after the third practice but Dongwoo and his grin full of cheese and his warm heart, had already cemented his position as one of my more favored friends even if we didn’t run across each other often.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” I said, patting his upper back when he pulled me into a bone-crushing hug. The last time we saw each other was a couple months ago, when we happened to order take-out from the same restaurant by chance.

“It has!” Upon releasing me, he cupped my shoulders and turned me this way and that, looking for any hint that I’d changed. I hadn’t. “How’ve you been? And Woohyunnie too.”

There was the option to be truthful and tell him that I hadn’t been feeling my greatest those last couple of weeks, but I didn’t want to see the worried frown that would dim his naturally bright aura. So, I said I had never been better and Woohyun was as carefree as ever. “But you’d never guess that I’m off the market now.”

Dongwoo’s eyes widened and his eyebrows rose, his grin expanding to a comical width only he could pull off. “He finally confessed?!”

What? My eyebrows pinched together and I tilted my head to the side, confused. Dongwoo knew Myungsoo liked me? I didn’t even know the two knew each other. They never brought the other up in conversation — not that Myungsoo talked about his other friends often, but Dongwoo was a gossip machine and talked about everyone whenever possible. “Why didn’t you ever tell me Myungsoo was interested in me? I know I told you I liked him at some point.”

The surprise in Dongwoo’s wide eyes morphed into confusion to rival my own. “Myungsoo?”

“Yeah,” I drawled. “My boyfriend. And the guy you apparently knew wanted to confess to me.”

Then, the surprise returned to Dongwoo’s eyes. “What about Woohyun?”

I didn’t get it. “What about Woohyun?”

Dongwoo looked like he was caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. All of a sudden, without answering my question, he took out his phone to spare a glance at the time, making a generic comment about how he was going to be late for class and he needed to go. I sighed as I watched him leave.

When I met up with Myungsoo for lunch the next day, I immediately quizzed him on his relationship with Dongwoo. I’d always had that problem: being over curious and needing to get to the bottom of things. If I didn’t, the curiosity and confusion and ignorance will build up inside me until I could no longer handle it and exploded from the activeness of my own brain. It was my biggest flaw if you didn’t count how I was horribly shallow and fell for people easily.

Myungsoo reached for his bowl of miso — he said he was in the mood for Japanese — eyebrows raised as he filled the hollow of the spoon with soup. “Who is Dongwoo?”

“Dongwoo? Jang Dongwoo? Psych major? Laughs louder than a bullhorn? Sometimes looks like a cross between a dinosaur and a hyena?”

Myungsoo snorted. “You’re ridiculous.” He sipped at his soup before replying again. “But I don’t know anyone named Dongwoo. As…interesting as he sounds.”

I hummed with my lips closed around the tips of my chopsticks, chewing slowly. But that didn’t make any sense. They have to know each other. How else did Dongwoo know about Myungsoo wanting to be something more than seat neighbors in biology? And I told Myungsoo this, wondering if he knew Dongwoo by a nickname or something but Myungsoo assured he didn’t know anyone who fit the wonderful description I gave him.

“That’s strange,” I mumbled under my breath. “But he did mention Woohyun. Maybe I should just ask him when I get back.”

“Woohyun?” I took my eyes off the bowl of pork tempura before me and glanced at my boyfriend. “As in Nam Woohyun?”

I nodded and asked if he knew Woohyun. He said he knew of him, that maybe they came across each other in the hallway one day, but nothing more than that. He recognized the name. Something about that sounded off to me. There wasn’t only one Woohyun in our entire school. I could have been talking about anyone and Myungsoo guessed my Woohyun correctly, but I ignored the voice in the back of my head. Perhaps Myungsoo heard about Woohyun's and my friendship through the grapevine. (But even that hypothesis was questionable because Myungsoo wasn’t one for gossip).

Shrugging, I shoveled more food into my mouth. Then, I proceeded to invite him over to my apartment sometime, remembering how he tricked me into meeting his mother. He wouldn’t meet my family, not that I’d want him to because then I’d have to explain how we met and my parents still weren’t comfortable with my being homoual in the first place. Rolling his eyes, he told me to stop talking with my mouth open. I swallowed a portion of my mouthful, sticking out my tongue to show him the remnants of the mutilated food.

“You’re a weirdo.” He grimaced, looking away to mix his miso soup.

Swallowing the rest of the half eaten and over-salivated tempura, I laughed. “But you like this weirdo.”

Myungsoo looked at me blankly before his lips curved upwards in a small smile that barely parted his lips enough to show teeth. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Are you still mad at me,” was the first question that came out of Woohyun’s mouth when I walked into the kitchen to grab an energy drink. He was standing at the stove, cooking ramyun. Yes, I was still mad at him, even wanted to do shove all of his shirts into the freezer so that all he had were cold, icy shirts, but I told him I wasn’t. Just because I knew he’d look at me with a crestfallen dim to his eyes and I hated it when Woohyun looked at me like that. (I noticed that I often had a problem with how he looked at me. Whenever he did, there’d be an overwhelming twist in my stomach, almost like I ate something that made me nauseous, and it bothered me. It wasn’t like I could confront Woohyun about it either).

Tossing the aluminum can full of sugar and caffeine back and forth in between my hands, I stood beside him, looking over his shoulder as he stirred the boiling noodles. Noticing that I was watching, he asked if I was hungry, if I wanted to share. I shook my head and pulled back the tab on the can. Before there could be a prolonged period of silence as I chugged my energy drink, he sighed, turning off the heat of the stove.

“You never give up a chance to steal my food,” he said, glancing at me for a split second before finishing the preparation of his late dinner. “You’re still mad at me.”

I hummed in affirmation.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“Can I make it up to you?”

“Not any time soon.”

He told me he would do it, he would do something amazing to make me to forgive him. I laughed and told him he’d need to go above and beyond and buy me a unicorn. He called me an idiot. I smiled, patted him on the back, and left him in the kitchen, returning to my room.

Once in the safety of my bedroom, door closed behind me, I sat my can on my desk. I jolted the mouse next to my laptop and watched as the screen came to life. Before I could type in my password, my phone jingled from its seat in the center of my bed. Walking over to it, I grinned at the contact picture lighting up the screen. I grabbed it and crawled onto my bed, flopping onto my stomach as I answered the phone, pressing the button for the speaker phone. My voice cracked like it used to when I was going through puberty as I greeted, overexcited because he was calling me and not the other way around like it usually was. I told him of my surprise, uncaring of how hyper I sounded.

“Yeah, well, I wanted to hear your voice.”

He couldn’t see it, and it was better that way because the warmth that spread across my face was humiliating. I wondered if I would ever get out of the honeymoon phase; if being with Myungsoo — hearing him speak, holding him, hugging him, bathing in the compliments he doles out — would ever stop feeling intoxicating and fresh and special. Absentmindedly tugging at the small folds in my blanket, I called him a cheeseball, voice filled with affection.

I grabbed a pillow and rolled onto my back, holding it firm against chest.

“How’s your research project?” he asked.

I stole a glance at the habitat sitting in my window, a frown instantly tugging my lips down into something full of hurt. So many of my beautiful babies had left me. He laughed when I told him I named on after him and, just as quickly as I had frowned, I smiled. Never would I get enough of his laugh — that bright, airy sound that was always full of mirth, unless he was trying to be sarcastic or cool, but even then, I loved to hear it. He asked me if I named the other ones, how I could tell them apart.

“Most of them have died,” I chuckled, though the sound was bitter. “There are only three left.”

He hummed. “Can I name one?”

I didn’t mind.

“I want to give it an awesome name. Maybe something beautiful like Sungyeol.”

I rolled my eyes. Just when I stopped feeling warm, he had to say something like that. “Please stop. I can’t handle such disgusting attempts at flirting.”

Mockingly, he made a wet kissing noise. I snorted and allowed a comfortable silence to wade in between us.

“I miss you,” he said suddenly.

“As you should,” I quipped. “You’ve been so busy lately. Is schoolwork more important than me?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my god, you at flirting,” I groaned, burying my face into the softness of my pillow. Sometimes, just sometimes, I wondered what attracted me to him, why I even liked him as someone more than a guy to fool around with.

(

You see, when I put up an ad looking for a housemate to split rent with, I interviewed a number of people, both female and male, but all of them either couldn’t afford their cut of the rent each month or their lifestyles were just too incompatible with mine. I was sure I was going to need to pick up a second job into to keep my apartment but then I got a call from a second year (who should have been a third year but took a year off between entering college) named Nam Woohyun. I could tell he was going to be annoying from the first day I saw him, all bright smiles and ugly plaid skinny jeans. But, he seemed nice enough and he didn’t have a pet tarantula like the last guy I interviewed and he could pay his half of the rent and utilities upfront in cash. We got along easier than I initially thought we would, almost like old friends. But sometime between a month and three weeks and two months, two weeks of our living together, I stopped being able to look at Woohyun without my heart racing fast enough to rival lightspeed.

I couldn’t tell him that, though, because there weren’t any signs that he’d be even remotely interested in me and I was afraid that if I told him, I’d make our relationship as housemates more uncomfortable than a turtle on its back. And during our fourth month of living together, my usual preferred seat in bio was taken by someone else and I ended up next to a guy I had barely noticed before, a guy who stirred up nauseating butterflies and had a voice sweeter than sugar and held my hand and kissed my cheeks.

Maybe why I liked Myungsoo was that simple; I liked the feeling of liking someone and I liked when the feeling was reciprocated.

)

“Sungyeollie!”

Shock gripped my heart and I fell forward, tripping over air as I froze in place and tried to run away all at the same time. Woohyun wrapped his arms around my mid-waist, hoping to keep me from falling flat on my face but gravity had a stronger pull on my longer limbs and we went crashing to the floor, his forehead knocking into the base of my skull. Biting my lip to keep from yelling out in frustration, I grunted when he voiced his own pain. His breath seeped through my thin shirt, warm against my upper back, as he mumbled apology after apology about how he didn’t mean to knock me over, how he was excited, and he didn’t think I would freak out like I did. I asked him if he was going to get off of me any time soon because I swore he was an elephant on my back, too big and too heavy. The extension of my limbs didn’t automatically mean I had enough muscle or body fat to not feel like I was suffocating with Woohyun attached to my back.

He laughed and the staccato puffs of air tickled, making me jolt slightly, not quite shivering. It was in his voice — the mischievousness that said he wasn’t going to remove himself from my back because he was amused from how I wasn’t amused.

“I don’t know, Yeol. You’re pretty comfortable as a pillow.”

“Nam Woohyun, I swear…”

“I’m not going anywhere unless you call me hyung.”

An animalistic sound left my throat — whether it was a growl or a whinny, I wasn’t sure — and I attempted to push him off except he threw his weight, pushing me down again much like a week ago when we were watching Hercules. As if I was going to call him anything nice after all of this. “Bite me.”

There was something about figures of speech that was an alien language to Woohyun. Seriously speaking, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he leaned in and dug his teeth into my trapezius but I screeched anyway. “What is wrong with you?! Get. Off. Of. Me.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“Now!”

I let out a sigh mixed with relief and exasperation when he finally rolled off of me, mumbling about how I was no fun as he curled his hand around the curve of my elbow and yanked me up from the carpeted floor. Not wasting a second, I punched him (albeit softly because I was tottering like a newborn deer after being pulled up so hastily and it was a miracle I landed the hit at all). He pretended like it actually hurt, hand over his chest where I hit him. Rolling my eyes, I brushed past him, our shoulders knocking together as I rubbed at my shoulder where he bit me. Woohyun followed me out of the hallway, calling my name like a toddler calling for his mother. I didn’t know if it was a mistake for us to live together or if we were two completely compatible, immature college sophomore boys. Annoyed, I stomped my feet and turned around, asking him what he wanted.

There was the brilliant Woohyun grin full of cheese, too close for comfort, and I averted my eyes, hoping the warmth I felt was a hallucination. If I was blushing, even just the smallest bit, Woohyun didn’t say anything. And I was thankful for that. Often, I found myself feeling warmth curling up my neck, spreading over my ears and across my cheekbones, and I thought I had gotten over it, but it appeared that I hadn’t. He used to make fun of me when we were still getting used to living with each other, poking my cheeks and doing everything in his power to embarrass me.

“I bought you a please forgive Woohyun because he’s innocent gift,” he chimed, grabbing my arm and dragging me back down the hall to his room. (I couldn’t get mad at him because I didn’t remember what I left my room for in the first place). Stopping in the doorway, he asked me to close my eyes. I rolled them, because this was stupid and Woohyun was stupid and what did it matter if I closed my eyes or not? He refused to retrieve whatever lame gift he had for me until I shut out all visual reception.

I tapped my foot impatiently. To be honest, I didn’t need anything from him; I wasn’t angry anymore. Stressed, yes, and taking out my frustration on him, sure, but not angry. Suddenly something soft was pushed into my hands. Opening my eyes I stared straight into the beady plastic eyes of a large, white stuffed unicorn. Its horn was but a few centimeters from skewering my forehead and I lowered it. Turning the plush toy from side to side, I bit my lip, effectively squashing the smile that threatened to split my cheeks. That dork actually bought me a unicorn.

“And if that’s not enough I got you a dart board and stapled a picture of my face to it.”

Tearing my eyes away from the adorable thing, I snorted at the dart board Woohyun held up, a picture of him pouting right over the bulls-eye.

“Do you forgive me?” he asked, making the same sad, puppy-dog face.

I hummed a noncommittal sound. He whined out my name as he wiggled, bouncing on his toes in anxiety.

Hugging the stuffed animal to my chest with one arm, I grinned and signaled him to come closer with my free hand. “Yeah, you big idiot, I forgive you,” I said as he enveloped me in a hug. (I hoped he didn’t notice, because I would never admit it, but as I laid my head on his shoulder, I may have inhaled more than I needed to).

“Good. Because my plan C was to cry and pray you didn’t kick me out,” he laughed, tightening his arms around me. “But I like this. We should do this hugging thing more often.”

Rolling my eyes, I slipped out of his hold. “You’re stupid.”

“Stupid people need love too.”