Jaeseop can read Kevin like his favorite book. Even with the spine cracked and cover worn out, the inside will always hold true. The plot twists snaking around the subtle dips and curves of his body. His favorite lines reading like braille on the surface of Kevin’s sweat-soaked skin. The rising crescendo of suspense in breathy moans in the early morning. The denouement in his smile, fading at the edges. The foreshadowing of things to come in wandering eyes. Every heal-toe, heal-toe step giving away his insecurities. The twitch of fingers on table tops broadcasting every emotion, loud and clear, directly to the frequency of Jaeseop’s beating heart.

And much like the story he’s read a hundred times before, the ending did not come as a surprise.

Jaeseop knew what happens to men like him, who fall hopelessly and violently in love a few hours too late. He’s read every story, heard every tale; warnings of tigers eating their young and lighthouses blinking in the eyes of a lover left at a port to die. It never ends well, not in this industry, not when there is two years of history he could never compete with. Two years might as well have been two centuries.

He saw all the warning signs, knew all the repercussions, and still couldn’t stop himself from diving in headfirst. Passionate, unwavering love is an amazing thing, but it’s blind at night.

Jaeseop realizes too late that love was never pouring rain kisses and moonlight dances. It’s a knife pressed to your throat when it’s too dark to see anything and the sickening awareness that you must have fallen asleep, watch dogs of your untamed spite and barbed wire fences wrapped in solitude not enough to keep you safe anymore. You must have fallen asleep.

More than anything, Jaeseop thinks that all his favorite parts went by too fast, pages more frayed and ripped as he nears the end that he had seen coming from the first word. He can hear over-extended metaphors in late-night meetings somewhere far, far away from his apartment. He can feel pieces of dialogue hanging like loose strings from ruffled shirts. He can read concluding narration in the strands of Kevin’s hair, too deliberately ruffled to be simply windswept like he promises.  Narration that reads: This is it. This is what you expected. This is what you were waiting for. 

Knowing that the reliable sidekick of the main character betrays him in the end never actually lessens the sting when it happens. He was supposed to help him win. They were supposed to do it together. You were never supposed to love him, and why did you have to fall asleep?

Maybe he should have got out sooner. He should have built up whatever fortifications he could, making molotov cocktails with words he doesn’t mean, hurling them at unseen attackers in the dark of the night. He should have ripped out the pages at the end of the book before he read them, rewrote his own ending with teeth and nails on the plains of a back he no longer lays claim to. He should have scribbled lines of poetry in bruises on hipbones, weaving verses of how those eyes used to look only at him, guiding him through troubled waters like the north star.

But boats sink, trains derail and what he thought of as love ends up scattered and broken at his feet. Jaeseop clings to hope like the smell of expensive cologne clings to the insides of Kevin’s thighs, marks littering the skin he would never dare to mar. As he turns to the final pages of the book, things get messy, words crossed out and notes in margins. Underlined parts he shouldn’t have missed, like voices in the background of late-night phone calls and trembling hands on the warmest of days. Entire sections are out but he still knows the words off by memory; I would have done anything. Underneath it all, one short phrase stands out, highlighted in neon. He never ing loved you.

Jaeseop grabs a pen and writes the only thing he can think of past the cannon fire in his head, a simple warning to himself and others, jotted in blood red ink at the bottom of a white page.

Sleep with one eye open at night.