I didn’t get to meet my roommate until the week after my first arrival. He remained a mystery face to me, keeping me on my toes in anxiety for the whole of the week before abruptly showing up.

We didn’t meet exactly under the most fortunate of circumstances.

He could have at least given me a warning.

It had been a busy day for me. My last roommate, the one I’d had back at the in-campus dorms from first grade, had finally returned back to Seoul from the Jeju Islands for the semester. Heechul was a fashion major from my school, my unlikely match who’d turned out to be a lot more fun than his face made him out to be. Just looking at his face, you would more expected him to be that cranky phone dealership worker with the ty service. Anyways, he wanted to have lunch; and I wasn’t the sort to go out missing food, especially if it was free.

Lunch was (expensive) in the forms of a buffet and a little awkward to go to as two males in a room of couples galore - the good food made up for the tension though. And of course, Heechul paid, as promised.

“You’re such a fat .”

He was just sore he had to pay for the both of us. Really, he should have been glad we’d gone to a buffet and not a family restaurant - because then, I would have easily ran him out of business.

After lunch came coffee and after coffee was a round of batting practice; and after that was a game (or three) of street basketball in the park with the neighborhood kids until my legs refused to move properly without wobbling all funny. More than just Heechul, I’d missed human company - to the point I’d begun talking to the empty space of my to-be-roommate’s door -, not that I was going to tell him that.

By the time we were done for the day and waving goodbye, I looked like I’d been standing out in the middle of a storm. Only, it wasn’t rain that I was wearing.

Heechul offered to walk me back home, like some girlfriend, but I kicked him away, rolling my eyes. As if he was any better with Seoul geography than I was. Shooing him off, I made my own way off, promising to contact each other more often now that we’d landed back in the same city.

(And this time, I didn’t get lost on the way back. At least, not too badly anyways.)

Bathed in sweat, that queer manly smell sticking to my jacket and shirt, the first thing I did undoing the locks and walking in, was to strip. The first layer off had been my windbreaker and the next following had been my jeans, peeling off in damp clumps in a following trail toward the single restroom in the two room apartment. It wasn’t as if there was anyone else watching, right? I’d pick them back up, after washing, as had done for the rest of the week alone.

The shower was nice, warm water pelting against straining muscles that I obviously hadn’t been working properly, judging how they complained. If it wasn’t for the shampoo that found its way into my eyes - shampoo always somehow managed to get in my eyes - the shower would have been perfect.

Drying off, wrapping a towel against my waist, I made a note to pick up my dirty clothes and toss them in the hamper before returning back to my room. Only, they weren’t there anymore. It was almost as if my clothes had gotten so sick and tired of me leaving them shed on the floor, that they’d grown legs and walked out on me. But that wasn’t very logical, or possible for that matter.

“Uh, hi.”

The sound I made was not manly at all. But in my defense, he had caught me off guard. I hadn’t expected him to suddenly show up just like that.

Scrapping back into the restroom, nearly tripping and making double the fool of myself, I peeked my head from the doorway with a frown, tracing my eyes back to the owner of the voice. My face was burning a shade of red, a shade I didn’t think was possible from my deep tanned skin, but he was laughing, holding a hand up to his mouth to try and cover the little shakes his shoulders couldn’t. “Sorry, I heard you in the showers and thought I should stay out here until you were finished to meet you.” The fact that he’d just seen me practically was overlooked. I really hoped he’d forget, the sooner the better. “I didn’t mean to scare you or anything. I … I’m Jongup, your … er housemate.”

I made a sort of a pitched noise and then cleared my throat willing the red of my ears to go away. A part of me wanted to come up with an excuse, an explanation to what happened, but there wasn’t exactly a whole bunch to explain. He’d seen me walk out of the baths, still half wet and completely stripped - though thankfully I’d kept in mind to pull a towel around myself. He is a guy though, not like it even matters, right? “Daehyun.” Still, didn’t make for exactly the best of lasting impressions.

He smiled, making a move to stand up, his hand reached out automatically in forms of polite greeting, before coiling back, dropping back onto the couches he’d been in since the beginning of my hell. He rubbed the back of his neck, breathing out a sorts of another laugh. “It’s, uh, nice to meet you.”

I wanted to mirror the smile, a loose pull of lips that looked too natural on him despite the occasion, but found my lips unwilling to cooperate. It might have come off more as a grimace than anything else.

“Can I … go put clothes on?”