The sea calls to Taeil like a siren’s song.

Its sound is a waterlogged roar, nothing quiet or delicate about it. Even the demure lapping of the juvenile waves against the sands of the beaches Taeil lives for are screeching, shrill little voices that scream out as they die against that same sand, and their corpses get pulled back to the deep.

He has a small sailboat, ten feet long and slick, streamlined like a marlin at the bow but fat like the broad side of a sunfish at the stern. The hull is painted white, with a thin, curling stripe of nacre pink, shimmering like its namesake in the sun. He sails out as far as he can on clear days, until the shore is an ugly beige splotch against the horizon and all he can breathe is brine.

Those are his best days. The days when the sky is clear and the water is blue and he can lie flat on his belly on the foredeck, fingers just skimming the surface. Just barely peeking past that glittering layer whose only distinction from the air sitting heavily above it is the coldness of it, the viscous, fluid, formless beauty that is the water.

That is Jihoon’s home.

Jihoon had had no name until Taeil had given him one, on their fifth rendezvous a hundred yards from the buoy furthest from shore.

Jihoon is beautiful, and he embodies The Ocean in a way so perfect that sometimes Taeil just has to stare at him, touch him, remind himself that Jihoon is not just a figment of his fervent imagination.

Jihoon has eyes the color of the water that swirls in the shadows of the deep, of the currents that kill sailors with no thought or hardship. They are whirlpools of intensity in the calm placidness of his pale face, and Taeil thinks often that the most expensive gemstones in all the world couldn’t be half as captivating as those wide, dangerous eyes are. Like his eyes, Jihoon’s hair is black, like ink and oil, and it swims through the water after him like it has it’s own life, it’s own breath.

His fingernails are more claws than anything, and as they trail down Taeil’s cheek, gentler than the wispiest sea breeze, he’s reminded of the skin of sharks. His teeth are pointed, too, sharp white things like the shiny shards of bivalve shells that Jihoon sometimes brings him. Jihoon had originally been fascinated by the bluntness of Taeil’s own teeth, enamored by their choppy, flat edges, and had often goaded Taeil into nibbling on his long, thin fingers, just to feel their rounded strangeness for himself.

Taeil had made sure, then, not to tear any of the delicate, mottled pink webbing between them.

Jihoon’s skin is soft and marred with countless coral white scars, blemishes that Taeil likes to kiss and with barely-there pressure, if not to see that soft seahorse pink flush on his cheeks then to assuage his own worries.

The sea is a violent, dangerous, and unpredictable place. That he’d always known.

But Jihoon is strong, large and able-bodied, and he tells Taeil stories with a puffed chest of battles fought and won with monsters that waited in depths and trenches that mankind had yet to even dream of exploring.

They are enthralling, these tales, and Taeil is not too naïve to be unaware of the fact that much of them must be posturing. Jihoon is only so strong, and he only has so much luck.

But it is endearing, that Jihoon wants to impress him, woo him and charm him with his physical prowess, so Taeil plays along.

He always plays along.

Taeil is in love with Jihoon, a love stupid in the hold it has on him.

Jihoon’s eyes, like sea glass and pearls and the bellies of starfish, make the beats of Taeil’s poor lovestruck heart match the squalls of the great storms that pull waves inland for miles only to drag them back out; repeat, repeat, repeat. A vicious riptide bubbles within Taeil’s chest whenever Jihoon smiles, whenever the sweet mauve scales that layer the rippling muscle of his broad back catch the light reflecting from the water like the shimmering tails of angelfish, whenever he brings back gifts from the ocean bottom, bones picked clean by hoards of hagfish and six gills’, utensils snatched from the wreckages of elegant old ships, the bleached skeletons of corals and the shed teeth of sharks.

‘Treasures for my sweetheart,’ he says as he hands them over, youthful grin on his ageless face, blush darkening the pink tips on his sharp-topped ears.

Taeil feels like his love for Jihoon shines from him like the divine steadiness of lighthouse candles, or the blade-like rays of the sun as noon pulls the highest waves from core of the sea. It’s a beacon, one he follows guilelessly, blinded by his own light.

At least he knows, with a certainty as solid as the rising of the tide, that Jihoon is there, to guide him back to the sea.