The door clicks shut behind him, and for a moment all Seungri can focus on is the familiar weight of the handle, just the same as every other room in this hotel. It seems absurd that something so insignificant could have caught his attention, before he stops to consider the three even strides he always takes towards the bed or the snap of his keycard into the light switch. But he here stands, fingers curling over cold metal and wondering that of all the things he could have found waiting for him in Seoul it’s the streamlined precision of the service industry that catches him out.

He slides his keycard into the lightswitch and smiles as it clicks into place. In three strides he is standing next to the bed with his suitcase trailing meekly behind him.

It probably says rather more about him than he’d care to admit that even as he reaches for his phone to run through half a dozen text messages from friends and snapchat notifications from loose acquaintances scattered half way round the world, he finds himself pulling the laptop from the bottom of his suitcase. Before he can so much as unpack his toothbrush. He flips it open and pulls up his work email account – thirty unread messages – he doesn’t even flinch.

Seungri’s sure this will keep him up half the night. He calls roomservice and asks them to bring him up coffee and lots of it, settles himself at the desk tucked neatly against the window and somewhat forlornly tells Hara that he’ll have to call her back tomorrow, to discuss the never ending disaster that is Jiyong’s hair. It’s fine, he’d rather do this tonight and do it right. Lord knows he’ll be lucky to find the time to keep on top of his emails over the next few weeks if he doesn’t.

When the coffee arrives it’s sweet and dark, because Seungri stays here so often that the staff don’t even need to ask how he likes it any more. A familiar girl with bright eyes and a plucky smile wheels in the trolly, the tips of her kitten heels thudding dully against the carpet. He doesn’t miss the way her eyes flicker over to the computer in the corner, and for a moment that smile looks like a grimace.

She leaves, he drinks deep, another message lands in his inbox. Seungri takes a slurp of his coffee and stares doggedly out of the window, straight opposite from the foot of the bed, just like every other room. His reflection peers pack at him, but his eyes are focused beyond it, to the flat on the other side of the road, a floor above him this time. So close, so very very close.

The room is lit in low, orange light, shining back at Seungri like some laughing jester, derisive of the fake familiarity of his pressed sheets and mass purchased door handles. From this angle he can just see in, to where a figure lounges at the edge of his vision. He tries to put the pieces together from the fragments he has seen before – someone not so tall, with a soft face and sharp jaw all crowded under a mop of black hair.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Seungri mutters under his breath, and in his mind he’s standing in line at Starbucks when the stranger from the flat across the way walks in. In his imagination, the stranger always recognises him.

Sometimes Seungri finds himself thinking about three years ago, maybe four. Whenever he first looked up and spotted a stranger with a familiar face staring back at him. He starts when he realises how long it’s been, he’s never considered himself much of a creature of habit, but staying in the same place whenever he’s in the city saves worrying about the extraneous details of travel.

Extraneous details – like a place to lay your head. Seungri supposes that he’s accidentally made himself something of a home away from home in this hotel, with it’s unfailing symmetry and clinical familiarity.

He had been restless, looking for any excuse to forgo work for the time being. His eyes had caught movement across the street, through the clear sunlight lighting up the street in redbrick, a failed mimicry of New York. There’s something enthralling about watching a stranger go about their daily life, unaware of your presence. And perhaps after a minute or two one may find that even the act of looking feels intrusive and creepy, but while it lasts it’s wonderful.

Seungri didn’t see much of course, the buildings may be nice but the windows aren’t all that wide in this part of town. But a flash of blue caught his eye – a dressing gown of some sorts, expensive looking even at this distance. He remembers tiptoeing closer to his own window, slowly slowly, like the occupant of the other flat might see him and stop at any moment.

There had been hammers and paintbrushes a great movement of material from one place to another, that Seungri viewed in snatches at the stranger flitted idly around the room behind the glass. Some sort of artist, he had assumed at the time. Truth be told he has no better idea as to what could have possibly been going on that day even now.

An artist in an expensive dressing gown lives across from a hotel. It’s midday and he’s still not dressed. Seungri laughed to himself, thinking that he must be looking at a trust fund baby celebrating their stereotype in full force. Every now and then the figure had lingered in his field of vision, silhouette fuzzy and striking.

All of a sudden, the window on the other side of the road opened and the stranger stuck their head out – a man with a face like fine wine to be drunk with all the graces of cheap beer. His hair had been wild, but everything else had been so neat. From the soft bow of his lips to the eyes that met Seungri’s despite the glass in the way. First the corner of his mouth had turned up in a bemused smirk, then he had waved.

Then he had pulled out a pack of Malboroughs and blown smoke at the sun.

And all the while Seungri’s thinking that you don’t see a face like that every day, and his imagination ran away with itself before he could stop it. He wondered what would happen if he opened the window and waved back, he wondered if he had enough self-confidence to not tie his tongue in a knot trying to shout a greeting across the street.

Well, he knew he had the confidence, but so did the stranger. It’s all a matter of who cracks first. He could have opened the window right then and there, stuck his head into the sun and said anything.

Fancy seeing you here!

And perhaps the stranger’s eyes would have widened in surprise, perhaps he would have asked where on earth Seungri had seen him before. And then there would have been stories to spin and wry smiles to share over the gulf of the road beneath them.

Perhaps the stranger would have called his bluff, and proven that twinkle sitting in his eyes was more than just the sun.

Seungri wakes as the plane touches down in Beijing with a crick in his neck and a dream dying on the backs of his eyelids. He struggles desperately to retrieve the tangled images falling away from him just as fast as the plane dashes across the runway, but it’s already gone.

He’s sure it had been a good dream, better than the proverbial nightmare that is filling out the never ending paperwork required to enter China. He hates airports, he hates how long it takes to get from one place to another – immigration to baggage reclaim, the runway to the street. He didn’t come here to wade through bureaucracy but he might as well have done for all the time it cuts out of the precious few hours he ever gets to himself on trips like this.

He climbs into a blue and yellow taxi and asks for a hotel recommended to him by a colleague. His Chinese is heavily accented but he’s always been able to make himself understood if nothing else. The driver nods and sets off down the freeway, massive and overflowing. Beijing is so huge, and so close to bursting with the weight of all that it manages to cram into it’s sprawling mass.

Tonight he will eat roast duck and raw donkey, stewed intestines and shredded pork, all while smiling and laughing and pretending that this great show of hospitality has as much to do with personal affection as it does business. He knows the customers he’s here to see, they’re met several times. But without the promise of an eventual financial gain on both their parts, they wouldn’t be eating dinner together on his first night in the city of their own accord.

It’s a long drive into the city centre, and as they go Seungri watches the skies fade through glorious pinks and oranges to the half dark of night in the city. As the other cars rush past them, snatches of images that could have been taken from a half forgotten dream flash across his mind, something a little blue and a little gold.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Seungri says to himself. And to the stranger. How odd that he should remember that face now, and here, as he’s stepping out of a taxi into a hotel with door handles of an unfamiliar weight.

The next time he’s in Seoul he requests his room specifically, “411, please. If it’s free.”

He doesn’t get in till late, and as he clicks the keycard into the light switch and takes three even steps across the room to the bed he thinks that this is becoming a worrying trend in his life. He always arrives in the dark, and what is there to see then?

There’s a pack of complementary nuts sitting on the desk this time. Something a little new, a little unfamiliar. Seungri tears them open eagerly and practically swallows them in one bite. It had been morning in another timezone the last time he ate. Perhaps it wasn’t even so long ago as all that, but he doesn’t have it in him to care. He supposes he should call room service, have them send up something a little more nourishing than coffee.

The phone is in his hands before he notices the stranger. He hadn’t even been looking this time, but a flash of blue catches his eye as Seungri turns towards the bed.

He can’t say he’s surprised, he picked out this room for this very reason after all. Still, as he steps towards the window, Seungri can feel his fingers twitching with nervous excitement over the hard plastic of the phone. In the dark, with the apartment opposite lit up, he can see the blue walls of the room beyond.

He can also see the stranger, hanging out of the window with a cigarette between his fingers like he was waiting for Seungri to show up. Their eyes meet and the stranger smiles, his lips stretching lazily into a friendly smirk.

Seungri opens his window and lets the cool night air wash over him. As soon as it’s done he feels foolish, he has nothing to do out here – he doesn’t smoke, there’s nothing he could conceivably say to this man with a face that won’t get out of his head.

Not that Seungri tries that hard to forget attractive faces, but he hates it when they bug him like this.

Fancy seeing you here – is the only thought that crosses his mind before he remembers that he’s locked eyes with the man across the way and all of a sudden nothing else matters. The night, the awkward placement of his hands on the windowsill, the phone dropped to the floor with the number undialed, it all fades to insignificance.

The weight of this gaze is familiar, even if the room behind the stranger is nothing more than badly remembered window dressing he never got a good look at in the first place. And as Seungri takes a deep breath and stares back, without embarrassment, he feels a jolt of excitement at the thought that he is looking at a man who recognises him.

Even at this distance, a smudge of something dark is visible on the stranger’s cheek. Ink, or paint. An artist, surely.

Seungri doesn’t speak, not because he can’t think of something to say but because to go shouting across streets at this time of night would be vulgar. His mind is reeling though, the pieces falling into place as he contemplates the possibility of all his day dreams coming true.

Seungri finds the coffee at most cafes bland or burnt, but he takes his hot chocolate with whipped cream and extra cinnamon. He smiles his brightest smile at the girl who serves him, because she’s pretty and he always smiles at pretty girls. She smiles back in kind, unruffled and edgeless.

There are no seats available, which is unfortunate but not the worst thing that’s happened to him today. Seungri sidles over to the window and checks his phone between slurps of chocolate coated cream. Hara’s taken to harassing him on twitter, trying to get him to go out with her and her friends the next time he’s home in Gwangju, and Jiyong’s knee deep in some fashion event in the states.

“Fancy seeing you here”

The voice is rich and smooth, heavy; like dark chocolate. Seungri’s head snaps up and his eyes flick around the room till they focus on a familiar face smiling slyly at him over the top of an espresso.

“You,” Seungri exhales, all in a rush.

The stranger chuckles, unruly hair bouncing with his shoulders. The smudge of black is still sitting on his cheek, but he’s replaced the dressing gown with a buttondown and donned a pair of loafers. No wonder Seungri didn’t spot him as soon as he walked in.

“Me,” he says, voice warm. Seungri’s not sure what he expected his voice to sound like, but he knows he should have expected this.

None of this reads like any daydream he’s familiar with, he doesn’t spend enough time in cafes to have wasted precious seconds imagining what might happen if the two of them were to run into each other in a place like this. He doesn’t know where to go, so he stands with his hot chocolate held close to his chest, waiting for the stranger to take the initiative. He supposes it would be rude to tell him that he’s managed to get this all wrong.

The stranger nods to the chair opposite him, introduces himself as Seunghyun. Seungri finds himself falling into place, tumbling into the line of conversation and loosening his jaw with every gulp of hot chocolate. He watches the way Seunghyun’s mouth moves when he talks and the way his eyes sparkle just before he makes a joke, it’s all so familiar, just seen anew up close.

Seungri finishes his drink, takes a deep breath. For the first time it occurs to him that he’s not the only one who’s mind has ever had cause to wander to thoughts of a stranger who sometimes lives across the street.