Part Six

“It’s awkward now. I wished he hadn’t confessed,” Yunho shared his tribulation with his lover that night as they met up like they had been doing since they’ve made things official over at his lover's place.

Haneul laughed and gave Yunho a quick back massage. “Do not dwell too much on it.”

Yunho reached back and laid his palm on top of his lover’s hand and reached back to drop a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks.”

He loved this. He loved being in the relationship. It was nice to met someone after work and talk to them about their days. It was nice if that person was your lover and not just a mere friend.

That day Yunho had been confessed to by a male teacher. The person had been someone he had gotten closed to. They had gone to dinner sometimes just the two of them, and during lunch at school they would sit together and talk. They had been getting close and the teacher had started to send him signals that he was interested in him. After assessing him for months and making sure to get Yunho to talk about LGBT and getting to know if he was homophobic the male had deliberately let Yunho read his text incriminating him as gay. That was when it became clear to yunho he would be getting a confession. In three months time it came.

He had wondered if he had done something to have gotten all of those confessions—though it was only two. Nayoung, whom he knew had been interested in him, had never confessed and had gotten herself a boyfriend.

“Are you hungry?” Haneul asked, walking away from him after dropping a kiss on the side of his neck.

“Yes please. I would appreciate dinner right now.”

‘That’s good that I made dinner, then.” He winked

Yunho smiled watching his lover shayshay in front of him.

Haneul was very effeminate in the private of his house or Yunho’s place. It was a side of him he only let out around Yunho. Yunho, weirdly enough, liked that. He felt special.

“Yum,” he said his lips for added affect, walking behind him. Wrapping Haneul into a back hug he nuzzled the side of his neck. “Hey!” he laughed, “be a good boy and have dinner.”

“I am a good boy.” He chuckled, biting him playfully.

Haneul lightly slapped him on the shoulder. “Have your mother never told you to have dinner before dessert.”

“Ah, so I am promised dessert.”

“If you eat dinner.”

“Definitely!” he beamed stepping away from a chortling Haneul.

Dropping one last kiss on his cheek he grabbed a plate and started to help his older lover with arranging the table.

Jaejoong had known that it would come.

Every time Yunho would seek him out after fighting with his boyfriend, he had quickly run over the speech of comfort he would give the desolated man. But those occasions over the year and a half they were together was never put to use till that day when Yunho called him to have a drink.

He had assumed Yunho would come to him right away after they broke up, but he had let a week passed before he called him out for consolation.

Jaejoong hadn’t been happy at all. He had been  devastated for Yunho, especially after learning the nature of the reasons behind their split. It was horrible and disgusting. But it could not be avoided, and Jaejoong knew Yunho would experience the same thing again as long as he continued on dating.

Biting a bit of his ice cream, Yunho lowered his hand and sighed looking at the dark water. They met up by the river that Jaejoong showed him the night view of years ago. Sitting on the grassy bank, Jaejoong listened to Yunho pour his feelings out.

“I am not going to cry,” he said, lifting the corner of his lips at Jaejoong as he brought his hand to his mouth and his ice cream cone.

“I am not saying you are, or that you should.” Jaejoong smiled at a fixated Yunho.

“I’ve just made a revelation. I should have made it ages ago.”

Jaejoong coughed, and looked at the male who quickly gobbled up the ice cream part of his ice-cone and take a huge bite of the crunchy tasteless cone.  

“Which is?”

Swallowing hard, Yunho threw the rest of the cone in his mouth and reached inside the plastic shopping bag between him and Jaejoong and pulled out a bag of m&ms and forcefully tugged it open.

“I told you about the two guys I dated before….” He swallowed and inhaled. “Haneul, right?”

Jaejoong nodded, and reached over and lowered his hand in the candy bag in Yunho’s firm grasp and grabbed some little balls of chocolate. “What about him?” He threw them in his mouth and started to chew.

Jaejoong had successfully managed to stop smoking, however,  that didn’t mean sometimes he didn’t get a want to hold a stick between his fingers and puff away. As he sat next to a dejected Yunho watching the river meet the dark night sky,  he desperately wanted to smoke just one stick.  He felt as if this was his fault in a way. Ad if he prayed for this day to come and had been waiting for it. He had been waiting for it. But to see Yunho hold back his tears and acted like he wasn’t hurt made his throat closed, his head pound, with a sharp pain flaring and fading in his chest. His heart hurt.

“I’ve learned from these two relationship that.…” He stopped to chew on some m&m. “My revelation is that people like me, like us, we weren’t meant to be happy.”

Jaejoong frowned.

“No?” Yunho laughed at seeing the man’s face. “You do not agree?”

“No!” Jaejoong exclaimed, shocked. Yunho was taking this harder than he had previously thought, he’d realized.

Yunho chuckled as he threw m&ms in his opened mouth. “Listen to me. We weren't meant to be happy. As in, we can never marry the one we love because of society. Because of our parents. Because of the world. Because of bigoted, hateful people. And most importantly, because we’re weak. Because we’re cowards.”

Jaejoong shook his head. “No.”

“No?” Yunho’s eyebrows went up.

Jaejoong shook his head again and reached for more m&ms.

Yunho laughed, reached over and messed up Jaejoong's hair. “How am I lying?” the embittered man demanded.

“Well,” he sighed, “I can't say you’re lying, however, we can be happy. We can find our  happiness. Marriage doesn’t equate love, nor is it the stage that one has to go through to show that they love someone. A committed relationship is the thing that proves you love someone. You can have it without marriage.”

“Not when the whole wide world tells you the person you love is wrong. Not when your parents never stop nagging about you getting married.” Yunho smiled and lifted his legs off the ground and rested his arms on his raised bended knees. “We cannot be in committed relationships.”

“Well...of course, we can!”

Yunho laughed and shook his head at his friend’s, to him, navie exclamation. “Thanks for trying to cheer me up, but the truth of the matter is….we are doomed to be unhappy. Most of us will be forced to marry someone we do not want. While the rest...we will either die young or die alone.”

He was stunned for a while. All he did was look at Yunho who continued on smiling sadly with his eyes never leaving the immobile water.

Did Yunho think about suicide? The question scared Jaejoong out of his skin.

Jaejoong pressed his palms on the ground on either side of him and scoot closer to the male and threw an arm around Yunho, surprising him as he tugged him into a hug. He patted him on the back rhythmically with Yunho’s chin on top of his shoulder.

“Wha—what’s this for?” A stunned Yunho asked. He batted his lashes at a beaming Jaejoong. Dropping his head on top his, Jaejoong bit his bottom lip and smiled harder. That might have been when Jaejoong fell for Yunho, a friend he had known by then for roughly three years, but he wasn’t sure if what he had felt at that moment with Yunho’s fragrance surrounding him as his soft breath hitting the skin of his neck and hard body pressing hard against his, had just been pity.

He pitied his friend who had have two of his lover’s stolen from him by their parents and being forced to get married to women and leave him in the cold to mourn.

Jaejoong had wanted to make Yunho feel better and be optimistic. He wanted the young man of twenty five to know that he was young still and had a lot of life left to live and he could and would find his own happiness. He would find someone that would stay with him forever.

“You can be happy.”

“I am not saying I cannot be happy.” Yunho pulled back. Jaejoong refused to release him, making the male arch his neck at an awkward angle to look up at him as he talked.

“Shss,” Jaejoong rolled his head against his. “You, Yunho, can be happy. We, people like us, can be happy. In some countries we can get married—”

“Doesn’t mean we’re not ridiculed and hated even there.”

“Shss, let me finish.” He breathed in through his nose. “Yunho, right now you're being extremely pessimistic, however, in the future you’ll find—”

He tried to pull away, again he didn't succeed.

“Stop it! Jaejoong, this isn’t about me—”

“Isn’t it? We, again, people like us, can be happy. Even in this country, in this society with parents like ours. We can form committed relationships—”

“Why are you single?” Yunho rolled his eyes, thinking his friend was a hypocrite.

“Because I was scared—no, I am scared of being cheated on again. My issues have nothing to do with my uality. Straight, gay, whatever you are, you can be cheated on.” He smiled at Yunho. “But not any more.” He briefly closed his eyes as he noted after his declaration. “Not everyone is like the person that cheated on me, just like not everyone is like Hansel and will leave you to go marry a woman because his parents and society dictates. We will find our perfect someone.”

“Perfect?” Yunho chortled tartly. “There is no perfect anyone out there.”

“But, that is where you’re wrong my friend. There is. By perfect, I do not mean that unattainable definition of perfect. I mean someone that will be all you ever needed and more. You’ll find that person.”

Yunho’s eyebrows rose. “Really? Thanks for making me feel better with your love life, but….” he sighed into the distance again and finally freed himself from Jaejoong's hold, now the half empty bag of treats, “I do not want to find that person anymore. Now I just want to be single and enjoy being young and free. I am twenty five, soon to be twenty six. I am only getting older. Now I think it is time I start to enjoy life. I do not need a lover to be happy. I can be happy by myself. I can make myself happy and be content.”

“That’s the spirit!” Jaejoong exclaimed, pulling Yunho into a side hug.  “Do not be sad anymore.”

“I wish it were that easy.”

“I know. Which is why my job from now on is to get you back to where you used to be. To how you used to be. To how happy you were.”

Jaejoong clapped him on the back and tried to console him more.

Inside Jaejoong was seething with anger directed at Haneul. If he knew he had to break up one day with Yunho to get married, he should had never touched his friend he thought. He wanted to give the man a good black shiner around the eye.