Bobby thinks he is made up of too many sharp angles and heavy gold chains to be able to appreciate beautiful things. He is a rapper, a powerhouse of heavy beats and rugged lyrics, dirt-streaked cheeks and booming tunes created to shake roofs and annihilate dancefloors. He thinks that a person like that doesn’t know how to love the soft fullness of what people call ‘beautiful’, a gentle concept that exists way above the rough underground life that he leads. Which is why whenever he visits museums and planetariums, he feels oddly out of place, out of orbit, out of step. His eyes can hardly bear to look at those artworks: pristine in their old age, and so magnificent that no one should ever touch them. Bobby knows that in front of all things exquisite, he is but a jagged shard of stone, rough at all the edges and with too many sharp angles.

Bobby knows he cannot appreciate beautiful things, so he does not know how he coexists alongside Kim Hanbin, the most beautiful thing of all.

If you had asked him years ago what he thought the most stunning phenomenon was, he would’ve told you that it was the way the stars blink into existence on a clear night. How they were millions of miles away, yet could carelessly evoke an awestruck disbelief of how such a magnificent view could ever be real.

But if you ask him now, he would think about the night where he realized that the most beautiful thing in life was the boy, filled with the splendour of a thousand undiscovered universes, pressed gently into his side on the damp grass field.

~

‘Hyung,’ Hanbin had said, his quiet voice louder than it seemed as it drifted into the previously undisturbed night air, shattering the silence that was only reserved for dark skies and sleeping cities.

‘Hm?’ Bobby replied, staring at the stars but not really seeing them, eyes glazed over in how fragile the moment seemed and how vulnerable it felt to lie with his body opened up to the skies, arms spread wide as though in sacrifice. Night was always a time that brought out the most insecure fragments of even the best people, a deep, unexplainable emotion of uncertainty and awareness of one’s own insignificance in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

‘Do you ever think about how beautiful the night sky is?’

Bobby turned his head to find Hanbin absentmindedly peering at him through half-closed lids and eyes dry from the cold night air. He opened to reply that yes, he often did, but a strange pang shot up his chest and into and he found himself unable to speak. In that moment as he looked at the soft curves of Hanbin’s cold-reddened nose, drooping eyes as smooth and pale as the half moon that hung fixedly above their heads, and the chapped lips slightly parted in exhaustion, he found that he no longer could think about the beauty of the night sky, and his heart ached strangely.

The sparse rays of moonlight fell gently upon Hanbin’s face, illuminating what had been hidden in the shadow of his hoodie. It was not the harsh light and sharp angles that Bobby was used to, but rather a glow that seemed to latch onto the radiance found beneath Hanbin’s own skin, highlighting the gentle slope of his jaw and the softness of his cheeks. It was a reverent light that caressed the fullness of Hanbin’s face as though to say, ‘Look at this beauty that I have illuminated for the world to see,’ and Bobby felt a tight protectiveness in his chest that made him want to be the only person to ever see Hanbin like this.

They looked at each other for what seemed like too many lifetimes, Hanbin never probing for a reply to his question as though he knew that Bobby didn’t have one. As the seconds ticked by and the planets orbited at the same old pace, Bobby looked into Hanbin’s eyes and felt empty, emptier than he had ever felt before. The skies, stars, and whatever else that had once mattered seemed to melt away from above them and the gentle intimacy of the moment crushed him like a vacuum, making it a little harder to breathe. He wondered how he could exist, in his small, trembling consciousness, beside the most stunning marvel he had ever seen, all of the most magnificent stars and revered constellations compressed into a human being too achingly beautiful to walk this earth. Bobby knew why he felt so hollow—because Hanbin was so full, full of goodness and softness and tenderness that in comparison, Bobby felt as though he had been split open and all his worthlessness and ruggedness released like secrets into emptiness. Hanbin was every universe in existence at once, and Bobby felt like he could not be anything close to that.

Perhaps his vulnerability was written too obviously on his face, or perhaps Hanbin had learnt to read him better than anyone else, but his eyes raised to look at the moon for a while and when they found Bobby’s again, they were softer than they had ever been.

‘I do think about how beautiful the night sky is,’ Bobby finally managed to reply, his voice barely a whisper and not quite as strong as he wanted it to be, ‘But I think more about how beautiful you are.’

The silence that his words left was almost sacred and Bobby thought that those words were the only thing left in him because when they were finally out, everything seemed to give out beneath him and the uncertainty of the moment made him feel weightless and frightfully unimportant. It wasn’t how he had foreseen himself confessing, and part of him felt like laughing at how much movies lied about this moment. They never told about the crushing helplessness and stuttering lungfuls of breaths that struggle to regain a normal rhythm. They were all about fireworks and passionate acceptance, not the deafening sound of night silence and the prickling of grass under his skin that started to feel unnatural.

Hanbin looked at him for a long time, unmoving, then, like a beam of light seeking out the darkest corners in its path, reached out for Bobby’s hand and linked their fingers together. At his touch, Bobby felt his universe slam back into existence. Clouds flew by in an exaggerated rush, civilisations built themselves and fell into ruins, skyscrapers rose from the ashes and glinted off the shiny sides of speeding cars. Light trails, long-exposure photographs, the Renaissance visited and left, and Bobby felt his world righten itself again. This is what the movies were right and wrong about—none of it could ever capture how suffocatingly beautiful the moment was.

He didn’t know how long more they laid there side by side, warm bodies pressed together in a familiar feeling that felt like home, and Bobby’s heart ached in a different way. As he looked up at the sky, he found it infinitely less interesting, less beautiful than the wonder he held in his hand, and he felt the weight lift from his chest because his world truly belonged to him in that moment. Hanbin shifted so that he could rest his forehead against Bobby’s neck and Bobby wondered if he could feel the thrum of his heartbeat, so calm and yet so erratic, beneath his collarbone, and he hoped Hanbin could hear all the unspoken words that weren’t ready to be released from his chest.

The night air was no longer bitingly cold and deafeningly silent. Bobby felt a new kind of warmth spread tenderly from his chest and he thought about whether Hanbin could feel it, from where he had buried his nose against Bobby’s jawline and where he had tucked his cold fingers under the hem of Bobby’s hoodie. Shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, ankle to ankle, they laid beneath the stars and maybe, just maybe, Bobby felt a little less small with his universe by his side.

~

Bobby still thinks he is made up of too many sharp angles and that he cannot appreciate beautiful things, but he will gladly make an exception for Hanbin. He knows Hanbin has a place in every art gallery in the world, a perfect artwork admired by everyone, and Bobby knows how lucky he is that he can touch Hanbin. Bobby doesn’t appreciate museums, but if Hanbin were a museum, Bobby would fall on his knees in front of every exhibition with a prayer on his lips.

On nights when they are wrapped up tightly in the sheets, around each other, he feels like the sharp tips of a crescent moon flowing gently into smooth curves that were meant for him all along, and Bobby realizes that they, him and Hanbin, are utterly beautiful.