Kibum couldn't stop berating himself all the way to the bus stop.

"I'm dumb, stupid, and an idiot. I'm not even a half of an idiot, that's how stupid I am. Even Choi Minho is a smarter guy than me."

Jinki was following him, both hands in pockets.

"Minho is not dumb, though. His essay on the Korean War was pretty neat."

One glance from his frustrated friend was enough for him to change the subject:

"Making a mistake doesn't make you a stupid person. I do stupid things all the time, but would you say that I'm a fool or dumb?"

Kibum began taking out his transportation card, even though his bus wasn't arriving yet.

"Ask me again when you're wearing socks that match."

Jinki looked down and realized that he was wearing a dark gray sock on one foot, and a light gray one on the other. He whistled and laughed about it, because the world wasn't ending for him.

If it was possible to trade their problems, Kibum would love to find a way to do that.

But then he remembered that they were in the same boat – it's just that one of them was sinking it, and it definitely wasn't his friend.

“What are you giggling about? We're about to have one long- day of birthing an entire project into existence.” He sounded more worried than sarcastic at this point.

“Why don't you focus on the fact that at some point between today and tomorrow you're gonna click ‘Send’ and it all will be dealt with? I bet that this time tomorrow it will be the last thing on your mind.”

Kibum wasn't sure about that.

“You don't get it. I wanted it to be perfect and best. Not a half-baked mess that won't even be considered for…” He waved his hand in the air instead of finishing his sentence.

“An award?” Jinki suggested with a smile hoovering on his lips. “I wouldn't mind if we got one, not gonna lie, but it doesn't mean anything in the long run. It will just stand dusty and useless on the shelf, and you'll forget it's there the next day.”

“Sounds like a great scenario to me.”

“For real, though. When I won a medal at a Science competition, the most exciting thing that happened to it was when me and Taemin threw it in the fireplace at his parents’ house to see if it would melt.” He shrugged. “And it did melt! A little.”

Kibum wasn't impressed with the story.

“First of all, you two are idiots, and second, I didn't put so many hours into making the visuals good for all of it to come to nothing. How much of your text have you completed?”

"About seventy percent?"

Kibum groaned out loud.

"Why, isn't that good?”

"Yeah, it is, but it also makes me really hate you."

Jinki chuckled and draped his arm around his friend's shoulders. He gave him an encouraging shake.

"Don't worry, man, you can do it. And by 'you' I mean 'we'."

“We're screwed,” Kibum sighed. “And by ‘we’ I mean me.”

Their agreement was such: Kibum would go home, add a finishing touch to his Photoshop file and write a brief version of the text he had planned to compose. Meanwhile, Jinki would go to his respective house and complete the seventy percent he had already done. And then – depending on how desperate Kibum’s situation would be, they'd meet up and see what they could do.

Kibum imagined their versions of today's evening to be quite different: he saw himself, slouching in front of his monitor amidst deep darkness, bloodshot eyes seeing no end to the torture – a mad scientist of the art world. And then he pictured Jinki, waltzing over to his house, maybe even with a grocery bag in hand, and sitting down to work in some ridiculous shirt he wore at home and with a plate of bacon sandwiches he had made himself without any hurry. Kibum felt there had to be a reason underneath it all for why the situation was unfair to him, but he couldn't find it: the only obvious culprits here seemed to be himself and his distractedness.

It goes without saying that there is no such thing as a convenient moment to think of that time when you accidentally imagined your friend shirtless – and that one definitely wasn’t it: Kibum had to work on an important task in a final countdown mode, and there was no energy or time to waste on intrusive thoughts. But the funny thing with intrusive thoughts is that any frantic attempts to fan them off end up only making them worse.

Kibum was looking at one thing, and seeing another.

When he was trying to be focused on examining the art project file to see if anything needed to be fixed or added before the final save (which Kibum was reluctant to do, knowing how far it was from perfection, in his eyes), he involuntarily busied himself with convincing his inner voice that the flashbacks were just a glitch and nothing to worry about. When he was supposed to be very attentive while saving the file, he was instead arguing with himself that such glitches are a very, very bad sign and should not be taken lightly. When he needed to assess how he could complete (or begin) the written part in a very concise form and how much time he would need, his mind was too taken up by increasing panic to be productive.

Why him out of all people?

Something was bound to happen. And when it did, Kibum was distraught, but not really surprised. It was tough on his pride to activate his phone and make the call that usually took no toll on him, and sometimes even filled him with happy anticipation.

“Hey.” Jinki’s voice was so relaxed it almost added insult to injury. He could as well been talking out of a thick layer of foam in a cozy mid-afternoon bubble bath.

“Hey,” Kibum replied in a similar way, but miserably. “Your words about the graphics came too early.”

“What do you mean the project is gone? How can it be gone?”

Kibum, who was beginning to hyperventilate, took a deep breath before starting his explanation over again.

“I made a backup file like you told me to, but I haven’t updated it for a long while. Its name was similar to the original file, and while I was saving everything I must have overwritten the original with the backup one. That wasn’t updated!”

There was an excruciating pause.

“How much of the project do you still have on that file?” Jinki was speaking slowly: the reality hadn’t hit him yet.

Kibum wanted to cry, despite being so against the act of it.

“About fifteen percent? It’s a few wonky layers and like three half-edited pictures. I’m telling you, it’s gone. Over. Lost.”

It occurred to him that, until now, he hadn’t even realized what the project had meant to him. It had turned into a habit, something he’d escaped to when he was too bored or unmotivated to do other things, a reason to sit Jinki down by his side and listen to his comments on how well he was doing. Unnoticeably, like an afterthought, it had been filling his days with meaning. It was their work, and he’d destroyed everything.

“Do you think you can redo a part of it? Just to make it complete, but maybe not as complex as you’d planned?”

His friend didn’t understand.

“It’s weeks of work, Jinki! It was one-of-a-kind thing, an artwork that a lot of thought was put into, not some bunch of cat memes! It was meant to have a lot of elements in it and look amazing.”

Even while saying it, Kibum realized how futile his lamenting was: what did it matter now that he’d wanted the project to look amazing and complicated? He was not getting the award now anyway. The mayor wouldn’t be shaking his hand, he wouldn’t be receiving his ticket to London and wouldn’t be applying the Valencia filter to some Hyde Park pictures, and Taeyeon - who was absolutely stalking his Instagram account like he sometimes did hers - wouldn’t be tearing her hair out in jealousy at the sight of his sunshine-filled selfies from the places they’d dreamt of visiting together one day.

Fantasies aside, he’d screwed up big time, potentially owed Jinki a Starbucks drink that his friend couldn’t normally afford (if only just because Kibum felt like a grande hot chocolate at the moment) and they both had nicer alternatives for spending that evening than frantically trying to jam a few months’ worth of work into a few hours’ time.

“You know what - let’s just forget about it. The damage is done, and we have a bunch of homework to do by tomorrow, too.”

“Are you being serious right now?” Jinki replied with sudden earnestness. “You just want to give up?”

Kibum shifted in his swivel chair. When his friend’s usually benign expression wasn’t attached to the tone of his voice, he found himself puzzled: he hated phone calls for a reason.

“Um, yes?” he said with less confidence than before.

“You think you’re the only one who’s been trying to make this thing happen?”

He was starting to feel like he was being scolded. Fair enough.

“Look, it was not a great concept either, to be honest. I didn’t mention it before, because I didn’t want you to feel like you were right when you wanted to make it personal and all… But every single team has been covering the same areas. Some people even photoshopped a dragon into their posters! They did look tacky as hell, I’ll tell you that.”

‘Double down and get verbose’ was a trick that had worked on some people who had been angry at him in the past, but Jinki, despite the soft core, could be a tough nut to crack when he wanted to.

That was the case now.

“I already said that we've got to finish what we started, and I still think that."

Kibum couldn't decide whether he was thankful for his partner's persistence because it had a potential to motivate him to push through, or annoyed that he wasn't being listened to.

He sank deeper into his chair.

"I'm not touching the stupid dragon again," he announced as a final act of rebellion before the frantic work resumed.

There was a pause where one side of the call was thinking of a solution plan, and the other swinging left and right in his chair idly and waiting for him to come up with something.

"You still have your instant camera?" Jinki asked at last.

Kibum did. Even though you did drop it on the ground last time, he wanted to add, but refrained.

"But it's gonna get dark soon," he said instead.

"Get ready fast, then," Jinki answered with an intonation that was almost boss-like. "And bring the fancy art supplies if you want it to look nice."

They were already hanging up when Kibum made sure he had the last word:

"Don't wear a trekking suit or something, though, okay?"

"I'm wearing the uniform! When did I ever-"

He hung up before hearing the rest: they didn't have the time for chatter. (And also he wanted to get on Jinki's nerves whenever he did have that chance.)

He saw Jinki waiting for him across the street. He was sitting on a bench with his back to him, the state of his hair betraying the fact that it hadn’t been touched by a comb since they’d last seen each other that day.

Nothing signified that the rest of the day would be anything out of the ordinary: the cloudy gray sky hung over the bigger world, bustling with the afternoon crowds and filled with discordant sounds of music coming out of every open door. And cramped into that world was theirs, where everything seemed to be a big deal, but hardly ever understood fully, where so many details were routinely overthought, but not examined enough. Their responsibilities, anxieties, tragedies, friendships were bound to be temporary, but at the same time, every single day felt like it could be the last.

Waiting at the crossing, an opened Skittles bag in hand, Kibum had one of those moments of sudden awareness. Everything that occupied his head was temporary. Even the figure of his friend on that wooden bench would disappear - perhaps one day he’d forget that it had ever been there, and pass that very street every day as an adult without ever acknowledging the fact that so many meetings had taken place there once.

Maybe that day wasn’t far off from now: Jinki was going to fall in love any moment now, and Kibum would have to return to the same cold and empty space he’d been at a few months ago.

Again, he was overthinking everything - but not examining.

The lights changed, and the awareness was over. He moved toward the bench to greet the other boy. When just one step separated them, Kibum paused.

Was he going to ruffle his hair? Slap his cheek playfully? Simply call out his name?

It was like he’d suddenly wondered about the mechanics of walking, and forgot how to walk for the first time in his life - he had no idea how to greet his closest friend anymore.

Something was just different about that day.

He approached the bench slowly and peered over Jinki’s shoulder. His friend was leaning back, right foot resting on the left knee, and watching something that looked like a remixed video of a big fluffy cat meowing. His socks were still mismatched.

Kibum plucked one earphone out of Jinki’s ear.

“Your doom is here.”

Jinki jerked upright, but let out a relaxed sigh once he’d turned around and recognized the source of the creepy whisper. He took off his vision correction glasses and wrapped his pink earphones around his fingers to stuff them away.

“Where’s your tie? Stayed at home?”

As always, there was something amiss in Jinki’s appearance that needed to be pointed out by someone else for him to notice. His top button was undone too, but the boy didn’t seem inclined to do something about it. 

“Yeah, he got tied of hanging around,” he shrugged.

“Maybe it’s because of your corny jokes,” Kibum said with an exaggerated tone of annoyance, like a parody of himself. He wasn’t sure if Jinki’s voice on the phone had sounded as cross as he’d imagined, and whether he was cross with him still - the least he could is get a reaction. Any reaction.

For now, above all else his friend seemed to be preoccupied - so much so that he didn’t even reply.

“It’s gonna start getting dark soon,” Kibum pushed as he tossed about five candies into his mouth, trying to sound as whiny as he usually did, only it usually didn’t require any trying.

Is he ever gonna look at me?

“We’ll have to crank up the aperture, then.”

Wasn’t it a bit rude how Jinki took out his phone again to answer a message while his friend was standing right there, waiting?

His expression was too unfazed to assume that he was busy replying to a love letter.

Kibum ceased to care and just flipped the Skittles pack upside down above his open mouth.

“Do the what?”

Jinki glanced at him briefly while still typing away on the screen.

“Match the light thingy with the little cloud by turning the lense on your camera.”

Somehow he managed to sound likeable even while being patronizing.

Kibum kicked the boy’s worn-out sneaker with his bright and new Reebok shoe.

“Are you being mad at me?”

“Why the present continuous?”

He repeated the assault, but Jinki simply moved his foot away by crossing his legs. His typing accelerated.

“Maybe I’m just mad at you in general. Simple present tense,” he continued, finishing his thought, but not the message.

Kibum crunched up the Skittles wrap into a ball and glanced around, unsure what to do. At least it wasn’t raining anymore.

“It’s okay, though. I‘ll be fine if we just throw the whole damn project away.”

Jinki finally put the phone away.

“I was just telling mom that you’re coming over and might be staying for dinner,” he explained, getting back on his feet.

Then he raised his head and looked into Kibum’s eyes.

“We’re in this together, aren’t we?”

He didn’t look mad, or frustrated, or particularly happy… He wasn’t sure what that expression was, and Kibum wondered if he’d somehow become unable to read his friend’s face in the course of one day.

He gave up and reached out to ruffle up his hair. It was both thick and soft to the touch, and Jinki jerked away the same way he did when he wanted to show impertinence. But even that felt somehow different than usual. He had no idea why.

“So, what are we gonna do?”

They were standing at a crossroads, familiar places and sights opening before them in every direction.

“Have fun, of course,” Jinki said with a shrug, and moved to cross the road first.

And Kibum followed his footsteps - just like any of us, he didn’t have the ability to predict the future.

What Jinki wanted to do was take pictures of their everyday life - walking down the street, playing machines at the arcade, grabbing a drink at a cafe, and then, of course, doing the homework for the next day. At first, Kibum wasn’t sure if he was following his concept entirely, but ultimately concluded that it didn’t matter: what they were doing were things they enjoyed. He was just hanging out with his best friend and having fun.

Jinki soon went back to his normal cheery self - or maybe it was Kibum who relaxed enough for his eyes to see clearly.

He took snaps of Jinki, and Jinki of him. Kibum’s face on his pictures was perfectly angled, background intentionally picked, while his friend went more for the comedic value with all the face-making and using everyday objects as funny props. They also took selfies, and more than a couple of times Kibum couldn’t shake the thought that something felt unmistakably out of the ordinary in those moments when the other boy’s arm wrapped around his shoulders and their heads leaned to each other in order to fit into the small frame of the picture… at least, there were no flashbacks anymore.

On the way to Jinki’s house, raindrops began pattering over the sidewalk again.

“Do you have your umbrella?”

Kibum shook his head, trying to shield his hair by using his hand, a precaution that would soon become useless in the thickening rain.

“I thought you had yours.”

“And I thought the rain had stopped, so I didn’t take mine.”

They quickened their pace, maneuvering as they moved down the hilly street, so that they spent more time walking under the awnings of the shops than they did in the open.

The asphalt turned completely dark, for the second time that day. The bus stop was at some distance from their starting point, and they ran long enough for Kibum to start losing the sense of purpose. Rather than running somewhere, it felt like he was running after Jinki, chasing him as if the boy had taken something that belonged to him and he wanted it back. Or slipping away, into some realm where he couldn’t follow him. He didn’t know where that urgency was coming from.

He didn’t always need the alcohol to feel weak at the seams, it turned out.

He heard Jinki shout something over his shoulder, but his temples were pounding too hard for him to hear. Kibum wasn’t much of a runner, and he cussed when he realized that his best friend was beating it toward the green city bus that was currently letting in passengers at their stop. People were closing their umbrellas and giving them a shake before boarding, which slowed things down a bit, but the main problem still remained - even if they managed to make it to that bus, they would be on the verge of their lungs exploding.

“Move your bum, Bum!” Jinki cried more distinctly, whipping out his transport card case on the move.

“Go… to Hell...” Kibum muttered, feeling like his very life was draining out of him with every excruciating push forward.

You cheerful idiot, he would’ve added - if only his vocal cords were still functional at this point.

“What?” laughed the other boy, gallantly holding the entrance door for Kibum, as if that could prevent it from closing in case the driver lost patience with the stupid children holding up the whole bus and just pushed the button.

He grabbed Kibum’s hand and pulled him up on top of the stair.

“I said…” Kibum wheezed, trying not to breathe too hard as they squeezed their way to the back part of the vehicle, “go… to Hell.”

Jinki grabbed hold of a railing and chuckled. He was panting and soaking wet both with the rain and sweat. Still, Kibum couldn’t forgive him for not panting enough - he would love to gulp down a couple of gallons of water right now, but his partner in crime looked like he’d just completed a round of his usual exercise.

Did he like him, or did he want to be him?

“C’mon, you know you wouldn’t wanna wait for the next one.”

Kibum pressed his hand to his side. He let himself breathe out of his mouth - what was the point of trying to keep himself together on the outside when his body was literally collapsing on him?

“Screw you,” Kibum muttered under his breath, because there were a few old folks sitting nearby.

“Are your art supplies okay?”

“Who cares,” he answered, running a hand over his face to wipe away the water. He meant it at this point. It was the last time for him to have assumed that someone else would take care of the umbrella.

“Well, even if they aren’t, now you don’t only have watercolors, but also water-pens and water-pencils, and maybe some water-paper. You could work with that, right?”

Kibum didn’t even have the energy to groan at the boy’s soul-destroying attempt at humor, so he just tutted the same way his grandmother did when the TV was showing her something upsetting.

Is Arisa even sure she can handle him?

Listen to him?

...Love him?...

The two boys both reached for each other’s hair at the same time, and their hands bumped into one another. Kibum didn’t want to smile, but it was hard to remain unresponsive to Jinki’s crinkling eyes for long.

“You look like you took a shower, but forgot you had clothes on,” Jinki noted.

“And you look like you’re wearing a swimming cap, but it’s your hair,” returned Kibum, his words coming sharp and fast as usual - only his cheeks were peculiarly warm.

After being stranded at a busy intersection for a few minutes, the bus jerked suddenly into motion, smashing Kibum onto Jinki’s chest.

Jinki’s instinctive reaction was to lock his arm around him, Kibum’s - to push him away. Because they were guys, and he didn’t need help. His reactions were getting slow lately, but maybe it was the exhaustion.

At the foot of the hill, where the Lees lived in a street made up mainly of modest traditional houses, Kibum took one more picture of Jinki grinning, his clothes drenched through, “to show you how ridiculous you look”. He never showed him that picture. He just hid it away in the inside pocket of his jacket so that the water wouldn’t ruin it, and forgot it was there.

Mrs. Lee hadn’t come home yet, and the house met them with the welcoming silence reigning in its low-ceilinged rooms, filled with such quantities of sentimental nicknacks and old things, peeking out of every shelf and strewn over every available surface, that it would give both of Kibum’s parents a panic attack for sure. Not because of their minimalist worldview: it was more likely that the mess - because that’s what it really was - would remind them of the old house in Daegu and the way of life they had gladly left behind after Kibum’s father made it big in the capital city.

Kibum remembered the old house too. And he liked it here. He would take his time running through every chaotic, colorful shelf in sight if he could.

It made sense that Jinki’s papers were habitually crushed, and it wasn’t even that surprising that he had tossed his medal into a fireplace. He’d been brought up by people who were as fond of imperfect things as they were of the shiny and new.

To the sound of the raindrops drumming on the windows, Kibum sat down on the floor of Jinki’s room and crossed his legs, like he had travelled in time to the big living room in Daegu again.

“It’s gonna heat up real fast,” Jinki promised as he undid the buttons on his jacket. “We turn it off before going out, ‘cause… you know.”

Because heating costs money. It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks.

Kibum pulled his bag closer and began unloading it to give himself something to do.

Meanwhile, Jinki pushed the power button on his computer.

“This guy won’t load fast,” he chuckled, and Kibum hummed in agreement: he already knew that his friend’s computer was as capable as it was old. “You can pop into the shower if you want. I’ll get you a towel.”

Kibum wasn’t sure whether agreeing to that offer would be odd or not, so he declined just in case.

“You sure? You don’t wanna catch a cold.”

Kibum unrolled some colored paper.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. I just wanna get this over with quick.”

Just as he raised his head to ask for a glue stick, a lump formed in his throat: Jinki was in the middle of taking his shirt off.

He wasn't sure how the slow motion effect was possible in reality, he was positively sure that it didn't, and yet the time seemed to curve and stretch as Jinki's bare torso gradually emerged from under the soaked fabric. Each passing second could be divided into dozens of perfect moments for Kibum to look away - only he didn't use them. He numbly watched his friend multitask - the habit at the cause of all those micro accidents he was prone to: he was pulling his shirt off, saying something to Kibum and walking at the same time, an oblivious bundle of multiple activities.

Kibum still stared as he grabbed a clean shirt from a drawer and proceeded to put it on wrong, the front side on the back and the back on the front. 

The upper part of Jinki's body represented an almost perfect triangle: wider shoulders, narrower waist. Robust. Man-ish. Something that was close to what Kibum wished he saw in the bathroom mirror one day.

Was that why he stared?

It took Jinki a moment to realize his blunder, but at least he realized on his own. There he goes again. Shirt up, twist around, and down again.

Their eyes met: Kibum had missed his window to turn away. He was sitting with a pair of open scissors in his hand.

"What?"

He snapped the scissors shut.

"If you're going to the shower, then why did you just change the shirt?"

Jinki needed a moment.

"Oh." There it is. "I failed to use my famous logic here. Stupid me."

He laughed, taking out his home pants. He didn't take off the ones he had on, thankfully.

And I stared at your back. Stupid me.

"Your logic is not famous, Jinki. Unless you mean famously bizarre."

Jinki ruffled Kibum's hair on his way to the bathroom.

Alone, Kibum slowly put the scissors down. He pressed his hand to his forehead, as if his head was starting to ache. But it wasn't that. He would prefer for it to ache than to feel like it didn't belong to him anymore.

He felt like a stranger had just moved in to his brain: he hadn't quite settled there yet, but he was already hanging his pictures on the walls. Bringing his stuff over. His trash. And Kibum couldn't even remember when he had agreed to let him in.

He saw a ghost of Taeyeon, ripping the tags off a new shirt she had bought herself in an underground shop on the way to Kibum's house, because she couldn't wait to put it on. She didn't care that he was there: she grabbed the hem of her uniform shirt and pulled it off, crossing her arms over her chest as girls do, while Kibum shielded his eyes with his palms just in time to avoid seeing her bra.

He called her an exhibitionist for disrobing like that in front of others. (He'd heard that word somewhere recently, and now found an opportunity to apply it.) She said he was a prude.

"If I were a guy, you wouldn't care. That's a double standard for you," she lectured in her confident matter-of-fact way, and Kibum knew that she was right, per usual.

It's true that he hadn't covered his eyes just a minute ago with Jinki, nor had anyone expected him to.

But did that really mean that he didn't care? Hardly.

Taeyeon had ended up hating the shirt and spent the following hours combing Naver for an instruction on how to reattach the tag back on to return it later.  

Jinki tried to help with assembling the visual part, which was now as simple as putting together some Polaroids, magazine clips and short bits of text - not an award-worthy work anymore, definitely. However, soon it became obvious that Kibum’s artistic abilities were indeed much higher than his own. At times, Jinki would hold a single piece of colored paper between his fingers and bite on his plump lip as it took him forever to see where to place it, and at other times he wouldn’t give it enough thought and would try to stick a picture on a spot that was apparently “ruining the composition”. Considering the looming deadline, Kibum gave it about the right amount of thought: one couldn’t say that his perfectionism was unearned.

In the end, Jinki decided to stick to the text writing - it would save them some time, too. The task he’d set before him was to compose something “concise and impactful”. “And don’t get smart with the jokes”, Kibum had warned (or threatened?) wisely.

Kibum played his music on the phone, Korean and western together, and they both hummed along as they worked, because Jinki already knew his favorite playlist by heart.

He was soon caught up in the flow, and the thoughts that had disturbed him so that day - Jinki, Arisa, Jinki again - seemed to step aside, but they were still there, hovering over his head, threatening to betray his secrets the moment the music stopped. He could hear their taunting whispers in the background, but chose not to listen. I just need to finish this. And then I’ll go home, and deal with all of this later. Deep inside his heart, he made up his mind not to deal, but simply to run away - he was beginning to think like a hostage who hadn’t been held long enough to start taking the situation as seriously as he should.

Jinki had unearthed some old magazines from the dark little closet that served as a storage space in his house for Kibum to cut pictures out of, and slowly, but surely, a very simplified version of the project he’d had in his mind emerged into existence. He’d found some pictures of Seoul’s main sights, drawn a minimalistic version of his dragon (because he still wanted to do the dragon, no matter what), and added all that to the photographs they’d taken that day together.

They looked so happy in those Polaroids. Which wasn’t surprising in Jinki’s case: he always smiled in pictures like an eager four-year old. It was odder for Kibum to see himself beaming into the camera like he didn’t have a care in the world. Like there was not a drop of damage inside his heart. And he looked his happiest on the selfies where both of them were present, as if Jinki was his own personal donor of joy.

It was all becoming so embarrassingly obvious.

“Not sure if I’m allowed to say this, but I think this looks even better than the original,” Jinki said in a couple of hours, when the windows had already turned dark blue, and the room was illuminated by yellow electric light. He was kneeling next to Kibum and studying the results of his labor.

“You’re not allowed to say it, but...” Kibum wiped some sweat off his philtrum: he had been concentrating hard. “Yeah, you’re right. Are you done, too?”

Jinki rose up and walked over to his desk.

“Yep, I just need to do some spell-check and it will be ready to send. Want me to read you the whole thing?”

“Sure.”

Jinki’s text ended up being exactly what he had wanted it to be: sweet and inspired, and largely devoid of the carefully researched facts that he had included in his more “science-y” effort from before. It was also considerably shorter: not much could be said about the daily life of a couple of teenagers that was worthy of presentation.

“‘...At the end of the day, our differences do matter, as we can’t understand each other’s points of view without examining our common history, and also the separate histories that stemmed from it, without understanding the changes that took place on both sides of the barbed wire fence. But, while important, what makes us different is just a small part of it. It pales in comparison to what makes us same: our youth, our friendships, our tears and smiles, our beating hearts.’”

Jinki turned around in his ridiculous glasses, his ridiculous shirt (there was a cartoon of a smiling hotdog on his chest) to hear his friend’s feedback.

Kibum, who had been taking photos of the finished project and also wearing a ridiculous shirt, gulped (the shirt had Pikachu on it; while he’d declined the shower once more, he’d agreed to change into one of the other boy’s shirts while his own one dried over the heater). He wasn’t sure what to say, except to confess that he somehow liked what Jinki had written more than what he, Kibum, had been gluing together and drawing for hours.

“That was pretty cool, Jinki,” he replied without a shadow of his usual irony. 

He tucked his hair behind his ear - no success.

Jinki’s eyes glistened behind the glasses, a relieved smile spreading across his face.

“We’ve done it, dude! Done it!” he cried, jumping back up and hurrying over to Kibum.

For the first time, he gave him a proper hug.

In the few seconds that he was enveloped in his warmth, Kibum’s pulse accelerated. It felt like an engine of a car revving up. Or a rocket ready to launch into space. He needed to get out of it - every terrified cell of his body was calling for it. But he didn’t listen. Instead, he threw his arms around his friend, tight.

“Good job, Lee Jinki,” he said quietly.

“Back at you, sir!” Jinki exclaimed, giving Kibum a brotherly hit on the back; their hug had lasted just about the right amount of time, so that nothing needed to be explained or justified.

Not that it mattered now.

Jinki was in his room, giving the photo and the text files one last look before sending them out to the teacher, and Kibum - standing in his bathroom. He was supposed to have grabbed his shirt on the way here: it was dry by now, and it was time to go home soon. But he’d forgotten: he’d been in desperate need for a break. His thoughts were collapsing on him, he’d used up all the energy he'd had to put it into the project. His defenses were low in that state.

Maybe I should just tell him about the note myself.

‘The sooner he gets together with her, the sooner you’ll get over him and you two will be just friends again.’

Kibum noticed a familiar bottle on a plastic shelf in the corner: it was the same shower gel that his mother had used to buy in the old days, before prosperity had changed their lives. The gel also doubled as a shampoo, and could even make bubble foam, as Kibum had found out rather early on.

He opened the cap and breathed in the scent that he remembered still with every fiber of his body. It all seemed to come back to him: safety, calm, innocence. Sweet ignorance of childhood.

There was one problem with that extremely reasonable piece of advice.

He didn’t really want to be over anything.

Jinki was typing away at his computer, muttering the words as they appeared on the screen. Kibum walked toward him slowly, but mindfully. He had a strange sense of clarity: he was so incredibly present that it almost scared him.

He put his hands on Jinki’s wide shoulders, startling him only a little: the boy was too engrossed to jump up. He could feel his warmth through the cheap cotton of his T-shirt. The scent of that shower gel from his childhood came back, and Kibum leaned forward to breathe in the smell of Jinki’s dishevelled hair. 

His hands wandered to the boy’s neck, and Kibum’s fingers brushed over his Adam’s apple. It bobbed under the brush of his fingertips.

Jinki didn’t stop him, didn’t show any sign of feeling that a line was being crossed. Maybe it was because Taemin had touched him the same way before.

Kibum bent down further, as if to see what Jinki was writing in that final email they’d been waiting for, but he did something entirely different. A single movement, which was ultimately the point of no return. What surprised him was how determined that movement was: his body must have been ready for this outcome long before his mind had given up on the struggle. 

With his left hand, he turned Jinki’s face to him. Then, he took off his friend’s glasses and put them gently on the desktop.

Every single noise in existence was cancelled out by the rush of adrenaline and the trembling silence that filled the void between them. Jinki’s eyes were so clear. So open. So full of kindness and wonder. 

Kibum closed the distance between them by putting his mouth over Jinki’s. He did it without any hurry, slowly - but, to tell the truth, his perception of time was broken at the moment. It just ceased to exist.

All that existed was the curve of Jinki’s lips on his, the soft firmness that was so different from anything he’d experienced before.

A/N: Dear readers! Happy New Year! Let's hope that 2020 will bring us a lot of happy SHINee-related moments and more! Thank you for reading the story and I hope to hear from you all~ X L