BRIGHT AND EARLY Thursday morning, a loudspeaker crackled to life in the hallway outside Jin’s room:
“Attention, Sword & Crosstians!”
Jin rolled over with a groan, but as hard as he crammed the pillow around his ears, it did little to block out Bo Young’s bark over the PA.
“You have exactly nine minutes to report to the gymnasium for your annual fitness examination. As you know, we take a dim view of stragglers, so be prompt and be ready for bodily assessment.”
Fitness examination? Bodily assessment? At six-thirty in the morning?
Jin had already been regretting staying out so late last night … and staying up so much later lying in bed, stressing.
Right around the time he started imagining Taehyung and Hoseok kissing, Jin had begun to feel queasy—that specific kind of queasiness that came from knowing he’d made a fool of himself. There was no going back to the party. There was only prying himself off the wall and slinking back to his dorm room to second-guess that strange feeling he got around Taehyung, the one he’d foolishly taken as some sort of connection. He’d woken up with the bad taste of the party’s aftermath still in his mouth. The last thing he wanted to think about now was fitness.
He swung his feet off the bed and onto the cold vinyl floor. Brushing his teeth, he tried to picture what Sword & Cross might mean by “bodily assessment.” Intimidating images of his fellow students—Yoongi doing dozens of mean-faced chin-ups, Hoseok effortlessly ascending a thirty-foot rope toward the sky—flooded his mind. His only shot at not making a fool of himself—again—was to try to put Taehyung and Hoseok out of his mind.
He crossed the south side of campus to the gymnasium. It was a large Gothic structure with flying buttresses and fieldstone turrets that made it look more like a church than a place where one would go to break a sweat. As Jin approached the building, the layer of kudzu coating its façade rustled in the morning breeze.
“Ken,” Jin called out, spotting his tracksuit-clad friend lacing up his sneakers on a bench. Jin looked down at his regulation black clothes and black boots and suddenly panicked that he’d missed some memo about dress code. But then, some of the other students were loitering outside the building and none of them looked much different than he did.
Ken’s eyes were groggy. “So beat,” he moaned. “I karaoke’d way too hard last night. Thought I’d compensate by trying to at least look athletic.”
Jin laughed as Ken fumbled with the double knot on his shoe.
“What happened to you last night, anyway?” Ken asked. “You never came back to the party.”
“Oh,” Jin said, stalling. “I decided to—”
“Gaaahh.” Ken covered his ears. “Every sound is like a jackhammer in my brain. Tell me later?”
“Yeah,” Jin said. “Sure.” The double doors to the gym were open. Bo Young stepped out in heavy rubber clogs, holding her ever-present clipboard. She waved the students forward, and one by one they filed past to be assigned their fitness station.
“Jung Hwan,” Bo Young called as the wobbly-kneed kid approached. Hwan’s shoulders caved forward like parentheses, and Jin could see remnants of a serious farmer’s tan on the back of his neck.
“Weights,” Bo Young commanded, chucking Hwan inside.
“Lee Jae-hwan,” she bellowed next, causing Ken to cower and press his palms against his ears again. “Pool,” Bo Young instructed, reaching into a cardboard box behind her and tossing Ken a red one-piece Speedo racer-back.
“Kim Seokjin,” Bo Young continued, after consulting her list. Jin stepped forward and was relieved when Bo Young said, “Also pool.” Jin reached up to catch the one-piece bathing suit in the air. It was stretched out and thin as a piece of parchment between his fingers. At least it smelled clean. Sort of.
“Jung Hoseok,” Bo Young said next, and Jin whipped around to see his new least-favorite person sashay up in short black shorts and a thin black tshirt. He’d been at this school for three days … how had he already gotten Taehyung?
“Hiii, Bo Young,” Hoseok said, drawing out the words with a twang that made Jin want to pull a Ken and cover his own ears.
Anything but pool, Jin willed. Anything but pool.
“Pool,” Bo Young said.
Walking next to Ken toward the boys’ locker room, Jin tried to avoid looking back at Hoseok, who twirled what seemed to be the only fashionable bathing suit in the stack around his index finger. Instead, Jin focused on the gray stone walls and the old religious paraphernalia covering them. He walked past ornately carved wooden crosses with their bas-relief depictions of the Passion. A series of faded triptychs hung at eye level, with only the orbs of the figures’ halos still aglow. Jin leaned forward to get a better look at a large scroll written in Latin, encased in glass.
“Uplifting décor, isn’t it?” Ken asked, throwing back a couple of aspirin with a swig of water from his bag.
“What is all this stuff?” Jin asked.
“Ancient history. The only surviving relics from when this place was still the site of Sunday Mass, back in Civil War days.”
“That explains why it looks so much like a church,” Jin said, pausing in front of a marble reproduction of Michelangelo’s pietà.
“Like everything else in this hellhole, they did a totally half-assed job of updating it. I mean, who builds a pool in the middle of an old church?”
“You’re joking,” Jin said.
“I wish.” Ken rolled his eyes. “Every summer, the headmaster gets it in his little mind to try and stick me with the task of redecorating this place. He won’t admit it, but all the God stuff really freaks him out,” he said. “Problem is, even if I did feel like pitching in, I’d have no idea what to do with all this junk, or even how to clear it out without offending, like, everyone and God.”
Jin thought back to the immaculate white walls inside Dover’s gymnasium, row after row of professionally shot varsity championship pictures, each matted with the same navy card stock, each showcased in a matching golden frame. The only hallway more hallowed at Dover was its entryway, which was where all the alumni-turned-state-senators and Guggenheim fellowship winners and run-of-the-mill billionaires displayed their head shots.
“You could hang all the current alumni’s mug shots,” Hoseok offered from behind them.
Jin started to laugh—it was funny … and strange, almost like Hoseok had just read his mind—but then he remembered the boy’s voice the night before, telling Taehyung he was the only one he had. Jin quickly swallowed any notion of a connection with him.
“You’re straggling!” yelled an unknown gym coach, appearing from nowhere. He—at least Jin thought he was a he—had a frizzy wad of brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and yellowing “invisible” braces covering his top teeth. He hustled the boys angrily into a locker room, where each was given a padlock with a key and directed toward an empty locker with a shove. “Nobody straggles on Coach Woo-bin's watch.”
Jin and Ken scrambled into their faded, baggy bathing suits. Jin shuddered at his reflection in the mirror, then covered as much of himself as he could with his towel.
Inside the humid natatorium, he instantly understood what Ken was talking about. The pool itself was giant, Olympic-sized, one of the few state-of-the-art features he’d encountered so far on this campus. But that wasn’t what made it remarkable, Jin realized in awe. This pool had been set down right in the middle of what used to be a massive church.
There was a row of pretty stained-glass windows, with only a few broken panels, spanning the walls near the high, arched ceiling. There were candlelit stone niches along the wall. A diving board had been installed where the altar probably used to be. If Jin had not been raised agnostic, but rather as a God-fearing churchgoer, like the rest of his friends in elementary school, he might have thought this place was sacrilegious.
Some of the other students were already in the water, gasping for air as they completed their laps. But it was the students who weren’t in the water who held Jin’s attention. Yoongi, Seo-joon, and Jimin were all spread out on the bleachers along the wall. They were cracking up about something. Bo Young was practically doubled over, and Jimin was wiping away tears. They were in much more attractive bathing suits than Jin, but not one of them looked like they had any intention of making a move toward the pool.
Jin picked at his saggy bathing suit. He wanted to go join Jimin—but just as he was weighing the pros (possible entrance into an elite world) and cons (Coach Woo-bin berating him as a conscientious objector to exercise), Hoseok sauntered over to the group. Like he was already best friends with all of them. He took a seat right next to Jimin and immediately started laughing, too, like whatever the joke was, he already got it.
“They always have notes to sit out,” Ken explained, glaring at the popular crowd on the bleachers. “Don’t ask me how they get away with it.”
Jin hemmed and hawed at the side of the pool, unable to tune in to Coach Woo-bin’s instructions. Seeing Hoseok et al. clustered on the bleachers cool-kids-style made Jin wish that Jungkook were there. He could picture him looking buff in a sleek black bathing suit, waving him over to the crew with his big smile, making him feel immediately welcome, even important.
Jin felt a gnawing need to apologize for ducking out of his party early. Which was strange—they weren’t together, so it wasn’t like Jin was obligated to explain his comings and goings to Jungkook. But at the same time, he liked it when he paid attention to him. He liked the way he smelled—kind of free and open, like driving with the windows down at night. He liked the way he tuned in to him completely when he talked, holding still like he couldn’t see or hear anyone but him. He’d even liked being lifted off his feet at the party, in plain view of Taehyung. He didn’t want to do anything to make Jungkook reconsider the way he treated him. 
When the coach’s whistle blew, a very startled Jin stood straight up, then looked down regretfully as Ken and the other students near him all jumped forward, into the pool. He looked to Coach Woo-bin for guidance.
“You must be Kim Seokjin—always late and never listens?” Coach sighed. “Bo Young told me about you. It’s eight laps, pick your best .”
Jin nodded and stood with his toes curled over the edge. He used to love to swim. When his dad taught him how at the Thunderbolt community pool, he’d even been given an award as youngest kid ever to brave the deep end without floaties. But that was years ago. Jin couldn’t even remember the last time he’d swum. The heated outdoor Dover pool had always sparkled, tempting him—but it was closed to anyone who wasn’t on the swim team.
Coach Woo-bin cleared his throat. “Maybe you didn’t catch that this is a race … and you’re already losing.”
This was the most pathetic and ridiculous “race” that Jin had ever seen, but it didn’t stop his competitive edge from coming out.
“And … you’re still losing,” Coach said, chewing on his whistle.
“Not for long,” Jin said.
He checked out the competition. The guy to his left was sputtering water out of his mouth and doing a clumsy freestyle. On his right, a nose-plugged Ken was leisurely gliding along, his stomach resting on a pink foam kickboard. For a split second, Jin glanced at the crowd on the bleachers. Yoongi and Seo-joon were watching; Jimin and Hoseok were collapsed on each other in an annoying fit of giggles.
But he didn’t care what they were laughing at. Sort of. He was off.
With his arms bowed over his head, Jin dove in, feeling his back arch as he glided into the crisp water. Few people could do it really well, his dad once explained to an eight-year-old Jin at the pool. But once you perfected the butterfly , there was no way to move faster in the water.
Letting his aggravation propel him forward, Jin lifted his upper body out of the water. The movement came right back to him and he started to beat his arms like wings. He swam harder than he’d done anything in a long, long time. Feeling vindicated, he lapped the other swimmers once, then again.
He was nearing the end of his eighth lap when his head popped above water just long enough to hear Hoseok’s slow voice say, “Taehyung.”
Like a snuffed-out candle, Jin’s momentum disappeared. He put his feet down and waited to see what else Hoseok had to say. Unfortunately, he couldn’t hear anything other than a raucous splashing and, a moment later, the whistle.
“And the winner is,” Coach Woo-bin said with a stunned expression, “Joong-ki.” The skinny kid with braces from the next lane over hopped out of the pool and started raising the roof to celebrate his victory.
In the next lane, Ken kicked to a stop. “What happened?” he asked Jin. “You were totally killing him.”
Jin shrugged. Hoseok was what had happened, but when he looked over at the bleachers, Hoseok was gone, and Jimin and Yoongi were gone with him. Seo-joon alone remained where the crowd had been, and he was immersed in a book.
Jin’s adrenaline had been building while he swam, but now he’d crashed so hard, Ken had to help him out of the pool.
Jin watched Seo-joon hop down from the bleachers. “You were pretty good out there,” he said, tossing him a towel and the locker room key he’d lost track of. “For a little while.”
Jin caught the key in midair and wrapped the towel around him. But before he could say something normal, like “Thanks for the towel,” or “Guess I’m just out of shape,” this weird new hotheaded side of his instead blurted out, “Are Taehyung and Hoseok together or what?”
Big mistake. Huge. He could tell from the look in his eye that his question was headed right to Taehyung.
“Oh, I see,” Seo-joon said, and laughed. “Well, I couldn’t really …” He looked at him and scratched his nose and gave him what seemed like a sympathetic smile. Then he pointed toward the open hallway door, and when Jin followed his finger he saw Taehyung’s trim, blond silhouette pass by. “Why don’t you just ask him yourself?”

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Jin’s hair was still dripping wet and his feet were still bare when he found himself hovering at the door to a large weight room. He’d intended to go straight into the locker room to change and dry off. He didn’t know why this Hoseok thing was shaking him up so much. Taehyung could be with whomever he wanted, right? Maybe Hoseok liked guys who flipped him off.
Or, more likely, that kind of thing didn’t happen to Hoseok.
But Jin’s body got the better of his mind when he caught another glimpse of Taehyung. His back was to him and he was standing in a corner picking out a jump rope from a tangled pile. He watched as he selected a thin navy rope with wooden handles, then moved to an open space in the center of the room. His golden skin was almost radiant, and every movement he made, whether he was rolling out his long neck in a stretch or bending over to scratch his sculpted knee, had Jin completely rapt. He stood pressed against the doorway, unaware that his teeth were chattering and his towel was soaked.
When he brought the rope behind his ankles just before he began to jump, Jin was slammed with a wave of déjà vu. It wasn’t exactly that he felt like he’d seen Taehyung jump rope before, but more that the stance he took seemed entirely familiar. He stood with his feet hip-width apart, unlocked his knees, and pressed his shoulders down as he filled his chest with air. Jin could almost have drawn it.
It was only when Taehyung began twirling the rope that Jin snapped out of that trance … and right into another. Never in his life had he seen anyone move like him. It was almost like Taehyung was flying. The rope whipped up and over his tall frame so quickly that it disappeared, and his feet—his graceful, narrow feet—were they even touching the ground? He was moving so swiftly, even he must not have been counting.
A loud grunt and a thud on the other side of the weight room tore Jin’s attention away. Jung-hwan was in a heap at the base of one of those knotted climbing ropes. He felt momentarily sorry for Hwan, who was looking down at his blistered hands. Before he could look back at Taehyung to see whether he’d even noticed, a cold black rush at the edge of his skin made Jin shiver. The shadow swept up on him slowly at first, icy, tenebrous, its limits indiscernible. Then, suddenly rough, it crashed into his body and forced his back. The door to the weight room slammed in his face and Jin was alone in the hallway.
“Ow!” he cried, not because he was hurt exactly, but because he had never been touched by the shadows before. He looked down at his bare arms, where it had felt almost like hands had gripped him, shoving him out of the gym.
That was impossible—he’d just been standing in a weird place; a draft must have shot through the gymnasium. Uneasily, he approached the closed door and pressed his face up against the small glass rectangle.
Taehyung was looking around, like he’d heard something. Jin felt certain he didn’t know it was him: He wasn’t scowling.
He thought about Seo-joon’s suggestion that he just ask Taehyung what was up, but quickly dismissed the notion. It was impossible to ask anything of Taehyung. He didn’t want to bring out that scowl on his face.
Besides, any question he might pose would be useless. He’d already heard all he needed to hear last night. He’d have to be some kind of sadist to ask him to admit he was with Hoseok. He turned back toward the locker room when he realized he couldn’t leave.
His key.
It must have slipped from his hands when he stumbled out of the room. He stood on tiptoes to look down through the small glass panel on the door. There it was, a bronze blunder on the padded blue mat. How had it gotten so far across the room, so close to where he was working out? Jin sighed and pushed the door back open, thinking if he had to go in, at least he’d make it quick.
Reaching for his key, he sneaked one last look at him. His pace was slowing, slowing, but his feet still barely touched the ground. And then, with one final light-as-air bounce, he came to a stop and turned around to face him.
For a moment, he said nothing. He could feel himself blush and really wished he wasn’t wearing such a horrible bathing suit.
“Hi” was all Jin could think to say.
“Hi,” he said back, in a much calmer tone of voice. Then, gesturing at his suit, said, “Did you win?”
Jin laughed a sad, self-effacing laugh and shook his head. “Far from it.”
Taehyung pursed his lips. “But you were always …”
“I was always what?”
“I mean, you look like you might be a good swimmer.” He shrugged. “That’s all.”
Jin stepped towards him. They were standing just a foot apart. Drops of water fell from his hair and pattered like rain on the gym mats. “That’s not what you were going to say,” he insisted. “You said I was always …”
Taehyung busied himself coiling the jump rope around his wrist. “Yeah, I didn’t mean you you. I meant in general. They’re always supposed to let you win your first race here. Unspoken code of conduct for us old-timers.”
“But Hoseok didn’t win either,” Jin said, crossing his arms over his chest. “And he’s new. He didn’t even get in the pool.”
“He’s not exactly new, just coming back after some time … off.” Taehyung shrugged, giving away nothing of his feelings for Hoseok. His obvious attempt to look unconcerned made Jin even more jealous. He watched him finish looping the jump rope into a coil, the way his hands moved almost as quickly as his feet. And here he was so clumsy and lonely and cold and left out of everything by everyone. His lip quivered. 
“Oh, Seokjin,” Taehyung whispered, sighing heavily.
Jin's whole body warmed at the sound. His voice was so intimate and familiar.
Jin wanted him to say his name again, but he had turned away. He hooked the jump rope over a peg on the wall. “I should go change before class.”

Jin rested a hand on his arm. “Wait.”
He wrenched away as if he had been shocked—and Jin felt it, too, but it was the kind of shock that felt good.
“Do you ever get the feeling …” he raised his eyes to his. Up close, he could see how unusual they were. They seemed gray from far away, but up close there were violet flecks in them. He knew someone else with eyes like that.…
“I could swear we’ve met before,” Jin said. “Am I crazy?”
“Crazy? Isn’t that why you’re here?” he said, brushing him off.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” Taehyung’s face was blank. “And for the record”—he pointed up at a blinking device attached to the ceiling—“the reds do monitor for stalkers.”
“I’m not stalking you.” He stiffened, very aware of the distance between their bodies. “Can you honestly say you have no idea what I’m talking about?”
Taehyung shrugged.
“I don’t believe you,” Jin insisted. “Look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong. That I’ve never in my life seen you before this week.”
His heart raced as Taehyung stepped towards him, placing both hands on his shoulders. His thumbs fit perfectly along the grooves of his collarbone, and he wanted to close his eyes at the warmth of his touch—but he didn’t. He watched as Taehyung brought his head closer so his nose was nearly touching his. He could feel his breath on his face. He could smell a hint of sweetness on his skin.
He did as Jin asked. He looked him in the eye and said, very slowly, very clearly, so that his words could not possibly be misunderstood:
“You have never in your life seen me before this week.”