Baekhyun is not that much older than him, but he can’t wrap his head around how much Jongin has grown. Jongin, to him, has always been candy wrappers and comic books, skipping school to skim pebbles on the beach; to him, Jongin in the summertime will always be faded shorts and melting popsicles (held in the mouth like lollipops and dry, swirled to death), overturned packing cartons used to make improvisational lemonade stands, and skateboarding through every street until they reach the boardwalk.

Baekhyun has returned to town after his college let out for the summer, visiting for the first time since leaving. The town itself is unchanged- repainted awnings for the same shops, kept within the same families. Everyone recognises him, and he recognises everyone except Jongin.

The Jongin of now has gained perhaps two inches since graduating high school. He’s been surfing since months before Baekhyun returned, so he has shapeshifted into a creature mouth-wateringly tanned and well-defined. He emerges from the waves with a sprinkling of grit and sand, a sprinkling of seasoning.

Baekhyun hates change. He never wanted to leave. But staying on meant stagnancy, according to his father. Going to the big city, going to college, wasn’t a choice.

He never learned how to surf- at least that was a choice. He likes to watch Jongin from the sidelines, and yell after him when he’s competing, or when he rides a particularly large wave. Jongin signs up for every competition, always under the name ‘Kai’. It’s a very surferboy name- “Sounds Hawaiian or something”-and it kind of suits him, Baekhyun concedes. He won’t admit to it, but he’s glad Jongin surfs under a different name, because that’s the one thing they don’t do together. Kai is a local favourite, but Jongin is his.

The town is unchanged; the vendors on the beach, however, are different. It’s a competition day, so there are a lot of people from out of town. Baekhyun gravitates towards the familiar Miss Meyy, who slices watermelon and mint and blends, smiling crinkles into her eyes from under her huge sunhat. It's not yet Jongin's turn, so Baekhyun helps her hack the melons open. The voices of the people watching rise and fall with the waves, crescendos alongside crests. Baekhyun looks up now and then when a wave crashes and they scream.

“Baekhyun-hyung!”

Baekhyun’s head snaps up. Jongin beams at him as he makes his way to the waves. The tide encroaches and recedes like a lover playing push-and-pull.

Baekhyun yells himself hoarse. A gaggle of girls from out of town are also cheering shrilly, cheering ‘Kai’ whereas Baekhyun makes it a point to scream ‘Jongin’.

When he’s back on land, they make as though to enclose him, but Jongin heads straight for Baekhyun.

“You were wonderful,” says Baekhyun quietly.

Jongin shakes his hair back from his face, shyly pleased. He glistens with sea spray. His eyes are the brightest Baekhyun has ever seen them, and Baekhyun vows he will never resent the ocean bearing Jongin away from him, not when it makes him this happy. He doesn’t have to be an intimate part of every single aspect of Jongin’s life; that’s just obsessive.

“It’s cause you cheered me on, hyung,” says Jongin, and it’s such an essentially inane thing to say, but the way he says it, so shy and sincere, makes Baekhyun’s heart swell. His Jongin was always starry-eyed and sunkissed, Baekhyun realizes delightedly. Not so different now. There are moments when he recognizes the Jongin he’s always known; stray, momentary shots, like a sped-up photograph.

Baekhyun whisks avocado and ice in the machine nearby and hands him the drink. Cold and smoothie-consistency, just the way Jongin likes it. He drops a couple of blueberries into his own glass of lemonade. One of the girls from out of town takes cucumber juice, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and sneaking a glance sideways at ‘Kai’.

Baekhyun clicks ice against his teeth. Jongin stares, and Baekhyun wonders, are you remembering what I’m remembering?- popsickle moulds stuck in the freezer every day; that one time they ran out of ice cream sticks and used barbeque sticks instead, and the popsickles slipped right off; so the next day, they made popsicles with ice moulds and broke them like ice. Clicked them against their teeth like they did with the ice in lemonade.

They go skateboarding in the afternoons, and it warms Baekhyun, as though he’s soaking the sun up right to the bone, because at this point it’s like a summer tradition. It strikes him, though, that he only sees Jongin’s knees nowadays when he’s wearing swimming shorts for surfing.

The Jongin of now is often shirtless even when they’re far from water, the sun casting shadows in the hollows and grooves of his muscles. The Jongin of now wears his jeans low on his hips. Baekhyun has to work not to linger over the band of his underwear, the jut of his hipbones. But whenever he wears sunglasses he has no reason not to, because Jongin can’t see where he’s looking anyway.

They’re approached by some guy called Luhan who Baekhyun doesn’t know. An outsider. He joins them on his hoverboard all the way to the boardwalk. Jongin is open and confident with him, slinging an arm around his shoulder and trying to make him lose his balance. Baekhyun lags behind, watching them laugh, and is glad he can’t see their eyes.

When Luhan finally leaves, he has Jongin’s attention again- the Jongin who’d trip up in front of him, over words and trailing shoelaces, clumsy and blushing, poised in his presence only on a skateboard. The Jongin of now still has that sweet, sweet shyness around him, even if he’s apparently become a lot more assertive with others.

If he had never left, Jongin wouldn’t have become more comfortable with others than with him. Baekhyun would’ve easily acclimatized change, in the form of minute, everyday differences. It’s not as easy to deal with it all stockpiled- hitting him with disquietude, with wistfulness and nostalgia for days.

In the city, Baekhyun felt like driftwood. Washed up on an unfamiliar shore and waiting for the tide to bear him back home. In the city, he just drifted, insensible to the surroundings, and thus believed himself unaffected. But as he raises a cigarette to his lips, he sees Jongin’s eyes widen, and then the realization hits- that all those days he ran through on the jitteriness of sleep deprivation, cigarettes and coffee, did change him.

He exhales. He didn’t start smoking for no reason. The smoke always means the same thing: a distress signal.

But he doesn’t know if he can come across to Jongin. He tries anyway.

“There’s this poem,” he says in-between puffs, “It goes-

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving, but drowning.”

He searches Jongin’s eyes for a flicker of understanding, of empathy, but he can’t read anything in them. Baekhyun is at sea.

A moment of silence. Dissipating smoke. In the blink of an eye, the opacity of Jongin’s gaze breaks, masked over by something else, and he grins. “So when you get high you start talking poetry, hyung?”

Baekhyun retaliates by leaning forward and exhaling in his face, laughing when Jongin reels, frantically waving his hand between them.

Jongin is skinnydipping.

He’d peeled off his clothes one by one, balled them up and thrown them on the deckchair. He’d motioned for Baekhyun to join him, but Baekhyun feels strangely incapable of any degree of ness in front of Jongin. He’d go if he had a vest on underneath his tee, but leave alone that it’s peak summer, it was never his habit to wear one.

He keeps his firmly planted in the sand and twiddles his toes every time the waves paw at his feet. He doesn’t submerge more than his shins.

Jongin wades over and splashes him, eyes screwed up by the force of the sun and the force of his laughter.

“Yah!” Baekhyun uses both hands to splatter back, mesmerized by the flick of the wet strands of Jongin’s hair when he whips his face away from the onslaught. The thought settles like salt on his tongue- an acerbic tang that only makes him thirstier- that Jongin is the same in more ways than he can recognise, but he’s different in more ways than he can learn.

And then Jongin is emerging from the waves- inch upon inch of sunkissed, salt-sparkled, sand-encrusted skin- and Baekhyun feels like he’s been dunked underwater, his breath out in a gush. Because Jongin is inhumanly beautiful like this, a merchild exchanged at birth, a creature of the depths. Baekhyun can drown with him but he can’t keep him.

Jongin sits next to him, maddeningly close and in all his glory. He looks at Baekhyun like he knows exactly what he’s thinking.

“I wish you’d get wet with me, hyung.”

“I-” Baekhyun is cut off by Jongin’s lips on his, pressing and molding. He feels like he’s being built up and broken, sandcastles and shipwrecks. Jongin tastes like pearls and brine and blazing sunshine; like summer hail, held in the mouth and clicked against teeth.

Baekhyun sighs into the kiss, into the transition of longing to belonging. He loves this change. And he loves what’s unchanged; Jongin always wearing that pendant he gave him years ago, an enigmatic little rectangle of steel that looks like a whistle but isn’t. He loves that it’ll dig into his own skin when Jongin presses down on him during lovemaking; that it’ll mark him the way it marks Jongin. But most of all, he loves the predictability of his own heart’s desire, the certainty that his heart won’t change. His love is like a lighthouse. Jongin will always beam him back home, no matter how insensible he is or for how long he drifts through the dark.