“I wish I could be there so badly.”

“Of course you do,” Hyukjae says, dropping a stack of paper into his printer and looking at it with a deadly stare, his laptop left ignored in a corner of his desk. “You’re insatiable.”

“Well, I’m sorry my boyfriend lives on the other side of the planet, and I can only see him like once every three months if I’m lucky,” Jongwoon says, not even trying to hide the sarcasm. Hyukjae’s connection is a bit flimsy in the evenings, and he can tell the clock has already hit 9PM just by the way Jongwoon’s voice wavers on the last word. “Sometimes, it feels like I’m the only one who has an issue with that.”

“You know that’s not true, hyung,” Hyukjae says, then exhales so heavily that he has to stop what he’s doing for a second and look straight into the camera, the notes he was about to print out now forgotten. “Do you think I enjoy it? Not being able to see you properly instead of watching you through a screen for months on end?”

“Your behaviour makes it look that way,” Jongwoon says, clearly not intimidated by Hyukjae’s stare. It takes way more than that to scare Jongwoon off, but that wasn’t Hyukjae’s intention in the first place. “Sometimes.”

“Well, maybe that’s because I don’t wanna be a ing downer all the time!” Hyukjae sighs yet again, more resigned this time. It’s not often that he wishes his roommate was home, but for once all he wants is for Henry to come barging through the door screaming about his professors and spare him the stress. “You know what? What makes you think I enjoy being all the way in ing Canada while you’re in Seoul, when all I want is to be with my boyfriend like a normal person? It’s so frustrating that you of all people would say something like that. God.”

“Hyukjae…”

Hyukjae shakes his head, eyes shut, then covers his forehead with the palm of his hand and keeps quiet, trying to collect his thoughts. Jongwoon shuts up, at least, luckily—or else Hyukjae might have truly snapped.

“Hyung,” he begins, eventually, pulling out his chair from under the desk. He’s not going to get anything done tonight, so might as well sit down and get a good talk in. “Listen to me.”

Jongwoon nods on the screen, looking slightly less pixelated than before. At least his Wi-Fi is reading the room, if no one else is.

“How would you feel if I complained every day? If I kept reminding you of every second that goes by without us being in the same damn room?”

Jongwoon opens his mouth, a conflicted expression on his face, and all Hyukjae wants is to reach out. Reach out, and kiss that little frown off those delicate features he loves so much, but he can’t. And it hurts like hell, every single time.

“Not good?”

“I miss you every ing day, hyung. Every single day, when I’m walking to class and I’m on the phone with you complaining about Henry forgetting to pay the damn water bill again. And all I want is to be able to tell you in person, just so I can hear your laugh in front of me without it sounding like it went through eight different cell towers before reaching my ears. If it were up to me, I’d be flying to Korea every weekend just to stay with you for not even a full day, but I can’t do that, because I’m a college student living off pizza and I certainly don’t have the money for something so i