I was weary at first. I was never sure when he would decide that one moment would be the happiest moment in his life and I would be left alone. I wanted to be with him constantly, and he didn’t seem to mind even when I became so obsessive that I would hold his hand or touch his leg or something to make sure he was really there. He was always so patient with me…

He asked me one night if I would follow him. I laughed a bit before replying with something he’d said to me years back: “Are you ill or something?” Heechul just smiled and settled into me before falling asleep.

We dated for a year before we talked about love. It was one morning at the breakfast table, not even a romantic setting. Still, it was comfortable, and we talked about things we had to do that day including grocery shopping and going to the dry cleaners. Our relationship right from the start was very domestic even when we weren’t going out. We lived around each other, like roommates almost, but we were more intimate.

Anyway, that morning I felt especially domestic and comfortable, so much that I felt as though we were a married couple. It just sort of slipped out before I had the chance to stop myself and consider what I was about to do. “I love you, Heechul.”

Heechul paused, still looking down at his chopsticks between his mouth and his plate. The seconds ticked by like hours as I waited for him to look up, to speak, to do something. Finally, it came. “How long?”

“Hmm?” I responded, confused at Heechul’s question.

“How long have you loved me and not told me?”

“I don’t know. Does anyone really know that they’re falling in love until they’re ten feet into a hole they can’t escape?”

“You can escape a ten foot hole…” The chopsticks met his lips and I watched him chew.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Heechul’s statement. What did that mean… that he wasn’t in love with me? Ideas turned over and over in my head until it became as busy as the streets of Seoul and everything was so quiet but in my head I felt I was going deaf… but then Heechul’s voice sounded and pulled me back. “Could you get some more kimchi?”

I wouldn’t have done it had I remembered what he told me. I wouldn’t have let my back face him had I known what would’ve come next, or I would’ve looked over my shoulder to make sure he still sat staring emptily at his plate but he wasn’t. I should’ve heard the clink of glass on glass, heard the elixir pouring into his drink, but I was panicking about something else…something that was so irrelevant but yet so very, very relevant.

When I sat back down, it seemed as though Heechul hadn’t moved an inch. Agonizing seconds ticked on while I hoped to God he loved me back, and then after taking a drink, he leaned onto his shaking hands (why were they shaking…? Was he nervous?) and very calmly eased my nerves. “I love you too, Hangeng.”

It wasn’t over, though. The most terrifying part was yet to come. It was then that his dilated pupils (why did it seem like such an important detail?) focused directly on me. He gave me a smile, and shattered my heart to pieces. “This has to be the happiest moment of my life.”

Then it hit me. Those words that Heechul had said all those years ago – whispered though they were – come back as though he’d screamed it through a megaphone: “I want to die when I’m at my happiest.” I felt the blood drain from my face as my mind left me. I felt my body standing up fast enough to knock my chair over and rush around the table, but I felt like I was running through jello. In the distance I heard Heechul telling me it was too late and a voice that sounded like mine saying that no, it wasn’t. I would save him.

I wouldn’t save him.

I pulled him out of his chair and onto the floor next to me and felt his body straining to fight the self-given poison while he just smiled at me. I was frantic, trying everything I could to keep him with me, and Heechul was too calm. He stopped my actions with nothing but a strained kiss before asking me to say it one more time. Tears were streaming down my face as I held my dying lover in my arms, but somehow I managed to say it again. “I love you, Kim Heechul.”

At that point, I knew what his last words would be, and inevitably, they left his lips with the last beat of his heart. “I love you too.”