Kris meets him at a party.

He’s long and lean, full of dark edges and skin that must feel like silk. It’s a foreign concept in the way that he moves, and his fluids lines feel all the more blurred when Kris finally gets some alcohol in his system.

He feels out of control, and he likes it.

“Kai,” the younger replies when Kris asks for a name. The smoke from his cigarette curls above him, heady scent nearly choking Kris off, and everything tastes bitter.

The hot press of other human beings is stifling, shouts and the occasional shove sending Kris off course. Kai smokes at least four cigarettes within the next two hours, and he pulls Kris from the dredging of his booze bottle when the smoke comes to a dull haze.

Kai smells like something far away. Foreign cigarettes that have a colorful tinge to their scent and a cologne that is only barely sprayed around the clavicle, tempting Kris beyond what he can control, and he bites down hard when Kai walks him home.

Kai gasps, hands sliding from the elder’s shoulders and down to his chest. In Kris’ drunken haze, he expects something more of a tug forward, but instead gets a shove backwards that sends him into the front of his door.

“I don’t do like this as a one time thing.”

“Why am I one time?”

“You’re Kris, from 431. You drink too much and like to throw things off your balcony,” Kai’s eyes narrow. “Namely a book on Shakespearean literature that landed in the shrubbery of a not too happy Do Kyungsoo.”

They watch each other, Kris trying to decide whether or not he should reach out, or just let it go. Kai rocks back on his heels, fingers rubbing together as if he’s itching for another cigarette, and Kris gestures to the door at the end of the hall.

“Do you love someone, in that place?”

Kai looks taken aback, and then shakes his head.

“Loving someone is knowing that you’ll keep throwing your things off that balcony because he did,” Kris thunks his head back against the door. “Do Kyungsoo doesn’t remember because he wasn’t there.”

Kai’s ghosts of cigarette smoke poke at Kris’ face, and he realizes that he’s lit one finally. There’s a rattled way that his hands shake, and Kris watches with hazy eyes as the younger attempts to flick the lighter back on again with much resistance.

“Love,” Kai says around his cigarette. “Love is watching it die, and then remembering that it’s not dead.”

There is little to be spoken after their cigarette stained night, and Kris lines up his empty bottles on the edge of the coffee table. He arranges them by height, color, and then by width. There’s a stain on the edge of the table though that speaks of red wine, a drink that Kris hasn’t had in a while, and he covers it up with a green bottle that he thinks had champagne, or maybe schnapps.

I love you is carved on the top of Kris’ headboard, placed there with careful hands and a small smile that breathed life ages ago. Kris sees Kai, the smoking neighbor a few days later, and in that moment his cigarettes no longer smell foreign, but like a home away from home.

“Could you please stop dropping books into my hedges? I’ve been gathering them up for the past few weeks if you want them back, but only if you promise to stop.”

Kris shrugs, sluggishly setting down the glass in his hand before pointing to the door at the end of the hall.

“Talk to Kai about it.”

“What does he have to do with this?” Kyungsoo looks almost offended, and his little squeak when Kris slams the door has some note of satisfaction.

“He seemed to like Shakespeare.”

There is another party. Kai is there in the corner, all black and white, gaunt in his cloud of nicotine and the sparing glances that the other guests give him. Kris drinks away the evening, and Kai tells him stories in between puffs.

“He left me because he thought that loving a man is something wrong, something sinful.”

“You are sinful,” Kris takes another pull off his drink and settles back in the couch they share, dull lights and smoke clouding their vision, choking. “He left me because he thought he wasn’t enough,” Kris jabs at Kai’s shoulder. “He liked Shakespeare, like you.”

“I don’t like Shakespeare.”

“Then stop collecting my books from Kyungsoo.”

Kai looks shaken, caught red handed. Kris starts to laugh because it’s hilarious, it actually ing worked, and now Kris knows that the idiot has been cleaning up after him even though he pretends like it shouldn’t matter.

“I don’t really like books,” Kai says. “Most of the things I read anyway tell love stories that aren’t true. They’re not possible, and they make me sick because they end well, so sappy.”

“Love is telling someone they’re worth it when you believe you don’t deserve them.”

“Love,” Kai parrots back, pausing for a moment to stare at his hands, twitching around the burnt out of his cigarette. “Love is playing pretend.”

“The best kind.”

Kris sits in the middle of his living room, staring out at the balcony with his hands rolling an empty bottle along the carpeted floor. He catches the whiff of a foreign cigarette and notes that Kai leaves his windows open when he smokes in his apartment.

Kai is cold and quiet when he finally comes in through the open apartment door. He takes in the mess and the quiet grieving, the way that things haven’t been moved in what seems like months, maybe even a year. The dust is thick in some places, smudged in others.

Kris drops a bottle off the balcony just to hear it shatter on the pavement beneath, mimicking what it must’ve been for his little prince’s skull, so fragile and broken and torn to shreds.

“You’re not going to jump, are you?”

“Love is trying to understand why,” Kris drops another bottle, the sound so resolute and perfect. “Love is watching him die over and over again because he was everything.”

For the first time in a month, Kai offers Kris a cigarette.

He obliges.

“What was his name?”

“Luhan.”

They smoke in silence, watching the sun start to set in a mirage of oranges and reds, something hazy in their foreign smoke smell.

Kai drops a bottle, once, twice, and then screams when he throws the last one. There is pain in eyes, and it drips through his open mouth, cigarette falling down to meet the shards of glass pulled into a pile near the hedges that were once filled with books.

“Love is disgusting,” Kai says.

“Love is everything.”

Kai drops everything and kisses him, a whispered out, "I love you," caught between sinful lips.