new york, new york
The Eventual Heat Death of the Universe, or: How Not To Be a Loser 101guys i realized that i messed up the formatting its fixed now sorry
Life at an Ivy League is decidedly less glamorous than the glossy blue brochures and the peppy guides at the campus tour she went on said, Haeun belatedly realizes. It’s halfway through first semester, and she’s been living off of stockpiled kimchi from home and rice, made zero friends, and she hasn’t even explored New York City, goddamnit. Haeun harkens back to the time when she was fresh on campus and just itching to explore The Big Apple, The City That Never Sleeps, New York, New York. It’s November, and she’s hardly gone out of Manhattan. The most ridiculous part is that it’s not even her freshman year. No, it’s halfway through the first semester of Haeun’s junior year at Columbia University, and she can barely draw a map of the five boroughs. Granted, she can get around just fine, but she’s got about as much knowledge of the city as a freshman.
She realizes how sad her situation is when she makes a wrong turn to the bookstore her High Energy Astrophysics professor recommended, and walks into a dance studio by accident.
Luckily for her, it’s Sunday morning and there’s only one person there, but unluckily for her, she realizes as her face heats up to at least 13.81 kilojoules per mole, it’s an attractive, young, Asian male person with his shirt off.
“Oh,” she squeaks, and ducks out of the door before he can say anything. Heart pounding, Haeun stands in the middle of the Manhattan street for at least 20 seconds before realizing that she needs to get to the bookstore somehow, and opens the door again. The attractive person is still there.
“Hi, I’m supposed to be at a bookstore, but I think I took the wrong turn,” Haeun explains to him. “Could you help me get to the right place?”
He rises from his spot on the flimsy folding chair by the stereo, and walks towards her. Haeun swears she can hear angels singing when she realizes that he has abs. His hands are in the pockets of his sweatpants, and his puffy lips quirk up into a smile that’s dangerously close to being a smirk. “I don’t know. Where is it?”
“Um,” Haeun says, ripping her eyes off his sweaty collarbones to rummage through her backpack and take out the crumpled post-it her professor had given her with the address scrawled on it. “I need one of my professor’s books for the paper I’m writing,” she explains, “and apparently this is the only place that carries it.”
“Perfect,” Asian Adonis says, turning away from Haeun to walk towards a backpack shoved against the stereo. None of the boys in the Korean Church in Haeun’s hometown had an like that. “I was just going to head there for some coffee,” he drawls as he pulls a sweatshirt over his head. “Wanna join me?”
Haeun’s suspicion goes on high alert. Is he asking her on a date? She looks down at her outfit for the day, ratty high-tops and skinny jeans paired with an oversized Columbia sweatshirt she had gotten for free when she volunteered at an on-campus event. She’s fairly sure her hair is in a similar state of mess.
Asian Adonis laughs, and Haeun’s head snaps up. “Don’t worry,” he smiles charmingly. “I swear, I really just want some coffee. My name is Jongin Kim, if that helps.”
Haeun is still suspicious, but she nods and reshoulders her backpack. “I’m Haeun Park.” Jongin Kim nods pleasantly and slings his backpack over his shoulder like some kind of model.
Together, they set off through the brisk cigarette and car exhaust-stained air.
“You must be really new to the city if you missed your turn so badly,” he says, and Haeun feels another burning rush of humiliation. Spotting her scarlet cheeks, Jongin is quick to backpedal. “I mean, it’s ok if you get lost,” he hurriedly amends, “in my freshman year, I got lost tons.”
“I’m a junior,” Haeun says quickly. There’s a split second of silence before Jongin bursts out into cackles, grabbing onto the grimy wall of a building to hold himself upright.
“I’m sorry,” he gasps out, clutching his stomach like he’s been shot.
Haeun’s attraction towards him is at a staunch zero now. “You’re an ,” she says like she’s stating an irrefutable fact, and as far as she’s concerned, it is.
“I swear to god I’m sorry,” Jongin repeats, and the rest of the walk to the bookstore is punctuated by more apologies.
Jongin follows Haeun like a lost puppy as she walks up the counter of the bookstore and asks the cashier (she recognizes him as the nerdy premed student named Junmyeon) about her professor’s book. Jongin continues to follow her as she follows Junmyeon down the long rows of bookshelves to get the book.
Even after the purchase is made and Haeun is out of the bookstore, Jongin trails behind her. “Look, if I buy you coffee, will you stop being mad at me?”
Haeun considers it. “Buy me coffee and a snack, and we’re good.”
Jongin bites his lip, but he agrees.
Five minutes later, they’re both seated at the window of the neighboring coffee shop with their respective drinks and Haeun with a package of red velvet cookies, watching people walk past.
“So, how’s the Ivy League,” Jongin breaks the silence.
“Hm?” Haeun’s mouth is full of cookie and mint chocolate chip mocha.
“Columbia,” he jerks his chin towards the words emblazoned on her sweatshirt.
“Oh,” she says, swallowing her mouthful of food. “It’s cool, I guess.”
“Cool?” he prods, obviously trying to get to the reason Haeun still doesn’t know her way around Upton in her junior year.
“I’m double majoring in Astrophysics and Engineering,” she reveals, and Jongin’s mouth drops open in horror. “I’d very much like to be run over by a truck sometime soon.”
“,” he whispers like he just learned that Haeun was being whipped by her professors every day, which was partly true, except instead of a whip it’s problem sets and papers and textbook readings and exams.
“So yeah, I don’t get out much,” Haeun concludes. “What do you do?”
“I’m an econ major at NYU,” he says, eyes still wide with shock.
“Cool, cool,” she nods, taking another sip of her drink.
“I will pull you out of your loser life even if it’s the last thing I do because you’re probably the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” he declares. Haeun knows she should be offended, but she ends up being flattered instead. It must be because of his pheromones.
He takes her to Flushing for lunch, and they have dim sum together. “We’re both Korean,” she complains, “You couldn’t have found a Korean place to eat?”
Jongin stuffs his mouth with those Chinese buns with the skins so thin they’re nearly translucent. “This is cheap,” he says. Haeun wrinkles her nose in disgust, but she goes with it anyway. When they’re done eating, Jongin makes Haeun pay for it (“You go to Columbia, you’re going to be rich in 20 years anyway”) and the bubble tea that they get later (“Did you know that this is CoCo’s only location in America?”).
To make up for it, he takes her on the train trip Downtown to Midtown Comics, and he buys her Hawkeye volume 1. “Matt Fraction is great,” he promises. “You can come to my place for the rest.”
Haeun ignores the fact that he just practically invited her over to his place, and decides to focus on the fact that he just spent thirty dollars in comics on her. “Jongin, you can’t just spend that much money on me and expect me to accept it as nothing but a gift—“
“But Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye is great,” he dismisses with a wave of his hand. “You spent that much money on food today anyway, so we’re even.”
“Yeah, but I ate the food too. You can’t just equate the two like that.”
“Whatever, loser” he says.
Their weekend outings always go like that, with Haeun paying for the food and Jongin dragging her into some obscure little niche in the city, occasionally introducing her to one of his friends.
There’s Sehun, the y looking blond one who models part time, and Zitao, the scary looking one who cried at the end of Captain America when they all watched it together. Sehun and Zitao live together, and Haeun is pretty sure that they’re at a constant tango on the edge of dating and friends with benefits.
Haeun learns that Jongin has his own place, an incredible feat for a junior at NYU. It’s a spacious apartment that’s way too big for one person, nestled in a cute little neighborhood in Williamsburg by East River. The first time Haeun goes there, she almost punches Jongin in the face.
“You’re an econ major, you should know enough about money to know better than to buy a place by East River. How can you afford it?”
“I teach dance at the studio you accidentally walked into,” he says, sinking down into the cushions of his couch. His apartment screams ‘young trendy hipster’, which Haeun knows isn’t a cheap look to have. “Zitao actually used to live here before he moved in with Sehun, which is why the apartment looks like this.”
“So Zitao’s…”
“A hipster?” Jongin rolls his eyes. “Yeah. You should see his closet. Leopard print skinny jeans.”
Haeun fights off a shudder and throws herself down on Jongin’s couch. “I think I actually like this place.”
“Chicks dig my crib,” he says, leaning his head back on the armrest.
“That’s the worst combination of words I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth,” Haeun sits up and throws a pillow at him. It hits Jongin in the chest. “Don’t do that ever again. Don’t you dare disgrace the walls of this gorgeous apartment with your stupid ‘swag’ or whatever.”
Jongin kicks Haeun in the ribs, hard enough to hurt, and Haeun snarls and crawls across the couch to try and smother him with a cushion.
Haeun also learns a lot about Jongin. She learns that he was born in January 14th in Seoul and moved to California when he was 2. He has two sisters, five and nine years his senior. He’s obsessed with Shinhwa, to the point where even his sisters make fun of him for it (“I love them in a completely non-homoual way, though. I mean, they’re all hot and talented and amazing but—“ “Jongin, you’re in love with a South Korean boy band.”). His mania for Korean boy bands is concerning, to be honest—when DBSK broke up in 2009, he cried in his room for 2 days. He started dancing jazz and ballet when he was 8 and now teaches. He’s the vice president of the dance club at NYU, and does hip hop. He shows Haeun the video of his solo showcase at their show last winter, and Haeun concludes that there are way too many hip s to be safe.
Jongin loves to eat everything and anything he can get his hands on with the exception of pickled beets. Jongin likes video games and comics, but he doesn’t like for people to find out. At school, he projects confidence and appeal and pheromones, strutting around in tight pants and designer kicks. When he was in first grade, he cried when the girl he liked pushed him and told him she wasn’t his friend anymore. Back at home, his mom has three dogs, two miniature poodles and one poodle, named Jjjanggu, Jjangah, and Monggu, respectively. Jongin is definitely a dog person. He has a best friend named Taemin back in California who got him into dancing in the first place. He shows Haeun a picture of a skinny boy with thick lips and an embarrassing mushroom cut, and tells her that Taemin kept the mushroom cut from age of 3 to 17.
Haeun learns that in high school, Jongin had stupid phase where he asked everybody to call him Kai, and that now he regrets it a lot. “You should,” Haeun tells him over her Physical Cosmology homework and a beer. “Kai is a stupid nickname. I bet you had b-boy phase too.” When Jongin hangs his head in shame, Haeun takes it upon herself to sigh heavily and cast him a look of disapproval. “And you call me a loser.”
The first time Jongin visits her on campus his the week before finals. Haeun is cramming for
Fluid Mechanics in the library. It’s eleven at night; she’s exhausted, hungry, and seriously considering buying the Adderall that the kid named Chanyeol purportedly has.
Fluid Mechanics in the library. It’s eleven at night; she’s exhausted, hungry, and seriously considering buying the Adderall that the kid named Chanyeol purportedly has.
“Say no to drugs, Haeun.”
Haeun nearly shrieks when Jongin swings from behind and seats himself beside her.
“What the ,” she swears, massaging her pounding chest. “How did you get in here without a Columbia ID?”
Jongin shrugs. “There was a cute girl outside and she ID’d me in.”
Haeun groaned. “They told us that there was state-of-the-art security when I went on my campus tour 4 years ago. The brochure told us that we’d be safe here. How does a class-A freak, creepy extraordinaire flirt his way into the heart of the campus?”
“You wound me,” Jongin says with mock-hurt. Haeun can see a group of girls with Organic Chem textbooks eyeing him from across the library. One of them giggles.
“By the way,” he tosses his backpack onto the ground in a pile with Haeun’s, “your campus is really ing pretty. Like, I’ve been here before, but every time I’m here, I feel like someone’s going to arrest me for not dressing up in like, a frilly jacket with lace sleeves and a powdered wig or something.”
The formulas are all starting to blend together in her mind and she isn’t sure if she can even do addition anymore. Honestly, she has that feeling of inadequate fanciness whenever she walks into the Morningside Heights campus too. “Greenwich Village isn’t that bad,” she bites her pen and tries to make sense of her caffeine-fueled chicken scratch notes.
“Yeah, I guess,” Jongin agrees. “Did you know that in the 60’s and 70’s, wonder Woman lived in the Vilage? Friends takes place there too.” Jongin is distracting her too much.
“Don’t you have finals too?” Haeun decides to give up Fluid Mechanics for the night and moves on to the thick notebook full of High Energy Astrophysics notes. She just wants to be an astronaut—she regrets her decision to declare a double major in Astrophysics and Engineering more than anything else at the moment. She could be an astronaut without the collective knowledge base of Bruce Banner and Tony Stark. Oh god, she buries her head in her hands, what has Jongin done to her?
“Yeah, I have finals. I’ll study later. I’m actually here to ask you something,” he says, leaning back in his chair and stretching his long legs across the underside of the table, kicking one of the legs of the opposite chair on accident. “A huge favor,” he adds, and it doesn’t help Haeun’s growing urge to throw herself off the top of the Empire State Building.
“Shoot,” she says, opening her notes and taking out a highlighter in preparation to annotate the whole ing thing.
“Move in with me,” Jongin says quickly.
Nope.
Nope nope nope nope nope. Haeun hasn’t even started studying yet, but she slams her notebook shut. The sound snaps Junmyeon, sleeping over an anatomy textbook nearby, out of his nap.
Jongin cringes. “Winter term is ending, right? So over winter break you can choose whether you’ll stay in campus housing or move out. Um, you were right and my apartment is kind of expensive, especially after Zitao moved out, so I kind of need a roommate.”
Haeun cradles her head in her hands. Jongin is so stupid.
“I have an extra room,” he goes on, “so you don’t have to sleep on the couch or anything. There’s only one bathroom, but I promise to keep things clean and not have in there. In fact, if you move in with me, I promise to not have anywhere except in my bedroom.”
“Jongin,” Haeun groans, “there’s a critical flaw in your plan.”
“What, you think I can’t restrain myself from ing girls all over the kitchen and bathroom?” He puffs up his chest angrily like his masculine pride has just been attacked. “Well, let me tell you, I have very good self restraint. I haven’t had on the kitchen counter since—“
Haeun interrupts before she can hear any more of his capades. “Jongin, you’re forgetting that I don’t work. I don’t have time to work.”
Jongin shuts up. “Well ,” he says eloquently.
Haeun doesn’t have an official job, per say, but she’s still making a considerable amount of money tutoring high school students with rich parents desperate enough to pay her 25 dollars an hour. She has a careful schedule lined up—she tutors two students a day for six days a week. For her average work week of 17 hours dealing with bratty entitled teenagers, she earns 425 dollars, which is probably more than Jongin gets paid teaching 8-year-olds to dance three nights a week. It’s practically a career, and Haeun even has business cards. She prays that Jongin doesn’t bring it up, but fate is not kind to her.
“Wait, don’t you tutor people for 25 dollars an hour?” Haeun cringes when Jongin remembers. Jongin is thinking hard, Haeun can tell by the way his face looks like he’s in physical pain. His eyes widen. “ you, Haeun, you make a -ton of cash from tutoring, you couldn’t totally help me pay my rent!”
“I’ll think about it,” Haeun says, opening her notes again. “Now shut up before we’re kicked out of the library.”
A week later on the last day to cancel spring Housing, Haeun curses Jongin’s talent of looking like a kicked puppy when he wants something as she calls her counselor.
“Yeah, I’m sure that I want to cancel. Yes. Yeah, I have somewhere to move into. Thanks.”
Jongin at least has the decency to help her move all her things in. He brags a lot on his Facebook about going to the gym and working out, but he literally spends 2 days after the move-in complaining about how sore his muscles are and how he “can’t believe you made me move everything on my own, Haeun. God, you’re such a .”
Haeun shrugs as she searches the fridge. Jongin is the poster boy for single male living—his fridge is stocked with protein shakes and beer. There’s little of actual substance. “Jongin,” she calls out as she moves on to the freezer compartment. It’s filled with frozen food and ice cream. “Where do you keep your kimchi?”
Jongin’s head pops over the couch where he had been lazing around. “I don’t have any Korean food, not even rice,” he says. “Why?”
Haeun nearly cries into the icy abyss of Hot Pockets and Ben & Jerry’s. Jongin is a red-blooded Korean man, born in Seoul and raised in a Korean-American community in California, the very, very least she expected was for him was to have at least rice.
“Don’t you get homesick without Korean food?”
Jongin shrugs. “I usually go out to eat when I’m craving something Korean. Lemme tell you, Kang Suh in Koreatown has the best damn bulgogi in America.”
“Stay strong, Haeun. You applied early decision. You knew that there was no backing out.”
“Haeun?” Jongin looks bewildered, and it’s almost cute until Haeun remembers that while school is 60% of her problems, Jongin is the other 40%. “Haeun, where are you headed?”
“I’m heading over to the Korean grocery to pick up some real food.”
“Are you kidding me?” Jongin scrambles up and picks up the coat he had left on the floor by the couch. “Alone? At night? It’s dark and scary outside—someone might mug you.”
“How endearing,” Haeun says sardonically as she puts on her beat-up converse. She really should get some new sneakers, she thinks as she examines the growing hole at the side of her right shoe. “You live in Williamsburg. You should know well enough how gentrified this place is getting.”
“ that,” Jongin says, hopping on one foot as he puts on his irritating designer basketball shoes. “I’m going with you.”
“Fine then,” Haeun shrugs, opening the door and waiting for Jongin to get himself pulled together. “Don’t complain, then.”
But Jongin does complain as they walk back from the store in the chilly January air. His breaths come out in little silvery puffs as he carries a 20-pound sack of rice in his arms. “Ughh,” he moans, rolling his eyes dramatically, “I’m already sore from carrying all your up the stairs, I can’t believe you’re making me carry this too.”
Haeun can’t help but to snort. She readjusts the heaping bagfuls of meat, vegetables, condiments, and various other Korean foods. “You talk a lot of on Facebook for someone who can’t even carry 20 pounds for 2 blocks without complaining.”
Jongin shuts his mouth, but a mischievous smile sneaks onto his face. “You’ve been stalking my Facebook?”
“No,” Haeun snaps. “Your stupid gym selfies and statuses about how much you lifted flood my feed every day. I’d call you a douchebag, but then I remember that you’re a huge nerd.”
“Oh.”
Jongin quickly changes the topic to Sehun and Zitao’s latest relationship drama. The only thing that Haeun gleans out of it is that boys and their feelings are dumb enough to make anybody tear their hair out.
When they get back into the apartment, Haeun spends 30 minutes shoving all of Jongin’s protein shakes and beer into the bottom shelf to make room for the real food that they had just bought. She washes and measures two bowls worth of rice and starts up the cooker. Jongin sits at the counter and watches as she sautés vegetables and sets them aside. Taking two bowls from the dishwasher, she scoops up the cooked white fluffy rice into each bowl and tops them with the sautéed mushrooms and cucumber along with raw soybean sprouts, kimchi, and gochujang.
“You look really hot when you cook,” Jongin says out of the blue. Haeun gives Jongin a weird look, and he backtracks. “Wait, I mean hot in a totally platonic way. Like, I totally wouldn’t have with you, but I’d recommend for my friends to have with you, that kind of hot.”
Haeun shakes her head as she slides a bowl of bibimbap across the counter to him, and seats herself with her own bowl. “You’re a freak, you know?”
Jongin’s metal chopsticks clack against the side of the bowl as he mixes up the vegetables and rice. “I resent that,” he says, scooping up a lump of rice and eating it. “You’re a bigger freak than me. You’re double majoring in Astrophysics and Engineering. If there isn’t anything freakier than that, then I give you full permission to put a up my .”
Haeun chokes on her food. “Oh god, Jongin,” a few grains of rice dislodge themselves from her windpipe and she can breathe again. “Jongin, what the .”
Jongin shrugs. “I swear, I’m definitely not gay. Give me some more gochujang?”
Haeun leans back to grab the jar off of the kitchen counter and places it between their bowls. Jongin dumps nearly half the jar onto his rice and Haeun resists the urge to gag.
When they eat out, Jongin usually has some semblance of manners. He even used a fork and knife when he brought her to his favorite steakhouse, but that might have also been because he was looking to pick up the hot waitress that served them. This is the first time Haeun sees Jongin eat at home, and outside of the scrutiny of others, Jongin eats like a pig. Haeun is disgusted, for the lack of a better word, at the little grains of rice that spill onto the kitchen counter and over Jongin’s shirt.
And just like that, they have their first dinner together.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise when Jongin takes a girl home for the first time while Haeun is there. In fact, it doesn’t. Jongin leaves at around 8, dressed flashily in tight pants (is that leather?!) and an expensive looking shirt that shows off his well built arms with his hair all gelled up so that he looks less like an annoying college student and more like a k-pop idol. Haeun goes to bed around 10 after she falls asleep halfway through a rerun of Grey’s Anatomy. She’s woken up again around 2 in the morning by the sound of the front door opening and feminine giggling. Haeun is almost on the train back to dreamland when she’s harshly jolted out of her half-sleep by the sound of the girl loudly .
Things only go downhill from there, because Jongin has a creaky bed frame that’s conveniently placed right up against the wall.
Haeun pulls her sheets over her head in an attempt to block out the noise and tries to think about anything other than the fact that her roommate is screwing some girl across the wall. Fall term finals are over and spring term is just beginning. There’s a cute guy in Haeun’s Advanced Mechanics of Solids lecture. There are usually hardly any cute boys in a lecture about stress and deformation formulation in two- and three-dimensional solids and viscoelastic and plastic material in one and two dimensions energy methods—just tired students who run on a mix of 5-Hour Energy and Monster, who have had nothing to eat for the past year and a half but cheap Nongshim ramen cups.
The boy’s name is Jongdae, Haeun thinks. His family name is Kim. He has cute lips that curl up at the edges and wavy brown hair that falls over his forehead. Maybe Haeun should ask him out—goddamnit, Jongin is still going at it—but then Haeun remembers that Jongdae’s got the biggest crush on the TA, so she lets it rest. Her mom is kind of mad that Haeun didn’t visit over winter break, but she was too busy moving to fly all the way back to Minneapolis and avoid her questions about why she’s still single. Her mother doesn’t even know about her current living condition, which is probably for the best, because she’d freak out when she learns that Haeun is living with a man she’s not married to.
It’s a lovely apartment, really. She’s honestly glad that she moved, because despite the fact that she shares the apartment with the biggest loser in New York City, it’s still pretty close to her fantasy life of living in a pretty little flat with gorgeous furniture where she could watch movies until dawn and wear cute oversized sweaters and curl up in blankets.
Haeun falls asleep when Jongin does, which is an infuriating 3:49 AM.
The next morning, she’s seated at the island eating a plate of leftover pajeon when Jongin comes stumbling out of his room, thankfully wearing pants. Haeun raises her eyebrows at the red marks littering his neck and chest. “Are those…bite marks?” She gestures towards them with her chopsticks.
Jongin groans and runs his hand through his disheveled hair. “I think she might have had a vampire or something.”
“Impressive,” Haeun says through a mouthful of green onions.
“Shut up,” he says, frowning towards the closed door of his bedroom. “When she comes out, act sad, yeah?”
Haeun rolls her eyes and nods, not a second too soon, because the girl he took home last night just then comes out of his room, dressed in the sparkly party dress she presumably wore yesterday.
Her eyes widen when she sees Haeun and falls open with a soft “oh.”
“Are you Jongin’s sick sister? That’s so sad!”
Haeun nearly snorts milk out her nose.
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it,” Jongin says suavely, demeanor completely changing once she stepped out of his room. “I have to go take her to the hospital soon, so if you…”
“Of course I’ll leave,” she gushed, eyes widening. “I would never want to intrude on something so personal!”
“Yeah,” he smiles charmingly as he ushers her out the door.
“Call me?” she says, fluttering her eyelashes at him.
“Of course, Jennifer,” he replies, leaning against the doorframe.
Her smile falters. Haeun can hear her say “but my name is Jessica,” before the door closes with a click.
“I would hate to be the person in your bed.” Haeun rolls up the last sliver of pajeon with her chopsticks and puts it all in .
“It’s ok, because you’ll never be. I mean, have you seen yourself?” Haeun shoots him an offended look and Jongin brushes it off. “Also, you’re too smart to fall for the sick sister play, or the lonely broken-hearted millionaire, or the secret k-pop star. Can you help me disinfect these bites?”
Sehun and Zitao come over in February to have a Super Bowl party, which is strange because Haeun is pretty sure that none of them are even into football. Sehun and Zitao are both New Yorkers, and are more into baseball, if anything. Zitao is Chinese and his family is rich—filthy rich, which explains how he can afford to decorate Jongin’s apartment like something you’d see on tumblr or weheartit, and then leave all the furniture there when he moved in with Sehun in Queens
Zitao’s an art history major, which is probably is a lot more financially viable when your parents own half of China’s pharmaceutical industry and you’ve already got an older brother to carry on the business. Sehun comes from less glamorous origins—he grew up in the suburbs of Albany and is, like Jongin, an econ major. He’s usually always frowning or stone-faced, but when he’s not, he’s probably giggling like a 5-year-old.
Sehun and Jongin play Pokémon on their DS’s through almost the entire game while Haeun and Zitao complain about them. Well, mostly Zitao complaining and Haeun interjecting a relevant story about Jongin every few minutes.
“Like I said,” Zitao flips his hair and leans on the kitchen island, “Sehun’s sweet and all but sometimes he can be so emotionally constipated”—Haeun vaguely wonders if she’s emotionally constipated. She once had a crush on a boy in her middle school for 2 entire years before she realized it—“I mean, it’s probably nothing, but I really do think that his emotional constipation stems from his insecurity about his crooked jaw. I keep telling him that I think it’s hot, but he doesn’t seem to care.” Zitao takes a sip of beer. He holds the bottle with his pinky out and somehow makes drinking beer seem like an upper crust society thing.
“Jongin got constipated once after eating nothing but rice and samgyeopsal and protein shakes for two weeks straight,” she says unhelpfully, and takes a drink of her own beer.
Zitao nods sagely like she’s just confessed her deepest insecurities to him. “Our boyfriends can be so stupid,” he says knowingly.
Haeun grunts an agreement while Jongin and Sehun scream at each other aggressively. It takes her 20 seconds to realize what Zitao had just said. “Wait,” she lowers her beer, “Jongin isn’t my boyfriend.”
Zitao raises his eyebrows so that they disappear into his fringe. “You live with him and you put up with his and cook for him,” his tone clearly tells Haeun that he thinks she’s an idiot.
“My relationship in regards to Jongin is closer to housekeeper than girlfriend,” Haeun says. She wrinkles her nose when Jongin takes an entire handful of Flaming Hot Cheetos and shoves them all in his mouth. “I can’t believe you think I’m in a relationship with that.” Jongin chokes and Sehun has to thump on his back to clear his respiratory system.
Zitao shrugs. “You’re really stupid for a future astronaut,” he decides, standing up to toss his empty beer bottle.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Haeun absentmindedly draws lines into the dewy condensation on her beer bottle.
“One day you’re going to wake up and realize that you’ve been secretly in love with your roommate,” he says, looking through the cabinets for some more snacks.
Haeun decides to ignore Zitao’s ominous prediction of her demise and generously helps him with his search. “There’s shrimp chips in the top right one, and a package of Korean sweets that Jongin’s aunt mailed from Korea for the Lunar New Year. He doesn’t really like them, so he just shoved them there. He asked me to make the traditional New Year soup and rice cakes instead.”
Zitao groans and takes the bag of shrimp chips. “The two of you make me so mad—you’re ruining my peace of mind.” Haeun thinks that she’d like to live in the world where the worst problems she has are her friends’ imaginary relationship problems, so she decides to entertain Zitao and nod sympathetically.
She and Jongin are cleaning up a few hours later when Zitao’s words hit her full force. She’s been living with him for the past 2 months and going out on pseudo-dates with him for the past 5. When Jongin came home 3 weeks ago crying about what had happened in the latest chapter of Naruto, Haeun had wiped his tears and made him kimchi jjigae. This is all progressing so quickly that even Haeun is mildly scandalized. She can almost hear the aunties with curly hair at the Korean Church in her hometown’s whispers, look at Seongho and Jeonghui’s daughter, she’s living with a man she’s only known for half a year, in no time she’s going to drop out of college and become a pregnant bum on the streets.
“Oh god,” Haeun says out loud.
“Hmm?” Jongin lifts his head from the mysterious stain in the carpet he’s trying to clean. “What happened?”
“I’m going to drop out of college and become a pregnant bum on the streets,” Haeun says in horror.
Jongin evaluates Haeun’s glazed eyes and slack posture, and shrugs. “Whatever tosses your salad, I guess.”
Once Haeun confirms her crush on her roommate, everything gets worse, and suddenly, she’s hyperaware once again to how painfully attractive Jongin is. Jongin in the morning is bad enough with his cute sleepy eyes and his ruffled hair, but Jongin fresh out of the shower is worse, since he has a habit of traipsing around shirtless, flashing his well-toned tanned body for everybody (which is really just Haeun) to see.
It gets to the point that Haeun takes on three new students and schedules him to a 6:00 slot because 6:00 is usually when Jongin finishes dance practice and he gets home at 6:30 and Haeun really doesn’t want to have to try and act normal when Jongin is tired and sweaty and the first thing he does when he steps into the apartment is take his shirt off (Jongin really needs to stop walking around shirtless so much). So Haeun now gets back a lot later than the usual 5 o’clock end to her last tutoring session of each day, but she also makes 150 dollars more a week.
By the time Haeun comes home, Jongin is usually draped across the couch in a t-shirt and basketball shorts, watching anime on his computer or Desperate Housewives when it’s on TV, and she immediately gets started on dinner for her and Jongin, which, if it’s not crappy and rushed Korean food, is instant ramen with an egg dropped inside. Haeun then proceeds to spend the next 5-6 hours doing homework, and by the time she’s done, it’s usually 1 or 2 in the morning and Jongin is already sleeping in a large lump in the center of his bed.
Haeun has 9 students and is in the second semester of her junior year and has to worry about helping Jongin pay his rent and buying him food and it’s exhausting and stressful and she always feels like she’s ready to cry any minute.
Jongin senses her stress too, because while Haeun is the type to hide her feelings, she isn’t the type to hide her misery. Besides, it’s probably kind of hard to be a Pokémon master when there’s a gloomy lump sitting in the kitchen mumbling about the finite element formulation for one dimensional problems and trusses and electrical and hydraulic systems, things that Jongin doesn’t understand but still fill him with ominous dread.
It’s like how they say that some animals can smell fear, Jongin can smell the stress of an exam in some sciencey, spacey subject, and it smells like red bull and ramen in 3 in the morning.
Haeun first notices that Jongin is starting to learn to be a functional human being when he has a hot dinner ready for her. She comes back from her evening tutoring session one day to find the apartment filled with a weird smell and two small bowls of meat jjigae on the counter.
Jongin looks at her expectantly as she takes her first sip. “I tried to make it like my mom does, but I couldn’t seem to get it right,” he says, watching her chew.
“You added too much garlic. That’s why the apartment smells so weird right now,” she says, and Jongin’s face falls faster than Haeun’s grade in Environmental Engineering.
“, I knew that I added too much of something,” his eyebrows are furrowed in frustration, “so I added more water but then it tasted too light so I boiled it down more and accidentally overcooked everything and I’m really sorry about this, I should have just asked you—“
“Relax, Jongin,” Haeun stops him before he has an aneurism. “It’s really good, I swear. Taste some of it.”
Jongin shuts up and takes a sip of his stew. “Oh,” he says, wiping his mouth. “It is pretty good, I guess.”
Jongin beams at Haeun and she swears she can feel her heart stop beating for a second.
That terrible 1-month span when teachers assign things because they say they don’t want to cram everything in the week before finals, but end up assigning everything at roughly the same time, is the worst time of the year. It hits twice, once in November, once in April. Haeun knows when it hits when even Jongin goes out to buy an 8-pack of Red Bull and hunkers down in the kitchen with Haeun to study over energy drinks and shrimp chips.
Jongin has this misconception that because Haeun’s job is to help teenagers with their math and science homework, she’ll help him with his math homework. It’s a cute misconception, really, but one that usually ends in disappointment on Jongin’s part because he’s clearly underestimating how much Haeun regrets double majoring in two very hard areas and how much she’d like to be into a black hole and be unavoidably carried to gravitational singularity once she passes the event horizon. If she’s being torn apart by growing tidal forces before crushed to infinite density, she probably wouldn’t have to turn in that 25-page paper on Hawking radiation and the eventual heat death of the universe.
Haeun has no classes on Saturday, but she teaches from 3 to 7 and it’s just her luck that when her last session ends and she steps out onto the grand white steps of the New York Public Library, she’s greeted with a sea of dark coats and dark umbrellas being blown sideways and rain coming down in sheets.
Haeun has no umbrella.
She saves her laptop and phone in her backpack with the plastic grocery bag she finds in one of the little front pockets, but by the time she gets on the MTA, she’s completely soaked. She momentarily thanks the gods that she decided to wear shorts that morning when she seats herself on the grimy plastic seat on the M line back home. As they cross East River over the Williamsburg Bridge, Haeun wonders if Jongin is worrying about her.
The rain is still going strong when she gets off at Central and Bushwick, and the two block walk feels like being a steak, pounded in preparation for grilling. Everything is washed in gray—the darkening skies, the empty sidewalks, the brick buildings with the little gray windows, their little gray curtains drawn over the glass.
The house is empty when she gets back home, and she’s almost disappointed by the absence of the soundtrack to some anime or the rattle of machine gun fire from a video game.
Evening finds Haeun lying on the couch on the dark, clad in her underwear in an attempt to stop feeling clammy and gross. She can smell everything Jongin has eaten in the past four months in the couch cushion, and makes a mental note to look up if it’s possible to use a power washer on indoor furniture.
Haeun doesn’t even bother to move when she hears the door click open. The couch cushions are too inviting. This must be what it feels like to lie in the fluffy stardust of nebulae.
“, Haeun,” she hears Jongin say, and she lets out a muffled whine into the fabric of the couch. “The last thing I want to see when I come home is your pasty all over my couch.”
“It was raining,” she complains, cranking the whininess in her voice up to 11. “I felt gross in my wet clothes, so I took it all off.”
“Obviously,” Jongin grumbles. Haeun feels something soft land over her head, and reaching out to grab the offending article from her still-damp hair, she fists her hand into something warm and fluffy. Turning her head so that it’s not wedged between the seat cushions, Haeun recognizes it as Jongin’s favorite red and black flannel shirt, the one that he’s spilled food on countless times, the one that he tied around his waist at his dance showcase this year. “Do me a favor and cover yourself.” Haeun hears Jongin disappear into the kitchen to do something.
Jongin’s shirt is warm and soft and she can understand why it’s his favorite, because it feels like she’s being hugged even though the hem stops a few inches above her knees and the sleeves extend over her hands so that they flop every time she makes a movement. Buttoning up the shirt, she tears herself from the warm downy comfort she had gotten accustomed to in the past hour and a half, and trudges, barefoot, to the kitchen, where Jongin is putting groceries away.
“You went shopping?” Haeun is impressed because Jongin never does household chores, especially when it’s such a gloomy day and his first instinct upon seeing a gray sky is usually to fall back into bed and sleep the day away.
“Yeah, I was getting restless all cooped up in here so I went over to Sehun and Zitao’s place,” he doesn’t look up as he continues to stock various vegetables and packages of meat into the fridge. “And when I was getting back, I passed by the Korean store, so I decided, why not?” He turns back around, a half-eaten cucumber in his hand, and freezes like a deer in the headlights when he sees Haeun.
“You’re wearing my shirt,” he says, mouth falling open. She can see mushy green cucumber in his mouth.
Haeun squirms under his scrutiny. “Yeah—you threw it at me. What are you, 14? I swear to god, if you pop a over my knobby knees, I’ll cut your off and feed it to the raccoons—“
Jongin convulsively folds his hands over his crotch and scowls. “Who would pop a at a shapeless pale blob like you? I know vegetables more attractive than you are.” Which, Haeun grudgingly agrees but would never let Jongin know, is probably true. An entire life spent cooped up studying can’t be good for her body line. In 20 years, she’s probably going to end up like one of those aunties with back problems and arthritis and blindness and deafness that her mom used to warn her about.
“Anyhow,” Jongin waves his hand carelessly towards the plastic bag still on the marble countertop, “guess what I found at the Korean grocery?”
Haeun’s mind instantly jumps to a variety of explosives, but she pushes that thought aside. “What?”
Jongin grins wickedly. “Chamisul soju was on sale today. The cashier shook her head at me disapprovingly.” Nine whole bottles.
Haeun weighs the pros and cons of getting smashed with Jongin in their apartment on a Saturday night when finals are a terrifying 2 weeks away and she needs to pull up two C’s into B’s and get all the IRB paperwork out of the way for her professor’s research that she’s helping out with, but all her self-resolve and moral righteousness fades away when Jongin starts streaming Pretty Little Liar and breaks out a bag of onion rings.
They get plastered by midnight and Pretty Little Liars is still streaming in the background but neither Jongin nor Haeun is paying attention to it because they’re giggling like crazy over the embarrassing childhood photos that Sehun’s mom has just posted on Facebook. “Look at that haircut,” Jongin shakes his head in second-hand embarrassment. “What a ing nerd.”
When Jongin gets bored flipping through everything picture from Sehun’s pre-modeling days, he pulls Haeun into his side to snap a selfie with his webcam, and Haeun throws up a peace sign. She wonders if it’s a bad idea to be posting a drunk selfie on the internet while she’s still wearing Jongin’s shirt, but it’s already posted and garnering likes and comments.
“Ugly es, heart Japanese emoticon heart,” Jongin reads Zitao’s comment out loud. He squints at Haeun. “I don’t know if it’s just the alcohol talking, but you’re actually not that ugly.”
“,” Haeun elbows him in the ribs and he yelps. He shoves her, harder, laptop forgotten on the edge of the couch. Haeun takes that as a challenge, puts her hand on Jongin, and shoves him all the way over, hard enough to make him swear loudly and knock his laptop onto the ground where it’s miraculously saved by a pillow that had fallen off the couch.
Their temporary aggression fades away in half a heartbeat and Haeun becomes very, very aware of the position she’s in and of the fact that she’s practically straddling Jongin, pale thighs on both sides of his hips, hands on his shoulders. Jongin just lies there and stares at her for a few, long seconds.
Her thought process goes haywire, looping around all over the place like silhouettes of the empty roller coasters on Coney Island. What she wants is to think about anything but Jongin, but that’s all her brain can focus on—Jongin’s jawline, Jongin’s fluffy bangs, Jongin’s straight nose.
“You know,” his eyes are heavy and dark, “the first time I saw you, when you walked into the dance studio by accident, I thought you were really hot, with that huge sweatshirt and your hair up. You always look the iest when you’re not trying.”
He his lips and Haeun can see his adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “And when you walked into the kitchen wearing my shirt—you and your stupid Hello Kitty underpants and your stupid purple bra with the hearts on them—I just really, really wanted to kiss you then. “
“Jongin, “Haeun shivers when she feels his hand creeping up her leg, thumb brushing on a sensitive spot on her inner thigh that makes her breath catch. She shifts her weight back so that she’s not pressing him down onto the couch. She can’t formulate a response, and she’s doesn’t know if it’s because of the alcohol, or if it’s because they’re about 1.5 layers of fabric away from ing.
“Haeun, I just—“ he bites his lip in irritation, “and—and that other time when I said that you were hot in the platonic way, that I’d recommend my friends to bang you but I wouldn’t, I was lying, because I’d totally bang you.”
He threads his fingers through Haeun’s hair, wavy and knotted from her walk in the rain earlier, and pulls her down to kiss her. Jongin tastes like soju and Yangpa onion rings and his thick lips are softer than she had imagined. She wraps her fingers around his shirt collar and his hand slides over her and her mind is hazy but if it’s anything like one of those brain-offices you see in cartoons, with the little file cabinets everywhere, she’s pretty sure that her brain-office would have red flashing alarm lights.
It’s too hot for Jongin’s thick flannel shirt, too hot for fuzzy blanket usually draped over the couch, and Jongin and Haeun devolve into panting breaths and sweaty palms and Haeun hasn’t made out with someone like this since she was in high school and she thought she was in love with her first boyfriend. Jongin groans when Haeun’s rubs against his groin and—oh god, Haeun’s not supposed to be kissing her stupid roommate, what happened to ‘just friends’—she involuntarily gasps when his hot mouth meets her collarbone and he’s ing the shirt and she knows that tomorrow morning is going to be regret, regret, so much regret, but the alcohol makes even this seem like a good idea, as it does with everything.
When a star explodes into a supernova, it instantly fuses everything past iron on the periodic table. Heavy elements can only come from supernovae.
In the first astronomy class Haeun took in high school, she learned that the energy that stars release comes from nuclear fusion, when two nuclei fuse together. The fusion of nuclei heavier than iron absorbs energy, so it generally occurs for lighter elements only. Only the extreme energy released when a star collapses and explodes into a supernova can generate enough heat to fuse the rest of the periodic table. Her physics teacher showed the class his gold wedding ring, and told them that every atom of gold in the ring was created in a supernova and dispersed through the universe in stardust.
For the first time, Haeun saw the beauty of a wedding ring. For the first time, she had the desire to share that beauty, that reflection of the colossal destructive and creative force of a dying star, that expression of the immeasurable elegance of the universe, with someone else.
At the moment, Haeun thinks that there are probably stellar explosions expelling the contents of a star’s material at up to 30,000 kilometers per second right behind her eyeballs and pounding on the inside of her skull. is scratchy and her eyes are dry and her head feels like she’s just died and been ripped back to life, and the yellow morning light beating against her eyelids isn’t helping anything.
Cracking her eyes open, the first thing Haeun sees is a mop of messy brown hair, and everything comes rushing back to her.
She moves herself out of Jongin’s bed faster than that time when she ran away from her older cousin at the Christmas party 12 years ago because he was chasing her with a dead centipede he found in their basement. She eventually ended up screaming and crying in the snow outside while her parents tried to coax her back into the house.
Even though Haeun isn’t quite screaming and crying in the snow, she’s violently putting on the underwear that she had discarded on the side of the bed the night before and redressing herself in the clothes she had left on the floor yesterday, now dry.
An aspirin two glasses of cold water later, she thinks she’s ready to face Jongin, who woke up from the noise she made freaking out in the kitchen after she noticed all the hickeys in her reflection on the microwave. The pounding hasn’t subsided much, but her state of mind has lessened from homicidal to plain unpleasantness.
“Morning,” (“KIM JONGIN PUT ON A PAIR OF PANTS FOR ’S SAKE”) “how’s your hangover?”
Haeun thinks back to that time where she told him that she’d hate to be the one in his bed, that time she laughed at the stupidity and gullibility to the bimbo he had taken home and he told her that she was too smart to fall for any of his tricks.
The scenario is a lot more painful on the other side of the kitchen counter when she’s the one that’s faced with his nonchalance towards his bed partners.
“Jongin,” is raw and she hopes it’s not from screaming, “What the happened last night?” She stares at him like the intensity of a gaze can somehow worm out the answer she wants to hear, that he’s in love with her and that he’ll never let her go. Reality can be so cold.
He shrugs. “We got drunk, we had . No big deal. I’m pretty sure we used a , if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Haeun feels like the air’s been out of her lungs, that if you were to cut her open, her lungs would be flat and crumpled like the unused grocery bags blowing around the corners of the little market a few blocks away, because it’s overwhelmingly obvious from his body language and the way that he won’t even look at her that he doesn’t care.
“No big deal?” She repeats his words, hoping that somehow he’ll realize what he said and take it all back.
Jongin just shrugs. “Yeah. It’s not like either of really care, right?”
Disappointment.
She’s not sure how or when it happens, but some time before she leaves that morning, Haeun Park, 5’5”, 108 lbs, stalks up to Jongin Kim, 6’0”, 152lbs, and punches him square in the jaw, hard enough to leave him stumbling back a few steps. She doesn’t stay long enough to see if she actually did any real damage, but judging from the state of her knuckles, she hopes the bruise shows for everybody to see.
A star of less than about half the mass of the Sun will be unable to ignite helium fusion, and will produce a white dwarf composed chiefly of helium.
In the end, all that remains is a cold dark mass sometimes called a black dwarf.
She has the sense to grab her backpack before she storms out of the apartment, but her MetroCard is still in the pocket of the blazer she threw down onto the living room floor the day before, so she scrounges up 2.50 in change from the bottom of her bag for the subway ride from Williamsburg to Zitao and Sehun’s stylish condo in Flushing, close enough to Chinatown that Zitao never feels homesick.
Sehun opens the door in Pororo pajamas, confused (“wha—why are you here?”), but Zitao needs to take one look at the way Haeun’s hair is fluffed around her neck and the air of awkwardness and shame that she’s standing in, and murmurs “Jongin” with a sympathetic nod. Haeun wonders if she should be concerned that Zitao can discern her situation with just one glance, but then she supposes that he’s the type to have experience in things like this.
He shoos Sehun off to the store to pick up some groceries, and then sits Haeun down on their couch with cups of tea so fast that she barely registers what’s going on.
(Haeun cringes. The couch is black leather, and Taohun seems like a pretty couple—who knows what they’ve done on it?)
“So,” he drags out the syllable and lets it linger in the air. Haeun doesn’t know how to respond so she just sits there and stares at him. Zitao rolls his eyes and clicks his tongue like he can’t believe he has the misfortune to have to deal with the idiots that surround him, which is partly true, because Haeun acknowledges that his friends are all kind of clueless. “What happened,” he says impatiently, crossing his legs.
“Oh,” Haeun wonders if she should tell it from the day she intruded on shirtless Jongin at the studio, or from the time he took her to his apartment and showed her the stack of comics under the bed, or from the time he barged into the library at Columbia and demanded that she move in with her. She decides that last night is a nice time to start.
“So there was cheap alcohol yesterday and Jongin decided to buy a bunch, and I was kind of sad yesterday for a bunch of reasons, so we streamed Pretty Little Liars and got really smashed and we ended up making out and having .”
Zitao raises his eyebrows. He’s either impressed or judging her hard. It’s probably the latter. “And the problem is…?”
“I punched him.”
Zitao coughs delicately, and Haeun wonders if he ever does anything like a normal, living, breathing, sweating, farting human being. Does Zitao even poop? Everything he does is chic and fairy-like. “Well, that’s certainly a way to handle it…”
“It was after he said that it was no big deal,” she amends so Zitao doesn’t think she’s completely crazy. “He said neither of us really cared. So yeah, I punched him. See?” She shows him her knuckles that have faded from angry red to show the yellow-green bruises that are slowly starting to peek through.
Zitao raises his eyebrows again, and this time, Haeun is pretty sure he’s impressed. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
She can’t stay in Zitao and Sehun’s condo for the rest of her life, no matter how spacious and modern and ridiculously expensive it looks.
Instead of facing her problems like Zitao repeatedly suggests to her, Haeun decides aggressively avoid Jongin for the next two weeks until finals are over and she can fly back home to Minneapolis and cry to her mom about how she was right the whole time about how men are pigs.
Jongin reminds her of her dad, and it scares her, because Haeun’s mom loved her dad, and he took her trust and devotion and tossed it all on the floor. Haeun was too young to comprehend the fact that her appa was cheating on her umma, but she knew enough to understand that her umma was never the same afterwards. Her mother never had the heart to file for divorce.
She doesn’t even come home to eat anymore, she does her homework and has dinner over at Zitao and Sehun’s and only comes home at night to take a shower and sleep.
She knows that it can’t last.
It’s Thursday and she has one final left, an easy one for Number Theory, when Jongin finally corners her down in the apartment after she gets back from her last tutoring session.
“Haeun, you can’t keep avoiding me,” he’s standing behind her and she nearly swears out loud because she swore the house was empty when she walked in. Has he been waiting in the dark this whole time?
“Yes I can,” she says stubbornly. She pulls the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and takes the long way around the island to get to the fridge.
In the 2-week absence of Haeun, Jongin has relapsed into beer bottles and protein shakes. She gives up the fridge as a lost cause, closes the door, and turns around to lock herself in her room. She frowns when she meets a roadblock to her plan in the form of Jongin’s chest.
“Move,” she orders, giving him her most venomous glare, but it doesn’t seem to faze him at all.
“We need to talk,” Jongin says earnestly and Haeun feels a tinge of guilt for being so mean to him.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” It’s better to avoid the problem than get hit with the bitter reality that Jongin doesn’t care about her.
“Yes there is,” he insists, putting his hand down on the glossy countertop. “You’ve been avoiding me for the past two weeks, and I could just lie and say that everything’s better this way, but it’s not. It’s obvious that the night—the night we got drunk, things changed, and I want to talk it out.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Haeun repeats firmly. “You wanted an easy lay, and I was miserable and drunk. You told me in January that I’m too smart to fall for your tricks, but you obviously overestimated me.” She’s saying this more for herself than for Jongin, but she hopes that if she says it in a firm enough voice, it’ll convince herself that she really doesn’t care about anything that happened.
“Wait, Haeun, that’s not true—“
“Jongin,” she doesn’t want to hear any more bull, or at least that’s what she tells herself. Deep, deep down inside, knows she’s secretly terrified of what Jongin will say. She’s terrified of the rejection that always comes to everybody that Jongin sleeps with. “You don’t have to apologize to me just because I’m your roommate. You know, if you wanted to sleep with me, you could have saved us both the trouble, and just asked.”
Jongin blows up at that last sentence.
“Stop it! Stop it with all your,” he wildly gestures with his hands, “pretentious character analysis or whatever the you’re doing. Stop thinking that you know me, thinking that just because I take girls home or that I act like a douchebag, that I’m automatically a who thinks two weeks ago meant nothing.” Haeun doesn’t flinch at his yelling. She doesn’t back down. She just stands there and stares at Jongin’s angry face. “Stop pretending, for ’s sake, that you don’t care, that your feelings don’t matter and that there’s nothing to talk about. Stop being such a—a—a little about this!”
Haeun is silent a few moments. Somehow, her memory is drawn back to one of her first astronomy classes and she can’t get the last lecture of the class out of her mind.
“It’s funny, because, in 10 to the 40th power years, black holes will dominate the universe, and by 10 to the 100th power years in the future, all the black holes will have evaporated and all the ordinary matter made of protons will have disintegrated.”
Jongin looks frustrated at her sudden change of topic, but he doesn’t interrupt her. He stands there and listens to her talk about events so far ahead in the future, they’re nearly incomprehensible, events that he doesn’t give half a about, but are so important to Haeun’s being that he’ll try to understand anyway.
“Gravitationally, the universe will be dominated by dark matter, electrons, and positrons, and all the matter will be extremely diffused and the universe will reach an extremely low-energy state. We think that the Universe will settle in this state forever, where there’s no thermodynamic free energy and no processes that consume energy can be sustained. It’s called heat death. It’s the end.”
“The end of…” Jongin prompts.
“The end of everything,” Haeun says impatiently. “Nothing will happen after this. The universe is in this state forever. Nothing will ever happen again. The point is,” she fists her hands into the long sleeves of her oversized sweatshirt, “the universe is infinitely vast and impossible for us to comprehend. Human life isn’t even a blip on the radar of the universe—our existence is tiny, infinitesimally small. In 800 million years, multi-cellular life will end, and by 1.3 billion years, all life on Earth will end.”
Maybe Haeun looks crazy right now, like one of those professors with the tweed jackets and thinning, white hair, the professors that always have a strange glint in their sunken eyes and talk too loudly, the professors that can’t seem to lecture without getting lost in their own thoughts about how amazing and terrible the world is.
“What I’m trying to get to is that nothing matters, nobody cares about the fate of our solar system, or the fate of the earth, or the eventual demise of humankind in the near future due to our misuse of fossil fuels or our greenhouse emissions. Nobody cares about the feelings of a 21-year-old student in Brooklyn who’s killing herself at Columbia and was stupidenough to convince herself that a boy loved her back. It’s ok, Jongin. I’ll be ok.” Haeun is almost surprised by the bitterness in her voice.
Jongin is silent and looks down at her with a strange expression. Haeun feels water spill over her lashes and realizes that she’s crying. She stares at the ground and tries to avoid his gaze, because if she looks into his eyes, she’ll cry more.
“I care.”
Haeun’s rant leaves dry and her thoughts swirling and acidic. “What?”
“I care,” he says quietly. Haeun can hear the clock ticking on the wall in the living room. “I care about your problems and your feelings. I care that you’re killing yourself at Columbia, and I care that you think that I don’t love you back.”
“Oh.” Haeun wishes she could think of a better response, but it’s like her joints are locked in place and she can’t move. She can’t remember anybody saying anything to her that’s made her feel like this.
“I—,” Jongin swears and runs his hand over his face, eyebrows crinkling in frustration. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You weren’t supposed to be crying like this. Hell, we weren’t even supposed to have .”
He takes Haeun’s hand and she looks up and meets his eyes, and Jongin continues. “The confession I had played out in my head was a lot less ty. You would have been be all happy and after acing your last final, and, I don’t know why, but in my head you’re wearing that stupid blue flowery sundress that I’ve only seen you wear once, and I’d meet you outside of whatever lecture hall you were in, probably some stuffy ancient building older than America, and you’d run into my arms all smiley and .”
“You always look so ing beautiful when you’re happy, you know that? And then we’d hug and I’d give you a bouquet of red roses and tell you that I’ve been in love with you ever since you first walked into the wrong building back in December and I ed up and took you out for coffee to make up for it.”
“And then, I don’t know, maybe you’d cry a bit but mainly you’d hug me and kiss me and tell me that you love me too. I know I do a lot of ty things and I admit, I’m a complete man-, but I swear to god, I really wanted to make this perfect for you. God, I’m such a ing idiot.”
“Oh,” Haeun feels like crying because Jongin practically just spilled the contents of his heart to her. She’s so happy that she thinks she might cry anyway.
“, Haeun,” Jongin hurriedly wipes at her cheeks with his thumbs, “I didn’t mean to make you cry. , , , I went overboard with that confession, didn’t I? Goddamn, Kim Jongin, you’re such a tard—“
“I love you too,” Haeun interrupts his frantic babbling, and it’s his turn to look dumbfounded.
Haeun smiles through her tears because Jongin is so stupid. “You said that you wanted me to cry a bit, and hug you, and tell you that I love you too. There was already crying, here’s the hug,” she reaches up to throw her arms around his shoulders and steps back, beaming up at his wide eyes.
“And here’s the kiss,” she gives him a peck on the cheek, because lips is probably excessive.
“And I just gave you the ‘I love you too’, didn’t I?”
“Wow,” Jongin says. If he doesn’t close his mouth soon, an insect will fly in. “We—we really are losers aren’t we?”
“Shut up, . Don’t ruin our moment.”
“The thing is, I feel like Sehun isn’t being sensitive to my feelings. I wish he would just smell the coffee and wake up.”
“Once, Jongin slept for 2 days straight after pulling 3 consecutive all-nighters to finish Mass Effect 3.”
“Our boyfriends are so stupid.”
"Yeah."
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