Once you have nothing to worry about though, hope becomes an illusion, a drug that drags you into an alternate reality you can’t quit and it stays until your thoughts waste away and render you unable to move forward. 

He cups Sanghyuk’s cheeks and pulls him a bit closer, kissing him deeply, because Taekwoon has never been good at putting his thoughts and feelings into words, and because he doesn’t think he could say anything that would express how much he loves Sanghyuk better than kissing him breathless.

He is honestly, deeply, madly in love with Hakyeon, but at the moment, he hates life, hates everything and everyone in the world, even— no, he doesn’t hate Hakyeon, but he does hate the fact that Hakyeon is buzzing around him like an annoying fly, asking him what’s wrong and how he could help when Taekwoon doesn’t reply.

Taekwoon had been used to silence once; he had lived in this very flat for years before Hakyeon came into his life, and Hakyeon was the first thing to fill it with noise and laughter and incessant talking, but he was nowhere now.

Wonshik snorts, half a smile quirking the left corner of his mouth upwards, but a beat later it dies down and he looks up with sadness in his eyes. “Please, don’t hurt Jaehwan,” he says quietly. “He’s not the one at fault.”

Sanghyuk keeps staring ahead, into the small, narrowed black eyes that are glaring at him, trying to find out how he should proceed from here.

As someone whose boyfriend appreciates the body aesthetics of both men and women, Taekwoon thinks he is righteously feeling upset about everything that’s going on in front of him.

Taekwoon is too much of a perfectly snarky smartass for Hakyeon’s stupid teenage girl-like taste in men.

His necktie is suffocating him and he loosens it, ending up dry-heaving above the sink nevertheless, the anxiety from not getting even just a text from Sanghyuk for the sixth day in a row stirring up in his stomach, making it cramp.

There was longing, warmth, something akin to happiness in there, all of them in his head and none of them in his heart where they should have been, where Hakyeon had said they would be if he ever loved someone. 

“Good morning,” Taekwoon says, pressing a short kiss to Hongbin’s lips. He must have just shaved; his skin is smooth where it was prickly last night, the scent of his aftershave lotion still lingering there and mixing with his perfume.

What exactly are you supposed to do when you bump into your ex-boyfriend thousands of kilometres away from where you both live?

“I’m rotting away anyway,” Hongbin replies desperately. “If I have to die, I want you to be the thing that kills me.”

Taekwoon remembers the first time he met Wonshik as if it had only been yesterday, whereas, in fact, it happened almost 17 years ago.