Synergy [Jinyoung/Sandeul]
Title: Synergy
Pairing: Jinyoung/Sandeul
Rating: pg-13
Summary: Pseudo-composer and college dropout Jung Jinyoung gives Junghwan piano lessons in an old Victorian-style mansion. AU.
The path that wound through the world of music was long and convoluted, and Lee Junghwan was not familiar with any of it.
He could sing three measure runs, but when it came to picking a half note from a quarter note on a sheet of music, he was absolutely clueless. It was his choir teacher who suggested that Junghwan start by taking beginner piano lessons, which was how he ended up in front of an old Victorian style house sequestered in pines on a thickly forested hill, spires peaking through the trees like robins. The foundation was made of a muddy reddish stone that faded to gray, and on top of it sat a baby blue-sided, white molded house with a roofed porch decorated with intricate, florally-carved railings and the occasional hanging basket houseplant.
Junghwan had spotted the previous student, much younger than him, leaving the house with a bit of a sniffle and a downcast expression, as if he’d just been told to sit in time-out. Junghwan frowned stiffly.
He reached to knock, but the door swung open prematurely. Junghwan met the gaze of a boy not much older than he was.
“You’re an oddly proportioned child,” said the boy.
“I’m eighteen,” Junghwan replied.
“Oh, so then you must be the babysitter.”
Junghwan struggled to remember the name of the instructor - “Jinyoung?”
“Yeah, where’s the kid?” Jinyoung said, swinging the door back and forth with his hand. He wore a black t-shirt that clashed rather innocently with his pair of straight-legged jeans. “Afraid?”
“I’m here for piano lessons,” said Junghwan through his teeth, and Jinyoung raised an eyebrow, then laughed.
“Oh, so you must not have seen the thing on the flyer,” Jinyoung replied, propping the door open with his foot and turning toward the living room. Junghwan peeked inside the house, which was decorated rather sparsely for such an outwardly ostentatious place. Long-boarded wood floors met white carpet, and the walls ran an old-fashioned green. To the left, two grand pianos sat back to back on the carpet, sheets of music littered carelessly across the floor under the back piano. Jinyoung returned to the doorway, and Junghwan jumped back and bit his lip. “The part where it says fourteen and under?”
Junghwan sighed. “Look, I’m a beginner and I’m not here because I want to be. My-”
“Parents?” guessed Jinyoung.
“Choir teacher,” Junghwan said. “She wants me to come. Because I can’t read music. So if you-”
Jinyoung laughed, interrupting Junghwan. “You’re not fourteen and under, but you sound like the typical reluctant child. Good enough for me. I’ll take you.”
Junghwan didn’t know if that was a compliment or not.
Jinyoung set him up with copies from books and a shopping list for later that evening, and Junghwan barged into the music store and made a beeline for the piano section. The books he’d been assigned were brightly colored and printed on thick, sturdy construction paper, he noticed sadly.
“Can’t you teach me out of beginner adult books?” Junghwan asked Jinyoung the next week as Jinyoung waited for him to clip his nails.
“My lessons, my rules,” said Jinyoung patiently. He trailed his hand across the top of the front piano, where Junghwan would take lessons for the next couple of months.
Jinyoung already had the melody established.
The one line of lyrics he’d penned flowed along an upbeat tune that said absolutely nothing: he was aiming for somewhat hackneyed prose to fill in the rest of the song. There was music, and there was music that was accessible to the general public, and Jinyoung found it more mentally taxing to write the latter as opposed to the former, possibly because of the dismal psychological level it required him to stoop to.
Since graduating high school, Jinyoung had found inspiration to be both addled and fleeting, the most frustrating kind of inspiration - he’d rather have no inspiration so that at least he’d be goaded to find his own. But instead, he perched lazily against the two pianos in his living room and let the Top 40 hits come to him via an outdated radio, and swallowed as they bled his ears like leeches.
“You don’t think professional songwriters write with some sort of legit purpose?” said Dongwoo over the phone, thousands of miles away on a study abroad in Europe. Dongwoo provided a different yet frustratingly stubborn perspective because he understood absolutely nothing about music yet had been Jinyoung’s neighbor and only friend since elementary school.
“Selling is purpose,” Jinyoung replied.
“No one writes to sell.”
“Want to bet?”
“No,” Dongwoo said. “But you can’t sell a song by trying to make it sound stupid. Isn’t that kind of arrogant?”
“I was born arrogant.” Jinyoung flipped through dog-eared magazines and let the fan blow his hair into a style cemented in one particular direction. “Got a new student, by the way.”
“You’re always getting new students.”
“No, this one’s, like, old. Like 18.”
Dongwoo paused for a moment. “I thought you didn’t teach kids over 14.”
“It’s okay, he’s a beginner. A singer. Can’t read music. Can you believe that?”
“Yes,” said Dongwoo. “Some people are born naturally talented. And arrogant. Sounds like you two will be a perfect match.”
After six failed G scales (Junghwan had somehow mastered the C scale, but after introducing a black key, he was once again lost), Junghwan gave a shout of frustration, which startled Jinyoung.
“That’s a loud voice,” Jinyoung noted, and Junghwan shrugged.
“I told you my choir teacher made me come here. I’m in choir.”
Jinyoung frowned and nodded slowly. “I’m a composer.”
Junghwan let his hands slide down the keys. “I thought you were a piano teacher.”
“Saving up some money to fund it,” explained Jinyoung. “Marketing and stuff. Ads. Want to hear some?”
“Not really,” replied Junghwan, but Jinyoung was already on his way to the back piano, where Junghwan reluctantly trotted after realizing that Jinyoung was going to show him regardless. There were a lot more things Junghwan would rather be doing than taking lessons, though, so he stood beside the back piano and glanced at the sheet music which, he noted, was filled with pencil-written notes and markings scrawled in disheveled handwriting.
The song was about love and something else painfully trite, and Junghwan barely held in a snort when Jinyoung started singing in a voice that sounded so gooey it could congest rivers. But Junghwan had to give him credit for spending what seemed like hours on the few measures he had written down.
“Your face,” Jinyoung said, and only then did Junghwan notice that Jinyoung had stopped playing.
“I wear my heart on my sleeve,” Junghwan replied sheepishly. “Sorry about that.”
Jinyoung sighed and gave Junghwan a half-smile in return. “Well, I guess that means I still have stuff to work on.”
A steady silence fell over the two of them, and Junghwan shifted his feet on the floor uncomfortably, staring down at the patterns his toes made in the carpet. He watched Jinyoung’s long, gaunt fingers tap against the leather piano seat as if he were expecting some sort of answer, or an offer, as if waiting under a streetlight for Junghwan to try the impossible task of catching up with Jinyoung’s pace. But when Junghwan looked up at Jinyoung’s face, Jinyoung had his eyes cast down on the music, eyebrows scrunched together in concentration.
“I’ll help,” Junghwan blurted out in the same loud voice.
Jinyoung looked at him.
“Record your guides, I mean,” he added. “Not, like. Compose or anything.”
“You can’t even tell an E from a C, how could I expect you to compose,” Jinyoung snorted, and Junghwan gave him a pout. Jinyoung pulled down the lid over the keys and leaned his elbows on it, looking up at Junghwan who was still standing there, feet planted together on the ground and hands stiff at his sides. Jinyoung laughed. “I’m free Thursday afternoons.”
Junghwan, nearing the end of his voyage through high school, was eager to dive into the music-filled world that college offered him without the by-products of math, sciences, histories. “You’re still going to have to take basic math in college,” his mother told him; how was it that the excess fat could never quite be trimmed off, Junghwan wondered grimly. Still, though - studio classes, recording, learning more about melodies and acoustics than formulas and integers, it all amassed into one wave of exciting things to come, having Junghwan more often than not wishing away the present moment and living in a capricious, imagined future.
“Give me that G scale again,” snapped Jinyoung from the other side of the room. “No, the one with the F sharp. Do you think this part would sound better if I raised the key?”
“I don’t even know what language you’re speaking,” Junghwan replied, struggling to contort his hand so that his thumb could somehow miraculously fit under his middle finger.
Of course, his choir teacher had to break it to him that he’d need to know how to read music if he wanted to study music in university - raw talent wouldn’t cut it. And Jinyoung somehow presumed that since Junghwan was nearly an adult, Jinyoung could berate him like one. “Do you treat all your students like this?”
Jinyoung poked his head out from behind the piano. “Only the ones with potential,” he said, winking.
Junghwan stuck his tongue out and smashed the keys down with a subdued vigor, laced with frustration.
Jinyoung remained stoic. “Raise the key or no?”
“What does that even mean.”
Jinyoung played what Junghwan assumed was a chord, then played some different notes, sounding similarly vibrant, but with a hint of - “Higher. At the end of a song. Sometimes the composers raise the key signature higher. So everything is shifted a little bit up.”
Junghwan moved his finger from a G to an A. “Oh, so like how those songs do that thing at the end.”
“I’m going to assume you know what I’m talking about,” said Jinyoung, walking over to Junghwan’s piano. “How’s that G scale coming along?”
“I don’t understand why the fingering is so important. As long as I know the notes, I’m fine, right?”
Jinyoung sat down beside Junghwan, their thighs touching. The blistering summer heat had them clad in khaki shorts, waves of sunlight torching through the window and beating down on their backs like an oppressively incessant wind, the kind that sinks into your skin and runs through your bones, even after you’ve escaped to the calm indoors. Junghwan felt Jinyoung’s knobby knee poke into the upper part of Junghwan’s calf. From the sound of the air conditioning rattling through the vents, Jinyoung had the thermostat turned to the coolest setting, but it wasn’t near enough. Salty drops of perspiration cling to Junghwan’s forehead and ran down his nose, and Jinyoung’s presence right beside him certainly didn’t help.
“The fingers are important because instead of sounding like this,” Jinyoung said, bouncing his index fingers on a few arbitrary notes, making a choppy almost-melody, “you can sound like this.”
Jinyoung’s clammy hands touched Junghwan’s wrists lightly before sliding down over his fingers. Junghwan jerked his hands back and felt Jinyoung smile against the side of Junghwan’s face, against his cheek, and the melody that swelled from Jinyoung’s fingers circulated miraculously into the still air of June. It seemed to get the air moving, a kind of elegance that stunned Junghwan into a gentle stillness that reclined against the placid summer air. Jinyoung reached behind him and around his waist to hit a lower note, and Junghwan tensed, feeling blood rush into his face.
“Like that,” Jinyoung murmured, his hand lingering hooked around Junghwan’s waist for a moment too long.
Junghwan let out a choked laugh, and Jinyoung pinched Junghwan’s cheek. “You’re really talented,” said Junghwan.
“I’ve been at it since I was nine. I wouldn’t call that talent anymore, just hard work.” Jinyoung stood, and Junghwan let his shoulders sink as he leaned his head back to look at Jinyoung. “What you have is talent. Can’t read a note of music but you can sing like that.”
Junghwan wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a compliment, either, but he beamed like a proud schoolboy.
What surprised Jinyoung about Junghwan, aside from his not being able to read music, was that he was neither particularly childish nor was he arrogant, just clueless. He seemed eager enough to learn, outright practicing his chords and arpeggios at Jinyoung’s house for far longer than his allotted lesson time, but Jinyoung never had the heart to charge him extra.
The melody at this point had some jumps in it. It rolled along in a major key until a slight dip in the road dropped it down to a minor chord here and there for flavor.
He’d never thought about it before.
Jinyoung had never consciously composed music this way, deliberately modeling the tune after thousands of dead chord patterns and used and recycled arrangements. He remembered sessions in the studio being far more invigorating and - he looked at his watch: 11:26, two minutes since he’d last checked it - the time tended to pass far more quickly. He’d generate hundreds of songs per session, thousands of couplets and half-rhymes, and hundreds more thrown away tunes that piled around the trash can under his desk, Jinyoung being too lazy (or too concentrated, depending on how he looked at it) to empty the poor bin.
He didn’t remember ever thinking about music until he began teaching piano, and even then, the thinking that he did was diminutive and something like a break from falling freeform through lines and lines of lyrics without an anchor.
The structure he felt now, though, wasn’t an anchor, wasn’t useful. It was more like an anvil, a considerable weight pressing his shoulders down into a slumped position over the guitar, from which the chords and runs came out more and more lifeless with every passing session.
“Your fingers are off again, it’s 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4-5 for almost every white key scale,” Jinyoung said, and Junghwan pulled his hands into wrinkly little fists. “Let’s wait another week before adding the left hand in.”
“I’m getting nowhere,” wailed Junghwan, and Jinyoung rubbed his back tentatively. Junghwan tensed his spine and turned to Jinyoung. “Let’s work on your song.”
“Ah, um,” Jinyoung mumbled. “It’s not exactly coming along as planned, either.”
Junghwan swung his feet against the carpeted floor. “I feel like I’ve driven us both into a rut.”
Jinyoung laughed. “Actually, it’s nice having you here. The rest of my friends are off in college, and everyone else I interact with is either under six or older than 35.”
“Then why aren’t you in college? Studying music or something?”
“Waste of money.”
“Who knows, it might look good on your resume.”
Jinyoung shook his head. “I don’t want to work for anyone but myself.” He trotted through two quick arpeggios on the piano, then leaned his elbow onto the piano and depressed the keys slowly. “Music used to come so easily to me, but I’m trying to make a hit rather than the indie stuff I keep pouring out, and it’s not really… working. I don’t know what happened.”
“You know, you might be trying too hard,” suggested Junghwan. “Like, when I try to headvoice too hard it just comes out sounding like I have laryngitis. You need some inspiration.”
Leave it to Jinyoung to break it to Junghwan after a month of arduous lessons all attended for the purpose of seeing-helping Jinyoung with his composition and pleasing Junghwan’s choir teacher. “I’ve decided. It’s for the person I like. The song, I mean,” said Jinyoung with a straight-faced smile.
“Oh,” replied Junghwan. He couldn’t help but add, then, “Well, the lyrics are really cheesy. And the song is. The melody is boring. And bad.”
“Wow, you have absolutely no filter, do you.”
Junghwan pressed his bare feet down onto the pedals and watched the keys shift, feeling cool metal sink onto the pads of his toes. The weather was cooler that day, yet Jinyoung still had the fan turned on and rotating so that the breeze hit just about every corner of the room. Junghwan would let out an involuntary shiver every time he met Jinyoung’s gaze, and he wasn’t sure if it was because the fan’s innocuous chill predictably reached him right then, or if the intensity in Jinyoung’s eyes shook him down to the veins in his wrists. “I’m just telling it as it is,” said Junghwan. “You need a better inspiration. Everything’s about love.”
“That’s the point,” Jinyoung said. “To be like everything else. Play the clock song again, you didn’t hit the last chord right last time.”
Junghwan stuck his tongue out at Jinyoung, and he watched Jinyoung struggle to hold back a smile, making that endearing scrunched expression dotted with dimples. As Junghwan’s fingers stumbled through Tick Tock Goes the Clock and his eyebrows furrowed at the brightly outlined juvenile images and excessively large notes (that still had their respective letters written in them; that was how far he’d gotten in a month), Junghwan wondered what she was like (why?), the type of person Jinyoung regarded so highly as to write a song for her.
“The point is to sell,” said Jinyoung, “by going with the flow.”
Junghwan stopped before the last chord. “I thought the point was to make music. You told me you were a composer, not a businessman.”
Of course, Junghwan had exaggerated slightly. The lyrics were elementary, but the melody itself was actually quite catchy, and Junghwan found himself tapping his feet along to the string of notes that danced in excruciatingly childish and wordy circles around him.
“I lied,” Jinyoung said after a moment.
“What?”
Jinyoung gave Junghwan a wry smile, the corners of his mouth curving down in startling amusement. “I don’t really like anyone. That might be the problem.”
Somehow, Junghwan felt sourly relieved (why?). He let out a bark of a laugh. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you make that up? To see my reaction?”
“No,” said Jinyoung. Junghwan’s laugh dissolved and he choked down a gulp of cold air. “I figured love is the easiest inspiration, right?”
“Yeah, but,” Junghwan said. The lyrics were trite but not uninspired; Jinyoung definitely felt love on a basic level. It was coming up with something he could be more realistically enthusiastic about that was the difficulty - and Junghwan had no problem thinking of what he wanted Jinyoung to be enthusiastic about (why?).
But instead, Junghwan murmured, “I guess it doesn’t have to be a person. Right?”
Jinyoung hadn’t taken a proper walk in the past three years or more.
The sidewalk curved around a painfully out of place asphalt road that stunk of burning rubber and was streaked with tire marks that slid into the muddy shoulders. It was moist, humid during the daytime in the dense forest where Jinyoung lived, and in the evenings mosquitoes buzzed in thick swarms around the front deck, eating at the new window screens and pushing insistently at the stale air inside the house. Despite all this, Jinyoung loved the house he and his mother occupied with disarmingly great presence.
Loved. Love. It didn’t have to be a person? “I’m going to write about my house,” Jinyoung said to himself, fingers pressing nail marks into his palms. “What a wonderful house. With mosquitoes and greenery-aplenty.” It was possibly the worse line he’d ever come up with, but Jinyoung chuckled.
He walked past a runner who baptized him with a hefty glare. Jinyoung snorted. If that was what he got for walking the neighborhood, then fuck it.
“I love life,” said Jinyoung. He loved people who loved life.
His headphones hung around his neck, and Jinyoung could hear the Rachmaninoff blasting with renewed vigor from his iPod, stopping only for the tri-tone of a new text message: come home before dinner.
Jinyoung had a habit of listening to the songs he was working on until he grew tired of their repetitive ache - until they grew weary of him and begged to be relieved of their tedious duties. But Jinyoung wouldn’t let up. The scaly piece roared into the flora, and Jinyoung could feel the slippery ivory piano keys at his fingertips.
Jinyoung loved people who loved life.
Junghwan hated his life.
Cha Sunwoo wouldn’t stop teasing him about Jinyoung, and Junghwan, in want of time, and space, to think about his own feelings regarding the Jinyoung matter, felt ready to stab Sunwoo with a kitchen fork for his harmless wrongdoings.
He wanted to kiss Jinyoung - that much had already been established. He wanted to kiss Jinyoung and hold him around the shoulders with Chopin (not Tick Tock Goes the Clock) playing in the background, he wanted Jinyoung to lean down and place his hands over Junghwan’s again as Junghwan struggled to get through simple pieces, just for the cool yet passionate presence that Jinyoung embodied.
As Junghwan trudged up the driveway to Jinyoung’s front door (Junghwan always parked at the end of the drive as if protecting himself, as if anticipating Jinyoung’s rejection before it even happened), he heard loud acoustic guitar resonating through the open windows.
He reached to knock, but the door swung open prematurely.
“Junghwan, just the person I was looking for,” Jinyoung said.
Junghwan raised an eyebrow. “You know my lessons are on Thursdays.”
“You tend to lose track of time when you’re having fun.”
“Why are you going on and having fun without me and these extraordinarily fun piano lessons,” Junghwan said in a flat tone, and Jinyoung laughed.
“Not that, the song.”
“I’m paying you to teach me, not to use me,” Junghwan mumbled.
Jinyoung ushered him in by the small of his back, and Junghwan flinched again. “What’s with you? You’re the one who offered.”
Junghwan tried to shoot Jinyoung the most condescending, nondescript look he could manage, holding his lips down into a thin frown and peering up through the hoods of his eyelids. It must’ve worked, because Jinyoung stepped back, retracting his arm.
“Look, just hear me out, and then we can move to your piano,” Jinyoung said.
The melody, at this point, ran alongside the lyrics with rushed fervor.
Jinyoung felt his way along the guitar for the right notes, closing his eyes and seeing his own handwriting scrawled across the backs of his eyelids. It came and left in a hurried font, chicken scratch, yet it was written deliberately, purposefully, almost as if the sloppiness were carefully calculated, each trail measured and each scratch intended.
Halfway through the song he’d opened his eyes to watch Junghwan, which, for someone so impressionable, had an alarming lack of reaction. The melody slowed down then, and Jinyoung had felt his hands going through the motions again, and he’d looked down at the music in front of him multiple times, though on his own he’d had it memorized front to back.
“Flat,” Junghwan said. “It sounds flat.”
Ouch. Jinyoung felt the sting right where he knew it would hit - his heart.
“I mean, the first half sounded good.”
Jinyoung had sung about music and life, things he’d really loved, yet there seemed to be a piece missing in it all, a stylistic passion for that bridge line, the one that would give the audience the genuine meaning of the metaphor, the one that he’d been getting at the whole time.
“We get it, you love music,” said Junghwan, waving his hand back and forth, a blasé motion that blew his hair into cute little tufts. He opened his eyes and crossed his arms and added, “Better than a fake person, I’ll have to admit. Am I right?”
Ah.
Jinyoung beckoned Junghwan over to where he was sitting with his hand. So that was what this had been all about. Jinyoung told him something impossibly corny, something along the lines of teaching him a new lesson about piano, or music, or life, or walks around the neighborhood featuring miffed runners and allergies. Then, Jinyoung kissed him.
Junghwan’s lips were plush and moist, and one kiss turned into two, which turned into Junghwan on his back under the piano and Jinyoung hovering over him and kneeling between his bent legs.
God, Jinyoung was sexy.
Junghwan had first noticed this when he’d watched Jinyoung’s lithe fingers dance across the piano keys with quick, sharp movements that had no elegance yet had a sort of grace to them. The way he played piano was sexy. The way his hands gripped the neck of the guitar as it perched on his faded jeans was sexy.
And now, Jinyoung’s lips were moving against his, Jinyoung was pushing him back into the carpet, Jinyoung’s fingers were playing him, trailing down his sides and dipping into his jeans.
Junghwan breathed hard against Jinyoung’s lips, and Jinyoung murmured, “My mom’s home.”
“Do I still have to pay for lessons,” Junghwan tried.
And by taking small steps forward and bickering arguments back, they familiarized each other with the world of music.
“So, metaphorically speaking, is the song about me?” Junghwan said, partly hoping the answer would be -
“No,” Jinyoung said, which was good, because Jinyoung wrote somewhere about how life could be stodgy as the endlessly winding asphalt roads in Jinyoung’s neighborhood, but that it was the mosquitos that lit up the nighttime air. Junghwan wasn’t in the particular mood to be compared to a mosquito. “It’s still about life and music. Alright, so if you want to record the guide, you’re going to have to be able to read the key of B flat major, which has E and B flats.”
“I still don’t know what language you’re speaking,” said Junghwan.
“It’s the language of love.”
“Please don’t write that one down.”
Pairing: Jinyoung/Sandeul
Rating: pg-13
Summary: Pseudo-composer and college dropout Jung Jinyoung gives Junghwan piano lessons in an old Victorian-style mansion. AU.
The path that wound through the world of music was long and convoluted, and Lee Junghwan was not familiar with any of it.
He could sing three measure runs, but when it came to picking a half note from a quarter note on a sheet of music, he was absolutely clueless. It was his choir teacher who suggested that Junghwan start by taking beginner piano lessons, which was how he ended up in front of an old Victorian style house sequestered in pines on a thickly forested hill, spires peaking through the trees like robins. The foundation was made of a muddy reddish stone that faded to gray, and on top of it sat a baby blue-sided, white molded house with a roofed porch decorated with intricate, florally-carved railings and the occasional hanging basket houseplant.
Junghwan had spotted the previous student, much younger than him, leaving the house with a bit of a sniffle and a downcast expression, as if he’d just been told to sit in time-out. Junghwan frowned stiffly.
He reached to knock, but the door swung open prematurely. Junghwan met the gaze of a boy not much older than he was.
“You’re an oddly proportioned child,” said the boy.
“I’m eighteen,” Junghwan replied.
“Oh, so then you must be the babysitter.”
Junghwan struggled to remember the name of the instructor - “Jinyoung?”
“Yeah, where’s the kid?” Jinyoung said, swinging the door back and forth with his hand. He wore a black t-shirt that clashed rather innocently with his pair of straight-legged jeans. “Afraid?”
“I’m here for piano lessons,” said Junghwan through his teeth, and Jinyoung raised an eyebrow, then laughed.
“Oh, so you must not have seen the thing on the flyer,” Jinyoung replied, propping the door open with his foot and turning toward the living room. Junghwan peeked inside the house, which was decorated rather sparsely for such an outwardly ostentatious place. Long-boarded wood floors met white carpet, and the walls ran an old-fashioned green. To the left, two grand pianos sat back to back on the carpet, sheets of music littered carelessly across the floor under the back piano. Jinyoung returned to the doorway, and Junghwan jumped back and bit his lip. “The part where it says fourteen and under?”
Junghwan sighed. “Look, I’m a beginner and I’m not here because I want to be. My-”
“Parents?” guessed Jinyoung.
“Choir teacher,” Junghwan said. “She wants me to come. Because I can’t read music. So if you-”
Jinyoung laughed, interrupting Junghwan. “You’re not fourteen and under, but you sound like the typical reluctant child. Good enough for me. I’ll take you.”
Junghwan didn’t know if that was a compliment or not.
Jinyoung set him up with copies from books and a shopping list for later that evening, and Junghwan barged into the music store and made a beeline for the piano section. The books he’d been assigned were brightly colored and printed on thick, sturdy construction paper, he noticed sadly.
“Can’t you teach me out of beginner adult books?” Junghwan asked Jinyoung the next week as Jinyoung waited for him to clip his nails.
“My lessons, my rules,” said Jinyoung patiently. He trailed his hand across the top of the front piano, where Junghwan would take lessons for the next couple of months.
Jinyoung already had the melody established.
The one line of lyrics he’d penned flowed along an upbeat tune that said absolutely nothing: he was aiming for somewhat hackneyed prose to fill in the rest of the song. There was music, and there was music that was accessible to the general public, and Jinyoung found it more mentally taxing to write the latter as opposed to the former, possibly because of the dismal psychological level it required him to stoop to.
Since graduating high school, Jinyoung had found inspiration to be both addled and fleeting, the most frustrating kind of inspiration - he’d rather have no inspiration so that at least he’d be goaded to find his own. But instead, he perched lazily against the two pianos in his living room and let the Top 40 hits come to him via an outdated radio, and swallowed as they bled his ears like leeches.
“You don’t think professional songwriters write with some sort of legit purpose?” said Dongwoo over the phone, thousands of miles away on a study abroad in Europe. Dongwoo provided a different yet frustratingly stubborn perspective because he understood absolutely nothing about music yet had been Jinyoung’s neighbor and only friend since elementary school.
“Selling is purpose,” Jinyoung replied.
“No one writes to sell.”
“Want to bet?”
“No,” Dongwoo said. “But you can’t sell a song by trying to make it sound stupid. Isn’t that kind of arrogant?”
“I was born arrogant.” Jinyoung flipped through dog-eared magazines and let the fan blow his hair into a style cemented in one particular direction. “Got a new student, by the way.”
“You’re always getting new students.”
“No, this one’s, like, old. Like 18.”
Dongwoo paused for a moment. “I thought you didn’t teach kids over 14.”
“It’s okay, he’s a beginner. A singer. Can’t read music. Can you believe that?”
“Yes,” said Dongwoo. “Some people are born naturally talented. And arrogant. Sounds like you two will be a perfect match.”
After six failed G scales (Junghwan had somehow mastered the C scale, but after introducing a black key, he was once again lost), Junghwan gave a shout of frustration, which startled Jinyoung.
“That’s a loud voice,” Jinyoung noted, and Junghwan shrugged.
“I told you my choir teacher made me come here. I’m in choir.”
Jinyoung frowned and nodded slowly. “I’m a composer.”
Junghwan let his hands slide down the keys. “I thought you were a piano teacher.”
“Saving up some money to fund it,” explained Jinyoung. “Marketing and stuff. Ads. Want to hear some?”
“Not really,” replied Junghwan, but Jinyoung was already on his way to the back piano, where Junghwan reluctantly trotted after realizing that Jinyoung was going to show him regardless. There were a lot more things Junghwan would rather be doing than taking lessons, though, so he stood beside the back piano and glanced at the sheet music which, he noted, was filled with pencil-written notes and markings scrawled in disheveled handwriting.
The song was about love and something else painfully trite, and Junghwan barely held in a snort when Jinyoung started singing in a voice that sounded so gooey it could congest rivers. But Junghwan had to give him credit for spending what seemed like hours on the few measures he had written down.
“Your face,” Jinyoung said, and only then did Junghwan notice that Jinyoung had stopped playing.
“I wear my heart on my sleeve,” Junghwan replied sheepishly. “Sorry about that.”
Jinyoung sighed and gave Junghwan a half-smile in return. “Well, I guess that means I still have stuff to work on.”
A steady silence fell over the two of them, and Junghwan shifted his feet on the floor uncomfortably, staring down at the patterns his toes made in the carpet. He watched Jinyoung’s long, gaunt fingers tap against the leather piano seat as if he were expecting some sort of answer, or an offer, as if waiting under a streetlight for Junghwan to try the impossible task of catching up with Jinyoung’s pace. But when Junghwan looked up at Jinyoung’s face, Jinyoung had his eyes cast down on the music, eyebrows scrunched together in concentration.
“I’ll help,” Junghwan blurted out in the same loud voice.
Jinyoung looked at him.
“Record your guides, I mean,” he added. “Not, like. Compose or anything.”
“You can’t even tell an E from a C, how could I expect you to compose,” Jinyoung snorted, and Junghwan gave him a pout. Jinyoung pulled down the lid over the keys and leaned his elbows on it, looking up at Junghwan who was still standing there, feet planted together on the ground and hands stiff at his sides. Jinyoung laughed. “I’m free Thursday afternoons.”
Junghwan, nearing the end of his voyage through high school, was eager to dive into the music-filled world that college offered him without the by-products of math, sciences, histories. “You’re still going to have to take basic math in college,” his mother told him; how was it that the excess fat could never quite be trimmed off, Junghwan wondered grimly. Still, though - studio classes, recording, learning more about melodies and acoustics than formulas and integers, it all amassed into one wave of exciting things to come, having Junghwan more often than not wishing away the present moment and living in a capricious, imagined future.
“Give me that G scale again,” snapped Jinyoung from the other side of the room. “No, the one with the F sharp. Do you think this part would sound better if I raised the key?”
“I don’t even know what language you’re speaking,” Junghwan replied, struggling to contort his hand so that his thumb could somehow miraculously fit under his middle finger.
Of course, his choir teacher had to break it to him that he’d need to know how to read music if he wanted to study music in university - raw talent wouldn’t cut it. And Jinyoung somehow presumed that since Junghwan was nearly an adult, Jinyoung could berate him like one. “Do you treat all your students like this?”
Jinyoung poked his head out from behind the piano. “Only the ones with potential,” he said, winking.
Junghwan stuck his tongue out and smashed the keys down with a subdued vigor, laced with frustration.
Jinyoung remained stoic. “Raise the key or no?”
“What does that even mean.”
Jinyoung played what Junghwan assumed was a chord, then played some different notes, sounding similarly vibrant, but with a hint of - “Higher. At the end of a song. Sometimes the composers raise the key signature higher. So everything is shifted a little bit up.”
Junghwan moved his finger from a G to an A. “Oh, so like how those songs do that thing at the end.”
“I’m going to assume you know what I’m talking about,” said Jinyoung, walking over to Junghwan’s piano. “How’s that G scale coming along?”
“I don’t understand why the fingering is so important. As long as I know the notes, I’m fine, right?”
Jinyoung sat down beside Junghwan, their thighs touching. The blistering summer heat had them clad in khaki shorts, waves of sunlight torching through the window and beating down on their backs like an oppressively incessant wind, the kind that sinks into your skin and runs through your bones, even after you’ve escaped to the calm indoors. Junghwan felt Jinyoung’s knobby knee poke into the upper part of Junghwan’s calf. From the sound of the air conditioning rattling through the vents, Jinyoung had the thermostat turned to the coolest setting, but it wasn’t near enough. Salty drops of perspiration cling to Junghwan’s forehead and ran down his nose, and Jinyoung’s presence right beside him certainly didn’t help.
“The fingers are important because instead of sounding like this,” Jinyoung said, bouncing his index fingers on a few arbitrary notes, making a choppy almost-melody, “you can sound like this.”
Jinyoung’s clammy hands touched Junghwan’s wrists lightly before sliding down over his fingers. Junghwan jerked his hands back and felt Jinyoung smile against the side of Junghwan’s face, against his cheek, and the melody that swelled from Jinyoung’s fingers circulated miraculously into the still air of June. It seemed to get the air moving, a kind of elegance that stunned Junghwan into a gentle stillness that reclined against the placid summer air. Jinyoung reached behind him and around his waist to hit a lower note, and Junghwan tensed, feeling blood rush into his face.
“Like that,” Jinyoung murmured, his hand lingering hooked around Junghwan’s waist for a moment too long.
Junghwan let out a choked laugh, and Jinyoung pinched Junghwan’s cheek. “You’re really talented,” said Junghwan.
“I’ve been at it since I was nine. I wouldn’t call that talent anymore, just hard work.” Jinyoung stood, and Junghwan let his shoulders sink as he leaned his head back to look at Jinyoung. “What you have is talent. Can’t read a note of music but you can sing like that.”
Junghwan wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a compliment, either, but he beamed like a proud schoolboy.
What surprised Jinyoung about Junghwan, aside from his not being able to read music, was that he was neither particularly childish nor was he arrogant, just clueless. He seemed eager enough to learn, outright practicing his chords and arpeggios at Jinyoung’s house for far longer than his allotted lesson time, but Jinyoung never had the heart to charge him extra.
The melody at this point had some jumps in it. It rolled along in a major key until a slight dip in the road dropped it down to a minor chord here and there for flavor.
He’d never thought about it before.
Jinyoung had never consciously composed music this way, deliberately modeling the tune after thousands of dead chord patterns and used and recycled arrangements. He remembered sessions in the studio being far more invigorating and - he looked at his watch: 11:26, two minutes since he’d last checked it - the time tended to pass far more quickly. He’d generate hundreds of songs per session, thousands of couplets and half-rhymes, and hundreds more thrown away tunes that piled around the trash can under his desk, Jinyoung being too lazy (or too concentrated, depending on how he looked at it) to empty the poor bin.
He didn’t remember ever thinking about music until he began teaching piano, and even then, the thinking that he did was diminutive and something like a break from falling freeform through lines and lines of lyrics without an anchor.
The structure he felt now, though, wasn’t an anchor, wasn’t useful. It was more like an anvil, a considerable weight pressing his shoulders down into a slumped position over the guitar, from which the chords and runs came out more and more lifeless with every passing session.
“Your fingers are off again, it’s 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4-5 for almost every white key scale,” Jinyoung said, and Junghwan pulled his hands into wrinkly little fists. “Let’s wait another week before adding the left hand in.”
“I’m getting nowhere,” wailed Junghwan, and Jinyoung rubbed his back tentatively. Junghwan tensed his spine and turned to Jinyoung. “Let’s work on your song.”
“Ah, um,” Jinyoung mumbled. “It’s not exactly coming along as planned, either.”
Junghwan swung his feet against the carpeted floor. “I feel like I’ve driven us both into a rut.”
Jinyoung laughed. “Actually, it’s nice having you here. The rest of my friends are off in college, and everyone else I interact with is either under six or older than 35.”
“Then why aren’t you in college? Studying music or something?”
“Waste of money.”
“Who knows, it might look good on your resume.”
Jinyoung shook his head. “I don’t want to work for anyone but myself.” He trotted through two quick arpeggios on the piano, then leaned his elbow onto the piano and depressed the keys slowly. “Music used to come so easily to me, but I’m trying to make a hit rather than the indie stuff I keep pouring out, and it’s not really… working. I don’t know what happened.”
“You know, you might be trying too hard,” suggested Junghwan. “Like, when I try to headvoice too hard it just comes out sounding like I have laryngitis. You need some inspiration.”
Leave it to Jinyoung to break it to Junghwan after a month of arduous lessons all attended for the purpose of seeing-helping Jinyoung with his composition and pleasing Junghwan’s choir teacher. “I’ve decided. It’s for the person I like. The song, I mean,” said Jinyoung with a straight-faced smile.
“Oh,” replied Junghwan. He couldn’t help but add, then, “Well, the lyrics are really cheesy. And the song is. The melody is boring. And bad.”
“Wow, you have absolutely no filter, do you.”
Junghwan pressed his bare feet down onto the pedals and watched the keys shift, feeling cool metal sink onto the pads of his toes. The weather was cooler that day, yet Jinyoung still had the fan turned on and rotating so that the breeze hit just about every corner of the room. Junghwan would let out an involuntary shiver every time he met Jinyoung’s gaze, and he wasn’t sure if it was because the fan’s innocuous chill predictably reached him right then, or if the intensity in Jinyoung’s eyes shook him down to the veins in his wrists. “I’m just telling it as it is,” said Junghwan. “You need a better inspiration. Everything’s about love.”
“That’s the point,” Jinyoung said. “To be like everything else. Play the clock song again, you didn’t hit the last chord right last time.”
Junghwan stuck his tongue out at Jinyoung, and he watched Jinyoung struggle to hold back a smile, making that endearing scrunched expression dotted with dimples. As Junghwan’s fingers stumbled through Tick Tock Goes the Clock and his eyebrows furrowed at the brightly outlined juvenile images and excessively large notes (that still had their respective letters written in them; that was how far he’d gotten in a month), Junghwan wondered what she was like (why?), the type of person Jinyoung regarded so highly as to write a song for her.
“The point is to sell,” said Jinyoung, “by going with the flow.”
Junghwan stopped before the last chord. “I thought the point was to make music. You told me you were a composer, not a businessman.”
Of course, Junghwan had exaggerated slightly. The lyrics were elementary, but the melody itself was actually quite catchy, and Junghwan found himself tapping his feet along to the string of notes that danced in excruciatingly childish and wordy circles around him.
“I lied,” Jinyoung said after a moment.
“What?”
Jinyoung gave Junghwan a wry smile, the corners of his mouth curving down in startling amusement. “I don’t really like anyone. That might be the problem.”
Somehow, Junghwan felt sourly relieved (why?). He let out a bark of a laugh. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you make that up? To see my reaction?”
“No,” said Jinyoung. Junghwan’s laugh dissolved and he choked down a gulp of cold air. “I figured love is the easiest inspiration, right?”
“Yeah, but,” Junghwan said. The lyrics were trite but not uninspired; Jinyoung definitely felt love on a basic level. It was coming up with something he could be more realistically enthusiastic about that was the difficulty - and Junghwan had no problem thinking of what he wanted Jinyoung to be enthusiastic about (why?).
But instead, Junghwan murmured, “I guess it doesn’t have to be a person. Right?”
Jinyoung hadn’t taken a proper walk in the past three years or more.
The sidewalk curved around a painfully out of place asphalt road that stunk of burning rubber and was streaked with tire marks that slid into the muddy shoulders. It was moist, humid during the daytime in the dense forest where Jinyoung lived, and in the evenings mosquitoes buzzed in thick swarms around the front deck, eating at the new window screens and pushing insistently at the stale air inside the house. Despite all this, Jinyoung loved the house he and his mother occupied with disarmingly great presence.
Loved. Love. It didn’t have to be a person? “I’m going to write about my house,” Jinyoung said to himself, fingers pressing nail marks into his palms. “What a wonderful house. With mosquitoes and greenery-aplenty.” It was possibly the worse line he’d ever come up with, but Jinyoung chuckled.
He walked past a runner who baptized him with a hefty glare. Jinyoung snorted. If that was what he got for walking the neighborhood, then fuck it.
“I love life,” said Jinyoung. He loved people who loved life.
His headphones hung around his neck, and Jinyoung could hear the Rachmaninoff blasting with renewed vigor from his iPod, stopping only for the tri-tone of a new text message: come home before dinner.
Jinyoung had a habit of listening to the songs he was working on until he grew tired of their repetitive ache - until they grew weary of him and begged to be relieved of their tedious duties. But Jinyoung wouldn’t let up. The scaly piece roared into the flora, and Jinyoung could feel the slippery ivory piano keys at his fingertips.
Jinyoung loved people who loved life.
Junghwan hated his life.
Cha Sunwoo wouldn’t stop teasing him about Jinyoung, and Junghwan, in want of time, and space, to think about his own feelings regarding the Jinyoung matter, felt ready to stab Sunwoo with a kitchen fork for his harmless wrongdoings.
He wanted to kiss Jinyoung - that much had already been established. He wanted to kiss Jinyoung and hold him around the shoulders with Chopin (not Tick Tock Goes the Clock) playing in the background, he wanted Jinyoung to lean down and place his hands over Junghwan’s again as Junghwan struggled to get through simple pieces, just for the cool yet passionate presence that Jinyoung embodied.
As Junghwan trudged up the driveway to Jinyoung’s front door (Junghwan always parked at the end of the drive as if protecting himself, as if anticipating Jinyoung’s rejection before it even happened), he heard loud acoustic guitar resonating through the open windows.
He reached to knock, but the door swung open prematurely.
“Junghwan, just the person I was looking for,” Jinyoung said.
Junghwan raised an eyebrow. “You know my lessons are on Thursdays.”
“You tend to lose track of time when you’re having fun.”
“Why are you going on and having fun without me and these extraordinarily fun piano lessons,” Junghwan said in a flat tone, and Jinyoung laughed.
“Not that, the song.”
“I’m paying you to teach me, not to use me,” Junghwan mumbled.
Jinyoung ushered him in by the small of his back, and Junghwan flinched again. “What’s with you? You’re the one who offered.”
Junghwan tried to shoot Jinyoung the most condescending, nondescript look he could manage, holding his lips down into a thin frown and peering up through the hoods of his eyelids. It must’ve worked, because Jinyoung stepped back, retracting his arm.
“Look, just hear me out, and then we can move to your piano,” Jinyoung said.
The melody, at this point, ran alongside the lyrics with rushed fervor.
Jinyoung felt his way along the guitar for the right notes, closing his eyes and seeing his own handwriting scrawled across the backs of his eyelids. It came and left in a hurried font, chicken scratch, yet it was written deliberately, purposefully, almost as if the sloppiness were carefully calculated, each trail measured and each scratch intended.
Halfway through the song he’d opened his eyes to watch Junghwan, which, for someone so impressionable, had an alarming lack of reaction. The melody slowed down then, and Jinyoung had felt his hands going through the motions again, and he’d looked down at the music in front of him multiple times, though on his own he’d had it memorized front to back.
“Flat,” Junghwan said. “It sounds flat.”
Ouch. Jinyoung felt the sting right where he knew it would hit - his heart.
“I mean, the first half sounded good.”
Jinyoung had sung about music and life, things he’d really loved, yet there seemed to be a piece missing in it all, a stylistic passion for that bridge line, the one that would give the audience the genuine meaning of the metaphor, the one that he’d been getting at the whole time.
“We get it, you love music,” said Junghwan, waving his hand back and forth, a blasé motion that blew his hair into cute little tufts. He opened his eyes and crossed his arms and added, “Better than a fake person, I’ll have to admit. Am I right?”
Ah.
Jinyoung beckoned Junghwan over to where he was sitting with his hand. So that was what this had been all about. Jinyoung told him something impossibly corny, something along the lines of teaching him a new lesson about piano, or music, or life, or walks around the neighborhood featuring miffed runners and allergies. Then, Jinyoung kissed him.
Junghwan’s lips were plush and moist, and one kiss turned into two, which turned into Junghwan on his back under the piano and Jinyoung hovering over him and kneeling between his bent legs.
God, Jinyoung was sexy.
Junghwan had first noticed this when he’d watched Jinyoung’s lithe fingers dance across the piano keys with quick, sharp movements that had no elegance yet had a sort of grace to them. The way he played piano was sexy. The way his hands gripped the neck of the guitar as it perched on his faded jeans was sexy.
And now, Jinyoung’s lips were moving against his, Jinyoung was pushing him back into the carpet, Jinyoung’s fingers were playing him, trailing down his sides and dipping into his jeans.
Junghwan breathed hard against Jinyoung’s lips, and Jinyoung murmured, “My mom’s home.”
“Do I still have to pay for lessons,” Junghwan tried.
And by taking small steps forward and bickering arguments back, they familiarized each other with the world of music.
“So, metaphorically speaking, is the song about me?” Junghwan said, partly hoping the answer would be -
“No,” Jinyoung said, which was good, because Jinyoung wrote somewhere about how life could be stodgy as the endlessly winding asphalt roads in Jinyoung’s neighborhood, but that it was the mosquitos that lit up the nighttime air. Junghwan wasn’t in the particular mood to be compared to a mosquito. “It’s still about life and music. Alright, so if you want to record the guide, you’re going to have to be able to read the key of B flat major, which has E and B flats.”
“I still don’t know what language you’re speaking,” said Junghwan.
“It’s the language of love.”
“Please don’t write that one down.”