tvxq: don't mention lost coastlines
don't mention lost coastlines
jaejoong/yoochun. 2,577w.
for noelle (finally).
"That was weird, right?" Yoochun said, as soon as it was over. "Sorry. That was weird."
Jaejoong's hand, half-ready to palm Yoochun's cheek, slowly relaxed. "It was a little weird."
"I shouldn't have done that." Yoochun let some couch space work its way back between them. He sounded calm, moved like a spooked animal. Moulin Rouge was, in retrospect, a really shitty choice of movie.
"Don't worry about it," said Jaejoong.
They were eighteen. This kind of thing happened. "Sorry," Yoochun said again, and cleared his throat. "Ewan McGregor just really gets me going."
It was the punchline Jaejoong'd been waiting for. "Obi-wan," he said, and clutched his heart and toppled over so he was crushing Yoochun's skinny American ass under him. He moaned some stuff about lightsabers and Yoochun kicked and yelled and bit his arm.
Once the movie ended, Jaejoong went to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth, and washed his face, and caught his own eyes in the mirror as he patted his skin dry. He thought he should do something with his mouth, which hadn't felt like his mouth since Yoochun'd kissed it. He pursed his lips, scrunched them up, smiled and frowned in succession. He studied his reflection closely, then felt stupid for it. It wasn't like Yoochun wore lipstick. There was nothing there, except something digging its roots in where they didn't belong.
Yoochun started dating Gahee.
Jaejoong's face was on subway posters and he was still fucking up onstage, forgetting words, forgetting where he needed to be. He wasn't a dancer. Yunho tried to coach him one-on-one and, after an hour of Jaejoong's body refusing to move the correct way, said, "Okay, that time was pretty good." What it actually meant was: You're the biggest fuck-up to ever fuck up. No one in the history of fuck-ups has ever fucked up as much as you're fucking up right now.
Yoochun and Gahee had a clear expiration date, but Yoochun was happy. People like him were happy in relationships; it helped him work harder, take direction. People like Jaejoong, nobody knew what to do with. He broke character too often. He wasn't good at opening up when he sang. (He wasn't as bad as Changmin, Junsu said, trying to help.) They told him that, for now, he should keep quiet in front of the cameras. Don't be Jaejoong. Be better. He was dieting, and hungry, but he knew how to trick his body into thinking it wasn't. The less he ate, the more he wanted to talk. He made friends with half the industry, everyone's mothers, the birds. His phone bill tripled within a month.
In the dressing room chaos, he changed into his street clothes, but hesitated before wiping his makeup off. He was the first one back in the van, the window rolled down so he could smoke. Yoochun climbed in a few minutes later. He smelled a little of perfume.
Jaejoong offered him a cigarette, even though he knew Yoochun would turn it down. Gahee didn't kiss smokers.
"I need a shower so bad," Yoochun said, collapsing next to him.
"Dibs."
"No way," said Yoochun, "I just said--"
"You didn't call dibs," Jaejoong said breezily.
"There were implied dibs," Yoochun said. "Hold still. You have--" He licked his thumb, and rubbed it into the corner of Jaejoong's eye. It came away smudged with eyeliner. "There. All better."
That isn't true, Jaejoong thought, but he let it go.
He nailed their next performance. The lights went down, and his throat hurt, and he was happy too.
They fed ducks to promote their presence in Japan. As duck-feeders. Last week they'd picked strawberries. Jaejoong didn't know why they did half the things they did. He swung around a bag of bread ends and mangled token Japanese phrases until the cameraman was satisfied and left him alone.
Changmin approached Jaejoong as soon as his own interview was done. "Did you know Junsu eats strawberries really pornographically?" he said.
"In Japanese," Yunho called out.
"I love ducks," Changmin intoned, in crisp, precise Japanese.
Jaejoong kept a straight face. "I'll bet 500 yen that you can't get him to do the same thing to the bread."
Changmin walked off, shouting, "Hey, Junsu!"
Yoochun came by five minutes later. He'd gone wading through the water, and his pant legs were rolled up to his knees, mud dried around his skinny ankles. "I hear you owe Changmin 500 yen."
"I hear we're changing our name from Dong Bang Shin Ki to Junsu Eats Things Pornographically," Jaejoong said. "And each of our stage names will become a different food that Junsu eats pornographically."
Yoochun threw a piece of bread into the lake, laughing. "Strawberries Yoochun."
"Popsicle Jaejoong. Eggplant Yunho. Cucumber Changmin."
"Way to make Changmin five times bigger than me."
The weather was nice today. The air smelled clean with wet grass and rain. For a second, it was a relief to be in Japan. "You know, it wasn't that weird," Jaejoong said, because it felt safer to, now.
"Junsu with the bread? It was pretty weird."
"Not that." He tossed his last bread end to a small brown duck. It was in the middle of bathing itself, its wings upsetting the surface of water, which rippled and shook and didn't clear up again.
"No, it wasn't," Yoochun said, after some time.
Somewhere along the way, he lost the rest of his baby fat and learned to sing properly. He still couldn't dance, but he could fake it. He perfected his Japanese; he busted his knee; he grew up. Problem solved. It wasn't like he worked with Yoochun, or lived with Yoochun, or Yoochun was single again, shuffling around the apartment like a bored ghost and forgetting to turn off the lights when he left a room and smoking an aggressive brand of cigarettes that made Junsu wrinkle his nose and Jaejoong breathe it in. Whatever it was between them went on and off like a bad water tap. Yoochun tried to make French toast one morning. Jaejoong put on the coffee pot. They sat around the kitchen like it was limbo, where they would always be in the process of looking up over breakfast, eyes always just about to meet.
Yoochun called it hair trauma, but Yoochun and hair had a bad relationship to begin with. He grew it out and cut it in maddening cycles like he could reinvent himself every four to six months. No one did hair trauma like Yoochun did hair trauma. But Jaejoong had been the pioneer.
It was 2006. It was a bad week. He came home and turned on the lights and saw his reflection and was suddenly, acutely aware of everything that was wrong with it. Like he couldn't comprehend how that was him in the mirror. There was nothing in there he didn't want to remake, in some cruel, frantic way. He buried his face in his hands, scrubbed at it like there was another face to be found underneath, then came back up for air. It didn't make him feel any better. So he went for the hair.
Three hours later Junsu paraded him out into the hallway.
"Ladies and gents," he said. "Our lemonhead angel."
Jaejoong took off the baseball cap. He ran his hand through his new hair: it was the same length, softness, so blond it was white.
"Huh," said Changmin.
"Wow," said Yunho, more audibly surprised.
"The color was Junsu's idea," Jaejoong said, while Junsu was busy looking blameless.
Yoochun made him come closer for inspection. He re-arranged Jaejoong's bangs so they kicked freely over his eyes. "It looks good," he said. "It's different."
"Yeah," Jaejoong said. He liked it. After management was done yelling at him, they would decide they liked it too. "I wanted a change."
He kept it for the next few months. Yoochun was changing too, barreling forward. They were at that rare place again, where they were both, with some margin of error, where they wanted each other to be, like the moon at its closest to the Earth, and gravity built up and built up until they were spending the Balloons shoot in three different supply closets. Yoochun broke his rabbit glove puppet when he banged his fist into the wall, knees buckling as he came in Jaejoong's mouth. Jaejoong's stylist had to redo his hair a dozen times. The rest of the day they ran around terrorizing the set, smuggling toy props in their costumes.
Then, as always: divergence, haircuts. Throwing out one body, all the baggage that had come with it, and starting over in a brand new one, only to discover it felt the same.
He drove his BMW into a tree on January 1st, with Yoochun in the passenger seat. Afterwards, it was funny, because they were exactly the kind of people who did shit like this, ringing in the new year with a car crash. Neither of them was hurt, but part of Jaejoong wished it'd left him something to look at and learn from. He was the bird that kept flying into closed windows. He was the ship out at sea that didn't know how to recognize a lighthouse.
Jaejoong woke up lying on the bed. The couch. The floor. He was horizontal. He'd lost all the feeling in his left arm. His headache went off like a landmine the second he opened his eyes. He discovered his phone: four text messages, three from Seunghyun checking if he was alive, one from Hyunjoong asking about a chicken.
Yoochun's hair appeared near Jaejoong's thigh, half-wild, half-adhered to the side of his skull. "Did we fuck?" he said.
Jaejoong vaguely remembered his courageous intention of jumping Yoochun's bones once he'd drowned his liver with enough alcohol. "No."
Yoochun's bare knee dug into Jaejoong's shoulder, foreign and cold. Jaejoong shut his eyes again.
"Next time, just tell me," Yoochun said into Jaejoong's jeans.
"Okay," said Jaejoong, even though that wasn't how this worked. The hard part wasn't saying: We need to sleep with each other, right away, for the sake of the band. It came after that, after the actual sex, the civil morning-after pancakes, when they had to decide what happened next.
Yoochun went back to sleep. Jaejoong tried to free his arm from all 64 kilos of Yoochun's dead weight, before he said, "Forget it," to the ceiling and laid there thinking about aspirin, and washing his hair, and giving up, and why he had all these pictures of his own dick on his phone.
Jaejoong came out pink from the shower just in time to see Yunho take off his pants. "Hello," he said.
Yoochun was wearing a fedora out of nowhere, sunglasses and little else: part-mobster, part-nudist. He looked up from his cards. "You want in?"
"Can I put on some clothes first?"
"It's strip poker, not put on some clothes poker," Changmin said, balanced on a small mountain of other people's clothes, some big shot King of Nakedness.
"Fine," Jaejoong said. He sat on the edge of a bed, next to Yoochun, legs spread deliberately wide under his towel.
"Oh, geez--" Junsu threw a pillow into Jaejoong's lap.
Yoochun'd opened the hotel balcony earlier so he could smoke indoors without setting off an alarm. The city air blew Jaejoong's skin dry, made his nose and cheeks cold. It was good to be on tour; the exhaustion peeled him clean. He yawned, and reached out with his foot, digging his toes into Yunho's bare spine while Yunho pretended not to squirm.
Yoochun stretched, his skin spread like butter over his collarbones. "I fold," he said, and gave up his fedora to Jaejoong, who pulled the brim low over his eyes. It smelled of sweat and Yoochun's shampoo--soap, melon, water. Jaejoong couldn't remember where it was, the space inside of him where details like that were important.
Junsu was the last one to lose his shirt. He stood, stubbornly, and pulled off his tank top as Yoochun shielded his eyes and shrieked, "Oh god it burns." Jaejoong's toes finally wormed their way into Yunho's left armpit, and Yunho's entire body spasmed with laughter.
Behind their backs, Yoochun braided his fingers through Jaejoong's, as if by accident, and Jaejoong found it again, crumbly and washed out, still there.
They went to L.A. They went to Bora Bora, and Prague, and Paris, and the Grand Canyon.
Six years and they couldn't get the timing down. Jaejoong was Point A, Yoochun was Point B. If you added up every kilometer they'd ever flown, it would have been enough to circumnavigate the Earth. Meaning there had to have been a second when, up in the air, they were coming full circle, and Jaejoong's hand could have finished cupping Yoochun's face and it would have been like pressing Play again. Meaning they should've been able to find at least one place on the entire fucking globe where this was easy.
Jaejoong rapped his fist against the back of Yoochun's skull. "Cigarette break."
"Now?" Yoochun said.
"Now is perfect," Jaejoong said, and to Junsu: "We'll be right back."
"Whatever," Junsu said, in the middle of a hand-stand. "Go have your secret nicotine club meeting and do your secret nicotine club things."
Yoochun blew him a kiss.
The wind up on the rooftop made it hard for Jaejoong to light up. It took five tries before he could shut his eyes and breathe the smoke into his lungs. He stuffed his cigarette case back into his jeans, next to his cellphone, where Changmin's contact had been changed a while ago to Do Not Call, and Yunho's to Definitely Do Not Call.
"So," he said, eventually. "I have a confession to make."
"Yeah?" said Yoochun.
"I was the one who broke your speakers. Not a savage raccoon."
"That was like, three years ago."
"I just thought of it," Jaejoong lied. He'd been thinking about it for the past day, how the raccoon had been Changmin's idea, and they'd smashed the window with a rock to make it look authentic before realizing there was no way a raccoon could have made it up the side of their building to begin with.
Yoochun half-smiled. "Right." Then he said, "We'll be fine," like it was inarguble.
Jaejoong flicked the ash off his cigarette. "Is this going to be a pep talk? When did you become peppy?"
"People are resilient. They move on. I got new speakers."
"I don't actually want to talk about your speakers."
"I know," Yoochun said. He held onto the front of Jaejoong's t-shirt and kissed him on the mouth, softly, and then a little harder when Jaejoong didn't resist. The rest of Jaejoong's body felt numb, like all of his nerve endings were focused on the kiss, the bitter and smoky taste of it, the way it didn't feel like the beginning and end of the world anymore.
Yoochun pulled away first. He released Jaejoong's shirt, one knuckle at a time. "Sorry," he said. "Too weird?"
"Yeah," Jaejoong said, because seven years was long enough.
It was spring. They stayed up there smoking every last one of Jaejoong's cigarettes, but no one came looking for them. If Jaejoong concentrated hard enough he could feel the ground rotating under him, tectonic plates shifting a millimeter at a time. He exhaled from his mouth and imagined something new: being empty, and clear, and weightless.
jaejoong/yoochun. 2,577w.
for noelle (finally).
"That was weird, right?" Yoochun said, as soon as it was over. "Sorry. That was weird."
Jaejoong's hand, half-ready to palm Yoochun's cheek, slowly relaxed. "It was a little weird."
"I shouldn't have done that." Yoochun let some couch space work its way back between them. He sounded calm, moved like a spooked animal. Moulin Rouge was, in retrospect, a really shitty choice of movie.
"Don't worry about it," said Jaejoong.
They were eighteen. This kind of thing happened. "Sorry," Yoochun said again, and cleared his throat. "Ewan McGregor just really gets me going."
It was the punchline Jaejoong'd been waiting for. "Obi-wan," he said, and clutched his heart and toppled over so he was crushing Yoochun's skinny American ass under him. He moaned some stuff about lightsabers and Yoochun kicked and yelled and bit his arm.
Once the movie ended, Jaejoong went to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth, and washed his face, and caught his own eyes in the mirror as he patted his skin dry. He thought he should do something with his mouth, which hadn't felt like his mouth since Yoochun'd kissed it. He pursed his lips, scrunched them up, smiled and frowned in succession. He studied his reflection closely, then felt stupid for it. It wasn't like Yoochun wore lipstick. There was nothing there, except something digging its roots in where they didn't belong.
Yoochun started dating Gahee.
Jaejoong's face was on subway posters and he was still fucking up onstage, forgetting words, forgetting where he needed to be. He wasn't a dancer. Yunho tried to coach him one-on-one and, after an hour of Jaejoong's body refusing to move the correct way, said, "Okay, that time was pretty good." What it actually meant was: You're the biggest fuck-up to ever fuck up. No one in the history of fuck-ups has ever fucked up as much as you're fucking up right now.
Yoochun and Gahee had a clear expiration date, but Yoochun was happy. People like him were happy in relationships; it helped him work harder, take direction. People like Jaejoong, nobody knew what to do with. He broke character too often. He wasn't good at opening up when he sang. (He wasn't as bad as Changmin, Junsu said, trying to help.) They told him that, for now, he should keep quiet in front of the cameras. Don't be Jaejoong. Be better. He was dieting, and hungry, but he knew how to trick his body into thinking it wasn't. The less he ate, the more he wanted to talk. He made friends with half the industry, everyone's mothers, the birds. His phone bill tripled within a month.
In the dressing room chaos, he changed into his street clothes, but hesitated before wiping his makeup off. He was the first one back in the van, the window rolled down so he could smoke. Yoochun climbed in a few minutes later. He smelled a little of perfume.
Jaejoong offered him a cigarette, even though he knew Yoochun would turn it down. Gahee didn't kiss smokers.
"I need a shower so bad," Yoochun said, collapsing next to him.
"Dibs."
"No way," said Yoochun, "I just said--"
"You didn't call dibs," Jaejoong said breezily.
"There were implied dibs," Yoochun said. "Hold still. You have--" He licked his thumb, and rubbed it into the corner of Jaejoong's eye. It came away smudged with eyeliner. "There. All better."
That isn't true, Jaejoong thought, but he let it go.
He nailed their next performance. The lights went down, and his throat hurt, and he was happy too.
They fed ducks to promote their presence in Japan. As duck-feeders. Last week they'd picked strawberries. Jaejoong didn't know why they did half the things they did. He swung around a bag of bread ends and mangled token Japanese phrases until the cameraman was satisfied and left him alone.
Changmin approached Jaejoong as soon as his own interview was done. "Did you know Junsu eats strawberries really pornographically?" he said.
"In Japanese," Yunho called out.
"I love ducks," Changmin intoned, in crisp, precise Japanese.
Jaejoong kept a straight face. "I'll bet 500 yen that you can't get him to do the same thing to the bread."
Changmin walked off, shouting, "Hey, Junsu!"
Yoochun came by five minutes later. He'd gone wading through the water, and his pant legs were rolled up to his knees, mud dried around his skinny ankles. "I hear you owe Changmin 500 yen."
"I hear we're changing our name from Dong Bang Shin Ki to Junsu Eats Things Pornographically," Jaejoong said. "And each of our stage names will become a different food that Junsu eats pornographically."
Yoochun threw a piece of bread into the lake, laughing. "Strawberries Yoochun."
"Popsicle Jaejoong. Eggplant Yunho. Cucumber Changmin."
"Way to make Changmin five times bigger than me."
The weather was nice today. The air smelled clean with wet grass and rain. For a second, it was a relief to be in Japan. "You know, it wasn't that weird," Jaejoong said, because it felt safer to, now.
"Junsu with the bread? It was pretty weird."
"Not that." He tossed his last bread end to a small brown duck. It was in the middle of bathing itself, its wings upsetting the surface of water, which rippled and shook and didn't clear up again.
"No, it wasn't," Yoochun said, after some time.
Somewhere along the way, he lost the rest of his baby fat and learned to sing properly. He still couldn't dance, but he could fake it. He perfected his Japanese; he busted his knee; he grew up. Problem solved. It wasn't like he worked with Yoochun, or lived with Yoochun, or Yoochun was single again, shuffling around the apartment like a bored ghost and forgetting to turn off the lights when he left a room and smoking an aggressive brand of cigarettes that made Junsu wrinkle his nose and Jaejoong breathe it in. Whatever it was between them went on and off like a bad water tap. Yoochun tried to make French toast one morning. Jaejoong put on the coffee pot. They sat around the kitchen like it was limbo, where they would always be in the process of looking up over breakfast, eyes always just about to meet.
Yoochun called it hair trauma, but Yoochun and hair had a bad relationship to begin with. He grew it out and cut it in maddening cycles like he could reinvent himself every four to six months. No one did hair trauma like Yoochun did hair trauma. But Jaejoong had been the pioneer.
It was 2006. It was a bad week. He came home and turned on the lights and saw his reflection and was suddenly, acutely aware of everything that was wrong with it. Like he couldn't comprehend how that was him in the mirror. There was nothing in there he didn't want to remake, in some cruel, frantic way. He buried his face in his hands, scrubbed at it like there was another face to be found underneath, then came back up for air. It didn't make him feel any better. So he went for the hair.
Three hours later Junsu paraded him out into the hallway.
"Ladies and gents," he said. "Our lemonhead angel."
Jaejoong took off the baseball cap. He ran his hand through his new hair: it was the same length, softness, so blond it was white.
"Huh," said Changmin.
"Wow," said Yunho, more audibly surprised.
"The color was Junsu's idea," Jaejoong said, while Junsu was busy looking blameless.
Yoochun made him come closer for inspection. He re-arranged Jaejoong's bangs so they kicked freely over his eyes. "It looks good," he said. "It's different."
"Yeah," Jaejoong said. He liked it. After management was done yelling at him, they would decide they liked it too. "I wanted a change."
He kept it for the next few months. Yoochun was changing too, barreling forward. They were at that rare place again, where they were both, with some margin of error, where they wanted each other to be, like the moon at its closest to the Earth, and gravity built up and built up until they were spending the Balloons shoot in three different supply closets. Yoochun broke his rabbit glove puppet when he banged his fist into the wall, knees buckling as he came in Jaejoong's mouth. Jaejoong's stylist had to redo his hair a dozen times. The rest of the day they ran around terrorizing the set, smuggling toy props in their costumes.
Then, as always: divergence, haircuts. Throwing out one body, all the baggage that had come with it, and starting over in a brand new one, only to discover it felt the same.
He drove his BMW into a tree on January 1st, with Yoochun in the passenger seat. Afterwards, it was funny, because they were exactly the kind of people who did shit like this, ringing in the new year with a car crash. Neither of them was hurt, but part of Jaejoong wished it'd left him something to look at and learn from. He was the bird that kept flying into closed windows. He was the ship out at sea that didn't know how to recognize a lighthouse.
Jaejoong woke up lying on the bed. The couch. The floor. He was horizontal. He'd lost all the feeling in his left arm. His headache went off like a landmine the second he opened his eyes. He discovered his phone: four text messages, three from Seunghyun checking if he was alive, one from Hyunjoong asking about a chicken.
Yoochun's hair appeared near Jaejoong's thigh, half-wild, half-adhered to the side of his skull. "Did we fuck?" he said.
Jaejoong vaguely remembered his courageous intention of jumping Yoochun's bones once he'd drowned his liver with enough alcohol. "No."
Yoochun's bare knee dug into Jaejoong's shoulder, foreign and cold. Jaejoong shut his eyes again.
"Next time, just tell me," Yoochun said into Jaejoong's jeans.
"Okay," said Jaejoong, even though that wasn't how this worked. The hard part wasn't saying: We need to sleep with each other, right away, for the sake of the band. It came after that, after the actual sex, the civil morning-after pancakes, when they had to decide what happened next.
Yoochun went back to sleep. Jaejoong tried to free his arm from all 64 kilos of Yoochun's dead weight, before he said, "Forget it," to the ceiling and laid there thinking about aspirin, and washing his hair, and giving up, and why he had all these pictures of his own dick on his phone.
Jaejoong came out pink from the shower just in time to see Yunho take off his pants. "Hello," he said.
Yoochun was wearing a fedora out of nowhere, sunglasses and little else: part-mobster, part-nudist. He looked up from his cards. "You want in?"
"Can I put on some clothes first?"
"It's strip poker, not put on some clothes poker," Changmin said, balanced on a small mountain of other people's clothes, some big shot King of Nakedness.
"Fine," Jaejoong said. He sat on the edge of a bed, next to Yoochun, legs spread deliberately wide under his towel.
"Oh, geez--" Junsu threw a pillow into Jaejoong's lap.
Yoochun'd opened the hotel balcony earlier so he could smoke indoors without setting off an alarm. The city air blew Jaejoong's skin dry, made his nose and cheeks cold. It was good to be on tour; the exhaustion peeled him clean. He yawned, and reached out with his foot, digging his toes into Yunho's bare spine while Yunho pretended not to squirm.
Yoochun stretched, his skin spread like butter over his collarbones. "I fold," he said, and gave up his fedora to Jaejoong, who pulled the brim low over his eyes. It smelled of sweat and Yoochun's shampoo--soap, melon, water. Jaejoong couldn't remember where it was, the space inside of him where details like that were important.
Junsu was the last one to lose his shirt. He stood, stubbornly, and pulled off his tank top as Yoochun shielded his eyes and shrieked, "Oh god it burns." Jaejoong's toes finally wormed their way into Yunho's left armpit, and Yunho's entire body spasmed with laughter.
Behind their backs, Yoochun braided his fingers through Jaejoong's, as if by accident, and Jaejoong found it again, crumbly and washed out, still there.
They went to L.A. They went to Bora Bora, and Prague, and Paris, and the Grand Canyon.
Six years and they couldn't get the timing down. Jaejoong was Point A, Yoochun was Point B. If you added up every kilometer they'd ever flown, it would have been enough to circumnavigate the Earth. Meaning there had to have been a second when, up in the air, they were coming full circle, and Jaejoong's hand could have finished cupping Yoochun's face and it would have been like pressing Play again. Meaning they should've been able to find at least one place on the entire fucking globe where this was easy.
Jaejoong rapped his fist against the back of Yoochun's skull. "Cigarette break."
"Now?" Yoochun said.
"Now is perfect," Jaejoong said, and to Junsu: "We'll be right back."
"Whatever," Junsu said, in the middle of a hand-stand. "Go have your secret nicotine club meeting and do your secret nicotine club things."
Yoochun blew him a kiss.
The wind up on the rooftop made it hard for Jaejoong to light up. It took five tries before he could shut his eyes and breathe the smoke into his lungs. He stuffed his cigarette case back into his jeans, next to his cellphone, where Changmin's contact had been changed a while ago to Do Not Call, and Yunho's to Definitely Do Not Call.
"So," he said, eventually. "I have a confession to make."
"Yeah?" said Yoochun.
"I was the one who broke your speakers. Not a savage raccoon."
"That was like, three years ago."
"I just thought of it," Jaejoong lied. He'd been thinking about it for the past day, how the raccoon had been Changmin's idea, and they'd smashed the window with a rock to make it look authentic before realizing there was no way a raccoon could have made it up the side of their building to begin with.
Yoochun half-smiled. "Right." Then he said, "We'll be fine," like it was inarguble.
Jaejoong flicked the ash off his cigarette. "Is this going to be a pep talk? When did you become peppy?"
"People are resilient. They move on. I got new speakers."
"I don't actually want to talk about your speakers."
"I know," Yoochun said. He held onto the front of Jaejoong's t-shirt and kissed him on the mouth, softly, and then a little harder when Jaejoong didn't resist. The rest of Jaejoong's body felt numb, like all of his nerve endings were focused on the kiss, the bitter and smoky taste of it, the way it didn't feel like the beginning and end of the world anymore.
Yoochun pulled away first. He released Jaejoong's shirt, one knuckle at a time. "Sorry," he said. "Too weird?"
"Yeah," Jaejoong said, because seven years was long enough.
It was spring. They stayed up there smoking every last one of Jaejoong's cigarettes, but no one came looking for them. If Jaejoong concentrated hard enough he could feel the ground rotating under him, tectonic plates shifting a millimeter at a time. He exhaled from his mouth and imagined something new: being empty, and clear, and weightless.