Joonmyun meets Kim Jongin when he is seven years old.

Joonmyun meets Jongin when he is seven. He is walking home and there’s a tiny boy with big fluffy black hair sitting on a park bench sobbing his eyes out.

“Are you all right?” he asks, and the boy stops his hiccupping long enough to wail no! at Joonmyun before a fresh wave of tears pour out of his eyes.

The whole story spills out between gasps for air, and Joonmyun takes the small hand in his own, heedless of the fact that his mother is probably wandering where he’s disappeared to. Joonmyun’s quest for ice cream is forgotten, though, in the face of such boisterous tears.

Jongin can’t find his sisters, who had brought him to the park earlier, and Jongin is terrified that they’ll never find him, not when the park is so big and Jongin is so small.

“I’ll sit with you until they come,” Joonmyun replies, and pulls himself up onto the bench next to Jongin, keeping the boys smaller hand firmly in his grasp. He looks up at Joonmyun with big watery eyes, and Joonmyun, who has never really felt protective of anything before in his life, suddenly feels like he’d do anything to keep the smaller boy safe.

The boy’s sisters do find him, and Joonmyun has this strange, overpowering feeling of mine that surges through him as Jongin waves at him shyly as his sisters lead him away.

“Where have you been?” Joonmyun’s mother shouts angrily when he finds her again, back on the other side of the park, her phone clutched in a white knuckled hand. Joonmyun quietly tells her all about the lost boy, and she smiles at him wryly at the end of his tale.

“You’re such a good hyung, Joonmyunnie,” she tells him, and Joonmyun beams at her.

“I hope I can see him again,” Joonmyun says to her, and she hugs him so tightly he can’t catch any air.

He meets Jongin again when he is eight. He is standing outside of his elementary school. It is the first day of classes, and Joonmyun’s older brother has left Joonmyun to wait for Chanyeol by himself, running to find his own friends. Joonmyun can see his breath in the air because it’s still so very cold.

Then, there’s someone bumping into him. Someone smaller than Chanyeol, and Joonmyun hears an anxious sigh.

“I dunno if you remember me,” the someone small says quietly, solemnly, tugging on Joonmyun’s shirtsleeve. Joonmyun looks down to see Jongin, his eyes widening. “But thank you.” He shuffles his feet. “For that time.”

“I remember,” Joonmyun says. “Kim Jongin, with two sisters.”

“Yes!” Jongin says, and Joonmyun doesn’t know why, but he grabs Jongin’s hand.

“Let me help you find your class,” Joonmyun says, and hopes Chanyeol will forgive him for not waiting.

By the time Joonmyun is twelve, Jongin is his best friend. They eat at each other’s houses for dinner, and sleepover on the weekends, curled up together in either of their beds talking about the mysteries of the universe and maybe about how mean the vice-principal is.

They aren’t very much alike. Joonmyun likes learning and piano and Japanese class, and Jongin likes dancing and art and tripping Chanyeol in the hallway. But their difference never seem to hinder how much they get along. Joonmyun, after all, loves watching Jongin dance, and Jongin loves listening to Joonmyun play piano. They both love the ice cream place that’s on the way home from school.

Jongin cries at the end of the year, when Joonmyun graduates from elementary school. “Hey,” Joonmyun says, when Jongin has sullenly curled up in Joonmyun’s bed and refused to say anything at all, “this doesn’t mean we won’t still be friends.”

“You’re going to make new friends in middle school,” Jongin says. “You won’t have time for me.”

“I’ll always have time for you,” Joonmyun replies, wrapping his arms around Jongin’s waist and settling his chin on Jongin’s shoulder. “Always.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” Joonmyun says.

It’s easy enough to keep that promise, especially when the elementary school is on Joonmyun’s way home anyway, and Joonmyun only has to wait outside for ten minutes until Jongin comes running out with his shiny Beyblade backpack bouncing on his back.

“There’s a new episode of that anime you like on today,” Joonmyun says, and Jongin grins. “You wanna come over and watch it while I do my homework?”

“I’d love to,” Jongin says, and he grabs Joonmyun’s hand. That steady thrum of mine mine mine has only gotten louder over the years, and Joonmyun has gotten used to it, along with the curious glances of his middle school classmates when he begs off the arcade after school.

Jongin has never liked walking home alone from school, anyway. Joonmyun would hate to make him do it.

Jongin changes, when he gets into middle school. Joonmyun is a third year, and first year Jongin gets into all sorts of trouble. “What’s up with you?” Joonmyun asks, and Jongin shrugs.

“Nothing,” he says, and he looks out at nothing instead of looking at Joonmyun. “You don’t have to wait for me after school today. I’ve got other plans.”

“Oh,” Joonmyun says, and for the first time in a long time, Joonmyun walks home alone after the ringing of the bell. (And wow, Joonmyun thinks, maybe it’s Joonmyun who hates walking home alone, because he keeps opening his mouth to talk to a Jongin who isn’t there.)

He finds out later that Jongin had been caught by the police trying cigarettes outside the convenience store.

“What were you thinking?” he asks Jongin, who ducks away from Joonmyun’s reaching hand to put space between them.

“That I wanted to try cigarettes,” Jongin says. He still isn’t meeting Joonmyun’s eyes. “It’s not a big deal.”

But it is a big deal, because Jongin now goes by Kai and stops wearing his uniform properly and starts ditching classes and starts ditching Joonmyun, and Joonmyun can see Jongin slipping through his fingers and it sucks.

“Do you not like me anymore?” Joonmyun asks Jongin, who looks at Joonmyun with a surprised and panicked expression.

“What?”

“Never mind,” Joonmyun replies, and Jongin frowns and casts about for words. (That’s also new, because Jongin had never been shy with Joonmyun the way he’d been with everyone else, and this new, delinquent Jongin who calls himself Kai isn’t shy at all.)

Jongin’s face is flushed and he reaches out and grabs the edge of Joonmyun’s blazer as Joonmyun turns, prepared to walk home alone again. It doesn’t even feel weird anymore, since it’s been six months since the beginning of the new school year, and having Jongin in the same school has turned out nothing like Joonmyun had thought it would. “Have you ever…” Jongin looks at the ground, and Joonmyun squints at him, patiently waiting.

“Tell me, Jongin.” He doesn’t mean for his voice to sound pleading, but Joonmyun misses his best friend and there’s a distance between them that he hates more than anything.

“There’s something wrong with me, I think,” Jongin says. “And I need to figure it out.”

He looks thirteen again suddenly, and Joonmyun’s heart quivers. He wants to give Jongin a hug, but they aren’t little kids anymore. He doesn’t think Jongin would like it, anyway.

“All right,” Joonmyun says, and Jongin falls in-step beside him as they walk in the direction of home. It’s a quiet walk, but Joonmyun feels the beginning of a bridge.

Whatever it is, Jongin seems to figure it out when September comes. Joonmyun has gotten his results back from his high school entrance exams, and Jongin looks at his scores with grim determination.

“You’ve made it hard for me,” Jongin says. “I’m not good at school, like you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m going to have to work really hard to get into this high school,” Jongin tells him, still looking at Joonmyun’s results. “Ugh.”

“You want to go to my high school?”

Jongin turns a dull red. “Yeah,” Jongin says. “Of course I do.”

Having something to aim for gives Jongin focus. Joonmyun tutors him for his whole second year, and Jongin catches up and then some from his deviant first year marks.

He still puts on his Kai persona, but never for Joonmyun anymore. Joonmyun finds himself looking too long at Jongin sometimes, but then he rationalizes that Jongin is his best friend, so of course he wants to look at him. Besides, Jongin is always making adorable facial expressions, and Joonmyun can’t get enough of cataloguing them all.

“I really want to meet this Jongin,” Joonmyun’s friend Yixing says one day, after math hagwon. Joonmyun pushes down the selfish mine! that jumps out of his stomach and up into his chest, right between his lungs. “Every story you tell begins and ends with the kid.”

“He’s not a kid,” Joonmyun says, and he wonders when he started to think that.

Sometimes, Joonmyun and Jongin stop at street vendors and eat ddeok, and Joonmyun looks up from his rice cake to realize Jongin is staring at him. Jongin always smiles, afterwards, and Joonmyun thinks Jongin has the best smile on the planet.

“Remember when you were too much of a bad boy to smile at me, Kim Jongin?” he says one day, taking off his high school blazer and throwing it across Jongin’s bed, on top of Jongin’s middle school one.

“I wasn’t too much of a bad boy,” Jongin says. “I just got a little lost.”

“Nothing new for you,” Joonmyun teases, but Jongin does not smile back. “What happened? I always wondered what you thought was so wrong with you.”

He pulls Jongin down to sit next to him on the edge of the bed, arm finding its way around Jongin’s waist. Jongin feels strong in his grasp. Jongin is holding himself tense.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Jongin tells Joonmyun. His voice is not steady. Joonmyun licks his lips. “I’ve dealt with it, mostly.”

“I could help?”

“You can’t help me with everything, hyung,” Jongin says, so quiet it sounds like nothing. “You especially can’t help with that.”

“All right,” Joonmyun says, and he ignores the way Jongin suddenly feels so far away, and squeezes him tighter.

When Joonmyun is eighteen, Jongin finally joins him in high school.

Joonmyun’s classmates are all shocked when a first year walks into their classroom at lunch and sits down at the desk next to Joonmyun’s, looking perfectly at ease as he unwraps his packed lunch. “Heya, hyung,” Jongin says, as Joonmyun stares at him. “How is school going today?”

“Not bad,” Joonmyun manages, and his heart swells as Jongin kicks at his leg and tells him to just eat already.

Joonmyun does, and it becomes a routine, Jongin making his way into classroom 3A at lunch every day. Joonmyun starts bringing extra food, because Jongin has a tendency to eat his whole lunch and then start picking at Joonmyun’s. Joonmyun remembers not to put carrots in anything because Jongin won’t eat them, and Jongin never tries to take any of Joonmyun’s anchovies because he knows they are Joonmyun’s favorite.

Joonmyun doesn’t know how he filled the time for the first two years of high school, because Jongin takes up his whole lunch with recounting of sporting events and anecdotes from his dance hagwon and terrible jokes.

“You two are awfully close,” Yixing says, with a curious glance at Jongin’s retreating form, at the end of lunch one day.

“We’ve known each other forever,” Joonmyun says. “We’re best friends.”

“Best friends?” He seems amused, but Joonmyun shrugs it off and pulls out his math notebook with a smile as their teacher walks back into the room.

During the second month of third year, Joonmyun bombs a practice test for his college entrance exams. He doesn’t mention anything to Jongin, but Jongin notices, grabbing Joonmyun’s arm on the way out of school and tugging him in the opposite direction from home.

They wind up at the park where they first met, sitting side by side on a bench as Jongin slowly divests himself of blazer and tie and pulls a sweatshirt over his head. Joonmyun leans into him when he’s finished, soaking in the warmth to distract himself from the poor test results and from the chill of early March.

Joonmyun’s breath hitches as Jongin’s hand comes to rest on his upper thigh. Jongin’s hands are big now. Jongin is big now. Joonmyun hadn’t noticed but Jongin is all grown up and so very handsome.

“You look sad today, hyung,” Jongin says, and Joonmyun turns to look at his best friend. It’s like he’s never seen Jongin before, when he looks at him now. Jongin’s lower lip is caught by his teeth and his eyes are earnest and hopeful. He’s excruciatingly pretty, and Joonmyun’s anxiety about the exams disappear into nothing at the wrinkling of Jongin’s nose.

“How can I be sad?” Joonmyun asks, setting his own hand on top of Jongin’s, “when you’re sitting next to me?”

Jongin grins, something careless and lopsided, and Joonmyun doesn’t miss the years he wasn’t cool enough or suave enough to be Jongin’s friend. “I’m always going to be sitting next to you, hyung,” Jongin says. “We’ll be old and gray, and I’ll be sitting next to you.” He laughs. “Maybe our grandkids will be best friends, too.”

Joonmyun’s stomach twists, horrible and disconcerting, and Joonmyun squeezes Jongin’s hand. “Maybe they will,” Joonmyun replies, and he smiles back at Jongin with all his might.

Jongin turns his hand so that the palm faces up, and they lace their fingers together. Joonmyun can’t seem to catch his breath.

He starts to notice it more, now, when Jongin sits too close or breathes against Joonmyun’s neck as he laughingly vies for Joonmyun’s attention. (He always has it, but he hasn’t seemed to notice that yet.) At first, Joonmyun focuses on those feelings too much, but then he gets used to the butterflies, and the strange nervousness.

It becomes normal for Jongin’s presence to speed his pulse and give him sweaty palms and dry out his mouth, and Joonmyun doesn’t think to hard about what that all means.

All he knows is that sometimes, when the light catches Jongin just right, Joonmyun has never seen a person more beautiful, and it aches and aches until Joonmyun has to avert his eyes to spare his heart.

Joonmyun is still eighteen when Jongin gets a girlfriend. “She asked me out,” Jongin says over lunch. Jongin knees keep bumping Joonmyun’s. No one even pays attention to the first year who eats lunch in 3A anymore. It’s nearing the end of the year, now. “And I said yes?”

“Do you like her?” Joonmyun asks, picking at his food. He stabs his chopstick into his hard fried egg, fighting down a feeling of nausea.

“I think so!” Jongin shoves a bite of rice into his mouth. Joonmyun studies the fall of his hair across his eyes and the way his shoulders are getting broader. “She’s really pretty, hyung. She’s in 1B.”

“Then congratulations,” he tells Jongin, smiling around this strange feeling of sadness and disappointment and anger. “You’ll have someone to eat lunch with, next year.”

“I want to eat lunch with you,” Jongin says, and Joonmyun gives up on eating, setting down his chopsticks.

He spends that night and the whole following day curled up in bed with the covers over his head, missing school for the first time in three years. He does not cry.

He thinks about the warmth of Jongin’s smile and the touch of Jongin’s hand at the small of his back and the way Jongin’s face lights up when Joonmyun laughs at one of his jokes. He thinks about ice cream after school and childhood nights curled up in bed together, spilling secrets that neither of them would ever tell anyone else. He thinks about the way Jongin still has the bear Joonmyun won for him at the arcade when he was ten at the head of his bed. He thinks about how Jongin’s eyelashes are dark across his cheeks and how his lips stretch when he grins. He thinks about their fingers laced together in the park.

Hyung, where are you? Jongin texts around noon. Joonmyun stares at the message and imagines Jongin’s soft worried smile and realizes, wretchedly, that he’s in love with him. Who am I supposed to eat lunch with?

Your girlfriend, Joonmyun thinks, and he still does not cry.

Lunches are a lot lonelier without Jongin. Joonmyun spends lunch-time reviewing for his entrance exams and Yixing takes to sitting in the space Jongin always occupied. “It’s weird,” Yixing says. “Without the kid.”

“He’s not a kid,” Joonmyun says, and Yixing’s quirked smile reveals a lot more knowing than Joonmyun would like.

“I miss you,” Jongin says to him, three months before graduation. “She makes me eat lunch with her every day, but she tries to make me eat carrots.”

“I miss you too,” Joonmyun replies. His heart is hammering. He still spends time with Jongin, but there’s a lot less time to spend, when Joonmyun is focused on university prospects and Jongin has joined a dance troop and found himself a girlfriend.

Jongin throws his arm around Joonmyun’s shoulders, and Joonmyun’s gut churns with anxiety and misery. It feels good, to have Jongin touch him, but it also feels terrible, because every touch that sends pleasure racing through him also reminds him that Jongin is not his, and that being Jongin’s best friend doesn’t mean he can lean over and kiss Jongin senseless.

He’d like to. He thinks about how much he’d like to all the time, to the point where he has started begging out of study dates and leaving earlier from school so he can walk home alone.

“Don’t you like me anymore?” Jongin asks one day, corning Joonmyun in the second floor boy’s restroom, and Joonmyun reaches out for the first time in a long time to wrap his hand around Jongin’s.

“Yes,” Joonmyun says. “I will always like you, Jongin. Don’t forget, our grandkids are going to be best friends.”

Jongin grins, the joy filling his eyes, and Joonmyun quickly jerks his gaze away because it hurts to look at him. Joonmyun had always thought heartbreak was exaggerated, but it feels just as terrible as advertised. It’s worse because he doesn’t even have the right to feel it. Not when Jongin is supposed to be his dongsaeng, the little boy with too much hair who is way too cool for Joonmyun to keep. “Then have dinner with me tonight,” Jongin says. “My mom is complaining about your absence.”

“Yes,” Joonmyun says, dropping Jongin’s hand. “I’ll come.”

Joonmyun chooses a university as far away from home as possible. He packs his bag and flies to California, hoping he can put his heart back together with an ocean between him and Jongin.

“I don’t even speak English,” Jongin says woefully. “How am I supposed to follow you there?” He pokes at Joonmyun’s packed suitcases with a socked foot, countenance morose.

“You’re not,” Joonmyun says. “College will be a great chance for you to make new friends and do new things.”

“I can do all of that and keep you,” Jongin informs him.

“You need a life without me,” Joonmyun says, smiling. He runs a hand through his hair and shoves Jongin, who doesn’t shove back.

“I don’t want a life without you,” Jongin says honestly, and Joonmyun wishes he could go back to being seventeen and thinking friendship was all he could ever want from Kim Jongin. “You’ve been pushing me away and I hate it.”

“Jongin…” Joonmyun doesn’t know what to say. I’m madly in love with you seems trite and out of place, and he doesn’t want to scare Jongin away. He just wants space to get over all these unnecessary dreams and feelings, and then everything can be like it used to be. Jongin and Joonmyun. Side by side and no secrets filling the space between them. “What if I want space?”

“Oh,” Jongin says, and his whole face falls. Joonmyun feels like he has thrown both of their hearts on the ground and squished them. “Okay.”

Then Jongin has pulled his face into an expression Joonmyun hasn’t seen since middle school, when Jongin had refused to wear his uniform correctly and gotten in trouble on the school roof for smoking cigarettes. It’s Jongin’s pretending face, and Joonmyun hates that it’s his fault that Jongin is wearing it.

“I’ll be back,” Joonmyun vows, and he reaches for Jongin’s hand, but Jongin flinches away.

Jongin writes Joonmyun letters in California. Long, winding letters that never get to the point and complain a lot about Jongin’s math classes. Joonmyun saves them all and does not fall out of love. Not even an ocean is enough to make Joonmyun’s heart stop beating for Jongin.

When Joonmyun is twenty, he dates a boy. He’s never been in a real relationship before. He finds it difficult, because he has never let anyone this close that wasn’t Jongin, but no one knows him like Jongin.

He loses his virginity one night and doesn’t feel any different the next day, only he closes his eyes sometimes and wonders what it would have been like if it had been Jongin beneath him, begging for touches and sprawled out on Joonmyun’s sheets.

I miss you Jongin’s letters still say. Joonmyun thinks about the previous Christmas, when Jongin had smiled at him from across the table and talked about his girlfriend and refused to join Joonmyun up in his room.

When Joonmyun is twenty-two, he comes back to Korea to stay.

He moves into an apartment and gets a job and goes to work from nine to five. He’d left his boyfriend back in California, and he hasn’t bothered to find another. In the end, it all comes back to Jongin, anyway.

Jongin is a second year in university. Joonmyun goes to visit him sometimes. Jongin is always happy to see him, welcoming him in to the house. It’s like stepping back in time. Jongin still smells the same, even if he’s a lot bigger and a lot warmer than he used to be.

“Did you find what you were looking for, in California?” Jongin says California the right way now. He studies English more seriously, now.

“In a manner of speaking,” Joonmyun says. “Maybe I just figured out that what I was looking for…” Space, distance, for time to turn backward and Jongin to fit next to him and have his chest not constrict with mine mine mine, “wasn’t something it’s possible for me to have.”

“I see,” Jongin says, and for the first time in a long time, he reaches out and folds his and Joonmyun’s hands together. “I’m glad you came back.”

“Me too,” Joonmyun says, and he resigns himself to the pain of having so much of Jongin but not enough.

When Joonmyun was seven… even then he’d known Jongin was special.

Now, when he is twenty-three, he realizes he will always feel that way, because as they grew up together, they grew into each other, and Jongin’s hand is the only hand that belongs in Joonmyun’s own.

Jongin is twenty-one when Joonmyun sees him pushing another man into the wall at a nightclub and kissing him. It looks like Kim Jongdae, a boy who’d been in choir with Joonmyun in high school.

He feels his heart fall out of his chest and shatter into a million pieces and he leaves it there as he takes two steps back.

“What’s wrong?” Yixing asks, and then he sees what Joonmyun sees and says “Shit,” loud enough that Jongin looks up and sees them both.

His eyes meet Joonmyun’s and Joonmyun can see fear and panic and something else he can’t fathom. He takes another couple of steps back and then turns and runs. He slows when he gets out of the club, breath jagged and harsh, and Joonmyun wonders what else Jongin has never told him.

“Are you okay?” Yixing says, hailing them both a taxi. “Randomly finding out your childhood best friend likes boys, I mean.”

“I…”

“He really never told you?”

Joonmyun thinks maybe he did, when he was thirteen and refused to wear his fucking tie or touch Joonmyun at all.

“I never told him either,” Joonmyun replies, and Yixing does a double-take before he starts laughing.

“It’s not funny,” Yixing says, “but I know why you went to California, now.”

“Yes,” Joonmyun says, and he relaxes into the taxi seat and waits to get home.

Jongin is already in his apartment when Joonmyun lets himself in.

“I didn’t think I’d beat you back here,” Jongin says. “You need to find a new place for your spare key. I guess the cab dropped Yixing off first?”

“Yes,” Joonmyun says.

“Can I explain?”

“You don’t have to,” Joonmyun says. “It’s been forever since we’ve told each other everything, Jongin.”

Joonmyun has never told Jongin he’s got all his letters saved and he’s never deleted an email and he’s never quite managed to stop the butterflies whenever Jongin smiles at him.

So he figures Jongin is entitled to a few secrets of his own, even if Joonmyun imagining Jongin kissing someone else makes him want to curl up and close his eyes and never open them again.

“I’ve been in love with you since I was thirteen,” Jongin blurts out. “Maybe since before that. Maybe since I was five and you found me on that park bench. I don’t think people fall in love when they’re five but…” He shakily breathes in.

“Jongin?” Joonmyun carefully closes his door and walks toward Jongin, who is sitting on the edge of Joonmyun’s kitchen table and swinging his legs to and fro.

“But you were never in love with me back.” Jongin covers his face with his hands. “I’m sorry. I never meant to lie to you. But I thought it would mess everything up. And then you left, and I thought maybe you’d finally noticed, or…”

“I’ve been in love with you, too,” Joonmyun says. It feels like a dream. “I left because I thought…”

“You thought…?” Jongin is staring at Joonmyun now. His gaze is feverish. Joonmyun moves closer still, until his palms are resting on Jongin’s knees.

“I had to get over you to keep you,” Joonmyun says. Mine mine mine.

“Oh god,” Jongin says, and then he’s kissing Joonmyun, both hands on Joonmyun’s cheeks and knees on either side of Joonmyun’s hips. Joonmyun still feels like this isn’t real, his hands shaking as they grab for Jongin’s arms. His knees are week. “Is this okay?” Jongin asks.

“Yes,” Joonmyun says. “Yes.”

Joonmyun is twenty-four when he and Jongin move in together. After all of Jongin’s boxes make their way into messy piles in the living room, they take a walk. They stop to get ice cream. Then they keep walking until they get to the park. They sit down on the bench and watch the kids playing, and Jongin turns to him with a lopsided smile.

“Can you still imagine us old and gray here?” Joonmyun asks, and Jongin nods.

“Yeah,” he says, “but we’re going to have the same grandkids.”

Joonmyun’s eyes feel kinda teary as he swallows down the lump of emotion that rises up his throat. “Side by side,” Joonmyun says, and Jongin rests his head on Joonmyun’s and grabs his hand.