inconsolable, ft. @bloomingrites
yul doesn’t look at the time, but it’s a bit after he showered and dried his hair and changed his shirt. he texted hwayang and invited him over for wine, no thought given whether hwayang is available or even half decent. it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. the dinner table usually cluttered, as you’d expect the living space of two men to be, is now cleaned up. laid atop of it are two glasses — the grocery store ones bought just yesterday after he’d finished up his shift, and a bottle of wine. him and minseok usually opt for beer.
white wine pairs well with fish, but it’s an effort too high for something casual or he’d forgotten to cook it. he’s a glass down with the drinks before hwayang knocked on his door. there’s no excuse for this — getting carried away is an amateur mistake and he’s someone who usually rations and controls his drinking along with everything else and god can hwayang stop staring at him like that. words bubble up in his mouth like carbonation.
he passes his greetings and gives hwayang a squeeze on his shoulders and they talk about things that aren’t all that important. before yul knows it, he’s two glasses down. he’s not fucked up, he just reached highs that take a little time to come down from. everything a hike up to everest. everything so high octane all the time. he’s sure hwayang wouldn’t mind.
“a lot of shit when i was away,” yul says, words slurred and blinking slowed. he’s not sure how they got to this conversation, but he sways his head and runs a hand through his hair. approval and validation comes in different doses but he wonders how far he can push it with hwayang, is what he would think if he was sober.
“it just made me think i’m not as great as people think i am. it’s just a lot of shit to deal with and i’m not, like, proud of myself for what i’ve done to keep it up, right?” he raises his eyebrows, trying to get a response.
for yul, hwayang would jump in a heartbeat — and he'd do it without checking where the ground was.
with yul, the flowers always get left unattended. some go unwatered until the leaves curl like scorched paper; others remain root-bound in the same exhausted soil, much like hwayang himself. for over two decades, the two of them have orbited each other in an intricate gravitational push-and-pull, a dance they've contorted their lives to fit. hwayang, especially, is a celestial body trapped in yul's wake. he found himself at yul's door no more than eight minutes and forty-two seconds (yes, he was keeping track) after the initial text. he'd even set a specific, hauntingly sharp text tone for yul — the only person in his digital world who didn't sound like a generic ping.
he showed up as the seo hwayang he'd always been: smelling of damp earth and the lingering, metallic scent of fresh april rain. he'd at least had the presence of mind to rinse his feet and scrub his fingernails at the garden well this time, though the grit of his work still clung to the creases of his palms.
but he isn't the same hwayang who grew up in yul's shadow. at twenty-four, he finally has the one thing he never dared dream of: yul's undivided attention. growing up, yul's posse of soccer friends had always been a barrier, a loud, intimidating, sweating wall of bodies that found endless nicknames to call the strange boy who talked to plants. back then, hwayang was background noise. now, he was the audience. and sometimes, like tonight, he might even be the lead character's favorite distraction.
this was the problem: yul could offer him a plate of nothing, and hwayang would thank him for the meal. because for so long, the boy who felt so unreachable — the center and paramount of hwayang’s childhood escapisms — was no longer a fantasy. it was full throttle, a high-speed chase where hwayang was desperately trying to keep his bicycle in line with yul's sports car.
hwayang can't keep the pace. he's trying, really; half a glass in and the wine is already hitting him with a dizzying, fermented heat. truthfully, he never drinks unless it's with yul, a rule made of both devotion and self-preservation. without any anju to soak up the alcohol — not even a measly cracker to bridge the gap — hwayang finds himself hyper-focusing. he tracks the way yul's hair falls back into place after he pushes it out of his eyes, a movement so fluid it feels choreographed.
he was in no mindset to have yul dump his conscience onto the table like spilled wine. but this is what couples do, right? or at least, this is what hwayang has told himself. if one needs to purge, the other must be the vessel. he has to be the one to say the world is good, that yul is still the gold-standard human being everyone believes him to be.
"well," hwayang says, his voice a little too careful. he opens his mouth like he's got something well-prepared, a sentiment packaged in silk and ready to be presented like a valentine — because he is terrified of saying the wrong thing. he has spent a lifetime learning that his "wrong" things act as repellent, pushing people into the distance. he isn't sure he would survive it if it pushed yul away, too.
he slides his hand across the table, his rough, garden-worn skin a sharp contrast to yul's, and brushes his fingers over the other, larger hand.
"if there’s things you aren’t proud of doing... maybe they don't matter as much as the fact that you're telling me." hwayang’s thumb traces the line of yul's knuckle, a grounding gesture for a man who didn't want to be grounded. "if you've done 'shit' to keep it up... then it was just the price of being you. and i'd pay it, too." the wine is starting to override the mechanics of his mouth, saying too much. "i'd pay anything to make sure you didn't have to carry that alone."
