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Whenever Felix was very young, a grain of sand found its way underneath his fingernail and became jammed beneath the tender skin where finger met nail bed. From there, it worked its way underneath his skin, became caught underneath flesh and muscle, and burned as it moved down his arm and across his chest. Something burned, and something hurt, but try as he might, he could never quite identify the cause or the cure. All the burn did was grow, and grow, and never subsided. Long days up and down the beach going in and out of the water until he was exhausted spent looking for relief. Nights spent underneath the stars were used to question everything. The stars, in their eternal silence never answer him.
Today, the burn in Felix’s skin is especially strong, and particularly present in his palms and in the soles of his feet. Felix is awakened by it in the faint hours of the morning, golden sun just beginning to crawl across purple sky. The apartment is already stifling hot despite the sun not yet rising. In this quiet and liminal space, his senses are heightened. Felix can feel the root of every hair on the top of his head, and the weight of every drop of sweat that trickled down his back in the heat. Despite having not gone to bed until well into the early hours of the morning, he’s never felt more awake.
Felix pulls clothes on over the underwear he slept in last night, manages to find his shoes despite not turning on the light in his room, and makes his way out of the apartment. There is only one place to go because there is only one place that soothes the burn in his skin ever so slightly.
Felix loves the beach, but the beach doesn’t always love him. The mid-day sun scorches his skin and dusts more freckles upon his face. Tourists make him feel like a stranger in his own city. However, when the sun has barely crept up over the horizon, or when the moon is high and the city sleeps the beach loves him back. Twin sisters, cool water and crisp air, soothe all the irritated places on his body where sand has rubbed between skin and muscle.
It takes Felix minutes to get to the ocean. It takes seconds to become lost to the roar-roll-crash of the waves breaking against dense wet sand. He strips off his shoes and carries them in hand as he walks down the line where tide meets beach, and toes are tickled by foam.
He makes it down to the rock jetty wall, and it’s strange, unnerving really, to see another person sitting on his favorite perch among the climbing rocks. The figure’s feet dangle into the ancient rock with a peculiar groove in the middle. From this basin rock, he spent hours in childhood scooping stranded minnows and crabs out of the shallow pool. The spot reminds him of—
“Felix?” and immediately the burn beneath his skin is intensified as if scarlet rash branched out across his skin. He’d never forget that voice.
“Chan?”
Felix isn’t exactly sure when that grain of sand became lodged underneath his skin, but he’s pretty sure that it happened when he was quite young. Felix squat upon the jetty rock wall doing his best to keep his balance, and absolutely desperate to scoop and fling the minnows and crabs stuck in the deep basin rock. The crabs would pinch at the skin between his fingers, and the fish felt slimy against his hands, and although the entire thing was incredibly unpleasant, Felix had to.
“When the tide comes in, they’ll wash back out.”
Felix looks up, and as he rises the blood rushes back to his head. Dizziness touches at his temples and embraces his brain when the brightness of the sun combines with sudden movement and the salty spray of seafoam in his eyes. The boy is taller than him, his voice a little deeper, and therefore a little older. He can’t make out the features of his face because of way that the sun shines in his eyes, but he knows there’s a fifty-fifty shot of what he’ll be like. Either he’ll be like the older boys at church that are nice to him and show him funny videos when they get on the computer in the youth room. Or, he’ll be like the older boys at school, the ones that tease him when they see him duck into the dance studio after class.
“No, they won’t,” Felix looks down at his hand and can see a small abrasion on the skin. Whether it’s from the rocks or a crab he’s not sure. “The gulls will get them.”
A hand joins his in the old basin rock, scooping out the minnows and flings the crab like they’re nothing. In that action, Felix finds an answer to what this boy is like.
That afternoon seems to go on for forever. He had all the American rap songs Felix’s mother didn’t like him listening to downloaded onto his blue iPod Nano, and they listen to them together. They eat ice cream together at Mrs. Xu’s parlor and mess around with the dilapidated arcade games in the back until they get kicked out. Said his name was Chan, but when his mom finally called him to go home, she said his name was Chris.
But to him his name is Chan.
Maybe that day on the beach when he cut his hand on the rock…Maybe that was when the sand was caught underneath his skin.
“How’d you get in town?” Felix cracks a smile despite the fact that he’s fairly certain his heart has stopped. It’s been years. “Kinda hard for you to fly under the radar these days huh?”
“Got in late,” Chan bends at the waist, and dips his hand into the basin rock. The sound of water lurching against rock rings in Felix’s ears. “Rented a car in Sydney, and didn’t stop til I got home. My sister had her baby. Felt like I needed to be here.”
“It’s about time.” Felix laughs. “I saw her at the market the other day. She was huge.”
“What are you still doing in Port?” Chan looks at him with a cocked brow and a smile, and in that moment, Felix’s heart starts beating again. “Every time I talk to my mother she tells me about how she’s seen you on television.”
“Ah,” Felix runs his fingers through his hair, and casts his eyes to the water which has now begun to shine silver with the rapidly rising sun. “The Morning Show here at home isn’t exactly the same as MBC.”
“Yeah, but my mom doesn’t get MBC, so it doesn’t matter so much.”
Chan hops down from the rock and hits the sand with a crunch. In that moment, Felix is ten years old again. His fresh pair of Converse are stuck to the sidewalk outside the souvenir shop by on the beach a pink wad of bubblegum. He tugs, and he tugs, and becomes unstuck slowly, moves forward to meet Chan sluggishly. Yet, hugging Chan feels like the most natural thing in the world.
Despite the fact that the day has barely begun, it is already stifling hot. Chan wears an unbuttoned denim jacket nonetheless. His skin burns hot on contact, and he smells like expensive cologne. “It’s good to see you Chan.”
One afternoon they’re down on the boardwalk pumping quarters into the skee-ball machine at Mrs. Xu’s parlor and listening to music on Chan’s iPod. They pass music and quarters back and forth until the quarters run out. Then, they sit on the ramp of the skee-ball machine, legs thrown over the ledge. With one earbud in his ear, and the other in Chan’s, Felix listens with one ear to the squeaky saccharine voice of Nicki Minaj. With the other ear, he listens to Chan matching her flow word for word, not seeming to care that he’s asked the whole parlor to call him Barbie.
Felix’s eyes dart from the neon clock on the wall, to Chan’s grinning face, and back to the clock once again. It’s almost 5:00, and he needs to leave for youth group soon. He never misses, but the thought of leaving Chan sounds almost as bad as skipping out.
“Do you wanna go to my church? They have food and basketball.”
And just like that, Felix doesn’t have to say goodbye to Chan on Thursdays at 5:00. They go together week after week until he’s thirteen and Chan’s almost sixteen.
Maybe it’s at church, after youth group where the sand gets underneath Felix’s skin.
It’s almost eleven. Youth group let out at nine, but for whatever reason, Father O’Neal hasn’t chased them off the lot yet. Chan’s mom is working nights these days, which is why she hasn’t picked them up. His mom probably just assumes that he’s staying over at Chan’s again.
It’s like that now. Mom never let him stay over anywhere. Ever. First it was a Friday, and then it was a Saturday, and now she doesn’t seem to be bothered so much at all. Funny how Chan has that effect on people. With his smile and his charm, he could ask for the world, and yet he asks for so little.
It’s for that reason, Felix supposes, Father O’Neil hasn’t chased them off. Instead he told them to close and lock the metal container which houses the piqued basketballs and the ribbed kickballs on the asphalt parking lot. Then, he just left them all alone.
They’ve got Chan’s phone sitting on the edge of the low concrete wall by the groundskeeper’s shed. The sound of the beat is lost in the hot night air, and it makes the music sound cheap and the beat tinny, but Felix’s voice rises up and over the poor sound. “By the way? What he say?” Words fly out of his mouth in a way that he’s never rapped before. “He can tell I ain’t missin’ no meals, come through and fuck him in my automobile.”
It’s dark outside, but light beams down on them from the lamp post. Sweat beads at the nape of his neck and trickles down his back.
Chan steps into his space, and cocks his head and grins at him like he’s about to steal the beat out of his back pocket and wear it better than he ever could. “let him eat it with his grills, and he’s tellin’ me to chill.”
But Felix isn’t the same kid Chan saw on the boardwalk three years ago. He’s not the person who had never heard a mix tape anymore. He swims in verses, and rides the waves of flow. Not as good as Chan, but good enough to not drown.
Felix wrestles the verse back and raps in perfect time with the music. “And he’s telling me it’s real.” He doesn’t care if it’s just a mimicry of Chan’s swagger. He meets Chan’s smirk tooth for tooth. Doesn’t care if he’s a few inches shorter, he leverages his body best that he can, stepping into Chan’s space.
Fingers hook into his beltloop and all of a sudden everything changes. Chan’s up in his face closing the scant distance between them.
Felix’s hands loop around Chan’s neck, and in that simple action, everything changes. “That he love my sex appeal,” but the words come out cracked and broken. He has no idea what he’s doing now, and it’s pretty sure that whatever he is doing is super lame.
But Chan doesn’t look at him like he’s lame. Maybe it’s the street lamps. Maybe it’s the heat, but he looks like he likes it, and he looks like he’s happy.
It’s like Felix has jammed the fast forward button and Chan’s jammed the slow-motion button when Chan’s lips come crashing down on his, chapped and warm.
For a fraction of a second, Felix feels like he should feel guilty for having his first kiss in the Church parking lot. He feels like he should feel really guilty for having his first kiss with another boy…in the church parking lot. Except, he doesn’t. Not at all. Chan smells like the cologne he keeps on his dresser, and the drier sheets his mom uses. Sometimes Felix’s clothes smell like that too if he stays long enough to do his laundry in the basement.
It’s the very best thing he’s ever done.
Pale morning light is muted by the purple sky as the sun sleepily crawls upward. The burn travels from Felix’s chest where their bodies pressed together to his lower lip, which trembles.
Chan is so close that he can feel his breath on his nose. In an instant, the dozens, if not hundreds of dates that he’s gone on, and the handful of relationships he’s had are tossed out the window. All it takes is a hug and he’s thirteen years old all over again. It’s like when he studied for hours to learn Korean. He’d carry the words around with him all day. The words swam in his brain and fell out of his ears because there were so many. When he really needed them, they vanished in an instant.
Unable to follow through, he waits for Chan. Unlike when he was thirteen years old, the soft, uncertain bump of lips against lips never comes.
It might not be like that anymore. Chan might not want him anymore. That’s fine.
It might not be like that anymore. Chan lives under a microscope now. Scrutiny is cast upon him every time he so much as blinks. That’s not fine, but he gets it.
But there is something in the way that Chan doesn’t pull back, and there is something in the way that he never once breaks eye contact with Felix, that suggests that it is still like that.
Chan’s on top of the world. But Felix can see it in his eyes. Somewhere through it all, the confidence and the swagger that he wielded freely when they were kids got kicked it off the edge. Chan doesn’t seem to be certain where it’s gone, but Felix sees promise in the fact that he’s looking.
“I gotta tell you something,” Chan forces their lips apart after a half dozen frantic kisses. Felix is hard, and his ears are ringing. Seconds ago, he was afraid of being caught. Now, he finds it difficult to focus on what it is that Chan’s saying. “Felix.”
It can wait, right? Felix never really considered kissing Chan before, but now that he knows that it is an option he doesn’t want to stop. Felix knocks their teeth together as he drags Chan back down. Warm lips melt and fade into soft tongue, and wow. He’s not just kissing Chan, he’s French kissing Chan.
“Felix,” Chan interrupts himself to give him another, too quick peck on the side of his mouth. “Seriously, man.”
“Alright,” Felix breathes. “What?”
“I got an audition.”
“Ay,” Felix snaps his fingers inches from Chan’s face. “Chan, you’re fallin’ out.” Chan’s head droops at the table. Felix, swear to god, can hear soft little snores come from his nose.
Chan’s nose dives down as his neck rolls downward and snaps back up and his eyes flutter open. “Ah-Sorry.”
“Face was about to end up in a bowl of almond milk,” Felix notes, clearing away the dish in front of Chan. Breakfast was just two stale bowls of cornflakes and some apples that were already starting to get mushy, but he’s proud of it nonetheless. These days he spends more time in Sydney than at home, and when he’s at home he spends more time outside of the apartment than in. The fact that he had anything in his fridge above and beyond a few stray cans of beer is something amazing in and of itself.
“Sorry, I’m so jetlagged.”
“No worries. My room is over there.” He motions down the hallway. Go lay down.”
From the audition, to the email, the second audition, and the phone call, every second of it felt like a dream. Everything that he saw looked as if it were coated in soft steam, the same kind that you wiped away from the bathroom mirror after a shower.
His ears popped in the plane, and then every syllable sounded elongated and poorly enunciated, and that too was like a dream.
As soon as the car crossed the river and he saw the bright city lights of Seoul, it was as if he woke up after a very long and very deep sleep. He arrived at the dorm in the middle of the night, and Felix was instructed to pick a bunk in an empty room and try to get some rest. He had a meeting in the morning.
But Felix was awake for the first time, possibly in months. Everything he touches from the wood of the bunk to the starched cotton sheets made his skin tingle with excitement. Every last thing, from the door to the rice cooker in the kitchen holds possibility.
The whole dorm smells like bleach, and it burns the nose hairs on the back of his throat. He finds it difficult to believe that anyone lives here at all because it seems like a hospital and a hotel were crammed together into one, odd and tight space.
Maybe it was then that the sand became embedded in Felix’s skin. Sand was folded into his clothes, and traveled with him in his suitcase. As he tossed and turned on a narrow bunk in Seoul, it worked its way between skin and muscle, and grew into an itch that could never be scratched.
Felix doesn’t remember falling asleep, and so he doesn’t trust a thing when he wakes. Because what he wakes up to is more enthralling than the neon galaxy skyline of Seoul, and more exciting than the free pair of socks they give you if you fly economy plus.
“Excuse me? I’m sorry,” a voice speaks softly into the room. Felix knows that he knows these words. He’s picked up basic Korean from his parents and grandparents, and learned so much from the hastily purchased workbooks and language podcasts. He knows that he knows these words, and yet they sound so foreign. “I know we haven’t properly met yet, but you should wake up. Someone from the company is here waiting for you.” The words sound so foreign, and yet they sound so familiar. His accent sounds like normal. Sounds like home.
Felix rolls on the bunk, and peaks his head out over the duvet cover, and yes. This is absolutely, 100% a dream.
“My name is—”
“Chan,” Felix breathes. His best friend from grade school. His first kiss. The person who jammed his earbuds into his ear and begged him to listen to the Young Money mixtape, and told him he had flow. The charismatic catalyst that set the whole thing into motion stands before him in Seoul as if it were a sleepover back home.
“Felix?”
“Thank you,” Chan’s eyes are barely open the second he hits the pillow. “It’s hard to sleep at home you know? Mom’s all worked up about Rachel.”
Felix could ask if he’d planned to call. He could ask if any of this would be happening if it weren’t due to chance and chance alone. He could ask, or he could just appreciate it. Felix sees the blessing in the glare that dances across the walls and the furniture, and the way that Chan pushes his comforter back in offering to him.
The bifurcated path is long and meandering. The root is strong, and the cobblestones are smooth. When one reaches the place where one diverges onto two; the choice is not easily made. Capillaries spring forth from each larger branch, and burst out when they become too narrow. The stones grind out underfoot into dust. The bifurcated path is faced with eroding stone, and flooded segments, but those who walk that bifurcated path press onward, in hopes that the path converges once more.
Felix crawls in bed next to Chan as if their friendship hasn’t skipped a single beat. Felix supposes that it hasn’t. When Chan first moved to Korea, the messages and the post cards were constant at first. Then they were reduced to once in the morning, and then every other day, on and on until they stopped completely.
For this very reason, Felix props himself up on pillows, opens his laptop, and for a split second believes he’s going to work. Instead, he closes his eyes, and focuses on the intense heat which radiates from Chan’s body. Felix listens to the rise and fall of his friend’s breath. No words scatter about in his brain or bump together to form questions to which there is no answer. No, instead in the quiet and in the warmth, a request for guidance, patience, and understanding is made to God.
Necking behind the church out on the school yard, or sticking their hands down each other’s shorts at the boardwalk, it’s almost like they pick up exactly where they left off. Except, Felix isn’t just some never-been-kissed kid anymore. He’s sixteen. Now that everyone he knows has grown up a bit, but doesn’t know the meaning of the word game, going to an all-boys school has been very good to him.
Chan breaks the lip-bruising, tooth-knocking, better than he dreamed, more awkward than he imagined, kiss and has the audacity to ask with arched brow, and devilish grin, “aren’t you worried that this isn’t allowed?” In the past this attempt to drag his confidence away, and kiss him until he was knock-kneed and dumbfounded would work. In the past it would work, but not now. Chan has the audacity to say this while pulling his hoodie up and splaying his palm against the small of his back.
“No.”
“It’s very much not allowed,” Chan says it in the same tone that he used to tell him to go to bed long after class, dance practice, and vocal lessons were over. That do as I say, not as I do kind of tone is equal parts infuriating and endearing.
In the common room of the cramped dorm, he can hear the low hum of their dormmate using the microwave. Someone’s got the TV on too loud, and the lock is broken on the door to Chan’s room where they stand. But if it wasn’t fine, why would Chan lean in closer? If it wasn’t fine, why would he thread his fingers in into his hair?
“Yeah, but if it were really a problem,” Felix takes Chan’s shirt between his fingers, and balls up the cotton. “You wouldn’t let anything happen at all.”
The second time around, they kiss not like two friends who used to make out, but two people who had something to prove to one another. Never one to be out done, but always one to quietly match move for move, Chan tugs his hair and tilts his head backwards. Breaks the kiss for a fraction of a second, only to dip his tongue into Felix’s mouth immediately. Chan tastes like diet Coke when they kiss. Chan’s put-on muscle since they last saw each other.
Felix traces the line of Chan’s lower lip, and catches it between his teeth. The action makes Chan gasp, and makes Felix want to chase it to the ends of the earth. From Port Douglas to Seoul. Maybe he has.
When Felix finally rests his head upon the pillow once again, the sun is high in the sky and streams in through the curtains despite his very best efforts to keep the room dark. He finally caves and turns on the window air conditioner precariously saddled in the window. The machine roars to life, and yet Chan does not stir. Although it’s past eleven in the morning, Felix is used to sleeping at odd hours. With back to back television performances, and hours long dance practice, and fan signs, he supposes Chan is too.
When Felix opens his eyes again, the sun once high in the sky has disappeared again. Not completely shrouded in darkness, his bedroom is foggy with purple evening twilight. His skin feels clammy from the combination of perspiration and unnatural, electric blue conditioned air.
“You still talk in your sleep.” Felix need not see clearly to feel the weight of Chan’s gaze upon him.
“What did I have to say?”
“You just love me for my space potato,” Chan responds.
“No way.” Felix hides his eyes in the crook of his elbow so he doesn’t have to face Chan, but he cannot hide the hint of laughter in his voice.
“Way.” Chan breathes in response. Light, airy, and gentle Chan, laughs too until cautious sniggers give way to genuine laughter.
Then, as soon as it begins, their staccato bursts of laughter are replaced by thick tangible silence that dries his throat and makes his heart pound in his chest. The sound of the window air conditioner thunders in his ears, and swear to God he can hear the sound of his own eyelashes bat against one another in the tense silence.
Felix can hear the springs in the mattress creak in protest. He cannot say for certain whether it’s him or if it’s Chan that moves forward and closes the distance between them. All he knows for sure is that his stomach flutters when Chan’s hand is splayed wide across it. All he knows for sure is that his lips still slot perfectly against Chan’s. On the beach he could at least acknowledge that this may not have been an option for them anymore. Now, with Chan breathing into his mouth and Felix’s lip trembling against the pressure and, he doesn’t understand what took them both so long.
Where in the past they were fast and demanding with one another, in the present they’re slow. Each swipe of their tongues asks a question. Pressure on each others’ mouths is unrelenting, as if both of them were determined to have a reminder that it was real, even if the other person wanted so badly to deny.
They part with a sharp sticky sound, tacky parched skin imprinted into sticky, morning breath lips. Every time in the past when they parted, Felix could feel their breath commingle and dampen their skin. He could never be completely certain if he closed his eyes again or was simply lost staring into Chan’s eyes blown wide.
Now, the fact that there’s space between them when they part is undeniable.
Neither of them lean in for another kiss.
Whether it’s who has the cleanest moves in the practice room, or who has the sharpest flow, neither of them has ever been able to stop issuing, or accepting challenges from the other.
Chan’s hands start underneath his shirt. So, the next and most obvious move for Felix is tugging the hem of Chan’s shirt until he Felix can pull it up over his head. This drags them quickly into territory that they’ve never broached together.
Yet time and experience have served them well. Kissing Jordan on the neck at Kara L’s sweet sixteen last October, and rubbing his palm against Michael’s crotch in designer jeans in the dressing room at the Mall, influence the way that he behaves now. Felix can only assume that it’s similar for Chan. The way that he kisses and the way that he runs his hands over his body burns with experience.
Chan kisses down his neck, firm enough to make him feel as if the air has been knocked out of his lungs but soft enough to never leave a bruise.
Aware of the noise in the common room, and the risk that anyone could walk in, Felix doesn’t make a sound. He simply threads his fingers into Chan’s hair and watches with red hot satisfaction as his friend takes a nipple into his mouth.
They fall into the bottom bunk in one seamless, practiced motion. It’s lucky really, the way that no one hits their head on the frame. Jeans unzipped, cocks pulled through their pants, they lie on their backs and grab one another. “Feels good?”
“Yeah,” Felix breathes. “God Yeah.”
Felix watches with rapt fascination as the twin heads of their cocks disappear as they tug their foreskin over the tip, and pull it back down in the twist and the drag of one another’s touch. It’s too sappy to admit to anyone, maybe even himself…But it feels like every experience built up to this very moment when they were reunited.
“Hey,” Chan mutes the television and pushes the lid of Felix’s laptop shut. “I have an idea. Let’s drive out to Cooya. Like we used to, but different.”
Felix knows that he’s supposed to say something now, but it takes all of his energy to size up Chan and try to get at what he’s really asking. After sleeping all day, he spent all night with his family, and then turned back up this morning for breakfast.
“Get away from the tourists.”
“Yeah sure,” Felix agrees. “I’ll ask my dad if we can borrow the tin can and the tent. We can camp, swim, look at the stars. But uh-” If Felix had to guess, he’d clock Chan’s outfit at a grand easy. Oreo Yeezys and a pale pink colored Palace t-shirt. Even if Cooya’s nice and quiet, he can’t go out looking like that and keep a low profile “We’ve got to get you something normal to wear.”
“And if I ask you,” Chan looks up from his computer and blinks his eyes in rapid succession as if he’d forgotten where he was and the conversation they were having. Never mind the fact that Chan’s been quizzing him about phrasing, grammar, and vocabulary for hours now. “I’m looking for the laundry room?”
“I’d say,” Felix wets his lip, buying time before the inevitable code switch, “In the basement, second door. And,” Felix breaks Korean for a moment, and starts back once more. “Don’t use the third drier.”
“And if I told you,” Chan looks sleepy in that moment, as if breaking contact with the screen made his eyes cloud over, and his lids grow heavy. “I like you?”
“I’d say ah-“ Felix looks up to the light fixtures, and lets the harsh fluorescent lighting blind him for a moment because there was no way he could respond the way that he wanted and keep a straight face. “I like deep fried squid.”
“Then you fail Korean!” Chan grabs the book in Felix’s lap, clasps it shut, and then Chan’s hands are all over him. On his shoulders, and tracing down his sides, and the waistband of his jeans. Chan blankets him with dangerous, sleepy warm affection which only solidifies the fact that neither of them will be sleeping any time soon.
“You have to,” Felix pats Chan’s thigh rapid-fire, until patting turns into slapping in time with the clicking sound of the engine desperately trying to throw itself into gear. “You have to pop the clutch, like throw your weight onto it.”
“What do you think I’m doing?”
The Renault 18 was something he can remember his grandmother picking him up in after kindergarten. His mother drove it for years after Grandma got too frail to drive, and then it sat out in the back yard becoming scraped by the sand and crumbling into rust.
In the present, it’s the only thing his parents will trust him with. The car still smells like his grandmother’s perfume, thick and flowery. Felix watches Chan’s hands clench over the cracked faux leather of the steering wheel.
“Let me, I actually know how to drive this thing.”
“But do you actually have a license yet?”
“No,” Felix admits. “But that’s not important.”
Chan repeats the motion of stomping on the clutch and then reaching to the floorboard for the gear shift. The car lurches and rolls and then finally glides backwards, and after nearly twenty minutes of bickering they manage to leave the driveway.
It’s a forty-minute drive out to Cooya, but the trip carries all the mystery and wonder of an all-out pilgrimage. “Look,” Chan points to the speedometer as the car, which was far older than them, struggled to go above 70 kph on the highway. “I’m flooring it.”
“Be patient,” Felix, responds. “I think this thing could actually fall apart.” This is said as he studies the floorboard, holes bored through rust, he can see the road pass by. The car is loaded down with a bunch of stuff from the garage that hasn’t been touched in years: a tent, and skim boards, and a faded igloo cooler filled with cheap beer. It’s nothing short of a miracle the car will move at all.
“Oh,” Felix rests his fingertips across the smooth plastic of a cassette tape jutting out of the stereo console. “What’s this?” Felix pushes the tape in, and with a pop-click the cassette begins to play. High pitched synth notes meld with a persistent drum machine beat.
“OH!” Chan’s hand brushes against his to crank up the volume on the stereo. Without abandon, Chan belts the opening line, “Goddess on the mountain top!”
And in no time at all Felix is joining him on the chorus. “She’s got it, yeah baby she’s got it.”
Together their voices blend together. Chan’s steady and beautiful, and his own powerful and loud. “I’m your Venus, I’m your fire!”
Somewhere between the highway and the back-dirt road, between the A side and the B side of the tape, Chan’s hand finds its way to his thigh. As it rests there, a light but smoldering pressure builds on Felix’s skin. Somewhere between the tape clicking off and parking the car at the very end of the road, Felix’s hand rests upon Chan’s.
“Ah, protect the great idol, Bang Chan,” Felix laughs swiping his sunscreen coated palm across the front of Chan’s face. Adorning him in war paint, Felix’s charge is less than pleased, screwing up his face and sputtering at the thick viscous substance spread across the bridge of his mouth and his parted lips.
Nevertheless, Felix continues to tease “Ah, Bang Chan, Oppa, so handsome.”
Chan wipes his own hand across his face, removing most, but not all of the sunscreen smeared across his skin. Chan mimics the action across Felix’s face. The lotion catches in his eyelashes and makes them feel matted and heavy. “If Lee Felix is kissed by the sun, then I’ll be jealous!” Fingers trace the line over Felix’s cheekbones and his nose where most of the freckles are on his face, rubbing in the lotion.
Blind to the world while Felix screws his eyes shut, in darkness he hears Chan speak, “I think you were the first person to ever really call me Bang Chan.”
Felix’s eyes flutter open, and shining bright sun spots blanket his field of vision.
“I didn’t know any better,” Felix says in retort. “You introduced yourself as that to me. It stuck.” Felix blinks once, twice, and Chan finally comes back into view. Felix takes the bottle of sunscreen from Chan, shakes the bottle, and squeezes more into his hand. He forces Chan to turn around, and smears the substance across his spine, squeezing his friend’s hand when he jumps at the cool sensation of lotion against warm skin. “And you were like the first person that let me teach them to dance,” and he says it in a muted tone that sounds like a confession best saved for church rather than casual conversation.
“And you were like,” Chan throws his voice, makes it high pitched and mocking in an attempt to discard the heaviness in the words that come next. “The first person I rapped for.”
“And you were like, the first person I rapped for,” but Felix’s deep voice is a permanent fixture. It’s difficult to throw it in any certain kind of way, and so the heaviness stays.
When the tension between them grows too thick and too tangible, the intimacy too real, the scuffle that breaks out between them is playful. For a moment it seems as if they both peeled back strange thick shroud that clung to their skin in Port Douglas and threw it out somewhere along the long and winding road from there to Cooya. Felix grabs for Chan’s nipple over his shirt and pinches skin. Chan elbows him in the ribs.
Chan’s bag, black leather adorned with a bright red king snake, two months’ worth of rent in a single handbag, is dropped to the sand. From the handbag spills bags of dollar snacks, a disposable camera, a key chain, a king’s ransom from the roadside stand.
Just as quickly as the faux brawl between them arises, it dies out. Pinches are released, and then it’s just finger tips against cotton and hands splayed across chests. Felix wets his lips with his tongue, closes his eyes, and presses his mouth to Chan’s. Time stops when he and Chan kiss. Time stops because Felix wills it to. Uncertain if he can handle another hesitant pull back from Chan, and wholly grateful when it never happens.
When they finally part for air, Chan presses another kiss to the side of his mouth like a signature or a reminder that at least for right now, Chan is here.
Felix nuzzles Chan’s neck, doing his very best to memorize the way that he smells and the way that their skin feels brushed against each other. Damn. He’s really going to miss this. Felix’s teeth graze the tendons in Chan’s neck, which undulate just under the skin and beg to be marked.
Felix wants to make him remember tomorrow, and the next day and the next day so badly. Felix wants to make sure that the messages don’t slow to a trickle immediately but last, and last, and last.
Felix does just that, bites down hard until Chan pulls back. “Hey-“
Felix offers no apology, just repeats the action. “What’s wrong with you?” Chan grabs him by the shoulders and pushes him against the wall. It’s exactly what he wants and exactly what he needs. “You know—”
“I don’t have to worry about that anymore.” But what good is freedom from an image that he had no problem living up to in the first place? He’s not like the kids that come from the countryside who get kicked for sneaking cigarettes, and he’s not like the girls who get kicked for getting caught messing around. He’s got it all save for what hundreds of hours of late night Korean lessons couldn’t fix.
Chan’s face falls, his body pulls back and it feels as if Felix has had his skin ripped off in all the places their bodies were joined. “Felix.” The wound pulsates and radiates heat, and Chan is the salve. “You can’t mean. That can’t be true. There has to be something I can-”
Chan always thought he could fix things for him, to the point of getting upset when he couldn’t. Doesn’t seem to matter if it’s his bicycle chain, or his broken brain that doesn’t understand a new language, or a broken contract “It’s not up to you anymore Chan.”
“I’m supposed to be the leader of this group. Let me try-“
Another fervent kiss is shared between them, too much teeth and too much tongue, a furious act of rebellion. Then, Felix sinks to his knees. “Let me do this. God knows when we’ll run into each other again.”
Felix means what he says. Something bigger, and grander, something that shone with a brilliance that his mind couldn’t understand, brought him here to this very spot kneeling on the dorm carpet. That same force is taking him away for reasons unknown.
His mouth feels dry, and his fingers linger on the waistband of Chan’s jeans. He looks to him for a shred of uncertainty, or a silent warning that this was a verse better left unwritten.
Chan offers no such warning.
Sand drags out between his toes as the waves ride in and out. The water is so cold that his skin stings red, but the sting is addictive. The icy cold sensation somehow soothes the constant burn in his skin that only seems to intensify whenever he and Chan are together.
It’s not an unknown feeling, that whenever he’s with Chan it feels as if it’s just the two of them. Whole train cars seem empty in Seoul, and arcades tourist traps empty out in the cape. But it it’s rare that they’re ever alone.
But by some strange miracle they really are. The sky is too bright, and everything in his field of vision is too pellucid for this to be a dream, and yet their stretch of beach is impossibly empty. In the over-exposed light of the sun, it seems as if this patch of beach becomes the world.
In the distance, Chan runs down the frothy white line where the ocean washes up onto the sand. A wave laps at Felix’s knees and by the time it reaches Chan, Chan’s thrusting the creamsicle colored skim board into the surf and riding the tail end of the wave.
Chan’s footwork is unsteady, Felix can see him shake, and he goes down before the end of the board reaches the crest of the wave. Chan pops back up from the water almost as soon as he goes down. With his damp hair in his face, he calls across the beach to Felix, “pretty good huh?”
“Real good,” Felix calls.
Chan repeats the action dipping into the wave and going down, over and over until he seemingly grows tired of it. Then, he stows the skim board on the beach and trudges out into the knee-deep water.
“What’cha doing Felix?”
“Finding treasures,” Felix shows Chan his cupped hand several pieces of broken off corals and bright purple shells. “For my lov-ah,” he laughs as he offers his open palm to Chan. But it’s different now. Back when they were kids they could find bits of coral still flush with pink color. Sand dollars cluttered the back of the car, and the basement, and their windowsills. Now, well all he has are a few bleached pieces of coral and brown muscle shells.
“They’re beautiful.” Chan plucks a shell from his hand and adds, “lov-ah,” mocking him. Pinching a shell between his thumb and his forefinger, Chan skips the shell out across the water, until it crashes into the cresting wave.
Felix makes a sound of faux disgust as he watches Chan discard the shell. “You just discard my love, just like that.”
“It comes back to you.” Chan takes another shell and tosses it.
“What are you talking about? It washes out to sea in the tide.” Felix should stop talking, but the words just spill out. “Maybe in a few years it will wash back up again.”
There’s a certain amount of heaviness anchored to what Felix has just said, regardless of whether or not he meant it. Like a storm blown in from sea, something heavy lingered on the skyline for days. Now, at the place where land meets ocean, it’s impact is strongest. The sound of the waves rolling in, and the gulls squawking past drowns out the sound of his own heart pounding, but doesn’t relax the tightness in his chest. Nothing can stop the storm from breaking.
Let it tear down hastily built structures, and decimate them both. Neither of them would stop it if they could.
Felix was a trainee for four hundred thirty-seven days. He figured it out in his layover in Taiwan on the plane home. If he wanted to, he could get into the specifics. He could calculate the exact day he had his first negative review, and piece together through back messages the second, and the third.
On one of his very first nights back home, his mother walked into the kitchen at three in the morning hair pulled back into curlers, slippers on and shut the lid of his laptop. Told him, “get off the damn internet,” and winced when she cursed.
It was solid advice that he never seemed to adhere to.
There are so many nights, whether it’s in Sydney, or Port, or Wollongong when Felix sees a video of Chan and the others on MNET or MBC. He always picks up his phone, allows words to fill up the text box, and then he deletes them. What is there to say other than he’s proud? What is there to say, other than he can taste the metallic tang of blood in Chan’s lyrics, even when he’s not up on stage beside him?
It would be inappropriate to tell him that he understands the points articulated within these messages. Feelings of loss intertwine with feelings of confusion, and are blanketed by the crushing anxious drive to make something beautiful from the ashes. But he can’t say that. Not at three A.M. when he’s been up all-night studying for an exam. Not when Felix hasn’t returned any of the scant, but persistent texts from Chan in months.
Although it felt like the end when it happened, somehow life marched onward. Five semesters at the University of Wollongong yielded an associate of fine arts degree. Mom framed it for him, and it promptly became lost in a box of junk in his apartment.
One spot on National Today Show for his dancing led to two, which led to more television appearances, alongside the slow and steady realization that his dream hadn’t died. Instead it was reworked and reborn, the process unknown to Felix. He felt so numb while going through all the motions. All he knew was that one day he went to bed feeling defeated, and the next day he forgot to feel guilty for his failure. He didn’t have to wonder if Chan ever felt failure. He has always been the kind of person who felt pain at another’s wounds. But he did always wonder if Chan eventually felt the strange and wonderful way that acceptance sprung upward from despair like a small spout and overtook one’s minds like weeds in the darkest hour.
Felix finds his answer in shin deep water three years later. Felix begins skipping shells and bits of coral back into the surf alongside Chan. When his hand is empty again, there’s nothing left but the feeling of the whole beach breathing. When waves roll in the beach inhales, pushing water over their skin and pushing the scent of salt into their noses. When they draw back out, the breeze draws backwards. The scent of salt brushes away and the air is clean. In the heavy silence between them, minutes backslide and distort into lifetimes. With each passing second, a different iteration of Felix and Chan dies and is reborn upon the beach.
Chan doesn’t say anything. Instead, wet fingertips glide against his palm.
Their fingers interlace, and then Felix can’t bear the thought of not being closer. So he pulls Chan close so that their chests press against one another. Chan’s shirt is soaked through, but Felix rests his cheek against it none the less.
It’s Chan that finally breaks the silence between them. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah sure.”
“Are you okay?” Chan adds, as if he wouldn’t know what he’s talking about. “With what happened?”
“Really Chan?” Felix catches a glimpse of the cyan blue sky as his eyes roll back into his head. “My family, people in town, fans, and people on the internet who think they know me…I expect them to not understand that I’m at peace with it, but not you.” Felix tries to pull away from Chan, but his grasp around his middle is firm. “You know if you’re unhappy, if you’re uncertain, just say so. I’ll understand.” Felix moves his hands just enough to grab Chan by the shoulders. “So, what is this really about?”
All he wants to do is put enough space between them so that they can look at one another. All he wants is some distance so that he can remove the stifling wet mask of Chan’s shirt pressed against his nose. Maybe he pushes too hard because he’s pissed off. Maybe a wave rolls in at just the right time and knocks them off balance. He’s pretty sure that he can feel Chan’s grip tighten at the same time as he pushes away hard.
Chan and Felix fall onto one another into the shallow water.
They roll once, twice, come up and gasp for air. Chan is heavy, and so Felix pushes him off once again only to get dragged down into the water. “What the hell Felix?” They’ve always wrestled and scuffled, but there’s an edge and bite to the way they push each other back down into the inches deep water.
Felix supposes that he can’t really think of another time that he’s been upset with Chan. Ever. Can’t really say for certain what he’s unhappy about.
They end up roll-crawl-pushing each other far enough that their bodies now lie in the wet compact sand, the place where the waves roll in and glide out. Felix leverages his lithe frame so that he’s on top, and straddles Chan’s middle before pinning his arms to the sand.
The beach doesn’t just breathe now, it heaves alongside their labored own breathes. Water lapping at their legs on the inhale, and drawing back on the exhale. Felix doesn’t repeat himself. The question hangs in the air, like the scent of salt.
“I feel all of those things Felix. Unhappy, uncertain,” Chan’s face is darkened by the shadow of Felix’s body, but Felix can see the strange mixture of vulnerability and dissatisfaction paint his features as he bites his lower lip. He watches the sand wash out between Chan’s fingers. “But considering what I have, I shouldn’t feel any of those things. What I feel the most is guilt, Felix.”
Chan raises his hand upward and cups Felix’s cheek. Harsh granules of sand become trapped between Chan’s palm and Felix’s skin and add fuel to the familiar fire. Chan’s fingers, wrinkled from so long in the water brush against his lower lip.
Chan’s skin tastes like salt.
There are no words that Felix can say to make Chan’s pain dissipate. There’s nothing that he can say to assuage years of pressure in the public eye. There’s nothing he can do about the self-doubt which creeps in day after day and works cracks into Chan’s exterior. These are things that he understands well, but knows that no matter how hard he tried he’d only push Chan away if he kept talking now.
So, Felix decides to violently push them back together.
They’ve kissed several times since Felix found Chan on the beach a few days ago. Yet only this kiss truly feels like a desperate, urgent kiss between two people reunited by chance, and accepting of the fact that they will be torn away again at any given moment.
Chan’s lips are chapped in the way that an idol’s skin should never feel. The briny taste of salt is strong upon their tongues. The bruising contact of lips against lips quickly gives way to something deeper and something that is somehow far more urgent.
Reluctant to break the kiss, Chan sinks his teeth into the soft flesh of his lower lip. Felix whimpers against him, and threads his fingers through Chan’s hair. Felix then tugs in retaliation, forcing Chan back into another bruising kiss before either of them has had a chance to breathe.
And it’s always been like that when they’re together. One of them slowly, silently, raising the stakes and the other blindly hedging their bets, blindly, stupidly certain that none of the games that they play could ever be zero sum.
Chan works a hand up underneath Felix’s soaked shirt and tugs it up over his head. The garment hits the sand with a heavy thwack and is washed out to sea. Felix can feel Chan’s cock stiffen underneath him even through two layers of soaked fabric. Felix grinds against him, but the action provides no relief.
And if this were a film about their story, the camera would fade out upon the poignant image of their bodies intertwined on the golden-brown sand. Then, it would pan back in to show them in dry clothes and wet hair, smug grins upon their faces and shared knowledge of what they’d just done.
But real life is not so neat, and not so orderly. Water logged and weighted down by a decade’s worth of burden produced by that strange and wonderful thing when friends become more than, they become adhered to the sand. Neither of them are to do anything other than kiss one another while the surf washes over. Even when Felix can give nothing more than sloppy, open mouthed kisses, which lack finesse, Chan meets him where he is. Tracing his lower lip, and fleeting laps at the roof of his mouth Chan maintains a brutal, antagonizing pace.
Time slides away like sand in the surf, and they become uncertain if they’ve been laying in the waves for minutes or hours. The sun has begun to drag down the cyan blue sky and pull up shades of lavender and fuchsia. Their skin becomes peaked with gooseflesh as the sun sinks. As the tide rolls in, water laps at their hips.
“Felix,” Chan’s voice shakes, as if he’s exhausted.
The beach heaves alongside each of their labored breaths.
“Chan,” Felix’s body aches, as if he’s swam and run all day. His fingers twist into Chan’s shirt because it is his only lifeline. Yet the longer he holds on, the more inevitable it is that they’ll both get dragged down into the tide and drown.
“This is our worst idea,” Felix says as he braces his hands against the rough bark of a palm tree.
“This,” Chan laughs in his ear. “This is our worst idea?” Chan’s hands slide down his right flank and rest on the firm flesh of his ass, squeezing lightly. “Worse than that time we made out back behind your school and the nuns blasted us with a garden hose?”
“It’s similar, right?” Felix looks over his shoulder, shakes his sticky damp bangs to the side, and waits expectantly for Chan to kiss him. Chan obliges, although it must be the thousandth time their lips have met that night.
“Worse than the time we asked your mom to send money for school books when we were both in Seoul and we bought Big Bang tickets instead?” Chan’s hands leave his hips for a moment, and he can feel the press of Chan’s cock against his thighs.
“Have you ever heard anyone say anything good about sex on the beach?”
“And yet,” Chan interrupts himself, and Felix can hear the metallic crinkle of the foil packet being torn, and Chan spitting out the corner into the sand. “You came so prepared.”
Cool viscous liquid is dribbled on the small of Felix’s back. “Ay, don’t waste it,” it’s not like he brought out his whole bottle of Astroglide.
Eagerly, Chan rubs the lubricant across his hole, and between his thighs before covering his own cock.
“It’s not like you brought anything,” Felix adds. Life in the spotlight has made Chan spacy. He hasn’t had to think about what to eat, or what to wear, or where to be in years, and it manifests in strange ways. Before they left that morning, Chan offered to make breakfast. Cracked an egg against the counter and dumped the contents straight into the trash and stared at the shell in his hand for several painful seconds before he realized what he’d done.
Something similar occurs when Chan tells Felix that he wants him, and Felix has to guide him through it. “What would you rather do? Just jerk each other off?” And adds as an afterthought, “like we did after that concert?” Felix would never forget it. They were in the men’s room at the train station, keyed up from a whole night of making out and dancing against each other.
“No,” Chan husks into his ear. The way that Chan sucks on his ear is criminal, first applying pressure with his lips, tugging skin inward and grazing the lobe of his ear with his teeth. It makes Felix’s knees buckle and his arms shake.
Not content to torment Felix on a single front, Chan drags his cock between his lube slick thighs and presses between them. Rutting into Felix as if this were the very best thing in the world. “But I don’t want you to feel like you have to.”
Chan tells him this as he thrusts against his clamped tight thighs. The contact is maddening, moreso than feeling Chan’s cock between wet clothes, or furtively jerking him off and desperately trying not to get caught as they’d done in the past. Chan’s cock drags against the silk smooth skin of his sac, touches against the underside of his cock, and slides back out and it is absolutely not enough.
It’s a lie. Even if they don’t get very far they’re going to at least say that they tried. From the love drunk way that Chan drags his cock against his skin, to the equally delirious way that Felix pushes back against him, they both know that they’re working on borrowed time. “I want to, and,” It’s only a matter of hours, not even days before their converged paths rip in to part once more. “It should be fine. Last night after you left I—”
“That’s so hot.” Chan breathes into his ear.
“Just go slow,” Felix instructs.
And with those words Felix gives permission for his own undoing. Chan moves his cock from between his thighs to between the cleft of his ass. Chan squeezes his cheeks together and teases and drags teases and drags. In that moment, Felix knows. Chan doesn’t do it just to wind him up, but instead the greedy everything at once behavior of someone who has wanted this for a very long time.
“C’mon, Chan,” and although his voice is always gruff and husky, Chan seems to sense the urgency in his tone and gives him exactly what he wants. He’s good like that. Always got him even when his flow was interrupted, and his words became inarticulate.
“Felix,” Chan breathes into his ear as the head of his cock breaches him, and barely manages to do as he’s told and go slow. Felix is no better, rolling his hips and pushing Chan in deeper. The sting of his skin in the place where he and Chan are joined matches the sting that he feels underneath his skin.
He’s been living with that sensation for well over a decade now. Rubbed raw by something that he could not describe, and could not shake no matter how badly it tormented him. Peace in both body and mind is something that has only come for Felix in fleeting moments while dancing. It glows across his skin now, warm and ember like with Chan.
“I’ve always thought you had the best body,” Chan mumbles into his ear. “Felix—”
“God Chan—” and there’s so much more that he wants to say. So much more that he’s got to say. The words dry on his tongue as Chan soothes away every bit of pain that he enacts on his body in the tense moments of too much too soon, and too little given how long it took to get here.
Hands slide over his chest, Chan takes a nipple between his fingers, rolls and pinches like they do this all the time.
He’s wanted this, “so long Chan,”
“Me too,” breathed into his ear.
Chan’s thrusts are disjointed and uneven, as if he does his best to go slow for Felix and let him adjust only to be swept up into his own pleasure and go faster, harder, and then slows back down again when Felix clenches down on him, or gasps in tones that suggest both pleasure and pain.
The sound of the waves are drowned out by the obscene slapping sound of skin against skin, and it feels so good. Moans spill out of their mouths between clenched teeth and sloppy kisses, and the sounds are all splashed against the backdrop of the orange-indigo sunset sky.
Questions burn in the back of his mind as Chan moves within him. Did he always know that his friend’s hands were so strong? Has he himself ever made that kind of sound when he was with anyone else, or was Chan special?
It certainly feels special as Chan confesses all kinds of barely intelligible things to him in a mixture of English and Korean.
Chan’s cock is thick, and feels just right. Each thrust dragging him closer, and closer, but paling in comparison to the breakneck pace at which Chan chases his own release. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it, not Felix’s hand desperately gripping his own cock, or the sinful way that Chan breathes heavily into his ear.
Felix knows that Chan’s cumming, arguably before Chan does himself. The evened-out rhythm that they worked so hard to find together becomes disjointed once more. Felix arches his back and ruts against Chan in a desperate attempt to force his own body to respond faster.
By the time Chan is grabbing down hard on his hips, and whispering an apology into Felix’s ear, Felix is frantically begging him, “not yet, not yet.”
By the time Felix feels the clammy sensation of cum drip down the small of his back and across his ass, Chan is already dropping to his knees, and mumbling another apology.
“Make it up to me,” Felix turns around, grips his cock by the base, and pushes it into Chan’s hungry, waiting mouth. He looks so good like this, cheeks flushed face softened by just fucked delirium. It seems as if all of the playfulness, and all of the mischief was drained from Chan. In its wake sensual, almost dangerous complacency was left in place.
Chan takes Felix into his mouth, and allows Felix to thrust into him. Does little to control the depth, save for throwing his head backwards, and relaxing his throat.
In that moment, that wild desperate attempt to make it all last, even when the other could sense the inevitable is felt by both of them.
The vein on the underside of Felix’s cock twitches against Chan’s tongue. Felix buries his fists into Chan’s hair, and tries so hard not to screw his eyes shut. Instead he drinks in sight of Chan’s puffy over kissed lips wrapped around his cock, and the bob of his throat as he drinks him down without question.
Felix is there. So there, and so far jammed down Chan’s throat that he’s got to pull away from his tight wet mouth, for fear of making his friend gag. Felix pulls back, and watches with rapt fascination as his cock spurts in short busts across Chan’s tongue, and lips, and face.
The aftermath should be disgusting. They’re all sand and cum and saltwater, and yet seeing Chan like this is the most beautiful thing. Graceless, and human, for a moment, Felix understands that Chan’s skin burns with an indescribable fire too. And it is so comforting that that fire has burned for Chan just as long as it has for Felix.
Their hastily made campfire burns surprisingly well, despite being thrown together from whatever sticks and discarded palm leaves they could find well after the sun went down. Bright orange flame licks at the black night sky, and embers break free and float through the air like fireflies until cool air melts them into ash.
Every bone in Felix’s body feels waterlogged and sore. Like he’s run a 10k in the water. He can only assume Chan feels the same way, boneless and fucked out. Propped against one another, they use each other’s bodies as the only force keeping them upright.
There’s food in the cooler, real food like sausages they could cook on the long metal fork they’d brought with them, or potatoes they could wrap in foil and leave among the coals. But the idea of moving from this spot seems impossible. The idea of breaking contact with one another, hands laced together sides pressed together, Chan’s head resting upon his shoulder…Giving that up, even if for a moment seems unacceptable.
So they pass back and forth packages of chips and pretzels from Chan’s Gucci bag. They sip beer from the cooler, because fetching that wasn’t nearly as difficult as cooking a meal.
Chan pulls an orange from his bag, and the sharp scent of citrus comingles with the thick taste of beer and salt in the air.
For a moment, Felix wonders what else is stowed inside. He’d do unforgivable things right now for fried chicken.
“Here,” Chan waves an orange slice in front of his face. Felix reaches for it, but Chan pulls away. “Open.”
Too tired to bicker, Felix does as he’s told, parting his lips and letting Chan press the fruit to his mouth. Felix chews, swallows, and licks his lips clean from fruit juice all under Chan’s fond scrutiny. Then the process is repeated again with Chan feeding him another slice of orange.
“Here,” Felix drags his hand across the sand until his fingers reach the plastic netting of the six pack. He pulls a can from the looped plastic, pops the top, laps up the foam from the top and passes it to Chan. “You need this.”
“Trying to take advantage of me?”
“Yeah,” Felix agrees.
In the silence, Felix pushes his still damp hair away from his face, and casts his eyes upward. The moon shines so bright tonight that he can see Chan’s features clearly.
He can feel the cool damp spot on his shoulder from where Chan rest his head, and he can feel the way his fingertips feel numb where he holds the icy can of beer. For a moment, Felix believes that it’s strange that among the thousands of prayers he’s offered to God, the one that he uttered without words or coherent thoughts yesterday morning was answered right away.
Realization sets in like the warmth of Chan’s hands against his body that it’s wonderful. Hundreds of those prayers were strung together over time and across space, and answered all at once like a great big epiphany.
“To answer your question Chan, I’m really okay with it.” Felix speaks honestly now, because he supposes that Chan truly does deserve to hear it. “I’m happy, and if I think about it…” Hesitance creeps into his voice for a moment, but Felix casts it aside. Who knows when their paths will converge once more. “It would’ve never happened like this if I stayed.”
“Hm,” Chan breathes while rubbing slow circles with his thumb on the inside of Felix’s palm. The silence between them now is comfortable, not tense.
“I forgot how nice the sky looks out here,” Chan’s gaze focused on a cluster of stars which create a constellation to which he does not know the name. “You see the city lights of Seoul night after night, and you can’t help but think it’s beautiful. But over time? Over time it becomes everything, you know?”
“Yeah,” Felix responds in agreement.
“You forget there’s things out there better and brighter like the stars on a clear sky and then it takes your breath away when you see it again.” Chan adds as an afterthought, barely there and under his breath “Seeing you is kind of like that.”
“Love you to Chris,” and the name for all its meaning sounds strange on his tongue. He can remember less than a dozen times in just as many years that he’s called him that, but the words are the truest thing he’s ever spoken.
Chan breaks gaze for a moment, hiding his face in Felix’s shoulder like he didn’t just feed him the biggest line of saccharine in history. A deep, carefree, almost goofy laugh is uttered into his shirtsleeve. Then, in a tone of calm, collected acceptance Chan confirms what they’ve already known now for over a decade. “But I do though,” as if hearing Felix response really solidifies what he means for the very first time. Chan turns, and mashes their mouths together in hasty, graceless kiss. Their noses bump together, and there’s too much tongue for a kiss that ends far too quickly.
Their lips part with a smack and quiet acceptance that neither would trade this haphazard intimacy for the world. “I do love you Felix.”
No sooner than the surf washes away the imprints of their bodies made in the sand, Felix is offered a job in Sydney judging the variety show he won last fall.
If Felix cared much about what other people thought of him, he’d allow the stream of quoted tweets, and threads underneath the announcement on the SBS page to bother him. But acceptance is a battle hard won, and continuously maintained. No, he doesn’t want to “just be a d list celebrity” forever, but he can’t say that he minds being able to walk to the store for snacks without being recognized by a dozen or more people.
But he can say that he’s bothered by a single DM he receives about a day and a half after the network announcement. A simple, “congrats,” in his inbox. It’s been weeks since their trip to the beach by then, and yet the scratch-itch feeling of sand against skin makes him grow restless.
Felix borrows eight hundred dollars from his mother to cover the deposit for his new place in Sydney. Taping lasts twelve, maybe sixteen hours a day, and it brings him back to another time, and another place. Dance practices, and school, and homework, and vocal lessons. Unlike back then, when taping lasts for so long there are always days off after.
Every week when taping ended, he told himself that he was going to order a sofa for the apartment. Just in case his mother wanted to come visit, or if he ever just got tired of sitting on a yoga mat laid out on the carpet to watch television on a comically large screen that contrasted with the emptiness of the rest of the apartment.
On days off, it’s difficult to know what to do with himself. Sydney is a restless city, and unlike Port he doesn’t know all of the secret places to go to get away from the tourists, and the hustle and bustle of city life. A stranger in the city, no local dare tell him until he’s proven himself.
In these times, Felix reaches for his phone for a lack of anything else to do in odd hours and in the middle of the night when he should be sleeping and he knows that Chan should be too.
But no matter how late it is, he always seems to get a response.
But Felix doesn’t even get a chance.
From the audition, to the email, to the second audition, and the phone call every second of it felt viscerally real, as if he were reliving the past and felt powerless to stop it. Felix is offered a job in Seoul by a record company without a name, but enough money to nullify his contract.
And after that, he doesn’t feel so guilty about never getting around to buying a sofa.
There are times when the bifurcated path is deceptively parallel. Running along, you can see the other person who walks this path, but can never reach out to meet them. There are times when the bifurcated path is deceptively parallel, but the roads curve inwardly at an angle so small it’s impossible to see with the human eye.
Slowly, unnoticeably, these two paths begin to converge, but neither realizes the gradual meeting until they’ve collided violently, and wonderfully.
Felix’s nose and skin are dry from the recycled air in the cabin of the plane. His head buzzes from the sound of the jet engine, and his ears which haven’t quite popped from descent. And he’s not sure what the customs agent asks him, but his response must be sufficient, because they let him go.
Walking into baggage claim, his ears pop and a monotone female voice barks, “The local time is 4:49 A.M. Flight A18, Sydney to Seoul checked bags will be available on carousel 19.” The nondescript yet authoritative tone over the speaker makes his tongue feel thick, and causes nostalgia to catch in the back of his throat.
Back then, he didn’t understand a word.
Now, he can read, and he can listen, and he can talk.
Back then, a representative from the company came to pick him up. Held his name on a slip of paper, and took one of his bags.
Now, Felix spies a lone stranger sitting on the bench in baggage claim. To sleep deprived passengers not expecting one of Korea’s biggest idols to show up in the terminal, he’s just another faceless airport haunt with his hat pulled down low and face mask pulled high. But, his headphones plugged into a twelve key sampler that lights up like the rainbow every time his fingers glide over the keys make him stand out like a sore thumb.
Felix purposefully walks to the left, out of his field of vision, and bounds up into his space with a stomp and a start, “HEY!”
Chan’s eyes go wide, the sampler is tossed to the ground, and his headphones become unplugged. Shock melts into excitement, eyes shifting from wide and panicked to soft and relaxed. Chan’s body is warm, and for a moment he doesn’t regret going summer to summer across hemispheres.
“I could tell you welcome back,” Chan grabs for his discarded bag with one hand. Felix can feel the soft tickle of skin against the palm of his hand. His fingers interlace with Chan’s as if they do this all the time. There’s pressure on his palm as Chan squeezes, and he doesn’t have to see his mouth to know that he’s smiling. “But I think it’s better if I said welcome home.”