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Though Seong-Jae knows how Malcolm feels about elevators, there is no way he is dragging his intoxicated old wolf up the hotel stairs.
They make it up to their room in a tangle of limbs. He struggles to swipe their room key without letting his partner’s unconscious bulk tumble to the floor, but Malcolm would never let him fall, were their positions reversed, so somehow, Seong-Jae manages.
“Jot,” he says under his breath, as they lumber into their hotel room like a clumsy, shuffling beast. He flicks on the overhead light before he maneuvers Malcolm onto the bed and quickly removes his shoes, socks, pants, suit coat, and shirt. While Seong-Jae takes off his own clothes, he keeps his eyes trained on Malcolm, who does not move, but simply remains sprawled on his back against the crisp, white bedsheets. Any minor irritation he feels evaporates as he looks down at Malcolm, whose slate-blue eyes would glow with unmistakable, unashamed affection if they were not currently shuttered.
Los Angeles may not be Seong-Jae’s home any longer, and Baltimore may be miles and miles away, but as his tired gaze traces the wild iron, silver, and chestnut spill of Malcolm’s hair over his pillow and his shoulders, he knows precisely where home is now—precisely where he belongs.
Home is where one lays one’s head, and after Seong-Jae turns off the lights, climbs into the unfamiliar bed, and pulls up the sheet and blanket to cover them both, he curls against Malcolm’s side and rests his cheek on Malcolm’s warm chest, his fingers walking familiar paths in the hair there.
That broad chest, those solid shoulders, that huge heart, hold the strength of mountains and all the safety Seong-Jae sought, craved, finally, finally found.
“I go where you go. Always,” Seong-Jae swears, returning Malcolm’s earlier words to him.
Until he knows Sila can never harm either of them again, Seong-Jae does not feel he has the right to say the words to Malcolm, but he is only human, after all, and weak, so weak, and surely it cannot hurt when Malcolm is sleeping the sleep of neat whiskey and exhaustion and will never know what Seong-Jae murmured in a moment of weakness.
In the hushed darkness, with a heavy-sweet ache in his throat and chest, Seong-Jae closes his eyes and allows his trembling fingers to slide like water over the new scar that collars Malcolm’s neck. His lips replace his fingers as he tattoos “I love you, omr-an” against the rough, raised skin. “I love you.”