Seungho returned home earlier than usual.
Haneul stopped vanishing for days.
There was always soup in the fridge. There were always wrappers in the sink.
They orbited.
Seungho found his sweaters vanishing, one by one, replaced by tiny heat bombs of static electricity, cinnamon, and Haneul’s too-expensive cologne.
He caught Haneul biting into nectarines in the hallway, juice dripping down his fingers, mouth parted in innocent sin.
“Use a napkin,” Seungho said once, too fast.
Haneul grinned, sucked the juice off his thumb slowly, eyes locked to Seungho’s the entire time. “Make me.”
Seungho turned away.
Didn’t sleep that night.
??????
Seungho never touched him. Not consciously.
But dreams crept in like smoke under a locked door.
Haneul, curled up against him in sleep. Haneul’s hand sliding over his. Haneul’s mouth open, breathing slow and sweet like he wasn’t born a storm.
Some mornings, Seungho woke up with clenched fists. With his face pressed to the mattress where Haneul had been the night before, curled in the closet room with the door cracked open.
Sometimes Seungho stood there and watched the restless curl of the boy’s spine, the way his fingers twitched even in sleep — not for calm, but for proof that Haneul could pause without disappearing.
Even unconscious, he was all teeth and tangled limbs and twitching dreams.
Like a storm that had forgotten it was lightning, just for a few hours.
Seungho never reached for him.
Instead of brushing the shower-damp hair from his forehead, he stood like marble at the threshold. He didn't let his hand hover.
But he wanted to.
God, he wanted to.
Not to own. Not even to soothe.
Just to anchor.
To tell that wild, furious creature with shaking hands and sleepless eyes that there was room for him to unfold. That he didn’t have to keep biting just to stay upright.
That rest wasn’t surrender. That trust wasn’t a leash.
He remembered what Ji-ho had said.
He wants to come in. He just doesn’t know how to knock.
Seungho had built his life around people who waited for permission. Who asked. Who negotiated.
Who mistook his silence for approval, or his patience for agreement.
