Chapter Text
Inside the trunk of his car, washed in the pale dawning light of Los Angeles' sun, laid everything Joshua could conceivably call his own:
Running shoes. Knitting needles. .45 Beretta, half loaded. Duct tape. Zip ties. Dossier. Backup dossier. First aid kit. Enough Valium to sedate a racehorse.
This was not including the thousand dollars cash in the breast pocket of his leather jacket, scraped together about a week ago. Joshua cleared out some space in his trunk and tucked the barrel of his Beretta into his jeans.
He checked his wristwatch for the fourth time since pulling up to the private lake. It was early enough that the only people on the trail were joggers and leisure fishermen, though the latter were scarce at this time of the year. The seven figure pensioners were off vacationing in Mykonos or Mallorca, leaving the Bluegill to repopulate in peace. Another jogger loped past, shooting Joshua a dirty look for polluting their idyll with his presence. Or maybe it was something to do with the eye-searing colour of his 1971 Dodge Challenger. If he lingered around for much longer, someone was bound to call the cops.
His gum was losing flavour. He stuck it onto a metal sign warning of endangered frog species and did up one more button on his shirt.
At three minutes until seven on the dot, a jogger rounded the corner.
“Could I use your phone to make a call?” Joshua stepped away from the propped hood of his car.
The jogger— tall, cropped brown hair, clean skin— slowed to a stop, removing his wired earbuds. He regarded Joshua warily.
“My car broke down and I’m out of battery. It’ll only take a minute.” Joshua explained.
The man’s workout clothes, plain grey sweats to most onlookers, were most likely made of cashmere. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses, perched on his nose and fogged slightly with sweat, lended him the slightly nebbish look of somebody who filed taxes for a living. And while the breadth of his shoulders suggested he was capable of hurting somebody, the manner in which he carried himself whispered he never had.
He stared for just long enough that Joshua was certain he’d been recognized.
“Sure,” the man finally muttered, casting his gaze downwards. He dug a gleaming Blackberry model out of his pocket.
Joshua flicked a glance at the trail behind them and estimated a good two minutes before the next jogger breached their blind spot.
“Thank you.”
He could smile, fake a call, and drive back to Sacramento.
“The service is kind of spotty here—”
But there was never a world in which he wasn’t going through with it.
Joshua tackled him to the ground with a spasm of adrenaline, sending them tumbling onto hard-packed dirt. The chloroform worked quickly, transforming the man’s choked-off gasps into smothered, eerie silence. His writhing stilled as his lids grew heavy and his limbs slack, and Joshua felt a tepid swirl of pity as he became dead weight in the crook of his arm.
Before his two minutes were up, Joshua had hoisted him into his trunk, zip tied his hands, and peeled out of the tranquil lakeside in a cloud of orange dust.
—
His name was Jeon Wonwoo.
He was also the least important part of this equation. It was a simple misfortune that he got caught in the crossfire.
The only thing that mattered about Jeon Wonwoo was the man he was married to, and the fact that he owed Joshua a brand new life.
His old one was worn out. Wrung out to its last drop, cracking at the edges. He would rather die than spend another day working for these men he hated. Joshua wanted a do-over, and he was willing to get his hands dirty to get it.
And if it sent Kim Mingyu to an early grave, it would only be icing on the cake.
—
They drove for two hours before stopping at a payphone on the side of the road. Joshua popped the trunk open and tossed a bottle of water and a notepad inside.
“Write down your husband’s phone number. A personal cell he won’t ignore.”
His cargo was awake, uncurling himself from a fetal position to readjust his glasses. He reached for the pen Joshua was holding and scribbled a series of digits in wobbly handwriting.
“He won’t answer. He’s got an important meeting today,” he rasped, and unscrewed the bottle of water.
Joshua plucked the notepad out of his hands and scanned the page.
“We’ll see about that.”
Boxed in by dirty plexiglass, Joshua dialled the number. It rang five, six times, then went to voicemail.
Calmly, Joshua considered setting fire to the payphone.
Instead, he replaced the phone on its hook and pivoted back to retrieve the Ziploc bag in his glove compartment. The Blackberry rattled around in the center cupholder, drained of service and battery.
“Open,” Joshua commanded to his prisoner, palm outstretched.
“What is that?” Wonwoo squinted at the blue pill. He was inexplicably calm for someone who just spent his morning in a stranger’s trunk. Even less explicable, he opened his mouth without much fanfare.
Joshua dropped the pill on his tongue and raised the bottle up to his lips. His throat moved as he drank.
“Show me your tongue.”
He did.
“The underside, too.”
Joshua tried not to let surprise show on his face.
“We have another hundred miles before our next stop. Are you going to piss in my car?”
A wordless shake of the head.
“The Valium’s going to kick in soon. Do your wrists hurt?”
He scrunched his nose. Gave an experimental wiggle. “A little bit.”
Joshua planted a hand atop the lid and slammed it shut.
“Good.”
—
Kim Mingyu was frequently away on business, and when he wasn’t, he was wining and dining his clients around town. He wasn’t a particularly exceptional accountant, but what he lacked in precision he made up for in magnetism. His go-lucky eyes and boy-next-door smile were enough to make Hollywood starlets hand over their treasuries. He made enough to provide for himself and his husband, and then some.
All Jeon Wonwoo had to do was be the perfect trophy wife.
He was good-looking enough. Came from his own pool of wealth, if the ancestry records were to be believed. But the weeks Joshua spent tailing him had mostly consisted of long, ambling walks around the same neighbourhood for hours at a time. Sometimes he went to the store and stood in the dairy aisle, opening and closing the fridge doors with a hypnotized quality about him. He always left with glazed eyes, empty-handed, although on one occasion he stole a carton of milk. Joshua had half the mind to check whether he’d been lobotomized.
No one ever said kidnapping victims had to be interesting.
—
That night, Joshua sent a photo from the Blackberry.
It was slightly blurry, but unmistakeable. Mingyu’s darling husband, glassy-eyed and pupils blown, kneeling on the greige motel carpet. A bit of spit gleamed on his lip where Joshua’s thumb pressed down on it, cradling his face in his palm. He had fallen asleep in the trunk, and his cheeks were flushed with warmth.
The call was near-instantaneous. Joshua let it ring five times before answering.
For a short stretch, no one spoke.
“Jagiya?”
He really hadn’t changed. Least of all that honey-sweet tone.
“Hi, baby,” Joshua purred.
“Who is this?”
“You know who it is.”
Electricity coursed through the line.
“You’re dead,” Mingyu breathed. A corpse, resurrected from his past. Boo.
“Evidently not.”
He could practically hear the gears turning in Mingyu’s brain.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
Silence.
“I don’t have time for prank calls.”
He was beginning to sound desperate.
“Where is he? What have you done to him?”
Joshua scoffed. “Nothing. Yet.”
A vein of panic bled into Mingyu’s voice. “For fuck’s sake Joshua, did you really have to kidnap my husband?”
Joshua’s throat squeezed with undampened fury. His fingers curled around smooth plastic.
“You left me to die,” he spat back.
“Then you should’ve had the grace to stay dead,” Mingyu hissed. There was the Mingyu he knew, cold and venomous underneath it all. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to choke down.
Then, as if the two of them were simply old friends exchanging favours, Mingyu’s voice went back to normal: “What do you want?”
Joshua swallowed his anger.
“I want my money.” As if Mingyu had anything else to offer him.
The line went silent for so long Joshua had to check if they had been disconnected.
“When?”
At this moment, Wonwoo was sitting on the opposite bed, a clean sock stuffed in his mouth and zip ties around his wrist, rapt in the cartoon Joshua had flicked on. On TV, Jerry was nailing Tom in the head with a falling anvil. Wonwoo snorted, then choked on his spit and started coughing around the gag. The Valium was definitely still cruising through his system.
“You have two weeks,” Joshua said, and hung up before Mingyu could say something cruel.
As far as prisoners went, Wonwoo was disconcertingly quiet. He followed instruction without questions or complaint, and kept his distress to a minimum. If it was a ploy to get Joshua to drop his guard, it wasn’t going to work. He was a paranoid bitch to the end.
The motel bathroom had no windows or large vents, so Joshua let him shower with his hands free. The Baretta stayed on him at all times.
While Wonwoo showered, Joshua recounted his supplies– which now included a plastic bag of groceries, a few balls of acrylic yarn, and a jug of water he bought at a general store at the edge of town. Wonwoo’s low melodic humming bounced around the bathroom tiles, filtering out into the bedroom.
After about twenty minutes, he emerged in a cloud of steam. There was a towel wrapped around his waist, and another around his chest.
“Do you have any extra clothes?”
Joshua was sitting near the door, casting on stitches. “No. You can sleep in what you came with.”
Wonwoo shuffled over to the double armoire and opened it. With a small “ah,” he procured a stiff terrycloth robe from its interior. Wonwoo shucked his towels on the floor and tied it around himself.
“Pick those up,” Joshua commanded, which he wordlessly obliged. Joshua then gestured at the stockpile. “Eat something.”
Upon careful inspection of what was on offer, Wonwoo selected a box of Raisin Bran and settled down on the bed to open it. The sliver of corner plastic was discarded into the wastepaper basket.
They managed to sit in silence for ten full minutes before Wonwoo broke it.
“Does my husband owe you money?”
Joshua lost count of his stitches.
“No personal questions,” he ordered.
Wonwoo chewed on his cereal.
“My husband owes you money,” he repeated, a statement rather than a question.
Joshua had failed to anticipate that kidnapping someone also meant giving up his blessed solitude. He considered reinstating the sock gag.
“Your husband owes me many things," Joshua said.
—
The next morning, Joshua offered the backseat if Wonwoo promised to be quiet.
“I don’t mind the trunk,” Wonwoo said, fiddling with the zip tie around his wrists. It clicked a notch tighter. “It’s nice in there. Dark.”
His cheek had a rectangular indent from the pillowcase tag. Joshua barely slept last night.
If Wonwoo’s head clipped the frame of the car while Joshua shoved him into the backseat, neither of them acknowledged it.
It was a fundamentally American practice to ascribe spiritual significance to the act of driving across the country. Nowhere else in the world did people write quite as many folk songs, operated the same janky roadside attractions, and generally underwent the type of baptism Americans did when faced with an endless stretch of open road. It was supposed to represent change. Possibility. Redemption.
When Joshua stared out into the open road, all he saw was the burning asphalt he woke up on five years ago with a bullet hole in his side.
The scar tissue still ached now, shiny pink flesh gnarled and sinewy where the doctors had performed a medical miracle on him. They found him, the corn-fed couple en route to their honeymoon. And when he woke up in that hospital bed, the phantom space where the bullet was lodged had been replaced by a burning vengeance, a new driving force Joshua was bound to live by. There was no other life for him to return to.
It wasn’t a bad place to die, out there in the desert surrounded by nothing but birds and dirt. Maybe Mingyu was right. He should have had the grace to stay dead. But instead he was here, sowing his affliction in a desperate attempt at living.
The Mojave stretched out into infinity, and Joshua kept on driving.
By late morning, the silence between them was thick as mattress foam.
Wonwoo was upholding his end of the bargain for staying out of the trunk, maintaining a creepily still presence in his backseat. The blazing sun, with its venomous ultraviolet rays, was searing them alive through the windows. Stale air blew out of the vents, cooling them down but barely. These long drives were usually time for Joshua to ruminate, but today, Wonwoo’s presence felt like a sinkhole. What was he thinking, in the midst of all this? Was he planning an escape? Were his pampered sensibilities offended? Maybe he was so certain of Mingyu’s devotion that his safe rescue wasn’t even worth doubting. Very quickly, Joshua found himself consumed with trying to guess what was on Wonwoo’s mind.
By early afternoon, the air had grown stagnant like swamp water, and Joshua was glancing in his rearview every few minutes just to confirm that, indeed, he was still sitting there. Wonwoo had barely moved since getting in this morning, posture ramrod straight in the middle seat, staring blankly ahead at the road. He barely seemed to blink. Catching him in the act of scratching his nose was enough to make Joshua realize his lunacy. For the next hour he managed not to glance into the backseat at all.
By late afternoon, every bump in the road pounded against Joshua’s skull like a sledgehammer. Driving for eight hours with few stops in between turned his joints to glue and his eyelids to sawdust, and Wonwoo’s silence was akin to a slow burning torch, sapping out all the oxygen in his lungs and then some. Joshua knuckled the steering wheel, the leather stitches digging into his palms, as the horizon line blurred into one sand-coloured smudge.
Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer.
“What,” Joshua snapped, breaking eye contact with the road.
From behind him, Wonwoo shifted slightly. Joshua must have startled him.
“Nothing,” he said, voice hoarse from disuse.
“Bullshit. We’ve been sitting here for eight hours. Say something.”
Wonwoo cleared his throat and sat forward slightly.
“We’d be getting wherever we’re going a lot faster if you weren’t afraid to merge lanes.”
The silence settled back down around them like a funeral shroud.
Joshua considered, very briefly, taking the Beretta out of his glove compartment and shooting Wonwoo between the eyes.
But he wasn’t a brute, despite everything. There were plenty of birds of prey around. He could leave Wonwoo trussed up in a field somewhere, a t-bone strapped to his chest while vultures circled overhead.
The thought made Joshua smile. The car went over another patch of bumpy road, and he unclenched his knuckles around the steering wheel, and the feeling returned to his fingertips in prickles.
“Good thing I’m not in any rush,” he said, and floored the gas pedal.
The Blackberry rang again that night. Joshua let it go silent twice before answering.
“Please let me talk to him.”
Mingyu’s voice was agitated.
“No, hello? No, how are you?” Joshua tucked the phone into the crook of his neck and continued his short rows.
“It’s been forty-eight hours,” he blustered, “I deserve some kind of proof of life, don’t you think?”
Wonwoo crunched on his cereal with dripping wet hair. Dry cheerios. He had a particular knack for cobbling together a self-care routine with nothing at his disposal. His skin was pink and shiny as a plucked turkey after taking a forty minute hot shower as soon as they arrived. At least it wasn’t Joshua’s water bill he was running up.
“You can speak to him when I’ve been paid,” Joshua said primly. “I’ll return him in better condition than when he left.”
The line was petulantly silent. Joshua could picture it, the hard set line of Mingyu’s jaw. He was used to getting what he wanted.
A puff of air, then a crackle.
“Right,” Mingyu said, voice soft. “You won’t hurt him, will you?”
The mouthpiece was right up against his lips.
“I know you, Joshua. You have a good heart. It doesn’t need to be like this.” He sounded earnest, plaintive, like a child who still believed in Santa. Joshua put down his knitting needles.
“We had such good times together. Remember when we used to sneak out of Will Pemberton’s dinners? He’d serve those greasy duck canapes and we’d go out the back and ruin our suits because he kept the sprinklers on, even in the middle of a drought. You were so happy back then. I miss that.”
A reel of tape, writing over itself. Joshua tugged the spool free from his ribs.
“I made a lot of mistakes. You deserved better than what you got. But, I swear I’ve changed. Ask Wonwoo about the charity I’m organizing. I want to help people. Come back to me, and I promise I’ll take care of you. We can put this whole thing behind us, I swear.”
A version of Joshua died when that bullet entered his abdomen. He was, indeed, happier. Lighter. That version was six feet deep. What refused to be buried was the anger. The shame. The resentment. Joshua was carrying enough of it to fuel a bonfire.
Mingyu had to know that they were past the point of no return. Still, it was a convincing act. He’d always been a good showman.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Joshua said crisply.
Wonwoo looked over, perking up. He was dusting cereal crumbs off the bedspread with one hand. The other was zip-tied to the headboard.
“Yeah?” Mingyu’s voice was hopeful.
“You have one week.”
Something heavy clattered to the ground.
“Damn you, Joshua.”
It probably wasn’t normal to feel this numb.
“And you’re wrong,” Joshua added before hanging up. “I absolutely would.”
He sat in a puddle of tar before Wonwoo opened his mouth. It was the third time he had spoken that day.
“What did he say to you?”
Joshua considered lying. He was too tired.
“He asked me to bring you home.”
“Are you okay? You seemed upset.”
Joshua glared. “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be fine?”
Wonwoo shrugged and spooned more cereal into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed.
“Do you do this often?”
“What?”
“Kidnap people.”
Joshua couldn’t believe he was having this conversation, much less entertaining it.
“It’s not a habit of mine.”
Wonwoo nodded. As if he had any idea about Joshua.
“I would probably do the same thing. If the circumstances were right.”
Joshua gritted his teeth. It seemed important to seem in control over the situation, suddenly. “Why aren’t you afraid of me? I could kill you, you know.”
“This is the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in a long time.” There was a strange little smile on Wonwoo’s face. Something was very, very wrong with him.
“Something is very, very wrong with you,” Joshua said.
This, of all things, seemed to please him.
“I could say the same for you.”
It unsettled Joshua that Wonwoo was becoming sentient. It was better to think of him more as a pet, a six foot tall sea monkey he had somehow gained temporary custody of.
“Go to bed,” Joshua said, even though it was only eight PM. “I’m sick of hearing your voice.”
—
Him and the sea monkey settled into an odd pastiche of a routine.
Every morning, Joshua acquired coffee for the two of them, and dissolved the crushed remnants of a blue pill into one of the cups.
They checked out of whatever motel they were staying at that night, and put another nine hours of distance between themselves and their previous sojourn. The route was purposefully confusing, meant to throw off whoever it was Mingyu had hired to track them. He steered clear of suspicious looking vehicles or figures. When he went into gas stations, it was always with a cap pulled low over his face. He checked the news every night for a missing person report. The truth was, he was taking a gamble on whether Wonwoo had any family who checked in on him. Anyone who spotted the Challenger at the lake could easily turn him in. The car was about as subtle as a house on fire. Joshua thought back to the jogger who gave him a dirty look. But he was counting on the fact that Mingyu had committed too much fraud to invite scrutiny from police. If Joshua’s sleuthing was anywhere near accurate, Mingyu owed tens of millions of dollars in stolen funds. He was in just as deep as Joshua. It was a small comfort, but it kept him from chewing through the skin around his cuticles at least.
The only stops they made were for gas and supplies. They sustained themselves off of convenience store food. Joshua forgot the taste of anything other than hard-crusted sandwiches, mummified in cling film, cereal bars, and the occasional plastic cup of fruit for a dose of vitamin.
There was some perverted, funhouse version of reality in which their excursion could technically qualify as a road trip. They even argued about the radio.
“Enya stays on because I say so,” Joshua snarled, slightly humiliated that he was defending his musical tastes to his prisoner. His literal captive audience. “She’s a national treasure.”
“She’s Irish,” Wonwoo muttered beneath his breath.
“My grandfather was half-Irish.”
“Still not as good as Celine.”
Joshua almost swerved off the road. “I will put you back in the trunk.”
Wonwoo’s silence was palpably smug, which only served to infuriate Joshua further.
When he wasn’t driving, or checking for tails, or debugging the motel rooms they stayed in, Joshua was knitting. He didn’t know what he was knitting, or why, only that he needed to do something with his hands lest he gave into the voices. That is, the series of imprudent impulses Joshua was fighting off at any given moment. Right now, for example, they were telling him to buy some t-bone steaks.
"You need to have a vegetable," Joshua said, not acknowledging the change in subject. For three days, all Wonwoo had eaten was cereal. "You're going to get a stomach ulcer."
Despite his many shortcomings, he felt a reluctant sense of responsibility for the sea monkey, though it was at no one’s behest but his own. The idea of doing it for Mingyu’s sake was laughable. He did have some remaining semblance of a moral compass.
"If my husband owes you money, I can help you get it," Wonwoo said later that afternoon. Joshua was watching over him as he ate a salad. It was the most forlorn Wonwoo had looked since being kidnapped, being denied cereal until he put something green in his body. Joshua was turning into a fucking babysitter.
"Don't talk about things you don't understand," Joshua snapped. They were sat on the hood of his car, parked in front of a water reservoir, an enormous man-made lake bracketed by looming walls of concrete. A flock of seagulls were pecking at something raw and bloody down below.
Wonwoo swallowed a mouthful of plain arugula. He hadn't even bothered to add the ranch packet.
“He rips off a lot of people. Skims off the top of their earnings and pockets the money for himself,” he said. There was a sliver of green stuck between his teeth. “If you need some leverage.”
It was difficult to discern what was being greased by the diazepam and what was Wonwoo’s actual personality. A part of Joshua didn’t want to find out. Mingyu’s husband seemed incredibly willing to throw him under the bus, which surprised him, if only because he was sure nearly everyone on earth except him was happily under Mingyu’s spell.
But he didn’t need more leverage. His leverage weighed one hundred and fifty pounds and was currently trying to spear croutons onto a fork.
“Just shut up and eat your spinach,” Joshua muttered. The water was reflecting the sun straight into his eyes. He brought up his hand to shield them.
He waited to see if Wonwoo would correct him, but he just kept chewing.
Mingyu’s words from their last call were bouncing around Joshua’s skull as they drove from sunset into dusk. The night air was significantly cooler, so he had all four windows rolled down to let in the breeze. Clearly, he still thought Joshua was soft if he was trying old manipulation tactics.
They stopped for gas and Wonwoo went inside. After filling up the tank, Joshua waited by a spinning display of cheap costume jewelry. Plated titanium baubles dangled from hooks, cubic zirconia earrings some trucker’s wife would receive in place of diamonds. A pair of barbells caught his eye.
“Say,” Joshua said after Wonwoo emerged from the restroom. “Are you afraid of needles?”
Wonwoo’s shirt was in a heap on the floor of another motel bathroom. At a certain point Joshua gave in and bought him a spare set of clothes, although pickings were slim on the road. The shirt on the floor was emblazoned with an image he thought was a bold statement about the Vietnam war. On the counter behind them there was a stack of paper towels and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. Even as Joshua peppered him with reassurances, Wonwoo was pale as a ghost.
“Relax, I’ve done this before,” he said, flicking the lighter on. “I pierced my own bellybutton in junior year of highschool.”
Wonwoo winced, though the flame was nowhere near him. Joshua did, however, catch his gaze flit down to his navel, which was covered by his own threadbare t-shirt.
“You should branch out more. Sartorially, I mean. You’re only twenty-eight and you dress like a sixty year old man.”
The colour returned to Wonwoo’s face for a second. “You don’t know how I dress,” he protested.
“Yes, I do.” Joshua put the lighter away and soaked some paper towels with the alcohol. He dabbed it at Wonwoo’s bare chest. “You once wore the same pair of wool trousers for a week straight.
Wonwoo spluttered, guppy-mouthed. “You followed me?”
Before he started tossing people into trunks, Joshua spent eight weeks camped out in front of Mingyu’s apartment.
“Only for a few days. You ought to pay more attention to your surroundings.”
Joshua felt a little bad for shattering Wonwoo’s illusion of privacy, although he supposed he violated something much worse when he smothered him unconscious and drove off with him. The least he could do was prevent him from being abducted again.
“Why do you spend so much time in the dairy aisle?”
This made Wonwoo go quiet. Joshua held the needle up.
“It’s cold. And always the same,” Wonwoo said. “It’s a good place to think.”
“About what?”
Somewhere in the next room, a shower turned on. The old piping between their walls heaved and shuddered.
“I don’t know. Running away.”
Joshua wanted nothing more, all of a sudden, than to sink his teeth into Wonwoo’s skin. To hurt him.
“Fuck!” Wonwoo cried as Joshua threaded the needle through his nipple.
“Hold still,” he commanded as he screwed in the first piece of jewelry.
Wonwoo bit down a sob. His eyelashes were brimming with unshed tears.
The jewelry gleamed against the dusky pink flesh, trickling with a bit of fresh blood. Joshua wanted to wipe it clean, but thought better of it. The more visceral a picture he could send Mingyu, the better.
“There. What do you think?” Joshua asked, holding up the second barbell. “Should we complete the set?”
Wonwoo craned his neck to look in the mirror. He didn’t look like someone who filed taxes, anymore. He looked like someone who had a life to live.
Sniffling slightly, Wonwoo nodded.
“Good boy,” Joshua cooed.
At that, he made a noise not dissimilar from when he got tackled to the gravel that first day.
Joshua froze, needle hovering between them.
“What was that?”
Wonwoo’s pupils were enormous under his glasses, tears webbing his lashes like dewdrops on spider silk. He blinked at Joshua and darted his tongue out to wet his lower lip.
Joshua shifted slightly, which made his knee brush against the inner vee of Wonwoo’s thigh, which in turn made Wonwoo let out a low whine.
Heat trickled down Joshua’s spine.
“You cannot be serious right,” he hissed, willing his face back to its normal colour. Wonwoo’s face was flushed and blotchy as the skin around his newly adorned chest.
“I’m sorry,” Wonwoo choked, voice strained.
“Don’t apologize, for fuck’s sake,” Joshua snapped. This was quickly crossing into a different territory. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No, it’s fine.”
He didn’t look fine. He looked horribly, incorrigibly turned on.
“What would Mingyu say? If he saw you like this?”
He wiped down the needle with alcohol and pinched Wonwoo’s other nipple. His breath came in short, erratic bursts.
Joshua plucked a hand towel off the railing, balled it up, and stuffed it between Wonwoo’s lips.
“Bite down on this. It’ll only hurt for a second.”
Wonwoo gave as easily as softened butter, and a coil of white hot rope knotted in Joshua’s stomach.
The second pass of the needle made a fresh wave of tears cut down Wonwoo’s face, and Joshua ignored the way it set him alight, the stifled little noises lighting up his nerve endings like a switchboard. He brandished his camera and took a photo before Wonwoo could blink his tears away, two bloody barbells shining under the blanched bathroom lights.
Afterwards, he eased the towel out of Wonwoo’s mouth and ran it under hot water, wringing it damp. Carefully, Joshua wiped the tear tracks off his face, then the blood off his chest, his own face level with his sternum.
When he looked up, Wonwoo was blinking back at him, eyes wet and mouth soft, and Joshua had the sudden, overwhelming urge to kiss him.
It hit him like a Mack truck, knocking the breath straight out of his lungs.
“You’d better clean up,” he said instead, throat tight. He forced himself to stand up on unsteady feet, to walk out the bathroom and shut the door behind him.
He heard the tap turning on a few moments later. It took Wonwoo another half hour to emerge, but by that point, Joshua was already gone.