Work Text:
The first time Chan noticed Jeongin’s profile, it was 12:53 a.m.
Not because he had spent hours mindlessly swiping through a dating app, determined to find someone who might miraculously fix his life, but because he had just come back from a twelve-hour studio session and was tired in the particular way that made sleep impossible.
It happened more often than he liked to admit.
His body would be exhausted, every muscle heavy with the kind of fatigue that should have knocked him out the second he got home, but his mind never seemed to get the message. It kept moving long after everything else had shut down. Melodies repeated themselves in his head like they were refusing to be left behind. Half-finished lyrics hovered just out of reach. Sometimes he’d spend an entire train ride replaying the same ten seconds of a track, convinced there was one missing detail keeping it from becoming what it was supposed to be.
Tonight had been no different.
He got home a little after midnight, dropped his keys onto the kitchen counter, and stood in front of the refrigerator for a full minute before deciding he wasn’t hungry enough to deal with food. There were leftovers in plastic containers, a bottle of water, and half a carton of milk that was probably expired. He closed the door without taking anything out.
The apartment was quiet.
It was always quiet.
Not peaceful quiet, either. Not warm, comfortable silence. Just the kind that settled into the walls and stayed there, waiting for him every night. Sometimes Chan wondered if anyone else in the building even knew he lived there. He left in the late afternoon, came back past midnight, and on bad days didn’t come back at all until sunrise. Even when he worked from home, he spent most of his time shut inside the spare room he’d turned into a studio, surrounded by cables and speakers and half-empty coffee cups.
There wasn’t much space in that kind of life for meeting people.
Not anymore.
That fact hadn’t bothered him for a long time. He liked being alone, or at least he’d gotten very good at telling himself he did. It was easier that way. Simpler. Work gave him a schedule, a purpose, an excuse. There was always another deadline, another session, another reason not to think too hard about what the rest of his life looked like outside of it.
Recently, though, the silence had started to feel different.
Less like solitude.
More like absence.
Maybe that was why, on a random Thursday night while standing barefoot in his kitchen, he found himself opening a dating app he had downloaded three days ago and barely touched.
He wasn’t expecting much from it.
A few conversations, maybe. A date if he was lucky. More likely an hour of scrolling until he got bored enough to go brush his teeth and pretend he was going to sleep.
Most of the profiles blurred together almost immediately.
Too polished. Too calculated. Too obviously written with the hope of sounding effortless. The same angles, the same carefully curated jokes, the same bios that managed to say almost nothing with an impressive number of words.
Then he stopped.
The profile on his screen was unexpectedly ordinary.
And because of that, it stood out.
Jeongin.
His photos didn’t look staged. In one, he was sitting beside a river in a sweatshirt, smiling at something outside the frame instead of the camera. In another, he was holding a handmade card covered in crooked little drawings and stickers, looking mildly embarrassed about it. There was one blurry picture in a classroom, half his face cut off, sunlight catching on the edge of his hair.
Chan frowned at the screen.
Teacher? he guessed immediately.
Maybe.
There was something easy about the way Jeongin smiled, something unguarded. Not the kind of smile people practiced because they knew it photographed well. The kind that appeared before they remembered they were being looked at.
Before he could think too hard about it, Chan swiped right.
The screen changed instantly.
It’s a Match!
He blinked.
“Well,” he said out loud to his empty kitchen, “that was fast.”
For a second, he considered closing the app and pretending the whole thing had never happened. That would probably be the smarter choice. He had no idea how to flirt with strangers online. He wasn’t even sure he knew how to flirt in person.
Still, after a moment, he opened the chat.
He stared at the blank message box for so long it became ridiculous. His thumb hovered over the keyboard. He typed something, deleted it, typed something else, deleted that too. Finally, running out of patience with himself, he sent the first thought that felt remotely natural.
You look like someone who reminds people about homework.
The message went through.
Chan closed his eyes.
That was terrible.
Actually terrible.
Not charming, not clever, not even properly funny. Just weird enough to sound like he’d lost a bet with himself.
He was already reaching for the button that would let him exit the conversation when three dots appeared.
A reply.
That’s concerning because I’m literally a primary school teacher.
Chan laughed.
Not the polite kind of laugh people gave when something was mildly amusing. He actually laughed, head falling back slightly, alone in his kitchen at one in the morning while the refrigerator hummed behind him.
“Okay,” he said quietly, looking at the screen. “Maybe not terrible.”
And just like that, the conversation began.
On the other side of the city, Jeongin was sitting at his dining table when the message arrived.
Calling it a dining table at this point was generous. It had stopped functioning as one months ago. Now it was mostly a place where papers went to multiply. Worksheets, spelling quizzes, sticky notes, lesson plans, a half-finished mug of tea gone cold hours ago. There was barely enough empty space left for his phone.
He’d been halfway through grading a stack of tests when it buzzed against the wood.
Normally, he ignored notifications while working. If he checked one, he’d check five, and then nothing would get done. Tonight, though, he glanced down anyway, mostly because the app icon startled him.
He had downloaded the dating app three days earlier after being bullied into it by a friend over dinner. Since then, he’d opened it a few times, swiped with very little commitment, and mostly forgotten it existed.
The message on his screen made him smile almost immediately.
Not because it was especially smooth.
It wasn’t.
But it was odd in a way that felt genuine, specific. It didn’t read like something copied from the internet or sent to ten other people that same night. It sounded like a real person had looked at his profile and said the first thing that came to mind.
That alone made him curious.
By the time he replied, he was already wondering what kind of person sent messages like that at nearly one in the morning.
That curiosity only grew as the conversation kept going.
Chan was funny in a dry, slightly self-deprecating way, like someone who didn’t fully trust charm and preferred honesty instead. He admitted almost immediately that he had no idea what he was doing on the app. Jeongin admitted he didn’t really know either. Somehow that made it easier.
They talked longer than either of them meant to.
About work, at first. About how children could be both adorable and terrifyingly observant. About how music production sounded glamorous until you realized most of it involved sitting in a dark room for twelve hours trying to fix one line no one else would even notice. About bad coffee and worse schedules.
By the time Jeongin checked the clock, it was almost two-thirty.
He stared at the time, groaned softly, and typed:
I have to wake up in four hours.
Chan replied almost instantly.
That sounds illegal.
I’m a teacher. Illegal is our default state.
Chan sent back a laughing emoji, then:
Sleep before your students stage a revolt.
Jeongin smiled at his phone for a slightly embarrassing amount of time before finally putting it face-down on the table and forcing himself to finish the last of the grading.
The next morning, he arrived at school running on far less sleep than was medically advisable.
Unfortunately, his students noticed immediately.
“Teacher,” one girl announced as she unpacked her pencil case, “you look tired.”
Several heads turned toward him at once.
Jeongin paused by the whiteboard and sighed.
Children, in his experience, did not believe in subtlety. Or mercy.
“Thank you for your concern,” he said.
The girl frowned. “I’m not concerned.”
A beat of silence.
Then Jeongin pressed a hand to his chest. “That’s somehow worse.”
The classroom burst into laughter.
Even he had to smile.
The moment stayed with him for the rest of the day, popping back into his head while he handed out worksheets, or while he broke up a disagreement over colored pencils, or while he stood outside during recess pretending not to be cold.
Later that afternoon, while supervising an art activity involving glue, glitter, and more chaos than any adult should have to manage alone, he pulled out his phone and typed:
One of my students told me I look tired today.
Chan’s response came less than a minute later.
Do you?
Probably.
Then maybe listen to the child.
Jeongin glanced down at the message and smiled.
I don’t like how quickly you sided with her.
Children rarely lie.
That made him laugh quietly enough that one of the students looked up from their paper and asked what was funny.
“Nothing,” Jeongin said, already locking his phone. “Focus on your tree.”
“It’s not a tree,” the child said, offended. “It’s a dragon.”
“Of course it is.”
That became the pattern after that.
Not because either of them tried to make it one. It simply happened the way some things do when they fit too easily to be forced.
They started telling each other about their days in fragments.
Small things, mostly. The kind of details that should have been forgettable but somehow weren’t when sent to the right person.
Jeongin sent stories about his students — the one who ate crayons in kindergarten and had somehow not improved much since, the one who insisted every class plant needed a name, the one who cried because another student drew a better rabbit than he did.
Chan sent stories from the studio — singers who swore they could hear a difference between two identical takes, producers who changed their minds every ten minutes, the weird sense of time loss that happened when he started working and looked up to realize it was suddenly 3 a.m.
At first, they talked for an hour here and there.
Then longer.
Then constantly.
Messages appeared during lunch breaks, between meetings, on the walk home, in elevators, while waiting for coffee, while brushing teeth, while standing in line at convenience stores. Sometimes one of them sent a picture of the sky because the color looked unreal. Sometimes it was a complaint. Sometimes it was a terrible joke neither of them would have admitted was funny to anyone else.
Somehow, the conversation kept going.
And at some point, without either of them noticing exactly when, it stopped feeling like talking to someone new.
Three weeks passed like that.
Three weeks of checking their phones more often than necessary.
Three weeks of learning each other’s routines in the quiet, ordinary way that only happened through repetition.
Chan learned that Jeongin left home before seven every morning and almost always forgot to eat breakfast unless someone reminded him.
Jeongin learned that Chan lost track of time so badly while working that “I’ll reply in five minutes” could mean anything from five actual minutes to three hours.
Chan learned the names of several of Jeongin’s students despite never meeting them.
Jeongin learned which songs Chan secretly hated even when his name was still attached to them.
There were small things, too. Chan preferred convenience store iced coffee over expensive café coffee because at least it didn’t pretend to be good. Jeongin graded faster when he had instrumental music playing in the background. Chan stayed up too late even when he was exhausted. Jeongin talked to himself while cooking and denied it when confronted.
By the end of the third week, something had shifted.
It showed up in the smallest moments.
When Chan heard a line in a song and immediately thought, Jeongin would make fun of this.
When Jeongin saw one of his students say something ridiculous and reached for his phone before the moment had even finished happening.
I should tell him that.
Not a friend.
Not a coworker.
Not family.
Him.
The thought was comforting in a way that felt dangerous.
Because they still hadn’t met.
Not once.
There had been suggestions, vague ones. We should do coffee sometime. Let me know when you’re free. This week is insane but maybe after. None of it had turned into anything concrete. Their schedules refused to line up. Chan’s workdays stretched unpredictably into nights. Jeongin’s were locked into an early morning routine and filled with responsibilities that didn’t disappear just because he wanted them to.
Still, the fact that they hadn’t met didn’t make what was growing between them feel less real.
If anything, it made it stranger.
And maybe a little more fragile.
One Friday evening, Jeongin was walking home after staying late for a school event when his phone vibrated in his pocket. The sky was already dark, the air cool enough to make him pull his jacket closer, and his feet ached in the dull, familiar way they always did after a long day spent standing.
He checked the message at a crosswalk.
Can I ask you something?
A smile touched the corner of his mouth before he could stop it.
Depends.
A second later:
Do you always answer questions with questions?
Yes.
Then:
Anyway. Would you want to get coffee sometime?
Jeongin stopped walking.
People moved around him on the sidewalk, annoyed but polite enough not to say anything. He barely noticed. His eyes stayed fixed on the screen while something quick and nervous kicked once in his chest.
It was ridiculous, really. They had been talking every day for weeks. He had known this question was coming eventually. He’d probably been waiting for it.
Even so, the sight of it made his heart beat faster.
Slowly, helplessly, he smiled.
I was wondering when you’d ask.
The typing bubble appeared almost immediately, disappeared, then came back.
Is that a yes?
Jeongin’s smile widened.
It’s definitely a yes.
For the next ten minutes they tried, with increasingly bad luck, to plan an actual date.
Saturday didn’t work because Jeongin had a family obligation in the afternoon and Chan had a studio booking that might run late.
Sunday was impossible.
Tuesday looked promising for nearly thirty seconds until Chan remembered a deadline.
Thursday died because Jeongin had parent meetings after school.
By the time they gave up, no coffee date had been scheduled at all.
Oddly, neither of them felt disappointed enough to ruin the mood.
Because the answer had still been yes.
Because they both knew they would try again.
Because whatever this was between them had already become part of their days, woven in too tightly to be dismissed by a few scheduling conflicts.
Later that night, after changing into comfortable clothes and dropping onto his couch with a groan, Jeongin looked down at his phone and saw one final message from Chan.
We’re weirdly bad at this.
He laughed softly and typed back:
At planning?
At meeting like normal people.
Jeongin leaned his head against the couch and smiled at the screen.
We’ll get there.
A minute passed.
Then:
Yeah, Chan replied. I think we will.
And somehow that was enough.
Because tomorrow morning, like every morning lately, one of them would send the first message.
Something small.
Something ordinary.
Something only the other person would understand why it mattered.
The conversation wasn’t ending.
If anything, it was becoming harder and harder to imagine what their days had looked like before it started.
Now a month later, late at night, Chan couldn’t sleep.
He tried, briefly.
He changed into an old T-shirt, turned off the lights, lay down on top of the blankets, and stared at the ceiling for ten whole minutes before accepting what he already knew. Sleep was not going to happen. Not with his mind this loud. Not with Jeongin still sitting somewhere under his skin like a thought he couldn’t set down.
So he gave up.
A few minutes later, he was out on the balcony with a cigarette between his fingers, leaning one shoulder against the cold wall and looking out over the city.
The night was black in the heavy, complete way it only became after everyone else had gone to bed. Most of the windows in the building across from his were dark. Somewhere nearby, the wind kept rattling against a loose metal awning, sharp and irregular, the sound carrying strangely well in the silence. It made the whole neighborhood feel emptier than it really was.
Chan took a slow drag and let the smoke leave his mouth in a thin stream.
The air still carried that early spring cold that never felt clean or hopeful the way people liked to pretend it did. It was raw. Restless. The kind of weather that slipped under sleeves and collars and stayed there. Somewhere down the street, a cat let out a long, miserable cry, and a second one answered from farther away.
He looked down at his phone again.
No new message.
Not that he was expecting one. It was late. Jeongin woke up before seven every morning, which meant he was probably asleep already, curled under his blankets with his phone charging on the nightstand, completely unaware that Chan was outside losing his mind over something as simple as missing him.
Missing him.
Chan exhaled sharply through his nose, almost laughing at himself.
It was ridiculous, wasn’t it?
They hadn’t even met yet.
If anyone asked, he wouldn’t know how to explain it in a way that didn’t sound slightly pathetic. That he had grown attached to someone through screenshots and voice notes and badly timed messages between meetings. That a person he had never stood beside in real life had somehow become the first thing he looked for in the morning and the last thing still on his mind at night.
But it didn’t feel ridiculous now.
It felt worse than that.
It felt real.
He tipped his head back and stared at the dark sky above him. No stars. Just the dull glow of city light bleeding upward, making everything look flatter than it should have.
For the past few weeks, the phone had been enough.
Jeongin’s messages showing up in the middle of the day. Photos of children’s drawings spread across a desk. Complaints about paperwork. A blurry picture of the sky on his walk home. The sound of his laugh in short voice clips that Chan replayed more often than he would ever admit out loud.
It had all felt surprisingly full for something so small.
Until now.
Now the distance inside it was starting to show.
Chan looked at the screen again, at the last few messages still sitting there from earlier.
He wanted more than this.
Not in some dramatic, impossible sense. Not all at once. He wasn’t building a fantasy in his head about forever or fate or any of the other things people said when they wanted to make feelings sound bigger than they were.
He just wanted to see him.
For real.
Wanted to know if Jeongin smiled the same way in person as he did in photos. Wanted to hear his voice without speakers flattening it. Wanted to sit across from him in a café and watch him wrap both hands around a coffee cup while he talked. Wanted to see what happened to his face right before he laughed.
Or really anything.
Because lately, the messages arrived and left him with an ache they didn’t know how to fix. The blue light of the screen, once comforting, had started to feel thin. Temporary. It gave him Jeongin in pieces, but never fully. Never in the way Chan had begun to want without meaning to.
He took another drag, slower this time.
The smoke stung slightly on the way down. He welcomed it.
His eyes drifted back toward the apartment window, where his own dark reflection faintly stared back at him. Tired face. Messy hair. Cigarette burning low between his fingers. A man standing alone on a balcony after one in the morning, thinking about someone he couldn’t reach.
He wondered what Jeongin was doing right now.
Sleeping, probably.
Maybe one arm under the pillow. Maybe the blankets kicked halfway down because he got too warm in the middle of the night. Maybe his phone on silent. Maybe his face soft with sleep in a way Chan had never seen but kept trying, uselessly, to imagine.
The thought settled warm and painful in his chest.
And then, because his mind had a mean streak when he was tired, another thought followed close behind.
What if Jeongin didn’t miss him like this?
What if Chan was the only one standing out in the cold at one in the morning, wanting more than messages, more than schedules that never aligned, more than half-made plans and “soon”.
What if Chan was the only one standing out in the cold at one in the morning, wanting more than messages, more than schedules that never aligned, more than half-made plans and “soon” and “when things calm down”?
What if Jeongin was asleep and peaceful and not thinking of him at all?
Chan shut his eyes briefly and rubbed at them with the heel of his hand.
He hated this part.
The uncertainty.
The way every quiet moment let doubt crawl in.
They talked every day. Jeongin said yes. Jeongin kept replying, kept making space for him.
None of that should have left room for this kind of insecurity, and yet there it was anyway, sour and stubborn and impossible to reason with at this hour.
He flicked ash over the railing and listened to it disappear.
The wind shifted. Somewhere below, another cat cried out, long and sharp enough to sound almost human.
Chan laughed quietly under his breath.
“Great,” he muttered. “Even the neighborhood is suffering.”
His voice vanished into the dark.
He looked at the cigarette in his hand, then at the city beyond the balcony, all concrete shadows and dim streetlights and the occasional passing headlights cutting briefly across the road. There was something restless in him tonight, something that refused to stay contained. If the city had put a locked gate in front of him right then, he thought he might have climbed it without even stopping to ask why.
That was the problem.
He was tired of waiting for the right time.
Tired of acting like this didn’t matter yet just because it was still new.
Tired of pretending the phone was enough when it wasn’t.
Because it wasn’t.
It really, truly wasn’t.
Chan crushed the cigarette out in the ashtray balanced on the balcony ledge and stood there for another moment without moving.
Then he looked down at his phone again.
Still nothing.
The screen lit his face pale blue in the dark, and for once he didn’t find it comforting. He thought of all the nights they had spent talking through that light, all the things they had managed to build through it, and still it felt unbearably insufficient now. A poor substitute. A fragile little bridge stretched over a distance he was suddenly desperate to cross.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he opened their chat.
For a few seconds, he only stared.
Then he typed.
Are you awake?
He hesitated.
Deleted it.
Too needy.
He tried again.
This is random, but I miss you.
He stared at that one even longer.
Still too much, maybe.
Still too honest.
His thumb hovered over the screen.
Then, with a tiredness that felt a little like courage, he added one more line.
I think I’m at the point where texting you doesn’t feel like enough anymore. I really want to see you.
Chan looked at it, pulse suddenly louder than the wind.
For one second, he thought about erasing the whole thing.
Instead, he hit send.
The message went through.
There was nothing to do after that except wait.
He slipped his phone into his pocket, leaned both hands on the railing, and let the cold night press against him from all sides. The wind kept shaking the metal somewhere overhead. The street stayed empty. The cats eventually fell silent.
Behind him, his apartment was still dark.
In front of him, the city stretched on, sleepless and distant.
And somewhere in it, Jeongin was there.
Real.
Not far in any way that actually mattered.
For the first time all night, Chan let himself believe that wanting more did not automatically make him foolish.
Maybe it only meant he had finally stopped lying to himself.
Jeongin didn’t see Chan’s message until the next morning.
He woke to the muted vibration of his alarm, reached blindly across the nightstand to shut it off, and lay there for a few seconds longer than he should have, still half asleep and reluctant to leave the warmth of his blankets.
His room was washed in the thin gray light of early morning. The kind that made everything look softer and colder at the same time.
He squinted at his phone.
There were the usual notifications — a message from a coworker, an email he immediately decided to ignore, a weather alert he didn’t care about — and then Chan’s name.
Jeongin sat up a little straighter before he had even fully processed why.
He opened the chat.
This is random, but I miss you.
Then:
I think I’m at the point where texting you doesn’t feel like enough anymore. I really want to see you.
For a moment, Jeongin only stared.
Sleep fell away all at once.
There was something about the honesty of it that hit him harder than anything smoother or more carefully phrased ever could have. Chan had never really hidden himself behind charm. Even in the beginning, there had been something disarmingly direct about him, as if he would rather risk sounding awkward than say something he didn’t mean.
This was exactly like that.
And maybe that was why Jeongin’s chest tightened so quickly around it.
Because he had been feeling the same thing for days now. Maybe longer.
The slow-growing frustration of finishing a long day and only having a screen. The strange ache of laughing at something and not having Chan there to see it. The way every conversation seemed to make him want the next one more, not less.
Jeongin pressed his lips together, then typed back before he could overthink it.
You sent this at one in the morning, so first of all, sleep is important and you should try it sometime.
He paused.
Then added:
Second, I miss you too.
And after another second:
And for the record, texting you hasn’t felt like enough for me in a while either.
He looked at that for a moment, heart beating a little too fast for a weekday morning, then sent it.
Almost immediately, the typing bubble appeared.
Jeongin blinked.
Why are you awake? Chan wrote.
A laugh escaped him before he could stop it.
Why are you?
I have not slept yet, so technically this is still the same emotional crisis.
Jeongin smiled despite himself and swung his legs out of bed.
That’s deeply concerning.
You like me anyway.
His smile widened.
Unfortunately, yes.
There was a pause after that, longer than the others, and when Chan replied, the message was simpler than Jeongin expected.
Good.
Something warm settled low in Jeongin’s chest.
He got up after that, moving through the start of his morning with more energy than usual. He brushed his teeth while rereading the conversation. Burned the first piece of toast because he was smiling at his phone instead of paying attention. Nearly forgot his bag by the door.
Before he left, another message came through.
Let me know when you get to school so I know you didn’t wander into traffic while distracted.
Jeongin shook his head.
You say that like you aren’t the one awake after not sleeping at all.
Deflection. Answer the question when you get there.
By the time Jeongin stepped out into the morning air, he was still smiling.
The day itself, however, had other plans.
It started normally enough. First period. Spelling. A minor argument over markers. One child announcing with absolute sincerity that he hated adjectives. Another asking whether worms had feelings. By lunchtime, Jeongin had already broken up two disagreements, confiscated a paper airplane, and been told by a seven-year-old that his handwriting looked “stressed.”
Then, halfway through the afternoon, the heating system in one wing of the building gave out with a sound loud enough to make half the class jump. What followed was thirty minutes of confusion, teachers being sent from one office to another, a maintenance worker with a ladder, and eventually an announcement that several after-school activities were canceled while the school sorted things out.
Which meant, for once, Jeongin got to go home early.
Not early enough to call it restful, but early enough to feel strange.
He texted Chan while packing up his desk.
School is kicking me out early because the building is falling apart.
Chan replied a few minutes later.
Finally, a reward for your service.
That feels disrespectful to educators everywhere.
I’m sure they’ll recover.
Jeongin smiled, slid his phone back into his pocket, and headed home.
At nearly the same time, on the other side of the city, Chan was also leaving work earlier than usual.
One of the sessions scheduled for late afternoon had been canceled at the last minute after an artist lost their voice, and for once there was no immediate disaster waiting to fill the gap. His first instinct had been to stay anyway, to find something else to fix, something else to polish, because he rarely knew what to do with unexpected free time.
Instead, after staring at the studio monitor for a long moment, he shut everything down and left.
It felt unnatural.
Wrong, almost.
The city outside was still bright with the tail end of afternoon. People moved with purpose along the sidewalks. Cafés were busy. Someone nearby was laughing too loudly into their phone. Chan kept checking the time like he had missed something important.
He texted Jeongin while waiting at a crosswalk.
Session got canceled. I’m going home at a normal human hour. I don’t know who I am anymore.
Jeongin’s reply came as Chan stepped onto the street.
Maybe this is your healing journey.
Don’t say things like that to me.
Go enjoy the sunlight while it lasts.
By the time Chan reached his building, the wind had picked up again, cool and sharp against the back of his neck. He shoved one hand into his pocket, fished for his keys with the other, and pulled open the outer door to the stairwell.
And froze.
Someone was standing directly on the other side.
A familiar face.
Soft brown hair slightly messy from the wind. A dark bag over one shoulder. The same eyes Chan had seen in photos and imagined a hundred different ways, now widening in startled recognition.
Jeongin.
For one blank, unbelievable second, Chan’s brain stopped functioning.
He stared.
Jeongin stared back.
And then, purely out of shock and absolutely no conscious thought at all, Chan let go of the handle.
The door swung shut.
Directly in Jeongin’s face.
There was a beat of silence.
Then the door opened again from the inside.
Jeongin stood there looking equally startled and deeply offended.
“Did you just shut the door on me?”
Chan blinked at him.
“I—” He stopped. Tried again. “I didn’t mean to.”
Jeongin’s mouth twitched.
“You looked right at me and closed it.”
“I panicked.”
At that, Jeongin laughed.
Actually laughed, the sound bright and warm and so unmistakably his that Chan felt it somewhere in the center of his chest.
For a second neither of them moved.
It was absurd, really. They were just standing in the entrance of an apartment building with the door half open between them, both looking at each other like the universe had made some kind of clerical error.
Chan was the first to speak, though only barely.
“You—”
Jeongin lifted his eyebrows. “I?”
“You live here?”
There was still a trace of laughter in Jeongin’s face when he answered. “Apparently so, yes.”
“In this building.”
“Yes, Chan.”
Chan stared at him for another second, then rubbed a hand over his face.
“No, because that’s insane.”
“I mean,” Jeongin said, “I was going to say the same thing, but then you assaulted me with a door, so I got distracted.”
“I said I panicked.”
“You did.”
“And you’re making it worse.”
“I’m enjoying myself.”
That should have felt awkward.
It should have felt surreal, standing there with someone he had never technically met and yet somehow knew so well. There should have been hesitation, some stiffness, some awareness of being strangers in a way that mattered.
Instead, there wasn’t.
The shock was real, but underneath it was something stranger and softer: immediate familiarity.
Jeongin looked exactly like himself.
Not like a profile. Not like a voice note turned into a body. Just himself, completely and plainly, as though Chan’s mind had already known where to put him. The line of his mouth when he was trying not to smile too much. The way he shifted his weight slightly to one side. The calm steadiness in his eyes, even now.
And apparently Chan looked enough like Chan that Jeongin’s expression had already eased into something fond and recognizable too.
It was the oddest thing in the world.
It felt less like meeting.
More like catching up.
“You really live here,” Chan said again, like if he repeated it enough it might become less ridiculous.
Jeongin leaned one shoulder against the inside wall of the entryway and folded his arms loosely. “Third floor.”
Chan let out a short, disbelieving laugh. “I’m on four.”
That made Jeongin go still for half a second.
Then: “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was.”
They stared at each other.
Then both started laughing at the same time.
It wasn’t graceful laughter. There was too much disbelief in it, too much what are the chances and how did this never happen and are you serious. Jeongin had to catch the edge of the door with one hand because he was laughing too hard to stand properly. Chan bent forward slightly, shaking his head.
“This whole time?” Jeongin asked.
“This whole time,” Chan said.
“How have we never—”
“I leave at horrible hours.”
“So do I, apparently.”
“I guess we were committed to the bit.”
Jeongin smiled at him, softer now. “That’s one way to put it.”
The laughter faded, but the ease stayed.
The air between them settled quickly into something warm and unforced. Chan noticed it all at once — how little effort it took to stand there with him, how natural it felt to keep looking at his face, how none of the usual first-meeting tension seemed to survive more than a few seconds in Jeongin’s presence.
It was there for Jeongin too, if the expression on his face meant anything.
He looked at Chan the way people looked at someone already known. Not cautiously. Not carefully. Just openly, like he had skipped past the stranger part somewhere along the way and only now realized it.
“I can’t believe this,” Jeongin said quietly.
Chan smiled before he meant to. “Which part?”
“The part where I’ve been missing someone who lives one floor above me.”
That landed somewhere deep.
Chan’s smile changed, softened around the edges.
“Yeah,” he said. “That part’s a lot.”
For a second they only looked at each other.
Outside, a car passed. Somewhere higher up in the building, someone dropped something heavy enough to make a dull thud through the walls. The stairwell light buzzed faintly overhead.
Normal sounds.
Ordinary.
And still the moment felt suspended, oddly private in the middle of it all.
Jeongin adjusted the strap of his bag on his shoulder. “So.”
“So,” Chan echoed.
“We finally met.”
Chan glanced meaningfully at the door between them. “After I almost sent you back.”
“I’m choosing to see that as nerves.”
“That’s generous.”
“I’m a teacher. I’m very patient with difficult people.”
Chan gave him a flat look. “You’re enjoying this way too much.”
“A little.”
He was.
And somehow that only made Chan feel more at ease.
The smile on Jeongin’s face was familiar enough now that Chan already knew what it meant — gentle teasing, no edge to it, just affection dressed up as annoyance. Seeing it in person should have changed the feeling. Instead it only made everything click into place more firmly.
“I was on my way up,” Jeongin said after a moment, “but this feels like a ridiculous place for our first real conversation.”
Chan glanced toward the stairs, then back at him. “Do you want to—”
He stopped, suddenly aware of how easy this had all become.
Jeongin waited.
Chan tried again. “I don’t know. Go somewhere? Since apparently we failed at planning like normal people.”
Jeongin smiled immediately, like he had been hoping for exactly that.
“I’d like that.”
There was no dramatic pause after it. No embarrassment. No need to pretend either of them needed time to think.
They simply turned together toward the stairs as if they had done it before.
And maybe, in some strange way, they had.
Chan held the inner door open this time, very deliberately.
Jeongin passed by him with a quiet laugh. “Learning from your mistakes. Good.”
“I’m trying to recover my image.”
“I don’t think you had one left.”
“Harsh.”
But he was smiling when he said it.
They started up the stairs side by side, neither too close nor awkwardly far apart. Comfortable from the first step, like old acquaintances falling back into conversation after missing each other for a while rather than two people navigating a first meeting. Jeongin told him about the heating system disaster at school. Chan told him about the canceled session. Their timing overlapped, interrupted, resumed — easy, instinctive, already familiar.
On the landing between floors, Jeongin glanced at him and shook his head slightly, still sounding amused.
“You know what’s bothering me?”
“What?”
“That all those nights we were texting each other, you were probably just upstairs.”
Chan huffed a laugh. “Don’t say that like I committed a personal offense.”
“You kind of did.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Exactly,” Jeongin said. “Rude.”
Chan looked at him for a second, then smiled in that helpless, unguarded way he rarely did around other people.
Jeongin smiled back without hesitation.
And there it was again — that immediate, impossible comfort. Not forced. Not imagined. Just real.
Like they had been making room for each other for weeks, and now their bodies had finally caught up.
In the end, they didn’t go anywhere at all.
By the time they reached the third-floor landing, the original idea of leaving the building already felt unnecessary, almost absurd. The whole city was outside if they wanted it, cafés and convenience stores and streets full of people, but after the shock of finding each other in the stairwell, neither of them seemed especially interested in being anywhere public.
It was Jeongin who looked up first when they reached the fourth floor.
“So,” he said, glancing toward Chan’s door. “Are you going to invite me in, or are you planning to shut another door in my face?”
Chan laughed under his breath as he unlocked it.
“I’m never recovering from that, am I?”
“Probably not.”
“That’s fair.”
The apartment was exactly how Jeongin had imagined it and not at all.
It was tidy in the way of someone who didn’t spend much time thinking about tidiness but hated visible chaos enough to control it. Shoes lined up near the door. A dark jacket thrown over the back of a chair. A stack of notebooks on the counter beside a pair of headphones and a mug that had probably been forgotten hours ago. The place was quiet in that familiar, self-contained way some apartments were, carrying the faint hum of the refrigerator and little else.
And then there was the room off to the side with the half-open door.
Jeongin only needed one glance to know it was the studio.
A keyboard. Monitors. Wires. A microphone stand pushed into the corner. The kind of space built slowly, piece by piece, around long nights and habits no one else ever really saw.
Chan noticed where he was looking.
“Don’t judge me,” he said, toeing off his shoes. “It looks worse when I’m in the middle of working.”
“I wasn’t judging you.”
“You were absolutely judging me.”
Jeongin smiled as he slipped off his own shoes by the door. “I was being observant. There’s a difference.”
Chan gave him a look, but he was still smiling too.
“Tea?” he asked a second later, already moving toward the kitchen.
Jeongin leaned one shoulder against the counter. “You drink tea?”
“No,” Chan said, opening a cabinet. “But I’m capable of offering it to guests because I was raised correctly.”
“That’s surprisingly noble.”
“Don’t sound so shocked.”
“I’m still processing the fact that you exist outside my phone.”
That earned him a brief glance over Chan’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” Chan said quietly. “Me too.”
For a moment neither of them said anything.
Then Chan reached for the kettle, and the ordinary sound of running water filled the kitchen.
It should have felt strange, Jeongin thought. Standing in this apartment, watching Chan move around the space with easy familiarity, seeing the private shape of his life in little details that had never fit into messages. It should have made him more aware of the fact that this was new.
Instead, it only made the whole thing settle deeper.
The version of Chan he knew through texts and late-night conversations was here, fully intact. Dry humor. Slightly tired eyes. The habit of speaking like every sentence had been run through one last filter to remove anything too polished. Nothing about him felt different in person.
Just closer.
“Do you actually have tea,” Jeongin asked after a moment, “or are you hoping something appears if you keep opening cabinets?”
Chan held up two boxes with a faintly defensive expression. “I have options.”
Jeongin looked impressed. “You have chamomile.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“That’s not the phrase I would’ve used.”
“Still rude,” Chan muttered.
Jeongin laughed softly, and the sound seemed to settle into the apartment like it belonged there.
A few minutes later they ended up on the balcony, each holding a mug warm between their hands.
The night had deepened while they were inside. It wasn’t quite as cold as the night before, but the wind still carried that early spring sharpness, enough to make Jeongin tuck one hand deeper into the sleeve of his sweater when he wasn’t using it. Below them, the street was mostly quiet. A few windows across the block still glowed dimly. Somewhere in the distance, a car passed and faded.
This time Chan wasn’t standing there alone with a cigarette and too many thoughts.
This time Jeongin was beside him, leaning against the railing, his tea cooling slowly in his hands.
For a while, they simply talked.
Not in the desperate, overly careful way people sometimes did when they wanted a moment to be important. There was no performance in it, no pressure to make their first real time together memorable in any obvious way. They just slipped into conversation as naturally as they always had, only now there was no screen between them to soften the pauses.
Jeongin told him more about the heating disaster at school and how one of the children had asked if the building was “dying.” Chan laughed so hard he nearly spilled his tea. Chan told him how often sessions got canceled for ridiculous reasons and admitted that at least twice in the past year someone had blamed “creative energy” when they were really just late.
“You work with dramatic people,” Jeongin said.
“I work with musicians.”
“That was implied.”
They talked about neighbors they had apparently both ignored for months. About how strange it was that their routines had managed to miss each other so completely.
The conversation drifted for a while after that, easy and unhurried, until a quieter pause settled between them.
Not awkward.
Just soft.
The kind that didn’t need filling immediately.
Chan looked down into his mug, then out over the street below. His fingers shifted once against the warm ceramic before he cleared his throat lightly.
“Can I ask you something?”
Jeongin turned toward him. “You can.”
Chan hesitated, which in itself made Jeongin pay closer attention.
It was such a small pause, but noticeable — the slight tightening in his shoulders, the way his gaze dropped briefly toward the balcony floor before lifting again.
“I usually smoke out here,” Chan said. “When I can’t sleep. Or when I’m thinking too much.” He gave a faint, self-aware huff of a laugh. “Which is most of the time, honestly.”
Jeongin listened without interrupting.
Chan glanced at him, then away again. “I’m not going to if you don’t want me to. I just—” He stopped, searching for the right wording. “I don’t want to assume you’d be okay with it just because it’s my balcony.”
Something in Jeongin’s expression softened immediately.
There was something unexpectedly careful in the question. Not performative. Not overly polite in a way that begged to be noticed. Just genuine consideration, quiet and instinctive, and somehow that touched him more than it probably should have.
“You can,” Jeongin said.
Chan looked at him properly then, like he was checking he meant it.
“I don’t mind,” Jeongin added. “Really.”
“You’re sure?”
Jeongin smiled a little. “Chan, if I wasn’t sure, I’d tell you.”
That made something in Chan’s face ease.
“Right,” he said softly. “Okay.”
He set his mug down on the small table near the door and reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out a cigarette pack and a lighter. Even that was oddly familiar somehow, though Jeongin had never actually seen him do it before. Maybe because he could so easily imagine it — Chan alone on this same balcony, shoulders hunched against the cold, smoke rising into the dark while his thoughts refused to quiet down.
Now, though, he wasn’t alone.
Chan lit the cigarette, the brief flare of orange catching against the night, then stepped half a pace farther toward the railing like he was still making an effort to keep the smoke away from Jeongin.
Jeongin noticed.
Of course he did.
“You don’t have to stand all the way over there,” he said.
Chan glanced sideways at him. “I’m being considerate.”
“You’re being dramatic.”
“I think you’ll find I work with dramatic people. It’s rubbed off.”
Jeongin laughed softly into his tea.
The smoke curled upward in thin, pale lines, disappearing almost as quickly as it appeared. For a few moments neither of them spoke. The city stretched quietly below them, and the wind shifted just enough to carry the faint smell of tobacco through the cold air.
It should have made the moment feel rougher somehow.
Instead, it only made it more real.
Jeongin leaned his elbows lightly against the railing and looked ahead. “Do you do this often?”
Chan took a slow drag before answering. “More often than I should.”
“When you can’t sleep?”
“When I can’t stop thinking.”
Jeongin glanced at him. “Those are different problems.”
Chan smiled faintly, cigarette balanced between his fingers. “Not for me.”
For a second Jeongin just watched him.
The city lights caught the side of his face in fragments — the line of his nose, the tired curve beneath his eyes, the thoughtful set of his mouth as he exhaled. There was something unguarded about him like this. Less polished than during their messages, less protected somehow. Maybe because there was no time to hide inside a screen, no chance to rewrite a sentence before sending it.
Just this.
A balcony.
A dark sky.
The sound of their breathing between words.
Jeongin lowered his gaze to the street again. “Were you out here last night too?”
Chan was quiet for a beat.
Then, “Yeah.”
Jeongin nodded slightly, not because the answer surprised him, but because hearing it out loud made something in his chest pull tighter.
“I thought so.”
Chan looked at him then, more directly than before. “How?”
Jeongin smiled without looking back yet. “Because of the message.”
That got a quiet laugh out of him, though there was no real humor in it.
“Was it that obvious?”
“A little.”
“Embarrassing.”
“Not really.”
Chan said nothing to that.
When Jeongin finally turned his head, Chan was already looking at him, the cigarette burning quietly between two fingers, his expression softer than it had any right to be.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Jeongin said, quietly and simply, “I’m glad you texted me anyway.”
Something shifted in Chan’s face at that.
Small.
But unmistakable.
He looked away first, like he needed the distance of the street below to absorb the feeling.
“I almost didn’t,” he admitted.
“Why?”
Chan let out a slow breath, smoke disappearing into the dark. “Because it felt like too much.”
Jeongin studied him for a second. “It wasn’t.”
“No?”
“No.”
Chan looked back at him then.
And because the night had already made them honest, because there was no real point pretending anymore, Jeongin added, “If anything, it was late.”
That made Chan smile.
Not the dry, quick smile he used when he wanted to deflect.
Something warmer.
Something that stayed.
He took one last drag, then leaned down to stub the cigarette out carefully in the ashtray near the railing. When he straightened again, the space between them felt even quieter than before, but not empty.
Settled.
Easy.
Like they had somehow stepped into a moment that had already been waiting for them.
Chan picked his mug up again, now only lukewarm, and leaned beside Jeongin at the railing.
Below them, the street remained mostly still. Above them, the night stretched dark and open.
And standing there together — tea cooling in their hands, the faint trace of smoke still in the air, conversation slipping in and out as naturally as breathing — they no longer felt like two people having their first real evening together.
They felt like something else.
Something older.
Something already known.
For a while, neither of them said anything.
The city stretched quietly below them, all dim streetlights and dark windows, but the balcony suddenly felt smaller than before. Not closed in. Just narrowed, as if the night had drawn itself tightly around the two of them and left everything else somewhere far away.
Chan was still standing close now, one hand wrapped around his mug, the other resting against the railing. Jeongin could feel the warmth of him even through the cold air. It should have been easy to ignore. It should have been simple to let the moment stay soft, familiar, safe.
Instead, every second seemed to sharpen his awareness of him.
The line of Chan’s mouth when he went quiet.
The tiredness in his eyes, softened now by something warmer.
The faint smell of smoke still clinging to his clothes, mixing with clean night air and tea.
It was too much and not enough at the same time.
And judging by the way Chan was looking at him, Jeongin had the sudden, unsteady feeling that he wasn’t the only one struggling with it.
Neither of them said it out loud, but it was there.
The pull.
Immediate. Heavy. Almost embarrassing in its strength.
They had only just met properly. They both knew that. Knew how reckless it would look from the outside, how easily it could be called too fast, too soon, too much for a first real evening standing together on a balcony.
But wanting did not become smaller just because it was inconvenient.
If anything, it only seemed to grow in the silence.
Jeongin swallowed.
Chan’s gaze dropped, just for a moment, to his mouth.
That was enough.
Not because it decided anything for them, but because it made the truth impossible to ignore. The air between them changed all at once, charged with something no joke could soften now. Something low and aching and difficult to pretend away.
“Chan,” Jeongin said quietly.
He wasn’t even sure what he meant to say after that.
Maybe slow down.
Maybe this is a bad idea.
Maybe come closer.
Chan looked at him like he’d heard all three.
For one second, he seemed to stop himself. Jeongin could see it happen — the restraint, the hesitation, the part of him still trying to be careful because they were here too soon, because this was their first night, because there were still a hundred reasons to wait.
Then Jeongin stepped closer anyway.
Just enough to erase the last excuse.
Chan let out a breath that sounded almost unsteady.
“This feels early,” he said, voice low.
“It is,” Jeongin admitted.
Neither of them moved back.
The honesty of it seemed to make the tension worse, not better. Now that it had been named, it was everywhere. In the closeness. In the way Chan’s hand tightened once around the mug before he set it down. In the way Jeongin’s pulse had climbed high enough that he could feel it in his throat.
“It probably shouldn’t,” Chan said softly, though it was obvious from the look on his face that he was no longer convincing himself.
“No,” Jeongin said, and then, even quieter, “probably not.”
But the words had no force behind them.
Not when Chan was standing there looking at him like wanting him had already become a problem.
Not when Jeongin felt exactly the same.
When Chan lifted his hand, it was slow enough to stop, careful enough to still be a question. His fingers brushed lightly along Jeongin’s jaw, and that small touch alone sent something hot and sudden through him.
That was the worst part.
Or maybe the best.
How immediate it was.
How neither of them had time to ease into it.
Jeongin turned his face slightly into Chan’s hand before he could think better of it, and the look that crossed Chan’s expression at that was enough to make the air feel thinner.
Then Chan kissed him.
Not gently at first.
Not rough either.
Just with the kind of contained hunger that came from holding back for too long and then failing all at once.
Jeongin kissed him back immediately, before there was time to question it, one hand catching lightly at the front of Chan’s shirt as if for balance. The first touch of their mouths was warm and real and somehow more overwhelming for how long they had both imagined less than this. It was not tentative for very long. The restraint between them gave way almost instantly to something deeper, something that had been there all evening under every look and every pause.
Wanting.
Plain and undeniable.
Chan’s hand stayed at his face, thumb just under his cheekbone, but the kiss itself deepened with a quiet urgency that made Jeongin’s breath catch. It was the kind of kiss that knew it should slow down and simply didn’t. The kind that carried too much built-up feeling inside it to stay innocent for long.
When they finally broke apart, it wasn’t by much.
Their foreheads nearly touched. Both of them were breathing a little harder now.
For a second neither spoke.
Then Chan let out a short, disbelieving breath, eyes still half on Jeongin’s mouth. “That was—”
“Too much for a first meeting?” Jeongin murmured.
Chan gave a breathless, helpless sort of laugh.
“Yes,” he said.
A pause.
Then, honest as ever: “I still want to do it again.”
That pulled a smile out of Jeongin, small and a little shaky around the edges.
“That’s the problem,” he said.
Chan looked at him. “You too?”
Jeongin didn’t answer with words.
He kissed him again.
This time slower for all of two seconds before the same pull returned, stronger if anything now that they had given in to it once. Chan’s hand slid from Jeongin’s face to the side of his neck, warm and steady, while Jeongin moved closer without thinking, until there was barely any space left between them at all.
It was dangerous, maybe, how easy it would have been to keep going.
How natural it already felt to want more.
But beneath the desire there was still that same thread of recognition, of comfort, of something deeply familiar. It kept the moment from tipping into recklessness completely. Even in the middle of all that heat, there was care in the way Chan touched him, in the small pauses, in the way both of them kept searching each other’s faces as if checking they were still together in this.
When they parted again, it was slower this time.
Reluctant.
Jeongin stayed close enough to feel Chan’s breath against his skin.
“We really are doing this too early,” Chan said quietly.
Jeongin smiled, still not stepping back. “Probably.”
Chan looked at him for another long second, then leaned in and pressed one last, shorter kiss to his mouth, like he couldn’t help himself.
“No self-control,” Jeongin whispered.
“None,” Chan admitted.
And neither of them sounded sorry.
Later, neither of them would remember exactly how long they stayed out on that balcony.
Only that after that night, it became harder and harder to return to separate apartments, separate routines, separate versions of their lives. Jeongin’s mugs began appearing in Chan’s kitchen. Chan’s hoodies started disappearing into Jeongin’s closet. Somewhere between late-night tea, missed alarms, shared keys, and kisses that stopped feeling new but never felt ordinary, they became something steady.
Something inevitable.
And somehow, without either of them noticing when it happened, home started meaning the same place.