Part Three: The Months Between

I.

The first text came at 11:47 PM that same night, when Haebeom was lying in his childhood bed staring at the ceiling and listening to his sister fail to sleep quietly in the next room.

Crown Prince JaeKyung (the contact name he'd accidentally saved, panicking)

Did you get home safely.

Not a question. The punctuation was a period.

Haebeom stared at it for a long time.

Typed: Yes. Did you?

Sent it before he could reconsider.

Three dots appeared immediately.

I'll be here in hotel for another hour. There's protocol.

I keep thinking about what you said. About negative space and emotional memory.

Haebeom sat up in bed.

What about it?

I've been thinking about that in relation to the last 5 years.

Haebeom held his phone with both hands and read the message three times.

Did the crown prince of this country just text me something profound at midnight? he typed, and immediately regretted it.

The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Go to sleep, Haebeom-ah.

The informal ending. Like it was already decided.

Haebeom pulled his blanket over his face and made a noise into it that he would never describe to anyone.

II.

Three weeks after the meeting, Haebeom's university semester began.

He loved it the way he'd always known he would — the smell of the studio corridors, the way afternoon light came through the north-facing windows at exactly the right angle, the twenty-three other people in his cohort who all had that particular quality of people who think in images rather than words. He was happy there.

He was also, aware of a black car that came near the campus gate when evening fell.

When he saw it, he texted: Are you outside my school.

The response was immediate. I had a meeting nearby.

At 6 PM?

It ran long.

Crown Prince JaeKyung.

I wanted to see you.

Haebeom stood at the campus gate in his paint-stained overalls and his old sneakers with the fraying left lace, and he looked at the car, and he felt something warm and slightly terrifying open in his chest like a window.

He walked to the car.

The window came down.

JaeKyung was in the back seat in a suit that probably cost more than his entire wardrobe, his tie loosened, his eyes doing the thing they did — finding Haebeom's face and staying there, like they'd been searching for a place to rest.

"You look," JaeKyung said, and then appeared to edit himself, "tired."

"I look like someone who has been painting for 6 hours," Haebeom said.

"Yes," JaeKyung said, and his voice did the thing where it went quiet and entirely sincere. "You look like that."

He did not say what he had almost said.

He didn't have to.

"I'll drive you home," JaeKyung said.

"You don't have to"

"I want to."

Haebeom got in the car. He told himself it was only practical. He told himself this for approx forty seconds before JaeKyung's hand settled on the seat between them — not touching him, just — there. Present. Available, if Haebeom wanted to close the distance.

He didn't.

But he looked at that hand the entire ride home, and JaeKyung, he was fairly certain, looked at him looking at it.

III.

The post appeared on JaeKyung's official public account on a Tuesday morning.

Haebeom was in his color theory lecture when 17 people texted him at once. He looked at his phone under the desk with the guilty posture of someone who absolutely never did this.

The photo was not of Haebeom directly.

It was a photograph of a painting — Haebeom's painting, from the university's end-of-month display, photographed at an angle that caught the brushwork perfectly in the light. A study in blue-grey, negative space, the suggestion of a figure that was more feeling than form.

The caption read: Some things are found rather than made. — JK

47m followers.

His professor stopped mid-sentence and looked at him. "Im Haebeom. Are you alright? You've gone quite pale."

"Yes," Haebeom said faintly. "Sorry. I'm very well."

That evening, JaeKyung called instead of texting.

"You didn't ask me," Haebeom said, instead of hello.

"No," JaeKyung agreed. A pause. "Are you angry?"

Haebeom looked at his phone screen. At the notification that his personal account — previously followed by his mother, his sister, three friends, and a bot — had gained eleven thousand followers since morning.

"I don't know yet," he said honestly.

"I wanted people to know," JaeKyung said. Simply. Without apology but without defensiveness either. "I wanted them to see what I see."

"Which is."

A long pause. The sound of him breathing.

"Someone extraordinary," he said. "Trying to take up as little space as possible. And creating something enormous anyway."

Haebeom sat on his bed and pressed his free hand flat against his sternum.

"You can't just say things like that," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because—" He stopped. "Because it's not fair."

"What's not fair about it?"

"That you just—" He exhaled. "That you mean it. You say it like you already know me."

"I do," JaeKyung said, with the calm certainty of someone stating a fact about the physical world. "Not everything yet. But enough to know that the rest of it will only make it worse."

"Worse," Haebeom repeated.

"For me," JaeKyung said quietly. "This wanting. It's already difficult enough."

Haebeom lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling.

Difficult enough. From the man who had sat across a dinner table for 2 hours moving nothing but his eyes.

"I'm not going anywhere," Haebeom said, without fully deciding to.

Another pause. Longer.

"I know," JaeKyung said. And the way he said it — soft, like something finally set down after being carried a long way — made Haebeom's chest ache with a feeling he didn't have the correct word for yet.

IV.

The first kiss happened by accident, which is to say: it happened because neither of them stopped it.

JaeKyung had been picking him up from the university every Tuesday and Thursday for 6 weeks by then. It had become a quiet routine. Haebeom finishing in the studio, JaeKyung's car at the gate, sometimes earlier than expected, once spectacularly late due to a parliamentary thing that Haebeom had been briefed about in an apologetic text chain that was, genuinely, adorable for a man of his station.

On this particular Thursday it had rained. Haebeom emerged from the studio building already damp, his portfolio case tucked under one arm, his hair doing the thing it did in humidity, curling slightly at the temples, softening the already-soft geometry of his face. He made it to the car through the drizzle. Slid into the back seat. Shook his hair out.

JaeKyung was already looking at him with that expression he had — the one that was always present but usually managed. Tonight the management was — thinner. Like the rain had done something to the infrastructure of his restraint.

"You're wet," he said.

"Mm," Haebeom agreed, unzipping his portfolio case to check for damage.

"Haebeom-ah."

Something in the way he said it made Haebeom look up.

JaeKyung reached over — deliberate, slow enough to be stopped — and moved a damp piece of hair away from Haebeom's cheek with two fingers. His fingertips brushed the line of Haebeom's cheekbone.

Haebeom went very still.

JaeKyung did not move his hand away.

His thumb traced, barely, the curve of Haebeom's cheekbone. Once. The way you trace something you have been trying not to touch for a very long time.

Haebeom looked at him. At that face — the jaw, the dark eyes, the precise tension of someone exercising willpower that was losing a negotiation with itself.

"JaeKyung-ssi," Haebeom said softly.

"I know," JaeKyung said.

He leaned in by exactly the distance that made it a question. Close enough that Haebeom could feel the warmth of him, could smell the cedar-and-snow of his scent opened up by the damp air, could see the way his eyes moved down, just once, to Haebeom's mouth.

Haebeom closed the remaining distance.

It was soft. Brief. The kind of kiss that is more acknowledgment than act — yes, this, here, finally. JaeKyung's hand curving around his jaw with a gentleness that contradicted everything about his size and his nature and the 5 years of waiting compressed into it.

When Haebeom pulled back, JaeKyung's forehead dropped to his. His eyes closed. His exhale was slow and controlled and not controlled at all.

"Months," he said, very quietly, as if reminding both of them.

"Months," Haebeom agreed, and hated and loved the word equally.

JaeKyung's thumb moved again along his cheekbone. Once more.

Then he sat back. Faced forward. His hands on his own knees.

The driver, separated by the privacy partition that had been raised sometime in the last ten minutes, drove them home through the rain.

V.

The texts had become their own language by now — a private country with 2 residents.

Photos Haebeom sent without comment: the particular blue of a Tuesday sky. A coffee cup with the exact right amount of foam. A detail of someone's coat on the subway that had interesting texture.

Photos JaeKyung sent without comment: state paperwork. The view from his office window at 11 PM. Once, inexplicably, a photograph of his own hand holding a fountain pen, captioned thinking about you.

Your hand? Haebeom had texted back.

No. A pause. Yes. I wanted to send you something but I'm in a meeting.

You're texting me from a meeting.

You're distracting.

I'm not doing anything.

You're existing somewhere. It's distracting.

Haebeom had bitten the inside of his cheek in the middle of his painting seminar and smiled at his phone like someone who had lost an argument they were glad to lose.

VI.

Three days before the 2 month mark, JaeKyung came to pick him up and was early, so he waited in the campus courtyard where students who recognized him gave him a wide respectful radius while pretending not to look.

Haebeom found him sitting on a bench. The Crown Prince of the country, future king, on a green-painted wooden bench outside the fine arts building, with his long legs extended and his face tipped slightly up and his eyes closed in the thin autumn sun.

He looked, for that one unguarded moment, very young.

And then he heard Haebeom's footsteps and opened his eyes, and the look on his face when he found him.The immediate, involuntary warmth of it, the way it moved through him like something released — made Haebeom stop walking for just a second.

That's what I look like to him, he thought.

That's what I do to him.

He walked over and sat beside him on the bench, close enough that their shoulders touched — something they'd discovered three weeks ago they could have, this small uncomplicated warmth of adjacency — and JaeKyung didn't move, just exhaled slowly and tilted his head so it was almost resting against Haebeom's.

Almost.

"Long day?" Haebeom asked.

"Parliamentary session," JaeKyung said. "And before that, a meeting about the meeting."

Haebeom made a sympathetic sound.

A group of students passed, noticed who they were, whispered. JaeKyung didn't flinch. He was used to it. But Haebeom felt his shoulder press just slightly more firmly into his — a small, unconscious claiming.

He's mine, that shoulder said, to everyone passing. He came and sat next to me. He's mine.

"JaeKyung-ah," Haebeom said softly, dropping the formality they'd negotiated their way to three weeks ago.

"Mm."

"Stop glaring at that student."

A pause. "I wasn't."

"You were. He was just walking."

"He looked at you for too long."

"Everyone looks at me. You told me I was the most—"

"That's different."

"How is that different?"

JaeKyung turned his head. Their faces were very close. His expression was entirely serious.

"Because when I look at you," he said, "I already know you're mine. They don't know that yet. That makes it" A pause. The honesty of someone who has decided not to be diplomatic about this. "Difficult."

Haebeom held his gaze for a moment.

"The wedding date," he said carefully, "comes soon."

"Not soon enough," JaeKyung said, with a quiet vehemence that was almost a growl.

Haebeom felt his omega nature respond to that. he warm, certain pull of it, the biology that said yes, alpha, here and he looked away at the middle distance and breathed carefully and decided that the bench in the public courtyard was a safe place to sit, because necessity was the only thing keeping either of them sensible anymore.

"A few more weeks," Haebeom said.

JaeKyung made a sound that was not patient.

But he stayed where he was. He always stayed where he was supposed to be — enormous and careful and wanting and waiting.

For Haebeom.

Still.

VIII.

The second one was less accidental.

Late October. The back seat of the car, after a dinner with both families that had stretched three hours and left Haebeom's social muscles pleasantly exhausted. The partition up. The city moving past outside.

Jaekyung had been quiet since they got in, but not the empty kind of quiet — the full kind, the kind of quiet that has something in it pressing against its walls.

"Are you alright?" Haebeom asked.

"You were laughing with my cousin at dinner," JaeKyung said.

"JaeKyung-ah," he said gently. "He's your cousin."

"I said I'm aware."

"And you are still—"

"Yes." Simply. Unapologetically. "I'm still."

Haebeom pressed his lips together to contain something that wanted to be a smile and wasn't quite.

He reached out and put his hand over JaeKyung's where it rested on his knee. Just that — his hand, over his.

JaeKyung went very still.

Then his hand turned under Haebeom's and held it. Properly. Fingers through fingers. The way hands hold when they mean don't let go.

He turned his head and looked at Haebeom with those eyes — full to the surface with something that had been building for 2 months and 5 years before that.

Haebeom leaned in first.

This kiss was different — less a question, more an answer. JaeKyung's free hand came up to the back of his head immediately, and the kissing was still tender but there was an urgency underneath it now, the controlled version of something that had been controlled for a very long time. He tasted like the wine from dinner and something underneath that was only him — cedar and first snow and want and patience and patience and patience.

When they broke apart, Haebeom's heart was doing something unreasonable.

JaeKyung pressed his lips to Haebeom's temple. Stayed there. His thumb moving in slow circles against his scalp.

"A few more weeks," he murmured, into his hair.

An anchor, Haebeom thought. For both of us.

"A few more weeks," he agreed.

Outside, the city kept moving. The moon, which the calendar had been consulted about, was approaching the phase under which two people who had been made for each other would finally be given permission to begin.

Haebeom held JaeKyung's hand  and thought about negative space — about how you could know the exact dimensions of a love before it was fully spoken, by the precise size of the absence it had occupied.

The moon would be ready soon.

So would they.

달의 짝 — Moon's Match "어둠 속에서도 제 짝은 찾아옵니다. — Even in the dark, one's match will find their way."