Frisian Writes

CHAPTER NINE

Light spills out from beneath the door before you. Tonight, even the abyss below the glass-floored hallway doesn’t raise the hair on the back of your neck. Instead, it’s the light, it’s the door—no,—it’s the man waiting on the other side that sends a shiver down your spine. With a shaky breath you press the door open, walking straight into the unknown.

Enter: silence.

You’re not sure what you expected. Hoseok, waiting eagerly for you?

Instead, just the homey scene before you: Hoseok, wrapped up in a blanket before the fire, one arm poking out of the comfy mess and balancing a heavy book. He’s got a pen gripped between his teeth.

“Hey you, where were you?” he mumbles around the pen, not even looking up.

“The library.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Ah, um—” You can’t help but think of the erotic image you saw earlier. Your face flushes with heat at the thought of those eight tangled bodies, pleasure drawn across their faces, hands gripping onto anything and everything in reach. The hands, oh, the hands, everywhere. “Picture books. And Jin.”

“Excellent pairing,” he says, a chuckle in his voice.

He keeps looking at his book.

You sigh. It’s been a long day. Maybe now’s not the time for this. Maybe now’s the time to crawl into bed and wrap yourself up with a nice warm man snuggly wrapped around you, an untethered voice in your head calls out. But the so-called warm man is currently busy with what must be the most engaging book in the whole world.

With a sigh, you make your way over to the wardrobe, opening it and begin to get undressed, combing through your thoughts, picking through the day.

What a day.

First the conversation with Yoongi, then Jungkook in the kitchen, Namjoon in the library, and finally that creepy fucking bear. All at once you feel the exhaustion hit you. It feels like it’s been five years since you got out of bed this morning.

Your mind, body, and heart all feel heavy and tired.

“Oh, shit, sorry, I—”

Hobi’s voice breaks through the grey reverie.

It’s then that you realize the door to the wardrobe barely covers your form and that you’re in direct view of Hoseok as you undress.

“I can leave and give you privacy,” he says quickly.

“No—”

“No?”

The two of you stop and stare at one another for a moment. You reach to pull your pajamas out of the wardrobe, searching for the right words.

Hoseok begins tapping a rhythm on the arm of the chair, a soft, nervous padpadpad. Your heart rate is rioting through your body, but when you listen, it matches the same tapping as Hoseok’s tic.

“I told you it’s okay to look, right?”

“Right, um. You did say that.”

Expressing that, god, it feels so awkward, you wish you could swallow your words right back up into silence, but you can’t, you won’t, and then, then he’s looking at you like that, not at your body, but at you, eyes burning like the fire that’s smoking behind him.

His fingers still.

And suddenly you are shy, wishing you didn’t have half a tit peeking out of your shirt. Your cheeks warm, and he notices, coughs, and looks away.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” you say. “I—” Deep breath. “I like it.”

It surprises you when it spills out, the truth of it.

“Oh.” Hobi glances up at your eyes one more time and there’s a secret smile dancing on his lips, one that you want to pocket for later, one that warms your chest. And then he returns to his book.

Jesus, now what the fuck was that?

You keep your eyes locked on the floor as you adjust your sleep clothes and pad barefoot to the bathroom. Your nightly routine disappears in a blur of mental fog and half-formed daydreams of bodies pressed closely against one another like the secrets might slip out if they were to allow themselves any space.

Somehow, you get everything done and wake up from the fog, staring at yourself in the mirror. It’s the same face that you stared back into every morning of quarantine. It’s the same face you know.

But now there’s something new flickering beneath the surface: fear. Hope. Desire. Exhaustion. You look older, in the way that experience can carve a person out of a body. You look sharper, the depth of everything you’ve experienced, swimming beneath your skin, bringing you to the surface.

After everything, you’re tired.

So tired. You just want to crawl into bed and scootch close to Hobi’s warmth. Maybe let him wrap an arm around you. So that, you decide, is what you’ll do.

Arms wrapped tightly across your chest, you return to the bedroom, only to find that Hobi hasn’t moved.

“Hobi?”

He doesn’t turn around, just hums.

“Hoseok.”

“Yeah?” He’s still engaged in his book.

“Aren’t you coming to bed?”

He doesn’t look up from his book.

“Yeah, soon.”

You move closer. He’s got a book, but he’s also scribbling in it. You peek over his shoulder and before he can notice, rest your head on his shoulder. He jumps at the touch, like you’ve shocked him, and then relaxes, leaning his head into yours. In the margins, his scrawling handwriting flows. Heavy-handed, but more words than you think he should be writing for simple marginalia. And lines, line breaks.

“What, are you some sort of poet now?” It’s a joke, but his ears redden. “Oh! You are!”

“Not a poet, I guess. But I’m writing. Writing lines.” He closes the book before you can read anything of significance.

“A poet!” you sing and pluck the book from his hands.

“Hey!” Hoseok laughs.

You spin away from him, holding the book over your head, and sprint to the bed, giggling. For a moment this level of comfort, it feels like comfort, it feels like no time has passed between you.

You flop on your back onto the mattress and open to a random page, prepared to read some old-timey poet of years gone by in a dramatic retelling. But instead, you find Hoseok’s handwriting and the words lift off the page.

“Hey give it!”

You ignore him and instead focus on the book. His handwriting sprawls across the page:

“Surrounded by people’s stares that can’t be touched I am getting out of breath at the twisted reality, I close my eyes every night, the music box of tragedy echoes

But to be free from this crime, it’s impossible to forget it, to give up.

Because those lips were too sweet.”

“Oh.” You breathe. “You are a poet. What’s that all about?”

You’re about to spin into a rant about just how beautiful the words on the page are when hands wrap around your ankles and you’re tugged down the bed.

“Hey!” You giggle as Hoseok crawls over you. His face is well warmed with embarrassment but there’s something darker, more meaningful swirling in his gaze. Your breath freezes in your throat when he settles above you, hands on either side of your head, looking down at you. The words of Yoongi’s proposal spring to the forefront of your mind then—suddenly—

It’s hard not to imagine him in the same position but in a different context. His shirt, loose from years of wearing it, swings low, revealing his chest. His face, pressed in concentration, his body,wrung tight in devotion, focus, oh. Your heart is racing too quickly. You set the words aside. Later, you tell yourself. This isn’t the right time.

You clutch the book tight to your chest.

“Give it back.” There’s a kind of nervous stillness, like a doe, unsure if she should bolt or stare straight into danger, in him that inspires the same in you.

Still, you push. “Say please,” you insist.

Silence hangs for a long moment before he speaks.

“Please.” He rolls his eyes, but there’s a quirk of a shy smile in the corner of his mouth.

“Alright, but only because you asked so nicely.”

When you offer, Hoseok snatches the book out of your grasp and retreats to his chair again.

You’re left sitting on the bed.

Something like a tense silence settles over the room, electric, the air between you and Hoseok full of unspoken words. Unspoken want?

The day before you has been so long, so full, and yet you can’t help but think on the half answered questions and begun-but-not-finished conversations. They ring in your head like eager bells, yearning for answers, for closures, for the silence of a period at the end of a sentence. Hoseok, the ultimate question mark.

Staring at the ceiling, you lie there for a long while before it becomes too much.

“Hoseok.” The word splits the silence. “Come to bed.”

He looks up at you. Really looks. His gaze lingers perhaps a moment too long, and then he nods.

It’s a slow process, Hoseok getting ready for bed, and it feels like he takes his time. Like he’s shy or hesitant or— you dare not think what else. When he does finally climb into bed, he reaches over to shut off the light immediately. The room plunges into darkness.

“Goodnight,” he says quickly.

You ignore it.

You’re going to tell him. You’re going to repunctuate one of the hundreds of questions from the day with a period and you’re going to tell him that this whole proposal isn’t so wild, it isn’t so crazy, because it’s already there. That connection. That experience. That electricity. And you’re going to tell him that the only mistake back in January was not holding onto him tighter and longer right before the world ended.

“I don’t think it’s so wild, you know,” you blurt out.

“What?”

“Yoongi’s proposal.”

Hobi is silent for a long minute. “I know.”

“You know?” You’re a little shocked by his answer.

“Yeah, I mean, he’s not wrong. There is chemistry there. Yoongi’s never been one to incorrectly read a room.”

Your heart skips in your throat.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, I can’t deny it. I’m not the only one who feels it.” He says it so assuredly.

You don’t want to say anything, dare you let the whole moment collapse around you.

“You didn’t fall asleep on me, did you,” he asks, playfully mocking your pause. Still, there’s a genuine, nervous question in his prompt.

“No, I’m awake,” you whisper into the darkness. “I’m just...processing. I don’t know what the right thing to say here is.”

“Well, maybe there’s just not a right thing to say,” Hoseok says sagely. “What is it?”

“I mean. I’ve thought about it.”

“You have?”

“Same as you,” you add, cheeks warming in embarrassment as you think of what you’ve revealed.

The next thing Hobi says makes you suck in a quick breath:

“And have you thought about me?”

When a million thoughts flutter like falling leaves in your mind, rather than to sort through them, your impulse is to say no, hum a goodnight, and turn your back to him. But the ache in your chest wants to reach for him, wants to take his hand and thread your fingers through his, but maybe that’s too much maybe it’s always too much, so instead you whisper: “Yes.”

He doesn’t hesitate. “And what have you thought?”

“That words don’t work for you,” you say.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” There’s a laugh in his voice, but an ache in his eyes.

“I don’t know.”

“Try.”

You look at him for a long time, like you might find your answer within his features. And then you roll on your back. Look up at the ceiling instead.

“Well. I suppose. You’re so many things at once — in the most beautiful way possible — but it can make it so that… that— I don’t know where to look. Where to begin.”

He looks back at you confused.

“That doesn’t make any sense, does it,” you say.

“Then begin at the start. Look at me. Tell me the first thing that pops into your head.”

“Hoseok…” you sigh.

“Seriously. If it’s a lot of things, start with just one thing. Start with my eyes.”

He turns towards you, rolling on his side. You’re still staring up at the ceiling, hands balled into fists, acid coursing through your veins. He reaches for you. His fingers wrap gently around your wrist and he tugs, softly, a gesture for you to roll on your side and face him.

You do as he bids. Your body feels too warm, hot even, for such a cool night. You can imagine the coolness swirling outside the window behind Hoseok, but here, here, it’s like a bubble of inescapable heat, your heart pounding, your breath coming quickly.

He’s so close too.

But you make yourself look him in the eye and look.

“Your eyes, wellthey'rebeautiful,” you begin, speaking too quickly. You take a deep breath. Start again. “But what I love about them is that when you’re laughing, it feels like they hold all your joy. And when you’re so serious or focused, it’s like, like, looking right into your mind. Like windows.” You can tell Hoseok’s face is warming, even in the dark, but you continue. “And when you want something, really want something, they shine in a kind of way that I don’t really have words for. But it makes me think that I don’t want the world to deny you a single thing.”

It’s then that you realize that Hoseok’s hand never left your wrist, and even though he’s struggling to meet your gaze, his fingers are tracing patterns along your veins. And you think he draws a sun there, right where your pulse is thrumming rapidly.

“Thank you.” He says it so softly you’re barely able to catch it. But then he brings his hand up to his eyes, his index finger gently running beneath one of them like he is experiencing them for the first time.

“And tomorrow,” you whisper. “We’ll do your beautiful nose.” You get a laugh from that, but silence quickly swims between you. Tense, full of questions, full of half said statements and half-sung songs. So you lean into it.

“Hoseok?”

“Yeah?”

“What was it that you were trying to tell me earlier?” you ask softly. The dark swallows your words. Doesn’t return anything.

And then it does.

“Earlier?” There’s a wave of unsureness in his voice. Like he doesn’t want to remember what you’re mentioning. But you push further.

“Earlier. Yes. Remember? You sent Jin to find me. You wanted to talk to me.” The words come strained. A ball in your throat. “You wanted to tell me something.”

“So did you?” Hoseok says softly.

Even though he lies just three feet apart from you, he feels impossibly far away.

“Hoseok.”

The moonlight is stark against him, illuminating half of his face. The way the light falls makes it seem like a mask has been drawn atop his familiar features. You have to remind yourself that he’s there, beneath the moon, beneath time, beneath all of the complications and fumbled words and silence.

“I feel like I’ve messed everything up,” he finally whispers. His voice cracks on the last word.

“Messed up—? how? What?”

He shakes his head.

“Sometimes it’s so hard to bring myself up to the surface.”

There’s a shocking kind of truth in his words and it shocks through your body like ice on a sunny day.

“Oh.” You know it’s not enough — not nearly enough of a response to someone trying to reach you through the fog. And yet even the single, simple syllable sticks.

Why does this feel like there’s a stopper in your chest? With all of the others, it felt as if there wasn’t a question in the world, though you do wonder if that might be an over-eager remembrance of the past couple of days.

Hoseok, before you, feels like the largest question of them all. And in the space of a millisecond, you finally understand. And in the understanding, the thing within you breaks open.

Hoseok is two sides of a precious coin: everything you have and everything you could lose.

But I am over it. I’m over it all.

The separation with Tae. That fateful January night. Everything that has come with the horrors of the pandemic, of isolation. I should be over it. But instead, where all of those things live in your chest, instead, you find ache. You’ve been floating through it all with blinders on and your eyes to the ground, never giving yourself a single moment to feel the deep cuttings of loss. It has been easier to power through, to keep your head down, to shift all of the pain residing in your chest up to the thinking parts of your mind.

There, within your mind, you turn pain to story. It’s the only way you’ve been able to survive it. Once it’s been molded and sculpted into pretty words that are easy to swallow, you wait until the stirrings in your heart quiet down. Though, now that you realize it, they’ve never really quieted down at all, have they? They’re still there within you, singing with the same sharp tremolo as they always have.

I never let myself feel it.

“Oh, Hoseok—” it breaks through the silence as a sob. He winds his hand up your back, tangling his fingers in your hair, and pulls you closer to his chest. You nestle your nose into the crook of his arm.

“Sh, sh. It’s okay. It’s okay. I promise it’s going to be okay. Just let it out.”

And you do. It’s like opening a damn, and your whole chest spills into the small space between you and your friend. At first, it’s just salt water, spilling onto your cheeks, but soon the mess comes. Globs of sorrow force their way out of your throat. Sobs wrack through your body, desperate, dying sounds.

You didn’t even know all of it was in you.

But it keeps coming, pouring out like the tide into bottomless sand and you realize Hoseok’s shirt beneath your face is soaked all the way through and so too is your hair except—

“Hobi?” you stutter through your tears.

“Yeah?” His voice is just as cracked and wet as your own.

“Why are you crying?”

He sniffles. Pulls you closer.

“I’m not.”

You look up at him then, arching your back so that you can see his face. As you take a shaky inhale, wetness still streaking down your face, you see it. It’s there. The grief. Sprinkled on his cheeks like stardust. You reach up and with your thumb, wipe them away.

With a sniffle, you say, “Tell me what’s going on in there.”

“I just—” It’s a long moment before he speaks. The silence weighs heavy.

“I feel overwhelmed.”

“What are you feeling overwhelmed by?”

He spits out the word: “me.” Then a pause. “You. Everything.”

“That makes sense,” you sniffle, drawing a smile onto your face. “Who wouldn’t be overwhelmed by J-Hope’s hot body?”

You instantly chide yourself for making light of his sorrow, but you get a wet chuckle in response. Unfortunately it’s followed by another sniffle and some silence.

“Sorry,” you say softly. “Bad joke.”

“It happens to the best of us. But with all that time spent away from everyone, alone, in my little apartment… I feel like I went a little off the rails. Like all that silence, all that alone time. I don’t know. It did something to me.”

You nod into his chest, encouraging him to go on.

“And I thought being back here that I would just feel the same way I felt about everything—about everyone—as I did before. But it’s not that. It’s so much more.”

“More?”

“I thought the missing you, the others too, would stop. But it hasn’t, even when I'm here, it’s like the distance doesn’t get any smaller like there is a gulf between us. Like a gulf between who I was and who I am and now, except now, I have no idea who this brand new me even is.”

Long pause. You hum, and that seems to spur him on.

“Do you feel like you need to know who that person is?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then you will. With time.” You let your fingers drum against his chest. “Whoever you are, in there. I love you, you know that right?”

He gives a shuddering, tear-ridden laugh. But he doesn’t say “I know,” back. So instead, you just tighten your grip around him. He responds by doing the same.

You lay like that for a long, long moment.

It feels like the moon could have swung through all of her seasons in that time, and yet the two of you stay, interlocked, clutching onto one another like the other is the only lifeboat for miles, in a deep, dark, stormy ocean.

But at some point the ocean quiets. As if the storm within has been heard, she stills. The clouds roll back, but don’t vanish entirely. The waters, once rioting, still.

Your breath shudders to life.

There’s a certain kind of clarity to your mind, like it’s been dunked in ice water. But around it, a heavy weariness.

“Hobi, you know I love you, right?”

A long quiet. And then: “I know.”

“Good.”

“I love you too.” He whispers it into your hair.

“Good.”

Silence settles around you like a heavy blanket. Your eyelids feel weighted down, and when you peek them open towards the window, everything, the stars included, are blurred.

“Hobi, I’m so tired.”

Hoseok’s hand trails down your arm. His fingers wrap first around your wrist, lifting it up and towards him, and finally, they intertwine with yours.

“Then rest. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you wake up.”

It’s as easy as that.

When you finally say yes, yes, to sleep, you know. Your body relaxes, and so does Hobi’s around you. And you know, if there was anything to be done, it was this: tangled up in one another, language falling silent, finally, finally breathing easy.

Most of the time, it’s hard to know if your dreams have colors.

But tonight, there’s no question. Dreamworld is alight with late autumn, leave flurrying down in rainbow hues.

That night you dream of not one, but all seven of your boys. They linger at the edge of your dream though, constantly out of sight. You wander through a dense forest. It grows darker and thicker the further into it you clamber, bushes and branches gripping onto your clothes like hands.

You can hear them calling out your name, and even as you keep on moving, it seems as if a question remains: Are you running towards them or away?

At some point the dream shifts. It’s winter, and you stand above the forest on some steep cliff. The height takes your breath away, makes your lungs tighten on the inhale.

You call out their names, and six voices answer from the forest beneath you. You can see them now, figures frolicking in the snow, laughing, throwing snowballs, but where’s—?

A hand snakes around you from the back as a body presses close behind you.

Your name, whispered in your ear, strung through with devotion, desire—

“Hoseok, is that you?”

Your question is answered when he spins you around and into him. He is leaning against the tall, black stone wall, looking down at you through full lashes. But there's a look in his gaze that you haven’t known before. Hunger, deep hunger, ravenous hunger, directed straight at you. And at the edges of it, sunshine peeks through.

Hands wash down your back, taking their time to reach your hips. Warmth swallows you, a pinkish, springtime glow you could bathe in for ages.

It’s snowing and when the flakes hit your skin, they immediately melt. But you’re not paying attention to the darkening sky, you’re paying attention to the way the man pressed against your body feels. You want to memorize it.

There’s a moment when you understand it’s a dream.

Knowing it, you grin. You lean into him, lips searching for lips—

But he stops you. Takes your chin between his fingers and tilts your head up. Looking at you. Examining you. And when he bends down, eyes fluttering shut, it’s not your lips he meets but the flushed and summer warmed skin of your neck, just below your ear.

You gasp, tangling your hands in his hair, back arching into him until there’s no space left between you.

Body, pressed to body.

This dream is so vivid it feels real. Feels so real that when your eyes blink open to find Hoseok’s skin pressed against you, it makes sense, and you lift his head from your neck to return the favor: like a gift pressed between secretive hands, you press a fluttering kiss to the sensitive skin beneath his ear. Letting your teeth graze against his warmth, you drink in the breath he sucks in so shakily with relish. Hands still tangled in his hair, you wonder when and how you moved to the ground. You’re tangled up in one another against the soft ground, and you can feel the winter air against your skin.

He moves a thigh between your legs, and as he tucks himself against you, it feels like puzzling yourself together.

Your eyes flutter open as you pull away from his neck. His eyes are still pressed shut, but your name quivers on his lips as he tries to pull you closer again. It’s dark out, and the moon leans in close to the window—

The window?

Breath stills in your chest as Hoseok’s eyes open too. Pupils blown wide, he reaches for you, trying to pull you back to him when the dream slips from his gaze too.

When breath returns, it comes quickly, like a river rushing. Hoseok’s gasps match the pace of yours. Your gaze flicks down to see that his neck is reddening quickly. His fingers trail to the spot you’re looking at and the both of you gasp. And that’s when you notice.

Against your leg. Something hard. Hot. Very much in the shape of—

Both of you move at the same time, detangling your leg from between his thighs, him pulling his hand from yours, and flipping to the opposite side at the same time.

Back to back, your breathing matches one another. Wide awake, you can’t calm the racing in your chest.

Fuck.

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