a sparkly boy

“Quit moving,” Hongbin says.

“I'm not the one moving, you are —Look at your hand shaking!”

Just out of teen-hood, they still squabble like children. Taekwoon—who does not have a direct age, but rather a coding that indicates his existence to be 4,982 days long—watches keenly. He has witnessed many bouts such as these. Hongbin, with his oil black hair hanging low into his gentle face, has once again been able to pester Sanghyuk into doing what his beating heart desires. Hongbin loves him—it is obvious. And Taekwoon believes, in the only way creations such as he can, that Sanghyuk loves him in return. It is said in the way he sits stolidly, watching not the way the small paintbrush moves over his kept nails but rather the way Hongbin's fingers wrap tightly about his large wrist. It is the way his eyes flicker across Hongbin's face when he pays no mind.

A petal falls onto the crown of Hongbin's bowed head and Sanghyuk removes it.

“What about Taekwoonie, then?” Sanghyuk says lightly. “Why don't you paint his nails, too?”

“Oh—” Hongbin looks up into Taekwoon's awaiting face; his eyes are like dark light, always sparkling in his white face. “What do you say, Taekwoonie?”

Taekwoon offers a smile. He shakes his head and the two of them turn away; easily dissuaded.

It has always been this way. After all, Taekwoon was not created as a plaything. He is a guardian of sorts; the one that watches. If it was not for the stature of Hongbin's family, then Taekwoon would not need to exist at all. He is there to keep an eye on the son of a large business tycoon who, over the reigning years, has felt the paranoid desire to keep such a being as Taekwoon around. A man like Hongbin's father would not entrust his son's safety in any living thing. It is Sanghyuk who is the outsider in moments like this; the one that does not belong at Hongbin's side, but who has refused to leave since childhood.

“You aren't any fun today,” Sanghyuk jeers lightly. He flashes a grin that Taekwoon has come to admire. “You're letting Hongbin walk all over me and you're enjoying it.”

“You're having fun,” Taekwoon says. He rises from the blanket, leaving the book on the ground where the ants have started to collect. It is spring and the insects are the least of Taekwoon's worries. Overhead, thunderheads have started to form.

“It's going to rain,” he says. “I'm going in.”

“Oh, Taekwoonie—” Hongbin makes as if to reach for him. “Don't go in yet. It isn't going to rain right now.”

“You'll be fine on your own.”

“But I'm almost finished —Look.” Hongbin lifts Sanghyuk's hand to show Taekwoon all but two fingers have been painted. Sanghyuk's face flushes a deep pink; if he could, Taekwoon is certain, Sanghyuk would snatch his hand away. But too enamored is he to ever do such a thing.

“I'm going in,” Taekwoon says again. “I'll wait by the porch and watch you from there.”

Hongbin accepts this with a huff. He pouts, but does not speak again.

As he walks toward the house that looms like something ancient, Taekwoon thinks of Hongbin's youth. There had been a time when Hongbin would have never accepted such behavior. He would have stamped his foot. He would have cried if Taekwoon did not waver. But he is not a child anymore; and the time is drawing close, they are both aware, when Hongbin won't need Taekwoon's unfettered companionship anymore.

He watched her and he knew she was nothing but wonderful. Glancing over the top of his book, suddenly warm in his wool coat; Leo watched as she waited tables with the collar of her pressed shirt askew and her hair tumbling down round her face. Indeed, she was wonderful. And so suddenly he was enamored.

• • •

“You're crazy,” she told him the first time he approached her, smiling with color bleeding into her face. “I can't just. . . leave. I'm working.”

“I know,” Leo said. “I meant after. Would you like to see me after work?” Her name-tag said Taekwoon. He thought it fit her well.

Up-close Leo could see the color that glossed her lips; how, when she smiled, she bit the inside of her cheek as if to keep from showing any expression at all.

He wanted to touch her, but knew that he shouldn't. And standing there, awaiting her answer, he wondered aloud: “Do you think I'm handsome?”

Taekwoon laughed at once. Her voice, soft and melodic, bubbled out of her like song; and Leo, unable to keep from smiling, tipped his face to the floor. “Is that a no?” he asked.

“I have to work,” Taekwoon told him. “I really do, it's getting busy.” She wasn't lying in the slightest. Leo had been watching the slow trickle of patrons ease in off the streets with growing nerves winding tightly inside him.

He looked away, burdened by his want to be near her.

But it was as Taekwoon walked away, back toward the kitchen where the other waitresses conversed over hot plates and ordered lattes, that she turned back to Leo and said: “I get off after 5. If you happen to be here. . .”  She laughed at herself. “M-Maybe I'll go with you somewhere.”

Even with so much he wanted to say, Leo could not find the courage to say anything. So he nodded with his face blossoming with color, wishing 5 o'clock would come much sooner.

• • •

Leo had kissed Taekwoon on that first evening together, beneath the ghost light of midnight. And she had leaned into him, tall and beautiful with her vibrant hair falling over her shoulder. When he held her, she felt small though he knew she was everything but; and when he let her go, she leaned farther into him as if chasing after a kiss cut short too soon.

“Do you work in the morning?” he asked her.

With her eyes still closed and her face tipped up toward him, Taekwoon shook her head. “I work in the evening.”

“Would you like to come home with me? Tonight.”

Taekwoon had opened her eyes and stared tragically into Leo's face. “I really shouldn't.” She looked at the time on her phone and said, “I should go now, actually. It's so late.”

At once she turned to leave as if spurned by something unseen; and in a hurry, Leo rushed for her. He took her elbow into his hand and pulled her gently back.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No, you didn't.” And when it was obvious he did not believe her, Taekwoon promised: “You didn't at all. It's me. I—I live with someone.”

“A roommate?” Leo asked.

“Something like that. I don't know.” She bit her lower lip, licking away the gloss that was there and biting it until it swelled. Then she lowered her head so that her hair covered her face and Leo could not see the way she looked.

“It's complicated? I guess?” she said. “It's not a big deal. I just need to get home.”

“If it's complicated, why did you come with me?”

“Oh,” she sighed, looking away, embarrassed. “I don't know.” He took her hand and Taekwoon let him; she held his gaze as long as she could, until he stepped forward to kiss her again. And she let him do it too, with her back bowing under his touch as he wrapped an arm round her middle; her face tipped back and her shoulders curving inward. All of her: small again within his grasp.

“He isn't my boyfriend,” she assured. “But it's late and he'll worry.”

“You're sure you don't want to come with me?”

“I do, I really do.” She whined softly when Leo kissed her with her lower lip between his teeth and his palm flat against her spine. “I do,” she said again. “But maybe it's not a smart idea right now.”

“Maybe not.”

Silence came and grew thick as Taekwoon rest her forehead to Leo's cheek. She waited in the silence until it seemed she could not wait any longer; it was as if she would burst.

So she asked, with a catch in her throat: “Will you come see me again?”

“Of course I will,” Leo promised her.

“And you won't run away?”

“No, why would I?”

“Because I live with another man.”

“I don't care about that,” he told her, though in his heart he felt jealous. It hurt to feel how suddenly he wanted her to be his. “I don't care at all. It's none of my business.”

“You're right,” Taekwoon said. “But I don't want you to run away either.”

He kissed her under the light of the streetlamps with her hair blowing forward in the wind, tickling his cheeks as he took her face between his palms. He kissed her until she melted against him with her whole body leaned into his.

“I won't run away,” he told her again as she breathed against his mouth warm puffs of air like cotton. Inhaling, Leo breathed her in and felt all the air knocked out of him by the press of her hands against his chest.

“Let me walk you home,” Leo said. “I'll walk you home and come see you tomorrow.”

And how wonderful it was that she let him.

• • •

Leo never asked about the boy Taekwoon lived with, because he could not bring himself to care as much as he thought he ought to. But he visited her often when the apartment was still and quiet and as impersonal as an open house. But it was nice in this way that Taekwoon—certainly, without notice; for it seemed she hardly noticed anything—would bring her belongings each time she visited Leo, so that it was as if she lived with him from the start.

There was something special about waking up with her perfume on his pillow and strands of bright colored hair left on the sheets. To wake up and see the books Taekwoon had been reading, the papers she'd been flipping through; magazines on the night stands and house slippers beside Leo's own, two sizes smaller than his own feet and much softer than any shoe he had ever owned. He loved to have her near and in this way, he had her all the time.

• • •

One evening, as they stood on the terrace smoking clove cigarettes that smelled of potpourri, Taekwoon leaned over the railing with her hair blowing against the wind, tousled and beautiful like something made-up. She was too wonderful like this with the top buttons of her shirt left open and the sharp slope of her collarbones striking against her light skin.

Leo reached for her and took her arm into his hand and when she turned to look at him, her eyes bright as the evening light in the sky, Leo felt it in this heart that she was more than wonderful. She had always been.

He told her with his voice petal soft and failing him, “You're lovely.”

Taekwoon smiled and looked away.

“You believe me,” Leo said, “don't you?”

“I do. A little.”

He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly to his chest, able to feel the beating of her heart through the thin cotton of her shirt. He kissed her temple where her heart pulsed deeply and whispered to her how lovely she was, how he thought of her always; he never wanted her to go.

And with a smile in her words, her voice a gentle whisper against a loud world, Taekwoon leaned her face up and kissed the corner of his mouth. She said, “I know it.”

“Do you?”

“I know it all.”

“How is that?” Leo whispered against her cheek.

“Because I feel it too.”