He swims two laps across before he notices. He goes back and forth, back and forth, up and down the fluorescent blue length before the legs come into view. They’re familiar—in colour, in length. He has seen their hairy paleness before. The knobbly knees and narrow ankles are not foreign to him or his touch, but this time he doesn’t touch. This time he keeps his distance and stops mid-length, standing between the deep and the shallow. 

“What’re you doing here?” is his first question. It sounds unnecessary. It tastes childish. A small pain blooms in his stomach, tugging at him to move, to reach out, to be closer. But he ignores the instinct. He stays put and lets his question do the stretching. He allows it to hang like a clumsy weight on a cable, slowly traversing the distance between their bodies. 

By the time it is fully across, Kim simply dissolves it with his steady gaze. His thin arms are taut against the cool night. His long fingers are waiting on the edge of the pool. With one push he could destroy distances. With one suggestion, one little gesture, he could command the very laws of space and time to obey him. What is Min, then? What is the point of his resistance? What does his desire or his anger or his apprehension mean? What is he, when Kim can bend anything to his will?

He’s sixteen. A boy with doubts and worries to fill a planet. He’s twenty, bearing change like a burden when others welcome it with grace. He’s twenty-six and flailing without a home for his unspoken fears. He’s thirty and tired and afraid that all that waits for him are empty pools on empty nights. He’s thirty-two and ready to let go of hope when… when Kim discovers and fills the silence in his mouth before—

“Would you rather I left?” 

Min doesn’t know. In all honesty, the answer doesn’t belong here. If it did, Kim would’ve never come. He would’ve been long-gone, moving on to better and easier endeavours. He would’ve lived a carefree life without the need to look back at the edge of awaiting pools. If there were answers to any of the questions either of them demand of each other, their bodies would have remained strangers forever.

Min considers the water. Even at midway, its cold extent feels so endless sometimes, he wonders why Kim bothers. “If I were you… I think I would,” he informs, like it matters. Like anything he says will make any meaningful dent in Kim’s resolve. If he didn’t know, he’d try in earnest. He would list out every reason to leave, every meaningful pursuit in comparison. But he has seen the other at work. He has borne the full brunt of Kim’s feet advancing, his digits unfurling, his stare softening to such careful blows they only touch their intended targets like compliments. 

“I think I’d go.”

“Then I’ll stay.”

The proclamation is followed by a dreaded push, and then Kim is moving. He’s walking, treading through the water, making nothing of the battlements Min had been building over the years. And Min is once more sixteen. He’s once more twenty, twenty-six, thirty, ageing up with every step. He’s realising he is still as graceless, still as afraid. He’s still tired of the love he harnesses, only to understand its inadequacies too late. 

By the time Kim’s nose nudges his own, by the time long fingers find a new place on his sides, Min has grown decades in the blink of an eye—but his love is as tepid as the fluorescent pool. It will never be enough, because he will never be enough.

He cranes his head away, willing to return to distances.

Kim’s eyebrows come together in concern. “Should I leave?” he asks, but he knows it’s not a real question. “Should I leave you?” His touch rises and falls like breath on skin, once playing on ribs, once brushing a cheek. His weight presses into the air until no air is left to hide behind. His black depths suddenly warm to a welcome haze, one Min would’ve gladly dived into, were he brave and happy. 

Sadness pulls his gaze low, bringing lips and reassurance to his forehead. Min knows this dream is coming to an end.

“Should I give you up?” Kim goes on, studding Min with kisses. “Should I let go? Let you have it your way?” His questions are kind, but his insistence is strong. 

When he walks again, he takes Min along. They walk together. They age together. Feet gliding though time, they cross the tiles, forging deeper into the unsaid, forcing their arms to close on each other for balance, for rescue, for all the dreams that broke before this one. And when the ground of their youth is gone, when the water is waiting for Min to speak his rejections, when they are old and weary of everything but each other, then Kim pushes harder—with his forehead, his chest, his very soul. He pushes, and suddenly all of Min’s butterflies are fluttering from his mouth to Kim’s. 

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Don’t you already know?” is Min’s last question, and only confession.  

They are sixteen, then twenty, then thirty, then one.