“What do you like about me?” Kim always asks as he carries Jon away to another reality.
“Everything,” the answer is whispered. Jon caresses Kim’s waist, rolls him onto his back and straddles across him. “Everything,” he always replies in the darkness, blankets draped over them and shirt slipping off easily. “Everything.”
“Then… what do you like about us?” Kim murmurs, cold fingers running over golden and heated skin.
Jon rolls his hips, brushes himself against the other. It is his wordless answer. Nothing else needs to be said. Nothing else needs specifying, regardless of Kim’s incessant, unsure inquiries. Jon places his hands over the other’s, pushing them harder onto his flesh and muscle, onto his existence.
“Everything.”
Kim glows in the dark, like he isn’t of this earth. Like he is not human, but celestial.
He turns Jon into someone else too. Jon changes whenever he is in Kim’s arms. He has never been held like that. He hasn’t been touched or kissed or even called the way Kim pronounces his name. And it makes Jon realise what an island he is, how quiet his life is despite all the noise residing around him. When Kim looks at him, when Kim touches him, when Kim is inside him, he isn’t Jon then. He turns into someone else. He turns into someone who loves Kim with everything he has.
“What do you like the most about this world?” Kim persists.
It is strange to do this. It is odd to be like this and to feel like this. The fingers in him, the slickness of their slide, the edge of a razor-like stare—everything is so strange to Jon, regardless of how many times they do this. Every encounter is new and unexpected, like he’s never experienced it before. Everything Kim does and everything it makes Jon feel, it is all so strange. One minute he wants to stop and speak his mind, spill serious utterances and truthful thoughts between them. And another, he wants to never stop, never say a word, never reveal more than Kim’s assured fingertips are willing to breach.
The softness of the mattress, the brightness of the moon, the chill in the air, the stretch of his ribs. Nothing is familiar no matter how many times they meet. No single time is the same as the others. No single time feels real. All their nights are dreams.
Panting, heated, needing, he lays on his back and locks his legs around Kim. He looks up expectantly, waiting for him with a palm on his hipbone. “I like this world… because you live in it,” he whispers.
Kim’s actions are always careful, gentle. He is always so deliberate when he moves, but his words are like knives.
“And what if I didn’t?”
Jon lets out a long sigh when he is finally given, when he finally receives. When Kim is finally piercing him like the needle he is, Jon coils his arms around the other’s neck. There is an unassailable need to be inseparable. A fervent yearning to speak with the same tongue, breathe with the same set of lungs, pump the same blood with the same pulsing heart. To think with the same mind and grasp with the same fingers and push the ground away with the same feet. There is a lust, to be one. To be the same person. To press against one another so hard that their skins and tendons and bones all mesh into one, devoted, intimate whole. One body. One being. One life. There is an emphatic desire to be one, and it lives in both. They needn’t give it voice; they needn’t even think of it when they are together in the same cramped quarters. But Jon knows and Kim knows. The desire makes itself plain, makes itself apodictic. They cannot dispute it. They cannot deny it, nor lie about its existence. It thrives within them, in the places where their bodies are joined.
“… then I’d want to be wherever you were.”
And that satisfies Kim. Every time he pushes in is more perfect than the last. Every time is more filling, more complete. Every time Kim pulls him by his thighs, every time they are joined the closest, Jon whispers the other’s name over and over, calls for him over and over. It is like giving himself up, like surrendering himself.
Jon’s love is thick. Viscous. It is love, of this Kim is certain. Because what else could weigh so heavily on his chest? What else could drag him down, bend him in half with its sheer mass as he lugs it in his trembling hold?
When Jon hums softly in their kisses, when his body burns from head to toe. When Jon breaths in what he breaths out—what else could Kim call it but love?
He doesn’t know for certain, he admits. He’s never experienced love before. It could be anything, really. Infatuation. Addiction. Obsession. It could be anything. He doesn’t know. But when Jon laces their fingers together, gasps every time he rises and sits back down onto Kim, when he closes his eyes and lets his head fall back. When he looks like he is trying to memorise how every slide feels… when Jon murmurs Kim’s name like it is a small prayer, it doesn’t matter what this is. Kim doesn’t feel the need to find out. He wants to stay ignorant. He wants it to run its course though him, though his blood and bones. Like a passing disease. He wants it to take over his every cell, corrupt it, and then let go of him when it has done irreversible damage.
He wants this fever, wants this calenture that no one can detect until it has claimed too much of him.
This man, his front against a wall and his arm hooked backwards onto Kim’s neck. This man with arched back and heavy arousal—whoever he is and whatever is in his heart, Kim doesn’t want to dig in and find out. He doesn’t want to look for answers, he doesn’t want to ask for explanations, he doesn’t want to follow his suspicions and uncover clues that will break the dream. He doesn’t want to wake up from this. He doesn’t want the desolation of reality. All he wants is Jon’s silken body shuddering against him. All he wants is the breaking voice moaning for him. Kim, Kim, Kim. All he wants is to keep hearing that grating and irreverent keen.
He wants nothing but that golden sound claiming his name.
He wants nothing but those short golden fingers clutching his hair.
He wants nothing but that golden stare boring into his chest.
He wants nothing but the wild pulsing heat around his yearning.
He wants nothing more than to bury himself into the man, to stay there eternally, to live in him, to make a house of him.
He wants nothing but Jon.
