The lobby is empty.
His footsteps are loud enough to touch each dark marble wall and return to him like luxurious boomerangs. He takes in the elegant chandelier, the tall stained windows, the contrasting silence against traffic outside, and awe fills him.
A few feet away, separate elevators for even and odd numbered floors await his choice. Like doors to heaven and hell, he repeats an old quip to himself and presses a call button. Made the same but traveling in different directions.
“Hey,” a voice calls from the gleaming entry doors. Han turns to it and draws a slow breath.
“… ah,” he quietly lets out.
A second pair of steps disturb the lake of silence when they shrink the distance between them. Each footfall is softer than the last. Each one clutches at Han’s rib cage with the intent to squeeze into its empty space.
Kim’s eyes were always the colour of midnight. Every morning when Han would make space for himself in the coil of the other’s arms, when he would place his lips against the other’s ears and whisper in greeting, sunlight would fight against the darkness of a bottomless gaze. Every night when their fingers met and their tongues tangled into each other, Han swayed from foot to foot and carefully descended into the depths of Kim’s stare. He would welcome its blanket around himself. It was his home, his sanctuary. Kim’s eyes were always waiting for him.
“What’re the odds…” It’s a deceptively tame comment.
Kim’s words were always hiding something. Han would try to coax their real meaning out of the man. He would seat himself next to each throwaway proclamation, pull each off-hand remark to his lap and pet it until it spilled all of Kim’s most guarded secrets. He would place a foot in the threshold of every utterance and conduct a careful negotiation until the door creaked open for him. When he heard the trail of a complaint, he would doggedly follow it down a maze of corridors. And when he was thrown off balance by an angry yell, he’d right himself and patiently hold on. Kim’s words wove untold stories from the air they shared.
“Hmm,” Han mutters now.
The other purses his lips. “You’ve… been OK?” he ventures.
“Yeah,” is the mustered answer. Eyes stay on shoes, on the way their scruffiness clashes with the polished floor. Thoughts stay in the present, holding the past at bay.
When Kim’s mouth took hold of him it would advance calmly. It would step on each inch of skin, walk every length of limb like a traveller crossing deserts. It would waver; it would stagger. But then it would dig its feet into place and march on. It would never stop. Sometimes the river of Han’s shyness would keep it in place. Sometimes the fervour of Han’s own lips would pull it in a different direction. But Kim lead all his voyages by it. His mouth ran, his tongue slipped, his teeth stumbled, but he was always aiming at the same place. He was always mapping his way across Han and his territories.
“And…” Kim continues to hesitate. “Everything’s… OK?”
Before they met, Han had fooled himself into thinking every man is complete in himself. Before he first set his sights on Kim, he was convinced that he was content. Fulfilled. Happy. Before he drove himself to the madness of being close, being together, being needed, his heart was a simple sphere he’d leave lying around without second thought. Sometimes it’d return to him in the same condition. Other times he’d wipe off resentful scuff marks and spend hours polishing it through forlorn days.
But the sphere remained whole. He’d been so sure he needed no one and no one needed him.
The moment Kim’s breath touched his cheek was the moment he realised he had always been an assembly; the moment Kim stole a piece for himself was the moment Han’s heart knew the bliss of breaking.
“Yeah,” he mumbles. He doesn’t know what he’s being asked but any amount of silence between the two of them is frightening. It’s been so long since they’ve exchanged words, he’ll settle for anything at all—even meaningless inquiries after his well-being.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“That’s good,” Kim nods. “I’m glad.”
Han blames his parents for not teaching him to be a good loser. When he visits them in the summer, when he calls his sister on sleepless unconsolable nights, when he returns to a silent apartment and turns around to leave again, this is what baffles him—why can’t he lose with grace? Why does he burn with regret? Why must he resist every step away from the things he wants most? He asks himself why he can’t accept defeat; why he can’t move his sight off the places he must leave behind. He asks himself why he walks backwards, drinking in every drop of someone else’s victory. And when he arrives at the answer, he pities himself.
“I’m really glad, you know…”
He doesn’t know what’s being asked or expected of him. He doesn’t know why Kim ever found him, or why he filled the lobby of Han’s modest life with his embellishments. But knowing and understanding Kim was never an aspiration. To have him, to keep him in place, to restrain him between the tiny spaces of their lives… those are the ambitions of a man with more forbearance. All Han had ever wanted was to not be empty. All he’d ever wished for was a few moments of honesty, when everything he placed inside his heart could rush out of him like pattering footsteps reaching for someone’s outstretched arms.
He was always a plain room of four walls; he doesn’t know why Kim deigned to visit with his finery and adornments. But for the duration of his stay, Han was a palace. For the handful of seconds that their orbits intersected, Han was at the centre of the universe.
“Come here.”
At the sound of a lift arriving, Kim touches his arm and moves them out of the way of an alighting crowd. The hold is firm. Its fingers are timid. They grip Han so tight he almost mistakes the action for a plea. What would Kim ever beg for? He is loved. He is wanted. He is the light of every eye he catches. Wherever he goes the air takes on the shape of admiration. What could he ever want from Han, a vacant hovel of a man?
“Listen,” he murmurs under the din of enthusiastic farewells and promises to meet again soon.
A long time ago they’d lain next to each other on the floor and stared at the ceiling fan. The exhales they’d exchanged, the sighs they’d shed, the kindness they’d halved, all lay in a puddle around them. On such a day, Kim had touched the middle of his chest and asked him a question.
“Are you happy?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“… it’s what I want.”
Han had looked over at the other, meaning to ask, for you or for me? Instead, he’d folded himself around Kim and kissed the frown off his brow. He’d pressed his lips to each candlestick finger on the other’s cold hands, carefully settling between his legs and into his warmth and against his straining voice. He’d pressed their foreheads together and whispered things he has never whispered since, nor will ever again.
It didn’t matter who arrived at happiness first, he’d reasoned to himself. To love someone is not a race. To love someone is to run beside them and lose all sense of time, of winning and losing. To love someone is to match their speed, no matter how fast or slow. It didn’t matter if Kim stopped often or ran to another, impulsive destination. It didn’t matter if Kim reached the end before him. Han still wanted him to inhabit his small room of love.
“Are you happy?” he echoes now. “Tell me you’re happy.”
Kim’s gaze wanders before settling gently on his face. His grip falls loose. “Why do you want to know?”
Han grants a smile. “I’ll be happy if you are.”
“And… when I tell you the answer?” the other takes a step back. “When you know, what will you do?”
“What I always end up doing,” he considers the pair of elevators, made the same but traveling in different directions. He blinks and makes his choice.
“I’ll wait for you.”
There’s a short pause before Kim gathers his eyes, his words, his mouth, and holds them out in a cup of his palms. “And if I follow you?” he offers. “I want to come with you. Will you let me?”
Han takes in the opulent marble and glinting chandelier. He spends a moment on every inch of this magnificent entryway, then he turns his back on its perfection. Behind him is the sound of a familiar stride, closing in on him, almost unsettling the breath in his lungs. Behind him is the sound of everything he holds dear. And as the elevator doors slide shut with a metallic hiss, as a hand curls around his shoulder, he is relieved by the weight. He is relieved to feel the part of him Kim once claimed as his own, still alive, still gasping for air.
The lobby is empty. The lobby is full.
