The teasing had become a background hum in their dorm, as constant as the ventilation system. Jisung was sprawled on the couch in the common area, one arm thrown over his eyes, trying to carve out five minutes of silence between schedules. The chaos of eight men living together was a familiar comfort, but today the noise felt pointed.
"I'm just saying," Hyunjin's voice cut through, melodic and deliberately casual from the kitchen island. "The one with the blue convertible? That was a good photo. Very… American summer."
Jisung didn't move his arm. "You've said. Many times."
"Because it's fascinating!" Changbin chimed in, dropping onto the other end of the couch. The cushion dipped. "Six months back from Arizona and your camera roll is still half-full of some girl we've never met. Not even a selfie with her. Just… her. Driving. Eating a burger. Laughing at something off-camera."
"It was one time," Jisung muttered, the words tasting stale. "I left my phone unlocked one time."
That one lapse in vigilance, months ago, had become foundational lore. Hyunjin, bored and curious, had scrolled. He'd found the archive Jisung had never shared: dozens of photos and short clips from Arizona that lived in a private album. Kelsey mid-laugh, head thrown back against her driver's seat headrest. Kelsey squinting against the sunset, a slushie in her hand. Kelsey asleep on her living room couch, one sock half-off. Moments too mundane to explain, too precious to delete.
"A guardian of memories," Hyunjin had declared, not unkindly, but the nickname stuck. The teasing was light, brotherly. It shouldn't have felt like a needle under his skin every time.
"You never call her anymore," Changbin observed, his tone shifting from teasing to something more observant. "You used to be on the phone in the studio lobby at weird hours. Now, nothing."
Jisung finally moved his arm, blinking against the ceiling lights. "The time difference is impossible. And we're busy. You know we're busy."
The excuse was polished, rehearsed. It was true—their schedule was a brutal, beautiful machine. But the deeper truth sat in his gut like a stone. Calling her was too hard. Seeing her face pixelated on a small screen, hearing her voice tinny through speakers, all while surrounded by the sterile order of his Seoul life… it was a specific kind of torture. It highlighted the distance instead of bridging it. It made her feel like a ghost, a vivid dream he’d once had, rather than the most real person he knew.
He missed her. The thought was a blunt, constant ache, separate from the fatigue in his muscles or the pressure in his skull. He missed the stupid, passionate arguments over song transitions in her car, her hand slapping his arm when he was being deliberately obtuse. He missed the chaotic warmth of her family’s dinner table, the way her mother would silently add kimchi to his plate, the way her brother Kohl would challenge him to video games he’d never win. He missed the vast, silent blanket of the desert sky during their late-night drives, the only sound her humming along to the radio.
Most of all, he missed the unthinking physical grammar of their friendship. Her hand slipping into his during a scary movie, her cold fingers lacing through his. The casual, weighty drape of his arm around her shoulders, her head finding the space beneath his chin as naturally as breathing. The way he could rest his hand on the small of her back to guide her through a crowd, and she would lean into the touch, an unspoken signal of ‘I’m here, I’m with you.’
Here, touch was choreography. It was intentional, often monitored, part of the performance. With her, it had been a language.
"What was her name again?" Hyunjin asked, rinsing a cup in the sink. The question was a trap. He knew her name.
"Kelsey," Jisung said, the name feeling both foreign and intimately familiar on his tongue.
"Right. Kelsey." Hyunjin turned, leaning against the counter, a thoughtful look on his face. "So. You're really just friends?"
The air in the room changed. Changbin stilled beside him. It was the question they’d all danced around, the core of the gentle teasing.
Jisung sat up slowly, the leather couch creaking. He looked at Hyunjin, then at Changbin, who was watching him with quiet intensity. He opened his mouth to deliver the usual line, the easy, practiced deflection. *Of course. Just friends. Best friends.*
The words wouldn't come.
He saw, for a dizzying second, a hypothetical future. Hyunjin, charming and effortlessly handsome, meeting Kelsey backstage at a concert in LA. Hyunjin smiling that particular smile. Hyunjin asking for her number. The fantasy was visceral, nauseating. His jaw tightened before he could stop it.
"Yeah," Jisung finally said, his voice quieter than he intended. "We're friends."
Hyunjin’s eyebrows lifted slightly. He’d seen the hesitation, the tension. A slow, knowing smile spread across his face. It wasn't malicious. It was the smile of a puzzle piece clicking into place. "Good friends," he amended, his tone light but his eyes sharp.
"The best," Changbin echoed, but his gaze was on Jisung, full of a sudden, deep understanding.
The conversation drifted, moved on to dinner plans, to a new choreography sequence that was giving them trouble. Jisung contributed monosyllables, his mind miles and months away. The teasing had stopped. The silence it left behind was somehow louder.
Later, in the dark of his shared room, the glow of his phone was the only light. He opened the private album. There she was, frozen in a moment of joy, the Arizona sun turning her hair to gold. He traced the edge of her smile on the screen with his thumb.
He had told himself he was protecting their friendship by creating distance. That the calls were too painful, so it was better to let the connection fade to a fond, distant memory. A clean break.
But lying there, with the ghost of Hyunjin's knowing look burning in his mind, he recognized the lie. It wasn't protection. It was cowardice. Calling her hurt because it made her real, and her reality made his own feel incomplete. Seeing her through a screen was a taunting reminder of everything he couldn't have, of the life that existed in parallel to this one, a life where he was just Jisung, not Han.
A life where, if another man had looked at her with clear interest, he wouldn't have had to hide his reaction behind a tightened jaw. He could have simply leaned over, kissed her temple, and said 'mine' without a single word.
The realization was quiet and absolute. He missed her not as a friend misses a friend, but as a compass misses north. The teasing hadn't been an annoyance. It had been a mirror, held up by his brothers, showing him a truth he'd been too afraid to name since the moment he watched her taillights disappear down that desert driveway.
He didn't just miss her. He was in love with her. And the thought of sharing even a single, casual moment of her attention with anyone else made his blood run cold with a possessiveness that had no place in the careful narrative of 'just friends.'
He locked his phone, plunging the room into full darkness. The silence now was inside him, vast and echoing. He had built a wall between them with his own two hands, brick by brick of unanswered texts and unplaced calls. And on the other side of that wall, he had finally admitted to himself, was the only thing that had ever truly felt like home.