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TWO YEARS LATER
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There is a melody to falling in love.
It starts off fast, fiery, fragmented. It starts off with a million violins screeching away at their resin-soaked bows, their irate melodies wrapping fever-fuelled souls in silk and stone. It starts off with a long dive off a short cliff. And then it descends, diminuendo, diminuendo, diminuendo, down to piano keys and intertwined sonatas and Coates' autumn etudes---before it calms, leaving its victim hopeful and breathless, thousands of butterflies invading the fragility of a heart.
Gregory feels it now, the little semiquaver butterflies dancing along his arms as the world shifts into oblivion, leaving behind just himself---and the blue-haired boy standing in front of him. He shouldn't be thinking like this---after all, he's known this guy for so long that he shouldn't even be attracted to him anymore. But there is something magnetic about the other boy's warm, cocoa-eyed stare, something that makes Gregory thank the heavens he'd crashed into his orbit.
Before he can take a step forward, the boy beats him to the punch.
"You were staring," the boy says, and there's so much love packed into his voice that it makes Gregory weak. Not pity, not sadness, nothing particularly negative, in fact. Just raw, undiluted, distinctive love, snapped into the rhythm of three simple words. Two bands are playing at the same time, from different ends of the park, and the music wavers and fades around Gregory's personal bubble---which the boy has just invaded.
It scares Gregory---how the mere sight of his boyfriend rips the air from his lungs, how three words bring his feelings crashing down on him like a runaway wave, how he loves him so much it hurts. He can't speak, so he doesn't, soaking in every inch of Jeong-Soon's tall, lithe form, drowning in the multitudes in his sunkissed eyes, watching the ocean sparkle in the crinkly wisps of his freshly-dyed blue hair.
"You remember," Gregory manages to get out as the rhapsody of his heartbeat swells with wild abandon, threatening to devour him whole. His lungs hum with ecstasy, and enclosed in their tiny universe, the melody whirls into a storm.
