An Encounter in their high school locker room changed Jimin's view, it leaves him unsettled. He is infected by troubling thoughts and dreams. Who will provide him peace now?
I look at my hands in the light and see the greenish tint of the dark skin on the back of my hands. The lighter skin on my palms is brighter, almost glowing. I walk down the hallway to the last door on the right, the one my memory tells me to approach.
There is a deadbolt as well as a knob on the door, and I remember watching his back -- Jamie's back -- and hearing him laugh as he drunkenly fumbles with his keys. How I pushed him against the wall to kiss him, right here in the hallway, felt his hard cock pushing against me as we made out. The liquor and cigarette taste of him.
I reach for the knob, twist it, and push. The door opens. I jump with surprise when I see a huge face leering at me.
My heart pounds hard, but I take a deep breath -- it's just a poster on the wall opposite the door. David Bowie, a close-up of his face. I push the door open further and step inside.
There's nobody in the room. It's large and extremely cluttered. Books and magazines and papers and clothes are all over the floor.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Several thirsty-looking potted plants sit on a desk facing the only window, which is propped open slightly. There are strings of holiday lights -- unplugged -- strung around the rim of the room where the walls meet the ceiling. There's a bed with a mattress and dirty-looking sheets. In the corner, I see a terrarium with a heat lamp inverted over it.
The lamp is on and casts a warm-looking, reddish-orange light down onto a twisted wooden stump, where some sort of lizard -- a pair of lizards -- are basking. Is this Hoseok's room? I bend to look at the papers on the ground. They look like ripped pages from some sort of technical manual; tiny, packed printed words in French, German, and Spanish.
There are other papers with random-looking doodles on them. I move over to the desk and see that there isn't really anything on it aside from the plants, just a mechanical pencil and some stray pieces of graphite lead. I sit down in the chair, a ratty office chair on wheels, and place my hands on top of the desk.
For a moment, I sit motionless, sensing the immense mass of the old house around me. It's completely quiet in here. I pull open a desk drawer.
Random detritus, paper clips, a few coins, matches, a pack of Post-it notes, and a marker. I pull open another drawer and see a battered shoe box. I lift it out slowly and remove the lid.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Inside is a stack of pictures bound with a rubber band. I freeze when I see him -- Hoseok -- grinning up at me from the top picture in the stack. My hands tremble as I pull the pictures out of the box and slide the rubber band off.
I hold the top picture up to get a better look. The light is dim, so I angle the photograph toward the window, into the waning daylight. It's definitely Hoseok, maybe a bit younger and skinnier than he is now, but the smile is unmistakable.
In the picture, it looks like he is standing on some sort of mechanical apparatus in a large building, maybe a factory, or a warehouse. He's standing on what looks like a set of huge interlocking pipes. His smile and his body ignite something in me, an echo of sexual desire, the memory of his body under mine.
