What if...? || Markhyuck

-90-

[february 2022]

[donghyuck]

Winter, which briefly visited us with snow and frost, quickly turned into winter with rain, puddles and autumnal misty greyness. That didn't stop me from going for a run first thing in the morning. Apart from the obvious benefit of getting in shape, which is useful in my so-called professional life, running was also perfect for calming my head. 

The head that had been bothering me lately with never ending apocalypse scenarios where everything in my life goes as I didn't plan.

I ran faster and faster to the rhythm of the increasingly dynamic music in headphones, until the image of the world around me began to blur. The world was already grey enough creating an image of a space so unfamiliar that I could be under the illusion of being lost. Maybe that's what I really wanted. To get lost and never find myself again. 

I finally stopped, all sweaty, with a burning pain in my lungs. There was not a single living soul around. Comforting and terrifying at the same time. Mark would have given me a good beating if he knew that I had dressed completely inappropriately for the weather. At least I felt like I was still alive. Physical pain always reminded me of that effectively. This is the only form in which I have been able to experience anything lately.

I leaned head against the trunk of the tree, trying to keep my balance on shaking legs. I didn't have much reason to, but I felt like I was about to cry. I had felt this way since the meeting in the pub. Like something was going to tear me apart from the inside. That small, hard-to-accept part of me that I had been gradually pushing to the back of my consciousness was activated. Now it was stabbing, tearing, choking with a dull pain from somewhere deep in the past.

I watched Minhyung and wondered if he was looking at me differently because of the new information, if he was treating my physicality differently now that he knew what the potential source of my initial pain and discomfort during penetration could be. None of that happened. The more I tried to make up a story to confirm the signals of possible rejection, the closer Mark got to me. He started the conversation more often, joked more, initiated sexual encounters that I didn't feel like having at all because of the distaste for that stupid game from the party, the conversation with Seth and then telling Minhyung the inside story of my hospital stay right after the rape. But the boy was really accepting. Instead of sex, he just hugged me more and tried to talk when I was sitting on the couch alone.

On his side, everything was normal, just like it always was. In my head, however, it wasn't like before and I couldn't arrange it to be different. I had this stupid, irrational fear that eventually Minhyung would leave me, if it lasted longer. But the more I wanted to get out of the stagnation, the deeper I dug myself in. And Seth's words about looking for something in another guy that I couldn't give him resonated with me more and more with each passing day. It locked me in a pattern that I couldn't break out of.

In the pattern of believing that I was so flawed that I couldn't be loved anymore.

~*~

[minhyung]

Weekends at my mom's were never particularly fun. Usually, in my eyes, they just seemed okay. They mainly served to maintain the appearance that we were working on our relationship. In reality, we probably weren't doing that at all. Today, I painfully realized that our occasional dinners together were okay because Donghyuck took the brunt of the conversation or relieved the tension when it arose. And today, Donghyuck spent most of the day in his head. Even my mom seemed more quiet because of it, like she didn't know what was going on. I could see in her eyes that she was paying closer attention to how we talked to each other, like she had already blamed me for my man's current mood. I didn't know until the end whether or not I had somehow contributed to it.