In This Light; Soonhoon

act four

➴ scene 1

SOONYOUNG'S LEG BOUNCING over the tile floor, the loud sound he makes when he sips the last of his milkshake through a straw. Retro 80s music playing over the diner's loudspeaker. Jihoon watching him with some look of disgust.

"Okay, Soonyoung. Jesus."

"You said my name twice."

"No, shut up." Soonyoung grins wide, and his laughter comes out half-silent, like a breathy outline, when Jihoon says, "Your drink is finished, cut it out."

"Does the noise annoy you?"

"You annoy me."

"Hm," Soonyoung pretends to think, pursing his lips and rolling his eyes towards the ceiling. "I don't know, Jihoon. I feel like that's a lie." That earns him a hard kick from under the table. He winces and leans down to rub his ankle while Jihoon watches him, smile looking proud. Soonyoung mutters, "Unnecessary."

Jihoon had asked him for dinner earlier that evening - "I've been working on my grid portrait for three hours straight, and if I don't find a reason to get away from it soon, I think I'll actually go into paralysis," is what he'd said, but Soonyoung likes to think that the art itself was the excuse Jihoon was looking for.

"You can ask to see me just because, you know. You don't need a particular reason for it."

"No, but I - "

"I would love to get dinner with you, Jihoon," he'd interrupted, feeling his smile up to his eyes. "And I don't have anything to get away from, I'd just like to see you." Soonyoung suggested the little diner off-campus, and so things went.

Through a mouthful of fries, he asks, "Tell me about your grid portrait. What is it?"

"I have to do this massive ass self-portrait, and paint it using a grid. So, like, paint the different squares in a way that won't make the overall piece look like ass."

"Huh. Fun."

"No, not fun. It's taking me forever to do, and I hate portraits. They're so ... " Jihoon makes a sort of face, something between disgust and a scowl, "blegh."

"Why do you say that?"

"Too difficult, having to get every particular feature right. It's not like - like painting the rest of the world, I can make a small mistake, and that's okay, because the world is full of mistakes, and I can take that and turn it into something pretty. If I fuck up trying to paint someone's actual face, though ... I mean, it's an innacuracy. It throws the whole painting off." He takes a bite of his burger and adds, mumbled around the sound of him trying to chew and talk at the same time, "I also get tired of looking at the same face for hours on end."

"You should paint me," Soonyoung winks, enjoying the way Jihoon's cheeks flush almost immediately. "You can't get tired of a face like mine." Jihoon grumbles.

"You're too confident."

They go on like that, joking back and forth and sharing sentiments, and it occurs to Soonyoung, at some point, just how warm he feels; it's an odd kind of comfort, buzzing underneath his skin like his insides are carbonated. They talk about the things they have in common, and that's nice, it always is, but what gets Soonyoung is when they talk about the stuff they don't.

Like when Jihoon gets started on his childhood, and how he got into art. He tells how, when he was a kid, his mom would hang up all his art projects around their home. He tells Soonyoung how his parents encouraged every little thing he did, whether it was a clay sculpture or a noodle on a string, and they only ever pushed him forward in what he wanted to do. "And my mom would always say this thing, you know, whenever I was feeling down because I couldn't get something right - especially in high school when I started taking art more seriously - she'd be like ... paint everything with love, Jihoon, because love is the warmest color, and it can make anything look beautiful." Jihoon pauses, looking shy all of a sudden. He says, "I took it to heart, you know. Thinking like that always helped.