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The sweltering heat of summer sticks to Taehyung’s skin and makes a home there. When winter comes, he will miss it. But it is not winter, the future that unfurls slowly down the lanes of the glow-in-the-dark stars that line the bedroom ceiling. It is the right now, a moment that feels quite liminal yet also not quite there.
The electric fan whirs some kind of white noise relief. The rent here is cheap because the A/C is broken. Taehyung could, plausibly, fork out enough spare change from the lining of his jeans to get it fixed. He doesn’t want to, though. Summer only feels like summer like this, in the humid air that makes it through the mosquito-netted windows left open in hope of a gentle cool breeze that never comes.
Seokjin sleeps on the fold-out couch that they’ve taken to, because the mattress, singular, hasn’t arrived yet. If Taehyung inches forward toward the bed he could, plausibly, hear soft snores. He doesn’t though, because, unlike the heat, the fact that he could, plausibly, make a home in the spaces between ‘Can I stay?’ and ‘I’ve never asked you to leave before’ terrifies him.
The springs of the makeshift bed creak as Seokjin shifts. Taehyung watches as best he can in the dark, manages to catch the way Seokjin’s hair is plastered to his forehead, the way the cotton sheets he can’t sleep without pool at his waist and around his calves, feet left bare.
Heat, Taehyung thinks, watching the rise and fall of Seokjin’s chest, at the shirt that sticks to his skin, is the sort of thing that folds in on itself and accounts the thought to a certain kind of yearning for the end of the summer in the middle of summer. Fleeting, timeless, and then some.
Taehyung promptly climbs in next to Seokjin and lets the heat exhaust him to sleep. It is late. The summer heat will still be around in the morning, ready to bury itself deeper into his bones, until it isn’t.
Until next year. And the next.
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