Tae-Hee was drunk. That much Ashton had clocked from the first second, the smell of cheap alcohol coming off him could have made a sober man's head spin. He tried to access the boy's phone to find his address, but the screen stayed stubbornly locked. No fingerprint registered.
Of course.
Ashton exhaled through his nose. He hoisted Tae-Hee up like a sack of dirty laundry—who whimpered vaguely, mumbled something that sounded like "more sushi" and instantly fell back asleep—and carried him to the car with the resignation of a man who knows his evening has just slipped out of his hands.
So he'd take him home. He had to take him home. It was the only reasonable option. Sure, a department head bringing his intern home after finding him dead drunk in the street had an uncomfortable way of sounding like the opening line of an HR complaint, but leaving him on the sidewalk was a no. Unthinkable. Inhumane.
Although.
Up until now, Ashton had rather cultivated a reputation for being exactly that kind of person. Cold. Cutting. The type who recycled interns like tissues and who'd once sent one home for holding his pen wrong. So why...why was he holding back from being cruel to this particular one?
That question occupied him for the entire drive. Which said a lot, because Ashton wasn't in the habit of letting anything occupy him.
In the passenger seat, Tae-Hee snored gently, head resting against the window, mouth slightly open. A thin trickle of drool ran from the corner of his lips with absolute serenity.
Cute.
Ashton nearly drove into the low wall on his left.
He straightened up, both hands gripping the wheel, and cleared his throat with the dignity of a man who had absolutely not just thought what he'd just thought.
— The worst part would be if he woke up, called me a pervert, and filed a sexual harassment complaint, he muttered to himself.
With that kind of thought process, frankly, Tae-Hee would have every right to sue him.
— Doctor?
Ashton jumped. A reflex rarely observed in him.
— Yes? he answered.
— Why did you choose surgery?
— Because it's impressive and difficult, it demands an extreme amount of effort. Why?
Tae-Hee didn't answer, he'd surely fallen back asleep. Ashton looked up; they'd already arrived at his place. He opened the gate with his badge, waited for the car to park, for the gate to close behind it, and let out a breath.
Step one accomplished. No one had seen him.
Carrying Tae-Hee to the couch took a few minutes. The boy, in a rare moment of partial lucidity, opened one eye during the trip and asked with disconcerting seriousness:
— Are we in space?
— No.
— Ah. Shame.
He fell back asleep.
Ashton set him down on the couch with a degree of care he couldn't quite explain to himself—he just didn't want to wake him, that was all, purely pragmatic—and stood there for a moment, looking at his own living room from this unfamiliar angle. His living room wasn't designed to accommodate an extra human being. It showed. Everything was functional, precise, cold as an operating room with nicer light fixtures.
If Noah finds out, he'll lose his mind, he thought.
His friend had been begging for months for the privilege of being the first to lay eyes on the color of Ashton's walls. He could already picture the text—HOW COULD YOU DO THIS, I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR A YEAR—accompanied by three hundred crying emojis. And here a drunk intern had just claimed that distinction without the slightest conscious effort. Life was deeply unfair.
Ashton crouched down, removed Tae-Hee's shoes—he couldn't very well let him sleep with his shoes on like some savage—then his jacket, which he folded with a precision perhaps excessive for the circumstances. He went to get water and bread, gently coaxed both into him. Tae-Hee swallowed with the coordination of a newborn, made a connoisseur's grimace, then sighed as if all his existential problems had just been solved.
Ashton looked at him. Then looked at the staircase behind him.
He could very well leave him there. The couch was comfortable. He'd already been more than lenient.
°
°
°
Twenty minutes later, he was climbing the stairs with Tae-Hee in his arms, who had wrapped his own arms around Ashton's neck in his sleep, as though this were perfectly normal, as though Ashton were some giant pillow provided for his convenience, and Ashton solemnly swore, at every landing, to call an architect first thing tomorrow and add: an elevator. A second bedroom. A dumbwaiter, you never know.
He'd designed this house with the sole purpose of never receiving anyone in it. One bedroom—his—like a perfectly selfish fortress. It was efficient. It was strategic. It was, he could see now, a decision a man with even a modicum of foresight wouldn't have made.
He set Tae-Hee down in his own bed and sat on the edge, slightly out of breath.
Tae-Hee immediately curled in on himself, grabbed the corner of the pillow, and let out a small satisfied sigh—the sigh of someone with absolutely no awareness of the scale of the services being rendered to him.
— I've gone from surgeon to pet-sitter, Ashton murmured. A magnificent career trajectory.
He was about to get up when-
— Doctor Ashton!
He jumped so violently he nearly fell off the bed. Tae-Hee was sitting bolt upright, eyes wide open, hair sticking out in every direction, with the inexplicable energy of a man who, ten minutes earlier, had been clutching a pillow in his sleep.
Ashton stared at him.
And to think he'd thrown out his back carrying him up the stairs.
— Lie down, he ordered.
Tae-Hee shook his head with admirable conviction.
— Listen to me first!
— I'll listen after you've lain down. Go on.
He held out his hand. Tae-Hee took it—with the air of someone graciously granting a favor—and got back into bed with the solemnity of a general accepting a surrender. Ashton had him sit on the edge of the mattress and crouched down to his level, elbows on his knees, to listen.
— What did you want to tell me?
He looked into Tae-Hee's hazel eyes, and found himself thinking, in a completely unsolicited way, that this shade—perfectly ordinary on pretty much anyone else—had something genuinely remarkable about it on him. As if the same color had decided, for once, to make an effort.
Why am I even thinking about this? he wondered.
He decided to ignore the thought. He was tired, that was all.
— Um... it's just... actually... Tae-Hee began.
He frowned, searching for his words with the intensity of a man trying to decipher a text in a dead language.
— Take your time.
Tae-Hee's cheeks turned pink. Not gradually, all at once, as if someone had flipped a switch. His hands twisted slightly in his lap. He took a deep breath.
Ashton felt a smile forming somewhere on his face without having given it the slightest authorization. This boy was transparent as glass. Every emotion was legible before he even opened his mouth, and yet he seemed sincerely convinced he could hide them.
It was...
Adorable.
Ashton frowned. Had he been drinking too?
Why am I noticing this? he wondered.
— I've wanted to tell you since the moment I saw you, Tae-Hee continued, with the gravity of a man about to deliver a state secret. Since day one. Actually, that's even why I chose this rotation, I-
He stopped. Swallowed.
Ashton didn't move. He noticed, almost despite himself, that he'd stopped breathing normally two sentences ago. He leaned forward, imperceptibly.
— Yes? he said, and his own voice sounded slightly too soft for the circumstances.
— I... it's hard to say.
— I'm listening.
Tae-Hee looked up at him. The pink on his cheeks had spread to his ears. He visibly gathered all his courage, opened his mouth-
— I ad-
What happened next was fast, unexpected, and absolutely devastating.
Tae-Hee choked. And threw up. On Ashton's face.
The silence that followed had a particular quality, the silence of natural disasters, of lab accidents, of moments when the human brain categorically refuses to process the information it's being given. Ashton hadn't moved. Hadn't blinked. His motor neurons had collectively tendered their resignation.
— Doc... tor... Tae-Hee breathed.
Eyes wide. Mouth open. His complexion gone from bright pink to chalk white in record time.
He sprang up and tried to fix things with his hands—pure panicked reflex, no strategy whatsoever—which, by every available metric, only made things considerably worse. Ashton grabbed his wrists.
— It's fine.
Three words. Calm. Even. Spoken by a man with vomit in his hair, who was choosing, for reasons even he couldn't fathom, not to make a scene about it.
Tae-Hee looked at him. This man. This face. This absolutely tranquil resignation. And he burst into tears—real ones, intense ones, the kind usually reserved for funerals or particularly cruel series finales.
— You're too nice, he hiccupped. Too, too nice, it's not normal to be this nice, I don't deserve-
— Breathe, said Ashton.
He awkwardly placed a hand on Tae-Hee's shoulder—the slightly too-rigid gesture of someone who doesn't often comfort people and knows it—and waited. Patted twice, mechanically. The way you pat a file you don't know where to put.
— I thought you hated me, Tae-Hee murmured.
— Why?
— Because I fell on you.
Ashton snorted but didn't answer.
Tae-Hee eventually calmed down, by degrees, then fell asleep with the abruptness of a switch being flipped. Mid-sentence, mid-tear, completely out.
★★★
In the bathroom, Ashton contemplated his reflection.
The vomit had, by all appearances, fused with his blond strands at a molecular level. He used a quantity of disinfectant that any reasonable doctor would have deemed clinically excessive, and looked at the man in the mirror—this respected surgeon, this feared department head—with genuine bewilderment.
He regretted it. He should have left him on the sidewalk. Called this Dave guy, whose number was sitting somewhere in a locked phone. Gone home, alone, as usual, as planned, as he had always done and always known how to do.
He left the bathroom. Crossed the hallway. Poked his head into his bedroom.
Tae-Hee was asleep. Curled up, cheeks still faintly red, the pillow half-crushed under his arm, looking exactly like someone with not the slightest idea of the chaos he'd just left in his wake.
Ashton smiled.
No. Actually—he regretted nothing.
That realization worried him far more than everything else.