The first time Tae-Hee had set foot in that university, he'd looked around and made a reasonable, pragmatic decision: he'd manage on his own.
It wasn't pride. It was calculation. He knew his own social limitations with almost clinical precision — he blushed at nothing, stammered under pressure, and had an irrepressible tendency to apologize for things that weren't his fault. Considerable assets for a medical career. Severe handicaps for making friends in a lecture hall of two hundred people.
For a few months, the system worked. Approximately.
He missed information. Not the coursework — he had that — but everything that circulated in the margins: last-minute cancellations, room changes, which professors to avoid, exams whose official format never quite matched what actually happened. An entire ecosystem of informal information from which he was systematically excluded.
It took him four months and two failed assignments to admit he needed a network.
He identified one. A single candidate, but high quality: Kiara Sydney, front row of the biochemistry lecture hall, purple streaks in her hair, an evidently unlimited address book, and an information index that would make an intelligence service blush. She seemed to know everything, know everyone, and moved through the university hallways with the ease of someone who had always known exactly where she was going.
Tae-Hee mentally prepared an introduction speech. He rehearsed it that evening, in his studio, in front of the unfinished bathroom mirror. He adjusted it three times.
He never got the chance to deliver it.
The next morning, coming out of the lecture hall, Kiara grabbed his arm with the precision of a predator that had spotted its prey and waited for the perfect angle.
— You. You're Korean?
—Uh... yes.
—I thought your face was too gorgeous to be Western. Pleased to meet you.
Tae-Hee didn't know what to say to that. Kiara didn't seem to notice, or care, and immediately moved on to something else, and that was how — without him having spoken a single word of his carefully prepared speech — he found himself hanging out with Kiara Sydney.
★★★
A few weeks later, she insisted he come with her to a welcome party for new students at a club in the university district.
Tae-Hee didn't like nightclubs.
He didn't say so, because he also didn't like disappointing people, and Kiara had a particular look when she wanted something, a look that made refusal structurally difficult. He got dressed, put on shoes he'd only worn twice, and followed her.
From the bar where Kiara had parked him with a cola — "don't worry, I'm keeping an eye on you" — he watched the room with the expression of a man in unfamiliar territory assessing his exits.
—See the tall guy over there?
Kiara had leaned toward him, a drink in each hand, her eyes bright with that energy she seemed to generate from nothing.
—The one with the group, over there. Built like a mover, laugh you can't miss.
Tae-Hee looked. It was hard not to look the man in question occupied his corner of the room with a natural presence that didn't need to seek attention to get it.
—That's Dave Brownson. Second year, should've been in third but he took a gap year. Why? No idea. Nobody knows. But everyone likes him so nobody asks.
She continued her inventory — that group, that girl, that guy to avoid at all costs — until someone called her from the dance floor and she vanished into the crowd with the fluidity of someone who belonged everywhere at once.
Tae-Hee stayed.
The bartender refilled his cola without being asked, with the sympathetic look of a man used to party castaways. The glass was cold. The music was too loud for conversation and not loud enough to get lost in. Tae-Hee mentally calculated how long he reasonably needed to stay before he could leave without offending Kiara.
He was concluding that forty minutes constituted a decent minimum when a voice spoke up beside him.
—Struggling with this kind of party too?
He startled.
Two stools away sat a boy with red hair and unusually precise green eyes, the kind of green you'd assume were contacts until you realized they were real. He smiled with the ease of someone who'd learned early that his face was an effective tool.
—Yes, Tae-Hee said honestly.
—Lucas. Pharmacy. Grad program.
—Tae-Hee. Medicine.
Lucas nodded, and the conversation started slowly at first, then with a fluidity Tae-Hee hadn't anticipated. Lucas talked about pharmacology with a precision and enthusiasm that made the subject feel alive, almost tangible.
A particular spark lit up in his eyes when he described his research, something genuine that cut through the social varnish of the rest of the evening.
The music was too loud where they were. Lucas suggested walking — he knew the place, there were quieter hallways toward the VIP areas.
Tae-Hee followed him.
Too absorbed in the conversation, he didn't notice the route they were taking. Lucas had that kind of charisma that captures attention and redirects it — toward him, toward his words, toward the way he phrased things — and when Tae-Hee returned to reality, he realized they had stopped.
They were in the restroom.
—What the-
He turned to face Lucas.
And Lucas stepped closer.
Slowly. Slowly enough that it was hard to read any other way, and yet Tae-Hee didn't move, because he didn't know what to do with what was happening, because he'd never been in this situation, because his brain was searching for a category and finding none.
Lucas's lips brushed against his.
Soft. Precise. Tae-Hee's heart did something uncontrollable in his chest.
It was his first time.
He opened his mouth by reflex, a reflex he hadn't recognized in time to control, and the kiss changed in nature. Deeper, more insistent. Lucas's hands were in his hair first, then moving down, slowly, with an intention growing less and less ambiguous, slipping under the hem of his wool sweater.
Tae-Hee stiffened.
He didn't want anyone touching his skin. It wasn't an articulated thought, it was something more physical, more immediate, a resistance surging up from somewhere deep and fast.
He tried to pull away.
Lucas held him there.
Tae-Hee put his hands on Lucas's chest, trying to create space between them, but the other boy was bigger, heavier, and the gesture didn't have the intended effect. He found himself with his back against the sink, his shoulders pinned, and a sudden sharp pain tore a sound out of him that he hadn't meant to make.
He bit Lucas's lip.
Lucas didn't let go.
A door slammed.
The sound echoed through the small tiled room, and Lucas looked up at the entrance with a slightly irritated expression, the look of someone interrupted at a bad moment who knows it perfectly well.
Dave Brownson stood in the doorway.
Tae-Hee recognized him immediately — the build, the shoulders, the way he occupied a space — but he was no longer the same person who'd been laughing with his group an hour earlier. His face was closed off, his gaze direct and unequivocal.
He crossed the room without a word, put a hand on Lucas's shoulder, and pushed him back with enough firm pressure to be understood without being violent.
—I'd suggest you leave.
Lucas rolled his eyes, the kind of eye-roll people give when they know they've lost but need some gesture to save face. He shrugged off the hand, threw a glance at Tae-Hee, and walked out.
The door closed.
The only sound left in the restroom was Tae-Hee's breathing, ragged, too high, his eyes burning with tears he hadn't had time to hold back.
Dave crouched slightly to get to his level. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket — clean, folded, exactly the kind of detail you don't notice until the moment you need it — and held it out without ceremony.
—Next time someone forces you, he said calmly. Knee them in the groin.
Tae-Hee looked at the handkerchief. Then at Dave. Then at the handkerchief again.
And for the first time that evening, something in his chest loosened slightly.
★★★
That was how Tae-Hee met Dave.
Not in a university hallway, not in class, not through some polite introduction orchestrated by Kiara. In the restroom of a nightclub, with a handkerchief held out and practical advice on self-defense.
He had never told anyone. Not even Kiara.
And Dave had never asked again.
It was precisely because of that — that particular way of not pressing, not demanding explanations, simply being there with no conditions attached — that Tae-Hee had never known how to imagine the hospital without him.
He thought about this as he followed Dave down the hallway, that morning, hands in his pockets and his heart a little tight.
He hoped he hadn't ruined everything.