The back parking lot smelled of industrial detergent and cold metal, that particular smell of places nobody frequents by choice. It was there, between the linen bins and the cleaning supply carts, that Dave had pulled Tae-Hee, away from prying eyes, away from listening ears.
Tae-Hee didn't know where to start.
Should he apologize? Explain the night at Ashton's, the half-formed lie in front of the others, the silence he'd promised to keep and was structurally incapable of keeping?
The words crowded in his head without ever finding the order in which to come out.
Lying was out of the question. He'd known that for a long time, forever, really. He'd simply never managed to make that mechanism work, no matter how badly he'd needed it.
Dave spoke first.
— Yesterday, I got a message from my roommate.
His voice was flat. Too flat. The kind of calm you build deliberately, plank by plank, to keep something more violent from surfacing.
Tae-Hee knew Nelson by sight, mostly through the anecdotes Dave sometimes told laughing , their apartment always a mess, their fights over dishes, their quiet understanding as roommates who'd found each other by chance and kept it that way. Nothing about that relationship hinted at bad news.
— He told me someone was waiting for me at the bottom of the building.
Dave paused. A pause that lasted a little too long to be nothing.
— It was my mother.
Tae-Hee's heart clenched all at once, as if caught in a vise.
He knew that sentence. He knew what it usually brought with it. The last time Dave had crossed paths with his mother, he'd fallen ill in the days that followed, not a metaphor, an actual illness, the kind that pins you to a bed and makes you miss entire weeks of class. He'd had to take a year off his studies. Every meeting between them left Dave in a state that looked more like convalescence than a simple family visit.
— I went. She talked.
A small, joyless laugh.
— She usually doesn't like wasting time on me, so I figure it had to be important.
Tae-Hee moved closer to him, his stomach knotted with an apprehension he couldn't yet name. He already dreaded what was coming another crisis, another forced pause, another delay in a career that had already accumulated so many. He couldn't stand watching Dave come back from these meetings the way someone comes back from a fight they'd already lost.
— She said again that I wasn't cut out for medicine, Dave went on, his voice still even, almost mechanical. That I had to disappear from her territory. That she didn't want anyone able to make the connection between her and me.
Tae-Hee knew the story, not in detail, but enough to understand its shape. Dave's mother was a respected figure, cited, sought after by every major university in the country. She sat on committees, approved theses, shaped careers with a single word. And she regarded her own son as a stain on a record she wanted spotless.
— Her only mistake, in an otherwise perfect life, Dave said, bitterness finally cutting through the calm. Why didn't she just drop me off at an orphanage, if she didn't want me?
Tae-Hee put a hand on his shoulder. It was trembling slightly, but it was there, under the fabric of his coat, a mix of anger and something older, something more exhausted.
— She wants me to change hospitals, Dave said. To do my rotation somewhere else.
— What?
Tae-Hee frowned. This wasn't the usual pattern. Normally his mother unloaded her anger, signed off a transfer like closing a file, and left. This level of direct involvement — demanding a reassignment — was new. And more worrying.
— I already submitted the request this morning.
Tae-Hee's hand slowly fell back to his side.
He looked at Dave, shocked, angry, and above all, deeply disappointed, a disappointment that had nothing to do with himself but hurt all the same.
— Why are you obeying her?!
His voice rose more than he'd meant it to. It echoed between the metal bins and came back to them, foreign.
Dave brought his hands to his face, as if he could hide in them.
— If I don't, she'll punish me.
The silence that followed had the weight of a confession. Tae-Hee lowered his eyes to the ground, feeling his eyelids start to sting. That precise sting that always precedes tears, one he knew too well to ignore.
— And what about me? he finally asked, his voice almost inaudible.
Since his very first rotation, since his very first year, Dave had always found a way to stay at the same hospital as him. It was never framed as a conscious choice, it just kept happening, again and again, like a given thing nobody bothers to explain because it's self-evident.
And now it was ending.
— We can write to each other, Dave said softly. I'll visit you. And on the days you're at the university, maybe I'll stop by your class.
Tae-Hee stared at the ground. He gathered whatever courage he had left to form the next sentence.
— Can't you... ask for my assignment instead? So we leave together?
— No, Tae-Hee.
His head snapped up.
— Why?
— You have everything, here.
Dave spoke gently, but every word carried the weight of a decision already made, already weighed.
— Kiara. The others. And most of all, I know you've dreamed of training alongside Doctor Ashton since you were a teenager. Making you give that up for me would be selfish. I refuse to be the one who takes that from you.
Tae-Hee knew he was right. He knew it with a painful clarity, because he himself had neither Dave's popularity nor a mother with the influence to rearrange careers with a single phone call. He was nobody in this hierarchy. He would never be anybody, not in that way.
— Tae-Hee, Dave finally said.
Tae-Hee didn't know what he'd expected coming here. He'd known for a long time, somewhere, that their paths would eventually split, residencies, specialties, life scattering them apart. But he'd never imagined it would be like this. Because of a woman who saw her own son as a mistake to erase.
And maybe there was only one way to keep Dave. One thing that might, possibly, change something.
— I... Dave. I lo-
A finger landed on his lips, cutting him off.
Dave was looking at him. But not with the usual tenderness, nor with the guilt he'd carried throughout this whole conversation. There was something different now. Something more final.
Sadness. Nothing but sadness.
— Don't try to lie to keep me here, he said softly.
He stepped back. Slowly, as if it took time to undo something that had been built over years. He walked around Tae-Hee and headed for the emergency exit.
He stopped in the doorway.
— I'll leave at the end of the week. After the surgery.
And he left.
★★★
Tae-Hee stood frozen for a second, two seconds, the time it took for the information to fully sink in.
When he turned around, Dave had already disappeared behind the door.
He started running, without really knowing where, toward the restrooms, maybe, anywhere with a door he could shut behind him, anywhere no one would see him break down. His eyes were already burning. He kept repeating to himself, almost like a prayer, not now, not here, not now-
He collided with someone head-on.
— Jong Tae-Hee?
The voice was unmistakable. Tae-Hee looked up despite himself, and Ashton's face almost perfectly symmetrical, his grey eyes fixed on him with that particular attention he seemed to reserve for very few things, filled his entire field of vision.
Ashton parted his lips to say something.
Tae-Hee never heard what it was.
Something inside him — the dam he'd been holding up since the parking lot, since the word never, since I'll leave at the end of the week — gave way all at once, without warning, without anything he could do about it.
He burst into sobs.
Not discreet tears. Not the contained, presentable version he usually forced himself to produce in public. Something rawer, more total, his shoulders shaking, his breath catching between sobs, his hands not knowing where to go.
Ashton froze for a fraction of a second, visibly caught off guard, a man used to mastering nearly every situation that came his way, suddenly faced with something that fit no known protocol.
The parking lot was empty. No one around, except the cleaning crew too far off to notice anything.
Then, by a reflex he didn't examine — that he deliberately chose not to examine — Ashton wrapped his arms around him.
Tae-Hee let himself collapse against him, and the sobs doubled, as if that simple gesture had opened a valve he'd been holding shut for far longer than just that morning.
Ashton said nothing.
He stood there, motionless, one hand resting with an almost touching clumsiness between Tae-Hee's shoulder blades, feeling against him all the pain of a boy who had just understood that you could lose someone without them dying, simply because the world had decided they didn't deserve to stay together.
And in the middle of all that — without seeking it, without really knowing where it came from — a thought crossed Ashton's mind, as unexpected as it was disturbing in its sincerity.
I didn't know a man could be this beautiful while crying.