Yes Homo

Ji leads him out of the library, up the stairs, and down a corridor to a bedroom. At some point in the journey the emotional whiplash fully hits Seunghyun and, humiliatingly, he starts to cry. In the course of a few weeks he went from wondering if he liked Ji, to knowing he liked Ji, to thinking Ji might like him back, to thinking Ji was straight and not caring, to thinking Ji was straight and being miserable about it, to thinking Ji might be closeted, to watching Ji nonchalantly snicker at two of his male friends casually kissing in the middle of a frat party. And Seunghyun still doesn’t even know what he is. Him or Ji, because maybe Ji is just a super friendly and accepting straight guy?

Ji guides Seunghyun to one of the two twin beds and sits him down; he settles himself in a rolling desk chair that he positions opposite Seunghyun and hands him a box of tissues. “It’s okay,” Ji says soothingly. “Just breathe.” He pats Seunghyun’s knee.

Seunghyun hides his face in his hands, trying to surreptitiously mop up his face. “I’m s-s-sorry –” he says, struggling through the tightness still in his throat.

“Shhhh.” Ji pats Seunghyun’s knee again and it’s starting to distract him from all the anxiety and embarrassment he’s feeling. “Don’t be sorry. Clearly Abe and Tyler affected you a lot. That’s all right. Take a deep breath, okay?”

Seunghyun does, and then he takes another one, and then another. Finally the tears have stopped. He blots the corners of his eyes a few more times and tries to look at Ji, but he gets nervous and starts laughing. “I’m really – god, I’m sorry. This is awkward. Sorry.”

“No, no, it’s okay. Really. Listen, I know we don’t know each other too well, but we can talk about this if you want. Or we can pretend it never happened. Whatever you’re comfortable with, okay?”

For one intense moment Seunghyun is overwhelmed with the urge to flee, to take Ji’s escape route and just go home and go to bed and forget all these feelings. He even jerks his leg, almost rising from the bed. But then he stops. Ji’s offering him something here, and he wants it, and more than that he wants to see what else Ji might offer. So he says, quietly, “If you – if you really don’t mind, maybe we could…um, talk?”

Ji smiles warmly, and Seunghyun feels almost at ease. “Sure. Of course.” He folds his legs beneath him to sit Indian-style on the chair, and he looks so cute that even more of Seunghyun’s anxiety is forgotten. “So. You said you think you’re gay. You’re not sure?”

“Um, yeah,” says Seunghyun. “I mean, no. I’m not sure. I don’t – I don’t know what’s going on with me. I’ve had girlfriends,” he says, tacking on the last bit hastily.

“Okay,” says Ji nodding. “So what made you think, at twenty-one, having had girlfriends, that you might be gay?”

Seunghyun freezes. Is there a polite, socially graceful way to say ‘because whenever I look at you I want to hump your leg like a dog’? Figuring not, Seunghyun says instead, “I – well, I – I developed a, um, a crush. On, you know, a guy.” He bites his lip. “But I’ve never had a crush on a guy before, or done anything with a guy, or anything,” he says, all in one breath. “So, I don’t know, maybe I’m really straight and he’s just, like, the one exception?”

“Umm,” Ji says through balled-up lips, his eyes turned thoughtfully toward the ceiling. “Well, that’s not really how it works. I mean, I guess it’s not impossible, but, for the most part, that’s not how it is.”

“H-how would you know? Are you...gay, or something?” Seunghyun asks, mentally cursing how obvious he’s being.

Ji smirks. “Or something,” he says. “So, these girlfriends you had. What was that like? Were you attracted to them?”

“Um,” Seunghyun stalls, reeling from this confirmation, at last, that Ji is not straight! “Yeah, I guess so,” he mumbles.

“That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.”

“Well, I – I mean, yeah. I was. It’s just… With my first girlfriend, it was sort of weird?”

Ji nods. “How was it weird?”

“Well, um…” Seunghyun flushes, realizing what he’s going to have to confess for this to make sense. “I used to be kind of...big. In high school. So girls weren’t really interested me. I was just kind of used to that. But then this girl Grace, out of nowhere she just asked me out, and I actually thought she was fucking with me? But I guess she wasn’t. So we dated for a while and we, you know…but I wasn’t always...that interested, I guess.”

“Has it been like that with the other girls you’ve dated?”

Seunghyun doesn’t see any need to correct Ji that it’s girl, singular, not plural. “Um… Well with my ex – we broke up last spring – it was definitely…” He sighs, remembering the fumbling first time that had blossomed into a comfortable rhythm; the sweaty excitement of learning to make her come and the intensity of his own orgasms as she moaned and moved against him. “I was attracted to her. Definitely,” he says firmly.

“All right,” Ji says. “So you’re attracted to women. Some women, anyway. Which means you’re not gay. We can rule that out, at least.”

To his surprise, Seunghyun is faintly disappointed. Pushing that aside, he asks, “How did you know? That you were...something.”

“Not straight?” Ji supplies. “It wasn’t really hard for me. I sort of always knew, I think. But everyone’s different. Like Abe –” He smiles to himself. “Well, okay, so Abe was the first friend I made in America because he was like the only American who could speak Korean well enough to actually talk to me, so they paired us up at school. But I mean it wasn’t just that; we like the same music and we get along really well. So I decided to tell him that I was not completely straight. And Abe’s family is pretty religious, so he was sort of upset by it, and he was asking me to explain why I thought that. And I told him how, like, in gym class, when we would be changing in the locker rooms, I wanted to look at other guys and I wanted other guys to look at me. And he got really annoyed and he was like ‘Everyone feels like that; that’s normal!’ And I just…didn’t tell him that I didn’t think everyone did. He wasn’t ready. It wasn’t until the end of our senior year of high school that he told me he’d realized he was into guys too.”

“Is Abe gay?” Seunghyun asks, nervous that this might somehow be rude. Their conversation is making him aware of how much more complex all this is than he thought.

“No, not at all,” says Ji. “He’s way more into women than guys. When we started college, I expected him to hook up with at least a few guys, to see what it was like, you know? But he didn’t. He just dated girls. And when I asked him about it, he said he knew the potential for him to be with a guy was there and that it was real; he was confident about that, but he didn’t actually like any guys enough to go after them. Tyler is the first guy he’s been with.”

“Really?” That surprises Seunghyun; it means their relationship can’t be more than a few months old, since Tyler’s a freshman. They seem so comfortable together.

“Yup. It was kind of crazy, actually; like, he just knew Tyler was the guy. Tyler was rushing and they’d only been around each other a few times and then at a party Abe just walked up to him and grabbed him and kissed him.”

“Wow. And Tyler was...okay with that? I mean I guess he was, but… How did he even know Tyler liked guys?”

“Oh, Tyler had told us about how he’d hooked up with two dudes at camp last summer ‘just to see’, so Abe figured he wouldn’t mind. I mean, it was still a risk, obviously, but the connection was there, you know? The chemistry.”

Heat flares under Seunghyun’s skin at the word ‘chemistry’. What would Ji do if Seunghyun just grabbed him and kissed him?

“Anyway, you have to kind of figure a dude isn’t going to be too offended by that when he’s so pumped to join the fag frat.”

“‘Fag frat’?” Seunghyun repeats, stunned.

“Yeah, you know. Our whole thing,” Ji says, waving his hand around in an apparent indication of the entire house.

“What whole thing?”

“Our thing of how we’re...the fag frat? Did you...not know that?”

“Um...no,” Seunghyun says. He’s pretty sure it would’ve spared him a lot of worrying if he’d known Ji was in something called ‘the fag frat’.

“Did you transfer in or something?”

“No,” Seunghyun says, feeling stupid. “I’ve been here all four years.”

“Well there was kind of a whole...controversy...you missed that?”

“Uh, I guess so,” Seunghyun says, embarrassed. “I...live off campus.”

Ji throws his head back and laughs. He has a very pretty throat. “It must be pretty far off campus,” he teases. “Okay, well, the full story is that back when I was a freshman, Abe and I wanted to pledge Kappa because it’s a good frat for business majors, right? Ah, you probably don’t… Anyway, whatever, we wanted to join Kappa; that was our first choice. So Kappa used to extend their bids – their invitations to join – in this big dumb public thing, and like they’d tell you specifically that they were not extending you a bid, which is embarrassing, obviously. So Abe and I go to this thing and Abe gets a bid and he’s all excited and then it gets to my name and I get told they’re not extending me a bid. So I was upset but Abe was really upset and he interrupted the whole thing to ask why I didn’t get a bid. Because we’d both had good experiences while rushing and gotten friendly with some of the brothers and everything seemed good, so why him and not me, right? So anyway they spun all this bullshit about the ‘culture of the frat’ and the ‘comfort of the brothers’ and basically they weren’t letting me pledge because it’d gotten around that I was queer.”

Seunghyun nods, engrossed. This doesn’t make Kappa sound like ‘the fag frat’. He’s also in disbelief that Ji’s apparently been out since he arrived on campus and he only just found out today.

“So Abe called them out on it right there, right downstairs with all the brothers and everyone who had rushed, and told them it was bullshit and he wasn’t going to pledge because he was queer too. Which at the time people thought was like an ‘I’m Spartacus’ thing, because Abe reads as straight to most people, especially without Tyler hanging off him. And some of the brothers didn’t agree with it either so they started speaking up, and people who’d been offered bids already said they were going to turn them down, and people who hadn’t even been told yet said they wanted to withdraw, and anyway by the end of it they wound up with, like, four guys who were still willing to pledge. It was chaos. So they decided they were going to re-examine their bids – which was totally unprecedented – and basically the fraternity president was forced out and a week later I got offered a bid too. But, I mean, obviously word spread, and some of the other houses heard and started calling us ‘the fag frat’, and there was some vandalism and stuff, and it turned into, like, a whole issue on campus. There were all these letters to the editor in the student newspaper. You… you really missed that whole thing?”

“I, uh. Don’t really read the student newspaper,” Seunghyun says.

Ji shakes with laughter, bright and happy again after his dramatic story. “Gosh, you know, when you asked if I was gay, I wasn’t sure if you were messing with me, because most people know it was me who triggered the whole thing – like, not everyone, but it’s sort of my claim to fame on campus.”

Jesus fucking Christ. Ji is famous on campus for being queer, and Seunghyun spent all that time wondering and then thinking he wasn’t! How oblivious can he be? He only has a semester left here, and he’s always shunned the more traditional aspects of campus life, but he resolves to start reading the student newspaper religiously.

“So,” Ji says after a long, quiet moment, his tone more sober, “enough about me. What are you thinking about you?”

“I – um – I still don’t really know,” Seunghyun confesses. His head is still spinning from the revelation that Ji likes guys. Ji openly, vocally, definitively likes guys. So maybe all those cues Seunghyun thought he was reading – maybe that really was interest? Maybe something could happen between them? He feels tense, aware of every breath, of every moment Ji’s eyes spend on him.

“Hey, can I just tell you something?” Ji says, rising from the desk chair and sinking onto the bed beside Seunghyun so fluidly Seunghyun doesn’t realize what’s happening until Ji has a delicate hand on his arm. “You don’t need to know, okay? It’s nice to know, it’s nice to have a label, but it’s not required. You should just trust your instincts and see where they take you. If you like someone, you should go for it, whether they’re a man or a woman. You can figure out exactly what it means later.”

Seunghyun has stopped breathing altogether. Ji’s thigh is pressed against his own. “Well,” Seunghyun says carefully, slowly raising his eyes to Ji’s, “I sort of need the person to like me back. Man or woman.”

“Who wouldn’t like you?” Ji asks, squeezing his arm. “You’re smart and interesting and funny and plus, you know, really, really handsome…”

Alive with heat, hardly believing his own daring, Seunghyun says – softly – “Maybe a really cute business major in a frat…?”

And then Ji’s kissing him. And grinning. And running his hand through Seunghyun’s carefully combed hair. And it’s every bit as good as he’d hoped and even better, and Ji’s lips are as beautiful and soft and he thought and more, and it feels so good and Seunghyun can’t believe he ever thought, even for a moment, that guys weren’t an option for kissing.

The break apart, both smiling too hard to kiss properly anyway, and Ji laughs loudly and says, “God, you – fuck! You really – you really, fucking – god!”

“What did I do?” Seunghyun asks, delighted by Ji’s sudden speechlessness.

“You – oh my god, what did you do? You fucked with me so bad! Christ, I spent all that time flirting with you like crazy, and I didn’t even know if you were straight or not, and sometimes I thought you were flirting back and sometimes not, and I honestly thought for most of this whole conversation that you’d just been nice to me because you knew I’d be a good person to have the whole am-I-gay talk with – fuck, man! I’m the one guy you like?”

Seunghyun nods. “Yeah. You were…flirting with me?”

“You idiot,” Ji says, and they’re kissing again.

Seunghyun’s not really sure how long that goes on for, because it all sort of melts into this one beautiful, blissful moment of warmth and happiness and the delicious way Ji’s mouth tastes. They touch each other – scalp and neck and shoulders and back and sides and thighs – and Ji’s lines are different than anyone else Seunghyun’s ever touched and he thinks it’s a little weird that he doesn’t find it weird at all.

But then it shifts, and Seunghyun doesn’t really notice at first because he’s enjoying himself so much, but then Ji’s tugging at his belt and a bolt of panic and excitement jolts Seunghyun out of his rapture and he pulls away.

“Um –” he says, a little breathless, “I’ve – I’ve never...done this before.”

“Hooked up with a guy?” says Ji, punctuating it with a kiss on Seunghyun’s neck, leaving the skin there hot and damp. “I know, duh.”

“No,” says Seunghyun reluctantly. He withdraws his hands from their spots on Ji’s back and leg, leaving them an awkward, fidgety barrier in his lap. “I’ve never, like...hooked up.”

Ji jerks away from him in his surprise. “You’re a virgin?”

“What? No,” Seunghyun says, flushing dark red. “I’m definitely not a virgin. I’ve just – I’ve never –” He sighs. He’s already regretting this, but he knows he would regret having a one-night stand with Ji much, much more. If he could even go through with it. “I’ve had sex, just...never outside of a relationship.”

“Oh,” says Ji. His shoulders round as he slumps in on himself, eyes on the floor. “And you…you’re not ready for a relationship with a guy, I guess.”

Ji states it rather than asking, and Seunghyun doesn’t know quite how to respond. “Well, no, I mean...if the right person...if there was, like, a mutual desire to be in a relationship...but if there isn’t obviously I’m not going to force anything...I just... I’m not comfortable doing that until I, uh, you know...get to know someone a little better.”

There’s an airless moment between them and then Ji lifts his gaze to Seunghyun. “Do you...want to get to know me?”

Seunghyun nods, struck by how lovely Ji looks in this moment, how lovely in his vulnerability. “Yes,” he says quietly. “If that’s okay with you.”

Suddenly the wide-eyed innocence on Ji’s face is gone and he’s laughing uproariously. Seunghyun does not get the joke.

“You –,” Ji sputters, “you – you don’t want to hook up with me...because you want to date me?” He’s almost doubled over with laughter, one hand hanging on to Seunghyun’s shoulder to keep himself upright.

“Um,” is all Seunghyun can say. Is this really that stupid? Is Ji really this cruel?

“No, no,” Ji says, finally picking up on Seunghyun’s tension. “That’s – oh my god, like – that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. That’s… Have we really been on campus for three years together? I can’t believe this is just happening now. I…” He blots his forehead with the back of his hand and then fans himself a little while clearing his throat. “I would love for us to get to know each other.”

“Really?” Seunghyun asks, a bubble of hope rising in his chest.

“Yes. Are you kidding me? I just...assumed you’d want to have sex right away, because that’s usually what people want – I mean, people who kiss me, not people who are figuring out who they’re attracted to – but usually everyone just wants to hook up and no one wants to date and I think dating is awesome. Like, really awesome. I’d love to go on a date with you. Or many dates. If that’s what you meant. Is that what you meant about getting to know each other?”

“Yeah,” Seunghyun says. “Yeah, like, dating. Going out to eat and stuff.” Seunghyun has already fantasized about several dates a little more creative than going out to eat, including the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and Color Me Mine pottery painting, but he doesn’t want Ji to think he’s any weirder than he probably already does. And anyway the Botanical Gardens will have to wait until spring, which is a long way off which would probably freak Ji out.

“Okay, yeah. So let’s date,” Ji says, grinning. They’ve wound up side-by-side again, untouching except for shoulders and knees. Ji twists his hands together. “I hope you don’t think I’m an asshole for trying to hook up with you when you just came out to me like five minutes ago. I’ve never hooked up with someone who came out to me before, but now that I think about it, it’s a dick move. I was just...excited.”

Seunghyun’s heart gives a little flutter of happiness and a smile twists the corners of his mouth hard. “You were excited about me?”

Ji grins too, tilting his head back to look at the ceiling as he snorts half in laughter, half in exasperation. He looks at Seunghyun. “I know we’re not gonna hook up tonight but is kissing okay? Can I kiss you one more time?”

“I liked the kissing,” Seunghyun says.

“Good,” Ji says just before pressing his mouth to Seunghyun’s once again.