Chapter 4: The Aftermath of a Touch
The steering wheel was cool and rigid under Hyukjae’s palms. He sat in the driver’s seat of his old sedan, engine dead, lights off. The only sound was the ticking of metal as the car cooled down around him. He could still smell the phantom sugar of strawberry milk.
It was the touch that played on a loop. Not the drink, not the words. The touch.
The specific, gentle pressure of Donghae’s thumb sweeping his skin. A touch that had no business existing in that grimy, violent space. It had been a surgical strike, bypassing all his defenses—the anger, the posturing, the cold glares—and landing somewhere soft and unprotected. He felt feverish. He hated it.
His fist slammed into the horn.
The blare was vicious, shattering the lot’s quiet. It echoed off the concrete walls of the academy, a raw, ugly sound. His heart hammered against his ribs. He kept his hand there, leaning into the noise until it felt like a scream ripping from the car itself. Then he stopped. Silence rushed back in, thicker than before.
He was cracking. He could feel it, fine hairline fractures spreading from that point on his temple.
A white fluorescent light above flickered, casting jumpy shadows over Donghae’s stupid, pristine SUV parked next to him. The comparison was a joke. His own car was a symphony of dents and faded paint, a testament to utility over style. Donghae’s looked like it had never seen salt or regret.
His phone, discarded on the passenger seat, lit up with a soft glow.
He didn’t want to look. He looked.
An unknown number. The preview text glowed against the dark upholstery.
Unknown: Sweet dreams, princess. 🌙
His breath hitched. The casual intimacy of it, the assumption of access, was a violation. He’d never given Donghae his number. Of course he’d found it. He probably had Hyohyeon’s number too. The thought sent a fresh bolt of possessive anger through him.
He snatched the phone, thumb hovering over the delete button. He didn’t press it. He just stared, the emoji’s cheerful yellow face mocking him. A confession he refused to make. An acknowledgment of anything beyond hatred would make this real. This… whatever this was.
The driver’s side door of the SUV opened.
Hyukjae’s head snapped up. Donghae emerged, a black duffel slung over one shoulder. He wasn’t smiling. He looked thoughtful, his eyes finding Hyukjae’s through two panes of glass. He didn’t wave, didn’t smirk. He just stood there, waiting.
Hyukjae’s fingers tightened on the phone. Every instinct told him to start the car, to peel out of the lot and leave that calculating gaze behind. His body didn’t move. It was as if that single touch had rewired his commands, leaving him stuck in neutral.
Donghae walked over. Not to his own car, but to Hyukjae’s. He stopped by the driver’s window.
Hyukjae didn’t roll it down. He glared out at him, a prisoner in his own vehicle.
Donghae tilted his head. He mouthed a word: “Open.”
Shaking his head, Hyukjae looked straight ahead. He heard a faint tap. Then another. Insistent. He finally cranked the window down a bare inch. Cold night air slithered in.
“You honked,” Donghae said. His voice was low, carried through the gap.
“I was testing it.”
“Sounded pissed.”
“What do you want?”
Donghae shifted his weight, leaning a hand on the roof of Hyukjae’s car. An act of casual ownership that made Hyukjae’s teeth grind. “You got my text.”
“I don’t know who that was.”
“Liar.” Donghae’s voice lost its edge, softening. “You’re sitting here in the dark thinking about it. About me.”
“I’m thinking about how much I want to rearrange your face.”
“Same thing,” Donghae said, a flicker of a smile touching his mouth. “You drank the milk. You let me touch you. Now you’re sitting here trying to convince yourself it didn’t happen.” He leaned closer, his breath making a faint cloud in the cold air between them. “It happened, Hyukjae. You liked it.”
“Fuck you.”
“Not yet.”
The words hung there, simple and devastating. Hyukjae’s brain short-circuited. All the clever, venomous retorts dried up. He was left with a hollow, ringing silence and the terrifying truth that Donghae wasn’t teasing. He was stating a fact. A goal.
“I hate you,” Hyukjae said, the words leaving him like a last, desperate prayer.
“I know.” Donghae’s eyes were dark, absorbing. “That’s okay. It doesn’t change anything.”
He pushed off from the car and walked back to his SUV. He didn’t look back. He just got in, started the engine with a purr that sounded obscenely healthy, and drove away. The red taillights shrunk to pinpricks and vanished.
Hyukjae was left alone with the echo of the horn, the glow of his phone screen, and a new, chilling understanding.
This wasn’t a rivalry. It wasn’t even a pursuit.
It was a siege. And the walls he’d spent a lifetime building felt alarmingly, irrevocably thin. He started his car, the engine turning over with a weary groan. He drove home slower than usual, the night air cold through the inch of open window, trying and failing to outrun the sense that he’d just surrendered something, and the war hadn't even really begun.
He drove home slower than usual, the night air cold through the inch of open window, trying and failing to outrun the sense that he’d just surrendered something, and the war hadn't even really begun. The "sweet dreams" text remained, a digital ghost in his pocket he couldn’t exorcise. Sleep, when it came, was fractured and thin, full of the sound of a horn blaring into silence.
The notice for the away match in Daegu was posted three days later. Hyukjae scanned the travel roster and room assignments with the focused intensity of a general reviewing battlefield maps. His own name was there.Then Donghae’s.They were paired together.Of course they were. He stared at the sheet, the letters blurring into a tactical ambush he should have seen coming.“A mistake,” he said to Coach Park, his voice even.
The coach didn’t look up from his clipboard.“No mistake.Budget’s tight. You two can survive one night.Or kill each other. I don’t care, as long as you win tomorrow.”
There was no arguing. The team bus to Daegu was a five-hour journey of confined, diesel-scented agony.Hyukjae took a window seat upfront. Donghae, naturally, dropped into the aisle seat beside him, his thigh a firm, unavoidable pressure against Hyukjae’s.“Cozy,” Donghae murmured, stretching his legs out.
Hyukjae spent the first hour pretending to sleep, listening to the rhythm of Donghae’s breathing beside him. He spent the second hour staring at the rain-streaked window, tracking droplets as they slithered down the glass. “You’re thinking about it,” Donghae said softly, not looking at him, scrolling on his phone.
“Thinking about how much I want to shove you into traffic.”
“Our room,” Donghae clarified, as if Hyukjae hadn’t spoken. “You’re picturing it.”
Hyukjae didn’t dignify that with a response.He clenched his jaw until it ached.
The hotel was mid-tier, a bland tower of beige brick.The lobby smelled of stale coffee and industrial carpet cleaner.Keys were distributed. Room 414. Hyukjae grabbed his bag and the key card, beelining for the elevator, desperate to establish a perimeter before the invasion. Donghae followed, a silent, smirking shadow.
The room was a predictable box: two lamps, a generic landscape painting, and a king-sized double bed dominating the center.One bed.
A large, immovable continent of mattress and pillows.
Hyukjae stopped dead in the doorway, his duffel bag hitting the floor with a dull thud.“They said double. This is one.”
“It’s a double bed,” Donghae said, slipping past him. He tossed his own bag onto the floral coverlet. “Semantics, princess.”
“This isn’t happening.”
“It’s already happened.” Donghae kicked off his shoes.“What’s the plan?You take the floor? Very chivalrous.Or do we share like grown-ups?”
Hyukjae said nothing. He strode to the bed, grabbed two of the overstuffed pillows, and then yanked the spare blanket from the foot of the mattress. He worked with a violent, precise efficiency, building a fortification down the exact center of the bed. He piled the pillows high, creating a lumpy, woolen-barricaded border.It looked absurd.It felt necessary.
Donghae watched, arms crossed, leaning against the bathroom doorframe. “A wall.”
“A boundary.”
“It’s pillows, Hyukjae.I could breathe hard and knock it over.”
“Try it. See what happens.”
The air in the room grew thick, charged with the silence between them. The harmless barrier seemed like the most provocative object Hyukjae had ever fashioned. It was a declaration and a confession all at once.It screamed I don’t trust myself. Donghae’s eyes gleamed with understanding, which was infinitely worse than mockery.
They got ready for bed with a ritualistic avoidance, a careful choreography around the cramped space. Hyukjae changed in the bathroom, locking the door. Donghae changed openly by the closet, the shift of his shoulders and the dip of his spine a pale flash in Hyukjae’s peripheral vision when he emerged.
Hyukjae approached his side of the bed like it was a ledge. He slid under the covers, back rigidly to the pillow wall, facing the window. The lights clicked off, plunging the room into a darkness cut by the faint orange streetlight bleeding through the blinds.
He heard the rustle of sheets as Donghae got in on the other side.The mattress dipped. The distance between them was maybe eighteen inches, but the barrier made it feel like a chasm and a hair’s breadth simultaneously. He could feel the heat of another body, could track Donghae’s movements by the subtle shifts in the springs.Minutes stretched, taut and silent.
“This is stupid,” Donghae’s voice came through the dark, quiet and clear.
“Go to sleep.”
“Can’t. You’re thinking so loud it’s keeping me awake.”
Hyukjae shut his eyes.The memory of a thumb on his temple flickered. The strawberry milk taste ghosted over his tongue.He swallowed hard.
A slight rustle came from the other side. Then, a single finger pressed against the center of Hyukjae’s back, right through the blanket and the ridiculous pillow wall. The touch was light, a faint, deliberate pinpoint of contact.Hyukjae froze. Every nerve ending fired at once, a cascade of sparks down his spine.He didn’t move.He didn’t breathe.
Donghae’s finger traced a slow, small circle through the fabric.A question.A claim.
The war was here, in this dark, quiet room. And the first rule of engagement—never let the enemy touch you—had already been shattered. Hyukjae lay perfectly still, torn between the instinct to roll into the touch and the desperate need to roll away and fight.He did neither. He just lay there, imprisoned by his own making, feeling that circle burn into his skin as Donghae breathed steadily behind the wall.