Chapter 6: Possession Marked in Bruises
The rain had softened to a drizzle by the time Donghae reached the sidewalk. He stood under the awning of a convenience store, the neon light painting his face in garish reds and blues. He didn’t feel the cold. He felt numb, a hollowed-out shell where his heart used to be. He pulled the cocktail napkin from his pocket, the phone number smeared and blurry. A specialist. A last, desperate lifeline thrown by a well-meaning friend.
His phone buzzed in his hand.
He looked down, expecting another message from a manager, or perhaps Hyukjae’s mother, who had been calling with increasing frequency. The screen glowed with Hyukjae’s name.
Three words.
I’ll try. Climb.
Donghae stared at them until the letters lost meaning, becoming abstract shapes on the glass. The numbness began to crack, splintering into something hot and dangerous. It wasn’t hope. Hope was a gentle thing. This was a dark, surging wave of fury and a desperate, clawing want. I’ll try. As if it were a favor. As if the last ten years of his life were a fucking mountain Hyukjae could decide to scale or ignore on a whim.
He didn’t remember walking back. He was just suddenly there, fumbling with his keys, his hand shaking so badly the metal scratched the lock. He shoved the door open.
The apartment was dark, still heavy with the scent of their failed, violent intimacy. And Hyukjae was still there. He hadn’t left. He was standing by the window, a silhouette against the city’s gray dawn, his shoulders slumped as if the weight of the sky were on them.
Donghae let the door slam shut. The noise was a gunshot in the quiet.
Hyukjae flinched but didn’t turn around. “I didn’t think you’d come back,” he said, his voice rough from crying.
“You told me to climb,” Donghae said, his own voice flat, cold. He dropped his keys on the table with a loud clatter. “So I’m here. At the bottom. Where you left me.”
Hyukjae finally turned. His face was ravaged, eyes swollen and red. He looked younger than eighteen in that moment, a child who’d been lost in a storm. “Donghae, I…”
“Don’t.” Donghae took a step forward, shedding his jacket. It fell to the floor. “Don’t talk. You’ve talked enough. Your words are just… noise.” He took another step. The space between them crackled. “You want to try? Then try this.”
He moved then, not with tenderness, but with a single-minded purpose borne of a month of heartbreak and an hour of shattered hope. He closed the distance in two long strides and grabbed Hyukjae by the front of his shirt, yanking him forward.
Hyukjae stumbled, a grunt of surprise knocked from his lungs. His hands came up, not to push away, but to brace against Donghae’s chest. “Wait—”
Donghae didn’t wait. He kissed him.
It wasn’t a kiss. It was a takeover. A branding. His mouth was hard and desperate, all teeth and bruising pressure. He poured every ounce of his frustration, his love, his bottomless grief into it. He licked into Hyukjae’s mouth, tasting salt and bitter coffee, claiming the space as his own. A low, wounded sound vibrated in Hyukjae’s throat. His fingers dug into the fabric of Donghae’s shirt, clinging rather than fighting.
Donghae walked him backward, never breaking the kiss, until the back of Hyukjae’s knees hit the bed and they crashed down onto the disheveled sheets. The lavender scent was there, mixed now with the sharp, clean smell of rain and their own rising heat.
“You remember this, don’t you?” Donghae growled against his lips, his hands already pulling at Hyukjae’s shirt. “Your body does.” The fabric tore at the seam with a sharp rip. Cool air hit Hyukjae’s skin, followed immediately by the scorching heat of Donghae’s palms. They slid up his ribs, rough and possessive. “Tell me you don’t remember how I touch you.”
Hyukjae gasped, his head thrown back, exposing the long line of his throat. His eyes were clenched shut. “I… I don’t…”
“Liar.” Donghae bit down on the sensitive skin where his neck met his shoulder, not hard enough to break the skin, but hard enough to mark. Hyukjae cried out, his hips bucking up involuntarily. “Your body isn’t lying. It’s screaming for me. Listen to it.”
He shoved Hyukjae’s torn shirt off his shoulders, pinning his wrists to the mattress above his head with one strong hand. With the other, he popped the button of his jeans, yanked the zipper down. The sound was obscenely loud. Hyukjae stared up at him, his chest heaving, his cock already hard and straining against his boxers. Confusion and raw need warred in his wide, dark eyes.
“Donghae, please…”
“Please what?” Donghae snarled, leaning down to suck a bruise onto his collarbone. “Please stop? Or please fuck me? Which one is it, Hyukjae? Which one feels true?”
Hyukjae didn’t answer. A shudder ran through him, a full-body tremor of surrender. He stopped fighting the hold on his wrists. He turned his face into Donghae’s bicep, his breath hot and ragged against the skin.
That small submission undid Donghae’s last thread of control. The fury bled out, leaving only a vast, aching hunger. He released Hyukjae’s wrists and hurriedly shoved his own jeans and boxers down, kicking them off. He took Hyukjae’s face in both hands, forcing him to look up.
“Look at me,” Donghae demanded, his voice ragged. “Look at me when I’m inside you. Maybe that’ll fucking stick.”
He spit into his hand, a crude, hurried lubricant, and reached down to stroke himself, watching Hyukjae’s eyes darken with a primal understanding. He hooked his fingers into the waistband of Hyukjae’s boxers and dragged them down. Hyukjae lifted his hips to help, his own cock springing free, flushed and leaking.
Donghae positioned himself between Hyukjae’s thighs, spreading them wide with his knees. He leaned over him, bracing his weight on one arm, his other hand guiding the head of his cock through the cleft of Hyukjae’s ass. Hyukjae was trembling, his breath coming in sharp, shallow pants. He was tight, untouched, but his body was arching up, demanding more.
“It’ll hurt,” Donghae whispered, the anger gone, replaced by a terrible, fragile honesty. He pressed forward, just an inch, the tight ring of muscle resisting then yielding in a hot, agonizing pulse around him. Hyukjae let out a choked gasp, his nails scratching down Donghae’s back.
“I don’t care,” Hyukjae gritted out, his eyes swimming. “Just… make me feel it. Make me feel something real.”
Donghae pushed the rest of the way in, a single, relentless thrust that buried him to the hilt. Hyukjae cried out, a sharp, broken sound that was equal parts pain and profound relief. He was impossibly tight, searing hot, and for a moment they were both frozen, joined in a painful, perfect stasis.
Then Donghae moved. He pulled back and slammed home again, setting a brutal, punishing rhythm. It was raw and dry and intense, a friction that bordered on pain for both of them. But Hyukjae was meeting him thrust for thrust, his heels digging into the small of Donghae’s back, pulling him deeper.
“Fuck,” Hyukjae moaned, his head thrashing on the pillow. “Fuck, oh god…” The words were slurred, instinctual.
Donghae bent his head, capturing Hyukjae’s mouth again, swallowing his cries. The taste was different now—less salt, more heat, a animal desperation. He gripped Hyukjae’s hip, his fingers leaving bruises, as he pistoned into him. The bed rocked violently against the wall. The world narrowed to this: the slap of skin on skin, the ragged symphony of their breathing, the overwhelming, suffocating rightness of this connection.
Hyukjae’s cock, trapped between their sweat-slicked stomachs, leaked steadily. Donghae reached down and took him in hand, his grip tight and rough, stroking him in time with his thrusts. “Come on,” he panted into his ear. “Come for me. Let me see it.”
It was a command Hyukjae’s body understood implicitly. His back arched off the bed, a taut bowstring. A ragged, gut-deep groan tore from his throat as he came, hot stripes of release painting his stomach and chest. The violent clenching of his body around Donghae’s cock tipped him over the edge instantly. Donghae buried his face in Hyukjae’s neck, biting down to muffle his own cry as he emptied himself deep inside, waves of pleasure so intense they bordered on pain.
He collapsed, his weight pressing Hyukjae into the mattress. For long minutes, the only sound was their struggling lungs and the drum of rain starting up again against the window. The scent of sex and sweat and lavender filled the air.
Slowly, the reality of what they’d done seeped back in. The violence of it. The raw, ugly need. Donghae softened inside him and carefully pulled out. He rolled onto his back beside Hyukjae, staring at the ceiling, a hollow feeling spreading where the heat had been.
Hyukjae lay still, one arm thrown over his eyes. The come on his stomach was already cooling, sticky. The bruises on his wrists and hips were beginning to bloom.
“I’m sorry,” Donghae said, the words ash in his mouth.
Hyukjae didn’t move. When he finally spoke, his voice was thin, scraped raw. “Don’t be.”
“That was… I shouldn’t have…”
“It’s what I asked for.” Hyukjae lowered his arm. He stared at the ceiling, his profile stark. “You were right. My body… it knows you.” He turned his head, his eyes finding Donghae’s. They were clear now, free of confusion, filled with a profound and weary sorrow. “I felt it. Every second. I knew exactly how you’d move. I knew what you’d sound like.” A tear escaped, tracking through the sweat on his temple. “But my head… it’s still so quiet.”
Donghae reached for his hand. Hyukjae laced their fingers together, a tight, desperate grip. They lay there in the wreckage, connected by touch, separated by a gulf of missing time.
“The doctor’s name is on the napkin,” Donghae said quietly. “On the table.”
Hyukjae nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.” Hyukjae squeezed his hand. “We call in the morning.”
Hyukjae’s “okay” hung in the air, a fragile bridge over the chasm between them. Their fingers remained laced, sticky with drying sweat and come. Dawn had fully broken now, a pale, sickly light leaching into the room and exposing the wreckage of the night—the torn clothing, the twisted sheets, the faint purple blooming on Hyukjae’s hip where Donghae’s hand had been.
Donghae shifted, the movement small. He didn’t let go of Hyukjae’s hand. “I’ll make the call,” he said, his voice stripped bare. “You don’t have to talk.”
“I should,” Hyukjae replied. He stared at the water stain on the ceiling he’d been meaning to fix for months. He remembered noticing it. He remembered Donghae joking they should put a plant there. The memory had no anchor, no date. It just was. A piece of driftwood from the flood. “It’s my head.”
They lay in silence for a long time, listening to the city wake up. The honk of a distant taxi. The rattle of the old pipes. The normal world carrying on, indifferent.
Finally, Donghae rolled up and off the bed. His body felt heavy, used. He walked naked to the bathroom without self-consciousness, a familiarity that made Hyukjae’s throat tighten. He heard the shower start. The steam curled out into the bedroom, carrying the scent of Donghae’s soap.
Hyukjae sat up slowly. Every muscle ached, a deep, pleasant soreness that felt earned. His skin was mapped with marks—the bite on his shoulder, the grip on his wrists, the press of the sheets against his back. A physical record. Proof. He touched a tender spot on his neck and a shiver, unrelated to the chill, ran through him.
He stood, his legs unsteady. He picked up his torn shirt from the floor, holding the ruined fabric. He’d bought this on a trip. To Osaka? Yes. Osaka. He’d argued with the vendor. Donghae had laughed and paid for it. The memory clicked into place, sharp and sudden. Not a feeling. A fact.
He dropped the shirt. He walked to the bathroom doorway. Donghae was a blurred shape behind the fogged glass, his head bowed under the spray. Hyukjae pushed the door open. The humid air wrapped around him.
Donghae turned, wiping water from his eyes. He didn’t speak. He just looked, his gaze traveling over Hyukjae’s marked body in the gray light.
“Move over,” Hyukjae said, his voice low.
Donghae shifted silently, making space under the water. Hyukjae stepped in. The heat was scalding, perfect. It sluiced over his shoulders, washing away the salt and the stickiness. He faced Donghae, the water plastering their hair to their foreheads.
“Do it again,” Hyukjae said. Water streamed over his lips.
“What?”
“Fuck me.” Hyukjae’s eyes were dark, intent. Not desperate like before. Resolute. “But slowly this time. Do it like you used to.”
Donghae’s breath hitched. He reached for the bar of soap, his movements deliberate. He lathered his hands, the suds white and slick. “Turn around.”
Hyukjae obeyed, facing the tiled wall. He braced his hands flat against the cool porcelain. Donghae’s soapy hands slid over his shoulders, down the knobs of his spine, over the curve of his ass. The touch was methodical, cleansing. It was also possessive. Hyukjae bowed his head, water coursing down his neck.
Donghae’s hands moved between his legs, soap making the passage easy. He washed him there, fingers circling, probing with a clinical thoroughness that was more intimate than anything they’d done on the bed. Hyukjae’s breath fogged the tiles in front of his mouth. He pushed back against the touch.
“Tell me,” Hyukjae murmured, his forehead now against his hands. “Tell me how we used to do it.”
Donghae rinsed the soap away. His clean hands returned, one smoothing over Hyukjae’s hip, the other positioning himself. The blunt head of his cock pressed against Hyukjae’s entrance, already loosened and receptive from before. “We’d take our time,” Donghae said, his voice a rough whisper next to Hyukjae’s ear. He pushed in, an inch, then two, a slow, burning stretch. “Usually here. In the shower. After a long day.”
He sank deeper, until he was fully seated, their bodies locked together under the falling water. Hyukjae groaned, a low, drawn-out sound of perfect fullness. Donghae held still, letting him adjust, his hands splayed on Hyukjae’s stomach, holding him close.
“You’d always be tight like this,” Donghae continued, his lips brushing Hyukjae’s wet shoulder. “Tense from the stage. I’d have to work you open, just like this.” He began to move, a lazy, rolling grind. Not the punishing pace from the bed. This was deep, measured. A claiming that was also a homecoming.
Hyukjae’s mind was quiet, focused only on the sensation: the slick heat of Donghae inside him, the rhythmic slap of wet skin, the steam filling his lungs. He pushed back, meeting each slow thrust. “What else?”
“You’d talk,” Donghae breathed, his pace increasing incrementally. “You’d babble about the choreography, about a fan you saw in the front row. Annoying shit.” He punctuated the word with a sharper thrust that made Hyukjae gasp. “And I’d just listen, feeling you clench around me, and think I was the luckiest fucker alive.”
The words unlocked something. A cascade of sensation without image. The feeling of cool sheets, not these tiles. A different shower, bigger, in a hotel. Tokyo. The memory was a scent—steam and expensive shampoo and Donghae’s sweat. Hyukjae’s fingers scrabbled against the wall.
“Harder,” he whispered.
Donghae obliged, his grip tightening, his thrusts losing their laziness, becoming purposeful, deeper. The water pounded on their backs. “You’d come first, usually,” Donghae grunted, his control fraying. “Just from this. Just from me fucking you like this. You couldn’t help it.”
As if summoned by the memory, a coil of heat tightened low in Hyukjae’s belly. His cock, trapped against the cold tile, was fully hard again. Pleasure built, a wave cresting from the deep, steady rhythm. It wasn’t the frantic chase from before. This was an inevitable surrender.
“Donghae,” he choked out.
“I know,” Donghae moaned, his mouth on Hyukjae’s neck. “I feel it. Let go.”
Hyukjae came with a broken cry, his orgasm tearing through him silently, his body convulsing around Donghae’s cock. The intensity of it blinded him, white noise filling his head. Donghae followed moments later, his own release punched out of him with a series of sharp, driving thrusts, his teeth sinking into the meat of Hyukjae’s shoulder as he emptied himself inside.
They slumped together under the spray, spent, breathing in ragged unison. The water began to run cold. Donghae gently pulled out and turned Hyukjae around, gathering him close, heedless of the mess. He shut off the water.
The silence was different now. Softer. The world came back: the drip of the faucet, the distant rumble of the city.
Hyukjae rested his forehead against Donghae’s collarbone. He was shivering slightly. “The napkin,” he mumbled into Donghae’s skin. “We should call.”
Donghae reached for a towel, wrapping it around Hyukjae first, then himself. They stepped out onto the bathmat. The morning light through the small window was bright now, clear.
Donghae led him to the bedroom. The napkin was on the nightstand, beside the ugly, lumpy scarf. Hyukjae picked up the scarf, running his thumb over the uneven stitches. His own clumsy hands. Donghae’s laughter. It’s the thought that counts, you idiot. I’ll wear it forever.
He remembered saying that. He remembered the winter wind on his face, the look in Donghae’s eyes—not pity, but a devastating tenderness.
He looked from the scarf to the napkin. The smudged numbers.
MEMORIES FLOOD BACK.
They didn’t come as a wave. They detonated.
It wasn’t a movie reel. It was every sense at once, a cacophony of stolen time. The taste of soju and Donghae’s mouth on a rooftop. The ache in his calves after a sixteen-hour practice and Donghae’s hands kneading the pain away. The sound of his own voice, shaky on a phone call to his mother: Mom, it’s Donghae. It’s always been Donghae. The feel of a ring box in his pocket, heavy with intention. The sight of Donghae asleep on a tour bus, dawn painting his face in gold, and the crushing, beautiful certainty that this was his life.
He saw their first kiss—not a passionate clash, but a fumbling, terrified brush of lips in a practice room after everyone had left. He heard his own voice, younger, saying “This could ruin everything.” He felt Donghae’s hand in his, their fingers slick with sweat. “Then let’s ruin it together.”
Fragments, sharp and unbidden: A fight in a hotel hallway in Paris. Making up in a bath that was too small. The giddy, secret pride of catching Donghae’s eye during a performance and knowing. The bone-deep fatigue of hiding it. The deeper relief of finally, finally stopping.
A Thanksgiving dinner with his family, his father’s stiff nod of acceptance. Donghae crying quietly that night, curled against him, saying “I didn’t think he ever would.”
The night he’d proposed. Not with the ring, but with his words, in this very apartment, on this floor, with takeout containers around them. “I don’t need a ceremony. I just need to know you’re mine.” Donghae’s smile, brighter than any stage light. “I already was.”
Every touch, every argument, every mundane morning and whispered night for ten years. The love wasn’t a single feeling. It was the bedrock of his adult life. The wall his mind had built hadn’t hidden it. It had damned it, and now the dam was gone.
He made a sound—a guttural, punched-out gasp. His knees buckled.
Donghae caught him before he hit the floor. “Hyukjae? Hyuk—what is it?”
Hyukjae clung to him, his fingers digging into Donghae’s arms. He was shaking violently, silent tears streaming down his face. He couldn’t speak. The weight of it was too immense, a universe collapsing back into a space meant for a single star.
He looked up at Donghae, really looked. He saw the man he’d grown up with, the boy he’d fallen for, the partner he’d chosen. He saw the fatigue, the fear, the unwavering hope in his eyes. He saw the last month of pain etched into new lines around his mouth.
“The scarf,” Hyukjae finally rasped, his voice shattered. “I… I dropped a stitch. On the third row. Right there.” He pointed a trembling finger at a specific, clumsy knot.
Donghae’s breath stopped. He searched Hyukjae’s face, his own eyes widening with a hope so fragile it was painful to behold.
Hyukjae reached up, his wet hand cupping Donghae’s cheek. His thumb traced the familiar line of his jaw. “In Paris,” he whispered, each word a stone lifted from his soul. “The fight. It was about the lunchbox. I threw the fucking bibimbap at the wall. You were right. The gochujang stain never came out of the hotel wallpaper.”
A slow, disbelieving sob escaped Donghae’s lips. He collapsed forward, his forehead pressing against Hyukjae’s.
“You remember.” It wasn’t a question. It was a prayer.
“It’s all there,” Hyukjae cried, the tears coming freely now, a release of pressure so profound it felt like his bones might dissolve. “It’s all there. The ring… it’s in my desk. The bottom drawer. Under the old tax papers.”
Donghae pulled back just enough to look at him, his own face wet. “You said you lost it.”
“I was scared.” The confession was a whispered rush. “I got scared of what it meant, so I hid it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Hae. For all of it. For this month. For every second I looked at you and didn’t see you.”
Donghae kissed him. It was soft, a sealing of a wound. It tasted like tears and forgiveness and ten years of shared history. When they broke apart, Donghae was smiling through his own tears, a real smile for the first time in weeks.
“You’re here,” he breathed.
Hyukjae nodded, clutching him closer. The memories weren’t just back; they were alive, thrumming under his skin, coloring every inch of the world. The unfamiliar apartment was now a gallery of their life. Every object had a story. Every shadow held a joke they’d shared.
He pulled back slightly, his gaze intense. “Call the doctor.”
“What?”
“Call her.” Hyukjae’s voice was stronger now, laced with a newfound urgency. “Tell her the patient’s memory has returned. Fully.” He looked around the room, at the life he’d built and forgotten, his heart pounding with a fierce, protective love. “And then tell her we need to understand why it left. So it never happens again.”
Donghae nodded, his face alight with a radiant, unguarded joy. He reached for his phone on the nightstand, his hand steady now, sure. The napkin with the smudged number was just a piece of paper. The real map was in Hyukjae’s eyes, finally clear, finally seeing him.
Outside, the city roared, indifferent. Inside, the quiet was gone, replaced by the beautiful, overwhelming noise of a life rushing back in.