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Lee Do is perfect.
He's the top of his cohort, a third-year in the medical faculty, the reserved one everyone admires from a careful distance. Clipboard and color-coded notes always in hand, praised by every attending who's ever supervised him, respected by the underclassmen who don't quite dare talk to him. Everyone admires him, even if no one quite knows him.
Moon Baek doesn't have to be perfect.
He gets A’s in the classes he actually bothers to care about and does just enough everywhere else to get by. A sophomore and a starting forward on the university basketball team —loud, reckless magnetic. The kind of person a lecture hall seems to rearrange itself around. He curses too much, smirks too easily, and picks fights he doesn’t need to pick. His teammates worship him. His professors are divided into two camps: the ones who like him and the ones who wish they didn’t have to deal with him.
Somehow, despite being almost complete opposites, Moon Baek and Lee Do end up enrolled in the same interdisciplinary elective, a general studies requirement neither of them particularly wanted.
On the first day, they’re paired together for the semester project. And met for the first time in an empty study room in the library.
“So I'm thinking,” Moon Baek says, feet up on the table, chair tipped back, arms behind his head. Lee Do sits across from him, posture straight, laptop closed and squared neatly on the table. “That we could do like a pretend scrapbook, yeah? Like of Korean students who studied overseas. We’d just have to find pictures and stuff and make pretend blogs about random shit.”
Lee Do folds his hands. “Why don't we just write a paper.”
Moon Baek stares at him blankly. “Why would we write a paper?” He makes it sound like Lee Do is suggesting grounds for failing this project—worth twenty-percent of their final grade.
“Because it's the safer choice," Lee Do says, unbothered. "Yours is a gamble."
“Yeah.” Moon Baek lets his chair drop back onto all four legs. “That’s why it’s a good idea, because—what the fuck—a paper?
He leans forward, studying Lee Do for a moment.
“I thought you’d be more interesting than that.”
Lee Do blinks, something flickering behind his calm. “I'm plenty interesting.” He hears how that sounds the second it leaves his mouth, and hates it a little.
Moon Baek grins. “Fine. My idea, then.”
-----------
“Lee Do?” one of Moon Baek’s teammates says with a laugh that night over champagne stolen from another teammate’s parents’ basement.
“Not really your conventional fuck, is he? You should’ve taken the lower class— someone easier."
One of the cheerleaders laughs, the shooting guard's hands under her skirt, champagne and beer spilling on the countertop, lights out in the house because the parents aren’t home. The basketball team, half the cheerleading squad, and half the dance squad are closeted in the house of Moon Baek’s point guard.
“He looks pretty though,” the cheerleader giggles, swaying dangerously on the edge of the counter. “Easy to fuck—but that’s so gay.”
“I’d make him cry,” his pointguard says, his arm loosely around the shoulders of one of the dancers. Her hand is gripping the shirt of a cheerleader and the cheerleader has her leg slumped over the shooting guard's thigh. His center pours his glass full to the brim again and holds the bottle, offering at large.
“You’d break him in half,” a cheerleader on Moon Baek’s left says breathlessly, rolling her eyes and tossing her hair back tipsily. The rest of the room laughs, loud and raucous and drunk and high.
Another teammates slaps Moon Baek's back and grins at him, head against his shoulder, “You’ll fuck him for us, right? I bet he’s still pretty hot once you get him tied up. Smart people love kinky shit like that.”
“Oh,” one of the dancers says, nursing a glass of wine—when did they break out the wine? “But he’s friends with Jo Seyeong.”
“Bitch,” a cheerleader chuckles.
“Whore,” another cheerleader squeals.
“Both,” his center says firmly, raising his glass, wagging his eyebrows, and the room explodes into laughter again—a few cheerleaders falling backward against the walls behind the countertop. A few feet away from Moon Baek, one of his shooting guard has started necking the dancer he’d had his arm around for the past few minutes.
Moon Baek downs the contents of his glass—his fourth round—and smiles appropriately when a cheerleader beside him whines girlishly about wanting to dance. His point guard starts up the stereo.
------
“What the hell—are you sick?” Lee Do says, bewildered, when Moon Baek comes into their usual study room the next day and slumps head down on the desk, lifeless and glum.
Moon Baek doesn’t bring his head up—he wants to punch the older man because that volume of voice doesn’t ever bring any good to the world, least of all a world that is currently suffering from the hangover of a lifetime and has been suffering the entire lectures day and now can’t even go home because this poor world has to suffer through a stupid project session.
“No,” Moon Baek says in a low voice, hoping that his tone will telepathically convey to Lee Do’s voice box to turn it down a little.
Or a lot.
“Then get up and help me with our project, you lazyass,” Lee Do says affectionately, clearly not getting the message or at least unable to recognize the symptoms because he pats Moon Baek’s head fondly and Moon Baek thinks his skull is about to implode upon itself.
The worst part is that this was his idea.
He was the one who convinced Lee Do that their project would be more interesting than a boring paper. But somewhere along the way, Lee Do has become far more enthusiastic about it than he ever expected.
“We need to pick a country,” Lee Do says, already flipping through his notes. “I was thinking the US. There’s more material online. Or Australia. Maybe Britain.”
Moon Baek, face still on the table, gives a thumbs up toward the ceiling.
"Great," Lee Do says. "America it is."
----------------
Moon Baek knows he’s good-looking.
He knows girls and boys find him attractive. He’s had cheerleaders, dancers, quiet little bookworms, even a few of his teammates. He’s had anyone who wanted him and anyone he wanted, because he’s good-looking, and he’s attractive, and he’s never seen a reason to say no.
It’s just sex.
Just him. Just them.
Just bodies, heat, and something that feels good.
Moon Baek has never needed more than that.
Until Lee Do.
Compared to Lee Do, Moon Baek thinks he’s hideous.
Not because he suddenly believes he’s unattractive. He knows he isn’t.
It’s just that Lee Do is beautiful.
Beautiful in a way Moon Baek has never known how to be. Beautiful in a way that makes every compliment Moon Baek has ever received feel suddenly meaningless.
And the worst part?
Moon Baek can’t stop looking at him.
-------------
“You’re late,” Lee Do greets him one day when Moon Baek strolls in fifteen minutes after their usual meeting time because the basketball player didn’t feel like rushing—a cheerleader wanted to blow him and Moon Baek didn’t say no, so he took longer to get changed after practice and he’s exhausted and he doesn’t want to work on a stupid project that he knows he can get an A on by smiling at the female teacher anyway.
He walks across the classroom to his usual desk, ready to wait for Lee Do to assign him whatever needs doing that day—if Moon Baek remembers right (which he probably doesn’t since that was some sketchy weed his striker gave to him two nights ago) then he’s probably going to be handed Lee Do’s laptop again to search up some more restaurants around Chinatown which is supposedly where their imaginary Korean students are supposedly living near.
Moon Baek looks up to ask what they’re working on today and when can he leave—
"What," falls out of Moon Baek's mouth before he can stop it.
Lee Do blinks. “Huh?”
Lee Do, in Moon Baek’s opinion, has no right to huh, has no right to any sort of surprised expression because that should be all Moon Baek.
That should be all Moon Baek because Lee Do isn’t allowed to stand in the sunlight. Lee Do isn’t allowed to be out of his composed, contained and unreachable into a paint-splattered T-shirt, worn and wrinkled and old. Lee Do isn’t allowed to have streaks of charcoal and pastels on his cheeks, isn’t allowed to have messy hair, isn’t allowed to be sweating just a little bit because of the unusually warm March day.
Lee Do looks…
Wrong.
Beautifully, unfairly wrong.
“Oh,” Lee Do says, then. He turns around and points at the cluster of desks pushed haphazardly together to make a bigger surface. “I’m painting some of the papers we’re going to use as pages for the scrapbook, but I had to glue some together first because they were too thin on their own.”
He glances down at himself, then gives Moon Baek a sheepish grin.
“Which,” he adds, “explains why I look like a mess.”
Moon Baek is afraid to open his mouth.
If he does, he thinks he might vomit up his heart.
“Yeah,” he manages once he’s reasonably sure he isn’t about to puke. “You look like shit.”
Lee Do throws a dry paintbrush at him—Moon Baek dodges. The paintbrush makes a loud clatter near a bookshelf that holds Pi posters.
“Oh, shut up,” Lee Do says, his eyes doing that lovely thing of vanishing into dark crescents while pretty white teeth are shown in a perfect open laugh. “Late bastards don’t get to talk.”
Moon Baek looks away quickly.
Apparently, not quickly enough.
Because when he glances back, Lee Do is suddenly right in his space, looking delighted and completely disbelieving.
Moon Baek tries to push him away.
“Are you,” Lee Do says in disbelief, “sulking? Did you just—like—pout? Am I going crazy? Should I be concerned?”
“No,” Moon Baek says, swatting uselessly at him.
“No, you weren’t sulking, or no, I shouldn’t be concerned?” Lee Do asks, smirking as he waves the paintbrush triumphantly in his hand.
Moon Baek looks up at him.
Lee Do raises his eyebrows, daring him to answer.
Moon Baek stands up instantly, grabs the paintbrush out of Lee Do’s hand and starts flicking the residual paint on the third year, chasing him around the room. Lee Do laughs and dodges and ducks—they stumble over desks and chairs and in a close call almost knock their drying project and Lee Do’s laptop to the ground. He chases Lee Do like that until the older man collapses, tired, against the windowsill and Moon Baek purposefully collides into him.
“Yah,” Lee Do draws it out breathlessly, head thrown back, panting and smiling. His legs are tangled with Moon Baek’s and their fingers brush. He kicks halfheartedly at the younger man, “Get away from me—it’s freakin hot.”
“Take your clothes off then,” Moon Baek shoots back, standing up and brushing the dust off of his pants. He inspects himself for splattered paint, and then offers a hand to Lee Do. The older man takes it and Moon Baek yanks him to his feet lightly.
“I would,” Lee Do says, continuing to tease him, “but then you wouldn’t be able to handle my inherent sexiness.”
Moon Baek smiles.
Lee Do’s eyes catch on it as though it’s something rare.
“You’re smiling,” he says, sounding genuinely delighted. “I should mark the calendar.”
“Shut up.” Moon Baek drops back into his chair, immediately pretending to check his phone so Lee Do won’t notice the warmth creeping into his face.
He tries to ignore the heat that spreads in his face when Lee Do comes a little too close when the third year wants to explain what the next step of the scrapbook is. The sunlight forms a halo around Lee Do's hair.
-----------
“Yo, Moon Baek,” his shooting guard calls cheerfully, catching up with him as they walk out of class. “How was it?”
He slaps Moon Baek on the back a few times, their shoulders knocking together.
Moon Baek glances at him. “How was what?”
“Fuck, you’re hilarious,” the other boy says, rolling his eyes. He shakes Moon Baek a little and jerks his head towards the lockers in the middle of the hall where Lee Do has his arm around Jo Seyeong, the petite quiet woman that looking irritated and amused at the same time while Lee Do laughs.
Moon Baek stares. “Oh.”
“He looks pretty peachy keen for someone who was fucked into a desk,” his teammates says, frowning. “Go easy on him or something? Or did he suck?”
“I—“
“You haven’t done it yet?” his shooting-guard cuts him off with raised eyebrows as they walk to their next class. “Man, this is fucking-ass slow for you. I’d be all up on that ass in double time, Captain-shii. I mean, he doesn’t look that girly, but pretty's pretty, right? And he’s a fucking doctor wanna be—get on it, Moon Baek-ah.”
Moon Baek doesn't answer. His teammate laughs and peels off toward his own lecture, leaving Moon Baek to walk the rest of the way alone, to the one class he shares with Lee Do.
-----------
“Oh,” Lee Do says when he walks into the classroom. “You’re early.”
Moon Baek takes off his headphones and raises his eyebrows in greeting.
Lee Do is dressed casually today, which probably means they won’t be painting. It’s likely going to be a research day or a cutting-and-pasting day instead.
That theory is confirmed by the enormous bag hanging from Lee Do’s shoulder, stuffed with all the materials they’ll eventually assemble into their project, along with their information-filled notebooks, scissors, glue, and whatever else Lee Do has decided they absolutely cannot survive without.
His laptop is tucked into a separate case slung over his other shoulder.
“Well,” Lee Do says, mockingly snapping his fingers. “Now I can’t complain about you being a late bastard.”
He drops his bags onto the desk and immediately starts pulling out his laptop.
“You picked a stupid day to be early, though. We’re just looking shit up again. We’re not actually doing anything.”
“I’ll be sure to be late next time,” Moon Baek says.
“Yeah, except next time we’re probably going to be doing something that requires a shitload of setup, and I’m going to bitch at you if you’re late.” Lee Do snorts as he opens his laptop and presses the power button. “So screw that brilliant plan.”
“Jackass.” Moon Baek smiles.
“Retard.” Lee Do grins back.
The rest of the time is passed like Lee Do said—researching more information, more places to make the scrapbook realistic, saving things to be printed out, arranging formats of a few more pages for Lee Do to make, materials that Moon Baek needs to go out and buy. The rest of the time is passed like Lee Do said, and Moon Baek gets almost nothing done on his own—everything that’s productive today is either done by Lee Do or pushed towards Lee Do discreetly by Moon Baek.
Moon Baek is usually given relatively simple tasks because like Lee Do has said multiple times before, the basketball player is quite useless when it comes to being creative. His task today was supposed to be looking up addresses of restaurants near the fake address they created for their imaginary students’ apartment, and Moon Baek found one-quarter of an address.
Meaning he wrote down the street number and that was about it.
He blames it on Lee Do.
He blames it on the fact that Lee Do talks more than anyone would guess, especially for someone who looks like he was born knowing how to glare people into silence, and it’s just noisy, incessant chatter about nothing important — about how he has another anatomy practical coming up, about the professor who insists on making them memorize every tiny branch of the brachial plexus, about how he needs to finish reviewing his pathology notes before tomorrow’s lecture, about how he’s been surviving on convenience-store coffee because he keeps forgetting to eat between classes, about how his study group is arguing over which textbook is actually worth buying, about how he still needs to prepare for his clinical skills assessment, about, about, about and none of it is relevant to Moon Baek’s life at all.
It’s all boring, normal stuff that Moon Baek would usually scorn at—that his teammates and the cheerleading squad and the dance team would scorn at because none of it is exciting, is rule-breaking, is thrilling.
It’s boring and not relevant to his life, but he wishes it was.
He wishes that Lee Do is telling him this not because he has no one else to talk to at the moment, not because he’s stuck doing an amazing project with a hideous, hideous, ugly boy, but he wishes Lee Do is telling him all this because Moon Baek is more to him than just a project partner.
He wants to be Lee Do’s friend.
He wants to be more than Lee Do’s friend.
Lee Do is too beautiful for Moon Baek.
Moon Baek is dirty. Moon Baek is foggy and filthy and disgusting and ugly and malformed and hideous. Moon Baek is dark and shadowed and gray and useless. Moon Baek’s world is terrible. Moon Baek’s world used to have a beautiful sun — round and orange, hanging above polished hardwood. A sky made of bright arena lights and towering banners. Clouds shaped like backboards and hoops. Rain that sounded like sneakers squeaking across the court, basketballs pounding against the floor, whistles cutting sharply through the air, and teammates shouting his name from the sidelines.
But then there is college.
And Moon Baek has a different sun—a sun that smells like sex and smoke, a sky that’s dark with the neon lights of a house party, clouds that are made of buzzing alcohol, rain that sounds like girlish sighs and moans and boyish shouts of ecstasy.
Lee Do’s world is beautiful.
Lee Do’s world has a bright, clinical sun — round and white beneath the fluorescent lights of the lecture hall, a sky that smells like antiseptic, clean and freshly printed notes. Clouds made of white coats, blue scrubs, anatomy charts, and pages covered in neat handwriting. Rain that sounds like the turning of textbook pages, the quiet beeping of monitors in the simulation lab, and there are stethoscopes around his neck instead of scarves, anatomy models on shelves instead of decorations, and color-coded notes scattered across every surface he claims as his own.
There is college for Lee Do too.
But his world is still beautiful.
--------------
The project is due in two days and they are already finished. They only have sessions now to finalize a few things here and there and make sure that they’ve filled out all the little details on the criteria paper that both of them were given when it was assigned. They only have sessions now because Lee Do keeps coming and Moon Baek comes too because if they didn’t have sessions he thinks that he might go insane.
Lee Do tells him about the clinical rotation he's about to start at the teaching hospital across the city — longer hours, a new campus, barely any time to breathe. He says it lightly, almost teasingly, tells Moon Baek he should stop by sometime if he's ever on that side of town. Moon Baek doesn't know why he'd say that. They're not really friends. They only ever talk during these sessions.
He hates that Lee Do makes him hope.
He hates it.
So Moon Baek stands up.
He stands up and walks over to Lee Do.
And kisses him.
Lee Do pulls away—he doesn’t look angry. He looks surprised—no smile, no frown—just surprise.
Moon Baek leans in to kiss him again, wordlessly—wordless this entire time—but Lee Do puts a hand on the taller man' shoulder, asking him quietly to wait.
Moon Baek doesn’t.
Moon Baek’s world is grimy and filthy and disgusting and dark. It used to be beautiful like Lee Do’s. It used to be beautiful but it no longer is and Moon Baek hates it. He hates that his world has been taken apart. Hates that he no longer has his beautiful orange sun, his polished hardwood and backboard clouds, or the rain of squeaking sneakers, bouncing balls, sharp whistles, and roaring cheers.
He hates that his beautiful world has been taken away but Lee Do’s hasn’t.
He doesn’t understand why.
When Moon Baek leaves the studyroom, he leaves Lee Do on the ground, bleeding and silent and broken and naked with clothes torn to the side. He leaves him limp and dirty—as dirty as Moon Baek and his world—and doesn’t look back. He leaves him in pain—as much pain as Moon Baek had striking through his entire body when he first joined the basketball team and realized that his teammates don’t share his beautiful world—they wanted him to live in a different world and he listened to them instead of himself.
As much pain as Moon Baek has striking to him now when he realizes that he’s just dirtied his own world a little bit more by destroying Lee Do’s.
Lee Do’s world is destroyed—
But only for this moment.
Only for this moment because Lee Do will rebuild his world—so easily, Moon Baek knows—but Moon Baek never can. Moon Baek never will. Moon Baek’s is dark and filthy and Lee Do’s is bright and beautiful and it doesn’t matter how much—how fucking much—Moon Baek wants to live in Lee Do’s world even for just a minute.
It doesn’t matter how much Moon Baek wants Lee Do—wants to be with him—even for just a moment.
Lee Do is too beautiful.
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Seyeong gives Moon Baek the project the next day—the scrapbook pressed and perfect. She gives it to Moon Baek at lunch—two periods before Moon Baek's shared class—places it on the table, ignoring the curious stares of the cheerleaders and the basketball players at the table. Seyeong puts it on the table and then slaps Moon Baek across the face—hard.
The entire table erupts into hoots and laughter and shouts, but Seyeong is already walking away, face stoic.
Lee Do isn’t in class that day.
Moon Baek doesn’t see him for the rest of the week.
Their project gets an A+.
Moon Baek doesn’t ever see him up close again—it’s always at a distance—a great distance that’s never any less than an entire hallway.
“I don’t think you fucked him hard enough,” his shooting guard laughs to him one night over vodka and whiskey and a little bit of cheap beer. “I saw him today in the Literature hallway and he’s still walking fine. You have to make ‘em limp, Moon Baek-ah.”
Moon Baek just silently holds up his bottle and smiles it off.
He feels like his face is being melted off with hot rocks.
----------
The semester ends, and the third-years have their white coat ceremony — the small, formal send-off before they scatter into clinical rotations across the city.
Moon Baek watched from a dark corner at the back of the room, leaning sideways. He isn't supposed to be there.
He just wants to see if Lee Do can still smile like that. Easy. Unguarded. The kind of smile that isn't for anyone in particular.
Lee Do can.
When his name is called, Lee Do steps forward to receive his coat, and his smile is exactly as beautiful as Moon Baek remembers it from the day he threw a dry paintbrush across a study room. And watching him from the distance he built himself, Moon Baek finally understands. That some doors only open once, and he's the one who let his close.
Moon Baek lowers his head and walks away.