Chapter 1: The Gift

The elevator ride to the thirty-fifth floor took forty-seven seconds. Jaehyun had counted them the first time Johnny brought him here, back when everything still felt like something he was choosing. Now he counted them again, watching the numbers climb, and wondered when he had stopped choosing anything at all.

The doors opened onto the executive level, quiet at this hour. Past eight on a Friday meant the assistants had gone home, the corner offices dark, the only light spilling from the crack beneath Johnny's door at the end of the hall. Jaehyun had rehearsed this. He had spent a week rehearsing it, actually—three breakdowns in the shower, two in the library stacks where no one could hear him, one in the middle of a lecture on constitutional law that he'd had to walk out of with his hand pressed against his mouth. The words were ready. I know you called your friend at the firm. I know I didn't earn it. I can't do this anymore. Clean, honest, final.

He pushed the door open without knocking.

Johnny was behind his desk, but not in the way Jaehyun had pictured him. His tie hung loose around his neck, the top three buttons of his shirt undone, and the glass in his hand held something amber that caught the light when he turned. His eyes were glassy in a way Jaehyun recognized immediately. Not just drunk. Something else riding alongside it, softening the edges of his face into something almost gentle.

"Baby." Johnny's voice came out slow, dragged through honey. "You're here."

"I need to talk to you." Jaehyun stayed by the door, one hand still on the handle, because walking further into the room felt like a decision he couldn't take back. "About the internship. About all of it."

"The internship." Johnny set the glass down with a carefulness that betrayed exactly how much he'd had. "You've been avoiding my calls for a week, and now you want to talk about the internship."

"Yes."

"Come here first."

"No." The word came out stronger than Jaehyun expected, and he clung to it. "I'm not—I came here to say something, and I need you to listen. I know you called in a favor. I know the placement wasn't mine. And I can't—I can't keep pretending that any of this is something I built when every door I walk through was opened by you."

Johnny watched him for a long moment. Then he stood, and crossed the room, and before Jaehyun could step back or finish the sentence he had prepared for this exact moment, Johnny's hand closed around his wrist and he was being pulled deeper into the office, past the desk, past the wall of windows, toward the door on the far side that Jaehyun had always assumed led to a supply closet or a private bathroom.

It didn't.

The room beyond was smaller than the office but not small. A bed took up most of the far wall, made up in dark sheets that Jaehyun recognized from the nights he had spent in Johnny's house. A low lamp in the corner cast everything in gold. There was a chair by the window, a rug he had definitely seen before, a nightstand with a glass of water and a small leather case he knew better than to ask about.

"See?" Johnny said, and his voice had gone soft, almost proud. "I built this for you."

Jaehyun stood in the doorway and felt something cold slide down the back of his throat. "What?"

"Every time I wanted you here, you had to come at night, sneak through the garage, take the service elevator like you were something I was hiding." Johnny stepped behind him, close enough that Jaehyun could feel the heat off his skin. "So I built you a room. You can stay here whenever you want. No driving across town. No waiting for the house to be empty. Just—" He gestured at the bed, the window, the lamp. "Yours."

The word landed in Jaehyun's chest like a stone in still water.

He turned to face Johnny, and whatever composure he had walked in with started to crack along edges he hadn't even known were weak. "You think that's what I wanted? A room? You think I came here because I needed somewhere to stay?"

"Then why did you come?" Johnny's hand found his waist. "You said you were going to end things. So end them."

"I am." Jaehyun's voice shook, and he hated it. "I am ending them. I can't do this anymore, Johnny. I can't be the thing you build rooms for and put in suits and walk through doors you opened. I look at myself in the mirror and I don't—I don't recognize anything that's actually mine."

"You're being dramatic."

"I'm being honest." The words started tumbling faster than he could catch them. "You don't understand. I have spent my whole life earning things. Every single thing I have, I earned. And now I find out that the one thing I thought was mine, the one thing I thought I did—" His throat closed. He tried to push past it, and couldn't. "You called someone. You picked up a phone and you made my life happen. Do you know what that does to a person? Do you know what it's like to realize you're not a person at all, you're just—you're a project. A thing someone's maintaining."

Johnny's face did something complicated, but Jaehyun was crying now, and once it started he couldn't make it stop. The words kept coming, wet and broken and barely coherent, tangled up with a week of breakdowns he had held inside until this exact moment.

"I don't know who I am without you. And I don't—" He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and sucked in a breath that shuddered on the way down. "I don't know if there even is anything left under all of it. Under the flowers. Under the room. Under every single thing you've ever given me that I couldn't say no to. And now I'm standing here trying to leave and I can't even—I can't even get through a sentence without falling apart, which is exactly the point, isn't it. It's exactly what you wanted. You wanted me to need you so badly that leaving stops being possible."

He didn't see Johnny move. He only felt it—hands closing around his upper arms, firm, steering him backward until the backs of his knees hit the edge of the bed and he sat hard, the mattress dipping under his weight. Johnny's knee pressed between his thighs, keeping him there, and Jaehyun's crying had gone silent and gasping, the kind that came with too much air and not enough of it at the same time.

"I'm sorry," Johnny said, and the words sounded like they were coming from a long way off. "I know. I know, baby. I know."

"You don't know." Jaehyun tried to stand, and Johnny's weight shifted forward, holding him down. "You don't—let me up. Johnny, let me up."

"No."

"Johnny—"

"I can't let you leave like this." Johnny's hand moved up, cupping Jaehyun's jaw, tilting his face up until their eyes met. "Look at you. You're shaking. You're not going anywhere. Not tonight."

"I don't want to stay." The words came out small. "I don't want to be here. I don't want to be this."

And then Johnny reached over to the nightstand and popped the small leather case open, and Jaehyun understood, with a clarity that cut through the fog of tears, exactly what was about to happen.

"No." He tried to push back, but Johnny's hand caught his shoulder and shoved him flat against the mattress. "Johnny, no, I don't—"

"Shh." Johnny's voice stayed soft. His knee pinned Jaehyun's thigh. His free hand was already working the cap off a small glass vial, drawing up a measure into a syringe with the same casual efficiency he used for everything else. "You don't have to be this. Not tonight. Just let me take it off you for a while."

"Johnny, please—"

"I've got you." The needle hovered. Jaehyun twisted under him, but Johnny's weight was over his hips now, pinning him completely, and one hand closed around Jaehyun's wrist and pressed it into the sheets. "You're going to feel better. You just don't know it yet."

The needle went in. Jaehyun cried out—not from pain, exactly, but from the wrongness of it, the cold wrongness of everything, and Johnny made a low soothing noise and kept him pinned while the plunge finished. And Jaehyun kept crying, kept saying no and stop and I don't want this into Johnny's shoulder, and Johnny kept holding him and kissing the side of his head and telling him it was going to be okay, and somewhere in all of it Jaehyun felt the first wave come up through his spine and dissolve the edges of the room into something soft and distant and very far away from anything he had been trying to say.

The room came back in pieces.

Jaehyun didn't remember getting off the bed. He didn't remember Johnny moving him, either, but here he was on the rug by the window, the fibers rough against his palms, his back against the low frame of the lounge chair. The lamp had been turned down to almost nothing. The city sprawled beneath them through the glass, a scatter of lights that didn't quite hold still when he looked at them, so he stopped looking.

Johnny sat across from him with his back to the wall, sleeves rolled past his elbows now, his face slack and beautiful in the half-dark. Between them, on the low table he had pulled over, two neat lines waited on a small hand mirror. The same mirror Jaehyun had seen in the bathroom at Johnny's house, silver-backed, old. It had always struck him as an odd thing for a man like Johnny to keep. Now it made a different kind of sense.

"You don't have to," Johnny said, though he was already rolling a bill between his fingers, watching Jaehyun's face for something.

Jaehyun's body was warm and weightless and entirely not his. Whatever Johnny had put into his arm had smoothed the crying out of him, had sanded down the sharp parts until he was just a shape sitting on a floor, breathing in time with someone else. He could still feel where the needle had gone in—a small, deliberate ache on the inside of his elbow—and he kept pressing his thumb against it without meaning to.

"I don't want to," he heard himself say.

"Okay."

"But I'm going to."

Johnny's mouth curved, slow, and he leaned over and did the first line himself, head dropping back against the wall when he came up. Then he held out the bill, and Jaehyun took it before he could hear himself decide not to, and leaned over the mirror, and the world narrowed to a bright line and the sound of his own breathing.

The burn came up behind his eyes and spread through his skull like warm water into cold. He sat back and let it happen, and the room sharpened around him, every edge defined, every shadow suddenly legible. Johnny was watching him, and Jaehyun could see every single thing in his face now: the drink, the powder, and underneath it, a bone-deep sadness Johnny had never once said out loud.

"Again," Johnny said.

They did it again. And again. Sometime after the fourth line Jaehyun lost track of which way was up and started laughing at something he couldn't remember being funny, and Johnny laughed too, low and warm, and pulled Jaehyun across the floor until he was tucked against Johnny's chest, cheek on his shoulder, and the two of them sat like that against the wall while the city went on with its lights, indifferent.

"You're so pretty," Johnny murmured into his hair. "You have no idea. You have no idea how pretty you are."

Jaehyun wanted to say something—something about how pretty wasn't the same as earned, how he'd rather be ugly and real than pretty and kept—but the thought dissolved before it reached his mouth, and the last thing he registered was Johnny's hand moving slow through his hair, and the floor tilting gently, like a boat, and then nothing at all.

He woke to gray light and a headache sitting behind his eyes like a thumb pressed hard against the socket.

The bed was Johnny's bed, in Johnny's hidden room, in Johnny's office, and Jaehyun lay still for a long time staring at the ceiling and trying to assemble the previous night in any order that made sense. It didn't. There were pieces—crying, the needle, the mirror, Johnny's voice saying I've got you—and none of them fit together in a way that didn't make him want to crawl out of his own skin.

Johnny was not beside him. Through the half-open door he could hear the soft tap of a keyboard. Working. Like it was any other morning.

Jaehyun got up. His legs came apart beneath him halfway to the bathroom, and he caught the doorframe hard, and stood there for a second with his forehead against the wood, breathing through his nose until the floor leveled out. Then he stepped into the shower and turned it as hot as it went.

The water helped. The steam helped. He stood under it long after the temperature had stopped mattering, letting it run down his back and over the small bruise on the inside of his elbow, which he looked at once and then tried not to look at again. His hands were steady by the time he got out. Nothing else was.

He found a towel, and then his own clothes from the night before, folded on the chair by the window—Johnny must have done that, must have tidied up while Jaehyun was passed out, and the tenderness of it made Jaehyun want to break something. He pulled his shirt back on. He didn't want coffee, was what he told himself, crossing back into the suite.

He heard Johnny before he saw him. The chair creak, the soft exhale. Then Johnny's voice, rough from the night, coming from somewhere near the bed.

"Jae."

Jaehyun didn't turn around. He walked back to the mattress and sat on the edge of it, blanket pulled up over his lap, and stared at the window. His nose was running. He wiped it with the back of his wrist, and then again, and the second time his eyes stung too, and he hated that most of all.

"I'm sorry," Johnny said.

Jaehyun said nothing.

"I shouldn't have—the injection. That was wrong. I know that was wrong. I was drunk and I was—" Johnny stopped. Started again. "It was a bad night, and I took it out on you, and that's not something I'm going to pretend didn't happen."

Still nothing. Jaehyun's nose kept running. He kept wiping it.

"Baby. Look at me."

"No."

"Jae."

"No, Johnny."

The silence that followed was long enough that Jaehyun thought he might have won something. Then he felt the mattress dip behind him, and Johnny's arm came around his waist, and Johnny's forehead pressed into the back of his shoulder. Not holding him down. Just holding him.

"I'm sorry," Johnny said again, quieter. "I'm so sorry. I know it doesn't fix anything. But I am."

Jaehyun closed his eyes and let himself be held, because his body was too tired not to, and because some horrible piece of him had been waiting all week to be back in this exact position, in exactly this warmth, and hated himself for how good it felt.

"I don't know why I'm here," he said eventually. His voice came out raw. "I don't know why I came last night. I had a whole—" A wet laugh, entirely without humor. "I had a whole speech. I practiced it in the shower like an idiot. Three times. And then you opened a door, and I just—"

"You didn't get to say it."

"No."

Johnny's arm tightened. "So say it now."

Jaehyun was quiet for a moment, sniffling, staring at the gray city beyond the window. Then he said it, because it was easier to say it to the glass than to Johnny's face.

"I know you called in a favor for the internship. I know the placement wasn't mine. And I know—" His voice cracked, and he swallowed it down. "I know I've been slipping. I know my grades are average. I know I haven't published anything useful in months. I know all of that. I knew it before I opened the offer letter, and I knew it while I was reading it, and the whole time I was just standing there thinking, someone thought I earned this, and then I found out it was you. It was you, Johnny. It's always you. There is not a single good thing in my life right now that isn't something you handed me, and I don't—" He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye, hard, until he saw light. "I don't know what I am without you standing behind me, telling people I'm worth something. And I want to know. I want to know so badly it makes me sick."

The words ran out. Jaehyun sat there breathing, and Johnny said nothing for a long moment, and then he said, very quietly, "You really think the only reason you got that offer is because of me."

Johnny shifted behind him, pulling Jaehyun back against his chest until they were both leaning against the headboard, Jaehyun tucked sideways under Johnny's arm like something that belonged there. It was a position Jaehyun had been in a hundred times. He knew the shape of Johnny's shoulder, the way his heartbeat sounded when you were listening from this close, and he hated how easily his body settled into it even now, even after last night.

"Ray called me," Johnny said. "Three weeks before you got the offer. He asked if I knew any students with a strong grasp of corporate litigation. He had read your paper. The one on derivative liability—the one you published with your professor last spring."

Jaehyun's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"He said it was the cleanest student piece he'd read in years. He wanted to know if you were still in the program. I told him yes. That's the entire conversation, baby. I gave him your name. He did the rest."

"Johnny—"

"You can call him yourself. Ask him. He'll tell you exactly the same thing." Johnny's thumb moved slow along Jaehyun's arm, tracing the edge of the bruise without touching it. "You think I have that kind of pull? I don't. Ray doesn't owe me favors. He runs his own firm and he does exactly what he wants. If he wanted you, it's because he read your work and he wanted you."

Jaehyun pressed his face into Johnny's shirt and breathed in. He wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe it so badly that his chest hurt with the wanting. But there was a voice underneath, small and stubborn, that kept saying, he suggested you. You didn't apply. You didn't do anything. You just existed somewhere Johnny could find you.

"I'm not stupid," he said. "I know my grades slipped. I know what my transcript looks like right now. Nobody hands out offers to people with—"

"You're not stupid," Johnny said. "You're exhausted. There's a difference. You've been running on nothing for months. You finished a paper, you carried a full course load, and you were—" He paused, and Jaehyun felt the pause more than he heard it. "You were dealing with me. All of it at once. Something had to give, and it was the grades. That doesn't make you less than. It makes you human."

Jaehyun let out a breath that came out shakier than he wanted.

"And now you have something you don't have to fight for," Johnny went on, softer. "You have an internship that other students would kill for, and you're three weeks into a case that most associates don't touch for a year. You're learning. You're growing. You're showing up." He tilted Jaehyun's chin up with one finger, and for a second their eyes met, and Johnny's face was so steady that Jaehyun almost couldn't stand it. "Do you really want to hand that back? Throw away the one chance you have to prove to yourself that you can do this?"

"I don't know if I can."

"You can."

"I don't know if I deserve—"

"Deserve what?" Johnny's voice sharpened a fraction, and then softened again. "Deserve to keep working? Deserve to learn? That's not how any of this works, baby. Nobody earns their first job. They get it and then they earn it. That's the whole point. You're already there. You're already in the room. The only question is whether you stay."

Jaehyun was quiet.

He was thinking about the case—about the second week of it, when he'd stayed up until four reading depositions and then gone in at seven and understood something no one else on the team had understood about the timeline of the acquisition. He was thinking about how it felt when Ray's senior associate called him into her office and said you might have found something here and Jaehyun had gone back to his desk with his hands shaking and had to sit still for a full minute before he could keep typing. He was thinking about how much he had wanted that. How much he still wanted it.

Johnny was right. He hated that Johnny was right.

"If I keep it," he said slowly, "and it turns out I didn't earn any of it. If I get to the end of the case and I'm just—the guy whose boyfriend called in—"

"You won't be." Johnny's hand moved into his hair, fingers combing through it unhurried. "Because you're going to work. You're going to work harder than anyone else in that office, and you're going to make that case yours, and when it's over nobody is going to remember how you got in the door. They're going to remember what you did once you were inside." He kissed the top of Jaehyun's head. "That's how people like us get anywhere. We work until the beginning stops mattering."

People like us. Jaehyun turned the phrase over, and hated how much he wanted to be one of those people, hated how much he wanted it to be true that he and Johnny were the same kind of thing—both of them from nowhere, both of them clawing their way into rooms they weren't born into, both of them pretending every day that they belonged.

He didn't say any of that.

He just let himself sink, a fraction at a time, back into Johnny's chest. His body did it before his mind agreed to, the way it always did. His shoulders loosened. His breathing evened out. The knot in his stomach that had been sitting there for a week started, slowly, to let go.

"I'm still angry," he said, into Johnny's collarbone.

"I know."

"About last night. About the—" He couldn't say the word. He just touched the inside of his own elbow, and Johnny saw, and something in his face flickered and went still.

"I know," Johnny said again. "And I'm not going to do it again. I'm not. I promise you, baby, that was—that was a bad night, and I wasn't myself, and it won't happen again."

Jaehyun wanted to argue with that. Some part of him knew he should argue with it, knew that a promise made in a room like this didn't weigh anything. But he was so tired. His head still ached. His eyes were still full. And Johnny was warm, and Johnny was promising, and Johnny was here, and the alternative was going home to a studio apartment with a mattress on the floor and a roommate who never asked questions and nobody in the world who cared whether or not he ate dinner.

He was so tired of being nobody in the world.

"Okay," he said.

Johnny went very still. "Okay?"

"I'll keep it." Jaehyun closed his eyes. "The internship. I'll keep it. I'll—I'll work on the case. See what happens."

Johnny's arms came fully around him then, and pulled him in tight, and Jaehyun let himself be pulled. He let his head fall back onto Johnny's shoulder and let his hand curl into the front of Johnny's shirt and let everything that had been screaming at him for the past week go quiet, all at once, like a switch being flipped. It should have felt like defeat. It did feel like defeat. But it also felt like relief, and Jaehyun had stopped being able to tell those two apart a long time ago.

Above him, Johnny pressed a kiss to his temple, and then to his hair, and then just rested his mouth there, saying nothing, and the gray morning light slowly filled the room, and somewhere down in the street the city kept going on without either of them.