Jae-min woke to sunlight cutting soft across the ceiling and a text already waiting on his phone, sent sometime past seven that morning.
Jihan: I'm sorry about yesterday. Work ran long and I know I was distant on the phone last night. I didn't mean to make you feel like an afterthought.
He stared at it for a long moment before typing back, some quiet, aching part of him wanting to feel nothing at all and finding, instead, that the warmth was still there, stubborn and unwelcome.
Jae-min: It's okay. You don't have to apologize.
Jihan: I do, though. How'd you sleep?
Jaemin: Fine, You?
Jihan: Better, now that I'm talking to you.
Jae-min set the phone down on his chest and stared at the ceiling for a while, the laptop from the night before sitting closed on the desk across the room like something radioactive, something he couldn't quite look at directly yet.
