attention | gyuricky

twenty-seven.

Gyuvin's lecture on brutalist architecture ends a little late the next day, and as he's greeted by the descending sunset as he steps out of the building, he realises it must be close to dinnertime. He scrolls through his recent calls log for Ricky's contact and clicks 'call'.

It rings, unanswered, until it times out and gets sent automatically to voicemail, but Ricky calls back before Gyuvin even gets the chance to dial again.

"Hey, sorry I missed that. What's up?"

"No, don't worry about it. Just asking if you wanna get dinner or something."

"Together? Or..."

"Yeah, duh."

"Okay. Can you give me a little while, though? I'm in the middle of working on something and I'm still at the studio."

"Take your time, don't worry. Call me when you're done, okay?"

"Okay. See you."

"See you."

Gyuvin heads back to their apartment to drop off his bookbag and switch out the hoodie he'd blindly grabbed from the pile of clothes on his side of the room that morning, in his rush to get to class on time, in favour of a slightly more presentable corduroy jacket.

He stares blankly at his reflection in the mirror and deliberates over styling his hair. He usually does, when he goes out for dates. Not that he's gone on many, ever since his middle school relationship ended. Mostly blind dates, really, or group dates set up by his friends he was dragged along to, but nevertheless, the logic still holds water.

He thinks about slapping himself. It's not a date, for heaven's sake, it's Ricky.

Besides, he doesn't need to look good. Ricky's seen him bleary-eyed and bedheaded when he first wakes up in the morning, and honestly speaking there's really no coming back from that.

As he leaves the house, hands in his pockets, earphones playing some song from a drama soundtrack from his playlist on shuffle, he reminds himself it's not a date.

He wonders if it could be.

He thinks about slapping himself again.

Gyuvin's taken his phone off Do Not Disturb, but by the time he gets to the visual arts building Ricky still hasn't called, and he figures he might as well go up to the painting studio to meet him. It's on a different floor from the architecture majors' studios and he has no idea which one Ricky's in, but he peeps in between the window slats as he passes by, most of them unoccupied considering it's dinnertime, until he eventually finds one with a lone boy seated in front of a canvas half his size, a paintbrush between his teeth as he fiddles with something, a pencil maybe, Gyuvin can't see.

Ricky doesn't paint with earphones in, but Gyuvin's footsteps are quiet enough he doesn't notice them, and Gyuvin watches silently from the back doorway as he puts down whatever it was he was holding and picks the paintbrush back up. He looks to be midway through a painting of a bright blue butterfly pinned up on a board. The details on the butterfly wings are clearly unfinished, but Gyuvin's floored at the way Ricky's somehow managed to capture the texture of velvet using oil paints.

Even though there's an easel set up in the corner of their living room, Ricky rarely does any actual painting in the apartment; whether it's because majority of his canvases are this size and unrealistic to be bringing to and from the studio or if there's any other reason, Gyuvin's never thought to ask.

Ricky registers that someone else is in the room and turns around eventually, but he's only mildly startled for a second. "Oh, you're here," he says, smiling. "I'm sorry I'm keeping you waiting. How long have you been standing there?"