Chapter 1

it's midnight, drunken with a tired voice

Koen hates his new apartment.

He hates the blue shag carpets, the slightly-moldy ceilings, the balcony with the door that won't open.

He hates how his bedroom walls have brown stains on them—seriously, what are they supposed to be—and hates how the dining table that was thrown in by his landlord for free has a wobbly leg.

He will admit, though, that his shower is pretty nice, especially when it's late at night and he can turn the heat up and lounge under the spray to his heart's content.

And he'd rather die before anyone finds out that yes, Koen Pope likes to sing in the shower.

Not

sing

sing, because he can't really do that, but a burgeoning rapper needs to practice somewhere and since it'll be a long time before he can save up to afford his own studio, the blessedly-nice shower in his shitty little apartment will have to do.

Normally, he practices his original compositions.

They're songs written when he was younger, full of teenaged torment, then edited and refined by his wiser adult self so that it sounds less like angst-filled love poetry and more like the harder-hitting, socially-aware raps that are popular these days.

Or so he hopes.

Tonight, though, he doesn't really feel like hashing out his own music anymore, not after already spending a long session this afternoon with Mason working on their latest collaboration.

Mason always insists that with enough hard work they'll be famous in the underground, but sometimes Koen finds it hard to believe that

Mercer&Rap King

can really beat out all the other hiphop hopefuls he knows are out there.

But still, nothing ever comes from a bad attitude, so Koen takes the bundle of negativity on his shoulders and shoves it down his throat as he strips down and turns the water scalding hot before stepping into the shower.

He feels like

Bye U

tonight, since he needs something fast and upbeat to get him out of this funk he's been feeling lately.

Plus, even though he'll just have to hum G.O's parts or something, Outsider's songs are always good pronunciation practice.

Somehow his terrible apartment happens to have a shower with

great

water pressure, so Koen raps a little louder than usual to hear himself above the pounding of the water in his ears.

He finishes the first verse before it's time for the singing part of the song, and Koen's the kind of perfectionist that can't just skip that even if it's just in his head, so he turns the water down a little so he can hum and fight his shampoo bottle for the last drops before he hears something that makes him nearly drop it.

Next door, through the wall, someone is singing G.O's part for him.

like in the movies, falling at first sigh

Nolan is ecstatic to finally have his own place this year.

Yeah, so maybe his new apartment is a little low-budget, but it comes with a fully (if cheaply) furnished kitchen which means he doesn't have to suffer through inedible dorm food for the second year in a row.

He gets home late at night nearly every day because of his dance practices, and sometimes he wishes Louis would hold them a little earlier in the day, but he understands that the older student has his own lessons and classes in the evening and really, Nolan should be thankful that Louis has any time left to teach Nolan at all.

And he is.

That doesn't mean that Nolan necessarily

enjoys

coming home with aching muscles to the silence of an entire apartment block that's already fallen asleep.

Honestly, sometimes it feels like he lives in a retirement home where everyone is out like a light by sunset.

Nolan had expected that cheap apartments would have attracted more broke college students, but apparently everyone at EyrieArts is rich and can afford better.

Nolan only has one source of company at night, and that's his elusive neighbor who never picks up his newspaper in the morning and

always

raps in the shower at night.

"Oh shit," he mutters as he looks at the clock, dropping his backpack unceremoniously onto the sofa as he hurries into the bathroom, shedding clothes down the length of the hallway.

Rap-nim only showers after midnight but usually before one, which means that Nolan may miss him if he doesn't hurry.

He's never actually met his neighbor, and while that might be a bit strange, it's not like Nolan doesn't know anything about him.

He knows that his neighbor is a boy that's probably around his age, knows that his neighbor is usually only home at night, knows that he has a penchant for listening to Epik High and particularly favors

Love, Love, Love

for some reason, since Nolan's come home to that song playing through the walls more than a few times.

And it's not weird, it's really not, that Nolan likes to shower at the same time as his male neighbor because it doesn't mean anything.

Nolan just likes the music.

Sometimes he likes imagining dance moves to the rhythms, likes miming them carefully so he doesn't slip on soap suds and bust an ankle.

Sometimes, if he recognizes the song (which he usually doesn't, which means Rap-nim writes his own songs, and isn't that the coolest thing?) he'll try to softly follow along, keeping his voice quiet in the fear that he might be heard through the paper-thin walls.