s e a m e n

(dance) don't hold the wall

2013-04-15T03:12:55Z

(dance) don't hold the wall / sekai, hunho / r / 2960
"once you do, you never," sehun whispers into his mouth, "ever, stop needing it."

sehun is the little spoon when he wakes up. arms that are not his are crossed around his torso. there's a hard on pressed against the small of his back. romantic. he swallows dryly and tries to wade out of bed, but the arms tense around him, fingers curling into his flesh like pincers.

"i should go," sehun whispers, "before your roommate wakes up."

jongin noses the nape of his neck, breathing him in. "where were you last night? you came to bed so late, smelling like smoke."

"i really have to go," sehun says blithely.

"busy day?" jongin asks equally casually, relenting. falling back. sehun straightens up and starts to pull his discarded clothes from the floor.

sehun makes a noncommittal sound even as jongin's fingernails drag against his scalp. caught by the shorthairs. he's done this so long he's not even sure what he'd do on a night left to himself. after everything, this is where he comes to finish. back here. it's a routine.

"if all you're gonna do is sleep," jongin calls when sehun is at the door and waits for sehun to turn and see him scratch his belly lazily before he adds, "don't bother coming back tonight."

sehun huffs at the hair falling into his eyes and fidgets. "shit, i was tired. it happens to the best of us. why are you getting all weird about it?"

"are you tired now?" jongin asks, getting up on his elbows and grinning predatorily.

the scratch of the matchstick against the matchbook and the ensuing flare mesmerise sehun. it's a cold day and the little fire is the only source of heat and light in a world of grey.

"you're late," junmyeon says amicably around the cigarette caught in his teeth. his perfect pearly whites.

sehun shrugs. he rubs at the back of his neck with a freezing palm. goosebumps break out over his skin and he tries to still the shiver by clenching his teeth and tightening his stomach. fuck.

"you can't be late, you know that right?"

sehun chews at the inside of his mouth before he snaps, "what does it matter? you lied about the time anyway."

junmyeon smirks. "well, if i hadn't, you'd be late, wise-ass."

"whatever," sehun mutters.

junmyeon stares at him with a mixture of amusement and disbelief for a brief moment. then he chuckles and tousles sehun's hair.

sulking, sehun ducks away from him and tries to fix his mussed hair. "don't try to do that to someone obviously taller than you."

"don't disrespect a hyung even if he's slightly shorter than you." junmyeon is smiling though, cherubic and good-natured, before he throws away the cigarette he hadn't even smoked and turns towards the building behind him. "come on. let's get this thing started."

the first time sehun clapped eyes on jongin, he'd been dancing. he had the grace of a panther on the prowl. something dark and sinewy and velveteen. right then. he'd seen jongin and jongin had seen him. it was all over. that was it.

in the dark of a muggy club, jongin was a beast in all the terrible, overwhelming ways, a stomping, devouring, ferocious creature with eyes like madness. he was a hot mouth and frantic hands, burning the oxygen from within sehun's lungs like they were running out of air. it was arson and sehun went quickly like a house engulfed and scorched to the black, charred bones.

they'd lined up so perfectly, head to sweaty head, tangled and fighting like stags butting antlers and jongin was panting against him, snarling something obscene, his grip on sehun so tight like he was going to wring everything out of him. leave nothing behind.

sehun remembers falling to his knees, spent and shaking and blank as a sheet. he clutched at the only anchor he found-- jongin's leg before him, the toe of his boot slick against the underside of sehun's oversensitive, twitching, softening cock.

he looked up at jongin just in time for jongin to choke his red, stiff erection into sehun's open mouth.

sehun remembers the spunk spilling at the seam of his lips like cream, remembers his fingers sticky around jongin's dick, remembers jongin looking at him with eyes like an abyss, like sehun had pushed him over the edge. and killed him.

"you're like a dog," junmyeon says in fascination, watching sehun pick at the barbecued meat and roll it into a lettuce leaf carefully.

sehun stuffs the parcel into his mouth. "thanks."

"no, i mean, it's like you're lost. and if someone were to take you in, feed you properly and get you cleaned up, you'd miraculously turn out to be prize-winning pedigree."

"so take me in," sehun challenges, swallowing and staring at junmyeon defiantly.

"you're too young for me," junmyeon says affably. almost too quickly, too nonchalantly. "but i will get you a job and make sure you keep it if it's the last thing i do."

"good luck with that," sehun grunts, going back to the food.

it's a few moments before junmyeon speaks again, slow and thoughtful. "someone lost you. you strayed. they made a mistake. and so did you."

it cuts right to sehun's heart and he curses inwardly, mouth full and soul empty. he feels like a chasm. depthless. a yawning vacuum. he wants what junmyeon has to offer but won't, kept fast against his chest. he doesn't want what junmyeon is offering.

"mistakes make us who we are," sehun says roughly. he clears his throat and looks junmyeon in the eye when he says, "if i hadn't made mine, you wouldn't have made me your charity case. and then where would i be?"

junmyeon rests his chin in his palm and smiles at sehun, echoing, "and then where would you be."

the couch smells funny. like milk gone off. sehun wonders when that happened. he's lying face down on it, pressing into the rough fabric.

from somewhere behind him jongin says, "reach back and hold your ankles."

sehun lifts his legs and makes a grab. he misses. jongin corrects sehun's posture as he exhales into a lump in the couch. "are we going to have sex or?"

"yes," jongin says patiently. "i am going to fuck your ass like a professional."

"i got a desk job," sehun says and it comes out muffled. "so be careful. it's at a publishing house and they're going to train me to design book covers on a computer."

"sounds deathly boring. i'd rather die," jongin sounds triumphant. "but modelling isn't so bad."

sehun lifts his hips up when jongin reaches under him to unbutton his jeans. it sticks around his knees and ankles, but with some tugging, the denim comes free. he holds his ankles again. a point in the centre of his back starts to ache.

"do you fuck any of the other models?" sehun asks uncertainly.

"no, but there's this one guy," jongin pauses, sounding breathless. "fuck he's gorgeous. every time i see him i imagine the three of us together. it'd be a fantasy come to life if we both got to play with him."

sehun bites his lip and tries not to tense up as jongin runs a wet finger down the cleft of his ass. "why do you want to fuck me right now?"

"i need a reason with you now?" jongin's voice sounds strained. sehun can feel jongin's breath, warm and damp against the base of his spine. "i'm gonna give you a pounding, make you come without touching your cock and milk you until you're empty. fuck, i'm already so hard just --fuck. you've ruined me."

they almost kiss. jongin never kisses him. sehun closes his eyes and holds his breath. there is a sickening self-righteousness with which junmyeon pulls himself away and relieves sehun of the bottle in his hands. it's junmyeon's treat. celebrating the job. the death of ambition.

"i need you," sehun wheedles. he's drunk, but fuck if junmyeon isn't drunk as well. they can afford a risk. there's a cure for aids now, so the worst thing that could happen has been taken care of. "i need a man like you. someone who treats me right. with respect. and--and affection."

"and exactly what qualifies me to be that man?" junmyeon asks, voice cracking over the last syllable. then he burps softly. and laughs like it's the most hysterical thing he's ever heard.

"you've fed me," sehun pauses to count. "more than twice."

junmyeon stares at him, still smiling. always smiling. "you are such a stray."

"so put a leash on me." sehun can't seem to tear his gaze away from the inky vee of the tight, black denim between junmyeon's legs. there's a place for him. there. somewhere. "take me home with you."

that sobers junmyeon up. he pulls sehun closer by his tie. he lowers his gaze to sehun's lips as though it's gravity, he can't help himself and licks his own lips. his breath hitches slightly. "you're still too young for me."

"you--," sehun grumbles. "why don't you ever shut the fuck up and kiss me?"

"because i know you." junmyeon lets him go and backs off. "you're trying to fuck this up and i won't let you. you know how i light a cigarette but don't smoke it? i can taste it from between my teeth through the paper. the smell and the feel of it are more than enough. if i just pretend, i don't actually need the hit."

"that is bullshit," sehun says and closes the distance between them to kiss junmyeon, bracing himself against junmyeon's knees that spread open under him. sehun sidles into the nook warm and drowsy and junmyeon's soft moan fuses their wet mouths together. sehun draws it out and sucks him in, catching junmyeon's lower lip in his teeth as he pulls away. they gasp at each other, a shared, breathless plea. sehun can't even bear to look at him anymore. he's so done for. junmyeon rubs a wondering knuckle along sehun's cheek.

"once you do, you never," sehun whispers into his mouth, "ever, stop needing it."

sehun goes four days without answering his phone. that's four nights he spends alone in bed. he wonders if junmyeon smiles at everyone he meets like that. he wonders if junmyeon stares in exasperation at anyone else like that.

jongin only calls him once.

the door in front of sehun is suspiciously blank. he always imagined junmyeon's front door as being a warm, latte coloured wood. the door in front of him is white. it has the plastic numbers 6 and 5 on it.

"are you ever going to ring the doorbell?" junmyeon asks from the other side making sehun jump.

"fuck!" sehun recoils. he seriously considers running away. this is ten times harder sober.

it's almost as though junmyeon reads his mind because the door swings open inwards. "come on in."

he's dressed in a loose black shirt and comfortable looking grey pants. he's so goddamn handsome in this clean, fresh as laundry way. it's the first time sehun allows himself to think it. his own jeans seem ratty and grimy in comparison.

"how long were you at the door?" sehun asks, shucking his backpack on the floor by the TV and following junmyeon to the kitchen.

"long enough," junmyeon smirks. "hey, it's okay. asking you over to my place for a first date wasn't fair."

sehun takes in the white tiles, the steaming bowls of food. "you're a dick."

"hope you like pasta," junmyeon says, handing sehun a huge serving.

"is this," sehun lifts fat strings of fettucine with his chopsticks, "part of the whole junmyeon dating experience?"

"no, not yet," junmyeon feigns seriousness. "this is a test. checking if you're a prize winner."

"if you keep calling me a dog, the joke's on you because you made out with this dog. you like this dog. you want to have sex with this dog." sehun's only half annoyed. the food's pretty good. it's like junmyeon; warm and filling and wholesome.

"i like you, oh sehun," junmyeon says quietly, sounding pleased.

sehun feels his face heat up stupidly. they're sitting on the floor so he crawls the short distance and pushes himself between junmyeon's legs. nowhere else to go.

on his knees, he cups junmyeon's face with both hands and it's a surprisingly tender gesture. what really breaks him is that junmyeon lets him. he finds his voice shaking a little when he says, "i like you, too."

junmyeon closes his eyes and kisses sehun first this time. he surges forward, coming away from deep, slow, incredibly intimate kisses with soft, chuffing sounds. sehun feels grounded, like he can't move, can't bring himself to galvanise this into something more.

junmyeon sucks on sehun's lower lip, his thumb stroking his right cheekbone, fingers splayed along his throat.

"hey," he says, voice lower and slightly rougher than usual, "you should know, casual sex is off the table, okay? it is never on the table. i don't do that."

“okay but can the serious sex be on the table sometimes? i like a change of scenery every now and then, old man.”

junmyeon sucks wet kisses along sehun's jaw, making him shiver. he holds and touches sehun like he's made of glass. like he can't get enough of touching sehun. it feels wonderful.

"if you're here," junmyeon says hands settling at sehun's hips, just above the waistband of his jeans. his grip is steadying, like a hook. "you're only here. all the way."

"so your phone does work!" jongin laughs.

sehun feels his heart rate escalate so fast he gets a little light-headed. "i've been busy. new -- new job. you know how it is. how are you?"

"that's great," jongin says brightly. "listen, i'm happy for you even though you're an asshole. and i can take a hint but are you free tonight? for old times' sake?"

"no," sehun hesitates. it's the first time he's heard jongin sounds desperate. "yeah i have this work thing but i'll try to drop by after."

"great," jongin chuckles. "you're a terrible fucking liar."

it's when he sees jongin's face later that evening that sehun realisest. it's over. his eyelashes look wet, like he's been crying. sehun's stomach turns to lead, gut twisting into a knot.

"i get it," jongin says curtly by way of greeting. "we're twenty. you lost interest or something. fucking youtube attention spans. shit happens."

jongin spins him around, pressing him into the door. sehun smiles into the crook of his arm as jongin slides around him, a snake, the twisting arms of a vine, poisonous.

"fuck you," jongin whispers in his ear, gripping sehun like a heart attack. "we were better than anything you or i could've imagined and you threw it away. it was something beyond words. you know that. you felt it, too. every time i saw you spread out, pink and breaking under me, it was like a punch to the gut. that sight -- you -- it was everything in the world to me."

"it'd be so much easier to believe," sehun says tightly, half afraid, half choking with something like sadness, "if you could actually bear to look at me when you say something like that."

jongin steps back like he's been slapped and sehun is grateful for the walls because he's certain his legs would've given away. this is it, though. he can never come back here. never return to the wild, heated, blind want jongin has from him. it's a different kind of love he's losing, sehun realises. everything about him that meets the eye is more than enough for jongin. everything beneath the surface has already been accepted, and all sehun had had to do was share.

"wait," sehun says hurriedly, turning to face jongin, panic rising like a tide in his chest. "no, no, not like this alright?"

it's a comforting vice. waking up to a certain shade of brown. sehun opens his eyes to the last day of a bare-chested, vulnerable jongin. asleep, he's defenceless. less teeth, more skin. he looks like someone sehun could grow to love behind all the senseless shit.

jongin never kisses him. there's something about a press of lips, sehun thinks, that demands some kind of honesty. to his surprise, jongin kisses him back. it's a passive, receptive response from him, lips simply falling open. totally unlike his usual hungry, demanding, dominating push.

"you're awake," sehun whispers, moving to straddle jongin's hips.

"yeah," he says dryly, hands settling around sehun's waist.

"you never kiss me," sehun says, searching jongin's face. he can't make out what he's thinking.

"you never asked," jongin shrugs.

"i thought it was simpler than that," sehun says, drawing little lines with his fingers at all the points his skin meets jongin's.

"it was always complicated," jongin frowns. "you know it was. you always just let me happen to you. every time we fucked i struggled for you to respond. i actually worked for it, every single time." he clenches his hands into fists at sehun's sides. "i hate you. always have."

"tell the truth, kim jongin," sehun says in a voice unlike his own, thick as honey, false. "it was the opposite of hate. always has been."

jongin's face crumples and he cries.

the thick of winter brings an onslaught of cold that pretty much incapacitates junmyeon. he turns into a hermit, stepping out for only what he absolutely can't do from home.

they waste away sunday afternoons playing go-stop! and eating mandarins.

"does this make me your boyfriend now?" sehun asks, poking a roughly junmyeon-sized roll of blankets with his foot.

“your feet are freezing,” junmyeon says, muffled, rolling away. "but, yes."

the waking sleep

2013-03-06T18:26:05Z

the waking sleep / baekris / nc-17 / 4788
they stand like that looking at each other awkwardly until the guy offers, “do you want to come in?”
a/n: blatantly copied from s2e5 of girls, sorry about that. while the episode actually had some stuff to it, this is just porn oop.

Subdued desire makes him sad. The light forks low over
the frozen earth: he woke up in his dream and strode barefoot
into the image of another man. Under his fingers, like
the spring snow, large biographies are thawing. Perhaps

he will now be forgotten by all, as he had wished a thousand
times.
– Aleš Debeljak

There are a lot of things to hate about the coffee shop that Jongin manages (the coffee machine that sprays scalding hot milk everywhere on a whim, the annoying old man who stops by everyday and always smells like rotting eggs, the way Jongin is pretty much a terrible boss) but on such a lovely Friday morning with the sun pouring in through the windows like a fat vein of liquid gold, it’s easy to forget all that. Baekhyun is inwardly commending himself for going with the floaty orange shirt he’s wearing. It’s so properly spring-like, it’s lifting his spirits. Jongin is giving him this surly look like he doesn’t share Baekhyun’s good mood. Then he starts listing off all the ways he thinks Baekhyun is a terrible employee.

“... always late, you have no work ethic and that’s coming from me, so it’s pretty bad.”

“Whatever.” Baekhyun flips him off and turns around just in time to see this tall, extremely handsome guy walk through the door. He makes straight for the counter and asks if he can speak to the manager.

“You’re talking to him,” Jongin informs him, wiping down the counter.

“Um, okay,” the guy frowns. “I just wanted to ask you to stop putting your trash in my bins.”

“Um,” Jongin says pointedly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re not.”

Baekhyun opens his mouth to interject but the guy speaks before he can get a word in. “Yes, you are. Or maybe it’s not you, it’s one of your employees. It’s fine that you didn’t know. But I’d really appreciate it if you could have them not do that. At first it was alright, but now there’s no room for me to put my garbage in my own bin.”

“Excuse me?” Jongin bristles, then goes on to rant. By the end of it he’s seething. “I train everyone here, personally, and I have an exceptionally high standard. So I don’t appreciate you coming in here and accusing me of something I haven’t done at all. Now that we’ve sorted that out, get. The fuck. Out.”

“Hey,” Baekhyun manages weakly before the guy splutters.

“Are you honestly– the least you could do is be civil about – ”

“I’m fucking serious,” Jongin practically snarls. “Get out of my shop.”

For a moment Baekhyun worries if it’s going to turn into a fisticuff but the guy scoffs and storms out of the coffee shop and Baekhyun turns to Jongin, shocked. “What is wrong with you?”

“What?” Jongin shrugs defensively.

“That was ridiculous,” Baekhyun says matter-of-factly, making for the door. “It was totally ridiculous. I can’t take this. I’m out.”

“You’re leaving?” Jongin calls after him, clearly exasperated. “Are you seriously just leaving?”

Baekhyun ignores him. The door to the coffee shop swings shut behind him. It’s a fairly lazy day outside. A gentle breeze sifts through the early afternoon light as Baekhyun crosses the empty street. He walks past the problematic bin and climbs up the steps to ring the doorbell. The guy opens the door and frowns at him. Frowning seems to be his thing.

“Hi,” Baekhyun smiles somewhat nervously.

“Hi,” the guy responds uncertainly. “Do I know you?”

Baekhyun grins. “Sorry. Yeah. I’m from the coffee shop where that asshole yelled at you and I just came over to apologise for him.”

“Oh.” His frown softens a little. “Thanks.”

They stand like that looking at each other awkwardly until the guy offers, “Do you want to come in?”

“Um, I’m not sure if I should – in case you turn out to be a serial killer,” Baekhyun says, all but racing up the stairs. He pauses before he ducks under the guy’s arm and darts into the house. “But, you seem really nice, so.”

It’s a really nice house, too. In fact, Baekhyun would’ve never guessed it looked like this on the inside, considering the neighbourhood and how it looked on the outside. The walls are painted a buttery cream and the fixtures are all a warm wooden. The sofas are a brown that’s almost black and they look squishy and inviting so Baekhyun promptly parks himself on one of them.

“Did you do all this yourself?” Baekhyun asks, too awed to be able to hide it properly.

The guy walks past him into the kitchen. “Yeah. Do you want something to drink? I have iced tea.”

“Sure. That sounds good,” Baekhyun says, pulling his feet up under him. He waits until he’s been handed the glass and has taken a few sips before he says, “So. About the bin. You’re totally right. I guess I just never thought about how annoying it would be because I don’t really have a bin of my own here. It was me. I was putting the garbage from the coffee shop in your bin.”

The guy looks confused, but he doesn’t look terribly annoyed. “Why?”

“Well,” Baekhyun shrugs, “At first it was because I was closing up for the day and I didn’t know where to put our garbage and I just crossed the street and put it in the first one I saw, but then. I started to like it. How it felt. The garbage going into the bin.”

Baekhyun’s been on the receiving end of the look the guy’s giving him now a lot of times. Like he’s not sure what to make of Baekhyun.

“So,” Baekhyun sets the mostly full glass on the coffee table before him. “I guess, now that you know, it won’t happen again. And obviously you’re not crazy for getting upset about this. And Jongin is just– a total jerk. And I’ll... just go now.”

He stands up and the guy stands up with him and before Baekhyun can take a step he asks, “Do you want to see the rest of the house?”

“Um... Alright?” Baekhyun smiles. The guy smiles back and leads him upstairs. The master bedroom is lighter and airier. A large, thick king-sized bed dominates the floor. There’s a monolithic TV on the only wall not eaten away by windows that overlook the suburb.

“I have never seen a house like this in this part of town,” Baekhyun enthuses, moving towards one of the windows. He turns around and in the light, he really looks at this stranger whose bin and house he’d pretty much invaded. The guy’s tall, alright. Enough to considerably dwarf Baekhyun. He’s handsome, too. Almost distinguished. Dark hair combed back carefully. His features are sharp; nose straight, eyes clear and lips small and soft looking.

The guy comes to look out the window with Baekhyun. “I spent a lot of time doing it up, so thanks.”

“Do you live here alone?” Baekhyun asks.

“Yeah,” he sighs. He gives Baekhyun a searching look. “For now.”

Baekhyun takes a breath before he asks, “What do you do?”

“I’m a doctor. I feel like I’m the oldest person in this neighbourhood.”

“You probably are,” Baekhyun laughs. “Are you married?”

The guy stops smiling. He takes a long time to answer but when he does, he looks at his shoes. “I was. Not too long ago.”

“What happened?” Baekhyun asks, softer this time. He tries for less obviously curious.

“Oh, you know, the usual.” This time the answer comes more easily. “I worked too much. She didn’t like it here. I was, apparently, too nice.”

“Okay,” Baekhyun nods. He pauses before he asks again, “Really, though. What happened?”

The guy smiles tightly, but it’s more like a grimace. He twists a signet ring on his index finger around. A flash of pain. “I’m – well, it turns out. Not the marrying type. I don’t. I’m gay.”

Baekhyun rests his elbow on the windowsill and his chin in his palm. A breath of air sweeps past him, coolly kissing the damp traces of sweat at his temples. “What’s your name?”

“Kris,” the guy answers. He’s tapping a shoe against the floor, but not in an impatient sort of way.

“No, really,” Baekhyun insists. “What’s your real name?”

“Everyone calls me Kris,” he protests. Then he huffs out a laugh. “It’s Wu Fan. But everyone really calls me Kris.”

“Well, Wu Fan,” Baekhyun smiles, really wishing for a cigarette – like Wu Fan’s face was something that demanded that the beholder finished looking at him with a nice, slow smoke, “It’s about time I got going–”

“You can stay if you like.”

“I don’t want to stay if you don’t want me to stay,” Baekhyun counters. “Do you want me to stay?”

Wu Fan shrugs. “I wouldn’t mind if you stayed.”

“But that’s not you really wanting me to stay,” Baekhyun clarifies.

“Okay – I’m – I would love it if you stayed. I really want you to stay.” Wu Fan steps closer. “Don’t go.”

Baekhyun laughs breathlessly. “Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but just go along with me here. If you can. Beg me. To stay with you. Beg me.”

Wu Fan looks at him and it’s clear he can’t believe Baekhyun, but his expression doesn’t betray it. It’s in his countenance. The way he’s standing. Baekhyun is almost certain he will laugh or simply not go along with it, but then he says, “Please. Please don’t leave.”

“Sadder– a little more sadly,” Baekhyun directs.

Wu Fan pulls a comedic scowl. “Please don’t leave me.”

“No, seriously. Honestly,” Baekhyun probes. “You’re sad and you don’t want me to go. You have to stop me.”

“Please don’t go,” Wu Fan says – no, begs. He steps closer still, within arms reach and grips Baekhyun by the shoulders. “I’ll – do anything you want me to. I need you here with me. Please don’t leave me. I want you to be here. I want you to stay. If you leave I’ll – ”

“Okay,” Baekhyun laughs in amazement, in a thrill of strange happiness, “Okay, I’ll stay!”

Wu Fan laughs, too. And then he’s close enough and his gaze drops to Baekhyun’s lips and Baekhyun feels the punch of his racing heart press him closer still and he kisses him. Wu Fan kisses him back, sucking in a deep breath like he can’t help himself. Baekhyun’s pretty sure he’s never been kissed like this. Like it’s somehow profound because it’s stripped of all the other expectations of who he is and what he does and where he’s come from and where they’re headed. Like it’s about just this moment and that nothing else really matters. It’s a moment that tingles and sparkles all the way down to the base of Baekhyun’s spine and he feels a little light-headed when he pulls away. And when he opens his eyes, Wu Fan looks a little like he feels the same way.

“I don’t usually – I shouldn’t have– ” Baekhyun shakes his head.

“No,” Wu Fan says, voice deeper and slightly rougher. “It’s okay.”

Then he pulls Baekhyun back in for another kiss. And as they kiss he maneuvers Baekhyun onto the bed, insinuating himself between Baekhyun’s legs. His teeth tug at Baekhyun’s lower lip at the edge of a kiss, fingers fumbling with the buttons of Baekhyun’s floaty orange shirt. He takes a moment between soft, chuffing kisses along Baekhyun’s jaw to ask, “What’s your name?”

Baekhyun lets himself sink into the mattress, weighed down by the heat of Wu Fan’s body, fastened in place by the chainlink kisses burned along his throat. “What do you think my name is?”

Wu Fan comes up to take a long, hard look at Baekhyun, his warm hands carding through Baekhyun’s hair. “Jihoon?”

Baekhyun laughs. “I wish that was my name!”

It’s magnetic, the force with which Baekhyun feels drawn to Wu Fan and if the way Wu Fan is making short work of his shirt is any indication, Wu Fan feels it, too. They break for a few seconds to pull Wu Fan’s shirt over his head and then collide together like being apart had been agony. It’s crazy, but at the same time, not really. Wu Fan gasps against Baekhyun’s breastbone as Baekhyun winds a hand down his pants. They spend a long moment sharing open-mouthed breaths, halfway kisses and knuckled caresses, simply rubbing against each other. It’s a languid, rocking rhythm, unsteady like a ship lurching through a stormy sea.

Then Wu Fan squeezes the flesh of Baekhyun’s ass and Baekhyun spreads his legs wider, looping them around Wu Fan’s hips and Wu Fan’s hand curls around Baekhyun’s cock as well. A part of Baekhyun wants this to go slower, to be able to sling his legs across Wu Fan’s shoulders and open himself up completely and bury Wu Fan deep within himself. A larger part of him can’t fucking wait. Above him, Wu Fan’s eyes are dark in the second before they close. Baekhyun feels half mad with desperation, both hands fisting in Wu Fan’s hair, leaving Wu Fan’s hands to jerk them both off together.

Baekhyun comes first and the sound catches in his throat, a rasping mewl that Wu Fan swallows with a kiss, a fighting spasm that pushes him closer to oneness with the broad shoulders bearing down on him. He falls from the high breathlessly, with Wu Fan burrowing closer into him, one arm around him, fingers curling into his hair, the other bringing himself off.

In the light that washes over him as Wu Fan comes barely a minute later, teeth gritted and heart pounding like a bloody drum, Baekhyun closes his eyes.

He feels safe and looked after.

It’s a good few minutes before Wu Fan stirs. His hair sweeps across Baekhyun’s shoulder as he moves to lie down beside him. Fingers still sticky, he interlaces them with Baekhyun’s and pulls Baekhyun’s hand up to place a kiss on his wrist and draw a line up to the tip of his ring finger with his tongue. Baekhyun shudders, empty and oversensitive.

“That was... fun,” Wu Fan sighs, reaching for tissues from the bedside table to wipe themselves off with.

“It was, wasn’t it?” Baekhyun muses sleepily.

Wu Fan sits up and pulls his clothes back on. He raises an eyebrow at Baekhyun, still spreadeagle and naked on the bed. “Are you hungry?”

Baekhyun pretends to think about it. “I could eat.”

“Come on, then,” he holds a hand out and pulls Baekhyun up. Then he gets to his feet and wanders out of the room.

Baekhyun dresses himself slowly, rucking his jeans back up from around his ankles and shimmying into them. Then he finds his shirt, twisted under him and crumpled beyond salvaging and slides it on, thoughtfully doing up the buttons. It is, he thinks, as his feet touch the carpeted floor, a really nice house.

He steps out of the room and finds Wu Fan behind the only other door on the floor, leading to a deck without much of a view. Wu Fan is on his haunches looking under a table, trying to fire up the grill.

Suddenly shy, Baekhyun stops a few feet away. “Were you expecting company?”

“No,” Wu Fan grunts as he twists and straightens up. “I just felt like barbeque for lunch.”

“When I feel like that, I just go to a restaurant,” Baekhyun smirks, hands in his pockets.

Wu Fan gets the barbeque going and starts piling marinated meat on the grill with tongs. “I like cooking outside. Sometimes.”

They eat in companionable silence, Baekhyun smiling through steaming mouthfuls of food. Wu Fan just looks at him, like he’s trying to figure him out. Like Baekhyun is a riddle, with little clues tucked away in the colour of his shirt or the way he does his hair or the quirk of his lips or how he sits.

“What?” Baekhyun asks thickly, when he can’t take the searching looks anymore. “You can just ask me, you know.”

Wu Fan swallows and comes up with, “What’s your name?”

“Baekhyun.”

“Baekhyun,” Wu Fan echoes, sounding the syllables out. “It’s a nice name.”

“Hey, so, just to put this out there,” Baekhyun starts, focused on the little valley of skin where the first two buttons of Wu Fan’s shirt are undone. “I mean, I’ve slept with people I haven’t known, but my friends have known them. I don’t usually just go around walking into people’s homes and fucking them. I’ve actually never done that before.”

Wu Fan laughs abruptly. “I haven’t, either.”

“Good,” Baekhyun confirms, suppressing a silly bout of giggles. “As long as it’s just our thing.”

“It’s definitely only our thing,” Wu Fan reassures him with a very fond smile.

Baekhyun wipes his hands on a napkin, soaking up every last dredge of sunlight, full with a lightness that sings in his veins. His skin prickles with a longing to touch.

When they head back inside, it starts to feel like early evening. Wu Fan pulls Baekhyun’s clothes off again, but carefully this time. He presses Baekhyun flat against the sheets, cradling his head in his hands.

“You’re okay here, right?” His thighs are lean and taut against Baekhyun’s, the heat of his body comforting and already familiar. “This is alright?”

“Yes,” Baekhyun says softly, the word sticking in his throat. He winds a palm around Wu Fan’s elbow. “Just promise me you have lube and condoms somewhere in this room.”

Wu Fan smirks and kisses him, open-mouthed and seeking. One of his hands flutters down Baekhyun’s side and in its wake, goosebumps texture the flesh, making Baekhyun shiver. There are pinking bruises on Baekhyun’s left hip in the shape of Wu Fan’s fingers. Wu Fan slithers down between Baekhyun’s legs and wetly kisses the white between the pink.

“You are so beautiful,” Wu Fan breathes against Baekhyun’s inner thigh.

“Even beautiful people–” Baekhyun breaks off with a gasp, arching further into Wu Fan’s mouth, “Beautiful people bruise ugly–oh god!”

He almost brings Baekhyun off like that, mouth a hot, wet, devouring furnace, but he stops short. Hurriedly, stroking himself, already hard, Wu Fan throws a drawer open, rummaging blindly through crackling plastic. He rips a packet open, slides back between Baekhyun’s legs and with slick fingers slowly loosens him up.

“Listen,” Baekhyun starts, high and broken, Wu Fan’s fingers curling inside him.

Wu Fan shakes his head, sweat dripping from his brow onto Baekhyun’s cheek. His face is guarded, almost closed off and his lower lip is caught under his teeth.

“Wait,” he breathes, even as Baekhyun sinks his fingers into the meat of Wu Fan’s thigh, trying to pull him closer.

Baekhyun opens around him, stretching to mold around the girth of his cock, like Baekhyun was made to fit him. He feels heavy with something like responsibility – like he’s the one for Wu Fan, like he’s going to ruin him for everyone who comes after, like in this moment, there will be no one after him for Wu Fan. Just him. Just them. Together.

Wu Fan takes a measured breath and draws himself out. Then he rocks inward and then he falls forward onto his elbows, mouthing the shape of Baekhyun’s lips with his own. He’s everywhere all at once and simultaneously concentrated in one spot, inside Baekhyun like a sinking anchor. Somewhere in all the heat, in the absurd pleasure of being denied attention, Wu Fan reaches between them and fists Baekhyun’s cock, sliding a thumb along the slit.

Baekhyun all but loses his breath altogether and Wu Fan grins at him wolfishly.

This is what he’ll remember Baekhyun decides. The almost silken slide of lubricated latex against flesh, the rising, the constantly rising pressure, building like a momentous wave, the texture of Wu Fan’s lips circling his nipple, the sharp graze of teeth purposefully catching at the seam of his lower lip, biting as if to tear into succulent fruit, mouth softly sucking and soothing as if to drink the blood that bursts and spills. Baekhyun reaches up, fingers curling like tendrils of a delicate vine around the shell of Wu Fan’s ear. He slides open palms along Wu Fan’s throat, over his shoulders, turning around under his arms to flatten against his chest.

As Wu Fan draws into him, Baekhyun hooks an ankle around his hips and cants himself upwards to meet his thrust – and it’s a fantastic hit that rattles him. That’s all it takes. It’s over.

In the morning, Baekhyun wakes up alone, naked atop the sheets. The bed is softer than his own and smells wonderfully like soap. Limbs heavy and sore in the best possible way, he rolls out of bed and practically slinks into the bathroom. The sunlight is everywhere in this house, like a shining flood of energy. He sloughs the previous night off his skin in the spray of the hot water. Still damp, he rummages through a closet and pulls on a pair of boxers that aren’t his. Then he makes his way downstairs.

Wu Fan is sitting fully dressed, a newspaper spread open across his crossed legs. He smiles when he sees Baekhyun and folds the paper. “Good morning.”

“Morning,” Baekhyun offers in return and makes for the cozy spot between Wu Fan and the armrest. There’s a pot of coffee on the coffee table. And a plate with a few slices of toast and jam.

“Call in sick to work, then breakfast,” Wu Fan instructs.

“What?” Baekhyun laughs. “It’s a Sunday.”

“You don’t work on Sundays?” Wu Fan frowns.

Baekhyun shakes his head and then remembers. “Oh right, doctor. Did you call in sick?”

Wu Fan nods, setting the paper aside and curving an arm around Baekhyun’s shoulders, pulling him close.

“So what happens if a doctor calls in sick?” Baekhyun asks, amused.

“People die,” Wu Fan says morosely. “It’s the price to pay.”

Baekhyun laughs and feels terrible about it and kisses Wu Fan and promptly forgets to feel terrible.

They play strip poker. Wu Fan loses badly and Baekhyun upsets the little wooden table in his hurry to suck Wu Fan off. They scuffle briefly on the floor, naked and laughing until Baekhyun straddles him and fucks him into the floor. It’s a life, Baekhyun thinks, palm pressed flat to Wu Fan’s chest as he braces himself for an orgasm, he could get used to fast.

They spend the afternoon trying to cook and after a badly burnt kimchi stew, decide to order pizza. He’s having such a good time, between sticky kisses and stickier fucks, everything sugary and fuzzy, that he forgets about his phone. About the fact that there’s a world outside this house, just across the street, that’s unpleasant and exhausting and full of heartache.

Sometime around evening Baekhyun decides to take a bath. He fills the tub with water and waits until the water is hot and still. Then, he slides slowly into it, not relenting against the burn of the heat. He lays down, head resting against the cool porcelain, body slowly disintegrating into plasma. He thinks it’ll take five minutes and when he emerges from the water, he’ll be cleansed and renewed, pure as the first spring flowers.

He closes his eyes.

When he opens them he’s in bed, head resting in Wu Fan’s lap. His head feels thick, like it has been stuffed with cotton. His cheeks are flushed and he’s warm all over. Wu Fan is running cool fingers through his hair. It’s soothing.

“What happened?” Baekhyun asks and the words pound in his skull feverishly.

Wu Fan’s fingers tighten in his hair briefly. “You passed out in the tub. It’d been over an hour.”

Baekhyun inhales. And exhales. “Oh.”

Looking down from somewhere above him, Wu Fan sighs.

“Can I just,” Baekhyun sits up and sways woozily. “Say something.”

“Sure.” Wu Fan looks vaguely worried.

“Wu Fan, this was. Amazing. This was really nice. You’re a really nice guy and you have a really nice house and. For the first time in a long time, I was really, really happy.”

Wu Fan just looks at him. “It’s Kris, actually.”

“What I mean is,” Baekhyun insists, “I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, I don’t want my life to be working at a coffee shop. Or managing a coffee shop. I didn’t even know it was possible to make a house look like this on the inside. But, someone has to run the coffee shop. Someone has to make that their life, right? Because if they didn’t we wouldn’t have shitty coffee shops. Right?”

It’s almost like all of a sudden the past two days didn’t happen at all. Wu Fan is giving him that look again. Like he’s not sure what to make of Baekhyun. “Sure...” he humors Baekhyun.

“I feel like that’s my life. Like I have to be those things and feel those things that no one else would want to. And I thought I wanted that. But being with you has made me realise I just want to be happy.”

“Everyone does, Baekhyun,” Wu Fan says haltingly.

“Right! But not me.” Baekhyun looks at him beseechingly. “I was never supposed to want to.”

“It’s alright,” Wu Fan says soothingly, reaching for Baekhyun. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

Baekhyun can’t hold back the flinch when Wu Fan touches his cheek and at that Wu Fan pulls back immediately, looking afraid and confused. “I just – I told you all of this. Why don’t you give me something honest about yourself, Wu Fan? Something about your marriage. Or this job. Or living here all alone. Or me. Anything.”

“Actually, it’s Kris,” he mumbles.

“Who the fuck cares?” Baekhyun feels a part of him just let go. Exploded. “You just use Kris for people who can’t really say your name or don’t get you or something. I can and Wu Fan is also your name so what is the fucking difference?”

Wu Fan just shakes his head. He pulls his feet up and circles his arms around his knees and stares at the bedspread under his feet for a long time. Baekhyun’s ears ring in the silence. Finally, Wu Fan looks up and says, “I should get ready for work tomorrow.”

He gets up to leave and Baekhyun asks, “Do you want me to leave? If you want me to leave you can just say so.”

“No,” Wu Fan turns to look at him and he looks almost sad. Baekhyun feels worse. He feels hurt and stupid and inexplicably angry with himself. Why couldn’t he just have said goodbye and left?

“You can stay as long as you want to,” Wu Fan says gently. And then he leaves the room.

Baekhyun falls asleep alone and when he wakes in the morning, it’s empty. The sunshine house is empty.

He has breakfast. He contemplates a carton of milk. He rests his head in his arms and thinks about Wu Fan’s mouth. Then he gets up. Clears the table and washes the dishes. Puts the sheets and old clothes in the laundry. He finds his own clothes and pulls them on. He finds his phone, dead, in the pocket of his jeans.

There’s a half full garbage bag lying in the corner of the kitchen. Baekhyun knots it up, takes one last look around the house and steps out. He shuts the door behind him, races down the steps and dumps the garbage bag into the satisfyingly empty bin. With every step away, his head feels clearer.

The street is quiet, empty and lazy. Baekhyun crosses it and leaves behind the world and the life that could’ve been his.

sorry for laughing

2013-01-30T17:43:35Z

sorry for laughing / hunho / r / 2350
sometimes it's sehun squeezing his hand behind everyone's backs, hidden from the cameras and prying eyes.

Junmyeon wakes up cold and drawn. His feet are frozen stiff and every muscle feels knotted and mottled like they'd torn and seized up and gotten stuck that way. He ignores his body's protests for more rest and gingerly inches out of bed. A chilling draft of air slips around him like an invisible tentacle of ice and Junmyeon shivers. He looks across the room and sees the window above Sehun's bed ajar. And Sehun himself asleep, hair tousled, mouth askew, fleece pajamas riding up his torso, blanket half on the floor, pillow halfway across the room. Junmyeon debates throwing one of his slippers at Sehun in revenge but decides against it because losing a slipper would mean navigating the tundra floor of their dorm barefoot. Junmyeon thinks of himself as reasonably brave - he doesn't mind bugs or shaking people's hands and aside from a mild wariness of big dogs and heights, he's mostly good - but the thought of taking on the floor at six in the morning makes his balls shrivel.

Junmyeon hates the cold. He's never been able to bear it. A lifetime of coddling had meant that he'd never really been exposed much to the extremes. His parents' modest affluence had ensured that among other luxuries he lived in the comfortable lap of controlled temperature. Leaving home for this idol business though, meant leaving all of that behind.

As he brushes his teeth, he thinks of himself, sharing a room and underwear and toothpaste with eleven other boys. The People's Party of SMTown. The Great Dance Break. The thought makes him laugh. Too bad he couldn't use the joke on TV. Jongin walks in sleepily, drops his pants and pisses into the toilet without so much as acknowledging that Junmyeon is also in the same bathroom. It's a miracle he doesn't miss the bowl. Junmyeon's face aches around his lips, but he brushes harder. Someone, he doesn't remember who, had commented that the lines around his mouth were growing deeper and that it was unattractive so Junmyeon tries to smile without stretching his lips too widely.

By the time they're ready and tripping out of the dorm, Junmyeon has heard five different versions of their schedule for the day. Sehun trails behind him and complains that he's hungry. Junmyeon is about to snap at him for having slept in so late but Jongin and Chanyeol mention that they have missed breakfast too. Junmyeon sighs. He knows the feeling. The dizzying, lurching weakness that feels like a sluggish high, the pangs deep in the belly, like the stomach is inverting itself in search of energy. It's a horrible feeling. Almost as bad as the chill. He tells them to get on, no turning back now and he himself dashes back in to grab them some granola bars. He's responsible for them now. One day they will leave him and in the next few minutes they'll forget about this morning, but Junmyeon can't- he's responsible for them. They're his to look after.

In the car Jongin falls asleep first, sandwiched between Sehun, who drifts off soon after, and Chanyeol, who fidgets with his phone. Junmyeon, sitting directly opposite Sehun, has the window. Baekhyun's knees crowd together between Jongin's splayed legs and Kyungsoo is huddled in the corner, making room for Chanyeol's long limbs. It's a long drive. Junmyeon checks his phone. His mother has sent him a text wishing him luck for the day. He looks up when he feels Sehun's knees trapping his right knee between them. Junmyeon smiles and when he tries to see if Sehun's awake he finds that Sehun has buried his face in Jongin's neck. He squeezes Sehun's right knee between his own in reciprocation and they stay interlocked, like the teeth of a zipper. Baekhyun sniggers and there's the snap and flash of his phone camera. Jongin starts awake looking shellshocked, a thread of drool dangling from the corner of his mouth. Chanyeol starts to laugh and Jongin kicks Baekhyun who collides into Junmyeon when he tries to duck. Sehun offers Junmyeon a sleepy, uncomprehending frown and then looks out the window.

Every performance reminds Junmyeon of trips to the dentist. His mouth goes wet and rubbery, numb and feeling painfully stretched around the edges. His tongue is a length of cotton in his mouth. He feels knocked around and sometimes like he can taste the metal grooves of the microphone at the back of his mouth. It's a kind of hot and heavy sweatiness that has more to do with nervousness than anything else. The heat burns him up. Like a fire, the ignition starts with the palpitations of his heart and then extends to the burning thud against his Adam's apple to the corners of his elbows to the hot coal roasting through the pit of his stomach to the backs of his knees to the edges of his toes curving painfully against the edges, crammed into boots. He blinks the sweat out his eyes and smiles breathlessly, feeling euphoric but at the same time feeling nothing. A vacuum. The sound drowns out and flushes back in. Someone is looking at him expectantly. A few thousand people are looking at him expectantly. Sehun is looking at him. Just looking. And nothing. Junmyeon tries to smile, tries to reach an arm up and wave

At the fan standing before him. He's signing the cover of their album. He has written the words "To Kwangjoo-ah, best of luck!" Sehun nudges him as "Kwangjoo-ah" thanks Junmyeon and turns to leave. Junmyeon turns to Sehun and Sehun leans in close to whisper, "Hyung, my hand is cramping."

Just a few more, Junmyeon cajoles him encouragingly. As Junmyeon scribbles out the next signature, he feels a part of him bleed out with the ink. He wants to call the girl back and say, no, please don't take this, please accept another copy, I need this, but it's already too late. He sits there, stunned and strangely bereft and Sehun tugs at his sleeve.

"Hyung," he says, "I'm hungry. I have to go to the bathroom. Hyung, help me. Hyung, which is it, ae or ei, when spelling this name? One of Kyungsoo hyung's fans was really pretty."

Junmyeon smiles at him and opens his mouth to answer

The question is something about what it was like as a trainee. Junmyeon can't focus. He garbles out something like it had always been his dream and he never wanted to give up. He smiles even though he feels tired and a familiar ache starts up around the edges of his jaw and under his ears. Kim Junmyeon always wanted to sing and this guy, this empty, two-dimensional asshole called Suho was stealing that history, that wish, that dream and the realisation of the dream.

The boys laugh nervously around him and Junmyeon feels a grounding tug pull the entirety of his person back into his body. The force of it nearly sets him off balance and Junmyeon struggles to keep from jerking reflexively, or worse, keeling over. It always gets like this. He is Suho so much during the day that as he gets tired, he starts to lose the grip on himself. Sometimes laughter helps. Sometimes sleep.

Sometimes it's Sehun squeezing his hand behind everyone's backs, hidden from the cameras and prying eyes.

Junmyeon knows he's not funny, but he loves the sound of laughter. There's something inexplicably nice about a hearty laugh, a gurgling warmth that is effusive and unchecked.

"Do you ever say things you don't mean?" Junmyeon asks aloud to no one in particular.

Everyone is fast asleep. Kyungsoo's head is in his lap and Baekhyun is making his little yelping puppy noises, pawing at the window. Someone's foot is pressed against Junmyeon's thigh, Jongin and Chanyeol are collapsed against each other and Sehun's head is tucked under Chanyeol's arm at a really uncomfortable looking angle, but he's clearly too exhausted to care. The car rocks and sways along the road like a cradle. Junmyeon presses his head to the window and tries to fall asleep but the glass is too cold and the lights too bright.

They wearily trudge up to their dorm and Junmyeon, Baekhyun and Chanyeol are the only ones who make it to the bathroom. And Junmyeon is the only one who showers.

When he pads back to his room, feeling like the bones in his feet are painfully close to wearing through the skin, Junmyeon finds Sehun asleep in his bed. Sprawled all over it, face-first into the pillows. Junmyeon grunts and crawls under Sehun's sheets. The linen feels soft and pleasantly cool, and somehow comfortingly familiar with the smell of Sehun's shampoo and skin. Junmyeon is smaller than the large, Sehun-shaped dent in the bed and he curls on his side and makes himself smaller still and falls asleep immediately.

Junmyeon is having dinner at a wooden table laden with food. Opposite him, Sehun has a plate piled high with peas. He keeps picking one up, tossing it in the air and catching it with his mouth. Every time he swallows, Junmyeon follows the bob of his Adam's apple along the pale column of his throat. Behind Sehun is a large bay window overlooking a beach. The waves sweep forward and ebb back, like a rhythmic sway. Sehun's mood changes with the rapidly undulating waves behind him. He goes from pleased to bored to annoyed to excited to adorable to icy to funny to weird to unreadable. Then he gets up and slides the window open like a door and walks out. As he steps onto the sand, the water rises up the beach to meet his footsteps. He takes another step forward. Then the water draws back a few feet and leaps forward twice the distance. And again. And again. Within seconds the water is lapping the floor. The next wave gushes forward, spilling salty water through the windows, onto the floor of the room. As the sea pushes forward, Sehun tears back into the room.

"Hurry! Take what you can carry and run upstairs!" Sehun yells, grabbing Junmyeon by the elbow with burning, damp palms.

Junmyeon tries to pick up something and suddenly finds the room filled with things precious to him. Letters, a lamp, a sweater, a photo album, an empty box of chocolates. The water rises. Sehun drags Junmyeon out the room waiting the panther leaps through the jungle hot at the heels of a gazelle foot catching at the last step, Junmyeon falls, twisting his ankle powerful jaws sinking shut over a delicate neck and the gazelle trips but Sehun catches him before he cuts his lip

"Hyung," he breathes, "You should really be more careful."

"Thank you," Junmyeon says, even though he's breathing fast and heavy.

"No need to." Sehun looks pointedly at a spot between Junmyeon's legs and Jumyeon looks down to find his hand fisted around his cock.

Junmyeon blinks at the white light flooding into his eyes suddenly and realises it's morning. He's on his side in Sehun's bed, body raw and singing from an orgasm. Oh god. He can hear the sheets rustle from the other side of the room. His hand is sill fisted around his now limp cock and uncomfortably wet with come. How embarrassing. He's sweating and the sweat is cooling on his skin and now he just feels vaguely gross and how is he going to change Sehun's sheets without him knowing or giving him the impression he'd. Had a very strange wet dream.

Junmyeon cautiously lifts his head to check if Sehun is still asleep and Sehun clears his throat. Junmyeon feels his insides go cold with dread and shame and the will to turn back time.

"You were talking in your sleep," Sehun informs him, voice scratchy from disuse.

"Oh?" Junmyeon tries to say casually. "What did I say?"

"Dunno," Sehun mumbles. "Just made a bunch of noises like you were in pain. Did you have a bad dream?"

"No," Junmyeon stares at the gleaming windowsill and tries to imagine what Sehun's face looks like right now. He swallows. "I don't know what it was."

Sehun hits the shower first and Junmyeon stays in his bed wrapped in the cocoon of sheets and rubs out another quick orgasm. Face pressed to Sehun's pillow, he breathes in deep lungfuls and tries to touch himself differently so he can pretend it's not his own hand. He sizes himself up, measuring with his index finger and his thumb, smudging a line of precum that drips down the shaft with his ring finger, sliding his pinky along the cleft of the slit. Sehun's fingers though, Junmyeon knows, are longer and thicker. And softer. And he uses them differently.

He probably touches himself and Junmyeon tries to imagine the severity of Sehun's frown in concentration, the wet, pink 'o' of his lips when he comes. At that image, the release hits Junmyeon like a shock, twin wires of pleasure tightening around his nipples. He lets his head fall back against the pillows and allows himself a few shallow pants and a moment of drowsy affection for Sehun's bed.

Then he tucks himself back in his pajamas, jumps off the bed and tears the sheets clean off the mattress.

One time Sehun trips over some equipment on stage during a rehearsal and swears. Junmyeon remembers the abashed laughter, the funny way he runs his tongue around his lips, without the slightest shred of self-consciousness. He thinks of Sehun reaching for him on a crowded stage, searching for an anchor to hold on to. The way Junmyeon keeps hold of him, and needs Sehun to need him in a desperate sort of sinking way. The way Junmyeon feels his nerves fall apart every time he seeks validation that someone, in this group of extraordinary people he ordinarily leads for some unfathomable reason, needs him. He thinks of Sehun and he wants that.

Junmyeon wants to ruin him.

fleur de saison

2012-10-21T20:41:21Z

fleur de saison / layhan / r / 2875
no, as yifan put it, one hazy summer day, lu han is like a goldfish: aesthetically lovely, but inedible, too many bones and meagre flesh that tastes like it’s rotting.

All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other -
Only the mountain and I.
– Li Bai

It’s an autumn evening, just brisk enough to feel the nip of the chill. Punished to stand outside the house for breaking a vase, Yixing waits to be dismissed for the day. Inside, just beyond the high steps leading up and into the mansion, stand three boys. They’re all dressed shabbily. Two of them are crying. One of them, the one being observed most closely, isn’t. He looks younger than Yixing – about twelve. His hair is fairer than the others’, even in the dark flicker of the candlelit room. Yixing thinks he likes him, too. Pale, like the delicate, early peony blossoms, his skin gleams despite being covered in dirt. His small hands are balled into tight fists at his sides. Later, when Yixing leads them to their quarters in the shed with the chickens, the boy curls up in a corner like a starved animal; all grime and bones and fatigue. The other two boys stay close to each other and fall asleep whimpering.

There is a wisteria vine that crawls all along the southern wall of the brothel. All three of them, Yixing, Zitao and Yifan, have been set to weed the yard and clean the pond. Scooping out wet leaves from the small, pebbled fishpond, Yixing sweats in the sun. Safe in the shade of the house, on the deck overlooking the yard, Lu Han sits sprawled along the wooden floor, reading from a book. He has drawn the legs of his pants up to his knees and his slim calves gleam in the bright sunlight.

“What are you staring at?” Lu Han calls and Yixing drops the basketful of dead leaves. Lu Han grins, eyes alight with mischief. From somewhere behind Yixing, Zitao snorts quietly.

Yixing studies his hands; they’re dirty with grime and raw from the weeding. The earth has gotten under his fingernails, thorns have pricked dots of red along his wrists and his throat is parched. He decides he deserves a break, even at the risk of a whipping. He can feel Zitao and Yifan bore holes into his back as he starts for the house. Swamped by an island of papers and books, Lu Han smiles invitingly at him.

“Exhausted.” Yixing tries to conserve his breath, but it leaves his lungs in a rush as soon as he sits down. His feet ache. His back aches. Even his jaw aches from gritting his teeth so hard.

Lu Han’s palm is cool and soft against the burn ripening along the nape of Yixing’s neck. “What is that tree?”

Yixing follows his gaze and finds Lu Han staring at the barren wisteria. “It’s not a tree. It’s a creeper. It should flower, but it hasn’t for the past two springs.”

“Is it dead?” Lu Han asks and the look on his face is deep and faraway. It’s an expression Yixing has assumed to mean concern, or sadness, depending on the situation. And there’s something about the look that terrifies Yixing a little. Attempting to really decipher it makes him feel like he’s trying to wade into a deep, still lake full of lotuses, into the thick twine of flexible, deadly stalks trapping and eventually, drowning him.

Staring at Zitao and Yifan bent over the yard, struggling in the heat, Yixing says, “Not yet. Dying, probably. I doubt it’ll flower again.”

“That’s a shame,” Lu Han sighs, but then he smiles again, clear and beautiful, resting his chin on his palm. “I guess I’ll never know what they look like.”

Yixing discovers the hole in the wall within his first six months. He’s left to rot in one of the rooms on the mostly unused upper floor as punishment one evening. From the lone, high window, he could see the street outside and the full moon heavy in the dark night sky. The room had been unfurnished, except for a large chest pushed against the western wall. He opens it and finds it disappointingly empty, save for a few silk robes and a cracked hand mirror with an ornate jade handle. He steps into the chest. Then sits down, facing the wall. Tired, hungry, sad and homesick, he draws his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around himself.

Then, distinctly, he hears a door open. The walls, he knows by now, are thick enough to muffle most sounds, but Yixing hears the voice of one of the kitchen maids quite clearly. Then another voice, lower this time. A man. He presses his ear to the wall-side of the chest, groping blindly – until he comes across the peephole, fingers slipping smoothly inside it. He presses his eye to it and finds that he can actually see.

He can see. Everything.

People working and living in the mansion fall into clusters. The maids usually band together. Some are loyal to the girls they wait on. Yifan and Zitao become inseparable. They’re protective of each other and wary of Yixing until Yifan befriends him over the time they steal tangerines from the kitchen. Some of them were rotten, but it didn’t matter. It was the thrill of it. Lu Han is never part of anything with anyone. Except the men who pay, perhaps.

The first man is moderately tall, dark, handsome and a foreigner. He pays heftily. Watching, without quite being able to breathe, Yixing freezes, transfixed.

Lu Han is a blade of grass, bending in the fierce wind, his back stretched to breaking point, ribs impressioned against the fragile skin like fingers trying to tear their way through him from the inside out. Still clad in silk, in another man’s arms, Lu Han lets his head loll back lifelessly. He jerks like a lifeless doll on a string as the man tugs his clothes loose and the robe teases along the slopes of his shoulders like a second skin, bright, blood red against pink. The whisper of fabric against skin is like the slither of a snake wading through the grass. The room smells like thick, oily perfume. Yixing watches, heart in his throat as Lu Han wraps a leg around the man’s waist, watches as the man presses ugly kisses to the china-fine bones wrapped and kept safe. Watches as Lu Han’s fingers like the tender tendrils of a vine wind in the man’s hair. A deadly cobra rising to strike, thick and sinister, wet and hard, the man slides into Lu Han and at that moment–

Lu Han opens his eyes even as he’s being devoured to look over his lover’s – no, Yixing corrects himself fiercely, customer’s – shoulder and straight at Yixing.

Yixing shrinks in the darkness, unable to tear his eyes away, burning, shriveling, going mad– with shame and envy and something terrible he can’t quite name. He wants to scream or cry, but Lu Han smiles at him, eyes dark and eyelashes lowered. There’s a whirl of movement and Lu Han makes a broken noise. They’ve turned so Lu Han is pressed flat against the opposite wall. Arms wrapped around another man’s throat, being fucked to within an inch of his life, Lu Han takes a moment to press a finger to his lips. Something within Yixing shatters. And it calms him.

Later, when he comes in to clean up, Lu Han stares at the ceiling, eyes glassy. His leg is bent at an angle that looks painful. Blood dots the sheets like a string of rubies from a broken necklace. Lu Han doesn’t move. He lets Yixing tidy him up and lies in bed, folded in on himself.

Alone in the yard, Yixing carefully makes it on tottering, unsteady feet to the compost and vomits into it.

In the beginning, he’s small and defenseless, dressed in clean, stark white. Ready for a funeral. The neck of the robes form a deep valley. From within, like a river of moonlight, a swathe of skin leads up to the gently sloping shoulders, to the graceful stalk of his neck, to his face, serene and calm. His eyes are closed, his lips slightly parted. A maid is dusting powder along his high cheekbones. Yixing busies himself with readying the clothes. He sits at Lu Han’s feet feeling pitiful.

“– But it’s a toad!”

“It’s a gold toad. With diamonds for eyes.” Lu Han pins the brooch on his shoulder, staring into the mirror, mouth set in a firm, determined line. “He’s my little lucky friend. No one will notice.”

The maid looks unhappy, mouth wilting in a frown, but she says nothing.

In the minutes before Lu Han steps out, Yixing stays with him. Lu Han straightens the pressed folds of silk carefully. His long sleeves drop to the floor, but he’s not uncomfortable. For someone who came out of seemingly nowhere, Lu Han looks like he was born to be decked in silk and jewelry, to be admired and touched like a particularly fancy hairpin. Yixing remembers him when he was a sickly bag of bones struggling to be brave two years ago. Today is, strangely, not much different.

Lu Han appears to read his mind. “Funny thing about an illusion. The truth behind it is always disappointing.” His voice breaks a little. “And sad.”

It’s dark but he can see the water brimming in Lu Han’s eyes. Lu Han clutches Yixing’s hands and they’re cold and clammy, nails sharp points against his veins.

“I don’t think so,” Yixing whispers, without knowing why. “I find the truth far more beautiful than the illusion.”

Lu Han shakes his head and every jewel crusted on him tinkles and whispers. He bows his head, resting his cheek against Yixing’s hand in his own. Yixing’s breath catches in his throat. He curses his fate for the fact that he’s more worried about leaving a streak of dirt on Lu Han’s perfectly made up face than he is about getting caught. He knows if Lu Han could see his face, the truth about how Yixing felt would be written on it, clear as day. The first wailing note of the erhu echoes through the room and Yixing squeezes Lu Han’s hand, feeling the air finally course through his lungs. It’s time.

“No, that’s not true.” Lu Han lifts his head, looking much more put together than before. Every hair in place, his profile – the smooth outline of his silhouette kissed into being by the ambient light from the stage beyond the passage– is perfect. “No one likes the truth.”

Yixing never stays to watch him dance. It’s too terrible a sight for him. Lu Han, graceful, ethereal like a cloud and fragile like a shimmering mirage. And those men, reaching for him with their cruel claws, their sharp beaks open and foaming with spittle, their beady eyes rolling madly, like birds of prey.

“Ah, my mendicant medicine man.”

Intoxicated and still half-naked, the red from his lips smudged onto his left cheek – Yixing remembers seeing it happen, the man pressing his fingers into Lu Han’s mouth until he’d choked – hair in a disarray, Lu Han pulls his legs together, struggling to keep from keeling over.

“Look at what I got,” Lu Han slurs happily, pressing the hairpin into Yixing’s hands. It’s a wisteria. The jade petals fall and glitter, fragile and beautiful, a perfect mimicry of the flower drooping in a gentle breeze. True mastery of craftsmanship. It must have been very expensive.

“It’s very beautiful,” Yixing mutters, swallowing a sick, hot wash of anger as he wiped the floor clean of spills.

Lu Han leans closer, vulnerable in his current state of undress, the picture of coquettish vanity. “Like me.”

Somehow, Yixing finds it in him to brush Lu Han's hair back gently and smile.

In the warmer months of summer, the servants sleep in the backyard. The maids take the meager luxury of the wooden deck. Zitao, Yifan and Yixing lie in the grass and listen to the cicadas chirp into the darkness. It’s been four years for Yixing, three for the other two.

Yifan nudges Yixing in the side. “We’re going to run away.”

Yixing sighs deeply. “You’ll starve to death. There’s nowhere to go, remember?”

“No, we won’t,” Zitao whispers indignantly. “We’re going to find monks and live with them and train to become fighters.”

They’re serious, Yixing realizes. “It’s a nice dream but you haven’t even seen the end of this street.”

“It’s not impossible.” Yifan sits up. He presses a big, callused hand on Yixing’s shoulder. “We could become bodyguards.”

Yixing thinks of life beyond the sick, lonely cycle of trading in pleasure and flesh. Of watching Lu Han shatter a little more each time. Of not being able to say anything to him. Of having to watch forever, unmoving in the sidelines, as Lu Han surrenders to faceless strangers, all the while staring at Yixing over the immeasurable rift of silence and distance between them. He can’t save Lu Han from this. They’d never make it out alive. He thinks of the emptiness of his life, like the beautiful, vacuous emptiness of Lu Han dancing and he knows he can’t leave.

“Won’t you be saying goodbye to Lu Han?” Yixing asks, though he’s pretty sure he already knows the answer.

Yifan shares a look with Zitao and shrugs. “There won’t be enough time.”

Lu Han doesn’t even notice their absence. He just smiles at Yixing and the warmth of it keeps him warm through the loss of his friends. Alone at night, he thinks some more of Lu Han, like he's finally allowed to. Of his soft hands and sweet lips. Of his lilting laughter and of his quiet loneliness and of his transparent unhappiness and of all the parts of him that will never be Yixing’s.

It’s a wet monsoon evening when Lu Han tries to seduce him. This time of year the customers trickle to a stop as the water pours from the open skies. Lu Han is dressed casually, playing checkers with Yixing on the deck behind the house. The deck was, by now, no man’s land, shared by servants and prostitutes alike. In a show of frustration, Lu Han rolls the sleeves up his arms. His fine, slim wrists spidered with veins turn in the soft light by the lamp.

“Are you letting me win, Yixing?” Lu Han proffers a coy smile.

Yixing rubs out an itch along his spine. “I don’t get as much practice as you so, of course not.”

At that Lu Han’s smile fades a little. He reaches across the board and presses a warm palm to Yixing’s knee, squeezing into the flesh. “You know. Sometimes I wish you’d tell me I don’t have to do those things.”

“I can’t tell you that,” Yixing says, finding the words dry and brittle clogged in his throat like fish bones. The nausea hits him gently this time.

“I know,” Lu Han says reasonably, sliding the board out from between them away and inching closer. “I just wish you could. I wish we could. I’ve loved you since I knew you but I know you don’t think me beautiful. I wish you’d say you wouldn’t share me with anyone. I just wish. Wistfully. Like a wisteria.”

Yixing finds he’s clenched his hands into tight fists. “I can’t.”

Lu Han closes off, shutters drawn over his eyes. They glitter like onyxes, black and shiny wet, boring holes into Yixing. If the child Yixing remembers struggling to keep from crying is still within him, he's so far away, or so diminished that it terrifies Yixing a little. He withdraws his hand, folding the sleeves demurely back down. “You’re right,” he says tightly, “We can’t.”

"You've changed," Yixing manages, swallowing thickly.

Lu Han shrugs coolly. "People do that."

From beyond the deck, the water drips ceaselessly, maddeningly, like a clock ticking. Yixing thinks of how he’ll have to scrub the moss away and chop wood to replace the rotting timber beneath the house. Thinks of himself, crumbling under the weight of it all (his broken heart and Lu Han's broken heart and all their shared broken dreams), as Lu Han danced above his head, graceful and blissfully ignorant.

Everybody else, Lu Han believes, is boring. As everyone else learns it, Lu Han is willfully vain. He’s sweet as persimmons, obeisant to his seniors, compassionate with the servants, beguiling to customers, and alone, dull as a mute bird in a cage. No, as Yifan put it, one hazy summer day, Lu Han is like a goldfish: aesthetically lovely, but inedible, too many bones and meagre flesh that tastes like it’s rotting. And that’s how Yixing starts to fall out of love with him.

syzygy

2012-09-14T10:17:32Z

syzygy / baekai / r / 2307
the fact – the big dirty fact – is that jongin is kind of madly in love with the idea that baekhyun might love him.

syz·y·gy /ˈsizijē/:

(biology) the pairing of chromosomes in meiosis

“It’s more than a time and a place. It’s a whole moment that begins when I first thought of you and took the picture and ends with you looking at the photograph and getting it.” Baekhyun smiles in self-satisfaction as Jongin passes him back a picture of a desolate, almost forlorn beach at sunset. The colours fold over each other, orange and purple and blue. It’s a beautiful beach. “Like a delayed sort of, transferred telepathy or whatever, you know?”

Jongin stares at Baekhyun. He doesn’t know. But it’s just so embarrassingly and achingly romantic that he nods. They’re grabbing lunch between a shoot – well, Baekhyun is and Jongin is gnawing at celery stalks halfheartedly, trying not to think about pizza.

“Where is that?” Jongin asks, watching as Baekhyun polishes off a rather dry looking sandwich.

Baekhyun shrugs almost too nonchalantly. “I don’t remember.”

“You were thinking of me?” It’s sort of cute, if he was. And Jongin knows he was, he just wants the gratification that he will get from hearing it. Again.

Baekhyun looks up, concerned. “Am I not allowed to?”

“No– I mean, sure. I guess.” Jongin says, looking away hurriedly because he can’t quite hide the smile threatening to split his face. “No, it’s not that. I was just wondering.”

They get back to business and Baekhyun spends a lot of time draping Jongin across the sofa at exactly the right angle. He presses the most subtle of caresses to the soft underside of Jongin's right knee. Maddeningly close, the heat of his fingers along Jongin’s thigh as he repositions his limbs again is enough to make Jongin have to think very hard about the most unappealing things he can think of. Things that are not the kisses Baekhyun hides against the corner of his mouth when they're outside and he can't help himself but they can't let anyone know and it's quick and exciting but tender and sweet all at the same time.

The sad fact is, Jongin realizes it too late, only as Baekhyun steps back to observe him. Satisfied, Baekhyun hurries back behind the camera and starts clicking away.

What it all boils down to is that Baekhyun loves him obsessively and objectively. Like a beautiful painting, Jongin is on a different plane and all Baekhyun can do is gaze longingly and touch superficially but never really be one with. The staccato glare of the flash is harsh and blinding. In minutes, Jongin's tongue feels like it's made of cotton. He's done this countless times, for much longer, and rarely tires but he finds himself exhausted all of a sudden. There are countless times Baekhyun tells him he’s beautiful, perfect, flawless, magnificent, breathtaking, surreal and he means it, every single time, but.

But what Baekhyun loves is a different thing.

(rare) a union of opposites

Baekhyun has the sort of taste in life that makes Jongin exhausted just to think about. What he likes ranges from old cameras and forgotten daguerreotypes to broken fiddles and treasure hunting in abandoned storage units. He collects receipts and ticket stubs from commutes he makes almost daily. Like he’s constantly afraid of needing to prove an alibi. The little things he holds on to, they always have a story, but that doesn’t make knowing him less frightening. Baekhyun might forget all the big, important things, but they say the devil's in the details and he never forgets the most infinitesimal little bits of information.

He’s constantly travelling for work, but he does it in a very self-conscious, introspective sort of way. When he’s in a new city or country, he’s thinking of all the catastrophes and consequences and wild strokes of luck and miraculous recoveries the universe has conspired to create to bring him there.

Every step he takes forward actually began three steps ago, well before the seed of thought was sown, a constant paradoxical cycle of existential crises giving way to an almost elementary evolutionary sort of progress.

So very exhausting.

("Lately, I pick up books and fall madly in love with them," Baekhyun confesses on the phone at 3 AM on a flight to some far away corner of the world. "Then I reach the halfway mark and it's not that I lose interest but things happen. I'm forced to put them down. And then I forget. My memory is so terrible, Jongin."

Jongin had been asleep, curled around the receiver of his hotel phone, sheets crumpled and whispering along his waist. "Don't forget me, Baekhyun. You promised. Said I was your muse. I'm your secret island. No coconuts, lots of bananas..."

"I miss you," Baekhyun says and Jongin can picture him closing his eyes, the words spilling from his lips like an endless waterfall of vomit. "I can't wait to be back so I can kiss your irritatingly beautiful, diamond-sharp face and show you how you make my heart burst."

Jongin falls asleep listening to him.)

Baekhyun likes to send postcards that he writes in the format of telegrams

(I THINK IM BEGINNING TO STOP
FALL IN LOVE WITH STOP
YOU FULLSTOP)

and enjoys when people smudge prints of his photographs.

In contrast, Jongin is very simple. People like to photograph him and he likes to get paid for being photographed. The days are long and sometimes the dietary restrictions annoy him, but he likes the free clothes and the money’s not too bad and besides, that’s how he met Baekhyun.

("I wish you would clip your nails," Jongin sighs, as they're pressed close together, Baekhyun's mouth warm against the jut of his shoulder blade.

"No, I like the marks," Baekhyun whispers, tracing a row of reddened half-moons just below the nape of Jongin's neck with his tongue. "They make you look young. Impressionable. Under all that make-up, you disappear, but like this, you come alive.")

(mathematics) a relation between the generators of a module

Sehun is the connoisseur of great excuses. He's the worst person Jongin knows. He’s never without an answer and usually fast to lie his way out of a situation that would be easier solved with the truth. If he has a suggestion that is helpful, chances are his gains from it are larger, much larger. It would, in fact, make more sense to say ulterior motives were almost never without Sehun. Still, he was Jongin's manager and any idea that would put him onto better jobs– regardless of what Sehun was getting out of it (a night with a model, most likely)– was an idea Jongin would be willing to try. This time, however, the windfall is all Jongin’s – a meeting so fortuitous Jongin feels a little bad about having planned it as well as he had. It's Sehun's idea to go to the party to try and get a meeting with Seoul's hottest photographer, Kris. Instead, Jongin meets Byun Baekhyun.

It's a nice place: all glass and plush velvet, simultaneously cold and inviting, sharp-edged and cozy. Jongin wearing his best and he's smiling to charm, but he still feels like he's falling a little short.

Sehun gives him an encouraging push in the right direction. “Go talk to him. I’m sure he doesn’t bite.”

Baekhyun is drinking red wine when Jongin starts to talk to him. Within minutes, he switches to scotch. He's like a diamond, bright and so different. It doesn't take very long.

“–Anyway, I like you. You've got that something – well, I'm not sure, it might just be the alcohol and the way the light is catching your face right now, but.” Baekhyun sighs abruptly, slender fingers curling reflexively around his tumbler; he uncrosses his legs and re-crosses them like he's nervous, which makes no sense at all. “We'll keep in touch via email–”

“Sorry. I don’t check my email.”

Baekhyun smiles. Wryly. “Too many backdated love letters?”

Jongin nods though he doesn't know what Baekhyun means, feeling a belated, misplaced nervousness, like he's on a blind date and not on an unofficial job interview. Baekhyun's fingers are cold against Jongin's as he accepts the business card. They're beautiful fingers, slim and gracefully long. "You have very nice hands," Jongin blurts, and then, resisting the urge to smack himself in the head, hurriedly adds, "Call me."

"Thanks." Baekhyun sounds surprised and he studies his fingers like he'd never noticed them before. "Maybe some day you can give in to the impulse."

"What impulse?"

Baekhyun shakes his head and smiles but doesn’t answer. Someone else steps into the conversation and Jongin fades into the dark walls of the background, swaying to the pulse of the music. When it's time to head home and Jongin manages to extricate Sehun from a tangle of limbs that appear to be a rather gorgeous Chinese model halfway out of a very tight suit, he looks back to see Baekhyun on the arm of this tall guy with a mop of unruly blonde hair. Baekhyun is standing on his toes, reaching up to wipe a smudge of sauce or chocolate or something away from the corner of the tall guy’s mouth. He licks his finger clean and it’s like a punch to the gut. Jongin stumbles out with Sehun, feeling distinctly winded; almost as badly as Sehun, but Sehun looks glassy-eyed with pleasure and Jongin is burning, raw and yearning for the touch.

That impulse.

(astronomy) straight line configuration of three celestial bodies

The fact – the big dirty fact – is that Jongin is kind of madly in love with the idea that Baekhyun might love him. It's a lot of postulating, lots of maybes, no one's sure of anything anymore when everything is postscripted with LOLs and besides. Prozac is a thing. Baekhyun has a special addiction for them. He keeps them in an old Altoids tin box and pops one whenever he feels like people are smiling around him a bit too much. He insists he's not depressed and they just help him get to his 'special work place'. And then he immerses himself in work. Tells Jongin he's not giving him enough depravity, sensuality, not enough despot, tyrant, not enough longing, spontaneity, vulnerability, not enough animal, ethereal, thrall, excitement, madness, not enough, never enough, never, ever close to enough.

Sehun watches their shoot from the sidelines. Sometimes he smokes. Most of the time he grins. Flirts with that one Chinese model. Jongin learns his name is Lu Han and that he suffers from a totally false sense of security. It's almost as if he doesn't know that anyone could break him in half by bending him over a tripod, but he's harmless; a drifting nymph on a floating cloud. Why would anyone hurt a beautiful, helpless creature like him?

Themed parties seem to become a part and parcel of Jongin's work life. They fill the vapid hours before mornings. People drink and get high and throw up and fall asleep. It's strangely suffocating, in the way that makes Jongin taste his make-up on the back of his tongue, thick and bitter and choking.

Baekhyun says, over little petri dishes of slick black beads of caviar and beakers of frothing, buttery champagne, "Suffering is the heart of any masterpiece."

Jongin sighs, unimpressed and hungry. No one, least of all Baekhyun, is ever quite like their usual selves at these parties. Something about the noxious mix of exhaustion and alcohol.

"It's true, think about it. The guy who cut off his ear. People love him. And Beethoven. Couldn't hear what he composed. Towards the end of his life? Whenever." Baekhyun pauses to drain his beaker of champagne. Then he begins to slather a slice of green-yellow avocado thickly with caviar. "Fact is, my life is boring. I have no great tragedy, no terrible secret, no obstacle I've overcome. My parents paid for school and gave me everything I've wanted, within reason. I have everything: good company, great food, enough money for any eccentric excesses and – you."

"What about," Jongin frowns as he watches his dinner – a lettuce leaf – get roasted on a bunsen burner, "The Mona Lisa?"

"Eyebrows singed off," Baekhyun murmurs, swallowing his mini avocado-caviar green-black sandwich whole. "Tragedy."

Jongin stares witheringly at his dinner. It wilts.

Baekhyun claps a hand on his shoulder. "Come on, eat something. And we'll burn it off by having athletic sex."

"No, you won't," Sehun says wryly, coming up beside Baekhyun out of nowhere. "You're a terrible influence. Jongin, wait until after the shoot. Until then, only greens or things you hate."

Jongin shrugs. "I guess that means no athletic sex."

But Baekhyun is staring at the thermometer that passes for a stirrer in his Bloody Mary. "I swear, they take this parties too seriously."

(poetry) the combination of two metrical feet into a single unit

When Baekhyun fucks him, it's always desperate and in the end, usually, a little sad. He is, singlehandedly, the most fascinating person Jongin knows. With his little haiku text messages and the way he pretends he's in a CF sometimes and the way he makes self-deprecating jokes even though he takes his appearance very seriously. The way his lips shine in the dark after he kisses Jongin, the shimmering streak of lube on his cheek from when he swept the sweat crawling down his skin with the back of his hand.

But then Baekhyun takes him to bed and it's soft, lingering kisses like they're actually lovers and not – whatever they really are. Baekhyun touches him reverently, says things like, "I want to kiss you in the most secret places, tongue-fuck the millimetres and inches until you're breathless and wanting."

Things like, "This brown doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, except this patch above your left hipbone and if I suck a lovebite onto it, it turns a delicious shade that I think is called burnt sienna. No, that's more orange and this is more red."

"And I think I do alright until I wake up and realize you are a part of my life," Baekhyun says, when he's in Jongin, hand fisting Jongin's erection keeping it stowed and steady and red rubbing raw against his belly and god this is the worst time for one of his little speeches, "Because then I hope you're half as mad for me as I am for you but I know you think. I know this goes one way. And sometimes I think you feel like this is part of the job–"

"It's not," Jongin says through clenched teeth, feeling the flush crawl up his body, "At least now–just fuck me, I promise we can talk about this la– ah!"

Baekhyun's fingers, pretty, beautiful fingers dip into Jongin's open mouth, hooking into the soft insides of his cheeks, scissoring above his tongue and stroking his palate.

"Mine. Though, I wish you would say," Baekhyun smiles, sad like his smoke-and-mirrors photographs, like his idyllic, empty camera-box of a life, "that you love me."

compound to compound

2012-09-03T13:13:13Z

compound to compound / baekai, baekyeol / r / 3740
the previous night was better. listening, as he lay in bed, to the sound of baekhyun’s careful footsteps past his room to chanyeol’s.

For all the silken smoothness of Baekhyun’s voice, it’s got a bit of a rough edge to it like he forgot to file down the little prickly edges. He’s going through notes, a harmonious (if repetitive) cycle of vocal exercises up and down the scales at the raw hour of seven in the morning. Jongin starts to pad across the floor to the rhythm when quite suddenly, like the saw of a mandolin shredding through the cold, whistling air, Baekhyun’s voice skates off a note rather unpleasantly and shatters the peace of the morning.

(The previous night was better. Listening, as he lay in bed, to the sound of Baekhyun’s careful footsteps past his room to Chanyeol’s. They’re so prudishly quiet though, that Jongin has to paint the mental image for himself: Baekhyun’s soft, sweet mouth wrapped around Chanyeol’s swollen prick, Chanyeol’s rough square-ish hands wound in Baekhyun’s carefully made-up hair, every shallow gasp, every guttural ejaculation of pleasure muffled by the pillows and sheets. And then there’s the aftermath: half an hour later, like clockwork, Baekhyun knocking on Jongin’s door asking him if he’d like to join him on the balcony for a cigarette.)

Baekhyun appears in the doorway, looking exhausted, the soft flannel of his yellow dressing gown hanging loose over a worn shirt that Jongin recognizes as Chanyeol’s. Jongin is stuffing his face with dry cereal straight from the box – he likes the loud crunches, the sharp little pieces jagged under his teeth and turning to paste along his tongue – but he feels the need to say something so he says, “Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key.”

“That wasn’t a minor key or a song.” Baekhyun snorts, shuffling towards the refrigerator. “Lately, it’s like all I ever do is disturb you. In the middle of the night. Now. Are you ever not listening?”

Jongin shrugs. “I meant well.”

When Baekhyun smiles at him, it’s simultaneously sharp and gratifying, thin like winter sunlight, but bright enough to give life. “Of course you did. As for me, you know. Force of habit.”

He peers into the refrigerator and doesn’t even blink at the severed head staring up at them from one of the shelves. “I see Chanyeol’s brought his homework back with him. He brings home jaundiced livers stewed in formaldehyde like we’re having some zombie pot luck but he can’t remember to buy milk.”

Baekhyun sighs at Jongin and Jongin grins back, wondering absently if Baekhyun’s breath still smells like sex.

In the beginning it had just been Jongin. Sehun had put him onto Junmyeon when he moved to Seoul to pursue dance and maybe a degree at Hongik, if he got in and if he did, then if he still felt like it and then, if he felt like it, if he could afford it. Mostly, it was to find a choreographer who saw his talent, network his way around the industry and move up the ladder. Work for one of the big three, and if things went really well, move to better markets. Japan. USA. Or something like that.

Junmyeon has a place that’s more of a dormitory than a flat, but the rent is peanuts and it could’ve been a lot worse, so Jongin deals with it. Predictably enough, within a couple months, Jongin picks up menial part-time jobs between sparse gigs. Six months in, he’s alone, friendless and desperate in a city with a million other talented, beautiful people and in a last ditch attempt, he auditions. That’s where he meets Baekhyun, on the verge of giving up after his latest rejection.

They go out, drink until they can’t tell their asses from their heads and fuck. And the worst part is, Jongin can’t remember it. Nothing. No phantom flesh memories of the feel of Baekhyun’s cock in his mouth or Baekhyun’s ass around his cock or a sigh or a kiss. It’s a blank.

All he has is the morning after, tasting stale and bitter, too bright for his pulverized brain to handle, a used condom plastered to the bedside table and Baekhyun tumbling out of his bed to heave on the floor, groaning, “That was a mistake.”

He buys Baekhyun breakfast, figuring it’s the decent thing to do and as they’re tearing through piping scallion pancakes listlessly, Baekhyun says, “It’s time to go home.”

“You’re giving up?” Jongin asks, wincing when he accidentally bites his tongue.

Baekhyun passes him a glass of water, staring absently at his chopsticks. “I feel like… I’ve lost sight of it, sort of like I’m going blind or drowning or something. Like, I’m standing there and it’s been do or die for so long, I’ve forgotten how to breathe. Sorry. I get the feeling that this,” he gestures to himself and Jongin, “should be really awkward, considering, but it isn’t. Or is that just me and you’re wondering why the stranger you had a one night stand with is pouring his guts out?”

“In more ways than one,” Jongin jokes and Baekhyun looks like he’s going to throw up again. “No,” Jongin amends quickly, “It’s not just you but hey, I guess, if you don’t remember it, then it’s like it never happened.”

Then Jongin had suggested Baekhyun stay, move into one of the three other empty rooms, not anticipating he’d fall in love with too many hair-care products taking up nearly ever spare inch of the bathroom and being able to borrow impossibly tight jeans and having his preshow make-up done with delicate, careful hands and being woken up by the sound of Baekhyun singing in the kitchen and having grocery shopping lists pressed into his hands and answering rejection phone calls together and the way his birthday is now part of Baekhyun’s calendar and drinking and singing in noraebangs and getting high and accidentally kissing on New Year’s Eve and then it happened but he never got around to saying anything –

How Baekhyun met Chanyeol is still, by far, the more interesting story.

The day Baekhyun moves in, it’s dark and stormy. Jongin watches him slip out of a hoodie and into his pajamas. Baekhyun shows him his personal talents; the commercial is cute, but when he starts dancing Jongin ends up on the floor, clutching his stomach, gasping for air.

“I’m so ready for this, seriously. I have everything prepared. All I need is for someone to want me.” Baekhyun fiddles with the drawstrings of his pants.

“I’m sure someone will,” Jongin says reassuringly. “You’re very likeable.”

Baekhyun smiles impishly. “Thanks.”

He’s got a face that needs peering at to find the beauty but once Jongin sees it, there’s a distinct feline grace to the shape of his eyes and the sharp lines of his lips. The slight imperfections just add to the allure and when he talks, there’s just something so magnetic and attractive about him that’s hard to resist. Jongin thinks he’d like to try kissing him again, but he can’t get the words out.

In hindsight, Jongin thinks, everything went wrong for Chanyeol because Jongin got there first and while he never made a move, he never really left either.

“The dismembered body parts are kind of a mood kill,” Baekhyun admits, trying on different jackets as Jongin thumbs through the scattered magazines while simultaneously trying to watch the latest episode of Bridal Mask. “It’s kind of cool that he’s a forensic scientist and works in an actual crime lab but isn’t ‘forensic scientist’ just a glorified title for lab assistant or morgue technician or whatever?”

“Kind of,” Jongin postulates, not really listening to Baekhyun as much as he’s just watching him preen in front of the mirror. He’s lounging on Baekhyun’s unmade bed, present for moral support, as Baekhyun gets ready for an evening out.

Baekhyun sighs, mouth twisting downwards in an unhappy, darling little frown. “Sometimes, and I know this is terrible, but I wish he didn’t live here. I mean, I like that things never get old and he’s funny, that’s why I gave him the idea in the first place. But now it feels like we’re already married or something when really it’s far too early for that, you know?”

Jongin raises an eyebrow in response and Baekhyun groans and pulls the jacket off. He stops just short of tearing his hair out, probably remembering it took him an hour to get it to fall into his eyes exactly the way he wanted it to.

Baekhyun sits down at the edge of his bed somewhat gingerly, looking beseechingly at Jongin. “It’s just. I’m worried it’s going to get too complicated. I mean, I can’t decide what to wear because he lives across the hall from me. Should I dress up or down, is black too formal, is leather too sultry– just because we live together is it okay to have sex after every date and/or in between?”

“Then don’t.” Jongin shrugs lamely and he feels bad about it a second later when Baekhyun stares despondently at the expanse of crumpled sheets between them. “Don’t worry.”

“You’re jealous,” Baekhyun hazards, half-jokingly.

Only the most serious things are said half-jokingly, all the things people are so afraid might be true. So afraid they can’t say it, can’t bear to give it the weight of being spoken aloud unless they pretend it’s absurd. Perversely funny. So Jongin, half-jokingly says, “It’s true, I love you.”

Baekhyun brightens up, lips curving upward, and he says, totally seriously, “And I you.”

Jongin thinks if he could’ve felt his heart break, it would’ve happened at that moment. It’s monumental but nothing shifts. He must be heartless. Baekhyun puts on his jacket, smooths his shirt down, reapplies his lip-gloss, checks his hair again and kisses Chanyeol at the door when he knocks. There’s no trace of the frenzied tension he’d expressed earlier in his silhouette as he laughs and slips a hand into Chanyeol’s back pocket and squeezes.

Jongin steals one of the sandwiches Baekhyun made for himself for tomorrow’s lunch and rewatches Bridal Mask. It’s been a year and he’s no closer to choreographing anything big, but he knows Baekhyun licks his lips when he’s nervous and only cries when he’s frustrated and doesn’t like his ears but thinks his eyes are his best asset and only wrinkles his nose when he’s trying not to smile and ends up smiling anyway. He bets Chanyeol doesn’t know any of this. He probably believes Baekhyun’s bullshit spiel about how he enjoys reading historical novels and likes action movies and his ideal date is strolling along the Han River, sharing patbingsoo.

When Baekhyun shakes Jongin awake, he looks obviously well fucked. Jongin tries not to stare at the oversized, unbuttoned shirt hanging down to Baekhyun’s knees, at the way the fabric shifts and whispers in the dark, revealing the pale gleam of Baekhyun’s chest, the dark circle of an erect nipple, goosebumps texturing the flesh along his throat. The tousled hair, the dilated pupils, the sweat-cooled palms. The satisfaction making his movements languid.

Leaning against the parapet, Baekhyun lights up. His lips around the cigarette are red and wet. As he exhales, Jongin hooks a finger in the collar of the shirt, inspecting the tag. It’s Chanyeol’s.

“That’s just going to ruin your voice, you know.”

Baekhyun shrugs. “It helps me… relax.”

“Relax,” Jongin echoes, eyes turned to the starless sky. “I see.”

“Besides, it just adds character,” Baekhyun says roughly. His fingers, the outline of his lithe body, the way his skin shines – it burns Jongin to know Chanyeol can touch him with his lips and hands and dick, share spit and sweat and oxygen when he can’t even– “Have you ever heard of anything bad happening to people who smoke?”

“Lung cancer,” Jongin says matter-of-factly.

Baekhyun flips him off. “Killjoy.”

“Why don’t you smoke with Chanyeol?” Jongin only just stops himself from saying ‘in bed.’

Baekhyun shifts uneasily and when he speaks it’s stilted and jerky like he’s being forced to confess. “He falls asleep, usually. I suppose it’s fairer to say that I wait for him to. This is just a me thing. Okay, well. I guess, as traitorous as it seems, considering I can’t call this thing with Chanyeol casual sex anymore, this is more of a you and me thing.” He chances a glance at Jongin. “Does it bother you?”

Jongin takes the cigarette from Baekhyun, presses it between his own lips and pulls. He feels vaguely dirty, vaguely cheated. The smoke goes down his throat hot and heady and when he exhales, Baekhyun’s sharp eyes trained on him, he says, “No, but it’s not me being bothered you should be worrying about.”

Baekhyun nods and looks away, flicking the lighter open and clicking it shut. “I’ve been thinking and… this dead end has gotten pretty stale. I think I’ll just apply to Kyonggi.”

“Well.” Jongin smiles bitterly. “It was only a matter of time.”

Baekhyun winces like he’s been stung. He wrings his hands together. “Chanyeol– he’s been offered a promotion. And he wants to move and he hasn’t asked me but I know he’s working up to it and I,” Baekhyun licks his lips. “I need a reason to stay.”

“Don’t you love him?” Jongin knows how words can be like knives and he’s digging one into Baekhyun’s side, twisting it to see how much it hurts.

And it’s like Baekhyun pulls it out, blood gushing from the open wound, bleeding like a martyr. “I’m not ready to.”

That’s when it strikes Jongin as ridiculous. All of this. Smoking on the balcony. Not talking about things. Hiding. It’s so stupid.

Baekhyun had been on a delivery run from the jajangmyeon restaurant he worked at part-time and he’d ventured into the deserted lab full of abandoned, blood-stained surgical equipment feeling distinctly like he’d walked into a horror movie. Then the pig hanging from the ceiling had exploded, showering him in blood and guts and Baekhyun swears he was about to faint or cry if he hadn’t been rendered motionless by what felt very much like a heart attack.

As Baekhyun told it, seconds later Chanyeol came barreling towards him, flapping his arms about, agitated and profusely apologetic and tooth-achingly sweet despite the shock. And as he set about trying to wipe Baekhyun clean with his lab coat, he apparently said, “Oh god, I’m so sorry this was for an experiment, I swear – pig flesh is closest in consistency to human – oh, I’ve ruined your eyeliner – wow, you’re so pretty, I could actually cry–“

And that had been the beginning of Baekhyun’s unfortunate stab at vegetarianism (ultimately his aversion had rather ironically been overcome by a treat of samgyupsal) and also of Chanyeol’s near constant presence.

The first time Jongin meets Chanyeol he asks, “Were you dropped on the head as a child?”

Chanyeol starts to answer but Baekhyun glares at Jongin and ushers Chanyeol out the door with, “Oh, would you look at the time! We have to go.”

And it had already been three weeks of Chanyeol leaving surprise cheesecakes and cold coffees in the fridge for Baekhyun before he left in the mornings, but if Jongin recalls correctly, it’s after they meet that the Tupperware boxes of frozen body parts start appearing between the milk cartons and cute heart-shaped prepacked lunchboxes with handwritten notes to Baekhyun.

In the hour that it takes Baekhyun to get home Chanyeol plays Diablo 3 as Jongin fiddles through a pile of bills inexpertly. Conversationally, like he’s talking about gameplay or the weather, Chanyeol says, “I know you’re in love with him. And it’s cool with me. In case you were wondering.”

Jongin pauses mid addition, feeling his skin prickle, hot, then cold, then hot again. “What.”

“Oh come on,” Chanyeol laughs throatily, crushing a handful of Cheetos into his mouth from the bag nestled between his legs, “It’s really obvious. Contrary to your belief being dropped on the head as a child hasn’t made me stupid! Or at least, that stupid. It was only once. And an accident. Anyway, you should tell him. It only makes sense to fight me if he knows he’s got an option, right?”

“We’re best friends,” Jongin says, sounding more strained than he intends to. “And I’ve got a life.”

Chanyeol shrugs. “Sounds to me like you’ve got a big, fat broken heart.”

“You’re an asshole,” Jongin mutters, trying to get back to work, but he feels restless now, like he needs to break something or run as fast as he can for as long as he can until he can’t see anymore.

Chanyeol grins, big and harmless, turning around to fistbump Jongin but Jongin doesn’t move. “All’s fair, remember?”

The key turns in the lock across the hall, front door swinging open inwards and it’s Baekhyun, hair windswept, smelling like the autumn leaves and coffee, hands weighed down by shopping bags and Jongin takes an uncalculated leap, crossing the room even as Baekhyun’s trying to say hi, to kiss him.

This is how it happens: Baekhyun drops the bags, kisses him back and the sounds of Chanyeol playing his video game set the tone, flashy and jumping and Jongin knows he should treasure this moment of actually kissing Baekhyun but he feels terribly like a bullet is going to lodge into his spine and he’s going to die and end up dissected by Chanyeol on one of his big, white tables, all blood and guts and Chanyeol will tell him that inside out he’s just like a pig, no difference at all and –

Baekhyun gasps, pulling away, a stuttered breath and the look on his face makes the dam of hope – held back and buried and bullied into silence – burst in Jongin’s chest. And then Baekhyun looks at Chanyeol.

They flirt over breakfast. Chanyeol corners Baekhyun at the counter as he’s trying to put together something like an omelet and says, “You’re hot like a crime scene with the bad guy still hiding in the closet. And the police show up and he has to stay very still and the body is still warm and. Yeah.”

Baekhyun turns in the parentheses of Chanyeol’s lanky arms and his big hands make Baekhyun’s hips look almost delicate. And Baekhyun’s wrinkling his nose, smiling though he doesn’t want to, hands coming up to curve around the nape of Chanyeol’s neck. He catches Jongin’s eye (the expression on his face somewhere between amusement and helplessness and embarrassment) as he presses closer to Chanyeol, mouth to the curve of his shoulder and he says, “I guess you’ll have to dust me for fingerprints then.”

Jongin retches exaggeratedly but Baekhyun misses it. He’s already shut his eyes and he’s kissing Chanyeol so Jongin crunches loudly, over the soft sounds of their lips sliding together. Behind them, the eggs burn.

“Is he home yet?” Baekhyun toes his shoes off, still breathless, letting his backpack drop to the floor. Jongin sits up and drops his phone, forgetting to hit send. “No? Good.”

And he climbs into Jongin’s lap, straddling his thighs, starting with his arms, precise even in his hurry but Jongin pushes his shirt up kissing the flat line of his tummy, delighting in the way Baekhyun gasps, in the way Baekhyun’s hands are claws fastened to Jongin’s shoulders holding him close, in the way Baekhyun is saying, “I’ve been thinking about this – and he won’t talk to me but I didn’t–”

“You did the time,” Jongin murmurs, pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses as he trails upwards, “Might as well commit the crime.”

“I still like him, you know,” Baekhyun whispers when Jongin reaches the curve of his neck.

Jongin stills, and it’s a herculean effort. “What is tact.”

Baekhyun grimaces. “I’m sorry.”

Jongin kisses him and it’s better than the first time they don’t remember and the second time they can’t forget, it doesn’t stop until they’ve undressed each other partly and Jongin is bucking up restlessly, trying to join their hips, starting to and then forgetting how to breathe. Baekhyun’s cradling Jongin in his perfect hands, slim, graceful fingers warm against his cheeks and scalp and Jongin feels utterly cowed by the affection, tonguing the soft bud of a nipple.

He’s trying to get to his feet so they can move to his room, when Baekhyun announces, “I got into Kyonggi.”

“Oh,” Jongin says intelligently.

“I did decently in school, alright?” Baekhyun sounds reproachful. He looks mildly offended and Jongin laughs.

“No, I’m not surprised you got in, don’t worry.” He rubs slow circles along the soft, pale skin of Baekhyun’s back, dancing around the jut of his shoulder blades and he knows this is somehow important but with all his blood having fled south his brain feels sluggish and altogether rather unwilling. “I – congratulations. What are you– what does this mean?”

Baekhyun takes an even, measured breath. “That I’m going to tell him. That he’s probably going to break up with me when he finds out.”

Later in bed, when they’ve finished, Baekhyun smokes with an almost vicious relish. He starts to laugh, shoulders shaking, beautiful in the golden afternoon light and it sounds like relief so Jongin smiles. The smoke from his exhales dissipates like every single doubt gnawing at the back of Jongin’s mind.

The day Chanyeol officially moves in Junmyeon is hanging around the doorway, handing over a pair of keys to him. Jongin helps Chanyeol move what looks like a massive, impossibly heavy typewriter with a mouse.

“It’s a pet project of mine. I call it the fingerprint recording device,” Chanyeol explains excitedly, flyaway, curly gold hair getting in his eyes. “You scan it with this thing – I haven’t decided what to call it yet – and usually you have to do a whole bunch of other stuff but once I get this baby running it’ll carry all the info and it’ll run through all the available databases until we have a match. So it won’t take ages going back to the office and stuff, but it’ll be faster than the current system and obviously it also records… the ones it scans… hence, you know, the name.”

Jongin nods sagely. “Isn’t that also called a computer?”

Chanyeol flashes him the most shit-eating grin he’s ever seen and throws an arm around Jongin’s shoulders. “You’re such a super guy! I think we’ll get along just fine. All we have to do is avoid each other.”

noir

2012-08-18T20:51:41Z

noir / sekai / r / 1863
private eyes, no matter how experienced only get so far with the kinds of cases we get. life would only be as interesting as my clientele.

Three o’clock in the morning on a Sunday. The candles have burnt down to waxy little puddles, their great white stalactites hanging off the tables. The photographs hang by their ends, held up by clothespins in the dark room, slowly developing. I stare the hands of a grandfather clock and we share an empty, vacillating boredom. My bow tie is undone, a stark black against the stiff white of my shirt. Brown paper bags hide the abomination that is prohibition whiskey smuggled from a local drugstore. I’m waiting for someone and he hasn’t made it because he’s–

– dead, killing someone, in prison, making love to someone else in his sheets or in their sheets or somewhere else, stealing jewels, overstaying a dinner party, drinking someone else’s alcohol, breaking in a gift horse, being painted in the nude, painting a nude portrait, complimenting his model, undressing his model, dressing his model, being kept hostage, keeping someone hostage, travelling, on a ship, by train, via car, or safe at home, fast asleep having forgotten this engagement–

From one of my photographs of him, Oh Sehun smiles down at me, master sleuth, beguiling thief of my wayward mind and muse of my heart.

I think of him in his indigo silk pajamas, rubbing the sleep away from his eyes, standing at the door to his bedroom, the innocent seducer. The way he smiles at me from across the bar, dressed in a dark suit, so rich it might be velvet, a drink away from a kiss in the back alley. A short drive away from an illustrious fuck in a motel room, on a bed where countless others must have had liaisons much more disappointing than ours. The way he whispers my name hard and fast in my ear, through shallow breaths, body arching off the sheets and further into my arms.

“My father,” he tells me, in the unspoken, presumed confidence of post-coital blabberings, as he traces my shoulder blades with his wicked, soft mouth and tickles my belly with his wandering, pale fingers, “He would kill you if he ever found out that the heir to his vast empire of organized crime was philandering with a no-good private investigator.”

The next morning, sharp at seven, a sobbing woman tries to knock down the door to my office. A lot of times it was about a drinking problem. A gambling son. An adulterous husband. Private eyes, no matter how experienced only get so far with the kinds of cases we get. Life would only be as interesting as my clientele. Besides the rare glimpses into some interestingly thought out frauds, the rest were the usual meat and potatoes. So very dull, but I have expenses and that is why I accept. Her first payment is a generous few hundred dollars. Thank heavens for the rich and their costly troubles.

I set her up with the landlady next door and tell her to make arrangements through her maid to skip town in case she’s next. Then I get down to business.

First, I make a phone call. And, as it turns out, that's all I have to do.

“Have you tried these?” Sehun asks me, licking some chocolate off his fingers. “They’re little cups of peanut butter covered in chocolate. Ingenious, really. Delicious, too. If I had a lifetime’s supply of these, I would need nothing else.”

He's sitting in my chair, feet propped on my desk, precariously close to my jar of tediously pickled blood samples. If I said anything, I knew he’d knock it over on purpose so I move it across the table, as far away from him, as subtly as possible. He wipes his hands on the front of his jacket. A very expensive looking jacket. “So. You need an appointment with father.

“I’m not going to ask you for that.” I shift uncomfortably, acutely aware of the straps of my suspenders cutting into my shoulders. Of my worn shoes and the general air of mustiness in my office.

“How noble.” Sehun gets to his feet, straightening the waistcoat of his three-piece pinstripe suit. He’s wearing the hat he won over a poker game and his obnoxiously skinny tie; such a sight for sore eyes. The whole lot probably cost more than I made in a year.

“You really are a terrible detective, though. Isn’t it obvious? The man owes me. I was so glad to hear his stupid wife had come to you instead of the police. Makes this whole mess a lot easier to clean up.”

I stare at him. “You have her husband.”

“He made a mistake. No one else gets away with trying to screw me.” Sehun shrugs, moving closer, brand new shoes practically squeaking against the wooden floor. Spoilt rotten, he kisses me, tasting sweet as the confectionary he’d made short work of. His sticky fingers wind in my hair and his left hand slips into my pocket to drop a small note.

“So sorry about last night,” he whispers against my mouth, smiling almost shyly. “I’ll make it up to you.”

He leaves me, standing in the middle of my office, dumbstruck. A few seconds later, he’s back, sticking his head around the door, grinning sheepishly. “I’ll send someone to get rid of the woman for you. We’ve got an expert.”

I walk back upstairs, slowly, now that I’m out of work again. Fix myself a breakfast of eggs and black coffee. Then as I chew, I play the song that was playing in the room where Sehun first spoke to me, asking, “Do you think it’s strange that sometimes, when I get tired of this music, I go to motel rooms, press my ear to the wall and listen to the sounds of the lovers next door?”

“I’ve always wanted a pink Cadillac. So if my father ever finds out about you, I’d buy one. Junmyeon, his right-hand man and the barkeep, Kyungsoo– do you remember him? They said they’d warn me if he found out.”

Sehun makes up for his unexplained absence to me with a nonsensical picnic basket. He tells me he’s been working on a crossword puzzle while Kyungsoo was trying to do the previous night’s accounts. He’s brought me a cigar, and although it’s not Cuban, it’s a luxury. He kisses my hands and presses our thighs close together as we share ham and jam sandwiches.

“Then I’d give you a list to read. I have a list of things I’d never tell you–”

“Like what?” I interrupt.

Sehun bites his lower lip. “I don’t like how you look in grey.”

“Oh.”

“White snakeskin seats.” When I look at him, confused, Sehun clarifies, “In the car. Custom made, of course. I know a guy. And we’d drive to the pier. Watch the sun set over the bridge. Glorious skyline from the west. We could break open a bottle of champagne. Kiss in the dying light, until our last breaths. It’s called carbon monoxide poisoning. Perfect and painless. It would be like falling asleep.”

I toy with his hat – it’s a really soft cream today, still pale enough to be a sharp contrast against my skin. “How would you get white snakeskin? Bleach?”

“No, there are rare albinos. Colorless down to their irises. Really quite beautiful.”

We share a moment of companionable silence and then I spoil it. “Do you really think you want to die with me?”

“I don’t want you to die alone.”

How Come You Do Me Like You Do (1924)

The barman, a handsome, full-lipped man, rolls his eyes at us when Sehun rests his elbow against the countertop and tells me to play him.

“And if you lose?” I ask, already captivated.

Sehun glances at the barman and then looks at me, lips curving upwards in a smirk. “Surprise me.”

Now the barman is staring at me, also intrigued and struggling to hide it. “And if I lose?”

“I’ll surprise you.” Sehun winks at the barman. “What do you think Kyungsoo? Am I going to lose?”

The barman snatches away our half-empty glasses. “If you’re not going to drink, get the hell out of here.”

I lose. Turns out I'm not a very good liar. Sehun sends me home alone, not one second of warmth or comfort. No goodbye kiss in the shadows beneath the awning, no hand sliding down the waistband of my trousers, not even a smile. No, quite the opposite. He has me thrown out. Smarting from the humiliation and the skin torn off my palms, I walk.

The next evening, Sehun storms into my office, locks the door behind us and presses a knife against my throat.

“Don’t.” He shoves a hand down the front of my pants, eyes glittering in the dark. “Say a word.”

He jerks me off, both of us still fully dressed and I don’t dare to take a breath, edge of steel against the tender chords of my throat. Sehun kisses me, knife still between us, metal biting the shallowest of cuts into my flesh. The heat of his palm around my cock, stroking downwards, is almost painful.

“When I first saw you,” he turns away to press his mouth to my throat and I can smell his perfume and the tobacco he’s been smoking, “it was all about how beautiful you were. I couldn’t stop looking and I just wanted to say something interesting.”

“Sehun,” I try to speak, but there’s the knife and the fact that I’m quite close to an orgasm. Instead, I run my hands up his arms until I have a firm grip on his shoulders.

“If you’re going to walk away at the first sign of trouble,” Sehun whispers, breath hot against my collar, “then let this be the last time.”

One more stroke, his thumb rough against the head and I soil my pants, hot and sticky, sharing every laborious breath with Sehun and he relents, finally, knife slipping from his hands. When I kiss him, he kisses back, the softest plunder, tasting like bitter oranges. And he nods, sweaty, hangdog and boneless, when I say, “You want a lot.”

"I know you don't love me." Sehun trembles as he sinks into me. "But you've got to understand that I need more than just romance."

When in the summer, I begin to learn the alphabet along the hollow of his spine, where the sweat collects in little puddles, like rainwater in forgotten cups, Sehun is still young – nineteen. Over the course of three nights, I find that the arch of his back is a language of its own, so dreadfully beautiful, and once I put my lips to skin, it is seared in my memory. And now that things have changed, taken a turn for the definite, a spiraling track winding inwards, a self-destructive circle – the pin scratching out a forgettable tune, vinyl burning, melting and the song comes to an end and with it, so does the dance – I find that what I miss the most is the sight of him, shirtless in the pale dawn, lighting a cigarette by the window as the dewdrops crawled down the glass.

The fifth time we meet, there has been a death in the vicinity of the bubbles that are our lives and we are too tired to make love or conversation. Through the thin walls we listen to the sound of lovers in other rooms undressing each other. The door is wide open and I know that he’s mine.

going nowhere

2012-08-14T17:11:13Z

going nowhere / sekai, one-sided kaixing / t / 3945
those two people who are so right for each other and so blind to the fact.

p.1.,

Jongin closes his eyes, ignoring the sting of fatigue. It’s first light and he’s barely had six hours of sleep. His body aches, every muscle sore, but it’s a sweet sort of agony. The evidence of hard work, of effort put in towards a goal. There’s no time to be tired. Stretching before the frameless mirror set in the cramped living room, he lets the music rise to a crescendo of beats washing over him. Each thump of the bass sets him alight inside out and he starts to dance–

“What’re you doing up so early?” Jongin tugs his headphones down, panting.

Sehun scrubs the sleep from his eyes half-heartedly. “I’ve got a class.”

Jongin watches him open the refrigerator to find it half empty. “It’s only six. Did I wake you? I didn’t mean to.”

“No,” Sehun smiles crookedly. “We’re out of milk. And almost everything else.”

Jongin pulls a crumpled slip of paper – a yellow post-it covered in scribbles that sticks to itself – from his pocket. “I’ve got a list.”

The commute to the dance studio is short. He switches twice, and the whole trip is usually never longer than forty minutes. Unless he forgets to get off at the right stop. Sometimes, with his hands curled around the cold railing, cap slung low, music pulsing in his ears, he gets lost. There are a lot of things to think about: his next paycheck, giving up and going to university, how much he owes Sehun and how far he can go before it’s too far.

It’s a Sunday afternoon and the light is softly yellow, almost mellow – he feels like a pat of butter on a cold plate dissolving slowly, so very slowly. One of Sehun’s seniors from university, Chanyeol, is smoking cigarettes on the balcony. His curly hair looks almost golden brown and his lips around a cigarette are very pink and soft looking. His large glasses have distracting smudges all over them. When he smiles it’s a big and disarming expression.

Sehun laughs abruptly, loud and distracting. “That guy you have a huge crush on, what’s his name? Kris? Just texted me.”

“I don’t have a crush on him,” Chanyeol says calmly, his voice a deep, soothing bass. The tips of his ears redden and he twists his cigarette, exhaling deeply.

Jongin lets his head loll back as a slight breeze licks cool fingers through his sweat-dampened hair. The sky is so blue it hurts to look at. He shuts his eyes and the light filters red through his closed eyelids. He needs to get a part-time job. Some way to get paid.

As if from a great distance, Sehun whoops. “We’ve been invited to a party!”

Sehun is squirming into a pair of almost unreasonably tight jeans when he says, between grunts and tugs, “Rent’s due this week.”

Jongin freezes, his socked feet inches away from their small, incredibly old television set. He’d just been about to change the channel. Maybe he can pretend to be asleep. Sehun tosses a tangerine and it catches Jongin in the stomach; he lurches forward at the impact. It’s surprisingly painful.

“Eat,” Sehun instructs. “I’m just letting you know. Don’t start worrying already. I’ve got it.”

Feeling extremely pathetic, Jongin pulls his knees to his chin and peels the fruit. White, sticky threads come away from the orange flesh; a web of lies. “There’s this... audition.”

“That’s great,” Sehun says brightly without the slightest shred of sarcasm or contempt. “You work on that. Which company is it?”

“It’s not really that great.” Jongin mumbles. “Back-up dance group. Only luck in that is getting picked for a music video.”

Sehun sits down on the small lumpy couch, sighing heavily. Jongin passes him a piece of fruit and he accepts it. “Well, you have to start somewhere. By the way, it will please you to know that I’ve managed to pick up an extra shift at the store. We’re good for a while.”

“Thanks.” Trying to keep from shriveling with shame, Jongin presses a foot against Sehun’s thigh in gratitude. Sehun rests a hand on his ankle, warm and reassuring.

A few minutes later he turns to Jongin. “Hey, you know who else started out as a back-up dancer? Michael Jackson.”

“That’s not true.”

This guy– this friend of a friend – Yixing. He’s magnetic. For the first time Jongin feels he understands why people call it chemistry. It’s got a formula to it – dim lights + body heat + alcohol = attraction. He’s got features that the light loves and when Jongin touches an eyebrow, the fine line makes him think of music and the synesthetic translation to dance– of flesh molding to form.

“You’re a dancer,” Yixing breathes in his ear, his drink in one hand, Jongin’s hair wound in his other. “You’ve got the legs– the body for it.”

Jongin feels the last shreds of inhibition melting away as the music grows louder and the lights grow blurrier; a staccato of bass thumping in his gut and neons disappearing into the night. And Yixing is so close and so warm and so beautiful. Still, he tries. “I really. Should. I just want to be alone.”

“Oh yeah. Me too,” Yixing says and kisses him, slow and hard. It’s so nice that Jongin forgets why he was supposed to resist.

Four a.m. Jongin doesn’t think there has ever been a time when the flat has been so quiet in the year or so they’ve lived here. He stares wretchedly through their mirror as Sehun keeps rubbing his forehead. Sehun pours himself a glass of water. Jongin finds his hair is sticky and his fingers are stickier and that the taste at the back of his mouth is of sex.

p.2.,

Sometimes Sehun wonders if he’s the only one who sees Jongin. With his hunched shoulders when he sits down to eat and his various caps and t-shirts. The adolescence of how he slouches in chairs, the smallness of his body balled up in bed after a grueling day of practice. How he stupidly forgets to buy eggs and sleeps through his birthday and with every willing person he comes across.

Sometimes, unbidden Sehun conjures the image of Jongin like that – but no, the way he looks when he dances is infinitely better. It must be. (Sex is pornography is boring. Dance, however, especially the way Jongin lets the art flow through him, is all about something no one can touch, or reach– a mirage. And that elusive, evanescing beauty could whet the most discerning of libidos.)

No. That’s not it at all.

Sometimes Sehun wonders if Jongin sees him – plaid shirts and brown sweaters and pouring over books, burning the midnight oil – at all.

Sunset in Seoul isn’t much of a view from their apartment but Jongin makes it. He’s standing in the balcony in three-fourths of a suit. The jacket is slung over his right arm. Sehun stares and forgets to breathe, the same way he imagines surgeons do before slicing a heart open.

It’s a moment. Clarity, as if staring through a fog that is finally beginning to lift. Like blood draining slowly south.

Jongin undoes his tie, runs a hand carelessly through his hair and turns around.

The silence is alight with a sort of caged wildness and a look in Jongin’s eyes obscene as a black sea– before it flickers to blankness, taking everything charged and feverish about the moment with it. Should’ve known better. It passes.

Jongin laughs self-deprecatingly. “It was for a performance. I would’ve told you, but it’ll be on TV soon.”

Sehun nods, not trusting himself to speak.

“Let’s get out of here.” Jongin crosses the room, jostling Sehun along, keeping his fingers carefully tucked out of reach. No touching. “Dinner’s on me. We’ll go somewhere nice.”

That evening Jongin laughs, deep and throaty. His eyes look beautiful and when he bites his lip, Sehun thinks of every time they could’ve but haven’t. He reaches for the bill and Sehun feels his blood run through his fingers, screaming to just be able to feel Jongin’s skin against his. And he knows if he touches him, he'll know and once he knows, it'll all be over. So close, within touching distance, but a sea – an ocean, a galaxy – away.

That night Sehun’s bed feels emptier and colder than it ever has.

p.3.,

He’s on his way home when someone grabs Jongin by his elbow and with his momentum turned against him, he swings back around to face them. It’s Yixing, looking much plainer and tamer than Jongin remembers him being. No predatory prowl, no alcohol, no dim lights. No tight, black leather, no lack of personal space. Plain daylight. White t-shirt and jeans.

“Hey, you’re that guy,” Yixing grins. His cheek dimples. If there had ever been (never) any doubt that he was attractive, his smile wipes it clean. Beside him, Chanyeol shrugs awkwardly.

Jongin stares at the floor, nodding. “Yeah. Yep. That guy. Me.”

“What a coincidence!” Yixing slings an arm around Jongin’s shoulder. “I’ve actually been asking this dick here if he knows you – I mean, I wondered about you, you know. And he was so unhelpful about it. Said he’d only seen you hang around one of his juniors or something.”

Chanyeol glances at Jongin as they reach the impasse. He fidgets with his glasses, then shoulders his bag. “He lives with Sehun.”

Usually Jongin is the one up first in the morning, so breakfast is his. Most days he throws together rice and some pickled side dishes or the rare Sunday kimchi stew. Lunch is usually grocery store kimbap that Sehun divides for them. Dinner is almost always ramyun finished with the fruits that Junmyeon mothers them with.

“Do you remember that guy, Yixing?” Jongin asks carefully, as he’s tossing their empty plastic cups in the garbage. It’s late, well past the staple of evening varieties. There’s no canned laughter in the background, only a maudlin violin piece from a drama.

Sehun stares at the TV as though possessed. “I heard.”

“I’ve missed this,” Jongin says, making himself comfortable on the floor. His head hits the corner of the console but it doesn’t really hurt. He’s drunk enough.

“What?” Sehun asks from somewhere near his feet. “Drinking or beating me at stupid video games?”

Jongin smiles. He can just picture the scowl on Sehun’s face. “Remember that first bottle of soju?”

“I remember how we emptied it. I remember regretting it the next morning.”

“You’re so much better drunk than you are sober.” Jongin winces as Sehun elbows him in the side.

Sehun shifts until he’s sitting next to Jongin. “My judgment is never as badly impaired as yours.”

Jongin doesn’t reply. He does sit up though, knees drawn halfway close, elbows resting haplessly on them.

Sehun sighs. “Sorry. I wasn’t. Didn’t mean it like that.”

“Yeah you did.” Jongin squints through the dark. He has no idea where he’s going but it’s time to break the tension. Lighten the mood. It was time to stop keeping score. “You only think they’re stupid when you lose.”

Sehun thumbs the soft underside of his wrist, mapping the textures of his skin rippling with thin veins and when he does respond, it’s a whisper against a myriad other ambient sounds and Jongin is nearly half-asleep. “Then don’t play games with me.”

He pushes Jongin away slowly, until Jongin falls.

p.4.,

The kettle whistles. It’s a colour that Jongin remembers a magazine describing as ‘kelly green’. A housewarming gift from Sehun’s mother. The TV splutters in the background. The refrigerator hums. It’s early. Jongin stares at a hard-boiled egg, perfectly white, sitting in a blue eggcup. He drags his hands down his face. It’s a silent, melancholy, contemplative sort of morning. The balcony door is shut. Sehun has spent the night somewhere else. With someone else. And he’s not back yet.

“Why dance?” Yixing tosses a water bottle at him.

Jongin feels his heartbeat reverberate back through the floor. Someday, the shoes will kill him. Today, he wants to dance and they fit. The bottle rolls harmlessly over the polished wood towards him.

Finding the air in his burning lungs, Jongin sighs heavily and it costs him. “I really don’t know. Took classes as a kid. Then it became a thing. My thing.”

“Don’t tell me.” Yixing presses a finger to his lips, his eyes alight with teasing laughter. “Ballet?”

Jongin nods, smiling despite himself. He unscrews the bottle and his palms still feel too hot. “And Jazz.”

“Boring.” The sound Yixing’s lips make as he draws away from a deep gulp of water reminds Jongin of the sound of Yixing kissing his lips and his skin.

Jongin sits up; his legs are spread flat, a wide delta against the floor, as if in acceptance of the slithery backwaters, if Yixing chose to be it. He shrugs and tries not to study the dark sweat stains on Yixing’s grey shirt, to find where cloth pressed to skin, to bones, to something– someone beautiful. “That’s all I’ve got, man.”

Yixing smiles. “I don’t believe that. There’s more to you.”

Keys in the lock and Jongin can tell Sehun is home without having to open the door. He can hear his laughter through the walls. He’s with someone. Jongin debates leaving and then decides against it. The door swings inward, free from his grasp. And he stares at the slightly stained, stretched-to-shapelessness sleeves of his sweatshirt held fast to his wrists by his fingertips. Afraid to look up.

Abruptly Sehun stops laughing. The silence is like a knife in his side.

“I’ll call you back later,” Jongin hears him say quietly.

“Where were you?”

Sehun ignores the question for about ten seconds, seemingly engrossed in the book he’s paging through. “Oh. I had an exam.”

“Overnight?” Jongin wishes it hadn’t sounded as accusatory.

Sehun looks up sharply. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just.” Jongin ducks his head and fumbles with the frayed hems of his jeans. “I was worried.”

“You were worried,” Sehun echoes hollowly. Then a moment later, “What store is it?”

Jongin faces him for the first time, bewildered. “What?”

“The store I work at. The one that pays me. You know, money for rent. Which is how we live here. What is it a store for? What does it sell?” Sehun bites his lip, fists clenched at his sides, shoulders stiff. He's not shouting, but he is angry. “Don’t tell me you worry when you don’t know the first thing about anything that doesn’t concern you.”

He gets to his feet, walks into his room and back out of it– all in under thirty seconds. “You want to talk about worrying? I worry, too. But that’s irrelevant because it is so far beyond your field of vision – with your little blinkers on that block everything else out. Nothing else. You don’t see anything except your own goddamn reflection in that mirror. Not one inch of the rest of the world. Well, I have news for you: it’s going to keep turning and one day it will leave you behind.”

Sehun exhales shakily. Presses the heel of his palm to his left temple and runs the hand through his hair. “And then. I’m not going to be there.”

p.5.,

A note on the refrigerator, scrawled hastily says:

gift store called ‘wish’

there is ice cream in the freezer

~~buy banana milk~~

It is well on its way to winter when Yixing presses his hands to Jongin’s hips in the practice rooms. Jongin breathes, taking in their reflection – a black silhouette against the murky grey – staring back at him. The line of Yixing’s leg, a perfect angle against the wooden floor. His breath warm against Jongin’s neck. It’s cold outside, so very cold.

“Stay,” Yixing says, as the lights dim. The room turns to stone in the darkness. Everyone’s gone home and it’s getting late outside. There’s no one waiting for him, so Jongin stays. They dance until they’re tired. They chat until the sun starts to rise, red over the edges of the flat, uninspiring horizon.

Yixing kisses him goodbye, soft and almost safe. “Not half as boring as you misled me to believe you were, Kim Jongin.”

“Don’t be a stranger now.” Jongin shuts his eyes and takes the salve for what it is, throat burning from all the strings he’s trying to cut loose.

“What’s a good gift for a first anniversary?” Sehun breaks the uncomfortable silence. Jongin freezes mid-chew, scrambling to mute the TV.

“Flowers?” Jongin suggests, scratching his head.

Sehun nods reluctantly. “Well, that’s sort of boring, isn’t it? I want something that’s special but I don’t want it to seem like I put too much thought into it. I don’t want to come on too strong. I just want – him to know I was thinking of him so it’s not something generic. But not too much, I mean, it should seem like I have other things to do–” Sehun takes a breath, almost despairingly– “Do flowers really say that?”

Jongin stares at him and Sehun stares back until they both crack– dissolving in a fit of giggles and snorts.

“I think you should go for ties,” Jongin says, feigning seriousness. “Much more expressive for that sort of vague insanity.”

Yixing calls him one night, sounding drunk out of his mind. “What are you wearing?”

“What?” Jongin laughs before he can stop himself at the obvious proposition. It’s late, but not enough. The next day is a Thursday.

“I’ve got a friend here,” Yixing slurs over a rush of static, “Says I can’t get you to have phone sex with me right here right now ‘cuz you're too good to be true.”

Jongin glances at the door to Sehun’s room shut fast. The streetlights cast an orange pool over the still, lifeless living room. Shaking his head in disbelief, voice lowered, Jongin says, “Yixing, I am not going to have phone sex with you while a friend listens in.”

“Way to let a man down.” Yixing hangs up.

He calls back a minute later. “It’s that asshole roommate of yours, isn’t it? Knew it. You were so impossibly good. Too good to be true.”

p.6.,

Is a break-up, Sehun wonders idly, twenty-four days before Christmas, an indication of failure on part of the one coming to the conclusion or the one caught unawares?

He feels the mattress dip under Jongin's weight. The warmth of his palm against the bony ridges of Sehun's curved spine. Jongin shifts until he's spooning him, a small ledge of distance between thin cotton and flesh over cool sheets. Sehun imagines what it would feel like to have Jongin slide around him, lift a leg to allow him passage, a part of him burying itself deep within Sehun saying, you're not alone. In Sehun's head, Jongin's cock is wonderfully slick against the most private parts of his body - the places (his mouth and his fingers and the tender insides of his thighs and beyond) few else have felt him.

Instead Jongin traces the English alphabet with his fingertips between Sehun's shoulder blades.

"I didn't know that about you," Jongin says, voice sounding rough with disuse.

Sehun licks his dry lips. "Didn't know what?"

"That you're." Jongin falters. "Like me. That girls are not–"

"Girls have never been." Sehun falters when his stomach grumbles.

"Oh," Jongin says intelligently. A moment later, he slips an arm around Sehun's waist and shimmies closer. Mouth pressed to Sehun's neck, he mumbles, "Let's go have some cake. And then I promise, you're gonna be okay."

It's the dead of the night and Jongin is licking the salty remnants of fried chicken off his fingers with relish. They're sitting on the lumpy couch. Sehun presses his foot against Jongin's thigh. Jongin grins at him and rests his hand against Sehun's ankle. Fingers still slightly damp, he rubs circles along the jut of bone. Sehun curls his toes against Jongin.

"If we did," Sehun whispers, staring at Jongin's thumb drawing aimless patterns over his skin, "What would happen next?"

Jongin shrugs. "I don't know."

Sehun looks at him beseechingly. "What if it's a mistake? What if there's no going back?"

"Then it's our mistake to make."

Sehun draws away from him. "That's not an answer."

The flat smells like spicy fried chicken and not much else. It's not entirely unpleasant. Jongin presses him flat against the lumps, spreads him out until he's lying with his arms caught above his head and his legs wrapped around Jongin's hips. Jongin presses his forehead to Sehun's forehead, hair damp, breath hotter. "Do you want me to beg?"

Breakfast is a quiet, strained affair of solemn eggs. Sehun tries to smile when he says, "No. I want you to work for it."

"He says he can get your name on the list," Chanyeol smiles, pleased with the peace offering of chocolate milk. He smells addictively bitter, like tobacco. "Audition onwards though, you're on your own. It's a chance. And it'd be a mistake to throw it away."

Sehun's got Jongin's arm twisted behind his back– literally. Jongin laughs helplessly. "Tell him thanks, but I'll take the mistake."

Sehun releases him, clearly shocked and Jongin sprawls forward bonelessly. Chanyeol gapes at him. "But... you love dance."

"No," Jongin looks Sehun squarely in the eye and Sehun meets his gaze head-on – like a hot knife sinking through a pat of butter. Autumn feels like forever ago. "Well, yes, but. It was a dream. And I know it might be sixty-eighth time lucky but banking on chance was never part of that dream. And even if it was, I can't take that chance with everything."

Sehun doesn't smile.

"You guys," Chanyeol breaks into a big, watery grin, squeezing them together – and now, face smushed against Jongin's shoulder, he does smile. Reluctantly. "That is so sweet! And stupid. But sweet. Giving me cavities."

p.0.,

There is something unflinchingly vulnerable about Jongin half-naked. The backs of his knees and the veins that begin to disappear below a waistband slung too low and the smooth lines of his flat belly, the curve of his shoulder and the lick of dark hair that settles along the tender nape of his neck. That trickle of water, diamonds scattered along the velvet-bronze canvas stretched in the shape of his body. Sehun kisses them all away, drinking him in, secretive and unsharing in his joy.

The doorbell rings, the phones ring, the TV babbles away, the kettle whistles and the oven timer screeches – Jongin ignores them all, eyes closed, mouth open in a perfect circle, heart pounding in his throat. The world disappears, except for the music and. Sehun. Sehun moves as one with him, palm curved along his neck, hips pressed fast against his; a dance.