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"I said no," Kyungsoo says when he opens the door and Sehun is standing there, no costume and entirely too much enthusiasm to his smile.
Sehun squeezes past him, with a backpack so stuffed it feels broader than him, and drops a kiss onto Kyungsoo's cheek, like that's where his kisses belong. "You just said you weren't going anywhere," he points out.
Kyungsoo wipes at his cheek, tries to rub the sensation off before it lingers, grows into more, and shuts the door. "You didn't invite everyone to my place, did you," he asks. He'd have enough food for a party but would have to spend it locked into the bathroom until everyone realised he wouldn't budge to let them pee.
"Am I not enough?" Sehun asks with a laugh, and Kyungsoo catches his backpack as it threatens to slip down his back and topple him over when he bends in half to untie his shoes.
"You're just the right amount of too much," Kyungsoo says fondly to himself after Sehun's disappeared into the bedroom.
He looks cosy in his loose shirt and beanie, Kyungsoo thinks as he boils more water for tea, shower-soft, like everything comes easy to him. Maybe it does, Kyungsoo can only assume watching him move through his life with little resistance and few turns. . . and he feels mean, dismissive at the thought. He knows better. Knows Sehun is a wave pulled to the shore, warm with sun against the sand—a being from the deep stretched into light, strange with the beauty of not belonging.
He thinks of the book sitting on his bed face-down, of telling Sehun when he returns from whatever he's doing in there. It's been a while since they'd last spent time alone, and Kyungsoo's heart settled into a comfortable stasis since, sated by Sehun's goodnight texts he wakes up to, by thighs touching during movie nights, by Sehun volunteering to clear the table when it's Kyungsoo's turn to wash the dishes, and he wonders—
"Didn't think you'd do it." Sehun stops in the doorframe to the kitchen, backpack shouldered, like he's shy all of a sudden.
So the evidence of Kyungsoo's weekend hasn't made it to their group chat yet, and Minseok's camera roll is a treasure trove well guarded. "It's nothing special," he says.
Sehun laughs again, relaxes against the doorframe by straightening his posture. "Not for a creature of the night, no."
“Come on,” Sehun says.
“A cat,” Kyungsoo guesses with a quarter of his heart in it and sighs into his tea.
“You’re the least online person I know so I’ll let this one slide,” Sehun tells him, sliding the cat ears out of his hair after Kyungsoo’s just shaken his head at him gesturing back and forth between the ears and his entire self, mouthed two words, Kyungsoo at him to no avail. “Only one more.”
Kyungsoo tilts his head back again, stares up at the ceiling. He liked the fangs on Sehun, the way he must have practiced to smile so only the sharp tips showed, cheeky and barely threatening. There's considerably more rustling this time, a zipper being pulled down, the sound of a large piece of fabric being shaken out. Kyungsoo smiles at the ceiling, doesn't wait to be told to look this time, says, "You're a ghost."
He's sure he's being glared at from below the bed sheet that looks yellowed with age when he does look, Sehun still struggling to fit the cut out holes over his eyes. They're circled with black, the mouth below them a smudged round dot.
“See? You’d do well at any Halloween party,” Sehun says, still in the ghost costume as he sits down on the couch, enough of a distance between them that it could pass as calculated.
Kyungsoo tries to swallow his nervousness, the freshly sprouting doubts; it might all have been in his head after all, and he's too tired to go through this once more. “A toddler could have guessed these, Sehun.”
"Your point?" Sehun lifts the bed sheet to smuggle a rice cake up to his mouth, then pulls one of the eye holes down and sticks it through to take a bite.
His point, Kyungsoo thinks, is that he's a pop culture abstaining killjoy with enough decency to stay away from Halloween parties. Instead he says, "I really like you. . . like, romantically."
"I know," Sehun tells him, ghost hand reaching for another rice cake, "that's why I'm here."
There's nowhere else Kyungsoo would want to be on a Halloween night, at home in his newly painted black bedroom with a good book and his new boyfriend in a bad ghost costume taking even worse selfies on his bed.