Archive of Our Own ^beta

Maybe it started a long time ago. Maybe it started when they first met. The seed must have been planted early, long before Yeonjun was paying any attention.

Maybe it started here: backstage at Music Bank, tearing into a spread of fried chicken with the effort of prerecording “Crown” still heaving their chests. Taehyun looked around the circle and asked, “If we had an official visual, who do you think it would be?”

“Soobin-hyung,” Kai and Beomgyu said at once, in perfect unison.

Soobin started, pausing mid-bite, and then smiled with closed lips and a chipmunk cheek full of chicken. He did look pretty dreamy.

Yeonjun didn’t try to think of an answer. Life was asking and answering these questions for them now, and it sucked some of the fun out of treating them like a game.

“Sounds like the votes are in.” He turned to wink at Taehyun and found Taehyun staring back at him. It was a little unnerving.

“I would have said you,” Taehyun said.

“Thanks,” Yeonjun said easily, because it was more or less a compliment, though it didn’t feel like one. Taehyun held his gaze for another long—too long, stretching—moment, and when he looked away, Yeonjun had the idea it was not because he’d let it go but because he’d gathered what he needed and was continuing to turn the evidence over in his head.

He’s still such a creepy robot kid sometimes, Yeonjun thought, though by then he’d already learned that wasn’t true. Whatever was going on behind Taehyun’s watchful gaze, it was wholly, brutally human.

*

Or here: three o'clock in the morning, so tired they were drunk on it. Yeonjun doesn't remember the joke he made, just that Taehyun was the only one who laughed. That was rare.

And even more rare was how he couldn't stop, rolling on the floor, clutching his stomach, laughing so hard he made the rest start, too. Yeonjun hadn't even known he wanted to accomplish that, but he put the memory away like a trophy all the same.

*

Maybe it started during one of the endless arm-wrestling competitions. Maybe when Yeonjun won every time. Maybe when he started to lose.

*

Anyway, where it really starts is here: Taehyun follows Yeonjun into his room as they’re turning in for the night. He takes a deep breath and says, “Can I ask you something?”

Yeonjun would recognize that nervous posture, asking for the oldest hyung’s help, on anyone.

Soobin carries the burden of the group’s emotional regulation, and Yeonjun backs him up on a key cross-section of issues only an oldest hyung is suited for: questions about navigating the real world outside the company building that Soobin also doesn't understand; complicated problems he’s already had a try at; hyung interventions; the care of Soobin himself. By the time the members get to Yeonjun, they can be embarrassed or frustrated by whatever they have to ask. They need that steadying breath, the carefully uptilted chin, to say it out loud.

Taehyun has chosen a good night—their schedule ran late enough that Yeonjun doesn’t have any plans to be interrupted, but not so late that he’s exhausted. He easily taps into the generous, attentive spirit best for advising confused dongsaengs.

“Sure.” He sits down and pats the bed next to him to invite Taehyun to join him.

Taehyun doesn’t usually ask for Yeonjun’s help outside of specific work situations—it’s not that he’s low-maintenance, more that he meticulously maintains himself. Still, over the years, Yeonjun has gotten pretty good at handling anything his dongsaengs can throw at him. He reaches for the water on his nightstand and takes a sip in preparation for a long talk.

Taehyun sits down gingerly, a little farther away than the spot Yeonjun patted. “Hyung,” he says, “will you have sex with me?”

Yeonjun sprays his sip of water clear across the room, and starts to cough so hard he splashes most of the rest of the glass on himself.

Taehyun takes the glass out of his hand to return it to the nightstand, tutting. “Be careful, hyung.”

“Are you trying to drown me?” Yeonjun checks that the door is actually closed. “Is Soobin filming this?”

“Okay, that’s fair,” Taehyun says. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but I can see why you’re surprised.”

“You’ve been thinking… what?” Yeonjun asks helplessly. He’s been thinking about… about Yeonjun?

Taehyun takes one of those deep breaths again. “I want to have sex. And I think it should be with you.”

It occurs to Yeonjun, only now, that Taehyun might be serious. But of course he’s serious—he’s Taehyun.

Yeonjun catches his own breath. This conversation is going to take more gentleness than he anticipated. Taehyun clearly needs something from him. It turns out being the oldest hyung can still present new challenges—but Yeonjun can meet them, because he has to meet them.

“Why is that?” he asks.

“Why do I want to have sex?” Taehyun asks. “Or why you?”

“Both. Start at the beginning. Slowly.”

“Well, there are all the usual reasons, I guess. I’m sure I don’t need to explain those to you.” Taehyun has such an orderly, reasonable way of talking; he can make his perspective seductively logical even, apparently, when he’s saying something unhinged. “But I can’t just meet someone the normal way. Even if I could, I’m too old to have no experience, it’s going to freak people out.”

“There is literally nothing you’re too old for,” Yeonjun says. “I'm trying to think of something you're too old for to make a joke and I honestly can't.”

Taehyun gives him a withering look.

“And especially not sex,” Yeonjun continues. “It’s totally normal to wait until your twenties, or whenever you want.”

“You weren’t this old.” It’s almost an accusation.

“Well, that’s normal, too. Normal is a wide range.”

“‘Normal is a wide range,’” Taehyun repeats derisively. “You sound like a human health textbook.”

That is a truly astonishing assertion for walking textbook Taehyun, of all people, to make, but Yeonjun stifles his own pettiness with a heroic act of personal will and stays in generous hyung mode. “That’s because it’s true. And—” quickly, before Taehyun can interrupt again— “You can date. Plenty of idols date. Publicly, even. They get married.”

“Not with other men, they don’t,” Taehyun says, his voice perfectly simple and even.

Yeonjun holds the pause for a beat. Two. He's always been open about his sexuality with those close to him—maybe, he's considering now, a little too open—but Taehyun never talks about this stuff. If he thinks no one will notice, he leaves the room when it comes up. Yeonjun notices. “The world is changing,” Yeonjun finally says.

“When?” Taehyun says. “When is it going to change enough?”

Yeonjun doesn’t really have anything to say.

“I think I… miscalculated,” Taehyun says. “I thought if I focused on studying and training, I’d be more secure after we debuted. But now we’re busy all the time, and sometimes people recognize me on the street, and I don’t want to wait until I’m thirty to even know what it’s like.”

Yeonjun knows, in his head, that anybody who says thirty like he’s talking about outer space isn’t old enough to worry about being old. But it’s hard for Yeonjun to protest when, in his heart, thirty feels really far away to him, too.

It feels like Taehyun has come to him on a foolish and childish impulse, but that's only because he's surprised. Taehyun said he's been thinking a lot. He has probably been careful. He's run the statistics on the next decade of his life and come up with a zero that is, if not accurate, at least possible.

This loneliness is not so terrible for Yeonjun, an occasional gnawing around the edges of his life, but as Taehyun draws it to the center, he sees how quickly it could grow. How the hunger could starve him.

“I mean, I don’t even really want to try to fall in love or whatever.” Taehyun delivers this monologue like he’s given it in his head a hundred times. “It seems like so much risk and trouble to try to meet someone online or whatever when I just want to make sure I’m not bad at it. I thought, maybe I could a hire a professional, but—”

“A professional?” Yeonjun asks, only realizing what that means when he says it out loud. “Oh my god, Kang Taehyun, you talk about risk—” 

“I said I’m not doing that.” Taehyun levels Yeonjun with even eye contact.

Right. Instead Taehyun is here, in Yeonjun’s room, trying to murder him with an indecent proposal.

Taehyun seems terribly small, sitting with his arms crossed on the edge of Yeonjun’s bed. He’s not, objectively, a small person, but being the smallest in the group makes him seem tiny, the same way Yeonjun being the oldest means he has to be in charge of this situation, even though he’s woefully out of his depth.

So, facts aside and truth only, Taehyun looks tiny and serious and very pretty, still made up and glowing in the low light. He looks lonely, somehow, though Yeonjun doesn’t know how he can see that—only that it’s clear.

“I guess I’d rather you come to me than some stranger,” Yeonjun says. Why him? He’s used to dissecting his own appeal, but he has no idea what he has done or been to draw Taehyun into his room right now. He silences the part of him that’s still reeling—and the part of him that’s flattered—and focuses on what matters, which is that he knows he won’t do anything to hurt Taehyun.

“I think you’re reasonable and you’re discreet and you won’t make things weird,” Taehyun says. “I know you know what to do, and it seems like you’d be good at it.”

“I’m good at it,” Yeonjun confirms—pure instinct, he can’t let that stand as a question, even though his better judgment suggests he should have kept that comment to himself.

Taehyun smiles—his real one, thoughtful and mild. “I know how busy you are, hyung. I thought maybe you’d like a break as much as I would.”

“Sure, I get—” Yeonjun swallows. “We all get lonely. But that’s no reason to do something stupid.”

“It’s a good reason to do something smart. An organized arrangement.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know!” Taehyun slaps his palm on the bed for emphasis. “That’s the point.”

Yeonjun rolls his eyes. Taehyun has him all turned around—debating him is like trying to box an Olympian. He parries before you’ve even struck.

Yeonjun shouldn’t be debating him at all. He can—and should—just say no, this is not appropriate and he’s not comfortable discussing it further. He should go to bed and get rested for their schedule tomorrow, like a sensible person.

But underneath Taehyun’s barrage of considered comebacks, there’s something he really needs—not what he asked for, but something, and Yeonjun might be able to find that for him. Special attention, some advice, might help him off this ledge he’s talked himself onto without Yeonjun having to hurt him with a rejection. 

A strange and unnameable feeling in Yeonjun’s gut is pulling him closer, stronger than the reason telling him to push away.

“Well, here’s your first lesson,” Yeonjun says with the most dramatic sigh he can muster. “You can’t just lead with ‘let’s have sex.’ You’re gonna kill somebody that way. I only survived because I’m so powerful—”

“It was one glass of water—”

“Start with some food,” Yeonjun says.

Taehyun pauses. “We had food together two hours ago,” he says in his little deadpan voice.

“Don’t be belligerent, you know what a date is,” Yeonjun says. “It’s not just eating, it’s flirting. It’s going in for the goodnight kiss. Send a text either the next morning or in exactly three days.”

Taehyun perks up. “Exactly three? Really?”

Yeonjun winks at him. “That one was free. We don’t have schedules so late tomorrow, right? Hyung will take you to dinner and show you how it works.”

“Flirting and—and all the rest?” Taehyun asks

“Sure,” Yeonjun says, and only when Taehyun’s eyes widen does he remember what the rest he said was. Going in for the goodnight kiss.

“All right.” Taehyun stands, eyes still wide, and wipes his palms down his thighs. “Tomorrow, after our schedule.”

Yeonjun nods. He sits on his bed in a daze after Taehyun leaves the room, thinking about getting up to wash for a long time before he manages to stand. It still feels possible that Soobin will pop up somewhere with a camera, that all of that was a prank or a joke or a fever dream—certainly more possible than Yeonjun kissing Taehyun less than twenty-four hours from now.

*

“Hey,” Yeonjun says as Beomgyu wanders toward the fridge. “How’d you sleep?”

“Fine.” Beomgyu’s voice is creaky with the early hour. “But I couldn’t poop this morning. Bad omen.”

“Maybe it's a sign you need to eat a vegetable,” Yeonjun says, tossing a mandarin in his hand.

Beomgyu shakes his head. “Bad.”

A normal morning, basically. Even if Taehyun doesn’t meet his eye as they’re loading into cars, even if there’s a new designer sweater ticking like a time bomb in Yeonjun’s bag. The idea of dinner with Taehyun hums in a flickering buzz through every moment of downtime. Surely one of them will chicken out? Except Yeonjun won’t let himself flinch, and Taehyun isn’t going to let go of an idea, and there’s no one more sensible than either of them around to intervene….

So, after his studio session, Yeonjun changes into his bleach-distressed sweater and some silver jewelry, tousles his hair with a serum one of the stylists gave him, and checks himself over. He looks good—he knows he does, in a simple, objective way, because it’s such an important part of his life to be able to present his best on demand. 

It’s hard to imagine it will fool Taehyun, who has seen him at his worst—blotchy, puffy, exhausted, throwing up a bad hot dog, losing his temper, losing his nerve. Maybe that makes this effort stupid; maybe it makes this more special. Analyzing the face in the mirror, he wonders again why Taehyun chose him, what he saw. The unshakeable eldest? The smooth player? Yeonjun can be those people. But if there’s something else—maybe something more—well, he’d just like to know what that is.

He goes to wait for Taehyun outside the gym.

“You look nice,” Taehyun says, a grim little frown on his face. “I didn’t bring anything else to wear.”

Yeonjun’s grin probably looks smug, but he’s just that satisfied with himself, preening in the clothes he was saving for a special occasion. “If you ask this hyung to date you, you’re going to get dated properly.”

He turns on his heel for the elevators.

“I didn’t ask for that,” Taehyun says behind him.

“Is being a know-it-all your idea of flirting?”

Taehyun considers the question, apparently, until the elevator doors open. Finally, he says, “Yes.”

“Good, it works for you,” Yeonjun says, pressing the button to carry them down to the street.

It should be a fucking restaurant. A private room in some overly fussy Western-style place with a glittering view, champagne on ice already waiting by the table as they walk in. With unlimited time and privacy and money, Yeonjun would be great at planning things like that—he has a strong attention to detail and deliciously expensive taste. Going straight from timid school relationships to little stubs of affairs fit in around his career, he hasn’t had a lot of opportunity for formal, romantic dates, but he knows he could do it well.

And whoever dates Taehyun, like for real, one day, should plan him nice dates. He’d be pretty in a situation like that, tidy and well-mannered and carefully calculating whether to be impressed.

It should be a fucking restaurant, but it’s just the cold noodle shop by their building. They can walk, and the auntie who runs the place knows them and takes care of them, so they’ll have their privacy. If they’re going to be making date talk, he doesn’t want to be overheard.

Taehyun plops down across the table with his arms crossed and that frowny pout on his face. “I can’t believe you look hot.”

“Believe it.” Yeonjun smiles in a way he knows is sexy because he has spent hours perfecting it. “Also, you shouldn’t make your compliments sound like complaints.”

“It is a complaint,” Taehyun says. “You didn’t tell me to dress up. You’re cheating.”

Yeonjun is so delighted his skin feels electric. Maybe he didn’t realize how dizzy Taehyun made him last night, and it’s satisfying to parry and leave Taehyun swaying. Taehyun’s not usually one to miss a step.

“I’m not cheating,” Yeonjun says. “I’m playing the game.”

He leans over the table on his elbows, one hand lifted between them so he can tilt it up and down like a seesaw as he speaks.

“Whatever you want to call it—dating, romance, sex, love—it’s all just power. We trade it back and forth. Sometimes we give it away. Sometimes we try to take it. We’re trying to figure out, is this person my match? Are they strong where I’m weak? Are they weak in a way that makes me cruel, or kind? You came to my room last night with a whole plan, thinking you could stay in control of everything. But you can’t control me. I did something you didn’t expect, and now we see how that changes the power between us.”

He turns his hand almost vertically, and then slowly tilts it all the way around.

“I could have made myself vulnerable, showing up overdressed. But instead you’re feeling vulnerable, sitting there in your gym clothes. So now you have to decide, do you want to make a move to get the power back from me? Or maybe it’s fun to let yourself be vulnerable and see what I do with that.”

“I put in extra eggs for both of you,” the owner of the restaurant says as she sets bowls down in front of them. “Eggs are healthy for you, eat them up. You work too hard for such handsome boys, you need more eggs and more sleep. Can I get you anything else?”

“Thank you, Auntie,” Yeonjun says, and he and Taehyun nod together.

The table feels very quiet after she leaves. Yeonjun takes a big slurp of noodles. Inside, he’s giggling.

“You’re so dramatic,” Taehyun says.

“Don’t try to get in the last word,” Yeonjun says. “Just think about it. You look cute in your gym clothes, by the way.”

Taehyun glances up without lifting his face, evaluating Yeonjun from under his brows. 

“That’s kind of you,” he finally says. “But you don’t have to make me feel better. It’s nice enough getting to look at you.”

Yeonjun coughs one small laugh into his noodles, more out of surprise than anything else. “That was pretty good.”

“Thank you. I’m going to keep practicing and get better at it,” Taehyun says, and it almost sounds like a warning.

*

“Can I walk you home?” Yeonjun asks, mostly failing to keep a straight face.

It's better that way—Taehyun smiles back as he pulls a beanie over his head. "I'd like that," he says, as if there was truly a question. He looks around the familiar street like it's hiding clues as they walk and adds in a clinical, assessing way, “This is romantic.”

They didn't linger over dinner, but Yeonjun kept the conversation carefully away from work, and maybe there was something datelike about the low-stakes pleasantness of making small talk about dramas and restaurants. 

The practice part of the date—narrating it to each other, making the gestures of it broad and obvious—is unlike any Yeonjun has ever been on or heard of. But weirdly, it makes this feel more like a date than the amorphous hangouts that have made up most of his love life. There's a tension to it, a heightened awareness.

The clarity of the intention almost makes it feel more like flirting with MOA on social media or something. But that power is an easy, giddy high like too much sugar. He can say anything and get the reaction he wants in a roaring wave. Walking down an empty sidewalk next to an equal, no way to tell what’s on Taehyun’s mind and not sure what he wants to signal from his own, he feels so much smaller, and that tension is huge in contrast.

Normally, they'd call out their arrival as soon as they came into the dorm, and whoever is home would shout back. Tonight, Yeonjun winces at the sound of the lock beeping and holds a hand up to keep Taehyun quiet. Understanding sparks in Taehyun's eye contact, and they sneak through a quiet hall, past music behind Beomgyu's door, to Yeonjun's room.

He lets Taehyun in first and closes the door behind them. Each movement is deliberate. Yeonjun's heart is beating fast from the rush in secrecy, and it doesn't want to settle. Now, surely, Taehyun is going to realize what he’s gotten himself into, thank Yeonjun for the trouble, and call the rest off. He has to.

“Would you like to come in for some ramen?” Yeonjun asks—a classic pickup line as a throwaway joke.

Taehyun doesn’t laugh. He turns and pins Yeonjun with his serious gaze. “We literally just finished eating noodles.”

Yeonjun is only halfway through his eye roll when Taehyun’s lips land on his.

He stays still once he’s there, pressing a sweet little stamp of a kiss that jolts down Yeonjun’s spine. He’s really doing it. This is a real kiss. They really—

It’s already over. Taehyun stands back on his heels and studies Yeonjun’s face. He never closed his eyes.

Yeonjun gives himself a few breaths. Taehyun's shoulders lock up all tight, like he's afraid of what Yeonjun is going to do or say next.

“My turn?” Yeonjun asks.

Taehyun nods.

“All right, then.” Yeonjun takes a step closer and turns Taehyun’s face with his hand. Should they be doing this? Well, they definitely shouldn't be doing it wrong.

He warms it up slowly, brushing his lips against Taehyun’s until a good sort of tension starts to make Taehyun stretch closer. Yeonjun closes his eyes and gives it a little pressure, and Taehyun takes a small, sharp breath.

Of course Taehyun picks up the dance of it quickly, lifting into each press with a hand on Yeonjun’s chest. Yeonjun’s lips part on a breath, and Taehyun’s follow, and Yeonjun lets the tip of his tongue test the seam of Taehyun’s lower lip.

Taehyun’s eyes are closed now.

Yeonjun peels away. He’s had his tongue in Taehyun’s mouth—by now, it has to be time to take a break and figure out how the new world works.

Taehyun slides his hand from Yeonjun’s chest around the back of his neck and pulls him in again, mouth already open, and Yeonjun’s body just yields.

They stand in the middle of Yeonjun’s room and trade kisses long past any excuse of a game or a joke or a bet could stand. It should be weird that this is Taehyun, but it isn’t, not really. All of Taehyun’s logic that seemed silly when he laid it out—that they know and trust each other, that they’re here and that’s enough—makes sense now that he’s in Yeonjun’s arms. And the chemistry of it, the dreamily slow spark they couldn’t have predicted and can’t control, catches and burns.

Taehyun lets Yeonjun lead but matches him at each move. Yeonjun has found the line where a date feels real, and it's right here.

But he stops himself from going where his body wants to—lips down Taehyun’s neck, hands under his shirt—because it absolutely is a little bit too weird. He still doesn’t fully understand the fear or desire that brought Taehyun to him, or what else is going on inside Taehyun’s head.

It is hard to ignore that they’re taking small breaks between kisses to shift or take fuller breaths, but not to speak.

Again, with more effort but also more force, Yeonjun peels away. Taehyun’s face is pink. He’s looking at Yeonjun’s mouth, not his eyes, until he realizes and his gaze snaps up.

“I should go to bed,” Taehyun says.

Yeonjun reaches behind himself to open the door. “Sweet dreams, Taehyun-ah.”

Taehyun blinks, and nods, and blinks again. “Yeah, goodnight, hyung,” he says and scurries into the hall.

*

As soon as Yeonjun steps into the living room the next morning, Taehyun appears in front of him with an iced Americano.

“Lifesaver,” Yeonjun says, grabbing the back of Taehyun’s neck to kiss his forehead. Nothing out of the ordinary, it feels all new.

“Manager-hyungnim brought them,” Taehyun says, but he squeezes Yeonjun’s waist and Yeonjun lets his hand linger against Taehyun’s hair, and the real message is received.

Yeonjun ends up in the back row of one car, behind Soobin and Beomgyu bickering so gently it feels like background music if he doesn’t listen too closely. He scoops his hood over his head, slouches over his phone, and takes the opportunity of the downtime to continue Taehyun’s education.

Thanks for last night
We should do it again sometime

No explanation, just demonstration. It’s more fun that way—and he thinks Taehyun will get it. 

You said wait three days to text

Yeonjun grins at his phone, disproportionately delighted at Taehyun’s careful studiousness.

Next morning or three days
Depends on how you want to play it
It’s a little late for you to try to play it cool with hyung

He can just imagine Taehyun staring at his phone in flat-lipped disapproval. He’s not even sure why that’s so funny, but it makes him smile at his phone again as the typing bubbles pulse.

Blowing up my phone at 6 a.m. talking about cool

Taehyun adds a string of ㅋㅋㅋ, though, to take the sting out.

Yeonjun yawns and stretches, reminded of the painful hour. He sips his iced coffee and watches Beomgyu poke at Soobin, who is trying to sleep, in a transparently desperate bid for more attention. Soobin starts laughing without opening his eyes.

Everybody always wants to follow the rules, take no risks
But it’s hard to win if you’re too afraid to lose
Flirting isn’t just about giving or withholding attention, it’s about inviting it

He gives it a second, but there’s no response or bubbles. He switches over to Twitter, and mostly scrolls without seeing, his brain replaying a certain small noise Taehyun made in his throat last night. 

It’s been a while since Yeonjun kissed anybody new. Maybe he forgot how much psychic space it takes up.

As they’re pulling into the parking lot at the soundstage, he gets two more messages in a row from Taehyun. 

ok
I had a nice time too ^^

Yeonjun is first into the hair chair. An array of extensions fan across the counter, and the stylist starts braiding them in right away. Yeonjun finishes his coffee and breathes through his nose.

The almost-pain of having his scalp yanked around and pulled back so tightly is even more bracing when his brain already feels spinny and strange. It’s like he doesn’t know where his edges are in the room.

They’re a challenge, for sure—Yeonjun doesn’t know how he’d deal if he was a girl and had to wear a weave for weeks and months at a time—but he can’t deny he likes the look of extensions. It’s dramatic to look in the mirror and be suddenly transformed—it helps him put away Choi Yeonjun and find TXT YEONJUN for the day. And the way the extra hair frames his face can highlight the expressions he crafts so carefully.

After the hair is done, he tests it in the mirror, running through bits of the choreo where he’s center and smoldering at himself to see the different angles close-up shots will find. Once he’s satisfied and steps back, he notices Beomgyu and Taehyun sitting behind him, watching him in the glass. Beomgyu has a sort of zoned-out look on his face—less like he was observing Yeonjun than Yeonjun happened to be the motion in front of his eyes—but Taehyun is alert.

“Is hyung handsome today?” Yeonjun asks in the mirror, and then turns around.

Taehyun’s gaze shifts, like a lens changing in the way he’s looking at Yeonjun, before he nods and speaks. “Yes, Beomgyu-hyung looks nice, doesn't he?”

Beomgyu laughs so uproariously he slips out of his chair—that wasn’t all that funny, but his favorite jokes are the ones at Yeonjun’s expense—and Yeonjun rolls his eyes.

Taehyun stands, too. “Hyung, look.” He tilts his face up to Yeonjun’s at an angle so unmistakably kissable that Yeonjun starts. But he only lifts his brows to hold his eyes wide open. “I have new lenses.”

Withholding attention, and then inviting it, like Yeonjun told him to, fast enough for an appealing whiplash. Yeonjun rewards him with it. He leans closer to look into Taehyun's eyes, an ethereal blue-green, and then hovers for the sake of it. “Pretty,” he says.

Taehyun twists his lips toward a smirk and moves back slowly—so slowly that Beomgyu’s face has time to appear between them, eyes ticking back and forth. “Are you guys drunk?” he whispers, sounding both genuinely scandalized and a little impressed.

Yeonjun is surprised into a true laugh, and Taehyun doesn’t miss a single beat before he launches into “Alcohol-Free” with full choreo, pushing his hand down his chest and wiggling his butt in arcs.

Yeonjun joins him for the bachata step, and then claps Beomgyu’s shoulder and leaves for makeup. He tells himself, very firmly, that it’s time to leave Taehyun alone for a while.

Actually, it’s time to work. It would take a lot more than some kisses to throw Yeonjun off his performance, and a few minutes into filming, his mind is completely clear and focused. When they break to eat and reset for the next song, he spends the downtime catching up with his messages from friends outside the group instead of letting himself get tied up in the web among the five of them again. The stylist trims his extensions a bit but doesn’t take them out, asking him to take care of them until a photoshoot in a few days, and he focuses on the itchy sting when he starts to get distracted again.

By the time they’ve filmed three performances and are driving home, dawn’s dark replaced seamlessly with the night’s, he’s so wrung out he feels like a monk—or at least ready for bed—his mind floaty and peaceful.

Soobin and Beomgyu are both already asleep in the car. Yeonjun takes out his phone to put some music in his headphones as he watches the traffic on the ride home. He loves this part—the dim glimmers of city lights, low music in a humming quiet, a moment and a space where there’s nothing for him to do but breathe and sort the day into memories to hold onto and ones to let go of.

But when Taehyun’s name appears on his phone, it all comes back in one rush: holding his waist, touching his hair, trying to talk to him with a stupid grin pulling at his own mouth.

Do you want to do something tomorrow afternoon?

Yeonjun drops his head back against the seat. Beomgyu has a solo schedule, and Soobin and Kai are going to spend the afternoon almost off, doing a prescribed cheerful activity with a camera crew following.

That doesn’t mean Yeonjun and Taehyun are off. Yeonjun has a list of things he needs to get done on his own time, and he was planning to tick off several tomorrow. But it does mean no one is expecting him to be at a certain place by a certain time in a certain outfit, so—purely practically—if he wants to spend a solid few hours with Taehyun, it’s a choice opportunity.

He’s telling himself that he really should, that he can move his to-do list around, that he already decided it was important to give his dongsaeng some needed one-on-one attention. But deeper than that, he already knows that he just wants to.

I was going to get some stuff done at the company and then go shopping. Want to join?

That’s a lie. His plans were to work at the company until he couldn’t stay awake anymore and then go home to bed.

He lied instinctively, without thinking, and since he’s been explaining every step to Taehyun as they go, it sits on his screen and mocks him. He knows exactly why it came to him.

He’s trying to seem cooler than he feels, like he wouldn’t change his plans for Taehyun. On its face, that’s absurd—any of his members should know he’d change his plans for them, and all this is happening because Taehyun felt safe coming to ask him for the most outrageous favor possible. That is who he is because of dedicated effort, because it’s who he wants to be.

But somehow he needs to keep more power here, or, maybe, claw back some of the power Taehyun has already robbed him of without even trying. So he’s telling a bullshit lie, and maybe Taehyun believes it, but it doesn’t feel powerful.

Meet around 4?

It’s a date

*

The problem with this particular lie is that Yeonjun has to pretend he was already planning to go shopping while, in truth, he doesn’t need a single stitch of new clothing. There are boxes from online deliveries he hasn't even opened yet stacked in his closet.

The strategy is to try on the most outrageous things in the store—and he picked an edgy, high-end boutique, all brushed steel and exposed brick, so there are some truly outrageous things—and find an excuse to be dissatisfied with all of them. Somehow, there is still a worrying collection of favorites growing on the dressing room’s rack.

“Wow.” Taehyun is sitting on the sofa in the dressing room, watching Yeonjun parade in front of him with a look of slack-jawed thoughtfulness. “I thought those jeans looked silly when you picked them up, but they really flatter your body line.”

“Where am I going to wear striped jeans? Nowhere.” Yeonjun gives him a stern brow. “Don’t trick me into buying stupid things because you’re practicing flirting.”

“It’s not my fault hyung looks good in everything,” Taehyun says, syrupy.

Yeonjun glares at him and then rolls his eyes as he turns away and steps behind the curtain to change. 

“Can’t it be flirting and true?” Taehyun asks in his normal voice. 

The sincerity catches Yeonjun off guard. He bites his lip, alone behind the curtain, and then lightly says, “Sure. It’s better that way.”

When he comes out again, Taehyun is typing something on his phone.

“Are you taking notes?” Yeonjun asks. He’s joking, but Taehyun presses his lips together and puts his phone down next to him.

“Huh,” Yeonjun says.

“What, do you just remember everything all the time?” Taehyun asks.

“No, I take notes. I just make sure no one can tell I’m doing it.”

Taehyun takes his phone and pretends to start typing, murmuring, “Hide in the bathroom to take notes.”

“No, your way works for you. It’s cute.” Yeonjun sits down on the sofa next to him, grinning, and Taehyun returns the smile.

It’s nice, in a deeper way than an afternoon shopping instead of working. It’s nice that a prickly word can become a kindness between them, to find ease where the friction used to irritate.

They’re too alike, or maybe too different in a single, disastrous way. For Yeonjun, the most important part of a long day’s work is the end, when he seals it off and makes sure no one can ever, ever see the seams. The only real grace is effortlessness—the look of it, at least, if he can’t have the real thing.

Taehyun doesn’t care, he never has. He flaunts his hard work. Yeonjun used to cringe at the thought of it, and Taehyun could probably tell that something about him made this cool hyung cringe, and it was hard to make a conversation work.

Yeonjun’s relationship with his own demon has barely improved, but he has truly learned to admire Taehyun’s dedication. Taehyun probably sees through all of it now—Yeonjun would rather not think about that, but it’s true. They grew into each other eventually.

So it’s nice to be able to joke about it.

“Is any of that worth buying? For real,” Yeonjun asks.

“I really did like that black sweater.”

“I have so many sweaters.” Yeonjun rolls his neck and pats the itch where his extensions are braided into his scalp. “I can’t believe you’re making me buy another sweater.”

Taehyun shrugs. “I don’t care if you buy it.”

“We’re ready!” Yeonjun calls for the salesperson. “My dongsaeng insists I get this one,” he says, handing over the sweater.

“I’ll take it to the counter,” she says. “Would you like to see anything else?”

“Did you want to look for anything, Taehyun-ah?” Yeonjun asks.

Taehyun props his chin in his hand on the arm of the sofa. He balances the sweetness better—less cloying, more true—when he says, “Maybe hyung could find something for me to try on.”

Yeonjun has to rip his gaze off Taehyun’s face to tell the salesperson, “We’ll look around.”

They make another slow lap around the store. Yeonjun already looked at everything for himself, but it’s all new as he considers Taehyun’s small frame in the giant things he usually wears.

He lets his hand hover over a garishly patterned silk shirt with a huge bow at the neck and glances at Taehyun, who lifts one eyebrow, unfazed by the challenge. Yeonjun grins and moves on.

He lands on a simply cut black t-shirt. There’s a band of leather along the shoulders and sleeves, and the rest is sheer, silky mesh. It’s even lighter than he expects as he lifts it, a whisper in his hand. The tag is clear to read through two layers of the fabric.

He glances at Taehyun again.

“Ha,” Taehyun says. “I wish I could try that on for you, but not in public.”

Yeonjun takes a second to consider if that’s true, or if he’s flirting or deflecting or thinks Yeonjun is joking, and then decides it doesn’t matter. He throws the shirt over his arm and strides to the counter.

*

He’s still standing in his closet, putting the day’s things away and trying to find space for yet another sweater, when the door to his room clicks softly open and closed.

Yeonjun is still riding the high of pulling out his credit card for such a showy win. He’s already delighted. He thinks he’s prepared for what he's going to see when he turns around.

Taehyun is barely in the room, back against the door and hands behind him on the knob like he’s ready to run, though he looks more suspicious than nervous.

And he looks… 

If there’s a word for how he looks, Yeonjun hasn’t learned it yet.

The shirt fits him like a slick of dark water. It’s not like Yeonjun hasn’t seen Taehyun’s body before, in every state of undress and in all the flirtiest little nonsense the best team of stylists in the world can procure, but something about this is different. This is new. This hits like a punch, and Yeonjun wasn't braced for it.

“What?” Taehyun says. “Oh my god, this is dumb—” He turns the doorknob and starts to move.

“Wait,” Yeonjun says.

Taehyun stops—he frowns, but he lets the door close.

“Come here,” Yeonjun says, though he crosses the room in three steps as Taehyun lifts himself away from the wall.

Yeonjun could kiss him—they’ve done it before, and that’s probably why Taehyun is here, and Yeonjun can suddenly taste the want, and all of that feels much more present than any reason not to—but he holds himself on that edge and keeps his hands hovering in the air between them.

“Do you like it?” Taehyun asks hesitantly.

Yeonjun nods, because he doesn't trust himself to speak rationally on the subject.

Taehyun smiles, biting his lower lip.

“Do you like it?” Yeonjun asks.

Taehyun shrugs. “If you like it.”

That's what's new. Not only the way Taehyun is obscured and revealed by that truly ridiculous shirt but the way they both know it's Yeonjun's gift, from him and for him. It's a grubby, covetous concession to ego sanctified by the way Taehyun starts to glow under the attention. Just looking at him is exciting, powerful.

“Hyung, will you kiss me again?”

“Yeah.” Yeonjun nods without moving closer. “Yeah, I definitely will.”

He lets himself watch the motions of Taehyun's breath in his chest until Taehyun exhales a faint laugh, and then he puts his hands on Taehyun's waist to feel that fabric move against his skin and kisses him.

Afraid to go too fast, he takes it so slow that the drag of his lips against Taehyun's feels heavy, thick and rich like honey.

Taehyun goes slowly, too, sliding his hands up Yeonjun's arms, over his shoulders, into his hair. He curls his nails gently above the ridge of the extensions at the back of Yeonjun's head, massaging the ache in little circles.

Yeonjun shivers as tension lets go around his head and down his neck. A low, humiliating noise comes out of him, and he has to press Taehyun back into the wall to balance. 

Taehyun jolts but keeps up those careful circles, a small touch but such a deliberate one. Maybe he thought of this earlier, watching Yeonjun get his extensions and deal with them, maybe he thought, I will touch him like this and then he'll feel good. Maybe he's been carrying the idea around with him, crafting and executing a plan.

A small touch, but these small waves one after another are going to sweep Yeonjun away. He lets himself move his lips down to Taehyun's jaw and then his neck. Without a kiss to muffle him, Taehyun makes little noises of something almost like pain on every exhale.

Yeonjun has been touched before. He's supposed to know what he's doing; the whole point of this date, the reason Taehyun came to him, is that he's supposed to know what he's doing.

But he has never felt anything like this, this intensity, this vivid awareness of every fingertip and breath, and definitely not over a few kisses and the simple fact of another body in the room. He might have just figured out what he's been singing about all these years.

And he has no idea what he's doing as his teeth find a sensitive spot on Taehyun's neck and Taehyun's noises get louder. “Hyung!”

Yeonjun eases back. “Okay? Feels good?”

“Yeah.” Taehyun nods quickly, pulling with his hands on Yeonjun's shoulders.

“Tell me.” Yeonjun gets distracted by Taehyun's mouth and has to kiss him again before he can speak. “Tell me when it feels good, or doesn't. I wanna—” He's gone too long without another kiss. It's like he can't breathe. “You have to feel good,” he finally murmurs against Taehyun's lips.

Taehyun pulls away on a breath to nod. “It does, everything feels good.”

Taehyun presses his own kisses in a delicate line down Yeonjun's neck, his hands still lightly in Yeonjun's hair, and Yeonjun tilts his head back to let the rush wash over him as he runs his nails up Taehyun's sides.

“Oh,” Taehyun sighs. “That feels good, too, hyung.”

He feels good in Yeonjun's hands, good enough that Yeonjun is ready to keep dragging up until he finds out how great this shirt looks on the floor and then pull them both back to the bed, and that thought, finally, slams the emergency brake in his useless, lagging brain with a shriek like an alarm.

He lets Taehyun's shirt fall back into place.

He tries to move away, but Taehyun chases, and Yeonjun has to press him back into the wall, and that feels all too much again, and terrifying. What is he doing? To Taehyun?

“Wait,” he says. “This is going too fast.”

He moves away until no part of him is touching any part of Taehyun and leans on his elbows against the wall. Taehyun reaches for his arm. “What's wrong?”

“Ah, you're too cute, darling.” Yeonjun tries to smile reassuringly and not in a monster grimace. “Hyung went a little crazy.”

“Good,” Taehyun says. “I mean, that's fine. You don't have to woo me or whatever. I appreciate the effort, but we both know where this is going.”

His gaze is so cool, Yeonjun can feel it on his own overheated skin. How great for him, that his clear head is up for making practical speeches right now. Just fucking great.

“You shouldn't rush something like that,” Yeonjun says. “You should be really sure.”

“Sure about what?” Taehyun asks, even icier.

“That you really want it.” Yeonjun opens his hands. “That you're with a good person, that you're not going to get hurt. Just… sure.”

“I am sure about those things. I told you, I thought about it a lot. And you're clearly—” Taehyun waves an arm in a big gesture that encompasses and dismisses Yeonjun at once. “Into it, too. So what are we waiting for?”

“Doing a bunch of equations and solving for Yeonjun-hyung isn't the same as actually wanting to sleep with me,” Yeonjun says. “I just don't want you to end up hurt.”

“Stop saying that!” Taehyun finally cracks, raising his voice and curling his hands into fists against his sides, and there is nothing satisfying in the victory. “You're the one who's messing with me.”

“I am not messing with you. I'm taking this seriously, because one of us has to.”

Taehyun's jaw clenches. “I just don't understand why you're doing all this other stuff to me.” He gestures between them, looking down at himself, and seems to notice what he's still wearing with a startled pause. He crosses his arms tightly over his chest. “What are we doing here?”

Yeonjun's heart drops. “I thought maybe there was something you needed from me.”

“This isn't what I asked for.”

“I can't give you what you asked for.” There it is, the words simple and clear in the air and the disappointment plain on Taehyun's face. “I guess I should have said that in the first place.”

“I guess,” Taehyun says. All the fire has already gone out of him. “I'm gonna go.”

Yeonjun braces for the door to slam, but Taehyun lets himself out in polite silence. Yeonjun stands there, wincing, like lightning has struck and he's waiting for a thunderclap that's never going to come, until he opens the door and slams it closed again himself.

*

Yeonjun wakes up an hour before he ought to be going to bed, groggy and miserable and hungry enough to roll over and gnaw off his own arm. At least he can do something about that last problem.

The food is even ready—the others are sitting in a circle around a picked-over spread of grilled chicken breast and vegetables.

Taehyun is at one end of the table with his chin in his hand, wearing a hoodie so big he's lost in it. With the hood up and the sleeve hanging past his fingertips, he looks like a pile of laundry with two eyes, looking everywhere except at Yeonjun.

It seems obvious that something is wrong with him. Yeonjun wonders if the others noticed, if they asked, what he said.

Yeonjun grunts something like a greeting as he sits down at the other end and reaches for some chopsticks.

“Did you have a good nap, hyung?” Beomgyu asks.

“No, I feel like shit,” Yeonjun says, brusquely enough that maybe even Beomgyu will let him have a little peace. He picks up a big piece of chicken and stuffs it in his mouth whole to cut off further conversation.

“Really?” Beomgyu leans in slyly. “I'd have thought all that exercise this afternoon would wear you out.”

Yeonjun almost chokes, and starts to chew as fast as he can while Beomgyu crows, “Hyung had a dude in here!”

Taehyun disappears deeper into his hoodie, but Kai gasps and Soobin asks, “Like, a dude?”

“Yeah,” Beomgyu says. “I came back from recording and I was so ready to have the place to myself to poop, but hyung's room was like—”

He makes a ridiculous moan he definitely did not hear from Yeonjun's room or anywhere else on earth.

Yeonjun finally gulps down his chicken. “Shut up,” he says, afraid to look over at Taehyun.

“Hyung, you're so good, oh my god,” Beomgyu squeaks, rubbing his hands all over himself like an idiot. Taehyun did not sound like that.

“Have you met someone?” Soobin asks, so sincerely it almost feels bad to ignore him. “That's really great.”

“That dude had a high voice,” Beomgyu says. “At first I thought it was a girl. Oh my god, was a girl calling you hyung?”

He leans in to check Yeonjun's face for an answer to that, and must see he's actually gone too far this time. Yeonjun holds himself still because he doesn’t trust himself to move. 

Maybe there are more important invasions he could be mad about, but all he can think is Taehyun didn't sound like that. He shouldn't have to sit over there listening to this, and there's nothing Yeonjun can do to protect him from it.

“I put my headphones in as soon as I figured out what I was hearing,” Beomgyu says, leaning back and lifting his hands. “I'm not an animal. I totally lost my poop vibes, too.”

“Thanks for your sacrifice,” Yeonjun says dryly. “And you are definitely an animal.”

Beomgyu makes puppy ears over his own head, trading aegyo for forgiveness, and Yeonjun winks at him and doesn't say anything else. If he put headphones in, he didn't hear the fight and he doesn't know he's talking about Taehyun, and Yeonjun can easily stonewall questions until this passes over.

Except that Kai has politely waited for everyone else to stop talking so he won't be interrupting when he leans forward and says to Taehyun, “I thought you were hanging out with Yeonjun-hyung today.”

Taehyun emerges a few centimeters from his hoodie. “We went shopping earlier this afternoon.”

“Shopping?” says Beomgyu, Yeonjun's usual shopping buddy, confused or maybe really stung.

Yeonjun can almost hear the gears whirring around the circle as everyone calculates how much Yeonjun could have fit into the hours of the afternoon.

“Taehyun wanted me to help him find some stuff,” Yeonjun says. “And then…”

He looks at Taehyun's face and waits for his brain to supply a convincing lie about how he managed to do that errand and then meet someone else he can provide no evidence of, get rid of that person, take a nap, and make it to family dinner.

Taehyun waits expectantly, ready to jump on the story, too. Yeonjun can feel the weight of his trust, so sure that hyung is going to fix this for both of them, but Yeonjun has nothing. He’s empty.

There was a second, today, when something real happened. The smile in the dressing room, or Taehyun's hands in Yeonjun's hair. He wasn't alone the whole time.

“And then we came back here,” Yeonjun says. “Together.”

Taehyun's jaw drops.

Beomgyu and Kai were halfway to figuring it out and now they're gawking, too. But Soobin has not caught up yet, sitting with half a smile and a confused forehead as he waits for someone to explain, and so they all have to sit there and wait for his smile to fade.

“Wait,” Soobin says.

“Oh my god,” Beomgyu says.

Kai is sitting very still, focused intently on Taehyun, and he does not say anything.

“So are you guys, like…” Soobin hesitates.

“No.” Taehyun yanks his hood down and addresses his empty plate with great clarity. “Whatever you're about to say, no, we're not. We weren't actually having sex, so calm down, and it was the first—the only time, and it wasn't for real. Hyung was just showing me how it works.”

Yeonjun is pretty sure that didn't make sense, and he still thinks that what he does understand is deranged, but Beomgyu says, “Oh, like a standard practice kissing arrangement.”

Taehyun looks up from his plate. “Yes?”

“Okay, that makes sense,” Beomgyu says. “That's a relief, actually.”

“No, it doesn't,” Soobin says. “No, it's not! Practice—what are you talking about?”

“You know,” Beomgyu says. “Naive beautiful main character, cool experienced oppa, hijinks misunderstandings and a confession by page forty.”

“Wait,” Taehyun says. “No?”

“Life isn't a webtoon,” Soobin says.

The look on Beomgyu's face is absolutely triumphant as he opens one hand under Yeonjun's chin. “Clearly, it is.”

Soobin groans and drops his head on the table. “Namjoon-hyung never had to deal with this.”

“I'm sure he did,” Beomgyu says. “You think none of the BTS hyungs ever had a practice kissing arrangement? Zero? There are seven of them!”

He’s getting screechy, and Yeonjun is still simmering with the hurt from earlier and new anger, and he can’t let himself give in to his temper. He has already done enough things he regrets for one week. “Can you take it down about three notches?” he asks. “You’re being a lot less cute than you think you are.”

Beomgyu tilts his head to the side and intentionally relaxes his shoulders. “You guys are cool with me and I support you.”

He smiles like an angel, a remarkably accurate calibration that punches the air out of Yeonjun's anger and just leaves him sad.

“Thanks,” Yeonjun says. “I don't think we're doing anything that needs support, though.”

“Are you going to say anything?” Taehyun asks abruptly. He's addressing Kai, who hasn't spoken again or even moved as this entire conversation has unraveled.

Kai opens his mouth, but closes it again. He shakes his head. Taehyun gives him another second, but he doesn't try again.

“Okay,” Taehyun says. “Well. I'm going to go to bed.”

“Okay,” Kai echoes. “I might stay with Soobin-hyung tonight.”

Taehyun pauses, halfway to standing, and searches Kai's face. “Okay,” he says again, though he's really just moving his lips, there's no voice in it.

The room feels empty after he leaves. No one has anything to say. Belatedly, Yeonjun realizes the others are waiting for him to go so they can talk to Kai without him. It takes him a second to figure out, because he's usually involved in that kind of conversation.

He sighs and stretches, and tries to imagine how to justify himself, or what to say to make them feel better, at least, before he leaves.

“He didn't sound like that,” Yeonjun says, and he takes the rest of the chicken with him when he goes.

*

He sits in the dark to eat his chicken in the hope that anyone who comes by will think he's asleep and leave him alone, but Soobin just opens the door without knocking and smashes the light on. “You made Kai sad and Beomgyu so happy,” he says, “so you must know you fucked up.”

“Why is Kai sad?” Yeonjun could cry. “He doesn't have to be sad. It's not about him.”

“I mean, it's a little bit about all of us.” Soobin sits down next to Yeonjun and steals some of his stolen chicken. “But I don't know, really, he didn't want to talk about it. So.”

“So.”

“So. What the fuck?”

Yeonjun tears a piece of chicken in half with his teeth just to feel something satisfying. “The fuck is, we kissed twice and already fought about it, and if Beomgyu had kept his mouth shut, it probably would never have come up again. So just forget it.”

Soobin looks like he's trying to read a secret code off Yeonjun's face. “Sorry, I'm still stuck on you kissing Taehyun.”

Something about the way he says it catches Yeonjun off guard. Yes, a person could definitely get stuck on that idea.

“How does that even happen?” Soobin asks, almost desperately.

“You kind of relax your mouth,” Yeonjun starts.

“Oh sick,” Soobin says. “Are you really being like this? I’m just trying to understand.”

Yeonjun closes his eyes. “He came to me the other night and—he actually asked me to sleep with him.”

Soobin clutches Yeonjun's arm like they're watching a horror movie.

“Not in a confession way,” Yeonjun continues. “In a weird virginity pact way. He was saying some wild stuff.”

“And you just went with it?”

“Well, no. That was what we fought about. But I thought, maybe he just needed something to get it out of his system. I thought…” He waits for something to come out of his mouth that will make sense, even to him. “I don't know what I was thinking.”

“Maybe…” Soobin fiddles with a loose thread in his track pants. “You were thinking, here's my chance. I'll finally light the torch I've been carrying for our Taehyunie for all these years.”

Yeonjun gapes at him. “No! What? No. Have I seemed like that was going on?”

Soobin shrugs. “Well, just by hooking up with him. Being secretly in love with him would be a better reason than, like, charity. Thought I'd check.”

“No. Sorry, that's not it.” Yeonjun says. He loves his members, obviously, with the pressure-cooked inevitability of going through debut together and then for all the truer things about them, but he's never allowed a stray thought about any of them.

There has always been friction between him and Taehyun, sending both good and bad sparks flying, and now that they've discovered it's enough to build real heat, that makes sense—but it wasn't something Yeonjun predicted, and if Taehyun hadn't brought it up, he never would have wondered on his own.

Soobin is still waiting, skeptical, for an answer that makes sense.

“You know how he is,” Yeonjun whines. “He logiced me into it.”

That's not true, though, Yeonjun knows it as he says it. Taehyun's logic had been circuitous and absurd. But he'd also seemed really lonely, and sort of beautiful, and somehow he's gotten into Yeonjun's system.

“I know how he is,” Soobin says darkly. “He hit you with the sweetness and you couldn't say no.”

Yeonjun rolls his eyes.

“He was probably like ‘hyung's so cool and hot’ in his little fact voice,” Soobin adds, “and you didn't even want to say no.”

“Oh, fuck off and let me go to sleep if you already think you know everything.”

Soobin laughs with self-satisfaction and no humor.

“I didn't bother you when you and Beomgyu were jacking off in front of each other all the time,” Yeonjun says.

“Masturbation Deregulation was a roommate peace treaty!” Soobin exclaims. “That has nothing to do with this.”

Soobin is probably wrong about that—there's something there about their boundaries or their lifestyle, about being all mixed up together—but Yeonjun doesn't want to say it. If Soobin wants to set his little interlude with Taehyun aside from the usual group dynamics then, well, fine. So does Yeonjun. It was uniquely stupid, but there was a kernel of unique sweetness there, too. He can hoard that for himself.

“I know it was a mistake,” Yeonjun says. “I don't want to argue with you. I thought, at least I know I won't hurt him, and I tried not to. I just want to go to sleep now.”

Soobin puts his head on Yeonjun's shoulder and stays quiet while Yeonjun finishes his chicken, though it must be disgusting to have Yeonjun chewing in his ear. 

“Okay, hyung,” Soobin finally says, rising and grabbing the empty plate. Before he goes, he says, “For the record, it's not just Taehyun. I don't want you to get hurt, either.”

Yeonjun does get some sleep, but after that weird nap, it's not great. There's a dull frenzy to getting out the door, like everyone's a little poorly rested and twisted around. Soobin is still asleep in the nest he and Kai made on the living room floor, and he'll try to wake up as little as possible on the walk so he can sleep in the car. Taehyun has a coffee drink from the fridge for Yeonjun, though still no eye contact. They say as few words as possible, and nobody speaks above a whisper.

Except, of course, Beomgyu, who comes in wearing a gold mask pack on his face and takes one of Taehyun's hands in both of his. “Hyung-ah is sorry,” he says seriously. “I shouldn't have made fun of your sex voice. That kind of thing works in the right situation, so don't be insecure about it. Taehyun-ah fighting!”

Soobin pulls his blanket over his head.

Not one single atom of Taehyun's face or body moves for a long moment, and then he extracts his hand from Beomgyu's grip. “Every day you can't poop, you get dumber.”

Beomgyu throws his head back and grips his belly. “It's starting to hurt!”

“Maybe if I punch ‘hyung-ah’ in the stomach, it'll all shoot out,” Taehyun says.

“Better not try in the living room, then,” Beomgyu says cheerfully, hooking his arm through Taehyun's and leading the walk out the door. He says something else, quietly, and Taehyun laughs.

How good that must feel, to make a mistake small enough he can simply apologize for it, be forgiven, and forgive himself.

So they’re fumbling and distracted getting to work, but it disappears in dance practice. If anything, they’re giving it too much for a routine day. Nobody wants to be the first one to make a mistake or drop an ill-timed joke, or at least Yeonjun doesn’t and no one else cracks, either.

It feels so good to do something right that Yeonjun keeps the room when they break for their separate rotations of lunches and voice lessons. He’s supposed to be eating, but he takes his stretch at center through the end, and he makes it perfect.

While he’s alone, he does the necessary but awkward work of staring himself down in the mirror, smiling and sneering from different angles. He runs through it at performance-level, no cheating his angles or relaxing his face, until his body is doing it without his mind.

And then, instead of stopping, he runs it until his legs go jelly and his hip threatens to give out, which is stupid, but an okay kind of stupid. When he’s lying on the floor after he’s done, hungry and tired and sore with nothing in his head but a tinny buzz, he feels the best he’s felt since… well. The best he's felt all day.

These rooms are well insulated, but someone’s in the hall singing loudly enough that it comes through. “You can’t sit with us—oh!—I hate you!”

Yeonjun closes his eyes. There’s only one person he knows who can sing girl songs with such commitment and intensity. He can only hope this cut was chosen randomly.

“Who do you think you—uh.” The door opens and Taehyun’s voice and footsteps stop abruptly.

“I’m done,” Yeonjun says. “I’m leaving soon.”

“I need the room in like ten minutes.”

“I'll be out of your way.”

Eyes closed, Yeonjun tracks the sounds of Taehyun moving around the room—the door closing, his steps on the floor, his bag hitting one corner and then the zipper.

Maybe Yeonjun will open his eyes and Taehyun will be incandescently gorgeous. He’ll wonder how he ever missed it; no, he’ll look back and realize he knew the whole time, that something pure and obvious and inevitable has been building. He’ll have the words for it, already rehearsed somewhere deep in his heart.

Maybe Taehyun will be all scrawny and weird-looking, the way Yeonjun finds himself when he catches chance sight of his unposed reflection, and Yeonjun will be free.

Yeonjun turns his head and opens his eyes. Taehyun is sitting cross-legged on the floor, drinking from a metal thermos and reading something on his phone, and he looks like Taehyun.

He looks so familiar that it takes some effort to see him with fresh eyes. He looks serious and self-contained. He looks tired.

He looks annoyed.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Taehyun says.

Yeonjun rolls over to get up from the floor. “I’m not looking at you like anything.”

“Everyone’s looking at me like that today. Like you all think I’m about to—to cry, or something.”

“I don’t think that.” Soreness slows Yeonjun down: he moves onto his hands and knees, sits back on his heels, pushes his sweaty hair back.

“Fine,” Taehyun says.

“Fine,” Yeonjun repeats, and does something grin-shaped with his mouth that’s as horrible as he feels. “Isn’t it nice to be fine?”

This is a large room, and they’re far apart in it, but he can feel the heat of Taehyun glaring at him. The friction.

He should have gone and found Beomgyu to burn off some bickering energy—even on a usual day, picking a fight with Taehyun would be subtle and complicated, dangerous.

“Why did you tell them?” Taehyun asks, holding his voice too flat to read.

Yeonjun stands and shrugs. “We were caught. There wasn’t a lie they’d believe.” He goes over to his bag and starts to check for his things. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have picked that situation, but it’s not like we would have lied about it forever.”

He puts away his water and towel, moves his phone and a mask to his pocket. He zips the bag and looks up to find Taehyun gaping at him. “We would have lied about it forever. Are you kidding me?”

“Did I agree to that?” Yeonjun asks. “I wouldn’t have. It’s one thing to keep things private, but you can’t hold onto secrets like you’re ashamed. That’ll mess up your head.” He pauses. “One more lesson, I guess,” he adds dryly.

“But… it wasn’t real,” Taehyun says.

There’s a squeeze somewhere around Yeonjun’s solar plexus, or his lungs, or his dummy heart. “Look, Taehyun-ah… it’s fine if it makes you feel better to keep telling yourself that. But it just makes me feel gross, every time you say it.”

“Because you think it was wrong,” Taehyun says, exasperated, “because you think my feelings are all hurt and I’m about to cry, like I said—”

“Maybe I’m worried about my feelings, have you considered that once?” Yeonjun says, because he’s been bothered and embarrassed in every other way, so why not make his humiliation complete. At least he’s not afraid of the truth.

Taehyun’s face falls. He starts to stand.

“Don’t,” Yeonjun says, and Taehyun freezes. “Look, I’m not trying to be dramatic about an entire fake relationship that took less time than Beomgyu needs to take a shit. But if I’d gone on a real date that felt like that one did, I’d be pretty happy about it. As it is, I just…”

Taehyun finishes standing, nervous and wide-eyed, and he still looks lonely and arresting and too close and too far away, it isn’t cathartic to be yelling at him.

The only real grace is effortlessness. There’s nothing to be won from this clumsy conversation, only more proof that Yeonjun has already failed.

“I just want a little space,” he finishes weakly. “Hyung is sorry I made it weird, but we’ll be back to normal in no time, I promise.”

It feels like a long wait for Taehyun to speak again—the silence grows heavy.

“Okay,” Taehyun finally says. Just that.

“Okay. Fine.” Yeonjun picks up his bag and leaves.

A few steps into the hall, he encounters a crowd—a couple staffers he knows and an unfamiliar camera crew who must be from one of the networks. He presses against the wall and gathers his bag close to let them pass, returning nods. 

And then he watches helplessly as they stream into the room he just left.

Yeonjun is going to be late for voice lessons if he stands in the hall staring at the door in horror, like he wants to. He types out a message as he walks: I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you had to film. I would never have said any of that. I shouldn't have said it at all.

In the elevator, he reads it over and deletes everything except I’m sorry.

And as the doors open again, he deletes the rest and puts his phone away. Having to respond to an apology would just be more work for Taehyun, and there’s nothing he could say that would help Yeonjun forgive himself for the way he’s acting. The best thing he can do for both of them is leave Taehyun alone.

It’s like he has a bug bite somewhere horrible, behind his knee or on the bottom of his foot, and the almost-pain is so distracting it cuts off every thought. It feels unbearable. But he knows it will only take two days for it to disappear so completely it isn’t even a memory, as soon as he stops scratching.

*

It would be convenient to lock himself in a room at the company all night instead of going home—and Yeonjun still almost wants to work like that, like he deserves the punishment and like it’s the only thing that will feel good—but they have a photoshoot scheduled at sunset to take advantage of the light.

The shoot is on top of a parking garage. Somehow, they’ve set up a four-poster bed, made with white linens, in the middle. It’s odd-looking in the way of things that often come out well in photos, and there is an appealing sense of drama to it, but there’s no reason for Kai to stop in his tracks and stare, awestruck, at the scene.

Kai reaches for Beomgyu’s hand. “It really is a webtoon.”

Beomgyu starts giggling. “There’s only one bed!”

“Why would there be more than one bed?” Taehyun asks. “How would they take the picture?”

Kai shakes his head, and Beomgyu keeps giggling instead of answering. When the art director walks up to them, he immediately asks, “Are we doing units? Please tell me we’re doing units.”

“We are doing units.” She checks her tablet. “You’re shooting with Soobin and Huening Kai. How’s that?”

“That is great.” Beomgyu presses his hands together at his chest. “That is so perfect. Thank you so much, really.”

Yeonjun gets the joke. But among all his worries, there are none about work.

They shoot first, sitting in the middle of the bed. The photographer directs Taehyun to lay his head on Yeonjun’s shoulder, which takes some awkward shuffling—for as often as they lie on one another like this, it’s hard to get the hang of sitting straight and holding someone else up without the support of a chair—but when they get it, Taehyun relaxes his weight into easy stillness. Yeonjun thinks about his posture, about keeping his eyes tense and mouth relaxed, and about turning his face into the full, smooth light, and that’s more than enough to fill his mind.

“Taehyun-ssi, can you move around to the other side?”

Taehyun reaches across Yeonjun’s body and scrambles over his lap in a quick leapfrog. Only when some of the crew laugh does Yeonjun realize it could be odd, to people who aren’t so easy with one another’s bodies, that he didn’t take fifteen seconds to get up and walk around the bed.

They don’t even have to try anymore to keep their breath on the same rhythm to avoid jostling one another.

This isn't exactly space. But the space Yeonjun needs most is room to do his job efficiently and properly, and if Taehyun understands that, they're going to be fine.

The farther they get from the set, the stranger it becomes. Maybe they speak to one another less than they would on another day. Maybe when they take a break to look at the shots, and Yeonjun says, “The light is really pretty,” there’s a pause before Taehyun says, “Yeah.”

It’s over fast, racing the sunset to get the others shot, too. After they’re done, Yeonjun sits down in the hair chair so the stylist can remove his extensions. The release hurts worse than the braids, for the first few minutes, at least, and Yeonjun tries to bite it down, but he makes some small, involuntary noises at the ache. 

“Sorry, sorry,” the stylist says. She starts working faster, which hurts more but will be over sooner.

Taehyun sits two chairs over without looking up from his phone, spinning back and forth, back and forth.

Stop scratching. After the stylist is done and Yeonjun flips his head over to shake his hair out, he doesn’t check the expression on Taehyun’s face.

“Hyungs fighting!” Taehyun calls as they walk off set. “Huening fighting!”

“Don’t be nice to them,” Yeonjun says, loud enough for the pile of the others on the bed to hear. “They don’t deserve it.”

Taehyun grins, maybe for real. “They can still have it.” Before Yeonjun can process that, Taehyun adds, “Do you want to do the music in the car?”

“Sure.”

“Hyungnim!” Taehyun calls to the manager driving them home. “Can Yeonjun-hyung do the music?”

They get the bluetooth set up before they pull out of the garage, and Yeonjun scrolls through his playlists. “What do you want to listen to?”

“Do you have any new stuff?” Taehyun asks. “I haven’t listened to hip hop in a while.”

Yeonjun has a playlist for that, as Taehyun must have known he would.

This is a ploy to avoid conversation, definitely, but Taehyun means it, too. By the second or third chorus of every song, he’s singing quietly along. Every few songs, he asks for a title or artist, and he notes each answer in his phone. Listening to music with him is active, it’s a full experience, just as it is when Yeonjun listens to music by himself.

The sun sets before they make it home. Yeonjun loves this part—city lights, low music, sorting the day into memories to hold onto and ones to let go of.

It was a bad day. But as Yeonjun stares out the window, listening to Taehyun humming to himself, he decides to hold onto this one.

*

Yeonjun wakes up resolved.

They have to dress for a day of meetings—he chooses armor, black and sharp. Absorb as much as he can in their production meetings; be ready to support Soobin as needed; leave Taehyun alone. These are all things he can do.

Soobin and Kai are up, too. Soobin is so cute on dress-up days—he looks like a street missionary with his little polo collar. Yeonjun wraps up his waist and rubs his cheeks, cooing.

“Oh, good,” Soobin says. “You’re in this mood.”

Yeonjun tries to kiss his face, undeterred even when Soobin cries, “I know where those lips have been!”

Kai laughs with genuine brightness, so he’s in a better mood, too.

They hear Beomgyu’s voice before they see him: “Everyone, I have an announcement!”

“Please,” Soobin says. “You don’t need to declare your poops.”

Beomgyu steps into the room with his fists over his head. “I pooped!”

Kai applauds and Soobin groans. Yeonjun keeps a smile for himself at all of them.

“I’ve never felt so good in my life,” Beomgyu says. “Got my skinny pants on. This is going to be a good day.” He looks around. “Well, I’m going to have a good day.”

“I’m going to have a good day, too, hyung,” Kai says, and Beomgyu darts over to slap his shoulder.

“I haven’t had a good day since 2018,” Soobin says. “The last time I didn’t have to know the exact state of Beomgyu’s gut.”

Yeonjun grins, but Soobin misses it, gaze caught behind him. “Hey, you look nice.”

“Wow, Taehyun-ah!” Beomgyu shouts. “Sexy!”

With all the self-preservation of a butterfly in an oncoming frost, Yeonjun turns around.

Taehyun is wearing the black shirt Yeonjun bought him, like a slick of dark water. He has a tank on underneath this time, and a jacket draped over his arm, but the raw impossibility of it is more startling than the skin was.

The cost of that shirt was worth the flounce of buying it—seeing Taehyun in it once was more than Yeonjun really expected. And again? Now?

Yeonjun isn't sure what Taehyun is trying to say, but he can hear Taehyun shouting it. 

"We were supposed to dress up, weren't we?" Taehyun asks innocently, the liar, draping his jacket over the counter on his way to the fridge.

Yeonjun throws himself into Soobin's arms. “You didn't tell me I look nice.”

“You look evil, like always,” Soobin says.

“That's just my angles,” Yeonjun says.

Taehyun appears in Yeonjun's line of sight again on his path around the room. “You look nice, hyung.”

Taehyun looks like an artist's study of shadow and highlight, all charcoal angles. He looks like a poisoned apple or some other deadly gift. He looks really nervous.

“Thanks,” Yeonjun says, and lets Soobin go. Soobin flees, but Beomgyu catches him across the room.

Kai gives Taehyun a thumbs up, only almost under the counter, and Taehyun pushes his hand down with a quick jerk. If they think they're being subtle, they are not, and that means Yeonjun doesn't have to be subtle, either. He doesn't stare, but he lets himself look. This has to be meant for him to look at, anyway.

This isn't getting back to normal, but it isn't fighting in the practice room, either.

Having shoved Yeonjun's day sufficiently off course, Taehyun puts his jacket on before they leave. It doesn't really matter. Yeonjun might have just discovered what he's been singing about all these years, specifically when they perform "Cat and Dog." He walks out of the building like Taehyun is dragging him on a leash. He barely even minds.

*

Even when Yeonjun is alone, closed in a small soundproof room, he doesn't have space. There's a knock at the door, and he's so sure it's Taehyun coming to explain himself that when he opens the door to Soobin, he has to blink a few times before he knows who he's looking at.

“Coffee break?” Soobin lifts a GoPro to show it's not really an invitation.

They trace the halls in a companionable quiet. Just before the cafeteria, Soobin asks, “Do you know what you're doing?”

What a question. Yeonjun thinks about it before he jumps to answer, but he knows the truth right away. “I trust myself, and I trust him, I think.” Yeonjun pauses. “Do you trust us?”

Soobin nods, looking dismal about it. “I guess I do.”

He clicks the camera on and dives to try to lick Yeonjun's face as soon as he has them in frame. Yeonjun spins away, laughing, and the lift carries him more lightly to the table where the others are waiting.

It’s less of a shock and more of a deep, heavy shift to lay eyes on Taehyun—jacket gone—again. He’s having a serious-looking conversation with Kai, gesturing firmly with his hands as Kai’s brow knits, but Beomgyu is sitting next to them laughing, so they’re probably talking about cartoons or something.

Yeonjun sits down across from Kai and takes the iced Americano that must be meant for him from the center of the table. Two wedges of a single pastry cut into five stingy pieces are left on a napkin. Soobin takes his and props the camera up, seamlessly joining the conversation. This part is never Yeonjun’s to lead, so he sits back. 

Taehyun’s arm is smaller than the sheer sleeve of his shirt, gathering shadows—no matter how much he goes to the gym, he’s finely built, and there’s something delicate about the intricate joint of his shoulder as it moves.

The luxurious bitterness of coffee fills Yeonjun’s mouth. Brought low by an armpit—he used to be cool.

“Oh, Soobin-hyung!” Kai says suddenly, loud enough to startle Yeonjun out of his reverie. “We forgot to… do that thing.”

Soobin blinks at him slowly, and again. “You mean abandon hyung?”

Beomgyu starts cackling.

Yeonjun nods. It’s almost a relief to stop pretending he has any power or control or even say in this situation.

“Throw him to the wolves?” Soobin asks, gathering up his stuff. “That thing, were we going to do that thing?”

“Wait, am I wolves?” Taehyun asks, looking around as the others rise. “Why am I wolves?”

“A confession by page forty, like I said,” Beomgyu says. “Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me?”

“I don’t care what you talk about,” Soobin says. “But I’d love for this to all be about ten percent less awkward this afternoon. Can we agree on that? Ten percent?”

Kai pats Taehyun’s shoulder as they leave.

Yeonjun drinks his coffee. This is Taehyun’s move.

“We don’t actually have to sit here just because they’re all dummies,” Taehyun says. He spins his cup around in his hands and doesn’t meet Yeonjun’s eyes. “I can give you space.”

Yeonjun shakes his head. The cafe isn’t empty, but there are only a few people around, far away to avoid the camera Soobin had. There’s nothing he can’t do or say here that he’d be comfortable doing or saying anywhere else in the building.

“It’s up to you,” Yeonjun says. “If wearing that was supposed to be a move, it was a good one. I look at you and I feel…” He opens his palms over the table. “Powerless.”

Taehyun looks up.

“So tell me what you want, and you can probably have it,” Yeonjun says.

“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” Taehyun says.

“That’s sort of hard to believe.”

Taehyun touches his own chest. “It was supposed to be more like an invitation. Like you said. I thought it would feel vulnerable, like the first time. But it doesn’t, at all, so I guess I was wrong about this, too.”

“Too?”

“Well, I was wrong about everything, wasn’t I?” Taehyun asks. “And now it’s all messed up. I wanted to ask you for another chance, not try to trick you into it.”

Another chance. Yeonjun guessed, but for the words to slip so simply by is a surprise. “Nothing’s messed up,” he says. “We’re having coffee and talking about it. Okay?”

Taehyun nods. He looks miserable, and not in the shallow, melodramatic way Yeonjun has been miserable today. “I talked to Kai last night,” Taehyun says. “I figured, while everyone was yelling at me, why not get it out of the way? I could tell he was upset, and I figured he was mad at me about the group, or because he cares about you so much, or something. So I asked.”

“I figured he was mad at me because he cares about you,” Yeonjun says.

Taehyun shakes his head. “He said he was sad I felt like I couldn’t talk to him. He asked me what he’d done wrong. It made me feel so much more horrible than yelling would have. I don’t know why I’m so scared. It doesn’t even make sense, I mean, I know you talk about guys and I know no one cares, but when it comes to me, I just freeze up.” His speech speeds up as he goes, shoulders hunching.

“Hey,” Yeonjun says, trying to cut off the momentum. “You feel how you feel. And you don’t have to talk to Kai about it if you don’t want to, that’s not fair of him.”

“I do want to. I just can’t.” There’s a strange contrast between Taehyun’s measured voice and his pleading eyes. “I’m trying to explain. I made this corner for myself that’s so small, I couldn’t imagine anything fitting in it but tiny compromises. And then yesterday, the things you said…”

He pauses, and Yeonjun winces. “You can ignore everything I said yesterday. I feel awful about springing that on you.”

“I thought it was wonderful,” Taehyun says. “Hyung, I thought anybody who ever touched me would be ashamed of it.”

A cold grip squeezes Yeonjun’s heart. Maybe it was a mistake to do this in the cafe—no one’s listening, but Yeonjun has never wanted to take someone’s hand so badly.

“I”m not going to eat this, if you want it,” he says, pushing the last wedge of pastry across to Taehyun.

Taehyun takes it down in one bite and smiles around it. “I was so confused, trying to figure out what you were doing. I couldn’t even see you were just being honest and good. But maybe while I was looking for something dumb, we found something really nice.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” Yeonjun says. “It’ll mess up my image.”

That wins him a little more of a smile.

“I think you’re being very hard on yourself,” Yeonjun says, “and too generous to me. I have some ideas about how to do better, too, next time.”

“Next time?” Taehyun repeats. “You do want to try one more time?”

“Just one more?”

Taehyun shrugs. “And maybe one more after that, if we want to. As many one mores as we want.” He pauses. “If you want.”

“Obviously I want to,” Yeonjun says. “Did you really think you were going to put that shirt on again and I was going to tell you no?”

A beat. Taehyun shakes his head slowly. “No, I didn’t really.”

A true laugh catches Yeonjun so hard he throws his head back.

“People keep complimenting me,” Taehyun says, only now leaning in like he’s admitting a secret. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say ‘my beloved Yeonjunie-hyung bought me this because he’s a genius of fashion,’” Yeonjun says.

“Oh, right,” Taehyun says flatly.

“I don’t know why being chic means I have to suffer like this.”

“Why are you suffering?” Taehyun asks. “I don’t want you to suffer.”

“I can’t believe I have to follow all your whims now,” Yeonjun says. “Let you finish all the food.”

“Well, I think that was already true,” Taehyun says. He’s smiling in the same stupid way Yeonjun is, an irrepressible sort of ache.

“Merciless, Taehyun-ah.”

Taehyun’s grin stays bold while his eye contact slips more shyly away. “I’ll try to make it worth your while.”

If they were alone, Yeonjun has a feeling Taehyun would be sliding closer; he knows he’d be pulling Taehyun in. He can feel the drag of it between them, weighted, not smooth.

So quietly Yeonjun can barely hear him, has to read it off his lips, Taehyun says, “Maybe we should have waited until we could be alone.”

“Maybe I should get a lobotomy,” Yeonjun says out loud.

“Hyung!” Taehyun almost laughs, and frowns instead. “Are you really still upset?”

“Yes.” Yeonjun can’t stop grinning.

“No, you’re not.” Taehyun sits back and crosses his arms, the tension gone slack and easy between them.

“You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

Taehyun’s eyes get wide. “No. Not at all. But someone told me not to get ahead of myself. Start with some food.”

Yeonjun shakes his empty coffee cup towards the pastry crumbs on the napkin. “We literally just finished the food,” he says, mimicking Taehyun’s flat tone.

Taehyun doesn’t roll his eyes. He smiles so sweetly, like he knows all the power is in his hands, like an absolute genius taught him to flirt, and says, “Your turn, then.”