Archive of Our Own ^beta

//

It’s 7:15 in the morning when Seungmin comes up on the coffee shop, which means he’s fifteen minutes behind schedule.

It isn’t a big deal, really. He had fussed for too long in the bathroom that morning, had spent too long debating whether or not to make his shake before heading out. Fifteen minutes isn’t a big deal, it isn’t, but he had still pushed himself a little harder during his run to try and make up for lost time.

Just to spite him, he thinks, his body had stubbornly refused to cooperate, so he ended up fucking with his pace and still somehow managed to be late.

The sweat is cooling on his neck as he peels off his jacket before pushing open the door to the shop. There’s a small crowd this early in the morning, mostly other college students who look like they’ve pulled an all-nighter, either from studying or poor, substance-induced decision making. Seungmin steps up to the register and raps his knuckles on the counter.

Minho is sitting behind it, legs crossed and scrolling lazily through his phone with one hand. He’s got his hoodie up, and there are purple bruises under his eyes, but the sour look he gives Seungmin is as potent with irritation as it ever is.

“Come here often, hyung?” Seungmin gives Minho the brightest smile he can manage this early in the morning. His blood is still pumping, and he feels a little lightheaded as Minho sighs heavily and drags himself to his feet.

“Loser,” Minho replies, but there’s not much heat to it. He punches Seungmin’s order into the register, a frown falling over his face.

“That’s really all you’ve got this morning?” Seungmin pulls his phone out to tap the card reader. It’s been months since he’s been coming to this coffee shop after his morning run, months of meeting Minho’s glare over the counter at approximately 7AM, and Minho knows his order without asking anymore. Some mornings he even has the coffee ready, and he says it’s so Seungmin won’t see him spit in the cup. It doesn’t stop Seungmin from blushing every single time. “You look tired, hyung. Out late last night?”

“It’s Sunday morning. Some of us have social lives. Some of us don’t wake up at dawn to exercise, because some of us are hungover and want to go home and slam their head in the nearest door.” Minho rips the receipt out, crumples it up and flings it at Seungmin. It flies weakly across the counter and Seungmin just watches it fall.

“At least try to be more creative with the insults. This is just pathetic.” Seungmin drops a dollar into the tip jar just to see Minho’s scowl deepen.

“Just go get your coffee and piss off.”

Seungmin beams at Minho. He trails over to where the barista is readying his drink, but not before calling over his shoulder, “Thanks, hyung. See you later, okay?”

He bites back a laugh when Minho tugs his hoodie up again and grumbles, “God, I hope not.”

Seungmin sits by the window at his usual table and sips his coffee. He fiddles with his GPS watch, and frowns as he runs through the stats of this morning’s run. He’s right, his pace was off, which meant his heart rate tracking was off, which meant the whole run was probably a wash. He drops his wrist back on the table and glares at his coffee, scratching the side of the cup with his fingernail, over and over, scratch and scratch. He doesn’t feel like drinking it anymore. He wonders if he should do double his evening route, just to make up for the waste of a morning.

Eventually it’s time to head out, so Seungmin sighs and gets up to his feet. He glances over and Minho hasn’t moved, still has his nose practically pressed to his phone screen. He tries not to feel a little disappointed when Minho doesn’t even spare him a glance as he leaves the shop, pausing right outside the door to stretch his quads, then starting up a jog back to his apartment.

//

This is how Seungmin’s routine goes:

He wakes up to his one alarm at 5:30. Sleep isn’t a priority, so waking up early isn’t hard for him anymore. It just took a year or so of training his body to not need the extra hours, and now he’s perfected the art of hitting the alarm and rolling out of bed to the bathroom.

He goes through the motions and is out the door by 5:45. Sometimes he dawdles and makes a shake before he heads out, but most of the time he just lets the packaged fruit sit in the freezer and crust over with ice.

He jogs for a couple miles, mostly sticking to the circuit around the lake and the pathways that weave around campus, and stops outside the coffee shop across from the admin building at just around 7 o’clock.

And when Seungmin walks in, without fail, Minho is sitting there, varying expressions of exasperation and annoyance playing out on his face as he takes Seungmin’s order and crams in as many insults into their short interaction as he physically can.

Seungmin drinks his coffee, sits at his usual table, attributes the flush of his cheeks to the hot drink and the fading exertion from his run, then jogs for a couple more miles before returning to his apartment to shower and get ready for the day.

By this time, Jeongin is usually just shuffling out of his bedroom, and there’s a fight as to who has rights to the shared bathroom; a fight that Seungmin always inevitably wins.

Then Seungmin goes to class, tucks in little pockets of study time, returns home in the late afternoon, once again spares a glance at the blender sitting on their counter, and preps for his evening run.

“You’re obsessive,” Jeongin says one night as Seungmin fills his water bottle at the sink. “I can’t think of a less fun activity than running. If you really want to exercise, come with me and Changbin to the gym and we can all suffer together.”

Seungmin only hums, not really listening, his headphones already clapped over his ears and a new girl-group song blasting through his head.

“Later, Innie.” Seungmin pulls on his shoes and moves towards the door.

“This isn’t healthy,” Jeongin calls after him, and he says it like a joke, but Seungmin finds it funny for the wrong reasons.

So Seungmin runs, he sleeps, he wakes up, he runs, he sees Minho, he goes to class, he comes home, and runs again.

There’s comfort in the cycle. He’s perfected it down to the minute, down to the millisecond. It’s all he needs, and also, he thinks, all that he really has.

//

“You look like a fucking traffic cone.” Minho is pulling a shot at the espresso machine and looking Seungmin up and down, his mouth curled up in a sneer.

Seungmin tugs at his shirt, neon yellow with reflective stripes up the side. “It’s for visibility, hyung.”

“It’s offensive, is what it is. They don’t pay me enough to have to look at you dressed like an idiot every single morning.”

“Do you want me to take it off?” Seungmin lets his hands drift to the hem of his shirt. He tugs the fabric up just to show off a sliver of his stomach and has to fight off a smirk when he catches the tips of Minho’s ears turning the slightest shade of pink.

“No shirt, no service. So, please, take it off and I can kick you out.” Minho shoves Seungmin’s latte across the bar with enough force that it splashes out of the cup. The second latte is placed in front of Seungmin with much more care. “I threw an extra shot in for Bin. Looks like he needs it.”

They both glance over to Changbin, who has his head down on the table by the window, cheek smushed and eyes vacant.

“Thanks, hyung.” Seungmin loiters at the counter, fingers playing with the paper sleeves of the coffee cups. “Come join us during your break?”

“Do I look like I want to join you during my break?” Minho scoffs. “Move. You’re blocking the pick-ups.”

Seungmin takes his cups, makes a smooching noise at Minho, and gently files away the sight of Minho’s ears turning a shade darker.

Changbin picks his head off the table when Seungmin returns, only to drop it back down with a low, wounded noise.

“You come here every morning?” Changbin groans, voice muffled against the tabletop. “At the ass crack of dawn? Just to flirt with Minho?”

“I come here because it’s on my running route,” Seungmin corrects him. He takes a sip of his coffee. Sets it down again and scratches the cardboard sleeve. “You didn’t have to join me, you know. It’s not my fault you have an 8AM lecture.” He takes another sip. “And I do not ‘flirt’ with Minho. I just shave off a few seconds of his life every time he has to look at me.”

“You two are so fucking weird,” Changbin finally sits up to slurp at his coffee and shakes his head.

Seungmin shrugs. “He started it.”

“Maybe he started it, but you just love to keep it going, Seungmin. Hyung is a good guy, you know, has always been good to us.”

“Yeah, well, it’s different for me.”

Changbin snorts. “Different because you have a huge fat crush on him, you mean.”

Seungmin can’t deny it. So he has a crush on Minho, has since he started coming to this coffee shop. Minho is pretty, is funny, is kind to people who aren’t Seungmin, and there’s that tiny masochistic part of him that lives for every single derisive snort Minho sends his way. If he adjusted his route so that the shop was on his way, that was between him and whichever god took pity on his gay heart and nudged Minho in the direction of liking Seungmin back.

“Tell him that. I’d like to see you get the shit beaten out of you with a milk frother,” Seungmin says, earning him Changbin’s scowl from across the table.

“I think something about the early morning air makes you ten times more annoying.”

Seungmin laughs and plays with his coffee cup some more, hooking his fingers in the sleeve so he can feel the ridges lining the inside. “It’s the endorphins from running.”

“Yeah, or you’re just a smartass.”

The morning crowd begins to filter into the shop. Seungmin stares unabashedly as Minho slaps his customer service face on, slips off his hood and shakes out his honey brown hair.

Changbin opens his mouth and Seungmin expects him to make a comment along the lines of ‘stop staring with your mouth open like that, you look like a fish’, but instead Changbin says, “You’ve lost weight.”

Seungmin lets it pass through one ear and out the other. His eyes are still fixed on the stupid little cat enamel pins Minho has attached to his apron.

“Training for a race will do that to you,” he says without looking, and Changbin’s frown slants to the side.

“Yeah, I mean – is that really how that works? Aren’t you supposed to be gaining? For stamina, or whatever?”

Finally irritation starts to spark under Seungmin’s skin. He turns back around and matches Changbin’s frown across the table without meeting Changbin’s eyes. “Oh, are you training for it too? C’mon, hyung. I know what I’m doing.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Changbin reaches over and pats Seungmin’s hand, and Seungmin lets it happen. “Just let me treat you to a meal once it’s over, okay? A victory feast, or whatever. Sound good?”

Not really. “Yeah, sure. Sounds good.”

Seungmin returns his attention to his coffee cup, desperate to end this line of questioning. His knee begins to bounce under the table and the noise of the café rises to a dull roar, shaking and sending tremors over Seungmin’s skin.

“Do you have a time you’re shooting for?” Changbin asks, apparently not willing to let Seungmin escape so easily.

Seungmin shrugs. His eyes drift from the coffee in front of him, to the expression on Changbin’s face that Seungmin can’t quite decipher, to Minho, chatting away to a customer at the register. “Just trying my best.”

//

Running brings a safety that Seungmin rarely ever feels.

It’s consistent, is the thing. Seungmin has a carefully planned route, has markers along the way to ensure he’s keeping up an acceptable pace, has people (dog walkers, fellow runners, folks on opening shifts at the shops) that he passes by and greets every morning.

Same, same, same: that’s the best thing about running. There’s a rhythm to his feet, to his arms, to the same playlist he has queued up every morning on his phone. Sometimes Seungmin thinks that if a serial killer is stalking him, it would be terribly easy for Seungmin to be tracked down and murdered in an alleyway. Then Seungmin convinces himself that he can easily outrun a murderer, and there’s no reason to change his route for something as silly as that.

Running is a heavy blanket and Seungmin is a spooked animal, needing the pressure and darkness covering his eyes.

He wouldn’t go so far as to say he loves it, but he does crave how it brings his mind some bastardization of peace. It’s not love, and never will be, but it doesn’t have to be. All it has to do is make his brain quiet, because nothing else will.

//

Jeongin introduces Seungmin to Changbin and his friend group early on in their second year of university, and it all goes downhill from there.

Suddenly there are six other boys trickling in and out of Seungmin and Jeongin’s very small apartment, all at once annoying the shit out of Seungmin and digging a deep and significant burrow into the chambers of his heart.

Sometimes, when Changbin is post-workout and rolling around on Seungmin’s bed, or when Hyunjin is painting his nails and spilling polish all over Seungmin’s desk, he thinks he might love them more than he actually likes them. Then Chan will drive him home to visit his parents for the weekend, or Jisung and Felix will take him to see the therapy puppies at the student center, and he’ll admit to himself that all of them have quickly cemented themselves as the closest friends he has ever had.

And then there’s Minho.  

Minho is a mystery from the very start. He barely speaks to Seungmin for the first couple of weeks after they meet, and even then, it’s either a necessary formality or a very thinly veiled insult. Jeongin once calls Minho ‘intimidating’, and Seungmin doesn’t think that’s quite right. He would use the words ‘asshole’, or ‘stupidly pretty’, or ‘cryptic to the point where it’s annoying as hell’, or all of the above, and in that order.

No one bothers to offer an explanation as to why Minho is the way he is. All Seungmin gets is a lot of shrugs, a lot of handwaving, a lot of ‘hyung’s just like that, he’ll come around,’ or variations of the sort, and it’s incredibly frustrating for someone like Seungmin, who already struggles with trying to understand why people are the way they are and do the things they do.

“I really think he hates me,” Seungmin comments to Felix after they bump into Minho on campus and he gushes over Felix for a solid five minutes before turning to Seungmin and simply saying, “You’ve buttoned your shirt up wrong,” and walking away.

“Hyung doesn’t hate anyone,” Felix giggles as Seungmin undoes his shirt and realigns the buttons again. “I didn’t think he even knew my name for weeks, and then on my birthday he showed up with a cake from a bakery I mentioned maybe one time in front of him. So all you’ve really got to do is wait, Min.”

Waiting is not what Seungmin does best. Waiting fits into neither the timeline of Seungmin’s day-to-day schedule nor his five-year plan. And waiting for Minho, as attractive as he is, and as badly as Seungmin wants to make Minho like him, is most definitely not in the cards.

Felix must see that written on Seungmin’s face, because he laughs again and says, “If you really want to get on his good side, Minho works part-time at a café near campus. I’m not encouraging you to go bother him at work, but, who knows, if you go there often enough…”

Seungmin starts going to the café every morning after his run. The first time, Minho merely stares at him, and the only acknowledgement that they know each other is that Minho doesn’t ask for Seungmin’s name to go along with the order. The second time, and the third, Minho’s eyes narrow by increments as they repeat the process.

The fourth time, Seungmin scores a small victory when Minho opens his mouth and says churlishly, “So is this going to be a regular thing? Because it’s 7 in the morning, and if this is how I’m going to be starting my day, I need to know so I can mentally prepare myself to put up with – this.”

Minho looks Seungmin up and down, and Seungmin is sure he sees a sweaty, stupidly skinny boy with floppy hair and big feet. He can admit he doesn’t look his best halfway through his run, but it doesn’t stop him from smirking back at Minho and trying to flush down each acerbic little negative thought that accumulates in his brain.

“You’ll get used to my handsome face eventually, hyung,” Seungmin says, because he’s started calling Minho ‘hyung’ unprompted, and he loves the way it makes a muscle in Minho’s jaw twitch.

“There’s a Starbucks down the street,” Minho tells him as rings Seungmin’s order through. “I’m sure they would appreciate your handsome face even more.”

But all Seungmin hears is that Minho thinks he’s handsome, and he blushes and trips over his shoes on the way to get his coffee.

He still thinks he’s right and Felix is wrong; if Minho does actually hate Seungmin, Seungmin can simply not allow it.

So his solution? Flirt. And flirt aggressively, until Minho tells him to stop.

And the thing is, Minho doesn’t tell him to stop. He’ll complain about Seungmin sweating over the counter, act upset over Seungmin’s choices in running clothes, threaten to salt Seungmin’s latte, but he always stares in the face of Seungmin’s terrible flirting and accepts it without ever telling Seungmin to cut it out.

Seungmin would be the first to admit that he’s laying it on a bit thick, and the last to admit that he just wants Minho to flirt back, just once.

So he goes to the shop every morning, freaks out a bit at how small and adorable and disinterested Minho looks, and wants a little more, budgets out a little more space for Minho to exist in his life.

//

Minho is restocking the pastry case when Seungmin and Jeongin trail over to pick up their drinks.

Jeongin is yawning with every other word and had ordered an obscenely caffeinated drink. Seungmin, on the other hand, is wide awake, alarmingly so, and his brain is ricocheting around in the confines of his skull.

Minho grunts in greeting, not even glancing up.

“You should wear gloves when handling food,” Seungmin feels the need to say, and Minho still doesn’t look up, just pointedly manhandles a muffin as he pushes it to the front of the case.

“I’m sure hyung washes his hands,” Jeongin yawns next to him.

“I don’t,” Minho says. He straightens up and finally looks at them. Seungmin stares at his face and sees a blank wall where there should be a smile, a frown, anything. He sighs. So it’s one of those days. The rattling of his stupid brain makes sense now. He’s a lab rat on steroids, running in circles and consumed with the singular need to simply be frenzied.

Still, Seungmin sees Minho start arranging loaves of freshly baked bread in a neat little row, and he tries for a, “Nice buns, hyung”, but his heart isn’t into it this morning, and he wonders if Minho can tell.

Minho shuts his eyes for a solid three seconds before opening them again and completely ignoring Seungmin.

“Boo.” Jeongin gives two thumbs down. “Zero out of ten. You have my permission to kick him in the shin,” he tells Minho.

“I would if I could reach,” Minho grumbles. “Take your coffee and get out of my face. I’ll bring your sandwich over in a minute, Innie.”

Seungmin follows Jeongin to his usual table by the window, taking a seat and resisting the urge to immediately stand back up again. He wonders if he starts pacing in circles around the table, how long he can manage before Minho materializes at his shoulder and unceremoniously kicks him out of the shop for disturbing the peace. He settles for just marching his feet in place under the table. Thunk thunk thunk goes each foot. Jeongin keeps shooting glances at him over the lip of his cup.

Jeongin looks like he’s about to say something, something Seungmin probably won’t hear over the humming in his brain, but suddenly Minho is there, slapping down a plate and ruffling Jeongin’s hair aggressively. Seungmin tries not to feel too jealous; not that he would want Minho’s fingers in his sweaty hair at this particular moment, but just because he needs something to feel.

His eyes zero in on the egg sandwich in front of Jeongin. He swears he can smell it from where he sits, and it’s the wrong thing at the wrong time, and Seungmin feels instantly like he’s going to puke right across the table.

“Did you want half?” Jeongin asks him, and Seungmin wonders what his face must look like to Jeongin and Minho, who is still standing there with a faint look of distaste.

Seungmin shakes his head frantically. He fists his hands on the tabletop. He can’t control how hard they tremble.

“Oh,” Jeongin says. “Oh.” He pushes the sandwich to the furthest end of the table and reaches for Seungmin’s backpack, rifling through the contents.

“Are you going to be sick? You look like you’re going to be sick,” Minho sounds like he’s curious more than anything, and Seungmin hates it, hates the way he’s shaking and shivering in front of Minho and there’s nothing he can do to stop himself.

He can’t remember if Minho has ever seen this before, the slow-motion, viscous bubble of time before Seungmin loses it. He doesn’t want Minho to see, but Seungmin doesn’t really have a choice. He’s already got one foot out the door.

Jeongin is pressing Seungmin’s headphones into his hands and saying something, a little louder a second time when it’s clear Seungmin hasn’t heard, but it still breezes through Seungmin’s head just the same.

Seungmin jerks the headphones over his ears. He can barely make out Jeongin and Minho talking somewhere above him when the first spurts of water leak through the cracks in the dam. He whimpers, far too loud for the quiet of the coffee shop still waking up, and Jeongin gets to his feet and tugs back at Seungmin’s chair.

Seungmin allows himself to be led away to god knows where by a gentle pressure at the base of his spine. He’s dizzy, so he shuts his eyes tight and puts all of his trust into the hand at his back. When he opens his eyes again, he’s in a musty, dark supply closet, propped up against a wall between a bucket and a dirty mop.

It’s not an ideal place to have one of his freak outs, but it’ll do. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he meets Minho’s eyes, level with his and still managing to glow even in the low light.

Minho is crouched across from where he sits, watching him. Seungmin catches the way Minho’s mouth forms the word, “Hey.”

He very carefully nudges his headphones off one ear, and Minho’s voice is a summer wind in comparison to the jackhammers and screeching of the rest of the world.

“I told Jeongin to get you some tea so I could bring back you here. Would you like some tea?” Minho asks.

Seungmin shakes his head, desperate. Minho just blinks.

“Alright, maybe later. What would make you feel better right now?”

Seungmin can’t speak, can’t think. He just curls into himself further and stares right back at Minho.

“Do you want something to eat?” Minho tries again, and the panic is instantaneous in the way it zings through Seungmin’s veins.

“No,” Seungmin can manage that word, because it is imperative that he does not eat right now, or ever again, for that matter. His mouth keeps up a chant of ‘no’s until he tapers off and falls into just humming.

“Okay. No food. Maybe we should just sit here like this for a little while?” Minho scoots away until his back hits the wall opposite. “No one will come bother us here. It’s not like any of my coworkers have ever picked up a mop in their life.”

There’s no explanation as to why Minho is sitting there with him, because Seungmin is sure that even if Minho doesn’t hate him, he certainly doesn’t like him. Seungmin can’t wrap his head it and doesn’t have the strength to do it right now anyways.

Minho stops speaking and tilts his head back against the wall, shutting his eyes. That seems like a good idea, so Seungmin does the same, shifting his headphones back into place.

He begins to cry, and he dreads what always happens next. He wants to open his mouth and tell Minho to leave while he still can, but the words don’t come out. Instead, he just garbles out, “I want to go home.”

He can last until then, he tells himself. He can fend off the storm until then. He just needs to get home, just needs to make it through the doorway, and then he can let go. “Too big,” he mumbles, more to himself than to Minho, but Minho looks to be listening all the same. “Too big.”

Minho nods at him, points at the door, then gets up to his feet and leaves. Seungmin hadn’t meant for Minho to leave, but he supposes it might be for the best. The sting of abandonment feels like a silly little thing, and it’s just beginning to build when the door to the supply closet opens again and Minho is back, Jeongin at his side.

“We’re gonna get you home, hyung,” Jeongin is saying close to his ear, muffled through Seungmin’s headphones. “Here, put your hood up, use my sunglasses, we’re gonna go, it won’t be too long, c’mon, up…”

Seungmin allows himself to once more be lead away. His head swivels back on its own accord and he locks eyes with Minho over his shoulder. Minho is standing in the doorway of the closet still, apron wrinkled and frown back on his face.

He doesn’t want to think too much about it. He just huddles into Jeongin’s side and lets himself be dragged back home.

//

Seungmin wishes that he could avoid the coffee shop forever after that incident, but his brain doesn’t let him. He keeps running, he keeps stopping in, he keeps wilting under the unreadable look Minho gives him each morning.

He doesn’t know how to say thank you, for whatever it is that happened between them, doesn’t know if he should, or if Minho will even accept it. He just wants Minho to never mention it again, and Seungmin will only be too happy to follow suit.

It’s been a few weeks, long enough that he hopes Minho’s forgotten, and Seungmin has deemed it safe to return to his table again and linger there for a while in the mornings.

“You never get breakfast.”

Seungmin tilts his head up and sees Minho standing above him, hands on his hips and hoodie bunched up around his ears.

It’s 7:45AM, and Seungmin has been sitting longer than he’d meant to. Minho usually makes a point to not speak to him once their interaction at the register is over; but here he is, glaring down at Seungmin like he’s a nasty spill on the floor Minho has come to clean up.  

“Huh?” Seungmin drags his headphones down and glances, self-conscious, around the coffee shop. It’s nearly empty this morning, and Minho is still standing there and looking at him.

Minho rolls his eyes like it pains him to have to repeat himself. “You never get breakfast. Only coffee.”

It’s not a question, so Seungmin thinks he shouldn’t have to answer. But he opens his mouth anyways, because he doesn’t want Minho to think he’s even more of a freak than he probably already does.   

“My stomach doesn’t wake up this early in the morning,” he tells Minho, and he can’t tell whether or not Minho believes him.

Then Minho titters, and it’s clear he hasn’t when he says, “But it’s awake enough for coffee?”

Seungmin sets his headphones down on the table. His fingers seek out the sleeve of his coffee cup and Minho’s eyes follow the motion. “Was there a point to this?”

“You’ve been here too long,” Minho tells him. He kicks the leg of Seungmin’s chair. “You have to order something or give up the table.”

Seungmin blinks and looks again around the room for help. Is anyone else hearing this?

“You’ve never had that rule, and I’ve been here for hours before,” Seungmin manages. “Plus, there’s no one here who needs a table.”

“Rules are rules. Order something else or get out.”

There’s a blush settling in on Seungmin’s cheeks, and he tells himself it’s from irritation. “Fine. Fine, I’ll just have another coffee.”

Minho clicks his tongue. “We’re out of milk -” he cuts Seungmin off when Seungmin opens his mouth again to protest, “- and the espresso machine is broken. You’ll just have to order a pastry or something.”

Seungmin’s mad now, angry with himself that nothing he seems to be saying is getting Minho off his case, and angry with Minho for being so goddamn pushy. “C’mon, hyung, you’re just making shit up now,” he complains.

“Door’s that way.” Minho nods behind them, where outside the rain that had been sprinkling throughout the morning has turned into what looks like hail.

“Maybe-” Seungmin can’t believe he’s giving in. Can’t believe it, but he is. “Maybe an apple or something? A banana?”

“Banana bread and an apple scone? I’ll heat them up for you.”

Minho is turning and heading back to the counter before Seungmin can get another word in. He grabs his headphones and squeezes them in his fist, fuming. He bounces his knee, up and down, up and down, trying to blink back the frustration threatening to leak out of his eyes. Fucking Minho. Fucking Minho with his weird rules and his bossiness and his contradictions. And his hoodie scrunched up behind his ears, and the little pins on his apron, and the way his front teeth jut out just a tiny bit.

Seungmin is pissed, and a little in love, but that’s nothing new when it comes to Minho. It’s not the greatest feeling in the world, but Seungmin can live with it.

He jams his headphones back over his ears, turns the volume up high, and glares out the window at his own reflection, smudged and warped by the rain.

When Minho returns to drop the food, warm and smelling like rotten flesh, onto the table, Seungmin ignores him.  

He eats half the banana bread and a quarter of the scone, because Minho is watching him from the counter, and he needs something to do with his hands and his mouth before he feels any more like a strip of bubble wrap someone is taking a knife to. They don’t taste bad, and he tucks them away in their pastry bags before heading out the door. He doesn’t throw his usual wink and farewell back at Minho. He doesn’t want to look any closer at the small upturn of Minho’s lips.

“You’ll need to pay for those,” Minho lazily calls after him, smugness evident in his voice.

Seungmin flips him off without turning around. Zips his jacket up to his chin and steps back out into the rain.

//

Minho starts to include food in Seungmin’s daily order, and Seungmin hates it.

“I’m not going to pay for this,” he says one morning when Minho places a bagel, lathered in cream cheese, on his table.

“You will one way or another,” Minho shoots back before stomping off to the register, and Seungmin has no idea what he means by that.

Some days are better than others. There’s a reason he drinks so much coffee, and it’s not because he needs the caffeine to get through the day. Just like the special types of tea he keeps in the kitchen cabinet, the coffee he drinks daily is a necessary coating in his stomach to deter anything else from entering it. He drinks coffee so he doesn’t have to worry about breakfast, maybe even lunch if he’s lucky, and is always thrilled when the science of it all actually works.

Then Minho walks by his table and pointedly shoves plates of food under Seungmin’s nose, and Seungmin is left with a choice. Drink his coffee and feel empty and good, or eat whatever Minho gives him and feel lousy and heavy and normal.

There’s not really a pattern to which days he chooses one over the other. Sometimes Minho will choose to give him something unpalatable, something Seungmin would never touch in a thousand years, and Seungmin will inch it across the table until it’s out of his line of vision. Annoyingly, Minho seems to adapt and learn from Seungmin’s preferences. Each day there’s a different food, one that Seungmin might even find tolerable, and it’s like Minho is dialing in on what Seungmin’s stomach, and more importantly, his brain, will accept.

“I really don’t do oatmeal,” Seungmin confesses another morning when Minho approaches him with the bowl. He’s already starting to feel queasy imagining the texture of the sludge sliding down his throat.

“Fine.” is all Minho says. He turns around and returns a few minutes later with a banana and peanut butter sandwich. Seungmin narrows his eyes and wonders how Minho has so quickly come to read him so well.

Some days he eats, and other days he doesn’t. It doesn’t really matter, in the end. Seungmin is happy to play whatever weird game Minho is indulging in, even if it means skipping meals later on in the day, or running a couple extra miles in the evening.

And when he eats and keeps it all down, and doesn’t adjust his day for any of it, it feels to Seungmin like a tiny victory, even though he’s not sure why he’s celebrating.

He keeps close watch on it, though, waiting for the moment this thing interrupts too much of his time, of the way he does things and always will. He’s ready to nip things in the bud at any moment, even if that means putting that frown back on Minho’s face.

//

This is how Seungmin’s routine starts:

He’s a shy kid. He doesn’t speak until he’s four years old, and even then, it’s sparingly. His parents call him a late bloomer; the doctors he visits every other week have other words for it, but he’s too young to understand them.

He doesn’t eat much, and when he does, it’s very specific foods. His mom takes it in stride, cooking his favorite meals in a constant rotation and packing his favorite snacks. His dad stocks the cabinets with all foods plain and bland, and Seungmin just exists in a very small, meticulously sketched circle of safety. No one had to teach it to him; it was just something he always knew to do.

Seungmin grows up and settles into a way of life that is at once painstakingly structured and debilitatingly suffocating. Comfort and discomfort become synonymous. His brain is a train on a single track, chugging along at one speed, and any threat that crosses his path is either mercilessly crushed or cataclysmic in the way that it sends him hurtling off a cliffside.

Those earth-shattering moments happen too frequently, and the doctors give him medications to make the train in his head ride a little smoother, if not a tad more ruthless.

His high school friends describe him as cold, as clinical. The track and field coaches call him the team’s ace. He calls himself a control freak who’s just trying his best.

Seungmin edges into adulthood, lonelier than ever and just a little frightened of his own brain. It isn’t enough to stop him from doing what he’s used to, and with time the circle of what Seungmin wants and needs shrinks and shrinks.

He eventually manages to cut out the act of eating from his routine almost entirely.

Having regular meals would take up precious time in his day, and it’s a good reason, he tells himself, the one that matters, the one that makes the most sense.

And there are the other reasons, of course, but they’re not as important. Not the bathroom scale, not the rubbery taste and texture of food in his mouth, not his shriveling stomach, not the way he likes his food either liquid or carefully tasteless. Side goals, Seungmin thinks, in his pursuit for total and utter control. 

Sometimes Seungmin will read blogs and articles and find solace in the fact that he’s not sick like these people are. His goal is discipline, is nice and neat, is dropping pounds until he finally feels a sense of satisfaction when he looks at himself in the mirror. He’s not sick, and sometimes it feels like his brain is playing tricks on him when it suggests that maybe he is.

He's not sick, he’s in control, he knows what he’s doing: a mantra he starts and ends the day with. And even though he’s all of those things, there is the conviction there, right in the slots between his rapidly visible ribs, that no one can know. Secrets are part of the routine, and he’ll be damned if he lets anyone interfere with what he has spent years of his life perfecting. 

He starts college and coasts by on one meal a day, if he’s generous with himself. On the days where he needs to get his shit together, he stretches out the hours between eating. It saves him time, saves him sanity.

There’s no end in sight, and Seungmin is fine with that. He runs, and he doesn’t eat. He doesn’t eat, and he runs.

Just fine, and always will be.

//

Seungmin comes home from his morning jog and immediately starts peeling off layers as he makes his way to his room. He doesn’t care that he needs a shower, doesn’t care about anything except getting out of his clothes and into his bed. Each stitch, each fiber of fabric against his skin is sandpaper and needles. He upends the basket in his closet, spilling out blankets and pillows and the handful of stuffed animals he’s kept over the years, and begins arranging them in a circle on his bed. He pulls on one of his huge hoodies and crawls into the pile, immediately rooting around to arrange them in an attempt to block out every single sound, sensation, sight. It’s not enough, but it’ll do, and he slips his headphones over his ears and clutches the stuffed puppy his dad had won him at a ballgame to his chest.

He’s not sure how long he stays like that, knees tucked up under his chin, shivering like he isn’t covered by three layers of blankets and throws. He’s still sort of swimming, and it takes him a while to recognize a knocking at his door, and he pushes his headphones off one ear to listen in.

He debates wanting to let anyone into his room, but it’s Jeongin calling his name softly, and Seungmin hums as loudly as he can his permission to enter.

“Hey, hyung,” Jeongin’s voice comes in from the direction of the doorway. “Not a good day?”

Seungmin only grunts in reply. He twists around in his blankets so he can peek out and get a look at Jeongin. He’s standing there with his glasses slipping down his nose, a mug in one hand and a paper bag in the other.

“Oh, sorry,” Jeongin rushes to shut the door as he steps further in, returning the room to the darkness Seungmin had maintained. “I just wanted to drop off some of your ginger tea, if you want some. I’ll put it here on the dresser?”

Seungmin watches as Jeongin sets down first a ceramic coaster that Seungmin insists on having in every room of the apartment and then Seungmin’s favorite mug.

“I stopped by the coffee shop earlier, I thought I might catch you, but Minho said you hadn’t been in. He gave me this, to give to you. He said to tell you it’s a cinnamon muffin.” Jeongin says, and Seungmin grimaces. Cinnamon. That would be a hard pass. Jeongin shakes the paper bag a little, before placing it down on the dresser as well.

Seungmin had been too busy crawling out of his skin to stop and make the effort to see Minho, to go through the entire ordeal of speaking, being spoken to, of being seen, so he had simply run right by the shop.

He had tried not to glance in as he picked up his pace, but his eyes still gravitated to the window against his will to catch a glimpse of Minho, sitting behind the register, elbow on the counter to prop his chin up with one hand, looking like he would rather be anywhere else.

Seungmin had kept running. No amount of Minho was going to soothe the incredible need to be as far away from everything and everyone as possible.

“Text me if you need anything,” Jeongin says as he begins to inch out the door again, careful not to let too much light bleed in. “Or if you don’t want to text, knock on the wall a couple times, I’ll hear it.”

Seungmin grunts again, and Jeongin shuts the door.

He doesn’t get up for the tea or the muffin Minho had passed along with Jeongin. He doesn’t want to think about whatever it might taste like, doesn’t want to smell it, doesn’t want to eat it or anything else for the rest of his life.

He tries to remind himself that it’s a kind gesture, but then again Minho had never explained why he had started doing it in the first place, so all Seungmin can think about is how irritated he is for no real reason.

He burrows back in the blankets and shoves the thoughts of Minho to the corner of his mind as best he can. Secures the headphones back over his ears and trembles apart.

//

The worst part is that his friends love to eat.

Half of them spend more time at the dining halls than in class. The other half have bottomless stomachs and still manage to stay bird thin. Seungmin, on the other hand, is neither.

They go out for dinner so often that it’s difficult for Seungmin to keep up, to keep track. He has to pick and choose his battles. Sometimes he can simply deny an invite, and his friends never hold it against him, knowing how easily he gets overwhelmed and how much safer he feels in the comfort of his room.

But most of the time, he trails after them, trying not to feel like a kicked dog or a wet blanket, and when they all down at their table, loaded with dishes and drinks and so so much more, Seungmin does his best to force himself to drift a million miles away.

He’s careful; he has to be. His guard goes up, and stays up, until the bill is being paid and he can finally step out the door and take a breath that doesn’t send an instant trill of nausea down into his stomach.

When it’s all eight of them, it’s the easiest. They’re all loud, all happy, and no one pays attention to whether or not Seungmin eats. No one makes a comment, no one looks at him too long; Seungmin can slip through the cracks and the relief he feels when he manages it is intoxicating.

Tonight, Minho is watching him.

“Is there something on my face, hyung?” Seungmin scowls. He pushes the rice around on his plate in tight, measured circles. Around once. Around again. Repeat.

“Ugly,” Minho throws back like it’s instinctive. Then – “Are you not hungry?”

Seungmin looks up, startled and unprepared for the implications of that question.

“I’m fine,” he says, blinking fast. He can feel his ears burn. “So stop looking at me.”

Minho purses his lips, picks up a piece of chicken from one of the platters in the center of the table, and drops it onto Seungmin’s plate.

“Eat it. I didn’t poison it.”

An excuse hangs off the tip of Seungmin’s tongue. He sifts through his arsenal, searching for one that Minho will believe. Hyung, I’m not hungry. My stomach hurts. I’m not a fan of that, I’m a picky eater. It’s your food, shouldn’t you be the one eating it?

But in the end Seungmin says nothing. He picks at the piece of chicken. Tears a little off and places it delicately in his mouth. Forces himself to chew. Forces himself to swallow. It tastes like wood shavings as it scratches its way down his throat.

Minho is still watching him. The others have moved on to another conversation entirely, leaving Seungmin and Minho in their own little tense bubble. The sounds of laughter and teasing fill out the restaurant, and it grates at Seungmin’s nerves, but all he can really focus on is Minho, sitting across from him and staring.

He wipes his mouth with a napkin and tries desperately to keep the food down. He thinks he might cry when Minho pointedly places another piece of chicken on his plate.

Seungmin stands quickly, rocking the table a little when he bumps it with his hips. “Bathroom,” he announces to the group, and shuffles off without anyone sparing him a glance; except Minho, whose eyes narrow and follow him across the restaurant.

Seungmin locks himself in a stall and considers the grimy toilet. He’s shaking, a full body thing, and as the hums begin to curl up out of his chest, he’s grateful that the restroom is empty. He’s never done this before, had never really considered it an option due to the mess and nastiness of it all, but tonight, tonight is different. Maybe it’s the weight of Minho’s gaze, maybe it’s the oil greasing the chicken, maybe it’s just the fact that Seungmin is a rotten tree one strike away from being felled by a blunt axe.

He pulls out a long strip of toilet paper and drapes it over the floor. Spares a moment to grimace as he gets down on his knees. Okay, now what? he thinks to himself. He honestly has no idea what a gag reflex is, doesn’t know beyond the handful of times he’s had a guy’s dick in his mouth what it’s supposed to feel like. He almost considers getting up again to wash his hands and do some research on the private tab on his phone, but he knows he’ll chicken out the minute he goes back into the stall.

So he just kneels and forces his mind to go as blank as it can. It should be pretty straightforward, right? Seungmin can handle this. He can figure this out, he won’t pussy out, he can do this, he can do this hecandoth –

The door to the restroom slams open and Seungmin scrambles up to his feet, kicking the toilet paper on the ground into the corner of the stall. He can’t keep his breathing in check, and distantly he feels bile rising in his throat, because of course his body would decide now is the time to make shit happen.

“Food’s getting cold.” It’s Minho on the other side of the door, and the bile pools with a vengeance on Seungmin’s tongue. Minho doesn’t need to raise his voice, because he’s all Seungmin can hear in the empty echo of the bathroom.

“So you came to harass me while I’m taking a piss?” His voice shakes and he knows Minho hears it.

“Is that what you were doing?” Minho asks, careful and quiet. Seungmin can’t look away from the toilet bowl beneath him, can’t stop thinking about being empty, being void, being gone. He’s trembling in earnest now, liquifying under the heat of the fluorescent lights above his head.

“Can’t you bother someone else?” Again, a crack in his voice. Any minute he thinks Minho is going to either laugh at him or bust down the door and drag him out of the stall.

A pause, and then – “No, I don’t think I will.”

Seungmin starts to hyperventilate. His vision goes fuzzy around the edges, and he shuts his eyes as if it’ll bring clarity back into his brain.

“Just – give me a minute,” Seungmin gasps. Minho doesn’t leave, but Seungmin hadn’t really expected him to.

He focuses on his breathing, trying to time his inhales and exhales with the drip of the faucet at the sink behind him. Minho is silent, and Seungmin knows he can hear the harried way Seungmin sucks in air and huffs it back out.

Finally, he crawls out of the stall and resolutely does not look at Minho as he washes his hands in the sink. He grabs too many paper towels and blots at his hands over and over, trying to wipe away the filth on his skin.  

“I’m gonna go home,” Seungmin mumbles, eyes trained on the floor. It feels like a terrible repeat of the morning at the coffee shop. Shame floods through Seungmin at Minho seeing him like this once again.

“Fine. Let me grab my coat and we can head out.”

Seungmin’s head snaps up. There’s a carefully blank expression on Minho’s face, like he couldn’t care less whether or not Seungmin refuses his company on the walk home. Still, Seungmin tries, “I didn’t mean we had to go together.”

“Tough.” Minho shrugs. “I’m bored and the food here sucks. I’ll walk you back and we can stop by that noodle place a few blocks from your apartment.”

“I don’t -” Seungmin deflates under Minho’s glare, crumpling in on himself like a can crushed beneath Minho’s foot. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re kind of a bully?”

“No. People tell me I’m a delight.” Minho holds the door open. “If we stay any longer in the bathroom, they’re all going to think we’re fucking. So let’s go.”

Seungmin blushes horrifically. Images splash through his mind of Minho bare and beautiful, want painted over his face, pressing Seungmin up against the sink and pinning him there. He spares another moment to adjust his clothes just because of that comment, then walks out the bathroom door with Minho on his heels.

Later, after they’ve sat down to eat noodles that Seungmin could actually stomach (because he goes there all the time, knows the menu, knows the ingredients, knows when to stop), Minho kicks his shoe against the pavement as they stand in the stoop of Seungmin’s apartment building.

“Are you going on your run tonight?” Minho asks. He’s swapped out his hoodie for a beanie, and his hair peeks out just beneath it, curling and tempting Seungmin to wind a finger through it and tug.

Seungmin feels bloated and pathetic and exhausted. There’s nothing he wants more than to hide in his room and fizzle out like a weak flame. “It’s too dark out. I’ll probably just head to bed.”

“Okay. Sure. Then I’ll see you tomorrow morning?”

Seungmin nods. He thinks – he may be delusional for this, but he almost thinks, here in the weak cast of the streetlight, that Minho is going to kiss him. His eyes are lidded and dark, his cheeks are dusted a fine pink from the cold, and his gaze flicks once down to Seungmin’s lips.

It could happen. It could happen, and Seungmin would let it, would want it. Desperately.

He’s taken too long to answer. Minho doesn’t kiss him, and Seungmin scoffs at himself, because really, why would he?

Minho just gives him a tight smile and says, “Good night, Seungminnie. Sleep well.”

Seungmin stands in the doorway and watches Minho walk down the street, back the way they came. His lips itch with a phantom kiss that he’s not sure he’ll ever get to feel.

//

The next morning, Minho slaps a smoothie down on the counter instead of Seungmin’s usual latte.

“What the hell is this?” Seungmin bemusedly inspects the drink. It’s the color of mud, and he can see the way the chia seeds float in the liquid, gelatinous and sickening.

“I made this for you. Have some respect.” Minho returns to stacking the cups beside the register, and Seungmin is so confused.

“Where’s my coffee?” he asks, refusing to pick up the foreign drink.

“Ran out of beans,” Minho shrugs. His coworker shuffles up to the counter and calls out the name for a mocha. Minho ignores Seungmin’s raised eyebrows. “I’m going on my break. Go and sit. Be there in a minute.”

Seungmin doesn’t remember inviting Minho to join him, but he doesn’t think he should complain. He takes a seat at his table by the window, bringing the glass with him, and watches as after a few minutes, Minho slumps towards him, hood up, glasses smudged, and a neutral expression on his face.

He sits across from Seungmin, a matching drink in front of him.

This has never happened before, and Seungmin feels incredibly out of his depth.

“How many calories is in this?” Seungmin asks before he can stop himself. He swirls the juice in the cup, making the liquid whirlpool before settling. Swirls it again and again and again.

Minho gives him a strange look. “How the fuck would I know? It’s a smoothie.”

Seungmin worries his lip between his teeth. He’s toeing a fine line, and his shoes are filled with lead.

He takes a sip and it’s sour. He uses his finger to delicately push it across the tabletop, as far as it can physically get.

“You’re the pickiest eater I know,” Minho tells him, but it sounds like a question, not an insult.

“Always pissed my mom off, too.” Seungmin mumbles, even though it isn’t really true. His mother had never said anything to that effect; Seungmin just knew it growing up, knew from the way she would worry her lip while he separated rice kernels with the tines of his fork, the way she stacked pediatric nutrition books on her bedside table, the way the digital scale disappeared from Seungmin’s bathroom one morning and never returned.

Minho studies him. “I’m not pissed. Just - is there a different drink you want? And don’t say coffee.”

Seungmin doesn’t know what to say, so he just mumbles a rote, “I’m okay hyung. Don’t worry about me.”

Minho stays quiet, sips at his own smoothie. It’s fascinating to Seungmin, the way Minho’s adam’s apple bobs up and down in a way that could only be described as pretty.

“When’s your race?” Minho asks, snapping Seungmin out of his study of Minho’s sleepy profile, and Seungmin frowns.

“Next month. Why? Do you want to come?”

“God, no.” Minho rolls his eyes. “I can’t imagine anything more boring. I was just wondering when you could get back to eating normally.”

Shivers down his spine. Seungmin is nauseous, strapped in a car hitting a patch of ice, spinning out of control. Normal. How would Minho know what normal is? As far as Seungmin is concerned, this is the way he’s always been, and always will be.

He knows not to say that. He knows he should lie.

“Normally,” Seungmin repeats, and his voice cracks. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s just, right now, I have to watch what I eat, and whatever. You know how it is.”

“I’m starting to find out,” Minho murmurs, and Seungmin’s stomach convulses around nothing. “C’mon. Let me buy you something different.” He pushes up out of his chair and it’s not a suggestion, not something that Seungmin can decline.

So he gets up and follows Minho to the counter. Slips himself out of his body as Minho orders him three different smoothies and sits them back down to watch Seungmin try all of them.

After seeing Seungmin take a sip of each and try to school his expression into something that isn’t instant disgust, Minho says, “I have to drop into the library this afternoon to study. I reserved a room.”

A chant of what the fuck is running circles in Seungmin’s head, and it’s not because of the weird combination of blended fruits sitting like dirt on his tongue. Minho doesn’t give him time to process before continuing on.

“Didn’t you say you had an exam coming up? There might be an extra seat for you in my room if you keep quiet and don’t distract me.”

“Hyung-” Seungmin tries, but his voice gets wedged in his throat.

Minho checks his phone. “My break’s over. See you at two. Text me when you get there. And text me what snacks you want me to bring.”

Minho stands up, stretches, adjusts his hoodie, and walks away. Seungmin stares at the three glasses in front of him and feels utterly lost.

//

The truth is, there is no race.

Seungmin is just intent on doing this for the rest of his life. It’s fine, he’s fine, and no matter how many times someone looks at him like he’s got one foot dangling off the side of a cliff, no one is going to stop him from being fine.

It’s normal, it’s fine, Seungmin knows what he’s doing. It’s a routine he can’t, won’t, break.

There’s comfort in the cycle, and Seungmin will happily run in circles until the day he dies.

//

“You two are so, so weird.”

He and Changbin are back at Seungmin’s usual table, and Minho is walking back to the counter after ferrying several plates of food back and forth for the last five minutes. Seungmin had greeted Minho when they walked in with a “Hey, hyung, if you were a coffee, you would be espresso cause you’re so-” and Minho had simply walked away before Seungmin could finish.

Changbin was still cringing when another one of the shop employees had to step up to take their order. Seungmin pouted profusely until he noticed Minho slinking out of the back room again, arms laden with food, and making his way towards where they sat. Changbin watched it all, eyes growing impossibly wider the more food Minho brought out, and had turned to Seungmin with a bewildered look on his face and his usual exclamation of how increasingly strange the dynamic between Seungmin and Minho has become.

“You’ve said that before.” Seungmin inspects one of the pastries, giving it a sniff and getting hit instantly with the cloying scent of marzipan. He places it back on the plate and pulls another towards him, repeating the process.

“But now it’s dialed up to eleven,” Changbin insists. He takes Seungmin’s rejected pastry and shoves the entire thing into his mouth. “Hyung looks at you like, like-”

“Like he hates me, I know.” Seungmin wrinkles his nose at the next pastry. The flakes crumble off and dust over his lap. Too messy.

“That’s not it,” Changbin shakes his head. “He looks at you like he wants to eat you. Not actually eat you,” he hurries to clarify after seeing the look on Seungmin’s face. “More like this is all an elaborate courtship. Like disgustingly romantic foreplay that could only ever happen between the two of you.”

Changbin gestures at the plates spread out on the table, the extra napkins and wet wipes Minho had included just for Seungmin, the glass of water that Seungmin could turn to when his mouth begins to feel like mush. “I’ve never seen Minho act so whipped.”

“Hyung doesn’t like me,” Seungmin mumbles, but it’s beginning to feel like the more he says it, the less he thinks that it’s true. “Much less want to, like, fuck me.”

“Min. Every time he walks over here, he stares at your legs for at least five seconds before saying anything.” Seungmin looks down at where his running shorts have ridden up high, revealing a lot more of his thighs than he had thought. A blush works its way up his neck and settles into his cheeks. “And don’t think I haven’t seen you checking out his ass, too. You’re both so transparent it hurts.”

Seungmin shrugs. So maybe he had been, but Minho looks especially cute today. His sweatpants ride low on his hips and Seungmin had caught a single glimpse of the band of his underwear and now that was going to be the only thing he could think about for the next 24-48 hours.

“Hyung doesn’t like me,” Seungmin says again, and it’s almost like he’s reassuring himself. “Cause don’t you think I’m a little too – much? For him to like me back.”

He thinks about Minho watching him have a breakdown in the shadowy corner of the supply closet. About Minho walking him home after buying him noodles that he barely ate. About Minho bringing him water and wet wipes and enough food to feed twelve people, all the while knowing Seungmin will probably taste less than half of it.

“Min. Hey, Min.” Changbin reaches over and slips his hand into Seungmin’s. Seungmin hadn’t even realized that he had been picking his cuticles until he sees the blood crusting underneath his nails. “Minho doesn’t think you’re ‘too much’. Neither do I, for that matter. And you know, if you asked him out, he would say yes.”

“It’s the asking out, though, that’s the hard part,” Seungmin tells him. Because flirting is easy, but everything that comes after that is uncharted territory for Seungmin. He doesn’t trust himself to take things further with Minho and not manage to fuck it all up.

“I believe in you, buddy.” Changbin is still holding Seungmin’s hand. “Just try not to get all in your head about this, yeah? Believe me when I say that Minho likes you just as much as you like him.”

Minho returns to their table before Seungmin can answer and wordlessly stacks the empty plates in one hand. Changbin has eaten most of it, but Seungmin had tried his best to sample almost all of the pastries Minho had brought him. There’s a flare of pride in his stomach when he sees Minho’s satisfaction as he cleans the table.

“You two keep looking over at me. Stop it. I’m trying to work.” Minho takes a rag out of his apron and wipes off the table, concentrating on brushing the crumbs off Seungmin’s side. “Want more water?” he asks Seungmin, and turns away without waiting for an answer.

“Weird,” Changbin emphasizes. Seungmin nods this time before pulling another plate in front of him. It’s a palmier shaped like a heart. Weird, he agrees, before taking a bite.

//

Seungmin is coming home from his lecture when he pauses in taking off his shoes and notices a book bag and a foreign pair of boots by the door.

Jeongin must have someone over, he thinks as he heads towards his room to change into his running clothes, but the sound of pans clattering in the kitchen makes him switch directions.

Minho is busy at the stove, manhandling a giant wok that Seungmin is pretty sure neither he nor Jeongin owns. Jeongin is nowhere to be seen, so Seungmin just stares and feels the same discomfort and confusion that he has come to associate with Minho every time they see each other these days.

“Why are you in my apartment?” Seungmin asks, watching Minho flick the overhead fan on.

“Making fried rice. My roommate has people over, and they were drinking and trashing my kitchen, so I needed somewhere to cook.” Minho points to one of the cabinets. “Grab us some bowls and spoons.”

Seungmin doesn’t even ask how Minho got into their apartment, or how he has quickly learned the layout of their kitchen. He just fetches bowls and utensils and hovers at Minho’s shoulder, watching Minho work.

“I didn’t add anything spicy to it. I also went easy on the garlic.” Minho turns around and offers Seungmin the spoon. His hair is pushed back off his forehead for once, his brow is shiny, and Seungmin swears he sees Minho’s big eyes sparkle under the kitchen lights. “Taste it and tell me if it’s too salty for you.”

Seungmin hesitates, his eyes zeroing in on the spoon in front of him. The food smells okay, he thinks, and it sounds like Minho’s kept the ingredients simple, but still he thinks about oil and soy sauce and whatever fatty cut of meat Minho had chosen to use. Minho nudges the spoon closer, and Seungmin very carefully leans in to taste the rice.

“It’s good, hyung,” Seungmin mumbles. He swallows, because he doesn’t want a repeat of the night at the restaurant, and Minho gives him a satisfied smile.

“Of course it’s good. I’m a great cook.” Minho ladles rice into two bowls and carries it over to the table tucked up into the corner of the kitchen. “Now sit and eat.”

Seungmin manages one portion, despite Minho’s offerings of more, and the discomfort that had been coloring the room gives way to something easier. Seungmin eats and sips at his water. Minho eats several bowls more than Seungmin and doesn’t stare at the way Seungmin gets up to grab chopsticks so he can pick out all the peas and pile them in a little well of rice in the corner of his bowl.

“My roommate has a lot of parties,” Minho mentions as he scrapes his spoon along the bottom of the bowl.

“I’m not really a party person, hyung,” Seungmin says, eyebrows raised.

“That’s not what I meant.” Minho takes Seungmin’s empty dishes and brings them to the sink. “I meant it gets too crowded at my apartment to cook in peace and quiet, and since this looks like the least used kitchen within a hundred-mile radius, I’ll be coming here when I need the space.”

Seungmin gapes. “Do I get a say in this?”

“If you say ‘okay, hyung, sounds good, you’re welcome to stock our pitifully empty fridge’ then yes, you get a say in this.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t gonna be it.” Seungmin gets up and follows Minho to the sink, where Minho has donned gloves and is starting to wash dishes in an alarmingly aggressive way. “How are you even going to get into the apartment?”

“Jeongin gave me an extra key. He gave me the all-clear after I told him I would leave him leftovers each time in the fridge. Which reminds me, pack some rice up for Innie.”

Seungmin obeys, because he’s not sure what else to do. The idea of having Minho regularly in their apartment isn’t a bad one; it’s just Seungmin wishes the promise of seeing Minho more often didn’t have to go hand in hand with the prospect of eating.

“So.” Minho is still resolutely concentrating down at the sink. “You like rice?”

Seungmin stills as he’s placing Jeongin’s leftovers in the fridge. “I guess? Rice, is, you know. A staple.”

“If there are other staples that you like, let me know.” Minho turns to look at Seungmin, and Seungmin finds himself rooted in place. Minho’s expression is neutral, but he speaks slowly as if choosing his words very carefully. Both of them are tiptoeing around something big and monstrous looming in the center of the kitchen, and Seungmin is holding his breath, waiting for Minho to poke the beast. But Minho simply says, “I like to eat anything, so if you want something specific, I can make it.”

Seungmin knows if he asks why, they’ll step an inch closer to what he badly wants untouched. So he just shrugs instead and says, “Sure, hyung.”

Minho turns back to the sink. “Grab a towel and dry these dishes.”

He and Minho stand shoulder to shoulder at the sink, leaving the monster there, and Seungmin is grateful for it, he thinks.  

He wonders how much of it, of him, that Minho can see, and how much more Minho can tolerate glimpsing before he decides he doesn’t want to be consumed by the beast just like Seungmin is.

//

It’s a new addition to Seungmin’s day, coming home and finding Minho bustling around the kitchen like it’s his own.

Sometimes Jeongin will be there too, sitting up on the counter and chattering away while Minho cooks, but most times it’s just Seungmin and Minho, moving around each other with a practiced air, and Seungmin isn’t sure where that came from.

He watches Minho cook, only interacting when Minho asks his opinion on certain spices or textures, and there’s a certain comfort to it. Maybe it’s the way Minho leaves his apron on the hook by the fridge, or maybe it’s how he brought over his special knife set and tucked it lovingly into one of the drawers. Maybe it’s just that Seungmin just likes Minho so much, and he’s beginning to suspect that Changbin is right, and the feeling might be mutual.

Because why else would Minho be here every other night, cooking meals that Seungmin definitely wouldn’t eat on his own, and even staying after they clean up so they can study together at the kitchen table, or read side by side on the couch.

It’s the only explanation that makes sense, and it resonates deeply when Seungmin finds himself talking Minho’s ear off about one thing or another, and he catches the tiny upturn of Minho’s lips.

It’s all very new, very sudden, and Seungmin is finding himself okay with it.

He feels a little exposed, here in his home where Minho can observe him when Seungmin isn’t vigilantly filtering himself. Since living with Jeongin, Seungmin has grown accustomed to feeling safe in the way he simply exists in the four walls of the apartment, quirks and specificities and compulsions and all. It’s unnerving to have Minho here, in close quarters, and to be giving Minho a glimpse of what Seungmin is like when he isn’t keeping it all very close to his chest.

Minho doesn’t seem to mind when Seungmin constantly picks and bites at his nails, or how he trails after Minho and closes cabinet doors, puts utensils back in the drawers. Sometimes Seungmin will outright refuse Minho’s cooking and will pull a frozen meal out from the freezer, because the concept of eating anything else seems like an awful, herculean task, and he knows what’s in those processed bricks of ice, knows what to expect. He’ll hunch over it, looking anywhere but at Minho, who simply heats up the same meal and sits across from him as they eat in silence.

Minho never says anything about it, never stops to tease or admonish him, and the nerves Seungmin feel in the very beginning start to melt away to a point where he can just relax and be.

One night, Minho asks if Seungmin wants to sit on the couch and eat so they can watch a show on the television. Seungmin nearly implodes at the idea of eating anywhere but the kitchen table, of spilling food on the couch, of not being able to devote his complete attention to the plate in front of him. Minho takes it all in stride and doesn’t suggest it again.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Minho once he’s calmed down enough to sit at the table. The food has gone a little cold and Minho is humming as he warms it back up in the microwave.

“Don’t be. The beef might’ve been a little undercooked, it’s good to pop it in for a few seconds.”

“I wasn’t really talking about the food.” Seungmin shakes his head to himself. “I’m sorry I’m… weird.”

The microwave beeps and Minho takes the plate out, gently sets it in front of Seungmin. “Seungmin. You’re weird, but not in the ways you probably think you are.”

“What does that mean?” Seungmin asks, bewildered. Even with all the time they’ve been spending together, Minho is still a mystery, still saying and doing things that are simultaneously endearing and confusing as hell.

“It means don’t apologize for being yourself.” Minho sits down across from him and points at his plate. “Food’s hot. If you burn your tongue, that’s on you.”

After they’ve finished eating, the two of them clean up together as they’ve started doing every night. It makes Seungmin feel useful, and it also satiates the little manic part of him that wants to see the kitchen as clean as it had been before Minho had started cooking.

They stand together at the sink, Minho once again washing dishes, and Seungmin drying what Minho hands over to him. He sneaks glances over at Minho, whose glasses continuously dip down his nose, forcing him to tip his head back and let gravity slide them back into place.

“I used to think you hated me,” Seungmin admits, although he doesn’t know why. Something about this terribly domestic moment, about the pretty pout of Minho’s lips, the way their shoulders and fingers brush constantly, makes him open his mouth and want to babble. He wrings the towel over and over in his hands, squeezing too tight.

“What makes you think I don’t?” Minho asks dryly.

“You made me mashed potatoes,” Seungmin says, because the evidence really is as obvious as that.

“And they were good, weren’t they?” Minho muses. He passes Seungmin a bowl to dry.

“Yeah, hyung. They were.”

They lapse back into silence. Minho hands Seungmin the last pot and picks up a towel to wipe down the countertops. Seungmin had mentioned one time how he hated when Jeongin left spills and sticky messes, and from then on Minho always takes time to wipe up after they were done. It’s the most benign things that Minho does that makes Seungmin’s heart skip a beat.

“Thanks, hyung,” Seungmin decides to tell him.

Minho continues to wipe, brow furrowing a little. “You don’t have to thank me, Seungmin. I need to eat too. Might as well do it together.”

“I think I do have to, though.” Seungmin watches Minho clutch the towel in his hand a little tighter. “Yeah, I think I do.”

Minho finishes cleaning up and folds the towel again, placing it exactly back where he had found it. “You’re blushing,” he tells Seungmin, and Seungmin’s hands shoot up to feel his cheeks.

“That’s not – it’s only because it’s warm in here!” Seungmin defends himself. Minho giggles at him, a completely foreign sound to Seungmin, and he thinks his heart stalls for just a moment in his chest. “Don’t laugh at me,” he whines.

Minho is still smiling as he pokes Seungmin in the arm. “Every morning you flirt with me like you’ll die if you don’t get to say whatever shitty pick-up line you came up with the night before. It’s very entertaining to see you all shy and blushing for once.”

“My pick-up lines are not pre-meditated,” Seungmin grumbles. He doesn’t want to think about the “51 Best Coffee Shop Pick-up Lines” page bookmarked on his computer. “They’re authentic and spontaneous, hyung.”

“Sure they are, Seungminnie.” Minho pats Seungmin’s cheek, his touch only adding to the flush of Seungmin’s skin.

“You’re insufferable,” Seungmin huffs, but he leans his head just a little more into the palm of Minho’s hand.

“That’s my line.”

“Remind me why I let you in here every night?”

“Because you’re kind of in love with me.” Minho snorts and pulls his hand away. Seungmin’s body reacts like he’s a moon caught in Minho’s gravity. They’re too close, sharing in each other’s air, and Seungmin feels chills race up his arms. Minho is looking at him with an expression Seungmin can’t quite pinpoint, but it’s still enough to maintain the flush to his cheeks.

Seungmin’s mind goes blank and quiet. He fumbles for a few minutes before admitting, “Yeah, okay. Okay, that’s fair.”

Minho levels him with a look. Steps up closer so their noses are almost touching. It’s just like the night after the restaurant, and this time Seungmin doesn’t imagine the way Minho’s eyes drop to his lips. “I was joking, Seungmin.”

Seungmin shrugs. “I mean, I’m kind of – not.”

“That’s not funny,” Minho says. He reaches out and twists his fingers in the front of Seungmin’s sweater.

“Hyung,” Seungmin whispers, because it feels blasphemous to speak any louder. “Can I kiss you?”

Minho considers this for a moment before backing Seungmin up against the kitchen counter and kissing him.

Minho’s hands are firm around Seungmin’s waist, his teeth determined as they tug at Seungmin’s lower lip. The countertop is digging into Seungmin’s lower back, but he doesn’t particularly care, not when Minho’s tongue is sliding into his mouth and licking against his teeth. He winds his arms around Minho’s neck and tugs him so they’re flush together, and he hopes Minho can feel the way his heartbeat speeds and skips along the more Minho’s fingers press into Seungmin’s skin.

Minho pulls away, and it takes Seungmin a good minute or so to catch his breath and open his eyes. Minho’s cheeks are colored pink in the way that Seungmin has come to adore, his lips kiss-bitten and his pupils huge and so, so pretty.

“Is this okay?” Minho asks. His hands flutter from Seungmin’s waist up to his arms, down to his wrists, back to his waist. Seungmin wants Minho to touch him all over, all at once.

“Yeah,” Seungmin murmurs, scraping his fingers through the short hairs at the nape of Minho’s neck, and getting rewarded with the way Minho’s eyes slip shut and the hum that is drawn up out of his throat. “Yeah, it’s – can you, hyung, can you-”

Minho raises his eyebrows. “All it takes to get you to shut your smartass mouth is to kiss you? I should’ve done this months ago.”

“Well, why didn’t you?” Seungmin mumbles back, and Minho laughs against his lips.

“I am now, aren’t I?” Minho smiles before kissing Seungmin again. He dips his thumbs in below the hem of Seungmin’s jeans, rubbing circles into Seungmin’s hips. When Seungmin has to breathe, Minho just moves along to trail open mouthed kisses down the side of his neck instead.

Minho nibbles a little right at Seungmin’s collarbone, before sinking his teeth in. Seungmin whines, embarrassingly loud, as he drops his hands down to Minho’s biceps and squeezes. He’s starting to overheat, the combination of his sweater and the pressure of Minho’s body holding him in place, and the overwhelming feverish speed with which his blood is pounding through his veins.

Minho is still sucking at his neck when he pushes a thigh right in between Seungmin’s, and suddenly Seungmin can’t focus on anything except the need to roll his hips down against Minho’s thick muscles.

“Hyung,” Seungmin gasps as Minho nudges his thigh up to meet the press of Seungmin’s hips. “Hyung, I want more, I want-”

Minho rucks Seungmin’s sweater up, ghosts his fingers against his nipples, before wrapping one arm around Seungmin’s torso and lifting him up onto the counter.

“What the fuck,” Seungmin squeaks, the casual display of strength sending a shiver down to the pit of his stomach. Minho slots himself again in between Seungmin’s thighs and yanks Seungmin’s legs forward so they wrap around Minho’s waist.

“What do you want, Seungminnie?” Minho asks softly. He pets Seungmin’s hair, brushing it off his forehead, and Seungmin revels in the intimacy of the touch. Lust floods his brain, and he wants wants wants.

“I dunno, just,” Seungmin fists his hands in Minho’s shirt and tugs him as close as they can get. “Can you just touch me, hyung?”

Minho smiles, a gentle thing, and Seungmin melts in his hands. “Tell me if you want to stop. Tell me if you don’t like something, okay?”

“Oh, uh. Sometimes I can’t really say it?” Seungmin already feels himself swimming a little, dizzy and simultaneously distant and hyper-focused. “Sometimes it’s too much, so can I like, tap you or something when I want to slow down?”

Minho unfurls Seungmin’s hand from his shirt and squeezes it. “Of course you can, Seungmin. Whenever you need to.”

“Thanks, hyung. And, um, you can do the same to me,” Seungmin says, a little shy. Sex has always been something he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of. His partners alternated between understanding and confused and sometimes frustrated with the way Seungmin handled, or rather couldn’t handle, acts of intimacy. He tries his hardest, he really does, but often it just doesn’t work out for him. He feels flighty, or nervous, or at complete unease in his own bones, and it’s all magnified ten times over during sex.

Minho knows him, though, Seungmin thinks. Minho knows how Seungmin likes to sit for hours at a time with his headphones clapped over his ears, how Seungmin fusses around while Minho cooks, how Seungmin refuses to eat anywhere but the kitchen table. Minho will keep him safe. Minho will listen. Seungmin is sure of that.

“Is it okay if I take off your sweater?” Minho asks. Seungmin answers by yanking it over his head, earning him a giggle and Minho’s hands returning to his waist.

“You, too,” Seungmin says, and Minho follows suit without another word. Seungmin isn’t sure what to do, where to put his hands, now that’s he’s confronted with what feels like miles of Minho’s perfect skin, almost-defined muscles and the soft give of his stomach.

He settles for simply pulling Minho into another kiss and letting his hands roam over everything that he can reach. Minho moans into his mouth when Seungmin’s fingers pass over the front of his jeans, pausing to fiddle a little with the buttons, and press his palm into where he wants to touch the most.

Minho hooks his fingers again into Seungmin’s jeans and tugs. “These next,” he mumbles against Seungmin’s lips.

It takes long enough to wrestle each other out of their jeans for Seungmin to get impatient and go back to kissing Minho, messy and wet. Finally, after Minho has yanked his pants down over his feet, the reality of the situation hits Seungmin like a truck.

Minho is standing naked in his kitchen, flushed from arousal, lips red and puffy, cock hard and leaking a little against his stomach. Seungmin is in a similar position, legs once again wrapped clumsily around Minho’s waist, caging him in close.

“We can go to the bedroom if you want?” Seungmin says, glancing at the door and trying to dig around in his cloudy brain for the details of Jeongin’s schedule – namely when he’ll be returning.

“Too far away.” Minho wraps his hand around Seungmin, and Seungmin gasps, eyes fixing on the sight of Minho’s short fingers in contrast to Seungmin’s cock. “And I’d really like to bend you over this counter.”

There’s a brief swell of alarm when Seungmin thinks about the mess they might make, the fact that sex should really, in his (usually correct) opinion, only happen in the bedroom. But Minho is looking at him like Seungmin is the only thing he can see, the only thing that exists, and Seungmin wants, so, so much.

Minho begins to work his hand in a slow rhythm, thumbing over Seungmin’s cock to collect the beading wetness there to make the movement smoother. “Remember to tap me if you want to stop,” he reminds Seungmin. Seungmin garbles some sort of affirmative, tongue thick and useless in his mouth.

Minho leans in and bites at the shell of Seungmin’s ear. He gasps as Minho whispers again, “Tell me what you want, Seungmin.”

“Anything, hyung,” Seungmin whines, heating rising to his skin and making him shiver all over. “Touch me, fuck me, I don’t – just please, do something.”

“How about I tell you what I want to do, and you can tell me if that sounds good, hm, baby?” Seungmin nods too fast, the pet name stoking the warmth in his belly. Minho hums. “I want to eat you out here on the counter. I want to make you come with my tongue and then again on my cock. How does that sound, Seungmin?”

Seungmin responds by untangling his legs from around Minho’s waist and spreading his thighs as far as he can manage.

“Good boy,” Minho smirks, and if Seungmin had thought he couldn’t get any more turned on, he was wrong. “Lean back, baby. Let hyung take care of you.”

Minho sinks to his knees as Seungmin leans back as best he can, propping himself up with a hand so he doesn’t smash his head against the wall. Minho’s fingers dig into the back of Seungmin’s thighs as he drags Seungmin a little further forward, slinging his legs over his shoulders.

The position isn’t comfortable, and Seungmin can only see the top of Minho’s head, but the discomfort quickly fizzles out at the feeling of a Minho’s lips fixing themselves to Seungmin’s inner thigh.

Seungmin shudders, sensitive and buzzing with a cocktail of nerves and want. Minho’s fingers press in a little firmer, as if to ground Seungmin, and Seungmin manages a “Please, hyung,” voice cracking in the middle.

Minho’s hot breath against his skin is a thrill in itself, and coupled with the kisses he lays inside Seungmin’s thighs, Seungmin is already embarrassingly worked up. He moans as Minho sucks and nibbles, taking his time to trail up and up to where Seungmin wants him the most.

Seungmin knows better than to open his mouth and demand that Minho hurry up. He’s certain that Minho is the type of lover who adores teasing, considering how much he teases Seungmin every day. So he just shuts his mouth and waits, waits until finally Minho is laying a soft, purposeful kiss right against Seungmin’s hole.

Seungmin’s hand slips and he fumbles to prop himself up again with his elbow as Minho begins to lick and mouth at him, laving his tongue in lazy patterns and sucking lightly at his rim. His head drops back, and moans spill from his lips as Minho begins to dip the tip of his tongue inside Seungmin, pushing a little further with each noise he wrings from Seungmin’s chest.

By the time he’s fucking his tongue deep into Seungmin, Seungmin is a shaking mess. His thighs tremble where they’re still slung over Minho’s shoulders, and he can’t seem to catch his breath, his mind abandoning all other involuntary actions just to dedicate his body to pressing back against Minho’s mouth.

Minho pulls away for just a moment, and his voice is deep and raspy when he says, “Want me to keep going?”

Seungmin groans, because now Minho is just being a little shit, and with his free hand he threads his fingers through Minho’s hair and drags him back down.

He rides Minho’s tongue until the filthy noises filling the kitchen and the wet heat from Minho’s mouth make the pressure in his gut crest, and he comes with a gasp, spilling all over his bare stomach.

There’s a ringing in his ears as he feels Minho slide gently out from underneath him to nudge Seungmin up the counter until he can rest his back against the wall. Minho grabs one of the clean towels and gently wipes down Seungmin’s stomach.

When Seungmin finally gets his eyes to focus, Minho is a sight to see. His lips, swollen before from kissing, are a brilliant cherry red. Spit is drying and dripping down his chin, and his eyes are clouded like he’s the one who just got tongue fucked to an orgasm.

Seungmin finds his voice as Minho is petting tender patterns on his thigh. “Now-” he tries, his mouth feels cottony and slow. “Now on your cock, hyung?”

Minho laughs outright and presses a kiss to Seungmin’s cheek. “If you want to keep going, Min.”

Seungmin’s legs are jelly as he clambers ungracefully off the counter, and he’s grateful for Minho catching him before he falls all the way to the floor. He kisses Minho like that, because he can’t help it, Minho looks perfect and stunning and –

“Beautiful,” Minho murmurs. Seungmin’s breath lodges in his throat. “You’re beautiful, Seungmin.”

In one ear, out the other. Seungmin is good at that these days. He doesn’t answer, just turns around and folds himself over the counter, pressing his hips back and moaning when Minho grinds his cock into his ass.

“Jeongin keeps lube and condoms in the cabinet beneath the sink,” Seungmin gasps as Minho strokes the pad of this thumb right over Seungmin’s hole, still wet with Minho’s spit.

“Of course he does. Nasty little freak.” Minho pulls away for just a moment as he roots around amongst the cleaning supplies and extra tupperware.

“You’re about to finger me on the counter of our kitchen. We have no right to call anyone nasty right now,” Seungmin says. Minho snickers and pops the cap on the bottle of lube.

The slide of Minho’s fingers is smooth and there’s not so much of an ache now that Seungmin is relaxed enough from coming already. He hiccups a little, rocks back against Minho’s fingers, but Minho goes slow, stretching Seungmin like there’s all the time in the world.

“Pretty baby,” Minho coos, his other hand stroking down Seungmin’s spine, and Seungmin shuts his eyes tight.

“Fuck me.” Seungmin chokes on the words as Minho crooks his fingers just right. “Please – hyung.”

Minho hums and Seungmin can hear the crinkle of the condom wrapper behind him. He buries his face where he’s got his head pillowed in his arms, clamps his mouth down around his hand as Minho eases inside of him.

Seungmin whimpers, and Minho stills his hips, breathing clipped. “Okay?” he asks. “Still okay, Seungmin?”

Seungmin whines out a broken sound, a combination of a moan and Minho’s name, and Minho begins rolling his hips up to meet Seungmin’s.

Minho sets a slow rhythm, fucking in deep and dragging his cock along Seungmin’s walls while Seungmin devolves into a sniffling, gasping mess.

“Feels good,” Seungmin groans around where he still sucking at the back of his hand. “Feels so good, hyung.”

Minho’s hands tighten where they’ve fixed themselves around Seungmin’s waist. He drapes himself over Seungmin’s back, his weight fully pressing Seungmin into the countertop, and begins to pump his hips a little faster.

“You too, baby,” Minho’s voice is suddenly close to Seungmin’s ear, and even though Seungmin’s skin feels impossibly hot, goosebumps still raise along the back of his neck. “Doing so well for me, taking me so well.”

Seungmin squeezes his eyes shut again and lets Minho’s praise wash over him. He loses himself in the ringing sound of when their skin meets, in Minho’s growl right in his ear, in the building pleasure surging up in his stomach again.

Minho pulls all the way out, and Seungmin has just a moment to collect himself before Minho is shifting Seungmin’s hips a little and realigning them so that when Minho pushes back in, Seungmin can see sparks behind his eyelids.

“There, hyung,” he chants, voice growing louder and pitching higher. “There, there, there-”

As Minho snaps his hips up into Seungmin, Seungmin hears the click of the lube cap once more, before Minho snakes a hand around his waist and wraps his fingers around Seungmin’s cock again. Each thrust from Minho pushes Seungmin into the tight hole Minho’s fingers have formed for Seungmin to fuck, the lube Minho had just drizzled over his fingers driving Seungmin closer and closer to insanity.

Seungmin is still garbling what might be nonsense now, and when Minho’s fingers thread through Seungmin’s hair and he tugs sharply, Seungmin’s hips jerk and he comes again.

He shivers and shakes as Minho keeps fucking into him, faster now, hands returning to Seungmin’s waist so he can yank Seungmin back against his cock over and over. Seungmin can’t stop moaning, still riding the high of his orgasm, and he can feel the moment when Minho’s movements stutter and he grinds out his own orgasm inside of Seungmin.

Seungmin only knows the weight of Minho on his back and Minho’s breathing and lazy mouthing at the crook of his neck for the next few minutes. Then Minho is murmuring, “I’m gonna pull out now, baby, but hyung will catch you if you fall.”

As Minho eases out, his arm around Seungmin’s waist is the only thing keeping Seungmin from crumbling to the floor. He grabs the towel off the counter again and wipes the both of them down, all the while still supporting most of Seungmin’s weight.

“Can you walk to the bedroom?” Minho asks. Seungmin leans heavily into his warmth.  

Seungmin whines, feeling small and a little petulant. “Carry me,” he demands.

“That wasn’t part of the deal,” Minho says, and Seungmin can hear from his voice that there’s a smile on his face.

“Is now.” Seungmin’s grumble turns into a yelp as Minho easily scoops him up and half drags, half carries Seungmin into the bedroom.

“You’re so light,” Minho says, but there’s a careful lack of inflection there. Seungmin doesn’t care; the words send a sharp spike of pride through him, a douse of lightning almost as heady as an orgasm.

Minho deposits Seungmin on the bed and turns to search for clothes in Seungmin’s drawers. He succeeds in getting an uncooperative Seungmin into a pair of clean boxers, and then takes a pair of Seungmin’s for himself.

Seungmin climbs under the covers and leaves a space open for Minho. He looks up expectantly, and there’s a smirk on Minho’s lips.

“I’ll be back, Min. Just gonna clean up the kitchen, in case Jeongin comes back and finds, you know. Cum on the cabinets.”

Seungmin giggles at that, head still floating up in the clouds, and Minho smiles down at him, fingers running through Seungmin’s hair. He presses a kiss to Seungmin’s forehead and murmurs, “Be right back.”

Minho returns with their clothes piled up in his arms. He takes a moment to fold each item of clothing and place them on top of the dresser. Seungmin’s heart swells nearly to bursting.

Seungmin makes grabby hands at him just as Minho is about to fold up his hoodie. Minho wordlessly tugs it down over Seungmin’s head.

When Minho finally climbs into bed with him, Seungmin immediately snuggles up close.

“We should shower,” Minho says, but his arms are wrapped tight around Seungmin and show no sign of budging.

“Later,” Seungmin mumbles back. He’s too tired and too happy to worry about being dirty in his clean bed, and he’s already beginning to feel the pinpricks and the buzzing.

Seungmin vibrates a little, unable to help himself, and begins to wiggle back and forth in Minho’s grip.

“Want me to grab your headphones?” Minho asks quietly, and Seungmin is once again struck with how much Minho knows, how much Minho sees. He shakes his head, unable to dig the words out of his throat. “Tap me if you need me,” is all Minho says.

For now, this is enough. Minho will keep him safe, Minho will listen. He shuts his eyes and rocks himself to sleep in Minho’s arms.

//

If Seungmin’s body is his temple, then he’s worshipping a false god.

Seungmin can name only a handful of moments where he has been truly content in his own skin. The discomfort he feels for the majority of his life feels like an insult, or a punishment. It doesn’t make sense, hating the thing he’s in, but he does it all the same. The hatred he feels for his body feeds him more than any morsel of food every could.  

But Minho called him beautiful. The word sticks to the walls of Seungmin’s mind like rotting, dirty, chewed-up gum. He wonders if Minho is a liar or just doesn’t see what Seungmin sees. Because when Seungmin looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see a single thing he would call beautiful.

He’s worked so hard, his whole life, to shed weight, to abuse his body, to make it good; and it still isn’t beautiful. And he thinks it can’t really matter what Minho says, because Seungmin doesn’t know if he’d believe him.

Minho touching his body is a blessing he doesn’t think he deserves, and that’s not something he thinks he’ll ever be able to say out loud. He can’t risk Minho hating him just as much as he hates himself.

//

The weight of a leg tossed over his own brings Seungmin drifting out of sleep.

His eyes open to the sight of Minho, pale-faced and undeniably pretty, resting his head on the pillow beside him. Minho is awake, just barely so, and watching Seungmin back.

“You snore,” Minho says, voice rough from sleep. His eyes are soft in the morning, blinking rapidly like he’s trying to convince himself he’s awake.

“You kick,” Seungmin tells him. He tries desperately to catalogue every part of this moment: Minho, still bare chested from the night before, Minho without his smudgy glasses, Minho with his hair mussed and clinging a little with static to the pillow.

“Maybe I kicked to stop you from snoring.”

Seungmin cocks an eyebrow and smiles. “Did it work?”

“No,” Minho grumbles. He buries himself back in the blankets. “‘M cold.”

“I can turn on the heating?” Seungmin offers, only to have Minho groan next to him.

“Obviously that was me asking you to cuddle.” Minho wiggles closer to Seungmin and pointedly wrestles and maneuvers Seungmin’s arms until that they’re comfortably curled together. “You’re so dumb sometimes,” he mumbles into Seungmin’s chest.

“Sorry for not being able to read your mind, hyung.” Seungmin’s hand finds Minho’s head. Minho’s hair might be the softest thing Seungmin has ever touched, all fine silk and satin.

“You should be,” Minho says, but the way he whines is offset by how he tangles their legs together, pressing his cold feet to Seungmin’s calves and making Seungmin hiss.

They lay like that for a while, Seungmin repeatedly carding his fingers through Minho’s hair, and Minho humming occasionally and tapping a rhythm out onto Seungmin’s skin. Then Seungmin can’t help it when his eyes flick to the clock on the wall; not because he wants this moment to end, but because he really, truly, cannot help it.

“Don’t you have work this morning?” Seungmin asks, eyes fixed to the hands twirling around in circles on the clockface.

“Got someone else to cover my shift.” Minho sounds so tiny and feels so precious in Seungmin’s arms.

“Oh, hyung,” Seungmin giggles and pulls back so he can get a better look at Minho. All he sees are the tips of Minho’s ears, glowing pink. “You like me, huh?”

Minho mutters something that might be a string of curses into Seungmin’s neck. Seungmin just pulls the blankets up higher and tucks them in around Minho’s shoulders. Warmth floods Seungmin’s chest, because Minho didn’t deny it, and that’s more than enough for Seungmin. He hides his smile in Minho’s hair and allows the excitement and the jitters to flutter up and down his body. Minho likes him, and Seungmin doesn’t understand why, but he’ll take it.  

They drift in and out of sleep nestled in one another’s arms, and it’s nice, it’s so nice. Then the pinpricks start to jab at Seungmin’s skin, swarms of bugs crawling over his skin and burrowing into his pores. He glances again at the clock and sighs. Time to get up and get dressed.

He gently disentangles himself from where Minho has locked all four of his limbs around Seungmin’s body. Minho makes a sleepy groan of protest, cracking his eyes open as Seungmin slides out from under the blankets and walks over to his dresser.

Minho props himself up on his elbow, shakes his hair out of his eyes, and raises an eyebrow. “Kim Seungmin. Didn’t take you to be a hit it and quit it kind of guy.”

Seungmin frowns back at him and says, “I’m not, hyung. I just have to go on my run.” He says it like it’s obvious, because it is.

Minho stares him down, and Seungmin busies himself with digging around for a pair of socks in his drawer.

“You’re not serious.”

Seungmin is. He pulls out each item of clothing and lays them down on the foot of the bed before dressing in order of feet up, Minho simply watching while he does. Seungmin tries not to feel self-conscious when he rolls the waistband of his shorts a few times so they don’t slide down his hips. He wonders if it’s time to buy new ones; the thought that they’ll be a size down sends a shiver down his spine.

“It’s raining out,” Minho says, again trying to catch Seungmin’s attention, and Seungmin only shrugs.

“I run all the time in the rain.”

“You shouldn’t, though,” Minho shoots back. “What if you slip and fall?”

“My shoes have good grip.”

Seungmin smooths the front of his shirt down and studies himself in the floor length mirror. Good enough, he thinks. Good enough.

Minho is silent again on the bed, and it’s unnerving Seungmin, who’s expecting a snarky comment or at least a crack at the matching lavender colored set of shirt and shorts he’s decided to wear this morning.

But Minho just says nothing, until there is very quiet murmur of, “Tell me what the right thing to do here is.”

Seungmin pauses in the act of tugging his hair back with a headband. He meets Minho’s eyes in the mirror. “Huh? What do you mean, hyung?”

“I mean,” Minho sits up fully, the blankets pooling in his lap. “I mean, Seungmin, that I can see your ribs. I mean I can count on one hand how many meals I’ve seen you choose to eat on your own. I mean you run every morning and every night, and you don’t skip a single day.”

Seungmin is someone else entirely while listening to the words coming from Minho’s mouth. It doesn’t feel real; it can’t feel real.

“So tell me, Seungmin, what should I do? Should I stop you from running? Should I go with you? Should I drag you back in bed and keep you here until you tell me what’s wrong?”

“There’s nothing wrong,” Seungmin insists, turning around to meet Minho’s hard gaze. He’s in freefall, a body untethered, cut loose and left at the mercy of the cruel elements.

A part of Seungmin is thrilled that Minho knows now, that he gets it. The rest of him is sick, sick to his stomach and so, so tired.

“Please.” Minho might be pleading, might be just speaking coolly and calmly, but Seungmin still feels a distinct reactionary panic. “Don’t lie to my face.”

All Seungmin does is lie. He’ll be damned if he stops now, just for Minho to stop looking at him like he’s one crack away from shattering.

He opens his mouth but doesn’t get a word out. Minho continues, “You can tell me, Seungmin. You can tell me if you’re not okay.”

Frustrated tears start to sting at the back of Seungmin’s eyes, and there’s nothing he can do to stop them. He feels dizzy, injected with fear and a sudden, intense loathing for every atom making up his body. “Why do I need to say it? When you’ve already made up your mind that I’m not?”

“Because if you don’t think you’re sick, then there’s no way you’re going to get better,” Minho tells him, voice so slow and controlled, expression so impossible for Seungmin to read.

“This isn’t – I’m not sick,” Seungmin fumbles. “I’m not. I’m just, just-” Disciplined. In control. Sick, sick, sick.

Minho sits up straighter, raises his hands as if to pacify a frightened wild animal. “Seungmin. It’s okay. I’m not blaming you. You’re okay.”

“You are blaming me,” Seungmin retorts. He stumbles over his words, breathing picking up. “You are, you’re – you’re putting words in my mouth, you’re being – I’m not sick, you’re just making me feel like shit, and making things up-”

Seungmin feels cornered, smothered. He begins to fist his hands in his hair and pull, hard. His scalp stings, and Minho gets up off the bed to stand in front of him.

“Hey, Seungmin, hey, it’s okay, you’re okay.” Seungmin feels the pressure of Minho’s fingertips beginning to scratch through the hair at the base of his neck. “You’re okay, you’re okay…”

“It’s not okay, it’s not,” Seungmin is chanting. “You’re wrong, I’m not sick, this is normal, hyung, I’m normal.”

“Seungmin.” Minho’s voice is firm in contrast to the way Seungmin’s voice is climbing higher and higher. “You’re hurting yourself. You’ve been hurting yourself for months. I want to help you, but I need to know what’s wrong.”

“I don’t want your help!” Seungmin jerks himself out of Minho’s hands. “I don’t want it, and I don’t need it. So can you just fuck off and leave me the hell alone?”

Minho’s mouth snaps shut, and a shutter falls over his eyes. Seungmin can’t tell what he’s thinking, what the hard line to his lips means. He can only assume that Minho is just as upset with him as he is with Minho.

“Seungmin,” Minho starts to say again, but Seungmin makes a frustrated, keening noise high in his throat.

“I have to go on my run,” Seungmin pushes past Minho and snatches his phone from the nightstand, yanking the charging cable out. “Can – can you not be here when I get back?”

Minho just looks at him. His expression is still that carefully blank one, and Seungmin finds himself hating it. “If that’s what you want.”

“It is.” Seungmin feels foul, feels dirty, feels all types of pathetic. “It’s what I want.”

“Fine.” Minho walks over and begins gathering his clothes from where he had folded them on the dresser before they had gone to sleep. “I’ll be gone when you get back.”

“Thanks,” Seungmin says woodenly. He opens his mouth to say goodbye, but the words stick in his throat as he watches Minho pull his socks on. Seungmin turns and walks out of his bedroom, but not before shutting it again to give Minho privacy while he’s dressing.

He crams his headphones over his ears and struggles to lace up his shoes, vision swimming shaky and red. The last thing he sees before he leaves the apartment is Minho’s stupid boots, slotted right between Seungmin’s sneakers and slippers.

//

Seungmin sprains his ankle in his senior year of high school.

It’s a stupid mistake. He trips over a rock while on a trail run and goes down hard. The urgent care is crowded at 7 in the morning, and Seungmin wants to get it all over with so he doesn’t have to worry about making it to class on time.

They fit him with a brace and recommend physical therapy. Seungmin takes the minimum three weeks off from running. He swears that in those lazy, heavy three weeks, the number on the scale ticks up up and up. He cuts down on intake. He does low impact exercises on his bedroom floor, quiet enough so his parents don’t hear.

Three weeks later, his ankle is still fucked, and he still starts to run again.

The hurt is justified, he thinks. It’s a punishment for getting lazy, sloppy; a reminder that he needs to tighten up and do better.

His ankle never fully heals. He doesn’t particularly care. He’s afraid, afraid because he knows himself, and he knows that he’ll keep running until the cartilage erodes, until his bones snap, until he weighs absolutely nothing at all.

//

“Hyung. Seungmin hyung. Seungmin.”

It’s Jeongin’s voice that forces Seungmin to open his eyes.

He immediately regrets it. The world is at once sharp and unforgiving, fingers digging into his eye sockets and knives scraping against his skin. His brain feels like it’s on fire, and he struggles to connect it to the chills running up and down his body.

Jeongin is speaking, and Seungmin has to concentrate too hard to listen. “I was getting ready to leave for class and saw that your running shoes were still by the door. And then Minho texted me that you didn’t stop by the shop this morning, and I just thought I should check if you were… okay? Are you okay?”

Seungmin feels one step away from death. “I think I’m sick,” he croaks out, and he’s not sure whether it’s an answer to Minho’s question from yesterday morning or not. He hasn’t been sick for months, years maybe, because he is so careful not to be. Illness would fuck his schedule, so his solution is to simply not get ill.

His body didn’t seem to get the memo this morning, though.

“Yeah, you don’t look great.” Jeongin hovers at the side of the bed. “Did you go running in the storm last night?”

Seungmin went running in the storm and had doubled his route. When he had returned to the apartment late in the night, he had nearly collapsed onto the shower floor, and had to take ten minutes to drag himself up and into bed. Jeongin takes his silence as answer enough.  

“How stupid can you be, hyung?” Jeongin sighs, bringing his hand up to press against Seungmin’s forehead. Seungmin doesn’t have a response to that one. A lot more, he thinks, but his mouth feels like it’s full of glue, and he can’t speak around it.

“You’re way too hot,” Jeongin withdraws his hand and Seungmin’s forehead feels ten times warmer without Jeongin’s palm there. “Like, seriously, I think we should maybe get you to a doctor.”

A doctor sounds good, Seungmin thinks. A lobotomy would sound better, though.

“I’m gonna get someone to drive us to the urgent care, okay? And then we can see a doctor and they can give you something for the fever and – everything else.”

Seungmin isn’t sure what everything else means, but he dreads finding out. A realization occurs to him, and he snatches at the front of Jeongin’s shirt, pleading, “Not Minho. Don’t let Minho drive us.”

“Are you delirious, too?” Jeongin asks, but he only sounds worried. “Hyung is probably the only one with a car who’s awake right now. I’m sorry that you two are fighting, or whatever it is that’s happening, but I’m gonna call him and you can’t stop me.”

Seungmin contemplates that for a moment before leaning over the side of the bed and puking his guts out onto the floor.

“Oh, fuck, okay, okay, I’m gonna get a towel and some water, just lean back, hyung, don’t get up, I’ll be right back-”

Seungmin doesn’t register Jeongin leaving, nor does he recognize Jeongin when he comes back to tip a cup of water down Seungmin’s impossibly dry throat and gets on his knees to wipe up the mess Seungmin had left on the floor.

It’s mostly bile and acid, and Jeongin pauses with the towel in hand.

“When was the last time you ate?” Jeongin asks quietly. “There’s no – this is just…”

Jeongin doesn’t seem to expect an answer, which is great, because Seungmin can’t give him one. When was the last time he ate? Seungmin’s brain is too dedicated to decomposing to be able to count back the hours. His throat is already dry again, and suddenly Jeongin is lifting him out of bed and setting him on his feet.

He lets Jeongin dress him, too exhausted to even fuss over Jeongin grabbing randoms items of clothing from the drawers. He does appreciate how Jeongin grabs Minho’s hoodie off the floor and wrestles Seungmin’s limp arms into it before walking him out of the apartment.

The trip in the elevator is two minutes of pure hell. Seungmin leans almost all his weight on Jeongin and devotes his remaining energy to not puking again all over the elevator floor and Jeongin’s shoes.

Once they step outside of the building, Minho is there waiting for them. He’s still got his apron on from work, and he walks up to immediately take Seungmin’s dead weight off Jeongin’s shoulders.

“Hyung’s strong,” Seungmin says, his voice scratchy and wrecked. He uses a finger to twirl Minho’s enamel cat pin around once, then again.

“I don’t think he’s even lucid,” Jeongin is saying to Minho. “He’s really out of it, hyung,

“Then we’re going to the emergency room instead.” Minho is his usual calm self, all business, as he pops the car door open. “Get him buckled in and sit with him in the back in case he throws up again.”

Seungmin doesn’t know how long they drive for, or where they’re going. The car is a liminal space, his head in Jeongin’s lap a tiny comfort, and Seungmin is out of his mind and unwilling to find it again.

The car stops and Seungmin whines when his head is lifted away from the safety of Jeongin’s lap.

It’s Minho speaking, lips almost touching the shell of Seungmin’s ear. “Hey. We’re here, Minnie. Hyung’s going to carry you, okay? So do me a favor and don’t vomit down my back, baby.”

Seungmin wants to say something like ‘No promises’, but Minho is already hefting him into his arms and carrying him through the misting of rain and into the building.

Seungmin doesn’t care anymore that he’s maybe fighting with Minho, maybe has permanently tainted their relationship with the horrible thing that’s chewing Seungmin up and spitting him back out. Minho will keep him safe, will make sure he’s okay. The thought is enough for Seungmin to let go and to shut his eyes.

//

He dreams of home, of his mother and father, of bathroom tiles and cold winter days. Minho flits in and out of the scenes in his mind, a background character in the spectacle of Seungmin coming undone. It’s like someone has tugged and tugged at the thread holding together his seams, and now his stomach is spilling out on the floor, and there’s nothing he can do to keep it all in anymore.

Sometimes his nightmares revolve around food; sometimes his good dreams do the same.  

He hates that it permeates his brain to the point that it consumes him even in sleep. It isn’t fair; it isn’t pretty. He thinks that it has seeped into his veins for long enough, deep enough, that it would be impossible to even begin to scrub it out of him.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to try.

//

He wakes up in a foreign bed and is immediately uncomfortable.

The blanket is too rough, the pillow too soft, and his head sinks in too much. There’s music being pumped in from somewhere, and Seungmin swears he can hear the trilling and beeping of every single machine within a mile radius.

He squirms in the sheets, but there’s not enough strength in his body to actually sit up and get out of the bed. His arm is tethered to something, his legs feel like lead weights, and panic begins to drip like acid, burning a hole in the center of his brain.

“You’re okay, Seungmin. We’re in the hospital a block north of campus. You’ve only been out a day. They’re giving you some fluids for your fever. You’re okay.”

It’s a terrible effort for Seungmin to turn his head, but he manages it anyways. Minho is sitting next to the bed, wearing a sweater and pair of sweatpants instead of his usual hoodie and jeans combination. He clutches a generic cup of coffee in one hand, and the burnt smell makes Seungmin’s stomach churn.

“I’m going to throw this out. Be right back, okay, Min?” Once again, Minho is able to read his mind, but Seungmin doesn’t think too hard about it. He’s just happy Minho is carrying away that foul smell and leaving the room neutral, blank beige walls and that distinct, clinical and stuffy smell accompanying all hospitals.

Minho sits back down and Seungmin tries to clear his throat. Wordlessly, Minho holds up a cup of water and guides the straw to Seungmin’s lips. He watches as Seungmin gulps down the water like it’s the first liquid he’s tasted in days.

“How do you feel?” Minho asks once Seungmin has drank his fill.

“Achy,” Seungmin croaks, because his whole body feels like it’s been crushed by an eighteen-wheeler and peeled off the pavement to be dumped into this bed.

“Well, you sound awful.”

“Thanks, hyung.”

“Just telling the truth, Seungmin,” Minho tells him, and it feels like the smallest dig at Seungmin’s nearly nonexistent pride.

“Can we please not fight while I feel like I’m dying? It’s not going to be a fair match,” Seungmin frowns.

“Sorry,” Minho says. His eyes are trained down at Seungmin’s blankets. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Seungmin fiddles with the edge of the blanket and Minho’s eyes drift to his fingers. “Me too. I’m sorry, hyung.”

When Minho doesn’t speak again, Seungmin lets himself take stock of the hospital room. His is the only bed, so it’s a closet of a space, really only a window, an armchair, and a television. He can see doctors and nurses bustling out in the corridor through the slim window on the door, and he thinks about how many people are more deserving of this room than he is, how many people are sicker and in need of desperate help.

The speculation doesn’t feel good, so Seungmin instead turns his attention back to Minho. The purple shadows under his eyes are more pronounced than Seungmin has ever seen them. He’s wearing a different pair of glasses, the lenses thicker and the frame chunkier. His lips look chapped, a far cry from when just the other night Seungmin had felt them, soft and supple, against his own.

His mind wanders once again to if his parents are being billed for his visit as he sits here. He doesn’t want to think about a call from his mother waiting for him when he gets home – whenever that will be.

Minho catches how his eyes drift to the bedside table, where a poorly wrapped gift sits. “Everyone’s been in and out of here to check on you while you rested. Changbin dropped that off earlier. The doctors want to keep you on a special diet, so you’re not allowed to eat those cookies yet.”

“Wasn’t going to anyways,” Seungmin mumbles, unable and unwilling to fit that filter over his mouth, and too exhausted to think again about what Minho knows and what he doesn’t.

“I’ll keep them until we get you home,” is all Minho says.

Seungmin sags back into the blankets. He starts to hum, no melody, just something to do with his mouth and his dry throat. He’s zoning out, unable to control his volume and getting swept up in the turbulent currents inside his head, when Minho reaches over and inches his fingers over Seungmin’s hand.

The instinct to recoil is strong, but the need to touch Minho is stronger. He watches Minho’s fingers pause, as if giving Seungmin time to retract his hand, and then intertwine with Seungmin’s fingers like it’s the most natural position in the world, something default, something that has always been.

Minho’s hand is small and warm. Seungmin’s hums taper off and he chooses instead to focus on the lines of Minho’s palm, the callouses at the tips of his fingers, the rough edges of his cuticles.

Minho lets him touch as much as he wants to, needs to. It feels like a peace offering, and Seungmin tries to let his own apology bleed through his fingers and spill onto Minho’s skin.

The hospital room grows impossibly loud, too many different sounds compiling into one big roar. Seungmin tries his best to concentrate on Minho’s hand in his, but it grows more difficult with the overwhelming shriek of machines and footsteps shaking through the hospital and reverberating around his room.

Seungmin taps Minho on the back of his hand.

“Too much?” Minho asks, and Seungmin is relieved that Minho understands immediately. He nods. “I’ll see if I can get the doctors to dim the lights, or something. Or if I can pull the blinds down over the window. Sit tight, okay?”

Minho leaves and Seungmin gets lost in rubbing the scratchy hospital blanket in between two fingers. When he returns, the room is a bit darker, and Minho walks over to the windows and lowers the blinds, shutting out more of the grating light.

“Better?” Minho takes the seat beside the bed once more, and Seungmin nods again. “Good.”

Minho doesn’t turn on the television, doesn’t do anything but seek Seungmin’s hand and use his free one to scroll through his phone. Seungmin is grateful for not having to verbalize anything, content just to hold Minho’s hand and rub the blanket, rub the blanket.

He goes back to sleep for a while, now lulled by the white noise of the machines running next to his bed.

When he wakes up, it’s Jeongin sitting in the chair this time. He’s got his legs propped up on the foot of Seungmin’s bed, earbuds in as he watches a video on his phone. Seungmin kicks his feet from under the blankets.

“Hey! You’re awake,” Jeongin smiles at him and pops his earbuds out. “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know,” Seungmin answers. He does a quick look around the room and feels himself deflate a little when he sees that it’s just the two of them. “Better, I guess?”

Jeongin hums and there’s a small knowing smirk on his face. “Minho went to grab us some snacks. He’ll be back in a minute, probably.”

“Oh.” Seungmin shifts around in his bed. “How long have you been here?”

“I just came up. Minho’s been here since-” Jeongin checks his phone. “Since you got here, I think. He only left when the nurses yelled at him to sleep in his own bed instead of this chair.”

Shame and embarrassment burn their way down Seungmin’s throat. He doesn’t deserve Minho’s kindness and attention after the things he’d said. He feels rotten just thinking about Minho sitting there, alone, watching Seungmin sleep uselessly in this bed he doesn’t deserve.

“Sorry for puking on the floor,” Seungmin tells Jeongin. “And for making you clean it up.”

“Call it payback for the time I missed the toilet after Changbin’s party, hyung. No big deal. ‘M happy to do it.” Jeongin pauses. “Well, happy isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean. I guess I’m just trying to say I’d do pretty much anything for you.”

“Oh,” Seungmin’s lower lip quivers and he doesn’t know why. “Oh.”

Jeongin shifts closer in the chair and Seungmin reflexively sinks back into his pillows. “So, hey, listen, hyung. The nurse said – well, they said a lot of things, but the main thing is that you’re underweight. Really underweight. And I don’t want to make you tell me anything you don’t want to, but I’d really like it if you told me maybe a little bit. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

Seungmin wants to duck down under the blankets and hide from the world for the rest of his life.

“You’ve told me before, how food is a weird thing for you, and I get that, that’s how your brain works, but hyung, this feels like… like it’s more than that.”

The door to his room slides open just as Seungmin lets his jaw fall slack and he says, reciting the words he has read a thousand times from various blogs, articles, studies, “Neurodivergent individuals show higher rates of disordered eating, including anorexia and bulimia.”

Minho is standing there in the doorway, a bag of chips in one hand, and the expression on his face, always so cautious and impassive, is one that Seungmin can’t recognize. He takes a moment to try and puzzle it out: furrowed brows, a downturn to his pretty lips. His eyes – Minho is blinking rapidly and Seungmin has never seen him look so, so –

“I can send you some articles to read, if you’d like,” Seungmin continues, because the growing discomfort in the room is starting to make his skin sting, and no one is stopping him from running on and on. “And there’s this book my mom had back in high school when she tried to get me kicked off the track and field team. Not because she was being mean, or anything, you know, just because I guess she was a little worried. It was fine though, in the end. I still got to be part of the team and still got to run, and, yeah. Anyways…”

No one speaks, and Seungmin fumbles his words. He thinks hard about the reality of where he is and what’s happened. Seungmin is in a hospital. Hospitals are for sick people. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that Seungmin is sick.

He knows that, and he doesn’t know what to do with that.  

Seungmin looks up at Minho. Now he’s got this look on his face like maybe his heart is breaking, and that, at least, is an expression Seungmin can put a name to.

“You asked if I was sick, hyung,” Seungmin says. “I think that book would say that I am.”

Jeongin makes a soft noise of distress. Minho sits gently at the edge of Seungmin’s bed and lays a hand on Seungmin’s leg through the blankets. “What do you say, though, Seungmin?”

“I’m tired. I’m really fucking tired.” Tension that Seungmin didn’t even know was present in his body begins to bleed out of his shoulders. He shudders and searches desperately for something, anything, and again Minho’s hand is there, an offering to ground Seungmin from the ensuing storm.

Seungmin squeezes too tight, he knows that, but Minho doesn’t complain. He just squeezes back.

“Eating is hard for me for all the reasons they say it is. All of it, texture, taste, smell, spice; it’s always on my mind, I can’t stop thinking about it, and that just makes eating so hard, you know?” Seungmin shakes his head, shakes his head. “Then, I dunno, I think I got too much in my head, because I feel bad all the time, with my body, with myself, so I run, and I don’t eat, and I just think if I can keep it all under control, all together, then my brain will finally be quiet.”

He's still shaking, dizzy from an exhaustion so bone deep and intrinsic that it has brought him fully to his knees.

“Cause that’s all I want. Quiet.”

Seungmin doesn’t want to touch the silence in the room. Then Jeongin’s voice breaks up the quiet hum of the machines and the lights with, “I’m sorry, hyung.”

“Why? It’s not your fault,” Seungmin frowns.

“It’s not yours either,” Jeongin tells him. Seungmin slumps back against the pillows. The only tether he has to the world is Minho’s hand in his.

He looks up at Minho, sitting across from him by his bed. He has his head bowed, solemn as if in prayer, and Seungmin wonders what god he would have to pray to in order to fix whatever is broken inside of him.

“I’m gonna go, ah, take a beat outside.” Jeongin stands up and his legs look like they tremble a little under his weight. “Sorry, hyung, I just don’t really want to, like, cry in front of you right now.”

Jeongin makes his way shakily out the door, leaving Minho and Seungmin alone.

“You should go check on him,” Seungmin gives Minho’s hand another squeeze as the door to the room swings shut.  

“I’ll give him a minute,” Minho says, and his voice is low, sobering.

“Are you going to cry?” Seungmin asks, too exhausted and stressed to stop his stream of thoughts from dribbling out his mouth.

Minho hums. “Not right now.”

“Oh.” Seungmin takes that and sits with it. He thinks about Minho crying alone in his room tonight, or any night, and the image immediately makes his stomach spasm.

Minho nods towards the bed. “Can I come up and sit with you?”

Seungmin shrugs and scoots over to make as much room as he can in the confines of the small bed. Minho clambers up and settles in beside him, pressing their shoulders together. He’s still holding Seungmin’s hand.

“I’m here,” Minho says. “I’ve got you.”

Only when he feels wetness down the front of his shirt and splashing down on their joined hands does Seungmin realize he’s crying. Frustration wells up inside of him and forces the tears to spill faster down his cheeks. The thrum of fear begins to beat against the walls of Seungmin’s brain.

He feels the cool slide of his headphones fitting over his ears, blanketing his brain in a silence that still manages to hum. Minho brings their hands to his chest, and emphasizes the way he breathes, mouthing at Seungmin “like this”.

Seungmin loses himself in the rise and the fall of Minho’s chest. He tucks his head into Minho’s neck and shut his eyes, desperate to shave his focus down into one sensation: Minho’s body next to his.

He doesn’t fall asleep like that, but he isn’t really awake either. When he next opens his eyes, the room is markedly darker, Minho is still by his side, and Jeongin is back and sitting in the chair again, phone on the lowest backlight setting as he holds it right up to his face. His eyes are puffy, and the ache in Seungmin’s body intensifies.

He pulls his headphones off and blinks around the room. His hand is clammy now, where Minho is still clutching at it, and he tries to be gentle as he wriggles out of Minho’s grip.

Jeongin looks up at Seungmin’s movement. He gives Seungmin a watery smile. “Hey. Love you, hyung.”

Seungmin manages a smile back. “You too, Innie.”

Jeongin pats Seungmin’s knee through the blankets.

Minho is shifting beside him in bed, and Seungmin suspects that he had been drifting in and out just as Seungmin had been. Seungmin flinches when Minho reaches up to brush his hair off his forehead, and Minho pauses with his hand hovering.

“Want me to get off the bed, Min?” he asks. Seungmin nods, a little ashamed, but Minho just slides out of the bed and readjusts Seungmin’s blankets, tucking him back in.

“I want to go home,” Seungmin says to the room, because it’s all he can ever seem to say, and he feels like a sullen child throwing a fit when he does. “It’s too much here.”

He trusts them to know what he means, and they do. Minho nods, “I know, baby. We just have to hear what the nurses have to say when they come back in, and then we can figure out when we can get you home.”

“I’m scared of what they’ll say, when they-” Seungmin swallows hard, then again and again, like there’s something wedged in his throat, and he can’t seem to dislodge it. “When I tell them the truth.”

“I’ll be here the whole time,” Minho tells him. Jeongin hums in agreement. “If you want me to be. You don’t have to do it alone, Seungmin.”

“I want you, hyung.” Seungmin says. “I want you.”

//

Seungmin is kept in the hospital one more day, and he thinks it’s mostly because Minho bullies the doctors into making him rest for an extra night.

Changbin is there to help him check out and get his things sorted, and he shoulders Seungmin’s bag while they walk down to the lobby where Minho is bringing the car around.

“I’m really glad you’re feeling better,” Changbin tells him, shoving Seungmin affectionately in the arm. Seungmin doesn’t really feel better; his body still throbs, it takes too much effort to stand, let alone walk, and he is dreading whatever conversation he and Minho are going to inevitably have when they get back to the apartment.

“Thanks for the cookies, hyung.” Seungmin is slow on his feet, but Changbin just easily keeps pace with him as they head towards the elevators.

“They’re my favorite brand. I checked the ingredients for you. Should be all clear,” Changbin says, and Seungmin wonders how much the others had told him, and how much Changbin already knew.

“Sure,” Seungmin mumbles. He concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other.

In the elevator, Changbin nudges Seungmin again. “So, you and Minho, huh? Finally?”

Seungmin flushes immediately. “How did you know?”

“Please,” Changbin snorts. “The man has barely left you alone for the past three days. It’s written all over his face. Kind of gross, if I’m being honest. But congrats, looks like all your flirting wasn’t hopeless after all.”

Seungmin leans against the wall and drops his head down. “I think I fucked it all up, hyung. I think it’s over between us, and it never even really started.”

They make it down to the lobby and Minho stands next to his car idling at the curb.

“Look at him, Seungmin. I think you’ll be just fine,” Changbin says, so Seungmin looks. Minho is worrying at the hem of his jacket, a scarf wound around his neck and a baseball cap low over his eyes, but he perks up almost imperceptibly as he sees Seungmin and Changbin walking towards him.

Minho clicks his tongue as they get closer. “You didn’t even help him walk, Changbin? What are all those muscles for, if you don’t actually use them?”

“He said he was fine!” Changbin whines, and Seungmin nods, “I wanted to walk, hyung, it’s okay.”

Minho still mutters under his breath as he puts Seungmin’s bag in the trunk and they all pile into the car. The radio is playing when Minho starts the car, and without a word Minho switches it off. Changbin sits in the back with Seungmin, holding his hand, and Seungmin lets his head lean back against the headrest and his eyes slip out of focus.

Changbin and Minho are talking, but Seungmin doesn’t try to listen. He just watches the outside world flit by, a mess of color and sounds, and wishes he could be back in his bed, surrounded by blankets and pillows and his stuffed animals and Minho. Minho most of all.

When they’ve managed to get Seungmin up to the apartment, Changbin parks himself on the couch and switches on the television, muting it and turning on the captions. Minho guides Seungmin into his room, and Seungmin is relieved to see the evidence of his horrible morning erased from his bed and the floor.

“I washed the sheets but let me know if I need to again. I started to use Jeongin’s detergent before I remembered your unscented one.” Minho smooths the blankets with one hand, eyes narrowed like the bed had tricked him somehow during the act of doing laundry.

Seungmin shifts on his feet. “I think I need to shower,” he says.

“Sure,” Minho starts walking towards the door. “Hospitals are nasty. I should probably shower after you. While you do that, I can go ahead and heat something up for you, I had Jeongin do some grocery shopping with that dietary list the doctor gave us-”

“Want to shower with me?” Seungmin blurts out.

Minho’s eyebrows shoot up and he stops in his tracks. “Do you want me to shower with you?”

“I asked, didn’t I?” A smirk ghosts across Seungmin’s lips.

“Three days in the hospital did not make you any less of a brat.” Minho peels off his jacket and scarf, hangs them on the hook at the back of Seungmin’s door.

Seungmin’s breath hitches at the sight of Minho’s perfect pale neck. “I don’t want to do anything,” he hurries to clarify. “I don’t want to do anything but shower. I just want to be… close to you.”

Minho’s ears light up red almost instantly. Seungmin can tell from the heat radiating off his face that his cheeks have colored up to match.

“Sure. Sure, Min, we can do that. We can shower.” Minho nudges open the door. “Lead the way. I’ll get us some towels.”

Seungmin thinks undressing each other like this, just to share a shower and be bare in each other’s presence, is maybe just as intimate as sex.

Minho is gentle as he eases Seungmin out of his clothes, slowing when Seungmin hisses at the twinges of pain still lingering in his body, and slower still when Seungmin feels a little flighty, a little too on edge.

Seungmin is enthralled with each article of clothing he pulls away from Minho’s body. He takes his time roving his eyes up and down, every single inch of skin something to be pressed neatly into Seungmin’s most precious memories.

Minho is smiling, cheeks always just shy of dimpling, as he turns the shower on and sticks his hand under the spray to check the temperature.

They don’t speak as Minho lets Seungmin take over, intent on soaping and scrubbing Minho’s body with the diligence he gives to every task he ever undertakes. This is special, Seungmin knows, and he wants to get this right. He leads Minho through each step of his shower routine, pinches Minho in the side when Minho complains about waiting three minutes for the conditioner to set in, and only when he is satisfied that Minho is done, does he turn to himself.

He walks through the same steps, and Minho doesn’t stop him, doesn’t try to interrupt. He just offers a hand to scrub Seungmin’s shoulders, takes the bottles and places them back once Seungmin is done using them.

When they’ve finished, Minho takes the towel from Seungmin’s hands and runs it through his wet hair.

“Cute,” Minho snickers when Seungmin’s hair sticks up in all different directions.

“Shut up,” Seungmin shoots back, and he snatches the towel from Minho and rubs Minho’s hair to match.

They’re laughing with each other when Minho steps up close and slings the towel around Seungmin’s neck. All of Seungmin’s brain cells focus in on the water still flecked through Minho’s hair, the dampness settling on his cheeks and his upper lip.

“Hey,” Minho murmurs, his eyes already dropping to Seungmin’s lips. “Can I kiss you?”

Seungmin holds back a smile. “Do you want to kiss me?”

Minho huffs a laugh against Seungmin’s lips. “I asked, didn’t I?”

Seungmin isn’t sure how long they stand there, pressed against each other and lazily moving their lips in tandem, but it must be longer than he thought, because they’re interrupted by a pounding on the door and Changbin’s voice calling, “Listen, I don’t really want to know what’s going on in there, but I need to piss, so I’m giving you a fair warning to get dressed, or pull out, or whatever it is you need to do before I come in.”

When they finally leave the bathroom, Changbin muttering under his breath as he pushes past them, they return to Seungmin’s bedroom.

“I washed this for you, too,” Minho says as they dress, and he holds out his hoodie without looking up at Seungmin.

“Hyung,” Seungmin takes the hoodie and clutches it with something like reverence. “Hyung, you like me.”

“Unfortunately,” Minho shoves the blankets aside and climbs into Seungmin’s bed. “I do. Now get over here. Doctors told you to rest, so you’re going to rest.”

Seungmin obeys, and the fuzzy feeling that floats up into his chest at Minho’s words immediately drops like a lead weight when he remembers what had happened the last time they had been together in bed.

“How do you feel?” Minho asks once he’s got his arms secured around Seungmin’s shoulders.

“Sorry, hyung.” Seungmin buries his face into Minho’s chest. “I’m sorry.”

“I meant physically, but how you feel mentally is important too.” Minho’s heartbeat is a steady rhythm against Seungmin’s ear. He hums along with it. “I’m sorry too, Seungmin.”

“It’s my fault though,” Seungmin says. “You were just trying to help, and I freaked out, because I always freak out, and I was cruel, and you didn’t deserve that, at all.”

Minho’s arms wrap around him a little tighter. “Maybe I was going about it the wrong way. I shouldn’t have pushed. Not when you were clearly upset, and vulnerable.”

Seungmin doesn’t want to fight Minho about who is more to blame, especially when he still has the suspicion that it’s himself. He just wants, just really really wants –

“Hyung?” He scoots up so he can get a good look at Minho’s face. His expression is lax, eyes blinking slow and sweet.

“Yeah, baby?”

“I don’t want to be sick anymore.”

Minho exhales softly. “I know, baby.”

“I don’t want to be sick anymore,” Seungmin repeats. “And I don’t want to be a burden. Sometimes I think you do too much for me, hyung, and I don’t get it, I don’t get why you or anyone else does anything for me, because I’m difficult, and I’m weird, and-”

“Seungmin.” Minho hooks two fingers under Seungmin’s chin and tilts his head up. “You’re not difficult. You’re not weird. You’re not a burden. I’ve never thought that, and I never will. I do things for you because you’re my friend, and I like you, and you deserve comfort just as much as anyone else does.”

“I like you, too,” Seungmin mumbles.

Minho snorts, but there’s only a fondness to it. “Seungmin. Is that really all you got from what I just said? The other bits are just as important as me liking you.”

“No, I got the rest.” Seungmin rests his head back against Minho’s chest. “Just wanted to say that part out loud.”

“Well.” Minho shifts so Seungmin’s head falls at a more comfortable angle. “Thank you. For saying that. Because, you know – It’s hard for me, to say things like that. I mean, I could barely form coherent sentences around you for the first couple of months we knew each other.”

Seungmin takes that little pearl of vulnerability that Minho has given him and cradles it in the palm of his hand.

“I never hated you, Seungmin. I just had no idea how to talk to you.” Minho’s voice has fallen to a whisper.

“It’s hard for me to talk too, sometimes.” Seungmin tells him. “But I’ve kind of learned over the years that sometimes you don’t really have to, so long as someone cares enough to listen.”

“Ah.” Minho takes a minute before he speaks again. “I care, Seungmin.”

“I know, hyung. And me, too.”

Minho hums at that. He pets Seungmin’s hair, a constant pattern of up and down, and Seungmin thinks they might fall asleep together like that, and he wouldn’t mind. But he still opens his mouth, because he has to tell Minho, has to admit, “I don’t really know how to stop being sick. I don’t know what to do.”

“I don’t know either, baby. It’ll just be something we find out together.”

“Together,” Seungmin repeats. He shivers. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

He feels himself lapsing into the comfort of Minho’s arms around him. He’s tired, brain fraying at the edges, but this moment of peace is enough to lull him into a deep, dreamless sleep.  

//

“Kim Seungmin. I don’t see a rain jacket.”

Seungmin steps up to the counter and shakes out his hair, just to see Minho’s lip curl up in displeasure. It’s another rainy day, but the coffee shop is warm and the lights aren’t too bright, and Minho is wearing one of Seungmin’s sweaters under his apron. It’s a good morning, in Seungmin’s book.

“I hung it up by the door,” Seungmin says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “I didn’t want to drip water all over the floor and get yelled at when you come to mop it up.”

Minho huffs. “I would never yell at you. I would just make you mop it up.”

It had only been a light sprinkle early that morning, but before Minho had left for work he had pointedly draped the rain jacket over Seungmin’s bed before pressing a kiss to his forehead and heading off to his opening shift at the coffee shop.

So Seungmin wore the jacket during his run, his run which has been carefully shortened by two miles. It had taken a lot of foot stomping and minor episodes on Seungmin’s part, but the end result was Seungmin made his run a bit shorter, and had the choice to eat one of his preset options for breakfast at the shop.

It worked better for Seungmin, to have a more predictable menu that Minho helped him come up with, instead of the russian roulette Minho used to bring him every morning.

“Can I have toast today, hyung? With, um, crunchy peanut butter if you have it?”

“Sure, Min. Now go sit at your table and try not to slip on the mud you’ve tracked in on your shoes.”

Seungmin giggles and skirts around the admittedly significant muddy imprints of his sneakers across the shop floor. After a few minutes, just like every day for the past couple of months, Minho comes over with two identical plates and takes his break with Seungmin, sitting at the same table and getting the same view of the early morning beginning to wake up just outside the window.

Seungmin considers the toast before picking it up. Minho knows just how toasted he likes his bread, just how thick to spread the peanut butter. His new therapist always commends Minho for being so supportive, especially when it comes to Seungmin’s eating habits. As Seungmin presses his fingers a little into the toast just to see how the bread gives under the pressure, he agrees. He tells Minho so all the time, thinking that no matter how many times he says thank you, it won’t be nearly enough. In response, every time, Minho calls him a loser with a blush high on his cheekbones, followed by a swift kiss that makes Seungmin’s cheeks match.

“It’s not supposed to be raining tonight, hyung,” Seungmin says around a bite of toast. Minho makes a face at him, which turns into a grimace as Seungmin chews louder, obnoxiously smacking his lips around the peanut butter. “It’ll be the perfect night to start your training.”

“I am already regretting this decision.” Minho plucks a napkin off the table and shoves it at Seungmin. “It’s definitely going to be raining, and it’ll be cold and wet and your stupid head lamp doesn’t even fit me right, so it’ll be dark, too. I’ll trip and eat shit, and it’ll be your fault. It’s an awful thing to do to your boyfriend.”

“Well, my boyfriend wanted to start training, and training means going for runs in less than ideal conditions. You don’t want to finish last, do you?” Seungmin teases. He watches Minho take a sullen bite out of his toast.

“I will win that 5K and I will do it out of pure spite. Watch me.”

The run is in two months, right before the onset of spring, and Minho had been clinging to Seungmin’s back while they had looked over the signup sheet.

“Bet it’s not that hard,” Minho had scoffed. “That’s what, only an hour? I could do that in my sleep.”

Seungmin had turned and a sly grin had slid onto his face. “Okay, hyung. Bet.”

He anticipates Minho giving up about halfway through, but he’s finding himself perfectly happy with the prospect of walking the rest of the way, as long as Minho is at his side.

Seungmin loops a hand around Minho’s wrist and tugs, laughing, “C’mon, hyung. Come running with me. It’ll be fun.”

Minho rolls his eyes. “The things I do for love.”

Seungmin leaves the coffee shop later, but not before offering to clean up the floor and being chased out the door by a mop-wielding Minho. Minho still kisses him right outside the shop, leaves a breathless “See you later, baby” in Seungmin’s ear, and the smile is still on Seungmin’s face as he makes his way home.

There’s no specific slot now in his routine for Minho. Instead, Minho just floats through Seungmin’s days and nights, a constant presence that eases into Seungmin’s life and envelops him in comfort.

So Seungmin runs, he eats, he sleeps, he wakes up, he falls a little more in love, he goes to class, he eats. With each day, the noise in his brain dulls and dulls until all he can hear at last is the hum of a sweet, tender quiet.

//