"I don't really know." 
Jiho taps his pinky finger against his own. "Tell me what's on your mind? We could try figure it out together." And god, Joohyoung wants to melt into him. Burn down into a heap of ash and run through the hourglass of his hands if it means he can make his home in his lap. 
He's not even making any sense. 
"Do you ever think about getting tattoos?" he bursts out and immediately cringes. That was absolutely not what he meant to say, but life has no rewind button and the universe likes to see him suffer. 
Jiho blinks. "Uhm. Sometimes. They're cool, they tell stories, but I'm too scared of needles to ever go for it. Why?"
"Do you think they're hot?"
"Hot?" Hesitance clings to his voice. "Define...?" 
Joohyoung's first reaction is to chuckle at his purity, but then he thinks about it for more than a split second. Hot can probably mean different things for different people. It's not as childish of a question as it sounds like. 
"You know. You think they're interesting. Make you want to know everything about them. You keep thinking about it, wondering what the tattoos mean and why they have it."
"Is that really what hot means, like, objectively" Jiho grins. But the right corner of his mouth doesn't go higher than the left as usual. He presses his lips together, looks away seeking courage on the frozen screen on his PC. 
He seems to struggle to get his next words out. "From what I heard, I thought you — feel something? Or is it really just pure interest and I've been lied to a thousand times?" The little laugh that follows sounds hollow and tense.
Joohyoung, in an attempt to make him loosen up, snorts. "You're talking like you've never found anything hot in your life."
"Because I haven't." 
The confession lingers in the air, suspended in the tireless buzzing of the fan. 
Joohyoung stills.
What does that even mean? He wants to ask. Why did you need me to define? I thought you knew everything. But his heart is breaking enough at the sight of Jiho's clenched jaw, his nervous eyes darting to ceiling, floor, screen, the figurines on the windowsill, everywhere but him, and Joohyoung guesses that there are much better things to say. This wasn't even supposed to be about tickling a secret out of Jiho. It's him who should be brave and stop beating around the bush. 
There's a kind of tension in Jiho's voice that he hasn't heard before. He is withholding something, trying to get a point across in his silence that Joohyoung can't gasp onto quite yet.
"That's fine," he offers. 
Jiho freezes. Then he softly shakes his head, like he's admitting defeat to something, or someone, that only exists in his head. "I'm not sure you get what I mean. Sometimes, I see people and think oh. I want to look like them. I need to copy and paste their genes into mine. Or something like that. I never felt like I had to... be with them? At least not in the way that most people do. And it took me a while to accept that, but I think that's just the kind of person I am."
He squeezes his hand, hard. But it's Joohyoung's heart that aches instead.
"Well, that's okay, too," Joohyoung says, and squeezes back through the pain. "You're being unusually vague and I'll be honest, it confuses the heck out of me, but it doesn't matter. You're still you. The details of your dating history don't change anything." 
"Would you feel sad for me if I never started dating?"
"No." 
The answer comes easily and firm, like it has always been right there, on the tip of his tongue. Because he means it. Because he can always be honest with him, without having to twist it into a joke in order to be understood. "If it's not your thing, that it's not your thing. It's as simple as that. Romance is super annoying anyway and in my humble opinion, you're doing yourself a huge favor by staying away as long as possible."