Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

[20241217_110505.png]

Changbin in the mirror, shirtless. Low cool lighting from above. It traces the angles of his body, the way he has grown into it over the years, the crescent shadow delineating bicep from tricep. The ridged definition of his forearm; the clean line of his collarbone traced from shoulder to sternum; the swell of his pecs; the faintest scattering of hair below his navel, where it disappears under the loose band of his sweatpants.

One lip between his teeth, the other visibly bitten-red. Hair damp with sweat and pushed back from his face. One hand holding the phone up by his shoulder; the other arm flexed at eye-level, the bulge of the upper arm gratifying, hard-won. In the mirror, Changbin does not look at the camera. His eyes are trained on something else, positioned out of frame.

The background blurred, indistinguishable.

[12.10 pm] me: hey hyung what do you think of the gains 💪
[12.10 pm] me: [20241217_110505.png]

[12.32 pm] minho-hyung 😌🤔💖😻: 📸 i know what you are, seo changbin.

[12.32 pm] me: ????
[12.32 pm] me: and??

[12.48 pm] minho-hyung 😌🤔💖😻: <3

[12.49 pm] me: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???

[12.50 pm] minho-hyung 😌🤔💖😻: <3

[12.50 pm] me: HYUNG???

[ minho-hyung 😌🤔💖😻 read this at 12.50 pm ]

Jisung never really stops performing. He nudges the door to Changbin’s room open with a toe and insinuates himself into the space between Changbin’s desk and his bed, leaning against the chair as if he’s been there the whole time, as if Changbin’s the idiot for not noticing him earlier. “Why are you moping?” he says, scooping Changbin’s phone up from the desk, where Changbin has left it so that he can stop checking for replies every two minutes. He thumbs his way through the double-layer of security, opens his mouth — shock and desire hang there for a moment, genuine and written in his flush, before his expression morphs into something more exaggerated, teasing.

“Did he say anything?” Changbin says, before he can think better of it. Desire through Jisung’s eyes would be more digestible, or something. He scowls. “Give me back my phone, Jisung-ah. Yah, get out of my room. What are you even doing here?”

“Visiting my favourite hyung,” Jisung says on cue, halfway to falsetto and blowing Changbin a kiss. “Thirsting over his dick pics. Wowww. You didn’t even send these to me first, huh? You’ve betrayed me for my own roommate?”

“Jisung-ah,” Changbin says, too tired to match the performance. He holds out his hand for his phone, palm facing upwards.

“When is somebody gonna match my freak,” Jisung sing-songs mournfully in English. He’s picked it up from Felix, who got it from God knows however many TikTok news cycles ago. Jisung pats Changbin on the shoulder, as if commiserating, then just leaves his hand there. “I love your biceps, bro. We should have gay sex.”

“I don’t want to have gay sex with you,” Changbin says through gritted teeth. There is negative space in the open palm of his hand, a sense of weightlessness. The quiet of a two-person apartment. The fucking read receipts. Jisung’s eyes find Changbin’s, earnest and gentle for a moment, and the weight of his stare is reassuring. He has always looked at Changbin, even before Stray Kids. Found something worth seeing. The central heating in the new apartments is quiet and clean, but Jisung’s sweet half-smile sounds like the rattle of a space heater in a trainee dormitory, the hum of a ceiling fan in a four-person house, the roar of a crowd.

“Funny,” Jisung says. “That’s what someone who wants to have gay sex with me would say.”

[20241218_073305.png]

Changbin’s dick, hard and flushed, framed against his lower belly in black and white. The skin around his stomach soft, the way he never shows it in photos. They all know how to suck the air in when they flash their abs.

His hand curled around the base of his cock, the ridge of a vein in his hand prominent where it runs between his middle finger and the bones of his wrist, the knobs of each knuckle. The head of his cock catching the low light with the shine of precome. The coarse hair coiled at his root and clustered beneath his navel. His cock seems bigger, framed like this, with the hem of a pushed-up shirt blurry in the background of the photograph.

[20241218_073259.png]

Changbin’s thigh, waxed hairless just in case the stylists ever want to put him in something shorter. His own hand splayed across it. Fingers on bruises on skin, performative and stored in a locked folder. A secret that could ruin them. He wants someone to look.

A streak of come over the arch of his hand. More painted across his flexed thigh.

Changbin in the mirror: look at me, look at me, see me.

[7.41 am] me: 😓😪
[7.41 am] me: [20241218_073305.png] [20241218_073259.png]

[ minho-hyung 😌🤔💖😻 read this at 8.13 am ]

[8.14 am] me: do you think im cuuute hyungie
[8.17 am] me: minho-hyungg
[8.22 am] me: it’s like you don’t even think i have a beautiful cock </3

[ minho-hyung 😌🤔💖😻 read this at 8.23 am ]

[8.23 am] me: hyung im MISBEHAVING.
[8.23 am] me: im BOTHERING you
[8.23 am] me: sure would be a shame if someone put me in my place
[8.23 am] me: hyunjinnie is over with minnie n lix
[8.23 am] me: i don’t have to be @ company until 11

[8.59 am] me: minho-hyung i showed you my dick please respond

Changbin feels like he’s losing his mind a little. Doesn’t know why it matters to him.

There’s an understanding in the group, of course there is — do what you’d like with whichever of us you’d like, just don’t ever put a word on it. If you call it ‘dating’, they can sue you into the ground, take everything else too rather than just your job — and Changbin has looked at Minho, once or twice, and wondered. Watched him, as he went from the last-minute dance enigma to a known, beloved quantity. Fallen into that nebulous sort of nothing-space with him, the way he has with everyone else — that thing that only exists in what isn’t said, behind closed doors, in double-encrypted group chats, by proxy. Changbin and Chan. Channie and — well, Jisung and Seungmin, at the very least. Felix. All of them with Minho, Changbin thinks. He tries not to track the constellation beyond what he happens to overhear, clinging to some vague hope that the tattered edges of his ignorance might save him.

It weighs heavily on him today, even in the soundproofed production room, behind the locked door. (Their staff know exactly where they are — but not, Changbin has to believe, what they’re doing there. The sense of eyes over his shoulders.) “Channie,” he says, deliberately cutesy, playing it up as if for a camera. Chan lets him get away without hyung if he feels like it. Changbin doesn’t know what it means — only knows the way their bodies fit together, whenever they can make the time.

Chan jostles his headphones so that one ear is free. “Mm?”

Weight blisters down Changbin’s spine. “Have you fucked Minho-hyung at all?”

Chan doesn’t choke on his own spit, but it’s a near thing. “Why?” he demands, when he gets his breath back. He keeps his eyes on the screen, one ear muffled by the company headphones that cost more than a Seoul apartment. After a heavy pause, Chan says, almost gentle, “You want to, Binnie?”

Fuck, he wants to. Doesn’t know why it’s all he can think about — wants Minho to look at him, find something in there the others can’t see. (Ah — Stray Kids’ visual, Seo Changbin. The condescension dripping from the words.) Changbin fumbles for his voice, doesn’t know how to position himself, what tone to take — who Chan wants from him, whether to play at unaffected and casual, to laugh it up for the cameras they can’t see. His head is spinning. Chan doesn’t look at him, but maybe that’s almost a kindness, Changbin thinks. It settles him. He glances again at the door — locked. Unobserved.

“I might be going a little bit insane,” he says, rough and honest and a little bit whiny. It’s fun to lean into the dramatics sometimes; feels safer when it’s just for Chan, Changbin’s Channie-hyung, who knew him before he was anything, anyone. “Hyung, I — he left me on read.”

“Changbinnie,” Chan says, making a gesture with his left hand that might be grabby-hands or something dismissive, Changbin isn’t sure. “He leaves me on read when I tell him we won an award. Relax.”

“But I showed him my dick,” Changbin says.

Chan finally glances at Changbin, the side-eye cutting. “I showed him the VMAs,” he says, dragging the volume on one of the stereo tracks down until it’s almost nothing, a murmur at the edge of perception. Changbin can’t hear it, but he knows how it’ll sound. Chan isn’t looking at him, only peering out of the corner of his eye, but Changbin knows how the weight of his stare feels. Warm, almost. Like being seen, not just observed. “And yet here we are.”

[20241219_082324.png]

Changbin’s body, in the full-length mirror in his bedroom, bare but for the scraps of soft green lingerie: a shade like muted spring, not one he remembers ever having worn before. A bralette framing the shape of his pecs, softening the harsh lines of a dehydrated body. (Diet, they tell the fans, but mostly it’s the water weight they cut, when they have a date with the camera coming up.) Panties low and snug on his hips. The silhouette of his soft cock. Changbin knows how to stand for a camera and doesn’t do it: not flexing, not posing, in the thousand subtle ways he’s learned. Just Changbin, unspooled around the edges. One hand holding the phone up to the mirror. The other at his hip, one thumb tucked under the waistband of the panties

The lingerie is for the camera, too, but it’s a different sort of performance — one that gives Changbin a headrush, feels sweet, sticks on the back of his tongue. He looks — good. Not innocent enough to be cute for the camera — his skin bared, the lingerie lacy and scalloped at the edges, sheer. Not quite masculine or dangerous enough to fit the sexy concept the way the industry likes it. A man who could go either way, he thinks. Muscle lining his arms even at rest. The shot cropped just above the slash of his lower lip, showing bare skin, no foundation, on his chin, but the dull red throb of a lip stain at the very edge of the photograph.

Changbin, in the mirror. Feeling strangely made anew by the eyes of the lens.

[20241219_082719.png]

The soft shade of green. The shifting tones of Changbin’s skin: paler where it never sees the sun, golden further down his limbs. They match the foundation shade to his throat. His erection, now, visible where his cock strains against the lingerie.

He knows he looks queer like this — not a little soft or gay in the clipped tones of fanservice, hushed and romantic, but queer. Like he knows the underwear is too tight around his cock and he doesn’t care. Like he wants to fuck men and be fucked. Like he’s a different person — someone who can afford to leave marks and have them left in return, someone who could walk into a bar unmasked and order a drink. Someone whose face is just another face, whose body is just another body: breakable, fuckable, likeable. Invisible. Soft with water weight and extraneous calories. Not like it is now — even relaxed, in the mirror, Changbin’s body is more chiselled now. He’s worked hard at it.

Still, he stands in the mirror and takes a photograph. Like it might show him something new: the way he looks in green, the way the head of his cock looks as it slips free of the waistband. The way he looks in the mirror, again and again.

This photograph could end all of them if it got out, if a ninth person ever saw it. Changbin takes it anyway. Somehow, it has to be worth the risk.

[12.23 pm] me: [20241219_082324.png] [20241219_082719.png]

[12.24 pm] kim seungmin: 👍

[12.24 pm] bokkie 🌻🍆🍑💥‼️: hjhgjkgsdhkgdsh
[12.24 pm] bokkie 🌻🍆🍑💥‼️: Yeah i’ll incorporate that into my blief system

[12.24 pm] J-ONE 1️⃣🎤‼️💦: HOW COME YOU GET TO PUT THIS IN THE MAIN GROUP CHAT.

[12.26 pm] me: i showed minho hyung my dick and he’s ghosting me
[12.26 pm] me: ergo i need justice

[12.26 pm] innie 💕💖🦊🍞🍼🥺😌: i’ll look at your dick hyung

[12.26 pm] me: you are eight years old

[12.26 pm] innie 💕💖🦊🍞🍼🥺😌: 👎

[ channiehyung 🐺 💪 💖 ✨ 👴 , kim seungmin, J-ONE 1️⃣🎤‼️💦, jinnie 💍👰‍♀️💦 read this at 12.28 pm ]

[8.14 pm] minho hyung 😌🤔💖😻: sorry i have a life

[8.15 pm] me: LOOK AT MY DICK.

[8.26 pm] J-ONE 1️⃣🎤‼️💦: WHY is HE allowed to send shit like this in the main group chat and no one else is

[8.28 pm] minho hyung 😌🤔💖😻: because he’s cute

[8.28 pm] me: ?????????
[8.28 pm] me: RESPOND TO MY DMS.

[ channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴, J-ONE 1️⃣🎤‼️💦, minho hyung 😌🤔💖😻 read this at 8.32 pm ]

“Take five,” Minho says, clear, brooking no argument. He doesn’t fumble with the sound system the way Changbin does. The four of them scatter around the room, the tight knot of their formation coming undone, like a dropped stich in knitting and the unravelling that follows — Felix to the water cooler, Chan to the ground, Minho to the mirrors. Changbin in place, almost transfixed, catching his breath.

It’s only half the group, so they’re mostly drilling tedium — the parts of the choreo that rely less on formation and group work and more on the tight machinations of a body, that need to be repeated a hundred times as a matter of course. The myelination, so the body knows the shape of every movement. Their vocalists are off taking individual lessons; Jisung and Hyunjin have some variety appearance or another, and Changbin can’t entirely remember if it’s together or separate; the four of them, the leftovers, the dregs, tread the same steps over and over. It’s sort of comforting. Changbin doesn’t usually mind it, finds it the same sort of meditative as the gym. But — Minho.

That’s the kicker. Always is.

Minho: de facto head of the practice session, speaking quick and clear and technically, coming alight when he speaks about dance. Minho in the corner of the room, close to the mirrors, now — trying the same movement over and over, it seems like, until Changbin looks closer and sees the way each take is subtly different. He’s searching for the best variation, sees some undercurrent in the move that Changbin can barely make out. Minho, ten minutes ago — his hands on Chan’s hips, his hands on the underside of Changbin’s arms, lifting them higher, drawing them into the arch he wants. Minho, a little blunt and businesslike. He always is, at drill choreo sessions. Minho, like nothing is different.

Changbin’s breath feels tight and high in his chest, but he exhales for more counts than he inhales, slows his heart rate that way. Four in; six out. Dance is familiar, even if he doesn’t know it as intimately as some of the others. Effort is familiar, is easy. Felix cuts him a sideways glance, then fills an extra cup from the water cooler, crosses the room and holds it out, says, “Five minutes isn’t that long, you know.”

“Yeah,” Changbin says. His knuckles brush Felix’s as he takes the waxy cup, drains it in one movement. Felix is sweaty, but holds himself with a sort of easy poise; he looks at Changbin like he’s got something on his face. Maybe sweat of his own. Changbin dashes at his forehead with his sleeve, winces at how wet it comes away.

Felix’s real laugh is higher than the one he puts on for the cameras. “Changbin hyung,” he says, with a sort of delighted knife-edge to his voice. “Did you and hyung —” A waggle of his eyebrows, filled with an obnoxious level of innuendo. “Hm?”

“No,” Changbin says roughly. Felix doesn’t need to specify who he means by hyung. It’s obvious, the way Changbin’s been orbiting him, the way he’s been moving today. Probably it’s just as obvious that Minho isn’t orbiting him back.

“Ah.” Felix grins, the shape of his smile familiar. Understanding, hushed: “But you want to?”

Changbin’s body feels bigger and smaller than it is. He can’t quite look away from Minho. “Yeah,” he says quietly, sullenly. “I guess.” This look isn’t good on him, he knows, this dull bitchy demeanour — but he’s so fucking sick of pretending, sometimes. He’ll do it, he’s good at it, but it aches. Changbin swallows the sour taste away, washes his envy down with the last few drops in the cup, the ones he hadn’t managed to swallow the first time around; in the space of a breath, of a swallow, Minho’s eyes are flickering towards him in the mirror. Then away. Like nothing is different.

Felix’s expression isn’t quite a smirk, but it’s dangerously close. Changbin tears his gaze from the mirror to the guy who’s actually fucking talking to him, sees something glimmering in Felix’s eyes, the same look he’d gotten when he and Chan had spent months brainstorming how to slip English profanity under the industry radar, the same sort of understated arrogance he’d worn when he’d written half a verse about the industry and then been told to turn it into a Beauty and the Beast parody: scheming, written in the twist of his bottom lip.

“I’ll text Hyunne,” Felix says now, in that sort of I’ve-got-something-in-the-works tone that always makes Changbin a little nervous.

“Okay?” Changbin says, off-kilter, lost. Felix laughs rough and low, claps him on the back and stalks over towards where Chan’s slumped on the ground, a sort of classical masculinity about him. Changbin says, a beat too late, “Please don’t fuck with —”

“They were hot, by the way,” Felix calls across the room, where he’s squatted down on his heels to rub a hand over Chan’s shoulders. Changbin stiffens — of course he does — but it’s just the four of them in the room, and they is vague enough, and — and still he’s afraid. Can’t shake it. Chan looks up, worrying a lip between his teeth, but lets it slide; Changbin’s laughter comes out of him in fits and starts, nervous at first, then reassured, at least at the edges. Minho is still standing in the mirror, intent, trying variation after variation. Changbin watches him for a minute, the way he moves. The way he focuses when he wants something.

“Thanks,” Changbin says to Felix. A beat too late, but he means it. He thinks of Felix seeing the photos, feels himself flush, gratified, glad. It’s not like he’d sent them thinking no one would open them.

So: seen but not seen. Eyes in the mirror. Pay attention to me and I’m misbehaving and the overacted squeal of aegyo; known but not known. Lives in his name that he’s never touched. Attention is effortless, and Changbin likes effort, likes the weight of it in his bones, his body. A selfie and two hundred thousand eyes, comments in fifty languages he doesn’t speak, but Minho won’t text him back. Being heard but not seen, or something.

Minho turns. Smiles when he sees Changbin looking. “You ready, Changbinnie?” he chirps, overly cutesy, his eyes narrowed in that feline sort of content grin. Changbin blinks at him, once, twice. Finds the surface of his mind and breaks it with a gasp.

“Of course,” he says. His laugh, when it comes, isn’t even feigned — just sits on top of the ache in his chest, fitting neatly there, dovetailing with the creeping sense of misgiving. “Did you work out which version you liked best, hyung? Or were you making sure your fly wasn’t undone?”

They’re wearing sweatpants. Minho rolls his eyes, looking as though he’s swallowing away a smile, and reaches for his phone, connected to the practice room sound systems — they’re not even working with music much at the moment, just metronome and movement. Changbin moves back to centre, accepts Chan’s fist bump and doesn’t look him in the eye. He laughs out loud when Felix unsubtly gropes his ass on his way to his own position.

Minho’s gaze on all of them is steady, appraising. “Behave,” he says, low and sweet. Ostensibly it’s for Felix; Changbin thinks, but can’t be certain, that Minho’s eyes flicker to his as he says it.

They dance. Changbin keeps up, loses himself to the low-grade ache in his muscles, the sharper burn in his ankle — he’s twisted it enough times that it never quite heals, and it reminds him every time he puts weight on it now. Just a dull throb. Enough not to worry. He stumbles but corrects himself, burns under the weight of Minho’s quick approving nod — it’s the same, it’s easy, it’s familiar. It’s like it meant nothing. Minho doesn’t look at him and then does, ignores him for hours and calls him cute, touches him brisk and businesslike — but Changbin knows the way rejection tastes and it’s not this. Not the way Minho moves between sweet and dangerous, blending the transition to the time of a guide track Changbin knows inside and out.

He doesn’t know what to make of it.

It seems ridiculous that he even cares so much, the way he catalogues the precise timbre of Minho’s eyes on him, when he’s lived in this man’s pocket for the better part of eight years. Why should it matter? Changbin could have millions of people looking at him, but Minho treats him the same. Dances the same. Changbin wants, he thinks, a reaction — something real, something he can touch. Something unambiguous, where the cameras can’t catch it. So he cajoles and he ups the ante and he texts Minho pictures, feeling only a little pathetic about it. Ugh. It coils warm in his stomach, the sensation of desire, mingling with the shame that lives in his belly — practically they’re the same anyway, Changbin thinks. Want and shame — both the conflict of presence and absence, meeting in your gut. Tangling together until they’re indistinguishable.

It’s kind of as simple as this: Minho looks good today. Changbin wants to have sex with him. He doesn’t know how to go about asking.

(It’s pretty standard, Changbin knows, for idols to have to feel out the barrier between what’s real and what isn’t, eyes closed, through touch alone — when chemistry is your commodity, when you touch your bandmates on stage and can never be certain whether it’s performance or adrenaline or something else entirely. He thinks of a tongue-in-cheek joke about how idols don’t have nose hair — Jisung had been laughing, sure, but it had rung uncomfortably true. I used the toilet for the first time last week! Bodies until they’re too real. Bodies in their most sculpted state, dehydrated, sucked in.)

(When in doubt, up the ante. Find what’s real.)

“Left foot, Changbinnie,” Minho sings, like he’s enjoying it, voice mostly steady but with that undercurrent of breathlessness, of effort. Shame and want, exploring each other. The next time, Changbin gets it right.

It’s a simple enough thing: how can guilt ever be untangled from desire when your contract has a whole subsection on intimate relationships? Dating bans, and the demand that queerness stay behind closed doors unless it’s fanservice, and the open-secret attitude — keep it in your pants, and if you can’t, then for the love of God at least keep it in the company. Wanting things you can’t have is simple when it’s a blanket category: if you want it, it’s not permitted. There’s no ambiguity. It stings, exhilarating, the way Minho doesn’t reply, except when he does — the way it doesn’t make sense. “because he’s cute” burns behind Changbin’s eyelids. He wants to know who he is through other peoples’ eyes.

Seen but not seen. Read at 8.23 am. Changbin wants so deeply it burns him too; the language of it isn’t one he knows. It’s written in lenses, caught in 1080p.

[Yongboks_iPhone_20241220114712.png]

Changbin facing away from the camera on an angle, his expression told in half-obscured suggestions: the low arch of lashes where his eyes are half-closed, the blur that might be lips where they’re pressed to Hyunjin’s throat. The complex lines of Changbin’s back. His hands cradling Hyunjin’s thighs, the bare flesh there, the hundred miles of leg.

Both of them completely naked. Hyunjin settled on the kitchen counter between snippets of a life: takeout containers and their fancy knife set pushed aside, the night-light in the corner glowing a dull amber. Hyunjin’s throat, impossibly golden. His head is arched in a way that is — performative, certainly, but not false, not with Changbin’s lips pressed to his neck, not with Changbin’s legs bracketing his against the counter. His hair is sweat-damp and tangled, like it knows the shape of hands threaded through it.

They’re tangled together, pressed close, so that only snippets of Hyunjin’s stomach are visible in the photo; still, through the frame created by Changbin’s chest and both of their arms, Hyunjin’s dick stands hard against his stomach, pretty and flushed like the rest of him. His arms are looped over Changbin’s shoulders and form spidery tense shapes there, splayed over the ridges and furrows of musculature, fingers arched as though he wants to make a fist out of Changbin’s skin, a line of faintly raised scratches in their wake. The photo, carefully framed — artistic, almost — from across the room, a strange juxtaposition of intimate and open, private and shared. A locked door. A kitchen counter. Not a stitch of clothing; the lighting soft and dimmed and golden, like something out of a dream.

[Yongboks_iPhone_20241220115319.png]

The shot the same; its contents different. The kitchen countertop in its cool slate shade, and the locked door in the background, and Hyunjin on his knees.

Changbin with his elbows braced against the counter, one hand woven into Hyunjin’s hair, his chest blooming with bruised red flowers. His lips parted. Pleasure taking its time with him, but taking him nonetheless; the shape of it caught by the camera, fleeting and frozen. The focus is shallow — bodies and skin caught in high definition, the rest of the room mostly a blur — but goes far enough to draw the lines of Hyunjin’s lips, pressed to the very tip of Changbin’s cock. The swollen kissed-red of them on the wanting-red of his erection; both of them drunk on desire.

Changbin’s eyes on Hyunjin; Hyunjin’s eyes on Changbin. Trust and a sort of warm teasing written there, pressed up against desire, like there’s room for them each to live in the space carved out by the other. Changbin, photographed, with a man on his knees.

(Felix had wanted to find a tripod, purely for the sake of turning on the timer and then sneaking himself into the corner of the frame with peace signs. Hyunjin had liked that — his laugh rang high and appealing over the hushed kitchen — but they’d turned the apartment upside-down and couldn’t find one. So Felix held the camera. Neither of them had minded; it felt sweet to be observed.)

[6.46 pm] minho hyung 😌🤔💖😻: why would you airdrop me this when i am sitting right next to you

[6.52 pm] me: bc who turns their phone to show someone a nude
[6.52 pm] me: look at it on your own phone like a grown-up
[6.53 pm] me: aren’t we cute??? 🎀🥰💞

[ minho-hyung 😌🤔💖😻 read this at 7.01 pm ]

There is a hand on Changbin’s thigh. Their cameras are shut off, but he can feel the layers of eyes around them regardless — the high blush on the cheekbones of the waitress who took their table’s orders, the manager noona who glances over every so often from the next table. Even the blink of a security camera in the corner of the room. It’s a strange bastard child of public and private: a buffer of nearby tables reserved and filled out by staff, and only the eight of them at their own, but still a restaurant open to the public, the hum of a hundred conversations in the one room. Felix on Changbin’s right, laughing at something Jisungie had said across from them. Minho on his left.

Minho’s hand on Changbin’s thigh like it’s nothing, calm and possessive. Over text, Changbin knows how to play at composure; here, surrounded by eyes, it’s all he can do to keep his breathing steady.

Changbin clears his throat, low and pointed. Says, “Hyung, we’re in public.”

“Hm.” Minho seems to draw colour out of the rest of the room, the way he burns in Changbin’s periphery. Like he’s the only real thing. Like Changbin’s only tethered to the ground by the places they’re touching. Minho laughs, slides his body closer to Changbin’s and his fingers further around the shape of Changbin’s thigh, inwards, and says, “No one can see.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Changbin says. He feels lightheaded. Wanted.

“Who do you think I am?” Minho says. Changbin thinks he’s smiling — can’t quite muster the control to move his head, to look. But he sounds like it. “Who even took that photo, hm, Bin-ah?”

“Lixie,” Changbin says. Still under his breath. Minho moves in his periphery, like he’s tilting his head; around them, the restaurant still buzzes, still real, still in motion. Minho’s right. No one is looking at them. “Wanted — I really wanted you to look at me.”

“So you got Yongbok to take a photo.” A smile playing at the edge of Minho’s lips — Changbin still can’t see it but can almost taste it, hear it in the way it cradles his words. “I don’t really see the logic, Binnie.”

“Sometimes I think you’re being wilfully obtuse,” Changbin mutters.

“Aw. Only sometimes?” Minho’s fingers flex against Changbin’s jeans, and he hums appreciatively. It’s like they’re burning. No — like they’re a photograph, here, burning at the edges, the rest of it flaking away into ash until all that’s left is the place that they’re touching, the weight of Minho’s gaze. Like he knows the shapes that make Changbin up, from the inside out: bone, muscle, skin. Above that, fabric. Above that again, Minho’s nails, catching on the coarse denim of the jeans. Warmth stirs and pools in Changbin’s stomach; he tenses his leg, just to hear Minho chuckle and dig his nails in a little deeper.

What the fuck. What the fuck.

Changbin catches Hyunjin’s eye across the table, widens his eyes, wordless. He’d have to speak up to be heard, anyway. Hyunjin glances quick and assessing at Changbin, at Minho pressed casual and close against Changbin’s side, and laughs in that melodic way he has, audible even over the noise. He mouths something, but Changbin can’t make it out.

Minho strokes the inside of Changbin’s thigh, drawing little circles on his jeans. Changbin swallows around air, and eats his dinner, and — hopes. Maybe. The evening feels rusty at the edges, raw-cut, and the company van drops them off two by two at their respective apartments — first Jeongin and Chan, then Minho and Jisung. Minho rakes his gaze across the shadowed back of the van as he stands to leave. Changbin stiffens under the weight of his stare. Minho’s eyes crease.

Text me, he mouths, miming typing, then turns away.

Hyunjin links their fingers when the van stops outside their own place, swings it like a five-year-old, murmurs in Changbin’s ear, “I saw the two of you. Huh? Hey?” Changbin feels almost tipsy via osmosis, even though none of them have had even a sip of alcohol. They fumble with their keys, somehow get the door open. Hyunjin is all long lines, even made clumsy by joy and the late hour; Changbin watches him, feels round and swollen and stocky in comparison, feels unmoored in his own body.

Hyunjin’s laugh peals through their apartment from the other room. “I’ll go over with Lixie,” he calls from the laundry, where he must be peeling off his outside clothes, shedding his skin. “Lix and Seungminnie. Leave you to it, hmm?”

Changbin stands arrested in the entryway, halfway through toeing off one of his shoes. His limbs feel heavy, the air honey-thick. His phone vibrates in his pocket. “Okay,” he says, not quite believing it. Minho’s hand on his leg. The pressure of fingers. Text me. The sensation of being seen. He blinks hard, comes back to himself enough to call out, sharp, “Felix has more choreo work tomorrow.”

“Relax,” Hyunjin says, appearing at the end of the hall. Even unspooled, in a hoodie and grey sweatpants, he still looks model-handsome, his hair a little tangled where it tumbles to his shoulders. “I was going to bottom.”

Changbin narrows his eyes. “You have more choreo work tomorrow.”

“I’m built different,” Hyunjin says, and snickers.

So it goes. Hyunjin leaves; Changbin hesitates, agonises, waits. He does text Minho, eventually — something trite and insignificant, asking if he maybe wants to hang out. Their text thread is all the white of sent, none of the blue of reply, except for the few messages over dinner; Changbin’s head is still spinning a little. Look at me, he thinks. He sees the way Minho looks at all of them. Clever, constructive, like he knows all the things that make each of them up, all the ways they’re different; all the ways they’re the same, beneath it all. Boys in bodies. Bodies for the camera.

The evening ticks onwards — uneventful, uninterrupted. Changbin hates the silent apartment a little — misses the cramped frustration of four people to a room, eight people to a dorm, before the company decided they’d earned their own space. The hum of the fridge seems impossibly loud. Minho doesn’t reply; Changbin dozes off on the couch, wondering, waiting, feeling a little silly. It should be a respite to go unobserved. He swims back into consciousness around three in the morning, checks his phone despite his better judgment, spots the familiar read receipt blinking back at him.

Hyung doesn’t do things in order, Jisung had said once, pressed against Changbin’s side in the studio, affectionate in a sort of disaffected way, intimate without needing to posture about it. Changbin hadn’t asked which hyung. He’d known. He’s — it’s a little twisted up in there, you know. He sees things from a different angle. It’s why I like him and it’s why I want to strangle him, like, all the time.

I thought he was the one that got off on strangling you, Jisungie, Changbin had said, digging an elbow into Jisung’s side. Still, it had stuck with him.

He climbs into bed alone and tugs half-hearted at the half-chub of his cock, not quite worked up enough to want to get off, just enough to grind down into the sweet pressure of his own palm. Alone. Unobserved. He wants Minho’s eyes on him, he thinks, wants him to see.

It’s like that theory: if something isn’t observed, it’s all of its states at once. Schrodinger’s cat, or a tree falling in a forest. Changbin huffs a laugh into his pillow — Jisung would find it funny that his mind had gone there, would tease him mercilessly. If Changbin comes into his hand alone in a shared apartment, did it EVEN REALLY HAPPEN?!? (GONE WRONG!) (GONE SEXUAL!)

He dozes off again — message read but not replied to; seen but not seen — and drags himself out of gross boxers in the morning, not quite sure if he’d come before or after falling asleep. He feels a little like a teenager. He’d dreamt of Minho’s pleasure-slitted eyes, the lithe shape of his body; the soft sweet pressure of his fingers, in public, no one but Changbin knowing his hand was there.

[20241008_231102.png]

Changbin in the bathroom mirror in a hazy October, rough-edged, in between legs of the tour — the shadow between two sets of spotlights, not long before they flew to Australia. Changbin, shirtless, holding himself like it’s an art form. Changbin, hair tinted in a new hue, uncertain of it.

Half of his makeup wiped away — stubble visible, but only on the left side of his face. His head held with the chin high, the jut of his jaw like a challenge. The line on his throat where foundation fades to skin. Changbin, or half of him, made up and painted pale; at least cute if he can’t be pretty. Changbin, scrubbed half bare, a shadow beneath one of his eyes. He doesn’t smile for the camera. No one who knows him barefaced would need him to.

The long line of his throat. The breadth of his shoulders. Two toothbrushes by the sink.

Changbin, in the mirror. For your eyes only. Add a teasing comment so they know you almost mean it.

[9.13 pm] me: channie if i send you a pic can you tell minho hyung how hot you think i am

[9.24 pm] channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴: do you really want me to dignify that with a response???

[9.25 pm] me: but have you considered
[9.25 pm] me: [20241008_231102.png]

[9.27 pm] channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴: You have to know he’s doing this on purpose right
[9.27 pm] channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴: “Channie channie surely if I don’t reply he’ll send more. THis is a foolproof plan”
[9.28 pm] channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴: anyway why are you sending him old pics, I saw that one two months ago

[9.30 pm] me: yeah but do you think it’s hot though

[9.32 pm] channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴: do you raelly want me to dignifiy that with a response

[9.32 pm] me: ofc baby <333

[9.33 pm] channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴: 🙄

[9.38 pm] channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴: i mean it is, objectively speaking.
[9.38 pm] channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴: i just don’t know how many objective reasoning faculties are being used in this situation

[9.41 pm] me: hannie please. you’re my only hope.

[9.48 pm] kim seungmin: who is loudly giggling and twirling their hair in my house? stop.

[9.48 pm] J-ONE 1️⃣🎤‼️💦: mb
[9.48 pm] J-ONE 1️⃣🎤‼️💦: there was a HOT SEXY MAN in my dms
[9.48 pm] J-ONE 1️⃣🎤‼️💦: im excited to go REPLY TO HIM like he DESERVES

[9.49 pm] kim seungmin: you don’t live in my house

[9.52 pm] bokkie 🌻🍆🍑💥‼️: boss makes a dollar i make a dime
[9.52 pm] bokkie 🌻🍆🍑💥‼️: changbin sends nudes on company time ✨

[9.52 pm] channiehyung 🐺💪💖✨👴: This is not even remotely close to what could be considered company time?

[9.52 pm] bokkie 🌻🍆🍑💥‼️: COMING FROM YOU?????????????

[9.52 pm] J-ONE 1️⃣🎤‼️💦: i sure wish i was coming from you

[9.53 pm] kim seungmin: sleep with one eye open

(“They’re so fucking stupid,” Chan says, then gnaws on Felix’s shirt, because he can and he needs to bite something or else he might actually combust.

Felix rubs his back, soothing. “Would it help if I showed you my dick?”

“HOW would that help.”

“I dunno,” Felix says. He’s smiling. Chan likes his smile so fucking much. “Would it, though?”

“Ugh,” Chan says, and moves to Felix’s exposed neck, tonguing over his collarbone. “Yeah, okay. C’mon then.”)

[ minho hyung 😌🤔💖😻 read this at 10.19 pm ]

“Seo Changbin-ssi,” Hyunjin sings, lobbing something at Changbin’s head across the room. Changbin leans back; it’s a balled-up karaoke bar receipt from only God knows when. “Jagiya. Baby,” in English. “Binnie.” He hesitates, then adds, throaty and performatively seductive, “Hyung.”

“God, what do you want?” Changbin says, instead of yes, Hyunjinnie~ or do you have to dance tomorrow or how bad would it be if you showed up limping. He puts down his phone anyway. Few men in the world exist who are strong enough to deny Hwang Hyunjin when he wants attention; Changbin should know. He’s tried. Hyunjin, sprawled on their couch — he’d exiled Changbin to the floor, where he’s been scrolling for longer than he’d like to admit now — looks good, of course he does, soft around the edges in a ratty muscle shirt and pyjama pants that are about four inches too short. Changbin’s eyes linger on the stretch of leg exposed between the hem and Hyunjin’s socks. He feels a little Victorian.

Hyunjin waggles his own phone, as if Changbin’s going to be able to read it across the room; begrudgingly, obligingly, Changbin drags himself to his feet, wincing at the ache in his joints. They’re all going to be arthritic before they hit thirty, of course — burned out their bodies too bright and too fast — but it has to be worth it for the time being, this dull throb of ever-present pain. “I might be wrong,” Hyunjin says, his lips smirk-curved, “but I think your plan involving one million two hundred photos —” he gazes at Changbin through his lashes for a moment, then can’t take the sultry expression seriously and giggles again, lets it drop — “has worked. Minho hyung wants me to go stay with Jisungie for tonight.”

Changbin closes his eyes for a moment. Opens them. Hyunjin is still there, the kilometres of legs still strewn variously over the couch, phone still brandished in Changbin’s direction like its pixels hold the secret to the universe. “Sorry,” Changbin says. “What?”

“Well, he said Hwang Hyunjin, leave your house. That’s basically the same thing.” Hyunjin waits patiently while Changbin digests that, rubbing at his brow, and only when Changbin has finally opened his mouth to respond does Hyunjin add, “Oh, yeah. He’s here, by the way.”

“What.”

“I buzzed him up already, hyung,” Hyunjin says, like he’s done Changbin some great service.

Changbin’s bones are buzzing in his body. He wasn’t thinking about it, for fuck’s sake, for — honestly, probably the first time in what has been a humiliating several days of preoccupation with Lee Minho. And Lee Minho’s dick. And Lee Minho looking at Changbin’s dick. He’d closed the stupid fucking group chat, had stuck his phone on Do Not Disturb and drowned himself in anime memes; now he feels blindsided, adrift. Like stumbling through a mirror maze; you don’t realise it’s a wall until you walk into it, your own form almost invisible in the haze of refraction. Standing in your own peripheral vision.

“What,” Changbin says, and then there’s a key in the door. Hyunjin gives him a smile bright enough to be measured on a scale of megawatts.

Minho walks into their apartment the same way he has every time he’s here: toeing off his shoes easily, fluently, like it’s just another Tuesday. Changbin feels dazed. Minho wears a powder-blue hoodie and the mask-cap-hood combo that keeps them safe, that all of them wear like armour, and he isn’t looking at Changbin. Perhaps he’d texted. Changbin’s phone is still shut off in his pocket. Hyunjin chirps something along the lines of hello hyung; Minho replies, quick and easy, with something about vacating the premises, violators towed at owner’s expense. Changbin — stares, feels unfit to be stared back, in ratty rest day clothes of his own. He doesn’t know what he looks like. Minho, clever and lithe and at least put-together enough to brave the outside world despite the chance that he’ll be photographed, seems mismatched against the anime haze that Changbin has been sitting in all afternoon.

“Hyunjinnie,” Minho says, getting a hand under the ear loop of the mask and ripping it off like he’s glad to be rid of it. His neat little lips are pursed, teasing, eyes creased like he’s teasing. “I’m trying out new recipes, you know. Perhaps we change the temperature this time?”

“I’m going,” Hyunjin says, seeming so rapt that he doesn’t even bother to wail it. Changbin is only glad he doesn’t have popcorn. But Minho seems done with him for the time being; he turns back to the entryway to set down his cap. The pale blue should wash him out, but instead he seems irritatingly vibrant in it. His hair is creased and flattened from where he’d been wearing the cap, a little greasy; Jisung always complains about how often Minho washes his hair.

Changbin swallows. “Hyung,” he says, neutral.

Minho turns to look at him, then. He falters. There’s something unreadable writ across Minho’s face, in the strange little twist of his lips. “Changbin-ah,” he says, “I’ve not replied to you yet.” A quick twitch, like he wants to bite his lip or bow in apology. Like he’s almost nervous. “But I heard your housewife was just leaving. Maybe I could — make dinner.”

Changbin feels the side of his mouth lift up, then, at the visible hesitance — maybe that’s a little cruel, but it’s something, it’s proof that this meant something, that he wasn’t just being toyed with. He says softly, searching, curious — almost trite — “What, did you see something you liked?”

Minho swallows, laughter tugging at the edge of his lips; he laughs the same way he does everything else, with a sort of neat deliberateness to it, like he’s already thought through the pros and cons of letting it break free of him. Relief crests the horizon of Changbin’s stomach and rises into his chest. A sort of dawn. “Maybe,” Minho says, with a little quirk to his eyebrow. “Who can say? I might.”

He says might like it’s present tense, drags his eyes over the heavy space of Changbin’s body. The loaded possibility set of his ribs. Changbin looks back and feels himself heating. He’s — seen enough of Minho’s body, in shared dorm bathrooms and harried backstage changes and the flushed awkward moment after walking into the wrong room and finding your hyungs touching each other, but never touched it more than he needs to. Not without the camera there to make it mean a little less. Minho gropes Changbin’s ass and Changbin drapes himself over his shoulders and they play at skinship, but he’s never — they’ve never fucked — but Changbin has wondered, over the years. Wanted. The way Minho looks back, Changbin thinks he might have wondered too.

Minho says, eyes locked on Changbin’s like he’s loath to look away now that he’s started, “Hyunjinnie, may hyung humbly request you make yourself scarce.”

“Mm,” Hyunjin says from the couch, chin perched on his hand, elbow on his knee. He’s all limbs, save for the knowing glimmer to his eyes. “Personally, I think I deserve to watch. I helped, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Minho says. He cuts a sideways glance back at Hyunjin, something like a smile playing on the corner of his lips. “Very pretty, Hyunjin-ah. You can go give Yongbokie my thanks, yes?”

“I’m being discriminated against.”

“Go somewhere else,” Minho says, dismissively, turning his gaze back to Changbin, the weight of it thick and honey-sweet even from across the room. “Changbinnie likes sending pictures anyway. I’m sure he’ll show you later.”

“That’s presumptuous,” Changbin manages, through a throat that feels cotton-wrapped, desire strangling his words like weeds do to seedlings. “Maybe I don’t want to —”

Minho’s eyes, feline and sweet-dark, the pupils blown by want, meet Changbin’s. Changbin swallows around the pressure of it. Minho’s stare is like a hand on his throat. “Hm?” Minho says, smug. “No, go on, Changbin-ah. What were you saying?”

“Fuck you,” Changbin says, struggling to shape the words around his smile.

“Maybe Jinnie can watch next time,” Minho says. He takes several slow steps towards Changbin, possessed of that grace Changbin has always envied, the measured power in every move — it’s a performance, Changbin knows, but a private one. A dance behind closed doors. A presence fit for the stage, sinking its teeth into their living room.

“Who says there’s going to be a next time?” Changbin says.

Hyunjin cackles. He and Minho raise identical eyebrows.

“Okay,” Changbin says, “Jesus Christ. Uncalled for. You both actually hate me, is what I’m getting from this.”

“If you’re into that,” Minho says, shrugs, somehow managing to make even that sinuous. Changbin would find it more ridiculous if he weren’t desperately attracted to it. Changbin can dance, but Minho lives it, moves like he speaks in its language, is always translating — like he knows he’s always being watched, it occurs to Changbin, then. Some eyes friendlier than others. Observed, but not always known, not always seen, so he moves through the world like he’s half of the way to meaning it.

Changbin’s breath sticks in his throat. “I might be,” he says, feels a little insane. “Um. Do you — want — ugh.” He scrambles for the frayed edges of his composure, tries to hem them into something less rapidly unravelling, a stopgap: “You look nice.”

Minho’s eyes crease at the edges, like half-fledged crows’ feet. “Would’ve dressed up for you, Changbin-ah,” he says, “but I think Sungie has stolen my lingerie, so the hoodie will have to do.”

Hyunjin, from the couch: “That seems unsanitary.” The two of them turn to him in sync. “Ugh,” he adds, like the world’s most personally inconvenienced aspirational voyeur, and picks himself up off the couch. “Minho-hyung, I would tell you to use protection, but, well. Hyung’s so into —”

“Hyunjin —”

“— cumslut-adjacent stuff that actually I’ll be personally offended on his behalf if you do,” Hyunjin finishes, beaming. Changbin wants to strangle him. Or watch Minho strangle him, his brain supplies, unhelpful. He knows Minho does it to Jisung, has seen the bruises enough, painted concealer over them on early, coffee-bitter mornings. He feels the weight of his own blinks, the yawning stretch of time, and then — Hyunjin’s gone, is out the door, and Changbin stands wearing nothing but an old shirt and frayed pyjama pants in his own apartment and feels impossibly seen, measured, judged. Minho’s eyes cut back to him and linger.

“Changbin-ah,” he says, soft, curious.

Changbin swallows. Tugs at the hem of his shirt. “Minho-hyung.”

The glimmer to Minho’s eye; the way he tilts his head, precise and a little cocksure, moving like a bird that knows the shape of its branch. “I want you to fuck me,” he says, blunt. Easy. “Thoughts?”

“Um.” Changbin is a butterfly pinned to a board. “Uh. Certainly amenable to the concept.”

“Fantastic,” Minho says, voice sugared and still a little dangerous. He hesitates, some of the composure lifting from him, mist burned off a valley: “I said I’d make you food.”

“I’m used to people making empty promises of dinner to get in my pants,” Changbin says, somehow dragging enough of his scattered pieces together to tease. “I sleep with Jisung. He asks to come over so he can ‘cook’.”

Laughter suits Minho, Changbin thinks. It plays over him like the push and pull of desire and restraint, the frayed-rope axis between them. Somehow they make it to Changbin’s bedroom, the apartment blurred around them like the background of a photograph: lamplight, a life lived out of focus, the knife-edge crease of Minho’s smile. Minho doesn’t touch him until they’re hovering by the bed.

Then: “Changbin-ah.” The pressure of a palm on his shoulder; Changbin goes with it, sits gazing up at Minho, feels spotlit by the way Minho’s tongue wets his lips as he looks at Changbin. He knows spotlights, knows the shape of his face blown up onto a screen as large as a room, but this is different. Fiercer. Minho’s eyes flicker over the shape of Changbin’s folded body, the space around them. “You know your bed’s not made.”

Changbin laughs. “Is that a deal-breaker, hyung?”

Minho parrots his words from earlier: “I sleep with Jisung.” The constellation Changbin tries not to know the shape of — this line of it is soothing, though, makes Changbin laugh. He’d already known, anyway. And the image of Minho wrinkling his nose at Jisung’s unmade bed sits warm and private in his chest, next to the memory of Chan’s quiet confidence as he’d said come with me all those years ago, the cool secret shape of Felix’s hand in his, the press of Seungmin’s shoulder against his own as they’d pirated a movie in an empty dorm room crowded with ghosts. Here, now, Minho looks down at Changbin like he sees something he wants. Changbin could move to pose for him. He knows his angles. But it feels better, the slow itching burn of embarrassment in his stomach, the thrill of being seen, to just sit, honest, barefaced, and wait.

Minho looks almost antsy. “Tell me what you want, Changbin-ah. You said something about misbehaving.”

Changbin glances at the end of the bed. His laptop is still sitting on the blankets. “That was more about — getting you to text back,” he admits. “I mean, I could. If you were into that.”

“I said what you want.” Minho nudges his way between Changbin’s slightly-spread legs, moves them further apart to make space for his hips. Changbin is totally normal about his thighs. Always has been. Fucking dancers. “Just text back, huh? I could do that. Left my phone in the other room though.”

Changbin swallows. “We could, uh. Kiss, if you wanted,” he suggests. He thinks he knows the shape of this game. Minho smiles like Changbin’s won something, like the glimmer of a low sun through leaves, told as much through the shape of its shadows as the places the light touches. When he leans down, brushes their lips together, it’s chaste. Brief. His knees knock against Changbin’s, urge them further apart, and heat gathers in Changbin’s stomach like the sensation of being watched.

Minho says, still leaning down, “I like when people ask for the things they want.” His arm rests on Changbin’s shoulder like it belongs there, draped past it like a girl in a romcom ready to be twirled around in the air. Changbin feels heady with desire. Minho has clearly talked to someone about what Changbin likes, has stolen the cheat codes. “Ask for what you want, Changbin-ah.”

Changbin leans his head into Minho’s inner arm, admits, “No one else makes me.” It’s true. Seungmin-ah does that thing where he just gazes right through someone and seems to know exactly what they want, exactly how to take them apart; Channie has known Changbin for so long, touches him gently, fervently, sweetly. Knows without having to ask. Jisung, for his part, does enough begging for the pair of them.

Minho settles with a smile, sweet like the blade of a knife, onto Changbin’s lap; he presses a kiss to Changbin’s jaw, then pushes him backwards until he’s flat on the bed, Minho braced above him on both arms, brilliant and infuriating. He says, “I’m not the others, Binnie.” Soft, intent. Like it’s a secret. “You want me to look at you, hm? That’s why you sent me all those pretty pictures?”

Changbin’s skin prickles all over. God, he wants it — the burn of Minho’s eyes on his chest, his thighs, his cock. Watched but not touched, perhaps. “Did you like them,” he says, taken aback by the soft edge to his own voice, the sort of muffled want in it, the sandpaper-smoothed edges to his hurt. Minho tilts his head; it settles him. “Did — did you think about them, hyung? Think about me?”

“Yeah,” Minho murmurs, his breath toothpaste-scented against Changbin’s cheek. “I liked looking at your cock so much, Changbinnie. Kept thinking about it when I was meant to be working.” He smiles, sort of feline, a little sweet and a little sharp: “Wanted it in me. You want that, hm? Want hyung to ride you?”

Changbin’s voice is hoarse. “Please,” he says. “Hyung, please.”

Minho’s eyes crease. He presses a kiss to Changbin’s brow, like a reward; Changbin makes a sound low in his throat and tilts his head, wanting to kiss Minho properly, arches his neck until he can just brush Minho’s lips with his own. Minho lets him for a minute, kisses him gently, restrained, parting his lips for a moment before pulling away. Changbin wants to follow, but the angle makes it difficult. Instead, Minho blinks down at him, lips spit-slick, smiling in the same way that’s been driving Changbin insane all week.

“Changbin-ah,” he says, looking far too pleased with himself. “Lube?”

Changbin huffs. He props himself up onto his elbows to fumble in the drawer of his nightstand, fairly confident it won’t actually be there but feeling obliged to mount a token search; when he comes up empty, he flops back down onto his back, rubbing a hand over his brow. “I don’t know what the fuck Hyunjinnie has done with it,” he says. His head is spinning.

Minho snorts. “Doesn’t he have his own?”

“He runs out,” Changbin says, disparaging. And then he’d come and bat his stupid eyes at Changbin and make some dumb comment about how statistically, Changbin would get more use out of the bottle if — whatever. Minho makes a small amused sound and stands up, skims a hand over Changbin’s stomach above his t-shirt as if in farewell or apology, then leaves the room. Changbin watches him go. Blinks up at the ceiling. He lies clothed and half-hard on his own bed, skin alight with sensation even in the absence of it, the expectation of touch as heady as the experience of it sometimes, and listens to Minho rustling around in the other room.

Like he has a better chance of finding Changbin’s lube in his own apartment than Changbin does. (Honestly, he’s probably right.)

There are no mirrors in Changbin’s bedroom, but he glances over to the ensuite, catches the very corner of his own eye in the one that spams the back of the bathroom door: sleep-shadowed, bare-faced, eyes blown a little dark with lust. He’d thought that was a myth once; then Chan had happened to him, and everything else had come in his wake. The comet and its tail. He shifts so he isn’t looking, doesn’t think he needs to see. Even settling into the mattress like this, alone for a moment, his heart drums double-time in his ears like camera shutters in an airport. He traces the spiral of time against the back of his own eyelids. It goes like this: read at 8.23 am, then sent, then read again. Minho in the practice room. Minho in his hallway, wearing powder blue. Changbin, for the camera, in the mirror. Changbin, on his bed.

Minho, now, framed in the bedroom door with a towel slung over his shoulder, looking at him with something that starts like triumph and peters off quickly into gentleness; he has Changbin’s lube bottle in one hand, which Changbin has enough awareness left to recognise is significantly emptier than he’d last seen it, and two condoms in the other that Changbin frankly hadn’t known they’d owned. “If you want, Changbin-ah,” he says, holding the latter up, his voice soft-edged and unjudgmental.

Changbin snorts. “Look, hyung,” he says, dragging himself up onto his elbows again, “if one of us somehow gets something, Jisung is going to give it to the rest of us before the week’s out.” The benefits of a closed constellation, he thinks: the insides messy, but the borders clean. A sort of quarantine. Within its boundaries roils all of the rough love-lust-care shoved and scrambled together, impossible to sort through in their circumstances, impossible to live without — something like brothers-coworkers-lovers-friends, tangled, tapestried. But protected by its edges. There’s something warm, reassuring, in knowing that in the last — certainly four years, possibly longer, the only people Minho have touched are the ones Changbin knows the best. Loves, in whatever tangled way he can. Shares a potentially concerning amount of bodily fluids with, dances at their sides, knows their sweat and blood and grime.

“Fair enough,” Minho says, slipping out of his jeans without fanfare. That, in itself, has to be some sort of feat; Changbin has never managed to take off jeans gracefully, ends up hopping on one leg no matter the sizing. He folds them, then sets them down by the door, puts the condoms in their wrappers on top. A funny sort of contradiction. Changbin watches, mouth a little dry, as Minho sheds his boxers with a similar sort of unselfconscious ease, his cock flushed and a little weepy against his hoodie. Wet at the head. The impossible lines of his waist. Minho folds his boxers like he’s not hard against his own clothed stomach, moving fluidly, easily, then turns and grins when he sees Changbin staring.

“In my defence,” Changbin says, then utterly fails to come up with any sort of defence.

Minho smirks. “I’m listening,” he says, moving back to the bed and straddling Changbin like he had before. He sets the towel down beside them. Changbin is still fully clothed, feels a little insane; he reaches for the swell of Minho’s thighs and gets his hands on them, squeezes, hopes it’ll bruise, hopes it won’t. Minho looks at him like he knows Changbin inside and out. “Changbin-ah,” he says, rolling his hips slow and filthy against Changbin’s clothed cock, enough pressure behind it that Changbin squirms even through the thin fabric of his pyjama pants; he’s more than half-hard now, digs his fingers into the meat of Minho’s quads. Minho glances at the white of his knuckles, laughs. “You want to finger me, Bin-ah?” he says. “Or do you want to wait and be good while I open myself up on your lap?”

Changbin likes being denied. He always has. More than that, he wants to watch — wants Minho to know the sensation of being seen and not touched, known but not enough to scratch the itch. He searches for the words. Minho grinds down against him again, then laughs at the way Changbin groans in response, says, “Cat got your tongue, Bin-ah?”

“Can I be blamed,” Changbin says, distraught. He drags his hands over Minho’s thighs and feels the way the muscles tense beneath his fingers, the power coiled tight there. God. “I, uh. I’d.” He swallows, gazes at the line of Minho’s cock. “I’d like to watch you do it.”

“Okay,” Minho says, in a sort of voice like he’d been aiming for saccharine and tripped violently sideways into gentle, tender. He skims his hand up Changbin’s forearm, making an appreciative sound. “Okay, Bin-ah. Take your shirt off for me so I can look at you.”

While Changbin scrambles to obey in a way that won’t lead to him elbowing Minho in the face, he hears the click of the bottle cap, emerges triumphant from his own shirt to see Minho’s fingers slick with lube. Changbin doesn’t know why he shudders at it. Minho smiles again, with that sort of understated arrogance like he knows exactly how he looks, and reaches down, presses his finger into himself easily, effortlessly. Changbin does not quite understand how this man is real. He gets his hands back on Minho’s legs and rubs his hands up and down them in what he hopes is grounding, soothing, not that Minho seems to need it; Minho’s eyes run up and down the planes of Changbin’s body. The scrutiny should make him shrink or falter. Changbin burns at the places where his body meets the world: his back against his bed, Minho’s knees bracketing his waist, the way Minho’s elbow knocks against Changbin’s knee as he contorts a little to finger himself. And Minho’s eyes, their weight as tangible as the rest of him.

Changbin lets himself look back, feels his own gaze linger. “Hyung,” he says, and slides one hand up to Minho’s hip, tugs at the gathered hem of that blue hoodie, tucks his fingers underneath it. “Come on.”

Minho looks as if a smart comment is gathering on his lips — then he falters, and Changbin catalogues what he looks like as pleasure darts quick and shocky across his face, as Minho grinds back onto his finger with a sort of silent gasp. His eyes flutter halfway closed for a moment. Changbin pauses, waits. When Minho looks back at him, it’s like the cocksure persona has left him for a little — he meets Changbin’s eyes, lips parted just a little, then tips forwards until he’s flush with Changbin’s chest for a moment, pressing a kiss into the junction of Changbin’s shoulder and clavicle. Changbin rubs a circle into his flank, then adds, hesitant — “Still okay?”

“Yeah,” Minho murmurs. Changbin can feel him breathing. At once he’s not so mythological — a man wearing skin and muscle and sinew, as flayed-raw by observers as Changbin always has been. Changbin slides his hands up and drags his hoodie up, over his shoulders — Minho lifts his arms to let him, and Changbin eyes his fingers a little suspiciously where the gleam of the lube catches the light — and then he’s shirtless, all angles and muscle, wirier than Changbin but sturdy and compact and strong. A tattoo on his navel, small and discreet, of a flower Changbin doesn’t recognise in a spray of leaves. Changbin hadn’t even known he’d had one. Eight years and change, but Minho had always guarded his privacy a little jealously.

Minho catches him looking, says softly, “That’s new, Changbin-ah. You didn’t miss it.”

“How did you convince them to let you?” Changbin says idly, tracing the shape of it with his thumbs. The head of Minho’s cock is flushed-red and weeps with precome, perilously close to the petal Changbin outlines with his nail; there’s a sort of pleasure in making him go untouched.

Minho laughs. “I didn’t.” There’s something tender in his voice beneath the burn of lust, and neither of them will ever be able to put a name to it. Not where someone might hear. Minho catches Changbin’s hand in his own — the one without lube, Changbin notes, a little prudish still — and interlaces their fingers against the tattoo, seemingly content even with his cock erect and untouched so close by. “Pass me the lube again, Bin-ah,” he says, sort of vicious, and Changbin fumbles for it without looking away.

(Touch is incriminating but inadmissible. It’s the only way Changbin can say it: the burn of eyes on skin, his hands on Minho’s body. Thank you for knowing the shape of me. Unspoken, always. Such is the way of things.)

Changbin drags his thumb over Minho’s tummy; Minho rolls his hips down onto his fingers again, smiling when Changbin can’t quite swallow back his sound. It comes out as a grunt that Changbin thinks must sound distinctly unsexy, but — Minho doesn’t seem to mind. “Shh, Bin-ah,” he says. His knuckles tighten on Changbin’s hand. “Patience. You’ve got me now. I’m not going anywhere.”

Changbin hums. Minho squirms, pressing a third finger into himself; Changbin narrows his eyes, says, “That seems fucking unrealistic.” It would explain how easily he’d taken his first finger, too. “Hyung, did you —”

“I might have — might have been thinking about it earlier,” Minho says evasively. Changbin laughs out loud. There’s a joke in there about presumptuousness, about being eager, but he can’t quite string the words together. Minho squeezes his thighs against Changbin’s hips, like he’s trying to close them but can’t; before Changbin can come up with something to say that sounds clever, attractive, sexy, Minho’s already speaking again. “Where did you take that other photo, Binnie-yah? Very artistic.”

“Artistic?” Changbin snorts. He’s still so flushed under the weight of Minho’s attention, still hard enough he’s a little lightheaded, but — it’s easier, settles him in his bones, for Minho to be teasing him. “I was standing in a hotel room looking depressed, hyung.”

“It felt real,” Minho says, hushed and intent and almost vicious. Something balloons hot and heavy in Changbin’s chest. Minho rocks his hips again, grinding back onto his fingers with a little sound like ah, says, “Binnie, Bin-ah, do you want me?”

“Yes,” Changbin says. It’s all he can say: yes, yes, yes. “Please.” Minho makes a soft punched-out sound, and then he’s wiping his fingers on the towel, slipping both hands under Changbin’s waistband, one of them still a little tacky with the lube — Changbin should shrink from the sensation but doesn’t, feels soothed by that evidence of presence, of touch. It felt real, Minho had said. The imperfection tastes like sunlight.

Minho slips one hand around Changbin’s cock, then, and presses Changbin’s hips back down with his thighs when he tries to buck into the touch, strokes Changbin’s dick like he’s learning its shape. Somehow fluid despite navigating around his own limbs, he tugs Changbin’s sweats down to his knees. Skims one hand over the thigh where he’d been touching Changbin in the restaurant. Heat burns bittersweet in Changbin’s gut — text me, Minho had said, then left him on fucking read again, always Changbin straining towards him like the inked flower on his navel to the sun, always only seen — but Minho is looking now. Touches him now. Changbin gazes at the tableau of him, the shape of his mouth, digs his hands into Minho’s hips until he can feel the jut of bone.

Minho laughs, working his hand over Changbin’s cock lazily. “Behave, Binnie.”

“You are going to drive me fucking insane,” Changbin says — not even in a put-on whine like he might with Chan, just honest, raw.

Minho’s smile is sharp-edged. “Thank you,” he says, like it’s a compliment. It probably is. Changbin wants to say more, say something perfect, honest, some way to sum it all up — the burn of seen but not seen, the low-grade ache of want — he opens his mouth, and Minho leans forward and kisses him out of it first, before he can put words to it. This kiss is needier, more intense. Changbin tilts his head and, as best he can, presses closer despite the angle, mouths at Minho’s bottom lip, imagines it swollen and bitten-red and finds himself bucking his hips again into the steady weight of Minho’s body.

Kissing Minho is almost familiar, as much as Changbin can’t have done it more than once or twice over the years. It takes him a moment to work out why. Then, of course, like lightning: Minho grazes Changbin’s lips with his teeth the way Jisung does, with a sort of unrelenting pressure that reminds him of Chan, and he tastes like the same brand of toothpaste that Changbin and Hyunjin have in their own bathroom. Changbin closes his eyes. Against the dark of his eyelids glitters the shape of a constellation, each star like a lump in his throat.

Out of the dark, their lips parting just enough for Minho to speak: “Changbin-ah. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Changbin says, dazed. He curls a hand around the jut of Minho’s hip.

“Okay,” Minho murmurs again. Changbin, eyes still closed, feels his weight shift atop Changbin, groans when the change in angle drags the head of his cock against Minho’s body — then Minho aligns them, sinks down onto Changbin like it’s easy for him, like it’s nothing. He makes a long, sweet sound into Changbin’s mouth. Changbin shudders beneath him at the sensation of Minho tight around his cock, at the way Minho’s knees squeeze against the frame of Changbin’s hips, at the way they mouth at each other. Less kissing, now. More breathing against each others’ lips.

Changbin is a bow string drawn impossibly tight, his gut coiled into knots. “Hyung,” he groans through gritted teeth.

“Hm?” Minho smiles against Changbin’s cheekbone. “I’m getting comfortable, Binnie.”

“Didn’t take it like you needed any time to get comfortable,” Changbin snarks, a little breathless. Minho is tight enough around him, lube-slick and hot, that he can’t quite think full sentences.

“No,” Minho agrees, shifting a little, experimental, not quite fucking himself but squirming in place; Changbin stiffens, feels the ripples of the movement radiate through him. He takes Changbin’s words and turns them back on him: “I was sitting on my toy sitting about your cock, Changbin-ah, if you must know.” He must feel the way Changbin white-knuckles his hips. There’s a sort of shit-eating arrogance to him as he nudges his cheek against Changbin’s, murmurs into his ear, “Now be patient, hm? I’m savouring the moment.”

“You’re so full of shit,” Changbin says. His heart beats against the cage of his body.

“I know,” Minho replies. “It’s one of my best qualities.”

Changbin grinds his hips up gently, hesitant; this time, Minho lets him. He moves with it, impossibly fluid. (Fucking dancers. And Changbin had thought Hyunjin’s thighs were ridiculous.) Minho draws himself upright in a sinuous sort of movement that begins at his hips and, when Changbin opens his eyes to gaze up at him, radiates through the compact frame of his body like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. He rolls his hips down to meet Changbin’s, confident, glorious. In his element — Minho both uses and inhabits his body, Changbin thinks, moving between the two fluently in a way Changbin has never been able to master, making it both a tool and a home. Changbin’s cock drags inside him; he groans.

“Give it to me, Binnie,” Minho says, lifting himself up, tension tautening his thighs. “Go on. Show me how much you wanted me, yeah?”

“Fuck,” Changbin hisses, his hands splayed over the narrow apex of Minho’s waist. He can’t think. The slide of his dick inside Minho is maddening, impossible; he ruts up into Minho and watches him take it, move with it, the way his mouth parts when he likes it.

“That’s it, Binnie,” Minho murmurs. He lifts himself up and then sinks back down slowly onto Changbin’s cock, gives a little punched-out gasp once he’s fully seated again. Changbin can’t think. Minho grinds his hips for a moment, satisfied, full — and it’s Changbin inside him, Changbin who’s given him what he needs — his hands wander over the expanse of Minho’s skin, up and down the column of his torso, tracing the coiled power in his obliques. He fucks up into Minho again, groans at the sensation.

Minho makes another sound when Changbin gropes at his thighs again, like a strung-out laugh. “You like my thighs, Bin-ah?” he says, fond, breathless.

Changbin ruts up into him in a heat-daze. “Who the fuck wouldn’t, hyung?”

“Mm. You —” Minho breaks off as Changbin thrusts up into him again, the sound that falls from him more breath than voice, then moves with it, drags himself up so he can fuck himself back onto Changbin’s cock. “You have a point.” He leans down to brace himself above Changbin’s chest, arms trembling but wiry-strong, brilliant, and Changbin tips his forehead into one of his forearms — aimless, just to touch, to be reminded it’s there. That he knows the shape of this body as well as his own. Minho adds, conspiratorial, “It’s okay. I like your shoulders, Binnie. Fair’s fair.”

He rides Changbin frustratingly beautifully. Changbin loses himself in it for a little while, the way their bodies fit and work together, the sensation of closeness, of touch; the way Minho looks at him is gentler now, softer through the crescent of his pleasure-lidded eyes, but no less powerful for the way its edges have blurred. The way he watches Changbin is electric. It feels the same way desire does; they burn the same beneath Changbin’s skin. Changbin tries to match Minho, to make it good for him, but it’s hard to fuck him from on his back — and Minho rides him like he loves it, anyway. Murmuring to him. Tireless. His thighs flex each time he moves. Changbin really does like them an embarrassing amount; Minho doesn’t seem to mind, though, so Changbin leaves his hands on them, the sensation equal parts settling him and heightening the flush of arousal through his body.

Pleasure creeps up on him until he’s almost startled to register he’s close, caught up in the shape Minho’s body makes above him, the curve of that little knowing smile. He ruts up into Minho again, clumsier, less controlled. Minho has enough poise for both of them, rolls his hips with a sweet quiet noise like ah; Changbin wants, has wanted, to break his composure. To see him fall apart around the edges, even a little. He thrusts up again, as best as he can manage given the angle, and knows he’s done something right when Minho’s mouth falls open again; his eyes narrow in a sort of breathless smile. “That’s it, Binnie,” he says, pitchy, flushed everywhere. “Yeah, go on. That’s good.”

“Hyung,” Changbin says, feeling raw-edged, gutted. Minho’s dick is red and pretty against his stomach; the picture he makes is brilliant, obscene, intimate. No — the picture they make. Arousal settles sweet into the curve of Changbin’s muscles, into the pool of his gut, the lining of his ribcage where his heart and lungs sit.

Minho grinds his hips in small filthy circles; Changbin groans. “You gonna last long enough for me to come on your cock first?” Minho murmurs. Movement flutters over his stomach, pleasure caught in the contraction of his abs. “I think — ah — I think you can, Changbinnie. Show me.”

Minho moves fluently, beautifully, even when Changbin thinks he must be close himself, even when he stops talking, just makes those quiet pleased sounds each time he fucks himself on Changbin just right. He’s not loud like Jisung, but a sweet sort of self-contained. Ah, ah, punchy and breathless, like little shocks. Changbin holds onto the muscle of his quads, warmth swelling in his chest and his cock in equal measures. Of course Minho’s good at this. And it’s — kind of perfect, the hushed quiet of them, the low lamplight — the lack of eyes except for each others’, the idea that the only people who know about this are the people Changbin trusts more than anyone in the world. The sweet build in Changbin’s gut. The tight pressure of Minho around him, above him, clenching on his cock. Minho grinds down into Changbin’s movements again, once, twice, gasps; then he’s coming, sweet and perfect and untouched, across his own chest and Changbin’s stomach. Messy and honest. It felt real. Changbin smooths his hands over Minho’s trembling thighs, slows his own hips, grinds into him in little circles until Minho settles. Then he pauses. They take a long breath almost in unison.

“No,” Minho says, quick and earnest, his ribs heaving with the weight of his breath. He lowers himself onto Changbin’s chest until they’re flush together, breathing together. “No, it’s okay, Changbin-ah. Go on.” Even undone like this and splattered in his own come, the way he smirks is perfectly self-assured. Like he knows exactly who he is. “I can take it.”

Changbin burns. “Are you —”

“I’ll help you,” Minho murmurs. His tattoo is streaked with come.

Changbin groans again, his skin prickling with the way Minho is looking at him, unrelenting, a sort of challenge in his eyes. He drives his hips upwards again into the heat of Minho’s hole. It doesn’t take him long — not with Minho sated and arch against him, murmuring in his ear. “Yeah, Changbin-ah — look at you, look at you. Look so good. Fucking me so good.” One of his hands smooths over Changbin’s bicep, and he follows it with his lips, open-mouthed, messy, grinding down on Changbin and clenching around him despite how sensitive it must be, despite his own softening cock.

Changbin feels the way he shudders as he comes, the way pleasure and heat ripple through him, hard enough he can’t quite make out anything but the sensation of Minho’s body against his own — doesn’t matter, anyway, not when he feels this good, not when he’d made Minho feel this good. Minho rolls his hips to meet Changbin’s messy thrusts, murmurs, “Look at you, Bin-ah,” his lips pressed to the shell of Changbin’s ear. Changbin makes a noise like a whimper, embarrassed, wanting, and clutches him close through his orgasm.

Stars against the dark of his eyelids. Love in the way their bodies press together, in the negative spaces carved out between them, in everything seen but not commented on, everything they know but cannot say. Minho threads his fingers into Changbin’s hair, murmurs, “You rest, Changbin-ah. I’ll clean us up.”

“In a minute,” Changbin grumbles, gets an arm around Minho’s waist and tugs him closer. “I. Uh.” Human speech is a little beyond him. He should say something, mean something, but can’t find the words to do it.

Minho’s smile against his cheek, though, is answer enough. “You’re going to complain so bad in like ten minutes,” he says, his fingers splayed over the swell of Changbin’s bicep. “But it’s your funeral.” He kisses Changbin’s collarbone, then his jaw, as Changbin’s softening cock slips out of him, his fingers still tacky with lube, the light still low across his body. Changbin angles his chin and the next kiss lands on his lips.

“I see you,” Minho says hoarse and throaty against his mouth. Changbin can feel his lips moving, the way they shape the words. “You impossible fucking flirt. It’s okay. I’m here now.”

Afterwards, Minho brings Changbin a glass of water from his own kitchen. “You — you looked good in that lingerie, Changbinnie,” he says; his free hand is carefully still, not fidgeting the way he’s prone to, shoved into the pocket of a pair of sweatpants he must have scrounged from Changbin’s wardrobe, given he’d showed up in jeans. “I’m sorry I didn’t reply.”

“Did I do something wrong?” Changbin murmurs, hoarse. He knows he’s wanted. It’d be hard not to know, the way Minho had clenched around him, the sharp ripple of pleasure moving across the muscles in his stomach, the way he’d looked down at Changbin through pleasure-slitted eyes — still, he feels unsettled. Sated, yes, but still stung. A little haunted by the empty spaces in everything in his life, the things he can never allow himself to say. (I’ll tell you in ten years, Felix had joked once, bitter-edged. No way we’re still doing this shit by then.)

“No, Changbinnie,” Minho says. He stands a careful distance away, then bites his lip raw and crosses the negative space of it, settling his hips on the bed and a soothing hand on the back of Changbin’s neck; it curls there, warm and possessive. Reassuring. He speaks like it’s difficult, like he’s trying: “Changbin, no. I was just — I don’t know what I was thinking. I — need to think things over, sometimes. It all happened very fast.” His throat works as he swallows. “I thought it was funny. Then I was a little scared.”

“I — I know something about that,” Changbin says. He gets an arm under Minho’s elbow and tugs him closer, kisses him — barefaced, gentle and unbeautiful, like a boy who wants a boy. He closes his eyes, loses himself to the brush of lips against his own. Doesn’t need to watch — the sensation is enough. Minho kisses him with restrained intensity, even spent; his fingers flex against Changbin’s neck briefly, then relax.

When Changbin pulls back, lets himself look, Minho’s eyes are creased. His smile is crooked and small and secret — like he knows something no one else does, and it’s precious to him. Like he’d heard what Changbin hadn’t said, everything written in the empty spaces in their lives.

Like he sees the way Changbin’s heart takes wing in him: quickening, private. For just a moment, unselfconscious.

[12.23 am] minho hyung 😌🤔💖😻: [20241224_122201.png] [20241224_122203.png] [20241224_122214.png]

[12.23 am] jinnie 💍👰‍♀️💦: yay :)
[12.23 am] jinnie 💍👰‍♀️💦: 👍👍

[12.24 am] bokkie 🌻🍆🍑💥‼️: oh hot
[12.24 am] bokkie 🌻🍆🍑💥‼️: love verbs <3

Chapter Text

A mistake to be paid for in high collars and concealer, caught in a motion-blur like it’s something precious: Changbin, spent and marked, face out of frame. Covered in hickeys. His back pressed against another man’s chest. Each of them anonymous, except in the eyes of those who know them.

Hyunjin’s long fingers cradling the frame of Changbin’s ribs, splayed across his stomach, both of them loose and sweaty and stained. Red littering the pale skin of his stomach. Marks bitten into his pecs. A sheen to his chest that could be spit or sweat. Anonymous: a man leaning backwards into the chest of someone who loves him, in his arms, blurred in a phone’s front camera. The background pale and white in the corner — something that could be a kitchen counter, maybe, but too blurry to make out.

(An impulsive selfie. “You should delete that,” Changbin had said, hushed and feeling guilty for it. “Just in case.” He should have been afraid, but there, sated and soothed, he couldn’t bring himself to; couldn’t connect action and consequence well enough to fear a hickey. Or two. Or thirty.

“Our faces aren’t in it,” Hyunjin had murmured, pressed a kiss to the top of Changbin’s head. Tender in the afterglow. “Hey. It’s okay, all right? We’ll keep each other safe.”)