Chapter Text
“You bought a scooter,” Seonghwa says, looking from Minho to the green scooter leaned beside the open living room window. The bows hanging from the handlebars are flapping lightly in the breeze. “For a seven-month-old baby.”
Sunlight sparkles through his soft blond hair and glints off the veins of silver and green in the marble coffee table. Outside, in the courtyard of the house, birds are chirping in the lemon trees. The steady, comforting pulse of Seonghwa’s happy home throbs through the soles of Minho’s bare feet.
There’s a baby seat hooked on the edge of the kitchen island, a bright yellow blanket with ducks on it tossed over the back of the couch, and a carnage of stuffed animals, colored blocks, and stacking rings strewn throughout the living room. A smiling blue dinosaur’s head is drooping to one side, nearly ripped off. Stuffing is oozing through the ripped seams and loose stitching.
Once upon a time, Seonghwa couldn’t stand mess and disarray. Even a book out of place on a shelf, and each book did have its proper place which Seonghwa knew by heart, or an errant sock hanging out of a drawer drove him to distraction.
Seonghwa bends down to place a teacup in front of him before sinking down gracefully onto the green sofa opposite Minho. He smiles then, with the cloying sincerity of a contented person, and Minho doesn’t know if he can ever be happy for him, truly selflessly happy for Seonghwa in a way that doesn’t also make Minho feel irrationally bitter, like a child left behind.
Thinking Seonghwa deserves to have this is easy, at least. Minho can think that and believe it.
Seonghwa has on his favorite rose-patterned shirt, parrot green and deep magenta now faded to pastels. He had worn it on their first date, like a test designed to weed out the weak and make sure Minho was in it for the long haul.
‘That shirt looks like it slithered straight out of your award-winning horror movies,’ Minho had told him bluntly in the candlelit restaurant where he’d taken Seonghwa for dinner, and Seonghwa had looked at him silently for a long moment before resting his elbows on the table and saying, ‘Thank you, do you want to take it off of me?’
Minho can’t help but smile, fondly. It’s both familiar and not, the depth of thoughtfulness in Seonghwa’s dark eyes and the fragrance of tea steeping in the old-fashioned pot on the kitchen counter.
Sometimes, when midnight found Minho bent over a script, muttering lines under his breath, Seonghwa would pop up behind his chair in their shared office, a cup of Minho’s favorite hibiscus tea in one hand and a slice of buttered toast in the other.
‘Can I help?’ he’d ask, drowsy eyes barely open, because he knew Minho needed to hear the lines aloud to memorize them.
“That,” Seonghwa says now, porcelain-smooth brow creasing gently as Minho takes a sip of tea and burns his tongue, “is a scooter for a toddler.”
Minho’s finger taps out a silent rhythm on the cup as he waits for the tea, sweetened to nausea, to cool a little. The fragile, almost translucent china feels like a calamity waiting to happen in his hand, an unsettlingly familiar anticipation lately.
“With light-up wheels,” he says finally, raising the cup towards Seonghwa as though to say, You’re welcome. “Where’s my Best Uncle mug?”
“Minho, he’s just started to crawl on all fours.” Seonghwa heaves a great big sigh through his nose. “He can’t ride a kick scooter.”
“Not with that attitude,” Minho says so ardently that Seonghwa blinks. “What’s this, Seonghwa, five foolproof ways to destroy your child’s self-esteem?”
Just then, the door slams open and Seonghwa’s giggling husband stomps in.
“I love this guy,” Hongjoong announces, almost tripping over his laces as he toes his boots off. Strapped to his chest in a kangaroo sling is Yejun, sound asleep, lips slack and cheek squished against his father’s shoulder. “How could you divorce him?” Hongjoong wriggles his eyebrows as he watches Minho from the doorway with a grin that seems oddly too big for his delicate face.
“Who wouldn’t choose you over me?” Minho’s eyes sweep over Hongjoong, his paint-splattered denim overalls and the ragged beige t-shirt underneath in a quick, dismissive once-over. “You’re getting drooled on,” Minho tells him, running a lazy finger around the gilded rim of his teacup. “Hope this isn’t your best shirt.”
It gets him another laugh from Hongjoong, warm and easy, as he wipes the baby’s mouth with his sleeve.
Seonghwa sighs again, longer this time. “I hadn’t even met Hongjoong when I divorced you,” he states, for the sixty-eighth time in the last three years, and sets his teacup down on its saucer with a clank. Looking back at Hongjoong over his shoulder, Seonghwa says, “Babe,” sounding a little resigned and only mildly confrontational, “what happened to Yejun’s romper?”
“His romper?” Hongjoong glances down at the baby with an abruptness that indicates he’d forgotten Yejun was there, shrinking into a full-body wince as he seems to register the blue and green handprints covering the sling and the baby’s clothes; Minho laughs. “Oh, he’s been keeping me company in the studio.” Glumly, Hongjoong pokes a forefinger at the ruined leg of Yejun’s romper. “I might have wiped my hands on him. Too bad, that’s Gucci.”
“You used our son as a wiping rag,” Seonghwa establishes, staring at Hongjoong in that serene way he has that makes knee-jerk belligerence lurch in Minho’s stomach like a Pavlov’s dog response; looking sheepish, Hongjoong runs a hand through his bleached hair.
Minho manages to stop laughing. “Surely Yejun can poop just as easily in non-branded clothes,” he offers.
“Right? Hongjoong keeps buying designer outfits for him.” Seonghwa throws his arms up in defeat, like it’s an argument even he cannot win.
“Heh,” Hongjoong says, unashamedly. He leans down around Seonghwa to steal a sip of tea from his cup, leaving a blue smear across the delicate blossoms painted on the side. “Sorry,” he mutters, “I was experimenting with a new technique. Oh, chamomile,” Hongjoong hums after a moment, handing back the teacup, “my favorite.”
Something hurts in Minho’s chest, deep down. Not a wound, not anymore, but a mess of crisscrossed scar tissue pulled tight over his flesh.
“What technique?” Seonghwa prompts, somehow managing to sound genuinely interested, and presses the edge of his napkin to the stained china. It looks to be more of a habit than any real urgency.
“Splashing and dripping. Looks fire but there’s probably paint in my ass crack, frankly.”
“Fascinating,” Minho says, rudely.
Smirking at him, Hongjoong strides over and unloads the still-sleeping baby into Minho’s arms, one hand braced on the arm of the couch for support. “There we go,” he says, smoothing Yejun’s scraggly hair with his blue-stained fingers, “Uncle Minho was dying to hold you.”
“Dying,” Minho confirms, sounding unconvinced to his own ears. Yejun writhes and splutters, tiny and warm and sweet-smelling as he curls right up against Minho’s chest. Reflexively, he cradles him in the crook of his arm as Yejun yawns and blinks huge brown eyes up at him. He smiles a near-toothless smile like an overly friendly grandpa who’s about to berate you for not visiting more often, before reaching out to grab Minho’s hair. “No,” Minho says as Yejun winds his little fingers around a strand tightly, in the clear, exaggeratedly enunciated way of someone scolding a disobedient puppy, “let go.”
“That’s not the tone we use in our discipline language,” Seonghwa says, sounding disapproving and amused at the same time; Minho wants to push him off a very steep cliff.
Propping his hip against the side of Seonghwa’s couch, Hongjoong snorts. Minho stares at him until Hongjoong laughs and shakes his head, looking away.
“What’s the appropriate register and tone to convey that I’d rather not have bald spots?” he inquires politely, trying to catch the small offending hand. Scream-laughing at him, Yejun stuffs one fist in his mouth and kicks against Minho’s chest, pulling harder on his hair. “Hey, hey, no!” He turns to Seonghwa, a little desperate. “Why is it doing that?”
“He is just happy to see you.” Seonghwa cuts him a chastising look over the rim of his teacup, then sets it down. “Stop calling him an ‘it’, he can hear you.”
“He’s a seven-month-old baby,” Minho parrots snippily, bouncing the baby in his arms like he’s seen Seonghwa and Hongjoong do. Yejun giggles and blows spit bubbles, letting go of Minho’s hair to clap his hands. “I’ve had a shit week, pal,” Minho murmurs, tugging his necklace chain out from under his shirt. He swings it back and forth above Yejun’s grabby hands to distract him. “You should be nice to me.”
“Was it, really?” Seonghwa asks. “A shit week? You can’t hate your… arrangement that much, or you would’ve told Steven to fuck off, regardless of what anyone was saying.” He picks off non-existent lint from the linen of his pants, shaking his head when Minho rolls his eyes at him. After a beat, Seonghwa rolls his back.
Yejun chases a sunbeam like a cat swatting its paws in the air, scrunching up his face when it dances just out of reach. Minho’s necklace is still clutched in his little fist.
“You like him,” Seonghwa says quietly, a small smile grazing the curve of his mouth.
Minho’s heart gives a twitch, unpleasant and unwelcome. “Your son?” he drawls, pulling the chain free from Yejun’s grip. “He’s alright. I’m not a kids person, though, you know that. You may recall that’s one of the reasons you left me,” he tells Seonghwa, eyeing him warily.
“I remember.” Seonghwa leans back into the couch. He lifts his left hand, finding his husband’s denim-clad thigh behind him with disconcerting accuracy. “No kids, unless we count the twenty-year-olds you let sit in your lap,” Seonghwa adds, giving Hongjoong’s hip a fond squeeze. The big, square-cut diamonds in his ring gleam and flash in the sun.
Glancing between them like a dog between two dinners, Hongjoong pats Seonghwa’s shoulder loyally. “Good one.”
“You can call me Pervy Santa,” Minho says, slipping his necklace back under his shirt. The gold is warm against his skin where it lies below his collarbones. “The last one was twenty-five, for the record.”
“Yeah. Jisung.” Seonghwa arches an eyebrow then says again, like the fucker he is, “You like him.”
They look at one another for a second.
“You know how annoying it is when you do that. Sure, yeah, I like him,” Minho snaps, and he doesn’t mean for it to sound as sharp as it does, but there’s something burning and contorting under his skin. He thinks about Jisung awkwardly twisting his shirt with both hands in the car on the way to the restaurant, curling himself up so small. Thinks about his eyes on Minho’s mouth, and his dark lashes, and his pink, pink lips bitten raw, and the thing is, he’s not denying it. He can’t, can he? “Of course I do,” Minho says, only sounding a little like the admission scrapes his throat bloody. “He’s cute. Sharp as a whip. Has a nice perky ass, what’s not to fucking like, Seonghwa?”
“Well,” Seonghwa says, half gleeful and half like he’s suddenly no longer sure he wants to be having this conversation.
“Yeah. Well.” Yejun babbles something as if he’s agreeing, and Minho huffs a laugh, shifting him to his shoulder. “This is really stretching the limits of my baby-handling knowledge,” he informs Yejun, half-apologetic. “Your parents are being rather careless,” Minho adds, watching said parents kiss out the corner of his eye.
“There’s tea in the pot,” Seonghwa is saying to Hongjoong quietly, their heads bent towards each other.
“Thanks, love.”
There’s tenderness in their private looks, meant just for the two of them, comfort in the way their bodies angle towards each other and fit together. Hongjoong hooks his pinky finger around Seonghwa’s for a second before pulling away, and Seonghwa’s eyes crinkle in the corners as he watches his husband drag his socked feet towards the kitchen.
Keeping a hand on Yejun’s little back, Minho bounces him again, probably too enthusiastically because the baby bounds up and down like a rubber ball in his arms before erupting into laughter. When he looks up, Seonghwa is smiling at them.
Seonghwa had told him that he wanted something real, real commitment and reliability. Wanted someone who would plan with him, and make him their priority, and be there for him. Someone who would never make Seonghwa wonder how much longer it would be before they slipped out of his grasp.
‘Sometimes I think you like loneliness more than you love me,’ Seonghwa had said, reaching across the dining table to lay a gentle hand on Minho’s arm, and Minho couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘Can you tell me I’m wrong? Can you promise me that it’s you, that you’re the one who can be that for me?’
Minho hadn’t tried to stop him, because he’s many things but a liar isn’t one of them. He’d let Seonghwa walk right out of his life, even helped him carry his boxes into the car, like a gentleman.
It was ironic, probably, that for everything he’d had at first and everything he’d hoped for later, the loneliness Minho had cherished was all he was left with after Seonghwa was gone. Just him in a silent house that now haunted him.
Six months later, Seonghwa went and got hitched at the courthouse to a penniless artist who lived out of his fifty-year-old van and had never held down a proper relationship or a job for more than two months.
‘So much for reliability,’ Minho jeered when Seonghwa told him. ‘That guy makes me seem stable and wise beyond my years in comparison.’
‘Oh, Minho,’ Seonghwa said in that soft tone, putrid with understanding and concern, that made Minho’s skin crawl, ‘but reliability doesn’t mean being perfect. It just means being dependable, and I know I can depend on him to love me the way I love him.’ He was quiet on the other end of the line for a while, and so was Minho, looking down at the paler spot on his finger where he’d worn his wedding band, still visible. ‘Have you ever loved anyone like that?’ Seonghwa asked.
‘No,’ Minho spat out, something sticky and dark, something red-hot like anger pooling inside his stomach. ‘Had you? Before him?’
Seonghwa didn’t say anything, which was answer enough.
Yejun is drifting off again in Minho’s arms when Hongjoong returns with the teapot. He refills Seonghwa’s cup first, then Minho’s.
“Minho is in one of his moods,” Seonghwa says, shifting slightly to make room for Hongjoong to sit beside him. “I can’t tell if it’s a very good one or a very bad one.”
“Bad one.” Hongjoong smirks when Minho flicks a peeved look towards him. “See? He wants to kick my ass.”
“That’s your litmus test?” Minho snorts. “Seems inherently flawed.”
“Bad one,” Seonghwa agrees, staring at him pensively. “Is it because of your little rockstar? Hongjoong showed me the photos from your date.” His mouth curls into a smile that would seem kind of sweet if Minho didn’t know better. “You looked very into each other.” He sips his tea slowly before adding, “Very happy together.”
“Reading gossip rags, huh?” Minho squints at Hongjoong, who shrugs with a smile.
“We all need hobbies.” He slings a leg over both of Seonghwa’s thighs, and Seonghwa gives his knee an indulgent pat.
“Did you see the one about me fucking Seonghwa behind your back, then?” Minho taunts, rocking the sleeping baby on his shoulder. “They had photos of us hugging outside your house.”
Inexplicably, Hongjoong perks up at that. “Cheating on Jisung already?” He jabs an accusing finger into the air at Minho. “Shame on you, Jisung is down bad! I’ve never seen him look so smitten.”
Minho casts a judgmental look at Seonghwa, who is staring at Hongjoong and looking completely enamored. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Hongjoong is a Gutter Talk fan,” Seonghwa supplies with a smile, like that explains it. “He bought tickets for the LA and San Francisco shows.”
“Of course he did.”
“If you’re going to say something about my husband’s bad taste—” Seonghwa starts warningly, and Minho just laughs at him.
“I like their sound, they’re good. Different,” he says, calling Hongjoong over with a crook of his finger; he rolls his eyes at Minho like a brat but stands up. “Come get your son. What am I, a free babysitter?”
“We all saw how much you like their frontman, at least. The photos were very clear.” He stretches his arms out to take Yejun, moving him to his hip with the ease of a practiced hand. “I wonder what lens they used to take them.”
On the coffee table, Minho’s phone lights up with Jisung’s name, vibrating and flashing up messages.
“I can ask the paps who follow me around,” Minho offers sweetly as he reaches for it.
“Cool, thanks, man,” Hongjoong says, mouth slanting into a vaguely maniacal grin. “So why were you pawing at that man’s dick, Minho? What kind of contract did your PR have you sign?”
Jisung Han [11:52 am]
are we still on for tomorrow night? what time do you want me there??
also
hi :3
oh and
send me the code for your gate so i can buzz myself in
“Guessing and speculating,” Minho mutters as he thumbs through Jisung’s texts, “there are no photos that show that.”
It’s true, Hyunjin had sent him the links along with a chaotic emoji buffet, and Minho scrolled through all the articles, some of which had thousands of comments, through the gossip blogs and social media. There wasn’t anything too graphic, but the implication of what the couple in the photos was up to was more than enough.
Jisung was right, the smile Minho had turned in his direction as they sat under the bougainvillea blossoms with a dozen cameras pointed at them at various heights and angles did look good. It looked exactly the way it was supposed to, with Minho’s eyes softened around the edges and Jisung’s sweet cheeks flaming with pink as he averted his gaze, as though overcome with shyness.
‘I don’t normally do this,’ Jisung had confessed in that car, in the breathless space between one kiss and the next, and Minho believed him.
Minho Lee [11:54 am]
Is that how we ask for things?
Jisung’s reply comes immediately.
Jisung Han [11:54 am]
🙄
…
please please pleaseeeee daddy can i have the codeeeee
Minho feels himself smile.
“That the boyfriend?” Hongjoong asks, trying to peek over Minho’s shoulder at his phone. He huffs when Minho angles it away, shooting Hongjoong a dark look. “Can you ask him to include ‘Wires’ in the setlist for the US leg?” he continues, unfazed. “I love that song.”
“Babe,” Seonghwa says before Minho can open his mouth, “go put Yejun down for a nap.”
Hongjoong is grimacing, like a kid who was just told to eat his vegetables. “Someone should represent Jisung’s interests and honor in this meeting,” he objects, moving the baby to his other arm.
Minho chuckles bitterly. “Bless your selfless, generous heart.”
“After giving him, and yourself,” Seonghwa adds like he hasn’t heard either of them, and wrinkles his nose, “a bath. Scrub well.”
Stomping his foot, Hongjoong finally gives a nod of surrender. He pads out of the living room, aiming a little kick at the door on the way out.
“Cute,” Seonghwa murmurs with a happy sigh, following Hongjoong with his gaze until he disappears down the hallway.
“Mm,” Minho says, skeptically.
Seonghwa exhales a laugh and leans his head back against the couch. “More dates?” he asks, nodding at the phone in Minho’s hand.
“Yeah.” He pauses to ask Jisung who’s taking him to the beach house and gets a testy ‘a chauffeur who will be driving me around town like an escort’ in response that makes Minho breathe a surprised laugh. “They’re supposed to get photos of him leaving my place early the next morning,” he says, texting back a ‘that’ll be a good look on you’ before placing the phone on the table with the display facing down.
“I assume Steven is happy with the media coverage?” Seonghwa crosses his legs, swinging the top one back and forth. “You two are everywhere, I’ve seen photo essays and deep dives about your relationship timeline already, and you know I’m not even online like that.”
Minho’s jaw clenches. “He’d better be fucking ecstatic. Hyunjin sure is,” he adds after a moment, then snorts and shakes his head. “He’s been in a good mood all week. I’d say back to normal after the Oscars shitshow, but that’s not it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Hyunjin so happy, it’s kinda disquieting.”
“Yeah, you would say that.” Seonghwa’s grin turns admonishing, and Minho laughs, drawing his feet up on the couch to sit cross-legged. “He’s a nice boy. A hard worker, too.”
“He’s been receiving death threats on my behalf from fans, apparently,” Minho clarifies, “which is pleasing him greatly. They’re upset that I’m no longer single.” He stares at the blue fingerprint on Seonghwa’s teacup until its edges blur and distort. “The Universal lawyers have backed off,” he tells him. “The movie deal is back on the table, or so Seungmin says. We’ll see.” The anger that knifes him, slicing finely through his skin, almost catches him off guard, which is laughable because Minho’s felt little else since he walked out of that conference room. “You can be a manwhore all you want, clearly, as long as you repent and reform.” Minho shrugs, pushing away his half-empty teacup on the table. “This tea is ass, by the way,” he says, and Seonghwa gives a dejected groan.
“I know.” He burrows his forehead into the cushions. “But Hongjoong likes it sickeningly sweet.”
“You are sickeningly sweet,” Minho says irately.
Seonghwa nods like he’s conceding the point. “Hey,” he says suddenly and then laughs, “remember when Steven wanted you to do that movie about the broken, lonely man stuck in a town that he can’t seem to escape?” Clambering off the couch, he goes to shut the window. “Tied down by a failed career and an unwanted baby daughter, he turns to drugs to cope with the stress of divorce,” Seonghwa adds as he turns the AC on full blast, still chuckling. “That logline was the most depressing thing I had ever read.”
Minho barks out a laugh. “Monetize your grief,” he intones, pitching his voice low to mimic Steven’s gravelly tone. “Channel that pain into the script!”
“You should actually try that,” Seonghwa tells him, leaning back against the wall. His amusement seems to dim slightly as he studies Minho. “It might help.”
“Turn to drugs? You know that’s not my poison of choice.” Minho stands up, rolling his neck to pop out the kinks. Under his bare feet, the plush Persian rug barely makes a sound as he walks past Seonghwa to the window. “Speaking of, do you have whiskey in the house?” he asks, not feeling especially hopeful.
“I meant,” Seonghwa huffs, throwing him a long and pointed glance, “direct all that anger in ways that aren’t self-destructive. Use it to ace the PR stunt,” he says patiently, “like it’s a role you can dig into.”
For a moment, Minho just watches the branches of the lemon trees in the garden, hanging low and thick like weeping willows, sway with the wind. Not keen on making eye contact. He clears his throat, rubs absently at his chest; something inside it feels like it’s been stained worse than Seonghwa’s precious china. “How about that whiskey now?” he says finally, which is as good as acquiescence and they both know it.
Seonghwa smiles.
Jisung tugs at the hem of his shorts, checks the car’s location on Google Maps. Peeks into the plastic bag from the liquor store for the seventh time, as if this seventh time, those bottles of wine he’d flailed about the store twenty minutes for might finally have disappeared into thin air.
There’s a driver up front, and it isn’t Chan, for once. Upon finding out he’d gone behind her back to cancel Hoseok’s gig that night and take it on himself, Genevieve had reminded Chan, We pay this guy for a reason. She’d had much else to say, of course. He’s more experienced than you at navigating celebrity neighborhoods by car—and I mean A-list celebrity neighborhoods, Chris, Gutter Talk are high C-list on a good day, for one. And also, naturally, Don’t you have anything better to do?
So in spite of Chan’s indignant mumbles (No, actually), Jisung now finds himself in Hoseok’s backseat, climbing the sunset-gilded Malibu hills to Minho’s home. Liquor store bag on the seat beside him, little overnight bag clutched in his lap. Glancing at the patient curve of Hoseok’s ear, he picks up on an… unnerving sort of tapping noise. Only to trace it to his foot. His own heavily-booted foot.
Jisung grabs for his knee. (Yes, the manual intervention is entirely necessary.) “Sorry, Hoseok,” he mumbles.
“It’s okay, kid,” says Hoseok warmly, turning down the volume on the eclectic folk-yodeling that has kept them company cruising up the Pacific Coast Highway. “You look nervous. Is it the paps? Don’t sweat it. I’ve got the code. I’ll have us inside before you know it.”
Jisung musters up an assenting sort of noise; it’s the least he can do to acknowledge Hoseok’s kindness. Because—yes, he is nervous, but not for the paps. An hour ago he’d scrambled into the backseat of Hoseok’s car, reeking of freshly-applied hair product and freshly-spritzed perfume and freshly-perspired desperation—desperation that perfused every inch of his casual-but-obviously-carefully-curated outfit. Oh, it isn’t those fifteen-or-so seconds of clicking camera shutters he’d dressed up for. And what Hoseok doesn’t seem to realize is the quicker he gets them in, the sooner Jisung will see Minho.
Jisung’s foot begins to tap again. He sinks his nails into his kneecap.
They’ve been texting, yes. On and off, never for too long in one go. Generally playful, surface-level flirty. Like any professional associates attempting to make lemonade from contractual lemons.
Nothing to the extent of the first date, though.
The first… the last. The last time, that is, that Jisung saw Minho, face to face. While he’s given up on trying to understand Minho’s motives beyond his obvious raging exhibitionism kink (to which private messaging just doesn’t lend itself), he hasn’t been able to move past agonizing over his own.
It’s just. Jisung doesn’t like to fly by the seat of his pants. If he had any say in it, he never would, and Gutter Talk might never have taken off the way they did, because he would have confined himself to the safety of the standing mic forever and ever.
Jisung overthinks. He second-guesses himself, often the full three-hundred sixty degrees, all the way around and right back to where he’d started. He stands in his closet three hours before Hoseok is set to pick him up, takes an hour to settle on the same Old Reliable oversized Vivienne Westwood t-shirt he wears every other damn day. Takes another to decide on little three-stripe athletic shorts to wear underneath, because he’s got an aquarium’s worth of creatures tattooed on one leg and an insectarium’s on the other, and, well, Minho’s never seen those, has he? And Jisung wants to pique his interest, show him something zingy and new each time they meet. But then, abruptly, he wonders if it’s too soon to show so much skin (so much skin?! they’re just legs, idiot!), and whether knee socks with matching stripes would render the outfit more or less slutty (more, obviously, but okay, were Minho actually discovering the true extent of the whimsy up your sleeve, you’d have to get buck naked, and parading up Minho’s grand stairs in your birthday suit isn’t second date material. at least, not according to Genevieve, haha! hey, what the fuck, don’t give her any ideas!) and by then his phone is chiming with Hoseok’s out front but take ur time and Jisung has no choice but to leave the knee socks on, abandon the mess on his closet floor, check he’d actually applied deodorant, and fly out the door, overnight bag swinging.
He overthinks. But around Minho Lee, his well-oiled overthinking gears grind to a halt entirely.
For days after the brunch date, whenever Jisung closed his eyes, he’d see, hear, feel the same blurry supercut; himself, lunging across the center console of Minho’s car to kiss him; Minho’s answering bewilderment; blinding flashes and the solid heat of Minho’s hand at his back, waist, of Minho’s body, buttressing his; dance if you must; those cascading magenta flowers the restaurant was bursting with; the twinkling wryness in Minho’s eyes as he’d called Jisung sweetling, ordered his drink, traced the fly on his jeans. Himself, egged on, like it’d suddenly been an all-or-nothing fake-boyfriend competition and he wasn’t going to just dance (sorry, Gaga). No, he was going to eye-fuck Minho right back while asking the waiter, Oh, sir, can we split the, uh, crispy squash blossoms, please? He was going to rub off on Minho’s hand like there weren’t a dozen cameras aimed his way; he was going to eat off Minho’s fork and call him daddy.
That’s what he finds the most mortifying, really—that unfettered side of himself that Minho brings out. It’s no wonder the crawl up the hill to Minho’s home feels like a trudge to the gallows.
Jisung sees them now, the paparazzi, stationed and chatting amongst themselves on the public road. They won’t be able to crowd the car while Hoseok lingers at the gates, too deeply inset on Minho’s private driveway, but they’ll have a good shot through the fence lining the property.
As they roll past the paps, Jisung sinks down in the backseat. The windows are blacked out, but there’s something about the not-seeing that calms his heart. That, and his latest coping mechanism: the conviction that the evening will pass with only civility, as within the four (or several hundred) walls of his home, raging exhibitionist Minho Lee will have no motive to go full menace on Jisung. More troubling are those several hours of civility. Those are what Genevieve ought to have prepped him for. Because: what the hell is he supposed to do now? Force Minho Lee to entertain him, make room for him somewhere in his private sanctuary, until Hoseok returns bright and early to fetch him? He has no idea what to expect, in fact, going in that door—
“Got everything?” says Hoseok from the front seat.
Jisung scrapes himself off the seat. And. Yup. There they are, in the roundabout of Minho’s driveway.
He gulps. The plastic bag crinkles in his grasp. “Yeah.”
“So, seven tomorrow?” Hoseok peers at him through the rearview mirror. “That early, you sure? I could always—”
“No, I’ve… got a work thing. Seven is good.” Jisung exhales thickly. Depending on how late a riser Minho is, it might even be great. He peers out the window at the imposing front steps. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
Jisung catches Hoseok’s crinkly-eyed amusement in the rear-view mirror, and burns. It’s enough to finally propel him from the car.
The breeze off the ocean, audible but not visible, is fresh against his flushed neck. He doesn’t think about not-tripping, which may be the only reason he doesn’t. Halfway up the stairs, he glances up to find the front door opening. Minho steps out in house slippers, breezy linen pants, and a loose knit polo, soft hair fluttering with the wind. Like he’s welcoming Vogue’s 73 Questions or Architectural Digest’s Open Door, not his fake boyfriend.
He meets Jisung a few steps down. Jisung is so numb he barely notices Minho offloading his overnight bag, only feels the sudden absence of its weight tip him off balance. As they crest the top step together, they make brief eye contact. There is hardly an exchange—Jisung is too blank, too at a loss, and Minho’s eyes aren’t twinkling-wry. Still, they’ve only got those fifteen-or-so seconds to milk. And Minho, perhaps the most professional Jisung’s seen him in all their four encounters, soothes over that blip like spackle over holey drywall. He transfers Jisung’s bag between hands, smiles gentle, saccharine yet believable, as he holds him under the chin to peck his lips. The cameras are at Jisung’s back, so they’d better get it—another pretty smile to add to their collection.
“Hi,” Minho murmurs. And before Jisung can so much as exhale his own hi: “Smack my ass.”
Jisung goggles. “W-what?”
“Did I stutter?” Minho’s eyes flash with something wicked. “Smack my ass.”
So Jisung does as he’s told. And Minho—gasps. Theatrical, scandalized, ass-clutching, leaping toward the door, he gasps. “Jisung Han, you perv!”
Jisung, palm stinging, neck prickling, does everything in his power to not glance backward. As he follows, head bowed and laughing, he vaguely recognizes that buzzing under his skin as… giddiness. “You’re,” he starts, shaking his head, “you’re an asshole.” He shuffles into Minho’s foyer without making eye contact. “See if I ever listen to you again.”
“Oh, that’s only a matter of time,” muses Minho. He closes them into the house, but lingers by the window until Hoseok makes it unharmed out of the gate. Then, they’re alone.
Just them. And the dozen paps out on the street outside Minho’s fence.
“Well, that’s that,” declares Minho as he turns from the door, irony in the soft twitch of his brow. “Until tomorrow.”
Jisung swallows. “Until tomorrow.” Then, preempting awkwardness, he raises his plastic bag and announces, “I brought wine.”
Minho’s eyes land on the plastic bag. “You brought wine.”
“Yeah.”
Minho briefly meets his eyes. Then he chuckles, pointing with his chin. “Alright. Thank you. You can leave it in the kitchen. I’m just going to drop this”—he lifts Jisung’s overnight bag—“in the guest room.”
The… guest room. Ha. Of course. Where else? The guest room, because they’re inside, in private. Minho had closed the door on their little charade moments ago. So Jisung nods stiffly, toes out of his shoes, and watches Minho go. It’s akin to a slow-motion rewind of the events of post-Oscars morning, when Minho had descended the stairs and Jisung had crept through his kitchen.
The bottles clink on the marble island as Jisung slips into a barstool. He’d wondered if it’d been his hangover brain fucking with him, but Minho’s house is as much a showroom as he remembers; tidily but sparsely furnished, nondescriptly but sparsely decorated. Like a dermatologist’s waiting room. But… in LA. Trendy, and specializing in injectables.
Jisung is swiveling on the stool, squinting at a large piece of art on the far wall that might be a grayscale cubist vagina, when Minho reappears.
“So, you brought wine,” he repeats, unsheathing the bottles from their flimsy bag.
“Yeah.” Jisung sits on his fingers. “But I didn’t know what you’d like”—and I don’t really drink, except I just did the other day at brunch, because you remembered my drink order, and now I have wine, so maybe I do drink, but if I only ever drink with you, is that toxic?—“so I… had to ask for help.”
A little smile plays at Minho’s lips as he examines the label on the bottle of red. “Oh?”
“Yeah.” Bless Hoseok and his patience—Jisung had taken so long on the impromptu liquor store detour that when he’d returned to the car at last, loot in hand, Hoseok had remarked, I was scared you got recognized and, like, kidnapped. “Well—no. I was offered help. After staring and dawdling for long enough. Anyway, the liquor store girl asked what the occasion was, and I couldn’t really tell her the truth, could I, so I said I was sleeping over at this guy’s house and she was like, I need more than that, so I said, Well, he’s, like, way out of my league. And straight away she was like, Oh, has to be red, but I wanted options… so.” Her interrogation had taken several other turns, like Just how into this guy are we? (quite) and Is he hot? (very), all of which were supposedly essential to whether he ought to go with fruity or earthy. Jisung scrubs his hand through the back of his hair. “I figured that’d be close enough to the selection for I’m getting papped at my PR boyfriend’s house, but if it’s shitty, then… that’s my alibi.”
Minho graces him with a faint, amused smile. Rifles through the drawers for a corkscrew, then the cabinets for a pair of enormous, elegant wine glasses that gong like church bells on contact. “How much did she charge you for these?”
Jisung is still fussing with his hair. He hadn’t really been worrying about price tags, is the thing. Like, he’d been on his way to Minho fucking Lee’s. “Something like… one-fifty, for the both—”
Minho cackles abruptly, twisting the corkscrew into the bottle of red. He hadn’t so much as glanced at the white, Jisung notes. “Oh, Jisung. Jisung, Jisung. She ripped you off.”
Jisung bites down on his shy smile. Grips the edge of the marble counter, so he doesn’t go toppling when he kicks a foot out at Minho—
Who dodges gracefully, not a hair tousled from its place. “She absolutely ripped you off.” Minho smirks, shakes his head knowingly. The crinkles by his eyes are… deathly attractive. “Highway robbery right there.”
“This is what I get for trying to be nice, huh,” Jisung scoffs, glancing with tempered interest between Minho’s face and his deft hands.
“She probably saw you through the shop windows. Hopping out of that Mercedes in head-to-toe designer, waltzing into her shop all clueless.” Pop goes the cork. Minho twists it off the corkscrew, tosses it. Sloshes a bit of the wine into one of those fancy goblets of glass thin as paper. Swirls it, sniffs it. “She saw that,” he tips the glass at Jisung, “and thought… money.” His eyebrows jerk. “Famous money. Or maybe, if she didn’t recognize you… sugar baby money.” At last, he lifts the glass to his lips, takes a sip. Takes a moment, too, tasting, smacking his lips. And the afterthought: “Would’ve been my guess, anyway.”
Jisung isn’t sure how he got there: elbows on the counter, fingers laced, jaw ajar. Upper teeth hooked over his closest knuckle, hot tongue feeling bone through warm skin. But that is how he finds himself. From which he must… tentatively untangle himself. “Fuck you,” he huffs, but hangs on, regardless, to Minho’s reaction. Flinches when he feels that knuckle in his mouth again, and forces his hands flat against the counter—no funny business. “Well?” Jisung nods at Minho’s glass, throat bobbing. “Is it shitty? Just how bad did she rip me off?”
Minho is still wearing his smug little smile. He fills the first glass, then reaches for the second. “Mm, you—”
“Did I do a bad job, daddy?”
Minho’s eyes flicker up to his.
Jisung cocks his head. Plays with his bottom lip—fuck it, he can’t resist. The room, his surroundings, whatever, wherever—it all kind of warps when he’s with Minho, distorting his sense of time, space. Social norms, too. Because surely, Minho’s hesitated for long enough now that he can’t pass it off as normal, but maybe he hasn’t, because Jisung is trapped in the warp of it all, the warping of space between Minho’s deft fingers and time between Minho’s clever eyes, and—
The corner of Minho’s mouth twitches. “You did just fine,” he answers placidly. Then he slides Jisung the untouched glass, and with that scrape of glass on marble, everything… un-warps. Snaps back to painful, plain normality. Even the cubist vagina on the wall bleeds back into Jisung’s periphery. “Still got ripped off, though. Are you hungry?” Minho picks up his glass and turns his back as if to converse with his refrigerator instead. “I have some frozen stuff… soup dumplings, and the like. Some gimbap Seonghwa sent me home with. Meal prep from my chef, in case you’re craving unseasoned poached chicken breast.” He glances over his shoulder, blinks lazily. His perfect lips already look wine-stained. “Any interest?”
In possibly the unsexiest Netflix-and-chill proposal in all of history (which… ought to indicate it’s no Netflix-and-chill proposal at all), Minho tells Jisung, “You can put something on the TV, if you want.” He’s just finished loading the dishwasher, moving to pick up his phone from the kitchen counter; it’d lit up with something Jisung isn’t privy to and hasn’t the gall to pry into. Then, like the disinterested little cherry on top: “I don’t really care.”
Jisung pulls his bottom lip into his mouth. It tastes of the wine of which he’s downed half a Minho Lee goblet now, certainly enough to tip him from sober squarely into tipsy on the Low Tolerance Scale. It’s strong, makes his mouth pucker, and he’s still not sure he likes it, but on the off chance the liquor store girl hand-picked it not to rip him off but to get him laid with her perfect-occasion-curation expertise, by God, he will be drinking it.
He plops himself on the far end of the living room sofa. It’s weird, sitting on a sofa he’d dozed a solid eight hours on and figured he’d never see again.
Then again, much of this isn’t weird.
For some unfathomable reason, Minho has cable, so when Jisung accidentally hits the wrong remote button, he doesn’t get Netflix at all, but rather Forensic Files. Tossed in medias res into the dramatic reenactment of a murder-by-poisoning, he blanches at the television. At Minho, idling in the kitchen with his wine and his phone. Then he changes the channel. And—hell, there’s something nostalgic about it, channel-surfing from the couch late at night. The last time he’d done it, he’d probably been fourteen, bored out of his mind in the basement of his childhood home in Irvine, parents arguing about his report card upstairs, Changbin unavailable to hang out because he had a real job validating parking tickets at the Regal fucking Cinemas.
Sensing Minho’s nearby presence, he realizes he’s been perched at the edge of the couch cushion completely zoned out on The Emperor’s New Groove.
“What the hell,” says Minho, easing onto the sofa’s opposite end. “Alright.”
Snapping into the bit, Jisung scoffs. “Oh? You don’t fuck with The Emperor?” He tosses the remote into that cavernous, several-cushions-wide gap between them. Clicks his tongue, bites its tip. Murmurs into his glass, voice reverberating, “See, I don’t know if I can fake-date a dude who doesn’t fuck with The Emperor.”
Minho smirks into his own sip of wine. “You should’ve said something when you still had the chance. No going back now.” He stretches his arm along the back of the couch. That’s how far apart they are, Jisung laments—far enough for there to still be ample space between Minho’s fingertips and his own shoulder. “Anyhow,” Minho adds, eyes on the TV, “I never said that.”
Jisung watches him, toys at his lip again. All but… fucking enraptured, at this point. “You didn’t have to,” he still manages to jeer. “It’s all over your face.”
“What is?”
Jisung sticks his neck out as he bats wide duh eyes at Minho. “That you don’t fuck with The Emperor’s New Groove!”
Minho stares him down, eyes gently lidded, mostly expressionless. Disbelief or amusement? Jisung can’t parse it. A mix of both, maybe. Minho’s eyes flicker back to the TV. “Who even says that?” he mutters. “What are we, fifteen?”
“What, The Emperor—”
“Well,” Minho chuckles, “one of us is. Will you shut up about the emperor?”
Jisung scrapes more of that musky wine-taste from his lower lip with his teeth. That must’ve been the last of the liquid courage he needed, because then he says, “Don’t worry,” and pulls his feet up onto the sofa, swiveling on his bottom to get comfy and, across all those cushions, jab his socked toes into Minho’s thigh. “I fuck with you.” He gives Minho an easy smile. “And I’ll keep you young.”
Minho glances at Jisung’s feet. Seems to swish his wine between his cheeks. Jisung’s knee twitches, thinking about licking that taste from his teeth. But that’s about twenty steps ahead of—“I’m sure you will,” says Minho, patting his anklebones. He leaves his hand there, and Jisung holds his breath, but turns out that’s only for four, three, two… one, when Minho retracts the hand to fish the remote from under Jisung’s legs. And turns the volume up. As if he’s actually watching the movie now.
Bastard.
But Jisung… Jisung can’t feign interest any longer. Responsibly, he cranes out his arm to place his empty wine glass on the coffee table. Irresponsibly, he slumps low against the armrest, turns his full focus on Minho, toes digging under his thigh. Life’s all about balance.
The graphic colors of the screen flash across Minho’s face in profile. Jisung lolls his head to the side. No (reasonable) amount of toe-wiggling gets him any more hand-on-ankle action. So he pesters. “So… you grow up here?”
Minho blinks almost sleepily at the TV. “Hm?”
“Did you grow up here?” He’s read Minho’s goddamn Wikipedia. First read it probably five hundred edits ago, back when his mother’s obsession began. He knows. And yet: “In LA?”
“No.” Minho cards his fingers through his hair. It falls back against his forehead, fluffy and artful. Jisung hadn’t touched it enough, the one chance he had. “New York.”
Yup. Knew that. “Like—the city?”
“Yeah.”
“You were born there?” He watches Minho nod. “When’d you end up here, then? Like, did you move with your family, or was it a just-you thing? Speaking of, is your family—”
“My parents are in Seoul.” Minho clears out his glass, glances fleetingly at the lingering wine stain within. “Have been for a while.”
Jisung tongues his bottom lip. “My dad, too.” For a moment, he only breathes; Minho’s nonreactive profile betrays nothing, invites nothing. He speaks anyway. “Apparently he has a whole family out there I’ve never met. Like, I have a half-sibling. Two, actually. One was just born this year.” He laughs suddenly. “My mom—when I was born, she really wanted to name me Peter. Like, legally. Peter Joseph. I could’ve been fuckass PJ Han. Can you imagine? My dad didn’t let her, though. Obviously. Actually, you—you’ve been acting a while. Like, since you were pretty young, no? How did you end up deciding to go professionally by Minho and not, like, I dunno—”
“You know, Google exists,” Minho interrupts, glancing at Jisung for the first time in however many Emperor’s New minutes. “Or, if you prefer another medium… there are whole books out there about this. Fans have illustrated entire biographies”—he blinks coolly—“about this.”
That silences Jisung. Minho is… telling him to fuck off with the questions and Google him. Yes, Minho is… telling him to fuck off with the questions, and instead, read a fan-made Minho Lee book, full of illustration-accompanied Minho Lee fun facts.
An L for Jisung. An incontrovertible, off-yourself-right-fucking-now L if there ever was one. But he can’t focus on that. Not when Minho’s hand is back on his ankles, thumb rubbing bone through sock.
Jisung sinks deeper into the cushions, neck nearly on the armrest. “Fine,” he huffs, finally, even though he isn’t feeling all that huffy. It’s for the performance of it all, though. So he pushes out his bottom lip. “No questions.” And gives his best shot at indifference.
And reading Minho is like… playing the slots. That’s really the best way he can put it. Should Jisung glance his way now, odds are he’ll hit somewhere on the spectrum between blankness and pure ice. Contempt, too, maybe. Amusement, if he’s lucky.
And if he’s really lucky—like he happens to be as his resolve crumbles and his flicker up through the gap between his knees—he’ll hit the jackpot: warm, molten. Inviting, soft around the edges. But always fleeting, doled out with all the stinginess of a scarce damn resource. And then, with a blink—poof, gone. Gone like it’d only been a trick of the light to begin with. Gone, and… back on that damn TV.
Jisung might just tear it off the wall, emperor be damned.
Abruptly, he draws himself upright, sweeps his ankles under his ass. He nods to Minho’s empty glass on the side table. “Want me to top you up?”
Minho glances at him unhurriedly. Registers his question with just as much delay. “Do I want you to…?” Retracing the steps of the question, he follows Jisung’s gaze to said glass. “Oh.” He huffs, something like a laugh. Takes the glass by its delicate stem to pass to Jisung, who is eye-level now. Eye-level and close enough to catch the wry edge of, “Thought I misheard.”
Jisung reaches for the glass. In the air, his fingers stop short. “You,” he croaks, then laughs, crackly, “No, what.” And he’s close, he’s close and he’d drunk that whole damn gobletful, so he gives Minho a light smack to the chest. Goes to stand—until he doesn’t, until he simply falls astride Minho’s lap instead. His slapping hand never loses contact, no—it presses instead into the soft knit of Minho’s nice top. “That’s not what I said,” he mumbles belatedly, weight sinking into Minho’s warmth. Warmth that gives beneath him, warmth that doesn’t… slingshot him into the glass coffee table. Or hasn’t, yet. His other hand follows, fingers spreading over Minho’s heart, curving over the swell of his shoulder.
He hits a point where he can’t sink any deeper, can’t hold the breath in his lungs any longer. He inhales, and on the exhale whispers, “Oops.”
Minho snorts. From the corner of his eye, Jisung glimpses him setting the empty glass back on the side table. “Some move.” But before Jisung can retort something ridiculous—heyitwasn’tamoveiactuallyfell—Minho speaks. Speaks into the clamor of the movie, the only noise in that big, empty house: “Is there an inch of you that isn’t doodled on?”
Minho makes idle contact with his thigh, fingers skimming bare skin. Jisung feels a smile come on, but his breaths also feel too big, his ribs too far distended into what little space remains between them. He sneaks a glance at Minho’s face; he’s watching his own thumb trace the stag beetle near Jisung’s knee. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” is Jisung’s hair-trigger answer. Then he relaxes a little, when it starts to feel like he won’t just blink this all into nonexistence. His wrist goes lank over Minho’s shoulder; his fingers toy with the tag at his back collar. He gives the real answer. “Plenty. The moneymaker, for one.” He points to his face, which earns him a stingy half-second of Minho’s flashing attention before it returns to the beetle. “Y’know… palms. Bottoms of my feet.” He squints in thought. “Other places. I’ve got a ton of free real estate. I just forget. Sometimes.” Again, he peeks at Minho’s downcast lashes. You could find out for yourself just feels a little too desperate, considering their… present circumstances.
Minho only hums. Thumbs at the bunched-up hem of his shorts, by the luna moth. “So, what. This whole leg is just… covered in bugs?”
“Insects, but yeah.” Jisung bites down on his lip, feels the pulsing of his heart through it. “Well, mostly. There’s a tarantula somewhere, too.” He’s warm now, all over—warm in the head from fluster, warm in the legs from the heat radiating through Minho’s pants. The socks feel too much, too tight. All of it’s got him a little dizzy, but still he abruptly rises to his knees, extends that buggy leg until it’s straight on the cushions, and pitches half his weight against Minho’s shoulder. “Look, I can make them creep and crawl.” He slaps his hamstring a few times. “See?”
Minho scoffs. Maybe it qualifies as a laugh, what does Jisung know—he doesn’t speak Minho-ese. Maybe it only qualifies if whoever’s deciding has also downed a gobletful of wine. Regardless, there’s a cute, gentle furrow of disbelief—confusion? bewilderment?—in Minho’s brow, and he flattens his hand to Jisung’s thigh, right where the skin is stingy from smacking. Jisung has to hold his breath so as not to twist and squirm, feeling Minho’s fingers spread. “No? Nothing?” he presses, shaky. Smiles, on instinct, when Minho does, too. “That didn’t turn you on?”
Minho eyes him, all beguiling beneath those eyelashes. “You’re trying to turn me on?” he asks archly, sinking his fingertips in.
“No.” Jisung looks down between them, lips twitching. He lets Minho maneuver him like a ragdoll until he’s back where he’d been, knees sandwiching Minho’s hips. The leaden weight in his head and chest grows, threatens to tip him off balance. Lucky he has a nice, sturdy shoulder to cling to. Then he breathes, “Maybe. Did it work?” and it’s too quivery-shaky to hide a damn thing. But why should he anyway—he’d thrown caution to the wind the second he’d first sipped that wine. Might as well have screamed Fuck it into the echoing caverns of Minho’s home the second he’d tumbled straight into his lap.
“What, your bugs?” Minho chuckles. “Are you asking if your bugs turned me on?”
He sounds wry, but Jisung can’t go looking for the cue of a twinkle in his eye; he’s sunken so close that his knees have spread as wide as they’ll go, that his every breath presses his ribs into Minho’s sternum, that the tip of his nose finds a resting place in the hollow of Minho’s temple. That his lips graze Minho’s proud cheekbone as he says, “You mean insects. But yeah.”
“Does it matter?”
“Does it matter if you say bugs or in—”
“Does it matter if you weren’t even trying?”
Jisung huffs.
In silence, Minho kneads at his thigh like dough.
So Jisung grabs for his hand, drags it high up his bare leg and toward his ass. Dips his chin and tilts his head until he’s right in the line of fire, where Minho’s warm breath ghosts his mouth, and mumbles, “What do you care if I try?”
Minho puffs out a little breath. Then, “I don’t,” he enunciates crisply, and his hand clamps down on the back of Jisung’s neck and his tongue pushes into Jisung’s mouth.
Even if he hadn’t known it an hour ago—leg jiggling maddeningly in Hoseok’s backseat, wine bottles clinking with every passing pothole—here is exactly where Jisung had hoped to end up. Where he wants to be. Here, again, again and at last, arms twining around Minho’s neck, bodies nestling with only heat and fabric between, Minho’s fingers nudging up intimately under the legs of his briefs. The room seems to recede, but maybe that’s just Minho turning the volume down on the Disney Channel, or maybe it’s just Jisung finally letting himself succumb.
Maybe it’s because they are, incontrovertibly, alone.
With other lovers, past lovers—not that being a contractual boyfriend who’s made him come once would Minho a lover make—Jisung has been happy to goad and nudge things along until the tipping point, when all of that potential energy finally explodes and he can simply lean in and enjoy the ride, go where he’s pushed and do what he’s told. But since that mortifying post-Oscars limousine ride he’s thought about this, this with Minho, more than he’d like to admit. And there are things he wants to do, things he’s been waiting to do, so he simply… does. He lets his head loll into Minho’s hand, makes a little sound when Minho sucks at his bottom lip, but he also tangles his fingers into Minho’s hair, hair he’s been dying to touch all night. His open palm greedily scopes out Minho’s chest, stomach, then cups between his legs, grips him through his linen pants. Minho accommodates the touch, shifts on the sofa to make room. Jisung rubs him the best he can, heartbeat and breath picking up, and as Minho’s hand gathers up his hair, makes way for his mouth to press to Jisung’s neck, the white wall blurs behind the flutter of Jisung’s eyelashes. And he thinks. He thinks… oh, he could make it through tomorrow’s press junket with a sore jaw just fine. Genevieve doesn’t like it when he talks, anyway.
Minho’s spare hand is fully shoved up under his briefs now, palming and squeezing his bare ass. Jisung’s hand, pawing at the drawstring on those linen pants, goes lank and useless at the drag of Minho’s tongue over his pulse. He thinks of rocking up to work the next day with a hickey, of the ruthless teasing that would invite from the band. And for all the bloody and bruised makeup he’s sported over the years, he’s never actually gone on stage all lovingly chewed up. Has never been able to show the world so much as a little bite of his private life. His giddy heart skips a beat—foolishly. Foolishly, because Minho isn’t his private life. Foolishly, because tour isn’t for several weeks. But tomorrow morning, there will be cameras—cameras before any makeup artist can tie him down to a chair and blur him into conformity.
Exhaling, he pulls Minho’s drawstring undone, snakes his hand under the loosened waistband. “You know,” he finds himself mumbling, pulse thrumming under Minho’s mouth, “bite me hard enough and there’s no way they won’t see it. When I leave.”
At first, Minho sort of… goes still. His breath is barely-there on Jisung’s neck; his hands are idle where they’d gripped him so fast. Then everything Jisung had been goading and nudging for begins to slowly unravel.
Minho sinks back into the cushions, sighing and wrapping his fingers around Jisung’s wrist to trap his wandering hand. He clears his throat and remarks, “It’s getting late,” not an observation but a clear-as-day cop-out. Jisung feels it instantly, the way the blood lurching through his veins, sluggish and indulgent like molasses, suddenly goes watery, streaming too fast, rushing to his head.
“What?” he mumbles in a small voice, panicked and rumpled and wrung out. He can still feel where Minho’s fingerpads had dug roughly into his neck, his ass, even as he watches said fingers push his own greedy hand away, further and further from Minho’s cock. “Wait, wait, what—why?”
Minho smiles at him magnanimously. No longer quiet, secret, fleeting, molten, but magnanimous. Pained, almost, to the point that when Minho seems to touch him at the hips as to evacuate him from his lap, Jisung decides abruptly that he doesn’t want to sit in the lap of someone who looks so pained to have him there. So he scrambles off while it can still pass as his own decision. “It’s getting late,” Minho repeats, and by then he’s even dropped the smile, gone completely impassive as he turns the TV off and grunts his way from the sofa to his feet. “Like I said, I made up one of the guest rooms for you. It should have everything you need. An ensuite, too. Upstairs, turn right, all the way down the hall, the furthest door.” He glances in the vague direction of Jisung, balled up on the sofa. Jisung, who can’t bear to think of just… up and walking away now. He’s still coming down off the temperature differential between Minho’s body and the sofa cushion.
But Minho is idling there, watching him. So he has to clear his throat. Rub some life into his bleary eyes. “Up…stairs.”
“Upstairs, turn right, then go all the way down the hall,” says Minho coolly. “It’s the furthest door.”
“Right.” Jisung glances in passing at the creased linen of Minho’s crotch. There’s no way to tell he’d been at half-chub two minutes ago. “Thanks.” He draws another breath, fingertips buzzing with pinpricks. He needs to think, but he can’t think—he has to move. “Do you.” He jerks his chin at his own empty glass, perched near the coffee table’s edge. “Where do you want—”
Nimbly, Minho snatches up the glass. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Okay,” says Jisung. And he may be dizzy with embarrassment, but at least he can make out the path to the stairs. He rises—“Thanks”—and departs for the guest room.
The morning is cool and damp when Jisung scampers down the grand stairs to meet Hoseok at the horseshoe driveway. And as he sinks down in the backseat, peeking through the blackout window at Genevieve’s cameras-for-hire behind the fence, he wonders if they’ll be able to tell from those shots that he hasn’t slept. That he hasn’t seen Minho since last night.