Chapter Text
Wai knows the bar's cleanup routine by heart. Considering how long he's worked there, it's impossible not to— first as a university student, barely making rent for a studio apartment, and now as a co-owner who had somehow been roped into running the business. Sweep the floors, switch off the neon signs, and usher out all the lingering patrons who are more than a little drunk.
However, some things never change, and this is one of them: the fact that he's the only person diligent enough to go through the nightly monotony of mopping up spills and stacking furniture.
"Hey, slacker. Care to help out?"
He tosses a rag and bottle of disinfectant at Korn, who's lounging by the bar, absorbed in his phone like Wai hasn't been making increasingly irritated eye contact over the last fifteen minutes.
"Looks like you've got it under control," Korn angles, tone high pitched and saccharine-sweet. Though at a particularly exasperated eye roll, he rolls up his sleeves anyway.
On the way over, he jostles Wai in the elbow with too wide of a smirk to be an accident, and Wai returns it with a casual kick to the shin, because when are they not trying to one-up the other, really? From there it's Korn's rag "accidentally" tossed onto Wai's expensive dress shoes, a fake, "Oops, sorry about that," and they're off, Wai chasing him around the tables with his spray bottle held up like a weapon.
"Okay, I tap out, I tap out, you win," Korn concedes, once Wai's got him trapped against the counter with a look ready to kill. Wai very resolutely ignores the high flush on his cheeks, out of breath. They're friends. It's normal to think your friends are objectively attractive, Wai reminds himself. Occupational hazard of spending entire days practically glued to each other's side.
Once they've returned to cleanup, he breaks out of the quickly spiraling thought process when he notices Korn giving him a look. One that usually means he's about to ask Wai for a favor or tell him the engineering and architecture students broke more tables. Sometimes both, if Wai is feeling unlucky.
"So, I've got a date tomorrow night," he says, and Wai feels like his feet have grown roots into the floor. "Think you can handle training the new hire by yourself?"
Korn is the picture of nonchalance. Wai has to school his expression into indifference, shrugging as if the question didn't tilt his world onto another axis.
"Yeah, whatever. But I'll be sure to tell them the co-owner skips out on work to mess around."
"Wa-i," Korn breaks his name into two syllables, "It's not like that, they just invited me out to dinner. We might get drinks after, go dancing." He waves his phone, solving the mystery of who he was texting. "Besides, weren't you the one who said he was tired of watching me mope around the bar every night?"
The worst part is that he's not wrong. It's undeniable that while Wai was deep into repressing his feelings, he'd been the one to shove a dating app right into Korn's hands as if trying to prove to himself that he didn't care. If he wanted to go off and meet someone, it was fine. Wai would be completely a-okay. But much more sober, he tries to picture Korn sitting across the table at some fancy restaurant with some faceless person. He'd probably mix up the dinner and dessert forks.
And worse still, dancing. Wai doesn't think he's ever seen him dance in all the time they've spent together. Whereas their bar mostly caters to college students more drunk on excitement than alcohol, packs of friends that stick to their regular tables like glue, Wai tries to imagine Korn in the crowd of a different bar. One with throngs of people and colored lights and hands sliding under shirt hems. He immediately suffers a coughing fit.
"Yeah, well, try not to scare them off by stepping on their toes," Wai deadpans, once he's recovered.
"Thanks for your vote of confidence." Korn fills a glass with beer, then a second one, and slides it to Wai on the freshly-wiped counter. "Don't I remember Pat saying something about you and Pran dancing at a graduation party?"
Wai buries his face in his hands at the memory. "That was on a dare, we were both drunk, and besides, Pat wouldn't stop glaring at me for the next two hours. It was like I'd offended his boyfriend's dignity or something."
The easiness of Korn's laugh makes Wai wonder if he'd already been drinking away their inventory while Wai was doing all the heavy lifting. We were drunk. It's an airtight excuse. A reasonable explanation, no strings attached.
"I bet you'd be good at it though," he contemplates, and that's how Wai knows he's probably tipsy— the compliment feels genuine. "If it was on a date, I mean. I bet you'd practice beforehand. And there would be music, of course there'd be music, and you'd just-" He places his hands on Wai's shoulders. Casual. "Like that."
In university, you couldn't pay Wai to touch him with a ten-foot pole, unless, of course, it was in the form of a punch across the face. Back then, they fought as easily as they breathed. Becoming conspirators in the grand secret of Pat and Pran's relationship changed the very air between them, and now inhaling was slinging his arm around Korn's shoulder as they walked home after work, and exhaling was sharing relieved fist-bumps after calming down a bar argument.
"Yeah?" Wai half-laughs into the question. His hands are on Korn's waist. He doesn't know how they ended up there.
"Yeah." There's the vague pressure of the countertop behind his back. "And they'd mention they like, I don't know, architecture, and wouldn't talk during dinner like you, and would let you play that shitty pop playlist in the car that I can't stand."
Korn must have forgotten to pin back his bangs in the morning. His shirt is missing a button, and his knee is inches away from bumping Wai's own.
It's all a game. Wai keeps his breath steady, and he knows how this goes— hold and release, getting up in each other's space for every argument, winding back like the snap of an elastic. He knows how Korn will rile him up until they're five seconds away from a fight, step back with a grin, and how they'll finish locking the doors and stacking the chairs, chatting like nothing ever happened. At this point, it's a form of communication.
Except, there's this— Korn's thumb tracing circles into the base of his neck, so tender he wants to die.
"Trying to practice on me before the big event?" Wai prods, playing along in the only way he knows how to deflect. There's not a searing heat thrumming behind his skin. There's not.
"Tch, asshole. In your dreams."
Wai leans forward into his face like a challenge, and the moment suspends. Korn's eyes are so dark that he feels unmoored, and then they're closing, and then the hands on his shoulders pull in, rough, (really, much too rough for how close they're standing,) and they're kissing.
Wai's first and only thought is, "This wasn't part of the plan," before the simmer of warmth in his stomach devours anything close to common sense or rational thinking.
It's never been Korn's nature to do things in halves. Wai knows well how many all-nighters he pulled to get through university. Not to mention buying the bar, and the way he'd already drawn up budget plans before Wai had even signed his name on the dotted line. He approaches challenges with a single-minded ferocity that burns up everything in its path. It's with this same focus that he captures Wai's lips, near-desperate.
It's almost bruising, and Wai hopes it hurts, hopes the slow drag of his tongue against the roof of Wai's mouth can hollow out his heart and leave a mark. Something to keep as proof that even in the low counter lighting, a little past midnight and hazy around the edges, Korn thought he was worth his time at least once.
He bites where Korn worries his lip when balancing the registers in the break room, eliciting a "shit, Wai," murmured into the space between them. Korn's hands find the back of his neck, tangle into his hair, and tighten , which is just about the final nail in his coffin— probably engraved with the words, “You're completely and utterly fucked!” —as he lets out a shuddering whine. They catch their breath and keep kissing, keep staying in motion, because Wai is afraid that if he stops, his whole heart will crack like glass over the high of where their bodies meet, leaving the shards all over the concrete floor to sweep up in the morning.
He flips their position so that Korn is pressed against the counter instead, letting his knee fall where Korn's legs part, and barely restrains a moan when he opens his mouth, heavy and damp, at the juncture of his neck.
"This is what it'd be like, yeah?" Korn's voice is thick, his lips bitten red. "When you'd kiss them. Dancing and kissing, you'd be good at it."
"What?"
To say Wai's memory is in working in the slightest would be an overstatement.
"With your date. Who you'd be dancing with."
It comes back to him in pieces. The theoretical date who got them into this mess, the "you'd be good at it, though".
"The one who likes my shitty playlist?"
"Yeah," Korn replies, and it's a half-groan as he starts to drag kisses across his jaw. "Yeah, that one."
And well.
It's like he can't think, and when Wai can't think, he ends up making objectively bad decisions. Even if he laid out every interaction over the past years, he'd know it only probably had something to do with hours of late-night conversations, spending more time in each other's apartments than they did alone, and commiserating over how disgustingly infatuated Pat and Pran were with each other.
So he simply elects to slide his hands under Korn's button-down as easy as anything, relishing in the full body shiver underneath his palms. Somehow, somewhere along the way, his heart decided for him that he'd end up with inconvenient feelings .
Korn maneuvers them backwards and somehow they tumble through the dark doorway and onto the break room couch, the air stripped out of their lungs.
"You are so annoying," Wai informs him, and Korn fires back, "Speak for yourself. You seem to be enjoying it."
"I'm helping you practice for your date, asshole. You should be thanking me."
We were drunk. We were practicing. Their excuses are hanging by a thread, and Korn has to know, he has to, because Wai is half-hard in his jeans, five minutes away from falling apart, and pretty sure he's in love.
It's not so different from fighting. Wrestling each other through heated kisses, Wai reverses them to box Korn into the cushions, slowing the pace simply to feel him squirm with impatience and rake his nails down Wai's back. When he can't seem to take it anymore, he shoves Wai squarely in the chest and straddles him against the backrest. It goes on like this for long enough that they start to lose track of time, reduced to the push and pull. Korn starts to make small sounds between each kiss, or maybe Wai's making them himself, because there's a potent insistence in his stomach that frankly doesn't care to know where his body ends and Korn's begins.
"Fuck," Wai sighs, when he slumps into his shoulder to catch his breath. "Fuck, fuck. "
"I know we're—" Korn starts, and falters, panting, "It's just, and you're, and I swear this is a one-off, ah—"
Wai internally mourns how he'll never be able to do paperwork on the couch again.
"We'll never speak about this again, I promise, just let me," Korn continues, and Wai doesn't know how to tell him that if they keep talking about it, he might start crying, which will be super pathetic and really not fun for either of them. Begging might suit Korn, but Wai is too far gone to care.
"I won't say a word," he agrees, already half-caught on a sob, "Yes, please—"
It's like a fever dream, and it's too easy to let months of repressed emotion and anger-induced denial bubble up to the surface. At the words, Korn moves from where he brackets Wai's thighs, allowing their hips to slot together, and they sigh in tandem at the contact.
Oh. He's hard too.
It shouldn't be a surprise, but it sends pockets of lightning off all over Wai's body. His hips hitch once, twice, without really meaning to, and he searches desperately for Korn's lips in the darkness. He only partially succeeds, in finding the corner of his mouth and kissing that too.
"You're so—mn, fuck—you’re so hot like this, you're so good," Korn says, fumbling at Wai's shirt and helping him lift it up. It lands somewhere in the darkness with a soft thump as he shrugs off his own. Wai has to tug on his undershirt (muttering, "off, off ,") before Korn finally gets the message and wrenches it over his head like the article of clothing has personally offended him.
Wai lets his hands wander, and keep wandering. From the short hairs at the back of his neck, down his waist, and further, Korn arches his back when he settles his thumbs in the space below his hips.
"Okay?" Wai asks, and Korn makes a funny sort of face that would almost suggest he was endeared, if Wai didn't know better.
"Okay," he confirms, and that's all the warning Wai gets before there's a hand palming him through his jeans, and he's keening into it.
They stay like that for a while, until the friction becomes uncomfortable, and the idea occurs to Wai of fucking in a real bed, instead of the cheap couch with fake leather that's sticky with sweat behind him. It's a path he has to cut off at the source as soon as it enters his mind, because he's promised. A one-off.
Korn's hand shakes as he undoes the button on Wai's jeans, pushing past his boxers to take him where he's already wet, and Wai has to freeze to keep the sharp rise of pleasure at bay.
"I'm not going to last," he immediately warns, face desire-flushed and screwed up with focus.
"Okay, shit, okay, you're going to be the death of me," Korn replies, sounding just as on-edge himself, and Wai wants to tell him: Your hair looks pretty messed up. I never really hated you in university. I hope you cancel your date and fuck me properly and fix the leak in the customer bathroom I've been nagging you about for weeks.
Instead, he keeps his mouth shut and tries to exist in a universe where the only things that matter are the way Korn strokes him just a bit too slow, and the bitten-back moans that he's trying (and largely failing) to muffle.
When Wai tries to return the favor, Korn slaps his hand away.
"Trying to…to focus here," he grits through his teeth.
"You might want to focus faster," Wai prompts, though too dazed to give the insult any real malice. It works though, and Korn picks up the pace, stroking him to a rhythm that has a low hum gathering in his stomach and a ringing in his ears. Wai tries for his half-unbuttoned pants again, and this time Korn doesn't stop him. His only response is a stutter, and a forced-out grunt when Wai starts to jerk him off in earnest.
And here's the thing: Korn talks a lot. He chats with the university's current engineering students at the bar, and can always be counted on to be found flirting with the servers at their favorite curry place. The fact that he talks during sex, mumbling intelligible words into the hollow of Wai's throat is unsurprising in itself.
No, what stupefies Wai instead is Korn's breathy whisper of "fuck, baby,” as he stiffens under Wai's hand, tips off the edge, and chases his lips. Wai has about two seconds to register the term of endearment before he spills over too, with a gutted sound. He doubles over to bury his face, shuddering apart.
After seeing each other through, it doesn't take long until they collapse, like a tent with broken poles falling in on itself. They meet in the middle, and Wai can't help but give in when they share one kiss, then two, gentle and chaste. It's the last small indulgence he'll allow himself.
When they do part, Korn is the one to break the lull, his voice devastatingly rough. "Okay. So," he brilliantly leads with, opening his mouth again just to close it again. "Um."
Wai feels wrung out, breathing hard, but he's also made a promise. And if not mentioning it means he can file this anomaly, this exception, deep in the back of his mind, then he'll take what he can get and pretend it never happened. So he stares Korn straight in the eyes, tries to forget how he sounded saying Wai's name, and inhales.
"Did you finish checking in the inventory from yesterday?"
It's like seeing the light behind Korn's eyes shutter closed. Wai can feel the deep breath he takes, and that blink-and-you'll-miss-it shift in his expression is gone. Korn looks at him like he's trying to solve a particularly difficult problem, and then rolls off, leaving Wai near-glued to the couch with the phantom weight of where his body was.
"Ah, not yet. I'll stay behind."
Hell, Korn won't even look at him as they gather their clothes and clean up. They make stilted conversation, so meaningless that by the time Wai is fully dressed, he can't remember anything they've talked about for the last five minutes.
What hurts most is the wanting. Near daily lunch dates, every time they crashed in Wai's apartment after ten-hour shifts, each ”You can borrow my jacket but it's really not my fault you forgot yours, dumbass". The extra toothbrush in the bathroom. Two Advil with a sticky note and a glass of water when he's hungover.
But why did it have to be Korn, of all people?
When Wai finally manages to return home, he collapses like he'd run a marathon to get there. Face down on his bed, he allows exactly five minutes of unbridled panic before he gets up and compartmentalizes like there's no tomorrow.
Then he tosses his clothes in the hamper, looks at the sad-looking pile for half a second too long and the memories flow unbidden—warm hands pulling off his shirt, the stain on his jeans—so he stashes them in the cabinet under the bathroom sink with a glare.
He wears that same glare while examining the darkened splotch of a bruise on his neck, aggravatingly noticeable in the fluorescent lighting above his sink. Like a huge arrow exists hanging over his head, "This idiot decided to go and fall in unrequited love!" Wai puts on his most high-necked winter shirt, in the middle of June.
He proceeds to go through his routine like a perfectly normal adult, (Never mind the fact that he gets toothpaste all over the counter when he squeezes the tube too hard, or how he nearly tips over a potted plant when lost in thought) and even checks the email for his day job like the employee-of-the-month he is. Of course, all without paying any attention to the second phone charger on the opposite side of his bed, the framed photos of the bar's ribbon-cutting ceremony, or the plush rabbit slippers Korn thought would be funny as a gift, but Wai wears more than he would admit.
There are zero missed calls on his phone, and he ignores that too, with a perfunctory click to the power button.
Korn stares down at Wai's number on his keypad.
The dial button almost seems like it's taunting him, and he pushes a hand through his hair while looking at it like it holds the answer to the world's mysteries.
And besides, he reasons, if Wai picked up, what would he say? "I know you acted like it was the worst mistake of your life, but that kind of blew my mind and let's do it again sometime, okay?" The thought is laughable. Wai would hang up on the spot.
Pocketing his phone, Korn flicks on the bathroom lights and takes a long, hard look at himself. He's a mess. The styling gel he so painstakingly applied that morning is near nonexistent, making his hair stick up at awkward angles and hang into his eyes. There are recently-dried tear tracks, color stubbornly painting his cheeks, and worst of all he looks wrecked, as if he'd just spent hours making out like some teenager at a party with their first crush.
He combs through the worst of his hair and splashes cold water onto his face, in the quickly-fading hope that it'll shock some clarity into his brain.
When his phone buzzes with Wai's ringtone, it snaps Korn out of his reverie, and he lunges for it so fast that it topples off the counter and onto the ground with a clatter. He picks it up slowly, as if the screen could eat him alive.
"I think I left the back door unlocked. Can you check?"
Korn goes to check. It's unlocked.
"Got it," he replies, adding a thumbs-up sticker.
"Thanks," The ellipses at the bottom of the chat rise, then fall, stay silent, and bubble up once more. "Get home safe."
Korn supposes this is just how it is now. Like something to laugh about in a few years—"Remember that time we broke the bus stop? When we signed the lease agreement? Or that night we hooked up after hours?"
In the morning, he'll call his date to explain that he's very sorry, but he has to cancel, and something came up that is absolutely not realizing he's fallen fast and hard. And later that evening, Korn will help out at the bar and pretend like said realization never happened.
But for now he just types out, ”Sleep well,” and leaves the, ”It might be you. I think it’s always been you,” unsaid.