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Minho’s hand is soft and warm where Jisung’s are cold and calloused.
It’s not the first time he’s taken advantage of this fact. Sitting together in the back of an abandoned crevice of the library, palm in palm to fight against the rattling heater in the dead of winter that never manages to get the temperature just right. On their way home, arms linked and hands stuck together in someone’s pocket (Minho’s usually) as they walk along the cracked concrete until the intersection where they’ll inevitably part. Scrabbling hands on a friend's couch, beneath blankets, poking into stomachs and sides and clasped tight. Fingers interlocked as they fall asleep, side by side in futons on the floor of the inn. Chan’s right there, behind Jisung, but it hardly seems to matter. He gets lost in the feeling of Minho’s hands touching his, a thumb roving over the back of his palm in calming sweeps, and the planes of his face and the depth of his eyes.
They’re almost black in the dim light.
Jisung can hardly fathom what he’s looking at with such intensity. Minho is Minho and Jisung is just Jisung. It feels right that Jisung should worship the view of Minho like a supplicant at a heavenly altar but not that Minho should regard him as anything more than the incessant buzz of a fly you’d rather chase out of your room.
He knows that’s not what Minho thinks of him. He knows, intellectually and perhaps a bit emotionally, that he is as important to Minho as he is to Jisung. And yet his gaze is puzzling. It holds more than himself. Jisung gets lost. Looking and looking and slowly his eyes drift closed and he falls asleep and he can’t remember whether Minho ever took his eyes off him. Whether he watched Jisung fall asleep.
He finds himself like this time and time again. Hand in hand. Eye to eye. There’s a creaking in his chest like an out of tune piano or the way a worn plank of wood bends beneath your feet, groaning with the effort of keeping you afloat. With the strain of not snapping.
Minho holds his hands – holds him – so gently. All of him. His body and his soul, gives it a warm place to rest inside of him. Jisung’s chest creaks and he can imagine that something bends in Minho too, his ribs giving way so Jisung can settle behind them. Lost in the catacombs of Minho’s gaze, of his winding arteries and between the meat and the sinewy chambers of his heart, Jisung is protected. He is protected, he is safe and he is precious. Important. A jewel Minho swallowed to keep from slippery hands.
Jisung doesn’t burn with the intensity of it because it is not something that hurts him. It is not a wound left uncleaned nor a flame that burns out too fast. It is warm and constant.
And here he is again. Half asleep on the couch while Minho holds his hand from his perch on the carpet below. The credits are rolling and snores fill the room – courtesy of Changbin – and there it is, Minho’s almost-black eyes peering up at him in the darkness, so full of something.
“What are you thinking about, Hannie?” Voice soft, as if the air itself could break under the weight of them. Hannie like honey because Minho thinks he’s so funny like that. Jisung’s tongue dries, but his throat is full.
You, he wants to say. His thoughts are always so full of him, ceaseless, endless like the infinity of his touch seeping into the flesh of Jisung’s body.
The muscles of Jisung’s heart stretch until it seems they’ll snap. His breath halts at the apex of his lungs. Minho’s hands are warm and soft, and Jisung’s are too, just a little, because of how long he’s been holding them. The parting of Minho’s is nothing but the downward flip of his lower lip but Jisung fills with unknowable expectation. Want .
Jisung hasn’t wanted like this before.
Not like wishing for a toy on Christmas or money for Chuseok or for a good grade. Not like hoping his parents had found a way to stay together, for him , not like longing for his brother between college breaks, not like desperately desperately needing friends to fill a rapidly widening hole in his heart. The want is inexplicable, unique, cardinal. The first of its kind.
“You.”
And yet it isn’t more than anything else.
It is carnal and passionate and twists him up with desire but it is not more intense than seeing Felix among a crowd of adoring classmates and wishing he could just talk to him.
It is not more but different. Radiant.
Different. But different how?
“Me?” Minho asks. His voice dips into something low and sultry but his eyes are the same as always, open, seeking. Like an arrow to its target. Like a dagger aiming to kill. “What about me, Jisungie?”
He dips closer, infinity sharply closing into a finite set. Too finite, too small. Their breaths share the same air. Jisung breathes out and Minho greedily snatches it up and breathes it in. The gap between the tips of their noses is a canyon of millimetres. And then – in a moment too quick to be given a name – Minho’s eyes flicker down.
Oh.
Oh.
It’s that kind of want.
Jisung had been expecting… something world-ending. Enormous. Something that would take him apart stitch by stitch and bring him back to primordial soup. A monument, a behemoth of emotions, rising against the tide and causing slips of tectonic plates to set forth a tsunami. Immeasurable. Unspeakable.
But here it is, measured in the angle of Minho’s eyes, in the width of the gap holding them apart as separate entities, distinct lines, and it is so small that it can fit – still – into the atrium of Minho’s pounding heart.
“That I want you to kiss me.” The words stick to his molars as they leave. It lingers in the air like sweetness and Minho licks his lips to taste them.
“Whatever my Jisungie wants.”
And kiss him he does, until the sweetness of his words resides not only on his lips, but in every crevice of his mouth, and there too – in the parts of Minho’s body that all the scientists of the world haven’t found the words to describe.