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“Seriously, Taesan-ah—don’t you think you’ve pushed him enough today? He’s been on edge since he came home, and then you just kept running your mouth.”
They’re sitting at the table, bowls still warm, the sound of the cars outside the apartment soft. Jaehyun’s voice is steady and angered. The overhead light hums faintly, a dry sound that makes Taesan’s jaw tense.
Taesan pokes at his rice. “He took his food to his room,” he mutters, defensive, because it’s the first retort that comes out. “I didn’t think he’d—”
“Cry?” Jaehyun cuts in sharply, with furrowed brows. “You didn’t think he’d cry?”
Taesan keeps his gaze frozen to the table. Steam curls from Jaehyun’s bowl. Woonhak’s chopsticks have been left behind on the table, the cheap metal ones bought in bulk that clink against porcelain. The sound keeps replaying in his head, the last couple of sharp clinks before Woonhak had left.
“He’s been off his game all day,” Jaehyun goes on, quieter now, with a tone of being past overt anger, but not yet forgiveness. “Overslept, bombed his calc exam, got a bad call from home. You’d know if you paid attention instead of making stupid jokes.”
Taesan chews at the inside of his cheek. “I do pay attention.” He says it too fast. “I just didn’t know about that. I’m sorry, hyung.”
Jaehyun looks at him, patient but still exhausted with him. “You tease him more when you’re worried about him. You know that, right?”
The scolding feels weirdly personal. Taesan gives a small shrug. “He’s not made of glass.”
“He’s also not you,” Jaehyun says. “He doesn’t bounce back from insults the same way. You know that.”
That worms its way somewhere into the sulci of Taesan’s brain. He stares again at the grain of the table, faint scratches, and a ring of soy sauce near the edge. The light continues to hum, and Jaehyun sighs.
“Just… talk to him later. Not to tease more, not to fix it—just talk.”
Taesan nods, though the motion feels heavy. He lifts his bowl and chews without tasting anything. The rice is too hot and it sticks to his teeth.
After Jaehyun leaves the table, Taesan stays, staring at the empty chair across from him. Woonhak’s chair and lone chopsticks. There’s a smear from his sleeve, maybe. It’s stupid that Taesan notices so much, but it sticks out. He taps the table once with his own chopsticks, a rhythm he doesn’t finish.
He replays all of the Woonhak-related instances of the day in his head. Woonhak had tripped on the way out of the apartment that morning, spilling coffee on his hoodie, and Taesan laughed too loudly. The calculus comment—“You probably used your fingers to count again, huh?”—which made Jaehyun groan and made Woonhak roll his eyes, but maybe with his lips pressed together too tightly. The teasing at lunch when Woonhak couldn’t open the ketchup bottle. Taesan had tugged it out of his hand, called him hopeless, flicked the cap at him. It made Woonhak grin for a second, but maybe that was merely habit.
By dinner, it had gone more sour than intended. He’d said something about Woonhak’s voice cracking when he argued, and he had gone quiet first, then awfully pink in the face, then stood up with his bowl. Eyes glossy. He tried to keep talking through it, sputtering, “I’m not mad, I just—,” but the words didn’t make it out any more after the chair scraped away from the table and the door to his room shut.
Taesan cleans up, half to move and half to stop thinking. He stacks bowls, rinses them, and leaves Jaehyun’s half-empty glass by the sink. He doesn’t turn the light off when he finishes, choosing to stare out the window above the sink for a second. Some neon light from the next building over blinks pink against the glass.
He knows he overdoes it with Woonhak. It’s not even about being mean. There’s something in the open, bright, unguarded way that Woonhak reacts that makes Taesan want to push, just to see how far he can stretch it before Woonhak gives him a reaction. He calls it teasing, but it’s most likely just habit, or impulse, or maybe just the only way he knows how to stay close. Sometimes, Woonhak gets quiet and draws in on himself, lost in worries, and it really doesn’t match his face, and Taesan fills it with noise so he doesn’t have to think about why Woonhak might be quieter than usual. Maybe that’s selfish.
He leans against the counter, arms crossed, the sound of the fridge humming behind him. He feels it through the floor. He thinks about the very pathetic image of Woonhak sitting in his room, bowl in his lap, eating just to eat, probably with his eyes still red, and a sticky guilt creeps through him. He could knock. He could say sorry. He could pretend it didn’t happen. He glances at the clock. It’s only nine, much too early to pretend the day’s over.
Jaehyun passes through the hall once, towel slung over his shoulder, hair damp. “You good?”
“Yeah.” Taesan says it too fast again. “Yeah, I think I’m gonna go talk to him.”
Jaehyun gives a small nod, accompanied by a very serious expression. “Don’t push. Just check on him.”
Taesan then drifts down the hallway past nine-thirty with his bare feet on cold hardwood. When he eases the door open, with the light from the hallway spilling in a long, thin rectangle across the floor—didn't even knock, why would he—the sound hits him first.
Quiet. Hiccupping. Muffled into the pillow, but unmistakable.
Woonhak’s shape is a curl in the blankets, on his side facing the wall, shoulders shaking in shudders that make Taesan's stomach drop and twist at the same time. The pillow under his face is dark in small, wet patches. His hair is messed up, sticking to his forehead and the back of his neck, and his fingers clutch the pillowcase. The image is too scarily small and fragile to match the person he spent all day teasing.
His throat tightens and his pulse kicks up and some deeply fucked up part of his brain files away Woonhak’s bare knees tucked to his chest and the redness blooming on his cheek where it's pressed against damp fabric. He leans against the doorway for far too long, which is a habit of his: the looking-too-long thing that precedes whatever he does next. He does it a lot with Woonhak, for reasons that are obvious and also somehow really oblique to him, which doesn't make it any less embarrassing.
"Are you crying because of me?"
It sounds wrong as soon as he says it—too self-aware, very brittle. His voice cracks halfway through, and comes out higher and more defensive than he meant.
Woonhak jerks upright, swiping hard at his face with the back of his hand, smearing tears across his cheekbone. His eyes are red-rimmed, lashes clumped, and he won't quite meet Taesan's gaze. "What are you doing here?” he mutters. “Just—leave me alone."
The sensible sequence Taesan knows: apologize to Woonhak (and Jaehyun, again, for good measure), and say some socially adjusted thing, and go. He crosses the room in four steps instead of leaving, the floorboards creaking once underfoot. Woonhak shifts away on the mattress in anticipation, but not far enough.
"I mean, seriously, for two hours straight?” Taesan says, while perching on the edge of the bed. “Woonhak-ah," he tacks on with the added tone of a question and simultaneous reprimand.
He reaches out before he can think better of it, tilting Woonhak's chin up with two fingers. Woonhak resists for half a second, then gives in, and Taesan drags his thumb across a wet track on his cheek. The tear smears under his touch, warm and slick, and Woonhak's eyes flick up to his face and then away again, shifty and embarrassed.
Taesan's throat goes completely dry. He wonders how salty his thumb would be if he were to bring it to his lips and taste it. Just from the sight of the tears, goosebumps rise on Taesan’s skin that feel scarily orgasmic, considering the circumstances, and it almost sends him into an internal panic.
He shouldn't feel this way. He knows that. Woonhak is upset—genuinely upset, bombed his calc exam, got reamed out by his mom on the phone, and then Taesan spent all day needling him because that's what he does, that's how he keeps his hands to himself. Woonhak's face is blotchy and his lashes are clumped together with moisture and his bottom lip is bitten red, and every single detail is lighting up parts of Taesan's brain that have no business being awake right now.
Woonhak turns his face away, voice small, "Seriously, just go."
Taesan’s hand remains on Woonhak's jaw, thumb resting just under his cheekbone. His skin is fever-warm, a pulse flickering faintly there. He brushes under Woonhak's eye, looking away from him, with the pad of his thumb and catches another tear before it falls. It’s absurdly hot, that tear. He half expects Woonhak to jerk away. Instead there’s a small tremor that starts somewhere beneath the jaw and travels up, and Taesan feels it all the way in his own palm. The human body shouldn’t be this communicative, he thinks. Too much data.
The following sentence tumbles out before he can stop it: "You're really pretty when you cry."
The words he usually throws at Woonhak—teasing, lazy insults, anything to ragebait that bright reaction—are performance. These painfully honest new ones aren’t built the same way. It’s not an exaggeration, not bait, not even a joke. It’s just true, and the truth lands wrong and unsteady on its feet, heavier than it should, something he feels embarrassingly unequipped to hold.
Woonhak looks sideways at Taesan, with glassy eyes and a mottled flush spreading across his cheekbones. "Hyung…"
It sounds small, ridiculous, and entirely unfair. The sound of it leaves Taesan reeling with guilt, and heat climbing up from somewhere low in his stomach and spreading fast, but. Not in the nausea way. He assumes it’s his body’s way of signaling an instinct to undo whatever this is, and he’s supposed to be the reasonable hyung right now.
He moves in closer before his mind catches up. His hand slides further along Woonhak’s jaw until his palm fits against the line of his throat. The thought of “correcting his mistakes” crosses his mind, ridiculous and impulsive, and his brain fills in the blank with the first thing it finds: a kiss. Not planned. Not smart. Definitely not what Jaehyun meant when he said don’t push. Jaehyun always says things that make sense, morally. Taesan doesn’t consider himself to be… too unconscionable.
"I'm sorry, I really am," he says, and he means it, sort of, in some diluted way, but his voice has gone rough and quiet and the words feel less like an apology and more like something else entirely. He doesn’t intend for the second part to sound dangerous, yet it happens anyway. "Let me make it up to you."
Woonhak opens his mouth as if he’s about to argue. Taesan doesn't give him the chance. He closes the distance and kisses him, tasting an intoxicating, subtle salt on Woonhak's lips where the tears haven’t dried up yet. Woonhak makes a sound like a mix of a gasp and a whimper and a hiccup, pleading and refusing, and Taesan swallows it, licking his bottom lip. He decides it’s the least surprising and the most infuriatingly tender thing he’s ever witnessed.
Woonhak's hands come up, fingers curling into the front of Taesan's shirt, and he's still shaking a little, still crying, but at least he's kind of kissing back now. Messy and uncoordinated in a way that makes Taesan think he could have been holding his breath for hours. With a sinking sort of despair, he realizes he is indeed very hard, pitching a tent in his jeans. For Woonhak’s sake, he chooses to not say anything that would betray this. The effort of restraining himself has him gritting his teeth.
He pulls back just enough to murmur against Woonhak's mouth, "I'll make you feel better. You'll like this, I swear." He tries to embed a promise in the words to make them more appealing. He’s also a little irritated at himself that he’s almost hallucinatory-like calm about the wrongness of all this, which is, to his own mind, both appalling and strangely liberating.
Woonhak's breath is shaky. His eyes dart around nervously, pupils blown wide, and the tear tracks on his face are constantly being made anew. The flush on his face crawls down to his throat. He looks perfect.
Uh-oh. Taesan knows this feeling that crawls up his throat, now. It’s not new. It’s been sitting under everything for months—this pull toward Woonhak that he keeps renaming and excusing. Proximity. Routine. Maybe boredom. Anything that sounds casual. It’s cuteness aggression, if cuteness aggression could hurt this much and border on hostility. Fondness that makes him want to bite or shove or say something cruel just to stop the ache of it. He wants to cover Woonhak completely, bury him in attention until he shuts up or laughs or does anything to break the intensity. He doesn’t have a healthy vocabulary for wanting someone.
Taesan kisses him harder this time, with any kind of restraint slowly feeling increasingly pointless, and one hand slides into Woonhak's hair and tugs just enough to tilt his head back. The wetness of another tear that made its way under his thumb blends with the warmth of the mouth he reaches. Woonhak whimpers again—more desperately than before—the sound sends a jolt through Taesan, and he feels recklessly hungry and alive and raw and unwilling to stop, partly because he doesn’t know how to.
He presses closer, crowding Woonhak back against the pillow, overcome with the urge to smother him with his presence. Woonhak’s hands shove at Taesan’s shoulders, not very hard, and then his fingers fall to lay limply and uselessly beside his head. He makes a small sound in the back of his throat that has no English equivalent. The movement wrinkles the bridge of his nose; he looks like he’s trying to reconcile two competing impulses and losing. His face is so tear-streaked and unbearably vulnerable that Taesan feels something in his chest crack wide open.
Taesan leans in until his breath fogs against Woonhak’s cheek. His knee sinks into the mattress between Woonhak’s legs, and the dip tilts them closer together. Their torsos are nearly flush, the only thing keeping them from completely merging being the fabrics of their clothing. When he shifts so that his leg is folded between Woonhak’s, it brings their groins close, and he can feel a small twitch coming from Woonhak where he brushes against his thigh. It’s good, but it could be better.
“Stay still,” Taesan mutters. His own voice sounds nervous, frayed around the edges. Woonhak shudders, sniffling. Taesan takes one of Woonhak’s legs in both his hands and maneuvers it so his ankle is balanced over his shoulder, and rocks his hips, and the resulting sensation makes his eyes squeeze shut and a strained moan slip from his lips.
Weight pushing forward even more, his hands scrabble to find Woonhak’s waist, thumbs pressing just under the fabric and pulling in close enough to grind their clothed dicks together. Woonhak’s chest jerks with a strangled gasp at the contact. Desperately wanting to replicate the reaction he got for it, Taesan rolls his hips again, and this time garners a loud, startled, high-pitched moan from the younger. Woah. His mind keeps flickering between wanting to see how far it goes, wanting to preserve Woonhak’s dignity, wanting, wanting, stopping, thinking, forgetting.
“You don’t even have lotion on your nightstand, or something?” He murmurs into Woonhak’s ear. The teasing tone of it doesn’t quite match the way his pulse thumps so unevenly in his head.
Woonhak lets out a protesting noise that isn’t really a word of any sort, and he shakes his head—though it’s not a reply to his question, more just a general movement. His hands move from settled by his head to down by his knees, clenching at the sheets, knuckles white. Taesan can feel his own control slipping, breath coming fast. The rhythm of the grinding is uneven now, and almost not enough to satiate him. He can only be grateful that he chose to wear jeans today, the rough friction providing most of the sensation for him, stars blooming behind his eyes every time he ruts forwards on Woonhak’s bare thigh.
Taesan’s hand moves down to fiddle with the string of Woonhak’s stupid fucking basketball shorts, untying them with a couple of tugs. At the signal of Woonhak’s tentative nod, his fingers slip further down to cup Woonhak through his underwear—he’s warm, half-hard, and Taesan’s head spins. Mostly because this is the pinnacle of affection, maybe, the ultimate manifestation of his weird crush-thing, to finally… touch Woonhak in the way he wants to, though, needless to say, well, that sounds pretty wrong. “Don’t say anything about this to Jaehyun-hyung,” he utters cautiously, under his breath. His heart lurches even saying it.
Woonhak’s lips part, soundless, and he doesn’t answer. His wet eyes shine, uncertain. Taesan feels the need to fill the silence, so—“Um, actually,” he fumbles, feeling like he should be doing more for Woonhak’s “apology” than just grinding against him, pulling his hand out from Woonhak’s shorts reluctantly, “I’m trying to make it up to, to you, not me, you know, so—” he wipes his hand across Woonhak’s face again, following the streaks of salt, collecting as many tears left behind as he can. Then, without thinking, he spits into his palm and rubs his fingers together. It’s messy and thoughtless, just a crude preparation resulting from the lack of resources, but enough to make the next moment easier.
This time, his hand moves past Woonhak’s boxers to wrap around his cock, slightly pulling it out to make the slow, purposeful flicks of his wrist easier to maneuver. The spit and tears aren’t incredibly moisturizing, by any means, but Taesan hopes it doesn’t feel too dry for Woonhak, who whimpers freely now. “Ah, uhhm, hyung—”
He looks down at where Taesan’s hand is, then throws his head back, body twisting. His whole body tightens, chest rising too fast, with his breathing uneven and staccato between gulps of air. Then, after shivering and shuddering with the effort of damping his noises into small huffs and strangled whines, he starts letting out full-blown cries and moans, and Taesan’s stomach twists so hard and intensely that he feels dizzy.
“You gonna relax for me? For hyung? Shh—come on, Unagi, Woonhak-ah, come on—” Taesan’s words dissolve into pleading when Woonhak gets louder and louder. “Jaehyun-hyung really shouldn’t know, right?”
“I-I’m trying, sorry,” Woonhak pants, voice wobbling, face shining with new tears, eyes noticeably puffy. His next couple of efforts to quiet down result in marginally better levels of noise than before. At the next tear slowly making its way down Woonhak’s cheek, any semblance of rhythm that Taesan previously had flies out the window. He grinds down harder, chasing the friction and heat as he finds a sweet spot along the seam of his jeans that rubs against the head of his cock just the right way, and he’s sure he would be able to see a damp spot there if he could tear his eyes away from Woonhak’s face for once. Woonhak’s sounds pull his focus, dampening other thoughts. He doesn’t try to stop watching, the wet shimmer on his face catching the little light that makes the room not completely dark.
He imagines that if he tried to get a detailed look at Woonhak’s dick, he could shy away or get embarrassed (and subsequently incur upon Taesan the biggest falling-anvil-to-the-head of regret in his life), so he settles for trying to observe it through touch, through his fingers as he wraps around it and strokes—it’s probably not any longer than his own, but there’s a nicely thick part somewhere close to the head, which mushrooms out when he twists going up, and increasing amounts of precum get squeezed out the tip. If it were a different day, with less of a shamefully mean background to the situation, he’d love to sink to his knees and take his time blowing and teasing Woonhak—maybe even for hours. Alas, today, he feels the need to get this done quickly.
“’S good, feels really good,” Woonhak says, raggedly, voice shaking. “Please—mmh, don’t stop.”
“I won’t—fuck, Woonhak-ah, you make it so, so hard to not do anything,” Taesan bites out, and grinds harder, now attacking Woonhak’s neck with wet, open-mouthed kisses. Some tears have found paths all the way down past Woonhak’s ears, below his jaw, and he licks them up, though his movements are sloppy.
Woonhak lets out a shivering half-cough half-laugh. “You’re such a weirdo, you really—hhuh, uh—you really like my crying, or something?”
With the intention of letting out a snappy retort, Taesan brings his head away from Woonhak’s neck—reluctantly—and somehow, unintentionally, squeezes the base of Woonhak’s dick much harder than usual, and then drags his tightly encircled fingers upwards. Woonhak, previously trying for a very weak smile, gets said smile wiped straight off his face and elicits a snivelling whimper. Unconsciously, he furrows his brows, scrunches his nose, and squeezes more gleaming teardrops from his eyes.
The sight sends sparks not too dissimilar from a poorly insulated electrical wire skittering down Taesan’s spine and straight to his cock. He ruts feverishly, over and over again, right on the edge. For the last hurrah, he doesn’t even need to replay the image in his mind. All he does is continue looking Woonhak straight in the face. His hand tightens and loosens erratically, and his mouth hangs open, huffs of breath and his own moans coming out higher and higher, and he—“Oh, Woonhak-ah, Woonhak-ah, Hak-ah—”
His hips stutter. His vision blurs and whites out, and he squeezes his eyes shut involuntarily, and everything dissolves into a mindless static and jolts upon jolts of pleasure rocking through his body. If his jeans didn’t have a damp spot before, they most definitely do now with the cum seeping from his briefs, and Taesan keeps shakily grinding against the seam and Woonhak’s thigh, which might also be damp, until it gets to be too much and too raw, at which point he slows completely. He lets his head hang forward limply, panting with his pulse hammering in his throat, until he remembers that his hand is still wrapped around Woonhak’s sticky cock, but hasn’t moved in a good minute.
The hand that has been propping Taesan up comes to rest on Woonhak’s chest, feeling it rise and fall unsteadily. His eyes are open and glassy, his lower lip trembling. He looks so alive in this moment that Taesan isn’t even sick of looking at his face, still entranced by the way his eyelids flicker, how he brings a delicate hand up to wipe at his nose messily. Taesan holds still for a second, then slowly shifts back on Woonhak’s thigh where he had been sitting. Woonhak shivers under him.
Taesan swallows, hard. “Hey,” he murmurs, softer now. “Woonhak-ah? You still with me?” His thumb rubs small circles over Woonhak’s clothed sternum, grounding the other as much as himself. Woonhak’s nodded answer is tiny, almost dazed.
“Good,” Taesan breathes, with a slip of fondness. “You’re fine. Sorry for, uh, edging you.” He squeezes his hand around Woonhak’s cock once. Finally, he resumes stroking, but gentler now, coaxing instead of demanding. He’d never demanded anything in the first place, it had all been coaxing, and Woonhak had somehow not pushed away the coaxing from the moment Taesan had first said sorry. His mind still hums with leftover static.
Woonhak’s hands come up to cover his face, clearly closer to coming than he was before Taesan briefly stopped jerking him off. “Ahh—mm, please—”
“Do you forgive me? Hm?” Taesan suddenly interjects without thinking, and it gives rise to a delicious feeling of glee that creates an almost sick, choking sensation in his throat. “Do you forgive hyung? I said I was sorry for making you cry.”
Woonhak pitifully responds with a blubbery sort of moan, but Taesan doesn’t take it for an answer. He didn’t intend it, but a smile spreads across his face, and he swings his leg so he’s fully between Woonhak’s, hiking his other leg up onto his shoulder, both now elevated. The hand not stroking him moves to Woonhak’s face to swat his hands away, and before he knows it, his thumb has found its way into Woonhak’s mouth, and he pulls the corner of it by hooking his thumb. Not hard enough to really hurt, but enough to at least get a good hold on him as he continues… running his fucking mouth again. “C’mon, Woonhak-ah, isn’t it good?”
Woonhak squirms around and huffs and puffs, body tensing and one hand gripping Taesan’s wrist, of the hand hooked in his mouth, but it doesn’t do much. He sputters out a “yes, yeah, pleeease” that drips with a torturously heady, whined neediness. Taesan’s grin widens, and he’s about to say something else with equal levels of annoyingness when he notices that Woonhak’s been holding his breath tightly for a little while.
Finally, after a brief silence, Woonhak lets out a heaving breath quickly exchanged for a harsh inhale, and his hips buck up into Taesan’s hand as his whines and moans reach a peak. Dribbles of cum spill into Taesan’s hand—kind of weak, which doesn’t make sense given the amount of zinc he probably has in his diet—and he shudders. It’s probably the hottest thing Taesan has ever seen and heard. He swirls his cupped palm around Woonhak’s tip to collect the cum and uses it to wetten his continued strokes, now creating obscene noises. After several more strokes, Woonhak starts shying away, grumbling, and curling in on himself, swatting at Taesan’s hand.
He rarely gets to baby him, since Woonhak’s taller now and always grumbles about it. Right now, though, Woonhak doesn’t argue. He just breathes, eyes now heavy-lidded, skin more flushed and damp than it was before the whole dry-humping-handjob ordeal. Taesan watches his eyes flutter shut until the world quiets around them.
Taesan then has the fleeting and vague thought that staring straight at Woonhak’s face while both he was coming and Woonhak was coming might have been pretty weird. He rolls off of Woonhak and onto his side, detangling their legs and letting Woonhak’s fall back down to the mattress, lungs still catching up. He blinks until the ceiling stops spinning. Beside him, Woonhak lies still, one hand pressed over his eyes, the other limp across his stomach. His chest rises unevenly, open-mouthed breathing between the sniffles and small gasps for air.
Taesan stares for a second too long. Then, quieter than he means to, he says, “See? Told you I’d make you feel better.”
No answer from Woonhak, who just rolls over to his side, curls in on himself, slowly and almost protective. The back of his shoulders, now facing Taesan, shake a little. Maybe from crying. Maybe from trying not to. These questions are answered by Woonhak letting out one final long, shuddering sob.
Taesan props his head up on his hand to peer over Woonhak’s back, watching. There’s a damp patch on the pillow near Woonhak’s temple where the back of his neck had been resting while Taesan practically tortured him, from the exertion, and a strand of hair stuck to his forehead, flushed and sweaty. Taesan reaches out before thinking and brushes it back, with his fingers feeling ten times clumsier than usual. The heat of Woonhak’s skin lingers on his fingertips for a while.
Nothing that he wants to say would sound right in this moment. Nothing funny or dumb, or apologetic, or smart and analytical. He ends up just taking deep breaths as if trying to meditate, and then after a minute or so he feels as though the silence is driving him crazy, so he mutters, “I mean… was that a good apology, or what?”
It’s both half-joking. Half-truthful. He hears his own voice and winces, hating it—too uneven, too careful. Woonhak flinches a little. No reply. Just the sound of a deep sigh. The room smells like detergent, but now, with the added scent of sweat, and a little bit of salt.
Taesan tries to look at Woonhak without the noise in his brain taking over and without seeing too much. Regardless, the slow, rhythmic pull of breath, the curve of his shoulder under the rumpled sheet, the reddened elbows peeking out, the faint twitch of his jaw and throat when he swallows down another sound... every small detail keeps hooking him and his attention. His pulse still hasn’t settled, and doesn’t show any sign of doing so at the sight of him like this. It makes him feel greedy, and stupid, and strange, deep within his heart.
He pushes himself up to sit. His shirt clings damp against his skin. He clears his throat. The words come out low: “I’ll clean up. Don’t move.”
Woonhak doesn’t even look at him, but this time, he gives a small exhale in response.
Taesan stands. His hips ache a little, likely from the repetitive movement of grinding as hard as he did. He grabs the first towel he can find off the back of Woonhak’s chair by his desk and stares at it for a moment, not quite sure what he’s doing anymore at all. He wipes his hands. The towel smells like fabric softener and the faint trace of Woonhak’s shampoo—minty, slightly sweet. Generic cucumber-mint, then, if not some scent named Cliff Waves Thrashing Against Rocks.
He turns toward the door, hesitating. He wants to come up with something to say that could begin fixing the odd, unsettling imbalance hanging in the air. Maybe like are you okay? or did I mess this up? He can’t tell which question is less selfish. So he settles for, “Um—then, I’ll be right back.”
He steps into the hallway. The apartment feels too quiet now. From the kitchen, the hum of the refrigerator cuts through the stillness. He prays—internally, with an absurd frenzy—that Jaehyun didn't hear. Woonhak was loud; he knows that, he’s still painfully aware of the moans, and most notably, the crying. He’d also disappeared into Woonhak’s room for longer than a simple apology would take. What if Jaehyun heard and keeps it to himself and the whole apartment dances around it and never addresses the elephant in the room? What if Woonhak blurts it out later because he can't stomach being quiet for once, or maybe because he and Jaehyun get emotional together, Christ, the ENFPs?
More than just embarrassment, it's possible that there could be a loss of the ordinary stuff. Fewer late-night messages, less shared silence and more awkward silence in the living room, an invisible barrier at the sink. He pictures Jaehyun's face not furious but hollowed, which is worse. His stomach tightens, heat rising, towel damp in his hands. He rehearses words and they all crumble. He imagines Woonhak laughing it off and Jaehyun not laughing at all. He just needs to hope that Jaehyun had his earbuds in and was listening to music, or headphones on and working on a song, or asleep already like the puppy he is. He knows it's unlikely for Jaehyun to feel that way in the first place. God, Jaehyun wouldn’t have any issue with the fact that they… had a sexual encounter, for fuck’s sake, he gets plowed by Sungho every other week.
He leans on the bathroom counter, towel still in hand, and stares at nothing in particular. He should probably be panicking more. What he feels instead is a strange calm tinged with the realization that he’s gone too far and can’t rewind, and nothing between him and Woonhak will be the same again.
He wipes his hand again even though there’s nothing left to wipe off. The towel ends up twisted between his fingers. He presses it to his face and breathes in until his lungs ache.
The image of Woonhak’s tear-streaked face keeps replaying behind his eyes. It doesn’t feel like guilt exactly, or at least, not only guilt. It’s more a complicated mix of tenderness, lingering adrenaline, and shame, and something bright that burns at the edge of it. The part of him that always wants to touch things, to make them better by feeling them, doesn’t know where to put his hands now. He can’t tell if he made anything better or if it helped ease the original situation that got him into this mess in the first place. Probably not.
He rinses his hands under cold water, towel forgotten on the counter, and watches the non-salty water bead on his skin. He focuses on that for too long, because the physical world always pulls him back when his brain starts running in circles. The water splashes against the inside of the sink, his knuckles looking harsh under the harsh fluorescent light. Eventually he straightens up, wipes his hands one more time, wets the towel with warm water, and heads back toward the hallway. The towel still smells faintly sweet. He stops outside the bedroom door, slightly ajar. The air feels warmer here. The mattress gives a soft creak, there’s a quiet sniff, the rustle of blankets.
Just for balance, Taesan presses his palm to the doorframe. He doesn’t go in yet. His heartbeat jumps anyway. The tug in his chest is two-sided: the need to check on him and the fear of talking about what happened. When he opens the door further, warm light from the hallway spills in. Woonhak’s still on the bed, hair a mess against the pillow, but his breathing slow and quiet, likely eased into sleep.
He clutches the towel in his hands, dripping on his wrist, and steps inside.