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Before the live is over, Seokjin makes a hasty retreat—by rolling off his couch with a thump. At full force.
A knee clutch. A succession of deep breaths. Followed by a drawn-out yah, because he’d missed the plush rug in the shape of seven gleeful Pokemon gathered by a campfire by mere centimetres, taking damage from his marble floor.
He feels for the growing bruise and presses it with a wince. Then he abandons it in favour of muttering a checklist of things that he should do, he wants to do, will do, as he paces the house, walking off the pain. He wriggles out of his RJ pyjama top and pulls on a thick grey hoodie. He stuffs his phone in his pocket. As he shuts the door of his apartment behind him, he swiftly uncaps a lip balm and shakes his head into it—replacing the cap and slipping it into his pocket the moment the lift dings and announces its trajectory in a crisp female voice.
He’ll walk. It’s cold. It’s near.
Once in a while, cars cruise silently past him, over roads slick all over with a thin coat of grey slush and fallen leaves. Vehicles of all manners of luxurious make, each one sleek and black. When he glimpses his reflection in them, bare-faced and wearing alpaca-patterned fleece pants that he’d underestimated the warmth of, he feels colder. Shit. It's too late to go back. He won’t give up, but he might just—
Without blinking twice, the guard waves him in. Him, and his face that’s known throughout the entirety of Korea and then some. He’s simply a multimillionaire about to pay another multimillionaire a visit. Maybe Seokjin has earned this familiarity by other means. Strawberries. Golden toilet brushes. Giant alien plushies that have been stretched out to resemble snow-white tteokbokki, right before it’s stirred in a spicy red sauce. A badge of honour or a badge of obsession, Seokjin sometimes wonders.
Oh, before he forgets. In a slightly different lift this time, Seokjin taps out hi jwehope and hits send. Then he spends the rest of the journey fidgeting with the lay of his pants. The wrong pants, clearly. Later, he’ll ask if he can—
On his phone screen is one tick. Two, when the lift doors open to a lobby softly lit in warm hues, bathed in the hushed silence of top-of-the-line soundproofing beneath the most expensive, plainest wallpaper.
Okay, then text me.
Seokjin runs on the spot outside a door he’s barged in on many times. Stamps out the cold as quietly as he can without disturbing the neighbours. He’s taking his own sweet time to press the doorbell. He knows the passcode. He understands it’s more polite to announce his arrival. Only…
He’s built his excuses up like a stack of desserts piled high and now has to casually knock them down with a hand. What does that make him then? He remembers the bruise blossoming on his knee. He feels cold. He feels warm. Or what he feels is the stretch between two extremes. A million thoughts in his head, and nowhere to put them down. His tongue simultaneously hard-packed snow and the clear nothingness of snowmelt. Maybe it’s not the weather he should blame, but it’s—
Oh, you weren’t overseas?
Hoseok’s laughter is louder in real life through the door, than the voice Seokjin hears through the intercom. Buzzy, champagne-y, and wispy—like the glistening gauze ribbon that wreathes a fir tree.
Then—Hoseok. Warmth. Coziness. Joy, in the pair of eyes peeking from the gap in the door.
“Yah, Jwe—” The greeting fades away on Seokjin’s tongue.
A beanie on Hoseok’s head. Lopsided. Not Hoseok’s preferred configuration.
A half-open suitcase haphazardly abandoned on the floor of his living room, partially gutted for the items stacked beside the two shells. Expensive chocolate, from the looks of the lustrous sheen on the shopping bag, topped with a bow.
Even pulled on a fleece jacket and… phone in pocket? Yes—Hoseok squeaks here, at the sudden patdown and spinaround, but Seokjin pays him no mind—phone already in Hoseok’s pocket.
In a hurry. Putting gifts aside. Ready to leave. Seokjin’s eyes dart between the different points behind Hoseok, returning to meet his gaze when Hoseok says, “Hyung!”
Not hyung. And not hyung? Instead, the word that left Hoseok’s lips is a pleasantly convenienced, hyung!
He was planning to come over.
When the realisation hits, Seokjin muscles into the space that is, in some ways, already his.
Bring me a present.
Hoseok’s hair is poodle-y at first, curly strands rubbed between Seokjin's fingers. Then silky, when Seokjin cards through them, tightening his grip, guiding Hoseok’s head to the side so Seokjin can kiss more of him. Skin, cologne, salt. Goosebumps he can taste on his tongue.
Hands on Seokjin’s hoodie. Hands under. Fists in the fabric. Sighs against his ear.
Pants. Well. They’re gone. Seokjin kicks them off.
“You’re cold!” Hoseok announces, not very helpfully. Both in the declaration, and in how he’s running his hands appreciatively up and down Seokjin’s bare thighs.
He won’t stop doing it, even as Seokjin pushes him in the direction of the bedroom. When that doesn’t work, Seokjin tries picking him up, which makes Hoseok scream—and scurry to where Seokjin needs him to be.
Where are you going, Jwehope?
It was only a matter of days. It had the same feeling as a year. Of coming and going, waiting for something dearly missed to come back. It will. He will. Of course.
Funny thing, about this fuzzy feeling in Seokjin’s chest. How it forces him to entertain the microscopic possibility that…
Hoseok keeps asking, Why? Why the rush? Why so sudden? Why all this, all this—
Every one of them, followed by a giggle. Like he knows why.
“You know why,” Seokjin tells Hoseok, just as much.
Seokjin wants to school him again, with a touch or two between the splay of his legs. Sate him with a graze of his lips. Maybe.
Everything is at the right temperature. Hoseok is even swimming in the sheets. In the nude. He is the picture of relaxation. Of bliss, while Seokjin finishes up on his routine of forgetting the world.
A chair to drape his clothes on, once placed there and never moved again afterwards. When Seokjin turns to the side, an appraising oooh comes from the bed to spur him on, from the figure sprawled there with an arm resting behind his head. Watch. Phone. Lip balm. All of it dumped on the tray, a spare, on a side table, which has been there since, since—
Ah. Spare. Not so spare.
Nothing is left. All is as pure as snowmelt. That’s right. The ice is melting. Winter is only that long—and so very short.
Seokjin wants Hoseok’s attention. He wants Hoseok to look at him as much as Seokjin looks at him.
Seokjin’s touch begins at the top of Hoseok’s foot. Skates up his calf. A sound of glee when he meets ink. Traces it, as he did many times before. Growing pressure on Hoseok’s thigh invites a sweet coo. Their eyes meet, and Seokjin’s breath is the one to catch here. He continues. He moves up.
Hoseok’s eyebrows work furiously to puzzle out his touch. Anticipation. Curiosity. The beginnings of a pleasurable yawn. The smallest quiver of his lips that Hoseok will permit. Tension girding his body.
Then, saving it for last, the softness of meeting Hoseok’s lips, preciously cupid-bowed, with his own before Seokjin falls fully into him.
Where are you going?
Their hands somehow find each other. Their fingers intertwine. They find each other.
So this is what it’s like to dance on the edge. To be the bearer of a million possibilities and wanting to achieve them all at once, now, later and forever. Should he hold back? Resist? Remain?
Seokjin shifts, presses into Hoseok again, in time to hear Hoseok yell, Oh my god! next to his ear. There’s something in the rhythm that he likes. Slower? Faster? Harder, slowing at the end to drag the pleasure out.
Hoseok’s eyes are squeezed shut. But his lips give him away. Trembling. Shifting, as if he can’t decide on the sound he should make. The whimpers that keep coming.
Seokjin kisses Hoseok on the brow, on his temples. He murmurs into Hoseok’s cheek desperately, over and over again, Hoseok-ah, look at me, please, please, pleasepleaseplease—
Seokjin won’t give up. But he’ll sure as hell give in. Yes, that’s what he’ll do. He nuzzles into the neck of a still-shaking Hoseok, and thrusts, once, twice, before spilling his gasps against a flitting pulse.
It’s oppa.
Hoseok teases him. In the afterglow, he’s ready to settle old scores when they have just mended new ones.
Seokjin shifts. Aware of a finger tracing his skin, hopping back and forth over the river that is his spine. And, as a last resort, stroking his waist with what seems like lewd reverence.
Seokjin flops like a tuna to give Hoseok the reaction that he wants. Then he pulls the blanket up to prevent it from slipping down his lower half.
“So hyung is oppa now? Oppa.”
Hoseok is sprightly enough, even after sex, to test the word with his mouth. To make music out of a one-off utterance, to mine rhythm from a never-again phrase.
“Oh. That.” Seokjin stretches, nonchalant but careful. The blanket is sliding off again. “I just say whatever I want to say.”
He says whatever he wants to say. Does whatever he wants to do. He slams his way into virtual chatrooms at the speed of light just to talk to someone he can talk to everyday, and braves the cold in clothes too purposefully thin, just to see someone who can meet him everyday. Or come over to meet him anytime.
Hoseok is the same. Which is why it’s concerning that he hasn’t said anything for a while now. So Seokjin turns over to peek at his face.
Hoseok has been looking at him for a while. Seokjin can feel that he’s being tallied, being taken apart and put together again. The picture Hoseok gets is clearly different, but he doesn’t appear to dislike it. Somehow, it makes Seokjin feel shyer than… all the body-warming stuff they were doing just now.
Seokjin looks away first, only to feel the weight of Hoseok curling over him. Hugging him. Taking a big totalising whiff of him even, before he sighs, all happy.
Hoseok-ah, would you still love me if I were a rock? If I were a big ball of hail? A tightly packed boulder of more ice than snow, unpredictable, inconveniencing, and ready to melt at your slightest touch?
The answer. Seokjin wants to escape it. He wants to be blanketed by it. That feeling, how wondrous it must be. The endless stretch between those two things.
Seokjin basks in it, until he starts to murmur something, a name, in almost-sleep.
Jwehope.