Archive of Our Own

Euijoo, March

“Byun? You still with me?”

Euijoo blinks through a thin veneer of sweat and anxiety, grips his knees so hard he can feel his nails. 

“Sorry, sir,” he manages. “Please—continue.”

A line appears in between Coach’s eyebrows. “Byun. You understand that we’re only going through with this if you’re one hundred percent on board?”

Euijoo tries to focus on the feeling of his blunt nails biting through the fabric of his joggers. He’d prepared for this, had for weeks primed himself to face the humiliation of discussing his own replacement. His shallow version of sacrifice, accepting the transfer-in of a more talented striker while he moves back to being the helpful winger that he knows he should have always remained. That in itself is a blessing; he thinks Coach might only be keeping him off the bench because he is, at least, useful as a team captain.

In no world had he imagined he’d be hearing that name on the roster.

“I know you two share some history,” Coach is saying through the muffled whirl of panic.

Irrational fear spikes in him. It is impossible for Coach to mean your strangely raw, codependent friendship with one another that has sizzled out into ice, but still every goosebump on Euijoo’s arm raises.

“We trained together in Japan when I was younger,” Euijoo clarifies, and clears his voice to add, “That’s all, sir.”

Coach waits a beat, likely analyzing him from his seat at the desk. Euijoo wipes his face as clean as he can considering the circumstances, but he isn’t sure. He hasn’t had to do this in so long—actively try not to think about Nicholas, that is.

Their team hasn’t been nearly good enough to go toe to toe with Nicholas’s current club. They only play twice against each other per league season—a ritual in which they do their best attempt at Polite Acquaintances, and they haven’t yet memorably faced off in the cups because of the bracket system.

There’s a single memory that Euijoo decompartmentalizes briefly just to feel the grounding bite of it: Nicholas approaching him after one of their rare games against each other, asking something utterly inane about Euijoo’s haircut, and then cameras flashing around them, reporters flying in to ask things like—“You were former teammates; how does it feel now that you’ve reunited as less than equals?”

It had never made sense for Euijoo to steal Nicholas's spotlight even in this underhanded way. So obviously Euijoo never let it happen again.

A lower voice from the desk this time, which means Coach has seen somewhat through this poor performance of calm: “He’s just an option, Byun. Our best option, sure; I’m not even sure why he’s considering it at all—”

“It has to be him,” says Euijoo with dread. It dawns on him with a syrupy hopelessness. 

Coach sits back with a brow raised. “You know how much I trust your IQ on the field. Say the word and it’s done, Captain—but think on it, eh?”

Euijoo swallows bile, composes himself with some scrap of control, and answers, “No need, sir. It has to be him. He will save the club.”

Nicholas, June

“I’d go so far as to call it disrespectful, bringing in a new striker to replace your only star player, who’s also your captain.”

“Right, good point, but: Byun seems, as usual, quite calm about this transfer. At his last conference he called it ‘a necessary change.’”

“But Byun—as I’m sure our viewers know well—is the only claim to fame AFC Hebden boasts; I’m always saying that he’s one of the most underrated players today, considering his incredible knowledge of the field. And for Hebden to waste that on this transfer…”

“Be honest, there’s no wasting here—Wang is such a one in a million opportunity, you’ve got to wonder how much Hebden dished out to hook him in.”

“Well, you couldn’t script it, could you? Best mates as kids, apparently, and proper rivals now—and the big question, really, is whether they can let it go now that it’s come to it, or if old grudges really do die hard…”

A clattering sound from a few feet away, and the channel abruptly switches over to a cartoon that’s trying very hard to be Peppa Pig and failing. 

“Oy, Takayama’s dropped the remote again.”

“Shit, that’s the third one we’ve replaced…”

With every inch of his remaining energy that hasn’t been burnt away in sheer nerves, Nicholas turns his head towards the tussling on the other end of the couch.

“Sorry, sorry!” Taki starts rambling an apology in English, that beatific smile leaving even Hughes, who is constantly moody, unexpectedly mollified. 

A thread of shame breaks through Nicholas’s thoughts, knowing Taki’s done it on purpose. He stands, shoving his hands in his pockets, and jerks his head with an awkward, faux-nonchalant mumble about taking a smoke break even though everyone here knows he doesn’t smoke. Taki’s eyes, knowing and worried, follow him out of the door and materialize outside moments later when he basically teleports himself to Nicholas’s side.

“How do you do that,” Nicholas wheezes in Japanese. He will never be immune to the scare of Taki’s face popping out of the darkness at whim; lately he’s been practicing the art of sneaking around, and it’s effective maybe eight out of ten tries. But it’s this energy that makes him a great player on the field (and a terrifying friend off of it).

“I move fast,” grins Taki. He slides into one of the patio chairs, head tilted towards the night sky in puppylike peacefulness.

Embarrassed, Nicholas slumps into the other chair. “You didn’t have to do that, you know…”

“You’re welcome, though,” comes the dimpled reply. 

“Yeah. Can’t really escape it for long though, can I? Every football channel is probably talking about this transfer.” 

Someone meaner would’ve made a joke about this being too self-centered of an assumption, but Taki just looks at him in an earnest sort of way, so Nicholas just sinks deeper into his chair. 

“Anyway…guess I’ll be the one to replace Hughes’s remote this time around,” he muses, and then they drift off into silence.

After an awkward shuffle in his seat, Taki breaks the silence to ask, “Were you two really friends?”

The cold air is burning Nicholas’s nose. He rubs a finger against it, stares down at his shoes, and says, “Best friends, I think. To me, anyway.”

“Wow.”

Another bout of silence. 

Finally Taki says, “I will miss you, Nicholas,” in that open and true voice of his, and instead of ruffling his hair like he usually would, Nicholas just pulls him into a long, long hug.

Nicholas, June

Euijoo hasn’t yet spoken two full sentences to him and it’s already been three weeks into practice. It’s enough time for Nicholas to have naturally befriended some of the other teammates and started an odd sort of amiable relation with his coach—and still, the person he used to call his closest friend only ever offers him perfunctory greetings when they pass each other.

It’s not for Nicholas’s lack of effort. Today, shortly after practice Nicholas opens his mouth to say something—Good game, maybe, but—

Euijoo just shoulders past him, careful not to bump bodies, politely moving out of the way with his head bent downwards. It’s a perfect parody of Nicholas after an especially bad game, when he doesn’t want to look at anyone or anything for fear of unintentionally glowering. 

Except the game hadn’t gone so badly—Dupont had unexpectedly blocked his final attempt at a winning goal, but the team had taken the tie in stride. They’d even laughed about it afterwards. And more importantly: it had been a practice game. Barely a training match, mostly for fun, to give the players a fun Friday.

“What is your problem…” 

Words muttered to himself in Mandarin, a language literally no one here speaks. 

Anyway, it’s swallowed up by the buzz and din of the locker room once he steps inside. His attention quickly cleaves between the process of pulling off his sweat-sticky clothes and this spasm of childish hurt too familiar to smooth over, muscle memory; he’s annoyed and therefore in the mood to annoy, pissed off and in the mood to piss the fuck off.

If he had one less screw in his head maybe he would do the crazy thing and confront him here and now, but he recalls, out of nowhere, old memories of Euijoo disappearing from the locker room and somehow reappearing clean and proper hours later, far later than anyone else. In this, he seems not to have changed much.

There were, of course, times when Euijoo couldn’t make his escape fast enough and he’d been forced to shower with the rest of the lowly vagrants around him, but even then he got ready so insanely fast you could barely catch a glimpse of bare suntanned skin before it was being swathed away in fresh clothes. Not that Nicholas was watching.

He thinks about sixteen year old Euijoo, tilting his shirtless body away when the locker room laughter got too loud as if anticipating something only he knew, and the ache in Nicholas’s chest stretches itself so taut it almost splinters him.

Abruptly, he gets up from the bench he’s sitting on. It wouldn’t be weird to find out where exactly Euijoo disappears off to, right? It’s in the best interest of the team, really.

Minutes later, as he’s finishing up and still deep in this train of thought, someone thumps him on the back with a goodnatured word or two. He looks up, bumps fists with Dupont, and remembers to ask, “Hey, have you seen Byun?”

Dupont rubs his nose with a forefinger. His English is worse than Nicholas’s, so he waits patiently for the very French reply—“Eh, well, ’e is with Coach. All the time. More practicing, too much practicing!”

“Yeah?” Nicholas says, biting his tongue to suppress a hysteric sound. Because of course golden boy Euijoo spends his free time with the coaches and a ball. 

He says none of this aloud, just throws Dupont a grateful smile and another fist bump before he makes his newly determined exit.

Coach is sitting in the shade when Nicholas jogs up to sit by his side. For a beat they both watch Euijoo in silence, who seems too preoccupied by the ball to notice that Nicholas is there. Expectedly his shots are clean and precise, though there’s definitely too much tenseness to say they’re with ease. 

“Shit, he’s good,” he murmurs.

Coach makes an assenting noise. “Better like this, when he plays alone. Gets less in his head about things.”

They watch Euijoo land his next kick solidly on the bar of the net, so clean Nicholas wishes he’d taken a video just to analyze it.

“Coach,” he hears himself say, keeping his voice low so Euijoo won’t overhear. Coach gives a jerk of his chin to indicate that he’s listening, so Nicholas barrels through: “I’ve been, um. Thinking. About. Something.”

“Spit it out, Wang.”

“Okay. Well. Have you ever thought about trying out a two striker formation? I mean, well—I was just thinking.” Unnecessary inhale of breath. “What if you let Euijoo play striker with me?”

A long pause runs between them. Coach is as stoic of a man as they come, so Nicholas has to wait with bated breath for the answer, which is inevitably realistic—“No premier team has successfully run a 4-4-2 in years.” He turns a critical eye towards Nicholas and adds, “Byun could be just as effective as a winger.”

“Yes, but,” Nicholas pushes, “he’s trained for accuracy. If you just build his confidence and give him some on-field support, he could be one of the most…” He bites his cheek to think of the word in English. The word he wants means something like intelligent, which is what a commentator called Euijoo once, but he doesn’t remember it now, so he just says, “One of the best link-up strikers playing right now. I swear, it’s just a problem of confidence. You could even switch me out—”

“No way in hell,” Coach scoffs. “You’re stuck playing striker, Wang.”

“Thanks, Coach,” Nicholas beams. “But I’m serious about this, sir; I know it’s not my place to say this but you’d be wasting him as a winger. I know his potential. I…” And then he nearly bites his own tongue to avoid rambling on about the things he knows.

After a beat, Coach sighs, but it’s one of his Thinking sighs. 

“Why don’t you get on that field and do some one-touches with him tomorrow? Since you’re properly head over heels.” 

Nicholas goes white as a ghost, but Coach just slaps him on the shoulder with a goodnatured laugh and leaves.

Euijoo, June

“No,” says Euijoo immediately, punctuating this with a severe shake of his head. 

“We’re not saying it’s a permanent change,” says Coach, even though he definitely is. There’s no way the team can survive switching formations last minute twice. “We’ll test it out for a few weeks, how about that?”

Euijoo almost vibrates with nausea. “Coach, I’m not sure—”

“It’s not your job to be sure.” 

Even though it wasn’t said unkindly, Euijoo feels a wave of shamed deference and shunts his eyes to the floor. It’s been years since he last stepped foot in his home country and still these instincts plague him.

More carefully—which is in itself a humiliation—Coach says, “He clearly believes in you. And, for the record, so do I.”

Warmth, and as always its companion, fear. “Thank you, Coach,” he’s forced to say, “I will work hard.”

──────

The first time he saw Nicholas play, when they were still freshfaced and clumsy teens, he knew Nicholas would go on to outshine the rest of them. 

And the first time Nicholas swung his arms around him in a hug—briefly, in the way that friends and teammates do, to celebrate a match well done—Euijoo had thought to himself in increasing levels of self-consciousness: why is it that I feel so happy living in his shadow?

Uniquely Euijoo trained for both positions of right-winger and the occasional striker, and even in this they were connected: Euijoo wearing his 7 jersey, Nicholas wearing his 9, the numbers of their positions. Nicholas going on and on about their birthdays, and destiny, and how fate shows itself in weird ways, or some such thing.

Euijoo can't help but wonder if Nicholas feels the same way now. Euijoo's sister had worried when she learned about the transfer: You don't think he's trying to sabotage you? 

But though Euijoo knows him too well to even entertain that, he can't parse why in hell Nicholas would basically ruin his perfect career to join Euijoo's doggedly mediocre team.

Nicholas, June

It takes him a good five minutes to hype himself up before Nicholas is walking onto the field like it was his idea all along, waving at Euijoo, who has just stopped short of a kick to stare at him with round, nonplussed eyes.

“You looked lonely, Juju!” 

He tries to ignore Euijoo’s visible flinch at the old nickname, fully in Korean no less. A lapse in Nicholas’s unreliable judgement, to use the language he’d learned just for Euijoo. Quickly he smooths it over with an overly bright smile, switching into Japanese, the language they grew up associating with the field: “Coach said I should do some one-touches with you today.”

Doubtful, Euijoo wipes at the sweat of his brow with the back of a delicate wrist. “You look like you’ve showered already?” he says.

“Wanted to clean up for you,” Nicholas grins, and Euijoo huffs out a surprised, disbelieving sound that thrills every sick bone in Nicholas’s body. He looks away from Euijoo, drenched in the sun Euijoo, sweat-soaked and flushed rosy Euijoo backlit by the neon green field and a setting sky, and somehow his voice comes out evenly when he calls, “C’mon, you just gonna stand there?”

They spend ten minutes doing quick one-touch passes, pretending there’s pressure, fast and electric and surprisingly not as clumsy as Nicholas imagined. They’re pretty coordinated with one another; he, of course, had faith in himself to remember every little thing about how Euijoo plays. But though they’re nowhere in the ballpark of perfect—their passes are still colored by a stilted and awkward quality—there’s no way this would’ve gone so well had Euijoo not studied him a little, too.

“Have you been watching my games, Euijoo?” Nicholas wheedles right before spinning a pass to Euijoo’s far left. But he’s already there, deftly kicking back to Nicholas’s right.

“Focus,” Euijoo says, eye intent on the ball, but the corner of his mouth is pulling up boyishly. He always looks a little bit more alive like this, mind honed in on one thing, hair so wet with sweat that it sticks to the sides of his flushed cheeks. 

Nicholas wheedles some more. “Well, I’ve been watching you,” he says easily enough, because it’s not his most embarrassing secret, then passes back with a sly look (some time during this conversation, they’ve switched over to two-touch passes and Euijoo has shockingly not said a word). “...You really need to work on your left foot, Juju.” 

Curse at me. Give me your worst. Nicholas waits with bated breath for the Fuck you.

Euijoo says: “Stop talking,” and kicks such a hard pass Nicholas has to run to catch up.

“Hey,” Nicholas calls, rolling the ball under his shoe. 

In the same way that Nicholas deliberately raises his brows when he wants to show that he’s paying attention, Euijoo furrows them ever so slightly instead, and what results is a focused, sincere look Nicholas has missed so much he almost stumbles over his next words when he sees it turned towards him now.

“Person who hits the most top-right corners owes the other drinks?”

Euijoo’s brow furrows further, but his left cheek dimples faintly when he says, “You don’t even like drinking.”

“You can buy me a smoothie then, yeah?”

The dimple deepens with Euijoo’s sideways smile of disbelief, quickly hidden away with a turn of his head. He huffs, “Who says I’m buying?” and Nicholas’s grin sharpens.

They do a round of rock-paper-scissors to choose who goes first like they’re fourteen all over again. Euijoo loses, so naturally Nicholas makes him go first with some intentionally obnoxious whooping.

Euijoo approaches the ball, shakes out his fists, and kicks such a clean arc towards the goalpost that Nicholas mistakes it for a perfect shot and whoops again, but it’s ever so slightly off; possibly a result of last-minute hesitation. 

He’d tell Euijoo this, but his ill-timed whoop has earned him a cutting look. Nicholas just laughs and bounces once on his heels before going for it himself, and it sails inches too high. To be fair, they’d upped the challenge a considerable bit, trying to hit a curling shot from this far. 

When he returns from retrieving the ball, Nicholas knocks his shoulder into Euijoo’s with a “Good luck, Euijoo,” that he’d meant to be friendly but comes out breathless and, unintentionally, too close to Euijoo’s ear. Possibly from this or from the muscle pain of two sets of practice, Euijoo visibly tenses.

His next shot is, again, too controlled to be fully accurate. 

“Don’t hold out on me, golden boy,” Nicholas mutters to himself in Mandarin. He inhales once, then runs into his own kick with enough power that it’ll hopefully curl the right way—and finally it does, hitting the corner of the goal with a gratifying wham. 

When he’s running back to Euijoo with the ball under his arm, he lets himself say, with a flash of a grin, “Guess I’m still better than you after all these years, huh?”

Equally as surprising as it is quick, a flash of furious heat crosses Euijoo’s sweet, unassuming eyes. 

And then he shakes out his right leg once, long enough that the baggy athletic shorts leave a considerable amount of skin bare above his socks—Nicholas is so busy watching a rivulet of sweat meander down the tender back of Euijoo’s knee that when he whips a shot even cleaner than his first, he almost misses the way the ball hits dead-center with a resounding whack. 

Nicholas, after a pause, claps on instinct, but it really feels like all the blood in his body has turned molten, searing his insides, turning all his muscle ache into white noise. 

Oblivious, Euijoo jogs back with the ball, golden and clearly holding back a smile at his expense, genuinely one of the most beautiful people Nicholas has ever seen and it’s not even close. He doesn’t fully knock his shoulder into Nicholas’s, just nudges him and then, hot and breathy into the back of Nicholas’s ear, pants, “C’mon, Nicho.”

Jesus. 

“C’mon, c’mon,” Nicholas mutters under his breath, squares his shoulders, sets his jaw, bounces on his heels. Euijoo’s retreated a few steps behind him, watching. 

Something both embarrassed and impatient and scorching surges through him. He flexes his hands to try and shake it off, but with the way he can feel Euijoo’s stare on his back it’s only getting worse. That stare burns through him, through his clothes, like it’s intent on seeing through to his seething blood.

He hits his next kick; Euijoo hits his. He hits the one after that; Euijoo matches it. 

After another few perfect shots in succession, they both start to get winded from all the running back and forth to retrieve the ball. When they were younger, they’d sprawl across the green in this state, rolling into one another, laughing and not at all bothered by the skin to skin.

Now, Euijoo just stares one second too long at him, both of them too out of breath to say anything substantial, and breathes, “Good game.” 

“Yeah,” Nicholas pants lamely, trying not to look at him for fear of letting this starving thing out of his chest.

They knock knuckles against each other in a performance of friendliness both of them have forgotten how to do well. Nicholas lifts the neck of his sun-hot shirt to wipe the sweat off of his eyelids, watches as Euijoo does the same, lets himself stare at the expanse of naked stomach and waist that’s flashed at him for a wretched millisecond before he turns towards the locker rooms.

Naturally dual practice would mean having the locker rooms to themselves, but to be fair Nicholas was a little too caught up on not embarrassing himself on the field to process this. So when they both start stripping off their disgustingly drenched tees he can feel every inch of the several feet Euijoo’s put between them, back-to-back, like he maybe thinks Nicholas is going to try and sneak glances. 

Reality is, he’s pointedly keeping his head down so Euijoo doesn’t feel uncomfortable. His heart is loud and hammering fast somewhere in his throat when he tries to start up casual post-practice talk, something like, “Nice kick at the end there,” but too late he realizes he’s alone and Euijoo’s already sped off towards the showers.

Well.

There’s nothing to do but to follow, with the same obsessive, dutiful mantra repeating in his head to keep his eyes down. Strangely enough, once he gets to work scrubbing himself down under the scalding spray—maintenance was supposed to fix the water temperature two nights ago—he has the unshakable feeling that he’s the one being watched. 

He chances a look to his right without moving his head from where it’s bent. Euijoo’s got his own head tilted back, face kissing the water. His lips are parted an inch. There’s a rivulet of water particularly noticeable in the center of his chest, the valley between his soft skin there. 

Nicholas rips his eyes back down to the floor, biting the inside of his mouth so hard he tastes the grounding metal of his own blood. After an excruciating few seconds of wondering why the hell the steam won’t kill his godforsaken dick, he hears Euijoo shut off the water, gather his things, and leave.

It takes Nicholas far longer to follow and when he does, he’s flushed and hot all over from the steam and a little in over his head, but—Euijoo’s waiting for him on the benches.

He’s running his towel over his head absentmindedly, face angled towards the phone in his right hand. The screen is black.

“Hi,” pants Nicholas, stretching out a crick in his neck so he has an excuse to be restless. “You good?”

Euijoo does his faux-look-up, which is to say that he lifts his chin but doesn’t stare at him directly. “Coach wants to see us,” he says. Quiet, casual. 

Nicholas can do that. He replies, equally as casually, “Cool. Now?” but his voice comes out rough as sandpaper and he has to cough into his elbow. Maybe it’s the lingering heat making him sick; he lifts the hem of his tank and brings it to his mouth, huffs against its blessed coolness, tilts back his head in relief.

This time Euijoo does look at him, albeit briefly. A glance up—“I’ll have a word with him about the water being too hot,” before his eyes flutter quickly away.

It’s just Euijoo being a good, thoughtful team captain, nothing personal. Still, Nicholas can’t help the irritating part of himself from being pleased at being thought of at all.

They take the stairs up to the office with Euijoo in front and Nicholas behind. Euijoo’s wearing his own tank, the gray cotton kind, not loose enough to hide the frankly obscene lines of his small lower back. 

With some shred of willpower sourced from god knows where, Nicholas glues his eyes back onto his shoes so that when Coach tries to hand him a water bottle, he doesn’t notice, and Euijoo has to hand it to him instead.

Does humiliation ever cease? Is it a lifelong illness? Questions for a god Nicholas does not believe in.

The conversation drifts somewhere above him. On a usual day he’d be focused and at attention (somewhat) but Nicholas has a headache thanks to the shower steam and all of his body is burning so severely he’d rather pass out on the ground. His attention fades in and out—“...passes go?”—“...next month…”—“...chemistry…”

It’s this word that vaguely snaps him out of it. From behind Coach, the back door to the office swings open to reveal a very tall and terrifying specter. 

“Euijoo-kun! Nicholas-kun!” exclaims Koga Yudai, way too energetic for 9 in the evening. He’s also the only one who gets away with calling players by their first names.

There’s a faint smile on Euijoo’s face that makes Nicholas do a betrayed double-take. Him? You’re smiling at him? 

Coach says, “Well lads, I’ll let Koga finish up here; my wife’s been blowing up my phone for the past hour,” before making his very characteristically bored exit.

Yudai sits them both down in the chairs facing the large mahogany desk and perches himself on the edge of it with crossed legs. Nicholas, who long ago accepted this part of himself, stares at those slender long limbs appreciatively before remembering to check into the ongoing conversation.

“...roommates,” Yudai’s saying, happy to address Euijoo as he’s the only one actively listening.

Euijoo is staring at Yudai without comprehension, and a vaguely horrified look.

“Uh,” smiles Nicholas. “What?”

Yudai happily backtracks. “Manager Murata and I took a peek at you two during your one-touches,” he says, which shocks both of them into a catatonic state. Barreling on through, he continues, “And I gotta say, there’s definitely potential there for Nicholas’s proposition! It could be the change the club needs, actually; we’ve been considering a new formation for a while. But for this to work, you need to be well-oiled.”

Unfamiliar with this last word, Nicholas asks, “Come again?”

With the patience and flair of a male Mary Poppins, Yudai lifts off the desk to begin a slow, methodic pace around them. All of Nicholas’s hairs stand on end.

“You two,” he says with a finger needlessly pointed towards them, “will need a lot more chemistry on the field than you have now. No offense, of course; but you two look like you’d rather be anywhere else when you’re together.”

Nicholas reins in a hurt frown, flicking his gaze towards Euijoo in vain; he’s just wearing the same blank, at-attention expression. Where did you learn to hide yourself away like this? he desperately wants to ask. You used to be easy for me to read.

Yudai continues from somewhere near the door: “Naturally we thought the best course of action was to pair you up as often as we can. That means dual practice, dual check-ins with Coach, and: roommates when you travel.”

Euijoo isn’t fast enough to cover the flinch from flickering across his face. Nicholas, on the other hand—

“Hahaha. What?”

All of a sudden Yudai materializes again behind them with a smile. Abruptly Nicholas realizes where Taki (who trained alongside Yudai back when he still played) learned his habit of sneaking up on people. It causes such a lurch of familiarity in him that Nicholas swallows his spit and stares up at him with renewed awe and fear.

Yudai breaks through this reverie with a quieter, more earnest voice. Unintentionally Nicholas and Euijoo both lean in from where they’re twisting around in their seats. Noticing this, Yudai slides smoothly back to the desk as he says, “I don’t exactly know what kind of history you two share beyond training together, but I promise that the only way for this to work—and it really does need to work—is for you to start talking to each other.”

Because he can’t help himself, he looks for Euijoo’s expression, but is disappointed to see that he’s hidden it, head bent towards his lap with his newly dried, fluffy hair in the way.

Nicholas wants badly to point fingers at him, tell him it’s not for Nicholas’s lack of trying, but two things ring clear in his head: (1) he’s actually just as bad when it comes to important conversations, and (2) Yudai is not their therapist.

Like he’s a cadet receiving orders, Euijoo inclines his head and says, “Thank you, Yudai-san. We will work hard, but…respectfully, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

A knife of hurt drives itself between Nicholas’s ribs. 

Yudai shows teeth, leans in, and ruffles Euijoo’s hair with a surprisingly familiar hand. Torn between twin knee-jerk reactions of jealousy and affection at Euijoo’s indulgent expression, Nicholas just gapes at them. 

“Agree to disagree, eh?” Unexpectedly, Yudai reaches over to pat Nicholas’s shoulder, which is shockingly comforting. “I’m gonna head home,” he calls over his shoulder, “you two should as well.”

Once they’re outside, Nicholas lingers near the doors of the building where it’s warmer than the sudden chill of night, and waits for Euijoo to catch up to him.

Bag over shoulder, ruffled hair, tired eyes. Nicholas’s lips itch, and he looks away when he asks, hoping it sounds noncommittal and not, like he feels, a step away from sulky: “So, are we gonna swap numbers?”

Euijoo’s very intentionally looking away from him, he can feel it. 

“I…” Nicholas swallows the lump in his throat with effort. “I know you hate this, but I want it to work. I think it could make a huge difference.”

Euijoo doesn’t say anything for a long while, and when he finally does, he flits those dark brown eyes up to look at him without lifting his chin. All the breath in Nicholas’s lungs catches in his throat—it dawns on him like a terrible truth that he’d severely underestimated himself and that he is no less immune to Byun Euijoo than he was years ago. 

The bane of his existence says, quietly, “You’re wrong about this.”

“No,” says Nicholas, pushing his phone towards him with a determined set of his jaw, “I’m not.”

Euijoo stares at him. Nicholas stares back. It’s a tense, challenging look, the kind they’d send one another before a match years ago, but intensified tenfold by something new.

After this lapse in conversation, Euijoo, chewing his bottom lip, takes the phone with such ginger hands Nicholas almost laughs. Everything about this is funny and serious at once: Euijoo tapping in his number, filling out his contact details with laughable professionalism—Byun Eui Joo, which Nicholas will fix not even seconds later—and when he hands back the phone their fingers brush so that Nicholas feels the cool, uncallused skin of a tried and true football player.

He, on the other hand, sports several rough calluses from his romps in badminton and guitar and whatnot. It’s an unwelcome reminder that they’ve always been opposites in everything.

“Let’s try our best for the team,” says Euijoo with a distant, firm voice.

I get it, Nicholas thinks, suddenly struck with a wave of realism, the kind that comes with any grim but inevitable realization. This is the only way I can be anything to you. 

With a forced grin, he answers, “For the team.”

Nicholas, July

“You’re somewhere else,” pants Nicholas, rolling the ball to a stop so he can squat and catch his breath. In his best, most annoying voice he sings, “You gonna actually kick, Juju?”

“If you actually pass right.” 

Despite his head clearly being elsewhere the entire time, there’s still a glint of the old, startlingly welcome competitiveness in Euijoo’s eyes. It sparks a huge smile on Nicholas’s face, he can’t help it.

“Why don’t you come get the ball from me yourself, Captain?”

Euijoo nearly, very nearly laughs. He runs toward him with a sigh like he’s just indulging, but the focus in his feet betray him—Nicholas deftly twists away, taking the ball with him, keeping it between his feet as best as he can while effectively dodging Euijoo’s inescapably long legs. 

He chokes out a laugh when Euijoo bumps into his side and goes for another steal of the ball, but Nicholas is expecting it; it bubbles into uncontrollable laughter when Euijoo swiftly snakes a leg between his to go for it again and succeeds. Immediately after, chest aching with a laugh, Nicholas hooks his leg around Euijoo’s to trip him.

Before Euijoo falls, instinct lashes out and Nicholas catches him tight around the waist with both arms. Those eyes are ocean-wide and shocked into meeting his for once, inches close so that Nicholas could just—reach up and press his lips to his lashes. If he wanted to.

The laughter dies in his mouth. Hastily he tugs them both down into the turf and rolls onto his back with his eyes shut.

“Nicho,” says Euijoo finally, “we both could’ve gotten injured—don’t ever do that again.”

Nicholas splays his arms out like a snow angel and pants into the sun. Comparatively Euijoo’s laying like a pharaoh about to be laid in a tomb.

“Saved you, though,” he murmurs.

“Don’t.” Warning voice. A pleasant shiver travels down Nicholas's spine; maybe he's a pervert.

“You’re no fun, Juju.”

From his peripheral view, Nicholas sees a small smile form on Euijoo’s face. 

“Five laps, Wang,” he says, in his dead serious leader voice.

Nicholas whips his head towards him. “Really?”

“Yes, really. I can’t give you preferential treatment.”

“This is, like, the opposite! This is targeted!”

But Nicholas ends up getting on his feet and running, anyway. On the stands, Euijoo watches him all the while with a water bottle pressed to his mouth, beautiful and utterly unattainable in the glow of the setting sun.

He barely jogs towards the locker room once he’s done because of the ache in his muscles; Euijoo easily walks ahead. He wishes all of those ardent commentators knew that only Nicholas can make cool, calm, collected Byun Euijoo reveal his true boyish and stubborn nature.

A frenetic, petty idea blooms in his head: a perfect way to test Euijoo’s patience, which is only ever short with him. 

Nicholas strips off his clothes, shoves them into his laundry bag (plastic from the grocery). Then he steps into the shower right next to Euijoo’s, flips the water on, and closes his eyes against the still too-hot stream.

In a low, wary voice only a few feet away, Euijoo says, “What are you doing.”

The steam probably has Nicholas’s skin flushed in all shades of red. He flashes a grin Euijoo’s way, answers, “Showering.”

When they were training together, they’d had unspoken tense moments like this in the lockers before—curious eyes flashing to one another’s bodies, flushed faces, sweaty palms. They’d never been completely alone in those rooms, though, much less inches away from each other.

Nicholas scrubs his left arm just to sneak a look at Euijoo, who’s soaping down his stomach. The white of the soap smears in parallel to the lines tapering towards his waist, and with dutiful fingers Euijoo rubs it into his skin inches away from the stream, reaching at his own chest in one or two quick, efficient strokes.

He rips his eyes away when he realizes where all his blood has gone and tries to focus on scrubbing at his own back, muscles twinging in a dull ache. His dick has started to grow heavy even as he lifts his face directly into the spray to kill it.

A surreptitious glance to his left. Euijoo’s dick, long and curved sweetly, is starting to fill, too. When he looks up, he catches Euijoo’s eyes flit quickly away from looking at his, but his lips stay parted like he’s also finding it hard to breathe.

“Euijoo,” he says, low and heated.

With a shock of surprise, Nicholas finds Euijoo staring back at him when he turns his head.

He doesn’t actually know who moves first, but they clash against each other so hard and rough Nicholas almost thinks he tastes blood; with hasty, desperate hands he slides fingers up Euijoo’s waist and presses him against the adjacent shower wall, caught half in the spray and half out of it, too busy moaning into his mouth to care.

With that streak of Nicholas-exclusive impatience, Euijoo grips at his arms to bring him even closer so that he’s sandwiched smotheringly between Nicholas and the wall. 

On instinct, Nicholas pushes his hips against Euijoo’s and they both gasp at the friction. “Is this—is this okay?” he pants, and Euijoo nods fast and breathless, hiding his face in the curve of Nicholas’s shoulder.

So he does it again just to feel it, maneuvers a hasty hand to position their dicks against one another so the roll is smoother. The water helps, but there’s also a slickness between them thicker than it; helplessly they start moving with each other to chase the pressure, Nicholas’s hand wrapping around them both to guide their thrusts. 

Euijoo jerks when he feels Nicholas’s teeth below his ear, breathes, “Not—on my neck,” so Nicholas obediently latches his mouth onto the sloping line of his forearm, the lean muscle there.

Despite no one being in their vicinity, both of them operate on some shared assumption and stifle their sounds as much as possible until they’re just breathing hot and heavy against each other, gasping when a grind feels particularly good. 

At the first touch to Euijoo’s chest, Nicholas comes. It’s a little embarrassing, but Euijoo follows immediately after, arching into the hand at his pec, audibly choking back a moan with his eyes clenched shut.

After, they let the water clean them both and then separate in a silence only interrupted by heavy panting. Nicholas means to break it first, he really does; he turns from the wall to say something, but Euijoo’s already shut off the water, is already walking briskly away. And when Nicholas, after a bloated pause, follows him into the changing room—Euijoo’s already gone.

A feeling of dread spreads itself into the haze of dopamine. 

Euijoo, July

It happens again only a day later. 

He doesn’t know why. He thinks: I don’t know how to shut him out anymore. 

Skills have to be practiced and trained. And maybe the years have allowed him to forget how to temper this unforgivable Nicholas reflex.

But, with Nicholas’s mouth against his again, this time with his hands splayed against the cold metal of the lockers and his hips cradled in Nicholas’s palms, he considers that it might be impossible for anyone. Nevermind how hard he resents it, but Euijoo of all people could never be immune to the heady draw of Nicholas’s eyes following him around a room.   

Nicholas drops to his knees halfway through. Euijoo almost says, You don’t have to, but he thinks Nicholas might almost want it more than him. 

The back of his head rings with pain when it hits the locker he’s pressed against. Nicholas’s mouth is furiously hot and clearly somewhat experienced; not for the first time Euijoo thinks about how they’ve both changed in the years since signing onto different teams.

Everyone says, You want to go big, you go to Europe. For the miniscule chance of becoming a less forgettable person, you sweat, you bleed, you sacrifice everything that tethers you.

But the thing that everyone fails to mention: it’s hard to cut ties with a person who you never knew you depended on so much until it was too late.

And now that Euijoo knows how it feels to drop to his own knees, to let the debasement seep into him from the spaces between the fingers in his hair, to shut his eyes to listen to Nicholas moan—it’s all so much worse.

──────

The day he and Nicholas signed onto different teams all those years ago, Nicholas was still, of course, hopeful. He’d always been naïve like that. “We’ll call each other every weekend, to check in!” he’d said.

Euijoo had been naïve, too. Inexplicably he’d thought about how, in all those cheesy romance series they watched together, the leads almost always had a severely irritating problem with communication. We won’t be like that, he’d thought nonsensically. We’ll stay friends no matter what.

The years haven’t killed this streak of foolishness in him at all, it seems.

Euijoo doesn’t see Nicholas on the weekend. He knows vaguely that he lives somewhere a few blocks away, but he does everything he can to not think about that. He cleans his room. Tidies the fridge. Visits the nearby park to sit under the sun and watch the kids play, sometimes kicks the ball back to them when it rolls over to him.

On Monday he has successfully vowed to himself that it won’t happen again despite having looked forward to seeing him all weekend.

During dual practice, this bubbles up into irritation— “Stop passing back to me. It’s your turn to shoot.”

Nicholas is clearly exhausted, too. There’s sweat pasting his headband to his forehead. “No. You haven’t even tried to shoot for half an hour.”

Euijoo flexes his fist. “I just gave you a perfect chance—”

“You have to shoot.”

“I—didn't have the right angle.”

“Euijoo, it’s a two striker formation for a reason—"

“And it’s clearly not working out, like I said it wouldn’t—"

“Because you’re not trying!”

Euijoo is surprised to feel the familiar pang of hurt, so acute it must show in his face because Nicholas immediately looks sorry. Nausea wracks through him.

“I’m going to shower,” he says to the ground, and turns away from the look on Nicholas’s face.

He lets the hot water run over his bowed head as he clears his thoughts. For a while he thinks Nicholas won’t even join him, will just sit out there on the turf until it grows dark, but after a long time he jerks to a hesitant touch on his bare shoulder. They don’t say anything to each other, but he can’t help but look up into Nicholas’s eyes, finds something far too complicated, far too intense there—and there’s nothing he can do but melt into those open hands.

He ends up with his chest pressed against the tiled wall and Nicholas curled into his back, sliding, so close to the real thing Euijoo has to clench his eyes shut at every thrust, every pump of Nicholas’s hand on him, everything wet and rushed. Nicholas sinks teeth into the back of Euijoo’s shoulderblades when he comes, grips his waist as Euijoo follows.

Under the spray, Nicholas tilts his head up as if to kiss him and Euijoo turns away, overwhelmed by the sudden rush of feeling in his chest, deeper and sweeter than shame.

──────

No dual practice today. Their casual Friday team training match; Euijoo is for once on a different side than Nicholas, which is so nauseatingly nostalgic he has to press harder during his stretches to think clearly.

“No matter what, focus on marking Wang,” he tells his team again. “He’ll try to score every chance he gets, even if it’s impossible. Don’t give him the chance.”

“Captain,” says Torres with a smile. “You’re always so serious about practice.”

Euijoo lets himself smile, too. “Have to be.”

He and Nicholas don’t end up clashing often on the field; it’s mostly the others putting up a valiant fight to keep the ball away from either of them. But every now and then Nicholas will try to do something silly to distract Euijoo even from far away, a wiggling of his brows or something or another, and Euijoo has to bite his own tongue to focus, and maybe not to let out an accidental laugh.

Obviously Nicholas’s team wins. Euijoo will face this embarrassment later, but he’s busy thinking about teasing Nicholas for his attention-seeking—and he somehow ends up in the showers with everyone else.

It’s been so long that he expects the players will make a fuss, but most of them are respectful to their captain, at the very least. Except—

“Whoa, is that a hickey Captain’s got there?”

Nearly everyone turns their heads at someone’s low whistle. Euijoo’s ears fill with a buzzing sound so fast he almost gets dizzy. He ducks his head underneath the spray, his fingernails biting so hard into his palms they might break skin.

“Ay, leave him alone, can’t you see he’s washing?”

“It’s just that I didn’t think he got any! Ow! What, I’m happy for him!”

“Who knew Cap liked girls who bite, eh?”

Tussling from somewhere a foot away, goodnatured laughter. Euijoo’s entire body has started to function on autopilot. He shuts off the water, grabs his things, dries himself off. He is most certainly not looking at Nicholas, still bare and in the shower, so bad at sneaking glances that Euijoo can still feel him staring his way. 

They meet in the tiny parking lot near the back of the building without having even messaged each other. Or more accurately, Euijoo expects to find Nicholas waiting there, and Nicholas, still so reliable and predictable, is sitting on the curb for him.

After a long beat of prolonged silence in which Euijoo tries to scope out the scene for potential eavesdroppers, Nicholas breaks it to say, “I’m sorry, Juju.”

Euijoo tries not to let his shoulders hunch. “I should’ve never let it happen.” 

But even now the impulse, the dreaded urge is there, with Nicholas at arm’s distance and his drying hair backlit by the sky. He could cross this distance easily, lean down, meet his mouth, let Nicholas do the rest.

Euijoo adds, “It was a mistake.”

Nicholas’s shoe rubs into the gravel. “I don’t think so,” he says quietly. “It wasn’t to me.”

Another long, long silence. Euijoo can’t bear it. He never asked for this—why would Nicholas say something like that? Why would he be so cruel? 

But then, maybe it means something completely different to Nicholas. Maybe it can mean nothing at all; just sex, just a mouth to kiss and hands to fuck, with the added convenience of knowing each other inside and out. For some awful reason this makes things somewhat more viable.

His walk home is torturous. Nicholas messages him once—Are you okay?—before he turns his phone off completely.

Nicholas, July

They’re shorter with each other during practice on Monday, both in patience and in words. Euijoo still won’t try to shoot unless he’s literally forced to, and when he does Nicholas can tell he’s holding back.

“You’re holding back,” he says after a particularly bad kick, and Euijoo sends him an exhausted, tense look.

“So are you.”

Nicholas tries not to flinch at being read so easily. He chews his cheek, tries to say, “No—” but Euijoo cuts in with a toneless, “Don’t lie.”

“I’m only holding back because—because you are,” Nicholas says lamely. How can he explain that he’s not patronizing, he’s deferring?

“Right,” says Euijoo blankly, and then he says lowly, “I’m showering first,” before disappearing.

A clear boundary. Nicholas sits on the turf, presses his temples in his fingers, and pretends to be completely fine about it. 

──────

Memories of a merciless summer sun. Grass in his mouth. Boys together, barely men—stupid and competitive, a little malnourished, hungry, starving.

“Your passes are getting sloppy.”

Nicholas doesn’t know how he’s gotten here. 

He falls onto his back without answering. A boy flops down beside him a few breaths later, now drenched in both sweat and morning dew. A wet-on-wet painting; gold in the sunlight.

When Nicholas turns his head, the boy’s wearing a blur of a face, vacillating between his eighteen year old self and a beautiful stranger. Desperately, Nicholas tries to ask, “Do you hate me now?” but it comes out in the one language they don’t share. 

He startles awake with his fists clenching empty air.

It’s his phone that’s woken him up. Flashing on the screen is a blurry photo of a black-haired boy with a million piercings striking a cat pose.

“Mrgh,” says Nicholas when he picks up.

“Good morning to you too,” says Yuma in that curling way that means he’s grinning. In a faux-petty voice: “Thought I’d check in on you, but you know, if you’re too busy…”

Nicholas wipes at his face with one hand to shake off the sleepiness. “Alright, alright, I’m up,” he rasps, and with some renewed lucidity adds, “You okay? What’s up?”

“Oh yeah. Doing great. I got that gig I was telling you about, the one in Shibuya?”

“Oh shit!” Nicholas exclaims. “Congrats, dude, I’m so proud of you. Wish I could come see it…”

“Ahh, I know how busy the start of season gets. But hey, how are you? I saw some stuff on the sports news. Jeez, can’t believe you have me watching that.”

With a sigh, Nicholas scoots back on the bed to lean his head on the headboard. “Actually…” He chews his lip. “Kinda long story.”

“Not doing anything right now, so...”

And so they switch over into FaceTiming, and while Yuma puts on an impromptu mukbang of gyoza and rice, Nicholas gives a heartrending but very objective account of his state of affairs, starting and ending with his Byun Euijoo problem. 

Minus all the sex.

“I agree with what your manager said,” Yuma ends up laughing. “You just need to talk to each other, I think.”

“Ugh,” groans Nicholas. “I’m trying to show him through—through my actions that I—well, you know, that I, um, care. And believe in him. But he still acts like I transferred in just to haunt him, or something.”

“You’re harder to read than you think,” says Yuma, and the corner of his lip curves into a rueful smile when he adds, “I’d know that well.”

Cut through with embarrassment and guilt, Nicholas offers a sheepish, genuine, completely insufficient, “Sorry.”

“Mm. Was my fault for trying the dating thing anyway. We’re better as friends,” he shrugs.

“Yeah,” says Nicholas with a relieved breath, making a stupid face in the camera to spark a laugh. “We’re good friends. Amazing friends, even.”

“Don’t push it,” Yuma says before shoveling another dumpling in his mouth, but he’s grinning all the while.

──────

Another round of dual practice so tense Nicholas thinks they’re one breath away from shouting at each other, though it all fizzles away into nothing when Euijoo ducks his head to go shower first. 

To his shock, Euijoo’s waiting for him in the parking lot after Nicholas finishes his own.

“Hi,” Nicholas says, awkward now that they’re neither friendly nor fighting.

Euijoo raises his head, half-soaked in sun. “Nicho,” he says—something in Nicholas softens despite himself—“I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” says Nicholas, dropping his eyes to the gravel, toeing a shoe at a pebble. “That’s a bad apology, Juju. Give me something better.”

Euijoo lets out an exasperated breath, but it seems mostly for show. “I’m sorry I’m inadequate during practice.”

Nicholas whips his head towards him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Euijoo’s eyes shutter. “Don’t make fun, Nicholas.”

“I’m not—Juju, your skill is not the problem here. You never listen to me! I told you this a million times!”

There’s a complicated look on Euijoo’s face when he says, “You misremember my playing skills—”

To escape this, Nicholas quickly cuts in, “And where did you even pick up that word? In-ad-equate."

“...I read a short story in Japanese the other day that kept using that word. I used Papago.”

Nicholas can’t help but laugh. “Juju,” he pleads, “Juju, please stop being mad at me.”

“I’m not,” says Euijoo, biting his lip, maybe to hide his own smile.

“Yes, yes you are. Here’s my apology: I’m sorry that you think that this won’t work, but it will, if you believe in it.” He clears his throat and adds, “’Cause I believe in you.”

“That’s a terrible apology.”

Nicholas shrugs, toes at the front of Euijoo’s sneakers with his own, lets the relief wash over him when Euijoo doesn’t pull his feet away. 

“Are we still friends?” he asks pathetically.

Euijoo stares at him for a long time, and only answers when he looks away. “Whatever you want.”

Thoroughly at a loss, Nicholas just chews his bottom lip. He makes up his mind and blurts, “I want to be best friends again. Like, starting right now.”

“I don’t think that’s how being best friends works, Nicho.”

“Why not?” To hide his nerves, he shoots a nearby rock into the lot with a running kick. “Go shopping with me this weekend, I need to get a few things. And then we’ll be best friends again.” He glances off to the side before adding, “Just friends.”

Euijoo makes a contemplative face, the kind that means he’s swallowed himself inward and Nicholas can’t parse any of his thoughts. “It would be good for publicity,” he murmurs.

A stab of childish irritation—“Sure, whatever, does that mean you’ll come out with me or not?”

The wind blows Euijoo’s hair into his face, at once making him look younger, more vulnerable. “Okay,” he says softly. “I’ll come out with you.”

Euijoo, start of August

It’s not that Euijoo got used to touching Nicholas; this seems impossible. But maybe it’s something close to that, because the days leading up to the weekend are torturously awkward. 

There are moments, especially in the dressing room after the showers, when it probably would’ve been less awkward if they’d just fucked, quick and fast and rough to get it over with, on the bench or against the wall, and then went back to ignoring each other. 

And then there are other moments when they feel so far from each other that it would've been better had Nicholas just pulled Euijoo into his arms, pressed an open mouth to the pulse in his throat, so Euijoo wouldn't have to say a thing—his desperate heartbeat could speak for him.

In all aspects Euijoo seems to be losing his mind.

But weekend comes, and with it a bit of hope, because they’re both considerably less tense outside of the field.

Hebden is pretty picturesque when you actually walk around (or when it isn’t raining) though Euijoo wouldn’t know; he doesn’t remember the last time he’s actually gone out of his own volition. 

It’s not that he’s mindlessly dedicated to the ball. He just doesn’t know what else to do anymore but practice. He hasn’t really had a friend in this sport in years, and even then they were never a friend he could go out with, not like this—Nicholas’s arm draped across his shoulder, pointing at this and that, ducking his head into his space to ask, What kind of food are you feeling? and squeezing his arm when they see a particularly nice building.

“Everything is so artsy here,” hums Nicholas, himself artsy-adjacent in a well-cultivated, fully black outfit save for a silver belt piece that’s clearly meant to be the stand-out. “It’s so colorful.”

Euijoo wants to say, Fits you well, which would make no sense to anyone but him. Instead he reaches his own hesitant arm around Nicholas’s shoulders and lifts his head towards the darkening sky.

They duck into a corner shop with so many little trinkets on display that Euijoo has to slow his steps by half just to make sure he isn’t knocking any to the ground. He peers at a few necklaces, thinks of sending one to his sister. Out loud, Nicholas says the same thing; they share a knowing glance and a laugh.

“Oh, look—it’s you, Juju,” grins Nicholas, pointing at a very stupid-looking glass tomato with big eyes.

“Very funny.”

“No, really… It’s so round, like you. I’m buying it.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Put it on my desk and sing to it every day, like, Good morning, Juju.”

For some reason Euijoo’s face heats. “You’re so weird,” he says, but Nicholas just happily takes it to the old shop owner and strikes up a conversation with a smoothness Euijoo has always admired and envied.

It starts to rain when they’re making their way out, so on impulse Euijoo grabs Nicholas’s sleeve and pulls him underneath the nearby awning. 

“Are you cold, Juju?” says Nicholas, and he wriggles closer to snake an arm around Euijoo’s waist.

The heavy downpour is so much like a shield around them. Euijoo can feel each of Nicholas’s fingers against his stomach, those broad and capable hands. Before he can think a sensible thought he just leans into Nicholas’s warmth without a word.

He doesn’t dare look at his face, but he can hear the softened chord in Nicholas’s voice when he says, “You okay?”

Euijoo never knows how he’s supposed to answer a question like that.

Luckily Nicholas takes this silence in stride. “You hungry?”

Euijoo bites at his cheek, answers, “Mm…I could eat. You?”

“I’m starving. You have a place in mind?”

“You pick. Whatever you want.”

“Yeah?” The smile on Nicholas’s face is so startling. Euijoo has seen various shades of this smile on one too many ad campaigns, Nicholas dressed to the nines by this or that sponsor, tailored perfectly to his body or styled in such a way that he looks so handsome it steals breath.

Euijoo smiles back helplessly. “Yeah.”

Apparently Nicholas has done his research, because he leads the both of them directly through all the rain to a restaurant that's a twenty minute walk away. They’re completely soaked by the time they show up to the door.

“We can’t go inside like this,” Euijoo pants, wringing rainwater from his jacket, but just then a broad Asian man with a toughened face pushes open the door.

“Come in, come in,” he urges them, and Euijoo and Nicholas exchange anxious glances before following him in.

Euijoo is about to apologize for their squelching when at his side Nicholas leans his head in to say something in Mandarin; at this, the man’s face brightens so completely he looks like a different person. 

The entire time they eat—Taiwanese food, a real find, and shockingly spicy—Nicholas chatters on with the man about something or another. Euijoo, who has always liked to listen to Nicholas’s mother tongue, stays quiet by his side even as Nicholas points excitedly his way during the conversation. Juju this and Juju that. 

His voice is somehow smoother in Mandarin; faster, yes, but more relaxed, deeper. He’s constantly in movement when he talks like this, his hands, his mouth, his arms in wide gestures. In another life, he might've been a handsome movie star.

After they finish eating and Euijoo’s wiping his mouth with a napkin, Nicholas finally pauses in his conversation to turn towards him. With a smile, he says, “Got something for you,” and pushes something across the table.

Skeptical, Euijoo just stares down at it. 

“It’s not a joke,” says Nicholas in his dramatic, fake-hurt voice, which means he's just actually hurt.

The corner of Euijoo’s mouth twitches. “Alright,” he sighs, playing into it, and opens the tiny white paper bag to find a very unique looking ring—two threads of cool silver intertwining all around.

“We won’t have many dual practices left before season kickoff,” says Nicholas, looking everywhere but at him, leg jumping underneath the table, “so think of this as, you know, your motivation. And really, you need better accessories, Juju.” 

A wave of fondness rises unwittingly in Euijoo’s throat. He coughs to clear it, but thinks it might still come out in his voice when he replies, “Mm? Motivation for what?”

“To believe in yourself,” grins Nicholas, because he’s always been unbelievably cheesy.

“Cheesy,” says Euijoo with a shake of his head. And then, with realization: “Don’t you also have a ring like this?”

Nicholas flushes, but his grin just becomes more wolfish. “Best friends have to match,” he says.

Euijoo shakes his head, laughing—from the corner of his eye he can watch in real time as Nicholas deflates little by little. He’s so dramatic, he thinks, and finally picks the ring up to slot it onto his first finger. It’s such a perfect fit that he glances up in shock and catches the absolutely incandescent look on Nicholas’s face.

He’s glowing with it when they leave; vibrant, handsome, loud. It’s still raining so hard they can’t see a thing, and they’ve got their hats pulled low and masks on and Euijoo—he pulls his mask down to pull Nicholas into the alleyway by the hand and kiss him. Nicholas laughs into his mouth, low and happy, vibrating through Euijoo’s bones.

“I thought this wasn’t allowed,” he says above the din of the rain, kissing gently down Euijoo’s throat, too gentle. Euijoo fists his hands into Nicholas’s nice leather jacket and tries to hate himself for what he does next, but all he feels is a wave of overwhelming relief when he sinks to his knees. 

They’re under some sort of cover, maybe from the tarp overhead, so the pavement’s dry enough on his jeans. Still Nicholas says with audible shock, “Euijoo, it’s dirty—”

He doesn’t really know what to do from here. The last time he’d gotten on his knees it had been so rushed he thinks Nicholas just led him through the whole thing. With shaking fingers he tries to unzip Nicholas’s jeans—he’s still standing there shellshocked—and then Euijoo can’t help but look up to stare at him from below, to try and communicate the thing he doesn’t want to say aloud.

“Juju,” chokes Nicholas, eyebrows furrowed, and Euijoo thinks he almost won’t let it happen, that he’ll push him away, but then he starts fumbling with his belt.

Euijoo has to take off his own cap and place it in his lap to press his face to Nicholas’s crotch, embarrassed and unbelievably desperate enough to sit there stockstill and let Nicholas do the rest—pull down the waistband of his expensive, sponsor-brand briefs, pull out his hard cock and tentatively press it against Euijoo’s parted bottom lip.

The storm is raging a few feet away from them, worsening by the minute. If his brain was working Euijoo would be worried about getting home, but right now he’s grateful for the blanket of gray around them, drowning out the small sound he makes when Nicholas accidentally hits a little too deep on his first thrust; he starts stammering apologies, but his hips won’t stop moving, his thumb pillowing the bottom of Euijoo’s stretched mouth. If Euijoo closes his eyes he can sort of make out the gist of Nicholas’s rambling, sweet nothings that feed immediately into the ache low in his gut. 

He’s still just sitting there with his hands in his lap. It’s a poor attempt at plausible deniability, having your face fucked by the person you’ve been trying and failing not to think about all week. But Nicholas, overly sweet Nicholas, Nicholas who treats everything like a gift, mumbles thank you’s with every slow pump of his hips. His thumb is still stroking Euijoo’s lip when he comes—Euijoo pulls off to spit, shaking, and then presses his forehead to Nicholas’s hipbone. 

Nicholas reaches out when he stands, but Euijoo only allows him to press their foreheads together for a breath before he’s murmuring, “I have to get back, Nicho.”

He gets drenched in the rain on his walk home, warm and cold all over, all at once. 

On Monday, he shoots two goals in such uncharacteristically bold succession that even Coach breaks his stoicism to clap him on the shoulder. 

Euijoo, August to October

Season kickoff is a complete mess.

Despite Euijoo’s best attempts not to just keep letting Nicholas shoot every goal—again, a strategy he thinks would’ve been far more effective—it’s clear that the two-striker formation is a little foreign to all of the team. If practice was grueling, matchdays are so tiring that Euijoo almost forgets their roommate travel arrangement. 

The first time they have an away game, Euijoo finds Nicholas sleeping on the covers of the other bed and has to shove him into the shower, where they give each other such hasty, rough handjobs it makes them even more exhausted afterwards and they fall asleep in the bath. Euijoo’s fingers are wrinkled all over when he slips away and into his own bed with some chagrin.

Matchdays 1-4: 1 win, 1 draw, 2 losses.

It’s not completely terrible, and in fact it’s much better than anyone had expected, but it’s still nothing like what Euijoo thinks it should have been. 

On matchdays 5-7, despite doing better all things considered, they suffer another staggering loss that is such a whopping failure, a complete mishandling of the field by all of the team—each of whom Euijoo is quite literally responsible for—that he sits in the bath with his knees drawn up and his forehead pressed against them for so long Nicholas has to physically pull him out, his arms hooked underneath his armpits, Euijoo’s snot and tears soaking into his sleep shirt. 

But it’s really their eighth match that everyone has been waiting for with alternating levels of dread and apprehension, because—they’re playing Nicholas’s old team.

It’s an away game, because bigger clubs host first. This, Euijoo had thought he’d trained himself for, especially after all these years of professional football. When they first step onto the foreign field, the first thing they register is, as usual, the ceiling giving way into an endless sea of overpowering light. 

But immediately after this expected round of overstimulation, Euijoo freezes with a blood-chilling realization; the sea is almost all chanting the same thing, discordant but undoubtedly angry: Wang sold his soul, Wang sold his soul.

A few feet away, Nicholas is casually stretching his arm, but he looks paper white. Euijoo doesn’t have the time to say anything—and what could he say?—before they’re heading onto the turf.

Whether it’s because of all the dual practice or something even more implausible, Euijoo has become far more sensitive to the minute changes of Nicholas's moods on and off the field, and it’s instantly clear that his energy is off from the start.

A forward bumps hard into Euijoo's side as the ball moves within reach; Euijoo swerves to hook it towards him but it evades him by a last-ditch effort from one of Nicholas’s old team’s best midfielders, and Nicholas himself is feet away, covered in sweat and jaw so set it looks like it hurts. When finally one of their wingers is able to steal the ball, Nicholas receives it with his usual deft ease—the crowd starts to boo so loudly it almost rings in Euijoo’s ears, and then the ball is being stolen again right from Nicholas’s feet. 

The chanting turns into fuzz in his ears as it dawns on Euijoo too late: Nicholas won’t be able to carry them today.

It’s 1-0 with Hebden losing when halftime comes, and it’s characterized by a dead, dreadful silence. Euijoo breaks it to go over the most glaring flaws, tapping on Coach’s mini whiteboard to go over the weak parts of their formation, but everyone’s faces are grim. 

For once, we’re acting scared, Euijoo muses in his head. They’d never been good enough to actually hope for better before, and this is a make-it-or-break-it situation; if they lose here, their team will go down in history as the making of the downfall of star striker Nicholas Wang.

Even as Euijoo pulls some of the forwards aside to brief strategy with Coach, he knows that most of this will be futile. He knows the truth of what has to be done.

──────

A few days before they parted ways to their new respective teams, Nicholas had been in a strange mood, had asked Euijoo out of the blue something like: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

“Being five years older,” Euijoo had said, and gotten a kick in the shin for it. He’d added, “Probably still playing, I guess. Will you? Keep playing, I mean.”

And Nicholas had said, “I want to play beside you.” 

Euijoo remembers nothing else from this day but this exchange of words alone, and Nicholas’s head slumped against the back of a chair, his sleepy, sincere smile. He’d only just started to grow into himself, but he’d always had the sort of charisma that helplessly attracted anybody close to him. 

Euijoo had been so young. His older self wouldn’t have even tried, but this smaller version of himself had asked, “Do you think that’s possible?”

“Some day,” Nicholas had answered, “we’ll play, side by side. That's my dream."

Finally, Euijoo thinks he might understand.

──────

Nicholas, bouncing on the balls of his feet, eyes moving lightning fast between the players a few feet away to catch a chance at receiving a pass—is also being hounded on all sides by the other side’s defense who, needless to say, know Nicholas’s skills well. But Euijoo thinks he knows them better.

The structure of their formation so heavily relies on Nicholas receiving all of Euijoo’s intentions and vice versa, which he has never understood completely until this moment: when Nicholas, finally dribbling the ball between his feet in the few seconds he has before it’s stolen, glances up with desperation and Euijoo doesn’t even have to say it, just lets him kick a soaring, perfect pass to him. He receives it with his left foot outstretched. 

It’s months of practice, yes, but it’s also all the years of playing together on the same field. They broke and regrew their limbs and bones and flesh together on that field. Years before they even pressed their mouths together—possibly from the moment they held their first awkward conversation with one another—they understood each other on and off the field like they’d lived several lives by each other’s side.

Now: Euijoo is running, so hard and fast his lungs burn. 

It’s clear no one on the other side expected Euijoo not to pass immediately back to Nicholas because his way is astoundingly clear. The shot is simple, easy, clean; he kicks into the corner of the goal, letting a cry of relief rip from him as it evades the goalkeeper’s fingers and whips right into the net.

Nicholas runs to him, sweaty, electric, beautiful, butting their heads together hard with a string of words like Juju, Juju, you’re amazing, you’re so good, which feels a touch too tender for game-speak but gets drowned out anyway by the seething crowd.

The ball comes back to him with some magical touch on every pass that follows: Nicholas shouts his name once and Euijoo’s already there to receive. The knee-jerk reflex to pass it back right before he nears the goalbox is undoubtedly there, but all of Nicholas’s stupid sweet-nothings-praise must be filling his head, because he goes for a borderline recklessly brave kick again, and again, and again—

“Holy shit, Cap!” 

On the fourth goal even some of the players across the field run over to hug Euijoo with incredulous laughter; but Nicholas is always there first, with a hand on the back of Euijoo’s neck or his shoulder bumped hard against his, pressing the same words into his ear: You’re so, so good. Euijoo thinks he might be close to believing him.

──────

The pub is far too loud and clashing for Euijoo to be having a truly good time, but with all of his teammates pressing grateful hands into his shoulder, there’s definitely a soft warmth in his chest.

Yudai, complaining about the taste of the beer, clinks his soda against Euijoo’s and takes a long sip before he nudges his phone onto the table, screen facing up.

“Hey, take a look at this: ‘With an unexpected win against Kingsmere today, Hebden appears to have embarked on a remarkable underdog’s story with its two star players, Byun and Wang…’”

“Damn, they listed Juju’s name first,” says Nicholas, grinning when Euijoo rolls his eyes. 

Relief and happiness are so obviously present in Nicholas’s face. He still has a sweaty headband pushing his bangs back and he smells a little bit like the grass from the field, but the desire to kiss him is so fierce and breathtaking that Euijoo starts to shake, a little. He gets up from his seat, hands in pockets, about to offer an excuse to leave early.

“You know,” says Yudai in Japanese, out of nowhere. Sandwiched in between Nicholas and Euijoo as he is, his next words are clearly meant for them both: “We have the weekend off for once.”

Both of them stare at him without comprehension. Yudai stares off into space (or possibly at Fuma, who is also in his line of sight), lifts the soda to his lips again and says very neutrally, “Means we have nothing scheduled tomorrow, boys.”

Euijoo starts to sweat profusely. “Thank you,” he says, adding a polite “good night,” and gets the fuck out of there. He doesn’t even try to look at Nicholas, who is no doubt still a few steps behind.

Season kickoff has inevitably meant that they haven’t had much time to touch one another, and the nature of their sport means it’s irresponsible to—to go any further than what they’ve done with each other already (hastily grinding against each other in the hotel shower or trading messy handjobs in Nicholas’s bed before passing out in Euijoo’s). It’s not to say that he hasn’t thought about it. After their first win, they’d tried something close (namely Nicholas grinding against his ass) but they’d both been exhausted, and it’d knocked a modicum of sense into Euijoo. 

He clings to the scraps of this modicum. Cleans up in the shower with eyes shut against unwillingly vivid memories of Nicholas slipping wet against his back; tidies the hotel room to have something to do with his hands; texts his mother back, who has been blowing up his phone with various cute Kakao emoticons that say Congratulations.

Nicholas unlocks the hotel room door and steps inside nearly half an hour later, hair windswept and cheeks burned from the cold wind. “Hi,” he says from the front of the room. 

Euijoo, sitting in the center of his bed with his wet towel around his shoulders, staunchly does not look at him. “Hi,” he says to the phone in his lap. Another Kakao emoticon pops up on his screen, this time a moving one of a hamster exclaiming Great Job!

From much closer this time around, Nicholas murmurs, “Hey.” Euijoo bites his tongue to stave off an involuntary bodily shudder. It seems that Nicholas has connected the dots.

“Nichol,” Euijoo can’t help but sigh. “Aren’t you tired?”

A glint of either extreme happiness or something far more fiendish crosses Nicholas’s eyes. “What can I say, I’m a night guy,” he hums, and presses one knee into the edge of Euijoo’s bed. 

“Nicho! Go shower first!” Euijoo exclaims, shoving him off.

“Juju,” cackles Nicholas, “you’re so red! What are you thinking!”

“You’re so—!”

Nicholas, October

They end up mostly naked on Nicholas’s bed—Euijoo completely bare in Nicholas’s hands, Nicholas only shirtless because he’s an impatient fiend for Euijoo’s swollen mouth. Euijoo tastes like the sun; sun-bleached shirt, sun-soaked mouth, a sunspot on the tender skin beneath his ear.

“How do you want me?” he asks, kissing along Euijoo’s jaw.

Euijoo swallows. Nicholas runs a hand across his throat, feels it move around another swallow. 

“When I imagined us doing this,” whispers Nicholas into the safety of Euijoo’s collarbone, “you fucked me, and then I fucked you, so we could be even. Always wanted to be—even with you.”

Above him, Euijoo’s expression softens. He says, “Nichol. What do you want right now?”

He feels a little desperate at that. Presses a smattering of kisses across Euijoo’s chest to make him laugh, and it somehow succeeds. “I want to take care of you tonight. Can I?”

Euijoo’s looking down at him with those round eyes lidded, a painting, a veritable marble statue. His voice is surprisingly small when he says, “Okay.”

“Okay?” Nicholas grins. 

“Yeah,” laughs Euijoo, the most beautiful thing Nicholas has ever seen.

“Can I touch you?”

“You’re touching me,” huffs Euijoo, and then, “Yes.”

Nicholas splays his fingers across Euijoo’s upper thigh, slides it up to stroke his cock once—Euijoo lets out a sweet sound—trails it down to his thigh, back up to squeeze at the curve of his waist, then lower again, even lower, and Euijoo’s breath audibly hitches.

Breathlessly Nicholas asks, “Have you touched yourself here before?”

Euijoo exhales once, frustrated. “Are you going to keep asking me weird questions?”

Nicholas grins, licks his lips, surges up to kiss him again just because he’s allowed to—he’s allowed to!—and sings, “I’m curious about you, Juju.”

With a huff, Euijoo turns his cheek into the pillow. And then he murmurs, “A few times,” so lowly Nicholas almost misses it with how focused he is on kissing down Euijoo’s bare torso.

“Yeah?” Nicholas hiccups, going red when Euijoo squints narrowed eyes down at him.

“What are you thinking, Nichol,” he says in that accusatory voice. 

“Dirty things,” Nicholas hums, then bends down to bite at the inside of Euijoo’s thigh.

“Ow—Nicho!”

“What?” He bats his eyes innocently from where he’s leaning over Euijoo’s flushed and rosy dick. “Oh, you need something?”

Euijoo lets out a hot huff, bites his lip as if gathering patience. “Knew you’d be like this,” he mutters under his breath.

“You’ve thought of us doing this, too, huh?”

“Nicho, just—” Euijoo shifts, one of his fists clenching, and Nicholas watches with awe as he scrunches his pretty eyes shut and breathes, “Please…”

So the fight in Nicholas immediately dies and, dutifully, he bends down to press a kiss on the crown of Euijoo’s cock. He lets out a badly stifled sound—so Nicholas does it again, and then promptly engulfs it whole with his mouth. Euijoo starts to pant; Nicholas bobs his head experimentally and is rewarded with a beautiful, “Ah—”

He smooths one of his hands over one of Euijoo’s, revelling in the softness of it, the way his fingers dwarf Euijoo’s, and brings that hand up into his hair. They never had time to touch like this when they were blowing each other in between practices, and sweet, thoughtful Euijoo had never even tried to touch his hair before; now, Euijoo’s fingers almost immediately find footing there, grasping with such a gratifying firmness Nicholas almost moans. 

“Thought you—ah—hated having your hair touched…”

Nicholas pulls off and shows teeth in a starved smile. “I don’t hate it in bed.”

The truth, considerably less sexy, is that Nicholas would enjoy any touch Euijoo offered him. 

Instead of saying this, though, he doubles his efforts with a hazy reliance on all of the tumbles he’s had throughout his career, none of them as terrifying as this—real, inexplicably real; Euijoo in his bed, in his arms, in his mouth.

“Nicho, Nicho—stop doing that—hah—”

Nicholas pulls off, belatedly realizing he’s been moaning on his dick the entire time. “Sorry,” he pants, but Euijoo’s hand flexes in his hair so mouthwateringly he has to suck his lip into his mouth to stop another from escaping. He skates fingers down lower, lower, and attentive to Euijoo’s flinch, raises his head minutely to ask, “Can I touch you here?”

“Why do you keep asking,” breathes Euijoo. “I already told you yes.”

“‘Cause I’m a sexy and cool guy,” says Nicholas. “So is that a yes?”

Euijoo has his eyes shut again like he can’t bear it. He whispers, “Yes.”

Nicholas lets his fingers drift closer to the pucker of Euijoo’s hole, bites the inside of his own cheek. “And here?”

“Mhm,” nods Euijoo tensely, eyes still closed.

Unwittingly Nicholas’s voice drops when he tests a finger out, just the tip of it, dry: “...And here?” 

Euijoo tilts his head back at the contact, his long neck moving on a swallow. “Yes,” he says, so quietly Nicholas has to lean in closer to catch it. 

He pulls away. At this, Euijoo’s eyes flutter open as if to ask, but he just watches Nicholas scramble around in the nearby bedside drawer.

“Why do you have that in there?” Euijoo mutters when Nicholas triumphantly holds up a travel-size bottle of lube.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” he answers, and Euijoo looks so unimpressed that Nicholas has to laugh. He presses a quick, spit-slick kiss against Euijoo’s swollen mouth because he can’t help himself, pushes him back down into the pillows, and flicks the bottle open with a spare hand. 

He tries to warm it up in his palm, but Euijoo still jolts when he first feels it, slick-covered fingers tracing his edge. He’s still way too tense, so Nicholas moves his mouth to Euijoo’s throat and then downwards—a brief detour to his chest because he’s greedy, until Euijoo starts to jerk. He squirms down and starts sucking cock like his life depends on it, which immediately has Euijoo’s legs spasming so hard Nicholas has to hold them open with the weight of his own torso. 

And then, when Euijoo’s arched on a particularly sharp gasp, Nicholas’s finger slips in with a wondrous smoothness, before being clenched down on so tightly he has to pull off Euijoo’s dick to bite his bottom lip bloody. 

He switches over to stroking hard with his left hand, rambling, “Don’t kill me, Juju, don’t kill me,” trying hard to keep his finger from punching too deep too fast when his attention is swallowed up by Euijoo gasping and shaking above him, biting his own palm, writhing. “Euijoo—”

“Nicho,” answers Euijoo immediately, breathless and beautiful. “Nicho, I—”

“‘s’okay, I’ve got you—”

“Nicho—”

“‘m here, baby,” he murmurs nonsensically, pumping another finger in, all the way to the ring at its base, unsure what language he’s speaking in. Saliva is pooling in his mouth.

Euijoo jerks hard against the bed and suddenly brings one of the hands clenched at his sides to knock Nicholas’s off his dick. Nicholas pauses, panting. “Are y—”

“You can—go ahead.”

Nicholas stares, uncomprehending, gingerly pulling his fingers out. “What?”

Then Euijoo tilts his chin up to look at him, eyes lidded and cheeks flushed, and says, “Nichol. Just do it.”

Shakily—“What, like, fuck you? R-right now? Jesus, Juju, I’ve only got two fingers in you.”

Euijoo turns his face away, closes his eyes, clearly frustrated. Nicholas waits as patiently as he can, which is a feat in and of itself.

Finally, Euijoo brings a trembling hand up to shade his eyes and says, “I’m…close.”

“Oh,” says Nicholas intelligently, even though his heartbeat has started rocketing up. “That’s okay, you can come.”

Euijoo turns his head further into the pillow, breathes, “Want you inside.”

The synapses in Nicholas’s brain shut off for a good second or two. 

In this span of silence, Euijoo blinks back up at him. “Nicho, if you don’t want—”

“I want!” Nicholas rushes, biting his tongue so hard at his own idiocy he tastes blood. “I mean, fuck. I do want. To. Fuck you. I’m just.” He leans in closer, letting Euijoo reach hesitant arms around him. “I’m nervous,” he admits in a rough whisper, planting his forehead on the firm softness of Euijoo’s chest.

“Nicho,” exhales Euijoo, something like fondness seeping into his voice, which makes Nicholas even more desperate. 

“Wanna be good for you,” Nicholas mumbles.

“...You’re trying to get me to call you good.”

“Yeah,” says Nicholas, kissing up to Euijoo’s throat and then hovering over his lips to murmur, “Cause you’re so good, Juju. You’re always so good for me.” 

Euijoo shudders, pushes up to kiss Nicholas like he’s escaping from the truth. Nicholas’s hand trails slowly back down, and is surprised when Euijoo’s hand meets his to guide it lower, down to that still slick heat—when he slips two fingers back inside it’s considerably easier, and Euijoo’s breath stutters against his mouth when he starts edging in another. 

He hasn’t done this in a while, has to go off of what he’s done to himself to bend his fingers in the right way to reach the right spot, so it takes a bit of effort and elbow grease; but Euijoo’s startled, choked cry is so gratifying that Nicholas curls his fingers again, and again, until Euijoo’s hand snaps out to grab his wrist. Ever gentle, but desperate enough to make him stop.

Nicholas pulls away from his mouth, stares down at its redness for a beat, then asks, “Now?”

“Don’t make me say it,” Euijoo breathes, obviously embarrassed but so, so gorgeous like this that Nicholas has to press another kiss against him before he’s pulling back to struggle with his belt. 

Euijoo’s hands are faster and more efficient, pulling off Nicholas’s belt and unzipping his pants so fast he has to stagger in a breath to slur, “You can touch me, Juju, you—”

But expectedly Euijoo’s so much more hesitant. He only uses one hand to touch the skin of Nicholas’s hip before he withdraws with an audible swallow. Nicholas, so flushed he can feel the blush spreading through to his chest, guides that hand back to his body, down the lines of his stomach, to circle around his heavy cock. 

Euijoo’s not really breathing. Nicholas can feel him holding his breath. He’s about to say something about it when Euijoo tests out a way-too-loose, casual stroke, and Nicholas bowls over with a humiliating sound at being touched after so long. Euijoo does it again, brows furrowed, lips parted, vaguely focused. Nicholas is shaking when he stops.

“Please, please, please,” he’s panting stupidly, at which Euijoo doesn’t even laugh, just pulls him close, arms instantly comforting around his shoulders. 

Nicholas maneuvers his dick into submission, tries to squeeze the base when he’s pressing up against Euijoo’s hole, and stutters, “Tell me—if it hurts, okay? If it…ah, ah—”

Euijoo just makes a choked, wounded noise as Nicholas slips in, an incredibly tight fit, so tight he remembers to stop halfway to check in but he can’t even find the words to do it right. Euijoo’s eyes are squeezed shut again.

“Look at me, please, Juju,” Nicholas pleads, reaching one hand to thumb against the slender curve of Euijoo’s waist in a gesture way too tender for the moment.

Euijoo’s eyes blink open, hazy but still so round and sweet. When their eyes meet, Euijoo chokes on his next breath, then chokes again, throat spasming, when Nicholas angles his hips and slides home to the root of his cock.

Grateful and relieved all at once, Nicholas whispers an overly sentimental, “Euijoo…” and all of a sudden Euijoo’s eyes squint and he’s gripping a hand around Nicholas’s arm—

“Hey, hey, are you—”

“Move, Nicho,” Euijoo pants, but it’s not his imagination, there really are tears beading at the corners of his eyes. Instantly Nicholas bends down to kiss at them, unintentionally folding Euijoo’s long limbs in half. Euijoo pushes out a breathless, wet, “Nicho, please.”

“Are you sure? You—oh, fuck,” Nicholas moans, clenching his own eyes shut when Euijoo writhes his own body beneath his to move him himself. “You’re really,” Nicholas groans, taking over in pace because he’s only human, “so pretty...”

His hips start to move of their own accord. It’s all way too fast for what he’d planned in his head; he’d meant to make love, really, or something close to it, but he also hadn’t thought he wouldn’t last beyond a few thrusts. He starts rambling again: “You’re—perfect, you’re—Euijoo, you feel so good—”

“Stop talking,” Euijoo gasps, throwing his head back hard onto the pillows.

“I’m, I’m,” Nicholas whines, overwhelmed by the tight heat around him, “Juju, I’m trying…”

Like a blessing, Euijoo pulls him down for another kiss. It’s much sloppier than before; at some point they’re just gasping into each other’s mouths, but they’re close, they’re one, they’re melting into each other. 

Nicholas laughs breathlessly against his mouth. Euijoo, who—incredibly—hasn’t taken his eyes off of him, huffs; his eyes ask, What’s so funny? so Nicholas bites into Euijoo’s bottom lip once and slurs, “’m so happy.”

Euijoo’s mouth opens on a silent cry as Nicholas slows his thrusts to focus on depth with Euijoo’s thighs hiked higher. He tongues into the open mouth offered to him, relishes the slide of his tongue against Euijoo’s gasps.

He has to pull away to tilt his head back and bite his lip against a wave of heat. He tries to find grounding, reaches out a greedy hand to grasp at Euijoo’s chest for a tether, but it makes everything significantly worse. He curses in one of his languages when Euijoo clenches around him, and he mumbles, “Close.”

Euijoo is sweaty and out of breath and magnetic. He pants something low that Nicholas doesn’t hear, has to repeat it against the underside of Nicholas’s lifted chin—something like, “Inside,” which makes his hips stutter.

“You—really?” he asks, incredulous at the idea of clean and tidy Euijoo asking to be defiled in this way, but then he’s moaning against another clench of the hot tightness around him, helplessly bucking his hips hard and fast; he tries to say, “Euijoo, ’m coming—” but everything whites out. 

The pressure of blunt nails in his back somewhat grounds him, blessedly keeping him conscious for Euijoo’s own cry of pleasure—dizzily he starts pumping Euijoo’s cock with his hand even as he’s still finishing inside him, sloppy and uncoordinated and obsessed thrusts, like he never wants to stop; Euijoo throws his head back again, convulses violently, sobs out Nicholas’s name. 

Fiercely endeared and turned on (the usual Euijoo-exclusive cocktail of feelings)—Nicholas nuzzles his nose into his throat and whispers, “Missed you so much.” And then Euijoo’s spilling onto himself in such a graceful arc that a needy sound punches out of them both.

Nicholas’s hips are still moving and he’s starting to get overstimulated, but he waits with gritted teeth for Euijoo’s wet, choked gasps to settle back into normal-adjacent breaths. When Euijoo’s back hits the bed again from where it’s been arched, Nicholas carefully pulls himself out, chews his own lip to watch the mess that follows, and collapses on top of him with his nose snug in Euijoo’s sweat-soaked neck.

Both of them don’t breathe right for another few minutes. At some point Nicholas starts giggling hysterically, so Euijoo rolls his eyes and pushes him off just to curl into his side with a surprisingly sweet arm around his waist.

“You have to be my boyfriend now,” says Nicholas out of the blue. Euijoo, eyes shut and looking for once at utter peace, makes a noncommittal huff. “I’m serious,” Nicholas continues, leaning over to wipe Euijoo’s face of tears. “We have to do that every day. I have to fuck you every day.”

From where his face is resting on Nicholas’s shoulder, his damp cheek smushed sweetly against it, Euijoo squints one eye open to give him a dubious look. “We messed around just fine before without dating,” he says, then, as if realizing how this sounds, makes a complicated face. “We’d have to be ten times more careful.”

“Not much would change, though!” Nicholas insists. “The public sees us as, well, really close friends. It's like you said, it's great for PR—we go on a date to the Taiwanese restaurant on Fifth? Oh, it was just our friendsiversary.”

“Our what?” Euijoo stutters into a laugh, sleepy and dazed and maybe even fond. “Nichol, what are you talking about…”

“Paparazzi gets pics of us wearing the matching rings? Just a BFF thing.”

“...Now I’m second guessing your motives for buying me that.”

“Only now?” 

Euijoo sighs. “Nicho, why did you transfer into Hebden?”

“Cause I was chasing my dream,” says Nicholas quietly, eyes closed. “You—you wouldn’t even look at me when we played on separate teams. I couldn’t handle it. I was always chasing you, I think.” 

With a newly vulnerable expression, Euijoo presses him close, whispers into his hair, the sweetest voice—“You don’t have to do that anymore. I’m here.”

They lay like that for a while, Nicholas kissing gratefully across Euijoo’s bare neck and arms, until Euijoo murmurs, “Nichol. I’m gonna go clean us up.” 

But Nicholas ends up tailing him into the bathroom anyway, slinging greedy arms around his waist, peppering kisses up his smooth back. In Mandarin, he whisper-chants, “Mine, mine, mine.”

A mini epilogue:

Three things Euijoo prepares himself for when he steps onto the field—

The first onslaught of white, searing into his eyes from the stadium lights; the chanting, singing roar of the crowds, almost musical; and: the first look Nicholas gives him from across the field.

Today Nicholas is kinetic, charged with such an addictive energy that when he looks his way it’s with a big wolfish grin, followed by a softer crinkle of his eyes when Euijoo can’t help but smile back.

Their team is by no means as good as Nicholas’s old one, not yet, anyway. They’re deemed the “not-quite-undefeated underdogs of the season” and everyone seems almost content with that. 

But with the ball between them and Nicholas waiting from afar to pass or receive based off of a single look from Euijoo, he wonders if he’s ever liked playing as much as he does when Nicholas is by his side.