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“Goodnight!” Hanbin cheers to the members slightly down the hallway, the others echoing the sentiment as Keita pulls the keycard out of his pocket. He presses the plastic rectangle to the censor, the click greeting him as he opens the door, Hanbin following him inside.
The room is still as chaotic as they left it many hours ago, right after they landed and before they rushed to do things around the city. Keita kicks off his shoes, Hanbin joining him, and throwing his body onto the queen-sized bed not holding their suitcases. His boyfriend hops up next to him, cuddling up to him regardless of the fact they are both soaked in sweat.
“Baby,” he says, Hanbin rubbing his face on his neck like an affectionate cat, “We’re gonna have to wash up.” The taller makes a disgruntled noise of protest, curling closer into Keita’s side as if it will make all of the grossness evaporate.
“How about we shower together,” Keita placates, “You’d like that, yeah?” Hanbin takes in the opportunity as it’s presented: a chance to be as close to Keita as physically possible while also getting ready to sleep before their flight in the morning. It’s the best he can get while their time left in the room is limited, and their next tour stop looming over them.
He hums, “Nae,” pressing a kiss to Keita’s collarbone to let his more sociably functional boyfriend that he would like that very much please. It takes them a few minutes before they slowly got up, groaning at the creaking of their joints and the ache creeping in on their back muscles. Hanbin continues in his personal task of being glued to Keita’s side as they tiredly trudge to the bathroom, both of them blindly searching for the light switch and eventually Hanbin finding it on his side of the room. The sudden light makes Hanbin release a little whine, and he burrows his head in Keita’s shoulder to hide from it.
“Aigoo, my baby,” he coos, pressing a messy kiss into his hair, “We’ll be quick, okay?”
Hanbin looks up at him again, smiling up at him, “I love you.”
“You..” Keita pauses, momentarily flustered by his boyfriend’s random proclamation, “Aish,” he pushes their foreheads together for a few seconds, “I love you too, Bin.” His boyfriend lets out a giggle, nuzzling against his neck and leaving a tiny nibble on the skin right under his ear. He playfully pats his arm, “C’mon.”
Keita turns the hot water on in the shower while they tiredly peel the sweaty clothes off their bodies, the two of them hopping in under its unforgiving warmth. Trying to actually get any bathing done is very hard, though, since Hanbin decided to plaster himself entirely against his back. “Yeobo,” he tries to turn out of his arms, but his boyfriend only clutches at him harder, whining into his shoulder.
“Baby,” he places his hand on Hanbin’s arm, rubbing lightly, “Can I least turn around?”
“Fine,” Hanbin humphs, loosening his grip on Keita’s waist a tiny amount, the shorter of the two shifting around to face him. He then tightens his arms back around Keita, now pressing their fronts flush against each other rendering any attempt at scrubbing the sweat off their bodies entirely useless.
“Bin, what’s gotten into you?” Keita strokes his lower back, “Is something wrong?”
Hanbin shakes his head, “I missed you,” he pouts at Keita, like he usually does when his emotional exhaustion weighs him down and he wants him to fix whatever is bothering him.
As much as he is adorable like this, pliant and soft, relinquishing his decision-making ability up to Keita’s discretion, he doesn’t know what his lover truly wants right now, “You say that like we don’t see each other every day.”
He trusts himself to make choices for Hanbin, the small non-life altering ones: like what Hanbin wants to eat after endless rehearsals, what clothes he wants to wear after a warm bath, what lines he wants in new songs he writes, what he needs when he is clingy and tired and disliking of humans other than him, “But we don’t get to be ourselves like this.”
This, though, is something other entirely.
Hanbin tucks his head flush to Keita’s neck, “I want to touch you every second of every day. I want to kiss you without it having to mean something.”
“I chose this path, because I love it, but I can’t let the world know you’re mine and it hurts. I miss who you are when we’re alone so much, but I can only keep it to myself, I want our fans to know that I love you,” Hanbin squeezes him, as if trying to merge their souls, “That they can’t steal you from me, ever.” He tries to punctuate the phrase with a chuckle but it’s very obviously a hidden insecurity that he’s trying to cover up.
“Baby,” he squeezes Hanbin for a moment, trying to be any semblance of comforting when they’re surrounded by steam and running on fumes, “I miss us too, Bin-ie, the distance hurts me too. You’re not alone with feeling like this,” he presses a kiss to the closest piece of his lover that’s available: the dip of his collarbone and the skin connecting to his shoulder.
Hanbin’s head shoots up, a gaze that is full of unspoken things boring into Keita’s face, and he doesn’t even get to react before his boyfriend corners him to the other side of the shower, a fervent kiss pressed against his lips. His hands find their way to his neck, grasping at the longer pieces of hair at his nape, trying to ground himself from where he’s pressed against the cold tile. Hanbin has always run a little warm, jokingly becoming his heater when winter hits the dorm, but right now it feels like Keita is melting against his skin.
Too aware of the combating temperatures around him, his brain almost becoming mush as Hanbin tries to steal the air from his lungs, the saliva off his tongue.
When Hanbin pulls away, breath heavy and pupils blown, does he fully realize how much Hanbin had put his heart out on his sleeve just a few moments ago. He cracked deeper into the shell that encased Park Hanbin, he found the soft underbelly and didn’t poke or prod at it. He let it be, and showed his as well, trying to show how equal they are in this relationship. Neither of their titles are anything over what they are to each other, because it’s more important than arbitrary labels made by their employers.
“I love you,” Hanbin presses their foreheads together, a content hum purring in his throat, pulling away to leave a peck on his cheek, “We need to actually wash up now, we’re pruny.”
“I love you too, Ahjussi,” he knocks his head against Hanbin’s while he squawks at him, the two of them scooting back under the spray of the shower head as he faints offense. Hanbin turns to fidget with their shared toiletry bag, the on they had haphazardly thrown onto the tile floor when they’d first gotten into the room, finding the travel size body wash.
“Hands, Hyung,” his lover says as he twists off the bottle-cap, and he offers them palm up, following their usual shower routine. Hanbin squirts the soap onto his hands, and then a bunch of his own free hand. They both lather it for a second before they take turns rubbing it on the other, any tension in their bodies resolving under the hot water, eventually leaving them leaning against each other like a pair of cats in winter trying to share body heat.
They mindlessly bicker for a few moments over if they should wash their hair or not, Hanbin winning out in the end and they just wet it, putting overnight treatment in and exiting the shower.
Keita hands Hanbin one of the towels from the overhead storage, grabbing the left over one for himself. They dry themselves quickly, trying to ignore the chill of the tile floor, and get to the suitcases across the room.
The two of them have spent enough time together that changing in front of each other is a
He shimmies his shirt over his head, turning to Hanbin, seeing his lover awkwardly looking down at the shirt still in his hands, “Bin-ie?”
“Hyung,” the taller pauses, opening and closing his mouth in a stilted fashion, “Could… I… Uhm…We…”
“Could we sleep without our shirts?” He finally spits it out, looking away from Keita, eyes set strictly on the floor like it would swallow him whole. “I just.. I promise it’s not anything weird, I just… It’s like after we… It’s really comforting,” his ears burning with embarrassment, “I like feeling close to you, and it’s the closest we can get, it’s fine if you don’t-”
“Yeobo, it’s fine. We can, I’m not uncomfortable with it,” He strips off his t-shirt, grabbing Hanbin’s hand and leading him to their bed, settling under the covers. Sleeping glued to each other without anything between is not a common occurrence beyond where they are too tired to change, or after any bout of heavy physical intimacy. It’s one of those moments where everything feels like it connects, a syncing of their flesh that is hard to describe beyond that it feels like returning to place you’ve been before.
Skin is the biggest organ on the human body, sensitive to some things and resistant to others. It’s one of things that connects all life; the protective layer on the outside of our organs, our skeletal structures. It is what we meet the world with, what we feel the wind with, what we take in the sun with. It’s vital to our existence, and the thing that binds us together. Touching is something intimate in some means, and the way they are resting together right now is the closest human beings can be together. Flesh to flesh, blood to blood, spit to spit.
There’s not many people Keita would consider doing this with, not anyone he’s dated before, not his sisters, not his closest friends. Intimacy on the closest level has long been reserved for someone he didn’t have the name for, but had quickly appeared before him during Boys Planet pre-production meetings. A quiet burning that had ended with them kissing in the booth of the soba place that Hanbin had taken him to when the ink on their contracts was fresh.
He never had dreams of a love like this, a contentedness in his soul as he lays here, feeling the heart of his loved one beat in his chest, as they try to fall into sleep. Together, and connected in one of the most sacred ways possible. Keita would’t have it any other way.