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Here’s the thing: Daeyoung is straight.
Okay. Don't get him wrong, though. It’s not like he has a problem with people who… aren’t straight. He just knows what he is and what he isn’t.
Growing up, he’s never had to believe he would be attracted to anyone but women, anyway. That was the default that was expected of him, and Daeyoung never felt the need to stray from it.
He’s always been the perfect boyfriend, too. He would always open doors for his girlfriends, buy them flowers before dates, and walk them up to their front doors, greeting them goodnight with a chaste kiss on the cheek.
He was perfect. Maybe too perfect, actually. All his girlfriends would break up with him eventually, and their reasons would always be along the same lines—their relationship never went anywhere. There’d never be any friction, to the point it felt like Daeyoung would just go along with everything they said. It’d only leave Daeyoung hurt and confused in the end, because he thought being this considerate of others would make them like him more?
That's how he ended up here in a club on a Friday night, sitting with seniors, juniors, and other second years he barely even knows. It was a group “meeting”—in other words, a blind date.
They just had their first round at a nearby barbecue restaurant, and Daeyoung’s already starting to reach his limit from the amount of soju he’d been fed like a stream there. Most of those came from the guy who invited him here in the first place, one of his seniors in the Liberal Arts College named Inho. He had approached him with an arm around his shoulder and a sleazy tone to his words, saying—
“Yah, Kim Daeyoung, why don’t you join us this Friday? Me and Kanghyun are setting up a meeting with some girls from the other university. It’s gonna be fun.”
Of course, Daeyoung could do nothing more than accept with a nervous smile on his face and pathetic nods straining his neck. He’s always been the popular and sociable type, but part of that is probably just because he sucked up to anyone who approached him. It always made him too much of an easy target.
Now, he’s also the main target of the group as they play a round of the 007 game. It feels like every other person would point at him or someone next to him, keeping him on his toes the entire time.
It also doesn't help that Daeyoung has always been competitive when it comes to games. So, every time Daeyoung would get called, it’d be met with an enthusiastic shout of the next word in the relay, or him practically bouncing out of his seat from the tension.
“Gong gong chil… bang!”
“And out! Too slow, Seoyunie!”
Eventually, the playing field evened out as players began dropping like flies, apprehensively gulping down their soju shot punishment to the background of drunken cheers. Soon, the only players left are Daeyoung, a fellow second year named Hyesu, and… Oh Sion.
Oh Sion is an anomaly. Among all the other guys in this group date, he’s probably the most popular one, alongside Daeyoung. Tall, handsome, and charming—Sion checks off all the boxes for the perfect campus crush.
The only downside is that, unlike Daeyoung, he’s notoriously closed off. Whenever girls shyly tried to ask for his KakaoTalk ID, he’d always lay them down gently with a tight-lipped smile before scurrying off. In group gatherings, he’d get along well enough with people, but no one knew much about his actual personal life beyond the small, tightly-knit circle of close friends he had. Almost as if he’s something beautiful only meant to be admired from afar, and getting too close would make him vanish like a mirage.
In other words, he’s basically the polar opposite of Daeyoung in every sense—all except for one thing.
He’s also competitive to a fault.
“Hm? Daeyoungie’s better at this than I thought?” Sion asks with a sly smile and a playful glint in his eye.
Daeyoung laughs in response, alcohol pleasantly thrumming through his bloodstream. It’s weird. He feels strangely warm inside, and part of him knows it’s less because of the alcohol and more because of Sion’s attention on him.
It's a rare occurrence, after all. Right now, they both have the backburner of alcohol to lean on, and any words exchanged between them are ones they’d never say under the cusp of daylight, or amid this line of strangers and not-so-strangers between them.
But Daeyoung quickly shoves it all down anyway. There’s no use dwelling on yesterday or tomorrow because, tonight, he’s Kim Daeyoung and he’s about to beat his opponent's ass at this drinking game.
“Of course,” Daeyoung shoots back, an easy smile on his lips. “Sunbae isn’t too bad himself.”
“Alright, alright,” Inho calls loudly as he stands, hands flailing wildly like he's herding sheep. “Last round, guys. Whoever loses now has to take two shots.”
“What?” Hyesu pipes up. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why’re we getting punished for lasting this long?”
“We have to up the stakes, Hyesu-ah! It’s the last round!”
Everyone else around the table cheers in agreement, and Hyesu can only slump down with a pout. Daeyoung’s eyes flit across the table to Sion, examining his face for any sort of reaction. There’s nothing—only that same, amused twinkle in his eyes.
His gaze suddenly meets Daeyoung’s, who’s practically radiating heatwaves with his own from across the table. But it only lasts for a fraction of a second before Sion quickly looks away.
With a dramatic “start!” from Inho, the last round finally begins. As expected, all of them are quick. Daeyoung practically has to flail his arms up in surrender every two seconds from each “bang!”
One of them is bound to fuck up, though, and it finally happens when Sion looks Daeyoung straight in the eye, practically magnetizing him to his seat. Daeyoung can barely register Sion pointing at him before he's yelling out, “bang!”
Sion immediately raises his own hands. Hyesu pauses, hesitating, before she quickly throws her hands up as well. It's too late though, because the entire table soon erupts into loud cheers.
Daeyoung can hardly hear it. Through all the noise, his eyes remain glued onto Sion’s face, letting everything else around him melt into whitewater. It’s in his face, flooding his lungs, the rushing currents pulling him under until the riverbed is grazing his skull. But, still, Daeyoung can’t look away.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, the sound like a faint memory, Daeyoung can hear Sion’s laughter. He’s being shaken around by his friends, their arms over his shoulders and their hands messing up his hair. It’s strange. Daeyoung has never seen Sion this… open before. It almost feels wrong to peer inside.
“And done!” Inho yells out, rising from his seat with a dramatic sweep of his arms. “We have a loser!”
Daeyoung blinks. The noise of the club immediately comes rushing back, the memory of Sion’s eyes on him fading from view like an afterimage. Maybe it’s a good thing Hyesu’s mistake finally ended the game. Daeyoung isn’t so sure he could’ve uttered the next words either.
“That’s not fair, Sion oppa!” Hyesu cries out now. “I want a rematch!”
The group erupts once again, this time with most of them loudly voicing their disagreement.
“Okay, okay, I can take the shots for you then,” Sion says, an amused laugh tucked in between every word. It’s charming in a simple, boyish kind of way. The soju stirs in Daeyoung’s stomach.
Hyesu cheers, while the rest of the group voice out a mixed bag of unamused groans and excited squeals. It could just be the alcohol talking, but under the shifting club lights, Daeyoung swears he can spot a hint of nervousness in the smile on Sion’s lips.
He knows that look. Right now, Sion is just appealing to Hyesu and the others in this weird game of social chess. In other words, being fake. Maybe Daeyoung can even see parts of himself in it, too.
So, either out of liquid courage or pure, dumb impulse, Daeyoung blurts out—
“We can do it together, sunbae.”
There’s a moment of not-so-silent silence as the rest of the group try to process what Daeyoung had said, but it seems to register in Sion’s face in crystal-clear quality. Daeyoung watches in real time as Sion’s face twitches into a frown, morphs into tight-lipped resignation, before finally settling on a small smile directed to no one else but him. Even that seems fake.
“Okay,” Sion says before his friend bumps his shoulder against his; Daeyoung can’t even remember his name from introductions anymore.
“Yah, you guys should do a love shot!”
Everyone else cheers in agreement, and Daeyoung can only splutter out in embarrassment. His pleas of, “we really don’t have to if you don’t want to, sunbae,” quickly get lost amid all the chaos once Inho pours more soju into his shot glass. Sion’s glass is filled next, before he’s finally rising from his seat.
“So? What’re you waiting for, Kim Daeyoung?” Sion asks, and Daeyoung can only look up at him in stunned silence.
Strands of black hair are falling over Sion's face, still cropped a little short from his recent enlistment. Daeyoung can hardly see his eyes from this angle, the club lights melting off his jaw, but he still feels trapped beneath his gaze.
Daeyoung swallows the lump in his throat before rising. He grabs his shot of soju and, slowly, links his arm around Sion’s. The rest of the group is going crazy all around them, their laughter and screams practically piercing Daeyoung’s ears. He wades through the noise until he can make out the soft, barely inaudible hum of Sion’s breath against his cheek.
The bass of the club music thumps against Daeyoung’s chest. His hands are sweating so badly that he’s scared his glass will slip out of his grasp. They’re both stuck in this awkward, half-bent position so they can meet halfway over the table and link arms. Sion’s face is so, so close to his, so much that Daeyoung can even see the beads of sweat on his forehead. When he finally risks a glance into Sion’s eyes, he's already looking back.
Daeyoung counts one, two heartbeats. He swears he can spot recognition in Sion's gaze, maybe even a challenge. He wonders if he really does remember. Five years is a long time. It's a long time to keep dreaming, to keep running. It's a long time to wonder what it'd be like to finally be in this position too.
As always, Sion is the first to look away.
Twenty seconds pass. Countless more heartbeats. In the space between a breath and a heartbeat, Sion breathes out, “Cheers.”
With that, he raises the shot glass to his lips. Their linked arms force Daeyoung to do the same, and so they both drink to the backdrop of cheers and the thundering drum of Daeyoung’s heartbeat. The alcohol burns as it travels down his throat, sending him dangerously close to the threshold of his alcohol limit. Daeyoung has to suppress a cough as Sion’s arm finally snakes away from his.
The senior next to him claps Daeyoung on the back as he finally sits down, his words of bemused encouragement only getting lost amid the club music. Daeyoung’s eyes then betray him as they instinctively search for Sion’s again from across the table.
All he’s met with is the sight of an empty seat.
It was a coincidence, really. Of all the universities, of all the buildings, of all the Ethics classes, of all the damn groups, Daeyoung just had to be paired up with Oh Sion.
He knows Sion is also attending the same university, of course. It's not like he's heard about him from one of his girl friends (the space is important here) who had a crush on Sion and was basically the daily scoop for his every move. And it's not like he'd asked Jia noona for his Instagram and spent an entire night just scrolling through Sion's photos, only to panic when he accidentally liked one from 3 years ago.
Daeyoung had just seen him in one of those posters around campus and thought, “Huh. That guy looks familiar,” and moved on with his life.
He just never thought it would actually be him, moreso that they'd even run into each other.
The good news is that Sion doesn't seem to have a single clue on who he is.
“Should we introduce ourselves first?” Sion asks from his table, naturally taking the lead.
The group is huddled around Sion and his seatmate's table now. Daeyoung had almost jumped when he turned his chair around and saw Sion. He hadn't even noticed Sion when he first walked into the classroom.
From up close, Daeyoung finally gets a better chance to take him in. Sion has definitely grown more into his features now. Sharper jaw, taller stature, no more acne littering his forehead. He's got an air of certainty to him, like he knows how to hold himself. But, underneath that, there's also this sense of distance. Closed-off. Daeyoung can spot that distant glaze over his eyes anytime.
“I'll go first. I'm Oh Sion, third year, from the CS Department.”
They go in a circle, introducing themselves one by one until it finally reaches Daeyoung.
Sion turns towards him, finally acknowledging him for the first time. Daeyoung searches his face for anything—any semblance of recognition—but all he gets is the same small, polite smile as the rest. Daeyoung tries not to deflate.
Maybe it's better off this way, actually. Oh Sion has spent the last few years as just another uncomfortable memory superimposed into the back of Daeyoung's mind. There's no need to get close now.
Daeyoung puts on his best smile.
“Hello, I'm Kim Daeyoung, a second year from the Liberal Arts College. It's nice to meet you all.”
After class, Daeyoung is just pushing his seat back when he steps on something. Looking down, he realizes it's a notebook. He brings it up to his seatmate, asking if it's hers, when she suddenly tilts her head.
“Hm? Isn't that Sion sunbae's?”
Ah. Shit. Sion had already left earlier.
With a quick nod of gratitude, Daeyoung speedwalks past the line of students filtering out of the classroom to catch up to Sion. He spots him alone at the end of the hall, head tilted down and phone in hand. He's just about to round into an elevator when Daeyoung calls out to him.
“Sion sunbae!”
Sion snaps his head up towards Daeyoung, and pauses.
Daeyoung finally catches up to him, holding the notebook up with both hands.
“Is this yours? I saw this under my desk.”
Sion’s eyes flit from the notebook to Daeyoung's face. There's no more smile on his face, just the stone-cold facade of his neutral expression. No more groupmates. No more strangers to appease. Is this it? Does he remember? Is it not just Daeyoung who's been thinking about such a fleeting, passing moment for an uncomfortably long amount of time? He can't even imagine how it must've felt being on the other side.
Sion smiles. That same, distant glaze passes over his eyes like a cloud. Obscuring him.
“Yeah, it is. Thank you.”
Daeyoung loses track of how many more shots he downs after the game. He’s been well over his five-shot alcohol limit since an hour ago, and now he’s basically just taken it upon himself to challenge that limit even more.
Daeyoung swears he’s usually much more responsible with his alcohol intake, but there’s just this lump that’s been stuck in his throat—one he can’t swallow down, no matter how many shots he drinks to try and wash it away. Part of him knows it’s futile. Part of him knows it only really materialized ever since he’d met Oh Sion’s gaze in that breath between a heartbeat.
It’s only when he’s met with a weird mix between cigarette smoke and perfume that Daeyoung finally snaps out of it.
“Hey. Kim Daeyoung. Wake up,” comes a familiar voice in his ear, and definitely much closer than he’ll ever be ready for.
Daeyoung practically jumps in his seat. Somewhere between all those shots, he'd started dozing off as his usual alcohol-induced sleepiness began to overcome him. The rest of the group had slowly started to filter out by then, with some calling it for the night while the others drunkenly danced in the heart of the club. That left Daeyoung alone in his seat, head tilted down, desperately trying yet failing not to doze off into unconsciousness.
“These guys really just left you here, huh?”
Daeyoung looks up and sees none other than Oh Sion. With his back to the dance floor’s colorful lights, Sion’s face is obscured in shadow, the edges of his frame tinged in this almost liminal glow. He’s an angel, a drunken Daeyoung thinks. He’s a memory. He’s hoisting Daeyoung up by the arm and pulling him to his feet.
Sion sighs. “Didn't you come here with a friend? Anyone to take you home?”
“Inho sunbae invited me…”
Sion tsks. “Of course. That asshole’s not coming back for you then. Come on.”
“Smells like smoke,” Daeyoung mumbles sleepily, exhaustion starting to mire his bones once again.
“I smoked outside.” Sion sniffs, almost like he’s upset. “And you’re heavy.”
“Sorry…”
They manage to hunker out of the club together, with Sion’s arm wrapped around Daeyoung’s as he practically pushes him forward with every step. Daeyoung can’t even appreciate the waft of fresh air that greets him before he’s stumbling onto the pavement.
“Daeyoung-ah,” Sion calls out from somewhere next to him. His voice has gotten firmer now, something sharp in his tone like the bite of cold air. “Where do you live? I’ll call a taxi for you.”
Daeyoung mumbles into his arms from where he’s pitifully slumped over on the ground. He thinks a bit of Sion’s perfume had somehow latched onto his jacket sleeve, and he drinks it all in like water. It vaguely smells like lavender, or something his ex-girlfriend would’ve spritzed on.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“Dorm… Curfew… Already…”
Daeyoung barely hears Sion curse under his breath. It sounds something along the lines of, “are you stupid?”
The normal, sane, and less-than-drunk version of Daeyoung probably would’ve cursed at himself too for said stupidity. He’s usually much more responsible with his alcohol intake. Seriously. But now he's out past curfew, drunk, alone, and with a near-stranger to rely on. His parents would probably kill him if they ever found out.
Daeyoung barely has the brain capacity to worry about that now, though. Right now, all he can focus on is the soft hum of cars passing by and the muffled bass of the club behind them. If he strains his ears hard enough, he could even hear Sion pacing back and forth somewhere behind him. Finally, there’s a frustrated sigh, before the shuffle of clothes as Sion crouches down next to him.
“Alright, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Sion says, looking at him with tired eyes, almost like a teacher regarding a child. Daeyoung tries to blink past the sleepiness to meet his gaze. “I’m gonna call a taxi, then we’re gonna book a motel to sleep in for the night—because who knows what’ll happen if I leave you alone—then you can just pay me back half in the morning. Okay? Got it?”
This sunbae is way too kind, Daeyoung manages to think through the drunken haze of his thoughts. Is this why everyone likes him so much? Why Jia noona likes him so much?
What comes out instead is a pathetic sniffle and “I'm… so sorry, sunbae… Syon—Sionie sunbae… S-sorry…”
Sion stares at Daeyoung and his red nose for a long, hard moment, then sighs. “Okay, okay. Stop. And just call me hyung. Seriously. We're meeting up for the rest of Ethics, anyway.”
Daeyoung’s bottom lip instinctively juts out into a pout. Eomma always says he looks like a puppy whenever he does this. Or a really pudgy piece of bread.
Sion’s lips spread into a thin line—almost as thin as Daeyoung’s on the regular—before he gently pushes Daeyoung’s chin, forcing him to look away.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
Daeyoung only pouts harder.
Daeyoung has always been the perfect boyfriend.
The day his last girlfriend had gotten sick, he skipped classes and came over to her apartment to take care of her. He bought her medicine and her favorite samgak kimbap, soaked the towel on her forehead every two hours, and helped wipe her down in the shower to relieve her skin of the scalding fever.
She had texted him a “Thank you so much, Daeyoungie oppa~” on KakaoTalk the day after, followed up by a stream of hearts and kissy-face stickers.
Two months later, she had asked to break up with him over text. Maybe part of Daeyoung was a little bummed out that her message didn’t end with a teary-eyed Loopy sticker.
It went on like that for months, with Daeyoung hesitantly accepting whichever confession seemed the most heart-fluttering to him, only to get dumped by the same girl a few months later. He always liked his girlfriends enough, and he definitely treated them more than enough, but he could never get why they’d always dump him in the end.
Either way, the one constant in all these relationships—aside from their confusing ends—is that Daeyoung always took on the role of the caretaker. It’s what he’s always known, anyway, growing up watching his father look after eomma, or his hyungs treating their girlfriends like royalty.
After all, it’s what's expected of him. It’s what’s been practically hammered into him since he’d been old enough to know what a crush was. He can’t be the taller, stronger, and older boyfriend to his partners if he couldn’t even be the tree they could lean on, right?
So it definitely feels strange leaning on Sion in the back of a taxi now, their arms pressed up together as they share residual body heat. For a brief moment, Daeyoung almost feels like the youngest again, constantly doted on by his older brothers.
The taxi rides over a speed bump. Daeyoung slumps over in his seat, cheek pressing up against the mat of Sion’s hair. Sion doesn't pull away. His hair smells like hairspray and a vaguely woody-scented shampoo, undercut by a lingering hint of cigarette smoke.
Right now, Daeyoung’s head still feels like mush. The soju sits heavy at the bottom of his stomach, but now it feels like his brain is sloshing around in a pool of it. He wades through it all anyway, dragging his limbs through the tides to cling onto the warmth creeping in—Sion.
He’s warm. Really, really warm. It’s one of the only things Daeyoung can grasp onto in his half-drunk, half-drowsy state, the blur of streetlights and buildings outside the window all dissolving into seafoam.
The warmth follows him up to their motel room as Sion drags him along, before he's finally dumping him onto a bed.
Daeyoung wakes up before his mind does. He thinks of tides rolling over him, rocks and riverbeds at his back, the blur of sky through rushing water.
And suddenly the night cuts through, startlingly clear.
Fuck. Daeyoung’s head hurts. His throat feels dry, grated with sandpaper. There’s an ache in several muscles he can’t even name. But he’s sober. Daeyoung is awake and he’s sober and the sobriety is almost spilling out of him.
“Hey,” a familiar voice calls out, streaming into his consciousness. “You’re awake.”
Daeyoung turns to his side. His heartbeat is pressed up between the mattress and his ears.
“I bought some water downstairs,” Sion says from where he’s sitting on the other bed. He nods towards the water bottles on the nightstand. His is almost half-empty. “Drink some.”
“Ah,” Daeyoung mutters weakly, then clears his throat. “Thank you, sun—hyung.”
He forces himself to sit up in bed before gulping down some water. It’s a welcome relief from the burn of soju he’d almost gotten too used to.
“It’s still dark out. You should probably go back to sleep.”
When Daeyoung finally settles back into bed, he can't help but let his gaze wander towards Sion again. He isn’t looking at him anymore, too busy taking off his accessories and setting them on the nightstand one by one.
Sion looks tired, the exhaustion from the day trailing down the curve of his spine. It's a million worlds away from his usual shy laughter or polite, closed-off smiles—from the Oh Sion that Daeyoung has only ever been allowed to know.
The moment pulses between Daeyoung's fingers like a bird caught in mid-flight. It's strange. Vulnerable. Sion is cleaved open in the warm motel lights and Daeyoung feels like a stranger for dipping his hand inside.
Sion’s hair is a mess. His shoes are strewn on the floor beneath him. He'd already taken off his jacket from the club, the collar of his shirt now hanging loosely over his frame and revealing a smidge of collarbone.
Daeyoung’s eyes zero in on that small stretch of skin, cut through by the golden necklace dangling from his neck. The only accessory he’d kept on. It catches a glint in the low light, and under this strange, unspeakable oiliness slithering beneath Daeyoung’s gaze.
Sion swallows. His Adam’s apple bobs slightly as he does, the skin stretched tight around his throat.
Fuck.
Daeyoung’s getting hard. Daeyoung’s getting hard from—what? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything. He closes his fists around the sheets. Opens them. His heart is a heavy, rotting thing inside his chest. Daeyoung closes his fists around it, too. Through the cracks between his fingers, he finds Sion's cold, tired eyes meeting his.
Sion stands up. Daeyoung tries to pretend he hadn't been watching him and flips onto his back, body taut like a bowstring. The headboard digs painfully into the knobs of his spine. Daeyoung can feel his heart leaking in his hands, and all the blood in his body has rushed straight fucking down. But Sion watches him the entire time, and Daeyoung almost feels like prey under the watchful eye of a predator.
“Hey, stay still,” Sion says, unusually soft. The day has already dulled him down into a blunt edge. “Here, let me help you take your jacket off.”
Daeyoung freezes. Sion probably doesn’t realize Daeyoung has already sobered up a bit; he knows he'd never approach him like this otherwise. But he can only watch as Sion buries his fingers into his jacket, grazing past the skin of his arms before pausing.
A breath. A flickering heartbeat. The predator still finds a pulse.
Daeyoung looks up. Sion's eyes have travelled far, far down, focused right on where Daeyoung's cock is straining against his pants.
They both go silent.
The silence swells into the corners of the room, finding space in Daeyoung and prickling under his skin. Daeyoung suddenly feels all too aware of his body—his hands trembling on the sheets, the ache in his neck, the breaths etching crossroads into his lungs, Sion's hands still on him, every point of contact like its own set of needles piercing into him.
But then, quietly—
“What were you thinking about?”
Daeyoung can’t speak. His heart feels like it’ll leap straight out of his fucking chest if he so much as opens his mouth.
Sion continues anyway. A strange hint of desperation seems to creep into his voice, and Daeyoung can only stare at him in silence the longer he simmers in it.
“Was it Hyesu? Or Seoyun? Or—”
“N-no,” Daeyoung finally chokes out. Dread scrapes against the back of his throat like rind.
Sion leans closer, still smelling like smoke and lavender. Light no longer reflects off his necklace, both their bodies drenched in Sion's shadow. Suddenly, Sion curls his fingers tighter around Daeyoung's arms, nails digging into his skin like they’re trying to pry the answer straight out of him.
There's a newfound intensity to Sion's gaze as he looks at Daeyoung. It takes every bit of his willpower for Daeyoung not to look away, prey caught between the teeth of a predator.
“Who is it then?” Sion’s voice is lower now, too, rough where it reaches Daeyoung’s ears. He’s never heard him like this before.
Daeyoung wants to run away. He wants to roll over, squeeze his eyes shut, and act like none of this ever happened in the morning.
But he can’t. He can’t. Because Oh Sion is looking at him right now like he wants to eat him alive, and Daeyoung would only be lying to himself if he said he wouldn’t let him.
“Hyung,” Daeyoung whispers shakily, like he’d been caught. Like he'd been the one standing on the other side of that door. “I was thinking about hyung.”
Sion pauses, realization flickering across his face. It's a gentle ebb and flow on his skin—all before it crashes under like a tidal wave.
“I can't believe—are you fucking gay?” Sion spits out, ripping himself away from Daeyoung. There's laughter wedged in between every word, mean and sharp like a knife. It twists in the hilt of Daeyoung's chest where he struggles to breathe around it.
“No!” Daeyoung quickly shoots back, sitting up on the bed. “I’ve never— Not with a guy before, I—”
The realization belatedly crashes into him, too. And suddenly everything is spilling out of him, guts and organs following the tail-end of his words. He’s an exposed nerve, an open wound, his blood now stained and rotted with this want.
There's no way Daeyoung is gay. He's not—he's not like him. He can't be. Daeyoung has never once doubted his attraction to his exes before. He swears he really did care about them, no matter how superficial their relationships started.
But Daeyoung does know about boys who were gay in his high school; it was inevitable at an all-boys school, he thinks. He befriended some of them—he's seen them before, but he always just felt sorry for them, really. He never thought he'd be… one of them.
Fuck. What would his exes say if they found out? What would his brothers say? What would his parents say—
“Touch it then.”
Daeyoung stills.
“I’m sorry?”
Sion comes into focus once more—properly this time, looking less and less like a predator and more like a wounded animal. He’s perched on the other end of the bed now, chest rising and falling in a frantic rhythm, fists curling into the already fucked up sheets.
Anger still shines in his eyes. But Daeyoung unearths it to find a softness nestled underneath. Curiosity. Daeyoung swallows, and finds hints of it stuck between his teeth, too.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Sion grits out. One wrong move, and it feels like Daeyoung will shatter this fragile stalemate between them. “I said touch it.”
When he was younger, Daeyoung had cried as his parents watched him tie his shoelaces with hardened gazes. When he was younger, Daeyoung had crashed into the hot, burning asphalt while riding the bike eomma had bought for him. When he was younger, the wooden rosary wrapped around Daeyoung’s fingers had still been wet with halmeoni's tears. When he was younger, Daeyoung’s father had bought flowers for eomma and told him, Young-ah, this is how you should treat your future wife. When he was younger, Daeyoung had wept into his hyung's neck, cheek still stinging from his father’s palm cracking against it like a gunshot.
Daeyoung knows what to do. It’s what led him to the university his parents wanted, it’s what led him down three tearless breakups, it’s what led him to a group date with near-strangers, it’s what led him here, on a Friday night, sharing a motel room with Oh Sion in the fifth year since he’d first shut that door on his face.
He listens.
Slowly, painfully slow, Daeyoung moves his hand towards his crotch. He presses his palm flat against the fabric until the pressure spreads across his aching cock.
A small, shuddering breath immediately escapes Daeyoung from the contact. Shit. He hadn't realized he was this pent-up before. Even he thinks it’s a little pathetic.
"You like it, Daeyoung-ah?” Sion says. The words pulse in Daeyoung’s throat, an ache he can’t swallow down. “Touching yourself in front of me like a fucking pervert?”
“I’m not,” Daeyoung gasps out. Part of him is mortified, defensive at being called anything close to a pervert, but the other part has him roughly swiping his palm down his cock.
Shame and guilt start to curdle up in Daeyoung’s throat. He has to squeeze his eyes shut, turning his head away from Sion. He can’t handle looking at him when he’s like this. When he’s so open and exposed all over, and like one step is all it’d take for Sion to crawl inside of him.
“Take it out,” Sion says, “and look at hyung while you do it.”
Daeyoung’s eyes fly open to meet Sion’s. Daeyoung knows that tone in his voice, can feel the claw marks of it down his skin. Want. Horrid, and terrifying, and putrid want.
So, with shaky hands, Daeyoung slowly pulls his zipper down. He looks at Sion the entire time, watching his eyes follow the movement of his hands as they clumsily pull his dick free from his underwear.
It’s warm and heavy in Daeyoung’s hands, twitching pitifully under Sion’s gaze. Daeyoung squeezes at the base, and has to quickly swallow down the moan that threatens to escape his mouth.
“What’re you thinking about?” Sion asks again. “Tell hyung what you’re imagining.”
“My-my ex girlfriend,” Daeyoung stutters, the jagged edges of the words catching on his lips as they tumble out.
Sion bites at the bait, lets the hook dig into his own lips. They glisten red with the lie.
“Really? You still think about her?”
Suddenly, Sion is moving again, slowly crawling towards Daeyoung on the bed. Daeyoung has to hold his breath until Sion stops right before him, hooking his legs on either side and caging him in.
Sion leans over him. His face is stained with shadow and the faint hints of something sad, something distant. But still, he looks beautiful.
Daeyoung has never found a guy beautiful before. Nor has he ever wanted to touch another one this badly—or maybe he wants Sion to touch him, he doesn’t know.
All he knows is that he wants Sion. Some horrible, terrifying part of him wants Sion—has always wanted him—but he doesn’t know how to. He’s never been allowed to want like this before. He’s never had to want like this before, not when every hope and dream has been etched with the lines of his parents’ palms, and not when every relationship has always been dumped unceremoniously into his lap. And now, Oh Sion is practically in his lap, too, but Daeyoung knows being a breath away now means nothing with the line that's been drawn between them all those years ago.
“I bet she was pretty,” Sion says, breath and smoke and lavender on Daeyoung’s face.
The image of his exes finally surfaces in Daeyoung’s mind. He thinks of his last one. She had long, dyed brown hair. Fair skin. Shorter than him. Pretty. Beautiful, maybe.
Sion’s voice shatters the surface.
“I bet she had nice tits.” He smiles, oily and vulgar. “Or a nice ass, right?”
The image sours, pith clinging to the back of Daeyoung's throat. Daeyoung feels gross and wrong even just hearing his ex being talked about like this. And yet his hand is speeding up against his cock and it’s dry and it hurts and it’s raw, but he remembers the softness of her body enveloped all around him. Remembers sinking inside and the almost dizzying warmth pervading his senses. Remembers her face. Remembers Sion’s face.
“Hyung, stop,” Daeyoung begs, weak and pitiful. “Please don’t talk about her like that.”
“Why? I thought you liked that?” Sion asks, eyes wide. They quickly turn mean with mirth. “Isn’t that why you’re hard right now after just looking at hyung?”
Daeyoung digs his thumb into the slit of his cock. He hisses. Sion continues.
“I never thought—” he laughs, mean and cruel, an edge of disbelief in it, “I never thought you were like this.”
A small, creeping part of Daeyoung thinks Sion isn’t really talking about him anymore.
“I’ve heard about you before, you know. Even before Ethics.”
Sion's laughter erodes into craters. Daeyoung watches as a gaping wound forms in the center of Sion's throat, right where his anger had excavated through.
“The girls from other departments—they liked you. Fuck, even some seniors liked you.”
Sion leans closer. Shadows are crawling all over his face. Lines mar the smooth planes of his forehead. Sion is shattering right in front of him, and Daeyoung hates how beautiful the fragments still look to him.
“Wasn’t that enough, Daeyoung-ah?” His voice cracks, raw and desperate. “Wasn’t any of that enough?”
“Hyung—” Daeyoung moves his other hand to—to grab Sion? Comfort him? He doesn’t really know. But Sion quickly leans away, drawing over that line between them again and again until it burns.
“Don’t touch me,” Sion hisses out—pained, almost, like he'd also been burnt. And then, in another breath: “Spit on it, Daeyoung-ah. Hurry.”
Daeyoung hesitates, but follows. His own spit feels tacky and warm where it lands on his dick, but one swipe of his palm and he’s instantly groaning in relief.
“Faster,” Sion urges him, desperate. Frantic and bursting at the seams as words begin spilling out of his mouth. “I knew it. You like hyung, don't you? After all this time?”
Daeyoung can hardly breathe. His reflexes still feel slowed, submerged in oil, thoughts sloshing around in his head. But it feels like Sion is reaching in, fingers curling into the back of his skull. His head hurts. Everything hurts, body scrubbed raw from the truth. There’s no going back from this. Tomorrow, he’ll be a different man. Tomorrow, he’ll be Kim Daeyoung again, but forced to live with the uncomfortable truth that this has always been a part of him. Tomorrow, he'll be the mirror Sion will always run away from. Tomorrow, he'll be nothing more to him but the memory of tonight.
“Stop thinking about her then, Daeyoung-ah,” Sion says, voice watery and flooding all of Daeyoung’s senses. “Only think of hyung from now on—no, only look at hyung now, and make yourself come.”
So Daeyoung listens, and speeds up. He squeezes his hand on the upstroke, feeling that familiar heat building up in him. And he looks at Sion and his beautiful, marred face staring back at him, and thinks there’s no way Daeyoung could ever blame this all on the alcohol in the morning.
“Come for me, Daeyoungie.”
Daeyoung comes to the sight of Sion in front of him.
And then it’s over.
And then it’s over, and Sion is sitting back on his heels, not even sparing Daeyoung another glance. And then he’s running a hand through his hair, and letting out a long, tired sigh. And Daeyoung is watching him, come still dripping down his softening cock, as Sion folds his body back up and all its raw, unbidden anger into neat little piles by his feet.
“Shit. Sorry,” he says softly. A quiet, broken thing. “I'll—I'll go wash up first.”
He looks drained, not at all like the Oh Sion he usually is in front of other people, handsome and charming. Not even the Oh Sion that seems distant underneath, the one only Daeyoung knows. He doesn't know this Sion that's quietly rising from the bed and closing the door behind him with a soft click.
Daeyoung doesn't mention how long the water stays running after that.
Sometimes, lying awake in bed in that space between dream and reality, Daeyoung remembers this:
His feet on the pedals of his bike, legs still soft with boyhood as they frantically kicked down the hills. The sun on his hair, on his face, in the criss-cross of veins under his skin. Sometimes he's with his friends, other times he's alone. But always, always does it end with him crashing into the asphalt.
At ten years old, Daeyoung had learned to just accept the scraped knees and bleeding palms. It was inevitable, anyway, especially when his parents had never taught him how to ride a bike. He'd always just cling to his mother's back on the rides home from school and feel the way it'd balance with her shifting weight, trying to imprint that feeling into his own skin.
But, even rarer, interspersed between heatwaves and bike rides, Daeyoung also remembers this:
An afternoon older than the rest, the waning sun on his hair and his face and his skin. The frantic rush of adrenaline as he weaved through the empty halls of his high school. He'd fallen asleep after clean-up duty that day, too tired from studying the night before. He'd only woken up from a gentle nudge from his teacher and a reminder to take out the trash before she'd left as well.
The feeling had been vivid. He'd messed up. He'd taken too long. Later that night, he'd come home to a call from the cram school and his mother's telling silence at the dinner table. Sometimes, at twenty years old, Daeyoung still wakes up and has to remember he doesn't have cram school anymore.
But, still, every time without fail, he'd stumble into that classroom, sliding the door open to grab his things and—
And he'd pause.
Before him, two boys had stood huddled at the far end of the room. One was sitting on a desk, his back facing Daeyoung. The other was facing him, but hadn't spotted him yet.
Because his eyes were quickly fluttering shut as he leaned in to kiss the other boy.
Daeyoung doesn't remember what he was thinking then. Part of him thinks he'd squashed down that feeling after all these years, tried to cram it into the back of his skull in the hopes of pushing the memory out altogether. It never works.
He does remember this, though:
The boy facing him, his dark hair falling over his eyes. His soft, pale hands rising to cup the other boy's cheek. The flutter of his lashes as he leaned in closer, closer, impossibly close.
And the slow, lingering breath that left his lips before he finally opened his eyes and saw Daeyoung.
Later, when he looks back on this, Daeyoung would realize he'd gotten on the wrong floor. Made the wrong turn. Entered the wrong room. Everything wrong and muddled from lack of sleep and the dread of returning home.
And, even later than that, the feeling he had would finally resurface again. Just as wrong yet infinitely more terrifying than the rest. Curiosity. Itching, itching under his skin. Still pulling at his teeth all these years later, a perpetual ache that's never gone away.
It's a dream Daeyoung has over and over again, and it's only growing more frequent with the years. Like it's catching up to him. Like he's still pedalling away on his bike, and it's only mere seconds before he's crashing back down into the asphalt. Like he'd run away from that door only to end up right back at the threshold.
But Daeyoung would still close that door anyway, and run. And he always remembers this:
The boy's face. Fear washing over it, a mirror of his own. Then clarity, then stone-cold acceptance. And, finally, the gleam of his name tag in the afternoon sun, where Daeyoung had barely made out the name: Oh Sion.
When Daeyoung comes back from washing up, he’s greeted with the lights off and Sion already in bed, his back turned towards him. Daeyoung carefully settles into his own bed, sighing as he faces the opposite wall.
The room is too quiet. Eerily still. Sion isn’t asleep yet; Daeyoung can tell. His waking presence feels far too much like a heavy hand at his throat.
Daeyoung turns back to face him. He watches the uneven rise and fall of Sion’s shoulders, the way his body curls in on itself. Then, softly, his voice a tentative hand reaching out into the dark, Daeyoung whispers:
“Hyung, shouldn't we talk about it?”
Silence.
Daeyoung stares at Sion's shadow as it melts into the wall. He's an ocean away. He's close enough to touch. Daeyoung wants to crawl outside of himself and into Sion's bed. Maybe if he were nothing, Sion could finally stand him again.
Instead, he waits. One, two, three heartbeats. He isn’t expecting an answer. At least he tried to fix this, Daeyoung tells himself. At least he didn't just run away again. But then—
“What's there to talk about?”
Daeyoung squeezes his eyes shut. It's a rejection, a sucker punch straight to the gut. But somehow the resignation hits harder, fluttering above his chest like butterfly wings. Daeyoung lets it pummel into him until craters form between his ribs.
“Nothing, sorry,” he says, turning back to face the wall. “Goodnight, hyung.”
Daeyoung doesn't know what comes after this. Maybe he can pretend like none of this ever happened in the morning. Maybe Sion will go back to ignoring him again. Maybe they’ll go back to running laps around this strange, blurred line they’ve drawn between them. Maybe Daeyoung will go back to accepting confessions from girls who’ll only dump him in the end, just to chase after the ghost of lavender on their skin. Maybe— Maybe—
Daeyoung gets a reply twenty seconds later, in that space between a breath and a heartbeat.
"Goodnight."
And maybe it's enough for now.