Lu Han wasn’t really thinking much. The day had started off with blistering heat that had worsened over midday, harsh sun peeking through the faded flower-print curtains of his living room. Yixing had somehow managed to drag himself and his electric fan over to his house at the earliest holy hour to be awake during the summer holidays and they’d pushed aside the rug and coffee table, making just enough space to plaster themselves to the lukewarm floorboards. Lying in the middle of the room with an artificial wind blowing on them from three directions, Lu Han thought that if it weren’t his brain cells that were dying, it was him.

“Han, your floor is the most uncomfortable floor I’ve ever lain on, and I make a point to lie on the floor as much as possible.”

“Excuse yourself. This floor has been blessed by three generations of Lu. Go sit on the couch if your bony isn’t man enough to appreciate it.”

“Ew, no. Gross. Your couch is leather.”

Lu Han turned his head to the right and poked his tongue out at his friend. For the trouble that he went through for it, was it truly necessary to have him here? Yixing ignored his unimpressed gaze in favour of fussing with the hair stuck to his forehead, long torso arching a little to get a bit of air on his tank-covered back. After a moment of consideration, Lu Han decided that he might faint without the extra fan but it was definitely a close call.

With that he groaned, hauling himself into a somewhat-upright position and digging through the DVD cabinet with a sweaty hands. “You,” he grumbled, sending a venomous look in Yixing’s direction, “are an ungrateful who is abusing my facilities to keep your body temperature within a liveable range. Where would you be without me?”

“Probably trying to sneak into Baekhyun’s,” Yixing replied with a grimace. “He has air-con, Lu. Air-con. What did he do in his life to deserve such good fortune?”

His answer was a rather passionate combination of a whine and a whimper.

Eventually, Lu Han’s hand closed around a video tape with a hand written Chinese label and it wasn’t what he was looking for – not that he had been looking for anything in particular – but he figured it would do. Shoving it into the ancient player and bending over to turn on the television, he mumbled over his shoulder, “I hope you like old- kung-fu movies, because that’s what’s going to distract us from this lowest-level-of-hell weather.”

“Classics, Lu. Don’t disrespect the masters.”

They ended up sprawled next to each other once again, propped up on cushions deflated from overuse and ice blocks excavated from the bottom of the freezer in hand. The video player wasn’t holding up so well – it was probably a lot older than the old- movie itself – and it tripped up every so often, but between the Chinese subtitles and how many nights they’d spent holed up with the lights off watching it before, they managed to relax and enjoy it.

With difficulty, that is. There were a few complaints – Why does your VCR so much? – Why don’t we see how yours works next time, huh? – and a few accidental shoulders to arms, which turned into elbows meeting stomachs accidentally-on-purpose, which led to very purposeful kicks and an eventual brawl in the middle of the living room.

Both of them were rather dirty fighters. They liked to tell other people they weren’t, but years of experience had taught them to keep up with each other and worn down their moral code just a little bit. A fair amount of time later, Lu Han was half-sitting on Yixing’s lower back, legs tangled so tightly together neither moved too much in fear of pulling something out of place. “Concede, Zhang. Admit I am the superior entity,” he growled, forcing Yixing into the wood with wrists caught above his head and torsos suspended close together.

Yixing’s chest heaved below him and his breaths were a little short with exertion, but there was nothing tired about the way he grinned and jerked so that they twisted yet again, balance tipped over. Lu Han shrieked but was too busy rolling into the floor so that they wouldn’t hurt themselves too much to fight when he was the one being trapped underneath this time. Leaning in close for dramatic effect, a quiet laugh escaped Yixing’s mouth and he whispered, “Never.”

Lu Han hissed in defeat. There wasn’t much he could do about Yixing bent over him, the sticky skin of his calves pressing into Lu Han’s thighs as he straddled his hips. Their chests were flush, almost uncomfortably warm, and the realisation came to him quite suddenly that they were very close together.

Puffs of humid air panned over Lu Han’s face. When he looked up Yixing’s face hovered a few centimetres from his, lips pink and parted in the slightest. A drop of sweat tracked from his hair line over his temples and his eyes were so, so dark. Lu Han wasn’t really thinking much when he let the muscles in his body relax, let himself melt into the hands gripping his forearms.

It was Yixing who moved first, leaning down to press his lips to Lu Han’s, and their first kiss was like that – chaste, sweet, and burning. When their noses bumped together he angled his head a little and moved back in, this time deeper, slower. Yixing tasted like honey dew melon and sugar, remnants from the ice blocks from earlier, and his musky scent filled Lu Han’s nose. When Lu Han reached up to hold Yixing’s cheek with sticky fingers, his sigh was contented.

There was no ‘HOLY I’M KISSING MY MALE BEST FRIEND’ moment.

It just was.

They remained that way for a while, Lu Han the first to pull away. Rather, he shoved Yixing off of him and back onto the floorboards. At some point video tape had caught again and the television screen replaying half a second of the movie over and over again. Perhaps it was about time to ditch it and get the film on disc.

“It’s too hot for you to be all pressed up against me,” he moaned, heaving his melting body off the floor, but his smile was bright when he leaned over to peck Yixing on the lips once again.

•         •          •

Lu Han wasn’t really thinking much when Yixing dropped his hand a block from school a month or so later. It wasn’t that he didn’t notice – it was just that thinking led to overthinking, which led to worrying, which led to people becoming upset, and Lu Han had no reason to be upset. It was still hot, even more so with the tails of his uniform’s shirt tucked into dense, dark material of his trousers, but with how blue and high the sky was that day he couldn’t bring himself to hate it that much. It was okay to let Yixing do the thinking about the small things sometimes and just feel his direction, go with the flow. And Lu Han was veryaware of Yixing.

Still, he didn’t feel the slightest bit of remorse when he walked straight by the gates while Yixing was held up by uniform check for forgetting to fix his top button before they approached.

Baekhyun was already in homeroom by the time he’d made it up the busy stairwell, about something and aggressively whacking a sheepish but unamused Zitao in the arm with his pencil case. The words locker door and your fault and brain damage managed to filter through, but Lu Han was pretty sure the rest was gibberish anyway. By the time he’d dropped his first and second period books on some desk in their general vicinity Junmyeon had also walked in, death on his face and a paper cup of what was probably more sugar and milk than anything else clutched in his hand. The expression that he made upon registering what was escalating into a rather noisy slapping fight between the two other boys conveyed a very real, tangible pain.

Lu Han slumped into a seat and bowed his head backwards with lazy ease. It had already been three weeks since the term had begun, but it felt like any barely time had passed at all. Outside the windows covering half of the left wall, the thick green foliage of some overgrown tree was scraping against the glass and casting a blurry, spotted shadow over the whiteboard. All the days shuffling between classrooms, sitting at old wooden desks that only differed by who had drawn on them, hanging out with the same people the same way as ever were beginning to merge together. It was almost as if nothing had changed since last year except for the number on the end of the date.

They had, of course. Just not in front of other people.

The bell had already gone by the time Yixing drifted in. The collar of his shirt had been flipped up and he was fiddling with the loose ends of his tie without much success, heavy schoolbag hanging by one strap from the crook of his right elbow. Wordlessly, Lu Han accepted it from him and slung it around his own neck, pulling the skinny end to the middle of his chest and crossing the longer over it. He knew Yixing could tie it on his own just fine. His mother was very enthusiastic about dressing well – he probably learnt how to do it before he learnt how to hold a pen. As he fussed over a Windsor knot, Lu Han fought down a rising heat crawling up the back of his neck. Stupid weather.

There was a shuffling by his side and Baekhyun’s whining grew to unbearable – their usual – levels. “Lu Han, this is a gross display of bias and I feel discriminated against. Do my tie too. Chanyeol slipped it out yesterday and refused to fix it for me.”

In the corner of his eye, he could see Junmyeon tossing back the last few drops of his coffee with much more livelihood than he had appeared capable of a few minutes before. “I think that was to force you to learn how to do it yourself, you know,” he said, chucking the cup across the room into the recycling bin near the door. He missed, but it bounced off the door frame and landed in the rubbish bin next to it.

Yixing’s eyes smiled at Lu Han as he looped the knot over his head and pulled it into place, careful to leave an inconspicuous amount of room to spare, before smoothing down his collar. His shirt was still half untucked, white cotton stained at the bottom from a bag of cherries Kyungsoo had brought in one day last spring, and his hair was messy from a rushed morning. He looked ridiculous. Lu Han felt like his heart was suffocating.

“Too bad, Baek. I get boyfriend privileges.”

And then, well, he really was suffocating, because he was choking on his spit and an unhelpful hand was rubbing him between the shoulder blades where his muscles had tensed up. When he glanced up Yixing was wearing his regular good-natured expression, but the curve at the corners of his lips was fond, and Lu Han ducked his head again. , he grimaced, more to be difficult than anything else. We haven’t even talked about that.

Then he remembered that he had said it to their friends.

Somewhat apprehensive, Lu Han brushed his forearm against Yixing’s under the desk and sent him a questioning look. The response he received was a shy grin and a warm, calloused palm gliding against his, weaving their fingers together and squeezing for a fraction of a second. It had been a long time that they had been by each other’s sides, since they had run into each other as devious children and clicked together like two pieces of a puzzle, two halves of a duo. Sometimes Lu Han felt like they didn’t need any words, to think very much, needed only to tune into the other’s wavelength to simply know. Feeling his chest grow warm, he squeezed back.

Zitao snorted from his seat where he was graciously received the distressed, fluffy – nobody knew how – strip of striped fabric being into his face. “From the way you’re attached at the hip and your gross domesticity,” he grumbled, “you might as well be.”

With a frown, Lu Han opened his mouth to correct him and at that moment the teacher hustled in late, looking harried and calling out the roll, and he was silenced.

•         •          •

It was rather difficult to raise the subject among his friends and it seemed to become harder as the week went by – even more so because Lu Han kind of, maybe, hadn’t even told them that he didn’t quite like girls. Not that he had said it to Yixing either but – well – that had just…worked out. In fact, looking back, he wasn’t so sure what had happened there, but he wasn’t going to complain at all. A part of him wanted to leave things as they were, just let them run their course. His friends would find out eventually. Another part was telling him that he was being a procrastinating .

Despite all of this, it couldn’t be said that he didn’t try at all. The second time he attempted to have that particular conversation with them it was Wednesday lunchtime and, small mercies, a light breeze was making it almost tolerable to be outside. They were all sprawled under the largest tree in the courtyard, half draped over the two wooden benches wedged into that particular corner of the school and half sagging into the almost cool pavement.

Lu Han ran his tongue over his teeth, setting aside his lunchbox from where he had been defending it from Jongdae’s sneaking hands. Yixing was sitting in a spot diagonal from him, poking Kyungsoo in the stomach with a blunt stick and not appearing to be paying much attention to his surroundings, as usual. There had been a lull in the conversation for a few minutes and if he was going to do it today, it had to be now.

He twisted his fingers together over his solar plexus in what he hoped was a casual fashion. “So,” he began, and at that moment, his mind decided to blank. His mouth continued on autopilot. “Let’s talk about .”

Junmyeon shot him an amused look from the ground and hurled an empty water bottle in his general direction. It missed and hit Jongdae instead who, bless the child, was too preoccupied attempting to stifle a bout of laughter at the abrupt and unprovoked mention of male ia to retaliate. It was Baekhyun who, with a spectacular -eating grin on his face, responded first. Of course it was.

“Yes, ,” he drawled, crossing his knees wit