"To have my cake and eat it too, that's what I want. Am I greedy? Despicable? So what if I am? Better an honest pig than a pretend puritan. I'll have it, I'll eat it and you along with it…"

"He's so good," Chanyeol mutters absorbedly, his black brows furrowed in fascination, his large eyes fixed on the fifty-fold larger screen upon which is projected the image of his favourite actor, in his favourite role, in his favourite film.

The sound of it snaps Baekhyun out of his own absorption: the sinewy denim-clad thigh that barely brushes his, the daily-widening shoulder that grazes his irremediably slight one, the cuts and curvature of the catlike visage that faces the screen in seeming disinterest but actual engagement. Why is it he feels that thigh, that shoulder, that gaze with ten times the keenness he does the arm of his lover that's wrapped about his neck? The right side of his lank body crushed against Baekhyun's left. Why is it he wishes he were similarly held by the other, the younger, their youngest? No, not as close – closer. I want him closer.   

Swallowing strenuously, he shifts in his seat, so that Chanyeol's arm grows all the heavier on his that's already half-numb with the weight, and for an instant, his body is severed from Sehun's – separation it reflexively jars at. Baekhyun is scared. It's getting worse, unmanageably worse…Sehun is.

He's always been overly conscious of their maknae. Sehun's simultaneously straightforward and enigmatic character, his part overcast, part brilliant, all-seeing illegible eyes, his stance, his speech, his smile, the very scent of him – all constant and constantly augmenting points of attraction to the elder. At seventeen he called it cuteness, at nineteen coolness, at twenty-one iness, at twenty-two…

He has Chanyeol. He loves Chanyeol. Chanyeol loves him back. They work together, live together, laugh together, make together and it's good, and he's happy, and it should be, but it isn't enough. It's warm and he wants it hot. It's hot and he wants it blistering. It blisters, Sehun's smooth skin beneath that coarse fabric. He wants it.

He springs up from the settee, shaking Chanyeol's arm off his burdened body.

The younger's brows unknot, his forehead pleating in protest. "Baekhyun-ah?"

"Toilet," Baekhyun replies, employing the sweetest smile in his arsenal, one reserved for his lover and beloved Aeries alone. "Keep watching; I'll be right back."

Visibly disarmed, Chanyeol nods and refocuses his stare on the screen, his oddly even teeth nibbling on his plump lower lip. Inwardly the elder sniffs. You're so easily manipulated. But promptly finds himself a reflection of the younger as, out the corner of his eye, he glimpses Sehun whose own are curiously lessened – half-moons waned into crescents. Thinking? What about, Sehunnie? He can never fully tell. Flustered, he bites his cheek and heads up the stairs. 

Tsk, it's bloody boiling! Baekhyun scowls and on his scalded fore and middle fingers. The main bathroom's thermostat's been acting up for days, dispensing near freezing water when asked to produce a hot stream, and a searing hot one when ordered to issue a cold current. Their manager said he'd fix it. Their manager always promises to fix things but only ever winds up breaking them into still smaller pieces. Whoever said it's the thought that counts must have been brainless. Reversing the handle's direction, Baekhyun turns it on hot and waits for the water to cool down.

Sehunnie… he mouths the name without uttering it, studying his lips' reflection in the fume-muddled mirror as it remoulds them, clenches his eyes and sighs. It's always there, in the back of his mind, on the tip of his tongue, like a prayer and a curse all tangled into three summary syllables: Oh Se Hun. When did it start? He wonders as, soundlessly, he repeats them. When did that name begin to reshape his heart as well as his mouth?

He was beautiful when Baekhyun first saw him, frightfully so for a boy of seventeen as he then was. Lean and lithe as a young tomcat and every bit as temperamental as one, always sprinting about the place, never still, never satisfied. Horrible. Those horrible eyes of yours – horrible then, horrible now. Why should they see so much when they show so little in return? Why can't they be like Chanyeol's – wide and clear and tender, even when they're cunning? Mechanically he smiles at the thought of his lover and the feature that first earned him the elder's favour. 

As if summoned by this thought, by this smile, Chanyeol suddenly appears in the door, his air the very cunning tenderness Baekhyun had visualised. He steps into the bathroom without awaiting invitation, and likewise unlicensed, parks behind Baekhyun and gently enfolds him in his arms. "You okay? You seemed a little restless downstairs. Was it me? Should I not have invited Sehunnie to watch with us?" he tests and flashes Baekhyun a positively lupine smile.

A slier canine than his seven months younger mate, Baekhyun spins round and softly pecks Chanyeol's cheek right where its dimple ends and his mouth begins. "Mm…maybe," he coos coquettishly, all the while secretly working to free himself of the younger's grip – his long arms that used to brace Baekhyun, yet now feel to fetter him. But rather than release, Chanyeol cuffs his wrists, and fixing him in place, kisses the elder keenly. Baekhyun allows him, plays along to the best of his ability. It isn't bad. It's comfortable, familiar, comforting, Chanyeol's warmth is. Warm. Warm eyes, warm arms, warm lips, warm heart. What good is warmth when one craves heat?

"You should go back," Baekhyun instructs, feigning breathlessness, where the younger pants for the real thing. "It'll look weird if you stay up here too long."

Chanyeol snorts. "He knows it's weird when we're together. He doesn’t mind it."

Baekhyun winces at this last, resentful at the thought of not being minded by the one who's come to occupy his mind completely. "I do. They've been more than accommodating about us, but we shouldn’t abuse their tolerance. When we're alone together, really alone, then it's you and me, but with the others, es – even Sehun, we should keep it discreet. Go on, go back to him. You know how he is about being left too long alone."

Chanyeol rolls his eyes long-sufferingly and the pair gurgle in chorus at the thought of their mollycoddled maknae, their pampered little prince, then likewise in chorus smilingly sigh in acknowledgement of Sehun's having long-since outgrown both his pubescence and his princely petulance.

"I'll go, then," Chanyeol concludes and, with a final peck to Baekhyun's pouty lips, leaves the washroom, his footsteps heavy as he trudges down the corridor and the staircase back to Sehun and their favourite film.

No sooner has he gone than Baekhyun retakes his position and immerses his face in the gelid water gathered in the basin. Tsk, it's bloody freezing! he cries again within and flinchingly retreats from the sink. He stares at his flushed sopping image and scowls. In the back of his mind, on the tip of his tongue, at the bottom of the stairs…Oh Sehun.

Tomorrow, on the stage, under the guise of servicing their fans, he can , touch him, hold and bite him. While the world watches, he can do all the things it forbids, and Sehun will sniff and smirk and sigh and let him. He always lets him. Why? Baekhyun knows better than to ask, knows that once he has, the license will be lifted. Kindly cruel or cruelly kind, what should we call you, Sehunnie? He turns on the faucet, somehow adjusts the temperature to tepidness and rewashes his face.

Abruptly his midriff is belted by a pair of familiar arms – Chanyeol's surely. Tsk, so stubborn. Reprising the role of coquette, despite his reluctance, he turns towards his persistent partner, ready to defuse him a second time. "Yah, Park Chanyeol, I told you later, didn –" His voice catches in his throat, his breath in his lungs, his pulse in his chest, his waist in Oh Sehun's embrace.

Paralysed body and mind, he gapes at Sehun as, wordlessly, the younger appraises his sodden features. He looks aroused, the pupils of his treacle-coloured eyes dilating as they trace the water's trail from the tip of Baekhyun's brow to that of his nose, lingering on his perked and parted lips, his own faintly fidgeting in mal-supressed appetite. Stilly and silently they stare at each other – Baekhyun at Sehun's eyes, Sehun at Baekhyun's mouth – the time it takes the droplets to fill its cusps. Is this real? Baekhyun self-questions, refusing to blink, lest it should all prove a trance. As he gulps in self-reply, the water overspills, trickling down his chin and collar. Before it can flood its base, the younger dams the wetness with a kiss.

Slowly, using only its tip, he sweeps his textured tongue up the elder's sinuous neck, while Baekhyun stutteringly gasps, his heart a away from bursting out of his juddering chest. Up it goes – up his collar, up his chin, up his mouth, even to his palate. He laps at Baekhyun as though he were freshly skimmed cream and Sehun a gluttonous cat. Not desperately, leisurely, not for nourishment but for the sheer pleasure of his taste. The elder hardly resists when he was sure he'd curdle before being thusly consumed. 

Tender love. He's never liked it. Tender kisses, tender caresses, tender embraces, being carefully held, as though he were the most brittle glass, when he wants to be broken, overwhelmed with sensation, driven to the very brink of pain without overtaking it. To be loved by a man, as a man. This man…he could love him right.

Up he goes – up as Sehun pushes his hips onto the edge of the vanity, spreads open his legs and stations himself snugly between them. By now Baekhyun is so aroused, he cares for nothing but being had by the boy, his so-called "littlest brother", never minding the other, his six years' lover who's waiting below – waiting for a later the elder wishes would never come. His insides are pulsating, his outsides pushing painfully against his trousers, Sehun against them both. He takes off his shirt and Baekhyun digs his nails into his broad back, wishing he could claw his way even to the younger's heart. I want it. That too. All of you.

Rather than wince, Sehun smirks and the crook of his perfectly curved and coloured mouth. Deeper than that, Hyung, I mean to go much deeper, Baekhyun can all but read the threat inscribed in those horrible half-moon eyes. Don't threaten, Sehunnie – promise.

Retracting his talons from the younger's back, he clutches him by his coal-coloured hair instead, pulling him into the kiss he's replayed a thousand times over in his head. He tastes like… His thoughts trail as it spreads across his tongue and Baekhyun thinks he could live off that tang and little else for the rest of his days.

By the time they pause for breath, Baekhyun's shirt is sprawled across the bathroom floor right next to Sehun's, the flesh it was used for to cover pressed against the younger's likewise exposed upper-half. He kisses him endlessly, everywhere; Baekhyun is halfway to unconsciousness with the simultaneousness of the sensation. He knows that Sehun is purposely playing with him, deferring his pleasure to madden him, turn him a beggar – he likes to make him beg. When Baekhyun pleadingly pouts and puckers his brow, his puppyish eyes drooping prettily on either side of his similarly formed face, that's when Sehun likes him best, that's when he lets him have his morsel of contraband happiness.  Oh Sehun…no more morsels, I want to have my fill of you. Love me, little brother. Give me love. He locks his legs about the younger's hips, intermittently panting and at the fever-raising friction as Sehun abrades him with increasing force.

Giving the senior a taste of his own bite, he suddenly sinks his teeth into Baekhyun's soft shoulder, causing his eyes that had been tightly shut to unlock, and when they have, his heart nearly seizes in their stead.

Standing at the entrance to the small restroom, his warm fay-like eyes irregularly tempered, is Park Chanyeol. Silently he observes the scene – observes as his best little brother all but devours his best friend and lover, observes as Baekhyun, his face agape with horror, vainly struggles to supress his body's responses to so much stimulation from Sehun, observes and in silence where he ought to be kicking and screaming and breaking everything in sight into irreparable pieces, chief amongst them Sehun and Baekhyun.

What is this?! How long has he been here?! How much of it has he seen?! How can he look on so calmly?! Why?! Baekhyun's mind first floods with all the logical questions. Yet, as he studies his lover's study of him, he finds that, like the malfunctioning faucet, Chanyeol's gaze that is set to coolness draws heat from him instead, so that rather than halting Sehun in his progress, Baekhyun incites it further as, alternately, he kisses, and nibbles on the younger's lissom neck, his stare all the time on Chanyeol's – probing, provoking.  

At last the rational reaction. Chanyeol grits his teeth, clenches his fists and marches towards them. The worst. Bloodshed. What else could it be?

Making of himself an armour, Baekhyun instinctively tightens his grip on Sehun, though he knows he cannot hope to shield him from the taller male. Don't hurt him! Don't! Plea – his thought, his dread, his lover's perceived wrath all disintegrate when, an inch removed from their junior's back, Chanyeol suddenly stops and in place of tearing at Sehun's unprotected neck, tenderly kisses it.

Unflinching to the last, the boy lifts his faintly flushed face from Baekhyun's fully flushed chest and smiles at Chanyeol's reflection in the mirror – as seductively soft a smile as any Baekhyun has ever beheld.

Blankly he looks on as the scene replays before him – his partner's pout on his lover's shoulder, his lover's collar, his lover's cheek. Kissing. He's kissing him. My Chanyeol. My Sehun. He's kissing him! is all he can think. That is until Sehun, his right hand still on Baekhyun's hip, extends his left toward the other, and taking him by the chin, kisses Chanyeol full on the lips.

"What the hell is this?!" Baekhyun gasps, his voice barely audible with bewilderment.

Half amusedly, half pityingly the pair smile at him in chorus, Sehun resting his head against Chanyeol's shoulder while fondling Baekhyun both with his fingers and his eyes.

"Byun Baekhyun," Chanyeol's even baritone vibrates through the length of his body as he begins, "how long do you think I've known you? How long do you think I've watched you? From the moment we met up to ten minutes ago when you sent me away with a promise of later you wished you wouldn't have to keep. I know you by heart, Baekhyun-ah, and I know yours better than you ever have or will. The problem with you is that you've never bothered doing the same for me. You never look at me, not really. If you did, you'd have seen me change right along with you, same as you, while we watched Sehun do his changing. You're small and soft and pretty and it's prettier watching the pair of you wanting each other, touching each other. You're beautiful together, really. Me, I'm a tower, same as him, so this may seem a little funny to you. But when I look at us in the mirror like this, side by side…we have our own aesthetic, don't we, Sehunnie?"

"Mm…" Sehun breathes out pensively as he hums, his stare never straying from Baekhyun's dumbfounded one. "Last week, when you were away for your reading and fitting, Chanyeol-hyung came up to my room and asked to have a talk with me. I think I knew what he was going to say even before he opened his mouth to speak." Cattishly he his head and slits his eyes as he inquires, "Hyung, do you feel guilty? I think you do, but then I think you don't. I know you want me, the pair of you; I can smell it on you a mile away, everyone can really. I've changed, haven't I? You knew I would, but not this much and not this quickly and now… I didn’t come between you, you called me here. I like you both, I love you both, as brothers, as something more than that, but I'd have gone a lifetime without doing anything about it, if you hadn't asked me to. I'm here at your bidding, hyungdeul; take responsibility, mm?"

Squarely Baekhyun studies the boy whose manner, smooth and sensuous though it is, somehow fails to convince him. What is this really? What are you hiding, Sehunnie? "That's quite the speech, but this isn't a play. How long have you two?"

"Mm...about a minute longer than you," Chanyeol clarifies, winding his arm round Sehun's waspish waist.

Baekhyun can't help but grimace at the act, though for whose sake he can't quite say. "What did you ask him?" he demands of his partner, but before he can reply, resets his gaze on Sehun's and instead enquires of him, "What did he ask you?"

"Which of you it was going to be," Sehun returns with composure sufficient to drive Baekhyun half-mad.

"To choose?" he chases, fighting tooth and nail to keep his tone level.

"If I wanted to. I didn't. I'm greedy." He digs his nails further into Baekhyun's thigh as he says. "Are you disappointed, hyung? In me? In him? Or in yourself for being relieved?"

Bitterly Baekhyun sniffs and bobs his head. As ever with Sehun, the boy's words cut deeper than his nails. "All three."

Sehun nods. "So, now you have to choose – heart or body?"

Choose? Baekhyun's eyes bounce nervously between Chanyeol and Sehun – the man he's loved for the past six years, and the boy he's wanted, it feels, since time immemorial. But hasn't love made him desire the one, and desire made him love the other? Or was it the other way around? He shakes his head, bites his lips and sighs. "It's not as simple as that, Sehun-ah. It's not just my body that wants you and not just my heart that loves him. It's a mess, I'm a mess, we're a mess and I don't know how to clean it up. I can't choose. I can't."

"That's your choice then – no choice," Sehun concludes with an infinitesimal and infinitely sarcastic smile. Baekhyun hates it, though not half as much as he hates himself for loving it so well.

"And you?" he says, now setting his sights on Chanyeol. "What's yours? Me or Sehunnie?"

Without a second's hesitation, his partner replies, "You…and Sehunnie."

Inwardly Baekhyun sneers. To have our cake and eat it too – that's what we want. "It'll end badly," he cautions the unconcerned.

Sehun juts his lips, spikes his brows. "For you maybe. For me…" He shrugs and smirks.

"You're cold," Baekhyun accuses whisperingly and glances at Chanyeol for the very warmth he was certain he had outgrown the need for.

Sehun grips his chin and stares him down, his mien abruptly mordant. "Isn't that what you wanted, hyung? A bit of wind to fan the fire?" Baekhyun shudders at its blowing.

Releasing first Baekhyun's face, then his form from both his brothers, Sehun scans the pair a scornful second, then starts toward the exit, as with a softly sneering voice he sings, "Come on then. We aren't a company, we're a crowd – this place won't contain us."

"Where to?" Baekhyun pursues with his words as well as his stride.

Now at the post previously occupied by Chanyeol, Sehun looks over his shoulder at the former and Baekhyun, so that the latter feels himself catch fire at the unfamiliar frigidity of his stare. "Where else? To bed, hyungdeul. To bed."