Requested by: Serena_nxm

Pairing: Seoksoo/sooseok (joshua x seokmin)

Author: Pollux

Started: 7/10/17

Finished: 7/17/17

Request:

Pairing: Seoksoo/sooseok (DK x Jisoo)

Author: Pollux

Genre: fluff, romance, school life, cafe!au

Plot: When Seokmin's only one week away from the finals tests that could decide his future, there are only two questions on his mind: Who was that cute waiter at the campus Diamond Cafe? And who keeps leaving gifts on his doorstep—not to mention flowers in his mail and good luck sticky notes on his front door?

Notes:

This is some special type of coffee shop where you order at the counter and then the waiter will bring your order to your table or you can take it from the counter too, if you're nice like Seokmin. Also, all of Seventeen (minus Joshua) live in a shared house that they rent and whoever goes to the cafe always buys drinks for the rest as well. I made it kind of longer to include a lot more of the other members because the recent concert videos gave me feels! :) I hope you like it~

~Pollux

Of Paper and Coffee Stains

When Seokmin first walked into the Diamond Cafe, he’d been astounded at the fact that such a quiet place existed in between the laughter-filled halls of his college campus. It was exactly as the name implied—a hidden diamond with walls painted lovely dark hues and smooth countertops that seemed to sparkle with each new drink set upon it, as if inviting the guest to take a sip of what could be compared to liquid gold. Not only were the cups they used dainty and elegant with flowing monochrome designs accented with gold, the waiters had seemed to be cut from the same cloth as that which sat on the curved wooden tables—beautifully poised and yet still comforting with their warm and friendly service. Specifically one waiter.

Said waiter had been the one to take their orders and Seokmin would have felt awed at his smile had he not already been embarrassed close to death by his friends who all suddenly seemed rather underdressed, despite it being simply a campus coffee shop, and out of place considering the ruckus they were raising up in an otherwise quiet place.

“Sorry,” he apologized to the patient man, chuckling as the other took in the spectacle with wide doe eyes. “My friends are just really fun, I promise.”

With wisps of light brown hair falling over his eyes ever so often, the man behind the counter smiled, quirking an eyebrow. “I don’t know if that’s the textbook definition of fun.” He tilted his head at two tall boys, Mingyu and Wonwoo, who were taking turns smearing cake frosting on each other’s cheeks all while giggling and producing more cake frosting from somewhere Seokmin wanted to know so he could get some too.

“Oh, it definitely is,” Seokmin said, unable to help the wide grin stretching across his face at seeing the way the stranger’s eyes crinkled into sparkling crescents with the quirk of a pair of dainty pink lips. Cute.

“And that?” The waiter asked, biting back a laugh at the antics of the other boys waiting for their orders at a table that was truly two tables very awkwardly combined. The shortest, Jihoon, was shooting death glares at the boy who any kindergarten teacher would deem the joker on the first day, Soonyoung, because the latter was apparently telling terrible dad jokes and making body gags—though one could argue that the wishes of imminent despair were probably meant for the other boy, Chan, who was actually laughing.

Seokin could only shrug and give the other man a cringeworthy wink and thumbs up. Encouraged by the amused laugh he got in response, he propped himself up with an elbow and leaned closer. “And you know what, I’ll tell you a secret,” he fake whispered. “I’m the fun-est of all of them.” Seokmin crossed his arms for dramatic effect—“Funniest? Most fun?”—and then flashed his winning smile across the counter. “Doesn’t matter.”

The waiter chuckled softly, a small smile on his lips and pink dusting the tops of his ears as he looked down at the order slip. “Oh, really?”

“Definitely.”

The second time Seokmin walked into the Diamond Cafe, he’d been too busy pouring over class notes in his mind that he’d ordered all their drinks wrong. But if he thought a little harder about it, maybe it had been the way the same waiter was there at the counter in that nicely pressed shirt and cute little bowtie with the same shy smile, or the way that their fingers brushed as he handed over their drinks for the second time with a laugh that seemed to say, “Don’t worry about it. I got you.”

Seokmin could only smile at the other in what he hoped was a warm fashion and run outside with the drinks for fear he might die of embarrassment had he stood there any longer.

The third time Seokmin walked into the Diamond Cafe, Soonyoung and—for some odd reason—Jihoon had caught wind of Seokmin’s new “crush” as Soonyoung called it with a baby voice and lots of lavish fawning: “Aw, my little baby’s all grown up and falling in love!”—to which Jihoon added a snort and smirked down at his phone. Needless to say, Seokmin hid in the bathroom and waited for someone else to pick up the orders.

After he checked that the coast was clear of any cute boys, however, his escape plan of hightailing it out of the shop was quickly foiled by Jihoon who called his name loudly, waving over to him with the same -eating grin from before—all while standing up. And needless to say, Seokmin was compelled to go sit down by the societal rules that dictated that one must not become a public disturbance for any duration longer than necessary or as he would like to rename it, one must obey one’s traitorous friends who use all necessary information to ruin lives in order to appease them to obtain the least ruinous results.

“So,” Wonwoo drawled out, leaning backwards in his chair as if it would give him some sort of badass look despite the fact that he was sitting in a velvety chair covered with little flower and leaves designs. Mingyu, on the other hand, looked extremely in place with his weirdly formal outfit that instead placed the contrast on his face which was full of childish excitement as he leaned forward—almost out of his chair unlike his boyfriend—with expectations of juicy gossip and apparently damning secrets. Likely too excited, he cut in, asking, “Which one do you like?”

But as Seokmin opened his mouth to retort that this wasn’t middle school, he was cut off by said crush approaching them with the ordered drinks that apparently not a single one of his good friends that he had known since they were wee toddlers in diapers had decided to get in place of Seokmin. Rushing out a string of apologies, Seokmin whacked Wonwoo on the shoulder before the elder could finish whatever dirty joke he was probably whispering to Mingyu and then proceed to try to take the whole set of 12 drinks out of the waiter’s arms. Seokmin really hoped he didn’t look ridiculous trying to balance the load but a glimpse of the amused smile on the waiter’s face told him otherwise.

“It’s fine,” the other man said, stopping Seokmin with the light touch of a hand. “I was just wondering where my favorite ‘Iced caramel macchiato with two shots of chocolate syrup!’ orderer had gone off to.” Favorite? Jihoon snorted. The waiter grinned and helped Seokmin lower the drinks onto the table.

To the side, Seokmin heard Soonyoung whisper something to Wonwoo whose eyes then lit up with something akin to the fire that probably burned in the depths of hell, spit out by the devil himself. And that was how all of his eleven friends ending up hearing about Seokmin’s crush on the “Diamond Cafe waiter with a soft voice.”

Unfortunately for his “blossoming love life” as Jun liked to call it, Seokmin did not return to the Diamond Cafe since that third episode because it was just a week before finals week and Seokmin really had to study like his life depended on it because his grades did and his monthly allowance depended on that and going to the Diamond Cafe depended on that. Of course, he really wasn’t justifying not going to see that cute waiter with wanting to see him because Jihoon would call him ridiculous and likely quote some line from Romeo and Juliet that he’d analyzed in Literature just for that moment.

What he did not expect was for Jun, hand in hand with Minghao, to do exactly that. “Oh, under love’s heavy burden do I sink,” the Chinese boy gasped dramatically, lifting a dainty hand to his head in a fake swoon. “Sad hours seem long,” Minghao added, putting on a mournful face and wrapping his arms around the older boy to pull him closer. “Oh yes—” Jun heaved Minghao off his back and leaned all over Seokmin’s notes on his desk. “Why the art thou Romeo?”

“Actually,” Minghao cut in thoughtfully. “What if he’s Juliet?”

Seokmin almost choked on his own spit.

“No, no,” Jun chided the younger teasingly, “Clearly he’s Romeo because he’s the one with dumb decisions and the initiator of bad flirting.”

Ready to make a quick retort, Seokmin opened his mouth and found that no words came out. His studying long forgotten, his eyes had drifted from his friends to the door, and more specifically, the red rose that lay right in front of it that hadn’t been there before. Muffled gasps and a quick “Oh ” was muttered from his side as he simply sat there and stared.

A loud sigh came from the corner and Seokmin vaguely registered Jihoon walking into his field of vision. He hadn’t even noticed the shorter male had entered their living room earlier.

“It’s for you,” Jihoon stated, picking up the rose carefully. When no one moved, he sighed. “Seokmin.”

“Maybe he is Juliet,” Jun whispered to no one in particular.

And so it seemed, there was a rose delivered everyday through the door’s mail slot. On Tuesday, it was left sometime during their lunch outing. On Wednesday, in the very early morning. On Thursday, during half the group’s trip to the library. On Friday, it was left in the ten minute period when all eleven of their schedules overlapped and no one was in the house. By Saturday, Jeonghan and Seungcheol—the mother and father of their group—had banded together to tease their poor son about this mysterious “secret admirer.”

“So,” Jeonghan drawled out, leaning in his chair in a rather familiar fashion. “Any guesses who it is?”

Jihoon huffed from across the room where he had been turning the first flower over in his hand as if it hid some miniscule clue, maybe a fingerprint or snagged thread, that would lend to the identity of its sender. Seokmin was beginning to worry that the wrinkles that appeared when the shorter man set his lips in a tight line would become permanent.

“Maybe it’s the girl from our grade,” Seungkwan offered. “The one who said you looked like an actor.”

Seokmin groaned. He remembered that girl and her insistent high-pitched voice droning on and on about how university was a waste for his talents. Unlike some people, he actually really liked it there.

“Yeah, why not give her a chance,” Vernon piped up from next to Seungkwan. He grinned at the way Seokmin grimaced. His thoughts drifted back to a certain unnamed waiter with pretty eyes and gentle smiles.

Luckily, before anything else could happen, there was a loud noise from the bedrooms upstairs and Mingyu came down the stairs sulking. Apparently, Wonwoo was the only one in the house that was serious about studying for finals because Mingyu had jokingly promised him a kiss if he got a perfect score on the Literature exam.

“That’s like almost impossible,” Chan said uncertainly.

“I know,” Mingyu wailed. “But I’d kiss him anyways so why can’t he just give up and cuddle with me?”

“Oh shut up.” Jihoon chucked the rose at the giant boy, having given up on his self-proclaimed quest to dabble in Seokmin’s love life. He smirked. “I bet Soonyoung that I could do it last year.”

“That was last year,” Seungcheol pointed out but Seokmin asked curiously, “And did you?”

One look at the pink flush on Soonyoung’s face confirmed that yes, Jihoon aced the test and probably got something else as well.

And thus, their weekend progressed with another rose and joking speculations combined with desperate last ditch attempts to all hang out and have fun before Monday. Monday, on which Wonwoo woke half the house up with his loud rock-playing alarm at some ungodly hour in the morning and then walked out the door with the calm of a man who either knows the lottery’s winning numbers are in his hand or that of a man who cannot see in the fog in front of him and resigns himself to fate—it was a terrific day. However, something broke the trance of Soonyoung as he was leaving for his first final because he ran back in with the new rose clutched in his fist and a yellow post-it note in the other.

“This is new!” Soonyoung yelled in Seokmin’s face as the Seokmin attempted to retain the delicate balance he had achieved with his spoon and his bowl full of cereal and milk. Soonyoung waved the post-it in his face. It had the words “Good luck!” written on it accompanied by a large smiley face. “The rose was on your doorstep, so I turned around to give it to you and this was on the door!” The excited boy took Seokmin by the shoulders and shook him fully awake. “Secret Admirer has leveled up!”

“Still a beginner though,” Seokmin laughed, trying to imagine the hands that wrote the note. Thin but not delicate, just like that waiter, he mused. Maybe he was a bit too obsessed. “No chocolates yet,” he joked.

Jeonghan hummed quietly from a chair, with a blanket still wrapped around him. “Or maybe he’s waiting for Valentine’s Day.”

“He?” Seokmin asked.

“Valentine’s Day?” Jun exclaimed.

Jeonghan shrugged casually. “Well, usually girls give love notes and guys get gifts, so I assumed. And yes, who doesn’t give chocolates on Valentine’s Day?”

Jun blinked and walked out the door muttering something about buying more vases.

Seokmin’s final was in the afternoon so he pocketed the note and placed the rose alongside the others in the newly bought vase that had become the unexpected centerpiece of their dinner table. In a way, they had all become accustomed to the gifts too quickly, Seokmin noticed. While they had joked about who they came from, no one had thought to question how they got to their doorstep every single day without being seen. That last Friday, it was too good of a coincidence, was it not?

When he voiced this to Jeonghan, however, the older boy just laughed and poured more coffee into his wine glass with flourish. “Don’t be silly, no one’s stalking us. He’s probably just really lucky.” Taking a sip, he smiled to himself and poured the expresso—at least that’s what Seokmin assumed it was—into a mug and then asked Seokmin to get him the pitcher of steamed milk with which he started to draw a little heart on the face of his coffee. When Seokmin wondered out loud how Jeonghan had learned to do latte art, the elder smiled and shooed him away, saying, “It’s a secret.”

And so it seemed, there was a little yellow post-it note stuck to the front door everyday of that week accompanied by various phrases wishing good luck and smiley faces that seemed to make the sun shine a little brighter each day. By Wednesday, Seokmin was almost curious enough to stay and catch the mysterious sender but Jeonghan had convinced him that his Biology grade was more important, using some suspicious argument that failing a class would mean wasting his money that would be better spent on some coffee at the Diamond Cafe, and there had been no way to say no to Seungcheol who was sending him puppy eyes from where he sat on the couch with Jeonghan in his lap as if they cared so much about their child’s education.

By Friday, he’d given up on his plan in a very similar fashion to how Jihoon had given up with the roses, because his attendance to his tests cut gigantic holes in any plan to sidestep his schedule. That day, the note was scrawled out a little messier, as if the writer had been in a rush before he’d dropped it off at some time between the first two finals of the day. It seemed oddly familiar.

At that test, Seokmin had answered all but one question and simply sat there with a pencil in hand wondering why there was a question on the effects of roasting coffee in his Organic Chemistry exam. He definitely did not know the answer and wondered if his unknown waiter might. For a moment, he smelled the faint aroma of coffee in the room. In the middle of the large testing room, he dropped his pencil and felt his mouth make a little ‘o’ shape as the crumpled yellow note rolled out of his pocket with it.

Seokmin laughed out loud.

Right after he finished, he’d pushed those doors wide open and fast-walked straight to the cafe.

“Umm,” Seokmin bounced up and down in line to catch a glance of the busy waiter. “Excuse me—” He wasn’t heard over the order.

“Excuse—” The man two spots in front of him turned around to glare at him pointedly. Seokmin stammered, “Sorry.”

“What’s your name?” Seokmin blurted out once he was one person away from ordering.

“Joshua,” replied the man with an amused smile dancing on his lips before turning back to the customer in front of him. When Seokmin finally got to the front of the line, Joshua already had his normal order written down. “And yours?”

“Seokmin.” Seokmin laughed. “But you can call me yours,” he joked.

“Alright,” Joshua blinked slowly as his cheeks tinted pink, as if questioning whether or not he should break out of his reserved waiter character, and then grinned. “I’ll call you Seokmine.”

Seokmin wheezed. The old couple behind him looked genuinely concerned that he was having a heart attack. “Alright,” he breathed out slowly, the contagious soft laughter from across the counter threatening to do him in again. “And I’ll call you tomorrow.” He finger-gunned and collapsed laughing on the nearest table. From the side, he could hear Joshua laughing loudly.

And so he sat there until the pretty boy’s shift ended, alternating between whispering and shouting terrible jokes and puns across to the counter and wiggling his eyebrows to solicit even louder chuckles from the other.

“Do you wanna walk around campus with me?” Joshua asked Seokmin the next night.

“Definitely,” replied Seokmin with a goofy smile and thumping in his chest that didn’t seem to go away.

By the time they sat down on a bench by the cherry blossom trees, both men were out of breath, be it from laughing too much or too hard, or from telling jokes so fast that they would occasionally mess up and trip over their own words before tripping over steps that they didn’t see because they were too busy looking at each other.

“So,” Seokmin asked, “Why are we here?”

Joshua leaned backwards serenely. “I like the cherry blossoms here; they’re pretty.”

Like you. But of course Seokmin didn’t say that. It was a little too fast even if it was true: the slender man seemed as beautiful as the flowers beside him, if not more, with the fading rays of light sparkling in his eyes. “I like them too.”

But Joshua nodded as if he heard it anyways.

Feeling his cheeks heat up, Seokmin stared at the street and cleared his throat awkwardly. “Do you, um, take customers here often?”

He stiffened at the feeling of a hand gently laying on his own and then proceeded to turn to jelly.

“I’m off work right now,” Joshua whispered back, “And no, you’re special.”

Seokmin turned to look back at the man and saw the same pink of the cherry blossoms mirrored in his cheeks. Grinning, he intertwined their fingers together. “And if I said you were special too?”

Joshua laughed. “Then, I’d say you’re my definition of fun and you’d agree and we would smile—”

“—Like a match made in heaven?” Seokmin scooted closer.

“Definitely.” Joshua took Seokmin’s other hand in his.

“And then you would ask me to go out with you?” Seokmin grinned.

“Of course,” Joshua chuckled. “Will you?”

“Definitely.”

And all Seokmin could say was that yes, suddenly there were no more roses or post-it notes and no, he never figured out who was sending them but it didn’t matter since he had his own barista boyfriend who would draw smiley faces in his coffee and send him chocolates on Valentine’s Day and that was more than enough.