a/n: hello, my lovelies. go back to the first chapter and read the addition that begins after the super long black line across the screen. then proceed to reading this. that is all. thank you.

Yixing has a habit of staring too long because he is so caught up in lightprettybreathereal. He observes life like his two semesters of psychology classes at the local community college allows him to decipher the world. He catches things that other people miss, the lingering teeth nipping a denied mouth or a small child begging for attention by acting not quite perfect enough.

 

Everything is simple, a domino effect spinning the world around. The only thing that refuses to break is Luhan.

 

Tamed, bursting at the seams. All camera strap or blown pupils that can never quite settle on one certain frame unless he is controlling a shutter. He skips on the balls of his feet, melts like sea foam when afraid, and mystifies the hell out of Yixing because he fits into too many politically correct terms of endearment that long to trip off the deep end of his tongue when he sees the ethereal glow of Luhan.

 

Just take it, he exclaims when Yixing drools over the strawberry ice cream at the parlor.

 

Sometimes I think I can read your mind, he whispers around puffs of weed when he thinks no one is listening, not even himself.

 

LIfe is such a , he hisses as he sobs over the National Geographic documentaries that Yixing likes to watch. He never can quite convince Luhan that they are just as primal as the hungry mountain lion eating the baby lamb on the screen before their wide eyes.

 

-.-.-

 

The only thing bigger than 4th of July or Christmas in town was the summer solstice. A communal festival of crazy people, mostly Ph.D. wielding hippies, that flocked into the beach town to shoot fireworks or get drunk or get stoned sitting deep in warm sand or run around proclaiming they were descendants of the Salem witches. For the most part locals avoided the celestial holiday and made certain to pull curtains closed tight in case someone ran down the street , a common occurrence on the 21st of June.

 

Yixing would talk Luhan into joining the fray after his shift ended at the bar and this year was no different. They worn-out-Vans walked between the scattered beach bonfires, greeting the few stragglers they recognized and juggling beer bottle necks between their sweaty fingertips. Since they had abandoned Luhan's Jeep at Yixing's cottage, where they would return to at the end of the night and it was offered by some high school kid with multihued hair, the duo sat and shared a blunt. By the time it had evaporated into smoke, Yixing realized they were swapping saliva via bitter paper and began to blush uncharacteristically.

 

'Sometimes, I get pissed at you,' Luhan suddenly gurgles next to him where he has fallen back flat, eyes floating full of star reflections.

 

'I'm sorry,' is the only thing he can think to reply.

 

'Everyone wants you. I'm like just chump seconds that only gets parting glances,' he swears Luhan hasn't blinked for five minutes straight. He throws a handful of sand on his flat chest and sighs in relief when he realizes that Luhan's body hasn't been overtaken by aliens.

 

'You're ing blind,' Yixing mumbles while staring down. Memories flash like Luhan's bad dye job in high school that had turned his hair a shocking pink, the time they drove twelve hour south to watch some horribly awful band because they had been bored, the first time he realized the champagne cork popping feeling in his lower stomach at the sight of a moon glazed, skinny 16 year old Luhan was something more than what normal best friends felt for one another.

 

'Blind and famished,' Luhan pops up suddenly, all pout and no bite.

 

Just like that they raid the few vendor carts still lining the sea wall. They mooch off each other's shrimp kabobs, Luhan peach ice cream off his fingers where it is melting out of the cone in a steady drip. By two a.m. they stop by Tao's spacious duplex where they giggle all together on the couch as Wufan mixed them more drinks and they watch old reruns of funny videos. Tao offers them the spare room or couch but Luhan peeks warily at Wufun who is making the weirdest gestures and drags Yixing off by their linked pinkies. They oh and ah at the final round of fireworks and stumble into the cottage in a blurry mess of salt stained skin and indigestion from some combo of their munchies binge.

 

Yixing is still intoxicated enough to refuse Luhan the couch and drag him into his bedroom. He watches as Luhan looks at him suspiciously before shrugging and stripping and draining half of the hot water heater so he can splash in a pile of bubbles overflowing the rim of the ancient claw foot tub. At least that is what he is imagining from his sprawled position on the bed, separated from the actual scene by the bathroom door and the water droplets falling into his eyes from his own shower. Plus he knows Luhan. Knows he would always prefer a bath, couldn't eat mushrooms or black olives on his pizza because 'ew!', and the way he had admitted a week before that he had never been touched except by that steroid munching neaderthal.

 

Because Yixing knew that Luhan didn't count the brush of their shoulders as 'that way', evident in the way his best friend had withdrew when his curiosity got the better of him and his fingers disobediently had traced the solid lump of clavicle. The thought had Yixing's own clavicle twitching, tattooed skin phantom burning like a brand. One they shared.

 

Jesus, then Yixing had woke too early the next morning with secretly strong limbs wrapped around him like a cuddling yoga pose. Luhan's pressed hot to his hip and it took every ounce of self control he possessed not to simply touch and pray for good consequences, to roll out of bed and shower in subzero water, to make it into a joke, to walk away.

 

'Either scoot over or I am gonna execute a perfect cannonball into your stomach,' Luhan appears in more borrowed pajamas, just boxers and a thin tie-dyed shirt this time.

 

Yixing has to bite his tongue and roll over complacently so not to dare his best friend to carry out his threat just so he can feel the damp fluff of that hair he knows now smells like his shampoo, like it has a bazillion times before. He fidgets uncontrollably when Luhan flips the lights off and crawls next to him on the double mattress. He hears the grunt and sigh as his best friend wallows himself into a comfortable position.

 

He has nearly hypnotized himself into slumber by reciting the only Shakespeare sonnet he knows silently in his head when he feels Luhan's cold toes trap themselves between the mattress and Yixing's left thigh seeking warmth.

 

Yixing resigns himself to the pitiful category when instead of falling asleep, he stays awake memorizing the way Luhan melds into the indigo of his shadow steeped bedroom. He has got it ing bad.

 

So bad he begins to wonder which would be worse, taking a chance of rejection or trying to force himself out of love with Luhan. Even when the sun begins to rise he doesn't have a clear answer. Only a clear view of eyelashes on barely freckled high cheekbones and the trail of drool in the corner of his best friend's open mouth.

 

-.-.-

 

Yixing wants to shoot Tao for having a party. He wants to shoot whoever had the bright idea to suggest they play spin the bottle because he has already had to kiss Wufan (on the cheek at Tao's insistence, thank God), and three girls who all tasted like chapstick. He wants to shoot Luhan becaue he is in control of the bottle when it lands on Yixing for the fifth time. He wants to shoot Wufan because he is making those wild gestures again and Yixing has almost caught on to the giant dork's code when Luhan spins the bottle again and it stops.

 

On Luhan. Oh .

 

When Luhan blinks slowly, maybe just a tadbit cutely, when he realizes the bottle had landed on him for the first time that night, Kyungsoo woots in the background drunkly. When Luhan's eyes grow comically large when he realizes he is suppose to kiss his best friend, Yixing wants to buy whoever suggested the game a herd of ponies with bows on top. So maybe he had a few beverages that weren't so .

 

Luhan shrugs like it is no big deal and scoots forward to seal their lips. Yixing chants 'this is Luhan, just Luhan, Luhan' in his mind but that makes matters worse. Because he is getting hs first taste of peach schnapps and graham crackers and it hits him hard that this is Luhan, just Luhan, Luhan.

 

Yixing loses it. By it he means the reigns over himself.

 

He fists a hand in the shirt that is just as much his as Luhan's. He cradles the jut of adam's apple in his other palm. He squeezes his eyes shut and tilts his head so he can better sample heaven. He hears a whimper and prays it was Luhan because it sounded like 'more', and Yixing needs Luhan to need 'more' just as much as he does.

 

Luhan's tongue in now somehow in the equation and Yixing jerks back because this is Luhan, just Luhan, Luhan. He has ed up everything now, no more cove escapes. No more shared beds, no touches that aren't 'that way', no more jokes about morning wood.

 

All because he stands, ignores the sudden roar of cheers in his ears, ignores the look on Luhan's face that his two semesters of psychology classes at the local community college did not teach him how to decipher. Because he walks out the door with a new memory of trembling lips beneath his crushing ones that he prays is enough to fuel the rest of his life.

 

Because he just ed everything to hell and revealed all his cards.

 

-.-.-

 

Yixing either dreamed in vivid color or striking outlines. It was like dousing himself in make believe that could almost be reality. He always dreamed about Luhan.

 

The first time he convinced a seven year old Luhan to skateboard. He had ended up spending the fortune of his saved allowance to raid the convenience store candy aisle when Luhan ended up with bloody knees. The injured boy won the battle with a pouting lower lip that still won arguments.

 

The time they had graffitied the faded white of the shop's alley wall and had talked their way out of the cop car. Luhan was shouting, albeit calmly, how the officer was supressing their rights of expression and had used so many confusing long words that Yixing had to fight himself not to shut his best friend up. With his own lips.

 

Their boring senior prom where they had declared 'bros before hoes' and laughed at the way the English teacher got thrown out for groping a student in the bathroom. Yixing had dugged a reluctant Luhan onto the dance floor for the final dance, all blushing cheeks and 'dude, why do I have to dance the girl part? I am a MAN!!'

 

The summer they had worked on a blackberry farm until they got fired for eating all the crop. Their annual tradition of pranking on birthdays. Once when Yixing had entered Luhan in a photo gallery contest in the nearby city and they both grinned like idiots when he won.

 

This is why Yixing believed he was dreaming when barely an hour after he crashed on his impossibly short couch Luhan showed up knocking on his door. He was convinced he was still dreaming when he opened the front door and his best friend stood before him with a look he was familiar with in the mirror. Want. Need. Now.

 

When Luhan dropped a fairly hefty box labeled 'explosive' into his outstretched arms instead of jumping his bones like was the normal path of his dreams, Yixing knew that this was indeed reality.

 

'Just shut up before I loose my nerve,' Luhan stuck a hand in the middle of his chest and shoved until they were both in the dim of the living room. He flicked on a lamp they had scavenged at a garage sale and sat waiting on Yixing to open the box.

 

Yixing hitched up a brow before dropping all bend limbs on the floor and pulled back the lid only to do a double take at his best friend. He wanted to chase the flush that was seeping down Luhan's pale column of a neck with first his tongue, then hands.

 

Inside the box was stack after messy stack of photos of Yixing, which might have been kinda creepy if he didn't know the sheer enormous number of pictures Luhan had captured in his lifetime. Looking down into the snapshots, Yixing could see things he had never noticed about himself before. How his dimple could appear even when he wasn't smiling, that when he looked Luhan dead on through a lens there was a certain light in his eyes that could so easily give away all of his secrets.

 

'Wufan told me something the other day and it has me really curious.'

 

Yixing looks across the floor to where his best friend has his knees drawn to his chest as if to make himself less noticeable. A laughable mission in Yixing's prescence, he was always aware of the other.

 

'So I started looking through all my pictures and I started noticing little things.'

 

Oh , hell, buddha. Air is nonexistent in Yixing's lungs by this point and his brain is too busy focused on calming his erratic heart rhythm to tell his body to inhale.

 

'Like how you have got this one freckle on your ear. How you blank face whenever you realize that I am looking at you. But I found his one picture...'

 

Luhan drags off and slowly stands before slothing his way to kneel opposite Yixing with the photo box between them. He pulls a slightly crippled photo from his back pocket and smiles down at it while Yixing can feel his stomach jumping up in his throat.

 

'Tao or someone must have took it.'

 

Yixing accepts the offered memory and nearly wants to cry. Someone had captured them together. Luhan was laughing about who knows what, eyes squeezed tight at the sheer hugeness of his face splitting grin. Yixing was turned slightly, staring at his friend with a look that was anything but funny. It was that look from the mirror, the sealing of his fate.

 

'And you look at me when I'm not looking the same way that I look at you when you don't notice. So maybe Wufan was right and you feel the same way I feel about you,' Luhan stutters out. All confusing and jumbled but it doesn't matter because Yixing is leaning forward to stop the words with his mouth.

 

This time Luhan whispers 'more' and Yixing knocks the box aside until the hundreds of pictures are covering the entire floor, but he has got to get closer. Has to learn if the hollow of Luhan's throat still smells of Yixing's cologne he had borrowed earlier that day. He doesn't but he smells even better.

 

Like tomorrow and salt water and reciprocated feelings. It is beyond intoxicating.

a/n: mk. yeah. i was going to only do luhan's perspective but i thought, why not let everyone see what yixing is thinking as well? so this is what happened. whatcha think?

the next chapter will be the last. it will contain the much anticipated, maybe just on my part, smexy scene of this lovely, beachy, skating version of layhan. it will probably be written in split perspective, alternating to give more flow. yeah. i can't wait. keke^^