So, you don't have a prom date yet, right?

No, I don't.

Okay, cause I don't have a prom date yet either, and I was wondering...

Yes.

Yeah?

Yeah.

“, no kidding?” Dongjun says, as he and Baekhyun sit on one of the benches in the school’s courtyard, watching the rugby game before them with a kind of lazy barely-there interest. “Congratulations, man.”

One of the players manages to grab the ball and starts tearing across the grass with several people on his tail, and Baekhyun and Dongjun both follow the movement with their heads in silence, until the guy eventually gets tackled and body-piled towards the opposite end of the makeshift playing field. “Thanks,” Baekhyun replies.

“UTSC was your first choice, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s awesome. It’ll be right in your area.”

Baekhyun drags the “y” out at the beginning of the word, “Yep.”

A group of girls walk by then, eyes trained on the rugby game as they passed by, and Dongjun watches one of them in particular before sighing wistfully. “Man, how does she manage to look so good all the time without even trying?”

“If you think she’s so fine that why don’t you try asking her to prom, retard?”

“Me, asking the Kim Hyuna to prom? Have you lost your mind?”

“Then try initiating some actual contact. I don’t think your random happenstance where you miraculously cross paths and become wholesome buddies before falling in love is gonna happen.”

“You watch too many chick flicks.”

“Says the guy who cried after watching A Walk To Remember,” Baekhyun grins, reaching for the small bag of potato chips between them and shoving his hand inside.

“Hey man, that was one time!”

“YEAHHHHHH! EAT MY DUST, MOTHERERS!” one of the rugby players, Yukwon, screams as he pulls the hem of his shirt over his head and starts running around in blind circles and flapping his arms.

Dongjun nods in Yukwon’s direction. “Why don’t you try asking that fine piece of to prom?”

“Get real.”

“Seriously speaking, though, are you planning to ask anyone to prom?” Dongjun reaches for the chips as soon as Baekhyun’s extracted his hand from the bag. “And stop mooching off my chips, I didn’t see you paying for these.”

“You had two slices of pizza and a beef patty already, I think you can handle losing a couple of deep-fried potato slices. And besides, me with a prom date is not happening. I'm not even sure if I'm gonna go yet.”

“What the hell? No way man, you have to go,” Dongjun argues. “The thing’s gonna if you’re not there. And what makes you so sure that you’re not gonna have a date?”

Baekhyun scoffs. “Who am I gonna ask, Dongjun?”

Dongjun falls silent at this. Baekhyun can’t blame him, because he didn’t exactly have the answer to that either.

It’s not like anyone had problems with Baekhyun being gay. Or, if they did, then they kept quiet about it. The school was pretty pro-LGBTQ, although this may have had something to do with the fact that there were more openly homoual staff than there were students. In any case, Baekhyun, at the very least, hadn’t been bullied or slandered once he’d started identifying as gay. Most people just left him alone, and he was perfectly okay with this. He didn’t like being the center of attention anyway.

Honestly, the worst part about coming out had been when a handful of girls had started shimmying up to him in the hopes of convincing him to get mud facials together. Baekhyun shudders at the memory.

“Besides,” Baekhyun continues, “I don’t think there’s anyone that I had in mind to ask anyway.”

Dongjun hums contemplatively. “What about if someone asked you?”

Baekhyun snorts. “Not likely.”

“No, but really.”

“I dunno. It would depend on the person, I guess.”

Dongjun gives out another hum, and they follow Yukwon with their heads again as he breaks away with the rugby ball.

By this point in the year Baekhyun was getting pretty tired of attending his classes, and heavily contemplates skipping first period in favor of sleeping, but he remembers that they’re almost upon their “culminating” period—basically a high-stress month where all of the courses that didn’t have a final exam started dishing out these projects that were worth 30% of their final mark—so he forces himself to class, dragging his feet down the hallway and internally grumbling because there wasn’t enough time for him to go down to the cafeteria and get himself a cup of coffee, when he spots something on his desk from the doorway that has him completely forgetting about his morning caffeine dosage.

There’s a bouquet of roses on his desk. A bouquet of roses. Although, he has to admit, the light pink buds are a pleasant surprise. Had they been red, then Baekhyun would’ve just dismissed the gift as a gesture made by someone with no imagination whatsoever. This, though, was different—it indicated a conscious effort on the part of the giver to place some meaning into the gift, and the fact that whoever had put those roses there had given it some thought before buying them has Baekhyun reluctantly picking them up out of sheer curiosity and opening the little name card attached to the silver ribbon holding the bouquet together.

There’s no message written inside of it, or even a name. In fact, the only thing written on it is a single letter.

P.

A hand abruptly whacks him on the back, causing Baekhyun to yelp loudly and flinch back before spotting a grinning Dongjun next to him. “And you thought nobody was going to ask you,” Dongjun says teasingly. “So who’s it from?”

“Will you keep your voice down!” Baekhyun shakes him off with a scowl. “And there’s no name on these, so somebody probably meant to give them to someone else and accidentally left them on the wrong desk.”

“That would be awkward.” Dongjun inspects the name card. “What’s with the P though?”

Baekhyun shrugs. “Search me.”

“Maybe it’s because the roses are pink?

“I think I know how to tell the colour pink when I see it—what are you doing now?”

“Searching up the meaning of pink roses,” Dongjun says, scrolling through his phone with the utmost attention.

“Dude, like I said, these probably aren’t even for me—”

“Sweetness and poetic romance,” Dongjun reads aloud. “Awwwww, isn’t that cute?”

It was cute, and Baekhyun kind of hates the way he can feel his cheeks turning the colour of these goddamn roses. “Look, just sit down and stop making such a big commotion already,” Baekhyun says heatedly, trying to shove Dongjun down into the desk next to his.

“Yeah, wait, hold on a second.”

“...What are you doing.”

“I’m just double-checking on a different site to make sure—” Click. “Oh, .”

“DID YOU JUST TAKE A PICTURE OF ME WITH THESE ROSES?”

“Um, no?”

“Delete it!” Baekhyun whines indignantly, lunging for Dongjun’s phone, but Dongjun just holds it out of his reach easily.

“Chill, dude, I’m not uploading it onto Facebook or anything, alright? It’s just for my own archiving purposes, no one’s gonna see it—”

“Nice flowers.”

Baekhyun and Dongjun both abruptly stop, and when they turn to look they see that Park Chanyeol was now standing in front of Baekhyun’s desk.

“Hey Baekhyun,” Chanyeol grins.

Baekhyun just kind of blinks back for a moment, surprised. Truth be told, Baekhyun hadn’t even realized that Park Chanyeol even existed before this year—they’d never had any classes together until now. This year they had English and computer science together, but there still hadn’t been any real contact between them. Baekhyun was a quiet student, one that preferred listening to engaging, while Chanyeol, he had soon discovered, was the renowned class clown. He and the teachers fell into the habit of starting these playful banters almost every class, which the teachers actually seemed to enjoy and found hilarious, almost as much as the student body did. Chanyeol was also known for being the resident nice guy—he completely disregarded all forms of social hierarchy and would earnestly talk to you even if you wore a head brace, or the large majority of everyone else found you annoying, or whatever. And, surprisingly, he earned a hell of a lot of respect for it, mostly because hating the guy was virtually impossible, but also because it just wasn’t cool to hate on him and you’d find yourself on the opposite end of a lot of glares if you did.

Still, considering how thoroughly excepted he was amongst the “popular” crowd, Baekhyun still found it a little strange that Park Chanyeol would approach him so suddenly and strike up a conversation with him.

“Hey,” Baekhyun finally answers.

Chanyeol’s grin extends a little bit before he finally looks over at Dongjun and extracts a hand from one of his pockets to lift it in greeting. “Hey Dongjun.”

“Hey man,” Dongjun grins back. Unlike Baekhyun, Dongjun had had his fair share of conversations with Chanyeol in comp science. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just saw the roses sitting on his desk earlier,” Chanyeol nodded towards Baekhyun. “People are wondering who it’s from.”

Baekhyun internally sighs. Of course. Nobody else would bother touching him with a ten-foot pole so they send Chanyeol in to do all the asking for them. Nosy pricks.

“It’s not signed,” Dongjun answers, when Baekhyun doesn’t say anything.

“No kidding, huh? So what do you think of them?” Chanyeol asks.

Baekhyun looks down at the bouquet in his hands. “I don’t really have a vase for them, but they’re a nice gesture. The pink’s original.”

Chanyeol nods, looking satisfied, when the teacher walks into the classroom and gestures for them to sit down. “Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you guys,” Chanyeol says, giving a small wave. “Bye Baekhyun.”

“Uh, bye,” Baekhyun responds lamely, watching as Chanyeol walked to his desk on the other side of the classroom.

“Aren’t you the articulate one this morning?” Dongjun snickers. “What’s the matter? Got too caught up in his looks?”

“Shut up,” Baekhyun says instinctively, too tired to think of anything else to retort with, although really he was just trying to hide the fact that he was on the verge of blushing. He did find Chanyeol attractive, but he’d sooner let his teacher catch him with a bong and a five-gram of weed in his locker then tell that to Dongjun.

“Oh my god,” Baekhyun gapes, “oh my god it’s for real.”

Dongjun studies the sight before them with lips pressed together and a scrutinizing eye. “Well, at least he has a decent sense of artistic taste.”

Sometime between the end of school yesterday and the start of class today, Baekhyun’s locker had been decorated and was now completely covered in pink wrapping paper, with red balloons taped all over it and little gold streamers hanging from the vent. There’s something imprinted on the balloons, though, so Baekhyun steps forward and plucks one of them off of his locker before inspecting it, and it’s only then that he realizes that someone had taken the time to scribble a single letter onto each and every one of them in bold, black marker:

R.

Jesus. Had this person literally stayed here overnight to work on this? The effort put into trying to make all of the R’s on each of the balloons the same size was impressive, too. Baekhyun can only imagine how long this person had toiled to make the letter come out neat and proportionate, seeing how the edges of the black marker were a little squiggly but pretty straight for the most part.

Click.

Baekhyun whips around. “ing cut it out, will you?!”

“Hey, come on, it’s cute,” Dongjun says, studying the picture. “And once we’ve graduated and stuff and we’re out attending university and becoming respectable citizens we can look back fondly on these pictures and go, ‘ah, yes, high school.’”

“Not likely.”

“So it looks like it’s the same person from before, huh?” Dongjun pockets his phone and takes the balloon from Baekhyun to turn it over in his hands with interest. “What do you think so far?”

“I think this is bringing a little too much attention to me than I would’ve liked,” Baekhyun says, trying not to wince as he looks around him and sees several passer-byers looking over his locker.

“Oh, c’mon, school’s ending in like two months, it’s not gonna matter. And I meant what do you think about this secret admirer of yours?”

Baekhyun coughs and starts working on the combination to his lock to hide the fact that he was having trouble fighting back a blush. Again. “I don’t know yet. Depends on who it is, to be honest.”

“So you’re saying the flowers and the balloons and don’t actually impact whether or not you say yes? After all the trouble this guy put into this stuff for you?”

“Stop putting it like that and making me feel like a ,” Baekhyun says moodily, opening his locker door up as best as he could with the balloons in the way. He blinks. “Speaking of which, what do I do now? Do I just, like, leave this stuff on my locker?”

“Yeah, I would, at least until the guy reveals himself. Otherwise it looks like you’re turning him down halfway through.”

“Huh.”

“Hey Baekhyun.”

Baekhyun and Dongjun turn to see Chanyeol walking past them, waving. “Ready for that test in comp sci today?”

Baekhyun has to keep himself from frowning a bit. When did Chanyeol start acting so chummy with him? “Not even close,” he admits.

Chanyeol laughs. “Same. I’ll see you guys later.”

“Okay?” Baekhyun says in confusion, and Chanyeol shoots them one last grin before disappearing down the hall.

“Wow, the dickwad didn’t even bother acknowledging me today,” Dongjun says incredulously.

“Yeah, well, don’t know why he’s acknowledging me.” Baekhyun closes his locker. “C’mon, let’s go fail the test already.”

The third gift comes with its first real note.

“Dude,” the guy seated next to him, Junghwan, says upon looking up at the approaching Baekhyun, “someone got you a cake.”

Baekhyun stares at the little box on his desk, because someone had indeed bought him cake. He drops his bag onto the floor and turns the box around so that he could open it up and take a look inside. It’s nothing too big, just a small little cake loaded with an assortment of glazed fruits on top. There’s something attached to the inside of the lid, though, and Baekhyun realizes it’s a post-it note, one with actual writing on it. He hastily plucks it off of the box and reads it closely.

Heard you like vanilla. Hope I got it right?

And, yeah, don’t worry, these are for you.

O

“You are so lucky,” the girl sitting to his left, Sohee, sighs longingly, causing Baekhyun to snap out of his daze. “More than half the girls in our grade aren’t even going with a date, let alone getting promposed so cutely.”

“Yeah, man. I’d want to get promposed too if people were buying me cake,” Junghwan says, eyeing Baekhyun’s gift with a woeful expression.

Baekhyun stares at Junghwan. “Did you want some of—”

“I’ll go get forks and plates from the cafeteria!” Junghwan jumps out of his seat so fast that Baekhyun quickly moves to shield his cake—Junghwan was a bit of a disaster magnet—and watches as the guy nearly trips sprinting out of the classroom. You’d think a bomb was about to go off.

Baekhyun looks down at his note again. He can’t say he can recognize the writing, but this person had apparently asked around to double-check what his preferred flavour of cake was, and had managed to figure out that Baekhyun had originally doubted that these gifts were for him at all. And there definitely weren’t that many sources to verify that kind of information, which meant...

“Spit it out.”

“Dude, you mind actually telling me what you’re talking about first?”

“Don’t play stupid, I know you know who this...this...person is.”

“Wait, are you talking about the guy who’s been leaving you the stuff?”

“Where are you right now?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“With people.”

Baekhyun groaned, bringing his free hand over his face as he slumped over in his seat on the park bench. “You’re avoiding me.”

“Dude, first of all, not avoiding you, and second of all, in the event that I am actually withholding the information that you want, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to just spit it out to you the second you cornered me for it.”

“You’re supposed to be my ally!”

“And you’re supposed to be in for a surprise. it up, soldier.”

“WAIT, SO YOU DO—”

“Whoops gotta go I see a kitten abandoned in a cardboard box on the side of the road bye.”

“DONGJUN I SWEAR TO GOD—”

Click.

Baekhyun stares incredulously at his phone for several seconds before repressing the urge to start tearing at his hair because he was sitting in the middle of a park and there were exactly two children and five pigeons who would be witnesses to any form of mental breakdown he wanted to have.

As soon as this is all over his is grass.

Dongjun, predictably, is not in English the next morning. But his final gift is.

Oddly enough, this is the gift that has Baekhyun’s insides going all sugary and gooey at the sight of it. And it wasn’t really anything overly special, plenty of people got these for Valentine’s Day and whatnot. Yet, as Baekhyun carefully picks up the little light-brown teddy bear, sitting at about twenty centimeters tall on his desk, he can’t suppress the warm feeling that starts pooling in his gut. He didn’t even own that many stuffed animals or was particularly partial to them, so why was he so affected by it?

A head pops up at his shoulder. “What’s that?”

Baekhyun looks over. “Oh, hey Amber.”

Amber would be another one of those people who was really chill and pretty much talked to everyone without any regard to their status in the social hierarchy. The difference between her and Chanyeol, though, was that she and Baekhyun traced way back to pre-school and had technically dated for exactly three days in the fifth grade. They joke about it a lot now, but weird dating experiment aside she was one of the few people Baekhyun was really comfortable around, even though they didn’t talk as often now as they used to.

“Oh, that’s cute!” Amber says, plucking the bear out of Baekhyun’s hands to examine it closely. “Now you can cuddle it and stuff in your sleep while you dream about your secret admirer.”

“You wish,” Baekhyun snatches the bear back, embarrassed.

“Hey man, careful, the thing’s gonna fall out.”

Baekhyun blinks. “The what?”

“The thing,” Amber says again, pointing to the back of the bear, and Baekhyun turns it over in his grasp to find that there’s another note taped to the back of it. He carefully dislodges the clear tape from the bear’s soft fur, choosing to put aside the fact that Amber was hovering in to read it as well, and unfolds the slip of paper before reading the tiny font.

Hopefully something that’ll last a bit longer.

So that you can look at it and remember me.

Auditorium, 12:00. Come alone.

M

Well, now Baekhyun knew why he enjoyed the teddy bear so much.

 “Oooooh, romantic,” Amber says, wiggling her fingers and her eyebrows at Baekhyun. “So are you gonna go?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Baekhyun mumbles, ducking his head so as to not give Amber the satisfaction of seeing his face turn red.

“Oh man, you totally have to tell me all the deets once you come back out of there.”

“You don’t think it sounds dangerous?” Baekhyun scrunches his nose up. “What if he like, jumps me?”

“I heard you’ve got a pretty good voice. Just scream really loudly and someone will hear you,” Amber suggests.

“Wow. That was fantastic advice, really, thank you.”

“Hey, that’s what I’m here for.”

Baekhyun ends up standing in front of the auditorium doors twenty minutes early, and the time is entirely spent internally debating whether or not to actually step through the doors. He can’t decide between running off, in case this whole thing was one giant ruse, or going inside in the event that someone was truly and legitimately asking him to prom, and the closer it gets to twelve o’clock the more he begins to panic because he still doesn’t know what to do.

That is, until someone claps him hard on the back around two minutes before noon hits.

“Dude, you look really sweaty.”

Baekhyun whirls around as soon as he recognizes the voice. “You—!”

“Don’t kill me,” Dongjun says quickly, raising his hands up in defense. “C’mon, you’re not actually mad at me for not telling you who it is, are you?”

“Yes,” Baekhyun hisses. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Uh, again, because it’s supposed to be a surprise. And you’re going to find out in about thirty seconds anyway,” Dongjun says, pushing him towards the doors.

“Wait, the instructions said to come in alone—”

“Yeah, but my instructions were to ensure that you showed up and didn’t chicken out last minute.” Dongjun pulls the door open. “Come on.”

All of the fire leaves Baekhyun’s throat and he swallows, instantly getting cold feet. “I-I don’t know...”

“Give it a chance,” Dongjun says seriously. “I know you, man. You’re going to regret it for a long, long time if you don’t.”

Baekhyun takes a deep, shuddering breath, and this time when Dongjun pushes him he stiffly allows himself to be guided past the doors, where there were only a few sets of very dim lights on inside. Dongjun keeps shoving him—because Baekhyun’s likely to stay frozen in his position at this point—until they’re moving up the stairs and then standing in the middle of the auditorium, looking down at the dark, unlit stage before them.

“A little further,” Dongjun says in a low voice, giving Baekhyun one last gentle push. Baekhyun’s kneecaps feel like they’ve been turned to jelly at this point, but he finds himself numbly moving forward, his feet stepping one after the other of their own accord, and he stops about thirty feet away from the stage, afraid to draw any closer.

Then there’s about five seconds of heart-pounding silence.

The sound of the guitar flows into the air so smoothly that Baekhyun doesn’t even flinch when he hears it, as high-strung as he is right now. He can hear—can sense, really—that the sound was coming from center stage, but none of the lights are turning on, so he just stands there and stares into the blackness as the guitar keeps on playing for another ten seconds or so.

And then someone starts singing. Admittedly, Baekhyun doesn’t recognize the tune, but it’s a slow, sweet song with lyrics that have his cheeks burning in the dark. More than that, though, the voice is amazing, a low timbre that manages to hit all of the higher notes anyway, with notable effort and obvious practise after hours spent rehearsing. And for the life of him Baekhyun, despite being positive that he was certain he knew this voice, simply could not put it to a face, so that he’s left with his mouth hanging open a bit and his face scrunched into a combination of confusion and concentration as the mysterious voice serenades him in the dark.

So he waits, soaking up the lyrics and the chords blending perfectly into one another with his heart thumping in his spot because honestly speaking he might just be falling in love a little with a voice, and he waits, sweaty palms tightly clenched to keep them from shaking at his sides, and waits.

And just as the song comes to an end, the stage lights fade in.

Baekhyun’s jaw drops.

Because sitting on a high stool center stage, guitar in his arms and sheepish expression on his face, is Park Chanyeol.

Oh my god.

“Sorry my range was a little too low for that song,” Chanyeol apologizes, standing up. “But I thought the lyrics did a good job conveying the right message.”

Park Chanyeol was his secret admirer.

Park Chanyeol had been the one who had sent him the flowers and the cake and the teddy bear and decorated his locker and left him notes.

Park Chanyeol has just serenaded a love song to him with a guitar to boot.

Park Chanyeol was asking him to prom.

“It’s, um, not exactly about prom, but...” Chanyeol hops down from the stage, setting his guitar aside and stuffing his hands in his pockets as he slowly approaches Baekhyun. “Well. Anyways. I thought it’d be better to do it here, you know, in private, so that people wouldn’t be watching. I didn’t want you to feel pressured into saying yes.”

This isn’t happening.

This can’t be happening.

There is no way in hell that this is happening right now.

“And, well, yeah.” Chanyeol stops a few feet short of him and clears his throat, giving him a shy smile. “So. Would you...want to go to prom with me?”

Baekhyun, for all that he was worth, can only stare dumbfounded and utterly speechless, standing there with his mouth hanging wide open and not even thinking about how stupidly he probably looked right now.

“Unless, you know, you wanted to give it some thought or—”

“No,” Baekhyun blurts out.

“What?” Chanyeol says, taken aback.

“WHAT?” Dongjun screams into the PA system from the back of the auditorium, where he’d been the one to turn the stage lights on in the control room.

Baekhyun practically starts hyperventilating, and the first two excuses that jump to the forefront of his mind—“I need to take a piss” and “I gotta go talk with my teacher”—crash-collide and morph into one very intelligent “I need to take a piss with my teacher” before he promptly bolts and makes a break for the doors, too absorbed in creating as much distance between him and Chanyeol as possible to hear Dongjun calling his name after snapping out of his own stunned stupor and chasing after him.

Baekhyun praises whatever higher power that’s watching over him for the fact that he manages to make it all the way back outside the auditorium without tripping over his uncoordinated feet.

“I can’t believe you actually ran straight out of the school.”

“Shut the up,” Baekhyun responds agitatedly, furiously mashing the buttons on his controller. “God, I cannot believe that just happened. I probably looked like such an idiot. How the hell am I supposed to go to school tomorrow? How am I supposed to live?”

“I’m a little more interested as to why you turned Chanyeol down.”

Baekhyun looks over his shoulder towards where Dongjun was seated on the couch. (He, on the other hand, was sitting on Dongjun’s apartment floor with his back leaning against the sofa.) “You can’t be serious,” Baekhyun deadpans.

“I am. Chanyeol’s a really cool guy, he seems like he’d be an awesome prom date. Hell, even I wouldn’t mind going to prom with him.”

“Okay, let me just go over the situation here for a minute. One, I have never, not once, heard anything about Chanyeol being interested in dudes. Two, he’s actually cool, like you said, and I am about as cool as a speck in the drywall. And three, we literally never talk. Why the hell would he ask me for?”

“Hey, you never know, man. Maybe he’s hoping that this will be an opportunity to get to know you better.”

“I still don’t like this. It doesn’t feel right. You see the people he hangs out with, what if it was just a prank or a dare that his friends cooked up?”

“Hey, c’mon, give the guy some credit, Chanyeol would never agree to pull a douche move like that—”

“And besides, there are social implications that come with getting a prom date from the same school. Word of me bringing a guy as my date from another school would’ve just passed without any commotion, but bringing Park Chanyeol is a whole new level of stirring up trouble. It defies the social order. People will be wondering why he didn’t ask someone more popular—or, if it was going to be someone on my level, why it had to be me, of all people.”

“I really think you’re overthinking this—”

“People are going to look at me, Dongjun. They’re going to start watching me to try and find out what’s so special about me that makes Park Chanyeol want to ask me to prom. Or worse, they’re going to start talking to me.”

“Baekhyun!” Dongjun snaps, and Baekhyun immediately falls silent, stunned at the sudden sharp tone coming from someone who was usually so laid back.

“You’re not even gonna see any of these people once you graduate anyway, so what difference does it make?” Dongjun asks, frowning. “Give the guy a chance.”

“Graduation is a whole two and a half months away, thank you very much, and I’m trying to make these last few days in this hellhole as painless as possible. Accepting Park Chanyeol as my prom date is not going to aid that cause.”

Dongjun sighs in frustration. “Will you stop being so prejudiced for just one second?”

Baekhyun can’t speak for a good four seconds, totally unprepared for the sudden accusation that had just been ed upon him. “I’m not—”

“No, listen to yourself. Not one reason that you’ve listed so far for turning Chanyeol down actually had anything to do with disliking him as a person. You don’t like being the center of attention, I get that. It can be scary wondering what people think of you once you are. But you’re obsessed. You don’t even talk to the majority of the school population and yet you turned Chanyeol down because you’re afraid of how they’re going to react. Well in case you’ve forgotten, they don’t matter. They never did, and they’re not going to anytime soon. The only thing that matters, in this whole situation, is that Park Chanyeol genuinely likes you and wants you as his prom date. That’s it. That’s the whole reason why he sang to you in the auditorium, where no one else would be watching. He doesn’t care about everyone else’s reactions. He didn’t do it for them. You think he’s just another one of them but he’s not. The only reaction that had ever mattered to him was yours.”

Baekhyun sits there, looking up wide-eyed at a huffing Dongjun and rendered completely speechless for the second time that day, because there wasn’t a single thing that Dongjun had said that hadn’t been true. He realized for the first time that he really hadn’t turned Chanyeol down because he didn’t like him. And that wasn’t fair to Chanyeol. And now he just feels like a shallow, self-absorbed .

“I,” Baekhyun finally breathes out, “.”

“I want a deluxe party-sized pizza tonight for still putting up with you, asswipe,” Dongjun spits.

“I think I need to kiss your feet or something.”

“Ew, please don’t. I wouldn’t kiss my own feet.”

“I,” Baekhyun shoots up from the floor, “I think I need to go?”

“Good. Although if you just meant to the bathroom then I don’t need a play-by-play every time you need to take a piss.”

“Christ, I think I need a pizza for still putting up with you.”

The door opens, and the person behind it immediately twists their expression into one of shock. “What are you do—”

“I lied,” Baekhyun pants, leaning with one hand on the doorway.

“What?”

“I lied. No, wait, that’s not right. Kind of. Look, I’ve just been really confused lately and this is all probably because I always stand in front of the microwave when I’m waiting for food to warm up, but putting missing brain cells aside I’m a coward and I don’t know how to express myself properly and I’m really awkward too and I just—” Baekhyun stops, his rant reaching the point where it was almost incoherent, and takes a deep breath. “I just, I was wondering...why. Why me.”

Chanyeol stares at him for a bit, long enough for Baekhyun to want to take a few step backwards and slowly phase into the wall behind him, but then Chanyeol opens the door the rest of the way and leans against the side of the doorframe opposite Baekhyun.

“Maybe I should’ve said this from the beginning,” Chanyeol admits. “I mean, I figured you’d be pretty surprised, since we don’t talk very much. But there’s not much to it, really. You’re usually pretty quiet, but I’ve seen the way you laugh and joke around with people you’re close with and you seem like a genuinely nice person. But you’ve always been really withdrawn with everyone else and I didn’t know how to approach you. And now high school’s ending and everything and I realized...well, I’d kind of regret not giving it a shot. So I did.”

“O-Oh,” Baekhyun says, his voice coming out in an embarrassingly high pitch. He clears his throat. “So, you...asked because you want to be friends with me?”

“Well, that and because I think you’re cute,” Chanyeol grins. “I like the way your eyes disappear when you smile. And you have really nice hands. I always stare whenever you start twirling a pen in class.”

Aaaaaand there goes the last of Baekhyun’s functioning brain cells. “Oh,” Baekhyun squeaks again, feeling his face turn bright red.

“So, um...” Chanyeol scratches the back of his neck bashfully. “What does that make all of this, now? I mean...is your answer...”

Park Chanyeol thinks he’s cute.

Park Chanyeol likes his eye-smile.

Park Chanyeol thinks he has nice hands.

And although there was a teeny part of Baekhyun that was still the slightest bit skeptical over all this, Park Chanyeol was also funny, and nice, and so crazy attractive up close that Baekhyun thinks he might just faint.

Not quite a crush, but he thinks it’s a worth a shot.

And high school was almost over anyway.

“Yes,” Baekhyun says.

Chanyeol stares. “Yes your answer is the same, or yes you changed your mind?”

“Yes, I’ll go to prom with you,” and Baekhyun can’t believe he had worked up enough nerve to get those seven words out.

“Really?” Chanyeol says, perking up a bit, and it reminds Baekhyun of a puppy.

“Yeah,” Baekhyun blushes, and he coughs in an attempt to shake off the girly falsetto that his voice keeps putting on. Smooth, Baekhyun.

“Okay, good, because I forgot to bring this with me earlier today,” and Chanyeol reaches behind the door momentarily before presenting something to Baekhyun.

Baekhyun blinks at the helium-filled balloon tethered to a piece of silver ribbon currently grasped in Chanyeol’s hand, and he takes it while staring at its question-mark shape a little more.

“I figured it needed a question mark on the end, since the stuff would just be spelling ‘prom’ otherwise,” Chanyeol says.

Oh.

Oh.

The letters.

Well, now Baekhyun feels like a total idiot.

He coughs again. “Thanks for all that stuff, by the way,” Baekhyun says, scuffing at the hallway carpet with his shoe in embarrassment. “It was really nice.”

“You sounded kind of unimpressed with the flowers, though,” Chanyeol chuckles.

“No, really, I liked them. The teddy bear was the best one,” Baekhyun replies and immediately wants to bash his head against the doorframe because wow Byun Baekhyun likes his stuffed animals that’s sure to score some points in the manly man section of his personality.

“Good,” Chanyeol says in relief. “It kind of reminded me of you, a little.”

“Small?”

“No, cute.”

Baekhyun’s face feels like it’s going to catch fire at this rate. This is going to take some getting used to.

a/n 

if anyone was curious what the song was listen to jason mraz's "i'll do anything" (acoustic version)

for those of you know baekyeol from c&w you can fill in the rest of the blanks here lol just picture prom going really well and them confessing at their graduation ceremony and lots of summer dates yay

cameos:

Dongjun - Dongjun of Z:EA

Hyuna - HyunA of 4minute

Yukwon - U-Kwon of Block B

Junghwan - Sandeul of B1A4

Sohee - Sohee of Wonder Girls

Amber - Amber of f(x)

they're all the same age so yeah

edited 18/07/2013 wow i need a beta reader