With time Luhan became a regular member of the kitchen, the first and probably only person not thoroughly analyzed, torn apart, and executed with Sehun’s harrowing criticism. Not to anyone’s surprise he is also the only one who the master seeks advice from, even if it’s strange that someone with almost no professional culinary training is allowed to be anywhere near Sehun’s enthusiastic habits.

When Jongdae brings up how strange it is that Sehun even added extra hours in lately, working well into the deep night, Xiumin simply shrugs and explains that Sehun has probably always wanted to include the extra hours of work.

“Knowing Sehun, he probably just didn’t know what to work on exactly, since all anyone ever tells him is that he’s impeccably flawless. And now he does.”

“Still weird,” Jongdae quips.


Xiumin can’t really help but agree. Then again, it’s not like Sehun would be hitting on Luhan, since it’s clear that the blossom-faced man has a boyfriend. After all, every time Sehun tells him to bring a batch home, he always comments on how much Yixing would appreciate them.

“Plus, Luhan knows Sehun well enough. You can worship or hate him, but you can’t really love him. Can’t love someone who doesn’t comprehend want and need.”

--

Amongst the many things Luhan lends Sehun—his slim t-shirts when Sehun comes to sleep over on his couch and dig through piles and piles of his old pictures in continual interest; words of advice about getting along with the kitchen staff; bits and pieces of himself when they come in with the crisp winter season breathing down their necks—of utmost importance is camaraderie, probably. It’s remarkable what companionship does to a person; away with the winter frost thaws Sehun’s blank stares and sudden outbursts. He’s almost approachable now. The café displays are filled with depravedly vibrant chocolate sculptures and the critics call it a new era in confectionary design.

“I would like to think that I really like you. You’re nice, and neat, and your eyes are really something,” Sehun confesses one night, shouting over the loud roar of fire and crackling oil as Luhan dumps a multiple of components from the fridge into a wok. A recipe for disaster, probably.

“I’m probably the only person you’ve ever tried to like, Sehun,” Luhan hollers back. His voice booms a little too blaringly within the tiny bachelor’s studio. Though small, with creaking floorboards and thick windows that can’t compare to Sehun’s penthouse of white tiles and glass walls, it’s neat and organized by deviant fingers that the younger finds hilarious.

Sehun chews on his thumb from time to time, sinking into the armchair that Luhan always takes up, and picks up a little of the scent of his fabric softener,

“Why were you named Sehun? It isn’t exactly a name heard commonly in Paris.”

“Same goes for you, Fine China,” Sehun chuckles almost inaudibly before continuing. “It has an exquisite stratosphere to it, a combination of modesty and the firm consonants,” He responds, and it’s only quarter a lie because Sehun isn’t about all that’s mentioned; neither the modesty nor the firm consonants; it’s about ductile deformity and distractions. An exercise in hiding his soul because underneath the entire craze there is nothing. Chocolate not so much an art but an illusion for the empty mousse center.

“I find your name quite admirable now. It sounds natural by knowing the meaning,” Luhan smiles in secrecy as he brings a plate of muggy-looking pasta with moist vegetables out of the kitchen, sets it by Sehun’s foot with two pairs of chopsticks and flips on the television within minutes.

“What is this?” Sehun’s face glowers in disgust, gaze flickering uncertainly over the meal as if detecting for toxicity.

Luhan notices his hesitation and scoffs half-heartedly, attention mostly directed to the new documentary episode, “Chicken Cordon Bleu pasta.”

“I will order simple pizza,” Sehun designates without sparing another second, and Luhan immediately drags him back into the chair with a hand gripped around his wrist. If he weren’t staring so focally at the entertainment medium, he would have noticed the alarmed flush over Sehun’s cheeks.

“Try it,” he mutters quietly.

Sehun does, and when he declares how shockingly average it tastes, Luhan merely chuckles and flips off the station, “I cook with happiness and joy.”

“So do I.”

“No, you cook with dignity and expectations.”

--

“You should ask your customers for opinions,” Luhan suggests, a few weeks later on a Friday night. The bistro has become a distillation of nothing but emptiness on nights like these, bloated occasionally by the bangs of cookware, “The other bistros seem to do that, like they have customer favorites and stuff, and weekly specials…”

The lights are off and Sehun works hastily through the moonlight, soft acapella that Luhan brought him streamed through the speakers behind, coursing in and out of the argent rays. Occasionally Sehun has a languid swing, as if pacing down to savor the moment, such as now, “Because they don’t have an idea of which pastries taste good until you display it to them. Additionally, you cannot do advancements on art; what a sweeping insensitivity.”

“I guessed, but why do you talk like that?” Luhan pipes up, rather abruptly, and mocks Sehun’s medium-ranged voice to make a point, “what sweeping in-sen-si-ti-vi-ty. Like a book. You talk like Google translator.”

Sehun pulls his hands out of oven mittens and leans back on the glass wall, almost solemn, “I don’t know, I don’t talk to people a lot.”

“I can tell. You talk to macaroons, don’t you?” Luhan mutters under his breath, and if it isn’t for that wide grin on his lips and the shimmering glitter in his eye, Sehun would have probably tossed a mitten at his face.

Instead Sehun holds back and yields a small, convenience-store chocolate bar from his pocket. The wrapper slightly wrinkled and opens to a half-melted, sloppy mess, which Sehun shoves into Luhan’s bewildered face, “Have a bite of this.”

“Mm,” Luhan nods, swallowing back with a sip of mineral water.

“Well? What do you think it tastes like?”

After a light cough, Luhan responds, “Tastes like amour to me,” though the words are sheared off as soon as his simper bursts into an open-mouthed laugh that breaks across the silence under the glass cupola, as easily as it had that night in Sehun’s condominium.

Sehun doesn’t share his joy, however, only judging from afar and returning back to his work before sputtering a small set of words, “You’re a freak.”

“And you’re speaking quite normally,” Luhan adds in. To his delight Sehun turns back to glower at him with a twinkle of a radiant beam, and maybe Luhan’s heart skips a few beats, “And, you are in love with chocolate.”

“What about you?”

The silence is incommodious. Luhan’s response only makes it spoiled, “Yixing.”

--

“I don’t think you’re there yet,” Luhan mumbles with bitter spring winds snapping at his scalp and gushing into his face. Sehun offered to take him out for a spin on his contrast vehicle, but it feels something more like car race than anything. Peeling down the high ways reckless and angry. Striving to prove that there is no dead-end in this path by sailing off of cliffs. “I think you’re missing a lot of things. I think you’re wonderful but you—you need—you need emotions.”

“Emotions,” Sehun echoes ambiguously. Gun ’N’ Roses bursts from the radio station and curls up between them, but a temporary existence whipped away instantly by the wind.

“Like a passion for something—other than chocolate and macaroons, I mean—like love, maybe. Loving someone, maybe—?”

“I love perfection,” Kai responds inwardly, swerving around a corner and Luhan hisses quietly when his neck cracks from the piercing turns. He thinks that Sehun is a little like this. All pointed turns and impulses, blunt thoughts circulating his cloudy mind. He’s as much an exquisite creator as a destroyer of perfection, and when the day comes that he runs out of things to demolish, he may as well put it upon himself. Feed his limbs, tainted heart and soul to a suicidal concept because no matter the brilliance he contains, at the end of the day Sehun isn’t perfect. At the end of the day there will always be a dead end. A dead end to someday realise that perfection never existed.

“No that’s not what I’m trying to say…”

“That’s the only possible way,” Sehun decides, and his shaded pupils latched onto Luhan’s own.

But Luhan says nothing. Sehun has always been like this from the very beginning: searching for a nonexistent essence and falling, apart.

--

“Doesn’t loving someone that won’t love you back—someone that you can’t even grasp—hurt?”

“Isn’t that the definition of love? After each alternative bite, everything slowly begins to feel like agony.”

--

As the year passes, Sehun begins spending endless nights in the kitchen, waking up to work through another day and experiment through another night on a daily basis. Eroding notebooks are thrown away because there is never enough time for all his wondrous ideas. He pulls proportions and new spices out of thin air and sheer brilliance, back-wheeling for an end that no one can quite understand and defining, redefining, scratching, perfecting, representing perfection.

Sometimes Luhan comes in to visit him during the nights, lurking along the glass walls to surprise him with a home-cooked meal or a new music album. After spending so many hours with Sehun, the kitchen has become something like a second home to the elder and he’s tasted various confections that it wouldn’t be a surprise if what runs through his veins is chocolate instead of blood.

“What are you trying to make?” Luhan asks out of curiosity, when Sehun is stooped over the counter once again, the other going on his toes to tip over Sehun’s shoulders even if it doesn’t work.

“The Luhan macaroon,” Sehun replies, jotting a series of numbers down in his pocket notebook.

“Very funny, Sehun.”

“Close your eyes and open your mouth,” Sehun orders straightforwardly. Luhan obeys like always, not without a little doubt at first.

A cogent pause, before something smooth and crisp meets his tongue. Luhan chokes back a startled cackle, “This is…the chicken pasta—”

Sehun cuts him off suddenly, “No, happiness and joy.”

Luhan opens his eyes midway, but Sehun cups one hand over them and scrams him back into the obscurity. Something softer and warmer touch his tongue this time, overpowered with pure saccharine with a little familiar grease, “Isn’t this from—”

“It tastes like love. Convenience-store chocolate, street lights, convenience-store romance by the cigarette counter,” Sehun reminds him. Luhan remembered the melted chocolate bars and Sehun with oversized green mittens and last Friday night. He begins to comment and that is when Sehun feeds him the very last fraction. Supple, cool, wet, a hint of cigarette smoke and cocoa powder and lithic and exigency, a whole lot of bitter and a veil of sugar and Sehun. Sehun. It’s obviously Sehun.

He tasted Sehun.

“What about this one?” Sehun questions, when he removes his hands from Kyungsoo’s face and neck, instead trapping him between his legs. Knees bumping. Heavy atmosphere. Cloaked pupils.

Luhan is slow on tempo, so Sehun answers for him, “Like an addiction. You taste like an addiction.”

He may have orbited his body around, said something about the need to go home and the fact that this is utterly bad, but it may have been wavered by a few audible moans, the shuffling of feet and dazed glances through thick lashes, hands firmly grasping onto waists and lips to the back of the nape district. Something sharp slices into his faint palm. Paper cut from the modern notebook.

“No, Sehun listen, this won’t work,” Luhan mutters quickly, a little fastidious with Sehun’s hot breath running down his neck and chest tight against his back.

Sehun traces a coiling line from his elbow to the cut on his palm, with something of an artistic caprice, before picking up the elder’s hand and pressing the plane of his wet muscle to it, “It will. It will. You’re perfect, Luhan.”

And maybe the thick sensuality in Sehun’s eyes is highly contagious, because when he looks into them, everything paces down just enough for Sehun to remove his mouth from Luhan’s hand and replace it fully over his lips. Sehun’s hand molds his hips in the swiftest movements and he doesn’t remember turning back around but maybe he did. Noses bumping, fingers grasping, loosening, catching, falling. Palms clamping throats and teeth breaking flesh, blood smearing down the line of Sehun’s arm and thumbs probing brazened moans and soft gasps, flickering December gazes while releasing loud quivers and silent pleas.

It’s not exactly a kiss, by Luhan’s definition, because it’s too aggressive and urgent as Sehun is eating him alive with his hands and mouth along with an unfaltering gaze, leaving not enough space for him to refuse what follows.

Then again, no one refuses an artist when they’re sculpting you like this. Not into a romance, but into a masterpiece. Thoroughly modernize and inspected. The texture of his voice. The flavor of his skin, glistening with sweat, elements and streaks of white and the way he breaks, the ‘snap’ and the finishes on the palate. Rebuilt and reconstructed. Displayed in the great glass cupola.

--

The problem with Sehun is that unlike normal addicts, he doesn’t let obsession drag him through the dust. Instead he leaps to the wheel and drives the road kill to pieces, even if it costs him an arm or leg—or with Luhan, his sanity.

Muttering loudly about, “maybe it was too much, maybe too soon,” he paces up and down, in and out of the sacred kitchen. Trying to focus on the recipe on hand. Melt unsalted butter along with bitter cocoa. Add egg yolk. Make meringue by egg white and sugar. Mix. Freeze. Bake. Doesn’t ing work at all. Once again. Melt, whisk, freeze, bake, and become repetitive with the actions. Something is not quite in slot. Luhan.

It’s been two weeks since he’s last seen Luhan and things have been going downhill ever since. Luhan has always picked up his calls. Opened his door. Joined Sehun when he asked. What altered between them?

The world is all luminous but Luhan makes no sense. Luhan’s silence makes no sense. To Sehun, who only registers personalities as ingredients—good or bad, Luhan comes up as a complete blank. A whole lot of emotions and no conclusion. Only leading to frustration. Maybe the bad kind. Sehun makes comparisons to chocolate because, after all, that is the only thing he happens to understand. Maybe Luhan wasn’t properly melted, maybe he rushed the tempering. Maybe he was molding sand. Was Luhan defective?

So when Luhan finally calls back, Sehun drops everything—even a handful of sliced French hazelnuts—and horrifies himself doing it because how can anything possibly outweigh chocolate—but the thought doesn’t last because as soon as he hears Luhan’s voice on the other line, everything ends and something new starts.

“Hello?”

“Luhan—”

“Sehun. I, um,” Luhan stammered a bit, and it feels as if a tsunami begins to surge up to the back of Kai’s throat. The nausea of an immediate screw-up coming in slow-motion. He feels awfully like stabbing something with a tong, “I um, you know that—it’s just—I’ve been meaning to tell you… for a while… Yixing and I…”

Beat. Sehun grasps at the corners of his humane soul but nothing is left other than rescind skin and blood visible in nails.

“We’re engaged. We’re going to be engaged. The party is next weekend.”

What Sehun hears next are not distinct words or specific requests. He understands everything that Luhan has said about “Yixing really likes your truffles and I know it’s terrible of me—but it would be really special—he thought if we could ask for a—you know, um, something like an engagement assortment to hand out at the party and—honestly you don’t have to—I understand, I understand, I’ll just tell Yixing that you’re busy, this is just ridiculous of—I’m sorry because, I just, you just, are we okay? Are you okay?” But they’re now only shadows of something humongous.

Beyond Luhan’s little concerns and tremulous voices, Sehun feels the sparks of hope on his tongue. When the dust settles, what remains is no longer a fantasy. He hasn’t been this hysterical in a long time. His knees crack as he stands up, finger-pads brushing across the recipe book. Arcane lines of numbers and notations. Luhan has never been deficient. 

Sehun just hasn’t been looking the right way.

“No, we’re okay. We haven’t been better. I’ll make you the perfect batch.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll need your participation.”

Because Luhan is an ingredient. The most essential ingredient.

--

People define perfection as a ephemeral concept. It is something which simultaneously attracts and confronts its suitors. Perfection is the only unrealizable dream, because how can the lacking create something unlacking?

Sehun decides, as he showers Luhan in vodka and rum, pumps him full of bourbon and champagne, just about any fancy booze in particular; that it’s not about creation. Hunting perfection does not involve making incompletes out of a handful of nothings. It’s about using the accurate ingredient. The problem with chocolate isn’t the mind or the method, but the basic material used.

So he solves it by lighting a match and sparking Luhan’s lifeless eyes. In the depth of the night, everything combusts with the glow of dawn. From a little further down the street, it’s almost as if the glass cupola has swallowed the sun.

And his chocolate comes to life, with a whisper of humanity.

--

90g purée de chestnut chocolate, 110g 35% liquid cream, 40g glucose, 155g gianduja madirofolo, Tahiti vanilla berries, 150g couverture Ghana, 30g trimoline, 10g orange zest, 3 g lemon zest, and a pinch of Luhan makes the ideal ganache.

A pinch of Luhan to make the ideal everything.  

With the morning comes a crowd, gathered behind the glass surface to watch Sehun whisk the ganache and temper viscosity like once before, sculpt beauty into the refined chocolate. There is something mesmerizing, perhaps the way he whips his spatula to produce striking and unyielding contours, breaking identity into each batch. Fluidity blends into sharp patterns; mercury molds steel, smoke emancipates sand, romance dissolves horror.

And as dust storms of atomized Lorraine hazelnuts blow across layers of tepid praline over scotch over apple blend, Sehun’s movements only become faster, more brash, stunning and furious. So stunning and furious that no one notices the thick scent of something, not quite cinnamon or chai—maybe a little like meat, in the air.

--

“Have you ever heard of the finest authentic French meringues, Junmyun-sshi?” Sehun questions almost inaudibly, dark eyes glinting as he picks up a silvery piece with knobby, thin fingers, and sets it down on the plate before Yixing, “Because see, I’m in the contour of making the most finest chocolate and desserts in all of Paris. It’s a tough business, especially with heavenly chocolate mousse, since the problem stems from the compound —no exquisite dark chocolate equals no luxuriance whip cream which leads to, no topping, nor mousse—it’s nearly impossible to find one without vice.”

 “Um—”

“But all of these,” Sehun sweeps his arm over the meter-long arbor racked with varieties of mousse batter, “are made from the pure dark chocolate. And I’d like to share them with you. Don’t hesitate to try a sample.”

Yixing nods and says a expeditious ‘thank you’ before taking a bite. Immediately something between a frown and a confused smile surfaces upon his lips, “Um this is…”

“Is the taste of exigency,” Sehun grins in return, all plush lips and firm eyes as he takes a piece for himself. Chews. Swallows. Another. Another.

“Go on, help yourself.”

Even though he tries his best to hold his smile up, Yixing is trying not to gag and Sehun can tell by the tint of his cheeks. His voice trembles as he says, “No that’s okay, it’s, thank you, but I just—I have another appointment?”

Long after Yixing has left, puzzlement scribbled all over his countenance, Sehun can still be seen sitting in the exact same spot, savoring his ultimate masterpiece with all of the time in the world, because he has finally captured flawlessness.

Closing his eyes, Sehun thinks of the texture of Luhan’s voice. The flavor of his skin, glistening with sweat, elements and streaks of white and the way he breaks, the ‘snap’ and the finishes on the palate.

Perfect.

A/N: Thank you for reading my first-ever two-shot.
I almost scared myself writing this, haha. Till next time. ~

(Editing mode) xoxo.