No one believed me when I said he’d be coming. 

Why would they? He’d been exiled, isolated, humiliated, thrown out of their socialite circle like an old pair of shoes not worth repairing. He never was as good as any of the others— that’s what they said, at least. 

His secondhand suit, the watch always two seconds off, the eager smiles at new introductions. I might not have noticed, but they did, they always did. 

They all knew he wouldn’t last long, but they also said the same about me. 

But despite it all, he still came, the click of his heel cascaded like a demand for attention down the marble hall. His hair was dyed in a color so fitting, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself, and his suit too, was tailored like this was his last night at something so grand, no one else might ever understand. 

He was still different, though. And it wasn’t just the resolute gleam in his eye, the dark shift that was dripping like aged whiskey from the sharp shine of his smirk. No— he had evolved in something so potent I couldn’t move my eyes from him, as if he were the center and all lines led to him. Though I had felt that way for sometime. 

The others too, a zip to their parted lips fell upon them and slowly they set down their bottles of bubbling champagne and liquor over hand crafted ice. I had the thought that his mere appearance was like mocking them; a man once never given a second glance, caught in the hungry stares of hundreds. I wondered if they regretted it when they told him he was nothing?

But of course, even if some did, I knew one who never would. 

Jongin stood from his spot beside me. I could feel the heat, no, the hatred expounding from within him from the sight. He wasn’t steaming, he was exploding. In embarrassment from being beat? In anger from being disobeyed? Both possibly?— I couldn’t be sure, but I knew it wasn’t going to be good like I knew the taste of his fist in my face after a long day or his clenched jaw after I said something I wasn’t supposed to. 

“Byun Baekhyun,” Jongin drug out like a pint up warning, “I thought I had made myself very clear.” 

Baekhyun said nothing and it was then that I thought I envied him, among other things I felt for him. 

Jongin didn’t like that. “Or should I remind you of your place among us?” He finished, hands flexing to show the branded rings and jewelry he knew Baekhyun may never own before coming to land his palm on my shoulder. His embrace, if you could call it that, stung like a regretted love. 

Baekhyun’s eyes fell on me then. And for once, I felt like I could breath out all of the fear, the disappointment and rage and hurt and leftover feeling of being nothing to someone I tried to be everything to for way longer than I should have. 

Because when I looked at him, none of that mattered. He dissolved all of it with his forbidden gentle touches and sneaked whispers so sweet I couldn’t not give in, not when I would always remember the way he touched my soul more than the way he touched my body. 

He understood it all. 

Now, only feet apart, I longed for him more than ever. I could see it too, that look of something so purely Baekhyun building up in his eyes that I knew it was time. 

Time to stop letting go of what I really wanted. Time to trust him like he had been asking all along. 

Jongin was quickly losing whatever strand of himself he had been holding onto, his heavy glare falling between the two of us with a twisted up gut. He glugged down three gulps of an alcohol I never wanted to know the taste of before staggering from beside me and out into the open ballroom, closer to Baekhyun. 

“You have something to say to me,” he spoke like a door slamming open, “then say it.” 

So Baekhyun did. 

He said it in three words that would be the ending of Jongin, perhaps the ending for them all. 

And when he pulled the pistol from his pocket, the trigger clicking into place in one swift, sickeningly sweet sound, he knew they understood that too. 

“Eat the rich.”