warned: vulgarities and profanities present in crude mannerisms. stereotyping at its best. (jock)

whimsical description not entirely relevant. mention of physical abuse. hope you'll enjoy it! :_)

“Have you seen Wonwoo?”

The sole breadwinner of the Kim household stood leaning against Mingyu’s door with laundry in hand. Mingyu looked up from his planner and shook his head.

“Have you seen him at all? You met up with him today, didn’t you?”

Mingyu shrugged his shoulders and feigned ignorance.

His mother raised a single eyebrow in return. “Huh. Did you guys fight again?”

Another silent shrug and lack of acknowledgement.

Mingyu’s mother sighed. “Make up soon, then. His mother says he’s not home yet.”

Mingyu rolled his eyes. “C’mon, it’s not like Wonwoo’s twelve, and it’s only half past eleven.”

His mother shook her head and picked up the scattered clothes on the floor. “Go look for him or something.”

She closed the door behind her, mumbling an incoherent sentence about hormonal teenagers.

After the door was shut, Mingyu made sure the lights were switched off. From where he sat on his bed of a mattress, he eyed his sweater hung on the coat stand. Even in summer, for Mingyu, who was prone to flu and suffered from the slightest bit of cold, temperature dipped slightly at night. Mingyu listened intently to his mother’s activities outside the door, and eventually, after she had turned in for the night, he stood up.

He dressed himself in the sweater and kicked on a pair of sneakers. He shoved the sliding window open harshly, hopped on safely to lower ground and walked briskly away from the dimly lit house.

He felt the dread drain into his fingertips and suddenly he wasn’t entirely certain if he wanted to go at all. Still, his pace maintained, and soon he boarded the bus to the place he never told Wonwoo about. In truth, though, he had never been one to tell Wonwoo about his many secrets despite their status of friendship.

Wonwoo had always stuck to him so close that whatever secrets Mingyu kept were revealed in a matter of time.

However, Wonwoo and Mingyu stood as polar opposites at school, the latter tending to delve into more austere situations like physical fights that led to occasional suspension while the former tending to stop them and negotiate.

So even as their relationship deepened, there was a borderline Wonwoo could never have passed. As Mingyu grew, physically and mentally, there was an aspect of his life Wonwoo didn’t and could never share.

Soon, Mingyu trudged down the cobblestone steps that led to a small, decrepit edifice. It was no more of a building than jagged blocks of cement and stone put together to form a roofless room. The trees guarded the edifice in maternal protection, the boscage concealing all visible parts of the concrete walls and made it difficult for others to discover the hideout.

From the tall rectangular space that allowed air circulation within the room and acted as a door, Mingyu carefully entered and began to walk toward a pair of unstable, emotionally sentimental voices.

As he approached, the voices increased in volume, more clarion, sturdy. They rang in his head and reminded him why he was reluctant to come in the first place. The acrid tang of beer and smoke - a smell that accompanied their presence like a lackey to a boss - was both hospitable and off-putting.

“Hey, look who’s finally here. After, what, forty minutes? What took you so long, Minwoo?”

Mingyu rolled his eyes and sat cross-legged next to Seungcheol, whom was patently intoxicated, evident by his inability to even recollect his best friend’s actual name and had a starry van-gogh look in his eye.

“I keep telling you, Seungcheol, your best friend’s name is Minghao.”

Erupting laughter from aside, Mingyu scowled at yet another victim of alcohol intoxication, Soonyoung, who held a green glass bottle -half full- like he held a torch that shone in Mingyu’s face.

There was a slur in both speeches, tone and pronunciation alike tremulous, words dragged and pulled on like some tried to savour smoke by inhaling deeply and exhaling long after holding their breath.

Seungcheol snickered and shrugged his shoulders. He took another swig from a bottle and threw it haphazardly in Soonyoung’s face which barely missed. “Minhyuk isn’t my best friend, you in’ idiot, he’s Wonwoo’s. They’re completely in love.”

The duo howled at the innuendo despite the lack of humour and clapped their hands delightedly. Mingyu shook his head and grabbed an unopened bottle. He stole glances at the two older hyungs, cachinnating at their own humourless joke, and debated worriedly about leaving them here to die later in the dusk.

The room, or the space cordoned off by four deconstructing walls, was lit by the stars, the streetlamps nearby, and the gigantic torch Seungcheol brought from his house.

The space was a sloppy, perfunctory effort in constructing a house and was a mere displacement of concrete and tiles above the ground. From previous meetings, various beer cans and newspapers were dispersed around, the torch hung and dangled from the unfinished curtain rail of the unfinished house.

“We’re not in love.” Mingyu deadpanned. He sat leaning against the dusty wall and kept the alcohol in his mouth without swallowing.

The duo beside him were unfazed by the disinterest their friend was showing and continued to giggle or make irrelevant jokes about . Seungcheol discarded his fourth bottle with a flick of his hand and leaned into Mingyu, who looked only at the ground as he swirled the liquid in his mouth.

“Oh?” He used his index finger to poke Mingyu in the cheek. “Someone is in a bad mood.”

Seungcheol’s misuse of an intentionally mocking, high-pitched tone ticked Mingyu off more than he imagined and he swatted Seungcheol’s hand away with a click of the tongue.

Seungcheol pouted and Soonyoung laughed. “Forget it, Seungcheol. He hates us, and he hates your aegyo even more.”

The former of the pair put his arm around Mingyu in a cautious attempt to comfort, which Mingyu thought was quite nice of the older to do. “Did you guys fight again? He didn’t call you a lousy, pompous, egotistical jock with a the size of a finger again, did he?”

Mingyu took that back.

The two convulsed in a fit of laughter while Mingyu felt a sudden urge to slap them both.

“I mean, you never bring him around. It’s as if you don’t want him to know about us.”

Mingyu threw the requested goods of convenient store confectionery atop of Soonyoung’s stomach, who had then laid on the floor like a starfish. He snorted, “I’d be embarrassed to let him meet the two of you.”
Seungcheol and Soonyoung flamboyantly feigned distress and they fumbled through the packaged breads Mingyu had bought for them earlier in the evening.

Whilst the drunk duo ate and concurrently thanked Mingyu for ‘his holy kindness’, the ash scattered round discarded cigarettes that numbered to six or seven became susurrant in the night wind, and Mingyu sighed. “I think Wonwoo confessed to me.”

“What the ?”

Mingyu collected the plastic wrappers his intoxicated hyungs left to pollute the lands calmly. “I know.”

Seungcheol nudged Soonyoung, who had begun clinking empty bottles together with varied amounts of strength to test sound. “Mingsoo isn’t even that hot, right?”

Soonyoung smirked. He lined the glass bottles on the ground neatly and hummed. “Hm, sure. Minsoo's hot, but not so much. Wonwoo’s now officially in the portion of human beings whom we don’t understand see exactly what in Mingsoo. Mingsoo ah, remember that time you dumped a girl in front of the school dumpster?”

Seungcheol gasped. “What? Minwoo, you bastard. How are you so mean?”

Mingyu straightened his back in exasperation. “It was the only place other people wouldn’t find us! You know I hate it when other people watch.”
“Whatever.”

Mingyu continued to look down at his hands. “But don’t you think it’s weird?”

“What is?” Soonyoung the cream off his fingers from the last few breads.

“Y’know, two men… I don’t know, going out?”

Seungcheol laughed and Soonyoung dabbed cream on his face. “What, two men dating? Kissing? Hugging? Having ? That’s called takin’ it in the , by the way. Seungcheol has experience!”

“Shut the up Soonyoung; I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Remember, that short, pink hair guy in Mingyu’s cla-”

“Shut up, Soonyoung, I barely even talked to him!”
“Yeah, but you called him cute and-”
“That’s not called taking it in the , you er.”

“Oh. Sorry, Mingsoo, I meant that Seungcheol wants to have experien-”

“Shut up, Soonyoung, I’m gonna hit your face.”

“Oh, someone wants to fight.”

Mingyu groaned. “No fighting, I’m not going to tend to all your wounds one by one again.”

Seungcheol glared at Soonyoung and Mingyu chirped again, “if you fight, I’m leaving y’all here to bleed to death.”

“I don’t see how it’s weird, though. The only difference is that both of you have , is all.”

“Yeah. I mean, he already confessed. If you like him, then just go for it.”

Mingyu thought back to when he and Wonwoo sat by the bench at the cliff about a year ago, in summer. It had been eventide. They had both just gone for a swim, then high and ebullient from ecstasy, skin colder than typical body temperature in summer. They waited to dry, pulled on the clothes they’d worn, raced to the convenient store, bought to-go sandwiches for dinner, and sat on the wooden table watching the colour gradient of the sky and offing.

He recalled the opalescent look in his best friend’s eyes; the shimmer at the very corner of his pupil, the slight gap between his upper and lower lip, the warmth radiating from his right hand placed delicately on his thigh, the odd angle at which he leaned into him. Mingyu had thought it was slightly odd, the way Wonwoo looked away and cleared his throat after seconds of that position they were in.

He thought it was odd that Wonwoo had a pink tint to his normally pale cheeks, or that his hands were clutching the plastic bottle of water tightly till they crun