Spin the Bottle 

So tired… Kyungsoo hangs his head and wrings his eyes as he turns the key in its latch. His fingers work slowly, made sluggish by the nigh on arctic mid-November air. The chill that’s settled suddenly on Seoul has cut short the day’s filming, and for the first time in Kyungsoo’s work-muddled memory he’s gotten an evening to himself. He inhales deeply the icy air, like a purgative allowing it to cleanse his lungs, his ovetaxed mind. This momentary interval between the bedlam of the streets and the chaos of their dorm is all the peace he could hope to obtain. Inside is surely life, with all its noises, sights and smells: Jongin will be sleeping, Sehun gaming or practicing his Mandarin, Chanyeol composing, Junmyeon preparing one of his special low-carb/high-protein meals, and Byun Baekhyun… Life. Dorm life. The very ordinary life of the extraordinary. He starts to twist the handle when the door abruptly flies open. Before him appears the hulking figure of his group-mate and principal provocateur, Park Chanyeol, his small face half-hidden by the long woollen scarf wrapped thickly round his neck.

“Oh, Kyungsoo-yah!” Chanyeol’s large elfish eyes widen further at the unexpected presence of his colleague and housemate. “Didn’t think you’d be back till midnight. Shoot go OK?”

“Mm,” Kyungsoo mutters as he limps into the heated house and likewise listlessly removes his parka. “Weather’s too bad, so they wrapped up early today. Going out?”

 “Mm. Sehunnie’s waiting for me at the gym.”

Fellowship of the Towers indeed. “I see, that’s good. Anyone home?” he enquires, nonplussed by the unusual stillness that’s greeted him.

“Baekhyunnie. Up in the studio, practicing. He starts recording for the Christmas album tomorrow morning.”

Had to be him, didn’t it. Expressionless despite his distaste, Kyungsoo nods his head in acknowledgment. “Train well.”

Chanyeol’s eyes taper impishly, his cheeks dimpling, though the grin that prompts their denting remains concealed behind the knitted wrap. “Ne, Hyung. Oh, wait, that’s me,” he jabs, as always lording his one and a half months’ seniority in age over Kyungsoo in full awareness of the younger man’s illogical  susceptibility to this particular provocation.

Kyungsoo says nothing, but glares at him so that his “hyung” promptly scurries out the house, as he leaves bowing and pleading repeatedly “Joesonghamnida…joesonghamnida…”

Good thing you’re tall – your one redeeming feature. Well, that and your face.

Now alone, he casts his gaze over the living space he’s shared with five of his eight group-mates for the past year and a half. The one they’d occupied from pre-debut to the release of their second mini-album he can scarce remember – the sights and sounds and smells produced by the quintuplet of raucous men, yes, but not the house itself. Smaller and plainer…but somehow more colourful, wasn’t it? He smiles nostalgically to himself, desirous of the days when their future was a promise they never thought to break. Hesitantly he peers up the stairs, teeth nibbling at the stubs of his fingernails as he weighs the worthwhileness of climbing them and entering the room at their end. Don’t. He’ll just annoy you – annoy you for the fun of it – and you’re tired enough as it is. Just take a warm shower and get some rest. The house practically to yourself: it won’t happen twice, don’t waste it on that idiot. A warm shower and rest. He bites his lips and takes the stairs.  

The door to the studio is slightly open; with careful fingers he widens the crack. His profile to Kyungsoo, Baekhyun stands at its centre, in his oddly delicate hands holding the music-sheets of their upcoming Christmas album’s title-track. He readjusts his headphones, closes his eyes, clears his throat and starts to sing. Kyungsoo’s brows knit reflexively at the sound, his heart condensing in his chest. Baekhyun’s uncommon tenor, the nuanced emotiveness of his delivery has always had this impact on Kyungsoo – susceptibility he resents. If only you could be this settled when the music stops, he reflects, marvelling at the air of elegance about the seven months older man. He has an interesting face – common but uncommon, masculine but feminine, expressive even when he’s expressionless. Memorable. Beautiful. He shifts self-consciously at the thought – one he shouldn’t have, one he’s done his utmost to repress these four and a half years of ofttimes strenuous cohabitation. And helping him along the way has been its very subject, with his ceaseless teasing that drives Kyungsoo half-mad. I’m grateful every day.

The elder hits a high-note and duly frowns at its shrillness. He clutches at his throat, swallows hard, shakes his head.

“Don’t do that,” Kyungsoo instructs, though he knows Baekhyun can’t hear him through the headset.

Reluctantly he walks up to Baekhyun and lightly taps his shoulder. Startled senseless, Baekhyun snaps round, his small eyes twice their normal size, then breaths out in a mixture of frustration and relief. “Yah, Do Kyungsoo, how many times have I asked you not to creep up on people?! You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

 “Sorry,” Kyungsoo says, pressing together his generous lips to keep from laughing.

Baekhyun’s expression promptly softens. “Weren’t you supposed to film till midnight?” he probes, but then answers his own question, “Must have been the weather. It’s good though, you could use the rest. You’ve been looking pale lately.”

“You’re one to talk,” Kyungsoo ripostes, bristling at the criticism.

The elder’s puckered mouth twists curiously up. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Well, I wouldn’t know, would I, when every other word you’ve ever said to me has been a jab.  “Don’t –“

“What?” Baekhyun interrupts in his habitual impatience.

You’re so annoying. Can’t you wait? “Don’t strain your voice like that on the high-notes; you should feel it in your diaphragm not your throat.”

“I know.” Baekhyun exhales in self-frustration. “But if I go too high it just happens involuntarily. It’s not that I run out of air, but the air alone isn’t enough to force out the sound. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“You just did,” Kyungsoo amends and sits himself on the edge of the office-table, too tired to continue standing. “It’s because you try to force it out that it ends up sounding harsh. It’s all in your head – you don’t believe you can hit those notes without straining, so you do and then you don’t. Here, take a deep breath and try again.”

With the sort of solemnity he reserves for work alone, Baekhyun nods, pulls back his shoulders, inhales profusely and retakes the note. Still strained. Exasperatedly he runs his fingers through his newly-tinted greyish-blue hair, clasps the nape of his slender neck. “Damn!”

Just stay where you are, Kyungsoo cautions himself. Fix it from here or don’t fix it at all, but stay where you are. He bites his lips and gets up from the table. “Here,” he says as he presses his hand against Baekhyun’s level abdomen and faintly flinches at the elder’s similar reaction to the contact. “This is where you should feel it. Now try again.” Baekhyun obeys, but to little avail.

Kyungsoo’s expression sours. “Byun Baekhyun, are you doing it on purpose?” he asks in a quiet voice underlined with menace.

Baekhyun’s eyes droop, his pouty lips jut further out, their twitching a betrayal of his culpability. “Why on purpose?” he protests, even to his own ears unconvincingly. “I’m the one who’s left with a sore throat if I don’t do it properly.”

And here I thought you were being serious for a change. Aren’t I the hopeless optimist? His tone unchanged, Kyungsoo reaffirms, “You are, aren’t you? You’re doing this on purpose just to see how long it takes for me to snap.”  

“Not snap, smile,” Baekhyun corrects, his face that singular blend of humour and candour that both incenses Kyungsoo and captivates him. "I like it when you smile."

“You tease me when I smile,” he counters, his indignation audible but only to himself. “You tease me when I smile, you tease me when I don’t, you tease me when I eat, when I sleep, when I breathe… The only time you don’t tease me is when I sing.”  

Baekhyun’s expression alters into one the likes of which Kyungsoo cannot recall ever having seen – a sort of tender wistfulness altogether disconcerting. “Don’t you know what little boys are like? When we like someone we tease them.”

Kyungsoo’s eyes, his mouth, his heart all gape at this revelation, at the intensity of the older man’s stare. He recalls a similar sensation now nearly five years in the past. The six of them had only just moved into their previous dorm and had decided to throw a housewarming party amongst themselves. It was the standard business for starving trainees – snacks and karaoke and silly party-games, one of them a six-round tournament of Spin the Bottle. Chanyeol spun it and it pointed to Baekhyun. He chose the challenge over the telling. True to his childish form, Chanyeol dared him to kiss on his mouth the member he liked best or found most attractive. After much protestation from their leader and double the persuasion from the rest, it was settled that the dare would be met or a forfeit paid. Broke as he was, Baekhyun coolly opted for the former. If anyone had told eighteen-year-old Do Kyungsoo that he would be the one chosen, when not one look, one smile ever given him by Byun Baekhyun had been of special favour, he would have surely laughed and walked away. But that precisely was what happened: Baekhyun walked up to him, took his face between his hands, and with a stare that would have cut through stone, let alone a man, drew his mouth to Kyungsoo’s to kiss. There could not have been two millimetres left between them when Baekhyun suddenly cried “Psych!”, and then kissed Sehun instead. That was the beginning of their tug-the-rope relationship and Byun Baekhyun has been tugging Do Kyungsoo’s rope with varying force ever since.

“You’re doing it again, aren’t you?” he accuses in a low, inflectionless voice, praying that his face matches it.

They stare at one another a full sixty seconds, Kyungsoo counts every one of them. He’ll do it now, he’ll smile that smile bright enough to blind a person, say psych! and walk away and leave me in the dark when he knows I’m short-sighted. Kyungsoo steels himself for the blow, but this time the axe falls short of his neck.

His eyes as still, as forceful as ever Kyungsoo has seen them, Baekhyun quietly asks, “What do you think? Does it feel like I’m teasing?”  

Mind over matter. You have a brain; don’t think with your heart. “I think I like it better when you tease,” Kyungsoo says with all the nonchalance he possesses and starts to leave the room.

“I know you do,” Baekhyun returns, stopping him in his tracks, “that’s why I keep doing it.”  

He’s just playing with you. This is all just part of some big elaborate joke. This place must be rigged. They must be filming this, that’s why they all got out of the house today. That’s right; they’re probably watching us as we speak, rolling on the floor laughing. Park DumbYeol must have planned it; Baekhyun wouldn’t have thought this up all by himself. Just get out quietly before you’ve really embarrassed yourself. He takes another step toward the door.

“Kyungsoo-yah, remember our first practice, the first time we sang together? Everything I’d thought or said about you till that moment, to myself or aloud, in my mind I took it all back right there and then. When you closed your eyes and opened your mouth and started singing… That day I told myself that no matter what happened between us offstage, if we got along like brothers, or fought like cats and dogs, or just ignored one another altogether, when we were onstage, when you were singing, I’d listen, I’d look, I’d see you…I’d love you. It’s been nearly five years since then and I’ve never once broken my promise.”

Walk. Out. Right. Now. Just. Go. Do Kyungsoo, put one foot in front of the other and go. He bites his lips and stands still.

“Do Kyungsoo, I’m going to do something now – something you won’t like – but I want you to let me, OK?”

Kyungsoo’s body petrifies, but his voice as he speaks is almost absurdly placid. “I don’t like half the things you do to me, but I still let you, don’t I?” Though he stands with his back to Baekhyun, he can all but see the soft sheepish smile on the elder’s face as he says:

“Yeah. I’m grateful every day.”

With measured steps Baekhyun walks up behind him and winds his arms about his waist. Gently he presses his right hand against the left side of Kyungsoo’s chest. “Here, right? This is where the voice should come from; this is where I should feel it. From here through here and all the way up to here,” he sweeps his fine fingers from Kyungsoo’s chest to his neck and finally parks them at his mouth. “Then what? Where does it go next?”

I’ll bloody kill you if you say ‘psych’! He turns around, takes Baekhyun’s face between his hands, and with a stare that would cut through stone, let alone a man, whispers “Here” and puts his lips to the elder's. They kiss slowly, carefully, as though these years of tug-the-rope have turned them wary despite their want.   

At length Baekhyun withdraws his face and smiles at him wonderingly as he caresses Kyungsoo's sweet-featured face. “Your eyes are so wide; I feel like they’ll swallow me whole if I stare at them for too long.”

“Well, yours are so small, I feel like they’ll swallow themselves,” Kyungsoo retorts, for once assuming himself the Joker’s hat. 

“I like it,” they conclude in chorus and likewise in chorus laugh, then gaze at each other in thoughtful silence as they work to make sense of their present and the future that lies ahead.

“Don’t strain your throat when you sing, OK?” Kyungsoo says at last and hands Baekhyun the sheet-music – a sign they should resume the practice.

Baekhyun nods his greyish-blue head obediently, takes the notes and with them Kyungsoo’s hand. Gently he presses it to the left side of his chest. “I’ll strain my heart instead.”