Still raw. It needs something…more. Something… Sehun wrings his eyes and sighs. He turns to the mirror of their newly furbished in-dorm gym that doubles as a practice room for him and Jongin and slowly re-sketches the sequence, revising each step as he dances them with unusual meticulousness. He had dabbled in choreographing during his training, yet nearing their debut and especially after it the effort seemed wasted when it was clear that the company would never allow him to perform his compositions under the group’s name. But then the unthinkable happened: two months prior to their Japanese debut, he and Jongin were summoned to their CEO’s chamber and ordered to create a new joint solo-stage for their EXO’luXions in Tokyo Dome. A miracle in September. It was as though some vital portion of him that had been dormant for years had suddenly awakened; as though he’d finally been jolted out of his suspended animation, and once revived, he could no longer bear to return to his past inertness.

Something more…but what? What? As he retakes his opening position, ready to repeat the number a fourth time, something catches his eye. Half visible through the crack in the door Sehun could have sworn he’d locked is a face – pale and tapered, with eyes whose smallness is counterbalanced by the depth of their expression, and lips that solicit touch. “Hyung?” he calls, somewhat shaken by the unexpected presence of his group and house mate of nearly four years, his senior by two, Byun Baekhyun.

Curiously, the elder flinches at the address, but promptly brightens as he opens the door and walks into the room. “Mm. Sorry, I was spying for a bit,” he says with a hangdog smile that only reshapes his mouth. “I heard this music when I got back to the house and couldn’t help following it. And then…just couldn’t help it.” He runs his delicate fingers over the keyboard of Sehun’s laptop and taps the space bar so that the music resumes. “It’s nice. Who by?”

“Yixing-ge. He played it for me last time he was here – I liked it so much, I asked him if I could use it, and he said yes.”

Baekhyun’s smile creeps an inch closer to his eyes at the mention of their kind-natured group-mate and elder. “He’s kind and he likes you…a lot. He’d never refuse you, if he could help it.”

Sehun’s expression sweetens. “I know. I’m grateful.”

“Brotherly love!” Baekhyun exclaims, his forefinger upright, and both chuckle at his acting. With a loud exhalation he collapses onto the wooden floor, crosses his legs, props his elbow on his thigh and his cheek on his hand. “Brotherly love…” he repeats with a mutter.

Sehun takes a seat beside him and briefly considers Baekhyun. He’s been like this for weeks now, bright one moment, then suddenly glum – like a sun and its eclipse all at once. He’s always known that half of the elder’s cheerful verbosity is counterfeit, an inbuilt defence mechanism for keeping tensions at bay, since he can’t abide them. But these days it seems to Sehun that even that other half, that truer half, has lost its authenticity and somehow it breaks his heart. “Hyung, are you –?” Alright? He wants to ask, but decides against it. Of course he isn’t. How could he be? He’s only just broken up with his label-mate, senior and first love, Kim Taeyeon.

“What?” Baekhyun prompts, his brows arched with curiosity.

Sehun shakes his head, and Baekhyun, knowing the younger’s disposition, probes no further. Instead he asks, “What you were practicing just now, I don’t think I’ve seen it before – something new?”

A little self-conscious, Sehun bites his lips as he replies, “Yeah. Just something I’ve been working on, that’s all.”

For the first time since entering the room, Baekhyun smiles with genuine delight. “Choreographing? You’ve become so invested – I’m proud of you.”

“Busun proud,” Sehun snorts, quietly clearing his throat of the lump that suddenly blocks it. “It’s just a form of exercise. This body won’t maintain itself, you know, I have to sweat for it. No, perspire – you like it when I use fancy words, right?” He grins at the elder.

Baekhyun says nothing, but smiles at him so miserably that at last Sehun can’t help but ask, “Is it that bad? Do you miss her that much?” then flinches slightly at the realisation of the extent to which the prospect, her effect on the elder, bother him.

Baekhyun considers the question, alternately jutting and retracting his plump lips as he does. “I miss myself,” he says at length, “the way I was when I was with her.”  

Sehun’s dark eyebrows knit together. “I don’t understand.”

Distractedly Baekhyun pursues. “You know, I’ve been thinking that we don’t really fall in love with people. It’s love we’re in-love with and ourselves – that version of ourselves we become when we fall in love. Really, we’re just in-love with ourselves.”

Sehun’s brows unknot into dubious arcs. “I still don’t understand.”

Baekhyun ruffles his hair, his expression indulgent. “That’s because you’ve never been in-love.”

The younger’s eyes slit with increased doubt. “But if we don’t fall in love with others, then neither have you.”

“That’s not true; I’m in-love with myself.” He tilts his greyish-blue head, smiles haughtily. “Can you blame me? I’m fabulous.”

Sehun laughs. “No…and yes,” he says, confirming the first and conceding the last. 

Baekhyun’s expression turns quizzical. “Would you like to? Fall in love, that is.” 

“I don’t know,” Sehun replies, inwardly marvelling at his own solemnity when he’d usually be the first to scoff at such discussions. “I mean it’s all we ever sing about – Love, Love, Love; What is Love; Tell Me What is Love; First Love; Tender Love; Love Me Right – but, somehow, the more we sing about it, the less real it seems. I mean, isn’t feeling it enough? Do we have to make such a fuss about it all the time? Make it so dramatic and painful? Happiness, isn’t that the whole point of the exercise?”

The elder’s lips twist wryly up, his features assuming that particular shrewdness that none, least of all Sehun, can resist. “Well, happiness is all well and good, but the best part is the pain.”

Sehun’s pulse quickens by a measure. “Why?”

“Because it enhances the pleasure, makes it more…vivid when it comes. You know, the way a black background makes the image it surrounds seem richer by comparison. We keep asking what love is, but that’s the answer – pain, pain that enhances pleasure.”

Mimicing Baekhyun’s allusive tenor as best he can, Sehun rebuffs, “That sounds…like a load of BS. Pain that enhances pleasure? What is that, masochism?” He sniggers.

Baekhyun nods. “The truest and falsest form of it.”

In a trademark gesture of mock wonderment, Sehun tilts his head whilst faintly shaking it. “Wah, Hyung, that’s too much philosophising for me!”

Baekhyun bites back a smile. “What? You can learn Mandarin but you can’t learn love?!”

“Mandarin is easier – all three-thousand three-hundred characters.”

“How do you know?” challenges the elder, “You’ve never been in-love.”

Sehun observes the elder’s furtively taunting face, the glint of immorality in his eyes, like Baekhyun’s image in the black, made richer by the sombreness that encompasses it, and mutely sighs. I wonder…

“Will you show me your dance?” Baekhyun abruptly asks, snatching the younger out of his abstraction and into self-consciousness, as he returns:

“It isn’t really finished yet. So…”

“It doesn’t matter; I just want to see it. Have you shown it to anyone else yet? Yixing-ge? Jongin?”

Sehun shakes his head. “No one yet.”

“Then I’m the first,” he says with evident contentment. “What an honour! Come on, show me.”

 Grudgingly Sehun picks himself up from the floor and makes for the laptop, as he goes stretching his neck and arms, readying both his muscles and his mind for the performance. His anxiety baffles him, the importance of gaining the elder’s approval, of being liked, even admired by him. With a quick glance at Baekhyun, whose expression is all earnest anticipation, reassuringly devoid of the least hint of derision, he takes his position and turns on the track. He dances with the sort of keenness he’d all but forgotten he owned. He can almost see himself through Baekhyun’s eyes – poised, fluent, precise, utterly compelling in his self-possession. Something more… He can feel it now. But what was it?

The recital completed, he brushes back his auburn hair, and panting, returns to his place by the elder.

Baekhyun studies him a moment, gravely, his smooth brow furrowed in concentration, then avows, “You know, I thought this the first time we met, though it wasn’t half as true then as it is now: you’re beautiful.”

Sehun’s tapered eyes momentarily gape. This is not the review he had expected, neither in content nor in delivery. Beautiful? Yes…that’s the word. He levels his gaze to Baekhyun’s. “Ditto.”

The elder shakes his head in dismissal. “No, I don’t mean cute or pretty or handsome. I mean…beautiful.”

Intently Sehun holds his stare so that Baekhyun’s cheeks start to colour. “I know what you meant, that’s why I said ditto.”

“I must say you’re very blasé about being called beautiful by another man,” Baekhyun jabs, reverting to his scapegoat playfulness, “and your brother at that.”

“You aren’t my brother.”

“What?”

“I have a brother; I don’t think he’s beautiful.”

Visibly gratified, Baekhyun still attempts at modesty as he cries, “Sehun-ah, what –“

“Oh Sehun,” the younger interjects, with half a smile steering the elder off his course.

 “What?”

“Oh Se Hun. I like it when you call me by my name – my full name. The others, not so much, but you… I like the way your mouth moves when you pronounce it. Just…the way your mouth moves.”

Baekhyun gawps at him a second, but soon complies, “Oh Se Hun.”

Sehun’s smile widens by a millimetre, a tinge of bashfulness in his fair complexion.

“What’s so special about it?” Baekhyun enquires with honest interest.

“Mm…how do I explain?” Sehun scans the room until he settles on the elder’s mobile. Nodding for permission, he takes it and holds it up to Baekhyun’s face like a mirror. “Here, look at your mouth and say it again.”

Baekhyun obeys without delay. “Oh Se Hun.”

“See?” Sehun mutters, his face aglow with fascination. “Like a kiss. Like my name is a kiss.”

 Baekhyun darts him a wondering look. “You’re surprisingly poetic, you know that?”

 “No.”

“Well, you are. Like a kiss indeed.” He sniffs and shakes his silvered head, his pleasure again discernible.

It’s this pleasure, this permissiveness, Baekhyun’s indulgence towards Sehun, often shown him when he least merits it, that spur the younger to further abuse it as abruptly he asks, “What did it feel like?”

 “What?”

 “When you kissed…her – what did it feel like?”

Baekhyun’s expression tautens and with it Sehun’s. They stare at each other a tense second, but true to his pacific form, the elder merely says, “That is a bizarre and inappropriate question.”

Sehun does not relent. “This is a bizarre and inappropriate conversation. What did it feel like?”

Another tense second, another tense stare. I know; I’ve gone mad. I’ve no right to ask you this. I’ve no right to pick at your wounds. But Hyung…

Baekhyun grits his teeth, purses his mouth. “I don’t know, like a…kiss – soft…warm…wet…good.”

“Mm…” Sehun nods thoughtfully.

“Oh Sehun,” the elder says suddenly, the tension in his visage giving way to ill-repressed amusement, “have you never kissed a girl?”

Scandalised, Sehun gapes at him. “What are you saying? I had a girlfriend in high-school, you know, and I’ve dated more than one since.”

Baekhyun smirks – the cat who got the cream, or rather, the dog who dug out an awfully juicy bone. “I didn’t ask if you’d had a girlfriend before, I asked if you’d kissed a girl. So, have you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you lying right now?”

“No.”

Baekhyun gauges him a moment, his eyes narrowing, his tongue peeping out the corner of his mouth, then, “Oh my god, you haven’t, have you?! You’ve got three and a half million girls thirsting after you day and night and you’ve never been kissed! Daebak, daebak, this is too delicious!” he sniggers.

As is his wont when irked beyond measure, Sehun grows alarmingly serene, his tone and features flattening in chorus. “I told you, I have.”

Undaunted, Baekhyun counters, “I don’t believe you.”

“I’ve kissed a girl. I’ve more than kissed a girl,” Sehun insists, his expression changeless.

Baekhyun arches an eyebrow. “What comes after kissing a girl?”

 “You tell me…or haven’t you had the chance to find out?”

Baekhyun sniffs as if to say well-played, yet pushes on unflustered, “A gentleman never tells and you’ve never kissed one, let alone done more.”

“I’ll prove it to you,” Sehun ripostes, taking the elder by surprise.

“How?” he asks, the cat foolishly allowing curiosity’s advances.

Without so much as a bat of his double-lidded eyes, Sehun replies, “Let me kiss you.”

“What?”

“You’re the experienced one; you’ll be able to tell right away.”

Baekhyun gasps, swallows hard, his cheeks inflaming. “Stop playing!”

As the elder grows in agitation, so does the younger in resolve. “Why? You’re the one who started this game.”

“I –“

“Don’t,” Sehun cuts in, his tone unwavering. “Don’t say I’ve gone crazy and to stop joking and all that usual crap. You’re a man, aren’t you? You started this, so let’s see it through. It’s just a kiss; people do it with perfect strangers all the time.”

“Yeah, because they know they won’t have to deal with the consequences afterwards,” Baekhyun counters, his face growing redder all the time.

“What consequences?” Sehun snorts, his sneer more seduction than scorn. “Are you scared it might get awkward between us? It would, if we were in-love with each other; but that doesn’t exist, remember? I want to kiss you.”   

Baekhyun’s expression evens, his fevered complexion steadily cooling to its habitual fairness. “Why?” he demands with the weight of seniority in his manner.

Sehun does not so much as flinch at the burden. “I don’t know. Because I like the way your mouth moves.”

“When I say your name?”

“When you say my name; when you say anything.”

Through narrowed eyes, Baekhyun considers him a moment – a look that’s a test, a dare, a doubt. Sehun knows that the least tic and spasm, a twitch of his lips, a blink of his eyes, could decide the elder against him. He can’t afford to dwell on things, can’t afford to analyse. Whether it’s impulse that’s driven him this far or repressed desire accumulated through four years of cohabitation, the upshot is the same: at this instant nothing matters but that they touch. Forget, Hyung. I’ll make you forget her.

“Alright,” Baekhyun says at length with a smirk, all the while insentiently nodding his head. “But it can’t get awkward afterwards, remember? And I will know if this is your first kiss, so prepare to be teased forever, if I catch you lying.” 

“Call,” Sehun returns, steadfast to the last.

Simultaneously the two draw nearer one another. He being the shorter, Baekhyun extends his neck, levelling his face to that of the younger man. With his forefinger Sehun brushes the hair away from the elder’s eyes, then traces the curve of his cheek all the way down to his lips and with the tip of his thumb parts them. Baekhyun’s breathing intensifies, his mouth that’s already fleshier than by rights it should be engorging further at the contact, while the corners of Sehun’s coil slyly at the sight. He uncurls them and touches his lips to Baekhyun’s, slowly, with the tip of his tongue, coaxing them undone. The softness is intoxicating. He tastes it further, alternately advancing and withdrawing his touch, and inwardly revelling at the elder’s seeking it anew each time he retracts his tongue.

As the kiss deepens, Sehun’s hands drift from Baekhyun’s face to his neck and gradually down his waist, pulling him into the younger’s embrace. Brittle. He feels so impossibly brittle in his arms; Sehun thinks that if he tightened his hold on him a fraction more, he’d break the elder in half. Somehow he finds the hem of his shirt and slips his fingers under it – the texture and temperature of his skin are addictive; Sehun wonders how on earth he could ever bear to part with it. He works his way up to Baekhyun’s chest and is somewhat surprised to find his s erect, but the sensation sends his blood on a southward rush.

By now Sehun can feel his tongue growing numb. He cannot say how long the kiss has lasted, yet he knows that to stop at this juncture would be tantamount to stopping his heart. He removes Baekhyun’s shirt to find his pale skin mottled red where his fingers have marked it and his lower body feels to catch fire at the sight. Abruptly it dawns on Sehun that at no point of this unexpected occurrence has Baekhyun shown the least bit of resistance; what’s more, his instincts tell him that he would meet with none even if he were to venture much farther.

He takes off his shirt and Baekhyun gasps. He touches his delicate fingers to Sehun’s bare torso and slowly shadows the outline of his muscles, his expression pained, almost pleading. Sehun winces at it. You want to do this, don’t you? You’ve wanted to all along. He eases Baekhyun to the floor and presses himself against him. Baekhyun pulls him into another kiss, at last taking the helm, and Sehun reconsiders the elder’s experience as he brushes his warm lips along the younger’s clear-cut jaw until he finds the small beauty mark that dots his smooth neck and nibbles at it so that Sehun for the first time realises it to be one of his body’s erogenous zones…or maybe it’s just Baekhyun that’s erogenous. 

“Sehun-ah, what should we do?” Baekhyun whispers breathlessly in his ear.

Sehun decides to admit the truth. “I don’t want to stop.”

Baekhyun sighs. “Neither do I, but I don’t know how to do this…with a man,” he qualifies.

And with a woman? With that woman…? His chest contorts at the thought, but he smiles and says, “Nor I…with a man.”

They press their foreheads together and coyly laugh. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Sehun mutters after a moment.

Baekhyun raises an eyebrow and pouts. “Maybe I don’t want to hurt you.”

Sehun darts him a dubious look. The elder chuckles. “See that locker?” Baekhyun says, gesturing at the small cabinet located by the door to the practice room. “If you open it, on the second shelve there’s a first-aid kit. Get it for me, OK?”

Sehun follows the instruction, while he’s at it, making sure the door is firmly locked.

Baekhyun opens the case and removes a small white tube.

“What is that?” Sehun probes, unable to read the mark…something with a V, he’s sure.  

Shyly Baekhyun smiles. “So that you don’t hurt me…as much.”

“Oh,” the younger says – to the elder, an admission of ity – and the two again laugh.

As they kiss, self-consciousness gives way to need. They slip out of their remaining clothes and for the first time see each other in full. The contrast between their forms is staggering to both – the quintessential maleness of Sehun’s, and the near androgyny of Baekhyun’s, the curvature of his hairless body defying his gender.

“You’re perfect,” Sehun murmurs entrancedly. “Perfect.”

Baekhyun runs his fingers over the younger’s toned abdomen, his dainty incisors cutting hungrily into the flushed tissue of his mouth. “You are.” All but imploringly he whispers, “Sehun-ah,” then quickly amends, “Oh Se Hun,” inciting the younger to kiss him anew.

Their bodies knit together like two threads, twisting and tangling, so that Sehun wonders how they might ever unravel them. When it feels as though to delay any longer will surely drive him mad, he reaches for the lubricant and daubs it generously on his hand. “Tell me what to do.”

Baekhyun takes his hand and guides it. Carefully Sehun relaxes him, adjusting the angle and rhythm of his motions to Baekhyun’s reactions, wincing along with him each time the elder winces. No matter if he’s driven mad with need, no matter if he dies for it, he won’t hurt Baekhyun. He can’t say how long it takes before he stops meeting with resistance; all he knows is that in nearly twenty-two years of living he’s never been in so much pain. Suddenly, the tip of his middle finger scrapes against a soft knot of flesh. Baekhyun jolts and whimpers at the contact. Alarmed, Sehun gently withdraws his hand.

“No,” Baekhyun pleads. “Do that again, just like that.”

Sehun strains to remember the precise spot. It takes him a moment, but he soon finds it and softly presses his finger against the nub. Baekhyun moans and shudders, arching his back into Sehun’s touch. Does this feel good for him? The younger marvels. This must be the prostate gland. I remember something…biology classes…the prostate…isn’t it supposed to be the most sensitive spot in a man’s body? With a bit more force he massages it and feels Baekhyun melt at the touch. He’s holding back his voice. Does it really feel that good? By now, Sehun is almost dizzy with his own need. His lower body is in agony, but he doesn’t want to thwart Baekhyun in the midst of his pleasure. His body shocks as suddenly the elder’s fine fingers coil around him.

“Hyung –“ he gasps.

“Don’t call me that just now,” Baekhyun pants. “Say my name.”

“Baekhyun.”

Baekhyun smiles headily and likewise headily kisses him. “Tell me what to do. Yours…it’s different.”       

“It’s good,” Sehun reassures, toiling to control his voice, “just…tighten your hand a bit and go a little faster.” The elder obeys and it’s all Sehun can do to keep from ing.

Abruptly Baekhyun stops. He gazes at the younger who’s half-dazed with desire, his silvered hair windswept and darkened with dampness, his cheeks tinged with heat, his lips ripe and swollen, his eyes glazed and hooded, he looks like he’s made of sweetness, and Sehun is certain that he’s never seen anyone or thing more beautiful than Byun Baekhyun. He says nothing, only nods. It’s all Sehun’s been waiting to hear.

“Slowly, okay?” Baekhyun can’t help entreating at Sehun’s advance.

“I won’t hurt you, I won’t,” the younger vows.

Baekhyun caresses his face, his eyes suddenly wistful. “You’re kind – so kind, it breaks my heart sometimes.”

“No one’s ever called me that,” Sehun confesses, his face a mirror-image of the elder’s.

“But you are…kinder than I deserve.”

With this Sehun kisses him, and then, employing more of gentleness and self-restraint than he had ever thought himself to possess, he inches his way into Baekhyun’s body. The elder whimpers and contracts at the inevitable pain and Sehun with him. At every stage he lets Baekhyun adjust to him before advancing further. Not until the elder nudges his waist, signalling Sehun he can move does the younger finally do so, slowly and measuredly, his mind on nothing but finding that little knot again, the key to their joint pleasure. At last he locates it and with it Baekhyun’s body wondrously opens to him. There, that’s the spot. Hyung, is this love – pain that enhances pleasure? He wonders and buries himself deeper in the elder.  

‘Sehun-ah…Oh Sehun,” Baekhyun pants in his ear in time with their movements, “it’s too much. I feel like my heart will give out, like I’ll run mad.”

Sehun only nods and kisses him again and again as they near the peak. Just as they reach it, he tears his lips away from Baekhyun’s and bites them as hard as he can to keep from crying out. His body is seized by stupefying pleasure, sparking and melting his mind. He gasps and all the force drains out of his limbs at once. Breathless, he buries his face in the elder’s shoulder, sinking his teeth into his flesh, breathing in his scent. Is this love? He doesn’t know; he’s never felt it before. All he knows is that his body, his mind, the whole of his being are in such a tumult of anguish and bliss that he sees no hope of survival. He wants everything. He wants to live inside Baekhyun forever, to never let go this body, to guard it, to cherish it, to rip it apart. He wants to devour him whilst keeping him perfectly intact. He wants no one to look at him, no one to speak to him, no one to touch him apart from himself. He wants to lock him away from the world, but to give the world entire to him. He wants to be his world, the whole of his happiness. Is this love? It’s horrible. It’s agony. It’s the greatest pleasure he’s ever experienced.

“Baekhyun,” he whispers to the elder at length, “you lied to me, didn’t you, when you said there’s no such thing as love?”

“I never said that there was no such thing as love, only that love is what we love and not each other.”

Sehun shakes his head. “I don’t love love. I love you.”

“How do you know that?” the elder asks, tears trickling down his temples.

Sehun kisses them away, one at a time, as he gives his answer. “Pain and pleasure.”

“What about them?” Baekhyun pursues, his body reheating at the touch.

“Yours are mine.”

Baekhyun smiles with a new kind of sadness, as he the younger’s cheek, and sweetly sighs. “Is that love?”

Again Sehun shakes his head, tilts his face into the elder’s hand and kisses its palm. “You are.”

“What’s that?”

“The image in the black.”