Happy Pride Month~!

I did my best to update this month, just 'cause xD

It's unusual and I almost died, considering I'm starting to write my thesis and I regret every single decision I ever made, because I probably bit more than I can chew. Anyways, my ace wanted to write something to celebrate, and what's better than an early update?? My point exactly.

So, as always, my mistakes are my own fault. 

If you can, stay at home. Take the vaccine. Even after it, continue to take care of yourself and others. Stay healthy, both mentally and physically.

Oh, the title is from The Promise by Andy Black, the guy from Black Veil Brides. I listen to a lot of their songs when I'm going through a lot. 

“Want to go out with me?”

The question startles Taekwoon so much he stops his fit of giggles, turning wide eyes to Hongbin.

The younger man is staring directly back at him, no sign of the words being a joke. His face is red but serious, and his eyes unwavering.

“H-Huh?” Taekwoon can’t help the quiver in his voice. The day’s pleasant weather feels stuffy now, too hot for the sweater he wears; he can feel the burn in his ears and the perspiration on the back of his neck, the gentle breeze not doing much to help with his increasing body temperature. He looks down, too embarrassed to confront Hongbin’s steady gaze, choosing instead to play with the rings on his fingers.

“I want to take hyung on a date,” he hears rustling, and then Hongbin’s hands are on his, cradling them on his lap, “and then on another and another, like boyfriends.”

Taekwoon doesn’t dare blink, fixated on their joined hands, his fingers longer and thinner and Hongbin’s warm and very soft. It’s… not a bad feeling. He holds Hakyeon’s hands pretty often, and Sanghyuk likes to pull him around by intertwining their fingers, and he likes the contact from both of his friends. Others have tried to do the same to call for his attention and he has always hated it. Other than family, only Hakyeon and Sanghyuk were permitted to touch him with any degree of intimacy.

Hongbin is the first person whom he accepts being touched by, not only today, but on several different occasions. He has fallen asleep on the younger’s shoulder, had small scratches be tended by him, let Hongbin pull him from scrutinizing eyes before. Every time it happened, his stomach curled weirdly, and his heart beat a little faster. Taekwoon considered it weird for lack of custom… Now he’s not so sure. He had never had a relationship, never even had a crush in his middle and high school years. Everything about this whole development is new to him, and he finds himself lost.

“I…” he breathes, peaking at Hongbin through his lashes. He is there, real and serious and bright red. The world seems to turn on its axis; he almost feels faint with how hard his heart beats against his chest. “I, I… I– Yes, okay.”

They flood his entire mouth, his words, so he spews them, immediately overwhelmed. He tries to turn away, hide himself from Hongbin and all this embarrassment that is consuming every cell of his body, but Hongbin’s hands fly to his face, cupping his cheeks, making Taekwoon look straight at him. He really is the most beautiful person Taekwoon has seen, and he’s angelical, smiling so big like he is.

“Really?! Will you really go out with me?!”

He sounds so excited; Taekwoon has to nod weakly, sinking into Hongbin’s touch and closing his eyes. The thrumming of his heart is a loud beat against his ears, his veins boil with hot mortification, but the touch feels so good and gentle. Again, Hakyeon has given him the same sort of touch, and yet again, it is different. Reminds him a lot of the honeyed tea he drinks after singing for a long time, a wisp of comfort that slowly sinks into his belly and warms his entire self, not like the feverish heat of just a minute ago. He thinks if this is what composers write about so obsessively, with so much longing and devotion. His own pieces are melancholic and he expresses his longing for something which he cannot name, and for the first time, this warmth seems to fit with the theme. There hasn’t been much time at all, and Taekwoon is starting to dread getting too attached to this touch only to lose it later.

As if reading his mind, Hongbin starts to lightly caress his face with his thumbs. The pads are calloused and rasp against his soft skin, gooseflesh erupts on his nape, and he involuntarily shivers, curling inwards. The movement stops – he bites his bottom lip to not whimper, so confused for liking the unfamiliar contact – so Hongbin can lean down and touch his forehead with Taekwoon’s.

“You dictate the pace, hyung,” he says, so close their breaths mix in the space between them, “and I’ll follow you.”

Taekwoon risks looking up to find Hongbin’s beautiful  so close he almost goes cross-eyed at it; from this distance able to see his dimples in startlingly detail, begging to be poked. So with trembling hands he cups the younger’s face, thumbs pressing slightly on the small holes. Hongbin presses his lips together, purposefully turning the dimples more pronounced to Taekwoon’s now not so secret delight. Once more, he nods softly, showing Hongbin he understands and trusts him. The fingers cradling his head tighten a little, going back to normal a beat later. Taekwoon cups the hands on his face, carefully taking them away, joining their fingers together on his lap. Immediately Hongbin’s fingers start moving, this time playing with the rings Taekwoon has on. The boy seems unable to stop touching him, and for once, Taekwoon decides he’ll indulge him. It’s absolutely not because of his fluttering heart and the softness of those touches.

They continue like this as time passes, neither knowing for how long.

Eventually Taekwoon’s heart settles into its normal beating pace, the burn of his cheeks, ears and neck subside, leaving behind only the poetic butterflies in his belly.

.

.

Jaehwan is painstakingly working on his and Sanghyuk’s assignment when he hears the apartments door bang shut with a deafening sound. He jumps on his chair, spooked to hell and back. His first instinct is to pick up something – his room is a mess, he used to have a baseball bat somewhere, so his desk lamp will have to do the job – to defend, or attack the source of the noise, before realizing that if it were a robber, they wouldn’t be barging in carelessly, banging the door like it stole their cat.

His second instinct is to ignore it. The only two other people who have a key to this apartment are Wonshik and Hongbin, and to be fair, he’s ing tired of both of them.

Really, he ing wants to say it and go to the trio of codependent s their university for some reason idolizes and spew the beans. Tattle-tales die early, but he guesses that whatever Wonshik or Hongbin have stored for him in case he does just that is going to be a lot better than what Hakyeon – someone notorious for being gentle and helpful as long as people don’t look at Taekwoon and Sanghyuk – or Sanghyuk – who is notorious on his own right, with rumors of being a past-delinquent who beat a guy to death, not that Jaehwan believes this particular one – or both will do to him in case this whole scheme plays out like it currently is.

If it’s Wonshik, great; him being angry is a great signal that Hakyeon is being his brand of self and is making the other’s life miserable. If it’s Hongbin… It’s definitely not; Hongbin is the type to curse up a storm and then sulk for entire days when things aren’t going his way, displays of angery testosterone not really his M.O. Also, the Ice Prince is not someone to grate on anyone’s nerves; he’s just an introvert – admittedly, one of the prettiest and people Jaehwan has seen – with talent in a building full of drama queens and narcissistic, egocentric personalities. People covet for his attention exactly because it is so hard to catch it.

Hakyeon on the other hand can drive someone to madness with a single look. Jaehwan had seen it before, passing by a corridor a couple of years back. The dancer had been helping another student, consoling him about a performance in front of a teacher that had gone wrong, and while his words were sweet and encouraging, the dark shine on his eyes clearly mocked the other, condescending and just so fake it made Jaehwan gag. Hakyeon had seen him that day and had smiled in his direction, before turning back to the student who trembled feebly at his side, tugging on his sleeve like he needed Hakyeon’s attention to survive; Hakyeon had looked too pleased with the result for it to not be intentional. Jaehwan had known previously to that day that the Dance Department was a den crawling with snakes, but from that day on, he had crowned Hakyeon its’ king.

It made sense that the one banging the door shut would be Wonshik. For all that was sacred, Jaehwan couldn’t understand the appeal he saw in the dancer, when Jaehwan himself saw all of his flaws right there, stamped on his face. In the beginning, the idea of seducing – ha! This sounds so ridiculous now, hilarious, he cannot – Han Sanghyuk had been jarring, yet within his realm of possibility. He was sure that Jung Taekwoon would never tolerate his babbling and that he would never be enough of an actor to deal with Hakyeon. No, Sanghyuk has been and still is the best option, especially since they started to get along, and Jaehwan truly enjoys spending time with him.

But for Wonshik to get so involved by Hakyeon’s spinning web? He was starting to think he had read the younger man all wrong this entire time. Wonshik is a romantic, silly man with simple tastes; he’s not made for drama and games, or that’s what Jaehwan used to think. Frankly, out of the three of them, he is the capricious one, full of manias and peculiarities…

And going nowhere with this train of thought.

Frustrated, Jaehwan gets up from his chair and jumps on the bed, hiding his face on the pillow and kicking the soft mattress into submission.

.

.

The sky is bright today, which doesn’t match Sanghyuk’s mood.

It’s surprisingly difficult to be by himself after Jaehwan decided to leave him glaring – Hakyeon is being cold n’ hot all over again, making Sanghyuk crazy to the point of wanting to rip his hair off his skull – at the library, saying that he was being a stuck-up and that if he wanted to fail his class, he should do it by himself.

Jaehwan is way too catty for someone with his temper, but Sanghyuk finds it refreshing; he enjoys the power he has over people by merely standing next to them, but it can get aggravating when he can’t even order food without the attendant looking like they’re talking to the Antichrist. Rumors have made his past as a delinquent be blown into a proportion quite absurd, if not funny. Apparently to some people, he’s a mob boss’ son, a serial-killer-in-the-making or a megalomaniac chaebol. He never thought his past as a delinquent would turn almost into a university urban legend, and most importantly, never shied away from acting tempestuously, only reinforcing it.

Hakyeon and Taekwoon had been all he needed for years, true friends that embraced him in his hardest moments. Their tight-knitted group didn’t need or want anyone else.

Sanghyuk is starting to think they might have dug themselves a hole too deep to crawl back of. Their dependency on each other is a known but untouched subject in their relationship. Sanghyuk has seen Taekwoon’s panic the times Hakyeon had gone on dance competitions for a few days, retreating inside himself even more than normal, and Hakyeon come back of these competitions with a manic glint in his eyes. Both of them had been friends for many years before they found him, alone in his own misery.

The thing is, when you are treated like the center of someone’s universe, like they did to him, Sanghyuk quickly took that dependency to himself. It didn’t help that he, for just as many years now, has struggled with… with ever growing feelings towards Hakyeon, those he really avoided thinking about, with names like lust, possessiveness, protectiveness, and that cursed four letter word called love.

Jaehwan is the catalyst. The older, eccentric guy that bomb dropped on top of Sanghyuk and carved his way into his daily life easily, in fact, so easily it’s a little scary; with him, came the realization that maybe he can’t continue living on this bubble together with Hakyeon and Taekwoon, as much as he wants to. Surprisingly, Sanghyuk considers Jaehwan a friend now, and he hopes he’ll be able to learn how to be a friend to him. At the same time, he wants – craves, yearns for – to have Hakyeon as more than he is, their current arrangement making it impossible for him to push further with his intentions.

As if in cue, his phone rings.

.

.

Sanghyuk answers on the second ring, one too many in Hakyeon’s admittedly frayed state.

He’s been hiding – from who or what exactly he can’t pinpoint – for the past hour inside a janitor’s closet on the theatre, after jumping out of Wonshik’s lap during their make out session and scrambling to leave the place as quickly as he could. The small space is filled to the brim with cleaning products, and the sharp smell of detergent is what’s been keeping Hakyeon somehow grounded. His phone had rung eleven times before finally stopping, leaving Hakyeon by himself, hugging his knees close to his chest and willing his heart to stop beating as if it were being chased.

“What,” Sanghyuk’s voice holds no inflection, reminding Hakyeon of their ongoing strife.

“Sanghyuk–”

His distress must show through his voice somehow, for Sanghyuk interrupts him immediately. “What happened?! Where are you?!”

Ah, his Sanghyukkie, doesn’t matter that they’re passive-agressively fighting, he’s always been able to identify when he’s distressed. It’s like a switch is inside the younger, making him abandon anything anywhere, softening his sharp edges as he does his best to make the situation better. Hakyeon has always thought of how cute that was, and maybe had exaggerated things once or twice – or twenty – to elicit this reaction; one of his pleasures was being embraced by long arms, crushed against a firm torso and wide shoulders, and when exactly had Sanghyuk turned from a gangly teenager to a man?

“…ung! Hyung!”

Hakyeon snaps out of his trance, Sanghyuk growing impatient on the other side of the line.

“Sorry… Can you come pick me up?”

“Where are you,” again, there’s no intonation in Sanghyuk’s voice, this time for a completely different reason. Hakyeon can imagine how agitated the younger man is, he knows he would be ripping the hair out of his head by now.

It is not the first time Hakyeon shivers from the Sanghyuk’s possessiveness; he thrills to get them, guards each one on his heart, and perhaps he should have been more aware of himself and their relationship before, considering all this.

He succinctly explains he is at the theater closer to their university, and where he is inside of it. It takes a full ten minutes of calming Sanghyuk when he tells him that he is inside a janitor’s closet, the other going absolutely ballistic – Hakyeon can hear the squeaking of Sanghyuk’s shoes, how he is taking shorter breaths as he runs towards him – thinking Hakyeon was hurt in some way.

It is no surprise the door is slamming open fifteen minutes after that, shoving bright, obnoxious light into Hakyeon’s eyes, obscuring his view of Sanghyuk. Blinking repeatedly to adjust to the sudden brightness, all Hakyeon can focus on is Sanghyuk dropping to his knees in front of him, pulling his towards his, grip crushing as he pants.

“ you for making me worry so much,” Sanghyuk curses despite tightening his hold, “stupid diva. What the hyung, do you want to kill me?”

On any other day, Hakyeon would neck chop him into oblivion. Today though, he giggles, wrapping his arms around Sanghyuk’s neck, noticing the sweat at his nape, proof he ran the entire way there.

He looks up, into Sanghyuk’s eyes.

“Nah, just kiss you.”

And he does. Kiss him.

This author loves everyone. Please don't kill the author.