Jongin had been correct – the parlor hadn’t been visited by him for three days now. As he cleansed equipment and worked on sketches of flowers and typography, Kyungsoo wondered what Jongin was doing. Was he in class? Working furiously on a paper due next week? Or maybe in a spacious dance studio, with mirrors on one wall and soft lights, ambient music playing in the background as Jongin moved with pointed toes and fluid motions.

He looked at his right arm, just under where his t-shirt’s sleeve ended, at the delicate black notes that decorated his fair skin. A smile ghosted over his lips as he imagined himself singing those notes with Jongin dancing to them – not so much a person, but a wisp of light fluttering through shadows.

The idea was impossible, though, he reminded himself. He hadn’t sung in over five years. His vocals would be rusty, at best. It was best to remain with his art on flesh, and let Jongin dance to someone else’s songs. That thought left a sour taste in his mouth, so he escaped the room and headed to the mini-fridge to see if either of the younger ones had left a water bottle.

The day had been slow enough that Chanyeol was taking a nap in the back, while Sehun sat at the front counter, idly drawing something. Kyungsoo peeked over his shoulder. Sehun’s art skills were getting better – this attempt actually resembled something other than a cloud. “A panda?” he asked. “Who’s it for?”

“Zitao,” Sehun mumbled, seemingly unruffled by Kyungsoo’s silent approach. “He wants something new, and he told me to choose. I picked this cause he looks like a panda.”

“It’s cute,” Kyungsoo admitted.

Sehun looked at Kyungsoo out of the corner of his eyes, a devious smile curling his mouth. “I know a person you think is cute.”

“Don’t,” Kyungsoo warned, backing away.

“Jongin!” Sehun yelled, throwing his arms up and then pointing a finger at Kyungsoo’s face, laughing. “I knew it! You’re blushing!”

“Shut up,” Kyungsoo hissed, “or there’ll be an open position in this parlor and a fresh grave outside.”

“I’ll keep your secret,” Sehun whined, just as Chanyeol shuffled into the room, blinking slowly in the light. “What are we keeping?” he asked.

“Kyungsoo has a crush!” Sehun sang off-key, bouncing around Kyungsoo, out of reach of his curled fists.

“How are you in college and not still in preschool?” Kyungsoo ranted, stomping past Chanyeol, who blearily watched him pass. He heard the front door open and Sehun greet a customer with a smile still in his voice.

Kyungsoo could count one hand the number of crushes he’d had in his life. All of them were stereotypical – the older brother’s friend, the best friend at school, and the unattainable popular kid. They’d come on gradually, like sleep, and ended just as slowly. This attraction to Jongin, though, resembled a daydream, without a lot of prior buildup and fitting what a person hoped for. Kyungsoo couldn’t say that he’d been anticipating someone as beautiful as Jongin stepping into his tattoo parlor and flicking something in his chest that made his heart pound the moment he saw him and calm as they talked. He wasn’t sure what real love was supposed to feel like, but he was sure that this sensation was more than a simple crush.

That didn’t give Oh Sehun the right to be an idiot about it, though.

In the evening, Chanyeol’s boyfriend, Baekhyun, stopped by to pick him up. Chanyeol jumped around so much in excitement that Kyungsoo considered getting Baekhyun a collar and leash to contain his oversized, happy partner. After the couple left, Kyungsoo told Sehun to leave the door unlocked. “I’m going to wait for a while. I don’t want Jongin to be stuck out in the cold if I leave.”

“I’ll stay with you,” Sehun instantly said, a genuinely sweet smile parting his lips. Despite his ability to annoy Kyungsoo, the older man couldn’t help but feel a brotherly affection for him, and was certain Chanyeol felt the same way. “I can’t have my cute little boss getting lonely.” And there was the irritation.

However, Kyungsoo couldn’t help but enjoy Sehun’s presence that night. His endless supply of nonsensical conversations and odd innuendos made for a fun, if somewhat exhausting, time. Sehun was in the middle of explaining one of the courses he was taking when there was a soft rap on the door, so low that Kyungsoo nearly missed it. He ran to the door, pulling it open for Jongin, who hobbled in, holding his coat tightly around him. “It’s below freezing,” he explained as he pulled it off, “but I couldn’t come yesterday and I’m not sure about tomorrow night, so I figured I’d come when I did have time.”

Sehun asked if he could stay for a while and watch. “Watching helps me learn. I’m a visual learner, I think,” he said. Jongin agreed, and as Kyungsoo began the process of the rest of the first wing, the two boys began to talk. As it turned out, they went to the same college and even had a mutual friend – the Luhan that had convinced Jongin to get the tattoo. Kyungsoo stayed quiet through the conversation, listening as they shared experiences at the college. Jongin focused mostly on dancing, but he was apparently good at gaming. Sehun laughed, saying that he’d heard from Luhan about a friend that always beat him.

Eventually Sehun drew him into the discussion with the question, “What do you want to do?” Singing, of course, was the first thing he said, with tattoo artist being the obvious second, but he confessed with words spilling off an unwilling tongue that he enjoyed cooking and would just as quickly become a chef as he would a singer.

“That explains the good food,” Sehun sighed, a faraway look coming into his eyes as he probably reminisced about past meals.

Not unexpectedly, Sehun grew bored after an hour in and wandered off, saying that he’d go finish Zitao’s tattoo design. He shut the door behind him, and Kyungsoo and Jongin were left in comfortable silence as Kyungsoo worked over the skin on Jongin’s back.

He had concentrated so much on the intricate lines of the tightly-packed feathers on Jongin’s shoulder that he didn’t notice for almost another full hour that Jongin had not made any noise or even moved since just after Sehun left, and that his breathing had evened out in a slow, natural pace. He only noticed when Jongin moved his arms in his sleep to rest under his cheek and he was forced to lift the tattoo machine up to avoid having ink smeared across Jongin’s skin.

Jongin’s eyelashes rested gently against the dim half-moons beneath his eyes. Kyungsoo’s brow furrowed, considering how much sleep Jongin got. With dance and school, there couldn’t be a lot of time for him to relax. “Jongin,” he whispered, pulling off his rubber gloves and gently shaking Jongin’s shoulder. “Wake up. You can’t sleep here.”

The boy made a soft snuffling noise, moving a hand to cover his eyes as he slowly awoke. “Ten…more minutes?” he mumbled sleepily, pushing his messy dark hair out of his face. “I want to sleep well before therapy tomorrow. They – ” he yawned widely, the corners of his eyes crinkling, “ – scheduled it earlier this time.” He closed his eyes again and tried to curl up on the table.

“Therapy?”

Jongin made a slow, assenting noise low in his throat and he opened his eyes again, staring straight ahead of him, not at Kyungsoo – not at anything. “They say with time it might be good enough again. Maybe…but I don’t think so.” He blinked, and when he opened his eyes, they were wet and shiny. “It’s ruined. My leg is useless now.”

They remained like that, hushed and somber, until Jongin abruptly laughed: a dry, desperate, painful sound. “I keep thinking, what am I going to do now? If I can’t dance, what else is there?” He turned his face away. “One leg breaks and I’m pathetic,” he whispered. “How fragile can a person be?” He sighed, and it was an angry, defeated breath. “It’s a hard thing to live in the human skin.”

Kyungsoo found it in himself to move, avoiding the ink on Jongin’s back, hands moving to his head and cautiously, tenderly running his fingers through the strands of his hair. “It gets easier,” he murmured. “You have a dream, and you lose it, and you find another one. A door appears, but it’s locked, and you find a window. But your dream isn’t lost yet. There’s still hope – there’s always hope. Patience, as terrible and maddening as it is, will bring you something good – maybe something better than you’d hoped.”

Jongin broke. A sob shoved its way out of him, with more following, wracking his body. He lay there, on his stomach, exposed and frightened. All Kyungsoo could do was shush him and pet his hair, letting him know that he wasn’t alone, that this moment wouldn’t last forever, that he still had that tiny ember of hope that dodged its way around his heart but would always remain close.

Enraged, fearful tears wet Jongin’s cheeks, pooling on the table, and only slowed when his body gave in to exhaustion and forced him into a deep sleep that Kyungsoo prayed would give him some peace.

Although reluctant to leave him, Kyungsoo didn’t want to wake him and left the room instead to find Sehun, who was hunched over his sketchpad but came immediately when Kyungsoo explained the situation to him. Together, they cleansed Jongin’s back and bandaged it. Sehun carefully picked him up, cradling him and Kyungsoo’s heart tightened at how small Jongin looked curled up in the youngest boy’s arms.

He directed Sehun to lay Jongin on the sofa and told him to call Chanyeol and tell him not to come in tomorrow; that day the parlor wouldn’t be open for business.

}{}{

For the next week and a half, Jongin didn’t come to the tattoo parlor, but he’d left his number in Kyungsoo’s phone before he’d left early the last morning he’d been at the shop. Kyungsoo didn’t receive any calls or texts from him for a few days, so he assumed either Jongin was too busy or he was shy. Either one was plausible.

He debated with himself for a while before typing out a short text: I hope you’re doing well. He hit send before he could back out and tossed the phone underneath the counter. Luckily, Zitao chose that moment to enter the parlor and Kyungsoo was distracted from his phone for a couple hours.

His mind wandered as Sehun nobly tried to talk to Zitao in Mandarin and Zitao replied with much better Korean. Jongin could be in therapy right now. He hoped it was helping and that it didn’t hurt too much. Jongin had never shown signs of limping or pain when he put weight on his foot, but Kyungsoo had read somewhere that physical therapy could be particularly tough. He tried to push the images his mind conjured of Jongin shuffling with crutches out and instead focused on Zitao, who was cooing over the panda that Sehun had designed and was choosing where he wanted it on his body.

After the tattoo was done, while Sehun cleaned up and talked with Zitao, Kyungsoo exchanged places with Chanyeol at the front counter to check his phone. A notification popped up as soon as the screen flickered on. Hastily, Kyungsoo tapped it and read the text that appeared.

i’m ok :) in class :P c u 2nite

“What are you grinning about?” Zitao asked, pulling on his ridiculously stylish coat before he paid. The panda had gone just below his left collarbone, and Kyungsoo could see the gauze peeking out over his shirt collar. It reminded him to text Jongin back and make sure he was taking care of his tattoo properly.

“Why’s it your business?” Kyungsoo answered, not unkindly, and accepted the credit card Zitao handed him.

“My favorite artist should smile like that all the time,” Zitao said, and then his eyes moved upward, lingering on some far-off point. “Everyone should, to be honest.”

“No existential discussion of the human nature in my tattoo parlor,” Kyungsoo ordered playfully, waving Zitao out. “Have a good day!”

“I will!” was the cheerful response, and then Kyungsoo was left with his phone and the promise of seeing Jongin that night.

Jongin came into the shop that night after Chanyeol and Sehun had left, looking faintly tired but not terribly exhausted. Kyungsoo took him straight to the back to get to work so that he could go home and get rest as soon as possible. They talked about his classes, and a little bit about the therapy, but Jongin seemed content to merely close his eyes and let Kyungsoo chat by himself. When Kyungsoo ran out of things to say, they remained quiet, letting the machine’s familiar noise keep the room from being entirely silent.

Kyungsoo gradually became concerned that Jongin had fallen asleep again and reached up to poke him awake, but Jongin beat him to it, saying softly, “Thank you for that night. I don’t know why I just started crying.” He moved his head to peek at Kyungsoo out of the corner of his eye and sighed. “The day after, I couldn’t seem to keep myself from laughing at the most random times.”

“That can happen,” Kyungsoo said. “I feel like the body is trying to make up for all the crying it did earlier.”

Humming in agreement, Jongin slit his eyes again, just barely watching Kyungsoo from under his eyelashes. The tattoo machine didn’t affect him much anymore, and the drone of it seemed to put him to sleep more than anything else. Kyungsoo pulled back to look at the tattoo as a whole. It was almost completed – the tip of one wing was left. One more session and it would be finished. Dread touched him, and the worry that he wouldn’t see Jongin again after the next time filled his mind. Only a few times and he’d already gotten attached, but that didn’t mean Jongin was.

“Is there much left?” Jongin murmured.

Kyungsoo switched off the machine and finished up on Jongin’s back. “It’s almost done,” he told him, with his lungs trying to come up his throat and his head stuffed with cotton. “One more time and you’ll be through.”

Jongin sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the table. His feet dangled, the toes of his shoes just barely dragging against the tiled floor. “That’s good,” he said, and his mouth moved into a faint smile. “I’ve looked at the tattoo in the mirror, and even backwards, it looks gorgeous.” He looked up at Kyungsoo through those long, dark eyelashes. “Thank you.”

After swallowing an unnatural lack of saliva down a dry throat, Kyungsoo managed to reply. “You’re welcome. A tattoo really only looks gorgeous if it’s on someone who looks that way to begin with,” he threw out of his mouth.

They stared at each other – for how long, Kyungsoo couldn’t be sure, because he was too busy trying to decipher the emotions that sparked in Jongin’s eyes, which he found to oddly look like hot cocoa. He finally managed to recognize one that passed as a deep apprehension, or…fear.

Was Jongin afraid? Kyungsoo decided not to risk it. “I’ll see you next time, then,” he spat out. “Bye.” He raced out of the room, leaving the door flung wide open, not stopping to see or hear Jongin’s reaction, and locked himself in the other room. There, with his nose stinging from the sanitary cleanser’s scent and eyes that watered, (definitely because of the cleanser, not because he was embarrassed) he sat, his back sliding down the door, waiting. He covered his head with his arms, not wanting to hear Jongin calling for him.           

 The next day, Kyungsoo came to the shop late for the second time, scrubbing tired eyes, stretching achy shoulders, and generally not in the mood for nonsense from Sehun and Chanyeol. Both, however, met him at the door with uncharacteristically sober faces. He glared at them with a tilted head and a disgruntled expression. “Move out of the doorway,” he ground out, “or I will move you.”

Before he himself could move, he was being pushed out onto the sidewalk and the front door of his own tattoo parlor was shut and blocked by his own employees.

“What have you done?” Sehun hissed.

“Woken up, brushed my teeth, and come to my shop. Is there anything abnormal about that?” Kyungsoo grumbled.

“More specifically,” Chanyeol said, giving Sehun a reprimanding look, “what did you do last night that would make us find Jongin sitting in the snow this morning by the door, waiting for us?”

Kyungsoo’s shoulders dropped, and he was vaguely aware of his mouth doing the same. “What?” he whispered.

“Yeah,” Sehun told him, not managing very well at keeping the spite out of his voice. “I was looking forward to having a nice, ordinary morning, and instead I have to pull all the stops just to keep a guy older than me from breaking down in our front room. I had to give him my sketchpad and tell him what to draw. Mine. It’s covered in weird scribbles now!”

“We haven’t even opened yet,” Chanyeol informed Kyungsoo, opening the door. “Please, for the love of all that is good and right, fix this.”

Kyungsoo dumped his coat on the floor and walked steadily, restraining himself from running, to where Jongin sat on the couch, fiddling with a pencil and blankly staring at Sehun’s sketchpad. As soon as Kyungsoo stopped in front of him, Jongin’s eyes roamed up to his face, with a questioning, terribly sad look.

He tossed the sketchpad and pencil away, standing up, almost a head taller than Kyungsoo. “Kyungsoo,” he said.

“Jongin,” Kyungsoo answered.

There was a weighty pause, like so many before it, with searching gazes and frantic grasping for words – the right words; any words.

“Jongin, I’m sorry,” Kyungsoo finally said. “What I said was…entirely unprofessional. And I ran away because I didn’t want to hurt you.” He stopped there, without further, better explanation, because he couldn’t think of anything. His brain seemed to have stopped functioning beyond panic.

“Do you not like me, then?” Jongin spoke the words so quietly that Kyungsoo almost mistook them for a displeased noise made in the dancer’s throat. He must have seen Kyungsoo’s conflicted mindset on his features, because he said almost directly after, “Please be honest. Please.”

Slowly, Kyungsoo forced himself to nod and took in oxygen to stoke his courage. “I do. I like you. I more than like you.”

Jongin’s reaction was one of astonishment. Kyungsoo trembled, ready to run again but unwilling to do anything that would cause this to repeat itself. He didn’t need to, though, because after bewilderment, Jongin’s expression changed to one of joy. He stepped closer to Kyungsoo. Kyungsoo let him.

“This is me being honest as well,” he murmured. “I more than like you, too.”

No more pauses, Kyungsoo decided. He carefully raised his hand to Jongin, who lowered his chin into Kyungsoo’s fingers, and pulled Jongin down, brushing their lips together. Jongin smiled against his mouth and pressed closer. Kyungsoo couldn’t help but pull back and laugh before kissing Jongin back, with more confidence and delight.

The front door suddenly slammed open. Kyungsoo snapped his head around, yelling out of instinct, “If you break that, I swear I’ll break your face!”

Sehun stomped in, snapping at Chanyeol, who followed closely, “I don’t care, I’m tired of waiting.” He stopped short, looked at Kyungsoo with Jongin’s chin in his hand and Jongin with hooded eyes and blushing cheeks, and rolled his eyes. “Finally. I’ll be in the back. Gosh.”

Chanyeol sighed and then began bouncing around the front room. “Yay! Good for you two!” He jumped up to them and asked excitedly, “Can I be the best man? One of the best men? The flower boy? Something?”

Growling, Kyungsoo slapped the taller boy on the shoulder. “We literally just had our first kiss. We’re not getting married.”

“Ever?” Jongin questioned, eyes wide and concerned.

“Not now,” Kyungsoo stressed. “Give me a few years and I’ll consider it.”

“I’ve got dibs on so many positions!” Chanyeol yelled as he ran back to tell Sehun, who’d probably already heard it, with how loud Chanyeol apparently had to be.

“So,” Kyungsoo told Jongin, “While you’re here, do you want to finish your tattoo?”

Jongin grinned and leaned down to kiss Kyungsoo on the tip of his nose, making him flush. “Only if you don’t run off this time.”