Mornings are always awful.

When you wake up with your oesophagus ablaze and a pounding headache cracking your skull—it all becomes a lot worse.

Hakyeon groans (tries, at least), opening his bleary eyes to stare up at the ceiling rotating above him. All of his limbs are aching, but he attempts to stand up anyway, only to roll off his bed and reach the floor with a loud thump. He’s pretty sure his brain splashed out onto the rug.

It’s okay, death will be a salvation at this point.

When he wakes up next, there’s a grinning face in his peripheral vision, laughing at him. Jaehwan is giggling like he’s seeing the funniest thing on earth, and when Hakyeon moans, he starts clapping like a circus seal.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he smirks, brushing Hakyeon’s sweaty fringe out of his eyes.

“Don’t touch me,” Hakyeon mouths, closing his eyes again. His mouth feels like it’s full of sand; tearing his tongue off his palate almost makes him cry, but Jaehwan just laughs anew. “What even is so funny? Give me water.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re a pile of ,” Jaehwan chuckles, and reaches out a bottle of water to Hakyeon.

Hakyeon pushes himself up into sitting position with great suffering, his legs numb and his skin feeling like parchment that could rip open any second. He unscrews the cap on the bottle and drinks two mouthfuls, close to vomiting onto Jaehwan’s chest.

“When did we get home?” Hakyeon asks, taking in the sight of discarded clothes and an empty cigarette pack on the floor, his phone face down by the door.

“Five hours ago,” Jaehwan replies, still smiling.

“Do you really think I know what time it is?”

“It’s almost noon.”

“I wanted to sleep until three in the afternoon,” Hakyeon sighs.

“Ugh, save your breath, you smell disgusting,” Jaehwan says, pulling a face and Hakyeon grimaces back at him. “Besides, to quote you: ‘why’d I wanna go home this eeearly’. I had to wrestle you into bed, mate.”

“Bloody lies,“ Hakyeon says. "I can’t remember a thing.”

“Really? What’s your last memory?”

Hakyeon narrows his eyes at Jaehwan’s smug grin. “Tequila,” he replies finally.

“The first one or the last one?”

“How should I know?! You’re such a pain, ugh. I need to shower.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” Jaehwan sniggers. “And you should probably throw your underwear away.”

“Why?” Hakyeon asks, now horrified. He was pissed, but he hopes only in the figurative sense. He couldn’t have—

“Sticky stuff drying into the fabric is hard to get rid of, you know.”

Hakyeon’s eyes turn wide, and Jaehwan laughs so hard he lies back on the floor, his body twitching with annoying cackles.

“Jaehwan, what are you talking about?” Hakyeon kicks him in the shin for good measure and gathers his blanket into his lap immediately.

“You’re such a , God!” Jaehwan says, and sits up, wiping his tears out of the corners of his eyes.

“Jaehwan!”

“You really don’t remember?” Jaehwan asks, and Hakyeon an eyebrow at him angrily. “Okay, wait.”

Jaehwan pulls out his phone from the pocket of his sweatpants, tapping away on it until he finds a picture that he holds up for Hakyeon to see. Hakyeon squints, trying to focus on it, and when he sees what’s going on in the photo, he snatches the phone from Jaehwan’s hand.

There’s a couch and on top of it, a crumpled mess with two legs around the waist of another mess that’s hovering above it, face hidden in the neck of the first heap. Hakyeon recognizes himself as the person lying on the couch, his eyes shut tight and brow furrowed in some kind of sensual agony so inappropriate he feels his face flush.

“What the …” he mumbles and swipes to the next picture.

Now he’s sitting in the lap of the guy that was kissing (?) his neck in the previous photo, seemingly trying to devour the stranger with his hands tangled into shiny black hair.

“What— who—”

“There’s a video, too.”

Hakyeon lets out a whimper but swipes to the left, revealing a 30-second video. He takes a deep breath before he presses play and quickly has to turn down the volume as the music starts blasting from the speakers of Jaehwan’s phone. The picture is shaky, but it’s obvious that Hakyeon is throwing his head back, still sitting in the guy’s lap, enjoying how the stranger touches him under his shirt and inside his jeans; it’s shamefully obscene, even with Jaehwan’s boisterous laughter in the background. The video ends with Hakyeon bending over to kiss the guy.

He’s horrified, but swipes again nevertheless, revealing a selfie of Jaehwan and that Wonshik guy he’s told Hakyeon about a few times, they too, kissing. When Jaehwan notices what Hakyeon is looking at, he takes his phone back, the corners of his mouth seemingly about to tear from how wide he’s grinning.

“You should see the look on your face now,” he snorts, snapping a picture of Hakyeon before the latter could oppose. He quickly hides his phone from Hakyeon, but Hakyeon doesn’t have the strength to fight him, anyway. “So, yeah, this happened. For like, two and a half hours. It was impossible to get you two off that couch.”

“Did I— did he— who is he?”

“A friend of Hongbin’s, if I’m not mistaken,” Jaehwan says. “Sang—Sanghyuk?”

“Sanghyuk,” Hakyeon repeats and feels like crying when the name evokes nothing in his mind. “What happened?”

“One moment you were arguing about who spilled the beer on your shirt, and I actually told you to shut the up because the kid’s huge, like, I was sure he’d kick your , but you were all like 'I can deal with it’ and 'you’re not my dad’… and I looked away for two seconds and when I looked back at you, you guys were eating off each other’s face.”

Hakyeon moans, covering his face with his hands, feeling nauseous to the pit of his stomach.

“Did we on that couch or—?”

“I didn’t see everything, but while I was dragging you home—because I literally had to hold you up, otherwise you couldn’t walk—you said you’d got the best ever and gave me an in-depth analysis of it which I probably won’t ever be able to delete from my memory. So, I assume that was all.”

“Why,” Hakyeon mumbles, swallowing back a lump in his throat, “why the hell didn’t you stop me?”

“I told you it wasn’t right!” Jaehwan replies indignantly. “You said you’d never regret it because he was sooo hot. And, I mean, yeah, he really was.”

Hakyeon lets out a muffled scream. If Jaehwan saw it, others saw it as well, and just what might they think of him? What might Sanghyuk or what’s-his-name think of him? Not that it matters that much because if Hongbin decides to invite him to a party next time he will definitely ask whether Sanghyuk will be there and if yes, there’s no way in hell Hakyeon will show up, but still… This is not who he is. He’s been mocking Jaehwan for that one time he ed a girl in the toilet of some club several years ago since it happened, and now he did even worse because it happened in front of literally everyone.

“Hey,” Jaehwan laughs softly, taking Hakyeon’s hands off his face, looking a lot less gloating and a lot more understanding now. “You don’t have to be ashamed. We all do crazy stuff.”

“I looked like a ing actor!” Hakyeon whines, kicking out under the blanket in frustration.

“Honey, you watch very low quality if the actors look like that in them,” Jaehwan snorts, and Hakyeon lifts an arm to punch him, but Jaehwan grabs his wrist, giggling. “No, but really. It’s totally okay. And God knows Sanghyuk might have liked it enough to contact you.”

“I want him to forget it, I want everyone to forget it. Delete those pictures.”

“No way.”

“.”

Hakyeon climbs to his feet, attempting to leave for the bathroom, but then Jaehwan grabs his ankle. “What will you do if he wants more from you?” he asks.

“Reject him, obviously,” Hakyeon replies, and shakes Jaehwan’s hand off his leg.