“Why is that you never text me when something major happens in your life?” Jackson asked plaintively as Mark started setting up his taco truck for the evening. “I always text you. I tell you everything. Why can't you return the favor?”

“And that’s the problem, Jackson. Your everything is TMI. There are some things other people don’t need to know.”

“That’s the thing, Mark. I need to know. I catch you and your cute new boyfriend making out, and then a few minutes later you two vanish and don’t come back. I want to know what went down in those unaccounted for hours.”

“You didn’t even catch us making out,” Mark reminded him. “We caught you making out.”

“Yeah, but you were on top of him on the couch, faces inches away. Your body language told me exactly what you were doing. Did you take him home and get it on after that?”

“I did bring him back to his place, but there was no getting it on. At least not all the way. We made it to a couple bases, but no homerun this time.”

“What the ? Why not?”

“Are you good boy shaming me, Wang?”

“Hell yeah, I am, Tuan. And I know it must have been your fault, because Jinyoung always looks like he wants to be done by you when he looks at you.”

Mark sighed. “Look, it’s not like I didn’t want to. It’s just that a lot happened yesterday. And I cried a lot because of sorting things out with Youngjae. Don’t your eyes get all weird and heavy after you cry a lot? I wasn’t about to have my first time with him be with nasty eyes.” He grimaced. “I did stay the night, though.”

“Well, I suppose that’s a step.” Jackson leaned in. “If you’re nervous about doing it, I could explain to you the step-by-step of ytime.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “I know how it’s done. You’re acting like I’ve never done it before.”

Jackson’s eyes widened. “Wait...you have? You…you…and Youngjae?!?! You two were banging, and YOU NEVER TOLD ME?”

Oh, I guess I didn’t, Mark remembered. “There was an embarrassing thing that happened with that, and I didn’t want you making fun of us,” he said nonchalantly.

“Something embarrassing? Now you absolutely have to tell me. What, did you fart or something while you were doing it? Because that totally sounds like something you would do.”

“No. And I’m not going to tell you. Youngjae and I really did part on good terms this time, so I’m not just going to let you broadcast our old news to anyone you feel like after I tell you.” He hung up his open sign, giving Jackson a look. “Anyways, I’m not planning on putting Jinyoung off just because we didn’t do it last night. I'm sure it will happen soon, but when it does, I'm still not going to give you a play by play. Now , I’ve got customers to feed.”

Jackson shot him a dirty look, but obligingly trotted over to Wang Chinese to open up. There was going to be an art exhibit in two hours, so it was going to be a busy night. Not that Mark minded—he felt like he still needed to calm down after the day before and settle his nervous energy. He still had to process it fully: he had a boyfriend. An adorable boyfriend who was both ruthlessly teasing and genuinely sweet, a boyfriend with a great body and perfect lips, a boyfriend who unabashedly loved him very much and wasn’t afraid to tell him so. He was in love again a second time, and it felt like the universe was at his fingertips. There was so much ahead of him, and for once, the possibility of an eventual ending didn’t ruin things for him. He was happy to be at the start and to see how far they would go.

He met up with Jinyoung in the neighboring park once he’d closed up shop for the night. “I saved you a burrito,” he said, passing it to Jinyoung. “If you haven’t eaten yet.”

Jinyoung accepted it skeptically. “Are these OK to refrigerate and save for later? Considering how many beans you can fit in those things, there could be later consequences to eating it now. I don’t really want to screw over my digestive system tonight of all times.”

“Why?” Mark asked. Jinyoung gave him a look, and he thought about it for a moment longer. “Oh.”

Jinyoung smiled in amusement. “Thanks, though. I wish I could have dropped by earlier, but I had some housekeeping stuff I needed to do. Did you have a good day?”

“It was pretty busy. Lots of people came for the nearby art exhibit, so there wasn’t a lot of down time. How about you?”

“Pretty fantastic.” Jinyoung leaned his head against Mark’s shoulder. “Because everyone asked me how the party went yesterday, and I got to tell them.”

“Oh really? I didn’t think you enjoyed the party all that much. I remember when I walked into the room to talk to you, you were pouting pretty darkly.”

“It got better.” Jinyoung took his hand, twining their fingers together. “You’ll just have to be careful not to give me anything to pout about anymore.”

“That seems like a tall order. You’ve already got these incredibly pout-ready lips.” Mark touched them with his thumb playfully. Jinyoung wasted no time in opening his mouth and sinking his teeth into Mark’s thumb. “Ouch! What was that for?”

“I never said I didn’t bite,” Jinyoung said, raising an eyebrow. “You say ‘pout-ready lips,’ I say ‘jaws of the beast.’”

“Well, that’s both fascinating and slightly terrifying. Should I be careful about which of my body parts I allow you access to?”

“I won’t bite everything. I know how to be good.” He glanced up. “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“Is it OK with you if we don’t…I don’t know, ‘map out’ this whole being together thing? Because I did that a lot in the past. Planning specific dates, always rigidly following anniversary rituals, sending scheduled texts before bedtime, only picking up after the second ring. With you, I want… I want more unexpected downpours and huddling in deserted buildings. Having you surprise me. Taking things as they come instead of arranging when they will.” He ran his finger along the back of Mark’s hand. “Like I said, I want my world pulled out from under me. You already did that. So I guess what I’m saying is…you don’t have to put it back. Keep letting me fall. That’s what I want.”

“That might be for the best,” Mark said. “Because I really can’t predict what you’re going to do either.”

“I wouldn’t say that’s due to any craftiness on my part. I mean, if you’d opened your eyes a little more, it was pretty obvious what I was trying to do from the moment we met.”

“Maybe. But it’s not so much what you did. It was the way you did it. There were so many surprises in that. It drove me crazy at the beginning, but it worked, didn’t it? I must like it after all.”

“Heh. I’ll keep that in mind. You like how crazy I drive you.”

“Isn’t it mutual?”

“I don’t know.” Jinyoung tilted his head up, pressing his lips against Mark’s ear. “Why don’t you show me how crazy you can drive me first?”

Mark threw his head back, trying to get some air flowing through him—it felt like he was entirely out of breath and would have to gulp it down before being able to function properly again. He hadn’t expected it to be that intense on just the first round, but it seemed like they had once again both flouted their expectations of each other. Jinyoung also looked bowled over, his mouth pursed into a little ‘oh,’ his eyes glittering with both satisfaction and amazement. They met each other’s gaze, and amused chuckles slipped through their lips as they saw each other’s expressions.

“All right…” Jinyoung said, rolling over onto his stomach so he could look down into Mark’s face. “That was…description defying.”

“In a good way, I hope.”

“In a phenomenal way. You were…” He shook his head, the words escaping him. “I thought it would be…I don’t know…a bit clumsier than that? Since it was our first time with each other, and all.”

Mark reached up and ruffled his hair. “I get it, I’m an awkward person usually, yeah, yeah, yeah. But all that flew out of my mind when I saw you and watched you… it wasn’t as if I would have trouble responding to that.”

Jinyoung smiled in delight. "I was aiming for that response. I'm surprised it worked so well--you weren't quite that good at reading my cues when we first met, after all."

"I'm a fast learner, I guess."

"And I'm told I'm a pretty good teacher." His expression suddenly grew more serious. “Truth or truth time. You’re probably going to kill me for asking this, but…how did I stack up to Youngjae?”

Mark’s eyebrows flew up. “Why do you automatically assume I did it with Youngjae? We were pretty young when we went out.”

“Maybe at the beginning, but weren’t you close to eighteen when you broke up? You guys wouldn’t be the first teenagers to do that. And besides…” He hesitated. “I did think maybe that this would be your first and assumed I might have to tell you how to prepare me properly, but you clearly knew what you were doing.”

Mark sighed. It wasn’t as if he was wrong, and he didn’t want to lie to him. “Are you sure you even want to know?” he asked.

“Why? Was he that much better than me?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just worried if I say anything that’s not ‘he was terrible,’ you’ll wind up feeling bad about it. I don’t see why it’s so important for you to know.”

Jinyoung bit his lips. “I don’t need to know. It won’t change how I felt about what just happened or how I feel about us. I just…I want to know everything about you from before we met. Who you were, and how it made you who you are. And if I’m not the best you’ve ever had, I want to know from the beginning so that I can…you know. Step up my game?”

“You already completely knocked me out. Do you want me to pass out completely next time?” He smiled indulgently, reaching out to play with Jinyoung’s hair again. It was so delightfully soft against his fingers. “It only happened a few times with Youngjae. We’d only started just a little bit before we wound up breaking up. And the first time...didn’t go as planned. Not with actually doing the deed itself, but the aftermath…” Mark grimaced. “Youngjae is a really, really loud person. And while it was happening, he was even louder than normal. So loud that my neighbor overheard us. Luckily she didn’t actually realize what we were doing, but she assumed I had beaten him up or something like that. And since this was at my parents’ house, she called them and told them I had basically violently attacked one of my friends while they were out. My parents were furious, and since I couldn’t tell them what I’d actually been doing, I wound up being put on house arrest for a whole month and almost got saddled with anger management on top of it.”

Jinyoung burst out laughing. “You’re serious?”

“Dead serious. We were both so humiliated about it that I’m surprised we even tried it again.”

“That’s…that’s certainly memorable.” Jinyoung held back another burst of laughter before growing serious again. “It must have made it better for you, though.”

“What, getting put on house arrest?”

“Not that. The fact that he, um, enjoyed it so much that he got that loud? People enjoy that, usually. It makes them feel more confident.”

Mark was pretty sure he knew what Jinyoung was fishing at. “It’s not like I assume he enjoyed it any more or less than you based on just that, right? Like I said, Youngjae was just loud in general. You’re not. If you had gotten that noisy out of nowhere, I would have assumed you were faking it. Besides, the way you sounded was…” He trailed off, thinking of how Jinyoung’s velvet voice had translated into his own little moans and hums of enjoyment. Just remembering it made him shiver all over. “Let’s just say, it made me feel plenty confident. And plenty .”

“Mmm.” Jinyoung relented, lips slipping into a happy smile at the praise. “I was actually holding back a little, because I thought any more than that might be embarrassing. I won’t next time, if that’s what you like.”

“You might want to let me build a little more endurance, first.” He trailed his fingers down Jinyoung’s back, tracing up and down his spine. “What about you? You’ve dated more people than me. I doubt that was your first time.”

“It wasn’t. It was the second time.”

“Second time in total, or just the second person you’ve done it with?”

“Both.”

Mark was shocked. He’d thought for sure Jinyoung would have more experience than him. “Really?”

“Really. I wasn’t really interested in trying again for a while after the first time. It wasn’t good.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It hurt like hell. I know that’s the norm, but the person in question didn’t do it romantically at all. Barely warmed me up or asked me how I wanted to do it. They just went in and did it. And it hurt and it and it felt really impersonal, like it could have been anyone in my place. It was so bad that I broke up with him right after, and, like I said, I didn’t really want to do it again after that.”

“Excuse me for saying so, but…I didn’t really get that impression from you.” Mark gestured to the bedroom broadly. “You were clearly ready to go not just tonight, but apparently yesterday, too?”

“That’s because I didn’t think you would be a repeat of that. You left a much softer impression. I thought there was no way someone like you wouldn’t treat me very, very romantically.” He tweaked Mark’s nose. “And I was right, wasn’t I? I spent my first time just waiting for it to be over, and this time I was pretty much begging you to keep going. I may not have been loud enough to wake the neighbors, but no one can say I didn’t very much appreciate what you did.” He paused. “It’s my turn to ask a question, but I want to go back to the one I asked before. I don’t feel like you fully answered.”

“What more do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say a lot more. All that we established is that I’m quieter. There has to be more for me to go on than just that if I want to deliver even better moving forward.”

“What, would you like me to draw a Venn diagram? A pro and con chart?” Mark grabbed Jinyoung’s shoulders and rolled him over, pinning him down with his body. “You don’t need me to compare you to anyone, all right? Because my mind isn’t comparing you or thinking of anyone else. I’m just thinking of you and how amazing it was.” He pressed his lips against the center of Jinyoung’s chest, kissing him lightly and tasting the sweetness of his skin. “How warm your skin was, how good it tasted,” he whispered, trailing his lips lower and planting a row light kisses against his flushed chest. “How you moved into me and how beautifully your back arched when I touched you.”

"Mmmm." Jinyoung was beginning to stir beneath him, eyes staring at him in wonder, mouth falling open and a contented sigh slipping out. As Mark's lips trailed lower, his back arched yet again, and his hands flew to Mark's hair, fingers entangled in the sweat-damp strands.

Mark lifted his head, meeting his eyes in a warm gaze, then slid back up his body so they were again face to face. Leaning in, he pressed a gentle kiss against Jinyoung's mouth, then abruptly tugged his lower lip with his teeth in a rough nip. “Do you still need to know more of what I loved about you?" Mark murmured, his breath tickling against Jinyoung's dampened lips. "There was also how roughly you kissed me with those lips of yours. How magnetic they were, drawing me back in whenever one of us pulled away. How they said my name between your pants for breath.” He drew away, trailing his finger along the curve of Jinyoung's mouth. "Are you satisfied yet?"

Jinyoung looked dazed, as if under a spell, but was still alert enough to shake his head. "Tell me more," he said in a low, sensuous voice.

Mark lifted Jinyoung’s hand and kissed his palm. “There was how you touched me and scratched me like you were going wild. How you spread yourself with your long fingers like you’ve done it thinking of me before. How you touched yourself until you were dripping, and then touched me with your damp fingers.” He pressed his lips right against Jinyoung’s ear, murmuring lowly. “The way you begged for more like you wouldn’t live if I didn’t give it to you. That’s what I liked. Everything about you. Everything you did.”

Jinyoung was now squirming desperately underneath him, skin flushing, head pressing hard against the pillow, his lips sliding open to release a little gasp. Mark could feel his whole body beginning to respond, and his own responding in return.

“I…I think I’m already ready to show you what more I can do,” Jinyoung said breathily. “Have you finished building your endurance?”

“We’ll just have to see for ourselves, won’t we?” Mark asked, wrapping him in his arms. “I think I’d like to find out.”

Though Jinyoung wanted to avoid too much planning and tradition-for-the-sake-of-tradition in their relationship, there was one thing he insisted on: going to Après un Rêve for their one month anniversary.

“Is it because of the discount?” Mark asked, remembering that his sister was the manager and had comped a lot of their first date check.

“Part that, part nostalgia,” Jinyoung said with a shrug. “I liked that first date, even if you didn’t.”

“I keep telling you, I didn’t hate it. It was just-“

“Unbearably awkward to the point where fleeing through the bathroom window was on the table, I know, I know.” Jinyoung grinned. “I went so easy on you, too. I didn’t grill you, I asked you only fun questions, I showed a healthy amount of interest in you without being too overwhelming to your fragile nerves. And yet you still freaked.”

“Well, excuse me for being this kind of person.”

“And yet you’re also the kind of person who is completely on fire when I get him into a bedr-“

“Jinyoung?”

“Yeah?”

“STOP.”

And so they’d ended up at Après un Rêve a second time. Mark had dressed better for it in black pants, a smart casual blazer, and a clean dress shirt, but he still arrived in GuacMan, the loudest looking car in a lot full of bright and shiny foreign imports.

Jinyoung was once again waiting for him in the lobby, dressed in a light blue dress shirt and khakis. He always looked so fresh, Mark thought, with a bright, pinkish glow like a delectable peach. It was hard to hold back the urge to kiss him when everything about him looked like something Mark wanted to take a bite out of. He settled for a brief peck on the cheek instead, and Jinyoung curled an arm around his waist, giving him an affectionate squeeze. Even with the kiss on the lips resisted, they still obviously looked like a couple.

“So, am I supposed to order the same thing as last time for symbolic reasons?” Mark asked when they were shown to their table.

“Did you like it? I don’t think I ever asked last time. You did eat the whole thing, so I just assumed.”

“It was great. I’ve always been a big fan of duck, so your recommendation was on point.” He paused. “Wait, you’d mentioned looking me up on your dating app, but did you look me up anywhere else?”

Jinyoung nodded, not looking too guilty. “Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Kakao. The duck thing was just a lucky guess, though. You don’t post a lot of food pics.”

Mark’s mind scrambled to think of what kind of posts Jinyoung would have seen back then. He wasn’t an incredibly regular poster, but now the subject matter of whatever he posted felt vitally important, having gone into Jinyoung’s first impression of him.

“You look a little panicked right now,” Jinyoung said in amusement. “Clearly there wasn’t anything bad, or we wouldn’t be here together. It’s not like you suddenly knowing this now changes anything. People always do some research before going on dates nowadays. Didn’t you do any on me?”

“Jackson didn’t actually give me time to.”

“No loss. I don’t actually post anything, anyways.” He studied the menu. “Hey, how about switching orders? I’ll get the duck, you get the steak tartare. We can get a taste of what the other was eating that day.”

“Chee-sy,” Mark said, imitating how BamBam would say it. Jinyoung rolled his eyes and kicked him under the table.​

Still, that was exactly what they wound up doing. A little cheesy never hurt in a relationship, Mark thought. Besides, it wasn’t as if he disliked steak tartare.

While they waited for the waiter to bring their drinks, Mark glanced idly around the room. He’d been so nervous last time he was here that he hadn’t really taken stock of the full scene, other than what his eyes had landed on while trying to avoid looking at Jinyoung. Now that he was taking a better look, he realized that it was even more upscale than he’d originally thought. Most of the clientele were in incredibly fancy eveningwear, and Mark could have sworn the woman eating near the back of the room was a popular TV actress.

“I still can’t believe that if things had gone differently, you would have taken Jackson here,” Mark said. “My brain just can’t process it.”

Jinyoung snorted. “Are you kidding? I had been planning on taking him to Lotteria. I don’t actually invest anything into first dates because they usually wind up being terrible, anyways.”

Mark blinked. “But he said…he said the whole reason he sent me in as a substitute was because he felt bad about you having to waste your reservations here.”

“That was a lie,” Jinyoung said. “I mean, Jackson didn’t lie to you. I lied to him. I was really ticked about him practically nagging me into a date that I wasn’t really interested in and then bailing on me out of nowhere. So I lied and said I had made reservations here to make him feel properly guilty about the inconvenience he’d caused me. I wasn’t expecting that guilt to lead him into sending a substitute. But here we are.”

“Sometimes I really don’t know whether to kill Jackson Wang or be grateful to him,” Mark mused. “But it seems like this was partially your fault, all that stress I went through. Especially since you totally played along with having reservations here when I first met you.”

“Are you really going to get mad at me about it? I think we can both agree that it paid off.” Jinyoung grinned. “I did go back and properly make the reservations with my sister when it was decided that you were going to be my date. Partly to keep up the ruse, but partly because I thought I’d have to pull out the big guns with you. You didn’t look like you’d be easily won.”

“How so?”

“I didn’t figure you were single from lack of people trying to get with you, that’s all. You have that kind of atmosphere about you, the kind other people want to be around. But you hadn’t found the kind of person you wanted to be around, yet. And I wasn’t sure at the beginning if that would really be me.” His eyes softened. “I’m just so, so lucky that it was.”

The steak tartare wound up being delicious, and the date itself amazing from start to finish. Mark felt so relaxed with Jinyoung there that it amazed him that he’d ever felt like he’d been sitting on pins and needles on the first occasion. Jinyoung made him laugh and smile and be playful, but at the same time he completely took his breath away and made Mark want to fall entirely under his spell and do everything he wanted if it made him happier. He felt more like himself, freer than he’d ever allowed himself to feel before.

He remembered then, the thing he’d forgotten through the distortion of his past memories. He remembered how much he’d liked being in love, how good having someone to treasure and to love him right back felt. The cheesy lines, the inside jokes, the spontaneous actions, the underlying crackle of tension—he loved all of it. How had he let himself forget that? The start of love was a beautiful, beautiful thing. And he would only hope that the love this time would be a circle rather than a line, and that the path would take him time and time again back to these feelings and there would never be an end to them, just new beginnings, new bursts of this incredible joy.

When the evening started winding down, he set aside his wine glass and pulled his napkin off his lap. “Bathroom,” he said. “If you feel like it, you can order dessert for us while I’m gone.”

“No,” Jinyoung said, his eyes twinkling in the candlelight. “I think we’ll have that at home tonight. I’ll call for the check.”

Mark slipped into the men’s room, feeling like laughing at himself when he remembered the last time he’d been there. Debating an escape, imagining Jinyoung laughing over it with his new muscular and inexplicably shirtless boyfriend. And now Mark was the new boyfriend, the one who got to joke about their embarrassing situation with Jinyoung. And he was all right with that. He was perfectly happy to do it.

When he went over to the sinks, he glanced at the window where he’d almost made his escape. To his surprise, there was a little note stuck to it, which he couldn’t see clearly from where he was standing. When he was finished washing and drying his hands, he went over and peeled it off.

Don’t even think about it, baby ;), it read.

And then, underneath in smaller letters:

I love you. Let me give you a lifetime of reasons to keep coming back.

-FIN-

A/N: Dearest thirsty readers: Don't even bother asking me to write the full version of the bedroom scene...it's not going to happen ;) Use your imagination based on what Mark said ;) ;)

Hope you enjoyed the story!