Though Yunho had already figured out that every human feeling was, to some extent, useless, as he stood up at the blackboard, glancing around that thirty some-odd students who all wore the exact same expression of complete and utter boredom, he realized just what feeling was the most useless of them all. 

          It was paranoia. That creeping feeling that held no weight, that served absolutely no purpose Yunho could discern other than making your palms sweat and your fingers shake for no reason at all. In theory, paranoia is supposed to protect you from impending danger, but that use is made completely null by the fact that it crops up at the most irrelevant of times. 

         And standing at the front of the classroom with thirty pairs of eyes quite literally fixed on him made him feel it more powerfully than he ever had in his entire, rather mundane life of mostly harmless behavior.

         Their stares made him nauseous. Their looks, even though they were disinterested, (a tremendous understatement), felt knowing to Yunho’s paranoia-rattled mind. Every casual glance or accidental moment of eye contact made his heart jump as a slew of his worst fears came tumbling through him like an avalanche. He couldn’t help but think that they knew, that in some moment of poor judgment Jaejoong had told them about his less-than appropriate relationship with him– a thought that he knew was impossible, seeing as in his months of working there he had never seen Jaejoong so much as look at another kid, let alone talk to them. But that didn’t help calm his nerves at all. And with all eyes fixed upon him, there wasn’t all that much he could do to escape the oppressive feeling of fear that seemed to soak the walls. 

         What’s worse was that he hadn’t even technically done anything. He had rejected his advances and spurned him at every turn, yet he still felt like he was at fault for something that had never even happened. It was irrational, but that’s exactly what paranoia was. Irrational. And in that moment, so was Yunho. 

         “Alright, class is over. Everyone do exercises B and C for homework.” 

         Yunho collected the few scattered papers decorated about the rather large desk - for which he still seemed wholly unfit. He felt it was far more appropriate for him to sit in one of the smaller tables for students, the desks that he was nearly convinced he was sitting in just yesterday, making idle doodles in the chipped and splintering wood and drifting off to whatever mundane thoughts were more interesting than class after class of the same. 

         He cringed as he realized he that the dreaded day for staff meetings had somehow rolled around once again. The moment he finished one of them he managed to completely deny that they would ever come back, resulting in him being unpleasantly surprised at every other week or so where they would shock him out of his blissfully ignorant state. But, as he thought about it a bit more, he realized the meeting was a bit of a blessing rather than just another painful facet of a job completely unsuited for him. Because this time, this suddenly too short hour of meaningless information that felt quite like being back in school was not just an interference from his return to his safe haven. It was a prolonging of the dread he knew he’d face the moment he stepped into his home - the place where he had somehow, in a moment of complete impulsiveness or utter insanity, just which he hadn’t exactly figured out, he had invited the very boy he was trying to avoid to essentially live with him for an indefinite period of time. 

         Thinking about it now, it was perhaps the worst decision he had ever made in his entire life. Though he, admittedly, had not made too many important decisions throughout his all of twenty-eight uneventful years. (Prior to the catastrophic choice to accept the teaching job, of course.) 

         This was the boy who had slung him into a pit of sheer self-doubt, not to mention confusion. He had never been quite so rattled before. Not from anything. And that truly was no exaggeration. His life was mundane. He had carefully adhered to the standard pattern of childhood bliss, teenage rebellion, then the straggling boredom of adult life to its strictest of guidelines. He was so unused to the persistent ‘in-between’ state he found himself in because his life had been far too simplistic to ever force him out of the black and white. And now that he lived in a strange, grayish amalgamation between the two, he had no idea just what he was supposed to do. 

         Whenever he attempted to sit and think through just what it was he felt about Jaejoong, on those rare days when he had enough energy to tackle such a problem, he seemed to make no progress. He had established that it wasn’t hatred after nearly a month of arguing with himself, but what else? 

         What was it that made denying the boy impossible - no matter what absurd request he had in store for him?

         What was it that made his heart flutter with every fleeting moment of contact? 

         What was it that made the image of the boy’s crimson dusted cheeks so prevalent in his every thought, so vivid in his imagination that focusing on anything else was beyond impossibility?

         He shook his head and pushed the thoughts away for what he knew would only be a short moment. Paranoia, he reminded himself. A useless feeling and nothing more. 

         “What’s wrong? You seem a little off.”  

         He jerked up upon feeling a familiar nudge at his side, only to have his anxieties further relaxed by the bright eyes of a girl he had found himself becoming more and more comfortable with. 

         He tried to relax his facial expression in a way that would display nothing but neutrality, but in his state of anxiety he seemed to have forgotten just how normal people managed to emote. 

         “Yeah... I’m alright,” he murmured. “Just a bit worn out. Long day.” The standard excuse. 

         “Oh, I completely understand,” she said, accentuating her sympathy with a brief touch to his arm. “This place will wear you out faster than anything I know.”

         “You can say that again,” he groaned as he allowed his heavy head to collapse backward over the edge of the chair. What he needed was an escape. Time was irrelevant. He would take a mere five minutes if it meant a completely empty head and a wonderfully thoughtless mind. 

         But it seemed like five minutes was far more than he could afford. 

         “Are you free this weekend?” Jessica asked, arms swaying quite close to his side as they exited the room after a meeting that for once seemed just a bit too short. He felt his throat clench up. He was free, in fact on any given weekend it was safe to say he didn’t have too much planned, but he felt himself hesitate. 

         “U-uh, yeah, I mean...”

         “Hey,” a voice interrupted, halting his violent stutters with nothing more than just a word. 

         Jaejoong stood, arms folded, slitted eyes fixed at not him, for once, but his partner just inches at his side. Fingers digging into the fold of his elbow and lip curled ever so slightly, it was safe to say he was angry. But Yunho probably could have deduced that without so much as a glance toward him. Anger seemed to be his default. 

         “Who is this, one of your students?” Jessica asked. 

         “Uh...” Yunho’s eyes traveled between the two, his skin pricking as he sensed some sort of imminent danger growing from the situation between them. “Yeah.” 

         Jaejoong eyes snapped up from Jessica’s to meet his own, and the stare made him wish he hadn’t said anything at all. 

         “Can we go now?” Jaejoong demanded, clearly a bit irked that he had to wait the strenuous hour long duration of Yunho’s meeting. 

         “Yeah, whatever,” Yunho replied before immediately remembering just who it was next to him who was most likely confused about the sudden exchange before her. “He’s... he’s... uh... a friend of the family’s son,” Yunho lied, scrambling for an adequate excuse that wouldn’t make him seem absolutely bizarre in her eyes. “His parents are on vacation, so they asked me to watch him for a bit.”

         “Oh, I see!” She said, displaying her teeth in that brilliant smile that was somehow more charming than it was on their first meeting. Yunho bit his lip as he caught a glance of Jaejoong’s furious exterior, his stare somehow heightened to a blood boiling glare enough to floor Yunho in a matter of seconds. Whatever danger he had been suspicious of seemed just a few breaths away... 

         “Okay, Jaejoong, let’s go,” he said, grabbing Jaejoong’s hand and yanking him down the hallway before he could say anything contrary to his blatant lie. “I’ll see you later, Jessica!” He called over his shoulder, not even bothering to look at the most likely still confused facial expression Jessica wore. 

         “‘A friend of the family’s son?’” Jaejoong repeated, his voice heavily saturated with a contempt still foreign to Yunho, one he didn’t expect from Jaejoong, at least quite so soon. 

         “What did you want me to say, Jaejoong?” Yunho spat, tossing Jaejoong in the passenger seat by his collar and whisking around to his own side to start the needlessly arduous ride home. “Do you know how bizarre it would have sounded had I told her the truth?” 

         Jaejoong remained silent for a few seconds while Yunho prayed that somehow, despite every single thing he had reluctantly learned about Jaejoong in the past however long months was screaming otherwise, something Yunho had said was actually piercing Jaejoong’s stubborn shield and sinking into his brain. Maybe for once he was using a rational side of him Yunho had never seen before. Maybe for once, just once, he was putting aside his feelings for the sake of understanding something other than what he wanted. 

         Maybe, just maybe, that five minute escape was not as far off as he had previously assumed. 

         “So you admit it?” Jaejoong whispered, clutching his bag tightly in his lap and shifting his feet against the carpeted floor. 

         “Admit what?” Yunho asked, but he already knew he didn’t want to hear his answer. Any ‘admittance’ was so far off that it must have been nothing more than a fabrication of Jaejoong’s overactive imagination, and that, by default, was sure to be completely absurd. 

         Jaejoong turned his head around and let a slight, dazed smile fall past his predominantly closed off exterior. “Letting a student stay in your house isn’t that weird in itself, you know. In fact, it’s pretty common,” he stated simply, though his self-assured tone whispered something else in Yunho’s ears. “But you fumbled for an excuse. You just had to tell her something else, even though the truth is nothing particularly strange. Do you know why?”

         “Jaejoong, there is no why. It doesn’t mean any - “

         “Because deep down, even if there’s nothing unusual about me staying at your place for a bit, you’re uncomfortable with it. Not anyone else, but you. Because even in the most innocent of situations, you’re having immoral thoughts, aren’t you?” 

         Yunho bit his lip and kept his eyes fixed directly on the road that flew by him in a gray blur. He searched for some words to aid him in denying Jaejoong’s accusation, but for perhaps the first time in his life, short as it was, he had nothing to say. Nothing at all. 

         Because Jaejoong, at least slightly, was right. 

         Perhaps ‘immoral’ was a bit of a stretch, but it wasn’t black and white. He didn’t hate Jaejoong and he didn’t have the capacity to understand what came after hate and before the exact opposite. 

         He was afraid of Jaejoong because he didn’t know how to feel about him. Or, rather, he didn’t understand the feelings he already had, the feelings had had absolutely no control over. 

         Jaejoong’s presence was unnerving. And it shouldn’t have been. 

         “And when I sleep in your bed every night I sometimes wonder what it is you’re thinking when you let me hold onto you like I do...” 

         “Be quiet, Jaejoong,” Yunho murmured, but found that his voice held absolutely none of the power he attempted to charge his words with. Jaejoong’s passive manipulation was taking an unusually talkative turn - and it was even more effective than his prior silent tactic. 

         And what scared him even more is that Jaejoong, quiet as he was, knew how to use words whenever he wanted to just to bend Yunho to whatever way of thinking suited his feelings best...

         “What do you think about during the night?”

         “I said be quiet.”

         “Do you think about me?” 

         “Jaejoong, I said shut up!” Yunho snapped, snatching Jaejoong’s wrist and holding it above his head while he kept one hand gripped firmly on the wheel. He couldn’t help but notice the way Jaejoong’s thin and flat chest rose with every gentle breath that danced between the silence of two bodies too tense to utter even the shortest of sentences. 

         Yunho had stopped his speech not out of annoyance, the usual feeling he attempted to attribute to his shortness with Jaejoong, but because he truly couldn’t bear a single other word. 

         He couldn’t stomach the boy verbalizing feelings he hadn’t even managed to understand himself, and he was terrified. Of what Jaejoong figured out with nothing but careful attention; terrified of what else Jaejoong could potentially reveal that he hadn’t even discovered himself. And most of all, terrified that whatever he said next would be truth. 

         “Not another word.” He demanded. He had had enough. 

         From that point on, that car ride was, thankfully, silent. But his thoughts weren’t. It seemed those five minutes of repose were still out of reach. 

         Perhaps his paranoia hadn’t been so far off as he had thought. 

         His obsession with avoiding the ‘immoral’ was suspicious in itself. Jaejoong, as much as he cringed to think of it, was right. If he thought about it, something he tried not to, but at this moment was pathetically failing, every word Jaejoong uttered stung like shrapnel piercing his skin solely because of their truth. 

         He was uncomfortable because he was feeling, and at times, thinking things that he shouldn’t. Because he continuously noticed the boy’s thin and delicately modeled legs, his pink, sculpted lips and his ivory polished skin. 

         He was terrified because his fear, his formerly ‘baseless’ anger and worry was completely justified. 

         Yes, if he thought about everything Jaejoong had said, the boy was right. 

         But thinking, really thinking, not just brushing off after a moment’s dwelling, about the feelings that contributed to such feelings? 

         That was one thing he was just not willing to do. 

         And it was one thing he knew he’d have to come face to face with - even with his continued resistance that had now been proved to be more fragile than he had one suspected.  

         Paranoia was at times irrational, certainly. 

         But it seemed now it was the only thing keeping an impending disaster at bay, if only for just a bit more time. 

         And whatever time he did manage to gather up? Well, it looked like that would be the only escape he’d be granted. 

----------------

A/N - Things are heating up.

Sorry for the wait! I was in the hospital for a while but I'm back now. 

-Gelisi

P.S. I started a new story. It's a 2min with slight Jongkey called The Young Writer. It would mean the world to me if you subbed!