If Yunho had even a shred of hope that he would get at least a few minutes of sleep that night, it had been thoroughly crushed by the very harsh reality of a sleepless night, a night spent twisting and turning and constantly feeling like just any minute the boy would waltz into his room, that any minute he’d hear his voice trickling in through the door and leaking to his ears, that any minute he’d hear his feet pattering down the hallway and everything would be over in a single second.

            He sat up, eyes searing in pain and entire body throbbing and screaming for just a few sweet seconds of sleep. But he knew that simply wasn’t a possibility. Any attempts to do so would just prolong the inevitable, and at the moment, he was more inclined to just get it over with.

            He dragged his limbs, heavy and stiff with the thick chains of exhaustion that pulled him down at every opportunity, out of bed until he could stand weakly on his sore legs.

            Everything felt dull. Even the ache of his bones was weak and barely present, the gentle hum of the feeling he couldn’t shake suddenly less powerful than it had been the night before.

            For a moment, he thought maybe Jaejoong’s presence simply wouldn’t bother him like it had the night before.

            For a moment, he thought he could certainly just ignore him.

            For a moment, he thought the burning feeling in his stomach would just disappear.

            Yes, it would be simple. He would walk into the living room, and Jaejoong would just be another person. They had no relation to each other, anyway. He had to remember that.

            He was just a person, an unimportant face that didn’t have an effect on him in the slightest. He was nothing to him. They were nothing to each other.

            Just two people. Two, unrelated people.

            And absolutely nothing else.

            “You’re awake.” Jaejoong said from his position stretched across the couch the moment Yunho walked in, the statement of such an obvious fact completely and totally unnecessary. Yunho merely grumbled in response, though whether it was in an attempt to once again keep his distance from the boy or just a result of his sheer exhaustion was entirely unclear. He took a brief moment to sigh in relief after he had seen the boy had already changed out of his pajamas. If he had seen even a hint of that pale skin, that smooth skin that he could still feel on the tips of his fingers if he thought about it for long enough, he knew his task of indifference would crumble. “I was waiting for you.”

            Yunho felt his skin prick at the statement. He took a moment to pause, to remind him of what he had promised to do, before speaking again. “Why?” He said hesitantly, not sure if finding out the reason was the best idea for him.

            “Because.” Jaejoong said, hopping off the couch and grabbing his bag. “I need homework help.” He stated. Yunho scoffed. The boy was asking for help, but, from his completely demanding tone, Yunho would have assumed otherwise.

            “What kind of ed up kid does homework on a Saturday morning?” Yunho growled, rubbing his sore eyes with his hands. Jaejoong only sat down on the floor in front of the chipped coffee table, spreading his papers across the surface like he had been living there for years.

            “My dad never helps me with my work.” He stated simply, his soft voice making Yunho remember just why he never asked him questions in the first place.

            “Fine, fine…” Yunho grumbled. The sooner he could do this, the sooner Jaejoong would just leave. Or, at least, he truly hoped so. “What do you need help with?”

            “Math.”

            He exhaled loudly as he collapsed his stiff limbs and took a seat next to Jaejoong. “I’m an English teacher.” He scoffed. “What the hell do I know about math?”

            Jaejoong merely shrugged his shoulders and pulled out a notebook, filled with scribbles of messy handwriting Yunho couldn’t possibly make sense of. He put his glasses on and held the paper in front of his face, slowly working out the mess of writing that might as well have been in a different language. Luckily, once he had gotten past the arduous process of deciphering it all, he realized he did remember enough to help him with it.

            And the sooner he helped him, the sooner he would leave.

            And that’s what Yunho wanted.

            Wasn’t it?

            “So your answer should be negative, do you get it?” Yunho answered, working his brain to its limit just to recall the math he had so desperately tried to push out of his brain after high school. It had been so long ago, he was quite shocked he still remembered any at all.

            What made the situation even more distracting was the way Jaejoong sat so close beside him, the way his shoulder was not just brushing his own, but full on leaning against him in the kind of forceful touch that was just impossible to ignore.

            Despite all the effort Yunho was putting into this, Jaejoong didn’t seem like he was listening in the slightest. And Yunho was scared to admit that even his attention was wavering due to how closely they were situated. He could feel the boy’s body move with every inhale, every slight twitch of his shoulders or shift of his legs feeling strong enough to shift mountains the way he was pressed against his body.

            Yunho found himself inadvertently clenching his fists at his sides, hating himself for doing so, for allowing the boy to affect him at all. Jaejoong was just another person. They were unrelated. They had nothing to do with each other. He might as well have been leaning up against a wall. He meant nothing more to him than a mere object did.

            But when that feeling returned, stronger than ever, he was sure that he would never be able to convince himself of that. And this time, mixed amongst the burning feeling he could never quite put in words, there was something else.

            Every so often, Yunho could simply tell something was about to happen. He had always been intuitive. His ability to read a situation, ascertain the mood, and accurately predict what would happen next was one that surprisingly didn’t come in handy all that often, since he was usually too busy trying to ignore his conclusions rather than prepare himself for them. He didn’t care about what he found to actually take it into account.

            But this time, the ‘something’ he felt deep in the pit of his stomach was something he just couldn’t ignore.

            Something that made his legs week and his heart patter in his chest.

            A fear that was confirmed in a split second, only a half a breath after Yunho had noticed it at all.

            For a moment, Yunho couldn’t, or simply refused to believe that the boy’s fingers were now inching up his thigh and crawling closer to his waist, but after the initial shock had died down, he couldn’t deny it any longer. Jaejoong’s fingers clamped firmly on his leg, the touch making Yunho shiver and drop the pencil that he had held so weakly in his hands, letting it plummet to the carpet below as a sign that math homework was the furthest thing either of them had on their minds.

            The boy’s hands were on his thigh. Resting unmoving in place as Yunho could do nothing but gape at him.

            Because the shock he felt wasn’t due to the boy’s actions at all. The shock he felt, the shock that numbed him to the very core, was that he wasn’t even surprised.

            He had seen it coming. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had known. Every glance, every inadvertent or purposeful touch – Yunho could never tell which it was anymore - had led up to this point. And Yunho knew.

            Distance was laughable.

            Resistance wouldn't change a thing.

            Though his cluelessness was far from feigned, there was always something there, a suspicion harbored only in the depths of his subconscious, a suspicion that snuck up when he least expected it, when he couldn't even make sense of it at all. He had simply pushed the feeling away, attributed it to a feeling of 'annoyance', of 'irritation’, of ‘anger’ that was surely caused by the younger boy.

            But that feeling wasn’t any of those things.

            And now, as the boy’s hands roamed across his thigh and as he stared at him with his wide, brilliantly dark eyes that Yunho simply hated himself for being so fixated on, that feeling, that ever-present suspicion, was only confirmed.

            But what scared him infinitely more than that was the fact that he didn’t even move.

            The reaction should have been instantaneous. A slap on the wrist, a jerk of his leg, anything to remove the boy’s touch from the much too intimate place his hand was resting on.

            But as much as he willed his body to move, nothing happened. His limbs just wouldn’t respond.

            It should have been immediate.

            But it wasn’t.

            And that terrified him.

            “What… what are you doing?” He finally asked, after he couldn’t bear the silence of the room a moment longer. He could feel the heat radiating off of the boy’s fingertips, the feeling settling somewhere he couldn’t explain, or just didn’t want to.

            He saw, or rather heard, Jaejoong his lips beside him. He was too nervous to actually look the boy in the eye, too terrified that the moment he saw him his resolve would crumble, that his already weakened footing would slip and he would crash to the earth that waited below him.

            The boy said nothing, merely letting something that sounded like a slight hum slip from his throat as he trailed his fingers gently across Yunho’s lap. The still air around them only served to drive Yunho even further into madness. He could hear his heart pounding in his head, his chest, even his toes the as his blood coursed furiously through his veins.

            His body felt hot. It felt like his skin was burning, flaking off and fluttering into the air that was now charged with that same feeling he had spent weeks just trying to push away. He could feel the blood running thick behind his eyes, his vision turning red as he slipped further into a panic with each passing second that he didn’t move, each passing second he just allowed the boy to continue with whatever the hell was he was doing.

            And no matter what he thought, no matter what he did, the fact still stood.

            Yunho didn’t stop him. He didn’t want to stop him. The knee-jerk reaction that should have come immediately after the boy’s touch never did.

            And even if he were to stop him now, too much time had already passed.

            The tension had grown.

            His shield of indifference had disappeared – no, it had been shattered by nothing more than the mere touch of the boy before him. He could pretend that they were just two unrelated people all he wanted to.

            It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t make a difference.

            They weren’t unrelated. They weren’t even close to that.

            If they were unrelated, Yunho would have swatted the boy’s hand away in an instant, only to continue the work that they had made a pretense of focusing on. If they were unrelated, his touch wouldn’t have caused his whole body to heat up, his heart to tremble and convulse behind his ribs.

            If they were unrelated, Yunho wouldn’t be so disturbed, so entranced by the dangerous look the boy wore proudly on his eyes at every second he looked at him.

            “Get… get out.” Yunho hissed, finally forcing out the words he had been attempting to say for the past however long they had been sitting like that. It felt like hours, though it may only have been mere seconds once Yunho stripped away the chaotic thoughts that, left with nowhere else to go, had settled on racing through his head until he could feel the blood boiling in his brain.

            “What?” Jaejoong whispered, the soft noise making Yunho cringe beneath his fingers.

            “Get your stuff and leave.” He demanded, voice growing louder along with his resolve. He finally built up the nerve to swat the boy’s hand off of his leg, immediately shuddering from the loss of heat that he become so used to in the seconds, or perhaps minutes, that he had spent growing warm beneath his touch.

            He had looked away from him the entire time, avoiding the gaze of the boy that he knew would make the situation a thousand times worse if he had seen it for even a moment.

            And the second he let his attention waver, his eyes inadvertently flutter over to the expression that Jaejoong wore, every single fear of worsening the situation was confirmed.

            He had become used to Jaejoong’s persistent expression of stubbornness. He had come to expect it from the boy, that hardened look he always wore, save the incredibly rare moments that he actually relaxed and let that crooked smile creep across his full lips. Stubbornness was the norm. Defiance was the usual. It was a dynamic they had both accepted, willfully or not.

            But this time Yunho didn’t see a hint of that stubbornness that he had labeled as Jaejoong’s default attitude. He could have searched for hours with no success.

            Because all he saw as he locked eyes with the boy was an expression of pure hurt.

            His eyes looked faded, his plump lips turned down and just barely hanging open as if he wanted to say something, as if he wanted to tell Yunho something that he just couldn’t.

            If Yunho waited just a moment longer, he knew the boy would speak again. His gentle voice would sail through his ears and pierce his heart with a sharpness Yunho would have never expected from the quiet whispers that he usually emitted.

            If he waited just a moment longer, his voice would simply break him apart.

            So he spoke first.

            “Get the hell out.”

            Without a single word Jaejoong leapt up, grabbing his papers and cramming them into his bag before scampering out of the room with quick and quiet steps.

            And Yunho was left alone. Stuck in the dead silence of his apartment, nothing but the sound of his pounding heartbeat in his ears to keep him company amidst the sudden loneliness he had been immersed in.

            He brought his hands to his ribs, feeling the tremors of his chest that stood as proof of how much the supposed ‘unrelated’ boy had affected him.

            It was undeniable.

            He was just barely holding on. Clinging for dear life on the cliff that begged him to fall, begged him to plummet to the cold hard earth below him.

            “Yunho?”

            Yunho snapped out of his far from restful daze and whipped his head around at the sound of his roommate’s voice. It seemed he was finally back from work, at an hour that would usually arouse suspicion, but at the moment it was the last thing on his mind.

            “What?” He hissed, deciding to skip the formalities of a greeting or a welcome back.

            “Why did I just see Jaejoong sprint out of here?”

            Yunho felt his stomach tighten and his heart somehow start beating even faster in his chest.  “He… had somewhere to go.” Yunho lied.

            Yoochun, for a brief moment, looked pensive. Yunho wasn’t used to such an expression on his face. Yoochun rarely thought about anything, if at all. “Are you sure?” He asked, placing his hand on his chin. “He looked kind of upset.”

            “I’m sure.” Yunho immediately snapped.

            He didn’t want to talk about the boy anymore.

            He wanted to stop all of the thoughts regarding him that just wouldn’t calm down.  

            He wanted the tingling feeling that somehow still remained from the boy’s touch to just disappear.

            A distraction. That was what he needed. A momentary distraction to ease his shaking hands, to calm his pounding heartbeat and his racing thoughts into a dull and mindless ache, one he could go back to ignoring like he had all this time.

            He needed the boy to return to what he was – a faceless person in the background, an unrelated presence that could easily be discarded with a flick of his wrist.

            He whipped out his phone, dialing the unfamiliar number that would soon become engrained in his memory if all went according to plan.

            “Jessica?” He asked, after hearing the sound of her voice on the other line.

            He needed normalcy. A final rope to pull him up from the ledge he dangled so loosely from.

            A distraction to pull him away from the depths that waited below.

            “Are you free today?” 

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A/N- sorry I missed last week's update. Real life was kicking me in the balls. It won't happen again. 

It's really late and I'm too sleepy to leave a proper A/N, so...

See you next week ^ ^