Genre: Humor / Fluff / Angst / Eventual

Warnings: OMG they were roommates / slice of life / slow burn / mutual pining / crude humor / cursing / !baek / idiots to lovers / UST

Characters: Baekhyun X You/Female Reader

Description: You teach Baekhyun how to date. (Basically the Get You Alone M/V)

it. You wanted to quit.

You wanted to quit. 

Your insides were a mess. Your sleep had been a mess. Your mood, an even bigger mess. 

You’d already quit on the idea of sleep sometime around 4am when your eyes popped open for the twelfth time that night.

What was the problem? What was your problem, really?

You knew what it was. 

It was too quiet. 

There was a thick, oppressive, suffocating, asive silence in this apartment and it was making you lose your mind. 

Until now you hadn’t realized how used to his noise you’d become. What if the constant and never ending hum of his racket behind that wall was what you actually needed to sleep? What if you’d fallen asleep on the rattling train tracks for too many months in a row and now you simply were unable to sleep peacefully unless you could hear him awake or singing or gaming or typing or hammering on the other side of that wall? Baekhyun thundered in everything he did. Why the hell was he so quiet? 

Baekhyun hadn’t made a single sound since...since he said goodnight.

And you, you hadn’t made a single sound since that shameful sound that escaped when he’d kissed you. You moaned! Oh God. Your body was on fire. Maybe you could just let it happen. You would lay here and burn alive, the mattress would catch and then the curtains and then the entire building would go up in flames. You wouldn't have to face your embarrassment if there were no survivors, right? 

You wanted to quit. 

You’d simply pack up a bag and leave, quit living here and quit using him so selfishly, quit your dead end job, quit being his dating teacher, quit trying to hook him up with her. 

Mia.

Your jaw clenched so hard your ears ached. 

God. She was so perfect for him. You’d paid such close attention to finding someone who would absolutely deserve to win his heart with her intelligence and her experience and her charm. She would be able to play online games with him without getting stuck in a corner and then getting killed from behind. She would actually be useful in the game without getting confused and accidentally killing him when she hit the wrong button. She wouldn't make him explain the instructions again and again in simpler and simpler terms until the frustration mounted on his voice and he gave up with a defeated ‘just try to stay alive.’ 

She would know exactly what themes and tropes he was talking about when he ranted about some show he’d been marathoning all night and she’d discuss these things with him at length, offering insights of her own and opening lines of discussion that you never could. She had a good job and good connections and she was everything — she was everything you’d thought he needed in his life. 

Why did it burn so much? You pounded your fist roughly over your chest plate. It didn't help one bit.

Your phone hummed with a good morning text from Ben. 

You liked Ben. He was at least a reliable distraction. He was an early riser and he wasn't shy about texting you first or double texting you sometimes. He never gave you grief about taking too long to reply to him and you could tell that he was respectful, understanding, and kind hearted. 

He was careful with his words as well, answering your questions with well-thought responses. You’d asked him an innocent hypothetical question last night; just to see what he would say. He’d responded that he would take you to see a movie as a first date. A movie and dinner. It was an expected response and you couldn’t shake the slight disappointment at how reliable and so very predictable this man was turning out to be. But really, what else did two people who didn't know each other very well at all do for a first date.  He didn't know a thing about what interested you. You didn't know what he liked to do for fun. Maybe the man liked being boring for fun. Maybe he was a risk analyst for his job and enjoyed a quiet life of safe unpredictability for funsies. 

It was morning time now. Not too early for a casual acquaintance to text you but too late for you to still be laying around in bed on a Sunday when you knew you had to be up and out in that kitchen to start prepping for lunch with Baekhyun’s grandmother. It had been 2 weeks since she last came to visit with her “sweet son.” 

At first, Baekhyun did most of the preparations alone but gradually, as you settled in here, you just couldn’t see leaving him to do it all on his own. It was a sort of tradition now. Every other Sunday with the three of you and some deliciously comforting homemade meal set on the table and the sounds of a baseball game playing on the big tv. Sometimes she smiled at you as you painted her fingernails or brushed her hair. Sometimes she looked into your eyes with utter confusion, asking who you were, but most of the time she just watched you silently. It was okay. You smiled brightly with her hand in yours or blotting a napkin to her lips to wipe the spilled tea and you reintroduced yourself every time she asked. Her eyebrows would lift up in surprise whenever Baekhyun called out ‘Bug, Bug, it’s ready,’ from the kitchen with a hot pot of bubbling soup and you rushed to place the trivet on the table. 

You’d already showered and got dressed for the day hours ago. Outside you looked well put together; pretty, even, in the right lighting and perhaps to the right pair of eyes — beautiful.

You’d obsessed plenty in the early pre-sun hours. You’d already been over it, again and again. The first hour had been spent reliving the evening. The perfect date with Byun Baekhyun. You’d even, much to your own horror, concealed a genuine squeal of delight into your pillow when the emotions grew to unbearable levels. It was the details. 

The details were the hardest to stand — the dinner as you watched the sunset; you’d often stepped out alone onto the terrace to watch the sunset at home. Your bedroom window faced west and it was genuinely your favorite time of day; when everything began winding down for the evening and the last bits of sunlight disappeared and the city lights began to twinkle on slowly — actual magic. And the fragrant rose at dinner; it was such a cliche but it took you so much by surprise; you couldn't understand why you hadn’t expected it. Of course he would have read about flowers in the book. Of course he knew roses were a classic choice. 

He’d taken you to the aquarium, a place you’d mentioned to him dreamily in passing last year about wanting to visit one day. But, you’d never gotten the opportunity to go and you simply forgot about it. Plus, you didn't even think he had been paying attention at the time and yet he’d arranged to go with you and had even brought along a change of shoes for you. It all felt so calculated and deliberate you wondered just how extensive the textbook and materials you had sent him had been. Everything about the date felt like a distant dream and the more you thought about it the less and less real it actually felt. 

The second hour was dedicated almost exclusively to the kiss — shame and confusion, school-girl giddiness briefly, before more shame and more confusion. What did it mean? What did this all mean? Was it fake? Was it real? How did he know how to kiss so well when you were solidly sure he had close to zero experience doing it? Had that really been him or had you played such an active role in that kiss that your lips had done most of the work and he’d just been pulled along for the ride? These sorts of questions plagued you again and again and your mind eventually settled on his secret confession pulled from his sleepy lips a few nights ago.

Baekhyun thought you were beautiful. But what of it? When you did your hair and makeup and put on a pretty dress you also found that you looked quite good. You could clean up well just as most people could. That didn't necessarily mean anything, right? You’d given him a task and he’d done it well and that didn't mean anything...right? 

You’d pulled your phone out and gone through your facebook, looking through old friends pages who had always caught your eye. 

Jun; he was very handsome. He was tall and he was nice to you in school and you’d even acknowledged many times how attractive you found him. And when given the opportunity, when he was single and you had been single you’d even gone so far as to share a meal with him. But that was it. He was handsome, but that was it. 

You found through your friends, several of these situations: Chan, Lee, Hyuk; several of these very handsome, attractive men who, despite their looks, you were simply not drawn to. On the surface, yes, but as you got to know them and more and more of their little quirks emerged, you often found reasons to distance yourself just a little bit. Sometimes an overbearing mother. Sometimes skewed political views. Some had questionable manners. A few simply fell off your radar and you slipped through the cracks of their giant egos. Everyone had their shortcomings. 

You certainly did. 

You heard the beep of the front door opening and you figured Baekhyun must have gone shopping. He’d woken up early for the day and had already been busy and productive; unlikely you who just stayed in hiding and selfishly stewed. You emerged from your bedroom to try and make up for your many shortcomings. 

You could hear him before you could see him. He was in the kitchen. You’d just heard the fridge open and you could hear the jostling of food packaging. A reusable shopping bag sat on the countertop still heavy with food items to be put away and as you stepped closer you could feel a bundle of nerves bouncing around inside of your belly. 

Maybe last night was a fluke. 

Maybe the feelings of love you felt was just you under the spell of that super magical date and today all of those embarrassing feelings of deep intense affection for your dumb roommate that surged up inside of you would have fizzled out and simply gone flat. 

Your early morning hours had nearly convinced you that while yes, Baekhyun did find you attractive, that was it — and really what did you expect? The man was ually repressed and the two of you had been living together in close quarters for two years now. Put a man and a woman together in such conditions and wires were bound to get crossed, it’s just the nature of human relationships. But Baekhyun had never once acted on such urges.

Not once. 

Last night must have been just like work for him. An assignment to complete for his own good. He’d gone through it, done his best because you were his friend that he trusted and his end goal was actually independence from you. It was Mia. You’d never seen him quite so determined to overcome his dating anxiety before. The only change was Mia. Nothing else added up but her. 

That was just the truth of it. 

After the first couple of hours you’d come to terms with these truths and you’d even gone so far as to prepare the report for him; his grade for the assignment. He got an A+ of course, and you were sure to outline where he excelled and the moments that made your heart flutter. You did not write down the goodnight kiss anywhere on the report. Something about that kiss and the way you could feel your heart racing inside of your chest every time you thought about it felt too vulnerable to write down on paper. 

And how could you? Oh to be so bold. You’d considered the horror. Giving him special marks for the goodnight kiss with an asterisk and a footnote with a message about the taste of his lips and the softness of his tongue and your inability to stop thinking about it since it happened. A special reference to the smell of the air from his lungs and how much more you wanted the fragrance of his breathing. God.

Embarrassing. Shameful. Forbidden. 

You felt stupid. You’d fallen for your own stupid lies. A fake date; for practice. A handsome successful man with a heart of gold to sweep you off your feet and pretend to like you for a grade on a paper. 

Your best hope was that it wouldn't hurt too badly to see him moving on with someone else. You only hoped you could withstand it and root for him and not do anything evil to destroy his happiness in the process. 

Right now, your best hope was that you could face him in the kitchen without trembling too much, stumbling on your words, or worse, losing your convincing smile. 

The kitchen was sparkling. He’d cleaned all of the surfaces, probably before he went to the market and you wondered what time he actually woke up this morning. You wondered why he’d been so quiet about it all. Baekhyun usually traveled with a soundtrack that could wake the dead. 

He heard you come into the kitchen when you reached for the shopping bag on the counter and you pulled it toward yourself and he spun on his heels, whipping his head around to look at you.

He was wearing a plain black t-shirt and jeans and the soft well-worn cotton fabric of the shirt cinched around his small waist. The short sleeves landed just over his biceps. The man had biceps. Oh no, the jeans. They were the very same pair you’d made him wear for the photo shoot in the moonlight and you pulled your eyes up from the view of his thighs with every ounce of self control you had left inside of you. It wasn’t much. You were sweating. You could hear something, what was that sound? 

Where he stood, the overhead kitchen lights cast a bright glow over his wavy hair. You saw natural highlights in the casual mess atop his head. Your fingers itched to toss them about. The strange sound continued as you looked at him and his eyes were wide and his lips hung open, pink and plumped up from his worrying teeth biting into the flesh again and again and aside from the wild thumping you heard inside of your own chest you realized that the sound you must be hearing was a chorus of angels singing in a heavenly choir. The clouds had parted and the light of God himself shone down on this beautiful man in your kitchen. Oh you were ed. 

Baekhyun was standing there with his golden face, with his bright pink cheeks, darker pink lips, pointed chin with round gold glasses on his nose and he was positively glowing below the illuminated lights of the heavens shining down on his beauty and you were losing your ing mind, all by yourself with a single zucchini in one hand and a big round onion in the other. You had dug them out of the shipping bag. 

If you could only get your legs to work. 

Baekhyun was holding his hands out to you and your torso moved on its own with thoughts of running into his waiting arms for a hug having an actual fight with your normal rational mind that beat those stupid thoughts down with a hammer. 

You hurled the vegetables very hard in his general direction and closed your eyes as you let go. 

He caught the zucchini, but clearly your aim with the onion had been shoddy. He let out a single surprised grunt when it bounced off of his chest and it rolled down his stomach to the floor below and you groaned inside feeling every single bit of red hot embarrassment that burned you from the inside.

“Wow, did you just throw an onion at me?” He was mumbling to himself as he chased it around the kitchen. “Good morning, Peanut. Thanks for not making too much noise so I could sleep in. Here’s your ing onion. Ugh.”

You laughed out loud. You could not control anything that your body was issuing out right now. He’d finally cornered it with his hands under the cabinets and was doing a highly inaccurate impression of you as he tossed it roughly inside the veggie bin at the bottom of the fridge. He then clapped his hands together in front of him like a baseball catcher ready for the pitch. 

“What’s next? I’m ready now, come on.” He clapped his hands again and the jarring sound woke you up from the trance you’d been stuck in. 

Inside the bag were more loose vegetables, many of a similar roundish shape. Ever conscious about the health of the planet, Baekhyun never used plastic bags. He was always nagging about the evils of single use plastics and one year for your birthday he gifted you a $500 donation to a non-profit organization that promised to clean up 500 pounds of plastic from the ocean in your honor. The donation came with images of baby animals that were now alive because of your generosity and you remembered actually crying when you read the story about the orphaned baby otters. The next day you started your period and you shook your head in disbelief over just how many super cool brand new things you could have bought with that $500. 

You hurled the organic produce at him with as much gusto as he fought for the baby animals in the sea. A few carrots, a big heavy radish, and a giant green onion landed with a slap into his waiting arms. You were tossing fast and he was catching and tossing them into the fridge, keeping up very well despite how quickly and how badly you were throwing. It was silly. It was the kind of silly that you often enjoyed with him and you were instantly grateful for the embarrassment you woke up with to be gone so completely and so easily. With Baekhyun, it was always so easy. One joke, one laugh, and you were putty. 

You reached into the bag blindly and pulled out the sauce. You were laughing now and weren’t really paying much attention to what came out of the bag. He was asking for this and if he wanted you to hurl vegetables at that pretty face you’d do it. 

“Wait,” he shouted, his eyes went wide and he shook his head rapidly, “that’s glass, Bug.”

He bolted upright and he was coming toward you fast when you pulled your arm back and aimed at him anyway, not really listening to what was going on.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, Bug. Glass! Glass!” 

The windup for the pitch was wasted and one of his hands grabbed tightly around your closed fist, covering it completely and his other arm reached around your waist to hold you in place should you decide to make a run for it with the potentially dangerous weapon you held.

“Jesus. Give it to me,” he said up close and well inside your personal space. The fanning out of his words warmed over your face as you looked into his eyes and your focus drifted down over the pink softness that gave his face such a lovely hue. His brown eyes were so pretty up close. 

The words might have registered faster if he didn't feel so warm; if he hadn’t bee