The world was spinning, twisting, disappearing and reappearing in front of Taemin’s eyes over and over again, and he no longer know what was up and what was down. His arms were tightly wound around Minho’s midsection, practically gluing him to the older male as his muscles had locked in their position. It was an instinctual thing; if he couldn’t get a hold of something that’d stop his world from spinning, then he was damn well not going to let go of the one thing – person – that he felt was anchoring him to the world.

But none of those things were really registered in Taemin’s mind at all, despite everything that was going on, because his brain was stuck processing the fact that Minho’s face was pressed against his throat. Which wouldn’t have been too bad – excluding Minho’s ice-cold nose which was poking him on the spot beneath his left ear uncomfortably, but he could live with that as long as their tumbling came to a stop soon – except Minho’s lips were pressed against his throat as well.

But that wasn’t a problem either, really. Jonghyun had on multiple occasions pecked Taemin on his cheeks in jest, as had Key, and Taemin was used to bro-kisses or whatever they could be called. So what exactly was the problem with Minho (accidentally) doing the same?

Nada, zip, nil. Nothing whatsoever.

Or, that was what he was trying to tell himself, but despite his best efforts he couldn’t stop the way his nerve-endings had seemingly caught on fire, how his breath had hitched and some sort of pressure had begun building up inside of his chest. Taemin was internally searching frantically for something that could explain away his reaction, to make sense of the whirlwind of chaos that had gotten set off by Minho doing… what he was doing.

And then they came to a stop, Taemin having still not found any plausible explanation behind his violent reaction but still searching valiantly as both of them lay still and rigid in wait for another lurch that’d send them spiraling down the slope for the third time that day. When nothing happened after a few seconds, Minho pushed himself up on his arms to look down at Taemin, cheeks and nose red from the cold.

“Are you okay?”

His eyes were going in and out of focus, a clear sign of Minho being just as dizzy as Taemin currently was, but he was grinning all the same when he spoke. Taemin didn’t really see what was so funny about their situation that it made Minho grin like a maniac, and he opened his mouth to tell the older male to stop smiling (because his mind was still reeling and spinning, his throat burned where Minho’s lips had touched him, and why was it okay for Minho to look that goddamned happy after their crazy fall?) but then he noticed the way Minho’s hair stuck out at odd angles beneath his hat and how snow clung to said strands of hair, how his eyes seemed to shine and just pull Taemin into their depths, and the ensuing reaction was instantaneous; as if Taemin had been punched in the gut all the oxygen left him, his throat dried up like it was trying to create a miniature version of Sahara, the something that had been building up inside of his chest beating in time with his heart.

Taemin ended up flapping his mouth like a fish out of water, all abilities of speech having left him in the dust. Minho was still lying atop of him (how did that happen again?) waiting for a reply with an expectant expression on his snow-kissed face.

Swallowing rapidly and clearing his throat, Taemin forcing his vocal cords to work despite their obvious reluctance. “I’m, uh. Fine.”

“Okay, good,” Minho made a sound of relief, beaming widely at him, and Taemin had to look away because his own emotional backlash made no sense to him and he still didn’t know what was so funny about the whole situation.

Then Minho got up, leaving Taemin lying there still frozen on his back while he brushed the snow away from his own clothes as best as he could.

Slowly, after attempting to gather his bearings, Taemin sat up, observing Minho warily while still feeling quite befuddled with himself as the other male clumsily stumbled around the two of them, looking for their skis and talking to himself until he realized that they were at least twenty yards up on the slope.

Taemin absentmindedly put a hand against the side of his throat to rub it, frowning and feeling really uncomfortable with the burning and fluttering (he could not come up with a better word for it, ugh) still having a party inside of his chest and up his throat.

He did not like it at all.

Please go away.

“I’ll go get our skis,” Minho said with a slight grimace, effectively pulling Taemin’s attention away from his inner conflict to himself. “Wait here.”

“Okay,” Taemin said, without any protests, because was quite content to sit there, his buried in the snow and his hands agitatedly rubbing his throat. And also, he was not sure his legs would be able to carry him long enough for him to trek up the steep, snowy slope, because they had, quite conveniently, turned into what felt like jelly.

Taemin grimaced and shook his head, trying to clear it. This was all too much for him.

“Here you go,” Minho, who had managed to retrieve their skis from where they’d fallen off, trudged down again to where Taemin was sitting to drop the boy’s pair in front of him. Thanking him somewhat quietly with a forced smile, Taemin averted his eyes from Minho’s face and practically glued them to anything but the other male as he mentally began preparing himself to get up.

Minho, who’d silently been watching Taemin, held out a hand. “Need any help?”

“Nah, it’s cool,” Taemin answered quickly, too quickly, almost looking like a deer in headlights in his hurry to turn down the friendly offer. He had come to the conclusion that all physical contact with Minho would have to be avoided from then on until he’d managed to figure out why his body had decided it wanted to go haywire on him when Minho had done… well… that.

Okay, so Taemin was kinda freaking out a tiny, teensy weensy bit. So what? It was only natural after something as sudden and unexpected like that. Yeah.

To prove his point – both to himself and to Minho – that he was in no need of assistance in any way, Taemin hurriedly got up from the ground and dusted away the snow that had stuck to his clothes before he put on his skis again, determinedly Not Looking at Minho.

This was all very weird.

~:~

The second Taemin stepped inside their shared cabin he practically jumped out of his winter clothes and ski boots, looking more like an undressing mini-hurricane than anything else, before he hurried to his and Jonghyun’s room, leaving Minho – who’d barely gotten inside of the house before Taemin had left the hall – to stare at Taemin in surprise. Jonghyun, who’d apparently been lounging on the sofa (looking a lot healthier and better than he had earlier that morning) reading a magazine like a lazy bum, looked up to greet Taemin with a grin, but Taemin had already shut the door behind himself before Jonghyun had even opened his mouth.

Breathing in slowly, a deep frown marring his face as he leaned back against the door and slowly slid down to sit on the floor, Taemin cradled his head in his hands.

Okay. Okay. What the .

He and Minho had, after finally completing that goddamned red slope, decided that they were going to turn in early and return to the small house to just chill and relax (because that fall had been enough action for both of them for the rest of the day, no, year). They’d spent the time it took them to get back in silence, Minho quietly humming some tune Taemin hadn’t been able to recognize while Taemin himself still hadn’t managed to get over the way the skin on his neck tingled and the way his brain kept repeating the accident over and over again like a broken record. The way Minho had grinned at him, the snow reminding Taemin of ice crystals where they had been stuck in his dark hair and eyelashes, looking… looking…

… perfect.

Groaning, Taemin squeezed his eyes shut. And that thought was one of the reasons behind Taemin’s hasty retreat to the room. The fall and the accidental press of Minho’s lips wouldn’t have been a big deal if Taemin’s brain would just stop making it into one, but despite his best efforts to erase those unwelcome thoughts about Minho looking like amazing (seriously, where id those come from? Where?) and the tingling and the butterflies – butterflies, man! What the – Taemin just couldn’t. They’d nestled their way into his brain and taken root there, and nothing he’d tried had made them go away.

He groaned again, debating whether he could delete the memories of the accident if he banged his head against the wall long and hard enough when the door was suddenly pushed open, Taemin yelping in surprise as he fell over (he still hadn’t moved from his position against the door, after all). Jonghyun peeked into the room.

“Um, Taemin,” he said, expression a mix between caution and surprise when he entered the room to help Taemin up from his newly attained sprawled position on the wooden floor. “You alright there, buddy?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, totally peachy,” Taemin forced himself to smile reassuringly, but it ended up looking like a grimace instead. “Never been better.”

“Huh. Really.”

Taemin didn’t even need to look at Jonghyun to know that the other male had raised one eyebrow and given Taemin a very, very unconvinced look. “Yeah, and I’m Rudolph the Red-nosed Deer.”

Taemin snorted. “He’s not a deer, he’s a reindeer.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Is not.”

“Is too.”

The two best friends shared a mutual grin (though Taemin’s was a little more subdued), and for a short second Taemin almost thought that Jonghyun had decided to let Taemin off the hook without having to explain his odd behavior. But then the grin fell off Jonghyun’s face and the former serious demeanor came back, and Taemin knew that of course it wouldn’t have been that easy.

But he really, really didn’t want to talk about this. Ever.

“Okay, look,” Taemin began when Jonghyun continued giving him that inquisitive look as he waited for an answer, and biting his lip Taemin momentarily searched for words. “I… I don’t really wanna talk about, okay? Can we just do something, like, um, I dunno, anything? I don’t wanna think about anything right now.”

Regarding Taemin for a moment, Jonghyun seemed to search his face for a clue about what in the world was going on (Taemin knew that Jonghyun was dying to know what was up with him, both because Jonghyun was his best bro and cared but also because he was just a really nosy guy in general), before he looked away with an exhale.

“Okay,” Jonghyun said after a moment, and Taemin smiled lopsidedly at him, relief washing through his body. “Wanna watch some movies, then? I downloaded a bunch earlier today, so I got a folder in the iPad full of ‘em.”

Now it was Taemin’s turn to raise an inquiring eyebrow. “Really? You haven’t forgotten that the iPad still isn’t yours but Onew’s, right?”

Jonghyun smirked. “How could I possibly do that when the background picture is of a chicken?”

“He’s gonna flip when he notices that you’ve both kidnapped his iPad and filled it with movies.”

“I know.”

They snickered, and Taemin felt a lot better than he had just five minutes ago already as the two of them settled down on Jonghyun’s bed with the iPad resting on Jonghyun’s knees to pick which film to watch.

Breathing in deeply, Taemin began reasoning with himself (it was strange how the mere presence of Jonghyun seemed to calm and clear his mind); it was the dizziness that had made him react the way that he had, nothing else, and he’d just been blowing things out of proportion because he’d still been reeling from the shock from the fall.

So, yeah. He was cool, Minho was cool, they were cool, everything was cool,

He’d practically forgotten about how it had felt with Minho’s lips pressed against his throat already, anyways, and his neck did not still tingle rebelliously.

Promise.

~:~

The two best friends holed up in their room for four and a half hours straight, ignoring the world and everyone in it waiting outside the door, and it was exactly what Taemin had needed to collect himself and sort out his own thoughts completely.

It was just as he’d thought earlier; he’d just been over-dramatizing the whole situation, that was all. Because it wasn’t as if Minho had meant to put his lips there. It had been an accident.

Jonghyun and Taemin would probably have ended up staying in there for a much longer amount of time to continue their movie marathon if their empty, and very neglected, stomachs hadn’t begun acting up, demanding food and nutrition, and they begrudgingly had to get up from the bed when they couldn’t take being hungry any more so they left their little sanctuary, legs stiff and eyes feeling strange after having been focused on the small screen of the technical device for so long,

“So you two have finally decided to join the land of the living?” Key, sitting in the sofa and undoubtedly watching one of the never-failing ty horror flicks, teased when he laid eyes on them. “Welcome back.”

Taemin stuck his tongue out at him. “You’re just jealous you weren’t invited.”

“Oh, bull’s eye, Taeminnie,” Key said sarcastically while rolling his eyes, putting emphasis on the pet name Taemin hated oh so much (and made him feel ten years younger than he really was), but Taemin noticed the way the corners of Key’s mouth twitched upwards in a suppressed smile, so he let it slide and instead settled on grinning at his friend before following Jonghyun to the kitchenette to raid the fridge for anything edible (that wasn’t vegetables).

On the way there, however, Taemin got side-tracked by the way Onew and Minho seemed to be deeply engrossed in something on Onew’s phone, and already having forgotten about his own starvation, Taemin stopped to peek over their shoulders to see what exactly it was. He was unable to see anything though, because their heads were blocking the view, and Taemin raised a questioning eyebrow as he rocked back on his heels.

“What are you guys watching?”

Onew didn’t move – didn’t even so much as twitch – as he either ignored the query completely or simply was too enthralled by whatever it was they were watching to even hear Taemin. Minho wasn’t as bewitched as Onew though, apparently, because he turned around to regard Taemin after seemingly tearing his glued eyes away from the cellphone and opening his mouth, he answered–

But Taemin couldn’t catch what he was saying it was, because he was busy feeling how the emotions from earlier (that he’d done very well with suppressing up until that moment) came crashing back, invading his thoughts and resurrecting the tingling and just generally busting down Taemin’s carefully built brick wall of denial.

And all Taemin could think, as he looked into Minho’s eyes, was:

Oh .

~:~

oh my gosh, this chapter took me aaaaages. ugh. I'm sorry, you guys :( .... is anyone even still reading this? Digital cookies  and hugs to the ones who are! You are amazing and I love you!

This chapter ended up a lot shorter than the previous ones, and that is because I've decided that I'm gonna try to shorten them from now on. That way I'll be able to finish and upload them quicker for you cutiepies! <3

Everytime Jonghyun comes up in this story I just wanna hug him, because in my twoshot 'Love' that I wrote he was all sad and stuff, so now I'm like 'nooo you gotta be happy you adorable little puppy haaaappyyyy now fluffy best friend timez' haha xD oh damn I'm ridiculous

Also, fun fact: we've passed 50 pages and 18'000 words mark! Yay! :D ihhii

Love ya'll, hope you enjoyed and thank you for reading!

16/09 2013 Elysionista