… eyes blinking expectantly when he flashes the older man a grin.

Jinki’s answering squeak is as unmasculine as they get, and blushes deeply when he stutters out, “Sure, I can help.” He pauses a moment. “W-With what, exactly?”

Laughing, Taemin eyes the paint on the elder’s hands and Jinki follows his gaze, quickly dropping the paintbrush on the mat that he’d been standing on while painting the studio walls, and then proceeding to wipe the white paint on his already ruined jeans.

Jinki was the only one out of the five volunteers that actually showed up to repaint the dance studio this past week; although the studio was supposed to be closed during that time, Taemin had also been the only dancer who still consistently appeared every day to practice long after the main classes in the makeshift studio a few streets down had ended. The other studio closed too early for Taemin’s liking and so he always came here.

"I need to stretch, but I can’t do it alone," the dancer says, and he looks almost shy of Jinki’s answer, as if he expected the other man to say no. Jinki’s responding nod, however, brings out one of Taemin’s sunshine smiles and he tells the older man to come closer.

"What should I do?" Jinki asks, hovering nearby. Taemin signals him to wait a moment before he lays on the floor, limbs splayed as he looks up. He brings up one leg so that it is vertical to the floor, toes pointed to the ceiling.

"I just need you to push my leg towards me, as far as it can go, while I press back," he finally says. Jinki nods, curiosity in his eyes as his firm hands wrap around the surprisingly muscular calf muscles—But it shouldn’t be so surprising, Jinki decides a beat later, he is a dancer after all.

So, as instructed, he pushes the stretched leg closer and closer to Taemin’s chest in little increments, feeling the younger resisting only a little as he pressed back. Jinki is in awe when Taemin’s leg is practically horizontal to the floor; he’d always known that ballet dancers were flexible, but this was a whole different sort of intense.

"Now the other leg," Taemin says, another one of those pretty smiles on his face, the ones that make his eyes shine brightly, as if he could just tell how amazed Jinki is by his flexibility. The elder complies almost eagerly, hands wrapping around the other leg’s ankle as it comes up. He repeats the movement again until Taemin tells him to stop. "Thanks," the dancer says with that perfect sunshine smile. Jinki returns the gesture with his own dazzling grin.

"No problem."

~~
a/n: i really don’t know anything about ballet so i watched a few ballet videos for this (OTL;;). this is the stretch i wrote about…

the game.