The next few weeks are a blur for Kai.

            He works, he dances, he eats, he sleeps, and then he gets back up and does it all over again.

            It’s a crazy routine that he’s going through with Kris, Sehun, and Yixing.

            But Sehun is the person he thinks about the most, when he’s walking home from work, when he’s lying in bed trying to fall asleep, when he’s in the same room as Sehun as they practice dance moves together, spinning and jerking in the same way, mirror images of each other.

            Kai loves watching Sehun dance. At first, the younger boy had been clumsy, stumbling over long legs and unbalanced. Sehun even accidently hit Yixing in the face once, in their first few days of practice, and Kai had had to leave the room to stop laughing, Yixing holding his nose and simultaneously glaring at Kai while trying to tell Sehun that, “Really, I’m fine, you didn’t hit me that hard,” as the rainbow-haired teenager bounced around, apologies spilling from his lips.

            But, as the days had passed, Sehun had begun to grow more accustomed to how his arm was supposed to be straight in that part, and how he had to tilt back in the next part, legs planted firmly in front of him. He had stopped watching Yixing all of the time, eyes glued to the older boy’s instructions, and had started looking at himself, correcting the little mistakes.

            Sehun had also taken to glancing at Kai once in a while, eyes meeting in the mirror’s reflection before one of them would look away quickly, Sehun usually missing a step in the choreography.

            Still, Kai never seems to be able to keep his eyes away from Sehun for very long. Every time there’s a change in the beat of the music, or Yixing calls out a mistake, Kai will sneak a glance at Sehun, thinking of the stories Sehun has told him about his home back across the ocean and trying to fit the image of a younger Sehun to the image of the present Sehun.

But no matter how hard Kai tries to learn more about Sehun, and no matter how much he does learn, like how Sehun doesn’t like strawberry ice cream, or like how Sehun always reaches for his camera when he’s nervous, Kai wants to know more.

Especially when Sehun keeps snapping pictures of him.

Kai laughing at some joke Yixing told, click.

Kai eating out of one of the various take-out boxes they take turns going out to buy, flash.

Kai demonstrating a move during one of their breaks, Sehun’s finger presses down on the shutter button.

And every time Sehun takes a picture, Kai’s stomach dips and his breath catches in his throat, and he thinks about Sehun’s words that first dance practice. “I like taking pictures of you.”

Kai is beginning to think that maybe he’s beginning to look at Sehun differently than how he looks at Yixing.

So now it’s been two weeks, and with the help of very late nights planning choreography, lots of coffee runs, and what seems like thousands of take-out boxes scattered all over Yixing’s kitchen, the three boys have finally started working on their first routine.

Their first dance battle won’t be for another month and a half, but if they want to have a chance, they have to start practicing now.

Another week passes, and Sehun is starting to feel stronger when he practices the choreography Kai and Yixing have planned out for their first routine.

            But he’s starting to feel weirder whenever he looks at Kai. Like a rush-of-adrenaline, dizzy, heart-pounding kind of weird. Sehun’s not sure if he likes it or not.

            So whenever Kai tries to help him with a dance move, or whenever Kai leans over Sehun’s shoulder as Sehun tries to finish some of his homework at Yixing’s table, trying to help with that stupid calculus problem Sehun can never solve, Sehun finds himself looking around for Yixing, trying to ignore the tightening in his chest and the shaking of his hands.

            And yet, Sehun can’t stop himself from taking picture after picture of Kai whenever he can.

            Click, a picture of Kai’s hand resting on the table.

             Flash, a photograph of Kai’s mouth when he’s trying to figure out a dance move, lips pressed together with concentration.

            Sehun’s finger presses down on the shutter button, and Kai is frowning because his mouth had been full of noodles, half of them hanging over his chin.

            The amount of pictures featuring Kai that have started to take up the front of Sehun’s refrigerator, the top of his desk in his living room, his photography portfolio, is starting to get out of control.

            But Kai never really asks Sehun to stop taking pictures. Sure, there’s the occasional grumbling when Sehun captures a candid photo of Kai napping on Yixing’s couch, or the frequent swipe for Sehun’s camera when the click goes off while Kai is trying to talk to Sehun about something. But Kai has never asked Sehun to stop.

            Actually, sometimes Sehun catches Kai staring at him after he takes a photo with an expression that Sehun can’t read, but that gives him that weird feeling again, except one-hundred times stronger.

            Another week flies by, full of exams and homework and running to Yixing’s apartment from campus and avoiding Kang-Dae on campus and dancing and avoiding Kai in Yixing’s apartment.

            Sehun had never imagined he would join a dance crew and meet two boys who had the potential to be the closest friends Sehun had ever had in his life when he had accepted the offer to be a student at NYU.

            He had never imagined he would also be scared by growing so close to other people either.

Growing up, Sehun never went out of his way to please other people, never let his guard down. Maybe it was because he had been teased in middle school, bullied by the bigger kids, books knocked out of his hands, always relieved when the bell would ring, signaling the end of another school day. The constant taunts and insults made him feel small, alone, insignificant.

            Going home was a relief, being able to see his parents, whom Sehun was closest to, and dropping the armor he always carried around himself. He could be himself at home, funny and sometimes too loud, his mother shouting up the stairs for him to quiet down before the neighbors complained. He never felt insignificant around his parents.

            At home, Sehun could focus on his real passion, photography. His father was a photographer, sometimes traveling around the world to take photos for the magazine he worked for. And Sehun never turned down the chance to sit next to his father in their living room, watching as his father explained what this button was for and what that effect did to the photograph. Slowly, bit by bit, Sehun learned how to work his father’s camera, and everything else would drop away when he was looking through the viewfinder. He would forget about the bullies, about how he sat by himself at lunch, about how much it hurt when Sehun tried to figure out w