In this chapter, you'll find out about what goes on in my mind while I write (or procrastinate)! Snippets have author's notes attached to them, explaining the context of the scenes, and trivia and easter eggs are properly explained. I'd really like it if you read this chapter, so please enjoy!

These snippets are "deleted scenes", so to speak, that didn't end up in the actual story. I've included them as they were originally, in my document titled "RBTL Snippets", with the headings that I classified them under. Enjoy! 

      1.  Kiss:  In which Taemin loses a race.
 

Taemin is a strange mix of sulky and happy for Jongin, silently congratulating the younger with lips and tongue and not-so-silent kisses. They fall backwards, fingers tangled in each other's hair and clothes and legs enmeshed together and the sofa is there to catch them with arms outstretched and pillows soft and comforting. 

I'd written this out way before I even thought of the kissing game, and I'd intended to use this in a chapter where they and Luhan and Sehun were having a competition to see who the "manliest man" was. Along the way of writing that chapter, however, my internet crashed and the 8th chapter, which was originally called "The Competition Incident", turned into that emo chapter called "The Noona Incident".

​      2.  Infiltration:  In which Jongin tortures Taemin by sneaking into his all-boys school and 'harassing' him.
 

When it comes down to it, there are several bad things about dating another man. For one, there's the strange stares people cast them, wondering about and silently judging their entwined hands. For another, Jongin knows that he annoys Taemin with his quiet-but-incessant snoring, and for his part, Taemin strips in his sleep. Yes, there are many bad things about dating another man.

This is not one of them.

So this was meant to be the introduction to a chapter where Jongin transfers temporarily into Taemin's school as an exchange student, somehow ends up in Taemin's class, and flusters him by sending him heated stares all throughout lessons. It was written after I'd just read all 8 volumes of a school-life manga in one sitting, and so I (being the easily-influenced piece of trash that I am) thought, Wow, wouldn't it be a good idea to write about TaeKai in a school setting?

I got about five paragraphs in, read it over, and regretted life as it was then, so much that I deleted all of my progress. Thus, Snippet #2 is all that remains of the chapter titled "The Transfer Incident". 

Somehow, the relative innocence of school life became Taemin grinding on Jongin in the nightclub. I'm not sorry.

​      3.  Ring:  In which Jongin gives Taemin a promise ring.
 

And when Taemin finally steps into the restaurant, hair all glossed back and slick, and his suit clinging to his body in just the right places, Jongin takes a deep breath and not-so-subtly touches the box-shaped lump in his pocket before he's taking the elder's hand and leading him out into the party.

I had originally planned to end the story a lot earlier, around Chapter 8, and I'd planned to keep Taekai as innocent as I could. Snippet #3 was a situation in which they were having their one-year anniversary and the EXO and SHINee members threw them a party, and Jongin wanted to kinda-propose to Taemin. In the end, though, I decided Nah, I'll continue RBTL for a little longer, and scrapped that idea. I liked how the snippet turned out, though, and so I kept it.

​      4.  Assailant:  In which Jongin and Taemin are having fun at the beach.
 

"Argh!" Taemin screams as he's tackled to the sand, the force of the impact strong enough to send both him and his assailant into the sea.

A wave crashes into the two tangled bodies, drenching them completely, and when Taemin finally manages to sit up, spitting out brackish seawater and flicking his bangs out of his eyes, it's to a laughing Jongin, and Taemin's not sure if the droplets of water streaming down Jongin's cheeks are seawater or tears of mirth.

I originally started off Chapter 11 with the idea that Taemin and Jongin had gone on holiday alone to the beach, and this was the only snippet that survived my regret-induced deleting spree. Eventually, though, it made more sense to me that they would have gone on holiday with "A-Bunch-Of-Really-Annoying-Others", which is how "The Beach Incident" turned out the way you see it.

      5.  Chocolate:  In which Taemin calls Jongin oppa.

Taemin's new hair is annoying, Jongin decides, watching the elder flit around his apartment. The pale-skinned male, so quick to change hairstyles, has decided to opt for longer hair this time, and so his new hairstyle cascades down his shoulders in waves of sleek brown, which, combined with his strangely feminine good looks, only serve to make him look more like a girl. 

That's not even the worst of it. Taemin drops onto the couch beside Jongin, hair floating down onto his shoulders and slipping into space as Taemin leans forward to offer Jongin a mug of hot chocolate. The tanned male accepts it gladly, eager for an excuse to not look at Taemin, and busies himself with warming his fingers around the cup, blowing occasionally on the surface of the chocolatey liquid, not noticing the way Taemin's eyes followed his every movement, as if deciding on what to do next. 

"Oppa," comes a voice from Jongin's left, breathy and girlish but so obviously Taemin, and Jongin freezes, mug halfway to his lips. "Oppa," Taemin says again, and Jongin makes the mistake of looking at the pale-skinned boy. The Lee is grinning, face framed by hair the shade of Jongin's hot chocolate, and he tilts his head ever so slightly, but it makes hair slide off his face and into empty space, and then Taemin says it again, pouty lips forming the syllables and then shaping a grin into the elder boy's mouth. "Oppa," he says yet again, this time more breathlessly, more sensually than the other times, and Jongin loses the power of coherent thought, one word surfacing over the sudden chaos in his mind: . 

They stay like that for a while, Taemin grinning madly at Jongin, and Jongin staring blankly at Taemin, and then, Taemin breaks the silence, voice back to its normal boyish quality, but wavering a litte with a hint of suppressed laughter. "Dude," he says, gleeful and amused and slightly tirumphant, and Jongin groans. He knows that tone. "Did you just get a ?"

Remember that one post on tumblr where this one user wonders if Taemin ever called Jongin oppa when he had those hair extensions from Sherlock? See, I liked that so much that I ended up writing an entire chapter about it. 

The only problem is that Snippet #5 was the introduction to a chapter I called "The Incident". Yeah, not the best (or most family-friendly of titles. Chapter 10, the chapter I affectionately dubbed "The One Where Taemin Is A -Tease" a.k.a "The Alcohol Incident", was supposed to be Taemin with hair extensions as opposed to Taemin grinding violently on Jongin. 

"The Incident" (I still cringe while writing it) went something like this: Jongin invites himself over to Taemin's house on a weekend and sees that Taemin has taken the liberty of getting hair extensions. Slightly miffed that Jongin woke him up at 8 am on an off day (read: 4 am on a normal day), Taemin gets his revenge in the satisfaction of watching Jongin getting more and more entranced by Taemin's hair, before getting the ingenious idea of calling Jongin "oppa" just to see what his reaction will be. As you can probably tell from my (less-than) amazing title, Taemin ends up giving Jongin a to relieve "little Jongin". In the end, though, I got so embarassed about the chapter (How would I go about uploading a chapter titled "The Incident"?) and exiled that chapter to the deepest darkest part of my writing folder.

      6.  Persuasion:  In which Jongin persuades Taemin to let him move in.

“Please?"

“Jongin."

"Please?"

"Jongin, we've been through this."

"Come on, seriously. How bad could it be?"

"Um," Sehun butts in, "I'll be glad to have him out of this apartment, but Hyung, you really do not want to have him in yours."

"Shut up, brat!"

"You leave your clothes everywhere," Sehun begins, holding up fingers for the number of crimes. "I thought I was messy before I met you. You can't cook. You never clean. Your idea of laundry is throwing everything into the laundry machine and letting it run for a few hours. You flooded the house while trying to mop once. You blew up the stove. You broke the television with a slipper that you threw at it while watching a horror movie. You killed your cactus because you didn't water it. Do you know how hard it is to do that? Now, tell me what does make you a good roommate."

"I love you, Taeminnie," Jongin says hopefully, clinging to the elder's waist, and Taemin sighs.

"Fine."

"Yay!"

This was something I wrote on a whim after reading a bunch of marriedcouple!Taekai stories on tumblr, and wondering how Taekai would approach that talk. I cringed so much from secondhand embarassment while writing Sehun's monologue (I don't even know how one manages to kill a cactus).

​      7.  Interrogation:  In which Taemin interrogates Jongin. 

"What do you like about me?" Taemin asks suddenly, gazing at Jongin over the rim of his glass, and Jongin promptly chokes on his latte.

"Wait, what?" he manages to say, through the coughing up of his lungs. "Why the question all of a sudden?”

"Because I was wondering," Taemin says, matter-of-factly.

"I like all of you! What's not to like?" Jongin splutters, gesturing up and down Taemin.

Taemin blushes, looks away, waits a few heartbeats - one, two, three - "But what specifically?”

Now it's Jongin's turn to blush, burying his face in his hands before answering in a muffled voice. "Your... smile? The way you laugh? The way you move... And a bunch of other things, too, but let me think for a while, your staring is really distracting.”

Taemin's laugh echoes in the coffee shop and he complies, staring pointedly at something over his own shoulder and contorting his body obnoxiously until Jongin bursts into laughter and Taemin turns around, a gratified expression on his face. When their laughter dies down and Jongin finally gets enough breath in his lungs to formulate coherence, he inhales once, exhales, inhales again, starts. "Basically, I like it when you smile. I also really like it when you laugh, with your crinkly eye smiles and weird hand movements, and I like it when you pester me to go with you to buy food. I like it when you dance, because you make the air seem like water and your bones seem like ribbons. I like how you eat twice your weight but never gain any, I like how you at all the sports that I'm good at and I like the way you're just that much shorter than me because it makes me feel happy. 

“I like how you make everything seem so much more interesting, and I once spent an hour contemplating leggings because of you. I like the way you move your head when you flick your hair out of your eyes and I like the way you always dye your hair weird colours and shock me. I like the way you never cry, even when I'm crying, and I like the way your voice is slightly higher than mine and cracks a lot. I like the way you're less muscly than me, because it makes me feel like I can protect you but we both know that you would be doing the protecting because you don't get scared of jump-scares, and I like how when we watch horror movies you're the one who's just laughing and I'm crying in the corner of the room. I like how you're the only guy I know who's afraid of insects, and I like how I'm the first one you call when you're hiding from the evil bugs in your house. I like how you worry about little things, like how the little potted plant on your neighbour's window might get drowned when it's raining, or how you might one day dye your hair a weird colour by accident. I like how you like to keep candy in your pockets for when you get hungry and I like how you sometimes share your precious food with me. 

“I like how you get cold easily and I like how you always get steak when we go to that restaurant where I first asked you out. I like how you always tease me about that time when we first met and I drooled all over your sleeve and I like how you constantly remind me of being the Sugar-Plum Fairy when we did The Nutcracker in dance class, shut up, I'm being serious here. I like how I never figured out why you were in that ditch, and I like how you kissed me in the lobby of your building that day and then pushed me out into the rain, and I really like how you tricked me into coming to see you that one day that you said you were injured. I also like how you tell me that I'm the first person you'd call if anything goes wrong and I like how you're the first person on my speed dial. I like how you never let my ego grow past your height and I like how you always get defensive when I tease you about being shorter than me. I like how you're weirdly obsessed with banana milk and ice cream and I like how you've always wanted to shoot an advertisement for ice cream. I like how you always complain that people mistake you for a girl and I liked it when you called me oppa, back when you had those weird hair extension thingies. Basically, I like everything about you, and I don't know how to express that enough. But thank you for choosing me too.”

Now, this was when I was having a bias appreciation phase, and at a point at which I couldn't. Write. Anything. Due to writers' block (that little ) and this kinda... happened...

Also, I kinda-maybe-probably have a thing for Jongin monologuing? I don't know if you've noticed this in RBTL because I've tried to keep monologuing to a minimum, but talkative Jongin has a habit of appearing in my stories. 

And now for Easter Eggs and trivia and stuff!

Reading Books and Faces

1. In "Reading Books and Faces", the worksheet that Taemin is doing is a Trigonometry Level 3 homework sheet. I'd been procrastinating finishing my homework that one weekend that I wrote that story, and the homework sheet I fell asleep on happened to be that. When I woke up, I looked up to see my tumblr dashboard full of Taekai, and I thought, What if Jongin fell asleep on Taemin while doing homework?     Basically, the whole reason you have been reading this story is because I procrastinated. (Take that, Grade 8 English Teacher! Who says stories are never born from procrastination?)
2. Story Time is actually a story that my Grade 7 Drama teacher taught me to keep me from being bored. She was very interested in Sherlock Holmes-like games, and always made us do deduction games and the like. I was bored and running out of ideas, Why would Taemin be interested in a weird man who falls asleep on his arm? and then when I started playing Story Time in my head with a bunch of characters from a story I was reading, I thought, Hey, what if Taemin played this game on Jongin? and so that's how it went.
3. The screaming librarian who wakes Jongin up is actually his cousin. I was planning on elaborating on her somewhere in the story, but I never got around to it.

Reading Between the Lines

1. In "The Ballerina Incident", the movie Taekai are watching is "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One". The reason for this is partly because I'd watched it a little while prior to writing that chapter, and partly because of Taemin's adoration for Emma Watson at one point. 
2. Also in "The Ballerina Incident", Taemin mentions that he bribed Sehun, Tao and Kyungsoo with the photo of Jongin in fairy drag. I was planning on including this in that chapter, but with Sehun, Taemin asked to be treated to steak in exchange for the photo, with Tao, it was because Taemin wanted to see Tao doing wushu, and with Kyungsoo, Taemin made him angry, and when he was about to beat Taemin up, he offered to let Kyungsoo see the picture. Somehow, I ended up not including that, though. (Taemin never does use the note for blackmail and bribery.)
3. In "The Ditch Incident", Sehun tells Taemin that Jongin's been " about how much he misses Taemin", to which Taemin replies, "We meet every day though, why did he say he misses me?" This is a kind-of reference to Taekai's 4-character talk in the 4 Things Show, which I thought was too funny to not be included.
4. Again, in "The Ditch Incident", Jongin almost burns down the apartment complex with a fire that starts from his beef casserole.
5. I have no idea what Taemin was doing in that ditch. It was something I came up with on the fly whilst half asleep, and to this day I have no clue what Lee Taemin would have been doing in a ditch. If anyone has any theories, please do suggest them.
6. In "The Umbrella Incident", the Tinkerbell umbrella is a kind-of reference to an EXO crack fanfic I read where Jongin allegedly wears TInkerbell underwear. I thought that was hilarious, and so I included it briefly in the story. Don't look at me I know I'm lame
7. All the names of Jongin's siblings are names of people I know in real life, and who adore the y beast named Kim Jongin. Initially, I also wanted to include myself as one of Jongin's siblings (even my last name fits! Wow! It must be fate!) but then I thought Nah, I don't wanna be sister-zoned. So yeah. ahem
8. The bonus chapter, "In The Blink Of An Eye", was inspired by Key's imitation of Taemin in their Replay era and how Taemin had a habit of blinking a lot at that time, which I thought incredibly cute.
9. In "The Ankle Incident", I briefly mentioned that Kai's been given permission to enter Taemin's building at any time "partly because of Kai's almost incessant visits and partly because he had a bad habit of jamming the intercom with his childish impatience". The reason for this was, because of my bad habit of procrastinating, I had recorded Jongin going "palli palli" (hurry hurry) and put it on loop to make me work faster. Eventually though, it annoyed me so much that I finished Chapter 6 within two days, as opposed to my usual four. A side product of this motivation, however, was Jongin's embarassment and his "childish impatience" that I came up with as the product of pure exasperation, as my brother eventually got a hold of the recording and started playing it at all times simply to annoy me. The things I do for you guys, honestly.
10. Also in "The Ankle Incident", Taemin calls Jongin his 'slave'. Now, because of certain influences ahem I was planning to do a ty master-slave chapter for Chapter 7. I got around three paragraphs in and scrapped the idea. Aren't you glad I did because ahem first date ahem
11. In "The Date Incident", I was planning to draw a chibitoon of the conversation (can I even call that a conversation?) between Sehun and Kai. I was really proud of it, in fact, but because my brother spilled his orange juice on it and damaged it beyond repair, and because I was too lazy to redraw it I never did include a chibitoon. (tears up)
12. My friend asked me what movie they're watching in "The Date Incident". I have no idea, I'm sorry! I don't watch horror movies? I feel the same way about them as Taemin feels about insects, so that should give you a little indication of how much I hate them.
13. I cried while writing "The Noona Incident". I went through about two boxes of tissues because I was crying so much, and it probably didn't help that I had a cold that day, but whatever.
14. Taemin's personality while waking up in "The Tickling Incident" is based on a video my friends took of me when I'm being waken up. I have quite low blood pressure, and so I'm basically a zombie in the mornings. I'll wake up, then go back to sleep, and then, when my roommate drags me out of bed, I'll change my clothes, and then go back to sleep. Then, she'll kick me out of bed, and I'll go to the living room and sleep on the sofa. After that, she'll sing bad trot songs really off-key, and eventually pour cold water on my head so that I wake up.
15. The present Taemin gets Kai in "The Tickling Incident" is a collection of video games and comics. I don't know how I managed to end up not writing that in the chapter? But oh well.
16. I was planning on writing Taekai's first time together in Chapter 10 instead of stopping when it got good (I'm sorry) but in the end, I chickened out. I don't think Taekai would want their first time to be some drunken fling, it should be when they're completely sober and  have "A-Bunch-Of-Really-Anoying-Others" intruding on their private time, because that suits them more than drunken , is what I thought. (sighs)
17. "The Beach Incident" is the longest thing I've ever written in one go. It's 3k, but while that might not seem like much, I wrote that in 7 hours straight. I just sat down at my laptop, put on my SHINee/EXO mix, and wrote solidly for seven hours. and I only stopped when I'd completed the chapter. I may also have replayed SHINee's View about a million times? Don't judge me.
18. The kissing game from "The Beach Incident" is something I saw a little while ago on livejournal after writing it. A little while after I published the chapter, I read a VIXX fanfiction where two of the members, Leo and Hongbin, play the exact same game: kissing only, the first one to touch loses. I got halfway into the story and then thought, wow, isn't this the kissing game? This is just something I thought was funny. I'm sorry.
19. "The Incident" is basically me rereading RBAF and RBTL and thinking Jongin would do something cheesy for a proposal, wouldn't he? and so it kinda wrote itself. The last two lines in "The Incident" are the same as the last two lines in "Reading Books and Faces", and I thought it would be a good idea to end the story with "Story Time". 
20. In "The Incident", the book that Jongin uses to propose to Taemin is called "The Flavour of Love". When I was writing and in need of a sappy romance novel, the title popped into my head for some reason. It's actually the title of one of my other fanfics (it's not TaeKai though, sorry) and it's about an ice-cream shop owner who falls in love with one of his regular customers. I thought it fit the description of a sappy romance, though, and so I used the title.

And now for general and author trivia:

1. The times in the chapters are all the times when I started writing. If I was writing continuously and needed a page break, I'd just look up at my clock and see what the time was then, and that was the time I would use.
2. Taemin and Kai always play a game before they do it to see who tops. (Jongin has that pride of his but usually doesn't mind if Taemin wins, Taemin doesn't care as long as it's Jongin.) Basically, they switch.
3. I had originally planned to end this story a lot later. Initially, I thought that I could maybe drag it out longer, maybe detail thei relationship with their friends, but then I thought Nah, the clingy couple don't want no other people intruding on their personal life and so yeah. Happy Birthday, Taeminnie!
4. My first language isn't English. I'm half Korean, half Malaysian, and so my English honestly isn't the best? Sorry. I hope you didn't notice that too much.
5. Lee Taemin is my ultimate bias.
6. The consistency in the chapter titles ("The _____ Incident") was an accident. I'd planned to make it more in tune with the story title, "Reading Between the Lines", and title the chapters "Line 1: Ballerina", "Line 2, Ditch", "Line 3: Umbrella", and so on, but I wrote "The Ballerina Incident" by accident because in RBAF, I said i'd wanted to to write about Jongin's "ballerina incident", and it stuck. Oh well
7. Initially, Jongin was going to propose to Taemin in this really old-fashioned way (bowing and saying "For the rest of my life, please wash my pants!"), but when I read it over, it seemed too ridiculous, so I stuck with the Western way of proposing.

and there you have it!

with this, Reading Between the Lines is officially over! 

taemin pls are you putting on your hat or are you crying

they even looked up at the same time oml ignore me just look at the gifs

I refuse to believe that they're not manga characters

How is it possible that humans shine this brightly?

Oh, well. 

Ok

Bye. I hope you enjoyed this story!

Please do leave me a comment!