sehun is fairly positive that his boyfriend keeps no secrets from him. they always wake up together, have breakfast together, do their chores together and go out together. they have other friends too, just enough to keep their relationship afloat, keep them away from monotony. but at the end of the day, sehun and baekhyun have chosen to be this close, and neither of them regrets it.

sehun is fairly positive.

except—

baekhyun keeps a journal. he carries it with him at all times, small, perfectly rectangular, with green silk adorning the covers and embroidered orange dragons dancing all around it. it doesn’t have a lock, and sehun always assumed baekhyun uses it to scribble down ideas for his book. but lately, baekhyun takes extra care to reread his notes in bed every night, sometimes editing more thoughts into it, other times erasing what he wrote earlier that day. sehun watches him but never peeks. baekhyun trusts him enough not to, he trusts him enough to store his notebook on their bedside table when he goes to sleep, without locks or any additional protection.

baekhyun trusts sehun to respect his privacy.

sehun doesn’t really trust himself.

he untangles himself from baekhyun’s hold one night, carefully placing his pillow between baekhyun’s arms so the smaller one won’t be roused from the lack of a warm body to cling too. sure, he’s not as fluffy as the pillow, but he doubts baekhyun can count his bones in his sleep. sure, he doesn’t. probably.

sehun tiptoes around the bed to baekhyun’s side, grabs the little notebook and his cellphone quickly and quietly moves on to the kitchen. he settles for the cold light of the phone, not ready to risk turning on the lights when he’s left the bedroom door askew.

the notebook is probably a sketchbook after all, without the traditional lines that are meant for notetaking. sehun smiles as he traces little doodles at the corners of the pages, dinosaurs, abstract flowers, a mandala that takes up a whole page and looks intricate enough to have taken baekhyun a whole day to finish. there’s various chibi drawings too, and sehun recognises his trademark ‘angry eyebrows’, as baekhyun always calls them, and the middle part in his hair. he also recognises droopy eyes and a small pair of puppy ears almost always adorning the chibis that cling to his own, and it’s not hard to decipher who’s the inspiration behind their design.

he flips the pages absently, not paying great attention to baekhyun’s scribbles and the ink blots that colour the pages, thinks he’s wasted time for nothing as he gets up from one of the chairs, only to be interrupted by two pages falling out of the notebook. he hurriedly drops to the floor, cursing quietly through his teeth as it dawns on him that he accidentally tore out pages and baekhyun is going to find out baekhyun is going to kill me! he inspects the pages quickly, only to find out they don’t seem to be from that particular notebook at all. on two pieces of regular lined paper, baekhyun has written what appears to be a rather long poem. the pages look worn out, as though they’ve been crumpled up and straightened out multiple times. there’s smudges over certain words or lines, and sehun has a hard time deciphering his boyfriend’s handwriting. it’s not baekhyun’s usual loopy handwriting, instead it’s rough, with too many edges, and looks rushed. sehun contemplates whether he should be reading this or not, but his mental battle is short lived as he finds his eyes scanning the lines almost immediately after the thought crosses his mind.

love of my life

you came to me last summer

you had all the free time in the world, fresh out of high school, yet so sure about your dreams

you played video games happily, every day

you watched tv, cartoons,

laughed loudly, unabashedly, every day

i never wanted you to know

how lost i was those days

how many times i thought— well

you watched your cartoons with me then,

gave me your favourite controller,

laughed loudly next to me and i sat quietly

i watched your head thrown back

your chest rumbling with mirth

i laughed too, at some point.

i still don't know

what we were watching

if it made you laugh,

then it must have been good

you told me you didn't connect well with others

that your parents gave you a hard time over it

i said i had the same problem

you pushed through it with your head high, never made a fuss,