Your lips at eight pressed against mine— 

---------------------------------------------

Sehun says it's embarrassing how Jongin has taken to following Soojung around everywhere. And maybe it is, a little, but he can't help it. He likes the exhilaration he feels around her and is intrigued by her seemingly convoluted personality. 

Soojung, in turn, uses this to her advantage. She asks him to dance for her again while she paints and he complies. This turns into regular painting sessions which eventually extend to lunch-and-painting, dinner-and-painting, lunch-and-dinner-and-painting or at the very least coffee-and-painting.

One time, Jongin flips through one of her sketchbooks while waiting for their food and is surprised to find sketches of his face. Soojung yells and tries to grab it back but he holds it out of reach, flipping through the pages and finding more observational sketches of him -- walking, reading, laughing, drinking coffee. "What's this, Soojung-ah?"

"Give it back," Soojung commands, but she sounds more embarrassed than menacing and there is a rosy tint to her cheeks.

"I thought your project was supposed to be abstract?"

"My project is anything I want it to be," Soojung bluffs, finally succeeding in getting her sketchbook back just as the waiter sets down two plates of pasta. "Don't smirk at me like that, Kim Jongin."

He does anyway. "So am I your muse, now?" He says this teasingly, but when Soojung glances at him, she looks serious.

"You are, probably.”

"You want me to dance. On the canvas. With paint on my feet?"

"Yes! Isn't that a great idea? Someone might have done it before but I don't care, I want it as part of my project... come on, I'm just using acrylic, they wash out with water."

Jongin stares at the paint and powdered pigments she'd put out on to flat, wide containers and the canvas she's rolled out on the ground. She must know that he just can't say no to her. “Is there a specific way you want me to go about it?”

Soojung pauses. “Um. Not really? I mean, just dance across the room while occasionally dipping your hands and feet in paint? I might direct you once in a while if I want a certain color to go to a certain area. So…” She gives him a small, hesitant smile, and he wonders if maybe she doesn’t know he can’t say no to her. “You’ll do it, right?

“What if I say no?”

Soojung stares so forlornly at the colors and canvas she’d prepared that Jongin bursts out laughing, and then her face turns indignant and she grabs his wrist. “Yah! You know what, I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“But I don’t want to get paint on my clothes.”

“Jongin, I specifically told you to come in clothes you won’t mind getting messed up, and you obviously did…” She gestures weakly at his outfit, and Jongin can tell she badly wants to make fun of him but is trying to be nice so he would do what she is asking him to. “And if you still don’t want to get paint on them you can take your clothes off, I guess…”

“Soojung!”

She blinks back innocently. “What? I mean, I’d prefer you keep them on.”

Jongin sighs. “Alright,” he says, stepping over a container of orange paint and making his way over to the center of the rolled-out canvas. “How should I start?”

Soojung grins and turns on the music. “Start with the blue,” she instructs. “I made, like, a medley and there is a transition of moods, so I’ll walk you through it.”

Everything goes well enough; he is free to move how he wants to, as usual, but Soojung directs a specific sequence of colors so that the layers build up nicely and create a cohesive effect instead of looking like a random mishmash of colors. It’s kind of fun, actually, and Jongin finds himself enjoying the activity despite the little voice in the back of his head reminding him that he will have to stand under the shower for three hours when he gets home — he was wrong to think he’d only get his feet dirty. 

He gets a water break when the expanse of canvas is about a third filled with color. He forgets how different the smooth surface of the floor is compared to the grainy canvas, and, of course, proceeds to slide and fall on his . 

Soojung laughs hysterically, and Jongin would be embarrassed but instead he was… proud, almost, to get her to laugh like this, since she’s not exactly emotional. Still, he puts on an indignant front. “Yah!” He scrambles to his feet and Soojung has enough sense to back away and run away from him, still laughing. Thus begins a mad game of cat and mouse which isn’t easy with all the containers of paint and pigment littering the floor, and the fact that Jongin has to be mindful of the slipperiness of his feet. Eventually, it is Soojung who trips over a tray of yellow paint and falls facedown on the canvas, so Jongin manages to catch up to her and gets the brilliant idea to shower her with powdered pigment. 

Soojung screams and quickly retaliates by flinging some green paint in his direction before running away again. Jongin wasn’t sure if he should chase after her with his paint-contaminated feet and mess up what was already on the canvas, but decides that Soojung herself didn’t seem to be too concerned with the trail of yellow, green and orange that she herself was leaving behind. “Kim Jongin, leave me alone!”

“After you laughed at me and hurt my pride?”

Soojung sputters. “Your pride? You’re kidding, right? What pride? Ack!” She lets out a strangled shriek as Jongin finally catches up to her and captures her. They bicker and playfight for a while longer and it isn’t until they start to tire that Jongin realizes just how close they are, their faces just inches apart.

She is so, so beautiful. Jongin realizes then how emotionally close they’ve gotten, too, in such a short amount of time, especially compared to when they first met and considering how neither he nor Soojung seem to find it easy warming up to new people. There is still so much he doesn’t know about her, so much that he wants to know. 

And he wants to so badly that he knows he has to take Sehun’s advice for once and just go for it, make things happen, be the one to initiate something even though he doesn’t know how she’d react. So he cradles her paint-streaked face in his even-more-paint-streaked hands and presses his lips to hers.

//

a/n.

i am so, so, sorry if you have been waiting and waiting and waiting for an update.

i've been super busy and for some reason this chapter was really hard for me to write? i might edit later

thing is, fyi, i already know what's going to happen in this story, and the following stories i have planned out for it, so i promise i will finish everything eventually. so i hope you will all stick around and be patient whenever i hit a roadblock. :)