Three-Fifths of Distractibility, 6/?
Title: Three-Fifths of Distractibility, 6/?
Pairing: 2min
Rating: pg-15ish
Genre: au, fluff
Summary: Taemin is the new boy at Minho's grocery store.
Words: 2635
Part Five
Things returned to normal-or rather, as normal as they could get the afternoon after the night before.
It wasn't a terrible exchange. Instead of semi-awkward conversation (“by the way, your mouth felt really good last night.”) he got a good-morning call that consisted of Taemin doing beautiful things with his mouth. But along with this very new, very appreciated addition of blow-jobs to their relationship came sexually forward Taemin.
This wasn't something new, Minho told himself as he hopped into the car with Taemin after they'd showered (together, a rather lengthy ordeal as Minho was finding that pleading Taemin was one of the better things in life, which thus led to him pinning Taemin to the shower wall before regretfully realizing that they still didn't have lube). Taemin was always horny, and he was always verbal about it.
Now that he knew that the only thing Minho was waiting for was an appropriate moment with proper supplies, though, he was worse. Ten times worse.
Minho really didn't know how much longer he could last.
They were at the kitchen table, Taemin fiddling with a coin as Minho dug around in the fridge, looking for something to cook up for them to eat.
“What are you making for breakfast?”
“Dinner,” Minho corrected as he held up the carton of eggs, waving it at Taemin. “I'm making eggs for dinner.”
Taemin made a face. “It's breakfast. We just woke up.”
“Dinner. It's quarter after five. Breakfast is a before one in the afternoon thing.” Setting the eggs down he began flipping through cupboards.
“The pans are in the drawer under the stove.” Apparently Taemin was moving on from the breakfast-lunch-or-dinner conversation, which was fine by Minho. “Do you even know how to fry eggs? You looks sort of clueless.”
“If you don't be quiet I'll eat yours too,” Minho replied blandly, and that was that.
//
“Heads or tails?”
Minho and Taemin were in the car on the way to the laundromat when Taemin asked, still messing with the coin he'd picked up back at his house.
“Why?”
“Just pick one.” Taemin gave it an experimental flick, scrambling after it when it rolled to the floor of the car.
Minho rolled his eyes, “I'm not picking heads or tails until I know the stakes.”
“You're no fun today,” Taemin said, pouting. “But fine. If you win, you get to top. If I win I get to.”
It was a testament to just how attractive Taemin was that Minho found his blood rushing southward at both options.
“What,” he finally ended up starting with after his head cleared enough to formulate a proper thought, “makes you think I'd actually let you top?” This wasn't something he'd even vaguely considered, and now that he was he wasn't sure how he was supposed to feel about the possibility of him bottoming.
“What,” Taemin parroted back, arms crossed, sunk into full-on teenager mode, “makes you think I'd actually let you top?”
Minho swung into the laundromat, thankful that it was mostly empty-he really did not have the fine motor skills needed to park in a tiny, crowded parking slot at this point in time.
“I'm going to top because I'm older and I'm taller and I have more experience than you.” He was studiously avoiding looking at Taemin's face, reaching instead into the back seat for the bag of sheets that Taemin had point-blank refused to send through his own washer.
“...what makes you think you have more experience than me?”
Minho stopped, his hand on the handle of the door. “You-well-I just assumed--”
The atmosphere was thick as Taemin opened his door, tossing an impertinent smile back at Minho. “You know what they say about people who assume.”
//
“Well?”
Taemin glanced over, face open and far too innocent to actually be innocent at all. “Well what?”
They were sitting on small stools a corner of the tiny laundromat, waiting for the sheets to be clean. It was an entirely inappropriate place to be asking this, but-seeing as the reason they were cleaning these sheets was because they'd spent the previous night not sleeping at all-Minho decided it wasn't the worst place in the world to ask.
“How much experience do you have?”
“Oh, you know.” He picked at a spot on on of his nails, by all appearances completely uninterested in the topic of conversation. “The usual.”
What was that supposed to mean?
He switched tactics. “Taemin, come on, I'll tell you how much I have--”
“Not interested.”
“I'll, I don't know, buy you another pair of pants?”
“How about this?” Taemin said, slanting an obscure look over at Minho. “If you stop thinking that you're going to top the first time we have sex I'll tell you.”
“No,” Minho said, trying to ignore the flush creeping up his neck at Taemin's ever-blunt phrasing. “No. The first time we have sex,” the flush crept up further, “I'm going to top. Okay?”
“Minho.” Taemin's voice was colored with both irritation and fondness as he reached over to pat Minho's red cheek. “You're such a prude.”
His color grew, if possible, even darker.
And that was the end of the conversation.
//
It wasn't two weeks later that Minho received a phone call from Taemin, frantic and pleading.
“I need your help.”
“Have you been watching porn again?” Minho asked distractedly, trapping the phone between his ear and his shoulder so he could have his hands free to eat his lunch.
“No, I'm not stuck, pabo. Don't be stupid.”
“That wasn't what I asked,” Minho said, scooping up a mouthful of chicken and rice. “But that's okay. What do you need help with?”
“My parents are coming back in exactly thirteen hours and I need to clean the closets before they do and I can't do it by myself.”
Minho choked, completely caught off guard. “You want me to come to your house when your parents aren't home to clean the closets?” Was 'cleaning the closets' a phrase that, in Taemin's world, was supposed to translate to come-over-let's-do-the-dirty?
“Yeah, my mom asked me to organize them and-Minho, why are you laughing? This isn't funny. She'll be so angry if I don't get it done!”
“It's just that-you--this--” Minho had to put down his chopsticks to hold the phone properly what with his shaking shoulders. “This is completely out of character. You inviting me over to clean.”
“Well,” Taemin said after a momentary pause, “it's not like you've told me you're going to let me top the first time or anything yet. I've been holding back, you know.”
So that was why Taemin had been strangely quiet on the let's-have-sex front since what Minho had sort of begun thinking of as The Laundromat Incident had occurred. And strangely, he wasn't all that happy with it. He'd grown accustomed to Taemin's constant stream of dirty propositions throughout the week, so now that he'd stopped cold-turkey Minho was beginning to feel like there was a gaping hole in their interactions.
“Oh,” Minho said finally. “Let's, just, talk about it later, okay?” Not that he was planning on acquiescing to Taemin's request, because he wasn't.
“So?” Taemin was breezing on, not fazed at all. “Will you come over?”
“Give me three hours, okay? I'm at work. I'll come over after.”
//
Taemin was neck-deep in the hallway closet when Minho cautiously pushed open the door, surrounded by dusty, dented cardboard boxes of varying shapes and sizes.
“I'm here,” he said after a moment when he realized that Taemin obviously hadn't heard the door open.
When Taemin pulled his head out of the lower recesses of the closet Minho couldn't help but laugh. His hair, usually brightly colored, was coated with gray, and his face was streaked with what looked to be dusty fingerprints. This, combined with his perky, groundhog-like behavior-he was perched on his haunches, blinking up at Minho like he'd never seen a human in his life before-was simply too much.
“What?” He shot a glare up Minho, scrubbing at his nose with the back of his hand. “Don't look at me like that. It's dirty in here.”
“When was the last time you looked in a mirror?” Minho stepped over a stack of boxes and crouched next to Taemin on the floor so he was at his eye level. “You have dust on your mouth even. How am I supposed to kiss you hello?”
Taemin rolled his eyes. “You don't kiss me hello.”
Minho hadn't been planning on it-the dust really didn't look appetizing-but the combination of Taemin and the slight bit of competition had him slipping his hand around the back of Taemin's neck, pulling him off balance so he had no choice but to hold onto Minho for support.
The dust was rapidly overpowered by Taemin, his scent, his taste, the feel of his mouth, soft and warm and moving comfortably against Minho's despite their awkward positioning. “Oh, really?” Minho asked smugly when he pulled back (regretfully, because he was beginning to get a crick in his neck). “Is that not hello enough for you?”
“You're too competitive for your own good. That was close enough though, I suppose.” He licked his lips, cocking his head to the side pensively. “Did you get new gum or something?”
“It's the dust,” Minho said seriously, giving up with squatting to sit cross-legged on the floor. “Think it's a repeat?”
When Taemin rolled his eyes for the second time in two minutes and Minho found himself feeling quite accomplished he realized that the younger was really getting to him.
It was a sign of just how far gone he was that he wasn't scared in the slightest.
//
They ended up only going through the first closet together for fifteen minutes before Minho stood up, brushing his hands off. “We are absolutely not going to do anything else with these boxes,” he told Taemin seriously. “Look at them. They're falling apart.”
“They are not,” Taemin said. “They're-oh.” The box he'd been gesturing with fell apart at the seams, photos flooding out of it like rain into his lap. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, tiny little things documenting what were most likely foggy memories at best. Taemin looked shellshocked.
“See?” Minho sat back down again, taking pity on him. “Listen,” he said, brushing the photos into piles when Taemin continued staring at them helplessly. “You run to the store, buy some new boxes to store this stuff in. Plastic or whatever. I'll clean up here while you're gone, alright?”
Taemin was up in a flash at the mention of an escape, snatching the keys off the table in the hallway and promising prompt returns (“Twenty minutes! That's all!”) as he backed out of the door.
“Just go,” Minho grumbled as he painstakingly began arranging the photos back into neat piles.
By the time twenty minutes had turned to forty though Minho found himself with five meticulously straight stacks of pictures and no Taemin in sight.
He'd probably had full intentions of returning quickly, he mused as he pulled a small, square box out from behind a larger one, opening it to begin organizing its contents. No doubt he'd just gotten distracted by the food on the way out, or maybe he was still trying to find the lowest priced set of boxes since he was using his own money--
Minho froze, realizing with a startling flash what exactly was inside the small, unobtrusive box. This was poetry, very obviously written in Taemin's handwriting. It looked as if there were a hundred or more sheets of sloppily folded loose-leaf paper, some lined up like they were intended to be neat, others shoved haphazardly into corners and gaps.
Taemin wrote poetry and he didn't even know.
Well, he thought, he supposed he sort of know. Periodically he'd find a stray bit of prose lying around, seemingly just sitting there but obviously meant for him. They were always in weird places though...once he'd even come across one written on the back of a receipt that was somehow tucked inside his wallet next to his paper bills (that one had bewildered him-he had no idea how Taemin had gotten hold of his wallet without him realizing). And then there was the spoken haiku or whatever it was about his legs that Taemin had recited to him, and then there was the permanent marker phrase across his back that had taken two weeks to wash away. That could probably be considered poetry as well.
Minho tucked the paper back into the box and shut it, feeling oddly like he was prying even though Taemin had never told him he wasn't allowed to look, then shoved the it back into place and continued onto the next container. He'd have to ask Taemin about it when he got back.
//
“So, poetry.”
“What about it?” Taemin grunted, wobbling through the door with a stack of plastic totes as tall as himself and twice as wide. “The store was horrible, they mispriced all of these and then had to go through and scan them again. Twice. I was never that incompetent when I was a cashier.” He set the boxes down with a thump in the middle of the living room.
“I saw your box of poetry,” Minho told him, watching Taemin through his peripheral vision from the hall closet to see what his reaction would be.
He was not expecting the immediate, dark flush. “You...you...no. You what?”
“They were pretty good,” Minho lied, straight-faced, curious as to what exactly Taemin had written that had him blushing this violently.
Taemin sunk to the floor, resembling a radish more with each passing second. It was creeping up his neck to his hairline and down the front of his shirt and Minho found himself wondering, as Taemin began stuttering and rambling, just how far it went. “I cannot believe this. I knew I should have locked them up. I knew it. I-just, that's how I get my emotions out, okay? I don't verbalize things well. And you screwed with my mind for months and months, that's why so many are about you--”
About him? They were written about him?
“Taemin.”
“I swear I, those, that's not how it always is--”
“Taemin-ah,” he repeated, more loudly this time. “I didn't read any.”
“They-you didn't?”
Minho shook his head vigorously, watching with a sort of clinical awe as the blush began receding just as quickly as it had appeared. “I just lied to see how red you'd get. Ouch! Stop!” He ducked as one of the smaller totes made a beeline for his head. “What are you doing!? I didn't read any! Stop, you're going to ruin all of my work--”
“I don't like you anymore,” Taemin told him gravely, a second tote in his hand, cocked back and ready to be let loose. “I really don't.”
//
It took trapping Taemin against the living room wall for Minho to be able to get a word in edgewise past the flying boxes.
“I'm sorry, okay?”
“That was not a funny joke, Minho,” Taemin struggled for a moment against the grip that Minho had on his shoulders, then went limp. “I thought you read them.”
He was so wide-eyed and earnest, bullet-boxes aside, that Minho's heart pinged with regret. “It was stupid,” he admitted. “But really, I'm happy anyway.”
“Why, that you're probably going to get a black eye? It's turning purple already.”
Minho winced; Taemin's aim was excellent. “More about the fact that you actually wrote about me. Words. On paper.” A lot of words on a lot of paper.
“That's only because you didn't read them.” Taemin wriggled out of Minho's grasp and edged around him, stopping just long enough on his way to the closet to drop a kiss on the exposed skin of Minho's arm. “Apology accepted, though.”
They continued on from there, Minho slightly bruised, Taemin slightly embarrassed, but neither really worse for the wear. In fact, Minho decided as he watched Taemin hastily shove his poetry into a new box, glaring at Minho whenever he saw him looking too closely, even though he had a stupid amount of unsatisfied curiosity and a purpling eye he felt surprisingly good.
Part Seven
Pairing: 2min
Rating: pg-15ish
Genre: au, fluff
Summary: Taemin is the new boy at Minho's grocery store.
Words: 2635
Part Five
Things returned to normal-or rather, as normal as they could get the afternoon after the night before.
It wasn't a terrible exchange. Instead of semi-awkward conversation (“by the way, your mouth felt really good last night.”) he got a good-morning call that consisted of Taemin doing beautiful things with his mouth. But along with this very new, very appreciated addition of blow-jobs to their relationship came sexually forward Taemin.
This wasn't something new, Minho told himself as he hopped into the car with Taemin after they'd showered (together, a rather lengthy ordeal as Minho was finding that pleading Taemin was one of the better things in life, which thus led to him pinning Taemin to the shower wall before regretfully realizing that they still didn't have lube). Taemin was always horny, and he was always verbal about it.
Now that he knew that the only thing Minho was waiting for was an appropriate moment with proper supplies, though, he was worse. Ten times worse.
Minho really didn't know how much longer he could last.
They were at the kitchen table, Taemin fiddling with a coin as Minho dug around in the fridge, looking for something to cook up for them to eat.
“What are you making for breakfast?”
“Dinner,” Minho corrected as he held up the carton of eggs, waving it at Taemin. “I'm making eggs for dinner.”
Taemin made a face. “It's breakfast. We just woke up.”
“Dinner. It's quarter after five. Breakfast is a before one in the afternoon thing.” Setting the eggs down he began flipping through cupboards.
“The pans are in the drawer under the stove.” Apparently Taemin was moving on from the breakfast-lunch-or-dinner conversation, which was fine by Minho. “Do you even know how to fry eggs? You looks sort of clueless.”
“If you don't be quiet I'll eat yours too,” Minho replied blandly, and that was that.
//
“Heads or tails?”
Minho and Taemin were in the car on the way to the laundromat when Taemin asked, still messing with the coin he'd picked up back at his house.
“Why?”
“Just pick one.” Taemin gave it an experimental flick, scrambling after it when it rolled to the floor of the car.
Minho rolled his eyes, “I'm not picking heads or tails until I know the stakes.”
“You're no fun today,” Taemin said, pouting. “But fine. If you win, you get to top. If I win I get to.”
It was a testament to just how attractive Taemin was that Minho found his blood rushing southward at both options.
“What,” he finally ended up starting with after his head cleared enough to formulate a proper thought, “makes you think I'd actually let you top?” This wasn't something he'd even vaguely considered, and now that he was he wasn't sure how he was supposed to feel about the possibility of him bottoming.
“What,” Taemin parroted back, arms crossed, sunk into full-on teenager mode, “makes you think I'd actually let you top?”
Minho swung into the laundromat, thankful that it was mostly empty-he really did not have the fine motor skills needed to park in a tiny, crowded parking slot at this point in time.
“I'm going to top because I'm older and I'm taller and I have more experience than you.” He was studiously avoiding looking at Taemin's face, reaching instead into the back seat for the bag of sheets that Taemin had point-blank refused to send through his own washer.
“...what makes you think you have more experience than me?”
Minho stopped, his hand on the handle of the door. “You-well-I just assumed--”
The atmosphere was thick as Taemin opened his door, tossing an impertinent smile back at Minho. “You know what they say about people who assume.”
//
“Well?”
Taemin glanced over, face open and far too innocent to actually be innocent at all. “Well what?”
They were sitting on small stools a corner of the tiny laundromat, waiting for the sheets to be clean. It was an entirely inappropriate place to be asking this, but-seeing as the reason they were cleaning these sheets was because they'd spent the previous night not sleeping at all-Minho decided it wasn't the worst place in the world to ask.
“How much experience do you have?”
“Oh, you know.” He picked at a spot on on of his nails, by all appearances completely uninterested in the topic of conversation. “The usual.”
What was that supposed to mean?
He switched tactics. “Taemin, come on, I'll tell you how much I have--”
“Not interested.”
“I'll, I don't know, buy you another pair of pants?”
“How about this?” Taemin said, slanting an obscure look over at Minho. “If you stop thinking that you're going to top the first time we have sex I'll tell you.”
“No,” Minho said, trying to ignore the flush creeping up his neck at Taemin's ever-blunt phrasing. “No. The first time we have sex,” the flush crept up further, “I'm going to top. Okay?”
“Minho.” Taemin's voice was colored with both irritation and fondness as he reached over to pat Minho's red cheek. “You're such a prude.”
His color grew, if possible, even darker.
And that was the end of the conversation.
//
It wasn't two weeks later that Minho received a phone call from Taemin, frantic and pleading.
“I need your help.”
“Have you been watching porn again?” Minho asked distractedly, trapping the phone between his ear and his shoulder so he could have his hands free to eat his lunch.
“No, I'm not stuck, pabo. Don't be stupid.”
“That wasn't what I asked,” Minho said, scooping up a mouthful of chicken and rice. “But that's okay. What do you need help with?”
“My parents are coming back in exactly thirteen hours and I need to clean the closets before they do and I can't do it by myself.”
Minho choked, completely caught off guard. “You want me to come to your house when your parents aren't home to clean the closets?” Was 'cleaning the closets' a phrase that, in Taemin's world, was supposed to translate to come-over-let's-do-the-dirty?
“Yeah, my mom asked me to organize them and-Minho, why are you laughing? This isn't funny. She'll be so angry if I don't get it done!”
“It's just that-you--this--” Minho had to put down his chopsticks to hold the phone properly what with his shaking shoulders. “This is completely out of character. You inviting me over to clean.”
“Well,” Taemin said after a momentary pause, “it's not like you've told me you're going to let me top the first time or anything yet. I've been holding back, you know.”
So that was why Taemin had been strangely quiet on the let's-have-sex front since what Minho had sort of begun thinking of as The Laundromat Incident had occurred. And strangely, he wasn't all that happy with it. He'd grown accustomed to Taemin's constant stream of dirty propositions throughout the week, so now that he'd stopped cold-turkey Minho was beginning to feel like there was a gaping hole in their interactions.
“Oh,” Minho said finally. “Let's, just, talk about it later, okay?” Not that he was planning on acquiescing to Taemin's request, because he wasn't.
“So?” Taemin was breezing on, not fazed at all. “Will you come over?”
“Give me three hours, okay? I'm at work. I'll come over after.”
//
Taemin was neck-deep in the hallway closet when Minho cautiously pushed open the door, surrounded by dusty, dented cardboard boxes of varying shapes and sizes.
“I'm here,” he said after a moment when he realized that Taemin obviously hadn't heard the door open.
When Taemin pulled his head out of the lower recesses of the closet Minho couldn't help but laugh. His hair, usually brightly colored, was coated with gray, and his face was streaked with what looked to be dusty fingerprints. This, combined with his perky, groundhog-like behavior-he was perched on his haunches, blinking up at Minho like he'd never seen a human in his life before-was simply too much.
“What?” He shot a glare up Minho, scrubbing at his nose with the back of his hand. “Don't look at me like that. It's dirty in here.”
“When was the last time you looked in a mirror?” Minho stepped over a stack of boxes and crouched next to Taemin on the floor so he was at his eye level. “You have dust on your mouth even. How am I supposed to kiss you hello?”
Taemin rolled his eyes. “You don't kiss me hello.”
Minho hadn't been planning on it-the dust really didn't look appetizing-but the combination of Taemin and the slight bit of competition had him slipping his hand around the back of Taemin's neck, pulling him off balance so he had no choice but to hold onto Minho for support.
The dust was rapidly overpowered by Taemin, his scent, his taste, the feel of his mouth, soft and warm and moving comfortably against Minho's despite their awkward positioning. “Oh, really?” Minho asked smugly when he pulled back (regretfully, because he was beginning to get a crick in his neck). “Is that not hello enough for you?”
“You're too competitive for your own good. That was close enough though, I suppose.” He licked his lips, cocking his head to the side pensively. “Did you get new gum or something?”
“It's the dust,” Minho said seriously, giving up with squatting to sit cross-legged on the floor. “Think it's a repeat?”
When Taemin rolled his eyes for the second time in two minutes and Minho found himself feeling quite accomplished he realized that the younger was really getting to him.
It was a sign of just how far gone he was that he wasn't scared in the slightest.
//
They ended up only going through the first closet together for fifteen minutes before Minho stood up, brushing his hands off. “We are absolutely not going to do anything else with these boxes,” he told Taemin seriously. “Look at them. They're falling apart.”
“They are not,” Taemin said. “They're-oh.” The box he'd been gesturing with fell apart at the seams, photos flooding out of it like rain into his lap. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, tiny little things documenting what were most likely foggy memories at best. Taemin looked shellshocked.
“See?” Minho sat back down again, taking pity on him. “Listen,” he said, brushing the photos into piles when Taemin continued staring at them helplessly. “You run to the store, buy some new boxes to store this stuff in. Plastic or whatever. I'll clean up here while you're gone, alright?”
Taemin was up in a flash at the mention of an escape, snatching the keys off the table in the hallway and promising prompt returns (“Twenty minutes! That's all!”) as he backed out of the door.
“Just go,” Minho grumbled as he painstakingly began arranging the photos back into neat piles.
By the time twenty minutes had turned to forty though Minho found himself with five meticulously straight stacks of pictures and no Taemin in sight.
He'd probably had full intentions of returning quickly, he mused as he pulled a small, square box out from behind a larger one, opening it to begin organizing its contents. No doubt he'd just gotten distracted by the food on the way out, or maybe he was still trying to find the lowest priced set of boxes since he was using his own money--
Minho froze, realizing with a startling flash what exactly was inside the small, unobtrusive box. This was poetry, very obviously written in Taemin's handwriting. It looked as if there were a hundred or more sheets of sloppily folded loose-leaf paper, some lined up like they were intended to be neat, others shoved haphazardly into corners and gaps.
Taemin wrote poetry and he didn't even know.
Well, he thought, he supposed he sort of know. Periodically he'd find a stray bit of prose lying around, seemingly just sitting there but obviously meant for him. They were always in weird places though...once he'd even come across one written on the back of a receipt that was somehow tucked inside his wallet next to his paper bills (that one had bewildered him-he had no idea how Taemin had gotten hold of his wallet without him realizing). And then there was the spoken haiku or whatever it was about his legs that Taemin had recited to him, and then there was the permanent marker phrase across his back that had taken two weeks to wash away. That could probably be considered poetry as well.
Minho tucked the paper back into the box and shut it, feeling oddly like he was prying even though Taemin had never told him he wasn't allowed to look, then shoved the it back into place and continued onto the next container. He'd have to ask Taemin about it when he got back.
//
“So, poetry.”
“What about it?” Taemin grunted, wobbling through the door with a stack of plastic totes as tall as himself and twice as wide. “The store was horrible, they mispriced all of these and then had to go through and scan them again. Twice. I was never that incompetent when I was a cashier.” He set the boxes down with a thump in the middle of the living room.
“I saw your box of poetry,” Minho told him, watching Taemin through his peripheral vision from the hall closet to see what his reaction would be.
He was not expecting the immediate, dark flush. “You...you...no. You what?”
“They were pretty good,” Minho lied, straight-faced, curious as to what exactly Taemin had written that had him blushing this violently.
Taemin sunk to the floor, resembling a radish more with each passing second. It was creeping up his neck to his hairline and down the front of his shirt and Minho found himself wondering, as Taemin began stuttering and rambling, just how far it went. “I cannot believe this. I knew I should have locked them up. I knew it. I-just, that's how I get my emotions out, okay? I don't verbalize things well. And you screwed with my mind for months and months, that's why so many are about you--”
About him? They were written about him?
“Taemin.”
“I swear I, those, that's not how it always is--”
“Taemin-ah,” he repeated, more loudly this time. “I didn't read any.”
“They-you didn't?”
Minho shook his head vigorously, watching with a sort of clinical awe as the blush began receding just as quickly as it had appeared. “I just lied to see how red you'd get. Ouch! Stop!” He ducked as one of the smaller totes made a beeline for his head. “What are you doing!? I didn't read any! Stop, you're going to ruin all of my work--”
“I don't like you anymore,” Taemin told him gravely, a second tote in his hand, cocked back and ready to be let loose. “I really don't.”
//
It took trapping Taemin against the living room wall for Minho to be able to get a word in edgewise past the flying boxes.
“I'm sorry, okay?”
“That was not a funny joke, Minho,” Taemin struggled for a moment against the grip that Minho had on his shoulders, then went limp. “I thought you read them.”
He was so wide-eyed and earnest, bullet-boxes aside, that Minho's heart pinged with regret. “It was stupid,” he admitted. “But really, I'm happy anyway.”
“Why, that you're probably going to get a black eye? It's turning purple already.”
Minho winced; Taemin's aim was excellent. “More about the fact that you actually wrote about me. Words. On paper.” A lot of words on a lot of paper.
“That's only because you didn't read them.” Taemin wriggled out of Minho's grasp and edged around him, stopping just long enough on his way to the closet to drop a kiss on the exposed skin of Minho's arm. “Apology accepted, though.”
They continued on from there, Minho slightly bruised, Taemin slightly embarrassed, but neither really worse for the wear. In fact, Minho decided as he watched Taemin hastily shove his poetry into a new box, glaring at Minho whenever he saw him looking too closely, even though he had a stupid amount of unsatisfied curiosity and a purpling eye he felt surprisingly good.
Part Seven