Riptide
baekhyun/luhan | pg-13 | romance | mentions of violence, drugs, and alcohol consumption | originally written for emperor_zurgtai in baektobaek. (I just decided to dabble in writing during winter break.)
Baekhyun finds somewhere. Luhan finds nowhere.
Baekhyun’s heart beats in sync with his footfalls.
His mouth drips in fog that whisks past his head in streaks of grey, his shoes against the pavement drowning out the sound of his lungs, of his heart beating wildly in his chest. Buildings whirl past in steel blobs, sometimes brick, sometimes neon signs that snag at the corner of his eye.
Baekhyun doesn’t wait for the world to stop moving.
He thinks he saw one of them. A lump of brown hair glued to pasty skin that’s broken out into clusters of tiny pimples. He could recognize one of them anywhere, any time, whether sleep is clouding his eyes or his back is turned.
They’re all glassy-eyed, with heart-shaped holes in their chests. He knows because he used to be one of them, worked with them for his entire life, was molded by them. They carved the shape of his frown. They chiseled the snarl of his teeth. They took his heart from his chest. Baekhyun took it back.
Baekhyun is already in Andong, North Gyeongsang, and he didn’t think he would be seeing any of them this soon. Not when he took an express train from Ulsan just last night. They must have been on the same train, in a different cart. Or the same cart. The thought makes him run faster, and the sound of his knees cracking gets lost under the sound of the riptide of his sprint.
He doesn’t stop even when he never hears the clad of heavy boots against asphalt behind him. He can’t risk it. He needs to be as far away from the main roads as possible. It’s late, and there aren’t enough people to blend in with, not with beaded pupils that scatter like marbles searching for the face of Byun Baekhyun in everyone they pass.
Baekhyun saw him when he went to turn into the convenient store a block away from his hotel. He can’t go back to get his stuff now. They’ve probably already traced his credit card, ransacked his room, and took out anyone that dared ask them what they’re doing.
They’re out for his blood.
Sangre.
He learned that word in Madrid last year. On business. The Spanish concrete was hot under his bare feet. The memory is incredibly inappropriate for a cold night in South Korea, on the border between panic and courage, cheeks pooled with heat and eyes filled with fear.
Maybe he thinks of that warm day because that’s when everything was okay. He was still in the business and the business was still in him. He had a heart-shaped hole in his chest. There was a human-shaped hole in the universe standing next to him. He learned the word sangre because it was relevant to his interests. The Spanish vendor that taught it to him was dead the next minute and he was fine with that.
Now, he thinks the only word that can fit to the contour of his lungs is correr.
//
It started in Fukuoka, Japan. Well, it was closer to Kyushu, really, but the occasional smell of sea salt that drifts into his memories makes Baekhyun remember it all as Fukuoka.
The sun was bright and coloring the skin on his shoulders a light pink. The wind made it seem cooler than it was on that summer afternoon, and the sand had a nasty, heated bite as soon as you dipped your feet in it. But the ocean made everything alright.
The ocean always makes everything alright, even if your life is a hurricane.
The way Baekhyun remembers it, one minute he’s looking at the sea, the waves lapping at his feet, leaving small deposits of broken seashells and salt on his toes; the next minutes the waves have transformed into large piles of dead bodies, the sand into a white powder, and a different, shiny kind of shell. The kind that falls to the floor a second before the man in front of you does.
It’s a coagulated blur.
Baekhyun sighs when he thinks about the mounds of carcasses. Not because he cares, but because he used to.
He had enough money in his pocket to buy a bus ticket to Yangyang last night, then a one-way ticket to Haidian, Beijing after that. Now he’s left with thirty-four cents and a pertinent, lasting regret that sits right under his chin, stashed away with the thought of the looks he got from the airport workers so late at night.
They can’t follow him from Yangyang, though. He hasn’t left a paper trail, not by paying with cash, and the bus he caught only had him, the conductor, and a mother of two on it. No one tailed them- he made sure of that by sitting at the back of the bus, much to the mother’s suspicion. He adds her wide eyes and black irises to the regret. And when they took a short break at a rest stop in Yongwol, Baekhyun felt under the frame of the single-deck bus. No devices, nothing but thousands of miles of caked on grease and soot.
The bus slips away from his mind as the plane rocks to a landing, the end of the strip lit up with tiny orange bulbs of light. The men holding them are lost in the dark, swallowed whole by the twilight, invisible on the pavement. Camouflaged by the night. Envy slithers up the back of Baekhyun’s neck as he glances at his own pallid skin juxtaposed against the vinyl airplane armrest.
The lights of Haidian seem pale in comparison to Baekhyun’s imagination. He thought Beijing would live up to the name metropolis even at three a.m., but the faded, far-away bulbs of encased tungsten wire are just as impotent and forgettable as they are in Seoul. The view of his hometown from his high-rise apartment is already washing away from his memories, just like Beijing the second he glances away. Only phosphenes are left to play.
Even the sound of his feet against the pavement sounds the same, with the exact dirty echo sounding in his ears. The scuff of his shoes doesn’t have a Chinese ring to it like he thought it would, only muffled Korean seeping from the soles, the characters tangled, obscured. And the same fear is still soaked into his heart. He doesn’t think it will ever leave.
Part of him says he deserves that impending sense of doom, the fear, the sweat on his brow and the tremble of his knees. The other half tells him he needs to get further away from the fear, from the sweat, from the tremble, from them. From himself.
//
The quiet hum of the baggage claims area nestles comfortably on Baekhyun’s shoulders. The conveyer belt keeps moving, but no bags appear. There are shadows, but no one there to claim them. Too much space when there was once so little. It’s a rare moment of peace between chaos, between landing and flying planes.
The janitor mops at the floor and Baekhyun watches the hairs of the mop swish against the tile, drawing lustrous circles in the floor that dry slowly under lethargic light. But you can’t clean away footprints. You can’t mop away the evidence of a traversed life-- there is no hiding the thousands of footprints that litter airport floors, spelling out stories of love and life and the tragedy that fills in the cracks.
It reminds Baekhyun of his own tragedy. Everything he owns is in his jean’s pocket. Thirty-four cents, a disposable cell phone, his passport, and his grandfather’s wristwatch. “Tragic,” Baekhyun mutters to himself, then wipes accumulated sweat from his palm onto his jeans, adding to the plethora of stains already there.
“What’s tragic?”
The sudden question from Baekhyun’s right has his eyebrows raising and a small stutter in his heart resounding loudly in his chest. There is any number of thoughts swirling around his mind in the milliseconds it takes to look at the man leaned up beside him against the airport wall. They all fade away when feathery strands of dark hair float into view, falling onto pallid, sweat-soaked skin.
“What’s tragic?” the man repeats, scooting a little closer, teetering somewhere on the border between lover and stranger.
The man has rounded eyes with softened irises that blend into the darkness of his pupils and compliment the black of his hair. His mouth is curved gently, placed just under the tilt of his nose, and Baekhyun doesn’t think he’s ever seen such a carefully arranged face- not in Madrid, not in Tokyo.
The man takes Baekhyun’s silence as its own answer, asking a different question with curiosity laced in the tones of his voice. “Where are you going?” He speaks softly, unobtrusively, but at the same time they pick at Baekhyun’s skin, pulling at the seams to try and unravel him.
“Going?” Baekhyun questioningly murmurs, and that’s when he remembers that they’re in the middle of baggage claims at an airport in Haidian, Beijing, China, and he’s leaned up against a wall like he has all the time in the world, and here’s a porcelain Chinese man speaking to him in accented Korean. The man keeps staring at him, intense yet mild, head tilted just the slightest in wonder, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Nowhere, really,” he replies without thinking, so quietly under the hum of the conveyer belt he’s not even sure the other man heard him. “No where at all.”
“That’s not a very fun place to be.” He smiles at Baekhyun, eyes curving slightly, his teeth peeking out from underneath his lips, and Baekhyun has to look down at his hands so that he doesn’t drown in his own blush. “I’ve been there a couple times myself,” he speaks again, joking so naturally that it almost feels like they were friends in a past life. “I’m Luhan.”
“Baekhyun,” he counters swiftly, naturally, then tries the other man’s name out a few times in his head. He watches Luhan roll Baekhyun around in his, eventually sighing it out in a long breath, the syllables tearing somewhere behind his teeth.
“What are you doing here all the way from Yangyang, Baekhyun?” Luhan asks somewhere between a comfortable silence and an awkward lull; somewhere between nothing and everything. The conveyer purrs heavily.
Baekhyun furrows his eyebrows, lip curling, and his heart jumping against his ribs. Not here. Luhan quickly points to the electronic board displaying YANGYANG TO BEIJING [ARRIVED] with a knobby finger, Baekhyun’s confusion and panic morphing into his own. “Oh.” Baekhyun breathes out. “Oh.” He breathes in. “I decided it was time for a change.”
“In the middle of a Tuesday night?” Luhan peeks at him from the corner of his eye, face still tilted towards the electronic board.
“Yep.”
“You left with nothing, from South Korea to China, not even a place to go?”
“Not a dollar to my name.”
“Then I guess that makes me your saving grace?”
Baekhyun glances at Luhan, pulling himself up off the wall to face the man beside him. The light in Luhan’s eyes changes slightly, bending into devious rings of playfulness, and it stirs a keen sense of euphoria in Baekhyun’s stomach. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Luhan drawls, slinking into the same position as Baekhyun, “that you can stay with me. And I’ll have this for collateral, of course.” From behind his back, Luhan pulls out a shiny piece of metal coated in the sticky light of the airport. It’s a watch, from what Baekhyun can tell, with a face similar to the one his grandfather owned-
“Hey!” Baekhyun shrieks. He doesn’t hear the echo of his own voice around the empty airport, nor does he pay attention to the few people with enough energy to shoot him glares. “That’s mine! And I’m not staying with you! I don’t even know you!”
“And it’s still yours.” Luhan grins. “It’s just in my hands. And yes you are. You have nowhere else to go. I’m really your only option. Besides, my life has been boring recently, and you look like a lot of fun.”
Baekhyun can feel his face going red with indignation and the excitement in his bones deflates with just a few sentences, but he doesn’t reach out for his watch to try and snatch it back. Something tells him not to. And he always follows his gut feeling. Even if his gut is telling him to follow a stranger into a strange land and sleep in his house. “How did you even get that?”
“A magician never reveals his secrets.” Luhan’s grin is sickly-sweet smeared across his face, and Baekhyun doesn’t notice that the space between them is steadily dwindling until Luhan’s palm presses against his chest, the heel pressing right into his sternum.
He knows that he should be trying to reach for a gun that isn’t there right now. He should be grabbing Luhan by the collar of his shirt and breaking the bones of his wrist for stealing his grandfather’s watch right from his fucking pocket. Quite possibly leaving a threat with a black ring around his eye. Except then Luhan is pushing him away and laughing and his eyes are curved like the moon and Baekhyun follows him as he skips towards the dimly-lit lobby.
The watch dangles precariously from Luhan’s fingers, but Baekhyun watches the long bend of the other boy’s wrist instead.
//
The feel of damp, rust-engraved handrails and the sour smell of rain-washed garbage makes Baekhyun’s stomach churn. Dusk is slowly giving in to dawn, but the halls of the one-stop-shop motel lay flat and covered in pitch-darkness. The stairs clang under his shoes. It reminds him of the sound a gun makes when you take it apart.
The sound of Luhan’s shoes against the metal is much quicker than his, and he follows the sound through the unlit corridors until he hears the sound of flesh against heavy wood. Then the wind-chime jingle of keys. Luhan’s back is highlighted by the moon, drawing long shadows against the thin stripes as he struggles to open the door.
“It’ll be just a moment,” Luhan grits, thigh against the door, trying to nudge it open. Darkness blocks his actual view of the knob, but he’s sure Luhan’s fingers are already turning white from pressure.
Baekhyun doesn’t bother trying to help him. He turns the opposite way, towards the parking lot a story below them. The light catches on every single crack of uneven asphalt, worn-away parking lines incandescent and so much more beautiful than they are in the daylight, with pathetic, beat up cars sitting idle between them.
This isn’t the best hotel he’s ever been to. He’s stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in New York, for Christ’s sake. He used to live on top of the world. Now he’s scratching at bedrock. He doesn’t even know why he’s here in the first place- Luhan said they were going back to his place, then shoved him off the bus in front of a two-story love motel.
“What are we doing here, anyway?” Baekhyun asks, much too casual for the situation they’re both in, right after Luhan manages to bust open the door.
“This is my place,” Luhan replies, winded, stepping into the room with a proud smile on his face. “I own this motel.” He doesn’t sound too fond of the place, though, not with the slight sag in his shoulders and the way his eyes narrow at the sight of the floral bedspread.
Baekhyun walks in also, stopping a pace behind him to grimace at the putrid smell of the place. “Your place? You serious?” It’s then that Baekhyun realizes he has no right to criticize the only home he’ll have in the next few days nor the man who loaned it to him, and he takes small steps towards the bed until he can sit on it, familiarizing himself with it. This could be the last thing he sees before he dies. Who knows. Luhan could work for his old boss and be assigned to lure him into a trap for his ultimate demise. But he could also be a random guy who decided he’d take in a bum from the airport. Either way, he doesn’t think he’d mind dying because of Luhan.
“It was my dad’s place until he died.” Baekhyun nods, a little lost in his thoughts, and doesn’t offer an apology. There’s no reason to say sorry for the dead. “Long story, actually.”
“I see.”
The room falls silent at that. Baekhyun doesn’t bother thinking of it as awkward; he doesn’t have the energy to. Luhan talks for a while about menial things after that, like how breakfast is served at 8 sharp and that he can’t have the microwave and fridge plugged in at the same time or else it will blow a fuse.
Baekhyun listens to some of it, but the majority of the time he just enjoys the sound of Luhan’s voice, soft and quieted in the small room. But all moments come to an end, and eventually Baekhyun has to muster up the energy to walk Luhan to the door with a smile, right before collapsing on the twin-sized mattress.
It’s Luhan’s question that he asks right before the door shuts that he doesn’t have the energy to answer.
“What are you doing all the way here from South Korea, Baekhyun?” Luhan seems much smaller, much more fragile with the moonlight as his silhouette.
“It’s a long story, actually.”
“Then maybe we can swap stories sometime then, yeah?”
Baekhyun answers with a small leer, then shuts the door and falls onto the bed. He doesn’t have much time to think about Luhan’s question before he’s out cold, face pressed into an old comforter and fingers curling around empty space.
And he dreams of the question, too afraid of the answer.
What would Luhan do if he knew why?
//
Baekhyun wakes up far too late for breakfast to be involved.
The moment he’s coherent enough to take in the fresh sunlight leaking in from the windows, he has his hand of his hip, reaching for the gun that’s always there: his SIG Pro semi-automatic.
His fingers meet skin and wrinkled clothes; not a trace of metal.
The blurry image of a man with hair like a crow’s feathers flits into his mind, and the musty smell of the bed hits him, and he instead reaches for the phone in his pocket. It’s much too warm from being smothered between him and the mattress for so long, but the heat feels nice against his skin.
3:26 p.m.
Baekhyun is out of his room by 4, after showering and shaving with an old razor he found in a bathroom drawer. His clothes are the same as yesterday’s- and probably tomorrow’s. He can’t tell the difference anymore. All he knows is that he’s hungry and there’s a delicious smell coming from near the small lounge he saw yesterday.
The area is large, much larger than his room, with a couch in one corner, a television in another, and a counter that hides a kitchen at the back wall. There’s a few chairs scattered over the linoleum floors, and of course Baekhyun kicks the only one in his path on his way to the counter. He cries out when the metal hits his small toe.
“What’s wrong?” Someone walks out of the kitchen, their lower half covered by the counter, with a spatula in their hand and a frown on their face. “Meilin, didn’t I tell you not to- oh.”
Baekhyun doesn’t ask who Meilin is; he doesn’t care, nor does he care that he probably looks like a baby sitting on the floor and holding his toe. He cuts straight to the point. “Are you cooking?” His stomach is practically feeding on his liver, and he can hear every violent growl from it.
“Oh. Yeah.” Luhan looks dazed, his eyes unfocused yet still pinned to Baekhyun, and it’s cute in a deer-in-the-headlights way. Luhan breathes in deeply before moving back to the kitchen, and Baekhyun has a chance to see the flour dusted over his back. He laughs. “What’s so funny?” Luhan looks back at Baekhyun to pout, flipping over whatever is in the skillet in front of him.
“It’s just…” he trails off, and decides in the end to get up and walk to the kitchen himself. Luhan watches him the entire way, and his knuckles have gone white over the spatula the way Baekhyun’s sure they did last night, with his muscles tensing the closer he approaches.
“Uh-”
“Chill,” Baekhyun murmurs, a small smile flitting over his lips, because this Luhan is the total opposite of the suave, brave, smart-mouthed Luhan he met last night. He quickly runs his palm over Luhan’s back a couple of times, the flour forming a small cloud over his hand, then pulls it back to show the chef. “You had this all over your back.”
“Oh. Um. Thanks?” Luhan’s cheeks are red and Baekhyun thinks it might be his new favorite color.
…
“Veggie pancakes? For dinner?”
“I like them. They’re the only thing I learned how to cook when I visited South Korea.”
“Tell me something, Luhan. Did you also have this for breakfast and lunch?”
“Maybe.”
Baekhyun hasn’t laughed like this in a long time- and it’s been even longer since there was someone sitting beside him laughing just as hard. Luhan had been kind enough to split his pancakes with him, and Baekhyun thanked him by condemning the practice of breakfast foods for dinner.
They’re sitting together on a couple of stools by the counter, but it reminds Baekhyun of a bar instead, with the way Luhan slides down a glass of milk for him before pouring himself one. For a second he wonders what his life would have been like if he met Luhan at a club in the Underground of Beijing, but he immediately dismisses the thought. He isn’t in that scene anymore. He isn’t in any scene.
“Are they good?”
“Delicious. Tastes like 8 a.m.”
“Shut up.”
Baekhyun smiles when Luhan blushes again. He thinks he likes this Luhan more than the abrasive one from last night, just a little bit. Just when he blushes and the colors of the sunset are spread out over his cheeks and he can see himself in the black of Luhan’s irises. Just then.
The minutes run quickly between them, and before either of them know it, they’ve finished half their plate and the clock is nearing 5 o’clock. The sun will stay up for a couple more hours before allowing the moon to replace it. Baekhyun feels the moments slipping between his fingers. “So, this was your dad’s place?” He’s never been much good at small talk.
“Yeah,” Luhan nods, and for a while it seems like that’s all he’s going to say. Baekhyun is prepared to ask something else when he speaks again, low and soft just like the night before. “It’s funny, though. This place was his pride and joy and he won the deed to it in a card game.”
Baekhyun almost chokes on his pancake.
“He was a real gambler, you see.” Luhan turns to him with a cynical smile. “He really liked to drink too. I guess in the end I didn’t like my old man too much. Maybe that’s why I don’t really take care of the place.”
Luhan’s words have Baekhyun’s eyes widened and his jaw hanging open. He never expected Luhan to tell him that much- not when they just met yesterday and Baekhyun is a stranger staying in one of his rooms.
“So that’s my answer,” Luhan sighs, but it’s the happy kind of sigh that you let out once you’ve laughed really hard. “What’s yours?”
“My… answer?”
“To my question. About why you’re here.”
“Ah. That.” Baekhyun looks at his plate, at his fork cutting through the vegetables mixed in his pancakes. His life can’t get much worse anyway. “I’m on the run from one of the biggest drug lords in Asia.” He doesn’t look up to see Luhan’s reaction. He can’t. “I used to work for him. We were like brothers, actually. But when I got tired of killing people for him, he didn’t want to let me out of the family, so I ran. I ran all the way from Japan to China.
“He had his men out searching for me. All through South Korea, I mean. I don’t think they followed me to China, but it’s possible that they’ll find me here. With you. And kill me. Maybe you too. Are you ready to die for me?”
The room rings with silence after Baekhyun’s story. He can feel the question he asked sticking to his tongue, the rest squirming over his skin like ants. He fidgets in his seat. Luhan is silent beside him, and he still can bring himself to look at the man.
The silence continues until Luhan’s laugh soaks through the air in a strident bubble. He laughs long and hard, with one hand on his stomach and the other in front of his mouth. His face slowly morphs into shades of red, the color dripping down his neck, and the occasional snort picking at Baekhyun’s humor also.
They end up hysterical together: bent over the counter, their stomachs aching, temples throbbing from lack of oxygen. Baekhyun almost forgets he was telling the truth.
“That was a good one, man,” Luhan pants out, wiping tears from the corner of his eyes. “You almost had me there.”
“Where did I go wrong, then?” Baekhyun grins at him, sipping at his milk to help the burn in his throat.
“When you said you killed people for him. That can’t be true. You don’t look like a killer.”
“Looks can be deceiving.” Baekhyun wiggles his eyebrows, and a tiny morsel of guilt settles in his gut because he’s covering up the truth with humor.
Luhan doesn’t know he invited a trained assassin for a drug lord into his business- his home.
//
Once Baekhyun’s sleeping schedule evens out, he joins Luhan for breakfast and dinner every day in the lounge slash dining hall.
It’s nice to spend those minutes with him.
There’s hardly anyone in the lounge in the mornings, so it’s usually just Baekhyun and Luhan. Sometimes Baekhyun helps out with the cooking, but it usually ends up with the smoke detectors going off and Luhan shooing him out of the vicinity.
A few people usually show up for dinner: an old veteran that curses at Baekhyun every time he sees him, a middle-aged couple with frown lines, and a senile old woman that likes to pinch Luhan’s cheeks. (And Baekhyun definitely doesn’t feel the tiny flame of jealousy lick at his heart each time she reaches for him.)
At the counter, they talk about a lot of things, like the weather that day or when are you going to go shopping I’m sick of seeing you in the same clothes every single day. But they don’t speak about the Questions, or their Answers.
Soon, Baekhyun finds himself falling into a routine. Falling into a lot of things, really.
//
The night is cold for July, and the moon is too clear through the overcast.
Baekhyun can see the stars through the dirty window of his room. They’re beautiful. They remind him of the look Luhan gets when he’s excited about something.
He’s laying on his side, hand on his stomach, his tummy still full from the meal he had with Luhan a few hours ago. Sweet and sour pork. It was absolutely delicious- but maybe that’s just because Baekhyun told a joke and Luhan laughed and the planets aligned for just the slightest second.
The night is endlessly quiet.
It’s late when Baekhyun hears soft knocks on his door, right as he limbos between awake and asleep. He teeters towards awake at just the right moment. Groaning, Baekhyun opens the door, not at all the cautious and paranoid man he was when he arrived here. Because love means you drop your walls- you don’t hide behind them.
“Luhan, what-”
“I found some of my dad’s old scotch,” he says in a rush, and there’s a small bloom of red on his cheeks from the wind. “Let’s share it.”
“Are you sure?” Baekhyun questions, but lets him through the door regardless. When Luhan wants something, Baekhyun has learned that he usually gets it.
“Of course,” he huffs back. “What’s good scotch without someone to share it with?”
“A wasted drink, that’s what.” Luhan laughs at that, and watching him, Baekhyun can’t help but join in.
They sit on Baekhyun’s bed, their backs against the headboard and their legs laid out in front of them, a glass in each other their hands. The scotch tastes like a combination of wood and old liquor, and Baekhyun can tell that it’s good from the way it slides down his throat so smoothly yet settles in his stomach with a burn.
They don’t talk during their first glass. The silence lays between them, but now it’s light and cool and Beakhyun likes it. He watches sparks run down his forearm when their shoulders brush together and wonders if Luhan can see them too.
During their second, they look at each other and giggle silently, letting the light of the moon shine in through the windows and illuminate their features. Baekhyun doesn’t know what they’re laughing at- Luhan probably doesn’t know either- but their silent gasps and sighs takeover the silence and the sparks down their arms proliferate.
It’s on their third glass that the laughs die down and the quietude reins again. They haven’t spoken since Luhan offered him a glass, but if feels like they’ve talked about a million things. Luhan asks questions with his eyes. Baekhyun replies with sly smiles. That’s the only conversation they need.
Luhan’s voice doesn’t upset the silence, only adds to it, if that’s possible, Baekhyun thinks. His voice is tinged with melancholy and a dash of wander, another dash of trust.
“You weren’t joking around back then, were you?”
The question hits Baekhyun hard, because there is no need for him to explain what he’s talking about. They both know. And they’ve both known the answer before the question was asked.
“No. I wasn’t.”
Baekhyun’s heart trembles in the wake of Luhan’s reaction. The latter simply remains silent, eyes set on the moon, sometimes distracted by the stars. He wonders if Luhan will kick him out. If he’ll call the police. Maybe he’ll scream and cry and call Baekhyun a liar and a murderer.
Luhan doesn’t do any of that. He takes a sip of his scotch, sets the glass against his thigh then his head against Baekhyun’s shoulder. With his breath caught in his throat, Baekhyun glances down at the man leaning against him, catching himself too late to pull away from Luhan’s eyes.
“What happened really?” Luhan mutters, the side of his nose meeting Baekhyun’s.
There’s not need for him to explain.
“His name was Jongin,” Baekhyun says, pulling back just a hair. “I wanted out, he didn’t want me to go, and the hunt ensued.” The straight line of his frown crack,
“It’s okay now, though.” Luhan’s eyes are sincere, and his face flushed with alcohol. “You’re okay. I’m okay. We’re safe. We’re together.”
Baekhyun scoots closer, running his cheek over the swell of the other man’s.
Unspoken whispers move between their lips. Baekhyun could speak a novel, but he leans down to press his mouth to Luhan’s instead. The kiss is short and warm and peppered with the taste of scotch, and Baekhyun knows it will be the only kiss he ever needs to steal again.
“Where do we go from here?” Luhan whispers, Baekhyun’s mouth hovering above his, their eyes straining to connect.
“Do you love me enough to follow me wherever I go?”
(A confession was never needed for Baekhyun to know that Luhan loves him, and vice-versa.)
“I’d jump off the edge of the world with you.”
Luhan’s lips taste like freedom when Baekhyun goes to kiss him again.
Baekhyun finds somewhere. Luhan finds nowhere.
Baekhyun’s heart beats in sync with his footfalls.
His mouth drips in fog that whisks past his head in streaks of grey, his shoes against the pavement drowning out the sound of his lungs, of his heart beating wildly in his chest. Buildings whirl past in steel blobs, sometimes brick, sometimes neon signs that snag at the corner of his eye.
Baekhyun doesn’t wait for the world to stop moving.
He thinks he saw one of them. A lump of brown hair glued to pasty skin that’s broken out into clusters of tiny pimples. He could recognize one of them anywhere, any time, whether sleep is clouding his eyes or his back is turned.
They’re all glassy-eyed, with heart-shaped holes in their chests. He knows because he used to be one of them, worked with them for his entire life, was molded by them. They carved the shape of his frown. They chiseled the snarl of his teeth. They took his heart from his chest. Baekhyun took it back.
Baekhyun is already in Andong, North Gyeongsang, and he didn’t think he would be seeing any of them this soon. Not when he took an express train from Ulsan just last night. They must have been on the same train, in a different cart. Or the same cart. The thought makes him run faster, and the sound of his knees cracking gets lost under the sound of the riptide of his sprint.
He doesn’t stop even when he never hears the clad of heavy boots against asphalt behind him. He can’t risk it. He needs to be as far away from the main roads as possible. It’s late, and there aren’t enough people to blend in with, not with beaded pupils that scatter like marbles searching for the face of Byun Baekhyun in everyone they pass.
Baekhyun saw him when he went to turn into the convenient store a block away from his hotel. He can’t go back to get his stuff now. They’ve probably already traced his credit card, ransacked his room, and took out anyone that dared ask them what they’re doing.
They’re out for his blood.
Sangre.
He learned that word in Madrid last year. On business. The Spanish concrete was hot under his bare feet. The memory is incredibly inappropriate for a cold night in South Korea, on the border between panic and courage, cheeks pooled with heat and eyes filled with fear.
Maybe he thinks of that warm day because that’s when everything was okay. He was still in the business and the business was still in him. He had a heart-shaped hole in his chest. There was a human-shaped hole in the universe standing next to him. He learned the word sangre because it was relevant to his interests. The Spanish vendor that taught it to him was dead the next minute and he was fine with that.
Now, he thinks the only word that can fit to the contour of his lungs is correr.
//
It started in Fukuoka, Japan. Well, it was closer to Kyushu, really, but the occasional smell of sea salt that drifts into his memories makes Baekhyun remember it all as Fukuoka.
The sun was bright and coloring the skin on his shoulders a light pink. The wind made it seem cooler than it was on that summer afternoon, and the sand had a nasty, heated bite as soon as you dipped your feet in it. But the ocean made everything alright.
The ocean always makes everything alright, even if your life is a hurricane.
The way Baekhyun remembers it, one minute he’s looking at the sea, the waves lapping at his feet, leaving small deposits of broken seashells and salt on his toes; the next minutes the waves have transformed into large piles of dead bodies, the sand into a white powder, and a different, shiny kind of shell. The kind that falls to the floor a second before the man in front of you does.
It’s a coagulated blur.
Baekhyun sighs when he thinks about the mounds of carcasses. Not because he cares, but because he used to.
He had enough money in his pocket to buy a bus ticket to Yangyang last night, then a one-way ticket to Haidian, Beijing after that. Now he’s left with thirty-four cents and a pertinent, lasting regret that sits right under his chin, stashed away with the thought of the looks he got from the airport workers so late at night.
They can’t follow him from Yangyang, though. He hasn’t left a paper trail, not by paying with cash, and the bus he caught only had him, the conductor, and a mother of two on it. No one tailed them- he made sure of that by sitting at the back of the bus, much to the mother’s suspicion. He adds her wide eyes and black irises to the regret. And when they took a short break at a rest stop in Yongwol, Baekhyun felt under the frame of the single-deck bus. No devices, nothing but thousands of miles of caked on grease and soot.
The bus slips away from his mind as the plane rocks to a landing, the end of the strip lit up with tiny orange bulbs of light. The men holding them are lost in the dark, swallowed whole by the twilight, invisible on the pavement. Camouflaged by the night. Envy slithers up the back of Baekhyun’s neck as he glances at his own pallid skin juxtaposed against the vinyl airplane armrest.
The lights of Haidian seem pale in comparison to Baekhyun’s imagination. He thought Beijing would live up to the name metropolis even at three a.m., but the faded, far-away bulbs of encased tungsten wire are just as impotent and forgettable as they are in Seoul. The view of his hometown from his high-rise apartment is already washing away from his memories, just like Beijing the second he glances away. Only phosphenes are left to play.
Even the sound of his feet against the pavement sounds the same, with the exact dirty echo sounding in his ears. The scuff of his shoes doesn’t have a Chinese ring to it like he thought it would, only muffled Korean seeping from the soles, the characters tangled, obscured. And the same fear is still soaked into his heart. He doesn’t think it will ever leave.
Part of him says he deserves that impending sense of doom, the fear, the sweat on his brow and the tremble of his knees. The other half tells him he needs to get further away from the fear, from the sweat, from the tremble, from them. From himself.
//
The quiet hum of the baggage claims area nestles comfortably on Baekhyun’s shoulders. The conveyer belt keeps moving, but no bags appear. There are shadows, but no one there to claim them. Too much space when there was once so little. It’s a rare moment of peace between chaos, between landing and flying planes.
The janitor mops at the floor and Baekhyun watches the hairs of the mop swish against the tile, drawing lustrous circles in the floor that dry slowly under lethargic light. But you can’t clean away footprints. You can’t mop away the evidence of a traversed life-- there is no hiding the thousands of footprints that litter airport floors, spelling out stories of love and life and the tragedy that fills in the cracks.
It reminds Baekhyun of his own tragedy. Everything he owns is in his jean’s pocket. Thirty-four cents, a disposable cell phone, his passport, and his grandfather’s wristwatch. “Tragic,” Baekhyun mutters to himself, then wipes accumulated sweat from his palm onto his jeans, adding to the plethora of stains already there.
“What’s tragic?”
The sudden question from Baekhyun’s right has his eyebrows raising and a small stutter in his heart resounding loudly in his chest. There is any number of thoughts swirling around his mind in the milliseconds it takes to look at the man leaned up beside him against the airport wall. They all fade away when feathery strands of dark hair float into view, falling onto pallid, sweat-soaked skin.
“What’s tragic?” the man repeats, scooting a little closer, teetering somewhere on the border between lover and stranger.
The man has rounded eyes with softened irises that blend into the darkness of his pupils and compliment the black of his hair. His mouth is curved gently, placed just under the tilt of his nose, and Baekhyun doesn’t think he’s ever seen such a carefully arranged face- not in Madrid, not in Tokyo.
The man takes Baekhyun’s silence as its own answer, asking a different question with curiosity laced in the tones of his voice. “Where are you going?” He speaks softly, unobtrusively, but at the same time they pick at Baekhyun’s skin, pulling at the seams to try and unravel him.
“Going?” Baekhyun questioningly murmurs, and that’s when he remembers that they’re in the middle of baggage claims at an airport in Haidian, Beijing, China, and he’s leaned up against a wall like he has all the time in the world, and here’s a porcelain Chinese man speaking to him in accented Korean. The man keeps staring at him, intense yet mild, head tilted just the slightest in wonder, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Nowhere, really,” he replies without thinking, so quietly under the hum of the conveyer belt he’s not even sure the other man heard him. “No where at all.”
“That’s not a very fun place to be.” He smiles at Baekhyun, eyes curving slightly, his teeth peeking out from underneath his lips, and Baekhyun has to look down at his hands so that he doesn’t drown in his own blush. “I’ve been there a couple times myself,” he speaks again, joking so naturally that it almost feels like they were friends in a past life. “I’m Luhan.”
“Baekhyun,” he counters swiftly, naturally, then tries the other man’s name out a few times in his head. He watches Luhan roll Baekhyun around in his, eventually sighing it out in a long breath, the syllables tearing somewhere behind his teeth.
“What are you doing here all the way from Yangyang, Baekhyun?” Luhan asks somewhere between a comfortable silence and an awkward lull; somewhere between nothing and everything. The conveyer purrs heavily.
Baekhyun furrows his eyebrows, lip curling, and his heart jumping against his ribs. Not here. Luhan quickly points to the electronic board displaying YANGYANG TO BEIJING [ARRIVED] with a knobby finger, Baekhyun’s confusion and panic morphing into his own. “Oh.” Baekhyun breathes out. “Oh.” He breathes in. “I decided it was time for a change.”
“In the middle of a Tuesday night?” Luhan peeks at him from the corner of his eye, face still tilted towards the electronic board.
“Yep.”
“You left with nothing, from South Korea to China, not even a place to go?”
“Not a dollar to my name.”
“Then I guess that makes me your saving grace?”
Baekhyun glances at Luhan, pulling himself up off the wall to face the man beside him. The light in Luhan’s eyes changes slightly, bending into devious rings of playfulness, and it stirs a keen sense of euphoria in Baekhyun’s stomach. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Luhan drawls, slinking into the same position as Baekhyun, “that you can stay with me. And I’ll have this for collateral, of course.” From behind his back, Luhan pulls out a shiny piece of metal coated in the sticky light of the airport. It’s a watch, from what Baekhyun can tell, with a face similar to the one his grandfather owned-
“Hey!” Baekhyun shrieks. He doesn’t hear the echo of his own voice around the empty airport, nor does he pay attention to the few people with enough energy to shoot him glares. “That’s mine! And I’m not staying with you! I don’t even know you!”
“And it’s still yours.” Luhan grins. “It’s just in my hands. And yes you are. You have nowhere else to go. I’m really your only option. Besides, my life has been boring recently, and you look like a lot of fun.”
Baekhyun can feel his face going red with indignation and the excitement in his bones deflates with just a few sentences, but he doesn’t reach out for his watch to try and snatch it back. Something tells him not to. And he always follows his gut feeling. Even if his gut is telling him to follow a stranger into a strange land and sleep in his house. “How did you even get that?”
“A magician never reveals his secrets.” Luhan’s grin is sickly-sweet smeared across his face, and Baekhyun doesn’t notice that the space between them is steadily dwindling until Luhan’s palm presses against his chest, the heel pressing right into his sternum.
He knows that he should be trying to reach for a gun that isn’t there right now. He should be grabbing Luhan by the collar of his shirt and breaking the bones of his wrist for stealing his grandfather’s watch right from his fucking pocket. Quite possibly leaving a threat with a black ring around his eye. Except then Luhan is pushing him away and laughing and his eyes are curved like the moon and Baekhyun follows him as he skips towards the dimly-lit lobby.
The watch dangles precariously from Luhan’s fingers, but Baekhyun watches the long bend of the other boy’s wrist instead.
//
The feel of damp, rust-engraved handrails and the sour smell of rain-washed garbage makes Baekhyun’s stomach churn. Dusk is slowly giving in to dawn, but the halls of the one-stop-shop motel lay flat and covered in pitch-darkness. The stairs clang under his shoes. It reminds him of the sound a gun makes when you take it apart.
The sound of Luhan’s shoes against the metal is much quicker than his, and he follows the sound through the unlit corridors until he hears the sound of flesh against heavy wood. Then the wind-chime jingle of keys. Luhan’s back is highlighted by the moon, drawing long shadows against the thin stripes as he struggles to open the door.
“It’ll be just a moment,” Luhan grits, thigh against the door, trying to nudge it open. Darkness blocks his actual view of the knob, but he’s sure Luhan’s fingers are already turning white from pressure.
Baekhyun doesn’t bother trying to help him. He turns the opposite way, towards the parking lot a story below them. The light catches on every single crack of uneven asphalt, worn-away parking lines incandescent and so much more beautiful than they are in the daylight, with pathetic, beat up cars sitting idle between them.
This isn’t the best hotel he’s ever been to. He’s stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in New York, for Christ’s sake. He used to live on top of the world. Now he’s scratching at bedrock. He doesn’t even know why he’s here in the first place- Luhan said they were going back to his place, then shoved him off the bus in front of a two-story love motel.
“What are we doing here, anyway?” Baekhyun asks, much too casual for the situation they’re both in, right after Luhan manages to bust open the door.
“This is my place,” Luhan replies, winded, stepping into the room with a proud smile on his face. “I own this motel.” He doesn’t sound too fond of the place, though, not with the slight sag in his shoulders and the way his eyes narrow at the sight of the floral bedspread.
Baekhyun walks in also, stopping a pace behind him to grimace at the putrid smell of the place. “Your place? You serious?” It’s then that Baekhyun realizes he has no right to criticize the only home he’ll have in the next few days nor the man who loaned it to him, and he takes small steps towards the bed until he can sit on it, familiarizing himself with it. This could be the last thing he sees before he dies. Who knows. Luhan could work for his old boss and be assigned to lure him into a trap for his ultimate demise. But he could also be a random guy who decided he’d take in a bum from the airport. Either way, he doesn’t think he’d mind dying because of Luhan.
“It was my dad’s place until he died.” Baekhyun nods, a little lost in his thoughts, and doesn’t offer an apology. There’s no reason to say sorry for the dead. “Long story, actually.”
“I see.”
The room falls silent at that. Baekhyun doesn’t bother thinking of it as awkward; he doesn’t have the energy to. Luhan talks for a while about menial things after that, like how breakfast is served at 8 sharp and that he can’t have the microwave and fridge plugged in at the same time or else it will blow a fuse.
Baekhyun listens to some of it, but the majority of the time he just enjoys the sound of Luhan’s voice, soft and quieted in the small room. But all moments come to an end, and eventually Baekhyun has to muster up the energy to walk Luhan to the door with a smile, right before collapsing on the twin-sized mattress.
It’s Luhan’s question that he asks right before the door shuts that he doesn’t have the energy to answer.
“What are you doing all the way here from South Korea, Baekhyun?” Luhan seems much smaller, much more fragile with the moonlight as his silhouette.
“It’s a long story, actually.”
“Then maybe we can swap stories sometime then, yeah?”
Baekhyun answers with a small leer, then shuts the door and falls onto the bed. He doesn’t have much time to think about Luhan’s question before he’s out cold, face pressed into an old comforter and fingers curling around empty space.
And he dreams of the question, too afraid of the answer.
What would Luhan do if he knew why?
//
Baekhyun wakes up far too late for breakfast to be involved.
The moment he’s coherent enough to take in the fresh sunlight leaking in from the windows, he has his hand of his hip, reaching for the gun that’s always there: his SIG Pro semi-automatic.
His fingers meet skin and wrinkled clothes; not a trace of metal.
The blurry image of a man with hair like a crow’s feathers flits into his mind, and the musty smell of the bed hits him, and he instead reaches for the phone in his pocket. It’s much too warm from being smothered between him and the mattress for so long, but the heat feels nice against his skin.
3:26 p.m.
Baekhyun is out of his room by 4, after showering and shaving with an old razor he found in a bathroom drawer. His clothes are the same as yesterday’s- and probably tomorrow’s. He can’t tell the difference anymore. All he knows is that he’s hungry and there’s a delicious smell coming from near the small lounge he saw yesterday.
The area is large, much larger than his room, with a couch in one corner, a television in another, and a counter that hides a kitchen at the back wall. There’s a few chairs scattered over the linoleum floors, and of course Baekhyun kicks the only one in his path on his way to the counter. He cries out when the metal hits his small toe.
“What’s wrong?” Someone walks out of the kitchen, their lower half covered by the counter, with a spatula in their hand and a frown on their face. “Meilin, didn’t I tell you not to- oh.”
Baekhyun doesn’t ask who Meilin is; he doesn’t care, nor does he care that he probably looks like a baby sitting on the floor and holding his toe. He cuts straight to the point. “Are you cooking?” His stomach is practically feeding on his liver, and he can hear every violent growl from it.
“Oh. Yeah.” Luhan looks dazed, his eyes unfocused yet still pinned to Baekhyun, and it’s cute in a deer-in-the-headlights way. Luhan breathes in deeply before moving back to the kitchen, and Baekhyun has a chance to see the flour dusted over his back. He laughs. “What’s so funny?” Luhan looks back at Baekhyun to pout, flipping over whatever is in the skillet in front of him.
“It’s just…” he trails off, and decides in the end to get up and walk to the kitchen himself. Luhan watches him the entire way, and his knuckles have gone white over the spatula the way Baekhyun’s sure they did last night, with his muscles tensing the closer he approaches.
“Uh-”
“Chill,” Baekhyun murmurs, a small smile flitting over his lips, because this Luhan is the total opposite of the suave, brave, smart-mouthed Luhan he met last night. He quickly runs his palm over Luhan’s back a couple of times, the flour forming a small cloud over his hand, then pulls it back to show the chef. “You had this all over your back.”
“Oh. Um. Thanks?” Luhan’s cheeks are red and Baekhyun thinks it might be his new favorite color.
…
“Veggie pancakes? For dinner?”
“I like them. They’re the only thing I learned how to cook when I visited South Korea.”
“Tell me something, Luhan. Did you also have this for breakfast and lunch?”
“Maybe.”
Baekhyun hasn’t laughed like this in a long time- and it’s been even longer since there was someone sitting beside him laughing just as hard. Luhan had been kind enough to split his pancakes with him, and Baekhyun thanked him by condemning the practice of breakfast foods for dinner.
They’re sitting together on a couple of stools by the counter, but it reminds Baekhyun of a bar instead, with the way Luhan slides down a glass of milk for him before pouring himself one. For a second he wonders what his life would have been like if he met Luhan at a club in the Underground of Beijing, but he immediately dismisses the thought. He isn’t in that scene anymore. He isn’t in any scene.
“Are they good?”
“Delicious. Tastes like 8 a.m.”
“Shut up.”
Baekhyun smiles when Luhan blushes again. He thinks he likes this Luhan more than the abrasive one from last night, just a little bit. Just when he blushes and the colors of the sunset are spread out over his cheeks and he can see himself in the black of Luhan’s irises. Just then.
The minutes run quickly between them, and before either of them know it, they’ve finished half their plate and the clock is nearing 5 o’clock. The sun will stay up for a couple more hours before allowing the moon to replace it. Baekhyun feels the moments slipping between his fingers. “So, this was your dad’s place?” He’s never been much good at small talk.
“Yeah,” Luhan nods, and for a while it seems like that’s all he’s going to say. Baekhyun is prepared to ask something else when he speaks again, low and soft just like the night before. “It’s funny, though. This place was his pride and joy and he won the deed to it in a card game.”
Baekhyun almost chokes on his pancake.
“He was a real gambler, you see.” Luhan turns to him with a cynical smile. “He really liked to drink too. I guess in the end I didn’t like my old man too much. Maybe that’s why I don’t really take care of the place.”
Luhan’s words have Baekhyun’s eyes widened and his jaw hanging open. He never expected Luhan to tell him that much- not when they just met yesterday and Baekhyun is a stranger staying in one of his rooms.
“So that’s my answer,” Luhan sighs, but it’s the happy kind of sigh that you let out once you’ve laughed really hard. “What’s yours?”
“My… answer?”
“To my question. About why you’re here.”
“Ah. That.” Baekhyun looks at his plate, at his fork cutting through the vegetables mixed in his pancakes. His life can’t get much worse anyway. “I’m on the run from one of the biggest drug lords in Asia.” He doesn’t look up to see Luhan’s reaction. He can’t. “I used to work for him. We were like brothers, actually. But when I got tired of killing people for him, he didn’t want to let me out of the family, so I ran. I ran all the way from Japan to China.
“He had his men out searching for me. All through South Korea, I mean. I don’t think they followed me to China, but it’s possible that they’ll find me here. With you. And kill me. Maybe you too. Are you ready to die for me?”
The room rings with silence after Baekhyun’s story. He can feel the question he asked sticking to his tongue, the rest squirming over his skin like ants. He fidgets in his seat. Luhan is silent beside him, and he still can bring himself to look at the man.
The silence continues until Luhan’s laugh soaks through the air in a strident bubble. He laughs long and hard, with one hand on his stomach and the other in front of his mouth. His face slowly morphs into shades of red, the color dripping down his neck, and the occasional snort picking at Baekhyun’s humor also.
They end up hysterical together: bent over the counter, their stomachs aching, temples throbbing from lack of oxygen. Baekhyun almost forgets he was telling the truth.
“That was a good one, man,” Luhan pants out, wiping tears from the corner of his eyes. “You almost had me there.”
“Where did I go wrong, then?” Baekhyun grins at him, sipping at his milk to help the burn in his throat.
“When you said you killed people for him. That can’t be true. You don’t look like a killer.”
“Looks can be deceiving.” Baekhyun wiggles his eyebrows, and a tiny morsel of guilt settles in his gut because he’s covering up the truth with humor.
Luhan doesn’t know he invited a trained assassin for a drug lord into his business- his home.
//
Once Baekhyun’s sleeping schedule evens out, he joins Luhan for breakfast and dinner every day in the lounge slash dining hall.
It’s nice to spend those minutes with him.
There’s hardly anyone in the lounge in the mornings, so it’s usually just Baekhyun and Luhan. Sometimes Baekhyun helps out with the cooking, but it usually ends up with the smoke detectors going off and Luhan shooing him out of the vicinity.
A few people usually show up for dinner: an old veteran that curses at Baekhyun every time he sees him, a middle-aged couple with frown lines, and a senile old woman that likes to pinch Luhan’s cheeks. (And Baekhyun definitely doesn’t feel the tiny flame of jealousy lick at his heart each time she reaches for him.)
At the counter, they talk about a lot of things, like the weather that day or when are you going to go shopping I’m sick of seeing you in the same clothes every single day. But they don’t speak about the Questions, or their Answers.
Soon, Baekhyun finds himself falling into a routine. Falling into a lot of things, really.
//
The night is cold for July, and the moon is too clear through the overcast.
Baekhyun can see the stars through the dirty window of his room. They’re beautiful. They remind him of the look Luhan gets when he’s excited about something.
He’s laying on his side, hand on his stomach, his tummy still full from the meal he had with Luhan a few hours ago. Sweet and sour pork. It was absolutely delicious- but maybe that’s just because Baekhyun told a joke and Luhan laughed and the planets aligned for just the slightest second.
The night is endlessly quiet.
It’s late when Baekhyun hears soft knocks on his door, right as he limbos between awake and asleep. He teeters towards awake at just the right moment. Groaning, Baekhyun opens the door, not at all the cautious and paranoid man he was when he arrived here. Because love means you drop your walls- you don’t hide behind them.
“Luhan, what-”
“I found some of my dad’s old scotch,” he says in a rush, and there’s a small bloom of red on his cheeks from the wind. “Let’s share it.”
“Are you sure?” Baekhyun questions, but lets him through the door regardless. When Luhan wants something, Baekhyun has learned that he usually gets it.
“Of course,” he huffs back. “What’s good scotch without someone to share it with?”
“A wasted drink, that’s what.” Luhan laughs at that, and watching him, Baekhyun can’t help but join in.
They sit on Baekhyun’s bed, their backs against the headboard and their legs laid out in front of them, a glass in each other their hands. The scotch tastes like a combination of wood and old liquor, and Baekhyun can tell that it’s good from the way it slides down his throat so smoothly yet settles in his stomach with a burn.
They don’t talk during their first glass. The silence lays between them, but now it’s light and cool and Beakhyun likes it. He watches sparks run down his forearm when their shoulders brush together and wonders if Luhan can see them too.
During their second, they look at each other and giggle silently, letting the light of the moon shine in through the windows and illuminate their features. Baekhyun doesn’t know what they’re laughing at- Luhan probably doesn’t know either- but their silent gasps and sighs takeover the silence and the sparks down their arms proliferate.
It’s on their third glass that the laughs die down and the quietude reins again. They haven’t spoken since Luhan offered him a glass, but if feels like they’ve talked about a million things. Luhan asks questions with his eyes. Baekhyun replies with sly smiles. That’s the only conversation they need.
Luhan’s voice doesn’t upset the silence, only adds to it, if that’s possible, Baekhyun thinks. His voice is tinged with melancholy and a dash of wander, another dash of trust.
“You weren’t joking around back then, were you?”
The question hits Baekhyun hard, because there is no need for him to explain what he’s talking about. They both know. And they’ve both known the answer before the question was asked.
“No. I wasn’t.”
Baekhyun’s heart trembles in the wake of Luhan’s reaction. The latter simply remains silent, eyes set on the moon, sometimes distracted by the stars. He wonders if Luhan will kick him out. If he’ll call the police. Maybe he’ll scream and cry and call Baekhyun a liar and a murderer.
Luhan doesn’t do any of that. He takes a sip of his scotch, sets the glass against his thigh then his head against Baekhyun’s shoulder. With his breath caught in his throat, Baekhyun glances down at the man leaning against him, catching himself too late to pull away from Luhan’s eyes.
“What happened really?” Luhan mutters, the side of his nose meeting Baekhyun’s.
There’s not need for him to explain.
“His name was Jongin,” Baekhyun says, pulling back just a hair. “I wanted out, he didn’t want me to go, and the hunt ensued.” The straight line of his frown crack,
“It’s okay now, though.” Luhan’s eyes are sincere, and his face flushed with alcohol. “You’re okay. I’m okay. We’re safe. We’re together.”
Baekhyun scoots closer, running his cheek over the swell of the other man’s.
Unspoken whispers move between their lips. Baekhyun could speak a novel, but he leans down to press his mouth to Luhan’s instead. The kiss is short and warm and peppered with the taste of scotch, and Baekhyun knows it will be the only kiss he ever needs to steal again.
“Where do we go from here?” Luhan whispers, Baekhyun’s mouth hovering above his, their eyes straining to connect.
“Do you love me enough to follow me wherever I go?”
(A confession was never needed for Baekhyun to know that Luhan loves him, and vice-versa.)
“I’d jump off the edge of the world with you.”
Luhan’s lips taste like freedom when Baekhyun goes to kiss him again.