(no subject)
title lip service
count 4803
“Right, so, is that it?”
“I guess it should be enough,” Minho says slowly, catching his eye.
Kibum nods and goes back to looking around. The second floor of the restaurant is, to their credit, even dinghier than the first. The table in the corner across from them keeps its chairs tucked close in a bid to prolong its existence and its only light comes from a lamp three feet away. The stairs up had been narrow and thoroughly musical, prompting Jonghyun to spend a good three minutes going up and down, trying to get some rhythm into their creaking.
The window behind Kibum is open and the nip of winter on his nape is refreshing. His friends’ eyes are bright in the dim light as they spar with the salt and pepper shakers. Jonghyun cheats and dumps a generous helping of pepper on Minho’s sleeve. Kibum doesn’t react when Minho flings his chair back and traps Jonghyun in a head lock. It wouldn’t be a night out without somebody getting bruised.
He scoots his chair closer to the window and twists in his chair, letting the wind skitter across his cheeks, feeling it pick his eyelashes apart. The wind is eager and his skin is cold where he touches it experimentally. Jonghyun’s grunts are loud in his right ear; the fight is still going strong. He’s watching a woman across the street, the dance of her eyebrows as she talks on the phone, when a hand taps his shoulder.
“Excuse me, could you ask your friends not to play around with the condiments?”
It’s a waiter. His hair is a clear caramel even in this light and messy, swinging like a curtain over his eyes when he jerks his head in the other two’s direction. The lamp overhead catches the kid’s snakebite piercings and for a second the newfound glint of them distracts Kibum.
“Excuse me,” the kid repeats, louder.
“I, yes, yeah, I’ll get them to stop,” Kibum says, leaning back in his chair. “Don’t worry about it though, we’ll pay the extra.”
The promise doesn’t help; the waiter, he could hardly be older than sixteen, bristles. “That’s not the point, you’re wasting them.”
“Oh.” Kibum fixes the other with a level gaze. “Well, I could pay in advance and then I’d be free to do what I want with them. Don’t you think?”
“Is there a problem?” The interjection is slick, casual to the point of calculation.
“Well, sir-”
“He didn’t like you two playing around with their stuff. Salt is for food, you know, and unless you’re planning to give Jonghyun a hickey I don’t see why he’s covered in it.”
Minho rolls his eyes and gives the waiter his complete attention. “You were saying?”
“Pretty much what he said.” The kid shrugs. “We’d appreciate it if you didn’t use our provisions to play around with your friend.”
“A fair point,” Jonghyun pipes up, dusting his lapels.
“And a fair waiter,” Minho says with a charming smile. “Just add it to our bill.”
Kibum can’t help his smirk.
“Sir, it’s not about the money,” the kid says testily. His lips thin over gritted teeth and Kibum’s gaze snags on his piercings again.
“What my colleague means is it’s the principal of the thing but we’re all prone to lapses in judgement. We’re not running a place where fun costs extra! I have your drinks.”
It’s the waiter who had taken their order. A tasteless plastic tray is sitting on one of his upturned palms, housing a Diet Coke and two bottles of beer. His free hand is digging into the other waiter’s arm. The smile on his face is terse but still warm and Kibum feels his impatience evaporating.
“Sounds good,” Jonghyun says cheerfully, almost idiotically if a glance was spared for the kid who is undoubtedly seething. The waiter with the floppy, honey blonde fringe job steers him away but not before he catches Kibum staring and the genuine hostility in his eyes throws Kibum off for a second.
“This place is a mess,” he snaps at Minho who shrugs and takes a long sip of his beer.
“The food is stellar from what I’ve heard and I don’t really care about the wallpaper, Kibum. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You are an absolute caveman.”
“No, that’s Jonghyun.”
Jonghyun’s yelp of outrage drowns Kibum’s laugh and he can feel the precise moment he’s been edged out altogether, another fight errupting. He doesn’t mind though, he doesn’t have the energy for it tonight. He knows if he really wanted he could have their undivided attention in seonds but he’s been strangely listless lately. It was a curious state for someone as talkative as him, a sort of emotional vaccuum. There simply was nothing to say. He turns towards the window again, crossing his legs and perching an elbow on the sill. A few seconds of idle concentration intimate him to the heated conversation at the top of the stairs. Their waiter is clutching their food and arguing with the younger waiter.
“Taemin-ah, come on. You know you’re not being fair to them.”
“Oh, please, hyung,” the kid hisses. “Who do they think they are?”
Kibum doesn’t bother tearing his eyes from the speeding traffic. It’s not like he knows either.
The food is, to put it mildly, incredible.
It is lightyears away from sagging seat cushions and lamp shades choked with dust.
“Maybe their kitchen is in a parallel dimension,” Jonghyun jokes.
Minho hasn’t said a word in fifteen minutes. He’s been eating, relentlessly, rolling mile after mile of flat rice noodles into his fork, making it comfortable, not a strand out of place before it disappears between his oil slicked lips. Minho eats like he flirts, with single minded concentration; he preys and Kibum lists watching Minho live his life as one of his favorite hobbies.
In another ten minutes, both dishes are empty, their white ceramic bottoms gleaming triumphantly. Even Kibum has indulged himself to a rare second helping and Jonghyun hasn’t dared to steal from Minho’s plate tonight. They smile at each other across the table, full and warm. They know they love food. Jonghyun knows Minho eats enough salt to kill three senior citizens and he taunts Kibum for eating like a bird but little as he eats, Kibum dotes on every bite. Maybe they revel in the feeling too long because the next thing Kibum knows is the waiter with the long hair throwing the bill down on their table and stalking off.
“I apologize for my colleague’s behaviour,” their waiter says to Minho on their way down. He’s hovering at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for them with his fingers in a twist. “He confused you with another table who had asked for their check.”
Kibum doesn’t bother pointing out they were the only customers on the second floor. He watches Minho resolutely assure their waiter nothing could keep him from coming back and hold out a generous tip freshly plucked from his wallet. Jonghyun is blocking his way as he cranes past Minho and animatedly praises the chef.
Kibum turns to look back up the steps; even hours later he isn’t sure why he did but the sight of the brown haired waiter - the piercing glint of the metal studs bracketing his lips, the hostility in his eyes - follows him around for the rest of the week.
“PMS, maybe?” Jonghyun speculates, squashing Kibum’s chin between stubby fingers. “You need to snap out of it, my friend, whatever it may be.”
“So it’s not ennui?”
“It could be gas.”
Kibum wrinkles his nose and shakes free. They’re sitting on his bed in the room he shares with Minho, their thighs brushing.
“I’m bored of this place.”
“You still have more than a year to go.”
“Don’t remind me,” he groans, eyes squeezing shut. “The classrooms smell like the same noxious mix of overpriced perfume every day and my sheets smell of factory flowers. They’re not soft, they’re itchy. I can’t think of one thing I learned here that I give a single fuck about and I need to get out of here or I’m going to disappear.”
He can feel Jonghyun still next to him before an arm slings itself around his shoulders and pulls him closer to his friend.
“What do you mean disappear, Kibummie?”
He doesn’t need to think, he knows exactly how he feels. “Like I’m going to have less and less to say, because I swear my thoughts are just spluttering dead, hacking and coughing into totally nothing and I just sit around, surrounded by people, and I go hours without a word in my head. There was a time I couldn’t stop talking and now I can’t start. It’s scary, it’s not me. I need me back.”
“Why didn’t you talk about this sooner? Kibum, if you’re feeling like you need to do something drastic-”
“I’m not suicidal, Jonghyun, don’t try to make it into some readymade formula,” he groans into Jonghyun’s left collarbone. “Please.”
“Sorry,” Jonghyun says and hugs him a bit fuller, curving an arm around his waist and letting him let go of his muscles. The tautness of his limbs melts into familarity. He’s been so angry lately.
“I wish our arts programme wasn’t full of pretentious morons,” he growls and he can feel Jonghyun’s little laugh ruffle his hair.
“Me too, Kibummie. Me too.”
He’s a little more there when they walk into the restaurant a second time. The reason is simple enough. He has his finals next week, on two days he has two, and the slightly melodramatic spacing out he’s been indugling in has turned out completely antithetical to his sanity. He would have brought his notes along but he doesn’t have any.
“Googling random questions that pop into your head is not going to make you pass,” Jonghyun says, guiding him up the stairs. Kibum doesn’t look up from his phone.
“Dude, I am seriously sorry I left my notes in my locker,” Minho says earnestly, poking his back. “I swear on every dish in this place they will be next to your pillow first thing tomorrow morning.”
Kibum mumbles something like, “They better be.” Jonghyun manuevers him gently into a chair as his eyes stayed fixed on the two ways of calculating the GDP. The website he has open is more jargon than accessibility, say like the printed out menu of a run down restaurant, but he couldn’t care less about his dinner tonight and he tells Minho as much.
He blocks out their voices and steels himself, rereading the thing from beginning to end and Jonghyun is three bites in when Kibum holds his phone out to him (he knows Minho is a lost cause).
“Quiz me.”
Jonghyun looks positively miserable as he sets his fork down but he accepts the device wordlessly. Still, he could never hope to match the level of misery Kibum feels setting in when the accuracy of his answers progressively dwindles.
“Fuck, I just read this, like less then ten minutes ago, I swear, I cannot fucking believe this is happening. Shit, shit, shi-”
“Kibum,” Minho says and stops short. Minho hasn’t spoken during a meal since the last time, seven months ago, when he looked up from his lunch long enough to turn down a girl asking if he would like to eat together in the courtyard. “You’re stressing yourself out and ruining your chances. You need to relax. Go downstairs, I saw a sign for a washroom. Wash your face, have dinner, I will stay up as long as you need and we will make you get this.”
“I- yes.”
He’s still tense. Walking to the stairs, his limbs feel dull like iron and his temples are throbbing but Minho seemed to have the right idea. He’s anxious to avoid being caught in a circle: if he freaks himself out he won’t be able to study, and not being able to study will only freak him out more. He takes a deep breath and focuses on the movement of his feet, left and right, as he begins making his way down.
There’s a rush of air but when they collide it feels pretty solid, solid like a person and it sounds like a person too when it goes tumbling down. Kibum’s head snaps up and he sees the kid with the piercings sprawled at the foot of the stairs.
“Oh, my God.” He races down to him. “Are you alright? You were running up so fast, I didn’t notice you at all.” He bends down, bracing himself on his knee and offering the other hand to help the waiter up.
“I’m so sorry, I hope you’re not hurt-”
The kid lets Kibum pull him to his feet before his wrist is flying out from between Kibum’s fingers. Their eyes meet and that same intensity, that hostility from all those weeks ago is intact and maybe that’s why, is all Kibum can think when the kid punches him. He staggers back an inch or two, his jaw throbbing lightly. He doesn’t hesistate, he throws himself on the kid, his fist catching the younger boy under his ear as they both go tumbling to the ground. The adrenaline clears his head and he’s almost relieved to be beating this kid up. He doesn’t care that the ten other customers are staring at him. He doesn’t care if his back is probably bruising from being thrown over, the sharp dig of this kid’s bones into his skin seems to be perfect. Suddenly, he has a lot to say.
“Are you fucking crazy, I was helping you,” is the first thing he screams. “I have finals coming up, alright, I haven’t studied all year and I’m really fucking stressed, I don’t need shit from you right now so-”
“What’s happen- Kibum!”
Minho is pulling him off the waiter in record time. Even as he’s struggling in Minho’s grasp, he can see the other waiter, their waiter, race out from the kitchen, the color gone from his face.
“Taemin!” he shouts and the kid, back on his feet, turns away mutinously. Their waiter strides over and grips Taemin by the forearm, giving his lithe body a good shake. “Apologize! Now.” Kibum goes limp in Minho’s arms, his mind catching up with his body and embarrassment quickening in his veins. The man’s eyes are endlessly dark once his customary smile is gone. Taemin seems unfazed; he’s an inch taller and he glowers down remorselessly.
“It’s fine,” Kibum manages. He needs to leave. He can feel so many people just staring and if he’s going to forget about tonight in this lifetime he needs them to stop. He doesn’t need to be known as a warmonger. He lowers his head and shuffles out quickly, grateful he isn’t in his uniform. The breeze ruffles his hair in welcome and he thinks none of this would have happened if they hadn’t shut their windows tonight. Childish again, he realizes and he can hear Jonghyun calling him but he keeps walking.
The next morning the delicate bruise on his jaw has bloomed purple. His favorite color.
It fades into his skin by the end of finals. He misses it, misses the surge of embarrassment, the burst of pure emotion it would hand him to slice through his now famed ennui. Sympathetic smiles became everyday fare. Kibum is off his rocker, he thinks, is what they think but won’t say. On the surface they’ll say, I hear Kibum is going through some problems, just proper enough to keep conversation civil and he may as well scream and leap off this metaphorical rocker and they’d still only just sigh and shake their heads while he dances around them. He spends his first night free sketching.
“You look like shit,” Minho informs him, stretching in his bed. It’s 10AM and Kibum’s pencil has the libido of a Spanish bull, it has a passion for paper and Kibum is a matchmaker not a home breaker.
“Haven’t slept,” he bites out. He’s sketching himself with his bruise. It’s in everything he’s made tonight, sometimes as the mark running down the waiter’s cheek, sometimes in the dark between the bottom of Minho’s coffee mug and the lacquer of his desk. It’s a moment of contact in which one object affects another.
Minho sits up, rubbing his fingers through his hair and feeling the sun on his skin. It’s quiet, it’s slow, the shadows the sunlight makes on him look like bruises, honestly. He stretches across to Kibum’s bed and picks up his potrait of the waiter.
“Pretty little thing, isn’t he?” Minho says, voice early morning hoarse.
He holds the tip of his tongue captive between his teeth, painstakingly inking his eyelashes on. Minho doesn’t look away. Kibum meets his eyes and shrugs.
Minho comes back from his shower with Jonghyun in tow, smelling like musk deers murdered in a rain forest. Kibum’s grandmother told him that a musk deer spends its entire life looking for the source of its own smell. A remarkably, resolutely idiotic creature, Kibum had decided, and it was a description that seemed to fit their trio well. In the end, they would always return to themselves. Maybe Minho will decide he loves gardening more than soccer but that is irrelevant. In the end Minho will play soccer. Jonghyun might resolve to stop chasing the sounds in his head and chase the grades in his future but even now his fingers are drumming down his trousers.
“He’s found a muse,” Minho stage whispers as they hover over Kibum’s bed. His drawings are laid out on Minho’s, sunbathing. He flips them off and turns on his side. He can hear them talking as he drifts off, fainter and fainter.
“He could apologize with a drawing, then we could eat there again,” Minho is saying wistfully.
“Yeah,” Jonghyun’s voice chimes. “He did say he would apologize once finals got out of the way. I mean, he punched a minor so it’s a no brainer really.”
Oh, Kibum thinks and then he’s asleep.
“You’re back,” the kid blurts out, then looks furious with himself. His hair is sitting on top of his head in a bun and slithering out in every direction. The restaurant’s ground floor is murky in the afternoon, its two lone windows barely catching the sun.
“Yeah. It’s Taemin, right? Can we talk, outside maybe,” Kibum says, gesturing and Taemin nods. The other waiter is nowhere to be seen but another, one Kibum doesn’t recognize, is serving a group of girls.
“Hyung, I’ll be right back,” Taemin calls to him over his shoulder before following Kibum out. When Kibum turns to face him he sees two things: Taemin’s skin is like paper and his piercings have little crystals in them today. He wants to touch them, he realizes. He really, really wants to touch them.
“I wanted to apologize for hitting you,” he says instead, sinking into a bow. “It was childish and I had no right to take everything out on you.” When he rights himself, Taemin is looking dazed.
“It’s fine, I-I mean, I started it,” the younger boy corrects without hesitation, folding at the waist and returning his bow.
“Maybe but I should have shown more discretion,” Kibum insists, eyes twinkling as he bows again, lower.
“You said you were stressed, you could have got me fired but you didn’t. Thank you." Taemin steps forward hesitantly, dropping his gaze to the pavement and the effect is impeccable.
The wind is in his hair, lifting and spinning strands in a breezy waltz. It shines like someone cared for and Kibum stretches his hand forward and lets it catch in his fingers. Taemin stiffens but doesn’t move away. Jonghyun would call this abuse. Kibum drops his hand.
“Can I ask you something?”
Taemin nods. His eyes flash like he's preparing himself and Kibum is feeling things he’s never felt before. Power, for one. Consequence. Genuine curiosity.
“Why do you hate me so much?”
Taemin relaxes, pushes his shoulders down, forcing Kibum to tilt his head back. There is eye contact and then, “It’s nothing personal, really. I hate the whole lot of you.”
Kibum's laugh falls from his lips with an honest ease he's missed so much. “We finally have something in common.”
“You hate yourself?”
“Maybe.”
“So did you like it when I hit you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing, I was just wondering if you were like some kind of masochist,” Taemin says, lips curving wickedly. “After all, you came back here.”
Kibum laughs again. “You’re implying your restaurant is a place of torture. Maybe I should tell your boss that.”
“Don’t bother, I can tell you how it’s going to go right now. My boss is going to listen to you,” Taemin says past his smirk, “very, very attentively. And once you’re done specifying how you deserve to be treated he’s going to watch you leave and not do a thing about it. You know why?”
Taemin’s tone is acidic but Kibum wrestles any expression off his face and asks, “Why?”
Taemin grins. “Because he hates the lot of you too.”
“When I asked why he said its because his boss hates us too,” Kibum concludes, scanning the dull white ceiling before turning to face Minho. “We talked a little more, I apologized again and made sure we understood each other. Or sort of did at least and then he got called back in.”
Minho is sitting on his bed, his back against the wall and a PSP in his hands. He nods at these dotingly precise intervals to show Kibum that even if he isn’t listening, he wants to look like he does for Kibum’s sake.
“Minho,” Kibum says a few minutes later. “Are they right? Are we something to hate?”
“Don’t you hate it when you see a perfectly happy family, a little kid walking with his mom holding one hand and his dad holding another?” Minho gives him a small smile and Kibum buries his face in his pillow. “We always resent the people who have what we want.”
“So Taemin wants to go to a posh school for rich brats and eat fish eggs for tea?”
“It’s not that simple,” Minho grunts, teeth gritted and eyes crossed. Kibum waits for him to finish prioritizing his virtual enemies before Minho slams down his PSP and literally leaps across to Kibum’s bed, landing on him like a deadweight.
Kibum shrieks and slaps every part of Minho he can reach until Minho rolls off him, landing next to him with his impossible eyes (they’re too big to be real) and says, “I know what you really want to know.”
“And what is that?” Kibum huffs.
“If Taemin really hates you. He doesn’t,” Minho pronounces. He’s barely a dozen inches away from Kibum and leering. Mischief is a good word on Minho. “He wants to but he clearly can’t and that’s why he hates you. And you hate yourself because enough of you knows that some things you’ve ended up as deserve to be hated. But the real question is, does this mean you hate me too?”
Minho is the pin-up boy of their advanched psychology programme; the nerds idolize him for his uncanny ability to know they secretly idolize him. To him, knowing minds is an athlete’s most valuable weapon. To Kibum, it is a pain in the ass.
“No, you’re my rock in an ocean of sanity, you’re my Sisyphus, you’re my coffee spoon in a world of meaningless parlor chatter,” he begins, his voice deteriorating into a sham, bubbling with laughter as Minho’s hands curl playfully around his throat.
“You would go normal without me, you would,” Minho says, tapping his forehead against Kibum’s. “That’s why the three of us stick together.”
“And what about Taemin? Do you like him?”
“I like him. You like him.” Minho wasn’t subtle, he stretched the vowel like bubble gum until the word was hanging between them, awkward and kind of gross. An accusation, an insinuation, a whiff of betrayal.
“Everybody likes him and everybody hates us,” Kibum says finally, giving Minho a bemused smile. “Poor little rich boys.”
Minho climbs off him with a laugh.
“This better be the last one or I quit,” Jonghyun growls, his features furrowing into his face as he lifts Kibum’s trunk off the pavement and heaves it into the boot.
“It is,” Kibum says, patting his shoulder on his way around to the passenger seat. He buckles himself in and pulls out his nail file. Lately his nails have been chewed more uneven than a crag mountain and he is determined to fix it. Jonghyun climbs in a few minutes later, twisting the key so the engine splutters to life. He shouldn’t be driving but by unspoken agreement he is. He looks old enough anyway.
They’re somewhere some minutes later when Jonghyun pipes up.
“Think of a song for your waiter. Something nice, we’ll finish it when we get home.”
Kibum always goes to Jonghyun’s for the holidays. People take them for brothers but since he’s been twelve Jonghyun has been his savior; when he has nothing to return to he knows Jonghyun will be sitting in the middle of all that nothing, just waiting. And he’s always happy to leave the nothing together but lately, he’s been feeling all sorts of things for the first time. It will be eighty one days before he sees Taemin again. Taemin, who may or may not wonder when he doesn’t see Kibum for three, four, seven, eleven unrelenting weeks. There’s a good chance he won’t. They have after all, no matter what it might feel like, only talked once.
“Something nice,” Jonghyun says again, “like, he was a boy with a diamond in his lips.”
“Technically,” Kibum corrects, voice shaking with disuse, “the diamonds are on either side of his bottom lip. And I’m pretty sure they’re not diamonds to begin with.” It’s early in the morning and the tarmac is gleaming. Jonghyun makes them race down it with a big smile.
“Kibum-ah, technically is no fun.”
The rice fields are swimming in water, water that catches the sun and looks like liquid gold when Kibum whizzes past it. It winks at him from the side of the road and shines until he has to look away. It reminds him.
He tries, “He was a boy with diamonds in his smile?”
"That's perfect!"
"Pull over, I think I'm going to throw up."
Kibum remembers coming out. He had always thought he would remember it as Coming Out but no, it was just coming out. Jonghyun had fielded off the dramatics with a sassy, “Tell me something I don’t know.” Kibum had laughed for a full ten minutes before letting out a warbled sob and tackling him.
He had been fifteen when his roommate graduated and Minho had walked in early one winter morning, damp hair curling around his ears and his tall frame blocking the doorway. Kibum liked to think he was more confident now. He told Minho four hours later. Minho, who blinked slow and brown eyed and had a voice that shook Kibum to the bones when he said Kibum’s choices had nothing to do with him and it should stay that way. Kibum spent seven months pretending that hadn’t hurt and one day it just didn’t.
A few days later they became friends. A week after that Kibum introduced Jonghyun to Minho and watched them beat each other up for no reason other than that they could. Minho was a sports star, Jonghyun loved sing and Kibum liked to draw. This was them when life was simple.
As was tradition, they got hammered their first night back, perched on Jonghyun’s sloping roof, beaming their slurred thoughts into outer space.
“When we get back,” Kibum says, a little too loud, “I’m going to ask him out.”
“And fuck him!”
“And fuck him,” Kibum agrees before he realizes something and feels very sad. “And graduate.”
“Top of your class for fucking a catch like that!”
He lands a hard slap on Jonghyun’s shoulder. “I’m serious, I’ll miss you.”
Jonghyun looks at him like he’s crazy. “But I’m not going anywhere.”
It’s 4AM and he’s still tipsy and he decides he needs to do this Moving On thing properly.
From: Kibum
To: Minho
4:07AM
you were my first love :s
From: Minho
To: Kibum
7:21AM
i'm sorry
He crawls into Jonghyun’s bed at noon and whispers Minho’s answer.
“What do you think?” Jonghyun mumbles, thumbing the sleep from his eyes.
“Such a gentlemen,” Kibum says after some thought.
“Such a gentlemen,” Jonghyun agrees, throwing a leg over Kibum's stomach and giggling when it lurches. "You sneezed! Somebody’s thinking about you!”
a/n: the point was to have a change maybe, to write about how much fun it is to fall for someone rather than writing about two people getting together or being together. there's enough of the latter and not enough of all the fun and tingles of having a crush.
and to end, if you have the time, please leave feedback for this journal here. it would be appreciated a lot and taken with due consideration.
count 4803
“Right, so, is that it?”
“I guess it should be enough,” Minho says slowly, catching his eye.
Kibum nods and goes back to looking around. The second floor of the restaurant is, to their credit, even dinghier than the first. The table in the corner across from them keeps its chairs tucked close in a bid to prolong its existence and its only light comes from a lamp three feet away. The stairs up had been narrow and thoroughly musical, prompting Jonghyun to spend a good three minutes going up and down, trying to get some rhythm into their creaking.
The window behind Kibum is open and the nip of winter on his nape is refreshing. His friends’ eyes are bright in the dim light as they spar with the salt and pepper shakers. Jonghyun cheats and dumps a generous helping of pepper on Minho’s sleeve. Kibum doesn’t react when Minho flings his chair back and traps Jonghyun in a head lock. It wouldn’t be a night out without somebody getting bruised.
He scoots his chair closer to the window and twists in his chair, letting the wind skitter across his cheeks, feeling it pick his eyelashes apart. The wind is eager and his skin is cold where he touches it experimentally. Jonghyun’s grunts are loud in his right ear; the fight is still going strong. He’s watching a woman across the street, the dance of her eyebrows as she talks on the phone, when a hand taps his shoulder.
“Excuse me, could you ask your friends not to play around with the condiments?”
It’s a waiter. His hair is a clear caramel even in this light and messy, swinging like a curtain over his eyes when he jerks his head in the other two’s direction. The lamp overhead catches the kid’s snakebite piercings and for a second the newfound glint of them distracts Kibum.
“Excuse me,” the kid repeats, louder.
“I, yes, yeah, I’ll get them to stop,” Kibum says, leaning back in his chair. “Don’t worry about it though, we’ll pay the extra.”
The promise doesn’t help; the waiter, he could hardly be older than sixteen, bristles. “That’s not the point, you’re wasting them.”
“Oh.” Kibum fixes the other with a level gaze. “Well, I could pay in advance and then I’d be free to do what I want with them. Don’t you think?”
“Is there a problem?” The interjection is slick, casual to the point of calculation.
“Well, sir-”
“He didn’t like you two playing around with their stuff. Salt is for food, you know, and unless you’re planning to give Jonghyun a hickey I don’t see why he’s covered in it.”
Minho rolls his eyes and gives the waiter his complete attention. “You were saying?”
“Pretty much what he said.” The kid shrugs. “We’d appreciate it if you didn’t use our provisions to play around with your friend.”
“A fair point,” Jonghyun pipes up, dusting his lapels.
“And a fair waiter,” Minho says with a charming smile. “Just add it to our bill.”
Kibum can’t help his smirk.
“Sir, it’s not about the money,” the kid says testily. His lips thin over gritted teeth and Kibum’s gaze snags on his piercings again.
“What my colleague means is it’s the principal of the thing but we’re all prone to lapses in judgement. We’re not running a place where fun costs extra! I have your drinks.”
It’s the waiter who had taken their order. A tasteless plastic tray is sitting on one of his upturned palms, housing a Diet Coke and two bottles of beer. His free hand is digging into the other waiter’s arm. The smile on his face is terse but still warm and Kibum feels his impatience evaporating.
“Sounds good,” Jonghyun says cheerfully, almost idiotically if a glance was spared for the kid who is undoubtedly seething. The waiter with the floppy, honey blonde fringe job steers him away but not before he catches Kibum staring and the genuine hostility in his eyes throws Kibum off for a second.
“This place is a mess,” he snaps at Minho who shrugs and takes a long sip of his beer.
“The food is stellar from what I’ve heard and I don’t really care about the wallpaper, Kibum. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You are an absolute caveman.”
“No, that’s Jonghyun.”
Jonghyun’s yelp of outrage drowns Kibum’s laugh and he can feel the precise moment he’s been edged out altogether, another fight errupting. He doesn’t mind though, he doesn’t have the energy for it tonight. He knows if he really wanted he could have their undivided attention in seonds but he’s been strangely listless lately. It was a curious state for someone as talkative as him, a sort of emotional vaccuum. There simply was nothing to say. He turns towards the window again, crossing his legs and perching an elbow on the sill. A few seconds of idle concentration intimate him to the heated conversation at the top of the stairs. Their waiter is clutching their food and arguing with the younger waiter.
“Taemin-ah, come on. You know you’re not being fair to them.”
“Oh, please, hyung,” the kid hisses. “Who do they think they are?”
Kibum doesn’t bother tearing his eyes from the speeding traffic. It’s not like he knows either.
The food is, to put it mildly, incredible.
It is lightyears away from sagging seat cushions and lamp shades choked with dust.
“Maybe their kitchen is in a parallel dimension,” Jonghyun jokes.
Minho hasn’t said a word in fifteen minutes. He’s been eating, relentlessly, rolling mile after mile of flat rice noodles into his fork, making it comfortable, not a strand out of place before it disappears between his oil slicked lips. Minho eats like he flirts, with single minded concentration; he preys and Kibum lists watching Minho live his life as one of his favorite hobbies.
In another ten minutes, both dishes are empty, their white ceramic bottoms gleaming triumphantly. Even Kibum has indulged himself to a rare second helping and Jonghyun hasn’t dared to steal from Minho’s plate tonight. They smile at each other across the table, full and warm. They know they love food. Jonghyun knows Minho eats enough salt to kill three senior citizens and he taunts Kibum for eating like a bird but little as he eats, Kibum dotes on every bite. Maybe they revel in the feeling too long because the next thing Kibum knows is the waiter with the long hair throwing the bill down on their table and stalking off.
“I apologize for my colleague’s behaviour,” their waiter says to Minho on their way down. He’s hovering at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for them with his fingers in a twist. “He confused you with another table who had asked for their check.”
Kibum doesn’t bother pointing out they were the only customers on the second floor. He watches Minho resolutely assure their waiter nothing could keep him from coming back and hold out a generous tip freshly plucked from his wallet. Jonghyun is blocking his way as he cranes past Minho and animatedly praises the chef.
Kibum turns to look back up the steps; even hours later he isn’t sure why he did but the sight of the brown haired waiter - the piercing glint of the metal studs bracketing his lips, the hostility in his eyes - follows him around for the rest of the week.
“PMS, maybe?” Jonghyun speculates, squashing Kibum’s chin between stubby fingers. “You need to snap out of it, my friend, whatever it may be.”
“So it’s not ennui?”
“It could be gas.”
Kibum wrinkles his nose and shakes free. They’re sitting on his bed in the room he shares with Minho, their thighs brushing.
“I’m bored of this place.”
“You still have more than a year to go.”
“Don’t remind me,” he groans, eyes squeezing shut. “The classrooms smell like the same noxious mix of overpriced perfume every day and my sheets smell of factory flowers. They’re not soft, they’re itchy. I can’t think of one thing I learned here that I give a single fuck about and I need to get out of here or I’m going to disappear.”
He can feel Jonghyun still next to him before an arm slings itself around his shoulders and pulls him closer to his friend.
“What do you mean disappear, Kibummie?”
He doesn’t need to think, he knows exactly how he feels. “Like I’m going to have less and less to say, because I swear my thoughts are just spluttering dead, hacking and coughing into totally nothing and I just sit around, surrounded by people, and I go hours without a word in my head. There was a time I couldn’t stop talking and now I can’t start. It’s scary, it’s not me. I need me back.”
“Why didn’t you talk about this sooner? Kibum, if you’re feeling like you need to do something drastic-”
“I’m not suicidal, Jonghyun, don’t try to make it into some readymade formula,” he groans into Jonghyun’s left collarbone. “Please.”
“Sorry,” Jonghyun says and hugs him a bit fuller, curving an arm around his waist and letting him let go of his muscles. The tautness of his limbs melts into familarity. He’s been so angry lately.
“I wish our arts programme wasn’t full of pretentious morons,” he growls and he can feel Jonghyun’s little laugh ruffle his hair.
“Me too, Kibummie. Me too.”
He’s a little more there when they walk into the restaurant a second time. The reason is simple enough. He has his finals next week, on two days he has two, and the slightly melodramatic spacing out he’s been indugling in has turned out completely antithetical to his sanity. He would have brought his notes along but he doesn’t have any.
“Googling random questions that pop into your head is not going to make you pass,” Jonghyun says, guiding him up the stairs. Kibum doesn’t look up from his phone.
“Dude, I am seriously sorry I left my notes in my locker,” Minho says earnestly, poking his back. “I swear on every dish in this place they will be next to your pillow first thing tomorrow morning.”
Kibum mumbles something like, “They better be.” Jonghyun manuevers him gently into a chair as his eyes stayed fixed on the two ways of calculating the GDP. The website he has open is more jargon than accessibility, say like the printed out menu of a run down restaurant, but he couldn’t care less about his dinner tonight and he tells Minho as much.
He blocks out their voices and steels himself, rereading the thing from beginning to end and Jonghyun is three bites in when Kibum holds his phone out to him (he knows Minho is a lost cause).
“Quiz me.”
Jonghyun looks positively miserable as he sets his fork down but he accepts the device wordlessly. Still, he could never hope to match the level of misery Kibum feels setting in when the accuracy of his answers progressively dwindles.
“Fuck, I just read this, like less then ten minutes ago, I swear, I cannot fucking believe this is happening. Shit, shit, shi-”
“Kibum,” Minho says and stops short. Minho hasn’t spoken during a meal since the last time, seven months ago, when he looked up from his lunch long enough to turn down a girl asking if he would like to eat together in the courtyard. “You’re stressing yourself out and ruining your chances. You need to relax. Go downstairs, I saw a sign for a washroom. Wash your face, have dinner, I will stay up as long as you need and we will make you get this.”
“I- yes.”
He’s still tense. Walking to the stairs, his limbs feel dull like iron and his temples are throbbing but Minho seemed to have the right idea. He’s anxious to avoid being caught in a circle: if he freaks himself out he won’t be able to study, and not being able to study will only freak him out more. He takes a deep breath and focuses on the movement of his feet, left and right, as he begins making his way down.
There’s a rush of air but when they collide it feels pretty solid, solid like a person and it sounds like a person too when it goes tumbling down. Kibum’s head snaps up and he sees the kid with the piercings sprawled at the foot of the stairs.
“Oh, my God.” He races down to him. “Are you alright? You were running up so fast, I didn’t notice you at all.” He bends down, bracing himself on his knee and offering the other hand to help the waiter up.
“I’m so sorry, I hope you’re not hurt-”
The kid lets Kibum pull him to his feet before his wrist is flying out from between Kibum’s fingers. Their eyes meet and that same intensity, that hostility from all those weeks ago is intact and maybe that’s why, is all Kibum can think when the kid punches him. He staggers back an inch or two, his jaw throbbing lightly. He doesn’t hesistate, he throws himself on the kid, his fist catching the younger boy under his ear as they both go tumbling to the ground. The adrenaline clears his head and he’s almost relieved to be beating this kid up. He doesn’t care that the ten other customers are staring at him. He doesn’t care if his back is probably bruising from being thrown over, the sharp dig of this kid’s bones into his skin seems to be perfect. Suddenly, he has a lot to say.
“Are you fucking crazy, I was helping you,” is the first thing he screams. “I have finals coming up, alright, I haven’t studied all year and I’m really fucking stressed, I don’t need shit from you right now so-”
“What’s happen- Kibum!”
Minho is pulling him off the waiter in record time. Even as he’s struggling in Minho’s grasp, he can see the other waiter, their waiter, race out from the kitchen, the color gone from his face.
“Taemin!” he shouts and the kid, back on his feet, turns away mutinously. Their waiter strides over and grips Taemin by the forearm, giving his lithe body a good shake. “Apologize! Now.” Kibum goes limp in Minho’s arms, his mind catching up with his body and embarrassment quickening in his veins. The man’s eyes are endlessly dark once his customary smile is gone. Taemin seems unfazed; he’s an inch taller and he glowers down remorselessly.
“It’s fine,” Kibum manages. He needs to leave. He can feel so many people just staring and if he’s going to forget about tonight in this lifetime he needs them to stop. He doesn’t need to be known as a warmonger. He lowers his head and shuffles out quickly, grateful he isn’t in his uniform. The breeze ruffles his hair in welcome and he thinks none of this would have happened if they hadn’t shut their windows tonight. Childish again, he realizes and he can hear Jonghyun calling him but he keeps walking.
The next morning the delicate bruise on his jaw has bloomed purple. His favorite color.
It fades into his skin by the end of finals. He misses it, misses the surge of embarrassment, the burst of pure emotion it would hand him to slice through his now famed ennui. Sympathetic smiles became everyday fare. Kibum is off his rocker, he thinks, is what they think but won’t say. On the surface they’ll say, I hear Kibum is going through some problems, just proper enough to keep conversation civil and he may as well scream and leap off this metaphorical rocker and they’d still only just sigh and shake their heads while he dances around them. He spends his first night free sketching.
“You look like shit,” Minho informs him, stretching in his bed. It’s 10AM and Kibum’s pencil has the libido of a Spanish bull, it has a passion for paper and Kibum is a matchmaker not a home breaker.
“Haven’t slept,” he bites out. He’s sketching himself with his bruise. It’s in everything he’s made tonight, sometimes as the mark running down the waiter’s cheek, sometimes in the dark between the bottom of Minho’s coffee mug and the lacquer of his desk. It’s a moment of contact in which one object affects another.
Minho sits up, rubbing his fingers through his hair and feeling the sun on his skin. It’s quiet, it’s slow, the shadows the sunlight makes on him look like bruises, honestly. He stretches across to Kibum’s bed and picks up his potrait of the waiter.
“Pretty little thing, isn’t he?” Minho says, voice early morning hoarse.
He holds the tip of his tongue captive between his teeth, painstakingly inking his eyelashes on. Minho doesn’t look away. Kibum meets his eyes and shrugs.
Minho comes back from his shower with Jonghyun in tow, smelling like musk deers murdered in a rain forest. Kibum’s grandmother told him that a musk deer spends its entire life looking for the source of its own smell. A remarkably, resolutely idiotic creature, Kibum had decided, and it was a description that seemed to fit their trio well. In the end, they would always return to themselves. Maybe Minho will decide he loves gardening more than soccer but that is irrelevant. In the end Minho will play soccer. Jonghyun might resolve to stop chasing the sounds in his head and chase the grades in his future but even now his fingers are drumming down his trousers.
“He’s found a muse,” Minho stage whispers as they hover over Kibum’s bed. His drawings are laid out on Minho’s, sunbathing. He flips them off and turns on his side. He can hear them talking as he drifts off, fainter and fainter.
“He could apologize with a drawing, then we could eat there again,” Minho is saying wistfully.
“Yeah,” Jonghyun’s voice chimes. “He did say he would apologize once finals got out of the way. I mean, he punched a minor so it’s a no brainer really.”
Oh, Kibum thinks and then he’s asleep.
“You’re back,” the kid blurts out, then looks furious with himself. His hair is sitting on top of his head in a bun and slithering out in every direction. The restaurant’s ground floor is murky in the afternoon, its two lone windows barely catching the sun.
“Yeah. It’s Taemin, right? Can we talk, outside maybe,” Kibum says, gesturing and Taemin nods. The other waiter is nowhere to be seen but another, one Kibum doesn’t recognize, is serving a group of girls.
“Hyung, I’ll be right back,” Taemin calls to him over his shoulder before following Kibum out. When Kibum turns to face him he sees two things: Taemin’s skin is like paper and his piercings have little crystals in them today. He wants to touch them, he realizes. He really, really wants to touch them.
“I wanted to apologize for hitting you,” he says instead, sinking into a bow. “It was childish and I had no right to take everything out on you.” When he rights himself, Taemin is looking dazed.
“It’s fine, I-I mean, I started it,” the younger boy corrects without hesitation, folding at the waist and returning his bow.
“Maybe but I should have shown more discretion,” Kibum insists, eyes twinkling as he bows again, lower.
“You said you were stressed, you could have got me fired but you didn’t. Thank you." Taemin steps forward hesitantly, dropping his gaze to the pavement and the effect is impeccable.
The wind is in his hair, lifting and spinning strands in a breezy waltz. It shines like someone cared for and Kibum stretches his hand forward and lets it catch in his fingers. Taemin stiffens but doesn’t move away. Jonghyun would call this abuse. Kibum drops his hand.
“Can I ask you something?”
Taemin nods. His eyes flash like he's preparing himself and Kibum is feeling things he’s never felt before. Power, for one. Consequence. Genuine curiosity.
“Why do you hate me so much?”
Taemin relaxes, pushes his shoulders down, forcing Kibum to tilt his head back. There is eye contact and then, “It’s nothing personal, really. I hate the whole lot of you.”
Kibum's laugh falls from his lips with an honest ease he's missed so much. “We finally have something in common.”
“You hate yourself?”
“Maybe.”
“So did you like it when I hit you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing, I was just wondering if you were like some kind of masochist,” Taemin says, lips curving wickedly. “After all, you came back here.”
Kibum laughs again. “You’re implying your restaurant is a place of torture. Maybe I should tell your boss that.”
“Don’t bother, I can tell you how it’s going to go right now. My boss is going to listen to you,” Taemin says past his smirk, “very, very attentively. And once you’re done specifying how you deserve to be treated he’s going to watch you leave and not do a thing about it. You know why?”
Taemin’s tone is acidic but Kibum wrestles any expression off his face and asks, “Why?”
Taemin grins. “Because he hates the lot of you too.”
“When I asked why he said its because his boss hates us too,” Kibum concludes, scanning the dull white ceiling before turning to face Minho. “We talked a little more, I apologized again and made sure we understood each other. Or sort of did at least and then he got called back in.”
Minho is sitting on his bed, his back against the wall and a PSP in his hands. He nods at these dotingly precise intervals to show Kibum that even if he isn’t listening, he wants to look like he does for Kibum’s sake.
“Minho,” Kibum says a few minutes later. “Are they right? Are we something to hate?”
“Don’t you hate it when you see a perfectly happy family, a little kid walking with his mom holding one hand and his dad holding another?” Minho gives him a small smile and Kibum buries his face in his pillow. “We always resent the people who have what we want.”
“So Taemin wants to go to a posh school for rich brats and eat fish eggs for tea?”
“It’s not that simple,” Minho grunts, teeth gritted and eyes crossed. Kibum waits for him to finish prioritizing his virtual enemies before Minho slams down his PSP and literally leaps across to Kibum’s bed, landing on him like a deadweight.
Kibum shrieks and slaps every part of Minho he can reach until Minho rolls off him, landing next to him with his impossible eyes (they’re too big to be real) and says, “I know what you really want to know.”
“And what is that?” Kibum huffs.
“If Taemin really hates you. He doesn’t,” Minho pronounces. He’s barely a dozen inches away from Kibum and leering. Mischief is a good word on Minho. “He wants to but he clearly can’t and that’s why he hates you. And you hate yourself because enough of you knows that some things you’ve ended up as deserve to be hated. But the real question is, does this mean you hate me too?”
Minho is the pin-up boy of their advanched psychology programme; the nerds idolize him for his uncanny ability to know they secretly idolize him. To him, knowing minds is an athlete’s most valuable weapon. To Kibum, it is a pain in the ass.
“No, you’re my rock in an ocean of sanity, you’re my Sisyphus, you’re my coffee spoon in a world of meaningless parlor chatter,” he begins, his voice deteriorating into a sham, bubbling with laughter as Minho’s hands curl playfully around his throat.
“You would go normal without me, you would,” Minho says, tapping his forehead against Kibum’s. “That’s why the three of us stick together.”
“And what about Taemin? Do you like him?”
“I like him. You like him.” Minho wasn’t subtle, he stretched the vowel like bubble gum until the word was hanging between them, awkward and kind of gross. An accusation, an insinuation, a whiff of betrayal.
“Everybody likes him and everybody hates us,” Kibum says finally, giving Minho a bemused smile. “Poor little rich boys.”
Minho climbs off him with a laugh.
“This better be the last one or I quit,” Jonghyun growls, his features furrowing into his face as he lifts Kibum’s trunk off the pavement and heaves it into the boot.
“It is,” Kibum says, patting his shoulder on his way around to the passenger seat. He buckles himself in and pulls out his nail file. Lately his nails have been chewed more uneven than a crag mountain and he is determined to fix it. Jonghyun climbs in a few minutes later, twisting the key so the engine splutters to life. He shouldn’t be driving but by unspoken agreement he is. He looks old enough anyway.
They’re somewhere some minutes later when Jonghyun pipes up.
“Think of a song for your waiter. Something nice, we’ll finish it when we get home.”
Kibum always goes to Jonghyun’s for the holidays. People take them for brothers but since he’s been twelve Jonghyun has been his savior; when he has nothing to return to he knows Jonghyun will be sitting in the middle of all that nothing, just waiting. And he’s always happy to leave the nothing together but lately, he’s been feeling all sorts of things for the first time. It will be eighty one days before he sees Taemin again. Taemin, who may or may not wonder when he doesn’t see Kibum for three, four, seven, eleven unrelenting weeks. There’s a good chance he won’t. They have after all, no matter what it might feel like, only talked once.
“Something nice,” Jonghyun says again, “like, he was a boy with a diamond in his lips.”
“Technically,” Kibum corrects, voice shaking with disuse, “the diamonds are on either side of his bottom lip. And I’m pretty sure they’re not diamonds to begin with.” It’s early in the morning and the tarmac is gleaming. Jonghyun makes them race down it with a big smile.
“Kibum-ah, technically is no fun.”
The rice fields are swimming in water, water that catches the sun and looks like liquid gold when Kibum whizzes past it. It winks at him from the side of the road and shines until he has to look away. It reminds him.
He tries, “He was a boy with diamonds in his smile?”
"That's perfect!"
"Pull over, I think I'm going to throw up."
Kibum remembers coming out. He had always thought he would remember it as Coming Out but no, it was just coming out. Jonghyun had fielded off the dramatics with a sassy, “Tell me something I don’t know.” Kibum had laughed for a full ten minutes before letting out a warbled sob and tackling him.
He had been fifteen when his roommate graduated and Minho had walked in early one winter morning, damp hair curling around his ears and his tall frame blocking the doorway. Kibum liked to think he was more confident now. He told Minho four hours later. Minho, who blinked slow and brown eyed and had a voice that shook Kibum to the bones when he said Kibum’s choices had nothing to do with him and it should stay that way. Kibum spent seven months pretending that hadn’t hurt and one day it just didn’t.
A few days later they became friends. A week after that Kibum introduced Jonghyun to Minho and watched them beat each other up for no reason other than that they could. Minho was a sports star, Jonghyun loved sing and Kibum liked to draw. This was them when life was simple.
As was tradition, they got hammered their first night back, perched on Jonghyun’s sloping roof, beaming their slurred thoughts into outer space.
“When we get back,” Kibum says, a little too loud, “I’m going to ask him out.”
“And fuck him!”
“And fuck him,” Kibum agrees before he realizes something and feels very sad. “And graduate.”
“Top of your class for fucking a catch like that!”
He lands a hard slap on Jonghyun’s shoulder. “I’m serious, I’ll miss you.”
Jonghyun looks at him like he’s crazy. “But I’m not going anywhere.”
It’s 4AM and he’s still tipsy and he decides he needs to do this Moving On thing properly.
From: Kibum
To: Minho
4:07AM
you were my first love :s
From: Minho
To: Kibum
7:21AM
i'm sorry
He crawls into Jonghyun’s bed at noon and whispers Minho’s answer.
“What do you think?” Jonghyun mumbles, thumbing the sleep from his eyes.
“Such a gentlemen,” Kibum says after some thought.
“Such a gentlemen,” Jonghyun agrees, throwing a leg over Kibum's stomach and giggling when it lurches. "You sneezed! Somebody’s thinking about you!”
a/n: the point was to have a change maybe, to write about how much fun it is to fall for someone rather than writing about two people getting together or being together. there's enough of the latter and not enough of all the fun and tingles of having a crush.
and to end, if you have the time, please leave feedback for this journal here. it would be appreciated a lot and taken with due consideration.