#27: Devil In The Dust: Part One
From: pocketdeer
Title: Devil In The Dust
Rating: PG-15
Word Count: 10,600
Summary: Luhan bursts into Sehun's life with the spontaneity of a whirlwind, sweeping him off his feet and leaving him unable to regain balance.
One day you'll leave this world behind,
So live a life you will remember.
- Avicii, The Nights
Sehun’s leaving work as the sun begins to slip west, his phone in one hand and briefcase in the other. He wonders whether he should visit a nearby restaurant for takeout or make do with instant noodles at his own apartment. Just as he’s reaching for his car keys, someone comes flying by on a motorcycle.
“Run!” he’s yelling.
Sehun’s beyond confused until he hears something like bullets being fired in the near distance, and he looks back to see two swerving cars with people pointing guns out the windows. He’s mere seconds away from being either run over or shot when the boy on the motorcycle makes an one-eighty back, hauling Sehun on behind him.
“Didn’t I tell you to run?” the boy yells again.
Sehun doesn’t have time to think. The motorcycle weaves between vehicles, tilting at dangerous angles, and he clings on for dear life, too scared to make a sound. Sehun hasn’t been this far from the city in years; the buildings are getting shorter, the roads rougher, and the streets emptier. He’s absolutely terrified, and he’s pretty sure the two cars are still on their heels.
“When I count to three, we jump!”
“What?”
“I said - “
“I heard what you said!”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Why are we jumping?”
“I don’t think the brakes work!”
“Oh my God - “
“One - “
“No!”
“Two - “
“Please - “
“Three!”
“I - “
“Jump!”
Against his own better judgement, Sehun jumps. Fortunately, he lands on the grassy side of the road; without the wind whipping past his ears and the engine of the motorcycle rumbling underneath him, the world is suddenly quiet.
“You okay?”
Sehun groans when he sits up, aching in several places, and realizes with a drop in his stomach that he’d let go of his phone somewhere along the way.
“Does anything hurt?” the boy’s leaning over him now, and Sehun’s temporarily distracted by how handsome he is. “Get up, I know a route back into the city.”
“I’m bruised, at least,” Sehun says, stumbling to his feet and brushing himself off. “Plus my suit is dirty, and I lost my cell phone.”
“You’re not missing a limb,” the boy rolls his eyes, beginning to walk. “Just buy another phone when you get back. You’ll be fine.”
“Who the hell are you?” Sehun finally remembers to demand. “I could be dead right now.”
“But you’re alive, and I’m Luhan.”
“Who were the people in those cars?”
“Some people I pissed off,” Luhan says easily, raising the hem of his shirt to wipe off his bloody elbow. “No big deal, they’re gone now.”
“The sun is starting to set,” and Sehun’s head is starting to hurt. He doesn’t feel like asking Luhan what exactly he did to piss them off. “Can we get back before it goes dark?”
“Probably not.”
“What? Why not?”
“Calm down,” Luhan says exasperatedly. “I know people near here, they’d be glad to let us stay a night.”
“How come I have to stay if they’re people you know?” Sehun has never placed this much distrust in anyone before. This is exactly the kind of dangerous situation they’d always warned him about in school, but he doesn’t really have a way out of this one.
“Do you want to sleep out on the streets?”
“No.”
“Can you find your way back to the city in five minutes?”
“No.”
“That’s why.”
“You awake?” Luhan kicks at Sehun in the middle of the night from his make-do bed on the couch. “Nothing could have really happened here, you know. I know them.”
“Yeah,” Sehun admits from his pull-out bed, thankful that most of the night has passed by without any further surprises. “I just wasn’t expecting to spend Friday night like this.”
“You’ll be back on track by lunchtime tomorrow,” Luhan tells him with a yawn. “You can iron your suit and buy a new phone then. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Sehun,” he answers, starting to get sleepy.
“Now if you plan on getting me into trouble, I can at least drag you down with me.”
“I’m going to sleep,” Sehun grumbles, turning his back to Luhan.
“Good.”
Sehun is violently shaken awake by Luhan the next morning, and Luhan walks him back to the spot they’d met the evening before.
“That shooting from yesterday has probably made newspaper headlines already,” Sehun exhales, but he could be less worried about the paper. For the most part, he’s just relieved to once again be somewhere familiar. “I hope this is the last time I see you.”
“Hopefully they didn’t get my picture on the front page, then,” Luhan says, shoving his hands in his pockets and cocking his head, his expression halfway to a smirk. “I’ll see you around, Sehun.”
Sehun sincerely hopes they never see each other again.
His wish is not granted.
Sehun runs into Luhan on another Friday night two weeks later, at a nightclub he’s never been to before. His coworkers have talked about it before though, and have tried - more than once - to convince him to go with them. But Sehun always refuses, going off about how “I can relax by myself just fine, who knows what could happen at a club? I could get beat up, my wallet could get stolen, I could get hungover the next morning - no good things could come out of me going, see? Absolutely nothing.”
Maybe it’s the extra assignments over the last two weeks that had Sehun almost falling apart from the excessive stress, but he’s not thinking straight by the time he gets back to his apartment. He tosses his briefcase onto the couch in his living room and leaves his suit lying on the floor at the foot of his bed. He grabs jeans and a shirt from his closet, shoves his keys, wallet, and phone into his back pocket, and heads out the door.
“It’s all done,” Sehun mumbles to himself as he starts up his car, going back in his texts to find the address of the nightclub. “I’m going to go crazy if I stay pent up any longer.”
It’s a relatively short drive to the club, ten minutes at most. Sehun parks his car along the road and gets out. The place is huge and evidently busy; he can hear a thudding beat even from outside the building, and he can see swirling lights through the windows. His fingers curl around the door handle, and suddenly he’s nervous.
The door bursts open then, tripping him backwards.
“Hey,” followed by a brilliant grin. “I thought I saw you out here.”
“Luhan?” It’s getting dark and Luhan’s eyes are almost hidden beneath layers of kohl, glittery black smudges painted over his eyelids and around the corners of his eyes, but Sehun can tell it’s him. “Why are you here?”
“I work here,” Luhan says, leading him inside by the elbow. “I’ve never seen you here before, is this your first time?”
The second half of what Luhan’s saying is drowned out by the deafening music, and Sehun has to shield his eyes with one hand to avoid being blinded by the flashing lights.
“What?” he yells.
“First time?” Luhan repeats.
Sehun nods.
“Would you like a drink?” Luhan grins.
There’s just something about Luhan and his sparkling eyes that’s making Sehun weak in the knees, and he can’t say no when Luhan picks up his hand to wrap his fingers around a glass. The place is surprisingly big and the music is blasting much too loudly, not to mention that the strobe lights overhead are starting to make his temples throb, so Sehun keeps close to Luhan the entire time, in fear of any unexpected happenings.
Not that he trusts him, but at least he knows his name.
The alcohol seems to raise his tolerance for all the noise and flashiness, so when Luhan takes the empty glass from him, Sehun accepts another drink without much hesitation. Sehun doesn’t remember how much he ended up drinking - or rather, how much Luhan convinced him to drink, but he remembers Luhan’s heated hands slipping under his shirt, leading him into a room upstairs, all the while sucking marks into his wrists and neck.
Sehun opens his eyes to a pounding headache and the faint smell of smoke. He props himself up on one elbow to see Luhan sitting at the other end of the bed, a cigarette between his fingers; he’s topless and his jeans are unbuttoned, the buckle of his belt undone.
“Good morning,” Luhan grins, turning around. “Headache?”
“I feel like death personified,” Sehun rasps, dropping his head into his hands and trying his best not to get distracted by Luhan’s state of undress. “Where’s your shirt?”
“My shirt?” Luhan scoffs. “You’re naked altogether.”
“Oh, no,” Sehun groans after looking down at himself, falling backwards into the tangled sheets. He can’t quite believe himself. “What did we do?”
“You came here, you got drunk, we - “
“Okay,” Sehun interrupts, not wanting to hear the rest of it so explicitly from Luhan. “I remember now, I remember.”
Luhan gets up to put out his cigarette, tossing Sehun his clothes.
“Are you okay?” Sehun asks carefully, slipping his shirt on over his head. “Does anything hurt?”
“You’re the one with a hangover and no clothes on,” Luhan tells him from across the room. “I’m fine, get dressed and we’ll go get some air. I’ll have some explaining to do if this hangover kills you, so don’t die on me, please.”
Sehun follows Luhan to a café down the street, where Luhan buys them each a light coffee.
“Won’t caffeine make it worse?” Sehun asks, peering down into the cup. The pounding in his temple has subsided, but he still feels like his head is about to explode.
“It’ll get worse if you don’t get a little caffeine in you,” Luhan says, pushing the door open to leave. “There’s a park two streets over, the air is better there.”
Sehun means to take a brief walk there and back just to clear his head, but he ends up walking circle after circle around the park with Luhan, long after he finishes his coffee and gets rid of the worst of his hangover. Maybe it’s because they always seem to meet when Sehun has his guard down, or maybe Luhan’s just naturally good at getting people talking, but Sehun isn’t uncomfortable around him.
“Why’d you go to the club?” Luhan wants to know. “You seemed pretty uptight the last time we met.”
“I’m not uptight!” Sehun protests. He pauses, and Luhan waits. “Don’t make jokes, I’m bad at them.”
“Fine, fine. So why did you go?”
“I had a long week,” Sehun tells him. “My coworkers talk about that nightclub all the time, so I wanted to go and see.”
“And how was it?” Luhan asks, tossing out the empty cup in his hand.
“I got drunk and had a one-night stand.”
Luhan laughs in surprise, and Sehun’s startled at how his own shoulders relax upon hearing his laughter.
“Come on, let’s go get lunch.”
Luhan takes him to a sandwich place not too far from the nightclub. Sehun looks up at the menu and just as he’s wondering whether or not he’s hungry enough to eat three sandwiches in one sitting, he feels a hand slip into the back pocket of his jeans.
“What - ”
“I left my wallet at the club,” Luhan explains half-heartedly, waving Sehun’s wallet at him. “And I spent what I had with me this morning on coffee, so now I’m forcefully being your guest.”
“Shouldn’t you go back and find your wallet before someone takes it?”
“Nah, I work there.”
“I don’t think that makes what I said any less valid,” Sehun says, nudging Luhan towards the counter as the line moves up.
“I pretty much live there too.”
“You live at a nightclub?”
“One more unnecessary word from you and I’ll max out your credit card at this fucking deli,” Luhan threatens. “Don’t think I couldn’t eat everything they have in store and then buy out all their tables and chairs too.”
Sehun laughs to himself as Luhan steps up to order.
“Wanna go see a movie?” Luhan suggests. “I have some time to kill before my shift and I heard there’s a good horror film playing right now.”
“What if I don’t want to see a movie with you?” Sehun asks, but he knows he’s not fooling either of them. Luhan has a freeing aura that surrounds him wherever he goes, and Sehun’s not quite ready to let that go just yet.
“Because I’m hot and cute and fun to be with.” Luhan doesn’t miss a single beat in answering him, and Sehun can’t really argue back.
Sehun ends up driving Luhan to the theatre, walking in half an hour late to the horror movie Luhan wanted to see, and getting dragged into a second movie afterwards.
“Is this allowed?” Sehun whispers before looking up to see the movie poster. He pokes Luhan in the side to make him look. “Luhan, this is a romance movie! Everyone’s here in pairs, and they’re all looking at us weird.”
“Just pretend we’re a couple,” Luhan whispers back, barely suppressing a laugh. “Our mission tonight is to make everyone in the theatre as uncomfortable as possible.”
Luhan’s way of accomplishing his self-assigned mission mostly involves his two hands never leaving Sehun, and making suggestively bothersome noises every ten minutes once the movie begins to play. Sehun can’t do much but cooperate, hoping the screen isn’t bright enough for Luhan to see his face turning red.
“I’m hungry,” Luhan whispers about an hour into the film. “Wanna leave now?”
Sehun is quick to agree, not necessarily because he’s hungry too, but because if he stays a minute longer there with Luhan doing what he was doing, he’d need either a cold shower on the spot or a ten-minute break to the washroom.
As Sehun drives, he can’t resist sneaking a glance at Luhan, who seems to be in a good mood. He’s humming softly - hardly audibly - under his breath, and Sehun doesn’t recognize the melody, but for some reason it puts him at ease.
They grab a quick bite to eat at a fast food restaurant, and Sehun feels like a student again. He can hardly remember the last time he went out in street clothes at all, let alone with company. It’s an unfamiliar feeling.
“I need a ride to the club,” Luhan says. “Can you give me a lift?”
“Sure,” Sehun nods, feeling the atmosphere shift awkwardly. He looks Luhan over. “You’re not putting on all that eye makeup today?”
“It’s all at the club.”
“Oh, okay.”
There’s quite a suffocating silence as they exit the restaurant and get into Sehun’s car, and out of the blue, a thought wedges its way into Sehun’s head. He asks about it when they arrive.
“What do you do at your job, exactly?”
“What I do at my job?” Luhan repeats, turning towards Sehun. “What I did with you last night.”
Luhan flashes a smile at him, and then Sehun’s left all alone in the car with a weird feeling in his stomach. With some difficulty, he pushes it aside.
Before he drifts off to sleep that night, he realizes that he’d forgotten to ask Luhan for any type of contact information.
It’s about two in the morning when Sehun stirs awake to someone knocking at the front door of his apartment. He groans and tries to ignore it, hoping it’s just some drunk neighbour that had accidentally mistaken his place for theirs.
“Ignore it ignore it ignore it,” Sehun mumbles to himself, rolling over and pulling up his covers over his head. “I can’t hear it I can’t hear it I can’t - ”
The knocking persists, and it’s getting more aggressive by the minute. Sehun finally kicks off the covers and stomps out of his bedroom to open the door, ready to tell off whoever it is outside. But when he rubs his eyes and looks, it’s Luhan, looking slightly out of breath.
“I’m dreaming,” Sehun mutters, shutting the door and opening it again. It’s still him. He tries calling his name. “Luhan?”
“Yep.”
“How did you get here?”
“I just looked up a couple of the nearest residences to the nightclub and picked the most expensive one, since I figured with a car and wallet like yours, you wouldn’t be living in one of those cheap student apartments.”
“How did you get into the building?”
“I got over the fence and asked the security guards if there was someone here named Sehun, and they said yes.”
“They gave you my apartment number?”
“No, I knocked them out and found you in the directory. Then I cut out some of the video recording from the security camera’s footage so nobody bothers me tomorrow.”
“Really?” Sehun gapes.
“Yeah,” Luhan grins at him as he stands on his toes to look over Sehun’s shoulder. “Is anyone in there? Can I come in?”
“Of course there’s nobody in here, it’s two in the morning,” Sehun says, letting him in as they speak. “Why are you here though?”
“Somebody reported the owner of the club for fraud or something and the police came to shut the place down, so the rest of us had to get out before we got caught in unnecessary trouble,” Luhan tells him, toeing off his shoes by the door and pointing at himself. “I had to jump out the back window of the second floor, hence all the holes and dirt in my clothes.”
“And then you just came here?” Sehun asks, still processing the situation.
“Apparently so,” Luhan shrugs at him. “I have nowhere else to go. Can I stay the night?”
“Would I be hiding a criminal?”
“Criminals are only criminals if they get caught,” Luhan says matter-of-factly. “And I haven’t been caught. So no, Mr. Oh, you wouldn’t be.”
“How do you know my family name?”
“Don’t you’d think they’d have your full name listed in the directory?”
Luhan and his smart mouth, Sehun thinks to himself, gritting his teeth.
“Go shower,” Sehun says irritably, pushing him towards the bathroom. “You look like a mess and you’re annoying me. There’s a stack of towels inside, I’ll go get you clean clothes.”
Luhan blows him a kiss before shutting the door to the bathroom. Sehun pinches bridge of his nose, wondering how exactly things wound up here. He runs a hand over his face and heads back into his bedroom, opening his closet door to look for something Luhan could wear. He shuffles through his hangers one by one, taking out the smallest sized shirt he owns and grabbing a pair of sweatpants off the rack. He hasn’t worn those since he graduated university.
When Luhan steps out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and another one draped over his head, Sehun tosses him the clothes and makes him re-enter the bathroom to put them on.
“You can sleep on the couch when you come out, okay?” Sehun calls through the door. “I’m going back to sleep, it’s almost three. Just remember to turn off the lights.”
Upon hearing a muffled “okay”, Sehun pats the door with satisfaction and stumbles back into bed.
When morning arrives several hours later, Sehun faintly remembers that there’s something different. It comes back to him when he hears someone moving around in the kitchen. He drags himself out of bed.
“What are you doing?” Sehun asks, crossing his arms. Luhan’s shuffling through his cupboards and refrigerator. “This is my apartment, you’re wearing my clothes, you slept on my couch, and now you’re looking through my kitchen?”
“I was hungry,” Luhan explains, straightening up.
“I’ll make breakfast,” Sehun sighs. “There should be some new toothbrushes under the sink in the bathroom, go brush your teeth first.”
Out of habit, Sehun ends up cooking a single-serving breakfast even as he thinks about Luhan. When he turns around to set the first plate on the table, Luhan’s already there, leaning back against the table and watching him, looking absolutely harmless.
“Here’s yours,” Sehun says, putting down the plate. Then he looks at Luhan again and laughs. “If those security guards from last night saw you now, do you think they’d recognize you?”
Luhan scratches the back of his head and laughs too.
“Where are you going afterwards?” Sehun asks when he sits down across from Luhan with his own breakfast.
“Can I stay here until I find an apartment?” Luhan looks up at Sehun with those sparkly eyes, sunlight practically bouncing off his skin, and Sehun can’t say no.
They spend the day sprawled out over the couch watching movies with Sehun’s entire junk food cabinet emptied out around them; although Sehun knows full well Luhan is almost a stranger, he still can’t help but feel like he has a friend.
The following morning, Sehun returns to his regular schedule. He turns off his alarm a few seconds after it goes off, unplugs his phone from the charger at the foot of his bed, and gets dressed after he cleans himself up. Luhan’s still asleep on the couch, so he tries to tread quietly when he walks out, but Luhan wakes up anyway.
“Where are you going?” Luhan asks, his voice weighed down with sleep.
“To work,” Sehun answers. “That’s kind of how I buy things.”
Luhan laughs and sits up to throw a cushion at him. “I’ll go out and look for an apartment today,” he says, straightening his back to stretch.
“Where do you have the money to rent an apartment?”
“Not all of it is legal,” Luhan says, raising an eyebrow at him. “But my job at the club paid pretty well.”
Sehun wishes him good luck before heading off to work, picking up a coffee on the way. He doesn’t have the habit of eating breakfast on weekdays.
His workplace is more bland than he remembers it to be, even though it’d only been one weekend. As usual, the building smells of freshly printed paper and newly made coffee, and the quiet environment is kept afloat by the sounds of coworkers conversing, coffee machines whirring softly, and people tapping away at their keyboards. On most days, the setting would be of comfort to him, but today it threatens to suffocate him.
Sehun opens the door to his office and sits down, adjusting the plaque at the front of the desk that reads his title: Marketing Manager - Oh Sehun. He tilts his head at it as his desktop hums to life.
The workday passes by like any other, with a handful of emails expecting his reply, two brief meeting before lunch, and a number of reports awaiting his approval.
Sehun gets his share of work done, but he’s already bored out of his mind more than an hour before he’s designated to get off work. After sitting at his desk and twirling a pen distractedly between his fingers for a good ten minutes, he decides it’s time to go. He won’t be getting anything done there anyway. He bids an early goodbye to his coworkers and runs down two flights of stairs because the elevators are busy, nodding hastily to the two front desk receptionists and making his way to the parking lot outside the building.
Sehun starts up his car.
He misses Luhan - or rather, the liberating feeling he carries with him everywhere. Luhan is spontaneous and reckless, everything Sehun has never been. He’s nothing like anyone Sehun’s met before, and Sehun wants to know more.
When he unlocks his apartment door, Luhan is laying out a floor full of new clothes in the living room, an impressive number of empty shopping bags piled off to the side.
“What are you doing?”
“I went to buy clothes today,” Luhan says, getting to his feet. “I know I said I was going to look for a new apartment, but the police are going to be alert for a couple months, so it’s probably best if I don’t do anything until it all blows over. I’ll look for apartment listings again then.”
“So you’ll be staying here for a while?”
“Do you want me to pay you rent?”
“I was just going to say you can’t keep sleeping on the couch, I’ll order a new bed or something sometime this week,” Sehun says, mildly offended as he walks into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of water.
“Really?” Luhan follows him, hopping up to sit on the counter. “Where would you put it?”
“Well,” Sehun puts down his water. “I was thinking we could just put it in the living room, since nobody really visits anyway.”
“Did you grow up sleeping in the living room?”
“What?” Sehun asks defensively. “Do you want to sleep in my bed instead?”
“Sure,” Luhan answers after several moments of contemplation.
Sehun splutters, coughing up water. “Excuse me?”
“You made an offer,” Luhan grins, swinging his legs to kick Sehun repeatedly in the knees. “Plus your bed looks like it could fit two people.”
Sehun moves away so Luhan can’t reach him, pouring himself another cup of water and resisting the urge to dump it over Luhan’s head. But then again, he thinks, he can’t force Luhan to sleep on the couch forever. Maybe they could hang a curtain from the ceiling or something to split the bed in half. Sehun absolutely refuses to admit that he has any selfish thoughts whatsoever in agreeing to sharing a bed with Luhan.
They spend the evening settling Luhan in, which is a lot less organized and peaceful than it sounds. For the most part, it’s Sehun trying to make space for Luhan and Luhan not cooperating.
“So my toothbrush and all will go on the right side of the sink over here, and I’ll put your stuff on the left here. You can use these towels and I’ll use those - are you listening?”
Sehun leads Luhan from the bathroom into the bedroom and shows him the closet. “I’ll move my clothes onto these two racks so you can have the other two, just remember that these two walls are mine, and those two walls are yours. We can take turns coming in here to change in the morning, but I’ll probably have to go first because I have to go to work - are you listening?”
He guides Luhan away from the closet a few moments later and points at the bed. “This pillow cover is new, I haven’t used it before. I’ll sleep on the side closer to the door - you’re not listening.”
Luhan finally bothers to pay some attention to Sehun instead of just following him around the apartment and poking around. He grins and joins his hands together behind his back, and Sehun briefly questions whether this is really the same boy he ran into at the club just two nights ago.
“I’m just getting acquainted,” Luhan tells him shamelessly. “I should get to know your apartment if I’m going to be here for a while, right?”
“Right,” Sehun says. “But I’m telling you about where your stuff goes.”
“Yeah, everything is just half and half,” Luhan says easily. “I get half your bathroom counter, half your towel rack, half your closet, and half your bed.”
“Okay then,” Sehun says after a pause, not seeing any problem with Luhan’s general understanding of how this will work. “Just promise to remember that for the entire time you’re here and we’re good to go.”
Luhan gives him a thumbs-up.
Before Sehun turns out the light that night, he warns Luhan: “We’re just sleeping, there’s no touching or rolling around allowed. And don’t kick the covers.”
Luhan concurs with a lazy “okay”, drumming his fingers over his stomach, his eyes closed and looking quite comfortable.
“We should get you some pajamas,” Sehun says when the room goes dark.
“This bed is soft.”
“Do you need pajamas?”
“Nah, the shirt and sweatpants from yesterday are fine.”
“Good night.”
Luhan yawns in response.
When Sehun’s alarm rings the next morning, he instinctively wants to reach over and turn it off, but there’s something weighing him down; he looks, and somehow Luhan’s halfway wrapped up in his arms. Sehun quickly pushes him off, and his hand slips twice before successfully silencing his alarm. He looks back at Luhan before heading off to the bathroom, and sees that he’s still asleep.
“Oh, you’re up,” Sehun says as he walks back into the bedroom to get dressed, surprised to see Luhan awake, his hands behind his head. “Good morning.”
“This bed is really soft.”
“You said that already,” Sehun laughs, buttoning up his dress shirt. “Just stay in bed then.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I get off work at five-thirty,” Sehun calls as he straightens his tie. “There should be enough food in the kitchen, but there’s a grocery store outside this apartment community and a convenience store just downstairs if you want anything else.”
“Thanks.”
Luhan’s flopped over on his stomach in the middle of the bed when Sehun leaves the room. Sehun shakes his head, but there’s a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes when he locks his apartment door behind him.
Sehun finds work increasingly insufferable as the weeks go on, yet he finds the hours disappearing between his fingers quicker than ever.
He slowly begins to forget what it had once felt like to face silence as he got ready for the day, then to return in the evening after work and face the same quiet rooms; he starts getting acquainted with Luhan’s habit of grumbling about his morning alarm even after Sehun mutes it, and he gets used to putting up with Luhan’s on-and-off talk until they both drift off to sleep at night.
To him, Luhan is the one splash of colour in his nine-to-five life.
Even with the knowledge that Luhan plans on moving out in several months, sometimes between Luhan’s fruitless negotiations - “you made me do the dishes yesterday, you go do them today” - and Sehun’s futile frustrations - “can you turn down the volume of your soccer game? I can’t sleep with all that noise”, Sehun has the occasional illusion that they’re really a long-married couple.
There are times he wonders if the boy who’d jumped off that motorcycle with him and led him into that nightclub for the first time is really the same one who now drags Sehun out on warmer nights to bring a tub of ice cream home -
- although Sehun hadn’t ever called his place “home” before, until Luhan moved in. He had always just referred to it as his apartment, because the connotation of the word “home” never seemed to suit the mute walls and still floors of his place. It’s only when a group of his colleagues tease him about it that he realizes what Luhan has made of his place.
“We’re going to see a baseball game after work today, do you feel like coming along? We have an extra ticket.”
“They’re all upper terrace seats,” someone chimes in.
“No, but thank you,” Sehun declines politely. “I have to get home.”
“Aw,” another one of his coworkers elbows him in the side, friendly and playful, but his next words give Sehun a little jolt. “Your heart has been tied home lately, huh?”
They bid Sehun a chattery goodbye. When Sehun snaps back into the present and remembers to call out “have fun” after them, they’re already partway out the door.
His hands are slow as he packs up his things, unable to recall the exact day he began seeing a haven in his apartment instead of simply a shelter. He may have given Luhan somewhere to stay, but Luhan has given him a home.
Luhan’s watching a music show on the couch when Sehun gets back that day, and he suddenly notices the extra pair of shoes by the door, the extra jacket hanging off the rack, and a plate in the sink that he didn’t use.
When he goes to change into more comfortable clothes, he’s aware for the first time of how Luhan’s t-shirts are hung in between his dress shirts, and how his laptop is upside down on his bed, cushioned on the pillow Luhan uses.
Luhan has wedged himself into every corner of Sehun’s apartment, and filled himself into every gap in Sehun’s life.
Part 2
Title: Devil In The Dust
Rating: PG-15
Word Count: 10,600
Summary: Luhan bursts into Sehun's life with the spontaneity of a whirlwind, sweeping him off his feet and leaving him unable to regain balance.
One day you'll leave this world behind,
So live a life you will remember.
- Avicii, The Nights
Sehun’s leaving work as the sun begins to slip west, his phone in one hand and briefcase in the other. He wonders whether he should visit a nearby restaurant for takeout or make do with instant noodles at his own apartment. Just as he’s reaching for his car keys, someone comes flying by on a motorcycle.
“Run!” he’s yelling.
Sehun’s beyond confused until he hears something like bullets being fired in the near distance, and he looks back to see two swerving cars with people pointing guns out the windows. He’s mere seconds away from being either run over or shot when the boy on the motorcycle makes an one-eighty back, hauling Sehun on behind him.
“Didn’t I tell you to run?” the boy yells again.
Sehun doesn’t have time to think. The motorcycle weaves between vehicles, tilting at dangerous angles, and he clings on for dear life, too scared to make a sound. Sehun hasn’t been this far from the city in years; the buildings are getting shorter, the roads rougher, and the streets emptier. He’s absolutely terrified, and he’s pretty sure the two cars are still on their heels.
“When I count to three, we jump!”
“What?”
“I said - “
“I heard what you said!”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Why are we jumping?”
“I don’t think the brakes work!”
“Oh my God - “
“One - “
“No!”
“Two - “
“Please - “
“Three!”
“I - “
“Jump!”
Against his own better judgement, Sehun jumps. Fortunately, he lands on the grassy side of the road; without the wind whipping past his ears and the engine of the motorcycle rumbling underneath him, the world is suddenly quiet.
“You okay?”
Sehun groans when he sits up, aching in several places, and realizes with a drop in his stomach that he’d let go of his phone somewhere along the way.
“Does anything hurt?” the boy’s leaning over him now, and Sehun’s temporarily distracted by how handsome he is. “Get up, I know a route back into the city.”
“I’m bruised, at least,” Sehun says, stumbling to his feet and brushing himself off. “Plus my suit is dirty, and I lost my cell phone.”
“You’re not missing a limb,” the boy rolls his eyes, beginning to walk. “Just buy another phone when you get back. You’ll be fine.”
“Who the hell are you?” Sehun finally remembers to demand. “I could be dead right now.”
“But you’re alive, and I’m Luhan.”
“Who were the people in those cars?”
“Some people I pissed off,” Luhan says easily, raising the hem of his shirt to wipe off his bloody elbow. “No big deal, they’re gone now.”
“The sun is starting to set,” and Sehun’s head is starting to hurt. He doesn’t feel like asking Luhan what exactly he did to piss them off. “Can we get back before it goes dark?”
“Probably not.”
“What? Why not?”
“Calm down,” Luhan says exasperatedly. “I know people near here, they’d be glad to let us stay a night.”
“How come I have to stay if they’re people you know?” Sehun has never placed this much distrust in anyone before. This is exactly the kind of dangerous situation they’d always warned him about in school, but he doesn’t really have a way out of this one.
“Do you want to sleep out on the streets?”
“No.”
“Can you find your way back to the city in five minutes?”
“No.”
“That’s why.”
“You awake?” Luhan kicks at Sehun in the middle of the night from his make-do bed on the couch. “Nothing could have really happened here, you know. I know them.”
“Yeah,” Sehun admits from his pull-out bed, thankful that most of the night has passed by without any further surprises. “I just wasn’t expecting to spend Friday night like this.”
“You’ll be back on track by lunchtime tomorrow,” Luhan tells him with a yawn. “You can iron your suit and buy a new phone then. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Sehun,” he answers, starting to get sleepy.
“Now if you plan on getting me into trouble, I can at least drag you down with me.”
“I’m going to sleep,” Sehun grumbles, turning his back to Luhan.
“Good.”
Sehun is violently shaken awake by Luhan the next morning, and Luhan walks him back to the spot they’d met the evening before.
“That shooting from yesterday has probably made newspaper headlines already,” Sehun exhales, but he could be less worried about the paper. For the most part, he’s just relieved to once again be somewhere familiar. “I hope this is the last time I see you.”
“Hopefully they didn’t get my picture on the front page, then,” Luhan says, shoving his hands in his pockets and cocking his head, his expression halfway to a smirk. “I’ll see you around, Sehun.”
Sehun sincerely hopes they never see each other again.
His wish is not granted.
Sehun runs into Luhan on another Friday night two weeks later, at a nightclub he’s never been to before. His coworkers have talked about it before though, and have tried - more than once - to convince him to go with them. But Sehun always refuses, going off about how “I can relax by myself just fine, who knows what could happen at a club? I could get beat up, my wallet could get stolen, I could get hungover the next morning - no good things could come out of me going, see? Absolutely nothing.”
Maybe it’s the extra assignments over the last two weeks that had Sehun almost falling apart from the excessive stress, but he’s not thinking straight by the time he gets back to his apartment. He tosses his briefcase onto the couch in his living room and leaves his suit lying on the floor at the foot of his bed. He grabs jeans and a shirt from his closet, shoves his keys, wallet, and phone into his back pocket, and heads out the door.
“It’s all done,” Sehun mumbles to himself as he starts up his car, going back in his texts to find the address of the nightclub. “I’m going to go crazy if I stay pent up any longer.”
It’s a relatively short drive to the club, ten minutes at most. Sehun parks his car along the road and gets out. The place is huge and evidently busy; he can hear a thudding beat even from outside the building, and he can see swirling lights through the windows. His fingers curl around the door handle, and suddenly he’s nervous.
The door bursts open then, tripping him backwards.
“Hey,” followed by a brilliant grin. “I thought I saw you out here.”
“Luhan?” It’s getting dark and Luhan’s eyes are almost hidden beneath layers of kohl, glittery black smudges painted over his eyelids and around the corners of his eyes, but Sehun can tell it’s him. “Why are you here?”
“I work here,” Luhan says, leading him inside by the elbow. “I’ve never seen you here before, is this your first time?”
The second half of what Luhan’s saying is drowned out by the deafening music, and Sehun has to shield his eyes with one hand to avoid being blinded by the flashing lights.
“What?” he yells.
“First time?” Luhan repeats.
Sehun nods.
“Would you like a drink?” Luhan grins.
There’s just something about Luhan and his sparkling eyes that’s making Sehun weak in the knees, and he can’t say no when Luhan picks up his hand to wrap his fingers around a glass. The place is surprisingly big and the music is blasting much too loudly, not to mention that the strobe lights overhead are starting to make his temples throb, so Sehun keeps close to Luhan the entire time, in fear of any unexpected happenings.
Not that he trusts him, but at least he knows his name.
The alcohol seems to raise his tolerance for all the noise and flashiness, so when Luhan takes the empty glass from him, Sehun accepts another drink without much hesitation. Sehun doesn’t remember how much he ended up drinking - or rather, how much Luhan convinced him to drink, but he remembers Luhan’s heated hands slipping under his shirt, leading him into a room upstairs, all the while sucking marks into his wrists and neck.
Sehun opens his eyes to a pounding headache and the faint smell of smoke. He props himself up on one elbow to see Luhan sitting at the other end of the bed, a cigarette between his fingers; he’s topless and his jeans are unbuttoned, the buckle of his belt undone.
“Good morning,” Luhan grins, turning around. “Headache?”
“I feel like death personified,” Sehun rasps, dropping his head into his hands and trying his best not to get distracted by Luhan’s state of undress. “Where’s your shirt?”
“My shirt?” Luhan scoffs. “You’re naked altogether.”
“Oh, no,” Sehun groans after looking down at himself, falling backwards into the tangled sheets. He can’t quite believe himself. “What did we do?”
“You came here, you got drunk, we - “
“Okay,” Sehun interrupts, not wanting to hear the rest of it so explicitly from Luhan. “I remember now, I remember.”
Luhan gets up to put out his cigarette, tossing Sehun his clothes.
“Are you okay?” Sehun asks carefully, slipping his shirt on over his head. “Does anything hurt?”
“You’re the one with a hangover and no clothes on,” Luhan tells him from across the room. “I’m fine, get dressed and we’ll go get some air. I’ll have some explaining to do if this hangover kills you, so don’t die on me, please.”
Sehun follows Luhan to a café down the street, where Luhan buys them each a light coffee.
“Won’t caffeine make it worse?” Sehun asks, peering down into the cup. The pounding in his temple has subsided, but he still feels like his head is about to explode.
“It’ll get worse if you don’t get a little caffeine in you,” Luhan says, pushing the door open to leave. “There’s a park two streets over, the air is better there.”
Sehun means to take a brief walk there and back just to clear his head, but he ends up walking circle after circle around the park with Luhan, long after he finishes his coffee and gets rid of the worst of his hangover. Maybe it’s because they always seem to meet when Sehun has his guard down, or maybe Luhan’s just naturally good at getting people talking, but Sehun isn’t uncomfortable around him.
“Why’d you go to the club?” Luhan wants to know. “You seemed pretty uptight the last time we met.”
“I’m not uptight!” Sehun protests. He pauses, and Luhan waits. “Don’t make jokes, I’m bad at them.”
“Fine, fine. So why did you go?”
“I had a long week,” Sehun tells him. “My coworkers talk about that nightclub all the time, so I wanted to go and see.”
“And how was it?” Luhan asks, tossing out the empty cup in his hand.
“I got drunk and had a one-night stand.”
Luhan laughs in surprise, and Sehun’s startled at how his own shoulders relax upon hearing his laughter.
“Come on, let’s go get lunch.”
Luhan takes him to a sandwich place not too far from the nightclub. Sehun looks up at the menu and just as he’s wondering whether or not he’s hungry enough to eat three sandwiches in one sitting, he feels a hand slip into the back pocket of his jeans.
“What - ”
“I left my wallet at the club,” Luhan explains half-heartedly, waving Sehun’s wallet at him. “And I spent what I had with me this morning on coffee, so now I’m forcefully being your guest.”
“Shouldn’t you go back and find your wallet before someone takes it?”
“Nah, I work there.”
“I don’t think that makes what I said any less valid,” Sehun says, nudging Luhan towards the counter as the line moves up.
“I pretty much live there too.”
“You live at a nightclub?”
“One more unnecessary word from you and I’ll max out your credit card at this fucking deli,” Luhan threatens. “Don’t think I couldn’t eat everything they have in store and then buy out all their tables and chairs too.”
Sehun laughs to himself as Luhan steps up to order.
“Wanna go see a movie?” Luhan suggests. “I have some time to kill before my shift and I heard there’s a good horror film playing right now.”
“What if I don’t want to see a movie with you?” Sehun asks, but he knows he’s not fooling either of them. Luhan has a freeing aura that surrounds him wherever he goes, and Sehun’s not quite ready to let that go just yet.
“Because I’m hot and cute and fun to be with.” Luhan doesn’t miss a single beat in answering him, and Sehun can’t really argue back.
Sehun ends up driving Luhan to the theatre, walking in half an hour late to the horror movie Luhan wanted to see, and getting dragged into a second movie afterwards.
“Is this allowed?” Sehun whispers before looking up to see the movie poster. He pokes Luhan in the side to make him look. “Luhan, this is a romance movie! Everyone’s here in pairs, and they’re all looking at us weird.”
“Just pretend we’re a couple,” Luhan whispers back, barely suppressing a laugh. “Our mission tonight is to make everyone in the theatre as uncomfortable as possible.”
Luhan’s way of accomplishing his self-assigned mission mostly involves his two hands never leaving Sehun, and making suggestively bothersome noises every ten minutes once the movie begins to play. Sehun can’t do much but cooperate, hoping the screen isn’t bright enough for Luhan to see his face turning red.
“I’m hungry,” Luhan whispers about an hour into the film. “Wanna leave now?”
Sehun is quick to agree, not necessarily because he’s hungry too, but because if he stays a minute longer there with Luhan doing what he was doing, he’d need either a cold shower on the spot or a ten-minute break to the washroom.
As Sehun drives, he can’t resist sneaking a glance at Luhan, who seems to be in a good mood. He’s humming softly - hardly audibly - under his breath, and Sehun doesn’t recognize the melody, but for some reason it puts him at ease.
They grab a quick bite to eat at a fast food restaurant, and Sehun feels like a student again. He can hardly remember the last time he went out in street clothes at all, let alone with company. It’s an unfamiliar feeling.
“I need a ride to the club,” Luhan says. “Can you give me a lift?”
“Sure,” Sehun nods, feeling the atmosphere shift awkwardly. He looks Luhan over. “You’re not putting on all that eye makeup today?”
“It’s all at the club.”
“Oh, okay.”
There’s quite a suffocating silence as they exit the restaurant and get into Sehun’s car, and out of the blue, a thought wedges its way into Sehun’s head. He asks about it when they arrive.
“What do you do at your job, exactly?”
“What I do at my job?” Luhan repeats, turning towards Sehun. “What I did with you last night.”
Luhan flashes a smile at him, and then Sehun’s left all alone in the car with a weird feeling in his stomach. With some difficulty, he pushes it aside.
Before he drifts off to sleep that night, he realizes that he’d forgotten to ask Luhan for any type of contact information.
It’s about two in the morning when Sehun stirs awake to someone knocking at the front door of his apartment. He groans and tries to ignore it, hoping it’s just some drunk neighbour that had accidentally mistaken his place for theirs.
“Ignore it ignore it ignore it,” Sehun mumbles to himself, rolling over and pulling up his covers over his head. “I can’t hear it I can’t hear it I can’t - ”
The knocking persists, and it’s getting more aggressive by the minute. Sehun finally kicks off the covers and stomps out of his bedroom to open the door, ready to tell off whoever it is outside. But when he rubs his eyes and looks, it’s Luhan, looking slightly out of breath.
“I’m dreaming,” Sehun mutters, shutting the door and opening it again. It’s still him. He tries calling his name. “Luhan?”
“Yep.”
“How did you get here?”
“I just looked up a couple of the nearest residences to the nightclub and picked the most expensive one, since I figured with a car and wallet like yours, you wouldn’t be living in one of those cheap student apartments.”
“How did you get into the building?”
“I got over the fence and asked the security guards if there was someone here named Sehun, and they said yes.”
“They gave you my apartment number?”
“No, I knocked them out and found you in the directory. Then I cut out some of the video recording from the security camera’s footage so nobody bothers me tomorrow.”
“Really?” Sehun gapes.
“Yeah,” Luhan grins at him as he stands on his toes to look over Sehun’s shoulder. “Is anyone in there? Can I come in?”
“Of course there’s nobody in here, it’s two in the morning,” Sehun says, letting him in as they speak. “Why are you here though?”
“Somebody reported the owner of the club for fraud or something and the police came to shut the place down, so the rest of us had to get out before we got caught in unnecessary trouble,” Luhan tells him, toeing off his shoes by the door and pointing at himself. “I had to jump out the back window of the second floor, hence all the holes and dirt in my clothes.”
“And then you just came here?” Sehun asks, still processing the situation.
“Apparently so,” Luhan shrugs at him. “I have nowhere else to go. Can I stay the night?”
“Would I be hiding a criminal?”
“Criminals are only criminals if they get caught,” Luhan says matter-of-factly. “And I haven’t been caught. So no, Mr. Oh, you wouldn’t be.”
“How do you know my family name?”
“Don’t you’d think they’d have your full name listed in the directory?”
Luhan and his smart mouth, Sehun thinks to himself, gritting his teeth.
“Go shower,” Sehun says irritably, pushing him towards the bathroom. “You look like a mess and you’re annoying me. There’s a stack of towels inside, I’ll go get you clean clothes.”
Luhan blows him a kiss before shutting the door to the bathroom. Sehun pinches bridge of his nose, wondering how exactly things wound up here. He runs a hand over his face and heads back into his bedroom, opening his closet door to look for something Luhan could wear. He shuffles through his hangers one by one, taking out the smallest sized shirt he owns and grabbing a pair of sweatpants off the rack. He hasn’t worn those since he graduated university.
When Luhan steps out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and another one draped over his head, Sehun tosses him the clothes and makes him re-enter the bathroom to put them on.
“You can sleep on the couch when you come out, okay?” Sehun calls through the door. “I’m going back to sleep, it’s almost three. Just remember to turn off the lights.”
Upon hearing a muffled “okay”, Sehun pats the door with satisfaction and stumbles back into bed.
When morning arrives several hours later, Sehun faintly remembers that there’s something different. It comes back to him when he hears someone moving around in the kitchen. He drags himself out of bed.
“What are you doing?” Sehun asks, crossing his arms. Luhan’s shuffling through his cupboards and refrigerator. “This is my apartment, you’re wearing my clothes, you slept on my couch, and now you’re looking through my kitchen?”
“I was hungry,” Luhan explains, straightening up.
“I’ll make breakfast,” Sehun sighs. “There should be some new toothbrushes under the sink in the bathroom, go brush your teeth first.”
Out of habit, Sehun ends up cooking a single-serving breakfast even as he thinks about Luhan. When he turns around to set the first plate on the table, Luhan’s already there, leaning back against the table and watching him, looking absolutely harmless.
“Here’s yours,” Sehun says, putting down the plate. Then he looks at Luhan again and laughs. “If those security guards from last night saw you now, do you think they’d recognize you?”
Luhan scratches the back of his head and laughs too.
“Where are you going afterwards?” Sehun asks when he sits down across from Luhan with his own breakfast.
“Can I stay here until I find an apartment?” Luhan looks up at Sehun with those sparkly eyes, sunlight practically bouncing off his skin, and Sehun can’t say no.
They spend the day sprawled out over the couch watching movies with Sehun’s entire junk food cabinet emptied out around them; although Sehun knows full well Luhan is almost a stranger, he still can’t help but feel like he has a friend.
The following morning, Sehun returns to his regular schedule. He turns off his alarm a few seconds after it goes off, unplugs his phone from the charger at the foot of his bed, and gets dressed after he cleans himself up. Luhan’s still asleep on the couch, so he tries to tread quietly when he walks out, but Luhan wakes up anyway.
“Where are you going?” Luhan asks, his voice weighed down with sleep.
“To work,” Sehun answers. “That’s kind of how I buy things.”
Luhan laughs and sits up to throw a cushion at him. “I’ll go out and look for an apartment today,” he says, straightening his back to stretch.
“Where do you have the money to rent an apartment?”
“Not all of it is legal,” Luhan says, raising an eyebrow at him. “But my job at the club paid pretty well.”
Sehun wishes him good luck before heading off to work, picking up a coffee on the way. He doesn’t have the habit of eating breakfast on weekdays.
His workplace is more bland than he remembers it to be, even though it’d only been one weekend. As usual, the building smells of freshly printed paper and newly made coffee, and the quiet environment is kept afloat by the sounds of coworkers conversing, coffee machines whirring softly, and people tapping away at their keyboards. On most days, the setting would be of comfort to him, but today it threatens to suffocate him.
Sehun opens the door to his office and sits down, adjusting the plaque at the front of the desk that reads his title: Marketing Manager - Oh Sehun. He tilts his head at it as his desktop hums to life.
The workday passes by like any other, with a handful of emails expecting his reply, two brief meeting before lunch, and a number of reports awaiting his approval.
Sehun gets his share of work done, but he’s already bored out of his mind more than an hour before he’s designated to get off work. After sitting at his desk and twirling a pen distractedly between his fingers for a good ten minutes, he decides it’s time to go. He won’t be getting anything done there anyway. He bids an early goodbye to his coworkers and runs down two flights of stairs because the elevators are busy, nodding hastily to the two front desk receptionists and making his way to the parking lot outside the building.
Sehun starts up his car.
He misses Luhan - or rather, the liberating feeling he carries with him everywhere. Luhan is spontaneous and reckless, everything Sehun has never been. He’s nothing like anyone Sehun’s met before, and Sehun wants to know more.
When he unlocks his apartment door, Luhan is laying out a floor full of new clothes in the living room, an impressive number of empty shopping bags piled off to the side.
“What are you doing?”
“I went to buy clothes today,” Luhan says, getting to his feet. “I know I said I was going to look for a new apartment, but the police are going to be alert for a couple months, so it’s probably best if I don’t do anything until it all blows over. I’ll look for apartment listings again then.”
“So you’ll be staying here for a while?”
“Do you want me to pay you rent?”
“I was just going to say you can’t keep sleeping on the couch, I’ll order a new bed or something sometime this week,” Sehun says, mildly offended as he walks into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of water.
“Really?” Luhan follows him, hopping up to sit on the counter. “Where would you put it?”
“Well,” Sehun puts down his water. “I was thinking we could just put it in the living room, since nobody really visits anyway.”
“Did you grow up sleeping in the living room?”
“What?” Sehun asks defensively. “Do you want to sleep in my bed instead?”
“Sure,” Luhan answers after several moments of contemplation.
Sehun splutters, coughing up water. “Excuse me?”
“You made an offer,” Luhan grins, swinging his legs to kick Sehun repeatedly in the knees. “Plus your bed looks like it could fit two people.”
Sehun moves away so Luhan can’t reach him, pouring himself another cup of water and resisting the urge to dump it over Luhan’s head. But then again, he thinks, he can’t force Luhan to sleep on the couch forever. Maybe they could hang a curtain from the ceiling or something to split the bed in half. Sehun absolutely refuses to admit that he has any selfish thoughts whatsoever in agreeing to sharing a bed with Luhan.
They spend the evening settling Luhan in, which is a lot less organized and peaceful than it sounds. For the most part, it’s Sehun trying to make space for Luhan and Luhan not cooperating.
“So my toothbrush and all will go on the right side of the sink over here, and I’ll put your stuff on the left here. You can use these towels and I’ll use those - are you listening?”
Sehun leads Luhan from the bathroom into the bedroom and shows him the closet. “I’ll move my clothes onto these two racks so you can have the other two, just remember that these two walls are mine, and those two walls are yours. We can take turns coming in here to change in the morning, but I’ll probably have to go first because I have to go to work - are you listening?”
He guides Luhan away from the closet a few moments later and points at the bed. “This pillow cover is new, I haven’t used it before. I’ll sleep on the side closer to the door - you’re not listening.”
Luhan finally bothers to pay some attention to Sehun instead of just following him around the apartment and poking around. He grins and joins his hands together behind his back, and Sehun briefly questions whether this is really the same boy he ran into at the club just two nights ago.
“I’m just getting acquainted,” Luhan tells him shamelessly. “I should get to know your apartment if I’m going to be here for a while, right?”
“Right,” Sehun says. “But I’m telling you about where your stuff goes.”
“Yeah, everything is just half and half,” Luhan says easily. “I get half your bathroom counter, half your towel rack, half your closet, and half your bed.”
“Okay then,” Sehun says after a pause, not seeing any problem with Luhan’s general understanding of how this will work. “Just promise to remember that for the entire time you’re here and we’re good to go.”
Luhan gives him a thumbs-up.
Before Sehun turns out the light that night, he warns Luhan: “We’re just sleeping, there’s no touching or rolling around allowed. And don’t kick the covers.”
Luhan concurs with a lazy “okay”, drumming his fingers over his stomach, his eyes closed and looking quite comfortable.
“We should get you some pajamas,” Sehun says when the room goes dark.
“This bed is soft.”
“Do you need pajamas?”
“Nah, the shirt and sweatpants from yesterday are fine.”
“Good night.”
Luhan yawns in response.
When Sehun’s alarm rings the next morning, he instinctively wants to reach over and turn it off, but there’s something weighing him down; he looks, and somehow Luhan’s halfway wrapped up in his arms. Sehun quickly pushes him off, and his hand slips twice before successfully silencing his alarm. He looks back at Luhan before heading off to the bathroom, and sees that he’s still asleep.
“Oh, you’re up,” Sehun says as he walks back into the bedroom to get dressed, surprised to see Luhan awake, his hands behind his head. “Good morning.”
“This bed is really soft.”
“You said that already,” Sehun laughs, buttoning up his dress shirt. “Just stay in bed then.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I get off work at five-thirty,” Sehun calls as he straightens his tie. “There should be enough food in the kitchen, but there’s a grocery store outside this apartment community and a convenience store just downstairs if you want anything else.”
“Thanks.”
Luhan’s flopped over on his stomach in the middle of the bed when Sehun leaves the room. Sehun shakes his head, but there’s a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes when he locks his apartment door behind him.
Sehun finds work increasingly insufferable as the weeks go on, yet he finds the hours disappearing between his fingers quicker than ever.
He slowly begins to forget what it had once felt like to face silence as he got ready for the day, then to return in the evening after work and face the same quiet rooms; he starts getting acquainted with Luhan’s habit of grumbling about his morning alarm even after Sehun mutes it, and he gets used to putting up with Luhan’s on-and-off talk until they both drift off to sleep at night.
To him, Luhan is the one splash of colour in his nine-to-five life.
Even with the knowledge that Luhan plans on moving out in several months, sometimes between Luhan’s fruitless negotiations - “you made me do the dishes yesterday, you go do them today” - and Sehun’s futile frustrations - “can you turn down the volume of your soccer game? I can’t sleep with all that noise”, Sehun has the occasional illusion that they’re really a long-married couple.
There are times he wonders if the boy who’d jumped off that motorcycle with him and led him into that nightclub for the first time is really the same one who now drags Sehun out on warmer nights to bring a tub of ice cream home -
- although Sehun hadn’t ever called his place “home” before, until Luhan moved in. He had always just referred to it as his apartment, because the connotation of the word “home” never seemed to suit the mute walls and still floors of his place. It’s only when a group of his colleagues tease him about it that he realizes what Luhan has made of his place.
“We’re going to see a baseball game after work today, do you feel like coming along? We have an extra ticket.”
“They’re all upper terrace seats,” someone chimes in.
“No, but thank you,” Sehun declines politely. “I have to get home.”
“Aw,” another one of his coworkers elbows him in the side, friendly and playful, but his next words give Sehun a little jolt. “Your heart has been tied home lately, huh?”
They bid Sehun a chattery goodbye. When Sehun snaps back into the present and remembers to call out “have fun” after them, they’re already partway out the door.
His hands are slow as he packs up his things, unable to recall the exact day he began seeing a haven in his apartment instead of simply a shelter. He may have given Luhan somewhere to stay, but Luhan has given him a home.
Luhan’s watching a music show on the couch when Sehun gets back that day, and he suddenly notices the extra pair of shoes by the door, the extra jacket hanging off the rack, and a plate in the sink that he didn’t use.
When he goes to change into more comfortable clothes, he’s aware for the first time of how Luhan’s t-shirts are hung in between his dress shirts, and how his laptop is upside down on his bed, cushioned on the pillow Luhan uses.
Luhan has wedged himself into every corner of Sehun’s apartment, and filled himself into every gap in Sehun’s life.
Part 2