Boyfriend (Tao/Sehun)

[warmboys]

Boyfriend
Tao/Sehun
~1700 words
PG

Shmoop and more shmoop.

“I found these flowers on the ground on my way home. Do you want them?”

Sehun looked at the crushed sunflowers. A couple of them were missing yellow petals, some others bent at the stalk. They reminded him of old people, of their missing teeth and hunched backs. “Sure?”

Zitao looked pleased, but the look was gone as fast as it’d appeared. He held the bouquet out at arm’s length and Sehun took it.

When Zitao turned the corner, Sehun brought the flowers to his nose and took a deep whiff. They smelled lovely.

Sehun was not the worst at languages but he wasn’t the best either. He wasn’t a Wu Yifan or a Lu Han, on whom Zitao had spied from afar for a year before they noticed and tentatively took him under their wing. One wing was larger than the other and reeked of cologne and other masculine aromas. Naturally Zitao gravitated towards it. Lu Han tried his best, but he just wasn’t Zitao’s type. When they graduated they left Zitao with a self-help book entitled How to Land the Man of Your Dreams. In the margins Lu Han had carefully traced out a banana, right next to which he’d drawn an arrow and double-underlined, “edible!!” Zitao didn’t get it, but he didn’t get many of Lu Han’s jokes.

A year later, a new student transferred into his class from South Korea. He was tall, but not as tall as Zitao, and his face was as flat as a pancake. But also long and interesting and handsome. He was placed in the seat diagonally in front of Zitao’s and sometimes dozed off during lessons, head lolling onto his arm. Zitao tried not to watch him. He made promises with himself: if I can go ten minutes without looking at Oh Sehun, I’ll buy myself a new strap for my cellphone. He didn’t even want a new strap. He was already attached to his current one. After two minutes, his eyes drifted back to Sehun’s sleepy slouch, the slenderness of his frame clearly outlined through his shirt.

When the teacher asked for volunteers to tutor their new classmate in Chinese, Zitao’s hand shot up like a stubborn weed. Sehun turned his head, and they shared their first Look.

“I want to eat a yellow peach.”

Zitao shook his head. “You have the ‘yellow’ part down, but you’re intoning ‘peach’ wrong. You should be using the second not the first tone.”

“I want to eat a yellow peach,” Sehun tried again, licking his upper lip with effort.

“No…” Zitao said slowly. His ears colored slightly. They didn’t match the rest of his face.

Sehun grunted impatiently. “You say it.”

“I want to eat a yellow peach,” Zitao said.

“Me too,” Sehun said, laughing.

“That’s cheating!” Zitao said, but he didn’t look mad. He took a breath and launched into a story about Helen Keller and how she learned to speak. Her tutor would place Helen’s fingers inside her mouth and let her feel the vibrations of her tongue.

“You want me to put my fingers inside your mouth?” Sehun asked.

Zitao’s ears were now as red as a robin’s breast. “I’m just saying.”

Sehun examined his own hand. Zitao was a weird kid, he thought to himself, and then looked up at the boy, at his mouth. He tried to imagine Zitao’s lips parting to let him slip in two of his fingers and then closing around them. Sucking at first out of confusion. Maybe Sehun would accidentally poke the back of his throat and make him choke a little. He wondered how Zitao would react.

“That’s weird,” Sehun said finally.

In gym class they were testing flexibility. Boys were expected to stretch six centimeters past their toes in a seated position. Zitao gently nudged Sehun’s back until his fingers just barely touched his toes.

“Ugh,” Sehun said. “I hate this.”

“You’d think this exercise would be easier for people with longer torsos and shorter legs,” Zitao said. “Try harder.” He increased the intensity on his nudging.

Sehun frowned before remembering that Zitao was behind him and couldn’t see. “I don’t have short legs.”

“You don’t. Mine are just longer.”

The pressure on his back disappeared. Two legs slid into view, one outside each of his, locked into a v formation. Zitao was sitting down now, and his arms had snaked around Sehun’s waist. He was hugging them together, to better demonstrate the length of his own legs.

“Okay, I get it,” Sehun said, because Zitao’s legs indeed extended further out than his own.

“Yeah?” For some reason Zitao was whispering.

“Yeah,” Sehun said, lowering his own voice as well. He wanted to tell Zitao to let go so they could continue the warmup but Zitao’s arms were strong and warm and contrasted the cool draft that weaved in and out of his hair, throughout the gymnasium.

In exchange for Chinese lessons Sehun would teach Zitao some Korean. Zitao already knew some from snatches he’d overheard between Lu Han and Yifan and the Korean dramas his grandma watched sometimes, but he had an awful memory when it came to internalizing foreign sounds.

“This one’s easy. ‘Suck me off.’”

“Suck me off,” Zitao said, cautiously.

“In your dreams,” Sehun said, and flicked Zitao’s forehead.

Zitao stared at him, rubbing at the small mark. “What’s wrong with you?” But Sehun was laughing, swallowing big gulps of air as his shoulders heaved up and down.

“How much are you willing to pay me?” He said when he’d stopped laughing.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“For me to…” Sehun made his hand into a fist, brought the fist close to his mouth, and then away. And then back again, like playing a trumpet.

After a few seconds Zitao put it all together. “Um.” He honestly didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t because he hadn’t thought about it. So he said the first thing that came to mind. “You have a really small mouth.”

Sehun’s fist paused in mid-air. “What?”

“I don’t think I’ll fit,” Zitao said honestly.

Sehun’s eyes widened and gently brushed past the tented crotch of Zitao’s pants. He looked ponderous, which quickly transitioned to murderous as he shoved Zitao to the floor, playfully repeating, “You don’t think you’ll what? You don’t think you’ll what?”

“Are you alive? We haven’t heard from you in three weeks.” Lu Han was lying, because it had been longer since Zitao last texted him. But ‘we’ included Yifan, and it was true that their last exchange had been almost a month ago.

“I’m courting someone,” Zitao wrote back.

“OH,” came Lu Han’s speedy reply. “Good luck!”

“The bird has flown the coop,” was Yifan’s, half an hour later.

“He’s sad. I don’t think he expected you to start using our present so soon after he left,” wrote Lu Han.

Zitao hadn’t cracked it open. The book rested on a dusty self, squeezed in beside Grandma’s old textbooks on Marxism.

“Don’t listen to him. I’m happy for you.” Yifan added two smiley faces that Zitao didn’t know what to do with. But his heartbeat didn’t quicken, and his palms were dry.

Sehun scored just above passing on his Chinese exam. He hovered over Zitao’s desk with the test paper held between his chin and chest. He lifted his chin, and the paper drifted right into Zitao’s hand.

“We should celebrate,” Zitao said. “Go out, get drunk, you know.” He wasn't sure what other kids his age did to have fun.

Sehun looked like he might start laughing again, but he didn’t. “Wanna come over?”

They settled on an old action flick Sehun’s parents had lying around in one of their unpacked boxes. Sehun sat about an arm’s length away from him on the sofa. Zitao placed his hand in the space between them, maintaining a casual equidistance from both their thighs.

When a flurry of gunshots rang through the room, Sehun jolted and his hand flew from his lap. He looked down, startled, because underneath his hand was Zitao’s, where it had been waiting patiently this entire time. He glanced up at its owner.

Zitao was having difficulty expressing anything in his eyes that didn’t mean, “Please.” He knew this about himself, knew it to be a weakness, the way he allowed what brewed below to rise to the surface. But he couldn’t help it. Sometimes he didn’t want to either.

The gunfire had ceased. Sehun turned back to the TV screen. He kept his hand there for the rest of the movie.

The next day Sehun wore a sunflower in the front pocket of his shirt. It was the sole flower that had escaped Zitao’s determined foot after he’d paid that visit to the florist and then decided he couldn’t give his crush a bouquet of flowers for no reason. He had to ruin them first, make it seem like an accident. Come up with a viable excuse. So he’d spent a good five minutes making thoughtful alterations to them with the heel of his foot. He didn’t want them to look too mangled, either.

Zitao didn’t say anything but he couldn’t stop staring, of course. The petals had all dried now, and the flower looked sad and crumpled in Sehun’s pocket. But it filled Zitao with an indescribable giddiness.

“This one reminded me of you,” Sehun said after class. He stood over Zitao’s desk and removed the flower from his pocket. After a moment’s consideration, he tucked it into Zitao’s hair.

It wouldn’t stay, because Zitao’s hair was not long like a girl’s. The flower somersaulted to the floor. Sehun stared at it. He didn’t blush, but Zitao could tell he was embarrassed.

Zitao bent over and picked it up, then stood from his chair and slipped it back into Sehun’s front pocket. He lingered a second too long against the warmth of Sehun’s chest, imagining a thundering heartbeat.

They weren’t at eye level; he was taller. He’d never been the taller one. Sehun looked up at him and licked his lips. Zitao closed his eyes as he leaned in, hoping he wouldn’t miss.

“You were wrong about Helen Keller,” Sehun told him later. “She never put her fingers in anyone’s mouth. She put them against people’s throats and lips.”

“Oops,” Zitao said, smiling and tugging at Sehun's collar to kiss him again.

my feelings about this ship :3 but mostly the biebz