How to Love (multi-ship)

[warmboys]

How to Love
everyone/everyone else (Luhan/Sehun, Sehun/Tao, Tao/Kris, Tao/Xiumin, Kris/Suho, Suho/Kai, Kai/D.O./Chanyeol, Chen/Baekhyun, Baekhyun/Chanyeol, Chen/Suho, Lay/Chen, Lay/Luhan)
~4700 words
PG-13

A series of encounters, like a Domino chain. (REALLY INDULGENT AU where everyone is gay and dates everyone else. Suspension of disbelief is HIGHLY ENCOURAGED DDD:) & ty li'l wayne

1

One year and three months after the breakup with his former-homie-turned-lover-turned-friend, pending on the “friend,” Lu Han waited patiently for his fifth and final consultation with Dr. Lee while pretending to scroll for new emails on his phone because he’d forgotten to bring earphones before leaving for the clinic. The guy sitting next to him wore an expression of shameless boredom, so he put the phone away and pointed at his own chin. “Are you here for your jaw, too?” The guy glanced at him through the corner of his eye at first, as if not processing that he was the addressee of the question, but when Lu Han repeated it his head moved with his eyeballs until they were both looking at each other. He was attractive, skinny, and boyish, which were three things that Lu Han looked for in a partner, alongside “bound to break my heart” and “possibly a reincarnation of myself from another lifetime.”

“I’m waiting for someone,” the guy said, and touched his jaw, patently affronted by the insinuation. Lu Han reassured him that he was fine and underbites were all the rage these days but considering that Dr. Lee was world-renowned for his jaw reduction surgeries-“I was just making conversation,” he concluded, winded from his own speech. “You looked about as bored as I feel.”

“I’m bored,” said the guy. “I’m almost always bored.”

Sehun was bored enough to leave his number to a complete stranger whom he might not even recognize the next time they met, but, then again, why not? Lu Han was charming, and Chinese. Sehun liked Chinese. He dated one in high school, and the kid had literally blown his mind. They’d sit up in the storage closet afterwards, panting against each other. He never had a fucking clue what Zitao said, only how Zitao’s lush mouth looked as he said it.

Two months passed by. Radio silence. Krystal’s nose fillers slowly deflated by the week. She posted review after disparaging review of Dr. Lee online, officially named herself his first anti. Dr. Lee appeared on the news to publicly announce that all he wanted was to make people feel better about themselves. Tears were shed. Hands were shaken. His Twitter followers tripled. Krystal threw a nude pump at the television, cracking not the screen but her heel. Sehun chewed his cereal slowly in the kitchen, keeping one hand on the phone in his back pocket. She was the reason he had the fire department on speed-dial.

He received a text on the first day of month three. “Yo, I’m beautiful now, let’s be beautiful together.” It ended with a cute emoji of a penis. The word “charming” came to mind again as Sehun scrambled to compose a text that would convey an appropriate level of detached interest. Like, “I will deign to rub my dick against yours.”

They got together for dinner. Lu Han chose a diner, which meant to hell with roses and foreplay, there would definitely be dick-rubbing in the imminent future. Sehun picked at his burger and tried not to stare at the man-turned-boy in front of him. His face had slimmed down, alright, but Sehun still recognized the widely set-apart eyes, the flare of his fat nostrils. He could probably get arrested on sight for hitting on a minor, if they were somewhere else. Good thing this was Korea.

They went on a couple more dates before Sehun broke it off via text, which he felt aptly reflected his blasé attitude to this entire relationship, and maybe relationships in general. The truth was that he couldn’t handle Lu Han asking him to bottom after being an adamant top his entire life, starting from the day Zitao pinned him against the wall in their high school broom closet and then offered to blow him. Lu Han said he was about equality, that he and his ex had always switched it up to keep things fresh, but Sehun said, “No, no, no,” and tucked his dick back into his briefs. It was hard… because Lu Han’s voice lowered an octave when he enunciated “equality.” Fuck, Chinese men sounded so hot speaking Korean. Sehun willed his penis to soften before pulling on his pants and leaving the hotel room. A couple hours later, he wrote to Lu Han: “This isn’t working.”

“You commitment phobe,” Krystal yelled at him, raising the other Manolo. She liked Lu Han for letting her practice her makeup tutorials on his new and improved face. The cameo he made last week gained her an extra two hundred subscribers in just over an hour. They slowly tapered off in the days that followed, after she added a note in the description box stating that this was a one-time occurrence-Lu Han was not going to be available for makeup application videos anymore now that he was no longer dating her stupid prune-faced lousy excuse for a roommate.

2

Zitao was going through a phase, a really great and empowering phase that was all about independence and sharp suits and not at all about chasing after emotionally unavailable men who pretended to be straight until you had their dicks in your mouth, and then suddenly cue the hair-pulling and ramming it down your throat when you really just wanted to work up a nice rhythm, make them wait for it, delayed gratification was cool, you know?

Victoria, who was leading these group sessions to fulfill her community service quota from shoplifting last month and secretly couldn’t wait to get home to her microwaveable popcorn and primetime reality TV show, cut in and said, “That was great, Zitao. Very telling of your inner turmoil. Does anyone else want to share how their week has been?”

“I’m not done-“ Zitao started, but across the room Minseok had uncertainly raised his hand, and Minseok never volunteered to talk, not even when they worked as pairs.

“I started jogging recently,” Minseok said and went on to describe the trail near his apartment and how the pounding of his feet against the pavement soothed his mind, drowned out the earlier visions he had of choking his manager in the aisle for size 9 ½ - 10 men’s dress shoes on sale. He was in group therapy for anger management issues that no one had yet witnessed, but Zitao knew the quietest ones were often the most volatile. He once tried asking Minseok out and was gently refused with a, “I’m vegetarian now,” which was such bullshit because he wasn’t even Buddhist. Repressed heteros.

Zitao was in group therapy for his hedonism, but that was just a stuck-up doctor’s way of saying he wanted to have sex all the time and he wanted it to be good. So what, he had a healthy libido. Korea had a low birth rate. Sure, he wasn’t wielding young jedi Zitao to procreate just yet, but a couple of years down the line he might want the whole deal-a modern white-picket-fence sorta scenario. With the right guy and egg donor. He could dig that.

3

One of Zitao’s most memorable flings was with a certain Kris Wu, who begged the modifier because it just added to his gentlemanly mystique. It didn’t take much for that mystique to crumble, maybe a couple of conversations littered with awkward pauses and the occasional grammatical error, but the alluring aura of suaveness was what most people saw first and remembered later. Kris Wu was having a rough day at the office where he worked as an auditor. He had a difficult time on the job because he wasn’t a detail-oriented person, just desperate and practical when the economy fell on harsh times. The aura also helped when his interviewers were of the female, straight, and rabid type, which they often tended to be after Facebook-stalking his name on the resume.

His ten o’clock meeting was with a manager in the finance department, a Kim Junmyeon who replied to emails within seconds of receipt. It was true; Kris had counted off his imitation Rolex. He couldn’t wait to meet this guy. He could smell his anal-retentiveness from three floors down.

Junmyeon was waiting in the conference room at 9:57 and shook his hand with a firm but friendly grip, the textbook guide to a perfect professional handshake. Kris seated himself and tried to place the pale face and slight body before him. Junmyeon had prepared a Powerpoint presentation just for the two of them and included little Dilbert cartoons on every slide. On a slide depicting an increase in sales from last year Dilbert had his arms raised and was shimmying to a couple drawn g-clefs while pointy-haired boss looked on disapprovingly. “Aha!” said Kris, pointing his finger at the other man. Junmyeon dropped his clicker.

“We’ve met before,” Kris explained.

They had, many years ago, at a college dorm party. Kris had been invited with the entirety of the intramural basketball team, and Junmyeon was a roommate of the host. He lived there. While everybody who was somebody played pong over the dining table, Junmyeon got quietly inebriated and began grooving to Nelly on his bedroom rug. Kris stumbled into the room, expecting to find a toilet, but instead found Junmyeon, his face and shirt freshly drowned in the beer that had previously inhabited Kris’ red plastic cup. “Oh crap,” Kris apologized, groaning, “sorry, I’m really sorry,” and lunged for the tissues on Junmyeon’s desk, violently dabbing at the flustered drunk boy in front of him.

“It’s okay,” Junmyeon repeated, looking smaller and more awkward by the moment, despite the beer goggles. Actually if anyone was wearing beer goggles it was now him, his entire face smelled like beer. Some of it dripped off his chin.

“I’ll go take a shower,” Junmyeon said, and moved his short legs to the door. Kris, sensing the inadequacy of his previous apology, blocked him. Junmyeon moved left, and he moved right. This continued for a while. “Ergh,” Junmyeon said, finally, and in an executive and very drunk decision, Kris leaned down and licked the small teardrop of beer clinging to the tip of Junmyeon’s nose.

They ended up in the shower together, clothes still on. None of it made sense, but as Kris wrapped his hand around Junmyeon’s hard, impressive cock, he couldn’t bring himself to care.

“You’re right,” Junmyeon said now, reddening as he picked up his clicker. “I think we have.”

4

Junmyeon liked to think that the past decade since graduation had hardened him, groomed him into a composed and well-spoken man, but there were downsides to being a top dog, too. His entire back was tied up in knots. Some nights he woke up clutching his foot and grimacing through a pulled muscle. “You are an old man,” chided Kyungsoo, kneading his fleshy hands into Junmyeon’s shoulders. It hurt like a mother-mothertrucker, but Junmyeon knew of embracing pain. Of waiting for the good to come later. In some ways he would’ve been the perfect sexual partner for Zitao.

“Come to my drawing class,” Kyungsoo suggested, hopping off Junmyeon to wash his hands in the kitchen sink. “I’m allowed to bring a guest. It’ll be therapeutic.”

Nothing about drawing a naked and nubile man standing on a milk crate with his biological sword unsheathed was therapeutic. In fact, it was terrifying, Junmyeon realized, as cold sweat seeped from his hand to the pencil clutched in it and slid into the pad of paper underneath. The male model was a mess of black hair and evenly tan skin. His stomach creased into a well-defined six-pack, which quivered with his every breath. Junmyeon was decidedly admiring his abdominals rather than the other thing. In the meantime his pants grew tighter and tighter. His pig-in-a-blanket felt even more blanketed than usual.

“Hey,” Kyungsoo said afterwards. “This is my friend Jongin. Jongin, meet Junmyeon-hyung.”

Jongin had put on a tank and jeans. “Hey,” he said to Junmyeon with an engaging smile. “Do you want to get a drink?”

One drink turned into seven. Kyungsoo excused himself after the second, rushing off to his hapkido class. Jongin slid a stool over to graze his lips against Junmyeon’s ear. “I know you want it.” He paused before specifying, “My six-pack. I caught you staring at it the whole time.”

Junmyeon nodded his sleepy eyes. He did; he wanted it so bad.

The theme to Jongin’s apartment was minimalist. He didn’t even have a bed, just a makeshift pile of blankets on the floor. “I moved in a few months ago, but I don’t know.” He trailed off, staring at Junmyeon. “I’m waiting for a sign to stay.”

“Ah,” said Junmyeon, before spinning in a circle and falling on the pile of blankets in question. He had completely ceded control over his motor skills.

In the morning Jongin was naked again, making breakfast in the kitchen. Junmyeon winked open an eye and was instantly wide awake.

“Sunnyside up?” Jongin called from the other side of the kitchen island. It was like a nude scene in an Austin Powers movie, every potted plant serving as a coverup for the Mike Myers’ private jewels.

“Up?” Junmyeon repeated, looking down. Not exactly. Half-mast, to be accurate. He pulled the blanket over his lap and said, “Yes, please.”

5

Most of their close friends knew about the two-year on-again off-again relationship Jongin and Kyungsoo had during the most tumultuous time of that initial post-university era, before Jongin learned to embrace the art of selling his body and Kyungsoo to hold his hand through the ensuing moral crises and later, to help him sell it. Jongin had Kyungsoo to point out things like, “Your abs are uneven,” and watch him do bicycle crunches on his bedroom floor, offering a blowjob for every extra set of fifty. Kyungsoo had studied psych and knew all about incentives and rewards. Jongin hit two hundred and slowly came apart in Kyungsoo’s mouth.

Not many people knew about the third person in their relationship. “This one time,” Chanyeol liked to bring up at casual dinner parties, “I had a threesome.” And then he’d point smugly at Jongin and Kyungsoo across the table, who would both reach for their wine glasses at the same time.

Chanyeol was being generous, because by his definition it hadn’t been just one time. In fact for a while he had constantly been having threesomes with the two of them, like at least once a week. He’d come back to their apartment after a long day at the post office and eat three servings of Kyungsoo’s home cooking-“could be better, a little on the dry side” was his muffled critique as he shoveled strips of braised beef into his mouth-watch some boring TV with them on the couch until eleven, then yawn, stretch, announce he was heading back to his place. Around this time was when Jongin would start smiling and Kyungsoo wiggling his eyebrows back, as Chanyeol gathered his stuff and shuffled towards the door. He made a quick detour to the bathroom. When he rushed back into their living room to say one last goodbye, Jongin had removed his pants and Kyungsoo’s head was hovering over his already-erect cock.

“Wait,” Chanyeol said, holding up a hand and dropping his coat and bag in the process. “No one told me we were doing this.”

“I thought you were leav-“ Kyungsoo started saying, but Chanyeol was already pulling down his own jeans. He couldn’t get out of them fast enough.

That was how Jongin’s hand would grudgingly end up around Chanyeol’s dick, stroking him with a raised pinky while rolling his eyes at Kyungsoo as loudly as he could without saying anything. Kyungsoo, of course, couldn’t see much beyond Jongin’s cock going in and out of his own mouth.

Sometimes this led to accidental sleepovers, and Chanyeol would insist on big-spooning the both of them with Kyungsoo in the middle. “Fuck off,” Jongin snarled. “I’m not being the littlest spoon,” but then Kyungsoo would gang up against him as well. “You’re totally the littlest spoon, little spoon,” he said, grinning with all his gums on display. When he put it like that, Jongin couldn’t really resist. Chanyeol couldn’t either, and he’d hug Kyungsoo closer from behind, pretending they were the north and south poles of two very differently-sized magnets. One was a fun eraser stub and the other a graceful ruler. So perfect. His friends were the best. He closed his eyes and was asleep before he could notice that one of his friends had flipped onto his other side and begun dirty making-out with other, his foot hooking over the back of Kyungsoo’s calf and subtly kicking one of Chanyeol’s legs off the bed.

“And then, get this, I woke up on the floor,” was how Chanyeol liked to end his story, before waiting for the slow clap. Sometimes it came, sometimes it didn’t. You couldn’t win ‘em all. He liked to aim for a 30-70 ratio. The humor lay in the irony of it all-the star of the threesome, the dude with the moneyshot, opening his eyes the next morning to find himself with his naked back against the cold, hard floor. The contrast of the situation versus his true importance. Get it?

“I don’t think ‘moneyshot’ means what you think it means,” Kyungsoo said, slowly.

In the end nobody took the Kyungsoo-Jongin breakup worse than Chanyeol himself. “But we were having so much fun!” he shouted, reddening with the vigor of his disbelief. Jongin opened his mouth, but Kyungsoo placed a hand over his arm. “Yeah,” Kyungsoo agreed gently. “We were. But now we can have fun by ourselves. You can, too, Chanyeol.”

Chanyeol insisted on one last sleepover, this time with him in the middle. Jongin grumbled as he folded again into the position of the littlest spoon. Kyungsoo wasn’t big enough to warm up all of Chanyeol, leaving his legs high and dry, but he knew this was the last time they could do this, all three of them, and he choked back a sentimental sob. He wanted to keep this memory forever, into the later years of combovers and erectile dysfunction, when he became too old for things like threesomes with best friends.

6

The week of his fifth subway mugging the attractive doctor at the hospital put down his clipboard and suggested, “Have you thought of taking self-defense classes?”

Jongdae pulled down his sleeve to hide the rapidly purpling bruise from where his assailant had clutched before tearing away his satchel. It didn’t hurt that badly, compared to some of the other times. His roommate blamed his guileless smile. “You look as gullible as a baby about to get his candy swiped,” Junmyeon chastised, and Jongdae was captivated by the circle of dancing golden orbs reflected in his eyes. A few months ago they’d bought a bunch of scented candles at the dollar store with Kyungsoo and Junmyeon finally decided to whip them out for the night, lighting a prayer circle around their dinner as if in repentance for murdering the delicious cow now gracing their plates. When Junmyeon cut up a strip of very rare beef and chewed it in his mouth, some of the bloody juices ran over his lower lip. He looked possessed. Jongdae thought he was breathtaking.

“Self-defense classes,” Jongdae repeated now, as an image of ahjummas pounding a dirty blow-up doll floated into view. The doctor nodded and wrote down an address on his prescription pad.

Happy Hippos Hapkido was actually a dojo for the students of the local elementary school, the mascot of their baseball team none other than the fat herbivorous land mammal. Jongdae paused over the banner covering the door of the second-floor studio. Someone had turned the two “p”s into nostrils and traced out the rudimentary shape of a hippo head around them. It was lightly crosshatched in with gray crayon.

The sabumnim was a small boyish-looking man with a thin line for a mouth. He was in the middle of demonstrating an inverse wrist lock on his apprentice, tall and floppy, with ears that protruded from his head like coffee mug handles, when Jongdae crept into the room and situated himself behind a row of ten-year-old girls. The apprentice’s face twisted into a grimace as his wrist snapped in the instructor’s grip. The sabumnim grinned, then narrowed his eyes. In another quirk of his hand the helper found himself on the floor, clutching his back.

It didn’t seem like they’d practiced this routine before. The ears of the apprentice turned a dark pink as he struggled to maintain a bright smile in front of the kids. “I’ll teach you guys that another day. When you’re all grown up,” said the sabumnim, dusting off his hands.

A chorus of Oohs sounded around the room. Jongdae found himself joining in. One hand shot up from the front row. “I’m turning eleven next week!” shrieked a little girl in pigtails.

The sabumnim coughed out an awkward laugh. The fact that he didn’t seem accustomed to the attention from his fanclub endeared him to Jongdae just a tiny bit.

“I’m not sure this is the right class for you,” he said to Jongdae later, after the kids had filtered out of the room. “You’re a little larger than the rest.”

“Not by much, though,” Jongdae joked. He found that he was nervous, which hadn’t happened since the last time he confessed to Junmyeon. “Same as you.”

“Same as me,” said the sabumnim, and let slip a hesitant smile. “I’m Byun Baekhyun.”

Baekhyun brought up the notion of private lessons. “If this is what the doctor prescribed…” he trailed off. Jongdae nodded vigorously.

Over the next week he gained another dozen bruises over his body.

“These kind of look like fingerprints,” Junmyeon marveled, pressing down on one particularly dark indentation on his calf. Jongdae had just gotten out of the shower and his skin was still tingling from the heat. An hour ago Baekhyun had wrestled him to the floor in a move that didn’t exactly seem tailored for a self-defense class. He breathed heavily into Jongdae’s ear, his nose nuzzling his cheek. Jongdae thought of turning his head, of puppeteering them into an accidental kiss. He didn’t have to. Half a heartbeat later Baekhyun was straddling him, sucking desperately on his lower lip. Jongdae tugged at the black sash fastened around his waist and watched the well-composed sabumnim unravel in his hands.

Junmyeon’s hand was still on his calf. For once it felt like nothing more than some platonic skinship between two good buddies.

7

Within a month of settling into his new apartment in Seoul, Yixing almost robbed someone on his crowded morning commute. The reality was he’d been reaching for his wallet but had found someone else’s instead, and then realized he was digging around in the wrong messenger bag. What? They were both brown and leathery. The owner of the other bag looked up. His face slowly shaded with understanding, and Yixing’s with horror that he was actually misunderstanding. “No, wait-“ he tried, but he’d only just cracked open his Korean language textbook a few days prior and fallen asleep before he could progress past the first chapter. Numbers were so tiring.

Luckily Kim Jongdae was a nice man who seemed to understand Yixing’s hurried protests. “I took a year of Chinese,” he said, smiling. They’d gotten off at the same stop. It was practically a romantic comedy. “Don’t worry about it, I’ve been mugged so many times I barely process it anymore.”

Yixing said, “That is sad,” in Chinese. Jongdae said, “Yes,” and made a sad face. They shared a laugh. Jongdae coyly suggested Chinese lessons in exchange for the trauma Yixing could’ve caused him but didn’t.

Yixing was on his way to their third coffeeshop date when he saw a familiar but also unfamiliar side profile hunched over the glass of a pet store. No way, he thought, and the pain in his chest felt like a dozen simultaneous paper cuts. Small, insignificant, not enough to call an ambulance but still it hurt all the same. “Hey,” he said.

Lu Han tore himself away from the puppy with visible difficulty. His eyes widened when he saw Yixing. “Whoa. You’re-”

“You did your jaw,” Yixing said.

“Don’t start with me,” Lu Han warned, but he was pulling Yixing into a hug, and the words got sort of lost in between his neck and his ear.

Yixing texted a quick sorry to Jongdae. Every character was a typo. His mind was somewhere else, on the way Lu Han maintained a careful two steps between them as they navigated to his favorite lunch place in the neighborhood. He talked about it like he’d already been bathed in Seoul, seen its dingiest and still decided to stay. Yixing shook his head. It’d been almost two years. Bitterness didn't deserve such a long shelf life.

“How’s your job?” Yixing asked when they were seated. Lu Han smoothed the napkin over his lap and grinned, launching into sordid insider exclusives on the entertainment industry.

Twenty-something months ago Yixing had said, meaning to wound, “You’re quitting your life to try and become the manager of a Korean boyband,” and Lu Han had turned his head like he didn’t want Yixing to see him cry. But he wasn’t crying. Neither of them did that with the other, the crying thing. Neither of them was okay with being so visibly soft.

“You say it like we’re never going to see each other again,” Lu Han said, and that was when it sunk in, that maybe they never would. They’d been going out for a year without putting a label on what they were doing. At first it was just two friends who found themselves finishing each other’s sentences without trying, like an unintentional party gimmick. “Shit, we did-“ “-it again.” They laughed breathlessly on the floor of Lu Han’s crowded one-bedroom, and before Yixing knew it, Lu Han’s face had appeared over his like a wish he’d never dared admit to himself. “Shh,” Lu Han said before he kissed Yixing. There was no one to tell. He kissed him again, and Yixing felt it in his bones, that he could do this forever and still want to do it again.

Lunch was good. Lu Han picked up the bill. There was the minutest of minute pauses where they stared at each other just before Lu Han cleared his throat and said, “We should do this again.” He didn’t specify what, but Yixing nodded, said, “Yeah, definitely.”

On the way home he texted another sorry to Jongdae, this time mockingly formal, with honorifics. Jongdae sent back a smiley face, saying it was fine.

He was in the middle of composing another text when his phone lit up with an incoming message. “I” was all it read.

“I”

He looked at it again. The number had somehow been programmed into his phone as “my best friend.”

“missed,” he wrote back, hands shaking.

The next one came within seconds. “you.”

“me”

“too.”

There was a long silence that Yixing didn’t know how to fill. It was his turn, but he’d run out of words. He wasn’t prepared. His fingers hovered over the keypad. Under them his phone began vibrating.

“I meant us,” Lu Han blurted out. “I want to do us again. There’s a reason I never said goodbye. It was a dick move. I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m so sorry. If you want to. I hacked into your phone. If you want to, Yixing, I’d-“

“Tell me how to not,” Yixing said. “How to not want to. Seriously, tell me and I’d do it in a heartbeat. Instantly stop all the wanting.” He cut off, realizing with mild terror that he was already sobbing.

Lu Han was quiet. “Does this mean-“

“Yeah,” Yixing said. “What it’s always meant.”