about the road, for back_hug
Title: about the road
Recipient: back_hug
Pairing: mino/taehyun/jinwoo | taehyun/seungyoon, mino/jinwoo, mino/taehyun, onesided jinwoo/seunghoon
Rating: nc17
Warnings: sexual themes, depictions of sex, alcohol, kind of infidelity? discrepancies in s.k. geography/culture.
Summary: two best friends take on a cross-country road trip, pick up a stray four hours in, and have a little carefree summer fun.
Notes: somehow i struggled a lot with your prompts? my attempt at happy ot5 summer road trip; sorry, but it’s not…it. blame the movie i watched when i got the idea. also let’s pretend korea is a little more like north america in some aspects. unbeta’d and rushed sorry again…this was the better of the two i wrote…i hope u don’t hate it at least. sorry!
.i.
“Promise me you won’t fuck anyone else when I’m gone?” Seungyoon asks. “In fact, don’t even jerk off without calling me first.”
Taehyun laughs, holding his legs tighter towards his chest. This is their third time fucking since he offered to help Seungyoon pack for his summer abroad in Europe. He needs a smoke. He hasn’t eaten in hours, hasn’t slept for days.
“I promise,” he moans into Seungyoon’s ear, canting his hips forward, trying to get Seungyoon to come so he can roll over and sleep for the next forty-eight hours.
“You promise what?” He slams into Taehyun harder than before, gripping his hips harder than before, like the possessive bastard he is. Taehyun’s eyes roll back, or maybe they just close, he can’t tell.
“I promise I’ll only fuck guys within the city.”
“Taehyun…” He’s being a little dramatic. Three months apart isn’t that big of a deal. They’ll see each other again in the fall, in music theory or whatever elective they both signed up for. They’re both in college. Young. Just passed the milestone of being able to drink legally in America. Seungyoon treats everything like he’s eighty-three and has been to war and back. It’s really not that serious. They aren’t dating.
“I won’t fuck any strangers.”
Seungyoon groans, flipping Taehyun over on his stomach. “What if I fuck someone else?” he asks. It sounds like a threat, and Taehyun knows it’s empty.
“You won’t.”
Seungyoon chuckles. Taehyun hates the sound of it right now. “Touché.”
“Don’t fuck any French girls.”
“I thought you said I won’t fuck anyone?”
“Yeah, but if you did, I wouldn’t know. Unless you tell me, because let’s face it, you’d tell me eventually.”
Seungyoon’s a shit liar and he comes with Taehyun’s name falling from his lips like a prayer. He starts kissing down Taehyun’s back, saying his I love yous. Taehyun falls asleep, thinking about how he’s never said it back.
.ii.
Minho’s cousin Gunhee is a bubbly son-of-a-bitch.
“Taehyun, right? Minho’s told me jack shit about you, but welcome to my humble abode.”
Humble is an accurate depiction in his case. The place is a total dump, like most off-campus dormitories are, but somehow Gunhee makes it even worse. It smells like a combination of the inside of a brothel and leftover black-bean noodles in the living room, but he lets Taehyun sit on the couch and light a cigarette with the patio door cracked, so he can’t complain.
Gunhee calls himself sharpgun, like a douchebag, and grows weed in a laboratory like the botanical engineer he’s studying to be. He dresses exactly like an adult fan of the teenage mutant ninja turtles would and Minho sees nothing wrong with it.
“Danah told me you were beach hopping this summer. Wish I could join you, but I’m taking summer classes starting next week.”
“What a shame.” It’s sarcastic, and Minho shoves him on the shoulder roughly. Gunhee doesn’t even notice his attitude, apparently, and slaps Taehyun on the back good-naturedly. It must be a Song family thing, he thinks, because Minho’s kindness and inescapable sociability are the reasons they became friends in the first place.
“So, you want to borrow my car. No problem. But first, I need something in exchange.”
Taehyun snorts. “If you’re asking me to have sex with you, I refuse.” He means it as a joke, so he’s not that offended when both Minho and Gunhee erupt in laughter.
“Dude, you’re fucking conceited,” Gunhee comments. “I don’t want you, at all. And plus I abide by the bro code. If Minho calls dibs, I back off, and vice versa.”
“We aren’t-” Taehyun starts. “Minho’s my best friend.”
Minho sniggers. “That means nothing to him. He’s fucking his best friend.” Taehyun rolls his eyes, toeing away fallen ash on the carpet with the tops of his new shoes. What smoker doesn’t keep an ashtray in their house? Obviously one that doesn’t mind sacrificing the carpet, he thinks wryly.
“So, what’s the favor?” Taehyun makes a show of checking the time, as if he has nothing better to do with his time than follow Minho around.
Gunhee smiles. It reminds Taehyun of a shark. “Just kidding! There’s no favor. Just return my car in one piece.”
.iii.
The first time Kim Jinwoo leaves Imja-do, he’s around thirteen, going on a school trip to Gwangju.
He can’t remember what the trip was for since he got lost for over three hours and wandered so far he ended up in a different neighborhood. That’s how he ended up meeting Seunghoon; the quick-tongued boy with a Gyeongsang accent so thick, Jinwoo hadn’t the slightest idea what he was saying. Somewhere between resorting to awkward conversation in a sad imitation of Seoul-speech and flagging down trusted adults to steer Jinwoo back to his group, they had exchanged numbers and cyworld pages with a promise to keep in contact.
“Hey pretty boy,” Seunghoon says over the phone, the nickname sounding just as aggravatingly condescending to Jinwoo as it did when they first met, that day in Gwangju. “Don’t miss your bus. Don’t follow strange men home. Don’t eat in weird places!”
“Sure thing, mom.”
The thing is, Jinwoo has never been outside of Jeolla-do. His first attempt at heading to Seoul to pursue his lifelong dream of being literally anything but being a fisherman, or a tractor driver picking leeks with the elderly widows of their village, was met with such determined opposition that the resistance shook his own resolve. He hadn’t even made it off the ferry that day.
“I’ll meet you at the bus terminal when you get here. If I don’t hear from you in the next five hours, I’ll assume you’ve been murdered and your organs sold on the black market.”
Jinwoo does that thing where he crushes the phone between his ear and shoulder, pressing a few buttons, mostly laughing obnoxiously into the receiver, wondering if it’ll feel the same in person.
.iv.
Taehyun doesn’t get to stretch until they stop a guesthouse in north Gwangju.
Gunhee’s car is a customized version of a classic vintage BMW; it’s black and boxy and most importantly, cramped. There’s a sob story attached to it that Taehyun failed to hide his surprise at hearing. For all of Minho and Gunhee’s extroverted sameness, they had a wealth of differences related to their upbringing. Gunhee’s lazy boy carefree attitude was a smoke screen for the vulnerable hard-working momma’s boy that lied under the surface of his sly smile.
Minho is much more transparent.
“So, still dating Seungyoon?” He dumps the entire contents of his suitcase on the floor of the guestroom; a couple of toiletries skid across it, hitting Taehyun’s feet. The two-in-one shampoo-conditioner set looks suspiciously like the exact bottle he lost when they went to Japan last winter, but they hadn’t shared the same room then, so he’s probably mistaken.
“Yeah, if you can even call it that.”
Minho grins. Taehyun can feel the twitch of his own lips, curses the contagious effect of Minho’s smile. Whenever they get together, they talk about their love lives in the traditional macho male bonding way. How great the sex was, the level of emotional distance relative to the length and intensity of the sex. It’s the worst kind of pissing contest, comparing conquests with Minho.
He brags every chance he gets, whether it’s a guy or girl, it doesn’t matter. Taehyun listens impassively when he gets to talking about how great the female anatomy is, but he can’t help the way his eyes follow the way Minho forms words around how he fucked some guy he met in Hongdae, how it feels when he doesn’t have to hold back. During those times Taehyun has to cross his legs, grab his phone like he’s busy texting friends they both know he doesn’t have, all while ignoring the way his throat goes dry at the imagery. A simple copy and paste into another dimension and Taehyun might know firsthand how it feels to be fucked by Minho.
“I never pegged you as the type to let a man get a leg over you.” Minho’s grin is gone, replaced by the closest equivalent of serious curiosity.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” He’ll be damned if he has to explain to Minho his preference for being stretched wide open on the dick of the day. Minho lives for making fun of Taehyun’s other, more generic hobbies. Sexual preferences are sensitive things.
“I don’t know either,” Minho confesses. “Back when we were just two people that had one class together, I got a taste of your anger. I can’t even remember what you were so pissed at me about, but I saw you next at a party and before I could even speak-”
“I shoved you face first into a door and told you to go fuck yourself,” Taehyun recalls. “You called me a bitch. We were shitfaced too, or at least I was, and we wouldn’t stop fighting until someone kicked us out.”
Minho rubs along his jaw, phantom pain from the memory. “You beat my ass. After I recovered from the shock of someone so skinny bruising my jaw, I destroyed you.” He snorts, shaking his head at something only he knows. “I thought about it once. You.”
Taehyun releases all the air in his lungs in one swift whoosh. He has a fleeting thought to ask Minho to elaborate, but he’s not sure he should. Nam Taehyun has developed a particular skillset since befriending Minho. One of them is keeping pace with quick changes in subject matter and another is understanding a sense of humor that rivals most sex-crazed teenaged boys.
Minho looks up, some kind of expectation lurking behind his smirk. “It’s bad enough I fantasized about someone’s dick up my ass, but it was your dick in particular. And then you started dating Seungyoon, who’d never take it up the ass, so I settled for the regular me fucking you imagery.”
He shrugs, like he’s commenting on the weather, or falling prices at the stock market, or the different ways he’d imagined them fucking, apparently.
The sound of a crash just outside the door followed by a pained apology and a flurry of movement snaps Taehyun out of the dangerous place his mind travels to when Minho is involved. He shouldn’t be surprised, really, Minho’s head is half-sex, half-filial piety. Taehyun isn’t truly the conceited person many believe him to be, but he knows people tend to sexualize him more because of the way he looks, and not some inherent captivating personality he has.
Minho has the attention span of a housefly. Just two minutes after their verbal foreplay and he’s up and putting on his jacket. Taehyun would normally follow, but he’s tired. For more reasons than one, he just curls up on the side of the bed facing the wall and sleeps.
.v.
Jinwoo manages to miss three buses in two hours.
It’s practically impossible confuse bus schedules to the extent Jinwoo has, but after falling asleep at the terminal and waking up to his bus as a square in the distance, he figures he should just wait until the morning instead of spending the next twenty minutes praying the next bus won’t leave him like the others.
He can’t remember where the nearest sauna is, so he decides to walk in the direction of the guesthouses he passed by earlier in the day. There’s one particular hanok that looks inviting enough. The sign out front says the price is 60,000 won a night, which would be true for him if not for the woman running it giving him a considerable discount on account of his pitiful eyes.
He struggles with unknotting his shoelaces at the front entrance. He backs into a shelf while trying to yank his foot free and the force of his weight pushing the shelf causes the contents to slide and fall to the ground, more noise than damage. He immediately sends his apology into the house, hoping he hasn’t woken anyone up.
The woman that took Jinwoo’s bag and 30,000 won comes around the corner in a panic.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Nothing’s broken.”
She visibly deflates, knocking her elbow into his ribs none too gently. “Bunch of kids coming here in the middle of the night. It means trouble every time. I ought to charge you double.”
Jinwoo’s first instinct is to argue that he’s not a kid. He’s twenty-five; a century plus in dog years. But he can’t argue with the assumption given the circumstances. The sound of sliding doors breaks his train of thought.
He looks up into a pair of open brown eyes, belonging to a handsome face with dark hair hidden partially by a gray knit beanie, broad shoulders and skin quite kissed by the sun. Jinwoo recognizes this moment from movies. The two leads meet eyes across the room and the attraction is instantaneous. Of course, he can only say for certain that it is the case for him.
Also in movies, the frozen limbs and dry mouth when tall dark and handsome stands a foot away, mouth stretched in a grin, eyes curious.
“Huh?” Jinwoo asks intelligently.
Handsome laughs. “I didn’t say anything yet.” Seoulite, Jinwoo thinks, judging by the tone. It feels like a step closer to everything he’s ever wanted, just listening to him speak.
“Oh.” Jinwoo thinks about something to say while they stand paralyzed in the hall. The exhaustion bleeds out through the soles of his feet as anxiety takes a hold of him. He’s a quiet type. Indoors and buried beneath blankets and books. He has all of two friends, both who have approached him in hopes of getting him to leave his shell. And Seunghoon, the friendship that came easy to him because there weren’t any expectations.
Handsome must notice the rusty gears clicking and groaning around in his head. He extends a hand, waits for Jinwoo to mirror the action. “I’m Minho,” he says.
“Jinwoo.”
And later when Minho asks about where he’s headed, Jinwoo talks about his lifelong dream of being literally anything but a fisherman, or a tractor driver, and the boy in Busan that’s waiting for him to call.
.vi.
“Uh, who is that and why is he in our car?”
A grin breaks across his face looking at Jinwoo stuffing his bags in the trunk of Gunhee’s car. Taehyun’s frown is pronounced and very clearly aimed at the mousy island boy with the big doe eyes that Minho clearly has a fixation with.
“He’s coming with us to Busan.”
“No,” Taehyun says definitively, “He’s not.”
Minho shrugs. “I already invited him. We’re all going the same way, might as well enjoy extra company.”
Taehyun gives him an incredulous stare for a full minute before his features smooth out and he points an accusatory finger right in his face. “I get it. He’s exactly your type. You want him.” He laughs, entirely humorlessly. Like a cat with mixed feelings towards being domesticated, Taehyun puts distance between them.
“Exactly,” he replies. There’s no point in denying the obvious, especially with someone like Taehyun. “So be a good best friend and give him shotgun.”
“Children sit in the back.”
“He’s three years older than you.”
“Fuck that. I sit in the front!” Taehyun practically stomps to the car. “I will not be cast aside because your dick needs petting!”
“It’s not just that!” Minho argues, following Taehyun before he can do something dramatic, or more dramatic than he’s already being. “We talked for a while last night. I think you’d like him. But not as much as I like him. Please just do this for me, Taehyun, best friend extraordinaire.”
Taehyun is stubborn and a professional grudge-holder, so Minho tacks on an exaggerated show of charms, which roughly translates to pouting and whining and lacing his fingers with Taehyun’s. Anything to get the cold, prickly exterior of Nam Taehyun to soften into at least a burlap sack-like texture.
It works.
.vii.
“So, are you two…” Jinwoo drops the end of the sentence, looking back and forth between Minho and Taehyun with meaning. The two hour drive to Jinju suddenly becomes a gateway for them to float back towards the conversation they started last night. It isn’t awkward between them like one might expect would happen between best friends after talking about latent sexual desire, but the atmosphere is definitely stretched taut with something electric.
“No, our dear Taehyun is in a serious monogamous relationship with a guy named Seungyoon.” Minho goes on to describe him as pretentious and fake deep, with a shitty taste in everything but the arts. He says it with one of his signature goofy grins of his. Taehyun knows more than anyone that Minho collects friends with an urgent sort of companionship that comes from a patterned experience of watching friends leave. That is to say, Minho has a friend in anyone and everyone, while Taehyun counts just the two.
Seungyoon and Minho were friends in the same way people were friends with their best friend’s distant older sibling. There was a familiarity there, but at the end of the day, you didn’t come over to hang out with the brooding older brother.
Jinwoo nods, stealing a glance at Minho when he thinks Taehyun isn’t looking. “Why didn’t Seungyoon come, then?”
“Study abroad in Europe,” Taehyun answers immediately. “And it’s not a serious relationship. We’re just, fooling around.”
“Exclusively, with each other,” Minho adds. “Seungyoon dates the people he has sex with, which includes Taehyun, whether he likes it or not.”
Taehyun scoffs, childishly kicking the back of the driver’s seat to watch Minho flinch. “We don’t date. Dating requires going out and spending time together. Without a mattress.” They promised not to fool around with anyone just last week, and Taehyun said it with the intention of abiding by it. He only recently decided to limit his sexual encounters to Seungyoon after their occasional fucks morphed into regular, everyday things.
“You’ve only had sex in beds? Amateurs.”
“Not everyone is used to your brand of athletic sex, Minho.”
“You guys could use some athletic sex. Both of you are built like branches. Seungyoon, mainly, but you’re a twig too.”
“Minho used to be chubby,” Taehyun stage-whispers to Jinwoo, leaning forward between the two front seats. “He compensates for it by being a sports freak and having a lot of rough, animalistic sex with numerous people every day.”
Jinwoo’s eyes sparkle naturally, like twenty-five year old eyes never do. His lips are shaped in that ideal pouty porn star way, and Taehyun understands why he’s there, sitting buckled up in the front seat like he’s never seen an endless road before. Looking at the slope of Jinwoo’s nose when he turns his head to listen, Taehyun would want to fuck him too.
They stare at each other for a while; Taehyun the predator to Jinwoo’s prey. He doesn’t know why his thoughts are running through scenarios right and left. Having sex with Minho, having sex with Jinwoo. It must be the summer heat.
“Lies,” Minho says, dragging Taehyun’s attention away from the possibilities of Jinwoo’s mouth. “I do not have sex with numerous people every day.”
“You don’t deny the rough, animalistic sex?” Jinwoo asks, cheekily. “You don’t seem like the type. Taehyun looks more like he’d be into that.”
Taehyun doesn’t have time to figure out how he feels about that implication.
“That’s where you’re wrong, young grasshopper.” Minho stretches his right arm over the back of Jinwoo’s seat, left hand gripping the wheel lazily. “Taehyun is delicate. Look at his small, wispy wrists. The tiny waist. The middle parted hair. So vanilla, so mild, our Taehyun.”
“Minho’s obsessed with being physically bigger than everyone he fucks. You can tell he got beat up a lot as a kid.”
Jinwoo laughs in series of short hiccups. It’s an odd sound you wouldn’t expect coming from someone with his face. It’s such an unattractive laugh, yet it doesn’t take away any of the desirability. Jinwoo just has that special thing.
They alternate between talking about school, Jinwoo’s string of bad breakups, their dreams and aspirations, and frank discussions of sex and relationships. Jinwoo, underneath his shyness and tendency to be quite scatterbrained, is sort of strange. He’s idealistic like Minho, but with a little bit of Taehyun’s romanticism. He thinks Jinwoo would fit well with them, back in Seoul, outside of the blithe spontaneous summer experience and into the normalcy of trying to navigate adulthood unscathed.
Taehyun thinks about Seungyoon, how he’d fit into their group, and then, with some sort of backwards clarity, he doesn’t think about him at all.
.viii.
They switch drivers somewhere between Haman and Gimhae.
Minho sleeps in the backseat while Taehyun tries to figure out how to escape the endless expanse of mountains and dirt roads. Jinwoo snores like a chainsaw most of the way there, which drives Taehyun insane, and makes him stop somewhere in Uichang-gu to end his suffering.
“Wake up, sleepyheads!” he honks the horn, effectively scaring Minho out of his sleep.
“Shit,” he exclaims, knocking his skull against the roof of the car trying to jump out of his skin. “Fucking hell.”
Jinwoo is tougher to wake. Taehyun lowers the passenger’s side window, watching Jinwoo’s head jerk sharply to the left to avoid falling out of the car. “Ugh, rude,” he mumbles. “I was having a good dream.”
Taehyun turns his head to ask Minho something, stopping short when he notices the obvious shape of his dick trying to escape his sweatpants. “Looks like you’re not the only one having good dreams.” He gestures meaningfully to Minho’s crotch when Jinwoo does nothing but blink unaware at the space above Taehyun’s shoulder.
“It must be the heat,” Minho tries. “And the small space.” He flushes, embarrassed, when Jinwoo continues to stare pointedly at his erection. “I’m not going to wank in the backseat, if that’s what you’re expecting.”
“Maybe you should.” Taehyun and Minho give Jinwoo matching stares of disbelief. Jinwoo stammers, seemingly catching up with what he just said. “I mean, you should take care of it here unless you want to walk down the street like that.” It’s terrible logic, but no one addresses it.
“Voyeur,” Taehyun accuses. “Fortunately for you, I think he’s into that.” Minho’s hand twitches at his hip, looking between Taehyun staring at him from the rearview, and Jinwoo’s attentive gaze. “Oh, you’re really thinking about it.”
“Keep your eyes closed and you won’t even notice.”
It’s easier said than done. Taehyun turns the key in the ignition, just to get some noise going, turns the radio to the first station that has a signal, and waits. He keeps one eye closed, the other squinting sideways at Jinwoo. He’s watching Minho shyly, eyes fluttering and mouth agape. Minho’s face and flushed chest are all that Taehyun can see without craning his neck. It’s almost enough, but not for the curiosity picking incessantly at his brain.
Taehyun has seen Minho naked before, has seen his dick swinging from the showers to his bedroom at the end of the hall when he forgot to bring a towel to the bathroom. Seeing it swollen and leaking between his palms is another thing entirely.
Taehyun’s throat clicks when he swallows and he gives up completely on being discreet. Minho’s the type to like an audience anyway. His pace is slower than Taehyun would have imagined from someone so fidgety, and he squirms, uses both of his hands to stroke himself, forehead creasing with concentration.
Some chart-topping hit from the nineties plays softly from the speakers. Minho moans as the chorus approaches, competing with the lead vocals, just as loud as Taehyun imagined Minho would be. His own dick makes itself known in his shorts, giving a mischievous twitch every time Minho fails to stifle a cry of pleasure. Jinwoo’s face is red, like lust, or the sunset over the Paldang Bridge. His fingers are toying with the hem of his pants like he’s waiting for the right time to shove his hand inside.
The clock jumps forward three minutes and Taehyun’s patience wears thin. “How the fuck are you not finished yet?”
“I don’t like rushing,” Minho says, voice like stone. “Some things take time.” Jinwoo laughs, breathlessly. Taehyun feels betrayed. “It might go a little faster if someone were to lend a hand.” He waggles his eyebrows like he isn’t sweating all over, like his eyes aren’t blown, desperate. Of course Minho would drag something like this out to get what he wants. Taehyun is about to say something sarcastic, his default when he’s trying to conceal himself, but he’s interrupted by Jinwoo climbing over the narrow space between the front and back seats to sit in Minho’s lap.
The surprise on Minho’s face gives Jinwoo pause. “What?” he asks, deer-in-headlights expression made worse with his eyes so dark, so opaque. Minho swallows, shakes his head, and lets his hands fall from his dick to press into Jinwoo’s sides.
“Just, wasn’t expecting you to.” Whatever Taehyun had been poised to say dies in his throat when Minho surges forward to kiss Jinwoo. Taehyun feels neglected immediately, and gets an odd feeling in his chest when Jinwoo starts kissing down Minho’s neck. Don’t forget about me, he thinks. Their best friend telepathy has always been spotty at best, so he’s a little surprised Minho reaches a hand out to pull on his shoulder.
“Hey,” he says. “Come here.”
Taehyun looks at the small space left in the backseat, mind working out the physics involved of three people fooling around in such a small car instead of two. Even then, Taehyun never had sex in a car, so he has no point of reference.
“Can I even fit?” Rhetorical question, since he climbs around Jinwoo anyway. He feels like a genius when he remembers that the front seats collapse, and suddenly there’s just enough room to make this work.
Minho reaches for Taehyun at the same time Jinwoo does. His face goes hot at the attention shifting towards him, but he’s oddly pleased; mostly horny. The disrobing is difficult. Taehyun presses his back into the door to make enough room to pull his shorts off without kicking anyone. Jinwoo pulls his shirt over his head but only gets his jeans down mid-thigh before rutting against Minho as best he can hunched over like he is.
Minho’s wearing one of those loose-fitting tanks with the sides cut out, so Jinwoo just yanks it to the side to get at one of his nipples. The radio is still on, cycling through advertisements. Jinwoo rearranges himself so that he’s facing Taehyun’s lap, ass level with Minho’s head.
“Can I-” Jinwoo finishes the rest of the question by wrapping his mouth around Taehyun, straightforward, no teasing. Taehyun gives Minho a helpless look, because, fuck it feels amazing, and fuck, Minho is watching him with two fingers sucked into his mouth like he’s the one kneeling between Taehyun’s legs instead.
“Slow down, Jinwoo,” Minho says, voice thickened with desire. “We don’t want him to blow his load yet.”
“Very funny,” Taehyun half-moans, half-drawls. Jinwoo pulls off slowly, like his mouth doesn’t want to leave the home it’s made around Taehyun’s length. They’re all damp and panting. The sun is starting to set but the temperature outside is much closer to hell than humid.
Minho leans over the passenger’s seat, fumbling around in the front for something. “Aha!” He returns with a condom and two travel-sized packets of lube courtesy of a convenience store, judging from the discarded bag he throws under the seat. Jinwoo situates himself so he’s carefully sandwiched between the two front seats with his ass hovering between Minho and Taehyun invitingly. Jinwoo doesn’t say much, but his body makes quite the statement.
“Minho?” Jinwoo asks, voice deliberately coy. Minho tosses Taehyun one of the packets of lube, carelessly ripping the other one open to quickly coat his fingers. They share a look, before Minho slides wet fingers between Jinwoo’s crack, testing his entrance with the tip of his middle.
Taehyun mirrors Minho’s actions, but with his own body. He likes the burn of the stretch, likes the feeling of the instinctual clenching of his walls like they’ve been waiting for this all day. His fingers are long enough to reach that little taste of ecstasy inside him, but he doesn’t want to take himself over the edge. Not when Minho has watered the seeds planted deep in the soil of Taehyun soul, because as fucked up as it is, Taehyun feels like this is where he belongs.
Jinwoo groans, the kind you make when someone knees you in the stomach, chest feeling like it’s collapsed in on itself. Minho is two fingers deep when Taehyun lifts his face from his shoulders, sweat slinking down Jinwoo’s pale back like a glass of ice water.
Taehyun and Minho share a look, and it’s just a matter of asking first. Jinwoo’s voice cracks, the sky fades to gray, Taehyun almost bursts into flames when he seats himself on Minho’s cock.
Jinwoo still has Minho’s fingers inside him, and Taehyun has his dick, like he’s wanted for a while. And Jinwoo whines, rocking back and stroking himself hard and fast. He loses it, cum splattering through his fingers and onto the gear shift. He slumps forward, changing the radio station with the crown of his head. They weren’t paying much attention before, but trot music has a way of cutting through one’s consciousness.
“My mom loves this song,” Minho remarks.
Taehyun rolls his eyes. “Don’t talk about your mom while we’re fucking in the back of your cousin’s car.”
His back is flat against the back of the passenger seat, weight being held up by Minho’s arms. One wraps around his waist, holding him close, while the other keeps his legs spread wide enough for Taehyun to feel whole again.
“I can’t find my shirt,” Jinwoo hums. “But that’s not a big deal right now. You’re probably sitting on it.” He climbs into the driver’s seat, naked, pulls napkins out of the sun visor, wipes down the defiled center console, whistling under his breath. He turns, watching Taehyun squirm on the leather seat beside him, reaching out to touch, almost tentatively.
Taehyun bites his lip, attempting to swallow back the embarrassing sounds he knows he makes when he’s close. Minho squeezes his jaw, shaking his head. “Let me hear you,” he says. Taehyun’s mouth falls open on a moan and he blushes when he sees the way they watch him. He’s so close. Just a little more-
Jinwoo drags a loose fist over Taehyun, thumb pressing into the slit on the way up, and he’s done for. Minho curses, canting his hips up one last time before he spills inside the condom, nails leaving marks on the inside of Taehyun’s thigh.
“I’m not looking Gunhee in the face when we hand over the keys,” Taehyun says. “This is all your fault, you can explain it yourself.”
“Don’t worry. We christened it.”
Jinwoo throws a set of cheap, sandpaper-thin napkins at Minho’s face. “Let’s find a bathhouse nearby. I smell like sex and suntan lotion.”
“Good thing we parked far enough away from foot traffic.” Taehyun fixes his damp hair with his unsoiled hand. “I would rather not be arrested for public indecency.”
Minho disposes of the condom and multiple napkins in the black plastic bag wedged under the seat. “Your little brother would get wind of it and find a way to replace you in the family registry. Danah would bail me out like the great sibling she is.”
“Jinwoo can cover for you so your landlord doesn’t use your place as a gambling spot.” Taehyun pauses. “In fact, Jinwoo can sleep on the futon in your studio and find some use for the pile of blank canvases you have collecting dust by the window.”
Minho tsks. “They’re not blank. It’s called, unfinished: a project in white.”
“To go along with your self-titled album, Song Minho: full of shit?” Taehyun laughs when Jinwoo giggles into his hands.
“Don’t think you’re funny just because Jinwoo laughs at your jokes.”
“I can say the same for you!”
“Children, don’t fight,” Jinwoo says with mock sternness. “There’s plenty of me to go around.”
By the time they redress and walk down the streets of Yongho-dong, it’s midnight and Busan is less than three hours away.
.ix.
Minho doesn’t like jumping the gun on things, but he really thinks he wouldn’t mind having Jinwoo follow them back to Seoul, maybe put some furniture in his studio and have Jinwoo stay there forever. Minho doesn’t believe in things like love at first sight or soulmates, or whatever. He has so much love to give everyone that he just can’t fathom loving only one person for eternity.
Two, however. Two seems possible.
He’s always been a little soft on Taehyun. But there’s something unique in the feeling he gets when Jinwoo laughs at all his jokes, like each one is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. And Taehyun was right, when he said Jinwoo was exactly Minho’s type.
It starts from the moment he meets eyes with Jinwoo, at the guesthouse in Gwangju. He’s a sucker for shy, quiet types, it seems. Jinwoo is shy in ways that Taehyun isn’t, and vice versa. Minho was born with a need to consistently socialize with someone else, whether through small talk, dirty talk, deep conversations or speaking in bodies. He just needed to be around people. He loved people.
Nam Taehyun hated people.
It took Minho ages to get Taehyun to stop picking fights. Taehyun found out the hard way that Minho just didn’t hate people. No matter how poorly he treated Minho, nothing changed. Minho would remain seated at their shared table in studio art, would buy Taehyun lunch whenever he caught him in line at the check-out. Minho didn’t take no for an answer when it came to being friends.
Jinwoo, he doesn’t hate people. People are as fundamentally important to Jinwoo as they are to Minho. Jinwoo doesn’t open up around other people, not unless he trusts that person to accept him completely.
It takes a few hours of talking overnight in Gwangju for Jinwoo to trust Minho.
“Are you in love with Seunghoon?” he asks Jinwoo when Taehyun is curled into a ball, sleeping comfortably in the soft blue cotton sauna clothes they were given when they walked in. Taehyun talks in his sleep, a habit Minho still finds cute, even after dealing with his nightmares, where he screams and whimpers, only stopping when he feels the weight of Minho’s body crushing his limbs. To this day Taehyun still believes that Minho is a cuddling freak.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” Minho says when Jinwoo doesn’t speak. He worries his bottom lip with his teeth, watching Minho in the dark.
“No, I don’t think I am. In love with Seunghoon,” Jinwoo confesses quietly. “I thought I was since we’d talk like we were dating sometimes. You know? Like, he’d tell me what he liked most about me out of nowhere, and I was happy.”
Minho nods, reaching out to trace lines up Jinwoo’s forearm. “How do you know you aren’t in love with him?”
Jinwoo’s face scrunches, like he’s tasting something sour for the first time. “I can’t explain how I know, but I can tell you when I knew.” Taehyun grunts and rolls a few centimeters away from their hushed conversation. Irritable even in his sleep. Jinwoo reaches a hand out to run his fingers through Minho’s hair. To anyone looking, it would seem like he’s fixing it.
“When you introduced yourself to me and offered to take me all the way to Busan. I swear I’ve never talked this much to a stranger before and I’ve never, I don’t do anything with strangers because I’m always so awkward around people I haven’t known my whole life.”
Minho can feel how grossly satisfied his smile is without even having to look in a mirror. “Aw. You like me.”
“You like me too,” Jinwoo replies, smug. “I heard you talking to Taehyun about me being your type.”
“It was never a secret. I’ve liked you from the start. You have the Song Minho stamp of approval.”
Jinwoo laughs, careful not to rouse Taehyun as he reaches over to smack Minho’s arm.
.x.
Seunghoon is entirely too sentimental for starters.
He falls a little in love with everyone he doesn’t immediately hate. Or maybe it’s not even love, but some weird form of nostalgic attachment.
He meets Jinwoo and is reminded of colors after rain. They’re twelve and thirteen, and they’re lost in Gwangju. Jinwoo’s looking up at him with eyes like little black lakes he could drown in if he wasn’t careful. He’s from Busan, he should know how to swim.
Jinwoo is water: constant, flowing, a major constituent of life. Seunghoon falls in love with that day in Gwangju, with the Jinwoo he met and the Jinwoo he knows now. His first love, the unforgettable scent of summer, the taste of sea salt caramel ice cream. He’s twenty-four, chasing the aftermath of a fading memory, the sound of a voice over the phone, hundreds of miles too far to touch.
“We’re like, twenty minutes away.” Seunghoon can hear the excitement in Jinwoo’s voice when he answers the phone.
“We?” he asks, catching the unfamiliar soft cadence of Seoul-speech arguing over directions. “We who?”
“I told you I missed the bus back in Gwangju,” Jinwoo says carefully. “I caught a ride with some really nice people and now the three of us are headed your way so please-don’t-be-mad-I-invited-them-to-meet-you.”
“Send me a proof shot that you aren’t being held at gunpoint right now and maybe I won’t be.”
Jinwoo cackles. Seunghoon looks forward to hearing it person. “Have more faith in my instincts. I’d know a serial killer if I saw one.”
“Say that again when you pull up to the driveway. I’ve been told I have killer looks.”
“I have witnesses,” Jinwoo declares, “You won’t get away with it.”
“Who says this all wasn’t a part of my plan to lure you into my lair and mount your head on my mantle, pretty boy?”
Jinwoo laughs, it echoes unnaturally and mixes with the sounds of another, deeper laugh. It’s quite apparent Jinwoo has him on speaker phone. “Glad to know you have such great fun planned, Seunghoon.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just hurry so we can turn pink and irritated trying to tan at the beach.” He thinks he hears a voice call him funny, before Jinwoo mumbles something he can’t make out.
“See you in a few, Hoon.”
The line dies with Seunghoon thinking of all the ways he can convince Jinwoo to stay.
.xi.
Seunghoon’s year old Chihuahua, nips at Jinwoo’s sandals when he bends down to pet her.
Seunghoon’s two-bedroom apartment, complete with a spectacular view of Haeundae’s nightscape, is bigger than Jinwoo expected. Minho and Taehyun are down at the beach, giving Jinwoo a moment to talk to Seunghoon alone before he joins them in typical summer vacation tourist activity.
The first thing he notices about Seunghoon, when they’re standing face to face, is that Seunghoon is tall. Not tall like Minho and Taehyun, but string bean tall, long arms and even longer legs. He’s broad, with the fat cheeked face Jinwoo is familiar with. It’s a little awkward for the first few minutes.
“Hey pretty boy,” Seunghoon cracks first. “Long time no see.” It’s almost the same as talking on the phone, except Seunghoon can catch everything on his face, and he’s watching him with a seriousness that never translates over the line.
“I know I was supposed to be here a long time ago, but you know me,” Jinwoo says, leaving the rest unfinished. “I kind of let myself get swept up in someone else’s vacation plans. They’re from Seoul.”
Seunghoon shook hands with Jinwoo’s travel buddies in the lobby. They seemed nice enough, but the one that held Jinwoo’s hand the entire time they talked about their trip raised a few questions in Seunghoon’s mind.
“You still want to move to Seoul?” he asks instead. Jinwoo lights up at the mention, retelling a story that Minho told him about the subway station, about Minho’s high school best friend Jihoon’s terrible perm and school MTs, and art colleges, and Taehyun’s weird roommate in cramped campus accommodations.
Seunghoon gives up.
.xii.
They stay in Busan for a week.
Taehyun spends most of his cash on buying clothes he probably already has in his closet in Seoul. Minho’s tan worsens, and he shows it off by constantly ripping his shirt off and comparing it to Taehyun’s pale blotchiness, or Jinwoo’s impregnable snow white skin defenses. Seunghoon warms up to Minho and Taehyun in the short time, and they even exchange numbers, like he did with Jinwoo years ago, promising to keep in contact.
They take a different route back to Seoul.
Taehyun gets a tattoo in Daegu, a banana peel on the inside of his wrist. Jinwoo clutches his stomach in laughter when Minho’s first reaction is to make gorilla sound effects while beating his chest. They stop at the former president’s birth home in Gumi, take dozens of pictures at places they figured Jang Woohyuk and Kim Taewoo would have been before they were famous. They eat sweet potato fries in Yeoju and visit King Sejong’s tomb site.
Taehyun calls Seungyoon when they stop at Taehyun’s childhood home in Hanam. There’s a seven hour and ten minute time difference from Seoul to Barcelona, but Seungyoon is awake and they talk about nothing important.
“Before you hang up and play soccer with bulls or whatever it is people in Barcelona do,” Taehyun says. “I want you know that me and Minho picked up a stray, an Imja island boy.”
“A child?” Seungyoon asks incredulously. “That’s illegal, Taehyun.”
Taehyun snorts. “He’s twenty-five, and if I’m being honest, we’ve had a lot of good not-so-wholesome fun the past two weeks.” There’s a pause, before Seungyoon speaks evenly.
“With the stray you picked up?”
“And Minho.”
“Hmm, seems like you fucked a stranger. Oh you cruel heartless bastard,” Seungyoon says flatly, giving Taehyun an awkward moment of silence before he continues. “Should I act surprised? I don’t know why you told me. You’ve never told me before.”
“Yeah.” Taehyun clears his throat. “But you know Minho, and I thought you’d want to know if it were Minho. And Jinwoo isn’t a one-time deal. He’s moving in with Minho.”
“Oh?”
“Jinwoo is Minho’s type down to the molecules. You’ll get it when you meet him.”
They hang up feeling the same they’ve always felt. Taehyun is oddly disappointed.
.xiii.
Kang Seungyoon is a horrible liar.
Almost as bad as Taehyun, who doesn’t lie to other people because he can’t understand them. They aren’t dating. Seungyoon is okay with that because he knows it’s true. And Seungyoon can’t lie, so he tells Taehyun, I belong to you. He implies Taehyun belongs to him too, but that he knows is a lie.
The paint dries and peels, and Seungyoon looks at the familiar walls, wondering when they were built, and who really controlled them. If they had met earlier, before Minho scaled the sides of the wall where the sun didn’t touch, where the foliage wrapped tight around the watchtower led many to their deaths, if they had met before then, Seungyoon is sure he would be the one to land perfectly on his feet at the other side of the untouched gates.
With Taehyun and Minho, they’re each other’s first choice. Seungyoon doesn’t mind because he understands how it feels to love the relationship you have with your best friend above anything else. He knows love is ridiculous and unfair and insane, really.
That doesn’t stop him from wanting it to work out in his favor.
.xiv.
They return Gunhee’s car after having it cleaned by professionals. Not that Jinwoo with a box of wet wipes and scented car tree fresheners wasn’t a good attempt.
In August, Minho fills every blank canvas in his studio with color. They stack up faster than student debt, and before long Minho starts selling them to art galleries, starts treating everyone he knows with the money he makes.
Jinwoo gets a job as a barista at the campus coffee shop. Taehyun stops by every Friday and waits until Jinwoo gets off work so they can walk to Minho’s together. Sometimes they lie together in Minho’s bed, making up songs in the darkness, too lazy to commit anything to paper.
Seungyoon returns a month later than he originally planned. His hair looks terrible and Taehyun refuses to kiss him until they have it fixed. Jinwoo and Seungyoon get along better than Taehyun expected. Soon, they all start gathering at Seunghoon’s apartment to study for midterms and have quiet four-person drinking parties.
Minho and Jinwoo fuck like rabbits, which annoys Taehyun to hell and back, after he decides he should properly learn to date Seungyoon. Date, the proper way. Date the way Minho and Jinwoo do when they leave Taehyun to sulk around with a new project. He’s a work in progress; still uncomfortable with being someone else’s and having someone else be his. Seungyoon is patient, but persistent. He does most of the work, honestly. Taehyun just gets to pick where he wants to eat and which day on the calendar should they celebrate things like anniversaries.
Instead, he picks the destination of the next summer vacation.
Recipient: back_hug
Pairing: mino/taehyun/jinwoo | taehyun/seungyoon, mino/jinwoo, mino/taehyun, onesided jinwoo/seunghoon
Rating: nc17
Warnings: sexual themes, depictions of sex, alcohol, kind of infidelity? discrepancies in s.k. geography/culture.
Summary: two best friends take on a cross-country road trip, pick up a stray four hours in, and have a little carefree summer fun.
Notes: somehow i struggled a lot with your prompts? my attempt at happy ot5 summer road trip; sorry, but it’s not…it. blame the movie i watched when i got the idea. also let’s pretend korea is a little more like north america in some aspects. unbeta’d and rushed sorry again…this was the better of the two i wrote…i hope u don’t hate it at least. sorry!
.i.
“Promise me you won’t fuck anyone else when I’m gone?” Seungyoon asks. “In fact, don’t even jerk off without calling me first.”
Taehyun laughs, holding his legs tighter towards his chest. This is their third time fucking since he offered to help Seungyoon pack for his summer abroad in Europe. He needs a smoke. He hasn’t eaten in hours, hasn’t slept for days.
“I promise,” he moans into Seungyoon’s ear, canting his hips forward, trying to get Seungyoon to come so he can roll over and sleep for the next forty-eight hours.
“You promise what?” He slams into Taehyun harder than before, gripping his hips harder than before, like the possessive bastard he is. Taehyun’s eyes roll back, or maybe they just close, he can’t tell.
“I promise I’ll only fuck guys within the city.”
“Taehyun…” He’s being a little dramatic. Three months apart isn’t that big of a deal. They’ll see each other again in the fall, in music theory or whatever elective they both signed up for. They’re both in college. Young. Just passed the milestone of being able to drink legally in America. Seungyoon treats everything like he’s eighty-three and has been to war and back. It’s really not that serious. They aren’t dating.
“I won’t fuck any strangers.”
Seungyoon groans, flipping Taehyun over on his stomach. “What if I fuck someone else?” he asks. It sounds like a threat, and Taehyun knows it’s empty.
“You won’t.”
Seungyoon chuckles. Taehyun hates the sound of it right now. “Touché.”
“Don’t fuck any French girls.”
“I thought you said I won’t fuck anyone?”
“Yeah, but if you did, I wouldn’t know. Unless you tell me, because let’s face it, you’d tell me eventually.”
Seungyoon’s a shit liar and he comes with Taehyun’s name falling from his lips like a prayer. He starts kissing down Taehyun’s back, saying his I love yous. Taehyun falls asleep, thinking about how he’s never said it back.
.ii.
Minho’s cousin Gunhee is a bubbly son-of-a-bitch.
“Taehyun, right? Minho’s told me jack shit about you, but welcome to my humble abode.”
Humble is an accurate depiction in his case. The place is a total dump, like most off-campus dormitories are, but somehow Gunhee makes it even worse. It smells like a combination of the inside of a brothel and leftover black-bean noodles in the living room, but he lets Taehyun sit on the couch and light a cigarette with the patio door cracked, so he can’t complain.
Gunhee calls himself sharpgun, like a douchebag, and grows weed in a laboratory like the botanical engineer he’s studying to be. He dresses exactly like an adult fan of the teenage mutant ninja turtles would and Minho sees nothing wrong with it.
“Danah told me you were beach hopping this summer. Wish I could join you, but I’m taking summer classes starting next week.”
“What a shame.” It’s sarcastic, and Minho shoves him on the shoulder roughly. Gunhee doesn’t even notice his attitude, apparently, and slaps Taehyun on the back good-naturedly. It must be a Song family thing, he thinks, because Minho’s kindness and inescapable sociability are the reasons they became friends in the first place.
“So, you want to borrow my car. No problem. But first, I need something in exchange.”
Taehyun snorts. “If you’re asking me to have sex with you, I refuse.” He means it as a joke, so he’s not that offended when both Minho and Gunhee erupt in laughter.
“Dude, you’re fucking conceited,” Gunhee comments. “I don’t want you, at all. And plus I abide by the bro code. If Minho calls dibs, I back off, and vice versa.”
“We aren’t-” Taehyun starts. “Minho’s my best friend.”
Minho sniggers. “That means nothing to him. He’s fucking his best friend.” Taehyun rolls his eyes, toeing away fallen ash on the carpet with the tops of his new shoes. What smoker doesn’t keep an ashtray in their house? Obviously one that doesn’t mind sacrificing the carpet, he thinks wryly.
“So, what’s the favor?” Taehyun makes a show of checking the time, as if he has nothing better to do with his time than follow Minho around.
Gunhee smiles. It reminds Taehyun of a shark. “Just kidding! There’s no favor. Just return my car in one piece.”
.iii.
The first time Kim Jinwoo leaves Imja-do, he’s around thirteen, going on a school trip to Gwangju.
He can’t remember what the trip was for since he got lost for over three hours and wandered so far he ended up in a different neighborhood. That’s how he ended up meeting Seunghoon; the quick-tongued boy with a Gyeongsang accent so thick, Jinwoo hadn’t the slightest idea what he was saying. Somewhere between resorting to awkward conversation in a sad imitation of Seoul-speech and flagging down trusted adults to steer Jinwoo back to his group, they had exchanged numbers and cyworld pages with a promise to keep in contact.
“Hey pretty boy,” Seunghoon says over the phone, the nickname sounding just as aggravatingly condescending to Jinwoo as it did when they first met, that day in Gwangju. “Don’t miss your bus. Don’t follow strange men home. Don’t eat in weird places!”
“Sure thing, mom.”
The thing is, Jinwoo has never been outside of Jeolla-do. His first attempt at heading to Seoul to pursue his lifelong dream of being literally anything but being a fisherman, or a tractor driver picking leeks with the elderly widows of their village, was met with such determined opposition that the resistance shook his own resolve. He hadn’t even made it off the ferry that day.
“I’ll meet you at the bus terminal when you get here. If I don’t hear from you in the next five hours, I’ll assume you’ve been murdered and your organs sold on the black market.”
Jinwoo does that thing where he crushes the phone between his ear and shoulder, pressing a few buttons, mostly laughing obnoxiously into the receiver, wondering if it’ll feel the same in person.
.iv.
Taehyun doesn’t get to stretch until they stop a guesthouse in north Gwangju.
Gunhee’s car is a customized version of a classic vintage BMW; it’s black and boxy and most importantly, cramped. There’s a sob story attached to it that Taehyun failed to hide his surprise at hearing. For all of Minho and Gunhee’s extroverted sameness, they had a wealth of differences related to their upbringing. Gunhee’s lazy boy carefree attitude was a smoke screen for the vulnerable hard-working momma’s boy that lied under the surface of his sly smile.
Minho is much more transparent.
“So, still dating Seungyoon?” He dumps the entire contents of his suitcase on the floor of the guestroom; a couple of toiletries skid across it, hitting Taehyun’s feet. The two-in-one shampoo-conditioner set looks suspiciously like the exact bottle he lost when they went to Japan last winter, but they hadn’t shared the same room then, so he’s probably mistaken.
“Yeah, if you can even call it that.”
Minho grins. Taehyun can feel the twitch of his own lips, curses the contagious effect of Minho’s smile. Whenever they get together, they talk about their love lives in the traditional macho male bonding way. How great the sex was, the level of emotional distance relative to the length and intensity of the sex. It’s the worst kind of pissing contest, comparing conquests with Minho.
He brags every chance he gets, whether it’s a guy or girl, it doesn’t matter. Taehyun listens impassively when he gets to talking about how great the female anatomy is, but he can’t help the way his eyes follow the way Minho forms words around how he fucked some guy he met in Hongdae, how it feels when he doesn’t have to hold back. During those times Taehyun has to cross his legs, grab his phone like he’s busy texting friends they both know he doesn’t have, all while ignoring the way his throat goes dry at the imagery. A simple copy and paste into another dimension and Taehyun might know firsthand how it feels to be fucked by Minho.
“I never pegged you as the type to let a man get a leg over you.” Minho’s grin is gone, replaced by the closest equivalent of serious curiosity.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” He’ll be damned if he has to explain to Minho his preference for being stretched wide open on the dick of the day. Minho lives for making fun of Taehyun’s other, more generic hobbies. Sexual preferences are sensitive things.
“I don’t know either,” Minho confesses. “Back when we were just two people that had one class together, I got a taste of your anger. I can’t even remember what you were so pissed at me about, but I saw you next at a party and before I could even speak-”
“I shoved you face first into a door and told you to go fuck yourself,” Taehyun recalls. “You called me a bitch. We were shitfaced too, or at least I was, and we wouldn’t stop fighting until someone kicked us out.”
Minho rubs along his jaw, phantom pain from the memory. “You beat my ass. After I recovered from the shock of someone so skinny bruising my jaw, I destroyed you.” He snorts, shaking his head at something only he knows. “I thought about it once. You.”
Taehyun releases all the air in his lungs in one swift whoosh. He has a fleeting thought to ask Minho to elaborate, but he’s not sure he should. Nam Taehyun has developed a particular skillset since befriending Minho. One of them is keeping pace with quick changes in subject matter and another is understanding a sense of humor that rivals most sex-crazed teenaged boys.
Minho looks up, some kind of expectation lurking behind his smirk. “It’s bad enough I fantasized about someone’s dick up my ass, but it was your dick in particular. And then you started dating Seungyoon, who’d never take it up the ass, so I settled for the regular me fucking you imagery.”
He shrugs, like he’s commenting on the weather, or falling prices at the stock market, or the different ways he’d imagined them fucking, apparently.
The sound of a crash just outside the door followed by a pained apology and a flurry of movement snaps Taehyun out of the dangerous place his mind travels to when Minho is involved. He shouldn’t be surprised, really, Minho’s head is half-sex, half-filial piety. Taehyun isn’t truly the conceited person many believe him to be, but he knows people tend to sexualize him more because of the way he looks, and not some inherent captivating personality he has.
Minho has the attention span of a housefly. Just two minutes after their verbal foreplay and he’s up and putting on his jacket. Taehyun would normally follow, but he’s tired. For more reasons than one, he just curls up on the side of the bed facing the wall and sleeps.
.v.
Jinwoo manages to miss three buses in two hours.
It’s practically impossible confuse bus schedules to the extent Jinwoo has, but after falling asleep at the terminal and waking up to his bus as a square in the distance, he figures he should just wait until the morning instead of spending the next twenty minutes praying the next bus won’t leave him like the others.
He can’t remember where the nearest sauna is, so he decides to walk in the direction of the guesthouses he passed by earlier in the day. There’s one particular hanok that looks inviting enough. The sign out front says the price is 60,000 won a night, which would be true for him if not for the woman running it giving him a considerable discount on account of his pitiful eyes.
He struggles with unknotting his shoelaces at the front entrance. He backs into a shelf while trying to yank his foot free and the force of his weight pushing the shelf causes the contents to slide and fall to the ground, more noise than damage. He immediately sends his apology into the house, hoping he hasn’t woken anyone up.
The woman that took Jinwoo’s bag and 30,000 won comes around the corner in a panic.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Nothing’s broken.”
She visibly deflates, knocking her elbow into his ribs none too gently. “Bunch of kids coming here in the middle of the night. It means trouble every time. I ought to charge you double.”
Jinwoo’s first instinct is to argue that he’s not a kid. He’s twenty-five; a century plus in dog years. But he can’t argue with the assumption given the circumstances. The sound of sliding doors breaks his train of thought.
He looks up into a pair of open brown eyes, belonging to a handsome face with dark hair hidden partially by a gray knit beanie, broad shoulders and skin quite kissed by the sun. Jinwoo recognizes this moment from movies. The two leads meet eyes across the room and the attraction is instantaneous. Of course, he can only say for certain that it is the case for him.
Also in movies, the frozen limbs and dry mouth when tall dark and handsome stands a foot away, mouth stretched in a grin, eyes curious.
“Huh?” Jinwoo asks intelligently.
Handsome laughs. “I didn’t say anything yet.” Seoulite, Jinwoo thinks, judging by the tone. It feels like a step closer to everything he’s ever wanted, just listening to him speak.
“Oh.” Jinwoo thinks about something to say while they stand paralyzed in the hall. The exhaustion bleeds out through the soles of his feet as anxiety takes a hold of him. He’s a quiet type. Indoors and buried beneath blankets and books. He has all of two friends, both who have approached him in hopes of getting him to leave his shell. And Seunghoon, the friendship that came easy to him because there weren’t any expectations.
Handsome must notice the rusty gears clicking and groaning around in his head. He extends a hand, waits for Jinwoo to mirror the action. “I’m Minho,” he says.
“Jinwoo.”
And later when Minho asks about where he’s headed, Jinwoo talks about his lifelong dream of being literally anything but a fisherman, or a tractor driver, and the boy in Busan that’s waiting for him to call.
.vi.
“Uh, who is that and why is he in our car?”
A grin breaks across his face looking at Jinwoo stuffing his bags in the trunk of Gunhee’s car. Taehyun’s frown is pronounced and very clearly aimed at the mousy island boy with the big doe eyes that Minho clearly has a fixation with.
“He’s coming with us to Busan.”
“No,” Taehyun says definitively, “He’s not.”
Minho shrugs. “I already invited him. We’re all going the same way, might as well enjoy extra company.”
Taehyun gives him an incredulous stare for a full minute before his features smooth out and he points an accusatory finger right in his face. “I get it. He’s exactly your type. You want him.” He laughs, entirely humorlessly. Like a cat with mixed feelings towards being domesticated, Taehyun puts distance between them.
“Exactly,” he replies. There’s no point in denying the obvious, especially with someone like Taehyun. “So be a good best friend and give him shotgun.”
“Children sit in the back.”
“He’s three years older than you.”
“Fuck that. I sit in the front!” Taehyun practically stomps to the car. “I will not be cast aside because your dick needs petting!”
“It’s not just that!” Minho argues, following Taehyun before he can do something dramatic, or more dramatic than he’s already being. “We talked for a while last night. I think you’d like him. But not as much as I like him. Please just do this for me, Taehyun, best friend extraordinaire.”
Taehyun is stubborn and a professional grudge-holder, so Minho tacks on an exaggerated show of charms, which roughly translates to pouting and whining and lacing his fingers with Taehyun’s. Anything to get the cold, prickly exterior of Nam Taehyun to soften into at least a burlap sack-like texture.
It works.
.vii.
“So, are you two…” Jinwoo drops the end of the sentence, looking back and forth between Minho and Taehyun with meaning. The two hour drive to Jinju suddenly becomes a gateway for them to float back towards the conversation they started last night. It isn’t awkward between them like one might expect would happen between best friends after talking about latent sexual desire, but the atmosphere is definitely stretched taut with something electric.
“No, our dear Taehyun is in a serious monogamous relationship with a guy named Seungyoon.” Minho goes on to describe him as pretentious and fake deep, with a shitty taste in everything but the arts. He says it with one of his signature goofy grins of his. Taehyun knows more than anyone that Minho collects friends with an urgent sort of companionship that comes from a patterned experience of watching friends leave. That is to say, Minho has a friend in anyone and everyone, while Taehyun counts just the two.
Seungyoon and Minho were friends in the same way people were friends with their best friend’s distant older sibling. There was a familiarity there, but at the end of the day, you didn’t come over to hang out with the brooding older brother.
Jinwoo nods, stealing a glance at Minho when he thinks Taehyun isn’t looking. “Why didn’t Seungyoon come, then?”
“Study abroad in Europe,” Taehyun answers immediately. “And it’s not a serious relationship. We’re just, fooling around.”
“Exclusively, with each other,” Minho adds. “Seungyoon dates the people he has sex with, which includes Taehyun, whether he likes it or not.”
Taehyun scoffs, childishly kicking the back of the driver’s seat to watch Minho flinch. “We don’t date. Dating requires going out and spending time together. Without a mattress.” They promised not to fool around with anyone just last week, and Taehyun said it with the intention of abiding by it. He only recently decided to limit his sexual encounters to Seungyoon after their occasional fucks morphed into regular, everyday things.
“You’ve only had sex in beds? Amateurs.”
“Not everyone is used to your brand of athletic sex, Minho.”
“You guys could use some athletic sex. Both of you are built like branches. Seungyoon, mainly, but you’re a twig too.”
“Minho used to be chubby,” Taehyun stage-whispers to Jinwoo, leaning forward between the two front seats. “He compensates for it by being a sports freak and having a lot of rough, animalistic sex with numerous people every day.”
Jinwoo’s eyes sparkle naturally, like twenty-five year old eyes never do. His lips are shaped in that ideal pouty porn star way, and Taehyun understands why he’s there, sitting buckled up in the front seat like he’s never seen an endless road before. Looking at the slope of Jinwoo’s nose when he turns his head to listen, Taehyun would want to fuck him too.
They stare at each other for a while; Taehyun the predator to Jinwoo’s prey. He doesn’t know why his thoughts are running through scenarios right and left. Having sex with Minho, having sex with Jinwoo. It must be the summer heat.
“Lies,” Minho says, dragging Taehyun’s attention away from the possibilities of Jinwoo’s mouth. “I do not have sex with numerous people every day.”
“You don’t deny the rough, animalistic sex?” Jinwoo asks, cheekily. “You don’t seem like the type. Taehyun looks more like he’d be into that.”
Taehyun doesn’t have time to figure out how he feels about that implication.
“That’s where you’re wrong, young grasshopper.” Minho stretches his right arm over the back of Jinwoo’s seat, left hand gripping the wheel lazily. “Taehyun is delicate. Look at his small, wispy wrists. The tiny waist. The middle parted hair. So vanilla, so mild, our Taehyun.”
“Minho’s obsessed with being physically bigger than everyone he fucks. You can tell he got beat up a lot as a kid.”
Jinwoo laughs in series of short hiccups. It’s an odd sound you wouldn’t expect coming from someone with his face. It’s such an unattractive laugh, yet it doesn’t take away any of the desirability. Jinwoo just has that special thing.
They alternate between talking about school, Jinwoo’s string of bad breakups, their dreams and aspirations, and frank discussions of sex and relationships. Jinwoo, underneath his shyness and tendency to be quite scatterbrained, is sort of strange. He’s idealistic like Minho, but with a little bit of Taehyun’s romanticism. He thinks Jinwoo would fit well with them, back in Seoul, outside of the blithe spontaneous summer experience and into the normalcy of trying to navigate adulthood unscathed.
Taehyun thinks about Seungyoon, how he’d fit into their group, and then, with some sort of backwards clarity, he doesn’t think about him at all.
.viii.
They switch drivers somewhere between Haman and Gimhae.
Minho sleeps in the backseat while Taehyun tries to figure out how to escape the endless expanse of mountains and dirt roads. Jinwoo snores like a chainsaw most of the way there, which drives Taehyun insane, and makes him stop somewhere in Uichang-gu to end his suffering.
“Wake up, sleepyheads!” he honks the horn, effectively scaring Minho out of his sleep.
“Shit,” he exclaims, knocking his skull against the roof of the car trying to jump out of his skin. “Fucking hell.”
Jinwoo is tougher to wake. Taehyun lowers the passenger’s side window, watching Jinwoo’s head jerk sharply to the left to avoid falling out of the car. “Ugh, rude,” he mumbles. “I was having a good dream.”
Taehyun turns his head to ask Minho something, stopping short when he notices the obvious shape of his dick trying to escape his sweatpants. “Looks like you’re not the only one having good dreams.” He gestures meaningfully to Minho’s crotch when Jinwoo does nothing but blink unaware at the space above Taehyun’s shoulder.
“It must be the heat,” Minho tries. “And the small space.” He flushes, embarrassed, when Jinwoo continues to stare pointedly at his erection. “I’m not going to wank in the backseat, if that’s what you’re expecting.”
“Maybe you should.” Taehyun and Minho give Jinwoo matching stares of disbelief. Jinwoo stammers, seemingly catching up with what he just said. “I mean, you should take care of it here unless you want to walk down the street like that.” It’s terrible logic, but no one addresses it.
“Voyeur,” Taehyun accuses. “Fortunately for you, I think he’s into that.” Minho’s hand twitches at his hip, looking between Taehyun staring at him from the rearview, and Jinwoo’s attentive gaze. “Oh, you’re really thinking about it.”
“Keep your eyes closed and you won’t even notice.”
It’s easier said than done. Taehyun turns the key in the ignition, just to get some noise going, turns the radio to the first station that has a signal, and waits. He keeps one eye closed, the other squinting sideways at Jinwoo. He’s watching Minho shyly, eyes fluttering and mouth agape. Minho’s face and flushed chest are all that Taehyun can see without craning his neck. It’s almost enough, but not for the curiosity picking incessantly at his brain.
Taehyun has seen Minho naked before, has seen his dick swinging from the showers to his bedroom at the end of the hall when he forgot to bring a towel to the bathroom. Seeing it swollen and leaking between his palms is another thing entirely.
Taehyun’s throat clicks when he swallows and he gives up completely on being discreet. Minho’s the type to like an audience anyway. His pace is slower than Taehyun would have imagined from someone so fidgety, and he squirms, uses both of his hands to stroke himself, forehead creasing with concentration.
Some chart-topping hit from the nineties plays softly from the speakers. Minho moans as the chorus approaches, competing with the lead vocals, just as loud as Taehyun imagined Minho would be. His own dick makes itself known in his shorts, giving a mischievous twitch every time Minho fails to stifle a cry of pleasure. Jinwoo’s face is red, like lust, or the sunset over the Paldang Bridge. His fingers are toying with the hem of his pants like he’s waiting for the right time to shove his hand inside.
The clock jumps forward three minutes and Taehyun’s patience wears thin. “How the fuck are you not finished yet?”
“I don’t like rushing,” Minho says, voice like stone. “Some things take time.” Jinwoo laughs, breathlessly. Taehyun feels betrayed. “It might go a little faster if someone were to lend a hand.” He waggles his eyebrows like he isn’t sweating all over, like his eyes aren’t blown, desperate. Of course Minho would drag something like this out to get what he wants. Taehyun is about to say something sarcastic, his default when he’s trying to conceal himself, but he’s interrupted by Jinwoo climbing over the narrow space between the front and back seats to sit in Minho’s lap.
The surprise on Minho’s face gives Jinwoo pause. “What?” he asks, deer-in-headlights expression made worse with his eyes so dark, so opaque. Minho swallows, shakes his head, and lets his hands fall from his dick to press into Jinwoo’s sides.
“Just, wasn’t expecting you to.” Whatever Taehyun had been poised to say dies in his throat when Minho surges forward to kiss Jinwoo. Taehyun feels neglected immediately, and gets an odd feeling in his chest when Jinwoo starts kissing down Minho’s neck. Don’t forget about me, he thinks. Their best friend telepathy has always been spotty at best, so he’s a little surprised Minho reaches a hand out to pull on his shoulder.
“Hey,” he says. “Come here.”
Taehyun looks at the small space left in the backseat, mind working out the physics involved of three people fooling around in such a small car instead of two. Even then, Taehyun never had sex in a car, so he has no point of reference.
“Can I even fit?” Rhetorical question, since he climbs around Jinwoo anyway. He feels like a genius when he remembers that the front seats collapse, and suddenly there’s just enough room to make this work.
Minho reaches for Taehyun at the same time Jinwoo does. His face goes hot at the attention shifting towards him, but he’s oddly pleased; mostly horny. The disrobing is difficult. Taehyun presses his back into the door to make enough room to pull his shorts off without kicking anyone. Jinwoo pulls his shirt over his head but only gets his jeans down mid-thigh before rutting against Minho as best he can hunched over like he is.
Minho’s wearing one of those loose-fitting tanks with the sides cut out, so Jinwoo just yanks it to the side to get at one of his nipples. The radio is still on, cycling through advertisements. Jinwoo rearranges himself so that he’s facing Taehyun’s lap, ass level with Minho’s head.
“Can I-” Jinwoo finishes the rest of the question by wrapping his mouth around Taehyun, straightforward, no teasing. Taehyun gives Minho a helpless look, because, fuck it feels amazing, and fuck, Minho is watching him with two fingers sucked into his mouth like he’s the one kneeling between Taehyun’s legs instead.
“Slow down, Jinwoo,” Minho says, voice thickened with desire. “We don’t want him to blow his load yet.”
“Very funny,” Taehyun half-moans, half-drawls. Jinwoo pulls off slowly, like his mouth doesn’t want to leave the home it’s made around Taehyun’s length. They’re all damp and panting. The sun is starting to set but the temperature outside is much closer to hell than humid.
Minho leans over the passenger’s seat, fumbling around in the front for something. “Aha!” He returns with a condom and two travel-sized packets of lube courtesy of a convenience store, judging from the discarded bag he throws under the seat. Jinwoo situates himself so he’s carefully sandwiched between the two front seats with his ass hovering between Minho and Taehyun invitingly. Jinwoo doesn’t say much, but his body makes quite the statement.
“Minho?” Jinwoo asks, voice deliberately coy. Minho tosses Taehyun one of the packets of lube, carelessly ripping the other one open to quickly coat his fingers. They share a look, before Minho slides wet fingers between Jinwoo’s crack, testing his entrance with the tip of his middle.
Taehyun mirrors Minho’s actions, but with his own body. He likes the burn of the stretch, likes the feeling of the instinctual clenching of his walls like they’ve been waiting for this all day. His fingers are long enough to reach that little taste of ecstasy inside him, but he doesn’t want to take himself over the edge. Not when Minho has watered the seeds planted deep in the soil of Taehyun soul, because as fucked up as it is, Taehyun feels like this is where he belongs.
Jinwoo groans, the kind you make when someone knees you in the stomach, chest feeling like it’s collapsed in on itself. Minho is two fingers deep when Taehyun lifts his face from his shoulders, sweat slinking down Jinwoo’s pale back like a glass of ice water.
Taehyun and Minho share a look, and it’s just a matter of asking first. Jinwoo’s voice cracks, the sky fades to gray, Taehyun almost bursts into flames when he seats himself on Minho’s cock.
Jinwoo still has Minho’s fingers inside him, and Taehyun has his dick, like he’s wanted for a while. And Jinwoo whines, rocking back and stroking himself hard and fast. He loses it, cum splattering through his fingers and onto the gear shift. He slumps forward, changing the radio station with the crown of his head. They weren’t paying much attention before, but trot music has a way of cutting through one’s consciousness.
“My mom loves this song,” Minho remarks.
Taehyun rolls his eyes. “Don’t talk about your mom while we’re fucking in the back of your cousin’s car.”
His back is flat against the back of the passenger seat, weight being held up by Minho’s arms. One wraps around his waist, holding him close, while the other keeps his legs spread wide enough for Taehyun to feel whole again.
“I can’t find my shirt,” Jinwoo hums. “But that’s not a big deal right now. You’re probably sitting on it.” He climbs into the driver’s seat, naked, pulls napkins out of the sun visor, wipes down the defiled center console, whistling under his breath. He turns, watching Taehyun squirm on the leather seat beside him, reaching out to touch, almost tentatively.
Taehyun bites his lip, attempting to swallow back the embarrassing sounds he knows he makes when he’s close. Minho squeezes his jaw, shaking his head. “Let me hear you,” he says. Taehyun’s mouth falls open on a moan and he blushes when he sees the way they watch him. He’s so close. Just a little more-
Jinwoo drags a loose fist over Taehyun, thumb pressing into the slit on the way up, and he’s done for. Minho curses, canting his hips up one last time before he spills inside the condom, nails leaving marks on the inside of Taehyun’s thigh.
“I’m not looking Gunhee in the face when we hand over the keys,” Taehyun says. “This is all your fault, you can explain it yourself.”
“Don’t worry. We christened it.”
Jinwoo throws a set of cheap, sandpaper-thin napkins at Minho’s face. “Let’s find a bathhouse nearby. I smell like sex and suntan lotion.”
“Good thing we parked far enough away from foot traffic.” Taehyun fixes his damp hair with his unsoiled hand. “I would rather not be arrested for public indecency.”
Minho disposes of the condom and multiple napkins in the black plastic bag wedged under the seat. “Your little brother would get wind of it and find a way to replace you in the family registry. Danah would bail me out like the great sibling she is.”
“Jinwoo can cover for you so your landlord doesn’t use your place as a gambling spot.” Taehyun pauses. “In fact, Jinwoo can sleep on the futon in your studio and find some use for the pile of blank canvases you have collecting dust by the window.”
Minho tsks. “They’re not blank. It’s called, unfinished: a project in white.”
“To go along with your self-titled album, Song Minho: full of shit?” Taehyun laughs when Jinwoo giggles into his hands.
“Don’t think you’re funny just because Jinwoo laughs at your jokes.”
“I can say the same for you!”
“Children, don’t fight,” Jinwoo says with mock sternness. “There’s plenty of me to go around.”
By the time they redress and walk down the streets of Yongho-dong, it’s midnight and Busan is less than three hours away.
.ix.
Minho doesn’t like jumping the gun on things, but he really thinks he wouldn’t mind having Jinwoo follow them back to Seoul, maybe put some furniture in his studio and have Jinwoo stay there forever. Minho doesn’t believe in things like love at first sight or soulmates, or whatever. He has so much love to give everyone that he just can’t fathom loving only one person for eternity.
Two, however. Two seems possible.
He’s always been a little soft on Taehyun. But there’s something unique in the feeling he gets when Jinwoo laughs at all his jokes, like each one is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. And Taehyun was right, when he said Jinwoo was exactly Minho’s type.
It starts from the moment he meets eyes with Jinwoo, at the guesthouse in Gwangju. He’s a sucker for shy, quiet types, it seems. Jinwoo is shy in ways that Taehyun isn’t, and vice versa. Minho was born with a need to consistently socialize with someone else, whether through small talk, dirty talk, deep conversations or speaking in bodies. He just needed to be around people. He loved people.
Nam Taehyun hated people.
It took Minho ages to get Taehyun to stop picking fights. Taehyun found out the hard way that Minho just didn’t hate people. No matter how poorly he treated Minho, nothing changed. Minho would remain seated at their shared table in studio art, would buy Taehyun lunch whenever he caught him in line at the check-out. Minho didn’t take no for an answer when it came to being friends.
Jinwoo, he doesn’t hate people. People are as fundamentally important to Jinwoo as they are to Minho. Jinwoo doesn’t open up around other people, not unless he trusts that person to accept him completely.
It takes a few hours of talking overnight in Gwangju for Jinwoo to trust Minho.
“Are you in love with Seunghoon?” he asks Jinwoo when Taehyun is curled into a ball, sleeping comfortably in the soft blue cotton sauna clothes they were given when they walked in. Taehyun talks in his sleep, a habit Minho still finds cute, even after dealing with his nightmares, where he screams and whimpers, only stopping when he feels the weight of Minho’s body crushing his limbs. To this day Taehyun still believes that Minho is a cuddling freak.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” Minho says when Jinwoo doesn’t speak. He worries his bottom lip with his teeth, watching Minho in the dark.
“No, I don’t think I am. In love with Seunghoon,” Jinwoo confesses quietly. “I thought I was since we’d talk like we were dating sometimes. You know? Like, he’d tell me what he liked most about me out of nowhere, and I was happy.”
Minho nods, reaching out to trace lines up Jinwoo’s forearm. “How do you know you aren’t in love with him?”
Jinwoo’s face scrunches, like he’s tasting something sour for the first time. “I can’t explain how I know, but I can tell you when I knew.” Taehyun grunts and rolls a few centimeters away from their hushed conversation. Irritable even in his sleep. Jinwoo reaches a hand out to run his fingers through Minho’s hair. To anyone looking, it would seem like he’s fixing it.
“When you introduced yourself to me and offered to take me all the way to Busan. I swear I’ve never talked this much to a stranger before and I’ve never, I don’t do anything with strangers because I’m always so awkward around people I haven’t known my whole life.”
Minho can feel how grossly satisfied his smile is without even having to look in a mirror. “Aw. You like me.”
“You like me too,” Jinwoo replies, smug. “I heard you talking to Taehyun about me being your type.”
“It was never a secret. I’ve liked you from the start. You have the Song Minho stamp of approval.”
Jinwoo laughs, careful not to rouse Taehyun as he reaches over to smack Minho’s arm.
.x.
Seunghoon is entirely too sentimental for starters.
He falls a little in love with everyone he doesn’t immediately hate. Or maybe it’s not even love, but some weird form of nostalgic attachment.
He meets Jinwoo and is reminded of colors after rain. They’re twelve and thirteen, and they’re lost in Gwangju. Jinwoo’s looking up at him with eyes like little black lakes he could drown in if he wasn’t careful. He’s from Busan, he should know how to swim.
Jinwoo is water: constant, flowing, a major constituent of life. Seunghoon falls in love with that day in Gwangju, with the Jinwoo he met and the Jinwoo he knows now. His first love, the unforgettable scent of summer, the taste of sea salt caramel ice cream. He’s twenty-four, chasing the aftermath of a fading memory, the sound of a voice over the phone, hundreds of miles too far to touch.
“We’re like, twenty minutes away.” Seunghoon can hear the excitement in Jinwoo’s voice when he answers the phone.
“We?” he asks, catching the unfamiliar soft cadence of Seoul-speech arguing over directions. “We who?”
“I told you I missed the bus back in Gwangju,” Jinwoo says carefully. “I caught a ride with some really nice people and now the three of us are headed your way so please-don’t-be-mad-I-invited-them-to-meet-you.”
“Send me a proof shot that you aren’t being held at gunpoint right now and maybe I won’t be.”
Jinwoo cackles. Seunghoon looks forward to hearing it person. “Have more faith in my instincts. I’d know a serial killer if I saw one.”
“Say that again when you pull up to the driveway. I’ve been told I have killer looks.”
“I have witnesses,” Jinwoo declares, “You won’t get away with it.”
“Who says this all wasn’t a part of my plan to lure you into my lair and mount your head on my mantle, pretty boy?”
Jinwoo laughs, it echoes unnaturally and mixes with the sounds of another, deeper laugh. It’s quite apparent Jinwoo has him on speaker phone. “Glad to know you have such great fun planned, Seunghoon.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just hurry so we can turn pink and irritated trying to tan at the beach.” He thinks he hears a voice call him funny, before Jinwoo mumbles something he can’t make out.
“See you in a few, Hoon.”
The line dies with Seunghoon thinking of all the ways he can convince Jinwoo to stay.
.xi.
Seunghoon’s year old Chihuahua, nips at Jinwoo’s sandals when he bends down to pet her.
Seunghoon’s two-bedroom apartment, complete with a spectacular view of Haeundae’s nightscape, is bigger than Jinwoo expected. Minho and Taehyun are down at the beach, giving Jinwoo a moment to talk to Seunghoon alone before he joins them in typical summer vacation tourist activity.
The first thing he notices about Seunghoon, when they’re standing face to face, is that Seunghoon is tall. Not tall like Minho and Taehyun, but string bean tall, long arms and even longer legs. He’s broad, with the fat cheeked face Jinwoo is familiar with. It’s a little awkward for the first few minutes.
“Hey pretty boy,” Seunghoon cracks first. “Long time no see.” It’s almost the same as talking on the phone, except Seunghoon can catch everything on his face, and he’s watching him with a seriousness that never translates over the line.
“I know I was supposed to be here a long time ago, but you know me,” Jinwoo says, leaving the rest unfinished. “I kind of let myself get swept up in someone else’s vacation plans. They’re from Seoul.”
Seunghoon shook hands with Jinwoo’s travel buddies in the lobby. They seemed nice enough, but the one that held Jinwoo’s hand the entire time they talked about their trip raised a few questions in Seunghoon’s mind.
“You still want to move to Seoul?” he asks instead. Jinwoo lights up at the mention, retelling a story that Minho told him about the subway station, about Minho’s high school best friend Jihoon’s terrible perm and school MTs, and art colleges, and Taehyun’s weird roommate in cramped campus accommodations.
Seunghoon gives up.
.xii.
They stay in Busan for a week.
Taehyun spends most of his cash on buying clothes he probably already has in his closet in Seoul. Minho’s tan worsens, and he shows it off by constantly ripping his shirt off and comparing it to Taehyun’s pale blotchiness, or Jinwoo’s impregnable snow white skin defenses. Seunghoon warms up to Minho and Taehyun in the short time, and they even exchange numbers, like he did with Jinwoo years ago, promising to keep in contact.
They take a different route back to Seoul.
Taehyun gets a tattoo in Daegu, a banana peel on the inside of his wrist. Jinwoo clutches his stomach in laughter when Minho’s first reaction is to make gorilla sound effects while beating his chest. They stop at the former president’s birth home in Gumi, take dozens of pictures at places they figured Jang Woohyuk and Kim Taewoo would have been before they were famous. They eat sweet potato fries in Yeoju and visit King Sejong’s tomb site.
Taehyun calls Seungyoon when they stop at Taehyun’s childhood home in Hanam. There’s a seven hour and ten minute time difference from Seoul to Barcelona, but Seungyoon is awake and they talk about nothing important.
“Before you hang up and play soccer with bulls or whatever it is people in Barcelona do,” Taehyun says. “I want you know that me and Minho picked up a stray, an Imja island boy.”
“A child?” Seungyoon asks incredulously. “That’s illegal, Taehyun.”
Taehyun snorts. “He’s twenty-five, and if I’m being honest, we’ve had a lot of good not-so-wholesome fun the past two weeks.” There’s a pause, before Seungyoon speaks evenly.
“With the stray you picked up?”
“And Minho.”
“Hmm, seems like you fucked a stranger. Oh you cruel heartless bastard,” Seungyoon says flatly, giving Taehyun an awkward moment of silence before he continues. “Should I act surprised? I don’t know why you told me. You’ve never told me before.”
“Yeah.” Taehyun clears his throat. “But you know Minho, and I thought you’d want to know if it were Minho. And Jinwoo isn’t a one-time deal. He’s moving in with Minho.”
“Oh?”
“Jinwoo is Minho’s type down to the molecules. You’ll get it when you meet him.”
They hang up feeling the same they’ve always felt. Taehyun is oddly disappointed.
.xiii.
Kang Seungyoon is a horrible liar.
Almost as bad as Taehyun, who doesn’t lie to other people because he can’t understand them. They aren’t dating. Seungyoon is okay with that because he knows it’s true. And Seungyoon can’t lie, so he tells Taehyun, I belong to you. He implies Taehyun belongs to him too, but that he knows is a lie.
The paint dries and peels, and Seungyoon looks at the familiar walls, wondering when they were built, and who really controlled them. If they had met earlier, before Minho scaled the sides of the wall where the sun didn’t touch, where the foliage wrapped tight around the watchtower led many to their deaths, if they had met before then, Seungyoon is sure he would be the one to land perfectly on his feet at the other side of the untouched gates.
With Taehyun and Minho, they’re each other’s first choice. Seungyoon doesn’t mind because he understands how it feels to love the relationship you have with your best friend above anything else. He knows love is ridiculous and unfair and insane, really.
That doesn’t stop him from wanting it to work out in his favor.
.xiv.
They return Gunhee’s car after having it cleaned by professionals. Not that Jinwoo with a box of wet wipes and scented car tree fresheners wasn’t a good attempt.
In August, Minho fills every blank canvas in his studio with color. They stack up faster than student debt, and before long Minho starts selling them to art galleries, starts treating everyone he knows with the money he makes.
Jinwoo gets a job as a barista at the campus coffee shop. Taehyun stops by every Friday and waits until Jinwoo gets off work so they can walk to Minho’s together. Sometimes they lie together in Minho’s bed, making up songs in the darkness, too lazy to commit anything to paper.
Seungyoon returns a month later than he originally planned. His hair looks terrible and Taehyun refuses to kiss him until they have it fixed. Jinwoo and Seungyoon get along better than Taehyun expected. Soon, they all start gathering at Seunghoon’s apartment to study for midterms and have quiet four-person drinking parties.
Minho and Jinwoo fuck like rabbits, which annoys Taehyun to hell and back, after he decides he should properly learn to date Seungyoon. Date, the proper way. Date the way Minho and Jinwoo do when they leave Taehyun to sulk around with a new project. He’s a work in progress; still uncomfortable with being someone else’s and having someone else be his. Seungyoon is patient, but persistent. He does most of the work, honestly. Taehyun just gets to pick where he wants to eat and which day on the calendar should they celebrate things like anniversaries.
Instead, he picks the destination of the next summer vacation.