Title: Satisfying Part 2 (sequel to The Right Guy)
Author: anoukinparis
Pairing: YunJae
Genre: Romance/Angst
Rating: PG-13/R
Summary: A year passes - a year that makes new memories for both Yunho and Jaejoong, even though they're both unwilling to let go of the ones that mean the most. Another chance meeting forces them to finally confront their feelings and all the complications that come with them.
Water bustled to fill the tub.
Jaejoong smoked as Yunho told him that yeah, he might as well be comfortable if he was going to have his pictures taken. Might as well be comfortable with the setting. Might as well. Jaejoong's setting of preference was the bathroom, insisting that was the place he went to the most, and since he seemed to know exactly what he wanted Yunho didn't say a word. At least it hadn't been the bedroom.
“Why are you giving me that face? You have the easy job,” Jaejoong laughed, fingers reaching back to dig into his t-shirt. He yanked it up in one sweep, the shirt sliding off of his back and revealing shoulder blades dusted with inkwork. Yunho had never seen anything like it, shaking his head to himself as Jaejoong continued to strip down.
“Just get in the damn tub before I change my mind.”
“Testy.”
The shirt dropped to the tiled floor. Then a belt. And pants. Jaejoong faced away from him the entire time, not saying anything else as he discarded the last piece, carelessly dropping his boxers down to all the other clothes pooling at his feet. He was all skin, no shame, raising a leg only to let it slip over the edge and into the bathwater.
Each movement was so nonchalant it felt as if Yunho wasn't there at all. But he was. He was fidgeting with his camera and feeling the onset of a very dry throat while Jaejoong eased more pale skin into the water. Slow. Excruciatingly slow. Everything to see, and yet once Jaejoong reached for the cigarette again it was obvious to Yunho he hadn't really given up anything of himself at all. He could see it flickering in that gaze: It's only skin, right?
Yunho observed the way the cigarette fell between his lips, the way the smoke wilted away, the way his body rippled the water with the tiniest of movements. Charged eyes, taut muscles, everything that came with the image. Just the image.
After a minute of pictures Yunho paused, frowned thoughtfully to himself. “You're too hard.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your expression,” Yunho clarified with a shadow of a smirk, and Jaejoong simply let his arm dangle over the side, cigarette nestled safely in his fingers.
“You want me to sweeten it up for you?”
Yunho didn't say anything, struck with an idea as soon as he lowered the camera back down to his lap. He edged closer to the tub, reaching a hand to wrap around Jaejoong's slick arm and pulling it to him until he was close enough to kiss. His tongue tasted the exact same. Everything was the exact same, including that it was another moment struck far too brief. But when Yunho forced himself to pull away, forced his fingers to take the camera again, there was his perfect shot.
The expression on Jaejoong's face then lasted only a second - and truly, it was perfect. He let go a piece of himself. He had left it in that kiss. If nothing else, Yunho held that much of the other.
“Bastard,” was all that Jaejoong threw at him afterwards, and Yunho just smiled behind the lens, taking more pictures as he felt them happening. Sometimes Jaejoong looked off to somewhere else behind Yunho or outside of the bathroom but mostly his gaze was direct and unflinching. Yunho wondered if it would contain as much electricity on paper, if it would pop in the middle of its four corners.
And still, irritating, recurring, was that dry throat.
Yunho dropped the camera away to wipe the back of his hand across his forehead. His eyes searched without the excuse of taking pictures, and Jaejoong slid his arms along the sides of the tub, wading closer to him. The sound of the water coupled with Yunho saying his name, stopping short. He barely shook his head.
Jaejoong only took the camera's strap and laid it down. Flicking his cigarette into the ash tray on the tiled floor. That voice knocked everything else away.
“...please.”
The barrier of the tub made every movement instantly frantic, rushed, Jaejoong's fingers tangling through increasingly damp hair, gasping in breaths, Yunho swallowing those breaths, pressing as tight as possible to the thick white wall, losing it gladly. Everywhere Yunho touched was wet, warm, inviting. He clutched at a shoulder, fingers rolling down the dip of Jaejoong's throat, and still his tongue tasted the exact same.
Yunho's shirt was added to the pile, Jaejoong's mouth momentarily leaving his own to press kisses to a suddenly, wonderfully bare shoulder. He kept arching for more, and Yunho kept undressing, and nowhere along this time was there a chance of stopping.
Jaejoong sunk back against the wall of the shower to allow room for him. Instantly rubbing against each other. Heavy kiss, struggling kiss, Jaejoong's arms curled underneath Yunho's, digging at his shoulder blades. Legs smoothed together. Breathing was so hard to do. All the while Yunho grew closer. He could feel every last inch of him. He could feel him and he wanted to feel him and Jaejoong knew it too damn well.
“Ever...?”
He had to know the answer. “Not like this.”
With his tongue Jaejoong followed a droplet of water from the hollow of Yunho's cheek back to his lips, drowning into another kiss. “I'm your first then,” he breathed those words inside of him.
There was a perverse satisfaction in that voice, a satisfaction that spiraled down Yunho's own spine, settling somewhere deep. He buried himself in Jaejoong's mouth to stop thinking - moaned. Water lashed violently as he shoved Jaejoong's wrists into the wall, broken notes gasped between lips, and he couldn't even believe it himself that it was all actually happening.
There are some moments in life that stay with you forever. You remain in them. It went like that.
A few unsteady thrusts, a messy embrace that fell into needy grabs as Yunho pushed against his knee to fuck him better. The water rocked around them, splashed against Yunho's back. Leg lifted farther, farther back. Ah Jaejoong panted against his ear. Ah ah it wasn't enough. Ah your first then. I'm your first. First.
Yunho felt he was being torn apart by Jaejoong's nails, but he was tearing the other apart just the same, breaking him with nothing more than his own skin and it was ruthless, how much he had actually ached for this. It still wasn't enough. It had never been enough. That meeting, that dance, that first kiss, it had never fucking been enough.
Ah take it. Ah ah take it. You wanted it too so take it.
Yunho sucked at his collarbone, sucked at the bathwater he found all over Jaejoong's skin until his mouth was moist again. Until Jaejoong groaned a rough rhythm, grinding his hips back down, water already gathering in pools on the bathroom floor and soaking that forgotten cigarette.
A-ahh but wasn't the past year worth it to hear Jaejoong pant like that? To hear him say he needed more? Ahh-ah one last thing ah just one ahh blind heat, reckless, gorgeous kiss that Yunho wanted to possess long after the water stilled again.
Which it did. Miraculously, eventually, it did still.
For those first few seconds, Yunho felt absolutely nothing. There was him and Jaejoong and absolutely nothing. Amazing.
And then Jaejoong stepped dripping and trembling out of the tub. And then Yunho followed, enfolding that body back in his arms before it could slip away, before it dried. And then Jaejoong just stood and hummed as Yunho kissed him below the ear, everything too natural, far too natural - including the way Jaejoong cocooned him up in a towel and shoved him out toward the bed.
Yunho figured it would happen and still the pressure of those lips strangled him. He clutched at the hair brushing against his hips, fisting the blond strands until he could practically feel Jaejoong smirking around him. The world glazed over. The second time Yunho slept with him.
It went like that for a week.
~
Whoever had held Jaejoong's attention before never came back into the picture. Not their picture, anyways. Just them in Yunho's frame of mind.
They didn't talk at all about Yunho's plane ticket back to Seoul, already booked, smothered between layers of clothes in his suitcase as if it was a snake that would hiss and strike. The venom was there, waiting. But they didn't talk about it. Not at all. It was a nice fantasy, a delicious one. More delicious than anything Yunho had ever had before with anyone else, and he couldn't put a finger on why.
Not everything was ignored. On more than one occasion Jaejoong asked what had happened between Yunho and his ex girlfriend, why he never talked about her much in the beginning, if he had even loved her in the first place. Yunho admitted that he had never been in love with anyone at all. Never even gotten close. Jaejoong was quiet a long time after that.
But you got close, didn't you? Yunho had asked.
Still too quiet, smoking steadily, not looking Yunho in the eye. Yeah, he said. Yeah, I got close. Too close. After two years he left me without saying a word and got engaged to some waitress a few months later. Apparently he didn't hold love in such high regard. Or me, for that matter.
It only took ten seconds for the story to unravel, yet Yunho felt as if he had been waiting for much, much longer to hear it. And perhaps Jaejoong had been waiting just as long to fully share it. But those ten seconds were it, and Jaejoong promptly returned the cigarette to Yunho's fingers, stilling once Yunho caught his hand before it could pull back. He twisted it up toward his lips and kissed a smooth wrist. Jaejoong just stared at him. And when his cell phone abruptly rang to life, abruptly ending the moment and abruptly pulling Jaejoong from his grasp, that was that.
But the damage was already done, and they both knew it. Yunho took all those jagged pieces - the defenses, the too sharp eyes, the rare true laughs, the restlessness, the sex, the right guy - and finally began to make sense of them.
“You're lucky not to have been hurt like that,” Jaejoong whispered to him a few nights later, the bedroom dark and Yunho's skin slick with warmth and sweat. Abruptly returning them both to that conversation, as if there had been no pause, no movement in time, just them.
“Hurts enough seeing you like this,” he murmured back.
“Don't say that.”
“I can say it if it's true.”
“Oh, artists always tell the truth,” Jaejoong dismissed in that mocking way of his, melting into Yunho's side and resting his head on the other's shoulder, tired of keeping himself up.
“I'm not an artist.”
“You really are the most frustrating person in the world sometimes.”
“Is that a step up from being too nice?”
“Go away.”
Only a tease, but Yunho just stared up at the ceiling, his stomach suddenly tied in knots he couldn't undo, jaw clenched. The ticket had tomorrow's date on them. Poison. Fantasy. It was all blurring. Couldn't stop it anymore. “I am.”
~
Yunho should have known it all along. Of course that gaze popped in the middle of those four corners. He had the proof now, enduring, real, and as he stared Jaejoong stared right back, caught in between steadying himself and not caring at all to steady himself. It was vulnerable. Vulnerable in a way that broke his heart, and made it burn all the more.
Don't say that. You don't know what you want.
He couldn't look at it anymore. He shut it away in his album and tried forgetting. Tried remembering how he had lived his life before.
At least I'm not terrified of what I want. You didn't have to leave last year.
Well, who's running now?
Yunho decided to put away his camera for a while. He asked about his old job at the bar, and was promptly welcomed back as if nothing had even changed. He was good for business, after all. Good with the customers. But there wasn't one single customer who smoked at his seat or pushed blond hair out of his eyes, and for that, Yunho couldn't have cared less about them.
That's home, Jae. That's your home. You can't keep living here like this, whoring yourself out to men and expecting the right guy to just happen to you.
He did just happen to me. Just as disappointing as the rest. But thanks for the advice.
There was so much else to say. Sometimes Yunho thought about it when he was pouring drinks, distracted by the numbing chatter of people around him, those few seconds to himself. He had wanted to say everything that had been building during those weeks, wanted to say everything before the rush of the airport ruined it all. In reality, they had ruined it.
Don't group me with them. I'm nothing like them, and you know it. I could never be like them.
And why's that?
Sometimes he felt as if his own memories were nothing more than a dream. But he still had his proof.
Which one of those guys has loved you back?
Jaejoong was right. Love was complicated, and it hurt, frequently and in the smallest of ways. But he was also wrong. Love could heal. It had tempted Yunho to see everything differently. It had made him want to start his life over. It had done too much for him to regret it.
Do you think we could start over?
It was that Sunday night when Jaejoong walked in with his hair plastered against his cheekbones and a broken umbrella, saying he had bought it with the only money he had left since he was broke from the plane ticket and the half-taken cab ride here, and if they could start over, could he also have a place to stay for the night?
“Oh, and the picture of me, I want to see it. You developed it, right? I want to see all your pictures.”
Yunho hadn't even fully listened to him, because pictures and umbrellas and all that shit seemed so irrelevant, and for once he didn't even think about letting it slip in front of the customers. Cut Jaejoong off somewhere in the middle of another question with his lips, and he didn't mind at all that Jaejoong was just as willing to leave it. Swiping strands of damp hair off of his face, sinking his fingers further into it, holding him the way he always wanted to be able to hold him.
And then, after a few attempts, Jaejoong murmured something that made Yunho break out into a genuine, breathless laugh. “Don't worry about it. You being wet has never bothered me.”
~
Jaejoong could have said it if he wanted to, but he didn't feel like waking him up and ruining what was making him content in the first place. He just felt like watching Yunho sleep, giving a curious eye to the small droplets that still clung to Yunho's shoulder from the tub before deciding that it was sexy and that he didn't want to wipe them away. No, he didn't want to change anything.
It was satisfying as it was. There wasn't even a need to justify it in French.
A sigh fell on Yunho's cheek, Jaejoong pressing into every niche of the other's body before finally allowing his eyes to close as well. It wasn't more than a whisper.
“I guess that means you're the right guy, huh?”