CHINGUX 2014: pandora's bottle (1/1) for chanmimi
Title: Pandora’s Bottle
Author: nachtegael
Recipient: chanmimi
Pairing/Focus: Chanyeol/Kyungsoo, Chanyeol/Baekhyun (Baekhyun/girl!Sehun)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: language
Length: 9,000
Summary: Chanyeol is surprised to find a bottle of whiskey outside his front door with a note attached.
“What the hell is that noise? Is Kyungsoo trying his hand at Nanta or something?”
“Ahaha, no!” Chanyeol shakes his head at the thought of anything that acrobatic going down in their tiny kitchen but files it away as inspiration for possible kicks to relieve upcoming finals stress. “The stove’s not even on, I’m helping Soo with homework.”
“Then what the hell?” Luhan repeats in an annoyed voice, as if Chanyeol were creating the disturbance specifically to interfere with this phone call.
“I wish I knew but I have no idea,” Chanyeol sighs. The banging and scuffling noises issuing from the vacant unit above their apartment started early in the afternoon. It was easy to ignore at first but now that it’s after dark with no sign of letting up Kyungsoo is getting cagey and Chanyeol has started to worry about a rat infestation and the safety of his Playstation wires from invading rodent incisors.
“Do you need me to call Yixing? Have him come stage an exorcism?” Luhan asks in his authoritative tone, thinking he’s being helpful as usual.
“No no! That’s ok! I think we’re good,” Chanyeol hastily assures.
“Well, let me know if anything else weird happens,” Luhan mutters through the thick frown in his voice.
“Ok!” Chanyeol promises, throwing an ay-okay sign at the wall by the refrigerator. “Bye!” He hangs up before Luhan can offer to bring him more traditional medicine to prevent head colds. Chanyeol’s not even sick anymore, his voice just sounds a little scratchy yet, but Luhan is like a mother duck sometimes. An annoying mother duck with an immense appreciation for schadenfreude.
“Did Luhan hyung just offer to bring us rat poison?” Kyungsoo asks, raising his head from the crack in the sofa cushions it was previously stuffed in. “He should know better, no chemicals allowed near my kitchen.”
“It was an even worse idea,” Chanyeol says, rubbing the skin between his eyebrows. “And of course I told him no.”
“Of course?” Kyungsoo snorts. “Because you telling him no would be a first, actually.”
“Whatever.” Chanyeol pushes his glasses back into place with a sigh. “Did you finish the first problem set? Lemme see.” Kyungsoo whines in the back of his throat but hands over his calc homework, thoroughly smudged and wrinkled from numerous erasures, and all thoughts of rats and poltergeists fly out of Chanyeol’s head as he attempts to make sense of Kyungsoo’s scribblings.
That is until the next night. On Tuesday night the banging doesn’t stop until 4 AM, this time augmented by some lovely metallic clanging and a final crash of shattering glass.
Chanyeol stumbles out the front door on Wednesday morning, half dead from sleep deprivation and smelling like old gym socks because he slept through his shower time, and almost shatters something himself. He shakes his head to clear his blurry vision (at least as much as it will clear before 9 AM) before bending over to inspect the heavy round thing that just rolled to a stop against his sneaker.
It’s a bottle of whiskey, still two thirds full, with a note stuck to the neck:
Sorry for all the noise last night, Jongdae broke that casserole dish just because he hates washing it, I think. No worries though! We only had the one, so he can’t do it again. Happy Wednesday!! Love from, your new neighbors! *|^_^/* Jongdae and Bae
The last name of the signature is all cramped into the corner of the oversized post-it note, letters blurring into each other until Chanyeol has to squint to keep his eyes from crossing. He shrugs, suddenly remembering he’s already late for class, and steps back inside to shove the bottle on the table for Kyungsoo to deal with.
Chanyeol doesn’t get back til well after dark, not a difficult feat considering it still gets dark before 7:00, but still.
“Have some rum cake,” Kyungsoo says in lieu of greeting from his usual sprawl on the sofa.
“We have rum?”
“Well, I made it with that whiskey you left on the counter, but same difference.”
“Oh.” Chanyeol sniffs as he opens the refrigerator to rummage. The air does smell good, buttery.
“Who is that from, anyway? Did Minseok hyung drop it off for our Pirates Of The Caribbean marathon next week? I hope he doesn’t mind I borrowed some~”
“Nope, it was an anonymous gift.” The fridge door slams shut with a suctioning smack.
“WHAT? You let me drink out of an opened bottle from someone we don’t know?”
“Well, we don’t know them yet, but--”
“What are you talking about?” Kyungsoo’s sitting up now, glaring at Chanyeol over the back of the sofa as he settles at the table with the cake pan and a carton of milk.
“I think we have new neighbors?”
Chanyeol’s suspicions are confirmed the next Thursday afternoon when an unexpected visitor arrives on their doorstep. Chanyeol answers the door in his polka dot pj’s, still yawning from his short lived nap.
“Hey, I’m Jongdae,” the short dude on the doorstep says.
“Oh, Casserole Boy, hey!” Chanyeol manages around a particularly gaping yawn, remembering the post-it note now stuck to the inside of his day planner.
“Casserole Boy?” Jongdae repeats, wrinkling his nose.
“Please excuse Chanyeol and his lack of a brain to mouth filter,” Kyungsoo says, appearing out of nowhere to shove Chanyeol away from the door. “I’m Do Kyungsoo. How may I help you?”
“Hey,” Jongdae says again with a curling smile, “we just moved into the unit above you guys and wanted to meet our new neighbors.” He does a little wave thing that reminds Chanyeol of windshield wipers.
“Oh, it’s nice to meet you,” Kyungsoo nods.
“So, we’re actually having a birthday party tonight and you all are welcome to come!” Jongdae continues before Kyungsoo can shut the door on him.
“That’s alright, thanks though.”
“No, really! It would be smash if you guys came. We wanna meet the ‘hood.”
“Ok...we’ll see how things look tonight with our schedule and get back to you.” Kyungsoo starts to edge the door closed with an ominous creak from the hinges.
“Joooongdaeeee!” Another short dude pounds up the stairs and onto the landing, his arms full of grocery bags. Chanyeol thinks he hears glass bottles clinking. “Hurry up and help meeeee!” The other short dude bounces on his heels and flashes Chanyeol and Kyungsoo a grin before jogging up the next flight. Too bad he ran off so soon, he has attractive teeth. Chanyeol has always considered teeth important.
“Hey, I gotta go unlock the door,” Jongdae says, gesturing towards the stairs.
“Ok! It was nice to meet you!” Chanyeol calls, waving both his hands.
“Yeah man, catch you later!”
“Well, that was really nice of them to invite us!” Chanyeol says as soon as the door is closed. Kyungsoo snorts, bending over the stove to check on his potatoes in the steamer.
“They probably just invited us so we wouldn’t call the police on them for noise violation.”
“But don’t they seem really nice?” And cute? Chanyeol’s brain helpfully supplies.
“You can do whatever you want, but I’m staying right here to have a nice dinner and finish my homework for tomorrow. Weren’t we going to start studying together for the Econ final?”
“Oh, yeah….ok,” Chanyeol nods glumly, flopping onto the sofa before Kyungsoo can beat him to it. It is a Thursday night, after all, and he has class in the morning.
By 10:30 curiosity starts to get the better of him.
“You know, maybe we should just drop by, just to say hello.” Chanyeol twirls his pencil. “It would only be polite, you know, since they did invite us.” It’s not like he’s really made progress with his exam review sheet anyway, unless you count the numerous replications of Doraemon all over the margins.
“Suit yourself.” Kyungsoo doesn’t even look up from his textbook. “But you better not come back smashed at 3 AM and forgot to lock the door again.”
“I won’t,” Chanyeol insists, slightly wounded at Kyungsoo’s lack of intrinsic trust. You should be able to trust someone completely if you live together.
“And you might want to put pants on first,” Kyungsoo says before Chanyeol can bound out the door. Chanyeol pauses with his hand on the door knob and looks down at his pajamas.
“Oh yeah, thanks.”
It only takes 23 minutes for Chanyeol to ransack his closet and then change back into the same pair of jeans he wore to class this morning. On the way out he grabs a bottle of wine off the top of the fridge to bring along, since Jongdae did say it was someone’s birthday.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Chanyeol wheedles with his cutest, toothiest smile, giving Kyungsoo one last chance to be worldly and sociable. “They’re really cool, Soo! Come on~!”
“I don’t do rats.”
“There aren’t any rats!” Sure, Kyungsoo may take a little time to warm up to new friends, but even for him this is a little ridiculous.
“You don’t know that, you haven’t been in there yet.” Chanyeol fakes a coughing fit to mask the incredulous laughter threatening to explode out of him and ruin the symbiotic balance of their cohabitation (every time he has a seizure laughing at his roommate, Kyungsoo refuses to feed him for at least three hours).
“Go on already, if you’re going.”
“Ok, bye!”
The party is not as wild as Chanyeol had anticipated (not surprisingly, as the units in their building aren’t big enough to reasonably fit more than 10, maybe 15 people).
“Hey dude, you made it!” Jongdae is the one who answers the door, face already tinged with a rosy flush creeping its way up from his collar.
“Yeah, just dropping by on a friendly neighborly visit! Whose birthday is it, anyway? I brought some--”
“It’s myyyyyyy birthdayyyyyy!” the other short dude yodels as he barrels into the entryway, snatching the wine right out of Chanyeol’s hands with an appreciative gurgle. “I love this stuff!” He kisses the neck of the bottle with a wet smack and Jongdae rolls his eyes, not even attempting to pull the bottle away before shoving the birthday boy back towards the action.
“Come on in,” he waves at Chanyeol with a lazy gesture.
Chanyeol kicks off his shoes and trails his hosts into the living room.
“Oh! Hyung! I didn’t know you knew Jongdae and--and--” Chanyeol flails, sitting down hard on the sofa as he realizes with a belated blush that he doesn’t even know the name of the second host slash birthday boy.
“Oh, Baekhyun’s my junior in the music department,” Joonmyun covers for Chanyeol without missing a beat. Chanyeol nods and curls his fingers around a sweating can of beer that finds its way into his hands. “What a coincidence you’re neighbors, huh?”
“Yeah, haha! Funny,” Chanyeol laughs, rubbing at the back of his neck.
“Not really a coincidence, Hyung, if you consider pretty much everyone in this building is an SMU student,” a boy with hooded eyes drawls, leaning into Joonmyun’s side. Joonmyun just nods before taking a sip from his pink plastic cup, the side of which is printed with some breast cancer awareness slogans from last year’s campus campaign.
“So, I take it you’ve met the hosts, and you of course know Yixing,” Joonmyun sort of undulates his cup at the far corner where Yixing is being tackled by a skinny freshman while Jongdae tries to pour some dark liquid down his throat. Chanyeol waves, but Yixing is apparently too preoccupied with surviving the drinking game gone wrong to wave back.
“The kid sitting on Yixing hyung is Zitao, a newbie in the dance department,” Chanyeol waves again at the tangle of limbs in the corner, “and this is Kris.”
“Hi!” Chanyeol smiles at the tall dude slouched in a rocking chair across the room. He vaguely remembers his lush eyebrows and chunky jewelry from his freshman bio lecture. “I’m Park Chanyeol!” Kris nods in acknowledgement, the wooden rocker creaking slightly.
“Hey, you forgot about me!” the kid plastered to Joonmyun growls indignantly. Joonmyun just pats his hair.
“And last but not least, this Jongin, also from the dance department.” Jongin gives Chanyeol the finger and another slow grin and Chanyeol thinks Kyungsoo might like this one.
“Where is Kyungsoo?” Joonmyun asks, stretching his free arm onto the sofa back.
“Meh, he’s downstairs being lame,” Chanyeol rolls his eyes. “Making quiche or trying to figure out his calc homework with his head between the sofa cushions.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very productive set up,” Jongdae smirks, coming around for refills with the bottle of wine that he’s somehow managed to pry loose from Baekhyun’s grasp.
“Yeah, he should’ve just given up and come with, considering he won’t get past the first problem without me looking over his shoulder.”
“Did I just hear you declare yourself a math genius?” a loud voice says in his ear and Chanyeol turns his head in surprise, practically brushing noses with Baekhyun.
“Uh, maybe?” All Chanyeol can think about right now is how uber shmexy his dark eyes look rimmed in pink glitter, and how that probably wouldn’t be a good thing to say out loud just now since he’s trying to make a good first impression, at least not until he’s had a few shots to catch up with everyone.
“‘Cause I’m on the market for a math tutor,” Baekhyun continues, not removing his face from Chanyeol’s breathing space at all.
“Um, I could...I could consider that,” Chanyeol stammers, not wanting to sound too eager by immediately agreeing to tutor a near stranger, because Baekhyun is still pretty much a stranger, Chanyeol has to remind himself, regardless of their recent geographical proximity.
“You really don’t have to, dude,” Jongdae sighs, pulling his roommate back to a socially acceptable distance by the collar of his pink polo. “Baek’s pretty hopeless so it would just be pointless to make two of you suffer through his stupidity.”
“Hey, I’m not--!”
“Do I have to remind you of your last test score? Not to mention the midterm fiasco? I’m surprised Dr. Lee didn’t send home a pink slip for me to sign.”
“Can we not talk about my failure at life on the happiest day of the year?” Baekhyun whines in a voice that is grating and strident and somehow super adorable.
“Whatever floats your rootbeer.” Jongdae turns around to hand Kris a refill and Chanyeol is willingly dragged off by Baekhyun to join the free for all in the corner.
When Chanyeol makes it back downstairs it’s closer to 3 AM than midnight but Kyungsoo is still up and pacing. He also appears to have baked his weight in french bread while Chanyeol was gone, if the pile of crispy baguette loaves piled on the counter is any indication.
“Did you, um, finish your calc?” Chanyeol asks, carefully locking the door.
“Don’t even ask, I think you know,” Kyungsoo glares, brandishing a spatula that has a newly charred spot in the right corner. That last problem set must be really something if Kyungsoo’s so frustrated he’s baking ruthlessly enough to damage kitchen equipment.
“You got it that bad, huh?” Chanyeol fills a glass from the sink and backs carefully towards the coffee table to check over Kyungsoo’s work before he crashes into bed. Chanyeol winces when a violent rain of crumbs hits the stainless steel basin of the sink as Kyungsoo starts to scrape a baking sheet with a vengeance.
“Oh, so much worse than you know.”
A string of texts from an unknown number interrupts Chanyeol from another nap on Sunday afternoon. He groans and rolls over to check them, mentally cursing himself for forgetting to turn his phone off first.
Heyyyy, joonmyun hyung gave me ur number
I can’t pay you in quiche but would an offer of limitless pizza tempt you to help a guy out with math stuff?
Hu hu hu T.T
this is baek, btw
jajjang~! ;D
Chanyeol grins at his phone screen until his jaw hurts as he texts back, Sure, dude!
The reply comes almost instantly, U da best! Finals are only a month away and i suck ><
Chanyeol bites his lip, trying to think of something inspiring and memorable before simply typing in, We can do it! Just send me your schedule~!
Baekhyun responds with an immediate, THanks ^_^ and Chanyeol saves his number before downloading the picture of his weekly schedule which is gel-penned into a pink day planner that matches Chanyeol’s white one. Chanyeol squeals into the corner of his blanket and decides their coordinating tastes in office supplies must be destiny (never mind that the campus bookstore sells identical planners to the vast majority of student body).
They make their first study date for Tuesday night and Chanyeol circles the day in his planner with a pink highlighter.
Chanyoel discovers when they meet up at a cafe two nights later that it wasn’t actually Baekhyun’s birthday last Thursday. Baekhyun just shrugs when Chanyeol pesters him for the reasoning behind this discrepancy.
“Jongdae won this recipe book for cocktails during a giveaway on his favorite foodie blog and didn’t want to wait three more weeks to try it out.”
“And you couldn’t have a party just because?” Chanyeol giggles into his latte.
“Oh, I didn’t think of that.” Baekhyun taps his pencil against the spine of his algebra textbook.
“So what are you doing on your actual birthday?”
“Dunno.” Baekhyun shrugs. “You wanna help me figure it out?” Chanyeol only asked about his plans out of curiosity, but since Baekhyun is requesting so nicely with a tilt of his head and a smolder in his eyes...
“Sure! Why not?”
After a spending few intense hours getting intimate with polynomials (and, in Chanyeol’s case, the cute little squints and nose wrinkles Baekhyun makes at particularly tricky equations) they walk back home together in the dark. The damp air is a little nippy even though it’s late spring, but the six lattes he downed plus all the delicious cackles Baekhyun makes at the end of every stupid joke keep Chanyeol warm all the way down to his toe socks.
That is until Chanyeol sees Minseok’s battered Volvo parked outside of their building and realizes with a sudden chill that Tuesday was supposed to be their Pirates marathon night. He doesn’t even need to check his neglected phone to know what he’ll find, but Chanyeol does anyway: two missed calls from Minseok, a 5:41 minute voicemail from Luhan, and a string of progressively passive aggressive texts from Kyungsoo. Shit.
Chanyeol doesn’t open the voice message because he’s practically on the doorstep now but saves it to his mailbox for later (recordings of Luhan being annoying turn into recordings of Luhan being hilarious if you listen while drunk) and bids farewell to Baekhyun in the stairway.
Baekhyun’s cheesy goodbye grin gives Chanyeol enough fortitude to open Kyungsoo’s messages and briefly scroll down the list before he heads inside. It’s always a good strategy to assess Kyungsoo’s level of wrath before entering the war zone. From the last text, which was sent 43 minutes ago and reads, If you know what’s good for you…!, Chanyeol is betting he’s between Level Creepy Eyebrow Twitching and Level Check It Out My Death Glare Can Melt Glass! He takes a deep breath and pushes open the door, which is fortunately not barricaded.
“Oh, hey, sorry guys! I was just helping out a friend and lost track of time!” Chanyeol slips out of his shoes and pads over to lean against the sofa. “How’s it going!” Yixing grins placidly from the easy chair next to the reading lamp, his teeth glowing in the light of the TV screen in an eerie Cheshire cat effect.
“Oh yeah? Who’s preying on your soft heart for tutoring services these days?” Luhan asks, adjusting a felt three cornered hat on his head. Chanyeol thinks he recognizes it from one of Jonghyun hyung’s past Halloween getups.
“Oh, um, just a friend, hehe!” Chanyeol twists his own hat around so the brim is facing backwards and tries to pour himself a cup of the spiced rum and lemonade concoction Minseok calls grog without splashing anything in the dark.
“No need to be secretive, we heard our friendly neighbor’s voice in the hallway,” Kyungsoo says primly, not even glaring. Uh oh. Maybe he’s just waiting for some privacy once everyone clears out before letting loose on Chanyeol, but if he’s already reached Level Let’s Pretend Everything’s Normal angry, Chanyeol is in trouble.
Chanyeol pulls a kitchen chair up next to Yixing and slouches on the hard wooden seat, his legs too long to balance his heels comfortably on the rung and the coffee table just barely out of reach. He considers scootching his seat forward enough to prop his feet on the table but decides to just bite his tongue and endure; there’s no telling what random actions will just add to Kyungsoo’s offense.
The third Pirates installation finishes just after midnight and Luhan half drags, half carries a boneless Yixing out to Minseok’s car with promises they’ll be back to finish the marathon next Tuesday. Chanyeol heaves a sigh of relief once there’s finally space in the room to air out the unspoken words, but Kyungsoo goes straight into the bathroom and makes a show of locking the door before running the sink to brush his teeth. Chanyeol leans against the doorjamb in the hall, slimy tentacles of worry tugging at his gut while he waits for the water to stop its slow trickle down the pipes.
His mouth is open faster than the door when Kyungsoo finally emerges with a towel around his neck. Chanyeol rapidly explains that it totally wasn’t intentional, he really didn’t mean to cut out on Kyungsoo at the last minute but Baekhyun had suggested a study date and somehow he just agreed before he could realize that the words were coming out of his mouth, much less remember that Kyungsoo had penciled the movie night reminder into his day planner for him on the same day, and that he’s sorry, really really sorry, and that he’ll wash all the dishes this week if it would make Kyungsoo feel better, and that basically, he’s just sorry.
Kyungsoo blinks twice to indicate that you betcha Chanyeol is washing all the dishes for a week and walks straight past him into the bedroom and slams the door.
Kyungsoo doesn’t talk to him for a week and cooks nothing but potato jeon, which he thinks Chanyeol can’t stand because of that one time Chanyeol got food poisoning right after eating a platterful of the greasy dough. Chanyeol actually doesn’t mind potato pancakes in the least, but he doesn’t correct Kyungsoo’s misassumption and pretends to suffer anyway, hoping to pay his penance like a good and shamed deadbeat roomie.
By the weekend Chanyeol is thoroughly miserable from the silent treatment act Kyungsoo keeps up even in front of their friends so he starts hanging out with Baekhyun during lunch, too. Avoiding the problem only seems to make Kyungsoo glare harder, though, so on Tuesday Chanyeol decides that this has gone on long enough and something has to give.
So Chanyeol gives Kyungsoo a new spatula as an apology. He even spends the extra 6,000 Won just to get the limited edition turquoise color.
“If you think copying the childish tricks of our immature upstairs neighbors is going to make me forgive you, consider yourself wrong.” Kyungsoo slices the spatula through the air, testing the balance of the proportions in his sensitive fingers before heading for the sink.
“I’m sorry I was late to our movie last week! Are you really going to let it ruin tonight though?” Minseok, Luhan, and Yixing are due to ring their doorbell in less than an hour for Pirates Marathon: Part II, and Chanyeol would really like to be able to actually enjoy it this time.
“You’re such a dolt, Park Chanyeol!” Kyungsoo doesn’t even turn around from the sink where he’s peeling more potatoes. “This is not about you being late!”
“Then I don’t even know what I did!” Chanyeol wails as Kyungsoo pads over to turn on the stove, apparently planning to break in the new spatula on a batch of jeon regardless of his continuing grudge.
“Then why don’t you spend some time thinking about it?” Kyungsoo snaps as he breaks an egg into his favorite mixing bowl.
Chanyeol resolves right there from his perch on the saggy left cushion of the sofa to think long and hard about the situation until Kyungsoo is satisfied and quits making nothing but potatoes. (Not that he would complain about his roommate being nice and giving him edible food, it’s just that eating the same dish for every meal is getting old. Has been since like Thursday). But before he can get anywhere productive with his thoughts Luhan’s banging on their door and demanding fuzzy blankets and grog, and somehow the rest of the whole next week ends up too busy to do things like think.
Tutoring Baekhyun keeps him pretty busy, for one.
They’re meeting at the library every other day now since the math tutoring sessions somehow expanded to include general homework time. It’s not that Chanyeol is avoiding going home exactly, it’s just that the library is less stressful. The only person who ever glares in the library is the cranky old man behind the reference desk and Chanyeol could care less about his fine opinion, at least when Baekhyun’s arm is linked through his and they’re swinging a bag of illegal oreos between them on their way up to their secret corner on the third floor. There are just some things he can’t share with Kyungsoo, and that includes the thrill of eating cookies in a prohibited area.
“So…” Baekhyun says, licking blueberry icing off half an oreo with a twirl of his tongue. “Noraebang? Thursday?”
“Ok,” Chanyeol nods, not even pretending not to stare at Baekhyun’s tongue acrobatics.
“You should bring your roomie, ‘cause I still haven’t met him but you talk about him all the time and I’m curioussss!” Baekhyun scrapes his bottom teeth across the chocolate surface to get at the last stubborn bits of filling.
“I do?” Chanyeol asks as Baekhyun takes the opportunity to shove the now icing free half a cookie in his mouth.
“Oh god,” Baekhyun groans, snorting chocolate crumbs onto his Comp Theory textbook. “Since I’ve already heard all about his teeth brushing habits and how adorable he looks when he’s flustered, it’s getting awkward we haven’t even met.”
“Oh.” Baekhyun does have a point. And then Chanyeol can’t stop thinking about it, thoughts of Kyungsoo’s adorable stuttering and Kyungsoo’s huge brown eyes pushing out any remaining room to consider anything else.
That is until Luhan peeks his head around a pillar.
“Ooh, are those the blueberry ones? I love these!” he squeals, snatching the last tray of cookies out of the bag.
“Hey, Hyung!” Baekhyun flashes a peace sign and a double wink. Luhan ruffles his hair.
“Shooo!” Luhan says, turning to Chanyeol with his mouth full of half chewed oreo. “A widdle bird tode me shumwum’s been getting cojee in de wibrary!”
“Eheh! Who told you that?” Chanyeol laughs awkwardly, suddenly wishing Kyungsoo were around to tell Luhan to chew with his mouth closed.
“‘S not important,” Luhan says after swallowing, wiping his mouth on his shirt sleeve.
“We’re just studying, Hyung.” Baekhyun raps his knuckles on the front cover of his textbook.
“Uh huh,” Luhan nods. “Behind a pillar in a secluded corner of the third floor.” He taps his fingers thoughtfully against his chin in a steady rhythm.
“We’re just hiding the snacks from the librarian,” Chanyeol says. “You’re welcome for the cookies, by the way.”
“Mmhmm!” Luhan hums ambiguously before disappearing around the corner with a little skip and a trail of crumbs.
“Ugh,” Bekhyun groans, faceplanting into his open backpack that’s propped against the pillar. “Ready to call it a day? I think my neurons are all fried.”
“Ok,” Chanyeol sighs, scraping his Econ notes back into his folder. Maybe Kyungsoo will still be up when they get back since it’s only just after 10:00.
Baekhyun hurries down the spiral staircase to the main floor. It’s a good thing his legs are so short or Chanyeol might have a hard time keeping up with him, especially with his penchant for skipping steps, sometimes three at a time.
Neither of them has anything to check out so Chanyeol follows Baekhyun as he plunges past the security detectors and the front doors onto the sidewalk, the crotchety old head librarian’s judging stare following them out as if he can see oreo crumbs clinging to the corners of their mouths.
Baekhyun halts under a lamppost to check his phone messages and Chanyeol discovers there really are a few crumbs of cookie sticking at the edges of Baekhyun’s mouth, either that or he’s suddenly sprouted a few new freckles on his upper lip.
“What are you staring at, Park?” Baekhyun asks, glancing up with a thoughtful look.
“Oh, nothing!” Chanyeol says with a quick smile. Baekhyun just shrugs and resumes typing away with both thumbs. Chanyeol pulls out his own phone to keep from staring because Baekhyun’s mouth is really cute in all its crumb covered glory, almost as pretty as Kyungsoo’s, even.
Chanyeol chances a look up, just to make sure the crumbs are still there. They are, and now he’s itching more than ever to brush them away and Baekhyun looks utterly adorable in an impish kind of way, his little smudge of a nose casting a smooth spill of shadow over the slope of his cheek. Chanyeol can’t quite make out the faint dusting of pale freckles he knows is there but he wonders if he could still feel them under his fingertips if he just-
“Agh!” Chanyeol groans, scraping his nails up and down the skin of his bare arms.
“What’s wrong?” Baekhyun gasps, leaning up to get a better look at Chanyeol’s face as he pockets his phone.
“I feel all-itchy!” Chanyeol whines, digging his nails in deeper to keep them from digging into something else far more tempting.
“Spring allergies?” Baekhyun bites his lip with a sympathetic look. All Chanyeol can do is nod, even though Baekhyun’s the one who’s making his skin crawl with tiny prickles of opportunity and future and what-if. “We’d better get you inside, huh?”
Baekhyun says goodnight at the stairs and Chanyeol takes a moment to collect his thoughts (and his fingernails) before going inside to face Kyungsoo. He rakes his nails down the sides of his arms one last time, sucks stale hall air deep into his lungs, and kicks the last of his frustration into the welcome mat.
He also kicks a heavy round thing with the instep of his sneaker. It’s some kind of dish, covered in tin foil with a note stuck on top:
Best wishes and good vibes,
From: your Constant Admirer
There’s no signature, not even a sloppy one running off the edge of the sticky note, so Chanyeol scoops up the pan and decides to ask Kyungsoo about it, if he heard any strange noises outside, or if any phantoms happened to ring the doorbell while he was out.
Kyungsoo is in fact awake and in a fairly decent mood when Chanyeol steps inside. “How was your study date?” he asks evenly, humming softly under his breath as he leafs through a recent issue of some cooking magazine Joonmyun gave him a subscription to for his birthday.
“It was cool.” Chanyeol kicks off his shoes and dumps his bag on the tile next to them. He slides the mystery pan onto the kitchen counter and plucks at a corner of the foil molded neatly around the dish. The kitchen is clean and perfectly in order, no stray crumbs, wet dishcloths, or wire cooling racks in sight, so no stress baking happened while he was gone for the first time in weeks. What a relief.
Chanyeol sighs and rips into the foil, tearing a wide strip across the middle. “Hey Soo, did anything happen while I was gone?”
“What kind of something?” The magazine rustles as Kyungsoo turns a page.
“Well, I don’t know, but I found this on the doorstep!” Kyungsoo peeks his head over the back of the couch as Chanyeol holds up the cake pan, now divested of half of the meticulously crimped foil.
“Oh my.” Kyungsoo delicately wrinkles his nose. “What have you there?”
“I know, right? It was just laying outside our front door, with no trace of where it came from! I think it’s a cheesecake? Maybe?” Chanyeol pokes at a blueberry.
“Was there a note?” Kyungsoo asks, sliding back down out of sight.
“Yeah, but it didn’t really say anything. And no signature like last time, so I doubt it was-well…”
“You don’t recognize the handwriting?” Kyungsoo flips forward three pages as Chanyeol fumbles for the sticky note. The letters are very neat, almost perfectly printed, like a grade school teacher or some kind of professional pen tester wrote them.
“Not really?” Chanyeol shrugs. There are hardly enough letters there to get a feel for the handwriting style. “Maybe whoever delivered it wrote the note for the sender, although there’s no bakery box so I can’t exactly call and ask. Weird.” Chanyeol crinkles the remaining strip of foil into a tight ball and pulls open the silverware drawer.
“But the note is on a post-it, not a proper card, so don’t-um, I mean,” Kyungsoo clears his throat as Chanyeol successfully locates his lucky spoon, the one with the slightly bent handle Kyungsoo’s always threatening to get rid of. “If it’s not in a box, why do you think it’s from a bakery? It doesn’t look homemade?”
Chanyeol turns toward the couch to find Kyungsoo sitting up again and fixing him with an intense stare. His hair is slightly tousled from lying on the sofa but his cheeks are a soft pink, just the shade of the streaks of raspberry juice seeping into the sour cream topping of the cake and-
Chanyeol shakes his head and looks away. “I don’t know…it just looks kind of perfect?” Kyungsoo makes a muffled sound in his throat and Chanyeol’s gaze darts back. Kyungsoo looks like he’s about to protest, but then he just bites his lip and flops back onto his belly. Chanyeol sinks into the nearest kitchen chair and scratches an itchy patch behind his left elbow. “I grabbed you a fork, you want some dessert?”
“No no, you just enjoy that.” Kyungsoo waves his fingers over the back of the sofa. Chanyeol digs in. He’s kind of surprised Kyungsoo isn’t making a fuss with comments about food left out in the open where rats can get to it and spread horrible diseases, but he’s glad. Chanyeol’s glad he can enjoy a quiet moment in their living room, and he’s glad he can enjoy the dessert, which is in fact an amazingly creamy cheesecake with strawberry filling and something chocolatey in the bottom.
It does bother him a little that he has no idea where it came from. As much as he wishes Baekhyun was his Constant Admirer, the note looks nothing like the one carefully preserved in the back of his day planner. And how could Baekhyun have known his favorite dessert is cheesecake with berries, the more berries the better? Unless he got help from someone. Whoever this admirer person is, they did their homework.
Chanyeol stands up with a satisfied groan to slide the uneaten half of the cake into the fridge and rinse off his fork. He downs a glass of water to help his stomach settle and lingers in the doorway to the bathroom, hunting for his toothbrush on the cluttered counter.
“You know, I wonder if Baek knows anything about the mystery note, since he is in the habit of leaving them himself,” Chanyeol wonders aloud as he squeezes out a long strip of toothpaste onto his brush. Kyungsoo snorts loudly from behind the sofa.
“How could he leave that note if he spent all evening with you at the library?” Chanyeol flinches at Kyungsoo’s suddenly harsh tone.
“How do you know who I was with?” Chanyeol frowns at his reflection in the mirror as he wets his brush, then flicks off the sink. “Why do you always have to assume things?” He kind of hates how defensive Kyungsoo gets every time Baekhyun’s name comes up in conversation.
“Well, I know you’re not meeting Luhan hyung over there, that’s for sure!” Kyungsoo snarls, sliding off the sofa and replacing his magazine on the neat stack of periodicals on the coffee table. Chanyeol watches him stretch his back over the armrest. “No alcoholic drinks allowed on the premises!”
“Well that’s where you’re wrong!” Chanyeol shoves his toothbrush in his mouth and slams the bathroom door before Kyungsoo can start a real argument.
Despite Chanyeol still being clueless about why Kyungsoo is suddenly acting like an adolescent girl discovering the joys of PMS, he quickly realizes that mentioning Baekhyun in front of his roommate instantly lowers the room temperature by about 5 degrees Celsius. So Chanyeol starts substituting destinations for the names of who he is meeting whenever he leaves the house, but somehow Kyungsoo always seems to know when Baekhyun is involved. (That may or may not have something to do with the fact Chanyeol only set foot in the campus library about once a semester before he started tutoring Baekhyun, but whatever.)
When Chanyeol finally does find a spare moment to think about things it suddenly strikes him as rather odd that Kyungsoo seems to hate anything and everything to do with their upstairs neighbor, especially since he barely knows the guy. It’s really not fair of Kyungsoo to judge a new acquaintance this harshly and Chanyeol is convinced that if he can just get the two to spend quality time together, preferably with some alcohol involved, Kyungsoo will realize what an idiot he’s being and everything can go back to normal and they can eat non-potatoes again.
Buoyed by his genius realization, Chanyeol rushes into the kitchen where Kyungsoo is hunched over the table, worksheets and graphs of integers and exam review papers spread in an avalanche in front of him. He’d been up until 3 AM the night before doing and redoing practice problems for the upcoming calc final and from the looks of things it’s not going so well.
“Do you want to go out tonight with me and Baek and Jongdae? It’s Baekhyun’s real birthday today!” Kyungsoo looks up from a differential equation to blink at Chanyeol.
“What possessed you to think I would willingly associate with someone who thinks it’s acceptable to celebrate their own birthday twice in the space of a month?”
“Well, it makes more sense than having the second celebration in, like, November,” Chanyeol reasons, stealing a strip of cold jeon from the pan on the stove. “Except hey, we could totally have a joint party then, for my birthday and his half birthday!”
“Get out of my kitchen!”
“Soo, please! Even if you won’t talk to me anymore, at least let me help you with your homework,” Chanyeol pleads, uncomfortably guilty about how this spat is affecting his best friend’s quality of life and cortisol levels. Kyungsoo gives him a long, hard, long stare.
“Fine, but only if we can agree to restrict our comments to mathematics.” Chanyeol nods and pulls up a chair next to Kyungsoo’s.
Chanyeol is hopeful but even more confused when Kyungsoo melts into his side half way through the third problem on the list, curling his left hand into Chanyeol’s T-shirt and resting his head against the dip of Chanyeol’s shoulder. Chanyeol’s breath catches, the sudden heat pressed up against him flushing him with a familiar warmth. His chest aches at the casual intimacy after weeks of estrangement and he’s dying to ask what this means, why Kyungsoo is being so confusing, but Chanyeol keeps his promise and keeps his mouth shut except to point out when Kyungsoo forgets a minus sign.
They finish the final problem just as the last rays of sun are starting to slant through the window. Kyungsoo drops his pencil with a heavy sigh but doesn’t move to get up. Chanyeol wraps his arms around Kyungsoo’s slender shoulders and gives them a soft squeeze. Maybe now would be a good time to bring up the...whatever this problem is that they’re having, but Chanyeol’s throat sticks around the words like a dried out lump of potato pancake.
Maybe it’s the distorted glow of the fading light that has them suspended in this fragile sphere of inertia, afraid to blink and disturb the stillness but all the while oppressed under the growing dread of this, whatever this is, being nearly at an end. Chanyeol realizes with a lump in his throat that more than resenting the unpleasantness of having to tiptoe around a volatile Kyungsoo, what he’s really missed is just spending time with his best friend, talking his ear off about random shit like the new guitar riff Yixing just taught him, or listening to Kyungsoo rant about his douche calc professor’s douche mullet, or just breathing peaceful air in the same room at the same time. And Kyungsoo is not usually into the skinship, like not at all, but this cuddling is pretty nice. Chanyeol could be ok with this addition to their relationship.
The moment splinters like a shattering casserole dish when Chanyeol’s phone buzzes and they both jump, Kyungsoo’s head knocking painfully into Chanyeol’s jaw. It’s a text from Baekhyun.
Heyyyeyyy~! meet us downstairs in 10
get ready to partayy, sexy!
“Hey...I gotta go now,” Chanyeol starts hesitantly, tugging at the hem of his shirt still clutched in Kyungsoo’s fingers. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”
Kyungsoo just pushes him away and stalks into the bathroom. The shower is still running when Chanyeol locks the front door behind him.
On Friday afternoon Chanyeol comes home from class to find an empty apartment and a foot high mountain of jeon piled on their largest serving platter. This time it’s so burnt Chanyeol can’t even taste the green onions around the pungent flavor of charred Teflon. He checks his phone to find a message from Luhan.
don’t you worry, baby
ur roomies safe ad sound with me for the weeknd
We’ll see you Mundey
So of course Chanyeol feels instantly lonelier and goes upstairs to bother Baekhyun and Jongdae.
“Yo,” Jongdae greets him at the door. “What’s up. We’re making potato pancakes, you want some?”
“Um, no thanks,” Chanyeol refuses politely, trying not to grimace. He thinks he still has a stubborn flake of Teflon stuck in his back teeth. “Hey, is B--”
“Lover Boy went to Cheongju for the weekend. His girlfriend has a dance recital!” Jongin’s voice crows from the kitchen.
“Oh, I--what?” Chanyeol, once again, is confused.
“Yeah, he ditched us for his girlfriend,” Jongdae explains, leaning on the doorframe casually as if Chanyeol’s not gaping in shock like he just watched a small horde of sewer rats scurry by. “You sure you don’t want any jeon? Jonginnie’s cooking is da shizzle!”
“Yeah...yeah I think I’m good…”
Chanyeol stumbles back downstairs and flops onto the sofa in the dark living room, his brain already in overdrive dissecting every moment of every interaction he’s ever had with Byun Baekhyun to come to the horrifying realization that maybe Baekhyun smiling until his eyes disappeared and Baekhyun belting impromptu duets with him on post-study noraebang dates and Baekhyun feeding him cold french fries in the cafeteria was just Baekhyun being Baekhyun, and maybe it didn’t mean anything special after all.
Maybe he just built it all up in his head as a cover for how much he misses Kyungsoo. Kyungsoo...shit.
Chanyeol is so caught up in all of this overanalyzing that he completely forgets to do important life things like charge his phone, shower, or finish eating the leaning tower of charred jeon.
Basically, he just wimps on the couch the whole weekend.
“Just, wow. I mean, I didn’t know ‘wimp’ was an actual verb until I walked in on this!” Luhan announces in a too loud, too smug voice when he waltzes through the door sometime later. “Did you skip class again? Professor Lee’s gonna be pissed.”
“Wha…?” Chanyeol pulls his head out from under a sofa cushion.
“Dude, it’s 3:57 PM on Monday, May 26, 2014, Year of the Horse, and you totally just missed our Econ final exam review.” Luhan closes the front door until it’s cracked open just one annoying centimeter and trips over to the fridge to steal a beer.
“Today’s Monday?”
“See you on exam day, loser!” Luhan makes a hand heart and skips out, leaving both the fridge and the front door wide open. Chanyeol moans and shoves his head back under the sofa cushion, too close to an untimely end of Death By Wimping to even care if he gets blamed for it. It’s not like he could possibly fall further from Kyungsoo’s good graces anyway. He’s already at, like, coal mine shaft depths of disgrace.
“Do you want to know who left that cheesecake on the front porch?”
“Huh?” Chanyeol scrambles up, clawing at the back of the couch for support. The voice in the doorway is not Luhan’s.
“The triple berry cheesecake with mocha crumble crust, dumbass! That was from me.” Kyungsoo pouts in silhouette in the open doorway, his eyes an indistinguishable darkness beneath furrowed brows. Chanyeol bursts out laughing, all the pent up feels suddenly loosing themselves from the prison of his ribcage, even though that probably isn’t the safest reaction have in front of Kyungsoo right now, considering they’re barely even talking to each other.
“Why would you do that, Soo?” Chanyeol snorts, another stream of sick laughter rippling out through his nose. “Did you set it on the porch to cool and just forgot about it? Are you turning into me?” Kyungsoo drops his bag to the linoleum with a heavy clunk, but fortunately nothing shatters.
“Fuck, Yeol! I did it ‘cause I like you.”
“What?” Chanyeol thinks he must have heard wrong but his breath catches anyway, squeezed around another bubble of laughter spasming in his chest.
“I like you!”
“Haha, that’s good to hear! I was beginning to really wonder, between all the burnt potatoes and avoidance going on aro--”
“No, you dolt!” Kyungsoo stamps his foot, one harsh resounding slap of rubber sole against vinyl flooring. “I like you!”
“Oh,” Chanyeol blinks, his nervous system so torn between more flailing or just toppling over the back of the sofa that it renders him motionless and tingling like a live wire plunged in a swimming pool full of electric eels. “‘Like’ as in--”
“As in I never used to care about your stupid friends as long as they kept their obnoxiousness far away from my zen, but this time it just makes me so angry that he’s monopolizing all of your free time and then when you come home all you can talk about is him and his popped collars and his pink polos and his glitter and--!”
“Wait! Who is h--”
“Baekhyun,” he seethes through flaring nostrils. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know! And don’t you dare interrupt me, Park Chanyeol!” Kyungsoo bellows, striding in to clutch the back of a kitchen chair, the door still wide open. “I’ve been putting up with your nonsense for weeks so now you’re just going to shut up and listen til I’m done and if you think for a moment that I’m going to forgive you just because you’re fucking adorable and simultaneously ravishing then you--!”
“Ravishing?” Chanyeol is mouthing soundless syllables and pointing at his nose. “Soo, did you seriously just say--”
“If you would just pay attention to me you would--!”
Chanyeol’s phone buzzes against his leg and he instinctively unlocks the screen to check it. It’s from Joonmyun.
Hey, sorry to interrupt your VIC (very important conversation, hahaha ^^)
but could you maybe keep it down a little? Jongdae
has a headband
*headache, oops >:P
“Are you seriously going to ignore me right now?” Kyungsoo chokes, his chest starting to heave under his unseasonably thick cable knit sweater. “And what the hell does kkaebsong even mean!”
“Hey, Kyungsoo, cou--”
“Quit trying to avoid me!” Kyungsoo hisses, and that’s really rich coming from him, but Chanyeol just smiles patiently and tries again.
“Soo, we really--”
“Oh my god, stop trying to change the subject or we’ll never get to the hot making out in bed because we’re stranded in this unrequited hell hole of a love triangle that isn’t even a triangle anymore!” Kyungsoo shrieks, the legs of the chair in his fists rattling against the floor as he quivers in furor. Apparently Chanyeol wasn’t the only one around here with pent up feels.
Since words aren’t working, Chanyeol decides the only logical thing to do is physically shut Kyungsoo up. As in with his lips. It works out quite nicely, Chanyeol’s arms drawing him close to soothe away his shivers as Kyungsoo sighs into his mouth, and Chanyeol feels an immense flood of relief, like this is the punchline to one of Luhan’s awful jokes he’s been hanging on for a week. Except no, this is way better than anything that has to do with Luhan, this is like...this feels like home.
Kyungsoo pulls away, his face adorably pink and torn between angry and star struck, and then they’re both giggling and leaning in to try it again.
“So…” Kyungsoo says, chewing at the swell of his lip as Chanyeol pulls away for breath. “Before this goes any farther I would really like an answer.”
“Oh, is it my turn to talk now?” Chanyeol teases. Kyungsoo rolls his eyes.
“Yeol…”
“I guess I had a minor epiphany with my head under the sofa cushion.” Kyungsoo narrows his eyes and Chanyeol gives a careful cough. “Well, not gonna lie, I maybe had a tiny smidgeon of a crush on, um, our neighbor,” Chanyeol mumbles, not sure if he still needs to avoid Baekhyun’s name in conversation, “but when I found out he was unavailable and was forced to actually think about it all...well, I realized my feelings for him were nowhere near the intensity of what I feel for you. Also, Baekhyun can’t cook like at all. Not even burnt pancakes!” Kyungsoo swats him on the shoulder before pulling him in for another kiss. “But most importantly, I like you too!”
“Ok,” Kyungsoo says, his voice shy but he meets Chanyeol’s gaze full on. “In that case, I accept your feelings, Mr. Park.”
Once finals are over, Jongdae and Baekhyun invite everyone over for a huge celebratory dinner before they all clear out for vacation or summer jobs or whatever. Baekhyun’s girlfriend, Sehun, comes up for the party. She’s like a foot taller than him and has him totally pussy whipped. Chanyeol doesn’t have time to feel jealous or awkward because he’s so wrapped up in Kyungsoo--that is, wrapped around his pinky finger.
“You know why I love you?” Kyungsoo hums, leaning back against Chanyeol’s chest as Chanyeol catches him around the middle and buries his nose in the soft waves of Kyungsoo’s hair. They’re washing dishes in the kitchen while everyone else cleans up in the living room, Luhan directing traffic from the top of Jongdae’s dining room table as he belts out pirate shanties.
“Because I always eat your pancakes, carcinogenous Teflon sprinkles and all?” Chanyeol teases and pinches Kyungsoo’s sides. Kyungsoo yelps, flinging soap bubbles at Chanyoel’s face. A clump of foam hits the side of his nose and slides down into a lopsided moustache.
“No, you idiot!” Kyungsoo reaches up with the corner of Chanyeol’s abandoned dishtowel to gently wipe away the soap. He clicks his tongue like he’s annoyed but Chanyeol knows he isn’t, not really, not when he’s staring up with adoration shining in his dark eyes. He drops the towel to smooth his thumbs over Chanyeol’s cheekbones and Chanyeol uncurls one arm from Kyungsoo’s hips to cup his jaw.
“Ok,” Chanyeol whispers, dipping forward to kiss the bridge of Kyungsoo’s nose. “Why do you love me?” He flutters his eyelashes and Kyungsoo gives him a dark look that only makes Chanyeol melt closer into the curves of his body, pressing his hips into the counter.
“Because you loved me enough to pretend to hate them,” Kyungsoo says, surprising a laugh out of Chanyeol.
“Well then,” Chanyeol gasps, still catching his breath, “if we love each that much, what are we holding back for?”
Kyungsoo answers by attaching his mouth to Chanyeol’s and sucking hard. Chanyeol moans and parts his lips for the first sweep of Kyungsoo’s tongue that leaves a wake of heat in his mouth. He buries his fingers in Kyungsoo’s hair, Kyungsoo reaching up to scrabble at Chanyeol’s shoulders for leverage. He drops a hand to the jut of Chanyeol’s hip and slips his fingers under the hem of his T-shirt. His palm is still warm from the hot water and Chanyeol shudders as it glides across his abs. He tilts Kyungsoo’s head and presses deeper into the heat of his mouth.
They pull away with a start when at a sharp gasp behind them and turn to find a red-faced Joonmyun frozen in the middle of the kitchen, clutching a collection of empty beer cans. “Sorry!” he stammers, dropping a can that rolls to a stop at the heel of Chanyeol’s sneaker. “Garbage bags? I-sorry!”
“Grosssss!” Jongin hisses loudly, sauntering in to attach himself to Joonmyun’s waist. He buries his face in the back of Joonmyun’s neck and Joonmyun loses the rest of his cans with a startled moan.
“How come no one ever tells me when something exciting is happening?” Baekhyun whines loudly as he dodges around Zitao, pushing into the rapidly crowding kitchen. They all tumble out of the way as Luhan careens through the door, swinging an empty whiskey bottle as he finishes the 36th verse of What Do You Do With A Drunken Sex God on a piercing high note that has Jongdae plugging his ears with leftover cheese puffs. He crashes into the dish drain and Kyungsoo jumps back into Chanyeol’s arms as Luhan emerges with the blender capsized on his elbow.
“Ayyy, love birds!” he slurs, “where has all the rum gone?” Joonmyun steps in to rescue the blender as Kyungsoo calmly hands Luhan a glass of water, shoves everyone out of the kitchen, and goes back to kissing Chanyeol. Obviously. He doesn’t need 36 verses to know the answer to that question.
Author: nachtegael
Recipient: chanmimi
Pairing/Focus: Chanyeol/Kyungsoo, Chanyeol/Baekhyun (Baekhyun/girl!Sehun)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: language
Length: 9,000
Summary: Chanyeol is surprised to find a bottle of whiskey outside his front door with a note attached.
“What the hell is that noise? Is Kyungsoo trying his hand at Nanta or something?”
“Ahaha, no!” Chanyeol shakes his head at the thought of anything that acrobatic going down in their tiny kitchen but files it away as inspiration for possible kicks to relieve upcoming finals stress. “The stove’s not even on, I’m helping Soo with homework.”
“Then what the hell?” Luhan repeats in an annoyed voice, as if Chanyeol were creating the disturbance specifically to interfere with this phone call.
“I wish I knew but I have no idea,” Chanyeol sighs. The banging and scuffling noises issuing from the vacant unit above their apartment started early in the afternoon. It was easy to ignore at first but now that it’s after dark with no sign of letting up Kyungsoo is getting cagey and Chanyeol has started to worry about a rat infestation and the safety of his Playstation wires from invading rodent incisors.
“Do you need me to call Yixing? Have him come stage an exorcism?” Luhan asks in his authoritative tone, thinking he’s being helpful as usual.
“No no! That’s ok! I think we’re good,” Chanyeol hastily assures.
“Well, let me know if anything else weird happens,” Luhan mutters through the thick frown in his voice.
“Ok!” Chanyeol promises, throwing an ay-okay sign at the wall by the refrigerator. “Bye!” He hangs up before Luhan can offer to bring him more traditional medicine to prevent head colds. Chanyeol’s not even sick anymore, his voice just sounds a little scratchy yet, but Luhan is like a mother duck sometimes. An annoying mother duck with an immense appreciation for schadenfreude.
“Did Luhan hyung just offer to bring us rat poison?” Kyungsoo asks, raising his head from the crack in the sofa cushions it was previously stuffed in. “He should know better, no chemicals allowed near my kitchen.”
“It was an even worse idea,” Chanyeol says, rubbing the skin between his eyebrows. “And of course I told him no.”
“Of course?” Kyungsoo snorts. “Because you telling him no would be a first, actually.”
“Whatever.” Chanyeol pushes his glasses back into place with a sigh. “Did you finish the first problem set? Lemme see.” Kyungsoo whines in the back of his throat but hands over his calc homework, thoroughly smudged and wrinkled from numerous erasures, and all thoughts of rats and poltergeists fly out of Chanyeol’s head as he attempts to make sense of Kyungsoo’s scribblings.
That is until the next night. On Tuesday night the banging doesn’t stop until 4 AM, this time augmented by some lovely metallic clanging and a final crash of shattering glass.
Chanyeol stumbles out the front door on Wednesday morning, half dead from sleep deprivation and smelling like old gym socks because he slept through his shower time, and almost shatters something himself. He shakes his head to clear his blurry vision (at least as much as it will clear before 9 AM) before bending over to inspect the heavy round thing that just rolled to a stop against his sneaker.
It’s a bottle of whiskey, still two thirds full, with a note stuck to the neck:
Sorry for all the noise last night, Jongdae broke that casserole dish just because he hates washing it, I think. No worries though! We only had the one, so he can’t do it again. Happy Wednesday!! Love from, your new neighbors! *|^_^/* Jongdae and Bae
The last name of the signature is all cramped into the corner of the oversized post-it note, letters blurring into each other until Chanyeol has to squint to keep his eyes from crossing. He shrugs, suddenly remembering he’s already late for class, and steps back inside to shove the bottle on the table for Kyungsoo to deal with.
Chanyeol doesn’t get back til well after dark, not a difficult feat considering it still gets dark before 7:00, but still.
“Have some rum cake,” Kyungsoo says in lieu of greeting from his usual sprawl on the sofa.
“We have rum?”
“Well, I made it with that whiskey you left on the counter, but same difference.”
“Oh.” Chanyeol sniffs as he opens the refrigerator to rummage. The air does smell good, buttery.
“Who is that from, anyway? Did Minseok hyung drop it off for our Pirates Of The Caribbean marathon next week? I hope he doesn’t mind I borrowed some~”
“Nope, it was an anonymous gift.” The fridge door slams shut with a suctioning smack.
“WHAT? You let me drink out of an opened bottle from someone we don’t know?”
“Well, we don’t know them yet, but--”
“What are you talking about?” Kyungsoo’s sitting up now, glaring at Chanyeol over the back of the sofa as he settles at the table with the cake pan and a carton of milk.
“I think we have new neighbors?”
Chanyeol’s suspicions are confirmed the next Thursday afternoon when an unexpected visitor arrives on their doorstep. Chanyeol answers the door in his polka dot pj’s, still yawning from his short lived nap.
“Hey, I’m Jongdae,” the short dude on the doorstep says.
“Oh, Casserole Boy, hey!” Chanyeol manages around a particularly gaping yawn, remembering the post-it note now stuck to the inside of his day planner.
“Casserole Boy?” Jongdae repeats, wrinkling his nose.
“Please excuse Chanyeol and his lack of a brain to mouth filter,” Kyungsoo says, appearing out of nowhere to shove Chanyeol away from the door. “I’m Do Kyungsoo. How may I help you?”
“Hey,” Jongdae says again with a curling smile, “we just moved into the unit above you guys and wanted to meet our new neighbors.” He does a little wave thing that reminds Chanyeol of windshield wipers.
“Oh, it’s nice to meet you,” Kyungsoo nods.
“So, we’re actually having a birthday party tonight and you all are welcome to come!” Jongdae continues before Kyungsoo can shut the door on him.
“That’s alright, thanks though.”
“No, really! It would be smash if you guys came. We wanna meet the ‘hood.”
“Ok...we’ll see how things look tonight with our schedule and get back to you.” Kyungsoo starts to edge the door closed with an ominous creak from the hinges.
“Joooongdaeeee!” Another short dude pounds up the stairs and onto the landing, his arms full of grocery bags. Chanyeol thinks he hears glass bottles clinking. “Hurry up and help meeeee!” The other short dude bounces on his heels and flashes Chanyeol and Kyungsoo a grin before jogging up the next flight. Too bad he ran off so soon, he has attractive teeth. Chanyeol has always considered teeth important.
“Hey, I gotta go unlock the door,” Jongdae says, gesturing towards the stairs.
“Ok! It was nice to meet you!” Chanyeol calls, waving both his hands.
“Yeah man, catch you later!”
“Well, that was really nice of them to invite us!” Chanyeol says as soon as the door is closed. Kyungsoo snorts, bending over the stove to check on his potatoes in the steamer.
“They probably just invited us so we wouldn’t call the police on them for noise violation.”
“But don’t they seem really nice?” And cute? Chanyeol’s brain helpfully supplies.
“You can do whatever you want, but I’m staying right here to have a nice dinner and finish my homework for tomorrow. Weren’t we going to start studying together for the Econ final?”
“Oh, yeah….ok,” Chanyeol nods glumly, flopping onto the sofa before Kyungsoo can beat him to it. It is a Thursday night, after all, and he has class in the morning.
By 10:30 curiosity starts to get the better of him.
“You know, maybe we should just drop by, just to say hello.” Chanyeol twirls his pencil. “It would only be polite, you know, since they did invite us.” It’s not like he’s really made progress with his exam review sheet anyway, unless you count the numerous replications of Doraemon all over the margins.
“Suit yourself.” Kyungsoo doesn’t even look up from his textbook. “But you better not come back smashed at 3 AM and forgot to lock the door again.”
“I won’t,” Chanyeol insists, slightly wounded at Kyungsoo’s lack of intrinsic trust. You should be able to trust someone completely if you live together.
“And you might want to put pants on first,” Kyungsoo says before Chanyeol can bound out the door. Chanyeol pauses with his hand on the door knob and looks down at his pajamas.
“Oh yeah, thanks.”
It only takes 23 minutes for Chanyeol to ransack his closet and then change back into the same pair of jeans he wore to class this morning. On the way out he grabs a bottle of wine off the top of the fridge to bring along, since Jongdae did say it was someone’s birthday.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Chanyeol wheedles with his cutest, toothiest smile, giving Kyungsoo one last chance to be worldly and sociable. “They’re really cool, Soo! Come on~!”
“I don’t do rats.”
“There aren’t any rats!” Sure, Kyungsoo may take a little time to warm up to new friends, but even for him this is a little ridiculous.
“You don’t know that, you haven’t been in there yet.” Chanyeol fakes a coughing fit to mask the incredulous laughter threatening to explode out of him and ruin the symbiotic balance of their cohabitation (every time he has a seizure laughing at his roommate, Kyungsoo refuses to feed him for at least three hours).
“Go on already, if you’re going.”
“Ok, bye!”
The party is not as wild as Chanyeol had anticipated (not surprisingly, as the units in their building aren’t big enough to reasonably fit more than 10, maybe 15 people).
“Hey dude, you made it!” Jongdae is the one who answers the door, face already tinged with a rosy flush creeping its way up from his collar.
“Yeah, just dropping by on a friendly neighborly visit! Whose birthday is it, anyway? I brought some--”
“It’s myyyyyyy birthdayyyyyy!” the other short dude yodels as he barrels into the entryway, snatching the wine right out of Chanyeol’s hands with an appreciative gurgle. “I love this stuff!” He kisses the neck of the bottle with a wet smack and Jongdae rolls his eyes, not even attempting to pull the bottle away before shoving the birthday boy back towards the action.
“Come on in,” he waves at Chanyeol with a lazy gesture.
Chanyeol kicks off his shoes and trails his hosts into the living room.
“Oh! Hyung! I didn’t know you knew Jongdae and--and--” Chanyeol flails, sitting down hard on the sofa as he realizes with a belated blush that he doesn’t even know the name of the second host slash birthday boy.
“Oh, Baekhyun’s my junior in the music department,” Joonmyun covers for Chanyeol without missing a beat. Chanyeol nods and curls his fingers around a sweating can of beer that finds its way into his hands. “What a coincidence you’re neighbors, huh?”
“Yeah, haha! Funny,” Chanyeol laughs, rubbing at the back of his neck.
“Not really a coincidence, Hyung, if you consider pretty much everyone in this building is an SMU student,” a boy with hooded eyes drawls, leaning into Joonmyun’s side. Joonmyun just nods before taking a sip from his pink plastic cup, the side of which is printed with some breast cancer awareness slogans from last year’s campus campaign.
“So, I take it you’ve met the hosts, and you of course know Yixing,” Joonmyun sort of undulates his cup at the far corner where Yixing is being tackled by a skinny freshman while Jongdae tries to pour some dark liquid down his throat. Chanyeol waves, but Yixing is apparently too preoccupied with surviving the drinking game gone wrong to wave back.
“The kid sitting on Yixing hyung is Zitao, a newbie in the dance department,” Chanyeol waves again at the tangle of limbs in the corner, “and this is Kris.”
“Hi!” Chanyeol smiles at the tall dude slouched in a rocking chair across the room. He vaguely remembers his lush eyebrows and chunky jewelry from his freshman bio lecture. “I’m Park Chanyeol!” Kris nods in acknowledgement, the wooden rocker creaking slightly.
“Hey, you forgot about me!” the kid plastered to Joonmyun growls indignantly. Joonmyun just pats his hair.
“And last but not least, this Jongin, also from the dance department.” Jongin gives Chanyeol the finger and another slow grin and Chanyeol thinks Kyungsoo might like this one.
“Where is Kyungsoo?” Joonmyun asks, stretching his free arm onto the sofa back.
“Meh, he’s downstairs being lame,” Chanyeol rolls his eyes. “Making quiche or trying to figure out his calc homework with his head between the sofa cushions.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very productive set up,” Jongdae smirks, coming around for refills with the bottle of wine that he’s somehow managed to pry loose from Baekhyun’s grasp.
“Yeah, he should’ve just given up and come with, considering he won’t get past the first problem without me looking over his shoulder.”
“Did I just hear you declare yourself a math genius?” a loud voice says in his ear and Chanyeol turns his head in surprise, practically brushing noses with Baekhyun.
“Uh, maybe?” All Chanyeol can think about right now is how uber shmexy his dark eyes look rimmed in pink glitter, and how that probably wouldn’t be a good thing to say out loud just now since he’s trying to make a good first impression, at least not until he’s had a few shots to catch up with everyone.
“‘Cause I’m on the market for a math tutor,” Baekhyun continues, not removing his face from Chanyeol’s breathing space at all.
“Um, I could...I could consider that,” Chanyeol stammers, not wanting to sound too eager by immediately agreeing to tutor a near stranger, because Baekhyun is still pretty much a stranger, Chanyeol has to remind himself, regardless of their recent geographical proximity.
“You really don’t have to, dude,” Jongdae sighs, pulling his roommate back to a socially acceptable distance by the collar of his pink polo. “Baek’s pretty hopeless so it would just be pointless to make two of you suffer through his stupidity.”
“Hey, I’m not--!”
“Do I have to remind you of your last test score? Not to mention the midterm fiasco? I’m surprised Dr. Lee didn’t send home a pink slip for me to sign.”
“Can we not talk about my failure at life on the happiest day of the year?” Baekhyun whines in a voice that is grating and strident and somehow super adorable.
“Whatever floats your rootbeer.” Jongdae turns around to hand Kris a refill and Chanyeol is willingly dragged off by Baekhyun to join the free for all in the corner.
When Chanyeol makes it back downstairs it’s closer to 3 AM than midnight but Kyungsoo is still up and pacing. He also appears to have baked his weight in french bread while Chanyeol was gone, if the pile of crispy baguette loaves piled on the counter is any indication.
“Did you, um, finish your calc?” Chanyeol asks, carefully locking the door.
“Don’t even ask, I think you know,” Kyungsoo glares, brandishing a spatula that has a newly charred spot in the right corner. That last problem set must be really something if Kyungsoo’s so frustrated he’s baking ruthlessly enough to damage kitchen equipment.
“You got it that bad, huh?” Chanyeol fills a glass from the sink and backs carefully towards the coffee table to check over Kyungsoo’s work before he crashes into bed. Chanyeol winces when a violent rain of crumbs hits the stainless steel basin of the sink as Kyungsoo starts to scrape a baking sheet with a vengeance.
“Oh, so much worse than you know.”
A string of texts from an unknown number interrupts Chanyeol from another nap on Sunday afternoon. He groans and rolls over to check them, mentally cursing himself for forgetting to turn his phone off first.
Heyyyy, joonmyun hyung gave me ur number
I can’t pay you in quiche but would an offer of limitless pizza tempt you to help a guy out with math stuff?
Hu hu hu T.T
this is baek, btw
jajjang~! ;D
Chanyeol grins at his phone screen until his jaw hurts as he texts back, Sure, dude!
The reply comes almost instantly, U da best! Finals are only a month away and i suck ><
Chanyeol bites his lip, trying to think of something inspiring and memorable before simply typing in, We can do it! Just send me your schedule~!
Baekhyun responds with an immediate, THanks ^_^ and Chanyeol saves his number before downloading the picture of his weekly schedule which is gel-penned into a pink day planner that matches Chanyeol’s white one. Chanyeol squeals into the corner of his blanket and decides their coordinating tastes in office supplies must be destiny (never mind that the campus bookstore sells identical planners to the vast majority of student body).
They make their first study date for Tuesday night and Chanyeol circles the day in his planner with a pink highlighter.
Chanyoel discovers when they meet up at a cafe two nights later that it wasn’t actually Baekhyun’s birthday last Thursday. Baekhyun just shrugs when Chanyeol pesters him for the reasoning behind this discrepancy.
“Jongdae won this recipe book for cocktails during a giveaway on his favorite foodie blog and didn’t want to wait three more weeks to try it out.”
“And you couldn’t have a party just because?” Chanyeol giggles into his latte.
“Oh, I didn’t think of that.” Baekhyun taps his pencil against the spine of his algebra textbook.
“So what are you doing on your actual birthday?”
“Dunno.” Baekhyun shrugs. “You wanna help me figure it out?” Chanyeol only asked about his plans out of curiosity, but since Baekhyun is requesting so nicely with a tilt of his head and a smolder in his eyes...
“Sure! Why not?”
After a spending few intense hours getting intimate with polynomials (and, in Chanyeol’s case, the cute little squints and nose wrinkles Baekhyun makes at particularly tricky equations) they walk back home together in the dark. The damp air is a little nippy even though it’s late spring, but the six lattes he downed plus all the delicious cackles Baekhyun makes at the end of every stupid joke keep Chanyeol warm all the way down to his toe socks.
That is until Chanyeol sees Minseok’s battered Volvo parked outside of their building and realizes with a sudden chill that Tuesday was supposed to be their Pirates marathon night. He doesn’t even need to check his neglected phone to know what he’ll find, but Chanyeol does anyway: two missed calls from Minseok, a 5:41 minute voicemail from Luhan, and a string of progressively passive aggressive texts from Kyungsoo. Shit.
Chanyeol doesn’t open the voice message because he’s practically on the doorstep now but saves it to his mailbox for later (recordings of Luhan being annoying turn into recordings of Luhan being hilarious if you listen while drunk) and bids farewell to Baekhyun in the stairway.
Baekhyun’s cheesy goodbye grin gives Chanyeol enough fortitude to open Kyungsoo’s messages and briefly scroll down the list before he heads inside. It’s always a good strategy to assess Kyungsoo’s level of wrath before entering the war zone. From the last text, which was sent 43 minutes ago and reads, If you know what’s good for you…!, Chanyeol is betting he’s between Level Creepy Eyebrow Twitching and Level Check It Out My Death Glare Can Melt Glass! He takes a deep breath and pushes open the door, which is fortunately not barricaded.
“Oh, hey, sorry guys! I was just helping out a friend and lost track of time!” Chanyeol slips out of his shoes and pads over to lean against the sofa. “How’s it going!” Yixing grins placidly from the easy chair next to the reading lamp, his teeth glowing in the light of the TV screen in an eerie Cheshire cat effect.
“Oh yeah? Who’s preying on your soft heart for tutoring services these days?” Luhan asks, adjusting a felt three cornered hat on his head. Chanyeol thinks he recognizes it from one of Jonghyun hyung’s past Halloween getups.
“Oh, um, just a friend, hehe!” Chanyeol twists his own hat around so the brim is facing backwards and tries to pour himself a cup of the spiced rum and lemonade concoction Minseok calls grog without splashing anything in the dark.
“No need to be secretive, we heard our friendly neighbor’s voice in the hallway,” Kyungsoo says primly, not even glaring. Uh oh. Maybe he’s just waiting for some privacy once everyone clears out before letting loose on Chanyeol, but if he’s already reached Level Let’s Pretend Everything’s Normal angry, Chanyeol is in trouble.
Chanyeol pulls a kitchen chair up next to Yixing and slouches on the hard wooden seat, his legs too long to balance his heels comfortably on the rung and the coffee table just barely out of reach. He considers scootching his seat forward enough to prop his feet on the table but decides to just bite his tongue and endure; there’s no telling what random actions will just add to Kyungsoo’s offense.
The third Pirates installation finishes just after midnight and Luhan half drags, half carries a boneless Yixing out to Minseok’s car with promises they’ll be back to finish the marathon next Tuesday. Chanyeol heaves a sigh of relief once there’s finally space in the room to air out the unspoken words, but Kyungsoo goes straight into the bathroom and makes a show of locking the door before running the sink to brush his teeth. Chanyeol leans against the doorjamb in the hall, slimy tentacles of worry tugging at his gut while he waits for the water to stop its slow trickle down the pipes.
His mouth is open faster than the door when Kyungsoo finally emerges with a towel around his neck. Chanyeol rapidly explains that it totally wasn’t intentional, he really didn’t mean to cut out on Kyungsoo at the last minute but Baekhyun had suggested a study date and somehow he just agreed before he could realize that the words were coming out of his mouth, much less remember that Kyungsoo had penciled the movie night reminder into his day planner for him on the same day, and that he’s sorry, really really sorry, and that he’ll wash all the dishes this week if it would make Kyungsoo feel better, and that basically, he’s just sorry.
Kyungsoo blinks twice to indicate that you betcha Chanyeol is washing all the dishes for a week and walks straight past him into the bedroom and slams the door.
Kyungsoo doesn’t talk to him for a week and cooks nothing but potato jeon, which he thinks Chanyeol can’t stand because of that one time Chanyeol got food poisoning right after eating a platterful of the greasy dough. Chanyeol actually doesn’t mind potato pancakes in the least, but he doesn’t correct Kyungsoo’s misassumption and pretends to suffer anyway, hoping to pay his penance like a good and shamed deadbeat roomie.
By the weekend Chanyeol is thoroughly miserable from the silent treatment act Kyungsoo keeps up even in front of their friends so he starts hanging out with Baekhyun during lunch, too. Avoiding the problem only seems to make Kyungsoo glare harder, though, so on Tuesday Chanyeol decides that this has gone on long enough and something has to give.
So Chanyeol gives Kyungsoo a new spatula as an apology. He even spends the extra 6,000 Won just to get the limited edition turquoise color.
“If you think copying the childish tricks of our immature upstairs neighbors is going to make me forgive you, consider yourself wrong.” Kyungsoo slices the spatula through the air, testing the balance of the proportions in his sensitive fingers before heading for the sink.
“I’m sorry I was late to our movie last week! Are you really going to let it ruin tonight though?” Minseok, Luhan, and Yixing are due to ring their doorbell in less than an hour for Pirates Marathon: Part II, and Chanyeol would really like to be able to actually enjoy it this time.
“You’re such a dolt, Park Chanyeol!” Kyungsoo doesn’t even turn around from the sink where he’s peeling more potatoes. “This is not about you being late!”
“Then I don’t even know what I did!” Chanyeol wails as Kyungsoo pads over to turn on the stove, apparently planning to break in the new spatula on a batch of jeon regardless of his continuing grudge.
“Then why don’t you spend some time thinking about it?” Kyungsoo snaps as he breaks an egg into his favorite mixing bowl.
Chanyeol resolves right there from his perch on the saggy left cushion of the sofa to think long and hard about the situation until Kyungsoo is satisfied and quits making nothing but potatoes. (Not that he would complain about his roommate being nice and giving him edible food, it’s just that eating the same dish for every meal is getting old. Has been since like Thursday). But before he can get anywhere productive with his thoughts Luhan’s banging on their door and demanding fuzzy blankets and grog, and somehow the rest of the whole next week ends up too busy to do things like think.
Tutoring Baekhyun keeps him pretty busy, for one.
They’re meeting at the library every other day now since the math tutoring sessions somehow expanded to include general homework time. It’s not that Chanyeol is avoiding going home exactly, it’s just that the library is less stressful. The only person who ever glares in the library is the cranky old man behind the reference desk and Chanyeol could care less about his fine opinion, at least when Baekhyun’s arm is linked through his and they’re swinging a bag of illegal oreos between them on their way up to their secret corner on the third floor. There are just some things he can’t share with Kyungsoo, and that includes the thrill of eating cookies in a prohibited area.
“So…” Baekhyun says, licking blueberry icing off half an oreo with a twirl of his tongue. “Noraebang? Thursday?”
“Ok,” Chanyeol nods, not even pretending not to stare at Baekhyun’s tongue acrobatics.
“You should bring your roomie, ‘cause I still haven’t met him but you talk about him all the time and I’m curioussss!” Baekhyun scrapes his bottom teeth across the chocolate surface to get at the last stubborn bits of filling.
“I do?” Chanyeol asks as Baekhyun takes the opportunity to shove the now icing free half a cookie in his mouth.
“Oh god,” Baekhyun groans, snorting chocolate crumbs onto his Comp Theory textbook. “Since I’ve already heard all about his teeth brushing habits and how adorable he looks when he’s flustered, it’s getting awkward we haven’t even met.”
“Oh.” Baekhyun does have a point. And then Chanyeol can’t stop thinking about it, thoughts of Kyungsoo’s adorable stuttering and Kyungsoo’s huge brown eyes pushing out any remaining room to consider anything else.
That is until Luhan peeks his head around a pillar.
“Ooh, are those the blueberry ones? I love these!” he squeals, snatching the last tray of cookies out of the bag.
“Hey, Hyung!” Baekhyun flashes a peace sign and a double wink. Luhan ruffles his hair.
“Shooo!” Luhan says, turning to Chanyeol with his mouth full of half chewed oreo. “A widdle bird tode me shumwum’s been getting cojee in de wibrary!”
“Eheh! Who told you that?” Chanyeol laughs awkwardly, suddenly wishing Kyungsoo were around to tell Luhan to chew with his mouth closed.
“‘S not important,” Luhan says after swallowing, wiping his mouth on his shirt sleeve.
“We’re just studying, Hyung.” Baekhyun raps his knuckles on the front cover of his textbook.
“Uh huh,” Luhan nods. “Behind a pillar in a secluded corner of the third floor.” He taps his fingers thoughtfully against his chin in a steady rhythm.
“We’re just hiding the snacks from the librarian,” Chanyeol says. “You’re welcome for the cookies, by the way.”
“Mmhmm!” Luhan hums ambiguously before disappearing around the corner with a little skip and a trail of crumbs.
“Ugh,” Bekhyun groans, faceplanting into his open backpack that’s propped against the pillar. “Ready to call it a day? I think my neurons are all fried.”
“Ok,” Chanyeol sighs, scraping his Econ notes back into his folder. Maybe Kyungsoo will still be up when they get back since it’s only just after 10:00.
Baekhyun hurries down the spiral staircase to the main floor. It’s a good thing his legs are so short or Chanyeol might have a hard time keeping up with him, especially with his penchant for skipping steps, sometimes three at a time.
Neither of them has anything to check out so Chanyeol follows Baekhyun as he plunges past the security detectors and the front doors onto the sidewalk, the crotchety old head librarian’s judging stare following them out as if he can see oreo crumbs clinging to the corners of their mouths.
Baekhyun halts under a lamppost to check his phone messages and Chanyeol discovers there really are a few crumbs of cookie sticking at the edges of Baekhyun’s mouth, either that or he’s suddenly sprouted a few new freckles on his upper lip.
“What are you staring at, Park?” Baekhyun asks, glancing up with a thoughtful look.
“Oh, nothing!” Chanyeol says with a quick smile. Baekhyun just shrugs and resumes typing away with both thumbs. Chanyeol pulls out his own phone to keep from staring because Baekhyun’s mouth is really cute in all its crumb covered glory, almost as pretty as Kyungsoo’s, even.
Chanyeol chances a look up, just to make sure the crumbs are still there. They are, and now he’s itching more than ever to brush them away and Baekhyun looks utterly adorable in an impish kind of way, his little smudge of a nose casting a smooth spill of shadow over the slope of his cheek. Chanyeol can’t quite make out the faint dusting of pale freckles he knows is there but he wonders if he could still feel them under his fingertips if he just-
“Agh!” Chanyeol groans, scraping his nails up and down the skin of his bare arms.
“What’s wrong?” Baekhyun gasps, leaning up to get a better look at Chanyeol’s face as he pockets his phone.
“I feel all-itchy!” Chanyeol whines, digging his nails in deeper to keep them from digging into something else far more tempting.
“Spring allergies?” Baekhyun bites his lip with a sympathetic look. All Chanyeol can do is nod, even though Baekhyun’s the one who’s making his skin crawl with tiny prickles of opportunity and future and what-if. “We’d better get you inside, huh?”
Baekhyun says goodnight at the stairs and Chanyeol takes a moment to collect his thoughts (and his fingernails) before going inside to face Kyungsoo. He rakes his nails down the sides of his arms one last time, sucks stale hall air deep into his lungs, and kicks the last of his frustration into the welcome mat.
He also kicks a heavy round thing with the instep of his sneaker. It’s some kind of dish, covered in tin foil with a note stuck on top:
Best wishes and good vibes,
From: your Constant Admirer
There’s no signature, not even a sloppy one running off the edge of the sticky note, so Chanyeol scoops up the pan and decides to ask Kyungsoo about it, if he heard any strange noises outside, or if any phantoms happened to ring the doorbell while he was out.
Kyungsoo is in fact awake and in a fairly decent mood when Chanyeol steps inside. “How was your study date?” he asks evenly, humming softly under his breath as he leafs through a recent issue of some cooking magazine Joonmyun gave him a subscription to for his birthday.
“It was cool.” Chanyeol kicks off his shoes and dumps his bag on the tile next to them. He slides the mystery pan onto the kitchen counter and plucks at a corner of the foil molded neatly around the dish. The kitchen is clean and perfectly in order, no stray crumbs, wet dishcloths, or wire cooling racks in sight, so no stress baking happened while he was gone for the first time in weeks. What a relief.
Chanyeol sighs and rips into the foil, tearing a wide strip across the middle. “Hey Soo, did anything happen while I was gone?”
“What kind of something?” The magazine rustles as Kyungsoo turns a page.
“Well, I don’t know, but I found this on the doorstep!” Kyungsoo peeks his head over the back of the couch as Chanyeol holds up the cake pan, now divested of half of the meticulously crimped foil.
“Oh my.” Kyungsoo delicately wrinkles his nose. “What have you there?”
“I know, right? It was just laying outside our front door, with no trace of where it came from! I think it’s a cheesecake? Maybe?” Chanyeol pokes at a blueberry.
“Was there a note?” Kyungsoo asks, sliding back down out of sight.
“Yeah, but it didn’t really say anything. And no signature like last time, so I doubt it was-well…”
“You don’t recognize the handwriting?” Kyungsoo flips forward three pages as Chanyeol fumbles for the sticky note. The letters are very neat, almost perfectly printed, like a grade school teacher or some kind of professional pen tester wrote them.
“Not really?” Chanyeol shrugs. There are hardly enough letters there to get a feel for the handwriting style. “Maybe whoever delivered it wrote the note for the sender, although there’s no bakery box so I can’t exactly call and ask. Weird.” Chanyeol crinkles the remaining strip of foil into a tight ball and pulls open the silverware drawer.
“But the note is on a post-it, not a proper card, so don’t-um, I mean,” Kyungsoo clears his throat as Chanyeol successfully locates his lucky spoon, the one with the slightly bent handle Kyungsoo’s always threatening to get rid of. “If it’s not in a box, why do you think it’s from a bakery? It doesn’t look homemade?”
Chanyeol turns toward the couch to find Kyungsoo sitting up again and fixing him with an intense stare. His hair is slightly tousled from lying on the sofa but his cheeks are a soft pink, just the shade of the streaks of raspberry juice seeping into the sour cream topping of the cake and-
Chanyeol shakes his head and looks away. “I don’t know…it just looks kind of perfect?” Kyungsoo makes a muffled sound in his throat and Chanyeol’s gaze darts back. Kyungsoo looks like he’s about to protest, but then he just bites his lip and flops back onto his belly. Chanyeol sinks into the nearest kitchen chair and scratches an itchy patch behind his left elbow. “I grabbed you a fork, you want some dessert?”
“No no, you just enjoy that.” Kyungsoo waves his fingers over the back of the sofa. Chanyeol digs in. He’s kind of surprised Kyungsoo isn’t making a fuss with comments about food left out in the open where rats can get to it and spread horrible diseases, but he’s glad. Chanyeol’s glad he can enjoy a quiet moment in their living room, and he’s glad he can enjoy the dessert, which is in fact an amazingly creamy cheesecake with strawberry filling and something chocolatey in the bottom.
It does bother him a little that he has no idea where it came from. As much as he wishes Baekhyun was his Constant Admirer, the note looks nothing like the one carefully preserved in the back of his day planner. And how could Baekhyun have known his favorite dessert is cheesecake with berries, the more berries the better? Unless he got help from someone. Whoever this admirer person is, they did their homework.
Chanyeol stands up with a satisfied groan to slide the uneaten half of the cake into the fridge and rinse off his fork. He downs a glass of water to help his stomach settle and lingers in the doorway to the bathroom, hunting for his toothbrush on the cluttered counter.
“You know, I wonder if Baek knows anything about the mystery note, since he is in the habit of leaving them himself,” Chanyeol wonders aloud as he squeezes out a long strip of toothpaste onto his brush. Kyungsoo snorts loudly from behind the sofa.
“How could he leave that note if he spent all evening with you at the library?” Chanyeol flinches at Kyungsoo’s suddenly harsh tone.
“How do you know who I was with?” Chanyeol frowns at his reflection in the mirror as he wets his brush, then flicks off the sink. “Why do you always have to assume things?” He kind of hates how defensive Kyungsoo gets every time Baekhyun’s name comes up in conversation.
“Well, I know you’re not meeting Luhan hyung over there, that’s for sure!” Kyungsoo snarls, sliding off the sofa and replacing his magazine on the neat stack of periodicals on the coffee table. Chanyeol watches him stretch his back over the armrest. “No alcoholic drinks allowed on the premises!”
“Well that’s where you’re wrong!” Chanyeol shoves his toothbrush in his mouth and slams the bathroom door before Kyungsoo can start a real argument.
Despite Chanyeol still being clueless about why Kyungsoo is suddenly acting like an adolescent girl discovering the joys of PMS, he quickly realizes that mentioning Baekhyun in front of his roommate instantly lowers the room temperature by about 5 degrees Celsius. So Chanyeol starts substituting destinations for the names of who he is meeting whenever he leaves the house, but somehow Kyungsoo always seems to know when Baekhyun is involved. (That may or may not have something to do with the fact Chanyeol only set foot in the campus library about once a semester before he started tutoring Baekhyun, but whatever.)
When Chanyeol finally does find a spare moment to think about things it suddenly strikes him as rather odd that Kyungsoo seems to hate anything and everything to do with their upstairs neighbor, especially since he barely knows the guy. It’s really not fair of Kyungsoo to judge a new acquaintance this harshly and Chanyeol is convinced that if he can just get the two to spend quality time together, preferably with some alcohol involved, Kyungsoo will realize what an idiot he’s being and everything can go back to normal and they can eat non-potatoes again.
Buoyed by his genius realization, Chanyeol rushes into the kitchen where Kyungsoo is hunched over the table, worksheets and graphs of integers and exam review papers spread in an avalanche in front of him. He’d been up until 3 AM the night before doing and redoing practice problems for the upcoming calc final and from the looks of things it’s not going so well.
“Do you want to go out tonight with me and Baek and Jongdae? It’s Baekhyun’s real birthday today!” Kyungsoo looks up from a differential equation to blink at Chanyeol.
“What possessed you to think I would willingly associate with someone who thinks it’s acceptable to celebrate their own birthday twice in the space of a month?”
“Well, it makes more sense than having the second celebration in, like, November,” Chanyeol reasons, stealing a strip of cold jeon from the pan on the stove. “Except hey, we could totally have a joint party then, for my birthday and his half birthday!”
“Get out of my kitchen!”
“Soo, please! Even if you won’t talk to me anymore, at least let me help you with your homework,” Chanyeol pleads, uncomfortably guilty about how this spat is affecting his best friend’s quality of life and cortisol levels. Kyungsoo gives him a long, hard, long stare.
“Fine, but only if we can agree to restrict our comments to mathematics.” Chanyeol nods and pulls up a chair next to Kyungsoo’s.
Chanyeol is hopeful but even more confused when Kyungsoo melts into his side half way through the third problem on the list, curling his left hand into Chanyeol’s T-shirt and resting his head against the dip of Chanyeol’s shoulder. Chanyeol’s breath catches, the sudden heat pressed up against him flushing him with a familiar warmth. His chest aches at the casual intimacy after weeks of estrangement and he’s dying to ask what this means, why Kyungsoo is being so confusing, but Chanyeol keeps his promise and keeps his mouth shut except to point out when Kyungsoo forgets a minus sign.
They finish the final problem just as the last rays of sun are starting to slant through the window. Kyungsoo drops his pencil with a heavy sigh but doesn’t move to get up. Chanyeol wraps his arms around Kyungsoo’s slender shoulders and gives them a soft squeeze. Maybe now would be a good time to bring up the...whatever this problem is that they’re having, but Chanyeol’s throat sticks around the words like a dried out lump of potato pancake.
Maybe it’s the distorted glow of the fading light that has them suspended in this fragile sphere of inertia, afraid to blink and disturb the stillness but all the while oppressed under the growing dread of this, whatever this is, being nearly at an end. Chanyeol realizes with a lump in his throat that more than resenting the unpleasantness of having to tiptoe around a volatile Kyungsoo, what he’s really missed is just spending time with his best friend, talking his ear off about random shit like the new guitar riff Yixing just taught him, or listening to Kyungsoo rant about his douche calc professor’s douche mullet, or just breathing peaceful air in the same room at the same time. And Kyungsoo is not usually into the skinship, like not at all, but this cuddling is pretty nice. Chanyeol could be ok with this addition to their relationship.
The moment splinters like a shattering casserole dish when Chanyeol’s phone buzzes and they both jump, Kyungsoo’s head knocking painfully into Chanyeol’s jaw. It’s a text from Baekhyun.
Heyyyeyyy~! meet us downstairs in 10
get ready to partayy, sexy!
“Hey...I gotta go now,” Chanyeol starts hesitantly, tugging at the hem of his shirt still clutched in Kyungsoo’s fingers. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”
Kyungsoo just pushes him away and stalks into the bathroom. The shower is still running when Chanyeol locks the front door behind him.
On Friday afternoon Chanyeol comes home from class to find an empty apartment and a foot high mountain of jeon piled on their largest serving platter. This time it’s so burnt Chanyeol can’t even taste the green onions around the pungent flavor of charred Teflon. He checks his phone to find a message from Luhan.
don’t you worry, baby
ur roomies safe ad sound with me for the weeknd
We’ll see you Mundey
So of course Chanyeol feels instantly lonelier and goes upstairs to bother Baekhyun and Jongdae.
“Yo,” Jongdae greets him at the door. “What’s up. We’re making potato pancakes, you want some?”
“Um, no thanks,” Chanyeol refuses politely, trying not to grimace. He thinks he still has a stubborn flake of Teflon stuck in his back teeth. “Hey, is B--”
“Lover Boy went to Cheongju for the weekend. His girlfriend has a dance recital!” Jongin’s voice crows from the kitchen.
“Oh, I--what?” Chanyeol, once again, is confused.
“Yeah, he ditched us for his girlfriend,” Jongdae explains, leaning on the doorframe casually as if Chanyeol’s not gaping in shock like he just watched a small horde of sewer rats scurry by. “You sure you don’t want any jeon? Jonginnie’s cooking is da shizzle!”
“Yeah...yeah I think I’m good…”
Chanyeol stumbles back downstairs and flops onto the sofa in the dark living room, his brain already in overdrive dissecting every moment of every interaction he’s ever had with Byun Baekhyun to come to the horrifying realization that maybe Baekhyun smiling until his eyes disappeared and Baekhyun belting impromptu duets with him on post-study noraebang dates and Baekhyun feeding him cold french fries in the cafeteria was just Baekhyun being Baekhyun, and maybe it didn’t mean anything special after all.
Maybe he just built it all up in his head as a cover for how much he misses Kyungsoo. Kyungsoo...shit.
Chanyeol is so caught up in all of this overanalyzing that he completely forgets to do important life things like charge his phone, shower, or finish eating the leaning tower of charred jeon.
Basically, he just wimps on the couch the whole weekend.
“Just, wow. I mean, I didn’t know ‘wimp’ was an actual verb until I walked in on this!” Luhan announces in a too loud, too smug voice when he waltzes through the door sometime later. “Did you skip class again? Professor Lee’s gonna be pissed.”
“Wha…?” Chanyeol pulls his head out from under a sofa cushion.
“Dude, it’s 3:57 PM on Monday, May 26, 2014, Year of the Horse, and you totally just missed our Econ final exam review.” Luhan closes the front door until it’s cracked open just one annoying centimeter and trips over to the fridge to steal a beer.
“Today’s Monday?”
“See you on exam day, loser!” Luhan makes a hand heart and skips out, leaving both the fridge and the front door wide open. Chanyeol moans and shoves his head back under the sofa cushion, too close to an untimely end of Death By Wimping to even care if he gets blamed for it. It’s not like he could possibly fall further from Kyungsoo’s good graces anyway. He’s already at, like, coal mine shaft depths of disgrace.
“Do you want to know who left that cheesecake on the front porch?”
“Huh?” Chanyeol scrambles up, clawing at the back of the couch for support. The voice in the doorway is not Luhan’s.
“The triple berry cheesecake with mocha crumble crust, dumbass! That was from me.” Kyungsoo pouts in silhouette in the open doorway, his eyes an indistinguishable darkness beneath furrowed brows. Chanyeol bursts out laughing, all the pent up feels suddenly loosing themselves from the prison of his ribcage, even though that probably isn’t the safest reaction have in front of Kyungsoo right now, considering they’re barely even talking to each other.
“Why would you do that, Soo?” Chanyeol snorts, another stream of sick laughter rippling out through his nose. “Did you set it on the porch to cool and just forgot about it? Are you turning into me?” Kyungsoo drops his bag to the linoleum with a heavy clunk, but fortunately nothing shatters.
“Fuck, Yeol! I did it ‘cause I like you.”
“What?” Chanyeol thinks he must have heard wrong but his breath catches anyway, squeezed around another bubble of laughter spasming in his chest.
“I like you!”
“Haha, that’s good to hear! I was beginning to really wonder, between all the burnt potatoes and avoidance going on aro--”
“No, you dolt!” Kyungsoo stamps his foot, one harsh resounding slap of rubber sole against vinyl flooring. “I like you!”
“Oh,” Chanyeol blinks, his nervous system so torn between more flailing or just toppling over the back of the sofa that it renders him motionless and tingling like a live wire plunged in a swimming pool full of electric eels. “‘Like’ as in--”
“As in I never used to care about your stupid friends as long as they kept their obnoxiousness far away from my zen, but this time it just makes me so angry that he’s monopolizing all of your free time and then when you come home all you can talk about is him and his popped collars and his pink polos and his glitter and--!”
“Wait! Who is h--”
“Baekhyun,” he seethes through flaring nostrils. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know! And don’t you dare interrupt me, Park Chanyeol!” Kyungsoo bellows, striding in to clutch the back of a kitchen chair, the door still wide open. “I’ve been putting up with your nonsense for weeks so now you’re just going to shut up and listen til I’m done and if you think for a moment that I’m going to forgive you just because you’re fucking adorable and simultaneously ravishing then you--!”
“Ravishing?” Chanyeol is mouthing soundless syllables and pointing at his nose. “Soo, did you seriously just say--”
“If you would just pay attention to me you would--!”
Chanyeol’s phone buzzes against his leg and he instinctively unlocks the screen to check it. It’s from Joonmyun.
Hey, sorry to interrupt your VIC (very important conversation, hahaha ^^)
but could you maybe keep it down a little? Jongdae
has a headband
*headache, oops >:P
“Are you seriously going to ignore me right now?” Kyungsoo chokes, his chest starting to heave under his unseasonably thick cable knit sweater. “And what the hell does kkaebsong even mean!”
“Hey, Kyungsoo, cou--”
“Quit trying to avoid me!” Kyungsoo hisses, and that’s really rich coming from him, but Chanyeol just smiles patiently and tries again.
“Soo, we really--”
“Oh my god, stop trying to change the subject or we’ll never get to the hot making out in bed because we’re stranded in this unrequited hell hole of a love triangle that isn’t even a triangle anymore!” Kyungsoo shrieks, the legs of the chair in his fists rattling against the floor as he quivers in furor. Apparently Chanyeol wasn’t the only one around here with pent up feels.
Since words aren’t working, Chanyeol decides the only logical thing to do is physically shut Kyungsoo up. As in with his lips. It works out quite nicely, Chanyeol’s arms drawing him close to soothe away his shivers as Kyungsoo sighs into his mouth, and Chanyeol feels an immense flood of relief, like this is the punchline to one of Luhan’s awful jokes he’s been hanging on for a week. Except no, this is way better than anything that has to do with Luhan, this is like...this feels like home.
Kyungsoo pulls away, his face adorably pink and torn between angry and star struck, and then they’re both giggling and leaning in to try it again.
“So…” Kyungsoo says, chewing at the swell of his lip as Chanyeol pulls away for breath. “Before this goes any farther I would really like an answer.”
“Oh, is it my turn to talk now?” Chanyeol teases. Kyungsoo rolls his eyes.
“Yeol…”
“I guess I had a minor epiphany with my head under the sofa cushion.” Kyungsoo narrows his eyes and Chanyeol gives a careful cough. “Well, not gonna lie, I maybe had a tiny smidgeon of a crush on, um, our neighbor,” Chanyeol mumbles, not sure if he still needs to avoid Baekhyun’s name in conversation, “but when I found out he was unavailable and was forced to actually think about it all...well, I realized my feelings for him were nowhere near the intensity of what I feel for you. Also, Baekhyun can’t cook like at all. Not even burnt pancakes!” Kyungsoo swats him on the shoulder before pulling him in for another kiss. “But most importantly, I like you too!”
“Ok,” Kyungsoo says, his voice shy but he meets Chanyeol’s gaze full on. “In that case, I accept your feelings, Mr. Park.”
Once finals are over, Jongdae and Baekhyun invite everyone over for a huge celebratory dinner before they all clear out for vacation or summer jobs or whatever. Baekhyun’s girlfriend, Sehun, comes up for the party. She’s like a foot taller than him and has him totally pussy whipped. Chanyeol doesn’t have time to feel jealous or awkward because he’s so wrapped up in Kyungsoo--that is, wrapped around his pinky finger.
“You know why I love you?” Kyungsoo hums, leaning back against Chanyeol’s chest as Chanyeol catches him around the middle and buries his nose in the soft waves of Kyungsoo’s hair. They’re washing dishes in the kitchen while everyone else cleans up in the living room, Luhan directing traffic from the top of Jongdae’s dining room table as he belts out pirate shanties.
“Because I always eat your pancakes, carcinogenous Teflon sprinkles and all?” Chanyeol teases and pinches Kyungsoo’s sides. Kyungsoo yelps, flinging soap bubbles at Chanyoel’s face. A clump of foam hits the side of his nose and slides down into a lopsided moustache.
“No, you idiot!” Kyungsoo reaches up with the corner of Chanyeol’s abandoned dishtowel to gently wipe away the soap. He clicks his tongue like he’s annoyed but Chanyeol knows he isn’t, not really, not when he’s staring up with adoration shining in his dark eyes. He drops the towel to smooth his thumbs over Chanyeol’s cheekbones and Chanyeol uncurls one arm from Kyungsoo’s hips to cup his jaw.
“Ok,” Chanyeol whispers, dipping forward to kiss the bridge of Kyungsoo’s nose. “Why do you love me?” He flutters his eyelashes and Kyungsoo gives him a dark look that only makes Chanyeol melt closer into the curves of his body, pressing his hips into the counter.
“Because you loved me enough to pretend to hate them,” Kyungsoo says, surprising a laugh out of Chanyeol.
“Well then,” Chanyeol gasps, still catching his breath, “if we love each that much, what are we holding back for?”
Kyungsoo answers by attaching his mouth to Chanyeol’s and sucking hard. Chanyeol moans and parts his lips for the first sweep of Kyungsoo’s tongue that leaves a wake of heat in his mouth. He buries his fingers in Kyungsoo’s hair, Kyungsoo reaching up to scrabble at Chanyeol’s shoulders for leverage. He drops a hand to the jut of Chanyeol’s hip and slips his fingers under the hem of his T-shirt. His palm is still warm from the hot water and Chanyeol shudders as it glides across his abs. He tilts Kyungsoo’s head and presses deeper into the heat of his mouth.
They pull away with a start when at a sharp gasp behind them and turn to find a red-faced Joonmyun frozen in the middle of the kitchen, clutching a collection of empty beer cans. “Sorry!” he stammers, dropping a can that rolls to a stop at the heel of Chanyeol’s sneaker. “Garbage bags? I-sorry!”
“Grosssss!” Jongin hisses loudly, sauntering in to attach himself to Joonmyun’s waist. He buries his face in the back of Joonmyun’s neck and Joonmyun loses the rest of his cans with a startled moan.
“How come no one ever tells me when something exciting is happening?” Baekhyun whines loudly as he dodges around Zitao, pushing into the rapidly crowding kitchen. They all tumble out of the way as Luhan careens through the door, swinging an empty whiskey bottle as he finishes the 36th verse of What Do You Do With A Drunken Sex God on a piercing high note that has Jongdae plugging his ears with leftover cheese puffs. He crashes into the dish drain and Kyungsoo jumps back into Chanyeol’s arms as Luhan emerges with the blender capsized on his elbow.
“Ayyy, love birds!” he slurs, “where has all the rum gone?” Joonmyun steps in to rescue the blender as Kyungsoo calmly hands Luhan a glass of water, shoves everyone out of the kitchen, and goes back to kissing Chanyeol. Obviously. He doesn’t need 36 verses to know the answer to that question.