DAY 14: One Wedding and No Funerals
Title: One Wedding and No Funerals
Written by: windowright
Pairing: Baekhyun/Kris, platonic(?) Chanyeol/Kris
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Baekhyun and Kris have a non-relationship, and Chanyeol and Kris get a fake one.
The day after Kris and Baekhyun broke up, they both informed Chanyeol that, really, they were much happier for it.
"I don't know why you're so horrified," Kris panted, calling as always during his morning jog. "You've been telling me to do this for the last two months. I was practically reading off your texts during my speech."
"Wait, you broke up with him?" Chanyeol demanded, and Kris suddenly noticed that he was passing under a bridge where reception was weak and hung up.
"We both broke up with each other," Baekhyun explained that afternoon over coffee and doughnuts. "It was simultaneous."
There was a chocolate sprinkle stuck to Baekhyun's cheek, and Chanyeol picked it off so he could flick it into Baekhyun's eye. "I think the word you're looking for is mutual," Chanyeol said as he teed up the sprinkle on the tip of his thumb.
"I think the word I'm looking for is 'you're the shittiest best friend ever'," Baekhyun grumbled. Chanyeol patted his hand, purring, there, there, and for the third time that hour, Baekhyun insisted, "No, really, we're both happier this way."
"You don't look happy," Chanyeol told him.
"That's because I have a piece of doughnut stuck in my eyelashes," Baekhyun growled, and they both laughed.
Which was probably why Chanyeol was offended to find out that asking Kris to be his plus-one for his sister's wedding meant Baekhyun would punch him in the arm, hard enough to leave a fist-sized bruise, and even more offended to find out that no one else was surprised.
"You were asking for it," Kyungsoo said, taking out a bag of frozen peas.
"They're not dating anymore! They haven't been for months-"
"One month," Jongin chimed in from where he was trying to shove peas up Kyungsoo's nose.
"One whole month," Chanyeol fumed. "And anyway, I don't actually want to date Kris. I just want my mother to stop trying to marry me off to every woman I'm in the same room with. Baekhyun can have him back afterwards." He dodged a pea that Jongin threw in his direction, then stuck out his tongue and caught a second one in his mouth. "If Kris would even want to go back to some tragically violent lunatic," he added.
"Why don't you just pick someone else then?" asked Kyungsoo.
"Are you kidding? Kris is the only one of us who's boyfriend material. I would know." Chanyeol preened. "I was the one who set them up."
Kyungsoo sighed, uncrossing his arms to rearrange Chanyeol's ice pack properly. "You know, your mother would take you and your sexuality seriously if you ever took your own love life seriously. Instead, you're too busy meddling in other people's relationships."
"Kris and Baekhyun don't have a relationship," Chanyeol reminded him. "They broke up. That is like the definition of a non-relationship."
"Then don't come crying to me when Baekhyun decks you," Kyungsoo told him, slapping the ice pack a little harder than necessary. "Next time, he'll probably aim for your face."
Here's the official story:
Kris and Baekhyun were on the same high school basketball team. (So were Chanyeol and Yixing, but this isn't about them.) Kris was captain and center; Baekhyun played small forward. (Chanyeol, power forward; Yixing, shooting guard.) They won two high school championships together before Kris graduated, and during those two years, Baekhyun worshipped the ground Kris walked on. Neither of them came out until college, and then they scrupulously avoided each other during team reunions during breaks (which disappointed Chanyeol, who was hoping he could blackmail them with Instagrams of drunken New Year makeouts). They lost touch, grew up, grew apart, graduated, moved back to the city. Two years later Kris asked Baekhyun on a date. It went well, until it didn't. And then they broke up.
Kris would tell you something like this:
He and Baekhyun were on the same high school basketball team. Kris was newly appointed captain when Baekhyun became a regular, and if sometimes Kris made Baekhyun stay behind a little longer for passing drills simply because they'd be in the showers alone together, no one had to know but him (and Chanyeol, who had to be there for the three-man weave). Kris knew Baekhyun looked up to him. He'd have to have been blindfolded, gagged, with basketballs shoved into both ears for all two years to miss it. But Kris thought he was a ladies' man until his sophomore year of college, when the aftermath of one keg stand, two car bombs and three tequila shots turned out to be making out with one of his three-on-three teammates, and Yixing had to talk him through a sexuality crisis via gchat emoticons at four in the morning. That year, Kris went home for New Year's Eve and spent the last few seconds of the ball drop in the bathroom avoiding Baekhyun, whose drunk face seemed luminescent, magnetic, in the dark.
After that, they lost touch, grew apart, graduated and, after a failed stint training backup dancers in L.A., Kris moved back to the city. Two years later, he ran into Baekhyun at one of Chanyeol's label parties, and Kris realized with a shock that Baekhyun's face was always luminescent, that Baekhyun followed him wherever he went, that his eyes followed Baekhyun whenever they were apart. Kris went home, pulled up Chanyeol's number on his phone, and together they pounded out a fifteen-slide PowerPoint presentation complete with 2x2 matrices declaring the magic quadrant to be K+B=synergy?.
"This is crazy," Kris said. "He's going to think I'm incapable of asking him out on a date like a normal person."
"Baekhyun's a consultant," Chanyeol said. "They eat this shit up."
Either way, it worked, until it didn't, and then they broke up.
But if you asked Baekhyun, he'd say this:
He never had a hero complex. He never worshipped the ground Kris walked on. Kris wasn't even his first boyfriend. He went to college, experimented, came to cogent, unshakeable conclusions about whom he wanted to have sex with and what kind, and he didn't even remember that New Year's Eve party, was Kris even there? He'd never thought about Kris as a sexual human being at all. But then he moved back to the city and Chanyeol invited him to one of those half-networking, half-rave parties he threw for his musician friends, and the lights hit both him and Kris like they were in a movie and this was their reunion scene, like it was a sign for Baekhyun, this is why you came back. The next morning, Baekhyun went into work and Zitao ushered him into a conference room, where Kris, in full suit and tie, pulled up a PowerPoint presentation titled "My First Love Story," and Baekhyun spit his coffee all over his chambray tie at the final slide: "Our Recommendation: Find a Strategic Partner." Baekhyun was a consultant - you don’t say no to things like that.
And for a while they worked. But there was this feeling Baekhyun could never shake, that they were in a movie arranged for them and they were both playing increasingly strained roles. It was, of course, partially Baekhyun's fault. He told Kris all sorts of lies: that he followed the Rules, that he didn't put out until the fifth date, that he liked long walks on the beach and roses for each quarter-anniversary, that he wasn't out yet to his father and thus couldn't take Kris home. Kris played gamely along, and, as if in penance, Baekhyun fell in with the cliches. In public, Kris was very adult; Baekhyun, trusting and pliant. They never argued, didn't even squabble. It was the sort of relationship he'd imagined for himself at thirty. He should have felt lucky. Instead, he felt like a frog in hot water, and he was the one cranking up the heat. Eventually, it felt like the only solution was to jump out of the pot.
"I think," Zitao said very carefully, "that means you're just better off as friends."
"Except the last time we were just friends, we were in high school," Baekhyun complained. "Everything we said was either basketball or jokes about the length of Chanyeol's penis. We were basically Neanderthals with a ball fetish."
They were watching action films in Zitao's apartment, one of Baekhyun's favorite forms of post-traumatic stress therapy, second only to watching Korean dramas and making Zitao act out all the parts. Baekhyun was pretending to nurse his hand. Occasionally his phone vibrated with text messages from Jongin on the State of Chanyeol's Whining, which Baekhyun read aloud so he could hear Zitao badmouth Chanyeol's pain tolerance. Since Kris's impromptu pitch at their office, Zitao had been unceremoniously roped in with Baekhyun's friends, but there was always a distinct feeling that Zitao was Baekhyun's friend first and everyone else's second. It was nice, and meant that Baekhyun could ran off to Zitao's for sanctuary whenever he needed. I thought you were the older one here, Zitao liked to grumble, but he always let Baekhyun in, a container of Baekhyun's favorite ice cream already waiting.
"Then maybe you should try being friends now that he's grown out of his Neanderthal ball-fetishizing ways," Zitao said. On the screen, Keanu Reeves floored the pedal to drive the bus over an unfinished bridge, and after they caught their breaths, Zitao added wickedly, "No guarantees about your mental development though." Baekhyun punched him, lightly, because he was still pillowed on Zitao's shoulder and the consequences could be severe. Zitao, laughing, offered him more ice cream.
In college Baekhyun learned to avoid exes for a solid month before initiating contact, because there was nothing more embarrassing than a drunken hookup with someone you'd recently called "more effective than taking Ambien while in the sack." The other three and a half relationships in between graduation and Kris taught Baekhyun, who easily compartmentalized and never looked back, that he had a knack for cutting people out of his life.
But Kris was not these other people. They had Chanyeol and everyone else in common. A week after the breakup, Chanyeol and Kyungsoo finally open the studio they'd been meaning to start since they met at a Lupe Fiasco concert three years ago, and Baekhyun got ten texts in an hour, all in Chanyeol's excited all-caps, to come to a studio-warming party. "I knew it," Kyungsoo said ruefully when the studio turned out to be too small for all of them, and they ended up at Kyungsoo's apartment, where Jongin, roused from his nap, mistook them for delivery and tried to shut the door in their faces after taking the box of fried chicken. They drew straws for clean-up duty before eating, but afterwards, Chanyeol, having drunk most of a bottle of champagne by himself, was too excited to be trusted with silverware, and Kris magnanimously withdrew from a game of Twister he was losing to help Baekhyun with the dishes.
This was a pattern everyone was familiar with, and Baekhyun knew he shouldn't be angry. Their friends were so used to Kris swooping in on Baekhyun that even now no one blinked an eye, except for Kyungsoo who, trapped under Jongin's leg and just now ordered by Chanyeol to put his left hand on yellow, couldn't come to the rescue even if he wanted to. Baekhyun hesitated by the champagne glasses anyway, trying to catch Zitao's attention. Finally, unable to draw Zitao away from the discussion on yoga teacher certification that he was having with Yixing, Baekhyun gave up and went to the kitchen, where Kris was already running hot water, a dry towel on the counter waiting for Baekhyun.
They finished all of the glasses and silverware in silence before Kris spoke up. "I feel guilty about the wedding thing," Kris said, not looking at Baekhyun. "I told Chanyeol you wouldn't mind."
"It's not your fault."
"It is," Kris insisted. "I should have told Chanyeol no. I didn't consider your feelings."
Baekhyun took a deep breath, looking at his own calm reflection on the marble counter. "You didn't think I'd react poorly?" he asked.
"You never did before."
"I overreact about everything. Once, when I was eight, my mother wouldn't order pizza and I smashed all the plates in the kitchen so we'd have to go out." He paused, trying to remember, then shook his head. "It seemed really important at the time."
"Funny," Kris said, voice dry. "You didn't break anything when we broke up."
"I was always on my best behavior when I was with you," Baekhyun snapped. He tried to grab the plate Kris handed him, but Kris held on, and, scared of it falling, Baekhyun pointedly placed his towel down on the pile of dry dishes, his eyebrow raised.
"Here." Kris thrust the wet plate at Baekhyun. "Do your worst." When Baekhyun made no movement, he grinned, lowering his voice. "I'll pay Kyungsoo back."
"I'm not eight anymore," Baekhyun whispered back, trying not to smile, but Kris slid the plate in between Baekhyun's fingers with a little nod. But before Baekhyun could grab hold, Kris let go, and the plate crashed onto the floor, exploding into pieces around Kris' feet.
"Oh my god I'm-" Baekhyun yelped, but before he could finish, Kris put a wet finger against Baekhyun's mouth, removing it just before Kyungsoo rushed in, first-aid kit already in hand.
"I don't know what happened," Kris said innocently, bending down to sweep up the pieces with Baekhyun's towel. "Baekhyun suddenly flipped out and-"
"I did not!" Baekhyun protested, horrified.
"Maybe you'd better let me finish the dishes," Kyungsoo said, turning to Baekhyun. "You can take Chanyeol home."
From behind Kyungsoo's head, Kris winked at Baekhyun. You're welcome, he mouthed, so smug Baekhyun was torn between irritation and, weirdly, awe.
"I’m not angry with you anymore," Baekhyun told Chanyeol. "I've decided, you and Kris deserve each other."
"No one wants your sloppy seconds," Chanyeol huffed.
"I take it back," Baekhyun muttered, starting the car. "No one deserves you."
Baekhyun always thought that if he asked people to describe Kris and created a man from their descriptions, he'd end up with the world's best-and most boring-boyfriend. Kris was attractive, but not unapproachable. He was strikingly but not freakishly tall. He laughed at Chanyeol's bad jokes and Baekhyun's better ones, and his own jokes tended towards lame puns. His default expression was to look icy, but once, Baekhyun found him on the couch crying over Breaking the Silence. You could take him to meet your parents without worrying. He was, in a word, safe - so safe that when he behaved badly, it seemed embarrassing instead of risqué.
"The kind of person that freaks out if you introduced anything more exotic than a vibrator when you were getting it on," Chanyeol once joked.
"Right?" Baekhyun had said, laughing. "Kris is the poster boy for missionary position in the dark. If I wasn't dating him, I'd call him a bore."
They had been at a karaoke bar waiting for Baekhyun's turn to sing, and, drunk, neither had noticed that Kris had already returned. Behind them, Kris slammed his beer hard enough to overturn a little container of limes on the bar, and Baekhyun jumped when he turned and saw Kris' expression. "I know everything we do is already public knowledge," Kris said peevishly, "but I wish you wouldn't complain about our sex life to Chanyeol."
"I'm not complaining," Baekhyun had said, shocked, and Kris had snapped, "Aren't you?"
Baekhyun still thought about that moment sometimes, especially after the break-up. Kris' bright gaze, the way his throat moved as he took a gulp of his beer, how he had snatched his arm back when Baekhyun tried to touch him - then afterwards, reluctantly, placed it around Baekhyun's waist. It was the first time Baekhyun had seen Kris as a real person instead of cloaked in the polish of Baekhyun's memories: Kris, the perfect basketball captain, his jersey flashing pure white as he swept Baekhyun up in a hug, the gleam of his teeth as he called out school chants from the sidelines until his voice was hoarse. Those things, Baekhyun realized, had been the fantasy, the boyfriend forged from cliches. Kris, angry at a bar and trying not to show it, was what was real.
But it had been just a glimpse. That Kris was too quick to catch, and when the painstakingly fabricated illusion came back, Baekhyun felt the sting reality left behind, like the residual slap of the basketball caught between his palms before he threw it away.
Kyungsoo and Chanyeol managed to sign their first artist a week before Yura's wedding. When they told Baekhyun the good news, Kyungsoo swiped Chanyeol's smoothie and, with an exasperated side-glance at Chanyeol, said, "But next time can you tell Poodle Park not to stalk our potential artists? We were this close to signing a restraining order instead."
"I wasn't stalking," Chanyeol said, offended. "Zico and I were bonding."
"And that's why you followed him into a McDonald's bathroom and I had to convince him you weren't trying to pick him up?"
"What is with you and Kris?" Chanyeol complained. "All I ever hear from you two is 'personal space, personal space, and more personal space.'"
"Where is Kris, anyway?" Baekhyun asked, taking the smoothie from Kyungsoo over Chanyeol's protests. "You didn't invite him?"
"We did, but he's giving you some 'personal space,'" Chanyeol said, rolling his eyes. "He should just change his name to P. Space Wu so everyone knows what to expect when they meet him."
"You're so petty," Baekhyun said, shaking his head.
But it was true that Kris was giving Baekhyun space. They didn't see each other again until EXO's official coming-out party. Kyungsoo had dragged Baekhyun along, awkwardly implying that Jongin knew someone who knew someone who was single, but Baekhyun had a pitch presentation the next day, and, to Chanyeol and Jongin's friend of a friend Sehun's chagrin, left early.
Outside, Kris was leaning against the wall, checking his phone. Half-hidden in the shadows, Baekhyun mistook him for a smoker and did a double take when Kris raised his head and waved. "I'm surprised Chanyeol let you out," Baekhyun said, making his way over. "He hasn't tried to set you up with Jongin's friend whatshisname yet?"
"Sehun," Kris noted absently.
Baekhyun hummed, amused, but stopped when he saw Kris' face, pinched in the half-light. "What's wrong?" he asked, and immediately regretted the words, Chanyeol's refrain of "personal space" echoing in his head.
"Nothing," Kris said, shrugging, but, as if also caught midway, slumped against the wall again. "No, you know what, I'm just-" He ran his fingers through his hair and threw a quick smile Baekhyun's way, and an absentminded part of Baekhyun that he couldn't squash thought, If Sehun were this handsome I wouldn't have left early.
"I'm just nervous about the wedding," Kris finished.
Baekhyun laughed. When Kris said nothing else, he coughed, pretending to swallow the laugh back in. "You're never nervous," he said, trailing off.
With a snort, Kris gently bumped their shoulders together. "I've never let you see me nervous. Last Thanksgiving I was convinced that you were going to take me home to meet your homophobic dad, and I practiced saying, 'It's lovely to finally meet you' in the mirror for two hours. When you didn't end up inviting me, I had to force myself to say nothing because I thought I was going to slip up and tell you it was lovely to finally meet you."
"You seemed so nonchalant."
"I'm always nervous. Like now. I'm not even actually dating Chanyeol," Kris admitted, holding out his palms, "and I'm still terrified of meeting his parents."
Looking at Kris' eyes hooded in the light of the streetlamp, Baekhyun was hit by the sudden realization that he couldn't recall ever seeing Kris nervous, much less terrified. He had no idea what to say. It had always been the other way around; on his phone, Baekhyun still had the cheerful texts Kris would send before each pitch presentation. Embarrassed, Baekhyun patted his pockets, as if something conversational would turn up, and when nothing did, he managed only, "It's cold. Go back in." Kris turned, surprised, and Baekhyun finished weakly, "Chanyeol will kill you if you get sick and sneeze through the wedding. It's in a few days, right?"
Kris shook his head. "I'll be fine. It's so loud in there I can't hear myself think."
"At least take my jacket," Baekhyun insisted, too self-conscious to take it back.
After a pause, Kris stuck his hand through one of the sleeves, hesitated, then resolutely put the whole thing on. The fabric of the blazer bunched around his shoulders, pushed up by the tight fit of the sleeves, and Baekhyun winced. Kris, smile widening, flexed his shoulders a little, as if admiring the fit. "I'll give it back to you after the wedding," Kris added.
"Keep it," Baekhyun said reflexively, and spent the whole cab ride home thinking of all the witty, reasonable things he could have said instead.
Baekhyun arrived early on the day of the wedding. The nave was filled with the sound of the musicians tuning up, and after bearing five cacophonous minutes in his assigned seat, Baekhyun retreated to the classrooms in the back, where the groomsmen were still pinning flowers to each other's chests. Yura's fiance pointed Baekhyun towards a recessed office. "Nosebleed," he said, grinning. "His boyfriend went with him to find cotton balls." Baekhyun thanked him and didn't think about the way his breath had stopped at the word boyfriend.
"I don't know why we haven't actually dated," Chanyeol was saying when Baekhyun rounded the corner.
The door to the office was open. From inside, Baekhyun could hear the opening and shutting of drawers. Slightly muffled, as if he had his head deep in a cabinet, Kris called out, "Is this a ploy? Trap me into a relationship with you so I can't say no later?"
"No!" There was a clatter of a chair, Kris shouting sharply, watch out!, before Chanyeol resumed. "I wouldn't do that to you. We're friends."
"Isn't that why? We're friends. We never clicked that way. With Baekhyun," a pause, "it was different."
"Yo, I hate to break it to you," Chanyeol said, snorting, "but you and him didn't click that way. That's why you kept calling me at two in the morning raving about how your Freudian dreams of drowning meant you needed a change and finally broke up with him."
"We broke up with each other," Kris corrected. There was a pause, and Baekhyun could hear the sounds of Chanyeol rearranging himself on the chair, Kris rustling a package. He scooted closer to the doorway. From the corner of his eye, he saw Kris' back as he hovered over Chanyeol. "And it's hard to explain," Kris continued. "Sometimes I felt like I was dating a robot Baekhyun. Like a Stepford wife version of who I knew he had to be."
"You don't have to keep making excuses for him," Chanyeol insisted.
"It was both of us," Kris said gruffly. "Now shut up and keep your head back."
From his pocket Kris fished out an iPod, handed Chanyeol an earbud, and crouched down so the cord could reach. For a while, the only sound Baekhyun heard was the band practicing outside. He felt peaceful, and yet, like an intruder. Suddenly Chanyeol popped up, singing, "You run my mind, boy," at the top of his lungs and Baekhyun, afraid he'd been caught eavesdropping, jumped back, just barely catching sight of Kris slapping Chanyeol on the forehead, pushing Chanyeol's head back.
"Do you want to bleed all over your nice tux?" Kris demanded as Baekhyun turned to go.
"I had to drown out your humming," Chanyeol complained. "It was giving me an earbleed."
Baekhyun liked his relationships clean, neatly laid out amidst his compartmentalized life. This separation with Kris was the messiest, though most civil, breakup of his life. They'd been amicable, truthful, understanding during it. The problem was afterwards. They still had to reach around the ragged edges of their broken relationship, sort through the fragments and patch together a friendship. But Baekhyun was an adult, or at least something approximating it. He thought he was ready for anything their new friendship threw at him, be it strangers or, as it turned out, Chanyeol.
And still, something boiled up in him, like now he was the pot and the frog was somewhere inside of him, trying to leap out. He looked at the back of Kris' head through the whole service, trying to bore down. Who was that man grasping Mrs. Park's hand, the one who listened to Frank Ocean and knew all the words and bickered with Chanyeol about his singing? Baekhyun realized with a start that they'd only ever listened to his music in the car, and Baekhyun had always picked safe things-jazz or classical music, sometimes public radio.
It was a weird feeling, he decided, to be thwarted by a lie of your own design.
The afterparty lasted until a little past midnight, and at one in the morning, Baekhyun slipped into the hotel room. Kris was changing with his back to the door and didn't turn around. "That was quick," he said, "I thought you were-" and stopped, still midway through folding his pants, when he saw Baekhyun.
"The ruse is up," Baekhyun said. He held Chanyeol's card out like a pretend pistol, and Kris obligingly held his hands up, dropping his pants. "I snitched on Chanyeol," Baekhyun admitted. "Yura slipped me the hotel key from Chanyeol's jacket pocket as thanks."
"Poor Chanyeol," Kris mused. "He deserved it, but it's cruel to throw him at Yura's mercy."
Baekhyun shrugged. "Whatever, she's about to go off on her honeymoon. It was the kindest time to throw him under the bus."
Kris hummed, reaching for a pair of pajama pants in his suitcase. Baekhyun watched him cross the room in just his underwear and, when it became obvious, turned towards the closet where he could see his own jacket, neatly hung up. Pleased, he continued, "You're not going to ask me why?"
"I didn't want to pry."
"Come on."
A shirt landed on Baekhyun's head. He tried not to think about how it was still warm. "Can't you let me play it cool?" Kris asked from behind him.
"No." Baekhyun grinned. "The last thing I want is you playing cool. Are you nervous right now?"
"Terrified."
Baekhyun swiveled around. Kris, dressed down in his pajamas, was also sitting down, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. "I can't tell," said Baekhyun, squinting.
"It's the Botox," Kris joked.
They lapsed into silence, and finally, Baekhyun looked down, toeing at the carpet. "I'm sorry. I'm doing this all wrong. I've just been thinking some things over and-" He took a deep breath. The room smelled like air freshener, clean linens, and under that, Kris, solid and reassuring. "Can you even say we really dated?"
"I’m sorry?"
"Weren't we as fake as you and Chanyeol? I just realized in the last month that I hardly know you, and we'd been dating for months. It's like we were stuck in some endless game of Charades, trying to act out 'boyfriends.'" He raised his hands to put scare quotes around "boyfriends", but feebly put them back down when he noted Kris' expression.
"I thought we did fine," Kris murmured.
"Sure," Baekhyun said, throwing his hands up in exasperation. "Absolute Boyfriend Kris and manic pixie dream boy Baekhyun did fine. But what about real us?" He walked over to the table behind Kris' bed, where Kris' formal jacket hung on a chair, and pulled out Kris' iPod. "You don't actually like jazz, do you?"
"You don't like long walks on the beach and I think you're allergic to roses," Kris pointed out.
"My father knows I’m gay. He doesn't like it but he's not homophobic."
"I know," Kris said. "Chanyeol told me like half a year ago."
"See? The whole thing was stupid. And normally I'd say what the hell, but I can't stop wanting to know how it actually was supposed to go between us. All that time we wasted." In Baekhyun's hands, the iPod lit up, Thinkin' Bout You scrolling across the screen, and he wondered if that was a sign. He turned to Kris' back, thankful Kris couldn't see his face. "Can we start over?"
There was a long pause. "Sunk costs," Kris said suddenly.
Confused, Baekhyun circled around again to face Kris, who seemed to be contemplating something very far away. "What?" Baekhyun asked.
"It's something in that stupid PowerPoint I wrote for you a long time ago," Kris explained. "The time we spent already is a sunk cost. We can't take it back, so we might as well make something of it now."
Baekhyun counted to ten and, when it seemed like Kris had nothing else to say, told him, "This is the most unromantic 'yes' I've ever heard."
Annoyed, Kris raked his fingers through his hair and glared up at Baekhyun. "I'm terrible at romantic gestures. I spent all evening trying to figure out a way to get you to look at me. I even Wiki-ed The Graduate on my phone during the last dance."
"You lack imagination. That's why you need me." Baekhyun grinned, leaning over Kris to kiss him on the nose. "That's how you and I equal synergy."
The day after Yura's wedding, Chanyeol broke up with Kris for cheating on him with Baekhyun. "I deserve better," he said, with a haughty sniff, and Baekhyun patted his hand, telling him, really, he'd be much happier this way.
"He doesn't look happy," Kris stage-whispered.
"Yura might have kicked him in the nuts," Baekhyun whispered back, and they laughed.
Written by: windowright
Pairing: Baekhyun/Kris, platonic(?) Chanyeol/Kris
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Baekhyun and Kris have a non-relationship, and Chanyeol and Kris get a fake one.
The day after Kris and Baekhyun broke up, they both informed Chanyeol that, really, they were much happier for it.
"I don't know why you're so horrified," Kris panted, calling as always during his morning jog. "You've been telling me to do this for the last two months. I was practically reading off your texts during my speech."
"Wait, you broke up with him?" Chanyeol demanded, and Kris suddenly noticed that he was passing under a bridge where reception was weak and hung up.
"We both broke up with each other," Baekhyun explained that afternoon over coffee and doughnuts. "It was simultaneous."
There was a chocolate sprinkle stuck to Baekhyun's cheek, and Chanyeol picked it off so he could flick it into Baekhyun's eye. "I think the word you're looking for is mutual," Chanyeol said as he teed up the sprinkle on the tip of his thumb.
"I think the word I'm looking for is 'you're the shittiest best friend ever'," Baekhyun grumbled. Chanyeol patted his hand, purring, there, there, and for the third time that hour, Baekhyun insisted, "No, really, we're both happier this way."
"You don't look happy," Chanyeol told him.
"That's because I have a piece of doughnut stuck in my eyelashes," Baekhyun growled, and they both laughed.
Which was probably why Chanyeol was offended to find out that asking Kris to be his plus-one for his sister's wedding meant Baekhyun would punch him in the arm, hard enough to leave a fist-sized bruise, and even more offended to find out that no one else was surprised.
"You were asking for it," Kyungsoo said, taking out a bag of frozen peas.
"They're not dating anymore! They haven't been for months-"
"One month," Jongin chimed in from where he was trying to shove peas up Kyungsoo's nose.
"One whole month," Chanyeol fumed. "And anyway, I don't actually want to date Kris. I just want my mother to stop trying to marry me off to every woman I'm in the same room with. Baekhyun can have him back afterwards." He dodged a pea that Jongin threw in his direction, then stuck out his tongue and caught a second one in his mouth. "If Kris would even want to go back to some tragically violent lunatic," he added.
"Why don't you just pick someone else then?" asked Kyungsoo.
"Are you kidding? Kris is the only one of us who's boyfriend material. I would know." Chanyeol preened. "I was the one who set them up."
Kyungsoo sighed, uncrossing his arms to rearrange Chanyeol's ice pack properly. "You know, your mother would take you and your sexuality seriously if you ever took your own love life seriously. Instead, you're too busy meddling in other people's relationships."
"Kris and Baekhyun don't have a relationship," Chanyeol reminded him. "They broke up. That is like the definition of a non-relationship."
"Then don't come crying to me when Baekhyun decks you," Kyungsoo told him, slapping the ice pack a little harder than necessary. "Next time, he'll probably aim for your face."
Here's the official story:
Kris and Baekhyun were on the same high school basketball team. (So were Chanyeol and Yixing, but this isn't about them.) Kris was captain and center; Baekhyun played small forward. (Chanyeol, power forward; Yixing, shooting guard.) They won two high school championships together before Kris graduated, and during those two years, Baekhyun worshipped the ground Kris walked on. Neither of them came out until college, and then they scrupulously avoided each other during team reunions during breaks (which disappointed Chanyeol, who was hoping he could blackmail them with Instagrams of drunken New Year makeouts). They lost touch, grew up, grew apart, graduated, moved back to the city. Two years later Kris asked Baekhyun on a date. It went well, until it didn't. And then they broke up.
Kris would tell you something like this:
He and Baekhyun were on the same high school basketball team. Kris was newly appointed captain when Baekhyun became a regular, and if sometimes Kris made Baekhyun stay behind a little longer for passing drills simply because they'd be in the showers alone together, no one had to know but him (and Chanyeol, who had to be there for the three-man weave). Kris knew Baekhyun looked up to him. He'd have to have been blindfolded, gagged, with basketballs shoved into both ears for all two years to miss it. But Kris thought he was a ladies' man until his sophomore year of college, when the aftermath of one keg stand, two car bombs and three tequila shots turned out to be making out with one of his three-on-three teammates, and Yixing had to talk him through a sexuality crisis via gchat emoticons at four in the morning. That year, Kris went home for New Year's Eve and spent the last few seconds of the ball drop in the bathroom avoiding Baekhyun, whose drunk face seemed luminescent, magnetic, in the dark.
After that, they lost touch, grew apart, graduated and, after a failed stint training backup dancers in L.A., Kris moved back to the city. Two years later, he ran into Baekhyun at one of Chanyeol's label parties, and Kris realized with a shock that Baekhyun's face was always luminescent, that Baekhyun followed him wherever he went, that his eyes followed Baekhyun whenever they were apart. Kris went home, pulled up Chanyeol's number on his phone, and together they pounded out a fifteen-slide PowerPoint presentation complete with 2x2 matrices declaring the magic quadrant to be K+B=synergy?.
"This is crazy," Kris said. "He's going to think I'm incapable of asking him out on a date like a normal person."
"Baekhyun's a consultant," Chanyeol said. "They eat this shit up."
Either way, it worked, until it didn't, and then they broke up.
But if you asked Baekhyun, he'd say this:
He never had a hero complex. He never worshipped the ground Kris walked on. Kris wasn't even his first boyfriend. He went to college, experimented, came to cogent, unshakeable conclusions about whom he wanted to have sex with and what kind, and he didn't even remember that New Year's Eve party, was Kris even there? He'd never thought about Kris as a sexual human being at all. But then he moved back to the city and Chanyeol invited him to one of those half-networking, half-rave parties he threw for his musician friends, and the lights hit both him and Kris like they were in a movie and this was their reunion scene, like it was a sign for Baekhyun, this is why you came back. The next morning, Baekhyun went into work and Zitao ushered him into a conference room, where Kris, in full suit and tie, pulled up a PowerPoint presentation titled "My First Love Story," and Baekhyun spit his coffee all over his chambray tie at the final slide: "Our Recommendation: Find a Strategic Partner." Baekhyun was a consultant - you don’t say no to things like that.
And for a while they worked. But there was this feeling Baekhyun could never shake, that they were in a movie arranged for them and they were both playing increasingly strained roles. It was, of course, partially Baekhyun's fault. He told Kris all sorts of lies: that he followed the Rules, that he didn't put out until the fifth date, that he liked long walks on the beach and roses for each quarter-anniversary, that he wasn't out yet to his father and thus couldn't take Kris home. Kris played gamely along, and, as if in penance, Baekhyun fell in with the cliches. In public, Kris was very adult; Baekhyun, trusting and pliant. They never argued, didn't even squabble. It was the sort of relationship he'd imagined for himself at thirty. He should have felt lucky. Instead, he felt like a frog in hot water, and he was the one cranking up the heat. Eventually, it felt like the only solution was to jump out of the pot.
"I think," Zitao said very carefully, "that means you're just better off as friends."
"Except the last time we were just friends, we were in high school," Baekhyun complained. "Everything we said was either basketball or jokes about the length of Chanyeol's penis. We were basically Neanderthals with a ball fetish."
They were watching action films in Zitao's apartment, one of Baekhyun's favorite forms of post-traumatic stress therapy, second only to watching Korean dramas and making Zitao act out all the parts. Baekhyun was pretending to nurse his hand. Occasionally his phone vibrated with text messages from Jongin on the State of Chanyeol's Whining, which Baekhyun read aloud so he could hear Zitao badmouth Chanyeol's pain tolerance. Since Kris's impromptu pitch at their office, Zitao had been unceremoniously roped in with Baekhyun's friends, but there was always a distinct feeling that Zitao was Baekhyun's friend first and everyone else's second. It was nice, and meant that Baekhyun could ran off to Zitao's for sanctuary whenever he needed. I thought you were the older one here, Zitao liked to grumble, but he always let Baekhyun in, a container of Baekhyun's favorite ice cream already waiting.
"Then maybe you should try being friends now that he's grown out of his Neanderthal ball-fetishizing ways," Zitao said. On the screen, Keanu Reeves floored the pedal to drive the bus over an unfinished bridge, and after they caught their breaths, Zitao added wickedly, "No guarantees about your mental development though." Baekhyun punched him, lightly, because he was still pillowed on Zitao's shoulder and the consequences could be severe. Zitao, laughing, offered him more ice cream.
In college Baekhyun learned to avoid exes for a solid month before initiating contact, because there was nothing more embarrassing than a drunken hookup with someone you'd recently called "more effective than taking Ambien while in the sack." The other three and a half relationships in between graduation and Kris taught Baekhyun, who easily compartmentalized and never looked back, that he had a knack for cutting people out of his life.
But Kris was not these other people. They had Chanyeol and everyone else in common. A week after the breakup, Chanyeol and Kyungsoo finally open the studio they'd been meaning to start since they met at a Lupe Fiasco concert three years ago, and Baekhyun got ten texts in an hour, all in Chanyeol's excited all-caps, to come to a studio-warming party. "I knew it," Kyungsoo said ruefully when the studio turned out to be too small for all of them, and they ended up at Kyungsoo's apartment, where Jongin, roused from his nap, mistook them for delivery and tried to shut the door in their faces after taking the box of fried chicken. They drew straws for clean-up duty before eating, but afterwards, Chanyeol, having drunk most of a bottle of champagne by himself, was too excited to be trusted with silverware, and Kris magnanimously withdrew from a game of Twister he was losing to help Baekhyun with the dishes.
This was a pattern everyone was familiar with, and Baekhyun knew he shouldn't be angry. Their friends were so used to Kris swooping in on Baekhyun that even now no one blinked an eye, except for Kyungsoo who, trapped under Jongin's leg and just now ordered by Chanyeol to put his left hand on yellow, couldn't come to the rescue even if he wanted to. Baekhyun hesitated by the champagne glasses anyway, trying to catch Zitao's attention. Finally, unable to draw Zitao away from the discussion on yoga teacher certification that he was having with Yixing, Baekhyun gave up and went to the kitchen, where Kris was already running hot water, a dry towel on the counter waiting for Baekhyun.
They finished all of the glasses and silverware in silence before Kris spoke up. "I feel guilty about the wedding thing," Kris said, not looking at Baekhyun. "I told Chanyeol you wouldn't mind."
"It's not your fault."
"It is," Kris insisted. "I should have told Chanyeol no. I didn't consider your feelings."
Baekhyun took a deep breath, looking at his own calm reflection on the marble counter. "You didn't think I'd react poorly?" he asked.
"You never did before."
"I overreact about everything. Once, when I was eight, my mother wouldn't order pizza and I smashed all the plates in the kitchen so we'd have to go out." He paused, trying to remember, then shook his head. "It seemed really important at the time."
"Funny," Kris said, voice dry. "You didn't break anything when we broke up."
"I was always on my best behavior when I was with you," Baekhyun snapped. He tried to grab the plate Kris handed him, but Kris held on, and, scared of it falling, Baekhyun pointedly placed his towel down on the pile of dry dishes, his eyebrow raised.
"Here." Kris thrust the wet plate at Baekhyun. "Do your worst." When Baekhyun made no movement, he grinned, lowering his voice. "I'll pay Kyungsoo back."
"I'm not eight anymore," Baekhyun whispered back, trying not to smile, but Kris slid the plate in between Baekhyun's fingers with a little nod. But before Baekhyun could grab hold, Kris let go, and the plate crashed onto the floor, exploding into pieces around Kris' feet.
"Oh my god I'm-" Baekhyun yelped, but before he could finish, Kris put a wet finger against Baekhyun's mouth, removing it just before Kyungsoo rushed in, first-aid kit already in hand.
"I don't know what happened," Kris said innocently, bending down to sweep up the pieces with Baekhyun's towel. "Baekhyun suddenly flipped out and-"
"I did not!" Baekhyun protested, horrified.
"Maybe you'd better let me finish the dishes," Kyungsoo said, turning to Baekhyun. "You can take Chanyeol home."
From behind Kyungsoo's head, Kris winked at Baekhyun. You're welcome, he mouthed, so smug Baekhyun was torn between irritation and, weirdly, awe.
"I’m not angry with you anymore," Baekhyun told Chanyeol. "I've decided, you and Kris deserve each other."
"No one wants your sloppy seconds," Chanyeol huffed.
"I take it back," Baekhyun muttered, starting the car. "No one deserves you."
Baekhyun always thought that if he asked people to describe Kris and created a man from their descriptions, he'd end up with the world's best-and most boring-boyfriend. Kris was attractive, but not unapproachable. He was strikingly but not freakishly tall. He laughed at Chanyeol's bad jokes and Baekhyun's better ones, and his own jokes tended towards lame puns. His default expression was to look icy, but once, Baekhyun found him on the couch crying over Breaking the Silence. You could take him to meet your parents without worrying. He was, in a word, safe - so safe that when he behaved badly, it seemed embarrassing instead of risqué.
"The kind of person that freaks out if you introduced anything more exotic than a vibrator when you were getting it on," Chanyeol once joked.
"Right?" Baekhyun had said, laughing. "Kris is the poster boy for missionary position in the dark. If I wasn't dating him, I'd call him a bore."
They had been at a karaoke bar waiting for Baekhyun's turn to sing, and, drunk, neither had noticed that Kris had already returned. Behind them, Kris slammed his beer hard enough to overturn a little container of limes on the bar, and Baekhyun jumped when he turned and saw Kris' expression. "I know everything we do is already public knowledge," Kris said peevishly, "but I wish you wouldn't complain about our sex life to Chanyeol."
"I'm not complaining," Baekhyun had said, shocked, and Kris had snapped, "Aren't you?"
Baekhyun still thought about that moment sometimes, especially after the break-up. Kris' bright gaze, the way his throat moved as he took a gulp of his beer, how he had snatched his arm back when Baekhyun tried to touch him - then afterwards, reluctantly, placed it around Baekhyun's waist. It was the first time Baekhyun had seen Kris as a real person instead of cloaked in the polish of Baekhyun's memories: Kris, the perfect basketball captain, his jersey flashing pure white as he swept Baekhyun up in a hug, the gleam of his teeth as he called out school chants from the sidelines until his voice was hoarse. Those things, Baekhyun realized, had been the fantasy, the boyfriend forged from cliches. Kris, angry at a bar and trying not to show it, was what was real.
But it had been just a glimpse. That Kris was too quick to catch, and when the painstakingly fabricated illusion came back, Baekhyun felt the sting reality left behind, like the residual slap of the basketball caught between his palms before he threw it away.
Kyungsoo and Chanyeol managed to sign their first artist a week before Yura's wedding. When they told Baekhyun the good news, Kyungsoo swiped Chanyeol's smoothie and, with an exasperated side-glance at Chanyeol, said, "But next time can you tell Poodle Park not to stalk our potential artists? We were this close to signing a restraining order instead."
"I wasn't stalking," Chanyeol said, offended. "Zico and I were bonding."
"And that's why you followed him into a McDonald's bathroom and I had to convince him you weren't trying to pick him up?"
"What is with you and Kris?" Chanyeol complained. "All I ever hear from you two is 'personal space, personal space, and more personal space.'"
"Where is Kris, anyway?" Baekhyun asked, taking the smoothie from Kyungsoo over Chanyeol's protests. "You didn't invite him?"
"We did, but he's giving you some 'personal space,'" Chanyeol said, rolling his eyes. "He should just change his name to P. Space Wu so everyone knows what to expect when they meet him."
"You're so petty," Baekhyun said, shaking his head.
But it was true that Kris was giving Baekhyun space. They didn't see each other again until EXO's official coming-out party. Kyungsoo had dragged Baekhyun along, awkwardly implying that Jongin knew someone who knew someone who was single, but Baekhyun had a pitch presentation the next day, and, to Chanyeol and Jongin's friend of a friend Sehun's chagrin, left early.
Outside, Kris was leaning against the wall, checking his phone. Half-hidden in the shadows, Baekhyun mistook him for a smoker and did a double take when Kris raised his head and waved. "I'm surprised Chanyeol let you out," Baekhyun said, making his way over. "He hasn't tried to set you up with Jongin's friend whatshisname yet?"
"Sehun," Kris noted absently.
Baekhyun hummed, amused, but stopped when he saw Kris' face, pinched in the half-light. "What's wrong?" he asked, and immediately regretted the words, Chanyeol's refrain of "personal space" echoing in his head.
"Nothing," Kris said, shrugging, but, as if also caught midway, slumped against the wall again. "No, you know what, I'm just-" He ran his fingers through his hair and threw a quick smile Baekhyun's way, and an absentminded part of Baekhyun that he couldn't squash thought, If Sehun were this handsome I wouldn't have left early.
"I'm just nervous about the wedding," Kris finished.
Baekhyun laughed. When Kris said nothing else, he coughed, pretending to swallow the laugh back in. "You're never nervous," he said, trailing off.
With a snort, Kris gently bumped their shoulders together. "I've never let you see me nervous. Last Thanksgiving I was convinced that you were going to take me home to meet your homophobic dad, and I practiced saying, 'It's lovely to finally meet you' in the mirror for two hours. When you didn't end up inviting me, I had to force myself to say nothing because I thought I was going to slip up and tell you it was lovely to finally meet you."
"You seemed so nonchalant."
"I'm always nervous. Like now. I'm not even actually dating Chanyeol," Kris admitted, holding out his palms, "and I'm still terrified of meeting his parents."
Looking at Kris' eyes hooded in the light of the streetlamp, Baekhyun was hit by the sudden realization that he couldn't recall ever seeing Kris nervous, much less terrified. He had no idea what to say. It had always been the other way around; on his phone, Baekhyun still had the cheerful texts Kris would send before each pitch presentation. Embarrassed, Baekhyun patted his pockets, as if something conversational would turn up, and when nothing did, he managed only, "It's cold. Go back in." Kris turned, surprised, and Baekhyun finished weakly, "Chanyeol will kill you if you get sick and sneeze through the wedding. It's in a few days, right?"
Kris shook his head. "I'll be fine. It's so loud in there I can't hear myself think."
"At least take my jacket," Baekhyun insisted, too self-conscious to take it back.
After a pause, Kris stuck his hand through one of the sleeves, hesitated, then resolutely put the whole thing on. The fabric of the blazer bunched around his shoulders, pushed up by the tight fit of the sleeves, and Baekhyun winced. Kris, smile widening, flexed his shoulders a little, as if admiring the fit. "I'll give it back to you after the wedding," Kris added.
"Keep it," Baekhyun said reflexively, and spent the whole cab ride home thinking of all the witty, reasonable things he could have said instead.
Baekhyun arrived early on the day of the wedding. The nave was filled with the sound of the musicians tuning up, and after bearing five cacophonous minutes in his assigned seat, Baekhyun retreated to the classrooms in the back, where the groomsmen were still pinning flowers to each other's chests. Yura's fiance pointed Baekhyun towards a recessed office. "Nosebleed," he said, grinning. "His boyfriend went with him to find cotton balls." Baekhyun thanked him and didn't think about the way his breath had stopped at the word boyfriend.
"I don't know why we haven't actually dated," Chanyeol was saying when Baekhyun rounded the corner.
The door to the office was open. From inside, Baekhyun could hear the opening and shutting of drawers. Slightly muffled, as if he had his head deep in a cabinet, Kris called out, "Is this a ploy? Trap me into a relationship with you so I can't say no later?"
"No!" There was a clatter of a chair, Kris shouting sharply, watch out!, before Chanyeol resumed. "I wouldn't do that to you. We're friends."
"Isn't that why? We're friends. We never clicked that way. With Baekhyun," a pause, "it was different."
"Yo, I hate to break it to you," Chanyeol said, snorting, "but you and him didn't click that way. That's why you kept calling me at two in the morning raving about how your Freudian dreams of drowning meant you needed a change and finally broke up with him."
"We broke up with each other," Kris corrected. There was a pause, and Baekhyun could hear the sounds of Chanyeol rearranging himself on the chair, Kris rustling a package. He scooted closer to the doorway. From the corner of his eye, he saw Kris' back as he hovered over Chanyeol. "And it's hard to explain," Kris continued. "Sometimes I felt like I was dating a robot Baekhyun. Like a Stepford wife version of who I knew he had to be."
"You don't have to keep making excuses for him," Chanyeol insisted.
"It was both of us," Kris said gruffly. "Now shut up and keep your head back."
From his pocket Kris fished out an iPod, handed Chanyeol an earbud, and crouched down so the cord could reach. For a while, the only sound Baekhyun heard was the band practicing outside. He felt peaceful, and yet, like an intruder. Suddenly Chanyeol popped up, singing, "You run my mind, boy," at the top of his lungs and Baekhyun, afraid he'd been caught eavesdropping, jumped back, just barely catching sight of Kris slapping Chanyeol on the forehead, pushing Chanyeol's head back.
"Do you want to bleed all over your nice tux?" Kris demanded as Baekhyun turned to go.
"I had to drown out your humming," Chanyeol complained. "It was giving me an earbleed."
Baekhyun liked his relationships clean, neatly laid out amidst his compartmentalized life. This separation with Kris was the messiest, though most civil, breakup of his life. They'd been amicable, truthful, understanding during it. The problem was afterwards. They still had to reach around the ragged edges of their broken relationship, sort through the fragments and patch together a friendship. But Baekhyun was an adult, or at least something approximating it. He thought he was ready for anything their new friendship threw at him, be it strangers or, as it turned out, Chanyeol.
And still, something boiled up in him, like now he was the pot and the frog was somewhere inside of him, trying to leap out. He looked at the back of Kris' head through the whole service, trying to bore down. Who was that man grasping Mrs. Park's hand, the one who listened to Frank Ocean and knew all the words and bickered with Chanyeol about his singing? Baekhyun realized with a start that they'd only ever listened to his music in the car, and Baekhyun had always picked safe things-jazz or classical music, sometimes public radio.
It was a weird feeling, he decided, to be thwarted by a lie of your own design.
The afterparty lasted until a little past midnight, and at one in the morning, Baekhyun slipped into the hotel room. Kris was changing with his back to the door and didn't turn around. "That was quick," he said, "I thought you were-" and stopped, still midway through folding his pants, when he saw Baekhyun.
"The ruse is up," Baekhyun said. He held Chanyeol's card out like a pretend pistol, and Kris obligingly held his hands up, dropping his pants. "I snitched on Chanyeol," Baekhyun admitted. "Yura slipped me the hotel key from Chanyeol's jacket pocket as thanks."
"Poor Chanyeol," Kris mused. "He deserved it, but it's cruel to throw him at Yura's mercy."
Baekhyun shrugged. "Whatever, she's about to go off on her honeymoon. It was the kindest time to throw him under the bus."
Kris hummed, reaching for a pair of pajama pants in his suitcase. Baekhyun watched him cross the room in just his underwear and, when it became obvious, turned towards the closet where he could see his own jacket, neatly hung up. Pleased, he continued, "You're not going to ask me why?"
"I didn't want to pry."
"Come on."
A shirt landed on Baekhyun's head. He tried not to think about how it was still warm. "Can't you let me play it cool?" Kris asked from behind him.
"No." Baekhyun grinned. "The last thing I want is you playing cool. Are you nervous right now?"
"Terrified."
Baekhyun swiveled around. Kris, dressed down in his pajamas, was also sitting down, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. "I can't tell," said Baekhyun, squinting.
"It's the Botox," Kris joked.
They lapsed into silence, and finally, Baekhyun looked down, toeing at the carpet. "I'm sorry. I'm doing this all wrong. I've just been thinking some things over and-" He took a deep breath. The room smelled like air freshener, clean linens, and under that, Kris, solid and reassuring. "Can you even say we really dated?"
"I’m sorry?"
"Weren't we as fake as you and Chanyeol? I just realized in the last month that I hardly know you, and we'd been dating for months. It's like we were stuck in some endless game of Charades, trying to act out 'boyfriends.'" He raised his hands to put scare quotes around "boyfriends", but feebly put them back down when he noted Kris' expression.
"I thought we did fine," Kris murmured.
"Sure," Baekhyun said, throwing his hands up in exasperation. "Absolute Boyfriend Kris and manic pixie dream boy Baekhyun did fine. But what about real us?" He walked over to the table behind Kris' bed, where Kris' formal jacket hung on a chair, and pulled out Kris' iPod. "You don't actually like jazz, do you?"
"You don't like long walks on the beach and I think you're allergic to roses," Kris pointed out.
"My father knows I’m gay. He doesn't like it but he's not homophobic."
"I know," Kris said. "Chanyeol told me like half a year ago."
"See? The whole thing was stupid. And normally I'd say what the hell, but I can't stop wanting to know how it actually was supposed to go between us. All that time we wasted." In Baekhyun's hands, the iPod lit up, Thinkin' Bout You scrolling across the screen, and he wondered if that was a sign. He turned to Kris' back, thankful Kris couldn't see his face. "Can we start over?"
There was a long pause. "Sunk costs," Kris said suddenly.
Confused, Baekhyun circled around again to face Kris, who seemed to be contemplating something very far away. "What?" Baekhyun asked.
"It's something in that stupid PowerPoint I wrote for you a long time ago," Kris explained. "The time we spent already is a sunk cost. We can't take it back, so we might as well make something of it now."
Baekhyun counted to ten and, when it seemed like Kris had nothing else to say, told him, "This is the most unromantic 'yes' I've ever heard."
Annoyed, Kris raked his fingers through his hair and glared up at Baekhyun. "I'm terrible at romantic gestures. I spent all evening trying to figure out a way to get you to look at me. I even Wiki-ed The Graduate on my phone during the last dance."
"You lack imagination. That's why you need me." Baekhyun grinned, leaning over Kris to kiss him on the nose. "That's how you and I equal synergy."
The day after Yura's wedding, Chanyeol broke up with Kris for cheating on him with Baekhyun. "I deserve better," he said, with a haughty sniff, and Baekhyun patted his hand, telling him, really, he'd be much happier this way.
"He doesn't look happy," Kris stage-whispered.
"Yura might have kicked him in the nuts," Baekhyun whispered back, and they laughed.