So Much Mine: Section Fourteen
Section Fourteen
Pairing: JaeHo
Rating: Overall NC-17. Naughty words at least.
All my Yoosu belongs to: Ranalore
Summary: The beginning of a shifting relationship. Hot Korean boys. Sex. Dancing and some angry words. Not necessarily in that order. Not necessarily in each section.
Section One; Section Two; Section Three; Section Four; Section Five; Section Six; Section Seven; Section Eight; Section Nine; Section Ten; Section Eleven; Section Twelve, Section Thirteen
The sound of his key in the apartment door lock worked a nerve in Jaejoong’s forehead, a slight pounding of a headache threatening the edges of his vision. Sconces lit the outer hallway, a length of corridor wrapping around the side of the building, trapped behind frosted over glass. Letting himself through the door, Jae stood for a moment in the frame, girding up his strength to face Yunho inside. A sickness bloomed inside of his belly, the parasitical need for Yunho pressing against him.
“I’ll have to give everything up.” Jaejoong pondered his options. The group was truly the only thing he had left in his life. With his family still estranged, his world had become the other four, a support system that he never imagined he would be able to embrace. “I need to get some distance from him. This isn’t fair to the others…they shouldn’t have to live in the middle of this madness.”
Jaejoong was accustomed to madness, having drank deeply at its river, drenching his weary body in its water in the hopes of washing away some of his sins. His dream-shaken nights still held the faces of horror, leering faces of rough-faced men when he worked tables down in the Itaewon district, groping hands grabbing at his ass or crotch, hard fingers digging into tender flesh. Jae knew that touch…that creeping insidious feeling of another’s unwanted sweat on his skin and the thought sickened him. He didn’t want to give Yunho that sensation… didn’t want to press the young man with his attentions if Yunho truly did not want him…despite the confession of desire.
Jaejoong knew about desire…an intimate knowledge of singular want clouding the mind until everything became a kaleidoscope haze. His skin crawled with memories, both wicked and sinfully delightful. Jaejoong wanted Yunho’s hands to rub at the stains of others reaching for him, erasing the greasy fingerprints they left on his being. He’d never succumbed to any of the unwanted advances forced up on him… a few frightening instances when the singer believed that he would not survive the night unscathed and whole…perhaps not even surviving at all.
Now, on his feet and stumbling towards the dream that kept him awake at night, he saw another glimmer of happiness fading in the distance… the possibility that he would lose both the band and Yunho.
A soft ballad hummed through the living room, the lights down low, as if setting a twilight behind the clouded windows. Winter stormed outside, the snow picking up its fury. Walking into the kitchen, Jae noticed the vegetables he’d abandoned on the counter had been put away, the surfaces wiped down with a sponge and the chopping board draining on the wire rack. Someone…probably Yunho… washed and clean the knife, wiping it down and sliding it back into place in the block.
“I left the rice in the cooker.” Yunho startled Jaejoong, a slender strength leaning on the wall of the hallway towards their bedrooms. “It’s cold enough that the rice won’t go bad…I don’t think.”
“No. It should be fine, I think.” Jae agreed, his words stiff. The roller coaster ride of emotions left him too tired to fight, much too tired to even do anything other than sleep off the exhaustion riding his bones. Yunho standing there was too much of an obstacle for his aching blood and the singer wondered if he could make it past the young man without breaking down into a flood of tears.
You’ll be fine, Kim.” Jaejoong scolded himself, pulling on the steely grit he had in his soul. Just make it past the hallway and you can just fall asleep…leave all of this outside, behind you. Look at things tomorrow morning.
“If you’re looking for your things, they’re in the bedroom…our bedroom.” Yunho’s eyes closed as Jaejoong brushed past him, shoulders barely skimming one another.
The intensity of the singer’s body inflamed him, the scent of his musky skin thickening the softness between Yunho’s thighs. Cupped up against his body, his arousal twitched, a firming Yunho forced aside. If he was going to examine his feelings towards the lead vocalist, he would have to do so without the lust hovering in his throat, Jaejoong’s insistence for respect an echoing refrain in his ears.
“What? Why?” With a turn of his shoulder, Jaejoong looked back at the leader, his pretty mouth twisted with suspicion. There was a sulk on Yunho’s mouth, the remains of a sour expression washed clean with something… delicious, Jae thought. “Did Junsu say something to Yoochun? Are they…?”
“No, neither one of them said anything.” Yunho spun slowly, taking his time walking up to Jae. “It seemed like what was necessary… it was the right thing to do.”
“I need to talk to you Jaejoong.” He continued, his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his loose cotton pants. The emptiness of the apartment ricocheted the slightest sounds back onto them, Jae’s inhaled breath a loud inflammation of suspense. “Please, Joongie-ah… we need to talk about…us.”
“There is no us, Yunho.” With a cock of his head, Jaejoong glanced into the bedroom he’d shared with Changmin and the group’s leader. His cherished sweatshirt lay on the smooth sleek of his blankets, a grungy stained garment that held each beat of his heart. A graveyard of things lost to him, fabric ghosts haunting his life. “You had a choice…you made that choice.”
“You didn’t give me enough time.” Yunho suddenly was beside him, nearly inside of him. The air, warmed first by Yunho’s mouth, drifted into Jae’s lungs, the scent of the leader’s erotically flushed skin pushing into Jaejoong’s senses. “I… please, we need to sit down and talk.”
“Not in the bedroom. I haven’t decided if I’m staying in there with you.” Jaejoong turned away, trying to drive the image of himself under the leader’s exploring hands from his mind. “The living area, that should be fine to talk.”
Where others touched with gluttonous lust, Jaejoong ached for the simple exploration of a nubile lover’s tongue, a wet tip finding the rise on his throat, feeling the movement of his eyes beneath closed lids. Jae rubbed at his arms, trying to feel the remnants of Yunho’s touch on his forearms, the bruises left by angry fingers faded through the time they’d spent avoiding one another’s gaze.
Yunho followed Jaejoong, watching the predatorily sensual stalk of his long legs eat up the length of the hallway, moving quickly to escape the closeness of their bodies. His mind still fought a war…an epic battle of familial obligations and cultural stigmas. The only weapon his heart could arm itself with was the softness of Jaejoong’s lips and the sweet, adoring smile of coy sex wrapped around the singer’s angelic face. Yunho feared for his heart, forging onto a battlefield it was little prepared for, entering into a conflict that could destroy him forever.
“Do you want some tea?” Yunho asked, wondering if he could his hands steady enough to measure out leaves and fill the tea pot.
“No, thank you, hyung.” A brittle politeness from Jaejoong. “It’s late. I don’t want anything but a shower and some sleep. Provided I can find my bed.”
Can I afford to lose this creature that shakes me? Can I lose you and keep everything else? Yunho asked of himself, the thoughts of his family’s disappointment in him strong in his mind. But can I afford to have this? What will doing this …wanting you…do to me?
His path in life was so simple, one etched in stone by centuries of a culture that prided itself on its elegance and dignity. Yunho had thrown over convention by turning his back on his parents’ desires to see him take up a more sedate life, one not ruled by hours of dancing and singing. His dreams led him to a spotlight on the stage, broad swaths of black-drenched arenas filled with the screams of people calling his name. Could he ask the people who nursed him into adulthood to turn their faces toward the pretty and wild Jaejoong, calling him son of their heart? Or was he too late to coax Jaejoong into giving him a single change to explore his affections.
Jaejoong worked himself down into the corner of the soft-sided crimson sofa, its throw pillows a riot of woven rainbows. The singer’s trim figure gleamed, a pure winter kiss on a sea of blood velvet. He’d shed the thick parka he wore, slung over the back of a side chair. The puffy down jacket held the perfume of the icy night, a black blueness that reminded Yunho of Jaejoong’s soft hair. A peek of the singer’s chest slid out from under his partially undone shirt, a string of pearl buttons unhooked from their holes. A faint inky purple belled the ridges of Jaejoong’s expressive eyes, ruins of sleep fallen on his pretty face.
It would be a sight that Yunho would carry with him forever, a snapshot of that moment in life when he would either know happiness or misery. He would be sure to remember…always remember the plumpness of Jaejoong’s mouth, a gift of sinful seduction on the package of demure innocence. Yunho sat down on the other end of the couch, wondering what to do with his hands.
They should be in his hair, wrapped around tight until his head is forced towards yours. Yunho’s darkness whispered, firming his awakening flesh. Will his mouth open wider if his head is leaned back? Would his tongue be moist against your own or does his mouth dry at the thought of you? Did he catch a snowflake in his mouth and will you still taste it there?
Concentrating, Yunho wiped his moist hands on his thighs, hoping the cotton would absorb his nervousness. Jae’s expression, hooded and wary, burned a stream of regret through Yunho’s guts. The tension in the other’s body was clear, any trust the leader might have had with Jaejoong now lay in the gutters of their arguments.
“I made the decision to move you back… put you back to where you belonged. No one else.” Yunho braced himself for the onslaught of Jaejoong’s anger at being manipulated into a corner. The lead singer wasn’t known for his tolerance of interference… a fierce streak of independence nearly as wide as his stubbornness.
“Why did you move my things back into the room? Suppose I don’t want to be moved?” Yunho’s words flattened Jaejoong’s apprehension, the singer working at the puzzle of the leader’s actions. He’d been expecting to come back to the apartment and find his things outside in the cold, a call on his cell phone from SM saying that he would be removed from the group’s dynamic. Never did Jaejoong imagine that he would return to his own private hell and discover his place near Yunho restored to him. “I’m trying to manage this… thing that’s between us. Being in that room… I can’t deal with it there.”
“I don’t want it managed. I don’t want it dealt with.” Yunho looked up from the contemplation of his own hands, his knuckles white from his fingers clutched tight on his knees. “I want it…explored. I want to see how you taste. Everywhere. Just a taste.”
“No.” A single word.. that final slicing cut to Yunho’s soul...slivered apart his grief…the final blow to his heart. “You want nothing more than… something moist to slide yourself into, leaving a wet sticky mess inside of my body. If I wanted that, I could get that anywhere…from anyone who didn’t mind that there was a cock between my legs.”
“That isn’t…” Yunho began, cut off when Jaejoong interrupted.
“I’m not some dirty hole you can get relief from, Yunho.” The singer’s coarseness, bred sharp and cunning from the years spent struggling on the street, welded a powerful punch to Yunho’s guts. “Every thrust you will give my body with your blunted cock or tongue will be a hot knife into me. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you just see that? Why do you have to be so selfish in your wants? Don’t I mean any small thing to you that you’d want me to survive you?”
“Let me finish…just hear me out.” The leader asked, shifting his body closer to the young singer, the couch cushions dimpling under his weight. His heart pounded hard, a thumping menace in his ears. “Just a few minutes…and then you can decide what you want to do. I promise I’ll live with anything you decide.”
“Alright, I’ll listen.” Jaejoong nodded once. He knew in the depths of his soul that the group’s leader would give him one final rejection but he wanted to hear Yunho’s words… perhaps a hint of a plea in that control.
“I found your hoodie when I packed your things from Yoochun’s room.” Yunho thought he saw a diminutive glimmer in Jaejoong’s face, hidden quickly behind his porcelain features. “I saw how grimy it was and wondered again why you kept it.”
“Then I dropped and when I went to pick it up, I noticed my name written on the tag, my mother’s lettering and that black marker she likes using so she knows whose clothes she’s folding.” The leader pressed in, Jaejoong’s body curling tighter in on itself. The young singer pulled up his long legs, hands wrapped around his ankle bones as he leaned into his thighs.
“That jacket was mine. All this time I thought you were just… carting around something that was long past its use because you don’t want to throw anything away. Because you hoard things around you, like a tiny dragon puffing up his territory and hoping no larger dragon will steal your treasures.” Yunho found the back of Jaejoong’s wrist with the tip of his finger, running a light touch on the bump of bone there. “Tell me that you weren’t… tell me that you didn’t keep that because it was mine. Tell me you only wanted it because it was…comfortable or warm…”
“Why do you have to dig into my tears?” Jaejoong hiccupped, gritting his teeth together. “I’ve already told you that I feel for you. How much more do you need, Yunho?”
“I need to know why you didn’t throw that sweat shirt away…after the studio…why didn’t you toss it in the trash like I threw your feelings aside?” Yunho asked, his breath a whispering touch on Jaejoong’s exposed neck.
They nearly were sitting on top of each other, Jaejoong was sure of it despite his seemingly rapt attention on the glass table in front of the couch. Yunho’s persistence wore at him, the feral resolve that gave him strength easily sliding off to the side in response to the leader’s heady presence.
“Because…” Jae stammered, unwilling to give another piece of himself. There were only tatters left, a stitched together rag doll of a broken boy. Each limb dragged heavy, weighted by the rocks tied there by others’ disappointments. Jae thought there was nothing that could compare to the yearning aloneness he experienced crawling through the streets in the hopes of reaching his dreams.
Jaejoong could deny Yunho nothing. If the leader asked him to pull a dull razor across the tender skin of his inner wrist just to quench Yunho’s thirst, Jae would do so without question, even squeezing at his dripping arm to sate the young man’s wishes. What more could his addiction want from him? What else could Yunho seize from his soul? An undertone of craving spoke for Jae, a hooked sibilant sting.
“I couldn’t… get rid of it. It would kill me…there’s so little of you that I can touch.” Jae shuttered his eyes tight, closing the world out behind a veil of greyed-in submission. “You are my temptation. You’ll be my downfall. When they cut me open and find the remains of my burnt heart, it will hold the image of your face in the sear.”
“Ah, Jaejoong…” Yunho’s hands finally rose, cupping at the back of the singer’s head. That touch shuddered Jae’s shoulders, the torment of Yunho’s fingers on him. Yunho’s cheek pressed in on Jae’s forehead, turning to brush a lingering kiss along Jaejoong’s jaw line. “If I am your temptation then you’re…my sin. I want to drink from that mouth and taste heaven. If there’s any sign of God on this world, it’s in your mouth… your body…your eyes.”
“You said you wanted me out from under your skin…” Jae continued, his mind breaking with Yunho’s touch. He briefly wondered why insanity tasted like soiled blood on his hungry soul. Jae’s throat found his voice again, straining and struggling to find some sense.
“I do.” Yunho admitted, his fingers gripping Jae’s black hair as the other attempted to shove away. “No! Stay and listen to me.”
“This isn’t easy for me…not as easy as it is for you.” The group’s leader said. “I don’t know where you find the strength or courage to turn your back on everything that we’ve been expected to do in our lives. I struggle with wanting you because I know that you’ll undo my convictions… you’ll slither into my life with that rolling, sexy walk of yours and I won’t be able to explain you to my family…or why I would need to love a man.”
“It’s easy for me to turn my back because there’s no one there for me, Yunnie-ah.” Jae chewed on his lip, pulling the flesh along the sharpness of his lower teeth. “My family… knows how I… my father has known for quite some time. My family does not want the only son they had. I left for my dreams…but also because I couldn’t live there any more. The day that my father found… my perversion… he called it… he told me that I would never wake up among family again. Certainly not his own.”
“All he could say was that I was an evil cursing his blood.” Jaejoong looked up, his chin brushing Yunho’s cheek. “You’ve seen them here… uncomfortable and wondering if I have seduced any of you, turning you into a useless horror that your family won’t be able to look at without throwing up in disgust.”
“They love you.” Yunho shook his head against Jae’s words. “I’ve seen your mother touch your face. They both love you so much.”
“They love the son they have in their hearts…not the son that lives in the world. Maybe one day, that son can be one person but that is something that they have to do themselves. I can’t change that for them.” Jae corrected. “I know what you would lose. That’s why I don’t…don’t bother you. I’m not asking you to love me, Yunho. I told you that.”
“But I am asking you to not use me to slake your desires. I feel too much for you. It would be a torture that I couldn’t stand.” Jaejoong said, the edges of Yunho’s hair brushing his mouth. How easy it would be to nibble on the coarse ends, biting off small bits of the leader’s locks and swallow them, a stagnant, barren stone resting inside of him. It would be the closest he would be to sliding Yunho into his throat, convulsing around the young man’s flesh until it spilled past his tongue, choking him with the saltiness of his seed.
Jaejoong denied himself the taste, wishing the torment of Yunho’s closeness would end.
“And see, Joongie-ah…” Yunho’s finger found the edge of Jae’s chin, gently lifting his face from its burrow of hair. “I’m asking you to give me the chance to… explore how I feel and if I can find the courage to face those rejections. I can’t promise you that I’ll be strong enough. I just can’t. You’ve made me discover that I’m not as strong as I thought I was.”
“I have to try, Jaejoong.” Yunho’s thumb pushed down on the soft velvet of Jae’s mouth, finding the moist triangle divot on his lower lip. His lips found the edges of Jaejoong’s, the tip of his tongue darting into the corners.
The hell in his turmoil became a sweet heaven under Jaejoong’s parted mouth, his chin canted up as Yunho pushed forward with his affection. Everything became clearer in that sole drugged sip of Jaejoong’s kiss. The world shrunk down, a damp wetness filled with mysteries Yunho’s being begged to explore.
The young man’s teeth raked across Yunho’s investigating tongue, the leader’s curiosity leading him to the lick at the back of the pearled enamel. Jaejoong’s ardor flared, passion moving his senses and drowning him the other man’s savouring taste. A nibble on Yunho’s mouth burled another onslaught on Jae’s mouth, their tongues mingling and twisting, a Jörmungandr welded together in the heat of their desires.
Jaejoong’s lungs exhausted its reserves before his want was sated. Pulling back, his head held captive by Yunho’s clenched fists in his hair, the singer placed a firm hand on the leader’s chest. His own body heaved with the effort of drawing away, the brush of his fingers finding the length of steeled flesh beneath the cotton of Yunho’s pants.
The touch of the other’s hard flesh shocked Jaejoong, never having touched another man’s desire.. just his own in the safety of a steaming shower or the subterfuge of a heavy blanket in the depths of night when the others breathed slowly in slumber.
“I just wanted a taste… even if you walk away from me right now…” Yunho’s words were an echoing refrain of a snowed in pain, the remains of a devastation he’d wrought on the man under his hands. “It will take time…I know it will take time for me to show you that I’m speaking the truth. But please… I’m asking you to give me that chance…even if I can’t… give you everything that you want and need. “
“I can’t promise you anything.” Yunho slowly released Jaejoong from his grip, rubbing at the rent in his hair, smoothing down the stygian silken tresses. “My every instinct says that this is wrong between us…and that if that wrong is too much for me to bear… I will have to walk away. I can’t risk losing myself in you, Jaejoong. I have too many people who depend on me. The sin of you will test me but I want to try to withstand it. To learn if I have it in me to want you…to maybe love you.”
Jaejoong held himself in, the ashen corpse of his love resurrected with a single kiss, a prince breeching the walls of the stone castle he’d erected around himself. Yunho promised nothing…could offer him nothing other than heart ache and the ache of lost dreams.
Swallowing Yunho’s kiss, Jaejoong pulled himself free of the other’s heat, finding some much needed equilibrium. Committing to the madness raging in his soul and heart, Jaejoong found his mouth shaping the one word he knew in the depths of his own insanity that he would eventually regret.
A fury of longing battered at Jae, a tempest he could no longer fight against. Still, there would be conditions to this, a negotiation of his willingness to splay himself open to the young man. A push off the couch lengthened the distance he needed from Yunho, searching for any air not already touched by the siren of the Yunho's body. “You are more than my temptation... so damned much more. You'll be the death of me but... yes, I'll give you that. But I won't promise you another if you turn away from me in this and I will kill you if you try after this. You only get one chance to break my heart. No more.”
Pairing: JaeHo
Rating: Overall NC-17. Naughty words at least.
All my Yoosu belongs to: Ranalore
Summary: The beginning of a shifting relationship. Hot Korean boys. Sex. Dancing and some angry words. Not necessarily in that order. Not necessarily in each section.
Section One; Section Two; Section Three; Section Four; Section Five; Section Six; Section Seven; Section Eight; Section Nine; Section Ten; Section Eleven; Section Twelve, Section Thirteen
The sound of his key in the apartment door lock worked a nerve in Jaejoong’s forehead, a slight pounding of a headache threatening the edges of his vision. Sconces lit the outer hallway, a length of corridor wrapping around the side of the building, trapped behind frosted over glass. Letting himself through the door, Jae stood for a moment in the frame, girding up his strength to face Yunho inside. A sickness bloomed inside of his belly, the parasitical need for Yunho pressing against him.
“I’ll have to give everything up.” Jaejoong pondered his options. The group was truly the only thing he had left in his life. With his family still estranged, his world had become the other four, a support system that he never imagined he would be able to embrace. “I need to get some distance from him. This isn’t fair to the others…they shouldn’t have to live in the middle of this madness.”
Jaejoong was accustomed to madness, having drank deeply at its river, drenching his weary body in its water in the hopes of washing away some of his sins. His dream-shaken nights still held the faces of horror, leering faces of rough-faced men when he worked tables down in the Itaewon district, groping hands grabbing at his ass or crotch, hard fingers digging into tender flesh. Jae knew that touch…that creeping insidious feeling of another’s unwanted sweat on his skin and the thought sickened him. He didn’t want to give Yunho that sensation… didn’t want to press the young man with his attentions if Yunho truly did not want him…despite the confession of desire.
Jaejoong knew about desire…an intimate knowledge of singular want clouding the mind until everything became a kaleidoscope haze. His skin crawled with memories, both wicked and sinfully delightful. Jaejoong wanted Yunho’s hands to rub at the stains of others reaching for him, erasing the greasy fingerprints they left on his being. He’d never succumbed to any of the unwanted advances forced up on him… a few frightening instances when the singer believed that he would not survive the night unscathed and whole…perhaps not even surviving at all.
Now, on his feet and stumbling towards the dream that kept him awake at night, he saw another glimmer of happiness fading in the distance… the possibility that he would lose both the band and Yunho.
A soft ballad hummed through the living room, the lights down low, as if setting a twilight behind the clouded windows. Winter stormed outside, the snow picking up its fury. Walking into the kitchen, Jae noticed the vegetables he’d abandoned on the counter had been put away, the surfaces wiped down with a sponge and the chopping board draining on the wire rack. Someone…probably Yunho… washed and clean the knife, wiping it down and sliding it back into place in the block.
“I left the rice in the cooker.” Yunho startled Jaejoong, a slender strength leaning on the wall of the hallway towards their bedrooms. “It’s cold enough that the rice won’t go bad…I don’t think.”
“No. It should be fine, I think.” Jae agreed, his words stiff. The roller coaster ride of emotions left him too tired to fight, much too tired to even do anything other than sleep off the exhaustion riding his bones. Yunho standing there was too much of an obstacle for his aching blood and the singer wondered if he could make it past the young man without breaking down into a flood of tears.
You’ll be fine, Kim.” Jaejoong scolded himself, pulling on the steely grit he had in his soul. Just make it past the hallway and you can just fall asleep…leave all of this outside, behind you. Look at things tomorrow morning.
“If you’re looking for your things, they’re in the bedroom…our bedroom.” Yunho’s eyes closed as Jaejoong brushed past him, shoulders barely skimming one another.
The intensity of the singer’s body inflamed him, the scent of his musky skin thickening the softness between Yunho’s thighs. Cupped up against his body, his arousal twitched, a firming Yunho forced aside. If he was going to examine his feelings towards the lead vocalist, he would have to do so without the lust hovering in his throat, Jaejoong’s insistence for respect an echoing refrain in his ears.
“What? Why?” With a turn of his shoulder, Jaejoong looked back at the leader, his pretty mouth twisted with suspicion. There was a sulk on Yunho’s mouth, the remains of a sour expression washed clean with something… delicious, Jae thought. “Did Junsu say something to Yoochun? Are they…?”
“No, neither one of them said anything.” Yunho spun slowly, taking his time walking up to Jae. “It seemed like what was necessary… it was the right thing to do.”
“I need to talk to you Jaejoong.” He continued, his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his loose cotton pants. The emptiness of the apartment ricocheted the slightest sounds back onto them, Jae’s inhaled breath a loud inflammation of suspense. “Please, Joongie-ah… we need to talk about…us.”
“There is no us, Yunho.” With a cock of his head, Jaejoong glanced into the bedroom he’d shared with Changmin and the group’s leader. His cherished sweatshirt lay on the smooth sleek of his blankets, a grungy stained garment that held each beat of his heart. A graveyard of things lost to him, fabric ghosts haunting his life. “You had a choice…you made that choice.”
“You didn’t give me enough time.” Yunho suddenly was beside him, nearly inside of him. The air, warmed first by Yunho’s mouth, drifted into Jae’s lungs, the scent of the leader’s erotically flushed skin pushing into Jaejoong’s senses. “I… please, we need to sit down and talk.”
“Not in the bedroom. I haven’t decided if I’m staying in there with you.” Jaejoong turned away, trying to drive the image of himself under the leader’s exploring hands from his mind. “The living area, that should be fine to talk.”
Where others touched with gluttonous lust, Jaejoong ached for the simple exploration of a nubile lover’s tongue, a wet tip finding the rise on his throat, feeling the movement of his eyes beneath closed lids. Jae rubbed at his arms, trying to feel the remnants of Yunho’s touch on his forearms, the bruises left by angry fingers faded through the time they’d spent avoiding one another’s gaze.
Yunho followed Jaejoong, watching the predatorily sensual stalk of his long legs eat up the length of the hallway, moving quickly to escape the closeness of their bodies. His mind still fought a war…an epic battle of familial obligations and cultural stigmas. The only weapon his heart could arm itself with was the softness of Jaejoong’s lips and the sweet, adoring smile of coy sex wrapped around the singer’s angelic face. Yunho feared for his heart, forging onto a battlefield it was little prepared for, entering into a conflict that could destroy him forever.
“Do you want some tea?” Yunho asked, wondering if he could his hands steady enough to measure out leaves and fill the tea pot.
“No, thank you, hyung.” A brittle politeness from Jaejoong. “It’s late. I don’t want anything but a shower and some sleep. Provided I can find my bed.”
Can I afford to lose this creature that shakes me? Can I lose you and keep everything else? Yunho asked of himself, the thoughts of his family’s disappointment in him strong in his mind. But can I afford to have this? What will doing this …wanting you…do to me?
His path in life was so simple, one etched in stone by centuries of a culture that prided itself on its elegance and dignity. Yunho had thrown over convention by turning his back on his parents’ desires to see him take up a more sedate life, one not ruled by hours of dancing and singing. His dreams led him to a spotlight on the stage, broad swaths of black-drenched arenas filled with the screams of people calling his name. Could he ask the people who nursed him into adulthood to turn their faces toward the pretty and wild Jaejoong, calling him son of their heart? Or was he too late to coax Jaejoong into giving him a single change to explore his affections.
Jaejoong worked himself down into the corner of the soft-sided crimson sofa, its throw pillows a riot of woven rainbows. The singer’s trim figure gleamed, a pure winter kiss on a sea of blood velvet. He’d shed the thick parka he wore, slung over the back of a side chair. The puffy down jacket held the perfume of the icy night, a black blueness that reminded Yunho of Jaejoong’s soft hair. A peek of the singer’s chest slid out from under his partially undone shirt, a string of pearl buttons unhooked from their holes. A faint inky purple belled the ridges of Jaejoong’s expressive eyes, ruins of sleep fallen on his pretty face.
It would be a sight that Yunho would carry with him forever, a snapshot of that moment in life when he would either know happiness or misery. He would be sure to remember…always remember the plumpness of Jaejoong’s mouth, a gift of sinful seduction on the package of demure innocence. Yunho sat down on the other end of the couch, wondering what to do with his hands.
They should be in his hair, wrapped around tight until his head is forced towards yours. Yunho’s darkness whispered, firming his awakening flesh. Will his mouth open wider if his head is leaned back? Would his tongue be moist against your own or does his mouth dry at the thought of you? Did he catch a snowflake in his mouth and will you still taste it there?
Concentrating, Yunho wiped his moist hands on his thighs, hoping the cotton would absorb his nervousness. Jae’s expression, hooded and wary, burned a stream of regret through Yunho’s guts. The tension in the other’s body was clear, any trust the leader might have had with Jaejoong now lay in the gutters of their arguments.
“I made the decision to move you back… put you back to where you belonged. No one else.” Yunho braced himself for the onslaught of Jaejoong’s anger at being manipulated into a corner. The lead singer wasn’t known for his tolerance of interference… a fierce streak of independence nearly as wide as his stubbornness.
“Why did you move my things back into the room? Suppose I don’t want to be moved?” Yunho’s words flattened Jaejoong’s apprehension, the singer working at the puzzle of the leader’s actions. He’d been expecting to come back to the apartment and find his things outside in the cold, a call on his cell phone from SM saying that he would be removed from the group’s dynamic. Never did Jaejoong imagine that he would return to his own private hell and discover his place near Yunho restored to him. “I’m trying to manage this… thing that’s between us. Being in that room… I can’t deal with it there.”
“I don’t want it managed. I don’t want it dealt with.” Yunho looked up from the contemplation of his own hands, his knuckles white from his fingers clutched tight on his knees. “I want it…explored. I want to see how you taste. Everywhere. Just a taste.”
“No.” A single word.. that final slicing cut to Yunho’s soul...slivered apart his grief…the final blow to his heart. “You want nothing more than… something moist to slide yourself into, leaving a wet sticky mess inside of my body. If I wanted that, I could get that anywhere…from anyone who didn’t mind that there was a cock between my legs.”
“That isn’t…” Yunho began, cut off when Jaejoong interrupted.
“I’m not some dirty hole you can get relief from, Yunho.” The singer’s coarseness, bred sharp and cunning from the years spent struggling on the street, welded a powerful punch to Yunho’s guts. “Every thrust you will give my body with your blunted cock or tongue will be a hot knife into me. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you just see that? Why do you have to be so selfish in your wants? Don’t I mean any small thing to you that you’d want me to survive you?”
“Let me finish…just hear me out.” The leader asked, shifting his body closer to the young singer, the couch cushions dimpling under his weight. His heart pounded hard, a thumping menace in his ears. “Just a few minutes…and then you can decide what you want to do. I promise I’ll live with anything you decide.”
“Alright, I’ll listen.” Jaejoong nodded once. He knew in the depths of his soul that the group’s leader would give him one final rejection but he wanted to hear Yunho’s words… perhaps a hint of a plea in that control.
“I found your hoodie when I packed your things from Yoochun’s room.” Yunho thought he saw a diminutive glimmer in Jaejoong’s face, hidden quickly behind his porcelain features. “I saw how grimy it was and wondered again why you kept it.”
“Then I dropped and when I went to pick it up, I noticed my name written on the tag, my mother’s lettering and that black marker she likes using so she knows whose clothes she’s folding.” The leader pressed in, Jaejoong’s body curling tighter in on itself. The young singer pulled up his long legs, hands wrapped around his ankle bones as he leaned into his thighs.
“That jacket was mine. All this time I thought you were just… carting around something that was long past its use because you don’t want to throw anything away. Because you hoard things around you, like a tiny dragon puffing up his territory and hoping no larger dragon will steal your treasures.” Yunho found the back of Jaejoong’s wrist with the tip of his finger, running a light touch on the bump of bone there. “Tell me that you weren’t… tell me that you didn’t keep that because it was mine. Tell me you only wanted it because it was…comfortable or warm…”
“Why do you have to dig into my tears?” Jaejoong hiccupped, gritting his teeth together. “I’ve already told you that I feel for you. How much more do you need, Yunho?”
“I need to know why you didn’t throw that sweat shirt away…after the studio…why didn’t you toss it in the trash like I threw your feelings aside?” Yunho asked, his breath a whispering touch on Jaejoong’s exposed neck.
They nearly were sitting on top of each other, Jaejoong was sure of it despite his seemingly rapt attention on the glass table in front of the couch. Yunho’s persistence wore at him, the feral resolve that gave him strength easily sliding off to the side in response to the leader’s heady presence.
“Because…” Jae stammered, unwilling to give another piece of himself. There were only tatters left, a stitched together rag doll of a broken boy. Each limb dragged heavy, weighted by the rocks tied there by others’ disappointments. Jae thought there was nothing that could compare to the yearning aloneness he experienced crawling through the streets in the hopes of reaching his dreams.
Jaejoong could deny Yunho nothing. If the leader asked him to pull a dull razor across the tender skin of his inner wrist just to quench Yunho’s thirst, Jae would do so without question, even squeezing at his dripping arm to sate the young man’s wishes. What more could his addiction want from him? What else could Yunho seize from his soul? An undertone of craving spoke for Jae, a hooked sibilant sting.
“I couldn’t… get rid of it. It would kill me…there’s so little of you that I can touch.” Jae shuttered his eyes tight, closing the world out behind a veil of greyed-in submission. “You are my temptation. You’ll be my downfall. When they cut me open and find the remains of my burnt heart, it will hold the image of your face in the sear.”
“Ah, Jaejoong…” Yunho’s hands finally rose, cupping at the back of the singer’s head. That touch shuddered Jae’s shoulders, the torment of Yunho’s fingers on him. Yunho’s cheek pressed in on Jae’s forehead, turning to brush a lingering kiss along Jaejoong’s jaw line. “If I am your temptation then you’re…my sin. I want to drink from that mouth and taste heaven. If there’s any sign of God on this world, it’s in your mouth… your body…your eyes.”
“You said you wanted me out from under your skin…” Jae continued, his mind breaking with Yunho’s touch. He briefly wondered why insanity tasted like soiled blood on his hungry soul. Jae’s throat found his voice again, straining and struggling to find some sense.
“I do.” Yunho admitted, his fingers gripping Jae’s black hair as the other attempted to shove away. “No! Stay and listen to me.”
“This isn’t easy for me…not as easy as it is for you.” The group’s leader said. “I don’t know where you find the strength or courage to turn your back on everything that we’ve been expected to do in our lives. I struggle with wanting you because I know that you’ll undo my convictions… you’ll slither into my life with that rolling, sexy walk of yours and I won’t be able to explain you to my family…or why I would need to love a man.”
“It’s easy for me to turn my back because there’s no one there for me, Yunnie-ah.” Jae chewed on his lip, pulling the flesh along the sharpness of his lower teeth. “My family… knows how I… my father has known for quite some time. My family does not want the only son they had. I left for my dreams…but also because I couldn’t live there any more. The day that my father found… my perversion… he called it… he told me that I would never wake up among family again. Certainly not his own.”
“All he could say was that I was an evil cursing his blood.” Jaejoong looked up, his chin brushing Yunho’s cheek. “You’ve seen them here… uncomfortable and wondering if I have seduced any of you, turning you into a useless horror that your family won’t be able to look at without throwing up in disgust.”
“They love you.” Yunho shook his head against Jae’s words. “I’ve seen your mother touch your face. They both love you so much.”
“They love the son they have in their hearts…not the son that lives in the world. Maybe one day, that son can be one person but that is something that they have to do themselves. I can’t change that for them.” Jae corrected. “I know what you would lose. That’s why I don’t…don’t bother you. I’m not asking you to love me, Yunho. I told you that.”
“But I am asking you to not use me to slake your desires. I feel too much for you. It would be a torture that I couldn’t stand.” Jaejoong said, the edges of Yunho’s hair brushing his mouth. How easy it would be to nibble on the coarse ends, biting off small bits of the leader’s locks and swallow them, a stagnant, barren stone resting inside of him. It would be the closest he would be to sliding Yunho into his throat, convulsing around the young man’s flesh until it spilled past his tongue, choking him with the saltiness of his seed.
Jaejoong denied himself the taste, wishing the torment of Yunho’s closeness would end.
“And see, Joongie-ah…” Yunho’s finger found the edge of Jae’s chin, gently lifting his face from its burrow of hair. “I’m asking you to give me the chance to… explore how I feel and if I can find the courage to face those rejections. I can’t promise you that I’ll be strong enough. I just can’t. You’ve made me discover that I’m not as strong as I thought I was.”
“I have to try, Jaejoong.” Yunho’s thumb pushed down on the soft velvet of Jae’s mouth, finding the moist triangle divot on his lower lip. His lips found the edges of Jaejoong’s, the tip of his tongue darting into the corners.
The hell in his turmoil became a sweet heaven under Jaejoong’s parted mouth, his chin canted up as Yunho pushed forward with his affection. Everything became clearer in that sole drugged sip of Jaejoong’s kiss. The world shrunk down, a damp wetness filled with mysteries Yunho’s being begged to explore.
The young man’s teeth raked across Yunho’s investigating tongue, the leader’s curiosity leading him to the lick at the back of the pearled enamel. Jaejoong’s ardor flared, passion moving his senses and drowning him the other man’s savouring taste. A nibble on Yunho’s mouth burled another onslaught on Jae’s mouth, their tongues mingling and twisting, a Jörmungandr welded together in the heat of their desires.
Jaejoong’s lungs exhausted its reserves before his want was sated. Pulling back, his head held captive by Yunho’s clenched fists in his hair, the singer placed a firm hand on the leader’s chest. His own body heaved with the effort of drawing away, the brush of his fingers finding the length of steeled flesh beneath the cotton of Yunho’s pants.
The touch of the other’s hard flesh shocked Jaejoong, never having touched another man’s desire.. just his own in the safety of a steaming shower or the subterfuge of a heavy blanket in the depths of night when the others breathed slowly in slumber.
“I just wanted a taste… even if you walk away from me right now…” Yunho’s words were an echoing refrain of a snowed in pain, the remains of a devastation he’d wrought on the man under his hands. “It will take time…I know it will take time for me to show you that I’m speaking the truth. But please… I’m asking you to give me that chance…even if I can’t… give you everything that you want and need. “
“I can’t promise you anything.” Yunho slowly released Jaejoong from his grip, rubbing at the rent in his hair, smoothing down the stygian silken tresses. “My every instinct says that this is wrong between us…and that if that wrong is too much for me to bear… I will have to walk away. I can’t risk losing myself in you, Jaejoong. I have too many people who depend on me. The sin of you will test me but I want to try to withstand it. To learn if I have it in me to want you…to maybe love you.”
Jaejoong held himself in, the ashen corpse of his love resurrected with a single kiss, a prince breeching the walls of the stone castle he’d erected around himself. Yunho promised nothing…could offer him nothing other than heart ache and the ache of lost dreams.
Swallowing Yunho’s kiss, Jaejoong pulled himself free of the other’s heat, finding some much needed equilibrium. Committing to the madness raging in his soul and heart, Jaejoong found his mouth shaping the one word he knew in the depths of his own insanity that he would eventually regret.
A fury of longing battered at Jae, a tempest he could no longer fight against. Still, there would be conditions to this, a negotiation of his willingness to splay himself open to the young man. A push off the couch lengthened the distance he needed from Yunho, searching for any air not already touched by the siren of the Yunho's body. “You are more than my temptation... so damned much more. You'll be the death of me but... yes, I'll give you that. But I won't promise you another if you turn away from me in this and I will kill you if you try after this. You only get one chance to break my heart. No more.”