Chapter Text
“Have you seen the tits on the new teacher? It should be illegal-” Jungkook’s filthy grin was undercut slightly by the fact that his voice was almost inaudible, one hand hooked around the back of his desk for balance as he leaned over, his lips almost brushing Jimin’s earlobe.
“Pervert-” Jimin shrugged reflexively, bashing the point of his shoulder into the underside of his ever-trying best friend-slash-dongsaeng’s jaw, which led to him biting his tongue, falling out of his chair, and cursing loudly, all in rapid succession.
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From the way that the teacher – small, slim, casually unglamorous and totally unphased by it, with her undyed wavy pageboy bob and complete and total lack of makeup – reacted as she ushered Taehyung into the classroom with a hand on the small of his back, barely tangible through the scratchy too-thick polyester of his school suit jacket, this was totally normal. She just sighed and rolled her eyes as she walked to the front of the room, leaving Taehyung to stand there awkwardly, feeling embarrassed that he hadn’t had a chance to change out of his school uniform in the rush of getting all of his new hagwon classes sorted out.
It was now eight o’clock and the early spring sun had long since set. His eyes itched and his muscles felt unpleasantly sore after the placement exam at his new dance hagwon. For the most part, it had definitely not been the worst day ever, but now he was staring at a room with five unfamiliar people in it who all knew each other, which made him kind of lowkey want to die, even though he’d tested into the class so it shouldn’t be a problem. Theoretically.
Kim Junghwa Teacher and the three girls hunched over their desks muttering furiously over their vocabulary practice seemed pretty much normal for a late night English hagwon class, but the two boys only just now attempting to look like they hadn’t been in the middle of furious gossip before he and the teacher walked in… Oh. Oh dear.
One kid was picking himself up off of the floor, rubbing his jaw and smiling fit to make your heart shatter into a thousand tiny little needle-sharp pieces. Or, okay, maybe that was just Taehyung’s problem. The one he’d carefully spent the last four and a half years making sure none of his friends back in Daegu realized, after Song Jung-ki in Sungkyunkwan Scandal had so helpfully enlightened him.
But this kid, with his crooked front teeth that stuck out farther than the line of his lower teeth and his enormous eyes squinted into perfectly arched crescent moons of suppressed laughter, seemed to be about as tall as Taehyung, maybe a hair shorter. His shoulders were unreasonably wide, though, muscle cording his arms under his white t-shirt as he slid back into his seat, slouching down and sticking his enormous-seeming Timberland-clad feet through the front bars to impinge upon the walkway in front of the teacher’s desk. Taehyung tried not to boggle, chewing vigorously at the inside edge of his lower lip as he stepped over the feet in question and took the seat Kim Junghwa Teacher indicated, on the other side of Extra-Pretty Teenaged Lee Minho’s tinier, even prettier sidekick.
Seriously, what was in the water in Busan? Even though this kid’s laughter was high and light, no one would ever mistake it for a girl’s, which maybe couldn’t be said for his face. But in a good way. His glossy black hair fell into beautiful eyes, angled kind of like Minzy from 2NE1’s, and the rest of his face definitely had more similarities than it did differences, though his jaw was sharper and broader, and the shoulder peeking from the wide-necked sweater that sort of engulfed his torso had way more muscle than any girl Taehyung had ever seen this side of those weird naked Romanian gymnast videos his friends had found last year.
He was so busy trying to casually stare at the two of them (seriously, what was this? Porno Hagwon?) that he managed to miss the names of the Three Silent Overachievers who sat in a row along the right side of the classroom. But the Terrible Twosome he caught, because they sat up straighter and attempted to not look like inappropriate thoughts personified when Kim Junghwa Teacher called their names. Park Jimin was the tiny (well, not that tiny, really, he probably wasn’t under 173, he just looked small and delicate) one, and the other one was Jeon Jungkook.
Once the attendance of all six members of the class had been established, Kim Junghwa Teacher handed out the vocabulary test sheets with a quiet reassurance to Taehyung that his score wouldn’t be recorded, since he’d had no chance to study. He didn’t do too terribly, though, which was something of a salve to his ego. The Terrible Twosome did well but not perfectly, and the Three Silent Overachievers all received perfect marks. No one seemed especially surprised by this, so as they settled in to attempt to master future tense Taehyung figured that it wouldn’t be too hard to settle into the classroom hierarchy.
Over the course of the fifty-five minute class period Taehyung discovered that the names of the Three Silent Overachievers were Kim Minji, Oh Eunji, and Seo Subin, and that his initial impression of them was 100000% accurate. They all knew the material really well, but never volunteered to speak, and since they all had precisely the same haircut, the undyed, dead-straight jaw-length bob and blunt bang of Good Students, and girl’s cut of the same jacket he was wearing himself, he figured that he’d probably be seeing at least one of them in one of his classes, but they weren’t exactly the kind of girl that caught the eye or held attention.
So instead of trying to get to know them better during the five minute break before the Native English Teacher’s class started, he turned to his left and put on his best “like me, like me, please like me” smile, broad and boxy and maybe just the slightest bit, he feared, desperate for approval, jaw tense and eyes almost painfully wide. “Hey, I’m Kim Taehyung, I just moved here from Daegu. Do you guys go to Busan Performing Arts High School too? I’m in third year there. I play the saxophone.”
The kid sitting next to him – Park Jimin – looked up at him through his definitely-not-regulation bangs and grinned, pulling full lips into an inviting expression that was almost equal parts friendly and distractingly suggestive. He offered his right hand without moving his left arm from where he was still propped on the desk and tipped his chin up a little as he said, “Yah, we’re chingu! I’m Jimin, I do dance, and this asshole is Jungkook the wonder dongsaeng. Make sure he calls you hyung, because if you don’t he’ll walk all over you.”
Taehyung couldn’t really bring himself to be upset about the seamless and undiscussed transition to informal speech as he shook Jimin’s hand, small and square and callused like someone who did a lot of work with them and didn’t have any time for lotion. Instead he found himself laughing with his new friend as Jungkook sat up and spluttered a curse, pushing his also-nonregulation bangs out of his eyes. “How dare you! I am an innocent angel who would never do such a thing as you cruelly imply. I have nothing but love and respect for my hyungs.”
Jimin didn’t even dignify that with a reply, completely ignoring the wide-eyed, artfully innocent expression on Jungkook’s face in favor of kicking the side of his knee and shoving his head into the desk. “Horrible liar! Anyway, he’s a first year, he finally became a real boy this year. He’s so obnoxiously good at everything that he’s been plaguing my hagwon classes for the past two years, making me look bad in his middle school uniform. It was awful. He’s in my dance hagwon classes, too, but he’s a vocal performance major. Never let him talk you into strip noraebang, or you’ll end up naked and confused and he’ll never let you forget it.”
“Strip… Noraebang?” Taehyung decided that he was going to pretend that his voice hadn’t cracked if no one else brought it up, and was saved from having to come up with a more intelligent reply than that by the entrance of their next teacher, who rendered all three of the boys speechless with a complicated mixture of guilty interest and fear within seconds of sweeping into the classroom.
“I don’t want to know why any of you are taking your clothes off,” the woman standing next to the desk at the front of the classroom said, raising a dark eyebrow sharply as she dropped her book and attendance clipboard onto the desk without looking at them. She was tall, probably about as tall as Jimin, with a pair of black leather motorcycle boots that made Taehyung suspect with a weird twist in his stomach that if he stood up they’d be eye to eye. Her outfit was weirdly stern and covered-up for the pretty spring weather they’d been having, a black turtleneck and skirt that nipped in at the waist with a wide satin band and fell in full pleats to mid-thigh, with charcoal grey tights on underneath.
Jungkook made a sound like he was trying to swallow his tongue, eyes skating to the edges of the classroom with the effort he was putting into not getting caught ogling her coke-bottle-on-steroids figure, and Jimin sounded suspiciously like he was trying not to laugh at him, with very limited success. Taehyung took it upon himself to put up a brave front on behalf of his new class, because from the disapproving glowers of The Silent Overachievers radiating like Chernobyl on his right, no one else was going to. “Hello, Teacher. We didn’t- We didn’t know you were coming in. Or, uh. That you spoke Korean?”
The woman’s laugh was low and kind of dark sounding as she sat behind the desk, flipping a pen out of the top of the clipboard and clicking it a few times with her long, red-tipped thumb. “I learned out of self-defense. You would not believe the things that students say when they think you don’t understand what they’re saying.” The look she pinned Jungkook with was deeply suspicious, her weird light-dark (blue? green? gray? Whatever they were, they definitely weren’t brown, but they also weren’t light like most movie stars’ eyes were, either, which was kind of freaky) eyes narrow, but then she sniffed, looked down at the board, and changed the subject, stalwartly ignoring the wavy lock of hair that worked its way out of her bun to fall beside her sharp-featured face. “Okay, anyway. Attendance. I’m Katherine Teacher, by the way, but you can call me Kitty Teacher. Everyone else does. Oh Eunji? Cool. Kim Minji? Right-”
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At the end of their class it turned out that Kitty Teacher was just as tall as Taehyung in her big scary black boots with the silver rings on the ankles, and that Jungkook really was just a hair shorter than him when they all stood up to gather their things, shoving books into overfull backpacks with tired sighs. “I don’t think a teacher has ever made me talk that much in my entire life,” Taehyung complained, hiding his yawn behind the back of his hand and taking a step back as The Silent Overachievers all trooped out, muttering about the test they had in Math hagwon, which was apparently two floors down in the same building and had no moral qualms with skating the hagwon curfew with a class that went from 10pm until five minutes to midnight. Ugh.
“But she’s so hot,” Jungkook said, those wide eyes of his going sort of far-away and dreamy as he sketched an only slightly exaggerated hourglass in the air in front of him, which earned him a disgusted grunt and a punch on the arm from Jimin.
“I’m pretty sure she’d murder you and drink your blood, dude. Teacher’s definitely a vampire. Why else would she be wearing all that black in March?” Jimin didn’t disagree with Jungkook’s assertion, though, which Taehyung found sort of interesting, given that their terrifying teacher was definitely at least as tall as Jimin was, and in Taehyung’s admittedly limited experience with this sort of thing, most guys weren’t huge fans of women who were taller than them when wearing any kind of shoe at all.
As he slung his backpack over his shoulder with a groan, Taehyung only hesitated a second before asking, voice quiet and carefully-casual, “Are you guys done, or are you ultra-hardcore? I only had dance, music, and English today, so I’m done. I just have to remember how to get back to my new house. If it weren’t for the fucking highway it’d be easy, but mom told me not to take my bike because she didn’t know there was a bridge, and now I have to walk, like. All the way across Guseo-dong. It’s wildly unfair.”
“Where do you live?” Jungkook asked, lifting his backpack to his shoulder like it didn’t weigh anything at all as they all walked out of the classroom, Jimin squinting a little as he skip-stepped to keep up with their longer legs.
“Keumgang Bukwang? They’re super tall and green and white?” Taehyung felt a little weird about it, because his old apartment building was just… Normal, and now he was living in the biggest, newest, nicest apartment building in the neighborhood, which was kind of… Weird. Cool, but weird. He was really grateful that his parents decided to move to a house close to the performing arts high school, even though it meant his dad had to spend like an hour on the subway getting to work downtown, but somewhat belatedly he realized that it might make him seem kind of… Stuck up?
But much to his relief Jungkook laughed and asked, “Hundred-one or hundred-two? I live in Hundred-two. Twenty-eighth floor. We have a great view of a lovely brown mountain with nothing on it right now, it’s great.”
Then it was Jimin’s turn to scoff and whine, pressing his forehead to Jungkook’s shoulder with effortless, casual skinship that made Taehyung’s stomach drop a little with a weird, awkward mixture of homesickness, jealousy, and embarrassment. “I’m surrounded by rich boys! I can’t catch a break!”
Jungkook punched him in the ribs just hard enough to make him lean against the wall instead, laughing his high, bright laugh, and smiled a small, almost-close-mouthed smile at Taehyung that he was almost entirely certain was meant to be reassuring. “Don’t mind him, he’s just a bitter shopkeeper’s son who only has to walk two and a half blocks to school every morning. He’ll be at home eating japchae literally before we even get on the bus. Want me to walk with you so you don’t miss the stop?”
The elevator chose that moment to ping and open, and they all trooped in, with two of the foreign teachers – the still-terrifying Kitty Teacher, now somewhat bafflingly wearing an enormous black jacket, hood pulled up and long black fur half-hiding her face as she typed furiously on her somewhat geriatric cell phone, and a tall, skinny dude who looked like he needed a shave and who neither Jimin nor Jungkook greeted – swooping in just before the door closed. That pretty effectively killed any conversation that might have happened until they emerged onto the yellow-tinged sidewalk outside of the building, and Taehyung almost forgot that he’d more or less agreed to walk home with Jungkook until the younger boy fell into step next to him as he started trudging dispiritedly towards the bus stop.
“Hey, so do you go to Dance Forever? I figured if your parents put you in all the local schools, that would make sense, and it would mean that you’re part of the crew. Kind of. I mean, you’re obviously not in our class, or we would have seen you, but-” Jungkook stopped abruptly, wrinkling his nose, which made him look hilariously like some kind of finicky rabbit or something, just for a second.
Taehyung couldn’t help but smile in response as he said, “Yeah, I’m in the afternoon basic hip-hop class. I’m not, like. Super good, or anything, but I like it. Do you guys go there too? From what Jimin said, you two must be, like. Uh. Super good.” They arrived at the bus stop, which was empty, since this side of the street was headed away from the subway station, rather than towards the main artery back to the rest of Busan, and they both carefully balanced their backpacks against the plexiglass backstop instead of setting them down. Taehyung shoved his hands into the pockets of his scratchy dress pants and grimaced all over again at how boring he looked, compared to Jungkook’s casual-badass denim jacket, white t-shirt, ripped up jeans, and big stompy boots. He was still wearing his tie, for fuck’s sake. Ugh.
Jungkook appeared to be blissfully unaware of his internal turmoil, though, as he popped his hips forward to counterbalance his backpack (which legitimately looked large enough to fit a medium-sized child into) and hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans, squinting somewhat hopefully down towards the street corner where the bus would turn their way. “We’re, I mean. We’re in the most advanced class, I guess. There’s a crew that practices at our studio, who do all their own choreography and shit, and they’re way better than we are, but most of them are, you know. Professional dancers. We’re pretty much the feeder group for them, and all the kids who aren’t going to go pro, but don’t want to give up the dream, yet. If that makes sense?”
His dark eyes seemed way more piercing than they had any right to be, as he glanced over at Taehyung and raised an eyebrow, and Taehyung had to swallow, throat feeling curiously wooly for a second, before he could find his voice to reply. “I- Yeah. Kind of like how I’m in jazz band but I know I’m gonna go to college for, like. Shit. I don’t know. Economics or computer science or engineering or something. I love playing, but I know I’m not good enough to make it big, there are only so many sax players the world needs.”
The laugh that found its way out of Jungkook’s throat was more conciliatory than mean, and any reply he might have made was interrupted by the arrival of the bus. They heaved themselves off of the plexiglass wall and made their way through the door and up the stairs, tapping their phone cases to the pad as they swept back towards the bench seats. There were only a few sleepy-looking commuters left on the bus at ten-fifteen, so they snagged the empty disabled-and-elderly bench across from the exit doors so they could stumble out at their stop with a minimum amount of fuss, sitting perched on the edges of the seats so that they didn’t have to take off their backpacks.
Taehyung almost fell into Jungkook’s side as the bus started up again with a lurch, which startled a brief bubble of a laugh from his throat. The warm bracing hand that Jungkook splayed across his thigh to help hold him in place, just above his knee, long fingers curling around his leg for purchase, made his heart skip a beat and his stomach flip over in a way that had nothing at all to do with the questionable condition of the narrow roads the bus was navigating. As Taehyung was struggling to come up with something to say that wasn’t miserably embarrassing, Jungkook leaned forward and half-whispered, voice barely audible over the rumble of the axles, “Check out the dude in the back row, with the neck tattoo and the snakebites. Would you hit it, or nah?”
Taehyung immediately felt like the entire bus had simultaneously gotten ten degrees hotter and ten degrees colder, his spine shivering in atavistic terror, but the gleam in Jungkook’s eye, catching the streetlights from behind the fall of his hair, compelled him to play along. He craned his head to peer past the bulk of Jungkook’s body towards the back of the bus, and as they pulled through an intersection where the lights were brighter he caught a good view of the guy and- “Whoa, shit. Definitely hit it. His makeup is better than my last girlfriend’s.”
The guy was a little taller than Jimin, his face not as feminine, but drawn along the same lines, the oblique shape of his eyes elongated with heavy black eyeliner as sharp as anything and an opalescent shimmer that made his plush mouth look positively sinful, framed by the sharp spark of metal to either side of the center of his full lower lip. He was looking out the window, an intricate design in black ink stretching across the pale golden skin of his neck like some kind of moth, unclear in the uncertain light. But with his slim-cut, chic black-on-black clothes and precise and slightly asymmetric hair (not to mention the foundation-perfect smoothness of his skin and the glitter of metal all up his ears as well as at his lip) he definitely didn’t look like he belonged in a sleepy little neighborhood in Northeastern Busan.
He was so unexpected, so unreal looking, that it took Taehyung a moment to realize what he’d just admitted, out loud, for the first time ever, to his brand new kind-of-maybe-sort-of friend. Oh shit.
But before he could work himself up into a proper panic about it Jungkook collapsed back with a grin that slid into a little grimacing half-snarl as he deliberately stretched his upper back over the bulk of his backpack, elbows stretching back towards the seat back in a way that made his denim jacket fall further open and did very interesting things to the thin fabric of his t-shirt. “Good choice. He graduated two years ago and works in one of those fancy-ass salons downtown now. Jimin was madly in love with him for the first six months I knew him, but I don’t think he ever had the balls to even say hi. I keep telling him that he’s never going to get anywhere if he doesn’t put himself out there, but, well. What can you do?”
Taehyung just sort of boggled at Jungkook, who seemed unfairly not-freaking-out right now. Jungkook just seemed unreasonably on top of things in general, which was cosmically unjust, since he was two years younger and should theoretically be the one looking to his hyungs for support and guidance, and- Taehyung got the distinct impression that Jungkook had never, in his entire life, been especially interested in doing what was expected of him.
Which was probably why when Hot Scary Goth Guy got off at the next stop he returned Jungkook’s casual wave with a suggestion of a smile and a brief lift of his fingers as he ghosted down the steps and out into the night. By that point Jungkook’s quiet, “Kissing with all that metal is kind of weird, though. It’s colder than you’d expect,” barely even made a ripple in the chaos of Taehyung’s mind.
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It turned out that their stop was the second one after that, and the unimaginable torment of getting back onto their feet and balanced so that the admittedly shitty suspension of the bus didn’t knock them down the stairs and into the closed plexiglass doors kept Taehyung occupied for an inordinately long time. They tapped their phone cases as the doors shut on the penultimate stop and held onto the rails at either side, looking down at their scuffed translucence with anticipation bordering on eagerness.
Finally the moment came when their silence had generated enough nervous tension in Taehyung’s belly that he glanced over at Jungkook and asked, only realizing what he was going to say as the words came tripping off his tongue, far too late to prevent them from potentially ruining his life. “Do you do that a lot?”
“Do I do what a lot?” Jungkook glanced over at Taehyung’s stricken face, full lips pulled into an unintentionally hilarious grimace, and hid his smile by ducking his head and pushing his bangs off his forehead as he asked, voice carefully light, “Kiss people? Kiss people with snakebites? Or…” This time he didn’t hide his smile from Taehyung at all, the inner edge of his lower lip caught for a moment between his adorably not-quite-straight teeth before he let it pull free to ask, his voice soft and low, just for the two of them, “Or do you mean, do I kiss boys a lot?”
Taehyung’s breath caught in his throat at the look on Jungkook’s face, trying, like a hamster on a wheel, to get to a place where all of this made sense and wasn’t simultaneously terrifying, exciting, and sublimely embarrassing. He realized belatedly that he was probably staring, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and pressed his lips together for a moment as he glanced up at the LED sign announcing the next stop, like they might somehow have missed theirs, then towards the front window, which resolutely did not contain their stop, before admitting, husky and hushed, feeling the warmth of a blush blooming in his cheeks, “I- Yeah. That’s what I meant.”
When he glanced back at Jungkook after a long, awkward moment of silence, he got a distinct impression, from the way the younger boy’s head swung around to stare at the door, that he had been staring at the side of his head. Which was a little weird, but okay, whatever. He licked his lips and offered, voice trying and almost succeeding in achieving an airy, unphased brightness, “If you do, I, uh. I don’t mind. I mean, it doesn’t matter if I mind. But, uh. I was just, you know.”
Taehyung’s attempt at speech died a merciful death as the bus stopped, and Jungkook’s reply was delayed by the doors opening in front of the kindergarten down the road from their apartment complex. Taehyung, being the craven coward that he was, shot out of the bus and onto the sidewalk like a slingshot stone. He realized belatedly that running all the way home without waiting for Jungkook would probably be the worst thing he’d ever done in his entire life, so he swayed to a stop a step or two away from the curb and shoved his hands in his pockets, inspecting the thin green shoots growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk like some kind of urban botanist.
The gentle, hesitant brush of Jungkook’s hand on his shoulder reminded him of nothing more than the way the nice lady at his riding hagwon, in the hills outside of Daegu, used to reassure nervous horses before putting on their tack. Which was only appropriate, he concluded somewhat guiltily, as he jumped and shivered, looking up at Jungkook’s face through his eyelashes. His shoulders rounded involuntarily and his breath sounded unusually loud in his ears, his fingers curling slowly into nervous fists in his pockets.
Jungkook just tipped a crooked little smile at him, like this wasn’t the single most terrifying moment of his entire life. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this wasn’t actually scary at all. Maybe Taehyung was a coward. Maybe all of those things were true, but when Jungkook’s hand returned to his upper arm and gave it a gentle squeeze, fingers bumping one-two-three over the sharp of his shoulder joint to rest steadily with the upper edge of his palm snug up against the underside of Taehyung’s collarbone, clear even through his suit jacket, no force in heaven or earth could have compelled sound from his vocal cords.
“Hey, hyung. Calm down.” Jungkook’s soft voice was smooth and even, the tip of his tongue pink in the glow of the spotlight outside of the kindergarten’s driveway as it glanced across his lower lip. His teeth were bright when they followed, biting into the full curve of it, which seemed to have developed some manner of magical, magnetic, Taehyung’s-eyeballs-attracting properties in the past twenty seconds. Because, for some reason, he couldn’t make himself look away.
He kept staring at those bright teeth worrying at the soft (inviting?) plush of Jungkook’s lower lip, breath ripping in and out through his nostrils at a speed just a hairsbreadth slower than hyperventilation, until the sides of warm fingers pressed gently under his chin, bringing his head up by some kind of automatic reflex that he hadn’t been aware that he had until that moment. That seemingly endless rush of air, in-out-oh-shit, caught and held as he blinked and the rest of Jungkook’s face pulled abruptly into focus, those great big eyes a million miles wide and slightly soft cheeks just as flushed as Taehyung was miserably convinced his own must be.
It wasn’t entirely clear when Jungkook’s body had gotten so close to his; close enough that the hand under his jaw was attached to an arm bent sharply at the elbow, the warm press of fingers at his shoulder broadening and firming to a hand pressed all the way across the span of his collarbone, fingers digging ever so slightly into the tense muscle that stretched from his shoulder to his neck. It reassured him, gave him space in his own head to steal a little breath as the pad of Jungkook’s thumb traced the very edge of his lower lip, mostly rubbing against the dent below it, touch gentle and far more hesitant than Taehyung would have expected.
There seemed to be something in Taehyung’s face that Jungkook was searching for, staring at him with such intensity that his eyebrows furrowed slightly as Taehyung simply panted and didn’t-die, uncomfortably aware of the fact that Jungkook must be able to feel the wash of his breath against his hand. After an interminable, eternal half-minute he must have found what he was looking for, though, and he smiled another one of those shatter-bright grins that pinched his eyes and made Taehyung’s heart skip a beat.
“I only kiss boys I want to kiss, Tae-hyung,” he said, sing-songing the older boy’s name to make it clear that he was simultaneously shortening it in a way that would, in the normal course of things, be inappropriately familiar after a few hours’ acquaintance, and simultaneously using the honorific that he hadn’t, in the entire three hour eternity that Taehyung had known him, used unironically until all of this had gotten super weird.
It made Taehyung feel a little better, a little more real. So did the slight tremor in the fingers under his chin, the way Jungkook’s teeth bit back into his lip when he wasn’t talking. Like maybe Jungkook wasn’t as preternaturally confident as he seemed to be. Like maybe he had weaknesses of his own, which reassured Taehyung, in a backward sort of way.
Belatedly he realized that his hands were still balled up in his pants pockets, all sweaty and nasty, his palms sore from where his nails bit into them. He reluctantly dragged them out of the weird plastic hell of his pockets to dangle awkwardly at his sides, pretending not to notice how the movement made Jungkook’s fingers shift and tighten on his shoulder, on his face. The side of his thumb dragged against the corner of Taehyung’s mouth in a way that felt, somehow, more intimate than every single actual kiss he’d ever had.
Taehyung wanted desperately to make a meaningful contribution to this conversation, to this… whatever it was that they seemed to be teetering on the edge of, but as he blinked, feeling dazed and dumb, to stare across the somehow ever shrinking distance between his face and Jungkook’s, unconsciously pressing his tongue against the inside of his lower lip just to feel Jungkook press back against it, in a way that definitely didn’t make his blood sing and his dick twitch, all he could come up with to say was: “Oh?”
Something that looked terrifyingly like irritation shadowed Jungkook’s big, expressive features for a second, lower lip pressing into an almost-pout that thankfully disappeared into speech before Taehyung could coordinate his jangling nerves and adrenaline-soaked muscles to launch himself into flight. “Yeah. Hyung, I only kiss people I want to kiss. Boys, girls, whatever. I don’t really care. But-”
Here Jungkook’s seemingly endless store of confidence seemed to run dry, or at least, the part of Taehyung that desperately wanted to not be shaking in fear in front of a kid two years younger than him hoped that was the case.
Because while Jungkook might have stopped speaking abruptly and looked down, long straight eyelashes shadowing his eyes, almost infinitely dark in the shitty overhead lighting, his hands were hanging uselessly at his sides while warm fingers curled around the back of his neck, pinkie and ring finger inching under the collar of his dress shirt in a way that definitely wouldn’t be haunting his dreams forever.
The rest of Jungkook’s fingers carded slowly through his hair, thumb settling against the side of Taehyung’s neck and pressing ever-so-slightly into the tender spot just below his ear and behind the hinge of his jaw in a way that made Taehyung’s knees feel weak and his own eyelashes flutter.
That gentle press evolved into a slow, deliberate pressure, dragging a tiny seeking circle into Taehyung’s skin that started a shiver that seemed to flow across his shoulders, wire-tight with nervous tension, and traveled down his spine like a stiff breeze through trees in the autumn, leaving everything jangling in its wake. He realized suddenly that his hands were warm, that the softness beneath his palms was cotton knit and the dense resistance against his fingertips was the muscular shape of Jungkook’s sides as he clutched at them, feeling inexplicably weak.
Taehyung blinked his eyes open on the general theory that maybe if he could see he’d feel less like he was about to fall, only to realize that Jungkook’s face was just a lean and a press and a breath away. Dark eyes gleamed from beneath the shadow of his bangs, and the slow smile that lit his face would have seemed sweet if it didn’t make Taehyung feel like he was about to die in literally the best way that he’d ever imagined.
“Hyung, I only kiss the people I want to kiss,” Jungkook murmured, close enough that Taehyung could feel his breath warm on his jaw, face stretching in a broad, slow, lazy grin at Taehyung’s gasp. He took advantage of the relaxation of Taehyung’s jaw to drag his thumb against his lip again, more forcefully this time, tracing the almost imperceptible border where Taehyung’s slightly chapped lip became soft and warm and slick with quiet assurance as he tipped his face impossibly closer. It made Taehyung’s vision go starry and hazy in a way that definitely didn’t have anything to do with the warm, solid press of Jungkook’s hip and thigh against his shivering body.
There was literally not one thing in the universe that could have prevented the way that Taehyung’s hips tipped into the warmth of Jungkook’s body, the soft ripping-silk catch and break of his breath muffled as his tongue glanced off of the pad of the younger boy’s thumb, jaw falling further open and eyes going wide for a split second before he let them fall closed. He was more than a little convinced that he was about to wake up with his face shoved into his pillow and another mess to clean up, but something about the very surreality of the situation almost made it easier to deal with.
If he didn’t know what he should do, why the fuck shouldn’t he do what he wanted to instead?
His hands shifted restlessly against Jungkook’s sides for a few moments, kneading at the dense muscle he could feel, like the sexiest stress ball that had ever existed, right below his fingertips. Then he slid his hands back to palm across the tops of Jungkook’s hips, fingers almost touching at the small of his back, just above the band of his jeans.
A louder and more emphatic noise of frustration rumbled low in his throat when he was prevented from sliding his hands further up Jungkook’s spine by the enormous backpack he still had on, heavy and hard-edged with books. So instead his hands slid down, long fingers splaying across the denim-clad swell of Jungkook’s ass and pulling Jungkook up against him. Somehow it was no longer a thumb that his lip was pressed against, but rather the sharp point of a chin, and he decided – in a brief, ringing moment of clarity – that he just didn’t give a fuck what the consequences would be. He tipped his chin up against the drag of the warm fingers beneath it and pressed his parted lips to Jungkook’s, barely registering that in that first moment of contact the other boy’s lips were stretched into a smile.
Taehyung realized, as a low groan that most certainly wasn’t his rumbled straight from his ears to his dick, that he’d never kissed someone who was the same height he was before. It made the angle different, meant he didn’t have to crane his neck down and worry about whether or not the person he was kissing felt loomed over. It was kind of cool.
Then Jungkook slid his hand from Taehyung’s jaw down his neck to press against his upper chest, pinkie just brushing the strap of his backpack as his fingers dug in a little for purchase. He rolled his hips back against the pressure of Taehyung’s hands, a soft, almost liquid groan reverberating against Taehyung’s tongue, pressed just into the warmth hiding inside the soft sweep of Jungkook’s lower lip, making Taehyung’s hips kick forward. Which made Jungkook’s dick – which Taehyung could definitely feel twitching against him, and wasn’t that a complete mindfuck – grind up against the long, lean muscles of his leg, perilously close to his own groin. He liked it.
A lot.
Maybe way too much.
The soft press of their lips gave way, seemingly by mutual agreement, to a slight separation, a sharing of quiet, gasped breaths, and feeling somewhat dazed, Taehyung leaned back just enough that he could blink his eyes open. Jungkook’s eyes were already watching his face, his expression hazy and open, and when their eyes met that shatter-sharp grin appeared again, making the rough edge of his voice an almost physical presence that slid along Taehyung’s nerves like a livewire as he repeated, sounding somewhat smug, “Yeah, hyung. I only kiss the people I want to kiss.”
Jungkook didn’t even get a chance to laugh at the wrinkle-nosed look of annoyance that twisted up Taehyung’s face before the older boy leaned in, rubbing the side of his nose against Jungkook’s as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his worn jeans to give his ass a firm squeeze. “You’re a terrible dongsaeng,” he muttered, voice rough and breathy, before pressing their lips together again.
He meant for it to be another quick kiss. Really, he did. But Jungkook’s mouth was as pliant and soft as his body was solid and sturdy and reassuring, supporting him like he didn’t weigh anything at all as he lost himself in the kiss. One playful tug of lip with lip became a quiet chuckle muffled by the press of their mouths, became Jungkook’s hand sliding up his neck to tug at his hair. As the younger boy’s lips left his own to press a line of kisses down the side of his neck he found his head tipping back into the supporting warmth of Jungkook’s palm without any conscious decision on his part at all.
Somewhere between ninety seconds and three hundred glorious years later a car backfired in an alley just down the street and Taehyung’s eyes popped open as he staggered and almost fell, the backs of his fingers abraded by the speed at which he’d pulled his hands out of Jungkook’s back pockets. His neck felt awkwardly cool (and damp, gah) in the evening air, after the sublime warmth of the other boy’s mouth. He looked around frantically, eyes wide and breath ripping through his lungs in a classic fight-or-flight reaction, and he only realized what had happened when he caught sight of Jungkook’s face, flushed cheeks and kiss-swollen lips and all, and realized that nothing bad was going to happen.
Taehyung covered his face with his hands as he laughed, soft and embarrassed, and only let them fall to take a few shaky steps towards Jungkook so he could catch his left hand with his right, tugging him from his half-crouch – wide-eyed and just a little feral looking, mouth pressed into a thin line – to start walking, just the slightest bit shamble-legged, towards their apartment complex. “Come on, let’s go home.”
After a few steps Jungkook seemed to relax, shaking his shoulders and dragging his free hand down his face as Taehyung eyed him obliquely, trying not to allow all of his attention to be captured by the flush on his cheeks, only barely visible in the dim and intermittent light, by the way his breathing was still just a little ragged. He met with limited success, but at least he managed to pay enough attention to the sidewalk in front of them not to trip on any curbs as they walked.
By the time they were just a few handfuls of meters away from the entrance to their apartment complex, now visible around the curve of the road, it was obvious that nothing else was going to rudely interrupt the almost aching quiet of the spring night that surrounded them like cotton batting, close and still. Jungkook gave Taehyung’s hand a squeeze and turned his wrist so that he could lace their fingers together, glancing out into the hazy dark in a way that gave Taehyung an excellent opportunity to appreciate how nice his profile was.
He finally said, after a long moment of comfortable silence, his voice sounding unfairly casual, “So, yeah. We should definitely spend more time together. Do you have any plans after hagwon, this Friday? Jimin-ah and I are having a party with our friends from dance class, to celebrate my ‘coming of age’. You should come.”
Taehyung suspected that he looked like an idiot as he blinked dumbly at the side of Jungkook’s head, jaw slack and eyebrows drawn together almost like two commas laying on their sides. Or maybe two shallow dishes, edges tipped up and confusion resting in the middle. “Uh. Okay?”
He honestly didn’t know what else to say, because part of him (roughly everything from the neck down) was still all flushed and shaky and painfully aware of the proximity of Jungkook’s body next to his, and the rest of him was reeling in confusion from the seemingly lightning-fast change of topic. He just contented himself with rubbing the webbing between Jungkook’s palm and thumb and hoped that something that made more sense would be forthcoming.
Jungkook seemed to be content just walking for a while, and completely disinclined to say anything further, until the gate at the front of their apartment complex loomed up in front of them and he spun Taehyung into the shadow next to it with deceptive, unsettling ease. He bounced up onto his toes (completely ignoring the twenty pounds of books in his bag) and pressed a gentle kiss to Taehyung’s forehead before pressing his nose to the side of Taehyung’s and murmuring, soft against his lips, “I’ll see you on Friday, hyung. Make sure to wear socks.”
The unexpected twirling and the doubly unexpected closeness flustered Taehyung enough that by the time he realized what Jungkook had said his lips were tingling from the goodbye kiss that had been bitten ever so lightly into his lower lip and the younger boy was walking rapidly away, across the broad brick plaza between his building and Taehyung’s, without looking back.
Taehyung was thoroughly distracted by the way Jungkook looked, jeans clinging to his thighs in a way that he didn’t even have words adequate to express. Ugh. He heaved a sigh, preparing to begin his shuffle to his own building – he had definitely not planned on walking half a kilometer with a boner today, and thus had failed to wear his extra supportive underpants – when he realized that he had no way of getting in contact with Jungkook or Jimin, nor did he know what classes they were in.
Fuck.
“Fuck.”
Taehyung pulled himself out of his dazed slouch with a grimace and readjusted himself with a finicky expression of distaste before setting off in a jouncy, awkward sprint after Jungkook. “Yah! Jungkook, wait!”
The look of confusion on Jungkook’s face was pretty priceless, even given the intense and acute discomfort Taehyung was in right at that moment, bouncing to a stop and leaning forward, one hand braced on his thigh and the other digging around in his back pants pocket for his phone. “I need- I need your KakaoTalk. And Jimin’s. So- So we can talk.”
Comprehension dawned on Jungkook’s face and he pulled his phone out of the pocket of his coat with a soft laugh, getting his QR code up in an almost freakishly short amount of time. Taehyung scanned it, then stumbled through getting Jungkook his, feeling like his fingers were numb and his face on fire, he was blushing so hard. The first message Jungkook sent him was Jimin’s screen name, followed almost immediately by a winky-face emoji, which made Taehyung hiccup a little giggle. “Classy. Super classy.”
Jungkook ducked his head and grinned up at Taehyung, running his hand over the back of his neck and putting on his best aw-shucks-I’m-adorable grin, which he then promptly ruined by deliberately dragging his tongue across his lower lip and winking. Taehyung rolled his eyes, pulling an Ew face for all he was worth, which was, perhaps, somewhat counter to the message his hands were sending, sliding up under Jungkook’s jacket to palm across his ribs. “Shut up, shut up. I need to go to sleep. You need to go to sleep! Stop doing the porn face. It hurts me. In my soul.”
No amount of effort was enough to save Jungkook’s equanimity as his face contorted, first his lips pressing together, then his eyes screwing up into happy crescents, and finally an enormous, goofy, slightly hyena-like laugh burst out of his mouth. “How dare you! You asshole! Casting aspersions on my sexy faces. How dare you.”
The laugh was, apparently, infectious. Taehyung laughed until he could barely catch his breath, leaning into Jungkook’s broad shoulder, and grinned at him with a loopy, slightly deranged look of happiness when he finally managed to get his shit together enough to hook his arm around Jungkook’s shoulder so he could push his face into the side of his head. “Fuck, you’re terrible. Okay. Okay. Your sexy face is gross and irresistible.”
He rocked back onto his heels to offer a muted, only slightly awkward closed mouth smile, which Jungkook returned with interest, reaching out to ease Taehyung’s bangs out of his eyes with a careful press of his fingertips, following the line of Taehyung’s brow in a way that made his stomach turn over. “Good night, Tae-hyung. Taehyung hyung? Just hyung. Yeah. That’ll work.”
He leaned forward, wetting his lips as he went, and pressed a light, gentle, barely-there kiss, which left just enough of a lingering warmth to make Taehyung never want to go another day without experiencing it ever again, to the soft parted bow of Taehyung’s lips. “Good night, hyung,” he said again, one corner of his mouth tugging up and his dimple making a brief appearance before he took a step backward, dragging his hands down Taehyung’s forearms as they fell away from his sides.
Taehyung caught the younger boy’s fingers with his own, just for a second, and gave them a squeeze before disengaging with a low, regretful sigh, the knowledge that it was probably almost eleven, he hadn’t eaten since four in the afternoon, and that he had to get three pages of math homework done before class in the morning motivating him to act like a rational human being. “Good night, Jungkook. It was, uh. It was really nice to meet you.”
Before Taehyung could take more than a few steps back, unwilling to turn back around towards his building, Jungkook darted forward with that disarming quickness and pressed another fleeting kiss to the corner of Taehyung’s mouth before backpedaling just as fast, his smile brilliant in the halogen-yellow lights. “Good night, hyung! I’ll see you tomorrow. Sweet dreams!”
He tossed the last few words over his shoulder as he tapped his phone case to the pad that opened the door of his building, and unleashed another one of those fucking winks before ducking inside. It left Taehyung feeling a little bit like he’d just been thrown out of an airplane, and he was waiting to find out if there was a chute in his pack when he pulled the cord. Right now it was fun as hell. Exhilarating, even. But he had no idea what it was going to feel like when he came down.