Archive of Our Own

“You’ve been charged with perjury, disturbing the peace, and last but not least—” Chenle leans closer to the karaoke mic after a cliffhanger silence, “—treason.” 

The microphone feedback gets a wince out of everyone but Donghyuck, too busy making his eyes roll back as slow as humanly possible, and Chenle, enjoying this enough to wait for Donghyuck’s sight to be back on him before he goes on. “How do you plead?”

Donghyuck feels all eyes turn to him, standing by in pin-drop quiet to see what share of the blame he’s about to take. 

“Do we really need to do this?” He cranes his neck back to look at the jury couch, disappointed when he finds stone cold faces far too in character. “Seriously. I didn’t kill Mark. I just fucked the guy.”

“I’m right here,” he hears behind him, and Donghyuck blindly points in the voice’s direction without looking away from the unimpressed crowd.

“See?”

A rolling pin smacks the side of the kitchen table, Chenle’s pretend judge hammer being slammed down as he calls for silence, please, and Donghyuck lets his forehead follow suit and hit the table. 

Perjury

Knowing and intentional act of swearing a false oath or falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth, i.e, being a fucking liar. 

Nobody drinks tequila for fun. It's a solid blanket statement, backed up by something harder to wear down than any stats or research: the fact Donghyuck says so.

Tequila is one out of three things to put up with if he's thinking of going to a college party, an errand that needs to be run to be able to comply with the protocol of getting wasted inside the four dubiously sticky walls of a fraternity. Why else do you think he's currently licking the space between his thumb and index finger free of salt to swing back a shot that smells like cleaning product? Pure administrative nonsense.

His palm is shiny with spit and the spilled over tequila that ran down the sides of the glass when Chenle poured it for him, which takes Donghyuck to number two of party nuisances: dealing with a tipsy Chenle, who will push boundaries until they push back—like he's doing right now, as he takes a wedge of lemon from the plate on the counter and presses the peel of it to someone else's mouth with a too proud grin.

A dubious, sticky frat boy lets his teeth climb over it to hold the lemon wedge around the back like a pliers' jaw, laughing around the piece with flushed cheeks, eyes spelling dopey and number three all over him: Mark Lee, getting in the way of Donghyuck's party chores and his honest attempts at not breaking exes-turned-friends etiquette. 

They've been saying they're fine for months now, reassuring everyone else that it's okay, it was on good terms, but no one's believed them so far. Not even Jeno, who is now bent in half in silent laughter, or Chenle, the one chanting kiss, kiss, kiss as the backdrop. 

It's only procedural, then, for Donghyuck to hook a leg over the marble top, rise up on a knee to stretch across it and tower over Mark and his offered sour bite, and dig his teeth into it, eyes on Mark's even through the struggle of being a nose apart. 

See? The best of buddies. 

Well. Sort of. 

“Wait, wait, do a body shot,” Chenle asks, louder and laughing harder than the mental picture of it probably calls for, raucous enough to get Mark to let go of the yellow peel and Donghyuck to come down the counter in one quick move, earning him a bump into a drawer’s handle and a parking spot saved for a future bruise to pull up on.

"Yeah, no. I'm not throwing up tonight. You're on your own," he cuts Chenle's hopes short, lemon wedge dunked into what he hopes is the trash can and Jeno's shoulder patted when he walks past him to make his way out of the kitchen at the excuse of getting some air.

Because maybe Donghyuck’s a liar, and perhaps some people can drink tequila for the sake of it and befriend their exes perfectly fine. Just not him. 

So, only hypothetically, the reason he’s sitting on the front steps of this house drinking from a water bottle he nicked on his way out might just be that he hasn’t been able to drink for fun all night, and he can’t be the best of buddies or ruin any break-up tinted friendship with Mark because they have never been friends. Not in the sense Donghyuck knows friends to be, anyway. 

A friend would be able to read between the tight lines around his eyes and the artificially raised corners of his lips well enough to know Donghyuck is asking to be left alone, and they would let him have his space. A good friend (read: Renjun, luckily nightlife averse and already asleep in his own bed) would care fuck all about Donghyuck’s implicit demands, and would follow him out with a question on the tip of their tongue. 

Which is why all he expects when the door behind him swings open for the nth time is another couple to tumble down the short-lived stairs, maybe the third guy of the hour with a smoke already between his teeth to stop on his way out and ask if he has a lighter—but never the footsteps to come to a halt for someone to flop down on the same wooden step he’s sitting on, or for it to Mark, because he’s not a friend (by Donghyuck’s own standard) nor good (fundamentally incompatible with the willingly dated Donghyuck for months premise). 

And yet. 

Donghyuck's head comes down from where it titled up to get the last of the bottle, the mouth of it leaving a ring of water over his lips that he wipes away, taking a leap over helloes and his to land in a, “Did Jeno send you?” 

“Nope. Already passed out on the couch.” Mark stretches his legs out in front of him, shoes scraping against the gravel path and gaze trained where the crown of the front yard's one lone lemon tree ends and the city-tar sky starts, Donghyuck definitely looking anywhere but at him. 

It's all in the corner of the eye, really. Irises climbing up and down tree branches and the ripe yellow hanging from them, the white around them going over Mark's elbows propping up on the step behind so he can lean back and join Donghyuck in tree-watching and light-pollution-gazing, and no one's any the wiser.

“Chenle?” he guesses again.

“Sad to say he's too pissed to care about you right now."

Donghyuck's snort at it can't be helped, mind playing out its best guess of Chenle going from room to room to recruit two new contenders to give him the body shot show he’d asked for.

"I think he had more to drink tonight than all of us combined," Mark adds on.

That would be an accomplishment, given that Donghyuck’s way from the kitchen to the front steps was made in need of a hand perpetually brushing over a wall or holding onto a handrail to keep his balance, or that Mark is putting to use the time Donghyuck’s spending deliberately losing himself inside his head to burp into his hand twice. 

Donghyuck turns a mind-made corner, watches a replay of Mark’s teeth closing tighter around the peel of the lemon wedge after Donghyuck had bitten into it, right before Chenle’s voice had drawn them out of Mark’s jaw-tight grip and Donghyuck’s use of party bureaucracy as a shield. He goes down another hallway (Mark blatant when he turns the key and locks his stare on Donghyuck licking the salt off the side of his thumb), takes another left (a need to prove something he knows isn’t true to a crowd who didn’t ask for it as he climbs onto a countertop), trips over his feet, falls on his face, and comes out the other end saying, “Sorry about him.” 

Say is a stretch. Implies articulation, diction and whatnot. Let's go with mumble to the point of indistinction. 

Mark blinks at him, waiting on for something explanation-shaped to pin and annex to his apology, as if it's not enough he's got Donghyuck apologizing in the first place.

“It got a little awkward, right?” he keeps it at. 

Awkward is a misunderstanding. It assumes inconvenience, embarrassment, like they’ve gone down the path of making sure they are never alone in a room so they won’t have silences they feel the need to fill and a lack of anything to fill those very silences with, the weather-talk alternative of falling out prototypes.

He’s not sure what would be the word for making sure they are never in the same room to begin with. And if they have to share a continuum of space and time, ensuring there will be opposite ends for each of them to be on, or that they'll be in the shit category of something-faced. And if they're cornered on one end of a room and wasted, reassuring himself that the staring and the shotgunning offers and the shot-drinking assistance are all a trick of the influence.  

Awkward will have to do.

Mark throws his lips out in an oblivious act, childish pout both the polar opposite and best possible fit for him smelling like alcohol and too much cologne.

“What do you mean? We were just chilling." A shoulder goes up in a shrug. “Just two bros hanging out. Casually sharing a lemon."

“Ew. Never say that word again,” Donghyuck squeezes his eyes shut at it, face scrunching up as if going through the motions of a sour taste in his mouth. 

Mark frowns. “Lemon?”

“Bro," Donghyuck corrects him, keeping his nose gathered into wrinkles and his disgust out in the open. 

“What do I call you, then?” Mark’s smile has been taken off its hanger, unfolded and slipped on, worn proud and without giving his words a second thought. 

Donghyuck gives his own words a first thought (my name), a second one (don't), and finally settles for, “Buddy?”

It’s not funny. Mark still laughs, the sound coming out in a burst, both as in a second long and eardrum-splitting loud, just noisy enough for someone inside the house to turn around and look out of the living room window to find out where it’s coming from. 

"Why not?” he pushes, and perhaps the actual worst part of the night is the fact he has no other term to use but giggle, corny and pet-peeving as they come, for the noise Mark is making. 

“That’s what you want? Me hitting you up like—hey, buddy.” Mark chokes on the word through his fucking giggle (too many Gs in it and next door neighbor to just as gross words like gag and gargle and glug), eyes shiny and butt risking slipping off and down to the step under. 

Donghyuck's head leans against the cold metal of the handrail, neck bending forward an ugly amount to keep Mark at sight's reach, and bites the inside of his cheek so he won't smile despite his will. 

“Yeah, no. I take that back. You sound like a whole little league coach," he tells him, tone leant to irony’s service, and it does the trick of getting Mark to actually fall down a step just fine, body shaking along to laughter and making his ass slide off to the bottom step. 

The rest of his body follows him on his way down, ending up splayed out across the stairs, a thunk to the nape when it hits the wood and an arm going for Donghyuck's knee to give it a squeeze that could play the part of a plea, a warning, a way to egg him on. Donghyuck sees the line of his neck under the porch lights, craned back and drunk pink, and decides he likes the last option the best.

“What about bud?” he eggs on, dutiful to the line. 

"That's the same thing," Mark complains, face leaned towards him with his cheek to the steps, his nails clawing at Donghyuck's jeans to keep his whining company.

Donghyuck's blinking misses a beat. His voice doesn't. "Dog?" 

“You think that would stick?” Mark counters. 

His fingernails dig into the skin over Donghyuck's knee, the thinnest of it and closest to bone there is—an anatomically incorrect fact in all regards, except the one where Donghyuck can vouch for it, the sting of Mark's fingernails getting him to press his tongue behind his teeth to fight the heady feeling. 

He falls behind on a blink's turn-in deadline, his pitch jumping up without his disposition to. “Homie?“ 

Mark's teeth show in something between a big smile and a silent laugh, seeming to realize at that moment he's been nail-deep on Donghyuck's skin for a second now and letting off immediately to sweep a thumb over the washed out jean covering it, as if he could soothe the ache away through the fabric, and Donghyuck's breaking point is pressed down with a fingertip’s brush somewhere in between then and now.  

“You’re the last person I would ever—” 

“Babe?” 

It pulls the plug on the moment in a wink’s time, Donghyuck’s wave crashing onto the shore and washing Mark’s smile off in its retreat, mouth left parted open and barely curled at the corners, the drag of the ripple leaving his eyebrows raised high and expression washed over. 

It lands on Donghyuck slowly and then all at once, holding Mark's eye until it means risking going shame-coded all over and breaking the dam that's keeping in what's left of his pride.

"Sorry. Too far," he talks to tree leaves and lemon branches once more, and he might be apologizing again, but at least Mark isn't laughing in a first-letter G way anymore, though stunned silence after the five second mark is showing itself to be worse than any heaps of giggling or sorrys. He makes his eyes go half-lidded and presses a knuckle to the bridge of his nose, trying his best to play the I'm-so-dizzy-the-world's-spinning card to save face as he adds in a slur, “I think I could beat Chennie if I have one more shot.”  

Donghyuck is swaying on a limbo of looking for a way out and hoping Mark will take that initiative all by himself when he hears his own words echoed back to him, same content but inflection gone from rueful to curious. 

“Only one?” Mark wonders, voice gone quiet, a bit like he’s taking on a dare Donghyuck doesn’t remember making a pitch for, and Donghyuck frowns at a streetlight seen through the leaves. 

“Yeah, I guess," he settles for, because having no memory of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and who is he to back out from this when Mark is already scrambling to his feet, pushing himself up with the help of Donghyuck’s knee and walking up the porch steps with Donghyuck’s empty water bottle in hand, snatched off his grip when Mark flips his switch and sets himself into motion?

There's a science to screwdrivers, one Mark has been testing out the same way Donghyuck has remained compliant to his tequila duty all night. Change the ratio of vodka to orange juice and you'll get a different outcome every time, a choose-your-own-adventure situation based on how far down you push the tasteless alcohol under the fruit juice to drown it out. Go generous on the orange and you'll sip it down like a juice box in a minute, drunk off your ass the next.

Mark is nothing short of well-mannered, which means orange generosity got out of his hands tonight, and it has landed him here, knocking on the glass of the living room window and waiting for someone to slide it open for him, music slipping out first and a human head second once it does. 

It’s the dude who looked out at the sound of Mark’s laugh a minute ago the one that has peeked out at the two-taps call. Donghyuck overhears a hey and a thanks as the starting and finishing lines of their seconds-something conversation, which has the guy exiting out of Donghyuck’s sight, only for him to arrive back a moment later with a half-full bottle of strawberry vodka, which comes mouth to mouth with Donghyuck’s emptied water bottle, gets tilted down, and pours a generous amount of itself into it. 

Tongue heavy and words like cotton on his mouth, he still makes the effort to talk when he sees Mark walk back over to him, but he only gets as far as what are you before the rest of his question dies in his mouth, getting handed what could pass off as a bottle's water refill.  

“Hold this,” is the one instruction he gets.

Donghyuck stays slumped down into a healthy spine’s nemesis of a posture and with a now battered plastic bottle held between loose fingers as Mark waddles down the steps and into the square of hay-like grass that constitutes the front garden. 

Him walking under the lowest branch of the tree and going into his tiptoes is what gets Donghyuck to stand up, his pace wobbly but just steady enough to be by Mark's side once he has finally gotten hold of a lemon going through its growing pains, still more green than yellow.

Mark takes a step backward that knocks them shoulder to shoulder, holds his prepubescent lemon up to the streetlight behind the tree and turns it over in his hand, as if performing a quality check. Donghyuck inspects it along with him—cram-full of dirt from where it slipped through Mark's fingers and hit the floor, rough outside with its stem's leaf still attached—and lets Mark turn his head to him before following in stride, inspecting him just as thoroughly—bloodshot eyes, pinker and drunker than ever, a downturn to his mouth that he uses to mourn, “I don’t have a knife."

Donghyuck doesn’t even get to wonder what Mark would need a knife for before he’s forced to take a step back, pushing away the hand nearing the ground-dirty lemon to his face. 

“Don’t put that in my mouth,” Donghyuck shrieks, eyes widening the next moment when Mark’s hand gives under the pull only to go the opposite way. "No, shit, don't put it in your mou—Mark."

Too late. Mark’s incisors are already holding onto a lemon the size of a fist, a muddy spot left against his tongue when it moves lipless and jawlessly to ask won mowre shot?

Donghyuck stays blank-faced until he remembers sinking his teeth on a wedge held by a laughing, dopey-looking, number-three-of-things-to-put-up-with version of Mark. Mark half an hour older is just the same, borrowing a drink for Donghyuck to take a swing of and a new wedge to offset the burn of the shot.

This is vodka, moron, is his first thought, sentence with a foot out of his mouth when he sees a drop of spit starting to trail down the side of Mark's chin, the point of it showing a smear of dirt. Mark is tipping his head up in a mimic to encourage Donghyuck to take a sip from the bottle, and his second thought is why Mark would want him to take that one shot away from Chenle's level of drunkness he claims to be lacking. 

He says neither, admits in its place, “I don’t want another drink.”

It’s enough to throw Mark off, and then, you dawnt?

Donghyuck shakes his head. 

Bawt you zaid—

“I don’t need it,” Donghyuck cuts him off, firmer but toned down. It works better than shouting it would have as the fight trickles out of Mark’s face, front row seat for Donghyuck to watch him go mellow, and this is why they’ll never be friends. Why they are bound to be lack-of-better-word awkward, why Mark’s not even close to being good and why Donghyuck’s fingers are pinching the sides of the lemon and pulling on it.

He does so until Mark gets the memo, teeth letting up on strength and jaw slackening, the quickness of it earning Donghyuck a handful of slobbery lemon that he drops to the ground. He wipes his hand on his jeans for good measure to get rid of the spit on his fingers, but when he looks up it's to find Mark's attention never left him, gaze unrelenting in something far too earnest for the guy who couldn't get a word in without laughter blocking the way and who just tried to force a whole lemon inside his mouth.

“Gross.” Donghyuck tries to say it like he means it, tapping a place in his chin to point at where the smudge is on Mark’s own, who raises a finger to exactly anywhere but the right spot and rubs nothing away. The least Donghyuck can do is sigh, the tiny step back he takes giving Mark enough room to see Donghyuck's thumb clear as day when it gestures to the house behind them. “You should go wash up.”

Mark lets his lips fall open, seeming to weigh the words, scale letting him know they are not too heavy but not too light before he asks, “Help me out?”

And Donghyuck knows what he's trying to say, but he's not sure if Mark himself knows. If he doesn't and Donghyuck breaks his pride-guarding dam, shame-codes himself into what he wants and lets it show through, it would shatter his dignity like cheap glass, a thousand smithereens you could reflect on and are always at risk of getting cut by. Vulnerable and desperate and coming back for scraps at Mark's beck and call.

“Help you?” as in, do you know what you're asking for?, because he already knows he won’t be able to be his friend anyway, and if Mark is the poster child of no good, then Donghyuck is the worst of them all. 

Pupils blown, a mess of fever warmth and red spots, filthy and clingy like a child, an average amount of in on it and a great measure of out of it, Mark's head shakes up and down. “Yeah," as in, I do. 

Sure, then. Why not? 

Donghyuck says as much, and by the time they make it back inside the house and to the bathroom, he has already gotten something off Mark. The dirt stain they don't get to until they're inside Mark's room. 

Donghyuck knows fraternities from Hollywood flicks, and even then know is an overstatement. 

His definition goes as far as a place housing a bunch of college-aged guys, and that Mark’s place is. Maybe not as cool-looking and edgy-sounding as the North American movies made them out to be, with the greek names and the initiation torture-type rituals Donghyuck never fully got the gist of. But Mark’s brother’s best friend decides to pay the bills of his grandparent’s hand-me-down house by renting out rooms left and right, with Mark being the first to jump at the offer and move into the Suh family owned home, so college guys in a two-story house it is. Alas, their university’s off campus, only unofficial frat house. 

Still, what exactly could be the outweighing-con benefits of sharing a bathroom with six other guys, Donghyuck’s got no clue. 

A first taste of independence and self-management are Mark’s reasons, give or take a few words. The implication of it is in the clothes that can't even be bothered to make themselves into one neat laundry pile at the top of a chair, but that lay around the room Easter-egg-hunt style instead, or the haphazard schedule he keeps, making it feasible for Mark to be up with the sun at five in the morning or clocking into consciousness at three in the afternoon. No one to tell him to look at the time, shaking him awake for breakfast or implying laziness. 

Donghyuck will admit that last one he understands, and that he had made use of it any time he could when they were dating. Or at least any time Mark had allowed him to, and hadn’t woken him up via the bedroom’s light being flipped on and a clatter of hands rummaging through a drawer.

He slit an eye open, then, too groggy to process much more than lightbulb brightness, Jaehyun’s already made bed, the narrow but empty line of mattress between the wall and his back with sheets already gone cold, and the familiar shape of Mark. He'd been bent down over his open bedside table, dressed for the day and only allowing his eyes to stray from his noise-making when he heard Donghyuck’s yawn. 

“Morning.” Donghyuck thought he could hear a smile in it even through closed eyes and the yawn in his ears, and there was the rustling again, quick to get back to work. “Hey, have you seen my charger?” Mark’s voice tapered off as he got distracted, gone into a mutter once he was saying, “I swear it’s in here. Like, I remember bringing it upstairs last night. I did, right?” 

Donghyuck groaned, attempting to seal back together the morning gunk between lashes and skin that had kept the light out up to that point, and honestly, this was on him. 

Slowly but surely, it had become less the nights where he was offered to stay over only once it had gone dark, with one foot already back inside his jeans and one hand feeling under Mark’s bed for his phone in between shoes and Easter egg underwear, and more the days where he arrived with a change of clothes already at the bottom of his bag. So really, Donghyuck was the intruder here, the eighth addition to the number of people sleeping under this roof and the one to meddle in his boyfriend’s unsanitary emancipation. Meaning it was completely warranted for Mark to drop to his knees by the bed, and insist to Donghyuck’s sleep-slack face when he realized he was no longer being listened to with, “Hyuck. My charger.” 

“Shhhhh.” Donghyuck blindly slapped a hand over Mark’s face, pressing his fingertips forward and burrowing the tip of an index into one of his tear ducts just to get back at him. “Too early,” his voice cracked all over his first words of the day, Mark’s snort at it being more than unwelcome. The palm that slid under the sheets and down his bare back to rub circles over it, maybe less so. 

“It’s almost twelve,” Mark told him, in that same look at the time tone they had both come here to run away from in the first place. The hand over Donghyuck’s back wrote the number twelve on it after he said it, however, and something inside Donghyuck retched and melted all at once. “Wanna go out for breakfast? Or lunch, I guess. Brunch?”

Brunch, Mark had gone on playing spelling bee on his skin, and Donghyuck wanted the bed to split in half and swallow him whole, so he could be miserable in peace in between metal springs and upholstery. 

“Why are you still talking?” he nagged, sightlessly lifting the covers right after.

Victory came in the shape of a dimple in the mattress hollowed in by a knee, followed by another, two more to make four dents out of Mark climbing up the bed into his hands and knees, and then he was pushing Donghyuck towards the wall to slip under the sheets beside him. 

Mark’s clothes wrinkled beyond their turning point as he made himself home, shirt creasing impossibly further up when Donghyuck came down earfirst over his chest, arms and legs wrapping obnoxiously tight around Mark’s ribcage and waistline. A satisfied breath had gotten puffed out of him at the comfort, and Mark’s hand then scratching lightly at the skin right over the elastic of his briefs, just the way he knew Donghyuck liked, had been all the encouragement he needed to get ready to fall back asleep. 

“I could make something, if you wanna stay in,” was the discentitive Mark offered to Donghyuck’s sleepy aim, and the sigh he let out was at realizing he wasn't getting out of this without indulging Mark in conversation.

“In that bromatological nightmare of a kitchen? With your skills?” The starting stage of a furrowed brow took shape in his face, earning himself a pinch to the hip. Donghyuck got back at him with what tried to be a bite to Mark’s chest, and instead ended up as him mouthing at his shirt. 

“I can pour cereal, believe it or not." (“I don't”) "And I can promise the bowl will be clean.” 

“And I’m supposed to stay up here and let you step inside a room with a working oven?" Donghyuck made a tsking sound, giving up on sleeping through midday hours and blinking his eyes open.

He turned his head to rest the point of his jaw where his cheek had been, coming across Mark’s insufferable wide awakeness, double chinned so he could look down at him and still going at the back scratching, and Donghyuck had sort of wanted to eat his own fist, bones and all. 

“I’ll be down. Just give me, like, fifteen,” he relented, muffled by the hand he ran over his face to rub awareness into it. He felt a drool spot and morning crust once he reached the bottom of it, heard the sound of some of the house rousing downstairs with cabinet doors’ creaks and home appliances' hums, and then added, “Ish. Maybe twenty.” 

Mark’s face went into amusement at the number, a tint of teasing to it as an afterthought when he asked, “Twenty minutes? Who are you getting ready for?” 

“You? The congregation of gym bros in your kitchen? My dignity?” Mark raised his eyebrows at that, a trigger to Donghyuck’s eyes rolling incredibly slow. “No, right. ‘Cause I look to die for. Hope no one goes falling in love with me.” 

Mark’s eyes left no place in Donghyuck’s face uncharted, before licking at the pad of his thumb and rubbing at Donghyuck’s mouth to turn it drool-free. 

“It might be a little too late for that,” he murmured, gaze going from the corner of Donghyuck’s lips to his eyes right after, holding it there, something tender and something tense in it all at once.  

But Donghyuck was letting go the next moment, leaning his cheek into Mark’s hand with wit on the tip of his tongue. “Oh, thank fuck you noticed it too. I didn’t wanna make it weird between you guys, but Johnny totally has a thing for me. It’s pathetic, actually. Did you see the way he looks at me?”

Mark’s mouth seemed to be pulled up to its feet against its will to stand up in a thin smile, but it had been a smile all the same, and it couldn't have been that bad if he was telling him, “Nah. Too busy looking at you too.” 

Donghyuck only looked back at him before he mirrored his grin, which climbed up his face the same way he shimmied up the bed, an elbow on either side of Mark’s face set in place for him to lean down and kiss him. It was too alike a rubber stamp coming down on an ink pad, firm and close-mouthed and procedural, parting with a squeak after and climbing over him to roll off the bed.

“Oh, hey,” Mark called when he had pulled his sweats on to make his way out of the bedroom and across the hall for his self-proclaimed twenty-minute bathroom stay. Donghyuck looked at him over his shoulder and saw Mark’s chin pointing at the left open bedside drawer. “I got a new toothbrush the other day. You can have it if you wanna.”

Donghyuck had looked inside and seen a torn open pack of toothbrushes with one last left. Brand new. Red, too. His favorite. 

He had taken it, thanked Mark with one more kiss that had left his mouth bitter with ink, and had spent half an hour in the bathroom. 

Now, he’s ready to make his way out of this house with no bathroom pit stops, him being the first out of Mark’s bed at a late morning hour this once, and Mark the one to grumble at him from under the covers.

Jeans zipped up, he does the button and tugs them a little higher up his hips, overgoing the pound of his head and morning after formalities to tell Mark with his back still to him, reassuring in everything but his dead tone, “Just me. Go back to sleep.” 

Mark’s answer is to sit up on the bed, sheets pooling at his hips and hair pointing in a compass card’s every direction. Scrunched shut eyes open slow, and then silently watch on as Donghyuck searches through his gathered pile of clothes for something, nothing but pants and a single sock on, ducking down the next minute to check under the bed for whatever it is he's missing.

“Leaving?” Mark croaks out, leaning over the side of the mattress to look at how half of Donghyuck's body disappears under the frame. 

When he comes back out, it's with a sock in his hand, successfully rescued from the unchanging sea of underwear and sneakers, staying kneeled by the edge of the bed to show Mark a face gone glum.

“What? Want me to stay for breakfast?” he can’t help the scorn, tongue leisurely running over teeth as he waits. Mark blinks in a violent squeeze of eyelids. More nothing. 

Donghyuck gets a move back on then, sock slipped on when he hears, “Can I see you again?”

“Guess so,” he hums distractedly, flinging the clothes laying over his shirt off of it and to the foot of Mark’s bed, letting them pile up over his covered feet instead. See him again? As in, hang out? A sock, jeans, another sock—and his t-shirt, there we go. Right. Mark. “Jisung’s thing is still on next weekend, right? I’ll be there.” 

“Uh, no. Not that.” Mark hesitates, the top of Donghyuck’s head having barely made it out of the shirt’s neck, and then, “I mean, yes, Ji’s thing is still—but I wasn’t—I mean, I was actually thinking we could, uh, maybe do this again.”

It gets Donghyuck to stop in place for a second, face still swallowed by black polyester, and when it comes out the other end, it does so a feature at a time, eyes buying themselves time through forehead, nose, mouth, chin, before he can’t put it off any longer and has to look back at Mark. 

He’s just as Donghyuck left him—blinking up at him, naked, back slouched, face bleary, worse for wear—and yet, somehow, Donghyuck is the one that’s feeling bare—by the blurry memory of biting into a lemon wedge and downing a water bottle and calling Mark dog flashing by, along with the clearer, not as blurry picture of what came after.

He remembers the nasty bump his hip took against the bathroom sink, its water left to run with the intention of dipping his fingers in it to wipe the dirt on Mark’s face clean, and it had been the same place he had hit earlier that night as he climbed down the kitchen counter after his tequila shot. He’d been drunk enough to laugh about it, but Mark had been gone enough to worry over it, try to mitigate the pain with the caress of his hand, drop to his knees to tug the waist of Donghyuck’s jeans down an inch and kiss over the reddened skin, nuzzle into it. And hands in Mark’s hair, and a mouth teething on the buckle of Donghyuck’s belt with a nose deep in his happy trail, and jeans going unzipped. And Mark's face rubbing up against his belly, and a kiss now over real skin instead of cloth, and the hands on Mark’s hair pulling on it.

And then Donghyuck’s sober fingers tripping over themselves, memory going into present time as he accidentally digs his nails into his own palms, done in his hurry to tuck his shirt inside his pants just so his hands have something to do under Mark's stare.

A bleary, naked Mark that still smells like stale alcohol and shit cologne and standing under a lemon tree.

“Yeah?” Donghyuck’s voice keeps its loyalty to him, unwavering in his attempt to sound casual after the stretch of time that he’s let pass. Shoes picked up and held in one hand, he lays his other palm against the bedroom door and looks back at Mark, a line appearing between his brows. “Is it really that bad out there? Are you actually bitchless enough you have to settle for your own sloppy seconds? ‘Cause that’s a whole new low.” 

He pushes the door open, and a haste seems to take over Mark at the sound of it creaking into the hallway, going commando to throw last night’s jeans on as quickly as he can, Mark’s spare time before Donghyuck slips out of sight put to use into slipping on the pair of socks he had unintentionally left him at hand. By the time he’s followed him out, Donghyuck is halfway down the stairs, an ongoing muttering of him thinking aloud and wondering to himself, “Is no one else willing to hook up with him? Is my bar that low?"

“It was fun,” Mark calls after him, a statement-like sound to the way he says fun, like there's nothing Donghyuck could put out to counter against it, seconded by him etching on, "Can't deny that."

“For you, yeah. ‘Cause it was me," Donghyuck argues anyway, sounding just as resolute about it, and he can't help a quickfire grin as the footsteps that had begun to climb down the stairs on his tail suddenly stop dead on their tracks.

"But not for you?"

When Donghyuck turns around at the foot of the stairs towards him, his smile has been mopped up, leaving on its trail an unimpressed set to his face, one he sticks to even through the sight of Mark and the pieces of his broken ego laying across the steps. The way he scoffs, too, and his cheap sarcasm when he tells Donghyuck, “Oh, you're right, now I remember. You looked dead bored."

Mark's forearm leans on the railing as he rests his weight on it,  and Donghyuck finds his effort to hold in a shit-eating smile mirrored back to him in Mark's smugness, pride all over his voice at, "Yawned really fucking loud." 

He remembers. Mark's face rubbing up against his belly, and a kiss over real skin, and the hands on Mark’s hair pulling on it as Donghyuck went along with a progressively whinier string of please, which lost its status of begging once there was nothing else for Mark to give him and he'd still been going please for something. 

Donghyuck shrugs, pretending he can't feel his ears grow hotter. “Not my fault you put me to sleep." 

Of course he remembers, please even as he kneeled alongside Mark and kissed him, still grimy and with Donghyuck's own bitter taste on him, Mark's jaw and cheeks a weight and size well known enough for Donghyuck's hands to mold themselves to before they'd even gotten to them, like a puzzle piece nearing the only blanks that could be right for it, tabs already shaped to their fit. 

“So?” Mark insists when all Donghyuck does is look blankly back at him, foot taking a step forward to come downward, suddenly too cool and collected to Donghyuck's liking.

In return, Donghyuck lifts a shoulder up in yet another shrug, refusing to roll up his sleeves and show his heart, how fast it's beating right now and how down he is for this whole thing—the casualness and the fun he can't deny and the seeing again. “So maybe I’ll need a ride back from Jisung’s. Who knows?” 

The quiet of a passed out house makes it easier for their resolves to show their first crack, only holding off long enough to be the one to grin back and not the first to break and show a genuine smile, and then, “Hyuck?”

The sound takes him off guard, a gruff voice he can’t pinpoint, with Mark’s facade crumbling into startled and his eyes jumping somewhere over Donghyuck’s shoulder being all the hints his body needs to have him turn on his heel. 

What he finds is Jeno sitting up on the couch, the same one where he passed out early last night and the one the whole party sidestepped to keep going around his blacked out form, wearing last night’s clothes and what looks like not much more than thirty seconds of regained consciousness, a hand rubbing at an eye to help him through as he wonders, “What are you doing here?”

No one moves for the moment it takes for Jeno to be satisfied with the ratio of knuckle to eyelid of his eye rubbing, query left to question mark the air up to the moment Donghyuck takes it upon himself to move towards the couch, pretty-boy-shaped obstacle hopefully the one and final boss on his way to the front door.

"Good morning to you too,” he teases, the one of Donghyuck’s hands that’s free from holding his shoes by their back reaching over to pat down a tuft of Jeno’s hair, with the sound of Mark walking down the last of the stairs and beelining to Donghyuck’s side working as the backdrop. “I crashed here too. Mark was getting the door for me.”

Jeno’s eyes onceover them as Donghyuck tucks one last strand of hair away, but their skimming stops early once they reach their bodies’ ground floor and stay there, an ounce of lucidness added to them as they remain fixed at both of Mark’s and his feet.

“And you switched socks while you were at it?” he says, flat voice giving Donghyuck nothing to go off of, at least until he can think to look down along with Jeno. 

There’s a pair of black and white checkered socks and two plain greens rolled up to their respective ankles, except Mark and him seem to have unintentionally gone halves in the dim light of Mark’s bedroom and the morning after daze, one foot green and one checkered each. 

Donghyuck’s brain has already put its shoes on and gone on a sprint, quick on its feet to offer a drunken bet excuse Jeno wouldn’t think twice of before rolling over. And if Donghyuck didn’t remember last night, then he would have gone for it, nosedived into the lie and left this to die, let Mark’s future hook-up texts (and that’s if he ever gets brave enough to send even the one) to pile up, and bury this thing into the ground.

But Donghyuck remembers, giving in and begging for it and everything in between, and his mind is backtracking to run the opposite way, making shit up as it goes, because if he’s already in this deep, he might as well bury himself one foot deeper and make it six feet under. 

“Look,” Donghyuck’s face angles back up with it, feeling Mark quietly follow in stride, and doesn’t have to make too big of an effort to look as if he’d been caught with his hand in the red. “We were keeping it low just in case, ‘cause we wanted to be sure, you know? But we were gonna tell everyone after Ji’s graduation dinner at your place. Swear it." He rolls his lip under his teeth in what tries to be a nervous bite, going for the sweet tone Jeno's track record shows to have a possibility of refusing Donghyuck anything that adds up to naught. "Do you think you can keep a secret that long?”

Jeno blinks in lethargy, brain appearing to be quick enough to decode two pairs of mismatching socks, but having trouble running his own little brother’s nickname through. By his side, Mark is facing him with a look that's doing its very best to put two and two together, and Donghyuck realizes that, even through his headache and his current willingness to kill over a glass of water, he might be the only one of them not too hangover and just awake enough to hold this conversation. 

“Tell who what?" Jeno repeats, still managing to make blinking look like a sweat and tears task. 

Donghyuck goes for straightforward, his hand reaching out and closing around Mark’s, which stays limp between Donghyuck’s fingers as if too low on self-esteem to believe it’s trying to be held.

“Jen. Keep up,” he deadpans, and two pairs of eyes follow the motion, one drawn to it by sight and the other by feeling. 

“Oh.” A pause, and then, “Oh, wait. You’re not kidding?” 

Jeno’s gaze goes from where it’s stayed on Donghyuck all this while to Mark for the first time, a side glance letting Donghyuck know Mark is the only one of the three to still be fixed down on their clasped hands, and he starts pulling him towards the door before Jeno decides to do more than gape, Mark historically too bad of a liar and presently taken too far aback to be able to answer anything with something that could neighbor coherence right then. 

He grabs the one half-full water bottle left amongst the great wall of empty beer cans over the kitchen aisle on his way out and tucks it under his armpit with a deja vu feeling passing him by, gripping Mark’s hand vice-like and talking loud enough for Jeno to hear him across the room. 

“Mouth shut until Friday, alright?” he makes sure one more time, grabs Mark’s house key off its hook from the wall hanger, and once he steps outside, he does so barefoot over the welcome mat and with a handful of Mark, fresh air seeming to be the winner in drawing him out of his close-lipped spell.

Mark wets his lips as Donghyuck holds onto the door handle and slips his shoes on, lets them part open when he lifts a leg to step on the wall high enough for him to tie the laces, and just as they are starting to take on their bunny ears shapes, Mark says, and Donghyuck quotes, uhhh.

“Jeno can’t keep a secret to save his life,” Donghyuck decides to save them time, switching feet and adding a new shoeprint to the front of the house, two new loops to tie together on the making as he goes on. “You want him telling everyone else he saw me walk of shame out of your place? Get our ears talked off about how bad of an idea this is? You want Renjun on our asses?”

He looks away from his foot and the background of old red bricks, waits for the words to sink in and get gold of Mark’s face crumbling, and only then goes back to pulling tight on his laces’ knot. “Didn’t think so. You’re welcome.”

Donghyuck fixes the cuff of his jeans before dropping his leg back to the ground, dusts his hands off, and when he faces Mark again he can’t keep his body from deflating, sigh taking the air out of his body and a centimeter off his height at Mark looking like no one warned him Donghyuck had picked up speaking in tongues. 

“Hear me out. We play house at Jisung's, keep this up for a bit until you figure out how to get ass again—” Donghyuck didn’t think Mark’s face could fall any further, but apparently there’s a basement to Mark’s levels of annoyance that he’s reached just now, “—we tell them we broke up again, make shit weird for a little while, and then,” he draws his shoulders in, makes a face, “I don’t know, life moves on.” 

Mark’s head is tilting on its own accord, the way it tends to do when he wants to say no but knows he’ll end up saying yes. And it’s not like he’s got much of a choice by now, with a lie already in the works and the threat of getting told off by Renjun something Mark would look forward to even less than Donghyuck, but some foul part of Donghyuck—the one hurting, with the ache in his ass, the pang of his hip’s bruise and feeling tender at the hickey sitting on the junction of neck and shoulder; or perhaps the one that at some point laughed into Mark’s mouth last night and feels like he could live off of that feeling for however long he’s got left—wants to try to win him over anyway.

He steps a little closer, comes face to face with Mark’s front teeth leaving their mark on his lip, and thinks of anything but leaning down to fit his head on the crook of his neck and doing something stupid like breathing him in and shit. 

“We play house for them. Meanwhile, you get to see me again.” Donghyuck’s hand rests on his stomach over his belly button. Doesn’t move, doesn’t slide down or press forward. It sits and splays open in a second’s time, sinless touch staying put as the sun gets hidden behind a cloud and Mark’s eyes are made to go blacker at their pit. “You have fun, I yawn, everyone wins,” he makes himself smile by the end of it, instruction followed to the letter with no feeling to back it up. “Won’t even have to sneak around for it. How’s that sound?”

The click-length of time between Mark’s mouth working open and him talking leaves a window for Donghyuck to cross his fingers and hope he aims for something longer than a monosyllable, and up to a point, Mark does. 

"What am I supposed to tell Jeno if he asks?” he whispers, untrusting of an outer wall’s width to keep them from being heard, eyes fleeting to the window and then racing back to Donghyuck, who refuses to consider cute the sight of a grown man telling him in a volume worthy of telling a secret, “You know I’m a bad liar." 

“Who said anything about lying? Tell him the truth—” a lull between words just to watch Mark’s eyes go wide, “—about how you won me back. The very sober, romantic PG truth.“ 

Donghyuck reaches around Mark's stock still form to turn the handle and push the unlocked door back open, guiding him backward through the threshold with a hand to his shoulder. “Go on. Make him a mean cereal bowl. Get creative.”

The door closes on Mark's face, and Donghyuck allows himself a moment of quiet to lean back against it, stare straight ahead at the empty, eight a.m Sunday street, unscrew the cap of the bottle that'd been tucked between his arm and ribs, and take a swing of—Fuck, vodka. That's Mark’s strawberry vodka water bottle. Shit.

"I don’t know what to tell you,” Donghyuck shrugs, shoulder dragging over the bakery’s display window, keeping his eyes on the street up front. “We got talking—”

“Seriously? You just randomly got talking. After months of not talking,” Renjun deadpans. 

Donghyuck fakes interest in the dog walker going against the current of window shoppers on the opposite sidewalk. 

"What does that even mean, got talking? Like, hey, hi, what's the time?, half past three, take me back?, sure, end scene?" 

The tiny one’s cute. What’s that dog breed called again? 

“Was this before or after you gave me your phone so I could delete all your texts and your pics together ‘cause you couldn’t get yourself to?” 

“There you go. I never got over him. We’re meant to be,” Donghyuck turns his head to smile at him for a second, lie-rotting tongue kept well hidden behind his teeth. He swallows the sour taste the words leave in his mouth, and points a steady finger to the other side of the road even as he feels meant to be kicking and screaming the whole way down his throat. “Hey, what’s that dog called?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“I meant the breed.”

“Oh, uh. Russell something. Terrier?” The focused furrow to his brow leaves as soon as it comes, quick and short slaps to the side of Donghyuck’s arm his way to retaliate. “Don’t try to distract me with dogs,” he tells him through his teeth, and Donghyuck takes it until it begins to sting, swatting his hand away in a I’m-giving-in gesture.

“That’s all there is to it, for real. He called me, we got talking,” he stresses it out just to be annoying, objective accomplished when Renjun doesn’t hold back from rolling his eyes to hell and back, and he takes advantage of the fact his friend’s barely listening to him anymore to go for the vaguest possible explanation, “and we just… felt like giving it another shot.”

Donghyuck stares at the dog, who suddenly makes a one hundred eighty turn and puts everyone’s walk on hold to head for the walker. Renjun stares at him, act perfected in its long fixed look dictionary meaning without a blink getting him to miss the beat. 

“So we’re talking hunches now,” he says, and Donghyuck doesn’t need to look back at him to go out on a limb and guess he isn’t overly impressed. 

The alleged Russell Terrier is humping the walker’s leg now. Not having to fabricate any excuses to be horny out in the open. Good for him. 

Renjun leans in closer, face both sheet-blank in emotion and irk written all over it. “You know, right now I’m feeling like shooting myself in the foot. Wanna join? If you step on my shoe we can probably two-for-one it.” 

Donghyuck twists around to look through the window, peeking through the gaps between the letters of the Mad Batter spelled out in decal stickers, the empty space between the A’s legs letting him see Jeno take a cake’s cardboard box from the counter, D’s tummy snitching on Mark leaving too big of a tip. Donghyuck genuinely hates his guts. 

“Would it kill you to be supportive?” Donghyuck answers as he presses his face closer to the glass, because the clerk didn’t even say thank you, and he squints until he can make out the letters on his name tag. Minho? Minhee? He’s fucking dead too, anyway.

“No, but a shot in the foot might, ‘cause I didn’t think it through. Did you?” Renjun challenges, know-it-all tone beginning to win Donghyuck’s short-temper over, detaching himself from the window to rest his cheek against it instead, crossed arms leaving his body weight with no choice but to trust the glass will hold him up. 

“I thought this through a lot. Trust me,” he assures him, anything but kindness in it. 

Renjun sighs, and Donghyuck feels a flash-fast glimpse of guilt.

“You know I do," his voice shifts, something softer and understanding that makes Donghyuck want to scratch away the awful-friend itch growing under his skin. "But wanting to be with someone isn't always a good reason to be with them. Does that make sense?"

Guilt zooms by, and Donghyuck stands empty-handed on what to give back. I know? Fuck you? Thanks? 

His lips quirk up in what any other day could have probably become a full bloom smile, but Renjun’s face makes a carbon copy of it anyway, mocking Donghyuck’s tense mouth going up for a second in what could as well be a wince, and it’s enough at least for then. 

The bell at the top of the door chimes on Jeno and Mark’s way out, and Renjun’s sentimentalism seemingly made Donghyuck miss the moment where the cake switched hands, his head still against the wall-tall glass lolling dramatically to the side as everyone else makes to go on their way. 

“Can literally anyone but Mark hold onto that, please?” he whines, voice shrill and top notch nerve-getter. 

It has its desired effect, with Mark taking Donghyuck's hand in his when he walks past him and towards his car's parking spot, pulling him forward with an overly confident, "I’m not gonna drop it.”

Their fingers run into each other when Donghyuck tries to lace them together at the same time Mark tries to curl them around the back of Donghyuck's hand to keep them palm to palm, an awkward collision and a painful sight they try to make up for by interlocking their fingers as close as they'll go and putting up with the sweat that's already beginning to build up.

“Yes gonna.”

“Not gonna.”

"So gonna."

"Nuh-uh."

Renjun and Jeno staying an even number of steps behind goes unnoticed, Donghyuck too busy shoving his elbow into Mark's side, Mark too busy trying not to trip over his feet and land his fall cakefirst.

“What the hell, dude?”

Their joined hands are brought up and slipped inside Donghyuck's jacket pocket, if only so he can really jam the bend of his arm under Mark's rib cage and keep it there to hear an endless stream of ow ow ows.

“That’s for overtipping an asshole.”

Who would have thought there could’ve been another Park Jisung in their same twenty kilometer radius, with a cake to his name at Mad Batter and due for pickup on a Friday night as well? 

Donghyuck guesses it’s either that, or the guy at the bakery’s counter could not care enough about his part-time to double check orders before handing them out, because flipping the cardboard box open shows them not a cake topper of a fist-sized mouse wearing a graduation cap, but the top of a bright lime green cake from top to bottom reading back to them a Happy 12th birthday! in black fondant. 

It’s late, they’re stuffed, and the cake is still very much a cake, so Jeno does the honors anyway, leaning across the dinner table with a clean wineglass on his hold. It gets flipped upside down, its rim pressing over the top of the cake to cage in the edible exclamation point, before he pushes down and cuts off his cup-shaped serving. “A toast to the birthday boy.”

Jisung’s glass follows suit and hoards the word day in his glassful, arm staying stretched out and ready to join the rest in a clink.

“Not my birthday," he echoes himself, voice having turned monotone after the fifth time.

A chef's knife cuts through the green glaze, the sponge cake, and the supposed fun of bending a cake out of shape. There's enough booing going on around Renjun and fingers jabbed into his side to convince him to at least give up on conservative plating and drop his acute-angle slice inside the bowl of his assigned glass, and when his cup walks into the gathering of clink-ready glasses, it does so like it's social suicide. “A toast to twelve year old Jisung.” 

Chenle is swirling his glass between loose fingers by the time Renjun’s arm stretches out beside his, a scoop of cake already taken out sand-castle-bucket style. "I'm hungry. Hurry."

“Toast to the only couple who doesn’t make me want to throw up.” Jaemin’s glass of neon cake makes to meet the rest of their glasses in the middle only to make a detour at the last moment, raising it over their heads to give a nod and a shutter-speed smile to Jeno's mom and Jisung’s dad on the other side of the kitchen pass-through, which falls as soon as his eyes go down an inch and get hold of Mark and Donghyuck sitting on the other end of the table, reluctant when he adds, “And you two. Love it for you and all that.”

Donghyuck puts on a show of mouthing bitch back to him, overplaying it when he goes big in exaggerated vocals and a display of teeth that borders on too long at consonants. Whatever it is inside him that boils into rage every time he gets a front row seat of Jaemin’s incisors smiling back at him, though, dies down to give room for far more urgent ways to fizz over, like it's doing now over the hand that squeezes his shoulder in reassurance and then stays there.

The dinner-sated warmth of Mark's palm burns through Donghyuck's shirt, as he reaches over the oak table to cut off his half moon shaped slice, and then raises his glass along everyone else's, holding the stem of it in a pinch of thumb and middle finger. 

"A toast to us," Mark offers, the soft motherfucker, and the air Donghyuck's body drinks up right after it tastes off, lungs making faces when they take a bite of the sugar coated oxygen, molecules glazed lime green from going sickening in sweetness.

He isn't aware of his mouth slowly curving up at the flush-cheeked, pinched-glass sight by his side, until Jaemin goes right back at it. 

"Us us or you two us?" is what turns the air back to bitter at record speed, and Mark’s steadying hand is forced off Donghyuck’s shoulder when he pushes the chair back and leans over to take Jaemin’s wineglass with a tug, replacing it instead with a bare fistful he takes from the cake and drops inside his empty cup, the uppercase letters to happy detached from each other and turned unreadable when Donghyuck crushes them out of shape. 

The foot of the glass is slid across the table by Donghyuck’s fingers, green under the nails and chocolate crumbles stuck to his knuckles, hiding all mean spirit under the sweet voice that calls, "A toast to Jaemin shutting his big fat mouth."

Half the table laughs, voices going treble with the sound, exceptions to it being too busy with stuffed mouths (Chenle, true to his hungry claim, and Jaemin, who picked up a spoon and dug in with his smile unmoved) or cleaning up after their mess (Donghyuck, trying to pretend he’s all about staring daggers into the side Jaemin’s face, and not going stiff at the muscles from Mark’s wordless hold around his wrist to rub a napkin between his fingers and the back of his palm and wipe it clean).

That’s the first and last mention of it, with the rest of the night stacking up in a pile of minutes they had spent singing happy birthday and times Jaemin had tried to talk just to have a spoonful of cake stuck inside his open mouth, force-feeding him into silence at every attempt. Nobody had cared. Except, well—

“You should have seen him when we were waiting for you guys. I know Renjun. He's actually pissed. Which he has no right to be, you know? It’s not like it’s his business what I—”

"Wait. It has buttons."

Donghyuck's hands go stiff at Mark's words, muffled through the fabric over his mouth. Rigid knuckles put a stop on Donghyuck's attempts to pull Mark's shirt over his head, the ones where he's been fighting the stubborn stretch of cotton that wouldn't move past it. His eyes move over the inside out of the shirt, and yeah, that's the sewn back of a queue of buttons indeed. 

"Fuck. Sorry." 

There's a second of nothing, and the next they are laughing. Not one of them on their own, or one at the other's expense, but together and over the same thing, and it's a first in a long line of times. Tentative, tip-of-the-iceberg nervous, but when Donghyuck pulls the shirt to lay it over Mark's chest once more and help his face come back into curtain-marred moonlight, Mark's faint outline unveils a smile-made scrunch that is a mirrored feeling on Donghyuck's own.

It's in that finger-snap moment where he's loosened up enough to lose track of who-when-and-why that he undoes the top button of Mark's beach shirt, TVlike static as his brain's only provided backdrop for it.

Mark growing quiet is what flips his realization's switch of what it is he's doing, and by then he deems it too late, with his only other option being looking up and away from his handiwork to risk meeting Mark eye to eye. 

Donghyuck's version of manning up right then involves staying where he is—at the edge of the bed, with his thighs on either side of Mark's lap and Mark's hands low on his back—and moving his fingers down to try to feel around for where the next button is. His hands go down with Mark's chest only a moment later, and after he hears the flick of a switch and warm light swims into the room, he sees Mark laid out on his back with an arm stretched out ridiculously far to turn his bedside lamp on. 

Donghyuck swallows with a noise that can't go unheard in the quiet of the room, and more than a risk it's an inevitability now, with the corner of his eye unforgiving when it shows itself resilient in catching sight of Mark. Blinking up at Donghyuck, short sleeved button-up open down to the starting line of his chest, blushed down to his neck and pink under the bomb threat to fashion that is that horrid blue Hawaiian shirt, and Donghyuck finds it in himself to undo the next button, carrying on silently with them one by one, even with the half sight of Mark still trying to shoulder its way into the limelight of his attention and the added weight in the air of something too akin to intimacy turning his fingers clumsy.

Here’s how it is: Donghyuck is used to the desperate, teenaged need to get off. The now, now, now, if I don’t come my balls are gonna turn permanently blue eager sort of timing. The care for feel-good touch traded for fumbling, clumsy and to the point, rushing through it like there's always somewhere else the other person needs to be (some place with someone they liked more than Donghyuck, perhaps; somewhere less filthy and with a lower quota of shame to pay for entrance). 

It's not until after Mark that he finds that, sometimes, it can be both slow and fun at the same time. Like the first time Donghyuck kissed him, open-mouthed and a little frantic—after Jeno worked as a bridge between them all, he was introduced as Renjun's friend to Jaemin's friend, they both earned the other's names past friend-of-a-friend and skirted around each other for a grand total of four hours—and Mark had broken away only to say slower, hands holding onto Donghyuck's wrists from where they were low on Mark's back ready to tug his shirt out of his jeans to slip under it, and repeated for Donghyuck to go slower, slower, until he was left pliant and unrushed, fingers tangled in Mark’s hair molding the tilt of his head a nickel of a breadth at a time, taking the time to breathe against his mouth just because he could.

"Wasn't this huge on you before?" Donghyuck finds himself asking, when part of the intrusive slideshow his mind shows him of Mark-branded memories gets to a slide with this same shirt being shrugged on in a changing room.

Donghyuck had gotten called in to peek his head in through the curtain and give a second opinion, Mark spreading his arms wide to let him see how baggy it had been on his frame, the very reason why he wasn’t sure whether he should get it.

It’s gonna shrink, Donghyuck had sentenced, his arguments for Mark not buying it having to do with everything about it except its size. Mark hadn’t believed him, they’d gotten into a two minute argument with the changing room mirror as their one eye witness and every retail worker in the store holding onto hearsay evidence of it, and the shirt had gotten checked out not so much because of Mark’s liking for it than a matter of two pieces of pride being on the line. 

"It shrunk,” and before the I told you so even manages to flash up on Donghyuck's mind, "Shut up."

Last button done with, Mark lifts himself off the bed to shrug it off and plop down on his back again. Donghyuck wastes no time taking his own shirt off, but when his head makes it out the other end, he finds Mark’s blue-treed nightmare still in his hold, held up to the light and being turned around in his hands. 

"It's a little tight now, actually," he ends up saying, and after blink-and-miss-it hesitation, he hands it out to Donghyuck. “Try it on.” 

Donghyuck stares at the balled up shirt, a mess of folds and creases in Mark’s hand, and feels like his body might be working on autopilot when he takes it from him and slips it on, leaving it unbuttoned and wide open. 

Mark's smiling when Donghyuck finally lets him into his line of vision for more than a corner-of-the-eye share, looking exactly the part of someone who is a little under the influence from two whole tipping-over glasses of cake, enough sugar by volume in them to guarantee the high that's got him with eyes barely holding themselves open and a softness to even the roughest of his edges—the white line on his chin resembles anything but a faded childhood scar, the bump on his nose runs down like a perfect curve in the lamp light, the cut on his thumb disappears when it's pressed against the shirt now hanging from Donghyuck's shoulders.

He tugs at the fabric from one end, and then smooths over one side of it with his palm, the drag of his nails carrying its five-fingered trail to Donghyuck's bare stomach, where it stays splayed open, always slow, slower, to the point of infuriating.

How it once was: Their first time—after more will-they-won't-they appropriate tension and a grand total of two weeks—had Donghyuck biting at the end of the thumb that ran across his mouth, telling him to hurry up, and Mark had pulled away looking appalled, a hint of a smile shining through despite the effort. 

"Bossy." Back when the word could sound like a compliment coming from Mark, who had lowered himself down to be almost nose to nose with Donghyuck and wonder aloud, "What's wrong? Too tough to let me spoil you? Or has no one ever taken their time with you?"

He hadn’t thought Mark would have liked what he had to say, options raging from upsettingly honest to honestly upsetting. Far too early to show his mean streak’s every color and sheets already kicked too far down this guy’s bed for a heart to heart, Donghyuck had kissed him in lieu of anything else to offer, avoidant tendency a heaven-made match for Mark’s proclivity to give in without a fight. 

The hand on Donghyuck's stomach climbs up and settles on his back under the borrowed shirt, fingers curling around his belt to give a pull and have him slide down Mark’s lap, gravity dragging Donghyuck down in return. 

"Yeah. You keep it," Mark says, sounding more satisfied and less loopy than the cover to judge him from would suggest.

Donghyuck kisses him, as if that's the thing to do to avoid upsetting with honesty or honestly upsetting him. Go figure. 

(When he looks inside Mark’s bedside for wet wipes, he finds a lip balm, Mark's glasses' case, earphones, expired creams, another lip balm, a packet of wet wipes with a broken lid left open to dry out, a four-pack of toothbrushes torn open at the back with a lone red brush still inside. Still there. 

Donghyuck pushes it closed and reaches a hand down the side of the bed to feel around the floor. His fingers meet nothing, a rug, the bedside table's leg, back to nothing, and then cotton, getting hold of it right away and wiping his stomach clean with ugly blue palm trees.)

Disturbing the peace

Any conduct that violates public order, disturbs the public, or incites violence, e.g leaving a kid without his birthday cake, ordering strawberry ice cream, and/or being a lying liar who lies. 

Mark’s name slips out at some point, probably part of a half-thought over the shoulder reply to his mom of whether he’ll be back for dinner or a name in a list of people that he saw that day, but it ends with his sister asking if his boyfriend could help her with her car. 

Donghyuck holds his phone between cheek and shoulder and waits on Mark’s ringing tone, damning all the talking about him over dinner and useless trivia like his dad’s a mechanic, all the dinners Mark was over for and his family’s pretense of oh, so your dad is a mechanic?.

Tone.

The couple of weekend lunches with Mark at the table, grease on his ratty work shirt and black stains in a hand or a cheek that Donghyuck always tried to clean up with a wet thumb, no matter how many times he found it to only smudge it further.

Tone.

The one and only time he’s asked if Mark will be joining them and Donghyuck’s clipped no is enough of an answer.

Screw family meals, and his sister's elephant memory, and Mark’s ability to open a car’s hood and make sense of what in Donghyuck’s humble opinion might as well be a maze of potentially volatile wires and plastic cases, and the fact he actually picks up Donghyuck’s call at the fourth ring.

“Please? I’ll suck you off,” he promises right after the deal is set out for Mark to take. Not because he thinks Mark might refuse, but because he can almost feel the yes that took a seat inside Mark’s mouth the moment he heard Donghyuck say Donghee's engine is acting up again.

It’s nice to at least pretend, then, that it’s Donghyuck’s oath to make it worth his time the only reason why Mark budges with a sigh, done with a reluctance he can’t keep up when Donghyuck’s mom opens the door for him that week’s Saturday morning. An unwillingness that’s lost as soon as Donghyuck hears Mark’s voice from where he lays on his sister’s backseat, unhelpfully there with his shoes pressed to the window, and Mark's cheering louder than Donghee herself once the engine starts again. It's forgotten about once he's asked to stay for dinner and for the night, giving in by sheer persistence and for appearance's sake in that very order. And it's bothering Donghyuck once he’s laying over his still made bed after dishes got washed and everyone clocked out for the day, something not sitting right with him, racking his brains until he runs into it. 

"You didn't even get head,” he announces to his room, staring at a ceiling that doesn’t seem to care much for unkept promises. 

Neither does Mark, who settles for pushing his feet off the floor so he can pick up the pace on Donghyuck’s desk chair, spinning taking on speed.

"I'm starting to feel like that blowjob was more of a reward for you than for me,” he ventures out.

“‘Course it was,” Donghyuck agrees with ease. “Dick’s always a reward.” 

Mark’s intention of keeping his volume down with the rest of Donghyuck's sleeping house in mind drives right into his voice’s overuse (hackneyed from shouting over the rattle of Donghee’s car and the one-on-one him and Donghyuck’s dad have over dinner) and leaves it a wreckage, hoarse and going up in smoke—the worst possible combination with him spreading his legs open over his seat, never stopping his wheely chair axis turning, and telling him, “Go ahead. Don’t mind me." 

Donghyuck looks at him, eyes closed and head leaned back, as he takes one more lazy spin with his soles dragging over the carpet, before lifting a foot off the mattress and stretching out his leg until it reaches Mark’s chair, plopping down on Mark’s lap to draw his spinning to a close. He sets it flat beside Mark’s leg and bends a knee to pull the chair closer, forced to a stop once it meets the edge of his bed, slides his foot back over Mark’s thigh and goes up until his heel can grind down on him, and—well. 

Donghyuck gives Mark’s crotch under his socked foot a nasty look, narrowed eyes reproaching it after his nth and last effort goes to waste. “I don’t think he even knows I’m here.”

The hint of disdain in it makes Mark go half-lidded to show him a smile.

"Don't worry, he will," Mark promises, patting his ankle once in there, there compassion that tries to get him not to give up.

Mark’s body gives into a shiver, then, a split second thing that runs through him from toe to shoulder in sleepy chills. It turns the already ridiculous combination of gym shorts and hoodie he’s wearing into pointless, hood up and hands dug deep into its pocket not helping his case. 

He looks closer to drifting off than getting off, Donghyuck notes, impossible to rile up when he’d most likely rather get a massage than a handjob. 

“Better not. Already brushed my teeth,” he finds himself saying, mindlessly moving the ball of his foot down to Mark's leg to knead at his thigh.

Mark snorts at it, keeping silent after, the curl to his mouth dying down as he grows softer in the lines of his face and palm left slack over Donghyuck’s shin as his foot presses down on the muscle once more, and Donghyuck’s brain cogs are already turning to make this into his new end of the deal, get off traded for drift off and nothing more.

“Hey,” he speaks up, however, just when he can see the last of tension leave Mark, a moment away from falling asleep sitting up. 

Mark hums back, only half of himself into it, and Donghyuck’s cogwheels are working overtime to think it would be weird if anyone came in here and saw your supposed boyfriend spent the night on a chair, and you genuinely won’t be able to sleep if you don’t ask him this, a shame the gears turn too coarse to keep going before he gets to don’t let this die just yet.

“Do you think cum can give you cavities?” 

Donghyuck stares with no inhibition as the words go into Mark’s ears, get unpacked and then packed back up with an extra of added sense, and then a grin takes over him, splitting his face in two before his eyes can think of opening up. 

“That would be bad news for you, wouldn’t it?” he says, still just as coarse and in the dying embers of smoke. Donghyuck gives a light kick at Mark’s side with the sole of his foot half for show, half to drag him out of his doze, and it at least works in getting an actual answer from him. “I doubt it. Semen is, like, a tiny pool party for sperm. I don’t think the little guys would like it too much if they were in a pool of acid.“

Mark looks up the pH level of human semen, sounding far more awake by the time he goes yo, there’s so much calcium and zinc in it, why don't they use it for toothpaste? make it organic and stuff, and honestly, screw Sunday lunches and Donghee’s memory and the fact an hour has gone by and Donghyuck’s eyes sting from looking at the screen of Mark’s phone, his belly hurts from laughing at the Naver search rabbit hole they’ve down on, and no one gets sucked off before falling asleep. 

It should be a little more embarrassing, probably. Not the bit where he wakes up horny enough to cream his pants on sight, or the part where he gets his ex to roll him onto his back and do all the work for him, but the one where he makes fifteen blocks on foot at six forty in the morning to get from point A to point B. 

One where he tosses and turns for a while before rolling out of bed and slipping on the pair of sneakers closest within reach, laces left untied and coat shrugged on on top of his stretched out sleep shirt and shorts. He gets in his cardio of the day with the 1,3 km. his phone promises him to have made in the eighteen minutes since he walked his way out of his house’s front door on his toes, journey made with his keys jingling all the way inside his parka’s pocket in oblivious glee over the reason for the bounce in his step, and a call that's saved from falling on the booty category by a hair's breadth.

It should be mortifying, except who could give a shit about their sense of self-worth and whatever else they’ve got left to lose when Mark's letting them inside his and Jaehyun's shared room and forcing Jaehyun himself out of it, who gets rushed into taking his morning shower with a bundle of clothes held to his chest and a door clicking shut at his back?

Downright humiliating, the image alone of Donghyuck’s cheeks sheet marked and sleep red, hair greasy from sweating through the night and loose shoelaces black from the underside of his shoes showing them no mercy, bareskinned legs with yellow trouser socks slid down to the ankles—all sitting under a coat too big to house him in, and all anyone passing through anywhere from Donghyuck’s street to Mark’s gate on their way to an 8-to-5 job or a morning class gets to see.

From the shoe-cramped entrance hall to Mark’s bed, however, it’s almost a brick by brick raise of Donghyuck’s vanity, with Mark’s stubbed toe on the stairs and the gunk in his eyes seemingly not being a detriment to getting Donghyuck out of everything from coat to pajamas but his ugly bright socks, which stay on as Donghyuck lays back, sinks his nose into Mark’s cheek and hooks a leg over his, his rubber-duck-yellow heel pressed to the back of Mark’s knee, and he thinks he could die just from that, just like this, smelling of the downsides to summer heat and the echo of his own morning-rotten breath against Mark’s skin. 

Mark says something that tries not to sound like Donghyuck’s name, mumbles nonsense into his jaw, and then his body’s dead weight is dropping heavy over Donghyuck when his arms give up on him, letting their bellies stick together when all he does is shift just enough to fit his face under Donghyuck’s chin.

It’s not all pretense when Donghyuck lets himself lay under Mark with eyes closed, breathing hard and wordless, because there’s truth in his tongue feeling too big for his mouth to speak, heart too violent inside his chest for his breath to allow itself to be caught, fingertips buzzing too hard to lend him the needed strength to push Mark off him—or to do much more than run a palm down Mark’s sweaty back. 

His fingers are slowed down by the speed bumps of Mark’s spine, and Donghyuck wants to hold him, the weight and the warmth that comes with it, only one breath longer. 

Keep him. Donghyuck wants to keep him. 

“Get off. Come on. Off off off—” 

He fights through the rock-heavy weight to his tongue to rush him off, forgoes the pins and needles running through his fingers to give a light push at Mark’s shoulder, fast-track heartbeat turning him unforgiving when he keeps at it until Mark groans and traps Donghyuck’s hand in his at the nth nudge the far end of his collar bone takes. 

“Okay, okay. Hold on,” he tries, voice a low rumble that works well enough as balm to soothe Donghyuck from giving another shove, Mark rolling over and off of him with eyes closed and a lungful slipping out in a breath. 

There’s never been the right amount of room in Mark’s single bed for two people to lay side by side without meeting at a point of contact or five—kneecaps on kneecaps no matter which side they are facing and arms having to worm their way over or under hips and middles and napes—but they seem to have somehow gone against the laws of physics and figured out the way to stay behind the manmade line telling their stretch of the mattress apart for the first time. 

Donghyuck runs a hand down his face, wiping away the dampness under his fringe and the set of his mouth, curling with something unnamable and gut twisting at the picture beside him he won’t allow himself to peek at and take.

A blink in place of a flash and then he'll be stuck with a mental print of Mark's nose bunched up against the bed and his pout kissing the brown sheets, a dip in the curve graph of the forever-there tension he seems to carry around now showing every muscle slackened and lax in turn, another image for the next intrusive slideshow his mind has decided he’s earned. 

Donghyuck wouldn't just want to plain keep him, then. He'd want to have him just like this, to give time an interlude and make him stay right there, to let Mark crawl under his skin so Donghyuck can lay him away inside him, loosened up and sleep warm and at reach.

“Too hot,” he feels the need to explain as his foot slips through the side of untucked bed sheets and meets hardwood.

“Thanks."

Donghyuck is looking at the floor as he searches for his shorts and yet still manages to hear the smile that wraps around Mark's face when he says it.

The rustle of his clothes coming back down over him is the only answer he gives, before his butt takes off the edge of the bed and Mark seems to find it in him to ask, "Leaving?"

Strength turns you weak, too much amounting to nothing. Grow too big and you'll break your stem off and fall, buzz too high and you'll find it hard to come back down, beat too violently and you'll give out.

Donghyuck is the frailest of them all, willpower a feeble and scrawny thing that lets him turn around and look at Mark over his shoulder while he rolls his socks back up to his knees. Bunched up, pouty, warm looking, relaxed, waiting on for Donghyuck to ruin it all.

"Not before raiding your kitchen." He steps on the back of his shoes, tucks the loose laces inside and grabs his coat before making his way to the door, happy keys' jiggle in its pocket trying to patch up the moment along with Donghyuck's promise of, "Check the fridge, yeah?"

(When Mark makes it downstairs, it's to an empty kitchen, everyone in the house already on their way to their morning class or early shift, still sleeping the day off, or walk of shaming back to their own home. 

It's either by art of reflex or a scrap of hope that he reaches up on his tiptoes to feel blindly over the top of the fridge, behind the massive, archaic-looking fruit bowl he hasn't seen anyone touch or refill as far back as memory goes—the one spot no one would look for, the one where you could leave a plate of steaming food in a house filled with men that won't work a stove and are always looking for a biteful to steal, one where Mark had found scrambled eggs and burnt toast more than once left tucked away for him when morning class and early shifts had Donghyuck leaving with a i'll leave you something or check the fridge the morning after.

Mark's fingers meet nothing, dust, a dubious bumpy lemon, back to nothing, and then the cold ceramic of a plate.)

"Wait. Where's Hyuck?" 

"On Mark." 

There's a second of only muted conversation, and then a laugh, Chenle's signature pitch all over it. "Oh."

Donghyuck’s eyes stay closed all the way throughout the new attention he gets hold of, breathing evened out and limbs hanging limp from where he’s perched on Mark's back. He’s a block away from letting the sway of Mark’s steps pull him closer to sleep, too comfortable in the dark of shut eyes and with thigh muscles still twitching thanks to the walk from Chenle’s place to the closest ice cream shop.

The good thing about having a fake boyfriend is that if he sees you there—smack in the middle of a Baskin Robbins late at night, staring vacantly at a list of flavors you're not really seeing with purpling eyelids growing heavy—patting his own shoulder for you to lean on while he orders for you both is the least he can do, offering a piggyback ride is almost mandatory, and taking him up on it is more than warranted.

Thus, Mark squatting down and leaning forward at the shop's exit is an invitation Donghyuck takes as eagerly as his leftover energy allows him to, the weak hop he’d made to climb onto Mark's back turning into him wiggling his way up until he had been able to lock his arms around Mark's neck, rest his cheek on the back of his shoulder, and let his ride for the night take off.

They're in no rush, a Saturday night with midterms and morning schedules nowhere in sight, taking the longer way back and stopping by every stray cat, waiting at yellow traffic lights to go green and then back to red instead of trying to dash their way to the other side, and Donghyuck hasn't felt this little in a long while. No thinking buzz or stress itch or anxious goosebumps. Only the hum of Chenle and Jeno's conversation from where they're walking further up the street, sore legs from a long day that ended on a fifteen block impromptu ice cream run, Mark's hands digging into the muscles of his thighs, and the melody of Renjun complaining as he walks by their side.

"There's so much Very Berry,” he hears then, a grumbling Donghyuck can picture in his head being paired up with Renjun’s scrunched up forehead and a judging plastic spoon sidestepping every gram of strawberry cream it could come into contact with, as if it might turn the spoon toxic.

Last Donghyuck had seen of their three-way shared cup, his scoop of Very Berry had been towering over Mark’s and Renjun’s pick of Cookies 'N Cream, just beginning to melt over it then. He can only guess what it looks like since, daring to think there's not much unadulterated cookies left for Renjun to scoop up.

"I thought he'd have some," Mark says it both like an apology and an excuse, volume kept down under the impression of Donghyuck being dead to the world. 

The back of his arm against Mark’s neck and right over his voice box lets him feel the vibration of every word, a touch-made lullaby that keeps on pulling him under, helped by the rhythm to Mark’s walk, the hitch to his breath right before he swerves a puddle with Donghyuck’s weight on him or when he has to adjust his grip so he won’t slide down, and Donghyuck has almost made it to unconsciousness when something settles on his face—like a fly making its way over his cheeks but never touching more than air, or his best friend’s eyes going over his face. 

Donghyuck wills every muscle on it not to give him away, lets his lips pout out against Mark’s shoulder and his arms sag over Mark's chest, not in the mood to blink his eyes open just to hear something stupid and incredibly petty, like eat your shitty fruit cream, or why did you keep this one thing from me?

The second one might be a little less stupid, a lot more justified, and just as petty. 

"He didn't tell you anything?" Mark adds on when Renjun keeps quiet, seeming to be on Donghyuck's same train of thought, and Renjun goes quick about being on board with playing dumb in return.

"No need. I'm well aware he loves Very Berry. He's always been a freak," he mumbles, words barely understandable, as if talking about this is the last thing on his mind, spooning up ice cream taking up all of his attention. 

There's a pause, one where Donghyuck feels Mark's neck stretch forward and his teeth lightly meet the plastic spoon Renjun sticks inside his mouth for him, Mark's hands too busy holding Donghyuck up to do it himself, and with the sound of Mark swallowing down also comes his answer.

"It just sort of happened, honestly. We really didn't plan on it," he insists, and Donghyuck's got no clue why Mark is trying to fix things up on his behalf, but it's definitely ruining the feeling-nothing wave he had been riding high. “I think he'd have come to you if we hadn't, like, you know—"

"Dived in dickfirst?" Renjun makes a noncommittal sound. "Yeah, I know."

One of these days Donghyuck is gonna strangle him, just you wait. 

"We're doing things differently now," Mark etches on to their defense, a bad liar but always good at skirting around half-truths, a craft Donghyuck helped him out with and something he prides himself in taking at least an nth of the credit for.

It’s not a lie because things did, indeed, come to be out of the blue, because they really are different now in all regards, and because Donghyuck would have probably come to Renjun if the got-talking bit he had sold to him had been as such. If either Mark or him had picked up the phone at some point, cursed the other out, picked it up again to apologize, and then, maybe, had an actual conversation, Renjun would have been the one to hear about it first, whether he’d have liked to or not. 

And Donghyuck is plenty aware it would have changed nothing, that Renjun would have most likely discouraged him from it, reminded him of you made me delete all your pics together just last week and you're gonna hate yourself after, one of them already true and the other on its way to being so. 

The thing is, Donghyuck expects the shit talking in all those would-haves to have been over Mark. Perhaps about how much of a bitch he himself is after he lets relationships crumble down, having the nerve to dress the part to attend their demolition, watch them be blown up to bits, and then complain about getting rubble on his nicest jacket. Or maybe a minimalistic, keep-it-simple recount of every time Donghyuck had made his grieving everyone else’s problem, torn his ruined jacket off and stepped on it on his way out as he shouted for someone to get the grime off of it now. 

Never, however, for Renjun to sigh out of his nose, a huff in the shape of compassion that Donghyuck had never been on the receiving end of, and tell Mark in the most earnest he could get himself to, "Just be careful, yeah?”

Careful. Adjective. Avoiding a potential danger. Or mishap. Or harm. Or Donghyuck, apparently, who has been made into a synonym of it by his own best friend, lips tightening and eyebrows pulling close together in what may look on the outside as if the dream he's under has gone rogue.

"It's good different." Mark is resolute with it, words distorted by the spoon Renjun seems to let go of and leave it to be held between his teeth as soon as Mark takes it. 

"Stop spoiling him, if it's so good. Next time we get only cookies," Renjun seals the topic with, and in his book, Donghyuck knows it to be the closest he can get to letting his arm twist.

A moment later, Mark is halting in place in what feels like his forearm being gripped tight, only for a mouth to close in on the shell of Donghyuck's ear and speak up right into it.

"Hey,” Renjun says loud and clear, and Donghyuck pulls off his best act of getting startled awake. “Your boyfriend got you your shitty fruit cream. Be nice and have some."

Donghyuck kisses Mark’s cheek with a dirty mouth in thanks afterwards, leaving a lip-shaped stain of artificial strawberry on Mark’s skin his eyes keep going back to for the rest of the night. 

Donghyuck is scrolling through his camera roll when he comes across a lime green cake wishing Jisung a happy twelfth birthday!. He remembers a bakery and a bill being slid across a counter that never gets a thank you for in return and a name tag, and suddenly it doesn’t matter that his eyes have been closing longer and heavier with every blink to take a rest from his phone screen and the time at the top reads 3:34 a.m, or even that Mad Batter’s last Instagram post is five months old. 

He’s sure at some point they’ll read the screen-filling message speaking about Minhee and wrong order and disappointed, with a blinding green picture to seal the deal. 

Even after all this time, Mark’s place's Blankblock Pattern remains unchanged. 

The fun of the Blankblock Pattern is that it can ruin anything for you, hence the name. Still, no matter what the blank is, it always starts and ends the same.

They might get there with their hands only an inch of human decency away from literally being down each other's pants. Or, when they were together, with takeout for the two of them, or a backlog of schoolwork for a study date Donghyuck never made the effort for them to hold themselves to, but always with the intention of locking themselves away in Mark’s room. 

In an ideal world, they would open the door, close it, say their helloes to whoever’s roaming around the first floor and dash up the stairs to do their blank—have dinner, cuddle, cram, nothing, fuck, all of that in that order. Except they open, close, greet Johnny staring holes at his food in the microwave or Jaehyun laying upside down on the couch, ask them how they are out of politeness, and then boom. Blankblock.

Mark ends up making conversation, like the social cockroach he is, and gets them stuck sat on the kitchen counter with their dinner going cold, or accepting a cold can of something and sitting down in the stretch of space Jaehyun’s sprawled out form has left for them, neverminding Donghyuck’s horny levels being through the roof—just as they are now, Mark's butt settling down at the top of the back of the couch, socked foot dug into Donghyuck's thigh and ankle trapped in the web of Donghyuck's interlaced fingers that goes around the roots of his shin. A homey picture, if not for the fact Donghyuck’s got a cushion over his hard on and a promise of a quickie gone to waste—and what for?

"Seriously. Apollo 11? Those guys got to the moon by a miracle.”

Moon landing discourse. That’s what. 

“Debatable,” Johnny mumbles into the rim of his coke can, if only to get under Mark’s skin, a hobby Donghyuck is sadly not the only one to partake in. 

“Seriously," Mark reiterates, already wide-eyed and leaning as far forward as he can, excited over… grown men who risked their lives to step on a floating rock. Like they couldn’t just do that by staying on Earth? Bunch of losers, if you ask Donghyuck. 

Mark, on the other hand—

"They got there on a space module that was this close from being held together by, like, staples and tape. Like, the minute they leave the ship an alarm starts going off, and it’s also coming from a computer that only works with a thirty two kilobyte memory. Thirty two. You know how much that is? Less than a freaking email,” he emphasizes every other word, mind-blown enough to make up for Jaehyun’s sarcastic wow while he continues his endless social media scrolling. 

“So they get to the moon,” Mark carries on for his attentive audience of zero. “They get there, do the whole one small step one giant leap slow-motion walking thing, and when they're going back inside the module to come back to Earth, one of them hits a circuit switch with their backpack.”

“Damn.” It’s Johnny this time, who’s looking at Donghyuck now, eyes moving down to the pillow he has in a death grip and then back up to his face, smile only climbing higher up when Donghyuck replies with a blank tilt of his head pointing up at Mark in a pay attention evasion of a gesture.  

“Yeah, and it’s basically the thing they had to flip so they could take off the moon and meet the other module that was waiting for them and go back into orbit. So they call Houston like guess what, and Houston’s like, let us check if we can fix it from here, and then they are like, okay, we can't, but take off is in like ten hours, so you guys take a nap and we’ll get in touch before the thing. So, uh—” 

Mark’s voice fizzles out, a frown taking shape as he stares straight ahead, and this might be the lamest anecdote known to man, but Donghyuck has been made to hear it so many times before he’s got no clue how Mark could have forgotten the one cool bit about it. 

His roommates' what? did they take the nap? and come onnn, Markies do nothing but make his brows come closer together, the lines on his forehead beginning to go into the growing-upset numbers, and Donghyuck decides to step in before he starts to bite the flesh of his thumb or pick at his lip.

He slips a finger past the cuff of Mark's sock to earn his attention, the back of his index soothing over the elastic mark left behind on Mark's shin when Donghyuck gets his eyes on him to tell him, “The pen, babe." 

Mark blinks at him, the come ons and nap comments wasting no time to become blank-babes (how could you forget the pen, babe? and you do pet names now, babe?) and yet managing to blend into background noise, eyes staying on Donghyuck’s face to roam over it, as Donghyuck holds back the need to swallow the spit that seems to have forgotten where to go and decided to gather on his mouth instead, fingers moving in awkward-paced circles where they’re still tucked inside Mark’s sock. And just like that it’s over, Mark drawn away and out of it with his next blink, braving through the red high on his ears to shush every last one of them. 

“Right. Shut up. So—shut up—So, this dude calls them back like half an hour before take off and he’s literally like, spitballing on the spot with them, like, okay, uh, do you have anything in there you can shove in to flip the switch?, and one of them suddenly goes I think I have a pen, so he just—” 

—jams the pen inside the gap and pokes around until Houston tells them it worked, flip successfully switched. Long story short, they get back safe and sound, a pen saves the day and it all works out.

Donghyuck finds out he’s zoned out only after reality has swam back into focus with a blink, coming back to it with Mark turned to him, pause pressed on his conversation with Johnny, who somewhere along the way actually got hooked on Apollo’s pen nonsense, to make an askless question to Donghyuck by the line of, “Pen dude’s name.”

And for all claims of lameness and nonsense, Donghyuck takes no time to answer back, "Buzz Aldrin.” 

It's a moment, instant-sized, but here's everything in that one second between the last of Donghyuck's voice and Mark's neck facing back in Johnny's direction: Mark's toes curling over Donghyuck's thigh through the layers; Mark's hand going to Donghyuck's nape to run the flat of his palm quick and gentle over blood warm skin and peachlike hair; a smile dimpling Mark's cheeks until the dip of them goes far enough to meet bone and muscle, flipping the switch the wrong way and making Donghyuck fall fast and land even rougher.

Thank fuck the moon landing's a sham, anyway. 

It’s weird, even for a dream. 

Donghyuck is at a dentist’s waiting room in a space suit, foot tapping going ballistic from nerves growing in size. When his name gets called, he opens the door to a dog in a dental gown, and he says nothing ‘cause he doesn’t want to offend him, but it’s a fucking Russell Terrier holding a dental drill, and now he’s telling Donghyuck he’s got cum cavities, and he doesn’t know how the dog can tell which cavities are due to inordinate amounts of candy and which to excessive dick in mouth, but he’s turned the drill on and the whole room smells of strawberry ice cream and Donghyuck feels like he might faint on the spot.

And then there’s a palm sliding over his, hand bare and locking its fingers in the spaces between Donghyuck’s own gloved ones, squeezing the blood flow out of it. Donghyuck turns his head, and finds the dark of his pillow against his face, alarm blaring him out of the dog dentist office and back to his bed.

He slips a finger inside his mouth, feels around for any newly empty gaps, and rolls over when he finds all thirty something of them safe and sound. 

Mark has him pressed to his front to stand between his open legs while he leans back on the kitchen counter, kissing him in that way he seems to love, the slower, slower kind he took his time teaching Donghyuck at one point, all languid and drawn out.

Never drawn out like a when does this end bad movie or a speech made of set phrases, drawing morphing into droning at an infuriating, almost aguishing, definitely lazy slow pace.

It's drawn out like a spoon refusing to accept it has already scraped the last of the food off the bowl and still going back in for one more sweep, just to stick itself inside a mouth to get the tongue on the shallow dip of it, the force in turn pressing the other silver side of the spoon against the roof of the mouth, and pulling it out at a steady, almost unhurried, definitely relishing pace to lick it clean. 

The hand on Donghyuck’s hair closes into a fistful and runs Mark’s nails across his scalp in a light scratch, the honey on Donghyuck’s grounds that had gone crystallized from him not being warm enough now scooped up under Mark’s fingernails with no complaint, everything a part to the sum total of Mark kissing him spoonful long, as if knowing there’s always a little sugar at the bottom left just for him to scrape up, gluttony kicking into gear for the scraps of sweetness Donghyuck only seems to be able to give him through motion. 

Mark presses his mouth to his and doesn't part, stays like it's the only reason he came to begin with, like he can't understand why someone would arrive just to take right back off, moves only as if he's just getting comfortable, lips sliding over Donghyuck's like he's sinking deeper into his seat. 

There's nothing out of place in being kissed like that—as if that's the main act, headliner of the night, like they are fifteen and this is the most fun they could ever have—and it's also not new that they're making out while Mark's horde-worth of roommates fill the house with the noise of Black Ops that comes from the living room, walks through closed doors and climbs up stairless through the floorboards. 

But then Mark drags his teeth over Donghyuck's bottom lip in something that's not biting, not tugging, but Mark letting his mouth hang loose for a moment and do whatever it can afford to, lips either gone numb or drunk in feeling, maybe just comfortable enough not to work to impress for a second. Right at that, at the beat of time Donghyuck's eyes open half-lidded and get to see Mark's lips stretching out into a small private smile, is that he realizes there's no one around to put an act up for and fool, the nearest thing to having another human around being the echo of Jaehyun's raised voice trying to talk his way into a rematch. 

Donghyuck leans back into Mark's space and makes a biting motion that lets out an ugly clack of teeth, exaggerated and mocking and successful in making Mark grin wider, and unwillingly gives room to the thought that, for the first time since they've been anything but together, this isn't the prelude to anything else, what with the most he's gotten out of it being Mark's hand on his ass. 

It feels like coming over with the intention to stay until the next day already in the plans, main act and headliner of the night being half past nine kitchen kisses and the five day old leftovers—the ones they had walked in there to reheat in the first place—still fridge cold and abandoned on the counter, as well as Mark humming into his mouth the way he does when he’s just remembered something, before taking a moment’s worth leave of absence from scraping Donghyuck’s sugared corners up and breaking away.

"Hey, guess what? You were wrong the other day," Mark leans his weight on his palms over the counter, putting enough space between them for Donghyuck to get more than just a fraction of Mark’s face at a time. The whole of it shows something cocky, the lame kind—eyebrows raised awkwardly high and a gleam in his eye too alike childish pride—that Donghyuck has only seen him be able to pull off. "It was Michael Collins. The pen astronaut."

No, it wasn't. Michael Collins had been all the way in the other module when the switch had gotten pen-flipped, in the one that had been dancing circles around the moon, waiting for the show to be over and to help Buzz go back into orbit.

“You’re thinking of another man now?” Donghyuck stresses the word with his hands sliding up Mark’s back, shirt riding up with the movement and in tandem with his brow scrunching up playfully, toeing a line he’s not sure he’s even allowed to slackline anymore. 

Still, Mark’s smile stays fixed, easy-looking crinkles around the edges that make sure to stretch the rope Donghyuck’s standing on tight and secure, so the next step he takes is safe and doesn’t have him tumbling down. 

“You’re all the same.” Donghyuck is forced to say it in a mumble from the sudden nearness, the last of it lost in his own grin and Mark’s mouth closing in on him once more, back in and there to stay.  

(In the morning, Mark's covers are lifted inch by inch with limbs moving only on careful grounds, so no one gets to ask if he's leaving before he already has.

Mark wakes up to skin temperature sheets with no body to own up to the crime, and when his hand feels over the fridge half an hour later, he finds nothing, dust, a rotten lemon, back to nothing.)

“Sorry. That wasn’t the most romantic,” is the first thing Mark had said after. 

It really hadn't. Mark had blurted it out with Donghyuck sitting on top of a closed toilet lid, his mouth on him, and a hand that had bunched Mark’s boxers up one of his legs, just to slide into place between his ass cheek and the cold ceramic sink he’d been leaning against and hold onto his bare ass—their way of making time on a restaurant's tiny bathroom until the beeper on the pocket of Donghyuck's pants buzzed to let them know their table was ready. 

Donghyuck had focused on tucking him back inside his underwear, as he willed his voice steady through his sore jaw and his heartbeat climbing up his throat, pushing casualness to the limit when he answered, “Heat of the moment thing. I get it.” 

It usually ended at that: Mark sent something Donghyuck's way, carefully wrapped up and tied together with tenderness; Donghyuck dodged it as if it had been hurled at him, double edged and bound with barbed wire; Mark caught it when it boomeranged back to him exactly as it was; after a while, repeat. 

And it had been just Donghyuck’s luck for this to be the one time Mark decided not to, the one that made that usually not be an always, with the moment having turned three-sixty and at the ready to land back at Mark's feet when he told him, “It kind of wasn’t."

“What do you mean?” Donghyuck grinned, letting the elastic of Mark’s boxers snap back against his waist with his mouth stretched thin into a smile, eyes never going higher than his hip bones. “That didn’t even sound like a love you love you. That was mid-orgasm love you.” 

“Not… really?” Mark's face scrunched up on its own accord, unwilling to let it go. “I love you love you.”

Donghyuck had busied himself lifting Mark's pants up then, letting them both drown in dead air, quiet enough to hear the bustle of the conversation heap coming from outside. 

He had been about to do Mark’s fly for him with treacherous shaky hands, when a palm curled around the back of his neck and pulled him closer, nearing Donghyuck's face to Mark’s stomach. Donghyuck heard the clink of Mark's belt as his interrupted handiwork left Mark’s pants to go back to pooling at his knees, too big for him in true older-brother-borrowed fashion. Pants as in slacks, and borrowed as in a need for something semi-formal nonexistent in Mark’s pile of caps and surfer shorts, because they had dressed up for once, all at Mark's insistence that they had never gone on an actual, proper date. 

Which Donghyuck thought was fucking dumb, honestly, because they weren’t a couple in their golden wedding years or living in the nineteen eightees for fine dining with candlelights and too many forks to be any more of a proper date than movie nights and takeout on Mark’s bedroom could be. He thought it was dumb as he made fun of it, as he took it back without giving away it had only been at the emotion-made flicker on Mark’s face, as he put on his own stupid slacks and let Mark pick him up and stood around to wait for a table. 

The sight of them in dress pants in a French-named place, with an actual waiting area and waitresses and table buzzers, had Donghyuck pulling Mark away from it all, an urgency for something familiar and under his control tugging at Donghyuck’s heartstrings, who in turn tugs at Mark’s sleeve towards the men’s bathroom. The risk of fucking up their dress pants in stains and crinkles and the chance to let the buzzer's vibration inside his pocket go unnoticed were both an added plus, which got Donghyuck hoping the limit of Mark's French experience that day would be a petite mort, before innocence sided with him for him to mourn oh no, we missed our cue at its most believable.

And there Mark went, making him feel like he deserved the Earth to crack under his feet and more, as he hauled him against his belly and bent down to press a kiss to the crown of his head, lips staying put to rest over a sweep of hair and murmur into it, “It’s okay. I didn’t say it just to hear you say it back.” 

The reassurance in it was bittersweet, sticking to Donghyuck’s gums and ruining the taste of every next bite he would take that night. Because the difference between them was that just thinking about that big-L-word’s heavy drop got Donghyuck to flinch, tail already tucked between his legs, and Mark to smile, crush always having been his favorite sound.  

“But you thought I would,” Donghyuck thought aloud to himself, only to tilt his head up so he wasn't talking muffled and against Mark’s dress shirt, chin coming down over Mark’s belly button with a painful dig of bone, a little louder and a lot more accusative when he repeated, “You said it ‘cause you thought I would say it back.” 

Because why else, if not? 

Mark opened his mouth with denial peeking over his teeth, and closed it back once he read through the line of Donghyuck’s mouth, bowing his adamance’s head with a puffed out breath. 

“Yeah, but—” He stopped to run a hand through Donghyuck’s hair, going down the curve of his ear and moving his thumb down to drag it over the corner of his mouth, wiping away leftover spit with a rough fingertip, filled with botched care and still finding it in himself to smile at him in ways Donghyuck didn't understand. “It’s okay,” he echoed, never calling reassurance quits, and something about it had set Donghyuck off then. 

"Is it?" he narrowed his eyes at Mark, who infuriatingly only smiled wider, dipping the tip of his thumb over Donghyuck’s reddened lip and rolling it under its sweep. 

"Yeah." 

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.” And then, still happy-dimpled and with a shrug signed on it like he was sharing an afterthought, "I already know, anyway."

Donghyuck's cheeks lost color with every tick of the clock, feeling the way his face hardened at the words, iron-made sulk and temper going taut, because it was fine if Mark liked the weight and the warmth that comes with being crushed, but why was he putting that on Donghyuck? 

“What do you know?”

Mark laughed at that, squeezing the side of Donghyuck's neck and going without taking the moment's measures as he lit up in a grin. 

"No, seriously. What—I don't even know. How could you know?"

“Come on, man,” Mark insisted, and if it had been any other time, Donghyuck would have found the fun in the way it slowly died down into a confused smile, eyebrows lifted and corners of his lips fixed in place, as if the threat of them moving might scare the moment away. 

“Are you actually mad that I love you?” he asked, disbelief having snowballed into a voice battered all over, still with his pants down to his knees and legs covered in goosebumps, sweet to the point of patheticness and yet always managing to make Donghyuck into the bad guy without even trying. 

Lips pressed together and sucked in in stubbornness, Donghyuck only stared back at him, getting Mark to rub a hand over his face with a sigh, as if recounting the options he got left.

“Shit. Okay, uhm—I’m sorry?” he said, seeming to land at a high pitch and backpedaling as the answers. 

“Don’t take it back,” Donghyuck wasted no time to whine, leaning back against the toilet tank from the force of it, frustrated over the fact Mark wouldn't shut up, over himself never being able to say the right thing, over the restaurant’s pager on his back pocket that wouldn't stop buzzing and how there wasn't one single stain on his slacks and that no one had tried to force the door open since they'd locked it ten minutes ago, over not knowing what it was he even wanted. 

“What do you want me to do then?” Mark kept on at, the lack of any trace of anger being the worst of it all.

It was a mean joke to crack if he was reading Donghyuck’s mind and going off its last written line, a pitiful plea to make if he wanted to know just to follow Donghyuck’s wish word for word—and Donghyuck had come apart at the seams, no pacing or degree to it, staring straight down at the floor before Mark could get hold of the sting in his eyes winning them over or his chin wrinkling up once his lips lost to a quiver. The first thing he had found were his own loafers, tight on his toes in true younger-brother-borrowed fashion, and as soon as he felt the winning sting move into something far more telling of tears, he was digging inside his back pocket to take out the pager and press it blindly into Mark's palm. 

“It buzzed like five minutes ago," he admited, words watery inside his mouth and bone dry by the time they were out. "Someone probably took our table already.” 

He forgets the rest of it. Something something, they have dinner, tense days go into high strung weeks, he asks for some time, Mark says yes first, tells him maybe they should just break up second, Donghyuck sees red, fill in the blanks. 

That, however, he remembers. Mark's silence before saying I'll go ask, and after a minute nod from Donghyuck, pulling up his pants and taking his leave. The deep breath he takes in as soon as the door shuts, soaked and filling his lungs in air that tastes desperate, and the heels of his palms when they wipe over his eyes before he follows Mark out.

It's their Gone Down The Drain Moment. The one circled-over bullet point in its list, a breaking point, a plot's twist—call it what you will. Always easy to recall afterwards, almost impossible to recognize in the moment. 

Here, Donghyuck will do a quick demonstration: a Drain Moment, live and in the flesh, as he bumps into Jaemin at the back of the store around the corner of Donghyuck's block, Jaemin's grocery restocking clashing with Donghyuck's snack run. 

It’s Donghyuck's bare-bones good manners that won’t let him walk past Jaemin crouching at the canned food aisle without acknowledging him rolled together with Jaemin’s capability of going along with anything which lands them at the store’s checkout, Jaemin’s brimming basket by Donghyuck’s armful of chips and a family-sized soda, in a quiet that's usually relative to them alone without a one to plus. 

To Mark's credit and Renjun's dishonor, the two of them grew a whole lot closer than Jaemin and Donghyuck ever got to as each other's your-boyfriend's-my-best-friends and vice-versas when they had a chance to. They never moved past someone else binding them as their one and only link, Jaemin too far removed from reality for small talk and Donghyuck still lost on how to manage social interaction with someone that can meet him in the middle, see him and then raise him.

Which is why Donghyuck only knuckles under after he's run out of tooth enamel to waste on lip biting for the day, out of place when he cuts through the beep of the cash register and vocals-void background music with, “Can I tell you something? Just promise you won’t tell anyone.”

“No,” Jaemin is quick to say without looking back at him, remorse on the loose and nowhere to be found. “If you’re cheating I’ll tell Mark. And if you're thinking of shoplifting that Sprite I’m telling the cashier.” He seems to think better of it, tacking on at the last moment, "If you're confessing your undying love to me I'm rejecting you. And then I'm telling Mark."

Why Donghyuck is desperate to let someone know, and why that has to be Jaemin of all people is anyone's guess. All he knows is he's too tense to take in more than a third of his five senses' capacities—only a tenth of what he sees processing as more than shapes and colors; the chips he doesn't realize he's ruining by hugging them too tight to his chest; Jaemin's spiel translated from Korean to Simlish just understandable enough for Donghyuck to cling onto the first of it and confess, "I technically couldn't be cheating on Mark even if I wanted to, 'cause we aren’t together."

Keeping his eyes up front to put off facing Jaemin turns out to be needless, because all he does is in response is pat his pockets before pulling out his phone, water-clear body language of his thumb opening up KakaoTalk to hold a different conversation right to Donghyuck’s face a contrast to the at least half-assed interest he puts into wondering, “You broke up again?” 

What Anyone dares guess is that Donghyuck has been gnawing on this feeling for weeks now, has finally sunk his teeth through the last of its layers—indifference going into half-heartedness going into carelessness—until he met the hard core, a soft spot made of bone and memorized Apollo 11 fairy tales and ugly Hawaiian shirts and a toothbrush at the back of a drawer. He's got to spit out the marrow or he'll either continue to live with it between his teeth or choke on it.

“Just the one time," Donghyuck smiles, an acrid kick to the memory of sitting on a restaurant table with weepy eyes down on a menu held by still shaky hands, the sourness of it a fair contender to the one offering him a whole lemon between drooly lips and kissing the bruise on his hip better inside a bathroom. "And then we hooked up at the house and Jeno sorta saw us and, you know,” he shrugs, like he’s circumstances’ prime victim when he says, “I didn’t want Renjun and the rest of you on my ass, so I said we were together so we could keep hooking up, and now it’s—”

His voice thins down and out once he gets hold of Jaemin's face, not a twitch of a reaction in it, and the halt of Donghyuck’s speech is what earns him Jaemin’s eyes jumping up from his phone’s screen to him, taking stock of how he’s waiting on for something, and then, “Oh, yeah, I know. Mark told me.” 

With how the idiom goes, Donghyuck’s open mouth and slack jaw should have caught him a fly or two by now, but all they do is leave him dumbstruck. 

"Mark told you,” he repeats, like him Chinese whispering Jaemin’s words wrong to himself could be a possibility that needs ruling out, chance no longer standing with Jaemin’s mhm tearing it down to pieces, Donghyuck unable to help the muttered motherfucker he thinks aloud.

The reasons to justify him holding this against Mark go into the negatives, considering he’s guilty of the same thing, turning Jaemin into their local confessional. Anger doesn’t need any alibi or official paperwork to swing into action, though, so Mark’s a dead man walking anyway. 

In a click of fingers, however, that thought gets filed to the back of his mind, a new one arriving when Jaemin’s dead-toned question rings out in his head again, brows knitted when it won’t add up no matter how hard he tries. “Why are you asking if we broke up if you already know?"

Jaemin takes his time typing out his next text, and when he looks up, he says like it's the only thing that could make sense, “‘Cause you might have.”

“But you know we aren’t together." Donghyuck talks slowly, as if afraid the point has jumped right over Jaemin’s head and their conversation is about to go in circles. 

Jaemin kicks his basket across the floor once everyone takes their step forward at one person less down the line, and then settles for, "Mark’s not seeing anyone else. Are you?”

“How do you know that?” Donghyuck's job at pretending he hasn't been dying to find that out is piss poor (even if with work and school and Donghyuck monopolizing his free time crumbs to lock them both away in his room, it would be medal-worthy for Mark to have managed to be with someone else, but possibilities being low still never amount to zero), and Jaemin tends to go unimpressed by most of what he says, but this once it’s bad enough to get Donghyuck to cross his arms in front of his chest in a stubborn shield, moving his body’s weight from one foot to the other before giving in. “No.”

“Then you’re dating," Jaemin tells him, a proud look on his face over figuring it out all by himself.  

"That's not dating."

"It is. You're exclusive, you're fucking, you're dating." 

“You’re oversimplifying it.”

“You’re overcomplicating it.” 

Donghyuck holds his eye until he remembers Jaemin won't look away for as long as Donghyuck insists on keeping him there. Once he can't take the lack of blinking anymore, he grabs hold of Jaemin's wrist until he's lifted his phone-filled hand up to his face, blocking Donghyuck's face from his sight in a request to let him go back to being ignored. "Whatever. Just—Not a word to anyone. Got it?” 

Treason

Betrayal of one's own; an attack to a figure who one owes allegiance to. Like telling on your friends with a secret they trusted you with—

“Donghyuck.”

It's Mark, in that all too familiar tone that seems to exist just to warn Donghyuck off every ledge he stands in, enough to get Donghyuck to lift his forehead from the table and go on. 

“I’m just saying. If we’re talking treason—” 

“Drop it.”

“—then your best friend is a backstabber," he raises his voice to finish, untroubled by it. “Same as mine." His head turns only a moment later, craning it back to find Renjun's face in the living room's couch-built sea of people. "Warning Mark to be careful of me? Seriously?” 

Jeno speaks up, probably coming to Renjun's aid, but Donghyuck is cutting him off at the single digit second mark. 

“Oh, you shut up." He turns back to the front at breakneck speed, the finger he points in Jeno's direction moving over with him as he turns on his seat, now drawing an imaginary dotted line all the way to Chenle. “You two and your we would never meddle bullshit. What’s this then?” 

This being Mark’s not-frat’s dining table housing Chenle at its head, cheap toy microphone in one hand and rolling pin in the other standing for a judge’s mic and hammer, a pulled out chair by him waiting for Donghyuck when he walked in, Mark standing by a corner with eyes down on the ground, and a living room couch crowded with the few of Mark’s and his’ friends that didn't seem to have had any plans for that Saturday morning, except force Mark’s roommates off their own living room to stage a trial for Donghyuck. 

Their intervention borders on too thought up, the seed for it planted the day before at a group text Jaemin sends from a mini-mart’s checkout queue, and the trap is laid that day's morning with an early hook up text from Mark’s contact (and he should have known, really, because when had Mark ever been brave enough to send even the one?). Donghyuck falls for it hook, line and sinker anyway as yearning blurs it all around the edges, phone screen unclear enough for him to realize the phrasing is filled with contractions and lacking any typed out laughter for it to be Mark’s to begin with. 

It’s too late once he realizes, Mark’s front door on its way to opening up to Jaemin’s face, Mark’s phone tucked safely in his jeans’ pocket and a beam that spreads wider as he scans through the shape Donghyuck is in—unkempt hair, a coat hiding his sleep shirt and shorts from sight, long yellow socks that have become part of his sleepwear uniform fading into untied shoes, flushed the way only someone who just powerwalked fifteen blocks could be. 

Ten minutes later find Donghyuck having gone through every wail and complaint he could think of to try to get himself out of it, resigned to taking a seat and being made to hear his charges. 

"This is exactly why we didn't want you all to know. What we do or don't do is none of your business,” he crosses his arms over his chest, Mark looking up to Donghyuck’s stare already fixed on him only for the second time since this started—the very first when he comes to bail Jaemin out of Donghyuck’s line of fire; the second one now, at the mention of a we he makes up the other half of, his name put on Donghyuck’s mouth as the backlash. 

There’s something in Mark’s eyes then—a glint, a speck, a brown shade or that same look he used to wear when he would be late to something or as he promised next time, yeah?—that get Donghyuck’s going astray in return, no pardon Mark can beg for if his admission of guilt never makes it to destination. 

"You don't think it's our business when it affects us as a group?" Chenle steps in at the right time and with the wrong stance, microphone not making his voice be heard any louder but turning it robotic instead. 

"Are you the judge and the prosecution?" Donghyuck tries to argue, but all it gets him is Chenle waving his rolling pin hammer around, pressing him into getting on with it. He complies, not before sliding down his seat, fur collar bunching up under his face. "Genuinely? No, don't think so." 

"When we are forced to pick sides whenever you argue?" Chenle challenges, and Donghyuck feels everyone’s eyes ping pong between them at their back and forth. 

"No one asked you to," he smiles through a raise of his shoulders. Ping.

"And when it affects you two? We can’t worry when you’re both miserable ‘cause you refuse to just talk to each other?” Pong.

Donghyuck's hand moves over to his heart, clutching his shirt with his lip out in a pout. "Poor bunch of empaths. I'm so sorry our personal lives have been giving you all a hard time.”

Our, one of them Mark’s, who pings his eyes from following Johnny’s undisturbed toast spreading inside the kitchen to Donghyuck once more, and he pushes on just for the sake of seeing its outcome. “Mark’s already in charge of the apology fruit baskets. Right, babe?” 

Mark’s lips stay sealed shut and with no one’s defense to jump to now, devil’s advocate suddenly too risky for him to play, and the last of Donghyuck that remained still unticked and on gets ticked off. 

"Wait a second. Why isn't Mark on trial? I'm the traitor here but he gets to walk free?” He leans on the chair’s legs to rock back on them, looking around the room in fake curiosity, the only one daring to make a move being Johnny’s steps taken towards the couch’s arm, sitting down on it with his toast between his front teeth to watch them on, the same way Donghyuck’s seen him do with the morning news. 

Someone shuffles in their seat. Renjun’s entire existence spells out cut it out. Jeno feigns interest on the curtains. A cough upstairs. No answer. 

"What is it?” he insists, make-believe good fun all over his easy posture, shoulders drooping and lax-looking arms spreading open. “You all like him better so I’m the only one in the wrong?”

“No, but you’re getting warmer. Guess again,” Jaemin shrinks the gap of silence from Donghyuck’s voice to his almost down to naught, idle in the space between the shoulders cramping him on the middle of the couch.

Dongyuck stays still for a moment, and then his eyes open wide, mouth going round in the sound’s very shape when he says, “Oh. So that's your problem with me. You think I’m a heartless douchebag who is just using him?” When he smiles, it’s with no intention to taunt, but only as a medal to wear for having successfully tracked down the humor to the whole thing, because— “I don't know what he told you, but he broke up with me."

Donghyuck can see the gears turning inside Mark’s head, peripheral letting him witness Mark’s face scrunching up at the bitter intervention, ready to make one of his own. 

"He did," Jaemin does the job for him. "He also told me why."

Time passes in heartbeats then, words stealing the last of his nerves' strength away. Bend of his fingers too feeble to dig his nails into his palm, teeth too tired to bite at his mouth, Donghyuck keeps himself low on his chair for one, two beats, and admits, "Well, that's already more than I know." 

The silence that follows almost leads him down to believing Jaemin is gonna raise his white flag, call it a day and count his wounded, but then he's getting off the couch with elegance cut short, unnecessarily dusting off his pants as he calls, “Mark Lee to the stand.” 

Mark blinks fast, ping pong audience driven to his corner of the  room. "There's a stand?"

"You’re the prosecutor?” Donghyuck wonders at the same time, catching Chenle staring at the rolling pin he's spinning on its axis on his hand, too engrossed in it to pay Jaemin more than half his mind.

Jaemin's answer is pulling out the chair across from Donghyuck, open palm inviting him to take a seat. Ping to Mark shaking his head no, sinking further into the wallpaper against his back. 

“Mark Lee. Stand. Now.”

Mark's feet drag over the floorboards when he makes his way over, sighing deep before putting his hand over the Girls' Generation album that makes do as a Bible to swear on ("Pretty sure this is blasphemy." "It's Run Devil Run, actually.") and finally taking a seat in front of Donghyuck.

Donghyuck keeps it blank, eyes down on his coat's zipper he keeps dragging up and down even as Mark tries to beg a look back from him with round eyes, as his slippers bump into Donghyuck's feet and their knees meet under the thin narrow table, the contact getting sparks flying—not of the butterflies-and-fireworks kind, but more of a fork-in-a-socket way, as in it zaps Donghyuck for just a second and it's still enough to scorch his skin an unsightly red, a flesh warmth feeling he draws back from as soon as Jaemin has turned to Mark.

“Care to tell everyone why you broke up?” he cross-examines, hands leaning over the end of the table to support his weight when he moves closer to Mark's face. 

“You’re enjoying this way too much," Donghyuck murmurs, the laps his zipper is running picking up the pace, half-hoping the metallic sound will drown out Mark's voice and half-wishing there's nothing to drown out to start with, unsure whether he wants Mark to answer in front of half of social circle or keep it locked inside with the key thrown out.

And it's not like he even cares for Mark's side of it, because what Donghyuck knows is what he knows: Mark loved enough for the both of them for months on end and one day he fell short of unconditionality to keep on going. Something about Donghyuck quit measuring up, and Mark couldn't be bothered to take his bar down a notch. 

“Didn’t you want to know? I’m trying to help you out,” Jaemin peeks at him over his shoulder, consideration real to the untrained ear, the one that can't tell F-sharp friendliness from B-flat bullshit.

"You kind fucking soul," Donghyuck deadpans, but Jaemin's attention has already moved on, back to Mark and his tight-lipped stare on Donghyuck's zipper still going up, down, ping, pong—

“Whose idea was this? Yours or his?” Jaemin tries again, and Donghyuck's eyes meet Mark's in the middle, truce called to settle whose guilt-riddled cork board gets to have the pin of blame on it.

“Both.”

“Mine.” 

Mark seems to lose his footing at Donghyuck's admission, bunny slipper's ear rubbing against Donghyuck's shin in a fluffy frenzy to sit higher up on his chair.

"I said we should see each other again. I did. Me," Mark's tongue trips over itself to say, as if taking the fall in front of a court of law and not Chenle's hot pink karaoke mic or Johnny filling the gaps between the couch cushions with buttered toast crumbs, absurd and heroic and drawing blood from how tight his grip around Donghyuck's heart goes with it. 

"The relationship bit was me. You know that.” Donghyuck looks at Jaemin when he tells him, calm and measured a polar opposite that leaves Mark’s frantic energy without a match, and doesn’t need to look away to catch Mark making a move that looks too much like wanting to get the last word in, Donghyuck stepping over a bunny ear and tugging at it with a slide of his foot to tell him off.

It doesn’t matter much, having already given Jaemin enough material to look like a kid in a candy store, precautions regardless. Always the least enthusiastic one of the bunch, with taste buds already gone cloyed as he unwraps what’s only his third sweet of the day, but still high on a sugar rush, chin coming to rest down on his palm as he smiles at Mark. “Why did you give in, then?” 

Donghyuck had sold it to him, offered every pro and kicked the cons under the rug, wrapped it up nice and presented it as a bodiless crime. Mark’s a man, their maturity’s age at least three or more years behind the one on their ID by rule of thumb. A man offered a ribbon-cloaked plan thinking with his hangover brain and recalling his last night self’s reasons, who had found it hard to be anything but all for it with Donghyuck’s teeth on his neck. 

Point being, Mark has more than one excuse to pick and choose from, Donghyuck deeming him smart enough to at least come up with the most basic-logic of them, and yet he sits with lips pressed together as if they were his last line of defense, an Adam’s apple that goes up and then down, eyes that ping pong from Jaemin back to Chenle, who makes his presence reminded of with a solemn-sounding, "Remember you're under oath."

A blasphemous oath taken on a cardboard square picture of Yoona. It’s either that or the sight Donghyuck makes then—in unofficial booty call attire, the top of the chair’s back towering over his head and a hand pressing the teeth of his coat’s zipper hard against his bottom lip—what wins him over. 

“I wanted to be with him. Whatever way he wanted to," he says, keeps his eyes down on the table, voice low as if that could avoid the sound of it reaching the couch five steps away. 

Donghyuck sort of wishes that had been the case, because it travels at least far enough to make it to his side of the table, and it has to have been Yoona, because he can’t find himself anywhere in that pity riddle Mark just said. 

“Now that’s rich.”

Attention table-tennises back to Donghyuck, sitting up straighter than when he first slouched on his seat after coming in, bend of his fingers and point of his teeth renewed in energy to claw their way up and bite back.

"Should have just stuck around the first time," he reminds Mark, no shortage of spite in it. 

And Mark must have been sitting on the words for a while now, because he takes no time to remark, “You didn’t want to be with me the first time. That’s why we broke up.”

Another cough upstairs and a bathroom door closing, and only then Donghyuck’s hung open mouth closes, laughing through a wow that makes his back hit the wooden frame of his chair. The sound gets swallowed up in the four legs of Mark’s own scraping the floor as he pushes it back, up so fast that the one of his slippers trapped under Donghyuck’s toes slips off. 

"Happy?" he asks Jaemin, not waiting for an answer before he’s turning his back on all of them, limping in a bunny-less foot and making his way up to the second floor of the house. Probably to go lock himself in his room, like a coward.  

It’s Jaemin’s voice’s turn to get lost in a chair-on-wood scratch, his very somewhere in the mesh of Donghyuck’s chair sliding across the floor and him talking to Mark’s retreating form. “Fuck no. You don’t get to storm out after that.” 

Trying to tread on Mark’s heels secures Donghyuck a rally of sounds at each other’s throats, all aiming to be the one he takes note of (hey, a nickname he hasn't heard from Renjun since childhood, where are you going?, Chenle's wait, your closing argument!) and succeeding in making Donghyuck turn around as he keeps climbing up backwards, a hard stare and a finger warning them all off. 

“Anyone coming up these stairs is getting kicked back down. That’s my argument. Case closed.” He hears Chenle shout that’s not how it works after him, and grants them one more cautionary tale yelled over the sound of him taking two steps at a time. "Stay out of this, shitheads.”

Mark is already sitting criss-cross on his bed when Donghyuck opens his bedroom door, his entrance paid no mind to with Mark’s attention down on his phone.

“There he is. Biggest traitor in this house,” Donghyuck announces to the rest of the empty room, shutting the door behind him with his heel. 

Mark looks away from his screen after a second at the sound of a zipper coming undone, watching Donghyuck shrug his coat off and leave it over Jaehyun's unmade bed. 

"Traitor?" he asks belatedly, letting his phone fade to black as Donghyuck takes a seat at the very edge of the bed, a body away from the corner Mark has cooped himself up in. 

“You told Jaemin and let him air out our shit without running it through me. That trumps everything those assholes are doing down there."

Mark stutters out a queue of sentences that start and finish as a sound, phone having slipped out of his hands and left forgotten between his legs.

“That doesn’t even count," is the sentence that does make it out, boyish around the edges when he tries to pin it back on Donghyuck. "You told him too.”

“But you knew he would hold it against me. He staged that intervention for me," Donghyuck stresses the word out with a hand to his chest, clutching his own shirt in a fistful for good measure as he says, "I’m the only one who’s been getting chewed out all morning." 

Mark looks away at that, head turned to the other side of the room with hand picking at his duvet, taut in lines Donghyuck had only ever seen stand easy up till then. He waits one more moment, the one it takes Mark to dig his nails on his bed cover and scratch at them, as if trying to get all fabric creases and the strain in the air off with a drag of his hand. He sees the burden on the veins of Mark’s hands that stick out in blue ridges, the anxious feeling on the curl of his fingers, and doesn’t need to think through what to say next at all. 

“He told me you aren’t seeing anyone else,” he says far more calmly, in line with Jaemin’s cross-examination tone, as if Donghyuck had switched teams on his way up the stairs and slipped on prosecution’s shirt, Mark put back on the stand when Donghyuck molds his words into a question—the only thing he’s allowed to say when playing for the winning team. “That’s true?” 

Mark seems to back out right before sending the ball back to Donghyuck’s court, gaze putting on its running shoes and taking laps across the room, and then comes back in at full speed.

“Have you?” He pauses, always a pick-up line away from getting together with hesitation. “Been with someone else. Since us.”

“I asked first.” 

“I asked second.”

It goes on long enough for it to become a staring contest, one Donghyuck taps out of when he feels his face on the cusp from backstabbing him in a twitch or a shake, but not without making reparations for it in the shape of petulance, scooting over to the edge of the bed in a threat to get up and leave that is followed by, “Fine. I’ll ask Jaemin again, since he seems to know everything.” 

Mark scoffs, always one to take the bait (the initial reason he became Donghyuck’s favorite person to keep around, the current reason he’s not Donghyuck’s to keep now). 

“I didn’t tell him everything.”

“No, you didn’t. Just that we’ve been fucking,” Donghyuck shrugs in a silent nevermind, “and who else you’re seeing, and why you called us off.”

“I called us off?” Open mouth, brow wrinkled, head tilted down—every line of body language under indignation you can think of, it’s there, on Mark’s stupid face. 

“Are you going senile or something? Yes, you. I wanted space. That’s not the same as breaking up.” 

“Well, you were the one who acted like any hint of commitment was like I had just dropped on one knee.” 

That gets Donghyuck to flinch, now a body and a wince away from Mark’s criss-cross, bitchy bed corner. Every readable line under shock, it’s there too, on the growing anger that’s standing in the usual place where Donghyuck’s face would be. 

“Renjun didn’t tell me to be careful of you. He asked me to be careful and watch my mouth, ‘cause he knows everything I ever said to you was always too much.” 

Donghyuck had seen his face’s double cross coming, expecting it when his jaw shakes.

“Everything’s always too serious for you. Am I wrong?” 

When his teeth press unhealthily tight together, when a vein feels like it’s about to pop. 

“You wanted me to pull back so I pulled back, and then the next thing I know you’re—“

“Fuck you,” Donghyuck raises his voice to cut him off, up from the bed and slamming the door on his way out in a moment's time. 

He leans back against the door, heartbeat thumping loud in his ears as he lets a deep breath out. The sigh bounces on the hallway walls, helped by the still the house seems to have gone under, somewhen between Donghyuck threatening the lives of any eavesdroppers and now. One more beat, and then his hand is feeling across the door for the handle, turning it open and coming back in at a mind's change.

“No, you know what?" he starts to say before he's inside the room, getting to see only the last of Mark jumping at the sound, still right where he last left him. "It felt like a lot to me. I just needed time, asshole.”

Mark looks at him for a second, out of the blue noise slowly loading up as words, then as a sentence, then as something he should answer to.

“How much?” is his best attempt at one, clinging onto the very last of it he heard.

“I don’t know!” Donghyuck’s arms spread open, a hand steered into bumping on the wall with the force of it, and the dull thud of his knuckles against the plaster goes quiet against his high pitch and higher tone. He’s shouting again. Great.

He lets his arms go down, palms trading hard walls for bland cotton as they hit the side of his thighs, deflating in temper until he’s drained out of it, hotheadedness watered down and fire put out. 

In the aftermath, he moves aside the cloud of smoke and sees Mark sitting at the head of the bed, back slouched, looking bleary and worse for wear. Strip some clothes down and rub some first hour of the morning blush to his cheeks and Donghyuck can almost picture him asking leaving? as he eyes Donghyuck slip his pants past his hips in his haste to get dressed. The main way to tell that Mark and this one apart is not the fact this version of him has five more hours of sleep on him or underwear on, however, but that he somehow looks even more lost than naked, fucked out, always-wondering-if-he’s-about-to-get-left-behind Mark.

This one looks smaller, more tired, exactly like he’s expecting Donghyuck to leave through that door for a second time that day, the nth one in total, and Donghyuck can’t believe he’s about to say this. 

“Look, you’ve done this before. You date people and you don’t kick them out the morning after and you make them breakfast and you get them toothbrushes without them asking and you—I don't know—you love them and stuff," his voice grows frantic as the lack of spoken Oxford commas leave him to run low on air, drained out of temper and oxygen but making up for it in embarrassment, what he lacks for hot in anger building up as heated skin instead. 

“I’m not that,” he admits, hears more than feels the way he swallows after it, trying his hardest not to break away from Mark’s eyes, too shiny to be left on their own. “Never had it, or wanted it—” Mark starts to look like he knows where this is going. He doesn’t. "—until you started acting like it was the most normal thing for my shit to be in your drawers and our lives to be all—all mixed up and mushed together. And it freaked me out, 'cause you're a serial relationship committer, but for me it's..."

Somewhere along the line, Mark had moved his pillow to his lap, now twisting the case between his fingers. It makes Donghyuck want to crawl into the bed for a second time, an nth, and kiss him, never having been sad or angry or disappointed enough to know what it’s like not to have that thought at the back of his mind.

What he is familiar with is the need to push at that very want until it returns to its spot at the end of the line, shoving it off with more strength than he meant to this once and ending up with a just as forceful, "You're insufferable.” 

The pillowcase twisting comes to a halt, Mark’s face falling off the edge it was already standing on as Donghyuck keeps on going.

“You're always the martyr. You love to think you know everything. You're a traitor and nothing is ever your fault—” Mark looks like he knows where Donghyuck is going again. He never learns. “—and you somehow still manage to make everyone be worth shit compared to you." 

Donghyuck’s butt comes down to the floor in the space between both beds, his back to the side of Jaehyun’s and legs stretched out to the point they reach Mark’s, staring down at the line between frame and mattress. 

"So yeah,” he mutters, fight and air and whatever tied the two of them together leaving him for good, uncaring of whether he’s inflating Mark’s ego or burying himself in shame when he adds, “Everyone else sucks and no one’s you and I can’t stand it.”

Because it might be selfish to think that for Mark it could be Donghyuck he's with just like it could be anyone else, but Mark’s already had this before, will probably still have it even after him. And it’s surely naive for Donghyuck to think it has to be Mark for him and no one else, but he’s not even sure he wanted this before he was in too deep with him, doesn’t think he will again after him. 

Mark makes a move just as the inside of Donghyuck’s lip starts to ache between his teeth, sliding off the bed and walking on his knees to Donghyuck’s side, his back to Jaehyun’s bed and legs to his own, and Donghyuck can feel it when he takes a breath in, air and fight and the tie binding them inside Mark clicking into place with it. 

“You're stubborn,” he starts with, and if anyone should know where this is heading, it’s Donghyuck. “I’ve never met anyone with a shorter temper. You never share anything and you keep everything in until you blow up,” he lists off, tone bold enough for Donghyuck to be one more bullet point away from telling him off, but then Mark lets that same air from before out of his nose, taking a page out of Donghyuck’s book and letting the fight go with it too. 

“But I did everything I did with you 'cause I wanted to do it with you,” he tells Donghyuck, bolder than before and enough for Donghyuck to turn his head and look at him an inch at a time, from his chin up to his nose and finally meeting his eyes, on the verge of too much when Mark assures him, “Not just anyone, or for the sake of commitment or whatever.” 

He bumps Donghyuck’s shoulder with his in a tentative move then, leaning back after but staying closer than before—a right ankle meeting a left one, an elbow on a line of ribs, the knuckles of Mark’s hand that got trapped between them now burrowed over the hem of Donghyuck’s shorts and on his first and only line of untanned skin. “'Cause everyone else sucks and no one's you.”

It jumps right over the Too Much edge and plummets towards tender ground, getting Donghyuck’s chin to duck down and meet his chest in what’s the only response his brain has been wired to give. 

“That’s my line,” he grumbles, newborn interest in anything but Mark having him pull on one of his sock’s loose threads. 

“And I’m never letting you live it down,” Mark agrees with ease, and Donghyuck hates that he can hear the smile he won’t let show in it, loathes even more the giddy feeling at the pit of his stomach that comes over him just from that. 

Mark keeps him company in taking in as the yellow thread becomes long enough to qualify as rollable into a skein, Donghyuck only beginning to twist it around a finger when he hears, “Why didn’t you talk to me?” 

"No,” Donghyuck is quick to shoot it down, shaking his head in a burst of angry-airy-everything energy. “No way you're putting that on me when you broke us up 'cause you sensed I wasn't into it.”

The elbow against Mark’s ribs pushes at him, and the hand knuckle-deep on Donghyuck's leg scrambles to get a grip on something to avoid falling on his side, as Donghyuck’s neck cranes back so he can complain to the ceiling. "The guy who dumped me based on fucking vibes calling me—" 

"Okay, okay. I get it,” Mark groans. Donghyuck goes quiet, stays with his neck craned and eyes ceiling-high, and waits. "So maybe we both fucked up,” comes Mark’s admission at last.

“You think?” Donghyuck faces him again to poke him back, but for a guilt-free martyr he guesses it’s a start, Mark showing him the white of his eyes cutting the moment short.

More loose thread rolling, Donghyuck’s fingertip shading itself red and going into the purples, and then Mark wets his lips to say, “Would you do it, though? If we tried again?"

Donghyuck pulls tighter and lets his finger’s blood flow cry out in an ugly lilac.

“You’d wanna try again?” he wonders, trying to keep the surprise off his voice, the same one that knocks the first brick off the life-after-Mark wall Donghyuck had been trying to build up. 

“Do you?” Mark asks back, neither of them seeming to want to be the one to say yes first. “Are you done needing space?”

Donghyuck frowns. It’s not gonna be him, that’s for sure. “I don’t know. Are you done thinking you can read my mind?”

Mark’s pride has taken enough bashing by this hour of the day to let that become more than a dent on it.

“We could take it slow, right? Like really slow. Baby turtle steps,” he says, Donghyuck daring to guess he’s not the only one Mark is trying to convince with it, an eagerness to the way he etches on, “It can be as little as you need. But it would have to be something, you know?” 

Mark’s lips press together then, a bit like a kid who knows he’s asking for something expensive, something he’s already been told no from, and yet here he comes again, willing to beg because he doesn’t know shame and ego well enough not to, arguments to their favor that Mark doesn’t hold anymore. 

Donghyuck watches his mouth turn white at the seam between his lips, growing paler at the same pace as his own hangman’s-noose finger, red flowing out of his veins in a feeling too akin to that tight blood-drawing grip around his heart Mark has mastered, the same one he has on it now.  

“So you wouldn’t be dropping on one knee right away?” Donghyuck is finally able to pick off the shelf his favorite brand of teasing, the one that comes without all the double entendres and the tightrope walking and the codes of conduct, and isn’t surprised to learn he’s missed it more than he is to find out just how much.

“I said slow,” Mark’s voice follows through with his words, taking his time with every one of them.  

“You'd test the waters first and take me out?”

“Slower.” The vowels of it show just how much by lengthening into ooos and eees, and Donghyuck listens by letting go of the thread suffocating his fingertip at an Os-and-Es appropriate pace.  

“We stand in the same room at least five meters away from each other and make small talk?"

“Even slower.” Mark’s lips go down with a grin, in case Donghyuck had any doubts left he’s fucking with him. 

“I change your contact name on my phone back to your name?”

The word slower dies on Mark’s mouth, frown taking over in its place. “What’s my contact name now?” 

“Buddy,” he grins, his self-regard puffing out its chest at the wit behind it, with his morale patting it in the back when Mark goes from slightly pissed to murderous. “So we start there?”

Donghyuck doesn’t manage to get halfway through renaming Mark’s contact, what with his phone plucked out of his hold once he starts typing side chick in the line under the gray blob where a picture should go, Mark taking it upon himself to type in his own name. 

Phone locked and tossed so it lands over his coat on Jaehyun’s bed behind him, he hears the now background noise of a cough and a door shutting somewhere on the house, staring straight ahead at Mark’s side of the bedroom, and—

“What now?”

Mark blinks at a water spot, as if he hadn’t thought about it either, and his face makes a slow journey from cluelessness to hesitation, telling eyes and bated breath aura making him an open secret, and Donghyuck pretends he can’t hear the physical effort it takes out of him to sound sure about it when he suggests, "You promise to think about it.” 

Donghyuck doesn’t do much more than look at Mark, open his mouth and evade him with, "And then what?"

And he didn’t say yes, but the corners of Mark’s mouth pull at it against its resistance, a half-something that doesn’t reach his eyes only because Mark won’t let it. 

“We go downstairs and hear your verdict?”

His verdict? His verdict. Right.

“Oh my god. Chenle’s Your Honor delirium.” It’s like a bucket of ice water dunked on him, knees folding up for his face to hide behind and whine. “I hate all of them.”

Mark groans as he gets up, something in his back cracking with it, and Donghyuck adds out of shape to the pros and cons of his Promise To Think About It list, already in the works. 

When he looks back at him, Mark is holding the door open with a hand, prompting Donghyuck to make his way out with a move of his head. “Come on, I can do the talking. You can curse them all out later without messing up your sentence.” 

Kissing him senseless right now wouldn’t be anywhere near going slow. In turn, Donghyuck decides to take painstakingly long to stand up, making a show move-by-move of every limb it takes for him to climb back to his feet. 

“It’s never too late to switch degrees, you know?” He lets his voice go lazy as he stretches out his arms over his head, rolling his neck to one side and then the other, and hopes he went far enough for the brand of his boxers or the days-old hickey at the bottom of his neckline to have made it into Mark’s line of sight. “You’d make a hot attorney.”

The door opens wider. "And you're gonna make a hot ex-con. Let's go."

Donghyuck is found guilty on all charges. His sentence: Celibacy. 

Nothing under the waist until they, quote unquote, learn how to behave. He would define what his friend-made jury meant by behave if he had been paying attention then, too distracted at the time by slipping on the stray bunny slipper that had remained under the table on his right foot, zoning further out by daydreaming about what Jaemin-as-Mark had promised him over text to get him to come over. 

He would also be more offended by his friends treating them like a pair of one-track-mind rabbits if he wasn’t here now, Mark’s car parked in front of his house after their second first date and his owner standing with his face to Donghyuck’s door frame, cheek bunched up against wood while he tells him, “I can’t come in.”

Donghyuck appreciates the effort Mark puts in saying it like it’s Donghyuck’s loss and not just as much his own, him shrugging along just to second the motion. 

“Fine by me,” Donghyuck tilts his chin up with the words, his lip going out in what could grow into a pout when all he gets in response is Mark looking incredulous, the look on his eyes spelling out he’s not buying it. 

An unjustified underestimation, that is. He won’t deny he’d settle for climbing inside Mark’s backseat and dry humping him to his heart’s content, but he’s also fine with this—crossing his arms over his chest to act as if he isn’t fighting off autumn night chill, leaning his temple against his front door so he’s mirroring Mark, and picking imaginary lint off his shoulder, asking, “What time do you finish tomorrow?” 

Another effort Mark puts in that Donghyuck appreciates is pretending he doesn’t know Donghyuck has his whole weekly schedule memorized, or that his future clocking out hour is the last thing he cares about then.

"Four,” Mark plays along anyway.

“Cool.” 

Donghyuck fights off the heat that tries to climb up to his face at the way Mark lifts his eyebrows, amusement springing up in plain sight.

“Cool?” he repeats, disbelief probably only growing at the unhealthy dose of nodding Donghyuck takes on, forehead starting to burn in its drag over the door as he mhms in agreement.

Mark looks at him then, like that’s enough of a thing to do, face softening along with it little by little, and Donghyuck hates that he kind of gets it. Because Mark is flushed, hair ruffled from taking the seat right by the restaurant’s open entrance door—this time not fine dining and not Mark’s bedroom, middle ground found in a barbeque place all they ever used to do was walk by and promise they would come to sometime—and cheeks straining under the weight of a smile that seems to have been born from listening to Donghyuck ramble, and Donghyuck could keep on staring at him for a minute or two more. 

Spoiler: that ramble-knitted smile is about to grow wider.

"You can still kiss me, right? The jury didn't say anything about goodbye kisses,” Donghyuck finds himself saying, and Mark is all teeth by then, lips and eyes the thinnest they can stretch to and smile standing ivory-tower high from the ground Donghyuck is down on, who's rolling his eyes with a hand already coming out of his pocket with his house keys. 

"Okay, fuck you too. I’m ruling them out,” he puts out his threat. An empty one at that, going by the way he’s got his front door key against Mark’s jaw seconds later, cold silver nickel sliding between Donghyuck's fingers that curl around the bone as Mark crowds into him, kisses him and then lingers. 

They stand on Donghyuck’s door for too long, lips on lips and nothing more, and beat the dead-horse beauty of chaste and warm until it turns into clammy and measly. The keys’ ridges and notches leave their imprint on the back of Mark’s neck at Donghyuck moving his hand over to his nape and pressing closer when Mark makes to pull away. He keeps him there as the outline of the way into Donghyuck's home gets hollowed out in red lines over Mark’s skin, drinking down the hum of Mark’s laugh against his mouth until he’s smiling too. 

It stays in place all throughout him toeing off his shoes, tiptoeing down the hallway to his room and leaning against his closed bedroom door, only falling once Donghyuck catches sight of his face in his wall mirror, rubbing a hand down his mouth so his cheeks won’t risk staying creased up forever.

He’s given up on trying and moved on to undoing his belt when his phone starts buzzing in his back pocket, and the name flashing up on his screen manages to do what he couldn’t, replacing his grin with its polar opposite, eyebrows huddling together as he picks up.

“Hey,” Mark greets him with. 

Just-kissed-him-at-his-front-door-two-minutes-ago, should-be-driving-home Mark. That Mark. 

“Hi?” There’s a forgot something? on the tip of Donghyuck’s tongue, which never makes it out as the voice on the other end beats him to the punch. 

“What are you wearing?" 

It sounds unnatural, forced, as if it was just said by someone who had never even dared send a hook-up text. In Donghyuck’s reflection staring back at him from his mirror, the look of betrayal: a new grin, one that he’s sure is gonna scar.

"You horny shit," he swears, and the lack of an engine’s white noise or traffic zooming by coming from the other side of the line lights up a bulb in his mind. "Did you even leave?" 

He tucks his phone between his shoulder and cheek to climb onto his bed with no time wasted, walking on folded legs over the covers until he’s in front of his bedroom window. His blinds are lifted to find Mark’s car still out on his street, with his body leaning over the passenger seat to stick his head out of the window, telling him in a matter of fact tone, "No one said I can't call you.” 

Donghyuck watches his mouth move through the glass all the way across the driveway, hears his voice in his ear misshapen by speakers, and feels the teenaged need to get the door open and let him sneak inside his bed. To lift up Mark’s shirt, stick his head under it and fall asleep like that, with his cheek to Mark’s stomach and—and, like, his hand in his hair. Or something. Sentenced celibacy and a good first date will fuck you up like that. 

"I'm just checking if you got home safe,” Mark goes on innocently, and Donghyuck—definitely feels something, whatever that is.

"And if I'm still dressed,” he presses on.

"Are you?" Mark asks, as if they aren't already eye to eye.

Donghyuck looks back at him and begins to feel the first of the weight of a heavy word in his mouth. It’s a capital L, which arrives on its own, lets him sweep it across the floor and roof of his mouth and then allows itself to get swallowed down, before Donghyuck finally pulls his belt out of the last of his jeans’ loops, unfastens the button and zips them down in one clumsy move. 

"Not for long," he tells Mark, before he's getting his pants to inch down his hips for everyone and no one on his block's street to see, and lets the blinds fall closed so his audience of one won't catch him try to bite a third and final smile off his mouth when he hears dude, babe, not fair.