Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Jisung can sense the presence behind him before he sees it. 

Footsteps, muffled by the dull gray of their dorm room carpet. Every step is punctuated with an uncomfortable awareness until it’s pausing right behind him, a looming warmth that has Jisung biting at the inside of his cheek when he feels it at his back. Jisung attempts — pretends — to ignore it, eyes flickering uselessly between his laptop and the notes he’s suddenly stopped writing down, pen frozen and beginning to form a small pool of stagnant ink. 

Then it touches him; the press of a broad chest against his shoulders as someone leans into him. Two large hands come to grip the edges of his small, dorm-sized desk, knuckles cast with shadow from the glaringly white LEDs of Jisung’s screen. Jisung can feel where the toned arms cage him in from behind, and he can even make out the way veins protrude up the muscle in his periphery. 

Jisung stubbornly keeps his eyes on the screen, even if he’s not absorbing the words anymore. He hears blunt fingernails on either side of him drum a playful cadence against the wood, body shifting down, down, right until there’s a face next to his. By the time he feels the breath fanning against the side of his face, he’s not even capable of pretending to focus.

“You’re coming with us,” a familiar voice teases directly into his ear. 

Jisung bites back his amusement. “Chan, c’mon,” he huffs. “You already know my answer is no.”

Listening to Chan and Changbin banter was always entertaining. They were his favorite background noise when they all came back to the dorm to study, flinging quips and jokes and anecdotes at each other that had sometimes brought them to forego their work entirely, cry-laughing against their pillows into the early a.m. with a series of noise complaints that followed the next morning. 

Sometimes Jisung would simply listen in a pleasant half-awareness to their conversation while he deep-dived on the internet and jotted down notes for his courses. 

Today was one of those days. He’d reached that focused lull to his surroundings, occupied in some meditative flow that no outside thoughts could breach. Jisung was grateful for moments like these from how few and far between he experienced them, finally free of his anxieties thanks to his workaholic nature and the cheerful whitenoise of his best friends gossiping at his side. 

The second his mind chose to pick out the word ‘party’ from their conversation, he suddenly wasn’t so thankful anymore. 

Such an insignificant word, a mere two syllables, but it was a small enough hole in his defenses to let one thought in, expand, and suddenly his mind was rushing in a flood of dulled worry; strangers, talking, awkward, socializing, Idon’tknowwhattodo—  

It was a routine thought process that he didn’t openly freak out at anymore, but that wasn’t to say the concept still didn’t give him chills. His best answer was to just shut the noise out and continue his work in peace, Chan and Changbin’s talk over what they’d wear and who they’d see on complete mute. 

But then he remembers that his closest friends are Chan and Changbin, and ‘peace’ was clearly never gonna be an option. 

Chan doesn’t let out that understanding hum he usually does through the thousands of times Jisung’s rejected his invites. His grip on the desk is adamant, and of course he’s letting every ounce of charisma he has drip through his deep accent. “I knew you were gonna say no, and I’m choosing to not listen. This party is gonna be different, Sung. Want you to come with me this one time. Please?”

Jisung humors him, tilting his chin back until his whole neck is bathing in the white glare of his screen. He gets an upside down view of Chan who’s looking down at him with a soft grin, his crescent-shaped eye smile nearly hidden behind a fringe of blonde waves. 

Chan lifts a hand from around the desk to poke his index into the squish of Jisung’s cheek. “C’mon. It’s like, a rite of passage as my best friend that you—”

“Hey!” Changbin barks off from the side. He’s leaning back at his own desk, heels kicked up on the edge of it. A pair of headphones are resting around his neck, pulsing with some experimental rap instrumentals, his expression a scandalized mock offense where he stares directly at Chan.

“Sorry,” Chan assuages with a teasing lilt, returning his attention back to Jisung. “Like I was saying, it’s a rite of passage that as one of —” he corrects, “— my best friends, you need to at least come to one party with me.”

Jisung lets out a weak little sigh, and the weight of his head seems to deaden with it. His face dips down to the scramble of his poor handwriting, the small pool of ink, the ballpoint pen digging its metal uncomfortably between the crevices of Jisung’s fingers. There’s a spark that goes quiet and distant somewhere in his stomach. Desire, the itch to say yes, tell himself and his friends that he can, that he wants to, that watching Chan and Changbin walk out that door on weekend nights with high spirits leaves something sad and alone stirring in his core. 

But, his head: strangers, talking, awkward, socializing, Idon’tknowwhattodo—

It always wins.

Jisung taps the edge of his pen against the corner of the paper, watching the way blue flecks of ink bleed into the surface, his own little physical manifestation of the swarm buzzing against his skull. “‘M just not party material,” he states flatly. “Sorry.”

“.. And how do you know you’re not party material?” Chan tries with a conversational tone, comforting. “Last time we ever went to a social gathering together was during one of those event things in our first year of high school. We were, like, fifteen.”

“Oh god,” Changbin pipes up again from his desk, voice decorated with the clicks of his mousepad and keyboard as he edits through a music program on his monitor with his eyes distractedly glued to it. “Fifteen-year-old Jisung, what an absolute nightmare. Had enough raging hormones for the three of us combined,” he huffs, flicking some of his black bowl cut out of his eyes. 

“Hey,” Jisung laughs lightheartedly, pointing a lazy index in his direction. “I’m not like that anymore and you know it.”

“That’s exactly my point,” Chan cuts in, giving him some pats on the shoulder. Jisung can feel where the warm reassurances get severed by his own doubt, as if recoiling against a glass pane upon impact. “You’re way different now, you never know what might happen.”

That’s the problem, Jisung’s conscience argues. The worst could happen. 

Jisung closes his eyes, feeling the blinding glare of his monitor behind his lids. “It’s just,” he begins, mind already racking through the variables without his permission. He can already see flickers of fantasies filled with awkward silences and judgmental coughs, unwelcomingly forced smiles — and he has to remind himself that it’s all in his head, fake, because the shame pooling cold tendrils up through his stomach is suddenly much too real.

“It’s not the party,” he tries again, shaking his head. “I mean, just look at me. I can’t talk to people without freezing up. I can barely even hold a conversation with my nail tech without shaking. I can talk to you guys easily, but I know you guys, and whenever I talk to people I don’t know there’s a lot I want to say, right? But then I wonder if it’s the right thing to say, and then I wonder if I’ve waited too long to say it, so I just stay quiet, and then I get home and think of what I could’ve done better and—”

The building tightness in his chest and throat pauses on a soft click, and Jisung finds the white glare against his eyelids gone. He opens them to find his laptop closed shut, with one of Chan’s warm hands enveloping his own to pull the pen from between his fingers and toss it off to the side. It clatters against the surface of his desk as the pressure of Chan’s body leaves his back, instead choosing to grip Jisung’s chair. 

He grabs the armrests and pulls until Jisung’s facing him, arms lying limp in his lap. He stares wide-eyed at how his sight is pure Chan, his full arms on either side of him, how he’s bent forward to be nearly at eye level. His gaze is so calm, and Jisung wonders why he isn’t saying anything, but then he’s aware of the hyperventilating burn pulsing through his chest and lungs and the slight ring in his ears. 

It takes him a few seconds to ease back into a semblance of normality, even if the heat stays high in his cheeks. It’s only then when Chan finally parts his lips, letting his dark eyes flit between Jisung’s own. 

“Sung?” he begins, gentle yet firm. Jisung feels almost too bashful to hold eye contact, yet something about his tone traps him with its sincerity. “Do you really think I’d take you there and just toss you in? Leave you alone?” he asks, his voice a soothing purr. Chan pulls the plush of his bottom lip between his canines in a smirk when Jisung averts his gaze, knowing he’s getting through to him with every passing word. “You know I’d stick with you the whole time, right? Not like I might need to.” He softly pokes at Jisung again, delighted when the younger reluctantly snorts at his touch. “Pretty sure most people there would really like you. Bambam’s parties are always full of chill people.”

Jisung can feel his body go taut again at the name, something nauseous and snappable akin to pulled wire lingering inside. “Bambam?” he asks with hesitance, head instantly swimming in sick nostalgia and memories filled with emotions he can’t place. 

It’s a name he’s heard tossed around ever since his last years of high school. Socialite. Popular. Rich, and with the expensive taste to prove it. Stoner — whispers and rumors of him dealing drugs to his classmates that grew more and more credible as the years ticked by. He was part of a group that felt more like myth and legend to Jisung, so far away and intangible that he’d begun to barely bat an eye in interest if he heard them in passing.

Jisung idles by scraping his thumbnails over the material of his jeans, and the sound of it feels too loud. “You guys still hang out with him?”

Jisung never understood why Chan and Changbin kept Jisung in their circle once they’d begun making friends like that; he was practically a nobody outside of the tracks the three of them whipped up together for music production. It took many midnight conversations between them to pull Jisung out of that inferiority complex, but it did nothing to change how he’d consistently rejected offers to ‘hang’ with that crowd without fault. He just couldn’t. It was an anxious envy his friends eventually grew to understand, just as he did. He never thought— he knew he’d never fit in.

“Yeah, we all catch up when we can,” Chan replies casually, and the ease in his voice is doing something to Jisung. “I mentioned bringing you to one of his parties a few times, actually. He said you were welcome with open arms whenever you felt up to it.”

Fuck, Bambam knew who he was?

Shit. 

Maybe Jisung would never fit in, but now his interest was beginning to dangerously pique. “Is he..” Jisung begins, uselessly flopping his hands around in his lap with lazy gestures that go nowhere. “Is he as cool as everyone always says he is?”

Changbin can’t help but scoff, letting out a brassy little hah! over his fervent clicks around his keyboard. Jisung can see his eyes flit, glassy where they reflect the edits he’s making on his monitor. “Aside from the fact that he wears sunglasses indoors and still thinks dabbing is a socially acceptable gesture, then yeah, I’d say he’s pretty fucking cool.”

“Hosts more relaxed parties than Jackson, anyway,” Chan confirms with a gentle nod of his head.

“Jackson?” Jisung asks, and the syllables spill past his lips slowly, like he can’t believe he’s even saying them, as if uttering the name of a celebrity or a notorious criminal. He knew Chan and Changbin hung out with some pretty wild people, but holy fuck. “J-Jackson Wang?”

“Oh god, don’t get Chan started,” Changbin groans while he adjusts some dials on his setup. He casts one furtive glance to Chan and Chan returns it, eyeing each other through what must be some pretty intense inside joke if the way they both begin smirking and shaking their heads is any indication. “Waaaay too many horror stories.”

“Yeah,” Chan adds, returning his attention back to Jisung. He’s got that parental look on his face, casting him a glare of pseudo-sternness that’s punctuated with a warning little finger wag. “Never go to his parties. Something bad always happens.”

Jisung lets out a weak scoff between his teeth. As if. “Why would I? I told you, I don’t do parties.”

Chan’s expression melts into a puppy-like frown. “What about Bambam’s?”

Jisung shoots Chan an unimpressed scowl before he’s fitting his hands into semicircles and grabbing at Chan’s stupid forearms that have so much stupid muscle that Jisung’s fingers strain to properly clamp them, flinging them off when they meet no resistance at his push. He kicks off from the floor so he can swivel in his chair, returning back to his desk and reopening his laptop to continue studying. “Not happening,” he declares on a shaky exhale, wincing when his eyes are assaulted with the return of his blinding screen. 

Chan blankets his form over Jisung’s shoulders again, and his chin digs right above Jisung’s collarbone with every word he says. “Y’know you want to,” he teases, probably able to catch the diffident traces that paint his words less towards his finality of not wanting to go. Asshole.

“I suddenly don’t know anything,” Jisung quips in return, clenching his jaw when Chan breathes out a few gentle laughs that coat his neck in a disgusting sort of joy. Chan’s form squeezes him in some semi-hug he tries to obediently not pay any attention to, though he can’t deny the way his mind refuses to scream anything but a party is happening, you’re invited to a party, why are you pretending to stare at your notes?

“C’mon, Jisung,” Chan says, deliberately flattening his hand over the pen he tossed earlier so Jisung can’t grab it when he goes to reach for it. “Come to just this one. For me.”

Jisung closes his eyes, feigning annoyance when he pokes his tongue against the wetness inside his cheek and sighs. “Let me think,” he says, bringing a hand up to hold his chin between his thumb and the bend of his forefinger as he pretends to mull it over. A pause. “Nah.”

Chan sighs impatiently, deliberately digging his chin harsher into his body. Changbin doesn’t bat an eye at Jisung’s overdramatic cries of pain while Chan insists Jisung come with them, listing off all the things they could experience together for his first party experience. It’s a tennis match of promises and declines, two stubborn best friends that ultimately know what’s best for the situation because of course. 

“Okay, fine, but please tell me you’ll at least think about it?” Chan eventually says, breaking first.

Jisung can’t even bask in the smugness of his own victory from the distress he feels vibrating his limbs. ‘No’ is so easy to say, so easy to just write it all off and not worry about, but Jisung wants to be able to worry about it. He’d love to fret over his outfit before a party, spend more time with his friends, play drinking games or even some simple and stupid shit like Truth or Dare. He wants to have fun and feel like his early twenties aren’t just spent wasting away with studies and classes and schedules, but doing that would have people thrown in the mix and suddenly the distress is turning into something sad and he can feel the way his throat is beginning to dry with it and— 

“Why are you so stubborn about having me come along?” he quietly asks his study notes, completely dejected. 

“Because,” Chan’s voice says, faraway and muffled like it’s being shouted from a few rooms down their messy dorm hall. “I’ve seen how much you light up a room when you’re comfortable. Trust me, Jisung, you’re a lot less socially inept than you give yourself credit for.”

That’s just a performance, Jisung tries to argue with himself. I just want people to like me. 

It’s so hard to believe with the reassurances of Chan bleeding straight comfort into the side of his neck and shoulder. Maybe it wouldn’t be so difficult if he had this presence beside him the whole night, there for him when it got too much, ready to take him home if he wanted to leave. He knew he could trust Chan — he just didn’t know if he could trust anyone else, maybe even himself.

“And,” Chan continues with this delighted lilt to his tone, “there’s actually some people who want to meet you.”

What?

Jisung frowns. “Who?”

“Not saying anything else. You’re gonna have to come n’ see for yourself,” he teases, pretending to zip the seam of his mouth shut. 

Jisung gives him a blind flick to the head as he continues to stare at his notes, punctuating it with a humorless chuff when Chan theatrically recoils. “Asshole.”

Still, he can’t deny the warmth that causes genuine amusement to bubble to the surface when Chan returns his head to his shoulder, continuing to pester him in a way much too childlike for his age. “Tell me you’ll think about it,” he asks one final time, soft. Jisung can feel the way he’s staring at him, his profile, how he’s trying to fight back the smile forcing his lips apart. 

A deep sigh. One, two, three. Breathe in. He finally grabs his pen again, forcing his eyes on the glimmer of ink at the tip of his ballpoint where it catches the light of his laptop. He really doesn’t want to study anymore.

“Okay.”

“‘Okay’?”

“I’ll think about it.”

And Jisung did think about it.

Far more than he probably should’ve.

Despite his efforts to get back into his flow while he studied, he couldn’t, even after Chan and Changbin had left him alone. They could no longer fall back into a pleasant whitenoise for him with how their voices were constant reminders of what’d just been discussed, their presences something of a promise for what would — could — be happening Saturday night. 

It went like that into the late evening until sleep fitfully accepted him with kicked up blankets and wrinkled sheets. His only respite was the brief increments of a dreamless unconsciousness he endured until their alarm blared its grating 7:00am symphony, stuck in that half-awake limbo where nothing makes sense for an unknown infinitum. He usually hates that feeling, yet he catches the glimpse of a smug Chan walking past his bed in his half-naked pajamas, smirking over the brim of their shitty dorm coffee.. and he suddenly needs to be asleep again. His mirthful gaze wasn’t even a question, it was a statement:

I know you’re thinking about it, and yes, I am absolutely going to annoy you about it later.

Ugh.

And there he goes again. His mind is nothing but that broken record of party, party, party eating dark and parasitic through his skull until there’s nothing else left. It’s there for the breakfast he catches on the way to his first morning lecture and all the way through the lecture itself.

He loves how big the lecture hall is. He arrives as early as he can so he can pick the spot he knows will be the least crowded, allowed to absorb in his own little bubble without the threat of eyes on him. It usually helps him focus, but of course, on a day like this, he wasn’t so lucky. 

It’s like his vision blurs and his mind purrs dead the minute he sits down. The petite woman giving the lecture becomes a foggy silhouette of nothingness, voice underwater and miles beneath the surface. Jisung can’t recall a word she says, instantly resting the edge of his jaw against his palm and idling the end of his pen between his teeth. He’s stuck in his own little mental purgatory of bouncing around fantasies of the party; what’s gonna happen, who’s gonna be there, who was Chan talking about when he said people want to ‘meet’ him, what was he gonna wear?

He realizes from the stir in his stomach far too late that this wasn’t just passive curiosity anymore; it was anticipation.

He’s so fucked. 

Past his unfortunate reverie, he’s suddenly aware that everyone was beginning to pack up for their next class. Fuck, it was already over? It felt like Jisung had been here for only ten minutes. His body lags behind his brain in a confused daze, looking down at his page of untouched, blank notes. It feels like the paper mocks him where it glares across his face, reflecting the torturous fluorescent beams overhead. 

He’s one of the last to pack up, and he hears the tail end of a conversation from a pair of girls that walk past him down the hall’s steps. 

“—inho’s gonna be there too.”

Jisung’s ears perk.

“No way, forreal? Thought he didn’t do parties anymore.”

“It’s Bambam’s, it’s not like he has much of a choice.”

“I mean, sure, but, like, will he actually be there?”

“What, does someone have a crush?”

“Depends. Does he still deal?”

“Ugh, of course you wanna get cross-faded.”

Jisung’s eyes slip to their faceless forms as they descend, watching the way their shiny hair swings from left to right under the buzzing lights as they clutch their books tight against them in their struts. They lean into each other and giggle to themselves through more of their trite gossip, leaving Jisung in a statuesque pause where his ears fight to recall the majority of what he’d been able to pick up. He swears he heard something — his brain is refusing to recall it. A name, maybe? Something in his mind screams its interest, yet Jisung knows nothing beyond it having to do with Bambam’s party. 

Now he’s really intrigued.

He’s the last soul in the lecture hall as he throws his bag over his shoulder to book it to his next class, suddenly struck with an uncharacteristic need to escape the quiet instead of inviting it in. 

The moment Jisung’s past the threshold of the doorway, his hurried form collides with the firm frame of another. He’s hit with stunned waves of decreasing shock once he feels the familiar muscle drape over his shoulder that’s now leading him down the hall to his next class, allowing his surprise to morph into a pseudo-annoyed grimace where he’s unwilling to lock eyes with his captor. 

“Took you long enough. Got an answer yet?” Chan asks, giving him a lovingly too-tight squeeze.

Jisung winces at the pressure as they walk past clusters of people. Something about today must be different, because the way people glance at them — particularly Chan — isn’t throwing Jisung off like it usually does. He feels.. fine, relaxed, capable of batting it all away so he can scoff at his friend with a particularly dramatic eye roll. “Not even gonna give me a full day to process my answer?” he jokes, feeling the heat rise in his cheeks where he knows people are staring. “Kinda rude.”

“S’cause I already know that you know what you’re gonna say,” Chan replies with pure confidence. He scratches his fingers through the side of Jisung’s mess of brunette, only giggling more when he lets out an affronted scoff at the action. “So say it.”

They arrive at the door of Jisung’s next class with a minute or so to spare. Jisung can feel the way the weight of unspoken seconds tick by in his stomach, surfacing to something he never thought he’d be able to finalize on in his life. It’s fast and dangerous and unknown and uncomfortably exhilarating, but the prospect of saying no suddenly seems too far away to manage. 

It’s a half-minute of averted gazes before Jisung breathes out, “Y-yeah, I think I’m gonna go.”

The gaze Chan shoots over his shoulder as he walks to his own class is disarming, perfect pearly teeth spreading open into a charismatic grin that’s beginning to alarm Jisung with the mischief hiding beneath. “You won’t regret it!” he finally calls out as Jisung walks into the room, forcing the maelstrom of excitement racking his organs to twist even tighter. 

Yeah, he’s not getting any work done today. 

And he doesn’t get any revision done tomorrow.

If Friday felt unhinged, Saturday afternoon was pure chaos. Not a moment passed without Jisung hearing talk of the party flit by in hushed conversations throughout his dorm, and even when he was alone in his room his phone seemed to light up with the notifying buzzes of his group chat every few seconds. He had the right mind to mute it far too late when Chan and Changbin finally decided to barge in through their front door in the evening all loud and excited, acting as physical manifestations of the hysterics that’d been chiming up his phone since noon. 

Jisung whines around a mouthful of candy as his headphones are plucked off his ears and flung to the desk, interrupting his solo Netflix session — the only thing that’d been doing the trick to calm and distract his nerves from how the clock ticked closer and closer to the time of the party. It all seemed too soon now, so claustrophobic on his mind that he could feel his heart begin to pound against his ribcage when the movie is put on pause for him. 

Maybe he was just trying to convince himself that feeling this exhilarated was a bad thing, not something he should be getting hyped up for just yet. It’s not working. 

He looks up when he feels his chair being forcefully swerved around again, and he already knows it’s Chan. He’s met with that blinding smile that turns his eyes into crescents, excited, and Jisung can practically see his invisible tail wagging. “Are you ready?”

“Not real—!” 

That is until something is thrown over his head, swamping him with fabric and the feedback of his hot breaths. His vision goes totally dark on a scared yelp, and he hears the beginning of a muffled conversation through the filter of the cotton Jisung struggles to yank off his head. 

“Back away from my model!” Changbin argues at Chan as Jisung coughs down the last of his candy, finally pulling the fabric into his lap to find a sage-green hoodie he hasn’t worn in forever. “Shoo! Shoo!”

“Whatever,” Chan says with a lazy smile, rolling his eyes away from the duo and into a stash of bottles nestled on a low shelf adjacent Chan and Changbin’s beds. “Gon’ do some pregaming while you play dressup.”

Jisung’s widening eyes are punctuated by the sound of a plastic cap getting flicked off as a solo cup is filled with a glugging mixture. He peers up to Changbin who’s now standing beside him, a pair of blue jeans laid over his forearm and a hand clutching one of his own personal black beanies. 

“Y-you’re helping me with my outfit?” Jisung asks as Changbin carelessly dumps the jeans over the hoodie. There’s big rips in the knees, and his fingers immediately seek to play with the frayed edges of them. 

“Ch’yeah?” Changbin scoffs. “Chan obviously can’t. For one, it’d take him a million years to decide and he’d still end up choosing all black anyways. For two, I have, like, the best fashion sense between the three of us.”

Chan can’t seem to hold it in anymore. He laugh-chokes downing his first sip, teeth clacking against the plastic brim with his eyebrows shooting to his forehead in disbelief. 

“Hey!” Changbin yaps. “Stop fucking coughing all over my bed!”

“Fuckin’ fashionista Dwaekki,” Chan says, and it only makes him holler even harder. After saying a mocking little ‘the best’ under his breath, he recoils until he’s lying fully on Changbin’s mattress with his drink sloshing around precariously in his grip. Changbin marches over to him with Jisung’s beanie now in a harsh fist, telling a distracted Chan off with a pointed index that only makes the volume of the room increase.

Jisung even smiles a little himself, although the scent of the clothes in his lap keeps him too much in the present. He stands with the bundle in his arms, making way for the bathroom to change while his best friends continue to pregame. 

Binnie does have style, Jisung thinks to himself once he’s pulled the hoodie over his head and jumped into his jeans, nearly catching his foot on one of the holes and busting his ass in typical clumsy Jisung fashion. Enough style to let me blend in with the environment if I need to, anyway. The hoodie is oversized and engulfs his small frame, and he can see where the tips of his fingers are the only thing managing to peek past the sleeves. The only problem he has with the outfit is the large, red logo-slash-design on the back. It makes him feel like a walking target. 

Would I be a target? Nah. Look at you. Jisung feels that tightness in his chest where he observes his bare face, self-consciously giving his cheeks a few light taps with the flat of his fingertips. Normal, good ol’ wallflower material. Plain. He lets out a sigh to the reflection he’s been acquainted with for a good twenty-one years of his life, letting that lingering curiosity at the back of his brain bubble nervously to the surface. 

Who would want to meet me? Who would want to see me? 

Jisung hears the muffled thumps of some EDM song come on in the main room, followed by a few whoops and shouts. 

“Yoo-hoo, where’s my model!?” Changbin calls impatiently, rapping his knuckles against the door. 

Jisung is immediately hyped up the second he shyly creeps out of the bathroom, able to now hear some royalty free catwalk music blasting from Chan’s phone where he’s doing some improvised dad-at-the-cookout level dance moves. Changbin pretends to nearly faint when his eyes lock with Jisung’s, clutching at his chest when he’s thrown an overdramatic finger heart. 

“Chan, look, it’s the one and only Han Jisung, J.One himself, I can’t believe my eyes, oh my god he’s so hot.”

“Do a spin!” Chan requests happily. 

Jisung can feel the tension melting from him in waves, back to that freeing level of comfort only his closest friends get to see. It’s like all of his masks finally drop to something uncaring and open and blissfully vulnerable, letting his limbs buzz and mind sing with the instinct to act on the first things that comes to mind — no doubts, worries or hesitations necessary. 

Jisung does a goofy spin, enacting a complete mockery of his hypebeast apparel. He hits Chan with a nonchalant wink the cringey jocks might do in the movies before he proceeds to shoot Changbin with finger guns, unafraid to make a total fool of himself now. 

“That’s the spirit!” Chan says, turning off the music so he can dawdle on another app. Changbin is in the middle of asking Jisung for his autograph when he continues, “Keep up that fun vibe at the party and you’ll do just fine, trust me.”

Jisung looks over to him, letting his full smile slip into something a touch more serious, reserved. He wants to believe that the warmth in his chest isn’t fleeting, that the laughter he causes isn’t just a matter of personal bias from his close friends. The exhilaration is still tightening his lungs, and Chan’s encouraging words make the edges of it all restless and tingly. 

“You really think so?” Jisung asks, breaking his silly character. 

“As long as you wear this, yeah,” Changbin says knowingly, shoving the charcoal black beanie in his clutches directly into Jisung’s chest. “Those headphones you were wearing made your hair flatter than a week-old soda.”

Jisung fixes the beanie on his head until his ears disappear with a scowl, only allowing the thick strands of his chocolate brown fringe to curtain over his eyebrows past the brim. “Sure thing, bowl boy.”

“B-bowl boy?!” Changbin snarls, scandalized. “My hair is perfect! It’s not my fault it refuses to do any other style!” 

Jisung nods sweetly, but his tone is anything but. “Stiff,” he grins. “Just like you in dance class—” 

“Yo! What the hell!” Changbin cries in feigned offense, capturing a laughing Jisung in a squeezing headlock. “Chan, when we get home you seriously needa file us for a new roommate, I think this one’s expired.”

“I’ll make note of it once I’m done calling for an Uber,” Chan murmurs with his chin to his chest, staring down at the digits of his phone he’s lazily pressing his thumbs into, a concentrated frown on his face. 

Changbin lets go of Jisung when his form freezes under his grip during their faked little argument. Confused, he asks “Uber?” with a lost furrow to his brows, intense enough that the skin pinches between them. “Isn’t the party gonna be here? At one of the dorms?”

It takes Chan a second to catch on while he processes through the app, but Jisung notices where the LEDs of his phone shine his slowly smirking features a brilliant, blinding blue-white. As if on cue, the phone eventually dings with a text, and while Chan lifts up his phone to reveal the message of the Uber confirming its oncoming arrival, he says, mischievous, “Bam doesn’t live at the dorms, he lives in—”

“—A house?” Jisung garbles incredulously from the backseat of their Uber. His frame is taut and anticipating, leaning forward until his chin rests on the shoulder of the passenger seat while his fingers idly scratch at the dark leather material there. It feels like the seatbelt is cutting into his neck, digging the rapid surges of his pulse right against it. He didn’t feel so ready anymore; the night ahead of them suddenly seemed colossal, unlike the movie-esque college fantasies he’d conjured from what he’d seen in film and TV.

“A house, yeah,” Chan says off to his left, having to talk a little louder with Changbin on the other side who’s popped the back window open to take a smoke. The whooshing sounds of streets and traffic graze by them in a flurry of orange, green and red lights overhead, and Jisung’s full eyes are stuck on them with sick hypnotization. “Bam’s fuckin’ loaded. Once everyone graduated high school and moved on, he decided to just collect a group of his buddies and take up some property near the campus instead.” 

“Said he did it ‘cause he didn’t wanna be away from his cats,” Changbin comments, letting a thick wave of smoke release through his nostrils, draconic. “Probably true, but he also never refuses an opportunity to flex, so who knows.”

“God, do not let him hear you talking shit about him when we’re inside, you’re gonna get taken off the priority list.”

“Oh shit, you’re right. Needa ask him for another baggie once we’re in there.”

Jisung’s breath hitches in his throat the second Chan speaks his next words, eyes catching on the hint of a nearby two-story peeking just around the corner, swamped with parked cars along the side of the street. 

“You’re in luck,” Chan said. “We just got here.”

The little GPS on the Uber dings their arrival, and Jisung attempts to delay splitting his part of the tip as much as possible to avoid shouldering himself out of the car. The last honest peek he took at the house was before he realized it was the house; this towering behemoth of construction that looks like it was made last century. It’d be a gorgeous property for an unassuming suburban family, sizable, yet the imagery is tainted with the offhand thuds of music and the beginnings of trash accompanying wave after wave of people outside, too close, even though Jisung’s side of the car is still closed. 

Chan ruins that of course, opening his side of the car and beckoning him out to the onslaught of music. Jisung looks up to him, and it feels like every second laid on his outstretched hand makes his throat constrict tighter. 

Chan leans down at the obvious hesitation, unbuckling Jisung’s seatbelt for him. Despite the alcohol laced in his breath, his tone sounds surprisingly sober. 

“It’s okay. We’ll leave if it gets too much, just give it a chance.”

Jisung looks him in the eyes. Too close. He blinks, blindly feeling for Chan’s hand and returning the harsh grip Chan gives him, both hyped up where their muscles flare with adrenaline. 

Then Jisung is yanked out of the car. 

He’s so lucky he doesn’t stumble, because holy fuck that’d be embarrassing. He tries to collect himself in the few steps it takes to get over the grass and accompanying sidewalk into the front yard, protectfully under one of Chan’s alert arms once again. 

He can feel the eyes on them once they start walking up the pathway. Chan in the middle with Changbin flanking his left side; of course they’d draw attention. Jisung attempts to keep his expression as vague as possible, though by the time they reach the steps up to the porch he catches just how many more people are partying through the windows, nearly shoulder to shoulder where they dance or converse in uneven circles, and that in itself inspires him to take the green hood of his hoodie and flip it over his beanie in a protective shield, cutting off his vision to an ahead-only view. 

When Chan escorts him inside past the front door with a nod to someone who opens it for them, it feels like the entire moment passes in slow motion. 

He feels everything: the bottom of his dirty nikes hitting the hardwood and how the air immediately switches from cool to dank warmth, full on the acrid fumes of alcohol and weed alike. It hits him instantaneously and makes his eyes blur in the dim lighting, drowning in pulses of heat and the electronic beats of house music so bassy that the floors and walls vibrate with it. An ocean of unknown faces and their foreign voices fill the last of whatever silence could occupy the air, and it’s so new and scary ringing through Jisung’s core that his body instinctively nestles further behind Chan’s frame akin to a startled animal. 

Changbin continues walking forward while Chan gives Jisung a comforting squeeze, throwing his chin over his shoulder to call out, “I’m gonna go find Wooyoung, I think he came here with San!” 

Chan gives him a farewell via a parting wave. Jisung looks up to him. “Who?”

“Good friend of his,” Chan murmurs, whispering into his space. “Probably gonna go try and annoy each other in an aegyo battle until one of them forfeits. The usual.”

Jisung absently nods to himself, but it’s cut off where Chan begins to drag him forward past the throngs of people. He’s led past a myriad of alarming sights; the beginning of a beer pong match, a claustrophobic huddle of girls that whisper as they watch Chan pass, another cluster of people chilling out in a seating area that look so high they can barely lift their limbs. Off further into the house is where most of the heavy dancing seems to be happening, and Jisung distantly wonders what Chan and Changbin must usually go to if they consider this a ‘chill’ party. 

Chan shoulders them past a few more bystanders until they’re finally in the first place of the house that seems to allow some semblance of breathing room: the kitchen. Chan immediately banks for the fridge, pulling out a bottle of some unrecognizable alcohol by the neck with an arm resting on the fridge door. He tosses Jisung a look over his bicep where he’s still rummaging. “Want one?”

Jisung’s always considered it. He’s only had a few sips in his life of varying things and regretted the taste every time. Maybe his palette would be different now. Maybe it wasn’t about the flavor to begin with. This would be the perfect scenario to dip his toe in the water, but, “Nah, I’m good,” he replies. Maybe on his second party, if there’d ever be one. To get drunk was to let loose, allegedly, but also to potentially embarrass yourself to such a mortifying degree that you could never show your face in public again. 

No thanks. 

Chan shrugs in a suit yourself sort of gesture, letting the bottle cap clang and rattle against the marbled island countertop when he pops it off. Jisung has just finally noticed how expensive this place looks, finally able to see the intricate designs in the wooden cabinets and expansive room that seems much too ostentatious for a group of college students. Almost every counter corner is lined to the brim with bottles of half-full alcohol and abandoned solo cups, and it feels like the miasma of liquor has him tipsy with his nerves already. 

Chan is back at his side with his chilled drink in seconds, giving him a playful nudge. “Ready to go talk to some people?”

Jisung gulps down with a nervous nod, and they’re off again. 

It’s mostly unmemorable people from Chan’s courses that Jisung only vaguely recognizes. Most of them are sweet, even excited to shake hands and introduce themselves to him, but he distantly wonders how much of that is the alcohol in their hands speaking. Chan does the majority of the conversation, allowing Jisung to happily stand like an ornament at his side that nods and softly laughs when he feels the need. It’s not forced with Chan’s jokes — he’s always funny, and Jisung notes how his demeanor adapts to whichever group of people they talk to so easily, a true people-pleaser. He even invites sly openings for Jisung to join the conversations when he wants, and Jisung can feel himself reacting more comfortably with every new greeting and person he knows will probably forget him by tomorrow. 

One person he’s introduced to does stand out to Jisung, however.

Maybe it’s because he’s one of the few people here alone, propped up against the wall with one drink in his hand and his phone in the other, scrolling so intensely that he’s not aware of Chan and Jisung’s presence until Chan calls out an ay, Seungmin! in his direction. 

When ‘Seungmin’ finally looks up, Jisung is met with a gaze that seems too wide and innocent to be at a place like this, yet that opinion instantly fades when he sees the way his expression falls to a severe flatness once he realizes who’s called him. He lets the hand with his phone drop to his side, the oversized sleeve of his cable-knit v-neck falling to hide the screen almost entirely from sight. 

“Oh. Hey, Chan,” he says, flicking some of his dirty blonde fringe out of his eyes. Whatever he’s drinking must not be too alcoholic, because he picks up Jisung’s presence faster than anyone at the party has thus far. Dark eyes rove over his figure, yet they don’t feel very judgmental; merely inquisitive. Sharp. “Who’s this?”

Chan gives him a pat on the small of his back. Jisung stutters out, “Oh, I-I’m Jisung.” 

Seungmin’s eyebrows raise just a fraction. “Ah, so you’re the elusive third member of Chan’s little rap group,” he says after giving him an appraising once-over. He must notice how the excess attention makes Jisung’s body language go nervous, because he immediately directs his eyes back to Chan. “Hyunjin wanted to see him, actually. Heard he’s killer at freestyle and wanted some tips.” 

“Oh yeah?” Chan replies, eyes slightly tensing where he takes another swig of his drink. “Y’know where we might find him?”

“Off somewhere in the sunset, gossiping to Jae about the gigantic crush I have on him,” Seungmin muses sardonically. “I’ll let you know if I see him.”

“Cool cool, we’re gonna keep mingling then. Was thinkin’ ‘bout giving Bam a visit,” Chan says, Seungmin nods, pulling his phone out again, eyes alight with his scroll down some social media. “What’re you gonna do in the meantime?”

Seungmin smirks to himself. “Gonna drop an accidental little email letting Professor Park know how much a certain Hyunjin in his class begs to get railed by him while he’s asleep.”

Jisung doesn’t know if he should wince at the threat or question the seriousness of it, especially when Chan scoffs out a little laugh of disbelief around the rim of his drink. “Shit, you talking about Jinyoung? You’re fuckin’ cruel, man.” 

Seungmin absently waves them goodbye. “He’s my best friend; his misfortune is my happiness.”

The party gets easier after that — now that Jisung’s finally met people he could confidently say he’d get along with outside of this hedonistic mansion from extroverted hell. He feels his limbs soften and lax where they press into the side of Chan’s frame as he guides them around more handfuls of party-goers, and Chan idles his ear with brief conversation of Seungmin and Hyunjin’s background as they move. 

It’s the loudest thing he hears until they pass a corner that’s a pure ring match of shouting. Jisung and Chan whip their heads in tandem to how its volume just supersedes the heady bass making the first floor of the house shake and the growing ring surrounding it, everyone in earshot laughing their asses off. 

“Found Changbin,” Chan says. 

Before Jisung can question it, they begin to pass the corner. Through the bodies of people Jisung’s eyes immediately look for Changbin, finding him right in the center clad in his dark sweatshirt and sharp features. He’s gesticulating wildly, just loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be properly comprehended. Even louder is who he’s shouting at; a downright stunning boy about their age with a curved nose bridge and a mole right beneath his eye. His hair is tied into a ponytail dyed black on top with platinum blonde peeking out underneath, dressed head-to-toe with a wardrobe profile of ‘tight, shiny or nothing at all.’ He’s just as flirtatious as he looks, skimming the tip of his tongue over his teeth on cheeky smiles whenever he allows Changbin the chance to yell next. They’re obviously playing — something Jisung realizes too late where he feels the panic subsiding in his system.

“That must be Wooyoung,” Jisung says to Chan.

“Mm,” Chan replies, nodding his head a little to Wooyoung’s left. “And his boyfriend, San.”

Hanging off Wooyoung’s shoulder is a boy slightly taller than him with slicked back hair and cheekbones higher than half the addicts in here. He only involves himself when Wooyoung starts getting all pointy and pushy, but there’s this fond little smile that reveals his dimples as he watches his boyfriend amuse himself with Changbin. Jisung is hit with a punch of jealousy he’s never quite felt before. 

It’s almost like San hears his name, because he’s looking over to Chan as if on instinct with a set of sharp, vulpine eyes. 

“Chan!” he says with a way more cheerful voice than Jisung anticipated from that severe face. “Hello!”

That causes Wooyoung and Changbin to interrupt their argument, even though Chan continues to walk past the whole debate with a lazy wave thrown to San. 

“Chan! Get back here!” a voice calls out, definitely Changbin. “Tell Wooyoung he’s wrong!”

“He’s probably one hundred percent right!” Chan calls back with a laugh, forcing a pair of rolled eyes out of Changbin as it sets off Wooyoung into another hysterical rant. San falls back towards them as Chan leads Jisung through the party, fist-bumping them both in greeting even though Jisung doesn’t know him. That was sweet.

“Things would be so much easier if Felix showed up,” San laments tiredly. “Did he mention anything to you?”

“Nah, he’s been cramming in studies ever since he skipped them for the last party,” Chan replies. “Just keep Bin off the Bacardi and you’ll be fine.” 

“Fuck, uh,” San laughs as he slinks back into the shouting. “Too late.”

Chan only snorts to himself with a go figure under his breath. He has to break his hold around Jisung in order for them to slink through the tighter throngs of people, clearly nearing the main hotspot of where everything was happening. Jisung keeps his eyes resolutely on the back of Chan’s black jacket, tailing him with enough nerves that he’s afraid he might step on his heels. It’s amazing in itself that he’s able to even withstand being surrounded by this many souls who could be staring at him right now, judging him — but those thoughts seem so far away. 

They finally pass a threshold of bodies where the air finally feels breathable and partially clear again. Chan’s back by his side as they make way toward a set of expensive looking sofas which are uncharacteristically uncrowded, giving off some sort of a VIP feel to the whole setup. Chan approaches forward anyways, leaving a tinge of panic in Jisung’s stomach.

In the middle of all the mostly-empty seats is a guy. He’s leaning forward to take a rip from a gorgeous looking bong: tall, stained glass with intricate designs and a pearlescent glow that shifts elegant rainbows with the light. The water bubbles and gurgles a mesmerizing little cadence as the smoke enters past a set of pillowy lips, full and content when they pull away. They belong to the face of someone who looks like he’d be more befitting doing coke on some yacht in The Bahamas, fit in casual clothes that don’t match the weather and some yellow-tinted sunglasses that probably cost Jisung’s tuition. He flicks black strands of his side-combed hair out of his eyes as he catches Chan’s, lush and shiny with product.

“Oh shit,” his astoundingly soft voice says after a cough, all breathy and delicate as if he were attempting to read the room a bedtime story, almost inappropriate with how seductive it sounded. “Look who it is.”

All the souls in the room seem to turn their gaze to Chan then, but he merely leans forward over the drug-riddled coffee table to clap his hand against the man’s in a greeting half-handshake where their fingers hug then slip apart before bumping knuckles. “What’s up, Bambam?”

So this was Bambam. Fuck, Jisung found it weird to finally see him in person after so many years since high school and not through the occasional glimpse on his social media feed.

“Nothin’ much man, just doin’ my thing,” Bambam says with the faintest rasp tickling his throat. “Who’s this?” he asks, letting his lidded gaze finally slip down Jisung’s figure as he slinks back into his cushions. Jisung almost lets out a scared laugh — it feels like he’s being interrogated by some big-time mafia boss. 

Jisung’s mouth opens with no sound coming out, but Chan saves his ass almost instantly. Amazing best friend. “Remember me mentioning a ‘Jisung’? The one I do music with alongside Changbin, this’s him. Got to finally drag him to one of your parties.”

“Ayy, that’s lit, that’s lit,” Bambam says after pulling on a cigarette, letting his pristine face get shrouded in a curtain of gray smoke. “Stay as long as you want, all are welcome.”

Chan snorts. “Even Jackson?”

“Fuck,” Bambam chimes with laughter, nose and eyes scrunching. “This ain’t his scene and you know that, dude. He’s prolly ziplining into someone’s pool or running naked ‘round a cul-de-sac right about now.” 

“I’ll bet you twenty on the streaking.”

“You’re fucking on.”

After exchanging some bills, Bambam gives a surprisingly thoughtful look between Jisung and Chan. He taps a column of ash into a tray near his side, yet Jisung can’t find his eyes looking anywhere but expectantly towards the gaze returned to his own. “If you wanna keep making stupid bets, gon’ be playing some dumb party games back here in a bit,” he offers, then he gives a particularly steely stare towards Chan. “I win every time.” 

“Suuuure,” Chan says with a lazy smirk. “We’ll consider. C’mon, Sung.”

They depart after Bambam throws up a peace sign, though a depraved part of Jisung was slightly hoping for the infamous dab or skrrt skrrt he’d been warned about during the ride over. 

Chan leads him down a packed corridor further away from the music, tangling him shoulder to shoulder with bodies that hurdle along the thumping walls. There’s smoke lines in the beams of dim, yellowish lighting escaping from the lamps on the side, and it’s suddenly one DJ booth and a few strobing neon overheads away from the entire path resembling an infested nightclub.

There’s one spot on the wall off to the side that’s finally rid of people, and Chan pulls Jisung into it with a gentle grip around his bicep, grabbing at more fabric than actual skin. They’re face to face now, and Chan gives him an inquisitive look for the first conversation they’ve had solo since acclimating to the party, like he’s trying to calculate Jisung’s comfort level. 

“So,” Chan says at the lowest register he can manage while still being intelligible. “You think you’re alright enough to do the games that Bambam offered?”

Jisung’s gaze averts while he attempts to ask himself the same question. It’s so hard to give a solid answer with no background experience to gauge himself on, but right now he feels content. Loose. Open. Almost like he did back while his friends pregamed, dangerously unafraid and at a comfort level that almost allowed him nothing but excitement. It’s the opportunity he’d been lost in fantasy about during his morning lecture yesterday morning, stuck and swimming in the opportunity to finally try something for himself he may regret never taking a chance on. 

“Yes. Yeah,” Jisung clarifies with a nod of his head, shot up with a rush of tingling nerves. “I’ll be fine, let’s do it.”

“Alright,” Chan says with a smile, almost proud in the way his eyes sparkle past the smoke and haze. “Just need you to do me one big favor before we go back.”

Uh-oh. “What is it?”

“Can you wait out here for like, one minute tops? I just needa use the bathroom real quick,” Chan says, nodding his head over to an unoccupied room at the end of the corridor.

Jisung looks at it with a gulp before his eyes flit back to Chan, and the words come out of him before he truly processes it. “Sure thing.”

“Cool, just one sec,” Chan says, giving him a pat on the shoulder. 

Then he’s walking away.

Jisung watches his form shrink away until it’s partially hidden by bodies, and the only indication he finally has of Chan’s disappearance is the way his ears strain to make out the sound of that door opening and shutting him off from his social life support.

And then Jisung’s alone. 

Just don’t think about it, Jisung shout-whispers at himself in his head, refusing to grit his teeth. Open your phone, check some messages. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. 

Only a few seconds pass with his phone open before he feels it. 

The excited nerves swarm and squeeze into some morphed pit in his stomach that expands rapidly at the feeling of being watched, judged, and he suddenly can’t sink and camouflage into the wall any further. They think you’re a loser, being alone at this party, his head tells him, forcing him to bite his bottom lip hard enough to break skin. They’re all watching you. 

Jisung suddenly feels claustrophobic, like no amount of air he takes in will let him breathe. He’s stuck like a deer in the headlights, too afraid to look up and have the eyes of bystanders meet his own, unable to read the horrid thoughts possibly coursing through their minds. What if someone tries to approach him and draw even more attention to it? What if they see just how horrible he is at speaking and they’re left with that impression of him for the rest of their life? Embarrassment racks his system and time stops moving, the clock in his head slowing down to a deadened tick.. tick…

Tick.

Strangers, talking, awkward, socializing, Idon’tknowwhattodo— 

Jisung needs air. 

He gives his nerves one last final fight to push himself off the wall, shove his phone in his pocket and find a way out of here. He ambles past the bodies as quietly yet casually as possible, hoping that looking like he has a place to go gives him a facade of nonchalance, that he’s not just some awkward outcast idling in the corner on his phone waiting for his friend to come back and hold his metaphorical hand. So weak. 

Stop.

His head whips around with rising panic in this labyrinth of a house, refusing to let him think. Every room is probably occupied with people from how many have been invited, so there’s nowhere he can go but— 

Outside. 

Bambam and Chan mentioned a pool earlier. That’s all Jisung needs to bank on assuming Bambam has one too, squeezing himself past hot, sweating bodies towards the back of the house where he prays a backdoor might be. 

He’s in luck.

A pair of double, all-glass French doors leads into the dark night outside, highlighted by the shocking turquoise rectangle of a light-lit swimming pool. The temperature is getting too cold to casually swim at this time of year, so there’s barely a body in sight. Perfect. 

Jisung can’t get to it fast enough, feeling the tail end of his nerves slip into relief the second his hands are on those handles and yanking, engulfing him in the fresh, freezing air of outside that sobers his mind and body immediately. He takes in a huge gulp of cold air as if downing an iced water after a mile-long sprint in the summer heat, letting his back fall against the glass panes as his breathing slows with his heart rate. 

After a few steadying breaths, he kicks himself off and walks in a slow stride down the steps into a patio area littered with chairs and closed, vibrant umbrellas atop small tables. He walks past it all in his tunnel vision, solely hypnotized by the calming sight of the water and how its ripples reflect a gorgeous teal-white in the surfaces surrounding it. 

He sits down right at the edge, crossing his legs and letting his hands lay limp in his lap after he pulls his hoodie off of his head. 

It feels like his mind runs blank for the first few seconds he simply stares at the water, but it’s only so long before the intrusive thoughts invite themselves in again. It’s a quiet little hum in the back of his head, almost innocuous: shame. Jisung hadn’t known what he was expecting, perhaps some sort of change, an invisible development or growth in his years away from interacting with so many people he didn’t know. Now that he’s out of the thick of it, there’s nothing left but the calm and familiar disappointment of just him, himself and his— 

“Can’t stand all the people?” a random voice says from behind.

Jisung startles on a delayed flinch, peering over his shoulder in a jittery motion to capture the blurred hints of a silhouette sitting somewhere back in the darkness on the end of a lounge chair, clad almost completely in dark. 

Jisung blinks his sight back to the water, feeling the telltale hints of that panic rising back in his stomach again. At least it’s only one person — although he’s seriously not in the best place for conversation. The question was easy enough to answer, though, and he’d rather humor it than get into any further complications with strangers tonight. So weak. 

“Y-yeah..” Jisung replies softly over the soft lapping of water.

“Me neither,” the voice replies. Now that Jisung’s aware of it — not taken off guard in his own surprise — he can finally focus on it. He picks up on the soothing tone of it and its husky timbre, this nonchalant flatness to it that Jisung can’t help but pique some semblance of interest in. It’s this perfect balance between high and low, and his spine tickles with a different set of nerves when he realizes that it’s gotten louder, closer. 

Jisung’s eyes tense on the water, beginning to wring his hands together in his lap with the tension he feels beginning at the base of his stomach. “Do you, um — do you get anxious too?” he sputters out. Despite being abysmal with strangers, over-speaking was a habit he never seemed to shake. 

Jisung can almost feel the way he’s approaching from behind. The soft cadence of shoes against the poolside slowly press on like a growing trepidation, laced with that same voice that grows increasingly more pronounced. “Nah,” it replies, a tinge of amusement somewhere in there. “Just gets a little stale after the hundredth time or so.”

Any further questions die on Jisung’s tongue when he makes out a pair of boots in his direct periphery — right beside him. He takes a long, deep inhale, struggling to keep his eyes resolutely on the water when this presence beside him feels more intense than the hundreds of people inside that house combined.

“I live here,” the voice clarifies.

Jisung looks up. 

Was this one of Bambam’s group? It had to be — Chan said only his close friends lived with him. If nothing but pure curiosity as his root cause, a part of him totally and utterly itched to wonder who would go out of their way to spark conversation with Jisung, especially someone of that type of caliber. It was all blended with the pure shock of it that had his limbs jerking, head tilted up to meet the eyes of who was engaging him. 

Jisung regrets it. 

He’s met with the sight of one of the most gorgeous people he’s decided — in a split second, no more than a mere catalogue of face and brief detail — he’s ever met in his life. 

His hair is a ravenette’s black and hanging brow-length across his forehead, parted in strands that give the illusion of wetness. It frames down into a sculpted jawline that tapers into a face shape Jisung can’t describe as anything less than perfect, like everything was exactly where it needed to be. He wants to give light to the detail of his angular pout or the immaculate sculpt of his nose, yet it’s his eyes that are most important to him now; they’re ensnaring and incendiary despite being so impossibly dark, darker than his hair, lidded as he looks down at him with an unblinking stare. The roll of a blunt wafts a gentle stream of smoke up to his features where he has it pinched between his index and thumb, and the slightest smirk lifts the corner of his mouth when he notices Jisung catch the sight of it. 

“Mind if I sit?” he asks, and the way he attempts to sound more serious does nothing but reveal just how he’s actually even more amused. 

The hairs at Jisung’s neck stand on end, because everything is suddenly too close and real and now with how he’s able to match that voice to the face, watching the way his lips part and press on every soft utterance of words that spill past like a bizarre mix of molten and gravel. His eyes whip back to the water in a stuttered exhale. “Sure, um, yeah,” Jisung finally gets out with a nod now that his voice isn’t trapped somewhere lost and foreign in his stomach. 

He can hear the way the guy beside him maneuvers down into a sitting position, the leather of his clothing letting out faint little squeaks with the effort. Fuck, this is happening, a voice inside him says. This was not what he was anticipating by coming out here. He’s so overwhelmed, unsure of why such a pretty person was attempting to coax more time and conversation out of him than they had to — this never happens. 

The guy speaks up again after Jisung hears the telltale signs of him pulling another drag of his blunt, avoiding the itch to squirm on the sound of him blowing the air out of his undoubtedly pursed and pink-red lips. 

“I’m Minho,” he introduces.

“I know who you are,” Jisung blurts out. Fuck.

“Oh?” the voice replies lowly. Jisung doesn’t need to see to know that he’s smiling around his blunt, tone muffled by the bulk of where his mouth presses into it. It’s so much in the quiet where the music from the house can’t reach them. “How do you know me?”

No going back now, he guesses. “I have a friend, Felix,” Jisung begins, soothing his thumbs of the tension betweens his knuckles to idle himself as he speaks. “You deal for him, I think.”

Minho wouldn’t remember Jisung. 

His last year of high school had been the first — and last — time he’d seen him. It was a vague memory, something about Felix having Jisung tag along to come pick up something. It was vague because the entire experience was drowned out by who he was picking his ‘stuff’ up from. Jisung was stunned when he saw Minho even though it’d been well over two years since now, and now he was finally able to put the pieces back together again. It was him. 

Jisung told himself he’d never go on another run with Felix after that. No way in hell he’d ever feel worthy of crossing paths with someone that stunning — the type of looks that stole your breath just from realizing you were inhabiting the same space. Too ethereal. Jisung simply couldn’t. Of course he was in league with Bambam’s group, why wouldn’t he be? It sucked all the self-confidence out of him every time he thought about him in the nights after that, eventually shoving the memory of him into the compartment of myth and legend, just like the rest of it. 

At least Minho doesn’t catch on to the whirlwind of memory racking Jisung’s brain, because he simply hums out, “Mm, I used to, probably. Don’t much anymore now that I’m rooming with Bam.”

There’s a long pause held between them, this stagnant silence charged with Jisung’s overwhelmed nerves and Minho’s arrestingly calm demeanor. He’s sitting with one knee propped up so his elbow can sit atop it with the blunt in hand, taking the occasional drag between the moments Jisung feels eyes on him. 

“Sort of wish I still did now, though,” Minho finally says. 

Holy shit, what?

Jisung thought the break in silence would help to cut the tension, but he’s beginning to find that Minho loves to unintentionally play with building it instead. The words do nothing but make his mind swim with more questions than he started with, and he attempts to shake off the suspicions before they can consume his mind in the only way he truly knows how: more talking. 

It’s only polite that he introduces himself, he argues internally. “I’m, um,” he stammers, almost smiling in disbelief at his own stupidity where the faint whisper of it lifts the corner of his mouth. “I’m Jisung.”

“I know,” Minho mimics.

Jisung’s smile fades instantly. He makes the same mistake of flitting his eyes over to Minho’s in surprise to find him staring once again, and Jisung is mesmerized.

He’s so much closer now, glancing at Jisung out of the corner of his feline eyes that are angled upwards in crinkles at the edges. They glimmer the same as his sharp cheekbones with the reflections of light off the surface of the pool, bathing the soft looking skin of his face in fragments of ethereal refractions that have his statuesque features glistening something akin to a crystal. Jisung can feel the air catch in his lungs (which he hopes to god isn’t noticed) before he’s once again turning his attention back to the water for his own safety. 

“How?” Jisung whispers past a pout, suddenly short of breath. 

“I sit behind you during the morning lecture,” Minho says, voice soft.

“I’ve never seen you,” Jisung says, thinking out loud. Not like he would, realistically, if Minho sat behind him, but fuck — he would notice a face like that if it occupied the same room as him. 

“You don’t,” Minho breathes out with a weak little laugh. “I barely ever attend. Not really a morning person,” he muses. Jisung has to close his eyes to resist rolling them; even the rhythm of his laughter is stupid pretty. 

“I recognize your face, though,” Minho continues. “Always off and alone on the sidelines, right? Away from everyone else,” he says with that smile in his voice again. “I’m the same way.”

Despite the icy chill in the air and the cold remnants of anxious nerves wrapping their tendrils through Jisung’s system, he can feel the warmth where a flush creeps up his neck and face, hot all the way until his ears undoubtedly tinge scarlet under his beanie. He takes in a shaky inhale, gently attempting to accept the idea that any person — Minho, above all people — would pay attention to him that much. The level of focus on him is frightening, but why doesn’t it feel wrong? Why is it not uncomfortable the way it had been when he was indoors, consumed and panicked under the notion of being observed so intensely? 

The second Jisung truly takes in Minho’s words, realizing he’s been watching him long enough to have his face memorized, it feels like all the blood rushes to his cheeks and leaves his heart flatlined of blood; astonished.

His face falls to his lap and his eyes close, mind kicking into overdrive. One, two, three. Breathe in. Breathe out. Fuck, this is awkward. 

Minho must be looking, because it’s not long before he’s speaking up again. 

“Are you still nervous?” he asks, retaining that addictive nonchalance in his voice that creeps past the scratchy gravel near the back of his throat. 

Jisung lets out a pathetic little laugh between his gritting teeth, but he still manages to smile something genuine. “Yeah,” he breathes out. “Just a little bit.”

Now with his vision cut off, Jisung is all too aware of the pleasant tone in Minho’s hum, thoughtful. It has something new swimming in the pit of his stomach and licking that same shameful heat upwards between his ribcage, buzzing electric from the inside of his torso. He can feel where the corner of his jawline tightens with the press of his teeth, but it all goes lax in confusion at the next words he hears.

“Let me smoke you out, then,” the voice says before it’s taking another steady pull of the blunt.

Jisung’s eyes blink open as if in slow motion, head twisting curiously to Minho before he can stop it. Something about the moment finally allows him to not panic when his sight fills with his form, too perplexed to truly absorb anything else. 

One of Jisung’s eyebrows tentatively lifts in question, watching the way Minho’s eyes briefly flit to the stars above, chest puffed out with the smoke it was holding. 

“What?” Jisung softly asks.

Minho looks back to him again — fuck, keep calm — before he’s smirking — calm, Jisung — and then releasing all the smoke that’d been held in his lungs, playfully blowing a cloud of gray-white into Jisung’s face. Jisung manages to not cough, though his brain feels like it goes into an acrid daze where his senses are overcome with the scent of something herbal and earthy. He blinks innocently through the sensation before his gaze shifts back to Minho’s own curious one.

“Never gotten high before, Sung?” Minho teases, finally smiling enough that hints of his teeth peek behind the stretch of his plush lips. It’s no moment sooner before he wets them with the tip of his tongue, and Jisung almost forgets that he was just asked a question. 

“Um,” he begins, searching high and low in his mind for an answer that isn’t an immediate no. It was always one of those things he’d been offered and constantly refused, figuring it just wasn’t the crowd he was destined to belong to. “This one time, I accidentally ate one of Felix’s weed brownies? I didn’t know until after he told me, though, so, uh, I don’t think I really felt anything. I wasn’t any calmer, or whatever it does — if that was what was meant to happen. It still tasted good, though?”

Minho’s smirk only grows wider with Jisung’s rambling to the point where a punch of amused air escapes his nose at the end, playing with what was left of his blunt between the pads of his fingers. “Never wanted to try it again?”

Jisung finally braves holding eye contact for longer than a second, because he knows he’s being dead honest. “Never really gave myself the opportunity.”

Minho does something that throws Jisung off guard.

Jisung’s gaze immediately snaps to where he hears the crinkle in the fabric of Minho’s jacket when he moves his arm, snaking his free hand to clasp around one of Jisung’s wrists so easily. He handles him like they’ve been friends for years and not mere on-off acquaintances since the end of high school, wrapping his fingers until Jisung can feel his thumb pressing gently into the jut of bone there. He lifts Jisung’s hand expectantly, bringing his own blunt right into his fingers. Jisung holds it awkwardly between his thumb, index and middle. 

“There’s your opportunity,” Minho muses ever so casually. 

Jisung gapes at the blunt, how its burnt end has a thin strand of wisping white curling up towards the moon, fading out like vapor where the wind above smacks and pulls against it. Something about the sight is pretty and calming to him already. His own little placebo, maybe. Maybe that’s not where the newfound warmth is coming from. Perhaps it’s the remnant tingles in his skin where he realizes Minho had just gripped him, hand only now sadly slipping away and back into place. 

Jisung looks down at his fingers again and the blunt that rests between them. He doesn’t know how to do this. He’s only ever seen people do it on occasion in real life or in movies without ever understanding the technique, if there was one. Part of him wants to ask Minho for help, but he already feels piteous enough given the circumstances. 

He braves it before he hesitates too long to rouse questions, bringing the end he’s meant to smoke to the pout of his mouth. He can feel Minho’s sharp stare when his lips curve around it, belatedly realizing Minho’s own were just on it minutes ago.

It’s somewhere between that realization and the way he sucks the smoke in like he would if attempting to drink out of a straw that has his throat immediately burning on a disgusting series of coughs. He’s vaguely aware of how he’s blindly handing the blunt back to Minho, doubling over in his fit to clear his throat until he can see the reflection of his own face in the water. 

Minho seems unphased, even laughing a few times as he rubs some soothing circles into Jisung’s lower back. “Yeah,” he says over the nasty chorus of Jisung clearing his throat. “First drag is typically like that.”

“Could’ve—” Jisung says, bringing a closed fist against his mouth, “—warned me.”

“Oops,” Minho shrugs when Jisung finally collects himself again. Jisung shoots him a glare that Minho returns just as fiercely, and it’s only a brief pause before they break out into crescent eyes and wide grins and begin chuckling together. The pain at the back of Jisung’s throat feels so far away when he gets to see that smile. 

Once their laughter finally ebbs away, Jisung can feel the way something in the air changes with it. Minho’s gaze is held for longer now even though it doesn’t feel much easier than the first time. Something about keeping his eyes there makes the space between them feel charged, and Jisung challenges himself a little longer every time before he eventually has to release a delayed cough and look away.

“Was worth a shot,” he says on a shaky exhale. 

Minho’s eyes remain on Jisung’s side profile. “There’s another way,” he replies in that soothing tone. “One that doesn’t require you to take a hit.”

Jisung’s eyes squint when he looks at him again. “Really? How?”

The smirk is back. 

“I take it for you.”

There’s a pause between them where they simply look at each other, their features. Minho seems particularly interested in piqued curiosity of Jisung’s full pout; Jisung in return staring back at eyes that he dares assume are beginning to cloud with something mischievous and dark.

“Show me,” Jisung says past the breath trapped at the back of his closing throat, unable to hide the desperate interest where his words taper off without the questioning lilt. 

Minho smiles, relaxing back on his hand as if finally being engaged in his element. “Lean forward,” he orders too casually. 

It’s almost embarrassing how easily Jisung follows such a simple command, albeit slowly. With every inch forward into Minho’s space — so much now that he has to prop a hand up on the poolside ground to keep himself stable — he belatedly realizes just how easier everything feels when he’s asked to follow instructions instead of calling the shots for himself. It’s like a balm on his mind, easy and simple, straight to the point. 

He only stops leaning in at the slight tilt of Minho’s head. Maybe he was testing how far Jisung felt it was appropriate to lean in, if the amused glare in his lidded eyes was any notion to go off of. 

“Open your mouth.”

Fuck.

Jisung feels his jaw slacken instantly, lips parting just a fraction. 

“More.”

Jisung’s lips part into a gentle ‘o’ shape, widened just the same amount he would to wrap his lips around a bottle for a swig. Minho keeps his eyes there for a moment longer than necessary, even as he brings the joint to his own lips. 

“Good,” he praises. Jisung can feel his hand tighten and grip against the ground, the grooves of skin in his palm collecting the sediment there. “Now stay still.”

They hold eye contact as Minho takes a long drag of the blunt at his mouth, and it requires everything for Jisung’s eyes to not drop to the way his pink lips press and suck in right at the bottom of his periphery. His eyes are intense, though; trapping him in a hold only his own embarrassment could be strong enough to break. 

It proves even more difficult when the blunt is pulled from Minho’s lips, chest puffed up from where his lungs are stuck and full — because then he’s the one who’s leaning into Jisung’s space. He’s so close now that their eyes can no longer comfortably stay fixed on the other, forced to stare at where their mouths are merely inches away from each other to the point where Jisung could lean in and brush their noses together. 

And then Minho blows. 

A white whip of smoke passes between them, and Jisung is so stunned that he simply lets the mixed concoction of earthy scents and Minho’s breath hit against his lips. A majority of it gets carried with the wind between the gap of their mouths and faces, and Minho releases a disbelieving little huff of laughter once all the smoke has left his system. 

“Might need to do that again,” he says.

Fuck, again? Jisung blinks, still stuck in his little maelstrom of whiplash from having Minho’s face so close to his. He can barely think straight, feeling where his heart kicks in his chest and the warmth spreading through his system leaves him in some hypnotized looking daze, all flush and incapable of being alert to anything around him except Minho. 

“O-okay..” Jisung gulps, giving himself a brief nod of reassurance. “Sure.”

“This time, I want you to inhale everything I give you, okay?” Minho says. Jisung means to reply to that, but then Minho is shifting so close that their legs brush together and he suddenly can’t do anything but simply nod again, lost for words. 

“Okay,” Minho begins again. “Open for me.”

Jisung is never going to get used to that. Even though his brain has convinced himself, his body still goes pliant and lax from the words alone, acting on complete autopilot for him. He wets the inner seam of his lips before parting them once again, the same as he had last time, but Minho doesn’t seem satisfied with just that anymore. 

He takes a steady drag of his joint, but there’s a determination set in his fixed gaze now. The blunt has been reduced to not much more than a stub, and Minho tosses it to the side and onto the ground once he’s done with his pull. 

Then his hand shoots up to Jisung’s face. 

Minho gently takes his jaw between the clasp of his fingers, thumb on one side and the other pads of his fingers on the other. He uses it to press in, adjusting the openness of Jisung’s parted lips just how he wants, pulling him forward as much as he wants — all the way until their noses do faintly brush together on certain movements and Jisung lets the quietest little gasp escape his mouth. Minho uses the opportunity to begin blowing directly into it, letting no smoke escape between them. Jisung belatedly realizes his orders — inhale everything I give you — and he’s breathing in all of Minho’s breath and smoke and there’s a too-short infinitum of simply everything that he feels in this moment. He can feel the taste of the smoke and how it doesn’t burn his lungs or coat them acrid and sour this time. He feels the dig of fingers remaining on his jaw and how the thumb twitches, like it’s itching to appreciatively pet down his jawline for being so good, taking everything that’s being passed to him and— 

It’s over. 

It’s over too soon. Jisung’s mind screams for Minho to not leave or part from him, yet he’s still surprised when he doesn’t. Minho keeps them close together, keeps his fingers clamped around his jawline until the only thing they’re left breathing in is each other's warm breaths, both a heady scent of herbal and wood. 

“I don’t feel anything yet,” Jisung whispers into the small space between their lips. 

“You will soon,” Minho whispers back, teasing his thumbnail into a press against where Jisung’s cheek is at its plushest. The only thing he hears after that is his own gulp, Minho’s subtle panting where he attempts to regulate his breaths again, the sound of those French doors opening at the most inopportune time on the planet. 

“Jisung!” a familiar voice calls out. “There you are!”

The hand at his jaw drops instantly. Minho’s eyes are on the source and scowling before Jisung can even properly twist around, meeting the sight of Chan’s exhausted yet panic-stricken form. He strides unsuspectingly down the stairs and into the patio, walking right towards them with an innocent and relieved look in his eyes. “Fuck, I’ve been looking all over for you,” he says, extending out a hand to him once he’s finally close enough. 

Jisung casts one final look at Minho, finding him still staring at Chan. The pause of silence is the only thing that causes him to break his glare and glance back to Jisung, who mouths out an appreciative thank you before flinging out his hand to get hauled to his feet. He wants to say more to him, wants to continue their conversation and see what Minho would’ve done had they not been interrupted, but that once-appreciated guiding arm from Chan is being flung over his shoulder and leading him back inside after briefly greeting Minho. 

The last thing Jisung sees over his shoulder when they depart from Minho is how his blank face stares dark and far into the water, reminiscent of how Jisung had done when he’d first come out here, wanting to be alone — distant, quiet and sulking — by himself. 

The sight of Minho like that bothered Jisung more than it should have. It should bother Jisung more than it does. It bothers Jisung.. he doesn’t like it. What he means is that it’s like, sad, right? It’s really sad. Sad. It’s sad. 

Holy fuck, wow.

Jisung snorts to himself, bringing a hand up to play with the fingers of the hand belonging to the arm flung over his shoulder as he’s brought back inside this, like, super mega big house. He plucks each pad of their fingertips as if playing a piano, and the idea is so ridiculous that he snorts again. 

“Oh god,” Chan huffs out as Jisung toys with his limbs, amused. “Sounds like your first meeting with Minho went well.”

Jisung hums blissfully, belatedly realizing that he’s getting escorted through all these throngs of people again and not really giving much of a fuck about their existence. His eyes are beginning to tingle a little, and it feels like the edges of his limbs are being pumped with TV static straight through the veins and all over his nervous system. It’s like a million little tiny pinpricks are tickling his nerve endings, and he sags his temple into the side of Chan’s chest with how relaxed it makes him feel. 

Chan can’t coerce Jisung to stay on his feet the entire walk back to Bambam’s lounging area, so he resorts to giving him a complimentary piggyback ride instead. By the time they arrive, Jisung lags his eyes around a group of probably familiar faces he met earlier tonight that surround the coffee table at the tail end of some game. He peers over Chan’s shoulder to see Bambam still in the middle of the sofas, cheering softly to himself as he’s the first person to put down all ten of his fingers.

“Ayy, I win again,” he says, taking a little pile of money off the table and into his hands. “You guys make this game too easy.”

The following banter is a garbled whitenoise as Chan carries Jisung over to the sofa Bambam is sitting at, depositing him backwards into the free seat right beside him. He blinks his focus back into his ears near the end of a conversation Chan exchanges with him, and Jisung throws up a dopey wave when Bambam hits him with some mischievous side-eye. 

“No shit. You guys were gone for fifteen minutes tops and you’ve already got the kid zooted?” he giggles behind an elegant hand with long fingers. They have so many of those shiny, ostentatious rings on them that keep shimmering when he moves. So pretty. 

Hearing Bambam giggle makes Jisung giggle. 

Bambam looks up to Chan who takes a seat on Jisung’s other side as Jisung himself begins sinking into the seat until his ass nearly hangs off the edge. All the voices sound like they come in muffled fragments past walls of thick, feathered pillows, but the light in the room is too bright, causing his lidded eyes to tense into a disturbed squint. 

“Damn, what the hell did you give him?”

“Wasn’t me, man. Minho gave ‘em some of his own shit.”

“Oh fuck, that makes a lot more sense.”

Bambam lifts a hand to scratch at Jisung’s scalp over his beanie, and he might be embarrassed if not currently stoned at how he almost purrs in reaction, eyes slipping shut and mouth parting open. He feels it behind his ears all the way down his neck and spine; those little tingles that make him feel like he’s sinking through the cushions and floating. 

“This his first time?” a faraway voice asks. 

“Given the fact he prolly took one hit n’ is acting like he smoked two full bowls, yeah, for sure,” another replies.

“On one of Minho’s strains, too,” the first says again with another chiming laugh. “His stuff is always intense.”

Jisung hears the distant call of his name and some belated touches on his body. There’s this disorienting pause where his brain has to register what’s going on before he can react to it with a delay that feels like minutes to hours in a blurry slow motion. He attempts to put the euphoria aside to process what’s happening, eventually opening his lids to an army of a thousand hands waving directly in front of his eyes, all sparkly and littered with designer jewelry.

“Earth to Jisung?” Bambam smirks down at him. Jisung’s eyes slowly rove up to his own soft ones hiding behind those sunshine yellow lenses, processing the way his alcoholic breath hits his face and coats his senses. “How you feeling, bud?”

“Mm..” Jisung replies with a dazed smile. He vaguely recognizes the sound of a few people in the vicinity laughing that he hadn’t known were even paying attention to him. That’s fine. He doesn’t mind the attention anymore — if anything, the chorus of giggles and chuckles simply have his bones buzzing something warm. 

“Think you can stay awake through a round of Never Have I Ever?” Chan asks softly at his other side as if handling a sleepy child, a wall of bodily warmth Jisung is super tempted to sink into. He fights the urge off with a suspended nod, arguing against the vertigo his body feels as he shoves himself back up into a seated position on the sofa and dizzily blinks whatever iota of concentration he has left in him to the forefront of his mind. 

He takes in the scene as much as he can: nearly every sofa is occupied around the table, somewhere between twelve to fifteen people casually drinking from their solo cups and engaging in conversation with those adjacent to them. Their eyes — along with Jisung’s — snap to Bambam at his left once he clears his raspy throat. 

“Alright, round two for Never Have I Ever,” he begins, fishing out a crystal decanter of an amber liquid he had sitting near his feet. He thrusts it onto the table, letting the liquid honey slosh around between the grooves of glass that morph it in so many different shapes under the overhead lights. Jisung is nearly hypnotized by it. 

“Wanna up the stakes this time, so I’m putting my best whiskey on the line. If anyone wants to put any bets down, now’s the chance.”

Most people around the table don’t have much up on offer, and Jisung connects the dots that they must’ve bet most of their share last round. Still, the occasional few bills get tossed in, and that’s all before Bambam’s explaining the rules. 

It’s simple enough for even the stoned version of Jisung to just barely understand: ten fingers up, they go around the circle making statements about something they’ve never done, and everyone who’s done said thing needs to put a finger down — except in this game, whoever gets the most fingers down first wins. 

Wildest wins, Chan mutters off to his right, letting out an amused shake of his head like this was something Bambam plays way too often. 

On top of those rules, Bambam announced that alongside putting a finger down, you have to also take a shot. 

“Except you,” he says, nodding to Jisung. “You just put a finger down.”

The almost parental scold in his voice has the circle giggling again, doubling over when Jisung belatedly nods with this tired grin on his face. After that, everyone holds up their ten fingers and the game begins with Bambam starting. 

It’s a fun game, even if Jisung immediately forgets what happened ten seconds after the fact and can barely muster the attentiveness to make out every word someone says, the sentences never quite sticking properly in his head. It’s not like it matters once he realizes he hasn’t done a majority of the things people are saying on their turns, looking down at his nine fingers he still has up. Bambam’s already got an entire fist closed and is on his fifth shot before they make it around the entire circle, Chan not too far behind. 

That’s when people seem encouraged to raise the stakes. 

“Never have I ever gotten a piercing below the neck,” someone vaguely recognizable says. 

Nobody moves to take a shot except this pretty looking boy at the sofa across from Jisung. His features are curved and lithe, almost too delicate for an atmosphere like this. He brushes shoulder-length strands of black out of his eyes where his half-ponytail doesn’t catch it, tilting his head back to wrap a set of pillowy lips around the brim of his cup.

“Nuh-uh,” Bambam huffs offhandedly. “Everyone knows about the new belly button piercing, Hyunjin. That doesn’t count.”

Hyunjin. Huh. Why does Jisung feel like he should recognize that name? Anyways, Hyunjin merely smirks over the brim of his handful of red plastic, casting Bambam a flirtatious little wink when he chugs back a shot of whatever he had inside and letting out a dramatic wince once it’s knocked back into his throat. 

Chan huffs to himself, tipsy. “I’m so confused.” 

“There’s a reason Hyunjin doesn’t wear shirts with thin material anymore,” that recognizable face teases, getting a weak slap in the chest from Hyunjin for it. 

“Fuck off, Seungmin!” Hyunjin whines over the melody of oh shit’s and oh my god’s as people finally catch on to the connotation of what Seungmin said. Jisung is too focused on piecing together how he remembers Seungmin to pay much attention to the whispers and amused claps, but he’s vaguely aware of the impressed nod Bambam gives at his side, conceding the point for Hyunjin. 

“I’ll give you it,” he says once Hyunjin and Seungmin’s bickering ends, but there’s no trace of unease or worry in his voice. “I’m still gonna win, though.”

“You sure about that?” a new voice says off to the side.

Everyone turns to it, even Jisung. It’s so prominent to the room; a familiar and husky flatness that immediately has his static insides blending together into something molten and overwhelmed. 

Minho shuffles past the sitting bodies with a blank expression, eyes fixed on the free seat that’s furthest away from everyone else. Bambam lets out an affronted sound at his arrival, clear amusement in the way the corners of his lips tilt up as his jaw hangs open while he watches Minho casually recline into the cushions, lazily lifting ten fingers against the fabric over his swell of thick thighs that Jisung suddenly has to fight to stop staring at. 

“What’re you doing here, dude?” Bambam asks, feigning shock. “Thought you didn’t do party games anymore.”

“Have to give you the chance to win sometimes, right?” Minho teases back, cocking a brow. “‘Sides, I’m in the mood for whiskey.”

God, his voice. Now that Jisung’s completely lost to his senses he can feel the way it courses straight through him, every note a tendril that slinks through his mind and consumes it until it’s the only thing he can hear past the people, the pulses of music, everything surrounding him. It’s the only thing that doesn’t come as a delay to his senses, he realizes — even his own mind relapses back to sobriety to give it his full attention. 

And fuck, his face. His fucking face is somehow even prettier now when Jisung looks at it because everything around it fades and blurs as if he’s looking at an unfathomable mirage in the desert. It’s far and close all at once, new yet familiar, just like how Jisung belatedly averts his gaze when Minho deftly flits his eyes over to peek and check if he’s being watched. 

Oblivious, Bambam settles into his seat. “Well, if you think you can beat me when we’re already halfway through the game, be my guest,” he says on a relaxed sigh, nodding for the game to continue on. 

The game runs smoothly, though the questions have gotten so intense now that Jisung barely even bothers with keeping his fingers lifted anymore. He instead focuses his attention on those who drink or not, curiously eyeing Minho, Bambam and Chan in his periphery that all seem to be taking the most shots. 

There’s a few hiccups for Bambam that he doesn’t seem to account for, yet Minho continues blasting through every single one called. Jisung is dazed and astonished that he seems to have done everything people name, but nobody else in the circle seems to bat an eye at the prospect.

By the time it’s Hyunjin’s turn, Bambam and Minho are tied with only two fingers left up.

And by the look on Hyunjin’s face — especially when he casts a knowing glare in Seungmin’s direction — he’s gonna make this a good one. He demurely tilts his head back, letting his long lashes fan his cheekbones on closed eyes as he pretends to think of a good option, like he hasn’t been brewing up one ever since he got called out on his hidden piercings earlier. 

“Never have I ever,” he finally says, attempting to bite back a smirk, “fantasized about fucking someone in this circle.” 

Even Bambam seems shocked by the statement. Jisung looks over to his side, noting how he doesn’t reach for his cup to take a swig. Seungmin isn’t as lucky, blinking a blank glare at Hyunjin that houses pure and irate fury just beneath the surface. Hyunjin cackles and claps as Seungmin begrudgingly knocks back his drink, letting out a disgusted smack of the taste in his mouth when a finger goes down. 

Jisung almost misses the way Chan is taking a sip from his own drink. He blinks over to his side profile and how his Adam’s apple bobs on the swig, mind lagging behind between the sight and surprise racking delayed through his system. 

“Oh wow,” Jisung eventually slurs out in a whisper once Chan puts a finger down, leaving two up. “Who is it?” 

Chan drunkenly shivers off the taste of his shot, blinking himself back into focus. He doesn’t meet Jisung’s eyes as he looks around the circle, merely saying an ominous “I might tell you later,” that Jisung is too stoned to put too much thought into.

He especially can’t focus on it any longer at the sound of loud clapping and shouting, head instantly whipping to the source. The guy that had been arguing with Changbin, Jisung distantly recollects — Wooyoung? — is playfully shouldering Hyunjin on the sofa, jostling them both amidst a series of laughs and high-volume conversation. 

“Wait, wait!” Wooyoung says, doubling over until his front presses into his knees, revealing the sultry planes of the chest hiding underneath his v-neck that contrasts against his teasing and animated nature. He eventually comes back up after a few high-pitched cackles now that it’s his turn, leaning to face the rest of the circle. “I can do you one even better than that, hold on.”

He clears his throat with pseudo-professionalism, smirking so hard he has to dig his teeth into the plush of his bottom lip. 

“Never have I ever jerked off to the thought of one of the people in this circle.”

Bambam and Hyunjin are on him instantly despite the mere increase in laughter, saying it doesn’t count since his boyfriend was literally right next to him, arm flung over his shoulder and all. It was a free point, they argued; no way in hell anyone else in this circle would be able to put a finger down for a claim as lewd as that. As if they'd admit it, even if it was true.

They were all wrong, apparently, because someone does. 

Minho. 

The moment he stands up, all fingers down and the last shot in his cup taken, the lounge seems to quiet itself again to a low murmur, decorated with the background cadence of house music and unassuming bystanders living their unimportant little lives outside this ring of stunned people.

Jisung feels a growing pit in his stomach where he walks closer to him — closer to the table — to casually pluck the decanter of whiskey off the surface with one fell swoop of his hand akin to a predator diving for its prey. He twists the glass around in his slender fingers, lazily eyeballing the label with growing amusement at Bambam’s next words. 

“Man, I swear you cheated.”

“I never cheat,” Minho smiles to himself, letting the hand holding the whiskey finally drop to his side so he can cast Bambam a sincere gaze. It reminds Jisung of that moment by the poolside, looking up to find such an intimidatingly strong presence looking down, nigh undefiable. 

Bambam seems to at least share a margin of the sentiment, because instead of outright arguing, he simply says, “So you’re telling me you have done all those things.”

“Mm,” Minho hums vaguely, secretive. Bambam lets out a petulant huff, and that’s all Minho needs before his ‘sincere’ gaze morphs back to its telltale mischief; a smirk crinkling the edges of his eyes, casting him a playful lift in his brow as he pokes his tongue in his cheek. He lifts the decanter with a smug cheers before turning to walk away, and the pit in Jisung’s stomach expands tenfold. 

On top of the tingles of his high, he feels how his melting brain swims and starves for answers from the boy that was walking away from him. He’s too sunk into the cushions to chase, too trapped in his mind to call out, forced to deal with the unsatisfying revelation amid his trip that the questions clawing to the forefront of his concentration would go unacknowledged. 

But as Minho turns, Jisung receives it.

It’s so brief, how Minho’s eyes level with his. It’s not a mere catch of gazes — he genuinely looks at him, cheeky demeanor fading beautifully from that piercing glare before he’s fully turning around to leave. 

His answer. 

Jisung watches him leave, watches his body disappear and blend with the ocean of people as he undoubtedly goes up to his room. It feels like the remnants of his sobriety scream at him, attempting to claw to the surface among all the haze and confused waves of static, but once it’s there in his mind— 

The last two fingers I put down.

—he can’t seem to shake it. He can feel the way his mind quickens with panic, eyes widening. He has to be overthinking, but there’s no way. Suddenly, completely, more than he had been since this party, since before today, he suddenly feels the most sober he’s ever been, because— 

They were about you.