sha sha sha (2/2)
sha sha sha
~16,400w; pg-13 (dk/jaehyun)
seokmin meets his first love again, three years later.
( part one)
Making friends, Seokmin realizes, is actually really hard. Which is probably why he didn’t have that many. Those that he did have were people he’d known for practically forever like Seungkwan, whose family lived two floors above them in their apartment complex, Soonyoung, whose meeting Seokmin doesn’t remember the exact details of, but according to Soonyoung, it involved someone hitting the other in the face on the jungle gym, and Mingyu, who’d uncannily shared every class with him from first grade in elementary school all the way to senior year in high school. Or, they were people like Minghao, who saw him basically twenty-four seven during the school year (Seokmin barely left their room), or Vernon, who he saw every time he saw Seungkwan.
That just left Jeonghan, Seungcheol, and Jihoon, all who had been friends with Soonyoung first, making the process of getting to know them go much smoother than it would with strangers. Maybe not so much with Jihoon, but that was beside the point. Of course, there were still things Seokmin couldn’t talk to them about without wanting to crawl under a rock, like farts. They were close, but not that close.
Getting to know Jung Jaehyun is, in contrast, more turbulent. Aside from what Seungkwan calls Seokmin’s figurative “boner” for the guy (that was when Seokmin again thought about making new friends, but then realized he didn’t have the time or energy for that), it was awkward, to say the least, trying to learn more about each other and find what common ground they had, apart from their majors, and usually resulted in this weird back and forth of random questions, trying to figure out what the other liked.
“Do you like basketball?” Jaehyun asks him one day, when they’re on their way to lecture. Their morning patterns were pretty similar - Jaehyun woke up at seven to take showers while Seokmin woke up at seven to finish any questions he forgot to do the night before. Jaehyun’s words, not his.
“Oh, yeah!” Seokmin readily agrees. It was fun watching NBA matches. Also, playing no-rule basketball with Soonyoung, Mingyu, and Seungkwan was hilarious because they fouled each other left and right.
Jaehyun’s eyes light up, excited. Or maybe that’s just the sun reflecting in them. He’s trying to be…impartial, something Seungkwan says he severely lacks when it comes to Jaehyun. Either way, Seokmin can hear his heart thumping loudly in his chest at how happy Jaehyun looks. “Awesome! Hey, do you wanna meet up sometime at the gym to play with me and some of these other guys I know?”
Seokmin freezes. The last time he played basketball was probably during P.E in high school, and even then, his skills were laughable. Not to mention, he’d only been to the campus gym maybe two times during his whole college career and the basketball dudes had intimidated him the most. “Uh…” he starts, trying to think of the best way to turn down Jaehyun’s offer. Not that he didn’t want to play basketball with Jaehyun, or watch Jaehyun play basketball. Because that would be a sight.
“Lemme guess, you can’t?” Jaehyun intervenes after an awkward moment of Seokmin searching for the right words, but failing to find them. A tight smile pulls on his lips. “Hey, no worries, I get it!” he chuckles, still sounding disappointed, when he sees Seokmin’s wide eyed expression and claps him on the shoulder for good measure. They don’t talk again until lecture is over and they say their friendly goodbyes.
But once they find their niche, the words come a lot easier. Whether it’s complaining about homework assignments over text, or asking each other why they’re Biochemistry majors - Seokmin’s been inspired to go into pharmacy, Jaehyun is daringly thinking about Pre-Med - they end up finding some kind of comfortable rhythm even though uncomfortable silences are still littered throughout the time they end up spending together.
And then Seokmin finds out Jaehyun plays Pokemon Go.
They’re in the library again a few weeks later, studying for the upcoming midterm together. Jaehyun, Seokmin’s learned after spending a good amount of time doing their assignments across from each other, is actually really organized and good at pacing out his workload, unlike Seokmin and a lot of his friends, who all pretty much subject themselves to the thrill of doing work last minute. Lab had gone pretty smoothly - usually when Seokmin worked with Jeonghan, someone was always rushing to finish things up and had to sprint to campus to turn it in (usually Seokmin) - with Jaehyun as his partner, which was a pleasant change of pace. They’d decided to be partners again next time, to Jeonghan’s dismay, who was stuck working with Im Nayoung, a girl Seokmin remembers going to his high school, super organized and practically a perfectionist, especially when it came to pep rally decorations.
It’s maybe four in the evening when Seokmin finally lets himself take a quick bathroom break, his head swimming with how much information he’s crammed into the confines of his skull during the past two days. Jaehyun’s still staring at one of their old homework assignments with his nose cutely scrunched in deep focus, per usual, when Seokmin looks up. Seokmin only lets himself mouth soundlessly “why is Jung Jaehyun so adorable” once he’s at the urinal. Some guy who’s washing his hands in the sink gives him this weird look, and Seokmin just presses his lips together.
He’s walking back to his seat across from Jaehyun when it happens. The way their seats are situated requires Seokmin to walk past Jaehyun to get back to his place, which gives him a decent view of Jaehyun’s phone screen. He’d probably taken out his phone once he realized that he should take a break from studying, too, after seeing Seokmin wander off. Seokmin doesn’t really mean to peek because that’s just rude, but his eyes kind of gravitate toward that direction on their own, and it’s not like Jaehyun would do anything stupid like watch porn on the school’s wi-fi...
And that’s when Seokmin sees the familiar blue-green map with Jaehyun’s character standing in the middle of it. Oh my god.
“Are you playing Pokemon Go right now?” Seokmin exclaims over Jaehyun’s shoulder, forgetting the carefully crafted friendship he’s been trying to kindle in a moment of his inner Pokemon nerd. Jaehyun flinches, startled, fumbling with his phone. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, I’m just excited -”
Jaehyun laughs quietly once he’s recovered from the initial shock before putting a finger over his lips. He tilts his head to Seokmin’s left, gesturing for him to look. When he does, he sees a good number of people sitting nearby glaring at him before going back to their books. Seokmin grins sheepishly before taking his seat across from Jaehyun again.
“Yeah,” Jaehyun whispers, putting his phone down on the table so Seokmin can get a look at his screen. Now that he thinks about it, Jaehyun did say something about his Eevee that first day they met in lecture. “I’m so bad at it, though, I don’t get how anything works like?” He lets out another quiet, this time self-deprecating, laugh, shaking his bangs out of his eyes. “Help me?”
Seokmin pulls the phone closer to him so he can look through Jaehyun’s Pokemon and items. Lots of Pidgeys and unhatched eggs. When he goes back to the home screen, he sees that Jaehyun is close to leveling up. “Hey, you’re almost to level 5!” Seokmin encourages, sliding the phone back towards Jaehyun. “If you walk to the end of the hallway, you can get close enough to the PokeStop nearby and spin it to get some XP. I mean, if you wanna level up, that is. Not saying you have to -”
Jaehyun gets up quickly before Seokmin can finish, determination in his eyes. When he comes back, he brandishes his phone in front of Seokmin’s face proudly, with “Level 5” in large print glowing on the screen. “Thanks for telling me,” Jaehyun says, nearly bouncing in his seat with excitement. Could he get more adorable? “Every time I ask my friend to help explain things to me, he just laughs.”
Seokmin laughs, thinking of Seungkwan. “Yeah, no problem,” he says, a grin spreading on his face, Jaehyun’s giddiness rubbing off on him. “You might want to pay attention to what Professor Willow’s gonna say next,” he suggests as Jaehyun’s drinking from his water bottle, Adam’s apple bobbing. Seokmin averts his gaze, feeling his cheeks flush. How Jaehyun managed to go from super cute to super hot in less than ten seconds was something only God knew the answer to.
Jaehyun scrambles back to looking at his phone, while Seokmin tries to re-focus on studying again. He’s in the midst of reading the same sentence a third time when Jaehyun taps his arm. “Did you know the library was a gym?” he whispers, his face a lot closer than Seokmin’s used to it being when he looks up.
“Um,” Seokmin, the oracle of Pokemon Go knowledge in Jaehyun’s eyes, articulates, simultaneously reminding himself that blurting out I like your face so much would definitely make things awkward between them. “Yeah.”
Jaehyun just gapes in response, leaning back. When he goes back to looking intently at his phone screen, Seokmin wonders if it’s too much to tell Jaehyun that he’s actually stationed his Vaporeon here. He had just figured out you didn’t have to be physically in front of a PokeStop to spin for it.
“I’m gonna battle it,” Jaehyun tells him, that determined glint in his eyes again. Seokmin chokes on air.
“With what?” he hisses, concerned for Jaehyun’s well-being. The last time Seokmin checked, someone left their CP 1557 Lapras here. He was lucky that they were on the same team, but it didn’t seem like Jaehyun shared that advantage. Jaehyun holds up his phone so Seokmin can see, revealing a CP 276 Pidgeot that he assumes Jaehyun’s friend, who had a modicum of pity, helped him with.
“Um…” Seokmin starts, trying to think of a way to convince Jaehyun to back down. But Jaehyun looks so enthusiastic about his plan that he falters. It’s like taking candy away from a baby. “About that…”
“It’ll be fine!” Jaehyun says, as if he senses Seokmin’s worries, but not the depth of them. “Isn’t Flying good against Water?”
Seokmin coughs, trying not to laugh. Jung Jaehyun really is a Pokemon noob. But a much more endearing Pokemon noob, unlike, say, Seungkwan who kept bugging Seokmin even after he linked Seungkwan to a Pokemon Go walkthrough guide. He feels a sudden flood of emotion and wonders if this is how parents feel when they let go of the handlebars on their child’s bicycle. Jeonghan’s face comes to mind, for some reason.
Jaehyun puts the phone between them again, so Seokmin can watch as the battle begins. Despite Jaehyun’s incessant tapping, the Lapras decimates his Pidgeot and collection of Pidgeys, Zubats, and a Bulbasaur in five seconds flat.
“I was trying to tell you,” Seokmin shrugs, voice quiet as Jaehyun flops onto his still-open textbook before him. When he looks up at Seokmin, there’s a hint of a pout on his lips and it’s the cutest thing Seokmin’s ever seen - erase whatever held the title in his mind before (probably either puppies or another of Jaehyun’s adorable facial expressions), this is definitely the winner - and Seokmin does his best not to clutch his chest and keel over -
And then Jaehyun whines. “Why didn’t you?” he says, drawing out the last word and it’s literally everything. Seokmin nearly dies right then and there.
In all honesty, he does feel a little bad that he didn’t give Jaehyun more of a heads up. But as he’s trying to cover his giggles with what hopefully sounds like a laugh, Jaehyun joining in after a beat, Seokmin doesn’t really regret anything.
“So when are you gonna tell Jaehyun you like him?”
Leave it to Xu Minghao to cut to the fucking chase. Seokmin nearly spits out his water at Jihoon, who’s sitting across from him, before willing all his facial muscles to prevent any projectile motion because it’s Jihoon. Almost-target just raises his eyebrows at him, judgmental, before shaking his head.
“They literally walk each other to and from every class,” Jeonghan reminds them all, again, as if he didn’t start the whole “Seokmin and Jaehyun” conversation five minutes ago with the same observation. “It’s like Seokmin doesn’t even recognize my presence anymore.”
Soonyoung’s wiggling his eyebrows at him. Seungkwan looks like everything that he’s wanted to say has just been said by Minghao. Mingyu is working on his and Minghao’s project, alone. Seungcheol is on RA duty and no one’s sure where Vernon is after he said he was going to the bathroom half an hour ago.
“You guys sound awfully close,” Junhui, Minghao’s big from his dance team, who Minghao invited into their dorm’s lounge for another so-called “study session,” remarks - as if his outsider perspective is conducive to their conversation. “Right, Wonwoo?” He turns to the guy who’s sitting next to him, extremely still in his chair. “Oops, I think he’s sleeping.”
“Did he really add you on Facebook?” Mingyu asks once he finally gets Minghao to look at their Word document. “Because I don’t believe it.”
Seokmin opens and closes his mouth, at a loss of how to reply. “Oh, believe it,” Seungkwan cuts in unhelpfully. “He talked to me about it for two hours. That’s some detail he can’t make up on the spot.”
Seokmin’s still flabbergasted at how his friends are so nonchalantly discussing this very serious proposition - as if it were easy and simple, like waiting for the toast to roll through the very convenient toaster in the dining hall, a slice of bread never emerging burnt - when Soonyoung nudges his arm and poses the question again. “So when are you gonna tell Jaehyun you like him?”
“Never!” Seokmin wails. It comes out louder than he thought it would. Wonwoo seems to flinch awake.
Vernon, who at that moment happened to open the door to come back inside, backs away slowly and closes it. Seokmin groans.
There are places Seokmin hates on campus. Dining halls at seven, when everyone finally remembers they have to eat before they close. The lecture hall he took his first Life Science midterm in during freshman year, because Seokmin bombed it. The Quad after nine in the morning, when everyone was rushing to class. The Quad when people handed out free food, hungry university students clogging Seokmin’s way to class. Crowded places in general. But out of all those places, he hates the gym the most.
It isn’t like he hates exercising. Exercising is great. Minghao was always telling him to go to the gym whenever Seokmin did his core-strengthening routine in the room, on the account that you pay for that shit with your tuition and you grunt really loudly by the time you start your fourth set. The point of that being, Seokmin did, surprisingly exercise.
He didn’t really mind the smell of sweat all that much, either. Well, maybe he was just being easy on himself - Seokmin did lean away from whenever Soonyoung tried to put an arm around his shoulders after his dance practice. That isn’t the problem with the gym.
The problem is, everyone at the gym looks really intimidating.
Seokmin waits next to the water fountains, where the occasional sweaty person takes a drink, staring at his phone screen impatiently, waiting for Seungcheol’s text. He’d put phone at 5% SAVE ME in the group chat an hour ago, and Seokmin, feeling bad that the message had been read by five with no replies thirty-five minutes later, had offered to lend Seungcheol his charger. Seungcheol just happened to be at the gym. Which is why Seokmin is now here, at his least-favorite establishment on campus, in the first place.
The first time Seokmin stepped into the gym, it had been one month into his freshman year. He’d decided to try some lifting, at Seungkwan’s suggestion (“I feel like every guy that comes back to visit our high school after his first year at Uni is a lot buffer than he used to be. At least I know you won’t make me feel like a limp noodle”). He was wandering around the machines aimlessly, not sure how to use anything, when someone asked if he would spot for them on the bench press. Seokmin, obviously knowing what he was getting himself into, agreed.
That person lifted more than Seokmin weighed. “Your turn?” they’d asked when they were finished. Seokmin stammered that he had to use the bathroom and never came back.
Seungcheol, he types once a guy with impressive arm muscles finally gets his fill from the water fountain. Please save me. His biceps had bulged just from pressing the button.
Five seconds pass. Seungcheol doesn’t read the message. Seokmin decides to be patient. Ten seconds. Four minutes.
He can’t do this anymore.
He’s in the middle of sending a glaringly distressed I’M DYING CALL FOR HELP I’M NEAR THE WATER FOUNTAINS to Seungcheol when he hears a familiar laugh. “Hey, I let you win that last game, okay!” someone’s saying as they turn the corner and then, oh fuck, Jung Jaehyun is looking right at him.
Seokmin nearly drops his phone. There’s an awkward split second of just them, trying to comprehend the situation. The guy standing next to Jaehyun, probably one of his basketball friends from the way he’s holding a basketball under his left arm, looks from Seokmin to Jaehyun, then back at Seokmin. He takes the chance to dive for the taller water fountain first, leaving Jaehyun with the shorter one.
“Hey,” Jaehyun says, breaking the silence first, pushing his sweaty bangs back, out of his face. They kind of stick to the rest of his hair for a moment before sliding back into this weird halfway position - not quite settling back against his forehead, but not staying where he placed them - and it’s just enough for Seokmin to see his exposed forehead and wow, is that a beautiful forehead - “Fancy seeing you here,” he chuckles. It doesn’t sound quite the same as it does when they’re sitting across from each other at the library or coffee shop - when it tickles Seokmin’s ears pleasantly. It’s more stiff. Awkward, maybe. It was always awkward seeing each other out of their normal places.
Jaehyun’s friend pauses from drinking at the water fountain, giving Jaehyun a funny look at his statement before bending back down again. “Yeah,” Seokmin says, brain short-circuiting from thinking of what to say and the wee two hours of sleep he got last night. “Fancy seeing you here,” comes out of his mouth at the end, cringing inwardly at the repetition, which is pretty pathetic, even in Seokmin’s book. Jaehyun’s friend pauses again, this time giving Seokmin the same look he gave Jaehyun, and it says something that Jihoon would probably say aloud.
“Oh yeah!” Jaehyun says, putting a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “This is my friend, Dongyoung.” Seokmin stretches out a hand in habit, which Jaehyun’s friend - Dongyoung - takes with his still-clammy one. For some reason, the name sounds familiar. “He’s a grade older than us, super old, really -”
And then it hits him. Kim Dongyoung. Leader of the tenor section. Head choir boy. The one who always knew when Seokmin was just a little bit off-pitch. He would totally recognize Seokmin. He would totally recognize Seokmin and tell Jaehyun that they went to the same high school and that would lead to an unfortunate downward spiral of Jaehyun asking Seokmin why he didn’t tell him that and then things would be super awkward between them again. He guesses he should count his blessings that he actually got to hang out with Jaehyun for the past few months, living out part of his dream before he dies of embarrassment.
Dongyoung looks at him. Like, really looks at him this time. Jaehyun’s drinking from the water fountain now, and Seokmin wonders if he’d been asked a question when he wasn’t listening.
“You know,” Dongyoung starts, thoughtfully. Jaehyun wipes his mouth using the bottom of his shirt, exposing a slice of his abdominal region for a brief, too-fleeting (in Seokmin’s opinion) moment, where there was definitely some definition of abs there. Not that he can enjoy that fact while Dongyoung is still looking at him. “You look familiar. Have we met before?”
Seokmin laughs nervously. Keep it together, keep it together. “Who knows?” Seokmin says, trying his best to be nonchalant. “Maybe we saw each other in a lecture or something.”
Jaehyun shakes his head. “Dongyoung’s an applied music major,” he explains. Some inner part of Seokmin screams. As he’s thinking the sound of his inner turmoil is ringing in his ears, Jaehyun looks pointedly down, to Seokmin’s pants pockets. “Is that you?” he asks at the sound of Seokmin’s phone.
“Oh,” Seokmin stutters, grabbing for it. It’s Seungcheol. Bless. “Um, I gotta take this, but I’ll see you around?” he says to Jaehyun as his finger hovers over the “answer” button. Jaehyun gives him a grin and a thumbs up in response and Dongyoung just waves, politely, as Seokmin speed walks to the exit, pressing the phone against his ear.
“Hey, sorry I made you wait,” Seungcheol says as Seokmin starts back to the dorms. “I just finished my workout now. Are you still by the water fountains?”
Well, shit. But Seokmin’s not going back in there after he just barely escaped. He slows to a stop, looking back to the gym that he left behind. “Uh…could you meet me by the tennis courts instead?”
Group chat: high school squad
seok (3:45pm) wtf
seok (3:45pm) i just saw kim dongyoung
seok (3:45pm) wtf wtf wtf
seok (3:46pm) did u guys know he goes here?
seok (3:46pm) WHY DOES BASICALLY EVERYONE FROM MY PAST GO HERE
boo (3:47pm) omg no
boo (3:47pm) did u talk to him???
soon (3:47pm) yea he’s in my grade
soon (3:47pm) we were in the same math class freshman yr
boo (3:47pm) did he say anything about being ur talking voice being an eighth off
seok (3:48pm) @boo no. he didn’t remember me bLESS
seok (3:48pm) @soon y do u always withhold this impt info from me
soon (3:48pm) how was i supposed to know it was impt to u???
boo (3:49pm) he did that to me once. i was so offended bc ur talking voice is way pitchier than mine? like
seok (3:49pm) HE’S FRIENDS WITH JAEHYUN
seok (3:49pm) HE’S GONNA TELL HIM THAT WE WENT TO THE SAME HIGH SCHOOL
mgyu (3:49pm) guys u woke me up
soon (3:50pm) calm down seok ): if he didn’t remember u then it’ll b fine
seok (3:50pm) MINGYU THERE IS A LARGER PROBLEM @ HAND
seok (3:50pm) MY PRIDE & DIGNITY
boo (3:50pm) every fuckin time mingyu
boo (3:51pm) and ia w soon. plus does it even rlly matter?
boo (3:51pm) didn’t he say u guys r friends now? who cares?
seok (3:51pm) ugh
seok (3:51pm) i hate when u guys r logical
soon (3:52pm) ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
boo (3:52pm) if we weren’t logical do u think ud still be alive rn
seok (3:53pm) ……
seok (3:53pm) i’m not gonna answer that
boo (3:53pm) technically u just did
seok (3:53pm) ……
mgyu (3:53pm) guys all i wanna do is fall back asleep
All hell breaks loose the night before their second-to-last lab is due.
Not hell in the academic sense. The write-up hadn’t been too impossible with both Seokmin and Jaehyun’s combined effort over the past few days, working on it until four in the morning at the latest, sitting across from each other at the coffee shop with two coffees that Jaehyun had swiped for between them. This kind of thing became a habit for them - when they knew they were going to be up super late, they’d opt for meeting up the coffee shop instead since it was closer to the dorms than the library, keeping each other awake for the most part.
A couple times, Seokmin wakes up at three AM, blinking, the blurry figure of Jaehyun across from him either typing away on his laptop or working on chemistry assignments. Jaehyun doesn’t usually notice Seokmin’s woken up until at least five minutes later, the longest, fifteen, and Seokmin can’t find it in himself to bother him.
“When did I fall asleep?” he asked the first time it happened, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Jaehyun had tapped his chin, scrunching his nose to consider an accurate time estimate.
“Maybe around twelve thirty?” Jaehyun tried. He went back to looking at something on his laptop screen.
“What?” Seokmin blurted, feeling bad about forcing Jaehyun to watch over his stuff as he enjoyed a nice, dreamless nap. “Why didn’t you wake me? I’m sorry I made you stay with me, this is so embarrassing, you probably could’ve gone to sleep by now…”
Jaehyun shook his head, a tired smile on his face. “I did,” he told Seokmin. “Around one. But you didn’t wake up, so I guess you really needed the sleep.” Jaehyun had to be an angel in disguise. He took a sip of his coffee, probably long-cold and gross tasting, before continuing. “Honestly, it’s fine. I’m kinda behind in this class so I wanna finish this tonight. And I would nap here, too. If I could.”
“You can’t?” Seokmin asked, before he could think better of it. But, again, Jaehyun didn’t look like he minded the distraction.
“I’m a really light sleeper,” he explained to Seokmin, a hint of a grimace on his face. “Can’t sleep if there’s any noise. When my roommate goes to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it drives me nuts,” Jaehyun chuckled sadly. Seokmin, still half-dazed, suddenly wanted to wrap Jaehyun up in a blanket right then and there. He almost did, before remembering he wasn’t in his room, and the thing he thought might be a blanket was actually the scratch paper he had drawn compounds on.
It’s that situation again tonight, Seokmin doing his best not to succumb to his sleepiness, but fighting a losing battle. Getting up every thirty minutes to go to the bathroom wasn’t working. Neither was poking his right index finger with his pencil. He’d only gotten an hour of sleep the night before - the result of starting his paper at five in the morning when it was due at noon - and the rest of the day he’d spent feeling uncharacteristically drowsy and chilly, like every lecture hall’s air conditioning was turned on higher than usual. At around eleven, with their lab write-up completed and Seokmin’s other homework assignment half-completed, he decides to cut his losses and nap, telling Jaehyun, whose nose is scrunched up in adorable concentration yet again, to wake him up in thirty minutes.
It’s a sound, pitch dark sleep at first. And then the dream kicks in, Jaehyun shaking him awake, face hovering near Seokmin’s. Jaehyun calls his name once. Again. Three times.
Dream-Seokmin mumbles incoherently back at him. That makes Dream-Jaehyun frown. “Seokmin, wake up,” he says, shaking him again. It all feels extremely real, like a dream you wake up from and can’t distinguish from reality. “It’s already twelve.”
Dream-Seokmin shakes Dream-Jaehyun’s hand off his arm, which makes Dream-Jaehyun laugh dryly. “Come on,” he prods Seokmin, shaking on his arm again. “Hey, Seokmin.”
He feels Dream-Jaehyun’s hand graze his forehead briefly in the midst of trying to pull him up to a sitting position. Then, that hand presses more firmly against his forehead. “Fuck,” Dream-Jaehyun says, sounding distressed. He puts his hand against Seokmin’s forehead again. “You’re really hot, Seokmin.”
Dream-Seokmin giggles at that. “I think you’re the really hot one, Jaehyun,” he replies, words drawn out from his grogginess.
Dream-Jaehyun laughs a little at that. Is he amused? Does he like that Seokmin complimented him? “Hey, but seriously Seokmin, your forehead is really hot, it might be a fever -”
And then the pitch of a dreamless sleep seeps over him again.
Of course, Seokmin doesn’t recognize that all hell has broken loose until he wakes up in his dorm room, sweating in a burrito of sheets. A pile of blankets that suspiciously look like Jeonghan - the hair on the pillow is the dead giveaway - are on the floor in between his bed and Minghao’s desk, currently occupied by said owner, who turns away from his laptop screen to look at Seokmin when he hears him trying to kick off the blankets he’s been buried in.
“Oh,” Minghao says once Seokmin’s done moving. “You’re awake.”
“Yeah, I’m awake,” Seokmin tries to shoot back, but his voice comes out as a parched croak instead. Minghao, the ever helpful when he wasn’t being a little shit, hands him one of their emergency water bottles. Seokmin gulps down half of it, offering a quick thanks before continuing. “Did I just sleep a whole day away?”
Minghao gives him a look full of concern. “No,” he starts slowly, as if he’s afraid to tell Seokmin the end of a story he’s already heard, but Minghao doesn’t know that. “It’s five AM right now. I think Jeonghan and Jaehyun carried you back here before one.”
“Wait,” Seokmin interrupts before Minghao can say more. Jeonghan and Jaehyun? The last thing he remembers is sitting across from Jaehyun at the coffee shop, asking him to wake him up in thirty minutes. And then that dream, when Jaehyun shook Seokmin awake. In which he told Jaehyun that he thought he was really hot. Unless that wasn’t a dream. “What?” he squeaks, the horrible realization dawning on him.
“You had a fever,” Minghao tells him, tossing him a bottle of Tylenol. Which, in Seokmin’s uncoordinated and tired state, just hits his lap and rolls onto the ground, stopped only by Jeonghan’s side. Minghao gets up, picks up the bottle, and this time hands it to Seokmin. “It might be the flu? Didn’t you say you felt cold all day? That might’ve been chills.”
Seokmin takes a pill wordlessly, too tired to say anything and still in a state of shock. He really told Jung Jaehyun that he thought he was really hot. Did friends do that? Not the kind of friends he was with Jaehyun, at least. Did he just make things awkward again by telling him that, then?
They’re silent after that. Seokmin struggles to put the Tylenol bottle on the floor next to his bed. Minghao keeps watching him, making sure something bad doesn’t happen, like Seokmin falling out of his bed.
“Minghao,” Seokmin whispers after he’s settled back into the sheets with much effort. Minghao, who had turned back to his laptop after he thought Seokmin was going back to sleep, turns his head to look at him. “I think I told Jung Jaehyun that he’s really hot,” he wails, muffled his pillow, pressed against his left cheek.
Seokmin thinks he hears Minghao say something along the lines of finally, you wuss before he falls back asleep again.
Seokmin wakes up several times - to pee and to his phone vibrating under his pillow (who put that thing there?) - before actually coming to again. By then, it’s afternoon of the next day, and he only has enough strength to drag himself to his desk, where there’s a bowl of lukewarm soup and a piece of bread that someone, probably Minghao, swiped for him. He eats it and then crawls back to his bed, fishing his phone out from under his pillow to see what messages he’s received since he passed out.
There’s one hundred and thirteen new messages in the SVT group chat. Seokmin’s not really in the mood to scroll through those at the moment, so he dismisses that notification. Individual texts from most of his friends - even Vernon, whose he does check because Seokmin’s sure this is the first time Vernon’s texted any of them (on account of Seungkwan always complaining that he barely uses his phone). It says a succinct feel better, devoid of emojis.
There’s five texts from Jeonghan, which he also ends up reading, telling him that he’d tell their TA that Seokmin was too sick to make lab today, but that he should send the TA an email himself telling him that too. Shit, Seokmin thinks as he registers that it’s already three in the afternoon. He actually managed to sleep through all his classes today.
Then there’s notifications about new emails - one from his lab TA, telling him that their write-ups were due today, others from the university career center and alumni network, which he never really read, anyway. And then, at the bottom of it all, are two texts from Jaehyun.
Fuck. Seokmin feels like he’s going to throw up. Maybe literally. He turns to his side, remembering that horror story Soonyoung told him of some frat dude choking on his own vomit because he had been laying on his back. Thankfully nothing comes out, but Seokmin’s stomach is swirling ominously as he opens the messages with a shaky thumb.
jaehyun (8:19am) hey seokmin! i hope you’re feeling better! you kinda passed out after i tried waking you up last night, idk if you remember. i didn’t want to leave you there so i called someone using your phone…i hope that’s ok with you. i kinda panicked and thought it would be best to call your parents? so i called your mom contact but it turned out to be your friend…yoon jeonghan? haha that was interesting. and we carried you back to your dorm room together.
jaehyun (8:21am) don’t worry about lab and stuff! not sure if you’ll see this but we finished the writeup anyway, everything should be fine! get plenty of rest and text me back whenever you wake up :)
No. No. Jaehyun knew about how Jeonghan called himself Seokmin’s mom now. And Seokmin had told him he thought Jaehyun was really hot. Wait, did Jaehyun and Jeonghan speak to each other when they carried Seokmin back to his dorm room? How else did Jaehyun know Jeonghan’s name?
Jaehyun definitely thought Seokmin was a loser now. If he hadn’t before. Maybe all this time they’d spent together as friends was really Jaehyun pitying how Seokmin desperately wanted new ones. Or maybe it was just to get help on his chemistry homework.
Maybe he’d known that Seokmin had a huge crush on him this whole time.
Seokmin groans, burying himself under the blankets, eyes still open in the artificial darkness of his sheets. He keeps thinking the same thoughts over and over and over again until the darkness becomes his eyelids closing, taking him back to a deep sleep.
It’s two day later when Seokmin finally has enough energy again to walk himself to and from classes. He spends the rest of the time in his dorm, lying around in his bed with his laptop propped against his chin, watching anime. He doesn’t walk past the library or the coffee shop, or go to his eight AM class at the ungodly far lecture hall. He doesn’t text Jaehyun back.
“I need you to go to lecture for me,” he told Jeonghan the other day, when Jeonghan called to make sure he was doing okay. “Eight in the morning, three times a week. And take notes.”
“Are you serious right now?” Jeonghan had said, a chuckle in his voice, like he expected Seokmin to tell him it was all a joke. A moment of silence. “Shit, you’re really serious, Seokmin?”
“Please, Jeonghan!” he whined. He wasn’t ready to face Jaehyun yet. Maybe ever. “For your child!”
Jeonghan considered for a bit. “Fine,” he finally grumbled. “But honestly, Seokmin, I don’t think Jaehyun minds, you know he told me -” And then, in a spur of momentary panic from hearing Jaehyun’s name, Seokmin hung up.
In fact, Seokmin makes a pointed effort to stop talking about Jaehyun. He changes the subject whenever Seungkwan gives him that certain look - the one that he had when he was going to bring up Jaehyun to Seokmin, a mix of a smirk and admiration at Seokmin’s “endearing idiocy,” as he put it - with a very smooth, “Uh, s-so the weather today! Is lovely! Isn’t it?” He says he has to go to the bathroom whenever Minghao tries to ask him whether Seokmin will be hanging out with his “friend” - meaning Jaehyun. Soonyoung and Seungcheol catch on fairly quickly, either talking about the weird things that happened to him that day (Soonyoung) or funny stories about his residents (Seungcheol). Vernon is always silently helping himself to whoever’s fries are at the table and Seokmin highly doubts Mingyu even remembers Jaehyun’s name.
It’s going so well that Seokmin tries to take the next step, which is to stop thinking about Jaehyun. But this, Seokmin discovers as he’s struggling through his chemistry homework for once, Jeonghan’s notes almost indecipherable, is a lot harder than it sounds.
“He asked how you were, you know,” Jeonghan tells him sometime after the fever incident, mouth full of chips from Seokmin and Minghao’s snack stash, sitting on the floor as Seokmin’s at his desk, asking Jeonghan every now and then to decode the notes he’s taken for him. “That Jaehyuk kid.”
“Jaehyun,” Seokmin corrects, in habit. Shit, he was doing so well not saying his name. Seokmin had even managed to avoid Jaehyun in lab the other day, walking into the classroom just in the nick of time, the only open seats being near the back - behind Jaehyun - or at the very corner near the door, with the projector blocking his view of the blackboard. Of course he chose the corner seat, and bolted out of class as soon as it was over.
A smug smile grows on Jeonghan’s lips. “Ha!” he exclaims. “I knew it, you still like him!”
Seokmin feels his face go hot. Jeonghan just continues, unperturbed by Seokmin’s lack of flustered denials and squawks that usually accompanied the subject matter. “You know, I think he likes you, too? I mean, he stopped me outside lecture today and asked if you were still sick.” Seokmin feels the heat of Jeonghan’s glance even though he’s still hunched over, staring at the assignment that continues to not make sense to him. “He looked pretty worried about you.”
“He’s not,” Seokmin starts, wanting to tell Jeonghan to drop the subject. But he had to admit that, the way Jeonghan described it, it sounded like Jaehyun still wanted to be his friend. Because Jaehyun didn’t like Seokmin, obviously. Jeonghan was stretching the truth to make him feel better. “We’re not…”
Seokmin stops before he can deliver the finishing blow, paired with a self-deprecating chuckle trying its best to sound nonchalant. We’re not even friends. Because Seokmin even though knew that this was the rational conclusion of everything he’d done in the past two weeks, the penultimate event to the inevitable end, and that acceptance was the first step of going back to how things had been before, Seokmin only hanging out with his small circle of friends, Jaehyun his untouchable crush from high school, something in his heart twists, thinking about the last few months he’d spent being Jaehyun’s friend - late nights working on homework, Seokmin actually getting more sleep than before thanks to Jaehyun’s organized pacing of assignments rubbing off on him, laughing at Jaehyun slowly learning the ins and outs of Pokemon Go, Jaehyun’s eyes sparkling with excitement when he spoke about his future aspirations, Jaehyun’s nose scrunched in concentration, Jaehyun -
Jeonghan’s hand is on his shoulder. In his other is the pencil Seokmin dropped, the pretty nice mechanical kind. It’s that pencil, the one he never really could bring himself to return to Jaehyun. He hadn’t even realized he’d been using it.
Jeonghan smiles at him again, gentle and encouraging this time. “What have you got to lose?”
Seokmin’s still fucked, though.
It’s eleven, a couple nights after he talked to Jeonghan, when someone knocks on his door. It couldn’t be Minghao - his dance team was having their “hell week” and Minghao hadn’t come back until maybe two in the morning, earliest. Also, Minghao never forgot his card key. Which meant that it was probably Seungkwan, who liked to come over to his room at whim, and Seokmin, being a good hyung but also enjoying his presence, usually let him in.
“Seungkwan,” he groans, pausing the video he was watching and shoving his feet into his slippers. He probably looks like shit, but it’s just Seungkwan, who’d definitely seen him in worse states, so it doesn’t matter. “I told you to text me before coming over -”
The person standing on the other side of the door is definitely not Seungkwan. He’s a little taller and wearing a sweater with their university’s logo on it that Seungkwan wouldn’t be caught dead with (one of their colors was a mustard-like yellow that he claimed made his face look super round). “Hey,” Jung Jaehyun says with a small smile on his face, hints of dimples on his cheeks, and Seokmin decides that, contrary to what Jeonghan implied, he actually has some things to lose.
Like his dignity. “Oh,” Seokmin hears himself say, as if on autopilot. His fingers are still clutching the edge of his door. “Hi.”
Jaehyun looks at him for a good minute, in utter silence. Maybe he was waiting for Seokmin to say something, but Seokmin’s mind was burnt from overthinking. How did Jaehyun know he lived here? Did he remember from when he carried Seokmin back that night? Why was Jaehyun here, anyway? Hadn’t Seokmin been avoiding him? Why did he have to come here now, when Seokmin had yet to mentally prepare himself for this whole encounter?
“Um,” Jaehyun clears his throat. Seokmin snaps his head up from where he was looking at the floor to meet Jaehyun’s eyes. Big mistake. They were mesmerizing, and it only made Seokmin’s mind go even more blank, if that was possible. He tilts his head forward, to the direction of Seokmin’s room. “Can I, uh, come in? If that’s alright with you?”
“Oh!” Seokmin says, getting it now. “Yeah, uh, sure.” He scrambles to the side, letting Jaehyun in before closing the door behind him.
Seeing Jaehyun in his room is surreal, to say the least. Seokmin remembers imagining Jaehyun hanging out with him on his floor, watching movies and anime together. In his imagination, though, that happened after Jaehyun confessed his undying love for Seokmin. Which was obviously not going to happen now.
Jaehyun walks around in a small circle, trapped by Seokmin and Minghao’s random piles of old textbooks they kept forgetting to sell and clothes piles. Seokmin’s face heats up, moving to make more room for Jaehyun to sit, but Jaehyun shakes his head. “Nah, it’s fine! I, uh,” he scratches the back of his neck, the situation awkward. “Just wanted to talk?”
Seokmin stares at him as Jaehyun’s finding the words to continue. “I…” he trails off, reaching a dead end. “Why didn’t you reply to my text?”
Oh no. Jaehyun’s trying to do that. Talking out their problems - the nice, adult way to solve things, except that Seokmin always said more than necessary, which usually created more.
What should he say? Seokmin swallows, uncomfortable, Jaehyun waiting patiently for an answer. Sorry, didn’t get it? How about I don’t have a phone? Except for the fact that it’s on Seokmin’s desk, in Jaehyun’s view. Or maybe I think I’m gonna be sick, because he actually feels like he will be. “Uh…” he says, intelligible, in the end.
Jaehyun frowns. “I was pretty worried when you didn’t come to lecture. Thought you were still sick or something?” He stops to rub his forehead, looking tired. “And then when I asked your friend Jeonghan, he said you’d been better for a while now.” He looks at Seokmin again and it makes Seokmin’s heart literally stop beating in his chest, because he’s never seen Jaehyun so distressed before and Seokmin shouldn’t be thinking that it makes him look attractive when he’s the cause of it all. “Are you avoiding me?”
“Yes,” Seokmin blurts, without transferring the message to his brain first, where it definitely would’ve stopped him from saying it out loud. Shit. Jaehyun blinks at the swiftness of his reply. “I mean,” he tries, waving his hands frantically. “No!”
Jaehyun takes a step closer to him, squinting as if he can figure out what Seokmin’s thinking by focusing his vision. Obviously, that doesn’t work. “Why?” he asks, sounding hurt. Which he shouldn’t. Seokmin literally just wants to turn into a pile of goo and seep through the dingy carpet of his room and avoid this whole conversation. “I thought we were friends, Seokmin?”
And in that moment, Seokmin feels like an utter and complete asshole. Here was Jaehyun, trying to fix whatever he thought he did wrong, when Seokmin was the one who messed things up by blurting out that he thought Jaehyun was hot in the first place, letting his feelings get in the way of their friendship. “No, no, we are!” Seokmin insists. “I just, I don’t know, felt so embarrassed? That you had to see me like that. All weird and saying weird stuff like thinking you’re hot and all.” Which I totally don’t, his brain feeds to him next. “Which I totally do. Think you’re hot.”
Holy shit. That did not just come out of his mouth. Jaehyun’s eyes widen and Seokmin opens his mouth to salvage whatever he can. “I mean! I just, you know. I don’t know?” He’s sweating now and he wonders if Jaehyun notices. “I’ve liked you since high school.”
No. Some part of Seokmin dies inside, withering into a husk of its former functional unit, along with his pride. He was so, so fucked. “Huh?” Jaehyun says, looking thoroughly confused now. He’s doing that scrunching thing with his nose, like when he’s trying to figure things he doesn’t understand out, and up-close, it’s not as adorable as Seokmin thought it was, but he still likes it, he just likes Jaehyun -
“I like how your dimples only show when you smile. I like the way you asked me to be lab partners. I like the way you kind of scrunch your nose up when you’re focusing really hard on something, like right now. I like how you never judged me when I said something super awkward, kinda like what I’m doing right now, and how you tell me a lot about yourself even though we were practically strangers.” Seokmin can’t stop himself once he’s started, afraid that Jaehyun will tell him to stop before he can say everything. “I like how you suck at Pokemon Go and know nothing about type match-ups but ask for my opinion on stuff. I like how we’re friends.” He pauses to suck in a breath. “But I, uh, also like you more than a friend. I think. Maybe.”
He doesn’t look up at Jaehyun even after he’s done. The carpet in his dorm room is a fascinating shade of dark, moldy green that he never really noticed before. He’s aware of the fact that he’s literally just dug himself a hole so deep that it’d be impossible to crawl out of. Seokmin knows his face is probably as red as a tomato right now, and he’s already embarrassed himself enough in the last ten minutes or so that he really doesn’t need any more reasons for Jaehyun to think he’s weird.
Seokmin doesn’t really know what he’s expecting Jaehyun to do. Maybe walk out of his room right then and there, and ignore Seokmin for the rest of the semester. Say an awkward, “I’m flattered, but no thanks”? All he hoped was that Jaehyun would at least offer to stay friends. Or that they’d end up as acquaintances that greeted each other whenever they occasionally made eye contact.
What he doesn’t expect is Jaehyun saying, “I, uh.” He’s looking down at Seokmin’s carpet like Seokmin had been before his head jolted up at Jaehyun’s voice. And is it the crappy lighting of his dorm room, or are Jaehyun’s cheeks flushed? “Like you too, Seokmin.”
Holy shit. Jaehyun looks at him, which tells Seokmin that he actually just said that out loud. “Not since high school,” he stutters. Seokmin blinks, wondering if this is real. Jaehyun’s still standing before him when his eyes focus again. “Dongyoung told me we went to the same high school.” Jaehyun wrings his hands, and all Seokmin wants to do is take them into his own, but that was too much right now. “I’m sorry I didn’t remember? I don’t think we ever really talked.”
Jaehyun shakes his head, a stiff laugh escaping his lips in the pause between his words, stilted and sounding even more unsure than he did that first time, when he asked Seokmin if the seat next to him was open. Seokmin feels his heart swell with everything he’s feeling (hope, love, fear, anxiety) and takes a deep, shaky breath - as if it’ll calm both him and Jaehyun - before Jaehyun continues. “But anyway, um, I just really like hanging out with you. You’re, like, one of the few friends I’ve made since I’ve came to uni? I…” He covers his mouth with the back of one of his hands, flushed cheeks peeking out behind it. It muffles the last few words that he says, and Seokmin stands there for a moment, trying to comprehend everything.
I wanna keep hanging out with you every day.
Group chat: SVT
hoshbrown added Lee Jihoon to the chat
hoshbrown changed Lee Jihoon to zhoon
hoshbrown (7:34pm) :D
hoshbrown (7:34pm) jihoon said he had something impt 2 say in the chat
hoshbrown (7:34pm) which in jihoon speak = saying congrats 2 seok
hoshbrown (7:35pm) interpretation: “why am i here” means “i’m happy 4 u”
dk (7:35pm) d’awwwwwww thnx jihoon!!!
zhoon (7:36pm) why r u hoshbrown
dk (7:36pm) …….
seungkwannie (7:37pm) remember when soonyoung was taking japanese class and wanted to practice vocab?
seungkwannie (7:37pm) and he was all like i’m a star! i’m a hoshi!
mingU (7:38pm) and then jeonghan ate hash browns the next day
hoshbrown (7:38pm) u luv me jihoon
dk (7:43pm) where’d he go
dk (7:43pm) my congrats??? ):
zhoon has left the group chat
dk (7:45pm) T____T
hoshbrown (7:45pm) …..
seungkwannie (7:45pm) hyung quick what does that mean in jihoon speak
hoshbrown (7:46pm) uh
hoshbrown (7:46pm) i think he loves us?????
~16,400w; pg-13 (dk/jaehyun)
seokmin meets his first love again, three years later.
( part one)
Making friends, Seokmin realizes, is actually really hard. Which is probably why he didn’t have that many. Those that he did have were people he’d known for practically forever like Seungkwan, whose family lived two floors above them in their apartment complex, Soonyoung, whose meeting Seokmin doesn’t remember the exact details of, but according to Soonyoung, it involved someone hitting the other in the face on the jungle gym, and Mingyu, who’d uncannily shared every class with him from first grade in elementary school all the way to senior year in high school. Or, they were people like Minghao, who saw him basically twenty-four seven during the school year (Seokmin barely left their room), or Vernon, who he saw every time he saw Seungkwan.
That just left Jeonghan, Seungcheol, and Jihoon, all who had been friends with Soonyoung first, making the process of getting to know them go much smoother than it would with strangers. Maybe not so much with Jihoon, but that was beside the point. Of course, there were still things Seokmin couldn’t talk to them about without wanting to crawl under a rock, like farts. They were close, but not that close.
Getting to know Jung Jaehyun is, in contrast, more turbulent. Aside from what Seungkwan calls Seokmin’s figurative “boner” for the guy (that was when Seokmin again thought about making new friends, but then realized he didn’t have the time or energy for that), it was awkward, to say the least, trying to learn more about each other and find what common ground they had, apart from their majors, and usually resulted in this weird back and forth of random questions, trying to figure out what the other liked.
“Do you like basketball?” Jaehyun asks him one day, when they’re on their way to lecture. Their morning patterns were pretty similar - Jaehyun woke up at seven to take showers while Seokmin woke up at seven to finish any questions he forgot to do the night before. Jaehyun’s words, not his.
“Oh, yeah!” Seokmin readily agrees. It was fun watching NBA matches. Also, playing no-rule basketball with Soonyoung, Mingyu, and Seungkwan was hilarious because they fouled each other left and right.
Jaehyun’s eyes light up, excited. Or maybe that’s just the sun reflecting in them. He’s trying to be…impartial, something Seungkwan says he severely lacks when it comes to Jaehyun. Either way, Seokmin can hear his heart thumping loudly in his chest at how happy Jaehyun looks. “Awesome! Hey, do you wanna meet up sometime at the gym to play with me and some of these other guys I know?”
Seokmin freezes. The last time he played basketball was probably during P.E in high school, and even then, his skills were laughable. Not to mention, he’d only been to the campus gym maybe two times during his whole college career and the basketball dudes had intimidated him the most. “Uh…” he starts, trying to think of the best way to turn down Jaehyun’s offer. Not that he didn’t want to play basketball with Jaehyun, or watch Jaehyun play basketball. Because that would be a sight.
“Lemme guess, you can’t?” Jaehyun intervenes after an awkward moment of Seokmin searching for the right words, but failing to find them. A tight smile pulls on his lips. “Hey, no worries, I get it!” he chuckles, still sounding disappointed, when he sees Seokmin’s wide eyed expression and claps him on the shoulder for good measure. They don’t talk again until lecture is over and they say their friendly goodbyes.
But once they find their niche, the words come a lot easier. Whether it’s complaining about homework assignments over text, or asking each other why they’re Biochemistry majors - Seokmin’s been inspired to go into pharmacy, Jaehyun is daringly thinking about Pre-Med - they end up finding some kind of comfortable rhythm even though uncomfortable silences are still littered throughout the time they end up spending together.
And then Seokmin finds out Jaehyun plays Pokemon Go.
They’re in the library again a few weeks later, studying for the upcoming midterm together. Jaehyun, Seokmin’s learned after spending a good amount of time doing their assignments across from each other, is actually really organized and good at pacing out his workload, unlike Seokmin and a lot of his friends, who all pretty much subject themselves to the thrill of doing work last minute. Lab had gone pretty smoothly - usually when Seokmin worked with Jeonghan, someone was always rushing to finish things up and had to sprint to campus to turn it in (usually Seokmin) - with Jaehyun as his partner, which was a pleasant change of pace. They’d decided to be partners again next time, to Jeonghan’s dismay, who was stuck working with Im Nayoung, a girl Seokmin remembers going to his high school, super organized and practically a perfectionist, especially when it came to pep rally decorations.
It’s maybe four in the evening when Seokmin finally lets himself take a quick bathroom break, his head swimming with how much information he’s crammed into the confines of his skull during the past two days. Jaehyun’s still staring at one of their old homework assignments with his nose cutely scrunched in deep focus, per usual, when Seokmin looks up. Seokmin only lets himself mouth soundlessly “why is Jung Jaehyun so adorable” once he’s at the urinal. Some guy who’s washing his hands in the sink gives him this weird look, and Seokmin just presses his lips together.
He’s walking back to his seat across from Jaehyun when it happens. The way their seats are situated requires Seokmin to walk past Jaehyun to get back to his place, which gives him a decent view of Jaehyun’s phone screen. He’d probably taken out his phone once he realized that he should take a break from studying, too, after seeing Seokmin wander off. Seokmin doesn’t really mean to peek because that’s just rude, but his eyes kind of gravitate toward that direction on their own, and it’s not like Jaehyun would do anything stupid like watch porn on the school’s wi-fi...
And that’s when Seokmin sees the familiar blue-green map with Jaehyun’s character standing in the middle of it. Oh my god.
“Are you playing Pokemon Go right now?” Seokmin exclaims over Jaehyun’s shoulder, forgetting the carefully crafted friendship he’s been trying to kindle in a moment of his inner Pokemon nerd. Jaehyun flinches, startled, fumbling with his phone. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, I’m just excited -”
Jaehyun laughs quietly once he’s recovered from the initial shock before putting a finger over his lips. He tilts his head to Seokmin’s left, gesturing for him to look. When he does, he sees a good number of people sitting nearby glaring at him before going back to their books. Seokmin grins sheepishly before taking his seat across from Jaehyun again.
“Yeah,” Jaehyun whispers, putting his phone down on the table so Seokmin can get a look at his screen. Now that he thinks about it, Jaehyun did say something about his Eevee that first day they met in lecture. “I’m so bad at it, though, I don’t get how anything works like?” He lets out another quiet, this time self-deprecating, laugh, shaking his bangs out of his eyes. “Help me?”
Seokmin pulls the phone closer to him so he can look through Jaehyun’s Pokemon and items. Lots of Pidgeys and unhatched eggs. When he goes back to the home screen, he sees that Jaehyun is close to leveling up. “Hey, you’re almost to level 5!” Seokmin encourages, sliding the phone back towards Jaehyun. “If you walk to the end of the hallway, you can get close enough to the PokeStop nearby and spin it to get some XP. I mean, if you wanna level up, that is. Not saying you have to -”
Jaehyun gets up quickly before Seokmin can finish, determination in his eyes. When he comes back, he brandishes his phone in front of Seokmin’s face proudly, with “Level 5” in large print glowing on the screen. “Thanks for telling me,” Jaehyun says, nearly bouncing in his seat with excitement. Could he get more adorable? “Every time I ask my friend to help explain things to me, he just laughs.”
Seokmin laughs, thinking of Seungkwan. “Yeah, no problem,” he says, a grin spreading on his face, Jaehyun’s giddiness rubbing off on him. “You might want to pay attention to what Professor Willow’s gonna say next,” he suggests as Jaehyun’s drinking from his water bottle, Adam’s apple bobbing. Seokmin averts his gaze, feeling his cheeks flush. How Jaehyun managed to go from super cute to super hot in less than ten seconds was something only God knew the answer to.
Jaehyun scrambles back to looking at his phone, while Seokmin tries to re-focus on studying again. He’s in the midst of reading the same sentence a third time when Jaehyun taps his arm. “Did you know the library was a gym?” he whispers, his face a lot closer than Seokmin’s used to it being when he looks up.
“Um,” Seokmin, the oracle of Pokemon Go knowledge in Jaehyun’s eyes, articulates, simultaneously reminding himself that blurting out I like your face so much would definitely make things awkward between them. “Yeah.”
Jaehyun just gapes in response, leaning back. When he goes back to looking intently at his phone screen, Seokmin wonders if it’s too much to tell Jaehyun that he’s actually stationed his Vaporeon here. He had just figured out you didn’t have to be physically in front of a PokeStop to spin for it.
“I’m gonna battle it,” Jaehyun tells him, that determined glint in his eyes again. Seokmin chokes on air.
“With what?” he hisses, concerned for Jaehyun’s well-being. The last time Seokmin checked, someone left their CP 1557 Lapras here. He was lucky that they were on the same team, but it didn’t seem like Jaehyun shared that advantage. Jaehyun holds up his phone so Seokmin can see, revealing a CP 276 Pidgeot that he assumes Jaehyun’s friend, who had a modicum of pity, helped him with.
“Um…” Seokmin starts, trying to think of a way to convince Jaehyun to back down. But Jaehyun looks so enthusiastic about his plan that he falters. It’s like taking candy away from a baby. “About that…”
“It’ll be fine!” Jaehyun says, as if he senses Seokmin’s worries, but not the depth of them. “Isn’t Flying good against Water?”
Seokmin coughs, trying not to laugh. Jung Jaehyun really is a Pokemon noob. But a much more endearing Pokemon noob, unlike, say, Seungkwan who kept bugging Seokmin even after he linked Seungkwan to a Pokemon Go walkthrough guide. He feels a sudden flood of emotion and wonders if this is how parents feel when they let go of the handlebars on their child’s bicycle. Jeonghan’s face comes to mind, for some reason.
Jaehyun puts the phone between them again, so Seokmin can watch as the battle begins. Despite Jaehyun’s incessant tapping, the Lapras decimates his Pidgeot and collection of Pidgeys, Zubats, and a Bulbasaur in five seconds flat.
“I was trying to tell you,” Seokmin shrugs, voice quiet as Jaehyun flops onto his still-open textbook before him. When he looks up at Seokmin, there’s a hint of a pout on his lips and it’s the cutest thing Seokmin’s ever seen - erase whatever held the title in his mind before (probably either puppies or another of Jaehyun’s adorable facial expressions), this is definitely the winner - and Seokmin does his best not to clutch his chest and keel over -
And then Jaehyun whines. “Why didn’t you?” he says, drawing out the last word and it’s literally everything. Seokmin nearly dies right then and there.
In all honesty, he does feel a little bad that he didn’t give Jaehyun more of a heads up. But as he’s trying to cover his giggles with what hopefully sounds like a laugh, Jaehyun joining in after a beat, Seokmin doesn’t really regret anything.
“So when are you gonna tell Jaehyun you like him?”
Leave it to Xu Minghao to cut to the fucking chase. Seokmin nearly spits out his water at Jihoon, who’s sitting across from him, before willing all his facial muscles to prevent any projectile motion because it’s Jihoon. Almost-target just raises his eyebrows at him, judgmental, before shaking his head.
“They literally walk each other to and from every class,” Jeonghan reminds them all, again, as if he didn’t start the whole “Seokmin and Jaehyun” conversation five minutes ago with the same observation. “It’s like Seokmin doesn’t even recognize my presence anymore.”
Soonyoung’s wiggling his eyebrows at him. Seungkwan looks like everything that he’s wanted to say has just been said by Minghao. Mingyu is working on his and Minghao’s project, alone. Seungcheol is on RA duty and no one’s sure where Vernon is after he said he was going to the bathroom half an hour ago.
“You guys sound awfully close,” Junhui, Minghao’s big from his dance team, who Minghao invited into their dorm’s lounge for another so-called “study session,” remarks - as if his outsider perspective is conducive to their conversation. “Right, Wonwoo?” He turns to the guy who’s sitting next to him, extremely still in his chair. “Oops, I think he’s sleeping.”
“Did he really add you on Facebook?” Mingyu asks once he finally gets Minghao to look at their Word document. “Because I don’t believe it.”
Seokmin opens and closes his mouth, at a loss of how to reply. “Oh, believe it,” Seungkwan cuts in unhelpfully. “He talked to me about it for two hours. That’s some detail he can’t make up on the spot.”
Seokmin’s still flabbergasted at how his friends are so nonchalantly discussing this very serious proposition - as if it were easy and simple, like waiting for the toast to roll through the very convenient toaster in the dining hall, a slice of bread never emerging burnt - when Soonyoung nudges his arm and poses the question again. “So when are you gonna tell Jaehyun you like him?”
“Never!” Seokmin wails. It comes out louder than he thought it would. Wonwoo seems to flinch awake.
Vernon, who at that moment happened to open the door to come back inside, backs away slowly and closes it. Seokmin groans.
There are places Seokmin hates on campus. Dining halls at seven, when everyone finally remembers they have to eat before they close. The lecture hall he took his first Life Science midterm in during freshman year, because Seokmin bombed it. The Quad after nine in the morning, when everyone was rushing to class. The Quad when people handed out free food, hungry university students clogging Seokmin’s way to class. Crowded places in general. But out of all those places, he hates the gym the most.
It isn’t like he hates exercising. Exercising is great. Minghao was always telling him to go to the gym whenever Seokmin did his core-strengthening routine in the room, on the account that you pay for that shit with your tuition and you grunt really loudly by the time you start your fourth set. The point of that being, Seokmin did, surprisingly exercise.
He didn’t really mind the smell of sweat all that much, either. Well, maybe he was just being easy on himself - Seokmin did lean away from whenever Soonyoung tried to put an arm around his shoulders after his dance practice. That isn’t the problem with the gym.
The problem is, everyone at the gym looks really intimidating.
Seokmin waits next to the water fountains, where the occasional sweaty person takes a drink, staring at his phone screen impatiently, waiting for Seungcheol’s text. He’d put phone at 5% SAVE ME in the group chat an hour ago, and Seokmin, feeling bad that the message had been read by five with no replies thirty-five minutes later, had offered to lend Seungcheol his charger. Seungcheol just happened to be at the gym. Which is why Seokmin is now here, at his least-favorite establishment on campus, in the first place.
The first time Seokmin stepped into the gym, it had been one month into his freshman year. He’d decided to try some lifting, at Seungkwan’s suggestion (“I feel like every guy that comes back to visit our high school after his first year at Uni is a lot buffer than he used to be. At least I know you won’t make me feel like a limp noodle”). He was wandering around the machines aimlessly, not sure how to use anything, when someone asked if he would spot for them on the bench press. Seokmin, obviously knowing what he was getting himself into, agreed.
That person lifted more than Seokmin weighed. “Your turn?” they’d asked when they were finished. Seokmin stammered that he had to use the bathroom and never came back.
Seungcheol, he types once a guy with impressive arm muscles finally gets his fill from the water fountain. Please save me. His biceps had bulged just from pressing the button.
Five seconds pass. Seungcheol doesn’t read the message. Seokmin decides to be patient. Ten seconds. Four minutes.
He can’t do this anymore.
He’s in the middle of sending a glaringly distressed I’M DYING CALL FOR HELP I’M NEAR THE WATER FOUNTAINS to Seungcheol when he hears a familiar laugh. “Hey, I let you win that last game, okay!” someone’s saying as they turn the corner and then, oh fuck, Jung Jaehyun is looking right at him.
Seokmin nearly drops his phone. There’s an awkward split second of just them, trying to comprehend the situation. The guy standing next to Jaehyun, probably one of his basketball friends from the way he’s holding a basketball under his left arm, looks from Seokmin to Jaehyun, then back at Seokmin. He takes the chance to dive for the taller water fountain first, leaving Jaehyun with the shorter one.
“Hey,” Jaehyun says, breaking the silence first, pushing his sweaty bangs back, out of his face. They kind of stick to the rest of his hair for a moment before sliding back into this weird halfway position - not quite settling back against his forehead, but not staying where he placed them - and it’s just enough for Seokmin to see his exposed forehead and wow, is that a beautiful forehead - “Fancy seeing you here,” he chuckles. It doesn’t sound quite the same as it does when they’re sitting across from each other at the library or coffee shop - when it tickles Seokmin’s ears pleasantly. It’s more stiff. Awkward, maybe. It was always awkward seeing each other out of their normal places.
Jaehyun’s friend pauses from drinking at the water fountain, giving Jaehyun a funny look at his statement before bending back down again. “Yeah,” Seokmin says, brain short-circuiting from thinking of what to say and the wee two hours of sleep he got last night. “Fancy seeing you here,” comes out of his mouth at the end, cringing inwardly at the repetition, which is pretty pathetic, even in Seokmin’s book. Jaehyun’s friend pauses again, this time giving Seokmin the same look he gave Jaehyun, and it says something that Jihoon would probably say aloud.
“Oh yeah!” Jaehyun says, putting a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “This is my friend, Dongyoung.” Seokmin stretches out a hand in habit, which Jaehyun’s friend - Dongyoung - takes with his still-clammy one. For some reason, the name sounds familiar. “He’s a grade older than us, super old, really -”
And then it hits him. Kim Dongyoung. Leader of the tenor section. Head choir boy. The one who always knew when Seokmin was just a little bit off-pitch. He would totally recognize Seokmin. He would totally recognize Seokmin and tell Jaehyun that they went to the same high school and that would lead to an unfortunate downward spiral of Jaehyun asking Seokmin why he didn’t tell him that and then things would be super awkward between them again. He guesses he should count his blessings that he actually got to hang out with Jaehyun for the past few months, living out part of his dream before he dies of embarrassment.
Dongyoung looks at him. Like, really looks at him this time. Jaehyun’s drinking from the water fountain now, and Seokmin wonders if he’d been asked a question when he wasn’t listening.
“You know,” Dongyoung starts, thoughtfully. Jaehyun wipes his mouth using the bottom of his shirt, exposing a slice of his abdominal region for a brief, too-fleeting (in Seokmin’s opinion) moment, where there was definitely some definition of abs there. Not that he can enjoy that fact while Dongyoung is still looking at him. “You look familiar. Have we met before?”
Seokmin laughs nervously. Keep it together, keep it together. “Who knows?” Seokmin says, trying his best to be nonchalant. “Maybe we saw each other in a lecture or something.”
Jaehyun shakes his head. “Dongyoung’s an applied music major,” he explains. Some inner part of Seokmin screams. As he’s thinking the sound of his inner turmoil is ringing in his ears, Jaehyun looks pointedly down, to Seokmin’s pants pockets. “Is that you?” he asks at the sound of Seokmin’s phone.
“Oh,” Seokmin stutters, grabbing for it. It’s Seungcheol. Bless. “Um, I gotta take this, but I’ll see you around?” he says to Jaehyun as his finger hovers over the “answer” button. Jaehyun gives him a grin and a thumbs up in response and Dongyoung just waves, politely, as Seokmin speed walks to the exit, pressing the phone against his ear.
“Hey, sorry I made you wait,” Seungcheol says as Seokmin starts back to the dorms. “I just finished my workout now. Are you still by the water fountains?”
Well, shit. But Seokmin’s not going back in there after he just barely escaped. He slows to a stop, looking back to the gym that he left behind. “Uh…could you meet me by the tennis courts instead?”
Group chat: high school squad
seok (3:45pm) wtf
seok (3:45pm) i just saw kim dongyoung
seok (3:45pm) wtf wtf wtf
seok (3:46pm) did u guys know he goes here?
seok (3:46pm) WHY DOES BASICALLY EVERYONE FROM MY PAST GO HERE
boo (3:47pm) omg no
boo (3:47pm) did u talk to him???
soon (3:47pm) yea he’s in my grade
soon (3:47pm) we were in the same math class freshman yr
boo (3:47pm) did he say anything about being ur talking voice being an eighth off
seok (3:48pm) @boo no. he didn’t remember me bLESS
seok (3:48pm) @soon y do u always withhold this impt info from me
soon (3:48pm) how was i supposed to know it was impt to u???
boo (3:49pm) he did that to me once. i was so offended bc ur talking voice is way pitchier than mine? like
seok (3:49pm) HE’S FRIENDS WITH JAEHYUN
seok (3:49pm) HE’S GONNA TELL HIM THAT WE WENT TO THE SAME HIGH SCHOOL
mgyu (3:49pm) guys u woke me up
soon (3:50pm) calm down seok ): if he didn’t remember u then it’ll b fine
seok (3:50pm) MINGYU THERE IS A LARGER PROBLEM @ HAND
seok (3:50pm) MY PRIDE & DIGNITY
boo (3:50pm) every fuckin time mingyu
boo (3:51pm) and ia w soon. plus does it even rlly matter?
boo (3:51pm) didn’t he say u guys r friends now? who cares?
seok (3:51pm) ugh
seok (3:51pm) i hate when u guys r logical
soon (3:52pm) ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
boo (3:52pm) if we weren’t logical do u think ud still be alive rn
seok (3:53pm) ……
seok (3:53pm) i’m not gonna answer that
boo (3:53pm) technically u just did
seok (3:53pm) ……
mgyu (3:53pm) guys all i wanna do is fall back asleep
All hell breaks loose the night before their second-to-last lab is due.
Not hell in the academic sense. The write-up hadn’t been too impossible with both Seokmin and Jaehyun’s combined effort over the past few days, working on it until four in the morning at the latest, sitting across from each other at the coffee shop with two coffees that Jaehyun had swiped for between them. This kind of thing became a habit for them - when they knew they were going to be up super late, they’d opt for meeting up the coffee shop instead since it was closer to the dorms than the library, keeping each other awake for the most part.
A couple times, Seokmin wakes up at three AM, blinking, the blurry figure of Jaehyun across from him either typing away on his laptop or working on chemistry assignments. Jaehyun doesn’t usually notice Seokmin’s woken up until at least five minutes later, the longest, fifteen, and Seokmin can’t find it in himself to bother him.
“When did I fall asleep?” he asked the first time it happened, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Jaehyun had tapped his chin, scrunching his nose to consider an accurate time estimate.
“Maybe around twelve thirty?” Jaehyun tried. He went back to looking at something on his laptop screen.
“What?” Seokmin blurted, feeling bad about forcing Jaehyun to watch over his stuff as he enjoyed a nice, dreamless nap. “Why didn’t you wake me? I’m sorry I made you stay with me, this is so embarrassing, you probably could’ve gone to sleep by now…”
Jaehyun shook his head, a tired smile on his face. “I did,” he told Seokmin. “Around one. But you didn’t wake up, so I guess you really needed the sleep.” Jaehyun had to be an angel in disguise. He took a sip of his coffee, probably long-cold and gross tasting, before continuing. “Honestly, it’s fine. I’m kinda behind in this class so I wanna finish this tonight. And I would nap here, too. If I could.”
“You can’t?” Seokmin asked, before he could think better of it. But, again, Jaehyun didn’t look like he minded the distraction.
“I’m a really light sleeper,” he explained to Seokmin, a hint of a grimace on his face. “Can’t sleep if there’s any noise. When my roommate goes to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it drives me nuts,” Jaehyun chuckled sadly. Seokmin, still half-dazed, suddenly wanted to wrap Jaehyun up in a blanket right then and there. He almost did, before remembering he wasn’t in his room, and the thing he thought might be a blanket was actually the scratch paper he had drawn compounds on.
It’s that situation again tonight, Seokmin doing his best not to succumb to his sleepiness, but fighting a losing battle. Getting up every thirty minutes to go to the bathroom wasn’t working. Neither was poking his right index finger with his pencil. He’d only gotten an hour of sleep the night before - the result of starting his paper at five in the morning when it was due at noon - and the rest of the day he’d spent feeling uncharacteristically drowsy and chilly, like every lecture hall’s air conditioning was turned on higher than usual. At around eleven, with their lab write-up completed and Seokmin’s other homework assignment half-completed, he decides to cut his losses and nap, telling Jaehyun, whose nose is scrunched up in adorable concentration yet again, to wake him up in thirty minutes.
It’s a sound, pitch dark sleep at first. And then the dream kicks in, Jaehyun shaking him awake, face hovering near Seokmin’s. Jaehyun calls his name once. Again. Three times.
Dream-Seokmin mumbles incoherently back at him. That makes Dream-Jaehyun frown. “Seokmin, wake up,” he says, shaking him again. It all feels extremely real, like a dream you wake up from and can’t distinguish from reality. “It’s already twelve.”
Dream-Seokmin shakes Dream-Jaehyun’s hand off his arm, which makes Dream-Jaehyun laugh dryly. “Come on,” he prods Seokmin, shaking on his arm again. “Hey, Seokmin.”
He feels Dream-Jaehyun’s hand graze his forehead briefly in the midst of trying to pull him up to a sitting position. Then, that hand presses more firmly against his forehead. “Fuck,” Dream-Jaehyun says, sounding distressed. He puts his hand against Seokmin’s forehead again. “You’re really hot, Seokmin.”
Dream-Seokmin giggles at that. “I think you’re the really hot one, Jaehyun,” he replies, words drawn out from his grogginess.
Dream-Jaehyun laughs a little at that. Is he amused? Does he like that Seokmin complimented him? “Hey, but seriously Seokmin, your forehead is really hot, it might be a fever -”
And then the pitch of a dreamless sleep seeps over him again.
Of course, Seokmin doesn’t recognize that all hell has broken loose until he wakes up in his dorm room, sweating in a burrito of sheets. A pile of blankets that suspiciously look like Jeonghan - the hair on the pillow is the dead giveaway - are on the floor in between his bed and Minghao’s desk, currently occupied by said owner, who turns away from his laptop screen to look at Seokmin when he hears him trying to kick off the blankets he’s been buried in.
“Oh,” Minghao says once Seokmin’s done moving. “You’re awake.”
“Yeah, I’m awake,” Seokmin tries to shoot back, but his voice comes out as a parched croak instead. Minghao, the ever helpful when he wasn’t being a little shit, hands him one of their emergency water bottles. Seokmin gulps down half of it, offering a quick thanks before continuing. “Did I just sleep a whole day away?”
Minghao gives him a look full of concern. “No,” he starts slowly, as if he’s afraid to tell Seokmin the end of a story he’s already heard, but Minghao doesn’t know that. “It’s five AM right now. I think Jeonghan and Jaehyun carried you back here before one.”
“Wait,” Seokmin interrupts before Minghao can say more. Jeonghan and Jaehyun? The last thing he remembers is sitting across from Jaehyun at the coffee shop, asking him to wake him up in thirty minutes. And then that dream, when Jaehyun shook Seokmin awake. In which he told Jaehyun that he thought he was really hot. Unless that wasn’t a dream. “What?” he squeaks, the horrible realization dawning on him.
“You had a fever,” Minghao tells him, tossing him a bottle of Tylenol. Which, in Seokmin’s uncoordinated and tired state, just hits his lap and rolls onto the ground, stopped only by Jeonghan’s side. Minghao gets up, picks up the bottle, and this time hands it to Seokmin. “It might be the flu? Didn’t you say you felt cold all day? That might’ve been chills.”
Seokmin takes a pill wordlessly, too tired to say anything and still in a state of shock. He really told Jung Jaehyun that he thought he was really hot. Did friends do that? Not the kind of friends he was with Jaehyun, at least. Did he just make things awkward again by telling him that, then?
They’re silent after that. Seokmin struggles to put the Tylenol bottle on the floor next to his bed. Minghao keeps watching him, making sure something bad doesn’t happen, like Seokmin falling out of his bed.
“Minghao,” Seokmin whispers after he’s settled back into the sheets with much effort. Minghao, who had turned back to his laptop after he thought Seokmin was going back to sleep, turns his head to look at him. “I think I told Jung Jaehyun that he’s really hot,” he wails, muffled his pillow, pressed against his left cheek.
Seokmin thinks he hears Minghao say something along the lines of finally, you wuss before he falls back asleep again.
Seokmin wakes up several times - to pee and to his phone vibrating under his pillow (who put that thing there?) - before actually coming to again. By then, it’s afternoon of the next day, and he only has enough strength to drag himself to his desk, where there’s a bowl of lukewarm soup and a piece of bread that someone, probably Minghao, swiped for him. He eats it and then crawls back to his bed, fishing his phone out from under his pillow to see what messages he’s received since he passed out.
There’s one hundred and thirteen new messages in the SVT group chat. Seokmin’s not really in the mood to scroll through those at the moment, so he dismisses that notification. Individual texts from most of his friends - even Vernon, whose he does check because Seokmin’s sure this is the first time Vernon’s texted any of them (on account of Seungkwan always complaining that he barely uses his phone). It says a succinct feel better, devoid of emojis.
There’s five texts from Jeonghan, which he also ends up reading, telling him that he’d tell their TA that Seokmin was too sick to make lab today, but that he should send the TA an email himself telling him that too. Shit, Seokmin thinks as he registers that it’s already three in the afternoon. He actually managed to sleep through all his classes today.
Then there’s notifications about new emails - one from his lab TA, telling him that their write-ups were due today, others from the university career center and alumni network, which he never really read, anyway. And then, at the bottom of it all, are two texts from Jaehyun.
Fuck. Seokmin feels like he’s going to throw up. Maybe literally. He turns to his side, remembering that horror story Soonyoung told him of some frat dude choking on his own vomit because he had been laying on his back. Thankfully nothing comes out, but Seokmin’s stomach is swirling ominously as he opens the messages with a shaky thumb.
jaehyun (8:19am) hey seokmin! i hope you’re feeling better! you kinda passed out after i tried waking you up last night, idk if you remember. i didn’t want to leave you there so i called someone using your phone…i hope that’s ok with you. i kinda panicked and thought it would be best to call your parents? so i called your mom contact but it turned out to be your friend…yoon jeonghan? haha that was interesting. and we carried you back to your dorm room together.
jaehyun (8:21am) don’t worry about lab and stuff! not sure if you’ll see this but we finished the writeup anyway, everything should be fine! get plenty of rest and text me back whenever you wake up :)
No. No. Jaehyun knew about how Jeonghan called himself Seokmin’s mom now. And Seokmin had told him he thought Jaehyun was really hot. Wait, did Jaehyun and Jeonghan speak to each other when they carried Seokmin back to his dorm room? How else did Jaehyun know Jeonghan’s name?
Jaehyun definitely thought Seokmin was a loser now. If he hadn’t before. Maybe all this time they’d spent together as friends was really Jaehyun pitying how Seokmin desperately wanted new ones. Or maybe it was just to get help on his chemistry homework.
Maybe he’d known that Seokmin had a huge crush on him this whole time.
Seokmin groans, burying himself under the blankets, eyes still open in the artificial darkness of his sheets. He keeps thinking the same thoughts over and over and over again until the darkness becomes his eyelids closing, taking him back to a deep sleep.
It’s two day later when Seokmin finally has enough energy again to walk himself to and from classes. He spends the rest of the time in his dorm, lying around in his bed with his laptop propped against his chin, watching anime. He doesn’t walk past the library or the coffee shop, or go to his eight AM class at the ungodly far lecture hall. He doesn’t text Jaehyun back.
“I need you to go to lecture for me,” he told Jeonghan the other day, when Jeonghan called to make sure he was doing okay. “Eight in the morning, three times a week. And take notes.”
“Are you serious right now?” Jeonghan had said, a chuckle in his voice, like he expected Seokmin to tell him it was all a joke. A moment of silence. “Shit, you’re really serious, Seokmin?”
“Please, Jeonghan!” he whined. He wasn’t ready to face Jaehyun yet. Maybe ever. “For your child!”
Jeonghan considered for a bit. “Fine,” he finally grumbled. “But honestly, Seokmin, I don’t think Jaehyun minds, you know he told me -” And then, in a spur of momentary panic from hearing Jaehyun’s name, Seokmin hung up.
In fact, Seokmin makes a pointed effort to stop talking about Jaehyun. He changes the subject whenever Seungkwan gives him that certain look - the one that he had when he was going to bring up Jaehyun to Seokmin, a mix of a smirk and admiration at Seokmin’s “endearing idiocy,” as he put it - with a very smooth, “Uh, s-so the weather today! Is lovely! Isn’t it?” He says he has to go to the bathroom whenever Minghao tries to ask him whether Seokmin will be hanging out with his “friend” - meaning Jaehyun. Soonyoung and Seungcheol catch on fairly quickly, either talking about the weird things that happened to him that day (Soonyoung) or funny stories about his residents (Seungcheol). Vernon is always silently helping himself to whoever’s fries are at the table and Seokmin highly doubts Mingyu even remembers Jaehyun’s name.
It’s going so well that Seokmin tries to take the next step, which is to stop thinking about Jaehyun. But this, Seokmin discovers as he’s struggling through his chemistry homework for once, Jeonghan’s notes almost indecipherable, is a lot harder than it sounds.
“He asked how you were, you know,” Jeonghan tells him sometime after the fever incident, mouth full of chips from Seokmin and Minghao’s snack stash, sitting on the floor as Seokmin’s at his desk, asking Jeonghan every now and then to decode the notes he’s taken for him. “That Jaehyuk kid.”
“Jaehyun,” Seokmin corrects, in habit. Shit, he was doing so well not saying his name. Seokmin had even managed to avoid Jaehyun in lab the other day, walking into the classroom just in the nick of time, the only open seats being near the back - behind Jaehyun - or at the very corner near the door, with the projector blocking his view of the blackboard. Of course he chose the corner seat, and bolted out of class as soon as it was over.
A smug smile grows on Jeonghan’s lips. “Ha!” he exclaims. “I knew it, you still like him!”
Seokmin feels his face go hot. Jeonghan just continues, unperturbed by Seokmin’s lack of flustered denials and squawks that usually accompanied the subject matter. “You know, I think he likes you, too? I mean, he stopped me outside lecture today and asked if you were still sick.” Seokmin feels the heat of Jeonghan’s glance even though he’s still hunched over, staring at the assignment that continues to not make sense to him. “He looked pretty worried about you.”
“He’s not,” Seokmin starts, wanting to tell Jeonghan to drop the subject. But he had to admit that, the way Jeonghan described it, it sounded like Jaehyun still wanted to be his friend. Because Jaehyun didn’t like Seokmin, obviously. Jeonghan was stretching the truth to make him feel better. “We’re not…”
Seokmin stops before he can deliver the finishing blow, paired with a self-deprecating chuckle trying its best to sound nonchalant. We’re not even friends. Because Seokmin even though knew that this was the rational conclusion of everything he’d done in the past two weeks, the penultimate event to the inevitable end, and that acceptance was the first step of going back to how things had been before, Seokmin only hanging out with his small circle of friends, Jaehyun his untouchable crush from high school, something in his heart twists, thinking about the last few months he’d spent being Jaehyun’s friend - late nights working on homework, Seokmin actually getting more sleep than before thanks to Jaehyun’s organized pacing of assignments rubbing off on him, laughing at Jaehyun slowly learning the ins and outs of Pokemon Go, Jaehyun’s eyes sparkling with excitement when he spoke about his future aspirations, Jaehyun’s nose scrunched in concentration, Jaehyun -
Jeonghan’s hand is on his shoulder. In his other is the pencil Seokmin dropped, the pretty nice mechanical kind. It’s that pencil, the one he never really could bring himself to return to Jaehyun. He hadn’t even realized he’d been using it.
Jeonghan smiles at him again, gentle and encouraging this time. “What have you got to lose?”
Seokmin’s still fucked, though.
It’s eleven, a couple nights after he talked to Jeonghan, when someone knocks on his door. It couldn’t be Minghao - his dance team was having their “hell week” and Minghao hadn’t come back until maybe two in the morning, earliest. Also, Minghao never forgot his card key. Which meant that it was probably Seungkwan, who liked to come over to his room at whim, and Seokmin, being a good hyung but also enjoying his presence, usually let him in.
“Seungkwan,” he groans, pausing the video he was watching and shoving his feet into his slippers. He probably looks like shit, but it’s just Seungkwan, who’d definitely seen him in worse states, so it doesn’t matter. “I told you to text me before coming over -”
The person standing on the other side of the door is definitely not Seungkwan. He’s a little taller and wearing a sweater with their university’s logo on it that Seungkwan wouldn’t be caught dead with (one of their colors was a mustard-like yellow that he claimed made his face look super round). “Hey,” Jung Jaehyun says with a small smile on his face, hints of dimples on his cheeks, and Seokmin decides that, contrary to what Jeonghan implied, he actually has some things to lose.
Like his dignity. “Oh,” Seokmin hears himself say, as if on autopilot. His fingers are still clutching the edge of his door. “Hi.”
Jaehyun looks at him for a good minute, in utter silence. Maybe he was waiting for Seokmin to say something, but Seokmin’s mind was burnt from overthinking. How did Jaehyun know he lived here? Did he remember from when he carried Seokmin back that night? Why was Jaehyun here, anyway? Hadn’t Seokmin been avoiding him? Why did he have to come here now, when Seokmin had yet to mentally prepare himself for this whole encounter?
“Um,” Jaehyun clears his throat. Seokmin snaps his head up from where he was looking at the floor to meet Jaehyun’s eyes. Big mistake. They were mesmerizing, and it only made Seokmin’s mind go even more blank, if that was possible. He tilts his head forward, to the direction of Seokmin’s room. “Can I, uh, come in? If that’s alright with you?”
“Oh!” Seokmin says, getting it now. “Yeah, uh, sure.” He scrambles to the side, letting Jaehyun in before closing the door behind him.
Seeing Jaehyun in his room is surreal, to say the least. Seokmin remembers imagining Jaehyun hanging out with him on his floor, watching movies and anime together. In his imagination, though, that happened after Jaehyun confessed his undying love for Seokmin. Which was obviously not going to happen now.
Jaehyun walks around in a small circle, trapped by Seokmin and Minghao’s random piles of old textbooks they kept forgetting to sell and clothes piles. Seokmin’s face heats up, moving to make more room for Jaehyun to sit, but Jaehyun shakes his head. “Nah, it’s fine! I, uh,” he scratches the back of his neck, the situation awkward. “Just wanted to talk?”
Seokmin stares at him as Jaehyun’s finding the words to continue. “I…” he trails off, reaching a dead end. “Why didn’t you reply to my text?”
Oh no. Jaehyun’s trying to do that. Talking out their problems - the nice, adult way to solve things, except that Seokmin always said more than necessary, which usually created more.
What should he say? Seokmin swallows, uncomfortable, Jaehyun waiting patiently for an answer. Sorry, didn’t get it? How about I don’t have a phone? Except for the fact that it’s on Seokmin’s desk, in Jaehyun’s view. Or maybe I think I’m gonna be sick, because he actually feels like he will be. “Uh…” he says, intelligible, in the end.
Jaehyun frowns. “I was pretty worried when you didn’t come to lecture. Thought you were still sick or something?” He stops to rub his forehead, looking tired. “And then when I asked your friend Jeonghan, he said you’d been better for a while now.” He looks at Seokmin again and it makes Seokmin’s heart literally stop beating in his chest, because he’s never seen Jaehyun so distressed before and Seokmin shouldn’t be thinking that it makes him look attractive when he’s the cause of it all. “Are you avoiding me?”
“Yes,” Seokmin blurts, without transferring the message to his brain first, where it definitely would’ve stopped him from saying it out loud. Shit. Jaehyun blinks at the swiftness of his reply. “I mean,” he tries, waving his hands frantically. “No!”
Jaehyun takes a step closer to him, squinting as if he can figure out what Seokmin’s thinking by focusing his vision. Obviously, that doesn’t work. “Why?” he asks, sounding hurt. Which he shouldn’t. Seokmin literally just wants to turn into a pile of goo and seep through the dingy carpet of his room and avoid this whole conversation. “I thought we were friends, Seokmin?”
And in that moment, Seokmin feels like an utter and complete asshole. Here was Jaehyun, trying to fix whatever he thought he did wrong, when Seokmin was the one who messed things up by blurting out that he thought Jaehyun was hot in the first place, letting his feelings get in the way of their friendship. “No, no, we are!” Seokmin insists. “I just, I don’t know, felt so embarrassed? That you had to see me like that. All weird and saying weird stuff like thinking you’re hot and all.” Which I totally don’t, his brain feeds to him next. “Which I totally do. Think you’re hot.”
Holy shit. That did not just come out of his mouth. Jaehyun’s eyes widen and Seokmin opens his mouth to salvage whatever he can. “I mean! I just, you know. I don’t know?” He’s sweating now and he wonders if Jaehyun notices. “I’ve liked you since high school.”
No. Some part of Seokmin dies inside, withering into a husk of its former functional unit, along with his pride. He was so, so fucked. “Huh?” Jaehyun says, looking thoroughly confused now. He’s doing that scrunching thing with his nose, like when he’s trying to figure things he doesn’t understand out, and up-close, it’s not as adorable as Seokmin thought it was, but he still likes it, he just likes Jaehyun -
“I like how your dimples only show when you smile. I like the way you asked me to be lab partners. I like the way you kind of scrunch your nose up when you’re focusing really hard on something, like right now. I like how you never judged me when I said something super awkward, kinda like what I’m doing right now, and how you tell me a lot about yourself even though we were practically strangers.” Seokmin can’t stop himself once he’s started, afraid that Jaehyun will tell him to stop before he can say everything. “I like how you suck at Pokemon Go and know nothing about type match-ups but ask for my opinion on stuff. I like how we’re friends.” He pauses to suck in a breath. “But I, uh, also like you more than a friend. I think. Maybe.”
He doesn’t look up at Jaehyun even after he’s done. The carpet in his dorm room is a fascinating shade of dark, moldy green that he never really noticed before. He’s aware of the fact that he’s literally just dug himself a hole so deep that it’d be impossible to crawl out of. Seokmin knows his face is probably as red as a tomato right now, and he’s already embarrassed himself enough in the last ten minutes or so that he really doesn’t need any more reasons for Jaehyun to think he’s weird.
Seokmin doesn’t really know what he’s expecting Jaehyun to do. Maybe walk out of his room right then and there, and ignore Seokmin for the rest of the semester. Say an awkward, “I’m flattered, but no thanks”? All he hoped was that Jaehyun would at least offer to stay friends. Or that they’d end up as acquaintances that greeted each other whenever they occasionally made eye contact.
What he doesn’t expect is Jaehyun saying, “I, uh.” He’s looking down at Seokmin’s carpet like Seokmin had been before his head jolted up at Jaehyun’s voice. And is it the crappy lighting of his dorm room, or are Jaehyun’s cheeks flushed? “Like you too, Seokmin.”
Holy shit. Jaehyun looks at him, which tells Seokmin that he actually just said that out loud. “Not since high school,” he stutters. Seokmin blinks, wondering if this is real. Jaehyun’s still standing before him when his eyes focus again. “Dongyoung told me we went to the same high school.” Jaehyun wrings his hands, and all Seokmin wants to do is take them into his own, but that was too much right now. “I’m sorry I didn’t remember? I don’t think we ever really talked.”
Jaehyun shakes his head, a stiff laugh escaping his lips in the pause between his words, stilted and sounding even more unsure than he did that first time, when he asked Seokmin if the seat next to him was open. Seokmin feels his heart swell with everything he’s feeling (hope, love, fear, anxiety) and takes a deep, shaky breath - as if it’ll calm both him and Jaehyun - before Jaehyun continues. “But anyway, um, I just really like hanging out with you. You’re, like, one of the few friends I’ve made since I’ve came to uni? I…” He covers his mouth with the back of one of his hands, flushed cheeks peeking out behind it. It muffles the last few words that he says, and Seokmin stands there for a moment, trying to comprehend everything.
I wanna keep hanging out with you every day.
Group chat: SVT
hoshbrown added Lee Jihoon to the chat
hoshbrown changed Lee Jihoon to zhoon
hoshbrown (7:34pm) :D
hoshbrown (7:34pm) jihoon said he had something impt 2 say in the chat
hoshbrown (7:34pm) which in jihoon speak = saying congrats 2 seok
hoshbrown (7:35pm) interpretation: “why am i here” means “i’m happy 4 u”
dk (7:35pm) d’awwwwwww thnx jihoon!!!
zhoon (7:36pm) why r u hoshbrown
dk (7:36pm) …….
seungkwannie (7:37pm) remember when soonyoung was taking japanese class and wanted to practice vocab?
seungkwannie (7:37pm) and he was all like i’m a star! i’m a hoshi!
mingU (7:38pm) and then jeonghan ate hash browns the next day
hoshbrown (7:38pm) u luv me jihoon
dk (7:43pm) where’d he go
dk (7:43pm) my congrats??? ):
zhoon has left the group chat
dk (7:45pm) T____T
hoshbrown (7:45pm) …..
seungkwannie (7:45pm) hyung quick what does that mean in jihoon speak
hoshbrown (7:46pm) uh
hoshbrown (7:46pm) i think he loves us?????