Three-Fifths of Distractibility
Title: Three-Fifths of Distractibility, 1/?
Pairing: 2min
Rating: pg-ish
Genre: au, fluff
Summary: Taemin is the new boy at Minho's grocery store.
Words: 6693
A/N: for 2minbiased because it was her birthday recently and she requested 'tooth-rottening fluff'. Here you are, love~
It was a large store, full of aisles containing everything imaginable. It had shelves, shelves upon shelves that held fake flowers and frozen food and velcro tabs. There were racks of clothing, two separate dressing rooms, a well-stocked books-and-magazines section, and warranties for every electronic device on the planet. This was the type of store you got lost in unless you worked in four to seven days a week for at least a year, and even then you didn't know where everything was until year two came around.
Minho knew where everything was.
The store was his. Not literally, of course; he wasn't the store owner, nor did he want to be. He figured that after he'd worked there for going on four years he was entitled to a bit of ownership, though.
He'd worked there since he was just sixteen. It had been a tiny job; he was a cart pusher and he was only allowed to work eight hours a week because he was underage and was still going to school. From there he'd been promoted to cashier, and from cashier to daytime-cashier, nighttime floor manager. His pay had increased steadily (not to mention the extra dollar and a half he got when he worked at floor manager). The fifty hour weeks he worked weren't always fun, but he was easily able to afford his apartment and car on the money he received. Besides, Sundays were always off.
It was a good job, overall, and he felt comfortable saying he still enjoyed it. There was a steadiness to it, a continuity that he appreciated. The regulars, the constant flow of newbies, the every second day arrival of shipments-he knew it all and was happy with it. It was second nature to him.
Things changed, then.
Minho never paid much attention to the new cashiers. They came in and they went out, most lasting less than a year. If they stayed over three months he tried to learn their names; over six, he made an effort to have casual conversations. There was no need for more than that though. He answered their questions with the seasoned patience of a veteran, then moved on.
It was the beginning of summer and the new crop of cashiers was arriving. They were young, nervous, and pitiful (per usual) in their pressed pants and fresh shirts. Minho made a mental note to avoid them as much as possible for the next week.
“Minho,” Kibum called as Minho passed by him, waving a hand in the general direction of the flock of kids, “can you throw that bunch on the registers?”
“What?” Minho stopped in mid-stride, hands frozen on the handle of the cart he was pushing to the back. “Why me?”
“We have a scheduling issue that Jinki didn't work through and I have enough work to drown in. Give them a run-down of what their job is, then assign them to some of the older cashiers. We have enough, I'm sure.”
Minho sighed, nodding a quick consent. It was better than having to have someone shadow him all day, he supposed, but only marginally. Assigning them to registers meant that he got all of the annoyed glares from the cashiers who would have to have a questioning newbie attached to them all shift, not to mention the honor of fielding all of the questions from them once they got assigned registers of their own.
There were roughly twelve of them and they looked like they ranged between the ages of seven and twelve, at least to Minho, who was less than pleased with his sudden acquisition of a group of nervous new hires.
“Here's what we're going to do,” he told them after he got their attention by pushing his cart into the center of their group. “I'm going to assign you each to a register, and you'll stick with them for the rest of your shift. If you have questions don't ask Kibum please, he's...” he paused, looking for the right words to describe the frazzled state of the daytime floor manager and failing miserably. “He's, uh, not in a good mood.”
They all nodded, trooping after him like sheep after he finished a brief spiel on company morals.
“These are our cashiers,” he told them, gesturing vaguely to the lineup of cashiers at registers. “Obviously it's not busy right now, but we should have enough of them to go around. Alright, hm, you,” he pointed at a the nearest girl, “you go to register two. Wait, no, three. Go to three.”
Minho realized he was in trouble when he had one boy left and no more cashiers to give him to.
“Sorry, what's your name?” he asked after a last desperate, futile scan of the registers.
“Taemin. Lee Taemin.” His voice was soft, quiet enough that Minho felt the urge to lean down and cup his hand to his ear to hear him better.
“Come with me. We're going to see Kibum.”
Taemin blinked, once, twice, four times. “But I thought you said we shouldn't...”
“This is an exception,” he told him, briefly touching the shoulder of the younger boy to get him moving. “It'll be okay since I'm asking.”
It was not okay.
“I told you to deal with them!” Kibum had two pens, one in his mouth and one in his hand, and there were inky scribbles covering what looked to be a very muddled schedule sheet. “I can't, there are fifteen people scheduled at seven in the morning tomorrow and no one scheduled at seven in the evening. Do I look like I can talk?”
“Well, no, but Taemin--”
“I don't care what you do with him, just take him away.”
“There're no--”
“Away.”
So they went.
“Apparently you were wrong about it being okay if you asked him,” Taemin said after they were far enough away.
Minho glared down at him. “How old are you anyway? Fourteen?”
“Sixteen, thanks.” There was an edge to his voice despite it seemingly mild quality, and Minho found himself doing a quick double-take. There was attitude behind that innocent baby face and fluffy auburn hair.
“Yeah, exactly. We're not talking about it.” There was no way he was going to discuss his complete humiliation in further detail with a new hire who was four years younger than him.
Taemin seemed to be done talking about it too, though. “Fine, okay. What are you going to have me do? Put that stuff away with you?”
Minho paused. He'd forgotten that he was supposed to be getting Taemin's training started; instead he'd gone straight back to restocking. What was he going to do with him? He was a cashier. Knowing the basics of restocking was not going to be useful the following day when he was assigned a register of his own.
There was one solution, obvious and unappealing. “Help me with this cart of stuff quick, then I'll open a register. You can shadow me for today.”
//
For the most part Taemin learned things quickly. He caught onto scanning ten minutes in. An hour later he was fairly adept at navigating the register screen. After two he'd gotten into a rhythm of doing that and bagging at the same time.
However, Minho realized, there were a few areas that the young boy was lacking. Or rather, there was one huge, gaping important hole in his functionality as a cashier: Taemin simply couldn't hold a conversation and check people out at the same time.
It was funny at first.
“Hi, how are you doing today?” He'd ask, and Minho would nod approvingly from behind him, mostly to himself. “Did you find everything okay?”
If it was left at that he was fine, completely, and then everything went smoothly. The problem was when the conversation extended further.
“Oh, I know, I'm confused about the store too,” he'd start. “Nothing makes sense. Did you know they keep candy in five different places? At least that's what one of the other cashiers told me. That one right there, on register seven, right behind you. He's new too, did you know that? There're twelve of us, so if we're not as fast as you think we should be, that's why.”
And he'd continue on, rambling with an open face and big eyes until Minho was forced to nudge him with his foot and hiss that he should keep scanning items, and then Taemin would invariably scowl at him and tell him that there was no way he could learn if Minho kept telling him what to do. Then Minho would feel stupid, because the customer also invariably nodded along, agreeing with Taemin about hands-on experiences and learning from mistakes, and then he ended up looking like the bad guy when all he was trying to do was keep things going through because the lines kept getting longer.
It was a terrible problem, this charming distractibility of Taemin's, and Minho had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
//
Minho ended up going home that evening with fresh resolve to leave the newbies for people who had more patience than him. They ('they' being Taemin) had been much more work than they were worth, and quite frankly, he was finished. Finished.
The more time he spent with the young boy the more he'd learned about him.
He had more attitude than was necessary. Minho knew he'd never had that much when he was sixteen.
“Are you still in school?”
“It's summer. Of course I'm not in school.”
He thought he was beyond hilarious.
When he was scanning corn and listening to Minho talk about the ins and outs of the register:
“Minho, stop telling me about how to open the cash drawer.”
“Why?”
“There're extra ears listening! Hahaha, do you get it? Ears? Ears of corn?”
He thoroughly disliked being called pretty.
“They all just want to take me home and feed me and ruffle my hair. It's so stupid. I don't get it.”
“It's because you're pretty. All old women like pretty boys.”
“Stoppit! I'm not that pretty, okay? Pretty is for...it isn't for me.”
(That really got Minho, because if there was one thing Taemin was without a doubt it was pretty. His smooth skin, clear eyes, full lips, nicely shaped nose, all set off by long, red-tinted hair that fell loosely onto his neck...there was no way anyone could look at him and not see it. But the perturbed flush of his cheeks at Minho's statement made it clear he was tired of it.)
Then there were the little things. He dressed nicely in clothes that fit him properly, from his head to--
Minho, at his bathroom sink brushing his teeth, sputtered at a sudden flash from earlier. “I try to dress well from my head to-ma-toes,” Taemin had said, grinning and holding up the red fruit when Minho'd commented on his clothing style earlier. “Haha, get it? Tomatoes. To my toes.”
He'd gotten it, alright, and it would have probably been funny if it hadn't been so accurate. Taemin had small feet that could only be described as dainty in the slim lace-up shoes he'd been wearing. They made Minho feel like a giant, galumphing elephant because his feet were huge next to Taemin's, his wrists were massive, his arms were ape-like--
Taemin was just small. Small and delicate.
Yeah, Minho decided, nodding firmly to his reflection in the mirror. He'd stay away from the front end for a while until the summer hires were trained in completely. They (mostly Taemin, he acknowledged) were simply too much work.
//
Jinki grabbed him the moment he got through the doors at two minutes after seven. “Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here. I need someone to sub for Kibum, he's going to be late and I have to go to to the back and work out some schedules. Please tell me you're staying for at least four hours, I need at least that much to get everything sorted because Kibum only called half the people yesterday and--”
“Breathe, Jinki! Breathe!” Minho knocked the older on the side of his head, stunning him momentarily. “Your face is turning purple!”
Jinki smiled, crooked and apologetic. “Sorry. Can you do it? There're only three of the twelve here today, it shouldn't be too terrible.”
Minho sighed deeply. There was no way he was going to be able to work in the back room today. “Yeah, I can. You go do your stuff, I'll be out there. Can I go clock in now?”
“Oh, yeah, go.” Jinki shoved him toward the door. “Thanks. I owe you!”
He wouldn't ever pay him back, Minho knew; Jinki's heart was in the right place, but he invariably forgot about all debts within a matter of hours, both the ones he owed and the ones owed him.
It wasn't two minutes later that he found himself wielding the floor manager badge.
The registers weren't busy. It was only a few minutes after seven and the worst wouldn't come until it hit ten. There would be a couple hours of relaxation before he started really getting busy, he figured. After all, they'd had seven hours on the clock yesterday, and there were only three new hires here today. How bad could it be?
//
The answer: very bad.
It took Minho a total of ten minutes to realize that Taemin was on the first shift of cashiers, which meant four and a half hours of straight register duty, starting at seven AM. And much to his dismay, the boy wasn't doing any better than the day before.
“Taemin,” he hissed when he sent him for a quick break, “you need to keep the line moving!”
Taemin looked more than a bit disgruntled when he stopped mid-stride, spinning around to face Minho. “What do you mean!? I have been keeping it moving!”
“You keep...” How was he supposed to tell him that he needed to stop talking? There really wasn't a polite way to, and he was supposed to be making good impressions. “Just go faster from now on, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I will.” He waved the remark off breezily and Minho fought the urge to strangle him. There was just something about that sweet face and childish, ill-tempered veneer that got under his skin like nothing he'd ever experienced before.
There was no way he could complain about it, though. To everyone but Minho Taemin was charming and cute and not in the least bit flippant. Jinki thought he was marvelous, and even Kibum, notoriously hard-to-please Kibum, had mentioned that “nice, angel-faced boy” in passing.
No, Minho was absolutely alone in his bad-Taemin experiences, and it was making him quite upset.
It only got worse after his first break.
Taemin started calling him over to ask him questions when the lines dispersed. “How do I do such and such thing?” he'd ask about the most useless techniques. “Do I have to memorize the department names?”
“No,” Minho told him exasperatedly when he called him over for the third time in twenty minutes. This time to ask whether he was able to call home on the register phone. “It's for in-store calls only. There's a list of them on the handle, see?”
“Oh, huh,” Taemin said, edging closer to Minho to get a better look at it. “Produce, 758. Why is it 758? Is that in secret code or something?”
Minho swallowed, catching a distinct whiff of a muted, musky shampoo that was somehow completely suited to Taemin. “Uh, what was that?”
“Code. Is it a code for anything?” Taemin glanced up at Minho, far too close in the small space.
“Oh. Yeah, it's the code for the produce department.” He needed to back away; Taemin was suddenly looking a bit too dark-chocolate-sweet for his comfort.
The younger boy sighed and rolled his eyes, turning back to the register. “I knew that, stupid. Somehow I wonder how you're the floor manager at all when you make obvious statements like that.”
Minho didn't bother to dignify the comment with a response, just left. Taemin could deal with his own questions if he was going to be snippy about things.
The scent, earthy and dark, stuck with him far past the end of his shift.
//
Taemin got better, both at coming up with ridiculous questions whenever Minho was around and at playing innocent whenever Minho opened his mouth to ask him why he was such a brat.
“Hey, hyung,” he said casually, stopping at Minho's register a few days after he'd started and kicking at Minho's shin with a small, black-leather-booted foot. “What are the chances of me being able to switch from the register to stocking, like you?”
Minho dropped the bag he was holding into the cart, quickly scanned for more customers that he'd missed, then turned back to Taemin. “Why?”
“Because I'm sick of this. I don't think I'm meant to be up front.” It was clear he wasn't happy, lips pursed in a pout and eyes slanted and sullen.
“It gets better, really. If you want I can find someone to cross-train you though, see if you can get switched in a couple weeks.” He'd could actually send Taemin straight to Kibum himself, seeing that apparently the manager liked the newbie better than he liked Minho (or rather, he tolerated him more).
“Can you do that today?”
“I'm kind of bus-”
Then suddenly there was a warm hand on his forearm and Taemin was blasting the puppy dog eyes full-force, and Minho was suddenly turning his register light off and they were going to talk to Kibum right then.
Minho had absolute no idea how it happened that he ended up with an antsy Taemin who was shifting back and forth booted feet in front of Kibum's office door.
“You ask him,” Minho hissed, reverting back to high-school behavior as he did his best to block the warm Taemin scent and shiny boots out of his head. “I'm just here as moral support; okay?”
“You've changed a bit since I first started working,” Taemin replied, nudging him.
Minho would have responded, but then door swung open and there was Kibum, tall and blonde and still just as frazzled as before.
“Make it quick. What's wrong?”
“Minho offered to cross-train me in stocking instead of working the register for the next few days. Is that okay?”
What? Minho's mind was struggling to catch up to the words coming out of Taemin's mouth. He was...he...what?
Kibum rolled his eyes. “Minho the handyman, doing everything. Sure, go ahead, we have enough people on the registers anyway. Tell Jinki to change you nametag, alright, Taemin?” Then he ruffled the younger's hair and shut the door.
“That was easy,” Taemin marveled, smoothing his hair back into place quickly. “I didn't expect him to say yes so fast.”
“You just...how did I just get assigned to this?”
“You offered!”
Minho bristled. “I absolutely did not offer! I said I'd come with you to find someone else to cross-train you, not that I would myself!”
Taemin laughed, loud and happy, and Minho found his heart dropping a bit at the his crescent eyes and wide smile. “Same thing. I'm going to go eat lunch.”
//
He told himself he went to go eat lunch with Taemin because it was useless to go back to the register after already being off for ten minutes and that he was going to sit at a different table than him anyhow. But somehow between the office door and the break room refrigerator things got mixed up, and they ended up driving together to the pizza place around the corner because Taemin didn't have his license or a car and he'd forgotten his lunch, and Minho knew working on an empty stomach was terrible.
“I'm going to get a personal pizza,” Taemin said decisively. He was buckled into the passenger seat, dark-jean-clad legs stretched out and loosely crossed at the ankles. “With onions and green peppers and pepperoni and canadian bacon. Oh, I wonder if they have feta cheese? Or anchovies. I've always wanted to see what anchovies taste like.”
This inclination to ramble was something that Minho was quickly realizing was a part of Taemin. It was somewhat charming. But then again, Minho thought ruefully, most of Taemin was 'somewhat charming'. His unruly hair, his cherubic face, his long long legs, slim wrists, eclectic collection of shoes, his soft voice and terrible sense of humor...
It was Taemin. This was the sixteen year old boy he was getting to know, whether he wanted to or not.
They ended up sharing five slices because Taemin couldn't decide on what to get because he was too cheap to get more than one slice so, after ten minutes of nose-to-the-glass pondering, Minho broke down and told him to get whatever he wanted because he was paying.
“Really, hyung!?” It was like there was a light behind Taemin's face that flared every time something went his way, and it was something that Minho was finding himself more and more susceptible to.
“Yeah, I am, so hurry up and order!” He wasn't going down without a fight, though.
//
“Take a bite of this one.” Taemin was holding a fork of pizza in front of Minho's mouth, cajoling. “It's really interesting.”
Minho had no idea how he'd gotten here, tucked in a booth in a corner of a pizza restaurant with Lee Taemin of all people. He'd gotten to work that morning with full intentions of avoiding him.
It seemed, however, that nothing was going his way.
“No, I don't like fish. Eat it yourself.”
Taemin switched gears. “It's ridiculous that you're not trying it. You have to, you'd be stupid to not take the opportunity to try something new like this. It's the perfect situation, you know that? It's someone else's food--”
“That I bought.”
“--so you don't even have to eat it all if you don't like it,” Taemin finished, unfazed by the interruption.
“Still not trying it. Ouch!” Taemin had kicked his shin, then shoved the food into Minho's mouth while it was gaping from shock.
“Disgusting, isn't it?” Taemin asked, beyond pleased with himself. “I don't know who would voluntarily eat it, it tastes like rotten fish soaked in stagnant sea water.”
It took all of Minho's willpower to keep his gag reflex at bay as he swallowed the fishy pizza. “That was completely uncalled for,” he told Taemin sternly after he took a quick gulp of soda to wash the taste away, but his glare buckled almost immediately. “I'm going to have fish breath for the entire day.”
“Me too. It's a good thing we're going to be working together, isn't it? No one else is going to want to be near us.”
The returning thought of another three hours with Taemin, sporadic, fish-breath Taemin, made Minho want to sob a little.
//
Taemin traded distractibility for distractibility.
It was stupid, Minho thought, how much enjoyment he was getting out of this task.
“This is so much better. It's not even work at all! It's just having fun and putting things away, that's it, and I get paid for this!? This can't be true.”
“It's not true,” Minho responded curtly, swiping the scanner out of Taemin's hand to finish the job himself. “You're only doing half of what you're supposed to be doing. Remember? It's a four step process. You don't just have to put the stuff on the shelf.”
Taemin was having none of it. “Come on, it's not that big of a deal. Lighten up, hyung. You take everything so seriously.” And then he was up and down the aisle. “Can we do cereal next? They probably always want to restock that. Oh, hey, they have the kind that turns your milk into chocolate milk! I loved that when I was younger.”
It wasn't that he wasn't intelligent, Minho decided after an hour of attempting to teach Taemin to restock. It was just that he had the attention span of a kitten-which was to say, five minutes if you made the work fun.
Or bribed him.
//
“That's not a bribe, that's a threat,” Taemin huffed, glaring at Minho from the other side of the pallet of boxed dry goods.
Minho blinked, playing innocent. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean! Telling me if I don't start working you're going to send me back to the register.”
Minho handed him Taemin the car key he'd been using as a replacement for the box cutter since the younger was obviously not eighteen. “I'm bribing you with a continuing job in the back room if you work hard.”
“And threatening to send me away if I don't.” Taemin slashed at the tape on the nearest box, put out. “It's not nice, hyung. Don't you want me to have fun?”
“Of course I do.” He was smug though, because Taemin was buckling down and working and it was all due to his planning.
//
It worked surprisingly well. Taemin still rambled, occasionally wandered off, and took bathroom breaks that were unnecessarily long, but it was okay because he really did catch on to stocking well. Minho got used to working with him quickly-too quickly-and before he knew it they had a system worked out that got the work done twice as fast.
Things were looking better.
Literally.
Taemin had found out in his second week of work that Kibum didn't mind if he took liberties with the uniform policy of pants-that-must-hold-a-crease now that he wasn't on the register. He'd taken to wearing dark, slim-fitting jeans, ones that rode low on his hips, and now every time he reached to put something up on a shelf Minho caught glimpses of pale skin and his lower back and hipbones.
Minho wasn't against being attracted to men. In fact, he'd found out early in life that he generally preferred them to women. But the fact that it was annoying little Taemin who was a minor (that meant too young, he told himself) was more than slightly terrifying.
What made it worse was the fact that Taemin was of dubious sexuality himself.
“He's got really good legs,” he'd mention casually, pointing out a customer perusing a shelf, and then a minute later he'd turn around and point out a similar feature on a girl. This left Minho with absolutely no idea what to think, both about himself and Taemin and what he was thinking and what he wanted him to be thinking, and how exactly was thinking possible when the small of Taemin's back was just in front of him, smooth and perfect?
For having such a good working situation, Minho thought to himself, he certainly was having a difficult time dealing with it.
//
And it got worse.
Minho work pants, his last comfortable had-been-worn-for-two-years-already pants, had just been eaten by his washing machine. This was realized at exactly one hour before work (he always saved his laundry for last minute).
He swore, holding up the mangled pieces of fabric. That was his last pair of black slacks, and he had no time to go buy another pair. What was he supposed to do!?
It was desperation that had him at work that evening with his only pair of dark jeans, hoping beyond hope that no one would point out his dress code violation.
He should have known that Taemin would.
“Oh, those look really good on you,” he said immediately when he went to go find Minho in the back room. “It's too bad there's no one here to see how nice they look besides me-hey! They do look good, stop looking at me like that!”
“They're just jeans,” Minho mumbled, turning to his scanner to hide his more-than-probably red face. “My pants got destroyed and I have no spares. I wouldn't have worn them otherwise.”
“I think you should wear them all the time,” Taemin replied. “They look a lot better than your other ones.”
Minho didn't answer.
“They do, really. Your legs are so long and the other pants didn't fit you right.”
“Taemin, we're in the store, you don't need to talk that loud!”
“Hah!” Taemin crowed, covering his mouth gleefully. “You're blushing! Minho hyung, are you embarrassed?”
Minho scowled, ripping open a box violently, feeling fervently thankful that there was no one around to witness this. “No, I generally just have red-toned skin." His sister had tested it once, simply out of curiosity, and he'd remembered that fact ever since.
There was no fazing Taemin though. “It's okay,” he said cheerfully, quickly patting the seat of Minho's pants. “I won't tell anyone else that you have a nice butt.” And then he disappeared around the corner of the aisle.
If Minho had ever had doubts about it being possible to blush so hard that his face stung, he no longer in did.
//
Taemin was unusually quiet for a while after that, and Minho was glad for that because he absolutely had nothing to say. While his face had finally returned to a more natural color, he was now supremely self-conscious of his legs. It wasn't something he should have given a second thought to, really. Taemin was joking around (ninety percent of what came out of his mouth wasn't serious), but still...
He really should have just bought another pair of slacks. It would have saved him a lot of humiliation.
“Hyung,” Taemin said suddenly.
Minho glanced over dubiously. “...what?”
“I composed an ode to your legs. Want to hear it?”
He choked, nearly falling off of the ladder he was balanced on. “You-you-what?!”
Before he could protest though Taemin was down on one knee at the base of the ladder, hand placed over his heart soulfully. “Minho, your legs are divine! I really do wish they were mine!”
“Taemin!” Minho sputtered, feeling his face start to heat up again. “I--”
But Taemin wasn't stopping. “Your butt is so pert, it really must hurt...” He stopped, frowning. “I forgot the last line. It was something about you being so fine.”
Minho was curled into the shelf, face throbbing uncontrollably. “I cannot believe you just said that my butt was pert,” he moaned, unwilling to raise his face from his arms.
“It is,” Taemin told him, patting Minho's thigh in a manner that was supposed to be comforting but that failed miserably as Taemin still smelled like laughter and bitter-sweet chocolate and some sort of faint cologne that Minho couldn't place. “You've obviously never looked at it. Hey, I have a haiku about your arms that I thought of while I was working. Want to hear it?”
Minho glanced up, doing his best to kill Taemin with his eyes. “Absolutely not.” What was with him tonight, anyway? Everything was about his legs. They weren't that special.
The younger put his hands up defensively and backed away, moving off to shelve some other boxes. “Okay, fine, fine! It's your loss, this one was really good.”
Minho highly doubted that.
//
The following weeks had Taemin becoming progressively pushier and pushier.
“What are those, your dad's?” He asked when Minho came in the next day with a pair of black slacks identical to the ones he'd been wearing two days before.
“They're mine, thanks,” Minho had responded, stonefaced.
It got worse.
“You need to get rid of those pants. They make you look thirty.”
“Since when do I care what a sixteen year old thinks about me?” Since that sixteen year old was Lee Taemin, snarky-boy extraordinaire apparently.
“I'm almost seventeen. How old are you anyway? Twenty-one?”
“Twenty.”
“Yeah,” Taemin told him resolutely, “you definitely need better pants.”
Minho didn't know why Taemin was so hung-up on his pants. They were perfectly respectable. Sure, they might not fit him perfectly-they were baggy and sort of just hung there-but they covered his legs, and they held a crease. What more did a person need in an article of clothing?
Taemin had different ideas.
“Miiiin-ho,” he sing-songed one evening, nearly waltzing into the back room. “Do you know what day it is today?”
“The eighteenth of July,” he replied, not batting an eyelash. Taemin was always asking questions; he'd learned that the fasted way out of them was to answer with as little words and eye contact as possible.
“Yeah. And do you know what day that is?” He was crouching next to him now, warmth and excitement emanating off of him.
“A Friday.”
“Ugh, stupid. It's my birthday. I'm seventeen now.”
“Good for you,” Minho told him, voice flat. “Do you feel grown-up yet? If you are, stop, because you're obviously not.”
“So how long have you known me for?” Taemin was unperturbed by Minho's gruff attitude.
The older glanced up, getting wary. The questioning period usually didn't go on this long. “Two months or so, I think.”
“Almost two months, yeah. Did you get me a birthday present?”
A birthday present? “Uh, obviously not. I didn't even know it was your birthday.”
“Good. Here, this is for you for my birthday then.” And he set down a roughly wrapped package in front of Minho. “Don't even think of not accepting it. It's bad manners to not give gifts to people you know on their birthdays; you owe me.”
His curiosity got the better of him then. Minho knew, knew with ever fiber of his being, that this was a bad idea. Taemin never gave gifts without a catch. Whether it was a gift of money, of a meal, or of his time, there was always some way that it benefited him in the end.
So, instead of refusing like he knew he should have (the two month birthday gift rule Taemin was citing was obviously not even a rule at all, he knew that) Minho opened the gift.
“I had to guess at the sizing, but I figured you were only a size bigger than me. Try them on, okay? Come on! Go do it!”
They were a pair of pants, deep black jeans that looked very similar to the ones that Minho had worn weeks ago.
“Taemin,” he said holding them up, dread filling his stomach. “I can't accept these. I can't. They're--”
“--not in the dress code, I know. I asked Kibum though he said that I should make sure to give them to you and to make sure you throw those bags you're wearing on your legs away so you can never wear them again. So come one, please go put them on. Please, hyung.”
It was useless trying to refuse the combination of puppy-dog eyes and the casual hand Taemin had placed on Minho's knee...completely and utterly useless. Because as much as Minho wanted to say he wasn't swayed by him, the truth was actually quite the opposite; he was swayed, just too much for him to admit it to himself. There was just something about Taemin he couldn't refuse, no matter how much he wanted to.
//
The pants fit like a glove.
“They don't fit,” he told Taemin through the bathroom door. “Take them back.”
Taemin snorted. “Liar. Come out and show me.”
“They don't,” he insisted, but opened the door anyway.
It was clear that they did fit, because Taemin's gaze went from curious to rapacious in a matter of seconds. “See? You lie terribly. They fit perfectly.” He smiled then, a cross between sly and sweet that had Minho's innards twisting.
//
Taemin, for someone who was so eager to get Minho into the new pants, was surprisingly quiet. They worked in silence for the evening, the clock ticking past midnight without either saying anything past the bare necessities.
“Wait,” Minho said suddenly, checking the clock. “Aren't you supposed to be going home at two? It's two-fifteen.”
“I'm seventeen, Minho. My parents signed for me to be able to work full nights now. I'm going home at four after a full eight hours.”
Somehow the implications of Taemin turning seventeen, of pretty much being an adult, had escaped him. “So they don't mind if you take the bus late at night?”
The younger boy laughed. “I have my license now and I use their car. They don't care whether it's at two or four that I come home as long as I get home before seven so my dad can go to work.”
“Oh.” Childish Taemin working late nights and driving cars seemed so completely out of character that Minho couldn't find any words.
“So yeah, I do feel pretty grown up.”
He was answering Minho's earlier question, seriously, and Minho was surprised to find that he could see it. Beneath the flighty attitude there was a grown-up with responsibilities and idea and thoughts of his own that weren't those of a kid.
It was screwing with his brain.
“Hey, Minho,” Taemin said, and his voice was a lot closer than Minho had expected. The younger had stepped closer, close enough that he'd touch him if he moved any more. “I'm curious. Would you consider me to be grown-up?”
Minho's heart was thundering and he was having a difficult time thinking when Taemin was so close, his scent seeping into his pores, his eyes dark and close enough that Minho could count the lashes were he inclined to. “Uh, I guess so.”
“You guess so or you know so?”
These sort of questions were the ones that Minho never knew how to answer. What was the difference between guessing and knowing? All knowledge was a guess as some point in time. And right now he guessed, he knew, he felt with every cell of his body, that, he wanted to touch Taemin.
“I probably know so.”
Taemin rolled his eyes, took a step closer so their bodies were pressed together and Minho was trapped against the shelf. “You're so stupid sometimes,” he breathed, eyes lidded and sleepy with something that was obviously not exhaustion, despite the hour. “Probably isn't a for sure.”
It was too much for Minho to handle, that much Taemin. With a rumble that was nearly a growl he wrapped his hands around Taemin's waist, pulling him closer. “I know. But even if I didn't know I'd still do this.”
Taemin's mouth was hot and willing, moving against Minho's eagerly as his hands trailed up and down Minho's back before tucking themselves into the back pockets of his jeans. They were sparking, burning up, and Minho couldn't think of anything besides Taemin-how his hips jutted perfectly into Minho's, how his waist was impossibly slim, how their legs fit together perfectly.
“Don't ever put on those hideous pants again,” Taemin told him seriously when they broke apart, breathing heavily. “I don't ever want to see them.”
Minho raised an eyebrow. “What, are you my boyfriend now or something?”
Taemin gave Minho's rear a none-too-gentle squeeze, pulling him closer and smiling into the curve of his neck.
“Idiot. What else would I be?”
Part Two
Pairing: 2min
Rating: pg-ish
Genre: au, fluff
Summary: Taemin is the new boy at Minho's grocery store.
Words: 6693
A/N: for 2minbiased because it was her birthday recently and she requested 'tooth-rottening fluff'. Here you are, love~
It was a large store, full of aisles containing everything imaginable. It had shelves, shelves upon shelves that held fake flowers and frozen food and velcro tabs. There were racks of clothing, two separate dressing rooms, a well-stocked books-and-magazines section, and warranties for every electronic device on the planet. This was the type of store you got lost in unless you worked in four to seven days a week for at least a year, and even then you didn't know where everything was until year two came around.
Minho knew where everything was.
The store was his. Not literally, of course; he wasn't the store owner, nor did he want to be. He figured that after he'd worked there for going on four years he was entitled to a bit of ownership, though.
He'd worked there since he was just sixteen. It had been a tiny job; he was a cart pusher and he was only allowed to work eight hours a week because he was underage and was still going to school. From there he'd been promoted to cashier, and from cashier to daytime-cashier, nighttime floor manager. His pay had increased steadily (not to mention the extra dollar and a half he got when he worked at floor manager). The fifty hour weeks he worked weren't always fun, but he was easily able to afford his apartment and car on the money he received. Besides, Sundays were always off.
It was a good job, overall, and he felt comfortable saying he still enjoyed it. There was a steadiness to it, a continuity that he appreciated. The regulars, the constant flow of newbies, the every second day arrival of shipments-he knew it all and was happy with it. It was second nature to him.
Things changed, then.
Minho never paid much attention to the new cashiers. They came in and they went out, most lasting less than a year. If they stayed over three months he tried to learn their names; over six, he made an effort to have casual conversations. There was no need for more than that though. He answered their questions with the seasoned patience of a veteran, then moved on.
It was the beginning of summer and the new crop of cashiers was arriving. They were young, nervous, and pitiful (per usual) in their pressed pants and fresh shirts. Minho made a mental note to avoid them as much as possible for the next week.
“Minho,” Kibum called as Minho passed by him, waving a hand in the general direction of the flock of kids, “can you throw that bunch on the registers?”
“What?” Minho stopped in mid-stride, hands frozen on the handle of the cart he was pushing to the back. “Why me?”
“We have a scheduling issue that Jinki didn't work through and I have enough work to drown in. Give them a run-down of what their job is, then assign them to some of the older cashiers. We have enough, I'm sure.”
Minho sighed, nodding a quick consent. It was better than having to have someone shadow him all day, he supposed, but only marginally. Assigning them to registers meant that he got all of the annoyed glares from the cashiers who would have to have a questioning newbie attached to them all shift, not to mention the honor of fielding all of the questions from them once they got assigned registers of their own.
There were roughly twelve of them and they looked like they ranged between the ages of seven and twelve, at least to Minho, who was less than pleased with his sudden acquisition of a group of nervous new hires.
“Here's what we're going to do,” he told them after he got their attention by pushing his cart into the center of their group. “I'm going to assign you each to a register, and you'll stick with them for the rest of your shift. If you have questions don't ask Kibum please, he's...” he paused, looking for the right words to describe the frazzled state of the daytime floor manager and failing miserably. “He's, uh, not in a good mood.”
They all nodded, trooping after him like sheep after he finished a brief spiel on company morals.
“These are our cashiers,” he told them, gesturing vaguely to the lineup of cashiers at registers. “Obviously it's not busy right now, but we should have enough of them to go around. Alright, hm, you,” he pointed at a the nearest girl, “you go to register two. Wait, no, three. Go to three.”
Minho realized he was in trouble when he had one boy left and no more cashiers to give him to.
“Sorry, what's your name?” he asked after a last desperate, futile scan of the registers.
“Taemin. Lee Taemin.” His voice was soft, quiet enough that Minho felt the urge to lean down and cup his hand to his ear to hear him better.
“Come with me. We're going to see Kibum.”
Taemin blinked, once, twice, four times. “But I thought you said we shouldn't...”
“This is an exception,” he told him, briefly touching the shoulder of the younger boy to get him moving. “It'll be okay since I'm asking.”
It was not okay.
“I told you to deal with them!” Kibum had two pens, one in his mouth and one in his hand, and there were inky scribbles covering what looked to be a very muddled schedule sheet. “I can't, there are fifteen people scheduled at seven in the morning tomorrow and no one scheduled at seven in the evening. Do I look like I can talk?”
“Well, no, but Taemin--”
“I don't care what you do with him, just take him away.”
“There're no--”
“Away.”
So they went.
“Apparently you were wrong about it being okay if you asked him,” Taemin said after they were far enough away.
Minho glared down at him. “How old are you anyway? Fourteen?”
“Sixteen, thanks.” There was an edge to his voice despite it seemingly mild quality, and Minho found himself doing a quick double-take. There was attitude behind that innocent baby face and fluffy auburn hair.
“Yeah, exactly. We're not talking about it.” There was no way he was going to discuss his complete humiliation in further detail with a new hire who was four years younger than him.
Taemin seemed to be done talking about it too, though. “Fine, okay. What are you going to have me do? Put that stuff away with you?”
Minho paused. He'd forgotten that he was supposed to be getting Taemin's training started; instead he'd gone straight back to restocking. What was he going to do with him? He was a cashier. Knowing the basics of restocking was not going to be useful the following day when he was assigned a register of his own.
There was one solution, obvious and unappealing. “Help me with this cart of stuff quick, then I'll open a register. You can shadow me for today.”
//
For the most part Taemin learned things quickly. He caught onto scanning ten minutes in. An hour later he was fairly adept at navigating the register screen. After two he'd gotten into a rhythm of doing that and bagging at the same time.
However, Minho realized, there were a few areas that the young boy was lacking. Or rather, there was one huge, gaping important hole in his functionality as a cashier: Taemin simply couldn't hold a conversation and check people out at the same time.
It was funny at first.
“Hi, how are you doing today?” He'd ask, and Minho would nod approvingly from behind him, mostly to himself. “Did you find everything okay?”
If it was left at that he was fine, completely, and then everything went smoothly. The problem was when the conversation extended further.
“Oh, I know, I'm confused about the store too,” he'd start. “Nothing makes sense. Did you know they keep candy in five different places? At least that's what one of the other cashiers told me. That one right there, on register seven, right behind you. He's new too, did you know that? There're twelve of us, so if we're not as fast as you think we should be, that's why.”
And he'd continue on, rambling with an open face and big eyes until Minho was forced to nudge him with his foot and hiss that he should keep scanning items, and then Taemin would invariably scowl at him and tell him that there was no way he could learn if Minho kept telling him what to do. Then Minho would feel stupid, because the customer also invariably nodded along, agreeing with Taemin about hands-on experiences and learning from mistakes, and then he ended up looking like the bad guy when all he was trying to do was keep things going through because the lines kept getting longer.
It was a terrible problem, this charming distractibility of Taemin's, and Minho had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
//
Minho ended up going home that evening with fresh resolve to leave the newbies for people who had more patience than him. They ('they' being Taemin) had been much more work than they were worth, and quite frankly, he was finished. Finished.
The more time he spent with the young boy the more he'd learned about him.
He had more attitude than was necessary. Minho knew he'd never had that much when he was sixteen.
“Are you still in school?”
“It's summer. Of course I'm not in school.”
He thought he was beyond hilarious.
When he was scanning corn and listening to Minho talk about the ins and outs of the register:
“Minho, stop telling me about how to open the cash drawer.”
“Why?”
“There're extra ears listening! Hahaha, do you get it? Ears? Ears of corn?”
He thoroughly disliked being called pretty.
“They all just want to take me home and feed me and ruffle my hair. It's so stupid. I don't get it.”
“It's because you're pretty. All old women like pretty boys.”
“Stoppit! I'm not that pretty, okay? Pretty is for...it isn't for me.”
(That really got Minho, because if there was one thing Taemin was without a doubt it was pretty. His smooth skin, clear eyes, full lips, nicely shaped nose, all set off by long, red-tinted hair that fell loosely onto his neck...there was no way anyone could look at him and not see it. But the perturbed flush of his cheeks at Minho's statement made it clear he was tired of it.)
Then there were the little things. He dressed nicely in clothes that fit him properly, from his head to--
Minho, at his bathroom sink brushing his teeth, sputtered at a sudden flash from earlier. “I try to dress well from my head to-ma-toes,” Taemin had said, grinning and holding up the red fruit when Minho'd commented on his clothing style earlier. “Haha, get it? Tomatoes. To my toes.”
He'd gotten it, alright, and it would have probably been funny if it hadn't been so accurate. Taemin had small feet that could only be described as dainty in the slim lace-up shoes he'd been wearing. They made Minho feel like a giant, galumphing elephant because his feet were huge next to Taemin's, his wrists were massive, his arms were ape-like--
Taemin was just small. Small and delicate.
Yeah, Minho decided, nodding firmly to his reflection in the mirror. He'd stay away from the front end for a while until the summer hires were trained in completely. They (mostly Taemin, he acknowledged) were simply too much work.
//
Jinki grabbed him the moment he got through the doors at two minutes after seven. “Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here. I need someone to sub for Kibum, he's going to be late and I have to go to to the back and work out some schedules. Please tell me you're staying for at least four hours, I need at least that much to get everything sorted because Kibum only called half the people yesterday and--”
“Breathe, Jinki! Breathe!” Minho knocked the older on the side of his head, stunning him momentarily. “Your face is turning purple!”
Jinki smiled, crooked and apologetic. “Sorry. Can you do it? There're only three of the twelve here today, it shouldn't be too terrible.”
Minho sighed deeply. There was no way he was going to be able to work in the back room today. “Yeah, I can. You go do your stuff, I'll be out there. Can I go clock in now?”
“Oh, yeah, go.” Jinki shoved him toward the door. “Thanks. I owe you!”
He wouldn't ever pay him back, Minho knew; Jinki's heart was in the right place, but he invariably forgot about all debts within a matter of hours, both the ones he owed and the ones owed him.
It wasn't two minutes later that he found himself wielding the floor manager badge.
The registers weren't busy. It was only a few minutes after seven and the worst wouldn't come until it hit ten. There would be a couple hours of relaxation before he started really getting busy, he figured. After all, they'd had seven hours on the clock yesterday, and there were only three new hires here today. How bad could it be?
//
The answer: very bad.
It took Minho a total of ten minutes to realize that Taemin was on the first shift of cashiers, which meant four and a half hours of straight register duty, starting at seven AM. And much to his dismay, the boy wasn't doing any better than the day before.
“Taemin,” he hissed when he sent him for a quick break, “you need to keep the line moving!”
Taemin looked more than a bit disgruntled when he stopped mid-stride, spinning around to face Minho. “What do you mean!? I have been keeping it moving!”
“You keep...” How was he supposed to tell him that he needed to stop talking? There really wasn't a polite way to, and he was supposed to be making good impressions. “Just go faster from now on, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I will.” He waved the remark off breezily and Minho fought the urge to strangle him. There was just something about that sweet face and childish, ill-tempered veneer that got under his skin like nothing he'd ever experienced before.
There was no way he could complain about it, though. To everyone but Minho Taemin was charming and cute and not in the least bit flippant. Jinki thought he was marvelous, and even Kibum, notoriously hard-to-please Kibum, had mentioned that “nice, angel-faced boy” in passing.
No, Minho was absolutely alone in his bad-Taemin experiences, and it was making him quite upset.
It only got worse after his first break.
Taemin started calling him over to ask him questions when the lines dispersed. “How do I do such and such thing?” he'd ask about the most useless techniques. “Do I have to memorize the department names?”
“No,” Minho told him exasperatedly when he called him over for the third time in twenty minutes. This time to ask whether he was able to call home on the register phone. “It's for in-store calls only. There's a list of them on the handle, see?”
“Oh, huh,” Taemin said, edging closer to Minho to get a better look at it. “Produce, 758. Why is it 758? Is that in secret code or something?”
Minho swallowed, catching a distinct whiff of a muted, musky shampoo that was somehow completely suited to Taemin. “Uh, what was that?”
“Code. Is it a code for anything?” Taemin glanced up at Minho, far too close in the small space.
“Oh. Yeah, it's the code for the produce department.” He needed to back away; Taemin was suddenly looking a bit too dark-chocolate-sweet for his comfort.
The younger boy sighed and rolled his eyes, turning back to the register. “I knew that, stupid. Somehow I wonder how you're the floor manager at all when you make obvious statements like that.”
Minho didn't bother to dignify the comment with a response, just left. Taemin could deal with his own questions if he was going to be snippy about things.
The scent, earthy and dark, stuck with him far past the end of his shift.
//
Taemin got better, both at coming up with ridiculous questions whenever Minho was around and at playing innocent whenever Minho opened his mouth to ask him why he was such a brat.
“Hey, hyung,” he said casually, stopping at Minho's register a few days after he'd started and kicking at Minho's shin with a small, black-leather-booted foot. “What are the chances of me being able to switch from the register to stocking, like you?”
Minho dropped the bag he was holding into the cart, quickly scanned for more customers that he'd missed, then turned back to Taemin. “Why?”
“Because I'm sick of this. I don't think I'm meant to be up front.” It was clear he wasn't happy, lips pursed in a pout and eyes slanted and sullen.
“It gets better, really. If you want I can find someone to cross-train you though, see if you can get switched in a couple weeks.” He'd could actually send Taemin straight to Kibum himself, seeing that apparently the manager liked the newbie better than he liked Minho (or rather, he tolerated him more).
“Can you do that today?”
“I'm kind of bus-”
Then suddenly there was a warm hand on his forearm and Taemin was blasting the puppy dog eyes full-force, and Minho was suddenly turning his register light off and they were going to talk to Kibum right then.
Minho had absolute no idea how it happened that he ended up with an antsy Taemin who was shifting back and forth booted feet in front of Kibum's office door.
“You ask him,” Minho hissed, reverting back to high-school behavior as he did his best to block the warm Taemin scent and shiny boots out of his head. “I'm just here as moral support; okay?”
“You've changed a bit since I first started working,” Taemin replied, nudging him.
Minho would have responded, but then door swung open and there was Kibum, tall and blonde and still just as frazzled as before.
“Make it quick. What's wrong?”
“Minho offered to cross-train me in stocking instead of working the register for the next few days. Is that okay?”
What? Minho's mind was struggling to catch up to the words coming out of Taemin's mouth. He was...he...what?
Kibum rolled his eyes. “Minho the handyman, doing everything. Sure, go ahead, we have enough people on the registers anyway. Tell Jinki to change you nametag, alright, Taemin?” Then he ruffled the younger's hair and shut the door.
“That was easy,” Taemin marveled, smoothing his hair back into place quickly. “I didn't expect him to say yes so fast.”
“You just...how did I just get assigned to this?”
“You offered!”
Minho bristled. “I absolutely did not offer! I said I'd come with you to find someone else to cross-train you, not that I would myself!”
Taemin laughed, loud and happy, and Minho found his heart dropping a bit at the his crescent eyes and wide smile. “Same thing. I'm going to go eat lunch.”
//
He told himself he went to go eat lunch with Taemin because it was useless to go back to the register after already being off for ten minutes and that he was going to sit at a different table than him anyhow. But somehow between the office door and the break room refrigerator things got mixed up, and they ended up driving together to the pizza place around the corner because Taemin didn't have his license or a car and he'd forgotten his lunch, and Minho knew working on an empty stomach was terrible.
“I'm going to get a personal pizza,” Taemin said decisively. He was buckled into the passenger seat, dark-jean-clad legs stretched out and loosely crossed at the ankles. “With onions and green peppers and pepperoni and canadian bacon. Oh, I wonder if they have feta cheese? Or anchovies. I've always wanted to see what anchovies taste like.”
This inclination to ramble was something that Minho was quickly realizing was a part of Taemin. It was somewhat charming. But then again, Minho thought ruefully, most of Taemin was 'somewhat charming'. His unruly hair, his cherubic face, his long long legs, slim wrists, eclectic collection of shoes, his soft voice and terrible sense of humor...
It was Taemin. This was the sixteen year old boy he was getting to know, whether he wanted to or not.
They ended up sharing five slices because Taemin couldn't decide on what to get because he was too cheap to get more than one slice so, after ten minutes of nose-to-the-glass pondering, Minho broke down and told him to get whatever he wanted because he was paying.
“Really, hyung!?” It was like there was a light behind Taemin's face that flared every time something went his way, and it was something that Minho was finding himself more and more susceptible to.
“Yeah, I am, so hurry up and order!” He wasn't going down without a fight, though.
//
“Take a bite of this one.” Taemin was holding a fork of pizza in front of Minho's mouth, cajoling. “It's really interesting.”
Minho had no idea how he'd gotten here, tucked in a booth in a corner of a pizza restaurant with Lee Taemin of all people. He'd gotten to work that morning with full intentions of avoiding him.
It seemed, however, that nothing was going his way.
“No, I don't like fish. Eat it yourself.”
Taemin switched gears. “It's ridiculous that you're not trying it. You have to, you'd be stupid to not take the opportunity to try something new like this. It's the perfect situation, you know that? It's someone else's food--”
“That I bought.”
“--so you don't even have to eat it all if you don't like it,” Taemin finished, unfazed by the interruption.
“Still not trying it. Ouch!” Taemin had kicked his shin, then shoved the food into Minho's mouth while it was gaping from shock.
“Disgusting, isn't it?” Taemin asked, beyond pleased with himself. “I don't know who would voluntarily eat it, it tastes like rotten fish soaked in stagnant sea water.”
It took all of Minho's willpower to keep his gag reflex at bay as he swallowed the fishy pizza. “That was completely uncalled for,” he told Taemin sternly after he took a quick gulp of soda to wash the taste away, but his glare buckled almost immediately. “I'm going to have fish breath for the entire day.”
“Me too. It's a good thing we're going to be working together, isn't it? No one else is going to want to be near us.”
The returning thought of another three hours with Taemin, sporadic, fish-breath Taemin, made Minho want to sob a little.
//
Taemin traded distractibility for distractibility.
It was stupid, Minho thought, how much enjoyment he was getting out of this task.
“This is so much better. It's not even work at all! It's just having fun and putting things away, that's it, and I get paid for this!? This can't be true.”
“It's not true,” Minho responded curtly, swiping the scanner out of Taemin's hand to finish the job himself. “You're only doing half of what you're supposed to be doing. Remember? It's a four step process. You don't just have to put the stuff on the shelf.”
Taemin was having none of it. “Come on, it's not that big of a deal. Lighten up, hyung. You take everything so seriously.” And then he was up and down the aisle. “Can we do cereal next? They probably always want to restock that. Oh, hey, they have the kind that turns your milk into chocolate milk! I loved that when I was younger.”
It wasn't that he wasn't intelligent, Minho decided after an hour of attempting to teach Taemin to restock. It was just that he had the attention span of a kitten-which was to say, five minutes if you made the work fun.
Or bribed him.
//
“That's not a bribe, that's a threat,” Taemin huffed, glaring at Minho from the other side of the pallet of boxed dry goods.
Minho blinked, playing innocent. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean! Telling me if I don't start working you're going to send me back to the register.”
Minho handed him Taemin the car key he'd been using as a replacement for the box cutter since the younger was obviously not eighteen. “I'm bribing you with a continuing job in the back room if you work hard.”
“And threatening to send me away if I don't.” Taemin slashed at the tape on the nearest box, put out. “It's not nice, hyung. Don't you want me to have fun?”
“Of course I do.” He was smug though, because Taemin was buckling down and working and it was all due to his planning.
//
It worked surprisingly well. Taemin still rambled, occasionally wandered off, and took bathroom breaks that were unnecessarily long, but it was okay because he really did catch on to stocking well. Minho got used to working with him quickly-too quickly-and before he knew it they had a system worked out that got the work done twice as fast.
Things were looking better.
Literally.
Taemin had found out in his second week of work that Kibum didn't mind if he took liberties with the uniform policy of pants-that-must-hold-a-crease now that he wasn't on the register. He'd taken to wearing dark, slim-fitting jeans, ones that rode low on his hips, and now every time he reached to put something up on a shelf Minho caught glimpses of pale skin and his lower back and hipbones.
Minho wasn't against being attracted to men. In fact, he'd found out early in life that he generally preferred them to women. But the fact that it was annoying little Taemin who was a minor (that meant too young, he told himself) was more than slightly terrifying.
What made it worse was the fact that Taemin was of dubious sexuality himself.
“He's got really good legs,” he'd mention casually, pointing out a customer perusing a shelf, and then a minute later he'd turn around and point out a similar feature on a girl. This left Minho with absolutely no idea what to think, both about himself and Taemin and what he was thinking and what he wanted him to be thinking, and how exactly was thinking possible when the small of Taemin's back was just in front of him, smooth and perfect?
For having such a good working situation, Minho thought to himself, he certainly was having a difficult time dealing with it.
//
And it got worse.
Minho work pants, his last comfortable had-been-worn-for-two-years-already pants, had just been eaten by his washing machine. This was realized at exactly one hour before work (he always saved his laundry for last minute).
He swore, holding up the mangled pieces of fabric. That was his last pair of black slacks, and he had no time to go buy another pair. What was he supposed to do!?
It was desperation that had him at work that evening with his only pair of dark jeans, hoping beyond hope that no one would point out his dress code violation.
He should have known that Taemin would.
“Oh, those look really good on you,” he said immediately when he went to go find Minho in the back room. “It's too bad there's no one here to see how nice they look besides me-hey! They do look good, stop looking at me like that!”
“They're just jeans,” Minho mumbled, turning to his scanner to hide his more-than-probably red face. “My pants got destroyed and I have no spares. I wouldn't have worn them otherwise.”
“I think you should wear them all the time,” Taemin replied. “They look a lot better than your other ones.”
Minho didn't answer.
“They do, really. Your legs are so long and the other pants didn't fit you right.”
“Taemin, we're in the store, you don't need to talk that loud!”
“Hah!” Taemin crowed, covering his mouth gleefully. “You're blushing! Minho hyung, are you embarrassed?”
Minho scowled, ripping open a box violently, feeling fervently thankful that there was no one around to witness this. “No, I generally just have red-toned skin." His sister had tested it once, simply out of curiosity, and he'd remembered that fact ever since.
There was no fazing Taemin though. “It's okay,” he said cheerfully, quickly patting the seat of Minho's pants. “I won't tell anyone else that you have a nice butt.” And then he disappeared around the corner of the aisle.
If Minho had ever had doubts about it being possible to blush so hard that his face stung, he no longer in did.
//
Taemin was unusually quiet for a while after that, and Minho was glad for that because he absolutely had nothing to say. While his face had finally returned to a more natural color, he was now supremely self-conscious of his legs. It wasn't something he should have given a second thought to, really. Taemin was joking around (ninety percent of what came out of his mouth wasn't serious), but still...
He really should have just bought another pair of slacks. It would have saved him a lot of humiliation.
“Hyung,” Taemin said suddenly.
Minho glanced over dubiously. “...what?”
“I composed an ode to your legs. Want to hear it?”
He choked, nearly falling off of the ladder he was balanced on. “You-you-what?!”
Before he could protest though Taemin was down on one knee at the base of the ladder, hand placed over his heart soulfully. “Minho, your legs are divine! I really do wish they were mine!”
“Taemin!” Minho sputtered, feeling his face start to heat up again. “I--”
But Taemin wasn't stopping. “Your butt is so pert, it really must hurt...” He stopped, frowning. “I forgot the last line. It was something about you being so fine.”
Minho was curled into the shelf, face throbbing uncontrollably. “I cannot believe you just said that my butt was pert,” he moaned, unwilling to raise his face from his arms.
“It is,” Taemin told him, patting Minho's thigh in a manner that was supposed to be comforting but that failed miserably as Taemin still smelled like laughter and bitter-sweet chocolate and some sort of faint cologne that Minho couldn't place. “You've obviously never looked at it. Hey, I have a haiku about your arms that I thought of while I was working. Want to hear it?”
Minho glanced up, doing his best to kill Taemin with his eyes. “Absolutely not.” What was with him tonight, anyway? Everything was about his legs. They weren't that special.
The younger put his hands up defensively and backed away, moving off to shelve some other boxes. “Okay, fine, fine! It's your loss, this one was really good.”
Minho highly doubted that.
//
The following weeks had Taemin becoming progressively pushier and pushier.
“What are those, your dad's?” He asked when Minho came in the next day with a pair of black slacks identical to the ones he'd been wearing two days before.
“They're mine, thanks,” Minho had responded, stonefaced.
It got worse.
“You need to get rid of those pants. They make you look thirty.”
“Since when do I care what a sixteen year old thinks about me?” Since that sixteen year old was Lee Taemin, snarky-boy extraordinaire apparently.
“I'm almost seventeen. How old are you anyway? Twenty-one?”
“Twenty.”
“Yeah,” Taemin told him resolutely, “you definitely need better pants.”
Minho didn't know why Taemin was so hung-up on his pants. They were perfectly respectable. Sure, they might not fit him perfectly-they were baggy and sort of just hung there-but they covered his legs, and they held a crease. What more did a person need in an article of clothing?
Taemin had different ideas.
“Miiiin-ho,” he sing-songed one evening, nearly waltzing into the back room. “Do you know what day it is today?”
“The eighteenth of July,” he replied, not batting an eyelash. Taemin was always asking questions; he'd learned that the fasted way out of them was to answer with as little words and eye contact as possible.
“Yeah. And do you know what day that is?” He was crouching next to him now, warmth and excitement emanating off of him.
“A Friday.”
“Ugh, stupid. It's my birthday. I'm seventeen now.”
“Good for you,” Minho told him, voice flat. “Do you feel grown-up yet? If you are, stop, because you're obviously not.”
“So how long have you known me for?” Taemin was unperturbed by Minho's gruff attitude.
The older glanced up, getting wary. The questioning period usually didn't go on this long. “Two months or so, I think.”
“Almost two months, yeah. Did you get me a birthday present?”
A birthday present? “Uh, obviously not. I didn't even know it was your birthday.”
“Good. Here, this is for you for my birthday then.” And he set down a roughly wrapped package in front of Minho. “Don't even think of not accepting it. It's bad manners to not give gifts to people you know on their birthdays; you owe me.”
His curiosity got the better of him then. Minho knew, knew with ever fiber of his being, that this was a bad idea. Taemin never gave gifts without a catch. Whether it was a gift of money, of a meal, or of his time, there was always some way that it benefited him in the end.
So, instead of refusing like he knew he should have (the two month birthday gift rule Taemin was citing was obviously not even a rule at all, he knew that) Minho opened the gift.
“I had to guess at the sizing, but I figured you were only a size bigger than me. Try them on, okay? Come on! Go do it!”
They were a pair of pants, deep black jeans that looked very similar to the ones that Minho had worn weeks ago.
“Taemin,” he said holding them up, dread filling his stomach. “I can't accept these. I can't. They're--”
“--not in the dress code, I know. I asked Kibum though he said that I should make sure to give them to you and to make sure you throw those bags you're wearing on your legs away so you can never wear them again. So come one, please go put them on. Please, hyung.”
It was useless trying to refuse the combination of puppy-dog eyes and the casual hand Taemin had placed on Minho's knee...completely and utterly useless. Because as much as Minho wanted to say he wasn't swayed by him, the truth was actually quite the opposite; he was swayed, just too much for him to admit it to himself. There was just something about Taemin he couldn't refuse, no matter how much he wanted to.
//
The pants fit like a glove.
“They don't fit,” he told Taemin through the bathroom door. “Take them back.”
Taemin snorted. “Liar. Come out and show me.”
“They don't,” he insisted, but opened the door anyway.
It was clear that they did fit, because Taemin's gaze went from curious to rapacious in a matter of seconds. “See? You lie terribly. They fit perfectly.” He smiled then, a cross between sly and sweet that had Minho's innards twisting.
//
Taemin, for someone who was so eager to get Minho into the new pants, was surprisingly quiet. They worked in silence for the evening, the clock ticking past midnight without either saying anything past the bare necessities.
“Wait,” Minho said suddenly, checking the clock. “Aren't you supposed to be going home at two? It's two-fifteen.”
“I'm seventeen, Minho. My parents signed for me to be able to work full nights now. I'm going home at four after a full eight hours.”
Somehow the implications of Taemin turning seventeen, of pretty much being an adult, had escaped him. “So they don't mind if you take the bus late at night?”
The younger boy laughed. “I have my license now and I use their car. They don't care whether it's at two or four that I come home as long as I get home before seven so my dad can go to work.”
“Oh.” Childish Taemin working late nights and driving cars seemed so completely out of character that Minho couldn't find any words.
“So yeah, I do feel pretty grown up.”
He was answering Minho's earlier question, seriously, and Minho was surprised to find that he could see it. Beneath the flighty attitude there was a grown-up with responsibilities and idea and thoughts of his own that weren't those of a kid.
It was screwing with his brain.
“Hey, Minho,” Taemin said, and his voice was a lot closer than Minho had expected. The younger had stepped closer, close enough that he'd touch him if he moved any more. “I'm curious. Would you consider me to be grown-up?”
Minho's heart was thundering and he was having a difficult time thinking when Taemin was so close, his scent seeping into his pores, his eyes dark and close enough that Minho could count the lashes were he inclined to. “Uh, I guess so.”
“You guess so or you know so?”
These sort of questions were the ones that Minho never knew how to answer. What was the difference between guessing and knowing? All knowledge was a guess as some point in time. And right now he guessed, he knew, he felt with every cell of his body, that, he wanted to touch Taemin.
“I probably know so.”
Taemin rolled his eyes, took a step closer so their bodies were pressed together and Minho was trapped against the shelf. “You're so stupid sometimes,” he breathed, eyes lidded and sleepy with something that was obviously not exhaustion, despite the hour. “Probably isn't a for sure.”
It was too much for Minho to handle, that much Taemin. With a rumble that was nearly a growl he wrapped his hands around Taemin's waist, pulling him closer. “I know. But even if I didn't know I'd still do this.”
Taemin's mouth was hot and willing, moving against Minho's eagerly as his hands trailed up and down Minho's back before tucking themselves into the back pockets of his jeans. They were sparking, burning up, and Minho couldn't think of anything besides Taemin-how his hips jutted perfectly into Minho's, how his waist was impossibly slim, how their legs fit together perfectly.
“Don't ever put on those hideous pants again,” Taemin told him seriously when they broke apart, breathing heavily. “I don't ever want to see them.”
Minho raised an eyebrow. “What, are you my boyfriend now or something?”
Taemin gave Minho's rear a none-too-gentle squeeze, pulling him closer and smiling into the curve of his neck.
“Idiot. What else would I be?”
Part Two