[exo] throw away the key (to your heart) 1/2
throw away the key (to your heart) | baekhyun/sehun | pg13 | angst, romance
baekhyun’s first disappointment had happened upstate, the collar of his tux tight around his neck, and the white cloud of taeyeon’s wedding dress spilling out between them along with the silence. runaway bride au.
a/n: thank you to my two k's for being my pre-readers/betas, and also for being the best ♥♥
originally written as a pinch-hit for thebaekfest, jan 2014.
title comes from heart's a mess -- gotye
warnings: mild homophobia
Throw Away the Key (To Your Heart)
The numbers on the page in front of Baekhyun are starting to swim and he rubs at his eyes, trying to get them to focus. There’s a large stack of budget reports lying under the one he’s reading that never seems to get smaller, no matter how many pieces of paper he puts aside, and Baekhyun is glad to be interrupted by a knock on his office door.
He pushes the stack away and straightens his back, sitting up for the first time in an hour. The joints audibly pop and his cell phone begins to vibrate in his pocket with an incoming call.
“Come in,” Baekhyun says, fishing his phone out to press the ignore button and laying it on his desk.
As usual, Minseok is impeccably put together in two pieces of what must be a three-piece suit, and he frowns at Baekhyun when he catches sight of him.
“That’s a little casual for the office, don’t you think?” he asks, looking over Baekhyun’s tshirt with critical eyes.
“It’s not like I’m a pageant contestant or something. Why should I get all dressed up so I can sit here alone trying to read these reports?” Baekhyun glances down at himself. “Besides, I brought a blazer,” he adds defensively.
The jeans, he concedes, might be a little much, even with the jacket hanging off the back of his chair.
Minseok eyes the frayed edges of Baekhyun’s pockets like he agrees, but doesn’t pursue it. He and Baekhyun have already had this discussion too many times to count. “Speaking of those reports,” he says instead, “are you finished yet? I need to be able to look at them too before sending them over.”
Baekhyun’s cellphone, still sitting on the corner of his desk, lights up with another call and starts to vibrate loudly against the wood surface. He ignores it and nods toward the stack of papers he’d been pouring over.
Minseok’s face drops. “Please say that’s not how much you still have left.”
“I could tell you that,” Baekhyun says while his phone buzzes once sharply to inform him of a voicemail, “but that would be lying.”
“I wanted to get those off to the Oh Group today, Baekhyun.” Minseok is trying desperately not to sound annoyed, but Baekhyun knows he is because his face is all flat, like he’s two seconds away from giving Baekhyun a death glare.
“I know, I just- “ Baekhyun pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes like that might help the dull throbbing in his skull. “I think I might need glasses. All the squinting is giving me a headache.”
His phone starts to buzz loudly again, the screen lighting up, and Baekhyun denies the call again, flipping it over so he doesn’t have to see the screen.
Minseok looks at him strangely. “You’re not going to pick up?”
“It’s just stuff about the wedding,” Baekhyun says, shaking his head. “I’ll deal with it later.”
He’s got a crick in his neck from being hunched over his desk for so long and he can feel the pinch all the way down his back. Two years ago, if anyone had ever told him working at his father’s company was this painful, he’d have laughed. Now, going to the office practically feels like a full-contact sport.
Even without being able to see the screen, Baekhyun can hear the noise of another incoming call on his cellphone, most likely from the same person, and he sighs, running a hand through his hair. “I’ll have these to you by the end of today and we can send them off tomorrow morning.”
It’ll take Minseok, who had become to be the Chief of Finance by being promoted up through the company purely through his own hard work and skills, no time at all to do what has taken Baekhyun most of the work day. Baekhyun will probably be here long after everyone else has gone home for the day, but it’s the least he can do, really, after two years in this position. He should be able to do this.
Minseok still doesn’t look too happy at the prospect of waiting a day, but a stack of reports to send over in the morning is better than no stack at all, so he agrees and lets himself out of Baekhyun’s office just as the Baekhyun’s desk phone begins to ring loudly.
He’d given his assistant the afternoon off after it became apparent all he’d be doing was this paperwork, and so he picks up without knowing who’s on the other end of the line.
“Mr. Byun, there you are!” The familiar peppy voice makes Baekhyun cringe. Just who he was trying to avoid. “Have you decided on the appetizer choices we talked about? There are a couple different kinds of the mini-quiche that- “
“Ms. Lund.” Baekhyun barely keeps himself from snarling the wedding planner’s name, but it’s a close thing. “Are you calling me at my place of work about appetizers?”
She is undeterred. “Actually, there are a lot of decisions I need you to make. The appetizers, the music for the reception and the rehearsal dinner…”
Baekhyun takes a deep breath in and out, the report in his hands crinkling a little from how tightly he’s holding it. “My fiancée can deal with those things. The only thing you need from me is my tux measurements, which you already have.”
“That’s another thing,” the wedding planner says, as though she hadn’t even heard half of what Baekhyun said. “Are you sure you want to wear a tux for the ceremony? A simpler suit might be more fitting for the- “
Baekhyun hangs up, the plastic of the phone making a satisfying sound as it slams down into its cradle. It’s not the wedding planner’s fault, really. In his extremely vast experience with weddings, they’re all kind of like that. He’s just less interested in putting up with it than he’s been in the past.
He looks down at the crumpled paper in his hand and tries to smooth it out. He’ll probably have to make a new copy before he sends it off to Minseok. The Chief of Finance is notoriously particular. He’s the opposite of Baekhyun, who can never remember to tuck in a dress shirt, or been able to recite the companies holdings and quarterly totals from memory, even though the CEO is his father and his brother the President, being groomed to replace him, and business should be in Baekhyun’s blood.
The shrill ring of his office phone cuts through the silence and Baekhyun puts both his hands over his ears, resting his elbows on the desk so he can look down at the report again.
No one’s ever said it to his face- even though they must talk about it around water coolers and in whispers over coffee in the break rooms- but Baekhyun knows that no matter how hard he’s tried, he is, and always has been, hopeless at this job.
It’s the least Baekhyun can do, to try his best during his last few weeks in this office until this merger is finalized. He’ll ignore the tension headache crawling up his neck and into his mind, the strain his eyes are feeling from trying to focus on the rows and rows of numbers on the papers in front of him, if he can avoid that little bit of disappointment.
Baekhyun hasn’t been able to do a lot right over the past few years, but he can do this.
Baekhyun’s first disappointment had happened upstate, the collar of his tux tight around his neck, and the white cloud of Taeyeon’s wedding dress spilling out between them along with the silence.
She’d come into the room where Baekhyun and his groomsmen were waiting to be called for the start of the ceremony, and Chanyeol, Baekhyun’s best man, had tactfully (not really tactfully, actually, but that was just Chanyeol), pulled the other guys out of the room under the pretense of finding food to help with their hangovers.
Taeyeon was a few years older than Baekhyun, a student at the private all-girls high school that was partnered with the all-boys one Baekhyun attended, and his crush on her had been notorious. He’d seen her at some society benefit his freshman year, sparkling eyes and pretty pink mouth, and decided he was in love with her.
Luckily, Taeyeon had found him more amusing than irritating, letting him buy her coffee and sit and smile at her over “friendly” lunches, telling her silly things so he could hear her laugh. By the time Baekhyun was in college, they’d become sort of friends, Baekhyun’s puppy love crush long forgotten between them, and when Baekhyun had kissed Taeyeon after one of their lunches, she had kissed him back.
Their relationship, which had begun in earnest after Baekhyun’s undergraduate graduation from NYU, was even more infamous than Baekhyun’s high school crush. Baekhyun was the guy who had got the girl of his dreams, after years of waiting, and Taeyeon was seen as lucky beyond measure, to be dating someone who adored her so much.
Baekhyun’s new job, a position high up in the company his father ran, coupled with the success of Taeyeon’s modeling career, had them labeled universally as a power couple, and the news of their engagement had been on page 6 of the New York Times.
Their wedding was a lavish affair, held away from the city and close enough to the beach that Baekhyun was able to hear the sound of the waves from the room where he slept. Or rather, where he was supposed to sleep. Baekhyun had spent the night before the wedding wide awake, staring up at the whitewashed ceiling of his room, listening to the rhythm of the ocean and trying to figure out why he didn’t feel excited.
Over Taeyeon’s shoulder, he could see his reflection in one of the mirrors hanging on the wall. He looked pale, probably from lack of sleep, and he bit at his lips to try and bring some of their color back.
Taeyeon looked beautiful, hair pulled back so it spilled over her shoulders, and the gloss on her lips caught the shine of the overhead light, but she hadn’t looked happy like a bride. There had been something stormy about her face, eyes shaded too dark to be excitement.
“I’m not supposed to see you before the wedding, am I?” Baekhyun tried to keep his tone light, but his chest felt tight all of a sudden, like he couldn’t breathe.
“Some things are more important than luck,” Taeyeon had said, studying his face, and she was frowning, like she’d found something wrong with him. “I just… I keep having this feeling like something’s…”
Taeyeon trailed off, like she hadn’t even wanted to say it, the large skirt of her wedding dress rustling between them as she crossed her arms.
“What are you talking about?” Baekhyun asked. His stomach had twisted up, angry that he’d skipped breakfast, and his palms felt clammy. He wiped them on his pants. It was probably just cold feet.
Taeyeon’s dress was sleeveless, and she pulled her arms tighter into herself, like she was cold. “Why do you want to marry me?”
Baekhyun’s mouth dropped open. Of all the questions, he’d expected that one the least. “What? Taeyeon, you know why I- “
“Do I, though?” She looked at him shrewdly, the searching look that Baekhyun knows she gave to people who tried to screw her out of her work contracts. “I thought I did. All those years with you trailing after me, and then when you finally grew up enough to ask me out, I thought I understood you.”
“The ceremony’s in less than an hour. Is this really the time?” He didn’t want to talk about this, not when his stomach was tied up in knots that made him feel nauseous and he could hear his heartbeat in his ears.
“I think this is the only time, Baekhyun. I don’t want to talk about whether you actually want me after we’re already married.” Taeyeon’s dress was big enough that they couldn’t stand too close without him being in danger of stepping on it, but they were near enough that he could see the tightness in her jaw, her frown.
“Whether I actually want you? This is ridiculous! Why would I even ask you to marry me if I didn’t- “ Baekhyun’s throat was so dry, it hurt to speak.
“Do you love me?” she pressed. “Is that why?”
“I- “ Baekhyun swallowed, his throat like sandpaper. The headlines about them had flashed through his mind, the fleeting weightless of his stomach when he’d first seen Taeyeon’s smile, his parent’s happy faces when he’d told them he was getting married, the comforting weight of Taeyeon’s hand in his, the sweet smell of her perfume on his clothes after they went out together. “I want to.”
There was a beat of silence and Baekhyun’s words had sunk into it, like a cement block dragging their relationship to the bottom of the ocean.
“You want to love me?” Taeyeon uncrossed her arms, hands gripping her skirt so hard her knuckles went white. “We got engaged because you wanted to love me? What were you going to do if it never happened?”
“Taeyeon, I- “
“No,” she cut in, voice hard. “Don’t pretend like you didn’t mean that. I knew something was off. I thought it was just all the wedding planning over the past year, but you just- what was I even to you? What was all this?”
Baekhyun hadn’t thought Taeyeon really wanted the answers to any of those questions (he wasn’t sure how he would even begin to answer them) and he watched as she pulled off her ring, big diamond glittering on its silver band.
He remembered slipping it on her finger after she’d said yes, and her smile had been bright enough to light up a whole room. It had felt warm in his hand back then, like hope. As she dropped it back into his hand, the metal was cold, and Baekhyun had closed his fist around it to keep from dropping it.
“I would have done it, you know,” she said, halfway turned to leave the room. The noise of her dress rustling was loud in the wake of their breakup. “I would have married you.”
“I know.” The diamond of the ring had dug into Baekhyun’s palm painfully, but he didn’t loosen his hold. “I’m sorry.”
And he was sorry. He’d tried, really tried, and he’d thought- with everyone’s bright smiles and congratulations, saying they’d known it would happen someday, that Baekhyun was so lucky- he had thought he was doing the right thing.
Baekhyun was still standing there when Chanyeol came back, Taeyeon long gone. Being left at the altar wasn’t as devastating as Baekhyun had thought it might be, no tears or heartbreaking pain, just a hollowness that Taeyeon’s smiles had once filled echoing inside his chest. It hadn’t been so bad, and Baekhyun had known it was because no matter how hard he’d tried, he hadn’t loved Taeyeon the way she’d deserved.
“What happened?” Chanyeol asked.
Baekhyun hadn’t known what to say, so he had opened his hand to show Chanyeol Taeyeon’s engagement ring, and Chanyeol had nodded, mouth set in a grim line, like he’d known all along.
The daylight that had been streaming into Baekhyun’s office has long gone dark the next time he looks up from the reports. His headache has been dialed back to a steady throbbing behind his eyes rather than the pervasive ache, which is a little more bearable. The tower of reports is much smaller than before, a small consolation for how he’s spent his day.
Baekhyun’s cell begins to vibrate again, and he almost turns it off before even looking at the screen, but the name on the caller ID makes him pick up.
“Come to dinner with me,” Chanyeol says, voice booming over the speaker and Baekhyun finds himself smiling in spite of himself.
“Can’t. I’ve got paperwork to finish before I leave.”
Chanyeol makes a dying seal noise of disappointment. “But I ran into Jinri and we wanted to get sushi with you!”
Baekhyun can see both Chanyeol and Jinri’s pouts in his mind, and is glad that they’re not here in person to try and convince him, or he wouldn’t be able to refuse. “I really can’t,” he says, sighing. “This has to be done by tomorrow or it’s my head.”
“Blech,” Chanyeol says, expressing his distaste for Baekhyun’s excuse.
“Well, not all of us can run our own companies and set our own deadlines, okay?” Baekhyun attempts to straighten the rest of the papers on his desk so he has somewhere to put this stack when he’s finished, but it’s kind of a hopeless cause. “Oh, and tell Jinri to call that wedding planner off. She’s been hounding me about reception food all day.”
“Oh no,” Chanyeol says, “Tell her yourself. She’s your fiancée.”
“You know she’s not going to yell at you even if she gets angry.” Jinri’s kind of known for her temper, but she’s always had a soft spot for Chanyeol.
“I’m not doing your dirty work for you, Byun,” Chanyeol teases. “You may be a company bigshot, but you have no power over me.”
“Not much of a bigshot then, am I?” Baekhyun says, but his tone must not sound as joking as he wanted because Chanyeol’s voice suddenly goes serious.
“Hey, you know that’s- “
Baekhyun waves Chanyeol off with a hand his friend can’t see through the phone. “Tell Jinri I’ll call her once I’m done here. And buy her lots of sushi for me.”
He hangs up to Chanyeol whining about “doing Baekhyun’s work for him”, Chanyeol’s low timbre even while pouting making Baekhyun laugh even if what Chanyeol’s saying doesn’t feel very funny at all.
Baekhyun’s been nursing the same glass of champagne for nearly an hour and the glass has gone warm in his hand.
On the other side of the ballroom, Jinri and a few of her friends have taken over the chocolate fountain, boisterously laughing and trying not to splash any on their gowns.
Baekhyun smiles as he watches.
Jinri has a nice laugh, one that he can hear over all the din of the party like the tinkling of the crystal chandelier, and her dress is champagne-colored in honor of New Years with little jewels sewn on it to match the ones on her ears and throat. The overall picture is a woman bright enough to light up the whole room, and most of the men in the room are stealing glances at her when they think their dates aren’t looking.
Baekhyun doesn’t mind.
“Did you see?” Junmyeon says, finally breaking away from the group of men all at least ten years his senior he’d been taken captive by almost since he’d arrived at the party.
“See what?” Baekhyun swishes the liquid still left in his glass around. There’s hardly any fizz left. He should get a new glass. It’s best to look like you’ve got your hands full at these parties.
“What are we seeing?” Chanyeol appears on Baekhyun’s other side. The suit he’s wearing is checkered in black and white and his tie is red. It’s a blinding combo, but Chanyeol has always been more than a little avant garde.
Baekhyun knew they’d both be here. Junmyeon works at a powerful law firm, already a shoe-in for partner, and one of the city’s most eligible bachelors, and Chanyeol’s pet project start-up just hit big internationally, but even more than that, they’re from old money, with family names as good as any invitation.
The rest of Baekhyun’s family is here too, his mother speaking with several other women she knows from the board of the Met, and his father and older brother are out on the balcony, no doubt smoking cigars and talking business with some of the other families. Baekhyun wasn’t asked to come along.
The rest of the guest list is pretty familiar, mostly society blue-blood types with a few others thrown in. There’s that pro-basketball star who recently married an heiress, a few other celebrities - actors, pop stars - but no big surprises.
That’s why, when Junmyeon nods his head toward the large windows at the other end of the ballroom, underneath where the largest chandelier hangs, Baekhyun’s half-empty champagne flute almost slips through his fingers.
He saves it from shattering on the floor only just barely, lucky there there isn’t enough liquid to spill.
“Yeah,” Junmyeon says, and he must be replying to something Chanyeol’s said, but Baekhyun had been too preoccupied with his glass to hear. “I heard he came back just in time for Christmas.”
“He’s already graduated though, hasn’t he?” Chanyeol asks, curious.
“I guess he stayed on for a few extra months, something about looking into his father’s west coast holdings before coming back in time for the merger preparations.” A waiter passes with a tray and Baekhyun trades his old glass for a new one as Junmyeon talks. “What’s it been, six years? Little Sehun has certainly grown up.”
It has been six years. Six years since Sehun Oh has been back in town.
Baekhyun takes a sip of his new glass of champagne to wet his suddenly dry mouth. He feels jittery, probably from drinking on an empty stomach, and he jumps at the hand that lands on his shoulder.
“Hey you,” Jinri says, coming up next to him. His tie matches the color of her dress and her engagement ring twinkles up at everyone in the golden light of the chandeliers. “It’s almost midnight. Ready for the countdown?”
Across the ballroom, Baekhyun can’t stop catching Sehun out of the corner of his eye. His hair is bleached blond now, slicked back from his face, and he’s taller, tall enough to tower over the people he’s talking to. There’s a glass of liquor in his hand, half empty, and he takes a sip, licking his lips after he swallows. He looks nothing like the eighteen-year-old that left for college all those years ago.
Near Baekhyun, the hosts of the party are beginning the countdown to the new year, eyes on the large, decorative clock behind where Baekhyun is standing, and Sehun glances up too, too fast for Baekhyun to look away. He’s been spotted.
“… 3! …2!…1!” Practically the whole party chants, and Jinri tugs on Baekhyun’s arm, making him turn away from Sehun and toward her instead. The countdown runs out and the whole ballroom erupts in a “Happy New Year!” and Jinri tilts her head up, eyes closed, expectant.
Baekhyun kisses her, hand moving to cradle her chin carefully as he brings their mouths together, but he swears he can feel Sehun’s eyes still on him.
“Have you seen him?”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
It’s been a week since the New Year’s party and Chanyeol’s finally managed to drag Baekhyun away from work to have dinner, so they’re at his favorite place for hot wings. There’s sauce all around Chanyeol’s mouth
but his eyes are earnest, not matter how Baekhyun tries to avoid them.
Baekhyun sighs. “Why would I see Sehun?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because you guys were good friends in high school and his dad’s company and your dad’s company are planning a merger?”
“It wasn’t like that. We weren’t really friends,” Baekhyun mumbles, looking down at the napkin in his lap, and Chanyeol sets down the wing he’d been working on to frown at him.
“I never understood whatever went on with you guys, but that’s cold, Baekhyun. You were close enough to be good friends, so you should call and say hi or something.”
Baekhyun tries to imagine just calling up Sehun for a chat after years, after he’d-
“I can’t do that,” he says, stopping his own train of thought in its tracks. “It’d be… weird.”
Chanyeol is still frowning at him with his sauce-rimmed mouth and Baekhyun tries to shrug his look off. Chanyeol has always been his closest friend, but there are still things Baekhyun has never shared with him, with anyone, and sometimes they weigh heavy in his chest, like a bag of stones. Baekhyun’s little bag of secrets.
“I know if I was gone for six years and came back and you didn’t call me, I’d be upset.”
“You and I…” Chanyeol was Baekhyun’s first friend after his family had moved into the city, and they’d done pretty much everything together since then. “Sehun and I aren’t like us. It’s different.”
“How?” Chanyeol blinks at him curiously.
“It just is!”
Chanyeol’s frown seems even more accusing with the frame of wings sauce and Baekhyun pushes his own plate away, suddenly sick to his stomach.
“I don’t think he’d want to hear from me,” Baekhyun says after a few moments of quiet. “I- I wasn’t very nice to him right before he left.”
Picking up a large wad of napkins, Chanyeol swipes at his face. “Maybe you should apologize, then. It’s been a long time. He might not even remember.”
Baekhyun hums as Chanyeol dives back into his plate of wings.
Chanyeol is right, in a way. Sehun may have forgotten, but Baekhyun hasn’t. He’s still got everything tied up in that bag of secrets, a phantom weight in his chest.
Baekhyun’s older brother had gotten married right out of college to a girl he’d been dating since high school. It was perhaps a lucky coincidence that she also happened to be the daughter of one of Baekhyun’s father’s associates, but Baekhyun had attended the wedding with a skeptical mindset, rolling his eyes during the vows and when they’d kissed after cutting the cake.
“Do they really mean it?” he’d asked his mother as he’d watched the couple dance under a spotlight. He didn’t think he liked weddings much.
“What do you mean?” His mother was beautiful, she always had been, fitting right in with the society wives of the social circle they’d moved into even if she hadn’t been born into something like that, and she’d had a glittering diamond wreath around her neck, a gift from Baekhyun’s father for their last anniversary.
“I mean, are they really in love? It’s really convenient with her dad and everything.”
Baekhyun’s mother had studied both Baekhyun and the couple on the dance floor before answering. “Who knows why people start out together? It could be a hundred reasons, good or bad. But love is work, and sometimes trying can make it grow between two people together, if they want it enough.”
Chanyeol was at the wedding too, with his family, along with some of Baekhyun’s other friends, and they’d all used the opportunity to sneak out and drink behind where the reception was, so they could talk loudly about which female guests they were going to try and hookup with.
Sehun had been there too, on the fringes of the group outside because he was still in his last year of high school. He’d had a cigarette between two of his fingers, smoke leaving his mouth in a haze, but he stayed silent through the conversation about girls, watching Baekhyun with dark eyes.
Baekhyun had stayed out of the conversation too, which surprised nobody because they all knew about his crush on Taeyeon, and the voices of the other boys had faded to a wash of sound as he watched Sehun smoke his cigarette, pink lips wrapping around the filter and sucking the smoke in, and more than anything else, that’s what Baekhyun remembers from that day: the circle of Sehun’s mouth as he blew out yet another cloud of smoke, the ember of the cigarette reflected back in his eyes.
After his conversation with Chanyeol over dinner last week, the last thing Baekhyun is expecting is to come into work to find Sehun waiting outside his office.
“Um,” Baekhyun says, and stops in his tracks.
Sehun looks up from the phone in his hands, lower lip sucked into his mouth and his eyebrows raised.
“What are you doing here?” Baekhyun tries again, and Sehun lets his lip slip out, slick and pink with spit.
“I’m supposed to work with you on stuff for the merger,” he says, and his voice is lower than Baekhyun remembers, but still soft, understated.
Baekhyun shivers. It’s cold outside, the wind whipping around the buildings, and his coat wasn’t enough to keep him warm. Tomorrow he should remember to bring gloves.
Sehun stands and Baekhyun nods, head dipping as he lets himself into his office with a hello to his secretary. His office is its usual mess, too many papers piled on his desk, and Sehun follows him inside, looking around curiously before settling into the chair across from Baekhyun’s desk.
It’s weird to have him there, this person that Baekhyun remembers, but who is also also so different, changed during his time away. Sehun is watching him intently as he takes his jacket off and hangs it over the back of his chair, and Baekhyun feels uncomfortable, so he tries to start a conversation to distract Sehun instead. “How was school?”
There’s an exhale through Sehun’s nose that might be a laugh. “Educational.”
Baekhyun narrows his eyes. “Oh, so it was one of those funny colleges, then.”
“It was college,” Sehun shrugs. His shoulders are broader than the last time Baekhyun saw him. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Right.” Baekhyun begins sifting through the papers on his desk, mostly to have something to do with his hands. “Do you know what you’re supposed to work on in particular?”
“I think they want us to look over things together to help with the transition.”
“Oh, so you’re…” Sehun has always been something of a math genius, so much so that he and Baekhyun had been in the same class for a year during high school, but Baekhyun had tried not to put too much thought into who’d be replacing him.
“Yeah,” Sehun says. “That’s why my dad asked me to come back.” He looks over Baekhyun’s shoulder out the window. It’s snowing lightly outside, one of those light snows that looks like powdered sugar as it blows across the sidewalk. “I forgot how cold it is here.”
“California’s made you soft,” Baekhyun says, not sure why he’s suddenly ready to joke with Sehun, but not stopping himself because he… against his better judgement, he misses it.
“Maybe.” Sehun laughs, a little silent thing that shakes his shoulders, and Sehun may be taller than Baekhyun remembers, his voice lower, and his face more finely boned, but his smile is just the same, the exact same. “I wanted to get away, though, and the other side of the country seemed far enough.”
Baekhyun swallows, throat suddenly thick. He holds up the bunch of papers he’d gathered in his hands earlier. “Should we go ahead and start?”
For the son of a businessman that had worked his way all the way from the bottom to the top with his own bare hands, Baekhyun had always been abysmal at school.
Reading was… well, he’d never been much good at it, and his new fancy private school in the city had an accelerated math track that had been way over his head from his very first day of school.
He’d gotten by well socially, more able to charm his classmates and teachers than do his math homework, but it was only a matter of time before his parents noticed his grades.
“You and Sehun are taking the same math course, aren’t you? Maybe he could tutor you, ” Baekhyun’s mother had said halfway through Baekhyun’s sophomore year, like it wasn’t a totally embarrassing idea to ask someone two years younger than him for help with his math homework.
Sehun’s older brother was right around Baekhyun’s age, but he was into acting or something, and went to the Professional Children’s School, and Baekhyun only knew him from seeing him at their parent’s parties.
Still, the failing grade on his last exam had flashed through his mind. Sehun seemed relatively harmless, quiet but with the sort of face that stopped people from teasing him, and he always got the highest test grades in the class.
Their parents were friends, even though Sehun’s family was older money and Baekhyun’s was new, and it was easy for Baekhyun to have his mother ask Sehun’s mother for Sehun’s help.
It was also easy for Baekhyun to grow fond of Sehun, of the way he chewed on his lips while he corrected Baekhyun’s homework, or the way he always yelped when Baekhyun poked him, his changing voice cracking unattractively. Sehun was like the younger sibling Baekhyun had never had, and he’d adopted him, bringing him around until the rest of his friends became fond of him too.
And if Baekhyun’s math grade had improved because of Sehun, well, then that was just a happy side effect.
“The wedding planner called this afternoon.”
Baekhyun pushes his dinner around his plate, sighing. He doesn’t usually mind the weekly dinners at his parents place because it’s good to see his family and taste his mother’s cooking. Baekhyun’s slow and steady failure at the company is something they don’t talk about by tacit agreement, but the weddings… well, those could hardly be avoided.
His mother looks at him over the top of her wine glass. “Actually, she’s called a couple times this week. She said she’s been having a hard time getting a hold of you.”
“I’ve been busy,” Baekhyun says, cutting his steak up into tinier pieces than really necessary so he has something to do with his hands.
Baekhyun’s father, sitting at the head of the table, sets down his knife, looking concerned. “If dealing with the merger is too much- “
The scrape of Baekhyun’s fork across his plate is far too loud. “It’s fine.” He sees his sister-in-law wince at the sound across the table and Baekhyun steadies his hands. “I told you I want to see it through. Everything’s going well.”
Sehun had been at his office every day that week, coming in bundled up in thick scarves to protect him from the winter wind, and he’d curled up in the chair opposite Baekhyun’s desk, going through page after page of numbers while jotting down notes and chewing on his pen. The chewing had looked like a fidget, the cap of the pen almost unrecognizable by the end of each day.
Baekhyun had spent far too long wondering whether Sehun still smoked, and then shaking his head, trying to figure out why it mattered.
“You know,” his mother says carefully, “just because Jinri’s father is chairman of the Oh Group’s board doesn’t mean the merger would be affected if the wedding was postponed for a little while, until you had more time to spend on planning it.” She looks at the head of the table. “Isn’t that right, sweetie?”
“Oh yes,” Baekhyun’s father nods and gestures towards Baekhyun’s older brother with his wineglass. “Baekbeom has done excellent work on the contracts with their people, so there’s no concern on that count.”
“Of course. I should have known Baekbeom already had everything taken care of,” Baekhyun says flatly, and his brother opens his mouth, looking a little stricken, but mostly just concerned.
“It’s not- “
Baekhyun stands, his silverware clattering loudly on his plate and his chair scraping back behind him. He’s always been pretty bad at formal things, too loud unless he’s trying hard not to be. “I’m finished. Thank you for dinner.”
He’s already got his shoes on again, searching in the coat closet for his scarf, when his mother lays a hand on his shoulder. Back in the dining room, Baekhyun can hear the mumble of other conversation, his father, brother and sister-in-law talking cheerfully about something else.
“It would be okay, you know,” his mother says, eyes searching his face as though looking for something, an answer, maybe. “Your father and I would like to see you finally settled, but if Jinri… I know you two were set up, and if marrying her won’t make you happy…”
She reaches up, fixing his collar and smoothing down the hair around his ears. Baekhyun has never doubted that his parents loved him, but he’s also never felt like he’s done enough to deserve it. Baekbeom was always there first, always doing everything right, and Baekhyun has tried, tried with school, with the company job, with getting married, but in the end, all there was was failure.
“We just want you to be happy,” his mother says. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted.”
Baekhyun looks away, out the window. He can see the lights in the apartments across the street, windows into other people’s lives, even if only for a moment. “I know.”
“Sometimes I think you’re so busy trying to make us happy that you forget yourself. What do you want? Is marrying Jinri what you want?”
“I- “ That little bag of secrets is sitting in his chest, heavy enough that Baekhyun knows he’ll have to tell them to someone someday, but this… this isn’t the right time. “I’m okay, mom. Don’t worry about me.” He bends to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Goodnight.”
“You look like a human pin cushion.”
Baekhyun jumps and nearly gets himself stabbed by the large handful of pins already stuck into his tux, turning around with a yelp.
Sehun’s got snow in his hair, one or two flakes that he shakes away with a smile while the tailor huffs at Baekhyun for moving.
“That’s a lot of pins,” Sehun says, peeling the deep green scarf he’s wearing away from his neck.
Baekhyun looks down at himself, still a little off-balance and trying to right himself. “I’m not exactly standard sized, I guess.”
One of the reasons Baekhyun had given up on suits in the first place was because they were such a bitch to get tailored. It wasn’t worth it to spend so much time on that when Baekhyun’s been wearing the same clothes size since his senior year of high school.
Sehun smirks. “Standard poodle-sized, maybe.”
Baekhyun makes an angry noise, but the tailor’s still got ahold of the hem of his pants. “If I could move move, I would come down and stab you with one of these pins.”
It’s easy with Sehun, almost too easy, to fall into their old patterns of conversation, even after years of silence.
“Lucky me, then.” Sehun’s jacket comes off next, the sweater underneath the same color as the snow outside, and Baekhyun feels completely ridiculous standing there in his half-finished tux. Sehun hands his coat and scarf to one of the sales people automatically, like he’d known instinctively that there’d be someone waiting at his side to hang it up. Sehun’s always been good at being rich, was born into it, like he’d been born into breathing.
Sitting down on one of the plush-looking couches scattered around the fitting room, Sehun picks at the sleeves of his sweater, pulling them down to cover his wrists. “I was out with Jongin and we ran into his sisters and Jinri, and she mentioned you were here getting fitted. It’s been awhile since I’ve needed a suit, so I thought I might stop by and look at getting a new one.”
It sounds like an excuse, but Baekhyun doesn’t mention it. He doesn’t want to know Sehun’s real reason if he’s not going to offer it.
“What would you need a new suit for? I know Minseok prances around in his fancy vests and pocket squares and stuff, but the office dress code is business casual.”
There’s this moment of silence where Baekhyun expects Sehun to laugh, but he doesn’t, and the beat of quiet sits heavy on Baekhyun’s chest.
He takes a deep breath in, lets it back out.
“For the wedding,” Sehun says softly, but his eyes are burning with… something, searching Baekhyun’s face. Baekhyun wonders what he sees. “Your wedding, I mean.”
Baekhyun doesn’t know what to say, his throat suddenly tight, like a bottleneck in his ability to make innocent conversation.
The tailor saves him from having to answer, stepping back and asking Baekhyun to take a look in the trifold mirror behind him. He can hear Sehun talking to one of the other salespeople as he looks himself over, low voice saying things about linings and inseams that Baekhyun doesn’t understand. It’s no surprise to him that Sehun knows how to speak suit.
The tux looks… well, like a tux. Baekhyun’s never been good with the particulars of clothing, and as long as the pants don’t sit too tightly across his hips and thighs, he’s never really cared about the fit.
By the time he’s stripped out of the tux and changed back into the clothes he’d come in, Sehun is standing in his place in front of the mirrors in a slate grey suit that sets off the pink of his mouth and the bleached blond of his hair.
It also fits him almost perfectly, right off the rack, and Baekhyun resists the urge to pout with jealousy.
“What do you think?” Sehun asks, turning around and tugging on the hem to make the jacket lie right. He’s got his eyebrows furrowed with frustration, and Baekhyun bites back a laugh, stepping up onto the platform to help.
“Here,” he says, pulling at the collar of the white dress shirt he’s got on underneath until it’s unfolded, lying softly against Sehun’s throat.
Baekhyun drops his hands, stepping back. It’s warm in the store, and he can feel himself beginning to sweating a little.
Sehun doesn’t seem to notice. “I asked for wool,” he says, smoothing some creases in the front of the pants. “Since, you know, it’s winter here.”
“Wimpy California boy,” Baekhyun teases. His hands are still sweaty, and he steps back down. Maybe standing closer to the window will be cooler.
On the street below, there’s only a tiny dusting of snow, the same kind they’ve been getting for the past week, and the city is bustling on, the lights flickering on as the daylight dims.
After their fitting together for the wedding with Taeyeon, Baekhyun had banned Chanyeol from coming with him to any more. He’s never liked shopping much, and going with someone who tried to talk him into a Beetlejuice suit wasn’t a huge help.
Sehun, on the other hand, is easy to shop with, already out of the grey suit and back into his sweater by the time Baekhyun is ready to leave.
“Hey,” he says, a hand reached out like he was going to grab onto Baekhyun’s sleeve, but had thought better of it. “Did you want to grab something to eat? Or maybe get a drink?”
Baekhyun hesitates. He should say no. He should go home, call Jinri and take her out to dinner, he should reply to the fifteen emails waiting in his inbox from the wedding planner.
“Okay,” Baekhyun says, in spite of himself. He’s hungry, and honestly, he could probably use a drink after that fitting.
Sehun smiles at him, pulling his jacket tighter around himself as they step outside. He’s so much taller than Baekhyun remembers, and their shoulders brush as they make their way down the street together.
They end up at a ramyeon place they used to frequent in high school, a small place with only a couple of tables, and Sehun only just manages to snag one while Baekhyun orders. It’s easy to fall back into it, talking the way they’d used to, hearing about Sehun’s time away and laughing too loud for the tiny restaurant when Sehun tells Baekhyun about when he’d tried to learn how to surf.
The table is narrow enough that their knees and ankles brush underneath it, but Baekhyun is too distracted to really notice.
After dinner, they go to a bar, one of the posh ones that Chanyeol and Junmyeon have always liked to drag him to, even before they could legally get in, and Sehun grins and buys him a drink.
“We haven’t been out together since I turned twenty-one,” he says, like that birthday was last week instead of almost five years ago, and he and Baekhyun haven’t been missing from each other’s lives for longer than that.
Baekhyun takes the drink anyway, hoping the little bit of alcohol in it will help him relax. “It’s been a long time,” Baekhyun agrees. This is the kind of place they’d gone to for Sehun’s going away party, with a dance floor in the next room over and fancy cocktails.
“So.” Sehun had gotten them both the same thing, something not-too-sweet, but with the fizz Baekhyun always liked, and it’s turned Sehun’s upper lip an even darker shade of pink than usual. “Three engagements in four and a half years?” he says casually, looking up at the shelves of bottles behind the bar and not at Baekhyun. “Sounds like I missed a lot.”
He’s not surprised that Sehun’s heard all about it. Baekhyun is used to being the subject of society gossip, but his stomach pulls tight, like he’s afraid of what Sehun might think of him. It’s stupid, because he really doesn’t.
He rocks his glass so that the ice in it clinks, just loud enough to be heard over the music playing overhead. “Yeah, well, turns out I might not be as lovable as I thought.”
Baekhyun’s voice is joking but Sehun turns to frown at him.
The neon lights of the bar catch the angle of Sehun’s jaw, sharper than it once was, but his mouth is still the same, and his eyes.
This is what he’d looked like that night, when they’d talked on the edge of the dance floor. Sehun, eighteen years old and hopeful, too young for heartbreak.
Baekhyun sets down his drink. He can feel his hands shaking.
“Baekhyun- “ Sehun starts, mouth open uncertainly, and Baekhyun swallows, curls his fingers around the edge of the bar to steady himself.
In his pocket, Baekhyun can feel his phone begin to buzz, and Sehun watches him reach for it, whatever he was going to say dissolving between them.
It’s Jinri, and maybe Baekhyun should ignore it, should let Sehun talk- he probably owes him that, at least- should clear the air of whatever is hanging between them.
He answers, listens to Jinri chatter cheerfully at him over the line and watches Sehun close his mouth, turning back to the drink in his hands and away from Baekhyun.
“I should go,” Baekhyun says once he hangs up. His drink is only half gone but his mouth tastes sour. He should go.
Sehun’s head bobs, shoulders sitting a little lower than they had when they’d first sat down, like he’s been let down. “Thanks for letting me buy you a drink.”
Baekhyun has always been good at disappointing people.
“Yeah,” Baekhyun breathes, that little bag of secrets suddenly a crushing weight, and he really should go. “I’ll- I’ll see you later.”
It’s feels colder outside now, cutting through Baekhyun’s jacket and making him shiver. He stuffs his hands deep into his pockets and hunches his shoulders, walking away from the bar and into the wind.
forward
baekhyun’s first disappointment had happened upstate, the collar of his tux tight around his neck, and the white cloud of taeyeon’s wedding dress spilling out between them along with the silence. runaway bride au.
a/n: thank you to my two k's for being my pre-readers/betas, and also for being the best ♥♥
originally written as a pinch-hit for thebaekfest, jan 2014.
title comes from heart's a mess -- gotye
warnings: mild homophobia
Throw Away the Key (To Your Heart)
The numbers on the page in front of Baekhyun are starting to swim and he rubs at his eyes, trying to get them to focus. There’s a large stack of budget reports lying under the one he’s reading that never seems to get smaller, no matter how many pieces of paper he puts aside, and Baekhyun is glad to be interrupted by a knock on his office door.
He pushes the stack away and straightens his back, sitting up for the first time in an hour. The joints audibly pop and his cell phone begins to vibrate in his pocket with an incoming call.
“Come in,” Baekhyun says, fishing his phone out to press the ignore button and laying it on his desk.
As usual, Minseok is impeccably put together in two pieces of what must be a three-piece suit, and he frowns at Baekhyun when he catches sight of him.
“That’s a little casual for the office, don’t you think?” he asks, looking over Baekhyun’s tshirt with critical eyes.
“It’s not like I’m a pageant contestant or something. Why should I get all dressed up so I can sit here alone trying to read these reports?” Baekhyun glances down at himself. “Besides, I brought a blazer,” he adds defensively.
The jeans, he concedes, might be a little much, even with the jacket hanging off the back of his chair.
Minseok eyes the frayed edges of Baekhyun’s pockets like he agrees, but doesn’t pursue it. He and Baekhyun have already had this discussion too many times to count. “Speaking of those reports,” he says instead, “are you finished yet? I need to be able to look at them too before sending them over.”
Baekhyun’s cellphone, still sitting on the corner of his desk, lights up with another call and starts to vibrate loudly against the wood surface. He ignores it and nods toward the stack of papers he’d been pouring over.
Minseok’s face drops. “Please say that’s not how much you still have left.”
“I could tell you that,” Baekhyun says while his phone buzzes once sharply to inform him of a voicemail, “but that would be lying.”
“I wanted to get those off to the Oh Group today, Baekhyun.” Minseok is trying desperately not to sound annoyed, but Baekhyun knows he is because his face is all flat, like he’s two seconds away from giving Baekhyun a death glare.
“I know, I just- “ Baekhyun pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes like that might help the dull throbbing in his skull. “I think I might need glasses. All the squinting is giving me a headache.”
His phone starts to buzz loudly again, the screen lighting up, and Baekhyun denies the call again, flipping it over so he doesn’t have to see the screen.
Minseok looks at him strangely. “You’re not going to pick up?”
“It’s just stuff about the wedding,” Baekhyun says, shaking his head. “I’ll deal with it later.”
He’s got a crick in his neck from being hunched over his desk for so long and he can feel the pinch all the way down his back. Two years ago, if anyone had ever told him working at his father’s company was this painful, he’d have laughed. Now, going to the office practically feels like a full-contact sport.
Even without being able to see the screen, Baekhyun can hear the noise of another incoming call on his cellphone, most likely from the same person, and he sighs, running a hand through his hair. “I’ll have these to you by the end of today and we can send them off tomorrow morning.”
It’ll take Minseok, who had become to be the Chief of Finance by being promoted up through the company purely through his own hard work and skills, no time at all to do what has taken Baekhyun most of the work day. Baekhyun will probably be here long after everyone else has gone home for the day, but it’s the least he can do, really, after two years in this position. He should be able to do this.
Minseok still doesn’t look too happy at the prospect of waiting a day, but a stack of reports to send over in the morning is better than no stack at all, so he agrees and lets himself out of Baekhyun’s office just as the Baekhyun’s desk phone begins to ring loudly.
He’d given his assistant the afternoon off after it became apparent all he’d be doing was this paperwork, and so he picks up without knowing who’s on the other end of the line.
“Mr. Byun, there you are!” The familiar peppy voice makes Baekhyun cringe. Just who he was trying to avoid. “Have you decided on the appetizer choices we talked about? There are a couple different kinds of the mini-quiche that- “
“Ms. Lund.” Baekhyun barely keeps himself from snarling the wedding planner’s name, but it’s a close thing. “Are you calling me at my place of work about appetizers?”
She is undeterred. “Actually, there are a lot of decisions I need you to make. The appetizers, the music for the reception and the rehearsal dinner…”
Baekhyun takes a deep breath in and out, the report in his hands crinkling a little from how tightly he’s holding it. “My fiancée can deal with those things. The only thing you need from me is my tux measurements, which you already have.”
“That’s another thing,” the wedding planner says, as though she hadn’t even heard half of what Baekhyun said. “Are you sure you want to wear a tux for the ceremony? A simpler suit might be more fitting for the- “
Baekhyun hangs up, the plastic of the phone making a satisfying sound as it slams down into its cradle. It’s not the wedding planner’s fault, really. In his extremely vast experience with weddings, they’re all kind of like that. He’s just less interested in putting up with it than he’s been in the past.
He looks down at the crumpled paper in his hand and tries to smooth it out. He’ll probably have to make a new copy before he sends it off to Minseok. The Chief of Finance is notoriously particular. He’s the opposite of Baekhyun, who can never remember to tuck in a dress shirt, or been able to recite the companies holdings and quarterly totals from memory, even though the CEO is his father and his brother the President, being groomed to replace him, and business should be in Baekhyun’s blood.
The shrill ring of his office phone cuts through the silence and Baekhyun puts both his hands over his ears, resting his elbows on the desk so he can look down at the report again.
No one’s ever said it to his face- even though they must talk about it around water coolers and in whispers over coffee in the break rooms- but Baekhyun knows that no matter how hard he’s tried, he is, and always has been, hopeless at this job.
It’s the least Baekhyun can do, to try his best during his last few weeks in this office until this merger is finalized. He’ll ignore the tension headache crawling up his neck and into his mind, the strain his eyes are feeling from trying to focus on the rows and rows of numbers on the papers in front of him, if he can avoid that little bit of disappointment.
Baekhyun hasn’t been able to do a lot right over the past few years, but he can do this.
Baekhyun’s first disappointment had happened upstate, the collar of his tux tight around his neck, and the white cloud of Taeyeon’s wedding dress spilling out between them along with the silence.
She’d come into the room where Baekhyun and his groomsmen were waiting to be called for the start of the ceremony, and Chanyeol, Baekhyun’s best man, had tactfully (not really tactfully, actually, but that was just Chanyeol), pulled the other guys out of the room under the pretense of finding food to help with their hangovers.
Taeyeon was a few years older than Baekhyun, a student at the private all-girls high school that was partnered with the all-boys one Baekhyun attended, and his crush on her had been notorious. He’d seen her at some society benefit his freshman year, sparkling eyes and pretty pink mouth, and decided he was in love with her.
Luckily, Taeyeon had found him more amusing than irritating, letting him buy her coffee and sit and smile at her over “friendly” lunches, telling her silly things so he could hear her laugh. By the time Baekhyun was in college, they’d become sort of friends, Baekhyun’s puppy love crush long forgotten between them, and when Baekhyun had kissed Taeyeon after one of their lunches, she had kissed him back.
Their relationship, which had begun in earnest after Baekhyun’s undergraduate graduation from NYU, was even more infamous than Baekhyun’s high school crush. Baekhyun was the guy who had got the girl of his dreams, after years of waiting, and Taeyeon was seen as lucky beyond measure, to be dating someone who adored her so much.
Baekhyun’s new job, a position high up in the company his father ran, coupled with the success of Taeyeon’s modeling career, had them labeled universally as a power couple, and the news of their engagement had been on page 6 of the New York Times.
Their wedding was a lavish affair, held away from the city and close enough to the beach that Baekhyun was able to hear the sound of the waves from the room where he slept. Or rather, where he was supposed to sleep. Baekhyun had spent the night before the wedding wide awake, staring up at the whitewashed ceiling of his room, listening to the rhythm of the ocean and trying to figure out why he didn’t feel excited.
Over Taeyeon’s shoulder, he could see his reflection in one of the mirrors hanging on the wall. He looked pale, probably from lack of sleep, and he bit at his lips to try and bring some of their color back.
Taeyeon looked beautiful, hair pulled back so it spilled over her shoulders, and the gloss on her lips caught the shine of the overhead light, but she hadn’t looked happy like a bride. There had been something stormy about her face, eyes shaded too dark to be excitement.
“I’m not supposed to see you before the wedding, am I?” Baekhyun tried to keep his tone light, but his chest felt tight all of a sudden, like he couldn’t breathe.
“Some things are more important than luck,” Taeyeon had said, studying his face, and she was frowning, like she’d found something wrong with him. “I just… I keep having this feeling like something’s…”
Taeyeon trailed off, like she hadn’t even wanted to say it, the large skirt of her wedding dress rustling between them as she crossed her arms.
“What are you talking about?” Baekhyun asked. His stomach had twisted up, angry that he’d skipped breakfast, and his palms felt clammy. He wiped them on his pants. It was probably just cold feet.
Taeyeon’s dress was sleeveless, and she pulled her arms tighter into herself, like she was cold. “Why do you want to marry me?”
Baekhyun’s mouth dropped open. Of all the questions, he’d expected that one the least. “What? Taeyeon, you know why I- “
“Do I, though?” She looked at him shrewdly, the searching look that Baekhyun knows she gave to people who tried to screw her out of her work contracts. “I thought I did. All those years with you trailing after me, and then when you finally grew up enough to ask me out, I thought I understood you.”
“The ceremony’s in less than an hour. Is this really the time?” He didn’t want to talk about this, not when his stomach was tied up in knots that made him feel nauseous and he could hear his heartbeat in his ears.
“I think this is the only time, Baekhyun. I don’t want to talk about whether you actually want me after we’re already married.” Taeyeon’s dress was big enough that they couldn’t stand too close without him being in danger of stepping on it, but they were near enough that he could see the tightness in her jaw, her frown.
“Whether I actually want you? This is ridiculous! Why would I even ask you to marry me if I didn’t- “ Baekhyun’s throat was so dry, it hurt to speak.
“Do you love me?” she pressed. “Is that why?”
“I- “ Baekhyun swallowed, his throat like sandpaper. The headlines about them had flashed through his mind, the fleeting weightless of his stomach when he’d first seen Taeyeon’s smile, his parent’s happy faces when he’d told them he was getting married, the comforting weight of Taeyeon’s hand in his, the sweet smell of her perfume on his clothes after they went out together. “I want to.”
There was a beat of silence and Baekhyun’s words had sunk into it, like a cement block dragging their relationship to the bottom of the ocean.
“You want to love me?” Taeyeon uncrossed her arms, hands gripping her skirt so hard her knuckles went white. “We got engaged because you wanted to love me? What were you going to do if it never happened?”
“Taeyeon, I- “
“No,” she cut in, voice hard. “Don’t pretend like you didn’t mean that. I knew something was off. I thought it was just all the wedding planning over the past year, but you just- what was I even to you? What was all this?”
Baekhyun hadn’t thought Taeyeon really wanted the answers to any of those questions (he wasn’t sure how he would even begin to answer them) and he watched as she pulled off her ring, big diamond glittering on its silver band.
He remembered slipping it on her finger after she’d said yes, and her smile had been bright enough to light up a whole room. It had felt warm in his hand back then, like hope. As she dropped it back into his hand, the metal was cold, and Baekhyun had closed his fist around it to keep from dropping it.
“I would have done it, you know,” she said, halfway turned to leave the room. The noise of her dress rustling was loud in the wake of their breakup. “I would have married you.”
“I know.” The diamond of the ring had dug into Baekhyun’s palm painfully, but he didn’t loosen his hold. “I’m sorry.”
And he was sorry. He’d tried, really tried, and he’d thought- with everyone’s bright smiles and congratulations, saying they’d known it would happen someday, that Baekhyun was so lucky- he had thought he was doing the right thing.
Baekhyun was still standing there when Chanyeol came back, Taeyeon long gone. Being left at the altar wasn’t as devastating as Baekhyun had thought it might be, no tears or heartbreaking pain, just a hollowness that Taeyeon’s smiles had once filled echoing inside his chest. It hadn’t been so bad, and Baekhyun had known it was because no matter how hard he’d tried, he hadn’t loved Taeyeon the way she’d deserved.
“What happened?” Chanyeol asked.
Baekhyun hadn’t known what to say, so he had opened his hand to show Chanyeol Taeyeon’s engagement ring, and Chanyeol had nodded, mouth set in a grim line, like he’d known all along.
The daylight that had been streaming into Baekhyun’s office has long gone dark the next time he looks up from the reports. His headache has been dialed back to a steady throbbing behind his eyes rather than the pervasive ache, which is a little more bearable. The tower of reports is much smaller than before, a small consolation for how he’s spent his day.
Baekhyun’s cell begins to vibrate again, and he almost turns it off before even looking at the screen, but the name on the caller ID makes him pick up.
“Come to dinner with me,” Chanyeol says, voice booming over the speaker and Baekhyun finds himself smiling in spite of himself.
“Can’t. I’ve got paperwork to finish before I leave.”
Chanyeol makes a dying seal noise of disappointment. “But I ran into Jinri and we wanted to get sushi with you!”
Baekhyun can see both Chanyeol and Jinri’s pouts in his mind, and is glad that they’re not here in person to try and convince him, or he wouldn’t be able to refuse. “I really can’t,” he says, sighing. “This has to be done by tomorrow or it’s my head.”
“Blech,” Chanyeol says, expressing his distaste for Baekhyun’s excuse.
“Well, not all of us can run our own companies and set our own deadlines, okay?” Baekhyun attempts to straighten the rest of the papers on his desk so he has somewhere to put this stack when he’s finished, but it’s kind of a hopeless cause. “Oh, and tell Jinri to call that wedding planner off. She’s been hounding me about reception food all day.”
“Oh no,” Chanyeol says, “Tell her yourself. She’s your fiancée.”
“You know she’s not going to yell at you even if she gets angry.” Jinri’s kind of known for her temper, but she’s always had a soft spot for Chanyeol.
“I’m not doing your dirty work for you, Byun,” Chanyeol teases. “You may be a company bigshot, but you have no power over me.”
“Not much of a bigshot then, am I?” Baekhyun says, but his tone must not sound as joking as he wanted because Chanyeol’s voice suddenly goes serious.
“Hey, you know that’s- “
Baekhyun waves Chanyeol off with a hand his friend can’t see through the phone. “Tell Jinri I’ll call her once I’m done here. And buy her lots of sushi for me.”
He hangs up to Chanyeol whining about “doing Baekhyun’s work for him”, Chanyeol’s low timbre even while pouting making Baekhyun laugh even if what Chanyeol’s saying doesn’t feel very funny at all.
Baekhyun’s been nursing the same glass of champagne for nearly an hour and the glass has gone warm in his hand.
On the other side of the ballroom, Jinri and a few of her friends have taken over the chocolate fountain, boisterously laughing and trying not to splash any on their gowns.
Baekhyun smiles as he watches.
Jinri has a nice laugh, one that he can hear over all the din of the party like the tinkling of the crystal chandelier, and her dress is champagne-colored in honor of New Years with little jewels sewn on it to match the ones on her ears and throat. The overall picture is a woman bright enough to light up the whole room, and most of the men in the room are stealing glances at her when they think their dates aren’t looking.
Baekhyun doesn’t mind.
“Did you see?” Junmyeon says, finally breaking away from the group of men all at least ten years his senior he’d been taken captive by almost since he’d arrived at the party.
“See what?” Baekhyun swishes the liquid still left in his glass around. There’s hardly any fizz left. He should get a new glass. It’s best to look like you’ve got your hands full at these parties.
“What are we seeing?” Chanyeol appears on Baekhyun’s other side. The suit he’s wearing is checkered in black and white and his tie is red. It’s a blinding combo, but Chanyeol has always been more than a little avant garde.
Baekhyun knew they’d both be here. Junmyeon works at a powerful law firm, already a shoe-in for partner, and one of the city’s most eligible bachelors, and Chanyeol’s pet project start-up just hit big internationally, but even more than that, they’re from old money, with family names as good as any invitation.
The rest of Baekhyun’s family is here too, his mother speaking with several other women she knows from the board of the Met, and his father and older brother are out on the balcony, no doubt smoking cigars and talking business with some of the other families. Baekhyun wasn’t asked to come along.
The rest of the guest list is pretty familiar, mostly society blue-blood types with a few others thrown in. There’s that pro-basketball star who recently married an heiress, a few other celebrities - actors, pop stars - but no big surprises.
That’s why, when Junmyeon nods his head toward the large windows at the other end of the ballroom, underneath where the largest chandelier hangs, Baekhyun’s half-empty champagne flute almost slips through his fingers.
He saves it from shattering on the floor only just barely, lucky there there isn’t enough liquid to spill.
“Yeah,” Junmyeon says, and he must be replying to something Chanyeol’s said, but Baekhyun had been too preoccupied with his glass to hear. “I heard he came back just in time for Christmas.”
“He’s already graduated though, hasn’t he?” Chanyeol asks, curious.
“I guess he stayed on for a few extra months, something about looking into his father’s west coast holdings before coming back in time for the merger preparations.” A waiter passes with a tray and Baekhyun trades his old glass for a new one as Junmyeon talks. “What’s it been, six years? Little Sehun has certainly grown up.”
It has been six years. Six years since Sehun Oh has been back in town.
Baekhyun takes a sip of his new glass of champagne to wet his suddenly dry mouth. He feels jittery, probably from drinking on an empty stomach, and he jumps at the hand that lands on his shoulder.
“Hey you,” Jinri says, coming up next to him. His tie matches the color of her dress and her engagement ring twinkles up at everyone in the golden light of the chandeliers. “It’s almost midnight. Ready for the countdown?”
Across the ballroom, Baekhyun can’t stop catching Sehun out of the corner of his eye. His hair is bleached blond now, slicked back from his face, and he’s taller, tall enough to tower over the people he’s talking to. There’s a glass of liquor in his hand, half empty, and he takes a sip, licking his lips after he swallows. He looks nothing like the eighteen-year-old that left for college all those years ago.
Near Baekhyun, the hosts of the party are beginning the countdown to the new year, eyes on the large, decorative clock behind where Baekhyun is standing, and Sehun glances up too, too fast for Baekhyun to look away. He’s been spotted.
“… 3! …2!…1!” Practically the whole party chants, and Jinri tugs on Baekhyun’s arm, making him turn away from Sehun and toward her instead. The countdown runs out and the whole ballroom erupts in a “Happy New Year!” and Jinri tilts her head up, eyes closed, expectant.
Baekhyun kisses her, hand moving to cradle her chin carefully as he brings their mouths together, but he swears he can feel Sehun’s eyes still on him.
“Have you seen him?”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
It’s been a week since the New Year’s party and Chanyeol’s finally managed to drag Baekhyun away from work to have dinner, so they’re at his favorite place for hot wings. There’s sauce all around Chanyeol’s mouth
but his eyes are earnest, not matter how Baekhyun tries to avoid them.
Baekhyun sighs. “Why would I see Sehun?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because you guys were good friends in high school and his dad’s company and your dad’s company are planning a merger?”
“It wasn’t like that. We weren’t really friends,” Baekhyun mumbles, looking down at the napkin in his lap, and Chanyeol sets down the wing he’d been working on to frown at him.
“I never understood whatever went on with you guys, but that’s cold, Baekhyun. You were close enough to be good friends, so you should call and say hi or something.”
Baekhyun tries to imagine just calling up Sehun for a chat after years, after he’d-
“I can’t do that,” he says, stopping his own train of thought in its tracks. “It’d be… weird.”
Chanyeol is still frowning at him with his sauce-rimmed mouth and Baekhyun tries to shrug his look off. Chanyeol has always been his closest friend, but there are still things Baekhyun has never shared with him, with anyone, and sometimes they weigh heavy in his chest, like a bag of stones. Baekhyun’s little bag of secrets.
“I know if I was gone for six years and came back and you didn’t call me, I’d be upset.”
“You and I…” Chanyeol was Baekhyun’s first friend after his family had moved into the city, and they’d done pretty much everything together since then. “Sehun and I aren’t like us. It’s different.”
“How?” Chanyeol blinks at him curiously.
“It just is!”
Chanyeol’s frown seems even more accusing with the frame of wings sauce and Baekhyun pushes his own plate away, suddenly sick to his stomach.
“I don’t think he’d want to hear from me,” Baekhyun says after a few moments of quiet. “I- I wasn’t very nice to him right before he left.”
Picking up a large wad of napkins, Chanyeol swipes at his face. “Maybe you should apologize, then. It’s been a long time. He might not even remember.”
Baekhyun hums as Chanyeol dives back into his plate of wings.
Chanyeol is right, in a way. Sehun may have forgotten, but Baekhyun hasn’t. He’s still got everything tied up in that bag of secrets, a phantom weight in his chest.
Baekhyun’s older brother had gotten married right out of college to a girl he’d been dating since high school. It was perhaps a lucky coincidence that she also happened to be the daughter of one of Baekhyun’s father’s associates, but Baekhyun had attended the wedding with a skeptical mindset, rolling his eyes during the vows and when they’d kissed after cutting the cake.
“Do they really mean it?” he’d asked his mother as he’d watched the couple dance under a spotlight. He didn’t think he liked weddings much.
“What do you mean?” His mother was beautiful, she always had been, fitting right in with the society wives of the social circle they’d moved into even if she hadn’t been born into something like that, and she’d had a glittering diamond wreath around her neck, a gift from Baekhyun’s father for their last anniversary.
“I mean, are they really in love? It’s really convenient with her dad and everything.”
Baekhyun’s mother had studied both Baekhyun and the couple on the dance floor before answering. “Who knows why people start out together? It could be a hundred reasons, good or bad. But love is work, and sometimes trying can make it grow between two people together, if they want it enough.”
Chanyeol was at the wedding too, with his family, along with some of Baekhyun’s other friends, and they’d all used the opportunity to sneak out and drink behind where the reception was, so they could talk loudly about which female guests they were going to try and hookup with.
Sehun had been there too, on the fringes of the group outside because he was still in his last year of high school. He’d had a cigarette between two of his fingers, smoke leaving his mouth in a haze, but he stayed silent through the conversation about girls, watching Baekhyun with dark eyes.
Baekhyun had stayed out of the conversation too, which surprised nobody because they all knew about his crush on Taeyeon, and the voices of the other boys had faded to a wash of sound as he watched Sehun smoke his cigarette, pink lips wrapping around the filter and sucking the smoke in, and more than anything else, that’s what Baekhyun remembers from that day: the circle of Sehun’s mouth as he blew out yet another cloud of smoke, the ember of the cigarette reflected back in his eyes.
After his conversation with Chanyeol over dinner last week, the last thing Baekhyun is expecting is to come into work to find Sehun waiting outside his office.
“Um,” Baekhyun says, and stops in his tracks.
Sehun looks up from the phone in his hands, lower lip sucked into his mouth and his eyebrows raised.
“What are you doing here?” Baekhyun tries again, and Sehun lets his lip slip out, slick and pink with spit.
“I’m supposed to work with you on stuff for the merger,” he says, and his voice is lower than Baekhyun remembers, but still soft, understated.
Baekhyun shivers. It’s cold outside, the wind whipping around the buildings, and his coat wasn’t enough to keep him warm. Tomorrow he should remember to bring gloves.
Sehun stands and Baekhyun nods, head dipping as he lets himself into his office with a hello to his secretary. His office is its usual mess, too many papers piled on his desk, and Sehun follows him inside, looking around curiously before settling into the chair across from Baekhyun’s desk.
It’s weird to have him there, this person that Baekhyun remembers, but who is also also so different, changed during his time away. Sehun is watching him intently as he takes his jacket off and hangs it over the back of his chair, and Baekhyun feels uncomfortable, so he tries to start a conversation to distract Sehun instead. “How was school?”
There’s an exhale through Sehun’s nose that might be a laugh. “Educational.”
Baekhyun narrows his eyes. “Oh, so it was one of those funny colleges, then.”
“It was college,” Sehun shrugs. His shoulders are broader than the last time Baekhyun saw him. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Right.” Baekhyun begins sifting through the papers on his desk, mostly to have something to do with his hands. “Do you know what you’re supposed to work on in particular?”
“I think they want us to look over things together to help with the transition.”
“Oh, so you’re…” Sehun has always been something of a math genius, so much so that he and Baekhyun had been in the same class for a year during high school, but Baekhyun had tried not to put too much thought into who’d be replacing him.
“Yeah,” Sehun says. “That’s why my dad asked me to come back.” He looks over Baekhyun’s shoulder out the window. It’s snowing lightly outside, one of those light snows that looks like powdered sugar as it blows across the sidewalk. “I forgot how cold it is here.”
“California’s made you soft,” Baekhyun says, not sure why he’s suddenly ready to joke with Sehun, but not stopping himself because he… against his better judgement, he misses it.
“Maybe.” Sehun laughs, a little silent thing that shakes his shoulders, and Sehun may be taller than Baekhyun remembers, his voice lower, and his face more finely boned, but his smile is just the same, the exact same. “I wanted to get away, though, and the other side of the country seemed far enough.”
Baekhyun swallows, throat suddenly thick. He holds up the bunch of papers he’d gathered in his hands earlier. “Should we go ahead and start?”
For the son of a businessman that had worked his way all the way from the bottom to the top with his own bare hands, Baekhyun had always been abysmal at school.
Reading was… well, he’d never been much good at it, and his new fancy private school in the city had an accelerated math track that had been way over his head from his very first day of school.
He’d gotten by well socially, more able to charm his classmates and teachers than do his math homework, but it was only a matter of time before his parents noticed his grades.
“You and Sehun are taking the same math course, aren’t you? Maybe he could tutor you, ” Baekhyun’s mother had said halfway through Baekhyun’s sophomore year, like it wasn’t a totally embarrassing idea to ask someone two years younger than him for help with his math homework.
Sehun’s older brother was right around Baekhyun’s age, but he was into acting or something, and went to the Professional Children’s School, and Baekhyun only knew him from seeing him at their parent’s parties.
Still, the failing grade on his last exam had flashed through his mind. Sehun seemed relatively harmless, quiet but with the sort of face that stopped people from teasing him, and he always got the highest test grades in the class.
Their parents were friends, even though Sehun’s family was older money and Baekhyun’s was new, and it was easy for Baekhyun to have his mother ask Sehun’s mother for Sehun’s help.
It was also easy for Baekhyun to grow fond of Sehun, of the way he chewed on his lips while he corrected Baekhyun’s homework, or the way he always yelped when Baekhyun poked him, his changing voice cracking unattractively. Sehun was like the younger sibling Baekhyun had never had, and he’d adopted him, bringing him around until the rest of his friends became fond of him too.
And if Baekhyun’s math grade had improved because of Sehun, well, then that was just a happy side effect.
“The wedding planner called this afternoon.”
Baekhyun pushes his dinner around his plate, sighing. He doesn’t usually mind the weekly dinners at his parents place because it’s good to see his family and taste his mother’s cooking. Baekhyun’s slow and steady failure at the company is something they don’t talk about by tacit agreement, but the weddings… well, those could hardly be avoided.
His mother looks at him over the top of her wine glass. “Actually, she’s called a couple times this week. She said she’s been having a hard time getting a hold of you.”
“I’ve been busy,” Baekhyun says, cutting his steak up into tinier pieces than really necessary so he has something to do with his hands.
Baekhyun’s father, sitting at the head of the table, sets down his knife, looking concerned. “If dealing with the merger is too much- “
The scrape of Baekhyun’s fork across his plate is far too loud. “It’s fine.” He sees his sister-in-law wince at the sound across the table and Baekhyun steadies his hands. “I told you I want to see it through. Everything’s going well.”
Sehun had been at his office every day that week, coming in bundled up in thick scarves to protect him from the winter wind, and he’d curled up in the chair opposite Baekhyun’s desk, going through page after page of numbers while jotting down notes and chewing on his pen. The chewing had looked like a fidget, the cap of the pen almost unrecognizable by the end of each day.
Baekhyun had spent far too long wondering whether Sehun still smoked, and then shaking his head, trying to figure out why it mattered.
“You know,” his mother says carefully, “just because Jinri’s father is chairman of the Oh Group’s board doesn’t mean the merger would be affected if the wedding was postponed for a little while, until you had more time to spend on planning it.” She looks at the head of the table. “Isn’t that right, sweetie?”
“Oh yes,” Baekhyun’s father nods and gestures towards Baekhyun’s older brother with his wineglass. “Baekbeom has done excellent work on the contracts with their people, so there’s no concern on that count.”
“Of course. I should have known Baekbeom already had everything taken care of,” Baekhyun says flatly, and his brother opens his mouth, looking a little stricken, but mostly just concerned.
“It’s not- “
Baekhyun stands, his silverware clattering loudly on his plate and his chair scraping back behind him. He’s always been pretty bad at formal things, too loud unless he’s trying hard not to be. “I’m finished. Thank you for dinner.”
He’s already got his shoes on again, searching in the coat closet for his scarf, when his mother lays a hand on his shoulder. Back in the dining room, Baekhyun can hear the mumble of other conversation, his father, brother and sister-in-law talking cheerfully about something else.
“It would be okay, you know,” his mother says, eyes searching his face as though looking for something, an answer, maybe. “Your father and I would like to see you finally settled, but if Jinri… I know you two were set up, and if marrying her won’t make you happy…”
She reaches up, fixing his collar and smoothing down the hair around his ears. Baekhyun has never doubted that his parents loved him, but he’s also never felt like he’s done enough to deserve it. Baekbeom was always there first, always doing everything right, and Baekhyun has tried, tried with school, with the company job, with getting married, but in the end, all there was was failure.
“We just want you to be happy,” his mother says. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted.”
Baekhyun looks away, out the window. He can see the lights in the apartments across the street, windows into other people’s lives, even if only for a moment. “I know.”
“Sometimes I think you’re so busy trying to make us happy that you forget yourself. What do you want? Is marrying Jinri what you want?”
“I- “ That little bag of secrets is sitting in his chest, heavy enough that Baekhyun knows he’ll have to tell them to someone someday, but this… this isn’t the right time. “I’m okay, mom. Don’t worry about me.” He bends to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Goodnight.”
“You look like a human pin cushion.”
Baekhyun jumps and nearly gets himself stabbed by the large handful of pins already stuck into his tux, turning around with a yelp.
Sehun’s got snow in his hair, one or two flakes that he shakes away with a smile while the tailor huffs at Baekhyun for moving.
“That’s a lot of pins,” Sehun says, peeling the deep green scarf he’s wearing away from his neck.
Baekhyun looks down at himself, still a little off-balance and trying to right himself. “I’m not exactly standard sized, I guess.”
One of the reasons Baekhyun had given up on suits in the first place was because they were such a bitch to get tailored. It wasn’t worth it to spend so much time on that when Baekhyun’s been wearing the same clothes size since his senior year of high school.
Sehun smirks. “Standard poodle-sized, maybe.”
Baekhyun makes an angry noise, but the tailor’s still got ahold of the hem of his pants. “If I could move move, I would come down and stab you with one of these pins.”
It’s easy with Sehun, almost too easy, to fall into their old patterns of conversation, even after years of silence.
“Lucky me, then.” Sehun’s jacket comes off next, the sweater underneath the same color as the snow outside, and Baekhyun feels completely ridiculous standing there in his half-finished tux. Sehun hands his coat and scarf to one of the sales people automatically, like he’d known instinctively that there’d be someone waiting at his side to hang it up. Sehun’s always been good at being rich, was born into it, like he’d been born into breathing.
Sitting down on one of the plush-looking couches scattered around the fitting room, Sehun picks at the sleeves of his sweater, pulling them down to cover his wrists. “I was out with Jongin and we ran into his sisters and Jinri, and she mentioned you were here getting fitted. It’s been awhile since I’ve needed a suit, so I thought I might stop by and look at getting a new one.”
It sounds like an excuse, but Baekhyun doesn’t mention it. He doesn’t want to know Sehun’s real reason if he’s not going to offer it.
“What would you need a new suit for? I know Minseok prances around in his fancy vests and pocket squares and stuff, but the office dress code is business casual.”
There’s this moment of silence where Baekhyun expects Sehun to laugh, but he doesn’t, and the beat of quiet sits heavy on Baekhyun’s chest.
He takes a deep breath in, lets it back out.
“For the wedding,” Sehun says softly, but his eyes are burning with… something, searching Baekhyun’s face. Baekhyun wonders what he sees. “Your wedding, I mean.”
Baekhyun doesn’t know what to say, his throat suddenly tight, like a bottleneck in his ability to make innocent conversation.
The tailor saves him from having to answer, stepping back and asking Baekhyun to take a look in the trifold mirror behind him. He can hear Sehun talking to one of the other salespeople as he looks himself over, low voice saying things about linings and inseams that Baekhyun doesn’t understand. It’s no surprise to him that Sehun knows how to speak suit.
The tux looks… well, like a tux. Baekhyun’s never been good with the particulars of clothing, and as long as the pants don’t sit too tightly across his hips and thighs, he’s never really cared about the fit.
By the time he’s stripped out of the tux and changed back into the clothes he’d come in, Sehun is standing in his place in front of the mirrors in a slate grey suit that sets off the pink of his mouth and the bleached blond of his hair.
It also fits him almost perfectly, right off the rack, and Baekhyun resists the urge to pout with jealousy.
“What do you think?” Sehun asks, turning around and tugging on the hem to make the jacket lie right. He’s got his eyebrows furrowed with frustration, and Baekhyun bites back a laugh, stepping up onto the platform to help.
“Here,” he says, pulling at the collar of the white dress shirt he’s got on underneath until it’s unfolded, lying softly against Sehun’s throat.
Baekhyun drops his hands, stepping back. It’s warm in the store, and he can feel himself beginning to sweating a little.
Sehun doesn’t seem to notice. “I asked for wool,” he says, smoothing some creases in the front of the pants. “Since, you know, it’s winter here.”
“Wimpy California boy,” Baekhyun teases. His hands are still sweaty, and he steps back down. Maybe standing closer to the window will be cooler.
On the street below, there’s only a tiny dusting of snow, the same kind they’ve been getting for the past week, and the city is bustling on, the lights flickering on as the daylight dims.
After their fitting together for the wedding with Taeyeon, Baekhyun had banned Chanyeol from coming with him to any more. He’s never liked shopping much, and going with someone who tried to talk him into a Beetlejuice suit wasn’t a huge help.
Sehun, on the other hand, is easy to shop with, already out of the grey suit and back into his sweater by the time Baekhyun is ready to leave.
“Hey,” he says, a hand reached out like he was going to grab onto Baekhyun’s sleeve, but had thought better of it. “Did you want to grab something to eat? Or maybe get a drink?”
Baekhyun hesitates. He should say no. He should go home, call Jinri and take her out to dinner, he should reply to the fifteen emails waiting in his inbox from the wedding planner.
“Okay,” Baekhyun says, in spite of himself. He’s hungry, and honestly, he could probably use a drink after that fitting.
Sehun smiles at him, pulling his jacket tighter around himself as they step outside. He’s so much taller than Baekhyun remembers, and their shoulders brush as they make their way down the street together.
They end up at a ramyeon place they used to frequent in high school, a small place with only a couple of tables, and Sehun only just manages to snag one while Baekhyun orders. It’s easy to fall back into it, talking the way they’d used to, hearing about Sehun’s time away and laughing too loud for the tiny restaurant when Sehun tells Baekhyun about when he’d tried to learn how to surf.
The table is narrow enough that their knees and ankles brush underneath it, but Baekhyun is too distracted to really notice.
After dinner, they go to a bar, one of the posh ones that Chanyeol and Junmyeon have always liked to drag him to, even before they could legally get in, and Sehun grins and buys him a drink.
“We haven’t been out together since I turned twenty-one,” he says, like that birthday was last week instead of almost five years ago, and he and Baekhyun haven’t been missing from each other’s lives for longer than that.
Baekhyun takes the drink anyway, hoping the little bit of alcohol in it will help him relax. “It’s been a long time,” Baekhyun agrees. This is the kind of place they’d gone to for Sehun’s going away party, with a dance floor in the next room over and fancy cocktails.
“So.” Sehun had gotten them both the same thing, something not-too-sweet, but with the fizz Baekhyun always liked, and it’s turned Sehun’s upper lip an even darker shade of pink than usual. “Three engagements in four and a half years?” he says casually, looking up at the shelves of bottles behind the bar and not at Baekhyun. “Sounds like I missed a lot.”
He’s not surprised that Sehun’s heard all about it. Baekhyun is used to being the subject of society gossip, but his stomach pulls tight, like he’s afraid of what Sehun might think of him. It’s stupid, because he really doesn’t.
He rocks his glass so that the ice in it clinks, just loud enough to be heard over the music playing overhead. “Yeah, well, turns out I might not be as lovable as I thought.”
Baekhyun’s voice is joking but Sehun turns to frown at him.
The neon lights of the bar catch the angle of Sehun’s jaw, sharper than it once was, but his mouth is still the same, and his eyes.
This is what he’d looked like that night, when they’d talked on the edge of the dance floor. Sehun, eighteen years old and hopeful, too young for heartbreak.
Baekhyun sets down his drink. He can feel his hands shaking.
“Baekhyun- “ Sehun starts, mouth open uncertainly, and Baekhyun swallows, curls his fingers around the edge of the bar to steady himself.
In his pocket, Baekhyun can feel his phone begin to buzz, and Sehun watches him reach for it, whatever he was going to say dissolving between them.
It’s Jinri, and maybe Baekhyun should ignore it, should let Sehun talk- he probably owes him that, at least- should clear the air of whatever is hanging between them.
He answers, listens to Jinri chatter cheerfully at him over the line and watches Sehun close his mouth, turning back to the drink in his hands and away from Baekhyun.
“I should go,” Baekhyun says once he hangs up. His drink is only half gone but his mouth tastes sour. He should go.
Sehun’s head bobs, shoulders sitting a little lower than they had when they’d first sat down, like he’s been let down. “Thanks for letting me buy you a drink.”
Baekhyun has always been good at disappointing people.
“Yeah,” Baekhyun breathes, that little bag of secrets suddenly a crushing weight, and he really should go. “I’ll- I’ll see you later.”
It’s feels colder outside now, cutting through Baekhyun’s jacket and making him shiver. He stuffs his hands deep into his pockets and hunches his shoulders, walking away from the bar and into the wind.
forward