SSS 2010: for phonebook
For: phonebook
From: Your Secret Santa
Title: Football
Pairing: Jonghyun/Minho
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2,748
Summary: This is football.
The blood is soaking the grass, seeping and feeding into the dirt salt-of-the-earth style. Minho's hand rakes at his face through the visor, scrabbling for soil and skin to pack underneath his fingernails because it's too much - the waves of pain, the shocks that are slithering up his thigh, they're breathing weakness into his mind, stingrays of pain into his heart. An arm wraps assurance against his shuddering shoulders but he pushes away, fights and kicks and perseveres until the paramedics are strapping up his leg and he's done, he's over, he's finished before he's even begun.
This is football.
To Minho, what football used to mean - blood, sweat, thirst and violence, friction and cracks on impact - is lost in a blur of breakage and collateral damage on a rainy Friday game. The crowd immediately dies when he slips, when arms loop around him and he's sped off in a strobe-topped ambulance in a haze of drugs and shock.
What it used to mean to him was the cheers of the fans, the adrenaline that pulsed through his veins the minute the skin of the ball met cold and dewy against his skin; practices on early Saturday mornings that lasted through the sweltering heat and into the purpling veined sky. It meant slipping hot and sweaty down onto the grass the minute drills were over, meant learning to be a teammate and a friend, to accept Joon's unintentional homoeroticism, the cheerleaders, the fame and the contempt.
It never prepared him to accept laying in a stark white bed, foot propped up at a hamstring-stressing angle, trying to avoid the sharp pain that shot up his thigh every time he moved to yell at his coach.
“I'm not giving up.” He hisses quietly and tenses like a bow when the older man sighs.
“Minho, listen to me, your ankle is damaged. Irreparably.”
Minho's eyes meet him dead on, deadpan, mouth set in a hard sharp line.
“No,” Edges out with a bite that chops his syllables curt.
“You can't,” his coach insists, and Minho grimaces so hard he's afraid the line of his lips will shatter into little splinters.
He chuckles a little bit, clutches the covers in his fingers and watches them sink in. Watch me, watch me, watch me pushes at the hardened enamel of his teeth and he tries to split his mouth open but it won't budge, won't give him that extra little bit of leverage that will make this man realize that you can't stop Choi Minho. No one can, not even the nerves pulsing anger up his body.
They stay like that until the sun starts setting and the nurses come to change the bandage.
Minho sleeps.
He gets visitors; Key makes sure he's comfortable and tugs Onew along, who brings Eunsook and Gwiboon, who tell the entire student body to sign a card smeared with gaudy colors and glitter for their quarterback. Minho accepts it with a smile and a nod, straightens its position on the counter when they hand it to him and throws it under the bed when they leave. The brightness breaks the eggshell flatness of the atmosphere and reminds him that he was someone, when his bone didn't jut cream and pink from inside of his skin, before he'd been hit from the left by tons of pressure that spun his world round and round. His parents come too, bringing his clothes and his toys and leaving just as unobtrusively.
The seventh visitor he isn't expecting - not the washed-out blond hair hanging stiff from his forehead, not the signature shoulder slouch that marks the brutal strength-driven athlete, the woman's waist that tells him this man is anything but and the eyes that make his mouth go dry for a moment. He doesn't expect his brain to blank in the face of a familiarly-lined body underneath the baggy sweatshirt, hands that kneaded into his side amongst thousands of pounds of pressure.
A jersey flashes, brief and black in his mind's eye. Kim--
39.
Kim Jonghyun.
Minho's eyes grow flint sharp, steely within the breath of his eyelash to his cheek. Jonghyun walks in first with another man tailing the heels of his sneakers, placing a hand on a broad muscled shoulder. They look somewhat skittishly at the rod-straight outline of Minho's frame, can't meet his set lips or his tensed shoulders and settle for eyeing the thin air around him instead.
The man speaks first, a slouched column of boredom and nerves. “Jonghyun has something to say,” Clears his throat and pushes him forward a little, one two steps that stutter against the floor lightly.
Minho lifts his chin and stares straight into the broad brown eyes, clenching his jaw hard because he's angry, so so furious, and because those eyes are dipping right into him and stealing his resolve piece by little piece with their earnestness. There's a sliver of pride niggling there but it's dashed when Jonghyun apologizes -
and steps back through the doorway.
Minho's fists clench and the only thing that stops him running after Jonghyun and beating the living shit out of him is the pain, the pain the pain. He contemplates doing it anyway.
Minho hasn't been able to sleep for days, for two if he counts correctly the ticks of the clock and the jolts of pain up to his knees. They're like clockwork, every two and a half seconds lightning through his bones and he knows he can't walk, run, play like this; a sigh leaves his lips and he thinks of those brown eyes and hates them for causing him this, this ache and this anger where he can't do anything about it.
His leg gives a sympathetic pulse and he sighs, grabbing his crutches and going for a walk (trip, stumble) along the floor.
Minho's team didn't win the next game, but the wall won a hole inside of it when GO passes to Mir instead of Joon and Minho could've averted that catastrophe if he had been there.
His fist still hurts.
He needs to get better, he muses, but his clockwork pain daubs everything a gaudy shade of white and red and he knows he can't do it alone.
A letter comes in the mail a day or two after, and then Jonghyun visits him - again, without the trainer and without anything to make him stay. To say he's surprised is something, to say his eyes narrowed and a wave of blind bitterness washed itself up his body is everything.
At first Jonghyun stands behind the door quietly, thinks that he doesn't notice, but Minho's adjusting his catheter and picks him up out of the corner of his eye.
“How long are you going to stand there?” He mutters, but loud enough that it's heard across the room.
Jonghyun's head shoots up.
“Um,” He fumbles, fingers interlacing, knuckles clenching like he's reaching for a dew-slicked ball that's slipping quietly out of his hands.
He breaks out in a grin, until Minho lobs himself out of the bed and winces when he falls hard on his ankle.
“Hey,” He says quietly, rushing forward to catch Minho as he scrabbles for his crutches, hands clenching a bit too tight against his thin wrists and scraping the metal with loud ripping sounds.
Minho eyes him out of the corner of his eyes and deliberates, one hand pressed to the broad chest that's planted firmly alongside him, other lanky appendage waving slightly for balance as he teeters on one foot and one crutch, balancing act that fails as he topples forward onto the bed instead. Easy way out if there ever was one, he muses, until Jonghyun lands like dead weight atop him and scrambles off nearly a millisecond later.
Minho yawns and scratches his chest, propping himself up on an elbow. Jonghyun stares at him from up against the wall and Minho doesn't flinch at all, just returns the sentiment double force.
“Why are you here?”
Jonghyun scuffs his toes on the cold floor, looking up at Minho through long pale bangs and making his heart give a painful thump. As much of an idiot as he is, his smile is undeniably genuine. “I feel bad for killing your ankle and you might never walk again and then you couldn't play and I fucking hate it but you're really good,” And he's about to go on, motormouth that won't stop recycling things that Minho's scanned over at least a thousand times in his head yesterday and today while laying, bored, in between drug administrations and walks around the floor, but Minho makes a sound of - that's enough, no more no more before I punch you in your pretty face.
Minho shrugs. “Nothing you can do about it,”
Jonghyun sighs and walks out through the door.
Again.
Minho doesn't stop him because the hesitance that precedes every one of his steps tells Minho that he'll be back.
He's right.
Jonghyun visits about every two days, now, regular like twenty four pulses of his leg followed by hours long stretches of silence. He brings with him no cards or candy like Key, simply because if his teammates knew he was visiting the captain of a rival team he'd be ridiculed and then beaten and then thrown out to the dogs; the dogs being the opposite team, who are waiting eagerly to bend his spine in half.
Jonghyun talks to him, which surprises Minho. He'd imagined maybe a ridiculing session, as departed from Jonghyun's earlier behavior as that would be, or a gift basket or a quick and impersonal apology like he'd first received. He receives none of those, just a dressed-down teenager with wet hair and a soft smile. He brings a video tape the first couple days of games that Minho's missed, but when his team makes a wrong pass or misses the ball Minho simmers quietly and Jonghyun has a hard time eking even a word out if him the rest of the meeting.
They sit in comfortable silence until Minho has a question - how's it without me? - and Jonghyun answers to the best of his ability, but most times he can't even manage a word out his mouth that Minho doesn't already suspect or know. Slowly they devolve into companionable silence; Jonghyun still visits, but his visits are a couple hours now and he brings homework that Minho helps him with and Minho does his own and sometimes finds himself staring at Jonghyun. They talk about their families - their lives, their girlfriends their hardships and what it's like to have breakfast (Minho doesn't know and doesn't want to) It's a foundation that's scattered tidbits of shared experience - as long as Minho's in the hospital Jonghyun visits, with a grin that slowly spreads over his own face and worms itself equally as slow into Minho's heart.
Jonghyun falls asleep next to him a lot, roots of his dark hair showing in the lamplight as he has his head laid next to Minho's thigh and breathes hot plumes of air against the sheets (that transfer them lightning fast and just as painful to Minho's knees) His lips twitch and he licks them, he turns around and around and his facial expressions are too ludicrous for Minho not to manage a chuckle whenever he mutters about mutant ninjas chasing him. It's cute, he realizes, until Jonghyun falls asleep within minutes of coming in and then a moan slips out his mouth - and Minho's fairly sure he can find his name nestled softly in there, but he shakes Jonghyun awake before he can make sure. The odd part is that it doesn't bother him, not the swell of disgust that he expected or needs, and that makes the door all the more inviting.
Minho hates it, but the anger that swelled in his heart when Jonghyun had first walked in, that disgust and that hopelessness, it's fading fast in the face of late night stare-at-Jonghyun sessions and the calls of the nurses that visiting time is over. He grits his teeth and packs his suitcase, walks (limps) through the door without leaving a note.
The day after there's no Jonghyun at his house, none if his barging in and his grinning and his lame jokes to break the silence of a mother at work and a father that hugs him wordlessly. His mother comes home and she fixes a quick dinner and they sit together, as a family, and Minho misses being alone so so much. He feels horrible, but it's how it is.
He walks slowly up to his room, dishes washed and parents sleeping comfortably, pausing when he reaches the landing and the light's on in his room. He hadn't left it like that when he trudged down, he knew, and so he grabs a baseball bat from the adjacent room and creaks open the door.
Jonghyun tackles him before he can get in a hit anywhere with the bat, and he crawls atop Minho with breath heaving and stare intense. “Where the fuck were you?” Jonghyun grits out and Minho hits his head on the floor and relaxes his grip on the bat because it isn't some rapist or a burglar, just fun-sized ball of rage. He tries to tip Jonghyun over, forward, off of him but it doesn't work and those vice-like hands are pressing him into the floor so hard he's maybe losing blood flow in his shoulder. That and his knee hurts like hell.
“The fuck are you doing?” He growls lowly, but Jonghyun rears back and punches him in the face.
Minho stares at him, shocked, but Jonghyun climbs up off of him, “Fuck you too,” and clambers out the window before Minho can get back up.
His knee tells him that he can't sleep, and he doesn't.
Minho arrives back at practice the next day with Onew carrying his books and Joon tackling him (he got a punch in the face for it) and many claps on his back. They have a game that weekend that they're prepping for but Minho walks around the field and just watches them - the brutal back-and-forth, the curses and the bruises and their stares outlining his figure in the distance. He asks for the ball and they toss it to him, grab a spare and watch, dumbstruck, as he sprints across the field as hard as he can. It isn't very fast, nor very comfortable, but his crutches are lying yards away and the pain rips through him like a drug.
He collapses on the far end, leg screaming, but he heaves a breath and grins. He's back, but without those big brown eyes watching him, his leg is pulsing harder than ever.
That weekend they don't put him out but he sits on the sidelines, watches his coach direct them, lurks in the entry way of the locker room cursing his injury (it hasn't stopped aching for days). He 's scanning the crowds and notices someone completely ignoring the havoc pulsing underneath them, blond hair a mess and sweater a drab color that isn't any of the teams playing. Minho meets his eyes and ducks back into the locker room, leg quiet for once in forty-eight hours.
Jonghyun is there in a flash, eyes hard and somehow past the security guards. Minho turns among the mess of t-shirts and pants and disappears in another row, but Jonghyun nearly materializes in front of him. A roar erupts from the crowd and the silence turns awkward, glares turned eye-rolling. Jonghyun turns to leave but Minho grabs his elbow quick and they stand there, stock still, until Minho hits Jonghyun over the head because he feels completely, utterly, ridiculously fine now that they're within inches of each other.
“Fuck you,” He hisses and when Jonghyun mutters a quiet I hate you Minho pulls him in for a kiss that sends his body soaring, makes his heart jump into his throat when Jonghyun reciprocates slowly.
Jonghyun punches him in the gut afterward and it's never comfortable, just harsh and quick up against the lockers and the tiles and in their houses with stolen minutes away from the world, but it is what it is.
It's football.
From: Your Secret Santa
Title: Football
Pairing: Jonghyun/Minho
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2,748
Summary: This is football.
The blood is soaking the grass, seeping and feeding into the dirt salt-of-the-earth style. Minho's hand rakes at his face through the visor, scrabbling for soil and skin to pack underneath his fingernails because it's too much - the waves of pain, the shocks that are slithering up his thigh, they're breathing weakness into his mind, stingrays of pain into his heart. An arm wraps assurance against his shuddering shoulders but he pushes away, fights and kicks and perseveres until the paramedics are strapping up his leg and he's done, he's over, he's finished before he's even begun.
This is football.
To Minho, what football used to mean - blood, sweat, thirst and violence, friction and cracks on impact - is lost in a blur of breakage and collateral damage on a rainy Friday game. The crowd immediately dies when he slips, when arms loop around him and he's sped off in a strobe-topped ambulance in a haze of drugs and shock.
What it used to mean to him was the cheers of the fans, the adrenaline that pulsed through his veins the minute the skin of the ball met cold and dewy against his skin; practices on early Saturday mornings that lasted through the sweltering heat and into the purpling veined sky. It meant slipping hot and sweaty down onto the grass the minute drills were over, meant learning to be a teammate and a friend, to accept Joon's unintentional homoeroticism, the cheerleaders, the fame and the contempt.
It never prepared him to accept laying in a stark white bed, foot propped up at a hamstring-stressing angle, trying to avoid the sharp pain that shot up his thigh every time he moved to yell at his coach.
“I'm not giving up.” He hisses quietly and tenses like a bow when the older man sighs.
“Minho, listen to me, your ankle is damaged. Irreparably.”
Minho's eyes meet him dead on, deadpan, mouth set in a hard sharp line.
“No,” Edges out with a bite that chops his syllables curt.
“You can't,” his coach insists, and Minho grimaces so hard he's afraid the line of his lips will shatter into little splinters.
He chuckles a little bit, clutches the covers in his fingers and watches them sink in. Watch me, watch me, watch me pushes at the hardened enamel of his teeth and he tries to split his mouth open but it won't budge, won't give him that extra little bit of leverage that will make this man realize that you can't stop Choi Minho. No one can, not even the nerves pulsing anger up his body.
They stay like that until the sun starts setting and the nurses come to change the bandage.
Minho sleeps.
He gets visitors; Key makes sure he's comfortable and tugs Onew along, who brings Eunsook and Gwiboon, who tell the entire student body to sign a card smeared with gaudy colors and glitter for their quarterback. Minho accepts it with a smile and a nod, straightens its position on the counter when they hand it to him and throws it under the bed when they leave. The brightness breaks the eggshell flatness of the atmosphere and reminds him that he was someone, when his bone didn't jut cream and pink from inside of his skin, before he'd been hit from the left by tons of pressure that spun his world round and round. His parents come too, bringing his clothes and his toys and leaving just as unobtrusively.
The seventh visitor he isn't expecting - not the washed-out blond hair hanging stiff from his forehead, not the signature shoulder slouch that marks the brutal strength-driven athlete, the woman's waist that tells him this man is anything but and the eyes that make his mouth go dry for a moment. He doesn't expect his brain to blank in the face of a familiarly-lined body underneath the baggy sweatshirt, hands that kneaded into his side amongst thousands of pounds of pressure.
A jersey flashes, brief and black in his mind's eye. Kim--
39.
Kim Jonghyun.
Minho's eyes grow flint sharp, steely within the breath of his eyelash to his cheek. Jonghyun walks in first with another man tailing the heels of his sneakers, placing a hand on a broad muscled shoulder. They look somewhat skittishly at the rod-straight outline of Minho's frame, can't meet his set lips or his tensed shoulders and settle for eyeing the thin air around him instead.
The man speaks first, a slouched column of boredom and nerves. “Jonghyun has something to say,” Clears his throat and pushes him forward a little, one two steps that stutter against the floor lightly.
Minho lifts his chin and stares straight into the broad brown eyes, clenching his jaw hard because he's angry, so so furious, and because those eyes are dipping right into him and stealing his resolve piece by little piece with their earnestness. There's a sliver of pride niggling there but it's dashed when Jonghyun apologizes -
and steps back through the doorway.
Minho's fists clench and the only thing that stops him running after Jonghyun and beating the living shit out of him is the pain, the pain the pain. He contemplates doing it anyway.
Minho hasn't been able to sleep for days, for two if he counts correctly the ticks of the clock and the jolts of pain up to his knees. They're like clockwork, every two and a half seconds lightning through his bones and he knows he can't walk, run, play like this; a sigh leaves his lips and he thinks of those brown eyes and hates them for causing him this, this ache and this anger where he can't do anything about it.
His leg gives a sympathetic pulse and he sighs, grabbing his crutches and going for a walk (trip, stumble) along the floor.
Minho's team didn't win the next game, but the wall won a hole inside of it when GO passes to Mir instead of Joon and Minho could've averted that catastrophe if he had been there.
His fist still hurts.
He needs to get better, he muses, but his clockwork pain daubs everything a gaudy shade of white and red and he knows he can't do it alone.
A letter comes in the mail a day or two after, and then Jonghyun visits him - again, without the trainer and without anything to make him stay. To say he's surprised is something, to say his eyes narrowed and a wave of blind bitterness washed itself up his body is everything.
At first Jonghyun stands behind the door quietly, thinks that he doesn't notice, but Minho's adjusting his catheter and picks him up out of the corner of his eye.
“How long are you going to stand there?” He mutters, but loud enough that it's heard across the room.
Jonghyun's head shoots up.
“Um,” He fumbles, fingers interlacing, knuckles clenching like he's reaching for a dew-slicked ball that's slipping quietly out of his hands.
He breaks out in a grin, until Minho lobs himself out of the bed and winces when he falls hard on his ankle.
“Hey,” He says quietly, rushing forward to catch Minho as he scrabbles for his crutches, hands clenching a bit too tight against his thin wrists and scraping the metal with loud ripping sounds.
Minho eyes him out of the corner of his eyes and deliberates, one hand pressed to the broad chest that's planted firmly alongside him, other lanky appendage waving slightly for balance as he teeters on one foot and one crutch, balancing act that fails as he topples forward onto the bed instead. Easy way out if there ever was one, he muses, until Jonghyun lands like dead weight atop him and scrambles off nearly a millisecond later.
Minho yawns and scratches his chest, propping himself up on an elbow. Jonghyun stares at him from up against the wall and Minho doesn't flinch at all, just returns the sentiment double force.
“Why are you here?”
Jonghyun scuffs his toes on the cold floor, looking up at Minho through long pale bangs and making his heart give a painful thump. As much of an idiot as he is, his smile is undeniably genuine. “I feel bad for killing your ankle and you might never walk again and then you couldn't play and I fucking hate it but you're really good,” And he's about to go on, motormouth that won't stop recycling things that Minho's scanned over at least a thousand times in his head yesterday and today while laying, bored, in between drug administrations and walks around the floor, but Minho makes a sound of - that's enough, no more no more before I punch you in your pretty face.
Minho shrugs. “Nothing you can do about it,”
Jonghyun sighs and walks out through the door.
Again.
Minho doesn't stop him because the hesitance that precedes every one of his steps tells Minho that he'll be back.
He's right.
Jonghyun visits about every two days, now, regular like twenty four pulses of his leg followed by hours long stretches of silence. He brings with him no cards or candy like Key, simply because if his teammates knew he was visiting the captain of a rival team he'd be ridiculed and then beaten and then thrown out to the dogs; the dogs being the opposite team, who are waiting eagerly to bend his spine in half.
Jonghyun talks to him, which surprises Minho. He'd imagined maybe a ridiculing session, as departed from Jonghyun's earlier behavior as that would be, or a gift basket or a quick and impersonal apology like he'd first received. He receives none of those, just a dressed-down teenager with wet hair and a soft smile. He brings a video tape the first couple days of games that Minho's missed, but when his team makes a wrong pass or misses the ball Minho simmers quietly and Jonghyun has a hard time eking even a word out if him the rest of the meeting.
They sit in comfortable silence until Minho has a question - how's it without me? - and Jonghyun answers to the best of his ability, but most times he can't even manage a word out his mouth that Minho doesn't already suspect or know. Slowly they devolve into companionable silence; Jonghyun still visits, but his visits are a couple hours now and he brings homework that Minho helps him with and Minho does his own and sometimes finds himself staring at Jonghyun. They talk about their families - their lives, their girlfriends their hardships and what it's like to have breakfast (Minho doesn't know and doesn't want to) It's a foundation that's scattered tidbits of shared experience - as long as Minho's in the hospital Jonghyun visits, with a grin that slowly spreads over his own face and worms itself equally as slow into Minho's heart.
Jonghyun falls asleep next to him a lot, roots of his dark hair showing in the lamplight as he has his head laid next to Minho's thigh and breathes hot plumes of air against the sheets (that transfer them lightning fast and just as painful to Minho's knees) His lips twitch and he licks them, he turns around and around and his facial expressions are too ludicrous for Minho not to manage a chuckle whenever he mutters about mutant ninjas chasing him. It's cute, he realizes, until Jonghyun falls asleep within minutes of coming in and then a moan slips out his mouth - and Minho's fairly sure he can find his name nestled softly in there, but he shakes Jonghyun awake before he can make sure. The odd part is that it doesn't bother him, not the swell of disgust that he expected or needs, and that makes the door all the more inviting.
Minho hates it, but the anger that swelled in his heart when Jonghyun had first walked in, that disgust and that hopelessness, it's fading fast in the face of late night stare-at-Jonghyun sessions and the calls of the nurses that visiting time is over. He grits his teeth and packs his suitcase, walks (limps) through the door without leaving a note.
The day after there's no Jonghyun at his house, none if his barging in and his grinning and his lame jokes to break the silence of a mother at work and a father that hugs him wordlessly. His mother comes home and she fixes a quick dinner and they sit together, as a family, and Minho misses being alone so so much. He feels horrible, but it's how it is.
He walks slowly up to his room, dishes washed and parents sleeping comfortably, pausing when he reaches the landing and the light's on in his room. He hadn't left it like that when he trudged down, he knew, and so he grabs a baseball bat from the adjacent room and creaks open the door.
Jonghyun tackles him before he can get in a hit anywhere with the bat, and he crawls atop Minho with breath heaving and stare intense. “Where the fuck were you?” Jonghyun grits out and Minho hits his head on the floor and relaxes his grip on the bat because it isn't some rapist or a burglar, just fun-sized ball of rage. He tries to tip Jonghyun over, forward, off of him but it doesn't work and those vice-like hands are pressing him into the floor so hard he's maybe losing blood flow in his shoulder. That and his knee hurts like hell.
“The fuck are you doing?” He growls lowly, but Jonghyun rears back and punches him in the face.
Minho stares at him, shocked, but Jonghyun climbs up off of him, “Fuck you too,” and clambers out the window before Minho can get back up.
His knee tells him that he can't sleep, and he doesn't.
Minho arrives back at practice the next day with Onew carrying his books and Joon tackling him (he got a punch in the face for it) and many claps on his back. They have a game that weekend that they're prepping for but Minho walks around the field and just watches them - the brutal back-and-forth, the curses and the bruises and their stares outlining his figure in the distance. He asks for the ball and they toss it to him, grab a spare and watch, dumbstruck, as he sprints across the field as hard as he can. It isn't very fast, nor very comfortable, but his crutches are lying yards away and the pain rips through him like a drug.
He collapses on the far end, leg screaming, but he heaves a breath and grins. He's back, but without those big brown eyes watching him, his leg is pulsing harder than ever.
That weekend they don't put him out but he sits on the sidelines, watches his coach direct them, lurks in the entry way of the locker room cursing his injury (it hasn't stopped aching for days). He 's scanning the crowds and notices someone completely ignoring the havoc pulsing underneath them, blond hair a mess and sweater a drab color that isn't any of the teams playing. Minho meets his eyes and ducks back into the locker room, leg quiet for once in forty-eight hours.
Jonghyun is there in a flash, eyes hard and somehow past the security guards. Minho turns among the mess of t-shirts and pants and disappears in another row, but Jonghyun nearly materializes in front of him. A roar erupts from the crowd and the silence turns awkward, glares turned eye-rolling. Jonghyun turns to leave but Minho grabs his elbow quick and they stand there, stock still, until Minho hits Jonghyun over the head because he feels completely, utterly, ridiculously fine now that they're within inches of each other.
“Fuck you,” He hisses and when Jonghyun mutters a quiet I hate you Minho pulls him in for a kiss that sends his body soaring, makes his heart jump into his throat when Jonghyun reciprocates slowly.
Jonghyun punches him in the gut afterward and it's never comfortable, just harsh and quick up against the lockers and the tiles and in their houses with stolen minutes away from the world, but it is what it is.
It's football.